Pay the Piper (7 page)

“They're all out to get you, Mom,” Rick said.

“All right, Dad.” She smiled again at his mimicry. Not until they flew down a ramp like a roller-coaster ride did she stop praying: God, William, somebody help me.

Rick looked at her curiously. “Why are you always so afraid?”

“I held everybody up. They won't love me.”

“So afraid,” he said, like a whisper. “Dad says you do so many things great. Why don't you have any confidence?”

“Because of the past Dad spoke about.”

“Dad saves every rubber band off the Sunday paper, and you have a drawer full of candle stubs. You both save every teensy bit of aluminum foil. He says that's because you both grew up during the Depression.”

“It marked our lives. My father yelled so about bills, I dreaded having new clothes. If we weren't already poor, I thought we were going to get poor. Gran shopped for dresses in bargain basements when she could afford not to. But my father never let up about money.” Gran, Laurel thought: everything was not easy.

“You and Dad are the best parents of anybody I know. I'm glad I didn't grow up like either one of you. I wish I could have known my grandfather, Pappy.”

“I wish so too. It was unfair he died when you were four months old. I'd always wanted to have a boy for him. What he had craved was ‘a tough little nut.' It was a terrible disappointment when I was a girl.”

“How do you know?”

“Because a black woman who was Gran's best friend's maid told me. She was there when I was born: Sudie. If I knew where to find her, I'd peel me a niggerhead.”

“Mom?”

“You know I'm kidding. That's the kind of thing I grew up hearing: Ah'm goin' peel me a niggerhead: phonetic. Boys used to go coon-conking, or said they did. I don't believe any of them really drove around Delton throwing eggs at Negroes. Back then, blacks couldn't have done anything about it. What a turnaround. They used to be terrified of us, and now we're scared of them.” Justice was a word she believed in.

“Why'd that maid tell you?”

“I guess she didn't assume it would always hurt. I wanted to have a boy for Dad too. Men want sons.”

What was she to say if Rick ever asked why he was an only child? She wasn't certain why; after a time, another baby just never came. Perhaps he thought he already knew enough. When William brought home flowers for their tenth anniversary, Rick said, “If you've been married ten years today, how come I'm—?” And then he hushed; his eyes had a light that lasted, closed. Later, she and William dissolved into one another's arms. “Whew,” he had said. “Well, that's over, and a lot sooner than I'd have expected.” They had both been impressed at how quickly things had dawned on Rick. But what had it meant to him to know his mother was knocked up when his parents married?

Laurel said, “What are you smiling about?”

“I was thinking of Dad at home in Pappy's old robe.”

“You can inherit it.”

“That robe sucks. And it's all worn.”

“Apparently, Pappy thought it was too fancy. Dad and I gave it to him. After he died, my mother said he never took it out of the box.” Why be told that? Why were people so unsparing?

“I'd chuck it out.”

“You're a spoiled Soundport kid.”

“Am I?”

“No. Don't worry. And your parents aren't rich.”

“I'm glad,” Rick said. “I know kids who're already talking about what kind of car they want in high school.”

“You can use mine. I'm always home.”

Rick gave her a loving pinch without hurting. “You're a good mother. You're always under my thumb.”

“I know it. How come I do everything my squirt of a kid tells me?”

“And the most famous mother in the neighborhood. How old was I then?”

“Seven.”

She had to repeat the story exactly: how when she won a large monetary award for her first novel, she was written up in the Soundport paper. One day Rick said, “You're famous in our neighborhood. Did you know that?”

Thinking he had overheard parents talking of her literary achievement, she'd said modestly, “No. Why?”

“When we play touch football in the backyard you bring out lemonade,” Rick said.

Pretending now to be an interviewer, using her writing name, he asked, “Which way had you rather be famous, Miss Wynn?”

“For writing or for lemonade? I'll choose lemonade. I think that's what life's really about.”

