A Cry of Angels (16 page)

"How much can you realize out of a little unit like this? In the time you put up one, we build a dozen. We're prefabbing whole sections now and hauling them to the job by truck. With override alone you could make three times what you're making now."

"We've talked about that, John. You know it's not the money."

"Jayell, don't kid me. I know you're hanging by your fingernails. Any day now you're gonna stretch a little too far and your creditors are gonna clean you out! Besides, how many of these things can you build on what you're clearing? Now, you come and get a-hold of this Abbeville thing and get it rolling, and in the meantime we'll feed some of your ideas to our boys in Miami. Let them look them over, test the marketability, and if they think you've got something, hell, we can turn 'em out by the hundreds. We're interested in the low-income housing market too. If it doesn't work out, you've made a little extra money, and you can go right on building your houses. No harm done."

Jayell looked at Gwen, whose eyes were dancing with excitement. "John, I'm just not ready yet, and I don't know how I want to handle it when I am ready. What you say is true, I am hanging by my fingernails, but if there's any way to do it on my own, that's the way I want to go."

Mr. Wyche was scribbling on the back of a business card. "Had to have my home number unlisted—wife's orders—but you can reach me here anytime." He handed the card to Jayell. "You think it over, Jayell, that's all I ask, talk it over with this lovely lady, and you change your mind, you give me a call." He turned to Gwen and took both her hands in his. "Miss Burns, it's been a genuine pleasure. Incidentally, my son, Carl, is eagerly looking forward to trying out for the senior class play this year. Now I can well understand his sudden interest." He turned and walked quickly back to his car, leaving Gwen with an expression of surprise and pleasure.

Jayell chuckled. "If a six-foot-two linebacker turns up at the tryouts, digging his toe and looking like the last man at the Little Big Horn, that'll be Carl."

"Jayell, I don't think you're being fair."

"Ah, John's all right. He just oversells sometimes."

"It sounds like a great opportunity to me. Why don't you take a breather, go to work for them awhile and put some money in the bank. Your boys can keep this going on the side, can't they? Then, when the financial pressure is off somewhat, you can attack it again. You just need a rest, Jay."

Jayell nodded. "But when you've accustomed yourself to sleeping on the floor, there's a danger in getting in a nice, warm bed. You don't want to get out again. If I had to go either way, though, I'd rather be out there with a construction gang than sitting in an architect's office, I know that."

"Jay, you have a blue-collar, with
starch
in it."

"Just a clodhopper, baby."

She put her arms around his neck. "And speaking of nice warm beds . . ."

Jayell kissed her. "Don't forget to leave your window unlocked tonight."

"Jayell, how much longer are we going to play that silly game? Why don't I just come down to the shop?"

"'Cause your bed's got springs! Besides, I kind of like being a porchclimber. Adds excitement."

"I'm convinced Mrs. Porter's putting a glass to the wall."

"Yeah? Well, tonight I'll throw her a few moans. Do her more good than her White River tonic."

"I wonder what we're doing for
him
?" Gwen nodded toward me. I got busy picking something from my sandwich.

Jayell laughed. "We probably just put him through puberty. Come on, big ears, let's go wreck a barn."

"Hey," said Gwen, "can I come too?"

"Ah-no," Jayell said quickly, "you might get hurt. Tearing down those old buildings can be tricky business."

"Well, you can't blame a girl for wanting to get out of doing lesson plans. Will you be late?"

"No, it's just behind the cemetery over the hill from the boardinghouse. I'll stop off and see you on my way back.

"Behind the cemetery!" I said.

Jayell shot me a glance. "Let's go." He kissed Gwen again and climbed into the truck. When we were out of earshot, I said, "The Boggs place? The barn's at Phaedra Boggs's place? No wonder you didn't want her to come along."

"Take your choice," Jayell said.

I kept my job.

Why Jayell broke up with blond, long-legged Phaedra was still a mystery to me and everybody else. She was far and away the most girl in Pollard County, in a rough-edged sort of way, and her reputation never seemed to bother Jayell; certainly it was no wilder than his, though it did run him a close second, and maybe surpassed him in certain particulars, but on balance they seemed made for each other.

