Walking Dunes (21 page)

“When you have the first baby you've put chains around your neck. Children are your own special homemade prison.”

“You can't mean that, Ma. Look at us, Joyce Ellen and me. We love you. Joyce Ellen can't get through a week without you.”

“She can't, she can't!” his mother wept. “That's what I mean!”

David patted her shoulder and stepped back to the stove to watch the coffee. His mother went on. “You'll be gone soon, you know you're dying to get out of here, you hate this house, you know you do.”

“Ma, I only hate it when you fight, I don't know what to do, I want you and Pop to get along—”

“I wouldn't do it over some other way,” his mother said. “I wouldn't not have had you, Davy. But you'll be gone, and what'll I have then? A bitter man, a job with crazy people, a roof that's going to fall in.” With her fists in her hair, she looked like she might pull it out.

David turned his back to her and stared at the pot as the coffee began to perk. He would never marry except for love. He would not live a boring life. He would not be his father, would not be his mother's son. His mother was right, he would go away. He thought of Patsy, and his heart clutched.

He poured the coffee, and cut himself a piece of cake.

20.

He had just closed his locker when he saw Glee running down the hall. She was moving so fast and heedlessly, she knocked some poor girl aside and sent books flying. “Oh, sorry!” she shrieked, still running.

She was out of breath, her face red. “It's so exciting!” she said to him. “You won't believe it.”

“Try me,” he sighed. She wound her arm around his and steered him in the wrong direction. “I've got civics—that way.”

“Walk me to English,” she said. She was bouncing as she walked. “Ohhh!” she squealed.

The bell rang. They were outside her classroom. “Now you've got me in trouble,” he said, although he doubted his stupid civics teacher would notice, or care.

“Nobody's going to get you in trouble, David Puckett.” She was still relishing what she knew that he did not.

“Glee, I'm late, you're going to be tardy in another minute, will you just tell me what's on in your pea-brain so I can get to class?”

She jumped a step and kissed him on the cheek. “You know Sandy and I are practically best friends, and she's on yearbook.”

He could not keep track of her best girlfriends.

“I saw her going down to the office with the announcements.”

“I'm leaving.”

She held his elbow. “Just
wait.
” She peeked inside her classroom and waved at Mr. Rigsby. “I'm here,” she called. Rigsby gave her a glancing look and turned to write on the board. “What are you doing, Hewett?” somebody called from within the class.

The principal came on the intercom. “I know you've all been waiting for the results of the yearbook elections,” he said, “so if you'll all settle down I'll read them to you right now.” Glee was grinning so big it looked like her face would crack.

In a moment he understood why. She was the runner-up for Senior Class Favorite. He was pleased for her. He gave her a big smacking kiss on the mouth. Somebody in the class whistled. “That's not all,” she said.

Beth Ann Kimbrough was Most Beautiful. This was no surprise. “I've got to
go
,” he told Glee. Then he heard his own name. “What did he say?”

Glee kissed him this time. “You were elected Most Likely to Succeed.” She threw her arms around him. “I'm so proud of you! I'm so happy!”

Over her shoulder he saw that half the English class was watching. He gave them a wave and backed away. “That's crazy!” he said. “Succeed at what?”

When he went to his locker at the end of the day there was a folded piece of notebook paper taped to it. “At what?” the paper said. He stared at the handwriting. It seemed familiar.

At what, that was the very question.

The next day he saw Beth Ann at student council. They congratulated one another rather formally. Talking to her brought a lump to his throat. She never said anything in council, unless it was to answer a question. She sat to his right, and back of him, so that he could not see her. It took a lot of self-control to keep from turning. She was so beautiful and elegant.

“I work on yearbook staff during your library hour,” she told him as the meeting was breaking up. “Come by if you can.”

When she saw him later at the door of the yearbook office, she got up and came out into the hall. “I voted for you.”

He did not understand how it happened. “There are kids you know will have their own businesses. Kids who'll go to law school, med school.”

“Everybody knows you'll go away and come back important.”

He laughed. “Everybody but me, I guess.”

“It takes something special. Something different.”

He felt brave and silly. “I voted for you, too.”

“My mother says when somebody tells you you're beautiful they might as well come out and say the rest of it: that you're not very smart.”

“I don't think that!”

“Nobody thinks a girl can be both. My mother was Miss Texas, you know.”

“You look like her.”

Now she smiled. “My mother's the smartest woman I know. She married my daddy.”

“I better get back to the library.”

“Come in a minute. You've got to see what I'm working on.” She was collating the senior goal statements, to go under their photographs. “Look,” she said. “So far four kids want to be missionaries in Africa. One wants to go to Red China. There must be twenty who want to do God's will.”

“I guess that's not too surprising around here.”

“I haven't got to yours.”

“I didn't put one down. Did you?”

“I said I wanted to live up to my parents' example.”

“That's nice.”

“If you think of something, you can still put it in.”

He was looking at her desk. Tyrone Knight wanted to be one of America's finest embalmers. “Look at that,” he said.

She laughed lightly. “I like the serious ones best.” He said he had to go. She touched his hand. “Congratulations to your girlfriend, too, David. She's such a sweet sweet girl.”

He blurted, before he thought about it, “We might be breaking up.”

That night Glee called him at home. “You never learn,” he told her. “WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?” she shouted. “Sometimes you are one hundred percent awful. You go around expecting things of people but you don't say what. You act like I'm a dog peeing on your leg sometimes. Everybody in our class likes me a lot but you!” She slammed down the phone. He called her back. “My dad's not home, I haven't got a car,” he said. “If you would drive we could go to Dewey's a while.” Everybody would be out. They would honk and wave. She had already calmed down. “I'm going with my girlfriends,” she said. “I'm just headed out the door.”

