Old Dogs and Children

by Robert Inman

  He pulled the refrigerator away from the wall a bit, reached behind and unplugged it, then climbed back up on the chair and unhooked several wires and started to work on the bolts holding down the motor, giving a sharp tug with his wrench to loosen them. By the time he finished, his hands were grimy with accumulated dust and beads of sweat stood out on his high forehead. He lifted the motor and stepped off the chair, holding it with both hands, a fat gray cylinder with wires dangling from both ends. He looked around the kitchen. “Where can I put this for a moment? Don’t want to get grease and dirt all over your counter.”

  She remembered the newspaper, fetched it from the coffee table in the parlor, brought it back to the kitchen and spread it out on the counter next to the sink. Little Fitz and Drucilla Luckworst stared up at them from the front porch of the camp house. Rupert started to put the motor down on it, paused. “Do you … ah … mind messing up the paper? This thing’s dirty.” He blushed with embarrassment. “I meant the motor.”

  Bright stared at the picture, wrinkled her nose. “Yes, it is,” she said. “Go right ahead.”

  He set the motor down, stared at his hands, cleared his throat. “I … ah … don’t know anything about politics.”

  “Good for you,” she said, putting him at ease, remembering at the same time that the telephone in the parlor was still off the hook, had been since midmorning. Fitz would have tried to call by now. Surely. “If I were you, I’d stick to motors.”

  “Yes,” he smiled. “Speaking of which, where’s the best place in town to buy an electric motor?”

  She went to the parlor for the telephone directory, and thought for a moment of placing the receiver back in its cradle so Fitz could call. But no, she decided that she didn’t want the phone ringing and waking Roseann from her nap. Fitz would keep trying until he got her. She took the directory back to the kitchen and flipped to the yellow pages while Rupert looked over her shoulder, holding his grimy hands away from them. MOTORS, ELECTRIC—REPAIR. THOMPSON’S FURNITURE. Rupert washed up at the sink with a bar of Lava soap while Bright gave him directions and told him to charge the motor to her account. Then he left with the old motor, wrapping the newspaper around it to keep from getting his hands and the Winnebago dirty.

  Bright stood for a while in the kitchen, looking at the old refrigerator, remembering Roseann and Fitz as children, making Kool-Aid Popsicles on a rainy summer afternoon. Roseann would have been about four, and that would have made Fitz eleven, already sprouting out of his jeans and shirts, giving evidence of the tall man he would become. Bright had bought plastic Popsicle makers at a Tupperware party at Xuripha Deloach’s house and stashed them away in the cupboard for just such a day. The children made grape Kool-Aid, measuring out the sugar, mixing everything in a pitcher. They stood together at the sink, Fitz pouring while Roseann held the plastic devices, both of them engrossed in the work and Roseann, for once, keeping her tart tongue civil. Then Bright helped them store the six Popsicle holders in their plastic tray in the tiny freezer compartment of the Kelvinator. They spent the next hour sneaking peeks, waiting for the Kool-Aid to freeze, and then suddenly the rain stopped and the sun reappeared and Fitz dashed out to find Francis O’Neill. It was not until after supper that he remembered the Popsicles. Bright heard his enraged bellow from the kitchen. He flew into the dining room as Roseann clambered down from her chair and darted out the back door. “She ate every one!” he screamed, his eyes popping with indignation. “Every goddamn one!” Bright banished him to his room for two days for cursing and spanked Roseann and sent her howling to bed. Roseann, she thought, never seemed to get over being two years old.

  Bright went now to the bedroom, stood just inside the door, watching Roseann. She was stretched out on Bright’s bed, arms stiff at her side, brow furrowed even in slumber, as if sleep were an act of contrition. As always, Bright felt at a loss, as incapable of reaching the grown woman as she had been the small girl who fretted and tugged at her hair, troubled by some nameless, restless animal that nibbled at her insides, opening raw wounds deep down where no one could truly soothe and heal. Only Fitzhugh Birdsong could keep it at bay.

