Читать книгу Coasters - Gerald Duff - Страница 10

Charlie McPhee stood with the door to the refrigerator open, feeling the cool air blow down his collar, and studied the contents before him. Six eggs and two bell peppers and the plastic container of patio beans turned over on its side. Had it done that on its own, he wondered. Some kind of chemical reaction at a certain temperature causing the contents to generate a gas and blow the lid open a crack? No, he told himself, you’d have to heat it up to get that kind of instability, not cool it down. Waylon just messed with it somehow, never able to leave things alone without poking at them, as usual.

Charlie took out the eggs and bell pepper out of the refrigerator and put them on the counter to wait until he found the iron skillet. With that in hand, he began looking for oil, pausing now and then in his search to rap the front burner of the electric range sharply with the skillet to make enough noise to wake Waylon, dead asleep in the back bedroom at nine o’clock in the morning.

It worked. By the time he had melted a half stick of margarine in the skillet and begun breaking the eggs into a bowl with the chopped-up bell peppers, he heard the toilet flush in the hall bathroom and thumping sounds along the wall as his son worked his way toward the kitchen.

“Having a hard time getting started this morning, Sonny?” Charlie said, not looking up.

“No more than usual,” Waylon answered. “What’s that? Not beans, is it?”

“Western omelet. Vegetarian. No meat,” Charlie said, whipping the mixture into a yellow froth with a fork. “A man doesn’t need all that animal fat after he turns fifty.”

“You did that a long time ago,” Waylon said, looking around for coffee. Seeing none, he settled for water and moved toward the sink. “More than twenty years back, as I calculate.”

“I’m talking about you, Waylon,” Charlie said, dumping the contents of the bowl into the skillet and stepping back from the pop of the hot margarine. “You’re the man advancing into deep middle-age. I done got over that myself.”

“You can tell me how you did it one of these days once I get my mind right about the subject,” Waylon said and sat to watch the cooking process. “Terry called last night.”

“Did you say I was out of the house?”

“She could tell that since I was the one talking to her. You fixing to burn that stuff.”

“Wrong, son. High heat and speed. That’s the way things get done these days.”

After he had divided the eggs and bell peppers between two plates, Charlie got himself a glass of water and sat down across from his son and began to eat with great flourishes of the same fork he had used to mix the omelet.

“Tell me that’s not good,” he said.

“That’s not good.”

“Did she say anything about Ronnie?”

“Terry? No. She didn’t mention him. Why? Is something wrong with him?”

“He’s fine, I imagine. I was just checking to see if your little sister had called her husband’s name. Far as I know, she ain’t said it in the last eight or ten years, that’s all.”

“Her record is intact, then,” Waylon said, picking out the pieces of bell pepper with his fork and carefully pushing them to one area of his plate. “How old is this green stuff here?”

“Anything fresh cooked is the same age,” Charlie said. “Done. You ought to eat that pepper. It’s the best part of your breakfast.”

“Is Ronnie still working at Koppers?”

“Yep,” Charlie McPhee said, finishing his last bite and leaning forward to spear at the bits of pepper on Waylon’s plate. “Just got his thirty-year pin in June. Terry didn’t tell me that, though. Amber did.”

“Proud of her daddy, huh?”

“A kid is supposed to be, when things are normal,” Charlie said. “What do you hear from Brian these days? What’s your boy up to?”

“Not much. He’s still living in Lake Charles, as far as I know. I haven’t heard from him lately.”

Waylon ate a small bite of the egg mixture on his plate and watched his father lean forward to chase the last two or three pieces of bell pepper around its flange. Charlie was having a hard time rounding up the remainder of the vegetable part of the dish, and Waylon hoped that distraction would keep him from pursuing the subject of Brian any further. He pushed his plate a little closer to Charlie and with that advantage his father speared the last piece of pepper and settled back in his chair.

“Let me tell you something,” Charlie said, gesturing toward the empty plate. “A man needs his breakfast and that there was a good one. Why haven’t you been over yonder?”

“Where? To Brian’s?” Waylon looked sharply up from the table to Charlie’s face, shaved so closely that it appeared almost skinned along the jawline. Charlie was chewing his last bite and clicking his teeth together as though the morsel was too fine to capture and he was having to chase it down before finishing the job.

