Killer Diller

by Edgerton, Clyde

  Wesley spoons out the last of the ice cream from his bowl. “Well, it’s a good thing you didn’t fall down the steps. You ought to be more careful.”

  “I am careful. I take about twice as long to do everything as I used to, and I get in Roses or somewhere and forget what I came in there for. And lose things. My Lord. Worse than Eloise Rymer. Did I tell you about that?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Poor thing’s getting so she takes those little bitty steps, you know, and she was walking down Compton Street with Dot Jenkins, over there close to the bakery I think it was, and she walked right out of her underpants. Man standing there calls out and says, ‘I think you lost something, ma’am.’ She stops, turns around. He points. She walks back and looks at them for a minute and says, ‘Oh, no, they ain’t mine.’”

  Wesley laughs, puts his hand to his mouth—in spite of the fact he’s had new teeth for four years now.

  Later, Mattie Rigsbee and Wesley pull into the parking lot of the Shady Grove Nursing Home. They’ve come to visit Mrs. Rigsbee’s sister, Pearl. When Wesley lived with Mrs. Rigsbee, she brought him out here to the nursing home before Pearl was ever over here and got him talking to these people, so he feels pretty much at home. He feels like he’s doing good, visiting. Sometimes he feels like he’s doing too much good, so sometimes if there is no attendant in the TV room he walks through and changes the channel just to hear the canes bang on the floor. Somebody threw a cane at him the last time he did it.

  Before they leave the parking lot, Wesley points to the front tire on Mrs. Rigsbee’s new Plymouth. “You’re over the line two feet.”

  Mattie stops, turns, and stands, holding her pocketbook with both hands in front of her stomach, looks at the wheel, then at Wesley. “Listen, son, when you get your driver’s license you can complain about what I do with mine. This parking lot has several hundred parking places and about twenty cars, so if I were you I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  Wesley holds the lobby door open for Mrs. Rigsbee, then follows her in. She’s getting more stooped, he thinks. Grumpier, too.

  Old people, mouths open, look up at them. One old woman gets up and follows them—at a distance—down the hall.

  Miss Emma sits in a wheelchair tied to the handrail along the wall. “Sonny, can you untie this thing, please?” She smiles broadly at Wesley.

  Wesley knows that Miss Emma has twice wheeled her chair down Interstate 40. “How are you, Miss Emma?”

  “Want an M&M? Untie me and you can have an M&M. Did you know I used to have everything I wanted?”

  “Yes ma’am. No, thank you. I got to get on down the hall —and see Mrs. Turnage.”

  “How are you today, Miss Emma?” says Mattie.

  “I’m fine. Did you know I used to have everything I wanted?”

  “You told me that.”

  Pearl is sitting in a rocking chair in her room. Her hair is white, and she is heavier, even sturdier looking, than Mattie. Pearl’s face has always reminded Wesley of an Indian’s. Her skin is still tough and dark. She rarely talks any more, so Mattie talks mostly.

  “I went in Revco yesterday to get some com pads,” says Mattie. “You know you used to could get twelve for thirty-nine cents. Did you know that?” she says to Wesley.

  “No, I didn’t know that. I don’t buy com pads.”

  “Well if you get corns you will. Anyway”—Mattie looks back at Pearl— “this was a box of nine for $1.44, marked down from $1.99. But the saleslady was some foreigner and I was thinking so hard about her I didn’t notice until I got home that she had charged me $1.99. If I hadn’t needed one so bad I would have taken them back. Well, they were just the right size for this bad com I got, so last night I got one out to put on. You pull off this backing and there’s this thick, sticky part that goes all around the edge, you know.” She looks at Wesley. “You ever seen a corn pad?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “You’d know it if you had. Anyway, about the time I got ready to stick it on the corn, for some reason I had to get up to do something, and I thought to myself, I’ll finish this in a minute. Well, when I got back to the couch I couldn’t find the pad—you know, the one I’d got ready to stick on—so I looked all around—under me, under the cushion. I went over to the kitchen, looked all around the sink, come back, and on and on. Couldn’t find it nowhere.

