The Tie That Binds (12 page)

“No,” Wenzel said. “No, I don’t guess you could say bored exactly. He just stopped squeezing Agnes and left.”

“How come?”

“That’s what we wanted to know,” Wenzel said.

So after Lyman took off, Wenzel told us that Harry Barnes called Agnes over to their booth where, between poker hands, they had been watching it all. Agnes came over and leaned against the table. She held the bar tray behind her and pushed her ample front out towards the men in the booth.

“What become of your boyfriend?” Harry said.

“Ain’t he cute?” Agnes said.

“Yeah,” Harry said. “He’s cute. But what happened to him?”

“Darned if I know,” Agnes said. “All I know is, after that last song he asks me what the time is, and I tell him, ‘Honey, it’s early yet. Only a quarter of eleven.’ And then
he says to me, ‘What time do you lock up?’ And I say, ‘Not till midnight, honey. We got lots of time left.’ And then he says something strange, he says, ‘No, we don’t. I can’t wait no longer.’”

“And that’s when he took off?” Harry said.

“That’s it,” Agnes said. “Right then he left, without so much as good-bye or thank you, kindly.”

“Well,” Harry said. “I wouldn’t take it too personal. You was doing everything you could.”

“I know it,” Agnes said. “But wasn’t he cute?”

Then Wenzel Gerdts stopped talking. He removed the tobacco from his cheek and examined it as if there was something there that might explain Lyman’s leaving. The wad of Red Man was white and stringy looking, used up. He tossed it into the gutter, where it sopped up the brown puddle like a sponge. Across the street I could see my mother come out of a store with a hatbox under her arm.

“So you don’t know why he left so sudden,” my dad said.

“No, sir,” Wenzel said. “We never found out. I guess he just had to take himself a pee and he couldn’t hold it no longer.”

W
ELL
, I don’t know that Lyman Goodnough was ever in his life what you might call cute. At least by 1940 he was not. By then, he was a gaunt middle-aged farmer, a little stooped over, and his hair was going. But of course it wasn’t his physical appearance that Agnes Wilson was talking about, and as for Wenzel Gerdts’s explanation of his sudden exit from the tavern that night, I don’t believe either that it was just a matter of Lyman’s having to relieve a full bladder. I think it was more that Lyman knew— and was able to remember despite the beer (he had certainly lived enough years in that house with his father to
know very well and to remember too)—that when he got home there was going to be hell to pay, and the longer he stayed out the more of it there was going to be.

So he must have paid for it. Maybe not that night when he drove their old car into the yard and parked it in front of the picket fence, but at least the next morning during breakfast, since even Roy must have felt differently about waiting for a forty-one-year-old boy to come home from the tavern than he did about waiting for a twenty-five-year-old girl to return from a night at the movies. It wasn’t quite so urgent; he could wait till morning to give Lyman hell. But in the morning, then, Lyman must have had to sit there with his head pounding and his mouth tasting something that resembled pig slop, while the old man, his father, drank and in between drinks said something mean and crazy like, “So you ain’t learned yet.”

“Learned what?”

“That if you’re ever going to mount to a goddamn, you can’t stay out all Saturday night diddling.”

•6•

B
UT AT LEAST
Lyman had accomplished that first trial run. He had sampled beer and women and he had had his first real taste of escape. It must have been heady stuff to him. In the tavern that night he had actually done those things himself that before he had only heard about other men doing. Even his father’s ridiculous breakfast sermon the next morning must have been satisfying to him: it tied the knot; it closed the circle; it made everything seem bigger and better. To have to endure a lecture about diddling away a Saturday night at a time when his head was still pounding from the beer he had drunk the night before and while the fried eggs he had just managed to get down were threatening to come back up again—it made it all worth it; it was how you paid for having a good time. At forty-one Lyman was like a middle-aged teenager savoring his first hangover. But he didn’t make another attempt to escape right away. Instead he went for more than a year on the memory of that first time. He went on working.

Then in the following year on a Sunday morning in December another outside event occurred that made it possible for Lyman to take off and not come back at all. Thousands of miles away something happened that was so explosive that it not only sank ships and killed men in the Pacific, it blew the door off the hinges of the Goodnough
barn in Holt County, Colorado. I’m talking of course about Pearl Harbor.

