Thrill Kids

by Packer, Vin

  Delia’s eyes had scanned Court Street as the car turned off West Tennessee and onto it; saw the same low-lying stores and buildings leading down to Courthouse. Square, and the Wheel; and there in the shadows by the Wheel, the gray stone figure of the Confederate infantryman, with Porter Drugs across the way.

  She had said, “God, it all looks the same. Now, Mama, do pull in so I can get cigarettes.”

  She had thought, it is the same too, and I’m not much different.

  Mrs. Benjamin had slowed up, saying, “I’m the muse of choral singing and dancing. Gay Porter is Clio, and she’s not very pleased about that, because you can imagine how little there is for the history muse to do during Music Emphasis Month … I wish you wouldn’t say God that way, Delia.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Dee had said, getting out of the car.

  Mrs. Benjamin had shouted after her, “Don’t buy two at once, Delia. I think it looks tawdry to buy two packages of cigarettes at once like some chained-smoker.”

  “Chain-smoker!” Dee had laughed over her shoulder, “and I am!”

  Then she was facing him suddenly—this stranger who was holding open the door of Porter Drugs, and “he was speaking to her.

  He said, “That’s a sick habit, chain-smoking.”

  He smiled, or at any rate his lips tipped in what must have been a smile, and his dark eyes shined unusually bright. He was tall and lean, with a stiff stance to his figure, in the gray flannel suit, ivy-league cut. He seemed to wait for her response. Dee noticed all this, thinking that he sounded like a Northerner, and she was about to answer him in some casual way, when she saw a second face, the face of someone she did know—Jack Chadwick’s, a face she had not seen in six years. He was sitting in a booth in the rear of the drugstore. Cass, his wife, was with him, and her back was to Delia.

  If Dee had known that they would be in there, she would never have insisted that her mother stop.

  Now it was too late to turn back. She drew a deep breath, and her heart, which had paused, rushed to beat again. It was bound to happen eventually, she thought. She clutched the expensive alligator bag to her side, worried that her short, loosely waved black hair had come down in the rain, making a mockery of the monk’s-cap cut which Kenneth had labored over at Lilly Dache; then compensated for that anxiety by remembering that she had automatically done a careful makeup at the airport over in Baldwin; retouched it en route to Bastrop in the car; and that the white linen collar which she had attached a moment before she stepped off the plane was crisp and clean above the tightly fitted jacket of the beige summer suit.

  The stranger said something else, but Dee didn’t hear it. Then he walked on to the fountain, and she remained at the cigarette counter. In a moment Jack Chadwick would look up and see her standing there. It was not too unlike, she recalled absurdly, the first time she had ever seen him, when she had been sitting in the back booth, and Chad had been standing in the exact spot she was, back in 1943.

  • • •

  That was the day in June when the temperature was well up into the nineties, and the humidity was killing, the year Judson Forsythe was in love with her, the beginning of that summer when everyone was singing “As Time Goes By.” All the girls were speaking in husky voices like the new movie actress, Lauren Bacall, and all the boys were destined to copy what Judson Forsythe was about to do that afternoon in Porter Drugs, if he could ever get Delia Benjamin to stop talking.

  Her hair was long then, down to her shoulders, and she had that habit of winding it around her fingers when she was impatient, which she was; but undaunted, Jud kept insisting she be still long enough to look at what he had to show her, kept tapping his finger on a box wrapped in red tissue, tied with white ribbon, set between them on the table. She was easily the best-looking girl in Tate County, and, her dates agreed, the most talkative, taking after both her parents in that fact, but favoring the judge, in spirit, because Delia Benjamin liked to “talk serious.”

  “Not now,” Jud was imploring her, “not when I got something to give you, Dee.”

  “But I was smack dab in the middle of asking you to explain something to me,” she said, “and you won’t.”

  “Well. why don’t you ask your daddy, Dee? I don’t know what all this withholding tax stuff is … Look, ‘member Casablanca we saw at the Alabama last week?”

  “You don’t know what the bill is President Roosevelt signed this very day, Jud Forsythe?”

