Captain Saturday

by Robert Inman

  “You realize -- no, of course you don’t realize -- that you made a mess of the company picnic.”

  “And how did I do that?”

  “That’s why Fincher and I were in the wine shop. Buying wine for the picnic. Then we walk out and find that the god-damn-car-is-gone,” she strung out the words. “Oh,” she went on with a wave of her hand, “we went ahead with the picnic. But Fincher and I were an hour late because the police had to come and take a report. And it just cast a pall over everything. My car stolen.” She paused, her lips pressed together in a grim line.

  Will waited. She would reveal all. She would tell him everything in great detail. And he would listen, nodding to show that he not only heard, but understood. It came to him, how calmly he would be able to sit here and do that, because it was not something, in his earlier life, that he had had time or patience to do. Nor had he understood that such a thing needed to be done. Clarice would begin to talk, to unravel a scenario of one sort of another in fine detail and with frequent digression, and Will would feel himself getting itchy and short of breath, almost a panic kind of thing, and he would say something. Then Clarice would stop abruptly and stare at him with a surprised expression as if to say, Why did you say that? It didn’t matter what he had said, only that he had said something in an effort to bring some kind of closure to whatever she was rambling on about.

  It had dawned on him once, a few years ago, that she didn’t want closure, or an answer, or even a response. She just wanted him to sit there and keep his mouth shut and let her verbally work out whatever it was she was trying to work out, as if the mere matter of words would give shape and meaning to it. The more words, the more definite the shape. He had tried then to be more responsive. Or, more to the point, less responsive. But that was about the time that Palmer had gone off to Duke and Clarice had got busy with the real estate thing. He had been more willing to listen just at the time she had become less talkative. They had missed connections on that one. Now, sitting here in the expanded and redecorated den, surrounded by all this new mahogany and upholstery, he had all the time in the world.

  But she surprised him. “I don’t want to talk about that. I’m too upset.”

  Will stood, fished in his pocket for the set of keys, laid them gently on the mahogany coffee table, and sat back down. She stared at the keys, then ran her fingers through her hair. It fell down around her face. It made his heart ache.

  “You’ve been acting ridiculous for a couple of months now.” Her voice trailed off and she looked away, out the window toward the back yard. “What’s gotten into you?” she asked softly.

  It was a long time before he responded. What indeed? Two months in which something -- God, fate, The Great Kahuna, sheer blind bad luck -- had grabbed him by his ankles and held him upside down while blood rushed to his brain and all manner of flotsam and jetsam and things he thought were irreplaceable fell out of his pockets. Vertical, but upside down vertical, struggling to get upright again.

  “I’m trying to get a grip,” he said finally. And that, by golly, was the simple truth.

  A long silence. She still wasn’t looking at him. “Palmer told me everything,” she said.

  “I know.”

  She chewed on her lower lip. He thought she was about to say something sympathetic, but she surprised him again. She turned back to him wth a jerk and said, “What did you think? That going to jail would remedy,” a sharp sweep of her hand took in the house, their selves, “all of this? Were you trying to be a hero, Will? A martyr? Looking for sympathy? Or maybe it was like committing suicide. After I’m gone, they’ll be sorry they were so mean.”

  Will shrugged. “I just thought it was the right thing to do under the circumstances. No hidden agenda, Clarice.”

  She turned away again, giving him her profile. He couldn’t fathom what she was thinking, not even a hint of it. For the longest kind of time, since their beginning, he had been able to read her, or so he thought. Her face had said everything, hadn’t it? Well, come to think of it, no. He had misread, especially there toward the last. Misread and just plain missed.

  She stood abruptly. “I don’t know why you did it, or why you stole my automobile. Right now, I want you to go.”

  “I hoped we could talk, Clarice. I’ve been trying to talk to you since…”

  “That day you acted like a goddamn fool right in front of my office,” she flashed.

  “Yes.”

  She looked down at him. Something tugged at the corners of her mouth, but nothing came out.

  Will spread his hands. “Please…” he said quietly.

  She sat back down. Now it was her turn to wait.

  Will looked her straight in the eye. “I’ve been coming over here at night.” Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t say anything. “Sitting out there in the back yard. Watching you through the window. Thinking. Trying to figure out how and why I screwed up so royally. Trying to come up with some excuses, I suppose. Thinking, ‘If I could just talk to Clarice, I could explain how things came to pass, how I toted a lot of baggage around with me and how I let the wrong things get in the way.’ But then it came to me that excuses and explanations are lame and late and maybe even irrelevant.” He looked down at his feet, then back up at her. Her gaze hadn’t left him. “So I stole your keys and came over here and waited for you to come home so I could just say I’m sorry. That’s all. I owe you that. And you don’t owe me a damn thing. So I guess now that I’ve said it, we’re even again.”

  Their eyes broke and they both looked away. They both waited. He could have said more. He could have invoked the name of Sidney Palmer, could have told her about that Sunday night visit. He could have mentioned Palmer, too. Do something, even if it’s wrong. But he didn’t, because this wasn’t about Sidney and Palmer. It was just about the two of them. After awhile, it was obvious she wasn’t ready to say anything -- maybe not ever, but for sure, not just yet. And he had said quite enough.

