Captain Saturday

by Robert Inman

  *****

  “ You like people in the abstract,” she said.

  They were in the kitchen, Clarice at the breakfast table with the News and Observer spread out in front of her, engrossed in the classifieds. She rarely bought anything listed in the classifieds, but she never missed a day perusing them. There was a story behind every item, she said. It was interesting to imagine. The classifieds didn’t interest Will at all. He had quite enough to do without poking about in other people’s lives or wondering about the things that fell out of their closets. It all reeked of self-absorbed history. Greensboro kind of stuff.

  He was at the coffee maker. He had gotten up early this morning so they could have coffee together before she dashed off to sell real estate and he puttered. She was already dressed for the day, in a smart navy blue suit and a red-and-yellow figured silk scarf tied nattily about her neck. She looked smashing. He was still in robe and slippers.

  “What do you mean, I like people in the abtract?”

  “All that hand-shaking and baby-kissing you do, working the malls, Rotary Club picnics -- you really hold people at arm’s length.”

  “I think that’s a little unfair,” he said. “I like people.”

  “In the abstract.”

  He poured her coffee, added cream and sugar, brought both cups to the breakfast table.

  “It works both ways,” he said. “Celebrity sets you apart. People can’t see past the guy on television. Take Chuck Durkin. They’ve been living next door for…what, fifteen years? We’ve had dinner back and forth…what, fifty times?”

  “Not that many.”

  “And when we’re together, Chuck can’t ever talk about anything but the TV station. ‘What are Jim and Binky really like? Have you ever met any of the Weather Channel people? Gee, those network news guys are a bunch of liberals, don’t you think?’”

  “If you weren’t a celebrity, would you still hold people at arm’s length?”

  “I don’t,” he insisted, his voice rising just a bit. “I don’t hold you at arm’s length.” He reached to touch her just behind her left ear, the place that made her shiver when he kissed it in bed. “We could…” he started.

  “I’ve got to meet a client in a half hour. Some people from Massachusetts.”

  “Oh. Well, Massachusetts…”

  “You’re wrapped up in yourself,” she said.

  “My God, Clarice. This is getting a little vicious here.”

  “I didn’t mean to be vicious,” she said, “I was just making an observation.”

  “Well, it’s unfair.” He was, truly, stung. He got up from the table with his cup of coffee and went upstairs. He heard her car start up and back out of the driveway a few minutes later.

  Unfair, he thought. Then he remembered something Glenda Turnipseed had said to him long years ago. “There’s something missing with you,” Glenda had said. And he had been baffled then, as he was now. For God’s sake, what was he, some sort of emotional cripple? Had something of himself gone down at sea with that planeload of people? And then had the odd circumstance of his upbringing left him without some essential instincts that other, more normal people used to transact human commerce? If so, then why had he done so well since he had put all of the business of his upbringing behind him? Why did so many people like him so much? Why did they honk their horns? Yo Will! Well, it was because they thought he was a regular guy. No, he didn’t like people in the abstract, and he didn’t hold people at arm’s length. Clarice was wrong about that. Hell, Will Baggett was Raleigh’s most popular TV weatherman. It just didn’t compute.

  *****

  Will’s finest hour came in early September of 1996 when Hurricane Fran hit Raleigh, barrelling up from the coast and still packing winds up to a hundred miles an hour when it plowed into the city. Raleigh was a mess -- several thousand downed trees, smashed homes, littered and flooded streets, an almost total power blackout. Will sent Clarice toward Greensboro as it became clear the storm would target Raleigh. She picked up Palmer at Duke on the way. They stayed in Greensboro while Will slept on a cot at Channel Seven (which was powered by a huge emergency generator) and stayed on the air almost constantly. There weren’t many people watching at first, but as lights and TV sets flickered on again, there was Will, anchoring the station’s coverage of the aftermath and cleanup. When the city had returned to something akin to normality, the City Council passed a resolution declaring “Will Baggett Day” in honor of his efforts to keep people calm and informed. “I just don’t know what we’d have done without you,” the Mayor said at the City Hall ceremony where they presented Will with a framed copy of the citation. Clarice and Palmer weren’t there. Palmer was busy with classes and Clarice had clients.

