by Bruce Jones
“Who would I tell?” Maser asked. And his voice came loud and clear through Richard’s once-deaf ear. Clear as a bell.
“No one,” Richard underscored.
“Okay, I get it! Hey, I’m not a complete dorkhead, y’know.”
Richard smiled. “Good. Let’s keep it that way. For now.” And he added: “Dorkhead.”
“Ass-wipe.”
“Shit for brains.”
“Butt-breath. See you in thirty.”
“Not if I see you first.”
And they hung up grinning.
* * *
It was kind of amazing, really.
No, it was fucking unreal is what it was. Here he was, Richard Denning, age fifty-nine and three-quarters, pulling out of the same driveway he’d pulled out of as a lad of sixteen, turning down Mulvane St. just as he had as a fresh-faced high school kid, nosing his car past Knollwood Dr. to 29th Street, hanging a left—passing the same houses, the same driveways and in some rare cases what looked like even the same cars—tooling on down through Burlingame Road with the soft greens of the Topeka Country Club on his left. His father—in fact, all the Deadenders’ parents (with the exception, of course, of Maser’s single mother) had belonged to the less tony Shawnee Country club further out of town--less elitist, less snobby, less look-at-me-I’m-a-rich-kid--but with a far better golf course and a warmer, family-oriented attitude. Also the Shawnee Club was closer to Lake Shawnee which, as far as Richard was still concerned, was the prettiest lake in the Midwest. On he drove now, past the Holiday Square shopping center on his right, still there, still standing, still looking pretty much the same except for a few new storefronts. How many digest-sized Amazing and Fantastic sci-fi pulps had he bought in the old Blaylock’s Drug Store there in his youth? How many times had he pursued the forbidden pleasures of the slicker Jem, Rogue, and ever popular Modern Man with its Technicolor redheads and leggy blondes? How many times, heart in throat, did he dare to face the white-haired, pinched face old lady behind the register, who always gave him that sideways, you-sure-you’re-old-enough-for-these-here-nudie-books look? That tight bun in back, those beady eyes in front, like the eyes of the science class rat.
On past Holiday Square and then on past Sunflower Lanes where so many countless Saturday nights had been spent with the other ‘Enders trying in vain to bowl a 300 game or waste another dime on the ringing clatter of the Bally pinball machines and talk the Kansas City Athletics or the St. Louis Cardinals but mostly talk girls, or sex, rather, and most of that talk lies and pure speculation but always rife with mystery and a comfortably alien urging. On down 29th Street to that other big locally owned Topeka retail outlet, Katz Drugs, which sold Lick’m-Aid and painted turtles in its basement department, eventually, over the years, morphing into somehow less regal Skaggs Drugs (a name with seemingly no end of derisive derivation) when old man Katz passed on. Then Kirby Drugs, which was completely without painted turtles and comics and was about as antiseptically kid-unfriendly as a drugstore could be until the mid 70’s, when the Kirby folks went under, followed by another local brand name or two Richard could never recall, and the place had finally gotten bought up by that omnipotent force from on high, Wal-Mart. Wal-mart. The very antithesis of the wood-floored Mom-and-Pop stores of his youth. But everybody shopped there. Because? It was cheap. And if Midwesterners worshipped any word in the English language it was: Bargain! Second only to: Sale! Third only to: Tuesday only! Not a single word, actually, but you get the idea.
On and on Richard drove until the road drifted from well-traveled, carefully maintained concrete to pothole pocked macadam and (in Richard’s youth) what eventually became two weed-choked lanes dividing barb-wire fenced fields where ranch houses were scarcer in quantity and quality, replaced by John Deere tractors and backhoes, long gravel drives to weathered barns and humble farmhouses and the occasional rusted out Ford. Then it was only wide, mostly empty rolling country, until at last he saw the low slung 50’s facade of the Shawnee Country Club (they called it Googie style in California after a restaurant of that name that had started a sweeping, Pop Art architectural trend in the mid-50’s) could be seen looming up over the farmland. Richard was there. Again. One more time, after all these years, all that time growing up, growing restless, moving away—first to New York—then to LA to lose most of his Kansas accent and spend the bulk of his life writing TV and movie scripts with Allie and living a life he thought he’d live forever. Only occasionally to think about this mid-century country club, this town, his childhood roots, his high school, the familiar quagmire of small town roads, the library (oh, let us not leave out the all important library!) the Jayhawk and Grand downtown theaters, the Corral and Chief out-of-town drive-in theaters, Allen’s Drive-in (food, not film) with its thick malts and dripping burgers. Shock Theater on Channel 9. Trying to stay awake on Sunday morning before Reverend Shumacher at the First Methodist.
