Old Powder Man (35 page)

“I bet,” Kate said.

Son crossed the room, belched and looked relieved. “She's too lazy to even get a job,” he said.

“You talk about lazy when you sleep till noon every day,” Kate said.

“Kate, are you trying to run my business again?” he said.

“You don't have any to run,” she said. “That's what's the matter.”

A long moment, he stood staring; then he said, “I worked thirty years so I wouldn't have any business to tend to, so I could sleep late in the mornings if I wanted. And nobody's going to tell me any different, you hear?”

“I hear,” she said.

He stared at her out of eyes turned white. Skin sagged like jowls along his face. “I don't want to have anything to do,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” Kate said. Her back to them, she kept sorting groceries.

He stared as if she faced him, once would have hit her, now only looked as if he would like to. Too much juice, he thought, had gone out of him. Laurel wondered why Kate, who so often had wanted him to change, intentionally antagonized him now that he had. Kate crossed the room, storing things. He said, “I told her I could get her a job as a messenger girl down yonder at the bank. But she can't start at the bottom. She's been to college.”

“She doesn't have to know what she wants to do yet,” Kate said. “She's only been home a month.”

He pressed a hand against his chest and caught his breath, as if needing to store it to say what he wanted. “She's got stock in her name in that bank,” he said. “She'll appreciate that some day. That bank's going to be one of the biggest in this part of the country, the way Delton is growing.”

“Oh, Frank, that's not the point,” Kate said.

“Well, I don't know what the point is then,” he said.

He dug a toothpick from the breast pocket of his bathrobe and picked at a back tooth. The pick bobbed up and down; he sucked occasionally, keeping it in place and said, “That stock split two for one not long ago.” For the first time he spoke directly to Laurel. “Do you realize that?”

“No,” she said. She was washing lettuce and had no idea what a stock split meant. Her stomach had knotted resentfully at the way they had spoken about her as if she were not there.

“Two for one!” he said happily. His grin returned; his eyes were full of delight. Sucking juicily at the toothpick, he shifted it across his mouth. “All I know is,” he said, “I'd have been a happy son-of-a-bitch to have had somebody offer to help me out when I was starting out, fourteen years old, to look for work. She'll find out what earning a living's like someday.” At the back door, Tippy whined to get in. Son opened the door. Shimmying his rear in delight, Tippy came through. Son said, “It was a booger, boy. A booger.”

Kate said, “Frank, are you going to stay here again all day without even getting dressed?”

He said, “Kate, I told you not to try to run my business.” Turning, he went out and down the long hall slowly, to his room at the end. He would get dressed, though he had not been going to until Kate started in on him.

Laurel said, “Mother, all those girls do at the bank is stand all day in the lobby until someone has a message to deliver.”

“I know it,” Kate said. “But I don't know what you are going to do.”

When he came back dressed, they were silent. “I bought that stock at twenty-nine, too,” he said, coming in. “Now it's worth sixty-one.” Neither Kate nor Laurel understood stocks and said nothing. He said, “I guess I'll have to go on down and get me a haircut and see about what's going on at the office.”

He went out and down the back steps and slowly across the yard toward the garage. Kate said, “Will you tell me what he's going to do the rest of his life, sit here and me sit here and watch him?” She threw a bunch of celery at the drainboard and suddenly crushed a paper sack so hard her knuckles stood out white and separate. “Oh, you don't know what it's like having everything turn out wrong. Him just sitting here and a daughter who's the only one of her crowd not married, a home you never want to come home to.”

Laurel thought, Why does she think I want to stay here? I've always been going to find a place where everything is different. Silent, she watched him out the back window; from the rear he looked like an old man; the back of his neck was narrow, his shoulders went forward and his clothes hung on him as if they were a larger man's; the sleeves seemed empty. Stopping at the garage, he held one hand against a door post.

