by Robert Inman
He sat there for a long time, then looked up to see the bedroom windows beginning to gray with first light. He stared at the cardboard boxes. He wouldn’t have opened them if he could. There might be things inside, things about Joe Pike and Irene, that he didn’t really want to know. Having them back, damaged or not, would be enough.
THREE
There was a good-sized crowd gathered at the parsonage by the time Joe Pike got there at mid-afternoon on Saturday.
The ladies of the Parsonage Committee arrived first, bearing armloads of food and housewarming gifts. They made a big deal over Trout, and then they wandered through the parsonage, making a big deal over Alma’s redecorating. Trout overheard one woman mutter, “The living room’s a bit garish for a parsonage.” And another replied, “She paid for it. She can be as garish as she wants.”
Then the members of the Official Board of the church began trickling in, most of them men. The crowd swelled until there were thirty or so people, spilling out of the front door of the house onto the porch and lawn, sipping punch in paper cups from a large bowl the ladies had set up on the dining room table.
They were, Trout came to realize, Joe Pike’s distant past.
A man named Fleet Mathis was the long-time mayor and had been Joe Pike’s scoutmaster before Joe Pike grew suddenly to great size and gave up the Boy Scouts for football.
“People been asking for years, when’s the Bishop gonna send Joe Pike back home?” Fleet Mathis said.
“He’d have been here long ago, but Irene wouldn’t stand for it,” Aunt Alma said. She seemed unconcerned that Trout was right at her elbow when she said it. Aunt Alma seemed accustomed to saying exactly what she thought whenever she thought it and expecting everyone to agree with her.
Mostly, they did. But out of Alma’s earshot, they appeared to say what they pleased. They regaled Trout with stories about his father’s growing-up. Garth Niblock was the barber who had given Joe Pike his first haircut at the age of three. He told how Joe Pike had screamed with indignation as his shoulder-length locks, his mother’s pride, fell to the floor under Leland’s watchful eye.
Miss Althea Trawick, now retired and shriveled, had been one of his elementary teachers in the years before Leland shipped Joe Pike off to Georgia Military Academy. Joe Pike didn’t want to go, she told Trout, and later he rebelled and came home and caused a family uproar. Joe Pike, she said, seemed to keep the family in more or less constant uproar.
Charlie Babcock was the dentist who had filled Joe Pike’s childhood cavities. Joe Pike had always had a sweet tooth, he said. He laughed and said he hoped Joe Pike would be a frequent customer at the new Dairy Queen, because Charlie sure needed some cavity business.
Tilda Huffstetler was the owner of the Koffee Kup Kafe who made Joe Pike’s hand-decorated birthday cakes in her kitchen until he was a grown man. She told of shipping cakes by parcel post to Texas A&M when Joe Pike was off playing football, how he would always make a special phone call to thank her. This afternoon she had arrived with two of her famous sweet potato pies (famous, she said, because of their mention in Southern Living magazine -- “If it’s in Southern Living, it’s gospel.”) and insisted that Trout stop by some afternoon after school for a free slice.
Grace Vredemeyer was the church choir director, somewhat younger than most in the crowd and one of the few who wasn’t a Moseley native. She had moved there with her husband twenty years before, only to lose him to cancer, and had stayed on. She had brought a copy of the weekly church bulletin for Joe Pike and showed Trout her column on church music entitled “Grace Notes.” “I hope you can sing better than your daddy,” she told Trout. “That man can’t carry a tune in a bucket.” To which Trout confessed that he couldn’t either, but at least he was aware of the fact.
Judge Lecil Tandy was no longer a judge, but had been some years before and was still called “Judge” in the southern way. The name fit. He was tall and spare with a lovely mane of soft white hair. He wore a three-piece seersucker suit, sagging a bit with age, and a watch chain from which his Phi Beta Kappa key dangled. Judge Tandy was the longtime Moseley family and Moseley Mills attorney and vice-chairman of the Official Board of the church. Aunt Alma was the chairman.