  “Finally I decide I’m going to have to get another one out of the package and take the backing off of that one and all that. The first one was sure enough lost. Well, I want you to know that while I’m pulling the backing off the second one I feel something stuck to the heel of my hand and bless pat there it was—the lost one. When those things stick, they stick. I didn’t think I was ever going to get it off. When I did there was a red circle on my hand for over an hour. So—I saved it. That one. Used the other one. I’m not about to throw away a—what would that be?—a twenty-cent com pad.”

  Wesley studies Pearl’s room to see if there are any new pictures up. She’s got family pictures sitting all over the place. Her mother, her father, her mother and father together, her brothers and sisters individually and in groups. The one of Mrs. Rigsbee is when she must have been about twenty, with lace up around her neck and her dark hair piled on top of her head. No smiling. No smiling in hardly any of the pictures, except one of the late ones of Pearl and Mrs. Rigsbee together. There are early and late pictures of Pearl and Mr. Turnage, and a wedding picture.

  Mrs. Rigsbee is talking about what she had for lunch at the K and W yesterday. She talks about every item, separately. Fish, the fish sauce, peas, which were mushy, though not as mushy as they have been, carrots, slaw. Next she talks about what Netta Gilbertson had, and then Savannah Smith. Then she starts in on what the people at the next table had. Pearl follows the stories with her eyes on Mrs. Rigsbee’s face.

  Wesley decides to wander around. He stands. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “We don’t have too much longer. I want you to visit some with Pearl. She’s happy to see you. I want to tell her about what all you been getting involved with at the college. Why don’t you tell her?”

  Wesley pushes his fingers through his hair. “Well, they’re starting this program thing where I’ll be doing some teaching, and they might let me take a class over there, too.”

  “He’s doing real fine,” Mattie tells Pearl.

  Pearl manages a weak smile and nods her head. She nods her head at a picture of Robert and Elaine, Mattie’s children.

  “Oh, they’re doing all right, I think,” says Mattie. “Elaine called the other night. She’s thinking about changing jobs again. She’s had a good offer.”

  Wesley walks down the empty hall toward Miss Emma.

  “I’ll give you an M&M if you’ll undo this wheelchair,” says Miss Emma.

  “Okay.”

  “Oh boy, you’re such a nice young man.” She starts to sift through the M&Ms in her lap.

  “I’ll just get a few myself,” says Wesley. He reaches down and gets a handful of M&Ms. “Whups, I hear Mrs. Rigsbee calling. I got to get on back. Sorry.”

  “You said you’d untie me.”

  “I got to get on back down the hall.”

  “I used to have everything I wanted.”

  “Yes ma’am. See you later.”

  Wesley sings the blues:

  Old people, old people, all over the earth.

  If old people could turn new,

  Just think what they’d be worth.

  Chapter 8

  The BOTA band members, plus Shanita, pull into the WRBR parking lot in the BOTA House van at seven twenty-five and pile out. “The Good Morning Charlie Show” starts at eight A.M.

  WRBR is housed in a small brick building, without windows, in the middle of a field.

  Sherri Gold stretches and yawns. Shanita hooks three fingers inside the waistband of Larry’s black pants and follows him along toward the building. Wesley holds the door for them all, tries to trip Ben as he goes in
.

  There is a man in an office straight ahead, a small sandy-haired man with his feet propped up on a desk. “Come on in here,” he says. He has a deep radio voice.

  The band files in.

  “My name is Jake Davis,” says the man. “Oh, I didn’t know there’d be but four.”

  You’d better get another chair, honky-face, thinks Shanita. I ain’t about to stand while Goldyass sits.

  “My name is Jake Davis,” says the man.

  Shanita looks around. “We need another chair,” she says.

  “Oh, hey.” Jake Davis hurries out, and brings back another chair. He sits behind his desk and pushes up the sleeves of his yellow V-neck sweater. “I’m the general manager here,” he says, “as I guess Sherri told you. All I need now is just a song, or a piece of a song, since there hasn’t been any audition. Buddy told me about—Buddy Loggins—told me about Sherri and all, and he’s got great judgment, so I’m not worried, but as a matter of procedure we need an audition, you know, technically.”

