Captain Saturday

by Robert Inman

  *****

  On one of Tyler’s absences over the Winter, he had gone to the coast and talked to French about trying to qualify for the pro golf tour. French encouraged him. He had friends in Wilmington who might put up some sponsorship money.

  And then Tyler had cooked up a trip to Augusta for the Master’s -- just the brothers and their wives. French was reluctant. He was up to his eyeballs in business affairs these days. But Tyler talked him into it. So in May they were back at Baggett House to drop off Wilbur for the weekend and then head south in a rented plane.

  Tyler insisted they drive to the little airport near Southport in the Cadillac, all seven of them jammed in with the suitcases in the trunk. In deference to Aunt Margaret, he left the top up. She was out of sorts, glum and snappish, walking like she had a carrot up her butt. She didn’t care much for golf and fretted about getting runs in her stockings hiking all over the golf course. But Tyler was working on her non-stop, buttering her up and complimenting her summer dress and her new hairdo and carrying her suitcase for her, assuring her that the Master’s course was safe for her stockings as long as she stayed out of the azaleas. Wilbur bet himself that by the time they landed in Georgia he’d have her all sweet and nice. Tyler could do that. He had even held out the possibility that she might meet Arnold Palmer. Tyler knew a fellow who had played golf on the college team at Wake Forest with Arnie, who was favored to win this year.

  Wilbur and Wingfoot helped the men carry the luggage to the plane and stow it in the compartment in the back. Margaret had brought enough for a couple of months, but they managed to get everything packed in except for one small bag, which Rosanna offered to carry in her lap.

  Rosanna looked awfully pretty this morning. She had had gained a little weight over the winter, just enough to fill in the worry lines and give a soft glow to her face. She gave Wilbur a hug and said, “We’ll see you Sunday night.”

  Uncle French put his arm around Min’s shoulder. “Min’s in charge,” he said, fixing Wingfoot with a stern look. “No trouble.” He waited for a moment and finally Wingfoot said, “Yes sir.”

  “That goes for everybody,” Aunt Margaret piped up, putting the evil eye on Wilbur.

  “Yes ma’am,” he said.

  “Y’all use the Cadillac all you want,” Tyler said. “Min, if a pack of girls start chasing you, put these two fellows in the trunk. I don’t want lipstick on my seat covers. And if a pack of boys start chasing you -- well, use your own judgement.”

  “Yes sir,” Min said solemnly, even though Tyler gave her a big wink. She was a serious girl with a bit of a squint about her eyes as if she were trying to look off there in the future and see if the Eighty Pies really would ask her to join and if she’d meet that eligible Wilmington boy and settle down and have lots of little debutantes. She would be going off to Chapel Hill in August, and she was mostly packed already.

  The four adults climbed in and closed the door of the plane and Tyler sat at the controls and checked everything out, then cranked her up and the engine turned over with a cough and a backfire and caught with a roar. They all waved to one another and the plane taxiied down to the far end of the runway where Tyler gunned the engine and tested the flaps and then it came barreling back down toward them, gaining speed and lifting off just past where they stood. Min and Wilbur waved and waved and Wingfoot snapped off a salute. They stood watching as the plane climbed and banked and headed south, a diminishing speck and sound that finally disappeared over the horizon.

  They walked back to the Cadillac and Min asked Wilbur, “Do you know how to let the top down on this thing?”

  “I sure do,” he said with a grin.

  After lunch they got the Wilmington paper and looked at the movie schedule. Wingfoot wanted to see “Seven Days in May” with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas (a general takes over the country), but Wilbur sided with Min on “Mail Order Bride” with Buddy Ebsen and Lois Nettleton.

  “Sissy shit,” Wingfoot muttered.

  Min gave him a hard look. “Wingfoot, Papa left me in charge. If I have any trouble out of you this weekend, or if you utter another word of profanity, I’ll tell Mama what I found in that box under your bed.” Wingfoot turned a little pale. Later in the afternoon, Wingfoot showed Wilbur the magazines. Some pretty hot stuff, Wilbur thought. Not the kind of thing Wingfoot would want Aunt Margaret to see.