And, of course, Laurie Seasons.
First love. First lover. Lost his virginity and his heart along with it. And yes, probably, his youth as well. Lovely, laughing Laurie Seasons.
But most of all, most of all and perhaps above all, Richard supposed, The Deadenders.
Those kind of friends—like the kind of life that surrounded them--you have only once.
Or maybe twice, now that they’d all grown older and he’d moved back to town? Yeah, maybe, just maybe.
It was pretty unreal, Richard thought--pulling the Civic into the wide carriage circle of the nearly unchanged Shawnee Country Club toward the clubhouse, the attendant pro shop, the swimming pool and the perfectly manicured greens beyond—how little, how really very little, any of it had changed. More than unreal, maybe. A little weird, even, the way time had almost stood still back here in the heart of America. In contrast to flavor-of-the-month L.A. and the-world-is-an-eastern-planet New York. All those years on the distant coasts with people largely smarter, mostly better-looking, and certainly more sophisticated (John Deere what?) than those he’d grown up with. Yet somehow—to Richard at least—they had lacked something, some earthiness that, try as he might, Richard had never completely dusted off his shoes no matter how far he’d wandered. Friends, neighbors, even strangers on the street, all looking at you slightly differently but in the same way too, with eyes maybe not as questing, maybe not as jaded, but eyes that also wanted nothing from you. Except maybe your honesty. And your smile. Perhaps because it was free. Okay, cheap. But perhaps too because it was simple. And freshly scrubbed uncomplicated simplicity, something of a rare commodity on the coasts, seemed as natural and abundant here as the waving fields of wheat, the wide endless skies.
All and all, not a bad place to have been raised, he realized with some chagrin. Not a bad place considering how desperately he’d tried to escape it. You could do worse, Sport, yes, you could. Not a bad place to come from, not a bad place to come back to.
Guy could get used to this again.
Guy could grow old and die here…
* * *
Richard nosed the Civic into the gravel club parking lot, cut the engine and sat there thinking quietly for a moment.
Maybe not the worst place to end up a life after all. He did, after all, have to end somewhere.
Why then, did he feel—after all he’d accomplished in his life, all he’d seen and done, the people he’d met (celebrities, some of them), the places he’d been—why, why on God’s green earth did he still feel like a failure?
He slammed the Civic’s door, started to lock it, then remembered again for the hundredth time he was in a small town.
He turned in early morning light and listened to the scolding grackles and felt the sun and breeze on his face and pulled in a deep, cleansing breath of air, air you couldn’t buy for all your riches in big cities.
He started across the crunching lot for the clubhouse, thinking: --and why on God’s earth am I still dreaming about Laurie Seasons?
* * *
They teed off, all four of them, at eight
forty-five, just like in the good old days.
Except the good old days had involved as much caddying for the adult members of the club--including friends of their parents--as it involved actually golfing. Long, usually hot summer work, for which—on a good weekend—one could collect a whole colossal two and a half or three dollars if one were lucky. Most of which got immediately spent on cheeseburgers at the clubhouse pool, where one lounged all day in the sun until tanned a deep bronze, not once giving thoughts to skin cancers and melanomas, or even knowing what they were, for that matter. Lounging and scoping out the chicks, some of whom went to Boswell Jr. High (and afterwards Topeka High) and some of whom didn’t. Some whose older sisters were better looking and better built than their sisters who were the Enders age, and all the more forbidden fruit for it. Lounging and girl-scoping and trying to summon the courage to do a backwards flip off the high dive. The complicated skills of today’s thrashers and snowboarders would have looked, by comparison, undoable if not downright suicidal.
