by Robert Inman
“You can forget tennis,” she said.
“Oh?” Had Mr. Blaylock put out a memo to the student body? This boy plays tennis. Watch him.
“There’s not a single tennis court in Moseley.”
Trout thought about the Prince Extender racquet he coveted, hanging on pegboard in the pro shop at Ohatchee Country Club. Black graphite with white binding on the grip. A wicked-looking piece. Walk on the court with something like that and watch your opponent’s eyes. Uh-oh. Two hundred-fifty dollars. He had been saving for it for two years, and he was getting close. If he sent the money, they would ship it from Ohatchee, he was sure of that. It’s not every day the pro shop at Ohatchee Country Club sells a two hundred-fifty dollar racquet.
“You want to know why?” she asked.
“Why what?”
“Why there’s no tennis court in Moseley.”
“Okay.”
“Your grandfather wouldn’t allow it.” She waited for some response from him. He shrugged. “He thought it was frivolous,” she said with a toss of her head. Trout searched her face. It seemed set in a perpetual scowl. She was rather pretty in a sharp-featured way, but the scowl undercut it. Was it indigestion? Or was she just generally pissed at the world. He looked down at her crutches, lying on the grass between them.
“What are you looking at?” she demanded.
He nodded at the crutches. “Is that why you’re pissed off? Or is it something else?”
She surprised him by giving him a crooked smile. “Hey, what have we here? ‘Pissed off?’ Pretty strong stuff for a preacher’s kid.”
Trout picked up his books, struggled to his feet. “Look. This hasn’t been the best day of my life. Mr. Blaylock is fixated on a football game that happened years ago. I’ve had to check myself several times to see if I’m transparent, because you’re the only kid who’s spoken to me and you’ve got a snotty attitude and I don’t even know your name. The lunch meat was inedible. Now you tell me there’s no tennis court. I’ve never lived here before and I don’t know what the hell it is about the Moseleys. I just know my dad said one time that when a Moseley farts, everybody smells it.”
“Your daddy said that?”
“Yes.”
“He’s a preacher and he said that?”
“Yes.”
She pursed her lips. “Hmmmm.”
“Tell me something.”
“What?”
“What’s with the silent treatment?”
A tiny smile played at the corners of her mouth. But she didn’t answer him directly. “Mill kids run this place,” she said.
“And the mill kids are just shy, right?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“When you live over in the mill village and your mama and daddy don’t make squat for money, there’s not much to do for diversion.”
“So I’m a diversion.”
“You’re a Moseley.”
Trout looked away, studying the cloudless afternoon sky above the stadium press box, imagining the stands packed with people, the loudspeaker blasting. Tackle by Joe Pike Moseley. Joe Pike had made it here. Bet the mill kids didn’t give him the silent treatment. Was it just Trout? Or had something changed? “What is it with you?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Why did you talk to me when nobody else would?”
“I just don’t give a damn.”
“Oh. Well, that explains it.” He turned on his heel and started walking away.
“Where are you going?”
“Dairy Queen.”
He was at midfield before she called out again. “My name is Keats.” He didn’t look back.
There was a huge pecan tree next to the Dairy Queen and a concrete picnic table beneath it. Trout sat on one side with his Blizzard, Joe Pike on the other with a banana split, two extra scoops of strawberry ice cream.
There was an ancient woman at the window of the Dairy Queen and the man behind the counter was watching her, waiting for her order. The woman scanned the big menu in the window carefully, nodding at each item, silently mouthing their names. It had the appearance of a ritual and she had the appearance of a regular. Trout could imagine her showing up every afternoon about this time, studying the menu at great length, then ordering the very same item. She never changed and neither did the Dairy Queen menu. There was something comfortably predictable about a Dairy Queen, Trout thought. The menu, the regulars. The old woman. A couple of guys in an ACE PLUMBING truck with a jumble of pipes in the back. And now Joe Pike and Trout. It was their fourth trip to Dairy Queen since Joe Pike had arrived on Saturday. Joe Pike was working steadily through the menu.
“I’ve got an idea,” Joe Pike said.
