Where You Once Belonged

  He was panting a little now. There was a thin sheen of sweat on his face. While he caught his breath Wanda Jo plugged it in. Then Jack produced a six-pack of beer. He centered the beer ceremoniously on a shelf in the refrigerator, shut the door, looked around at us, then opened the door again. “There,” he said. “Now don’t that scratch your ass? Which one of you boys wants a cold beer?”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “It’s all the comforts of home, Jack.”

  “You goddamn right it is.”

  “And there ain’t no place like home,” Bobby said.

  “No, there ain’t,” Tom Crossland said. “Oh Dorothy, come and fuck me.”

  “What in hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Home,” he said. “The Wizard of Oz.”

  “Well watch your goddamn language,” Jack said. “There’s a woman present.”

  We all looked at Wanda Jo. Wanda Jo looked lovely. She was smiling at Jack as if what he had said was not only chivalrous but clever.

  And that set us off. Snorting and laughing, we pounded Jack on the back and shared the six-pack of beer out among ourselves. And though the beer wasn’t cold yet, it didn’t matter. It was cold in theory. So we began to tell and retell the story, inventing new twists in the string of events and speculating frequently upon the look on Burcham Scott’s old face the next morning when he would walk out onto his back porch. He’d scratch himself and look flat dumbfounded, we said. He’d misplace his worm, Bobby Williams said.

  About two o’clock we finished the beer. We left Jack at the hotel with Wanda Jo and went home. The other boys lived out in the country, but I lived in town on Cedar Street.

  When I arrived at the house that night and mounted the stairs I found that my father was waiting up for me. That is, he was in bed but he was still awake. “Pat,” he said.

  “Yes sir?”

  “Come here.”

  I stopped in the doorway. He was lying in bed beside my mother. She was asleep but my dad had been reading. His glasses were pushed up onto his forehead and the reading lamp shone down onto his face. His face looked very white.

  “Son,” he said. “I’ve just been wondering.”

  “About what?”

  “Son, you ever figure on making anything of yourself?”

  “I hope to.”

  “Do you?” he said. “That’s a comfort. But I’m just curious: when do you plan on starting?”

  But Jack Burdette didn’t have a father anymore to wait up for him, to question him about his intentions—not that old John Senior would ever have done much of that anyway, even if he were still alive—but now the old man wasn’t available even to pretend that he might; and of course Jack had already broken with his mother. So, for him, this episode with Burcham Scott’s Majestic refrigerator became just one more piece in the growing legend. It became just one more feature in that local aura that was already following him around high school and about the town. For we had all begun to expect the unusual of him by that time, while he, for his part, had already learned—if acting on bent and sheer heedless volition can be said to be a form of learning—not to disappoint the expectations of anyone. Least of all his own.

  Thus he finished his senior year at Holt County Union High School in style. He lived upstairs in the Letitia Hotel. He worked every day at the Co-op Elevator among grown men who admired him. He played poker with his friends in a room he had paid for himself. And on Sunday nights he drank cold beer that had been chilled in somebody else’s refrigerator. It was a high-school boy’s dream of a dream.

  Except that there turned out to be one final hitch in this too: while most of the adults in town and even the high-school principal took a tolerant view of Jack’s activities, Arnold Beckham did not. Arnold Beckham was the sheriff. He was one in the long string of Bud Sealy’s elected predecessors and he wasn’t stupid. He understood that this weekly teenage hell-raising might not only endanger his reelection the next time he ran for sheriff but that it might even reduce the amount of his eventual hard-earned pension. He couldn’t tolerate that. Consequently he took measures to protect himself.

  One night about midnight, toward the end of April, Sheriff Beckham climbed up the narrow stairs at the hotel and knocked on the door to Jack’s room. It was a Sunday night and as usual four or five of us were playing cards. When we heard the knock there was sudden quiet in the room. Jack nodded at Wanda Jo Evans, who rose obediently from the bed in the corner. She had been doing Jack’s homework. Now, still carrying a textbook and one of the cheap tablets under her arm, she crossed to the door and opened it slightly.

  “Wanda Jo,” Arnold said. “You tell that boyfriend of yours to come out here.”

  Wanda Jo shut the door.

  “Now what?” one of us whispered. “Jesus, he’s going to tell my folks.”

  “Stop your crying,” Jack said. “I’ll handle this.”

  He stood up from the wooden box in the center of the room and stepped out into the hallway. We could see Arnold through the open door.

  “Sheriff,” Jack said. “What can I do for you?”

  Arnold Beckham was a short man with a wiry ring of black hair above his ears. He looked Jack up and down. Then he began to speak. It was as if, on his way over, he had prepared a speech.

  “Now look,” he said. “I know what’s going on in there and I know who’s in there with you. And I don’t care a damn what you do or who you do it with. But by god, boy, the first time somebody calls me up in the middle of the night complaining how his kid ain’t home in bed yet, or somebody else says there’s empty beer bottles scattered all over their petunia patch—well by god, boy, I’ll close you down so fast you won’t have time to kiss it good-bye or even hide your beer. You understand me?”

