by Robert Inman
“Don’t touch anything,” Wingfoot commanded.
“That’s what Min said about her room.”
“Her room’s just full of girl shit. This one’s booby-trapped. Mess with anything and you’ll blow your fuckin’ hand off.”
“Well, how am I gonna share your room and not touch anything?”
Wingfoot grinned. “Very goddamned carefully.”
Wilbur noted two things about Wingfoot: he had an exceptionally foul mouth and he was taking this military thing very seriously, even more seriously than Min was taking Chapel Hill. This was a house full of obsessed people, he thought, the children even more than the parents. There was something both alien and exotic about the place and its inhabitants, a constant electric current that seemed to hum and throb through the house. Especially Wingfoot, who seemed wired directly into a socket. He was short and muscular with close-cropped hair, almost a buzz-cut, and intense gray eyes. He could, if you took him as seriously as he seemed to take himself, make you nervous.
Wingfoot was sitting at his desk, tinkering with something in a cardboard box. There were wires hanging out of it, but Wilbur couldn’t see what was inside. A book was open on the desk next to the box. “Whatcha doing?”
“Building a bomb.”
“For real?”
“I’m gonna blow up that fuckin’ alligator.”
“What alligator?”
“Barney. He sleeps in the reeds down next to the river. You better stay away from there. He’ll eat you, just like he ate Prissy.”
“Who’s Prissy?”
“Mama’s dog. She got loose and went down by the river and the goddamned gator came up out of the reeds like he’d been shot and gobbled her little ass down in one gulp. I saw it all from the tree house.”
“What did you do?”
“Not a goddamned thing. I couldn’t stand the little shit. She’d jump up on the couch between Mama and me when we were watching TV and curl up in a ball, and then after awhile she’d cut a fart. I never smelled such a big fart from such a pissant little dog. And Mama would make like she didn’t smell it. Mama’s like that.”
“I’ll bet,” Wilbur agreed. “Do you always talk like that? I mean, all the cussing?”
“I’m practicing.”
“For West Point?”
“Vietnam.”
It wasn’t really booby-trapped, as Wilbur figured out after several days of residence, during which time he had the room almost entirely to himself. The weather was nice and Wingfoot spent most of the time in the tree house, coming inside for occasional meals and bath and change of clothes. Wilbur made himself at home, though he was careful not to mess with Wingfoot’s stuff. Just in case. There was a double bed, and the first night he spent in it, he felt a lump under his pillow. His hand found the unmistakable hard steel of a pistol, a huge one with an enormously long barrel. He lay there frozen with fear for a long time, then eased his head off the pillow and eased the pillow off the pistol and, holding it by the tip of the butt, placed it gently in a drawer of Wingfoot’s desk.
The gun, as Wingfoot told him the next day, was not loaded. Bullets were in the closet where Wingfoot could get to them quickly (he didn’t explain why that might be necessary) but the gun was not loaded. The bomb was another matter.
The blast shook him upright in bed and he grabbed his head with both hands, probing frantically for the bullet he was sure was imbedded in his brain. There was no hole, no blood. But there was, within an instant, a great commotion throughout the house. Lights came on, feet thundered up and down the hall, muffled shouts rang out. He sprang from his bed to join them.
The acrid smell of cordite drifted up on the light haze of smoke from the river’s edge, where they found Wingfoot standing with a flashlight, probing the reed-clogged water’s edge.
Uncle French, for the first time, seemed to have lost his air of genteel calm. “What in the name of God is going on down here?” he said as he scrambled down the slight incline toward the river, waving the rest of them to stay back, up on higher ground.
“He got away,” Wingfoot said, disgusted.
“Who?”
“Barney.”
“Goddamn,” Uncle French barked.
“French, I don’t think we need any blue language,” Aunt Margaret called down.
“Margaret, shut up.”
“All right.”
French came back with Wingfoot’s collar clutched tightly in his right hand, the flashlight in his left. He shined the light into Wingfoot’s face. “Do you want to tell the rest of the residents of this household what in the hell you’ve been up to?”
