by Robert Inman
The basketball team went to the state tournament, where they lost to a team from Winston-Salem that went on to win the championship. Billy Hargreave, by now six-feet-five and quick of foot for such a big guy, signed with North Carolina State. The coach named Wingfoot captain of the team for the upcoming senior season.
In the Fall of Wingfoot’s senior year, he was visited at home by Norm Sloan, the basketball coach at State. Billy Hargreave came too. Wilbur helped Min serve coffee and homemade cinnamon rolls and then they sat down and listened to Coach Sloan offer Wingfoot a full scholarship.
“I’m going to West Point,” Wingfoot said. “They have a basketball team.”
Norm Sloan shook his head. “What a waste.” He looked over at Billy Hargreave, who shrugged. “Like I told you, Coach, I think he’s got his mind made up.”
“Baggetts are stubborn people, Coach Sloan,” Min said. “Always have been.”
“A streak of orneriness,” Wilbur chimed in, but Min gave him a frosty look and he didn’t open his mouth again.
Coach Sloan said, “If you change your mind, son, or if your plans don’t turn out like you hope, the scholarship’s waiting. I’ll hold it for you as long as I can. We’d sure love to have you. With you and Billy, we can win the ACC. Maybe more than that.”
“No need to hold the scholarship,” Wingfoot said. “I’m going to West Point.”
By the time Coach Sloan came to call, Wingfoot had done most of what he needed to do to get admitted to West Point. His grades were respectable. He had gotten nominations from the local Congressman and both of North Carolina’s U.S. Senators. His basketball coach at Southport High had given him the standard West Point physical fitness test and he had turned in an astonishing performance -- twenty pull-ups, a nine-foot standing long jump, a three-hundred-yard shuttle run in fifty-two seconds, and eighty-six pushups in the two-minute time allotment. Plus, he had thrown a basketball ninety-two feet from a kneeling position. The basketball coach at Southport High had also written to the basketball coach at West Point, who was said to be salivating over the thought of Wingfoot Baggett.
Wingfoot was prompt about everything in the application process except the Scholastic Aptitude Test. He was nervous about that and kept putting it off until January of his senior year, the last opportunity, stared him in the face. On a Saturday morning, he rose early, rousted Wilbur from his bed to time his five-mile run in a cold drizzle, showered and clothed himself, threw up, and drove to Wilmington in the station wagon alone. In the late afternoon, he appeared at the store, ashen-faced but calm. When the test results arrived two weeks later -- his scores well within the acceptable range -- he went out to the tree house in the liveoak and stayed for twenty-four hours.
The only thing left to do was take a medical examination, and the Army scheduled that for him at Fort Bragg on a Saturday in April. He boarded a bus for Fayetteville. He planned to go by the Post Exchange while he was there and buy a pair of second lieutentant’s gold bars. When he graduated and got his commission, he said, Min and Wilbur could pin them on his uniform. One on each shoulder.
Wilbur was at the house alone late that afternoon with a long list of chores that would take him all weekend. He was out front, trimming shrubbery, when he heard the phone ring.
“Wilbur…”
The voice sent a chill through Wilbur. “Wingfoot, what’s wrong?”
“I can’t go. They won’t let me go.”
“What…?”
“They won’t let me go to West Point.”
“Why not? God, Wingfoot…”
“I failed.”
“What, the exam?”
“I failed.”
He was going off someplace, he said, someplace where he could think. Don’t try to look for him, he said. Just tell Min he’s okay, he said. And he hung up.
I failed. And Wilbur Baggett, who didn’t know shit from shineola, was smart enough to know that he meant a lot more than just a medical exam.
Min was wild with grief and worry. She called Uncle Harbert in Wilmington, but she was incoherent. Wilbur took the phone and told Harbert what Wingfoot had said. Harbert had political connections. He was the one who had gotten Wingfoot’s nominations from the congressman and senators. He’d call the Governor right away, he said. The Highway Patrol would find Wingfoot. Everybody should just sit tight and stay calm.
