A short story
by Jack Mauro
Last Week: Dip Dip learned Italian; pink turned to gold; Miss Bascombe clawed a road to salvation; and Junior got stoned.
"Well. Look at you."
"Yes'm, just look at me."
These observational commands are passed between Dip Dip and the pink silk suited splendor of Lucius Temple. But there is not much time for looking; a limousine awaits to escort Lucius to the airport, thence to wing over the South and swoop down to slice opening ribbons. Lucius, today, is a more exotic fowl than his industrious weaver bird of a partner. Lucius is a fabulous African bird with a peculiar diet.
Dip Dip, battlefield promoted, is to oversee the original Luscious stand on Cumberland. Farewelling her iridescent employer, she recalls a hint made over cocktails on the previous evening by Baron Dunn. Dunn had suggested something mysterious about the recipe itself, the unique lemonade in which he was so momentously investing. In the burning air of this 23rd day of August, Dip Dip asks Lucius a question soon to be mouthed by thousands of pink-lipped Southerners. Namely, how can he protect his lemonade formula in this age of laboratory testing and product mimicry?
(Parenthetical: Dunn had also remarked to Dip Dip upon the uncanny similarity between the hue of her cheeks and the shade of Baron Luscious. And, as he drew the comparison, the current Mrs. Baron Dunn experienced in her Atlanta townhome a decidedly unharmonic ringing in her ears. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, tertiary Mrs. Dunn.)
The sleek sedan idles. Lucius straightens the knot in his pink silk tie, and says: "Can't be stole, my girl. I am the secret." She stares at him.
"Hell, woman. It's just lemonade." He slips into the car, winks, and is gone.
Just look at you, Mr. Lawhorn.
He is unkempt. Slumped behind and partially under his desk in his dark, dark office, Brice is unshaven. The air conditioning drones on, as chillier machines do in more macabre rooms holding only slightly more horizontally inclined and slightly less active bodies.
He has spent the night here. No one at the bank knows. Not the tellers, not the cleaners, not his AmSouth peers. Not Mrs. Lawhorn. But that lady's distress took the curious form of hourly and eager time checks, and frequent trips to the Lawhorn house safe, in which resides the Lawhorn will.
Like a biblical patriarch, Brice Lawhorn gave his only son. He gave him to Darya Bascombe; Junior will toil as a busboy and learn from the rigorously pious woman to be a less despicable creature. Brice coerced Junior into a routine physically taxing, spiritually painful, and greasy, that both father and son may atone. For Junior's new career will ensure that Brice's contact with Darya Bascombe remains strong. As a penitent father, he will need constant updating on his boy's progress, along with the severe scoldings he himself so undeniably deserves, the vituperation he as a dreadful parent so richly merits and so surprisingly looks forward to.
And Miss Bascombe? She is doing God's work. She is assisting a dissolute boy and an errant man to the proper path. Miss Bascombe is gratified that the proud Lawhorn receives her calls and submits to her scorn. To her mind, he is a sinner with a chance, now, for redemption.
As Brice vacantly stares into the sepulchre of his office, Junior is at work. Junior today is clean and groomed, smart in black tuxedo trousers and a clip-on bow tie. Oh, but he is miserable, is Junior. His nose feels forgotten by its owner. He hurls a tray weighty with filthy plates onto the dish platform. The noise reverberates throughout the Holiday Inn kitchen where, from her imperial corner, Darya hears it. She rises, paces with steely resolve to the simultaneously indignant and petrified Junior, and smacks him on the back of his head.
Her telephone rings. It is Brice. Junior, rubbing his scalp like a dumbfounded chimpanzee with bleached hair, hears her speak his family name.
"Is that my dad? I wanna talk to him!"
Miss Bascombe nods in solemn resignation. She holds out the receiver to Junior. As he extends his hand to take it, she—yes, that's right—smacks him on the back of his head.
Brice overhears all of it, including his son's infuriated flight out of the kitchen. He knows that this latest act of unacceptable behavior will now be placed by the inflexible Darya, quite correctly, on his doorstep. He leans back further into his chair, as Miss Bascombe prepares to verbally flay him a bit closer to a far more distant and completely contrary rapture than that which, within five minutes, he will pantingly achieve.
Brice Lawhorn Sr., Brice Lawhorn Jr. Two-thirds of a trio unholy by, coincidentally, exactly sixty-six percent.
Best Carmichael, bank manager, is motoring to work in the thick dawn of August 25th.
He slows down upon nearing a familiar billboard. It has changed once more. No longer do a few words herald the inexplicable essence of Knoxville. Now, five square yards of a young woman's face beam beside the words she would, if three-dimensional, cry out: Baron Luscious? Con Piacere! Fortunate for the painter that the same can of pink served for both face and the glassed object of her ecstasy.
Why is Knoxville endlessly intrigued by a lemonade blurb in Italian when it was disinclined to pursue the enigmatic alteration on the former billboard? One may as well mine summer stories for lessons as expect an answer.
A Dunn is entombed, a Dunn prospers further, and the Dunn name is stripped from one female's brow and bestowed upon another's. A fairly ordinary beverage moves like a pink river through the South, bringing pink riches to a very hip Black man. A foul youth becomes a token in the turnstile of his father's erotic monomania, and a great lady fights for two souls composed entirely of hedonistic debris. These are turns and tides of life in Knoxville, that summer; billboards and lessons require more sturdy foundations.
Best to leave it all, now. And best to leave Best, on his way to his finer job in his windowed office. Where his fern, finally granted the wholesome light of the sun, peacefully dies.
Jack Mauro's book Gay Street is available locally at B. Dalton in West Town Mall, Barnes & Noble and online through Amazon.com. Mauro will release Spite Hall, which is also set in Knoxville, in September.
July 26, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 30
© 2001 Metro Pulse
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Part V