“Sounds like a cardinal point to me.”
“That’s what it hinges on, all right.”
I gave her a smile and took a third brain-alerting bite of coconut pie.
“How’s your boy doing?” Shorty asked me, indicating to Theo that it was Dr. Pepper time.
“More ice?”
“New glass.”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I’m going up to see him tomorrow.”
“You want me to have a talk with him?”
“No thanks. You helped me get a roof over my head; you can’t browbeat him into making an honest woman of me.”
“Just say the word. I’m always here, if I’m not there.” Wheeze, wheeze.
THE AMAZING THING about driving up to the farm on Tuesday was that I didn’t have to hurry home, not the way I used to. I was halfway moved into the place on Huckleberry, which was due, in a couple of weeks, with a little help from my friends, to emerge its former dark and gracious self. The potbelly was gone, a not very well-matched circle of hardwood fitted into the hole it had left. I was still partly at Eben’s, with all of us treating me in the manner of a visiting relation who’s overstayed her invitation.
But at least everyone knew I was seeing Drew, that we were sometimes at the farm together.
The duster had left tracks along the road, almost as if tree branches had been dragged along the shoulders, or Czechs with brooms had set about to tidy even their countryside. Dust was still in the air, a faint haze, fine topsoil far from home, some part of west Texas blowing our way. A couple of bluetick hounds chasing turkeys through a field stopped to shake off silt that settled like a sigh on their backs and the surrounding stalks.
The truth was, I was nervous. The crazy eagerness I always felt barreling up the road to see him was still there, that lurching in the stomach, the feeling of sex running like a current up my legs, making a flush across my chest. The feeling that I was not going to be able to wait—for it, for him, for the sound of his belt buckle hitting the floor, for that old quilt-covered double bed. It made me giddy, a haze in front of my eyes worse than the dust. But, in addition, I was scared.
What if—I didn’t know how to finish the thought. What if Drew didn’t want it, me; what if he was out working on his bikes when I got there, suggested we go into town to eat, said maybe we should wait a few months to get together, until his mother, or Mary Virginia—I got myself in such a state I had to pull over on the side of the road and lean my face against the steering wheel. Breathe a little. Locate the old hounds running around chasing a little swirl that had risen between their paws, snapping at it with their jaws.
When I parked the Firebird by his pickup, I could hardly brake and turn off the ignition for nerves. For just a second I felt as if the car was going to slide right on into the shed, nose the wide doors off their hinges, come out the back and keep going right into the field of clover, the bluebonnets and primroses gone.
Drew was working on the bikes. He had them both out, the Western Flyer, mine, the Schwinn Black Phantom, his. Shiny as if they were in a showroom. He was oiling them, and looked to be fixing a loose chain. “Whoa,” he said, getting up, wiping his hands on his jeans.
“She saw the barn and bolted,” I told him, getting out.
For a minute we stood there, six feet apart, both of us trying to read what was going on, looking, scanning. Then we were holding on and it was just the same again.
I didn’t talk or think until we were out of our clothes and had done it on the bed and again on the feather pillows on the floor, and were too winded to get back up on the bed. Lord, I’d been so terrified.
“God,” Drew said. “The way you looked driving up, like you were going to run me down. Like you were not even interested in stopping. I’ve been nuts to see you; getting hard just walking down the street, like some kid who hasn’t got control over it. I thought I’d die when you walked out of Circleburgers and never even looked back.”
“Me, too,” I said. “I was afraid you didn’t want to see me.”
“How could you think that when I’m messing up my whole life and all my granddaddy’s acreage so we can be doing this every day of our lives?”
“That’s why, that’s because. Because you might be mad about that; because you might decide this wasn’t worth it.”
“What is this it—? Worth it? We’re talking about you and me. And damn straight it’s worth you and me.” We kissed, then put the pillows back on the bed and got into our clothes. “I don’t know what’s got into Mother. Some ant’s up her ass.”