  They were just about to leave the house, shortly after six o’clock, when Aunt Grace and her husband Harbert from Wilmington arrived with the news that the plane was missing.

  *****

  A nightmare of flame, stench of smoke searing his throat and burning his eyes. He flailed at a crush of debris -- twisted metal, daggers of glass. Blood. A severed arm. He screamed.

  A hand on his shoulder, clutching him firmly, pulling him away from the wreckage. He woke and looked up to see Wingfoot in the dim light of the spare bedroom, leaning over him.

  He began to sob again, though he had thought when he finally collapsed into sleep somewhere in the emptiness of early morning that he surely had no tears left in him and never would again.

  Wingfoot slipped into bed beside him and wrapped his arms around him. They clung desperately to each other and Wingfoot’s hot, salty tears ran down his face and mingled with his own.

  “Please,” Wingfoot cried, “don’t tell anybody I cried.”

  He never did.

  *****

  The search for the plane went on for more than a week. No one had seen it since it took off into the flawless May morning, headed west-southwest toward Augusta. The flight path should have taken it between Columbia and Orangeburg, but an air traffic controller in Columbia had noticed the blip on the radar making a broad, sweeping turn just after it passed Sumter, curving back toward the coast in the general direction of Charleston. Since Tyler hadn’t filed a flight plan, there was nothing about the plane’s course to raise curiosity.

  The search concentrated in the wooded expanse of the Francis Marion National Forest where a hunter had reported a smudge of smoke on the horizon the day of the flight. But the Civil Air Patrol and volunteers on the ground could find nothing. The smudge had come from a campfire. The Coast Guard combed the Atlantic waters offshore, but they too came up empty-handed. Newspapers and broadcasts were full of the story, and some of the rampant speculation -- public and private -- bordered on the bizarre. Was it a suicide pact? A hijacking? Had the occupants bailed out somewhere over land to begin new lives under assumed names? Was organized crime involved? The CIA?

  When the search was finally called off, an expert from the National Transportation Board concluded that, in all probability, the plane’s engine exhaust system had malfunctioned, the cabin occupants were overcome by carbon monoxide fumes, and the plane flew pilotless until it finally ran out of fuel and went down in the Atlantic. With no plane and no occupants, no one would ever be able to say with absolutely certainty. But, bizarre possibility aside, it seemed the only logical explanation.

  For Wilbur, numb with loss, the details didn’t seem important. He sat for hours at the edge of the marshland down by the Cape Fear River, staring off in the direction of the Atlantic. He never once imagined that the plane would suddenly come into view, restoring safety and sanity. No, his parents were gone. What filled his imagination was an ongoing replay of the terror that had awakened him the first night -- smoke and flame, and then as the week wore on and a crash in the Atlantic seemed likely, visions of a violent plunge into rock-hard water, the plane coming apart and settling beneath the waves where fish began to rip at dead flesh. He could not make it go away.

  At night, with the river quiet and dark, there were twin red pinpoints of light hovering in the air across the Cape Fear. Wingfoot told him they were warning beacons on radio station towers. But they seemed to him, in his grief, somehow connected with Tyler and Rosanna, out there far beyond his reach. He tried to think of them in heaven. He could only think of them as dead and himself as utterly lost and alone.

 
*****

  “ Papa left me in charge,” Min said firmly.

  They sat in the front parlor of Baggett House -- Min and Wingfoot and Wilbur, Aunt Grace and Uncle Harbert from Wilmington. Grace was Margaret’s sister, and certainly not a Baggett, but she had taken charge of things. She had stayed at the house, presiding with calm efficiency over the rituals of mourning. Aunt Grace was the closest relative Min and Wingfoot had. But since she was Margaret’s sister, not French’s, she was no kin at all to Wilbur. He felt eyes on him, studying him -- orphaned child of the family’s black sheep. He knew nothing of these people, even the ones with the same name as his. Grace was sweet. She hugged him a lot. But it didn’t help. It just made things worse.

