Captain Saturday

by Robert Inman

  Nobody in Dysart knew what Tyler did for a living. Rosanna and Wilbur simply told folks that he “traveled.” And Tyler was never there long enough for anybody to ask many questions. He would swoop back in periodically with cash in his pocket and they would have a high old time -- going to movies and eating at nice restaurants in Charlotte and Winston-Salem and Raleigh, jaunting around the Carolinas to places like Myrtle Beach and Grandfather Mountain and sometimes even farther than that, to Hot Springs or New Orleans, one time all the way to San Francisco. Then one day the cash would be mostly gone and they would be deliciously exhausted from the spending of it and Tyler would be gone again, leaving them with what little cash was left. It was never quite enough to sustain them until Tyler got back again, and so Rosanna worked at the Winn-Dixie for sixty-five dollars a week and Wilbur mowed lawns, and together they usually had enough to scrape by. Usually.

  Tyler was quite up-front with his son about what he did out on the road. “I fleece suckers,” he told Wilbur, “and I’m damn good at it.” The way he said it made it sound like the most natural thing in the world.

  Tyler found a lot of suckers, he said, many of them at country clubs. “Now, there’s nothing wrong with country clubs. Plenty of nice people belong to country clubs. But some of ’em are fellows who’ve got new money in their pockets. Doing pretty good at some kind of business, driving a fancy car, living in a big spread, wangled their way into a country club membership. They take up golf and take a few lessons and get to whacking the ball around pretty well. And pretty soon they think they’re hot stuff. A guy with new money in his pocket is apt to think he’s bulletproof.”

  “And then you come along,” Wilbur said.

  “Yessir. Just wander into the pro shop and strike up a conversation. Or get into the dollar-ante poker game in the locker room. And one thing leads to another and first thing you know you’re out on the course. After nine holes, I’m down three and spraying the ball all over the place and cussing to myself. New Money thinks he’s found a patsy. Okay, let’s double the bet over the back nine. I lose another hole and New Money’s already counting his winnings. Down four holes with eight to go. I change putters and pull a new two-wood out of the bag and suddenly I’m making some shots. On the seventeenth, I’ve pulled even. Everything riding on the last hole. New Money’s got his ego sitting on one shoulder and a monkey on the other. Double the bet again. I hit my drive about two-eighty straight down the fairway with a little fade on the end and I look at New Money and I can see it in his eyes. He’s a dead duck. He hits his drive into the trees and then catches a fairway bunker and before we even reach the green he’s paid up and headed for his car. I don’t give a damn what he tells the guys in the club house. I’m out of there.”

  “Ain’t that gambling?” Wilbur asked. Gambling, he knew from character study at school, was sinful and illegal and addictive and led to other kinds of licentious living. A fellow who started out playing poker for nickels could end up a Hippie or a free-love Communist.

  “I think of it as social work,” Tyler said. “When I leave New Money standing in the parking lot, he’s a wiser man. At least he knows he ain’t bulletproof. I may have saved him from making the same kind of mistake in his business. His wife can keep going to New York to shop and his kids can get a Chapel Hill education and he’ll keep his fine house and his big car. Well, usually the car. I’ve won a couple of those, too.”

  Over the years, of course, the Carolinas golfing community had caught on to Tyler Baggett. He roamed far afield now. He had set out for Kentucky three months ago and had called only once, from Pine Bluff, Louisiana. Things were not going well. His putting stroke had deserted him. But he was pressing on. And meanwhile back in Dysart…

  “Okay,” Wilbur said. “Rinse.”

  Rosanna leaned under the faucet, letting the gush of lukewarm water carry away the shampoo. He guided the water with his hands, filtering it through his fingers into the fine strands of hair and then squeezing it out. He turned off the taps and handed her a towel as she rose, rubbing vigorously at her hair, turning to face him. He felt his face flush, seeing her here in her brassiere, trying not to look.

  She smiled, reading him. “Are you getting a little old for this?”

  The blush deepened. She touched his cheek, then punched him oh-so-lightly in the tummy. “Funny feelings?”

  He nodded mutely.

