After Bathing at Baxters (11 page)

Not long after the story appeared he was gone again, to Nashville, people said. Taking the photolab out round the county I used to look for mentions of him in the trade papers you found lying around the barbers' shops or pinned to the walls of roadside diners. There was a paragraph or two, early on, listing him among the ‘New signings to Cherry Red' but that was all. Somebody came back from Nashville and said they'd seen him on stage at one of the small talent clubs, along with some harmonica players and the Tallahassee Country Gospel Choir. Third on the bill. Old Joe Brackus stopped answering enquiries. People stopped asking.

Maybe six months later I bumped into Barrett at the Stonewall, where he'd been taking the committee's views on the new freeway. ‘Scott's back,' he said.

‘At Brackus's?'

‘You got it, my man.' And Barrett smiled that lazy, mischievous smile that made me think again of Antonio Fargas. ‘Prodigal son,' he said.

I stopped off at the bar a couple of nights later when the Dixie Stealers were headlining. It was one of those tense, sultry evenings you got occasionally at the end of summer when the crowd at Brackus's got surly and the sawmill boys threw beer glasses at the microphones. I got there just as the Stealers were finishing their set (‘Sweet home Alabama' sung to the accompaniment of lofted Confederate flags) but there was no sign of Scott on the stage or waiting, guitar slung under his arm, over by the PA stacks. At the bar I brushed past Barrett, who had his arm round a cheerleader and his tie yanked down into a low, pendulous knot on his chest.

‘You seen Scott?'

Barrett jerked his finger back over the bar, pointing hard at the giant bottles of Southern Comfort and the henge of beer cans. When I saw Scott bending down over the beer pump, straightening up as old Joe snapped an order from the cash register, I realised that none of the carefully chosen phrases of welcome I'd rehearsed would do. The South will
rise
,' Barrett said gleefully, loud enough for the bar to hear, and I stayed just long enough for Scott to catch sight of me, sidling off with that sad, resolute feeling you get head on with somebody else's tragedy.

II.
La Grange

Summer '83 wasn't a good time for the repro business. Kodak had a three-month strike at their warehouse at Dyersburg, there was a run on the world silver market that sent up the price of film, and what with the expense and the flaring heat which hung over the cornfields from dawn till sunset people stopped using their cameras so much. For a time I tried to ignore the disappearing orders and the shaking heads at the roadside pharmacies – I headed north into Kentucky, went to trade fairs in Lafayette offering bargain rates, thought about going into partnership with one of the local chemists, but then the drought set in, the dust swarmed up over the bumpy Cook County backroads, the drug-store windows were full of second-hand Leicas and Hasselblads and it was suddenly cheaper to stay at home. ‘When the punch comes, ride it,' Barrett the journalist used to say, so I made the call to Photomax, put the mobile lab in storage and took the job at La Grange.

It was one of those places you see very often in the South, which has outgrown its origins without ever letting go of them. The dirt farmer with a thousand acres and a contract with three flour mills who still has trouble signing his name; the small-town newscaster who makes it on to network TV and still says ‘y'all' and ‘I guess' when she comes home to visit her folks: such sights were common in Cook County. La Grange was the biggest track complex for a hundred miles, but they still kept on the old, slow-witted announcer who had been with them twenty years back when the site was opened and Howie Jasper, the owner, still took two days a week off to dodge the phone calls from the West Coast agents and the Ivy League track clubs and go duck-shooting in Johnson City marshes. ‘Just your average hillbilly with a wallet,' Barrett used to say disparagingly, but the local TV station covered two meetings a month in the summer and the results got printed in the East Coast sports papers. In the early eighties Calvin Smith ran there at a charity meet and two reporters and a photographer arrived from Houston to write Howie Jasper up for
Track and Field
.

After that things began to take off. He had plans for La Grange, Howie Jasper told us, in that shy, puzzled way that redeems its guile with transparency. Pretty soon he had the stadium turned into a limited company with investors in Jackson loaning him money for redevelopment. He took out the old cinder track and had a sports contractor from Memphis come and lay an all-weather surface. He put a roof on the rickety grandstand and sold concessions to the local burger salesmen and the McDonald's franchises, finessed his way into sports sponsorship schemes that would bring in the big names from UCLA and the Santa Monica track club. And, most important of all, he signed the deal that made him Clyde Hopkins's manager.

