Walking Dunes (33 page)

Hayden smiled indulgently. “Are we putting odds on two minutes?”

“Not me, sir, I don't gamble,” David said, hoping he sounded easygoing and humorous, rather than stupid.

“Not on trivial matters, anyway, hey, David?”

“Sir?”

“Life's a gamble. I say you ought to take a chance or two. The West was built on risks. And I'd say the odds are in your favor.”

David was lost. He tried to show no expression at all, while he searched for something to say.

“I'm glad to have a moment with you. Two minutes, as they say. I've been meaning to talk to you.”

David wondered what Beth Ann had said. He swallowed hard.

“I get down to Austin every month or so. How would you like to make a trip with me, say in June? I could take you down to the legislature, see what might happen for you in the fall. You are set to go to UT, aren't you?”

“On paper. I guess I will, if I get a job, find a place, all that.” He could not imagine how he was going to last that long in the house with the baby.

“We could look around.”

“That would be great. I appreciate it.”

Hayden studied David. “You're wondering why, aren't you?”

David squirmed, though he hoped it was not noticeable. He felt itchy and hot. With effort, he smiled. “Beth Ann—” he said.

Hayden waved his hand. “Not Beth Ann. You. Laurel and I have grown fond of you. We see things in you.” He leaned his elbows on the table, closing the gap between them. “We look at some of the boys we've known all their lives, and we see boys without intention, boys without spines. Not all, I'm not saying our friends don't have fine youngsters! But there are some. They lack sinew. They've had it too easy too soon.”

David wheezed.

“Besides, the world can't be run by a tiny elite. You have to have new blood.”

“I'd like to be that,” David said, finding the courage for a certain heartiness.

Hayden sat back in his chair. He waved at a waiter and asked for two brandies. The waiter looked at David. “My wife will be right back,” Hayden said patiently. The waiter nodded and came back with the snifters. He set one in front of Hayden, the other at an empty place. Hayden smiled. As soon as the waiter turned around, he passed the glass to David. The first taste made David's nose and throat burn, but the second made his chest warm pleasantly. He could not think of anything to say. He hoped he looked casual about the brandy, and about Hayden Kimbrough's little speech, which might or might not be over.

“It's different for girls,” Hayden said. “Beth Ann will go to college, study something not too hard, pledge a sorority. She'll grow more beautiful, more sophisticated, more like her mother. She'll make a fine wife one day.”

David's face flamed. He had not finished the brandy, but he could not take another swallow. He set the glass down gently on the tablecloth. “All in good time,” he said.

Hayden smiled broadly. “Exactly. That's it, young man. All in good time.”

David flushed deeply, then relaxed. He had merely stumbled on the right phrase, but with it said, he could see clearly what Beth Ann's father had on his mind. A small hand-out, a bit of caution. No promises. It was not quite a contract, was it? But the door wasn't shut. Here's a leg up, Puckett, see what you can do with it.

What more could a poor West Texas boy ask for? Even Saul would say it was a fair deal. All David had to do was work hard and grow up, while Beth Ann matured with some less effort. Then they would see.

All David could lose was Beth Ann. He could gain a better life, the one his classmates thought he was headed for.

He picked the snifter up again and drained the glass. “Thank you, Mr. Kimbrough,” he said. He was pleased with the nice dark timbre of his voice. “I am truly grateful.”

“Don't you think it's time you called me Hayden? Look, here come the girls.”

David and Beth Ann sat on the patio while her parents had a drink with friends in the bar. It had been a hot, summery day, and though it was much cooler now in the darkness, there was a pleasant smell and feeling to the air. David could feel the brandy. His toes seemed far away, but warm.

“What did you and Daddy talk about?”

“Not about. Around. We talked around you.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That I'm a patient young man. That I know you'll want to do better if you can.”

“David, you didn't!”

“Around. We talked around these things.”

“They know I like you a lot.”

“I like them too. I always supposed rich people were arrogant, but they're not.”