  “You’re almost a teenager. Not my little boy any more. When Dad gets home, you two need to talk.”

  She left the bathroom to him, and by the time he had showered and changed clothes she had supper ready. They took their plates to the living room and sat together on the sofa and watched an “I Love Lucy” re-run on the black-and-white while they ate and laughed at Lucy working on an assembly line in a cake factory and trying to put cakes into boxes while the line kept going faster and faster. It was a disaster, a wonderful mess, cakes going everywhere and Lucy ending up covered with cake and the studio audience and the folks in Dysart all in hysterics. Pure slapstick, just the way they liked it.

  Later, in bed, he started thinking about Lucille Ball and how it might be to have a television show like that and make a mess with cakes and have everybody laughing, and then when the show was over you could just go home and let somebody else clean up the mess. If you had your own television show, and made people at home feel good, they would send you cards and flowers and maybe name their kids after you. There were probably all sorts of little Lucilles all over the country. And the people who owned the television station would pay you enough money so that you wouldn’t have to kiss the ass of somebody like Buster Dysart. The thought of Buster Dysart soured the good feeling he had about Lucille Ball. Big Butt Buster Dysart loomed like a hungry beast out there on Monday.

  The thought of Buster Dysart brought on the thought of Nell Dysart, Buster’s daughter, who was in the same grade with Wilbur and, at one point toward the end of the school year, had thought he was cute, which is exactly what he thought of Nell. Wilbur had discovered in the past couple of years that he had a knack for mimicry. He could do Elvis Presley and Ed Sullivan and Cary Grant, and he had this whole routine he had thought up where Ed Sullivan doesn’t want Elvis Presley on his television show, but Elvis shows up and starts singing and gyrating, and before it’s over, Ed Sullivan is singing and gyrating right alongside him. He had performed it for Rosanna, who laughed until she cried, and then at a Wednesday assembly and the kids thought it was a riot, but the principal summoned him to his office right after assembly and told him he didn’t want to see anything like that in his school again. The principal was a deacon at Dysart Baptist.

  Nell Dysart was one of the kids who thought Wilbur was funny, principal or no principal. She sat right across the aisle from him in Old Lady Bentley’s English class and they passed notes back and forth while Old Lady Bentley wasn’t looking until she caught them one day and made Wilbur, who was the author of the particular note she confiscated, stand with his nose pressed against a circle she had drawn on the chalkboard. After class, Nell had said she was sorry he was the one who got caught, because if it had been her note, Old Lady Bentley probably wouldn’t have done anything because Buster Dysart was the chairman of the School Board and the top deacon at Dysart Baptist.

  Nell had freckles and reddish hair and a nose that turned up right at the tip, and when she brushed her hand lightly against his in the hallway outside Old Lady Bentley’s room, it made him feel incredibly nice. At home that night, Wilbur thought about washing Nell Dysart’s hair and his penis made a tent out of his pyjamas, and after that it made him self-conscious about washing his mother’s hair when she was wearing nothing on top but her brassiere.

  On the last day of school, when they were sitting in Old Lady Bentley’s class waiting for final report cards to be passed out, Nell passed him a note. I’M HAVING A PARTY AT THE SWIMMING POOL TOMORROW AFTERNOON. 5:00.

  He had spent all the next day mowing lawns, juggling his schedule so that the last customer of
the day was Fatboy Gaines, the police chief, who lived just a block from the swimming pool. He stowed the mower behind Fatboy’s garage and headed for the party.

  There was a squat two-story building at poolside -- concession stand and dressing rooms on the ground floor, a big open room on the top with a pinball machine, juke box, and ping-pong table and a sign above the door that said DYSART MUNICIPAL RECREATION CENTER. Fatboy Gaines’ brother, Ernest, was the pool manager and he presided over a booth at the pool gate where he stopped Wilbur in his tracks. “Hey, where you going, sonny?”

  Wilbur pointed up at the recreation center, where Elvis Presley’s “Teddy Bear” was drifting from the open windows. “Nell Dysart’s party.”

  “Twenty-five cents,” Ernest said.

