Where You Once Belonged

by Kent Haruf

  There was one day in the summer that we drove to Denver. It was a Sunday in August. We left Holt about noon, driving west across the High Plains past fields of wheat stubble and green corn and the dry pastures, and after a while we began to see the mountains rising up toward us, and then in a couple of hours we were in Denver. We wanted to make an afternoon of it, to take the boys to Wet World where there was a water slide, and afterward we planned to eat at Casa Quintana.

  It was about two-thirty when we arrived at Wet World on South Colorado Boulevard. We took our swimming suits and went inside. I bought the tickets at the counter and took the boys back to the men’s dressing room while Jessie went to change in the women’s. The boys were bashful getting undressed in front of me; they turned their backs and pulled their suits up and draped towels around their necks. When we were ready we went outside and waited for their mother. Then she came out, and my god she looked lovely. Every time I saw her I felt the same way. She was wearing a two-piece suit, with the towel wrapped around her hips. She was naturally brown-skinned and now late in the summer she was a wonderful dark color.

  “Good lord,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “What’s wrong, though?”

  “It’s just you. You look beautiful.”

  We went back to the water-slide area and climbed the flights of stairs to the top. There was a long line of people waiting to go down. You went down through a tube, through fast twists and swoops, sitting on a piece of plastic with a stream of cold water pushing you and at the bottom you shot out into the swimming pool. As people disappeared, going down, you could hear them screaming and hollering. The line kept moving forward, then it was our turn. “Who wants to go first?” I said.

  TJ’s and Bobby’s eyes looked huge. They stood on the platform staring down into the water slide where it made its first turn.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “You’ll see.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “No. You won’t get hurt. It’s fun.”

  “Okay,” TJ said. “I think I can try it.”

  I gave the attendant the tickets and he handed us the plastic pieces to sit on. TJ sat down on the plastic and inched himself toward the lip of the platform, then he was over the lip and the stream of water caught him and he went down fast, screaming.

  “Next,” the attendant said. “Who’s next? There’s people waiting.”

  “What do you think, Bobby?” I said.

  “Can I try it with you?”

  “Yes. Come down with me once, then you’ll be all right.”

  I sat down on the plastic rug and took Bobby on my lap. I winked at Jessie.

  “See you boys at the bottom,” she said.

  I pushed us off the platform, leaning back, holding Bobby with one hand and pushing off with the other; then the water caught us and we went down in a wet rush around the first turn, banking up onto the side and shooting ahead, then more twists and sudden dips and a long fast straight run and a sudden turn up onto the side, the water carrying us and Bobby and I both yelling, and another swoop and then a short run and finally out, flying, still seated on the plastic rug but suspended in air now, and then down into the pool. We went under, I held Bobby around the chest and swam to the surface. When we came up Bobby’s eyes were as bright as glass. “How’d you like it?” I said.

  “I’m going by myself next time.”

  We turned to watch for Jessie. But one of the lifeguards standing at the side of the pool motioned us out of the way, so we wouldn’t get hit. We swam over to the edge where TJ was. We climbed out and waited. But she didn’t come.

  “Where’s Mom?” TJ said.

  “I don’t know. She was right behind us.”

  “What’s taking her so long?”

  “I don’t know. Keep watching.”

  Then suddenly she came flying out of the tube with a big fat man in yellow trunks just behind her, the two of them sitting briefly on air, his legs around her, and then they sat down into the water in a tremendous splash. They rose to the surface and Jessie swam over to us. “Sorry,” the fat man called. “Did I hurt you? I’m sorry.” Jessie shook her head and waved at him. She was laughing.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. She looked toward the man in yellow trunks; he was climbing up the ladder out of the pool, pulling his trunks up over his fat bottom. “I got stuck about halfway down and I couldn’t move.”

  “Wasn’t there any water?”

  “Yes, but I lost the piece of plastic. Then that man came down and smacked into me, with his legs around me, and we came down the rest of the way like that.”

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “No it was just funny. And he kept yelling: ‘I’m sorry, lady. I’m sorry.’ But it wasn’t his fault. He was awfully big, though.”

  “Well,” I said. “It’s a little unorthodox, but you did make a splash.”

  “I think we did,” Jessie said.

  “But, Mom,” TJ said. “Don’t do that again. It’s embarrassing.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “I know. But it’s embarrassing.”

  “Very well. Next time I’ll let Pat follow me. Will that be all right?”

  “It’s certainly all right with me,” I said.

  “But you should have heard him,” Jessie said. “ ‘I’m sorry, lady. I’m sorry, lady.’ God, it was funny.”

  Jessie began to laugh again. Her sons stood beside her, looking up into her face. I don’t think they had ever seen their mother look so amused and animated. She was having a good time. We all were.

  We stayed at Wet World for most of the afternoon. Jessie and I went down the slide several more times with the boys, then we got out and dried off and sat at a table watching them. The boys swam and played in the water, diving after a piece of tile, and finally they rode the water slide a few more times. Then we got dressed and walked out to the car. We were very hungry.

