Things as They Are (3 page)

Some louts and layabouts got the wrong idea from this, they figured King for a soft touch. “Catch you next time, my good man,” Harvey Ferguson would say, climbing out of the chair. Harvey had eighteen months of haircuts on tick when one day King threw a head-lock on him in the chair. He squealed like a stuck pig, but King buried the clippers to his scalp, yanked him out of the chair, and pitched him into the street with a furrow through his thatch like a line down blacktop. Nobody knew what set it off. I asked King, in private.

“Because he farted,” said King. “Here the son of a bitch owes me for a year and a half of haircuts and he can’t make the little bit of extra effort to pinch one back when I’m working on him? No, Harvey just lets her drift free and easy, like he’s a rose in the Rose Bowl Parade. Well, I
drifted
him, I showed him a
parade.”

You’d believe King’s unpredictability would be held against
him but it wasn’t. It was appreciated. Some smirking fool was always sidling up to me. “Hear what your brother done now?” he’d ask.

The most unpredictable thing King ever done was run after Ruby Diehl. Given all the girls he’d had, or could have had, who’d ever have thought he’d fall for a woman like her? And, strange to say, it pleased people that King Walsh could lose his head over a homely woman.

Ruby tried, after a fashion, to make herself attractive. Unfortunately, her home dye jobs came out the colour of one of those creosote-treated railroad ties, a streaky, oily, rusty-black. Painting her fingernails and toenails wasn’t such a good idea either because it drew attention to the size of her feet and hands, which was considerable. Too much face powder in the summer only succeeded in making her eyes and nose look all the redder and runnier when she was suffering from hay fever.

Ruby operated the switchboard for the town telephone exchange out of her father’s clapboard house, details which give some indication of how long ago all this happened. Ruby was not King’s first fling since he’d heard wedding bells. Already there had been the sort of girl who make themselves available to men like King, but never anything serious. I knew about these women because King got in the habit of asking me to lend him the use of an unoccupied room in the hotel where I worked as desk clerk. I didn’t like to oblige him, but I knew it was better he put himself in my hands rather than somebody else’s who might talk. I wanted no hurt to come to Elsie.

Ruby Diehl wasn’t cut on the pattern of those other girls though. The ladies in Advance might deplore the way she trowelled the paint on, but there had never been a word spoken against her reputation. All that make-up was just spinster silliness, a woman thirty-five trying to lose ten years with a compact, they said.

I must have been one of the first to spot them together, although I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Out driving in the country one Sunday afternoon, inspecting the crops, I
met King’s Ford on the road. I had to look twice to be sure I saw what I saw – little Sonny (he must have been about two years old then), standing up on the front seat between King and Ruby. Now that’s strange, I said to myself. I never knew Elsie and Ruby were friendly. Because Ruby and King was so impossible a connection I never made it. I just assumed Ruby was in charge of the baby to give Elsie a break since King couldn’t be trusted to do a proper job – wiping up shit and snot being beneath him.

But then people began to question me about my brother and Ruby. From the doubtful tone of their voices I could tell they couldn’t believe what the signs were pointing to, and figured I had an explanation for it. But I didn’t. For the life of me, I didn’t know why King and Ruby were taking Sunday drives in broad daylight, or why he had been seen slinking outside Diehl’s house when dusk was coming on, walking slowly up and down the sidewalk with a desperate hunch to his shoulders.

I knew my brother, I knew if I asked him for the straight goods he wouldn’t lie. He was relieved, glad to talk to somebody about it. King seemed bewildered by what had happened to him, the strange way it had started. You see, Ruby had asked him to come to her father’s house to cut the old man’s hair. Her father had begun to wander in his mind. She was worried that he might cause embarrassment in the barbershop. He said filthy words out loud.

So King had done as she asked because he could always be made to feel sorry for people. And when it came time to settle up, he didn’t want to take any money for a neighbourly act, but Ruby kept insisting and insisting until finally he told her that all the payment he wanted for cutting the old man’s hair was a kiss from his pretty daughter. Now King meant this as a joke and never expected poor Ruby to take him up on it, but she did. She kissed him and then she kept right on kissing him. According to King there was no stopping her.

