The Maid's Version (11 page)

I
wore Ruby’s hat whenever I played Robin Hood. I found the hat in Alma’s dresser drawer and promptly saw the swashbuckling potential: It was green and narrow, peaked along the center line, edged with a thin black cuff—the cuff was clearly embroidered for girls with tiny sorts of flowers, but I dismissed them as blooms in my mind and considered them rapier nicks—holding a long reddish feather that leaned backwards. Robin Hood was my top idol (rivaled only by Little Joe Cartwright, Bob Gibson and Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox) and I would open Alma’s entrance to the Teagues’ main house when I thought it empty and leap about from chair to davenport to ottoman, waving my sword, hurdling coffee tables and low antiques. I slid dashingly in socks across the hardwood floor and didn’t break too many things. The house was a massive Victorian and it didn’t seem like small things I broke while resisting tyranny in this room or that room or one of the others would be missed anytime soon.

July Teague knocked one afternoon on Alma’s door when Alma napped and called me into the main parlor. She was still beautiful, had been and would be so at every stage of life, even a boy knew that when in her presence he faced a blessed beauty, and she dressed nifty, always, since she knew she was watched for flaws wherever she went. I looked up at her with her red lips and big smashing eyes and elegant hair and confessed with a tremble before she even asked if I’d done anything wrong, and she began laughing.

“You’re lucky you’re one of the cute kind of Dunahew boys, know it?”

“Yes, Mrs. Teague.”

“Cute boys shouldn’t ever admit they know it—that peels the shine right off the cute. And call me July, please. I’ve told you that umpteen times.”

“Aye, aye, July.”

“‘Aye, aye’?—what ship were you on, sailor?”

“I haven’t been on any, yet. Dad was, though.”

“I know your daddy, Alek. I knew your daddy’s daddy when I saw him, and your mom’s people, too.” Mr. John Teague owned three car dealerships in different Ozarks towns and they owned more than one house and he was not in this house more than in any other, seemed to much prefer the log place on the Jacks Fork River, but was as nice to us when home as she was. July drank bottled beer in the kitchen with the curtains drawn and smoked cigarettes on the side porch behind the honeysuckle trellis and did both with natural-born style and obvious pleasure. I enjoyed watching her do anything, because she did everything the way you hoped to see it done. She played cribbage and mah-jongg with the ladies afternoons at the country club, golfed and swam in the pool there, and her skin tanned to a fetching glow. I didn’t quite get what the big deal about girls was yet, specifically, and July was older by a long stretch than my mother, still she gave me feelings I didn’t recognize or know where to put. “That’s actually why I asked you out here, sailor. I hadn’t noticed the broken things yet—thanks for folding so easily, and confessing and all, I appreciate that, but don’t break any more of my things or I’ll paddle your behind. That was Harlan and Rosalee on the phone a minute ago. They want Alma to bring you by tomorrow for lunch.”

“Okay, I’ll tell her.”

“I can carry you over there on my way to the club, if she’d like.”

“She’ll want to walk, no matter how hot.”

“You’re right. You are so right—jeez, don’t you just love that old battle-ax?”

No place in town was too far to walk and Alma took me there. She delivered me to the door but wouldn’t come inside and wasn’t begged to do so, either. She sat waiting in the yard under the shade trees on the bench beside the horseshoe pit. Hudkins smelled of old and fresh cigars and decades of breakfast bacon, and I surrendered to the embracing smells about two steps inside the door. It was the merged aromas of lives well led, of warmth and permanence, air flavored further with gun oil and lavender perfume by a hard-nosed old sportsman and Ma-ma, who admired things English, read one or two novels daily, and put artworks on the walls depicting ladies in plumped and layered dresses standing in the garden among spread flowers and cubist hedges, overdressed and bewigged gents in blue coats or red assembled in serious purpose around maps on a table, and hushed views of the Lake District at dawn.