“Oh?”
“Jumping for Jesus.”
“What’s that?”
“An exercise class.”
“Where?”
“The church. Did you get a good look at the congregation yesterday?”
“Sure.”
“What did you notice about them?”
“Older.”
“Moribund. If flies had lit on ‘em, the flies would have gone to sleep.”
The old woman at the Dairy Queen window finished scanning the menu and placed her order. A fifty-cent cup of ice cream with crushed pineapple on top. The man inside already had the cup ready. He handed it out the window with a red plastic spoon stuck into the glob of pineapple.
Joe Pike sliced off a chunk of banana and strawberry ice cream , lifted it to his mouth, savored it for a long moment, swallowed. “I stood in that pulpit years ago and delivered my first sermon as a kid preacher. The congregation… It dawned on me this morning. Nothing’s changed. The same people, give or take a handful, just fifteen years older. Sitting in exactly the same pews. In a church, when nothing changes, when people don’t come and go, that’s not good.”
“Moribund,” Trout said.
Joe Pike concentrated for awhile on the banana split. Trout finished his Blizzard, took the empty cup to the trash can, returned to the table.
“It needs shaking up,” Joe Pike said. “Something to get the older members’ blood flowing, get some younger folks into the church.”
“Jumping for Jesus.”
“It might be the place to start. You like the name?”
“It has a ring to it, I guess.”
“Marketing. Folks nowadays are part of the T-V generation. You need a catchy phrase to get their attention. It’s a little like selling Alka-Seltzer or Pepsi.”
Trout thought about all those old folks, knobby knees and blue-veined legs, paunches and spreading behinds, twisting and bouncing in the assembly room of the education building to a strong rock beat. Maybe a little Four Tops. Sugar Pie Honey Bunch…Ooga-chukka…ooga chukka… And Joe Pike up at the front, leading the pack. Well, that was a stretch. A test of the structural integrity of the building. Joe Pike in one of his Dairy Queen phases.
“How was it?” Joe Pike asked, interrupting the image.
“What?”
“First day at school.”
Trout shrugged. “Okay.”
“Just okay?”
“No. Strange.”
“In what way?”
“Mr. Blaylock said he didn’t want any trouble.”
“Was there any?”
“No. He said it wasn’t a good idea, my being there. Especially now.” He gave Joe Pike a long look, waiting. But Joe Pike didn’t say anything. He finished off the banana split, placed the plastic spoon in the styrofoam boat, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, wadded it up and put it in the boat beside the spoon. “Will there be any Dairy Queens in heave-n-n-n-n?” he sang off-key, then grinned. “I sure hope so. It is one of life’s great pleasures, and I can’t imagine the Lord running the after-life without it. How could you have the Sweet Bye-and-Bye without Dairy Queen?”
“Mr. Blaylock told me about the football game.”
Joe Pike gave him an odd look. “What about it?”
&
nbsp; “Twenty-one to twenty.”
A cloud passed over Joe Pike’s face then. Not so much pain as…what? Embarrassment? “What else?”
“That’s about it.”
“Well, there’s not much more to tell. It was just a football game.”
Joe Pike got up from the table and took his trash to the garbage can. Trout sat at the table watching. When Joe Pike turned back to him, Trout said, “Did you know there’s not a tennis court in this town?”
“I never thought about it. No, I guess there’s not.”
“Do you know why there’s not a tennis court?”
“No.”
“Grandaddy Leland wouldn’t let ’em build one. He thought it was…” Trout searched for the word… “frivolous.”
“Who told you that?”
“A girl at school. Where am I gonna play tennis if there’s not a tennis court?”
Joe Pike sighed wearily. “I don’t know, son.”
“The state juniors are coming up. I haven’t practiced in more than a week.”
“Maybe we can build a backboard at the end of the driveway,” Joe Pike said hopefully.
“It’s not the same.” Trout knew he sounded petulant, but he couldn’t help it. No tennis court, nobody to play tennis with. The only person who even acknowledged his existence all day was crippled. And pissed off at Trout’s grandfather, to boot. No, make that pissed off at Moseleys in general. But at least she spoke.