All right, I said, you made a mistake but
this
has got to stop. There’s talk already. Taking Sonny in the car with you when
you go driving with Ruby Diehl won’t protect her good name any more. She’s a lonely woman and its wrong to lead her on. You have to break this off.

“Maybe I don’t want to break this off,” said King. “Maybe I can’t.”

It was true. From the look on his face I could see it was true. He had tried to stay away from her but found he couldn’t. He’d swear off Ruby, then turn around the next minute and telephone her to make an appointment behind the lilacs. This was how they spoke of adultery, behind the lilacs. When it got dark, Ruby stole out of the house with a blanket and lay down behind the Diehls’ lilac hedge to wait for King to come to her. The hedge stood flush against the sidewalk. Occasionally they heard footsteps and their passion would turn to stone, the two of them hardly breathing until the passersby rounded the corner. King said when they went absolutely still like that and waited, all the world stood brave and clear to him in a way he had never known before, he could feel the stars staring down, the heavy sweetness of the lilacs pressing in, the damp grass under his hands. He could feel the life in everything around him, the life in himself.

When a man talks in such a peculiar way, you know the thing is far from being over. By winter what they were up to was common knowledge in the town and neither one seemed to be making much effort to hide it. As her father grew sicker and feebler in his mind, Ruby had less to fear from him, and she began inviting King into the house. After a light snow, a man’s footprints could be plainly seen on the walk to the Diehls’ door.

Anybody else but King would have run the risk of being laughed at for taking up with a woman older than himself, and an unbecoming one to boot. But not King. To the beer-parlour crowd he was a hero.

“She was saving it all those years. You know how crazy they get saving it.”

“Itching for it.”

“And King owns the scratcher.”

“If I know King, he’s got more than scratching up his sleeve. Mark my word, boys, thar’s gold in them thar hills. Old Diehl has deep pockets.”

“Fucking King. He was born lucky.”

“You got to make your luck. There she was sitting on that little toy all those years, but it was King who unwrapped it and taught her how much fun it was.”

“That son of a bitch.”

Shortly after old man Diehl died, King and Ruby ran off together for the first time. My brother left a letter for me at the hotel asking me to break the news to Elsie. All Elsie said was, “We’ll see.” In forty-eight hours, hardly enough time for anyone but a wife or brother to notice they had gone missing, the two of them were back in town. During this elopement King had only one topic of conversation, Elsie’s goodness and kindness. Ruby told him if that’s the way he felt, they’d better turn the car around and go back to their former lives.

But in a matter of weeks King had had his fill of goodness and kindness and was back carrying on with Ruby Diehl like there was no tomorrow. It went on like this for two years, Ruby pressing him to make a choice and King delaying. Meanwhile Ruby was changing, she stopped painting and powdering her face, polishing her nails, dying her hair. Bit by bit her experience with King was teaching her confidence.

This may seem a strange claim to make when you consider that the second time they ran away together the same thing happened as the first. King sang Elsie’s praises in every hotel room they stopped at, which seems to me a sure way to destroy a woman’s confidence. But obviously it didn’t injure Ruby’s. She hopped a train in Winnipeg, headed east. King came back to Elsie and me.

The other night when the phone rang I expected it to be King. It was Sonny.

“Dad’s gone and done it again,” he said. “We’re losing our patience here, Myra and me.”

“What’s he done?”

“The police brought him home last night.”

“What’s he done, Sonny?” I demanded.

“They picked him up roaming around that mini-golf course in the dead of night. Way past midnight. Myra and me didn’t even know he’d slipped out of the house. He climbed a fence to get into Putt ’N’ Fun. It’s only about three feet high but God knows how he got over it with that bum hip of his. The police saw somebody moving around in there and suspected vandals so they went in to check on it.” Sonny paused. “He tried to run from them.”

“Jesus.”

“You ask me, he’s losing his marbles,” said Sonny. “He goes there every single morning, doesn’t miss a day, and now he’s climbing fences in the middle of the night.”

“What was he doing in there?”

