Toby Heaton

'I love good endings, so I rarely put a story together until I know what happens. Endings, for me, encapsulate what the story is about-- what, as a writer, you're trying to get to.' - Toby Heaton

Aunt Rose never got her lipstick on quite right. She ran it off above the corners of her mouth, as if the face in the mirror was a carefree twenty-year old girl instead of a woman struggling to stay upright under the weight of some heavy object. Now, an unnatural smile twisted upward under a waxy coat of carmine, rippling her upper lip and turning her nose sideways; an expression pinned to her face like a butterfly on a collection board. Where another grief-stricken relative might have been beyond tears at this final indignity, I was conjuring up the letter I would dictate to my secretary on Monday:

Mr. Shakley, Pursuant to our burial agreement for Miss Rose Kennars, Flaxen Shades Funeral Home agreed to present the aforesaid Rose Kennars in the most natural state possible for her final viewing by relatives and friends. We are therefore shocked en masse to find on her face an expression of. . .

I bent over to look more closely at Rose's face, trying to come up with the words she herself might use to shrivel more than just the unfortunate Mr. Shakley's final bill, when the air in the small viewing room that held me and Flaxen Shade's reinterpretation of Rose contracted. I flashed on the thought that Rose had returned from the dead, sucking an influx of oxygen back into her body, and I jerked away from the casket and. . . bounced. My cousin Bob Ray crowded his greasy bulk up against my best suit and said, "Where is it?"

I froze, just a split second before I got away from his all-encompassing mass. Just long enough for him to know I knew exactly what 'it' was. I pretended anyway. "You know, of course Bob Ray, this is Aunt Rose here. This is a viewing here. A place of respect here."

"Dead is dead," Bob Ray said and moved back against me, taking these idiotic mincing steps that were his idea of subtlety. He hadn't bothered to change out of the farmer-john overalls he wore to work at the garage he owned. The sleeves of his T-shirt were ripped off, displaying tattooed upper arms. His face shone almost Greek-like in profile -- slicked black hair with long sideburns, slightly hooked nose and a jutting chin -- but head-on, it appeared disjointed, like one of those flip pads that the police use for character identification where nothing quite lines up. He glanced nervously at the body in the casket. Bob Ray, like me, had never quite known where the boundaries were around Rose.

He tried to wedge me between his body and the casket, and could have crushed me, his two-sixty against my one-fifty or so. With anyone else, I would have had no compunction about driving my foot against the outside of his leg or kneeing him in the balls; but we had rules, Bob Ray and me. Aunt Rose's rules. And we'd played these parts so many times before. So I just scuttled around to the back of the casket and we looked at each other across Rose's body, the three of us together again.

"Where is it?" he repeated.

"What, Bob Ray? What?" Just the right note of injured innocence. It's always easier when you have what they want.

* * * * * * * * * *

I was an only child. Not that that meant anything. I had Bob Ray. Our mothers and Rose, the Kennars sisters, had a three generation history around Asheville. Rose was the oldest and married at fifteen -- this from my mother -- to an older man who had five acres of burley tobacco and a shack up near Marshall. After he died, a few years into the marriage -- and my own personal opinion without ever having known the man is that he died of fright -- Rose sold the acreage and bought an old two-story clapboard on the French Broad River just north of Asheville where she lived the rest of her life. She ran Morley's Stop'n Go over on Leicester Highway and in the drinking bars out in the county where a few of my less prestigious clients were more comfortable, her name sometimes came up.

As a lawyer I occasionally got invited to one of those black-tie affairs the Biltmore folks are so fond of, and if I've had two or three too many, I might let it slip I'm kin to Rose Kennars. There's always at least one audible indrawn breath, a gratifying sound in such esteemed company.

When Bob Ray was just a baby, his mother Joline followed a blues band to Memphis and didn't come home for a year and a half. She was a large jiggly woman, a skilled fiddle player, and in great demand at the contra dances, but not much use to a blues band. We never knew if she actually eventually played in the bands she ran away with (the blues band was only the first) or if she was just some kind of musical groupie. She had the knack of making herself needed. Bob Ray lived with my mother for most of that time -- this before I was born. I always wondered how my mother had time to fool around, taking care of Bob Ray and all; and if Bob Ray was her impetus to have her own child. It lent a sobering complexity to my own life.

