Emboldened by his success, Turner asked Jolene out again, and she accepted. She told me the details between Sunday school and church.
“So, are you getting soft on this guy? I mean, you didn’t even spill punch on him or anything.”
“That was Bubba’s fault!” She tossed her long, black hair back in irritation. “I don’t want Turner ta get any ideas. I need ta come up with somethin’ big, somethin’ really dramatic, ta make up for the first date.”
“What about the trick where you disconnect the distributor, and when he opens the hood to check it out, you honk the horn? That’s a good one.”
“No, it’s not enough. I mean somethin’ big. Somethin’ new.” She concentrated, staring across the branch at the elementary school, and then shook her head. “Can you think of anythin’?”
“Me? I don’t want to get mixed up in this. Turner seems like a nice enough guy. This is your war against the opposite sex, not mine.”
“Oh, come on. It’s not a war. It’s just a joke. Where’s yer sense of humor?”
“Hiding behind my loyalty to my own sex.” In the end I was powerless in the face of her appreciable charm. I racked my brain for ideas and struck pay dirt in the pages of Damon Runyon.
“It’s called ‘The Brakeman’s Daughter.’ You get this guy worked up on asking out a girl, but you tell him terrible stories about how jealous the old man is and how he shoots at the guys who try to take her out. You tell him he can only come when the old man is gone. Then you set up a time for him to come, and when he shows up, somebody comes roaring from the back of the house shooting a gun in the air, and you holler, ‘Oh, no, he found out!’ and the guy loses it.”
“Great! He hasn’t ever met Daddy. We can do it this Friday when he comes ta pick me up.”
“We?! No, siree, Bob. I just supply the ideas. You’ll have to find somebody else to do your dirty work.” I grasped desperately for a way out. “Get Bubba to do it.”
“Oh, don’t be silly. You know Bubba has no sense of humor.” She shook her head. “And we’re twins. How could that be?”
“I can’t imagine. Maybe you got both doses by mistake.”
“Anyway, you’ll have ta do it. Bubba would never go along with it, and I don’t know any other guys who would do me any favors.”
The following Friday night found me crouched in the shadows on the side of the Culpepper house behind a pallet of roofing shingles. The damage from the fire had been primarily to the roof, and with the help of all his crews Mr. Culpepper had made rapid progress in restoring the house to its former glory. I was wearing an oversized coat and a big, black cowboy hat. I cradled a shotgun loaded with rock salt in my lap and was sandwiched between two very smelly hound dogs. Jolene had arranged every detail. Bubba was playing in a softball league and her parents were with him at the game, so there was nobody to get disturbed about the gunshots. Except our intended victim, of course. And we expected him to get very disturbed.
I checked my watch for the sixth time in half as many minutes. “Where is that boy?” I muttered to the hounds. They were lying in the dirt, ears making an L on either side of their heads like bookends. One of them rolled his eyes up in my direction and whacked his tail on the ground a few times. I shook my finger in his face. “If I had a date with a girl that looked like Jolene, you can bet I wouldn’t be late. I might come a few days early, just to make sure she didn’t forget.” The dog snorted, blowing up a little cloud of dust.
As if in answer to my question, a pair of headlights veered off the highway one hundred yards away and wound through the trees toward the house. “Uh, oh. Looks like we’re on.” My pulse quickened.
The dogs perked up. When the car pulled up in front of the house, they started growling. The car door slamming set them both to barking, and I had to grab their collars to keep them from bolting to the front of the house. When Turner started up the walk, they pulled me off balance. The gun fell to the ground, and I was dragged a few feet. “Come on, Jolene!” I muttered through clenched teeth.
I heard the screen door slam, and Jolene’s voice exclaiming with unexpectedly convincing agitation, “Watch out! Daddy came back!” So convincing that I looked behind me to make sure he wasn’t there. Then I realized she was talking to Turner.
With a sigh of relief I released the dogs. They tore around the corner, baying like they’d treed a coon. I fumbled for the shotgun, scrambled to my feet, and came staggering around the corner, shooting and hollering.
