While I was looking through my closet for other time bombs, I came across Dirk’s poster behind a pile of outgrown clothes. I unfurled it, and there was Dirk in all his glory in the boy’s head. Even though he’d returned to school after John Carlisle died, it wasn’t the same between us. I finally told him how I felt about Rozene, and he was mad at first, then just confused, which made two of us. I didn’t have a job so there was time for Dirk and me to hang out, but we didn’t, partly because he had to stay after for tutoring, and partly, I thought, because of all the omissions that had become lies between us. I decided to return the poster as an excuse to talk. I was feeling about as old as the house I’d inherited, certainly too old to climb the double billboard, so I asked him to meet me by the swings at Klah Hah Ya Park. Besides, the billboards represented a kind of intimacy I wasn’t feeling toward Dirk just then.
I cut across the dewy grass and stuck the poster through the buckle connecting the swingseat to its chain and took the swing next to it, one of those strap seats. The moon was so bright I could see my shadow in the sand as I pushed gently back and forth. I wanted this to be a reconciliation meeting to bridge over everything that had happened. In truth, Dirk was still the only friend I had. I hoped the fact I was bringing back the poster would be a reminder of how I’d tried at least once to stick up for him.
He was wearing a pair of baggy jeans with a low crotch that came down almost as far as his knees, and he was clean-shaven with energy in his face like he’d had a makeover. But we were two Dobermans on leashes meeting for the first time. When I gave him the poster, he snarled. “Bet you and Rozene enjoyed studying this.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I forgot I even had it.”
“What took so long to give it back then?”
“What took you so long to tell me you were at Carlisle’s that day?” I planted my feet in the trough and twisted my swingseat to face him. “Huh, why didn’t you say something?”
He tried to scratch his crotch, but there was so much material in the way he had to settle for grabbing a handful of jeans and tugging it up and down. “You’re hardly in a place to talk about honesty. Who told you?”
“None of your business.”
“Jesus, you didn’t want her found naked, did you?”
“She was dead. How bad could naked be?”
He flung his swing clanking against the poles. “Don’t you understand? I was the one who shut the damned thing off. It took me so long I thought I’d screwed up.” He grabbed my chains and shook them as he shouted at me. “I was embarrassed for her. And for you!”
I reached up and put my hand on his fist, which was as cold as the cast steel chain it was clenched around. It occurred to me his hiding what had happened to Mom was no different than me ripping the poster off the blackboard. We were trying to protect each other from the ridicule and the pain, but we’d both failed. The pain had found its own seams to seep through. “I’m sorry to jump on you, Dirk. I probably would have done the same thing.”
He kicked some sand. “I’m so fucked up I couldn’t blame you for hating me. How many people have a friend who’s killed someone?”
“You didn’t kill him.”
“I’m not stupid. It was the day before the trial. I was going to lie my face off about him. I know something about shame and he had a lot farther to fall than I ever did.”
This business of protecting someone else’s privacy was getting complicated, and as I looked at the tears in his eyes I could see that Dirk had aged too. He was no longer just the kid who loved Cagney and Bogart flicks. He’d made an investment in my life and he’d paid big-time for it. “It wasn’t your charges that made him do it.”
“Bullshit.”
“Carlisle wrote a letter to my dad. Mailed it the day of the fire.” Dirk licked the depression under his nose. “It was suicide, but it was because of new charges against him, not yours. Dad had already written up the story. They said he molested some kids at Lake Spigot.”
“Jesus, do you think he really did?”
I let my hands slide down the chain links that might have been worn smooth by the same kids John Carlisle was accused of molesting. “I don’t think so. Dad says it was hysteria, people piling on.”
He spun my swing seat around. “All that dough and he ends up this way.”
Neither one of us spoke and Dirk continued to play with my swing chains. It felt good to be flopped around aimlessly. I was usually so hysterical if I wasn’t in control. I knew this would have been a good time to tell him I was a Carlisle too, but I wasn’t ready to go that far, not until I could say it without bitterness, not until I could see it the way Mom must have seen it.
Deliveries started arriving on our doorstep—boxes of chocolate samplers, smoked salmon, salami and cheese displays, soup bones and dog biscuits—some with perfumed letters, all from Edda Holliday. Some nights, Willard asked me to look after the dogs.
“Give ’em their walk and feed ’em breakfast.”
“Breakfast?”
“You know. In case I get tied up.”
Each time he’d go calling, he’d shave with his straight edge, buff up his shoes, and wear matching socks. His diet even changed. I caught him eating leafy salads and cottage cheese on canned pears with paprika sprinkled on top. She came by and took him to church on Sundays, alternating between St. Augustine’s, St. John’s Episcopal, and Zion Lutheran. She gave him reading assignments, juicy romances with bodice-ripping pictures on the jackets.
