Where You Once Belonged(11)

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?”

So 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.