Old Powder Man (38 page)

“It sho is quiet,” Sarah said.

He went sooner than would have been expected to the office for a few hours a day. On the way down, he stopped at the bank to redeposit money withdrawn from all his accounts prior to January first. On that date, the state collected taxes on personal assets and every year Son withdrew his money, carried it around in cashier's checks, and put it back in the bank when the tax period was over.

He stopped at the main post office downtown, bought a hundred post cards, wrote one and mailed it. There was a man in Hill, Mississippi, who had bought dynamite and never paid for it; Son had written, phoned, threatened. Now he was going to send him a post card every day asking for his money. He figured in a town that size, the postmaster would soon notice, read them and start talking. He would see just how many post cards it would take to embarrass that soandso into paying him.

At the office, Holston said, “That fellow in West Delton you talked to finally gave us a big order.”

“Is that so?” Son said. “I'm sure glad to know something goes on around here when I'm not here.”

“Oh, old man, we get along all right without you,” Holston said.

“Well, I'm sure surprised to hear it,” Son said.

They looked at one another a long moment, Son not trying to hide his loneliness. Holston went back to work; ping ping ping, only his typing broke the silence. Son put his feet up and stared at the pictures on the wall, tilted back in his chair. Then he put his feet down, swung around and stared out at the road. Nothing happening out there either. Swinging back, he took paper and envelopes from his desk and from his breast pocket a fountain pen and looked at it; his name was on it in tiny fourteen-carat-gold letters. It had been his habit for many years to send his best customers a poinsettia every Christmas; one year the pen had come back in return. This year he had sent only a few plants but had received a tie from the wife of a good customer down in Batesville. It wasn't one he would ever wear, but he was as proud as he could be she had thought enough of him to send it. It hung in his closet where he liked to see it, opening the door. He wrote her now and thanked her, tried to think of other letters to write but there were none. Proud that he knew how, he folded the letter correctly as he had been taught long ago in night business school, the bottom up first, the top half over that. He crossed over to tell Holston he had to mail a letter, might as well go on home afterward. “How you fixed for towels?”

Holston said, “I believe we're doing all right in that department. Don't you want to stop fooling with that? I could send them out from here.”

“It's not enough to have a fellow stop,” he said. “I got to come down and see what's going on anyway. It's easy to take them home, let Kate put them in with our laundry.”

“Suit yourself,” Holston said.

“Take it easy,” Son said.

“You do the same. We'll see you, Frank,” Holston said. His typing resumed as Son turned slowly and went out to his car. He mailed the letter and drove home slowly, trying to think of other errands to do. In his mind he ran through the things in the medicine cabinet. Did he need tooth paste, shaving cream, razors? He decided he needed a new laxative. The one he was using didn't do him a damn bit of good. He always had had trouble going to the bathroom; Kate said it was because he had rushed out every morning to get on the road and never given himself a chance. At the drug store, having discussed all the laxatives he had tried, he asked for another one; the druggist suggested a new one called Magic. He bought a box of Whitman's candy and several packages of gum. Outside an old man was in a wagon selling produce; Son bought apples, feeling sorry for the old man out in this weather trying to make a living. In the car, he rubbed an apple along his pants leg, then bit into it; juice ran down his wrists, up his shirt sleeve, but he did not mind. He liked driving along with it cold outside, warm in, the winter sun coming through the windshield, the almost sour taste of the apple in his mouth.

Magic was the most successful laxative he ever had; later he sent Laurel a box telling her if she ever needed one it was the best he had found. He told about sending sixty post cards to a fellow who finally paid some money he owed. He wrote that it was windy but bright and pretty every day; he was going to the office as much as he could but didn't feel any better at all. He knew it hadn't been much time since she left, but if she'd like to come home for Easter he'd be glad to send her the money to.

