She sat with both hands gripping the steering wheel. Even if she could manage to drive herself over there to Sheila Arnett’s, she couldn’t go there. She couldn’t risk seeing Joey with that black-haired woman who could be one of those perfect women dancing around in a CMT video.
She was sweating, she realized. Great heaps of sweat, and she was so hot she couldn’t stand it. She got out of the Suburban and gulped in air.
Eleven
The City Hall thermometer reads 81°
Just before dawn, after her husband Perry took himself off to the drugstore and while Belinda was still in bed, Vella Blaine went outside to tend her rosebushes while it was as cool as possible. She wore a wide, leaf-green straw hat decorated with cloth ivy, and a green apron with deep pockets for her hand tools. She was inspecting her Mr. Lincoln for aphids when she saw Winston Valentine come out on his porch.
Quickly, she stepped behind the big lilac and pulled her binoculars from her apron pocket. She peered through the leafy branches, moving the binoculars over to Everett Northrupt and back to Winston, the two old coots and their silly flag business. Winston had a time getting his set in place today, and when it unfurled, Vella saw why he’d been struggling—it was a much bigger flag. So that was what the UPS man had delivered to him yesterday. It draped clear down into his boxwoods.
Winston looked down and saw the edges of his flag snagging in the bushes, and his stomach about hit his shoes. He’d known that he needed to try out the flag first, to see what he was going to do about the hanger. He’d been too dang impatient, and this self-knowledge was not helped when Everett called over, “Winston, it’s hittin’ your bushes.”
“I see that, Everett.”
“You can’t let it stay like that,” Everett called. “You’d better take it down.”
Winston looked over his shoulder at his neighbor, who turned from him to his own flag, fluttering nicely, and smiled with appreciation. The Northrupts didn’t have anything but little pansies at the edge of their porch.
Winston wasn’t about to take his flag down. It had taken him nearly a week to get it. He started off purposefully for the toolshed at the back of the house.
Just as he passed by the roses, here came Ruthanne, wearing nothing but a slip. Thank heaven it was a full slip that at least partially covered her breasts that were swaying back and forth as she carried a dishpan of soapy water.
Winston took note of her surprising appearance but kept right on walking, saying only, “Ruthanne, do you know you’re only wearin’ a slip?”
Already past, behind him Winston heard, “Oh! Oh, my goodness!” and then the sound of a splash, footsteps scurrying up the steps and the banging of the porch screen door.
In the toolshed, Winston looked at the electric trimmers but then grabbed the large loppers from their hook.
Vella was about to leave her position behind the lilac when she caught sight of Winston coming back from the rear of the house, striding with loppers in his hand. She had a rising panic for a moment in which it crossed her mind that maybe he was going to attack Everett Northrupt. She was just about to run for the phone to call the police, but then Winston was at the boxwoods, and of course he was attacking them.
Vella watched until there didn’t seem to be much left of those boxwoods, and the big Confederate flag flew free. In fact, it started fluttering high above where the bushes had been because the wind began to pick up.
“Minnie, I just saw Ruthanne come out of the house half-naked,” she reported to her friend on the phone. “Lord knows, she must walk around like that inside. Poor thing doesn’t have but half her mind, and no tellin’ what Winston encourages her to do.”
“What was she doin’ outside?” Minnie wanted to know. “Just walkin’ around? In her slip?”
“No, she came out and threw something on the rosebushes, and Winston whacked down his boxwoods. All the way down.”
Minnie was a little confused about this, and Vella had to back up and tell it all. Then Minnie said she remembered when those boxwoods were planted, but Vella wasn’t paying too much attention to that. She wondered about what Ruthanne had thrown on that rosebush. Looked like wash water. Maybe she should find out what dish soap they used. Maybe that was why Winston’s roses were blooming so abundantly.
