Shame (5 page)

October 7, 1994

Mr. and Mrs. John Tilden
7743 Sunny Acres
Phoenix, AZ 85372

Dear Mom and Dad,

How's life in the desert? Had a letter from Candy, and she says she's visited recently. I'm sure that was a nice homecoming. She's turned into a beautiful young woman, smart and capable. Know you're proud of her, and you certainly should be.

Basketball started today, Michelle's classes are going well, and the new calves are putting on weight. Speaking of cows, remind me to tell you a funny thing that Lauren said recently about cows. You're going to love this, Dad, I know you are. Just remember that she didn't get this idea from me.

Then again, why don't I let her tell you when you see her next? Yes, I think that would be best. Let her take credit for her own ideas, I always say.

Michael's just as moody as ever. I don't have the slightest idea what to do with him, about him. Was I ever like this? I don't think so. At least, I like to think I was like B. W., quiet, hardworking, studious, obedient.

And yes, now I can hear you laughing all the way from Arizona. Okay, okay. Maybe I wasn't quite as wonderful as he is, continues to be.

Alma Cooper asked after you at church Sunday. Told her you were well, just growing cactus instead of wheat these days. You should have heard her cackle. Glad I didn't tell her during the sermon. Hope I was right in assessing your state of being, that your ticker isn't giving you any more trouble, Dad, and that you've been sleeping better, Mom.

Did you ever suppose we'd be sharing these kinds of details with each other? I sure didn't. But then, life is a constant and ongoing surprise to me.

Write soon with some wisdom. I always appreciate your advice, even if I never seem to take it.

Your son,
John

Philanthropy

We stayed mad at Michael for some time, all of us, and I suppose I should have taken some parental action right away, although I don't know what that action might have been. Anyway, something else came along that promised to distract us from purely familial difficulties for awhile. I got my first notion that something out of the ordinary was up when B. W. rushed into a stall at the back of the big barn, followed closely by the dog, Frank, who had stopped to snuffle some particularly choice manure.

I was working with one of the calves that had a stubborn case of pneumonia and was probably going off on wobbly legs to that great salt lick in the sky, but the sight of B. W. in a hurry, which he rarely was anywhere off the basketball court, shook me. My first impulse was that he brought news of some tragedy: my parents, Michelle's parents, some friend dead or dying.

“Don't kill me,” he panted, his breath clouding in the early- morning chill. “I'm quoting. Mom says you need to get your butt in to the phone. It's important.”

“How do you know?”

“She put her hand over the phone and hissed at me. And that's what she hissed.”

“Okay,” I said, and I got a little unsteadily to my feet, maybe from the blood rushing out of my brain. Hissing. Rarely a good sign. “Okay.”

I hurried off after him, past the old chicken house—now a storage shed—past the barren site of next year's garden, and into the house through the back porch.

In the kitchen, Michelle had the receiver to her ear and was saying “Uhn-huh. Uhn-huh. Sure.” As soon as I came in, she put her hand over the mouthpiece, whispered, “It's Bill Cobb,” and made a sort of “Why on earth is he calling us?” face, one eyebrow raised, her other features squinched. I let out a sigh of mingled relief and resignation. While I was glad there was no tragedy, I didn't want to listen to Bill talk about his wonderful expense account, his wonderful house, his wonderful life.

“Here he is now,” Michelle then said brightly into the phone and gladly surrendered it to me, for which I probably made a “Thanks a lot” face if there is any justice in the universe.

“John,” Bill Cobb said in his big, hearty Republican businessman's voice. “Only have a moment, but Sam said that in your last letter you talked about some financial problems in the old hometown.”

“I may have,” I said.

“Something that affects the basketball team.”

“Ah,” I said, remembering my last letter. “Currently it's uniforms.” Moth-eaten jerseys. “Next year it'll be something else. But this year it's uniforms.” And I made Michelle's “Why on earth is he calling us?” face right back at her as she finished packing her lunch across the counter from me—an apple, celery, and some low-fat yogurt with wheat germ liberally sprinkled over it.

“Exactly,” Bill said. “This year it's uniforms. Next year, who knows? So here's my proposition. I'll donate the money for the uniforms. I think I can write it off as a charitable contribution. But I can't be expected to bail out the school year after year.”

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

“The community is going to have to chip in. Some kind of fund-raiser. And I have a wonderful idea along those lines. Simply wonderful.”

