Taft

  Taft walks between the stacks of lumber. There are floodlights outside that make it light as day in some areas. Then you turn a corner and it's dark again. Part of Taft's job is just to make himself seen, let anyone who may be driving by know that they spent the money to hire a night watchman. He whistles when he can think of a song he feels like hearing. He isn't looking for anybody, he's just trying to stay awake. He wonders what things are coming to when you need to hire somebody to guard wood. Nobody's going to steal anything, he tells himself. No one is coming.

  To keep himself occupied he thinks about his family. He thinks about what kind of husband Fay will have. She has too many boyfriends now. Everybody likes Fay. He's hoping she waits at least until she's twenty. Girls get married too young. They fall in love and that's that. They don't see all this time they've got ahead of them. He thinks about Carl and his wrestling. He sees him winning the state championship next year, going on to the nationals. He is pinning boys from Texas and California, the referee circling them and counting. He wonders if Carl could get a wrestling scholarship and go to Iowa and work with Dan Gable. Taft has no idea what kind of grades a boy would have to have to get a wrestling scholarship. Then he remembers Carl's deer, how they hung it up for two weeks to age in the yard from the pole that held the clothesline because it was cold enough. Fay acted miserable about it the whole time. She'd only go in and out the front door and demanded they keep the curtains drawn in the back of the house so she wouldn't have to look at it. It costs money to shoot a deer. The license costs, the rifles, the ammunition, but when your freezer is full up with venison you can't help feeling like a rich man. Taft boned the whole thing, showing Carl how to cut around the bone. Then his wife came out with freezer bags and helped to cut the meat into steaks. She wrapped the roasts and ribs. She cooked the tenderloin for dinner that night.

  Taft thinks about his wife the least because in a way she stays outside his thinking. She is a fact, as much as his own life is a fact. The things she does that used to annoy him he hardly ever notices now. The things she does that thrill him he has come to expect. They are together. They have been together since they married, the first Sunday after their high school graduation. They were together before that. It is so true that it's barely worth mentioning.

  When Taft is too tired to think about his family he thinks about lumber. It is everywhere. Plywood sheets and two-by-fours. Four-by-sixes and pressboard. Stacks of fir and knotty pine in a separate section near the office. Boxes of trim and quarter-inch dowels. Whenever he lets his mind wander, it goes to the wood. This is how he decides to build the deck.

  When Taft gets home it's still dark. He doesn't know if he should eat something or go right to bed. Everything in the house is quiet. He wonders if someone were to break in while he was gone if anyone would even hear it. Taft takes his clothes off in the kitchen. He puts his shoes and socks underneath the chair and lays his pants and shirt on top. He walks down the hallway, past Carl's room and Fay's. The carpet makes everything quiet. He won it for his wife in a production contest that went on for six months. The fastest man on the line. It's a thick shag, an inch of solid blue pile sitting on a quarter-inch padding of quilted foam. Top of the line, plenty of wool, he should know.

  "Levon?" his wife says. "You home?"

  "Shh. Go back to sleep."

  She raises up on one elbow. "Was your night okay?"

  "Sleep," he says quietly. He can't see her. He follows her voice into bed.

  "I'm up," she whispers.

  "It was fine. Quiet. Nothing happened."

  "I always worry about you down there by yourself."

  "Don't worry."

  "You're going to have to talk to Fay," she says as he slides into bed beside her. "She was out until one. Nothing I say makes any difference to that girl. She thinks when you work nights the rules don't apply."

  "I'll talk to her."

  "Are you hungry?"

  "Hm?"

  "Let me fix you some eggs," she says, and reaches down to the foot of the bed for her robe. The second she moves away from him, he wants her back, wants her more than he wants the eggs. He wraps an arm around her waist and holds her there next to him.

  "Stay put," he says.

  "Let me make you something," she says. "I don't mind. I'm going to be getting up soon anyway." When she starts to pull away again he puts his other arm around her and smells her hair. He kisses her neck at the top of her nightgown. Then she understands what he's talking about, and she rolls over to face him.

  The next morning Taft puts the foundation down for the deck.

  Even coming in at five A.M., he still wakes up before Carl. The sleeping a child can do at that age is almost inconceivable. Fay is up by ten. She brings Taft a cup of coffee that her mother has sent her out with.

  "Morning, Daddy."

  "Heard you stayed out late last night," Taft says.

  It catches her off her guard. Fay looks at her feet. She makes a line in the dirt with her toe. "I didn't know what time it was," she says.

  "You know what time you're supposed to be in, don't you?"

  "Yessir."

  "I'm telling you, Fay, you have to mind your mother. Just because I'm out for the night doesn't give you the license to go living it up and making her worry. Do you understand me?"

  "Yessir."

  "We can make that curfew earlier if you want to, if you think that would make it easier for you to remember when to come home."

  "Dad," she says.

  "Okay, that's enough then. You'll remember from now on. Don't make things hard on her, Fay. There's no call for it. Hand me that can of nails over there."

  Fay picks up the can full of tenpenny nails and brings them to her father. "Go see if you can't raise your brother from the dead," he tells her.

