Jolly

by John Weston

  It was then the storm broke. As happens in the high pine forests, it came with the first lightning as if someone had ripped a huge water-filled balloon and sent its contents down on everything thirsty below.

  “No,” Jolly whispered and clenched Dogie to him, trying to wrap his whole self over her as if by shielding her from the rain it would see and cease.

  The little fire hissed and sent up spurts of white smoke, but it was no match for the downpour and was extinguished by the time Jolly and Dogie—she shrieking, delighted—had gathered the blanket and box of food.

  “We better get to the car!” he yelled, louder than was necessary for her to hear. He guided her to the front door and opened it, but not before they were drenched. “Quick!” His voice was urgent. He threw the box across the front seat and shoved her in. The inside lights of the car flared brightly.

  Dogie stopped, one knee on the seat, the other foot on the ground. She stared into the back seat. “God,” thought Jolly. “Jesus God. They could’ve at least used the blanket.” He pushed against Dogie’s bottom and shoulder and sent her sprawling across the cardboard box on the other side of the seat. He slammed the door and waited.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Luke said. He was plainly angry.

  “It’s raining, idiot,” said Jolly. “We better get the hell outa here before the mud’s ass-deep.” Well, he wasn’t inclined right then to be cautious. He felt for the key in the ignition, found it, and started the engine. He raced it a few seconds before turning on the headlights. He put the car in reverse and leaned over the seat in order to back up onto the road. He tried to ignore the rearrangements being made in the back seat, now only faintly visible in the reflected light, and concentrated on backing the car.

  Once on the road, he shifted to forward gear, and his eyes passed over Dogie. She sat low in the seat, looking straight ahead, her arms crossed over each other tightly. Jolly gave the road more attention than it needed and drove too fast so that the back of the car slewed on the curves.

  “Take it easy, Joll,” Luke spoke calmly. “Take it easy.”

  On the paved road Jolly relaxed some and lighted a cigarette. The cigarette was reason not to talk. Outside, the white streaks of lightning cracked over the forest, lighting the asphalt channel over which the car traveled and the border of trees that seemed to stretch upwards in delight toward the rain.

  Jolly felt Dogie edge toward him, her arms still clasped about her body. “You scared?” he said and smiled down on her head. She moved the rest of the way to him and seemed to welcome his arm.

  “A little,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The storm, I mean.”

  He ignored the unnecessary added explanation and said, “We’ll have these sudden storms off and on all summer. They’re loud—”

  “—and wet.”

  “Yes, but they only last a little while. It’ll be over by the time we get home.”

  “We’re going home?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he answered. “We’re going home.”

  No one spoke more than to comment on the conditions of the weather until Jolly stopped the car on the road at the bottom of Dogie’s driveway. “We’ll have to walk,” he said. “The driveway’ll be too muddy.”

  “OK,” she said and waited for him to open the door. Without looking toward them she called goodnight to Luke and Babe and stepped onto the road.

  “Here. Take some of this stuff,” said Jolly.

  “No. You keep it,” she said.

  “What’ll I do with all this? You take it. Your mother—”

  “I don’t want any of it!” she interrupted. She turned to walk away. Jolly ran to catch her hand. They slipped in the mud, and he pulled her up the driveway quickly because the rain had not stopped.

  On her porch she faced him and said, “Goodnight, Jolly. I loved it.”

  “Wait a minute, Dogie.” He reached his hand to brush back a strand of wet yellow hair from her face. She took his hand from her face and held it. Her eyes watched his in the light from the windows. He smiled and that seemed to be enough for her. He put his arms around her, but she averted his face in favor of his shoulder.

  “Jolly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jolly, they were making love, weren’t they?” she said.

  He took longer to answer than is needed to say yes or no. He felt her back heave beneath his hands. He should not have pulled her up the steep muddy driveway so fast, he remembered. “I shouldn’t have pulled you so fast,” he said.

  She said, “It doesn’t matter.” The bellows sound had started. She lifted her head. Her face wore a question. She waited.

  He pushed her head back on his shoulder and said, “Yes.”

  In a few minutes her breath came more naturally. She moved back from him and smiled, but the freckles didn’t chase across her face. “Goodnight, Jolly,” she said and opened the door of her house.

