NORBERT KEENE OWNER & MANAGER 19 page

“It’s brilliant! You’re a genius! Will you write the script?”

“You bet. It won’t take long, either.” Corny old jokes were already flying around in my head: Coach Borman looked at the orange juice for twenty minutes because the can said CONCENTRATE. Our dog had an ingrown tail, we had to X-ray him to find out if he was happy. I rode on a plane so old that one restroom was marked Orville and the other was marked Wilbur. “But I need plenty of help with other stuff. What it comes down to is I need a producer. I’m hoping you’ll take the job.”

“Sure.” She slipped back to the floor with her body still pressed against mine. This produced a regrettably brief flash of bare leg as her skirt pulled up. She began to pace her living room, smoking furiously. She tripped over the easy chair (for probably the sixth or eighth time since we’d been on intimate terms) and caught her balance without even seeming to notice, although she was going to have a pretty fine bruise on her shin by nightfall.

“If you’re thinking twenties-style flapper stuff, I can get Jo Peet to run up the costumes.” Jo was the new head of the Home Ec Department, having succeeded to the position when Ellen Dockerty was confirmed as principal.

“That’s great.”

“Most of the Home Ec girls love to sew . . . and to cook. George, we’ll need to serve evening meals, won’t we? If the rehearsals run extra long? And they will, because we’re starting awfully late.”

“Yes, but just sandwiches—”

“We can do better than that. Lots. And music! We’ll need music! It’ll have to be recorded, because the band could never pull a thing like this together in time.” And then, together, we said “Donald Bellingham!” in perfect harmony.

“What about advertising?” I asked. We were starting to sound like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, getting ready to put on a show in Aunt Milly’s barn.

“Carl Jacoby and his Graphic Design kids. Posters not just here but all over town. Because we want the whole town to come, not just the relatives of the kids in the show. Standing room only.”

“Bingo,” I said, and kissed her nose. I loved her excitement. I was getting pretty excited myself.

“What do we say about the benefit aspect?” Sadie asked.

“Nothing until we’re sure we can make enough money. We don’t want to raise any false hopes. What do you think about taking a run to Dallas with me tomorrow and asking some questions?”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday, hon. After school on Monday. Maybe even before it’s out, if you can get period seven free.”

“I’ll get Deke to come out of retirement and cover Remedial English,” I said. “He owes me.”

Sadie and I went to Dallas on Monday, driving fast to get there before the close of business hours. The office we were looking for turned out to be on Harry Hines Boulevard, not far from Parkland Memorial. There we asked a bushel of questions, and Sadie gave a brief demonstration of what we were after. The answers were more than satisfactory, and two days later I began my second-to-last show-biz venture, as director of Jodie Jamboree, An All-New, All-Hilarious Vaudeville Song & Dance Show. And all to benefit A Good Cause. We didn’t say what that cause was, and nobody asked.

Two things about the Land of Ago: there’s a lot less paperwork and a hell of a lot more trust.

Everybody in town did turn out, and Deke Simmons was right about one thing: those lame jokes never seemed to get old. Not fifteen hundred miles from Broadway, at least.

In the persons of Jim LaDue (who wasn’t bad, and could actually sing a little) and Mike Coslaw (who was flat-out hilarious), our show was more Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis than Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo. The skits were of the knockabout type, and with a couple of athletes to perform them, they worked better than they probably had a right to. In the audience, knees were slapped and buttons were busted. Probably a few girdles were popped, as well.

Ellen Dockerty dragged her banjo out of retirement; for a lady with blue hair, she played a mean breakdown. And there was hootchie-koo after all. Mike and Jim persuaded the rest of the football team to perform a spirited can-can wearing petticoats and bloomers down south and nothing but skin up north. Jo Peet found wigs for them, and they stopped the show. The town ladies seemed especially crazy about those bare-chested young men, wigs and all.

For the finale, the entire cast paired off and filled the gymnasium stage with frenetic swing-dancing as “In the Mood” blared from the speakers. Skirts flew; feet flashed; football players (now dressed in zoot suits and stingy-brim hats) spun limber girls. Most of the latter were cheerleaders who already knew a few things about how to cut a rug.

