Taft (17 page)

She didn't have a drop of water on her, just like she didn't before, but she wouldn't have thought there was anything wrong with me being soaked. Just look at the night. No one would blame me for looking the way I did. I didn't say anything. I closed my eyes and put my hand behind her neck and brought her to me. There wasn't a lot of time. Not while everything was still clear in my mind. I kissed her there at the door. I kissed her neck and her ears. I kissed her hard on the mouth and she kissed me back, pulling her dry arms around me. Once I could feel the pressure of her against my chest I could think again. Then I could smell her and see the people in the sugar egg. I could pull her down to me the way I wanted. I reached under her coat and lifted up her shirt, ran my hands across her back and down to the sides of her hips. I touched the slick material of her underpants with my fingers. She kept kissing me. She was pulling on my belt. My clothes were so wet she had to struggle with them. I felt her tongue against the side of my face. It was the same rain making the same noise. The noise kept everything else quiet. Her raincoat slipped off of her and suddenly she was everywhere. I could feel her in back of me and in front of me at the same time. She was against the door and still I felt the door on my back. I wanted her. I told myself so over and over again in my mind. This is how I made love to all of them, equally.

Taft doesn't like going to Memphis. He doesn't like his wife's sister or her husband. He doesn't like the thought of their family being anything more than the four of them. Lily is always talking about family, family this and that. "We should do more things together as a family," she says, and Taft wonders what the hell she's talking about. He doesn't see any way that their two families link up. Lily has her eye on his kids. That's what it's all about. Never had any of her own and now she wants to get a hold of his. She's always asking Fay and Carl to come up for holidays or spend the summer with them. Virginia told him her sister couldn't have children. Or maybe it was Calvin. There was something wrong with one of them and it showed. Whenever Taft walks through their house he thinks, You can't have carpet this pale and expect to raise a family on it. Of course, it wouldn't be bad having that kind of money. He doesn't like looking at Lily's jewelry all the time. He thinks she could wear a little less when they're around, or give a piece of it to her sister. One sister raises two children on next to nothing, keeps a job and a clean house and is lucky to get a nice sweater for Christmas. The other one goes out to lunch at the country club while somebody else gets bused in to do her vacuuming and she gets something called a tennis bracelet for Christmas which she never takes off. She doesn't play tennis, either.

When Virginia and Taft were first going out Lily used to drive to Knoxville to study in the medical library because she'd read in a magazine that that was the best way to catch yourself a doctor. She didn't know the pharmacology students studied there too. But this one had a family business, four generations of Martin-Quick pharmacists. And he was from Memphis, which was far enough away from Coalfield to forget about it altogether. There went Lily. It wasn't until Fay and Carl were born and there were no babies for Lily and Calvin that they even started hearing from them regularly.

Taft and Virginia and Fay and Carl are all going to Memphis. Carl is going to wrestle in the state championship. Virginia says it's killing two birds with one stone. Taft usually manages to get out of the trips to see her sister, but he would go anywhere his son was wrestling, even to Memphis.

Taft doesn't like going to Memphis. He doesn't like the look of the place. It's too flat. The river is dirty. He's been sitting in the shadow of the Smoky Mountains since the day he was horn. The mountains, he thinks, are beautiful. He doesn't like the weather, which never seems to cool off. Every breeze is choked with humidity. It's like trying to walk through water. The people are too rough, too forward, everybody knowing how much money everyone else has and where the money came from. In Memphis, money is worth more if you didn't have to earn it. The old money lives in special neighborhoods. They have picnics and parties together where they feel especially clever because they don't have to work, although a few of them do, just to pass time.

It's a long drive. It is Tennessee end to end, mountains to delta, with the dip of Nashville and the valley in the middle to break things up. Fay can read in the car without making herself sick. Carl is staring out the window, concentrating. He's been training like crazy, running up and down the school bleachers holding bricks over his head. His weight is exactly right. He measures out the water he drinks and wraps himself in Hefty bags and sweats in the sun. He knows there are two boys ranked higher than him, and another half a dozen beneath him who could take his spot. Taft looks at him in the rearview mirror while he drives. He worries for his worrying.

