Hug Dancing

by Shelby Hearon

  “That’s the question.”

  “But that’s not what brought you here, is it, girl?”

  “No.”

  “You want the guest room? The Guests’ guest room. Be our Guest.”

  Oh, Lord, I’d forgotten that routine. Doo-doo happens, I reminded myself. “I might,” I admitted. “Eben has given me two weeks to get out.”

  “Used to be,” Theo said, “in Texas law you could kill your wife for messing around.”

  Shorty licked his fingers. “Only if you caught them flagrant.”

  “That means blazing or burning,” I told him.

  “That’s what I said, caught ’em hot.”

  “That reminds me.” Theo looked at her watch, looked sadly at my half of the cream cheese sandwich, and stood, her uplift shaking.

  “What does?”

  “You whipping out that definition. I’ve got something for you. I dug it out when I heard the news, brought it home. Let me go locate it. Sit tight; don’t jump up and run off the way you usually do.”

  “I’m not budging.”

  Shorty gave me a fatherly look. “Nice boy. So what’s going on?”

  “He’s the one for me.”

  “That’s good. Old age isn’t for sissies. Being happy helps the odds.” He gazed off after Theo. “What’s he up to these days?”

  “He’s worried about losing his land. The government’s wanting to buy up the acres around Waxahachie for the atom smasher.”

  “Tell me about science. Worse than boll weevils. This used to be great country for hardware. Farmers buying out the stock faster than you could order it. Then we started hug dancing with the Japanese, and everything went soft. Now there’s nothing but software from Austin to Dallas. No wonder I closed up my business and took early fishing.”

  “We’re going to live on his farm.”

  “Any rivers?”

  “Stock ponds.”

  Theo bounced back in, waving a sheet of paper. “Here we go. Remember this?”

  It was Cile’s Red Bird Quiz. Heaven help us. She must have squirreled this away nearly twenty years ago. I was touched, really touched. “Miss Moore,” I said, “you old sneak.”

  She looked pleased with herself. “I still pass this out in my classes, to give the kids an idea what’s coming down when they take the SAT.” She pronounced it sat. “I figured you’d be needing it back yourself about now, for a little advance advertising. I priced around for you. The standard outfit that they all use, the cram course, costs seven hundred for seven four-hour sessions. That’s twenty-five an hour. Seems to me you can charge twice that, charge fifty, for a one-on-one. Say you saw ten students a week, that would tide you over, wouldn’t it? Now it’s a seasonal market, like income tax and Christmas, but you’d have a spring crop and a fall crop. This is a good time to get your name out there, end of the term.”

  Cile’s Red Bird Quiz. Lord. Did that take me back. To the younger Mrs. Dr. Croft and all her cronies who’d been so good to me when I’d been starting out. It had been my quick-check reading comprehension test to see where the student was. She took the test, he took it, while I watched, and at the point where they looked up, having trouble, I knew where to begin. The paragraphs and their multiple-choice questions in those days went through a consistent pattern: the word required was stated; it was in an earlier passage; its synonym or antonym was there; it was inferred.

  Shorty motioned me to move over close and we read it together, him looking over my shoulder, moving his lips.

  1. Out my window this morning I saw a red bird at the feeder. What color is the bird at the feeder?

  a. brown

  b. black

  c. red

  d. blue

  2. A redbird swooped down into the pear tree. I watched as he took flight again, then landed at the feeder.What color is the bird at the feeder?

  a. brown

  b. black

  c. red

  d. blue

  3. The crimson-breasted cardinal sang from the highest branch of the dogwood, a brilliant contrast to the brown-coated sparrows eating below. He landed in their midst, scattering them in the air.

  What color is the bird at the feeder?

  a. brown

  b. black

  c. red

  d. blue

  4. What a variety of birds at the sunflower seeds outside my window: a crow, a jay, a cardinal, a sparrow. Then they were joined by the tabby tomcat from next door, out for a morning stalk. Quickly the crow, cardinal and sparrow took flight.

