Raising Blisters
Tim meets a friendly haint; Jethra gets her feet washed
[Back to the Mad Art Project. This story picks up three days after Cracker Island. Our old friend Tim Teresias has finally gotten to Chattanooga, where he meets up with his high school buddy Grin Watson. Grin, remember, was going to tell Tim all about that so-called two-bit Boss Hawg, Donnie Ross. He certainly delivers the goods. Meanwhile, Tim, who’s narrating all this from some point in the future, lets us know a little about what’s happening with Jethra. Yikes!
We don’t check in with the Moon Calf, but it’s out there somewhere.
And yes, that’s City Cafe. Of course it is. Why did I give it mirrors and red velvet walls? To make it a bitch to find stock art for, of course. But I’m stuck with it now.
Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
I lost my poor 1972 Triumph Spitfire in Bad Oak River on a Thursday. Of course nothing is ever lost—but more of that later. Anyhow, almost drowning, then being rescued by Donovan Holloway took some time, and by then it was past midnight.
So I rescheduled my meeting with Grin Watson. We arranged I should drive over to Chattanooga on that Sunday afternoon. Donovan gave me a lift to the private garage where I’d stashed my other cars, and I picked up my you-didn’t-see-me, lowest-common-denominator gray 2016 Honda Civic. I do have one ugly big SUV—a 1985 Chevy Suburban with a roof rack, 14,000-lb. front winch, and similar other goodies—but I didn’t see the need for that then, of course.
Silly me.
Sunday afternoon was shading quickly into evening under an apricot sky you could almost mistake for spring when—again, of course—I walked into one of those conversations.
“Everyone I know is transitioning.”
Hand on the black-painted doorjamb, I froze.
Trojan Horse Community Theater seats 80, but there’s more to the repurposed upholstery shop than that. In front is a lounge, currently decorated in the punk style, where they hold everything from jazz soirees to consciousness-raising sessions. In back, in addition to the cluttered, carpeted space that’s dressing room, green room, and storage room all at once, there are a couple of small, soundproof rooms. One houses a battered piano and is mostly rented out for music lessons. The other contains a small recording studio and brings in a decent income from musicians and podcasters.
I paused in the doorway of the recording studio as Grin Watson introduced his two collagues, Long Tom and Holly.
Long Tom—like the big gun on the Jolly Roger, though who knows if that was the reference he had in mind—was a skinny fellow with tobacco-brown skin and ice blue eyes. He was decked out with a couple of feathers and a raccoon tail in his hair. He might have been 40 years old. He wore a tee shirt that read I failed the Turing test.
To his right, Holly was dressed as a Confederate widow out of a movie in window-curtain green. She’d left off the skirts, though: under the table she wore cut-off denims, fishnet tights and Converse.
Grin Watson, my old high school classmate, newspaperman, gothic short story writer, and mastermind of the Choo Choo Chiller podcast, sat to Long Tom’s right. He was a tall, mountainous man with a tall, bald dome, now painted ghostly white. His eye sockets were filled in black and he wore black lipstick widened into his trademark grin, along with black sleeve garters on his button-down shirt. He would have looked like a melancholy haint if not for his welcoming smile.
“Tim! Come on in here!”
I stepped through the door as Long Tom went on, ignoring Grin, “Dorian’s the sixth one since 2020.”
“Which way?” Holly asked. I dragged my eyes off her powered décolletage. She had bright black eyes, and, under her stage makeup, was probably about 50 years old—my age and Grin’s.
“Which way what?” Long Tom asked.
“Boy to girl, or … ?” she prompted.
“You know — I can’t remember!” He burst out laughing. “Dorian’s my cousin’s kid; you’d think I’d know.”
That easy. I relaxed.
“Now, then!” Grin rounded them up. “This here’s Tim Teresias. I went to high school with him over in South Pittsburgh.”
Long Tom stood up as Grin introduced us, and, to my surprise, Holly stood as well. She leaned across the table for a pleased-to-meet-you hug.
“We’re just wrapping up this week’s episode,” Grin explained. “We’ve got everything shot but the trailer. If you sit there in the corner, you can listen.” He indicated a stackable, church-potluck kind of chair with a torn seat.
They got the trailer to their podcast recorded, including a couple of callouts to local businesses. Then Grin turned down Long Tom’s invitation to have a drink. “I’m gonna catch up with my friend Tim here.”
Half an hour later, Grin and I were sitting across from each other in a booth at the all-night diner, same place Jethra and I used to eat, with probably the same grime on the floor. Grin was still wearing his haint makeup.
“I didn’t realize you recorded podcasts on video,” I said.
“Oh, we have a YouTube channel, too,” he explained, delving into his smothered tots. “Quite a few viewers and plenty of product placement sales. We don’t make much money, but we pay all our production expenses.”
