Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  As he stuffed his lighter into a pocket of his tight, white jeans, his legs parted and his rounded maleness showed. Laurel looked away.

  “I’ll tell you a funny story about that old man.” When he began, she thought how her father would have liked having a cotton farmer as a son-in-law. She saw them laughing together over anecdotes, the way her father sat at a table full of whiskey bottles, talking to his friends. Men who worked in offices all day did not really work, had been her father’s belief.

  “One day I was practicing my bagpipes,” Hal said, “and heard a racket outside. When I had cut loose with my fine rendition of ‘Scotland the Brave,’ my friend on the trash wagon was just rounding the building. His mule almost got away from him. The backyard of the camp looked like the city dump. I don’t think that old man ever did figure out what the noise was or where it came from.”

  “It’s good you can still laugh, Hal.” Her father had not had time to know William; when he died, William said, “I thought at last I’d have a father. People are always leaving me.”

  “Honey, if I couldn’t laugh in here, I couldn’t stand the tension.”

  Honey. She assured herself the word meant nothing; it was common usage down here. However, endearments undid her because she had not known many in her life.

  “Funny, Laurel. I’ve never mentioned the tension to anyone else. But I’ll tell you something else. I used to have blinding headaches at home. And I’ve never had one since leaving there.”

  “From the tension at home?”

  “That’s all I can think of.”

  “You didn’t mention the headaches to the psychiatrists?”

  “No. The headaches went as soon as I left home, even when I was in jail at first. Then my lawyers had me sent to a psychiatric hospital. It was a lot more comfortable place to wait for trial than jail. I was there for several months. My lawyers wanted to enter a plea of temporary insanity. The doctors gave me every test and said, We’re sorry, but Hal is not crazy.”

  Laurel thought if he’d been in a psychiatric hospital for several months, he must have received a lot of help. It seemed the kind of treatment she’d like to undergo, though just a long rest was what she really wanted.

  “My little girl Tina was always talking about the sheriff dropping by the hospital to see her mother or coming out to Matagorda.” And Hal had to sit helplessly confined, imagining what could be going on, what his daughter could be seeing whether she knew it or not. If nothing was happening, he was tortured by his thought, and that was the point, Laurel thought, feeling sorry for him. She said, “What hospital?”

  “The one in Swan where the boy Greg was. You didn’t understand he didn’t die that night?” Laurel didn’t know why that should make a difference, but it did. “Laurel, that boy was up walking around and ready to go home. He lived for weeks. He died unexpectedly of an infection.”

  “Died in the hospital? Why in the world did they keep him in a little country one? Delton’s one of the finest medical centers in the South. Why didn’t they take him up there?”

  “Daddy offered to move him. His family was happy with the attention he was getting.”

  “He might not have died in a Delton hospital,” she said.

  “Don’t think I haven’t gone over that in my mind a million times. When I found out that boy had died, my whole world ended. I was no longer arrested for manslaughter, but murder.”

  “And you must have cared so terribly, the boy was dead.”

  “When I put down that phone, everything turned black. A little nurse had to help me to bed. And do you know, Laurel, despite giving me a sleeping pill, she said she sat by me all night.”

  “Really.”

  “She’s even knitted me socks and sent them since I’ve been here.”

  “Isn’t that sweet,” Laurel said. “I gathered from one of your letters, you don’t want a divorce from Sallie?”

  “I’ve tried to accept the inevitable. I don’t want to go home to nothing, like most of these guys here. I don’t want to lose another child. I come from the most conservative people possible. I can’t go around being the poor man’s Tommy Manville.”

  “Two divorces does sound awful,” she said. “I hardly know anyone who’s been divorced even once.”

  “When I was young, I had to be Pete’s partner in a tennis tournament at the Delton Country Club. I was embarrassed because his parents had been divorced. It was a stigma that rubbed off on you, I felt. I’d talked about a divorce. But I guess neither Sallie nor I wanted to admit we’d made a mistake. Also, I think she was hanging on to live in my parents’ big home on Matagorda. The night we came out of the J.P.’s, Sallie was already hoping we’d have a girl so she could make her debut from my parents’ big house.”

  “I don’t understand how someone like you married Sallie.”

  “You want it put in its simplest terms? I was hot for her box. I was just so—” He looked away into the distance as if unable to explain exactly how intense his feeling had been. Then he looked at her hesitantly. “When you said you were going through a bad period in your life, I thought you might be getting a divorce.”

  “I want to, but I’m afraid. And I don’t know what to do about my son.”

  They sat there in what seemed a world of their own, with nothing to do but talk on intimately. Hal said the hardest thing he’d ever done was tell his first wife, Carla, he wanted a divorce. Now he would have enormous guilt about his older child except she’d turned out so beautifully. “Children forget, Laurel. But you and your husband will suffer over your divorce the rest of your lives.”

  But not if I want a divorce, Laurel thought, her dander up. She said, “I’m sure Sallie must be quite lonely now.”

  “Sallie’s not lonely. She’s the type person that when we went on trips, she’d know everybody around the motel pool in five minutes. I could have stayed a year and never known anyone.”

