Free Tomato Red by Daniel Woodrell Page B

jug around at an informal wine-tasting party? Does shrimp cocktail call for this fork or that fork or some other goofy utensil you never heard of and wouldn’t recognize if the First Lady stabbed it into the back of your fuckin’ hand?
    Jamalee had acquired a great thick dilapidated and somewhat dampened book of manners, and the book smelled like a cotton picker’s hatband. She spotted lessons in that volume and tossed them before us, and we three snuffled after the kernel of meaning. The main idea was that we should each of us shed the skin that limited us, the social costumery we wore that communicated our lowlife heritage at a glance, and adopt a new carriage and a routine of manners and that air of natural-born worthiness that the naturally born worthy displayed.
    “We weren’t raised with decent values,” she said. “We’ll have to memorize some on our own.”
    Jamalee needed to borrow a desert of hot sand and scour it through our skulls so we could start over with scrubbed-clean skulls and build uncrippled brains to stock anew with useful thoughts and habits and intentions.
    This process went on over a span of days.

    Jamalee would bow her tomato head, dive into the warped pages of that book, then trot out more protocol you couldn’t imagine ever needing to know. She was teachy around many themes: learn this, taste this, become that different thing. She wanted us to become “civilized,” which I think to her meant to ape the quality folks right down to spit-tin’ at our own shadows.
    The radio was kept tuned to the classical station, and I don’t care much for any music you’d go crazy if you tried to hum. I’d sit there agitated by the Great Foreign Masters and listen to her just enough to avoid arguments. Fairly often she’d use the book as a guide to construct place settings for a formal dinner, only without the right silverware or dishes, then run us over the whole course and chastise our imaginations if we mistook the white plastic knife for the consommé spoon.
    At times Jason would get weary and impatient and she’d say, “Hey, I’m not doing this trying to torture you.”
    “You don’t have to try,” he’d say. “I’m easily tortured.”
    Usually we’d be in the yard as the month of May slid by, or in the kitchen, and that tiny hard-nosed girl worked away at us. She was my junior in years but probably three times smarter and older in every useful way. She’d come to solutions where I’d yet to note there was a question.
    “Then,” she said eventually, “we must master the proper mode of treatment for, as it says, Those Who Are in Our Service. This is crucial, because the high and mighty judge the other high and mighty by how they treat their peons, dig?”
    The girl put bubbles in my spirit with her dedication and hope. She tried to speak with curlicues in her language, fancy twists in her high-blown sentences. She usually leaned into whatever she said, worked it over in her head before letting
it fly, so the words she’d come out with would help her seem to be that other person, not the one she was but the one she was in training to become.
    The world she aimed us at seemed like a child’s wish of a world, except, okay, for the male prostitution and the blackmail.
    I, myself, often wished to be spared the expectation of better days ahead or such. On my own it basically never came up.
     
    IT WAS SAID to me twice by Jamalee that Bev’s motto went, “Live fast, learn slow.” Once this motto had been quoted when we watched Bev spill from a Lincoln and stagger inside with two lovey-dovey paychecks in short-sleeve white shirts and fat neckties. Another time the motto came up when Bev fell by with a sack of burgers and shakes but had forgotten to get Jam’s built with no mustard or pickles. Jam flung the motto in Bev’s face and Bev just laughed back at her.
    “You’ve got freedom of choice, hon. Your choice could be to go hungry. I sure do want you to suit yourself.”
    On