My mother, Cecelia, had a penchant for preachers -- she married six of them that I'm aware of. My father, whom I never met, was a Louisiana Revivalist on his way to save the North. Her 'mistake,' she calls him, the only one she didn't marry. I'm sure any oratory eloquence I possess came from him.

Every time my mother left, she would hug me, cry a little, and say, 'I have to do this, Jonas. I just have to. He's the One.' Then she would launch into this fairy tale about what was going to happen when the World finally realized the Reverend SoAndSo's true worth. She always went in the morning when I was in school, telling me she would send for me as soon as they were settled. And wouldn't it be lovely, the three of us together, in His light, and I would be baptized in the waters of the Lord. I never was.

Bob Ray's father worked at the water department and as soon as his wife returned from her escapade with the blues band, he got a job in Richmond. The family never heard from him again. If Bob Ray missed his presence, he never said. Those two sisters, Cecelia and Joline, were together on a cosmic menstrual cycle -- gone at the same time with the same frequency, leaving and returning home when their love and sweetness had finally bled dry. If I said to Bob Ray, 'That was around the time of Reverend Torrance,' he would say, 'Oh yeah, The Sawgrass Cousins,' keeping track of the bands his mother ran away with the same way I kept track of the holy rollers my mother married.

We had permanent bedrooms at Rose's but showing up unannounced was something Bob Ray and I were very cautious about. In her first months at the convenience store, some eighteen-year old kid came in late at night to rob the place and decided, as long as he was there and Rose being so pretty and all, he would take a piece of her as well as the money. I've seen pictures of the three sisters when they were in their early twenties -- those brown sepia prints -- and Rose almost took your breath away. But even in my youngest years I could sense this darkness in her, as deep as the black dye she used on her hair. She had enough mad for all three sisters which probably accounted for the sweetness of the other two.

Anyway -- this kid -- she slit his throat with his own knife and left him laid out on the floor of the cooler for the owner to find in the morning. Like some slab of unexpected beef. This happened before either Bob Ray or I was born, but it became folklore in the counties of Western Carolina. Rose Kennars. The men who recognized the name seemed to withdraw inside themselves, as if they could somehow get their blood vessels far enough under the skin to avoid the thought of that knife.

After school on those days when my mother left, I would ride to the house on the river, lean my bike against the front steps, fully visible from the driveway, and sit on the porch to wait; wanting to make very sure Rose knew it was me come to stay and not some dumb idiot rapist. I kept this picture of myself in the corner of my mind lying in one of the back rooms of that old house, my throat slit, mummifying (after the flies and maggots were done), waiting for my mother to come and fetch me.

Rose treated us like her own, which is to say when she lost it, she would pull out this sharp-edged leather belt and whip us across the backs of our thighs, screaming about ungrateful bastards and such. We took it, every strop, every curse. Because in our minds, there was always the knife. It was probably good she didn't have any kids herself. Bob Ray and I were deposited on her doorstep over and over by the irresponsible tide of our mothers' lives, and if life with Rose was difficult at times, it was also the only settled life we knew.

The year my mother went South with the Reverend Williard Jackson (the waters of the French Broad not being conducive to baptismal activities in January), Jayne Mansfield or someone who looked a lot like her came to Asheville; and I fell in love with Merleen Waycaster. Merleen and I were both fifteen. She had breasts the size of cantaloupes, covered by translucent skin with blue veins that ran down the sides, and nipples the color of salmonberries, almost as big as silver dollars. I saw them, the first time, accidentally. She and one of the other girls in my class had just come out of the woods next to the practice field the football team used. We were supposed to be looking for some kind of indigenous Appalachian flower and I had sort of followed Merleen into the woods, the way fifteen-year old boys moon around their lust objects. The other girl found a tick on her throat and Merleen stripped down to her waist, right there in front of me. Well, she couldn't really see me but what I saw was . . . spectacular. I held my breath until the sun went down, trying to take them all in and later in Vietnam, I could hunker down in the bush with a J, and go far, far away from that place; the image of those breasts on the backs of my eyelids.

