Where You Once Belonged (6 page)

“Yes. You look terrific.” And she did of course. The dress she was wearing was a pale green color, which set off her hair, and it was made of a soft material which fell smoothly from the shoulder down over her breasts and hips. There were little buttons down the front of it.

She smiled. “You don’t look so bad yourself.”

“I’m losing my hair,” I said. “Look at this.” I slapped myself on the forehead where my hairline had been. “If I don’t quit this pretty soon I’m going to be a walking cue ball.”

“Jack’s losing his hair too.”

“But he’s got more to lose. He could transplant some off his chest and nobody’d even notice.”

“I’d notice,” she said. Then she laughed. She’d drunk enough to be amused by the thought of that. “He
is
awfully hairy, isn’t he?”

“He’s the missing link,” I said.

We looked over at Jack where he stood beside the pool table. He was telling another joke or retelling one of his stories, and the men standing around him were waiting for the punch line. Jack had their complete attention. A barroom and a male audience were Jack’s element.

Wanda Jo turned back and began to twist a straw between her fingers. “I saw your wife and little girl on Main Street yesterday,” she said.

“Did you?”

“Yes. What’s your little girl’s name again?”

“Toni.”

“Toni. Well she’s cute. And she had the prettiest little dress on. I wanted to hug her.”

“She’s got some of her mother’s good looks at least. But she’s stubborn as hell. Maybe you could come over and help us out at nap time.”

“I would,” she said. “Just let me know.” She was serious. “Anyway I think you’re lucky.”

“Oh? I don’t know,” I said. Because I didn’t think of myself as being lucky. Not in marriage anyway. But of course Wanda Jo meant that I was lucky being a father. I would have agreed with her about that. At least at the time I would have. Toni was what kept Nora and me together.

“But I hope to have children myself,” Wanda Jo said.

“Do you?” I said.

“Don’t you think I’d make a good mother?”

“Of course.”

“I think I would. Only it’s getting so late. Sometimes I wish Jack would just hurry up and make up his mind. He says he will but then he keeps putting it off.”

“That sounds like him.”

“Did you know we were going to be married last summer?”

“No.”

“We were. I bought a dress and wedding invitations. But Jack decided he wasn’t ready yet.”

“I don’t suppose he was.”

Wanda Jo stopped twisting the straw and looked at me. “Of course he will eventually. I have to think that. Otherwise, what else is all this for?”

“He’ll come around. He’s just not done playing yet,” I said. Then I took her hand; I squeezed it and she smiled. But the smile didn’t last long; it didn’t change anything in her eyes. Afterward she looked unhappy again.

“Let’s have another drink,” I said.

So we talked about other things for a time and drank another round or two. And in the end Wanda Jo Evans became drunk while Jack Burdette went on talking to his circle of male friends.

Finally I decided to go home. It was after midnight and they were closing the bar. When the lights were turned on Jack came over and put his arm around Wanda Jo and they walked out to his car together. Outside on the sidewalk he said something which made her laugh, but her laughter was too loud and you could hear it along the storefronts, hanging in the air like fog. I stood on the sidewalk and watched them get into the pickup. Then they drove over to Chicago Street.

S
o it might have gone on indefinitely. It had already gone on that way for most of a decade. Then in 1970 Doyle Francis turned sixty-five and decided he wanted to retire. And Doyle’s retirement turned out to be the first in a series of events which ended it for Wanda Jo Evans, although neither she nor anyone else knew it at the time.

Doyle Francis was the manager of the Farmers’ Co-op Elevator in Holt. He had been the manager for more than thirty years—for as long as anyone could remember—and he had worked hard and he had performed valuable service. But now he was tired. He wanted out. He wanted to play golf and to see if he could raise asparagus in the garden behind his house. Consequently early that summer he had notified Arch Withers and the other members of the board of directors of the Co-op Elevator that he would retire in the fall, after corn harvest.

