Joey drove straight to Sheila Arnett’s place. When he came up the drive, a light glowed from the living room.
The next second he let up off the gas, pushed the headlights down to parking beams and crept past the house as quietly as possible. He stopped the truck out front of the little travel trailer. Dust billowed in the dim yellow lights and sifted in the window. His shirt stuck to his back when he got out, even at nearly ten o’clock. The air conditioner jutting out of the trailer window was going hard, spitting out hotter air into the night heat.
“Joey?”
His head whipped around. She always said his name like that, dragged out slowly. Her voice was always a little surprise. It was high-pitched and didn’t quite match the smoky way she looked.
He saw her step off the porch and into the moonlight. She moved like a cat, drawing a man’s eye and making things happen inside him.
“Good evenin’,” he said, stuffing his hands in his back pockets. Sheila scared him a little.
“I almost didn’t hear you drive up. Didn’t see your lights.”
“I dimmed them. I didn’t want to wake you, if you were already in bed.” He caught her scent, some womanly perfume that wrapped around him like a summer night.
“I was reading. I never get in bed before midnight. How’d it go with the kids? You were gone awhile. You all must have had a good time.”
He nodded. “It’s pretty easy to please kids with pizza and video games.” He shifted a step away, while an inner voice was saying, Go ahead and be with her…go ahead….
“Would you like to come in for a while? I just opened a bottle of wine. We could talk.”
He stood there a moment, on the edge. But then he just felt tired of everyone’s expectations.
“I thank you all the same, Sheila,” he said, “but I don’t have a thing to say right now.”
He turned to the camper trailer, holding himself to measured steps, while inside he was running for all he was worth. Entering the trailer, he closed the door and leaned on it, as if trying to hold back the world. What he really wanted to do was go get a horse and ride out down the valley in the moonlight, but he was too afraid that Sheila might see him and come after him.
The City Hall thermometer reads 85°
Mason rode in the police car with Neville Oakes. Their images reflected in the night-dark windows—Neville in his policeman’s uniform and Mason in a tan denim shirt. Even in the midnight hours, it was still so hot that they had the windows up and the air conditioner running. Neville was twelve years younger than Mason and almost a hundred pounds heavier. He sweated easily, and Mason sometimes got so cold in the car, he had to lower his window, which he did now.
“Whew.” Neville pointed at the digital thermometer out in front of City Hall. “Do you believe it? After midnight and it is still eighty-five degrees.”
“I wish they had never put that thing up there,” Mason said. “Are they ever goin’ to get the clock workin’? Then we can all obsess about the time along with the temperature.”
“They’re callin’ in some guy all the way from St. Louis,” Neville said. “No one seems to be able to figure out the problem. Oh, the clock keeps time, but it runs ten to fifteen minutes behind, so they fixed it so it won’t show at all.
“And they really did a nice job on that old buildin’. The thought was to bring up City Hall and set a standard for everyone to match. It’s workin’. Look at the Valentine Voice—Miss Porter is cleanin’ off that brick and puttin’ in new windows. And Blaine’s got a new awning.”
He turned the corner and drove down a tree-lined street. The fresh scent of mowed lawn came through the window.
“There’s Winston, right on time,” Neville said, slowing the cruiser.
Mason saw Winston Valentine in white T-shirt and dark sweatpants. Neville lowered his window and greeted the old man, and Winston said, “Good evenin’, boys,” without breaking his slow but rhythmic stride.
“Gettin’ out from the women, Mr. Valentine?” Neville asked.
“Gotta get out and keep what I got of my mind and my body,” the older man said. “Gotta work at it, boys, or women and the Feds sap it all right out of you. Least ways that Fed gov’ment can’t tax me for this walkin’ yet.”
“No, not yet, anyway.” Neville gave him a wave and drove off. “I’d like to be able to jog when I’m in my eighties,” he said to Mason.
“You don’t jog now.”
