Waiting for Augusta (7 page)

He and Daddy spent seven whole days cooking barbecue for customers, hitting balls behind the café, drinking too much, quoting old players like they were disciples, and trading facts about their favorite current player. Hobart Crane was a humble, hardworking man who persevered through tragedy, Luke'd said, clinking beer bottles out by the smoker. A man's man, who didn't give up on life even when he had a darn good reason to, Daddy'd said, clinking back.

Cheers to Hobart, cheers to his poor, long-since-passed-away wife and his poor newly-passed-away daughter, and cheers to the Big Five. Cheers to Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen, Byron Nelson, Sam Snead, and Ben Hogan. I didn't hear my name come up when they were drinking to things. That's around the time I started noticing that something was stuck in my throat, though I didn't realize that it was a golf ball until after Daddy died.

“Hey, Daddy? How come you haven't said anything about Uncle Luke? He's in Georgia. Maybe he could help.” The last day Uncle Luke was with us, he and Daddy had a terrible fight. Woke me up in the middle of the night with the yelling and pounding and breaking of things. The next morning Mama drove Uncle Luke to the bus station, and I hadn't heard his name mentioned since. But it didn't make much sense to hold a grudge in purgatory.

“He's right in Augusta. You know that. And we're not getting help from him. You hear me? You stay away from Luke.”

“Yes, sir.” I knew that voice. That was his shut-down voice. It had an edge and a warning in it not to push him. I wondered where he'd gotten that voice from and if I'd inherit that from him along with his looks.

“Hey, don't you get quiet on me, son,” Daddy said. “I know that tone in your voice. That's your ‘I'm giving up on you' voice. You've got more fight in you than that, don't you? Don't go getting upset when people talk hard to you, your father included. You curl up like a flower at night the second you get told something you don't want to hear, boy.”

He's right
, said a crow flying overhead.
That's just what you do
.

“Why don't you tell me something about yourself,” Daddy said. “It takes an awful lot out of me to talk.”

I stopped walking. The golf ball in my throat got real heavy. Who has a father who says something like “Tell me about yourself,” like they were strangers instead of part of each other? Then again, I couldn't recall my daddy ever asking me to tell him anything other than what he'd already taught me.

“Okay.”

My childhood was flooded with names of golfer people I didn't give a flip about, so I figured I'd do him a favor and skip over names. I didn't think he'd want to hear about nice Miss Stone and mean Mr. Underwood and pretty Erin Courtney. I didn't tell him how my best friend was May
Talbot, or at least she had been, or how there was an unofficial Negro lunch table at our school, or how May had spoken little since she started coming to Hilltop Primary and even less since Mr. Talbot's barbecue business burned to the ground around the time Bobby Jones died last December. I didn't tell him that I'd been mourning someone important, too, or how part of me knew it was my fault that I'd lost her.

I didn't think he'd noticed that I never hung around with Bill Sweeney or Davey Burr or John Conner anymore, since they were all at the private school now. Their parents didn't want them mixing with me anymore. I stopped by to play when I saw them all over at Davey's house one day, but Bill shook his head and pointed at me to go home. I might have colored germs on me from staying at the integrated school, he'd said.

And I knew for a fact Daddy wouldn't want to know the names I'd been called for talking to myself and drawing pictures of trees outside school windows.

So I told him about how some boy had brought a salamander to school and put it right on a teacher's head, and the teacher didn't even notice because she had so much hairspray on. I told him how the halls and classrooms were less crowded this year, how the girls' bathroom toilet overflowed one day and flooded the hallway, and how the principal, Mr. Bottom, had come in one day to find his office covered in toilet paper.

He chuckled a few times and didn't once interrupt to tell me how the legendary golfer Bobby Jones had said that some people think they're concentrating when they're really worrying or how golf was the greatest game in the history of the world or how you can't hit too slow or too fast on the putting green or how a man's patience with a dead pig meant more than his patience with boring conversation.