At the office he began to clean out things, told himself it was only spring cleaning long overdue. Going through the files he found the personal letter from Winston Laurel had put there and threw it away. He found other things it seemed nobody had any business seeing, threw away wastebaskets full, to Holston's astonishment. Son had always kept receipts, bank statements, cancelled checks for years back; now he kept them only for a year. He could not have explained a feeling of urgency about getting everything in order. He went through an old photograph album, mostly pictures of blasts; but there were some of him and Betty Sue swimming in the bayou in Mill's Landing. He threw those away thinking they sure didn't mean anything to anybody in the world but him.

He found in the files another man who owed him two dollars for a roll of fuse, started sending post cards to him.

In the summer Laurel was home briefly and went back to summer school. What he had said had taken root; she was going to stay in one place until something did happen. Occasionally Son played Pitch at the Engineers office, came home at four-thirty when it closed, waited until the paper came and read it until supper. He looked at television until he went to bed but seldom slept well. It was because he hadn't done enough during the day to be tired, Kate said. When he fell asleep it was late, then he slept late the next morning and could not sleep again at night; he could not break the circle. Often he lay in bed all morning not really asleep, his knees drawn toward his chin. One morning, struggling up, he said he always had wanted to go back and see Pike's Peak; they would drive to Colorado and perhaps see Laurel. He went to the doctor to see if he ought to make the trip. This time the doctor sent him to a specialist, Dr. Phillips. He came home trying to tell Kate what the specialist said he had; he couldn't remember how to pronounce it. But it was something they were just finding out about and even the doctor-fellows didn't know too much about it. He held up his hands the way Dr. Phillips had done, showing the size his lungs ought to be and the size they were.

“Well, what can they do about it?” Kate said.

“Nothing,” he said. “There isn't any medicine, there isn't anything. You just got to live with it the man said.” He could do what he felt like doing and would go ahead with the trip. The day before they were to leave he took towels to Holston. He wrote post cards, dating them ahead, for Holston to mail while he was gone. Sitting alone in the office thinking, he knew it was foolish to start out on a drive across the country without a will. But he wasn't going to pay any shyster lawyer to draw up one; he'd write it himself. When he had, it didn't look like much on paper for thirty years' work; there ought to be some way you could put down what it had been like scraping around for every dime. Maybe Laurel would appreciate more all those shares of old A.T.&T. if she knew what he had been through to get them. His pen hesitated over the paper a moment, but having disposed of his stocks, house, car, he wrote only that his diamond ring was for Buzz. He guessed that was all else of value he had. Mace and Holston were witnesses.

“Well,” Kate said when they started off at noon the next day, “I never thought I'd live to see the day we didn't start out on a trip at the crack of dawn.”

“Hell,” he said, settling to the wheel, “I never thought I'd see the time when I couldn't sleep at night either.”

They stayed in New Mexico for a week. For the first time in years, Son bought a bathing suit, sat beside the motel's pool, said he believed the sun helped his chest. Kate said he just wanted to look at those little airline stewardesses staying the week-end. He wanted her to buy a bathing suit; she would not, had never been swimming in her life. Where she grew up there had been no place to learn, except in muddy ponds with snakes, and afterward she had been too timid. She did not want to be wrinkled (more, she said) by the sun. She sat in shade near him. In the afternoons he rested and Kate took walks, visited places where Indian carvings were sold, began a collection. It was the first thing he had ever seen her interested in; he was glad.

They drove on. By the end of each day, he was too tired to lift the suitcases to carry inside a motel, would have changed all their reservations ahead to hotels but Kate carried the bags. He never had expected to be in this kind of shape, he said. It was night when they reached Colorado Springs. The porter, showing their room, pulled aside the window curtain to say the lighter section of sky in the distance was from a light atop the Peak. Son turned toward it, embarrassed by his own grin of pleasure. Next morning, as early as he could make it, they started. Driving the winding route to the top and down, he knew just how long ago it all had been, thinking that once he had walked it. The next day, they went in search of the lumber camp and the ways he took were wrong. He drove through forests until Kate made him stop at a filling station where an old man sat on a bench in front and answered that the camp had not been in operation over fifteen years; long ago everyone had lost contact with the couple who had run it. Bent forward—he said he could breathe easier that way—Son stared into the distance, raced the motor once. Then, turning, he said expectantly, “I worked out to that camp when I was just a boy.”

