Dairy Queen Days

by Robert Inman

  Fifteen minutes, they had told Trout at the front desk, and that only because he was a blood relative. He pulled up a chair next to the bed and sat watching Phinizy, noticing after awhile the almost imperceptible rise and fall of his chest under the sheet, so little air being taken in and exhaled that Trout wondered that it could sustain life. The only sound, a tiny wheezing in his throat. A bedside cart stand held an oxygen bottle and mask, but Phinizy was apparently in no need of it at the moment.

  Then all of a sudden Phinizy said in a raspy but perfectly clear voice, “The sonsabitches took my cigarettes and my pants and they won’t bring me any whiskey.” Nothing moved but his lips. Then his eyes fluttered open and he cut a glance at Trout. “What are you gonna do about it?”

  “Me?”

  Phinizy made a little farting sound with his mouth.

  “I just came over here to see how you were doing,” Trout said.

  “Well, I’m just damn near dead. And I want to die in Moseley, not Thomson. I ain’t got a thing against Thomson, but at least in Moseley I can smoke cigarettes and drink whiskey and wear my own pants.”

  Trout didn’t know whether to believe him or not. Dying? From the look of him, that might well be the case. And if it were, Trout knew that it would make him indescribably sad.

  “You look a mite taken aback,” Phinizy said.

  “Are you really…”

  “Yes,” Phinizy said, and there wasn’t an ounce of self-pity to it. “They took out one lung five years ago and now the other one is as rotten as a month-old watermelon.”

  “I’m sorry,” Trout said.

  “Well, I’m not. Only thing I regret is, I ain’t gonna be around to see how it turns out. I’ll just have to use my imagination.”

  The door opened and a young nurse stuck her head in. “Time’s up,” she said. “Mr. Moseley needs to get some rest.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  The door closed and Trout got up and moved the chair back against the wall.

  “Well?” Phinizy asked. “Are you gonna take me home?”

  “Uncle Phin, I can’t do that,” Trout protested. “I’ll go get Uncle Cicero or Aunt Alma.” He didn’t think it necessary to go into the business about Joe Pike.

  “Cicero and Alma are the ones who put me in here.”

  “Wouldn’t the doctors raise hell…”

  “Screw ‘em,” Phinizy interrupted. “There’s not a damn thing wrong with me except that I’m dying, and I’ve been doing that for months. It could take me several months more. Those assholes just want to watch.”

  Trout thought of Phinizy as he had most usually seen him -- nestled deep in the recliner with glass in hand, smoke curling about his head and disappearing into the pool of light from the reading lamp, holding court with the latest footsore pilgrim who wandered in. The place, for all its scruffiness, fit Phinizy. This place, this plastered and tiled sterility with its hospital smells and mutterings, it was no place to die.

  But what to do?

  “Go get your mother,” Phinizy said. “She’ll get me out of here.”

  “Mother?”

  “She’s the only one of the whole goddamned bunch that’s got any sense.”

  “But she’s…” What the hell is going on here? All these people suddenly invoking the name of my mother. Have they forgotten? Are they just trying to be nasty?

  “Either get Irene or get me out of here yourself. I’m going home. It’s your responsibility.”

  “What if the doctors won’t let you leave?”

  “Who the hell’s gonna ask ‘em. I’ll just walk out. Go get the car. I’ll meet you in the parking lot.”

  “I didn’t come in the car,” he said.

  They had almost reached Moseley, taking the back way on two-lane roads, when the state trooper stopped them. Trout pulled the motorcycle over to the grassy shoulder next to a thick stand of pine trees. He left the engine running and balanced the motorcycle with both feet on the ground. Not that Phinizy weighed all that much. Not even as much as Keats. The trooper got out of his cruiser and left the blue lights on top flashing and put on his Smokey Bear hat and walked up to the motorcycle. He was about thirty, Trout guessed, lean and crewcut, creases sharp, leather and brass polished, the hat tilted forward on his head so that it shaded his eyes. A pair of sunglasses hung from one shirt pocket. Above the other was a small brass nameplate: SPENCER. He stopped a couple of yards from the motorcycle, studied things for awhile, then walked all the way around and ended up back where he started. Finally he asked, “What in the hell is going on here?”

