Beautiful Kate (4 page)

Putting the paper down, I took note of the beautiful day outside.

“Think I’ll take a walk around the place,” I said. “See how it’s holding up.”

Junior looked at the clock. “Yeah, you still got time. I’ll go with you.”

“What do you mean, got time?”

“Before the Lords show up. The barn, it’s their clubhouse.”

“What
Lords
?”

“The Congo Lords. A gang of neighborhood black kids, teenagers mostly. The barn and the grounds too—it’s all pretty much theirs.”

“What do you mean—they rent it?”

“After a fashion, yeah. They agree not to burn us out and we agree to let ’em have the barn.”

“Beautiful.”

Junior shrugged. “Maybe not. But it is survival. And these days, that’s the name of the game.”

I could not argue that point. And anyway, Toni had just come down the stairs, wearing her own robe for a change, a long green Dragon Lady affair with a split up the side, showing not only her leg but a sizable portion of her derriere as well. Junior noticed.

“Be a good idea, though, if she stays inside,” he said. “At least today, when most of ’em show up. No sense stirring up the Lords any more than you have to.”

Looking half asleep still, Toni apparently had not heard him. She asked where Sarah was.

“Getting ready for church,” I told her.

“You’re kidding. What’s for breakfast?” She was sitting down, waiting to be served.

I pushed a box of cornflakes over to her. “Nothing fancy.”

“But I smell eggs!” she complained.

Junior was already on his feet. “And you shall have some, milady,” he said, in a plucky attempt at charm. “And why not some bacon too?”

Toni smiled at him. “Why not?”

Minutes later Sarah came downstairs wearing a flowered dress with sleeves and a flowered hat pinned into her tightly curled hair. As she saw Toni, with no makeup and her hair uncombed and half her ass hanging out, she stumbled off the last stair and almost fell. Her face was crimson as she hurried past, heading for the garage.

“Got to rush,” she said. “Sunday school’s in twenty minutes.”

“Yeah, and it’s all of a half mile away,” Junior observed.

When she was gone, Toni looked at me in consternation. “How old did you say she is?”

“Thirty-five.”

“You could’ve fooled me.”

Outside I found the day much colder than it had looked from the kitchen. A membrane of ice covered the water puddles in the driveway and my breath plumed in the air. Nevertheless it was every inch a beautiful Midwest fall day, bright and crisp, perfect for football. And, oddly, it was that very perfection my eyes found so harsh, for it pitilessly pointed up how ugly everything else had become, in this once lovely place I called home. The lawn that Cliff and I had kept short and smooth with a push mower and weed knife now looked more like a field of beaten-down brush. And the trees were gone too, the dozens of high-rise elms that had shaded the lawn and the driveway as it curved past the house, back to the barn. Now only a few stumps were left, big as poker tables, sad reminders of how virulent the Dutch elm disease of the sixties had been. And, looking down the street and out past the barn at the once handsome hills and fields now scored with roads and cluttered with ramshackle houses and abandoned cars and other junk, I found myself wishing that some simple disease had caused all that too, a disease with a name. Poverty somehow did not quite measure up.

Junior, walking next to me, said that we could go through the barn if I wanted.

“Part of it anyway,” he went on. “All except their club rooms.”

“What do they do in there?”

“Who knows? I guess they oil their weapons and practice karate and talk about The Day.”

“What day?”

“
Our
day. The day we get it.”

“That one, eh?”

“And they swap girl friends,” he said. “And drink beer and smoke dope. They’ve had four fires I know about. Fortunately they put ’em all out in time.”

Inside, I barely glanced at the opening to the mow, knowing I would see things that were not there. Swallowing my anguish, I sauntered on. And I noticed that the place did not even smell like a barn anymore. The milking stalls, with their open stanchions and dungless floors, looked almost sinister in their emptiness. Our old Holsteins once had filled them like berthed ships, twice a day giving full buckets of warm rich milk, most of which had been fed to our Angus calves, whose mothers had been bred down to such fashionable blockiness that they could not give enough milk even to sustain their own offspring. Farther on, in the loafing shed part of the barn, I looked up through the opening above a manger and saw the great rafters vaulting toward the roof beam and the rail below it, from which the old rusted hayfork hung like some giant spider waiting through the generations to feed again. I thought of the time with the sparrows, that night of death and high excitement.

“Bring back memories?” Junior asked.

“Yeah—lousy ones,” I lied. “Did you ever have to milk?”

He shook his head. “Naw—by the time I was old enough to do anything, the cows were gone. Jason had sold them off.”

We left the barn through the rear door and started down the path toward the pond, which once had lain like an emerald amid the thick sand of oak and hickory trees that had separated the barnyard from the main pasture. Now most of those trees were gone also, probably because they had lain too close to one of the new roads, across which a row of ranch houses now faced us. I came to the last rise in the path and went over it, expecting to see the pond again, icy at its fringes. Instead there was only a sinkhole, a depression littered from one side to the other with old tires and empty cans and paper and garbage as well as the skeletons of a dog and a burned-out Lincoln Continental.

“Not quite like it was, huh?” Junior said.

“No, it’s changed.”

He grinned. “Yeah, we don’t swim here much anymore. Not enough privacy.”

Across the road, a tiny black boy was throwing stones at us, stones that kept dropping short, into the sinkhole. Junior shook his fist at him.

“Debbil gonna git you, boy!” he shouted. “Debbil gonna eat your ass!”

The kid turned and ran, both hands covering his backside. Junior was laughing.

