“Hell, I ain’t got a problem with his dog.”
I stared at the worn carmine fabric on the sofa. The antennas on our TV set had been mended with masking tape. One of our front windows was missing a screen.
Mom came to the room and sent me to the back yard. I went outside and perched on the swing and listened to their voices rising and falling. My brother came home about that time, and when he heard them shouting he elected not to go inside.
“What is it this time?”
“Pop wants to fight Mr. Kellner. He just called him up and challenged him to a fight.”
“What for?”
“He almost hit Rusty. Mr. Kellner thinks he did it on purpose.”
“Rusty the dog? What’s Mom shouting about?”
“She doesn’t want’em to fight. Pop told Mr. Kellner to meet him at the drainage pipe.”
“No kidding? Is he gonna show?”
My brother grinned. He liked it.
We ate our burgers as a family, in silence. I was sad for the Witchers. Only recently I had visited the Pendleton house and one of the Pendleton boys, Johnny, had afterwards made a point of cleaning the front porch with a hose because I’d been sitting there. Tanya Browning, Susie Kellner, the three Coghill daughters—the very belles of our neighborhood—had all been present (so my informant, Dickie Pudding, later related), and they were giggling and laughing and shrieking encouragingly, “God, Johnny, you’re so cruel!”
What was so bad about the Witchers? We didn’t listen to country music. We didn’t eat chitterlings; we didn’t wear overalls. My mother read books by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen. She could play show tunes on piano.
It was Pop, he was the one who made the trouble.
After supper he headed to the bedroom and put on his T-shirt and jeans. When he finally left to go beat up Mr. Kellner, my mother called out that my brother and I should stay behind. But we ignored her, and Pop didn’t send us back. He wanted us to see that Kellner would be a no-show.
We went to the end of the street, turned left and circled around to Stanley Street, which ran between the end of Livingstone and the field with the drainage pipe. (There was a worn path that debouched on Livingstone about a hundred yards from our destination, but we didn’t take it. Shortcuts, for some reason, were taboo to grown-ups.) As we approached the field we saw Kellner standing next to well-dressed Mr. Joyner, his next-door neighbor and father to Myra, who had learned by now, or would learn shortly, that Mr. Witcher had picked a fight with one of the community’s more esteemed dwellers, a man who smoked a pipe and listened to Dave Brubeck. I was confused by shame and pride, feelings intensified by my secret passion for Myra, who was kind when no one else was around.
My brother and I, flanking Pop, stood on the side of the street where it verged on the field. Mr. Joyner strode briskly forward. I was worried Pop wouldn’t recognize his role as emissary and would punch him instead of Kellner.
“Look here, Witcher,” Joyner said.
Look here! What a civilized sound it had to my ears. It’s what decent men in movies said when forced to reason with desperadoes and thugs.
“There are other ways to iron out your differences.”
This was no longer a world of Kellners and Witchers. Mr. Joyner might have been Gregory Peck or Gary Cooper. (I guess Pop was Richard Widmark.)
“Stand aside, Joyner,” Pop said.
I almost burst out laughing. Mr. Joyner noticed.
“What did you bring your kids for?”
“To show’em Witchers look out for themselves. Kellner, you ready? ” he called.
“I’m ready,” Kellner feebly responded. You had to feel a little sorry for the man. He was making a stand, he was going to take my pop’s pounding. Pop was from the mountains, a hillbilly.
I tugged on Pop’s sleeve and jerked my eyes in the direction of home. But Kellner was distracting him. He had removed his navy blazer and folded it neatly across his arm. Now he was placing it on the ground and carefully setting his pipe beside it. He rolled up his sleeves.
My father brushed past Mr. Joyner.
“Witcher!” Joyner called.
“Mister Witcher,” my brother said. “Kick his ass, Pop.”
Kellner positioned one leg slightly in front of the other, raised his arms and began to revolve his fists in the air like a turn-of-the-century pugilist demonstrating fisticuffs.
Pop’s eyes bugged out. He gave me a wink and said, “Sheeit,” playing the rube, a mortifying tendency whenever he got around civilized types like Kellner and Joyner.