  It was about five-thirty now. We drove across town to West Colfax, to the shopping center where Casa Quintana was. It was a large Mexican restaurant where the food was satisfactory, but the primary attraction—for little boys—was the entertainment and the decor. The rooms had been plastered to give them the appearance of adobe, as in a Mexican village, and sitting in the rooms you were meant to have the feeling of being in a peasant’s house. Most of the rooms looked out at a central square where there was a sunken pool with a clifflike platform above it. Also in one area there was a cave which kids could explore. We walked inside the lobby and stood waiting for half an hour for a table. I gave the hostess our name and told her we wanted a place near the pool, so it took a while for a table to be available. Then there was one and we followed the hostess back through a couple of the rooms to a booth. “Your waitress will be with you in a minute,” she said. From where we were sitting we had a clear view of the pool and adobe cliff.

  After the waitress had come and we had ordered, some mariachi singers came through the rooms, singing sad songs in Spanish. They were dressed in Mexican costumes with braid and silver and wore big decorated hats. They stopped at our table and sang to Jessie in high voices.

  “Ask them to sing something happier,” she said.

  “I don’t know any Spanish songs. Just ‘La Cucaracha.’ ”

  “You would,” she said. She smiled at the singers. When they were finished we applauded and they went on.

  In a little while the waitress brought us our food. There was a small Mexican flag on a stick on the table and if we wanted anything more we could run the flag up and she would see it and come back. When we had finished eating I said: “Don’t you boys want some sopapillas now?”

  “What are they?”

  “They’re like pockets. They’re made of dough and deep-fried. You can put honey inside them.”

  “Okay.”

  “Run the flag up, then.”

  They ran the flag up the stick and the waitress ca
me over to the table.

  “These boys want a sopapilla,” I said. “So do I.”

  “Three of them?”

  “Do you want one, Jessie?”

  “Of course.”

  “Four of them. With honey.”

  The waitress cleared our plates and went back to the kitchen to put in the order. While she was gone there was a sudden racket on the cliff above the pool. Two men were arguing with one another, shouting nonsense and pretending to fight; then they each pulled guns and shot tremendously several times, but threw the guns down when they were empty and began to fistfight. They struggled on the lip of the cliff again until one, the bad one, was slugged hard and he fell forward in an arc off the cliff and dove into the pool. Then he climbed out, streaming water, and he and the man above him yelled again at one another while people applauded and whistled. I looked at TJ and Bobby. They were stunned.

  “They were just fooling, weren’t they?” Bobby said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think?”

  “There wasn’t any blood.”

  “Wasn’t there?”

  “I didn’t see any blood,” Bobby said.

  “Well. It looked pretty real to me.”

  “They were just fooling,” TJ said. “You could tell because of the way he dived.”

  They looked at me solemnly, studying my face. Finally I winked. Then they grinned.

  Afterward we ate the sopapillas, leaning over the table, dripping honey onto the plates. Jessie and I ordered coffee while the boys explored the cave in the back room where there was a cache of jewels and other gems studded in the plastered roof. Later they came back talking excitedly and I paid the bill and we left. It was getting dark outside now and the air was cooler again, as it always is in the evening in Colorado even in the summer.

  When we were in the car, TJ leaned forward from the backseat and said without being prompted: “Thank you for taking us to these places today.”

  “Oh. Well, you’re welcome. It was your mother’s idea too.”

  “Thank you, Mom,” Bobby said.

  “We had a good time, didn’t we, honey?”

  We went home then. It was almost eleven-thirty by the time we arrived in Holt. On the way TJ and Bobby went to sleep in the backseat while Jessie and I talked quietly and looked out at the flat dark open country and held hands. She slept a little too, leaning against my shoulder. Then she woke again as I slowed down, driving into town. I stopped at their apartment on Hawthorne Street and we walked the boys inside to their bedroom. They were asleep on their feet and I don’t think they really woke up. Jessie opened their window and left the door open so there would be a cross draft of air.

  When we were back in the living room I said: “I’d better go home now. It’s late.”

  “Are you very tired?”

  “I’m tired, but it’s been a wonderful day. I think the boys had a good time.”

  “They did,” she said. “But why don’t you stay the night? You never have.”

  “I haven’t wanted to cause you any trouble.”

  “It isn’t any trouble. But I suppose you mean the people in town.”

  “I didn’t want them to see me leave in the morning. It seems different if I leave in the night.”

  “Don’t you think they talk about us anyway?”

  “Probably.”

  “What difference can it make, then?”

  “I don’t know. I’m being stupid, I guess.”

  “You’re not being stupid. You’re just trying to be nice. Now are you going to take me to bed or not?”

  “Well hell,” I said. “If you insist.”

  “I do,” she said. “Come to bed, please.”