“Yea, verily,” Joe Pike said. “Out of the mouths of babes. You speak a profound truth, son. A backboard is not a tennis court.”
“What’s going on here, Daddy?” Trout asked.
Joe Pike pondered that for a moment, then made a little hissing sound through his teeth. “I’m not sure I know, son.”
“When you find out, will you tell me?”
“Sure.”
“When do you think that’ll be?”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“What’s tomorrow?”
“That’s when we’re gonna see Wardell Dubarry.”
Trout woke deep in the night with his brain in overdrive -- humming like a high-voltage line with all that had happened, the utter strangeness of it, the incredible twist his life had taken.
He thought of Ohatchee. Even with all that had happened there, it seemed so normal by comparison. He had had friends. A girlfriend. He had played tennis almost every day, even in the winter. He had delivered the Atlanta Constitution on his bicycle. He had almost lost his virginity.
The memory of it rushed back in a breath-catching, blood-pounding surge of heat. Cynthia Stuckey. A Spring afternoon, the sweet smell of photinia blossoms drifting on the breeze through her bedroom window, parents gone. A flash of white thigh, her breast cool in his hand, her breath like hot wind in his ear. Cool and hot. Hot and cool. He had felt faint, as if he were about to be suddenly plucked from obscurity and made famous. And then…
He knew now that she had never entertained the slightest thought of letting him into her pants. She had teased him with breast and thigh and sent him home with an ache in his groin that made it difficult to walk upright, probably laughing her ass off as he limped down her front walk. But he had not known it then, even suspected. He had followed her around Ohatchee like a drooling puppy, hoping it would happen again. Just getting close, that was something. If he got close, even if he did more than that, he wouldn’t tell his friends. Not even Parks Belton. He would be honorable. No smutty talk about Cynthia Stuckey. He was mad for her. A fool, but a fool gladly.
But then the other craziness had swallowed him – Irene, Joe Pike and the motorcycle, Easter Sunday – and Cynthia had dropped him cold, without warning. Not only dropped him, humiliated him. Maybe it had been her mother, who was chairman of the pastor-parish relations committee at Ohatchee Methodist. Or her father, who was on the school board and had voted to ban Maggie, A Girl Of The Streets from the school library. They were both tight-asses. Maybe it was Cynthia herself. But she could have let him down easy. Instead, she gathered an audience in the hallway outside Plane Geometry the day he returned to school after Joe Pike’s Sunday escapade. Trout could tell by the looks on all their faces that they were waiting for something. He touched her sleeve. That was all. Just touched her sleeve. And she spun on him, a nasty little smirk on her face, and said, “Go play with yourself, Trout. Leave me alone.”
That had been two weeks ago, and it still made him writhe with embarassment. And even worse was the fact that the other memory – breast, thigh, hot breath – could still reduce him to a gasping, fist-pumping pulp. To hell with Cynthia Stuckey! His fist was faithful. Always willing. Never an embarassment.
So now, lying here in his new bedroom in this new parsonage in his strange new life, he kissed his fist and massaged the hot memory of Cynthia Stuckey from his mind, at least temporarily.
That done, he tried to go back to sleep. He would have to drag himself out of bed in the morning and face another day of near-invisibility at Moseley High School. And the thought of that made him even more wide awake. So he got out of bed and went to the front porch with his portable radio, sat in the porch swing and tuned in the Atlanta oldies station. And thought about his mother.
Irene knew all the songs. The Shirelles, the Supremes, the Everly Brothers…Here he comes…it’s Cathy’s Clown…Elvis, Ruth Brown, Clyde McPhatter, Dee Clark…Raindrops, so many Raindrops… Irene in a dishwasher-less kitchen, hips swaying to Little Richard as she labored over a suds-filled sink. Joe Pike and Irene doing the Panama City bop to Sam Cooke, blinds closed against parishioners who might not appreciate a preacher with rhythm. Big Joe Pike and tiny Irene, bear and bird, gliding and twirling. Watching them, Trout laughed and felt oh so fine. They taught him the steps and they all laughed when he invented one of his own. We’re having a party… The music. Keeping the world at bay, the world outside the parsonage. But then the time came when the music didn’t work any more, when Irene’s silences grew and grew until they drowned out everything, even the music.
