In Wilde Country (9 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

H
e said he’d
stay for the night.

“I have a guest room,” she said, “not that anybody ever uses it.”

“Thank you, but the sofa is fine.”

Miss Cleary took off her rain-dampened jacket and helped him off with his.

“I’ll make some tea. Or hot chocolate. Which would you like?”

“Thank you, but—”

“Tea,” she said briskly, as she hung their jackets away. And something to eat. Soup? How about a cheese sandwich?”

“Miss Cleary. Ma’am. Thank you, but I’m not hungry.”

She gave him a long, assessing look. Then she sighed, went to a closet, took out a pillow and a comforter.

“Bathroom’s over there,” she said. “Kitchen’s down that hall, if you change your mind. I’ll be in my room upstairs. Call if you need me.”

He thanked her again and promised he’d call her if necessary, but he figured she knew, just as he did, that he wasn’t about to call her for anything.

He wasn’t about to spend the night, either. He’d just said that to keep her from any more kind offers. He didn’t deserve kindness, not hers, not anyone’s.

Johnny leaned his crutches against a chair, hobbled to the sofa and sank down on it. He’d just rest for a while. Then he’d…

He’d what?

His car was totaled. He had no money. Well, he had some savings from summers of working at odd jobs, but the money was in the bank and it was four in the afternoon, meaning that the bank was closed.

Four in the afternoon.

Johnny yawned.

It felt more like midnight.

He was exhausted. Completely drained. His head was pounding, his ankle ached, and even though he could feel cold air seeping through the old windows behind the sofa, he felt hot as hell, almost as if his skin was burning.

He yawned again, started to put his feet up on the floral slipcover, thought better of it and worked off his one shoe. Then he lay back against the pillow the old lady—the pillow Miss Cleary had brought him.

A tremor went through him.

Jesus, he felt awful. On fire one minute, freezing cold the next. His gut felt weird, too. Queasy, which was nuts considering that he’d turned away the hospital’s idea of breakfast hours ago.

He reached for the comforter and drew it to his chin. Maybe a nap would help, although how he was going to fall asleep with one foot—the one in the cast—resting on the floor and the other hanging off the too-short sofa was anybody’s guess…

Crap!

He bolted up from the sofa, but not in time. The little he had in his belly spewed from his lips. He gagged, gagged again, and then Miss Cleary was there, soothing him, holding a thick towel beneath his chin while he dry-heaved, then placing a cool hand on his forehead.

“John! You’re burning up!”

Spent, he fell back against the pillow, horrified and humiliated.

“Sorry,” he gasped. “So sorry…”

She hurried away, returned with a basin of warm water, a washcloth and a robe covered with flowers that she draped over him after she cleaned him up. He wanted to stop her, but he was too weak, too dizzy to do more than offer verbal protests.

Somewhere along the way, she popped a thermometer into his mouth, took it out, read it and shook her head. When he tried to sit up, she put her hand on his shoulder and wouldn’t let him. That her liver-spotted hand could exert enough pressure to hold him down was as frightening as what had just happened to him.

“Stay where you are,” she said sternly. “Do you hear me, young man? Do. Not. Move!”

The truth was, he couldn’t have moved if the house had suddenly gone up in flames.

* * * *

The doctor came, poked at him, asked a bunch of questions, said he had apparently picked up some kind of bug in the hospital.

“Most dangerous places on the planet,” he muttered.

Then he wrote prescriptions, warned John to do nothing more strenuous than walk around the house for the next few days and, at Miss Cleary’s request, helped get John into the small, meticulously neat guest room.

She saw the doctor to the door. By the time she returned, Johnny was sitting up, still wearing the flowered robe and reaching for his clothes.

“What,” she demanded, hands on her ample hips, “do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m getting dressed.”

“No, you are not.”

“Miss Cleary. You’ve been very kind, but—”

“I’m not being kind at all. I’m doing my Christian duty.”

“Miss Cleary. Ma’am—”

“Are you going to go through life feeling sorry for yourself?”

John blinked. “I don’t feel sorry for myself.”

“Of course you do.”

“Don’t you get it?” His voice roughened. “My brother—”

“Your brother is dead, God rest his soul. You are not.”