BOOM! “Where is that no-good, mealymouthed, son of a motherless flea-bitten, egg-suckin’ cur?” BOOM!
Turner stood frozen in terror, his eyes open almost as big as his mouth, his eyebrows disappearing under his cowboy hat. I lowered the gun in his direction. He turned and ran faster than I thought was possible in boots, the dogs trailing him like clouds of glory. I fired at the space where he had been. He dove through the passenger window and had the car started before he was even behind the wheel. In less time than it takes to tell you, he was burning rubber on the highway, his presence no more than a memory and a cloud of dust.
Jolene and I burst out in laughter, the deep, exhausting laughter that leaves you weak and helpless. She fell against me and we hugged each other to keep from falling over, which was the closest I ever got to embracing Jolene. After several minutes we regained a semblance of composure and staggered into the house.
I collapsed on the couch and had a relapse for several minutes. Eventually the gale of laughter passed, and we were blown by occasional gusts as we recalled the look on Turner’s face when I came around the corner. It was the most intense sensation of euphoria I had ever experienced, exceeding the fit of laughter M and I had shared on our meeting. I looked across the coffee table at Jolene and studied her for a minute or so through the hair that hung in my eyes, too tired and contented to bother clearing my line of vision.
“What?” she asked reflexively at my stare.
“Does it always feel this way?”
“Does what always feel this way?”
“You know. When you pull tricks on your dates. Does it always feel like this?”
She considered the question for awhile. “Not really, because I usually can’t laugh at the time. Sometimes it gets close.” She chuckled. “But this was really the best. It tops them all.”
“Now I think I have some idea of why you do it. I always wondered how you could keep it up. You know, after awhile I figured you’d get tired of it.” A grin crept across my face. “Shoot, this could be habit-forming.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
We basked in the glory of it for a little while longer, telling each other the details and reliving it once again. Then I put up the hat, coat, and gun, extracted the car from its hiding place behind the barn, and went home. The worst part about it was that I couldn’t tell anyone. The only person who could share that moment with me was Jolene. It somehow made me feel even closer to her, more intimate, which was frustrating.
That feeling served to accentuate my own lack of romantic success. Unable to bear it any longer, upon my return to the house, in a rare fit of vulnerability, I told Heidi of my abiding obsession with Becky. To my amazement, instead of laughing me out of the room, she welcomed this sign that her bookoholic brother was perhaps turning human.
“So, when are you going to tell her?”
“What?!” I stared at her in amazement. “Tell her?”
You know how some people talk to foreigners, as if by just talking slower and louder the foreigner will suddenly understand English? That’s how she started talking to me, like I was a little slow on the uptake.
“You have to tell her. How else will she know?”
“But what if she laughs or gets sick?”
“Tell her,” she repeated. “No girl can resist the idea that someone has such a passionate devotion.” I expressed my doubts that any girl would find me difficult to resist. “Don’t be silly. Any girl would die to have an admirer who wrote poems about her.”
Becky, how it beckons to my soul and
Summons forth a yearning for your kisses
Tuttle, aye now that name I would rather,
With your heart, transform into my own
I left for the bus early that morning and stopped by a rosebush to arm myself for the quest. To my dismay it was empty. Looking around in panic, I spotted a dogwood tree. I stowed several blossoms in my notebook. On the bus I tried to memorize the poem, being careful not to let anyone else see it.
I endured each class in agony and rehearsed my confession of love until the words rolled off my tongue as emotionlessly as the Pledge of Allegiance. When lunch arrived, I trudged to the cafeteria, my trancelike appearance belying the raging pulse pounding in my veins. I mechanically bought a lunch and shoveled the contents in my mouth, ignoring everyone around me. Then I went in search of Becky, clutching my notebook like a life preserver.
I found her kneeling in front of her locker, getting her books for the next class. I took a deep breath and decisively walked up to the locker, stopping in front of her without a word. She looked up expectantly, but my rehearsed speech fled from my mind. A horrifying sense of déjà vu rushed over me as I saw a flashback of a white sheet of paper fluttering into a black orchestra pit. I stared down and she stared back, both of us as silent and still as statues. As usual, my hair hung before my eyes like a shield, but this time it failed to protect me from the incapacitating assault of her gaze. In a convulsive rush I opened the notebook and dogwood petals showered over her. One flower remained intact. I picked it up and held it out. “For you,” I croaked.
