At least Joel understood. He understood everything. After a bad week their friendship was back on track. Teddy had gone to see him Sunday afternoon, as soon as he was certain he’d be able to get Susan out of the house. He felt nervous as he approached the Wootens’ big front door. If Joel rejected him now he didn’t know what he was going to do. And the initial omens weren’t good. Something bad had visited the Wooten household in his absence. Ardelia answered the door, looking like death warmed over. Usually totally composed, she now looked like she’d been up for weeks. She was still in her bathrobe, even though it was three in the afternoon. Her watery eyes didn’t seem to recognize Teddy at first.
“Hey, Mrs. Wooten—long time no see,” he tried.
She simply stared at him.
“I was wondering, is Joel around? There’s a couple things I wanted to square with him.”
“Yes. Of course.” Her voice was distant. “Come on in, Teddy.”
He stepped into the big front hall, with its wide staircase and marble floors. His eyes washed over the portraits of all those vanished Negroes, including Joel’s something-or-other grandfather, who’d been an honest-to-God slave. Fairly fucking intense. The twins emerged from the den, staring at him in a way that made it clear they expected someone else. He gave them a jaunty little wave. They disappeared.
Ardelia had moved to the bottom of the steps.
“Joel?” she called out in a voice that wouldn’t make it past the fourth baluster. “Hon?”
“Mrs. Wooten?”
She turned.
“Why don’t I just go up?”
“Oh. Yes. I suppose that would be best.”
He could hear music as he reached the top of the steps. He took a deep breath, running over what he was going to say before heading down the carpeted hall, past neatly framed Jacob Lawrence prints. Joel’s door was off the latch. Teddy knocked. He could hear the bed creak. A few seconds later the door came open. Joel’s face creased in surprise, then took on that same stony expression he’d had a week ago, when he’d stared down at Teddy from his window.
“How’d you get in?” he asked.
Not the greatest of openings. But.
“Explosives to break the perimeter fence. Then drugs to bribe the guards.”
Joel failed to see the humor.
“Come on, man. Your mom. What do you think?”
They stood there for a moment. Music seeped past Joel. The Stylistics. Just a few days away from Teddy’s stern tutelage and the guy’s tastes had already gone AM.
“Look, man, it’s not going to work out,” Joel said finally.
“What?”
“You and me. When we were kids, it was cool. But now, I don’t know. There’s just too much bad shit out there for us to make it. Maybe we should just, you know, shake hands and call it a day. Go our separate ways. Or whatever.”
Teddy felt a brief moment of panic that he quickly reasoned away. This was just Joel’s anger talking. An anger he was about to transmogrify.
“I just saw Susan.”
Joel stared at him for a moment. Curious now.
“Say?”
“In fact, I’ve seen her every day for the past week.”
“Bullshit,” Joel said. “Where?”
“Her house.”
“Really?”
“You gonna ask me in or am I gonna have to stand out here like some sort of fucking doofus as I explain to you how I’ve saved your heinie? Just a question.”
Joel let him in. Teddy collapsed in the chair by the window. He paused for a dramatic moment, then let him have it. The whole shooting match. As he spoke he could see the hostility vanish from Joel’s face. The old emotions returned. Respect. Admiration. Awe.
Friendship.
“What about the sarge? He must have something to say about all this.”
“He’s got this new job. He’s totally out of the picture.”
“Doing what?”
“Shoveling shit in Louisiana. Who cares?”
“So what’s the plan?” Joel asked after a moment.
This is more like it, Teddy thought.
“Can you get out of the house?”
“Hell, yeah. They never grounded me. Just said I couldn’t see Susan.” His voice dropped slightly. “Besides, my folks had this big fight yesterday. Dad’s in deep shit.”
“In that case, my swain, what do you say we gather at the broken pier come Tuesday night, me, you, and the nymph, to continue the summer’s festivities?”
Joel’s eyes filled with gratitude.
“That would be great, man.”
