The two men from the counter were standing in the aisle, adjusting their Levi’s and sucking on their teeth. “Maybe the Stockman ain’t the place to go no more,” one said. The other said, “You figger that? Eating with niggers?” His pal replied, “They was queers, you see that hair?” One of the other customers said, “Where do you think they’re from, not knowing no better?” Another man joined the group, chewing on a toothpick. The cook said, “They’re gone now, how about a piece of pie, on the house?” He had the steady neutral gaze of a school administrator. One of the men, a sandy-haired roughneck type, said, “I’m full up,” and hitched his pants to make his point. A man at the register, fiftyish and tired-looking, waved his hand at the little gang; “Aw, go home, you jerks, the world is changing.” When he opened the door they could hear the sluggish chugging sound of an engine not quite turning over. Ari, turned so that he could see out the window, said quietly, “Our friends are having car trouble, bad luck.” He scooted out of the booth. “Let’s see if we can give them a push or something.” David fumbled with his wallet at the register while Ari went outside. The men, still loitering at the counter, caught on. The car labored, then sputtered and died. “Looks like they’re gonna need a little help getting outa here,” the sandy-haired fellow said. The other men snickered and guffawed, and like a sticky lump of insects, went out the door.
David and Patsy followed. Ari was leaning in the window of the station wagon, talking with the Negro driver. The men from the diner strolled to the wagon, one at each bumper. Ari straightened up. “Hey man,” he said. “We can take care of it.” One of the men gave the bumper a hard shove, grunting furiously. Then another did the same, and another. In half a minute they were rocking the wagon violently. The driver tried the starter again. It almost made it. “Shit!” David said. He was still back by the cafe door with Patsy, wondering what to do. Ari started shouting, “You stupid jerks, leave them ALONE.” He was holding onto the edge of the window pane, like a man in a cartoon clinging to a flying airplane. The men paid him no attention at all. He ran to his own car and started it. David and Patsy panicked and ran toward the car too. Ari leaned out of the window, waving them back, “Wait!” he shouted. “Get back!” By now the station wagon was rocking dangerously. The men shouted something back and forth, and the rocking slowed. Two of them came over to the same side as the other two. “They’re going to turn it OVER!” Patsy said. She turned around twice, like a confused dancer. There were at least a dozen onlookers from the diner in the parking lot by now. The cook was at the door, wringing his apron. “Do something?” Patsy shrieked. The four attackers, cursing and laughing, were positioning themselves to lift the side of the station wagon.
There was a frightful clank as Ari’s Ford hit the back of the station wagon. His engine revved fiercely. The driver of the wagon cranked the starter again. The four men were shoving the side of the car. The wheels on that side were just off the ground when Ari managed to give the car enough push to lurch forward, and in that instant the motor turned over, and the bucking car drove away. One of the men had been thrown onto the pavement by the movement of the car. David grabbed Patsy’s arm and yelled, “Come ON!” Ari screeched up to them, and David and Patsy both managed to jump in as he accelerated.
David let out a long noisy exhalation of breath. “God DAMN, Finberg,” he said. “You were slick as spit back there.”
Ari shook his fist in the air. “You don’t have to fight people dumber than you.” He was laughing. “If you’re in a car and they’re not.”
They could not get inside fast enough. They ran from Ari’s to Patsy’s apartment. There they clung to one another. They were inflamed by what had happened, by the near-miss of it, like passengers out of a wrecked car. “God I hate this place!” Patsy cried. David clasped his arms around her and kissed her neck. There was no one else he would have wanted to be with at the cafe scene.
They lay on the daybed, on the faded chenille spread. He did not stop to think about the ways this was different from the first time, the comfort of her house, the sweet easiness of it. They were together, as they had to be, like exiles.
That was on a Thursday night. Friday he went up to the hospital to help his mother. Saturday he watched TV at Leland’s. At home, when the phone rang, he jumped. He did not call Patsy. There had to be some time to let things settle down again. He did not want to make too much of what had happened.