He had the car. A little after five, he went down to the clothing store to pick up his father. Saul had suggested that they go have barbecue that night.

He spent a few minutes admiring the good clothes. He loved the feel of fine fabric between his fingers. The manager, Chuck Bradley, came up behind him. “You're looking good, David,” he said. “How's every little thing treating you?”

David shook Bradley's hand. “Things are swell, sir.”

“Sir, huh! I like your style, David. I could use you at Christmas, you know. Why don't you come down Saturday, let me start breaking you in.”

He did not have enough money for a car, he would need money if he went away to school, but the thought of selling men's pants made his stomach clench. “I'd be grateful for the opportunity, sir,” he said. He wasn't sure what his father would think.

“I'll give you a discount on clothes, too,” Bradley said, “We put a good suit on you, you'll bowl over the customers. I could make a real salesman out of you, you finish school this year. Retail men's wear's a place to build a future.”

Sick at the very thought, David nodded, to let Bradley know he had a customer behind him.

He walked toward the fitting rooms to look for his father. He saw Hayden Kimbrough come out of one of the little rooms, his pants tacked at the bottom, followed by Saul with pins in his mouth. They arranged themselves in front of the three-way mirror. Kimbrough tugged at the inseam below his crotch and studied his reflection. He said something, and Saul nodded. David, standing behind a rack of sport coats, watched as Saul knelt in front of Kimbrough's legs to adjust the seam.

21.

David saw how his life ran along with the pieces laid out like thread on a table top, pieces and pieces of parallel thread, never touching. As soon as he thought of it that way—Glee a thread, his parents a thread, his friendship with Leland, and so on, all the pieces, separate, never touching—he realized it was bound to change. Life was never so neat as to save you trouble when you started complicating it, and he saw that that was what he had been doing, maybe what he was doing just by getting up in the morning and putting in another day. He wanted a complicated life, he realized that, too. He wanted parts of it to butt other parts, and in this way the trivial things, the sad things, could be pushed aside, and better things could take over. Only what were these “things?” He could not find the words he knew were inside him, words like love and music and pain and work.

The only person he could think of who might understand what he was thinking was Patsy Randall. He thought of going to see her and saying, “It would help a lot if I could see the future like a play on CBS. What doors am I going in and out of? What chair am I sitting in? Who's in the room with me?” They could invent possibilities. Sometimes he thought about what had happened that last night between them, and he remembered the things they said to one another, that she was a coward, that he was no man. It did not seem right that they had hurt one another like that, not over sex. He had wanted to be close to her, that was what it had been about. He had been caught up in the drama of the play. He remembered his anger, too, but she had been scared and confused, and he felt sorry that he had not known what to do. He knew an older man would have. Other times, when he thought about her, and about their misunderstanding, it was all quite vague, and he hoped she remembered it that way, as cloud-breath on a cold night.

He saw her downtown a few days after Christmas vacation began. On a break from the clothing store, he had gone into the jeweler's two doors up the street, to look for a Christmas gift for Glee. He wanted his gift to be in a jeweler's box and not from a department store, but he did not want to spend very much money. He had fifteen minutes to look; he thought he would come every day until he decided on something appropriate.

“There are these little pewter hearts,” someone said. He looked up and saw that it was Patsy behind the counter. “Hi, David. And gold lockets, but mostly girls in junior high like those. And a single pearl, on a chain. Of course, it's imitation.” He flushed red. He stood up straight.

“I'm just looking.” He disliked her confidence, her knowing exactly what (who!) he was there for.

“Sure,” she said, and walked away.

He left the store bristling with irritation, but he went back the next day and let her show him everything she had suggested, then left her to put the boxes away again, saying he had to think about it. She was pleasant and helpful and neutral, just the way she would be with any customer. She had already turned away from the counter before he left. She wore red, startling with her hair, and looked wonderful in it.

The third day he bought the pearl drop necklace. He waited, looking at watches, while Patsy took the box away and wrapped it in a creamy paper and tied it with gold ribbon. He thought it was awkward for her to do that for him, but he did not have anything to wrap it in at home, and it was her job, just like his was hanging up pants and jackets all day long, and once in a while selling a shirt or a tie. When she gave him the box, he said it looked very nice. She shrugged, unsmiling, and for a moment he thought, hell, she was acting like that to make a sale, but when he reconsidered, he did not think she would be working for a commission, any more than he was. There really wasn't anything for her to say.

Outside the store he stood for a moment, taking in the bright winter afternoon, looking up and down the street. People were dashing in and out of shops, then hurrying along the sidewalks to their cars, their arms laden with boxes and sacks. He had bought his father a fancy ballpoint pen, his mother a scarf he could not think she would ever wear. He had not thought to get anything for Joyce Ellen.

Across the street, in the doorway of the State Farm office, he saw Saul. He almost raised his hand and called out, but then he saw that his father was standing with a woman in a green cloth jacket and a tight brown skirt. She was a young woman, with short curly dark hair, and David could see her face from the side. She was talking and gesturing animatedly, touching Saul's sleeve, leaning toward him as she laughed. As David watched, they moved closer and talked intensely for a moment. Then Saul squeezed the young woman's arm, and walked away whistling.

Whistling.

David was already at least five minutes late, but he ran over to Walgreen's and bought a Christmas card. They sold him a stamp at the register. Then he had to find a phone book, to look up Patsy Randall's address. The card was a picture of a medieval painting of the Madonna and child. Inside, the message wished the recipient a joyous and holy season. He wrote: I don't know about all that, but Merry Christmas. Below, he signed his name. He dropped it in a mailbox, and went back to work.

A couple of evenings later, she called him, speaking rapidly. “Is that you? I'm glad it's you, I didn't want to talk to one of your parents. That was a nice card. I don't send them out. I never had anybody to send cards to.”