Kings of the Earth: A Novel (30 page)

Preston

T
HE FIRST THING IS
, you don’t smoke in a barn. Least of all in a hayloft. You don’t have to be very smart to figure that out even if nobody ever told you. Margaret gave me a telescope for my birthday that year, with a tripod and everything, and I had it set up on the screen porch. It’s so dark out back you could just about run an observatory. Margaret was in the front room at the other end of the house with the television on but you couldn’t see that from the screen porch. So there I was in the dark looking at Venus I think it was and just kind of finding my way around the heavens on account of I was pretty new at it when what do I see but this little orange dot going back and forth, way up in the hayloft door.

I knew who it’d be. I’d heard Tom’s friend come up the dirt lane on his motorcycle while Margaret and I were having supper, and Tom’d been here himself all day and all day the day before that too. I’d about come to the conclusion that he wasn’t working anymore unless you called what he was doing up by that old still working. Which I guess it is if you look at it that way, but that’s not how you think of it as a rule. You don’t think of it as a job, I mean. A regular job you’d go to.

So I knew the two of them were up there, and I just hated like hell to see it. To see a perfectly good dirt farm being turned into some kind of opium den. A
seraglio
, like Margaret says. I thought about how that land had produced so much over the years. The way it smelled in the spring and summer, good smells and bad smells both. How it had supported Lester and Ruth all those years and then their children one by one. And now to see it come to this. I wondered where was the justice in it. If this was the way everything would go sooner or later.

I turned the telescope on the hayloft and Tom and his friend looked like a couple of big old giants sitting up there. They looked like something you’d find at the top of a beanstalk. That marijuana cigarette they were smoking could have passed for a comet the way it moved back and forth, getting brighter when they pulled on it and dimmer when it just sat. Which wasn’t for very long, let me tell you. It didn’t look like they wanted to waste any of it.

I kept an eye on those two until the cigarette went out and then I quit holding my breath and looked at the stars for a while. It’s amazing what you’ll see. Then they went and lit up another one and I had to keep an eye on them until that one was gone too.

Preston

L
IKE THAT OLD SONG
used to say:
“How ’ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?”

Ruth

H
ER NAME IS
V
ELMA
, a name that in these days is just coming into fashion and will not stay in fashion for long. Her eyes are deep-set and her nose is sharp and she favors lipstick the color of fresh blood. She keeps her thick dark hair pompadoured in the front and brushed close on the sides and pinned back into a ponytail that hangs down inside a sling of black netting. The first time Creed Proctor sets eyes on her he decides that this is the woman he would like to have serving him his supper every night of the week, and for a while he will nearly manage it.

He still has some army pay. When he came home he used a little of it to buy his mother a brooch at the Woolworth’s in Cassius and he used some more of it to buy hardware for the whiskey still, but the rest he has kept in a carton under the bed with his clothes and it has been burning a hole there for weeks now. He and his brothers have taken the tractor to the feedstore in Cassius and they are coming back with the stake-bed wagon loaded down behind it when they pass the Dineraunt on Madison Street and Creed happens to look in through the window. There she stands behind the counter, working the register and looking up at some customer in the most earnest manner. The light is just perfect and the plate-glass window between Creed and the woman inside seems to fall away. Even the lettering on it. There is no reflection to separate the two of them and no glare of sunlight from anywhere and no arch of hand-painted letters spelling out
MADISON STREET DINERAUNT—GOOD FOOD
. Just Creed and the dark-haired woman and nothing in between. He realizes all of a sudden that he is hungry but he does not say anything. He isn’t going to stop now. Not with Vernon and Audie to drag along. They’d probably think they could beat his time with any girl but they’d be wrong about that. They’re just a couple of hayseeds who’ve never seen anything worth looking at in this big old world. He’ll come back sometime soon. He’ll make a point of it.

His immediate problem is those army khakis. He’s been wearing them every day since returning from Korea, and as much as he has tried to go easy on them they just won’t stay clean. His mother washes them every Saturday morning with the rest of the laundry and she presses the creases back into them with an iron heated up on the stove, but her disease is already beginning to weaken her and the filth never comes out entirely and the heat of that big rusty iron just seems to set it in. She apologizes every time she hands them over. He sizes them up and tells her that it doesn’t make any difference, but it does and she can see that but there is no help for it.

He takes them now from the carton under the bed and unfolds them and lays them out, picturing the girl behind the cash register and despairing in his heart. He simply cannot go down there dressed this way. And he certainly can’t go in his coveralls. He considers washing these poor things himself and he considers asking his mother to try again but neither course seems promising. So he folds them and puts them back in the carton and slides it back under the bed where it belongs, and when the day is done he takes them out again and brings them across the yard to Margaret Hatch. She has a brand new Bendix Duomatic in the basement, and it washes and dries both. Margaret tells him that she will do her best to get the stains out, but that if he really wants to preserve his uniform the way Preston preserved his from the second war then he might want to stick to wearing his coveralls around the farm from here on out. He says he knows that. He says he isn’t interested in keeping them but in wearing them. She sighs and says they won’t last then and he says he’ll be careful. He promises to bring them out only for special occasions.