As for me, I'd made every effort to avoid Phaedra ever since the time I jumped out of the hedge with a cap pistol and popped a couple of shots at her as she was passing the boardinghouse, and she took the pistol away from me and beat it to pieces against a rock.

There was another time, when I was seven and she was twelve, that we might have encountered each other, but after what happened before I was in no mood to help her. That was the night that the sheriff and a search party came by the house to look for Phaedra after she had been missing for a couple of days and her hysterical father, the cemetery caretaker, convinced the sheriff that one of the Ape Yard Negroes had dragged her off to the woods.

Em wanted us to go along with the men and help look for her. He said it would be good for me. But there was no way I would be caught near the woods at night, unless they dragged me. I had pretty well conquered my ghosts by that time by using the methods Em had taught me, but for some reason I could not go near the woods at night. There was no way to describe or explain to him the paralyzing dread that came over me at the sight of a clump of trees shadowed by dark. I would watch them from the window of the boardinghouse or the loft as the sun set, wondering about it, trying to recall some past incident that might have caused it, imagining the friendly trees as I knew them in the daytime, full of birds and squirrels, but nothing seemed to help. As the long shadows moved jaggedly into the fields, as the gloom slowly descended with malformed shapes of white limbs, and the streaks of dark hung like black tinsel among the trees, the cold, nameless dread came climbing as steadily as the blood coursing toward my heart. I tried not to make a big thing of it, but when we went on a hike through the woods, or inner-tubing down the river, I always carefully calculated the time and distance to be sure we would arrive at home before dark. Fighting Em down to the loft when he was drunk, I could sometimes forget, but usually I stayed the night in the loft after I got him there. And those nights I had to get him from Dirsey's and follow him on his rampages along the river, through the nightmarish world of licking tongues, of hostile creatures that touched and rubbed and skittered away and sat watching behind trees and under branches and climbed gleefully to warn others of my approach and wait ahead in other gangs for that one moment when they could get me alone—they all come as fervently to life in my mind as they were in those early dark days of childhood.

So when the opportunity came to venture into the woods behind the cemetery in search of the girl who had busted my cap pistol, I let it pass. After half a night of searching, it was Em who finally found her, hiding in a boiler in the remains of Tyndall's still. She had run away from her father, she said, who had come home shot down on moonshine and stay-awake pills and, as usual, itching to beat somebody. He used to beat both her and her mother, Phaedra said, but since her mama had gotten sick Phaedra had to bear it all, and she was fed up. She wasn't going back home come hell or high water. Sheriff Middleton had told her she was either going home or to the girl's reformatory. She finally went home, but only after scorching Em's ears for bird-dogging her, and sinking her teeth in the sheriff's hand.

As Phaedra moved along three years ahead of me in school, having failed a couple of grades along the way, I watched in fascination as this tough, croaky-voiced girl with the stringy blond hair metamorphosed into a sleek, full-sweatered young woman. That froggy voice mellowed into a husky burr that did things to the hair on the back of your neck, and by the time she was thirteen she sported a figure that had the teachers lifting eyebrows at each other. And as she grew older, she grew wilder. There was a different sports car or hotrod buzzing over the hill through the cemetery almost every Saturday night, many of them belonging to sons of some of Quarry town's best families, to take her to the drive-in, to restaurants out of town, to the dances at Taylorsville—to take her anywhere, of course, but home.

Jayell met her the year he taught at the high school, and, despite their age difference, dated her a couple of times on the sly (more to ease his own conscience for dating a sixteen-year-old, no doubt, than any fear of the school system), and he said her low academic showing wasn't because she was dumb but because she just didn't give a damn. She was a whiz in math and science, he said, and could rasp out plant names by the hour, many in Latin, and ripped into frogs with a savage curiosity. She loaded her homeroom with the jars of mosses and odorous shrubs she was always collecting from the woods, until finally her teacher, who favored delicate blooms and pretty berries, put her foot down. The trouble was, that was
all
Phaedra cared about, and she let her other grades die. She just wouldn't average out. The girl didn't know a sonnet from a soup recipe, and despite the discovery that she had an above-average singing voice, they could no more get her to join the girls' chorus than they could lure her into the home economics kitchen. The teachers concluded that Phaedra elected the extra math and science classes just to be among the majority of boys in those classes, who were, no doubt, responsible to some degree for her high grades.