  Now, with the search ended and the conclusions drawn and the memorial service over and done with, they talked about what next.

  “But Min honey, you can’t take care of a house and two boys.”

  “Can and will,” she said. There was a fierce glint in her eyes and her hands gripped the handkerchief in her lap, squeezing and squeezing all the tears out of it as she had squeezed the tears out of her eyes and replaced them with this stubborn thing.

  “But you’re going off to Chapel Hill in a couple of months.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Uncle Harbert spoke up. “Min, let the boys come stay with us. There’s plenty of room. You’ve got to go on with your life.”

  “This is my life,” she said. And then again, “Papa left me in charge.”

  “You’re still a minor,” Grace said. “Eighteen years old.”

  But she didn’t seem that way, Wilbur thought. She seemed to have grown up all of a sudden -- the girl with the room full of Carolina blue and frilly dresses for Eighty Pie replaced by someone much older and more serious. She had spent unflagging hours in the parlor in the days after the plane’s disappearance, greeting the flocks of people who came bringing enormous mounds of food, many of them Baggetts from the Pender County bunch. She had sheltered Wingfoot and Wilbur from the curious. She grieved, but she did it behind the locked door of her own room. Wilbur could hear her quiet sobs in the dead of night. But when she emerged each morning she was dry-eyed and calm and seemed quite sure of who she was and what she was supposed to do. As she seemed just now.

  “Uncle Harbert can write the checks,” Min said. “But we intend to stay here in this house. I intend to finish raising these two boys. Wingfoot is as wild as a buck and this is about the closest thing Wilbur has ever had to a home.”

  That wasn’t really true, he thought. The house in Waxhaw had been becoming a home, with Rosanna there all the time and Tyler spending long days with them and an easy peace settling about the place, maybe even a sense of some permanence. But that, of course, was all gone.

  His mother’s family? That wasn’t even a remote possibility because Wilbur had no earthly idea who they were. He had asked her once about them. All she told him was that they were in Louisiana. “I don’t want to think about them, and you don’t either.” There was, he understood, some bad business there. The Louisiana people weren’t an option. And neither was anybody else. So if he were to have any home at all, this would have to be it.

  “Min honey, I just can’t in good conscience let you do this,” Grace said. “Margaret would…”

  “Margaret is dead,” Min said flatly. “And Papa left me in charge,” she said for the third time. Wilbur thought it sounded like something from the Bible or the legislature, and that maybe she should have it lettered on a sign she could wear around her neck. She did, indeed, seem very much in charge. “Aunt Grace, if you fight me on this, I’ll make a stink.” The look on Aunt Grace’s face said the last thing she wanted was a stink.

  Min stood up now, and Wilbur and Wingfoot, who were seated on either side of her on the sofa, stood up too and she put her arms around both of them and pulled them close to her. And for the first time, Wilbur thought there might be some hope, that he might eventually get over feeling utterly lost and scared to death.

  The next morning he emerged from the back door and stood there for a long time trying to figure out what was wrong. Then it came to him: the Cadillac was gone. There was only Uncle French’s Ford station wagon in the garage behind the house.

  “Uncle Harbert took it to town to sell,” Min said as she stood at the stove frying bacon. “The money will go toward your college education.”

  “But I’m only thirteen,” Wilbur protested.

  “It will be here before you know it.”

  “But that’s my Dad’s car.”

  Min dropped her fork with a clatter and turned with a sudden fury that stunned him. “I don’t ever want to hear Tyler Baggett mentioned in this house again.”

  For a moment, he couldn’t speak. The bacon sizzled and popped in the frying pan. “But…”

  “He was an irresponsible no-account who never did an honest day’s work and left his mess lying around for other people to pick up.” Her eyes blazed -- the muscles around her neck and jaw taut, her face wild and twisted. “He killed my parents.” The words were jagged stones, dropped from a great height, gathering speed until they smashed against him.

  “Min, please…” He felt tears, very close.

  “No!” her voice a lash that made him cringe. “I’ll give you a place to live and I’ll raise you right, Wilbur. But I won’t have that sonofabitch Tyler Baggett hanging around here. Do you understand that?”