“Arrogant?” Beth Ann said idly, as if it were a foreign word she only wanted to pronounce.

“Though it's hard not to mind.”

“Mind what?”

“Where other people start from.”

She didn't comment. Someone blinked the yellow patio lights.

“Maybe we should go in.”

The lights went out. “I like the dark,” she said. Through the glass doors, the dining room, now empty, seem to glow softly like a bowl of fireflies. They sat side by side on lounge chairs, their legs stretched out. She reached for his hand. “Davy, what did you do with that girl's diary?”

The feeling in his hand, one second before so warm in hers, went numb. He could still feel his toes, but not his fingers. He pulled his hand away, sighed, adjusted his position in the chair.

“Stop squirming and answer me.”

He could imagine why men hit women. She would have to stop talking to him like that, sooner or later.

“I hear Mommy and Daddy talking about it. The case, not the diary. Of course they don't know about the diary.”

“Notebook. She called it a notebook.”

“Daddy says Mr. Crawford will say that Leland was crazy when he shot her, that she made him crazy, but that when he woke up in the morning, he was all better. It was all out of his system. Kids at school, they say she was weird. She bugged people. Daddy says Mr. Crawford can make it work. There'll be a hearing about it, it won't ever go to trial.”

“That's what the notebook shows. The way she was.”

“But they know all that already! You're being stubborn and
stupid
, David. They don't need her
notebook
. It would just be embarrassing. It would make you look just awful.”

“You're the only person besides me who knows that it exists.”

“So get rid of it! And yours, too.”

“Mine?”

“What do you need to write things down for? You're going to go to college, you're going to go to law school. What's to write down? That's all high school stuff. She's dead.
You're my boyfriend now.
”

They heard Laurel's soft voice calling them. “Beth Ann, David. Are you out there?”

As they stood up, David pulled Beth Ann against his body. Over her shoulder he could see her mother standing in the open door, peering out into the darkening evening. He kissed Beth Ann quickly, hard. He thrust his tongue into her mouth. She pulled her face away. “Over here, Mommy,” she called. “We're coming.” To David she whispered, “I want to see it. Her notebook. I want to read it.” She was panting lightly.

“I thought you didn't want anything to do with it.”

“Before you destroy it. I want to see it. There's no reason not. I already know, don't I? Don't I?”

35.

He felt like an alley cat. When night came, he wanted to prowl. He felt he might explode. He wanted to swim at school, but he did not have an excuse anymore. The coach had moved him out of tennis practice last hour into general P.E., a class he cut repeatedly. It had been a mistake to drop tennis so precipitously. He had not thought it through. Maybe he would not have won big. Maybe he would not have won at all. But he would have looked like someone with guts, plowing on when his partner defected, and instead he looked like a tuft of milkweed. The galling thing was, nobody cared. They did not miss him. He got word about his transfer out of tennis by student messenger, a little slip of paper with numbers and times and his name on it. He literally had not spoken to the coach again. The other players acted like they did not see him. They were doing fine. Maybe not sweeping the state, not like that, but in every tournament somebody made the cut. Lasky came in fourth at the San Angelo invitational.

I could have found my stride, if I'd kept at it
. Thinking that, he ran sweating through the streets at night. When he had worn himself out—otherwise he did not know how he would ever get to sleep—he walked, sometimes slowing down so that it was a matter of one foot in front of another, like an old woman. He imagined himself as Saul, roaming these streets, escaping the house. He walked again and again to the apartments where he was certain
she
had lived.
I would have understood
, he cried out in the night to his father. If only Saul had talked to him. Then what?

Then I would have been in his confidence. I would have said, “
Good luck.
”

Back in the house, the night before graduation, the baby was screeching. Marge was not yet home from work, and Joyce Ellen was just about at her limit. She glared at David as he walked through the livingroom. “Jesus,” he said, “what do you want me to do?”

He showered, thought a moment about going to bed, then dressed in clean chinos and shirt. The baby's energy was amazing. He squalled for ten, fifteen minutes at a stretch, took a breather for five minutes, then screamed some more. He was named Ward, after Marge's father. Screaming Ward.

