Killer Diller

by Edgerton, Clyde

  Sears knows Ballard’s black enrollment is climbing every year. A mind is a mind and a soul is a soul, regardless of that Ham business in the Bible. But as a matter of fact, he can hardly think of any young blacks who will look at him. Certainly, he glows around them just like he glows around white people. He’s never tried to glow less around one group than another. And he’s supported BOTA’s acceptance of young black criminals. He’s on the BOTA House board, where he’s had to listen to all sorts of views about that topic, including one board member’s preference for small-nosed instead of larged-nosed Negroes.

  “Keep up the good work,” says Sears as he turns to leave. His rounds don’t allow loitering. But one of his personal responsibilities has been to advise Mrs. White, the housemother, since even before this Project Promise agreement came about, and he feels good about how he’s been able to drop in and offer advice.

  “We got to get a new red-alert song,” says Ben, when the door closes behind the provost.

  In comes Sherri Gold. Sherri Smith, really. Gold is her stage name.

  Lord God, thinks Shanita, what the dogs drug up.

  Sherri, wearing tight jeans, boots, a red shirt and a Durham Bulls baseball cap, backwards, believes the band should eventually do four kinds of music: gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, and country club standards. “I’m talking money,” she told Larry at the last rehearsal. “Country clubs is where the money is. You might have a good time playing The Continental Club, but you can’t make the kind of money you can in country clubs, especially if you learn a few standards. And they got country clubs in Myrtle Beach, and Key West, especially Miami.”

  “We asking for trouble,” Larry had said, while Shanita thought, No way we can add all this country club honky shit. Lord, help my time.

  “You’re late, man,” says Ben.

  “I ain’t no man, man,” says Sherri. “Howdy, Shanita. Hey, boys.”

  “Fine,” says Shanita.

  “I’m sorry I’m late. Let’s get to work. Play the blues.” She clinches her fist and draws her elbow into her side.

  “We’re going to work up the ‘Jelly’ song,” says Wesley.

  “What about the radio show?” asks Sherri.

  “Just those five gospels for the radio show.”

  “Can we go over those first?”

  “Okay with me.”

  “I mean, you know,” says Sherri, “the radio show is a big deal. We need to be ready. There ain’t no re-takes on a live radio show. What time we supposed to be out there, anyway?”

  “Seven-thirty A.M.,” says Wesley.

  “I ain’t ever been up that early,” says Sherri.

  Chapter 3

  On Tuesday, a month later, Wesley stands at the snack bar on the Ballard campus. It’s lunchtime. He’s been laying bricks, helping build a wall for the new addition to the vet school. His denim jacket and jeans are cruddy and dusty at the elbows and knees.

  “What do you need today?” says Robbie, the small woman behind the counter.

  “I need a new car—a Trans Am, or a Continental.”

  “Me too. And a good man. You must already have a good woman.”

  “Sort of.”

  “What kind of food you want?”

  “A barbecue with slaw, a bag of Nachos, and a Mello Yello.”

  Robbie pulls a Mello Yello from the drink box, pops the top and sets it on the counter. As Wesley takes a sip, he pulls a folded letter from his back pocket, shakes it open, checks the room number over in Morgan Hall where he’s supposed to have this first Project Promise meeting—meet this Vernon Jackson he’s going to be teaching masonry to. It’s 231 Morgan Hall.

  Wesley eats as he walks across campus. He thinks about Phoebe, about Phoebe and him. They talked on the sidewalk in front of BOTA House yesterday, the fourth time they’ve met. Twice she’s driven him out to the mall, where they sat together on a bench and talked about things. She talked about how she had been addicted to food. She seemed to enjoy telling him, talking to him. She said she used to go into a 7-Eleven and eye a bag of Nacho chips and say to herself that she was not going to buy them, yet deep inside she’d hear a whisper —yes, yes you are, yes you are, yes you are, and she would way deep down know with one hundred percent certainty that before she could get out of that store, she would buy that bag of Nachos, the giant bag of Nachos, go home and eat them up with a big hunk of hard cold cheese put in a little pot on the stove, melted, and then poured all over them.