He had just squeezed out of one girl’s clutches, he told himself. He was not ready for another. But Sunday was long and dull, and he went back to Patsy’s. She had a copy of “Antigone,” which they were casting soon. For an hour he listened as she told him the story and read long passages to him, while he stared at her and wondered who she had been with before him, where she had learned not to be scared.
After a student council meeting, Beth Ann said, “David Puckett, aren’t you going to ask me out? Or are you waiting for me to call you every time?” Stupid and surprised, he stood with his mouth open. She laughed and invited him to dinner at her home the next weekend. Going out isn’t any better than staying in, she said. He supposed that was true, if you had her house.
The house was in a cul de sac, further hidden by a brick wall eight feet high in front. An arch curved over the front of the long drive; there was no gate. He had not remembered how grand the house was. After the club party, they had entered the kitchen from the garage, and he had seen only that room. This time he stepped down onto flagstones in the entry way, and followed the Negro maid through a room lined with books and paintings, to a sitting room where the family was gathered. Laurel Kimbrough sat at a small teak table, folding a creamy piece of paper into an envelope. Hayden had a fat book on his lap. Beth Ann was stretched out on a chaise longue, half a dozen glossy magazines spilled onto the floor beside her. David had a moment of complete bewilderment, as a person must feel upon entering a room where another language is being spoken. He felt overwhelmed by the variety of patterns and colors (however subtle) in the room; the chairs were upholstered in rich fabrics and the walls were flocked or embossed with an intricate covering. He sat down most gingerly on the offered chair, feeling his awkwardness as a great weight on a delicate surface.
They ate in the dining room, served by the Negro maid. He said thank you when she ladled soup into his bowl, but the Kimbroughs did not acknowledge the service, and he decided to do only what he first observed. He ate lightly, for him, out of self-consciousness. There were certain obligatory questions about his family, which he answered with a briskly polite brevity. His father was a tailor, his mother a nurse. There was the sister, married to a “radio executive.” The answers seemed to satisfy; he was not required to elaborate. There was of course no way for him to ask the things he wanted to know, details about Hayden’s role on the bank board, the nature of his law practice. It was like dining with Africans and never mentioning the home country; not having traveled, he did not know enough to formulate inquiry. Beth and her mother moved their food around on their plates, eating little, and though the maid said there was a cobbler, they declined dessert. Hayden said, wouldn’t that make a good snack later? and David of course claimed to be altogether too satisfied with the meal to have another bite. He wondered if the maid took leftover food home, or if the Kimbroughs threw it away. Glee had told him her mother was once fired for taking a ham bone home from a cafeteria.
Beth Ann’s parents excused themselves and disappeared into a far wing of the house. Beth Ann took David into a large room with a white tile floor, pool table, couches, a bar. The high ceiling was crisscrossed by dark beams. One wall was broken by French windows, looking out onto the same gardens as the breakfast nook. Near the windows stood an easel with a canvas, covered by a length of muslin. Stacks of board games filled two shelves behind the pool table. Beth put on a stack of records, and they danced. Perhaps half an inch taller than he, she was a light and graceful dancer who seemed to anticipate his every movement. They danced as they had at the club, politely. When he
said he thought it was time for him to go, she kissed him. Her lips were cool. He felt like a boy with a fever being soothed. And he was surprised.
“But why me?” he blurted.
“I’m bored with them. I understand them perfectly, boys who grew up like me. I don’t understand you.”
Later at home, as he was undressing, he noticed the fleshiness of his belly. He had been eating like a starved man. Soon, with winter winding down, he’d be able to play tennis again, and he could swim before class. He fell onto his bed smiling. You could be confused as hell, and a girl could interpret it as mystery, when all along, the mystery was the girl herself. He felt he had survived an initiation. He would wait to see what happened next.