Joyner came between the two men. “I’m warning you, Witcher,” he said, like a sheriff.
“Am I gonna have to fight both of you?”
“I’ll back you up,” my brother said.
“You go home, boy,” Joyner said. My brother was eighteen and soon to begin classes at the cracker college downtown so he wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam. He’d long harbored murderous feelings for Mr. Joyner’s son, Gaylord, because Gaylord had stolen his girl, Courtney Blankenship. Possibly this made the tone of Mr. Joyner’s voice sound more imperious and disdainful than it was. To me his tone was moralistic; he was saying, “Go home, this is no place for a young man.” To my brother it was more like “Go, villain. Leave.”
Suddenly Joyner said in amazement, “This young man is threatening me.”
Sure enough, my brother was pounding his fist against his palm and staring aggressively into Joyner’s eyes. Which didn’t surprise me. My brother had inherited Pop’s feeling for the clan.
“Keep him covered,” Pop said, moving towards Mr. Kellner.
“You’re encouraging him!”
Joyner blustered in the direction of the crowd gathering on the side of the field, mainly kids who lived on local streets. He was playing to them, gleaning support in a propaganda campaign he’d already won.
“Beat him up, Mr. Kellner!” a pipsqueak hollered from the sidelines.
Kellner desperately charged. He flung himself in the air, putting all his weight into a fist that he sent sailing into Pop’s jaw. It staggered Pop for a second. He wasn’t expecting it. No one expected it, a sucker punch from Kellner. A shout of “Oh!” came from the sidelines.
Pop rubbed his jaw and grinned. Then he came in swinging. Pow pow pow!
Mr. Kellner flopped to the ground like a tumble of clothes.
The kids on the side couldn’t believe their eyes. A grown-up from the neighborhood had just pummeled another grown-up. The entire world had just observed the barbaric effects of a mountain upbringing.
Mr. Joyner seemed appalled, but not exactly eager to press the matter.
“You okay, Paul?” he asked Kellner.
A mumble came from within the sack of clothing.
Pop was staring at a cut on his knuckle.
“Do you need an ambulance?” Joyner asked.
A monosyllable came from Kellner, without the close front rounded sound that might have signified a yes.
Joyner turned sternly to my pop.
“Are you happy now?”
Pop stomped his foot, Joyner leapt back.
We followed him off the field. My brother swiveled his head, grinning in the faces of the stunned onlookers. We marched back to our house, victorious but unpopular, like Wehrmacht infantrymen goose-stepping into Prague.
2
POP BEATING UP KELLNER WAS, I think, the beginning of it all. We bear primal anxieties about our fathers, and it’s tough to witness your pop beat up a pipe-smoking gentleman from the next street over. I had visions of the police raiding our house, of my mother, hair wrapped in a scarf, taking us to visit Pop in jail where we’d have to pass snacks and tobacco through cold iron bars. Truthfully, at the time I was more worried about how the news would affect Myra. Myra was everything to me, probably because there wasn’t much else.
My brother, meanwhile, was having an entirely different reaction. He’d had a five-year jump on me in suffering rejection from El Dorado Hills, and life had embittered him early. On the w
ay home he kept slapping my father’s back. “Way to go, Pop! Did you see Kellner fall?”
My father was a quiet man until he knew you, and a veteran of Normandy. Probably he had killed people. He’d been raised in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
When we got to the house my brother dashed in before Pop could grab him and told Mom about the heap Kellner made when he fell to the ground.
She was holding on to his shoulder when we came inside.
“Is it true?” she asked.
Pop went down to the bedroom without saying a word.
The next day he was home before noon. He had been fired from his job as a mechanic at the refrigeration company.
My first thought was regret for those Sundays when he used to bundle me in a furry arctic parka and take me into the deep freeze and let me walk amongst the sides of beef. That was part of his job, to make sure the freezers were working properly.
“What do you mean you’ve been fired?” Mom said.
“Old man Ball told me to go home. Said he didn’t need me no more.”