  He got up and saw himself to the front door. He stepped outside into Saturday afternoon and was just about to close the door behind him when he looked back into the house and saw her standing down at the end of the hallway, framed in the doorway to the den, looking at him. “You wouldn’t want to give me a ride to the wine shop, would you?” he asked. “My truck is there.”

  She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then, “When you were out there on the lawn…”

  “…at your office. Holding up that sign and stopping traffic and making a ruckus and a fool of myself.”

  “Yes.”

  “What about it?”

  “I could have had you arrested then.”

  “You could, indeed. I would have been in deep shit. Why didn’t you?”

  “I thought, ‘He came to fight for me.’”

  “Yes. That’s exactly why I was there, Clarice.”

  She hesitated for a moment. Then, was there just the tiniest trace of a smile? “I liked that,” she said.

  “Then why…”

  “Because it wasn’t enough. And too late.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess so.”

  “But I’m glad you tried.”

  “And now?”

  “Go get your truck,” she said. “It’s not too far. The walk will do you good.”

  *****

  On Sunday night, he watched enough of the late news on Channel Seven to know that showers were probable tomorrow afternoon. He called Palmer. “I’d like to get an early start in the morning,” he said. “If we get way behind on Monday, we’re behind all week.”

  “Wilbur, you are taking this lawn care business entirely too seriously,” Palmer said. There was no irritation in it.

  “How did Hickory go?”

  “Okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  “Are you going to ask me if we made out on the couch?”

  “I didn’t mean to pry. Just showing fatherly interest.”

  “Well, I’m on probation,” Palmer said. “She thinks maybe I’ve
gotten my act together, but she’s not absolutely sure. She was pretty interested when I told her what I’d been doing all summer. She said maybe it had given me a little character.”

  “Probation,” Will said. “It’s a start.”

  He hesitated, thinking maybe Palmer had talked with Clarice since he had gotten back from Hickory, and that if he had, she had maybe told him what had happened Saturday afternoon, at least enough to let Palmer know that he had done something, even if it was wrong. Was it? Wrong? Hard to tell.

  But Palmer said nothing.

  “Seven?” Will offered.

  “That’s pretty early, Wilbur.”

  “International House of Pancakes?”

  “Seven-fifteen.”

  He was brushing his teeth when the phone rang.

  “All right. Seven-twenty.”

  “That beard and the glasses are really ridiculous looking,” she said. “And you’ve lost a lot of weight. You really don’t look like yourself.”

  “I’m not myself,” he said.

  “That was a terrible thing you did yesterday.”

  “Terrible?”

  “Well, not very nice.”

  “Target of opportunity.”

  There was a long silence. Music in the background, the public radio station from Chapel Hill. He guessed she was in the bedroom. They had one of those fancy radios that the manufacturer said sounded like a concert hall. He had given it to her as an anniversary present several years ago when they first came out and they had put it on the dresser across the room from their bed and turned it up quite loud when they made love. Beethoven and ecstasy. He stirred, mildly stimulated, at the memory of one time when “Bolero” had been playing. It had been magnificent. It was always good, but with “Bolero"…

  “I just wanted to say,” she said, “that I think that was an incredible thing you did.”

  “Which one?”

  “For Palmer.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I shouldn’t have questioned your motives.”

  “Only natural, I suppose. I questioned them myself at one point, after I had done it. But when I did it, I just did it.”

  “That’s not like you, Will. Just doing something. You always thought things through.”

  “One of my most maddening characteristics.”

  “Yes.”

  Another pause. He heard her breathing, very light, almost not there at all. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said quickly. “I’m making it.”

  “If there’s anything you need…”

  He thought about that for a moment. All the things he might need, or at least want. The list was surprisingly short. A little grace, perhaps? We could all use a little grace.

  “…I mean, from the house. Clothes, books, things like that?”

  “I don’t need anything from the house,” he said. “Nothing from the house.”

  “Well…” the way she said it made it sound as if she were ready to hang up.

  “What I needed was to say what I said yesterday.”

  The silence this time seemed to go on forever. Finally she said, “I have… an entanglement.”

  “Interesting way to put it, Clarice. What I can’t figure out is, was it cause or effect. I mean…what?…did you just stick around until you got a better offer?”

  “No, Will. I stuck around until I couldn’t stand it any more.”

  “It was that bad?” he asked.

  “Not…bad. I just…got weary. Nothing was going to change.”

  “Except you. You moved on. And I’m not talking about your entanglement, or criticizing you for moving on. But you did change. You found your own pair of britches.”

  “That’s an interesting way of putting it.”

  “So, you moved on, and you have an entanglement, whether one has anything to do with the other or not. But it’s an interesting word, Clarice. Entanglement. An entanglement, I would think, has to go somewhere. One direction or the other.”