  She finally had to stop going into any store where there was food. She did a lot of shopping at hardware stores. But she kept finding ways to eat. Once food got into her mouth, all resistance was gone, she said. She’d always have to eat all of whatever was in front of her.

  Wesley sees Phoebe in his mind. She is so . . . she looks so good. Her face. Those freckles, that thick, soft red hair, and blue eyes. He thinks—yet again—about this whole business of sex before marriage. Maybe he should read up on it in the Bible—this love and sex stuff. There is supposed to be something in there about David and some women or something like that.

  Being too strict can’t be right. That’s for monks and all them.

  Wesley walks up the steps at Morgan Hall. He’s done some masonry work on these steps and has been inside a few times. Little gold plaques are beside each classroom. The John H. Collins Classroom, says one plaque. The Bertha Swain McDuff Classroom, says the next. A broom closet with no plaque. Then the Tina Johnson Dillworth Classroom. He’s ten minutes early. There is no one in sight. He pulls his screwdriver from his back pocket.

  Wesley looks both ways, covers a smile with the back of his hand.

  The broom closet becomes the Tina Johnson Dillworth Classroom.

  Upstairs, Wesley sees a side view of Dr. Fleming through her open office door. He’s seen her before, in the snack bar. She’s not so old, and she’s sitting in a chair that’s out in front of her desk, wearing glasses, a turtleneck sweater, short brown hair. Cardboard boxes and stacks of books and papers are all around on the floor, on a table, and on her desk. As he moves on into the doorway, Wesley sees, on a couch, a white man with big grimy hands and a—Wesley stares . . . damn . . . he looks like a possum. A boy sitting there rocking back and forth with his elbows tucked between his knees.

  “You must be Wesley,” says Dr. Fleming, standing, extending her hand.

  Her hand—small, soft. Wesley again thinks about Mattie Rigsbee, how she taught him to shake hands. He squeezes firmly, looks Dr. Fleming in the eye. “Yeah. Yes, ma’am. That’s right.”

  “I want you to meet Holister and Vernon Jackson,” says Dr. Fleming. “Wesley Benfield.”

  Holister stands, starts his hand forward toward Wesley, stops it. “My hand’s pretty dirty.”

  “That’s all right.”

  Holister’s hand is rough. He holds firmly, turns loose fast.

  Vernon still sits, rocking himself forward and backward, looking at his hands, then up at Wesley.

  “Stand up, boy,” says Holister.

  Vernon stands up, looks down, puts his hand forward. Wesley gives it a shake. The hand is limp, little, no grip at all.

  “Wesley, you can sit over here in this chair by the door,” says Dr. Fleming. “I was just telling Mr. Jackson and Vernon about Project Promise, about how we hope to set it up and run it. Did you get a letter?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  Dr. Fleming sits in her chair again. “We believe this can be a positive experience for everyone involved. Mrs. White speaks very highly of you. We will be able to pay you for your time, and our graduate students will be able to assess how these kinds of programs might work in other, similar settings.

  “There will be three of you at BOTA, working in the program initially. Carla McGhee and Linda French are the others. I think that’s in your letter. We hope to involve more later on. Today I want to set up a tentative schedule for meetings and so on.”

  “That’s the messiest desk I ever seen,” says Vernon.

  Holister
jerks his face toward Vernon. “Who you talking to?”

  Dr. Fleming smiles and looks at her desk over her shoulder.

  “Her,” says Vernon. “I mean, I mean I seen messy stuff in the shop and all, tables, but I ain’t ever seen nothing that messy. That is messy.”

  “Well,” says Dr. Fleming, “you probably haven’t seen anything like that. Occasionally, I—”

  “I mean, how do you find something under all that stuff? What if you had something under there you just needed to pick up, just, you know, pick up?”