  She goes into the house, looking relieved about the whole thing. Taft wonders if he didn't let her off too easy. Fay's problem, as he sees it, is that she likes men over women. She likes her father and her brother. She likes the boys in school. But she never has special girlfriends. She has girlfriends, but they don't count with her the way boys do. Taft knows women who can't go anywhere unless they're in a whole pack of other women. The time they spend with men only seems to be for collecting stories that they can go back and tell to their girlfriends later on. But that's not Fay. Fay thinks women are boring, silly. Fay never minds her mother. Sometimes, Taft even thinks Fay looks down on her some. All she's interested in is what the boys are doing. That kind of business only gets girls into trouble.

  A half hour later Carl appears, his hair working in several directions. He's had his cereal already. Carl doesn't do anything before he eats in the morning. "Thought we were going to work on this deck," Taft says.

  "I slept too long," Carl says.

  "I want to carry some of the lumber over from the garage. You up for that?"

  Carl nods and yawns. He seems so exhausted by his own sleep that it makes Taft tired just looking at him.

  It's a fine day to be working outside. One of those great April days when everything is up and blooming and the weather isn't hot or cold. The bank of iris bulbs Taft put out for his wife last September came up so thick you would have thought they'd been there twenty years. Work is easier on days like this. The two of them start bringing the two-by-fours out of the garage. Taft could have done it himself, but he thinks it's important that the boy helps. If Carl is in on every step then when it's all over he can take some pride in the deck, know that he built it too. They carry five boards each trip, laying them in stacks on a sheet of plastic drop cloth Taft has put next to the house. Carl is going faster. That's what Taft is thinking. So much younger and faster than me. He wonders if Carl is showing off. Taft is going slower and slower. There is a good April breeze that blows over the smell of the iris and Taft is chilled from his sweat. Something, the sweat or the smell of the flowers, is making him sick. The boards aren't so heavy, but they are getting heavier. He tries to catch his breath and can't and can'
t until he has to stop. There's a pain in his left arm so sudden and sickening that he looks down to see if he hasn't run something through it. The pain shoots all the way up into his jaw. There is a straight line of pain from his fingertips to his molars. A pressure comes from someplace outside him and begins to crush him as he stands there. Everything starts to drop away. The boards slip one at a time and hit against each other with a terrible crashing sound and then he is falling, down on his knees. He is sitting down next to the boards, holding the bad arm in the good, trying to breathe.

  "Dad," Carl says. His voice is loud. He runs and sits beside him. Taft is dead white. Carl puts his hands on his shoulders.

  Then just the way it came, everything starts to move backwards. The pain recedes. He inhales slowly, his chest making small, cautious movements in the face of air. "I'm fine," Taft says.

  "Stay there," Carl says. "I'm going to get Mom."

  Taft takes his son's hand. "Sit," he says, "I'm fine." He looks back over at the house. There's nobody at the window. No one saw. "I didn't get enough sleep last night," he says. "I should be more like you."

  He is still sitting on his knees. Still holding the bad arm, though now it is only a dull ache. "I think you're sick," Carl says.

  Taft loves him. At that moment he loves his son more than he has ever loved anything in his life. Carl is sitting beside him and Taft puts his hand on his son's leg, thinks, I made this.

  "Listen," Taft says. "Don't tell about this. Don't tell Fay or your mother. Once they start worrying it won't ever end and all I did was drop some wood. I was up till five this morning. I have a right to be tired."

  "You sure?"

  Taft nods, smiles. They stand up together. It would have been hard to tell from a distance who was pulling up who. "You put this lumber back?"

  "No problem."

  "I think I'll go in and take a nap." The nausea is still there. It would be good to lie down. "By this afternoon we should be right back at it."

  Taft starts to go towards the house and Carl stays right with him. "Go get the wood," Taft says.

  "I will in a minute," Carl says. Carl walks Taft all the way back to the bedroom and turns down the bed and undoes his shoes. Carl pulls the curtains closed until the room is dark again. "Get some rest," he says, and then he kisses him.

  I don't know how long I stayed in my office, an hour or two, but when I came down to the bar Carl had taken up his rightful spot. There was somebody I didn't know sitting at his table and they were talking. Carl nodded at me when I walked by.

  "Your brother's getting popular," I said to Fay.

  "Thank God," she said. "He hadn't made any friends in Memphis till he started coming over here. Carl's a social kid at heart. He likes being around people."

  Wallace put three bottles of beer, two bourbons and a gin and tonic out on the bar and Fay loaded them onto her tray. "See you," she said, lifting it all up with one hand. She had good balance.

  "You watch that brother's sociability," Wallace said to me once she was gone.

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "It doesn't mean anything other than you should be keeping an eye on him." Arlene came to the bar and gave Wallace a long order and he started to work again. Wallace was a young man. Figuring when I'd seen him play ball, I put him at about twenty-three or -four now. It was his size, maybe, that made everything he said seem so credible, either that or his voice. Wallace's voice was quiet and low and he didn't talk fast. You had to almost lean in to hear him. It made you pay attention to what he said.