A month after school was out, I came back from a pickup baseball game to Rose's house in the late afternoon. Instead of being at work she stood on the porch having a sugar snit fit.

"This is so amazing, Jonas. I should call Leila and tell her to come over. A movie star. Right here in my backyard. Maybe Nina and Shirley too. No, not Shirley. Shirley never shuts up.

"My, oh my. She is so beautiful. Did that photographer say Jayne? Jayne Mansfield? Well, she's certainly big enough on top. Maybe he was fooling. Maybe it's not really her but someone who just looks a lot like her."

Two Caddies, one a convertible, had parked in the picnic area right next to the river on the other side of the house, and four or five people milled around. Among them was a chesty blond wearing a white dress with blue polka dots and straps that barely hung on to her shoulders.

I watched awestruck; both the blond and Aunt Rose. Red carnations had bloomed high in her cheeks and her voice had the timbre of a ten-year old girl.

"My god! She's coming up here! She's coming to the house." Rose flew back inside, letting the screen door slam behind her.

High heels on wooden steps. "Excuse me?" a high trilling voice at the back door screen. Light taps on the door frame.

Through the kitchen window I could see Rose straighten her skirt and push her hair up before she went to the door. "Yeah, hon?" She sounded so natural, so Rose-like.

"I'm sorry to ask," the blond said. "but may I use your bathroom?" She seemed flustered, maybe because Rose just stood there, the screen door still closed between them. "The boys . . . the boys can go in the woods, but I'm kinda stuck . . ."

"You come right on in, hon. Top of the stairs." Rose gave her a little push in the back in the direction of the stairs then came back out on the porch to stand with me.

"Jayne Mansfield, my word in heaven. My house. A movie star in my house. Can you believe this, Jonas? They're taking pictures right here. Right here!" Then she hugged me.

While Rose was still in her reverie, the blond came back through the screen door and went down the stairs, a sweet Thanks trailing behind her. We watched for two hours, both of us draped over the railing, the blond spread in various poses on the picnic table against the backdrop of the river. Two of the men held reflector panels, focusing as much of the ambient light that filtered through the trees on the blond as they could. It was about the most unsexy two hours I've ever spent considering the subject matter. I think we were both disappointed in the end.

When they were gone, Rose went back inside and didn't come out for a long time. That night when I went to use the bathroom, the toilet seat was gone.

Rose collected memorabilia. But weird stuff. Joline brought her some guitar picks she said had once belonged to Buddy Rougah. Buddy Rougah? Who ever heard of Buddy Rougah? Then there was a dress with lacey pink and blue butterflies that supposedly had been worn by one of Loretta Lynn's daughters and a toilet roll holder from a bathroom in Warm Springs where FDR once stayed. Rose would keep these things in her room, fondle them, stroke them, like whatever magic they possessed would rub off on her. After a while, if nothing changed, she would consign them to the attic and go on to something else. The toilet seat was only the latest in a long list. Jayne Mansfield's butt sat here.

A few days after this I was playing another pickup baseball game at the high school -- I was into baseball that year -- and Merleen and a few other girls showed up to watch. I had my shirt off, a good tan and all, and managed not to make too big of a fool of myself in front of them.

She stopped me after the game. "I heard Jayne Mansfield was out to your place."

"Yeah," I said, "two days ago." My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. She waited for the rest of the story but my mind arced in lust-lock.

"Well. . .?"

She turned to go, shaking her head in disgust, and I said desperately, "She left something behind."

"What?" She turned and came back, close enough to touch. "She left. . .what?"

"A surprise." I said, cotton-mouthed. "If. . . if you come out to the house, I'll show you."

"No way Jonas Kennars. You gotta tell me or I'm not coming."

I couldn't decide what was worse: telling her and having her laugh in my face or not telling her and having her walk away. Now, of course, I know there's a lot more choices than those two but at fifteen I was still pretty uneducated in the ways of women. "A seat," I mumbled.

"What?" she said.

"Seat, " I repeated. "She sat on a seat. Bare butt."

It only took her a second to get it. "A toilet seat?"

"She sat on the seat and Rose took it off to preserve it or something. Ain't been sat on since."

"Jonas, I swear --"

"Tomorrow night," I just wanted to get it out and get away from there. "you come tomorrow night and I'll let you sit on it." And I ran.