She smiled in surprise, a May queen crowned with dogwood petals. Before I could speak, she uttered the words that slayed the hope budding fretfully in my heart. “You know, Mark, that’s what I like about you the most. You’re such a good friend, and you do such nice things. I wish I had a brother like you.”
Friend! Brother! I gasped; I swooned. Plague! Destruction! Woe! Death! The dreaded word—friend—gripped my soul and froze the proclamation of love in my throat. I tried to twist my grimace of dismay into a smile but only succeeded in producing a ghastly leer. Incapable of speech, I staggered off in a stupor of confusion.
Friend! How could she say such terrible things to me? The f-word no guy ever wanted to hear from a pretty girl. Was her heart made of stone? Had she no feelings at all? My only consolation was that no one had been around to hear it. In that moment I vowed to take this secret with me to the grave. Oops.
CHAPTER NINETEEN On the heels of the Tuttle disaster, I buried my devastation in the grand tradition of disenchanted lovers throughout history. I risked my life in foolish adventure. Lacking a Foreign Legion, I made the best of what was available: I took a ride with Darnell.
Fred was a veritable breeding ground for daredevil drivers, but after a few years in high school, Darnell had become the dominant daredevil, the preeminent road hog, the Grand Pooh-bah of reckless driving. His formal title was Darnell Ray: the Terror of the Back Roads, but most folks called him “Darn ElRay,” especially if they encountered him driving down a dirt road. He cruised them as if he were headed to Houston on I-10, trailing clouds of glory and dust.
Darnell was much like the Israelites in that his journeys were accompanied by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. At least, illuminated by the taillights, it looked like a pillar of fire. He could raise a dust cloud on a four-lane highway from the residue that settled in the bed of his truck.
If you were driving down a dirt road, the first clue that Darnell was on the same road would be a vague fuzziness on the horizon. You would pull off your glasses (assuming, of course, that you were wearing glasses) and check them for smudges. When you put the glasses back on, you would notice a dark spot in the smudge. About the time the spot began to assume a definite shape, you would realize that a vehicle was bearing down on you with deceptive speed—a vehicle at the front edge of a dense cloud of dust, as if it were one of Bradbury’s Martian ships surfing the leading edge of a raging sandstorm. Before you could get a grip on the window handle, you would hear a cacophony of rattles and your car would be engulfed in a choking maelstrom of grit. You would at least mutter “Darn ElRay,” if not lose your religion altogether.
Even Dad, as pristinely correct in his speech as any rational animal, was moved to strong language when baptized in dust by Darnell. “That dadgummed reckless whelp of the earth!” he would exclaim, fumbling with the window. This was serious terminology from a man who normally possessed the equanimity of a tortoise.
The instrument of terror Darnell wielded was a ’52 Ford pickup of indeterminate color, christened the Hound of Hell by Dad when he was feeling particularly charitable. The years had added large patches of rust, and Darnell’s driving had added salvage parts of various hues, from fire engine red to primer gray. To attempt to describe the color scheme of the Hound would be like trying to describe Texas weather. “Which day?” would have to be the first response.
Darnell’s dad, known as Good-Buddy Ray since he called everybody “good buddy,” grew up on a farm in Arkansas, its primary cash crop being a liquid derivative of corn. Before you start thinking that he was a foreigner, I should tell you that G. B.’s mamma, Darcy, was from Fred and got romanced away for a few years by a sweet-talking Arkansas boy visiting kinfolk in Caney Head. They eventually moved back to Fred after Darcy convinced him that Arkansas lacked the culture and grace to which she had been accustomed in Fred.
