Ivy touched him on the arm. “Sometimes you’ve just got to ignore him. I’ll go fishing with you. Please, I’d love to. And I love everything you brought. Thank your wife, Nabby, for me.”
Marriage was a good cause, thought Ross. On a given day chances were one of you might be human. Was D. H. Lawrence a rude bastard, even into his thirties?
He saw the kids gather and Newt go out as the giant weird quarterback. The day was marked for gloom but he was going to have something good out of it. He did not want to watch his son play football. But thanks, Lord, for providing him with the dread image: Newt had once embarrassed him playing football with young kids.
He was home from graduate school — Greensboro — at Christmas. He was invited over to an old classmate’s house in Daphne. Ross came later to have a toddy with the boy’s father. It was another big modest beach house with a screened porch all the way across the back. They took their hot rums out to the old wooden lounges and watched Newt and his friend quarterback a touch game with his friend’s nephews and nieces, ages five to twelve. Ross was pleased his boy cared about sports at all. It was a stirring late December day, cool and perfect for neighborhood touch, under the Spanish moss and between the hedges. But then Ross saw his contemporary staring harder out there and when Ross noticed, things were not nice. Newt was hogging the play and playing too rough, much too rough. He smashed the girl granddaughter of this man into the hedge. She didn’t cry, but she hung out of the game, rubbing her arms. Then Newt fired a pass into the stomach of a boy child that blew him down into the oyster-shell driveway. The kid was cut up but returned. Newt’s friend implored him and the children were talking about him, but he remained odd, yes, and driven. Ross was looking at something he deeply despised seeing. He did not want to think about the other examples. They called the game. The children came up on the porch hurt and amazed, but gamely saying nothing around Ross. They were tough, good children, no whiners. In the car home, he said to Newt, “Son, you were a mite fierce out there. Just kids, kids.” Newt waited a while and came back, too gravely: “You want me to smile all day like a waitress?”
This fierceness, off the point, that was it.
So they drove around and Ivy, who did not change from her short skirt and flowered blouse to go fishing, directed him through town to pick up Newt’s bounced checks — this tavern, that grocery, the phone company. Ross didn’t mind. He’d expected financial distress and had brought some money. With some irony of kinship he’d brought up a fairly big check from Louisiana State University Press to sign over to Newt. This concern had published Newt’s books. Ross had just picked up a nice bit of change from a piece of his they were anthologizing. Christ, though, the kid might make something out of it. But not a kid. He was thirty. Newt’s sister Ann was twenty-eight, married in Orlando, straight and clean as a javelin, thanks. Ivy Pilgrim (her real name) wanted to know all about Ann and Nabby. Then they did go fishing.
Auburn had some lovely shaded holes for fishing in the country. Erase the school, and it was a sweet dream of nature. Ross, a Tuscaloosa man, could never quite eliminate his prejudice that Auburn U should have really never occurred, especially now that it had fired his boy. There had been some cancerous accident among the livestock and chicken droppings years ago, and, well, football arose and paid the buildings to stay there and spread. These farm boys, still confused, had five different animal mascots, trying to get the whole barnyard zoo in. Ivy was amused by these old jokes, bless her, though he really didn’t mean them. She was in architecture, hanging tough. How could Newt have attracted her? he thought, instantly remorseful.
She thought Newt would return to his poems soon. Improbably, she understood his books and wanted him to move on to — pray for rain! — some gladness, bless him. The poetry had won her over, but as a way of life it sucked wind.
“Newt is proud of you and he wants to be glad,” she said.
“Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
Once he had been to an inspirational seminar with one of his clients. The speaker was a man who had been through unbearable, unlucky, unavoidable horror. He told the crowd he intended never ever to have another bad day. He just wouldn’t. He was going to force every day to be a good day. Ross was heeding the man now. He was glad he’d remembered. He concentrated on Ivy, who was a good fisherman. She had sporting grace. They caught several bluegills and one large bass. There was never any question but that she’d clean them and put them in the freezer, since Ross was buying her supper.
“I suppose, though, Newt is casting around for other work?”
“It’s the band, the band, the band. He writes for it, he sings. He says everything he’s ever wanted to say is in the band.”
Ross had noted the late gloomy competency in American music, ever a listener in his Riviera. Electricity had opened the doors to every uncharming hobbyist in every wretched burg, even in Ohio. You could not find a dusthole without its guitar man, big eyes on the Big Time beyond the flyspecked window, drooling, intent on being wild, wild, wild. America, unable to leave its guitar alone, teenager with his dick: “Look here, I’ve got one too.” He saw Newt, late-coming thirty, in the tuning hordes, and it depressed him mightily. As witness the millions of drips in “computers” now. Yeah, toothless grizzled layabout in the Mildewville Café: “Yep, my boy used to cornhole bus exhausts, he’s now in computers.” Look down at a modern hotel lobby, three quarters of them were in “computers,” asking the desk clerk if the sun was shining. His daughter’s husband, a gruesome Mormon yuppie, was “in computers.” Then Ross’s ears harked to the Riviera speakers — something new, acoustic, a protolesbian with a message. Give people a chance, Ross corrected himself: you were a G-22, Intelligence, with the marines in the worst war ever, by choice, dim bulb in forehead. Whole squad smoked by mortars because of you, put them on the wrong beach. A gloomy competency would have been refreshing, ask their mothers. I could have stayed home and just been shitty, like the singer Donovan, hurting only music.
Back at home, she showered while Ross set up the CD player with its amazing resonant speaker boxes. What a sound they had here with Miles Davis. She heard it while the water ran. Ross was excited too. In his fresh shirt, blazer, trousers and wingtips, he emerged from his own shower, opened the mirror door of the medicine chest to check Newton’s drugs, and caught Ivy Pilgrim sitting naked on her bed, arms around her breasts, sadly abject and staring at the floor. Ross looked on, lengthening the accident. This is my daughter, my daughter, he thought, proud of her. The brave little thing.