Dairy Queen Days

by Robert Inman

  DAIRY QUEEN DAYS

  A Novel by

  Robert Inman

  Cardinal Publishing

  For Larkin, Quaylyn and Devanna Ferris

  I am leaving, I am leaving

  But the fighter still remains.

  From “The Boxer”

  Simon and Garfunkel

  Life can only be understood backwards;

  But it must be lived forwards.

  -- Soren Kierkegaard

  Copyright © by Robert Inman – 1997

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any smiliarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, 1997

  Paperback edition by Back Bay Books, 1998

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Inman, Robert

  Dairy Queen Days: a novel / Robert Inman – ebook edition

  ISBN 978-1-62050

  Cover design by Lee Inman Farabaugh

  CONTENTS

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  WHAT THE CRITICS SAY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY ROBERT INMAN

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  The year is 1979, and the stable moorings of sixteen-year-old Trout Moseley’s life have been torn loose. His mother is in an Atlanta psychiatric facility for reasons he doesn’t entirely understand, while his father, a three-hundred-pound Methodist minister who rides a motorcycle, has begun delivering scandalous sermons comparing Jesus to Elvis and the Holy Ghost to his college football coach.

  Moving back to the small Georgia town that bears his family’s name and powerful imprint, Trout is caught between ancestral tradition and the need to create an identity of his own. Deeply entwined in Trout’s struggle to find himself are the rest of the townsfolk: Aunt Alma and her daunting admotion “Don’t forget who you are” (as if he knew); Uncle Cicero and his offer of a “respectable job” at the local hardware store (versus the chance to work at Dairy Queen, a place with no history); the learned, quirky Great Uncle Phinizy; and, most of all, Keats, the strong-willed, sharp-tongued girl who wins his heart.

  Trout finds refuge at the Dairy Queen, where he can deal with the burden of being a Moseley in Moseley and begin to sort out the muddle of his life (“why should I be the only sane one in the family?”). He learns, in the wrenching business of growing up, that in the face of chaos he must figure out how to save himself.

  WHAT THE CRITICS SAY

  ““Robert Inman’s rich style, along with the plot and family characters he creates in Dairy Queen Days, makes this a remarkable and profound novel….A joyous addition to our Southern literature.”

  --Rick Tamble, Nashville Banner

  A novel with characters quirky enough to grab our interest but familiar enough that we may identify with their joys and sorrows….Many readers will identify with Dairy Queen Days immediately, and remember it long afterward.”

  --Max B. Baker, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  “Inman’s characters are totally alive and exuding energy, while the story is filled with mystery, sadness, and the exquisite beauty of youth.”

  --Larry Lawrence, Abilene Reporter News

  “The poignant, yet somehow exultant tale of a young boy dealing manfully with problems too big for him….A complex story, mastefully plotted and told by a superb writer. Another rich triumph for Inman.”

  --Barbara Hodge Hall, Anniston (AL) Star

  “A grave and delicate story…slow and serene, making its point without fireworks….The prose itself is graceful.”

  --Carolyn See, Washington Post

  “An amiable novel….Robert Inman tells this story with humor, compassion, and a sense of baffling sadness at the ways relationships can go wrong….He is a storyteller perched between the Old South and the New, a writer whose characters wrestle with tradition as they try to shape their futures.”

  --Linda Barrett Osborne, New York Times Book Review

  “There are a few exceptionally gifted writers – Allan Gurganus, Mary Hood, and Bobbie Ann Mason come immediately to mind – whose “take” on Southern themes is cript and unsentimental. Robert Inman should be added: Inman’s third novel, Dairy Queen Days, likewise explores familiar Southern territory from a perspective that is both fresh and unexpectedly moving.”

  --Greg Johnson, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Funny, tender, sad, and surprising….with Dairy Queen Days, Robert Inman steps to the front rank of today’s Southern novelists.”

  --Dan Rather

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Robert Inman is the author of five novels: Dairy Queen Days, Home Fires Burning, Old Dogs and Children, Captain Saturday and The Governor’s Lady, as well as a collection essays, Coming Home: Life, Love and All Things Southern, and a family holiday book, The Christmas Bus.

  He has written screenplays for six motion pictures for television, two of which have been “Hallmark Hall of Fame” presentations. His script for The Summer of Ben Tyler, a Hallmark production, won the Writers’ Guild of America Award as the best original television screenplay of 1997. His other Hallmark feature was Home Fires Burning, an adaptation of his novel

  His playwriting credits include Crossroads, The Christmas Bus, Dairy Queen Days, Welcome to Mitford, A High Country Christmas Carol, The Christmas Bus: The Musical, and The Drama Club. He wrote the book, music and lyrics for Crossroads and The Christmas Bus: The Musical. Inman’s plays are published by Dramatic Publishing Company.

  Inman holds two degrees from the University of Alabama, including a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. He left a 30-year career in television journalism in 1996 to become a full-time writer. He and his wife Paulette live in North Carolina. They have two daughters.

  Visit the author’s website at www.robert-inman.com.