One day toward the end of that year, with Jayell leaving and Phaedra on the verge of failing again, she was standing at the pencil sharpener when Charley Thurston, the son of the president of the Three Angels Monument Company, whom she had dated once or twice, and no more, happened along behind her and gave her a hard pinch on her shimmying fanny. Phaedra, apparently in a sour mood, turned and smiled and gave Charley a wink, and then knocked him over a row of desks. Charley's parents said the bridgework alone cost four hundred dollars, and Charley had played first-chair trombone. Enough was enough, the principal had said, and suspended Phaedra for the rest of the year. Phaedra had said it was plenty for her, too, and chucked education altogether.

After that she and Jayell squared off in a serious two-year courtship that had everyone predicting that they would get married or kill each other, when suddenly Jayell broke away and left for Atlanta. He would never say why, or what happened. He just wouldn't talk about it. And no one ever asked him more than once.

Phaedra was now working at Nelson's Florist shop and singing Saturday nights with the Graniteers at the dances in Taylorsville.

"Take it easy on the tin," said Jayell, "he gets to keep that." I was on the roof of the Boggses' barn with a crowbar, making more noise than progress, while Jayell carefully pried off the weathered siding. The sun was hot despite the breeze, and before long the tin was burning through my tennis shoes. The barn was down near the woods. Jayell had come in the back road to avoid the house, but I knew It was only a matter of time.

"What the damn hell are you doing?"

Jayell dropped his crowbar and turned around, and there she stood, in skin-tight cut-off jeans and a white blouse knotted below her breasts.

"What the damn hell does it look like," said Jayell, retrieving his bar. "I'm tearing down this barn."

"What for?"

"I bought it off your old man for the lumber. That all right with you?"

She squinted up at me. "You see a gray mama cat up there?"

"Saw one down near the woods awhile ago."

"Probably moving the kittens. Give me a foot up," she told Jayell. She put a foot in his folded hands and hoisted herself easily through the rafters. After a search of the loft she said, "Yeah, I guess she moved them already. Damn, looks like could have told me. Now I got to find 'em before the dogs do. Help me down." Jayell reached up for her and lifted her down again and she stood for a moment, her hands resting lightly on his shoulders. Without expression she said, "How you been, Jack?"

"Can't complain."

"Got the world's poor in castles yet?"

Jayell smiled. "Still working on it."

Phaedra nodded and walked back up the hill.

We stacked the siding and tin and went to work on the framing. The little barn was tacked together with country carpentry and came apart with little trouble. In a short time we were laying out the rafters and joists.

Phaedra drifted down the hill and sat in the wheelbarrow with a handful of raisins. She sat popping them into her mouth. "What you going to do with that scrap?"

"Build a house."

"Won't be much of a house."

Jayell didn't say anything. He climbed in the wall and started knocking out studs.

"Tick Weaver asked about you the other day. Said he hadn't seen you since you got back."

"How is old Tick?"

"Still pickin' guitar half the time—drunk on his ass the rest."

Jayell laughed and shook his bead. "Been meaning to look in on those fellas."

"We know, you been—tied up."

"Hey"—Jayell wiped his face with a forearm—"you suppose you could find us a drink of water?"

"Sure." Phaedra slid out of the wheelbarrow and tugged at her blouse, pulling the cloth tight across her breasts; a seemingly unconscious movement, except that I knew Phaedra. "If you want something stronger, we've got a jug in the kitchen."

"No, water'll be fine."

"You can help me carry the glasses," she said, lifting a chin at me.

I threw down my bar and followed her up the hill. She moved ahead of me in a full Phaedra walk, brown legs stroking, careful of the motion in her shorts. It was intended for Jayell, of course, and it was just as well, since it would have been lost on me anyway. I was watching that house.