“Great’s my middle name. Meet me at nine-thirty sharp. If I’m not there by, like, ten, there’s been some problem getting her past Colonel Klink. Hasten back here and I’ll come with alternative arrangements. Contingencies will be hammered out. Whatever you do, despair not. El Ted is in the driver’s seat.”
Joel nodded.
“Well, I better go.”
“You want to hang for a while and doobify?” Joel asked.
Teddy was sorely tempted, though he knew that the less he was around Joel, the less anyone would suspect what they were planning.
“It’d be better if we pretended like we were still pissed at each other.”
“Yeah. You’re right.”
“Not that we are or anything.”
Joel scowled.
“Hell, no. That was just … no, man, we’re cool.”
Teddy smiled and rose.
“Tuesday night it is.”
He started to go.
“Teddy, man—thanks.”
“Hey, no sweat. After all, what are friends for?”
After arriving at the Truaxes, Teddy chatted with Irma, waiting for Susan to descend from her bedroom. The sarge was nowhere in sight. As usual. Irma was all dressed up tonight, as if she were the one going on the dream date. Mauve slacks. Cork heels. A flowery satin blouse. Perfume, lipstick. They waited in the living room, talking about the new Bond film Teddy was allegedly taking Susan to see. Irma complained how all the stars these days seemed to be hairy, mumbling Italians. Teddy nodded heartily. Absolutely, he thought. Warner Bros. über alles. In the past few days he’d realized that there was nothing this fucking woman would not say after knocking back a couple whisky sours.
Susan finally emerged, meandering down the steps in that slinky style of hers. Venus on the half shell, Teddy thought. She, too, had primped, wearing her best peasant blouse and those hip huggers whose knees were freshly patched with squares of paisley cloth. Silvery bracelets dangled from her wrists. Her blow-dried hair floated vaporously around her head.
Teddy stood upon her entry. Ever the gentleman.
“You look great,” he said.
“So do you,” she answered, the note of sarcasm in her voice detectable only to him.
“This is so nice,” Irma intoned.
She walked them to the door.
“We won’t be too late,” Teddy said.
“Don’t worry.”
They turned to go.
“Susan?”
She kissed her dutifully. Irma started to fuss with something in her hair, a tangled imperfection visible only to a mother’s eye. Susan pulled away with a grimace. Irma clicked her moist tongue and looked at her daughter with frustrated affection. Susan rolled her eyes and turned to Teddy.
“Let’s go,” she mouthed.
Teddy nodded good-bye to Irma.
“Have fun, you two,” she said, her words muffled by the closing door.
25
Wooten wondered if he should knock. Part of him knew the idea was absurb. This was his house, after all, built with his own hands. But he also knew that Friday’s revelation had changed all of that. It would be a mistake to make too much of the fact that his name was on the deed. He looked around at the night-quiet yard and realized that he’d made himself a stranger here. And strangers knocked. Knocked and waited to see if they would be welcome, or have the door slammed in their face.
> He was coming home. Finally. He’d had enough. It was time to set things right with Ardelia. He had to snap the bizarre string of calamity that had entangled him these past few days. Nothing had been right since Friday. Night, day. Work. Sleep. The simplest of conversations. Eating—Christ, he hadn’t been able to swallow more than a few bites at a time since the flight back from Chicago. His head ached and his clothes stank and his guts were twisted by a hunger more profound than he’d felt in years.
He couldn’t keep on like this. He had to be home.
It had been the worst four days of his adult life. The bad luck seemed to follow him out the door after his bedroom confrontation with Ardelia. Following that first sleepless night on strange sheets he’d emerged from his dank motel room Saturday morning to find a flat tire on his Ranchero. He’d called Ardelia from the piss-stained phone booth of a Phillips 66 after changing it, only to have her hang up on him before he could even tell her where he was staying. He’d spent the afternoon in Newton, going everywhere but home—or unit 27. Several times he thought about simply showing up on Merlin’s Way, acting as if she had never thrown him out. But the prospect of enduring another dose of her anger made him keep his distance. So he spent the day visiting sites, pestering his men and lending a hand, before returning to the motel, whose plastic and mold he’d already begun to dread.