“Why not?”
Pop shrugged. Bad luck never needed a reason. But later we found out there was indeed a reason. Mr. Ball was cousin to Mr. Joyner.
My mother’s knees gave way and she sank to the worn carmine sofa. Poor Mom. Thin lips, haggard nose, weary eyes, a face that belonged in a Dust Bowl documentary. No one had ever been attracted to her, except for Pop and the manager of the Ben Franklin store. But Pop had a painful way of showing his love. Which is to say he never showed it.
“What are we gonna do?” she said.
“Look for more work. You should too.”
“Who’s gonna hire you now? You’ve been fired from every job you’ve had.”
“I’ll go to Southside,” he said.
He meant across the river. He figured no one knew him there and his reputation wouldn’t precede him.
All that week Pop would be at the kitchen table with the newspaper spread before him while Mom paced from the stove to the sink and back. “What are we going to do? Where will the money come from?”
Finally, in desperation, she painted on lipstick and wiggled into a skirt so short and tight it made her knees touch and her calves bow out like a wishbone. Then she made me go with her to the Ben Franklin store.
Short skirts weren’t too common back then. Only recently had the first miniskirts made it to the market, and they were designed for girls far younger than my mother. Skirts like hers you saw on tarts in Andy Capp cartoons.
We passed the drainage ditch where the kids were hanging out and came upon Myra sitting on the front steps of the Coghill house, among the Coghill lovelies. Alas, the second she spotted my tart-skirted mom she turned away.
In humiliation I fixed my eyes before me, seeing nothing.
We arrived at the Ben Franklin and Mom took care of her business, whatever that was. Why did I have to come? The manager of the store was Mr. Harris. He’d long held a flame for my mother, and he liked it that she looked like a tart. (When she was growing up in Lakeside, Mr. Harris resided in the house across the street, a henpecked man at the time, now a widower.)
The walk home was brisk, furious. Mom’s heels were stabbing the macadam. At intersections, looking both ways for cars, and unavailing of the sting, she dug her nails into my shoulder. When we passed the Coghill porch Myra was gone, and I found the pain of not being able to alleviate the shame of our last encounter worse than the shame itself.
After we got home Mom announced she was going to start work at the Ben Franklin the next week, as a cashier.
Pop didn’t say anything. It was summer. School was out, baseball was in. He was on the bed listening to a day game on the radio.
Stan stared for a long time. Mom had whored herself, that’s what he was thinking.
“What does that mean, Pop, you’re going to be the housewife?”
He got up and left the house.
Later, when the game was over, Pop cut off the radio and rose from the bed.
I ran to the kitchen. I assumed he was going to raise hell with Mom for getting a job without consulting him. But maybe she did consult him, who knows.
He sat at the table. Something long and brown, like a strip of bark, was sizzling in the pan. Through the torn screen of the door we could see the tops of the trees blowing as a storm moved in.
THE WAR AGAINST the Witchers began to escalate about this time. I remember when the war was still cold, when all we had to deal with was the snootiness of our neighbors. Oddly enough, Pop was more trouble then. He gambled, he drank, and perhaps he ran with women. I wasn’t positive on the last score, I only knew what Mom and Stan had hinted at. The legendary days of Pop’s life of sin belonged to my insensate years, when I was small and assumed all was well in the world. I did have shadowy memories of Pop being drunk, but I loved those memories. Pop was fun when he was drunk.
He straightened himself out only when Mom threatened to leave him for good. He got the job at the refrigeration company and our family was granted two years of domestic calm. Yet that is precisely when the neighborhood hostilities became overt. Maybe no one feared Pop sober. Or maybe it was the increasing militancy of my brother, who rode the streets on his Sting-Ray bicycle, one arm at his side and one arm holding a portable radio to his ear.
