Jolly (11 page)

“There you are, you old scavenger,” Jolly laughed. “And I haven’t got anything for you.” He tore a match from its packet and struck it. When it blazed he dropped it directly upon the fish, who seemed to hang suspended on an invisible wire just beneath the surface. The fish didn’t flinch as the match hissed onto the water. “Can’t fool you, can I,” Jolly said.

He left the pond and stopped to gaze at the bronze statue of Teddy Roosevelt presumably charging San Juan Hill, sword drawn, his horse’s hooves pawing the air, its neck arched as if it had just been struck in the nose by a musket ball, or whatever the enemy fired at San Juan Hill. The city fathers were once at the point of removing the statue at the insistence of a tourist, something of an equestrian expert, if not a sculptor, but they hesitated at the last moment for two reasons; one, what do you do with a four-ton statue when you have removed it? and two, about forty flesh-and-blood horsemen rode in from the country in the style best reminiscent of a time a hundred years previous when city fathers were allowed to survive at all only by luck. Given time, the tourists’ children would pull the whole thing down around their heads anyway.

Jolly passed along the final lane of the plaza, the one that received the most generous share of the afternoon sun. On the benches in two’s and three’s sat all the old men of the town who gathered there (from where, no one knew exactly) each Sunday to watch the town. They hushed their talk as Jolly walked by and only tapped their canes, impatient for him to be gone. He pulled out his cigarette pack and after choosing one let the package drop, as if by accident, onto the sidewalk between the two rows of benches.

“They’ll fight like hell over those,” he chuckled. He stepped from the curb to cross over to Doogle’s.

“Did you want something?” the straggle-haired girl asked in a tone that said “You have a nerve.”

“I did and I still do. A Coke and some cigarettes. Luckies.”

“You get the weeds over yonder,” she said, dipping a glass in the ice bin.

At the over-yonder counter Mr. Doogle himself presided, nervous and gold rimmed. His fidgets were constant, as if he feared some government inspector was about to bring the sky crashing down for selling cigarettes, beer, and prophylactics to minors.

“Luckies,” said Jolly.

“You eighteen, young man?”

“Of course. Would I ask, otherwise?”

“Well, it pays to be safe. Cain’t never tell about you young hoodlums. Seems to me, tho’ I might be wrong, that eighteen gets younger about ever’ year. Here y’are. That’ll be twenty-four cents.”

Before he finished his Coke, Jolly swung from the stool, and balancing an ash tray, the Coke and his cigarettes, he encased himself in the phone booth. Once settled, he considered the probability of getting through to Luke. It wasn’t likely there was anything he’d care to hear Luke’s mother say. He decided on the code ring.

“Number please,” said the metallic voice.

“129, please.” He waited until he heard the number ring once, then hung up. He watched the clock above the door of the drugstore until the red second hand had swept around twice.

“Number please.”

“129, please.”

“I’ll ring again.”

This time Luke answered promptly. “Jolly?” he said.

“Yeh. How are things on death row?”

“Sweet Jesus, was my old lady mad. She’s been raising hell since three this morning. She finally taken a pill and went to bed.”

“Can you get out?”

“Not a chance. She won’t sleep forever.”

“Did you see what I saw in church this morning?” Jolly asked and hoped he hadn’t.

“No. Something?”

“I’ll say. They’re new. And is she ever! About five feet five, blond, and everything.”

“How’d I miss that? What about the other, ah, features?” If it is possible to drool over the Bell System, Luke was.

“They’re all in place. I know her last name, but how am I going to find out where she lives?”

Luke laughed. “She got a phone?”

“How the hell should I know? They’re new, I told you.”

“Look, moron. You ever thought of asking the operator do they have a phone?”

Jolly said, “That’s an idea.” And then he said, “Say, Ass-Hole Buddy, since you can’t get out, how about me borrowing the Goose?”

“Sure. I’ll go down the back stairs and leave the keys in it. Rather, I’ll wait in the garage for you. I’d like to hear more about this.”

“OK. Wish me luck,” said Jolly and hung up. He deposited another dime and dialed 0.

“Operator,” said a voice, identical in nasal tone with the first.

“You got a number for Van Dearen? That’s D-e-a-r-e-n.” He listened while the operator rustled pages.

“Is that on Paseo Redondo?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jolly said, noting that that address would mean the Mountain Knolls area, something he hadn’t anticipated.

