In Rockbottom you can kill a man and get away with it, as many have done over the years, but you cannot buy a copy of Playboy magazine. Apparently, few things are more threatening than exposed flesh.
So it was no surprise that the townspeople were discountenanced, as some of the more articulate put it, by the nakedness of Calla May Winslow, whose exposed flesh could corrupt St. Peter himself, to hear them tell it. Malvin Goodroe, the undertaker, claims that he had just rolled Old Man Studstill into the front viewing room when she strolled by outside, and the Old Man, dead as a dartboard and with his veins full of methanol, groaned and nearly put a dent in the top of his casket. Other men merely told of ripping their pants or popping their zippers, and if you were to believe the stories that people told, Calla May had every cock on Main Street at rigid attention. Tenpenny swore on the Bible that the statue of General Jethro T. Harlan (C.S.A.) moved six inches when she passed by.
But nobody stopped her.
At least not right away.
It was the second Saturday in June, about two o'clock in the afternoon when Calla May, naked as the day she was born but looking a lot healthier, drove to the corner of Third and Main, parked her red Mustang in front of the funeral parlor and walked the two blocks to the poolroom, attracting the undivided attention of every person in town with the least amount of eyesight. Old Blind George kept pounding his cane on the floor of the Dixie Grill and shouting, "Tell me again, tell me again!"
And the telephone began ringing in the office of the sheriff, Homer Barlow, a heavy-gutted easygoing man of fifty who was dozing in his cushioned chair behind a large oak desk whose edges were fluted with cigarette burns made by a dozen former sheriffs, dating back to 1896. The sheriff's office was in the front part of the county jail, downstairs, and was usually quiet this early on a Saturday afternoon. Homer had closed his eyes and laced his fingers over his large belly a half hour earlier, thinking of a rainbow trout, yellow perch, and suchlike. In his dream he had just hooked a largemouth bass and was reeling it in when he heard the telephone ring in the cabin nestled in the pine trees behind him. He continued reeling in until the noise roused him and he let the fish escape. The cabin in the pines disappeared too as he lurched for the phone.
The first call was from Agnes Stritchfield, cashier at the Paradise Theater (where only G and PG pictures were shown), always quickest to report any wrongdoing on Main Street. She screamed like a banshee and nearly addled the sheriff, who wasn't quite awake and was still thinking of fish. This uproar, he managed to discern, was occasioned by a naked woman walking the street plain as sin and in broad daylight! As soon as the sheriff put the telephone down, it rang again, allowing him no time to think. When Beulah House confirmed Agnes Stritchfield's hysterical complaint, the sheriff said he would "get right on it" - immediately regretting his choice of words. Before he got to the door, hat in hand, the telephone rang again. He picked it up and without identifying himself or his office said, "I'm on my way," broke the connection, then left the receiver off its hook. He opened the door to the jail behind his office and yelled down the solemn row of cells. "Hey, Rubbydub, you doing anything?"
A mild ironic voice answered from one of the barred rooms. "Nothing important-just time."
"How 'bout answering the phone for me while I'm out?"
"Shore." A lean angular septuagenarian of six feet threw open a cell door and shuffled toward the sheriff, grinning toothlessly. "Be a nice break in the routine."
Rubert Leggit Croft, known to everyone as Rubbydub, was serving a ten day sentence for public intoxication and disorderly conduct. He was often drunk, but seldom disorderly; harmless, but easily influenced. Some of the local pranksters had put him up to taking a leak on the mayor's new Cadillac just as the mayor and his missus came out of the Bar-B-Q House licking their chops and patting their tummies. The magistrate, a small portly man who took himself and his office with a seriousness bordering on the fanatical, was outraged and demanded that Rubbydub be arrested. Tenpenny was there, of course, he being one of the instigators, telling the mayor that Rubbydub thought he was a hound dog and was just being natural. Then some of the others tried to get the old man to howl, but he was too drunk to do more than groan and croak.
"We'll take him back to the kennel, mayor," Tenpenny said, but the mayor was too incensed for levity, although his wife cracked a horsey smile when Tenpenny told them Rub needed worming and a distemper shot. "His honor don't like jokes," she drawled.
