Walking Dunes (29 page)

But this was what he had.

He found Ellis again and they threw their arms across one another's shoulders. First there was a shower, clean clothes, then the barbecue at the fairgrounds. Even with the wind and sand, the city would turn out. There were so many winners, in so many events. The locker rooms were full of shouts and moans and congratulations, the aftersounds of competition among the young.

Ellis' whole family was at the fairgrounds, except his father, who was working. David and Saul met up with them and went through the long lines to get meat and beans and coleslaw on big paper plates. They sat at rough wooden tables and gorged. “Here we go, partner!” David said, slapping Ellis on the arm. He had thought he would feel more exultant.

Then someone came looking for the Whitteys, and suddenly all around them there was a terrible silence, a parting of the crowd, people staring and moving back slowly, giving the Whitteys room. There had been an accident in the oil field. Ellis' father was at Basin General, it was bad. David said he would take the younger children home, so that Ellis and his mother could go to the hospital, but Mrs. Whittey said no, they would all go. She pulled two young sons close to her hips. “We have to be together,” she said. You could see in her eyes that she knew the worst had happened. The man who came to get her had said, you have to come, it's bad, but hadn't he said, on the way, let me through, someone's been killed? Give me room, I have to find the widow. Couldn't she tell, by the look on his face, on the faces of the people he had passed on his way to her? Ellis' father was dead.

David and his parents huddled at the table to read the newspaper account. He could not think when they had been so close. Joyce Ellen, who could have cared nothing for the Whitteys, lay on her bed weeping.

Mr. Whittey had been struck by a drilling tong and his head wedged against a corner of the derrick he was working on. “Listen to this!” David said indignantly. “Listen to the last line of this article: ‘The rig supervisor said the rotary table kicked out of gear and stopped the kelly before much damage was done to the equipment.'”

“What's a tong? What's a kelly?” Saul asked drily. His wife gave him a long look. “What do you care?” she asked. “What does anyone care, except whoever owns the equipment?”

The family went to the funeral together. There were three dozen people in the church, most of them kids; anyone who had wanted to go was excused at school. It was a funeral Mass, long and dull and in Latin. They sat a couple of rows behind the Whitteys. Just in front of David was Betty Leyerbach with her mother; both of them cried all through the service. When the Whitteys entered the aisle behind the casket, Ellis looked at Betty in passing, and as David saw Ellis' face, so full of misery, he clasped his own hands hard, into two white-knuckled fists.

The next weekend “Antigone” was performed. David had not talked to Patsy in almost two weeks, except at rehearsals. He told himself it was because of their parts, the antagonism and tension between Creon and Antigone. When she looked at him, he saw how remote she had become in her resolve, how capable she was of anger and spite and self-punishment, all to defy authority. When he looked at her, when he heard her fiery denunciations, he felt his spine stiffen and his temples pound. How dare she, he thought. How dare she.

He went to the cast party at Mr. Turnbow's house alone. Beth Ann had gone with her mother to Houston to a baby shower for a cousin. She had not said anything about missing the play. David was shocked; all along he had assumed she was impressed by his leading role in a classic play, but it was obvious that it meant nothing to her. The play was merely something for him to finish up, so he would have time for her when she had time for him. At least his own family was there; his mother took off work on Saturday to come. Afterwards she kissed him and said, “I knew you had it in you.” Saul shook his hand and said, “What are the wages in this line of work, son?” David, hurt, said lightly he had no idea. “Acting is for fun,” he said. “I'm going to be a lawyer.” His father did not comment.

Of everyone, Sissy was the most excited. “I love theatre!” he heard her say over and over at the party. Her eyes were glittery. She never sat down or stood still for long. David asked her how she was getting home; he had his mother's car. She said Leland was coming for her. “Well, then, I'll say goodnight,” David said. They were in a corner of the kitchen. Someone had spilled a Coke on the counter and it had run toward the sink, a rivulet dripping over the edge onto the floor. She saw him looking at it. “Yuk,” she said. She looked around. She took a damp towel from the table and wiped up. She rinsed and wrung out the towel, then hung it over the faucet. All the while, he leaned against the refrigerator, watching. She turned around, close to him. “Sissy,” he said. He put his hand on her shoulder, leaned toward her, and kissed her mouth. It was a sweet kiss, the kiss of a friend, it was his admiration for her tidiness and generosity, her kinkiness and independence, it was his appreciation for her dating Leland. It was a gift.

