Walking Dunes (13 page)

He put his fingers to his face. He could smell Glee on his hand.

12.

“Okeydoke, you gotta get the picture. This guy, Longli was his name, he falls off this Swiss mountain, and listen, here's the good part,
he gets stuck
. He doesn't disappear down some crack in the range, he dangles out on a hunk of rock, in full sight, but out of reach. See, they climb up to try to get him and they can see him but he is suspended, like in mid-air—He's been hanging there for a year. Meanwhile there's this fellow down in the village, he owns a big telescope, what would you do? He sets it up and tunes in Stefano Longli as he swings in the winter wind. He had a lot of customers this last year.” Leland grasped the edge of the table and leaned into it so far he nearly had his face in the remains of their very substantial Mexican dinner. The whole story told, he leaned back, tilted his chair, and guffawed. “If you could see the look on you turkeys' faces!”

Ellis said, “One of these days somebody is going to stuff your newspaper clippings right down your big-mouth throat, Piper.”

David found it hard not to laugh, not at the poor mountain climber, but at Leland finding himself so funny.

“I always thought a public death would be the worst kind,” Leland went on blithely. “Executions, say. How'd you like to be strung up in front of a crowd?”

“I don't think they do that anymore,” said David.

“Yeah, but just 'spose. Or you fall down in the middle of the street, gasping for air, your hands on your throat—” He gestured aptly.

“I say if you're dead you won't care where it happened,” Ellis said mildly. He munched on a broken tortilla chip. “Only Leland will care, when he reads about it in the paper!” The three of them laughed and hit one another.

“You guys want anything else to eat?” David asked, and the other two groaned. They were at Cisco's in colored town on Friday night, and they had eaten like kings for five bucks. The room smelled of beans and onions and cigarette smoke. The white family trade, from the other side of the railroad tracks, came and went early in the evening and now, after eight o'clock, the boys sat as if on an island, surrounded by empty tables. In one corner a Negro family was eating, paying the white boys no mind. The children, a boy and girl of grade school age, were dressed in starchy dress-up clothes. Along the window wall of the cafe half a dozen Mexicans sat at two tables, drinking beer and joking. Cisco, his big paunch wrapped in a white apron, came to the table. He had the easy saunter of a successful man; his fiery food, of best quality and low price, drew customers from all over Basin. In his thick accent he asked the boys, “What else can I get you? Josefina, she make you some nice sugary cinnamon chips, you eat them with coffee.”

David spoke in a low conspirational whisper. “Actually, Cisco, we were thinking it was time to toast the new school year. The new football season. If you get my meaning.” He pantomimed his hand around a bottle, his ready throat.

Cisco pulled his apron up and wiped his dripping brow. “You boys get me in trouble.”

“Hey, you look around you,
matador
,” Leland said. Cisco's claim to fame was his cousin Pepe,
banderillero
to a top Mexican bullfighter, whose posters adorned the walls. The Negro family got up to leave. Cisco said, “You hold your horses,
caballeros
,” and went up to the cash register. Afterwards he disappeared for a minute into the back, and came out with three long-necked bottles of Dos Equis.

“Now that's a good Meskin!” Leland exclaimed. Cisco's expression was completely bland. “That'll be a dollar each.”

“A dollar!” Leland protested. David put up his hand to end the talk. “Open 'em up,
por favor.
” When they had their bottles, they held them up in the middle of the table. “To our last year, may it go fast,” he said.

“To not suiting up.” Ellis added, their annual toast.

“Say hey!” Leland said. “To no jerseys, no tackles, no pain.”

They cheered and drank. David pulled the bottle from his mouth to add, “And no glory, alas,” which caused Leland and Ellis to make faces. David drank the rest of his beer in a gulp, and belched loudly. Leland followed suit. Ellis' burp was small and high-pitched, and they burst into raucous laughter.

Cisco gathered the bottles quickly. “You boys can't handle
cerveza
, eh?” he teased.

“You know, we're seniors now,” Leland bragged.

Cisco said, “You come back when you graduate. I buy you a beer myself, the end of being boys.”