“I had an awful time Sunday.”
“What happened?”
“Not being at Lila Beth’s. Not having brunch there one more time.”
“Lot of fun that would have been. The preppies in their Sunday suits pretending they cared who found the golden egg, Mother looking at me like I’d got fleas, Mary Virginia talking about what a bummer that ParkGate was going down the tube, all her sister’s hubby’s money going with it, thirteen swimming pools or thirteen golf courses, thirteen somethings. And all that’s on my mind is that I’m about to lose my granddaddy’s land, which is suddenly valuable because the Austin chalk formation is easy to tunnel under—”
Did he mean that’s how it would have been Easter, if we’d all gone? Or that’s how it was? Had he gone to Lila Beth’s with them all? Had he gone to the Episcopal service with Mary Virginia? Sat by her? Did he still live with her, with them, as if nothing had happened?
“Let’s eat.” He pulled me against his chest, kissed my neck.
“I didn’t stop for kolaches, I didn’t even bring butter. I was a wreck; all I could think about was getting here.”
“Yeah, I didn’t pick up steaks, same thing. What the hell, we don’t have to hide out here. Let’s go into West and eat at Vlasek’s on the square.”
Vlasek’s, the old café in the center of town, with the ancient sign in the window that said WHEN YOUR ONION RINGS ANSWER IT HERE, was now sandwiched between the Orient Express Chinese takeout, and Eata Fajita Mexican fast food.
On the square, we saw the drab green fifties pickup I’d told Drew about, pulling away, heading out of town in the direction of the milo silos to the west. No sign of the fancied up Model A I’d seen parked at the horse posts last time.
“Let’s get to-go,” Drew said. “I’m too antsy to sit in there.”
We stood at the counter, reading the menu, trying to get our appetites up. We got half a dozen big hot links, juicy sausage baked in bread dough, and half a dozen baby hot links, plus a quart of local milk. It was too early for the lunch specials.
In the truck, riding around town, we ate a couple still warm, taking turns drinking from the glass milk bottle, getting mustaches, trying to celebrate because we were out in public. The yards were still full of CZECH YOUR BALLOT signs, and the Old Czech Corner had its crafts set out in the window of its restored nineteenth-century quarters.
“Let’s go back,” Drew said, turning and heading east without waiting for an answer. Out of town, we were into rolling fields, with not a tree in sight except those planted, like Drew’s pecan, by a farmhouse, or in a clump down by a stock pond for summer shade.
“Some granddaddy of mine,” he said, “dug out the first tank in these parts, did you know that? With a scraper of cowhide.”
We passed cozy roadside homes with grape arbors and stands of phlox as high as the doors.
“Did you hear back there?” he asked. “Man in Vlasek’s said the phone lines were out again in the whole town. Third day in a row. Fire ants eating the cables, everybody knows that; he was claiming the trouble was they dug a trench in the wrong spot.”
He turned the radio to the Best Country in the City, and we heard Charlie Pride singing “Let’s Fall to Pieces Together.” “You can say that,” Drew said.
It seemed to me he was running, riding around, going out, coming back, in order to avoid talking. Maybe that wasn’t right; maybe it was just his way of dealing with worr
y. I hooked a couple of fingers in his belt, sitting close in the high cab of the truck, the sack of hot links between us.
“—alone, we’re better together—” Charlie sang.
I hadn’t been wrong; something wasn’t right.
“You get over the idea of renting a place in the Berries?” he asked, making a point of staring down the road, in case a combine or tiller sprang into view.
“I was never renting; I bought a house. I tried to tell you. On Huckleberry. It’s walking distance from the schools. So students can find me without having to draft their carpools or their folks. My own kids can walk.”
He took his eyes off the road, steering with his left hand, his elbow resting in the window. “Bought? You’re kidding. That’s no place to buy. It’s rough. It’s mixed.”
“The whole world is mixed, dickhead.” I borrowed Sugar’s word.
