Terms of Endearment (37 page)

“Lord knows the trouble it saves,” she remarked, to general agreement, and the conversation, such as it was, was largely concerned with the question of unwanted pregnancies. A woman who was sitting in one of the toilets was regaling everyone with a story about unwanted triplets when with no warning at all a small male Cajun popped through the door and right into their midst. The appearance of F.V. was so startling that no one noticed the small frightened-looking redhead who was right on his heels; but the shock that followed when the truck hit the wall was nothing anyone could miss. Gretchen fell right off the lavatory, and a blonde named Darlene opened her mouth to scream and dropped a false eyelash in it. F.V., off balance to begin with, had the bad fortune to fall right on top of Gretchen.

“It’s a monster, get him away,” Gretchen screamed. She assumed she was about to be raped and rolled on her belly and kept screaming. A couple of women rolled out from under the doors of the toilet stalls. They assumed a tornado had struck, but when they saw F.V. they began to scream for the police. Rosie had her ear to the door, and could hear the wheels of the truck
spinning on the slick dance floor. When she looked around she saw that F.V. was in real trouble. Five or six women had leaped on him to keep him from raping Gretchen, and a particularly tough-looking young brunette was trying to strangle him with a tubular syringe.

“Naw, naw,” Rosie said. “He ain’t out to hurt nobody. He just run in here to hide. My husband tried to run over him in a truck.”

“He dove at me,” Gretchen said.

“You mean there’s a truck loose in this dance?” the young brunette said. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard of.”

She hurried over and peeked out the door. “Aw,” she said, “it’s just a little truck. I thought you meant a cattle truck, or something like that. Anyway, it’s driving off.”

Gretchen was still looking at F.V. with burning eyes. The news that a truck was loose in the dance hall seemed to mean nothing to her at all. “I still think he’s an ol’ sex fiend,” she said, looking at F.V. “A man that waits till he’s right between my legs to fall down may fool you, honey, but he ain’t fooling me.”

F.V. decided Royce was the lesser of two evils. He ran out the door, with Rosie close behind him. On the dance floor a scene of pandemonium reigned. Royce had a headache from bumping his windshield, and had decided to go back to his original plan, which had been to run over the two sinners in the parking lot. To make that work he had to get back to the parking lot, and it wasn’t proving easy. The patrons of the J-Bar had had time to size up the situation, and a number of the drunkest and most belligerent began to throw things at the truck—beer bottles particularly. The outraged vocalist had managed to locate the two security policemen, both of whom had been taking lengthy craps when the trouble started. The two policemen rushed onto the dance floor with guns drawn, only to discover that the criminal was in retreat.

Royce ignored the rain of beer bottles and plowed on across the dance floor, honking from time to time. The two policemen, plus Bobby and John Dave and the vocalist, began to chase the truck. Neither of the policemen was the sort to enjoy having a crap interrupted, though, and they weren’t running their best.
When a small man jumped out at them and yelled “Stop!” they stopped.

“Don’t stop,” the vocalist yelled, very annoyed.

Rosie joined Vernon. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she assured the policemen. “It’s my husband. He’s crazed with jealousy, that’s all.”

“I knowed it, Billy,” one of the policemen said. “Just another goddamn family fight. We could have stayed where we was.”

“Family fight, my Lord in heaven,” John Dave said. “Lookit this dance hall! Hurricane Carla never done us this much damage.”

“No problem, no problem,” Vernon said quickly, pulling out his money clip. He peeled off several hundred dollars. “The man’s my employee and I’ll make good your damages,” he assured them.

At that moment there was the sound of a car wreck. Despite the bottles and an occasional chair, Royce had managed to drive more or less calmly down the length of the dance floor and out the hole he had made coming in. It was just after he got out that the wreck occurred. The large man in the blue Pontiac had thought it all over and decided to come back and throw the little man against the wall again, and he was driving along slowly, looking for him, when Royce drove through his hole. Darrell, the large man, was not expecting anyone to drive out of the wall of the dance hall and was caught cold. The impact threw Royce out the door of his truck and onto the asphalt of the parking lot.