“Yeah, but I’ll take it up. Winston didn’t jog when he was my age, he told me. He said that back then he smoked up to two packs of cigarettes a day and drank a six-pack of beer. Do you think the women in his place really pester him, like he claims?”
“I haven’t spent much time speculatin’ on that.”
Neville shook his head. “My grandmother and Vella Blaine sure have. Mrs. Blaine is not at all happy about those women that come and go at his place.” He pressed the accelerator and headed out the highway east of town. “I wonder if men his age really can get it on. Could your granddaddy do it when he got old?”
Mason slid his eyes to Neville. “I never had occasion to ask, and Grandpap didn’t never say. He’d been widowed three times, and he wasn’t very inclined to have anything to do with women. He said he didn’t want to have to bury another one. You sure are powerfully interested in the sex lives of the elderly.”
“I’d just like to know what to expect for when I get there.”
“I think it is an individual thing.” Mason offered.
“Well, they sure don’t want them foolin’ around at the nursing home. My mom said that a few of the old men and women there are nutty about sex, and she’d like to get programs to give them some activity to divert the energy. My dad and the mayor are workin’ on getting some outfit to come in here and build a senior living community for people that don’t really need the nursing home. Duplexes and apartments, golf course, maybe.”
“We could use it,” Mason said, remembering how his grandfather would have been shuffled off to a home, until Mason moved in with him. His grandfather ended up dying in his own bed, where he wanted to be.
“Well, buddy,” Neville said, shifting his large bulk, “you thought any more about becomin’ a full-time deputy?”
“Answer’s still no.”
Mason was serving as a special deputy. Valentine now had a force of three and a half, that was the joke. His duties entailed driving around with an official officer three nights a week and wearing a pager to be on call twenty-four hours. Mason rarely slept more than four hours a night, and he liked to put his waking hours to good use. Liked to keep himself busy, even if it wasn’t much more than walking around checking doors, helping Lodi, the town drunk, to a bunk at the jail for the night, or getting Vella Blaine’s cat out of the elm tree.
“I could use you, you know that.” Neville, who had quit the army and taken over from his father, Mickey, as Chief of Police back in the spring, took his job seriously. “This town’s growin’ whether we want it to or not—we’ll get that senior living center by and by, and there was a guy in here the other day talkin’ to the mayor about building one of those juvenile detention centers. I don’t much like the idea, but it could bring upwards of a hundred new jobs with it. We’re not hardly the little rural burg we used to be. I’m gonna have to hire more men to deal with stuff like what’s been happenin’ around here lately.”
He was referring to two recent situations—one had been a farmer going crazy and threatening to shoot all his cattle, and another had been an altercation right in the middle of town at the Main Street Cafe, which also served as the bus station, where a young hoodlum high on this and that—not one of the Valentine boys but a young fella from up north somewhere—had pulled a gun.
“Oh, Neville,” Mason said, “those were just a couple of fluke happenings. People here are human, just like everywhere else, and sometimes they get a little out of sorts. I don’t think we’re lookin’ at a crime wave in Valentine. It’s the heat, most of it. It’ll
all calm down when this spell breaks.”
“I know we aren’t any Oklahoma City, but I’ll tell you, buddy, I don’t know what we’d have done without you in that mess at the cafe. No, sir.”
“That boy did not intend to shoot anybody. The gun wasn’t loaded. It was all a mistake.” The boy had broken down crying like a baby in Mason’s arms. He thought of it. He needed to get himself up to the county jail to visit the boy.
“Nobody knew it wasn’t loaded,” Neville said. “And the point is, what if it had been loaded? By golly, I think Midgett would have gotten himself and maybe me shot.
“I never in my life thought I’d be facing a .357 right here in Valentine. That’s why I came home here, so I wouldn’t have to face stuff like that.”
Neville went on in that vein for some time, about how Valentine had always been a peaceful place with no crime. About how neighbor looked after neighbor, and old men like Winston could walk the street safely at night. About how, if he could, he would pull Oklahoma out of the United States and put a wall around it because the rest of the nation did not deserve Oklahoma.