“Do you take him to the doctor?” he asked Joyce Ellen. She was walking around and around the table in the kitchen. The baby was seated on her palms, tucked back against her chest. He looked pleased, for the moment, drowsy and self-satisfied, the little tyrant. David knelt in front of the open refrigerator, looking for something to eat, finding only crusts of unwrapped cheese, a curled single slice of bologna, a row of eggs. He slammed the door. “Isn't he SICK or something?”

Joyce Ellen began bawling. The baby's eyes opened wide, as if in amazement, then he set in yowling again.

David stormed out the front door and around to Saul's storeroom. There was everything, as if Saul would be back in an hour. A dark gray thread in the sewing machine, the scissors partly open, a saucer of pins. David picked up the scissors and threw them across the little room. They bounced off the wall and fell into a box of kitchen towels.

Boxes of clothes and fabrics were piled against the wall. There might be a thousand dollars worth of goods left. David would have to go back to Fort Stockton, and make the circuit. He could make more money off this, his father's leftovers, than from any kind of job he could find for the summer. And, item by item, he would be rid of the remnants of his father.

Had Saul planned it carefully, over weeks? Had the two of them sat huddled on her bed (he in his tattered underwear?), laughing and figuring it out? Or had something struck him like lightning, set him aflame, so that he suddenly just
had to go?
Nobody had known it was happening. Saul had come home sometime late that evening, but not so late that Marge was home. He had packed a suitcase, taken some of his things, not all, clothes and
War and Peace
and
Anna Karenina
. He had slipped the suitcase into the yard through the bedroom window, then strolled back through the house, not saying a word—it would look like another of his walks—and outside he had collected his belongings and walked to meet her.

David went into the house again, banging the screen door behind him. He did not know what to do. He thought he would wait for his mother, and drink with her. He would say it was a celebration. His last night of childhood, if you thought about it. Tomorrow, graduation, adulthood. Why did it all seem to swirl around him, why did he seem to be sinking into it? He had grown up on the plains; he wanted to look out and see the future as a great undulating landscape of good fortune.

Joyce Ellen had turned off the lights. He stepped into the living room and paused for a moment. The light on the top of the stove in the kitchen shone eerily across the two rooms. He stepped toward it. From the little bedroom came the sudden piercing wails of baby Ward, followed immediately by the sharp shriek of Joyce Ellen, who had been sitting in the dark, in her father's easy chair. She sprang for David, and pounded him on the shoulders and neck. “He was asleep!” she screamed. “He was asleep!”

“You're crazy!” David shouted back, pushing her arms away, and rushing across to the kitchen. He looked back at her. “You need to be in Mother's unit, Joyce Ellen.”

“I need sleep!” she yelled back. “I lie in that bunk bed and the baby is six inches away, I hear his breath whistle, I hear his little poots. You don't know, you're off in the luxury of your private world. I WANT YOUR ROOM. At least then I can put him across the room from me. I can look at him across space. I can go to sleep!”

David moved quickly to his room and slammed the door. He leaned against it, gasping. He had to get out of there. He could not take it, not all summer, not one more night. He had to get out of there, right away. He pulled a duffel bag out of the closet and began to stuff clothes in it, knocking his drawers onto the floor. He packed until the bag was too full to close, took out a pair of aged jeans, and drew it shut. He threw it at the back door, where it thudded and shivered still. He grabbed his pillow and a blanket off the bed and threw them onto the duffel bag, took his cash out of his sock drawer, then stood staring at the bed. He remembered that Poe story, “The Telltale Heart,” with its beating heart—and an eye? Did an eye beat too? That was what the damned notebook was like. It lay under the mattress, pounding.

He pulled the mattress off partway onto the floor, and grabbed both notebooks and stuffed them up under his armpit. The cunning little bitch, he thought. This was why she had given it to him. She could not get to him alive, but she had him, dead.