“It looks like a lot of fun.” I ate a sliver of cheesecake.
“Oh, yeah.” Grin spread his arms. “So tell me everything.”
I swallowed. “Not much to tell. Twelve years in the Air Force, eight years in an accounting firm in St. Louis, moved home to take care of Momma.”
“Right home? South Pittsburg?”
“Right home: Bethlehem. I mean my birth mother, you don’t know her.”
“Oh, beg pardon.”
I’m not sure whether I ever told Grin I was adopted. He gave me some space, but I didn’t elaborate. “What about you?” I asked.
“Teach fifth grade, write podcasts, publish a little online paper, ads and community events, mostly,” he said. “I stay busy. Married a lady with four children; we’ve got grandkids now, one great-grand. We’re a rabbit warren at home.”
I puzzled it out. “She’s older?”
“About 10 years older. Rosemary.”
I liked how he said her name. One thing I carried away from my decade or so of crossdressing: I judge men by how they treat women. Not so much their newest girlfriend, you understand, but long-time wives, ex-wives, mothers, daughters, colleagues. Women they so easily could take for granted or treat badly. With one word Grin Watson passed the test.
I caught a glimpse of myself in the crazed, gilt-edged mirror on the wall behind Grin. Even without makeup, I was almost as pale as he was—bone-white and brittle-looking. My hair was still black, but most of the top was gone. I kept the remnant trimmed close with a No. 2 guard.
I still had the blue eyes, arched black brows, all the rest I’d been so proud of, but my cheeks were sunken, my shoulders were stooped, and below my scrawny ribcage I had a round little potbelly that bothered me a lot more than it should have. Like Grin, I wore a button-down shirt with the cuffs rolled up—no tee shirts for us.
I resisted the mirror’s pull. On a man, pale skin and a paunch are signs of vice—sloth, for starters, with cowardice breathing close down its neck—and on a woman—well, there’s no point in being an homely woman at all.
No. If you can’t be a silver screen goddess, there’s no point at all.
But I never thought that about Jethra, did I? Did I think it now, about the delicious, grandmotherly Holly I met an hour ago, whose eclair of a hug I was quite eager to sample again?
No. No, I did not. Not about any woman other than —
That’s the worst of it. That spiral of contemptible navel-gazing.
Even if you don’t transition—perhaps especially if you don’t transition—once you begin thinking about it, you never stop.
Even if you can assert, bleakly, as I do, that you aren’t in any way a woman. (Or man, you know what I mean. And don’t throw a bunch of other monikers at me. These newfangled in-between genders are just mental masturbation.)
Even now I can feel the weight of your thought on me—you, reader, whoever you are—trying to convince me there’s only one narrative for people like me, and it always ends the same place.
I defy you.
More to the point, fuck you.
I never should have told you as much as I have. I’m sorry I did.
Grin was telling me all about his grandkids, watching me closely all the time. At last he must have seen me settle in. He smiled at me. “You didn’t call me up to exchange pleasantries, Tim. As I remember, you’re a tad jealous of your time.”
“And I hate to waste yours, Grin.” In the mirror I saw a dry little smile. “I’m keeping you from your family right now. But this is important. I’m afraid a friend of mine’s getting hurt.”
He thanked the waitress as she freshened up our coffee. I stirred in more sugar. He pushed his tots aside and leaned forward on his elbows. “Then it’s no waste,” he said.
I told Grin everything. Not about me—my personal details aren’t relevant to this story—but about Jethra, our friendship, and her mad art project. How she’d been in love with me and I’d an asshole about her toddler son, all that. How she’d recently been convicted of a raft of nonsense crimes, put on probation, and assigned to Donnie Ross to report to—Donnie Ross, a preacher and two-bit Boss Hawg who had no business supervising anyone’s probation.
How she’d disappeared.
How Ross tried to hire me to find her, on apparently no better reason—or for exactly the reason—than that I’d been away from town for 30 years and would be absolutely ineffectual in the search.
You can’t get anything done in Bethlehem unless you’re from Bethlehem, of course. Grin and I both understood that point.
When I finished my narrative, he whistled. “Donnie Ross,” he said.
“That’s who I mean,” I replied. “Who is he? Far as I know, he has no reason to know I exist.” I sighed. “I’ve been away from that part of the world too long. I’ve lost my touch for the subtleties.”
Even in Chattanooga, 45 miles from Bethlehem, we both looked around like the greasy, velvet walls had ears.
Grin took out his handkerchief and mopped his head.
“You’re right he’s a preacher,” he said. “And he has some businesses — lemme see.” He pulled his plate back in front of him and looked at the last of the tater tots, chili, and nacho cheese. “Want some of this?”