“That number is 4112,” said the voice.

Jolly waited for his dime to return and studied the bottom of his Coke glass, possibly in hopes there would be emblazoned the words he would use if he called 4112—and if 4112 answered.

He decided against the phone call and opened the booth. “Here you are, girl of my dreams,” he said, setting his glass and the dime on the counter a dozen feet from where he had first sat. The waitress pushed a tired lock of hair back from her eyes and slid off the ice cream cabinet. Now she would have two wet circles to wipe off the counter.

Jolly approached Luke’s from the alley and found him leaning against the back of the row of garages.

“Hey.”

“Hey. Well?” Luke wore his quizzical expression.

“Well?” Jolly mocked. “I didn’t call her.”

“She have a phone?”

“Yes.”

“You some kind of a nut? Whyn’t you call her, chicken?”

“I found out her address—sort of. I think I’ll just drive out that way and look around,” Jolly said. Then he added, “Mountain Knolls.”

“Mountain Knolls! Jeez, you can pick ’em. I bet there’s a law against cars as old as the Goose up there.”

Jolly laughed. “Probably. You got the keys?”

Luke hesitated. “Yeh, I got ’em. But I don’t know if I oughta let you go without your old dad. Think you can handle things?”

“What’s there to handle in the middle of the goddam afternoon?” Jolly took the keys Luke handed him. He inspected the Blue Goose critically. “When in hell did you wash it last?”

“Well, Your Royal Patookus, I didn’t know it was gonna mix with no damn Cadillacs or I’d a washed it. Jeez.”

Jolly backed the coupe from the garage and then drove into the alley. Luke called, “You know what I always say; when in doubt—”

“Whip it out,” Jolly finished, and the Blue Goose clattered down the alley.

JOLLY shifted into second gear as he drove through the flagstone pillars, and the car pointed up the first short hill. Mountain Knolls was not really in the mountains at all, but in the thick pine woods that edged the town on the south. The area was laced with small dirt roads that wound and circled and intercepted one another in what seemed an obvious (and well nigh successful) attempt to keep outsiders outsiders. The roads were unequalled for playing ditch ’em, to the immense displeasure of the residents, who had chosen country living partly in the belief that they would escape the wracking noises of the city only to find that the worst of the noises raced and honked and raised billows of dust before their very front doors every night. Many of the residents were only summer folks who could afford to escape the heat of the southern counties for a month or two during the year. The houses themselves, separated by several acres of unkempt natural pine growth, were studies in rustic architecture. One after the other vied for authenticity and number of screened porches. They were built only of native pine boards or logs and had unnecessarily steep roofs as if the snow could be expected to fall in greater quantities there.

Once over the first hill, Jolly divided his attention between keeping the car on the road and peering for the proper wooden arrow that would designate Paseo Redondo. When he was at last on the right road he shifted his gaze to the houses, trying to choose the one most likely to conceal a girl who wore a white sailor hat.

Before long he recognized the sedan he had seen the Van Dearens drive that morning. It sunned itself in splotches of light and dark before the front steps of a house.

“Hey!” a voice yelled.

Jolly slammed on the brakes, and the small car slid to the edge of the curve, its bumper just resting against a high gray boulder. He heard a peal of laughter encircle the car. He looked atop the boulder.

There she was.

There she was sitting above him, laughing, her legs drawn up into her arms, her chin on her knees. Jolly wondered at their brownness. Her hair hung long and entirely straight on either side of her face. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said. There she was. He stepped out of the car. She watched him climb toward her. When he was part way there he stopped, his two hands leaning against the boulder.

“Good thing you yelled,” he said.

Her laughter trembled. “Yes. You sure weren’t looking at the road.”

Jolly stepped up two more foot-holds. His eyes were level with hers as she lay the side of her face on her knees. There were yellow flecks among the brown of her eyes just the color of her skin below the white shorts she wore.

“Hi,” he said, breathless not from the climb.

“You said that,” she said. Jolly watched the bridge of her nose wrinkle when she laughed, stirring the freckles that paced across her cheeks. “My name is Dogie.”

“Dogie? That’s a calf.” He waited a moment for her to explain. She did not. “I’m Jolly Osment,” he said.

“Hi,” she said and then, “Aren’t you going to ask my last name?”

“I know that already.”