In the car, he stared ahead at the wall where garden tools hung, smelled the cool damp smell of the concrete floor, listened to himself breathe. You never gave a thought to something like breathing until you couldn't do it so good anymore, he thought. The time was almost here to do some of the things he had put off, to have some fun with his money Kate said they never had had. He didn't know exactly what he wanted to do. But he knew one thing, he had to get to feeling better before he did it.

He went to the office off and on until Christmas; during January when Buzz was in town, he went every day. On the first, Buzz had looked at him in surprise. “Ain't you lost some weight, boy?” he said.

“I ain't doing a damn bit of good,” Son said.

“Probably your damn meanness coming out,” Buzz said.

“Hell, I ain't even mean anymore,” Son said. “Until I fell off the wagon Christmas, I hadn't even had a drink in six months.”

“You are sick,” Buzz said. They were laughing, then suddenly Buzz was not. He sat down and said, “Old man,” and his voice had no inflection; it was as if he were trying to hold it on one straight note. “I've gone broke, busted, on that job up there.”

Son tilted back; one leg crossed the other; his hands gripped hard the arms of his chair. “Whew,” he said.

Buzz said, “Every red cent I had was tied up in that job. First my machinery broke down and it rained four days out of every seven. Naw. First I underbid the job.”

“Whew,” Son said again. “Last thing I knew you was a millionaire, now you're broke. Don't you have no money put away anywhere for a rainy day?”

“You know I never have been able to save nothing,” Buzz said.

“Old man, it looks to me like you're in a hell of a mess. I thought when you took on that job you was getting to be a pretty big operator. I can't imagine any grown up man not having money put away. Miss Kate now, she's always been on me about putting everything I made into stocks. But the way I feel, what if I had to be out on the road still, trying to make a living?”

“What's the matter with you?” Buzz said.

“Damn if I know. I'm not suppose to know anything except how to sell powder. And the doctor-fellow can't find anything the matter with me either. I have a bad cough. What's going to happen now?” Son said.

“My creditors are fixing to take my machinery,” Buzz said. “If they do, I ain't got a snowball's chance in June. Would you lend me some money?”

Son said, “It looks to me like I'm going to have to bail you out this time.”

They discussed the amount and Son's terms. “I'll go down to the bank this afternoon and get a bond,” Buzz said.

“I don't want no bond,” Son said. “I take your word.”

“Not even for that amount?” Buzz said. “That's a lot of money.”

“I couldn't stand to see no old man go to jail,” Son said. With a little effort, he rose; they shook hands. “This is enough, for all that?”

“It's enough,” Son said.

“Old man, you ain't as tight with your money as they say you are,” Buzz said, laughing almost in his old way.

“I can be,” Son said.

“How's Miss Kate and Laurel doing?” Buzz said.

“They're both about to worry me to death,” he said. “I think sometimes that's what makes me feel so bad. Miss Kate is just the same. Laurel don't seem to be able to settle down. She's had two or three little jobs around Delton, and quits them. She's not doing anything right now but she's talking about going up yonder to New York to work.”

“Can't you make Kate quit that,” Buzz said.

Son said, “I thought she'd quit when Laurel came. I just don't know what to do.”

In February when Buzz went back to East Tennessee, Son thought he missed the old soandso like he had missed few people; still he would not lend him money a second time. You could make a mistake once. There had been only a few old boys in town that winter staying around at the hotels, nothing like it used to be. He got around to seeing everybody, had them out to the house, shot craps once, not like it used to be either. That spring, Buzz called from his job. “Cliffs,” he said. “Just solid rock two hundred feet straight up. I got to get the side shot off, to flatten it out wide enough for a roadbed. Frank, nobody can do it but you. Come on up here. It'll do you some good.”

He started out a few days later for the Smokies. Kate said, “Thank goodness, he's got something to do.” Maybe it was something to do, he thought; maybe it would do him some good; but what nobody could see was he just didn't have the stuff anymore. “I'm wore out,” he told Buzz when he got there. “I'm going to have to rest up before I even look at the job.” One problem was to get tractors up the cliff. When they figured a way, Son knew it was a sight he would never forget; they hooked a pulley to a tree and the tractors to the end of the rope and pulled them two hundred feet straight up the side of the cliff, before Son shot the side off.