“Been too busy,” Waylon said. “The front brakeshoes on my car are shot. I lost my map of Louisiana. Brian’s fallen in love again.”

“Now you’re getting down to it. That’s your reason, that last thing you said. The rest is just excuses. What ought to be called rationalizations.”

“Where’d you hear that word?” Waylon asked. “You been watching talk shows again?”

“That’s common knowledge, Way. You just got to focus your mind. Besides, that kind of talk is just special pleading, rationalization, creating your own reality.”

“You have been watching daytime TV,” Waylon said and pushed his chair away from the table. “You probably even read some kind of a paperback book on the sly.”

“Nope,” Charlie McPhee said, smiling broadly. “I just been talking to Hazel.”

“Hazel Boles told you all that?”

“She knows all kinds of things. She is a woman who thinks about stuff. Nothing that is human is foreign to her, she says.”

“I’d be scared to meet her, then,” Waylon said.

“You going to have to get over that, if you expect to be living here at home.”

“I’m not living here at home, Dad,” Waylon said. “I’m just staying here until I decide what’s next, that’s all.” He lifted his eyes to the line of cabinets over the sink and against the wall behind the electric range. “And I’m paying you rent, too, don’t forget. Don’t you have any coffee I can make?”

“I don’t need the stimulation,” Charlie McPhee said. “Neither does anybody else. Pregnant women these days are told not to drink it. What’re you thinking of doing about a job?”

“Setting up a coffee shop. Or probably starting to work on my fingering,” Waylon said. “And then begin a rock and roll band with me on the lead guitar and vocals.”

“What?” Charlie said, rearing back in his chair until its legs scraped on the floor. “You haven’t touched a musical instument since you was going to college.”

“That’s a joke, Dad. I figure I’ll go over to the high school and see if they’re needing a substitute teacher. That’s my plan short-term. Long-term, I got to study on it.”

“Teaching arithmetic’s not what it used to be, Son,” Charlie said. “Let me tell you. Kids are a different breed nowadays.”

“Let me tell you something, Dad. It never was, and they always have been.”

Charlie picked up the plates and forks from the table and headed for the sink, clearly in a hurry. Viewed from behind, the tight gray pants he was wearing, the tan shoes on his feet, and his pink polo shirt looked to Waylon as though they were garments hanging on a sixteen-year-old boy whose hair had suddenly turned white.

“What am I supposed to tell Terry or Beth when they call here checking into your whereabouts?” Waylon said to his father’s back. “They seem to have developed a real interest in knowing where you are all the time.”

“I know they have, Son. The girls mean well, but they’re all stirred up for no good reason.”

“Don’t like to see Daddy with a woman other than Mom, huh?” Waylon said.

“That’s part of it, I imagine. That’s a natural thing. It comes with the final stages of the grieving process.”

“The grieving process?”

“Yeah, that’s what I said. People have made a study of what happens to survivors, Waylon, in their mental makeup when a loved one dies. We know a whole lot more than we used to about what makes folks tick.”

“You talk like you sure do,” Waylon said.

“Learn or die, Sonny. Adapt or wither away. It’s the law of life.”

“Uh-huh,” Waylon said. “Well, I don’t want to slow you down any more on your way out. What do you want me to tell these surviving daughters of yours when they get on the phone?”

“Say I’m working day shift starting tomorrow, and I don’t know where all I’ll be before then. In and out, around and about.”

“I’ll write it down just the way you told it,” Waylon said. He had not finished his glass of water before Charlie left the house, jingling his car keys in his pants pocket and whistling as he hit the door. He ought to have some coffee around here, Waylon told himself, at least instant. Or maybe a couple of tea bags or a bottle of Coke.

Waylon decided to walk to the high school, figuring that if he took his time he wouldn’t get too sweated up along the way and that there might be some luck in retracing the route he had taken twice a day for four years, sometimes with his sisters and increasingly, as he had gotten older and more advanced in the grade structure of Thomas Jefferson High, alone.