“Add it up, we'll divide it by three.” David told Cisco. “And add a dollar for the great service.” He belched one more time and patted his chest. “Girls are nice, but they're not up to the company of men,” he said grandly.

Cisco lifted his pencil off the pad where he was doing his figuring. “Women are madonnas,” he said.

Leland hooted. “You lead me to 'em, buddy, and I'll worship at their shrine.”

As they clambered into Leland's '52 Chevy, Ellis sniffed the air. Ellis's father had been a tenant farmer in Central Texas; Ellis was always noting the weather. He said, “Dry as ground bone still. But rain's gotta come. That drouth broke last year. It's September. Fall's in the air.” They were, after all, at 3,000 feet. The night would cool fast.

Leland turned the key and revved the motor. Before he dug out from the gravel-strewn dirt in front of the cafe, he said, “What do you know, Whittey? I don't 'spose you could fry an egg on the walk anymore, but it's still summer. I smell like a mule from sweating.”

“That was all those chiles, Piper,” David said, pronouncing
chiles
the way it sounds in Spanish.

“I tell you, if this is the first week of school, why don't we celebrate the end of summer, and go skinny-dipping at the windmill?” Ellis suggested.

“Hot damn! Now there's an idea for picking!” Leland said, and gunned the motor.

“I'm all for it,” David agreed. The sudden thought of his body in water was quite appealing. Dusk was over, night was rapidly blacking out the sky. They sped back into the main part of Basin, out the county road, and onto an old pasture they knew, where there was still a working wheel with a tank up six, seven feet high. They climbed out of the car and shed their clothes on the ground. Sometimes, with other boys, in the showers at school, David was wracked with self-consciousness because of his skinny body, his pale skin, his drooping sex, though there was nothing wrong with it, he knew that. With Ellis and Leland, he felt like a little kid before he noticed other boys were bigger. Ellis could have been his brother, they were built so much alike, Ellis a little bit skinnier, his arms a little longer and stronger. Leland was tall but like a big flat board, and he always seemed to be walking into invisible walls, gracelessly catching himself before he stumbled. The Three Sticks. They were buddies.

There wasn't a ladder, so David climbed up on Leland's shoulders and heaved himself up to the edge. He pulled up Leland, who stood on Ellis' hands, and together they hauled up Ellis. With a whoop and a holler, they fell backwards into the tank.

The tank was just big enough to float in place and maneuver a little, not big enough for strokes. They dunked one another and snorted like seals. Ellis climbed up the rickety little ladder to the top of the windmill and cannonballed off. Deeply tanned from his work, he was a study in two colors, pale as bread below his waistline. David and Leland hugged the side of the tank to stay out of the way. Although this was a favorite part of the sport, it was dangerous. The water was about six feet deep, not allowing any real dives. And if there was any breeze, the windmill moved, the wheel rotated. David had gone out once when Jason Short got his ass knocked right to the ground from up there, and broke his leg in two places. With the three there tonight, the bravado level was reasonable; they didn't have to impress one another. They just wanted to have a good time.

“Oh brr!” Leland said before he jumped. Wet, you could feel yourself turning blue in the high prairie night. After the shock of air on your bare skin, the water felt warm going back in.

As if on signal, the three of them quieted and hung in the water, bouncing and dogpaddling to keep their heads clear. Leland, several inches taller than the other two, could manage to stand still, craning his neck high to clear the water. David worked his way to the edge and leaned his head against the tank, holding onto the edge behind him. He looked up at the sky, which was now smeared with milk white stars. “Look at that, will you?” he said, with awe in his voice.

“It's just flat-dab gorgeous, ain't it?” Leland said, ever playing the yokel. Ellis added, “That's heaven up there.”

In the next few moments, in the silence, David felt suspended in the water, and then suspended again, as if the tank floated in the sky. It
is
beautiful, he thought. Somewhere far off a pump was beating like a giant heart.

He dunked his head and brought it up, shaking like a puppy. A person doesn't live under the stars, he mused, unless he's a nomad, or a mystic fool. What's the point of craning your neck to see something shining so far away it's probably dead already? Where will stars at night ever get you?

