Anyway, when Wenzel stopped choking, he took a silver half-dollar out of his overall pocket and gave it to me. My dad said I could keep it, and Wenzel said, “Now you can buy you a slingshot that ain’t already had the stretch pooped out of it.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “But not right now. I want to stay here.”
“That’s right, son,” my dad said. “I believe Wenzel’s about done storytelling anyway.”
“Sure,” Wenzel said. “There ain’t much more to tell.”
But before Wenzel Gerdts went on, he stood there and chewed a while. All along Main Street men were still talking in groups, and here and there a woman was carrying a box of groceries out to a car parked diagonally at the curb. While we waited for Wenzel to continue, a yellow dog came sniffing along the cars, wetting hubcaps and tires, until a man in a straw hat yelled at it, then the dog looked up and trotted across the street and began to work its way back up the block towards the railroad tracks, wetting wheels as it went.
Anyway, after a minute or two Wenzel seemed to have worked his wad to the right pitch and he went on. He told us that when Lyman stood up from the booth where he had been drinking their beer and taking their money, he walked over and stood directly in front of Agnes Wilson. He didn’t say anything to her, though. He just stood there hang faced and bashful. Of course he still had that yellow tie on and that black Sunday suit, so the only change in him from when he first put foot inside the tavern door was that his eyes had turned to glass marbles, or more like bloody egg yolks now, because by this time he had drunk more than just three beers. But again, it was as if he was starting over; he didn’t know what to do with himself after he had somehow made the first effort. But that didn’t seem to matter this time either: Agnes Wilson figured it out for both of them. She said something to him and he nodded, then she set her bar tray down and took his hands and showed him where to put them, one on her soft waist and the other in her white hand, and they began to dance.
“That is,” Wenzel said, “if you can call what Lyman was doing with her dancing.”
“Why?” my dad said. “Couldn’t Harry Barnes write that down for him too? How to dance, I mean.”
“I suppose Harry could,” Wenzel said. “But Harry didn’t need to. Agnes was doing everything anybody needed to do. She had him sucked up against her like he was a fifty-dollar bill.”
So Lyman must have felt that he had arrived in heaven. He was on the dance floor at the Holt Tavern with his face hidden in Agnes Wilson’s pink hair. Her full, ripe body was pressing him all along his own, and he had dispensed with holding her hand. Both of his middle-aged bachelor arms were wrapped around her so that his white Sunday shirt cuffs showed bright against the black of her waitress dress where his hands rode snug above her heavy buttocks. When the dance band started up another song Agnes would shuffle Lyman around a little bit on the dance floor, but between songs they just stood there, waiting, not moving at all, while Lyman maintained the same clenching hold on her, like he didn’t dare let go.
“Like they was two dogs that was locked,” Wenzel said. “You should of saw it.”
“How long did it go on?” my dad said.
“I wasn’t counting the dances,” Wenzel said. “And I don’t guess Lyman was neither. He was too satisfied to do something like count.”
But it must have gone on long enough that an hour or two passed. Agnes Wilson didn’t seem to mind it, though. Occasionally she patted him on the head or tickled a finger in his ear, and now and then she winked at the other people in the tavern, who didn’t seem to mind it either; they were all going up to the bar to get their own drinks. They were slapping one another on the back and congratulating themselves as if they were all in attendance at some significant event. I suppose it was an event too: Lyman Goodnough was enjoying himself.
“Until, bang,” Wenzel said. “All in a sudden, he’s gone. He’s took off.”
“Wait a minute,” my dad said. “You mean he got bored with that too? That don’t leave him much to graze on. He’s already used up beer and poker and women.”
“No,” Wenzel said. “No, I don’t guess you could say bored exactly. He just stopped squeezing Agnes and left.”
“How come?”
“That’s what we wanted to know,” Wenzel said.
So after Lyman took off, Wenzel told us that Harry Barnes called Agnes over to their booth where, between poker hands, they had been watching it all. Agnes came over and leaned against the table. She held the bar tray behind her and pushed her ample front out towards the men in the booth.
“What become of your boyfriend?” Harry said.
“Ain’t he cute?” Agnes said.
“Yeah,” Harry said. “He’s cute. But what happened to him?”
“Darned if I know,” Agnes said. “All I know is, after that last song he asks me what the time is, and I tell him, ‘Honey, it’s early yet. Only a quarter of eleven.’ And then he says to me, ‘What time do you lock up?’ And I say, ‘Not till midnight, honey. We got lots of time left.’ And then he says something strange, he says, ‘No, we don’t. I can’t wait no longer.’”
“And that’s when he took off?” Harry said.
“That’s it,” Agnes said. “Right then he left, without so much as good-bye or thank you, kindly.”
“Well,” Harry said. “I wouldn’t take it too personal. You was doing everything you could.”
“I know it,” Agnes said. “But wasn’t he cute?”
Then Wenzel Gerdts stopped talking. He removed the tobacco from his cheek and examined it as if there was something there that might explain Lyman’s leaving. The wad of Red Man was white and stringy looking, used up. He tossed it into the gutter, where it sopped up the brown puddle like a sponge. Across the street I could see my mother come out of a store with a hatbox under her arm.
“So you don’t know why he left so sudden,” my dad said.
“No, sir,” Wenzel said. “We never found out. I guess he just had to take himself a pee and he couldn’t hold it no longer.”
WELL, I don’t know that Lyman Goodnough was ever in his life what you might call cute. At least by 1940 he was not. By then, he was a gaunt middle-aged farmer, a little stooped over, and his hair was going. But of course it wasn’t his physical appearance that Agnes Wilson was talking about, and as for Wenzel Gerdts’s explanation of his sudden exit from the tavern that night, I don’t believe either that it was just a matter of Lyman’s having to relieve a full bladder. I think it was more that Lyman knew— and was able to remember despite the beer (he had certainly lived enough years in that house with his father to know very well and to remember too) — that when he got home there was going to be hell to pay, and the longer he stayed out the more of it there was going to be.
So he must have paid for it. Maybe not that night when he drove their old car into the yard and parked it in front of the picket fence, but at least the next morning during breakfast, since even Roy must have felt differently about waiting for a forty-one-year-old boy to come home from the tavern than he did about waiting for a twenty-five-year-old girl to return from a night at the movies. It wasn’t quite so urgent; he could wait till morning to give Lyman hell. But in the morning, then, Lyman must have had to sit there with his head pounding and his mouth tasting something that resembled pig slop, while the old man, his father, drank and in between drinks said something mean and crazy like, “So you ain’t learned yet.”
“Learned what?”
“That if you’re ever going to mount to a goddamn, you can’t stay out all Saturday night diddling.”
6