Tumbleweeds (40 page)

“How long is he staying?”

“A couple of days, John said.”

“That doesn’t sound like he’s come to hook up the RV for a while.”

“You’re right. He’ll be staying at Harbison House until his business is through, he told John, but that’s all we know at the moment.”

“Did he ask Father John about us?”

“No, but he may be testing the waters, and that’s why I’m here. I came to ask you to see him if he wants a meeting, because if I know my son, he’ll take off hiking with his dog this weekend until his father goes back to where he came from. I’m advising you not to do that, Will. If you don’t like what he has to say, then kick him out, spit in his eyes, slam the door in his face. That’s up to you, but I believe if you don’t see him, you’ll regret it later.”

“What if he hasn’t come to say anything to me, Mom? What if he’s come simply to sell his aunt’s house? What if we’re not on his agenda?”

Cathy shook her head. “He didn’t have to come here in person to clean out his aunt’s house and take care of the house sale. That could have been done from San Diego. Father John and I both agree on that.”

Will concurred. He studied his mother in a new, frightening light. He half-suspected she welcomed this visit, had been expecting it for
years. Looking at her now, still youthful and beautiful, he wondered what she would do if TD Hall—washed up, divorced, reputedly broke—should show up again at her door, beg her to forgive him and grant him a second chance? She was well thought of, a pillar of the county. What would it do to her reputation if she took back the bastard who had left her and her son high and dry?

“Tell me,” he demanded. “What you would do if the guy walked in right now, says he’s sorry and that he loves you and wanted to make it up to us? What would be your reaction?”

She granted him a smile understanding of his anger. “Your godfather asked me basically the same question, so I’ll tell you what I told him. It will take more than sweet talk and self-flagellation to win me again, Son. For twenty-two years, he’s ignored your existence. Forget mine. Mine pales to a mere snub compared to his rejection of you. I can never forgive him for the shadow he cast over your childhood, but I don’t hate him for it, either. That’s because, amazingly, you grew into a man you never would have been if your father had been around.”

“I’d have been okay, Mom,” Will said. His pride in her roughened his voice. “I’d have had you.”

“Not the mother you know. If TD Hall had married me, I wouldn’t have been the woman I am today.”

He conceded that was probably true. His mother had overcome a different, and more commendable, set of odds than the ones she’d have faced with his self-centered, womanizing father. You could tame a tiger only so far.

“All I’m asking is that you give him a chance to say what he’s come to say,” she said. “I plan to. I have a feeling it will convince me we were fortunate he abandoned us.”

“All right,” Will said. “I’ll do it for you. But don’t be disappointed if he’s only here to sell his aunt’s house.”

Cathy stood and removed her car keys from her purse, her movements calm and resolute. “I don’t think it’s possible for Trey Don Hall ever to disappoint me again.”

If only he could believe that, Will thought, as he escorted her to the parking lot. His jaw felt so hard he could barely feel his mother’s lips when she kissed him good-bye. As usual, she read his thoughts.

“He’ll try to charm the hate out of you, Will, and that would be a good thing,” she said. “Don’t be afraid to let it go. Releasing hate does not make you forget what you want always to remember. It does not mean reconciliation.”

Will watched her drive off, shaken that she’d been aware all along of the fear he’d tried to hide since he was old enough to analyze it. As much as he hated his father, Will was afraid that if he ever met him, he’d fall victim to his charisma, his star shine, and despise himself for his vulnerability, his neediness, when he’d had the love and attention since the day he was born of the best father figure ever to walk the earth—Jesuit priest John Caldwell.

Yet what else but a need for his father would explain why, on the sly, he’d made a study of TD Hall? There wasn’t a word about him Will hadn’t read, not many of the man’s football games he hadn’t seen one way or the other. Will told himself he was on a quest to find out how much like him he was, what tendencies he recognized in himself. He had made up his mind early that he didn’t want to be like Trey Don Hall in any way, and as far as he could tell, he wasn’t. He’d inherited his mother’s innate courtesy, calm temperament, and sense of commitment. He wasn’t a skirt chaser or a practitioner of casual sex.

But really, his object had been to get to know his father, to share time and be with him even if it was only through published interviews and the TV screen. Will would never let his mother know that, until he graduated from high school, he still looked for a package at
Christmas, a card for his birthday, a telephone call out of the blue, some sign that his father knew he was on the planet.

But that was then, and this was now. His yearning days were over. He despised Trey Don Hall. If he’d come to worm his way into their lives when he’d made such a mess of his, his son would make sure the man regretted it.

H
e slid open the grill between him and the penitent three times that morning.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“How have you sinned?”

“It’s my father. I have no respect or liking for him. He lies; he gambles; he cheats on my mother; he does not keep his word. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw a bull. He’s overweight, smokes like a fiend, and drinks. He doesn’t give a damn about me.”

“Do you love him?”

“Yes, that’s the thing. I care about him, and I don’t want to. I know it’s a sin to want to hate somebody, especially your father, but life would be so much easier and my pain gone if I could only hate him, and I’m furious with myself because I can’t.”

“Do not be angry with yourself. You have demonstrated the greatest love of all. You love someone unworthy of your love. This cross you bear is a burden now, but such crosses, faithfully carried, are the wings that fly us to heaven.”

“Can people change, Father?”

“In what way?”

“The genes we’re born with.”

“Not your genes, but the behavior they generate. We are given the power to be in control of what we do because every person is born with free will. With the help of God, we human beings can choose to disobey the dictates of our baser natures. The original self will always be with us, like the alcoholic’s inborn proclivity to drink. The struggle against our nature is never ending, but it can be overcome.”

