Pig-Out Inn (10 page)

“Wellington.”

“You, son?”

“Uh, Ponca City.” Tag looked at me smugly.

“Bad news at Ponca City. We got some switching trouble, but I believe we'll get it patched up before the train's due to pull in.” He drew a gold watch with a chain out of his breast pocket. “Plenty of time,” he assured us, stuffing the watch back. “
Tickets!
”

We handed over our tickets, Mr. Malroy continued down the aisle, stopping at each seat on the coach. Finally he came back and perched on the armrest of the seat across from us.

“Did you ever think where Kansas would be without the railroad?” he said.

“In Missouri?” Tag suggested.

“In Missouri!” Mr. Malroy shook with laughter, and the shiny buttons around his middle strained sorely. His laughter stopped as suddenly as it began. “There's nothing more important to the economy of this great nation than the railroad.”

Tag said, “My dad's a truck driver.”

“Oh, is he now? Well, how do you think they get the goods to the trucks? Every one of those grand manufacturers and the big farm co-ops and your major grain elevators, they all back up to railroad tracks. We move the lifeblood of this nation down thousands of miles of track, and the trucks pick up the goods for the short hauls where there aren't any tracks. Believe it.”

Tag didn't look like he believed it.

“Oh, but the days of the grand passenger trains are gone,” Mr. Malroy said, pulling a huge rumpled red handkerchief from his back pocket. He dabbed at his eyes and blew his nose soundly. “Gone. Why, I remember when President Woodrow Wilson came through here in the prettiest coach you ever saw. Painted yellow, it was, and all the upholstery was white. And the world-renowned actress, Sarah Bernhardt, she had an aunt over in Elgar, and she came through whenever she could, with a whole car full of luggage and packages for the folks in Elgar.”

Tag asked, “Did you ever have any baseball players on your train?”

“Did we! Why, it was maybe 1940, '41 when the great Ted Williams rode in this car.”

“Ted Williams? No kidding? Ted Williams of the Red Sox? He rode
this
car?”

“As I recollect, he sat in that very seat. Yours, or the one behind you, sure enough.”

“Wow!” Tag cried. “This is unbelievable. Wait till I tell my dad!”

“Say, son, isn't that a Red Sox cap you're wearing?” Mr. Malroy asked.

“Yes, sir,” said Tag, beaming.

“Can you beat that coincidence?” Mr. Malroy said, chuckling. “Well, the railroad's full of romance, son, it's full of romance.”

TWELVE

I was in charge of local arrangements for the Beach Boys' concert tour. They liked thick rare steaks served backstage right after each performance. Johnny had his hibachi set up behind the scrim. Smoke curled up into the lights of the show. Just as Johnny was lifting his machete to attack the side of beef and tame it into T-bones, I woke up: there was something out there.

I bolted up in my bed, my ears alert as a hound dog's. Footsteps. Heavy footsteps trying to be light, trying not to grind the gravel of our lot, trying not to upset a single stone. I pulled back a corner of the curtain. A large man had just passed my window, tiptoeing like a clumsy Frankenstein. He was heading—where?—for another cottage? Maybe he was a hobo needing a place to sleep for the night. But something said no. Even in the dark, with just a memory of light from the sliver of a moon, which was so high up in the sky that it was almost ready to give way to morning—even in that light I sensed that the man wasn't a bum. There was nothing untied about him, no clothes flapping or trailing behind him. He wore something all one piece—overalls, and high-top tennis shoes. He walked past Green Cottage 5 and stopped in front of the next cottage. He seemed to be looking it over carefully. Then he raised his beefy hand and knocked on the window of Red Cottage 4. Cee Dubyah!

I pulled on my jeans and a loose T-shirt and stole past Stephanie. The night was almost cool, like it was forgiving the stones under my feet for being lumps of coal during the day. Crickets sang their summer song, stopping for only a second as I passed their love nests. By now Cee Dubyah was inside Tag's cottage. The door was wide open, and barely outlined in the darkness was the giant Cee Dubyah with Tag scooped up in his arms like a puppy. Fenway circled them both.

I tried to look away but couldn't. I was drawn back to those two—Tag with his legs wrapped around his father's waist, and their faces as close to each other as a bow to a violin.