  Clarice had a lot of clients. “It’ll take more than a hurricane to stop Raleigh,” Fincher Snively said to Will at the company picnic. A poll of readers of a major financial magazine had named it the best place to live in the United States. And Clarice Baggett was riding the wave. Her finest hour, too.

  *****

  It seemed to Will, in the twenty-fourth year of his marriage, that he and Clarice had reached a sort of equilibrium in their lives. They each had something, and they both still had each other. He had done with his life what he set out to do, what he needed to do. And Clarice was doing what she set out to do. They had endured and persevered, accommodated differences, made a life together in spite of. A long and mostly happy life. Things had turned out just fine.

  And if he had fallen short, had erred in any way in his relationship with his wife and his son, he would make it up to them along the way. They had plenty of time for that. All the time in the world.

  BOOK FIVE

  EIGHTEEN

  “You’ve got a visitor,” the deputy said as he unlocked Will’s cell door. He led Will to a room partitioned into small booths, thick glass separating the free from the incarcerated. Will slid into a chair. There was a vented hole in the glass through which they could talk. The deputy parked himself in a chair across the room behind Palmer and took a magazine out of his pocket.

  Morris had been his first visitor, and now Palmer was his second, a week into his thirty-day sentence in the Wake County Jail. It was the first time he had talked to Palmer since the night, two weeks ago, in Chapel Hill. Palmer had tried reaching him by phone through Morris’s office, but Will hadn’t returned the call. He thought a little time and distance was called for -- for both their sakes.

  They looked each other over for a moment. Palmer was freshly scrubbed and nicely dressed in chinos and a baby-blue oxford cloth shirt, buttoned-down and economical in movement, nothing like the wretch Will had found in Chapel Hill. But he was nervous -- eyes darting, hands busy with the two paperback books he was holding. Will gave him what he hoped was a reassuring smile.

  Palmer held up the books. “Brought you something to read.” He nodded at the deputy. “He said they’d have to check ’em before they gave ’em to you.”

  “Standard procedure,” Will said.

  They were both novels -- one by Chekov, one by Danielle Steele. “I don’t know what kind of stuff you like,” Palmer said. “I read the Chekov in a lit class last year. I picked up the other one at the drugstore.”

  “They’re fine,” Will said. “I’m probably somewhere between the two.”

  Palmer studied the covers of the books as if seeing them for the first time, then put them aside. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “You’re growing a beard.”

  “I wasn’t sure they’d let me, but as it turns out, there aren’t a lot of unreasonable rules here. It’s sort of like kindergarten. As long as you raise your hand to go to the bathroom and don’t break in line, they don’t hassle you.”

  The levity was lost on Palmer. “It looks, you look…different,” he said.

  Will scratched his chin. “I’m getting used to it. Doesn’t itch as much as it did at first. And I’ve lost some weight. Food’s okay, but I thought I needed to
drop a few pounds. I was getting a little thick in the middle.”

  “Yeah. I mean, you were all right. Maybe a little thick. In the middle. Not much.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you’re wearing glasses.”

  Will slipped off the glasses and looked at them. “Contacts are too much trouble in here.”

  “I don’t remember you wearing glasses.”

  “It’s been a long time.” It had, in fact, been in New Bern, back when he was just getting started. When Channel Seven hired him, Old Man Simpson insisted he switch to contacts. “Glasses don’t look good on somebody who’s appearing on TV,” Old Man Simpson had said. “They create a subtle barrier between you and the viewer. Folks want you to look them in the eye. Straight in the eye.” Well, now he didn’t have to look anybody straight in the eye, and nobody expected him to. If you were looking for a benefit to being a convicted felon, maybe that was it.

