Dairy Queen Days

by Robert Inman

  “Enough of your public hand-wringing.”

  “Is that what I’m doing?”

  “First it’s the Holy Ghost on a motorcycle. Now it’s Elvis as the messiah. My Lord, Joe Pike!”

  There was a long silence, and then Joe Pike said, “I take it you’re not open to serendipity.”

  “Serendipity has no place in church.”

  “And what does, Alma?”

  “Scripture. Eternal truth. Godly verities.”

  “On Christ the solid rock I stand.”

  “Yes!”

  Joe Pike shook his head slowly. “Well, to tell you the truth, Alma, I don’t know where the rock is right now. I’m trying to find it.”

  “Then find it somewhere else, Joe Pike. Not in my church.”

  “Your church.”

  “Our church.”

  “No, I think you had it right the first time. It’s not the congregation that’s had enough, it’s you. Personally.”

  “Yes I have,” Alma said. “I am personally mortified. Embarassed, to tell you the truth. My brother, making a spectacle of himself in the pulpit of the church his family founded. It’s appalling. I am being totally honest with you here.”

  Joe Pike nodded slowly, thought about it for a moment. Then he leaned toward Alma, elbows on the table. “Did you notice anything unusual about the congregation this morning, Alma?”

  “No.”

  “Did you, Trout?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “What?”

  Trout felt himself again his father’s ally. “There were a few more of ‘em.”

  “Yes, there were,” Joe Pike said. “Out there amongst the vast,” he swept his arm through the air, “reaches of the sanctuary, amongst the empty pews, sprinkled in with the small band of faithful, were a few new faces. And there may be a few more new faces next Sunday.”

  “Is that why you put on a show?” Alma demanded, “To draw a crowd?”

  “It was an honest effort to be,” he waved his hand again, searching for a word, “honest. And I believe I struck a responsive note with some in the congregation. I saw a few heads nod.” He turned to Trout. “Did you see any heads nod?”

  “Yea, verily,” Trout said.

  “Don’t mock me, son. I do that well enough myself.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Alma gave an impatient jerk of her head. “Well, if what you’re after is filling up the pews, I suppose Elvis Presley or Godzilla or any other freak show will do just fine!”

  Cicero spoke up. “I think if you’d serve coffee in the vestibule between Sunday School and church, you’d swell the crowd a little. Regular and de-caf, and maybe doughnuts on Communion Sunday…”

  “Cicero, hush,” Alma said. And then as an afterthought, “We Methodists refer to it as a narthex, not a vestibule. Vestibule is a Baptist word.”

  “I don’t believe…” Cicero started, then trailed off, deflating. He sat there for a moment, wrinkled his nose, furrowed his brow, stared down at his plate. Good old Cicero, just trying to grease the skids a little. Trout felt a pang of sympathy for him. Alma was drumming her nails on the table, paying Cicero no attention. Did she pick him, or did he pick her? And whichever it was, why?

  Joe Pike looked at Alma for a long moment, then let out a breath and sat back in his chair. “You just don’t see it, do you?”

  “See what?”

  “The church,” he said quietly. “It’s dying, Alma.”

  Now it was Alma’s turn to look stricken.

  “Those people who always show up,” Joe Pike went on. “The terminally faithful. Judge Lecil and Mister Fleet and Eunice, Tilda and Boolie, Grace up there in the choir, all the rest with their perfect attendance records, sitting in the same places year after year until the cushions bear the permanent imprint of their rear ends.”

  Alma flushed. “Joe Pike!”

  But Joe Pike plowed ahead, his voice growing urgent. “Did you ever notice how few cars there are parked at the curb on Sunday? They all walk, for God’s sake. They all live on this end of town, the Moseley end. It’s like a little fiefdom. The Moseley manor house and the Moseley cathedral across the street and all the poor serfs trudging dutifully in the door when the bell tolls.”

  “They are our people!”

  “I love ’em dearly, Alma. But we -- our family -- we have sucked the life out of them. We have turned them into Christian zombies.”

  “Stop it!” Alma cried out, banging her fist on the table. The dishes rattled. It scared the hell out of Trout. He jumped an inch or two in his chair. “Christ!” he blurted.