I sweated all that day and the next. What was I thinking of? What was I going to do if she was crazy enough to come? As it happened I didn't have to worry. The universe threw me a curve ball Warren Spahn never dreamed of on his best day.

At four in the afternoon Rose said, "Come on and throw your bike in the car."

"Aren't you going to work?"

"Gotta take inventory tonight and Mal's in Florida."

"But Aunt Rose--"

"No buts, Jonesy boy. You're it. Five or six hours, you move a few boxes, get paid, free coke and hotdogs. What could be better'n that?"

Lots of stuff, but nothing I could tell her. I worked like crazy, pictures of Merleen's breasts hovering in the distance like an oasis; but around seven a busload of camp kids came in and it took forever for them to get their bubblegum and candy before we could get back to counting. I passed on the hotdogs and pop and rode back to the river like a night demon, my shirt tied around the handlebars. The house stood dark, deserted and I was just about ready to go inside, resigned that either I had missed Merleen or she hadn't come, when I heard this kind of high moaning and some sharp bangs of wood on wood. Lots of noise emanates from the edge of a river but I'd never heard anything like that. I went to the porch railing and looked down towards the picnic table where Jayne Mansfield had posed for her pictures. Bob Ray's car was down there. Bob Ray was down there. Bob Ray had Merleen spread out on top of the picnic table. Both of them naked. In the reflection of moonlight off the water I could see the sheen of sweat on their bodies, the toilet seat beneath them as they rolled from side to side.

I sat against the front of the house waiting for them to finish. It stopped for awhile, then started up again and went on and on, the toilet seat banging against the top of the table. I never imagined sex like that -- on and on and on. When they left, it was the squeal of the tires from Bob Ray's car out on the road that woke me from the somnambulistic state I had slipped into. I tortured myself with the picture of them doing it again in the car.

* * * * * * * * * *

I went to Vietnam when I was eighteen. Bob Ray and Merleen had two kids by then so he was exempt. They still held hands in public. (I say 'still' because I thought it was a phase, something married people did before they settled into the drudgery of a relationship. But Bob Ray and Merleen, to this day, hold hands. Even their kids think it's pukey.) I heard a historian a few years ago on a radio talk show discussing the reasons Vietnam vets had a harder time adjusting to civilian life than men from World War II and Korea. One word, he said, explained most of it: lines. In those earlier wars soldiers fought at the front for five or six weeks, then rotated back to safe areas where they could relax. Vietnam was like a huge game of Capture the Flag, groups of soldiers from both sides roaming around all over the country. You could die in Saigon just as easy as the bush. You could die from a grenade rolled by a kid who should have been in school learning nouns and verbs just as easy as a Vietcong ambush in the mud of the Mekong. I thought maybe that historian could have been right, but my adjustments, either going or coming, were minimal.

When I got off the plane at Travis AFB in California after my tour of duty, hundreds of yelling hippie kids outside the fence were waiting. The Air Force baggage handlers dumped our duffels on the tarmac and it took about a half hour to get them all straightened out. Then they opened the gate to let us out. It was like walking one of those Indian gauntlets, long-hairs on both sides screaming invectives like we were pariahs. A big looger landed on my left shoulder, someone's spittle. I turned to look for the chickenshit bastard and there was Bob Ray.

I stood there like a dope. Then this guy with hair down below his shoulders who must have done the spitting started squealing because Bob Ray, a chaw of tobacco in one cheek, had ground his boot down on this kid's foot. He kept on even after Bob Ray moved off him so Bob Ray slapped him upside the head. It sounded like a belly-flop. That boy went totally inert and I knew exactly how he felt. His brain was trying to process pain signals from two different parts of his body, ping-ponging back and forth and, in the interim, he got a stream of tobacco juice in the eyes.

I went crazy. I hit a guy in a leather hat and head-butted someone after that and all the grunts in the gauntlet went right along with me. Those protesters turned and ran but for the ones at the front there was no place to go so we worked them over pretty good from behind. I had ripped off a few girls' shirts and gotten some good licks in when that same big paw that slapped the hippie, grabbed me around the waist and hauled me away, kicking and yelling like a little girl. Bob Ray carried me and the duffel to a pickup with caked red North Carolina mud on the fenders and an engine, I knew, that would do at least one-forty.

