The Tie That Binds (11 page)

“It was like he’d took the wrong turn somewheres,” Wenzel Gerdts said. “Like he’d come up unexpected inside the women’s outhouse. I mean he looked scared and interested at the same time.”

Wenzel Gerdts was telling this story to my dad the following Saturday afternoon. I was there too with my dad, standing on Main Street in front of Wandorf’s Hardware Store while my mother went across the street to shop for a hat. There were other groups of men standing all along the four blocks of stores on either side of the street. The men stood with one foot cocked up behind them against the brick storefronts or sat on the fenders of the cars parked at the curb, all of them talking in groups of three or four about the weather and corn and Roosevelt and war. Their wives were inside the stores, buying bits of elastic and brown cloth and a week’s worth of groceries. They were talking too, of course, above the canned beans and the macaroni, beside the yard goods and the cash register, while here and there a little girl tugged at a skirt and a little boy peeked out like a shy country rabbit. The women went on talking in the stores and they were not in any hurry, because they were in town now and it was a Saturday afternoon in Holt in 1940.

But my dad and I were outside on the sidewalk listening to Wenzel Gerdts talk about Lyman Goodnough. Wenzel was a tall, stringy farmer dressed for the trip to town in clean overalls and he had a fresh cheekful of Red Man chewing tobacco at work in his jaw. As a kid of twelve I was almost as fascinated with the way Wenzel worked tobacco as I was with what he was saying about Lyman.
It was an art the way Wenzel could shoot that long brown spurt of his from where he stood leaning up against Wandorf’s storefront, shoot it clean too, over across the sidewalk down tidy into the gutter, and shoot it every time into the same brown puddle, like he was not just showing off (like if I was doing it, like even if I could do it) but was actually trying to be kind to the folks who might have reason to step there. He would chew awhile and talk and then quick, shoot a neat brown spurt into the gutter, and afterwards lick a drop off his bottom lip, and then go on talking and chewing and not miss a beat.

And Wenzel was saying, “Why sure, the poor dumb geezer looked scared and interested at the same time. And don’t you know I felt kind of sorry for him? Here’s Lyman Goodnough that’s been out there on that farm all them years with the hot sweat running down into his pants, and now he’s somehow turned up inside the Holt Tavern on a Saturday night and he don’t know what to do with hisself.”

So Wenzel said he waved Lyman over to the booth where he was sitting with Harry Barnes and a couple of other men, playing poker and drinking tap beer from a pitcher. They poured Lyman a beer and he tasted it, but he apparently didn’t like the taste of it much, because he set the glass down and looked around at the faces watching him as if he was a kid at school and they were waiting to see whether he could detect the dog manure they had put in his buttermilk.

“He probably hadn’t never tasted beer before,” my dad said.

“Most likely,” Wenzel said. “It ain’t like drinking orange soda pop.”

But Lyman drank his glass of beer finally, without tasting it any more than necessary, just throwing it down quick like he was taking cod liver oil or prune juice. Wenzel
Gerdts poured him another glassful, and Lyman drank it the same way, with both hands on the glass.

“But he ain’t no kid,” Wenzel said. “And I ain’t no nursemaid, neither.”

So Wenzel poured him one more. He threw that one down too, with his Adam’s apple snapping hard above the yellow tie. So by this time Lyman had drunk three of their beers, and about all the profit they had to show for it was that Lyman’s eyes had begun to look like they were glass marbles.

But glass marbles must have been enough for Harry Barnes, a bald-headed man of fifty-some and the best poker player in Holt County. Harry studied Lyman’s eyes for a minute, and then said, “Boys, I believe Lyman’s ready. Deal him in.”

“But he didn’t know how to play poker, did he?” my dad said.

“No,” Wenzel said. “I had to show him.”

“Then he got a good taste of that too,” my dad said. “How much money did you and Harry Barnes take off him?”

“Now wait a minute,” Wenzel said. He shot that quick neat spurt of his over into the gutter and licked the drop off. “It wasn’t like that,” he said. “Sure we was playing for money—a nickel ante with a dime bump—because Harry Barnes ain’t going to play for matchsticks, is he?”

“Not unless they’re gold matchsticks,” my dad said.