It was the middle of a sunny afternoon when he got back home, but he could not wait to get to bed. As he crossed the back yard, Sarah came to the door of her room off the garage and said, “Mrs. Wynn's gone to play cards. She'll be back at six.”

“Sarah, I'm about to starve to death,” he said. “Can you rustle me up something to eat?”

“Yes sir,” she said. She came inside and fixed him a sandwich and after he ate he went to bed. He tried to read a new detective magazine but he could not concentrate. He could not sleep either. Closing his eyes the road swept beneath him and he travelled again the mountainous curves; the wheel had seemed heavy, had rubbed red places on hands not used to gripping one. Mile had lengthened into mile, the way ahead had grown until he thought he could not push that buggy home. He had thought of stopping in a motel fifty miles out of town, then would not let himself do it, had pushed on. He had a drink and finally slept, heavily he knew, because when the phone rang, it was a long time before he could bring himself up out of the dark.

Holston said, “I thought you were coming back this evening. What are you up to?”

“Hell, I'm trying to get some rest but there don't look like there's any place you can go to get some,” he said.

Holston said he was wanted way down in south Mississippi by a county to do some muck shooting; they hadn't been able to find anybody else who could shoot the stuff.

“Jesus Christ,” Son said, laughing. “You mean there still ain't anybody that knows anything about shooting dynamite but me? I thought somebody else would have learned something by now.”

Holston said, “Can I tell them you're coming?”

Son said, “Hell, I'm in the bed.”

“Well get out of the bed,” Holston said.

He said, “I'll have to see. I'll call you tomorrow.”

All the way down to his toes his legs ached; he could not make it. No one seemed to understand; nobody seemed to know what it was like now or what it had ever been like. He got up and took another drink, looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and thought, I'm wore out. Only Sarah was in the house and it was dark except for a crack of light around the closed kitchen door. He smelled supper cooking and it made him hungry and suddenly it made him angry too: why wasn't Kate here seeing his supper got on the table? What time was it anyway? Angrily, he grabbed the clock to look closely in the twilight. It was only five and he had another drink and went back to bed. He woke when Laurel said, “Daddy, are you asleep? Some woman wants you on the telephone.” He came up out of the darkness again and said, “Hello,” gruffly.

“That's not any nice way to greet an old friend,” a voice said.

“Who the hell is this?” he said.

“You know who the hell it is,” the voice said and laughed. Of course, he knew then. He guessed that was the very first thing he had ever noticed about her. All those years he had seen her whenever he was down in her part of the Delta, a lot had changed, but her laugh never did. Then this past year or so he had not gotten down her way; but of all the women he had been out with, she was the only one he had ever cared anything about. “What the hell you doing in Delton, May?” he said.

“Got a ride up with a friend,” she said. “Told her I had a friend I wanted to look up I hadn't seen in a long time.” As she spoke, he thought what a long time it had been, looked all the way back to the time he gave her the teddies. May said, “We got a couple of rooms down here at the Andrew Johnson. Where you been so long?”

“Minding my own business I guess,” he said.

“We're fixing to have a little party. Can't you come on down? We got some good drinking whisky that'll still be here if you get here soon enough.”

He thought how it used to be: all night, any time; and the next morning too. He'd never needed anything but whisky to keep him going. Looking back, he thought of all the laughing he and May had done; it seemed it had all been a whole lot of laughing; why wasn't it anymore? If anybody understood him, he guessed she came the closest. She had said, “Mr. Will now, some of the others seem satisfied. You've made your money, got your business, but it don't seem like you're happy. Seems like there's always something eating at you still.”

He had said, “I hate to say it but the older I get it seems like I get more like my mammy every day.”