by Lee Martin
Everything was a flurry of feet to me, then, and the rise of people’s voices. The funeral director still had me in that headlock, twisting me around, and every once in a while I caught a glimpse of someone’s shoes. The carpet smelled of some sort of floral cleaner, and the funeral director had on too much pine-scented aftershave, something from Avon, I’d wager. Probably some of that Wild Country that my father always wore. I heard a man say, “What in the world?” A woman said, “He’s a drunk, you know.”
I felt a stir of air around me. A woman screamed. Everything went quiet, then, like all the air had gone out of the place, and that’s when I heard it, the sound I knew so well, the gentle click of the safety going off on my Ruger. I knew, without having to look, that Wink had been so pissed over what the man with the beret said that he’d gotten the rifle from his Mustang and had it shouldered up now and ready to use.
“Let loose of him,” he said to the funeral director, and then I was free. I rubbed at my neck. “All right, then,” Wink said, and he swung that Ruger around, pointing it into the viewing room, where people scrambled to crouch down behind the sofas and chairs.
That’s when I saw the most wonderful thing. Lily, still wobbly on those stilettos, was very patiently making her way up the center aisle. She stepped around folding chairs knocked cockeyed, waited patiently for those who were still trying to get somewhere safe. She made her way to her daddy’s casket, and, once she was there, she reached her hand out and put it on top of his. She stood up straight, her back to all the ugliness we’d wrought behind her, and she had that moment, one she might not have had without me, without Wink.
“Put down the gun,” I told him. I nodded toward the front of the visitation room.
He took the Ruger down from his shoulder. He rubbed at his good eye. He was seeing what I was, the grace that’d come to someone we’d thought, only minutes before, was a drunk girl in stilettos looking for a ride up the blacktop. Now she was Lily. Now she had the chance her mama said she’d deny her. “Mercy,” Wink said.
It was a no-good prayer on account, at least in one sense, it was over for him and me. Of course you can’t cause a disturbance and point a loaded rifle at folks in a public place and not pay the price for it, particularly after all the times I’d been arrested when I was drunk. Aggravated assault. What would you expect, folks would say, from the likes of them?
Lily, though, was at the start of something. I felt it in my heart. This was the day she’d start to turn everything around. Or maybe that was only my hope talking. I really don’t know a thing about what happened to her after the county sheriff carted Wink and me off to jail. I just remember seeing her mama easing up beside her at the casket. She put her arms out and gathered her in, her little girl—the one she’d sworn she’d disown—and they held onto each other.
I’ll carry the picture of that to my grave, and though I’m sorry for all the fright we brought folks that day, I can’t say I regret it. I can only hope they finally saw the good that lay on the other side of what we did. I hope my own mama knows it, too.
She was outside the funeral home, just arriving, when the sheriff brought me out in cuffs.
“I’d do it now,” I said to Wink.
He was in front of me in the company of a deputy. “Do what?” he wanted to know. “Have a drink.”
A million drinks. I’d have drunk myself to death to keep my mama from seeing me in trouble, the way she’d seen me so many times.
“Oh, Benny,” she said. She lifted her arms a little like she might try to touch me, but, of course, she couldn’t. The law had me, and when that’s the case, you don’t have many choices; you just go. “Benny,” she said, “is that you?”
Like she’d been waiting. Maybe I’d been gone on a long trip somewhere—I closed my eyes an instant and made it true—and now here she was, glad in the heart.
I’d tell her to take me home, and we’d have a good laugh over how at first she hadn’t seemed to know me. “Oh, I did, too,” she’d tell me. She’d lean over and whisper in my ear, “You didn’t have me fooled. I knew it was you all along.”
A MAN LOOKING FOR TROUBLE
MY UNCLE WAS A MAN NAMED BILL JORDAN, AND IN 1972, WHEN I WAS sixteen, he came home from Vietnam, rented a small box house on the corner of South and Christy, and went to work on a section gang with the B & O Railroad. If not for my mother and her romance with our neighbor, Harold Timms, perhaps my uncle would have lived a quiet and unremarkable life, but of course, that’s something we’ll never know.