The Atlanta Oldies station was playing Brenda Lee now. I’m sorrreeee…so sorrree… He wondered if Irene might be listening too, over there in Atlanta at the Institute. Did they allow people at the Institute to be up this time of the night listening to the radio? Or did some guy come in at nine and give you a pill? Could you live in the past if you wanted? Or did some therapist keep insisting, “Now! Now!”
Was she lonely? There didn’t seem to be much opportunity for company. Joe Pike and Trout were being held at arm’s length for the moment. And the Troutmans, her own family back in Texas, were all gone except for some distant cousins. She was the antithesis of Joe Pike. She had no family to speak of. He had too much.
There was so much Trout needed to know from her. And about her. Her silences, and now her absence, had made her a stranger. When he finally got a chance to talk to her, would she know him? Would he know her? And would he even know which questions to ask?
The music drifted out of the radio, hung suspended in the hot quiet of the porch, and settled in that big hollow place somewhere between his stomach and his heart that Trout figured must be his soul.
I’m not gonna cry. Dammit, I’m not. You’re not gonna make me cry, God!
But he did, while Brenda Lee sang.
And then when she had finished and he had wiped away his hot tears, he looked across the street at Aunt Alma’s darkened house. And he saw the light in the window of the garage apartment out back. Uncle Phinizy.
FIVE
The garage was at the back of the deep lot behind Aunt Alma’s house, almost hidden from the house itself by pecan trees and a cane thicket, reached by a gravel driveway that curved around the edge of the lot from the porte-cochere. There were three open garage bays on the ground floor. In the light of the half-moon, Trout could see the dim outline of lawn equipment and old bicycles in one bay. The other two were empty. The upstairs apartment had two dormered windows peeking from the roofline, open to the night air. In one of the windows, a ligh
t was on. Trout climbed the narrow outside stairs, hesitated for a moment on the small landing, knocked.
“Door’s open, Trout.”
He pushed it open and looked inside. Phinizy was sitting deep in a naugahyde recliner, legs up, floor lamp on at his shoulder, book in one hand, half-smoked cigarette between two fingers of the other. On the table at his elbow were a half-empty whiskey glass and an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. Phinizy marked his place in the book with his finger and closed it. Then he looked up at Trout, studying him. He took a deep drag on his cigarette, released a double stream of smoke through his nostrils that kept coming and coming, the streams breaking apart and curling back around his head, then disappearing as wisps of bluish haze into the lampshade. Trout stared. All that smoke coming out of this little bitty old man. Finally it ended and Phinizy said, “Well, don’t just stand there. You’ll let all the flies out.”
Phinizy reminded him of a shriveled, wizened gnome from one of the folk tales Irene had read to him as a small child -- leathered skin, beaked nose, gnarled hands. An ancient wreck of a man. But there was something else -- a lively snap to the blue eyes, an odd way he cocked his head as if listening for some faint signal. An air of…what? Expectation?
“I saw your light on,” Trout said, closing the door behind him. “How did you know it was me?”
“Well, Joe Pike left about an hour ago. And Cicero was here a little before that. I figured it was either you or Banquo’s Ghost.”
“Who?”
“Haven’t you read Shakespeare?”
“Yes sir. A little.”
“Hmmmm. Yes sir. A young’un who says, ‘Yes sir.’”
“My mama taught me,” Trout said.
“Ah, yes. Your mama.”
“Why was Daddy here?”
“Same reason Cicero was. Same reason you are.”
“Why is that?”
“You all think I know something.”
“Do you?”
“Not much. Want a drink?” Trout looked at the whiskey glass. “I’ve got some ginger ale,” Phinizy said. “Nobody around here drinks whiskey but me. It’d probably help Cicero and Joe Pike both if they’d tie on a good one every once in awhile. But a man’s got his obligations, I guess.”