  “What about Mama?” he asked, his voice shaking, barely a voice at all.

  There was a long, unyielding silence and then she repeated, “Do you understand?”

  He nodded. And then he fled.

  He cowered in his room -- wretchedly, physically ill.

  He thought of leaving -- packing some stuff and standing out on Highway 133 with his thumb out. Just disappear, the way Tyler and Rosanna had done. But to where? And what?

  No, he was trapped -- weak, helpless, dependent on Min, who needed somebody to blame for the unthinkable thing that had happened to her. And, in a way, wasn’t she right? It was Tyler who wanted to go, Tyler who piloted the plane, Tyler who was instigator and instrument of tragedy. Sure, it was a senseless, fickle twist of fate. And there was enough grief to go around for all the survivors. But Min’s bitter, wrathful blaming towered over everything, shutting out all the rest. He huddled in its shadow.

  He would have to stay. And in staying, he would have to abide by her terrible rule, keep his mouth shut, not utter the unutterable, suffer his own private grief in his own private way until he was old enough to make his own rules, make his own way. At thirteen, that seemed a long way off.

  He was still on probation here, just as he had been when Aunt Margaret was casting her evil eye on him. Would he ever in his life get off probation?

  Aunt Grace came and stayed with Wilbur and Wingfoot while Min and Uncle Harbert went to Waxhaw. They took the station wagon. It was all they needed. They were back by nightfall with Wilbur’s things. Min never said what she did with all the rest of it. And he didn’t ask.

  *****

  In the Fall, Wilbur and Wingfoot rode the bus to school in Southport -- Wingfoot to the high school, where he was in tenth grade, Wilbur to the seventh at the junior high, where the bus stopped first. When Wilbur started to get off the bus, Wingfoot said, “You have any trouble with anybody, tell ’em to come see me.”

  But he didn’t have any trouble, and if he had, he sure wouldn’t have involved Wingfoot. He got along on his own, as he had learned to do with all the moving around they had done during his elementary years, rarely in the same school for more than a year at a time. He had no trouble talking to people, and he had a fairly quick wit about him. He supposed he had gotten that from Tyler. And he could do imitations. By the end of the first month he had the principal and a couple of the teachers down pat, and of course he had his old repertoire of Elvis Presley and Cary Grant.

  The thing to do was keep your eyes open and your mouth shut at first, get the lay of the land, figure out
who was who, not try to shoehorn yourself into any established cliques, smile (but not too much so you didn’t appear too eager), avoid confrontation, and join the band. Sports would have helped, but he was too much of a runt for that, a late bloomer. So he played saxophone, which he had learned in elementary school. It wasn’t an especially difficult instrument, and most school bands had an extra saxophone lying around somewhere, since he couldn’t afford one of his own. At least, he couldn’t until he started Southport Junior High. He came home at the end of the first day and told Min he had joined the band. When he arrived the next afternoon, there was an instrument case on his bed, and he opened it to find a gleaming gold sax nestled in a bed of velvet. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Min was matter-of-fact about it. “Baggetts don’t use junk.” He thanked her and gave her a hug.

  Another thing he had learned about getting along in a new school was to pick out a girl -- not the most or least beautiful or the most or least popular, but somebody in between -- and befriend her. And keep it on a friendship level, at least at first. A girl like that, right at the middle of the scale, didn’t threaten anybody else and provided connections. It was a delicate thing, not letting it develop into anything serious, at least not at first, and not being such a busom pal with the girl that the guys thought you liked girls (and guys) for the wrong reason.

  He picked out Glenda Turnipseed, who played clarinet. She had a nice smile and a flat chest and she rode a different bus. She made good grades, especially in math and science, which were Wilbur’s weakest subjects. And she didn’t mind making good grades, though she didn’t flaunt it, either. Wilbur was a middling student. All that moving about, and missing big chunks of school time when Tyler would be taking them on jaunts, had given him a sketchy background in the basics. Glenda helped him with math problems in study hall, patiently explaining things like integers that gave him a headache.