Knights of the Hill Country (16 page)

“Who you talking about?” I said when I got my tongue to working again.

Blaine's eyes narrowed to little slits. “You know who I'm talking about.”

“Your mom was out with someone at the game?” Carl asked. He sounded jealous. There was a time when he tried getting Mom to go out with him, but for all the men she dated, she never did include no married ones in there.

“You must be talking about Tommy Don Coleridge,” Norman the bartender said. “I seen him out there with her. I didn't even know he was back in town.”

“He's back, all right,” J. M. said. “I heard he come back broke and had to move in with his old man.”

“That figures,” Norman said.

“Wasn't he a Buddhist for a while?” Carl asked, but no one jumped in to verify that one.

“He always was a crazy bastard,” Norman said. “I'm surprised he's even still alive.”

Everything was flying by me so fast, I couldn't hardly grab ahold of any of it, but I knew what they was saying didn't sound the first thing like the man I met yesterday.

“He seemed all right to me,” I said, shooting a quick glance towards Blaine. He just set there, turning his beer mug in a little circle on the table, a look in his eyes like he had more on his mind than he was coming out with right now.

“Don't let Tommy Don Coleridge fool you,” Haywood Ritter said from the next table over. With that white walrus mustache and them wild bushy eyebrows, Haywood was the oldest one in the room, and he was the most respected out of any of them too. Not 'cause of his age but 'cause he was the cousin of T. Roy Strong. “I wouldn't trust Tommy Don any farther than I can spit,” he said.

“Maybe he's changed since you knew him,” I said, but old Haywood shook his head.

“People don't change.”

“That's right,” Blaine added for good measure. “Once you're a loser, you're always a loser.”

On the ride home from the Rusty Nail, I didn't have nothing to say to Blaine till we turned down Mission Road, and then I just had to come right out and ask it. “Why'd you say that about my mom back there?”

Blaine kept on staring ahead. “I didn't say it about your mom. I said it about that jerk she was with. You needed to know what kind of company she's keeping.”

“You didn't have to say nothing in front of everybody like that.” I looked out the side window at the row of run-down gray houses. “Besides, I ain't got no say over who she goes out with.”

“Well, maybe it's about time you did. It might be better for you and everyone else.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I'm talking about how your mom goes running around with different men. You think other people don't notice that? Why do you think we never hardly spent any time over at your place all these years? My folks wasn't exactly crazy about us hanging around our house all the time, you know. They just didn't want me hanging around at your house, with what was going on with your mom and all her dates.”

That got my face to burning hotter than a teakettle right there. I mean, it was one thing for me to question my mom's way with men, but I sure didn't like the idea of other folks doing it. “Who my mom goes out with ain't nobody else's business.”

“Well, you oughta make it your business. You know, them colleges look at more than just your football. They look at your overall reputation too. They don't want no one shining a bad light on their school.”

“You saying I'm shining a bad light somehow?”

“I'm talking about that Tommy Don Clapsaddle character.”

“It's Coleridge.”

“Whatever. My dad told me all about him. He's bad news.”

“What's supposed to be so bad about him?”

Blaine reached over and turned the radio off. “One thing is he used to play football here but turned traitor, took sides against his own team, and sold 'em out quicker than Benedict Arnold sold out to the redcoats. Ended up, he got kicked off the team and then just went totally downhill after that. My dad said he was the only hippie ever to come out of Kennisaw. Probably even sold drugs and everything else. Never did amount to any good, and now he's back sponging off his old man for a place to stay. That's about as pitiful as you can get, if you ask me. He'll probably start hitting your
mom up for money. So if you don't think any of that's your business, then you ain't got the sense God gave a dog.”

“How's your dad supposed to know all that?”

“How do you think? He grew up here. He knows. Just like them old boys over at the Nail. You heard what they had to say.”

Blaine pulled Citronella up to the curb in front of my house. For a moment, I set there staring at the dashboard before finally opening the door.

“Hey, I'm just trying to shoot straight with you,” he said.

“Okay.” I didn't look at him.

“We gotta watch out for each other, don't we?”