Mason listened, staring at his reflection in the black glass, seeing vague pictures of his own violent past that he never could completely erase.
“You have a lot more experience than the rest of my force in dealin’ with violent situations,” Neville pointed out. He seemed possessed of the opinion that because Mason had been in prison, he had good experience with violent offenders. “You’d be a real good deputy for us.”
“You know I don’t want to carry a gun,” Mason said. “And I’m not all that fond of khaki, either.” As a part-time special deputy, he wasn’t required to wear a uniform or allowed to carry a firearm. He liked that.
Neville cast him a frown. “It was a boot you used to kill that boy, and you still wear boots.”
“They’re on my feet,” Mason replied, not letting himself be perturbed.
Neville breathed deeply, looked at his watch and pronounced it time to head back to town. “Juice’ll be pullin’ the first of those red chili pepper bagels out pretty soon now. I like to get them when they’re soft.”
“Those aren’t real bagels…not like bagels are supposed to be.”
“They’re Southern bagels. What would you expect?”
Mason said he could use a cup of coffee. It occurred to him that the night sort of had its own inhabitants, such as night patrolmen, and the bakers and the nurses at the nursing home, and a few senior citizens, like Winston Valentine, who walked up and down the streets at night.
Neville had turned around and was heading back toward town when suddenly a yellow truck came flying into the glow of their headlights. The pickup was going so fast that its tires never touched the ground as it crossed the road in front of them. A boy hanging out the window yelled, “Yee-ha!”
“Oh, geez,” Neville said. “I want my bagel.” But, flipping on his blinking lights, he turned left onto the gravel road and followed after the truck.
Mason sat up in the seat. He recognized the truck. It belonged to Larry Joe Darnell. Charlene’s son.
He thought of her sitting in the Suburban that evening, gazing at him.
Neville said, “That’s Larry Joe. He’s got that truck souped up, too.”
Mason reminded Neville to remember eighteen, and Neville said he had never been eighteen because his daddy had been the police chief.
The yellow truck stopped, or Neville might never have caught it. Neville pulled up behind it. The patrol car’s headlights caused the chrome bumper to gleam and illuminated three male heads.
They’d been at the lake. Young men cutting up on a Saturday night, filled with beer and cocky as God allowed. Mason stood back and watched as Neville had the three get out of the truck and line up beside it. He knew Randy Stidham by first name. Randy pumped gas and fixed cars at his daddy’s Texaco and had taken his own apartment that summer; Ralph Stidham was proud of the boy. The past spring Larry Joe Darnell had started working part-time at the Texaco, mostly nights. The third one was Jaydee Mayhall’s son, Clay, who didn’t work anywhere that Mason had ever seen. He pegged Clay Mayhall as a troublemaker, and Mason had learned to spot such when in prison, where survival often depended on being able to judge people with one look. Mason felt certain Clay Mayhall was destined for prison down the road, or at least to be a heartbreak for a lot of people. Unless God intervened, but likely the boy would be calling on the aid of his daddy, Jaydee Mayhall, who pampered the boy straight down the wrong road.
“Are any of you boys of age to be consumin’ alcohol?” Neville asked.
And right off the Mayhall boy said, “We ain’t been consumin’ no fuckin’ alcohol. Search us. We don’t have none,” and sort of laughed.
Neville leaned close and said, “You watch your mouth. I don’t like such language.”
The boy, tall as Neville but skinny, grinned and said a mock, “Yes, sir.”
The other two boys were decent and looked downward.
Neville came over to Mason and said in a tired, annoyed voice, “They’re not sober enough to let ’em go drivin’ around. Be my dang luck they’d crack up and kill themselves or someone else. Well, dang. I don’t want to take them to jail,” he added miserably.
“You mean you don’t want to chat with Jaydee May-hall?” Mason asked, teasing.