The music ended; the laughing, winded cast stepped forward to take their bows; and as the audience rose to its feet for the third (or maybe it was the fourth) time since the curtain went up, Donald started up “In the Mood” again. This time the boys and girls scampered to opposite sides of the stage, grabbed the dozens of cream pies waiting for them on tables in the wings, and began to pelt each other. The audience roared its approval.

This part of the show our cast had known about and looked forward to, although since no actual pies had been flung during rehearsals, I wasn’t sure how it would play out. Of course it went splendidly, as cream-pie fights always do. So far as the kids knew this was the climax, but I had one more trick up my sleeve.

As they came forward to take their second bows, faces dripping cream and costumes splattered, “In the Mood” started up for the third time. Most of the kids looked around, puzzled, and so did not see Faculty Row rise to its feet holding the cream pies Sadie and I had stashed beneath their seats. The pies flew, and the cast was doused for the second time. Coach Borman had two pies, and his aim was deadly: he got both his quarterback and his star defenseman.

Mike Coslaw, face dripping cream, began to bellow: “Mr. A! Miz D! Mr. A! Miz D!”

The rest of the cast took it up, then the audience, clapping in rhythm. We went up onstage, hand-in-hand, and Bellingham started that goddam record yet again. The kids formed lines on either side of us, shouting “Dance! Dance! Dance!”

We had no choice, and although I was convinced my girlfriend would go sliding in all that cream and break her neck, we were perfect for the first time since the Sadie Hawkins. At the end of it, I squeezed both of Sadie’s hands, saw her little nod—Go on, go for it, I trust you—and shot her between my legs. Both of her shoes flew into the first row, her skirt skidded deliriously up her thighs . . . and she came magically to her feet in one piece, with her hands first held out to the audience—which was going insane—and then to the sides of her cream-smeared skirt, in a ladylike curtsey.

The kids turned out to have a trick up their sleeves, as well, one almost certainly instigated by Mike Coslaw, although he would never own up to it. They had saved some pies back, and as we stood there, soaking up the applause, we were hit by at least a dozen, flying from all directions. And the crowd, as they say, goes wild.

Sadie pulled my ear close to her mouth, wiped whipped cream from it with her pinky, and whispered: “How can you leave all this?”

And it still wasn’t over.

Deke and Ellen walked to center stage, finding their way almost magically around the streaks, splatters, and clots of cream. No one would have dreamed of tossing a cream pie at either of them.

Deke raised his hands for silence, and when Ellen Dockerty stepped forward, she spoke in a clear classroom voice that carried easily over the murmurs and residual laughter.

“Ladies and gentleman, tonight’s performance of Jodie Jamboree will be followed by three more.” This brought another wave of applause.

“These are benefit performances,” Ellie went on when the applause died down, “and it pleases me—yes, it pleases me very much—to tell you to whom the benefit will accrue. Last fall, we lost one of our valued students, and we all mourned the passing of Vincent Knowles, which came far, far, far too soon.”

Now there was dead silence from the audience.

“A girl you all know, one of the leading lights of our student body, was badly scarred in that accident. Mr. Amberson and Miss Dunhill have arranged for Roberta Jillian Allnut to have facial reconstructive surgery this June, in Dallas. There will be no cost to the Allnut family; I’m told by Mr. Sylvester, who has served as the Jodie Jamboree accountant, that Bobbi Jill’s classmates—and this town—have assured that all the costs of the surgery will be paid in full.”

There was a moment of quiet as they processed this, then they leaped to their feet. The applause was like summer thunder. I saw Bobbi Jill herself on the bleachers. She was weeping with her hands over her face. Her parents had their arms around her.

This was one night in a small town, one of those burgs off the main road that nobody cares about much except for the people who live there. And that’s okay, because they care. I looked at Bobbi Jill, sobbing into her hands. I looked at Sadie. There was cream in her hair. She smiled. So did I. She mouthed I love you, George. I mouthed back I love you, too. That night I loved all of them, and myself for being with them. I never felt so alive or happy to be alive. How could I leave all this, indeed?

The blow-up came two weeks later.

It was a Saturday, grocery day. Sadie and I had gotten into the habit of doing it together at Weingarten’s, on Highway 77. We’d push our carts companionably side by side while Mantovani played overhead, examining the fruit and looking for the best buys on meat. You could get almost any kind of cut you wanted, as long as it was beef or chicken. It was okay with me; even after nearly three years, I was still wowed by the rock-bottom prices.

