Memorial Day

by Paul Scott Malone

  He became involved in the union movement, and he got involved in other "shady outfits," as Dalrymple's father put it, and then one day he set out for parts unknown. There was one story that he had been married for a while but Blackie never confirmed this. Other stories had him riding the rails as a hobo, shipping out to sea, working as a lumberjack in the Northwest, all those romantic myths that follow a man such as Blackie. And Blackie never did anything to dispel them. He would show up from time to time during the '40s and '50s, always needing money, always a little more busted up, always a little rowdier and more outspoken and then after hanging around Houston for a few months, maybe a year, he'd disappear again. Blackie would never say where or why.

  Then sometime in the early '60s Blackie showed up and stayed, working odd jobs, doing anything to keep himself going. He would arrive for Sunday lunch every few weeks, always wearing his trademark jeans and white sport shirt, and when he sat down at his sister-in-law's prim dining room table, it was as if a bulldozer had come to a grumbling halt in a dainty rose garden. He always dominated such affairs with tales of his adventures, to the great discomfort of Dalrymple's parents, who tolerated him because he was family but considered him an iffy-at-best influence on their three tender children, who generally ignored his stories but found him high excitement nonetheless. After lunch he'd sing songs for the kids, strumming his old guitar inexpertly, or he'd roughhouse with the boys or he'd lend advice as Dalrymple's father finished some project in the garage. And he always helped Dalrymple's mother with the washing of the dishes. Those Sundays usually ended with Blackie snoring away in a restless nap on the den couch and waking up so stiff that he'd have to be helped to his feet by Dalrymple's mother.

  Blackie's body was a wreck by then and he soon reached the point where he could barely walk under his own power. Dalrymple's father had been paying most of his bills for several years, though he still earned a little doing handyman work around the seedy apartments he lived in. These "loans" were an awful source of friction among them and his father seldom spoke of Blackie without resentment in his voice. Blackie was rarely invited to the house anymore. Dalrymple had often thought his family wished Blackie would just go away again so they could quit worrying about him and being embarrassed by him. After all, he was a card-carrying Democrat, a union man, a troublemaker.

  7

  Dalrymple heard life again on the line. Blackie was sniffling and clearing his throat and muttering about something. Then Dalrymple realized he was speaking to someone else; someone was with him. He heard a woman's voice telling Blackie to take his medicine, and then Blackie snapped at her that he had already taken that medicine and would she leave him alone about it.

  She said, "Oh you, what am I gonna do with you."

  "Hush now . . . Uh, Clydie, you there?"

  "I'm here. Is somebody with you, Uncle Blackie?"

  "Well sort of. Yeah. There is. She's a friend of mine. Takes care of me. We go way back."

  A hefty feminine voice wailed faintly, "Do we ever!"

  "That's good," Dalrymple said and he felt himself smiling.

  "Don't tell your folks," Blackie said and the woman giggled.

  "No I won't. Of course not." Then: "Why not?"

  "Just because, smart ass. You know why. You know how they feel about love." He said the word in something resembling a Cajun accent and with a certain inflection as if it were a foreign concept and infinitely humorous. "In fact you know it better'n I do, you and Angie." Blackie laughed his cynical chuckle. "They believe big time in marriage, of course, but they don't necessarily think much of love, especially the carnal kind."

  The woman asked in the background: "The what kind?"

  "Hush," said Blackie. Then: "She's always butting in."

  "What's her name?" asked Dalrymple.

  "Her name? Her name?"

  Dalrymple heard the feminine giggle again.

  "You're gonna like this," Blackie said. "Her name, son, is Georgia T. Ombaugh. She goes by Georgia T. but I myself prefer GTO. And for an old gal her engine still purrs just fine."

  "That's quite a name."

  "That ain't a name, boy, that's what you call a symbol."

  They all laughed.

  "Just how old is she?"

  "Old enough," said Blackie. "She sure ain't no jail bait. Say maybe you can come by and meet her sometime."