“He’ll do all right,” my father said one night at supper. He looked out the window and nodded his head. It was the first warm day of spring, and the window was open. I smelled the damp ground, heard the robins singing. “I’m glad he’s back,” my father said, and I believe now, for just an instant, my mother and I let ourselves get caught up in his optimism, a gift we desperately needed, although we were the sort of family that never would have admitted as much.
“How’s your pork chop?” my mother asked.
“Bill’s going to be aces,” my father said.
Then we all sat there, chewing, not saying much of anything else at all. Bill was home, safe, and for the time that’s the only thing that mattered.
By summer, though, he was fed up with Harold Timms, who happened to be his foreman on the section gang. It was generally known throughout Goldengate that Mr. Timms was keeping time with my mother, a fact that rankled Bill day in and day out because on the job he was tired of acting like he didn’t know better. My father, a withdrawn man who kept his troubles to himself, had apparently decided to ignore my mother’s adultery.
“I have to do what Harold Timms tells me every day,” Bill said to my father one Sunday afternoon. They were in the shade of the big maple alongside our house, changing the points and plugs on our Ford Galaxie. “And all the while everyone in town knows he’s getting it steady from your Annie.”
I lay on my bed, listening. Out my window, I could see Bill leaning over the fender of the Galaxie. The hood was open above him, and he was going to town with a spark plug wrench. He had on a black bowling shirt with a print of a teetering pin wearing a crown and the words KING PINS across the back. He’d rolled the short sleeves tight on his biceps. From my position, all I could see of my father, who stood on the other side of the Galaxie, was his long, narrow hand on top of that fender. The face of his Timex watch seemed enormous on his slender wrist. A brown leather band wrapped around that wrist with plenty of length to spare. I knew he’d had to punch an extra hole in it.
“Damn it, R.T.” Bill banged the spark plug wrench against a motor mount. “You need to put a stop to that monkey business. For Roger’s sake, if for no other reason.”
My name came to me through the window and caught me by surprise, as if my father and Bill knew I was eavesdropping even though I was sure they didn’t. My father’s hand pulled away from the fender, and I imagined him, outside my view, fuming.
The leaves on the maple rattled together. It was August, the start of the dog days, and we were grateful for every stir of air. Next door, at the Timmses’ house, a radio was playing. The curtain at the window lifted and fell back with the breeze. I could hear the faint strains of “Too Late to Turn Back Now,” and the chorus—I believe, I believe, I believe I’m fallin’ in love—annoyed me because I knew it was Connie Timms listening to it, and I was fretting about her because she’d told me after church that she and I were through.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she said. We were outside on the sidewalk, and people were coming out of the church and down the steps. “I want a boyfriend I can tell the world about. I don’t want some…” Here, she struggled to find the words she wanted, the ones that would describe what she and I had been up to that summer. “I don’t want an affair,” she finally said.
Now I can almost laugh at the way that word sounded coming from a girl her age. At the time, though, my heart was breaking.
She wanted a boyfriend she could show of
f, parade around with on Friday and Saturday nights, maybe go to a movie at the Avalon Theater in Phillipsport and later drive out to the Dairy Queen to see who was sitting around on the hoods of their cars before heading to the state park or the gravel pits for that alone time in the car, that baby-oh-baby time, secretly hoping that some of the other kids would happen by, so come Monday there would be talk all over school. That was the sort of gossip she wanted to be part of—the kind that said you were part of the cool crowd—not the kind I could give her, the kind filled with shame.
I watched her run down the sidewalk to her father’s Oldsmobile 98, fling the door open, and get inside. I knew she didn’t mean for me to come after her. I wanted to, but I didn’t have the nerve.