The next thing Royce knew he was looking up at a lot of people he didn’t know, all of whom were looking down at him. The surprising thing was that there was one person in the crowd he did know, namely his wife Rosie. The events of the evening, particularly the unexpected car wreck, had confused Royce a good deal, and he had for the moment completely forgotten why it was he had come to the J-Bar Korral in the first place.

“Royce, just keep still now,” Rosie said. “Your ankle’s broken.”

“Aw,” Royce said, looking at it curiously. It was the ankle belonging to the foot on which he had no shoe, and the sight of his sock, which wasn’t even particularly clean, made him feel deeply embarrassed.

“I never meant to come with just one shoe on, Rosie,” he said, doing his best to meet his wife’s eye. “The reason is Shirley’s damn old dog carried the other one off.”

“That’s all right, Royce,” Rosie said. She saw that Royce had forgotten her little indiscretion for the moment; he just looked tired, drunk, and befuddled, as he often did on Friday night, and squatting down beside him in the parking lot, with hundreds of excited people around, was indeed a little bit like waking up from a bad dream, since the man before her was so much like the same old Royce instead of the strange new hostile Royce she had been imagining for several weeks.

Royce, however, felt a little desperate. It seemed very important to him that Rosie understand he had not deliberately set out to embarrass her. Long ago his own mother, a stickler for cleanliness, had assured him that if he didn’t change his underwear at least twice a week he was sure to be killed in a car wreck someday wearing dirty underwear, a fact that would lead inevitably to the disgrace of his whole family. A dirty sock and one shoe was maybe not so bad as dirty underwear, but Royce still felt that his mother’s prophecy had finally been fulfilled, and he needed to do what he could to assure Rosie it hadn’t really been his fault.

“Looked ever’where for it,” he said morosely, hoping Rosie would understand.

Rosie was plain touched. “That’s all right, Royce, quit worryin’ about that shoe,” she said. “Your ankle’s broke an’ you wouldn’t be able to wear it anyhow. We got to get you to a hospital.”

Then, to Royce’s great surprise, Rosie put her arm around him. “Little Buster asked about you, hon,” she said softly.

“Aw, Little Buster,” Royce said, before relief, embarrassment, fatigue, and beer overwhelmed him. Soon, though, he was completely overwhelmed. He put his head on his wife’s familiar slate-hard breastbone and began to sob.

In that he was not alone for long. Many of the women and even a few of the men who had gathered around forgot that they had come out to tear Royce limb from limb. At the sight of such a fine and fitting reunion the urge for vengeance died out in the crowd’s collective breast. A number of women began to sob too, wishing they could have some kind of reunion. Darrell, the owner
of the ill-fated Pontiac, decided to forgive Royce instead of stomping him, and went off with his girl friend to continue the argument they were having over whether “titty” was an okay word. Bobby and John Dave shook their heads and accepted ten of Vernon’s one-hundred-dollar bills as collateral against whatever the damages might total up to be. They realized that, once again, the East-Tex Hoedown had been a big success. The two policemen went back to their bowel movements, Vernon started an unsuccessful search for F.V., and Mitch McDonald, Royce’s best buddy, immediately went to a phone booth to call Shirley and tell her Royce had gone back to his wife. He made it clear that he had nothing but forgiveness in his heart, and hinted rather broadly that his own, very own, old thing was aching to have Shirley come and sit on it again. To which Shirley, who was filling beer pitchers with her free hand at the time, said, “Sit on it yourself, you little tattletale. I got better things to do if you don’t mind.”

Rosie knelt by her husband, gratefully receiving the warm sentiments of the crowd. Many a woman leaned down to tell her how happy she was that she and her husband had got it all straightened out. Royce had cried himself to sleep against her breast. Soon an ambulance with a siren and a revolving red light screamed up and took Royce and Rosie away, and then two big white wreckers came and got the Pontiac and the potato chip truck. Some of the crowd straggled back through the hole in the wall to talk things over, others drifted off home, and many stayed where they were—all of them happy to have witnessed for once, such passion and compassion. Then, when all was peaceful, a spongy raft of clouds blew in from the Gulf, hiding the high wet Houston moon, and the clouds began to drop a soft, lulling midnight drizzle on the parking lot, the cars, and the happy, placidly milling crowd.

CHAPTER XIV

1.