Wilbur hung up. Min had collapsed in a chair, sobbing into her hands. “Min,” he said gently, “it’s gonna be okay. He’s just upset. He’ll be back.”
She didn’t seem to hear him. “Papa left me in charge,” she kept saying over and over.
*****
It took a month to locate Wingfoot. He was in Morehead City, living in a boarding house and working as a laborer in a boatyard. An assumed name. Harbert also found out what had happened at Fort Bragg. Wingfoot had something called premature atrial contractions in his heart. Palpitations. Benign, the Army doctor said -- nothing life threatening or even alarming, though unusual for an eighteen-year-old. But West Point wouldn’t take him with premature atrial contractions.
Wilbur was unpacking a case of canned green beans when Harbert came into the store to tell Min. “What do you want me to do?” Harbert asked.
“Nothing,” Min said. “Wilbur, go get in the car.”
She closed up the store, right then and there in the middle of the afternoon, and they drove to Morehead City. Wingfoot was just getting off work, walking out of the boatyard shed, when the station wagon pulled up. It was late June, the air hot and sticky with the smell of rank salt water, diesel fumes, resin, freshly-sawed wood. Wingfoot stopped in his tracks when he saw the car. Nobody moved. The all just stared at each other. Wilbur thought Wingfoot looked older. He had let his hair grow. It was over his ears, crawling down the back of his neck. He reached in his shirt pocket for a pair of sunshades and put them on. Min started crying. Wingfoot walked over to the car, leaned inside and hugged her.
She didn’t fuss at him, as Wilbur thought she ought to. He had scared the hell out of them, running off like that. If anybody could take care of himself, he kept telling Min, it was Wingfoot. But just disappearing -- well, anything could happen to you. Hitchhiking, probably. And he had a heart condition, she kept saying. Wilbur hadn’t tried to argue with her. He had stood somewhere at the fringes of her grief for a month, afraid to say much of anything, feeling alone and, at times, a little pissed off. Would she have carried on like this if he’d been the one missing?
But now, for all she had been through, she didn’t fuss. She looked up into Wingfoot’s face and caressed his cheek and patted his hair and cried. Wingfoot was stone-faced, and whatever was going on behind the sunshades, you couldn’t see. He might have glanced over at Wilbur, or he might not have. Wilbur wanted to say something, anything, but he couldn’t for the life of him think of a thing. He was still out here on the fringe of things.
“Come on,” she said finally, “let’s go home.”
Wingfoot withdrew his head from the car. “I’m okay,” he said. “Just let me be. I’m not ready to go home.”
“Wingfoot…”
“It’s a big old empty hole, Min. I can’t go to West Point. I can’t be a soldier. They won’t even let me be a private. I was…” He held up his hand, a tiny space between thumb and forefinger, “this close. And now it’s gone.”
“I called Coach Sloan,” she said. “He’s still holding the scholarship.”
Wingfoot shook his head. “You don’t get it, Min.” Then he turned and walked away.
They were almost home before she broke the silence. “Well, it’s just the two of us now.”
I’m not much at math, he thought, but I know that one and one ain’t always two.
*****
Glenda Turnipseed rode the bus home with him after school one afternoon during the Spring of his junior year to study for an English test. Actually, a performance. Their teacher had decreed that every student would memorize Marc Antony’s funeral oration from “Julius Ca
esar” and recite it in front of the class. Glenda was petrified. She was quiet and shy, a tall girl who was self-conscious about her height.
She and Wilbur had kept an easy, casual friendship. He had grown a foot since junior high. His voice had deepened. He was mildly popular. At the Junior Class follies he had brought the house down with a dead-on imitation of Jeffers, the principal. He played saxophone. His grades were okay. Not spectacular, but okay.
“Stand up straight, Glenda,” he told her. She stood in the middle of the parlor, slumped at the shoulders, hands clasped in front of her and writhing like small animals. She straightened just a bit. “More,” he said. “You’re a nice-looking girl when you’re not all bent over like some old person. That’s it. Throw your shoulders back. You’re gonna be magnificent. Now. Let ‘er rip.”
