Old Powder Man (34 page)

For her final two years of college she went to California. Maybe that was having a good time, jumping all around, he thought. He had said do what she wanted to, but it seemed like she was doing a lot of jumping around. She did not seem to listen. Also, he wondered why she always had to pick out the colleges farthest from home she could find.

That winter Buzz stayed in town as much as he could and also Will and Martha; he guessed everybody was getting to the age they had to rest up. They played bridge or canasta every week-end, went out to eat often. He went along with as many plans as he could; Kate was better when other people were around. He had put a lock on the liquor closet and had the only key. But it seemed that was one of the reasons she did what she did; she could buy her own and he couldn't do anything about it.

Kate thought of that winter and spring as the time she began her walks. He had never talked to her about anything but business, not been interested in anything she did, and the house's silence finally drove her outdoors. That Christmas Laurel had bought a poodle she saw in a pet store window. Now almost every afternoon and as the days got longer, sometimes after supper, Kate and the poodle, Tippy, set out. She followed one side or the other of the circular drive, alternating days; it gave her something to think about. She listened resentfully to the gravel crunching beneath her shoes, knew she should have had sense enough to tell him not to pave the driveway, then he would have. She turned one way or another, alternate times, down the narrow sidewalk put in only recently by the city. But the neighborhood was as serene still as countryside; she saw rabbits and quail, heard nothing. She went as far as a boulevard to watch the changing of traffic lights, people passing in cars, entered stores to browse. She returned home thinking only there was nothing to go for; often she looked back on all those weeks, Monday to Friday, when she had been alone, would think how gradually even when he was home on week-ends, she still felt alone. She had never learned a thing in the world in Bess, North Carolina. When she left home, she had not known exactly what to turn to either. But one thing she knew was that people who didn't worry, lived on credit, were a lot better off than they were; people who went places, did things and had fun. She wondered if he ever was going to stop worrying about spending money.

One night, entering the house from a walk, she found him in a rage about a two-hundred-dollar department store bill. It was a mistake. Someone had used their charge account. Look at the sales slips, Kate said. Nothing would even fit me. Ladies shoes size nine. Probably one of your girl friends charging, Frank.

Hell! I never had no girl friend with big feet, he said. If it was a bra now, it might be a different thing. For once, he and Kate laughed together.

That same spring he began renovating the office, said it was time they had room to cuss a cat in. He wrote Laurel how pretty it was; she'd have to come home now and take over the dynamite business. Sealing the letter, he glanced at pictures of blasts on the wall; all of them purty, he thought.

Suddenly he rummaged in a bottom drawer. On his desk were hammer and nails he had used to put up the photographs. Calling Holston, he gave him two more things saying, “Boy, do me a favor, will you? I'm too tired to move. Hang these up there on the wall for me?”

Holston read the fancy gold lettering, “Handy, Colorado. Where in the world is that?” he said.

“Hell, I don't know whether there ever was such a place. There never were such gold mines,” Son said. “Put those certificates up on the wall. I want to sit here and remind myself it's possible to make mistakes.”

While Holston hammered, Son told about buying the stocks, laughing. “I shore thought I had it made when I bought those,” he said, seeing back to that beautiful fall day exactly, himself going down to the bank happily, in the sunshine, his coattails flying.

When Laurel graduated from college, he agreed to go to California by train, couldn't make that haul across Texas in June. Since he had been a stock boy in all those jewelry stores, long ago, he had dreamed of going to San Francisco. There was one particular big firm he had done business with he had always wanted to see. Kate said, Well here we are. What is there to see?

It was a grey stone building on a crowded narrow street. But he was thrilled, thought of the dreaming boy he had been who had never had any idea in the world whether he would make it out here or not. All that time as a boy, he had worked among all those beautiful things, not able to have a single one and had promised himself someday he would be able to buy what he wanted. That day had come. He took his wife and daughter inside, having said how much they could spend. Kate could hardly believe it; everything he had done on the trip had been in the best way; she had never expected to own jewelry too. She chose pearls and Laurel a watch. He said, “I'd like to have something inscribed on the back.” Laurel said she would too. What did she have in mind? She said, “From Daddy.”