Pearl Harbor was hell and tragedy for most Americans, but it was what Lyman Goodnough was waiting for. Now I don’t mean that he would ever have hoped for something that murderous—he was desperate, damned desperate, but he wasn’t bloodthirsty—and I’m not saying that he had any idea in the world that the thing he was waiting for, the thing he hoped would happen, would ever take the form it did, because he sure as hell wasn’t any prophet either. Still it is true that he seemed to recognize almost immediately that Pearl Harbor was his ticket out, his open barn door. It was like the explosion in the waters of Hawaii was the pop of a starter’s gun in a track meet. Lyman heard it, he was ready, and he took off running. He began a race that he wouldn’t stop running until almost twenty years had passed and until he had seen half the cities in this country. My dad helped him.

In the middle of the night my dad put him on a train that was headed west. But that was later. That December Sunday in 1941, after morning chores, my dad and I sat at this same kitchen table and listened to the radio. It was exciting and it was awful. My dad said it was hell. But my mother went to church as usual. She put on a navy-blue dress and drove off in her new car to sing hymns and Christmas carols and to put her folded offering into the felt-muted plate that a gray usher passed among the pews. She prayed and afterwards she returned home to cook us a Sunday dinner of fried chicken and mashed potatoes as if nothing was wrong. I believe she spent the afternoon reading in the living room in a stuffed chair.

All the time, though, my dad and I listened to the radio. Between news bulletins we got out the world atlas and
discovered the dots in the Pacific Ocean that meant Hawaii and with a ruler tried to figure the miles between Honolulu and Tokyo and between Tokyo and California. The news kept coming in on the radio, and it seemed to me that it was all happening right then, since I was only just hearing about it. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to bomb such a small speck on the ocean in our atlas— before that Sunday Pearl Harbor and naval installations hadn’t existed for me: there weren’t a lot of sailors in Holt County—but I could tell from my dad’s face that something important was happening and what was happening was bad. My dad’s face, more than the pitch of the broadcaster’s voice, made it seem so. His face was hard set all day. It looked even worse than it did those times when he looked up and watched the Goodnoughs’ car pass our house, passing on down the road into dust. He said that what we were hearing on the radio was the start of a war, a world war that now we in this country were going to have to be a part of. He hated it all. He only hoped that it would be over before I was old enough to be called to it.

Of course people in town were talking about it, too. All along Main Street in the poolhalls and the grocery stores they were talking about it, and much of the talk was crazy, wild, frantic nonsense, and it wasn’t long before anything seemed possible to believe. The men in the bank and the beer drinkers in the tavern were even speculating that Hirohito would somehow drop down into Los Angeles and start marching up Sunset Boulevard to conquer Betty Grable: there was that kind of fear and excitement loose everywhere. So, with all that going on, I don’t remember that we were very much surprised a couple nights later when long after we had gone up to bed and were sound asleep Lyman came and started knocking the holy bejesus out of our front door. My dad just got up and put his
pants on and went downstairs to let Lyman in before he broke the door down.

I got up too and stood in the dim light at the top of the stairs to watch. I could see Lyman below in the front hallway; he had his heavy overcoat on and he was wearing his winter cap with the corduroy earflaps. Beside him on the floor was a metal suitcase with a belt strapped around it. My dad and he were talking, and though I couldn’t hear what they were saying, I could tell that Lyman was more than a little excited. He began to tie and untie the strings on the earflaps of his cap, and he was shifting from one foot to the other like he had to use the toilet. In my goofy sleepiness I wondered whether that was the reason why he had come over—to piss in our pot—except that wouldn’t have explained why he had brought a suitcase. Then my mother was there, too, beside me at the top of the stairs.

“Sanders,” she said. “Go back to bed.”

“It’s Lyman Goodnough.”

“I don’t care who it is. I want you to get dressed or to go back to bed.”

My mother had a maroon robe on with matching open-toed slippers. Her blond hair, treated so that it stayed blond, looked freshly combed.

“Lyman’s seen striped pajamas before,” I said.

“That is not the point.”

“Here comes dad.”