That day I had something other than groceries on my mind: the Hazzard family living at 2706 Mercedes, a shotgun shack across the street and a little to the left of the rotting duplex that Lee Oswald would soon call home. Jodie Jamboree had kept me very busy, but I’d managed three trips back to Mercedes Street that spring. I parked my Ford in a lot in downtown Fort Worth and took the Winscott Road bus, which stopped less than half a mile away. On these trips I dressed in jeans, scuffed boots, and a faded denim jacket I’d picked up at a yard sale. My story, if anyone asked for it: I was looking for a cheap rent because I’d just gotten a night watchman job at Texas Sheet Metal in West Fort Worth. That made me a trustworthy individual (as long as no one checked up), and supplied a reason why the house would be quiet, with the shades drawn, during the daylight hours.

On my strolls up Mercedes Street to the Monkey Ward warehouse and back (always with a newspaper folded open to the rental section of the classifieds), I spotted Mr. Hazzard, a hulk in his mid-thirties, the two kids Rosette wouldn’t play with, and an old woman with a frozen face who dragged one foot as she walked. Hazzard’s mama eyed me suspiciously from the mailbox on one occasion, as I idled slowly past along the rut that served as a sidewalk, but she didn’t speak.

On my third recon, I saw a rusty old trailer hooked to the back of Hazzard’s pickup truck. He and the kids were loading it with boxes while the old lady stood nearby on the just-greening crabgrass, leaning on her cane and wearing a stroke-sneer that could have masked any emotion. I was betting on utter indifference. What I felt was happiness. The Hazzards were moving on. As soon as they did, a working stiff named George Amberson was going to rent 2706. The important thing was to make sure I was first in line.

I was trying to figure out if there was any foolproof way to do that as we went about our Saturday shopping chores. On one level I was responding to Sadie, making the right comments, kidding her when she spent too much time at the dairy case, pushing the cart loaded with groceries out to the parking lot, putting the bags in the Ford’s trunk. But I was doing it all on autopilot, most of my mind worrying over the Fort Worth logistics, and that turned out to be my undoing. I wasn’t paying attention to what was coming out of my mouth, and when you’re living a double life, that’s dangerous.

As I drove back to Sadie’s place with her sitting quietly (too quietly) beside me, I was singing because the Ford’s radio was on the fritz. The valves had gotten wheezy, too. The Sunliner still looked snappy, and I was attached to it for all sorts of reasons, but it was seven years downstream from the assembly line and there were over ninety thousand miles on the clock.

I carried Sadie’s groceries into the kitchen in a single load, making heroic grunting noises and staggering for effect. I didn’t notice that she wasn’t smiling, and had no idea that our little period of greening was over. I was still thinking about Mercedes Street, and wondering what kind of a show I’d have to put on there—or rather, how much of a show. It would be delicate. I wanted to be a familiar face, because familiarity breeds disinterest as well as contempt, but I didn’t want to stand out. Then there were the Oswalds. She didn’t speak English and he was a cold fish by nature, all to the good, but 2706 was still awfully close. The past might be obdurate but the future was delicate, a house of cards, and I had to be very careful not to change it until I was ready. So I’d have to—

That was when Sadie spoke to me, and shortly after that, life as I had come to know it (and love it) in Jodie came crashing down.

“George? Can you come in the living room? I want to talk to you.”

“Hadn’t you better put your hamburger and pork chops in the fridge? And I think I saw ice cr—”

“Let it melt!” she shouted, and that brought me out of my head in a hurry.

I turned to her, but she was already in the living room. She picked up her cigarettes from the table beside the couch and lit one. At my gentle urgings she had been trying to cut down (at least around me), and this seemed somehow more ominous than her raised voice.

I went into the living room. “What is it, honey? What’s wrong?”

“Everything. What was that song?”

Her face was pale and set. She held the cigarette in front of her mouth like a shield. I began to realize that I had slipped up, but I didn’t know how or when, and that was scary. “I don’t know what you m—”

“The song you were singing in the car when we were coming home. The one you were bellowing at the top of your lungs.”

