Junior Ray. John Pritchard
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refrigerator repair business, but he worked at it so seldom, I swear, I think he about forgot how to do it. Sunflower, well, she was always the kinda girl that keeps her panties in her purse. You know what I mean. Voyd, though, he was blind as a bat to all that. You know love. When it bites a sumbich he either can’t or won’t see shit, or worse, he sees stuff that ain’t there and drives himself nuts and ever’body else around him. Anyhow, one day Voyd comes up to me and says, “Junior Ray, I got to ast you somethin.” And I said, “What is it, Voyd?”
He said, “Somethin’s botherin’ me.”
“Like what?” I said.
“Like Sunflower’s underpants,” he said.
“What about her underpants?” I ast him, knowing sure as shoot’n what he was gon’ tell me.
“They was in her purse,” he said.
Playin’ dumb, I said, “Well, at least, they was in HER purse.”
“What the fuk does that mean!” he hollered and then said, “Gotdammit, Junior Ray, be serious.”
“All right,” I said. “How come they was in her purse?”
“Well,” says Voyd, “I ast her; I said, ‘Sunflow’r, how come you got your underpants in your purse?’ And she said, ‘Well, Voyd, it is the middle of summer!’ And I ast her if all ladies carried their underpants around with ’em in their purses in the middle of summer, and she said, ‘How the fuk would I know! I don’t go around lookin’ in their purses like some people around here. That’s the dumbest question I ever heard.’”
Then I asked Voyd what she finally gave him as the whole excuse, and he said, “Well, she said she did it as a way to com-bat the heat.” According to Voyd, he looked her straight in the eye and said, “Gotdamn, Sunflow’r, how fukkin hot can it be?” Then he said she looked like she was gonna tune up and cry, and she told him she done took ’em off to be more comfortable, and then Voyd said he asked her how can them flimsy little old things be anything but comfortable, and she said he never did believe her and never did trust her and all that crap, and then, Voyd, that dumb sumbich, started feelin’ sorry for her and feelin’ even worse that he had brought it up in the first place, and so, finally, there that coksukka is, and he’s askin’ me:—“Junior Ray, you think I ought to be worried?”
“’Bout what?” I said, like I didn’t know what he meant.
“’Bout Sunflow’r, you know . . .”
And I told him; I said, “Voyd, put it this way, I don’t think the weather is your main concern.”
“What the fuk, does that mean!” he asked me, and I said, “Voyd, if Sunflower is so hot she has to carry her panties around in her purse, then I’d say she’s takin’ her termperature with somebody else’s thermometer.”
Man, he had a fit about that, but he got over it, and I didn’t say no more about it. People do what they’re going to do, and that’s it. I got a philosophy: things work out, or they don’t.
But it’s funny how things change. I never did get married. Me and my old girlfriend, Des—that’s short for Desira, who was a girl back yonder in a Flash Gordon funny book—just more or less stopped seeing one another, and then there never was nobody else special, and, I don’t know, one day it just seemed like time had passed, and I hadn’t paid it no ’tention. Time, I mean.
Now Des, she married Garvin what’s-his-name from down around Dundee—last time I saw him he was cryin’ and eat’n a beer bottle inside the Ole Miss Drive-Inn, a cafe which used to sit up there on the side of the road on the way to Meffis. Nothin’ but an empty building there now. And it ain’t got no roof.
Anyway, Garvin was upset because his first wife had run off with a flim-flam man I call “Temptation Jones.” He was a fellow who come to town one day and, in the course of about a week, got all the merchants to participate in a contest and to put up merchandise as prizes, along with a good bit of cash—one hunnerd and ten dollars to be exact—which he, the flim-flam man, collected and held on to. And it was all to go to whoever could guess the identity of “Temptation Jones.” Theoretically “Temptation Jones” was supposed to turn out to be one of the men downtown, but none of it was ever very clear—except the fact that, on the morning they were supposed to award the prizes to whoever had wrote down the true identity of “Temptation Jones” and was the winner of the contest, everybody waited and waited for the stranger to appear and say who won, but he never showed up, ’cause that sumbich had run off with every bit of the merchandise, all the cash, and, as it turned out, with Garvin–what’s–his–name’s first wife. And that was possibly the strangest thing of all. Shoot, anybody could see why the feller would want the prizes and the money, but nobody could figure out why he’d want to include Garvin’s wife, because it wuddn no government secret that she was ugly enough to make a freight train take a turnrow. Well, hell, Garvin weren’t no movie star hissef. However, he looks a lot better now that Des has took a hand to him and made him dress nice and use hair spray.
But, the truth is, a lot more was disappearing at that time than just those things. And had it not been for what’s just happened around here recently, the whole gotdamn town was on its way to disappearing. It just goes to show, you can’t always tell the difference between when something’s ending and when it’s beginning. A lot of times it looks the same.
Back to Garvin: one morning, before he got straightened out, I remember somebody cut him up real good in a fight, and he was walking right down main street in St. Leo with his arms folded in front of him holding his intestines to keep ’em from falling out on the sidewalk. And it was a good thing they didn’t, too, because them was still the old days, and they’d a’ been stepped on real quick. I was in the City Barber Shop, and I saw him. Say what you will, he mighta had a soft heart, but he was a tough muthafukka.
Anyway, Des got ahold of him and turned him into a solid citizen, made him to stop eat’n glass and become a member of the Lion’s Club. And I hear he did pretty good sellin’ insurance, which is what all them reformed muthafukkas seem to wind up doin’; and him and Des have a granddaughter over at Chickasaw West. That’s in Coldwater. It’s a college. Over in the Hills.
I’m just glad it was him and not me; that’s all I got to say. I never did understand how a man could be married to just one woman all his life. The way I figure it is we—men that is—are more like the buffalo. By that I mean a man just naturally needs to roam the herd and service as many buffalettes as he can. That’s just nature. And—now, I know them preachers would disagree, but that ain’t nothin’ new—I say it is contrary to the way things really are, as I see it, for a man to tie hissef down to one woman for his entire lifetime—shoot, after a while he spends most of his waking moments trying to get away from her, and she nine times out of ten don’t want to do it no more and just wants to “cuddle” or flat wants to be left alone. I be dammed if I’d want to live like that. Hell, I’m better off with cable than I would be with a woman who don’t want nothin’ to do with you but at the same time wants you to do everything in the world for her and who won’t give you time of day much less a piece of pussy which you don’t want from her in the first place. At least you can unplug the TV; and, even if it don’t give you a lot, it don’t ask nothin’ of you, neither. So I say fuk bein’ married.
Move, I got to spit.
And then when you don’t want to mess with ’em, they get mad. Mean, too. I ’member one night back in, I reckon it was nineteen fifty-seven, Des and me was at the MoonLite Drive-In movie the-ater, north of Clarksdale at Lyon, and the mosquitos was chewin’ us up something awful; plus it was hotter’n a bitch in heat, and I was sweat’n like a nigga on election day. Well, we’d been rolling around in the back seat the whole time, and I was get’n somewhat wore out—I mean, let’s face it, you can just laugh so much. And here’s what I’m talking about when I say a woman can have a mean mouth: I says to her, “You want some more milkduds?” And she says, “Damn you, Junior Ray; food’s all you ever think about”—bear in mind we’d been wallowin’ all over my fifty-four