Old Dogs and Children

by Robert Inman

  She woke, blinking, sleep-logged and headachy. She lay there for a long moment, climbing into consciousness, and realized that it was midafternoon. She had lain down after a light lunch, intending to rest her eyes for just a few minutes. That had been two hours ago.

  She heard voices outside now, children’s voices, along the sidewalk in front of the house. Tatters of careless sound echoing across the surface of the afternoon. It reminded her of another afternoon so very long ago, an autumn afternoon but one very much like this one, when she had waked from a nap to hear the voices of children at play in the street in front of her house, soft music in the shades of orange and gold that colored the tree outside her bedroom window. The house was very still and quiet and she nestled like a small animal under the light blanket that covered her, feeling safe and warm. Then something tugged at her mind, something dark and frightening. And she suddenly saw the still form of her father sprawled across the steps of the camp house, the blood everywhere. “No,” she cried softly into the silence of her pillow. And the voices of the children outside mocked her, calling back, “Yes. Yes.”

  She shook it away, rose now, rumpled from sleep, steadied herself with a firm hand on the bedpost, went to the kitchen and took two aspirin, washing them down with tap water. Then she walked to the living room and looked out the window. The children were playing in her front yard in the shade of the pecan trees. It had been a very long time since children had played in her yard. There were a half dozen of them now, darting about in the warm speckled afternoon, touching the trees and shouting to each other in some sort of game. She watched them for a minute or so before she realized that one of them was Jimbo, and he was wearing overalls. Blue denim bib overalls with straps over his shoulders and big loose legs that flapped around his ankles. A red T-shirt under the overalls, sneakers on his feet, white with newness. It was an ungainly costume, something resurrected from Buster Putnam’s memory of his long-ago childhood, but it didn’t seem to bother Jimbo, who moved with a sort of awkward grace, like a heron lifting into flight. Bright stepped to the front door, looked through the screen, saw a book open on the seat of one of the wicker chairs. She wondered how long he had been back, where he and Buster had been and what they had done. She pictured them in a roadhouse with the jukebox playing hillbilly music and Buster guzzling beer while Jimbo sat gawking on the stool next to him, awed by riotous living.

  “Jimbo,” she called, and he stopped in his tracks and whirled to look up at her in the doorway.

  “Hi, Mama Bright. We’re playing.”

  “Yes. I can see that. Hello there,” she called to the others. She didn’t recognize any of them. She hadn’t paid much attention to children for a long time.

  “What have you been up to?” she asked.

  “Just messing around,” Jimbo said, impatient to get back to the game.

  “Doing what?”

  “Uncle Buster took me to Columbus.”

  “Uncle Buster?”

  “He said y’all might be getting married, so he’d be my uncle.”

  “Good grief!”

  He stood there, waiting for her to be finished with him, and she said finally, “I like your overalls.”

  He looked down at himself, shrugged.

  “Well, be careful,” she said.

  He gave her an odd look and went back to his play, and she turned from the door and glanced at the clock on the mantel. Three-thirty.

  She sat down for a moment on the sofa, reconnoitering, her mind revolving slowly like the ceiling fan overhead, trying to sort everything out. She was still a little groggy from sleep and there was quite a jumble of things. First order of business, Harley and the town council. She thought for a while about what she might do about that. She went to the telephone table, took the receiver out from under the pillow where she had stuffed it when she went to lie down, placed it back in the cradle. Then she picked it up and dialed Flavo Richardson.

  14

  Fitz called around four o’clock and she started to tell him about what she had decided to do, but then thought better of it. For one thing, she wasn’t exactly sure what she had decided. For another, she didn’t want him trying to talk her out of it, whatever it was. And for still another, there was no need to worry him with anything, as much as he had on his plate right now. By the time he got here Thursday, things would be taken care of. It was a small thing, really, a local matter, not something that would affect the governor’s race. The thing about politicians was, they worried about everything they remotely suspected had “vote” written on it.

  Fitz sounded frazzled and out of sorts. “It’s been a helluva day, Mama. I won’t burden you with details.” She heard someone speaking in the background and then Fitz, angry, his voice muffled but still discernible as he put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Tell the asshole to get lost. No, don’t tell him that. I’ll be with him in a minute.” He spoke again into the receiver. “Sorry. Hyenas.”

  “I just talked to Flavo. He said you called.” That was the most important thing, she thought.

  “Yes’m. That’s why I called you. He sounded kinda strange, Mama.”

  “Well,” Bright said, “he’s been through a lot.”

  “No, I don’t mean just losing the boy. He sounded angry. There’s nothing wrong down there, is there?”

  She started to tell him about the swimming pool, thought better of it. Instead she said, “Are you coming to the funeral?”

  “I’m supposed to be clear at the other end of the state Thursday morning,” he said. “I was going to fly in just in time for the parade.”

  “I think you should be here,” she insisted.

  “Yes,” he said. “I should be there. All right. I’ll just shuffle things around. Hell, there may not be anything to shuffle by Thursday.” Bright heard the great weariness there, almost despair. He paused for a moment and then he said, “Are you all right, Mama?”