“You know what they call me?” he said.
“Mister
Kendall. Been so long since they seen Jason, they don’t even know he’s still alive.”

On the way back I asked him the inevitable question—why he had stayed on here all these years—and he gave me the same crap that he had given Toni, saying he was a leech and preferred to live off Jason.

“What about women?” I asked.

“I can take ’em or leave ’em.”

“But too smart to leave home over them?”

“That’s it. I’m too smart.”

Talking to him was like playing tennis with a pro: everything came back at you, just out of reach.

As we rounded the barn, heading for the house, I saw two young black men pausing at the barn door to give me the onceover. Junior raised his fist to them in a black power salute.

“The Lords rule!” he shouted.

They nodded coolly. One of them said, “Right on, man.”

“This is my brother,” Junior said. “My real, honest-to-God blood-brother.”

They seemed to know he was having fun with them, but it apparently did not bother them. As we went on into the house, he explained them to me.

“The mean-looking dude is Captain Midnight. The meaner-looking one calls himself Sandman. He’s an amateur fighter. They run the Lords. Not to mention the neighborhood.”

“But they take sass from you?”

“Well, I’m a special case. I don’t count, you see. They think I’m crazy.” He said this with a grin, as though he were really getting away with something.

Later that morning, as I sat alone in my room writing some of the forgettable words above, Jason knocked on the door and immediately entered, as if he expected to catch me
flagrante delicto
, schlong in hand. He had come up from downstairs and was breathing hard from the effort, which in turn made him scowl as though his infirmity were somehow my fault. He wobbled across the room and sank into the bentwood rocker there like a man lowering himself into a hot bath.

“What do you do up here?” he asked.

“Sleep. Write. Make love.”

He shook his head in knowing contempt. “Always the wiseacre. Even now, when you’re—how old are you now?”

“Forty-three.”

That made him snort. “Middle-aged. Almost old yourself. But still a wiseacre.”

I asked him what he wanted, which made his bushy eyebrows ride up.

“What is this? Can’t I visit my own son in my own house? Is that against the law now?”

“No, but I’m working,” I explained.

“Working?
”

“I’m writing. That’s what I do. I’m a writer.”

He pretended to be impressed by this bit of news. “Oh yes, now I remember. And what was that last motion picture you
wrote?
Last one I heard about anyway?
Passing Through
, wasn’t that it? The one we couldn’t take Mother to, because it was so filthy.”

“The one that got a nomination, you mean. But that wasn’t my last film, Jason.”

“Oh? And did they get even dirtier after that?”

“Naturally. The most recent one was all fucking. No dialogue at all.”

My response seemed to please him. “And still the wiseacre.”

“That’s me, all right. Listen, you wouldn’t want to do this some other time, would you?”

“Why? Is what you’re scribbling there so important?”

“It passes the time.”

“Well, I can do that too, you know.”

Accepting my fate then, I swiveled the desk chair to face him and lit a cigarette, only to hear him comment on the unwisdom of “that filthy habit.” He then asked me about Toni, wondering why such a pretty young woman would sell herself so cheap, living with a man without benefit of marriage. Why, a girl like that certainly should have been able to find herself a husband in Hollywood, he said, somebody more her own age, somebody rich and successful, maybe a producer of some kind. I suggested that perhaps she had a weakness for wiseacres, but Jason ignored that. He expressed a keen interest in my matrimonial history since my last home visit, for Mother’s funeral, as if he didn’t already know it by heart, and I dryly explained to him that I’d been married only twice in my life, once to Janet Murphy, who was suing me for nonsupport of my two teenage daughters (that lie again), and most recently to Ellen Brubaker, the Santa Barbara millionairess, as he habitually referred to her.

Had I liked it, living off a rich woman like that? Hadn’t it made me feel less of a man? Well no, not really. And what was it that made that marriage too go sour finally? Was it the usual, that I hadn’t bothered to listen to my marriage vows and had gone on living the life of a “swinging Hollywood bachelor”?—yes, that was the very phrase he used. So what could I do except nod and mumble that, yes, it possibly had been something like that, a failure of some sort or other. But I had made the lady happy, I said, so happy in fact that she had given me a boat—a yacht—as a divorce present.

“Divorce
present! Never heard of such a thing before.”

His black eyes seemed to glow with the effort to read me correctly. I could see the near-panic in him, the fear that he was being ridiculed in some subtle “Hollywood” way. And I could almost hear his mind turning over, seeking some safer ground from which to attack again. His hands, on the arms of the rocker, would not lie still. They stroked and drummed the wood.

“You know, Gregory, we never did talk much about that last summer, did we? The summer you left?”

I pretended that the floor was not opening under me. “What is there left to say?”

He forced a laugh out of his wheezing lungs.
“What is there to say?
Oh, I’d think quite a lot. Your brother and your twin are in a terrible accident. Clifford dies—” Even now he couldn’t speak the truth of it, couldn’t get his mouth around the more exact word. “—Kate is so terribly hurt.”

“I know all this, Jason.”

“And maybe you know
more
too. That’s all I’m asking.”

“What more?”

“Like what were they doing alone in the car? Where were their dates? It was early to be coming home from the dance, wasn’t it?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Not for me. It’s like yesterday.”

I shrugged and squirmed, wishing his goddamn eyes would wander from mine for even a second. But they would not. “Well, I don’t know what happened. I didn’t understand then, and I don’t understand now.”

“I see.” His hands continued to drum on the chair. “You don’t understand any of that, eh? Well then, maybe you can help me with this—
why did you leave?
Why did you run off when Kate was still in a coma?”