The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “Well, that’s a matter of opinion,” I allowed, “and if I really believed it, if I really could believe it, I’d stay, but I’m passionately convinced, you see, that this town, for all its niceties, is, by and large, a goddamn—”

  “Don’t say it,” she said. “Let me believe what I want to believe, and let’s not spoil it with more bickering.”

  “All right. But are you absolutely certain you won’t reconsider? Because if there is any chance—”

  “I’m absolutely certain, Clifford,” she said. “There’s not even any doubt any more, not even any misgivings. But why don’t you go and talk with Doyle about it? Perhaps he could persuade you to stay.”

  “No, my mind is made up. There just isn’t any place for me here.”

  “Well, go talk to him anyway. He’s beginning to wonder what happened to you.”

  “How do you feel about Dall?” I asked her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean how do you feel toward him? What do your emotions register when you think of him?”

  She smiled. “He’s my favorite brother.”

  I smiled. “So if I am a father figure to you, that would make Dall my stepson?”

  “No, because he’s your brother too.”

  “Then he would be your uncle, not your brother.”

  “But actually you are my brother too.”

  “So that would make me my own son, and Dall’s nephew and—”

  “Oh,” she protested, “you’re confusing me. Let’s just all be friends, and let it go at that.”

  “When I leave,” I asked her, “what are you going to do?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said.

  “Where are you going to stay? Where are you going to sleep at night?”

  “Oh, just anywhere I can find an empty bed. Here. Naps’s house. Any place where they will have me.”

  “You’re going to stay here when Dall gets out of the hospital?”

  “Yes. Somebody has to take care of him until he’s recovered, and then somebody has to be his housekeeper, because he wants to get his two sons back home again. I’ve been a housekeeper for my mother ever since my father died. I’d much rather keep house for Dall—or anybody—than for my mother.”

  “Why don’t you just marry him?”

  She laughed nervously. “Well,” she said, “the first time I ever came over here, and saw what a mess the house was in, I said to him, ‘Dall, you ought to get married again,’ but he got all red in the face and said, ‘Aw hellfire naw!’ and he said he’d had enough experience with women, after that Rowena girl, that he was just going to be a bachelor for the rest of his life. But I don’t suppose he’d mind if I became his housekeeper, in return for room and board.”

  “Dreary prospect,” I mumbled.

  “Not at all,” she said. “He’s a very interesting person to be with.”

  “Which reminds me. I guess I’d better go visit with him for a while.”

  I opened the back door and whistled, and Bowzer trotted up onto the back porch and came into the house. I made the introductions, and Margaret, having never had a dog of her own before, was timid and unconfident: she patted him lightly on the head. For his part, he leaned his massive flank against her legs and almost bowled her over. I bade him sit, and then I explained to Margaret that it would be wise to keep him in the house for a while, until Dall came home again or until Bowzer had become more accustomed to the place. Then I went to the icebox to get the poor dog a bone, but the icebox was bare of the bones I had left there; I asked Margaret about them, and she said she had mistaken them for soup bones and had made a soup out of them. We gave him a can of Ken-L Ration and closed up the house. I took note, in leaving, of how nicely she had swept and dusted and mopped and waxed the place; she had rearranged the furniture and put up some new curtains in the living room, and the house, homely and squalid as it was, was beginning to bear her own stamp.

  I started walking in the direction of the bus stop, but she stopped me and said that we could go in Dall’s old car. He had given her the keys. I offered to drive, but she said she had to get as much practice as she could. Obviously, I reflected, as we got into the car, she was bent on devoting herself for a while to Dall, that coarse but kindly police sergeant who had helped her out of her doldrums and changed the course of her life. I suggested to her, half jokingly and teasingly, that since the doctors said some plastic surgery would be required for Dall’s battered face, she ought to give them an old photograph of her father and ask them to “copy” it, and then Dall could become a perfect father figure for her. I said I suspected that Dall, wrapped in all those bandages, might seem to her to be, not simply the reincarnation of her lost father, but her father himself rising, Lazarus-like, from the dead. She laughed, but again nervously, because she knew that what is spoken in jest is often close to the truth. I told her that she couldn’t see Dall’s face because of all the bandages, and she didn’t remember how ugly he was, and as far as she was concerned it could be anybody beneath those layers of gauze and adhesive tape, anybody, particularly her lost father. “Oh, stop it!” she protested.