Friends, womans, countrymen,
Lend me your ears.
“It’s Romans, Glenda. Not womans.”
“Did I say womans?”
“Afraid so.”
“If I do that in front of the class, I’ll die.”
“Remember the Bible. The book of Romans, not Womans.”
Friends, Romans, countrymen,
Lend me your ears.
I come to praise Caesar, not to bury him.
“Actually, it’s the other way around. I come to bury Caesar…”
“Oh.”
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
“Bingo. And why don’t you try a little dramatic thing with your hands.
She stared at her hands.
“When you say ‘bury Caesar,’ do a little downward sweep with your right hand. Like this. Like you’re indicating the hole in the ground where they’re gonna put old Julius. And then when you say ‘praise him,’ lift your other hand up, like you’re indicating the sky. Get your whole body into it.”
“My whole body?”
“Yeah.”
Glenda stared at the floor. “I can’t do it, Wilbur.”
“Yes you can,” he said firmly.
“You try,” she said. And she sat down on the sofa. “Show me.”
Wilbur stood in the middle of the room and looked Glenda squarely in the eye. “I am Mark Antony. A bunch of other guys have just stabbed my best friend to death in the Roman Senate. I didn’t really take part in the foul deed, but I didn’t do anything to stop it, either. And now they’ve asked me to do the oration at the funeral. There’s no way I can make up for betraying this guy, but I know how to give a good speech. And I’m clever. I’m gonna tell ’em I didn’t come here to praise Caesar, and then launch into doing that very thing.” He placed one hand on his hip and lifted the other slightly toward his audience, assuming what he imagined to be a tragic pose.
Friends…Romans…countrymen…
He went through the whole thing, using his hands and a little body English and inflection. Glenda sat there, spellbound, her mouth slightly open. And when he finished on a high, tremulous note, his voice full of the pathos and passion of the moment and then lowered his arms slowly to his side, she didn’t speak for a long time.
“You have a really nice voice, Wilbur,” she said after awhile.
“Thank you.” He sat down beside her on the sofa and picked up his English textbook from the coffee table to see if he had gotten all the words right. She took the book away from him and closed it and put it back on the coffee table. Then she kissed him. She tasted of Juicy Fruit and smelled of White Shoulders. “I love you, Wilbur,” she said. “I’ve been in love with you since the first time you spoke to me in the hall in Junior High.”
“Well…oh.”
“You don’t have to be in love with me. I don’t want you to be in love with me unless you really mean it.”
What was he supposed to say -- that he was in love with her too? He wasn’t, not in the way she was talking about. He didn’t know anything about being in love with somebody. Anybody. But he owed her something, he supposed.
He thought about it for a long time, and then he reached across the sofa for her hand. To his surprise she drew it back. There was an odd look in her eyes and he could see that she had been watching him, studying him, while he agonized over this business of loving.
“There’s something missing with you,” she said quietly. “I thought maybe it was like, you know, how an artist will paint over a canvas, put a new picture on top of an old one. You wonder what’s down there where nobody can see it. But maybe there’s not anything at all.”
She got up and left him, walked out of the house and down toward the river. He watched her for a long time through the window, standing there with her shoulders hunched over, as if she might bump her head on something if she stood up straight and tall. Then she straightened up and he could see her arms moving about and he realized that she was doing Julius Caesar. Doing just fine without him.
Min came in from the store after awhile and offered to drive Glenda back to Southport. Did Wilbur want to go? No, he sure didn’t.
Min was back in a half-hour. “I don’t think you ought to be spending time with that girl, Wilbur. She’s…” Min waved her hand, and the gesture said everything. Glenda’s father operated a boat, taking tourists deep-sea fishing. Wilbur had never been to her house, but he could imagine it -- probably something like the little cinder block oven he and Rosanna had lived in in Dysart while they waited for Tyler to come home.