  "I'd like to."

  "Well do, anytime."

  "I will."

  "Good. I kind of miss your ugly mug, you little bastard."

  For a moment then they were silent, feeling the strange bond again that made of them partners in the business of living and family and staying alive. It made Dalrymple feel better about his uncle's plight knowing he had someone. Dalrymple often worried about Blackie's living alone. He wished he were there now, held close in the warmth of their apparent friendship.

  "Anyway. As I was telling you: 'Don't go.' And I mean it. This Vietnam thing, like all wars, son, is just a capitalist plot to gain new markets and they couldn't give a good goddamn about you or me or anybody like us. Don't fight their war, son."

  "How am I supposed to get out of it?"

  "There're ways."

  "What ways?"

  "You dumb shit. You should get out more. Canada! Mexico! Try Mexico, and I'll go with you. Hell, son! Fiji for all I know."

  "But how?"

  "I'm not gonna get into it now and not on the telephone in any case. You know how J. Edgar likes to spy on us all. But when the time comes, we'll talk. When are you supposed to go anyway?"

  "Don't know."

  "Well don't do anything till you've talked to me."

  Blackie went into another coughing fit, and Dalrymple could hear Georgia T. fussing over him.

  "Listen, Blackie," Dalrymple said. "I better go. Got to get to work and it sounds like you better take care of that cough."

  There was a shuffling of the receiver on the other end, and then the woman came on the line.

  "High, honey, it's me, Georgia T., pleased to meet you . . . well, sort of meet you. Would you tell your uncle he ought to go to the hospital, or at least a doctor. He can't get rid of this cough and it's starting to scare me."

  The receiver changed hands again, and Blackie said, "To hell with that, I'm fine, just hay fever or something."

  "Maybe you ought to listen to her, Blackie."

  "And just who's gonna pay for it? Your Old Man?"

  "I'll pay for it," Georgia T. said from far away.

  "Hush," said Blackie.

  "Then I'll pay for it," said Dalrymple.

  "Get real, kid. You keep your money. You're gonna need it for passage on the Underground Railroad."

  "The what?"

  Blackie laughed. "Dumber 'n dog shit, this one. You little bastard. Listen. We'll talk. You come see me. Okay?"

  There was a long silence before Blackie said softly, "Look, Clydie, try not to worry. You're a young man, have some fun for Christ's sake. Get out. Meet some women. Hell fuck some women. Don't sit around and mope over this."

  "No I won't."

  "You okay, son?"

  There was another long silence. Dalrymple longed again to be with Blackie and Georgia T. there in Blackie's apartment with its shabby curtains and its used furniture from the Goodwill store and its smell of neglect and tobacco and night sweats. He longed to hide in the shelter of his uncle's hard experience and protective knowledge. He felt hot tears coming into his eyes but couldn't have said where they had come from or why. He almost said I love you, Blackie but his uncle would not have understood this and he would have teased him without mercy. No that's not it: He would understand, but he would brush past it with hard teasing nonetheless; this was the way of the men in the Dalrymple clan.

  "Listen, Blackie, I . . . I better go," said Dalrymple in a voice that even he could tell was less than convincing.

  "Keeping the lowlife's time are you," Blackie said in his blustery tone. He knew, he did understand, there was no point in saying it out loud.
"Well everybody's got to eat, I guess. But you listen to me: don't you do anything till you've seen me and we've talked. You hear me, you little bastard?"

  "I hear you."

  "All right then. Take care of your old self.

  "I will . . . you old bastard."

  "Hah!" snorted Blackie. "That's the way."

  He chuckled and coughed for a moment, huffed out, "All right then," and the line went dead.

  "Blackie?"