He just listened. When he did talk, his voice sounded farther away. Weary. He asked me how far we were from Augusta and told me he'd better rest up. Then Daddy didn't speak again and my only close company was the lump in my throat. I had the strangest feeling that I'd imagined him talking in the first place. Or maybe listening to me talk was exhausting to him. Maybe that's why he didn't do it much when he was alive.

“Hey, crazy!” Noni waved from fifty yards ahead. The dirt had changed to pavement somewhere along the way, and we'd reached Heart. She grinned and pointed to the
BUS DEPOT
sign far down the street. “You ever been to Georgia?”

I shook my head and jogged a little to catch up to her. I'd never been anywhere outside of Hilltop, other than Heart and Mobile.

“Well, Bobby Jones,” she said, slapping an arm around my back, “I haven't either. But I bet it's pretty enough to scatter ashes on.”

A
clock read six o'clock in the morning when Noni and I walked inside. The big indoor room held benches and a ticket booth and smelled like a combination of cleaning supplies and body odor. Posters for destination cities plastered the walls. We found the water fountain, a rusty piece of metal nailed to the wall that dribbled liquid even when nobody was there to drink it. Only after taking a sip did I notice the ghost letters above it, barely visible under a layer of paint. The entire wall was covered in the same white as the rest of the station, but you could see what else used to be there.

The word
COLORED
was hidden for the most part, but I could still see it. I bent to take one more sip of water, then moved to let Noni have some. While she drank, I noticed a cleaner-looking fountain attached to the opposite end of the station.

A uniformed maintenance worker shuffled over to the
side door of the ticket office. I heard a low murmur of tired voices. A few people were scattered around the benches, reading or staring sleepily at the air in front of them.

“Hey,” I said to Noni. “You never said where you're from. Is there a chance anybody here might recognize you?”

She nudged me toward the wall map, and I caught her studying her reflection in the clear plastic covering it. She tugged at her long ponytail. “No. I'm a nobody now.”

Blue, green, and red lines spread from the town of Heart like veins in the body of America. “We could go to Chicago or New York if we wanted,” I said in wonder. I studied the map again. “Okay, Birmingham, Montgomery, Atlanta, or Chattanooga. Those are all in the right direction, for the most part.”

“Atlanta,” Daddy said, sounding confident. “Watch the station until you see an older lady, then go up to the ticket taker and tell him she's your grandma. Tell him you were just having a visit with Granny, and now you're buying a ticket home to your parents.”

It sounded a little far-fetched to me. “Daddy says we should buy a ticket to Atlanta. He said to attach ourselves to an old person and the ticket person will sell us the tickets, no questions.”

Noni eyed the urn in my arms with a look of approval I hadn't earned from her yet. “Smart man, that dead daddy of yours. I'll just tell the ticket taker that our granny lets me buy
the tickets because I get a kick out of it. But we don't have enough money to get to Atlanta.”

I studied the fare rate. “Says thirty-five dollars per person. Half that for kids. We've got plenty.”

“Not after I left some for the eggs and clothes.”

“How much did you leave?”

She shrugged. “Most of the clothes hanging on that line didn't look so good. I figured they needed extra.”

The Hilberts had eight kids and could use all the extras they could get. “You're right about that, but you had no right to—”

“We're five dollars short. Don't worry, though. Just follow my lead.” She walked toward a little white-haired woman who'd come through the front station door.

The lady fingered a cross necklace hanging around her neck and looked repeatedly at the station clock. She had no bags, other than a light brown purse.

“Follow me,” Noni murmured. “And let me do the talking.” She walked right up to the woman, gripping my shirt and yanking me along. She gave the woman a big smile. “Hello, ma'am. Who're you waiting for?”

“My Jimmy,” she answered. “He'll be here on the eight o'clock from Branson, Missouri. Ya'll are welcome to keep me company.” She patted the bench beside her.

“Thanks. We're going back to my parents in Atlanta. We've been visiting my grandmother. You sure look like her.”

“Oh?” The woman patted her hair. “What's her name? I know just about everyone in the area.”

“Mrs. Jones,” Noni answered. “You wouldn't know her. She lives alone in a shack way back in the woods. Likes to live off the land. Doesn't trust the government. Eats a lot of squirrel.” She rapped a hand on my shoulder. “This is my brother. He doesn't talk.”

