Old Dogs and Children

by Robert Inman

  “Has Fitz called you?”

  “No,” Bright admitted.

  “Well …”

  “He may have tried, but the phone has rung all morning. I’ve got it off the hook now.”

  “And yesterday. Was it off the hook yesterday? All this happened Saturday night. Fitz had all day yesterday to call.”

  “Don’t grill me, Roseann,” Bright flashed.

  Roseann shrugged, unchastened.

  “Hello, Rupert,” Bright called to her son-in-law as he stepped out of the door of the Winnebago and started across the bare patch of yard toward the steps. He was wearing seersucker Bermuda shorts and an argyle knit shirt, black socks and bright blue running shoes with big red stars on the sides. Rupert had a wide, open face and thinning black hair that he parted just above his right ear and swept across the top. He took the pipe out of his mouth and gave her a hug. The golfer she never hugged. With Rupert, it seemed the thing to do. “My father,” she told him, “always said he’d never hire a man who smoked a pipe because he didn’t believe a fellow could hold down two jobs at once.”

  Rupert laughed. “How are you, Bright?” He had called her Bright from the day more than a year before when Roseann had brought him home and introduced him as her new husband. That too seemed the thing to do. Rupert was in his midforties, several years older than Roseann and light-years ahead of her in stability. Bright had heard Roseann refer to Rupert as a professor at the University, but in fact he was not. He was a technician, a man who worked in the Engineering School, designing and building instruments and machines for faculty members’ experiments.

  “I’m fine, Rupert. And you? Are you bearing up?”

  Rupert laughed again. “Yes, that’s a good way to put it. Bearing up. Definitely bearing up. Ready for a vacation.”

  “I thought you’d be here earlier,” Bright said.

  Rupert stuck his pipe back in his mouth and Roseann gave Bright a pained look. “Well, I had a little, ah …”

  Rupert pulled the pipe out and held it, stem poised next to his lips. “Asthma attack,” he said. “She got a little excited with all the packing and loading and then this”—he nodded toward the newspaper. “She couldn’t catch her breath. We had to take her to the hospital.”

  “Good Lord,” Bright said softly. “Are you all right?”

  “Of course,” she snapped.

  “I’m afraid it gave Jimbo a bit of a scare,” Rupert said.

  “What’s he doing in there?” Bright looked toward the open door of the Winnebago.

  “Jimbo,” Roseann called.

  “He reads a lot,” Rupert said. “And he has an alligator …”

  “A what?”

  “Well, it’s an imaginary alligator. Named Josephus. When I was a kid, my dad was in the Army, and we traveled all over the country towing a house trailer. We had this imaginary alligator named Josephus who lived under the trailer. Whenever we got ready to move, we’d hitch up the trailer and Dad would put us all in the car, and then he would go back and get Josephus out and put him in the trailer. And whenever we stopped, Dad would make us stay in the car while he let Josephus out.”

  Bright studied him as he talked, smiling, waving the pipe, the strands of his thinning hair snaking down across his forehead. A good man for a small boy, she thought, a man who grew up with an alligator under the house. She couldn’t imagine the golfer with an alligator, except on his shirt.

  “Anyway,” Rupert said, “I was the oldest, so I inherited Josephus. And I gave him to Jimbo.”

  “And he lives under the house,” Bright said.

  “Yes, but he goes on trips.”

  “He’ll grow out of it,” Roseann said. She seemed impatient with the alligator business.

  “I hope not.” Rupert shook his head. “I didn’t.”

  “Jimbo,” Roseann called again. And finally he poked his head through the open doorway of the Winnebago and Bright saw with a pang how small and frail he seemed, how pinched the features of his thin face. She saw Jimbo perhaps once a year, on Roseann’s infrequent visits. How old was he now? Nine? Ten?

  Bright stepped around them and walked over to the Winnebago. “I hear you’ve got an alligator in there.”

  Jimbo gave her a thin smile, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Rupert says it used to be his alligator.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But he gave it to you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, are you so busy with your alligator you can’t give your grandmother a hug?”

