by Robert Inman
They lay there together quietly for awhile, not touching. And then Will sat up suddenly, kicked in the gut by something that had been lurking down there since his visit to Old Man Simpson’s office two days ago, something he had almost forgotten. “You know what Simpson told me?”
“What, Will?”
“He said your father called him about me.”
“When?”
“Twenty years ago.”
There was a long moment before Clarice said, “They were fraternity brothers at Duke.”
“I know that.”
“And?”
“Here, all these years, I’ve been under the impression I got the job on my own.”
There was an edge to her voice now, impatient. And something else. “You did, Will. You got it because you were qualified. All Daddy did was ask Mister Simpson to give you a fair chance.”
“You knew about it.”
“Yes.”
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat, back to her. “But you didn’t say anything.”
“Will,” she said finally, wearily, “I’m not going to go there. If you resent the fact that my father put in a good word for you, that’s your problem. I thought, and he thought, that it was a kind and gracious thing to do. Do you think you’ve got to do everything in this world right by yourself?”
He shrugged. “Well, I sure got fired right by myself. I’m sure nobody put in a word for me on that.”
She sat up and put a hand on his back. “Will,” she said softly, “I think you need to go somewhere quiet for awhile and sort all of this out. Not just the job, but how you feel about things in general.”
He turned to her, catching on to the thing in her voice. “And you?”
“Maybe I could use some quiet too.”
He sat very still. What’s going on here? He knew, of course, but then again he didn’t.
She said, “Your cousin Wingfoot’s downstairs. He wants to take you to Brunswick County.”
“Good God.”
Brunswick County. Once, a good long time ago, it had been a place of refuge. Not of his choosing back then, and certainly a time that existed bittersweet in his memory. But it might indeed be the place of quiet and recuperation he needed just now, away from prying eyes and inquiring callers. In Brunswick County, on the peaceful banks of the Cape Fear River, he might be able to put body and soul back together and figure out how the hell he was going to get his life back.
But what about this thing with Clarice? Shouldn’t he stay here and thrash it out with her? Shouldn’t they ever-so-carefully poke about in the minefield, locate the mines and disarm them? Or would that be the very wrong thing to do just now? Was it better, for the moment while he was distraught and poisoned with dread, to put yellow warning tape around the field and step back and think about things, each of them in their own time and space? Either way might be right. Or wrong.
Clarice stood beside the bed with a rustle of silk as she smoothed her dress. “I think you should go,” she said.
“But you think all those people down there in Brunswick County are crazy,”
“At the moment,” she said, “You might fit in just fine.”
BOOK TWO
FIVE
The summer of 1965 was one of the hottest anybody could remember in Dysart, North Carolina. There was a string of days in early August in which the temperature regularly flirted with one hundred and the humidity was as thick as pudding. It was hot, but it was not dry. Almost every afternoon, just like clockwork, thunderheads gathered over Dysart and deluged the town and surrounding countryside with rain, gusty wind and occasional hail. Rain came in buckets, as one local put it, “like a cow pissing on a flat rock.” The rain and fetid heat made Dysart’s grass grow like crazy. And the rain and the heat and the grass made twelve-year-old Wilbur Baggett think he might go crazy. If he didn’t die first.
On a particular Thursday afternoon in early August, Wilbur struggled across the lush bermuda lawn in front of Buster Dysart’s home, muttering curses at the heat, the lawnmower, the bermuda, the insects that swarmed up from the grass and peppered his exposed flesh, the threatening clouds beginning to pile up overhead, and Buster. Especially Buster.
It seemed that Buster Dysart was everywhere in his twelve-year-old life. Buster owned (among other local businesses) the Western Auto Store where Wilbur had purchased the lawnmower in early June, just after school let out for the summer. Rather, he had begun paying for the lawnmower in early June. It was a time payment plan: twenty dollars down and the remainder of the $79.95 (plus interest) over the course of the summer in twelve weekly payments of ten dollars apiece. Wilbur was no whiz at math, but even he could figure out that Buster would make a handsome profit from the lawnmower. Buster was no fool of a businessman. Dysart might be a pissant town, hardly a speck on the map, but Buster, latest in the line of Dysarts who had founded it, owned most of the place and profited thereby.