“You’ve got to help me, Piper. I can’t keep up.” He was both frightened and giddy.
“This is trash.”
I read In the Grip of the Night, Amber Love, and Lullaby of the Heart, and gave him book reports in sufficient detail so that he could fake a conversation with her. In truth, they were page-turners and I began to wonder if the critics hadn’t overrated the classics. But I worried how Willard was ever going to satisfy a woman with such inflamed expectations.
On the fourth of July weekend, Willard moved in with her. It wasn’t the Holliday he’d had the crush on since putting a hose in her parents’ car at the Phillips 66 station. That would have been Bonnie, who was Willard’s age and now deceased. But Willard didn’t seem to mind the switch and I knew he was going to have his hands full keeping up with a woman seven years his junior. The secret ingredient was going to be their dependents. It turned out that while Willard was vacuuming up the stray dogs in Stampede, Edda was doing the cats. She was also pro-life and refused to have them spayed, which had proven to be a dangerous combination because she now had twenty-six of them.
The courtship was rapid. Edda, who’d been widowed twice, once by an overturned combine and then by prostate cancer, knew what she liked and disliked. Willard’s tastes, on the other hand, had been sanded smooth by Grandma Carol’s unrelenting strictness. As long as he could have his dogs though, Willard could have fallen in love with just about anyone who wouldn’t ignore him. The day he told me she’d asked him to move in with her I was washing the mud off his basement windows where the drips from the eaves splattered.
“She’s got pillows for the cats on her bookshelves,” he said. “And the spare beds are swarming with ’em.”
“You can’t just shack up with someone, Willard.” It was hard to admit the real reason for my reticence, especially after all the fuss I’d made about him coming to stay with us in the first place. “The cats’ll scratch the dogs’ eyes out.”
“She wants to set up a half-way house for strays.”
Half-way to what, I thought, as I swished the squeegee around in the mop bucket, stirring up the ammonia fumes until my eyes watered. For a dog, living with Willard would already be heaven. “She sounds like your kind of woman.” I looked up and his eyes were watering too.
“I don’t want to move away.”
That’s what I wanted him to say, but I knew it was wrong to hold him back. Reagan was still President the last time he’d slept with a woman and that was Grandma Carol, who’d made him
choose between her and the animals. “I don’t want you to move either.”
“I can’t sponge off you and Tom forever.”
I wished I had the words to explain how far from sponge he really was. For as long as he’d been here, he’d left far more than he’d ever taken. “Tell me one thing, Willard. Do you love her?”
“Like a found dog.”
“Then you have to do it.”
22
It was hard to let go of Willard, mainly because I didn’t want to. Father Tombari came by the house to see Dad, who was gone, so he talked to me and the subject got onto Willard.
“I didn’t realize how much I’d gotten used to him being here,” I told Father.
“You’re going through a kind of grieving process.”
I only half paid attention as he ran through the seven stages or whatever. It was difficult to trust anything he said about the subject, given that his first question had been whether or not Willard and Edda were living in a state of sin. As if Willard were some covetous Beelzebub. Anyone who knew him knew a man who always found room on the path for fellow travelers, who always had enough in his lunch box to split with whomever he sat. The pittance of sin Willard had to confess would make the priest blush. God would scold the priest and let Willard pass.
The truth was Willard had become a presence in me. When I looked in his room, I could hear him conversing with his dogs as if they were chums from his old unit. When I scrambled an egg, I could smell the grease from his Spam burning. Every time I passed under the Carlisle Bridge, I could look up and see him in one of his dumb hats with a cheap cigar clenched in his teeth, aiming a pebble at my noggin just for a joke.
Rozene came by one afternoon in her brown Toyota. I was out front weeding the flower beds for the first time since Mom had done it the summer before. We sat on the front porch steps and I stared out at the empty passenger seat that used to be mine. I almost wished she’d been with a guy, so I wouldn’t have to think it was just me.
A column of sunshine bathed her like a waterfall, and I realized once again what a special class of beauty she was in, the kind that made you feel like a mechanic in coveralls when you were next to her. More than her beauty though, I admired her sense of who she was. Unlike me, she didn’t obsess about her isolation. In the ten years she’d been in Stampede, she’d never let anyone blow her off course with their cold shoulders and their taunts.
“That’s nice about Edda and your grandpa,” she said.
“I miss having him here.”
“Anything I can do?”
For a moment I let my mind run wild with the possibilities, but I knew begging wasn’t becoming. “Thanks for asking.”
“Piper, I’m sorry for giving you the ditch like that.”
I harrumphed like no big deal from my side.
“I don’t have your guts,” she said. “When things get sticky, I revert to type.”
“I don’t believe that for a second.”
She put her hand on the dirty knee of my jeans. “Give me time to get past myself, okay?”