When he saw Glee, he ducked or turned or pretended not to see her. She walked in a mass, surrounded by her girlfriends who, when they saw David, moved in closer. (But hadn’t Jenny Weaver stood in the cafeteria line flirting with him when Glee wasn’t around? Hadn’t Betsy been friendly as could be at “Antigone” tryouts? Wasn’t he “available” again?) He had not met her eyes since the night she threw his pearl on the floor. At first when he saw her he was pinched with regret, but it had already faded; he did not want to think about her. And suddenly he was very busy. He did start swimming early in the mornings before school. There were always a few guys from the swim team, and they all joked and splashed and then got down to serious laps. The mornings he swam, he felt lean and sharp; he was losing that embarrassing ring of belly fat he’d built up over Christmas break. Then “Antigone” was cast and he was Creon. Often on weekday evenings he took Patsy home and they dissected the rehearsal. Sometimes they did schoolwork, sometimes they made love. On Friday nights he took Beth Ann to the movies, or, once in a while, to the Teen Center to dance. “See you tonight?” he would say at council meeting, and then that night, “See you tomorrow?” She smiled and nodded, like these were silly questions, but they had no understanding. Sometimes she did have other things to do. One weekend he did not see her, and then on Sunday in the paper were photographs of a “Black and White Ball” at the club, and there she was, with her mother, and Amos Lawton, home from Yale. Usually on Saturday he went to her house and they watched television or played cards and listened to records. And talked. Mostly, he talked. She listened sweetly, she smiled at him, but she did not really have very much to say. He had never heard her voice a strong opinion about anything. Maybe opinions, like meals, were to be served in tiny portions, something to do with good manners, with breeding. He thought he ought to be more reserved with her, but if he stopped talking, their evenings would consist of dead space. They were most chaste.
There was still often a bitter wind, and an occasional rain, but now and then the day was bright and clear, and David and Ellis began practicing tennis again. They laid bottle caps on the court and aimed serves at them. They played each other for hours at a time. They ran. The team began to assemble after school for workouts; winter was winding down. Some days he went straight from the court to rehearsal, skipping supper altogether. He liked to go late at night to the Stockman for a hamburger. He could not lose the feeling that he was an alien, visiting a local waterhole. Since the incident with the opera singers, he found a curious pleasure in watching the other patrons in the cafe. Most of them were laborers, coming or going from a job, or sensibly having a bite before hitting the bars. He thought you could tell by looking what any of them would say about white and Negro friends eating together. What you could not tell was how far they would go to make a point. In January a spurned lover had burst into a cafe like this in Andrews and shot two people dead. Any of these customers could be capable of such an action: one night a customer, the next a murderer. Any of the customers could be victims, himself included. All it took was a moment of insanity, a storm of anger, a gun.
Leland started dating Sissy. David had told him that her father was working pipeline in New Mexico, and on David’s dare, he had called her, while David listened. When he hung up—“She said, ‘That’d be nice!’” he was sweating drops so big he looked like he had come in from the rain. Sissy had cut her hair in a short style that made her look more like the other girls and less like a waif. David thought she was putting out signals. He was too busy to spend time with her, and he did not want to encourage any fantasy she had about the nature of his friendship, but for some crazy reason he wanted to help her out. She had never once talked about wanting to belong, but who didn’t want that? If it did not matter to her, he could admire her solitary pride, but she had to be lonely. He suggested that she work on “Antigone,” where anyone could be useful. She was assigned to props, and was helping build the sets. Some evenings he didn’t see her; she was like a mouse, you only caught a glimpse of her if she moved across your vision. Leland complained that she wanted to talk about David when they went out. “But what about me?” David asked. Leland shrugged. “‘What would David think of that? Did David ever do this or that?’ Like I’d know everything about you.” He did not seem to mind all that much. His tone was jocular: “I can’t get to first base with her, there’s Puckett in the road.” David did not think Leland was serious about bases with Sissy. The little joy ride with LaVonne and the boys had scoured a lot of the brave vulgarity right out of him. David thought he and Sissy were a good pair. He tried to get Leland to describe their dates, but there did not seem much to talk about. They went to movies, they drank Cokes, they kissed goodnight. Evidently Sissy did not read her notebook to Leland. Maybe, David thought, she had given it up, as, it seemed, he had. His notebook lay on the floor by his bed, and there were times when he picked it up, but he could not manage to write anything, as if his hand had grown too heavy to move across the page. He had lost patience with his notes, and he was awed by the challenge of attempting a real story. Maybe next summer, he told himself. Maybe in college there would be a writing class. Maybe a writer had to live first and write later. There were innumerable reasons for avoiding his notebook. When he was at Patsy’s, though, he often noticed that she had a lined pad out on her table, stacks of pages covered with her scrawl. He thought she probably wrote every day. He wanted to say to her, I thought you wanted to be an actress! Her discipline was accusing; she flaunted it.