But they never noticed me out there in the dark, and soon they fell to whispering and talking in low mahogany tones, and I had to strain to catch as much as possible.

“You come for me, Cee Dubyah? I can be ready in thirty seconds.”

“Not yet, son. Just wanted to see how you're getting along.”

“Aw, I'm doing okay. I made a clean profit, more than fifty dollars already after I pay them for my meals.”

“Are they giving you any hassles, son?”

“The one, Dovi, she's real bossy. She thinks she's in charge of the world. But I figured out how to get her to do my laundry every Sunday.”

He
figured out!

“And she warned me when the cops came looking for me with a picture.”

“Yeah, well, that's what I got to talk to you about.” Cee Dubyah put Tag down and closed the door. I had to move to the window where it was open around the air conditioner Tag never bothered to turn on, and hook my ear to the opening. Cee Dubyah talked up louder anyway, since the door was closed.

“Your mother, she's missing you, son. Bonnie too.”

Bonnie?

“Look, Tag, my boy. I know I did the right thing taking you away, because your mother wouldn't of let me have you. But you see what's happening here?”

“What, Cee Dubyah?”

“Well, they're acting like I'm some kind of criminal, sending the police out for me and all. I'm gonna get caught. I can't disappear forever and never get back to driving my truck, and when they find me, do you think a judge is gonna let you come live with a man who's a kidnapper?”

“It's not kidnapping when it's your own kid,” Tag said.

“I know that and you know that, but your mother doesn't, and those cops don't, and a judge sure won't, because—” he paused as if he were looking for just the right way to put what he had to say. “Your mother has the law on her side.”

“But nobody ever asked me who I want to live with,” Tag cried, and whatever else he said was muffled in his father's chest.

After a while Cee Dubyah said, “Here's what I got to do, son. I'm turning myself in, because I can't keep you holed up here, and I can't keep running, and there's nowhere we can get to that they won't find us.”

“We could go to Boston, Massachusetts,” Tag said in a tiny voice.

“No, son.”

“All right,” Tag said, back in command of himself. “What's the plan? We gotta have a plan.”

“That's my boy. I'll just catch a few winks here. You think you can find a corner of that bed for me for an hour or two? Then I'll head back to Wichita, and me and the lawyer will go to the police.”

“They gonna put you in the slammer, Cee Dubyah?”

“Naw,” he said, without much conviction. “Then the lawyer and me are gonna start building an airtight case for you to come live with me. If your mother won't let me have you full-time, well then, we'll work on half-time, or summer-time, or whatever we can wheedle outta her, because she sure knows now that you and I belong together. Now don't you worry, we'll work it out … it'll be all right … we'll be two peas in a pod again.” Cee Dubyah crooned it over and over, like a lullaby, and pretty soon I heard this little crinkling of bedsprings as Cee Dubyah put Tag down, then a ferocious groaning of the springs under Cee Dubyah.

I leaned my back against an oak tree out behind the cottages to wait for the sun, but even so I missed Cee Dubyah's leaving. I hoped Tag had, too.

Tag never said a word about his middle-of-the-night visitor, but I had to tell Stephanie and Momma that the ax was about to fall. I went the long way around from the walk-in freezer to Tag's shop that morning. There he was squeezing one of Johnny's lemons into a can of Coke and telling some trucker that this was the refreshing new taste sensation from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He licked the lemon juice off his grubby fingers and puckered his whole face up.

“Real sanitary conditions here,” the trucker said, giving way to a big yawn.

“You look a little sleepy, sir,” Tag told the driver. “That's the curse of being on the road.” Again, it sounded just like Cee Dubyah talking.

“I could use a package of No-Doz,” the driver conceded.

“Hey, forget No-Doz.” Tag fished around in his carton and pulled out a package of Bubble Yum. “Try this. I reckon nobody can fall asleep while he's chewing and blowing bubbles.”

I smiled to myself as the man gave Tag a quarter for the gum and headed back to his truck with the refreshing new taste sensation sloshing around in the can.

“Hold it!” Tag said. He wrote something on a slip of paper.

“What's this?” the trucker asked, stretching to get the kinks out of his long, lean body.

“It's a receipt.”

