Where You Once Belonged (4 page)

Thus he finished his senior year at Holt County Union High School in style. He lived upstairs in the Letitia Hotel. He worked every day at the Co-op Elevator among grown men who admired him. He played poker with his friends in a room he had paid for himself. And on Sunday nights he drank cold beer that had been chilled in somebody else’s refrigerator. It was a high-school boy’s dream of a dream.

Except that there turned out to be one final hitch in this too: while most of the adults in town and even the high-school principal took a tolerant view of Jack’s activities, Arnold Beckham did not. Arnold Beckham was the sheriff. He was one in the long string of Bud Sealy’s elected predecessors and he wasn’t stupid. He understood that this weekly teenage hell-raising might not only endanger his reelection the next time he ran for sheriff but that it might even reduce the amount of his eventual hard-earned pension. He couldn’t tolerate that. Consequently he took measures to protect himself.

One night about midnight, toward the end of April, Sheriff Beckham climbed up the narrow stairs at the hotel and knocked on the door to Jack’s room. It was a Sunday night and as usual four or five of us were playing cards. When we heard the knock there was sudden quiet in the room. Jack nodded at Wanda Jo Evans, who rose obediently from the bed in the corner. She had been doing Jack’s homework. Now, still carrying a textbook and one of the cheap tablets under her arm, she crossed to the door and opened it slightly.

“Wanda Jo,” Arnold said. “You tell that boyfriend of yours to come out here.”

Wanda Jo shut the door.

“Now what?” one of us whispered. “Jesus, he’s going to tell my folks.”

“Stop your crying,” Jack said. “I’ll handle this.”

He stood up from the wooden box in the center of the room and stepped out into the hallway. We could see Arnold through the open door.

“Sheriff,” Jack said. “What can I do for you?”

Arnold Beckham was a short man with a wiry ring of black hair above his ears. He looked Jack up and down. Then he began to speak. It was as if, on his way over, he had prepared a speech.

“Now look,” he said. “I know what’s going on in there and I know who’s in there with you. And I don’t care a damn what you do or who you do it with. But by god, boy, the first time somebody calls me up in the middle of the night complaining how his kid ain’t home in bed yet, or somebody else says there’s empty beer bottles scattered all over their petunia patch—well by god, boy, I’ll close you down so fast you won’t have time to kiss it good-bye or even hide your beer. You understand me?”

“On what charge?” Jack said.

“You ain’t listening,” Arnold Beckham said. Then he did something none of us expected. He reached up and grabbed Jack’s shirt at the throat and pulled Jack’s big face down toward his own. “I don’t need no charge,” he said. “On whatever comes to mind.”

“Let go. We’ll keep it quiet. You don’t have to worry.”

“No, now,” Arnold said. He twisted the shirt tighter in his fist. “You still ain’t listening. Because I’m not going to worry. See? I’m not the one that’s going to worry.”

“All right. We’ll keep it down. Now let go. You’re messing my shirt up.”

“Am I? Well tough titty.”

Then Sheriff Beckham stared into Jack’s eyes. Their faces were only inches apart. But finally he released him.

“So is that all you wanted?” Jack said.

“No, that is not all I wanted,” Arnold Beckham said. “I’d like a fishing cabin in the mountains and a young girl waiting on me. And just now I wisht I was in bed. But that’ll do for starters. Now you mind what I said.”

He turned then and we could hear him walking back down the narrow hallway. But he stopped before he reached the stairs. “And you tell that little girl of yours to go home now. I seen her mom leaving the hospital already.” Then he went on.

Jack reentered the room and closed the door. He sat down at the wooden box again. We were all watching him, looking for proof that something had registered. But it hadn’t. All Jack said was: “Wanda Jo. You heard what Arnold said. Your old lady’s got off her shift at the hospital. So you better leave that homework till tomorrow.” Then he smoothed his shirt over his chest once more. And gathering up his cards, he said: “Now who dealt this goddamn mess?”

S
o the point of all that was wasted on Jack. He had had his first brief taste of law and authority. He had been warned officially. But the warning hadn’t meant much to him. It had merely meant that he had to be more careful, a little more circumspect. It never occurred to him that he might have to alter in any real way whatever he wanted to do. I suppose to him it was like a complicated play in football—a double reverse, say, with a fake dive into the middle, by which you could still score, only it would take a little more practice and finesse to do it. It was merely a lesson in subtlety, a brief instruction in the need for secrecy.

