“I thought you looked restless.”
“Oh, no.”
“Well, school will start soon. Summer always drags about this time.”
He looked so cheerful nowadays. He had made her an appointment with a plastic surgeon for September, and at supper he had grown talkative and sometimes made small jokes. What she should have said was, “No. I don’t like you anymore, I don’t like your music, I don’t want you sleeping on my porch.” Then life would be simple again. No more hanging around waiting and wondering, no more secrets hidden from her whistling, unsuspecting father.
Drum set up a pattern. He came whenever her father was gone, as if he kept close watch on the house, and he seldom spoke. Conversation was up to Evie. If she was silent he seemed irritable, tapped his fingers or swung his foot, left before he had to. If she talked he seemed not to listen, but kept very still. He rested the back of his head against the wall and watched the ceiling while she searched for any words at all to fill the space. “You mustn’t mind Clotelia. Does she get on your nerves? Once I went home with her when my father was out of town and I met her boyfriend, not the one she has now but another one, who sat around drinking beer all the time and matching pennies, living off her money. She thinks all men do that way. That’s the only reason she acts so snippy. His name was, wait a minute. Not Spencer, no—”
She had never been given so much time before. No one interrupted her, no one shifted impatiently. She could choose her words as slowly as luxury items in a department store. “Not Steward, not Stengle. It will come to me in a moment. Spindle. I knew it was something peculiar. Have you ever heard of anyone named Spindle? He had a black knitted skull cap on in the middle of summer. His shoes were the big high kind with metal toe-caps.”
Drum stubbed his cigarette out and passed a hand over his eyes. “Are you tired?” Evie asked him.
“No.”
But his face was pinched and tight, and his tan was turning yellow. Sometimes, lost in what she was saying, she forgot that anything was wrong. Then she would look up accidentally and notice how he sat, limp and heavy-limbed, not bothering to protect himself from the net of words she had wound around him. She would break off and say, “Do you want something? Iced tea?”
“No.”
“Are you not sleeping nights?”
“I’m sleeping fine. Go on talking.”
“How can I talk if I never get an answer? You talk to me. What’s been happening? Have you been back to see your mother?”
“No.”
“Are you going?”
“No.”
“She can’t still be angry with you.”
“I don’t care if she’s angry or not, I’m not going.”
“What, not ever?”
“I’ve had it,” said Drum. “All this time telling how famous I’m going to be, and then she goes to pieces at one little setback. I’m nineteen years old. I got a right to get fired once, don’t I? Oh, it looks like I will never get anywhere in this life. Never do a thing but bag groceries on Friday nights. A lot she cares.”
“If you’re not going back,” said Evie, “where are you going?” She was careful about her tone of voice. Even a sudden movement, she felt, might frighten him away. But Drum only shook his head. He didn’t seem to care what she said.
He spent five days moving between her house and David’s, where he was allowed to visit but was not asked for meals. He shaved in the restroom of an Esso station, borrowed a change of clothes from David, and kept his guitar in David’s tool shed. At Evie’s house he saw only Evie and Clotelia. Once Violet came, pink-cheeked with curiosity after what Evie had told her on the phone, but Drum left immediately. “I believe he doesn’t like me,” Violet said.
“No, that’s not it. It’s some mood he’s in,” Evie told her. When Violet was there, she could draw back from things and see how strange they were: Evie Decker making excuses for a rock guitarist, protecting a fugitive sitting boldly in her kitchen chair. She said goodbye to Violet as soon as she could and went out back to signal toward the tall grass behind the house.
On Friday afternoon Drum’s mother called. “This is Mrs. Ora Casey,” she said stiffly. “Is that you, Evie?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Evie.
“I am trying to get ahold of Bertram. He’s wandered off somewhere. Has he been by your house?”
“No, ma’am.”
“If you see him, will you say I’m looking for him?”
“All right.”
There was a pause.
“I’ve called David too,” Mrs. Casey said. “He’s not seen him. Now, where would a boy go off to like that?”
“Well, I ‘ll certainly tell him you were looking for him.”
“Evie, I’ll be honest with you. I been looking for him all week now. Since Sunday. We had a little falling-out. Oh, it was all over nothing — a misunderstanding at the Parisian — but you know how sensitive he is. I told him he had let me down — well, I had my reasons. We may not be college-educated in our family but we are law-abiding, we don’t give no one cause to complain about us. I did speak sharp to him, but only because I was disappointed, nothing permanent. What call did he have to take it to heart so?”
“Well, if I see him—” Evie said.
“Yes, yes. All right. Good-bye.”
Evie hung up and went back to the living room, where Drum and Clotelia were watching soap operas. Drum had grown bolder now. When the television was on he sat watching it as if he were an invited guest, talking back to all the actors. “This here doctor,” Clotelia was telling him, “think he’s the center of the universe. Selfish? Watch.” Drum nodded, probably not listening, concentrating on the screen so hard his eyes had turned to slits. He and Clotelia shared the couch. Clotelia had grown used to him, although she still said he was trash. “Now, here is what I want to know,” she told him. “When that doctor mince in such a stuck-up way, is it his way? Or do he just act like that for the play? Which? Pull your gut in, Evie. Who was that on the phone?”
“No one,” said Evie.
“If I don’t get on her tail,” Clotelia told Drum, “she would go around looking like a old bedsheet. What am I going to do? I tell my boyfriend, ‘Brewster,’ I say, ‘you ain’t going to believe it, but I know a white girl seventeen years old need a full-time nursemaid. Maid ain’t enough,’ I say. ‘She need a nursemaid.’ ”
Drum rolled his head back on the couch and watched Clotelia. During commercials he would listen to anyone. It didn’t have to be Evie.
“ ‘Why won’t you quit then?’ he say. I tell him I will. Nothing more disgraceful, he say, than me spending my lifetime picking up over Evie Decker.”
“I wish you would quit,” Evie said.
“Oh, I will, miss, I will.” She made a face and twisted her watch around sharply. “Week to week I say I will. Only if I could find me something else to do. Factory job. Do you know how long I wasted on her? Four years. Now I got to say it was all for nothing and quit. My land.”
“Go to some city, why don’t you,” Drum said.
“Sure. Be glad to.”
“I would too, if I had the money.”
Evie stood above him, folding her hands on the back of the couch and looking down at the top of his head. There was no part in his hair, just a dense sheet of black separating into thick strings. Sometimes, watching him sprawled in her house, she felt an unpleasant sense of surprise hit her. There were things about him that kept startling her each time she noticed them: the bony, scraped look of his wrists, the nicotine stain on his middle finger, the straggling hairs that edged his sideburns. He was sunk into the couch cushions as if he were permanent. If her father walked in right now, what would Drum do? Raise his hand no more than an inch, probably, say “Hey” and let the hand drop again.