Where You Once Belonged(9)

It was an old ramshackle two-story frame building with a deep long porch on its north side. It was built in 1914 by an early resident, an Irishman who had arrived some twenty years earlier as a small boy in the company of his parents. Then the mother died of influenza while he, the immigrant boy, watched, and so years later when he built the hotel he gave it her name out of lingering grief and old affection. It stood (and still stands, though a rooming house now for old men and migrant laborers and drunks) on the corner of Second and Ash streets, a block west of Main. Across the street there is an old hackberry tree which isn’t doing very well. The local historical society claims that it was one of the first trees planted in Holt County and they’ve erected a cement curb around it to protect it.

Jack’s room was on the second floor. There wasn’t much in it: an old iron bed and wooden dresser and a gauzy-curtained window overlooking Second Street. It didn’t have any sink or bathroom; the only bathroom on the second floor was at the end of the hall, a space about the size of a walk-in closet. But it didn’t cost much to room at the hotel and he took his meals (when he wasn’t eating at Wanda Jo Evans’s house or with one of the rest of us) in the little dining room on the first floor.

He paid for these—the rent and the occasional dinners—by working at the Farmers’ Co-op Elevator beside the railroad tracks. He had first begun to work at the elevator in the summer when he was sixteen. They had put him to work scooping wheat and unloading grain trucks and running the big augers. Now he began to work there in the afternoons after school and on the weekends as well. The work suited him exactly. It gave him another opportunity to sweat, to display that considerable strength of his, to expand himself amongst the exhaust of trucks and the clouds of grain dust. They were even paying him something for his efforts. Then, too, there was always that rough backslapping of the men who worked there, their sardonic talk and their jokes. For the men liked him, of course: Jack was a local phenomenon. They talked football to him. They remembered each game he had played better than he did himself, and not just the scores but the individual plays and the records he had set as well. They kidded him, they slapped his back; it was a kind of grown-man’s adulation, a form of praise he needed and enjoyed.

So now, once he had left his mother’s house, he had all of that again, every day. But also, for the first time, he had a room he could call just his and the liberty to come and go from it as he would, with a steady diet of free meals, or at least cheap ones, and enough money left over in his pocket to spend on beer and poker and nickel cigars, and still enough left over to buy gas to put in his pickup and then occasionally even something yet remaining to spend on Wanda Jo Evans. Because he wasn’t cheap: if Jack had money he always spent it. So he might take her out to a movie, say, or treat her to a hamburger at the Holt Cafe, with an order of French fries on the table between them to share equally. Then we would see them together: Wanda Jo leaning toward him across the table, her hand with the gripped hamburger arrested before her face, while he talked and ate and chewed and while she went on watching him out of those gray and wondering eyes.

But what I remember most about that time were those evenings in the hotel room. Jack and the rest of us would be playing poker. We would be betting our nickels and dimes at a wooden box upended in the center of the room, under that high old ceiling, under that single dim light bulb suspended from a cord, while off in the corner sitting on the bed Wanda Jo Evans would be bent over the books and the cheap tablets on her lap. She would be attempting to complete Jack’s and her own English and math assignments in time to hand them in the next morning, and only now and then would she even stop long enough to look up from under her strawberry hair, to glance quickly at Jack when he laughed or thought to say something that included her.

We played most of these poker games on Sunday nights. There would be beer then too. Jack was nineteen and the rest of us were eighteen now. We were legally of an age not only to be drafted to fight this country’s wars but to buy beer too, which if we drank enough of it, and God knows we tried, would give us the necessary recklessness and the urge to shout that we believed were essential for any poker game involving high-school boys.

We had a good time that winter and spring. At school it became a point of honor and a matter of high privilege to say that you had been allowed to sit in, that you had entered Jack’s room at the hotel and had lost your dollar or two at cards on Sunday night and had drunk a six-pack of beer. It gave you the right to boast the next morning—on Monday, at Holt County Union High School—to boast and complain of a headache while old Mrs. Lindquist tried once more to explain to us The Importance of Being Earnest.

But there was at least one snag in these Sunday night proceedings: the beer was warm. It had to be bought on Saturday night because none of the bars or liquor stores was open in Holt on Sunday. And since Jack’s room didn’t have an ice chest or a refrigerator (and since none of the rest of us was quite fool enough to store the beer at home in his own refrigerator where his mother would sure as hell find it and ask questions), the beer, by Sunday night, was approximately the temperature of blood.

We attempted several solutions to this problem. We tried, for example, stacking the cartons of beer on the window ledge outside Jack’s room. And that kept it cool overnight, but sometimes it kept it too cool: it froze. Then we had Popsicles while we played cards. Which was a funny thing for a while. But the bite was gone out of the beer. It was like kissing your own sister, Bobby Williams said.