A Compendium of Skirts

"Kid. It ain't but only one bar in Bunker Hill." I made arrangements. The cats, the clients, my hyacinth beds. I even made up a batch of the coconut curry dish the neighbor lady who takes care of my cat likes so much-left it in the refrigerator as a surprise. I rented a car, a Chrysler, the environment be damned, and canceled all and every obligation, even the feisty Mrs. Gilsinger. I made a special trip out to the only good record store in town for Hoagy Carmichael, the Smithsonian collection, a perfect boxed set. Hoagy Carmichael: the saddest man in the history of Indiana, with the one exception of my brother Richard.

I drove a hundred miles, his thin hurt rounding slow on tinsel cassette tape.

Pool balls click velvet. A dime slides down the jukebox throat.

Voice at the bar: "Reason the dinosaurs gone extinct, they run out of stick."

The only light is the beer light. Tiny Clydesdales run soft and silent around a yellowed Anheuser citadel. It is a roomful of men. The Leaning Men, I think, taking a cautious look around. Rough Giacomettis with eyes worn all the way down to the clay. Men leaning over other men, two over the jukebox, Wurlitzer blue, one over the pinball, others over pool tables, game tables. Over things you put money in and get something in return.

"Reason the dinosaurs gone extinct, sticks gone soft. Sticks gone soft account of equal right. Account of the lady dinosaur equal right."

He said Thursday and this is Thursday. He said noon and it's been noon for an hour. I take another look at my watch.

"Lady dinosaur, she want on top. Lady dinosaur, she big as hell. She want to crush the man."

The bartender looks up from his work. He is grilling rinds from skinny pigs, raised on his own place, just down the road.

I take a deep breath and realize two things. A, my brother is not coming, and B, I am wearing too much perfume.

My brother is not coming because he is in some kind of trouble. Richard was always in some kind of trouble. Once it was a motorcycle and once it was his football coach. Once it was something he said about the government to his civics teacher, a retired master sergeant. The day he lost his base ID card, I thought our Air Force dad would beat him bloody. The announcement came that night at the supper table: Thanks to my brother Richard, the Communists would now be able to take over Indiana.

Meanwhile here I sit, perched on a bar stool in the middle of Nowhere, USA, wearing a festive neck scarf, all tied up in a pretty pink bow and braced to play the female version of Ned Beatty in Deliverance to a bar full of what look to be cousins.

"Mary Louise."

It was him.

I got up off the bar stool and spread my arms wide. It was like trying to hug a refrigerator.

"Hey, squirt," he said.

"Hey, yourself," I said.

I squeeze hard, trying to bring back the whole Cheerios-and-milk routine. I step back to take a good long look.

Next to my brother stands a woman with a ponytail.

"This is Red."

Next to the woman stands a beard.

"This is Chit."

The beard raises its head in short incremental jerks as if hoisted on an invisible tire jack. It inches up me, notch by notch, finding absolutely nothing of interest, then down, collapsing back into its original give-up position. The beard is wearing a cap. The cap says EAT MORE PUSSY.

I've had worse dates. I dated a little mountaineer once. He punctuated his sentences and some of his romantic efforts with a little "Ho-o," the way Ed McMahon used to say. For six months I dated a dead man. Finally, he told me. "Sorry. Just dead I guess."

I look at my date.

"Pleased to meet you," I say.

"Pleased to meet you," he says, extending a hand.

His hand is a wadded-up ball of tin foil, small, like a cat toy.

The four of us stand there, an unpracticed quartet.

"Ready to roll?" says Richard.

"Can do!" I say.

He smiles to acknowledge the family joke, but there is a distant look in my brother's terminally green eyes.

Bunker Hill Air Force Base, now Grissom, was a SAC base, and in 1962 everything was in high gear for the upcoming show with Cuba. A Catholic was President. The base was on twenty-four-hour alert.

Crest had been shown to be an effective decay-preventative dentifrice that could be of significant value if used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional care. Mary Louise Stinson was eight years old, hell-bent on memorizing anything that got in her path. Sunday next, Psalms 23. There was a new Easter muff in this for her. Somehow between her supper-troubled mom, Jesus, and the deep blue sea, she was going to get that muff. Sheila Daghita could eat dirt and Mary Louise would stand over her and watch. White virgin rabbit fur, lined in silk-white satin. In the presence of mine enemies.