That night he went for a solitary dinner at Mary’s Bar BQ down in Powdertown. It had been a long time since he’d been to the county’s only soul food restaurant—Ardelia hated the place, with its fatty food and raucous atmosphere, its card-playing men and women who pulled up chairs at your table without an invitation. Children running riot. There was no Mary as far as Wooten could tell, just a big-bellied cook named J. D. Stacey, who wore his blood-splattered apron like a preacher’s smock. He could be seen through the serving hatch, talking nonstop to no one in particular as tongues of grease flame licked the smoky air around him.
Wooten figured that if he had to eat alone he should at least eat well. There would be plenty of other ways to punish himself. He chose a corner table and sat facing away from the other diners. He’d brought along the thick binder of preliminary AmericaWorks specs that Savage had given him, though as he flipped numbly through the blueprints and costings and flow charts he found his mind too full of Ardelia’s choking voice to concentrate.
“Know what you want?”
The waitress was young. High school. Already starting to go to fat.
“Ribs and tea,” said without consulting the menu.
It took her a long time to get this on her pad.
“You want somethin’ else with that?”
“More ribs.”
She shot him a quick look, then lifted the menu from his table, her eyes scanning the wall above.
“Uh huh,” she said listlessly before retreating back toward the hissing grill.
Wooten continued to leaf aimlessly through the specs. But the sight of all that promise only served to sour his mood further. Twenty-four hours since he’d been offered the best job in American construction and his wife still didn’t even know about it. Nor would she any time soon, if her attitude this morning was anything to go by. Which meant that there was no way he’d be able to give Savage his answer on Monday morning, as promised. Now that the shock of discovery was wearing off, Wooten was beginning to fear that he’d done some permanent damage to his marriage. On the rare occasions he’d contemplated detection in the past, he’d somehow managed to convince himself that beneath Ardelia’s anger would lie a substrata of understanding. She was bound to know how little the whole sordid mess meant to him. She was Ardelia, after all. She understood everything. There was no way she could fail to see this for the nonsense it was. But he now understood that this mythical forgiveness was nowhere in sight. The woman he’d left in the bedroom was hurt and confused and angry. What he’d torn into with his infidelity was the very part of her that was strong and placid. He hadn’t counted on her emotions running away with her like this. It scared him.
The food arrived. Two thick racks of pork ribs, a mound of greens, half a corn cob. There was a baked potato, too, a rapidly diminishing ball of chive-studded sour cream sinking into its split opening. The ribs were covered by a sheer membrane of glistening fat. Subterranean crackles sounded from within them. Steam swirled from the vegetables and the sauce in its stainless-steel sidecar. Wooten realized that he was looking at the perfect meal. The sort of thing he’d ask for as a last supper. What he always hoped would be in the fridge instead of the neatly stacked Tupperware and anonymous packets of dimpled aluminum foil.
Problem was, he couldn’t eat it. The intricate odor rising from the steaming plate hit him with the stomach-churning force of a ruptured sewer pipe. Suddenly, the food looked withered and putrid. Even the large mug of iced tea seemed stagnant, the wedge of lemon floating on its surface reminding him of Lake Newton’s fish. He couldn’t eat this. The thought of placing even a morsel of it in his mouth was abhorrent.
He summoned the girl.
“I’ll just have the check now.”
Confusion spread across her broad face. She pointed at the food with her gnawed Bic.
“You ain’t gonna eat that?”
Wooten slowly shook his head.
“Why, something wrong?”
“Not with the food.”