“I don't follow you,” I said.

“It's very simple,” he said very slowly, speaking with the kind of tolerance that always let me know he thought I was stupid. “I'll donate the money for your uniforms. And you help me get the team—our team from seventy-five—back together to play a fund-raiser. We'll use the proceeds to set up an endowment for future expenses for the basketball team. Maybe we could play against your current varsity. That has a nice symmetry to it. What do you think?”

I thought that perhaps Bill Cobb didn't understand precisely what the word “symmetry” meant, but that was no kind of an answer.

I looked around. Michelle had kissed me on the cheek and was gone with Lauren; B. W.'s tiny truck had already putt-putted away; Michael, if he was even in the house, was sleeping soundly. There was no one left to make faces at, for which I was heartily sorry. There were things I wanted to say and knew I shouldn't.

One thing I longed to say was, “You know, Bill, not all of us are that anxious to be reminded of the past. Not all of us feel that our lives have proceeded in quite so orderly a fashion as yours.” But what would be the point of it? It would be like trying to convince my Cheyenne friends that white men had always had their best interests at heart, like telling my farming friends hereabouts that we should all raise emu.

We all see reality in a particular way, generally for pretty good reasons, and things that clang against our vision of that reality usually ricochet off again without doing serious damage to it.

“I think,” I said finally, when the long-distance hum on the line became apparent and speech became impossible to avoid, “that it would be generous of you to help us out. But I don't see how we could possibly get our team together. I'm sure you're still in pretty good shape, but we've got a couple of guys who'd be courting heart attacks. And maybe Sam mentioned to you that Phillip One Horse doesn't seem to be feeling particularly social these days.”

“Oh, I'm sure you can bring him around,” Bill said, and even from four hundred miles away I could see him making that dismissive rising hand gesture I always hated. “Anyway, that's my deal. Call me back and let me know what people think.”

We needed those new uniforms—needed them, that is, if we didn't want to be the laughingstocks of the conference. I didn't see how any of the rest of what he proposed could work, but the thought of his hand sweeping up like a backhanded slap, brushing difficulties and objections from its path, drove me back out into the yard, slamming the back door so hard it rattled in the frame.

Maybe nothing would ever come of it, I thought on the way back out to the barn, my sick calves, and the smells of manure and dust, but once we had his check in our mitts, I didn't much care what happened afterward. I wouldn't feel sorry for taking his money. Bill could afford to be magnanimous; he won. He got everything: the girl, the car, the house, and whatever is behind curtain number one.

“I think it's a great idea,” Lauren told me that night while we shoveled feed for the calves. “Could I bring a date?”

“I'd like to play,” Oz said at coffee the next morning. “And it'd be great to see the whole team together again.”

“Phillip won't come,” Bobby Ray growled, “and even if he would, I'm not sharing the court with a criminal.”

“If you'll just act like we'll do it,” I told him, “I think I can get my uniforms. Nothing else actually needs to happen.”

Or so I thought. This was one of the many miscalculations I made that fall.

When Oz and his wife, Caroline, came out to the farm for lunch that Sunday after morning services, he had cooked up a plan that was going to elevate Bill's half-baked idea to a different plane: completely baked.

We were loitering over cherry pie and coffee and making small talk while the dishes soaked in the sink when Oz turned to Michelle and said, “I've got an idea about the reunion, but if you like it, we'll have to get on it right away.”

Michelle raised an eyebrow. Although she and Oz were both on the Watonga High Class of '75's permanent homecoming committee and we were slated to have our twentieth anniversary that next summer, she had already set up a dinner catered by End of Main, one of the few dining establishments left in town. That was her responsibility, she had carried it out with distinction, and I could see by her expression that she wasn't particularly keen on changes or further complications.

“It would take a lot of work,” he went on, oblivious, “but Bill's idea for a fund-raiser made me think of it. What if we moved our reunion to coincide with the game between our team and the Watonga varsity, moved it from summer to Christmas vacation? Don't you imagine that people would come back to town to see The Team play again?”

“But they have seen us,” I said. “Even with Bill in Texas and Phillip in exile it's not like any of us are dead or living on another continent.”

“Ah,” he said, smiling, and he raised a long, thin pharmaceutical finger, “but have the five of us been together since graduation?”

I took a sip of the dregs of my coffee and realized he was right. At our last reunion, the warden at McAlester Penitentiary had requested Phillip's presence. When it came down to it, the five of us had never really even hung out together in school, although some of us had been social off the court.