“That's what I had in mind too,” he said. The salesman suggested they add the date; they agreed and he wrote, June 1951. Then Son did what gave him one of the biggest kicks of his life: paid the man in cash. “You should have seen that peckerwood's eyes bugged out,” he told at home. “He thought we were country folks walking in there, but changed his mind quick!” He would throw back his head and roar, then sober, a little unsure. “Miss Kate now,” he would say, “was em-
barrassed
. She can't see why I don't pull out a check and pay like everybody else.” He told her, You're all the time telling me I don't know anything. It's you don't know anything. You know how many people there are would like to be able to pull that much money out of their pockets? Half those peckerwoods at that Country Club you and Laurel think are so hot never have seen that much cash. I know that for a fact. Take that fellow I buy my car from, always having his picture on the front page. He sees me on the street and acts like he don't know who I am when I been buying cars from him twenty years and paying for them. Everybody in Delton knows he runs his business on credit. One time he was down in the hole just about as far as a man can get. I walked in there and paid for a new car in cash, pulled the money out of my pocket and said, Here, I thought I'd hep you out some.

“I still don't see why you couldn't have paid by check,” Kate said.

“Oh hell,” he said.

He went down to the hotel bar and had several Gibsons; he'd just found out about those. He thought of the time Kate had run up a hundred-dollar bill in a neighborhood shop. He gave her a single bill and told her to go pay it. Every bill he got he paid the day it came in, did not wait even for a month's worth to accumulate. Whoever sent him a bill had his money the next day. Kate came back embarrassed, said the saleslady had been so excited, run all about the shop saying she'd never seen a hundred dollar bill before.

I don't reckon she was embarrassed to take it, he had said. He couldn't understand anybody being embarrassed to walk in somewhere with money to pay a bill they owed. If there was any woman he never was going to understand, it was Kate.

“Boy, I better have another one of those with a onion,” he said. After several drinks the boy Laurel brought along to supper looked a lot better. There wasn't anything the matter with George; he had graduated from college with Laurel and was a nice enough boy, way over six feet tall and sandy-haired, though he wore horn-rimmed glasses which he took off when he spoke and put back on to hear what you were going to say; it was just that he did not seem to know what he was going to do, now that he had been to college, any more than Laurel did. Laurel said he was going to go to school some more. He said, Whew. Kate wondered if Laurel was going to marry George. He said he'd like to know what they were going to live on if she did. He certainly wasn't going to support some big hunk of boy too lazy to get out and start learning a business when he was twenty-one years old and was still going to school, Jesus Christ. The next day, Laurel and Kate went to ride the trolley car. It wore him out walking up and down all those hills. He said he had to wait for the mail, see if there was anything Holston wanted to know about. But there was only a short letter from him saying everything was running along fine without him, stay as long as he wanted. There was a post card from Sarah, saying the house and Tippy were fine but she got lonesome at night with no lights on. All those onions had kept him awake. In the night he had decided what he was going to do and now did it. He was back in the hotel when Laurel and Kate came back, sitting in the room, looking like the cat that ate the canary, Kate said.

“What've you done?” she asked. “Bought me a light,” he said.

“A light?” she said. “What are you talking about?”

He stuck his hand straight before him, wearing a heavy ring with a diamond center. “When I was a boy I worked around all those pretty things and couldn't have any of them. I promised myself some day I was going to buy me a diamond ring. Now I have.”

“Frank, I swear to my soul, men don't wear diamond rings,” Kate said.

“What the hell they make 'em for if men don't wear them,” he said. “You don't know what you're talking about. I've known plenty men wore them. Lots of men on the levees wore 'em so they could scratch up another fellow's face if they got in a fight.”