  I lay my head back against the car seat and folded my hands over my chest. It had begun to rain. Margaret fumbled for the windshield-wiper switch, and turned it on, and that rain, like any Southern rain when it finally comes, came in great sheets of noisy splatters. There now, she said; there goes your drought. The headlights could scarcely penetrate it, it was so heavy; we had to slow down.

  “Why else,” I asked her, “would you be the least bit interested in Dall, unless he is a father figure for you?”

  “Would I need anything else?” she replied candidly. “Wouldn’t that be reason enough?”

  “Yes, I guess it would,” I had to admit. “Probably that was what attracted you to Slater as well, because Slater was even old enough to be your father. But you couldn’t get him, at least not unless his wife died or was disposed of, so you had to give him up. So then you considered me, but I was too small to be your father; you couldn’t have a father who is shorter than you.”

  “Are you shorter than I?” she asked innocently. “I wasn’t aware of that.”

  “Sure,” I said. “A good inch shorter. I might as well tell you, since it doesn’t matter any more, that I wear elevator shoes.”

  “I don’t care. I still love you.”

  That pierced me down deep, and I could say nothing, there was nothing else for me to say. Margaret was a good driver—better, probably, than I would have been. I watched the rain splash against the windshield, I looked at the trees along the street swaying, pitching in the watery wind, and I listened to the sound of the cascade of raindrops on the metal roof of the car, and the sound of the busy windshield wipers speaking to me: you big chump you big chump you big chump…

  ‘Margaret,” I said finally, “it’s silly of us to disagree over something so irrelevant as whether we go or stay—”

  “Is it?” she said. “Then why don’t you stay?”

  “I can’t. “Why don’t you go?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why can’t you stay?”

  “We already discussed it,” I said. And we had. Could anything else be said?

  It could, and she said it: “The difference is that you will keep coming back—I’m sure of it—but I won’t ever have to go.”

  Chapter forty-four

  “Why, hi there, Nub old buddy!” he said, raising his head a little off the pillow.

  “Hello, Lazarus,” I said.

  “How you been doin?” he said. “Aint seen you for a little spell.”

  “Just fine, just fine. How’re you getting along? They feeding you well enough to suit you?”

  “Aw, I caint complain. Them nurses is kind of uppity, but they aint put nuthin over on me yet.”

  “Nice flowers you got,” I observed, scanning the arboretum that surrounded his bed.

  “Aint they, now?” he said. “Them
gladiolies yonder there was sent to me by the boys down at the station house…and these here chrysanthemumses come from your Grammaw Stone…and I got that there potted lily from Naps—you should a seen the way them nurses was carryin on and carryin on when he brung it in, cause lilies is supposed to be only for when you’re dead…and them poinsettias come from the florist with a little card said ‘Remorsefully, J.R. Slater,’ wasn’t that nice of him?…and them hyacinths is from the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the police officers…and them red roses is from Margaret…and that there bunch of yellow roses of course come from my old buddy Nub Stone and I thank you very much.”

  I smiled to say that he was very welcome.

  He turned his head to the window. “Hey, look at that toadtranglin rain pour down, will you! I’m sure glad I aint out on a night like this. You get very wet comin in?”

  “Not very. It’s really a hard rain, though.”

  “It really is,” he agreed. A moment of silence ensued, and then he said idly, weakly, “Yes sir, it is. It’s sure a real pour-down.”

  Another silence came and hung over the room like a pall of formaldehyde, and I struggled mightily to think of something to say. Now that our adventures were at an end, had we lost the need for talk?