  Just then, the door from the kitchen opened. Rosetta stood there staring at them. My, my. White folks ‘bout to come to blows in here. Fightin’ over Jesus.

  At the table, there was an embarassed silence. Finally, Rosetta said to the blasphemers, “Fellow on the phone said to come quick. Wardell Dubarry’s painting his house.”

  By the time they got there -- all riding in Cicero’s police cruiser -- Wardell Dubarry was well along. It was a bright red, a shade that reminded Trout of Chinese New Year decorations. Wardell had already covered a good bit of one side of the house and he was up on a ladder now at the peak of the roof, brush in hand, paint bucket hanging from the top rung. A middling crowd had gathered on the other side of the street. There’s all kinds of wrecks, Trout thought.

  icero eased the police car to the edge of the street next to Wardell’s house, and Alma was out of the car and up the yard before he could get the engine turned off. She stood there below the ladder for a moment, watching Wardell, while the others got out of the car and followed her. Wardell didn’t seem to notice a thing. A portable radio, sitting in an open window below the ladder, was playing country music. Merle Haggard. I’m proud to be an Okie from Muscogee! Trout looked around for Keats. She was nowhere in sight. Probably working the afternoon shift at Dairy Queen. Did she know what was going on here? Did she care? Probably. Tweaking the noses of the Moseleys. She would get her jollies from something like that. Keats seemed to have a serious burr under her saddle about the Moseleys.

  Apparently, so did her father. Wardell was having a grand time up there on the ladder, spreading on the red paint with sweeping flourishes of his brush. He didn’t look down, just kept with the work.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Alma demanded.

  Wardell looked down and gave her an arch look. She could see what he was doing, couldn’t she? Wardell went back to painting.

  So Alma told him what he was doing. “You are painting my house.”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I am. Painting the house,” Wardell said.

  Alma turned to Cicero. “Arrest him,” Alma said.

  Cicero looked pretty uncomfortable. He hitched his gun belt. Then he hitched his britches. Trout imagined that Cicero’s underwear was probably creeping up the crack of his butt like ivy. “Hon’, I can’t do that,” Cicero said in a low voice.

  “What do you mean, you can’t do that?”

  “This,” he took in the neighborhood with a sweep of his hand, “is outside the police jurisdiction.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Alma said.

  “Well, that’s what you Moseleys wanted.”

  “No, it’s ridiculous that you won’t arrest a man who’s breaking the law.”

  “Which law?” Wardell asked from the top of the ladder.

  “Damage to property,” she answered.

  Trout wanted to be helpful if he could. “You could take down the ladder, like Miz Estelle Collier did with the flim-flam man,” he said to Uncle Cicero.

  “But Wardell’s on the ladder,” Cicero said. “The flim-flam man was up on the roof.”

  Trout nodded. “Yes sir. I can see that.”

  Wardell added a few more brush strokes while they all watched, at a loss. Merle Haggard sang on: …we don’t smoke marijuana in Muscogee… Aunt Alma finally spoke up again. “Wardell, I’m going to tell you one last time. Stop painting my house and come down off that ladd
er. If you don’t, you are fired. And you’ll be out of this house by sundown if I have to put you in the street myself.” She speared Cicero with a wicked look. “And given the level of support I’m getting, I may well have to do it myself.”

  Wardell paused in mid-stroke, then looked down at Alma. “I’m just doing what Joe Pike told me to do,” he said.

  “Hey,” Joe Pike said, holding up his hands. “Leave me out of this.”

  “Joe Pike stood right yonder,” Wardell said, pointing with his brush at the front yard, dripping red paint, “and said, ‘Paint it red if you want to. I don’t care.’ Young Trout there was standing on the porch. He heard it.”

  There was a long silence while Alma stared at Joe Pike. “Yeah,” he said finally with a shrug of his shoulders. “I did say that. But I didn’t mean paint the house.” He looked at Trout for confirmation.

  “That wasn’t the way you said it,” Trout agreed. “You didn’t say paint the house. You said…”

  “Paint the house,” Wardell filled in for them. “And I took it to mean paint the house. You’re a Moseley, ain’t you? And the Moseleys own the house, don’t you? And you said paint the house.” Wardell went back to his painting.

