Jolly (10 page)
“That’s right, Brother!” shouted Able Peckham, which may have indicated he was there when it happened.
Jolly didn’t remember the verse in question, but he could tell from its tone that the congregation was in for it this morning. He shifted his gaze to the back of Luke’s head. From there he looked to the young girls in the choir, whose faces served as mirrors of Luke. He discovered Netty Alan blushing pink above her choir robe. So Luke was winking at Netty today. “Blush, poor girl,” thought Jolly, “but you’ll never make it in the Blue Goose.”
At twelve fifteen exactly, the Sanic Sisters let go their final tone, reluctantly, Harold Cramer rushed to the back of the church to begin shaking everyone’s hand for the second time, and Jolly Osment fell in love.
As he turned into the aisle, there she was. It was as simple as that. There she was. There she was stepping between her father (who had concealed her before) and mother directly across the aisle. Her eyes met his squarely without hesitation, and the heat lifted from the room as clearly as if a window had opened itself to spring. She returned his smile, and still stepping between her parents, she ignored the preacher’s proffered hand, and Jolly watched incredulously as her white sailor hat bobbed down the stairs.
“Excuse me,” said the lady behind him.
“Oh, excuse
me,
ma’am.” He rushed ahead of her.
“You will come in to play, won’t you?” the preacher was asking.
“Yes. Yes, sir. I enjoyed—I liked your sermon.” Jolly watched the hat bob through the front doors. He pulled on his hand.
“Thank you, Jolly,” Harold Cramer said. “We’ll see you?”
“Yes,” he said aloud, and to himself, “Let go, let
go.”
“And Jolly?” the preacher persisted.
“Yes, sir?”
“Their name is Van Dearen. That’s D-e-a-r-e-n.”
“Thank
you,
Mr. Cramer!” The hat was no longer to be seen. Jolly clattered down the stairs but checked himself prudently before rushing hell-bent into the sunlight, lest he appear anxious. The girl was just ducking into the back seat of a car. Her mother and father were already in the front. “Damn,” said Jolly. What was a person to do? You can’t just go rushing up to complete strangers and say “Excuse me, sir, but I want to stare at your daughter.”
The sedan backed out into the street, stopped for a moment, then nosed away, around the corner, the white sailor hat nearly the last thing to go out of sight.
Jolly grouched against the hot stone church and waited for his mother. She arrived in time, with Mr. and Mrs. Favor, who had offered them a ride home in their car.
“Unless you’d rather walk, Jolly?”
“No ma’am. I’d rather ride.” And that was the truth. It was too hot to walk if you didn’t have to, and not only from the sun.
“All’s we’re having is some leftovers,” Mattawilde spoke from the kitchen, later. “But I think I’ll serve them in the dining room. It’s cooler.”
“OK with me,” said Jolly.
“Well, you can’t sit in the dining room in nothing but your pants. Run put a shirt on. And some
shoes.
I don’t care if we are the only ones left around here. Besides, it’s Sunday.”
“All right, Mom. Anything you say. Mom?” Jolly called with his head in the closet, “did you see those new people at church? The man and the woman. And the girl?”
“Was she the one with the green summer straw?”
“No. It was white. One of those big, broad-brimmed ones.” Jolly paused. “Oh, you mean the woman?”
“Yes. Who’d you think I meant?”
“I didn’t notice what she was wearing. Their name is Van Dearen. That’s D-e-a-r-e-n.”
“I know,” she said.
“How’d
you
know?” Jolly came into the kitchen, buttoning his shirt.
“Well, don’t look at me like I haven’t got good sense.” She made another trip from the kitchen to the table. “I asked around.” And that was more than Jolly had had the mind to do.
“I might have known. Isn’t she pretty?”
“Who?”
“The girl. You know who I mean.”
“Here, carry these.” She moved deliberately into the dining room (which was really only the far end of the living room) with Jolly close behind. “I reckon I didn’t notice.”
“What do they do? Where do they live? Do you suppose they’re real
strict
Baptists?”
“Wouldn’t hurt you none to know some real strict ones. And I don’t know their whole life history. Set down and have your lunch.”
