by Robert Inman
“Keep trying,” Keats said.
“What?”
“Being pissed off. It takes practice. Like anything worth doing.”
EIGHT
When he parked the motorcycle in the shed behind the parsonage, he heard music coming from the church education building next door. Loud boogie music. Fats Domino. Hello Josephine…how do you do…
He opened the door of the assembly room and peered in. Joe Pike, wearing ancient plaid bermuda shorts, a faded green knit shirt and jogging shoes. Grace Vredemeyer in pedal pushers and a loose-fitting upper garment, half-shirt and half-vest that wrapped around her busom from both sides and tied in the back. Say, hey Josephine… They faced each other, about ten yards apart, and they were doing jumping jacks. Trout remembered. Jumping for Jesus. The music thundered from Trout’s boom box, set up on a table at one side of the room. All the folding chairs that usually filled the room had been stacked against a wall, leaving the expanse of linoleum floor clear for Jumpers. But it was just the two of them. Joe Pike was sweating profusely despite the air conditioning: hair matted against his skull, armpits and shirt front dark green, arms flailing the air, legs hopping out…back…out…back, belly bouncing up and down. Grace Vredemeyer was doing a pale, dainty imitation of Joe Pike’s movements, like somebody making angels in snow. She sweated not at all; her hair and makeup were perfectly in place and undisturbed. Her breasts bounced a little under her upper garment, but it was like small animals burrowing furtively. She gave Trout a tiny wave without breaking stride. “Come join us,” she called out.
Trout waved back, took a folding chair from a stack near the door, opened it and sat down to watch for a moment until Fats Domino got through with them.
Jumping for Jesus. He hadn’t given it much thought when Joe Pike had announced it from the pulpit last Sunday. Maybe he didn’t think Joe Pike was really serious. He had never done anything remotely resembling it anywhere they had lived before. He was the sort of preacher who would golf with members of the congregation, have uproarious fun at an Easter Egg hunt, dress in drag and dance in a chorus line at the Lions Club Follies. But church, to his way of thinking, had always been for, well, going to church. He hadn’t had much truck with Boy Scout troops and sewing circles and literary societies, not in the church buildings. But now, everything was out of kilter. Elvis Presley in the pulpit and Fats Domino in the education building. And Joe Pike himself didn’t seem to be having much fun with any of it. Look at him now: mouth set in a grim line, brow furrowed in concentration, arms and legs and belly shattering big chunks of air. Josephine, Josephine…
It troubled Trout on several counts. For one thing, it had the smell of another Dairy Queen Phase coming to an end, the beginning of salad days, body at war with itself. The little man trapped inside the big man, whoever he was, trying to claw his way to the surface. No, he didn’t like it one little bit. And he liked this Grace Vredemeyer business even less. That had a smell to it, too, but nothing he dared try to put a name to. Not yet.
The music ended. Joe Pike gave out a big whooosh of air, arms collapsing at his side. “Lordy! That’s too much like work!” He pushed the stop button on the boom box before Fats Domino could crank up again. Trout knew the tape by heart. It was one of Joe Pike’s favorites. The next song was “Blue Monday.” Only this was Wednesday.
“Jumping for Jesus,” Joe Pike said to Trout.
“Uh-huh.”
“Thought we’d have more of a crowd. But you’ve got to start somewhere,” Joe Pike answered. “Folks hear about it, they’ll come.”
“We’ll spread the word,” Grace said. She did a couple of dainty torso rotations, keeping her eye on Trout. “Have you been exercising, Trout?” she asked.
“No ma’am.”
“Your face is red.”
“Oh. Yes ma’am. I reckon it is. I’ve been…” What to tell? What would Grace Vredemeyer even remotely understand about his day? Better still, would Grace Vredemeyer do the Christian thing and go away so he could talk about it with his father? He had a lot of questions. “I’ve been lifeguarding at the pool.”
Grace gave him a blank look. It was another thing Moseley didn’t have. A swimming pool.
“They needed a substitute. Just for the day,” he said.
Joe Pike wasn’t paying any attention. He was fumbling with the boom box, putting in another tape. He turned back to Grace. “Some alternate toe touches?”