  We went back to her bedroom. We felt very close when we were in bed together, and then afterward, before we slept, we looked out the opened window toward the streetlamp while the light played on her face and her shoulders and breasts, and we talked a little, and at last went to sleep with her head on my arm and her dark brown hair, like silk, smooth against my face.

  That was in the summer on a Sunday in the middle of August. Then in the fall on a Saturday afternoon in November, Jack Burdette suddenly appeared in Holt once more.

  • 10 •

  No one believed it at first. Then suddenly it was true: he was back in town again after eight years. He was driving a red Cadillac and after he had been sitting in the car for an hour on Main Street while people went by in front of him, shopping, paying too little heed to what they saw to understand who it was, Ralph Bird had finally recognized him. And so in the early evening Bud Sealy arrested him and hit him once in the back of the head with a gun and then forced him into the backseat of the police car and drove him around the corner and up the block to the courthouse on Albany Street and put him in jail.

  So the local phenomenon was home again. The native son had returned. Only he was behind bars now, locked up in a cell where he couldn’t get out, and people were glad that he was. They began to talk about him immediately. They told one another they would get something satisfactory out of Jack Burdette yet.

  As for Jessie and me, we heard about it that same evening, on the Saturday of his return. We were in her apartment in the old Fenner house at the edge of town, watching a movie on television with TJ and Bobby. It was eight o’clock by that time. Jessie had come home tired from work so we had decided not to go out. Then the phone rang.

  Jessie went out to the kitchen to answer it. When she came back she said it was for me.

  “Who is it?”

  “I think it’s Bud Sealy.”

  “What does he want? They were just getting to the good part in this movie.”

  “Should I tell him you’ll call him back?”

  “No. I’ll talk to him.”

  I walked out to the kitchen and picked up the phone. “Bud, is that you?”

  Bud Sealy sounded grim and official. “Listen, Arbuckle,” he said, “I’m going to tell you something first. Then you can tell her yourself if you want to.”

  “Tell her what?”

  “You’re not going to like it. I don’t like it much myself.”

  “What is it?”

  “Her husband’s back in town.”

  “What? You mean Burdette’s here in Holt?”

  “That’s right. The son of a bitch come back. You ought to see him. I got him locked up in jail.”

  “Jesus Christ. What’s he doing back here?”

  “Hell if I know. He isn’t saying.”

  There was silence for a moment.

  “You still there?” Bud said.

  “I’m still here.”

  “Yeah. Well, I thought you ought to know. There’s going to be a hell of a mess about this.”

  We hung up then. I stood looking out the kitchen window into the backyard. It was dark outside and the trees looked black and still. Then while I stood at the window it all began to race in my mind. Everything was changed now.

  I was still standing at the kitchen window when Jessie came out to see what was taking me so long. She put her arm around my waist. “Is something wrong?” she said.

  “Yes. I’m afraid so.”

  “What is it?”

  “Oh Christ,” I said, “Jessie.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Sit down, please. Will you?”

  I pulled out a chair for her at the table and sat down beside her. Jessie watched me steadily while I talked. She did not seem to be greatly upset, nor even much at a loss by what I said. And in the months that have passed since that night I have had time to think about it and I believe that it was not so much that she expected him to come back any more than the rest of us did. It was more, I think, that she had managed to achieve a kind of distance and poise of her own, a perspective from which she no longer allowed herself to worry about things she couldn’t control. She had been made to suffer so much that spring after he had left, she had had to endure so much that in the end when she had survived it all she was stronger th
an she had been before and now she saw things differently than the rest of us do. She would no longer permit herself to worry about someone who was supposed to be a thousand miles away—even if he was suddenly back in Holt, a short five-minute drive across town.

  Nevertheless when I had finished talking she said she didn’t want to see him again. She did not want to have anything more to do with him.

  “No. You won’t have to see him again,” I said.

  “And I don’t want TJ and Bobby to see him.”

  “No. But I’ll have to. There needs to be something written for the paper about this.”

  “Will they put him on trial?”

  “I don’t know. They will want to. It depends on what evidence they still have.”

  She stared at the white enamel on the kitchen table. After a while she said: “I need to tell TJ and Bobby.”

  “Yes.”

  “I better tell them now.”

  She went back into the front room. She turned the television off and I could hear her talking to them; I could hear the questions they asked and then her quiet voice talking again, reassuring them. I sat at the table thinking about it all.

  That was on Saturday night. On Monday I went over to the courthouse to see Jack Burdette. Jessie had called in at work and she had kept the boys home from school. We thought it would be better to let some time pass. The boys were frightened and upset. Nevertheless they went back to school and Jessie went back to work the next day. They were not trying to avoid things indefinitely.

  On that Monday afternoon when I got to the courthouse there was a group of men, hangers-on and old local men retired from work, standing around in the parking lot in their adjustable caps and their long-sleeved shirts looking at Burdette’s car. The police had moved it from Main Street on Sunday morning and it stood now, long and shiny and red, gleaming in the lot behind the courthouse. Parked beside the cars from town, it looked an affront. The men were talking and gesturing to one another.