Trout guessed their average age at somewhere over sixty. They were sweet people, he thought, with soft, gentle rhythms of speech, in no particular hurry to say or do anything. They stood about on the porch and under the shade of the pecan trees, drinking punch and trading bits of reminiscence and making Trout comfortable in their company. In their voices, he could hear the echoes of Joe Pike’s childhood, and he felt a tinge of wistfulness. To have grown up in a single place, to be able to say you were truly “from” somewhere…well, that might not be too bad. And he began to see how Joe Pike might find rest here for whatever troubled his soul. It would be, he thought, like drifting off to sleep under a soft, familiar blanket.
Just before three, a GMC pickup truck towing a U-Haul trailer pulled up at the curb in front of the parsonage. Uncle Cicero was at the wheel, Joe Pike riding shotgun. “Here he is!” somebody called out, and they all turned to look as Joe Pike threw open the door and hopped nimbly out of the truck and came hot-footing it across the parsonage lawn. “Good Lordy, looka here!” he called. The crowd surged out to meet him with Aunt Alma in the lead and they gathered around him, hugging and shaking hands, all talking at once.
Trout hung back a bit, giving Joe Pike the once-over. His face was still ruddy from his motorcycle ride, but he looked fit and rested, big and solid and dependable, nothing like the man who had stood in the Ohatchee pulpit two weeks before, ashen-faced and sweating like a field hand.
Joe Pike was in his element now, never better than when he was in the middle of a crowd. Trout remembered how it was at Methodist Summer Camp years before: Joe Pike, one of the preacher-counselors, riding herd on a bunkhouse full of second-grade boys, Trout among them. Headed for the lake for an afternoon swim, Joe Pike draped with noisy, clambering kids, hanging from his shoulders, arms, legs. Trout, trotting along behind, watching. Joe Pike was the most popular guy at camp.
He was the most popular guy on the parsonage lawn this late-May afternoon, working this crowd like a master fisherman with a big bass on the line -- reeling them in, drenching them with his smile, lifting them up.
“Lord, Miz Trawick you ain’t aged a day since I was in the second grade. I remember you in Vacation Bible School, saying, ‘The Lord wants everybody to sit down and shut up.’”
“You never did,” Miz Trawick shot back, hands on hips.
“No ma’am. I’m still on my feet, still talking.” Big grin, sweeping them to him with his huge arms. “…mighty good to be back home…Mister Fleet, it’s good to see ya…’preciate ya’ll coming over…be over next week to get some of your sweet potato pie, Tilda…Hooooo-doggies!”
Then finally he looked out over their heads and his eyes lit on Trout and his face went soft. “Howdy, son.”
“Howdy yourself.”
The rest of them stood back a bit and Joe Pike reached Trout in three big strides and threw his arms around him. He didn’t say a word, just swallowed Trout up and held him for a long moment. Then he released him, held him at arm’s length.
Trout looked up into Joe Pike’s big brown eyes and saw what you would not see from a distance -- a kind of opaqueness there, like a sheer curtain. There was a weariness around the edges, deep crow’s feet that hadn’t been there before. He could tell that part of Joe Pike was still off someplace else, maybe out there on the road to Junction. That was the thing about Joe Pike. There was so much of him, he could be two places at once. For such a big man, he was a quick, moving target.
“You okay?” Joe Pike asked.
“Yes sir. How about you?”
Joe Pike worked his jaw for a moment. “I’m still vertical.”
Trout thought he might have said more, but Aunt Alma was at Joe Pike’s side now, taking hold of his arm. “Well, come on in and see the parsonage.”
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“Alma’s been redecorating,” Tilda Huffstetler said.
“I’ll say she has,” Fleet Mathis chimed in. “You better not let the Bishop see it, or he’ll want to move in himself.”
That drew a laugh from the crowd and Joe Pike looked down at Alma. “Alma, what have you gone and done?”
Alma gave a wave of her hand. “Started all over.”
Joe Pike nodded, then gave a little hissing sound through his teeth. “Sounds about right.”
They started toward the house, and as they climbed the steps, Trout looked back toward the curb. Uncle Cicero’s pickup truck was gone. The U-Haul trailer was still there, tilted forward on its tongue. Joe Pike, he realized with an uncomfortable lurch of his stomach, had brought the motorcycle home.