I didn’t, but I did. I’d been nibbling the same slice of cheesecake for the past 30 minutes and hadn’t got more than an inch or so in. I hovered my fork over Grin’s plate.
“Go on, son!”
I speared a laden tater tot. As I chewed, Grin Watson recited the list of Donnie Ross’s businesses as far as he knew them. “He owns a beer distribution place, feuds on and off with another beer distributor keeps trying to come across Bad Oak River into his territory. Been some shootings over that.” He chuckled. “That’s old news, back in the 90s. Things have calmed down some. He’s just slowly expanding, now. And he preaches at some foot-washing Baptist church out from Bethlehem, it’ll come to me which one. Coffey Springs, maybe. And he runs Southside Utility, I mean, he’s chairman of the board plus he personally owns the land where a lot of the wells draw from. He’s been fighting the State of Tennessee for years over pollution control. Never met a regulation he didn’t hate.”
“‘Don’t tread on me’?” I suggested.
Grin nodded. “He had the State water quality control engineer hog tied and whipped, back in the day, but no one could pin it on him. Some of his nephews did it, I reckon, but no one was naming names. He never married, no children, but he has a couple dozen nephews, grandnephews, cousins, you name it, all ready for action.”
He shoved the plate at me again. “Finish em off!” I ate another tater tot.
Grin thought for a while. “He doesn’t contradict people when they say he’s Cherokee, and he looks it—plus the name—but I don’t think he’s any such thing. Great-grandpappy was Greek, something like that, I hear. Came to this country and worked the copper mines around the turn of the last century, they used to be mostly Cherokee over Copper Hill way, that’s how that story got started, and he let it grow, or someone back in his family did. Doesn’t want folks saying he’s not from around here.”
“Obviously.”
“Right?”
Grin had started on my cheesecake. We ate and pondered the impenetrability of the culture we’d grown up in. The room, even here in urbane Chattanooga, began to close in on us. Who covers walls in maroon velvet? At the same time, this felt very much like high school—situational intimacy, Grin trying to get me to eat, sharing what we had because, after all, we were two oddballs in a world of mens’ men.
Grin Watson, at least, seemed to have grown into that last role. Despite the cane he walked with, he was a businessman, patriarch, and—still—a gothic freak who could comfortably wear full Halloween makeup into a rough-edged diner at 11 p.m. Might have helped he was about 6-foot-7.
“Lemme see what else.” Grin ticked on his fingers. “He grows magnificent tomatoes and shares em generous. Goes around in a pickup truck with an old lawnmower in back, cuts folks’ lawns, old people, anyone who needs it. His parishioners, mostly, but anyone he calls on who can’t do it for themselves. Ladies love him, but ain’t none caught him yet. He’s easy to do business with—hired me to do some social media for Southside Utility for a while—and I’d work with him again.”
“And you’re not looking to make enemies?”
“Not an issue; my home base is here, now.” Grin looked at me seriously. “That being said, you understand the trust I’m placing in you.”
“I understand, and I’m obliged to you.”
“There’s one more thing.” Grin mopped his head again. That white paint was holding strong. He looked at me out of the black-painted hollows of his eyes, close enough I could see the bags under the paint. He lowered his voice. “It’s a strange tale to tell of a preacher, but they say he sold his soul to the Devil the day he turned 21.”
The grandfather clock chimed the four quarters, ending the last on a falling note. A single stroke announced one in the morning.
“You don’t understand,” Jethra said for the umpteenth time.
(I’m making this up. I didn’t meet Donnie Ross until later. But while we were only briefly acquainted, you might say we formed an intimate connection. I reckon I have a pretty good handle on what they said to each other, or if I’m making any mistakes, it’s in guessing what Jethra said. She’s always been beyond me, some way.)
Donnie Ross, also repeating himself: “Well, honey, what if you explain it to me again?”
Jethra sat in a metal-legged chair, catty corned from Donnie Ross in his own metal-legged chair, in his kitchen that was now only lit with the single incandescent bulb over the sink. The bulb was drawing moths, but the two of them sat in shadow.
I don’t picture Jethra as being tied up, chained, anything like that. But she’d already been there a long time. Her flamingo-print, sleeveless shirt was rumpled. The fabric was grimy around the neckline and stained under the arms. She was starting to get hollows beneath the apples of her cheeks, and her sweet, triangular jawline was emerging again from the face that had gone softly round over the last decade.
Point of fact, my strong, strange friend looked sick.
“The first point,” she said, slurring a little, “was to call out the ridiculousness of abortion laws that treat a clump of tissue far smaller than the blood clots I throw every month as sacred, and its loss as a murder. The second point, not that I thought I’d get enough attention to pull it off, was to distract attention from people who actually needed to be left alone to do what they needed with their own damn bodies.”