  After a while he asked, “How’s my dog?”

  “Just fine. Eats like a horse. Misses you something awful, though. Moans and whines for his master to come home.”

  “Aw…that old dog…that old fleabag…” he said, but then he ran out of words, and it was up to me, after another long silence, to say something.

  “How’re your injuries and all? Coming along nicely?”

  “Pretty good. They’re going to take some of the catgut out of the stitches tomorrow, so I reckon they’ll leave off some of these overgrown Band-Aids and I might get a look to see if I can still recognize myself.”

  I made a friendly little laugh, but I couldn’t think of anything more to say.

  Eventually he said, “What all you been doin lately?”

  “Thinking,” I said.

  “Yeah? What about?”

  “Oh, I’ve just been trying to make up my mind whether to go back to Boston or not.”

  “That right? Well, have you decided on anything?”

  “Yes.”

  He waited, then he said, “Well, do you aim to tell me, or do I have to get out of this bed and wring it out of you?”

  I laughed. “Dall, I’m going back, I guess.”

  “Naw!” he said. “You caint, you just caint!”

  “I’m sorry, Dall, but I have to. Vacation’s over.”

  “When you goin?”

  “Soon. Tomorrow or the next day.”

  “Listen, Nub,” he said, “I got a idee. If you could just wait till I get out of this hospital, I’ll help you, and me and you will rig up one of them big packin crates like they ship tigers in, and then we’ll sneak up behind old Marge and grab her and put her in it and ship her off up to Boston on the same train with you. Okay?”

  Again I laughed, but I shook my head. “No, we’d better not do that. I wouldn’t have any use for an angry tiger.”

  “Aw, I bet she’d be just tickled pink.”

  “No, Dall. For better or for worse she is absolutely determined to remain in Little Rock.”

  He tried to scowl but the bandages dampened the job and the best he could manage was a fierce, penetrating glare of his green lynx eyes. “Don’t you want her?” he demanded in such an incredulous voice that my negative answer would seem not just unbelievable but entirely stupid. “Here you’ve been goto to all this trouble to smooth the way for you and her, and now that you’ve got her free and clear, you skip on out.”

  “Speaking of all this trouble,” I inquired, “what’s the latest word on Slater? Have they found him yet?”

  “Naw, but you aint got nuthin to worry about, far as he’s concerned, if that’s what’s botherin you.”

  “That isn’t what’s bothering me,” I said.

  “Well, what is, then, for godsakes?”

  “At a loss for a more suitable explanation, I could only offer a cliché: “Little Rock is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here.”

  “But what about Margaret?” he asked.

  “She wants to be your housekeeper. Didn’t she tell you?”

  “Aw, hell yes, but she don’t know what she wants. If she came to stay at my place, she wouldn’t last two weeks. I’d be droppin my pipe ashes and stuff slab dab in the middle of the rug, and she wouldn’t like that none atall. And she’d have to take care of them little boys of mine whenever I get em back, and, by God, I’m tellin you, them is the nastiest little fellers this side of Polecat Creek, if I do have to say so myself. Caint you just see us settin down with her at the supper table, and me and them boys both a-burpin and a-belchin fit to kill ever other bite or two and sloppin gravy on the tablecloth and eatin peas with a knife and God knows what? And me—I never shave on my day off or any time I’m on any kind of vacation, and I look bad enough even when I do shave. Ye gods! First time she catches me settin in the kitchen cleanin my toenails with a dinner fork she’s gonna turn on her heel and light out for home. And snore! Why, I’ve had neighbors call me up in the middle of the night of a time and ast me to please feed my dog or sump’m to get im to quit growlin, and that wouldn’t a been so bad only I never had no dog up until I got Bowzer. But worst of all sometimes I feel like scratchin, and by dang when I feel like scratchin I’m sure enough gonna scratch, and they aint nobody gonna tell me—”

  “But your heart is pure,” I interrupted his outrageous parody of himself. “Your heart is good and benign, and you will be like a father to her.”

