“Helen’s goin’ to leave me if I lose the dealership, Dad. She likes bein’ the wife of the owner of a Ford dealership. She likes havin’ money, and we may not have it much longer.”
“Helen may surprise you, son. How are you goin’ to find out in here? You stay in here, she’s going to leave you anyway. Now…” it was hard for him to say “…if you want, you can come on home to your mama’s and my house for a while.”
“Your house?” The hopeful spark that lit his son’s eyes made Winston feel guilty.
“If you want to come stay with me for a while, if it’ll help, you come on. But you have to do something one way or the other, Freddy. You can’t just sit in here idling your engines. Sooner or later you’ll run out of gas and not be able to go anywhere. And your insurance is running out, too.”
The City Hall thermometer reads 105°
Mason took off early and went over to the barbershop, where everyone was commenting on the temperature. The barbershop was well within sight of the town thermometer. He got a haircut and went home, twisted up the knob on the window air conditioner and took a cool shower. He shaved and put on some high-priced aftershave Iris had given him the past Christmas. He decided on a pale yellow, long-sleeved shirt, even in the heat. He buffed his dress boots with a kitchen towel. He got his good summer Stetson and looked in the mirror when he put it on.
He kept himself moving, not giving his mind time to talk himself out of his intentions. On the drive back through town, he stopped at Grace Florist. He had a time deciding between roses and a colorful mixed bouquet. He decided on the mixed bouquet. He thought roses would be too overwhelming.
His courage was ragged but holding when he drove up to Charlene Darnell’s house. He fairly threw himself out of his truck and was three strides down the walk, before he remembered the bouquet and had to go back and get it out of the seat.
Bouquet in hand, he strode up and knocked on the door, adjusted his hat and rehearsed in his mind what he was going to say.
Charlene, could we visit? Or maybe, Hello. I hope it isn’t an inconvenience that I didn’t call, but I…
The door swung open. Instead of Charlene standing there, it was her son. The middle boy, who looked just like Joey Darnell.
Mason asked, “Is your mother here?”
The boy was staring at him. He shook his head. “No. She went up to take care of my aunt Rainey.” The boy was looking at the flowers, and Mason felt like a clown in full get-up.
“She’s gone?”
“Yes, sir. Uh—she won’t be back until next week.”
“Oh. Well, you can tell her I came by.”
“Okay.” The boy was still staring at him.
Feeling as if he had been shot in the back, Mason walked back to his truck and slipped inside. He was still holding the dang flowers. He threw them over in the seat, thinking that buying them had really been silly. He sat there a few more long seconds, feeling a little confused. He had never considered that she wouldn’t be here. She was gone until next week, the boy said.
At last he started his truck and turned it toward the road. Disappointment was on him so heavy that he almost didn’t see Joey Darnell waiting to turn into the drive as he was coming out. He saw Darnell’s curious look, waved a finger at the man and headed on down the road to town, wondering where he was going to go now. Going home to his empty house was almost more than he could think of.
Joey went down the drive, wondering if MacCoy had been delivering grain. That wasn’t the feed store truck, though; it was MacCoy’s own. MacCoy had been wearing a cowboy hat, too.
When he stopped in front of the house, Joey felt uncertainty about whether to go in the front door or the back. Deciding on the front, he went toward it, hoping that he and Charlene didn’t get in a fight. He didn’t want that, but somehow he always managed to say the wrong thing.
He felt a little foolish knocking, so right after a light rap, he opened the door. “Hello? Anyone home?”
The television was on, and there were a number of cold drink cans on the coffee table.
“Hi, Dad,” Danny J. said with some excitement as he came down the hallway.
Joey’s heart swelled at the sight of his son’s smile, and he reached out to hug his son. They both broke apart, a little self-conscious.
“Where’s your mom?” Joey asked. “I’ve called a couple of times, but I keep gettin’ that machine.”
“She’s not here,” Danny J. said. “Her and Jojo went up to take care of Aunt Rainey for a few days.”