He gave a sharp, bitter laugh.

“That’s exactly right.”

“I see. It would have been better if you had died. Is that what you think?”

It was precisely what he thought.

“Alden’s dead because of me.”

“That is not true.”

“I was driving, or didn’t you know that?”

“Were you drunk, John?”

“No! Dammit, no.”

“Were you driving too fast?”

“I was ten miles under the speed limit.”

“Had you been smoking weeds?”

As upset as he was, her misuse of the term almost made him laugh.

“No. But none of that matters. I had control of my vehicle.”

“Yes. You did. It was the other driver who didn’t have control of his.”

“That sounds good, but—”

Miss Cleary plopped down in a chintz-covered chair beside the bed.

“What if you and Alden had been crossing the street and a truck missed you and hit him?”

Her tone was gentle; the words were blunt and called up a flurry of half-buried images.

“That isn’t what happened.”

‘But if it had. If the results were the same as these. Would you blame yourself?”

John scrubbed his hands over his face.

“It isn’t the same thing.”

“It is very much the same thing.” She reached for Johnny’s hand. “He loved you, John, and you loved him. Let that guide you. Let the memory of him be a part of your life.”

“How?” John’s voice broke. “How do I do that when he’s gone?”

“You could begin by living your life as he would have lived his.”

“My father would laugh to hear you say that.”

Her hand tightened on his.

“I’m going to give you some advice I never thought I’d give a young person.” She leaned closer. “Defy your father. Defy his expectations of you. Show him who you really are, who Alden always knew you were.” Her voice softened. “John. It’s time to become a man.”

* * * *

The fever passed, as did the nausea

A week went by and each day found him feeling a little stronger.

He knew it was time to stand on his own feet.

The previous summer, he’d been a leasehand at one of the drilling operations two towns over. It was a fancy term for someone who did scut work. There were oil wells right on
El Sue
ñ
o,
but the foreman worked for his old man and he’d shaken his head, looked down at his boots and said no, sorry, he wasn’t hiring. He’d broken horses, too, but not at
El Sue
ño
,
and the wrangler in charge of the operation had done that same looking-down-at-his-boots thing before offering the same
no, sorry, he wasn’t hiring
excuse.

Not true and the three of them had known it—the foreman, the wrangler, and Johnny—but he wasn’t about to beg.

His father didn’t want him working on the ranch? The hell with him.

Instead, he’d been a leasehand in that other town. He’d pumped gas at the Texaco out on the highway just north of Wilde’s Crossing, fixed cars at the same place because he was good at engines. He’d broken horses for whoever needed horses broken; weekends, he’d even delivered groceries for the supermarket. He’d hated all those jobs, but he’d done them because they put money in his pocket.

He could do that stuff again, but he couldn’t wait until summer. He needed a place to live and once he found it, he’d need to buy food and pay the bills that went with living on your own, and that took money. What he had in his savings account would not be enough.

On top of that, he’d have to find a job he could handle with his cast still on and his ribs feeling like knives stabbing him in the chest if he moved too fast. Once he found that job, he’d quit school. There was no other solution.

Miss Cleary would be all over him and he hated to disappoint her, but what choice did he have?

She subscribed to the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
and he went through it each day, looking for jobs. There were none. None, anyway, for a seventeen-year-old kid with a busted ankle.

He got TJ to drive him to the bank, took out all the money in his account—four hundred and twenty bucks—and counted through it twice. He had enough to take the bus to Dallas. Or Austin. Or Houston. Then…

He couldn’t get past the
then
, except to know that he could not impose on Miss Cleary’s hospitality any longer.

That afternoon, when she got home from school, he was waiting for her in the kitchen.

“I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for me,” he said. She didn’t look at him; she was busy putting things in the fridge. “But it’s time I stand on my own feet.” She did look at him then, graying eyebrows raised, and he had to laugh. “Figuratively speaking, I mean.”

“Ten-dollar word for a two-dollar student,” she said calmly.

Hadn’t Alden said something like that to him the night of the accident? Not that it mattered. He was who he was, who he’d always been, the Wilde kid who was a troublemaker, who wasn’t the kid his old man had wanted.

Who was the reason his mother and now his brother were dead.