Doesn't talk? I opened my mouth to correct her, but she pinched my shoulder so hard that I forgot what I was going to say.

“At all. Not a word,” Noni continued, her big eyes making it clear that there were more pinches where the first one came from.

The woman eyed me with sympathy. “Is that right?”

Noni nodded. “Sure is. Hasn't said a word since he got run down by a wildcat in the woods. Right near Granny's place, matter of fact. We found him curled up with slashes on his back the size of a ruler. It was one of God's honest miracles that he's alive.”

The woman swallowed a look of horror and patted my knee. “Aren't you sweet?” she said, reaching a shaky hand out to pinch my cheek.

She smelled kinda funny, but looked nice enough. Part of me hated to admit it, but Noni's quick thinking might have helped us out. We had ourselves a ticket granny.

“ 'Scuse me, ma'am. I just have to go buy our tickets. I'll
be right back,” Noni said, leaving me to squirm.

At the ticket counter Noni studied the departure times, and I saw her frown and talk to the ticket seller. She handed over all of our cash and then pointed to the old woman and me and waved at us. I nudged the woman's side and waved back at Noni.

“Yes, dear. That's your
sister
.” The woman smiled and waved at Noni, who had turned back and was making clawing motions in the air and then shaking her head in apparent sorrow.

I'm silent. I'm not dumb
, I wanted to tell Granny, but couldn't for obvious reasons. I stood a little and saw the ticket seller raise a hand to her mouth and shake her head a few times. Then she nodded, and Noni came back with a big grin.

“Six hour trip with stops, leaves at ten o'clock.” She saw the question in my eye and said, “Get out your paint box, brother. That nice ticket seller said she'd spot us the five dollars if you'll make her one of your famous paintings.” She smiled at the old woman. “My nonspeaking brother sells his paintings for charity, and all the money goes to research how to cure people from wanting to give up talking and only listen.” She shuddered a little at the thought.

Good Lord, Daddy was right. This girl was full of tricks. I swallowed a Daddy word and gave Noni my best “what should I paint” expression. She ran over to the ticket office, peered inside, and jogged back. Then she glanced over at
the ticket seller, and her eyes grew soft, her lips pursing out like she was thinking real hard. More than a minute passed before I poked her and she turned back to me.

“Mountains,” she said. “That woman needs a picture of mountains.”

I raised my eyebrows.
How do you know?

She winked. “Magic. Magical, mystical, mysterious powers.” Laughing at my expression, she kicked my shoe. “She's got about five photos pasted to the wall in there, all of them with mountains in them.”

Inwardly, I sighed with relief. Mountains were one of my specialties. While I painted and Noni looked at Daddy's Augusta book, our adopted granny spread the word to other bus waiters about the sweet little silent boy and his special pictures. There were two colored women sitting on the next bench over, but I noticed that Ticket Granny didn't talk to them.

I sank into the landscape on my paper and lost myself for a moment. When I finally did look over, the old woman was holding Daddy on her lap. I'd taken him out when I got my paint box, and she'd gone and picked him up.

I must have inhaled pretty loud, because she looked over at me and smiled. “This is real pretty, dear. Is it for your painting supplies?”

Noni looked up from the book. “What's going on? You need more paint supplies?”

Mrs. Jones started to play with the top, and I lunged over and snatched the urn out of her hands just as she was about to try twisting the lid open. I almost shouted at her, but managed to let out a closemouthed moan, checking the clasp and hugging Daddy to me.

She gave me one of those dirty looks that grandma types sometimes will, like you passed gas real loud in church.

Noni reached over and smacked me. “Bobby Jones, you stop being rude.” She clucked her tongue. “I'm so sorry, ma'am,” she said, sweet as Mrs. Grady's walnut bars. “That's just got Granny's cookie mix in it, and my parents will cook our gooses if it doesn't get back in one piece. My mama still loves her mama's baking, you see. Says she can't make cookies as good as Granny's for nothing.”