My dad came up the stairs and met us at the top landing. His face and neck and hands were dark tanned to the shirt line; against the rest of him they looked purple in the dim light. He had black hair on his bare chest and he was smiling.

“So the vigilantes are up too,” he said.

“This is not the time for your jokes,” my mother said. “What does that man want?”

“You mean Lyman Goodnough.”

“I know who it is. What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing particular. He’s just discovered he has something like a backbone.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“He wants a lift into town.”

My mother looked at my dad as if he was talking utter nonsense, as if she still thought he was trying to be funny. “Now?” she said. “At this hour? Whatever for?”

“He wants to catch the train. He’s leaving.”

“But that’s ridiculous. He can’t do anything. Where can he go?”

“He can go west, I suppose,” my dad said. “That’s the direction the train is headed in.”

“West,” she said. It sounded foolish and obscene in her mouth. “Well, I hope you had the sense to tell him no.”

“No, I told him I would. I come upstairs to get my shirt and boots on.”

“Are you insane?”

“Probably,” my dad said. “And I’m getting cold standing here talking about it.” He turned to go back to their bedroom.

“Dad,” I said. “I want to go.”

“Get dressed then.”

“He’s not going. You’re not going,” my mother said.

But she wasn’t even looking at me. She followed my dad into the bedroom, and I followed her down the hallway and stood in the door. My dad went over to the closet and took a flannel shirt off a hanger. She watched him as if it was a conspiracy against her, as if he and Lyman Goodnough had decided to get up a plot. With one hand fisted at the neck of her maroon robe, she watched him unbutton his pants and begin to tuck his shirt in.

“Will you tell me,” she said, “why that man can’t at least drive himself to town?”

“Yes, but you aren’t going to like it.”

“Of course not. I don’t like any of this. But I assume you mean it’s something more than just the fact that he can’t get his own car started.”

“He never tried it,” my dad said. “He’s afraid if he starts the car it’ll wake the old man.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, that does make sense, doesn’t it. He can’t wake his own father but it’s perfectly all right to wake us.”

“I said you weren’t going to like it.”

“Yes, you did say so and you are right about that. But what about her? What about his sister? I suppose she’s afraid to disturb the poor old man too.”

My dad stopped dressing then and looked at my mother. He wasn’t happy. “Leave her out of this,” he said.

“Or hasn’t she learned how to drive a car at night yet? I’ve never seen her driving a car at night.”

“Keep your mouth off her,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, I do,” she said. “I know more than you think I do.”

“No, you don’t,” he said. “You don’t know the half of it.”

“All right,” my mother said, looking at me in the doorway. “I’ve had enough for one night. I’m going to bed.”

“That’s right,” my dad said. “I think that’s a good idea.”

“And you are too,” she said to me.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m going along. Dad, you said—”

“I told you to get dressed,” he said.

“No. That’s definitely out. He’s not going.”

“It won’t hurt him.”

“He’s not going,” she said. “He has school tomorrow. He’s no Edison, or haven’t you noticed?”

“It won’t hurt him. And he can still make school.”

“I don’t want him to go with you. I forbid him to go.”

“I believe he’s going, though.”

“AH right,” she said. “All right, go then.”

But she wasn’t looking at me. She was watching my dad. It didn’t have anything to do with me anymore—if it ever did.

“Go,” she said. “You may as well get yourself involved in this too. You’re just like him. You don’t care what I think. Why do you bother to ask?”

But she didn’t go back to bed yet and she wasn’t finished talking. She had more to say to my dad. From their bedroom down the hall I could hear her talking to him while I got out of my pajamas. Her voice was going on and on with steel in it, like she was some lawyer summing up the defense in a bad case, and even though by 1941 it must have been an old defense and an old case, she did not sound tired of it. There was all that steel and ice mixed up in it. But my dad wasn’t saying anything. I could hear just the sound of him sitting down on the edge of the bed to put his boots on and the noise on the wood floor as he stamped into them. Then I was dressed and out in the hallway again ready to go downstairs, and I heard him say something to her. It sounded like two words, and they must have been enough, or too much maybe, because after he said them it was only silence coming out of their bedroom. I went downstairs.