“Okay, I’ll tell her.”
“I can carry you over there on my way to the club, if she’d like.”
“She’ll want to walk, no matter how hot.”
“You’re right. You are so right—jeez, don’t you just love that old battle-ax?”
No place in town was too far to walk and Alma took me there. She delivered me to the door but wouldn’t come inside and wasn’t begged to do so, either. She sat waiting in the yard under the shade trees on the bench beside the horseshoe pit. Hudkins smelled of old and fresh cigars and decades of breakfast bacon, and I surrendered to the embracing smells about two steps inside the door. It was the merged aromas of lives well led, of warmth and permanence, air flavored further with gun oil and lavender perfume by a hard-nosed old sportsman and Ma-ma, who admired things English, read one or two novels daily, and put artworks on the walls depicting ladies in plumped and layered dresses standing in the garden among spread flowers and cubist hedges, overdressed and bewigged gents in blue coats or red assembled in serious purpose around maps on a table, and hushed views of the Lake District at dawn.
Grandpa Harlan took me to his paneled den and made me slap-box a couple of friendly rounds with him as usual, then look at his newly acquired and mighty handsome maple-stocked twenty-gauge he pulled from the gun cabinet and had me hold and aim. He put me in a headlock and rubbed a soft Dutch rub, pinched two knuckles around my nose and squeezed out a buffalo nickel, gave me a slurp from his can of beer. We went to the dining table when called. Ma-ma had dragged out the heavy black skillet and served pork chops fried with white pan gravy over mashed potatoes, crowder peas and pole beans, blackberry cobbler with a scoop of vanilla for dessert. On the plate it looked to be more than I could eat but I ate it all and almost asked for more. That day it was as ever at Hudkins a slow, wonderful meal, with prickly banter and quick lunging shifts of subject matter, droll jokes, rolled eyes, and laughter. Harlan and Ma-ma took me to the door once the dishes were cleared and said next summer I’d stay with them in my own bedroom and ride the horses all day, every day, any day I wanted.
Maybe a block away from Hudkins, trudging in the smothering heat, Alma, pink-skinned and sweating gushes, asked what Harlan had had to say about her behind her back this time. “He didn’t say anything,” I said. Fingers jumped to my ear and yanked until I could feel it about to rip from my head. “Except you’re batty as a loon!”
“I knew he would.”
“Arthur was his very good friend, his personal pal, and loaned him bank money every spring to stock enough feed at the mill, and did so much for folks around here. He saved the bank when thousands of others went under.”
“That’s no reason to look away if he does wrong.”
“He said it was a horrible jumbo accident, or maybe it wasn’t such an accident, we’ll never know, not all the answers, and don’t waste my summer worrying about old-timey sad stuff.”
“Which one of us is it sounds to be worse off in the head to you now, Alek?”
Early on an amiable and improvised Saturday morning in autumn, I was with Dad at the Woolworth’s located in the business section of Main Street. He was sitting in a booth drinking coffee with a man who’d once been our neighbor two doors down, but who couldn’t control his jealous temper when he drank and he drank buckets on weekends. He poured concrete and made good money during the warm months. His wife was Mom’s best friend and he’d tried to kill her with a switchblade knife in our front yard, got the tip into her one time, high on the arm, before Dad brought him to ground with a baseball bat. Dad whacked him behind the knee, kicked the blade from his hand, then busted him but good when he crawled toward the knife. The man was oh so guilty and admitted it every day and lived now in a rented room above Olmert’s News-stand across Main from where we sat. He wanted to thank Dad for keeping his wife alive and him out of prison, some men wouldn’t have, and he hoped to find a way to win her back and live again with her and the kids, which could never happen if Dad hadn’t whipped him quiet that day. He would always be grateful. They drank a few cups of coffee while I twirled on my stool at the lunch counter and sipped butterscotch shake through a straw.
We left the man at the door and walked away from the businesses and on down Main, which was a street made of ruddled bricks that rose and dipped beneath traveling tires and dated from long ago, after both the Spanish and French quit this land and it became American. Old imported-looking row houses with wood gutters or no gutters lined both sides and were rank and ailing places of begrimed brick, with rough folks leaning in the historical doorways or sitting on ruined chairs at the curb to watch traffic jitter past. The Missouri River flowed sixty yards from the street, and there was a small crotchety tavern on the corner with walls that had settled a touch out of plumb during a dozen floods and was the oldest watering hole on this side of the river. Dad said, “Let’s pop in a minute—I’ve got to take the edge off that joe some.”
We sat at the bar. Sunlight leaked in through rectangular windows at the front and shoved in through the glass half of the back door. Dad had a Stag. Within three sips he knew the barmaid’s name was Rita, and he said his friends called him John Paul, and next time she used his name to ask if he wanted another. She lingered near us, relentlessly drying one washed beer mug with a white cloth, and the four or five moony morning tipplers down the rail observed this eager abandonment and were dashed in their wishful thinking.
