Yellow Mesquite (9 page)

Sidney brightened. “Oh-ho! Another Jackson Pollock, eh? A brawler, eh? Hmm. Very well, then. Ortega. That is where you will begin.” He lifted his jelly glass.
“Salud.”

Harley lifted his glass in turn. He could hear his own heart thumping. “Salute,” he repeated.

Chapter 8

Aunt Grace

H
ARLEY WALKED UP
alongside the boardinghouse. He lingered a moment, gazing up at the night sky—a velvety blue hole ringed by a dark circle of trees on one side, the boardinghouse on the other. The problem with a big city like Dallas was that you couldn’t see anything. On a night like this back in Separation, you could step outside and see the Milky Way sweeping overhead, horizon to horizon. And sometimes the night was so bright you could identify individual cows over in the pasture. In Separation, there weren’t any trees to mess up the view.

He went in through the back door. Aunt Grace came in from the parlor as he passed through the dining room. Everyone referred to her as “Aunt Grace,” though she wasn’t anyone’s aunt that he knew of. She wore a print dress with a wide lace collar, a cameo brooch at the neck, and hose rolled above her ankles. It was almost eleven o’clock and he was surprised that she was still up.
 

“Good evening,” she said, fanning the sweat-shine on her forehead with a Japanese fan. She nodded at his paint box. “I see you’ve been to your little art class.”

“Hello, Aunt Grace.” He didn’t bother to explain that he had dropped that class weeks before, and was working with Sidney two or three evenings a week now. Neither did he take offense at her use of “little” in reference to his art. Aunt Grace’s view was that outside of religion, little in this world was important. She was a large, rounded woman with steel-rimmed glasses and smooth, iron-gray hair drawn back in a knot at the nape of her neck, a severe woman with an imposing presence. He had come to think of her as a Fernand Léger with a Grant Wood’s
American Gothic
face. It pleased him to make these associations now that he was up to his ears in art history, an undertaking prescribed by Sidney along with a study of ancient and modern philosophy. He felt like he was practically in college.

“Would you like a glass of milk?” Aunt Grace asked.

He hesitated in surprise. “No, thanks. I grabbed a hamburger earlier.”

“My, my. You young people, always on the go, just a-raring and a-tearing to get at life. Well, you’re a nice young man with ambition.” She squinted at him as if to reassure herself that this was true.
 

“Uh, thanks.”

“I knew from the first that you were a gentleman. Your mother did a good job with your upbringing.” Aunt Grace paused. “You
are
a nice young man.” It sounded more like a question.

“Well…”

“So many young people these days, thoughtless, selfish, never time for anyone or anything but themselves.”

He didn’t know what to say to that.

Aunt Grace fanned herself. “It’s because they don’t have the love of Jesus in their hearts.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She paused. “Would you like a piece of chocolate pie? Mattie made some this afternoon. Very good.”

His surprise turned to bewilderment. “Thanks, but—”

“Good then.”
 

Reluctantly, he followed her into the kitchen. A food safe from another era stood against the wall, six pies on the shelves behind the screen doors. Aunt Grace took one out and cut a wedge from it. The chocolate was an inch deep on a graham-cracker crust, and there was a good two inches of white meringue lightly browned on top with beads of syrup.
 

“Get a glass from the cabinet,” she said. “There’s milk in the refrigerator.”

“Isn’t this for tomorrow’s dinner?”

“You don’t have that many meals with us, your little art classes and all. Here, you want to bring that along and sit with me in the parlor?”

It wasn’t something he wanted to do at all, but she took up a paper napkin and he followed her out.
 

“You can set it right there on that coffee table. Here, let’s put this chair in a little closer so you don’t spill.”
 

He felt like a child as Aunt Grace arranged his setting. She then settled into a wingback alongside a floor lamp, the shade heavy with yellowed fringe. She and her ancestors in their oval frames had him surrounded. She took off her glasses and wiped them with a little lace handkerchief she kept tucked into her narrow black patent-leather belt. Without her glasses she no longer looked so imposing, but tragic, vulnerable as an unshelled mollusk. How could you draw a woman like that, big, yet make her appear frail and vulnerable? He thought about something Sidney had said:
“
The appearance of a thing is only one of its realities.”