“Sure,” Wenzel said. “But it wasn’t like you think it was. I tried to explain it to him—what a ace is and about pairs and full houses and straight flushes. But goddamn it, he just don’t get it.”

“So what you’re saying is,” my dad said, and I could see he was smiling in his eyes. “You’re saying you ain’t going to tell us how much money you took off him.”

“Now, damn it,” Wenzel said. “That ain’t either what
I’m saying. I’m saying I tried to explain it to him but he just don’t get it. He keeps asking me things like how come a flush’ll take a straight, or how come three deuces is better than four cards even when them four cards is two aces and two kings. What in hell was I supposed to tell him then? If I started talking percentages, we was going to be there all night and never get no cards played. Let alone get any money to change hands.”

“Okay,” my dad said. “So what’d you do? Because you already said how he played poker.”

“That’s right,” Wenzel said. “Lyman played poker. He played poker all right. And that’s just the damn hell of it. Call it just a middle-aged farm boy’s dumb luck that never had time to play cards before, or say it’s because Harry Barnes finally wrote it down for him on one of them bar-room napkins. Because that’s what Harry done: he wrote it all down for him, all that poker knowledge down there in black ink on a paper napkin. Why hell, even somebody that never played poker before in his life, let alone a hand of whist or old maids, even somebody as green as Lyman is is bound to win if he can just manage to get Harry Barnes to write it all down for him on a Holt Tavern napkin. And the only thing that seemed to bother him was he hadn’t drawed no royal flush yet.”

“You mean he won some money then,” my dad said.

“Won hell,” Wenzel said. “Won hell—he won the first five hands he played and he was still drinking our beer.”

“Well sir,” my dad said. “I guess old Roy Goodnough did you and Harry Barnes a favor keeping Lyman buried out there all these years. You might have to stay home at nights.”

“It might be less taxing,” Wenzel said. “It surely might.” Then he laughed and spat into the gutter again but didn’t snap it off clean enough, so that a brown spit string hung
from his bottom lip. He wiped it off with his hand and smeared it onto his pants cuff.

“But how long’d Lyman stay there?” my dad said. “How long did you and Harry Barnes let him pocket your nickles?”

“About five dollars’ worth,” Wenzel said. “And that wasn’t near long enough.”

Because, according to Wenzel, after Lyman had won the first five hands of poker he played, it began to appear that he was getting bored. It was as if he was saying to himself, So this here is the game of poker that I been hearing so much about all these years. Well, shoot now, it ain’t so much. It ain’t a tall what it’s cracked up to be. So I reckon I’ll just see what else there is to do on a Saturday night. And what Lyman did was, he stood up in the middle of a hand that had already been dealt and he went over to one of the waitresses. It didn’t seem to make any difference to him that the men in the booth were trying to play cards and that Harry Barnes had finally managed to deal himself three aces and a king of spades. Because when Harry called him back, asked him where in the hell he thought he was going, all Lyman said was, “Oh. You want your money back. Here, you can have it. I don’t want it none.”

“So he give it all back,” my dad said.

“Every dime,” Wenzel said. “Dumped it all out on the table.”

“Well, it ain’t like planting corn or stacking hay,” my dad said. “He hadn’t sweat enough for it.”

“Sure,” Wenzel said. “Only you ain’t played poker with Harry Barnes.”

“Just once,” my dad said. “I could see it wasn’t gambling. But then you was saying how Lyman went over to some waitress.”

“Agnes Wilson,” Wenzel said. “He went over to Agnes Wilson, that big hefty gal with pink hair and them big legs that some boys claim is soft as pillows. Anyway, she ain’t been working at the tavern long—come over here from Norka when her husband run off to Denver with some telephone operator. She’s got that kid that got hisself kicked out of school for playing with ladies’ corsets.”

Then for the first time that afternoon I said something. I had been listening to them talk and watching Wenzel spit tobacco, but now they were talking about something I knew about. I said, “No, Mr. Gerdts, I believe it was garter belts.”

Wenzel Gerdts looked at me as if he was shocked, as if someone had come up behind him and buzzed him with a cow prodder. He seemed to have forgotten that all that time I had been standing there with them in front of Wandorf’s Hardware Store. It was as if I was a stray calf that had suddenly decided to speak, even if all I had to say was: “Garter belts.”

“Was it?” Wenzel said, looking at me. “I heard it was corsets.”