“Sure,” she said. She stood there bouncing lightly from one foot to the other.
Trout started for the door. He didn’t want to see any more of this. He was exhausted and his sunburn and his raw hands were beginning to sting again. He needed. What? A big vat of vanilla pudding. Naked.
“Your Aunt Alma wants to see you,” Joe Pike said.
“What about?”
“Ask her.”
“Now? I’m really tired. I thought I’d take a nap.” Trout could hear the irritation in his voice and he didn’t care.
“She’s waiting for you. Get cleaned up first. She said she’d be at the mill until five-thirty.”
Trout turned to go. He stopped, hand on the door knob. “What’s for supper?”
“Thought I’d fix us a salad,” Joe Pike said.
“I thought so.”
By the time he reached the parsonage, the boom box was thumping away again. The BeeGees now. Stayin’ alive…stayin’ alive…
There was only a scattering of cars in the parking lot when Trout got to the mill. Second shift, he remembered, the one Wardell Dubarry worked. Trout imagined him now inside, tending looms and cussing the Moseleys. Alma’s car was parked in front of the one-story office annex. It was her everyday car, a late-model gray Buick. Trout hadn’t seen the old Packard in use since the day he arrived, the day she had brought him here and told him that one day, all this would be his. He stood beside the motorcycle for a moment, looking at the mill building: dull red brick, tall windows so sun-mottled they looked like stained glass with the late afternoon light hitting them just so. Like a church, he thought. Aunt Alma’s two churches: this one and the one where they were Jumping For Jesus. Both had operated at full steam at one time, so Phinizy said. Now, both reduced – two shifts, one service. What happened?
The door to the office annex was open. Trout stuck his head in, looked around, didn’t see anybody. It was after five, the office staff gone for the day, their tiny cubicles with the wavy-glass partitions empty, desktops bare. Back in the mill area, he could hear the steady hum of machinery. He called out: “Aunt Alma?”
“Back here.”
She was at the mahogany desk in her office, a big green-sheeted ledger spread open in front of her. “Be just a minute,” she said, waving him into a chair. He sat, hunched a little forward. He had showered gingerly, found a tube of first aid ointment and smeared it on the places he could reach, then dressed in short-sleeved cotton shirt and khaki pants. If he didn’t do too much moving around inside the shirt, it was bearable. He waited, trying to be still and quiet.
Aunt Alma looked up at him and frowned. “Do you have hemorrhoids?”
“What? Oh, no ma’am. I just got a little sunburned.”
“It runs in the family.”
“Sunburn?”
“Hemorrhoids. All the Moseley men have them.”
“Well, I never have, ah, had the problem.”
“Your father had a terrible case when he was a teenager. Football aggravated his hemorrhoids.”
“Maybe that’s why he fell down,” Trout said. Could you trip over a hemorrhoid?
Aunt Alma gave him an odd look and went back to her ledger. She consulted a pile of papers at her elbow, made entries in the book with a pencil, flipping pieces of paper as she went. “I’m almost finished,” she said after awhile.
“No hurry,” Trout said. And waited some more.
She reached the bottom of the stack of papers, put them aside, then started to work with an old crank-handled adding machine -- the index finger of her left hand movi
ng down a column of figures on the ledger, the right hand jabbing keys, hauling on the crank. The paper tape curled out of the top of the machine, longer and longer, almost reaching the floor. Alma was very deft. She never took her eyes off the column of figures until she had finished and given the adding machine handle a final pull. She squinted at the last figure on the tape and sat there for a long moment staring at it. She closed her eyes, opened them, looked again. Her lips moved silently. She ripped off the tape and started wadding it up until the long streamer of paper was just a small hard ball. She dropped it into a waste basket at the side of the desk. Then she looked up at Trout, her eyes narrowed, and she broke into a perfectly hideous grin. “Now. How’s it going?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“I heard about your tennis tournament. That’s too bad. I know you’re disappointed.”
“I played pretty badly,” he said with a shrug. “I have this problem with my backhand.”
She gave him a blank look. “I never played tennis.”