In November, then, about two weeks before Thanksgiving, the board invited all of the local farmers who were shareholders in the elevator, and all of the Co-op employees and the mayor and the town councilmen and all of their wives, to a banquet to be held in Doyle’s honor at the clubhouse at the golf course east of town. And Nora and I went too, so I could cover the occasion for the
Mercury
. I don’t suppose such an event would have received much play in the
Denver Post
or the
Rocky Mountain News
or, for that matter, in any other newspaper along the Front Range, but in Holt, on the High Plains, it was front-page news. It was a matter of local concern to see how Doyle’s retirement would affect things at the elevator.

At the banquet there were the usual long rows of tables set up with chairs along either side and there was a head table established up front. For dinner we had the customary roast beef and mashed potatoes and green peas and coffee and a form of fruit cobbler. Afterward we listened to several brief speeches and testimonials. Then a few of the farmers who were present stood up voluntarily—but a little awkwardly too, with their white foreheads shining fresh and clean for the occasion, under the clubhouse lights, with their big calloused hands showing red beyond the cuffs of their suit coats—and once they had stood up they began to tell stories and jokes at Doyle’s expense, stories about Doyle which everyone in attendance had heard three or four times before and in more profane and expansive versions. But it was a success nevertheless. And of course Doyle took all of this good-naturedly. Then Arch Withers, the president of the elevator board, called Doyle up to the lectern so he could present Doyle with a gift. It was a sizable box wrapped in silver paper and a red bow. Everyone was watching him open it, although Withers and the other members of the board who were sitting with their wives at the head table were more than just watching him: they appeared to be beside themselves. There wasn’t a straight face among them. But finally Doyle got the silver wrapping off the box and opened it. Peering inside, he looked bewildered at first, dumbfounded; then he grinned and reached inside and held up the contents of the box for all to see. And what he showed us was not the usual pocket watch or a brass pen and pencil set that would gather dust on some desk. No, it turned out that the board had presented him with a good sturdy outdoor hammock to lie in—and a five-year subscription to
Playboy
magazine to read while he was lying in the hammock. Doyle grinned largely. Then he spoke:

“Boys,” he said, “I’m afraid you flatter me. The sad truth is, I’m too fat for one and too old for the other.”

Everyone laughed. Then one of the board members called out: “Yeah but, Doyle. What we want to know is, which one is it you’re too fat for?”

Then people did laugh. They turned to look at Doyle’s wife who was sitting at the head table beside Doyle’s vacated chair. She was a small plump kindly woman with white hair, and now her face was suddenly red and her hands were playing in embarrassment with a clubhouse napkin. Doyle spoke again:

“Course,” he said, “I suppose I could always lose some weight. I mean I might even manage to get skinny again. Don’t you think?”

People laughed once more, and when he carried the box over to his chair and set it down and then bent and kissed his white-haired wife loudly on one of her red cheeks, kissing her with obvious good humor and genuine affection even after more than forty years of marriage, people applauded.

So that much of Doyle Francis’s retirement banquet was a success. People in Holt felt good about it. And I believe they felt good about the final proceedings that night too.

Because what happened next was the public announcement that Jack Burdette had been chosen to succeed Doyle Francis as manager of the Co-op Elevator. Arch Withers made the announcement. Leaning heavily on the lectern, speaking solemnly to the audience, he said that he and the board recognized that it would be hard to fill Doyle’s shoes, but that they had decided to look no farther than right here at home. After thinking about it thoroughly they had come to a unanimous decision; they had all agreed to promote Jack to manager.

People applauded once more. Everyone approved. And while Jack walked up the lectern to shake hands with Arch Withers, one of the farmers in the audience said: “Well at least his feet are big enough. Burdette ought to be able to fill Doyle’s shoes, or anybody else’s, with them big boats.”

Sitting in the middle of the room at one of the long tables, Wanda Jo Evans might have said something about Jack’s having clean socks too. But she didn’t—although when I looked at her there were tears shining in her eyes, tears of love and approval, I suppose, but also of private expectation. For I think Wanda Jo Evans must have thought that now, with his promotion, Jack might want to settle down, that he might be ready to make their relationship—that almost-eight-year-old Saturday night transaction of theirs—not only a weekly exchange but a daily and permanent condition.