“The preacher help you get it?”
“My folks did a little bank work.”
“Shorty and Theo?”
“Daddy and Mom, these days.”
“I’ve heard everything.”
“Any birdhouse in the storm.”
“They seen the place you bought?”
“No, but they’ve seen me.”
“Where’d you get the money? I thought you said the parson was only kicking in five thou period. Cile, what’s the matter with you? I thought you’d rent something temporarily, while Mother and Mary Virginia were waging all-out war on my future life and the dreams of my ancestors, and then we’d be up here. The way we said. You changed your mind? You want to live in the city? You want to date or something?”
“Date?” Was he mad that I was going to have a place by myself? What was going on? “You mean you? Or you mean date-date people? You early primate—” This time I borrowed from Drew’s elder son. Vocabulary enrichment. “What’re you talking about?”
“You don’t want to live there, in the Berries. Any place there you can afford, you don’t want.”
“It was built in 1885. Old, it’s old. It’s a Carpenter’s Gothic. I have it on good authority.”
“Falling apart, something that age. Nobody’s kept it up.”
“I thought you’d be glad. I need somewhere in town I can teach. You said you had to keep your office in town. I’d thought we could—”
“When did I say that? I don’t see why I can’t run things from up here. What am I going to have to run, anyway? I give up the acres, the mineral rights, the riparian rights, the access roads, the topsoil to the dusters, the innards under the soil to the federales, what’s to manage? The bikes I can handle up here.”
What a earful of hurt feelings, his, mine. Why don’t we fall to pieces together, as the song said. A cluster of Maine d’Anjou cows looked solemnly at us through a shredding cedar-post fence. On the other side of the road, Holstein, neat and long-headed, chewed in a mannerly fashion. Did the two breeds consider themselves the same species? Did they like one another’s looks? Was the buffalo grass greener across the road?
“You want to try them out?” he said, pointing to the bikes, back at the house.
“Sure.”
We got on the bikes and rode, panting slightly because of the strain of loosening the chains, stiff from being long unused, around the drive, then out onto the dirt farm-to-market, then back in front of the shed.
“We can take a picnic—”
“Yeah.”
We went in and sat at the kitchen table, dumping the rest of the hot links on a plate. Drew put a pot of enamel-chipping coffee on and we filled the blue-veined tin cups, sat in the Stickley chairs, stared at the BUY FROM THE PUMP sign.
“Lord,” I said, “we’re a mess.”
“I know it. I know we are. I don’t know what’s the matter. I was mad coming up here, mad all the way through, and when you showed up you just seemed to be asking for some of that mad to land on you. I saw red, I mean it, bright red sheets just the way they say, when you said you’d bought a house. Imagined you going at it with somebody else, even though I knew better. What do I think, I own you? You can’t make a move without asking me? We talk about moving up here and I’m killing myself to hang on to this place so we can move into it, and then you go buy a house.” He got up and poured his coffee down the sink. “It still makes me mad.”
“What’s happening with you? Is Mary Virginia saying no?”
“Mary Virginia has not yet said uno word about the fact that I’m all but gone. That I’ve told her to get a lawyer. That we are finished, through, that we aren’t married anymore.”
“Did you go over to your mother’s Easter?”
“That was a command performance, after the parson’s egg hunt.”
“Are you still living at home?”
“What is this? Is this a cross-examination? Are you saying I should have moved my straight edge and collar stays here? Are you? Or what?” He poured us a fresh hot stomach-jolter of coffee. “You think that would help? Get my point across? Move myself up here? I’ll do it.”
“I mean maybe Mary Virginia doesn’t really believe you’re leaving.” I made fists, mad myself. “Maybe I don’t.”
“Mother says that Mary Virginia will sell all the acres she can for all the money she can get; the land’s gone, last count, up to seven thousand per.” He looked wild.