  The band starts singing “Time Ain’t Long.” After a few bars, Jake Davis holds up his hand. “That’s great. I just needed to know, you understand. Procedure. So . . .” He picks up a clipboard and mechanical pencil from off his desk. “What was it? ‘Noble Defenders of the Word’?”

  “Right,” says Sherri. “This radio stuff’ll be good for exposure. But I gotta admit I ain’t used to being up this early. I bet you ain’t either, are you, Shanita?”

  What you say, bitch? “Oh yeah, I get up early all the time.” What is your problem, you cracker? Shanita slides down in her chair, folds her arms.

  “Radio separates the men from the boys,” says Jake, filling out the form. “Now, let me tell you something about Charlie.” Jake lights a cigarette with a metal flip-top lighter, leans back in his chair. “Charlie knows you guys are going to be here, but he won’t get here until about five till. Like I say, he’s not a morning person. But listen . . .” Jake draws on the cigarette, blows smoke, looks at each band member, and at Shanita.

  Don’t look at me, you pasty-faced white boy.

  “Here’s the important message,” says Jake, “that I need to get across to you folks. ‘The Good Morning Charlie Show’ is a call-in show. But there aren’t that many calls, usually. So Charlie gets excited about a call. Real excited. If you’re in the middle of a song and that phone rings, you can forget the rest of the song. Charlie will snap the phone up and start talking, and you folks will have to get quiet. Okay?”

  “It ain’t especially okay with me,” says Ben, looking at the others. “I don’t especially like my music interrupted.”

  “I’m sorry. It’ll have to be that way.”

  “Maybe we could start up where we left off as soon as the call is over,” says Wesley.

  “I don’t know about that,” says Jake.

  “This exposure will be good,” says Sherri, “either way.”

  Exposure my ass, thinks Shanita.

  Over on the Ballard University campus, the sun shines warmly. The dew sparkles on freshly mowed grass—probably the last mowing of the season. Lumps of grass will be sucked up into the appropriate machine before ten A.M.

  On Monday mornings, Ballard U. exudes a special air of importance and confidence. Monday mornings are set aside for the weekly breakfast meetings, when President Ted and Provost Ned meet with the executive committee to discuss the charting of Ballard University’s course through another week of witnessing by example. Ted’s secretary, Mysteria, Miss Sum-merlin 1939, has picked up the doughnuts at Dunkin’ Donuts on her way in to work. Mysteria Montgomery is a faithful and loyal secretary. She’s short, a bit baggy, and wears excessive lipstick. Her hair is dyed a very dull red. This Monday morning, as usual, she has made the coffee—regular and decaf —and has set out pencils and legal pads on the big meeting table in Ted’s pine-panelled Executive Meeting Room. The leaders meet at seven-thirty A.M. sharp. Sharp.

  The oldtimers on the executive committee are able, dedicated men. They mean to save Ballard University from wayward and sinful trends brought on by the modern world. Each of them wears, with pride, at least one day per month, his green blazer with the yellow Ballard bulldog emblem on the breast pocket.

  Stan Laurence, the new assistant treasurer at Ballard University, arrives at the meeting at seven-twenty, sits at his usual spot at the table, and stares out Ted’s wide, spotless picture window, studying the differences in the grilles of Ted’s silver Chrysler New Yorker and Ned’s white Lincoln Continental. I wish I had one payment on either one of those cars, he thinks. Stan, a former trade book sales representative, has been at Ballard less than a year. He read in Business Week last week that, with his four children and Ballard’s salary for beginning administrators and professors, he now lives below the poverty line. Just last night he and his wife decided that to avoid embarrassment about using the food stamps that they are now eligible for, and plan to use, they should shop at the Listre Winn Dixie, ten miles away, rather than at the Food Lion near campus.

  Present for today’s breakfast meeting are six men: the Sears twins; the acting dean, Bob Reynolds; the treasurer, “Big Don” Summers; athletic director and special projects coordinator, Coach Mack Guthrie; and assistant treasurer, Stan Laurence —the new man.