“Gee, now I can die happy,” she whispered.

He touched the lobe of her ear with his thumb. It was soft and faintly downy. “You deserve a lot more than that,” he said. He was suffused with a feeling very much like shame.

Ellis did not come to tennis practice. David felt lost. The coach paired him for doubles practice with Burt Lasky. They did not make a good team. David played badly, resenting Burt's smug competence. The coach slapped David on the back. “This Whittey thing is bad business,” he said.

David felt like throwing up. “I'm going in to shower,” he said.

He went straight to Ellis' house. His mother was in the kitchen setting biscuits. When David let himself in, she smiled and told him to sit down for a minute, and she would get coffee. “I don't want you bothering,” he said. “I just came to see Ellis. I wondered when he's going to come to practice. I thought it might help if he played.”

Mrs. Whittey wiped her hands slowly on a big white towel, then sat down at the table across from David. “Ellis is what we have now,” she said. “You have to understand. He isn't thinking about tennis.”

David was embarrassed. “I didn't mean—”

She patted his hand. “You meant well. I know you love Ellis. But he's the man of the house now.” She got up and poured them coffee. David put too much sugar in his cup, and gulped the coffee down. “I wish I knew how to help,” he said, pushing the cup toward the middle of the table. “I wish it hadn't happened.” He felt tears welling, his face burning. Mrs. Whittey leaned over and laid her open hand along his cheek. The cool feel of her flesh comforted him. Her belly pressed into the table's edge.

Ellis called late that night. “I'm not going back to school. I'm going into the field, just like my dad. I'm starting in the morning.”

“Oh shit, man,” David said. He felt rigid with fear, as if Ellis were calling to him from a pit of quicksand. Don't go under, he wanted to say. Don't leave me by myself.

“What else can I do?” Ellis said. “My mother can't work, with the baby coming.”

“Didn't they give you anything? Wasn't it somebody's fault?”

“His supervisor brought a ham,” Ellis said.

At the country club meet, David lost to Burt Lasky early, a humiliating defeat. Lasky went on to quarterfinals and lost to a kid from a little town with no team sports. David slunk away without speaking to any of the Kimbroughs. He felt that Ellis' father's death had brought him bad luck. If there had been a little more time, he told himself. If he had had a little more time to get his game together.

He opened the car door and reached across to lay his racket on the floor. For a moment he held it in his hand, wondering if it was his, it felt so strange to him. He laid it down and drove to Patsy's.

“I thought you might have come to the tennis match.”

“You didn't ask me.”

“It's a public meet.”

“At the country club?”

He shrugged. “I'd have asked you later. This was just the first stage, the good part should have come after. Only I'm already out. I lost. I played like a real amateur.”

“So now you know you aren't going to have everything you want.”

He could not believe her cruelty. “What, you're glad? You wanted me to lose?”

“Of course not. But you can't win everything. You can't succeed at everything.” He thought, maybe she does mean to sympathize, but she added, “You don't try hard enough.”

He remembered the note on his locker door the day he was elected Most Likely to Succeed.
At what?
it said. He realized it had been Patsy's writing, he was sure of it.

“You've been angry with me all along, haven't you?” He was amazed at the truth of it; he suddenly saw her for what she was.

“I've just had enough,” she said.

“Enough of what!”

She spoke in a maddeningly calm, even tone, almost as if she could not be bothered to muster up energy for him. “I kept waiting for you to take me out. I bought a dress with my Christmas savings. I thought, sometime we'll go to a movie. We'll go out to eat. But it never happened.”

“I've spent so much time with you!” he protested.

“At my house!”

“I thought—”

“You didn't think. You just tagged along. You didn't think I might like to be seen, like any other girl, on a Friday or Saturday night. You thought I was thrilled just to be your weeknight fuck.”

“Patsy!” He was shocked at her language. It was something she had picked up from Finberg, that New York Jew. “Where did you learn that?” he had to say. “From your big city lover?”