“Take care of Rainey?” It was usually Rainey who took care of people. “What’s wrong with Rainey?”
“I guess she’s havin’ trouble about the baby. Mom said Aunt Rainey wasn’t supposed to get out of bed.”
Joey felt confused. This was the first he had heard of Rainey having a baby. And how could Charlene just take off like that? It wasn’t like her.
“Mom had to leave really quick to catch the bus,” his son said. “I guess she didn’t have time to call you.”
“Yeah. Probably so.” He didn’t want to let on that he was totally in the dark about the situation with Rainey. “She left you here by yourself?” That definitely wasn’t like Charlene.
“Aw, Dad, I’m not a kid anymore. And Larry Joe’s here. He’s at work now.”
Joey gazed at his son, still trying to take it in. “Well, you want to go get some pizza? We can talk about a couple of buckin’ horses I’ve located.”
His son definitely wanted to get pizza and ran eagerly down the hallway to get his boots, leaving Joey standing there, a stranger in his own home, thinking of how his wife had gone away and not told him.
This fact was hard enough to take in, but then, when he was backing the truck, he happened to ask Danny J. about what Mason MacCoy had wanted at the house, and his son told him, “Uh…he asked for Mom. I guess he wanted to see her about something.”
Joey, thinking of Mason in his cowboy hat and private truck, pressed the gas pedal hard enough to sling gravel. He clamped his mouth shut against further questions. He was fairly certain he didn’t care to hear the answers.
They drove over to the Texaco to let Larry Joe know where Danny J. was going. The MacCoy red Cadillac was pulled up at the pumps. Larry Joe was washing the windshield. Next Joey saw that Iris MacCoy was out of the car and leaning against the driver door. Sort of displayed against the door with her body covered, though not much, in shorts and a skimpy top. Iris had a body that displayed well. And she was smiling at Larry Joe in a way that caused Joey to get out of his truck and walk over to intervene.
“Hello, Iris,” he said. He felt he needed to put a halt to what was going on, even if he couldn’t exactly name what that was.
“Well, hello, Joey. How are you this evenin’?” Her eyes were on him then.
“Hot, like everybody else.” He kept himself from looking down her body.
She gave her tinkling laugh. “I know everyone just hates this heat, but I’ve always liked it,” she said, including them all in her grin designed to turn the heat up another ten degrees. Joey felt a dribble of sweat go down his back.
He did not like the way she was looking at his son.
When she paid Larry Joe, she told him to keep the change for himself, gave him another one of her smiles, slipped her body back into the car and drove away.
Larry Joe’s gaze met Joey’s, then dropped as he turned quickly and strode into the station. Joey thought he needed to speak a bit of warning about Iris, but not in front of Danny J., so he was saved from a task he really didn’t know how to handle. Charlene ought to be there to handle it, he thought.
“Dad’s takin’ me for pizza,” Danny J. said.
“Can you get off to go along?” Joey said quickly. “We could wait.” He really wished his son would come.
Larry Joe shook his head. “Randy’s gone over to Ryder’s for parts. I’m the only one here.” Then he added, “Thanks, though. Hey, bring me back some, kid,” and he playfully punched hi
s brother.
At the restaurant, Joey and Danny J. sat in a green booth, two pizzas on the table between them. They talked about horses and bronc riding. It was easy with his son, and Joey kept thinking about Larry Joe. Why was it that he and his eldest son seemed to be facing each other with fists raised all the time? When had that happened? It seemed to start when his son had entered his teens, and had gotten worse in the past year, when Joey and Charlene had started arguing so much. But it was true they had had difficulty almost from the time Larry Joe had been born.
A little bit later, Joey and Danny J. drove back to the Texaco, bringing a small pizza and cold drinks. Larry Joe’s gaze was almost welcoming, so they hung around awhile. Standing there with his two sons and Randy Stidham, Joey suddenly felt quite old and a little lost. His two sons were almost men. One was man enough that a grown woman was flirting with him. Where did that put Joey himself?