  THIRTEEN

  THE following morning Jolly awoke late and lay in bed even later. His last exam at school was not until the next day so there was very little he had to do better than stare at the low ceiling and wonder about the strange yellow-haired girl whom he had seen but twice—three times counting the morning in church. His mother had no objections to his lying late abed, because he had come in early the night before. He heard her puttering quietly about the house fulfilling her part of a tacit agreement that had always seemed backwards to him. At ten-thirty, no longer able to forestall a trip to the bathroom, he swung his legs off the bed and jammed them into his Levis.

  Later he studied some, but Silas Marner yellowed like the old miser’s gold before his eyes, and the words came alive like freckles moving. He rejected the desire to phone, because you weren’t supposed to phone girls, that is, special girls, before noon.

  He closed the book. “Mom. I think I’ll go down to school for a while.”

  His mother came to the kitchen door, wiping flour from her hands on a cloth. “You have a test today?”

  “No, but I need to clean out my locker and stuff.” He tied his shoelaces, sitting on the living room sofa.

  “What about lunch? You need to eat some lunch.”

  “I’ll eat somewhere, Mom. Don’t worry.”

  “Lord a mercy, the kind a food you eat. I don’t know when you’ve had a square meal. Sometimes you don’t eat enough to shake a stick at. You’ll dry up and blow away.” She followed him into the bathroom and stood watching him comb his hair.

  “OK, Mom, OK. I’m not exactly skin and bones.”

  “You put too much water on your hair. It’ll all fall out someday, doing that. You ought to brush it.”

  “Like Jamie, you mean? As I remember he brushed his, and it still fell out.”

  His mother turned momentarily to view a pot of something on the stove. “Jamie’s hair is different. He has his father’s hair.”

  “OK, Mother. Excuse me.” He moved past her, through the kitchen toward the bedroom. She followed.

  “How was your picnic last night? You never said.”

  “It was OK.” He took a shirt from his closet.

  “You-all came home mighty early. Why’d you decide to come home so early? Didn’t you and her get along?”

  “Mother,” he said, “don’t quiz me. It rained. And everything was fine. OK?”

  She drew up stiffly. “You needn’t get on your high horse. You just never tell me anything. You could be dead and buried and I’d be the last to know. It’s a come-off.”

  She withdrew to her pots and her pans, and Jolly buttoned his shirt, then stuffed his pockets with his change and wallet, his comb, and a clean handkerchief. “See you later,” he called and closed the front door.

  In her kitchen Mattawilde Osment clucked her tongue and wondered what would finally become of that boy.

  At school Jolly walked first into the gymnasium locker rooms and was greeted by the dirty socks-n’-jocks odor that had permeated the walls for so long that it never subsided, not even in
the summer when the school was closed for three months. He took the lock off the handle, knowing he would never remember the combination by fall. His gym clothes he rolled in the stiff towel as neatly as possible and tied the laces of his tennis shoes together for easier carrying.

  “Fingers!” A door slammed and big Guppy’s voice reverberated against the metal lockers and echoed through the tiled showers he loved so well. “How the hell?” he said.

  “Hi, Guppy.” Jolly shut the door of his locker and turned. “You still around? I thought you’d be long gone by now.”

  Guppy threw his meaty body down prone on a wooden bench. “Shit,” he said. “Coach called me and said I had ta clean out my friggin’ locker.”

  Jolly opened his mouth to say something like “Me too,” but Guppy, well started, continued his diatribe. “Christ, what a night,” he said, flinging one huge arm over his eyes. “Me and the guys really laid one on.”

  “You get drunk?”

  “Drunk? That ain’t the half of it. I feel like a goddam punching bag or something. Jesus, I’ll be glad to get outa this friggin’ dump.” He sat up suddenly. “You know what old lady Kastner gimme in English, fer chrissake?”

  “She pass you?”

  “She gimme a four. A goddam four.” Guppy shook his head. “I shoulda got better’n a goddam four, don’t ya think? Christ, I taken that course three times.”

  Jolly laughed. “Guppy, you ought to be glad she passed you at all. She probably only did so she wouldn’t have to see your ugly face again next year.”

