Moving On (55 page)

“If he competes for six more weeks I can get a job somewhere giving rubdowns,” Boots said. “Boy, am I getting good at it.”

“I think it’s insane,” Patsy said. “There’s got to be something safer than rodeo. Couldn’t you buy a ranch or something?”

She regretted saying it, for it was obvious that no one who stayed in such a motel could buy a ranch. But the Tatums were not offended. Boots even laughed. “We can’t even buy a steak, much less a ranch,” she said.

Teddy noticed that Pete was drinking beer, a beverage for which he had a taste. He got off the saddle and came over. Pete held out the can and Teddy licked a little of the foam from around the opening. Patsy decided it was time to diaper him and swooped him up from behind and plopped him on the bed. Teddy looked at her hostilely but made no resistance while she took the sopping diaper off. Pete gave her a newspaper to put it on. “All this room needs is a few wet diapers,” he said.

Patsy felt a little self-conscious folding the diaper. Teddy was docilely sucking his finger, but just as she got it folded and reached for his ankles to raise him up and slip it under him he adroitly rolled himself away and scooted to the head of the bed, where he sat looking at her with quiet poise, as if to say, “Your move.”

Patsy knelt and gave him a sorrowing, appealing look, trying to coax him with her expression, but Teddy’s heart had turned to stone. He held his ground until Patsy tried to grab him and then rolled off the bed and deposited himself in Boots’s lap. She giggled and Teddy giggled too, but Boots proved a treacherous ally. She carried him to Patsy, who deposited him firmly on his back in the vicinity of the diaper. “No more nonsense,” she said. Teddy lay quite still for a second and then flipped onto his stomach. When Patsy flipped him back he began to struggle in earnest. She kept hold of his ankles but made little progress with the diaper. Every time she got close he would arch his back or knock the diaper away with his behind.

“Oh, Teddy,” she said. “Please be reasonable. Lie still.”

Teddy was growing red in the face from his efforts to flip onto his stomach again. The look he gave her was far from reasonable. Patsy had not expected him to be so strong. She got one side of the diaper pinned but could not get the other. “What’s got into you, damn it?” she said. “You used to be my friend.”

Pete came to her aid. “If you don’t quit that wiggling I’m going to sit on you,” he said, pointing a finger at Teddy. Teddy took it to heart and stopped wiggling immediately. Once diapered, he recovered his affection for Patsy and sat on her lap.

They chatted for a bit, and Patsy found that she was growing depressed. It was the crampedness, uncertainty, and untidiness of the Tatums’ life that depressed her. She liked them despite it. They had an openness with her that she liked, just as the Hortons did. It was an ever better openness than it had been, because before there had been that small thorn pricking them all, that sense that she and Pete were edging toward each other in some way. That was gone. Boots was bright and cheerful, despite the room and their financial troubles, and the two of them seemed married in a way that they hadn’t the summer before. They had become each other’s sustenance, and it would have been hard to imagine them apart.

Still, she felt awkward with them, and it was because she pitied them and was afraid they would notice it. And it was mostly pity for Pete; his life seemed so tiring, so cluttered, so full of worry. Some of the springiness he had had the summer before was gone. He didn’t move like he had. For a few minutes they allowed the ebullient Teddy to dominate the scene and then Patsy got up to go, the newspaper with the soggy diaper in it in one hand. The Tatums followed her out to the car—it seemed she had only known them in the vicinity of cars. Someone was always leaving, or being left. They looked at the gray sky while Teddy gathered a handful of gravel; they looked at the white Astrodome, not far away.

“Please be careful with those broncs,” she said to Pete. “I wish you could find some other way to make money.”

“Daddy’s offered him a used-car lot to run,” Boots said. “I guess when we get tired of rodeoing we’ll take him up.”

“I couldn’t sell money, much less cars,” Pete said, opening Patsy’s door for her.

