Where You Once Belonged(10)

“Hell,” Jack said. “It’s more like kissing my old lady. Which ain’t even worth trying once.”

In the middle of that next week, then, after midnight, Jack Burdette and Tom Crossland and Bobby Williams and I crowded into the cab of Jack’s old pickup. Wanda Jo Evans was there too. Jack was driving and Wanda Jo was sitting on my lap—which was about as close to a high-school boy’s notion of heaven as I was ever to come. We drove across town that way. Then Jack eased the pickup into the alley behind Burcham Scott’s old house. When we entered the alley Jack turned the lights off and coasted to a stop. Then we got out and whispered to one another and slunk along in the dark away from the pickup into the old man’s backyard, past his cement-block incinerator and his fallow garden and finally up onto his back porch, where, pushed off into a corner, there was an ancient Majestic refrigerator which everyone in Holt County knew about. It was a part of the legend we’d all grown up with. We all knew that Burcham Scott was a fisherman, that he was an old freckled-headed man who had long ago retired from the pretense of ever doing anything else but fish and we knew the refrigerator was a part of his equipment. He kept his night crawlers and red worms in the refrigerator so they would stay lively and unspoiled until he needed them.

But it was only the middle of March now, too early for Burcham to begin fishing again, so the refrigerator was empty and unplugged. We began to slide it away from the wall. Then we tried to pick it up. But we were fumbling in the dark and the porch was narrow and we kept bumping into one another. Finally Jack hissed:

“Get back, you damn morphadites. I’ll do it myself.”

And he did. He was that big, that strong. He stooped in front of it, threw his arms around the old Majestic as if it were no more than some heavy tractable farm girl who had come into town for a squeeze and a dance, and then stood up with it. He turned, pivoting, and waltzed off the porch with the refrigerator hugged up into his arms and carried it out to the alley, while behind him Bobby Williams and Tom Crossland and I followed like children, punching one another and giggling.

At the pickup Jack said: “You think one of you runts could at least open the goddamn tailgate?”

So we drove back across town that night with the old refrigerator riding up white and square in the back of the pickup, the four of us sitting around it while Wanda Jo Evans drove, and at the hotel we didn’t even attempt to help him. We merely held the hotel door open while he lifted the refrigerator out of the pickup once more and then carried it against his chest, as if it were still only a farm girl or a crate of peaches, say, on up the stairs to his room. There we opened that door for him too and watched him set it down.

He was panting a little now. There was a thin sheen of sweat on his face. While he caught his breath Wanda Jo plugged it in. Then Jack produced a six-pack of beer. He centered the beer ceremoniously on a shelf in the refrigerator, shut the door, looked around at us, then opened the door again. “There,” he said. “Now don’t that scratch your ass? Which one of you boys wants a cold beer?”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “It’s all the comforts of home, Jack.”

“You goddamn right it is.”

“And there ain’t no place like home,” Bobby said.

“No, there ain’t,” Tom Crossland said. “Oh Dorothy, come and f*ck me.”

“What in hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Home,” he said. “The Wizard of Oz.”

“Well watch your goddamn language,” Jack said. “There’s a woman present.”

We all looked at Wanda Jo. Wanda Jo looked lovely. She was smiling at Jack as if what he had said was not only chivalrous but clever.

And that set us off. Snorting and laughing, we pounded Jack on the back and shared the six-pack of beer out among ourselves. And though the beer wasn’t cold yet, it didn’t matter. It was cold in theory. So we began to tell and retell the story, inventing new twists in the string of events and speculating frequently upon the look on Burcham Scott’s old face the next morning when he would walk out onto his back porch. He’d scratch himself and look flat dumbfounded, we said. He’d misplace his worm, Bobby Williams said.

About two o’clock we finished the beer. We left Jack at the hotel with Wanda Jo and went home. The other boys lived out in the country, but I lived in town on Cedar Street.

When I arrived at the house that night and mounted the stairs I found that my father was waiting up for me. That is, he was in bed but he was still awake. “Pat,” he said.

“Yes sir?”

“Come here.”

I stopped in the doorway. He was lying in bed beside my mother. She was asleep but my dad had been reading. His glasses were pushed up onto his forehead and the reading lamp shone down onto his face. His face looked very white.

“Son,” he said. “I’ve just been wondering.”

“About what?”

“Son, you ever figure on making anything of yourself?”

“I hope to.”

“Do you?” he said. “That’s a comfort. But I’m just curious: when do you plan on starting?”

But Jack Burdette didn’t have a father anymore to wait up for him, to question him about his intentions—not that old John Senior would ever have done much of that anyway, even if he were still alive—but now the old man wasn’t available even to pretend that he might; and of course Jack had already broken with his mother. So, for him, this episode with Burcham Scott’s Majestic refrigerator became just one more piece in the growing legend. It became just one more feature in that local aura that was already following him around high school and about the town. For we had all begun to expect the unusual of him by that time, while he, for his part, had already learned—if acting on bent and sheer heedless volition can be said to be a form of learning—not to disappoint the expectations of anyone. Least of all his own.