One Saturday afternoon he spent an hour with Hayden Kimbrough in his shop. He had admired the teak table where Laurel liked to work on correspondence, and Hayden had revealed that he had made it. David sat on a bar stool that matched the set in the den, while the older man puttered at the bench. Kimbrough was finishing a small cherry wood stool. They spoke of inconsequential things—the weather, sports, the likelihood that Basin would build a new high school next year. All the while, David longed to ask him real questions: What does a board chairman do? Did you always know it would be like this, your life? Did it all come naturally, because you are who you are? How can I be more like you? Kimbrough was the son of a judge, and the judge the son of a sheep rancher who had moved into liveries, hardware, freight drayage. Beth Ann had told David that her mother’s family had bought school land for a dollar an acre, then raised cattle, cotton, and sorghum. She showed him handsomely bound books stuffed with photographs and clippings about the families. Being old family seemed as important as the wealth. You could find a way to make money, but how could you make up for being nobody from the start? What would Kimbrough tell him about that?
David ran his fingers down the silky wood. Kimbrough said, “This is the one thing that makes me stop thinking. It’s not social, I don’t have to talk, there’s no strategy, just the craft of it.” He clapped David’s shoulder. “A hobby gets important when you have a home and family. It’s your retreat.”
David thought of his father in his easy chair, his feet propped on the hassock. “Beats drinking, for something to do,” he said. He wished he had not. Kimbrough gave him a quizzical look, then switched off the lights and led them back into the kitchen where the women were drinking cocoa.
That night David sat with Beth Ann in the den, she curled up against him on t
he couch as they listened to music. They sat in shadows, the only light a small lamp across the room. He was saying how good it felt to start playing tennis again, how much he looked forward to the spring competition. He did not say what he was thinking so much lately, that he wanted the chance to be somebody, to show what he could do. Whatever had appealed to Beth Ann in him might soon wear thin, without fresh accomplishment. Kimbrough often mentioned the successes of men in his acquaintance: one appointed to a judgeship, those who won major cases, a friend who was likely to be the Republican candidate for district congressman. Of course no one expected a boy to walk on water, but if you could not get by on who you were, you had to be what you did. These people admired tennis; they would admire him if he won. Beside him, Beth Ann said, “Mmm.” Her father was going to organize a tournament at the club in April, she said; David would play, surely. She snuggled closer. He laid his arm across her shoulders gently. He was suffused with the sense of rightness, being there, of the surprising fit of himself and this girl. He wondered why he kept seeing Patsy at all, and decided it was only the play, that threw them together four nights a week. She was beginning to get on his nerves. Always he felt there was something she wanted from him, something she was waiting for that he might or might not have to give. They had some unspoken pact not to talk about sex. It happened now and then, and they felt close for a little while, though there was never the intensity of that night they came back from the opera. Was he ignoring signals from her? Had it gone so far now that she did expect something, some outpouring of feelings, verbally, to make the sex mean more? Wasn’t she the one who wanted to run off and live like a bohemian? Didn’t that let him off the hook, let her off, too? Then there were her damned poems. They lay there like indictments: where were his stories? He did want to write, but it wasn’t so easy. You couldn’t write if you didn’t yet have a story to tell.
Walking Dunes Page 20