She waddled off to the kitchen to explain the situation to J. D. Stacey, who stooped to get a better look at the dissatisfied customer through the revolving metal ticket wheel in his hatch. Not wanting to get into it with the cook, Wooten pointed a dyspeptic finger at his stomach. Stacey rolled the toothpick from one side of his mouth to another, shrugged his commiseration, then returned to his spitting flames. The waitress returned to say Mr. Stacey didn’t want him to pay. Wooten slipped her a five-dollar tip for her trouble. She grunted and disappeared. He closed the EarthWorks binder and walked quickly toward the exit, careful to avoid eye contact. He’d almost made it when he heard a familiar voice.
“Lookeehere. Earl Wooten.”
It was Raymond McNutt, sitting with his family in the last booth before the door. His wife, Vonda, sat opposite him, her hair twisted into a beehive that made her look like a back-up singer for some long-ago girl group. She flashed Wooten a smile as phoney as a three-dollar bill. Mc-Nutt’s two sullen teenage sons sat against the window, lost in the crevices of their sundaes.
“What you doin’ here, man? I thought you never came down to Powdertown.”
Though McNutt’s question came as a jolly shout, there was a barb in it. As the only black lawyer in Cannon City, he’d tried for years to get Wooten to join the various organizations he ran, most notably the venerable Colored Chamber of Commerce. Unspoken in all these invitations was a desire that Wooten become a client, even though he’d explained that he used Austin for all his legal needs. Some time last year the invitations had stopped coming, as they had from all quarters of Powdertown. Wooten knew that after a spell of intense but unrequited goodwill the local blacks now regarded him and Ardelia as being too high and mighty for their churches and clubs. Their resentment was an unfortunate fact of life for the Wootens. After all, they were Newton people. Its location in Cannon County was merely an accident of geography.
“Busy,” Wooten said. “You know.”
McNutt nodded at him for a moment. He was a short, dapper man given to jaunty hats and the occasional cape. His ironed hair glistened with pomade that had the same insistent sheen as the ribs in front of him. There was a keloid scar on his neck, as big as a silver dollar. Ardelia found him unbearably crass. Wooten had to agree. The man was loud. That marcelled hair and the gold incisor and the overpolished Florsheims made him seem a bit too much like a hustler for Wooten’s taste.
“Ardelia here?” McNutt asked, looking around.
“No, she’s a … she’s back in St. Louis. Family.”
McNutt’s gold tooth actually flashed as he shot Wooten a sly, complicit smile.
“While the cat
’s away, right?”
Wooten smiled tightly in return. The boys were nearing the end of their desserts, long spoons chiming against the bottoms of their fluted glasses.
“In that case you ought to pull up a chair and visit, Earl,” Vonda said. “Have some coffee with us.”
Wooten flapped the binder in his right hand.
“Better run. Got all this work to catch up on.”
The smile dropped from Vonda’s face like an overripe fruit. McNutt’s eyes narrowed. The gold tooth was back under wraps.
“Man work as much as you, hard to see how he can ever get behind,” he said, the friendly bluster gone from his voice.
“Well, I’ll be seeing you folks around,” Wooten said.
McNutt said nothing, his eyes still locked on Wooten. Vonda had begun to organize the crumbs on the table. The boys continued to peer into their desserts, trying to salvage one last remnant of sweetness.
“All right, then,” Wooten said with false cheer.
He’d almost made it to the door when one of the boys spoke.
“Stay black, bro.”
He turned in time to see McNutt going upside his son’s grinning head. But, even from this distance, Wooten could tell that there was more affection than anger in the blow.
Back at the motel he started to call home, but never made it past the fifth digit. Phoning now would needlessly inflame matters. If Ardelia hung up on him in the morning, she was hardly likely to hear him out at night. Better to leave it until a new dawn. He propped himself in bed, chewing ice he’d harvested from the hall machine as he watched the Orioles. Sleep was a long time coming. And then, just as he finally drifted off, some joker pulled the fire alarm. By the time they let everybody back in their rooms it was almost three. Wooten knew there would be no more sleeping that night.
The New City Page 31