  “Of course I’m all right, Fitz. Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Just checking.”

  “Well, that’s nice.”

  “You know what I’d like to do, Mama?”

  “What’s that, son?”

  “I’d like to get in the car right now and come down there and sit on the porch with you and drink a glass of iced tea.” There was something wistful in his voice, something she hadn’t heard in a long time.

  “You’d draw a crowd,” she said, “you always do. But why don’t you anyway.”

  “Ahhh,” he sighed. “Too many hyenas to keep at bay. I’m up to my keister in hyenas.”

  “Maybe I should be asking you if you’re all right,” Bright said. “Are you?”

  “Lavonia took the kids and went to the beach,” he said by way of answering. “I’m staying up at the lake house at night. Me and Sergeant Dodson.”

  “Well, if you came down here you could have the camp house.” And she was instantly sorry she had said that. “I didn’t mean …”

  “I know.”

  “The camp house is a good place to get away,” she hurried on, trying to explain.

  “Mama,” Fitz said, “I could never in a million years tell you how sorry I am about the camp house. I’m sorry about the embarrassment. About everything —“

  “Stop, Fitz,” she interrupted him. “Now go take care of the hyenas. And when you’re finished, come down here and sit on the front porch and have some iced tea. Whenever that is.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Thursday. We’ll have some iced tea after all the folderol is over. Just a quiet glass of iced tea.”

  When he had hung up, Bright thought for a fleeting moment about getting in the car and going up there to the Capitol and sitting down next to his desk and telling all the hyenas to go away and leave him alone. But no, that would not do. He was a big boy and this was his fight.

  She wondered if she had prepared him for it. He had been full of mischief as a child, but she had always been able to get his attention with just a snap of her voice. And then he would l
ook up at her with a sorrowful eagerness, pleading with his eyes to be forgiven. He wasn’t the kind of child who talked back. It was entirely possible that she had done too much, given him too much direction, made him too quick to please. Looking back, she thought she might have done things a little differently, been a little less quick of tongue. But that was hindsight.

  She sat pondering all that, and then she realized after a moment that he had not said a single solitary word about the money.

  >

  Bright heard the roar of Buster Putnam’s riding lawn mower around four-thirty and she walked to her front door and looked out as he made a wide curving slash through his overgrown front yard, aiming the mower in no particular direction. He had a Budweiser can in his hand and he polished off the last of its contents and gave the empty can a fling toward his front porch, where it landed with a rattle. He reached into the cooler between his legs, pulled out another beer, and popped the top one-handed with an expert flick of his wrist. He saw her then and waved grandly and she walked across the porch and down the steps toward him. He cut the engine back to a throaty idle and coasted to a stop, waiting for her. The grass was above her ankles and she stepped carefully, wondering if there were snakes and small animals about.

  “Beer?” he said as she reached him, drawing another can, dripping with water, from the cooler. Buster was wearing a shapeless green jumpsuit with a large grease stain on one leg. His face was flushed with the beer and heat and the white stubble of his whiskers stood out against the skin.

  “You’re going to fall off that thing dead drunk and run over yourself,” she said, waving the can away. “No, I don’t want a beer.”

  “Loosen up, Bright,” he said as he dropped the can back into the cooler, then indicated his yard with a wave of his arm. “I have carefully calculated the size of my property here. It is a six-beer lawn. Six Budweisers will not make me dead drunk. Drunk, but not dead drunk.”

  “Well, if you don’t fall off the thing, you’ll keel over from heatstroke.”

  “Another good reason to drink beer,” he said.

  “I hope you weren’t imbibing while you had Jimbo with you.”

  “Imbibing.” He grinned. “How quaint. Matter of fact, we did duck into the Spot and take the chill off the morning.” Then he held his hand up. “Just kidding. I was as sober as a judge. So was he. Gad, the kid is sober. He, too, needs to loosen up.”

  “I have some business to transact with you,” Bright said.

  He gave a little bow from the waist, sloshing a bit of the beer out of his can. “At your service, madam.”

  “If you tell another soul in this town you’re going to marry me, I’ll shoot you dead,” she said, trying to put some starch in her voice.

  “That’s what the Chinese Communist Army said,” Buster deadpanned.

  “You weren’t trying to marry the Chinese Communist Army,” she shot back.

  Buster put his hand over his heart. “If I have offended you, I am grievously sorry.”

  She gave a disgusted shake of her head. “Put your beer down and come have some iced tea.”

  “Delighted,” he said, and cut off the lawn mower engine and followed her back to the house. She got two glasses of tea from the kitchen and they sat on the front porch, watching the children playing out in the shade under the pecan trees. They had a ball now and they had divided themselves into two teams of three, using the trees for bases and sending the ball spinning through the hot afternoon while they ran, shouting, to touch the trees. One strap of Jimbo’s overalls had come undone and it flapped loosely, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “Jimbo says you took him to Columbus,” Bright said.

