Heading Out to Wonderful (6 page)

She looked like the kind of pinup girl men had carried pictures of off to the war, and looked at in the lonely nights, after they had written to their sweethearts. A pinup girl in sunglasses, her eyes hidden from the world. Together, Boaty and Sylvan looked important, like people you’d see in Life magazine.

“Him you know,” said Will. “You’ll want to know about her. Tell him, Alma.”

“I only know what everybody in town knows.” She paused, as if she were trying to recall some tale, a myth she had heard as a child. “There’s a place about fifteen miles from here called Arnold’s Valley. It’s hard to get to, but it’s very wild and beautiful, lovely. It’s untouched by time, like Eden. I’ve only been there once, a long time ago. The same fifteen or sixteen families have lived there for generations, since before this town even started, and they don’t like strangers, and they don’t much like modern life.

“Nobody goes there, except occasionally people from the state, who go and try to get them to send their children to school, and, for a couple of years, men from the army who tried to get the boys to sign up for the draft. The boys hid in the woods, until finally they were left alone. But, still, their children don’t go to school, and their boys never went to war. If anything goes wrong, they decide it themselves. When they marry, if they church marry at all out there, or if they die, they take care of everything themselves. Nothing leaves the valley.

“Once in a while, you’ll see them in town, buying shoes, or sugar, things they can’t grow themselves. But not often.

“Harrison Glass was a bachelor until he was forty-eight years old. He took care of his mother, I have to say that, a difficult woman who had spells and seizures and was not only sick but a hypochondriac. Thin and romantic, like she’d been planted in weak soil. And three weeks after she died and he watched her go into the ground, he drove out to Arnold’s Valley for the first time. Everybody thought he was going to buy some land there. He didn’t talk to anybody, and nobody talked to him, just watched that big car of his wander the dirt roads. But it wasn’t land he was after.

“He went out twelve times, they say. On the third visit, he saw a girl walking in a yard, and then he went more often, and looked for her, in the yard, in the fields, sitting on the porch.

“On the last visit, he stopped his car and got out in front of her house. He walked into the yard, knocked on the door, and spoke to her father. Then he bought her for cash, along with the farm neither one of them ever went back to I don’t believe, bought her for one or two thousand dollars, although it could have been more, could have been less. She was seventeen.”

“He bought her like a head of cattle,” Will added.

“That was three years ago. He brought her to town, and he married her. We went to the wedding, such as it was, Will and I. Except to say ‘I do,’ she never spoke one word during the whole day. Then he took her to the one place she wanted to go, Hollywood, so she could get on a bus and take a tour of the stars’ homes—five days out, a week there, and five days back.

“And, since that time, she’s hasn’t spoken much more. He bought her her own car, and she drives into Lexington every other day to go to the movies. She’s crazy about the movies.

“Her name is Sylvan. Isn’t that a lovely name? It might be her real name, some old mountain name, or she might have heard it on the radio or made it up out of some movie. Sylvan Glass.

“She goes to the movies and sees some getup, or she cuts out a picture from a movie magazine, and then she gets a woman in town to make a five-and-dime version of what they wear in Hollywood. That’s how she learned to speak in that fancy way, first by listening to soap operas on the radio from the time she could walk, and then by watching movie stars, once Boaty got her that car.

“And, yes, that is her real hair color. Everybody in Arnold’s Valley is blonde, pretty much. She’ll never go back there.”

“Alma drove out there once, it’s that big house on the way to the slaughterhouse, and asked her to come into town and have an iced tea and a visit.” Will looked at his wife.

“She said she’d be happy to,” Alma said, smiling. “Sweet as she could be. But she never came. I never asked her again.”

Charlie never looked at Sylvan the whole time Alma was talking. He just took it all in. From his first sight of her, that day in the butcher shop, she had burned herself into his mind, vivid and beautiful, the effect she had on most men, and women, too.