I tried to remember and couldn’t. All I could remember was thinking I’d always have to dress like a slightly down-on-his-luck workman on Mercedes Street, so I’d fit in. Sure I’d been singing, but I often did when I was thinking about other things—doesn’t everybody?

“Just some pop thing I heard on KLIF, I guess. Something that got into my head. You know how songs do that. I don’t understand what’s got you so upset.”

“Something you heard on K-Life. With lyrics like ‘I met a gin-soaked bar-room queen in Memphis, she tried to take me upstairs for a ride’ ?”

It wasn’t just my heart that sank; everything below my neck seemed to drop five inches. “Honky Tonk Women.” That’s what I’d been singing. A song that wouldn’t be recorded for another seven or eight years, by a group that wouldn’t even have an American hit for another three. My mind had been on other things, but still—how could I have been so dumb?

“‘She blew my nose and then she blew my mind’ ? On the radio? The FCC would shut down a station that played something like that!”

I started to get angry then. Mostly at myself . . . but not entirely at myself. I was walking a goddam tightrope, and she was shouting at me over a Rolling Stones tune.

“Chill, Sadie. It’s just a song. I don’t know where I heard it.”

“That’s a lie, and we both know it.”

“You’re freaking out. I think maybe I better take my groceries and head home.” I tried to keep my voice calm. The sound of it was very familiar. It was the way I’d always tried to speak to Christy when she came home with a snootful. Skirt on crooked, blouse half-untucked, hair all crazy. Not to mention the smeared lipstick. From the rim of a glass, or from some fellow barfly’s lips?

Just thinking about it made me angrier. Wrong again, I thought. I didn’t know if I meant Sadie or Christy or me, and at that moment I didn’t care. We never get so mad as when we get caught, do we?

“I think maybe you better tell me where you heard that song, if you ever want to come back here. And where you heard what you said to the kid at the checkout when he said he’d double-bag your chicken so it wouldn’t leak.”

“I don’t have any idea what—”

“‘Excellent, dude,’ that’s what you said. I think maybe you better tell me where you heard that. And kick out the jams. And boogie shoes. And shake your bootie. Chill and freaking out, I want to know where you heard those, too. Why you say them and no one else does. I want to know why you were so scared of that stupid Jimla chant that you talked about it in your sleep. I want to know where Derry is and why it’s like Dallas. I want to know when you were married, and to who, and for how long. I want to know where you were before you were in Florida, because Ellie Dockerty says she doesn’t know, that some of your references are fake. ‘Appear to be fanciful’ is how she put it.”

I was sure Ellen hadn’t found out from Deke . . . but she had found out. I actually wasn’t too surprised, but I was infuriated that she had blabbed to Sadie. “She had no right to tell you that!”

She smashed out her cigarette, then shook her hand as bits of live coal jumped up and stung it. “Sometimes it’s like you’re from . . . I don’t know . . . some other universe! One where they sing about screwing drunk women from M-Memphis! I tried to-to tell myself all that doesn’t matter, that l-l-love conquers all, except it doesn’t. It doesn’t conquer lies.” Her voice wavered, but she didn’t cry. And her eyes stayed fixed on mine. If there had only been anger in them, it would have been a little easier. But there was pleading, too.

“Sadie, if you’d only—”

“I won’t. Not anymore. So don’t start up with the stuff about how you’re not doing anything you’re ashamed of and I wouldn’t be, either. Those are things I need to decide for myself. It comes down to this: either the broom goes, or you’ll have to.”

“If you knew, you wouldn’t—”

“Then tell me!”

“I can’t.” The anger popped like a pricked balloon, leaving an emotional dullness behind. I dropped my eyes from her set face, and they happened to fall on her desk. What I saw there stopped my breath.

It was a little pile of job applications for her time in Reno this coming summer. The top one was from Harrah’s Hotel and Casino. On the first line she had printed her name in neat block letters. Her full name, including the middle one I’d never thought to ask her about.

I reached down, very slowly, and put my thumbs over her first name and the second syllable of her last name. What that left was DORIS DUN.