  “On what charge?” Jack said.

  “You ain’t listening,” Arnold Beckham said. Then he did something none of us expected. He reached up and grabbed Jack’s shirt at the throat and pulled Jack’s big face down toward his own. “I don’t need no charge,” he said. “On whatever comes to mind.”

  “Let go. We’ll keep it quiet. You don’t have to worry.”

  “No, now,” Arnold said. He twisted the shirt tighter in his fist. “You still ain’t listening. Because I’m not going to worry. See? I’m not the one that’s going to worry.”

  “All right. We’ll keep it down. Now let go. You’re messing my shirt up.”

  “Am I? Well tough titty.”

  Then Sheriff Beckham stared into Jack’s eyes. Their faces were only inches apart. But finally he released him.

  “So is that all you wanted?” Jack said.

  “No, that is not all I wanted,” Arnold Beckham said. “I’d like a fishing cabin in the mountains and a young girl waiting on me. And just now I wisht I was in bed. But that’ll do for starters. Now you mind what I said.”

  He turned then and we could hear him walking back down the narrow hallway. But he stopped before he reached the stairs. “And you tell that little girl of yours to go home now. I seen her mom leaving the hospital already.” Then he went on.

  Jack reentered the room and closed the door. He sat down at the wooden box again. We were all watching him, looking for proof that something had registered. But it hadn’t. All Jack said was: “Wanda Jo. You heard what Arnold said. Your old lady’s got off her shift at the hospital. So you better leave that homework till tomorrow.” Then he smoothed his shirt over his chest once more. And gathering up his cards, he said: “Now who dealt this goddamn mess?”

  So the point of all that was wasted on Jack. He had had his first brief taste of law and authority. He had been warned officially. But the warning hadn’t meant much to him. It had merely meant that he had to be more careful, a little more circumspect. It never occurred to him that he might have to alter in any real way whatever he wanted to do. I suppose to him it was like a complicated play in football—a double reverse, say, with a fake dive into the middle, by which you could still score, only it would take a little more practi
ce and finesse to do it. It was merely a lesson in subtlety, a brief instruction in the need for secrecy.

  And so at the end of May he graduated from high school. We all did: Wanda Jo Evans and Bobby Williams and Tom Crossland and the rest of us.

  Jack was almost comical in his cap and gown. The red mortarboard was perched like a pinwheel at the back of his head and the crimson gown he wore was at least three sizes too small for him; it was stretched tight across his shoulders and the hem of it stopped at his knees. He looked a joke, a travesty, like some form of Paul Bunyan who had been gotten up for a kindergartener’s promotion or a pigmies’ ball. But when his name was called he rose dutifully, even proudly, from his seat in the auditorium. Then he stomped up across the stage in his cowboy boots and accepted the diploma from the president of the school board as if the diploma were something he actually valued.

  In the evening we got drunk with one another for the last time. Afterward we went our separate ways. Bobby Williams and Tom Crossland went to work for their fathers, farming. Wanda Jo Evans stayed in Holt, where she was employed at the phone company as a secretary. And Jack and I went off to college, to study at the university in Boulder. I had in mind to study journalism, in the attempt to begin making something of myself as my father had suggested. And what Jack had in mind was to play football. He had an athletic scholarship, a full ride. The coaches at the university were willing to ignore the Ds on his transcript if he was willing to get his nose dirty. And of course he was.

  So we had that in common that summer after graduation: we were both going to college at Boulder. It served as another bond between us. Whenever we met during the summer we talked about college and explained to one another just what kind of splash we intended to make. When we got there, though, it didn’t turn out quite the way we intended: one of us sank and the other barely made a ripple. Boulder was a deeper pond than a couple of boys from Holt County had anticipated.

  • 4 •

  But it was all right in the beginning. He was a big rawboned kid and when he showed up for football practice in the middle of August he was sufficiently violent to please the coaches. Still it must have been obvious that he wasn’t a college-level running back. He was big but he was too slow. So in the second or third week of practice the coaches moved him into the line. That way he could use his strength and aggressiveness and not have to think too much. But he missed the glory. In high school he had carried the ball himself and had had his name featured prominently in the local papers. Now he was a defensive tackle and while he was still pretty good, everyone in college was good; so he wasn’t singled out for special attention.

  Then school started. I had arrived by that time myself. I had moved into the dorm with another freshman, a scrawny red-haired kid from Chicago named Stewart Fliegelman. I had never met anyone like Fliegelman before. As soon as I’d unpacked my bags he announced that he had come out West as a missionary, to spread the gospel according to Marx. He was full of that kind of youthful enthusiasm. But I enjoyed him a great deal, and the truth is I still miss him. He’s a lawyer now in Oak Park, working on a second marriage with two sets of kids to provide for, but about twice a year I call him up and we talk on the phone.