On the next morning, they passed Knoxville and wound through gray morning haze in the Smokies over a circuitous two-lane mountain highway. Truck drivers suggestively tooted diesel horns if she passed them—they somehow felt that seeing a single female on the road gave them the right. Then she was saying, “I can't believe you've done this, Rick.” He had held his Slinky train out the window, it unwound, and now it was wrapped somewhere underneath the car. “You're too old to be playing with a Slinky train.”

He was frightened; something serious might be wrong with the car. Laurel controlled her temper; she had always thought herself too irritable and as a mother wanted to change her ways, though to change her spots seemed impossible. Her parents always made such large issues out of the smallest happenings, and she did not want Rick to have that past. Whatever she had done wrong seemed to them beyond belief. “I swear,” they would say in turn, with a finality that included the past, the present, and the future.

“I just don't know what to do about the car,” Laurel said.

“Well, Laurel.” Rick drew down his chin and deepened his voice into his father's. “I'd back carefully. If there's a problem, I'm sure Rick will run to that garage and see about a tow truck.” Distantly, they saw a dilapidated cedar structure and a typical country store with two gas pumps in front.

“Good thinking.” Backing along the shoulder of the road, Laurel was proud of being able to go in a straight line. She equated this ability to being her father's daughter, as she equated her tenacity on the road to him and her ability to make the long trip alone, too. Sometimes she worried about having what seemed too much male strength; for instance, she had never shed a tear in front of William.

Laurel parked in cinders before the grocery. The landscape beyond it seemed to beat and pulsate with a lonely silence. There was nothing but emptiness and yellow spurts of stinkweed sticking up for miles. Buff waited on the porch, looking through a screen door with cotton wads stuck to it, hopefully warding off flies.

She nudged Rick. “You ask.”

He held up Buff's plastic dish. “Is there a place I can get my dog some water?”

A woman sat on a stool, her hair skinned back so tightly, her eyes looked Chinese. She had the vacuous, blue-eyed look of country people who seldom see anyone and have no news. Nearby an old man sat in a rocker spitting tobacco juice into a can labeled Bartlett Pears, which brimmed full. Yuck, Laurel thought. “There's a bathroom back yonder I hate for you to see.” Rick followed the woman's directions, carrying the bowl ahead as if soliciting.

This was not really her countryside here, and yet she felt a sense of coming close to it; here it was possible to stand without air-conditioning and not be soaked in perspiration, the air was not so heavy. In the rackety cedar building beyond, a man stood humped over welding, sending blue and green sparks into the air. Laurel explained about the car. “Bubba could he'p you if he has a mind to,” the old man said, spitting.

Rick came back, the bowl slurping water to the floor. “Hey, Mom,” he said. “Fireworks. Can I get some?”

“You've got money.”

“That boy don't want to use his'n.” The woman laughed.

Laurel tried to whisper. “Get them at Loma's. I like to buy as much as possible from her.”

“Last year she didn't have anything good. They're getting stricter in Mississippi. How about at least five bucks' worth? Remember last year I doubled my money selling firecrackers back in Soundport?”

“I'm not bailing you out of jail for selling illegal contraband. Five bucks? Use your money.”

“It's for the gun.” He adopted a younger kid's whining: “Pleee-se, Mom.”

“Oh, here,” she said.

“I'll use my own quarter for this paper.”

“What do you want a newspaper for?”

“It's got an article about Mickey Mantle.”

“Mickey Man-till. Where'd you get that accent?” She wondered what his accent was. He'd grown up hearing southwest Tennessee mixed with Beacon Hill Boston and Connecticut suburbia. And what was that? “We have to ask that man if he'll help us.”

“I'll be picking out fireworks.”

“You don't want to go?”

“You can go alone, Mom.”

She gave him a half-pleading look and went onto the porch, telling Buff to stay where she was. Why must she be worried about going to ask a garage man to fix her car? Laurel knew as she walked his way it was because any refusal or hesitancy on his part she would take as personal rejection. And she stood right beside Bubba's elbow but he did not look up. She adopted William's hearty, winning, breezy manner and said, “Hello. Hello.”