Castro was only a word.

Bunker Hill Air Force Base was the place to be in 1962. They had one of the Doomsday planes. The other one was in Nebraska, a place too distant to count. The Doomsday plane was for the President for when the end of the world came. Even an eight-year-old could appreciate the glamour of living where the President of the United States and his wife might come when the world blew up. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

Their father worked on the flight line, NCO. His squadron's motto was CAN DO! This message echoed relentlessly throughout the house-on mounted plaques, on coffee cup coasters, the welcome mat. It rang in Mary Louise's ears night and day. It was in the green beans they ate for supper every night, cold and thin, spooned straight out of the can.

On top of the TV set there lived a little ceramic family of ducks. Three baby ducks with Mama foremost. They were strung together by a cheap brass chain. Mama Duck always looked a little tired to Mary Louise, a little jumpy. But bold across her breast were the words tattooed in gold: CAN DO!

The top drawer of their father's dresser drawers was his sock drawer. You had to make his socks smile. The three of them lined up behind his six-foot-tall fatigues-Mary Louise, her brother Richard, and their little blonde mom.

First, match pairs. Put the one on top of his buddy and press down hard. Italy, see? Now roll up from the toes. Jelly roll, see? Take this one's lip, pull it tight, all the way around, turn him face up, pinch up the sides of his mouth. See him smile?

"When I open my sock drawer," their father said, "I don't want to see anything but smiles."

"Can do, Dad!" they said.

There was a fan in the living room; it was a fan for jets. Their father brought it home from the flight line-it cooled the whole house off, top to bottom. It stood up in the corner of the living room like a man. Once, Ricky took her kitten, a black Manx named Blackie, held it up in front of the fan, and let go. The kitten actually flew a foot or so, then dropped easily into the crystal ashtray on the coffee table.

"It's women."

The four of us were spread out picnic-style-Richard, his girlfriend Red, me, my date.

"They can really fuck you up."

Soon a thematic thread emerged. Seems Chit's whole life, women had really fucked him up. First, his mother. She dies early in the story though, bad conscience you bet, and life begins to look up for little Chit. It was just him and Pete.

"Who's Pete?" I ask.

"Pete's my dad," says Chit, surprised at my inability to follow such a simple narrative line.

Things could not be better for father and son. They fished, played catch, smoked dope. It was as Ward-and-Beaver as it gets, recounted Chit. Until one Monday morning after a trip to Kansas City, Pete comes home with Chit's new stepmother.

"She really fucked me up."

The stepmother emerges as a kind of cross between Muammar al-Qaddafi and Cruella De Vil, a well-heeled terrorist in a Disney sports coupe. A step can fuck you up, according to Chit, worse than your own blood. Next, high school. Chit falls in love. Never in his life had he met anyone quite like Cindy, but in the end,

"She fucked me up royal."

He drops out of school and travels around the state awhile till he lands a job just outside of Kokomo. Melting down iron ore gives Chit a kind of satisfaction he has never known. There was this woman. And before he knew what hit him, he was married, childed, cheat upon, childed again, this time not even his, and kicked clean out of their little brown house before you could say squat-diggity-dog-kicked out, by the way, of a house which now belongs to the tramp and her lawyer.

"She fucked me up but good."

There was a poem on Chits T-shirt. It was too long to memorize but the gist of it was: my old lady might not think much of its size, but once I get her turned over, this old pal of mine starts looking real big. The word wicket figured prominently in the rhyme scheme.

"Women," concluded Chit, wishing things were otherwise.

He looked to Richard for support. Richard was playing with my key chain. I have a million keys. Car keys, house keys, front door, back door, side, and porch. Keys for the office, keys for the garage, keys that open I don't know what. My brother had been listening to Chit, but he was looking at me. He said,

"Are you important?"

We were parked in front of Hooker's Hamburgers, squashed in between hundreds of other campers lining both sides of the highway leading up to the Speedway. It cost a hundred and fifty dollars to park.

"These boys don't take American Express," Richard said, as I pulled out my American Express.

