Knights of the Hill Country (18 page)

Just then, the light changed, and the Pawtuska boys drove off, laughing. You better believe Blaine was hotter than a spark plug on that. He pulled in right behind that truck again, only this time he got too close, and Citronella jolted against their bumper, not hard enough to cause a wreck, but plenty hard enough to mash in a dent about the size of a gravy dish back there.

That got Rachel to damning him to hell worse than a preacher at a tent revival meeting, but he didn't do nothing but laugh at her, and when them Pawtuska boys turned into the Wal-Mart parking lot, he pulled in right after them.

Trouble was, them boys piled out of that truck armed to the teeth with monkey wrenches and baseball bats. Blaine took a quick look around the parking lot to see if he might have him some allies hanging around like kids do on a Saturday night, but this early in the evening there wasn't nothing but a crew of girls setting on the hood of Darla Monroe's Camaro.

Rachel started screaming for him to get the hell out of there, but she ought to have known Blaine better than that.

“If this is the way you want it,” he said, gunning his engine, “then, boys, this is the way you're gonna get it.”

Rachel braced her hand against the dashboard again. “What are you doing? Are you crazy?”

He didn't even answer. He just threw the shifter into gear,
stomped on the gas, and yelled out the window, “Fill your hands, you sonofabitch!” Which, if you don't know, is what John Wayne yells in
True Grit,
riding off to do battle with a patch on his eye.

Old Citronella fishtailed across the pavement straight at them three boys from Pawtuska, and they took to scattering, but not before one of them flung his baseball bat hard as he could. It bounced once off the hood, then smacked a hard one into the windshield. Luckily, it didn't bust through but went rattling away off the roof.

Rachel went off like a homemade firecracker then. “You idiot! That bat could've broke clean through the window and killed me dead.”

But Blaine just said, “What are you yelling at me for? I didn't throw it.” Which was true, but Rachel didn't think that was the point and went to screaming for him to drive her home before they both did get killed.

Blaine wasn't about to drive nobody home, though. Instead, he just turned Citronella around, glared through that cracked windshield, and revved the engine. This time them Pawtuska boys scurried back to their truck and climbed in faster than a pack of squirrels into a knothole.

“Running ain't gonna save you boys,” Blaine said.

Inside the pickup, the driver was fumbling with his keys, a look on his face like he seen the shadow of God fixing to smite him down. Blaine revved the engine again and grabbed the shifter, but before he could tromp on the gas, Rachel yanked the keys out of the ignition and jammed them behind her back. Meantime, across the parking lot, the Pawtuska boys' pickup peeled away, hands flipping the bird out of the windows on both sides.

“I don't know what's got into you anymore,” Rachel said, still holding the keys behind her. “But I'm about fed up.”

Blaine just gripped on to the steering wheel, watching that pickup truck's taillights disappear down the road. “Give me my keys,” was all he said.

She didn't budge. “You keep on acting like this and some-one's gonna get hurt, and I'll tell you what, I sure don't want it to be me.”

“Darla Monroe and all her friends are over there staring at us,” Blaine said, not yelling or anything, keeping as under control as he could. “I don't want them thinking even my own girlfriend's turning against me.”

Rachel done made her mind up to have it out, though. “Don't pull that old routine on me. Just because I don't go along with everything you want to do doesn't mean I'm turning against you.”

That right there was Blaine's idea of loyalty, though, and he let her know it too. “You can bet if my buddies was here they wouldn't be yelling, 'Let me out, let me out,' and grabbing my keys away from me.”

Rachel just gave him a snort and said, “You say that like they'd be doing you a favor, but you know what? One of these days I'm not gonna be around, and you're gonna get yourself in some real trouble you can't get out of.”

“Look,” Blaine said. “Darla's walking over here. Go on and give me my keys right now.”

She glanced at Darla and then turned back to Blaine. “Can't you at least talk to me about what's bugging you?”

Blaine held out his hand and said, “Nothing's bugging me. Now you gonna give me my keys or am I gonna have to ride home with Darla?”

He got her with that one. “I give up,” she said, and dropped the keys in his palm. “If anyone's riding home with Darla, it's gonna be me. You can go drive yourself off a cliff, for all I care.”