I reached out and touched his brick red face, his brick red hair. He was wearing a pickup red cotton shirt. No wonder he and I were seeing red. I wished we weren’t picking at each other, sitting two feet apart and losing each other. “We could go dancing,” I said. “If we can go to Circleburgers and Vlasek’s, we can go dancing.”
He brightened at that. “Yeah. We don’t have to drive ourselves nuts, do we? I mean we can go out, not out-out, not flaunt it where all the bankers in town can see, but, yeah, out. We can go out. We can dance our brains out; maybe that will shake our heads loose.”
“We could drive down to Round Rock and see if any of those little dumps are still open. Nice pickup bands, sawdust on the floor.”
“Not down there. Not that far away; I need to stay on tap. We’ll think of something. Wrong time of year for Czech Fest.” He gave me an old-Andy look.
“There must be places around West, out in the country. Some dance hall next to a Meetingside Church of Christ?”
“Cinco de Mayo, that’s just a couple of weeks away. Cen-Tex Hispanic Chamber goes all out for that. Firing cannons to reenact the Mexicans stomping the French. Little kids dancing in costume, big folklórico. There’s always a tent where just plain people can polka and do a little country. I remember because I used to go every year, looking for you. Dragging the boys with me, who didn’t give a bat’s eyesight for the Mexican hat dances; giving them ten dollars to eat their way through sixty taco and chalupa stands.”
“I know, I used to take the girls. Looking for you.”
“You ever think, what if we’d run into each other five years sooner?”
“Sometimes.”
“The thing is, you know, Cile, that I’m kicking myself for taking so long, the way it turned out. If I’d come home, right home, that night after the Czech Fest and cut out, before the supercollider was even a gleam in some crazy physicist’s eyes, when all that land was still too far south for Dallas to expand into, and too far north for Austin, and Waxahachie hadn’t even been invented, and the fastest way to bore my mother and my wife was to get off on the subject of grass, talk about the difference between windmillgrass and big sandbur, saltgrass and indiangrass, cottontop and silver bluestem, I could have got my gear out of there and they’d have said, Good riddance to small potatoes.”
“Not if it’s me Lila Beth is mad about.”
“Yeah, she said that. I don’t know. I always thought she preferred you. Mary Virginia was never her kind.”
“Let’s try the feather pillows again,” I said, starting to unbutton my shirt.
“Let’s try the bed and then the feather pillows.”
EARTH DAY WAS perfect: sunny,
calm, blue, clear. Weather, in an ecological mood, had taken a holiday in Waco. My girls, who were running in the six-mile benefit marathon along the lake, came by looking frisky as young heifers. A comparison I didn’t confide to them, being happy to be included on their itinerary.
Barbara Bledsoe was going to pick the four girls up from my place and take them to the start of the run, which followed the west side of the Brazos, crossed the suspension bridge, came down the east side, and ended at the park by the Austin Highway bridge. My two and her two wore identical T-shirts, the theme of the day having eclipsed private concerns. These had a banner saying THINK GLOBALLY / ACT LOCALLY, and, under that, listed in order, the top ten threats to the earth: global warming, ozone hole, air pollution, water pollution, garbage, rain-forest destruction, ocean pollution, topsoil destruction, toxic wastes, endangered species. I asked them to see if they could find just a STOP TOPSOIL DESTRUCTION T-shirt for me, man’s large.
They’d carried in a stack of posters that read BAN THE BOX and WRAPPING IS A RIPOFF. The posters were on stakes, and looked as if someone had taken the campaign posters from the recent runoff election and covered them with a fresh message. A new form of recycling. After Earth Day maybe they would be used for the general election, and then for other topical movements: blocking bulldozers in Tasmania, saving the Belize coral reefs, planting trees in Kenya, putting down roots in the Amazon. They also had literature on Earth Day, pamphlets proclaiming this a grass-roots movement. I took two, thinking I could make Drew a birthday card with grassroots cut out and pasted front and back.
Hug Dancing Page 15