  He stepped out then and put his arms around her neck as she bent to him, clasping his small body, smelling his fresh-scrubbed smell, thinking that it was unnatural for a boy to smell this clean this late on a summer morning.

  “Will you come in and sit a spell?” she asked, straightening.

  Jimbo looked back at the Winnebago. “I suppose so.”

  “Do you want to put your alligator under the house?”

  “We’re not gonna be here that long. I’ll just let him rest inside.”

  “Well, come on and let’s talk about what we’re going to have for lunch.” Jimbo closed the door of the Winnebago and she took his hand and led him to the steps, where Rupert and Roseann waited.

  “We can’t stay…” Roseann started to say.

  “Of course you’ll stay for lunch,” Bright said firmly. “You’ve got to eat lunch somewhere. I’ve got ham and potato salad in the refrigerator. And iced tea. That’s better than somebody’s greasy hamburger with who knows what kind of germs and hair in it.”

  She herded them into the parlor and got them seated, Rupert and Roseann on the sofa, Jimbo on the piano stool. He eyed the keyboard of the piano, but he didn’t touch it, just sat there watching his mother. Roseann perched rather than sat on the edge of the sofa, running her hands over the worn edge of the fabric and looking about the room, taking in the clutter of magazines and books that Bright had not had time to straighten up, the long thin cracks in the ceiling plaster and the faded wallpaper coming loose in places and the threadbare Oriental rug on the hardwood floor. All right, Bright thought, settling herself into the wing-back chair next to the window, say something.

  “Your phone’s off the hook,” Roseann said. She still had the newspaper in her hand, and she waved it in the direction of the telephone table next to the front door.

  “Yes, it is,” Bright said evenly. “I just told you, I took it off the hook. That’s why I don’t know whether Fitz has called or not.”

  “I suppose everybody in town has been calling.”

  “Not anymore.”

  Roseann flounced a bit on the sofa, straightening her skirt beneath her. “I’m just glad we’ll be at the beach all week so we won’t have to answer people’s snotty questions and hear their snide remarks.”

  Bright glanced over at Rupert. He was working hard on his pipe, looking out the window across the front yard, a thin wreath of smoke encircling his head. She turned back to Roseann. “You’re not coming back Thursday?”

  “What’s Thursday?”

  “Governor Fitz Birdsong Day.”

  “You mean they’re actually going ahead with it? After this?” She thumped the paper again.

  “I imagine they are. They’ve got the parade all arranged, and they sold so many tickets for the luncheon, they had to move it to the gymnasium at the high school.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Francis O’Neill is the chairman.”

  “Francis? You mean Big Deal?”

  “I’ve always thought of him as Francis,” Bright said. Francis and Fitz had been the best of boyhood friends. She remembered them sitting for hours in the wicker chairs on the front porch on long summer afternoons, reading the Tom Swift and Hardy Boys books that were stored away now by the shelffull in the attic. Bright had always called him Francis O’Neill.

  Roseann looked out the window up Claxton Avenue at the Ford dealership with the big sign on the front that said BIG DEAL O’NEILL NEW AND USE
D CARS. “Everybody calls him Big Deal, Mama.”

  “I don’t,” Bright said simply.

  Roseann laughed. “I’ll bet you even call him Francis when you go in there to get your car worked on. And I’ll bet he just wants to go back in the men’s room and hide.”

  Bright could hear the faintly mocking tone in Roseann’s voice. She really wanted to say, You’re so old-fashioned, Mama. But she wouldn’t say that, not out loud anyway. It would just be there, an undercurrent.

  “No,” Bright said, “as a matter of fact I don’t call him Francis when there are other men around. But I don’t call him Big Deal, either. I just don’t call him anything. When it’s just the two of us, I call him Francis.”

  “So Big Deal O’Neill is the Grand Lama for Governor Fitz Birdsong Day.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, we’ll be at the beach all week.”

  “Fine,” Bright said. “We’ll make out.”

