Blue World (27 page)

The man had crew-cut hair the color of fire. He wore a red-checked shirt and trousers the shade of Italian wine. On his feet were red cowboy boots, and he was unloading a U-Haul trailer hooked to the back of a beat-up old red station wagon. The woman wore a pink blouse and crimson jeans, and her shoulder-length hair glinted strawberry blond in the strong morning light. A little boy and little girl, about six and seven, were scampering around underfoot, and both of them had hair that was almost the same color of the house they’d come to inhabit.

Well, suddenly the man in red looked up, saw us on the porch, and waved. “Howdy!” he called in a twanging voice that sounded like a cat being kicked. He put aside the crimson box he’d been carrying, strode across the street in his red cowboy boots and right up the steps onto our porch, and he stood there grinning. His complexion looked as if he’d been weaned on ketchup.

“Hello,” my mom said breathlessly, her hand digging into Dad’s arm. He was about to snort steam.

“Name’s Virgil Sikes,” the man announced. He had thick red eyebrows, an open, friendly face, and light brown eyes that were almost orange. He held a hand out toward my dad. “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure.”

Dad was trembling; he looked at Virgil Sikes’ hand like it was a cow flop in a bull’s pasture.

I don’t know why. I guess I was nervous. I didn’t think. I just reached out and shook the man’s hand. It was hot, like he was running a high fever. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Bobby Deaken.”

“Howdy, Bobby!” He looked over his shoulder at the woman and two kids. “Evie, bring Rory and Garnett up here and meet the Deakens!” His accent sounded foreign, slurred and drawled, and then I realized it was Deep South. He grinned wide and proud as the woman and two children came up the steps. “This is my wife and kids,” Virgil said. “We’re from Alabama. Long ways from here. I reckon we’re gonna be neighbors.”

All that red had just about paralyzed my dad. He made a croaking sound, and then he got the words out, “Get off my porch.”

“Pardon?” Virgil asked, still smiling.

“Get off,” Dad repeated. His voice was rising. “Get off my porch, you damned redneck hick!”

Virgil kept his smile, but his eyes narrowed just a fraction. I could see the hurt in them. He looked at me again. “Good to meet you, Bobby,” he said in a quieter voice. “Come on over and visit sometime, hear?”

“He will not!”

Dad told him.

“Ya’ll have a good day,” Virgil said, and he put his arm around Evie. They walked down the steps together, the kids right at their heels.

Dad pulled free from my mother. “Nobody around here lives in a red house!” he shouted at their backs. They didn’t stop. “Nobody with any sense wants to! Who do you think you are, comin‘ around here dressed like that? You a Commie or somethin’? You hick! Why don’t you go back where you belong, you damned--” And then he stopped suddenly, because I think he could feel me staring at him. He turned his head, and we stared at each other in silence.

I love my dad. When I was a kid, I used to think he hung the moon. I remember him letting me ride on his shoulders. He was a good man, and he tried to be a good father--but at that moment, on that hot July Saturday morning, I saw that there were things in him that he couldn’t help, things that had been stamped in the gears of his soul by the hands of ancestors he never even knew. Everybody has those things in them--little quirks, meannesses, and petty things that don’t get much light; that’s part of being human. But when you love somebody and you catch a glimpse of those things you’ve never seen before, it kind of makes your heart pound a little harder. I saw also, as if for the first time, that my dad had exactly the same shade of blue eyes as my own.

“What’re you lookin‘ at?” Dad asked, his face all screwed up and painful.

He looked so old. There was gray in his hair, and deep lines on his face. So old, and tired, and very much afraid.

I dropped my gaze like a dog about to be kicked, because my dad always made me feel weak. I shook my head and got back inside the house quick.

I heard my mom and dad talking out there. His voice was loud, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying; then, gradually, his voice settled down. I lay on my bed and stared at a crack in the ceiling that I’d seen a million times. And I wondered why I’d never tried to patch it up in all those years. I wasn’t a kid anymore; I was right on the edge of being a man. No, I hadn’t patched that crack because I was waiting for somebody else to do it, and it was never going to get done that way.