Blaine wasn't playing no games with her, though. “If you walk off from here, don't think you're gonna call me up crying about getting back together.”

“You can forget that,” she said. “I don't even want to hear your voice unless you're down on your knees apologizing.”

He started to tell her not to hold her breath on that, but she slammed the door before he finished. And that was it. They hadn't spoke a word to each other since that night.

When he finished off telling me the story, he said he had one piece of advice that I ought to learn right now. “Don't never apologize to a girl,” he said. “They'll think they own you if you do. You can bet the sun'll burn out into a cold black cinder before Rachel gets an apology out of me.”

Well, I didn't have no apologies in mind to give at the moment neither. No girl was going to think she owned me. I told myself that over and over. But somehow it didn't make me feel no better.

I still thought Sara was one hundred percent wrong about standing by your buddies, but I did have to admit she was right about something else. I ought to go over to Tommy Don Coleridge's house and talk to him face to face. A man at least deserved a chance to tell his side of things.

The Kennisaw phone book only listed one Coleridge, so I didn't have no problem finding the right house. That was another thing that bugged me, a man Tommy Don's age living with his daddy. Sponging off him. That'd take a lot of explaining right off the bat. I rang the doorbell, but no one answered, so I knocked a couple times, not real hard, just loud enough to show I at least gave it a good try. I was about to call it quits when the door opened, and there Tommy Don stood, a paintbrush in one hand and paint spatters up and down his jeans and sweater.

“Hampton,” he said, breaking into that big wide grin of his. “I didn't expect to see you here. Come on in. It's a little chilly out there tonight.”

“It ain't bad,” I said, stepping inside. All the sudden, I was a little more nervous than I thought I'd be.

Tommy Don suggested we ought to go on out to the garage and talk. His father was resting in the other room, and he didn't want to disturb him.

“I was just finishing up some work out here,” he said, shutting the door to the garage behind us. “Have you a seat on the wooden bench over there. Sorry to have to bring you out here, but Dad hasn't been doing real well.”

There wasn't no reason to apologize about the garage. It had a good comfortable feel to it. Every corner and every shelf was filled up with the kind of stuff you'd accumulate over a long life. Old clocks, lamps, fishing tackle, scuffed-up trunks, and just about every kind of tool you could think of. Outside the side window, there was a half-moon shining in and the bushy silhouette of an evergreen tree pressing against the glass.

What Mom said about Tommy Don being a picture painter turned out to be true. He had him an easel set up by the back wall, and there was a good paint smell hanging in the air. For a second, he stood on the other side of the easel, I guess sizing up the painting there, but it was facing the other way, so I couldn't see what it was.

“Cancer,” Tommy Don said.

“Pardon me?”

“My father needs his rest because he's been fighting cancer. Started in his prostate, but it seems like it's spreading everywhere now. That's why I moved in here with him. I want him to be able to stay in his own home for as long as possible.”

“Oh,” I said. That took care of one explanation, and I got to admit I felt a pretty good-size shot of guilt over thinking he wasn't doing nothing but sponging. “Where was you living before this?”

Tommy Don took note of something on the canvas, dabbed at it with his paintbrush, and then nodded, satisfied with whatever it was he done. “Santa Fe,” he said. “I still have a studio out there.” He set the paintbrush down, pulled up an old-fashioned metal lawn chair, and took a seat.

“So, Hampton, what brings you over here today?” The painting was forgot then, and he had all his attention tuned in towards me.

I didn't know much where to start, though. I was still a little thrown off, first by finding out about his dad's cancer and then just by the comfortable way Tommy Don acted. It was hard to believe anyone like that had a rotten past to him. “Umm,” I said like a fool. “Uh. So. Santa Fe, huh? I guess that's a pretty long ways away.”

“Not that far. You can drive it in a day if you have to. I know, I've done it. Texas panhandle isn't much to look at, but when you get into New Mexico, there's just something about the landscape out there. It's spiritual.”

Now, I didn't know many folks likely to use the word
spiritual
outside of church deals, but I had heard someone else say it not too long ago. Sara. We was talking about how the land looked then too.