Normally the sheriff would take the old man home and tell him to sleep it off, not giving a thought to arrest. In this case, however, he had no choice, because the mayor, irate as a harridan with boils - "He pissed on my car!" - insisted on pressing charges. The indictment itself posed a problem: nobody knew of a law that specifically prohibited peeing on automobiles, a discovery that irked the mayor, who seemed to think there was a law against showing disrespect for public officials. The closest thing the law had to offer was an injunction against urinating in public, one of the many indecorous breeches of custom under the broad category of Disorderly Conduct. Unmollified, the mayor-who favored public stocks-said he guessed that would have to do, after being persuaded to accept the fact that disrespect per se wasn't an amerciable offense and that Vandalism wasn't a valid charge because no actual damage had been done.
The mayor carped about the sentence too, claiming that ten days wasn't nearly enough.
"Just tell whoever calls that I've got it covered," the sheriff said.
Rubbydub nodded and perched on the edge of the chair behind the sheriff's desk. He put the receiver back on and watched the instrument as though it were magical, waiting for it to ring. He was as alert as a cat stalking a bird.
The sheriff strode to his car, shaking his head as he heard the jangle of the telephone behind him.
He remembered the Saturday afternoon Johnny Shine had gotten drunk, staggered out into the middle of Main Street, and started shooting at traffic lights and neon signs with an ivory-handled .38 revolver, causing all vehicles to stop and Minnie Waters to miss her period. Only two calls had come in then, one from Ida Slote at the Western Auto store and the other from Agnes Stritchfield, who was angry but far from hysterical as she crouched in the Paradise ticket cage, her Window on a World of Irritants. He wondered how Agnes kept her blood pressure down.
The sheriff got to the poolroom right behind Calla May. Her husband, Eban Winslow, spotted her at the door, threw down his cue and dashed out the back like a sprinter at the tri-county track meet.
"Eb!" Calla May called to his fleeing back, but it was no use. She might just as well have been trying to halt the flow of the river or the falling of rain.
All the others in the pool hall stopped dead still and gawked at the naked woman as if frozen in their tracks like rabbits in the glare of headlights.
"Calla May," the sheriff said, "what are you doing?"
She turned around and looked him straight in the eye, her arms akimbo. "I came to get my husband."
The sheriff frowned. "You ain't got no clothes on, Calla May."
The men at the tables sniggered and Tenpenny said, "Ol' Homer's got a sharp eye, ain't he?" and someone else said, "Cain't put nothin' past him," but the lawman ignored them.
"My idea was to shame him into coming home," Calla May said.
The sheriff shook his head and fought to keep his eyes fro wandering. "I don't get it."
"I came to see what's so fascinating down here-and to let everybody see what he's got at home."
"And we sure appreciate that!" Tenpenny declared.
The sheriff took off his hat and scratched his head, his eyes falling, then closing quickly like a book slammed shut. When he opened them again, he gazed at the bridge of her nose, which he noticed had a few tiny freckles that were just lovely. "I don't understand."
"Ever since I was twelve years old," Calla May explained, "men been trying to get at me."
"I believe it."
"But my husband's got me and he don't even try."
This news seemed to pain the sheriff, and he expressed his wonderment with a deep sigh.
"And I'm in my prime. Wouldn't you say I'm in my prime, sheriff?"
"Oh yes," he moaned.
"Every night in the week he's too tired, says he works so hard. All he wants to do is watch TV and go to sleep. Sunday he claims is the day of rest, and so that only leaves Saturday. And what does he do on Saturday? Gets out of the house quick as he can and hangs around here all day. It's not right."
The sheriff put his hat back on. His face was red and he kept taking deep breaths and pulling at his collar as if he couldn't get enough air.
"All day he hangs around down here and leaves me home alone. Why does he do it? Why doesn't he stay home with me?
"Lord help me," the sheriff said, "I don't know."
"Make him come home."
"I got no right," the sheriff said. "He's not breaking any law." He paused and took another deep breath. "But you are."
"You gonna arrest me?"
"Now, I don't wanta do that, but I can't let you go around town nekked."
"Then you gonna have to arrest me."
Tenpenny started tearing off his clothes. "Arrest me too, sheriff!" he yelled. "Lock us both up and throw away the key."
"Shut that up," the sheriff ordered, "right now," then looked back at Calla May, his face pleading for understanding. "See what a mess you're causing? Now, be reasonable."
She shook her head. "I ain't gonna be reasonable."
The sheriff looked stricken. He closed his eyes, then took out his bandana and wiped his forehead. "Call May," he said forlornly.
"Nope."