  Nothing. That's how he always ended a conversation: it just stopped. Dalrymple stood there a moment thinking about his uncle and what he had said. He wanted to listen to his uncle, he hoped he had an answer but there was something about Blackie that always frightened Dalrymple. He felt his uncle wanted him to do things he wasn't sure he could do. In everything between them there was a sense of challenge, the challenge to prove himself masculine in all the rougher meanings of that word. Blackie was the kind of man who could get you into big trouble. Still, speaking to Blackie had lifted his spirits, and he went into the bathroom whistling a lighthearted tune.

  It felt especially good to shower and shave that morning. He thought he had finally washed off what had happened to him the day before. He dressed casually, in comfortable loafers and old slacks and an old sport coat. He turned off each of the three air conditioners in the house and then locked up.

  His car, the Camaro, was parked at the curb. He started it and just listened for a moment as he lit up his first cigarette for the drive to the store. He enjoyed the deep growl of the Camaro's V-8, the whooshing intake of its four-barrel carburetor, the faint clatter of all those valves. He kept it immaculate, inside and out, because he liked driving a clean car and he liked to show it off. Besides the child support he paid to Angie each month, the car was his primary obligation in life. The payments were more than he could afford, but he felt it was important to have something in life, something that was truly yours, something worth working for. He would miss his car.

  It was time to go. He put the car in gear, popped the clutch and laid rubber for twenty yards as he sped down the street. He'd probably hear about that later (the neighbors would report), but he grinned all the way to the freeway.

  8

  That day Dalrymple floated. A bit lightheaded, he was like a bubble of foam above the shocking ocean breakers of crude living.

  The morning passed with blessed speed. It was busy at the store. About nine o'clock the company truck arrived and stock boys started rolling canvas hampers through the warehouse and onto the floor to be unloaded. They banged through the big brown doors at the back and rumbled like bumper cars all over the showroom. Then a truck from Old Colonial showed up with two sets of new living room furniture and all the salesmen gathered to comment. "Ugly as my first wife," said one of the old guys, and they all laughed, throwing out other cruel but accurate observations. Huge and overstuffed, the sofa was a cheap boxcar covered in the tackiest possible floral print, dull brown on dull beige, and no one could figure out what kind of flowers were being depicted. Dalrymple said nothing; he wasn't sure they would have even listened. His colleagues seemed to be trying to ignore him, or avoid him, as if he were a ghost now or a dying man.

  Which was fine with him; they meant nothing to him, and he would not miss them at all.

  While all of this was going on Dalrymple quietly sold a doubledoor refrigerator, a console television-stereo combination and a set of top-of-the-line Super Forty tires, the last to a man with a Camaro similar to his own. In just a few hours, as he figured it, he had made enough commission to pay half of his child support for the month a good day and it had all just walked in the door looking for him. He'd had to do nothing but write up the sales. So he decided to take it easy for the rest of the day, just get through until five o'clock.

  When he came back from lunch Jane was in the store. He sensed her presence before he even saw her across the showroom talking to McCleary back near the bedroom furniture. McCleary was smiling, leering ludicrously, joking with her. All the men, even good old McCleary, ogled her and tried to get close. Dalrymple figured he was giving her instructions on what to do for the day, a two-minute task that he could always stretch into fifteen.

  Gee-god! she looked good, especially from a distance. Her hair was thick, pale like winter oak leaves and pulled back from her face, which had no sharp angles, no disturbing lines, though the general appearance of that face was one of heaviness, thickness, like that of a very handsome draft horse. There was something rough about her as if the human sculptor had lost interest in her before finishing the task of creation. She was dressed in a black jersey with a red rose painted on the front in such a way that the stem angled up between her breasts and the flower lay against her collarbone. But it was the lower half that made men stare: those great strong big-woman thighs covered by the skimpiest of red mini-skirts. It sent an ache through his loins just thinking about what was so thinly hidden up underneath that hem which cut across her pale skin a good hand or more above her knees. What made it all the more appealing was that it seemed she had no idea she was so appealing. To her it was just the current fashion, the kind of stuff you bought at K-Mart for ten bucks or less. It was cheap and she knew it, everybody knew it.

