by Robert Inman
They finished their sodas and crackers and Will collected the bottles and wrappers and took them to a trash can beside one of the gas pumps. The day care van driver was just finishing. She hung up the nozzle and started past him toward the convenience store. “Hi,” Will said. “Know anybody who needs a lawn service?”
She stopped, gave him an odd look. Her mouth opened, closed again. Then, “Are you…”
“No,” Will said. “I’m just a lawnmowing guy.”
Back in the pickup, he was about to crank up when Palmer said, “Where did you get this lunatic idea?”
“I told you. Wingfoot.”
“Is that all? Wingfoot said you oughta mow grass, so you went out and bought all this stuff?” He waved at the trailer full of equipment behind them. “That’s a helluva stretch.”
“Well,” Will said, “I’ve been in the business before.”
“You have?”
Will told him about Dysart, the summer of his twelfth year, the heat and the insects and the dying lawnmower and that sonofabitch Buster Dysart.
“And after an experience like that…”
Will smiled. “Well, this time I ain’t pushing no piece of junk. And, this is sort of life or death.” He paused, remembering. “Come to think of it, that thing back there in Dysart seemed a little like life or death, too.”
And then he found himself telling about Tyler and Rosanna, Tyler being gone for long periods and Rosanna holding things together while they waited, and Wilbur mowing grass to make a little extra money.
Palmer stared, brow knitted in fascination. “I’ve never heard any of this. Why haven’t you told me?”
“I haven’t really given much thought to them for a long time.”
“My other grandparents,” Palmer said. “Most kids have two sets.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Mom told me one time that they were killed in a plane crash when you were a teenager.”
“Thirteen.”
“And that’s about all I know.”
“Well, you’ve got two living grandparents in Greensboro. I guess they’ve more than taken up the slack.”
Palmer shifted in his seat to face Will. “That bothers you.”
Uh-oh. Back in that minefield.
“All right,” Palmer said. “Save that for later. Tell me about your parents.”
“I just did.”
“More.”
Will shrugged. “They’ve been gone a long time, Palmer. I don’t remember much.”
“Bullshit,” Palmer said simply. “You were thirteen.”
Will sat there for a moment staring out the window. The day care van pulled away. One of the kids in the back was mooning the world, the round pink globes of his butt hiked up over the rear seat. Kids.
“My father was a golf hustler,” he said. “He made his living gambling on golf games. He would leave wherever we were living at the time and be gone for weeks -- travelling all over the south and east, getting up a game here and there, winning more than losing. He would come home with a wad of bills in his pocket, driving a real nice car, and we’d take trips and spend it all and then he’d take off again.”
“No kidding,” Palmer said slowly. “He was good?”
“Could have been a successful pro, I think. In fact, he was thinking about doing that when he and Mom and Uncle French and Aunt Margaret took off. They were going to Augusta to the Masters.”
Palmer hesitated for a long moment, then asked softly, “Did you miss him?”
Will started to answer, but his voice caught in his throat and he realized that he was suddenly, astonishingly, on the verge of tears. Did I miss him? Do I still? He looked quickly away, fighting to bring it under control.
Palmer touched his arm. “Dad. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he managed to say.
They sat there for a minute or so and then Palmer said, “I think I’ll take a bathroom break,” and he was out of the truck and gone, giving Will some time and space to compose himself.
When he returned and climbed in, Will said, “We’ll have to talk about all that sometime. When I figure out how.”
Palmer looked him straight in the eye. “It’s about us, too.”
“Yeah, I guess so. It’s about us. It’s all connected.”
“Well, I want to know.”
*****
They drove back to LeGrand to pick up Palmer’s car. It was after six o’clock. Clarice wasn’t home yet.
“Are you gonna stay over here?” Will asked. “Maybe you should. I don’t think you got much sleep last night. Long way back to Chapel Hill.”
Palmer climbed out of the truck. “I like having my own place,” he said. “I’m all grown up now, Dad.” He closed the door and started away, then turned back. “Morris called you Wilbur,” he said through the open window.
“That was my name until I got to Chapel Hill. Then I told everybody I wanted to be Will.”
Palmer cocked his head to one side. “Do you mind if I call you Wilbur?”
Will thought about it for a moment. “No,” Will said, “I don’t mind. In fact, I think that might be just fine.”
*****
They came to him as he sat alone in the dark. After all this time. He had been afraid of them, he supposed -- of what they might say about Min’s banishment and his own acquiescent betrayal. Afraid that they would be angry and vengeful, that they would haunt his wakings and his sleepings, pointing accusatory fingers. But it was not so. They were vivid but gentle spirits.
Rosanna with her marvelous hair, long and straight and fine, cascading mane-like down her back. He could feel the strands of it in his hands, wet from washing, as she bent over the bathroom tub. And the feeling of having lived in a protective backwater that she provided for him, even -- especially -- when things were tight. Something will turn up. Trust me. He did. And something always turned up, until there at the last.
And Tyler, swinging into the yard at Baggett House behind the wheel of that wonderfully long, gleaming Cadillac convertible, arriving just in the nick of time. You thought I forgot! Strong arms around him, a cocoon in which he might rest for awhile until it was time to fly free.