For four days we drove almost without talking. Somewhere in the flatlands of Texas, in the midst of a thousand acres of cotton fields, I threw my cap out the window. Then the jacket.

"Might as well do 'em all," Bob Ray said, and the shirt and pants were gone five minutes later. I was home.

We waited on the porch for Rose, a couple of cold six-packs on the waffled wood between us. Bob Ray had parked the truck down on the river, and we sat in a dark corner away from the light. When Rose pulled in, she got out of the car slowly, as if something hurt inside of her, and held on to the porch railing coming up the steps. She couldn't see us in the dark so I clinked the bottle against the chair rail. She didn't say a word. Didn't jump or scream out 'Who's there?' in one of those breathless voices the women in the movies do so well. Her hand just slipped inside her purse and she waited.

"Hey, Aunt Rose," I got up and came out into the moonlight, Bob Ray right behind me.

"Well, can't say as I'm surprised." She went back to looking like just another middle-aged lady and opened the door to switch the kitchen light on. Then came back to give me a hug. That surprised me. First Bob Ray and now Rose. She pulled out two bottles of Jack Daniels and we drank until dawn. Talking now and then with long stretches of silence soft as old bedsheets filled in between. Somehow we got onto movie stars and Jayne Mansfield came up.

"She was here, wasn't she?" Bob Ray said.

"Right down there on the picnic table." Rose grinned her wolf grin. "I got a memento."

"Where is it?" Bob Ray said.

And right then the hair went up on the back of my neck. Not 'What is it?' but 'Where is it?' Bob Ray knew the 'what.' Well, of course he did. That's how he got into Merleen's pants.

"Oh, it's up in the attic somewhere," Rose mumbled.

I kept my face straight or what passed for straight through the haze of alcohol. But I remembered Bob Ray's interest. Oh yeah. I remembered.

* * * * * * * * * *

Bob Ray had changed his T-shirt since I'd last seen him at the funeral home, but not much else. He sat in the leather chair I had bought a few summers before in the mistaken idea it would improve the impression my office made on clients. It fit Bob Ray perfectly.

The attic stairs at Rose's had been pulled down and someone had broken one of the rungs going up. I was sure it was Bob Ray.

"Where is it?" he said.

"It is only two letters, Bob Ray, but it covers just about every object in the entire universe. As a lawyer, I require specificity, exactitude."

"The Jayne Mansfield thing."

"Now there you go again. Thing. What is that?"

"The toilet seat. And you know damn-well what it is."

"You're welcome to it. Go out to the house and get it. But I'd appreciate it if you put another one on the toilet bowl. We're going to have people going through, looking at the house, and a toilet with no seat makes the place look cheap." I rocked in my chair. "You know what I mean?"

"The Jayne Mansfield seat. The one Rose saved." He seemed exhausted, sinking lower and lower into the chair.

"Oh. That one. Well, I have to tell you, Bob Ray, that's mine. Rose left it to me."

"Bull. Shit. Rose wouldn'a put no toilet seat in her will. She probably forgot she even had it."

"I'm the executor, Bob Ray. I'm the only one who's seen the will. I'm the --"

"I want it, Jones and you better ante up."

I leaned across the desk, trying to keep myself from smiling, and said, very serious-like. "This is a legal matter, Bob Ray. That toilet seat is part of Rose's estate. It has value." I sighed, ready to set the hook. "I'm responsible for the disposition of anything in Rose's estate. Now if you wanted to buy it?" I waited a few seconds and then went on in my most pedantic voice. "The money would go back into the estate and be split among the beneficiaries, of which you are, of course, one. So, you'd get part of it back." Sure, and my father was really the Pope travelling incognito through the provinces.

He didn't explode, didn't say anything. I let my chin fall down on my chest, like a judge deciding the fate of a sometime miscreant. "Five hundred dollars," I said, "but you'd be a lot better off just going to the drugstore. They got stuff for men you know. Male hormones and such. It would be cheaper than --"

He came out of the chair, around the desk, dragged me out of my chair and pinned me up off my feet against the wall, almost driving the starch from my shirt under my skin. I laughed. I wanted him to hurt me. I don't know why, but I did.