  Guppy looked up at Jolly to better decide the nature of his comment. Satisfied, he studied his hands hanging limply between his knees. “Ah, screw her,” he said and thus closed the subject.

  “You’re going to graduate tonight, aren’t you?”

  Guppy grinned. “You bet your sweet ass I am. Hey! You can’t smoke in here! This is the locker room, fer chrissake.”

  “I can’t think of a better place.”

  “What if they catch you?” Guppy’s face hung in honest concern.

  “Maybe they’ll bar me from this damn gym forever. That would be about the greatest injustice known to man.”

  “You’re some kind of a nut,” said Guppy. “Hey! Know what me and the guys’re gonna do tomorra night to celebrate?”

  “No. What.”

  “We’re gonna shagg ass to Nogie.”

  “Nogales?”

  “Yeh, man! First I’m gonna get me about a dozen beers, and then I’m gonna plunk down my three dollars and get me the biggest, fattest, hottest piece a tail on Canal Street.” Guppy flopped back on the bench and yelped.

  Jolly flicked the ash from his cigarette on the floor and spread it with his shoe. “Who’s going with you?” he asked.

  “Hell, I don’t know. Burgess and Culp, I guess. And Skinny if his old lady’ll let him outa her sight.” He sat up again. “And then ya know what I’m gonna do, Fingers?”

  “What.”

  “I’m gonna do it all over again!”

  “You’re going to break this goddam bench if you don’t quit flopping on it. You ever been there before, Guppy?”

  “Shit yes. Lotsa times.” Guppy grinned his secret thoughts to the ceiling. “Ain’t you?”

  “No.”

  Guppy sat up again. “You ain’t?”

  “I said no,” Jolly said.

  Guppy watched Jolly’s face closely. “You ain’t?” he repeated quietly. “I bet you never even had a piece.”

  Jolly walked to the far end of the room before he answered. “Sure I have, dope. All the time.” He dropped the cigarette into a toilet and with his foot on the handle watched it swirl away.

  “Well, I got to go, Guppy,” he said, gathering up his things.

  “Say, Osment. Why the hell don’t you go with us?”

  Jolly smiled but said, “No thanks. Not this time. I—”

  “We’re gonna have a real blast.”

  “—I have a date.”

  “Stick around while I clean out my goddam locker.”

  “I can’t, Guppy. I have to see the principal or somebody.” He opened the door that led onto the basketball courts. “See you later, Hero.”

  “So long,” said Guppy as he stretched out on the bench.

  Jolly stopped by Mrs. Perley’s room to see if she was in the mood to divulge final geometry grades. She wasn’t, so he went on to his hall locker and faced the job of separating a nine months’ collection of ill-related items into a keep pile, a sell-back-to-the-book-store pile, and a throw-away pile.

  At twelve he crossed the small campus to the phones in the hall opposite the office. “4112, please,” he responded to the nasal voice. He listened as the phone rang twice.

  “Hello?”

  “Is Dogie there?”

  “Who? Oh, Dorothy. Yes.”

  He heard the voice call Dogie to the phone.

  “Yes?”

  “Hi, Dogie.”

  “Hello, Jolly.”

  “What’s the matter with your voice?”

  “I caught cold last night, I’m afraid. It’s not bad, though. Mother’s not too happy about my going out tonight.”

  Jolly laughed. “You’re getting pretty cocky, aren’t you?” he said. “I don’t believe I’ve got around to asking you yet.”

  “Asking me?” she said after a moment.

  “Yeh. We could go to a movie or somewhere. I really ought to study for that test tomorrow, but in this case—”

  “Jolly,” she interrupted.

  “What?”

  “Jolly, I already have a date for tonight.” Her voice came quietly over the phone. “Jolly?”

  “You already have a date? But, Dogie, I thought—well, I thought—” He traced over the number 4112 with his pencil on the plywood panel that was nailed anew each fall on the wall by the students’ telephone. “Never mind,” he said. Then he said, “Who?”

  “Who do I have a date with?”

  “Yes.”

  He heard her cough dimly, as if her head were turned away from the phone. She said, “With Luke.”