  Under discussion is the filling of the academic dean post. Two resumés have survived the cut. The faculty senate had asked for three finalists, but Ted and Ned decided the budget would not allow travel funds for three men to come for interviews.

  This business of faculty senate power gets to be a problem at some universities, Ted knows. Professors and such deciding policy. He knows that parents, at least Ballard parents, want their children ultimately—in terms of overall policy and so on—in the hands of a few good administrators, not in the hands of dozens of faculty members and instructors who have come onto the campus from out there in the world where no telling what has influenced them in no telling which ways—politically, as well as theologically. You can’t be too careful. Carelessness on these kinds of matters will come back to visit you on a cold dark night. At Ballard, final authority rests with final responsibility, the president’s office. And this, Ted knows, is the way trustees and parents want it, or would want it.

  “Seems to me, all things being equal,” says Big Don, the treasurer, “we should go with the military man, this Trent fellow. He’s going to have some experience with a chain of command behind him. And he had those three tours in Vietnam. Plus, he gets about $23,000 a year just for waking up every morning. Money we won’t have to pay him.”

  “That’s right,” says Ned. “And this other fellow’s wife is a Methodist.”

  “They must go to separate churches or something,” says Bob Reynolds.

  “She might not go at all.”

  “What?” says Big Don, turning up his hearing aid.

  “She might not go at all.”

  “That’s right,” says Bob. “She’s a Methodist.”

  “Find out about all that, Don,” says Ned, “and let me know.”

  And this other fellow, thinks Stan, this military man, could wear a Micky Mouse hat and chew shrapnel.

  Stan misses sales more than he ever thought he would. He actually gets to spend less time with his children now than he did, and he’s beginning to feel pretty certain that he’s going nowhere in this new job. All the benefits, as in “salary plus benefits,” were supposed to round out the low salary, but that hasn’t happened. And Big Don, his boss—the man he will be replacing—has recently mentioned that he’ll probably stay on an extra year before retirement. Stan was told—by Sears, the provost—about the impressive qualifications of all the applicants he beat out for the job. But Coach Guthrie, the athletic director, told him the main reason he got the job was that he was the only applicant who’d been in the Marines.

  President Ted, steely-eyed, strong-chinned, glances at this fellow Stan, this new fellow—who could, should, be jumping in and agreeing, and he’s not, thinks Ted. Y
ou’d think he’d say something agreeable about this military thing. He’s a Marine. Or was. But he just doesn’t speak up enough. He looks out the window too much. And darned if he doesn’t need a haircut. Ted decides to kid him about that after the meeting. Maybe he can take a hint. Some long hair on faculty is unavoidable. But on administrators? Not at Ballard. Long hair on the outside of the head is a clear sign of confusion on the inside of the head.

  “Let’s go with Trent,” says Ted, “unless the interview goes bad. We don’t need to be taking chances. But let’s bring both men down so the search committee can interview them both. Any discussion or objection? Good. Can you see about getting plane reservations and meeting them at the airport, Coach? Ned, you handle it with the senate and trustees if they ask about it. Tell the senate we have a ‘private and confidential’ on the reasons for two instead of three finalists.”

  “What’s a ‘private and confidential’?” asks Stan.

  Ted looks at him. Why is he asking that? “It means private and confidential.”

  “For what kinds of things?”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss it—it’s private and confidential.”

  “Oh.”

  “This Trent fellow has a daughter at the Nutrition House, he said in his letter,” says Ned. “That’s another plus.”

  “Mysteria was saying something,” says Ted, “about. . .” He presses his intercom button. “Mysteria, what were you saying about—”

  “His daughter’s name is Phoebe,” says Mysteria, “and she’s gone out several times with the brickmason at BOTA House, the one in the Project Promise who got written up in the newspaper. Mrs. White was telling me all about it.”

  “Yes, I couldn’t—”

  “He’s one of the ones in the Christian band they’ve got over there with the blacks in it.”

  “Yes, I knew I’d heard something about that. Thank you, Mysteria.”

  “How’s that band working out, anyway?” Coach asks Ned. “What kind of music are they doing now?”

  “Working out good,” says Ned. “They’re doing just gospel music.”