  “I’m like that too,” Laurel said. She could see Sallie prancing around the pool wearing high heels with her bathing suit, but there was something in the image she could envy.

  “She’s got those breasts, if you remember.”

  “No. I never paid attention to the breasts of other girls.” She remembered only being embarrassed by her own.

  “Sallie went to a finishing school. She used to come down to Chapel Hill to see guys from Delton. I’d seen her as a child, but that was when I first knew her. She’d pose around the frat house in a sweater, and the guys would be betting on whether all that was really Sallie.”

  She remembered back to those days when girls wore foolish pointed things called falsies. “That’s when you started dating her?”

  “Hell, no. She was too much woman for me. I was a virgin G.I., just back from overseas. I started dating Carla in college. She went to a junior college and majored in horseback riding. She’d come down to see her brother. She was an army brat and had lived all over. She was a little more sophisticated than you Southern girls, in some respects. I got sucked into that marriage in more ways than one. She blew me on the first date. I couldn’t have been more surprised—or pleased.”

  “First date?” Laurel recalled her mother once insinuating there was such a practice, and saying that was why men went to prostitutes. She had been glad to be of a more enlightened generation than her mother’s. But first date!

  “Carla cried when I was graduating and didn’t want us to separate. She wanted to get married. So I said, All right.”

  Just like that? Laurel thought of the five years she had wandered around after college in terror of being an old maid; it would never have occurred to her to propose. Why hadn’t she gone to a finishing school and learned to flaunt her breasts, or to a horseback-riding college and learned fellatio? She had learned nothing at all practical at Bard College, but a great deal about the development of the modern short story. Hal’s world had been so safe and secure. “I didn’t get married for five years after college,” she said.

  “That was a lo
ng time. But Pris said you ran away after high school and married Kevin Shea.”

  “Why did Pris say that? It was so long ago, I didn’t think anyone in Delton even remembered.”

  “I guess because she’s uptight about you coming here. She’s uptight about everything, so afraid something might happen about my parole. But I don’t think a thing in the world could interfere with that.”

  “How much longer do you have?”

  “Two years.”

  Only two years, for a life? She could not help the thought surfacing. “I thought you had nine years.” The law, too, seemed then to realize his being here was all a mistake.

  “That was my sentence. I’m eligible for parole in three years and have served one. Actually, there’s a chance I’ll get out earlier. This prison is all politics. There are men at home the Governor owes favors. They’re getting up a petition asking for my earlier release. There’s opposition. The boy’s grandmother, I’m told, has had her whole garden club write letters to the Governor asking for me not to get out early.”

  “Letters like that would count?”

  “Flower power. We’ll have to wait and see what value it has.”

  Laurel shyly asked directions to a bathroom. When she got up, she had the strange impulse to carry along the waste-basket he had littered with cigarettes and empty it. Hal did not like walking without Buddy in the administration building, despite being a trusty. “I made trusty in six weeks,” he said.

  She said belatedly, “Congratulations.” But wouldn’t he assume he’d make trusty right away, being who he was and a college graduate? Had he done anything to merit it? she wondered.

  When she came from the bathroom’s booth, the room’s whole atmosphere changed. Everything grew still, as before a storm. Birds hushed. The sun seemed to shine with brighter intensity. She looked out past the railroad tracks paralleling the prison—the ones she had crossed coming into it—and past the highway she had traveled to get here. Men stood in the yard of a camp over there gripping a wire fence. Then a train came roaring past, a gossamer thread speeding on toward New Orleans and hooting in the distance, You can’t catch me.… Hal mentioned lying awake at night, listening when a train came through and thinking of freedom, and knew other men lay awake listening too, but no one ever mentioned a train.

  She stood drying her hands on a soggy, grayed roller towel. Beside its canister someone had written on the wall in pencil:

  In Case of Fire

  (W)ring This Towel

  She laughed over the wit of country people. When she returned to the library, Hal looked at her beyond Buddy’s back. “Time to step along, young lady.” Buddy recognized from their faces this was no ordinary leave-taking. He walked on ahead.

  She went along the corridor beside Hal, longing to touch him. “Does the prison give you these oxford-cloth shirts?”

  “No. I have my own shirts from home. I have my own pants, too. I order these jeans from Pettibone’s in Delton. The pants the prison issues are too baggy.”

  Clothes make the man, she supposed, but thinking of fashion here seemed inappropriate. Anyway, she’d have taken whatever the prison handed out. She realized now why the trusty at the entrance looked different from Hal. She wondered if the country boys resented his better clothes or knew enough to know the difference. They went through the foyer. “I wish there was something I could do for you on the outside.” In the free world, she thought.

  “Well, how are you at turning collars on shirts?”

  “Are you kidding? Genies do that.”

  “You know what I really miss, Laurel? Something so simple as a baked potato and sour cream. Here, all the cooks know to do is fry potatoes or mash them.”

  “I’ll send you some. And sour cream mix. How could you cook?”

  “I have a little oven. Pris keeps the cage supplied with food. She has themes. Chinese. Mexican. French. The guys won’t eat half what she brings because they don’t know what it is. It gets tossed out.”

  “I’ll send baking potatoes for everybody.”