If not for my mother and Mr. Timms, everything between Connie and me might have been fine. My mother and Mr. Timms. Like my father, I tried to ignore what was going on between them, but it was impossible.
Earlier that summer, Connie and I began to take note of each other, and as we got cozy, we agreed to keep our hey-baby-hey a secret. What would people think? Apples didn’t fall far from the tree. Why did that concern me? I suppose there was a part of me that believed I was betraying my father, who lived with the pain my mother caused him every day, and who surely wouldn’t be happy if he knew I’d thrown in with Connie. How could she and I make our affections known when her father and my mother were the subjects of so much gossip? I’d like to say we wanted to be better than that gossip, but I suspect we were just embarrassed. We were afraid the town was watching us, and every time we were together on the sly, I felt guilty. I wanted to think that we’d found each other solely from our two hearts syncing up, but as long as I had to worry about my mother and her father, I wasn’t sure. Maybe we were just following their lead.
We couldn’t have said any of this at the time. At least I couldn’t have. I won’t presume to speak for Connie. I only know this: No matter what we could say then, or what we knew by instinct, one fact was plain—whatever was happening between the two of us could never be separated from the fact that her father and my mother were lovers.
“We can’t let anyone find out,” I told Connie early on. “We can’t be trashy like them.”
“My father’s not trashy.” She had a pageboy haircut and her bangs were in need of a trim. We were talking over the wire fence that ran between my backyard and hers. She had on Levi’s and white Keds sneakers and a T-shirt that advertised Boone’s Farm, a soda pop wine popular in those days. She brushed her bangs out of her eyes and stared at me. “He’s lonely. He’s a very lonely man.”
I loved her brown hair and her blue eyes. I loved the smell of her perfume—something called Straw Hat that was sweet and woodsy and made me want to press her to me and breathe in that scent. She could have said anything to me at that moment and I would have taken it as gospel. So I let that statement about Mr. Timms’s loneliness absolve him, and with my silence—much to my shame—I allowed my mother to become the wicked one in the story of their affair.
Mr. Timms was a widower. His wife, a nervous, fretful woman, took sick one winter night when a heavy snow was falling. It started around dusk, and before long the streets were covered. The snow kept coming down as night crept in. My father and I went into our living room to watch it out the window. By that time, the snow was up to the top of the drainage ditches that ran alongside the street.
“It’s like a picture out there,” my father said. I was thirteen then. We stood in the dark room and watched the snow coming down past the streetlights. No cars passed by. We could see lights on in the houses around us. Everyone was hunkering down to wait this one out. Over twenty inches by morning, WAKO radio out of the county seat, Phillipsport, said. The wind was up, and already the snow was starting to drift against the side of our shed. My father’s Galaxie, parked in our driveway, was barely holding its shape under the snow. “Roger, I swear.” He put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a squeeze. “It’s like we’re in a picture,” he said, and I’ve always remembered that because it was one of the first times he ever said anything that I sensed came from some private place inside him that he generally kept to himself.
My mother was in the family room with the television playing. It was a Saturday night. I’m sure of that because I remember that The Jackie Gleason Show was on. My mother laughed at something, and I could hear the television audience laughing, too. My father and I turned at the same time, looking back through the French doors that separated the living room from the family room. We saw the lamplight there. He squeezed my shoulder again, and at his touch we headed toward those French doors. Once we opened them, we stepped back into the life that was ours.
“Baby, you should’ve seen,” my mother said to my father. She was kicked back in her Barcalounger, her arm bent at the elbow so it went up at a right angle. She held a Virginia Slims cigarette between her fingers and the smoke curled up into the lamplight. “It was the funniest thing. I was afraid I was going to wet my pants.”
She was wearing a pair of black slacks and a black turtleneck sweater. She’d just had her hair done the day before, and her loose blond curls came down over her shoulders. I’d always known she was a pretty woman—prettier than most of my friends’ mothers—but she looked particularly glamorous in the lamplight. Big gold hoop earrings dangled against the sides of her turtleneck.