* * * * *
He was alone in the open gun turret, crouched in the bucket seat behind the quad-fifties, peering up into the fog, every nerve ending alive, as if he were wired directly into the ship’s power plant. He heard the drone of engines high above. Germans. Or maybe Japs. He stared, trying to part the fog with his eyes, swinging the muzzles of the guns back and forth. They were getting closer, coming at him from every point on the compass, their nasty high-pitched roar closing in. …RUM-UM-UM-UM-ADN-ADN-ADN-ADN-RUM-UM-UM…. “Show yourself, you bastards!” he cried. And then he squeezed the trigger and the guns bucked and roared, blotting out everything. A long fevered burst, every fourth round a tracer, evil red blips spitting off into the fog. He released the trigger. And still they came, even more of them now. Whole squadrons. An entire air force. …RUM-UM-UM-UM…ADN-ADN-ADN… Then something about the sound caught his ear and he jerked his head up, straining to listen. Damn! They’re on motorcycles!
Motorcycles. Trout sat bolt upright in bed. He was drowning in sweat, his pajama bottoms plastered to his legs, the bedsheets soaked. “Uggghhhh,” he grunted.
He lay there for a moment, listening, trying to sort through the muck in his head. It was very early. The morning was the palest of gray around the edges of the window shade near his head.
Then he remembered. Moseley. The parsonage. Aunt Alma. The cotton mill. Joe Pike. The U-Haul trailer.
The door to the backyard garage was open and he could see the rear end of the motorcycle and next to it, Joe Pike’s big rump. It occurred to him that Joe Pike had put on a little more weight during his trip. A grand tour of the Gulf states Dairy Queens? He crouched now by the motorcycle, screwdriver in one hand, fiddling with the engine. Every so often he would reach up with the other hand and goose the throttle…RUM-UM-UM-UM…ADN-ADN-ADN…RUM-UM-UM-UM… Trout stood in the open doorway watching for a moment and then Joe Pike seemed to sense he was there and looked back over his shoulder.
“Morning,” Joe Pike said brightly.
“Daddy, for gosh sakes. It’s five-thirty.”
…RUM-UM-UM-UM…
“You’re gonna wake the neighbors.”
Trout stepped out of the shed, feeling the cool wet grass on his bare feet, looked over at the house beyond the back fence. A light was on in the kitchen window and a woman in curlers was peering out. She stared at Trout and he gave her a weak, embarassed wave and she disappeared. He realized she must think he was the one out here playing with the motorcycle. Clad only in pajama bottoms. Crazy half-naked preacher’s kid. Well, that was better than her thinking that it was the preacher himself over here making a ruckus at five-thirty. Joe Pike didn’t need to get off on the wrong foot here.
Joe Pike was sitting on the motorcycle now, legs splayed out to the side, hands on the handlebars. He had on an old grease-smudged tee-shirt and a faded pair of khaki pants. And the cowboy boots. He dwarfed the motorcycle, yet the man and the machine seemed to fit together in a strange way. He goosed the engine again, then cocked his head to one side, listening, and gave a tiny nod of satisfaction. He looked over at Trout. “You’re up mighty early.”
Trout shrugged. “I had this dream about guys on motorcycles.”
“I never dream,” Joe Pike said. “It’s probably not healthy. They say you get rid of a lot of psychic waste matter when you dream.”
Trout looked for a place to sit, spied an old Coca-Cola crate, turned it on end and perched on it. “What’re you doing?” he asked, hearing the irritation in his voice, making no attempt to hide it.
“Adjusting the idle. I took the carburetor apart and cleaned it and blew out the fuel line. It’s been running a little rough. But I think I got it fixed. Must have been a piece of dirt or something.” He reached down and turned off the ignition and the motorcycle died with a cough. Trout crossed one leg over the other and wrapped his arms around his bare chest, huddled there on the Coca-Cola crate watching, studying. Joe Pike hadn’t known diddly about motorcycles when he brought the Triumph home in pieces in the trunk of his car. Didn’t know a spoke from a piston. And here he was taking apart the carburetor.
“How long have you been up?” Trout asked.
“Never went to bed,” Joe Pike said. He pulled a grimy handkerchief out of a back pocket and started rubbing on the glass face of the speedometer. “I couldn’t sleep, so I’ve been nesting. Got all my stuff unpacked in the church study, put my name on the marquee out front. And today’s sermon topic.”
“What’s your topic?”
“Bear Bryant and the Holy Ghost.”