Buster also owned the most handsome home in Dysart, this red-brick-and-white-columns monstrosity with its lush expanse of bermuda lawn where Wilbur labored now. Buster had other people who seeded and fertilized the lawn and kept it free of crabgrass and insects and fungus. But only to Wilbur Baggett did he entrust the mowing of the lawn because Wilbur Baggett worked cheap and Buster Dysart was one cheap sonofabitch. Most of Wilbur’s customers paid him to mow their lawns once a week, an average of two dollars per lawn. Buster insisted on his being mowed every other week. And he paid three dollars for a lawn that was twice as big as any other in town. “Take it or leave it,” Buster had said. Wilbur took it because at the time, when June was just beginning and Wilbur was just starting out with a brand-new lawnmowing business, a customer was a customer. Every two weeks, as the summer progressed, he regretted it.
“Sonofabitch,” Wilbur yelped as the lawnmower choked down for the umpteenth time. It was not much of a mower -- he had realized that almost as soon as he forked over the down payment and began to trudge from lawn to lawn. He had bought one of the cheapest models at the Western Auto store, with a lightweight aluminum frame and a dinky engine: just dandy if you intended to occasionally trim up around your backyard swimming pool, but no match for a town full of rain-fed bermuda, especially the yawning front lawn at Buster Dysart’s house where the grass was three inches high and thickly matted by the time he mowed. There were big chunks of aluminum missing from the mower’s frame, victim of rocks lurking in the grass; and the engine, victim of two months of rugged work, wheezed and rattled and died at the slightest provocation.
Wilbur backed the mower away from the clot of grass that had bogged it down and reached for the starter cord. He reached, but he couldn’t quite reach it. His body just wouldn’t move any more. He felt lightheaded. Spots danced before his eyes. He sank to his knees, shoulders slumped, and stayed there in just that position for what seemed a great long while -- eyes closed, mind entirely blank. The sweet-tart odor of fresh-cut grass, engorged with precipitation and fertilizer and herbicide, made him nauseated. Every inch of him was sweat-soaked -- cut-off jean shorts, grubby tee shirt, sockless sneakers, the dorky narrow-brimmed hat his mother made him wear. He felt entirely drained, entirely empty, entirely lost in a sea of grass that stretched so far ahead of him that he could barely see September off there in the distance. September, when school would start and the final payment would be made on the mower just as it died completely and went to the scrap heap behind the Western Auto store. Next summer, he would have to start all over again. That is, unless his father, Tyler Baggett, came home and rescued him from all this -- from lawnmowing, from Dysart, from yawning uncertainty.
It was, he reckoned, just after five o’clock in the afternoon. He had been at it since early morning, trying to get a head start on the worst of the heat and humidity. He had twelve soggy dollars in his pocket, the result of an unceasing day in which he had stopped only long enough to drink an RC Cola and eat a package of cheese crackers he had bought at the tiny corner grocery store next to Old
Lady Bentley’s house. Old Lady Bentley had plied him with ice water when he mowed her lawn at 11:30 and had given him a quarter tip, which he had spent on the RC and crackers.
Five o’clock in the afternoon, his body and soul drained and shriveled, still more than half of Buster Dysart’s lawn left to cut.
And then the rain started. It came without warning -- none of the rumble of thunder or gusts of wind that usually preceded the late-afternoon summer downpours. It just started raining -- a steady shower that pattered on his hat and shoulders and drummed quietly on the aluminum frame of the lawnmower. He roused himself long enough to take off the hat and the t-shirt and toss them aside in the grass. He turned his face skyward and let the rain beat against his face and bare shoulders. He opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue and tasted the warm wetness and let it soak into his skin and mingle with his honest sweat. There would be no mowing the rest of Buster Dysart’s grass this August afternoon, not with it three inches high and rain-soaked. So Wilbur Baggett rose unsteadily to his feet, gathered his hat and shirt, and pushed his mower homeward.