  “Yeah, we got the overalls and stuff at Putnam’s and then we rode over to Columbus for a hamburger and a milk shake. You were asleep when we got back, so I went down to the preacher’s house and rounded up some kids for him to play with.” He nodded toward the group in the front yard. “He seems to be doing all right. At least he doesn’t have his nose stuck in a book.”

  “Roseann overprotects him,” she said. “What the boy needs is some space.”

  “What the boy needs is to do something outrageous,” Buster said. “Something unscheduled and totally outrageous. You know what he told me? He told me that when he comes home after school he has to stay in the house and call his mama at work every thirty minutes.”

  They sipped their iced tea for a few minutes and then Bright told Buster about Gladys’s peeing on the mint and Harley Gibbons’s reaction and Buster got a good laugh out of that. Then they watched the kickball game under the trees, Jimbo and the others shouting to each other, arguing over the score, cheering a good kick.

  After a while, Bright said, “Flavo Richardson’s grandson drowned because he didn’t have a season ticket.”

  Buster turned and looked at her. “A what?”

  “To the swimming pool. You can’t swim in the city pool unless you have a season ticket. They cost fifty dollars. Black children can’t afford that. So they swim in the river.”

  He studied her for a moment the way she thought he might have studied a white stretch of Pacific beach from the bow of a landing craft. “Bright,” he said, “what are you up to?”

  “I’m not exactly sure. A little voice in the back of my head keeps telling me it’s not my fight.”

  “Is it?”

  “Ten years ago I would have said yes. Twenty-four hours ago I would have said no.”

  “What happened?”

  “Flavo.”

  “Hmmmm.” He fell silent for a moment, sipping his tea, and then he said, “What is Flavo going to do?”

  “Right now, nothing. He wants me to do it for him.”

  “Why?”

  “He says, because I’m Dorsey Bascombe’s daughter.”

  “Hmmmm. And if you don’t?”

  Bright shook her head. “I think there might be trouble, Buster. I could feel it when I was over there this morning. Real trouble.”

  “Over season tickets?”

  “Over an injustice. Flavo’s distraught, he’s grieving, and he blames the white folks. There’s a death involved, and I think he looks at it as a kind of lynching.”

  Buster gave her a long, careful look. “I hear you used to cut a wide swath, Bright.”

  “Not anymore. I retired. Or at least I thought I did.”

  “Just like me,” Buster said. “I’ve been shot at all I want.” And that was probably true, Bright thought. Buster had gone into the Marine Corps in 1942 and over the years he had seen a good deal of combat. World War II, Korea, Vietnam. He had come home with a chest full of ribbons.

  “You’ve earned the right to drink beer and go to seed,” Bright said.

  “Yes ma’am,” he said flatly. “Damn straight.” Then he put his iced tea glass down on the table and stood up. “Speaking of which, I have miles to cut and beers to drink before I sleep. I smell a fight over here, and I think I’ll just get back to my dissipation.”

  “A fight,” she said. “Well, I don’t think it will come to that.” Then she thought for a moment and added, “But it might, I suppose.”

  Buster looked down at her, a bemused expression on his face. “Just make sure you clean the rust off your sword before you ride into battle, m’lady.”

  >

  The city swimming pool was on a wide flat shelf of the riverbank, nestled among a grove of huge oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. There were rough-hewn picnic tables scattered underneath the trees and a small parking area next to the high chain-link fence that surrounded the pool itself.

  “Why can’t I swim?” Jimbo asked as they bounded down the gravel driveway from the street in Bright’s Plymouth. The color was high in his cheekbones, sweat beads stood out on his forehead, and he gave off a powerful aroma of boy-at-play smell. Not at all unpleasant, she thought. It brought back memories. She thought again of Fitz at his desk at the Capitol, keeping the hyenas at bay.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” she said. “Maybe
you can swim tomorrow when there’s more time. I just want to see about something.” She parked next to the fence and they both got out and looked it over. There wasn’t much of a crowd here in the late afternoon —a few young mothers watching small children splash about in the wading pool, a handful of children about Jimbo’s age leaping off the diving board to retrieve pennies from the pool bottom, a gaggle of teenagers lounging about on a patch of grass. All of them white. There were several round umbrella-covered tables on the concrete apron that surrounded the pool and a row of lounge chairs, but they were mostly empty. There was plenty of room here for everybody, she thought.

  The pool manager looked vaguely familiar —late thirties perhaps, with a broad forehead and thinning hair that he parted just above one ear and flipped over the top. He sat on a stool inside a small shelter at the pool gate. There was a big soft drink cooler behind him and a counter with boxes of candy bars and crackers.

  “I’m Mrs. Bright Birdsong,” Bright said, stepping up to the counter.

  “Oh, yes ma’am,” the manager said, smiling. “Haven’t seen you in a while, Miz Bright. Don’t think I’ve ever seen you over here at the pool.”

  “It’s my first visit in a good long while,” she said. “This is my grandson, Jimbo Blasious. He’s visiting me for a few days.”

  The manager looked over the counter at Jimbo. “Your mama and I graduated from high school together. She doing all right?”