Where You Once Belonged(23)

“Well,” Withers said. “What happened? Did you get tired of motel food and decide it was time to come home again?”

“No. I liked their food all right,” Burdette said. “Their beds was satisfactory too.”

“So it wasn’t that. Well that’s something at least. I wouldn’t want to think you missed any meals or lost any sleep on our account—just because you finally come back two days after you was supposed to and never called nobody the whole time and never even answered the phone when somebody else tried to call you.”

“Arch,” Burdette said, “you sound a little upset.”

“That so?”

“Yeah you do. And it doesn’t become you.”

“Then you’ll have to excuse me,” Withers said. “Maybe I ought to apologize. Because I’m not upset, goddamn it. I’m mad. Just where in the goddamn hell have you been all this time anyhow?”

Burdette told him about Jessie Miller then, about meeting her in the Holiday Inn lobby where she was showing that continuous monotonous film about hybrid seed corn. He told Withers about dancing with her. “She was pretty good-looking too,” he said.

“Was she?” Withers said. “Then I guess I’m glad for you. But what the hell’s that got to do with anything?”

“Quite a lot,” Burdette said.

“How do you mean?”

“Well. I married her.”

“What?”

“I married her.”

“The hell you did.”

“That’s right. I’m a old married man now. Like everybody else.”

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Withers said. “I thought you had better sense.”

Then, as Arch Withers told it later himself, he chewed his toothpick for a while and studied Burdette, looking him up and down as if Burdette were some sudden bump in the evolution of humankind, and not an attractive one necessarily but as if he were a talking mannequin, say, or an enormous and potentially dangerous aberration.

But finally Withers accepted this new fact and went on. He said: “All right, then, so you’re married. You married some good-looking girl in Oklahoma. But Jesus Christ, man, didn’t you even go to a single meeting we sent you down there to go to?”

“Sure,” Burdette told him. “I went to some of them. I went to a goodly number. I didn’t meet her till Saturday.”

“Then how come you never come back until Wednesday? You was supposed to report to us here on Tuesday.”

“I remember,” Burdette said. “But you don’t expect them to open that office of theirs on the weekends, do you?”

“What office?”

“The one so we could get our blood tested.”

“You mean you got married on Monday?”

“That’s right.”

“But that still leaves Tuesday.”

“No it don’t.”

Withers stared at him.

“Tuesday was our honeymoon,” Burdette said. “We was still in bed on Tuesday.”

Withers took the toothpick out of his mouth then and threw it away. He said he didn’t have any more use for it now. It didn’t taste good to him.

Nevertheless he went on once more. “All right,” he said, “I guess some kind of congratulations are in order. And I do congratulate you—I wish you both well. Still I’m only going to hope for one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m just going to hope that this doesn’t spoil your good judgment.”

“It never has before.”

“Goddamn it—you haven’t never been married before either.”

“That’s a fact,” Burdette said. “I haven’t even been to Tulsa before. It might get to be a habit.”

Burdette slapped Withers on the back then. But Arch Withers still wasn’t amused. He climbed into his pickup and started it. Through the open window he said: “How was your blood anyway? That report you had. It might be of interest to the board.”

“Arch,” Burdette said, “it was hot. You just wouldn’t believe how hot it was.” He began to laugh. “And hers was too,” he said.

Then Withers drove away, across the gravel out onto the road and over to Main Street to Bradbury’s Bakery. For an hour before going home again, before returning to the tractor waiting for him in the half-plowed field which he admitted he had left for too long already over this damned business, he sat drinking black coffee and eating cream-filled doughnuts while he told some of us what he had just heard. He said he believed that Burdette had stopped laughing as he drove away but that he was pretty sure Burdette was still grinning.

“So,” one of us said. “He’s married now, is he? Well hell’s bells.”

“Except you mean wedding bells, don’t you?” one of the others said.

“No, I don’t. I mean, that son of a bitch. I wonder what she looks like.”

As a result of all this there was a considerable crowd at the Holt Cafe on Main Street that Thursday noon. People in Holt knew Burdette ate lunch there and they hoped that his new wife would join him. They wanted to see this new woman for themselves. They wanted to examine her and confirm their expectations. By twelve o’clock all of the tables and booths at the cafe were occupied and there was an increasing number of people standing up at the front door waiting for the possibility of a vacated table. Meanwhile the special of the day—Swiss steak and potatoes and green beans and hot apple pie—had already been used up.