Turn Signal

by Howard Owen

  They didn’t know I was in the next room, kind of lost in my own little world, staring out the window and imaging I was standing guard, on the lookout for Germans. I kept quiet. Now I was a spy, stealing secrets from the enemy.

  “I told you he was going to do it,” he told her. “I just never have trusted that fella. I believe he’d screw a snake if somebody would hold it and keep it from biting him.”

  I heard Mom shush him, but I heard her giggle a little, too.

  Years later, when I was home on leave from the Navy, Dad told me McCauley Prince had been known to bring young women into his office, that he even had a room in there with a bed in it. He’d told Arlene he needed it because some nights he would be working so hard he would just have to sleep over, couldn’t get home at all.

  His office was right in the middle of Speakeasy, and from the way he acted, my father said, it was obvious he didn’t really much care who knew what he was doing.

  “Poor Arlene,” my mother said.

  “Poor Jerry,” Dad said, and I came to think of Jerry Prince that way, although even with his father gone, he had more than most of the rest of us.

  One of the things I enjoyed doing, when I would get a rare invitation to their house, was playing with his electric football set. We would have been in first or second grade by then, and what we knew about football wouldn’t have filled up a thimble. But we loved to set up the little red and yellow players facing each other with one of the offensive players holding the little cotton ball and his blockers set up in such a way that he wouldn’t be touched by a defender.

  We had to be very quiet, because Arlene Prince didn’t like noise, and the electric football game would eventually start vibrating and making this godawful metallic racket. That and our occasional screaming would eventually cause her to make us stop and do something “less nerve-wracking.”

  What more or less drove a wedge between Jerry and me was this stupid coonskin cap. It’s the summer between second grade and third, and the other kids are already kind of picking on him, calling him “Princess” and stuff like that. He just seemed to not fit in. He was in sheer terror of getting his clothes dirty, and when it came to sports, his arms and legs seemed like they were screwed on backwards. And I’m taking up for him, most of the time, although any kid that age will run with the pack, go with the cruelty of the crowd occasionally.

  That summer, Jerry’s mother had bought him a coonskin cap, like the one Davy Crockett wore on TV. Jerry didn’t much care for it, and I did, so one day after he had worn it down to my house to play and was going home, he asked me did I want it. I said I sure did, and he gave it to me.

  The next morning, Arlene came wheeling up in our driveway—she drove everywhere—got out of her big old Buick and came marching up and banging on the front door.

  Mom answered, and Arlene told her that I had taken the coonskin cap away from Jerry, and that he wanted it back, and how much she hated a bully.

  Well, I’d told Mom and Dad the night before that Jerry had given it to me, and for a little while, it looked as if I was going to get a whipping for lying to them. They gave her the coonskin cap back, and she left without another word.

  “I didn’t take it, “I was crying, pulling on my mother’s dress. “He gave it to me. I swear he did.”

  In the end, they believed me. I wasn’t a bad kid, really. The lies I told were for the most part pretty small stuff. I don’t believe either of them thought I would take Jerry Prince’s coonskin cap and then lie about it to them.

  What happened, I’m sure, is this: He came home without that cap, and his mother jumped him, and he panicked. She didn’t much believe in giving things away, and he probably figured the only way out was to tell her that Jack Stone had taken his cap away from him.

  We didn’t see each other all the rest of that summer, and that fall at school, we weren’t in the same class. You could say it’s funny how kids can fall out over such a little thing, but I’ve seen adults do worse.

  I just think Jerry was embarrassed. He knew what he had done, and he knew that I knew.

  I made up my first story when I was in third grade. It had a bunch of cowboys, heroes and villains, a shootout, and an unforgettably tense scene where the bad guy says to his would-be victim, “Gimme the dough,” and she throws biscuit flour in his face and escapes.