“I guess I know what you're thinking,” Tommy Don said. “You're wondering where your mom fits into that.”

That wasn't exactly what I was thinking, but now that he brought it up, I figured it was a pretty important point.

“I don't blame you for being concerned,” he went on. “My
mom passed on quite a while back, and I've tried to do what I can for my dad. That's what family's for.”

“My dad run off on us,” I said, which surprised even me. It wasn't something I said out loud in front of too many people.

“I know it,” Tommy Don said, and he had a look in his eyes like it really hurt him to think about that happening to me. “Your mom told me about that. It's a tough thing. I wouldn't be surprised if the two of you didn't go around thinking that was a reflection on you, but it's not. That was him. He didn't know what he had. I'll guarantee you that. But some men don't know who they are, so how can they know what they want?”

There he went, reminding me of Sara again. Made me wonder if maybe there wasn't more folks out in the world that I could talk to about things like that than I ever thought there was.

“I don't know if my mom knows what she wants neither,” I said.

“You might be surprised about her. Have you ever read any of her poetry?”

“Poetry? My mom writes poetry?”

“She does for a fact.”

That was just like her, I thought. Up to her old tricks. If Tommy Don was an artist, then she'd be artistic herself and whip out some poetry to get in good with him. But then I remembered something, just a scrap of an old memory from the days before my dad run off. I was so little, me and her could lay there on the couch with me in front and her arms around me. She held out this yellow notepad filled up with her own handwriting and little drawings, and she read off page after page out loud. It was almost like music.

“I told her,” Tommy Don went on, “she oughta send her poetry off to one of those literary journals. It's some of the most incredible I ever read. Like Emily Dickinson, only with more real-life experience.”

That impressed me right there. I had to read me some Emily Dickinson poems sophomore year. They was weird, but I liked a few of them pretty good. Not that I would've told no one that.

“See,” Tommy Don said. “She doesn't know what she's got. She has all these things inside her that she's afraid to show to anyone because one man couldn't see it in her.”

I knew a lot more than one man didn't never see what she had in her, the latest one being old Jim Houck, the hotshot from Lowery, but what Tommy Don said made sense. I sure understood how it was being around folks you couldn't show things to.

“But”—Tommy Don leaned back in his chair—“I guess all that doesn't answer the question of what happens when the time comes for me to head back to Santa Fe.”

“No, sir,” I said. “It don't answer that one.”

“And the bad thing is, I don't know what answer to give you. Too early to tell. But sometimes you have to take your chances.”

I stared at that clean-swept garage floor, remembering the time I come home to find Mom out on the front porch, the tear tracks down her cheeks. What would happen this time if someone she opened herself up to—someone who could see everything inside her—picked up and drove away? If that was Tommy Don's idea of taking chances, I didn't want no part of it. The way I seen it, you chose your side and you stuck to it, no matter what. That's what loyalty was. But then, I guessed maybe that was why Tommy Don had the bad reputation he had.

“There's something else I wanted to ask you,” I said, trying to work up the courage to come out with it.

“Ask me anything you want to,” Tommy Don said, smiling.

“Well,” I said. “It's just I was kind of wondering what happened to you on the football team back in high school.”

“What do you mean?”

I hated sounding like I was accusing him of something, but there wasn't no way around it. “The thing is, I heard you got kicked off the team.”

His smile come undone around the edges on that. “Who told you that?”

“A lot of folks.” I tried to think up the most reliable names. “Haywood Ritter. My best friend Blaine Keller's dad.”

“Old Haywood and little Frankie Keller, huh?” The smile sort of inched back, but it looked a touch sour this time.

“They said you took sides against your own team.”

“Well, I guess I remember it a little different than they do.”

“Something must've happened.” I was in the middle of it now and kept on talking even though I wasn't real sure where I was headed. “I looked you up in an old yearbook, and you was in there with the team picture, and then there was another one with you and T. Roy Strong and another guy, Bo somebody. But then you wasn't in the picture at the state championship. There ain't nobody wouldn't show up for that picture unless something pretty bad happened.”