As for himself, Taft has stopped worrying. The pain in his chest did not come back. By the time he woke up from his nap on the day he and Carl were working on the deck he was already beginning to forget about it. A cramp, a spasm, indigestion, exhaustion, strain, none of those things were important. Doctors are for sick people and Taft isn't sick. Once they start looking it opens up a whole can of worms. They find things wrong, one thing and then another until you're dead. That's the way it went with his father. He went in to see about a simple cough and came back with cancer. The more those doctors looked, the more they found. They said his father was shot through with it. They said they needed to explore. The exploring took them deeper down the mine shaft, into veins stuffed with cancer. They said he wouldn't live six months, and so he didn't. Taft believes people are like wells, clear water with some sediment on the bottom. As long as you don't disturb them, they're going to be fine.

This is the way he likes it, his family in the car, everybody together.

Taft gets off the interstate and drives through downtown. His wife has forgotten to buy a gift for her sister. She wants to bring her something, a box of candy or a shaker of bath powder. Never go to someone's house empty handed, she says.

"I'll wait in the car," Taft says.

Carl and Fay want to go with their mother. They're restless from sitting for so long. They like the shops in Memphis. There is nothing like them in Coalfield.

"We won't be twenty minutes," his wife says.

Taft turns off the engine and rolls down the window and sits and waits. He's watching the people. And while he is sitting and waiting and watching, Taft thinks about the reason he doesn't like Memphis: too many blacks. In Coalfield this has never been a problem for him. There are plenty of blacks at the carpet factory and he likes them fine. He doesn't make jokes behind their backs. He doesn't think they shouldn't get the same breaks at work as everybody else. Plenty of people at the factory are this way and Taft isn't one of them. When Tommy Lawson lost two fingers in the cutting blade Taft chipped in more than any white guy on the line. Whenever there's an accident like that the guys put some money in the card. Taft likes Tommy. They ate together in the lunchroom sometimes. Tommy knows a lot about basketball and once they'd even talked about driving down to Knoxville together to see a Vols game, but they never did. Sitting in the car, Taft knows he doesn't have any problem with blacks. Tommy Lawson is proof of that.

But in Memphis, it's different. In Memphis, downtown in the middle of the day, he feels funny being a white man, there are so few of them around. When he decides to count every black person who walks by his car, he can't. He has to count the white ones instead. Things aren't the way they're supposed to be. That's the problem with Memphis.

"I got some pretty little hand soaps," Virginia says as she gets into the front seat and Carl and Fay slide into the back. "Look at these. They look like shells." He wishes he could ask them if they've noticed, but he never would.

Lily makes a crown rib roast for dinner and then takes offense that Carl will only eat salad without dressing. "I made it for you," she says. "For luck tomorrow."

"It's his weight," Taft tells her. "If he doesn't make weight tomorrow he can't wrestle."

"Well, everybody eats dinner," Lily says.

They move their food around on their plates. There's something about the room. The sound of the knives and forks tapping against each other seems magnified a thousand times. Taft can hear people chew. The room is too fancy to really enjoy the meal. If he could choose, he would take their breakfast nook any day. The table is only big enough for four, and anything you want you can reach, or somebody can pass it to you without it being any bother. They use placemats instead of a tablecloth. They use paper napkins. Who in their right mind would want to fool with cloth napkins?

Taft can't think of anything to talk about. Will he say to his brother-in-law, How's the drug business? He finds himself staring out the window that is half covered up by bushes and low tree branches. If it was him, he'd cut all that back so a person could see out.

Calvin comes to the wrestling match with them, but Lily doesn't. She says that gymnasiums make her claustrophobic, all those people crammed together on bleachers, sweating.

The waiting goes on forever. There are a dozen pairs that go before Carl. Taft watches every boy carefully. He looks to see if they are better or not as good. He watches for moves, any little trick he can tell Carl about later.

"Look at that one," Fay says. "He's cute."