  What color is the bird at the feeder?

  a. brown

  b. black

  c. red

  d. blue

  It made me happy to remember how hard I’d worked to develop the stilted style of the prose, trying to match the stilted style of the paragraphs on the actual test. Reading it again brought back half a dozen faces, the quick grins and troubled frowns of my favorites. Great kids. I hoped they were all whatever they wanted to be. Imagining a coterie of thoracic surgeons and rat-lab researchers who owed it all to me.

  “Hey, you pulled a fast one on that last one,” Shorty said, reading it over again. “A switch.”

  “Harvard for you,” I said.

  “You want me to mention your name for a SAT coach?” Theo looked at her watch again and slipped into her tiny-heeled pumps, a bright blue the color of the garden on her dress.

  “You kept this all these years?”

  “All these years.” She turned rosy. “You were my prize, girl. I followed everything you did. I wouldn’t have set my cap for your daddy here if I hadn’t wanted to have a shot at the source.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Clean sheets in the back bedroom.”

  “I might take you up on it, while I’m looking for a place.”

  “Tell your boy to come see us.” Shorty was setting out bottles on the counter for his after-lunch fix. Geritol, Solotron, PABA, zinc, choline, folic acid, biotin. He washed down a handful of tablets with the last of his Dr. Pepper.

  “When it’s official.” The idea of Drew over here in Birdville still gave me a slight skin itch, not quite hives but a kissing cousin.

  “I won’t hold his dad against him,” Shorty said, shaking out a second batch of supplements in his hand.

  “I won’t hold his mom against him,” Theo said, jiggling her car keys in the doorway.

  “All I want to hold against him is me.” I clowned, imitating a big squeeze.

  Theo led me out the kitchen door—past bundles of newspapers waiting for pickup, and bags labeled PLASTIC, ALUMINUM and PAPER—and we got Shorty settled on his stool, working on his bait trap.

  Exiting the area was as simple as pie. I did my trick backward, Guest Lives Where, taking Nightin-gale to Ibis to Bobo-link to Oriole to Red-wing, and there I was back on Lake Shore. I made the turn with a feeling of satisfaction. I, too, had spread the word: Theo would be sure to drop a little gossip in the teachers’ lounge, and Shorty would break the news to his pals while they watched the big yellows choose between goggle-eyes and bluegills.

  I’D PAID NO attention to the sky in my anxiety about not getting lost on the way to the Guest house, but once safely back on familiar turf, I could see that the air indeed had that eerie yellow calm, that creepy stillness of tornado weather. I tuned the radio to the Best Country in the City, figuring the deejay would interrupt the Randy Travis vocal if there was any serious trouble.

  When I was first learning my way around Waco, it had helped to see it as shaped like a kite, the top pointing northwest toward Ft. Worth, the upper right side being the Brazos River, the upper left the South Fork of the Bosque, the bottom right the Austin highway, and the bottom left the Old Mill Road, which I now turned onto from Lago Lake. Heading toward the kite’s base, the circle where five highways intersected, where the kite tails were tied.

  Drew pulled off the freeway just as I pulled up to the front of Circleburgers. It gave me a thrill to have him park his red Chevy pickup right bes
ide my rattling, sagging old Firebird, bold as you please. For us to be having a date in a public place hadn’t happened since high school. A couple of lifetimes ago.

  He steered me through the door. “What do you want?”

  “Chiliburger.” Inhaling the great hickory smoke aroma I managed to forget that I’d already gummed up my stomach with cream cheese.

  Drew ordered two chiliburgers, two flameburgers, one large vanilla shake, one large strawberry shake, one double order of French fries, one double order of onion rings and two peach fried pies with extra powdered sugar.

  I dug out a fistful of quarters and headed for the jukebox. The green and purple Wurlitzer gave one selection for a quarter or three for fifty cents—so I played all our George Strait favorites: “Hot Burning Flames,” “That’s When the Cowboy Rides Away,” “Second Chances,” “All My Exes Live in Texas,” “Heaven Must Be Wondering Where You Are.” Then, just to be ecumenical, Hank Williams, Jr.’s “This Ain’t Dallas” and Willie Nelson’s “All of Me.”