“What can I do for you?” he said, with a suspicious mountainside manner.

She said, “I know it sounds ridiculous.” Then she explained to him what had happened.

“Kids'll be kids,” Bubba said. “Bring the car on over here.”

Laurel went back for it, wondering if to drive it further might not be bad for the car. But she would not protest. Why, she questioned herself, because Bubba might not like you?

“You a long way from home,” he said, looking at her license plate; then Laurel thought, Lord, she was home. Because all summer long, country people said the same thing to her, with the slight idea that something must be wrong. Did they never go anywhere? she wondered. She felt a great need to explain to Bubba she was not some agitator from the East—though the time was late for that—but that she belonged, and anyway she was more apt to get good service, being part of where they were. “I came from Delton. And I have people in Mississippi. I go back every summer to visit them.” She had purposely used the word “people” as a Southernism.

“Making this long trip by yourself?” Bubba chose among tools.

“Yup. Except for my son.”

“Wire's caught up in the rear axle. Got to run her up on the lift.” He began to snip with wire clippers, giving her a sideways glance. “If you come up down in this part of the world, how'd you get so far up the country?”

“Oh.” She shifted her feet about in his sawdust, wondering herself; then she said, “I married a man up there. It just happened.” That was the whole truth.

“You still married?”

“Yes.”

He gave her another sharply angled look. “If I was married to a good-looking woman, I wouldn't let her be running around the countryside loose.”

She was not running around loose, she thought angrily. She had given him a viable, justifiable reason about why she was on her way south; why was she made to feel odd making this trip?

“Done. You ain't got much toy left.”

“The car's still all right?”

“Good as new. It
is
new, ain't it?”

She nodded. She hated again those moments in the showroom when William moved about turning steering wheels, grinning like a small boy: his conservative family seldom bought new cars: her salesman father, except during the war, had a new one every year. In her mind's eye, Mr. Woodsum remained stationary in a yellow convertible, asking questions of a salesman. It was tawdry, Laurel thought, a scene that should have been far removed from their lives, and William, despite moralistic attitudes, had brought them to it.

“You going on down the road, or staying round here?”

“Going on down the road.”

“If you was to stay here, I'd carry you on over yonder to that store for a Coke,” Bubba said.

Laurel smiled. “That would be nice.” What made such men assume you would like to go? “How much for the work?”

“Not something I've priced. Gimme a couple of bucks.”

She opened the car door. “If you was to come on back this way, I'd carry you on over yonder yet,” Bubba said.

“I go home a different way. Through St. Louis.” She fended off such suggestions all summer from the most outlandish men, being alone. Always she felt the safety and security of being married; nothing could harm her, really, while there was William.

“Mom. Buff's gone.”

“She couldn't be gone. She never goes anywhere.” Laurel got out of the car.

“I've called and called.”

She looked toward the highway where another diesel truck passed; the silhouette of its driver inside looked like a paper doll. “She wouldn't go to the road.” They looked out over the scraggly land with its yellow weeds; after following footpaths through it, their shoes seemed to have been dusted by dry mustard. They picked cockleburs from their clothes and went on calling, “Buff, Buff,” her name echoing back to them from hidden hollows.

“We can't leave her,” Rick said.

“I know.” But how long could they wait? One time Rick had said that when Buff died that would be the end of his childhood; they had had the dog so long, he did not remember a time without her. But that's not now, God. Laurel's lower lip trembled. It's too soon. Yet that's what she was thinking of doing to Rick's childhood; to divorce his father would end it. He'd never have again the innocence he now had. And what about herself? She was walking along thinking she must call William and ask him what to do next.

Then the miracle happened; the little body came running toward them. Rick fell on his knees and instantly got up holding his nose. “Whew!”

“She's been rolling in cow plops,” Laurel said. “Buff, how could you?”