He knocked on the door after a while, but he didn’t wait for me to invite him in. That wasn’t his way. He stood in the doorway, and finally he shrugged his big heavy shoulders and said, “Sorry. I blew my top, huh? Well, do you blame me? It’s that damned red house, Bobby! It’s makin‘ me crazy! I can’t even think about nothin’ else! You understand that, don’t you?”

“It’s just a red house,” I said. “That’s all it is. Just a house with red paint.”

“It’s different!”

he replied sharply, and I flinched. “Accardo Street has been just fine for a hundred years the way it used to be! Why the hell does it have to change?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Damned right you don’t know! ‘Cause you don’t know about life!

You get ahead in this world by puttin‘ your nose to the wheel and sayin’ ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’ and towin‘ the line!“

“Whose line?”

“The line of anybody who pays you money! Now, don’t you get smart with me, either! You’re not man enough yet that I can’t tear you up if I want to!”

I looked at him, and something in my face made him wince. “I love you, Dad,” I said. “I’m not your enemy.”

He put a hand to his forehead for a minute, and leaned against the doorframe. “You don’t see it, do you?” he asked quietly. “One red house is all it takes. Then everything starts to change. They paint the houses, and the rent goes up. Then somebody thinks Accardo Street would be a nice place to put condos that overlook the bay. They bring machines in to do the work of men at the factory--and don’t you think they don’t have machines like that! One red house and everything starts to change. God knows I don’t understand why Mr. Lindquist painted it. He’s not like his old man was, not by a long shot.”

“Maybe things need to change,” I said. “Maybe they should change.”

“Yeah. Right. And where would I be? Where else am I going to find work, at my age? Want me to start collectin‘ garbage the tourists leave down at the beach? And where would you be? The factory’s your future too, y’know.”

I took a step then, over the line into forbidden territory. “I’d still like to go to college, Dad. My grades are good enough. The school counselor said--”

“I’ve told you we’ll talk about that later,” Dad said firmly. “Right now we need the extra money. Times are tough, Bobby! You’ve got to pull your weight and toe the line! Remember, a bull should roam his own pasture. Right?”

I guess I agreed. I don’t remember. Anyway, he left my room and I lay there for a long time, just thinking. I think I remember hearing a boat’s whistle blow, way off in the distance, and then I fell asleep.

On Monday morning we found out where Virgil Sikes was assigned. Not the line. Not the loading dock. He came right into the big room where my dad worked on one of the machines that smoothed and polished the gears until they were all exactly the same, and he started working on a machine about twenty feet away. I didn’t see him, because I worked on the loading dock that summer, but my dad was a nervous wreck at the end of the day. Seems Virgil Sikes was wearing all red again; and, as we were to learn, that’s the only color he would wear, crimson right down to his socks.

It began to drive my dad crazy. But I know one thing: the first week Virgil Sikes worked at the factory, I carted about twenty more crates than usual off that loading dock. The second week, the factory’s quota was up by at least thirty crates. I know, because my sore muscles took count.

The story finally came from Mr. Raphaelli: Virgil Sikes had hands as fast as fire, and he worked like no man Mr. Raphaelli had ever seen before. Rumor was circulating around the factory that Sikes had labored in a lot of different factories along the coast, and in every one of them he’d boosted production by from twenty to thirty percent. The man was never still, never slowed down or even took a water break. And somehow Mr. Lindquist had found out about him and hired him away from a factory down South, but to come to Greystone Bay Virgil Sikes had asked one thing: that the house he live in be painted as bright a red--inside and out--as the painters could find.

“That redneck’s a lot younger than me,” Dad said at dinner. “I could do that much work when I was his age!” But all of us knew that wasn’t true; all of us knew nobody at the factory could work like that. “He keeps on like this, he’s gonna blow up his damn machine! Then we’ll see what Lindquist thinks about him!”

But about a week after that, word came down to assign Virgil Sikes to two polishers at the same time. He handled them both with ease, his own speed gearing up to match the machines.

The red house began to haunt my dad’s dreams. Some nights he woke up in a cold sweat, yelling and thrashing around. When he got drunk, he ranted about painting our house bright blue or yellow--but all of us knew Mr. Lindquist wouldn’t let him do that. No, Virgil Sikes was special. He was different, and that’s why Mr. Lindquist let him live in a red house amid the gray ones.

