Kathren begins the summer with no scruples.  Willing to do anything to avoid living at home for another year, she takes the job.  She begins the summer afraid of Mississippi, of its connotations and its rhythms, in spite of her parents' origins here.  She exists here without emotion.   As she waits for him, she ponders this beginning. The humidity is like smoke from the cigarettes of men she loathes intensely.  The kind she smiles vacantly at and perhaps laughs at their jokes while praying for divine intervention or nuclear holocaust.  It is a suffocating heat, bearable but on the verge of maddening.  She glances at her watch casually, with subtle femininity.  She is late on purpose.  "Always make them wait,"  her mother said constantly.
        Work had started three weeks ago, and already burnout is scorching her outer reaches. The job is pointless.  The Delta intrigues her, though.  First off, the Mississippi Delta is nowhere near the delta of the Mississippi River.  "That's in N'awlins," her landlady had explained to her with exaggerated patience two and a half weeks ago.  Weeks, days.  She ignores time, or tries to.  She checks her watch again, and discreetly re-crosses her legs as she sits on the bench outside the bar.  Ostensibly with this gesture, she is making a half-assed attempt to adjust her pantyhose.  Another pearl of wisdom from her mother.  "All men love pantyhose.  Wear them."  Kathren finds this more than vaguely ridiculous.  The only interest any man she has ever known had in her pantyhose was how quickly he could peel them off.
        He isn't the one who is supposed to be late, she is.  The fact that she is the first one there rattles her.  It's her job to make him wait, not the other way around.  For lack of nothing better to do, Kathren opens her compact and absently applies fresh lipstick. "What the hell am I doing here?" she wonders audibly.  Two fraternity boys stroll into the bar, giving her the once-over as they pass by.  She shudders.  "Little fuckers," she mutters.  The square will be bustling soon with college kids, rednecks,
and old money bluebloods.
        She is nervous.  Kathren hadn't expected Will to call in the first place.  She barely remembers him, just a composite sketch of memories of him hunting with her father, spending weekends at her house, loud laughter.  She remembers bringing them Coors from the brown fridge in the laundry room.  She remembers her own hands very clearly, how her stubby pink fingers couldn't fit all the way around the bottles and it made her self-conscious, even as a child.  She examines her nails and wishes she'd gotten a manicure this morning.  Instantly, she regrets the thought and curses herself for entertaining such an uptight notion.
        Kathren knows Will is rich old Delta money.  She accepted this dinner invitation because she knows it would be embarrassing for her father if she doesn't.  Her father is the executor of Will's father's estate.  The Southern way: hunt together, finance together.  She knows he is the one who asked Will to take her out to dinner.  But when she heard his voice on the phone, there was a compelling vibrance.  She wants to hear it again.  She is nervous, and the nervousness stems also from the prospect of meeting a contemporary  of her father's on adult terms.  Will's association with her father is unsettling.  Anything associated with her father is unsettling.  Men cannot be trusted.
        "Hey sweetheart!"  Will's voice breaks in, booms, from the open door of his battered blue Bronco, and he steps forth bearing smiling eyes and a peach rose bud, which he hands to her.  She calms her butterflies, accepts the flower, and walks with him into the bar.  Wary but gracious, Kathren wishes she could acheive controlled warmth.  They are seated at his regular table, a small one but out on the balcony wth a glimpse of stars and the square spread out before it.  He orders red wine.  She thinks of her father, and how he disapproves of drinking.  He speaks and dominates the conversation from its inception.  She lets him, and as they sit on the balcony, she cannot help but watch his face.  She wants to hear him, to feel the life in his breath.  His voice is like music.
        He talks that night of Che Guevara, frontal assaults, and the counter-intelligence of the 1950s Central American campaigns.  His drill sergeant, a man named Boggs, is the one he credited with forming his manhood, by building him up on the inside and demanding "fifty more, asshole!" on the surface. He burns with possibilities and the defiance of silence, all with the dash of something pure of life on its elemental level, Mississippi Delta trademarks.  He grabs her wrist with excitement when they talk of Eastern cultures and rests his fingers on hers while she talks.  His touch is casual but reverent and devoid of sexual desire.  The brush of his hands seems brusque to her - gentle in movement but roughened by the cotton farmer's calluses.  The stiffness of his metal-gray mustache, which curves upward at the tips, is tempered with roundness of his eyes, which blink wide like a child's. They are lurking and luminous, and they caress the women who traverse the bar's balcony with something ephemeral, not surrogacy or lechery or triteness, but something admiring and complex.  In the balcony bar, which has changed hands but not patrons over the years, he sits overlooking the square, taking in the soft humidity with the Chilean red wine.  He very well may be the only person in Mississippi both to have ever laid eyes on Fidel Castro and to know the mechanical workings of the cotton gin.
        Words come faster than food at dinner.  Always words, the opening of memory.  His heart is cobbled, like the Reconstruction streets, with burgeoning experience.  The liquidy breeze ruffles his thinning salt-and-pepper hair and he smiles at her.  Fleetingly.  She notices that his smiles are few and far between.  He talks unceasingly, like there is a flood welling inside him.  To this man, there are two things in life: ideas and women.  He is a man who wants a woman, not a flower.  The breeze lifts Kathren's hair as well, the tendrils creeping wildly down her back.  What she should do, he said, was wear it in a bun.  Not a tight one, the gesture of a schoolmarm, but soft and curved at the nape of her neck.  "Sensual," he says. "Every woman who's ever made me lose my mind had a bun.  You're next on my list, sweetheart."  Taking the strands in his fingers and running them through in stroking motions, he talks of more women and expansive ideas.  She remembers him asking her, a serious and bookish nine-year-old, when she would run away with him.  Admiration, not sex.  To him, the world and the South (two distinct entities in his mind) are one gigantic creativity buffet, and the Delta was the silver platter garnished with crimson crustaceans and fish eggs.
         "I was involved in the theater before my father died," he said. "And when you start a theater in a small Southern town, you attract nothing but the town drunk, housewives on the brink of breakdown, and the outsiders from the North.  A Yankee girl, a nurse,  auditioned for Ophelia. She had a bun.  As she read, I climbed over the tops of the seats, row by row, and by the time she finished her monologue, I was sitting at her feet.  Neither of us said a word.  I breathed once.  She smiled.  And then I stammered, 'Who the hell are you?'  That was Elizabeth, my first wife.  You're like her, only you're a real Southern woman." Kathren giggles at the absurdity of this and relaxes into her chair, tipsy and no longer nervous.  She watches him.  Waits for him to go deeper.  The childwide eyes reflect a sliver of the moon and a twinge of pain.  They both sip their red wine and watch the square.

-- Jane Carr

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