giant conspiracy that, if she but had enough time to unravel, would implicate Pope John, Boris Yeltsin, and Madonna.
“Don’t patronize me, buddy boy,” Beverly warns her husband.
“I know that little smirk. You think you know all these people because you grew up with them. You have no idea what’s going on.”
John shrugs, apparently not wanting to incur his wife’s are. Beverly looks as if she could be a mean drunk.
“That’s for damn sure,” he says, his tone still friendly.
“Do you really think Paul is involved in this?” I encourage Beverly, who is chewing vigorously on a piece of meat she has cut for herself.
The deer tastes disappointingly like chicken. It doesn’t have the gamy distinct flavor that I remember from my childhood. Maybe it is the way it has been cooked.
“Of course he is!” Beverly says.
“Everyone’s heard about the tape. Why else did Willie tape him if he wasn’t afraid of Paul? Just like you say, nobody’s ever crossed the Taylors And when they started going down economically, Paul couldn’t stand the fact that an old Chinese man had, outside our one factory, the only decent business in town. He had him killed and now he’s bought off a nigger sheriff, judge, and prosecutor, the way people have been buying them off for years. What else is new?”
Beverly’s face is flushed, but I’m not sure whether it is from liquor or from anger. Hell may have no fury like a woman scorned, but the way she looks I doubt if she was ever in the running for Paul’s affections.
Perhaps she has been jealous for her husband’s sake. The Taylors have been top dogs here for years, and Beverly, for one, is glad to see them get their due.
Perhaps to change the subject, John turns to his wife.
“I’ve heard that Gideon here has been calling on the widow Marr. She would have married him, but he broke her heart by joining the Peace Corps.”
Beverly rolls her eyes at her husband.
“John’s told me that at least twice, but since it’s usually after a pint of bourbon he never remembers. I admire Angela, and I’m sorry I’ve never gotten to know her as much as I would have liked. For all those years she was so involved with their farm.
What is she going to do?”
“I don’t know,” I say too quickly, but not wanting to betray what I think was told to me in confidence.
For all I know, she may have told the entire town that Cecil wants to buy her half of the farm, but she seemed too angry about it for me to feel comfortable enough to gossip about it.
“Angela and I are just friends,” I add, hoping I’m not blushing. If my face is as florid as Beverly’s, I look like as big a fool as I sound.
John leans his elbows on the table and snickers, “And I’m the ghost of John Lennon.”
Beverly laughs, but defends me.
“Dwight’s body isn’t even cold,” she scolds her husband.
“You just know how a man would react, not a woman. Men can barely wait for the funeral to be over before they’re trying to get in another woman’s pants.”
Knowing me too well, John scoffs, “It’s cold enough. He was sick for years.”
I say nothing. If I start talking about Angela, I may not be able to shut up. There is much I want to know about the past thirty years, but Rome wasn’t built in a day, and I like both John and Beverly too much to let them think I accepted this invitation just to grill them for more information about the principals in the case. There will be plenty of time for that, I hope. I switch to coffee, hoping to sober up for the drive home. Beverly pumps me for anecdotes about John. She doesn’t even know he tried to shoot his sister, and I delight her with stories he either has forgotten or told her so long ago neither of them remember. One Halloween John broke into the nursing home and hid all the bed pans that weren’t in use.
“I thought he was going to jail for that.”
Far from being apologetic for the implicit cruelty in his behavior, John concludes the evening with a joke. Licking at his glass for the last drop of the amaretto Beverly produced and I couldn’t resist, he tells the story about the old man in the nursing home who went around on his birthday asking his fellow residents to guess how old he was. ““You’re seventy-three,” says the first man he asks.
“No, I’m seventy-eight!” the old man cackles.
Then he hobbles a little further down the hall and asks an old woman in a wheelchair, “It’s my birthday. Guess how old I am.” The old woman peers over her bifocals at him and tells him to unzip his pants. He does, and she takes his old shriveled penis into her hands and begins to rub it as she looks from his member to his face and back again.
“Seventy-eight!” she says finally.
“How did you know?” the old man marvels.” Delighted that we haven’t yelled out the punch line, John grins at us and says in an old woman’s voice, ‘“Well, I heard you tell that old man down there.”” I stand up, and take my leave, dimly aware that there is a moral here somewhere.
Women, I think the message is, know what they’re doing.
Instead of trying to drive all the way back to Blackwell County, I head for the Bear Creek Inn and check in. I’ll drive home tomorrow morning.
Poor women. They never quit trying to change us. When they do, that’s when we’ll need to worry. Betty gives me a wistful look as she takes my
money, but the last thing I need is to accept her invitation to watch television. Inside room number nine, I begin to think about Angela and wish there was a way to call her. I feel as if I have a crowbar in my pants, but it is probably because I have to piss so bad.
I go to bed with the room spinning, my last thought that once again I am in a motel room in my hometown.
Hung over, I arrive home at ten the next morning and find an urgent-sounding message on my machine from Tommy Ting. I sit down in my recliner in the living room and dial his number, wishing I’d had more sense than to keep drinking with John last night.
“Connie is worried,” Tommy says, without preliminaries, “that you’re going to argue that our mother killed our father!”
