So when he made that big show about the three bulls going off to have some boy time, I got a little fed up with the way he kept acting like we were charmed when really we weren’t at all. We were gossip. We were the family folks could feel sorry for or judge. Either way, our lives weren’t ours anymore. We belonged to the town and its prying eyes and clucking tongues. I was tired of that. I wanted my father to finally acknowledge that fact.
So I said, “Where’d Mom go?”
She’d slipped out of the house after dinner. We’d gone to services at the First Christian as usual and then come home to the meal she’d prepared. Bill came by and had coconut cream pie and coffee with us. Then he and my father went out to work on the Galaxie. I lay on my bed and heard Mr. Timms fire up his Olds. He honked his horn as he went up the street, and Bill said to my father, “There he goes.”
From my bedroom I could hear my mother singing along with the radio from next door. She had a pretty singing voice, and as I listened to her, I couldn’t help but think how happy she sounded. Soon I heard our screen door creak open and then slap against the jamb. I sat up and leaned over to look out the window. She had on a red summer dress that had a halter top and a pleated skirt. Her bare shoulders were shiny in the sunlight. She carried a box purse made from woven straw. It had strawberries and white blooms on it, and she held the handle and swung it back and forth as she walked. Her shoes, a pair of strappy sandals, slapped over the sidewalk. Her curls bounced against her bare back, and I thought she looked like a girl heading off to somewhere she’d been looking forward to, and despite the fact that I knew that Mr. Timms was most likely waiting, I couldn’t help but feel happy for her.
She turned back once and waved at my father and Bill. “Going fishin’, boys,” she said and then walked on up the street.
Now, as I waited for my father to answer my question, I saw the slightest grimace around his lips.
“She went visiting,” he said.
I wouldn’t let him off that easily. “Visiting who?”
Bill was wiping off his hands with a red shop rag. “Get your gun, hotshot.” He threw the rag into my face and gave me a hard look that told me to shut up and fall into line. “Chop, chop, buddy boy. I mean it. Right now.”
It was a quiet ride down into the country. Bill drove his El Camino, and the three of us crowded onto the bench seat. I was crammed in between Bill and my father. Our guns, my.410 and my father’s and Bill’s twelve-gauges, were cased and stowed behind us in the bed.
“Damned hot,” Bill said.
We were on the blacktop south of town, and the fields were flashing by, the corn stunted along the fencerows, the ground cracked from lack of rain.
“No good for the crops,” my father said, and it went like that for quite a while. Just a thing said here and there. The windows were down and the hot air was rushing in, and it was hard to carry on a conversation, but I knew, even if we’d been cruising along in air-conditioned quiet, no one would have felt much like talking.
That was unusual for Bill, because he generally had something to say, and he wasn’t afraid to say it. He was a different sort of man from my father. He was blustery and hot-tempered, but fun-loving too. He was always pulling a prank on someone and then looking so daggone happy about it that everyone forgave him. He was a trackman on the section gang, and back in the winter his trickster ways had finally caught up with him. He pulled a joke on Mr. Timms, stuffed five cigarette loads into one of his cigars, and when Mr. Timms put a lighter to it, the cigar exploded and frayed at its end. Mr. Timms, startled, jumped back, slipped on the icy rail, and fell onto the slope of the gravel bed.
He was all right, just shaken and bruised a little, but he was pissed off too. “I don’t have to ask who did that,” he said, staring right at Bill. “Some people are ignorant. That’s all that needs to be said about that.” What Bill didn’t know — or if he’d ever known, had no reason to recall — was that day was the anniversary of Jean Timms’s death. “Now how was I to know that?” Bill asked my father later. “He’s got it in for me now. You can by God know that for sure.” True enough, Bill had spent the rest of winter and on into spring and now summer suffering the brunt of Mr. Timms’s anger. “Any shit job you can think of,” Bill had said to my father earlier while they were working on the Galaxie. “You can bet I’m the one who’ll get it. I’ve just about had enough.” Bill blamed this all on my father. “R.T., if you just told him you know what’s what between him and Annie, maybe then he’d ease off.” Bill had never been married himself, but he thought he knew how to handle matters of the heart. “Timms wouldn’t be so quick to bust my ass if he knew that you were onto him. He’s that way. He likes to think he’s a decent man. Let him know he’s a phony, R.T., and he’ll be more humble.”
My father wasn’t made for such a thing. As we went on down the blacktop in the El Camino, I took note again of that Timex watch he was wearing — the face so big on that delicate wrist — and I found myself thinking, He doesn’t have the heart. I’m ashamed of that thought now, considering everything that was about to happen that day, things I still can’t get straight enough to suit me.
Bill and my father owned eighty acres in Lukin Township just off the County Line Road. The farm had belonged to my grandparents, but that summer my grandfather was dead, and my grandmother was living in a nursing home. She’d deeded the place to Bill and my father, and they leased it out to a tenant farmer. Often on Sunday afternoons they came down to give the place a look-see. The home place, they always called it. Sometimes, like the day I’m recalling, they brought their shotguns.
We uncased our guns and started out. We skirted the old chicken house and the clump of horseweeds taller than the roof.
“Should’ve brought a hoe to cut those down,” Bill said.
“Next time,” said my father.
We walked single file along the edge of the field that came up to the chicken house and the patch of ground my grandparents had always used for their vegetable garden. The tenant farmer had plowed up the field and sowed it in soybeans once he’d cut the wheat. The bean plants were already reaching toward knee-high. We had to crowd up into the foxtail growing along the wire fence to keep from tromping the beans. The leaves on the plants in that outer row brushed against my legs.
“Sowing fencerow to fencerow, ain’t he?” Bill said.
He was in the lead, and my father was right behind him. “Using all he can,” he said. “Getting everything he can get.”
A little air stirred the bean plants. A covey of quail got up from the fencerow, their wings a loud whirring and clacking that startled me. Bill got his twelve-gauge to his shoulder, but already the covey was banking over the tree line.
“Damn, I should have been ready,” Bill said.
“Out of season,” my father reminded him.
“Who would’ve known?” Bill lowered the twelve-gauge and cradled it. “Just you and me and Roger out here. Far as I can see, there’s no one else around.”
The sky didn’t have a cloud in it, just the contrail from an invisible jet stretching out little by little. I thought about Connie — wondered what she was doing, wondered if she’d really meant it when she told me we were through. Some nights that summer we’d driven down to the farm so we could be alone and out of sight. I had a ’63 Impala I’d bought with the money I’d saved working hay crews since I was thirteen and the last two summers on a Christmas tree farm west of Goldengate. Connie sat close on the bench seat when she rode with me, her hand on my thigh. Our routine was she’d go for a walk in the evening. I’d hear her screen door slap shut, and I’d see her going on up the sidewalk. She’d have on a pair of Levis and one of the halter tops she favored that summer, her breasts loose beneath it, a blue or red or white bow tied under her hair at her neck and another sash tied at the small of her back, the tails of that bow trailing down over the waist of her jeans and bouncing with the roll of her hips. She’d walk out Locust Street to the city park at the edge of town and wait for me in one of the dugouts at the baseball field. I always gave my horn a honk when I took the last curve out of town, and when I pulled in behind the concession stand, she’d be there, ready to open the passenger side door and slide across that bench seat and kiss me.