He reached out and splashed his friends as hard as he could, and after one more round of horseplay, they went home.

“Come On in,” David said as Leland pulled up in the alley. “Maybe my pop's got some beer. We can chew the fat a while longer.”

“I feel whipped,” Leland said. “I'm going to bed.”

“I can get home from here,” Ellis said, and got out too. He and David thumped Leland's car and went into David's room.

“I don't feel ready to be inside,” Ellis said. “Want to sleep out?”

They dug out a pup tent from Saul's storeroom and lugged it over to Ellis' where they set it up in the yard. In town, it was warmer, the air still. Besides, there wasn't room in Ellis' house for David to sleep over. Inside the tiny tent, they were quiet and still and congenial, tucked into old army-green bags with plaid flannel linings. They had been doing this since they were twelve. David had always liked to hang around the Whitteys. Ellis' mother made big pots of beans, and homemade light bread, and in the mornings there were soda biscuits and grease gravy. Everybody couldn't sit down at once; she fed the little kids first, or they ate off their laps, sitting on the floor. Mr. Whittey called his wife Mama, she called him Mr. Whittey. Ellis told David once that he could remember the first time he heard his parents whispering to one another, saying their Christian names. It had thrilled him to discover their secret.

“You mind about football?” Ellis asked. He meant not playing. Football was all Basin cared about in the fall. Every business sponsored the team, plastering walls with big posters and photographs. Everybody assumed that if you were high school age, and male, it was on your mind.

“Hell no. Football's boring.” David realized that football had not even been mentioned that morning he spent at the country club. Maybe it was because the Kimbroughs had a daughter. Maybe it was that rich people could afford to have other things on their minds. David wished he could talk it over with Ellis, but he felt sheepish about having played out there and not saying anything about it up until now. It was too late. “What about you?”

They already knew what each other thought, but it was comforting to say the same things once in a while. “Not me,” Ellis said. “Where I was a kid, the sport was getting in your daddy's crop. The big kids were Negroes, and we didn't play with them. Out here, it's like this annual brain disease. Football! Travis is miserable about it.”

Travis was one of Ellis' little brothers. “What for? He's only fourth grade.”

“Fifth. He showed up after school the second day for practice, and the coach told him he'd been cut.”

“Cut!”

“Yeah. He said he's not big enough, he should find another hobby. He didn't even tell him find a sport. He said hobby. Travis told him, ‘My brother's going to be state tennis champ!' and this asshole says back, ‘Well, I hope that makes you feel better, son.'”

“Asshole is right. So let's get Travis a racket.”

“I think swimming. I'm going to pay for him to take lessons at the Boy's Club this winter. He's not going to be very big, but he's already strong. He could swim, I think.”

“You look after them, don't you?”

“Aw, it's like looking down and seeing yourself at all the stages you just went through. Ornery little kids, they are, but tough, and smart enough, good guys. I don't understand the girls so well, I guess that's Mama's business. But the boys are like pieces of me.”

“You'll make a good daddy one of these days,” David said, meaning it.

“Not too soon, let's hope!” Ellis laughed.

“Well—you do have to have a girl first.” David scrubbed Ellis' scalp affectionately.

“So—?” Ellis said.

“Hey, what haven't you told me?”

Ellis turned and lay on his back. He sighed and tucked his arms behind his head. “Know who Betty Leyerbach is? Little blond? She's in our class.”

“I don't know. I don't think so.”

Ellis flipped over restlessly and propped his chin on his hands. “She's only about yea-tall, skinny as spaghetti, she wears these little circle bangs—”

“And you're dating her!”

“Yeah,” Ellis said with satisfaction. “I saw her at the hiring hall one day, her dad's a dispatcher. And then I saw her at Mass and decided it was fate.”

“So how far's this gone—?”

“It's not like that, David. She's sweet. She's
Catholic.
”

“What do you guys do?”

“Same shit as anybody, what do you think? Go to the movies. Went to the Teen Center a couple of times. But I like to go over to her house and sit on the back step and talk, too. She's got a nice family. She never—she never even dated before. She's so shy, till you get to know her.”