The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (14 page)

Danny took me to meet his parents on a warm Sunday afternoon. Late-autumn katydids were buzzing from the high grass as we rolled by, Danny driving and me watching his profile silhouetted in the dizzy bright sunshine from the car window. We drove south from our house, heading toward Millboro and then through it, passing the roadside filigree of tiny cornfields, gray wooden houses, little strips of gas stations and grocery stores, patches of pine forest, and scrap yards of rusting pickup trucks that decorated the edges of Old U.S. 213, mostly forgotten now that the new 213 had been built. We had the windows down.

The brick house Danny's parents had built with the insurance money (after the wooden house he had grown up in burned to the ground in a suspicious incident involving cheap tequila
and Danny on the roof installing an electric attic fan) sat close to the road with a new butter yellow Cadillac parked in the gravel under the carport at the side of the house and a faux-stained-glass ornament hanging in the front window that spelled out in Gothic lettering, “This HOME Protected By JESUS.” It featured a disembodied, presumably heavenly, and somewhat glowering pair of eyes that seemed to be sending out sizzling beams of yellow light on to the letters below them. Underneath that, in the very bottom corner of the window, was a sticker that said, “Protected by ADT Security Systems.” A sort of trust-but-verify attitude toward heavenly intervention that probably should have been comforting. I saw the two crocheted cats propped up in a side window and realized suddenly that I was out of my league.

We entered through the side door, straight into the kitchen. Danny didn't knock; he had let go of my hand. His parents were sitting together at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, but he called out, “Anybody home?” anyway. The kitchen smelled delicately of air freshener.

Danny's parents had had him late in life
—old
was the word he used for them more than any other. And they
were
old—with thin, papery skin that dissolved into relief maps of wrinkles like aerial photographs of drought-stricken lake beds, wispy white hair almost gone from his dad's head and curled into pristine rigidity on his mom's.

For a couple of such radically old and withered-type people, his parents had not lost the capacity for the strip-you-bare appraising glance. His mom did an amazing imitation of the Jesus eyes in the front window, lacking only the death rays of yellow light, and turned her whole body toward me.

“Now let's see here, where are you from?” she asked in a lipless drawl. “Your
people,
I mean.”

My
people.
I remembered my mother, one long-ago morning,
gently brushing Belle's silky hair and tying a blue ribbon in it and then, catching sight of me lurking in the doorway, turning away as if she hadn't seen me. I thought of Uncle Joe letting out a whoop the first time I hit one of the cans balanced on the top rail of the fence. My
people.

I tried to subdue my uncouth backwoods twang and dial up my best genteel Deep South accent. After an entire adolescence of repeatedly watching
Gone With the Wind
on the cable channel out of Atlanta, I felt that anything was possible. I took a shot at Scarlett O'Hara but in the pressure of the moment missed and got Prissy instead. I babbled a bit while his mom stared at me and pursed her lips (which did nothing for my ability to form a coherent sentence), and I began to understand more viscerally what Danny had been doing on the roof with cheap tequila in the first place.

“Yes,” his mom said finally, a long, sibilant syllable that very obviously meant
no.

His dad turned to Danny. “Y'all should have come down earlier, Daniel. Reverend Tucker asked after you at church, wondering how you're doing. You know he always asks after you.”

“We knew another Catholic girl once,” his mom interjected to me faux-conversationally, making it clear that I had been discussed more thoroughly than Danny let on. “You remember that red-headed Barnett girl in your senior class, Daniel, whose daddy was in the highway management? They were foreigners.”

“They were from Virginia,” Danny said with a little sigh that meant this was not a whole new fresh conversation we were having here.

“She became a nun.”

“A nun?” Danny said. This was apparently news to him.

“She had to go to Charlotte to do it,” his mother smiled at me.

“Now, after the war,” his dad said to me, “I used to go down
to Charlotte just about every month. Because of the fire department.” Danny's father had been instrumental in setting up the local volunteer fire department, which of course made the whole attic fan/cheap tequila incident all the more ironic.

“Oh?” I said, trying to be polite. “What did the fire department need to do in Charlotte?”

His mom looked at me incredulously. “They needed to put out fires,” she said.

“But Charlotte's miles and miles from here,” I started.

“Well, honey, they have fires miles from here, too. There's fires all over,” his mom said with a small, ambiguous chuckle.

“Do they still have that Lunch Box Diner on Trade Street there?” his dad asked me. “What's the cross street? It's near the hardware store.”

“I've never been to Charlotte,” I said.

“You haven't even visited it?” He sounded very surprised at this.

“Daniel,” his mom began, “Arnold was at church this morning. He said to tell you hello. He's in the bank now. His daddy took him on last spring.”

“I would at least visit it first, if it was me,” his dad admonished me. “I know the bus goes down there because after the war we used to take it for the fire department. We took it from Waterville.”

“That sounds nice,” I mumbled, confused. I felt that one or the other of us was not tracking properly on this conversation.

“And of course, Robin was there. She's such a nice girl,” said his mom, eyeing my boots.

“The corner of Trade and Graham!” his dad crowed with delight. “Next to the hardware store.” Then his face fell into a frown of doubt. “I don't suppose,” he said to me, “that you'll get out to eat much.”