She laughed at him. “Ari is homosexual, you baby, don't you know anything?
Don't you pay any attention?
”

He was sitting in her lumpy armchair. He simply could not make his muscles pull him to a standing position, not yet. He felt like a cripple. “Then who?” he asked. He was confused. He had thought he had it figured out.

“After that night at the courts, I decided to get rid of my virginity,” she said coolly. “It was easy.”

He shook his head. He would have liked to cry. He felt such a sense of loss; it might have been him.

“You want me to choose,” he said. “You can't make me choose.” Beth Ann never asked what he did on week nights. She never showed any interest in what he did away from her.

Sadly, Patsy said, “You are going to have to learn to treat people better, David. At least you would have to treat me better, though I think it's too late now. I have learned a lot from Ari, you know. He's a true friend. That's what I wanted from you, really. Your friendship. I want out of Basin as much as you, you know. I'm no Glee Hewett. But you made me feel like an alley cat. One day I said to myself, why am I putting up with this?”

“You never said anything—”

“We didn't talk about anything important. It didn't matter anymore.”

He thought: She looks older. She's grown up this year. She looks like someone who's been away and just come back to visit.

Everybody's leaving, he thought.

Hayden Kimbrough was casual about David's loss. “Listen, David,” he said. “Put it in perspective. What's tennis good for? You never wanted to go on the circuit. It's a social skill, like bridge. You're a good player. It'll stand you in good stead all your life. You don't want to be so good nobody wants to play you!” He put his arm across David's shoulder. They were standing in the garden, where Hayden and Laurel had been pulling weeds while Beth Ann sat in a lawn chair, her skirt hiked up to bare her legs to the warm spring sun.

“Are you sending out your college applications?” Hayden asked. He stepped around in front of David. “Am I intruding here?”

“Oh, yes sir. I mean, no sir!” David laughed uneasily. “I'm applying to UT. I've got all the stuff at home.”

“No problem there.”

David took a deep breath and then said, “I'll have to get a job. I'll have to pay for it myself.”

“Ahh,” Hayden said. “I thought as much. That's why I brought it up. We've plenty of time to discuss this, but I'm glad it's come up. I can help, you know. I know a lot of people down at the legislature. No need for you to work at something mindless. You can start in the right lane from the very beginning.” He smiled broadly. “With your looks and brains, and my pull—” He did not have to finish the sentence.

30.

They drove to the sandhills in a convoy of souped-up cars and motorcycles. The girls liked the bikes best, broad and humming between their thighs. At the dunes, everyone pitched in to carry cases of beer, bundles of kindling, ice chests with hotdogs inside, sacks of buns and mustard. At midafternoon the wind died down, and there was the clear hot brilliance of a spring afternoon. Everyone, among friends, was happy. School, work, adults were forgotten; there was no one to tell them what to do, no one to bemoan their bad language and bad grooming and bad manners and bad attitude.

They did not worry about the sand; they burrowed in it, lounged on it, dug in it with bare toes. They sprawled on it in a gulley between dunes, drinking and talking, telling terrible jokes. Some of them would feel the sting of the season's first sunburn by nightfall, would stand in front of bathroom mirrors pasting on Noxzema, grinning, before they went to bed.

At dusk the wind picked up again, and it was sharp. The gang clustered in the hollow and built fires. They ate messy hot dogs and washed them down with beer. Here and there couples lay stretched out on blankets or towels, or only on sand, seeking the warmth of one another's bodies. One boy slipped his arm around the girl next to him. She snuggled closer. Tentatively, he kissed her, then looked around, embarrassed. She lifted her hand to his neck, drew close, and kissed him back. Someone close by yelled, Way to go! Let's hear it for making OUT! The boy and girl drew apart, faces hot in the dark. All around them boys started to make smooching sounds, laughing, maybe meaning well, calling out, Come on, you can DO it. Girls, giddy with their sophistication and opportunity, placed warm hands on their boyfriends' crotches; boys slid their hands up under shirts and inside the legs of shorts. Still the boy and girl sat side by side, now barely touching. Aw, they're shy! someone said. So, go over the hill! someone else yelled, and suddenly kids were tugging at the girl and boy, pulling them to their feet, while the chant built:
Over the hill, over the hill
.