The City Hall thermometer reads 88°
The two things Joey liked best in the entire world were the gentle creak of saddle leather and the jingle of spurs. He listened to the mingled sounds and the thud of hooves as he rode the sorrel colt down the valley beneath the tall elms and around the mesquite, a rare treat for both man and horse, who both seemed to need the break from the confines of fences and people.
Joey’s father had put him on his first horse at the age of three, given him his first spurs at four, just as he had Joey’s brothers—Bull, who died in Vietnam, Theo, who went to Mexico, and Purvis, who went off in the army and had never been heard from again.
Their father had been a horse-trainer. He’d kept them moving all over, from Texas to Colorado. His father had always spoken of having his own place, but he hadn’t settled down until he got stomped really badly and couldn’t ride enough to train. They’d had to move to a cotton farm one of their mother’s relatives owned. No matter that his father had had a massive heart attack at the age of fifty, Joey believed what had really killed him were the confines of plowed fields and mounting debts and faded dreams. Bull, who had witnessed it, said their father rose up from where he was patching over patches on the roof of their shotgun house, looked off in the far distance, then collapsed like a balloon with the air going out of it and rolled off the roof easy as a child’s rubber ball. It was figured he was dead before he ever hit the ground.
The image of his father lying like a discarded rag on the ground that day filled his mind, until Joey blinked and realized he and the horse were approaching the gate to the long barn. He dismounted and led the colt through the gate and into the barn. The alley with stalls lining either side stretched ahead, a barn such as he’d always wanted. He looked at it with a mixture of excitement and shame, the thought coming, Did you leave your family for a barn?
Then here came Primo. “Mr. MacCoy has come with the feed delivery,” Primo told him. “He has asked for you.”
“Oh…thanks,” he said when Primo took the horse’s reins. “He’s not too hot. You can just rinse him off, but leave him tied for at least thirty minutes. Watch him, now…he’s knowin’ he’s a colt these days.”
The next instant a figure came wheeling a dolly of feed sacks in the walk-through door.
It was Mason MacCoy, and at the sight of the man annoyance crawled over Joey. He resented the man for drawing him away from the horses. And that MacCoy had witnessed an embarrassing moment in Joey’s life still nagged at him.
“I have that order,” MacCoy said. “Got some cow feed in it. That correct?”
“Yes,” Joey said, nodding and remembering Larry Joe’s truck being at MacCoy’s house. “We got in twenty head of calves for practicing cutting. The feed doesn’t go in here. We’ll put it in the shed near the pasture.”
“Okay…right here I have the pelletted horse feed. I had to substitute with a brand that has fourteen percent protein but two percent less fat. Do you still want it?”
“Let me have a look,” Joey said. He was particular about feed. These high-bred horses could up and colic on the least change.
He turned the top sack over to read the listing of ingredients. The print was somewhat blurry.
“Here.” MacCoy offered a pair of reading glasses.
“That’s okay. This looks fine.” He was not about to use the reading glasses. Old man glasses.
He turned and walked ahead, opening the door to the feed room. MacCoy wheeled the sacks inside and began to unloaded them. Joey noted the man didn’t look so old, and he had thick shoulders, thick arms. Joey jumped in to help with the sacks. He could toss fifty-pound sacks as easily as MacCoy.
He remembered how MacCoy had o
ften delivered feed to Joey at his and Charlene’s place, too. He thought of dropping Larry Joe at MacCoy’s yard.
Then they were straight and looking at each other again.
MacCoy said, “You want to show me where to put that cattle feed?”
They walked out to the delivery truck. Joey heard his spurs jingle with each step. They made him feel good. He slid into the truck seat and directed MacCoy to the small building near the pasture where they fed the calves. The wind had picked up.
“May get rain,” MacCoy said.
They both looked up to see a plane buzzing in and out of billowing clouds.
“It’d be helpful,” Joey said.
He pitched in to help MacCoy unload the sacks of grain. The memory of his son’s truck in MacCoy’s front yard tugged at him.
Finally he said, “My boy’s truck was out at your place on Sunday.”
MacCoy squinted at him. “Yep, it was.”