It disconcerted him. Maybe it's hard to hurt someone who doesn't give a damn. For all his bulk, Bob Ray's never been a bully. He looked out the window a second or two, took a few deep breaths, then let me drop and went around to the other side of the desk. My shirt pocket was ripped half off. He pulled a roll of bills from the depths of his overalls and let some of them spill down on the desktop like green confetti. "I want it now," he said.

"It's at Rose's."

"I checked already. It's not there."

"It's there. You go on. I'll be along directly."

At the door, just before he went out, he turned back and said, "It's not me. Not me."

The night Bob Ray stole Merleen, I walked down to the river after they were gone and watched the moonlight ride the ripples, still half in a trance. All I had on were shorts and the mosquitoes left welts all over my upper body and my legs. The toilet seat lay where Bob Ray and Merleen had left it, the lid open, the bolts dug into the soft wood of the tabletop. I picked it up and threw it as far out into the water as I could. I was crying then, and barely heard it splash. Back in my bedroom I couldn't sleep, thinking about Merleen and the way she had sounded. The mosquito bites itched like crazy but I knew they'd be gone by morning. It wasn't till I heard Rose's car in the driveway that I thought of what was supposed to be in the pillowcase at the back of her closet.

There were no nights in Vietnam worse than that night. I lay like a stone, waiting for her. She must have been tired because she never looked at that crazy talisman, never came to my bedroom. At first light I dressed silently and walked my bike up to the road. I went to every public bathroom I could think of, searching for a white, slightly worn seat with dark brass bolts. Toilet seats are not something you pay a lot of attention to. But Rose . . . Rose, I imagined, took it out of its cloth wrapping and ran her fingers over the smooth wood, caressing the places where the skin of Jayne Mansfield had left some magical imprint that might somehow transform a life on the river. Rose would know that toilet seat in intimate detail. She would have a body memory of that wood surface imprinted on her brain.

By noon I knew I wasn't going to find one. They were all the wrong material or had the wrong kind of bolts. In desperation I rode to the garage where Bob Ray worked. What was I going to say to him? I have no idea. He wasn't there but in the closet-sized bathroom off the mechanic's bay was a light wooden toilet seat, not really white but not another color either. And dark brass bolts. I closed the lid and got on my knees to reach around under the bowl to unthread the nuts, breathing through my mouth the whole time to keep from gagging, seeing all those greasy butts that had sat a half-inch below my face. Too tight. I went back out to the shop to get a wrench, being quiet because Kingman, the guy Bob Ray worked for, was eating his lunch in the office. When I finally got the seat off, I wrapped it in a bunch of rags and tied it to my back with wire for the ride back to the river.

I cleaned it up as best I could and put it in the pillowcase where the old one had been. It didn't look right, even to me. But maybe the same water that blessed the Baptists, that took that piece of traitorous wood somewhere onto its banks, blessed me because nothing ever happened. I monitored the attic. When Rose got tired of her mementos, that's where they ended up. Sure enough, a few months later, there it was, still in the pillowcase, just a few feet away from the pull-down stairs. I hid it under some rock-wool insulation at the far corner of the attic to make sure she would never have an occasion to remember it again. And there it's waited.

From the bottom drawer of my desk I got the bottle of smokey single-malt scotch that I kept for the "blackened" times; coined by one of my law professors as occasions when you did what you were supposed to do as a lawyer, yet found yourself burned, either inside or out. The scotch had been aging patiently, since the day, almost four months ago, when I got a creep named Roger Divinity off from a battery charge against his wife, and that night he went home and beat her so bad she was in the hospital for a week.

I sat with my feet crossed on the corner of the desk while out there, against the western ridges a fiery sun burned the wispy fragments of ashen clouds as they settled down to earth. I could see Bob Ray and Merleen holding hands in the Wal-Mart parking lot; the bloom on Rose's cheeks the day they shot Jayne Mansfield at her place on the river; the serenity of my mother's face when the preachers were finally done with her and she rambled around her gardens, soothing her plants with the same touch she gave to small children. I saw the Southern Baptists of my childhood who laid themselves for God in the French Broad, and wondered how many of them had been saved.