  “You’d be—”

  “Something you just needed to pick up, like a pencil or something like that.” Vernon’s rocking is constant.

  “You’d be surprised at how easy it is to—”

  “I mean you’d have to climb down in all that stuff.”

  “Shut up,” says Holister. “Let her finish.”

  “I was letting her finish. I was just telling her what—”

  “No, you won’t. Now shut up, I said.”

  “I usually know where the important material is,” says Dr. Fleming. “Most of it is—”

  “Why don’t you just throw it—”

  “Shut up. I mean it.”

  “Away.”

  “I always wanted to be a carpenter-brick thing,” Vernon says to Wesley, outside after the meeting. “That’s one of the things I’ve always wanted to be.”

  “Well, I think I can teach you some bricklaying,” says Wesley.

  “Carpenters and stuff are killer dillers,” says Vernon.

  “I tried to teach him about automobile engines,” says Holister, “but it didn’t stick. He has a unusual approach to things. But he can flat play a piano. That’s one thing he can do.”

  “Yep,” says Vernon. “That’s one thing I can do.”

  Ted Sears is on his 1:45 to 2:05 lunch beak, standing at his office window, eating the ham and cheese sandwich made by the Sears’ cook, Aunt Polly. He watches a threesome walking along the brick pathway under the shade of the big oaks, now turning gold and red. He recognizes Wesley Benfield from church and from the picture of him that was in the paper, along with the article on Project Promise. And that must be the retarded boy with him. This whole business with BOTA House as a lab is certainly bold, thinks Ted. But not too bold— Ballard will be free of any liability. The relationship is just right for full impact at low risk. He might even be able to entice this Benfield boy, since he’s a Christian, to take a class or two— firm up the relationship—so the world can see that Ballard is taking an active part in his transformation from sinner to Christian.

  Parents would love it. A direct result of the foresight of the university president who was once poor, too. Yes, one of them. They all know Ted was raised in a poor family. They know he paid his own way through college, joined the Marines and flew jets—was an officer in the military—and then came home and went back to school, earned a Ph.D. in physical education, became a nutrition scholar and a professor at Ballard. Then a dean. And now president. He manages to work this information into speeches and into interviews, whenever possible. He believes that his constituents should know him as thoroughly as possible. If they feel that he’s one of them, they will trust him. If they trust him they will freely and in good conscience support Ballard University. Without the support of parents and friends, Ballard’s mission will fail.

  And most people know that he’s the author of two full-length books on nutrition: Food and the Bible and Nutrition for a Christian.

  Now with Project Promise, parents will see a form of Christian education at Ballard that actually touches the criminal, the Negro criminal even. And this new Project Promise may attract money sources as yet unrealized— liberal money sources. Ballard’s boldness, spurred by his leadership, and a few key Washington contacts are keeping the grant money coming, while it’s thinning for schools with less bold, less farsighted leaders.

  Yes, this Project Promise will be his latest in a long line of victories. The trustees approve all of his plans. They are loyal almost to a fault. His most recent victory was the Marilyn Massy Hargroves School of Veterinary Medicine, now regularly sending young Christian vets into the coastal, mountain, and piedmont towns of North Carolina. And South Carolina, where they’re needed even worse.

  And earlier, when Ted realized it could be just the thing for home missions, he founded a school of social work, a grand opportunity for Ballard to enter a field dominated, sadly, by liberals and secular humanists. By golly, somebody needed to cut into all that mumbo-jumbo government social work business with bedrock free-enterprise Bible-believing Christianity —why hadn’t he thought of that before? And so he established the Horace B. Groves School of Social Work, offering a master’s degree. And Ballard College became Ballard University—a dream come true.

  Along the way, Ted has learned to raise money. He raises money by talking to God-fearing Americans who are sincerely afraid—in these strange times—of losing America, if not from without, from within. He preaches quietly, neatly, about the American flag, democracy, about the Bible, Jesus, about heritage, his heritage, his family’s heritage, the sacred heritage of Bible-believing Baptists and the sacred heritage of Ballard University.