Joey took Danny J. home and stayed to watch a couple of movies. It was the first time he had sat in his own home in weeks. For the first twenty minutes he sat on the edge of the chair that had always been his spot. Finally he took his hat off and slid back, getting comfortable.
It was almost dark outside when Charlene called. Danny J. answered and spoke to her, nodding and saying a succession of yeahs and nos. Then he said, “Dad’s here with me. Want to talk to him?”
Joey got ready to take the receiver, but then Danny J. said, “Okay, bye,” and hung up.
Twenty
The City Hall thermometer reads 101°
Vella Blaine walked out to her mailbox at the curb and pulled out her mail. Seeing the envelope from the county extension office, she hurried back up her walk and into the house, opening the envelope as she went. In the kitchen she pulled a paper from behind the coffee container—the analysis of her own soil—and sat at the Formica table, laying the forms side by side and smoothing them with her palms. She adjusted her bifocals and bit her bottom lip as she compared.
“Well,” she said, highly annoyed.
She sat back and breathed a deep sigh. The reports were almost identical. She didn’t see how that could be. She just did not see it. Winston had great big roses all over his bushes. She did not. She had done everything she knew, everything recommended by people and in rose-care guides. Roses, as a general rule, simply quit forming in such heat. But not Winston’s.
She got up, walked around the table deep in thought, and then went out the back door, snatching her bonnet from its hook and smacking it atop her head. Taking up the hose, she wet her roses that sat in the hot sun, felt of the soil beneath the mulch, murmured to them and lovingly touched leaves here and there.
Shoulders slumping, she looked down toward the Valentine house. That was when she saw the three figures in the front yard. She went over and looked from the shelter of the lilac. One of the figures in the yard was Winston; the two others were unknown to her. Younger men. There was a beat-up van at the curb, and she strained to read the printing on it. Goode Plumbing, Heating and Electric. She’d had them over once to clean out a drain. They had been real good, too.
What was Winston doing? That one fella was unrolling wire. It looked like Winston was putting in some lights in his yard. It seemed a silly thing to be doing at his age. His house wasn’t any showplace, no more than her own. Except for those roses.
Maybe it was light shining on them at night that made them bloom like that. Maybe that was why she had seen that glowing out there in the rose garden. The solar lights she had seen up at the Wal-Mart popped into her mind. Simply stick in the ground lights, she thought, turning and going back in the house, taking off her apron as she went.
The City Hall thermometer reads 104°
Mason was bent over the engine of his grandfather’s car. He straightened, bringing out the alternator. Air blowing from the old industrial fan cooled the sweat running down his temples. He walked over to the entry for better light, turning the alternator over in his hands.
Just then a vehicle drove up—Larry Joe Darnell in his pickup. Mason recognized the sound of the truck before he saw it.
“You left a message for me. Said you wanted to see me,” the kid said as he strode forward, all youthful muscle and cocky assurance.
Mason nodded. “You want a job workin’ over the engine of this Chevy?”
“Well, that depends.” The kid stepped into the shade of the barn, tucked his hands up beneath his folded arms and rocked back on the heels of his boots. “Looks like you already got started. I don’t know if I want to step into any mess you might have made.” His lips twitched with a grin.
“I’m payin’ hard cash. How about five hundred to rebuild?”
“I think I’m your man.” The boy took the alternator out of Mason’s hand and walked toward the old car. “But if you help me, I’ll have to charge more.”
Mason followed, grinning broadly.
When he had been Larry Joe’s age, Mason had worked with his grandfather on car engines in this same barn over the long hot summers and oftentimes in the winters, when they had to wear insulated coveralls and take turns warming against a portable heater. Temperature had never seemed to bother his Grandpap. Mason could recall the patience with which the old man had taught him everything that was of any import and use in this old world. As he watched Larry Joe roll beneath the Chevy, he remembered his grandfather doing the same, and eventually it had been Mason rolling under there because his Grandpap couldn’t do it as easily anymore. The memories came flooding back. The day of his grandfather’s funeral, he had closed this barn and in the years since had opened it only on rare occasions.