And probably, Richard supposed now, that lounging and splashing was still going on around the pool and clubhouse, goggle-eyed boys scoping a fresh crop of leggy chicks and a more expensive menu of smaller cheeseburgers and Cokes, both of which were consumed by sun-blond teen boys whose endless appetites never seemed to budge their washboard stomachs, to the grinding envy of everyone over thirty, and the philosophic shrug of that notch along the ladder of life Richard and the other Enders had finally surmounted, commonly and not a little irritatingly known as ‘senior citizen’. You couldn’t miss the phrase, it was on the back of every menu in every Denny’s from coast to coast, when it wasn’t showing up in the mail in the latest effort to get you to join that most dreaded of all clubs (worse even than Rotary) AARP, which always reminded Richard of ‘harp,’--you know, the angel-playing kind.
Scroogie teed off first. And not a bad swing, for a guy his age; no better than when he was twelve maybe, but then that was saying something in itself, right?
Of the four of them, Scroogie had changed the least, in many ways. Always a ‘stout’ (as his mother liked to say) kid, the added girth of adulthood had perhaps blended more seamlessly with the younger Scroogie than had the thickening frames of his once skinnier childhood pals. He had remained unchanged in other ways as well, of course; he still thought about money all the time, still talked about it all the time, still alluded to it; he was the same in almost every way, with the possible exception of no longer reading those Dell Uncle Scrooge Comics, and that was probably only because Carl Barks was dead. Still quoted Frost, though, as often as he could, even now that he was rich, at least Topeka rich. He had, against all odds, bought into a used car lot and made a fortune on it—to the point of making bad local commercials for late night TV.
Scroogie was loaded.
But still—hair thinning, gut expanding, knees ridiculously knocked and freckled under his Madres golfing shorts—still the same old Scroogie in the main. Case in point (as Richard Boone used to say at the beginning of every Medic TV show): the plump man’s triumphant cry just after teeing off: “Money shot! Beat that one, Peasants!”
Pete Shivers came next. And he did beat Scroogie’s opening shot, at least in terms of keeping it closer to the center of the fairway. Peter Chevalier (“don’t ever call me that, and don’t even fruggin’ think about ‘Maurice’!”) had, to Richard’s eyes, the least luck over the years with Father Time. Not that he looked inordinately older than the other Deadenders, really—in fact he was the second youngest member--more that he’d apparently picked up somewhere in the long and winding road the seeming weight of the world on his now slightly stooped shoulders; the worn look of a Singapore dockhand more than a man whose trips outside the state of Kansas could be counted on one hand. He’d had a hard life, admittedly, ended up all alone. None of them, of course, any longer had the old bounce and jaunt privilege of ignorant youth, but Shivers definitely had the aura of one who’d been there and done that, gone around the block, journeyed through the proverbial mill.
Something deeper down and further away, probably having to do with his childhood, seemed to haunt Shivers. As far away as those youthful days Richard himself held in such high nostalgic esteem. Had Shivers been marked by a trauma of childhood? By that dark thing, perhaps, that nobody had talked of in years—not much back then--and not at all today? A sudden tragedy in the family? The death of his younger brother?
Everybody remembered Andy Chevalier, what a sweet kid he’d been before the kidnapping, even though he was barely able to talk and depended on his older smarter brother for everything. And no one knew it better or perhaps felt it more keenly than the Enders, with whom poor little Andy had so often wanted to tag along. Nobody forgot either The Day.
A Friday to be precise. A nice day. A typical summer Friday in every way.
Andy had been up and out and grinning and tagging along with the other kids in Knollwood. Walking their familiar sidewalks, exploring their never-quite-familiar woods, perusing comics and drinking Orange Crush and generally hanging out. One of the group one minute, then just simply not there the next.
For what everybody initially assumed would be a few minutes.
That turned to hours. Then to long hours. Then--to close friends and certainly Shiver’s parents--to agony. To days. Then weeks. Then months, when his kidnapper was caught and brought to justice. But they had never found Andy.