I remembered the day I had spoken to Frank Dunning’s wife, pretending to be a real estate speculator with an interest in the West Side Rec. She’d been twenty years older than Sadie Doris Clayton, née Dunhill, but both women had blue eyes, exquisite skin, and fine, full-breasted figures. Both women were smokers. All of it could have been coincidental, but it wasn’t. And I knew it.

“What are you doing?” The accusatory tone meant the real question was Why do you keep dodging and evading, but I was no longer angry. Not even close.

“Are you sure he doesn’t know where you are?” I asked.

“Who? Johnny? Do you mean Johnny? Why . . .” That was when she decided it was useless. I saw it in her face. “George, you need to leave.”

“But he could find out,” I said. “Because your parents know, and your parents thought he was just the bees’ knees, you said so yourself.”

I took a step toward her. She took a step back. The way you’d step back from a person who’s revealed himself to be of unsound mind. I saw the fear in her eyes, and the lack of comprehension, and still I couldn’t stop. Remember that I was scared myself.

“Even if you told them not to say, he’d get it out of them. Because he’s charming. Isn’t he, Sadie? When he’s not compulsively washing his hands, or alphabetizing his books, or talking about how disgusting it is to get an erection, he’s very, very charming. He certainly charmed you.”

“Please go away, George.” Her voice was trembling.

I took another step toward her instead. She took a compensatory step back, struck the wall . . . and cringed. Seeing her do that was like a slap across the face to a hysteric or a glass of cold water flung into the face of a sleepwalker. I retreated to the arch between the living room and the kitchen, my hands held up to the sides of my face, like a man surrendering. Which was what I was doing.

“I’m going. But Sadie—”

“I just don’t understand how you could do it,” she said. The tears had come; they were rolling slowly down her cheeks. “Or why you refuse to undo it. We had such a good thing.”

“We still do.”

She shook her head. She did it slowly but firmly.

I crossed the kitchen in what felt like a float rather than a walk, plucked the tub of vanilla ice cream from one of the bags standing on the counter, and put it in the freezer of her Coldspot. Part of me was thinking this was all just a bad dream, and I’d wake up soon. Most of me knew better.

Sadie stood in the arch, watching me. She had a fresh cigarette in one hand and the job applications in the other. Now that I saw it, the resemblance to Doris Dunning was eerie. Which raised the question of why I hadn’t seen it before. Because I’d been preoccupied with other stuff ? Or was it because I still hadn’t fully grasped the immensity of the things I was fooling with?

I went out through the screen door and stood on the stoop, looking at her through the mesh. “Watch out for him, Sadie.”

“Johnny’s mixed up about a lot of things, but he’s not dangerous,” she said. “And my parents would never tell him where I am. They promised.”

“People can break promises, and people can snap. Especially people who’ve been under a lot of pressure and are mentally unstable to begin with.”

“You need to go, George.”

“Promise me that you’ll watch out for him and I will.”

She shouted, “I promise, I promise, I promise!” The way her cigarette trembled between her fingers was bad; the combination of shock, loss, grief, and anger in her red eyes was much worse. I could feel them following me all the way back to my car.

Goddamned Rolling Stones.

CHAPTER 17

A few days before the end-of-year testing cycle began, Ellen Dockerty summoned me to her office. After she closed the door, she said: “I’m sorry for the trouble I’ve caused, George, but if I had it to do over again, I’m not sure I would behave any differently.”

I said nothing. I was no longer angry, but I was still stunned. I’d gotten very little sleep since the blow-up, and I had an idea that 4:00 A.M. and I were going to be close friends in the near future.

“Clause Twenty-five of the Texas School Administrative Code,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“I beg your pardon, Ellie?”

“Nina Wallingford was the one who brought it to my attention.” Nina was the district nurse. She put tens of thousands of miles on her Ford Ranch Wagon each school year circling Denholm County’s eight schools, three of them still of the one-or two-room variety. “Clause Twenty-five concerns the state’s rules for immunization in schools. It covers teachers as well as students, and Nina pointed out she didn’t have any immunization records for you. No medical records of any kind, in fact.”

And there it was. The fake teacher exposed by his lack of a polio shot. Well, at least it wasn’t my advanced knowledge of the Rolling Stones, or inappropriate use of disco slang.