Jolly poked among the cold chicken parts until he found a thigh. It had lain overnight at the bottom of the dish and had a thin edge of white grease on it. He began to scrape the grease away with his fork.
“How is it you never liked the drumstick? You’re the only one a my children never fought for the drumstick.”
“That’s because I was deprived as a child,” said Jolly, scrutinizing the chicken thigh.
“What do you mean deprived? Wasn’t anyone in
my
house ever deprived or went hungry. Not that I ever knew of.” She pulled off a small piece of meat and chewed it delicately. At sixty-four Mattawilde Osment was in fair health, but her teeth were wearing down. “Never did have a true bite,” she had often said.
“Oh, Mom, I mean there’s ordinarily only two drumsticks on a chicken, right?”
“Never heard different.”
“You ever heard of two characters, formerly from these parts, name of Jamie and Nell Ann?”
His mother tidied her lips with a linen napkin. Her brown eyes shot past Jolly to the pictures on the buffet. “Don’t be gettin’ sassy, young man,” she said in a voice that was clear sign she was changing the subject. “Eat some a these asparagus. They’re right tender.”
“Cold? Jeez, they’re bad enough hot.”
“You used to like them, as I recall. I don’t know what gets into you sometimes. Lord knows; I don’t.”
“Mother, I used to like to
cut
asparagus when we grew it. I never liked to eat it.” True, fresh asparagus spears, just six or seven inches high, cut clean and nice and made you feel you
had
something. Not like picking tomatoes, or pulling radishes or turnips or anything that had to be yanked, or that came out of the dirt unwillingly.
“What you grinnin’ like a chessy-cat for?”
“Nothing, Mom.” Every time he saw asparagus he thought of Jamie’s comment ages ago about their being phallic symbols. The comparison would have meant nothing, of course, had not Jamie continued with one of his famous explanations, which were seldom accurate but always graphic. Accurate or not, Jolly never ate asparagus with what anyone could have called relish, afterward.
“Jolly-Bo.”
“Hum?” He watched her slice an asparagus spear into bite sizes.
“I been meaning to talk to you about Jamie.” Her eyes, peering above her glasses, concentrated on the asparagus, which meant she was approaching a topic she would rather put off.
“What about Jamie?”
“Have you seen him and didn’t tell me?”
“Yes. I saw him last night.” He watched her lips begin to tighten.
“Was that you and him I heard talking out in front right before you came in? I thought so.” She glanced up at him. “What did he tell you?”
“What do you mean, what did he tell me? We just talked. About things.” He lined up the chicken bones to one side of his plate.
“Now, I want to know. What things.”
“Aw, Mom. Just things, that’s all.”
“Did he tell you anything about himself? You know, where he’s been and what he’s been up to?”
“No. I asked him, but he wouldn’t tell me anything. Why? What’s the matter?”
She reached for his plate to stack on her own. “I don’t know.” She tk’d her tongue and repeated, “I don’t know. Something. I’m worried.”
Jolly threw down his napkin. “What’s there about him to worry over? He hasn’t been home ten minutes his whole life, it seems to me. Not when anybody needed him or wanted him. He’s been here a whole damn—a whole darn week and I get about a half hour.” He scraped his chair back from the table.
“Don’t get on your high horse, Jolliff. If Jamie doesn’t want to talk, he’s got reason. You let him alone, you hear?”
“Let him alone! Look, I don’t want his whole crazy
life,
I just want—Oh, forget it. I don’t want anything.” He sat on the sofa to tie his shoe laces.
“Where you going?”
“Out.”
“In this heat? Seems to me you’d love and appreciate a nap today, what with all the galavantin’ you been doing lately. And haven’t you got some last-minute school work to do?”
“I’ll do it later.” At the door he turned. “Mom, you don’t know where he’s staying, do you?”
She shook her head.
He closed the front door and jammed his hands in his pockets and faced the proposition of walking to Doogle’s in the heat. He wouldn’t worry about anything at all, not until he got to the drugstore and cooled off, and then he could use the telephone there if he decided to.
Cortez wasn’t up to much early on a Sunday afternoon. The streets were nearly empty of traffic, except for a few cars headed out Sierra Road toward the country club and another afternoon of golf or bridge or gin and tonic. The front shades were pulled in most of the houses, and even the trees drooped and nodded as if they also would take an hour or two off from growing.