  “Luke!” Jolly nearly shouted. “With Luke?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why—but when—when did he—”

  “He called me this morning. Jolly, you’re not mad, are you? You sound mad.”

  The point of his pencil broke on the number 2. He stuffed the stub into his shirt pocket. Then he answered, “No, crazy. Why should I be mad?”

  “Well,” she laughed, “you just sounded—”

  “Look, Dogie,” he said, “I have to go. I got some things to do. I’ll call you tomorrow maybe. OK?”

  “Well, OK. Jolly, listen, I didn’t—”

  “Bye, Dogie,” he said and hung up the receiver. He leaned against the small counter that held the telephone and stared blankly at his tennis shoes lying crazily atop his notebook. “Son of a bitch!”

  “Osment!”

  Jolly turned. There stood Mr. Hanfield, coach-turned-counselor. Jolly flushed before the indignant stare.

  “Whatya mean using that kinda language on the school grounds? Look, just because school is about out don’t mean you can—”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Hanfield.” Jolly picked up his tennis shoes and gym clothes and books. “I didn’t know—I mean, I didn’t mean—”

  “Look,” the man said, coming closer, “something the matter?” He peered at Jolly’s face, then reached out a hand to Jolly’s shoulder. “Look, if there’s something—”

  “Nothing’s the matter,” Jolly said and moved out from under the hand.

  “You look kinda—well, you look like you been—”

  “Please, Mr. Hanfield.” Jolly turned to the glass door that led onto the parking lot. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing the matter.” He shoved hard with his hip on the metal bar that opened the door.

  Mr. Hanfield rubbed one hand over his gray head and readjusted his glasses. “That boy’s gonna be a real case about next year,” he said. He watched Jolly’s
back as he walked across the lot. “That big and he don’t like football or basketball or nothing.” He wagged his head. “A real case.”

  Jolly climbed the steep path that ran over the hill behind the school to the low stone wall that embraced the Historical Museum, a series of dark, squat buildings in which were mercilessly guarded such things as stuffed owls from the homes of early persons of note in the territory, or rusted and rotted wagon wheels that had dropped off along the way as white men routed the Indians back to the sage brush and claimed the pine forests in the name of the Union. Jolly sat on the wall from where he could look down on the pink-topped school buildings, and beyond to the town itself—the plaza, Whiskey Row, the drugstore, the dimestore, Penney’s—all settled down like an alley full of motley cats for a nap in the heat of the day. Jolly wondered in passing which of the old widows that guarded the museum’s priceless junk would recognize him sitting there and report the fact of his smoking to his mother. He followed the progress of a white-shirted figure across the school parking lot far below and tried to guess who it was. He saw the man enter a blue car and watched it back up, then move forward over the nearly empty lot and onto the street. Mr. Smithson; typing. He heard the horn of a diesel engine howl through the heat waves over the town from the railroad yards. He remembered the time when he was very small when he and Jamie got in trouble for putting pennies on the rails so that the coal-burning engines would flatten them into oval copper disks. He looked for recognizable animal shapes in the white thick clouds that had begun to rise trembling over the mountains to the east. The cigarette was bitter and stale from being carried around or cached in his locker too long. He dropped it among the small stones at the bottom of the wall and thought about it until the blue smoke ceased rising. He picked up the dirty white tennis shoes and the towel-wrapped clothes and the books. With the other hand he shoved himself off the wall and stood looking across town toward where the aspens lined the streets, gray-green and still. “Goddam son of a bitch.”

  Jolly ran his hand along the impersonal dark gray stones of the church as he rounded the corner and approached the front door. Once there, he took his penknife from his pocket, and balancing the tennis shoes atop his books, he opened the short blade. With his shoulder against one of the double doors he inserted the knife blade between them and pushed in on a small metal peg until it sprang back and its mate popped forward. He folded in the knife blade against his leg and replaced it in his pocket. Taking hold of the door handle he pulled once, hard, and the two doors swung open with a loud crack as the inside chain catch was forced from its niche. He closed but did not lock the doors from the inside and climbed the stairs to the sanctuary. The sun filtered through the yellow-glassed windows and created a false sunshine over the pulpit and pews, homely and quiet.