“She always asks after you,” Danny's mother continued. “You really should go by sometime and see her. I know she'd be so tickled to see you anytime.” She turned to me. “I'm sure Daniel has told you all about Robin, of course.”

“Well, I guess we'd better be going,” Danny said.

“Why, no, he hasn't,” I said.

“It's a long drive back,” Danny said.

“Gracious!” His mom definitely chuckled now. “They were inseparable, just inseparable!”

“Of course,” his dad added thoughtfully, “no one knows what you look like under there, so you might as well eat what you want.”

“High school was a long time ago, Mama,” Danny said.

“Might as well get whatever pleasures you can,” said his dad.

“Not to look at Robin, it wasn't,” countered his mom. “Her figure looks just as slim and pretty as it did the day y'all graduated.”

“Is gluttony still a sin for y'all?” his dad asked me, looking concerned and holding up his fingers to count off. “There's pride, I know, and fornication . . . .”

“We really have to go now,” Danny said, standing up and heading to the door.

“Good luck in Charlotte!” his dad called.

“Is there any particular reason why your dad thinks I'm going to become a nun in Charlotte?” I asked Danny once we hit the highway.

“Not that I know of,” Danny said, and then laughed. “I tried to warn you. Now let's go home and figure out a way to forget them, okay?”

Summer lingered for a long time that year, but eventually the sky turned a hard steel color and the dogwoods dropped their
leaves and the crows began to sound mournful calling to each other from the edges of the meadow, which is how you know that it is autumn at last.

Danny and I found a not-too-bad love seat at the dump and put it in front of our empty, ash-scattered fireplace and fully intended to spend our evenings cuddling before a roaring blaze. Danny went so far as to borrow a firewood ax from his cousin and to lean it up against the side of the house.

We had no neighbors out in the woods and easily could have spent all day fornicating on the deck—or in the middle of the road, for that matter—without being disturbed by anyone. But the weather had turned raw and gritty and inhospitable to exposed skin. The fallen dead leaves were slippery and damp, clinging like slugs to the outdoor furniture so you were never quite sure what you were feeling when you accidently touched one. Inside the house, the light was a perpetual gloom and we kept the lamps lit all day long. Danny was gone most nights until late.

Charlie Blue and I were sitting down at the end of the bar when Tom came in after closing up the bookstore and asked Rafi for a Natty BoHo.

“When did you learn to play bass so well?” Tom asked Charlie.

Charlie blushed and smiled and looked down at his beer. “Oh, I've just been picking at it some,” he said. “Just, you know, to kind of pass the time. I don't really know how to play much.”

“Why don't you start playing out more?” Tom asked him. “You could get together some folks to play with, I bet.”

Charlie blushed some more and didn't take his eyes off his beer. “Oh, I just play from time to time,” he said. “Just kind of on
the spur of the moment. I couldn't go onto a stage or anything like that.”

“You did here.”

“Well, it's different here. I mean, it's just us here, you know. Friends . . .”

“I'd go see you play,” said Tom.

“We all would,” Rafi said, looking down the bar.

“Not me,” said Stinky, who had been shouting out a string of wrong answers to
Jeopardy!
and was looking disgusted with the TV.

“See?” Rafi said. “It would be perfect.”

Charlie grinned down into his beer.

“The problem in this town,” Stinky said, ignoring Rafi, “is that every two-bit circus pony thinks he's the horse of the year. Some things are best left to be effectuated by the professionals. Who wants to listen to amateur hour? I mean, as a musician, you're not exactly that hula hoop guy.”

There was a pause while we all thought about it.

“Yo-Yo Ma?” Tom said.

Stinky gave Tom a withering stare and pointedly turned back to
Jeopardy!
“Morons,” he muttered under his breath.

“Ignore him,” I said.

“He's got a point, though,” Charlie said. “I'm no professional musician. I'm no Billy Joe.”

“Let me tell you,” Rafi said. “I've known Billy Joe for almost a thousand years now, and even Billy Joe didn't used to be Billy Joe.”

“Who'd he used to be?” Charlie asked.

Stinky snorted with his back to us.

“Just another kid with a secondhand guitar,” Rafi said.

“Still is,” Stinky said to the room.

“Maybe in some ways he still is,” Tom said. “But that's the beauty of it.”

“How do you mean?” Charlie said.

“I mean that we're all in it together—just human animals here on earth together for a short time. If we can make some music and share it with each other, well, then I guess we've done some good in the world.”

“Oh, brother,” Stinky said to the TV screen.

“I'll tell you what,” Rafi said to Charlie. “Billy Joe is at the house right now, and I bet he's not doing anything much. Why don't you go on over there and bring your bass and play some with him for a little bit?”

“Oh, I couldn't just barge in like that.”

“Come on,” Tom said. “I'll go with you. Billy Joe will be happy to see us. We'll bring beer.”

Charlie looked doubtful, but he got up off his barstool. Rafi filled a brown paper bag with cold beer and handed it to him. Tom pulled out his wallet.

“No charge,” Rafi said.

After they left, I said to Rafi, “Tom sure is a nice guy.”