“You know,” he demonstrated, wincing a little when the fabric of his shirt scraped across his back, “when you reach across your body to hit the ball. Backhanded. I don’t do it very well.”
“I see,” she said.
“I have a pretty good serve,” Trout went on. For some reason, it seemed important to explain this to Aunt Alma, who had grown up in a town where tennis was considered frivolous. Moseley could have used a little tennis, he thought. Or maybe a drug culture. “In fact, my serve has been referred to as ‘wicked.’ Like a rocket. WHOOSH!” He made a rocket gesture with his hand, sending a ball screaming across Aunt Alma’s desk. She flinched a little. “Usually, I can groove the sucker in there and knock the other guy back on his heels and never even have to bother with my backhand. I get a lot of aces.”
“Aces?”
“Yes ma’am. That’s where your opponent can’t return your serve. But this kid from Augusta, he was returning my serve. Every time. To my backhand. I had one ace the whole dad-burned match, Aunt Alma.” Trout shook his head, remembering. “It was horrible. I feel like I let the family down. The whole town, in fact.”
She shook her head, sympathetic. “It was just a tennis match, Trout.”
“The State Juniors.”
“Well, it’s not the end of the world.”
Trout stared at the floor. “I guess not.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “Since I don’t play, I suppose I can’t fully appreciate what it means to you.”
Trout looked up. “You could learn, Aunt Alma. I could teach you to play tennis. Everything,” he shrugged, “but the backhand, I guess.”
“Oh no,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “At my age?”
“I had a friend in Ohatchee, his grandfather learned to water ski when he was sixty. You’re not that old.”
Aunt Alma smiled. “Not quite.”
Trout imagined Aunt Alma on the tennis court, maybe at the club in Augusta, dressed in a little white tennis skirt with her hair tied back. She had decent legs, what you could see of them. A little hippy, but that was from sitting here at the desk too much. She’d be stiff at first, but once she got the hang of it, she might play decently enough to enjoy the game. If she did, maybe she would build a tennis court. It would be a good way to get to know her better, teaching her to play tennis. If she’d just loosen up a little…
“I always wanted to go to Wimbledon,” she said. “Not to play, just to watch. No, not even to watch so much as to just be there. It has a nice ring to it. Wimbledon. Very British, don’t you think? The best people, on their best behavior. Some nice parties, I imagine.”
“Well, why don’t you go?”
Aunt Alma stared at him for a moment, then something wistful crossed her face, a pale version of the sadness he had seen in her unguarded moment in church. She looked away. “Maybe I should have,” she said quietly. “But now? No, I don’t imagine so.”
Then Aunt Alma closed her ledger book with a bang, suddenly all business. “Enough about tennis. You’ve got the rest of your life to think about, Trout, and it’s time you started learning.”
“About what?” Trout squirmed in his chair. It sounded ominously permanent: the rest of your life.
“I’m going to start you off in shipping and receiving. It’s hard work and it’s not very glamorous, but it’s a good point of view. Raw cotton comes in, white goods go out. A few weeks of that, then some time in the spinning and weaving operations. After school starts in the Fall, you can work in the office. I want you to know the business top to bottom.”
Trout felt his mouth drop open. Here? The mill? It was something he might have to think about a zillion years from now when Aunt Alma was dead from extreme old age and he and Eugene were the only ones left. And then they would hire somebody to run it and send checks every month. But now? Work here in this ancient beast of a building with all that machinery rumbling and growling, waiting to snatch you by the sleeve and chew you to a bloody pulp? He didn’t even know how a pencil sharpener worked and didn’t want to. He would screw something up horribly and the mill would explode and white stuff would float to earth for days. HEADLINE: BOY PUSHES WRONG BUTTON. Joe Pike should be here. He should be the one running looms and shipping and receiving, maybe even running the whole mill – especially since he didn’t seem to know why he had become a preacher. Instead, here was Trout, who had his mother’s innate distrust -- nay, outright fear -- of all things mechanical, contemplating a career in textiles.