And so at the end of May he graduated from high school. We all did: Wanda Jo Evans and Bobby Williams and Tom Crossland and the rest of us.

Jack was almost comical in his cap and gown. The red mortarboard was perched like a pinwheel at the back of his head and the crimson gown he wore was at least three sizes too small for him; it was stretched tight across his shoulders and the hem of it stopped at his knees. He looked a joke, a travesty, like some form of Paul Bunyan who had been gotten up for a kindergartener’s promotion or a pigmies’ ball. But when his name was called he rose dutifully, even proudly, from his seat in the auditorium. Then he stomped up across the stage in his cowboy boots and accepted the diploma from the president of the school board as if the diploma were something he actually valued.

In the evening we got drunk with one another for the last time. Afterward we went our separate ways. Bobby Williams and Tom Crossland went to work for their fathers, farming. Wanda Jo Evans stayed in Holt, where she was employed at the phone company as a secretary. And Jack and I went off to college, to study at the university in Boulder. I had in mind to study journalism, in the attempt to begin making something of myself as my father had suggested. And what Jack had in mind was to play football. He had an athletic scholarship, a full ride. The coaches at the university were willing to ignore the Ds on his transcript if he was willing to get his nose dirty. And of course he was.

So we had that in common that summer after graduation: we were both going to college at Boulder. It served as another bond between us. Whenever we met during the summer we talked about college and explained to one another just what kind of splash we intended to make. When we got there, though, it didn’t turn out quite the way we intended: one of us sank and the other barely made a ripple. Boulder was a deeper pond than a couple of boys from Holt County had anticipated.

• 4 •

B
ut it was all right in the beginning. He was a big rawboned kid and when he showed up for football practice in the middle of August he was sufficiently violent to please the coaches. Still it must have been obvious that he wasn’t a college-level running back. He was big but he was too slow. So in the second or third week of practice the coaches moved him into the line. That way he could use his strength and aggressiveness and not have to think too much. But he missed the glory. In high school he had carried the ball himself and had had his name featured prominently in the local papers. Now he was a defensive tackle and while he was still pretty good, everyone in college was good; so he wasn’t singled out for special attention.

Then school started. I had arrived by that time myself. I had moved into the dorm with another freshman, a scrawny red-haired kid from Chicago named Stewart Fliegelman. I had never met anyone like Fliegelman before. As soon as I’d unpacked my bags he announced that he had come out West as a missionary, to spread the gospel according to Marx. He was full of that kind of youthful enthusiasm. But I enjoyed him a great deal, and the truth is I still miss him. He’s a lawyer now in Oak Park, working on a second marriage with two sets of kids to provide for, but about twice a year I call him up and we talk on the phone.

As a roommate Fliegelman was lively, opinionated, verbal, well-read, studious, disorganized, bighearted and politically radical. He used to say that my beliefs were quaint, that whatever charm I had was the direct result of my universal ignorance. Whenever he said such things I told him to go to hell. I told him that coming from Chicago he wouldn’t know the difference between bullshit and chocolate pie even if he stepped in it. Then he would jump me and we’d wrestle in the room. By the end of that first semester we were close friends and during the four years that I knew him in Boulder I learned as much from him as I did from anyone else in the world. I’d never tell him that, though. He’d say that I was getting sloppy again. He’d say: “Arbuckle, for once in your life try not to confuse opinion with facts. You’re supposed to be a journalist, for Chrissakes.”

And so I am. Or at least I try to be. And the IRS, for their part, think so too: they continue to accept my claim to be a newspaperman without ever demanding to see the actual product. Besides, I keep a framed diploma hanging on the wall above my desk to further substantiate my claim. The diploma’s been there for more than twenty years. It’s dust-coated and spider-webbed now and the paint behind it is darker than the rest. Because, in the end, after four years of college, I came home again. It was my father’s idea; he wanted me to help run the paper and eventually to take it over. At the time it sounded like a good thing to do. And so I’ve been here ever since, for twenty years and more, trying once a week to get out a small-town newspaper for the edification and entertainment of the local populace, if not for the profit and remuneration of its editor and publisher: the
Holt Mercury
.

But that was later. In the fall of 1960 I was in college. And so was Jack Burdette. For a while yet.