  As a roommate Fliegelman was lively, opinionated, verbal, well-read, studious, disorganized, bighearted and politically radical. He used to say that my beliefs were quaint, that whatever charm I had was the direct result of my universal ignorance. Whenever he said such things I told him to go to hell. I told him that coming from Chicago he wouldn’t know the difference between bullshit and chocolate pie even if he stepped in it. Then he would jump me and we’d wrestle in the room. By the end of that first semester we were close friends and during the four years that I knew him in Boulder I learned as much from him as I did from anyone else in the world. I’d never tell him that, though. He’d say that I was getting sloppy again. He’d say: “Arbuckle, for once in your life try not to confuse opinion with facts. You’re supposed to be a journalist, for Chrissakes.”

  And so I am. Or at least I try to be. And the IRS, for their part, think so too: they continue to accept my claim to be a newspaperman without ever demanding to see the actual product. Besides, I keep a framed diploma hanging on the wall above my desk to further substantiate my claim. The diploma’s been there for more than twenty years. It’s dust-coated and spider-webbed now and the paint behind it is darker than the rest. Because, in the end, after four years of college, I came home again. It was my father’s idea; he wanted me to help run the paper and eventually to take it over. At the time it sounded like a good thing to do. And so I’ve been here ever since, for twenty years and more, trying once a week to get out a small-town newspaper for the edification and entertainment of the local populace, if not for the profit and remuneration of its editor and publisher: the Holt Mercury.

  But that was later. In the fall of 1960 I was in college. And so was Jack Burdette. For a while yet.

  After I’d arrived in Boulder and moved into the dorm I’d still see him occasionally. He’d be on campus with some of the others, big muscular kids wearing athletic tee shirts, filling up the sidewalk coming toward you or occupying a table with some of those good-looking long-legged sorority girls, all of them loud and joking, in the University Memorial Center. But I didn’t see him very often and we didn’t have much to do with one another then.

  He was living in Baker, one of the other dormitories. It was like all of the buildings at the university, constructed of flagstone and brick and red tile. For it was a pretty campus, one of the most beautiful in all of this Rocky Mountain region, with the abrupt sides of the Flatirons standing up at the start of the mountains just above town, and on the campus itself the big trees and the old evergreens and all the red-tiled buildings, with still sufficient space between them so that you didn’t feel stifled or closed in by the mass of stone or the press of trees. It was a good place for someone like me to be. Boulder—and living with Fliegelman—opened my eyes.

  But none of that was true for Jack. He wasn’t there long enough. Not that he would have allowed his vision to have been changed appreciably even if he had been. But he didn’t get the chance. Within a month after school started he got into trouble. The trouble had to do with a radio.

  I first heard about it—or knew about it, that is—when I saw the article in the Colorado Daily. They ran it in a little box on the second page. The article said that another freshman named Curtis Harris had brought charges against Jack and that the student judiciary would convene on Friday to hear the case. The article appeared on Tuesday morning. After reading it I went over to Baker to see if I could find Jack in his dorm room. His roommate, another football player, said he didn’t know where Jack was; he was probably watching TV.

  “But doesn’t he have classes?” I said. “It’s the middle of the morning.”

  “What classes?” he said. “Jack doesn’t go to classes.”

  “You mean today?”

  “I mean any day. He hasn’t been to a class in three weeks. He’s going to get in trouble.”

  “He’s already in trouble,” I said.

  The guy studied me for a moment. “What’s that to you? You know him, or something?”

  “I know him,” I said. “And they should have given Wanda Jo Evans a scholarship too if they expected Jack to go to class.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “You wouldn’t know her.”

  “I know some girls.”

  “But you wouldn’t know her. Anyway where’s this TV Jack might be watching?”

  “Downstairs. Only I don’t know if he’s even there. I’m not his keeper.”

  “I’ll go see if I can find him,” I said.

  I went back downstairs.

  After looking around for a few minutes I found Jack in one of the rooms next to the dormitory lounge. The door was shut. He was the only person in the room and he was lying on a sofa in his blue jeans and gray tee shirt. He was watching a game show on the black-and-white television
and his feet were sticking out over the end of the sofa. When I sat down near him he looked over at me and then turned back to the TV.

  “Jack,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  “I can’t complain.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “But what do you think will happen?”

  “About what?”

  “About this radio you took.”

  “How’d you hear about that? You been talking to somebody?”

  “It was in the student paper this morning. I came over to see what you’re going to do about it.”

  “What the hell is there to do about it?”

  “Well. The paper said somebody named Curtis Harris filed charges against you. That you stole his radio.”

  “That’s a lie. Hell, he wasn’t using it so I just borrowed it for a while. And then I didn’t give it back to him yet.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “Not now.”

  “How come?”

  “Because. I don’t have it no more. The police have it. They took it for evidence.”

  “All right, then. But what do you think’s going to happen?”

  “I already told you: I don’t know. Besides, what difference does it make?”

  “They might kick you out of school. That’s one thing.”

  “I’m sick of school.”

  “How do you know that? I mean, Jesus, you haven’t even been to classes yet.”

  “I’ve been to enough. It’s just talk.”

  I continued to look at him. There were dark bruises on his arms from practicing football and there was a scab on his nose between his eyes. Looking at him, he seemed exactly like a kid who’d fallen off a bicycle, like a great big kid who was now consoling himself by watching television from the living room couch.