“Search me. The police say he was just walking around, they thought maybe they heard him talking to himself. He isn’t talking now though. I can’t get anything out of him. No way he’ll confess what he was up to. Could be he doesn’t know himself. I hate to say it about my own father, but I don’t think he’s too sound in the head anymore. We try to discuss the situation with him but we get nowhere.”

“He was always stubborn,” I said.

I could hear Sonny take a deep breath on the other end of the line. “This Putt ’N’ Fun is no joke. I mean you just can’t go making free with people’s private property like that. And then look what happened last summer with that boy. He keeps hanging out there it’s bound to happen again. As Myra says, ‘It’s only a matter of time.’ He doesn’t know how lucky he was last year. If that friend of his, that Lila woman, hadn’t lied for him, God knows the hole we’d have had to dig him out of.”

I hadn’t moved on to consider any of that. All I could think of was King wandering up and down the little dark streets, talking to himself. It made me cold, frightened.

“You know,” said Sonny, “Myra and me, we’re coming to the conclusion that maybe the city isn’t the place for him.
There’s too many ways he can get into trouble here. Dad’s not a city person. He doesn’t belong here.”

Sonny waited for me to take the bait. But what am I supposed to do with King? All the accommodation I’ve got is the single I rent in the hotel where I worked all my life. I got no room for him.

“You struck a bargain, Sonny,” I told him. “Keep your end of it.”

Sonny claimed he didn’t know what I was talking about.

Most people in Advance took King for nothing but a gay dog. Elsie and I saw the other side of him, the hidden side which moves him to climb fences, slouch up and down empty streets in the dark, mutter to himself. What Sonny’s first wife Lucy said about King, about him running after life, was true. But King’s got no clear notion of what “life” is, except maybe that it’s the opposite of unhappiness. King was determined not to be unhappy.

The mood would creep up on him like a shadow. He might smile, even laugh, but if you watched him careful you’d notice it was only the muscles of his face doing a job. Everything was rote – the way he cut and combed hair, even the way his flat, empty laughter joined with everybody else’s. At our regular Friday-night poker game I gave him a nudge to remind him to crow if he won, or curse if he lost. He drank his whisky like water and it had no effect. At home he lay on the sofa with a newspaper spread over his face, or sat in front of the radio, switching from one station to the other without pause, hearing nothing. He lost his appetite for everything but black coffee. There were times his hands shook so bad he had to hide them in his pockets.

No, nothing’s wrong, he used to say.

Needing King back we got frightened, Elsie and me.

Sonny must have been reminding him of last summer. Every time he does, King phones to explain himself.

“They kept running up my heels,” he said. “I was too slow for them.”

“I know, King. I heard all this before.”

“They were sniggering at me, him and the girl.”

“You got to learn to ignore them, King.”

“I was trying to line up a four-foot putt on the Hansel and Gretel hole. But I couldn’t do her, not with all that giggling going on behind me. A fellow can’t concentrate, those circumstances.”

“They find old people funny, King.”

“A sixteen year old wears his shorts ten sizes too big, hanging down past his knees, that’s funny. What’s he expect – to grow into them? Make up your mind, I wanted to tell him, don’t get caught in no man’s land. And you should have seen what the girl has printed on her
T
-shirt, little whore. It said, ‘If it swells, ride it.’ Can you believe that? ‘If it swells, ride it.’ Jesus.”

“Was a time you’d have been one hundred per cent in agreement with the sentiment, King.”

“That’s not the point. The point is, I’m nobody’s joke. So I turns around and I says to him, ‘If you want to laugh at me, don’t do it behind my back. Be a man. Do it to my face.’ ”

“Which he did.” I reminded him.

“ ‘Chill out, dude,’ the kid says. I says, ‘Tie your goddamn shoe-laces.’ He was slopping along in these untied sneakers, it got on my nerves. ‘Don’t tell him what to do,’ says the girl. ‘You’re not his old man.’

“ ‘And a goddamn lucky thing for him I’m not,’ I said. ‘Or he’d have been fed to the pigs when his bones were soft.’

“ ‘Oh, like wow, what have we got here? Excellent rural humour? Reruns of Jed Clampett and “The Beverly Hillbillies?” That’s seriously droll,’ the kid says. ‘Melissa, did you catch what Jed said?’ And they start with the laughing again.