When Carl comes on, he's focused. The look on his face is the same as it was the morning he shot the deer. He isn't jittery the way the other boys are. He's all warmed up, but doesn't shake his hands and jump around. He stands at the edge of the mat in his red singlet and stares at the boy from Jackson, who he then pins in eighty-five seconds.

"Fish!" Taft shouts from the bleachers. "Go Carl!"

Carl pins two more boys, one of them the number-four-ranked 126 from Nashville. Then he is up against the number-two boy who is from Memphis. A black boy from Memphis.

There are a lot more white kids at the meet than black. Taft knows Carl doesn't see it. All he is thinking about is size and shape, weight and speed. Color doesn't make a difference when you're trying to put a boy's arm behind his back. But Taft sees it. Sees it as they circle each other on the mat. Sees it as they lunge, miss, lock. They are twisted together, leg to arm, head to torso. The black boy goes behind. He passes Carl over his back and wins three points. Carl tries for a double leg tackle, but he can't hold him. The boys are slick with sweat. The black boy sweats more than Carl. He is number two in the state. By the end of the day he might have a championship. Taft can see that Carl is going to lose and what he wants him to do is roll over. Save his energy, take the pin. He wants his son out of that tangle. There is something about seeing those arms around Carl's chest that makes him want to go down into the ring and put a stop to it. The boy has Carl on his stomach. He has one of his legs pulled back, his head is down. The boy has his knee in Carl's back. Taft has seen this hold before. It's the position you use to brand a calf. Then the boy flips Carl, both shoulders firmly on the floor. It should be over, but it isn't. The referee is circling them on his hands and knees, counting like it was a boxing match, counting, higher numbers than they've counted for any other boys, 54, 55, 98, 212. It isn't fair that he should be pinned like that, that he should have to suffer so long. It is all Taft can do to watch.

I
HAD FALLEN ASLEEP
. I looked at the clock and it said ten. I had to think for a minute, ten o'clock at night. Outside I could hear the rain going same as ever.

"You up?" Ruth said.

There wasn't anyplace to go in a situation like this. Nothing to do but roll over and kiss her, and even knowing that I closed my eyes and lay there for another minute. Above the rain I could hear a light and steady sawing sound. Ruth was doing her nails.

Neither one of us had been drinking, but there was something distinctly drunk about what had happened. We'd done it before talking, before coming inside, and once we got the door unlocked it all started up again.

"I know you're awake," Ruth said.

"I'm awake."

The sawing stopped and I felt her coming towards me in the bed on her hands and knees. After that time Ruth had kissed me when she was fourteen I had never liked being alone with her. It made me nervous.

"I always knew my sister was a fool, but I never knew how much of a fool until now." She ran a rough nail up my side.

I asked her if she would get me a drink. Ruth was family. She'd been in my apartment a hundred times. She knew where everything was.

She got up and walked naked through the room and out into the kitchen. I'd never thought about it before, but she had a body like Marion's too, small in the waist, big through the hips, pretty legs. I was sure that would be the last thing she'd want to hear.

"I knew you were listening to what I was saying this afternoon. I didn't think you'd call me so quick, but I knew you'd be thinking about it." She sat down on the edge of the bed and handed me some bourbon in a Mickey Mouse jelly glass that had been Franklin's. As much as I wanted Ruth to be any place in the world other than my bedroom, I have to say I felt some admiration for her, the way she sat there so casually, like she'd forgotten she was naked.

"What were you saying this afternoon?"

"In the bar," she said, slapping my shoulder in a friendly way. She took the jelly glass from my hand and had a drink.

Then I remembered. I hadn't been thinking about what she had said. Drumming didn't seem like such a pressing issue, not with everything else that was going on. "I wasn't calling you about that. I just thought we could get together, have a drink or something."

"Well then, let's have a drink." She lifted the glass.

I lay back in the bed, thinking that maybe if I closed my eyes she'd just be gone. "You have to understand. I had a bad night was all. There's just a lot of stuff on my mind." Hey Ruth, I couldn't with Fay, not six inches from her uncle's house. Not with her thinking about her father. There is some shit even I won't get into in this world. Seventeen.