Pain slashed through him, but he wasn’t going to give in to it. Pain was weakness. That was one of the lessons his father had taught him.

“Nothing to say, John?”

He cleared his throat.

“Ten-dollar words don’t change a man’s life.”

“Neither does doing something foolish.”

He wasn’t going to rise to the bait.

“The thing is,” he said, “I’m moving out.”

Miss Cleary folded her arms.

“I’ll repay you for everything as soon as I can.”

She didn’t answer.

“It might take a while.”

“You have a place to go?”

“Yes,” he said, lying through his teeth.

“And a job?”

“Sure.” What was a second lie after you’d told the first?

“What about school?”

“What about it?” he said, and even he could hear the belligerence in the words. “Miss Cleary. I don’t meant to seem ungrateful…”

“Do you mean to sound stupid?”

“Dammit,” he said, belligerence giving way to anger, “you know that I’m not stupid!”

“I do know it. And you know it. So how come you’ve decided on such a stupid plan? We both know you don’t have a place to go or a job, and if you quit school you’ll never be anything but the bum your fool of a father thinks you’ll be.”

Johnny wanted to tell her she was wrong, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t, because he knew damn well she was 100 percent, completely, totally, absolutely correct.

His shoulders slumped and he sank into a chair at the kitchen table.

“I can’t go to school and work at the same time,” he said softly. “And I can’t you let you go on supporting me forever.”

“Correct on all counts,” she said briskly. She took the chair across from his. “Which is why
I’ve
come up with a plan.”

“A plan?”

“You return to classes on Monday—you’re strong enough for that now.”

“You don’t get it. I need a job. A place to live…”

“And I need someone to help out around here. Outdoors, once you’re out of that cast. Indoors for now. Dust. Sweep. Fix things that need fixing. Do some things in the kitchen.”

“Me? Me, dust and sweep and do things in the kitchen?”

“You,” she said, staring him straight in the eye. “Do a decent job, maintain a B average in school—”

“What?” he said, halfway between laughter and disbelief.

“Maintain a B average, do what needs to be done around here and I’ll give you room, board and twenty dollars a week.”

“Is this a joke?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Do I look like a woman with a sense of humor, young man?”

She didn’t. And she wasn’t. Everybody knew that.

“Well? Is it a deal?”

A deal? A proposal so ridiculous it was almost insane?

Work as a handyman. Go on living with a stern old woman… A stern old woman who had showed him more care than his father ever had, the father who had not tried to find him or contact him since the day of the funeral.

Johnny looked up.

“Why?” he said softly.

He knew she’d understand the question, and she didn’t disappoint him.

“Because you’re a much, much better man than you think you are.”

Johnny swallowed hard.

“It’s a deal,” he said quietly, and Agnes Cleary rose to her feet, came around the table and did something he knew he’d never forget.

She bent down and hugged him.

CHAPTER FIVE

H
e pulled C’s.

Then B’s.

When he scored a B-plus on a calculus exam, he had to bite back a whoop of victory. He wanted Miss Cleary to see it, but he didn’t want her to think it mattered all that much to him so instead of telling her about it, he left the test paper lying on the kitchen table where he did his homework each night.

She spotted the paper and picked it up.

He waited for praise. What he got was the dry suggestion that B’s were better than C’s, but A’s were better than B’s.

Jesus. What in hell did she want from him? He wasn’t any kind of student, no matter what she thought—and, to prove it, he studied harder.

Son of a gun.

Next time around, he got an A, and another A on a bio exam.

A’s became familiar grades, with B-pluses close behind. And on the home front, as he thought of it, he learned how to cook pasta, make pancakes from scratch, pick up his room and do his own laundry.

He told himself what hell he’d face if his pals from school saw him doing any of those things, but the truth was that he didn’t have many pals now that he’d quit the football team. Not that he could play with a cast on; not that there was football this time of year. But the team always hung out together and he wasn’t into doing that anymore.

He had chores to do, homework to complete, a life to live that suddenly didn’t have much room in it for fooling around.

He did make time for seeing Alden’s girl.

Her name was Connie and he’d never said more to her than hello or goodbye. Now, whenever their paths crossed, she gave him such a sad-eyed look that one day he sat down beside her in the lunchroom.

