vacant lot where a small concrete block factory once stood. At the rate this town is going, twenty years from now, there may not even be a Bear Creek. Why doesn’t capitalism work here? Is it racist to think that blacks don’t take to free enterprise?
Is it the need to dominate and control they lack? Even as black as Bear Creek is becoming, it appeared to me yesterday during my brief drive down Main Street that most all the stores are still owned either by whites, Chinese, or Jews. Yet that might not hold true much longer.
Will Angela leave? She would if she’s smart. There is no future for her here. I sip at my coffee, certain that her choice of meeting places reflects her ambivalence about seeing me again.
How could any involvement with me do anything but hurt her? What did she say-Paul is the air we breathe?
As I begin to replay yesterday’s visits and wonder how close we were to walking back to her bedroom, Angela bursts through the door, bundled up in a purple ski jacket and gray sweats.
“I almost made it!” she says, pushing back her left sleeve to check her watch.
I stand up, my thoughts undoubtedly transparent.
Her face is rosy from the cold. It is eight-forty. I doubt if she has ever been on time in her life.
“A virtue of the dull, you used to tell me,” I respond, helping her off
with her coat. Why am I being such a gentleman? Amy would hit me if I tried to assist her. Yet, east Arkansas was part of the Old South. Manners were to be minded, whatever the circumstances. Forgotten habits have a way of reappearing.
“You used to believe everything I said,” she says lightly.
The power of sex. I can’t read Angela. Maybe she is not even conscious of the mixed signals I seem to be getting from her.
“I still do,” I admit.
When she sits down, I ask, “Is the Cotton Boll the best Bear Creek can do these days, or are you trying to hide me?”
She smiles at our waitress who is approaching us with a mug in one hand and a pot in the other.
“Wait until you see who the owner and cook is,” Angela murmurs, and says brightly, “Hi, Mckenzie!
How are you?” Our waitress nods vigorously and says something unintelligible. She pours Angela a cup and refills my mug while Angela writes something on a napkin and hands it to her. She frowns, and Angela points to me.
“How do you do?” I say, thinking I am being introduced. What must it be like not to be able to hear and speak? Given my tendency to hear only what I want to and to put my foot in my mouth, I might be better off. Lately, in the press there has been a flurry of articles about a debate
between those who want to bring the deaf into the mainstream and those who argue that the deaf have their own culture and should not be forced to adapt to the hearing world. Like religion, it is a useless argument for the true believers. Surely, it is academic in Bear Creek.
Mckenzie smiles politely and points to the Cotton Boll’s menu in front of me. It is an unadorned 8 1/2 by 11 pink piece of paper protected by plastic.
“What’s good?” I ask Angela.
Angela winks at me.
“Everything mat’s bad for you. The biscuits and gravy with sausage are sublime.”
How does anyone live past thirty over here?
“I’ll just take some toast,” I say to Mckenzie.
The girl knits her brow. Angela says, “You have to write it. She can’t read lips any better than you can.”
So she remembers, too. Embarrassed, I print out in block letters the words toast and jelly and push the paper over to Angela, who scribbles the works! and hands it to the girl.
Mckenzie gives me a look that suggests I have insulted the honor of the Cotton Boll, but turns on her heel and marches back to the kitchen.
Cautiously, I ask Angela, “How are you today?” “I’m fine,” Angela says, her voice neutral but friendly.
“Mrs. Petty thinks you’ve come back to farm.”
We both laugh at the same time. For someone who was raised in an environment so uniformly rural, I was remarkably ignorant of Bear Creek’s lifeblood and still am. I stayed in town and cruised Main Street with my friends.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Mr. Carpenter, my old junior high science teacher, doddering toward me. He must have been around my present age when he taught me, my last year in Bear Creek before I went to Subiaco. I loved ninth grade science. He made “the laws of nature,” his term for the mathematical formulas he wrote on the board, seem real. Physics, three years later at Subiaco, was just a bunch of numbers I couldn’t get to add up. Mi. Carpenter gave us the illusion the world could be comprehended if we just had the brains to do it. As an adult, I realized what a hoax he had played on us, but thanks to his passion, for years afterwards I retained a vague hope somebody would figure it out.
“Gideon Page,” he says, his eyes twinkling as he comes up to us.
“What an appreciative kid you were. You thought I was a magician, but then you were kind of dumb in science, weren’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” I say, getting to my feet, marveling that he remembers. He probably doesn’t. Mediocrity is always a safe bet, and as a lifelong teacher, he knew the odds.
“It’s good to see you, Mr. Carpenter. You were the best teacher I ever had in nineteen years of going to school.”
Rubbing his hands on a dirty apron, he beams as if I had just awarded him the Nobel Prize.
Teachers have learned to be content with praise in Arkansas.
“You know how much I liked your mother. A well-bred woman who deserved better luck. After your father died, she couldn’t do a thing with you, though, until those Catholics scared the be jesus out of you. Are you still superstitious?”
He offers his hand, and I take it.
Religious, I think he means. What a character he still is! Mr. Carpenter, a lifelong bachelor and, I suddenly realize, homosexual, lived two doors down from us. He used to quiz me about what the fathers and brothers were teaching me when I returned home for holidays and summers. He’d rail at me, “Those damn Papists were first-class truth muzzlers! Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, anybody with a brain they scared shitless.”
“When did you open a restaurant, Mr. Carpenter?”
I ask, as if I have been away at school.
“I never knew you could cook.”
The old man tugs at the St. Louis Cardinals cap that’s perched atop his
still formidable head of hair, which closely resembles cotton left too long in the fields, then tells Angela, “Gideon’s grandfather on his mother’s side knew some science. He couldn’t cure anybody-they didn’t have antibiotics then-but he was an intelligent man. Gideon got his gift for gab from his paternal grandfather. Now, there was a man who could rattle on for hours and never say a damn thing.”
Odd what people remember about me. It is apparent I was known as a talker and not much else. Was that the reality? I can’t remember, or maybe I don’t want to. I glance at Angela, but she has no intent of rescuing me.
“You’ve got a nice place here,” I flounder. This old guy has me off balance. Maybe he felt sorry for me in junior high, but now that I’m an adult I’m supposed to be able to take it.
“It’s a junk heap,” Mr. Carpenter says calmly, inspecting a knife on the table as if he were running a four-star restaurant. He adds, “I heard last night you’re here representing one of the Bledsoe boys in Willie Ting’s murder case. Now, those Ting kids were students. Connie knew more physics when she was a junior in high school than the rest of Bear Creek put together. Tommy was good in math, but when she came along, Connie liked the experiments.”