Margaret

P
RESTON GAVE ME
that Bendix because he always had to have the very latest of everything. I never got a word in on the subject. He just brought it home one day. He meant well, but the truth is it was a step backward from what I’d had before. Not that I’d ever tell him that. Not in a million years. Not even now.

Creed’s uniform was hopeless, with that awful Bendix or without it. I took it straight to the dry cleaner’s, and even they had a terrible time with it. I don’t believe they so much as charged me, they felt so bad about how little they’d been able to do. They’d even replaced a couple of buttons that were missing, no charge.

Creed, though, he was thrilled to death. It just goes to show.

Ruth

W
ITH THE EXCEPTION
of his mother and his little sister, Creed has always found women completely inscrutable, captivating in a nearly mystical way, and troublous as snakes. They’ve borne watching, but beyond that he has never known what to do with them. Even at Camp Drum, among soldiers possessed with the romantic impulses of French legionnaires and the self-restraint of Siberian tigers, he was at a loss for role models. He would go with men from his barracks to seedy little taverns around the base and get a glass of whiskey and sit at the bar with his mouth shut and his eyes open, wondering how it was that these fellows could talk so easily to any girl about anything at all. Wondering how they’d gotten so smooth with the offer of a drink or a cigarette and where they found the courage to invite these strange creatures to dance with them, cheek to cheek.

By the time he’d worked up the courage to try his own luck, he’d been mustered out and sent home to Cassius on the railroad. And now here he is on his way into that same town all over again but on foot this time, wearing his pressed khakis and keeping up a brisk military pace in spite of the heat. His shadow stretches across the fields and his boots raise dust. He covers the six miles to the city limits in a little more than an hour and a half and it is another fifteen or twenty minutes to the far end of Madison Street, and when he pushes open the door he realizes that he is ravenous. The place is air-conditioned and the difference in temperature hits him hard. He shivers and he feels the long wet stripe down his back go icy. The spots under his arms too. There are booths and stools and all of the booths are taken but that’s all right. That’s fine. He doesn’t want a booth. He sits on a stool by the cash register where he saw the girl before, as if she were some vision that might appear only in that one particular spot. He keeps his arms pressed tight to his sides and he waits for her to come around from the back and take his order.

When she comes out her face is flushed pink and she is adjusting the shoulders of the sweater she has to wear because of how cold they keep the restaurant. She apologizes for making him wait, saying that she likes it better back in the kitchen where at least there is a little bit of warmth but that’s no excuse. She knows it. She reaches into her apron pocket for a pad and a pencil and asks him what he’ll have. He looks from her to the menu and he chews his lip. She says she is sorry but there aren’t any specials tonight. They sold out an hour ago. He’ll have to come in earlier next time. But the meat loaf is good and so are the pork chops and can she get him some coffee while he makes up his mind.

Creed says coffee will be all right. What he really wants is some ice water but he doesn’t know if it’s all right to ask for two different drinks. Even one hot and one cold. She disappears to fetch the coffee and take care of some other customers and when she comes back she has both the coffee cup and a glass of ice water and he tells himself that he has made a very fine decision in coming here. He takes a sip of the water and studies her name tag with a kind of alarming intensity and then he tells her he thinks he’ll have the meat loaf if it’s anywhere near as good as she says it is. He says it in tones so serious as to border on accusatory, as if she has tried to work some fraud upon him and he means to call her bluff.

She says it is every bit that good and it comes with green beans or carrots on the side and does he want his potato baked or mashed. He asks do the potatoes come with the meat loaf or are they extra. She says they come with it and he says in that case mashed. He squints down at the menu and up at her again. As for the carrots or green beans why doesn’t she pick. She touches the name tag on her sweater as if to dust from it whatever is drawing his attention. The green beans, she says, on account of she hates cooked carrots like anything, and he says all right.

She says it’ll be out in two shakes, hon, and he very nearly faints.

Hon
.

Later he will blame it on the heat.

He eats with a mechanical intensity, sawing the meat loaf into regular cubes and spearing each cube with his fork and loading up mashed potatoes on the back of the fork and shoveling it all in upside down. He cuts the green beans into pieces and he spears great quantities of them with the fork as if he is loading hay and he shovels them in too. When he is finished he takes rolls from the basket and tears them in half one by one and mops up the last of the gravy, and then he sits back on his stool and smacks his lips and inhales as with the satisfaction of a job well done. As an afterthought he reaches for the water glass and drains that too. The waitress comes by and he points to his gleaming plate and says he guesses they might not even have to wash that for the next customer.

She says she doesn’t know about that but she marvels at it anyhow. He checks her name tag again and says I guess that’ll be all for me tonight, Wilma, and she does not correct him. When the check comes he pays it exactly, down to the cent, counting it out twice over in dimes and nickels and pennies. Then he goes out into the dying heat and walks on home, light as air.