Perhaps most wondrous of all, the realization that it was his own son who had summoned them. He had been afraid to miss them for a great long while, but what Palmer had said -- no, what he had not said -- had made it suddenly all right. It’s okay to miss them. I would miss them if I were you. Perhaps Palmer knew all too well. But they had set about remedying that, father and son, and maybe that had opened this other door.
There was another realization now on the heels of the first: that he might have gained something from them, that even though they were long lost, there were remnants of what and who they had been that were useful to him in his present dire circumstances, when he had been brought crashing down as they had been thirty-five years ago.
Small but sturdy and resilient Rosanna. Just do what needs to be done. Something will turn up.
Tyler, that maddeningly intriguing mixture of free spirit and orneriness. Get up a game and let’s see what happens.
They were his history, and Uncle French was right about that -- you could make use of your history or not. But first, you had to acknowledge it.
He had kept Tyler and Rosanna locked in an out-of-the-way closet of his past for a long time. But now, here they were, just when he needed them most.
TWENTY-TWO
He sold his car. He didn’t need it any more, not with the pickup, and he did need the money.
Palmer had suggested the classified ads in the News and Observer, had even helped him word the advertisement: FOR SALE: 1991 Buick LeSabre, clean, runs good, new tires. $5,200 OBO.
“ What’s OBO?” he asked.
“Or best offer.”
“You know a lot about the classifieds.”
“From Mom.”
“Shouldn’t it say, ‘good mechanical condition’?” Will suggested.
“‘Runs good
’ sounds more down to earth,” Palmer said. “Guy’s looking in the paper for a used car for his teenaged daughter. He sees Buick LeSabre and he thinks, ‘Old Man’s Car.’”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Face it, Dad, a Buick LeSabre is a good car, but it’s not rad.”
“Rad?”
“It’s a phrase. You know, like, what was it your generation used to say? ‘Cool’?”
“I get the picture. I’m not completely old-fashioned.”
“But you’re not rad.”
“I guess not.”
“So anyway, the guy sees Buick LeSabre and he thinks some old geezer’s been driving it around town at twenty miles an hour and leaving his blinker on for eighty-three blocks. But then he sees ‘runs good’ and he thinks, ‘Well, maybe this is, like your average dude who knows something about cars and has taken good care of it. Buick LeSabre’s a good car and this one runs good. Might be just the thing for my teenaged daughter.’”
Palmer was constantly surprising him like that. There was a savvy down-to-earthness, an almost street-smartness about him that didn’t fit the picture of the buttoned-down oxford cloth-chino-Bass Weejun young man Will had thought him to be. This was a young man with texture, a young man who could smoke pot and nearly flunk out of medical school. There was a sort of duplicitousness in the way he presented one image to his grandparents and his mother, and yet had this other side that was rough-woven, like a reversible jacket. Like the jacket Will had been wearing in court that afternoon. It was troublesome, Will thought, but also intriguing. Layers there that Will had never imagined, nooks and crannies of Palmer’s personality that made him infinitely more interesting. It was almost like discovering a child from a long-ago, forgotten liaison who showed up suddenly one night on the front porch. And intriguing to wonder where the rough-woven side came from. It sounded a little like… good God …Tyler Baggett. He laughed at the thought.
Palmer had also proved more adept with the machinery than Will. He handled the big mower easily, and when something broke, he was more likely to figure out what was wrong. He had even spent an evening on the floor of Will’s living room taking apart a carburetor, studying the diagram that came with the owner’s manual, finding and extracting the piece of trash that had caused the mower to run roughly.
“Gesundheit!” he cried, using a very bad fake-German accent, “ve haf located the appendix! Ve take out the appendix und leaf the bowels for another adventure.”
“You’re going to make a wonderful surgeon,” Will said.
So Will had the classified advertisement published in the News and Observer exactly the way Palmer had suggested. A man who worked on the assembly line at a manufacturing plant in Fuquay-Varina bought the LeSabre, not for his teenaged daughter, but for his elderly mother. He drove to Raleigh one night after work and took the car for a test drive. “Runs good,” he said to Will when he returned, and he wrote Will a check for five thousand dollars after they haggled a bit.
“I should pay you a commission,” Will said to Palmer.
“Keep it,” Palmer said. “A few years from now when you need your appendix removed, I’ll charge double.”
*****
They were on the Beltline. It was a mistake. It was the shortest route to their next customer and they thought the traffic wouldn’t be too bad this time of day, mid-morning, but there had been a wreck at the Western Boulevard exit and traffic was backed up, two lanes of parked vehicles trying to go south, but nothing moving at all, not for the past fifteen minutes. Palmer was driving, or would have been had there been any driving to do.
They had heard about the wreck on the radio -- an 18-wheel flatbed loaded with lumber. It would take awhile to get things cleaned up and get traffic moving again.
Palmer was flipping through the stations now. He was grumpy and nettlesome. Raleigh was gripped in a July heat wave and the air conditioning on the Ford pickup was spasmodic. There was no time to take it back to the dealership for service, not with thirty customers lined up waiting to have their lawns mowed. The radio was all about the heat wave and the traffic tie-up, and neither one made Palmer very happy. He punched the buttons on the radio. “You keep changing the settings, Wilbur,” he complained. “Every time I get in here, you’ve changed the settings. You add the public station in Chapel Hill and that stupid hillbilly stuff and take out Big Rock 97.”
