“Good or bad?” She raised her head to see if Katya was still out, and was reassured by the mound of little behind beneath the baby quilt the four aunties had made.
“Bad.”
She rolled up on an elbow. He was staring at the ceiling, his face set. She let her hand wander to afford some distraction from whatever it was that was making him unhappy.
“Cut that out,” he said without force.
“Tell me or I’ll quit.”
“All right, all right, Jesus! Some women.” He pulled her back down for a fierce kiss.
“Forget it,” she said, grabbing his hair and pulling. “Talk.”
“Ouch! Damn it! Jeez, you’re always beating up on me. You think you’d take it easier on a poor, helpless cripple with-”
She pulled harder. “Tell me.”
He sighed. “My brother’s coming.”
“Your brother?”
He nodded.
“You have a brother?”
He winced. “Yeah.”
“We’ve been married, what, going on two years, we have a child, and this is the first time you tell me you have a brother?” A murmur from Katya in the living room made her lower her voice. “Older or younger?”
“Older.”
“Does he have a name, this older brother?”
“Jeffrey.”
“Any other siblings I need to know about?”
“No.”
“This is like pulling teeth,” she said. “Talk to me, Clark. Why is it bad news that your older brother Jeffrey is coming to visit?”
“He’s not coming to visit. We don’t visit.”
“Then why is he coming?”
“He didn’t say, he just said he was coming.”
“Did he write, call, what?”
“I got a letter yesterday when I went into town to check the mail.”
She digested this. “When?”
“Tomorrow.”
She took a deep breath. “I appreciate all the advance notice there, Clark.”
“I didn’t get much either, Cookman, like I said, I just got the letter yesterday. I don’t even know how the hell he found me. I haven’t spoken to anyone there since before I joined up.”
Mistaking her silence, he added, “Don’t worry, he’s not staying here. I got him a room at Auntie Vi’s. With luck, you won’t even have to meet him.”
“I don’t mind if he stays with us, Bobby. Half the Park’s on the couch every other night as it is. Besides which, you’re his brother. Why wouldn’t he stay with us?”
“Because I wouldn’t invite him to.” When she would have said more, he said, “Let it alone, okay, Dinah? He has nothing to do with me.”
“He’s your family.”
There was a moment of silence so fraught that Dinah could feel the hairs on the back of her neck stand straight up. “Jeffrey Clark is not my family,” Bobby said, enunciating each word with exaggerated care. “That he is my brother is strictly an accident of birth. You are my family. Katya is my family. And Kate. Nobody else, and in particular no one from inside the city limits of Nutbush, Tennessee!”
She flinched a little at the volume of his response. He saw it and took a deep breath. When he spoke again his voice was lower and more controlled. “If I could have gotten away with it I never would have told you he was coming at all, but the way the Bush telegraph works, you’d have heard about the only other black man in the Park two seconds after he got off George.”
Dinah was the only child of two only children and her parents had died young, and the most family she’d known was beneath the roof she was living right now. To whistle family of any kind down the wind seemed to her the height of foolishness.
On the other hand, she knew something of the circumstances surrounding Bobby’s departure from Nutbush, Tennessee, which had resulted in him lying about his age to get into the army. It had also led, indirectly, to his residence in the Park, which was where she had found him, and she was inclined to regard whoever had helped make that happen with a benevolent eye.
On the whole, however, she thought that this might be one of those times when a smart wife stayed quiet.
He’d rolled to one side, his body so tense she could hear him glaring. She leaned over and kissed his spine. “Were you thinking you wanted dinner anytime soon?”
He looked at her over his shoulder and must have been reassured by what he saw on her face. “Hell, yes, I want dinner!” he said, the familiar bray back in full force. “You just worked ten pounds off me, woman, I need fuel!”
“Then get your butt into the kitchen and peel me some spuds.”
She took her time getting back into her clothes, knowing he was watching, and knowing too that Bobby was never so ready as when he just had. She was rewarded when a hand grabbed her elbow and tumbled her back into bed.
The last thing she thought before giving herself up to his single-minded possession was, “I’ll ask Kate to check this brother out. Then we’ll see.” And then she stopped thinking, because only a fool would not pay attention when Bobby got her horizontal, and Dinah Cookman was no fool.
5
I don’t think I’ve seen Dreyer since last fall,“ Bernie said. ”September, maybe? Maybe later.“ ”He stop in for a drink?“
“He was working for me. Hauled and laid gravel on the paths between the cabins and the outhouses, and the Roadhouse and my house. They were starting to get a little boggy.”
The Roadhouse was one big square room with exposed beams, a bar down one side, tables around two others, and a small dance floor covered with Sorel scuff marks. A thirty-two-inch television hung from the ceiling, blaring a basketball game.
“Isn’t basketball season ever over?” Kate said unwisely.
There was a sign behind the bar that proclaimed free throws win ball games, and Bernie, in his spare time the coach of the Kanuyaq Kings, swore to the precept with a fervor only previously matched by medieval saints. “Basketball?” he said, politely incredulous. “Over?”
“Sorry,” Kate said. “I forgot myself there for a moment. I’m all better now. About Dreyer.”
“Basketball is never over, Kate,” he said. “Basketball is the one true thing. Basketball is the only game where brains and brawn are equal. Basketball-”
“Bernie-”
“Not to mention which, basketball is the only sport where the ball is big enough you can actually keep your eye on it. I mean to say, have you ever watched a football game? Or baseball? Now there’s a ball you could shove up a-”
“Yes, yes,” Kate said hastily. “You’re absolutely right. Couldn’t be righter if you were the governor. But about Len Dreyer-”
Bernie, deciding he’d ridden that horse long enough, capitulated. “Like I said, last time I saw him was August, shoveling pea gravel. I think I paid him off around Labor Day.”
There was a note in his voice she couldn’t identify. “Check or cash?”
He gave her a look.
“Right,” Kate said, “of course cash, what was I thinking.” She was thinking a check was traceable and that cash was not, and that she’d like to have just one piece of paper with Dreyer’s prints on it. “Probably didn’t make him sign a W-2, either,” she said with no hope at all.
“What, you’re working for the IRS nowadays?” Bernie inspected an imaginary spot on the glass he was polishing. “Is it true he caught a shotgun blast to the chest?”
“That news already out, is it?”
“Well, hell, Kate, there were a few kids around when the body was found.”
“And some of them play for you,” Kate said. “Yeah, I get it. Anyway, yes. Front and center.”
“Ouch.”
She frowned. “You know him well?”
He shrugged. “Well as anybody, I guess.”
He met her eyes with a look of such studied indifference that she stiffened. “He hang with any particular Park rats?”
“Didn’t have many friends that I noticed.” Somebody yelled for a refill, and as he moved down the bar Kate thought she heard him say, “Not a big surprise.”
She watched him pull a tray full of beers and amble over to the table in front of the television, where sat the four Grosdidier brothers and Old Sam Dementieff, taking turns calling the play-by-play and not hesitating to revile the ancestry of the referees every time a whistle blew.