It was a square cinder block building with a low-sloping roof on a pot-holed, unpaved street on Dysart’s outskirts. There was a garage on one side and a weed-choked vacant lot on the other. The garage, tended by two middle-aged brothers, was noisy with the clang of metal and the rumble of engines from early morning until early evening, after which the brothers began drinking and arguing, activities that would take them well past dark. The vacant lot on the other side was quiet, but snake-infested. Wilbur’s mother, Rosanna, had killed some kind of reptile with a hoe in their back yard just days ago. After Rosanna got through with the snake, Wilbur couldn’t tell whether it was poisonous or not.
Buster Dysart owned everything on the street -- garage, house and vacant lot. And now, as Wilbur approached, pushing the lawnmower through the rain, Buster Dysart’s big-finned Chrysler was parked in the twin ruts next to the house that served as a driveway. Buster’s car was the only one there, of course, because Wilbur’s father was using the family automobile on a business trip. Tyler had been gone for three months.
Wilbur stowed the lawnmower next to the house and covered it with a ragged piece of tarpaulin and went in through the back door, letting the screen slam loudly behind him. When he got to the living room, Buster was headed for the front door, filling it with his big round butt as he said over his shoulder, “Monday, Miz Baggett. That’s it. Monday, or I’ll put you out.” And he was gone into the late afternoon drizzle.
“Asshole,” Rosanna said softly. She was planted firmly in the middle of the room, back to Wilbur, arms encircling her torso in a tight grip. Her shoulders were shaking.
“Mom…”
She didn’t move. He crossed to her, touched her arm. He thought maybe she was crying, but she was dry-eyed when she turned to him. There was a deep flush in her high, fine cheekbones. She took a long, deep breath and her arms dropped to her side. She looked him over. “You’re drenched.”
Wilbur looked out the front door, out to where Buster’s Chrysler was backing into the street. “Asshole,” he said.
She put her arms around him, drenched and all, and hugged him tightly for a good long moment. She was still shaking just a little. He could feel it all through himself.
A month behind on the rent, and another payment due Monday. Buster Dysart wanted all of it, all one hundred ten dollars of it. And all they could scrape together, as they sat at the kitchen table that evening, was forty-two, and that included the twelve Wilbur had brought home in the pocket of his cut-off jeans.
“How many lawns tomorrow?” she asked.
“Just two. And finish Mister Dysart’s. That’s…” he did the math, “seven dollars. I could do the Mondays on Sunday.”
“Not in Dysart,” Rosanna said with a wry smile. Wilbur and Rosanna didn’t belong to a church, but it seemed as if everybody else in town did. Dysart was as dead as road kill on Sundays.
“When do you get paid?” he asked.
“Next Friday.”
Rosanna worked checkout at the Winn-Dixie, a couple of blocks walk from their house to the main street that served as the downtown business district. Whenever Wilbur started feeling sorry for himself, trudging along behind his lawnmower in the heat, he thought of Rosanna standing there at the checkout counter for eight hours a day, ringing up everybody else’s groceries, then walking home with a small sack of their own just after five o’clock -- likely as not just as the daily rain shower hit. He had bought her an umbrella for her birthday the end of June, but a vicious gust of wind during an afternoon storm had ripped it from her hand as she tried to juggle it and a sack of groceries and it had sailed under the wheels of a dump truck.
“Forty-two and seven. That’s forty-nine.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We could go next door and stick up the garage,” Wilbur said.
“We don’t have a gun.”
“Maybe they’d lend us a tire tool.”
Rosanna laughed. She had a soft, easy laugh, even when she was sixty-one dollars in the hole with no prospects. “Headline in the Dysart Tribune : GARAGE ROBBED WITH BORROWED TIRE TOOL.”
“Dysart doesn’t have a Tribune.”
“But,” she said, “Dysart does have an asshole who wants a hundred and ten dollars by Monday.”