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“So have we all, my friend.”

T
rey Hall slowed down his rented BMW as he turned off Interstate 40 onto the road leading to Kersey. His plane had landed in Amarillo with minutes to spare. He had no luggage to collect, and there had been no waiting line at the car rental office, giving him time to kill before meeting the Tysons at eleven o’clock. Except for the wind turbines—mammoth energy-producing structures that looked like sculptures of gigantic white albatrosses lined to the horizon—the prairie in spring was as he remembered. For a while he drove with his window down to let in the fresh smell of Panhandle grasses, but he found the wind nippy and raised it. He had been warned against getting chilled.

A mile from his destination, he spotted the water tower of Kersey, and memories flooded over him of the times he and John used to climb the darn thing. They’d been too respectful of its important place on the landscape with its proud claim C
ITY OF
K
ERSEY
written on its girdle to deface it, but mainly they’d been too scared of Sheriff Tyson finding out they were the culprits. But they were definitely not above leaving a physical reminder that they’d scaled the ladder to the catwalk that ran around it. They completed a successful rite of passage when, in the seventh grade, they finally reached their goal and
left a scarf of Cathy’s tied to the railing. It blew in the wind for some time until one day it was no longer there.

Like a lot of other things that had blown away, Trey thought.

As he entered the city limits, he noted some new signs and a few unfamiliar shops—a hair salon, an antique place, a game-processing plant—but the old automotive repair garage and feed store and junkyard rusting away behind a Cyclone fence were still in place. There was nothing much about the entrance to his hometown to distinguish it from other widely scattered prairie communities except the weathered, faded billboard that greeted visitors at its city limits: W
ELCOME TO
K
ERSEY
, H
OME OF THE
B
OBCATS
, W
INNER OF THE 1985
H
IGH
S
CHOOL
F
OOTBALL
S
TATE
C
HAMPIONSHIP
. The sign echoed a time long past its glory like a boarded-up hotel in a ghost town.

The gate into the Peaceful Haven Cemetery was up ahead, and he turned in and located the grave site of his uncle Harvey from memory. As Trey had expected, Aunt Mabel had been buried beside him. Their memorial stones were identical, with a hand engraved on each reaching toward the other. Aunt Mabel never did get over the death of Uncle Harvey, Trey had realized long after it was too late for him to be of much comfort to her. He’d known his uncle only a few months before he died, but Trey remembered him well, and he’d grown up thinking the two of them married—Aunt Mabel a small, shrinking-violet type and Uncle Harvey robust and rugged, a big-game hunter—was something of a joke. But back then, what the hell had he known?

He’d bought a bouquet of spring flowers at the airport and laid the perky arrangement of carnations, stocks, and daises before her name. The burning sensation he hated flamed in his throat. “I’m sorry, Aunt Mabel,” he said. “I wanted to come, but I didn’t have the guts. Now that you’re in heaven and know all, I hope you can forgive me.”

He glanced about at the other memorial plates in the area and noted the familiar names of those who had died since he’d been
away. For one, their old school bus driver he’d given undeserved grief, and for another, a woman who’d worked in the school cafeteria who always added extra helpings of mashed potatoes on his plate. He now wished he’d shown her more appreciation. Cathy’s Baptist minister had bitten the dust, a sanctimonious ass who’d slammed the door shut to her future when she turned up pregnant. Trey looked around for Miss Whitby’s grave and Emma Benson’s but didn’t see them in the vicinity, and it was time to go. Before leaving, he kicked a clump of cockleburs on the Baptist minister’s grave and headed for his car.

The high school and football stadium were on this side of town, and he took the improved road to the entrance of the place where he’d spent the happiest years of his life. A digital billboard had replaced the old wooden structure that had announced school events. It wished students and teachers a safe vacation and informed the unlucky ones that summer school would begin in a week’s time. With the exception of a few cars in the expanded parking lot, he had the place to himself.

He got out, the opulent slam of the BMW door carrying in the quiet, almost still, prairie air. The school had been modernized to a degree, but the feel of it was the same. With the close of his eyes, he could imagine being a school kid again, arriving in the bus in the junior high years, then in his Mustang or John’s old pickup when they hit their teens, Cathy wedged between. The intrepid trio of Kersey High, they’d been called.

Trey walked the distance to the fence that enclosed the running track and football field. The gate was probably locked, but he heard young male voices like his used to be and figured students were working out on the track. His guess was right, and a padlock hung unfastened on the gate. He pushed it open and saw three boys at the far end of the track in running shorts and T-shirts, stretching their hamstrings and rotating their arms. Trey heard the field house door creak open and turned to see a man step out wearing a ball cap in
the school’s colors and a whistle around his neck. A coach obviously. “May I help you?” the man asked.

“No, not really,” Trey said. “I graduated from here and thought I’d stop by to see what the place looks like now. Mind if I look around?” The man was middle-aged but still looked too young to have been on the coaching staff when Trey ran track and played on this field.

“No, go ahead. Happy to have you.” The man peered at Trey, his forehead moving back as recognition dawned. “You’re… TD Hall, aren’t you?”

“I am.”

“Well, Christ almighty!” He stuck out his hand. “Tony Willis. Track and special teams coach. It’s an honor to meet you. They should have named the place after you for all the trophies you won for the school. Is this the first time you’ve been back since you graduated?”

Trey shook his hand. “I’m afraid so. Anybody around who coached when I was here?”