  Laurel felt very much part of a couple walking along with Hal. Never before had she sat for so long talking to someone, one on one. Hours had passed. Without a key being turned, they had been locked in together. They had sat in the two straight chairs, close together but never touching, the whole outside world a totally remote one as if they were never to see it again. And with no diversions but conversation. Buddy watched them approach and said, “Hal, I was thinking. I can arrange one more visit for Laurel, with some other prisoners for her to interview. But also, the day I take you out to cover the Indian Fair, she could meet us there.”

  “Meeting a woman on the outside for a whole day would be like getting back to reality. Could you come?”

  She certainly could come and took down directions to a town she had never heard of. As Buddy drove away with the trunk of his car lifted, it wobbled as if in goodbye. “I have to be searched again going out?” she said. “I was planning on stowing you away.”

  “I’d almost try it. Some guys hid in the free-world bread truck but got caught. That’s about all that delivery man can’t do for you. He’s the main supplier of drugs or liquor or anything you want. They make home brew in here, too. I could have a drink any time. But I never have. If I could get one look at Matagorda, I think I could pull time a lot better.”

  She was glad he had refused to take a drink. “Why doesn’t Buddy take you by when you’re out?”

  “I’m not allowed back into my county until I’m paroled. It’s part of the deal I signed when I accepted the nine-year sentence the night before I was supposed to go on trial.”

  “You didn’t have a trial?”

  “The District Attorney told my lawyers he’d have to try me for murder because that’s what I was charged with. But he knew it was a manslaughter case, and he thought that would be the jury’s verdict. My lawyers agreed. It spared everyone, not having a trial. My little daughter Tina would have had to take the stand, even.”

  “But didn’t you take a chance? A jury might have let you off.”

  “We never claimed I didn’t do it. Only that it was manslaughter. Not murder. I never shot that boy on purpose, Laurel.”

  “I never thought you did,” she said. Did he think she would have come here if she had thought so?

  Hal put out a hand to shake goodbye and held to hers. “When I find something good, I hate to let go.”

  “I know,” Laurel said.

  8

  Laurel drove north with a sense of relief that she had no farther to go than the hills. She felt something enormous had happened between her and Hal, and she sensed he felt the same way. No one had ever seemed to match her capacity for feelings, but she thought he might. She would write him cautiously, protecting herself in case he did not feel as she hoped he did. Hal, I don’t know about you but it seemed to me something extraordinary took place between us. I don’t know words to describe exactly what I mean. His letter crossed hers in the mail:

  August 6

  Dear Laurel,

  Since our visit yesterday I have thought of little else. I hope you got something out of coming here. There is a story; there are many stories. I’m amazed at the speed and depth of our relationship. Ordinarily I’m not so quick to give of myself to a person, and I have a feeling you aren’t either. Perhaps if we had known one another longer or lived closer together such a thing could never have happened. You have no idea how good it felt to say what I knew was the truth and to be able to talk, letting my guard down. Some of the things I spoke to you about I have never been willing to admit before, and that was forever frustrating the poor psychiatrists who worked with me so hard before my sentence.

  Your visit had one result I didn’t foresee and was totally unprepared for. I have tried to put it into this letter but I cannot. Perhaps later. Right now my view on your divorce situation is practically worthless. After being with you for one day I’ve lost my objectivity. I’m looking forward to our upcoming visi
t more than to anything for a long time. I’ve never had a harder time writing a letter.

  Hal

  Laurel danced cheek to cheek with Buff around the cabin. She wrote out their full names and crossed out all the similar letters, saying Love—Marriage—Friendship—Hate over the letters left, to see how things came out. She worked over the letters various times, using her maiden and her married name and the two in combination, until she got Marriage to come out at the end of both their names.

  She knew this was all foolish and childish. But she was seventeen again and the feeling was wonderful. Their letters kept crossing in the mail as they wrote every day, waiting to see one another. Then one night Clarence Lee came from his house, tap-tapping, and announced a phone call.

  “Hey.”

  She choked back Hal’s name. Clarence Lee’s wife, Mabel, had turned down the television set, either out of consideration or to enable herself to hear. “How is this possible?” Laurel said.

  “I’ve been to an AA meeting with Buddy. We stopped at his office on the way back to the cage. I’m using his WATS line. If anybody comes, I’ll have to hang up quickly.”

  “I’m not—you know—either.”

  “Alone? Talking cryptically is something we’ll have to get used to. I’ll be able to call you off and on this way.” They went on trying to convey a lot with few words, and their voices shook. Lovers kept apart are bad enough, she wanted to say. But lovers who cannot be lovers? “Exquisite misery.” She remembered the words from his letter.

  “I finished the books you sent,” he said. “We’ll talk when I see you.”

  “Only tell me if you liked The Death of the Heart.”

  “That little girl’s loneliness broke my own heart.”

  “I knew you would like it too.”

  She heard the creak of a door, and footsteps. It was like listening to an old radio program. The sounds fit into all the incredible excitement. “I’ve got to go,” he said. Did he say Honey or did she imagine that? As Laurel returned through the living room, Mabel said, “Don’t sit over yonder pining your young ’un. Come over here any time.”