  “I am an escapee from the Augusta Center for the Criminally Insane and Terminally Wealthy,” Phinizy rasped. “I have commandeered this vehicle and have wired powerful explosives just under the gas tank. One false move, officer…” he peered at the nametag… “Spencer, and I will blow all of us into the afterlife.”

  “He’s just kidding,” Trout said quickly.

  “Try me,” Phinizy snapped.

  “Really,” Trout rushed on, “he’s my uncle. Well, my great uncle. And he’s been in the hospital over at Thomson and he’s only got one lung and I’m taking him home to Moseley. There’s no explosives or anything. Honest.”

  Officer Spencer didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally, he reached out his hand, rubbed his thumb and two fingers together. “Your license.”

  Trout gave it over.

  “What are you doing all the way up here?” Officer Spencer asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The address on here is Ohatchee.”

  “He’s a runaway,” Phinizy said.

  “Dammit, Uncle Phin!” Trout exploded, turning with a jerk and almost toppling the motorcycle. “Will you just shut up?” Phinizy gave a little shrug. Then Trout said to Officer Spencer, “We just moved to Moseley about three weeks ago.”

  “We?”

  “Me and my father. He’s a Methodist minister.”

  Officer Spencer studied the driver’s license for awhile, making small movements with his lips as he read. Then he nodded. “That one.”

  “Yes sir.” He waited, but Officer Spencer didn’t say anything else. “Can we go now? I need to get my uncle on home.”

  Officer Spencer gave Phinizy a careful looking-over. “His butt’s showing.”

  That was, indeed, the case. They had sneaked out, miraculously avoiding nurses and doctors, and Phinizy still wore only the light green hospital gown. Nothing underneath and a fairly wide swath of skin showing down the back. On a younger person, it might have been obscene.

  “You can’t ride around the state of Georgia like that,” Officer Spencer said.

  “What if I just take the whole thing off?” Phinizy asked.

  “No sir.” Then to Trout, “You’ll have to cover his butt.”

  nd so it was that Trout rode into Moseley bare-chested and Phinizy had Trout’s tee-shirt strategically placed at the rear of the hospital gown.

  He pulled into the driveway of Aunt Alma’s house and kept going to the foot of the stairs above the garage apartment. Then he helped Phinizy up the steps and into some clothes and on to the recliner. He fetched cigarettes and whiskey and Volume Three of Shelby Foote’s history of the Civil War. Phinizy seemed tired but satisfied. “Now go away for awhile,” Phinizy said.

  “Can you get up and down if you need to?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m going to tell Uncle Cicero,” Trout said, “I don’t care whether you like that or not.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Phinizy said. “Thank you for everything, Trout. You are a rather uncommon young man. You just don’t know it yet. Come back later and we’ll talk.”

  * * * * *

  The rest of the week, to Trout’s great surprise and relief, passed without ruckus.

  Trout stopped by Phinizy’s apartment several times a day, bringing meals from the Koffee Kup Kafe and checking on his condition, expecting each time to open the screen door and find him peacefully departed in his c
hair with a half-drunk glass of whiskey beside him and a cold cigarette stub between his fingers. But Phinizy seemed his old self -- wry, grumpy, curious. His appetite was good, his relish for tobacco and alcohol undiminished. Trout suggested that perhaps Aunt Alma would be happy to hire a woman to come in occasionally and handle domestic duties. Phinizy wouldn’t hear of it. “If I wanted a woman, I’m perfectly capable of hiring one myself. But I don’t. I have had singular lack of success with women all my life,” he said. “I don’t need to spoil the record now. I am completely comfortable with male orneriness and dissipation.” He sent Trout to the library with a list of books, and Trout returned with the only one available, a thin volume of Robert Frost poetry. And miles to go before I sleep… They spoke no more of death.

  Nothing more was said from either side about the union movement at Moseley Mill. Aunt Alma was silent on the subject, and from what Trout could tell, there was no particular agitation among the work force. Everyone seemed to be waiting on that score. Alma threw herself into cleaning up the house. A construction crew arrived to repair the fire damage in the kitchen. A professional cleaning crew came from Augusta and began to scrub walls and floors and carry off piles of clothing and linens to be drycleaned. Alma dogged their every step, making sure they handled the furniture and fixtures with care. She wanted everything back in its place exactly as before. Her greatest anguish was the draperies. They were simply rotten with age and came apart when the cleaners took them down. Alma sped off to Savannah with salvaged scraps of cloth, bent on finding exact replicas, or at least a close approximation. The house was a fixation. Nothing must change.