Joey tossed a sack in the shed and straightened. MacCoy tossed his and got another.
“What was it doin’ there?” Joey asked.
Mason paused and squinted at him. “Why don’t you ask your son?”
“’Cause I’m askin’ you.”
MacCoy threw another sack in the shed, and Joey waited.
“Well,” MacCoy finally said, “he needed a place to park it Saturday night.”
Joey figured things in his mind as he unloaded another sack. “Where’d you and Neville pick him up?”
“Out on Cemetery Road. He wasn’t causing any trouble, just havin’ a good time with a couple of buddies and some beer. He’s a good kid.”
“I know that. He’s my son.”
Mason inclined his head. “Just thought I should say it.”
Joey thought he probably should have said thanks, but he couldn’t. Then he said, “I think if it happens again, you’d better call me or his mother.”
“I can do that,” MacCoy said, “but the boy is eighteen. Anyone else catches him, calling his parents isn’t required.”
Joey looked at him, and MacCoy looked back, then finished unloading the last two sacks. Handling them both, as if he just had to show that he could do it easy.
They got back into the truck, and MacCoy drove to the barnyard. As he pulled to a stop, Sheila came walking across from the house. The wind was blowing her black hair back from her face and plastering her thin shirt to her body. She had that stride about her that drew a man’s eye. Joey noted that MacCoy looked.
He wished deeply that she hadn’t come out. Somehow he didn’t want to be seen with her. He sure wished she wouldn’t wait there for him to get out of the truck. And then he sure as hell wished she hadn’t slipped her arm through his as she turned him to the house, all right in front of Mason MacCoy.
Mason, leaning a bit, watched the two in the rearview mirror, the black head very close to Darnell’s shoulder and the dust swirling up around them.
So that was the true fact of the case, Mason thought with a good deal of satisfaction.
Mason could still recall the day he had first seen her. Oh, he had seen Charlene before that day, of course. He knew her as Charlene Valentine, one of those Valentine girls. They had gone to the same school, and he wasn’t but two grades ahead of her. But back then she had been just one of many schoolgirls and nothing to interest him. He had been wild and chasing girls equally wild. Then, fleeing his daddy more than growing up, he had gone out into the world, a tough guy working tough jobs roughnecking on oil rigs all over the country, getting wilder and wilder until he landed himself in prison. He had not returned to Valentine until he was thirty-five, and then, with wounds freshly patched and tender, he had kept to himself and his Grandpap for a number of years.
Eventually he had gone to work in the feed store warehouse, and one day he had come to deliver feed to Joey Darnell. There she was, walking out from her house, the prettiest woman Mason had ever seen. His eyes had landed first on her coppery hair shining in the sun, and then her smiling face, her skin like fresh-from-the-warm-cow cream.
He tried not to stare at her.
“Hello,” she said to him in the voice of an angel. “Do you know where to put the feed?”
He didn’t, since it was his first trip. She showed him the shed, and he watched her graceful stride as she went on ahead of him. She had a walk that was more of a glide, as natural as the breeze that fluttered her hair.
When she turned slightly to say something over her shoulder, he realized that she was pregnant. He was hit with the full realization that she was Joey Darnell’s wife, when she said, “My husband just went to town for a few minutes. I bet you two passed on the road.”
That day love at first sight happened to him. The kind of love no one believes can happen but that poets and novelists write of with regularity. And no matter that she was married, and that he would never have anything with her, Mason could not stop loving Charlene Darnell.
It was a pure love, and, as such, strong as a love can be. For ten years he had enjoyed seeing her, usually from far away. His eye would follow her walking down the street, or maybe into a store, or even out to greet him from her house when he brought grain, which he always did with a mixture of eagerness and fear of his feelings being discovered. He made a point of not ever approaching her. That would not be right and might tarnish his shining love.
Although, sometimes when he delivered feed to the Darnell place or he met her in passing, when she would invariably smile at him, he would exchange a greeting with her, in the manner of two casual people who lived in the same town. And he had made himself be content with that.