“You being so busy with the Jamboree and all, I thought I’d write to the schools where you’d taught and save you the trouble. What I got back from Florida was a letter stating that they don’t require immunization records from substitutes. What I got from Maine and Wisconsin was ‘Never heard of him.’”

She leaned forward behind her desk, looking at me. I couldn’t meet her gaze for long. What I saw in her face before I redirected my gaze to the backs of my hands was an unbearable sympathy.

“Would the State Board of Education care that we had hired an imposter? Very much. They might even institute legal action to recoup your year’s salary. Do I care? Absolutely not. Your work at DCHS has been exemplary. What you and Sadie did for Bobbi Jill Allnut was absolutely wonderful, the kind of thing that garners State Teacher of the Year nominations.”

“Thanks,” I muttered. “I guess.”

“I asked myself what Mimi Corcoran would do. What Meems said to me was, ‘If he had signed a contract to teach next year and the year after, you’d be forced to act. But since he’s leaving in a month, it’s actually in your interest—and the school’s—to say nothing.’ Then she added, ‘But there’s one person who has to know he’s not who he says he is.’”

Ellie paused.

“I told Sadie that I was sure you’d have some reasonable explanation, but it seems you do not.”

I glanced at my watch. “If you’re not firing me, Miz Ellie, I ought to get back to my period five class. We’re diagramming sentences. I’m thinking of trying them on a compound that goes, I am blameless in this matter, but I cannot say why. What do you think? Too tough?”

“Too tough for me, certainly,” she said pleasantly.

“One thing,” I said. “Sadie’s marriage was difficult. Her husband was strange in ways I don’t want to go into. His name is John Clayton. I think he might be dangerous. You need to ask Sadie if she has a picture of him, so you’ll know what he looks like if he shows up and starts asking questions.”

“And you think this because?”

“Because I’ve seen something like it before. Will that do?”

“I suppose it will have to, won’t it?”

That wasn’t a good enough answer. “Will you ask her?”

“Yes, George.” She might mean it; she might only be humoring me. I couldn’t tell.

I was at the door when she said, as if only passing the time of day: “You’re breaking that young woman’s heart.”

“I know,” I said, and left.

Mercedes Street. Late May.

“Welder, are you?”

I was standing on the porch of 2706 with the landlord, a fine American named Mr. Jay Baker. He was stocky, with a huge gut he called the house that Shiner built. We had just finished a quick tour of the premises, which Baker had explained to me was “Prime to the bus stop,” as if that made up for the sagging ceilings, water-stained walls, cracked toilet tank, and general air of decrepitude.

“Night watchman,” I said.

“Yeah? That’s a good job. Plenty of time to fuck the dog on a job like that.”

This seemed to require no response.

“No wife or kiddies?”

“Divorced. They’re back East.”

“Pay hellimony, do you?”

I shrugged.

He let it go. “So do you want the place, Amberson?”

“I guess so,” I said, and sighed.

He took a long rent-book with a floppy leather cover out of his back pocket. “First month, last month, damage deposit.”

“Damage deposit? You have to be kidding.”

Baker went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “Rent’s due on the last Friday of the month. Come up short or late and you’re on the street, courtesy of Fort Worth PD. Me’n them get along real good.”

He took the charred cigar stub from his breast pocket, stuck the chewed end in his gob, and popped a wooden match alight with his thumbnail. It was hot on the porch. I had an idea it was going to be a long, hot summer.

I sighed again. Then—with a show of reluctance—I took out my wallet and began to remove twenty-dollar bills. “In God we trust,” I said. “All others pay cash.”

He laughed, puffing out clouds of acrid blue smoke as he did so. “That’s good, I’ll remember that. Especially on the last Friday of the month.”

I couldn’t believe I was going to live in this desperate shack and on this desperate street, after my nice house south of here—where I’d taken pride in keeping an actual lawn mowed. Although I hadn’t even left Jodie yet, I felt a wave of homesickness.

“Give me a receipt, please,” I said.

That much I got for free.

It was the last day of school. The classrooms and hallways were empty. The overhead fans paddled air that was already hot, although it was only the eighth of June. The Oswald family had left Russia; in another five days, according to Al Templeton’s notes, the SS Maasdam would dock in Hoboken, where they would walk down the gangplank and onto United States soil.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 705