“I built a bomb,” Wingfoot said simply. “I set it off.”
French shook him. Wingfoot’s head wobbled crazily. “You could have gotten yourself killed.”
“Well, I didn’t. But the mission wasn’t a total failure. The bomb worked just like the book said.”
“I swear,” Aunt Margaret piped up, “sometimes you act just like your Uncle Tyler.”
Wilbur, standing with Rosanna’s arm around his shoulders, could feel her stiffen. But she didn’t say anything.
“Where did you get the…whatever blew up?” French demanded.
“Dynamite,” Wingfoot said. “There’s a couple of cases of it in an old shack over by the lighthouse.”
“Good Lord.” French released him. Wingfoot shook himself and stood military-erect. “What am I going to do with you?” French asked.
“Be patient,” Wingfoot said calmly. “Give me a couple of years and West Point will take over.”
Aunt Margaret grabbed Wilbur’s arm. “Did you know anything about this?”
“Of course not,” Wingfoot said quickly. “You think I’d tell a twelve-year-old I was making a bomb?”
But Wilbur could tell that Aunt Margaret didn’t believe it, or didn’t want to believe it. Everything about her since his arrival had said that he was on probation here and always would be. Why? Well, that remark about “Uncle Tyler” said everything. He bristled with indignation, but his mother’s firm hand on his shoulder and her own silence kept him from saying anything.
“You’ll sleep in the house from now on,” French said to Wingfoot. “Where we can keep an eye on you.”
“Yes sir.”
Wingfoot slept nude. Wilbur was stunned when he pulled off all his clothes and tossed them in a corner and climbed in the bed, the twin globes of his bare ass disappearing under the sheet. “Turn out the light,” he said, his back to Wilbur, who was still standing in the middle of the room.
“Don’t you…”
“No.”
“Why?”
“So I can get to my willie when it needs workin’ on.”
“You mean…”
“Yeah. Don’t you?”
“Well…”
“I’ll show you sometime.”
Wilbur got reluctantly into bed, but he perched precariously on the far edge away from Wingfoot, who seemed to him a great deal older and wiser in the ways of the world. He probably knew some stuff Wilbur wasn’t quite ready to get into yet. But one thing for sure, if he went to Vietnam and slept like this, some jungle thing was likely to get hold of his willie.
*****
At dinner one evening, Aunt Margaret said something about Min “coming out.”
“What’s she coming out of?” Wilbur asked.
Margaret’s nose curled up a couple of centimeters. “She’s coming into society .” The way she said society made it sound like something just short of being a movie star.
“Then why don’t they call it coming in instead of coming out?”
“Wilbur, that’s enough,” Rosanna said. She explained later that Min was a debutante and that it was a big deal for girls of Min’s age from prominent families in the Wilmington area. They went to lots of fancy parties, and then the whole thing -- the “season,” they called it -- wrapped up with a fancy dress ball where everybody was really gussied-up. The debutantes were thus formally introduced i
nto Wilmington’s social life and then were expected to meet some eligible young Wilmington man and marry (after they had finished being Eighty Pies at Chapel Hill) and have daughters who would come out in their own time. Or come in, as it were.
Each family with a debutante daughter hosted one of the summer parties, and the Baggetts were to have the last one before the big fancy ball at the end of August. Aunt Margaret said it was an acknowledgement of the Baggetts’ long-standing social prominence that they were chosen for the honor of giving the last party. Wilbur wondered why, if it was such an honor and all, Aunt Margaret had her asshole so puckered up about it. She was like a tornado, tearing through the house from dawn until late into the night during the week before the party, ordering everybody about, seeing to caterers and decorators and a professional cleaning service that scrubbed the house from top to bottom, inside and out, even though the party was to be on the lawn where two huge open-sided tents were set up, one for dining and the other for dancing.
“Mama, it’s just a party,” Min said to Margaret at dinner.
