Linger (10 page)

Sloan said her father called feminists fema-Nazis. She was for nearly everything he was against. She said she was living proof conservative politics wasn’t genetic.

Promptly at eleven
P.M.
Mr. Scott strolled in yawning, in case I didn’t get the message that it was past everyone’s bedtime.

He asked me, “When’s the big blow-out for Bobby up at Linger?” He patronized Waffle Waffle more than he did Linger, but Linger was everyone’s place for special occasions.

“Mr. Dunlinger says maybe he’ll do it this summer. Whenever my brother gets home.”

“Is your Mr. Raleigh going to play the piano?”

“Why is he Gary’s Mr. Raleigh?” Sloan asked.

“He’s your Mr. Raleigh too, isn’t he? Isn’t that where you pick up all your liberal ideas?”

“Gary’s not a big liberal, Daddy.”

I laughed. “I’m just a little liberal, I guess.”

“When your big brother comes home, you ask him what
he
thinks of high school teachers who march in peace parades.”

“I’ll do that,” I said. I had the idea he didn’t like me, that the only points I got in his eyes were because Bobby’d been in Desert Storm.

“Ned Dunlinger ought to tell your Mr. Raleigh he doesn’t belong in any victory celebration.”

Mr. Scott was a big, beer-bellied roughneck who rode around in a Ford truck with his two black Labs barking in the back. Pete and Repeat, snoozing out in their doghouses that very moment.

When I left there nights, he had to stand on the porch and shout “Stay!” so they wouldn’t eat through the back of my pants.

When Sloan was helping me into my coat, I told her to tell her mother thanks again for the Jell-O. When Mr. Scott was downstairs, Mrs. Scott was up, and vice versa. Before I knew that was always the way it was, I used to think they’d just had a fight.

Mrs. Scott seemed to claim the upstairs for her turf. Sloan said that was where her sewing room was, that because of the recession she was doing tailoring for the Berryville Dry Cleaners. Mr. Scott didn’t want that broadcast, so I had to promise never to refer to it.

When she did appear, she was this thin little lady who seemed always to be running, the same way Edith Bunker did on the reruns of
All in the Family.
She’d ask if she’d made enough Jell-O, if we wanted some Mallomars, more Coke, anything so she could wait on us. She always thanked me for coming, when it should have been me thanking her for managing to raise a daughter as great as Sloan, with Bigfoot under the same roof.

I was falling hard for Sloan. I thought about that while I walked home that night. She had a theory that falling was the best part, and landing was the beginning of the end. She said her father had actually gotten down on one knee in the dining room of The Berryville Hotel, before it went to seed, and begged her mother to marry him. Look at them now, she said. They’ve landed.

Her idea was to avoid landing, which meant there was always that point when she’d stop us from going further.

“It’s not safe, anyway,” she said.

“We’ll make it safe.” For the first time in my life I was carrying a couple of Trojans in my wallet, just in case.

“I don’t want it to happen when I’m so young. If it really bothers you, Gary, you’ll have to date someone else.”

There wasn’t anyone else, anymore. I don’t know how long it had been since I’d indulged in my favorite daydream of Lynn Dunlinger cornering me in some hallway up at Linger to tell me I’d been on her mind a lot. Then I’d say, What do you mean? and she’d say, You know what I mean, and the rest was X-rated.

I kept remembering her out in the snowstorm with Jules Raleigh, the way they looked at each other with the snow falling on them, and then that awkward up-and-down gait of his when he ran after her.

I wanted to write Bobby about Sloan, but I didn’t think someone who’d come out of a war deaf and burned would be greatly thrilled by news that I’d lucked out while he was gone and finally found a life.

Even Mom and Dad weren’t aware what was going on with me. I had the war to thank for that. I liked having my own private world. Bobby was the only one I’d talk to about Sloan, anyway, and I figured he’d come home and the cool, cool Peel brothers would get back their Sunday walks together, when we’d let Mom and Dad drive home from church. We’d pick up ice cream for Sunday dinner.

My letters to him were mostly about school and Linger. I told him how Mr. D. had made us replace all the old yellow ribbons with new ones, and there were huge American flags in every room, with a blowup of Bobby in his Linger uniform over the bar.