  I wrote this out of boredom. We were in a mixed third-and fourth-grade class, and we spent about half the day doing assignments while the one teacher, Mrs. Mattson, worked with the other grade. Mrs. Mattson saw me writing away and made me let her read it. She seemed truly excited that someone in one of her classes had actually done something semi-creative. She tried in vain all the rest of the year to get me to write another story.

  But there was always an itch there. When I thought I was going to college instead of screwing up my sorry-ass life, I figured I’d major in English, maybe teach it in high school in addition to coaching the football team, on the outside chance I didn’t make it in the pros.

  I’d always liked stories, reading them and hearing them and even writing one now and then. It wasn’t something I wanted spread around, though. When you’re one of the jocks, you don’t want to go there.

  Even the short story I wrote in seventh grade that won the junior high literature contest was done in haste and repented at leisure. It was about a boy who causes his rival to have an accident that leaves the other boy blind. The first boy commits himself to being the other boy’s eyes from then on, leading him to classes, helping him with his homework and becoming his best friend. My seventh-grade teacher said it was powerful. Jerry Prince came in second.

  My buddies, most of whom didn’t read it, just seemed to think it was weird. They’d call me “Shakespeare” and make jokes about me and Jerry Prince. Even Dad didn’t quite know what to make of it and was more than glad to turn his attention back to my next football game. Mom thought it was nice, and Sandy made a fuss over me, but the message you got if you grew up when and where I did was: Girls write, boys do other stuff. If you were going to be a boy and a scholar, it ought to be in the general area of math or science or business.

  You make some strange decisions at that age. You decide you would rather be a jock than a writer, and you decide, because that’s what all evidence seems to be telling you, that you can’t do both.

  Even in my one semester of college, there was this love-hate thing with writing. I signed up for a creative writing course, right out of the gate. And then, in the first class, I looked around, and two-thirds of the other students were girls, and the boys—most of them a bit younger than me by then—mostly looked as if they were much smarter than me. When the professor said we would be reading to each other and critiquing each other’s work, I was gone. The idea of reading stories I’d made up and then having these strangers sit around and pick them apart was too much for my tender ego.

  We’d had to submit an essay before we could be admitted to that class, and the professor went to the trouble to call me two weeks later and tell me what a mistake I was making, how promising my writing was. He was probably all of 25, not much older than me, and what the hell did he know? But I should have listened to him. If I’d stayed in school, I might have given that creative writing course another shot. I did still plan to major in English.

  Shoulda, coulda, woulda, as my father used to say.

  After that semester, though, it was one headlong plunge. The move back home, marriages, kids, responsibilities, hanging out with the old crowd.

  On the road, I’d find myself making up stories about the people and the places I saw, and believe me, I saw a lot of people and places, driving an 18-wheeler. You’d think that kind of life would just beat any kind of creativity right out of you, but not necessarily. You can get inside the noise.

  Even as a kid, mowing people’s lawns, the noise was like this shell I could crawl inside, and the most amazing stories would come to me. I was very popular with my little nieces and nephews, not because I was a foo
tball star, but because I could make up stories that would keep them out of mischief for hours on end. Sometimes, I’d make one up and tell it to them in little 30-minute segments, string it out for months, like chapters in a book. Later, I was too busy, too tired, too something to do that for Brady more than once or twice.

  The thing is, you can choose to live your life in some kind of diminished state. People do it all the time. You can even be happy, if nothing unusual comes along, like an old man in baggy clothes who’s prone to disappearing.

  Women give it up to do 90 percent of the child-rearing (no matter how sensitive and new-age Daddy is) and hold down a job at the same time.

  Men, because we’re just naturally dumber, give it up sometimes just to be cool, just to be like everybody else. You’ve got this certain range of possibilities, and Writer of Novels isn’t in the range for some, unless you want to be considered a little light in the loafers.

  And then, sometimes, a thing will happen that will make you realize what a loser strategy that is, to not lead with your strength.

