The Ghosts of Now (2 page)

He sits up tall, trying to look as though what I said couldn’t possibly matter. “I told you, Angie. Boyd is my tennis partner. We’re pretty evenly matched, and probably the best of the tennis teams. I might even end up with a tennis scholarship when I graduate.”

“Great.” I attempt to sound more enthusiastic than I feel. “Speaking of college, if I want to get there I’d better study. You too.”

“Don’t try to be my mother,” he says. Then he shrugs and mumbles, “Yeah. Why not study? There’s nothing else to do.”

I find myself saying “Unless you’d like to try just one more game of Monopoly. This time I’m going to beat you.”

The game doesn’t last long. Jeremy puts enough hotels on Indiana to create a convention center, and of course I land on it, which wipes me out.

Jeremy heads for his room, laughing like the fiend on the late late show. I stop to rinse out my glass and hear the back door open. “Mom?”

There’s a stumbling sound, and Mom mutters something under her breath. The door from the utility room to the garage slams. I put down my dish towel and go to meet her. “Got something to carry?”

“No, no,” she says. She leans against the washing machine and makes an effort to focus on me. “Honey,” she says, spacing her words, “how did it go at school today?”

“You need some coffee.” The chill in my voice must have touched her, because she shivers.

She tries to sound lighthearted. “Oh, I’d love a cup of coffee. And you can tell me all about the new friends you’ve made.”

I take her elbow and guide her into a kitchen chair. “Mom, you’re talking to me as though I’m in the third grade.”

She sits at the table, shoulders hunched, staring at her hands, which are resting in front of her. Her blond hair may be touched up, but it’s swirled into
the latest hairstyle, and the cosmetics that give her a polished glow are the most expensive on the market. The day is sticky with stale, dragged-out summer heat, but in spite of the temperature and of having too much to drink, Mom still looks crisp and cool. She’s beautiful, and occasionally, when her acquaintances gush that I look like my mother, I really don’t mind a bit.

As I put coffee in the filter and pour water over it she raises her head and says, “You’re good at making friends, Angie. With every new school you always come home and tell me about your friends.”

“When I was little.”

“Not just then, honey. What about that Marilyn you were always with in Los Angeles?”

“Meredith.”

“Sure. Meredith.” She hiccups.

The coffee’s ready, so I bring her a cup and sit opposite her. She cradles the cup between her hands and smiles at me. “Mom,” I ask, “why did you drink too much?”

“It’s those bloody Bloody Marys.” She giggles into her coffee cup until the heat of the liquid stops her. “I mean,” she finally says, “that they taste like jazzed up tomato juice, so if I have a couple or three I don’t know it’s too many until it’s too many.”

“Then don’t have any.”

“It helps. You can’t im-imagine how much it helps. Oh, ho, ho, ho, there are things I could tell you.” She picks up the cup again, as though she’s forgotten what she was talking about, and closes her eyes as she sips.

I quickly get out of my chair. “I’ve got to study, Mom.
If you want me to make dinner, just tell me what to do.” I don’t want to hear about her problems. I’ve got enough of my own.

Mom doesn’t answer. Never mind. She’ll sleep it off in her bedroom, and when it’s close to the time Dad is due home, I’ll poke around in the refrigerator and find the chicken or ground round or whatever she had in mind. Dinner will be on the table, with Mom showing up looking great, as usual. She’ll give me a hug and tell me I’m wonderful, and that’s all we’ll ever say about it.

The telephone rings, and I pick up the kitchen extension. In how many cities, how many times have I grabbed for the phone hoping it would be someone who wanted to be a friend, only to hear the same cheery voice saying “Hi! I’m with Welcome Wagon.”

But this time the voice is deep, and it drawls, “Angie Dupree, I hope?”

I take a quick breath, steadying myself. When I answer, my voice is just as calm as his. “This has got to be Del. Right?”

“Yep,” he drawls. “You’ve got a good memory for voices.”

“That must be it.” I can’t help smiling.

“Our conversation got interrupted,” he says.

“That’s right. Where were we? Disneyland?”

“Don’t I wish,” he says. “I thought maybe I could come by your place tonight, if you’re not too busy. It’s going to stay light until around eight. I can bring the pickup and show you around Fairlie.”