  “But…”

  “Twenty-five cents.”

  Wilbur fished in the pocket of his cutoffs and handed Ernest a crumpled dollar bill and got three quarters in return.

  He climbed the steps and stood for a moment at the screen door, listening to Elvis and chattering laughter and Nell Dysart’s tinkling lilt. Then he opened the screen and stepped inside. There were fifteen or so kids there, drinking Cokes and playing games and jostling each other. Nell was standing by the pinball machine, watching Joe Curtis as he pulled the lever and sent a ball spinning into the maze and did a little body English jive to get the ball to give him a hundred million points. Nell had her hand on Joe Curtis’s shoulder.

  Wilbur headed straight for the pinball machine and reached it just as Joe hit the jackpot and lights started flashing and bells started dinging. “Oh, Joe!” Nell cried. “You’re the champ!”

  “Nell…” he said.

  She turned with a jerk and stared at him.

  “I made it,” he said, grinning. She kept staring and he felt his grin freeze on his face and turn to something more like a grimace as her upper lip curled slowly up and up, toward her nose.

  “You stink,” she said, loud enough for everybody in the room to hear it, and all of the other noise stopped except for Elvis and the pinball machine. They all stared at him. Then he fled as the laughter began, flaying his back. He didn’t even stop to get his twenty-five cents back from Ernest Gaines.

  He sobbed in Rosanna’s arms when she got home from the Winn-Dixie, sobbed with impotent humiliation.

  “Honey, I’m sorry,” she said as she cradled him on the sofa and brushed the hair back from his forehead. And then, ever-so-gently, “didn’t you think about coming home and taking a bath first?”

  “No. I just went.”

  “You were excited.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You like her.”

  “Did. Not any more. She made me feel like I’d been wallering in shit.”

  Rosanna was usually pretty firm about four-letter words, but this time she didn’t say anything. She held him and rubbed his forehead and patted his arm and let him be miserable and then later fixed banana pudding, his favorite, for dessert. It helped, helped a lot, but it didn’t anywhere near make up for the sting of public shame. It was his fault, of course. He had made a terrible mistake and opened himself to being the butt of laughter and ridicule. But that didn’t excuse Nell Dysart, who should have taken him by the arm and walked him to the door and gently said, “Why don’t you go freshen up and come back later.” That’s what his mother would have done. His mother was a lady who knew what to say and when to say it and how to make somebody feel okay even when things weren’t going so swell. He thought of all sorts of things he could do to Nell Dysart, like sneaking into her house in the middle of the night and setting her hair on fire. Instead, he just kept to himself as the summer wore on and the bermuda grew and Tyler Baggett was gone, gone, gone.

  One thing he would not do again, he vowed, was entertain any snot-nosed Dysart kids with his imitations. It was an odd thing about performing, he had thought when he started doing it -- a way to get people to like you, and yet at the same time a way to hold them at arm’s length, just beyond outer boundary of whatever it was you were doing that they weren’t clever or talented enough to do. Close, but not too close. Well, screw ’em. Let ’em get their Ed Sullivan and Elvis Presley somewhere else.

  *****

  Saturday. Wilbur mowed lawns and Rosanna checked groceries and at the end of the day when he headed home, he stopped just out of sight of the house, around the corner from the garage, and took a deep breath. Be there. But there was no car in the yard. When Rosanna got home a half-hour later, he could tell that she had been a little hopeful, too.

  *****

  She had a surprise for him on Sunday. She had arranged with Dooley Potts, an old guy who bagged groceries at the Winn-Dixie, to take them to Asheboro, twenty miles away, to a movie. Dysart had a movie theatre, but it closed on Sunday in deference to the church crowd. Folks in Asheboro were a little more liberal-minded.

  “We can’t afford to go to a movie,” Wilbur said. “We’ve got rent to pay.”

  “We don’t have the rent money whether we go to the movie or not. So why not enjoy the movie?” She was, he thought, a little like Tyler. Spend it while you had it. Let tomorrow be tomorrow.

  “What are we gonna do on Monday?”