And one night when Dad was drunk he said something that I knew had been on his mind for a long time. “Bobby boy,” he said, placing his hand on my shoulder and squeezing, “what if somethin‘

bad was to happen to that damn Commie-red house over there? What if somebody was to light a little bitty fire, and that red house was to go up like a--“

“Are you crazy?”

Mom interrupted. “You don’t know what you’re saying!”

“Shut up!” he bellowed. “We’re talkin‘ man-to-man!” And that started another yelling match. I got out of the house pretty quick, and went up to the church to be alone.

I didn’t go back home until one or two in the morning. It was quiet on Accardo Street, and all the houses were dark.

But I saw a flicker of light on the red house’s porch. A match. Somebody was sitting on the porch, lighting a cigarette.

“Howdy, Bobby,” Virgil Sikes’ voice said quietly, in its thick Southern drawl.

I stopped, wondering how he could see it was me. “Hi,” I said, and then I started to go up the steps to my own house, because I wasn’t supposed to be talking to him and he was kind of spooky anyway.

“Hold on,” he said. I stopped again. “Why don’t you come on over and sit a spell?”

“I can’t. It’s way too late.”

He laughed softly. “Oh, it’s never too late. Come on up. Let’s have us a talk.”

I hesitated, thought of my room with the cracked ceiling. In that gray house, Dad would be snoring, and Mom might be muttering in her sleep. I turned around, walked across the street and up to the red house’s porch.

“Have a seat, Bobby,” Virgil offered, and I sat down in a chair next to him. I couldn’t see very much in the dark, but I

knew the chair was painted red. The tip of his cigarette glowed bright orange and Virgil’s eyes seemed to shine like circles of flame.

We talked for a while about the factory. He asked me how I liked it, and I said it was okay. Oh, he asked me all sorts of questions about myself--what I liked, what I didn’t like, how I felt about Greystone Bay. Before long, I guess I was telling him everything about myself--things I suppose I’d never even told my folks. I don’t know why, but while I was talking to him, I felt as comfortable as if I were sitting in front of a warm, reassuring fireplace on a cold, uncertain night.

“Look at those stars!” Virgil said suddenly. “Did you ever see the like?”

Well, I hadn’t noticed them before, but now I looked. The sky was full of glittering dots, thousands and thousands of them strewn over Greystone Bay like diamonds on black velvet.

“Know what most of those are?” he asked me. “Worlds of fire. Oh, yes! They’re created out of fire, and they burn so bright before they go out--so very bright. You know, fire creates and it destroys too, and sometimes it can do both at the same time.” He looked at me, his orange eyes catching the light from his cigarette. “Your father doesn’t think too highly of me, does he?”

“No, I guess not. But part of it’s the house. He can’t stand the color red.”

“And I can’t stand to live without it,” he answered. “It’s the color of fire. I like that color. It’s the color of newness, and energy… and change. To me, it’s the color of life itself.”

“So that’s why you wanted the house changed from gray to red?”

“That’s right. I couldn’t live in a gray house. Neither could Evie or the kids. See, I figure houses are a lot like the people who live in them. You look around here at all these gray houses, and you know the people who live there have got gray souls. Maybe it’s not their choice, maybe it is. But what I’m sayin‘ is that everybody can choose, if he has the courage.”

“Mr. Lindquist wouldn’t let anybody else paint their house a different color. You’re different because you work so good.”

“I work so good because I live in a red house,” Virgil said. “I won’t go to any town where I can’t live in one. I spell that out good and proper before I take a man’s money. See, I’ve made my choice. Oh, maybe I won’t ever be a millionaire and I won’t live in a mansion--but in my own way, I’m rich. What more does a man need than to be able to make his own choices?”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Bobby,” Virgil said quietly, “everybody can choose what color to paint their own house. It don’t matter who you are, or how rich or poor--you’re the one who lives inside the walls. Some folks long to be red houses amid the gray, but they let somebody else do the paintin‘.” He stared at me in the dark. His cigarette had gone out, and he lit another with a thin red flame. “Greystone Bay’s got a lot of gray houses in it,” he said. “Lots of old ones, and ones yet to be.”

He was talking in riddles. Like I say, he was kind of spooky. We sat for a while in silence, and then I stood up and said I’d better be getting to bed because work came early the next morning. He said good night, and I started across the street.