I look across the street into the park where I was going to walk Jessie. Damn, I wish Amy would bring her back. I miss her.
“No jury would buy that for two seconds,” I say, not really answering the question.
“Anybody just looking at her will know how ludicrous that is. She’s so frail she can hardly lift a tea cup. Now, I can’t take responsibility for what Dickerson might do.”
“Will you talk to him and convince him not to make that argument?”
Tommy presses me.
“It would kill her!”
Tommy doesn’t know what he is asking, but I don’t want to piss him off.
On the whole, I am getting some good information from the workers at the plant. At least Darla Tate was helpful.
“Sure, I’ll talk about it with him. Dickerson is too smart to insult a jury’s intelligence.”
He seems mollified, and I tell him what I have found so far.
“I’m not at all convinced that the Mexican worker didn’t kill your father,” I tell him, thinking of the dignified expression on Alvaro Ruiz’s weathered face.
“The sheriff doesn’t seem to consider him a suspect,” Tommy reminds me.
“It’d be a mistake at this stage,” I insist, “to eliminate anyone.”
Perhaps Tommy unconsciously is worried that I will try to pin the murder on another defenseless minority.
“Anyone could have set up Class Bledsoe. Hell, Ruiz could have gotten someone to do the job for him. Class was a sitting duck.”
We talk for a few more minutes and by the time we are finished. Tommy seems calmed down. Unlike his sister, he wants to trust me.
Tuesday afternoon I hurry home to see Sarah, who is home for spring
break. She has stayed in Fayetteville with a friend for the first three days, so I am anxious to see her. When I turn in the drive, there is a Subaru behind Sarah’s ancient Beetle
. Perhaps one of her friends from Fayetteville has dropped by. These girls look so young to me that I wonder how any of them are taken seriously when they apply for jobs. As I go in the back door, I hope Sarah has picked up a little.
College hasn’t made her a better housekeeper.
Though I can tell she has matured in the last couple of years, she comes home and sometimes regresses into an adolescent who might not make it out of junior high.
In the living room Sarah is sitting on the couch with a guy who is much too old for her. Though not bad looking in the face, this man even has a receding hairline and looks kind of flashy in a sports jacket that reminds me of the coat the Masters golf champion is presented after he wins.
“Hi, Dad!” Sarah says brightly.
“This is my friend Larry. He’s down here for a meeting for his company and I invited him to come by.”
The AIDS patient! He jumps to his feet and offers his hand.
“Larry Burdette, Mr. Page,” he says, giving me a firm grip and looking me straight in the eye like every other salesman I’ve known.
“Your daughter talks about you all the time. It’s a pleasure to meet
you.”
“Nice to meet you,” I murmur, noticing he looks pretty good for someone on his last legs.
Though I know all the literature says you can’t get AIDS except by sexual contact or through contact with their blood, I feel uneasy. A plastic glass full of water sits on the table by his chair. I need to try to remember to wash it thoroughly. I wonder if the guy has used the bathroom.
“Dad, you want a beer?” Sarah asks, her voice too loud, since she is standing right beside me. I feel in a daze. I wasn’t expecting this guy.
“Yeah,” I manage.
“That’d be good.” I need something.
“Have a seat,” I say to Larry, who is appraising me coolly. I watch Sarah disappear into the kitchen and wish she had warned me about this visit.
When he sits back down, I take the chair opposite him.
“Sarah says you sell computers. I can hardly turn one on, much less do anything with it. A friend of mine down the hall has one, but it just sits on his desk like a pet rock.”
He crosses his legs.
“In ten years they’ll be as simple to learn as driving a car.”
“Given some of the drivers I see around here,” I say, “I don’t know if that’ll help much.” He doesn’t even look gay to me.
He smiles as my daughter walks into the room and hands me a Miller Lite.
“Would you like one?” I ask, wondering if Sarah has already offered.
“I haven’t had a drink in five years,” he says, moving back his legs to let Sarah by.
“I’m in AA.”
Damn. AIDS. An alcoholic. If I were this guy, I’d be climbing the walls, but he seems pretty laid back. Maybe he’s on drugs.
“After a couple of drinks,” I say, watching Sarah’s face, “alcohol has never done me any favors.”
“Or solved a single one of my problems,” he responds amiably.
“Which are not inconsiderable, Sarah tells me,” I say, taking a long swallow.
“Dad!” Sarah shrieks. I wonder if she was expecting him to come by.
She is wearing old baggy jeans and a faded Razorback sweatshirt.
“Larry is the guy you’ve been writing me about, isn’t he?” I ask
innocently.
“It’s okay, Sarah,” Larry says.
“I don’t expect to live in a vacuum. The more people get to know us, the less afraid they’ll be.”
Out of politeness I nod, but I wonder if the reverse is true. I’ve been nervous ever since I found out who he was.
“How long since you’ve been diagnosed?” I ask, not really wanting to talk about this, but morbidly curious.
“Two years,” he says.
“It’s been quite an adjustment, but the support people like Sarah have given me has made all the difference in the world. You’ve got some daughter.”