  ALSO BY ROBERT INMAN

  Home Fires Burning

  Old Dogs and Children

  Captain Saturday

  The Governor’s Lady

  Coming Home: Life, Love and All Things Southern

  The Christmas Bus

  ONE

  Trout Moseley was a day shy of sixteen when his father, Reverend Joe Pike Moseley, ran away.

  Most people thought it started with the motorcycle. Maybe even before that, when they sent Trout’s mother off to the Institute. But people thought Joe Pike had been handling that unpleasantness reasonably well -- keeping his equilibrium, as they said -- until he showed up with the motorcycle.

  It was an ancient Triumph, or at least what had once been a Triumph. Joe Pike found it in a farmer’s barn, in pieces, and brought it home in the trunk of his car. Trout was standing at the kitchen window when he saw Joe Pike back the car down the driveway to the garage behind the parsonage. By the time Trout got out there, Joe Pike had the trunk open and was standing with his arms crossed, staring at the jumble of wheel rims, pitted chrome pieces, engine, handlebars, gasoline tank.

  “What’s that?” Trout asked.

  “A once and future motorcycle.”

  “What’re you gonna do with it?”

  Joe Pike uncrossed his arms and hitch
ed up his pants from their accustomed place below his paunch. “Fix it up. I am the resurrection and the life. Yea, verily.” A trace of a smile played at his lips. “Up from the grave He arose!” he sang off-key. Joe Pike sang badly, but enthusiastically. In church, he could make the choir director wince. He referred to his singing as “making a joyful noise.”

  “You know anything about motorcycles?” Trout asked.

  “Not much.”

  “Need some help?”

  Joe Pike stared for a long time at the jumble of metal in the trunk of the car. Trout wondered after awhile if he had heard the question. Then finally Joe Pike said, “I reckon I can manage. It ain’t heavy.”

  “I mean…” But then he saw that Joe Pike wasn’t really paying him any attention. His mind was there inside the trunk among the parts of the old Triumph, perhaps deep down inside one of the cylinders of the engine, imagining a million tiny explosions going off rapid-fire. Trout studied him for a minute or so, then shrugged and turned to go.

  “It’s a four-cycle,” Joe Pike said.

  Trout turned and looked at him again. Joe Pike’s gaze never left the motorcycle. “What?”

  “You don’t have to mix the gas and oil.”

  “That’s good,” Trout said. “You might forget.”

  When Trout looked out the kitchen window again a half-hour later, the trunk of the car was closed and so were the double doors of the old wood-frame garage. But he could faintly hear Joe Pike singing inside, “Rescue the perishing, care for the dying!”

  Over the next two months, Trout stayed away from the garage when Joe Pike was out there. But he followed the progress of the motorcycle by sneaking a look when Joe Pike was gone. At first it was a spindly metal frame propped on two concrete blocks like a huge insect, and metal parts bobbing like apples in a ten-gallon galvanized washtub filled with solvent to eat away years of grime and rust. Before long, with the metal sanded smooth, the motorcycle began to take shape on the frame. Joe Pike took the fenders, wheel rims, gasoline tank and handlebars to a body shop and had them re-painted and re-chromed. Replacement parts -- headlamp, cables, speedometer -- began to arrive by UPS.

  Trout remained vaguely hopeful at first. Fifteen years old, almost sixteen, fascinated by the thought of motorized transportation. But he came to realize that Joe Pike had no intention of sharing the motorcycle.

  Joe Pike worked on it in the garage deep into the night, showing up for breakfast bleary-eyed, smelling of grease and solvent, grime caked thick under his fingernails. That was uncharacteristic. Joe Pike was by habit a fastidious man. He took at least two baths a day -- more in the summer, because he was a prodigious perspirer -- and changed his underwear each time. But this present grubbiness didn’t seem to bother him. Neither did the state of their housekeeping, which got progressively worse. The church had hired a cleaning woman to come once a week after Trout’s mother went off to the Institute, but she was no match for the growing piles of dirty dishes and laundry. Trout finally took matters into his own hands and learned to operate the dishwasher and the washing machine and dryer. After a fashion. At school, he endured locker room snickers over underwear dyed pale pink by washing with a red tee-shirt. Joe Pike’s underwear was likewise pale pink, but he didn’t seem to notice, or at least he didn’t remark upon it. Joe Pike’s mind seemed to be fixed on the motorcycle, or whatever larger thing it was that the motorcycle represented. There was a gently stubborn set to his jaw, almost a grimness there. On Sundays his sermons were vague, rambling things, trailing off in mid-sentence. He didn’t seem to be paying the sermons much attention, either. In the pews, members of the congregation would steal glances at each other, perplexed. What?

  “How’s it going?” Trout would ask.

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t you get cold out there?” It was March, the pecan trees in the parsonage yard still bare-limbed and gaunt against the gray morning sky.

  A blank look from Joe Pike. “No. I reckon not.” Then he would stare out the kitchen window in the direction of the garage and Trout would know that Joe Pike wasn’t really there with him at all. He was out there with the Triumph.