She didn’t raise her voice or even sound angry. She sat flat against the back of the chair, well away from Donnie Ross, but she looked limp, not, you know, tense like she expected a blow. Or if she thought he might hit her, she was past minding, maybe.
Anyway, hitting women was never his style. Donnie Ross leaned forward, elbows on his knees, black curls dripping over his forehead. He didn’t say a word. Nor did Jethra. The clock in the hall chimed the first quarter.
“And the third point?” he asked at last.
“The third point, I suppose, was I became attached to the narrative I created.” Jethra looked at her folded hands. She’d gnawed her fingernails away, and eczema had roughened her fingers. In a couple of places her skin was oozing. “I had rituals, you know, and after a while I believed them as if they were real. They started as satire, but I believed them. I do think I became as attached to each clump of blood as if it was—not a human child, maybe, but a like a dead bird or kitten. Something you’d bury with a posy and mourn for five or 10 minutes, even half an hour.”
A tear rolled down her face. Donnie Ross reached out and caressed her cheek, rubbing the tear away. He had a ponderous way of moving, each gesture like some old patriarch statue set to life. Jethra neither leaned into his touch nor resisted.
“Bewitched,” he said, “by your own spell.”
Jethra did not answer. The clock ticked.
“When you posted the latest one—Penelope Moonchild, you called it—you said the momma was Diotima the Prophetess,” he said. “Was that you?”
He had settled back to his original pose, elbows on knees. You could picture him leaning this way, forehead to forehead, with some man he was counseling with, praying together with, maybe. Wrestling together in prayer, it’s called, sometimes.
But Jethra wasn’t praying.
“It wasn’t me.”
“Who was it, then? Who did you mean by that name?”
Jethra looked like she was falling asleep. Outside, a whippoorwill called. She started. Then she shook her head.
“Tell me.”
Another shake of her head. “I can’t.” Again her head drooped.
Donnie Ross put his palms on his knees and stood up. He wasn’t above average height, but the way he pushed up, ponderous, straining his shirt-shoulders, you’d think he was lifting the sky. He took Jethra by her jaw and lifted her face to him, a gesture that looked humiliating and must have been painful.
He studied her face. The clock chimed the half hour. “Let me help you,” he said.
Jethra looked as if only his grip was keeping her from falling asleep. She whispered, “No … ”
Donnie Ross let her go. From my imagined perspective I could see the left side of Jethra’s face. Donnie’s thumb left a white mark just above her jaw.
Did I tell you I carry a .45 ACP Sig Sauer 1911?
No?
But I wasn’t there, and I hadn’t guessed where Jethra was, or what was happening to her, and anyhow, all this probably happened a month before I met up with Grin Watson and he gave me the full scoop.
“I’m sorry.” Donnie Ross repeated it. “I’m so sorry.”
Jethra stared. Her eyes, violet-blue and violet-shadowed, seemed to fill with tears.
Did they?
Am I imagining her more helpless than she was?
Jethra was a rugby player. She could have whupped his ass.
Well. Twenty years ago, she could have whupped his ass, and would have. But who was Jethra now? Did I know?
I knew nothing.
Donnie Ross fetched something from a cabinet to the right of the sink. A basin and a white towel. He filled the basin with tap water. Then he returned to Jethra in her metal-legged kitchen chair. With a grunt, he lowered himself to one knee. He placed the basin on the floor and threw the towel, with a practiced flip, over his shoulder. He looked up at Jethra.
“It’s all my fault,” he said. “I haven’t been able to help you. All this time, all this work, and I haven’t helped you release your sin.”
Jethra shook her head. “You don’t have to do this for me.” She wiped her nose with her arm. “You don’t need to. Let me go to jail. I don’t like to be on probation.”
Donnie Ross reached down and cupped one of Jethra’s broad, dirty bare feet.
“Please let me go to jail,” she repeated. “I really don’t mind.”
She used to say that to me when—I realized now—I hurt her feelings. I really don’t mind.
Diotima, of course, had been my name. Tim, Tina, Tiny Tina—it was not lost on me that Jethra had imagined herself pregnant by me—not once but dozens of times over 20 years, imagined it with such fervor that she held pretend funerals over the babies—and was now risking herself in earnest to protect me from the crimes she imagined up for me.
It’s nothing to do with me, I thought angrily at Jethra. You’ve made it all up. If I ever found her, I’d give her such a tongue-lashing I’d raise blisters.
She wouldn’t mind that, either. Of course.
Meanwhile, Donnie Ross was doing what men do so easily—forgiving Jethra for wrongs he’d done her.
“It’s all right, honey,” he said. “This is my responsibility. Don’t feel bad about it. I’m blessed to help you. I only ask your forgiveness that I haven’t been able to do more.”
He looked up at her. “Let me wash your feet.”