  “Oh, I know, but ye gods and little fishes I bought you a dog-damn whistle, Delia Benjamin, just like the one Humphrey Bogart gave to Lauren Bacall! ‘Member, in the movie?” He shoved the box across to her. “I had it inscribed, too,” he said.

  Still frowning, Delia took the whistle out of the box and read: “If you want anything, just whistle. J.” She said “It’s very nice, Jud. Thank you. But it does seem it’s a funny place to present it. Right out in the open in the drugstore.”

  “I did it because of the air conditioning,” Judson answered. “Knew you wouldn’t want to take a hike out to the Dip in this heat.” He’d been looking at his thumbs; blushing, and when he looked up and said, “Well, do you like it? Do you remember the part in the movie, Dee?” she was looking past him toward the front of Porter’s, looking at someone standing up there by the door. “I’ve never seen him before.”

  “Him?” Judson had swung around in the booth to see the short, wiry young man with the bright red hair, who was buying a package of cigarettes and clowning with Cassie Beggsom. “He’s the new boy. Family just moved here from the state of Missouri. Name’s Jack Chadwick, only everyone calls him Chad,” Jud said; then added significantly, “He’s older—he’s more Cassie’s age, eighteen or so.”

  Chad told Dee later that he had noticed her that same afternoon; that he had seen her sitting back there looking bored and beautiful and that he’d thought, She’s someone I’m going to get to know better, almost simultaneously with her thinking, He’s someone I’m going to fall in love with this very summer. But it took him a long time and plenty of cat-and-mouse before he confided this to her. Dee, of course, thought she was the cat, never dreaming he had flung himself headlong and heart-sore across her snares, his soul filled to spilling with her after his encounter with the first snare of the series, before he was sure enough of her to tell her the way he felt.

  The first one was set at the Yellowhammer Country Club, three days from that afternoon in Porter’s. She attended the Friday night dance with Judson Forsythe, and even though, like any good daughter of a Southern belle, Delia Benjamin knew even better than most how to “follow,” and Judson Forsythe enjoyed a reputation as an excellent escort on the ballroom, Jack Chadwick and Cassie Beggsom found themselves perpetually pushed, shoved, and jostled by the pair. Chad could hear Jud protesting, “Dee, what is the matter with you tonight? You’re not paying attention;” and Cass Beggsom decided, “Dee Benjamin’s been drinking. She always was a little too precocious for her own good,” smiling up at Chadwick with an air of amused tolerance at Dee’s antics. Cass liked Dee then and called her “cute;” and Cass, precocious in her own right, already attended the University of Alabama at age eighteen, in her sophomore year, added matter-of-factly: “Dee’ll probably be coming to Alabam in a coupla years. I’m going to have to tell the Pi Phi’s to look out for her. She’ll make good sorority material. A little wild, though.”

  Cassandra Beggsom was wrong about one thing, right about the other. Jack Chadwick found it out toward the end of that evening, when he went out behind the Yellowhammer to get his car. Sitting in the front seat, playing the radio, Delia Benjamin smiled up at him as he pushed down the convertible’s door handle; said, “It’s crazy the way music makes you feel, you know? Even the tackiest old pops that rhyme moon and June—you hear them often enough, they begin to get you. Like this one: We strolled the lane together, laughed at the rain together,” she sang in an off-key soprano. Chadwick winced. “Oh, I know I can’t carry a tune, but lane and rain and all that tacky
mush. Still, I don’t mind it.”

  Chad said, “There are worse.” He got in beside her, took a package of cigarettes from the pocket of his white linen jacket, lit one, blowing the smoke out in a cloud that she brushed with her hands.

  He said, “I’m sorry,” and held his arm over near the window. “Look, Cass is waiting for me on the steps.”

  “I expect Judson will be keeping her company.” She smiled at him. “You know my name?”

  “Sure,” he said, “Cass mentioned it tonight. Said you’d make good sorority material when you go to Alabam.”