  And you see that the kids who were a little off-center, not in the thick of all that seemed to matter, the ones in the Library Club and the French Club, might have learned this particular lesson long before you did.

  You pay a higher tuition when you come to it late, like I did, but the course is still worth it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Small, stenciled signs lead the Class of 1970 home.

  As if, Jack Stone thinks, we need directions. The classroom buildings are virtually unchanged since they graduated, at least externally. The gym and football stadium are both relatively new, built with boosters’ money, and there are a dozen trailers that already look older than the redbrick structures they supplement. Generally, though, it’s still the same. The elementary, junior high and high schools touch, so that you could go through all 12 grades in an area less than a quarter-mile wide and 200 yards deep. A young scholar might find his parents’ names or initials carved into the wooden desks.

  But Martha Sue Levens Bain has never been one to leave anything to chance. She would have been haunted by the thought of one out-of-town classmate somehow losing his or her way to the reunion.

  In school, she had been a thin, frowning, freckled girl with nails bitten to the quick who cried in 11th grade when she got her first B. She has loosened up some over the years. Jack has even seen her very close to drunk on a couple of occasions. In her late 40s, though, she seems to be going back to what Milo Wainwright calls her tight-ass mode.

  Jack Stone and Martha Sue Levens were voted most likely to succeed. They should’ve waited until a little later in the year on that one, he thinks. By the time the yearbooks came out, the image of Jack Stone standing there in cap and gown, football in one hand and textbook in the other, looking to the future, was a bad joke.

  He’s helped Martha Sue and the others get things ready, even mowed the grass since no one else is going to do it until the week before classes start. He pounded all those signs, eight of them exactly 100 yards apart, into the rock-hard clay alongside School Road and wondered why Ray, Martha Sue’s husband and a county commissioner, wasn’t donating a little sweat equity.

  He’s driven to the school half an hour early as a favor to Martha Sue. When he walks in the school cafeteria, it still smells of decades of overcooked lima beans and greasy meat despite its impressive physical make-over. Martha Sue walks up to him with some urgency and asks him how he thinks it looks.

  Jack looks at the red and white bunting, the oldies band setting up in the corner, the caterers assembling cold cuts, fruit-and-cheese platters and shrimp, the papier-mâché gladiator standing eight feet high in the corner, and he tells her it looks fine, just grand.

  “You don’t think it smells like a cafeteria?”

  “It is a cafeteria. It smells fine. And it never looked better.”

  She thanks him. He wants to reach out and smooth the vertical frown wrinkle creasing her forehead. He does take a loose wisp of graying hair and push it behind her ear. The frown disappears.

  Thirty years have passed so quickly it makes Jack’s chest hurt. He’d like to make them all young again.

  He sees half his former classmates at least once a year, and a lot of them more often than that. Today, though, he knows that the enormity of time’s little joke will hammer him, and he has a momentary rush of panic. If it weren’t for Jerry Prince, he doubts even the cajoling of Martha Sue Levens Bain could have gotten him here.

  Ray Bain comes over, already sampling the shrimp, and extends his hand.

  “How’s it going?” he says, not bothering to wait for a reply before telling Martha Sue that the band says it isn’t familiar with one of the songs on her must-play list.

  “Which one?”

  “‘No Time.’” He says with a shrug. “Whichever one that is.”

  “Shit!” Martha Sue exclaims, causing her husband to jump slightly. The frown wrinkle returns. “They’re supposed to be an oldies band. This is the class of 1970. What did they think we wanted them to play, Sinatra?” She spins on her heel and goes striding toward the band’s leader, a man about half her age with a mullet haircut.

  “He better run, he better hide.” Ray Bain is shaking his head.

  “Well, it was our class song,” Jack says.

  “Oh, yeah? You know, I can’t even remember which one it was. I remember ‘Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?’ but not that one. Hum me a few bars.”

  “You’ll know it when you hear it.”