He’d started to count the days from the war’s end to Bobby’s return. It was up to Day 20, or something like that now. Mr. Yee changed the number every morning, and in the weekly ads for Linger, the number appeared with “Waiting for Sp.4 Robert Peel,” after it (Bobby’d been promoted to Spec-Four). On one tape he said he was only a dozen more grades until brigadier. He’d also received a Bronze Star with a V for valor.

We worried some about what Bobby meant when he said that the Army hadn’t told us everything. But we figured he was referring to all the details of the Battle of Norfolk, which was what they’d named this tank war in the desert.

Dad figured Bobby was sparing Mom the bloody details until he was healed and home, and Mom figured Bobby was sparing Dad.

Every time they hinted at how much they’d like to go out to Denver, just for a day even, just to see him, Bobby said he wanted to wait until he could come home.

When I got in that night, Mom and Dad were having a fight. I could hear them from downstairs. I could hear Dad shouting something that ended in “all your fault.”

They didn’t have bad fights very often, but sometimes Mom agreed with Bobby about Mr. Dunlinger’s treatment of Dad. I remember Bobby used to say You work for a man for twenty-one years and you still call him Mister while he calls you Charlie!

I knew Dad had trouble standing up for himself, and I was embarrassed for him at times.

I made a lot of noise on the stairs going up to my room, so they’d know I was back in the house.

That worked.

They quieted down.

I heard some closet-door slamming and I heard a few muffled, angry words, but I put on C + C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat,” and I danced around by myself, the only way I
could
dance, getting out of my clothes, getting with it. I was thinking how much easier dancing was when you had someone in mind you’d be moving toward, who’d be moving toward you, too.

It was my father’s habit to take a cup of tea up to my mother first thing every morning, and he came down to do it the next day while I was pouring milk over my Froot Loops.

He said, “Do you know how much sugar’s in there? Why don’t you eat Special K instead? Or pay your own dentist bills!”

I chuckled. “Rough night, huh, Dad?”

“Jules Raleigh’s in trouble, thanks to your mother.”

“What’d she do to him?”

“Your mother was smoking again in Lingering Shadows and Mr. D. raised hell with her. So she got the bright idea to say she wasn’t the only one who smokes Camels. She said someone else who’s here all the time smokes two packs of Camels a day!”

“So what? Mr. Raleigh doesn’t go up there. Dunlinger knows that.”

“But it got him to go up there and look around good!”

My father slapped a bag of Celestial Seasonings Lemon Zinger on the counter.

“And?” I said.

“And he found a book Raleigh gave his daughter, with something written in it. I don’t know what it was. But he came down the stairs with it in his hand and he watched Jules from a barstool. He just sat there watching him. Jules saw him watching him, so when he finished his set, he goes over and he says, ‘What’s up?’ Mr. D. says, ‘I know all about it. Lynn told me everything.’”

“What was that supposed to mean?” But I knew the trap had been set, and Mr. Raleigh probably walked right into it. That was his way: to take people at their word, to trust.

My father said, “Jules looked like the cat who’d swallowed the canary. He says to Mr. D., ‘I’m relieved, Mr. D. I wanted to tell you myself.’”

I said, “Uh-oh.”

“And Mr. D. punched him. Hard! Jules fell down on The Grill’s floor. And Mr. D. said, ‘Get out now! Don’t come back here!’ There were customers still there, Gary. I’ve
never
seen Mr. D. lose control like that.” My father turned around and looked at me. “So we can thank your mother for opening up one whopper of a boil!”

“She didn’t know it, Dad.”

“But if she just hadn’t made that insinuation! … See, I must have been right, son. Remember when I said I saw them that afternoon, and they looked like a couple?”

B
OBBY

c/o Linger

Berryville, Pennsylvania

Dear Bobby,

I do not know your last name, nor even if you will ever receive this. Your first name and the name of the restaurant came to me in letters from my son, Donald Sweet, who served with you in the Gulf War.

Since his mother died when he was very young, my boy and I grew closer than most fathers and sons. I took him with me everywhere until this war separated us.

I am anxious to know anything you can tell me about his last days and his death. I am taking the chance that you are alive, and that this will be received by you, if it is, with a compassionate spirit, since Donny was my only boy, and I wish to find out anything I can about the end of his life.