* * *

T
hen it was 1971. It was spring. Jack had been the manager of the Co-op Elevator for about six months. At the beginning of April that year the board decided to send him down to Oklahoma, to Tulsa, so he could attend a weekend convention for the managers of grain elevators. It was the board’s belief that it would be worthwhile for him, and the elevator too, if he would attend the convention, sit in on the seminars and workshops, and then return with the latest predictions about the futures market as well as any new information he might collect about the prevention of grain dust explosions. An under secretary of agriculture, several economists and university scientists were to be there, to lead the workshops and seminars.

So Jack drove down to Tulsa. He went alone, driving one of the company pickups with two or three different company charge cards in his pocket. He left on Thursday. The convention was to begin at noon on Friday at the Holiday Inn, and it was understood that he would stay through the weekend, return on Monday sometime late in the afternoon or early evening, and then make his report to the board at a special meeting on Tuesday. And apparently Jack arrived in Tulsa on Thursday evening just as planned. He found the Holiday Inn, checked himself into the motel, located the dining room and the bar, hobnobbed with some of the other elevator managers, listened to their stories and told some of his own, went to bed at a reasonable hour, and afterward there is reason to believe that he even attended some of the meetings on Friday afternoon and again on Saturday. But by Saturday night, apparently, he had had enough.

I don’t know; perhaps he was just bored. Perhaps he was tired of it all already. Attending convention workshops and seminars would no doubt have been too much to him like taking high-school classes and college instruction. There would have been all that talk in those close windowless rooms, with the pitchers of ice water and the urns of coffee set out on a table in the back, but nothing stronger, nothing for a man to drink really: those experts up at the front of the room talking on and on, speaking learnedly, humorlessly, professionally about corn futures and grain dust explosions, with the accompanying racks of charts and diagrams beside them and the sheaves of documented scientific research, all of which he was not only supposed to believe and make sense of but to take careful notes about too with that ballpoint pen and that new tablet they would have given him, sitting there at some table with his big muscled arms resting out over the table in front of him like two oversized ham steaks while he calculated the hours and minutes until dinnertime and the first drink of the evening, though not necessarily in that order. And meanwhile the experts would still have been talking and he would still have been trying to stay awake. Consequently I believe he must have been good and bored by Saturday night, tired of it all. But also, I know, by that time, he had met Jessie Miller. And Jessie Miller, as she was known then, would have been enough to make him want to disappear even if he weren’t bored.

She had been hired by one of the sponsors of the convention to stand behind a table set up in the lobby. She had been instructed to wear a white blouse and a black miniskirt, to smile congenially, to pass out glossy colored brochures, and to show continuously a film extolling the virtues of a particular species of hybrid seed corn. And she had been doing all of this faithfully all of Friday afternoon and all of Saturday. So Jack must have met her, or at least have talked to her, several times already.

Then on Saturday evening, after he had been released at last from the last workshop late that afternoon, he began seriously to charm her. For he was capable of charm. I may not have made that clear, the fact that Jack Burdette could be attractive to women, that he was capable of exercising considerable charm and persuasiveness where women were concerned. Still it’s true; on those occasions when it mattered to him what women thought of him and whenever it made any difference to him how they responded to his talk—that is, when he wanted something from a woman—he was in fact capable of great leverage and conviction. But he had that effect on men too. He dominated any room he entered. But it wasn’t all conscious and deliberate on his part. Most of it was a matter of impulse and instinct, the result of native vitality and energy. He was full of himself. Domination came naturally to him. And in any case, he was huge, and he still wasn’t bad-looking at that time. He hadn’t gotten sloppy yet.

So he began to charm her. She was just twenty years old in 1971 and he was already thirty. He wined her and dined her, bought her steak in the dining room and danced with her in the lounge until late that night, swirling her around the floor to the live music played by the country band hired by the sponsors of the convention, and he mixed it all with a variety of expensive wines which he charged on the Farmers’ Co-op Elevator’s charge cards. Then he disappeared with her. They went upstairs to his motel room and didn’t come out until Monday morning—not until everyone else at the convention had already checked out and had gone home—leaving the motel room only then to have their blood tested and afterward to locate the nearest justice of the peace before returning once more to the privacy of Jack’s room at the Holiday Inn.