  Roseann spread the newspaper out on the coffee table, just in the spot where Flavo Richardson had left his copy open an hour or so before, out where they could all keep Little Fitz Birdsong and Drucilla Luckworst in full black-and-white view. Then she picked up a magazine from the table next to the sofa, an ancient edition of National Geographic with a picture of some round-bellied African children on the front, and started flipping through the pages absently, seeing nothing. Rupert took his pipe out of his mouth and stared at it for a moment, then fished in the pocket of his Bermuda shorts for his pipe tool and started poking about in the bowl. Jimbo just sat, his head cocked a bit to one side, watching everybody. And the silence grew like a toadstool, filling up the room.

  Finally, Bright said, “Would anybody like some iced tea?”

  “Coke,” Jimbo said, brightening.

  “You know better than that,” Roseann said, still flipping pages. “Coke at this time of the day?”

  “Well, I don’t have any Coke,” Bright said, “so that settles that. But the iced tea is excellent.”

  So she got up and went to the kitchen, leaving them to the strained silence of the living room. She poured three glasses of iced tea, then surveyed the contents of her refrigerator and cupboard. She had plenty of sliced ham and a bowl of potato salad, but there were only two slices of bread left in the wrapper. So she took the iced tea glasses to the living room, wrote down “bread” just below “bananas” on the telephone table pad, and went to fetch her purse.

  “I’m out of bread,” she said, returning with it from the bedroom.

  Rupert heaved himself off the sofa. “I’ll go.”

  “Nonsense,” Bright said, waving him back to his seat. “It’s just across the street. Won’t take but a minute. You rest yourself.” She looked at Jimbo, who sat on the piano bench with one finger poked into his iced tea glass, swirling the ice cubes around and around, making small motions with his mouth. “Come help a little old lady across the street,” she said. Jimbo looked up at her, then over at Roseann, who seemed at the moment to be powerfully absorbed in the National Geographic. Then to Rupert, who winked at Jimbo and nodded. Jimbo got up, put his iced tea glass on the coffee table, and followed Bright out the door.

  They stood for a moment on the sidewalk, waiting to cross Birdsong Boulevard to the Dixie Vittles Supermarket, feeling the heat of late morning radiating from the concrete. The leaves of the pecan trees in her front yard drooped in the hot, still air. Only June, and already summer clutched the town in its first fevered heat wave.

  “Is this street named for you?” Jimbo asked, pointing to the BIRDSONG BOULEVARD sign across the way, where Claxton intersected.

  “Your grandfather,” Bright said.

  “Why did they name a street for him?”

  Bright looked down at him in surprise. “Why, he was a congressman. He was very distinguished.”

  “Was he on TV?”

  “Well, yes he was. A number of times, in fact. He was a rather well-spoken man. And handsome, too. He came across very well on TV.”

  Indeed he had. There had been a story on Huntley-Brinkley when Fitzhugh Birdsong retired from Congress. “A master of compromise, an architect of American foreign policy under six presidents,” David Brinkley had called him. Brinkley and the others had been surprised when he retired and went home to the small town where they named a street for him. Birdsong Boulevard. Bright had never considered it very boulevardish. It looked pretty much like any other street in town, not like you would imagine a boulevard, with two broad lanes on either side of a landscaped and tree-lined median. But it had been the town’s way of honoring Fitzhugh, who had brought them a measure of fame. They had the ceremony the day after he arrived home from Washington, and there was nothing particularly grand about it—no parade, no pomp and circumstance, nothing like they would have this Thursday on Governor Fitz Birdsong Day.

  “Were you on TV?” Jimbo asked.

  “No,” Bright said. “I was not on TV. I left all that business to your grandfather.”