  “Are you going incognito?” Palmer asked.

  Will laughed. “Oh, everybody knows me in here.” Later, now…well, that was a different matter. He might, indeed, go incognito. Keep the beard and the glasses. Disappear without going anywhere. And there would be no place to go, since the terms of his three-month probation required him to stay in Wake County. Probation. Now, it was official.

  Palmer dropped his eyes, stared blankly at a spot on the counter in front of him, and took a deep, ragged breath. “This is pretty goddamn awkward,” he said softly. “This…” his hand fluttered, indicating jail, personal situation, life in general, “…is one screwed-up mess.”

  Will leaned back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest, waiting.

  “I’m sorry,” Palmer whispered. Will couldn’t really hear him through the vented hole in the glass, but he could see his lips forming the unmistakable words, could see the glisten of tears in his eyes. Still, he waited.

  Palmer glanced over at the deputy, then he leaned close to the hole in the glass. “I oughta go over there and tell him.”

  Will unfolded his arms and leaned close. Their faces were only inches apart. “But of course you won’t. That would ruin everything, Palmer.”

  “But doesn’t it…for you…” his voice trailed off.

  Will gave him a wan smile. “It is one more shovel full of manure added to the pile, but the pile was already getting pretty big.”

  “Don’t you care any more?”

  Will didn’t answer that. He wasn’t sure what the answer would be.

  “Why did you do it?” Palmer asked.

  “I’m pondering that and a lot of other things. You have a lot of time for pondering in a place like this. I think the best thing for me to do is keep pondering for now, and then after I get out of here we can talk about what I’ve figured out. If anything.”

  Palmer shook his head and then stared at the counter again.

  “Did you go see the dean?” Will asked.

  Palmer looked up, relieved to change the subject, at least a little. “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “He said it has to go to the admissions committee.”

  “Did he seem sympathetic?”

  “I guess. He was pretty pissed off at first.”

  “But he didn’t say no.”

  “No.”

  “When do you think you’ll hear?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  Palmer studied his hands. He had slim fingers. His nails were trimmed. As far as physical appearance was concerned, things seemed to be pretty much reversed here -- Will with his orange jail jump suit and scraggly beginnings of a beard and his thick-rimmed eyeglasses.

  “How’s your mother?” Will asked.

  A pained look crossed Palmer’s face, replaced almost immediately by a flash of anger.

  Will waited for him. “We really ought to talk about it, don’t you think?”

  “What’s to talk about? You guys…”

  “I hope we can work things out. But whether we do or not, I don’t want you to feel like you’re caught in the middle. It has nothing to do with you.”

  “Bullshit!” Palmer barked. The deputy looked up sharply from his magazine. “I know how it is when parents split. They always run around telling the kid it’s not about him. Well, what the hell, isn’t the kid part of the family? And if you’re gonna split up the family, isn’t that about the kid? And even if I am twenty-three years old…”

  Will nodded. “You’re still our kid.”

  “Mom said the same goddamn thing. ‘It’s not about you, honey…’” His voice mocked her bitterly. “Well, to hell with that.”

  The deputy stood. “Is there a problem over here?” he asked.

  Palmer blanched, then turned to him. “No sir. Sorry.”

  Will waved his hand to indicate things were okay. The deputy sat back down and reopened his magazine.

  “Palmer,” Will said quietly, “It is about you, but it isn’t your fault. It’s your mother’s idea, and it may be all my fault, but she won’t talk to me about it. And I’m not asking you to tell me anything she’s said. I don’t want you in the middle.” He took a deep breath. “This is all, as you say, a mess.”

  “A screwed-up mess,” Palmer said.

  “But remember this. You’ve got a bit of a mess of your own. And I assume you haven’t told your mother about that.”

  Palmer shrugged.

  “Well, don’t. Hope it works out.”

  “And all the other?”

  It was Will’s turn to shrug.