“You have to remember who you are,” Min said.
“A Baggett.”
“Yes.”
“How could I forget?”
*****
Over the next year, Wilbur puzzled frequently over what Glenda had said. Was there something missing? Was he missing something?
But hell, he kept telling himself, he was seventeen years old. You weren’t supposed to know everything about yourself when you were seventeen. Maybe later, you might find some missing stuff. It might suddenly appear, like something that had been lost in the Bermuda Triangle. But if it wasn’t all there right now, at seventeen…well, hell.
He wondered about Wingfoot, what he knew of himself, what he had learned by aiming at something like a powerful guided missile and then exploding in mid-air, almost to the target. Wingfoot called occasionally, just to let them know he was alive and okay. He worked at the boatyard in Morehead City for awhile, on a state highway crew at the other end of the state near Asheville, on a Christmas tree farm in the mountains outside of Boone. He was doing okay, he said. Making it. But the calls were brief. If you said anything even obliquely about coming home, he hung up. If he was finding out anything about himself, he sure wasn’t sharing it with anybody at Baggett House.
And what about Min? At twenty-three, did she know all about herself? If she did, she didn’t reveal any more than Wingfoot did. She was mostly pleasant. She would occasionally unwind and joke around a little. But there was always a distance, a line she had drawn somewhere that he was careful not to approach. She worked hard at the store and he helped in the afternoons and evenings and on long days during the summers. She provided the things he needed, at least in a physical sense. But what they said to each other, that was all pretty much on the surface, and carefully said at that.
So here he was, Wilbur Baggett, seventeen years old, an uncharted island in the midst of a blank sea. Who was he? What was he? Was he simply whatever he could touch and see? Or was some part of himself, as Glenda had accused, really closed off and painted over? And if so, what?
The answer came to him on a Spring afternoon in his senior year.
He heard the splash of water from the half-opened door of the bathroom as he mounted the stairs and started down the hallway toward his room.
“Wilbur…”
He peeked in. She was bent over the tub, rinsing shampoo from her hair, a towel draped over her shoulders. “The conditioner…” She was pointing to the shelf on the far wall. “Pour some on and work it in,” she said when he tried to hand it to her.
He froze, assaulted without warning by a powerful, sudden
memory. He felt weak in the knees, the floor about to drop out from under him. “I can’t,” he said, barely above a whisper.
She turned to look up at him. “What?”
He stared at the bottle of conditioner. “I used to wash my mother’s hair.”
He set the bottle down on the rim of the tub and bolted, slamming the door behind him. He made it as far as the stairs and collapsed on the top step, head in hands. He heard the bathroom door open and close, Min’s footsteps in the hall, heading back toward her room. After awhile he got up and hid away in Wingfoot’s house up in the liveoak tree, collapsing in a corner, feeling the structure shift precariously under him. He didn’t care if the whole goddamn thing fell out of the tree. He was near panic, brain roiling, breath coming in gasps.
He had tried so hard to keep the past at bay, to play by the rules and not make any mess and be a good kid and be grateful for a place, any place, so that he could carry on his own pitiful, inconsequential little life. He had done what Min had told him he must do. He had come to accept, in a way, her version of things. Tyler at the controls. But he could see now that acceptance had come at a terrible price. He had betrayed his parents, had denied them Judas-like, had given them up to save his own stinking ass. He hated Min for what she had done to him, but he hated himself a lot more for letting her do it. Maybe it was Tyler at the controls, but Wilbur was the one who had killed his parents, over and over, in every instance that he had pushed them to the back of his mind or given over to Min’s version of things. They weren’t lost at sea, not at all. They were here, in graves far too shallow to keep the wolves away. They rose up now to accuse him.
Glenda Turnipseed was right, and she was wrong. There wasn’t anything missing. It was all there. And the sudden, searing knowledge of what was down there, what had been painted over, drove him into the corner of the tree house, terrified and wretched. He curled up into the tightest ball imaginable, head buried between his knees, and sobbed.