  “Maybe something will turn up,” she said with a wave of her hand. “A bag of cash will fall out of an airplane into the yard. If you don’t want to go to the movie, you can stay here and wait for the airplane.”

  They drove over in Dooley’s old Ford and saw the re-release of “Gone with the Wind.” Dooley had a good sense of humor, despite the fact that he had lost his wife to cancer a couple of months before, and he cackled every time the black maid, Prissy, came on screen. On the way home, Wilbur did imitations. “Lawd, Miz Scarlett, I don’t know how to birth no baby.” And Elvis, appearing on Ed Sullivan’s show. Dooley howled. “You oughta be in showbiz, kid.”

  Dooley let them off in front of the house. The yard was still empty. They went in and fixed RC Cola over ice and sat at the kitchen table with an oscillating fan running on the counter to stir the early evening heat. The cinder block house trapped it and held it and even with the fan running and all the doors and windows open, it was like an oven. It would have been a little cooler outside, but you couldn’t sit outside in Dysart in August because of the mosquitoes. They were plentiful and they were big. Dooley Potts said he had waked up the night before to hear two huge mosquitoes talking at the foot of his bed. “Do you want to eat him here, or carry him off in the woods?” Wilbur thought he might work it into a routine sometime. But not for the snot-noses in Dysart.

  They sipped on their RC Colas and sat very still, making small economical movements, but even so, Wilbur could feel trickles of sweat down his back. “Maybe he’ll be here tomorrow,” he said finally.

  “I don’t think so,” Rosanna said. Then after thinking about it for a moment she added, “He must be doing all right. Winning some money. When he’s got his game going…” There was a quiet, distant look in her eyes, as if she were out there on the road or on a fairway with him, following along while he fleeced the suckers with a long, straight drive and a little fade at the end. She had gone with him a few times at the beginning, she said, before the baby came. One time she watched from the woods near the eighteenth green at a country club in Fayetteville while he won twelve-hundred dollars and a Rolex wristwatch.

  “I don’t think he’s coming tomorrow,” Wilbur said, “just like he didn’t come yesterday or the day before or any time for three months. What if he doesn’t come back at all?”

  She turned with a jerk and stared at him as if he had just struck her a really underhanded, cheap blow, as if he had just asked the most ridiculous question in the world, as if he were a little twelve-year-old snot-nose who didn’t understand a thing in the blessed world. But she didn’t say a word. She got up and went to the back door and stared out across the yard for awhile, sipping her RC Cola, her back very straight. He could see the ridges of her spine through the thin dress and the way her hair fell mane-like across
her shoulders.

  “I’m going to town,” she said after awhile.

  “What for?”

  “To use the pay phone.”

  “Do you know where to reach him?”

  “No.” Then, “I’m gonna call your Uncle French.”

  “Aw gawd, Mama. Not again.”

  “Just for a little while, until Dad gets back.”

  “They act like we’ve got some kind of social disease or something.”

  “French doesn’t. He’s always said, ‘If you need me…’”

  “But Aunt Margaret. She thinks her shit smells better than anybody else’s.

  She turned abruptly. “Watch your mouth, bub. That’s no way to talk around a lady.”

  She didn’t say, he thought, talk about a lady.

  “Anyway,” she said firmly, “there’s nothing else to do. I won’t give Buster Dysart the satisfaction of kicking us out.” There was nothing resembling defeat in her voice. Just doing what had to be done. That was the way she was.

  *****

  French Baggett, Tyler’s older brother, was there with a truck late on Monday afternoon, and he had Wilbur’s and Rosanna’s things -- the few items of furniture and boxes of clothes -- loaded by dark.

  “What about this lawnmower,” he said, peering out the back door.

  “Leave it,” Wilbur said. “It’s about shot anyway.”

  “No,” said Rosanna, “you take it to Mister Dysart. It’s not paid for. It belongs to him.”

  “Aw, Mama.”

  She pointed. He went. He was back in twenty minutes.

  “Did you take it to his house?”

  “No, to the Western Auto.”

  “It’s closed. Did you just leave it?”

  “Yes ma’am. I set the sucker on fire, and then I just left it.”