I was busy the first couple of weeks at La Grange, sending out franchise forms to the Coke and Burger King reps, dealing with the contractors who were putting in the new electronic scoreboard, but it wasn't difficult to find out about Clyde Hopkins. The bar-hall idlers and the local talent spotters who hung around the stadium of an evening taking drinks off Howie were already talking about him, this kid who still ran barefoot but could whip any college boy the West Coast cared to send down. Barrett, who turned up halfway through the third week to write him up for the Cook County
Sentinel
, filled me in on the details.

‘Sure, my man. All happened a month ago, down near Atalanta' – Atalanta was the farming end of Cook County, seventy miles away – ‘when Howie decides he'll checkout some of the local talent, you know, turn up at one of the high school meets with a stop-watch and see if anything takes his fancy. And it's the usual thing – a few bullet-heads throwing the shot around, teenage high-jumpers thinking they're Dwight Stones – and Howie's on his way back to the car when up steps this kid in a windcheater and runs the hurdles in fourteen dead.'

‘That's a state record.'

‘You got it, my man,' Barrett said tolerantly. ‘Or would have been if they hadn't been using a hand-timer. So Howie makes enquiries and finds out the kid's seventeen years old, never run outside the county before. Real country bumpkin stuff. Howie asked him where his track shoes were and he says, he'd never gotten used to them: did all his running on grass.' Barrett flicked his head towards the window, where his track-suited joggers laboured through the shimmering afternoon heat. ‘Lick anyone in
this
stadium, that's for sure.

‘And another thing,' Barrett said. ‘There's a little part-time photography job going down at the
Sentinel
. Weddings, mayoral clam-bakes – you know the score. I put in a word.'

There was a fortnight until the
Sentinel
started interviewing. In the mean time, repairing the stadium advertising hoardings from the top of a twenty-foot ladder or sitting in the office typing up CVs, I saw quite a lot of Clyde Hopkins. He came and sat in the admin block, while the secretaries made long-distance phone calls to Miami and Tampa Bay or talked about driving to Nashville for the weekend to see the Atlanta Dance Kings, and flicked through the back numbers of
Dixie
magazine. Other times he stayed out on the track running circuits or lining up the hurdles in files of six or eight and doing stepping exercises. The other runners, the lanky PT students who reckoned on making the state championships in Jackson, the burly National Guardsmen sweating to pass army medicals, offered him handshakes, tried to buy him beers in the stadium bar, but he kept out of their reach. He seemed remote, preoccupied, embarrassed by the way people called him ‘Lightnin'' after the old blues singer, by Howie's back-slapping and the posters billing him as the ‘Cook County Express' which appeared in the barbers' shops and on the motel display boards. But in early July he walked away from a field that included the state champion and a sweating two-hundred-pounder who had once come seventh in the US junior trials, and Howie talked about entering him for some of the West Coast college meets or getting him a track scholarship somewhere out East:

Barrett got interested then, in his sideways-on, reporter's way. At the close of a discussion of the photographer's job, which it turned out was going oh ice until the end of the summer, he said, ‘Hear Howie's been talking big about the Cook County Express. Track scholarships. The West Coast. Isn't that right?'

I nodded. ‘A pile of forms came in the office this morning.'

‘Uh huh. I heard.' Barrett smiled in that mischievous way that lifted him a thousand miles north of Cook County and put him on a TV screen opposite Paul Michael Glaser. ‘Well, you can kiss your ass goodbye to that, my man. Sure, there's plenty of track scholarships going for meathead hurdlers, and nobody's going to mind an awful lot about your grade point average, but you have to be able to read and write. I talked to one of the Grange lawyers who stopped by the other day. Seems like the kid had to have that contract Howie made him sign explained to him clause by clause. You never saw anything like it.'