  We sat side by side in the last booth, where we could look down the wall at a couple of dozen framed photos of the fifties high school scene: marching bands, drill teams, parades, football players, homecoming queens riding on the backs of convertibles, holding roses and waving at the crowd. Right at eye level at our booth was a fullback with gigantic shoulder pads and black smudges under his eyes, his arm around a girl in a suit and heels, who had a big mum corsage and smooth flipped hair. They were leaning against a Chevy Bel Air. I nudged Drew, who was staring at his stub, waiting for them to call our order.

  “Look.”

  “Son-of-a-gun.” He peered around me. “A ’57. Green and cream, I bet.” He looked closer at the black and white photo, sounding about as excited as if I’d showed him a sack of potatoes. Obviously things hadn’t gone all that great with his mother.

  When he brought the tray of food, we just sat there looking at the best hamburgers in Texas, the thickest shakes, onion rings crisp and juicy at the same time, fried pies still steaming, the powdered sugar melting.

  “Bad?” I asked.

  “Bad.”

  “Real bad?”

  “Worse.”

  George Strait was singing about Heaven at top volume. We could have shouted and not been heard by the staff in the back. There was nobody else there; it was too early for school kids, too late for the lunch crowd. Probably we could have been meeting here for years, but we’d been too scared to try it.

  He took a swallow of the strawberry shake so I sipped the vanilla, wondering if I’d got a milk mustache like Martha.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “You want to hear about it?”

  “I asked.”

  “She’s trying to box me in the canyon. They are.”

  Out the window, right past the highway intersection, we could see little whirls of wind pick up and drop bits of paper, and hear a slight whine in the air that hadn’t been there before. Off in the distance, we could make out a couple of dark cones that might be little twisters touching down in cornfields.

  “Great—” Drew interrupted himself. “We’ll get a tornado warning and have to sit here until supper, or the whole place will be lifted up into the sky and they’ll find us twelve blocks north on Baylor campus.”

  “How bad?”

  “Bad.” He ate half a flameburger, getting sauce on his white shirt. “See, we own the land jointly, Mother and I. Undivided halves. That’s so one of us doesn’t have the oil and one of us the milo blight. We split the proceeds and losses. Undivided half means survivor gets all. Dad went over it with me a couple of years before he died, the will. It was holographic, just a few lines on a piece of his office paper. I didn’t really think about it; it seemed a couple of decades too soon, you know? I mean he’d just turned sixty but he looked the same to me as he always had. You remember him from when he used to hang around the clinic with your mom. He always looked like he just rode into town on a horse; that weathered skin and shoulders wider than mine even at his age. He’d grown a mustache right before we left Austin, but he shaved that off, and his hair had got salt-and-pepper, or whatever we redheads get: salt-and-cayenne.”

  “I know you miss him.”

  “He was a white hat.” He stared at his burger. “You want to hear about it?”

  “I want to hear about it.”

  “What Dad had in mind, undivided halves, was that Mother couldn’t sell without me and I couldn’t sell without her, so nobody could sell off the land. That’s what he figured. But it doesn’t work that way because of Mary Virginia. Half of my half is hers, community property, acquired after marriage, commingled. Mother says that makes Mary Virginia a swing vote, and that I might as well get it through my head that I’m not going to be able to get a divorce without selling off a lot of land. Mary Virginia and Mother own three-fourths between them, I guess that’s what she means. I guess she was trying to say that they can vote to sell seventy-five percent of the whole spread if they want to. Good-bye grasslands, I think was the message over garden greens at lunch.”

  That sounded like a threat, and a threat didn’t sound like Lila Beth. “What bothers her the most?” I asked. “The divorce? Us? The church?”

  Drew put an arm around me, eating the French fries with his left hand. “Beats me.”

  We could hear the high wail that meant a tornado warning.

  “Shit. It’s going to hit.”

  “We have these six times a week in the spring; you’re just spooked.”

  “I guess.” He looked at me. “I don’t know what Mother wants. What she said was—” He had trouble getting the words out. “—that I’d get over you. That I got over you once and I could do it again.”