  The radio announcer was talking about corn plasters. Dee Benjamin reached over and turned it off. “I wouldn’t go to Alabam for anything,” she said. “I don’t believe in going to college in your own state, do you? I don’t believe in sororities either.” She looked at him frowning. “Do you Chad?”

  Chad had told Dee later that it seemed like the craziest thing that had ever happened to him, walking back and finding her in his car, the green net gown she wore spilling over his yellow straw seat covers, showing the bare burnished skin at the dip above the incredibly full bosom, white shoulders and soft-looking long white arms, half covered by the matching net stole, and down at the gown’s other end, the glistening, silver spike-heeled slippers. He told Dee later that he had wanted to reach out then and there and touch the long coal-colored hair, bring his face close to it and smell it, feel it rub against his cheeks. But he let on none of this that night; he stayed stoic, seemed nonchalant, smoking his cigarette and answering her, “I’m going to my state university when I get out of service. It’s got the best school of journalism there is, Missouri has.”

  “That’s different.” She traced the edge of the net gown with her finger. “You probably know what you want to be, and are going where you can take the right courses.”

  “I’m going to be a newspaper man.”

  “Do you believe in sororities?” she asked. “You know what I heard? I heard that the Chi Omegas down at Alabam make their pledges get into a coffin during initiation; and then close the lid on them. I mean, I think that’s just awful to imagine. Tempting death like that. Lord knows, I’m afraid enough of dying, are you, Chad?”

  He felt the slight pressure of her hand come on his knee, then go. “I don’t much like the idea,” he said.

  “The idea of dying, or the idea of sororities and fraternities?”

  “Neither one.”

  She said, “I don’t either. We’re liberals, I guess.”

  “I guess,” he said.

  They were quiet for a bit. Behind them at the clubhouse the Alabama Blue Notes were playing a raucous jitterbug tune; there was the noise that crickets make coming from the golf links; and out at the cooks’ quarters the Negroes were giggling and shouting in a game of craps. A breeze

  was beginning, stirring the long-leafed pines in the distance, and the haw trees close.

  • • •

  Jack Chadwick finally repeated, “Cass is waiting for me on the steps.”

  “Do you feel like kissing me before I get out and go on back?” she asked.

  He smiled and turned toward her, but saw she wasn’t smiling. He looked at her for a minute. He told Dee later that was the very minute he fell dizzy in love with her, but when he reached for her he did it in some mild calm trance; he pressed his lips down on hers for only an instant, then placed her back against the seat with his hands on her shoulders. He straightened, and started the motor.

  “I better walk back,” she said. She got out of the car, and looked back in through the open window, her arms leaning on the edge. “Chad?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Take me to see For Whom The Bell Tolls? It’s coming to the Alabama Sunday.”

  “All right, Dee,” he said.

  She paused. He had been looking straight ahead, his profile turned to her. Then he looked at her directly.

  “I guess you think I’m a little wild?” she said.

  “Cass mentioned something about it earlier. But I wouldn’t know.”

  “You and Cass must have had a good time tonight talking about me.”

  “You kept bumping into us,” he answered.

  “Well, she’s right about one thing,” Delia Benjamin said. “I am a little wild. But she’s wrong about Alabam and these coffin closing sororities. I wouldn’t belong to one.”

  “How old are you, anyway?” Jack Chadwick asked.

  “Going on seventeen.”

  He put the car in gear, looked away from her to the rear-view mirror.

  “You’re all right,” she said. “Plenty of room on both sides … Chad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re going to be a great newspaperman some day,” she said. “There’s something about you that makes me know that.”

  Chad’s insides did flips, the first of hundreds of thousands of flips to come in the space of seven years from that night.

  Pulling his blue Dodge out of the lot, going slowly up the circular gravel drive to the steps of the Yellowhammer, Chad thought, I’m going to marry Delia Benjamin. Some six weeks after that moment, there wasn’t anyone in Bastrop who didn’t think the same thing.