After I’d arrived in Boulder and moved into the dorm I’d still see him occasionally. He’d be on campus with some of the others, big muscular kids wearing athletic tee shirts, filling up the sidewalk coming toward you or occupying a table with some of those good-looking long-legged sorority girls, all of them loud and joking, in the University Memorial Center. But I didn’t see him very often and we didn’t have much to do with one another then.

He was living in Baker, one of the other dormitories. It was like all of the buildings at the university, constructed of flagstone and brick and red tile. For it was a pretty campus, one of the most beautiful in all of this Rocky Mountain region, with the abrupt sides of the Flatirons standing up at the start of the mountains just above town, and on the campus itself the big trees and the old evergreens and all the red-tiled buildings, with still sufficient space between them so that you didn’t feel stifled or closed in by the mass of stone or the press of trees. It was a good place for someone like me to be. Boulder—and living with Fliegelman—opened my eyes.

But none of that was true for Jack. He wasn’t there long enough. Not that he would have allowed his vision to have been changed appreciably even if he had been. But he didn’t get the chance. Within a month after school started he got into trouble. The trouble had to do with a radio.

I first heard about it—or knew about it, that is—when I saw the article in the
Colorado Daily
. They ran it in a little box on the second page. The article said that another freshman named Curtis Harris had brought charges against Jack and that the student judiciary would convene on Friday to hear the case. The article appeared on Tuesday morning. After reading it I went over to Baker to see if I could find Jack in his dorm room. His roommate, another football player, said he didn’t know where Jack was; he was probably watching TV.

“But doesn’t he have classes?” I said. “It’s the middle of the morning.”

“What classes?” he said. “Jack doesn’t go to classes.”

“You mean today?”

“I mean any day. He hasn’t been to a class in three weeks. He’s going to get in trouble.”

“He’s already in trouble,” I said.

The guy studied me for a moment. “What’s that to you? You know him, or something?”

“I know him,” I said. “And they should have given Wanda Jo Evans a scholarship too if they expected Jack to go to class.”

“Who’s she?”

“You wouldn’t know her.”

“I know some girls.”

“But you wouldn’t know her. Anyway where’s this TV Jack might be watching?”

“Downstairs. Only I don’t know if he’s even there. I’m not his keeper.”

“I’ll go see if I can find him,” I said.

I went back downstairs.

After looking around for a few minutes I found Jack in one of the rooms next to the dormitory lounge. The door was shut. He was the only person in the room and he was lying on a sofa in his blue jeans and gray tee shirt. He was watching a game show on the black-and-white television and his feet were sticking out over the end of the sofa. When I sat down near him he looked over at me and then turned back to the TV.

“Jack,” I said. “How’s it going?”

“I can’t complain.”

“That’s good,” I said. “But what do you think will happen?”

“About what?”

“About this radio you took.”

“How’d you hear about that? You been talking to somebody?”

“It was in the student paper this morning. I came over to see what you’re going to do about it.”

“What the hell is there to do about it?”

“Well. The paper said somebody named Curtis Harris filed charges against you. That you stole his radio.”

“That’s a lie. Hell, he wasn’t using it so I just borrowed it for a while. And then I didn’t give it back to him yet.”

“Are you going to?”

“Not now.”

“How come?”

“Because. I don’t have it no more. The police have it. They took it for evidence.”

“All right, then. But what do you think’s going to happen?”

“I already told you: I don’t know. Besides, what difference does it make?”

“They might kick you out of school. That’s one thing.”

“I’m sick of school.”

“How do you know that? I mean, Jesus, you haven’t even been to classes yet.”

“I’ve been to enough. It’s just talk.”

I continued to look at him. There were dark bruises on his arms from practicing football and there was a scab on his nose between his eyes. Looking at him, he seemed exactly like a kid who’d fallen off a bicycle, like a great big kid who was now consoling himself by watching television from the living room couch.

“But listen,” I said. “Think about it for a minute. Isn’t there something we can do about this?”

He stopped watching TV, briefly. He looked at me. “Yeah,” he said. “You can loan me some money. I missed breakfast. You can do something about that if you want to.”

So I did. I gave him a couple of dollars. I was glad to do that much for him and was ready to do more, although I couldn’t have said then what it might have been. He folded the bills I gave him and put them away in his jeans pocket. I watched him for a while longer. But when he didn’t say anything more I left. He was still lying on the couch watching somebody else win money in a California studio. That seemed to please him.