  Trout looked at Alma, Joe Pike, Cicero. They all looked a bit dazed and slack-jawed, victims of collision with a man with a bucket of paint who wasn’t even paying them any attention any more.

  Alma took one more step forward and gripped a rung of the ladder about a yard below Wardell’s feet.

  Wardell never looked down. “Take your damn hand off my ladder, Alma,” he said. “It may be your house, but it’s by God my ladder.” He kept painting.

  And then Joe Pike stepped forward, put his hand on the ladder just next to Alma’s. He looked up at Wardell, and when he spoke, his voice sounded like barbed wire. “Wardell,” he said carefully, “that will be enough of that. If you can’t speak to my sister with a civil tongue, I’ll come up there and haul your ass off that ladder myself.”

  Wardell’s brush stopped in mid-stroke. Nobody moved. Nobody looked at anybody else. Nobody spoke. For once, Uncle Cicero seemed not to have the gift of words to grease the skids. It was as if they were frozen in tableau, not one of them having the foggiest notion how to extricate themselves from the situation.

  Finally, Wardell said, “I reckon you won’t have to do that, Joe Pike.” He didn’t sound like he really meant it, but he said it anyway.

  Joe Pike wasn’t finished. “I did say paint the house, however you took it. But I have changed my mind. So stop painting the house.”

  Wardell shrugged and laid the brush along the top of the paint can, then stood there unmoving on the ladder.

  It was Alma who finally moved. She slowly took her hand off the ladder, then turned and walked very deliberately back to Uncle Cicero’s police cruiser. She got in, cranked it up, and drove away. Trout thought she carried it off quite well. The rest of them walked home.

  * * * * *

  Uncle Phinizy was reading Aeschylus, an old leather-bound volume with yellowed pages. He had found it, he said, in an antiquarian bookshop in Washington -- had probably paid too much for it, but with Aeschylus, you wanted the heft of old leather in your hand.

  Trout wasn’t much interested in Aeschylus. He had come again in the middle of the night seeking answers, and Phinizy didn’t seem at all surprised to see him. The door was open, only the screen keeping out the night. Bluish cigarette haze hung just below the ceiling and drifted upward through the shade of the lamp beside Phinizy’s chair.

  “The usual?” Phinizy asked when he had turned down the page of his book and placed it on the table at his elbow.

  “I don’t want anything,” Trout said from the sofa.

  “Well, you sure look like you want something.”

  Trout thought for a moment. “Why are they like that?”

  Phinizy lit another cigarette from the one burning low in the ash tray, stubbed out the old one and took a drag on the new. “Did Joe Pike tell you what I did for a living?”

  “No,” Trout answered, remembering that Phinizy rarely spoke to anything directly. He was oblique. A riddler. It was aggravating, but if you wanted anything from him, you had to put up with the aggravation. He might eventually come to the point. Or he might not.

  “I was a spy.”

  “What? You mean the Russians?”

  “Among others.”

  “Gee.”

  “Oh,” Phinizy said with a dismissing wave of his hand, “nothing glamorous. No parachutes, no submarines at midnight, at least not after the Big War. Most of the time I just read a lot.”

  “Read?”

  “Spent most of my time in a cubbyhole reading newspapers, periodicals, things like that. Amazing what you can learn about people who don’t want you to know anything about them, just by reading what they write. Not that they come right out and tell you in so many words. You pick up a piece here, a piece there, and before you know it you’ve got enough of the puzzle to tell what the whole thing looks like.”

  “You know Russian?”

  “Like it was my mother tongue,” Phinizy said.

  Trout marveled at that for a moment, then let it go. Interesting, but not at all what he was after. He was bone-tired, head aching from all the space junk spinning wildly inside it, bouncing off one nerve ending and colliding with another. Phinizy was still being oblique. He appeared to tell you something, but he really didn’t.

  “You don’t ever say anything,” Trout accused.

  “Who am I to say?” Phinizy shot back.