“Hey,” he said, sparkling conversationalist that he was.

“He talked about you all the time,” she said in a soft, small voice. “And about how close you two were.” Her eyes filled. “You must miss him a lot.”

Johnny looked at her. Everybody else at school avoided the topic. She, this mousy-looking Connie, was the only one who’d even mentioned that his brother was gone.

“I miss him more than seems possible,” he blurted out. “And you must miss him, too.”

She nodded. “I always will.”

Years later, it would dawn on him that maybe that had not been the best groundwork for a romantic relationship, but right then neither of them was looking for romance, only for comfort.

They took to eating lunch together and then to hanging out together and by the time he realized they were in a relationship at all, his life had done yet another 180-degree change.

A change that began the last day of that agonizing school year.

He hadn’t replaced the Mustang—he couldn’t afford to and besides, the thought of getting behind the wheel of a car held little appeal.

He’d bought himself a bike instead. Nothing fancy, just a Raleigh that he picked up, used, at a garage sale. It got him wherever he needed to go, and when he heard guys snickering behind his back, he took care of them fast. Losing Alden had mellowed him, but the quick Wilde temper he’d always shared with his old man—though not with his brother—had turned out to be dormant, not lost.

The day school let out for the summer, he rode home feeling pretty good, anticipating the pleased reaction Miss Cleary would have to his report card—A’s in math, science, history and English, B-plus in Spanish and Italian. Her approval had come to mean a lot; it was only in the darkest hours of the night that he let himself wonder how Amos would have reacted to his being on the honor roll, man, the
honor roll
!

As he turned the corner for home, because that was how he’d come to think of the Cleary house, he told himself that it didn’t matter a damn that he had not heard from his father since the funeral. He knew that Miss Cleary had. He’d seen an envelope addressed to Amos lying on her desk early one Saturday morning.

It was gone a few minutes later.

Consumed by curiosity, he’d said to hell with ethics and once she was out of the house, he’d gone down to the mailbox where he figured the letter would be waiting for the postman. He’d steamed it open. Inside, he’d found a check for five thousand dollars made out to Agnes Cleary torn in half, along with her stiffly worded note.

I have no need of this, Mr. Wilde,
she’d written,
but you might wish to consider that John has need of his father’s love.

Johnny had felt his throat constrict.

His teacher was a good woman if not a wise one, because he sure as hell didn’t need or want anything from his father.

And then, on that last day of school, he came pedaling around the corner and saw his father’s black Coupe De Ville parked in front of her house.

He skidded to a stop. He could feel his heart thudding. What was Amos doing here? He didn’t want to see him or talk to him. They had nothing to say to each other.

He started pedaling. Slowly. Very slowly. All he had to do was pick up the pace and go right on by the big, ostentatious car.

He didn’t.

He brought the bike around to the backyard, the way he always did. Took his book bag out of the basket, the way he always did. Opened the rear door, the way he always did. Walked through the kitchen, down the short corridor that led into the small, always neat living room…

Miss Cleary and his father were seated facing each other, she in her favorite wing chair, Amos in the center of the sofa.

He looked from one of them to the other.
Say something,
he told himself,
don’t just stand here, say something!

But he didn’t.

After what seemed an eternity, his father rose to his feet.

“John.”

Johnny swallowed dryly.

“Father.”

“Your teacher tells me you’ve done well this semester.”

“Yessir.”

“And that you have been helpful here.”

He swallowed again. “Yessir. I mean, I’ve tried to be.”

Amos folded his arms over his chest.

“What are your plans, John?”

“Plans?” Johnny said blankly.

“For the summer. For the coming academic year.” Amos paused. “For your life.”

Johnny glanced at Miss Cleary. She looked stern, but she gave him an encouraging nod.

“I have a job lined up for the summer.”

“
Sir
,” Amos said sharply. “I have a job lined up for the summer,
sir
.”

Johnny swallowed hard again.

“I have a job lined up for the summer, sir.”

“Doing what?”

“I’m going to work at the Texaco station part time.”

“Part time?”

“Yessir. I’ve got a weekend job at the Circle D. The dude ranch over in—”

“I know where it is. What will you be doing there?”