On Dad’s second Stag two bums came to the back door and opened it to speak. “Rita? Could we get us those beers?” They were heavily powdered on their faces and hands with black dust. It had rained the night before so they’d slept out back in the giant coalbin by the tracks because the bin had a roof and the piled coal held them above ground high from the swooshing water. They hadn’t yet had a morning rinse at the spigot by the depot.
She said, “Did you pick it all up already?”
“You can look if you want, ’cause we did.”
I slid from my seat at the bar and approached the doorway and said, “Hiya, Bill. Hey, Speed.”
Bill stood dusted black in bright light and looked closely to see me in shadow, then said, “It’s Derby Street.”
Speed said, “Have I ever had any trouble with you?”
“No,” I said.
“Keep it that way, then.”
“He’s the Russky kid from Derby Street.”
“Well, now, the Russkies was our allies in a pincher movement when it was good news for me and everybody crossin’ the Rhine they was, boy, I’ll tell you.”
“He’s the one brings potato chips in a great big can sometimes.”
“That’s my favorite kind.”
Rita carried them two beers apiece and they both grabbed one in each hand and turned away. I knew they’d head to the thicket visible through the door, where in reasonable weather or foul in desperation, bunches of them lived hidden away along narrow trails curling between the tracks and the river. She said, “See you Monday, gentlemen. You’re on your own tomorrow.”
Dad stared steadily at me once I returned to the stool and sat. He lit a smoke without need of a single glance at the pack or the lighter, created a gallop from his fingernails tapping the bar, and his eyes didn’t leave my face. “You know those characters by name?”
“Sure. That’s Bill and Speed.” “
I heard you twice the first time, son. Why do they call ol’ Freddy the Freeloader, there, Speed?”
“ ’Cause when, like, teenagers and stuff drive around here they like to slow down and call bums over to their car and ask for directions or something else to get them close, then squirt shaving cream or throw rotten stuff or dog flops in their faces and laugh and drive away, but Speed can catch them in traffic at the stop signs.”
“He can, huh?”
“Bill says Speed is the fastest bum alive.”
“When he catches them, then what?”
“He’ll whip up on them a little, or at least try to, no matter how many are in the
car, and he gets bloodied and kicked around pretty bad sometimes, too, but they likely won’t be quick to ask him for directions again.”
“I don’t know if I want you knowing those sorts too well, son.”
“Dad, Bill and Speed aren’t the ones who steal our milk—don’t you ever even once in a while wonder about Grandpa Buster?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“Your grandpa Buster was a bum.”
“Just because you’re a bum, it doesn’t mean you’re bad.”
“You’re right, son. It doesn’t. I stand corrected. It absolutely does mean you’re a bum, though.” He tossed a few dollars on the bar and scooped his cigarettes, left the change. Rita said, Come back soon, John Paul, and he winked like he might and led me to the door and out. He squinted in the sunlight, yawned, stretched, yawned. “I’ve got two goddam tests coming this week—Modern Business Theory and Shakespeare, and Shakespeare’s the one I’m worried about.”
“We haven’t got to him yet.”
“That flowery fart has things to say, but he sure doesn’t make it easy to get what he means.” We walked along the old warped street toward our wheels and paused to stare at the river when we were between buildings and could see the water and all the way across to the next thicket. “But when you do get it, it was worth the trouble.” Dad slid into the Mercury wagon on his side and me on mine. It started right up at the turn of the key, which was an only occasional result, and we pulled into traffic to drive six blocks up Derby Street to home. At the first stop sign Dad paused with his foot on the brakes and stared ahead in reverie down the uneven bricks of Main. “I think I like Speed.”
Trains have haunted the nights in West Table since 1883 and disrupt sleep and taunt those awakened. The trains beating past toward the fabled beyond, the sound of each wheel-thump singing, You’re going nowhere, you’re going nowhere, and these wheels are, they are, they are going far from where you lie listening in your smallness and will still lie small at dawn after they are gone from hearing, rolling on singing along twin rails over the next hill and down and up over the next onward to those milk-and-honey environs where motion pictures happen for real and history is made and large dashing lives you won’t lead or even witness are lived.
On the cold night of November 10, 1933, James Dunahew hid inside the Glencross garage, knife drawn and opened, blowing on his hands for warmth, cap pulled low, listening to repetitive mockery from the goddam singing trains. When Arthur Glencross arrived home late he did not park inside the garage but left the car on the driveway and turned toward the front steps. James rushed from the garage back door. Glencross began to woozily turn to the sound of movement and James tripped the man, shoved him onto his back and fell upon him, stabbed his blade high in the body. He stabbed twice and Glencross looked up into his face and said, “Oh.” The man did not resist past the sighed “Oh,” and James shoved his small blade through the heavy overcoat a third time and the blade bent. He had intended to become a murderer this night but recoiled when engaged in the act, repulsed by the feeling in his hands and the forlorn grunts from his own chest and the shock delivered him by Glencross’s abject acceptance of the assault. There was no blood visible on the coat. James never said a word, but withdrew his blade and started to stand, then dropped again and pulled the black leather gloves from the wounded man’s hands. He raised upright and looked at Glencross where he lay, pulled the gloves on and nodded one time, then ran toward the singing rails, boots stomped on the street with loosened soles flapping, breaths gray as ash tossed into the air behind, and was gone from this town forever.