  “A piece here, a piece there. How am I supposed to figure it out? I don’t even know what I’m looking for.” He stood up to go, disgusted. “You just want to stand around and watch the wreck. It’s your entertainment. You’re weird, Uncle Phinizy.”

  He was halfway down the steps when Phinizy opened the screen. “Trout.” Trout stopped, but he didn’t look back. Phinizy was seized by a fit of coughing, and Trout waited until he had finished. Then, “I’ll come with you. I need some fresh air.”

  They walked through the downtown together, past the row of vacant storefronts, the Koffee Kup Kafe, the open lot where the furniture and appliance store had been, the feed-and-seed, Uncle Cicero’s hardware.

  Phinizy ticked off the names of now-departed businesses, ghosts from his youth: Grover’s Sundries, where you could get a scoop of homemade ice cream for a nickel on a hot summer afternoon and savor it at a small round oak table beneath a paddle fan (in the back, behind a high counter, Dexter Grover dispensed condoms along with prescriptions, but children weren’t supposed to know that); the Freewill Cafe, operated by a jackleg Pentecostal minister who dispensed Scripture with the stew and preached a sermon every afternoon from the sidewalk out front to whatever collection of human beings and stray animals was inclined to gather; The Moseley Messenger, a thin excuse of a newspaper that died from lack of advertising and interest; and Bob’s Barber Shop, the main attraction of which was a lively penny-a-point pinochle game in the back room.

  The town seemed to exist in Phinizy’s memory as a vivid fixed point from which the rest of his life proceeded. He, who had lived so long away from it, was a walking compendium of Moseley’s history -- not just the major occurrences, but the trivia of everyday human commerce that made the place real.

  “I loved this place,” he said as they passed the last of the empty storefronts and crossed the street. “It was a good place for a boy to grow up.”

  “Why did you leave?” Trout asked.

  “I grew up,” Phinizy said. And then, “There was an unpleasantness.”

  “What?”

  “Leland and I had different ideas about things. After our father died, Leland wanted the town to be a shrine to Broadus Moseley.”

  “And you wanted…”

  “To let it breathe.”

  “So you left.”

  “Ran away, I suppose you could say if you wanted to be uncharitable about it.”

  They reached the
other side of the street and started back in the direction they had come, back toward Broadus Moseley’s end of town, past City Hall and the police department, the grocery store and the Welfare office. Everything was dark except for a bare bulb dangling from the ceiling at the rear of the tiny police station. There was a padlock on the door. Law enforcement in Moseley went dormant at dark. A lone car with a sizeable hole in the muffler rumbled along the street behind them, eased to a stop as the traffic light in front of City Hall turned red, sat there growling in idle for the minute it took the light to turn green, then moved on. Trout stopped, stood at the edge of the sidewalk staring at the traffic light, the street. There was no intersection here.

  He turned to Phinizy. “There’s no intersection.”

  “No.”

  “Why have a traffic light when there’s no intersection?”

  Phinizy smiled. “To stop traffic. Back in the fifties, Leland got powerfully exercised about traffic speeding through town. So he had the light put up. As you see, it stops traffic.”

  “But there isn’t any traffic.”

  ” I-20 took care of that.”

  “Then why don’t they take the light down?”

  Phinizy didn’t answer. He turned and headed down the sidewalk and Trout followed, glancing back at the traffic light. Green. Yellow. Red. Since the fifties. Everything about the place was like being stuck in a time warp -- not just the traffic light, but everything. Including people’s lives. Including his own. He half expected a carload of teenagers out of an old black-and-white movie to round the corner -- ducktail haircuts, bobby sox, pedal pushers, oldies on the radio. He was beginning to feel like one of them, suddenly thrust backward into a strange and distant time. And held there against his will.

  They stopped at Broadus Moseley Park. Phinizy was badly winded by now, though they hadn’t walked all that far or the least bit fast. They hunkered in silence for a long time on the steps of the bandshell while Phinizy got his breath back. His face looked ghastly in the dim light that filtered through the trees from the lamp out on the street. The night was sultry and close around them, an army of crickets sending coded messages across the grass of the park riddleit-riddleit. After awhile, Phinizy fished a cigarette out of the crumpled pack in his shirt pocket, lit it, sucked noisily.