  Which was not precisely true, she thought. A fellow with a TV camera had been there at Fitzhugh’s reception. Bright and Fitzhugh had walked downtown at midmorning to City Hall, where there was a nice gathering of local folks, and Mayor Harley Gibbons had said a few words and read a proclamation renaming Hill Street (so named because it climbed a hill as it wandered out of town) as Birdsong Boulevard. The town council had gone to some lengths to find a street that wasn’t already named for someone else, to avoid ruffling any feathers, but no one seemed too proprietary about Hill Street. There were no Hills in town. Fitzhugh had made a short speech about how he was glad to be back home among the people who had sent him to Congress for so many years, how much he looked forward to being just plain folks for a change, away from the weighty issues of Washington. When he was finished, they had punch and cookies inside City Hall and everybody went home in time for dinner. That night, they sat down and watched the six o’clock news, and there was a nice story about Fitzhugh’s retirement party, a good shot of him shaking hands and making his speech, with Bright standing off a bit to the side, next to Xuripha Deloach. Bright had on a nice pink dress that day, but you couldn’t tell it on the evening news because their set was a black-and-white. Fitzhugh remarked that they would have to get a color set, now that he was home to watch it. But two weeks later, Fitzhugh was dead. Now, eight years later, Bright still had the black-and-white set.

  “The cars sure do go slow,” Jimbo said.

  Yes, she thought, things move so slowly for so long, and then change comes suddenly, without warning. You can have a heartache for a long, long time—and then have your heart completely broken in an instant.

  “That’s so little boys and little old ladies won’t get run over,” Bright told him.

  Conversation froze when Bright and Jimbo pushed through the big glass door into the fluorescent cool of the Dixie Vittles. Doris Hawkins, at the cash register, swept up the newspaper that was spread out on her counter with a noisy rattle and stuffed it underneath, but not before Bright got a glimpse of the photograph of Fitz and the woman on the front porch of the camp house. “Lord, howdy, MIZ BRIGHT!” Doris tossed the name back over her shoulder loudly enough to alert the rest of the store. “Ain’t it a scorcher already!” Bright could see another woman, a shopper, peering around the corner of the canned goods section and Fonzel Baker, the butcher, craning his neck from behind the meat counter in the back.

  “Good morning, Doris.”

  “Who’s that handsome young man you got with you, Miz Bright?”

  “This is James Randolph Blasious,” Bright said, putting her hand on Jimbo’s shoulder. “Better known as Jimbo. Passing through on his way to the beach.”

  “Yeah, I saw the mobile home pull in over yonder.”

  “It’s a Winnebago,” Jimbo said.

  “This Roseann’s boy?” Doris asked.

  “That’s right.” Bright picked up a small shopping basket from the stack next to the door, just big enough to hold a loaf of bread and a few
bananas.

  “Blasious,” Doris mused. “I thought she was a Poteet or something like that.”

  “Poquette,” Bright said, remembering the golfer’s last name for the first time that morning. Kip Poquette. Tall, slightly slump-shouldered from bending over golf clubs for so many years. He had started playing when he was five years old, that’s what he had told Bright one time. She thought it odd. Five-year-old boys were supposed to play with frogs, not golf clubs. Kip Poquette had unruly blond hair and a big toothy smile and, to hear Roseann tell it, an absolute lack of a sense of responsibility about anything but golf. Roseann, of course, was as mean as a snake, and it had been a disastrous marriage, which ended amiably on Kip’s part when, five years earlier, he simply declined to come home after the golf season was over. Kip might have been amiable about it, but Roseann was not. The next year, Kip had almost won some enormously big golf tournament. Bright remembered that he was leading by five strokes after the third round, but Roseann had called him on the telephone in Georgia or wherever it was and told him she was putting a curse on him. Kip went out the next day and sprayed golf balls all over the course and missed a three-foot putt on the last hole to lose the tournament by a stroke. He had never been the same. Roseann had said the newspapers started calling him “Yip” Poquette. The last time Bright had heard anything about him, he was an obscure club pro somewhere in South Carolina.

  “Kip Poquette,” Bright said again, looking down at Jimbo. “But Roseann is remarried.” She started to say that Rupert had adopted Jimbo, but then she thought that it was really none of Doris Hawkins’s business, no matter how harmlessly she intended her busybodyness. Doris was the one who always called the radio station whenever she saw Little Fitz’s big black limousine pull into Bright’s driveway. Just to let everybody know the governor was visiting his mama.