“No, I believe it was garter belts all right,” I said. “He was making slingshots with them and selling them to kids for a nickel, three for a dime.”

“Did you buy one?” my dad said.

“No, sir,” I said. “The elastic was all pooped out. It was too stretched.”

My dad started laughing then, and Wenzel Gerdts choked a little on his Red Man chewing tobacco. I didn’t know what I had said that was funny, but I grinned and felt pleased that I had been able to make my dad laugh. He didn’t laugh much, not openly or loudly. The amusement would show in his eyes, but I don’t remember him laughing
very often. He laughed that time, though, and maybe because I was the cause of it is the reason why I remember that afternoon so well.

Anyway, when Wenzel stopped choking, he took a silver half-dollar out of his overall pocket and gave it to me. My dad said I could keep it, and Wenzel said, “Now you can buy you a slingshot that ain’t already had the stretch pooped out of it.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “But not right now. I want to stay here.”

“That’s right, son,” my dad said. “I believe Wenzel’s about done storytelling anyway.”

“Sure,” Wenzel said. “There ain’t much more to tell.”

But before Wenzel Gerdts went on, he stood there and chewed a while. All along Main Street men were still talking in groups, and here and there a woman was carrying a box of groceries out to a car parked diagonally at the curb. While we waited for Wenzel to continue, a yellow dog came sniffing along the cars, wetting hubcaps and tires, until a man in a straw hat yelled at it, then the dog looked up and trotted across the street and began to work its way back up the block towards the railroad tracks, wetting wheels as it went.

Anyway, after a minute or two Wenzel seemed to have worked his wad to the right pitch and he went on. He told us that when Lyman stood up from the booth where he had been drinking their beer and taking their money, he walked over and stood directly in front of Agnes Wilson. He didn’t say anything to her, though. He just stood there hang faced and bashful. Of course he still had that yellow tie on and that black Sunday suit, so the only change in him from when he first put foot inside the tavern door was that his eyes had turned to glass marbles, or more like bloody egg yolks now, because by this time he
had drunk more than just three beers. But again, it was as if he was starting over; he didn’t know what to do with himself after he had somehow made the first effort. But that didn’t seem to matter this time either: Agnes Wilson figured it out for both of them. She said something to him and he nodded, then she set her bar tray down and took his hands and showed him where to put them, one on her soft waist and the other in her white hand, and they began to dance.

“That is,” Wenzel said, “if you can call what Lyman was doing with her dancing.”

“Why?” my dad said. “Couldn’t Harry Barnes write that down for him too? How to dance, I mean.”

“I suppose Harry could,” Wenzel said. “But Harry didn’t need to. Agnes was doing everything anybody needed to do. She had him sucked up against her like he was a fifty-dollar bill.”

So Lyman must have felt that he had arrived in heaven. He was on the dance floor at the Holt Tavern with his face hidden in Agnes Wilson’s pink hair. Her full, ripe body was pressing him all along his own, and he had dispensed with holding her hand. Both of his middle-aged bachelor arms were wrapped around her so that his white Sunday shirt cuffs showed bright against the black of her waitress dress where his hands rode snug above her heavy buttocks. When the dance band started up another song Agnes would shuffle Lyman around a little bit on the dance floor, but between songs they just stood there, waiting, not moving at all, while Lyman maintained the same clenching hold on her, like he didn’t dare let go.

“Like they was two dogs that was locked,” Wenzel said. “You should of saw it.”

“How long did it go on?” my dad said.

“I wasn’t counting the dances,” Wenzel said. “And I
don’t guess Lyman was neither. He was too satisfied to do something like count.”

But it must have gone on long enough that an hour or two passed. Agnes Wilson didn’t seem to mind it, though. Occasionally she patted him on the head or tickled a finger in his ear, and now and then she winked at the other people in the tavern, who didn’t seem to mind it either; they were all going up to the bar to get their own drinks. They were slapping one another on the back and congratulating themselves as if they were all in attendance at some significant event. I suppose it was an event too: Lyman Goodnough was enjoying himself.

“Until, bang,” Wenzel said. “All in a sudden, he’s gone. He’s took off.”

“Wait a minute,” my dad said. “You mean he got bored with that too? That don’t leave him much to graze on. He’s already used up beer and poker and women.”