“Death’s a pisser, isn’t it?” I say, still feeling out of sorts.
“What did Woody Alien say about it-that it was the hours that bothered him?” I laugh, knowing I am sounding needlessly cruel.
“Who else is still around that I knew?” I ask, wondering if the entire town is in Paul’s hip pocket.
“I’ve got my high school annual in the hall,” she answers and rises to get it when I nod.
I look out the kitchen window into the backyard and notice the dark shapes of two magnificent trees, one pecan and the other a magnolia.
How do people in places like west Texas and New Mexico stand to live without real trees? Nothing in nature is more satisfying. Could I live over here again? I don’t know. Angela returns with a dark gold book and sitting down again across from me, slides it across the table.
“I keep forgetting you’re not in there.”
“Thank goodness,” I say, glad I don’t have to be confronted with what thirty years has done to me.
“You were handsome!” Angela exclaims.
“And you’ve hardly changed.”
“That’s silly,” I say, turning to Angela’s senior class. Actually, I am flattered beyond belief. I know she’s lying, but maybe not too much.
“Is Gary Holt still here?” I ask, looking at a picture of a boyhood friend who went through the University of Arkansas and then returned to Bear Creek to run his father’s Ford dealership.
Angela shakes her head.
“Almost a year ago he sold it and moved to Memphis to become an
Oldsmobile dealer. The day they left, Martha told me Cary didn’t want them to be the last white family in Bear Creek.”
Damn. Gary’s family had lived in Bear Creek since it was founded after the Civil War. When people like him begin to move, you know the town is in trouble. With the aid of the yearbook I ask about others I would have graduated with, and Angela helpfully provides a running commentary on their whereabouts. Surprisingly, several are still in or around Bear Creek. Despite the economy, a few whom I knew fairly well have flourished: Jeff Starnes is one of only two physicians in the county; Darby Nails has a CPA business that has offices all over the Arkansas Delta, John Upton farms and owns several businesses, including an insurance agency downtown.
“If you had come to any of the class reunions,” Angela reminds me, “you’d still know everybody.”
I look at John’s picture and wonder how much information he would give me. He and I had been inseparable in junior high before I got shipped off to Subiaco. Each year I would hang out with him during the summers, though our relationship never quite recaptured its adolescent intensity.
“I always had ambivalent feelings about this place,” I confess.
“Rosa was so dark that I was afraid somebody would make a crack about her.”
“If your daughter really looks anything like her, any remark would have been out of envy,” Angela says, not denying the possibility.
“Your mother was so proud of you when you joined the Peace Corps. She thought you were going to save the world, too.”
I tell her, “She would have been delighted if you and I had gotten married even though you were a Yankee. Of course she didn’t know what we were doing in the backseat of her car.”
Angela laughs selfconsciously, and suddenly I feel a sexual charge in the room. She shifts in her seat and studies the place mat in front of her.
“I would have married you,” she says solemnly, “but you never asked.
Though it worked out for the best for us both, how come you never did?”
I look at the top of her head, now bent, and see a small but unruly patch of gray hairs. It has taken her more than a quarter of a century to ask this question, and I still don’t know the answer.
That last summer I loved her as much as I was capable of, but how much was that? My head obsessed with the sacrificial lives of the saints, and the rest of me one unrelenting sex hormone, there wasn’t a lot of room left for single-minded devotion to one girl, however idealistic her mind and rounded her ass.
“I was too young; you remember I was pretty callow back then.”
She shrugs.
“Do you realize you were the only person I ever preached to? I guess I
felt safe with you.”
Angela has begun to worry a spot on the mat with her ring finger. A modest diamond glints in the overhead kitchen light. At this moment an orange and black cat pushes through a tiny door by the kitchen window and leaps onto her lap.
She strokes its back and coos, “This is Baby Dave.”
“Hello, Baby Dave,” I say, wondering what we do now. I’m not sure what Angela needs or even wants. For reasons I do not understand I am attracted to her again as much as I was when I was eighteen. Why? Is it simply nostalgia for lost innocence?
“Am I so middle-aged crazy that I think I can capture that again? In her passionate, arrogant way, Angela embodied ideals I had never encountered. But what is delicious about her now is that there is not even a trace of self-righteousness in her. I can only conclude she is what she seems: a complex, mature, enormously appealing woman my age, and one I can understand, given enough time.
Baby Dave leans back against his owner’s diaphragm and begins to purr.
“Gideon,” Angela says, using my Christian name for the first time, “I’d very much like for us to be friends. I’m still half-crazy right now.”
I know what she means. To get through the day, you have to repress.
But sooner or later, the feelings and memories, bittersweet and painful, come at all hours of the day and night.
“I understand,” I say, truly sympathetic as she drops Baby Dave to the floor and begins to cry again.
I must not take advantage of her, but I don’t stop myself from getting up from my chair. Awkwardly, I reach down and hug her while she sobs against me. Her face against my cheek is burning hot. Knowing I shouldn’t, I kiss her.
For an unforgettable moment she begins to respond but almost immediately pulls back.
“Will you leave now?” she asks, her voice barely a whisper.
“I need you to do that for me.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, backing away from her. This isn’t the time to admit that I would like nothing more than to take her back to the bedroom she shared with her husband for almost thirty years.
Yet, what would be so wrong about that? I cared for her once, and already I’ve begun to do so again.
At this moment the phone in her kitchen rings.
Watching me carefully as if I were a shoplifter about to walk out with a bag of cookies in a 7-Eleven, Angela picks up the phone, and her somber expression changes to a smile.
“Hi, Mrs. Petty, how are you?”
How can that woman still be alive? If it is the same person I think it is, she was an old woman when Hannah and I were children picking up acorns in her yard. Now she apparently lives across the street. I hear Angela ask her if she remembers me. I am in town and stopped by to see her. As Angela talks, I look out the window and wonder if the old snoop has been trying to spy on us.
Small towns. I have forgotten what it was like.
Every move I make here will be documented and recorded. After five minutes Angela shakes her head and more or less hangs up on her, explaining to me that she would be kept on the phone for hours. Of course, she remembers me. I was the Pages’ only son who went off and married that nigger woman from Haiti or someplace.
“You know you can’t hide anything here,” Angela says, primly, not sitting down again. She still wants me to go.
“I’m surprised that as soon as she noticed your car, she didn’t try to stumble over here on her walker. She can’t get up the porch, though.