“It’s a paradise out there in Arnold’s Valley,” Alma said. “Tended. Cared for. They have nothing, no money, no education—no regular morals, a lot of people say although I don’t believe it—nothing except for their land. They don’t know anything about what’s going on in the world. They only care about their place, farm after farm. They never leave it. Maybe it’s religion. Maybe they’re just private people. The only things Sylvan knows, she’s gotten from the radio, and, in the last three years, at the movies.”

“She’s beautiful,” Charlie said as he stole a glance over to where Harrison was laughing loudly while Sylvan stood silently by his side.

“Don’t say that too loud,” said Will. “Boaty Glass’ll cut your ear off quick as that. He was a good boy, my best friend, but he’s a mean man now with a lot of money and a quick temper and a nasty disposition.”

Charlie stood up. “Sam, let’s go say hello to Mr. and Mrs. Glass.” He took the boy by the hand, and they walked over to where the couple stood and Charlie shyly shook Boaty’s hand. Then Sam shook Boaty’s hand, too.

Sylvan turned to him, took off her sunglasses so her green eyes flashed in the sun, and she, too, shook both of their hands, first the boy’s, then Charlie’s, without a word. But you could tell the way Charlie let his hand hang just for the moment in the air where her hand had been that something, some word of recognition, had passed between them. It was as though whatever was going to happen between them had already happened, was already over and done with.

If it had been winter, there might have been a static spark, something visible, but it was too warm. Something had been said, but she was the only one who knew what it was.

Charlie let his hand drift in the air for a moment, a long moment, watching the last of her gaze as her sunglasses went back on, and then he put his hand in his pocket, holding on to the warmth of her brief touch. Then he nodded, first at her, then at her husband, and he and the boy returned to their places.

“She smells nice, Mama,” said the boy. “Like she cost a lot of money.”

It was late afternoon, the second time he saw her. But twice was enough. Something had been said. The movie had started.

They didn’t stay long. Harrison Glass and his wife stayed no more than an hour, Boaty eating a helping of everything, telling dirty jokes to red-faced Baptist men, laughing while the food dribbled down his chin, sweating like a pig, Sylvan nodding charmingly to everyone, but hardly speaking, staring off somewhere, one, two, glances in Charlie’s direction, no more. Her vague green eyes sparking into sudden sharp focus at the sight of his face, seemingly random glances, once, twice, a third time as her husband shut the car door for her. No more than that, but that was enough.

After they left there was some more eating, and a little dancing—although ordinarily the church didn’t much approve of it—until the shadows were long on the makeshift ball field and all the children were tired and the smell of cooking oil was thick in everybody’s clothes and all the oysters were gone.

THE TWILIGHT BEGAN
to
fall and then to fade, and Christmas lights out of somebody’s attic were turned on, but the children were arguing, and Ray Turner drove the Gadsden twins home to their big house, the biggest in town, because they didn’t drive and he was a good, careful boy. People began to leave after that, and the Baptist men and women began to clean up whatever the animals could get at, leaving the rest for tomorrow.

Charlie waved to the Haisletts and got into his truck and drove out to his land by the river, the night clear, the stars as close as the top of the willows by the river, and he lit a Lucky Strike and wrote one word in his diary, one Christian name. Then he drank his glass of whiskey and said his faithless prayers and lay out on the ground and slept with only one thing on his mind, burning bright in his eyes and torching his heart like music.

CHAPTER FIVE

F
IRST OF ALL,
this should be clear: She wasn’t a bad girl. She was a dreamer, and she wanted things, something, anything of her own. What girl doesn’t? What girl her age, coming out of what she came out of, wouldn’t go a long way to get closer to where she wanted to be in this world? She dreamed of movie stars years and years before she even saw a movie, and only when she finally saw her first one, hypnotized in the dark in the State Theater, could she even put a name to what it was she had always wanted.