“Is something wrong?” Aunt Grace squinted, her head angled at him.
 

“Oh…no. Sorry. I was just thinking about something.”

“Yes. Well.” Aunt Grace strained toward him with her weak eyes, then put her glasses back on and looked normal again. “My little niece is coming up from Louisiana.”

“Oh?” Harley cut off a bite-size chunk of pie with his fork.

Aunt Grace settled into the wingback with a sigh. “I have no idea what a girl that age is like these days.”

“How long is she staying?”
 

Aunt Grace picked up the paper fan. “Indefinitely.” She took a tug at her lace collar and frowned. “Yes. Indefinitely.”
 

“Her folks coming too?”

“Unfortunately, she only has a mother. Well, she
does
have a stepfather but… I’m afraid the mother isn’t able to care for the girl, poor dear.”

“That’s too bad.” He had trouble picturing Aunt Grace with a little kid to raise.

“She’s coming in on the bus tomorrow.” Aunt Grace began to fan herself again. “I was wondering, how would you like to go with us to the Cotton Bowl tomorrow night to hear Brother Billy Graham? You’re a nice boy and I think Sherylynne would like that.”

“Me?” Harley said, suddenly alarmed.

“I’m sure Sherylynne would be pleased.”

“Uh, I don’t know anything about little kids…”

Aunt Grace stopped fanning. “Little kid? No, no. She’s sixteen.”

Harley stared.

“You thought…” Aunt Grace paused, amused.
 

“I thought you meant little, like a little kid,” he said.
 

“No, no. Sherylynne is sixteen, going on seventeen. I thought she might feel more at home…well, if someone near her own age…that you might accompany us to the Cotton Bowl. A little welcome for Sherylynne.”

“Uh, well, uh…” He couldn’t think of a single reason not to go with Aunt Grace and this Sherylynne to hear Billy Graham, not one thing that wasn’t an obvious excuse. “Uh, sure,” he mumbled. “I guess so.”
 

“She’s a charming girl who has had very little opportunity.” Aunt Grace fixed him with her steely squint. “It’s harder for girls, don’t you think?”
 

“Yes, ma’am. I guess so. She gonna go to school here?”

Aunt Grace averted her eyes and stood up, her old stern self again. “If you’re finished, we’d better call it a night.” Harley took his dishes into the kitchen. “Leave them in the sink,” Aunt Grace said. “Mattie will take care of them in the morning.”
 

“Thank you. That was good.”

“Good night.” Aunt Grace switched off the parlor lights.

He went upstairs. Why in hell was he thanking Aunt Grace? He’d been had. Snookered with a piece of pie and a glass of milk.

Chapter 9

Rebound

I
T RAINED ALL
day and they played penny-ante poker under the tarp on back of the sand truck. By five o’clock, when Berry let Harley out at the corner and Harley paid him for the week’s rides, the rain had stopped, the sun low and dim in a gray sky.
 

Harley took a clean change of clothes to the shower. Afterward, he lay across his bed and read a few pages from Nietzsche’s
Beyond Good and Evil
, one of the books Sidney had assigned him. He bought his books at a used bookstore near Southern Methodist University.

Aunt Grace’s two dining tables were long, men at one, women at the other. These meals with all the boarders lined up at the tables reminded Harley of cattle lined up at feed troughs. The men were mostly middle-aged. Men in boardinghouses, he had concluded, were either on their way up, or on their way down, mostly down. Attempts at cheerfulness and the occasional laughter were undermined by a mood of melancholy: the inability of men and women to give or receive comfort for the secret tragedies of their lives. They made attempts, smiled and indulged in self-conscious conversation, but mostly each nursed his or her failures and defeats privately. The only other man near Harley’s age was a mildly retarded boy who delivered prescriptions for a drugstore. Harley learned there had been another “kid,” a crop-duster who killed himself flying under a power line. Harley had his old room.
 

When everyone was seated, Aunt Grace took her place at the head of the women’s table near the kitchen. She bowed her head and everyone went silent. “Lord, thank you for bringing us together again in good health. Bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies and forgive us our sins. In Jesus’ name we ask. Amen.” Immediately there was a rush of activity, murmuring voices and creaking chairs as bodies reached and stretched and adjusted, a clinking and clanking of dishes and flatware as platters were hoisted and food was spooned and speared. Occasionally someone would try to help the retarded boy, but he’d get upset, so mostly they let him be his independent self and make a mess.
 