  Palmer pushed his chair back from the counter. “I guess I better go,” he said. But he didn’t get up, not yet.

  Will leaned close to the hole in the glass again, his lips almost touching the metal vent. “Did it embarrass you, coming here?”

  “Yeah, I guess. I mean, your father in jail?”

  “Especially me.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, it’s not the first time I’ve embarrassed you,” Will said.

  Palmer pulled the chair back close to the counter.

  “Remember the seventh grade?” Will asked. “I came to your school as the Weather Wizard. You got sick. You asked me not to ever do that again.”

  “Well,” Palmer said, “when you’re in the seventh grade you just want to be…”

  “A regular guy.”

  Palmer grimaced.

  “And having your father up there in front of all of your friends wearing some goofy costume…”

  “Not just that,” Palmer said with a shake of his head. “Being on TV every night. Everybody knowing who you are…were. People pointing in the hall. ‘That’s the weather guy’s kid.’”

  “Embarrassing.”

  Palmer made a face. “It’s not like I was ashamed of you or anything.”

  Will smiled. “Even in the Weather Wizard costume?”

  “Well, yeah. But most of the time, just…”

  “Embarrassed.”

  Palmer nodded mutely.

  “You realize,” Will said, “that this is really the first time we’ve talked about any of this. In fact, this -- and over in Chapel Hill the other night -- are the first time in a long time we’ve talked about anything much.”

  Palmer’s face clouded. “Are you doing this because you think you owe me something?”

  “Like I said, I’m pondering all that.”

  “Well,” Palmer said, “don’t.”

  Then he got up and left.

  *****

  Will had only one other visitor during his incarceration. Mr. Dinkins showed up one afternoon during the third week. He looked rather spiffy in a dark suit and tie and held himself carefully erect -- nothing like the shambling old man who had puttered around the halls of Channel Seven all those years. He was carrying a hat, an old-fashioned snap-brim, which he placed on the counter in front of him.

  “Barfield Simpson died a couple of nights ago,” Dinkins said. “Didn’t know if you’d read it in the paper, but I thought I’d come by. Just been to the funeral. There was a big crowd.�
�

  “I don’t usually read the paper,” Will said. “I’m sorry to hear it. He was a good man, Mister Dinkins, one of the best I’ve ever known. Like a father to me. I hope it wasn’t bad at the end.”

  Dinkins shook his head. “He thought a lot of you, Will.”

  “Did he know about all this?”

  “No,” Dinkins said. “Over the last few weeks, he didn’t know much of anything. Right after you saw him the last time, he went downhill pretty fast.”

  “I’m glad. I mean…”

  “I know what you mean.” Dinkins picked up the hat, and Will thought he was about to go. But he looked it over carefully, turned it a hundred-eighty degrees, examined it closely, and put it back down on the counter. “Even if he had heard about it, he wouldn’t have believed it. I don’t.”

  Will was careful not to say anything, not to move a muscle.

  “You’re a good man, Will.”

  “I appreciate that.” Then, “Mister Dinkins, what is your first name?”

  “Abner.”

  “I’m sorry I never asked before.”

  “Well, it’s Abner. Don’t even have a middle name. Just Abner Dinkins, plain and simple.”

  “Now that Mister Simpson is gone, I guess you’ll be getting along to Alaska,” Will said.

  Dinkins smiled. “No, I’ve pretty much rid myself of that idea. Alaska’s too cold for an old man’s bones. And the distances are too far. Alaska? That’s something for a young man. Now you, Will, you could handle Alaska. You’re young enough. Maybe you should think about someplace like Alaska. A fresh start, you know.”

  Will returned the smile. “I guess it’s worth considering. Among other things.”

  “Any idea what you’ll do now?”

  “Not a clue,” Will said. “I’ve got another week in here with nothing to do but figure out what matters and what doesn’t.”

  Dinkins picked up the hat aagain. “One thing, Will.”