  Alma made no more mention of Rosetta, but Cicero remarked that he had inquired at her house, hoping to learn more about the origin of the fire, only to find that she was visiting a sister in Detroit.

  What Cicero did clear up was the mystery of the skeleton in the vacant lot. Dental records identified the remains as that of a wanderer from Birmingham, reported missing by his family several years earlier. As best the state crime lab technicians could determine, the man had somehow reached Moseley on a cold winter night, broken into the rear of the furniture store seeking a warm place to sleep, and had managed to start the fire. When the building collapsed, the body had been buried under the rubble. The intial investigation had blamed faulty wiring, so no one had imagined a human being was involved. Until now, when Cicero Moseley started digging up the past. Channel Five Eyewitness News reported the new developments, but they did not send a crew back to Moseley. They simply replayed earlier pictures of the crime lab technicians bagging the bones. Moseley’s brush with notoriety had passed.

  Joe Pike remained in the tiny cell at the rear of the police station. Trout visited daily, but Joe Pike seemed distant and preoccupied. By the end of the week, he was nearly to the end of the traffic signs on the poster, and the more he thought about, the deeper into himself he seemed to slip. Mayor Fleet Mathis came to call, gently suggesting that perhaps Joe Pike was needed elsewhere in the community. Joe Pike demurred. The preacher from the Pentacostal Holiness church also showed up and spent several hours in prayer and meditation with Joe Pike. At the end, he seemed inclined to join Joe Pike on a more or less permanent basis, but Cicero hustled him out, reminding him that he had another job as night watchman at a poultry processing plant in Warrenton and a family to feed. Cicero brought Joe Pike three meals a day from the Koffee Kup Kafe. Dinner and supper included sweet potato pie. Cicero was keeping a tab, he said, and would present Joe Pike with a bill when and if he finally decided to give up his meditation and go home. The city would not pay to feed a man who wasn’t supposed to be in jail.

  Trout worked and rested. At the Dairy Queen, he settled into a routine, comfortable and proficient now with preparing any item on the menu. Herschel pronounced him satisfactory, ended his probationary period, and gave him a twenty-five-cent-an-hour raise.

  With Keats, what had begun as a sort of truce passed at some point into something a bit more. They talked, stepping nimbly around the subject of their families and the nasty potential for conflict lurking in the background. Instead, they talked as teenagers -- about music (“You like all that old stuff,” she teased. “The Platters. Yuck. They’re about as exciting as an organ recital.”), movies (She had been to Augusta once to see a Zefrelli film and pronounced it high art. His all-time favorite was an old black-and-white with Van Johnson and June Allyson, which turned up occasionally on TV.), dreams (Portents, she said. Entertainment, he countered.) and zits. The latter was the only thing they agreed on, but that was okay. Trout found himself lowering his guard, hungering for some normalcy. And so did she. There was no more physical contact, but he could still feel her cool touch on his hand. At night, in the silent dark of his room, he imagined more. In his fantasies, she was strong and unfettered, without limitation. Facing her at work, remembering, he stammered and blushed. There would, of course, be nothing more to it. They were too different in temperament, too bound by circumstance. She could still make him mad as hell.

  He had the parsonage blessedly to himself. He ate mostly at the Dairy Queen, making do with orange juice and Fruit Loops at breakfast. Nobody came to call. The community, particularly the Moseley Methodist congregation, seemed to regard the situation with the same kind of awed fascination as had the good folk in Ohatchee when Joe Pike replaced his wife with a motorcycle. Another wreck here, obviously not finished. You wouldn’t want to get too close for fear of being struck by flying angst. So they stayed away.

  Trout fell into the habit of peeling off all his clothes the minute he stepped in the door (though he always took them to the dirty clothes hamper), remaining bare until it was time to leave the house again, except at night when he would sit naked on the back steps for an hour or so, letting the summer air bathe and soothe him. As he sat there on Friday night, thinking about nothing in particular, it began to rain. But it was a warm, soft rain and he didn’t move until it had passed.