  Chad never showed that he had succumbed, in the beginning. He enjoyed the chase, because Dee was doing the chasing, using every wile known to woman, and some known only to Dee. But through it all, he could hardly believe that Delia imagined she would have to do any more than crook her little finger to bring him to his knees. For she was possessed with a breath-catching kind of fabulous beauty, that haunted even strangers who had seen her no oftener than once, and that quivered like a just-thrown dagger in the hearts of those who had become obssessed by her, and ultimately dedicated. Judge Benjamin’s family was rooted in the traditional and the respectable, and Delia’s blood was the good kind that told well. Even more incredible to Jack’s mind was the fact that Dee read the national news in the Bastrop Citizen, as well as “Social Notes All Around;” and finding that scanty, read her father’s copy of the Birmingham Post-Herald; that she thought she might go to law school somewhere up North; that she didn’t compare Roosevelt with Christ; and that she knew who D. H. Lawrence was, even quoted him on their second date: You tell me I am wrong. Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong? I am not wrong … In Syracuse, rock left bare by the viciousness of Greek women. No doubt you have forgotten the pomegranate trees - - -

  Jack Chadwick’s family was new in town, and while it was rich by Bastrop standards, it was nouveau riche. Chad’s father sold furnaces out of Birmingham; their only ancestor to fight in the Civil War was some second cousin of Chad’s grandfather; and Chad’s mother was bedridden with arthritis, a fact that kept her off church committees and away from bridge teas. When Dee wore heels, Chad was shorter. Because he had not gone to high in Bastrop, his “best friends” were back in Bolivar, Missouri. People said that he was a good-looking boy, but not especially handsome; nice enough, but not particularly outstanding.

  Yet when Chad and Dee became a steady couple, no one in Bastrop could imagine either going with anyone else.

  They were the most devoted pair in town. Neighbors of the Benjamins’ on Clock Hill could tell time by the blue Dodge parked in front of Number Nine. When Chad and “Benny” (his name for her) arrived at a dance at the Yellowhammer, folks sighed and felt the evening was finally in full swing. The two of them strolling down Court Street on their way to Porter Drugs for a soda, were as indigenous to Bastrop as the tolling of the tower chimes at the courthouse. They were as bright and alert as a pair of hounds in a duck blind, always amused and off to somewhere, and always seeming to possess some superior secret unavailable to others, who neither loved as much as they did, laughed as often as they did, nor seemed so certainly satisfied within the cocoon of their individual pairs.

  Enchanted, inseparable, inevitable; admired, envied and extolled—Jack Chadwick and Dee Benjamin were the ones. When Chad went off to war, Dee mooned around listening to “Saturday Night I
s The Loneliest Night of The Week” on the phonograph, knitted socks furiously for Bundles for Britain, and only occasionally went to a picture at the Alabama, or a dance at the Yellowhammar with Judson Forsythe, who had long since established a “pals” relationship with her. When Chad returned, Bastrop’s principal hero, holder of the Purple Heart, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal with four oak culsters, and a personal commendation from General Twining, no one was surprised. Special got more special, as the rich got richer; and by the same token, Jack Chadwick and Dee Benjamin took up where they left off, only more so. Judge Benjamin was credited with possessing a shrewd sort of compassionate wisdom when he agreed to allow his daughter to attend the University of Missouri with Chad, on condition they did not marry until after they graduated.

  • • •

  Triumphantly they returned at the end of four years; Jack with a Phi Beta Kappa key dangling from his gold watch chain; Dee with scholastic honors and a cardboard beauty queen’s crown painted silver and bedecked with papier-maché roses. They were both unchanged, seemingly the same enamoured couple Bastrop had always smiled on; matured now, with ambitions to revive the floundering Bastrop Citizen, taking to it the knowledge they had acquired in journalism school.

  Time had failed to raise new idols in their absence. The

  ones remained unchallenged. That they would make a success of their business venture; that Second Methodist Church would resound with the Wedding March’s booming finale “almost any time now”; and that Dee Benjamin would ultimately give birth to any number of wildly healthy, and impossibly beautiful redheaded babies, seemed the only conceivable ending to this idyl.