I will be grateful to you for any information.

Sincerely

Spencer Sweet

F
RIDAY NIGHT I WAITED
tables at Linger because a regular weekend waiter came down with flu.

That weekend was the first one since Christmas that Lynn hadn’t come home from boarding school.

Neither was Jules Raleigh behind the piano at Linger, though he’d been at school that morning with a black eye. Word was out that he’d had a fight up at Linger, but no one knew any details.

Sloan was the only one I’d told the truth.

The kids thought he’d crack a joke about his shiner, but he didn’t. He was in a foul mood. It didn’t help that he was having more trouble than usual walking.

For homework he told us to write an essay about how the war had changed things. “Or how it
hasn’t
changed things,” he said. “Did it change anything in
your
life? Was it over before it could? Whose lives do you think it changed? And what will happen now? Will everything just go back the way it was? What about Iraq? Do you have any idea what life is like there? Or doesn’t that concern you? Should it? Let’s hear your thoughts!”

Mr. Dunlinger had managed to find a middle-aged, crew-cut piano player who seemed to know only songs from the sixties, so we heard Beatles songs and things like “Lay Lady Lay,” “Mellow Yellow,” “Stop in the Name of Love,” and “Surfer Girl.”

Mrs. Dunlinger got up and sang “Yester-me, yester-you, yesterday.”

When Mr. D. asked the piano player if he knew anything “patriotic,” all the fellow could come up with was “Soldier Boy” and “Give Peace a Chance.”

“Not ‘Give Peace a Chance!’” Mr. D. barked at him. “Never play that hippies’ song here!”

The Regency Room didn’t have the same feeling without the violin playing, and everyone was asking for Jules.

“I don’t know where he is.” Mr. Dunlinger shrugged.

My father looked grim and uncomfortable and went home as soon as the dinner crowd left.

I had the same ominous feeling Mr. Yee seemed to have when he told me, “We’ve seen the last of Jules around here.”

“Is that what Mr. D. said?”

“No, he said nothing. I just know it.”

Even Joan felt the change, I think, and she hightailed it out the door, down to the highway. Someone stopped his car and found the Linger collar around her neck, and brought her up wrapped in a newspaper.

Mrs. D. said when the ground thawed they would bury her out in her hunting ground in Lingering Pines.

I got home late, and Mom was watching a movie she’d rented with Goldie Hawn in it called
Swing Shift.

She said, “Exactly what Lynn did to Bobby with Jules Raleigh, Goldie did to Ed Harris with Kurt Russell! Exactly! Only in this film poor Ed came home on leave and found out for himself…. I don’t know how Bobby’s going to handle it, but we’re not going to tell him now.”

I didn’t care to point out everything all over again: that the poem she’d seen in Lynn’s bureau drawer was obviously meant for Mr. Raleigh, not Bobby, that Mom had manufactured the whole thing out of that, that and wishful thinking.

I told her about Joan, and she got teary-eyed and said that cat had been there sixteen years and now an era had ended.

“No more mouse corpses in The Regency Room,” I said.

She shouted the news down to my father. He was tinkering with something in his workshop, a part of the basement Bobby used to call “The Land of Buried Dreams.” Bobby said whenever Dad wanted to put something behind him, he went down there and nailed an old chair together, or glued a handle back on an old teapot—anything to deny something in his own life had come apart. I never knew before how much he’d liked Jules Raleigh. He hated it that Mom got him sacked.

The next day Mom and I called Bobby and told him about Mr. Sweet’s letter, and he asked us to read it to him.

When Mom was finished doing it, she went outside where Dad was shoveling snow, to tell him we had Bobby on the phone.

It was the first time I had any privacy to talk to him.

He said, “Is anyone else listening?”

“No.”

“Do you remember me writing about Sugar?”

“Sure!”

“When we got him out of the Bradley and laid him down on the ground, he was screaming. His feet were gone, Gary, and his left arm. I could see white bones and shoulder ligament where it had been. He got the worst of one of the tank rounds.”

I mumbled something, I don’t remember what.

Mom was back, calling out “Tell Bobby about Joan, honey!”

“Is that what the Army didn’t tell us?” I asked him.

“Later, on the floor of the tank? We found his feet still inside his combat boots, sliced from his shins.”