“That dang Jaydee’ll be all down my back, and I’ll have paperwork out the ying-yang.” Neville didn’t believe in swearing, although he managed by making up his own acceptable words. He sighed. “I guess there ain’t no gettin’ around talkin’ to Jaydee, but if I get him out here to get his boy, I won’t have to do paperwork.”
Mason looked over at the boys. At Charlene’s son, seeing Charlene that afternoon in the sunlight.
Almost before he knew it, he said, “Let me drive the boys to wherever they’re stayin’ the night. I’ll keep the truck and drive myself on home.”
Mason got behind the wheel, and the three boys squeezed in the single seat next to him, Charlene Darnell’s son right against his elbow.
“The clutch is real tight. You gotta do it just right to get it goin’,” the Darnell boy said, sort of squinting at him through a beer-fog.
“I think I can manage,” Mason said, easing the truck into motion.
He drove the boys into town to the Stidham boy’s small, old duplex apartment. A Harley motorcycle was torn apart on the front porch. The two other boys slipped out of the truck and headed for the apartment.
Mason told young Darnell where his own place was. “You can come for your truck any time after nine.”
When the boy glared at him, Mason said, “It’s better than goin’ to jail and havin’ your mother and father find out, isn’t it?”
The boy gazed long at him, and Mason gazed back; without words the boy asked why, and Mason refused an answer.
The kid slammed the door, then called through the window, “Don’t scratch my truck.”
Mason laughed, a pleasure he recognized as rare washing over him.
He managed the clutch and drove off down the street to the stop sign. He lingered there, revving the engine and working his hand over the round gearshift knob and rushing back in time to his twenties again, when he believed there wasn’t anything in the world he could not do.
Overtaken by the youthful sensation, he gave in and turned right, heading out of town and along the road past Charlene Darnell’s house.
It sat well back from the road, the Darnell house. No one would hear him. He let up off the gas and cruised by slowly, seeing the house under the trees. Light from the pole lamp filtered down on the roof. The windows were dark, but he knew Charlene was in there. Likely lying in bed.
He could have answered the boy’s silent question. He would have had to say, “Because I have loved your mother since the first day I laid eyes on her ten years ago.”
The City Hall thermometer reads 83°
She awoke abruptly, coming out of a dream about cars. Cars chasing her. At f
irst she didn’t know where she was. Her heart was beating like a hammer…the television was on…oh, yes, she’d fallen asleep on the couch. There were cars racing all over the screen. The Dukes of Hazzard was on.
She was wringing wet. She was so wet, her Goofy sleep shirt was soaked through. Goodness gracious. She wiped her fingers over her chest, and they came away wet. Had the air conditioner given out again?
Taking up the remote, she pressed the button, and the time came on the television screen: 5:00 a.m. My heavens, she had slept the night through. It was the first time in a week. She’d been waiting up for Larry Joe to come in. Wouldn’t you know she would go and fall into a sound sleep on the night she wanted to stay awake.
She got up and peered out the window to make certain Larry Joe’s truck was there. It was strange that she had not heard it.
The truck wasn’t there.
She jerked open the front door and padded barefoot on the still warm concrete walk, looking for the truck. Maybe he’d parked somewhere different. But all that was there was the old Suburban.
Racing back inside, she hurried down the hall and peered into Larry Joe’s room. There was enough moonlight to see that his bed was perfectly made.
Larry Joe had not come home. It was 5:00 a.m., and her son had not come home and had not called. Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord.
She grabbed the cordless phone and carried it into the kitchen, dialing Larry Joe’s pager number as she went. Her fingers were shaking, and she misdialed and had to punch in the numbers again.
She set the phone on the table and stared at it.
Now just calm down, Charlene. There’s no need to think the worst. Don’t go screaming in there to Rainey. She needs her rest, and there’s no need to get the entire house in an uproar.
She kept staring at the phone, waiting for it to ring.
Then she made herself move and set the coffeemaker to brewing.
Ten minutes later, she dialed his pager number again. Maybe he was out of range or had it turned off.
Driving Lessons Page 7