  Suddenly McCleary pointed at something up front, and she followed where he pointed. Then she saw Dalrymple. He could tell in the way her face at first brightened and then darkened when she realized that someone might have noticed the attention she threw out to him so casually. She immediately dipped her chin out of shyness, acting as if she were listening to McCleary. But she couldn't help herself; she waved. McCleary looked up, grinned when he saw who she had waved at.

  They met at the time clock at the back of the store, smiled at each other without speaking, and then punched in. It was 1:11.

  "Hey, good-looking."

  "Hey yourself."

  They looked at each other and know, knew it was coming, and soon. He would try it today, somehow, something, at least set the thing in motion. He felt he was looking good, he felt the fire of manhood in his veins after his talk with his Uncle Blackie and his successful morning. To hell with the others who were already sending him off. He wasn't gone yet; he was still here, still a functioning go-getter. Money, or even the prospect of it, made a man attractive to women, he thought; they could smell it on you; they could smell the success like a subtle aftershave. He had the sense of her sniffing around him for the signal scent and now he had nothing to lose.

  "I heard," she said, frowning.

  "Heard what?" he said.

  "You know, the lottery."

  "Oh that."

  "It's so unfair, this war! What are you gonna do?"

  So it was this, the sense of the tragic about him, that made her eager and interested, even loving. Success meant nothing to her. He thought for a moment and said, "What I'd like to do is get a peek at what you're hiding up under that skirt." Then he blushed. He felt it spread up from his neck and across his face all the way to his scalp. She blushed too and playfully tapped his shoulder with her fingers.

  She smiled through the blush and said, to Dalrymple's astonishment, "Well I'd like to show you."

  It had been building to this for weeks.

  Just then somebody walked by and they separated, walked away, watching each other through the shelves of merchandise as they hurried toward Automotive up parallel aisles still crowded with hampers. It was a kind of game with them, racing through the narrow aisles, tossing out taunts of "I'm gonna beat" or "last one's a rotten egg," and it often made their faces flush like the faces of children at play. When they got to the checkout counter, a customer was waiting with a can of upholstery cleaner in his flabby hand. He was a fat man with a midsection like an inner tube and a thick coal-black beard that lacked a moustache and gave him the appearance of a New England minister from the last century. He regarded them severely. Dalrymple and Jane glanced at each other and grinned, almost laughed out loud, and then made an effort to comport themselves with the dignity appr
opriate to employees of Green's Furniture and Auto. While Jane busied herself with a hamper, Dalrymple rang up the man's sale and sent him on his way with a "you come back now." Then he bent and looked between two shelves of car-washing sponges and tins of polish, and he said to Jane, "When?"

  "Whenever," she came back lightly and blushed again, smirked with embarrassment, glanced away.

  "How's about right now?"

  "Can't now, silly."

  He made a fake and exaggerated frown and turned away to the counter where the big cash register squatted like a sculptured God of Money. He punched the button for his drawer and then the NO SALE button. His cash drawer clattered out, tapping his thighs, and he removed his nametag. She came around the long shelf holding a boxed headlight in her hand, and she leaned against the counter, not a foot away from him, eyeing him closely with a sweet little twist to her plain lips. She wore no makeup at all didn't really need it and probably couldn't afford it.

  He fumbled trying to pin his name tag to his lapel, so she put down the headlight and helped him. Their eyes met briefly, and they smiled again. Dalrymple glanced around. It was that time of day when the employees were in and out for lunch and only a few customers in the store and sure enough there was no one close-by just then, no one who could see. Quickly, in a burst of enthusiasm and unwonted courage, he thrust his hand under her skirt and cupped her crotch with his palm. She did nothing but look at him with that faint and appealing twist in her lips, though he thought perhaps she spread her thighs just enough to let his hand get the whole effect. What he felt was firm and full and warm, and her underpants were moist. Soon she became shy again and glanced around herself, and then suddenly she backed away as if someone were coming. No one was; it was just the jitters, and it made everything all the more exciting.