Bagombo Snuff Box (31 page)

“Lucky man,” he said.

“Would you like to hear exactly how much I have already
learned about pipe?” she said.

“Go ahead,” he said.

“I read a whole book about pipe,” she said. “I went to the
public library and got down a book about pipe and nothing else but pipe.”

“What did the book say?” he said.

From the tennis courts to the west came faint, crooning
calls. Borders was now prowling the club grounds, looking for his Hildy. “Hildeee,”
he was calling. “Hildy?”

“You want me to yell yoo-hoo?” said Andy.

“Shhh!” she said. And she gave the small, melodious hiccup.

Arvin Borders wandered off into the parking lot, his cries
fading away in the darkness that enveloped him.

“You were going to tell me about pipe,” said Andy.

“Let’s talk about you,” she said.

“What would you like to know about me?” he said.

“People have to ask you questions or you can’t talk?” she
said.

He shrugged. “Small-time musician. Never married. Big dreams
once. Big dreams all gone.”

“Big dreams of what?” she said.

“Being half the musician your husband was,” he said. “You
want to hear more?”

“I love to hear other people’s dreams,” she said.

“All right—love,” he said.

“You’ve never had that?” she said.

“Not that I’ve noticed,” he said.

“May I ask you a very personal question?” she said.

‘About my ability as a great lover?” he said.

“No,” she said. “I think that would be a very silly kind of
question. I think everybody young is basically a great lover. All anybody needs
is the chance.”

“Ask the personal question,” he said.

“Do you make any money?” she said.

Andy didn’t answer right away.

“Is that too personal?” she said.

“I don’t guess it would kill me to answer,” he said. He did
some figuring in his head, gave her an honest report of his earnings.

“Why, that’s very good,” she said.

“More than a schoolteacher, less than a school janitor,” he
said.

“Do you live in an apartment or what?” she said.

“A big old house I inherited from my family,” he said.

“You’re really quite well off when you stop to think about
it,” she said. “Do you like little children—little girls?”

“Don’t you think you’d better be getting back to your
fiance?” he said.

“My questions keep getting more and more personal,” she said.
“I can’t help it, my own life has been so personal. Crazy, personal things
happen to me all the time.”

“I think we’d better break this up,” he said.

She ignored him. “For instance,” she said, “I pray for
certain kinds of people to come to me, and they come to me. One time when I was
very young, I prayed for a great musician to come and fall in love with me—and
he did. And I loved him, too, even though he was the worst husband a woman
could have. That’s how good I am at loving.”

“Hooray,” he said quietly.

“And then,” she said, “when my husband died and there was
nothing to eat and I was sick of wild and crazy nights and days, I prayed for a
solid, sensible, rich businessman to come along.”

“And he did,” said Andy.

‘And then,” she said, “when I came out here and ran away
from all the people who liked pipe so much—do you know what I prayed for?”

“Nope,” he said.

‘A man to bring me a drink,” she said. “That was all. I give
you my word of honor, that was all.”

‘And I brought you two drinks,” he said.

“And that isn’t all, either,” she said.

“Oh?” he said.

“I think that I could love you very much,” she said.

‘A pretty tough thing to do,” he said.

“Not for me,” she said. “I think you could be a very good musician
if somebody encouraged you. And I could give you the big and beautiful love you
want. You’d definitely have that.”

“This is a proposal of marriage?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. ‘And if you say no, I don’t know what I’ll
do. I’ll crawl under the shrubbery here and just die. I can’t go back to all
those pipe people, and there’s no place else to go.”

“I’m supposed to say yes?” he said.

“If you feel like saying yes, then say yes,” she said.

‘All right—” he said at last, “yes.”

“We’re both going to be so glad this happened,” she said.

“What about Arvin Borders?” he said.

“We’re doing him a favor,” she said.

“We are?” he said.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “On the terrace there, a woman came
right out and said it would ruin Arvin’s career if he married a woman like me—and
you know, it probably would, too.”

“That was the crack that sent you out here into the shadows?”
he said.