“No it’s not,” Margaret said emphatically. “When you’re a Baggett, you have obligations and duties that other people don’t have. Everything has to be just right. There’s a standard that’s higher than everybody else’s. You must always remember who you are. Isn’t that right, French?”
“I suppose so,” French said, sort of noncommittally.
“Of course it is,” Margaret emphasized.
Uncle French found a great deal to do with his business interests in Wilmington, and when at Baggett House, stayed mostly in his study, working on the family history and writing checks to the legion of workers Margaret had hired. Rosanna worked lengthy hours at French’s store out on Highway 133. Wilbur (whose offer to mow the lawn had been rejected by Margaret) and Wingfoot retreated to the woods and marshland between the house and Orton Pond, where Wingfoot instructed in guerilla warfare, which involved a good deal of crawling on bellies while pretending that live ammunition was being fired overhead. Wingfoot ate grasshoppers. Live ones, for God’s sake. Just protein, he said. It made Wilbur sick, just thinking about it.
Wilbur’s thirteenth birthday would fall on the same day as the party, but when he mentioned that to Rosanna, she advised him to keep quiet about it. They would have their own celebration later, she promised.
Margaret had decided on a Mexican theme. The decoration ran heavily to gaily-colored blankets, which were draped from the front windows of the house, and tons of flowers, delivered fresh-cut on the morning of the party. The guests arrived in costumes which rivaled the blankets in gay color, the debutantes themselves attired in dresses with wide flouncy skirts and tops that showed a great deal of flesh across shoulders and upper torso. A little mishap with elastic, Wilbur thought, and you could really get a look at something. It was sexy-looking enough as it was.
Tables set up under the tent and the liveoak tree were laden with mounds of food -- tortillas, tacos, frijoles and tons of guacamole dip. A black fellow dressed in starched white jacket dispensed margaritas from a bar to the adults and fruit punch to the young ladies and their dates. A mariachi band -- some local guys wearing serapes and fake moustaches -- wandered through the crowd playing guitars and fiddles and making a brave attempt at “La Cucaracha” and “Alla En El Rancho Grande.” Wilbur and Wingfoot, attired in white shirts and sombreros, were pressed into service to pass amongst the guests with trays of finger food. They had been warned by grim-lipped Aunt Margaret to behave themselves or die.
“What a great place for tear gas,” Wingfoot said as they surveyed the scene from the front door. He was still mad because, over his heated protests, Margaret had insisted on having the treehouse in the liveoak dismantled for the occasion. He could build it back after the party, she said. But he wasn’t mollified.
“Or a dog with firecrackers attached to his tail,” Wilbur offered. Several days of crawling around the grounds with Wingfoot had gotten him into the spirit of mischief, if not the practice of it.
Wingfoot’s eyes lit. “I know where there’s a dog.”
“Well, I don’t have any firecrackers,” Will said quickly and set off with his tray.
The party began at six o’clock in the evening, and by the time the sun had set back beyond the house, it was going full blast. The debutantes and their dates were sneaking margaritas from the bar and transferring them to fruit punch cups. The mariachi band had changed into more casual attire and shed their fake moustaches and were belting out rock and roll under the second tent, where young and old were packing the dance floor. It was a soft, beautiful evening, the lawn bathed in the gentle glow of fading daylight and a couple of hundred Chinese lanterns strung about (Margaret couldn’t find Mexican lanterns anywhere in the two Carolinas, and said that by the time everybody had plenty to eat and drink, they wouldn’t know the difference anyhow). Margaret glowed and beamed. Uncle French, pretty well into the margaritas himself, floated through the crowd with a vague smile on his face, chatting up the adult guests. Wingfoot and Wilbur, finished with their finger food duties, retired to a corner of the porch to watch from a safe distance.
And that was when Tyler showed up. There was first the insistent honking of a car horn that caused heads to turn, and then the longest automobile Wilbur had ever seen rounded the corner of the house and kept coming across the parking area and up onto the grass and stopped right in front of the front steps. It was a huge car, an ocean liner of a car. And it was a convertible. With the top down.