Then on Friday, when his hearing came up, the student judiciary found against him. It was an open-and-shut case and after they had heard the evidence they recommended that he be expelled from school. There had been a number of thefts on campus already that fall. Consequently the administration accepted the students’ recommendation and decided to make an example of him. But it didn’t matter to Jack what they did; he didn’t contest the charges or even defend himself. In fact he didn’t even attend the hearings. Instead that morning he had gone to the Army recruiter on campus and had enlisted; so now he was obligated to two years of military service, and the Army was glad to have him swell their numbers.

He came over to see me before he went back to Holt. He said he didn’t have to report to boot camp until the end of October and he thought he’d go home in the meantime and work at the elevator and see Wanda Jo Evans. He wasn’t dissatisfied by the turn of events at all.

“Well,” I said. “Maybe it’s for the best.”

“Why not?” he said. “I might even learn something in the Army.”

“Take care, then.”

“But just a minute. You got any more money?”

“Probably.”

“Because I could use something to get home on.”

S
o Jack Burdette went back to Holt County where he was still a hero and where no one knew about Curtis Harris’s radio, or would have cared very much if they had known about it; and then at the end of October he went off to Texas, to boot camp at Fort Bliss. I doubt that the irony of that name occurred to him since he wasn’t one to pay much attention to such things and I don’t suppose the Army is either. Anyway he was there for almost two months. Then I saw him again just after boot camp was finished. Before being reassigned he had come home on leave and I had gone home at semester break. It was Christmastime. Jack looked thinner and harder now, although it might have been just that his head had been shaved; his cropped head made his neck look taller and now his ears stuck out. In any case all the time he was home he insisted on wearing his uniform and his Army cap about the town. He stayed at the Letitia Hotel while he was home, sleeping through most of the day in his room and spending his nights at the tavern with Wanda Jo Evans, the two of them drinking late into the night while Jack told her stories about things he’d already seen and done in basic training in Texas. I don’t know how she stayed awake for all of that since she still had to get up early in the morning to work as a secretary at the phone company every day. But she did; she stayed awake; and it was obvious that if anything she was even more in love with him than she had been before. Then he left again, for Fort Ord in California where he underwent two more months of training—as an assistant machine gunner this time—and afterward he was sent overseas to Germany. So none of us saw him again until he was finally discharged late in 1962. He had stories about all of it. He had liked the Army.

I
n the meantime I was still in college. By the end of my sophomore year I had managed to pass most of the required courses that everyone had to take and so I was beginning to concentrate on journalism. Much of the classwork was mere theoretical posturing, of little practical use once I had returned to Holt two years later to work on the
Mercury
where people were more interested in who had visited whom over the weekend than they were in the ethical paradoxes presented in the First Amendment. But I didn’t know that yet. So I attended class regularly and took notes, and when I was a junior I began to cover various campus events for the
Colorado Daily
. It was heady stuff for a while. It was just beginning to be a willful and exciting time on campus and at the paper we had the illusion that we were a part of it all and that we were speaking in the voice of the people even if the people didn’t know it yet or want us to. I remember, for example, that it was about this time that Barry Goldwater came to speak on campus and in the paper we said that Goldwater was a fascist, no better than a murderer. After this statement appeared there was a considerable outcry all over the state and finally the chancellor was compelled to remove the student editor who was responsible for it. Then there were demonstrations on campus. The due processes of law had been abrogated and we all felt hot about it. But the editor was never reinstated and it turned out to be a lost cause.

Still I was beginning to get hot about something else just then. I had met Nora Kramer by that time and for a year or more she seemed very much like a lost cause too.

N
ow I am not very eager to talk about Nora Kramer. And certainly she is less than eager to have me talk about her. For Nora was—and is—a very private person and she will no doubt resent this invasion of her privacy. But I can’t help that: like it or not she is a part of this account. We were together for eighteen years, after all, and we had a daughter together. And it was only a good deal later, after Nora left Holt and and moved to Denver, that I turned finally, out of loneliness and admiration and love too, toward Jessie Burdette, who was as different from Nora Kramer as fire is from ice.

But my god, she was a beautiful young woman when I first knew her in Boulder. She had astonishing black hair then. It was as dark and shiny as coal and wonderfully thick and clean. And her skin was so white that it was like porcelain, or like ivory, and it was almost transparent so that you felt that if you were only permitted to look at her long enough you might actually see the slow movement of blood at her temples and wrists. She was a very small person, very bright and intelligent and all neat and tidy, and she seemed as self-sufficient as a bird.