  I looked over and saw that whoever Carl had been talking to had left his table and left the bar. I picked up my drink and went over to see him myself.

  "How you doing there, Carl?"

  "Hey," he said, pulling out a chair for me. "I'd wanted to talk to you before. Some guy was lonely, you know, just parked himself here."

  I sat down. Carl looked a whole lot better than he usually did. His eyes were clear and he wasn't sweating. Drugs made Carl sweat, I'd seen it before. As far as I could tell, he was all there.

  "I wanted to tell you I felt bad about last night," Carl said. "I didn't mean to be such a jerk. I was just mad at myself was all. When you and Fay found me down here the other night—" He stopped for a minute and opened up his hands. There wasn't a good way for him to say it. "I was doing things I shouldn't have been doing. I was messed up. I was sorry you even knew about it. I mean, I guess it was a good thing you did. If you hadn't picked me up somebody else would have."

  It had a bad sound the way he said it, somebody else. "That problem you were having that night, how much of a problem is it?"

  "No problem," Carl said, taking a sip of his Coke. "Everything's under control now."

  "That's good," I said. I didn't believe him, but there was really no point in telling him so. A boy in Carl's place has to figure out some hard things. You can tell them what they should do until you don't have any breath left, but the thing that stops them, the thing that scares them bad enough to stop, is something they have to come to by themselves.

  "Can I buy you a drink or anything?" Carl said. "I'd like to do something and I can't think of what."

  "I don't pay for my drinks," I said. "You don't have to do anything for me. You just worry about taking care of yourself. That's what's going to be best for everybody."

  "Best for Fay," Carl said, looking over at his sister carrying beers to a table. "She's had a bad time. I shouldn't be worrying her so much."

  We got everybody out by eleven-thirty. Rose was gone after the kitchen closed at ten. Carl and Fay walked out with Arlene. It was just me and Wallace there when I opened up the cash register.

  "We'll start on Sunday," I said, lifting the whole thing out. I liked to count the money upstairs, where I wasn't in front of the windows.

  "You think it's a good idea, trusting me with all that?" Wallace said.

  "I don't think there'll be any problems."

  I was just heading back when the door opened and Fay and Carl came in. "I left my jacket," Fay said. "It was so nice I just walked right out and forgot it."

  Wallace looked under the bar and came up with Fay's puffy jacket. "Thanks," she said.

  "I'll come out with you," Wallace said. "Lock the door behind me."

  I put the register tray down on the bar and followed the three of them to the door. Carl was just standing there quietly, waiting on his sister.

  "Night," Fay said.

  When I got up to the office I started thinking about calling Marion. It was late, but she worked all sorts of crazy shifts. There was always the chance I was going to wake her up no matter what time it was.

  "Marion," I said. "It's me. Were you sleeping?"

  "I wish I was," she said. "I just got in a little while ago. Franklin's asleep."

  "I figured that. I was calling to talk to you."

  She yawned. "Did you get the pictures I sent?"

  "No, but I saw them. I was over at your parents' house for dinner."

  "I never will understand why they like you so much all of the sudden," she said, but she said it nice enough. I was glad I'd called. I'd caught her in a good mood.

  "They were telling me that I should call you. They said you're having all sorts of problems down there."

  "They shouldn't be talking about me."

  "You having problems?"

  She was quiet for a minute. "It hasn't been so good lately. I don't know, Franklin getting stitches and all, that really threw me. Now I'm worrying about everything."

  I hadn't figured her parents might be right about her not being happy. All Marion ever told me was that the world had been going her way since she hit Miami. "So do you want to come home?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Come back to Memphis," I said. "What do you think I mean?"

  "Nothing," she said. She was quiet again. "I was thinking we might drive up for Franklin's spring break next week. I haven't taken any time off since I've been here. Franklin misses you," she said.
"I think it might do him good to see you for a while."

  I sat up in my chair. "Come home then," I said. Her just saying that made me miss him so strongly it felt like it was the day they left.

  "Maybe we will," she said.

  "You know Ruth's home." Franklin liked Ruth, even if Marion didn't get on with her so well.

  "I know. She lost her job or something. She doesn't really say what happened. Seems like whenever things get bad the whole world packs up and goes back to Memphis."

  "It wouldn't be like that for you. You have a good job. You could get back on at Baptist in a minute." I was letting my mind run away with me. Franklin would come back. I could take care of him. He could come and live with me for a while. I'd see that I got a lawyer, that it was legal that I was his father and he was mine. Nothing like this could ever happen again. "Marion," I said.

  "What?"

  "We've known each other a long time. A long time. If you came back we could manage fine, better than we used to. We wouldn't have to be fighting about things. We'd take care of Franklin. You don't have to worry that I'm going to make any sort of trouble for you. If I'm the reason you're thinking about not coming back, I'm just telling you, don't worry about it."

  "No," she said. "You're not keeping me away."

  By the time we got off the phone she had all but said that she was going to bring Franklin up for his vacation. That was promise enough for me. If they were happy back here for a week, then why not a month, or a year? Why not move back altogether? I had a son. I was the one to look after him. I was starting to think that the world was a dangerous place for boys.