He had closed the door on a lot of old wounds, he thought. He looked at Larry Joe’s young sweat-glistening arms and thought of himself at that age, running over here to be with the grandfather who thought he mattered and getting away from the hard father whom he could never please and the fragile mother who withdrew from a world and a husband she found too harsh.
His mother had been beautiful, like a tender butterfly. Her husband’s domineering personality and constant infidelities had eventually caused her to become chronically ill and withdrawn. There had been weeks on end when she did nothing but lie in bed and gaze out the window. The one thing she had done, to the great surprise of Mason and everyone else, was, at the sudden death of her husband from a heart attack, to engage a powerful Oklahoma City lawyer to bestow upon Mason the bulk of her inheritance in the feed store, a share making him equal to Adam, and to tie it so tight that not Adam, or anyone else could break it. “I learned something from Mac,” she said at the time, and then closed her mouth and didn’t utter another word for the rest of her life, which was only three months.
Sometime in their hour of working on the old car, in Mason’s mind the young man had become firmly Larry Joe, not simply kid and not a boy at all.
“Okay, Larry Joe, time for a break to cool off.”
On the way to Mason’s back door, they walked over to the fence, where Mason ran cool water in the trough for the horse and mule. The curious animals came over to see the humans and to receive petting. Mason rubbed the horse’s ears the way the old fellow liked.
“He doesn’t look like it now, but this guy was a stellar ropin’ horse,” he told Larry Joe, who was petting the mule.
“I don’t ride,” Larry Joe said, as if defensive. “I can ride, but I don’t.” He let go petting the mule, and the mule bared his teeth and carefully took hold of his shirt. “Hey…”
“He likes you,” Mason said, chuckling. “And that’s an honor. Old Buck doesn’t care much for people, as a rule. He always turns and gets set to kick my brother.”
Larry Joe again petted the mule, and the mule closed his eyes with comfort. Larry Joe felt sort of taken up by the mule, who had liked him with only a little touch.
They sat on Mason’s back porch, in the two rockers, with their boots propped on the porch posts, drinking small bottles of cold Coca-Cola.
“You said you got drunk and killed somebody,
” Larry Joe said and raised an eyebrow. “Who?”
Mason, who had felt the question coming, said, “My wife’s boyfriend.” He looked at the curved white letters on the cool bottle and thought that he should tell the son of the woman he wanted. “I was twenty-two, and I’d been out with the guys, drinkin’ and carryin’ on like I did in those days. I don’t think you could call our marriage very much of one. We were both young and wild. And one night I came in—I stopped in, really, to get some cash for more drinkin’—and found her in bed with this fella. I grabbed the first thing I saw, which was one of his big boots, and swung it upside his head hard enough to knock him into the night table. The blow just right killed him. Manslaughter. A boot wasn’t really considered a lethal weapon, and it was understandable that I wasn’t thinking.”
“Did you go to prison?”
Mason nodded. “Two years, then parole for good behavior.” He looked over at the kid. “I do not recommend the method, but prison is a place that can grow you up. It sure gives you time to think, and there are times you find yourself on your knees ’cause there’s nowhere else to go.” He sort of grinned. “Down on my knees, I was able to look at myself.”
Larry Joe’s gaze met his, and there was rare understanding there.
They sat there in companionable silence for some minutes, in which Mason felt himself drifting in and out of memory.
Then Larry Joe said, “Danny J. said you came over to the house lookin’ for Mom. He said you had flowers in your hand.”
Mason had been wondering when they were going to get around to that. “Yes, I did,” he said, slanting the boy a glance. “Do you have any problem with that?”
“No,” Larry Joe said and sort of squinted at him. “What if Mom doesn’t want to go out with you? Do you still want me to work on your Chevy?”
“Absolutely. You’re contracted.”
“I haven’t seen any money yet.”
Mason pulled out his wallet and handed over a hundred dollar bill. Then he asked, “You want another Coke?”
“Yeah. You got anything to eat?”
Driving Lessons Page 19