T
HE NEXT
morning Aurora was downstairs early, merrily making her way toward breakfast. She was not so much making it as compiling it from a number of exotic leftovers and a new omelette recipe she intended to try. She was watching the
Today
show with one eye and thinking to herself what a good idea it had been to reduce her load of suitors, since it meant she didn’t have to attend to such a confusing battery of morning calls. Without the calls she was able to make much better breakfasts, and she could not remember anything that had been said on any of the calls that could compete with food.

Just as she was tasting some plum jelly to see if it was holding its flavor the General came through the back door and slammed it resoundingly.

“Hector, it’s hardly the door of a tank,” Aurora said mildly. “It’s not made of plated steel. How are you this morning?”

“You’ll find out,” the General said. He immediately poured himself some coffee.

“Where’s the paper?” Aurora asked, switching off the
Today
show to watch him a minute.

“It’s in the goddamn yard, if it’s been delivered,” the General said. “I’m not in the mood for it just now.”

“No, I can see that you’re in a snit,” Aurora said. “Naturally you would decide to be in a snit on a brilliant morning when I happen to be in a wonderful mood and could be talked into almost anything. There’s not a bit of telling what I could be talked into if only I had a cheerful man for five minutes.”

“Well, you don’t,” the General said succinctly.

“Tsk, tsk, what a waste,” Aurora said. “Go back and get the paper then.”

“I told you once I wasn’t in the mood for it,” the General said, taking his place at the table.

“I heard you once and your mood is quite irrelevant to the issue at hand,” Aurora said. “It’s my paper and one of your little obligations under the terms of our new arrangement is that you bring it in to me in the morning. I am always in the mood for it, since there seems to be little else to do with you around.”

“I’m sick of your sexual innuendos,” the General said. “What do you think life is?”

“It could be very nearly a pure pleasure if men weren’t such spoilsports,” Aurora said. “I refuse to take this bad mood of yours seriously, Hector. Just go get me the paper, please, and I’ll make you a delicious omelette and we’ll start over on the day once we’ve eaten.”

“I won’t get you the paper,” the General said. “If I get it you’ll sit there and read it for two hours, singing opera. I don’t sing opera when I read the paper and I don’t see why you should. You shouldn’t read and sing at the same time. I particularly don’t want to watch you read and listen to you sing right now, because I’m very annoyed and I want some answers.”

“My God, what a pill you are,” Aurora said. “I’m beginning to wish I had some of my other suitors back.”

Without further ado she went out the back door and got the
paper. The sun was high and the grass was shining with water from the midnight rain. A gray squirrel was sitting on her lawn, very erect and evidently not at all discomfited by the wet grass. He was often on her lawn in the mornings, and Aurora sometimes said a word or two to him before going back in.

“Well, you’re a pleasing sight,” she said. “If you were only a little tamer you could come in and have breakfast with me. I have lots of nuts.”

She picked a few flowers, wet though they were, and went back to the kitchen, hoping the General’s mood had improved in her absence.

“I was talking to a squirrel, Hector,” she said. “If you took more interest in animal life you might be a jollier man. The only animals you ever see are those spotted dogs you’re so fond of. Frankly, those dogs are not terribly well behaved.”

“They are perfectly behaved around me,” the General said. “They are wonderful animals, I do not want any others, and I do not want to be a jollier man.”

“Oh, Hector, what do you want then,” Aurora said, flinging down her paper. His scratchy tone was beginning to irritate her exceedingly.

“Tell me,” she said. “I must confess it’s more than I can figure out. I’m wearing my new red robe and it’s a wonderful morning and I had a nice breakfast planned. I was quite prepared to go to unusual lengths to please you today, just to see if we could get through one day without you being surly, but now I see it’s hopeless. If you’re going to be surly you might at least tell me what you fancy you have to be surly about.”

“F.V. never came home,” the General said. “He wasn’t there this morning. I had no one to drive my car, so I couldn’t go on my run. I’ve been waiting for him for two hours. The dogs are frantic. They get very upset when they don’t get their exercise.”

“My goodness, Hector, you could just turn them loose,” Aurora said. “They could just run around like normal dogs. I wouldn’t think it would hurt you to miss your run now and then. You’re too skinny as it is. Much as I admire you for keeping up your standards, I do think you could lower them a bit now that you have me to entertain you.