“Godawmighty,” Wingfoot said softly. “That’s one sonofabitch of a car.”
Tyler stepped nimbly out, looked around, spotted Wilbur. “Yo, Birthday Boy!” he called out.
Wilbur met him at the steps.
“You thought I forgot,” Tyler said, wrapping him in a huge hug, then stepping back and holding him at arm’s length. “I brought you a present.”
Wilbur could feel the mass of the party moving their way, and when he glanced in the direction of the tent he saw Aunt Margaret at a full gallop.
“A present?”
Tyler indicated the car with a grand sweep of his arm. “A Cadillac.”
“Holy shit,” Wingfoot said from somewhere behind him.
“Where did you get it?” Wilbur asked.
“Well, it used to belong to a fellow in Hopkinsville, Kentucky whose inflated opinion of his game was exceeded only by his hook. That there automobile comes courtesy of a twenty-two-foot putt on the eighteenth hole.”
It was magnificent -- a beautiful light blue with sweeping lines and big fins on the rear. It was polished to a fair-thee-well and it glowed like a humongous gem in the lantern light.
“Mine?”
“Yessir. ’Course you aren’t old enough to drive it just yet, but I’ll keep it up for you until you turn sixteen. Can you imagine, tooling around in something like that? You’ll have to drive fast to stay ahead of the mobs of women.”
“Tyler!” the shrill voice of Aunt Margaret bearing down on them. “Everybody’s supposed to park up the road. There’s a shuttle bus. French, do something…”
“I missed you,” Tyler said, looking straight down into Wilbur’s eyes, his hand resting firmly on the top of Wilbur’s head, like a preacher performing a baptism. Wilbur could feel something warm and powerful flowing through the hand and into his head and all down his body. Everything was okay now. Tyler was back and they could go somewhere and be just the three of them for awhile and leave Aunt Margaret with her society shit and Uncle French with his piles of history and Min with her Eighty Pie business and Wingfoot with his bombs. They would take a trip somewhere and be almost normal.
“I missed you too,” Wilbur said. He put his arms around his father and held tightly to him as the crowd surged up around them.
“Hi, Margaret,” Tyler said, across the top of Wilbur’s head. “Damn good of y’all to throw such a nice party for my boy. It ain’t every day you turn thirteen.”
By the time the party broke up near
midnight, Tyler Baggett had utterly charmed the crowd, had taken carloads of debutantes for rides in the Cadillac, and had arranged a golf game the next day with several of their fathers. He and French and Wilbur stood at the porch saying goodbye to the guests. Aunt Margaret was upstairs with a headache.
Tyler and Rosanna appeared arm-in-arm in the dining room for breakfast the next morning. She glowed, clinging to him, her eyes smiling and her mouth soft. Watching them, Wilbur felt something inside himself ease off a little. Things would be okay, he thought. At least until next time.
SEVEN
It was a good nine months. Tyler took them to Waxhaw, a little town just below Charlotte near the South Carolina line, where they rented an old house across the road from the railroad tracks that split the town. They enrolled Wilbur in the seventh grade (a couple of weeks late, of course, after they made a trip in the Cadillac to Lake of the Ozarks and then on to Chicago, where Tyler bought him a whole new wardrobe for school). Tyler played some golf and was gone for occasional stretches of a week, two weeks, but he was around the house a lot, too. His game, he said, had never been better. He and Rosanna talked about maybe buying the house, staying put while Wilbur finished junior high and high school. There seemed to be plenty of money. Rosanna stayed home. When Spring came, nobody said anything about Wilbur mowing lawns all summer.
Tyler took up flying again. Refresher lessons at the airport in Charlotte, then a physical to make sure Korea hadn’t impaired his ability to pilot a plane, and finally renewal of his license. On a lovely early Spring day he took Rosanna and Wilbur for a ride. They flew all the way to Roanoke, Virginia, had lunch, and flew back. Wilbur sat up front, wearing an extra set of headphones and listening to all the radio traffic and feeling more important than he had ever felt in his life. Important and rich, in a way that went far beyond money.