  She took a step toward the bed, drawn by the immutable sadness of her sleeping daughter’s taut body. She wanted to cover Roseann with a light spread, to touch the deep lines of her brow, to comfort. To make the smallest of amends. But she froze with her hand outstretched, afraid of waking her. It would not do. Awake, there was only the dark undercurrent of rancor, of their inability to simply get along. They should be long past the necessary disagreements of mother and child to a time of easy friendship, shared wisdoms. That was the way it was supposed to work. Instead, there was only a profound separateness made of equal parts of Roseann’s long-simmering anger and Bright’s … What?

  Bright lowered her hand slowly to her side. No, not now. But there is this one small thing I could do, and that might be an opening …

  She turned away from the bedroom, leaving Roseann in troubled sleep, and went to the porch. Jimbo sat reading in one of the wicker chairs, perfectly still except for his right hand idly playing with the short strands of his brown hair, reaching every so often to turn a page of the book.

  Bright sat next to him, but he didn’t look up. “What are you reading?” she asked after a moment.

  He put his right index finger on the place where he had been reading, turned and looked up at her. “Encyclopedia Brown,” he said.

  “What’s it about?”

  “A smart kid who solves stuff.”

  “Would he know how to stop a runaway truck?”

  “Well, he’s not one of these action guys like G. I. Joe or anything. But yeah, I suppose he would.”

  “Would you?”

  Jimbo shrugged.

  “Well, it could happen at any moment,” Bright said. Jimbo cocked his head, gave her a curious look. “In fact,” she went on, “it almost happened last month.”

  He waited. All right, what kind of old-lady foolishness is this?

  “Right up there is the River Bridge,” she pointed, and he followed her aim down Claxton where the street rose to cross the river. “And there at the bottom of the bridge, you see, is a stoplight.” Jimbo nodded. “Last month, a truckload of logs crossed the bridge and it didn’t even slow down. It ran right through the red light and kept coming.”

  “Did you see it?” Jimbo asked.

  “From this very chair.”

  Jimbo was wide-eyed now. He put Encyclopedia Brown on the chair seat beside him. “What did you do?”

  “Not a thing,” she said. “About midway the block, the truck swerved to the right and snapped off a telephone pole clean down to the ground. And stopped. As it turned out, the driver had had a heart attack.”

  “Was he dead?”

  “As a doornail.”

  “What would you have done if he hadn’t hit the telephone pole?”

  “Gone upstairs,” she said. “That’s what the upstairs is for. Emergencies. Floods and runaway trucks and such.”

  They both sat quietly for a moment, watching the early afternoon traffic along Birdsong Boulevard and Claxton, contemplating disaster and its consequences. Henry Wimsley passed on his motorcycle, going back to the Methodist Church after dinner at the parsonage. And then Harley Gibbons drove by in his dark gray Oldsmobile, heading back to the bank with his tinted windows rolled up to keep the air-conditioning inside. It was a tradition that died slowly in a small Southern town, she thought—the notion of people going home for dinner in the middle of the day, sitting at their own tables, eating a good meal with two meats and four or five vegetables, the way her father had always done, the way Henry Wimsley’s and Harley Gibbons’s fathers had done. It was a way of measuring the day, dividing it properly into its halves, putting commerce in its proper place. One should not conduct commerce over dinner, like they did nowadays at the Three Square Café downtown. Taking one’s dinner at home helped preserve the particular rhythm of life that made a small town worth living in, n
o matter its other warts and foibles. Young Jimbo Blasious, sitting next to her now in his wicker chair, might come to understand that if she showed him, if she had time enough …

  “I’ve never been upstairs,” Jimbo said, breaking into her thoughts.

  “Really? Well, it’s nothing much but junk anyway.”

  “Can I take a look?”

  “Gracious, it’s too hot right now. You’d faint dead away up there. Maybe tomorrow. We’ll go up early in the morning and you can see what it looks like.”

  He stared at her. “I’ll be at the beach tomorrow.”

  “Yes,” she said quickly, realizing that she had decided. “Of course.” She tried to keep her voice light. “Unless you wanted to stay here with me this week and let your mama and Rupert go on to the beach.”