“Yes,” she said. “It was very upsetting. I didn’t want to
hurt anybody’s career.”

“That’s considerate of you,” he said.

“But you,” she said, taking his arm, “I don’t see how I
could do anything for you but a world of good. You wait,” she said. “You wait
and see.”

They left a note saying teenagers were as capable of true
love as anybody else—maybe more capable. And then they took off for parts
unknown.

They took off in the boy’s old blue Ford, with baby shoes dangling
from the rearview mirror, with a pile of comic books on the burst backseat.

A police alarm went out for them right away, and their
pictures were in the papers and on television. But they weren’t caught for
twenty-four hours. They got all the way to Chicago. A patrolman spotted them
shopping together in a supermarket there, caught them buying what looked like
a lifetime supply of candy, cosmetics, soft drinks, and frozen pizzas.

The girl’s father gave the patrolman a two-hundred-dollar reward.
The girl’s father was Jesse K. Southard, governor of the state of Indiana.

That was why they got so much publicity. It was exciting
when an ex-reform school kid, a kid who ran a lawn mower at the governor’s
country club, ran off with the governor’s daughter.

When the Indiana State Police brought the girl back to the
Governor’s Mansion in Indianapolis, Governor Southard announced that he would
take immediate steps to get an annulment. An irreverent reporter pointed out to
him that there could hardly be an annulment, since there hadn’t been a
marriage.

The governor blew up. “That boy never laid a finger on her,”
he roared, “because she wouldn’t let him! And I’ll knock the block off any man
who says otherwise.”

The reporters wanted to talk to the girl, naturally, and the
governor said she would have a statement for them in about an hour. It wouldn’t
be her first statement about the escapade. In Chicago she and the boy had lectured
reporters and police on love, hypocrisy, persecution of teenagers, the
insensitivity of parents, and even rockets, Russia, and the hydrogen bomb.

When the girl came downstairs with her new statement, however,
she contradicted everything she’d said in Chicago. Reading from a three-page
typewritten script, she said the adventure had been a nightmare, said she didn’t
love the boy and never had, said she must have been crazy, and said she never
wanted to see the boy again.

She said the only people she loved were her parents, said
she didn’t see how she could make it up to them for all the heartaches she had
caused, said she was going to concentrate on schoolwork and getting into
college, and said she didn’t want to pose for pictures because she looked so
awful after the ordeal.

She didn’t look especially awful, except that she’d dyed her
hair red, and the boy had given her a terrible haircut in an effort to disguise
her. And she’d been crying some. She didn’t look tired. She looked young and
wild and captured—that was all.

Her name was Annie—Annie Southard.

When the reporters left, when they went to show the boy the
girl’s latest statement, the governor turned to his daughter and said to her, “Well,
I certainly want to thank you. I don’t see how I can ever thank you enough.”

“You thank me for telling all those lies?” she said.

“I thank you for making a very small beginning in repairing
the damage you’ve done,” he said.

“My own father, the governor of the state of Indiana,” said
Annie, “ordered me to lie. I’ll never forget that.”

“That isn’t the last of the orders you’ll get from me,” he
said.

Annie said nothing out loud, but in her mind she placed a
curse on her parents. She no longer owed them anything. She was going to be
cold and indifferent to them for the rest of her days. The curse went into
effect immediately. Annie’s mother, Mary, came down the spiral staircase. She
had been listening to the lies from the landing above. “I think you handled
that very well,” she said to her husband.

“As well as I could, under the circumstances,” he said.

“I only wish we could come out and say what there really is
to say,” said Annie’s mother. “If we could only just come out and say we’re not
against love, and we’re not against people who don’t have money.” She started
to touch her daughter comfortingly, but was warned against it by Annie’s eyes. “We’re
not snobs, darling—and we’re not insensitive to love. Love is the most wonderful
thing there is.”

The governor turned away and glared out a window.

“We believe in love,” said Annie’s mother. “You’ve seen how
much I love your father and how much your father loves me—and how much your
father and I love you.”

“If you’re going to come out and say something, say it,”
said the governor. ,—“I thought I was,” said his wife.