Grandpa Harlan took me to his paneled den and made me slap-box a couple of friendly rounds with him as usual, then look at his newly acquired and mighty handsome maple-stocked twenty-gauge he pulled from the gun cabinet and had me hold and aim. He put me in a headlock and rubbed a soft Dutch rub, pinched two knuckles around my nose and squeezed out a buffalo nickel, gave me a slurp from his can of beer. We went to the dining table when called. Ma-ma had dragged out the heavy black skillet and served pork chops fried with white pan gravy over mashed potatoes, crowder peas and pole beans, blackberry cobbler with a scoop of vanilla for dessert. On the plate it looked to be more than I could eat but I ate it all and almost asked for more. That day it was as ever at Hudkins a slow, wonderful meal, with prickly banter and quick lunging shifts of subject matter, droll jokes, rolled eyes, and laughter. Harlan and Ma-ma took me to the door once the dishes were cleared and said next summer I’d stay with them in my own bedroom and ride the horses all day, every day, any day I wanted.

Maybe a block away from Hudkins, trudging in the smothering heat, Alma, pink-skinned and sweating gushes, asked what Harlan had had to say about her behind her back this time. “He didn’t say anything,” I said. Fingers jumped to my ear and yanked until I could feel it about to rip from my head. “Except you’re batty as a loon!”

“I knew he would.”

“Arthur was his very good friend, his personal pal, and loaned him bank money every spring to stock enough feed at the mill, and did so much for folks around here. He saved the bank when thousands of others went under.”

“That’s no reason to look away if he does wrong.”

“He said it was a horrible jumbo accident, or maybe it wasn’t such an accident, we’ll never know, not all the answers, and don’t waste my summer worrying about old-timey sad stuff.”

“Which one of us is it sounds to be worse off in the head to you now, Alek?”

Early on an amiable and improvised Saturday morning in autumn, I was with Dad at the Woolworth’s located in the business section of Main Street. He was sitting in a booth drinking coffee with a man who’d once been our neighbor two doors down, but who couldn’t control his jealous temper when he drank and he drank buckets on weekends. He poured concrete and made good money during the warm months. His wife was Mom’s best friend and he’d tried to kill her with a switchblade knife in our front yard, got the tip into her one time, high on the arm, before Dad brought him to ground with a baseball bat. Dad whacked him behind the knee, kicked the blade from his hand, then busted him but good when he crawled toward the knife. The man was oh so guilty and admitted it every day and lived now in a rented room above Olmert’s News-stand across Main from where we sat. He wanted to thank Dad for keeping his wife alive and him out of prison, some men wouldn’t have, and he hoped to find a way to win her back and live again with her and the kids, which could never happen if Dad hadn’t whipped him quiet that day. He would always be grateful. They drank a few cups of coffee while I twirled on my stool at the lunch counter and sipped butterscotch shake through a straw.

We left the man at the door and walked away from the businesses and on down Main, which was a street made of ruddled bricks that rose and dipped beneath traveling tires and dated from long ago, after both the Spanish and French quit this land and it became American. Old imported-looking row houses with wood gutters or no gutters lined both sides and were rank and ailing places of begrimed brick, with rough folks leaning in the historical doorways or sitting on ruined chairs at the curb to watch traffic jitter past. The Missouri River flowed sixty yards from the street, and there was a small crotchety tavern on the corner with walls that had settled a touch out of plumb during a dozen floods and was the oldest watering hole on this side of the river. Dad said, “Let’s pop in a minute—I’ve got to take the edge off that joe some.”

We sat at the bar. Sunlight leaked in through rectangular windows at the front and shoved in through the glass half of the back door. Dad had a Stag. Within three sips he knew the barmaid’s name was Rita, and he said his friends called him John Paul, and next time she used his name to ask if he wanted another. She lingered near us, relentlessly drying one washed beer mug with a white cloth, and the four or five moony morning tipplers down the rail observed this eager abandonment and were dashed in their wishful thinking.