The old man spit into the road. Kate said, “Frank, that was more than forty years ago. It couldn't be the same. Those people probably aren't even alive.”

He said nothing until a few moments later that he was too tired to drive. Having exchanged places, Kate released the handbrake; they moved. “Much obliged,” he called back to the old man, driving away, again through trees, then facing forward said, “I thought I saw some things I recognized.”

At the end of the week, Laurel came, George with her. They had been married the week before. Son thought he had to be glad she was settled at last; taken care of, he hoped. He had been fooling himself all this time thinking she would come back. Buzz had tried to tell him when she went the last time she probably never would be, had told him not to worry; but as long as she was alone, he had. He never would understand why she left home. He had thought she had everything in the world to make her happy.

Not understanding how things had gone wrong, he knew he had to make the best of them, told the hotel clerk he had a bride and groom on his hands, fix up the bridal suite. He treated them to it as long as they could stay. When they had to leave, he gave George a thousand dollars, said he figured they had saved him at least that much running off to get married. Couldn't they stay longer?

George had to get back to teach, Laurel to classes. He told her, Any time you want to come home, I'll be glad to send you the money. She said they would come at Thanksgiving and she could stay for a long visit. Afterward she got on the plane with George, not wanting to. She had let happen what had, never stood still to think, knew now she did not want not to be going back to Delton either.

They were gone and he said, Did Kate think George would ever amount to a hill of beans? Kate said he already did. Because he didn't work with his hands, sweat to make a living the way Son had, didn't mean he didn't
work
. He said at least he wasn't a Jew or a Catholic or a shoe salesman, he had something to be grateful about. Kate liked George, was glad Laurel was married, like everybody else's daughter. The house had been empty so long, she thought she was used to it.

But it seemed more quiet, more empty after they had been travelling had someone in the motels always to talk to. And before it had not seemed Laurel was really gone. For a few days Kate had to unpack, had things to go over with Sarah. Then when everything was put away, clean, she began to stretch out on the bed for long parts of the day, closed her eyes but was not asleep. By suppertime her cheeks had a faint red flush, her eyes a look of wandering.

He had to rest. As much as he might want to do something about Kate, there was nothing he could do. And he had to rest. He sat, resting and worrying about Kate, elbows on his knees, his head hung almost between them, rubbing his hands back and forth over his scalp, watching dandruff fall.

Kate went to the grocery store, occasionally played bridge. He searched the house, once asked Sarah to help him lift her mattress but found nothing. Sarah said she didn't know where Mrs. Wynn hid them but she for a long time had been the one carrying out empty pints in the trash.

“Pints! What kind of whisky is it?” he said.

“Southern Lady,” Sarah said.

“Je-sus Christ.” If that wasn't just like that woman. Nobody but Negroes bought Southern Lady or whisky by the pint either. That night, slapping a twenty-dollar bill on the table, he said if she was going to sneak whisky into his house stop sneaking in that cheap stuff. Get some good whisky and get it by the fifth. Taking the money, Kate said he had lost his mind.

Whew! He lay awake nights wondering what was going to happen to Kate if anything happened to him. Often, still awake in the middle of the night, he would get up and sit in a chair, look out at the nighttime trees and the black yard and the even blacker street where there was nothing to see but occasional cars going by, their lights mellowing the lonesome night, their tires making sounds like
thump
as they passed the house. He thought of her reasons for drinking when she could not deny she did: to get back at him for all the drinking he had done, for the times he had hit her, for the women he had known. He waited as expectantly for sleep as if it were a guest coming to the door, wondered all the time now what had happened, where he had made his mistake.