  And Ted Sears knows he’s not hurt by his looks, neat and clean—strong-chinned, clear-eyed. And he knows exactly how to slap an admiring American man—rich or poor—on his back and talk in confidence about long hair on men and about the dread danger of unions, and about what takes place on the campuses of state-supported schools, talk in such a way that this American man, rich or poor—a man who suddenly realizes that this college president is his Mend—can hardly wait to pull out his checkbook and support Ballard’s bold mission of making the world more American, more Christian, more union-free in the best sense of those words.

  And Ted knows (grew up with the knowledge of) how to get along with elderly widows—when to visit, what to say, what to eat, how much, and how long to stay. He knows when to go himself and when to send someone else. And he knows that many of these elderly widows will, in appreciation for maintenance men dropping by and mowing their lawns and tending their plumbing needs for the remainder of their days on earth—he knows that for these thoughtful services there are a few elderly women who’ll leave the university their houses and property.

  And he has a sense of humor. He can tell funny jokes, funny clean jokes. And he does. He’s even got a written record of which ones he’s told at which Kiwanis or Lions or Elks Club, and when. And he has an idea that before too long, he may have the opportunity to tell some of these jokes from Washington, D. C.—if everything falls into place.

  Chapter 4

  It’s Work Task time at BOTA House. Ben is raking leaves, Don and Dennis are painting gutters. Wesley is inside, building a wall—a waist-high brick wall in the den, designed to hold plants along its top. He is working with mortar, brick trowel, hawk, chisel, level, bricks, and a canvas floor cover.

  Carla and Linda, the two female residents, are sitting on the front porch, sewing curtains. Carla has a scar across her nose. Linda has a scar running from the corner of her mouth down her neck.

  “What’s yours like?” Carla asks Linda.

  “She’s a Mongolian idiot.”

  “No. They don’t call them that any more. It’s Down’s syndrome.”

  “Mongolian Down syndrome?”

  “No. No. Plain Down’s syndrome. That’s the disease.”

  “I thought diseases were something you catch.”

  “I don’t know,” says Carla. “This is something you’re bom with.”

  “They call the person ‘retarded,’ don’t they?”

  “That’s what they used to call them. I think it’s mentally handicapped now. Or exceptional. My sister is one. We got mail calling her all sorts of things.”

  “Does she have the Mongolian thing?” Linda bites a thread.

  “No. She got some kind of brain damage when she was bom. Not enough oxygen, or something.” Carla bends over
and sifts through the shoebox of sewing gear on the porch floor.

  “It’s terrible, ain’t it.”

  “Yeah. It is. She was older than me so I didn’t know too much about it when it happened. She was in the County Home for a long time.”

  Linda looks across the lawn. “Look at that.”

  A boy dressed in overalls and wearing wire-rimmed glasses is running down the sidewalk toward them, pumping his legs, making good time. He sticks his arm out straight, turns and runs across the lawn. “Eeerk,” he says at the front porch steps as he stops. He opens his car door, gets out, slams the door with both hands, saying “Blam.” He looks up at the two women.

  “What you driving?” Carla asks the boy.

  “Plymouth.”

  “Looks pretty good.”

  “It’ll go about a hundred miles a hour. Is this where Mr. Wesley Benfield lives?”

  “Sure is. Go on in. He’s in there.”

  Vernon studies the two women as he comes up the steps. He stops on the top step. “What happened to your face?” he asks Linda.

  “I got cut.”

  “Yours too?”

  “Yeah, I got cut too,” says Carla.

  “How did that happen?”

  “Accident.”

  “I mean how, how did it happen?”

  “It’s private.”

  “You can’t tell nobody?”

  “Listen, boy, Wesley’s inside—if he’s the one you come to see. If you come to see me, it’s time for you to go back home.”

  Inside, Wesley has only two more rows of bricks to go on the wall, up top. “I’ll just watch,” says a voice right behind him.