Until now. Now he began to have fantasies that kept him awake at night, tossing and turning with sweat. Fantasies that made his heart swell with so much yearning he thought he could not stand it.
Now, whenever he went into town, he looked hard to see her. Now he carried on entire conversations with her in his mind, in which he got around to telling her how he felt, and she replied that she felt the same. Now hope that he could actually experience these fantasies had risen, and he couldn’t seem to snuff it out.
Twelve
The City Hall thermometer reads 103°
The clouds billowed, giving hope for rain. A couple of times airplanes darted and swooped around, as if to ascertain the wisdom of cloud seeding. Nothing ever came of it. The wind got harder and blew the clouds right away. It also blew down some of the cable company’s tower equipment, so that Charlene lost a number of her favorite stations. After a day of this, she disconnected the cable and had Larry Joe help her to climb around on the roof and get hooked up to their old antenna on the chimney. She could get a Wichita Falls station with it, and they had a few good old shows.
Father Knows Best was just coming on and Charlene settling at the kitchen table with a glass of ice tea when Larry Joe and Danny J. came in to tell her that they were leaving. Larry Joe was going to meet Randy Stidham and do whatever they did to engines, and he would give Danny J. a ride over to Curt Butler’s house. Mr. Butler would bring Danny J. home. Charlene kissed both her sons and sent them on their way, returning to find she could still get the gist of the story on Father Knows Best.
Later, while watching Lassie with Jojo, they had a call from Mary Lynn Macomb, who asked if Jojo could come spend the night with her Sarah, to keep her entertained while Mary Lynn and her husband wallpapered the dining room.
With a hand over the receiver, Charlene discussed the matter with Jojo.
“Can I come home whenever I want?” Jojo asked.
“Of course.”
“Even in the middle of the night?” Jojo was a detail person.
“Yes. I’m sure Mary Lynn would bring you, or if Larry Joe is home, he will come get you, if you want to come home.”
Jojo said she wanted to go stay.
Mary Lynn offered to drive down to get Jojo, but Charlene said quickly and firmly that they would walk.
It was a half mile along the blacktopped highway to the Macombs’ hous
e, and the wind blew them most of the way. Charlene carried an umbrella to shade them, which turned out to be a mistake because the wind tried to snatch it out of her hand and finally succeeded in turning it inside out.
She kissed Jojo and watched her daughter cross the road and, with her little blue suitcase bumping her leg, run up the manicured, if sunburned, yard. The house looked like something out of Southern Living magazine, with ceramic ducks sitting at the edge of the porch stairs and a green wooden bench on the green-railed porch, which Jerry Ma-comb was that minute painting. He was wearing painter’s overalls and no shirt. He had the muscles of a thirty-five-year-old man, which he was.
Charlene jerked her gaze away from his bulging shoulders and saw Mary Lynn Macomb poke her head out the door. Mary Lynn motioned and hollered something the wind snatched right away.
Charlene acted like Mary Lynn’s motion was a friendly wave and waved in return, then headed back the way she had come, her face turned to the hot wind.
When she went into the house, she stood a minute, listening to the quiet. She was alone. She could let her shoulders sag all she wished.
Rainey telephoned. “What are you doing?”
“Watching television. I Love Lucy. The one where she’s learnin’ to drive.”
“You need to get out of the house. Have you been out of the house?”
“I was on the roof this morning.” Charlene explained about the television crisis.
“I was thinking more in the direction of going to the beauty shop and gettin’ your hair done,” Rainey said. “It’ll give you a real lift.”
“Yes. That is a good idea.” It was a good idea, only the thought of going to the beauty salon didn’t appeal to Charlene. She didn’t see a need to upset Rainey with that information, though.
“Well, have you spoken to Joey?”
“Yes.”
“Good…so what have you two decided?”
“I told him I had agreed that Danny J. could pursue bronc riding,” Charlene said. “We decided that.”
Driving Lessons Page 11