  “I don’t want to be her goddamn father!” he raged.

  “Look at the economic side of it,” I said. “Obviously, when you get out of the hospital, you aren’t going to be able to do anything for a week or two, and you’d have to hire a nurse to keep you in bed and bring you your pills and all, and you could have Margaret as a nurse and housekeeper both and it wouldn’t cost you a cent except for groceries and what you’d have to pay to buy her some fine new clothes ever now and then.”

  “It wouldn’t look right to the neighbors,” he protested. “I mean, her being so young and pretty, she just don’t look like no goddamn nurse nor housekeeper.”

  “Did you think of the neighbors when she lived with you for a week that other time?”

  “Well, no, but that was different. It was me helpin her, not her helpin me.”

  “But now she wants to repay you for all you’ve done for her.”

  “I was just doin my duty. She don’t owe me a damn thing.”

  “But she still needs you. What she really needs, of course, is a father, but if you can’t be a father to her, then you can be a brother. She never had a brother, but she always wanted one, and she told me tonight that you were her favorite brother.”

  “Aw, gee,” he said, touched in spite of himself.

  “Just be nice to her, and provide a willing ear for her to talk to, and sometimes a shoulder for her to cry on, and you’ll get along just fine. If you can afford it, take her to dinner sometimes at the Embers or Bruno’s Little Italy or Shakey’s or the Lamplighter. She’s never been to any of those places. And take her out to ride the Ferris wheel at War Memorial Park, and take her for long walks at night down all the streets.” In a counseling mood, I continued, “And it might help if you could be a gentleman, and maybe watch your language, and also attempt to use honest grammar and diction more often.”

  He scowled. “You don’t like the way I talk?”

  “I love the way you talk,” I said. “It’s like a creek rippling across rocks, like crawdads scurrying for shelter, like whippoorwills and crickets out in the dark night, like coon hounds baying on a distant mountainside, like chiggers chomping into flesh…But it’s not true, not really natural, and you may think you have fooled me into thinking it is, but I know that you really know that you’re not fooling
me.”

  “Aw, get out,” he said, but it was an objection, not a command.

  “Come on,” I urged him. “Let’s hear you say something properly.”

  “I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “You stay in Little Rock, and I’ll come over every day and say all the proper sentences you’d ever want to hear.”

  “Thou almost persuadeth me,” I said. “But even that would not be sufficient reason to get me to remain in this godawful town.”

  “Nub,” he said, “me and you used to have such good times together. Why don’t you stay here, and it’ll be like old times again.”

  “Old times never come back,” I said mournfully. “That’s one lesson I’ve learned recently, and the sooner I get out of this town the better off I’m going to be.”

  Then this is good-bye?”

  “Oh, I’ll come back and see you again before I go. But Margaret’s waiting downstairs to see you, and I guess we’ve been keeping her waiting long enough.”

  “Nub, even if I don’t see you again—”

  “You’ll see me again, I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “—even if you don’t, I just wanted to say thanks for everything.”

  Thanks? “Why?”

  “Helpin us out and all, I mean. If you hadn’t come along when you did, and done what you did, no tellin what might’ve happened.”

  “Dall,” I said sadly, “everything I’ve ever done in my whole life has been done out of a selfish motive, and nobody owes me any thanks for anything. I was just a friendly, willing pawn.”

  “Well, then, thanks for being a friendly, willing pawn.”

  “You’ve done a lot for me too,” I said. So now, having said it, I could go. I took a step away from his bed, but then I stopped, turned back, stared at him a long moment and said, “There’s just one more thing. I suppose it really doesn’t matter any more, but just out of curiosity—you know what an incorrigible busybody I’ve always been. Well, I was just wondering if you might know what sort of relationship there really was between Slater and Margaret. I mean, what was really going on? Did she ever tell you? She claims that she’s a virgin, but I got the idea from you that he must have done something to her, and I was just wondering if you knew what it was.”