A green Ford convertible raked down the hill past Jolly, its nose dipped forward, pipes popping. “Fingers!” Guppy called, and the five or six bodies laughed by, nothing but bare skin showing above the edge of the car, on their way to the lake.
Jolly waved. “Hello, Hero.” He paused to watch them out of sight. The seniors had finished their exams the week before, and Guppy was graduating at last. He could well spend the day (and the night) at the lake in celebration. He had just been awarded the healthiest scholarship of anyone in his class to play football for the university. On the strength of that and his size, and the footwork of his coaches, he would be given a diploma the following week along with the eggheads who couldn’t afford a raked green convertible with twin pipes and twin spots and mirrors and green-and-white-striped leather upholstery. Just how Guppy came to afford the car wasn’t certain, although a number of people had wondered, briefly. It was doubtful his ten-year-widowed mother could have bought it for him, what with only her six women tenants in the cupolaed and turreted white house that stood opposite the old grammar school. She had had the house chopped up into small apartments after her husband died, and she had tried to lighten the rooms and cheer the naturally morose exterior with white paint and pots of red geraniums. But the geraniums in the window boxes seldom lived because over there, that close to Maricopa Street and the noisy playground, it was hard to get genteel tenants who would give care to geraniums. Mostly the ones who came to live there were secretaries and beauty operators. They were all flighty-restless, apt to move closer to downtown after three or four months, so that a person couldn’t depend on having any tenants at all except for the two over-thirty women who taught across the street and shared the expense of one apartment and whom she would not have had back at all this year, because they sometimes acted strangely, if she could have picked and chosen.
Guppy helped around the place, mending stairs, or mowing the lawns, or painting—the things a man would have to be hired to do next year when he left for the university. She had worried some the last couple of years about her son in the house with those flighty-restless girls, and she had tried to see that things that needed fixing in their rooms got done during the day. If there was something at night, a leaky faucet, or a stuck toilet or window, she went along, too, and chatted about the geraniums or the cost of plumbing. With the schoolteachers it was different, of course. They were finicky about things in their apartment, more so, probably, than they had a right to be, not paying any more rent than they paid, and they had the only keys to the lock that had been changed on their door (heaven alone knew what she’d do if she ever really
had
to get in there), which meant that Guppy—Benjy—would have to go up there at night if anything needed fixing, when he would sooner be with his own friends, but then, after he had unstuck their toilet, or whatever it was, they would help him with his homework, and she could go on to bed more than a little thankful that the boy wasn’t out chasing around town.
When the two teachers told Mrs. Gusperson that they wanted to buy the green car for Guppy for graduation, she was bewildered and touched. It wasn’t, after all, a really
new
car, they had explained. She wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do, but maybe a boy who didn’t have any father and who had to help around the house instead of working for money deserved a little something more than she could provide, and, well, if they really wanted to do it, she guessed they would anyway, whether she had anything to say about it or not. But she thought she’d be able to have their apartment done over with that blue paper and new curtains this summer while they were gone.
Jolly and Guppy had developed an unspoken mutual respect since Guppy had learned that Jolly lately listened when he talked (and could diagram two or three senior sentences in the hall between classes), and Jolly had learned that whatever he might not be, Guppy was constant. Guppy was proud of the green Ford and embarrassed by it at first, until he had one day tried incoherently to explain its reason for being to Jolly, who hadn’t asked, and found he couldn’t, but more than that he realized for the first time that even if he could speak as well as he wished he could, even if he explained the whole crazy thing, it wouldn’t make sense.
Jolly cut across the plaza on the courthouse square. Several families of early tourists who didn’t know of the good picnic spots were eating hot dogs and drinking pop and sleeping, their children flitting over the fresh lawns like bits of bright paper in the wind.
He stopped beside the goldfish pond, black-railed more for the safety of the fish than the children. From the fountain, green and slime-coated, the water splashed sporadically, keeping the fish in a state of constant agitation. Jolly watched for Old Whitey, a giant by goldfish standards and bleached white from age and poor sunlight, to come to the edge of the pond.