Everyone had clung to hope at first. Everyone. Despite what they all knew the local police reports said about missing kids. But hope and good luck and God were out of the office that summer. Hope, for little Andy, would never come—or for him, another Friday. Andy Chevalier vanished, though his ghost remained for some time. Even after Shivers’ parents had finally divorced a year later and moved on opposite sides of the town, where Shivers was a constantly shifted post and not ever, maybe just not quite ever, the ‘Ender he used to be. Even back then Richard could remember the dark circles beginning under his eyes. Now, here this morning on the old club fairway, the circles were still there, darker, deeper, giving Shivers a kind of hollow look. Maybe that’s why, of the four of them, the Shiv had never even talked about leaving, never apparently even dreamed of it. He would stay right here, thank you, perhaps until Andy came back. Even if perhaps he never came. Maybe too, that’s why Shiv had done the least well of the group—whatever the fuck that meant. He’d begun working as an auto mechanic shortly after high school and remained one to this day, though rarely at the same garage for more than a few years. “I like the freedom,” he’d once told Richard shortly before Richard had moved away so long ago. For years Richard had always thought his friend had meant ‘restless spirit’ when he said ‘freedom.’ Now he thought it wasn’t so much about wandering for the Shiv as it was about a kind of control. He always thought about two things over the years when he thought of Pete Shivers: one was the role of that actor who watched his brother drown in a boating accident in Ordinary People. The other was that verse in the old Kristofferson song Bobbie McGee: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
Walking the fairway now, golf clubs jutting from his bag (the Enders had never gone in for those sissy two-wheeled bag carriers, and those sissy golf carts were out of the question), watching his old pal Shivers slugging along under the weight of his own clubs, Richard started at Maser’s hand on his shoulder. He turned to imagine concerned eyes behind the good doctor’s mirrored sunglasses.
“How you feeling this morning, Rich?”
“Why?” Richard answered in mock sarcasm, “was my drive that bad?”
Maser’s reply was a simple “Humh!”
“’Humh’? What’s ‘humh’ suppose to mean, Dr. Feelgood?”
Maser looked ahead at a sturdily striding Scroogie and a coming-up-slow-on-the-outside Shivers moving up the fairway ahead of them. “It means I was just thinking how good you looked making that drive.”
Richard snorted. “Maze, I’m ten yards behind you on the fairway and less
than two feet from the rough.”
Maser shook his head. “I mean the way you hit the ball.”
“Badly.”
Maser grinned. “Stinko’s more like it. But stinko like a younger man. You been working out behind our backs?”
Richard shifted the golf strap on his shoulder and turned to his old pal as they strode along, a pal with whom he’d shared every childhood secret and confidence. “Couple things I need to talk to you about, Maze…”
And the Maze—abruptly Dr. Robert Maser again—jerked quickly with unbidden concern to Richard. “Pain? Already?”
Richard shook his head, hardly feeling the heavy weight of the clubs banging against his back, but finding it slightly and ironically difficult to suppress the idiot smile pushing behind his lips.
Maser’s voice was coming through strong and clear as a spring songbird in Richard’s ‘deaf’ ear.
THREE
They were sitting in the clubhouse now, all four Enders, and that was something of a hoot.
Because it was, to them, always the Forbidden Clubhouse, at least in their youth, the slightly intimidating clubhouse, and maybe, maybe just a little bit, it still was. This was where their parents and their parents’ friends had sat. This is where the grownups came to convive and have drinks and talk grownup talk and smile and have another drink until they laughed and sometimes, on a good day after a good round of golf, have one more drink still and laugh some more, silly laughter, over silly stuff, or so it seemed to Richard, peeking around the corner of the bar next to the waiters cubicle. Silly but never drunk, not falling down drunk. Richard had never seen his father crocked, not once in his young life. Nor the other guys’ parents for that matter. Well. Okay. Maybe Shiver’s parents there toward the end, together and finally singly he’d seen both Mr. Chevalier and his willowy blonde and attractive wife Mrs. Chevalier get a bit of a toot on; feeling no pain, as Richard’s mother used to say. But who the hell could blame them? Losing a six-year-old boy that way. One day here, the next…