I didn't say nothing.

“Don't we?”

“Yeah,” I said finally. “That's right. We gotta watch out for each other.”

Inside in the living room, I set down on our old brown couch without even turning the light on. The dim gray in there fit the way I felt good enough. It was tough to swallow the idea that the whole time last night with Tommy Don Coleridge was completely phony, but what else was I supposed to think after what Blaine and the Rusty Nail boys said?

Just about then's when I noticed a slip of paper on the coffee table. I picked it up, and for a good long while I just set there staring at the writing on the front. It was a check for a hundred dollars my mom made out to Tommy Don Coleridge. I dropped it down on the table and sank back in them couch cushions.
Blaine was right,
I thought. Tommy Don didn't waste no time hitting my mom up for money.

Seemed like she must've dropped her guard this time, somehow shook loose of that same old airtight routine she'd
stuck to when it come to men. Right after my dad left, she shut herself up in her room every day after work, and I didn't even know what it was she did in there hour after hour. Then one evening, a man in a cowboy hat was setting at the kitchen table. A cowboy hat and jeans and shiny black boots. Turned out he was a welder, but he dipped snuff and talked about rodeos and riding bulls, and next thing you know, there Mom was, decked out in her own western jeans and boots and hat. For six months. Then the cowboy was gone and so was the cowboy outfits.

Next come the greenskeeper/biker, and she dressed in leathers till she threw the biker and the leathers out on the garbage heap, and then the highway patrolman and the long-haul trucker and on and on. It was just about like my real mom never come out of that back room. But this time with Tommy Don, I could've swore it was different. She seemed like her old self again—as much as I could remember what that was, anyways. I sure didn't want to see what would happen if the tables got turned, and it was Mom that got thrown over. After the way Dad done her, she probably couldn't have took it again.

It was past five o'clock in the afternoon when she come home from work, and there I was, still waiting on the couch. Now I had the lamp on, the light pointed straight down at that coffee table where I left her check for Tommy Don setting out.

“Oh, hi, honey,” she said, all breezy and carefree. “I'm glad you're here. Tommy Don's having a cookout in his backyard tonight, and he said for you to come along too if you want. I think it'd be real fun to have us all there.”

“
His
backyard?” I said. “Or his dad's?”

“Well, he's staying with his father right now 'cause—”

“How much is he charging for the food?”

“What? I didn't hear you.” She closed the door to the hall closet after hanging her coat up.

I set forward and rested my arms on my knees. “I just want to know how much money it's gonna cost us to eat over there.”

“We don't have to bring anything.” She hadn't picked up on an ounce of the disgust I was putting out. “He's gonna have everything ready to go. There's gonna be grilled chicken and ears of corn and those little potatoes you like. All we have to bring is our appetites.” I swear, she sounded about as happy as a kindergarten girl on paste-eating day.

I picked the check up. “Then what's this for?”

“That?” Her eyes fixed on the check. Finally, it looked like my grim old tone was sinking in. “That's just for some work he's gonna do over at the dollar store for us.”

“What kind of work?”

“He's gonna paint the south wall. I'm giving him a check, and then I'll get reimbursed out of petty cash. Why? What did you think it was for?”

I looked back at the check myself, eyeballing it over like a sheriff sizing up a murder weapon. “The outside wall by Sixth Street?” I said. “That wall don't need paint.”

“Not like a regular paint job. It's gonna be a mural.” She was starting to sound a little wore out with me. “That's what he does. He's a painter. An artist. He paints pictures. And it was my idea. He said he'd do it for free, but I wasn't about to let him do that. Now, what's this all about?”

“Pictures.”
I just about spit the word out. Picture painting didn't sound like much of a living to a Kennisaw boy like me.
“I don't think he's the kind of guy you oughta be going out with. That's what I think.”

“You what?” Her face went red. “Since when do you tell me who I ought and ought not to go out with, young man?”

Young man,
she called me. Like them mothers you always hear getting on their kids over at the Wal-Mart. Only difference was my mom hadn't been around enough the last few years to start in on any
young man
business with me.