“Well, they hire extra hands in the summer. They get guests who’ve never ridden before and—”

“You’re going to pump gas and shovel shit. Is that right?”

“I—I guess you could put it that way. Sir.”

Amos nodded.

“And next year? Your senior year? What courses will you take?”

Senior year was, for many students, a time to ease back. You took the minimum number of academic credits necessary to complete graduation requirements and filled the rest of the day with gym, shop, whatever took the least work.

Johnny had chosen to do otherwise.

He rattled off the courses he’d signed up for. Advanced trigonometry. Mechanical engineering. Military history.

“Military history,” Amos repeated. “That’s a sudden interest for you, is it not?”

It was. Military history had been Alden’s passion. Johnny had never understood why. He’d never understood Alden’s passion for math and science, either. But these past months, studying those subject made him feel—made him feel as if the two of them were connected by more than memories.

“John? Is military history a new interest?”

“Yessir. It is.”

Amos’s mouth thinned. “I hope it is not because you believe you can somehow replace your brother in this world, John. Surely, you realize that such a thing is impossible.”

Miss Cleary rose to her feet.

“Mr. Wilde. John has suffered an immeasurable loss. He’s experienced great pain, physically as well as emotionally. I must ask you to—”

“Thank you for your concern,” Amos said in a tone that made it obvious he was not thanking her at all. “But I have no need for your advice. John is not your son. He is mine.”

Johnny looked from the elderly woman who had shown him such kindness to the man who had never shown him any.

He wanted to defend her to his father, but all he could think of was that months ago, Amos had all but disowned him.

Now, he was calling him his son.

“You want to play around with oil and horse turds, you can do it at
El Sue
ño
.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Pack your things, John.”

Johnny’s feet might as well have been rooted to the faded floral carpet.

“Or leave them. Perhaps that’s best. You have everything you need at
El Sue
ň
o
.” Still, Johnny didn’t move. Amos frowned. “Unless you have no wish to come home.”

“No. No, I do. I mean—I mean—”

He looked at Miss Cleary. She walked to him and put her hand on his arm, just as she had done so often in the past.

“Go on,” she said softly. “And remember, you’re welcome here anytime.”

He put his hand over hers. He wanted to say something eloquent or at least clever, but the words wouldn’t come.

Amos made a sound of pure impatience.

“I’ll be outside,” he said, “in the car.”

The front door swung shut behind him. Miss Cleary clasped Johnny’s face in her hands.

“You have a loving heart, John, and a fine mind. You’re going to go a long way.”

Impulsively, he bent his head and kissed her cheek. Her skin was soft and velvety under his lips, and she smelled faintly of lemons.

“Thank you,” he said. “For everything.”

She patted his chest. Then she went to a table that flanked the sofa where a cut glass vase held a spray of bluebonnets. Bluebonnets were the most common of Texas wildflowers. They flourished in the wild, but they needed care if you wanted them domesticated.

She had helped him grow them.

“For you,” she said, holding out the flowers.

He looked at those bluebonnets. His vision blurred. He nodded, took them from her and because he was afraid he might do or say something stupid, he turned on his heel and fled from the room, the house, the life he’d led within its walls.

The chauffeur stood at attention beside Amos’s Cadillac.

“Mr. John.”

Mr. John. Who was that? He’d been “Johnny” to virtually all the servants at
El
Sue
ñ
o
—The Dream—for as long as he could remember.

He got into the car. A shudder went through him. The air conditioner was on at full blast.

The chauffeur shut the door and got behind the wheel.

The car began moving.

Panic gripped Johnny’s throat.

“Wait,” he started to say, but his father spoke at the same instant.

“What,” he said coldly, “are those?”

Johnny followed his gaze.

“Bluebonnets,” he said, looking up at Amos.

“I know they’re bluebonnets, for Christ’s sake. What are you doing with them?”

“I grew them. From seed. Miss Cleary—”

“Miss Cleary is a foolish old woman. You are a man.”

Amos put down his window and snatched the flowers from his son’s hand. The bluebonnets went flying and the window shot up again, sealing in the chill of the air conditioning. “Now. Let’s talk about your future.”

The car moved faster and faster, and when Johnny looked back, Miss Cleary’s house was part of the past.