She waved, they waved, and Teddy waved at length. They drove home in the thickening four-thirty traffic, Patsy a little sad. She liked the Tatums and knew they liked her, and yet it was odd that they should even know one another. For a few minutes, poking along in the traffic, she felt very isolated. She knew almost no one who was really her companion in experience. Perhaps no one but Jim. Even Emma, whom she loved, was different from her. Emma would understand Boots and Pete better than she did, understand staying in cheap motels and having no money and not very good clothes. Hank would understand it too. He was even related to Pete Tatum in some remote way. Even the Duffins had been poor once; Lee had told Jim about them living over a lumberyard in Indiana when they were first married. She felt herself still but a child compared to them all. She didn’t have to ride broncs to pay hospital bills. She wouldn’t have to feed her child hamburger three times a week, as Emma did. She had never been in a really tight corner of any kind. Neither had Jim. He was talking, finally, of selling the Ford and buying them two new cars, a sports car for himself and a sober station wagon for Patsy, the young matron-to-be. The Ford had been wheezing too much of late. Jim had completely abandoned his poverty pose. He was buying too many books to be able to maintain it successfully.

The real mystery was not just that people like the Tatums could tolerate her, but that they didn’t even seem particularly envious of her. Emma envied her her clothes, but that was about all. She was sure that if the situations were reversed she would be madly envious of everyone who had more money than she did.

“Very puzzling,” she said to Teddy, who was in a brood of his own. As soon as he was home he climbed in Emma’s lap and began to recount his adventures. Tommy was sitting on the rug in his pajamas playing with some tinkertoys. He looked feverish and not especially glad to see either Patsy or his brother.

“Thanks for taking him,” Emma said. “They fought all morning. I was about to strike bottom.”

That night, sitting in her nice clean bed combing her hair and watching Jim tinker with a new television set they had bought, she thought of the Tatums again. When would she see them, through the years? They might vanish—she might never see them again. Or they might meet once a year, during the rodeo, in whatever town they were in, and sit and visit about the little they had to visit about in some bar or motel. Her memory of sitting with Pete under the carwash had grown very vague. She remembered that it had happened but not how it had felt.

“It ought to be clearer,” Jim said. “It ought to be clearer.”

“Maybe the trees are in the way,” she said, indifferent. Jim had reached that point in his graduate career where it was a handicap not to know more about pro football than he did. Their little portable TV had been given them as a wedding present and had gone on the blink so many times they had both lost patience with it.

Two days later Jim went to see the Tatums and had a pleasant afternoon of beer drinking. Patsy found an excuse not to go, and when Jim returned looking cheerful she could not be sure whether she was sorry that she hadn’t, or glad. That night he was still fiddling with the new TV. “You take too dark a view of the Tatums’ life,” he said. “Rodeo isn’t bad. I think it compares favorably with graduate school.”

“Oh, it does not,” she said. “Turn that stupid thing off and come to bed.”

18

“W
HY DID WE WAIT
?” Jim said. They were in the hospital; time was running out. Patsy had had a shot and the pains were getting noticeably more frequent. She was squeezing his hand hard and seemed giddy, though she was quiet. Her dark eyes had ceased focusing on him, at least for seconds at a time, and they still had not settled on a name. Patsy wore a blue gown and had so much color in her cheeks that it made her look feverish and a little wild.

“We weren’t waiting,” she said. “We’ve been considering. I say David and Margaret. David, Davey, Margaret, Maggie. I like those.”

“They’re okay. They just aren’t very inspired. After all, there are a lot of available names.”

“You’re not naming my child anything inspired,” she said. “It’s ill-bred to go afflicting children with literary names. Look at the Wasatches.” The Wasatches were a graduate famliy at whose house they had endured one awful meal. They had a little girl Ariel and a little boy named Dylan.

An elderly nurse came in and gave them a stern look; they both fell silent and felt guilty. “Give her a kiss and trot off,” the nurse said.

“Okay,” Jim said meekly. Patsy’s lips felt dry and feverish.