He patted his forehead, tugged at his collar, and hitched up his belt. Then he put the bandana back in his hip pocket and yanked at his collar again. "Well," he said at last, "come on and get in the car."
"You taking me to jail?"
"Naw, I'm gonna take you home."
"I don't wanta go home till Eban goes with me."
"Maybe he's already gone home."
"Ha."
"Well, I'll go look for him then," the sheriff said. "But you gotta get out of public."
Calla May chewed on her bottom lip. "You'll make him come home?"
"I got to find him first."
"Okay, you can take me back to the funeral parlor."
As they left the poolroom, Tenpenny, who always has to have the last word, yelled, "Watch out your gun don't go off, sheriff!"
Homer put Calla May in the back seat of his car, then took off down the street in the opposite direction from the funeral home. He made a turn at the red light and drove to the jail. "I'll be right back," he told her, and pattered into his office. Rubbydub jumped up at once, like a jack-in-the-box, beaming at the sheriff. "Is it true?" he asked, his voice quavering. "They all said-"
"It's true," Homer replied, marching past him and into the supply closet. Half a minute later when he came out with a sheet for a single bed draped over his arm, the front door to his office was open and Rubbydub was gone. Homer started to yell for him, then changed his mind when he saw the old man bent over the rear window of the sheriff's car, staring at Calla May, who was smiling and saying something to him. With a trembling hand, Rubbydub opened the door-and she stepped out.
The sheriff chugged up to them. "You're not supposed to be out," he said, not sure which of the two he was addressing.
"Everybody else in town's seen it," Calla May said nonchalantly, striking a pose. "I'd hate to deprive Rubbydub."
The old man's mouth hung open and his eyes were big as plums. He was making a noise - "Huh, huh, huh" - as he breathed, and he was breathing faster by the moment.
The sheriff handed Calla May the sheet. "You put that over you," he told her, "'fore he has a stroke. I keep a blanket in the trunk but it's kinda rough-this'll be more comfortable."
"Why, thank you, sheriff," she said, wrapping the sheet around her and pulling it close. "That's very considerate."
Rubbydub looked as though he were going to cry. Homer put a gentle hand on his shoulder and guided him back toward the jail. "You take care of things while I'm gone."
"Huh, huh, huh," the old man wheezed, trudging back to the office like a condemned man approaching the gallows. When he reached the door, he turned and waved to Calla May. "Thank you, honey," he said. "You're a real sweet girl." Calla May was so moved that she opened the sheet wide and gave him a final treat before slithering into the back seat, saying to the sheriff that it was getting real easy, a statement he found less that comforting. The old man stood in the doorway, his mouth gaping, his head bobbing loosely, like a cork on the river.
The sheriff returned to the funeral home by going down Jefferson Davis Street and cutting back on Third, avoiding Main Street until the last. He parked beside Calla May's car and she got out of his vehicle and into hers. She wadded up the sheet and tossed it through his open window. "You bring him right home, you hear?"
The sheriff nodded. "And you go straight home, you hear?"
She smiled and started the engine.
For the next hour Homer drove up and down the streets of Rockbottom, looking for Eban. He didn't know what he was going to say if he found the man, for Calla May's behavior had been so embarrassing-no, it was worse than that, it was humiliating, and the sheriff wasn't one to add to another's misery if he could help it. But he had promised Calla May that he would look, and look he did.
She had married Eban Winslow about three years before. Eb was born and reared in Hampton, but he wanted to get away from there and the domineering influence of his father, who owned the Winslow Canning Company and one of the largest homes in the county. Success had not made Winslow pere an easy man to live with. He saw himself as having the mien of a nobleman and the wisdom of a sachem, neither of which was true. His wife and son saw him as a petty tyrant who would never understand why people didn't love him.
Eban got a job in Rockbottom as the manager of the combination machine shop and garage owned by "Tool" McKenzie, his second cousin, and had worked there successfully for three years. He was generally well-liked and especially admired by most of the men because he was married to Calla May. They would roll their eyes and grab their crotches, saying, "If I had that in my bed, I wouldn't never want to leave!"
But the sheriff thought that being married to Calla May must be a hell of a burden to Eb. He was beginning to feel burdened himself. Shortly after three o'clock he gave up his search and drove to Eban's house, a small bungalow set back from the street and canopied by huge pecan and pink-bloomed mimosa trees. Calla May's Mustang was in the driveway and he thanked his luck for that, at least.