G. B. built his first vehicle from parts he found rusting in the Ozark hills and drove it most of the way back to Fred, although it had to be towed the last two hundred or so miles when the fan came loose in Domino and chewed halfway through the hood. He had a priestlike devotion to the service of vehicles, performing repairs with the ritualistic solemnity of a liturgy. If great artists painted frescoes of mechanics on the ceilings of auto-parts stores, G. B. would doubtlessly have been pictured on the ceiling of Harmon Johnson’s service station, lying on his back beneath his Kenworth, anointed with oil, his head surrounded by a nimbus of salvage parts.
So, as you can see, Darnell didn’t stand a chance. The grease had permeated G. B. so completely that it was genetically passed on with a vengeance that would have even surprised Lamarck. Like a crack baby being born hooked, Darnell was born with it in his blood. It flowed SAE 10W30 in his veins. He drove go-carts all over Fred until adolescence stretched his bones out long enough to clear the dash and the pedals. By the time he was thirteen, he was driving the first incarnation of the dreaded Hound of Hell with which he terrorized the citizens.
Darnell normally drove dirt roads, not out of fear of the law but because they offered more excitement. They were narrower, twistier, and more conducive to fishtails and donuts. Plus, only on a dirt road could he leave a wake of dust as a tangible, if transitory, testimony to his speed.
So the afternoon after I had been so inhumanely abused by Becky, C. J. Hecker came over to give me a guitar lesson. We were in the garage enjoying the Indian summer and annoying the neighbors (the closest of which was a quarter-mile away) with endless attempts at “Born to Be Wild,” when a clamor of rattles drowned out our amplifiers. A cloud drifted into the garage. When the dust cleared, I saw Darnell grinning from his truck in his characteristic pose. He invariably skidded up to any destination in a cloud of dust, and when the fog thinned, he always looked the same, as if he expected the paparazzi to jump out at any second for a photo op. The pose consisted of the right hand gripping the knob at the top of the steering wheel, the left arm (usually sunburned) jutting out of the window, a cap jammed on his head at an angle, and a grin straight out of MAD magazine.
“Say, doll, let’s go swimmin’.”
C. J. and I looked at each other and nodded. In a matter of seconds we were hurtling down a back road to the swimming hole that everyone c
alled Toodlum Creek, despite the fact that the county map labeled it as Theuvenins Creek. I was stuck in the middle. C. J. was new to the area and had evidently never been a passenger in the Hound of Hell. He was an aggressive driver in his own right, but now he was in the presence of a master. I detected a substratum of tension under his air of nonchalance. He even gripped the window to the point of white knuckles on a few curves. I was accustomed to it, having spent a few years building up immunity. I calmly followed my normal program when riding with Darnell: I silently prayed like a drowning man.
Despite C. J.’s expectations, we arrived at Toodlum intact. The water was typical East Texas muddy creek water and was home to its share of fish, turtles, and snakes, but the critters usually left us alone, especially if we made lots of noise. It was a popular spot. Sometimes even girls would come down and swim.
We spent the rest of the day drowning our sorrows in the creek, seeing who could swing the highest or the farthest, or who could jump from the tallest tree, or who could stay under the longest. When it started getting dark, we piled into Darnell’s truck. As we pulled onto the dirt road, Darnell said, “Hey, let me show you this neat road I found. I call it the Roller Coaster.”
I shrugged my shoulders. With Darnell, I was at the mercy of the “Key Rule” : The one with the key makes the rules. C. J., on the other hand, was already dreading the ride back, and the revelation that it was about to be lengthened did nothing to lighten his mood.
“Hey, look, I have to get back to Warren, and it’s getting dark.”
Darnell frowned at him through his greasy glasses and pointed to the sky with one hand. The other hand gripped the ball on the steering wheel and spun it around as he took a corner of at least 120 degrees at forty miles an hour. “Hey, it’s still light. You got plenty of time.”
C. J. clung to the bar between the window and the vent like it was a spike on the north face of Mount Everest. With white knuckles and a white face, he glared at the sky as if it had betrayed him, the silver fleck in his eye seeming to darken with anger. Under the canopy of green that shielded the swimming hole, we had experienced a false twilight, but now that we were out in the open, it looked like we had a couple of hours of daylight left.
Welcome to Fred (The Fred Books) Page 15