If Jack's in Love (14 page)

“What are you gonna do? You need to come up with a plan and write her back.”

“What kind of plan?”

“I don't know. Get her to sneak out of the house after dark, meet you outside. Set up a time, make sure the old man and old lady are in bed.”

“And then what? Could I bring her to our room?”

His sunglasses peered in my direction. Truth is, I didn't really expect him to agree to my bringing a twelve-year-old to the room. Stan had little tolerance for the wholesomeness of twelve-year-olds. Occasionally he would slap Dickie Pudding around simply because he didn't like the way he whinnied when he laughed. But now we were speaking of a girl whose presence in our house at night would bring shame and devastation to the entire Joyner family. And he liked that idea.

“You could hide her in the room 'til we come up with something better. Taking her to the shack on Baskin Road is a possibility. We could put her up for a few days, bring her food and water.”

“Yeah, but . . .”

I looked at Anya.

“N-O spells no,” she said.

“Shit, man,” my brother said. “Like, wow. We'll get you and the little Joyner girl fixed up. It'll be a gas when Gaylord finds out his sister split for a Witcher.”

Later that afternoon, as I was approaching the house, I noticed the red flag on the mailbox jutting in the air.

I found another envelope inside, with my name in Myra's hand.

I took it to my room and opened it.

I gnawed my nails, terrified of failing her. How had she reached this state of abandon so quickly? Was it my kiss? Was my kiss that good?

What if Myra's parents made her go to a psychiatrist too? This was the madness of Courtney Blankenship all over again!

I found some paper in the wooden desk by the window and wrote a reply. “Dear Myra,” I began, forgoing the “dearest.” I had decided on a no-nonsense approach.

I dropped the letter in the box and put up the red flag.

At midnight it was there. And again at eight the next morning. But sometime later, I don't know when, the flag went down and the letter was gone.

A Coghill abetting a Witcher to elope with a Joyner: what a revolution was taking place in El Dorado Hills!

THE ANSWER DIDN'T COME until the afternoon, when I heard the mailbox lid creak on its hinges and spotted Kathy Coghill rushing past the window. I left Pop in front of the TV (he was too involved in
As the World Turns
to notice the daytime drama under his nose) to retrieve the missive lurking in the cryptic depths of the box. I read it in my bedroom with my shoulder against the door to bar intruders. Myra said she was ready to do whatever I wished. However, she did make one small adjustment to my plan. Her bedroom being on the second floor, she couldn't very well slip out of that window; on the other hand, the den window behind the house would suit nicely. Her parents went to bed early, but to stay on the safe side I should wait until after midnight. But we couldn't do it tonight, she added, because her parents were going to a play at a local supper club and would be out later than usual. Otherwise, and this is exactly how she put it, “I am yours.”

My heart pounded when I read that line. Had she truly written those words? In a daze of ecstasy, of apprehension, I roamed up to Gladstein's shop. I was so preoccupied that I forgot to look in on my mother when I passed the Ben Franklin.

The prissy bell tinkled, the Yatzis yapped, Gladstein shouted a greeting.

But I didn't say a word.

I placed the letters on the counter for him to see.

He beetled his brow and read what I'd given him.

“My my,” he said, “the magic works.”

“Is it really magic?”

Gladstein remained silent awhile, thinking, and then he said, “If it works, it is magic.”

He let me ruminate on that, watching me with a smile. One of his eyebrows was quivering like a Cupid's arrow about to be shot into the air.

“You have quite a situation here,” he told me, “a damsel in distress, and she's locked in an attic. What are you gonna do about it?”

“I guess I have to help her. This whole mess is because I kissed her.”

“You'll get no argument from me, Witcher. I may not look like Paul Newman, but I once had my day.” He was from Atlantic City, he said, where horses dive off boards and Miss Americas ride the boardwalk in shiny new convertibles. They smile in their bathing suits with their arms in the air, like movable Statues of Liberty, and all the while the great ocean is lapping behind them. Atlantic City is a world of fun rides, Ferris wheels and roller coasters; people from Atlantic City possess an innate sense of beauty, Gladstein told me. As a young man he'd gone on a romantic quest for a Miss North Carolina whom he met while employed as a bellboy in a hoitytoity hotel. One afternoon while the beauty queen was in the hotel's lounging area—she was with a few other contestants—she suddenly expressed, loudly and within earshot, a desire for cotton candy. She'd glanced directly at him, batting her lashes in case he didn't understand. Gladstein, being young and vigorous and strong, had instantly leapt to the occasion. He abandoned his post, dashed to the boardwalk, procured a sticky bale for his Tarheel queen, and rushed back holding the fluffy confection aloft. Meanwhile his boss had been pacing the lobby, incensed. He fired Gladstein on the spot for leaving without permission. “But what did I care? I was in seventh heaven. I asked Miss North Carolina for her phone number and she told me she wasn't allowed to date. Instead she gave me the address of her parents' house in North Carolina and said I could write her there. And you know something? Every week for three years I sent that gal a letter to Rocky Mount, North Carolina. And to every letter I sent she penned a gracious reply, thanking me for the cotton candy I had lost my job for. I would think, Ah, these southern gals, so sweet, so soft-spoken. Then in one of her letters she expressed a racist sentiment and I never wrote her again.”

“What happened to her?” I asked.

“She married a local baseball player. They have a minor league team in Rocky Mount.”

“So you married someone else.”

“Local Jewish gal. We were hitched for twenty-five years, before the cancer got her. Good woman. Class. Social consciousness, compassion for the poor, the oppressed.”

I tried to imagine her. All I could picture was a woman with a rag tied round her head.

“You're really against prejudice, huh?” I said.

“Of course. Aren't you?”