  It worried Trout a good deal. It brought back all the old business of his mother’s long silences, the way she went away somewhere that nobody else could go, stayed for days at a time, and finally just never came back. With Irene’s silences, he had felt isolated, left out, wondering what of it, if anything, was his fault. Now, Joe Pike’s preoccupation with the motorcycle gave him the same old spooked feeling. Joe Pike, like Irene, seemed unreachable. And Trout finally decided there was really nothing he could do but watch and wait.

  So he did, and so did the good people of Ohatchee, Georgia -- particularly, the good people of Ohatchee Methodist. They watched, waited, talked:

  “What you reckon he’s gone do with that thing?”

  “Give it to Trout, prob’ly. Man of his size’d bust the tires.” (Hearty chuckle here. Joe Pike’s stood six-feet-four and his weight ranged from 250 to 300 pounds, depending on whether he was in one of his Dairy Queen phases.)

  “Well, it gives the Baptists something to talk about.”

  “Yeah. That and all the other.”

  “Damn shame.”

  “Was Irene hittin’ the bottle?”

  “Don’t think so. Just went off the deep end.”

  “Poor old Joe Pike. And little Trout. Bless his heart.”

  Long pause. “Don’t reckon Joe Pike had anything to do with it, do you?”

  “‘Course not.” Longer pause. “But it does make you wonder.”

  “Reckon they’ll transfer Joe Pike at annual conference?”

  “Prob’ly not. He’s only been here two years.”

  “Hmmm. But folks sure do talk.”

  “Yeah. ‘Specially Baptists.”

  They talked among themselves, but they did not talk to Joe Pike Moseley about his motorcycle. No matter how gracefully he seemed to have handled the business of his wife, there was in general an air of disaster about Joe Pike. People were wary, as if he might be contagious. Then too, a motorcycle just didn’t seem to be the kind of thing you discussed with a preacher. At least it didn’t until Easter Sunday.

  Ohatchee Methodist was packed, the usual crowd swelled by the once-a-year attendees, the ones Joe Pike referred to as “tourists.” They were crammed seersucker-to-crinoline into the oak pews and in folding chairs set up along the aisles and the back wall. It was mid-April, already warm but not quite warm enough for air conditioning, so the windows of the sanctuary were open to the Spring morning outside and the ceiling fans went whoosh-whoosh overhead, stirring the smell of new clothes and store-bought fragrances into a rich sweet stew.

  When they were finally settled into their seats, the choir entered from the narthex singing, “Up From the Grave He Arose!” They marched smartly two-by-two down the aisle, proclaiming triumph o’er the grave, and the congregation rose with a flurry and joined in, swelling the high-ceiling sanctuary with their earnestness. The choir paraded up into the choir loft and everybody sang another verse and then they all sat down and stared at the door to the Pastor’s Study to the right of the altar, expecting Joe Pike to emerge as was his custom. They sat there for a good while. Nothing. They began to look about at each other. What? Then after a minute or two, they heard the throaty roar of the motorcycle, faintly at first and then growing louder as it approached the church and stopped finally at the curb outside. Trout -- seated midway in the middle section with his friend Parks Belton and Parks’ mother Imogene -- looked about for a route of discreet escape. Joe Pike had spent all night in the garage. He was still there when Trout left for Sunday School. And now he had ridden the motorcycle to church. Maybe if I crawl under the pew. But he sat there, transfixed. They were all transfixed.

  After a moment, the swinging doors that separated the sanctuary from the narthex flew open and Joe Pike swept in, huge and hurrying, his black robe billowing about him, down the aisle and up to the pulpit. He stopped,
looked out over the congregation, gave them all a vague half-smile, and then settled himself in the high-backed chair behind the pulpit. He slouched, one elbow propped on the arm of the chair, chin resting in his hand, one ham-like thigh hiked over the other, revealing a pair of scuffed brown cowboy boots. Trout stared at the boots. Joe Pike had bought them in Dallas years ago when he played football at Texas A&M, but they had been gathering dust in various parsonage closets for as long as Trout could remember. He had never seen Joe Pike wear the boots before.

  The choir director, seated at the piano, gave Joe Pike a long look over the tops of her glasses. Then she nodded to the choir and they stood and launched into “The Old Rugged Cross.” As they sang, Joe Pike sat staring out the window, the toe of his boot swaying slightly in time to the music, brow wrinkled in thought.

  The last notes faded and the choir sat back down. Joe Pike remained in his seat, still staring out the window, out where the motorcycle was. The choir director gave an impatient cough. Then Joe Pike looked up, shook himself. He stood slowly and moved the two steps to the pulpit. He picked up the pulpit Bible. It was a huge thing, leather-bound with gold letters and gold edging and a long red ribbon to mark your place. Joe Pike held it in his left hand as if it weighed no more than a feather. He opened it with his right, flipped a few pages, found his place, marked it with his index finger.

  His eyes searched the words for a long time. Then his brow furrowed in dismay, as if someone had substituted a Bible written in a foreign tongue. He looked up, gaze sweeping the congregation. His mouth opened, but nothing came out. Sweat beads began to pop out on his forehead. He opened his mouth again, made a little hissing sound through his teeth.