“You’re kidding. Is that what you put on the marquee?”
“Yep.”
“Aunt Alma said she planned a service without a sermon. Some extra hymns and stuff.”
Joe Pike shrugged. “Preachers preach. Especially new preachers. Everybody wants to see if a new preacher can hold a congregation.”
“Haven’t you ever preached here before?”
“Not since I was ordained. My ordination service was in this church. You were just a baby. And I preached a sermon, sort of a call to arms, about the Disciples going out to witness. ‘Go ye unto all the world…’” He smile, remembering. “Young preachers tend to be full of piss and vinegar.”
Trout took note of that. Piss and vinegar. Joe Pike’s customary manner of speaking was colloquial, down-home, even mildly earthy at times. He had gained a reputation as a preacher whose choice of words raised eyebrows and kept the folks in the pews alert. Like the time in an Ohatchee sermon when he said Christians should get off their fatty acids. But piss and vinegar? This was something new. And it rolled easily off his tongue, the kind of thing Joe Pike Moseley the Texas A&M football player might have said. But then, Joe Pike Moseley was just back from Texas, wearing cowboy boots and taking apart a carburetor.
Joe Pike finished with the speedometer, then crammed the handkerchief back in his pocket. He climbed off the motorcycle, knelt on one knee next to it, reached for a ratchet wrench and started removing the spark plug from the engine.
“How you been getting on with Alma?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Okay.”
Joe Pike held up the spark plug, examined it closely. “She give you any instructions yet?”
“She told me not to forget who I am, be careful of the mill kids, and stay away from Great Uncle Phinizy.”
Joe Pike turned with a jerk. “Phin?” He blinked, his face all puzzlement. “He’s here?”
“Yes sir.”
“Where?”
“He’s living upstairs over the garage behind Aunt Alma’s.”
“I’ll be doggoned,” Joe Pike said softly.
“He says he’s infamous.”
“Yes, I imagine he is.”
Joe Pike pulled out the handkerchief again, wiped off the spark plug and studied it carefully, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. Then he looked up at Trout. “Let me tell you about Uncle Phin. When I was playing football at A&M, he was the only member of the family who ever came to see me. We were playing Baylor, and when I walked out the door of the dressing room after the game, there he stood. Drunk as a lord, sucking on one of those Picayune cigarettes.”
“Why was he the only one who went to see you?”<
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Joe Pike didn’t appear to have heard the question. He turned back to the motorcycle, tightened down the spark plug, put the wire back on, then put the wrench and screwdriver in a cloth pouch and stored them in a compartment under the seat.
He stood, wiping his hands on his khakis, then finally looked down at Trout. “I’m sorry I missed your birthday.”
Trout shrugged.
“It’s not every day a guy turns sixteen,” Joe Pike said.
“I guess not.”
“I haven’t gotten you a present yet. Thought I’d ask what you wanted.”
“I got my license,” Trout said.
“You did?”
” The examiner said he played football against you in high school. You and some fellow named Dewberg or something like that.”
“Wardell Dubarry.”
“That’s it.”
“Wardell and I used to do the old high-low on quarterbacks.”
“Well, the examiner said y’all near about ruined his team’s quarterback. He said y’all were rough as a cob.”
“Yeah. I guess we were. Me and the mill kids. Wardell’s still here. Still works at the mill. We’ll go see him.”
“Okay.”
Joe Pike slung a leg over the motorcycle and eased down into the seat and reached for the handlebars. And then he seemed to forget for a moment that Trout was there. He stared off into the distance, far beyond the back wall of the storage shed, out past the edge of town, maybe beyond Atlanta. Maybe even all the way to Junction, Texas, where Bear Bryant had taken young men into the desert and tried to kill them. Why did Joe Pike need to go to Junction, after all this time? And more to the point, why hadn’t he really come back yet.
“Daddy…”
“You can still get there on two-lanes.”
“What?”
Joe Pike turned and looked at him. “All the way from Ohatchee, Georgia to Junction, Texas and I never set foot on an Interstate. Only a few four-lanes. Mostly, just back roads where you can’t see past the next hill. Lots of farm tractors and school buses. Folks wave at you when they pass. Figure you must be from somewhere around there or you wouldn’t be on their back road in the first place. Never looked at a map, either.”