Harley often missed the evening meal altogether. Tonight he had hoped for a preview of Aunt Grace’s niece, but she was a no-show. Finally Aunt Grace and Mattie picked up dirty dinner plates and served the pie on saucers. The slices were noticeably smaller than what he’d been bribed with the night before.

Aunt Grace took his plate up and set a sliver of pie in its place.
 

“Be down at seven,” she commanded in an aside.

He wondered what she would do if he stood up and saluted.

IN ADDITION TO
the front entrance, there were two rear entrances to the big sprawling Victorian, but only the rear entrance by way of the kitchen was open to roomers. The other entrance led to Aunt Grace’s private quarters.
 

At seven o’clock he stood before this entrance, braced himself and knocked. Aunt Grace opened the door and ushered him inside. “Come on in,” she said, beaming over her glasses.

“Hello,” he muttered, entering a small foyer. A tall piece of hall furniture with an oval mirror stood against the wall among old sepia photos in oval frames. The piece had a low seat with little compartments on either side containing an umbrella and rubber boots. On the seat were neatly stacked copies of
Reader’s Digest
and
The Baptist Standard
.

Aunt Grace ushered him into her living area. Again the fine old furniture was impressive. The house must have been something in its day, and he tried to imagine Aunt Grace as a young girl, lighthearted and with a young girl’s dreams. Now the rooms smelled vaguely of Vicks salve and furniture wax. He felt sad for her, a loveless woman reduced to taking in boarders. He wondered what it must have been like that first day, moving the best of everything to these private rooms before hanging out the first vacancy sign.

“Nice place—” he began, then almost lost his voice as an auburn-haired willow limb of a girl with a light flush of freckles across her nose swept into the room.

“This is my niece, Sherylynne. Sherylynne, Harley, the nice young man I told you about.”

The girl dipped her chin, a flash-smile as her eyes locked with his for the briefest moment and they took each other in. His senses scrambled. He could hardly breathe.

“Nice to meet you,” he managed.

“Nice to meet you, too.” Her voice flooded him like a drug.
 

She wore a white sleeveless dress and flats. Her hair was dark and hung down long in back. Her eyes were full of light, though he saw now that her left cheek was faintly discolored, a pale lavender with a tinge of yellow. She saw that he saw and lowered her gaze. Still, she came toward him, dreamy, fluid, disjointed, her body parts seeming to move independent of one another. Her hand floated up and he took it, certain she could feel his pulse pounding through his fingers.

“Sherylynne, you best take a sweater,” Aunt Grace was saying. “It may be chilly out there in that Cotton Bowl.”

“Yes, my sweater.” Sherylynne flashed him another quick smile. He wanted to laugh out loud. He wanted to grab Aunt Grace and hug her neck—he wanted to calm down so as not to make a fool of himself.

He and Sherylynne played sneak-a-look-and-smile around Aunt Grace in the Cotton Bowl all evening, and when at the end of Billy Graham’s sermon hundreds of people were pouring out of the stands to be saved and rededicate their lives, Harley felt a little guilty because he hadn’t heard a word the man said. He didn’t feel guilty enough not to take Sherylynne’s hand when Aunt Grace got up and trundled down onto the field to make a public rededication of her own. Sherylynne’s leg wandered against his. They smiled into each other’s eyes—full of mystery, full of promise—and kept a sharp lookout for Aunt Grace.

THE NEXT EVENING
they exchanged secret glances across the dinner tables. After dessert they said good night to Aunt Grace and took the bus downtown to the movies, leaving Aunt Grace clucking pleasantly to herself. Later that night, he and Sherylynne stood just inside the open garage under the women’s quarters. Laundry hung on lines above two washing machines and two dryers against the back wall. They kissed until his mouth was sore, pressed against each other until his pecker was raw from rubbing against Sherylynne’s pubic bone.
 

From the house, Aunt Grace turned on the garage light.

THE FOLLOWING EVENING
they took a walk, leaving Aunt Grace with a thin smile and a worry line across her forehead. They walked almost all the way to downtown to a drugstore with a soda fountain.