  There was a tiny sound on the other end of the phone, something so brief and small he couldn’t tell whether it came from the radio or from Clarice. He waited for something else, some clue, but there was nothing. “Well,” he said after awhile, “thanks for calling. I’ve got to get an early start tomorrow. Customers waiting. Palmer and I are having a good summer. Staying busy. Making a living. Catching up on some things.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “About the beard and the glasses…”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t need ’em any more. But I think I’ll keep ’em, just for the hell of it. No particular reason. Just for the hell of it.”

  After he hung up, he sat for awhile longer in the chair by the open window in his boxer shorts. It was too hot to sleep in anything more. He might even take the shorts off and lie atop the sheets and let the small oscillating fan stir the air across his body through the night.

  Tomorrow, he would remove the air conditioning unit from of the bedroom window and take it to a repair shop. Rain would cool things off around Raleigh, at least for a day or so, and perhaps the repair shop could get the unit back to him before the weather steamed up again. A little thing like air conditioning could mean a lot. And he didn’t think he’d be taking any more long walks in the middle of the night.

  Across the yard, the light was still on in Dahlia Spence’s bedroom. She was staying up later than usual these days -- engrossed, she said, in a book about a man with a crippling mental illness who had helped to write the Oxford English Dictionary. She was reading it aloud to Ethel, her dalmatian. It was an astonishing story, Dahlia said, astonishing that a keen intellect could co-exist with fevered madness, how one part of the brain could fight so hard to maintain some kind of coherence when all else was chaos and torment. Dahlia thought the madman was brave in his struggle for sanity against such overwhelming odds. “Sometimes,” she said, “you just have to grab one small thing and hang onto it for dear life.” Maybe, Will thought now, the madman was just trying to be ordinary. Not sane, just ordinary. Or maybe the two things were one and the same.

  Mowing grass, as Will was doing, that was pretty ordinary, part of that basic thing that was his life, his existence. He was as dependent on grass as a cow. He had finally, he thought, become ordinary -- and in this, even more ordinary than usual. He had learned that many of the lawn care services operating around Raleigh were owned by firefighters who used the businesses to supplement income on their off-duty days. That was an extraordinary thing, being a firefighter. You might be a hero, or you might fall off the back of a speeding truck, as Dahlia Spence’s late husband Ernest had done. But Wilbur Baggett had no such other existence. He was just an ordinary mower of grass, with miles of green stretching both before and behind him. Mundane, pedestrian, as ordinary as an old bedroom slipper.

  If somebody had told him back during his former extraordinary life that he would be existing as he did now, it would have cleaved him with a deep, gnawing sense of loss and yearning. But now it didn’t, at least not for those things that he now saw as trappings, fringe benefit, decoration. He did yearn, oh yes indeed he did yearn, for the thing he had lost that was the only thing truly worth yearning for. He ached with the yearning of it, and of the tiny, fragile flame of hope that he now cupped in his hands, protecting from the elements. He had done something. And if it had been the wrong thing, why had she called? And what now?

  But then… what if she were to say, “Come home?” What would I make of all the rest of it? Who would I be? Not what, but who? He might, he suspected, just continue to be ordinary. Like an old bedroom slipper. And that might be the most extraordinary thing of all.

  *****

  Dahlia Spence had given over the bay of her garage to his trailer when he had been banished from Morris’s driveway. She parked her Oldsmobile now on the gravel next to the house. The garage was a great improvement, once he got the hang of backing the trailer down the driveway and into the bay where it was protected from the elements
. He had set up a small maintenance shop against the rear wall -- nothing fancy, just some hand tools hanging from pegboard above a workbench he had cobbled together out of two-by-fours and plywood. He had mounted a vise and a grinder on the workbench and he could sharpen mower blades, change oil, wash air filters, replace worn cables, reload string trimmer spools, and the like. He was in the garage on this rainy Monday evening, working on his equipment.

  “Well, you got me into this goddamned mess,” Wingfoot said from the doorway.

  Will turned to him with a plastic bottle of 30-weight motor oil in his hand. “I’m right in the middle of this,” Will said, pointing to an old kitchen chair propped against a side wall. “Sit down and be quiet. If you distract me, I’ll forget that I’ve drained all the oil out of my Hy-Ryder and when I crank it up in the morning the engine will seize up and I’ll have to have it rebuilt.”

  “That’s a helluva mower,” Wingfoot said. “Do you stand on the little platform in the back? Like a Roman chariot? Wilbur Baggett, the Ben Hur of Raleigh lawn care.”

  “I said, sit down and be quiet.”

  Wingfoot sat, tilting back against the garage wall in the chair, feet propped on the front rail. He watched in silence as Will finished changing the oil and then cleaned the air filter, washing it in detergent and water and squeezing out the water and setting the filter aside on the work bench to dry.

  He turned finally to Wingfoot, who was watching him with a bemused expression. “What?” he asked.

  Wingfoot lowered the chair to the ground. “You act like you know what you’re doing.”

  Will shrugged. “What kind of mess have I gotten you into?”

  Wingfoot made a face, scrunching up his lips until they almost touched his nose. “Peachy asked me to marry her. She called me in the middle of the night from someplace in Kansas a couple of weeks ago and sang to me and then asked me. She said you told her to do it.”