“For twenty-five cents' worth of gum?”

“Sure. It's a tax-deductible business expense,” Tag assured him. “Just a little service I give my best customers.” The trucker stuffed the receipt in his shirt pocket, behind his cigarettes, and chuckled all the way back to his cab. I could just picture him blowing purple bubbles from Spinner to Oklahoma City.

Back in the Pig-Out, I couldn't delay it any longer. I had to tell Momma about Cee Dubyah.

“Oh, that poor sweet child,” she said, while Stephanie gasped and added something to her fiction novel. “Did Cee Dubyah say anything about somebody coming for Tag, or are we to have him until Tag gets married?”

I hadn't given it a thought, but it's true that Cee Dubyah never did tell Tag exactly what was going to happen to him.

“He'll come for Tag,” Stephanie said.

“How can he, if he's in custody?” asked Momma.

We talked about it off and on while we got ready for the lunch crowd, and before the first onslaught I took Tag's lunch out to him. We'd started doing that so Tag wouldn't miss any of the business he stole away from us. Stephanie and I packed him up a couple of pieces of fried chicken—Johnny had become a master of fried chicken that was light and crisp on the outside, but you had to eat it carefully because you might bite into a grease pocket that would spurt hot stuff into somebody else's hair. Along with the chicken we brought him a cup of cole slaw, a nectarine, and a piece of pecan pie. Momma said this was the $1.50 Blue Plate Special, which cost everyone else $4.25.

“Chicken again?” Tag said, wrinkling up his nose. “I was hoping for a peanut butter and jelly.”

I almost yelled, “You're the most ungrateful child!” But then I flashed on Tag curled around Cee Dubyah's waist, and I bit my lip to hold back the words. Instead I said, “What have you conned Johnny out of this morning?” I noticed Tag had added a line of potato chips and Fritos in little twenty-five-cent bags. I remembered Johnny asking me to order these, but come to think of it, we'd never sold them in the Pig-Out.

“I buy them from Johnny at cost,” Tag said simply. Fenway stood on his hind legs, lapping water from the ice bucket, raising his leg to let it go, then lapping more water, like a perfectly efficient waterworks system.

“Gross, Fenway!” I said.

“Aw, leave him alone.”

Trucks were pulling up behind the restaurant, and soon Stephanie leaned out the door and signaled for me to get to work. The Pig-Out was jumping with truckers anxious to get back on the road and collect for their long hauls.

The hours flew by—noon, one o'clock, two—until finally the place cleared out and we could start mopping up for dinner.

Just then Tag came to the door carrying Fenway, like a hunter with a deer draped across his arms, only Tag's face was chalk white, and his eyes were huge and sunken.

“A car hit him,” Tag said.

“Momma, come quick! Fenway got run over!” The dog hung limply, overflowing Tag's arms. Momma felt for a pulse and shook her head.

“Oh—my—Lord!” Stephanie cried. Tag just stood there like a statue.

Johnny came out front and quickly sized up the situation. Without a word he lifted Fenway from Tag's arms and took the pup out back somewhere. Momma pulled Tag to her and stroked his head, not saying much.

Tag didn't make a sound either, just shook a little, and when Momma shifted him around the top of her apron was soaked gray. “Maybe it's time for you to go home,” Momma said softly.

Something was sizzling on the grill and Stephanie went to the kitchen, leaving the doors to swing back and forth with a lonesome swoosh.

With Johnny out back taking care of Fenway and Stephanie busy in the kitchen and Momma holding Tag, I'd never felt more useless in my life.

THIRTEEN

I knew who she was as soon as she walked in that night, wearing a crisp yellow jump suit and a raspberry-and-lemon-sherbet shirt rolled up at the cuffs. The freckles gave her away. She had long plum nails, and her right pinkie was gold-speckled. Her hair was feathered back and layered to her shoulders. I was pretty sure she wasn't a natural blonde. She warmed the air around her with delicate driver-sweat and some perfume that smelled like baby powder.

There was this little round girl with her, about five, wearing a snug halter top and shorts and carrying a stuffed Snoopy with sunglasses.

The one lone truck driver left after dinner looked the woman over good and hard, until his eyes fell on the little dumpling of a girl and then trailed back to his newspaper.