“I’d like that,” I answer. He tells me he’ll come “after supper,” around six thirty. I put down the
receiver, lean against the counter, and grin. The grand tour of Fairlie, in a pickup truck. I wish I could tell Meredith about that.

At twenty after six Dad comes in the door, drops his briefcase on a chair, pulls off his suit jacket, and yanks at his tie, all in one smooth motion. He’s tall and trim, with thick brown hair, and even when he’s rumpled he carries it off as though everyone’s supposed to look that way.

He says, as he always does, “How did everything go today, Angie?” and “Where’s your mother?”

I always say “Fine” in answer to the first question, because he doesn’t hear me. Mom always comes in at this moment, and he always looks at her as though he’s just won first prize in a raffle and says something like “Well, L.A. called, and I’ve got the raise” or “The Kenneths want us to come to dinner Friday” or “I’ve got to fly to Denver tomorrow.”

And it goes like that now, only Jeremy rushes into the room, bumping and banging against one of the chairs as he tries to manage his long legs. His voice is a little high-pitched, as it gets when he’s excited. “Boyd’s stopping by tonight,” he said. “I called and asked him if he could, because I want him to meet you, and he said he might, and then he said he would, and—”

“Calm down,” Dad says. He puts a hand on Jeremy’s shoulder.

Jeremy takes a gulp of air, nods his head, and continues. “Boyd’s my tennis partner. He’s good, Dad.”

“Great,” Dad says. “I’m counting on you to be a winner.”

“I think we can win,” Jeremy says. “It’s going to take a lot of practice, though.”

I break in and say, “Listen, everybody. Dinner’s in the oven, and I’ve already eaten.”

Mom looks as though I’d said I was running a fever. “Why did you eat by yourself?”

“Because I’m going to be taken on a tour of Fairlie.” It comes out with a giggle.

They’re staring at me, waiting for me to explain, when the doorbell rings. Naturally, Jeremy reaches the door first. “It’s Boyd!” he yells and flings it wide. I wish he weren’t so eager. Mom and Dad don’t seem to notice, but I do, and it hurts.

But it isn’t Boyd. Del steps through the door, pulling off the kind of broad-brimmed, high-crowned felt western hat I’d seen a lot of around Fairlie. He’s even better-looking than I’d remembered, and I know if Meredith were here she’d groan and say, “Why’d you have to find him first?” He sticks out his right hand and shakes Jeremy’s, saying “Howdy. I’m Del Scully.”

Jeremy’s mouth is open. “Howdy—uh—hi,” he stammers.

Dad’s tall, but Del looks down on him a couple of inches as I introduce him to my parents. “Welcome to Fairlie,” Del tells them.

“Thank you,” Dad says. He’s very much the poised executive and studies Del as though he’s applied for a job. “Won’t you sit down?” he asks.

“That’s mighty nice of you to ask,” Del tells him, “but I want to show Angie around Fairlie before the sun goes down.”

“I’d like to get better acquainted, to learn something about you and your family,” Dad says.

But Del just grins again. “That would take hours and hours. Y’all will hear about us some day when we can stretch out our legs and take plenty of time.”

At first I think he’s matching Dad cool for cool, but then I realize Del’s just being open and honest. He doesn’t know that Dad’s maneuvering to take command.

Mom hasn’t said much. She just smiles kind of weakly and says, “Well, do have a nice drive.” She walks with us to the front door and takes a long look at Del’s dark blue pickup with the dent in the right front fender; her perfectly matched eyebrows get somewhat out of alignment.

“I’ll take good care of Angie, and bring her home about ten,” Del tells them. He takes my elbow and steers me down the steps, the walk, and into the front seat of his pickup truck.

As he drives away from the curb I say, “I’ve been wondering what there is to see in Fairlie.”

“I’m going to show you some things that will make you feel more at home here,” Del says.

At first I don’t believe him, but I change my mind. Because what Del shows me are people. He gives me stories, not statistics; minds, not monuments.

He drives to an older part of town, where the blocks are lined with huge, brick homes set well back from the street. “This is old Judge Wallaby’s house,” he says, as he slows by a white-brick corner home. “The judge had a daughter whose husband just seemed to
go loco and beat that little woman something awful. So she ran home to her daddy, and when the husband came after her, the judge got down his rifle and shot him dead. Shot right through that front door.”

“How awful. Did the judge go to prison?”

“Nope. Nobody blamed him. It didn’t even get to the grand jury.”