“I guess. I got a friend whose dad is in the KKK. He doesn't like it 'cause my pop is friends with Snead.”

Gladstein arched that quivering eyebrow. “Your dad's a friend of Snead's? Well well, what a world. I wouldn't have pegged your father as a liberal.”

“I don't think he calls himself that. He voted for Johnson, and I think for Kennedy. He's a Democrat,” I said. I wanted Gladstein to like Pop. I figured a report on his voting record might do it.

Gladstein nodded and looked away, full of heavy musings I couldn't possibly understand.

Finally he tapped the Myra letters on the counter.

“All right, to the matter at hand. You've kissed Myra, so what next?”

“Well, now I have to rescue her.”

“From what?”

“From being grounded. Her parents don't want her going with me.”

Gladstein folded his arms. His chest rose and fell with his breathing.

“Have you felt her breasts?”

“No sir,” I said awkwardly. That a grown man should speak of breasts to a child in El Dorado Hills was unheard-of. Only foulmouthed brats spoke of breasts. I hadn't given Myra's breasts a moment's thought. I wasn't even sure she had any.

“Well,” Gladstein said.

There was a shrug in his voice: a sigh for the fatuousness of romantic boyhood. “To each his own, I suppose. But I should think you'd want to touch her breasts. Certainly I would have at your age.”

“Did you touch Miss North Carolina's breasts?” I asked.

Gladstein roared with laughter. “The mountains of North Carolina, hey, Witcher? Asheville on the left, Boone on the right!” He hacked out a laugh and slapped his thigh.

My face was hot as a furnace.

“Listen, Witcher. She has the ring, and that means she is in your power. Whatever you want her to do, she will do. Look at me, Witcher, you're looking away.”

I obeyed.

He handed over Myra's letters. “Don't forget these,” he said. “And here, take this.” He pulled a golden bracelet from the drawer and dangled it before my eyes.

“What is it?”

“It's for her. Take it, it's junk. Otherwise I'll throw it away.”

“No, don't throw it away.”

I pocketed the bracelet, dazzled by his bottomless stock of trifles.

“Listen, do you want to see her breasts or not?”

“I do,” I said.

“Then you must think of them constantly. Make it a prayer. Do not let her nipples out of your mind. Smell them, taste them. Picture her blossoming young tits. Myra's breasts are yours, Witcher.”

“Yes sir,” I said.

Gladstein's baggy eyes released me. I left the shop.

THE NEXT NIGHT, the night I had arranged for Myra's rescuing, Snead paid a call at our house.

My heart sank as his truck pulled up. When I sent my final instructions to Myra I hadn't reckoned on his being at the house. I had told her I would come to her yard at midnight, or shortly thereafter. I was to hoot three times like an owl, and she would climb out the den window.

Around ten I went to my room and pretended to go to bed.

It was a cool night and the fans were off and I turned out the light and listened to Snead and Pop and Mom under my window. They had a cooler out there and I would occasionally hear the soft pressurized sigh of a beer can jabbed by an opener. The guitar-playing didn't last very long that night, there was conversation instead. More and more the music was simply an excuse for Snead and Pop to get together.

Their voices kept lulling me, and several times I was close to falling asleep. Around eleven I heard my mother say good night. She folded up her lounge chair and came inside.

Usually at midnight Snead would head home, but sometimes he stayed as late as two or three in the morning. The thought made me tense with anxiety. I heard the sound of cigarette lighters thumbed open, the scraping of flints, the clicking of lids, hands rummaging through the slushy ice in the bottom of the cooler for the coldest beers, the springy metal of a lounge chair whenever one of the men shifted in his seat. Each time I heard a noise I hoped it meant Snead was rising to leave.

“Go, Snead, go,” I prayed.

Stan was out somewhere with Anya, and I was alone in the room.

The men's voices were murmuring, late-night voices, indistinct; and then I realized they were talking about Gladstein. Several times I heard his name. Snead said something about Jefferson Ward and they started laughing.

“Good God,” my father said, and they laughed some more.

Their voices grew lower and I strained to hear. I felt defensive for Gladstein, sorry he was so out of place in the world.

Pop made a remark and Snead laughed, and then he began to croon a blues song.

He broke off. “What did you say?” he responded to one of Snead's murmurs.

“Man wants me to come out and see him. In Jefferson Ward.”

“You gonna go?”

“I ain't gonna go calling on no white man in Jefferson Ward.”

That set off another round of guffaws.

“That would leave his place ripe for the picking, Snead. The store all by itself.”

Snead snorted. After a while he said, “I gotta go.”

“Naw, don't go.”

“I gotta get up in the morning.”

“Come on, stay awhile.”

“Naw, I can't.”

“Go, go, go,” I prayed.

Ten minutes passed. Why can't people leave when they say they're going to?

Finally the metal of the lounge chair creaked as Snead urged his bulk upwards. The voices retreated to the edge of the yard. I heard a door slam and an engine rev. Snead's truck pulled away.

Even though it was after midnight I still couldn't leave. I had to wait for Pop to gather the things from the yard and come down the hall and go to the bathroom. I needed to see the dark at the crack of my door before I could take off.

Finally I tiptoed down the hall and slipped out the front door.

By the time I got to the Joyners' yard it was almost one in the morning. A sleepy bark came from around the side of the Kellner house and quickly I whispered Rusty's name.

I crouched by the cars in the driveway (the Joyners' blue Chevrolet Impala, Gaylord's cherry-red Mustang convertible gleaming in the porch light) and Rusty approached, growling low in his throat. But it was okay: as soon as I held out my hand the menace melted away and he slavishly began to lick my fingers. His tail was swinging like a metronome. I let him lap me for a while and then we trotted together around the side of the house.