My brother's camper was a great lumbering pachyderm, one of the first RVs off the assembly line. It came about an inch off the ground. Richard and Chit had gone in on it together. They pooled their money, their carburetor skills, their Saturdays off. When it was all fixed up and running, they painted it pink. It was a pink an eight-year-old girl with high self-esteem would pick out.

"He did the left, I did the right," said Chit.

"Looks nice," I said.

There wasn't an inch of space left in all of Indiana. Still, they came: eight lanes of highway fat with cars, trucks, campers, and vans. Teenage cars souped up in the back like cats in heat; mean-spirited trucks angry for a place to park; friendlier station wagons, tailgates open, swinging legs and tossing out free beers and tokes. Race fans galore arriving by the minute from nowhere to here, spilling out onto the pavement like excited crickets, like the scene at the end of Day of the Locusts, the movie about Hollywood and alienation where the one small lonely guy gets swallowed up whole by the mindless masses. Dark little movie, that. But this was no movie. This was Indiana.

It was a day of celebration. Everyone had come in their best descriptive wear. There were T-shirts of saddened commentary (SHIT HAPPENS), T-shirts of regret (TOO DRUNK TO FUCK), and T-shirts of directive (give me head till I'm dead). Apparently, all these people ordered out of the same catalog.

And the refrain, "Show us your tits! Show us your tits!", a chant you could hear repeated in the distance and see printed on signage-on upturned cases of beer sitting friendly by the side of the road; on the sides of cars, spray-painted in red. It was written on makeshift cardboard signs necklacing entire gangs of boy drunks running hither and thither, Polaroids dangling:

"Show us your tits!" Show us your tits!"

Perhaps this is what historian Paul Fussell meant in his essay on the subject in which he described the Indy 500 as "a language event." He found the entire experience "therapeutic." Of course, his point of reference was World War I.

Before leaving Chicago, I had taken the time to read up on the Indy 500 in order to acquaint myself with the nature of auto racing. For weeks now I'd been keeping up with the sports sections of the two daily papers, familiarizing myself with the names of the drivers, their sponsors, the preferred motor oil. I memorized the mph of all thirty-three qualifying cars. I rehearsed things to say.

"Som-a-bitch. Can't do more'n two-thirteen. And that's in the stretch." This I would say to my brother in the conversation we would have about the aging A. J. Foyt. He would look at me, appreciative, and smile.

"Fifty-seven years old, though, sis. You got to love the guy."

I would try out my Chevrolet joke.

"Ask me, Heartbeat of America barely has a pulse."

I would deliver this line slow, lean back on my left elbow, and pull out my smokes. First, the lighter. I'd tap my Marlboro on the silver surface of my cigarette lighter, packing the tobacco the way our father used to do. The lighter would be a real lighter, the kind you have to put fluid in, not one of those pansy-ass throw-away Bics. There's a little white pad on the bottom you have to soak.

And we would smoke, my brother and I, smoke the whole day away, nothing else. Picky would turn to me at some point: "Hey, sis. Out of smokes."

And I would look up lazy into that Indiana sky, inhale all the way down like Claudette Colbert, and breathe out slow.

"Look in my purse."

This is what I would say to my brother.

It was hot. Only Indiana knows how to be this hot. Digging in my purse I find my toothpaste warm.

No one was saying a word. It was as if we had all forgotten the language. Chit was taking a breather from his life story and Richard had his head on Red's bare stomach. They were tangled in a way I felt I could not intrude upon. The little pink reunion I had acted out in my mind between me and my brother had not happened and would not unless I did something, so when Ricky stood up and walked over to the beer cooler I said,

"Howdy Hughes to win."

Ricky stood up straight and stretched and then looked slow down into the crowd.

"He only docked two-o-two in nine, I'll grant you that, but Ricky. Guess his sponsor."

He turned around and reached deep down into the cooler.

"He's no speedster, so okay. But guess who his sponsor is. Take one guess."

"Beer?" he said.

"I'm fine," I said.

"It was the night before Christmas."

It was the night before Christmas, and Chit was on a

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A Compendium of Skirts by Phyllis Moore Copyright © 2002 by Phyllis Moore
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