Trouble had arisen over Stan’s wooing of Courtney Blankenship, a clear signal that the Witchers no longer knew their place. The Blankenships were gentry. Mr. Blankenship was the weatherman on Channel Six, and for a half-hour every weekday morning he spruced himself up in a crisp white sailor’s uniform and genially hosted a local children’s program called Ahoy, Mateys, which came on just before Captain Kangaroo. The neighborhood, you understand, instantly realized something needed to be done. A Blankenship gal dating a Witcher? It rallied by enlisting the square-jawed charms of Gaylord Joyner. It was as though a committee had been formed to appoint some local squire the task of coaxing Courtney back to the realm of suburban chivalry. Later, when the seduction was accomplished and she had dumped my brother, Gaylord just as casually dumped her, and promptly was awarded the scholarship to Duke University (although I’m not sure there was a cause-and-effect relationship).
A day or so after Pop’s pummeling of Kellner, a patrol car pulled up in front of our house. My brother and I were watching through the front window with the missing screen. “It’s a cop,” Stan called.
Pop jumped from the sofa and took a peek.
The cop stayed in his car, the way cops do, writing his report and mumbling in his walkie-talkie; and then out stepped a skinny guy wearing glasses who seemed no older than Stan. He peered at our house, verified the number, and made an inscription on his legal pad.
Stan and I answered his ring. The cop bent and squinted through the dark screen.
“I’m looking for Mr. Charles Witcher.”
“He’s not here,” my brother said.
“Stan!” Pop called, admonishing him. He swung from the sofa, where he’d rearranged himself after spotting the cop through the window, and invited the officer in.
He turned down the volume on the TV (he was watching As the World Turns) and turned to the cop with a cocky grin. He didn’t offer a seat or anything, he just grinned. Meanwhile I studied his sandy curls and his red mechanic paws rakishly placed upon his hips and wondered what he was going to do. (Stan and I had inherited Pop’s hair and not, for which we were thankful, Mom’s orange tangles.) Pop was magnificent, but what made him magnificent was too obscure to understand, exactly. His smile made you an accomplice in mischief that never happened; or you might find yourself laughing at things he said without knowing why. It was always hard to tell whether he was being charismatic, or simply hollow.
The cop introduced himself as Reedy. “I hear you and Mr. Kellner got in a scrap,” he said. You could see in his eyes that he was already taken by Pop. My father had that redneck charm so vital to the design of the South. But it only worked on ladies and cops.
“Has K
ellner swore out a complaint?”
“No sir, I’m just following up on what I heard.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“No sir, I just want to make sure everything remains peaceful.”
“Giving me a warning, huh?”
“I’m not taking sides. I just want to know if there’s anything I can do to help you and Mr. Kellner be civilized with each other.”
“Keeping the peace?”
“Yes sir.”
Pop nodded distrustfully. He had the mountain man’s suspicion of the badge. He kept out of trouble with the law, and he had taught us not to believe in cops. “Don’t mess with ’em, don’t call ’em. You get in trouble you can get out of it without’em.”
Now he said, “Boys, disappear.”
My brother and I hesitantly headed to our room, with no option but to chart the progress of the conversation through the walls and windows.
The men meandered out to the yard. They kept looking at the roof of the house as though they were discussing home improvements, but it was just one pair of eyes wandering off and the other pair following. Pop’s shirt was undone two or three buttons, disclosing his softening chest. His bulging forearms and pinched elbows made me think of Popeye.
We heard the big bedroom door creak open and ran to the hallway. Mom was stepping out, one-eyed from her nap.
“Who’s your father talking to?”
“The police,” we said.
“Good Lord, what now?” She came and peeked out the window.
Pop was dominating Reedy. He had his arm around the cop’s shoulder, and he kept poking his chest, making points.
“What does he want?” Mom said.
“Says he came as a peace officer,” Stan said. “Old man Kellner snitched. I’m gonna kick his ass for that.”
“You watch it,” Mom said. “Look who’s in our yard, that’s what kicking someone’s ass does. And stop saying ‘ass.’”
We watched Pop usher Reedy to the patrol car. After the cop got in he sat and wrote in his pad for a while.
When Pop entered the house we filed into the living room.
“Shhh,” he said.
We waited until Reedy started the engine and moved the cruiser away.
If Jack's in Love Page 2