On Dad’s second Stag two bums came to the back door and opened it to speak. “Rita? Could we get us those beers?” They were heavily powdered on their faces and hands with black dust. It had rained the night before so they’d slept out back in the giant coalbin by the tracks because the bin had a roof and the piled coal held them above ground high from the swooshing water. They hadn’t yet had a morning rinse at the spigot by the depot.

She said, “Did you pick it all up already?”

“You can look if you want, ’cause we did.”

I slid from my seat at the bar and approached the doorway and said, “Hiya, Bill. Hey, Speed.”

Bill stood dusted black in bright light and looked closely to see me in shadow, then said, “It’s Derby Street.”

Speed said, “Have I ever had any trouble with you?”

“No,” I said.

“Keep it that way, then.”

“He’s the Russky kid from Derby Street.”

“Well, now, the Russkies was our allies in a pincher movement when it was good news for me and everybody crossin’ the Rhine they was, boy, I’ll tell you.”

“He’s the one brings potato chips in a great big can sometimes.”

“That’s my favorite kind.”

Rita carried them two beers apiece and they both grabbed one in each hand and turned away. I knew they’d head to the thicket visible through the door, where in reasonable weather or foul in desperation, bunches of them lived hidden away along narrow trails curling between the tracks and the river. She said, “See you Monday, gentlemen. You’re on your own tomorrow.”

Dad stared steadily at me once I returned to the stool and sat. He lit a smoke without need of a single glance at the pack or the lighter, created a gallop from his fingernails tapping the bar, and his eyes didn’t leave my face. “You know those characters
by name?
”

“Sure. That’s Bill and Speed.” “

I heard you twice the first time, son. Why do they call ol’ Freddy the Freeloader, there, Speed?”

“ ’Cause when, like, teenagers and stuff drive around here they like to slow down and call bums over to their car and ask for directions or something else to get them close, then squirt shaving cream or throw rotten stuff or dog flops in their faces and laugh and drive away, but Speed can catch them in traffic at the stop signs.”

“He can, huh?”

“Bill says Speed is the fastest bum alive.”

“When he catches them, then what?”

“He’ll whip up on them a little, or at least try to, no matter how many are in the car, and he gets bloodied and kicked around pretty bad sometimes, too, but they likely won’t be quick to ask him for directions again.”

“I don’t know if I want you knowing those sorts too well, son.”

“Dad, Bill and Speed aren’t the ones who steal our milk—don’t you ever even once in a while wonder about Grandpa Buster?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“Your grandpa Buster was a bum.”

“Just because you’re a bum, it doesn’t mean you’re bad.”

“You’re right, son. It doesn’t. I stand corrected. It absolutely does mean you’re a bum, though.” He tossed a few dollars on the bar and scooped his cigarettes, left the change. Rita said, Come back soon, John Paul, and he winked like he might and led me to the door and out. He squinted in the sunlight, yawned, stretched, yawned. “I’ve got two goddam tests coming this week—Modern Business Theory and Shakespeare, and Shakespeare’s the one I’m worried about.”

“We haven’t got to him yet.”

“That flowery fart has things to say, but he sure doesn’t make it easy to get what he means.” We walked along the old warped street toward our wheels and paused to stare at the river when we were between buildings and could see the water and all the way across to the next thicket. “But when you do get it, it was worth the trouble.” Dad slid into the Mercury wagon on his side and me on mine. It started right up at the turn of the key, which was an only occasional result, and we pulled into traffic to drive six blocks up Derby Street to home. At the first stop sign Dad paused with his foot on the brakes and stared ahead in reverie down the uneven bricks of Main. “I think I like Speed.”

T
rains have haunted the nights in West Table since 1883 and disrupt sleep and taunt those awakened. The trains beating past toward the fabled beyond, the sound of each wheel-thump singing, You’re going nowhere, you’re going nowhere, and these wheels are, they are, they are going far from where you lie listening in your smallness and will still lie small at dawn after they are gone from hearing, rolling on singing along twin rails over the next hill and down and up over the next onward to those milk-and-honey environs where motion pictures happen for real and history is made and large dashing lives you won’t lead or even witness are lived.