  There was something a little like panic in his eyes. At the very least, uncertainty. She realized that he didn’t know her, not really, not the way a grandson might know his grandmother. A funny old woman, living alone, babbling about runaway trucks.

  “I’d like it very much if you would,” she said softly. “In fact, you would be doing your grandmother a very great honor if you would stay here with me. I’ve got an attic full of books, and we’ve got a nice swimming pool on the other side of town, and there are some things I could show you about being a small-town boy.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He looked very small and frail, hunkered down in the chair. Too quiet, too compliant, she thought. He should be rowdy and rumpled. He picked up his book again, finding the page he had marked.

  “Well, you think about it,” she said, and then she heard the screech of pecan limbs on metal and looked up to see the Winnebago pulling into the driveway. Rupert gave them a wave and blew a little puff of smoke out of one side of his mouth, around the stem of his pipe. The Winnebago eased to a halt and he got out after a moment, carrying a large box under one arm.

  “We’ll have you perking in a moment,” he said as he climbed the steps. “Good as new. Well, almost. This one”—he patted the box—“only has a one-year warranty. They don’t make anything these days with a warranty more than one year.”

  “Roseann’s still asleep,” Bright said, opening the screen door for him, looking back to see Jimbo engrossed in Encyclopedia Brown again. She followed Rupert to the kitchen, where he set the box on the counter, took the motor out, pulled up the chair, and started to work.

  “Had to get some of the holes in the mounting brackets rebored to fit,” he said. “No charge for that.”

  Bright left him to his work and fussed around on the back porch for a few minutes, then stood just inside the kitchen door, watching him.

  “This shouldn’t take long,” he said, wiping a forearm across his brow. His thinning hair was dark and plastered with sweat.

  “I hope not,” she said. “I’m ready for you to clean up your mess and go on to the beach.”

  Rupert gave her a strange look. “Well …”

  “That didn’t sound right,” Bright said hastily. “I’m obliged, really.” She shook her head. “I’m a little sharp-tongued sometimes, I suppose. It’s what happens when you get old and live by yourself.”

  Rupert put down his wrench and looked down at her with a smile. “No offense. I like for people to say what they mean. That’s the worst thing about working with college professors. They hem and haw a lot. You don’t hear a lot of plain speaking around college professors.”

  “Or politicians,” Bright said. “Except for Fitzhugh. He was a plainspoken man. Not sharp-tongued, mind you, just plainspoken. Fitzhugh once had a man from the State Department before his committee, testifying about some blunder or another, and when the man got through with his long-winded explanation, Fitzhugh looked him square in the eye and said, ‘I don’t believe you.’ And the man broke down and cried, right there in front of the committee, right on national TV. Fitzhugh was a kind and gentle man, but plainspoken.”

  Bright wondered why she was telling all this to Rupert Blasious. She hardly knew the man. But then, there was something in his face akin to that in Dorsey Bascombe’s, something that invited you to tell him what you knew. Dorsey had been the kind of man who dealt with you straight on, at least until the end, when he had retreated deep down inside himself where nobody else could go.

  Rupert paused now to take his pipe out of its little leather holster on his belt, pack it with tobacco from the pouch in his rear pocket, and light up. An aromatic cloud filled the kitchen, swirling about his head and drifting toward the open doorway to the porch where Bright stood.

  “You know that Roseann wants to leave Jimbo here with me,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said around the stem of the pipe. He didn’t look down.

  “You know why.”

  He nodded.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  Rupert stopped, took the pipe out of his mouth, laid it on the top of the refrigerator. “To tell you the truth, he might have a better time here. Not that I don’t want him at the beach. I do. But Roseann wants to work on me a little, and when she’s got something on her mind, everything else is a little extraneous. Roseann wants me to go into business for myself, and I’ve given it a lot of serious thought. There’s pros and cons.”

  Bright crossed her arms. “Let me ask you this, Rupert. Has she made you miserable yet?”