  “If I ever hear it,” Ray says, and they both watch Martha Sue have an intense moment after which the mullet haircut nods his head as if he has suddenly, magically remembered that he does indeed remember and know how to play ‘No Time.’

  “Martha Sue can make people do things they didn’t even know they were capable of doing,” her husband says, throwing an empty shrimp tail back onto the plate.

  Soon, the crowd begins arriving. The ones who never left or left and came back are mostly with wives, often two couples together, as if for support.

  They are all issued name tags complete with their senior-class pictures, clipped from a yearbook.

  “Oh, my God,” Mack McLamb exclaims as he gazes at his, “haven’t we suffered enough? Why don’t we put our senior-class weight on here, too, and make it complete?”

  Mack has made the trip up from Richmond by himself.

  “I told Sarah that I wanted no witnesses,” he tells Jack. “I told her I aimed to get as obnoxious as I wanted to, that this day was off the books, doesn’t even count. Nothing I do today can be held against me.”

  Several others within earshot second him on this. In high school, Mack McLamb was a ring-leader, the one who got them to climb up a rickety ladder and paint “Class of ’70” and an obscene caricature of their mascot on the steep, slippery roof, the one who was always trying to get you to skip afternoon classes with him and go to the creek.

  He leans close to Jack and whispers in his ear:

  “Intel and Cisco, Bubba. You’re gonna be able to retire and write that Great American Novel of yours without having to drive a friggin’ UPS truck any more. Might as well give that brown suit to Goodwill, if they’ll take it. And I’m gonna be able to retire and spend the rest of my life wearing out blenders making pina coladas.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Jack has entrusted some of the money from selling his truck, plus the small amount his mother left him, to his old friend. In the last statement, he had almost $75,000.

  Jack looks at his name tag and comes face-to-face with who he used to be. He’s wearing a sports jacket and tie like the rest of the athletes, a big man on campus. His sideburns seem to be the only bow to the late-arriving ’60s. His smile is perfect, open and uncomplicated. His hair, a reddish-blond that has faded and receded steadily over the years, is full and perfectly combed. He looks like a boy prepared to live up to everyone’s expectations.

  “It sucks being old, don�
��t it?”

  Milo Wainwright and Cully Dane have sneaked up on him. They’ve both already pinned their name tags to their knit shirts. Milo’s is upside-down. Cully has drawn a mustache on his. They both were a little wilder than Jack back then, with their hair hanging down far below their ears and collars. Coach Tate would have loved to kick them off the football team, but it was a good team, and Milo and Cully were at least somewhat valuable, in addition to being good friends with Jack Stone.

  “It sucks being you,” Jack says.

  “You were a handsome devil,” Cully tells him as he pins Jack’s tag to his dress shirt. Martha Sue asked him if he would please dress up, as an example to the others, as if the sight of him wearing a tie would make the likes of Cully Dane and Milo Wainwright go back home and change clothes. “You know, I never told you, Jack, but I’ve always loved you.”

  The old friends are comfortable with each other on a daily basis. Jack sees them both all the time, especially since he changed jobs. All three rib each other about receding hairlines, weight gain and choice of clothes, even their marital mishaps.

  But this is a little different. They all feel it. Their roles have changed. Milo’s been on the school board for the past six years. Cully has gotten rich developing land for commuters wanting quick access to the city and the illusion of country life. Jack Stone drives a UPS truck.

  “Gina didn’t come tonight?” Cully asks him.

  “Nah, she said she didn’t want to hang around a bunch of old farts.”

  “I hear that. Carrie said she’d rather do a hysterectomy on herself. But Milo, you’re a great disappointment to us. I figured you’d be here with one of your 15-year-old conquests.”

  “I have never,” Milo says, holding a finger up for emphasis, “never dated anyone less than half my age. Wait … OK, 40 percent my age. Hey, I’m entitled to some fun, aren’t I? I need some comfort. Being divorced is tough.”

  “Then how come you keep doing it?”

  “I’m just misunderstood.”