“Talk money, talk breeding, talk education, talk friends,
talk interests,” said the governor, “and then you can get back to love if you
want.” He faced his women. “Talk happiness, for heaven’s sake,” he said. “See
that boy again, keep this thing going, marry him when you can do it legally,
when we can’t stop you,” he said to Annie, “and not only will you be the
unhappiest woman alive, but he’ll be the unhappiest man alive. It will be a
mess you can truly be proud of, because you will have married without having
met a single condition for a happy marriage—and by single condition I mean one
single, solitary thing in common.

“What did you plan to do for friends?” he said. “His gang at
the poolroom or your gang at the country club? Would you start out by buying
him a nice house and nice furniture and a nice automobile—or would you wait for
him to buy those things, which he’ll be just about ready to pay for when hell
freezes over? Do you like comic books as well as he does? Do you like the same
kind of comic books?” cried the governor.

“Who do you think you are?” he asked Annie. “You think you’re
Eve, and God only made one Adam for you?” “Yes,” said Annie, and she went
upstairs to her room and slammed the door. Moments later music came from her
room. She was playing a record.

The governor and his wife stood outside the door and
listened to the words of the song. These were the words:

They say we don’t know what love is, Boo-wah-wah, uh-huh,
yeah. But we know what the message in the stars above is,— Boo-wah-wah, uh-huh,
yeah. So hold me, hold me, baby, And you’ll make my poor heart sing, Because
everything they tell us, baby, Why, it just don’t mean a thing.

Eight miles away, eight miles due south, through the heart
of town and out the other side, reporters were clumping onto the front porch of
the boy’s father’s house.

It was old, cheap, a carpenter’s special, a 1926 bungalow.
Its front windows looked out into the perpetual damp twilight of a huge front
porch. Its side windows looked into the neighbors’ windows ten feet away. Light
could reach the interior only through a window in the back. As luck would have
it, the window let light into a tiny pantry.

The boy and his father and his mother did not hear the
reporters knocking. The television set in the living room and the radio in the
kitchen were both on, blatting away, and the family was having a row in the
dining room, halfway between them.

The row was actually about everything in creation, but it
had for its subject of the moment the boy’s mustache. He had been growing it
for a month and had just been caught by his father in the act of blacking it
with shoe polish.

The boy’s name was Rice Brentner. It was true, as the papers
said, that Rice had spent time in reform school. That was three years behind
him now. His crime had been, at the age of thirteen, the theft of sixteen automobiles
within a period of a week. Except for the escapade with Annie, he hadn’t been
in any real trouble since.

“You march into the bathroom,” said his mother, “and you
shave that awful thing off.” Rice did not march. He stayed right where he was.

“You heard your mother,” his father said. When Rice still
didn’t budge, his father tried to hurt him with scorn. “Makes him feel like a
man, I guess—like a great big man,” he said.

“Doesn’t make him look like a man,” said his mother. “It
makes him look like an I-don’t-know-what-it-is.”

“You just named him,” said his father. “That’s exactly what
he is: an I-don’t-know-what-it-is.” Finding a label like that seemed to ease
the boy’s father some. He was, as one newspaper and then all the newspapers had
pointed out, an eighty-nine-dollar-and sixty-two-cent-a-week supply clerk in
the main office of the public school system. He had reason to resent the
thoroughness of the reporter who had dug that figure from the public records.
The sixty-two cents galled him in particular. ‘An eighty-nine-dollar-and-sixty-two-cent-a-week
supply clerk has an I-don’t-know-what-it-is for a son,” he said. “The Brentner
family is certainly covered with glory today.”

“Do you realize how lucky you are not to be in jail—rotting?”
said Rice’s mother. “If they had you in jail, they’d not only shave off your
mustache, without even asking you about it—they’d shave off every hair on your
head.”

Rice wasn’t listening much, only enough to keep himself smoldering
comfortably. What he was thinking about was his car. He had paid for it with
money he himself had earned. It hadn’t cost his family a dime. Rice now swore
to himself that if his parents tried to take his car away from him, he would
leave home for good.