For an instant I feel as if I am going to cry. This poor sucker is dying, and he credits my child with helping him want to live.
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” I say, watching Sarah blush.
“Has she told you about her personal odyssey the last few years? She’s quite the seeker.” “No,” he says, turning to Sarah.
“I’m afraid I’ve done most of the talking.”
Sarah gives me a look but answers, “Oh, I just went through a period in
high school when I was real religious and went to a fundamentalist church, and then last semester I got kind of caught up in a feminist movement on campus.”
Larry runs his arm down the back of the sofa.
“So I’m part of the quest, huh?” he asks, gently.
“No!” Sarah says, her face suddenly agonized.
“I just got involved with RAIN because it seemed the right thing to do.
Everybody in school is so self-centered. All they talk about is themselves and parties and dating and the Razorbacks. It feels good to be a part of something more important than who got drunk last week at the Sigma Nu house.”
By the expression on her face I know Sarah is mad at me. So be it. I am not particularly pleased with her for having set this visit up without talking to me first. I suggest that we invite Larry to go out to eat with us, and though he says he needs to work for a while, Sarah easily persuades him to come with us. At my suggestion we drive out to the Breadbox in western Blackwell County for Mexican food. I have eaten out here with Amy, and not only is it cheap, I am not likely to run into anybody I know. It is not that I think this guy will suddenly start bleeding on the dishes, but I feel uncomfortable with him. Yet, for all I know, half the staff at the Breadbox has AIDS.
Larry proves to be an entertaining dinner date.
Open and talkative, it is easy to see why Sarah responds to him.
“I had no clear understanding something was different about me,” he says over bread pudding and coffee after polishing off a full chicken enchilada dinner, “until I was in junior high. And then I spent the rest of high school and college trying to pretend I was normal and feeling incredibly lonely. I was like a bad magician telling a ridiculous joke while doing sleight-of-hand tricks, hoping nobody would notice what was actually going on.”
His parents had been stalwarts of a nondenominational Bible church in Texarkana, and the minister ranked homosexuality with mass murder on the top ten sin chart. Not to fear, however.
Homosexuals could be saved through prayer and rigorous counseling. When I ask whether he let them try, he responded quickly, “I wouldn’t have confessed to being gay in that church if they had put me on the rack.”
As he talks, I think of old Mr. Carpenter and resolve to go by to see him when I return to Bear Creek. He has asked me every time I have seen him.
“What was scary was that by the time I was seventeen I had gone from simple loneliness to thinking I might be some kind of monster. The day I graduated from high school I took off for San Francisco. I’ve never been back home for more than a couple of weeks.”
His brave talk earlier of educating people that AIDS victims are just plain folks has disappeared.
Yet who does not regress to childhood in front of their parents?
“How’d you wind up in Fayetteville?” I ask, curious. There are gay hangouts up there, but it’s hardly San Francisco.
While he explains that it was cheaper to go to school in Arkansas and pay in-state tuition, I glance at my daughter’s face. She has doubtlessly heard this story before, but she is hanging on his every word. Her mother was the same way. She was a sucker for victims. Yet, to this guy’s credit, he isn’t whining. This was how his life was.
Over a final cup of coffee, he brings up his alcoholism and says that it has nothing to do with him being gay.
“Like most people, I’ve got a hundred excuses, and none of them has ever stopped me from opening a bottle. The only thing that’s ever h
elped me is the twelve-step program. I’m a big believer in it. I go to an AA meeting once a week.”
Damn. This guy lets it all hang out. These recovery groups are all the rage. The paper is full of them. Hi, I’m Gideon. I’m a human being.
Still, if they work, who can knock them? If they work. Dan went to an overeaters anonymous group and said a couple of the guys stood out on the steps of the church during a break and ate a box of Snickers, proof that you can lie to yourself anywhere. I’ve done it every place but in the kitchen sink. I wonder if I am lying to myself about what things were like in Bear Creek. I have begun to have the feeling that my memories don’t jibe with what other people remember. The other night John looked at me as if I were making things up about the way the
Taylors had treated my family. Yet the problem with Angela and John is that they have lived in Bear Creek so long that they probably have come to accept the Paul Taylors of this world as normal.
Back at the house Larry declines Sarah’s invitation to come in and says he needs to get back to his hotel. I wonder if he is going out to one of Blackwell County’s drag shows. Sarah would probably like to go check it out with him, but he doesn’t ask. Probably she has already been to something similar in Fayetteville with him and wants to spare my feelings. I’m all for that.
Inside, I putter around the house, straightening up a bit. I am not used to having Sarah home, and her habit of not taking anything back to the kitchen is already getting on my nerves. She gets the hint and folds up the pages of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette she has spread out all over the kitchen table.
“Dad,” she says, watching me load the dishwasher, “Larry made you nervous while he was in the house, didn’t he?”
I turn on the hot water and wash the glass he used by hand.
“It just seemed weird,” I say, irritably.
“Nobody understands the disease. How can you be too careful?”
Sarah stacks the paper on top of the refrigerator.
She can’t fold up a newspaper any better than I can.
“I know how you feel,” she says.
“I felt funny around him at first, but less and less as time goes on.
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