“David and Margaret,” Patsy said. “Remember, now.”

He promised and went out. It was six in the morning and there was a warm gray mist on the streets of Houston. The Toddle House where he ate breakfast was very brightly lit. Back in the green waiting room of the huge hospital there was little to do but look down at the mist that hid the other hospitals. There were only two other men waiting. Jim had bought a paper—peace marchers were in the headlines. When he dropped the paper on the couch one of the men, a large florid man, asked if he could read it. He was very nervous, and his fingers seemed as red as his face.

“I better find out what those goddamn bearded beatniks are up to today,” he said. “If there’s anything that upsets my potty it’s a goddamn bearded beatnik. You know what they are? Swindlers. They even swindled me.” His expression was ferocious but his voice was surprisingly mild.

“How’d they manage?” Jim asked.

“I’ll never tell you,” the man said. “I’m enough ashamed of it as it is—getting swindled by a bearded beatnik. My name’s Rawlins, since we’re getting acquainted.”

Jim was tired and would have preferred just to watch the fog, but Mr. Rawlins was eager to talk. He asked Jim what his business was and then launched into a prideful account of his own career.

“I’m in relics,” he said. “You know, old stuff. Branding irons, wagon wheels, steer horns, spinning wheels, all that kind of thing. I’m the relic king—least that’s what they call me. Got a factory up in East Texas where we make ’em.”

“I thought you found them,” Jim said.

Mr. Rawlins looked at him as if he were a child. “No,” he said, “you can’t find actual relics no more. At least you can’t find enough of them, and what you do find’s sky high. Lot more profitable to make them. You know there’s six thousand antique stores in Texas alone, not to mention Arkansas and Louisiana? Where you gonna find that many kerosene lamps and wagon wheels? I tried to buy some rusty old branding irons from a man the other day and the son of a bitch wanted five dollars apiece from them. I can make ’em fer two and a half, already rusted. It’s a scramble, I tell you.”

From time to time a nurse would open the door long enough for a few screams and groans to come through. None of them sounded like Patsy, but apparently all of them sounded like Mr. Rawlins’ wife.

“I swear this is the last one,” he said. “Got seven. Don’t know what I’d do if my wife was ever not to make it. Hell, I’m crazy about my kids, but I stay so busy up at the relic factory that I can barely keep their names straight. If my wife was ever to die I’d have to get the neighbors to introduce us. How many you got?

“How ’bout that,” he said when Jim told him the one being delivered would be their first. Mr. Rawlins fished in his pocket, took a printed slip out of his billfold, and wrote something on it with a ball-point pen.

“Here you are,” he said, presenting the slip to Jim. “Good for five antiquing lessons at any of the shops listed on it. You know, antiquing, sort of like relics—teaches you to make your furniture look old. You don’t want to take ’em, probably your missus will. Women get quite a kick out of antiquing. Compliments of Charlie Rawlins.”

Jim was trying unsuccessfully to read
The Philosophy of Literary Form
when the door opened and their doctor came in to congratulate him. He went into the hall. There was no sign of a baby but Patsy was being wheeled down the hall. Her hair was tangled, sweaty at her forehead, and she looked woozy but triumphant.

“Hey,” she said. “It was a David . . . I think I’ll get to see him later.”

“Fine, fine,” Mr. Rawlins said as Jim passed back through the waiting room. “Don’t let him grow up to be no bearded beatnik. We got enough of them. If you’re ever in Longview, stop by and see my factory. Might give you a discount on some of our nice relics.”

“I’m afraid he has my capacity for fury,” Patsy said. “Of course you can’t tell it now. Look at him.” Davey, two days old, was at the breast. Patsy had on a bright new robe that Dixie had brought her, and her hair was loose. Jim looked and saw a baby at the breast, a nice sight; but somehow only a slight current of parental emotion flowed in him. He had not yet so much as touched the child and had a certain feeling of anticlimax. He had not been particularly worried, and nothing at all had swept over him at the first sight of his son.