“You mean because it was self-defense?”

“Well, sure, but also because Judge Wallaby’s family helped settle this part of West Texas and build Fairlie. That son-in-law wasn’t even from around these parts.”

He drives to a huge yellow monstrosity on the next street, where it dead-ends near a gully. Overgrown, dusty shrubbery twists with scraggly trees in a tattered screen that hides much of the house. Here and there a window appears like an unblinking glass eye. “That’s the Andrews place. Miz Andrews had so much money she didn’t know what to do with it all, and after she died eight years ago every cousin and kin who ever heard her name wanted it.”

“But the house looks empty. Don’t any of her relatives live in it?”

“Maybe some of them will after the court finally settles things. Until then nobody wants to live there except the ghost.”

I turn to stare at him, but he looks serious.

“I’m not kidding. Something moves around in there at night. The neighbors have heard it. And they’ve seen flickering lights.”

“Have you?”

“Nope. But we might go looking sometime.”

We drive until the sun explodes into scarlet shatters across an orange-streaked sky and drops beyond the flat horizon, and I hear about the people who fought the dust storms to raise cattle and scratch out farmland and cluster together in neighborhoods until one day they formed a town. Oil was discovered and Fairlie expanded, with two country clubs and twenty Baptist churches and four indoor shopping malls and all the people who kept the whole thing running.

We stop at a brick building that looks purple in the garish green light from the neon sign over the door. Inside are guys and girls in jeans and cowboy hats, and lots of them look our age. Country-western music is blaring from the juke box, and a few couples are dancing close, elbows out, feet doing a fast shuffle. Some of the kids call out to Del, and he grins back at them, at the same time gripping my right elbow again and steering me in a zigzag course into a chrome and plastic chair. He hooks the heel of his boot into the spindly leg of another chair, dragging it to a spot next to mine. While I’m busy staring around the room, a waitress slaps down two large colas.

“This is where I like to hang out,” Del says. He’s watching me to see how I’ll react. Will it matter to him? This is a strange world to me, and I feel a little apart from it. But there’s something I like about it. At the moment I wouldn’t mind belonging.

“It’s nice.” I lean back in my chair, relaxing, and smile at him.

The question in his eyes slides from the corners into laugh crinkles. He puts a hand over one of mine and says, “I’d like you to meet some of my friends.”

“Okay.”

“But not now. Tonight I want to find out about Angie Dupree.”

It’s easy to tell him about the girls’ school in Los Angeles where I met Meredith, and about the fun we had together, and the surfing at Malibu and the window-shopping in Beverly Hills and the classes at the county art museum on Wilshire. But it was another planet. It was another Angie. Here, in Fairlie, Texas, a country-western singer nasally wails for a lost love, and Del’s fingers are warm and strong.

He sits up, shoving back his chair with a screech along the wooden floor. “Quarter to ten,” he says. “Time to get you home.”

“It’s still early.” I don’t want to go.

“I said ‘ten’ to your daddy. Let’s get moving.”

It’s been a strange evening. Everything from haunted houses to country music, with a guy who seems to belong in an old-fashioned western TV show. As we drive back to my home I ask myself if this makes me like living in Fairlie any better. Maybe, for the moment. But that other world is waiting. One year, and I’ll be back.

There’s a low, black sports car parked in front of our house. Del says, “Looks like you’ve got company.” He walks me to the front door, says “See you tomorrow, Angie,” turns, and leaves.

I don’t know what I expected, but this wasn’t it. What’s with this cowboy’s code? Doesn’t he kiss girls good night? I might not have kissed him anyhow. But at least he could have tried!

I shut the front door a little harder than I mean to. The voices in the living room stop, so I hurry to let them know it’s just me, and not a door-slamming burglar.

Happiness is a golden gleam in Jeremy’s eyes. “Angie, this is Boyd Thacker.”

Everyone in the room smiles with the same pleased expression. Everyone but Boyd. For a few moments his appraisal of me is penetrating and unblinking. Then he smiles with a polished charm that matches his dark good looks as he says “You’ve got a beautiful sister, Jeremy.”

I don’t say anything, so Mom giggles and says, “We agree.”

And Dad asks me, “How was your little sightseeing tour?” Not waiting for an answer, he turns to Boyd and says, as though it’s a private joke, “Angie seems to have found an honest-to-goodness cowboy.”