“That's just what I'm talking about,” she said. “It's tacky.”

“Tacky my foot,” he said. Just because nobody in that wide place in the road she came from could afford a diamond ring she thought men didn't wear them. He told Laurel later, Your mother doesn't have any sense, never has had. Laurel only thought, Even now, even at my graduation, they couldn't stop.

Back in Delton, he went to the doctor about his cough, told him he didn't have the breath to get up and down a one of those hills in San Francisco. The doctor found nothing wrong, said it was probably a cigarette cough, to cut down on smoking. Not too much was going on in the office during the hot weather and he stayed home a lot the rest of the summer, getting up when he wanted to. One morning he was eating a late breakfast while Laurel ate lunch; he noted her fingernails were bitten to the quick, as always; and she had gotten too thin out at that school, he thought. Her hair had always hung straight to her shoulders but in San Francisco she had had it cut short; it swung against her cheeks, just covering her ears, and he thought she looked even more like Kate. He said, “Now what are you going to do?”

“Today?” she said.

“I'm talking about from now on,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “I don't know. I've been to all the employment agencies. There aren't any jobs.”

He had been cutting up two fried eggs, crisscrossing his knife and fork rapidly across the center of his plate. He stopped, reared back, his wrists settled to the table edge and his silverware stood upright. “That's the silliest damn statement I ever heard in my life,” he said. “I told you I could get you a job down yonder to the bank. That's one place in this town somebody knows who I am.”

The table was beside the window; they had to squint to bear the day. His eyes, blue, seemed to reflect the bright late summer sky. “I took out all the loans I ever took out for my business down at that bank. And I met all the notes early. I did that on purpose, to establish my credit. I took them all out through Mr. Gordon sits there in that first desk in the lobby. I could walk in there today and get any kind of loan I wanted in a minute. I believe if I asked Mr. Gordon he'd get you a job as one of those messenger girls they have there in the lobby.”

“But, Daddy, I don't want a job as a bank's messenger girl,” she said. “I want a job that has something to do with what I majored in at college, English.”

“English?” he said. “Whew! Did you have to go to college for four years to learn English?” He sucked a bite of egg from his fork thinking how he had wanted her to go to college. She hadn't been interested in getting married and he figured the more education a woman had, the less likely she was to make mistakes. He had wanted her to learn how to make something of herself, remembered telling her when she left, Now, see if you can find out some of the things I never could. But he didn't believe she had. And what got his goat was, she didn't seem to have learned one damn thing to help her get out in the world and earn a living. He ate some more, wondering what all that money had gone for. Stacking his cup and saucer into his plate, he pushed them away, lit a cigarette, but began as soon as he inhaled to cough.

Laurel said, “I thought the doctor told you to quit smoking.”

Taking out his handkerchief, he blew his nose with a hard blaring sound. His mouth cocked into its crooked, tough, still handsome grin. “That's what the man said,” he said.

“Then why don't you?” she said.

His eyes opened wider, in astonishment. “Because,” he said, “not a man alive's going to tell me when to smoke and when not to.” He looked at her expectantly, laughing. When she did not laugh, he stopped. He stood up, narrowing his eyes against smoke twisting toward him. It was Sarah's day off. He picked up dishes and carried them to the kitchen as Kate came in the back door, her heels making mice-like squeaks across the polished linoleum floor. With two thuds, a sigh of relief, she set down grocery bags. Laurel, having picked up her dishes, came into the kitchen too. Son was backing rear first from the ice box holding a large container of ice water. He put it to his mouth and drank in long gulps, his Adam's apple jumping. Kate, taking things from the grocery sacks, turned in disgust. “That's supposed to be for everybody to use,” she said.

Without answering, he returned the bottle almost empty.

Kate said, “I hope you had a nice sleep while I was off at the grocery and lugging in these heavy sacks.”

Laurel said, “I would have helped, I didn't know what you were doing.”