Where did she get such ideas? From the time she was six, she listened to The Romance of Helen Trent on the radio. Helen Trent was always in love with and never saying yes to Gil Whitney, who wanted her with all his heart, even though she was thirty-five. On the show, Helen was always and forever thirty-five, and Sylvan hung on her every word, her every refusal of Gil’s love, forming the words the actors spoke, mimicking their ways, and maybe she learned it from there. For her, Helen Trent was a real person, frozen in time, speaking perfect English, and designing costumes for movie stars. Sylvan wanted to be like her, to have the life she had. Maybe the dreaming started there, maybe that’s why that thing, that way of being, caught her imagination and fired it up. Hollywood. The people and the clothes. The hopelessly elusive quality of true love. The kind of love that only little girls think is possible.

Where would a girl get such notions? Where do you get porcelain skin, or blonde hair or green eyes? They’re born in you, those ideas, and the patient ones wait, and the lucky ones find, and the smart ones get. She got.

You have to understand where she came from, what she came out of. If you heard the name she was born with, the one she had before she married Boaty Glass, you would laugh. Most people did. They laughed at her all the time in the first days. She was only seventeen and she knew they were laughing and she went about her life quietly, pretending to the world that it wasn’t happening the way it had happened every time she set foot in town.

This is America. She had a right. She had a right to be whoever she wanted to be, and she was becoming that person every minute of every day, long before she even knew who the person was. She, like the rest of the country, was always becoming, never just being, never at rest, and because now she’s part of a story, a story that gets told again and again, she just goes on becoming, even after anybody who actually knew or saw her is dead and gone. Most of us will be ended then, when we die, we will have become, but not her. So, in her way, she did get to be a movie star.

I knew her. I saw her. She was, I can promise you, a woman of quality.

She was remarkable, particularly considering where she came from, who her people were. Nowhere and nothing, that’s what. She was like a buried treasure until Boaty Glass got the idea in his head that he should take a wife, and that that wife, like everything else Boaty got, should be acquired cheaply and should be of the best quality. He got to be so rich because, from the time he was a boy, he could drive a bargain like a New York lawyer, and he got to be so fat because he couldn’t seem to find a limit, could never know how much was enough.

Ever notice how a fat man’s shirts never wrinkle? A skinny man, he’ll be a mess by noon, but a fat man’s flesh holds the cloth so tight, his shirt still looks pressed when he takes it off for bed.

Now think about Boaty, lying in his bed night after night, in that big house he had lived in all his life and couldn’t get rid of. After the war, people didn’t want that kind of thing any more, because families that had been together on the same land for two hundred years went their own ways and left nobody except the old ones to look after what the young ones called the “home place.”

Think of Boaty, forty-eight years old, five eight and 280 pounds, lying in his cold bed at night and dreaming of a young blonde girl who would be his wife and bear his children. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand he was a gross and greedy man, crafty enough to satisfy his greed. He just didn’t care. He just wasn’t built that way. Boaty was like a big round of dough that had never been baked into bread, worthless as nutrition, unfeeling and fat as risen flour paste.

Boaty had never been with a woman. Even before he got so huge, he was already gross in other ways, arrogant about his lineage, and unkempt and unruly in public and private. His knowledge of women was formed by the pages of girly magazines he bought in Staunton and kept in a box under his bed. He wore flesh-colored neckties that had pinup girls showing their breasts painted on the inside, and he thought it was cute to show these off to religious men at Rotary Club meetings.

But even Boaty Glass had feelings, although you’d never know it. Whatever else might be said about him, he’d worked hard all his life, and, rich as he was, he still lived alone. He’d seen the sad and mournful look on his mother’s face as she died, looking at her son, heavy, sad, childless, and rich. He felt he owed it to her, to himself, to have a wife and children, the best wife, stunning, acquired as cheaply and craftily as everything else, and children whose futures grew more grandiose with every passing night, the royalty of his own widening realm. Tall, handsome, muscular boys and lean, well-mannered girls. Popular children, children who would be sought after and asked everywhere, and who’d grow up to be successful and respected in a way Boaty knew he never would be.