Their arrogance shouldn’t surprise me now.
“Sure,” I say. Dick expects me to do his work for him because he doesn’t have time. I’ll be happy to oblige him. We talk for a few more minutes, and then I am back on the road to Blackwell County for a deposition in one of my two personal injury cases. I will turn right around and be back over here tomorrow to pick up Angela and drive to the ball game. What will Dick think about me when he learns I have lied to him?
Gunning the Blazer up to seventy-five, I pretend I don’t really care.
The next morning I get to Angela’s a little before noon, but as usual she is running behind and comes to the door with a tube of lipstick in her hand.
“Come on in,” she says, smiling.
“I’ll be ready in a few minutes.” Even without her face completely made up, she looks good. She is wearing black stockings and a tight gray skirt, and I feel a stab of desire slash through me like a sudden twinge
of heartburn. Goodness. Does she know what she is stirring up in me? I tell myself to calm down. She is entitled to dress up without me thinking about what she looks like naked. I stand in the kitchen and to still myself contemplate the oak tree just outside her window. I spot two squirrels chasing each other on a branch that almost touches her roof. Probably a male chasing a female. Damn, if that’s what she wants, I don’t have a chance.
Driving over the desolate flatness of the Delta, we are soon chattering as if we were a pair of old biddies heading out for an afternoon’s shopping in the big city for our grandchildren instead of two healthy heterosexuals enclosed in a small space with a long erotic history between us. As she talks her skirt creeps up an inch on her thigh.
A scent that reminds me ever so slightly of honeysuckle permeates the space between us in the front seat of the Blazer. As children, my best friend Hannah and I used to pretend we were hummingbirds, rapidly waving our arms and biting off the ends of the flowers on the bush in old Mrs. nectar contained inside. Of course, we had to use our hands to remove the stems to get at the juice, but the image of Hannah’s pixieish face as she waggled her palms up and down beside her head remains an indelible memory. I have never been that innocent in the company of a female again.
Angela wants to know everything about the case, and I tell her, beginning with my visit with Connie and her mother last Saturday morning after breakfast and ending with my cup of coffee with Dick yesterday.
“Dick acts like I’m on their payroll,” I say, not without satisfaction.
“Neither of them has a clue how I feel about Paul.”
Angela, who has been listening and asking questions with the devoted fascination of a true trial junkie, comments, “Maybe they don’t remember the past exactly the way you do.”
I swerve to avoid the remains of a possum.
“Are you saying the Taylors never cheated us, or that Paul never bought up our land at a tax sale?”
I exclaim, irritated by her dispassionate tone.
Angela reaches over and pats my leg.
“I wasn’t there, Gideon. If you say it happened, I believe you.”
Though her comment reassures me, I begin to wish my memories of the actual events were more concrete. But I was only a kid when my father died, and I was in the Peace Corps when my mother lost her land. It was only when she died that I discovered there were no eighty acres to inherit.
When I do not respond, Angela says, “There is already so much gossip about us that half the town will be disappointed if we don’t come back married.”
I chuckle at the thought of it, but the fact that she is willing to tease is proof that she has been thinking about me.
“I’ve stirred the pot pretty good, huh “You don’t know the half of it,” she says cryptically, and then adds, “At least this will take some pressure off me. As soon as your husband dies or divorces you, and the pity wears off, a woman, unless she’s old, becomes a pariah in a small town. You’re viewed with fear and loathing by the women and the men suddenly think you’re white trash.”
This outburst and the vehemence with which it is said is straight from the heart. I now understand better my mother’s words after the funeral that she should have just jumped in the grave with my father. She wasn’t just grieving for the past; she was thinking of her future.
“Unless you’re old, it must be terrible being a single woman in Bear Creek,” I say, sympathetically.
Angela shrugs.
“Maybe it’s the futility of the situation over here that gets us down.
East Arkansas is probably more like South Africa than anyone cares to admit, but we don’t have a Nelson Mandela to save us.”
Again, the hyperbole. Yet, in Memphis, less than an hour’s drive east, it is hard to get away from the feeling that racial problems in the Delta are as permanent as the land itself. At the Pyramid, just across the Mississippi River, the coaches and players are almost all black while the crowd is overwhelmingly white. Dan and I have just this week been to see Hoop Dreams, a documentary that follows two black Chicago youths through their high school basketball careers to college. One kid, the less talented of the two, ended up at Arkansas State after
graduating from a junior college. I left the movie more convinced than ever that big time university athletic programs are poorly disguised professional sports businesses that should pay corporate income taxes.
Both the Memphis and Arkansas coaches have recently complained loudly and publicly of racism directed against them. Their bitterness stems from some commentators’ past contentions that as coaches they are better recruiters than tacticians. White coaches such as Bobby Knight and Eddie Sutton get praised for their game plans. The implication, the black coaches contend, is that they are too dumb to be astute tacticians. Angela, chewing contentedly on a hot dog before the game begins, asks, “How hard can it be anyway? I’ve never known any coach who I wanted to do brain surgery on me.”
I laugh, glad I am here with her. Angela is an enthusiastic fan, calling the Hogs with the cheerleaders as if she had been one herself.
Our seats are a mile from the court, but Angela overrules the referees’ decisions with the confidence of the confirmed sports couch potato.
“That was a charge!” she screams, as the game winds down, punching my arm for emphasis.
“He had position!
Didn’t you see it?”
How? From this height, the players look like ants to me. It is easy to forget some of these guys are seven feet tall and weigh more than 250 pounds.
“They ought to give him a couple of foul shots just out of sympathy,” I agree.
“I wouldn’t stand still and let one of these rhinos run over me unless I were wearing a fall suit of armor.”
Angela nudges me with her shoulder.
“You would if that’s what it took to win.”
When I ran track in high school, I was never sure if I competed so hard because of a desire to win or the risk of being humiliated. The race I remember most is the Meet of Champions race in which I finished last, not the state “A” finals, the week before, which I won.
The buzzer sounds. The Razorbacks are victorious by seven points.
Though I never quite got into the game, Angela gives me a high five, irritating some Tiger fans sitting next to us. To hell with them. The next time they win they will be just as obnoxious. Angela is grinning as if she had scored the decisive points. She likes to win, too. I wonder what motivates her. As Hog fans celebrate around us, I lean over and kiss her quickly on the lips. Though she doesn’t respond, she doesn’t chastise me either, and even this chaste contact has made my blood thicken.
After the game we park near the Peabody Hotel and walk around in the damp chill on Beale Street, a historic black area because of its musicians that has been revitalized to attract tourists-one of
Memphis’s many efforts over the years to preserve its downtown. We stop at the King’s Palace restaurant and have a couple of beers and talk over a jukebox that seems mainly devoted to the blues. The game has left her in a good mood and she lets me kid her about her devotion to the Razorbacks.