She lifted her head, and most of her hair, the color of April laburnums, fell down her back. It was her turn to wait for an explanation.

“I asked,” he said.

“Do you live here? In Cortez?”

“Yes,” he said. “Have you come here in the summers before? I’ve never seen you.” It was the truth, but he was seeing her now.

“No. Will I like it here?”

I will like you here, thought Jolly. He said, “I hope so. Where you from?”

“My dad has a ranch down near the border. This is the first summer he’s been willing to leave it.” She unclasped her knees and let her legs stretch down the face of the rock. She lay back on the flat surface. Her head lay on her hands. She watched Jolly’s eyes, which had considerable trouble avoiding the space between her shirt and shorts where a band of brown skin showed. She began to twist a piece of her hair over a finger. She smiled.

Jolly turned his head on reluctant muscles and lifted his eyes beyond the brown thighs toward a clearing that formed a small valley just visible through the trees. “There’s a nice little pond down yonder,” he said. “With salamanders and frogs and all.”

“OK,” she said and sat forward. “Let’s go see it.” She gave him her hand to help her get down the granite face. At the bottom she said, “Are we going to drive, or what?”

“It’s not far,” he said, noticing she hadn’t retrieved her hand and not wanting her to. “Let’s walk.”

“But I haven’t any shoes.” She looked to her feet.

“I’ll fix that.” Jolly thought wildly for a moment about the hand he still held. He let go of it, conscious of the difficulty of getting it back. He leaned one hand on the car and with the other slipped off his own shoes and socks and tossed them onto the front seat of the Blue Goose. “Now, we’re even,” he said.

She laughed. The freckles chased among the wrinkles across her face. “Crazy,” was all she said and began walking.

“What do the kids do in Cortez in the summer?”

“Nothing much, I’m afraid. That is, nothing very exciting unless you use your imagination. Swim at the lake, mostly.”

“Do you have wiener roasts? You know, around a fire at night—that sort of thing?”

“Oh, sure. We do that lots, too.” He picked up a pine cone and sent it over-ending toward a tree trunk. He missed.

“What are they like?”

“Just like wiener roasts anywhere, I guess.” He saw that she was watching where she placed her feet at each step. “Why? Haven’t you ever been on one?”

“No,” she said.

He stopped short in the road. “What? You mean to tell me you never been on a wiener roast? Why the hell—the heck not?”

She faced him. The flecks in her eyes acted as lenses through which he could see the yellow of her hair. “I told you. I live on a ranch, thirty miles from the next one. And nothing in between but cactus and scrub oak and those darn cows.”

“But—” said Jolly, perplexed.

“When school’s on I ride twenty miles—twenty-three miles—each way to school on a bus. You can’t exactly roast wieners on a school bus. Or do much of anything else.” She began walking again. “I’ve always thought you had to have trees, lots of trees, for a wiener roast. Don’t you?” she said.

He stepped beside her. “I don’t know. I reckon so. I never went to any kind of thing—outdoors I mean—where there weren’t trees.”

“I never smelled anything as good as these pine trees. Do you like them?”

“Well, sure. I like them OK.” He attempted a cautious sniff. They smelled dusty to him. “Haven’t you ever seen trees before?”

She laughed. “Crazy,” she said, “of course. But not like these, not pines, not by the hundreds.”

Jolly didn’t know precisely where to take the conversation next so he let it lie. It was enough to keep his mind from falling into pieces just being with this girl, let alone talk about trees.

“Don’t you have any brothers or sisters? Or anybody to—to—”

“To play with?” she laughed. Then she didn’t laugh. “No.”

“Oh.” The talk died again. Jolly fumbled in his shirt pocket for a cigarette, but after he had lured one from the pack he decided against using it. He put it back.

“There’s the pond,” he said, and she followed the direction of his finger. “Come on!” he yelled, and taking her hand he ran, pulling her mostly, down the last slope that dropped from the road and out of the pines into the clearing. The pond lay small and darker green than the grass, formed by a dam someone had once built for his own reasons in the ferny cleavage of a gully. The water wasn’t very fresh most of the year; in fact, it came close to being stagnant. The cattails choked the edges all around except by the dam itself, standing straight or bending at angles (not curves) to dip their brown heads beneath the water. Two or three frogs plopped into the water without grace and surfaced again two feet away, their yellow legs hanging down, their eyes just above the water.