And then she left.
Unknowingly, Dirk had probably given me the best advice on how to deal with Rozene when he came by a few days later on his way to California. A cousin on his mom’s side knew a stuntman who’d promised him a grunt job with one of the movie studios.
“I gotta make something of myself first,” he said. “Then the dames’ll fall all over me.”
“What’s your dad say about you going down there?”
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “He wanted me to enlist in the Army, just to make sure it’s all out of me.”
“If that’s his problem, why would he throw you in with a bunch of guys?” It was a chance for Dirk to pile on, but he just chuckled, which made my remark seem vindictive and uncalled for. “Hey, are you still moving?”
“They are.” Dirk moved his mouth around like he was adjusting an imaginary toothpick between his lips. “’Fraid I’m gonna miss roll call that day.”
“Don’t forget who your main woman is.”
He raised his arms like he was going to wrap them around me, but then he just patted me on the outsides of my arms, and I wondered if it was because he’d remembered. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll be back. Riding into town in a black Cadillac.”
“Look at you,” Willard said, when Edda dropped him and a couple of the dogs off for a visit while she went to the beauty parlor. “You’re moping.” He’d caught me curled up on the couch reading. If he’d come forty-five minutes earlier, he’d have seen me painting the back porch. For some reason, I was getting into home improvements lately, little chores that didn’t talk back or let you down.
“There’s nobody to do anything with.”
“Darn you, girl. What about your dad?” Willard was wearing a powder blue dress shirt with a starched collar and a brown vest with an adjustable waist tab, Edda’s work. “You bellyached he worked too much at the paper and now he’s home.”
“I think he’s still sore about me running away and lying to him.”
“Pooh. What’s that between a girl and her dad?”
“We don’t have that much in common.”
“What’s wrong with pretending? He says bowling, you say when.” The romance with Edda had turned Willard into a matchmaker. He wanted everyone to be hopelessly in love.
“Would you come with us?”
He straightened himself up, tucked in his shirt, and stuck his thumbs into his vest while he thought it over. “Well … sure, maybe. Edda. I’d have to check with Edda.” Then a light went on inside that bobbing head of his. “Say, didn’t we have a deal? What about that trip to the Mississippi?”
“I thought you’d forgotten.”
“Maybe I had and maybe I hadn’t, but I want to cash in. Under one condition.”
“Edda goes?”
“No. Your dad.”
“You’re crazy. He’d never do that.”
“Ask him.”
The idea grew on me. I checked into the train, thinking that’s how Willard and Mom might have done it if they’d taken the trip when she was young. Flying would have been too pretentious and, besides, how could you count telephone poles and spot license plates from thirty-thousand feet? Willard was a hands-on kind of man, someone who had to step out and stretch his legs on solid ground once in a while. No pre-heated dinners from stacks of aluminum trays with cold silverware packaged in plastic. But Amtrak didn’t go through Hannibal. I thought of hitchhiking, and kept imagining being picked up by goons from Hood River or Pocatello with tomahawk haircuts, rifle racks across the back windows of their pickups, and the inside door handles removed. Condon Bagmores gone bad.
When I broached the idea with Dad, I made it sound as if Willard and I were already going, and it was just a matter of adding a third.
“What about that summer job you were going to get for your college money?” he said. So far, college wasn’t a big issue with me and I’d missed all the deadlines for applications. Like Dirk had said, “In college, they teach you the theories. Why be satisfied with theories?”
“No Tom, no trip,” Willard said, when I told him about the cold water Dad had poured on the idea. The trip was down for the count. Kaput. I went back to summer and my home improvements, waiting for Rozene to get past herself.
Then one night while I was writing a letter to Dirk I hoped I’d send, telling him the truth about my adoption, Dad interrupted me with a knock on the door. I turned the tablet over and covered it with a book before inviting him in.
“I’ve been thinking over what you said the other day about that trip,” he said. He was in his stocking feet, his hair was mussed, and he seemed rootless. There wasn’t that divided look on his face of needing to be someplace else. He shuffled one hand in and out of his pocket like he was going to show me something but his hand came up empty. “Is there still room?”
“What about your job search?” Dad had been circling items in the classifieds
from the newspapers that were still being delivered to our house from all over the country.
“Before I go to work for someone else, I need to retool. I’m stale.”
“What are you talking about? You could write a story with the dirt under your fingernails.”
Dad wasn’t one to let accolades be mumbled over him. “You haven’t answered my question. Can I come?”
This was a nice twist. I had something he wanted and he was asking for it rather than presuming he could have it. “It wouldn’t be any picnic,” I said. “We’d have to do it Willard’s way, you know. In the Skylark. Making bologna sandwiches in our laps on the fly, staying at places that’ll take dogs. I’m talking low down on the food chain.”
Piper Page 27