After he knocked twice, Calla May opened the door and smiled shyly. Her face was flushed, her hair was rumpled like a bed sheet after a restless night, and the robe she had on was unbuttoned. "He's here, sheriff," she said, "and everything's fine."
"I'm glad to hear it," he answered. "Mighty glad."
"Sorry for your trouble." As though in a terrible hurry, she gave him a half smile and started closing the door, so the sheriff just nodded and touched the brim of his hat.
"And I thank you," she added, quickly shutting the door and scurrying back to the bedroom where the shades were pulled all the way down.
The sheriff drove around the outskirts of the city, trying to scour the image of Calla May's nakedness that was in his mind like a brand in cowhide. Failing, he drove home and wrapped his arms around his fat wife, who had just put a cake into the oven and was so surprised by his attention that she assumed he had been drinking and was afraid he'd lose his job. "Your color's up," she said, sniffing his breath suspiciously.
"I ain't been drinking," he told her. "And can't you get it through your head that I'm elected? Or that I just might be trying to show you some affection?" He stomped out of the house without saying another word to his bemused wife, a woman of sober habits who had made a routine for her life as fixed as the movement of the planets. She sat at the kitchen table and pondered her husband's words for several minutes, finally resolving that she would be real nice to Homer when he came back.
However, that was not the way things turned out.
Before returning to his office, Homer made two more stops: one was for the affection he had missed at home and the other was for a bottle of muscatel wine, which he would give to Rubbydub after supper to settle him down. At least on Saturday night the old man would have a little musky-doodle, if nothing else.
It was one of the quietest Saturday nights in history. The sheriff ended up breaking open a quart of whiskey, and he and Rubbydub, after a long but inconclusive discussion of the mystery of women, got knee-crawling drunk and spent the night in jail.
Nobody saw Calla May or Eban in Rockbottom again. Sunday they spent packing and Monday they moved into the Winslow house in Hampton, where they still live today. People say that Calla May so shamed Eban that he couldn't show his face in Rockbottom, that he just had to leave.
But all sorts of stories began popping up about Eban after that Saturday. Cecil Hardaway, a grinder in the machine shop, said he once caught Eban whacking off in the john, and was so flabbergasted by what he'd seen that he couldn't believe it, at least not until that Saturday afternoon. "Why in the world," Cecil wondered, sucking his breath in over clenched teeth and shaking his head in disbelief, "would a grown man beat his own meat when he had a bee-yo-tee-fool girl like Calla May?" It was more than he could comprehend.
Others began to speculate that Eban was "funny," that he didn't really like girls, which was why he had a job that surrounded him with men and why he chose to spend his leisure time in an all-male hangout like the poolroom. That story didn't have much currency, though, because the men who hung around the poolroom didn't like what it suggested, and the others simply could not believe that a man-any man-married to a sexy girl like Calla May could prefer-___ No, it was unthinkable, a perversity beyond belief.
Tenpenny says that when Calla May got home, Eb was waiting for her. Enraged, he began slapping her around - "really whippin' her fine ass" - and in the process of venting his anger he discovered that he was excited in more than one way-and so was Calla May. "It was just a matter of establishing his dominance," Tenpenny explains like a professor of psychology, "which is what they both needed. So he threw her down on the living room floor and plowed into her with a plow hardened by powerful feelings he hadn't had in a long time. And from then on, it was 'Me Tarzan, you Jane' all the way."
Nobody ever asks Tenpenny how he knows these intimate details, but he swears they are the naked facts.
"You can drive to Hampton right now," Tenpenny assures the skeptical, and you'll find Calla May with a big smile on her face and Eban rushing to get home from his day's work-" here he inserts a wink and a leer-"which he often cuts short."
Others say Calla May has taken to drink and letting herself go, so that you wouldn't recognize her now if she walked down the street in broad daylight clothed or naked.
But what happened to her and Eban after they left Rockbottom is another story.
That warm afternoon in June gave the people of Rockbottom more than a perennial topic of conversation. What nobody mentions is the fact that over three times as many babies as usual were delivered at the new city hospital the following March. Forty-two, the paper said, was a record for that or any month. Nineteen of those babies were female, and not one was named after Calla May.
And you still can't but a copy of Playboy, even from under the counter.
Ben's novel, JUNKMAN, will be published in paperback by Avon Books this summer. It's a killer novel, so don't miss it. Should be in fine supermarkets everywhere.
For other stories by Ben Satterfield, click here.
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