  Rupert stared at her, but there was no rancor in it. “You really are plainspoken, aren’t you. No, she hasn’t made me miserable. Roseann has a lot of … ahhh … energy. She’s spunky. I tend to cogitate too much, and I’m as dull as dishwater. So we sort of complement each other, I suppose. We accommodate.”

  “What was your first wife like?” Bright asked.

  “Too much like me. We bored each other to death. It was like sleepwalking.” He picked up his wrench again, inserted a bolt through the bottom of the motor mount and began tightening it.

  “So now you’ve got a wife with a lot of, as you put it, energy. And a ten-year-old boy.”

  “Yes,” he grinned. “And maybe that’s the biggest change. My first wife and I didn’t have any children. Thank goodness. They would probably have been as boring as we were, and the world doesn’t need any more boring people. Jimbo’s anything but. The kid’s got quite an imagination. He just needs a little space to let it work.”

  “Roseann, you mean.”

  “She mothers a lot,” he said reluctantly. “But that’s natural, I guess. She’s had him all to herself most of this time. She doesn’t want to make any mistakes with him, doesn’t want him to make any mistakes. So she …”

  “Smothers him.”

  Rupert shrugged. “Hmmmmm. I suppose. A little.”

  “A lot.”

  “Yes. A lot.”

  Rupert appeared almost finished now, the new motor bolted into place and connected by a belt to what he had told her was the compressor. “I don’t know how long the motor will hold out,” he said, “but the rest of this old gadget ought to last for at least forty more years.”

  Forty years? She imagined herself long dead, dust to dust, while the Kelvinator hummed on in this kitchen, keeping potato salad safe from bacteria. Surely, though, they would tear the house down and replace it with a washateria. She would be glad not to be here.

  “All right, then,” she said.

  “All right what?” Rupert asked. His pipe was back in its holster, waiting to be drawn again when he needed to wrestle with his thoughts or keep the rest of the world at bay.

  “He can stay. I’ll be glad to have him.”

  “Jimbo.”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “While you go to the beach and work out whatever it is you need to work out.”

  Rupert stepped down from the chair, then reached around behind the Kelvinator and plugged it into the wall socket. The refrigerator gave a tiny shudder and hummed to life again, a slightly different sound now with the new motor powering its innards. It would take a while before she would stop hearing it, before it became part of the great sil
ence of this house. Rupert stepped back up on the chair and gave the works on top a good look, craning his neck to see the motor and compressor from several directions. Finally he grunted, satisfied. “I hope it’s not an imposition,” he said. “Jimbo, I mean.”

  “No, not an imposition. A little strange, I reckon, having a boy around the house. But no imposition.”

  Rupert replaced the round white metal housing on the top of the refrigerator and tightened it into place with four screws, working methodically, taking his time. There was a smudge across the bridge of his nose. A dark stain spread down the back of his shirt.

  “I suppose I ought to think about air-conditioning someday,” Bright said.

  Rupert waved his hand. “Oh, I wouldn’t bother. A house like this, it would be a waste of time and money. They built ’em like fortresses back then, but they didn’t build ’em for air-conditioning. It would be like trying to cool the whole town. A window fan is about all the good you’ll do. Just keep the air stirred up, take advantage of the natural drafts. Do you have a window fan?”

  “Up in the attic. The motor …” Rupert’s eyes brightened. “Oh, no,” she said firmly, raising her hands. “You’ve done enough. Quite enough for one day. Wash your hands and face and go to the beach.”

  “All right,” Rupert said, “I’ll take a look at it on our way back through the end of the week. You could put it right in there”—he pointed at the breakfast room window—“and pull a lot of air through the front door and the back and even the window of your bedroom. Surprising what a window fan …”

  “Stop!” she commanded, reaching for the bar of Lava soap by the sink and pressing it into his hand. “Wash.” He was probably a little maddening at times, she thought. It probably made Roseann a bit frantic.

  “Well, are you finished?” Roseann at the breakfast room door, hands on hips. Sleep had not smoothed the deep furrows of her brow. Does she truly rest? Ever?

  “All done,” Rupert said cheerily. He turned on the cold faucet at the sink and water came out with a splat.