  He kept the parsonage neat, even spending one morning with the vacuum cleaner. There was something comfortingly satisfying about a simple task that took no thought to speak of and produced immediate results, much the same as preparing a banana split at the Dairy Queen. He mowed the lawn of the parsonage and church on Saturday with the same sense of satisfaction.

  He watched TV, slept a lot, felt himself slowly edging up from the black hole of physical and mental fatigue. He found to his surprise that he was now in no hurry for Joe Pike to come home. He tried not to think about it.

  * * * * *

  He was sitting on the front steps (dressed in shorts and baseball cap) when the Atlanta Constitution arrived early on Sunday morning, delivered by a boy on a bicycle who flung its hefty rolled-up bulk from the sidewalk. It plopped with a thud onto the walkway. The delivery boy made a turn when he reached the business district and worked his way back up Broadus Street on the other side, dropping papers at Aunt Alma’s house and those of her neighbors.

  Trout would have let the paper lay where it landed, but he became curious about the Braves’ score from the night before. They had played the Dodgers and Trout had neglected to check the radio for results before he went to bed. So he barefooted out the walkway and picked up the paper and returned to his place on the steps with it. He removed the thick rubber band and spread the paper on his knees. And there it was. A large photo dominated the front page: a small crowd, mostly men and mostly young, proceeding along a downtown Atlanta street. “GAY PRIDE MARCH,” the bold letters above the photo read. And there, in the middle of the throng, was Eugene. He carried a placard that said, “QUEERS HAVE RIGHTS TOO.”

  Trout studied the picture for awhile and read the accompanying article all the way through twice. Then he said, “Oh, shit.”

  He looked across the street. Alma and Cicero’s copy of the Constitution lay on the walkway beneath their front steps. Trout thought about going over there and getting it. But did he have any right to meddle? He had no idea what Alma and Cicero knew about Eugene
’s lifestyle and preferences. They hardly ever mentioned him, except for Alma’s occasional insistence that he would one day, along with Trout, be responsible for the mill and the perpetuation of Moseley-ism. If they knew, this might be no great surprise. If they didn’t, they soon would, one way or the other. Trout agonized over it for awhile longer and then Uncle Cicero saved him the trouble. He walked out in his bathrobe and fetched the paper with a wave to Trout. He disappeared into the house and Trout held his breath, half expecting an explosion. None came. After a moment, Trout got up from the steps and put on a tee shirt and shoes and went to the jail.

  * * * * *

  At precisely eleven o’clock, just as Grace Vredemeyer was lifting her hands to launch the choir into an opening fanfare, the doors to the sanctuary swung open and Joe Pike strode in. Grace’s hands froze in mid-air and she turned and watched Joe Pike (as did they all) as he marched down the aisle and up to the pulpit where Judge Tandy was standing, prepared to lead the service in the absence of the minister. They all saw that Joe Pike was wearing his cowboy boots under the billowing black robe. But it was the only thing even slightly scruffy about him. He was clean-shaven, freshly-scrubbed, hair neatly combed. And there was a firmness to his face that Trout hadn’t seen for some time -- slightly less fleshy, more purposeful.

  Joe Pike extended his hand and Judge Tandy, mouth slightly open, shook it. Then he glanced at Grace. “Y’all go right ahead,” he said. And he sat down in the big high-backed chair behind the pulpit, crossed his legs and waited.

  Grace Vredemeyer glanced toward Aunt Alma, who was sitting in her accustomed pew between Trout and Cicero. They had entered the sanctuary five minutes before Joe Pike. She had looked neither left nor right but had proceeded directly to her pew and sat down stiffly, smoothing out her clothing and then reaching for a hymnal. She gave Trout a thin, tight smile. She looked quite attractive, dressed in a navy blue summer suit with white piping on the sleeves and pockets and a simple strand of pearls. Her makeup was faultless, every hair in place. But if you knew what to look for, you could see the strain etched in thin lines around her eyes and mouth. If the sight of Joe Pike marching in abruptly had either surprised or nonplussed her, she gave no evidence of it. At the moment, with Grace Vredemeyer’s eyes on her, she moved not a muscle.