“We were watching it snow,” my father said.
I believe now he must have been uncomfortable with my mother’s beauty. He wasn’t the kind of man who could enjoy knowing that wherever he went with his wife, other men would be looking at her. Thoughtful and shy, he preferred to live a private life. If there were pleasures to be had, he’d rather the world not know about them. He was the county tax assessor and he knew that it was a man looking for trouble who chose to parade his riches and not expect someone to take notice and wish himself into a share of that wealth.
“Everyone has to pay for what he has,” he told me once. “That’s what I know, Roger. No one gets off scot-free.”
He wasn’t a looker. Not that he was an unattractive man, but next to my mother, he paled. He had sloped shoulders and a long face and a nose that was too big. I expect he spent most of his married life shaking his head over his dumb luck in landing a woman as beautiful as Annie Griggs.
One night, at the Uptown Café, we walked away from our table, and just before we got to the door, I heard a low wolf whistle. I know my father heard it, too, because just for an instant his back stiffened, and he gave a quick glance behind him. My mother took his arm, and that claiming gesture must have soothed him because he opened the door and we stepped out onto the sidewalk. Later, when I was supposed to be sleeping, I heard them talking about what had happened. “Dang it, Annie,” my father said, and after a while my mother answered in a quiet voice, “It’s not like I ask for it.”
What she was asking that winter night, when she told my father about the comedy sketch she’d seen on TV, was for us to sit down with her and be a family—to give her, I imagine now, a reason to be happy with her home and the people in it. But before any of that could happen, someone knocked on our front door.
“My word,” my father said. “Who could that be on a night like this?”
He went into the living room to open the door, and after a while, I heard Mr. Timms’s voice. It was a loud voice, full of dread and fear. “It’s Jean,” he said. “She’s sick and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Sick?” my father said in a way that told me he didn’t know what to do about it either.
“She went to bed for a rest after supper, and now I can’t get her to wake up.”
My mother had already put the footrest down on her Barcalounger. I could feel the cold air around my legs, and I knew my father was holding the front door open as he talked to Mr. Timms.
“Tell him to come in,” my mother called to my father. “Harold, come inside,” she said.
The ceiling light snapped on in the living room. The front door
closed, and I heard Mr. Timms stomping snow from his boots on the rug just inside the door.
I followed my mother into the living room, and there he was, bareheaded, the collar of his black wool coat turned up to his ears. He’d stuffed his trouser legs into the tops of a pair of green rubber boots from which snow was melting. He wore a pair of glasses in black, plastic frames, and those glasses were steamed over now that he’d come in from the cold.
“Annie?” he said, and he sounded so helpless.
“Don’t worry, Harold.” My mother walked right up to him. She reached up and took his glasses off his face. She used the hem of her sweater to wipe the steam from the lenses. “I’m going to get my coat and boots on,” she said. “Then I’m going to come see to her. Everything will be fine.”
Mr. Timms reached out and touched my mother lightly on her arm. “Thank you, Annie,” he said, and I believe it may have been then, though he surely couldn’t have known this, that he started to fall in love with her.
It must have been a feeling that simmered those three years after Mrs. Timms died. She died that night, was dead already, in fact, when Mr. Timms stood in our living room, putting his glasses back on and waiting for my mother.
“There wasn’t a thing I could do,” she said later, after the ambulance had finally made its way through the snow and taken Mrs. Timms away. “Poor Jean. She was gone when I got there.”
My father and I had eventually put on our own coats and boots and made our way next door. My mother called for the ambulance, which was something, my father said later, that Mr. Timms should have done instead of coming to our house. “He didn’t know what to do,” my mother said with a sharp bite to her voice. “That poor man. He was lost.” Connie wasn’t crying. That would all come later. She sat on the couch in the living room and stared straight ahead, not saying a word.