“Be here at eight,” Aunt Alma said. “Cooley Hargrove is the shipping manager. He’ll be expecting you. Now go home and get a good night’s sleep. And for goodness sake, get something for those hemmorhoids.”
He was on the way home, stopped at the traffic light in the middle of town when he heard Uncle Cicero hail him: “Trout! Yo, Trout!” Cicero was standing in the doorway of the hardware store, looking very snappy in his uniform and cap, gunbelt circling his waist. “Need to talk to you, Trout.”
Trout didn’t much want to talk to Uncle Cicero just now. His back and shoulders were stinging again and he wanted to glop on some more ointment. But there didn’t seem to be much of a way out of it. So he pulled over, parked the motorcycle at the curb and followed Cicero into the store. It was a cavernous, high-ceilinged place, a single big room with shelves rising behind display cases along the walls, aisles lined with bins and more shelves, all filled with tools, nuts and bolts and nails, cans and cartons. Facing the front plate glass window, a soldierly row of lawnmowers and garden tillers. Hanging from one pegboarded stretch of wall, weedeaters and chain saws. From another, brooms and mops. Still another, shovels and rakes and hoes. Along the back wall, sacks of mortar mix, rolls of fence wire, cases of motor oil, cans of paint. Near the front door, a long counter with a cash register and a big roll of brown kraft wrapping paper. It was well-lit with low-hanging flourescent fixtures, everything very orderly and neat, a rich stew of smells -- leather and metal, wood and solvent. And color. Orange weed trimmers, green lawnmowers, oak-handled sledgehammers, bright red gasoline cans, even the grays and silvers and blacks of tools. Amazing how colorful hardware could be when you put it all together. Merchandise as decor.
Trout stood just inside the door, taking it all in, while Uncle Cicero leaned against the counter, arms crossed, cap tilted back on his head, lips pursed, watching. It struck Trout that Cicero didn’t look at all like a policeman in a hardware store. He looked like a hardware man dressed in a policeman’s uniform. The place fit him like a glove. He was perfectly at home here. “Gee,” Trout said. “It’s a lot of stuff.”
“I know where every item is, down to the last cotter pin,” Cicero said. “Fellow comes in, wants a half-pound of ten-penny galvanized nails, I take him right to ‘em.” Cicero pointed down one of the aisles where metal bins held a jumble of nails. “Another fellow comes in, says he needs a lawnmower. How much of a lawnmower? He doesn’t know, just enough to cut the grass. How big’s the lawn? Oh about yea
-by-yea,” Cicero made a lawn with his hands. “What kind of grass you got? Bermuda in the front, St. Augustine in the back. How often you cut it? Once a week.” Cicero walked over to one of the lawnmowers, patted the silver handle. “Okay, what you need is your Lawn Boy Model L-250. Briggs and Stratton two-point-five horse engine, made in the good old U.S.A. Twenty-two inch cut, self-propelled. On special this month for two ninety-five.” Cicero knelt next to the Lawn Boy and pointed to the wheel height adjustment. “For the bermuda in front, set ’er at one inch. You gotta show that bermuda who’s boss. For the St. Augustine, pop ’er up to two inches. Cut St. Augustine too close, you’ll damage it. And keep the blade sharpened.” He stood, gave Trout a direct look. “In the hardware bidness, you don’t sell stuff to folks, you help ’em decide what to buy. And then you tell ’em how to use it. Now,” he stuck his finger in the air, “if the fellow says he’s got two acres of zoysia sloping back to front with a stand of pine trees, I tell him to go to Augusta and get him a riding mower. You don’t sell a fellow something he can’t use, ’cause he’ll be back in a week raising hell and you done lost a customer. Got that?”
“Yes sir.”
“You come just in the nick of time, Trout?”
“What for?”
Cicero tucked his thumbs in his gun belt. “I’m expanding.”
“Oh,” Trout said, looking around the store. “Where?”
“I’ve bought out Ezell.” Cicero walked past him, out the front door and onto the sidewalk. Trout stood there, not sure what to do, and then Cicero motioned for him to come out. He stood next to Cicero on the sidewalk and followed his gaze to the feed, seed and fertilizer store next door.