But there were other reasons, I discovered, why it would be difficult to get Howie's prodigy up there on the national circuit with Greg Foster and Skeats Nehemiah. Two nights later at the big La Grange invitation meet he came second to a fading thirty-year-old from Mississippi who had hung around the fringes of the '76 Olympic squad, but he did it in thirteen seven zero. I skipped the post-race celebrations – there were letters I needed to write to the other big repro houses in the East – and was heading out through the empty foyer when a girl's voice pulled me up.

‘You know where I can find Clyde Hopkins, mister?' She couldn't have been more than sixteen. There was a dirt bike propped up against the foyer's glass exit gate with a Snoopy pennant fixed to its handlebars. I explained about the party.

‘You want to come along? I can take you up.'

The girl twisted her fingers uncertainly for a while. She had very pale blonde hair that reminded you of Cissy Spacek. ‘I guess not,' she said finally. ‘Listen,' she went on. ‘Next time you see him you could tell him that Terry was waiting.'

I watched her riding off through the rows of Lincolns and Pontiacs in the stadium forecourt and out on to the highway. Next day I gave the message to Clyde but I needn't have bothered. She was round at the stadium in the morning and the two of them stood there arguing while the hurdles Howie Jasper had lined up for a demonstration race in front of cable TV got taken down and the local reporters kicked their heels and drank whiskey sours in the hospitality suite.

Summer dragged. The heat rose up over the parched grass and the cotton died in the fields, so that there were rumours of hardship funds and the insurance company travellers sat in the roadside diners selling fifty-dollar policies against drought. I had cool, non-committal letters from the East, from Philadelphia, Boston, Pittsburgh, from big repro houses who said they wanted college graduates or ten years' experience and told me to write again in the Fall. Then a week into August Barrett wrapped his car round a fire hydrant over near the Tennessee border and broke his thighbone, so I took a day's holiday, borrowed Howie Jasper's pick-up and drove over to the hospital at Union City to see him.

‘One of those things, my man, just one of those things,' Barrett said. He was grim and irritable because the nurses wouldn't let him smoke and there was a rumour that his mother was arriving that afternoon from Memphis. There was a copy of the
Tennessee Sports Illustrated
lying on the bed with a picture of Clyde rising up effortlessly over a hurdle, the bunch of perspiring also-rans seen dimly in the distance behind him. ‘You heard the latest about Lightin'? Looks like Howie's sending him West for a couple of months. Catching the big LA meets and the Prairie Games. Plus a five-thousand-dollar sponsorship deal from some sportswear manufacturer Howie reckons owes him a favour.'

I told him about Terry. Barrett laughed. ‘Uh huh. I heard. You know he ran thirteen five eight midweek over at Lafayette? Beat Missouri Joe Constantine into third. And another thing, old man Hopkins comes up for trial at Jackson tomorrow on a repossession order. Put those two together and see what they come to.'

After that I didn't stop hearing about Clyde Hopkins. About how his pa was a dirt farmer ruined by the drought, about how his mother had to wash dishes at the diner in Degville. You couldn't stop at a gas station without some wisecracking ancient hawking his gum in the dust to tell you that he'd known Grandpa Hopkins way back in the Depression when he'd gone out West to pick oranges in California. Howie Jasper was very great around this time, bustling about in a new Fox Brothers suit, though the temperature hit 92 that week, and hosting afternoon-long lunches for the company shareholders. There were other signs, too, of this new-found confidence. Come mid-August a couple of NBC lawyers showed up for a meeting and anyone who worked full-time at the stadium had to wear a scarlet and blue uniform mocked up to look like a track-suit with the La Grange jack-rabbit logo on the back. Then, when Clyde got accepted for the September meets at UCLA and Frisco, he bought airtime on the Memphis radio stations to advertise it. And though the kid hated drinking and the air conditioning had stopped working in the heat, Howie made him put on a suit and sit in the stadium bar three nights a week talking to the fans.

I saw him there one Sunday night when it was getting late and the barman was already putting the towels over the Seven-Up dispensers and corking up the barrels of root beer which Howie bought at a discount from a supplier in Nashville and which nobody would drink. He looked a little uncertain amid the fading fight, mightily uncomfortable in the suit Howie had bought for him, tie yanked up against his throat. There was a cup of coffee on the table in front of him with the surface stretched into a skin and a packet of the Bluegrass cigarettes which the farmers used to smoke.