“I guess we haven't,” I said. “But this game is never going to come off. Don't hang the whole reunion around it. It'll just be a disappointment.”

Caroline sat forward and spoke for the first time in quite awhile, maybe since we'd sat down to dinner; if Oz could rightly be considered quiet, she was a conversational black hole. “But, John, if it could happen—did anything happen that year that was more important than the state championship?”

Oz nodded forcefully.

Michelle and I each, without consulting the other, glanced quickly down the hallway toward Michael's room, where he may or may not have been in attendance.

“Maybe for some people it was momentous,” I said, finally. “But it's just not going to happen.”

“And why not?” Oz asked. “You can schedule the varsity for an exhibition like this. We can surely find a night during Christmas break when the gym isn't in use.”

I looked over at Michelle to see what she was thinking. Her bottom lip was in between her teeth and she was worrying it like she always did when she was trying to decide something. “The game could work,” she said, looking back and forth between Oz and me, “if you old folks will agree that it doesn't mean anything, that it's not a way to reclaim your lost youth or something ridiculous like that. Because you can't. John's high schoolers will beat you, no matter who you were twenty years ago.”

“Maybe,” I said. I hoped they would. While much of what Michelle said made sense, I wasn't sure yet that my kids could beat somebody's seventh-grade varsity on a good shooting night.

But there was more: “I also thought we could have a dance the night before the game,” Oz said. “Decorate the gym, all that. We could have rock, disco, country from the seventies. The game could be open to the public, but the dance would be just for the reunion folks.”

“A dance?” I asked in mock—but barely mock—horror. “What will the pastor think when he hears that two of his deacons are planning a dance?”

“I think that's probably low on his list of worries,” Oz said dryly.

Michelle's teeth were still worrying her lip through this exchange, but at last she said, “I'll talk to Sharon about it, see if we can get the information out in time, get some reaction. If we set this up for sometime after Christmas, we've got about three months.” She sighed. “That's not much time, but if people really want to do this, I guess we ought to give it a shot.” Sharon was Bobby Ray's first wife, yet another member of the class of '75 marooned in Watonga, and as former head cheerleader, nobody had a better finger on the pulse of the student body, then or now.

“Everybody I've talked to has been wild for the idea,” Oz said.

“You haven't talked to Phillip One Horse,” I muttered.

But it was clear that I was outvoted. I was just the court leader of one team and the coach of the other, so what possible weight could my vote carry?

“A dance,” Michelle said later as I was climbing into bed and she climbed in after me. “I love to dance.”

“I know,” I said. I myself did not. I could not scoot a boot, cut a rug, do anything on a dance floor that someone would recognize as rhythmic motion except maybe line dance, and there I could get by because mostly people were too busy to pay attention to what anyone else was doing. I could slow dance, for what that was worth. In fact, I preferred to, since my idea of dancing was that it should be something closer to passion than aerobic exercise.

“I love to dance,” she said again, in a lower, throatier register, and she threw one leg over me, and bent low to nibble at my ear.

“I know,” I said again, although by that point I didn't really know anything except my fingertips moving across her body and my lips meeting hers and my body rising to greet hers and a lot of sweet movement, noise, and sensation.

Maybe there was something to the idea after all, no matter where it came from.

The next time I saw Bobby Ray, a few mornings later at coffee, I threw in the towel, threw up my hands, threw out the baby with the bathwater: “Why don't you call Bill Cobb and officially accept his offer to send us some money?” I said, although before I'd uttered the last word he was shaking his head.

“You're the coach, you made the contact, you're going to have to make the arrangements. Besides, I've never liked the son of a gun.”

“Oh, and I do, right?”

But I said I'd do it.

That night, while the family watched
Murphy Brown
in the living room, I, with pulse racing—have I mentioned that I can't abide the telephone?—dialed the number on our old rotary phone, the line crackling with the background noise common to rural connections. My heart began to speed up as the first ring burred through the miles between us, and then the second. My finger tapped at the cradle, and I wanted to hang up, but I let it ring a third time, a fourth, and then there was a click and a tinny version of Bill's voice, strange and almost funny without the deep baritone, crackled into my ear.

“You've reached the Cobbs. We're unable to come to the phone right now, but if you have business with us, please leave your name and number—”

Business. No thanks. I hung up before the message concluded.