“It’s a test of will,” Will said. “No pun intended.”
Palmer made a face and punched the buttons some more…
…with an expected high today of 95…
… on the Channel Seven Noon Report, details on the wreck that has snarled traffic…
…"I can see that lonesome teardrop…”
…for the best deals in Raleigh on…
“ Hey!” Will yelped, startling Palmer. He pushed Palmer’s hand away from the radio and punched the button for the country station again.
“…tell that you’ve been had by a woman that’s mean and bad…”
“ You really like that stuff, don’t you,” Palmer said, disgusted.
“Shut up.”
“…but let me tell you this before you start…”
“ Look,” Palmer snapped, “if you think I’m going to sit her with sweat running down the crack of my butt and traffic backed up to East Jesus and listen to some redneck woman…”
“She’s not a redneck. She’s from Pender County. Well, actually from Greenwood, South Carolina. She was Miss Greater Greenwood.”
“My God,” Palmer shook his head. “Are you a member of some fan club?”
“I know her,” Will said.
“…but I ain’t baby-sittin’ no broken heart.”
“ You mean you really, like, know her?”
“She’s Cousin Wingfoot’s girlfriend.”
While Palmer stared, mouth slightly open, Will told him as much as he knew about Peachy Delchamps, what he recalled from an acquaintance that had lasted a little more than twenty-four hours, some of which remained fairly murky in his memory. He told how Wingfoot and Sheriff Billy had fairly kidnapped him and taken him off to the wilds of Pender County and thence to a night of revelry. “I got up on the stage and played the tambourine with Peachy’s band,” he said. “And I am told that at one point toward the end of the evening, I rendered a tambourine solo.”
“You’re kidding me,” Palmer said with both wonder and skepticism.
“I am telling you what I remember and what was recounted to me later. I fell in with what Cousin Wingfoot described as the trashy side of the Baggetts and apparently acted accordingly.”
“You actually got drunk?”
“That’s what they tell me. Drunk and rowdy.”
“I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“Neither did I.”
“God damn .”
“But I have been on the straight and narrow ever since.”
Palmer indicated the radio. “And what about this woman?”
“Off to Nashville where she has, apparently, made a recording.”
“And she’s Wingfoot’s girlfriend.”
“Well, used to be. Still should be. Wingfoot’s a damn fool, but then he’s been knocked about, too.” Will told him about West Point, the years of aimlessness, then the life Wingfoot had carved for himself out of the piney woods of Pender County with Peachy, the woman he had let get away. “It appears we Baggett men are unlucky in love,” he said.
Palmer just grunted.
“So what do you think of Peachy’s singing?” Will asked.
Palmer made a face. “It’s country music. But she’s got an interesting voice. Like she might be, you know, kinda…”
“Yes,” Will smiled. “I got the impression that she is just that. A handful.”
“Is Wingfoot in love with her?”
“Yeah. And she’s in love with him.”
“Then why didn’t he go to Nashville with her?”
“He wanted her to see what she could do without any entanglements.�
�
Palmer drummed his fingers on the steering wheel for a moment and looked out the windshield at the traffic. There wasn’t much you could see. A big Office Depot delivery truck was right in front of them, blocking their view. They were pretty well stuck here for awhile, it seemed to Will. There wasn’t another exit before Western Boulevard.
“He’s stupid,” Palmer said after a moment, “if he loves her, he ought to be with her. He ought to go fight for her.” Then he turned and looked hard at Will. But he didn’t say anything else.
*****
He called Baggett’s Place from his apartment that night. “I heard Peachy’s song on the radio,” he said to Cousin Norville. They both had to shout over the noise -- booming music, what sounded like a big crowd of very rowdy people, and somewhere near the bar, a woman with a braying laugh.
“Yeah,” Norville shouted back, “it’s already up to number fifteen.”
“What?”
“On the country music charts. Number fifteen and climbing.”
“I know you’re real proud of her.”
“Real what?”
“Proud!”
“Oh, hell yeah. Got her start right here. If Peachy hadn’ta been singing the night that record producer came in, she’d still be growing azaleas.”
“How’s Wingfoot?” Will asked.
There was a pause. “Wingfoot’s a damn fool,” Norville said.
“I said the same thing about him just a few hours ago. I was thinking maybe I should talk to him.”
“Ain’t no use talking to Wingfoot. He’s not only a damn fool, he’s a stubborn damn fool. I don’t know where he gets that from. Ain’t none of the rest of us Baggetts that way.” Norville laughed, enjoying the joke.
“Well, I just wanted to get word to Peachy that I heard her song on the radio,” Will said. “If you talk to her…”
“Then call her.”
“You mean, like, call her?”
“Sure. Pick up the phone and dial the number. Just like you did with me. Hold on a minute. I got the number here someplace.” He put the phone down again for a moment. “Okay. Area code 615, that’s Nashville. 383-9482. Got it?”