Mississippi
Tableau
in Motion

by Laura Jaworski

Deppray, the man Otis Thame burned herself over, Az the only man to call Deppray friend, and Otis in her puckered skin—nighttime. They gather together in the nighttime when it's cool and foggy-wet; they drink their beers on Az's backstep where they know the whole town can see. If it wants.

There is poetry in Otis's hands—there always has been—the magic of taking shape and place, and pinching it between thumb and forefinger, gathering the all-world home in one gesture to the wrist. But she holds it hard against her now—too fast—she chokes life in her palm. It's hard to hold something precious loosely when you almost let it slip. Her tears are so blue they're balm when they flow on her cheeks. Her scars are dry-bed with no moisture in them—they are more fittingly banked full, but less often. More fitting, but fleetingly full.

Deppray has eyes set far back in his head—his hands are often mute; his face hangs in slack lines. He is not a man whose silence becomes him. His silence eats him smaller and tighter against his ribs. His teeth are yellowed; his eyes are yellowed. Rejecting white—his body—yet with no pride. Self-eating rebellion has stolen his health, and every heave of lung he battles impulse he knows he shouldn't have been made to have. Only lunacy would pray to be so—aware. Contempt keeps lunacy arm's length, but it doesn't ease his blood. Nothing freezes him as fast as a mellow breath.

Az is Az, as God is God. No explanation, no excuse—though twice as good, seeing what God can do. A man is rendered harmless in his limitation; Almighty has the tornado and the plague. What is a balled hand compared to that? Az has beat his mama. Az has beat his wife. But no more. He is young in learning that worship fades and other alliances are made when cruelty's your creed. It's the inconsistency of God that gigs the faithful, and Az isn't up to that. If he can't be bad, then he'll be good because he's got to play it straight. Throw the ball from the chest. He has no poker face—his body is pre-thirty soft in line. A mockery of immolation, his skin. Glisters not with quick-pulled tracks of fire, but with sweat and damp. The first joint of his right thumb is lost. That is his attraction, or he would be too smooth and whole.

She holds her beer against her chest, tight, where she can't see its brown-shiny curve of bottle. He dangles it between spread knees by the neck, shifting it in jerks from hand to hand. And Az sets his down, finely and firmly, square on the stairs. Three, six, one—this is how they drink on Az's homebrew of a night.

After what with Otis, Deppray couldn't get a job—still can't. Tools of electrician sit dusty in his van. That's the way it is some places, even still. Little man can't get away with the dirt that the big men can. And Deppray's never saying something cute when he can say his truth. That's the quickest way to be unlucky; the quickest way to commit to social crime; the quickest way to lose most trust.

Trust and truth—words that had some big wide feet, never standing like a woman on the corner shifting weight. But trust gets carried in hand mirrors nowadays—footless, small, and unrelated.

So Otis can talk and take all the responsibility she wants. Decision, she says. Forgiveness, she says. My own, she says. All her words and her hand-dances, her creation of forest in flame and inch-wide universe that she holds up like a gift—it still isn't proof against the lapping of female voices. Protective beating wings of My girl, Otis . . . and Motherfucker and uh-uh-uh. Shaking heads and NO, and uh-uh-uh. It's too soon to be disappointed in her, face-front, but that will come in their own good time.

Self-respect, they will all but say.

Impulse, she will answer.

Strength in bitterness, they will mean.

The last gasp of a fagged-out love. (Her voice is tired; she will think.)

No man worth that.

Yeah. I know.

After all, she will be a reason to shunt Deppray, shun him to the side, shut him out of life. She will let her portion of sympathy roll down her breast to the ground, hoping his feet will soak it up. There is that thing love leaves behind in its going, causing useless tenderness.

She believes she's spent her passion, her one pyre being built. That she will be limp and calm and wise until she dies, regarding all Man from the mount of death-near wisdom. From the height of the present-tragic, she doesn't know she will want again.

Two old nut trees—black walnut—shiver over the three, dusk joined. The shiver the way only nut trees do, unwillingly but glossily, making the best of a bad day's work. The sound of their leaves is short, abbreviated—you're always listening for more, the rustle and the secret. They are trees of little mystery, staid and gnarled and scarred. They are trees to make your home by because they weave no discontent. Solid shadows, stains of tannin on your stoop. Draw the squirrels like hell, but Az, he doesn't mind. Sometimes he gets out his .22 and has his grandad's dinner; other times he watch them play. Deppray, hunched down in his shoulders, doesn't notice them, and Otis cusses them for fun.

With her cracked-rubber scars and rack-stretched skin, still she laughs. The only thing painful about it is her looks, any more. And like any woman loves life like a lover, she doesn't mind her looks. Looks ain't a life, and looks ain't even much a pleasure. Someday she might mind, but just now, someday can't be real. The next moment can't be real. She won't live in her conceptions, only in the air and the pig-shit smell of rain on rotted fields.

The three—I look at them—trading voices, brushing skin. My lungs are punched by beauty; they look up, and disappear—snatched by time, and leaving random rush of flickers, incomplete. The pulses of dying fire.

Her laugh hangs for one short second, imposed on caved tin rusting roofsheet metal. Gutted van. An extra creeping in of spanish moss and gone-mad rose.

Compassion, the curve of an elbow; pain, a crease between the brows. Restraint, eyelashes clapped firmly to the cheek.

All land is sacred land that chimes with ghosts of a recent past.

A flash-photograph of clanking bottleglass on blocked concrete.

The smell of sulfur—the gun-crack of dispersed visions.