They sat for awhile thinking about it and then Wilbur went to the refrigerator and opened an RC Cola and put ice in two glasses and halved the soda between them and they sat and sipped on it, making it last, while they thought about it some more. There was one thing that hung in the air between them, and that was Tyler Baggett. But neither spoke of that. After they finished their RC Cola, Rosanna stood up and said, “Come help me wash my hair.”
It was long and straight and fine and hung mane-like down her back. She knelt next to the bathtub and he straddled her back, piling the wet hair on the back of her head and kneading in the shampoo, using strong, hard pressure the way she liked it. She always looked small and frail to him this way, with thin shoulders and the knobs of her spine poking the flesh above the strap of her bra and the hair, wet and plastered, exposing a skull that was almost tiny. But she was not frail at all, not in the least. She was strong and sturdy in her wiry smallness, and she had strong opinions about things and people, and when she spoke, it was in a firm, confident voice that made her twelve-year-old son feel anchored and rooted, at least in her presence. She was always very much a mother and put up with no foolishness, but she spoke to him as if he were older. In some ways, he supposed, he was.
“It’s been three months,” he said.
She cocked her head to the side. “What? I can’t hear you for the water.”
Louder. “I said it’s been three months.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe he’ll get here this weekend.”
“Uh-huh.” The way she said it, it didn’t sound like she was counting on Tyler Baggett to show up in the nick of time. Tyler Baggett wasn’t a nick of time kind of guy. When he showed up, it was usually at odd moments.
When she spoke of Tyler to Wilbur, she pulled no punches and made no excuses. She called Tyler what he was, and he was a golf hustler. At least, that was what he worked at.
He had come back from Korea with a chest full of medals and a steel plate in his head -- both medals and steel plate, the result of an act of singular bravery. He had been the pilot of a tiny, slow-moving plane, an aerial artillery spotter. On a frigid, snow-swirling afternoon, as a Red Chinese human wave attack threatened to overrun a Marine Corps position near the Chosin Reservoir, Tyler kept his plane in the air above the battlefield while the Chinese riddled it with shot and shell, calling in artillery fire that broke apart the enemy formations. The plane finally gave up the ghost and spiraled down to a grinding crash just behind the American lines. The Marines pulled him out of the wreckage -- one side of his skull split open, one leg shredded, life oozing out of every bodily opening. Somehow, he survived the grievous wounds and the
jostling of the litter-bearers who toted him back to a first aid station and the trip by ambulance over rugged ground to a field hospital where doctors managed to save the leg and patch the hole in his head. He spent six months in a hospital in Japan and then he came home and took up golf on a course near the Veterans Administration hospital in Salisbury where he completed his recuperation.
From what Rosanna had learned from Tyler Baggett’s family, the man who returned from Korea was a good deal different from the one who left. He had been quiet, bookish, introspective -- headed for, they expected, a career in law or medicine or perhaps a college professorship in one of the social sciences. Now he was voluble, quirky, charmingly outgoing, a man with a quick laugh and an odd glint in his eye and an astonishing talent for striking a golf ball. His older brother, French Baggett, had once opined that the Chinese bullets and the crash had altered Tyler’s entire n*-motor makeup, scrambling signals and re-wiring his brain and body in an odd way that established some almost mystical connection that ran from eye to hand to tee to green. Tyler Baggett loved golf and loved life and loved easy money, especially the kind you could win from other golfers.
In the early years he had worked the Carolinas, the country clubs and public courses, anywhere he could find a golfer willing to wager on his prowess. He walked the fairways gimp-legged from his Korean leg wound, and that helped sucker the unsuspecting. He won a great deal of money and made sure he spent whatever was in his pocket at any given time. He and Rosanna had met in a bar in Greensboro on an evening after he had made a sizeable raid on the bank accounts of several of Greensboro Country Club’s members. They had married shortly thereafter, when she turned up pregnant, and after several years of bouncing from one town to another, he had settled his wife and son in Dysart, which was sort of neutral ground. It had no golf course, thus nobody to hold a grudge over losing a thousand-dollar nassau. And it was centrally located in the Carolinas. Tyler could toss his clubs into the trunk of the car and be anywhere from Boone to Charleston within hours.