  “What happens now?” I wanted to know where he was, if she’d talked him out of us.

  Willie Nelson was urging us to take all of him, while outside the whine had got louder and the wind buffeted the sides of the diner. The sky had got dark, so it was passing through. The staff from the kitchen leaned on the counter, looking out the windows, watching also. They had cups of coffee and one of them was smoking under the THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING sign. They didn’t seem bothered.

  “I don’t know, honey. I can’t think straight. It’s easy to say that we’ll go ahead and move in together at the farm and I’ll get a job pumping gas and we can tell them to go to hell. But all I know is that land; all I have is that land—”

  “What does Mary Virginia say about it?”

  “Same as always, zip. A closed subject. Goes on about my birthday, the boys’ camp. Her schedule.”

  “Can’t you talk to her?”

  “Not a chance. Tomorrow, Tuesday, is her day in Dallas. Since it’s the runoff election, though, she’s decided the highways won’t be safe in the morning or at night, country people going to the polls in their horse and buggies, to hear her tell it, so she’s going up this afternoon, coming back on Wednesday. She does that now about twice a month. Her mother’s under the weather, or her sister’s having trouble with her husband, who’s losing about a billion dollars on ParkGate, that planned community they sunk their shirts in. Two golf courses, beach and tennis clubs, stables, thirteen lakes. They thought they’d be getting thirty gee an acre for it; now it’s on the market.”

  While Hank Williams, Jr., reminded us that this wasn’t Dallas, I tried to read between the lines, to figure out what was really going on. “How about the boys?” I asked him.

  “Come in wearing their tennis whites, go back to their wing and do whatever preppy types do. What do they do? File their compact discs? Buzz their computers? Amortize their tennis rackets? One thing they don’t do is talk to their old man. They’ve been momma-pecked since the crib. Dallas boys. I’ve got a couple of sweetheart Dallas boys.”

  “Drew, don’t. Don’t say that. They’re two of the—greatest kids in the world.”

  “You always could get along with them.” He looked dejectedly at his strawberry shake, finished it off.

 
I was trying not to feel hurt, way down deep hurt, that Lila Beth could have such strong objections to Drew and me. I’d thought that she would be pleased; she’d never got on with Mary Virginia, not from the start, not really. It must be the church. Her loyalties were divided; she’d be bothered to think we were responsible for breaking up her pastor’s home. “When Eben marries again,” I said, “your mother will feel differently. Maybe we’ll just have to wait.”

  “Him, remarry? I never figured out how he located some in the first place; he’ll never get his hands on some a second time.”

  That gave me a couple of mixed feelings, none of them kindly. I told him about Jae-Moon, also known as Dr. Song, who apparently was already the successor designate.

  “No kidding,” he said, requiring the rest of his burger. “Him? With a Korean? A physicist? Tell me he walks on the Bosque or he’s parting the Brazos, I’d believe that sooner.”

  “He wants me out in two weeks. I’m going to stay at Shorty and Theo’s unless I can find a place.” I was trying to spell out for him that I was putting no pressure on to move up to the farm.

  “At your dad’s?” He looked amazed.

  “I had lunch with them today.”

  He laughed. “Any birdhouse in the storm?” I’d told him about getting lost in the bird streets every time I went to see them.

  “Something like that.”

  Out the window we could see a funnel drop down and lift a billboard in the air like a paper cup and then dump it in a field a few feet away. Cars on the freeway didn’t take notice. The siren went off once more, a sighting, and then the sky began to take on a dusty look, rosy and windy.

  “The trouble with the spotters,” Drew said, “is that they only spot it after it’s happened. The Severe Storms Center issues watches, but it’s the local weather stations give warnings. By the time they do, the tornado’s history. They had a three-hundred-mile-an-hour wind in Kansas. Too late is long gone. Oklahoma’s got Nexrad, a fancy Doppler radar system. They can tell, by winds going both ways at once, what’s going to happen. We could get one of those here if anybody cared; we’ve got half of all the weather in the United States.”