“I guess since not soon enough,” I told her. “Maybe if I'd started sooner, you wouldn't have gone and got hooked up with a guy everyone else in town thinks is the biggest loser since Benedict Arnold.”

“Who thinks that?” She planted her hands on her hips and gave me the squint-eye stare. “Who've you been talking to? Those numbskulls down at the Rusty Nail? Blaine's dad?”

I didn't like the way she said
Blaine's dad,
like he wasn't nothing but a stupid nobody instead of a man who once played side by side with T. Roy Strong.

“I'll tell you what,” I said. “First of all, you hear enough folks say something, you figure there has to be some truth to it. And second of all, Blaine's dad's sure been around for me to talk to more than you have.”

Her shoulders slumped then. The red drained right back out of her face, leaving her about as washed out as an empty bottle. “I guess I deserved that,” she said. “No, I know I did.”

She walked across and set next to me on the couch. It looked like she was fixing to reach over and pat my arm, but she dropped her hand back in her lap instead. “Look,” she said. “I know I haven't been here for you as much as I should. I know I've been out looking for the wrong things to fill up my life. But this isn't one of those things. Tommy Don
Coleridge is a good man. Don't ask me how I know. I just feel it.”

For a good long moment, I set there quiet, tapping that old check against the top of the coffee table. I didn't know the last time my mom said something to me that come straight out of her heart. Finally, I handed the check to her. “I ain't blaming you for anything,” I said. “I just don't want you to get taken in by somebody 'cause he knows how to say what you want to hear.”

“I don't want that to happen either.”

“So, are you still gonna go over to his house tonight?”

“Yes,” she said. “I am. Are you going with me?”

“No,” I said. “I guess not.”

Monday, I skulked back and forth past the door to the school library a good three times without going inside. After the third time, I stopped dead in the middle of the hall and flat forced myself to walk in there. I had me two real good reasons for paying a visit to the library right now, but neither one of them had the first thing to do with studying.

Reason number one had to do with Tommy Don Coleridge. I figured if he went to Kennisaw back once upon a time, then he was bound to be in a couple of the old yearbooks, and just maybe there'd be some clue in one of them about what he done to make everybody think he was such a loser.

Reason number two was every bit as important as reason number one. Sara worked the afternoon shift three times a week as a library student aide.

Ever since that stupid fight over at Wild West Days, she put her guard up anytime I got within ten yards of her, like maybe she thought I was liable to whip up another full-scale brawl just for grins. Morning, noon, and night, I kept trying to hammer out some kind of decent explanation about that durn fight, but as usual when it come to girls, I couldn't get nothing to take shape.

But now at least I had me a good reason to go into the library and talk to her. I knew how she was. If I come in asking for help, wasn't no way she'd turn me down, even if I was an idiot who got sucked into fights I didn't know the reason for fighting.

This library at our school wasn't no bigger than two classrooms put together, but she was sorting through a stack of books on a little pushcart and didn't see me come in at first. For a moment, I stood back and watched her. That famous pile of hair of hers nearly covered up her face, but that was okay. I knew them brown eyes by heart. And anyways, I liked all that hair and the way she moved, kind of herky-jerky, stoppy-starty, and the baggy way her sweatshirt and jeans fit. Comfortable and real was what she was. Not one stitch of fake anywheres on that girl.

Right when I started walking over, she looked up and pulled her hair back from her face the way she probably had to do about eight hundred thousand times a day. “Hi,” she said, and maybe I was just imagining things, but her eyes looked a little bit wary—like it was a gorilla sidling up to her instead of a redheaded lunk in a black letter jacket. “Is there something you're looking for?”

You don't know how close I come to blurting out, “Yes, there is. I'm looking for
you
!” But course, I didn't do it. Instead, I told her how I wanted to look at some old yearbooks
on account of I was checking out the background of a man my mom had took up with. Now, a lot of folks might've made up a story about how come they wanted to comb through old yearbooks, but like I said before, I had a hard time lying to Sara Reynolds. Which didn't mean I went into all the details about the other men that'd come and gone through my mom's life. That was one sad country song I didn't feel like singing right now.