Two days later Alma came unstuck and wailed to pieces in public. Glencross received fourteen stitches at the Bogan Hospital and told Sheriff Bob Jennings that he’d been cut by two pasty-faced men with severe northern accents who’d driven away in a white coupe he’d never seen before, but he told Alma the truth and she broke. She broke and yawped accusations at the town in general and the gentry by surname and released blanket lamentations for all the needlessly dead during one full day and most of a morning. That knife in his hand was not aimed to kill by James alone, and the guiltiest are amongst us without shame at themselves or respect for others every minute, hour, day, world without end, amen. Mrs. Glencross was the concerned citizen who contacted the Work Farm and helped the caretakers track Alma through the cold-snapped flurrying town, trying to guess where mad sorrow runs, until finding her atop Sidney’s grave (for which Mrs. Glencross, guided by unspoken guilt and honest anguish, had secretly paid) facedown with snowflakes resting on her back.
At the Work Farm she fell more deeply into the hole, the blue hole that beckons beneath all our feet when lost for direction or motive for moving at all, the comforting plummet past common concerns and sensate days, down the blue gaping to the easy blue chair that becomes ruinous for its comforts provided in that retreated space, and it takes from years to forever to garner enough replenished zip for the stalled occupant to merely stand from the soft blue avoidance, let alone walk back to the hole and climb toward those known perils of the sunlit world.
For two years she sat facing a yellowish wall in a room without decoration. The room held another woman who stared at the opposite wall and they sat that way without speaking to each other but speaking often, ate when spoon-fed and slept sitting in their chairs. In 1935 Alma developed pneumonia and the doctor gave up but her body didn’t. The Work Farm cook, Miss Daiches, who’d been in service for many years to the Etchieson family on Grace Avenue, and had during that time often relaxed for a spell amongst maids gathered at the Greek’s, began to pull Alma to her feet daily and make her walk and spit heavily into the hallway spittoons. Kate Daiches walked her down the hall and back, and down and back, and after weeks walked her down the stairs and back, and by the next spring she’d walk her outdoors around the two-acre garden maintained by the less damaged residents. Alma spoke in streaks but not sensibly until on a garden walk in June, with dew dampening her feet she stopped and pointed at a wooden stake standing with a vine fallen over slipped string loops and draped limply to ground, and said, “Them ’maters want tyin’ up.”
Within three months of that utterance she was helping Kate Daiches in the kitchen. The residents admired her fairy-tale hair but not in their soup, so Alma began the ritual daybreak brushing and brushing and pinning she would repeat daily for the rest of her life. She did at first help only with those aspects of cooking that did not require the use of a sharp knife—boiled water, washed produce, tore lettuce, pulled the strings from string beans, measured molasses, sugar or meal, mixed and rolled biscuit dough, washed dishes and put eating utensils on the table. She worked grief out through her fingertips and before the next summer began to hum as she worked.
It was Kate Daiches who told Alma in the kitchen as they shelled peas that autopsy X-rays revealed Freddy Poltz, when found blown into the alley, had two bullet wounds behind his left ear. Mr Etchieson, the inquiry cochairman, used to gab plenty during cocktail hour at his home amongst friends and he even had the X-rays in his desk and shared them with esteemed guests who questioned his assertion. Half the country club crowd had seen the proof of murder and remained mum in public. Eventually she’d snuck a look at the stark images and saw that the slugs had been closely spaced and remained obvious and lodged inside Freddy’s skull. Kate had always wished she’d tracked Mae after she’d been so meanly chased out of town and shared this fact, but hadn’t. She did at night search her soul through self-recriminations stated sharply while staring into a mirror, then on the holiest of days raised her chin and asked Mr. Etchieson about Freddy’s murder and had been rebuffed and soon after informed that her services were no longer required. But she thought Alma should know and the town should know and wished she had the courage to spill the beans herself, and she did not, but knew who did when well.
“And you are getting well.”
After being returned to town by July Teague, one of the first things Alma shared with her new
employer was an account of the bullet holes. July already knew of their existence and she and John Teague had been shown the X-rays at a frolicsome summer party on a gin-soaked night that turned both somber and charged with suspicions as they stared and calculated the significance of two bullets behind the ear. Alma and July told each other all they had to tell, or most of it, anyhow, and soon Alma became aware that she’d been hired as an ally in the pursuit of answers as much as she had been for domestic chores. The women got along well on the instant, and Alma settled into a life that though familiar in many details felt fresh on her skin, then went looking for John Paul.
She had been told by John Paul and others that he lived now with the Rooshian, so she asked the exact whereabouts and went there. The old man and the boy and the old woman were at work in the great garden. Alma laid a hand on the top strand of the barbed-wire fence near where they crouched and told John Paul what was most on her mind. “I don’t care ever to hear any more talk that you take money from the hand of that man Glencross.”
“I caddy for him. At the country club. You get paid for that.”