Reaching the intersection of Helena Street and N, he automatically turned right and trudged on, remembering the first time he and Beth had made the journey together. It hadn’t been as hot a day or he hadn’t noticed the weather most likely, not yet accustomed to living in habitations subject to air conditioning and central heat.

He and his sister had started out from the house on Helena a little before eight, too late to make it to the high school on time for the first bell of that opening day in late August. The delayed start had been at Beth’s insistence, she two years older than Waylon and already thinking well ahead to consequences.

“We’re going to be tardy,” Waylon had told her, feeling a tight little ball of panic kick up just beneath the center of his chest where his rib cage started as they stood on the sidewalk in front of the house and waited.

“Of course we are,” she had said. “You little dummy. We’re not about to get to that school before the bell rings for everybody to go inside.”

“Why not?” Waylon said. “It’s done past time for us to leave. We’ll be late.”

Beth hadn’t answered him at first, looking down instead at what she was carrying bundled up against her chest in both arms. Walking steadily along the edge of N Street now, Waylon couldn’t remember what it was she had been taking to school that first day. It couldn’t have been books because the school people wouldn’t have issued them yet. Maybe it was just a purse. Maybe a notebook and paper.

When he had asked her again why she was making them late, Beth had turned to give him a long look, her mouth twisted down at the corners in the same expression their mother had always used when forced to explain herself. “Because, Waylon,” Beth had said, “we are new here. And do you know what those high school kids are going to be doing before the bell rings to make them go inside the building?”

“Waiting?” he had offered.

“Standing on all those steps in front, watching everybody that comes walking up, and if we get there when they’re doing that, they’ll be looking right at us the whole time. Understand?”

“Oh,” he had said, instantly in his sister’s debt for what she was saving him from, and he hadn’t said another thing to her all the ten blocks to the high school.

Charlie McPhee had moved his family to the coast two months before from Linden, a county seat over two hundred miles away from Port Arthur, deep in East Texas where the good lumber was all cut and no oil had been discovered and the land was fit for growing nothing but grass burrs and volunteer scrub pine. The Gulf Coast was flat and humid and close to the Cajuns in Louisiana, but there was work back then for anybody who could turn a valve and add numbers in the refineries of the Golden Triangle of Beaumont, Orange, and Port Arthur. So the McPhees had come to live near the big water.

All the way to the high school that morning over thirty years ago, Waylon had pictured how those Gulf Coast kids clustered on the steps of Thomas Jefferson High School would have looked at him and Beth in their new school clothes, if his sister had not had the sense to make them late enough to miss the bell.

The women behind the counter in the principal’s office had complained about their tardiness when he and Beth had wandered in a few minutes after eight o’clock, but Waylon had not been bothered by that. Instead, he had dwelled upon the blessedly empty way the steps in front of the building had looked and how wonderfully vacant of Gulf Coast kids the hallways had been, and he had been grateful, feeling the tight knot in his chest loosen and slide away as he stood before the counter and listened to the annoyed woman behind it tell him where to go.

At the end of the next block of N Street, his feet told him to turn left and cross the street, and Waylon did so, looking both ways and pausing to let a City of Port Arthur dump truck roar by before he crossed.

The big white frame house on the southeast corner of N Street and Myra was still there, but something seemed wrong about it, and it wasn’t until Waylon had gone past it and looked back that he realized the porches which had once encircled it were long gone in some renovation scheme. The sycamores in front were still there, though, and he kicked at a few of the brown puffy balls they had dropped on the sidewalk he traveled. He lifted his gaze, followed the path his body told him to take, and felt sweat begin to trickle down his back as he walked the last two blocks to Thomas Jefferson High.

Waylon had to try four of the glass doors at the top of the steps leading up to the entrance before he found one unlocked, and it seemed half-jammed. When he got inside, he stopped to let his eyes adjust to the relatively dim foyer and looked around to remember which way he should take to get to the principal’s office.

“Are you adolescent counseling?” a voice said to his right. It came from a woman sitting behind a small table piled high with papers and stick-on name tags. She had a lot of hair and a lifted ballpoint pen, and she was gesturing with it toward a specific location on the table.

“Oh, no,” Waylon told her. “I’m just looking for the office.”

It was to the left, he remembered, but as he proceeded down the hallway, none of the rooms he passed seemed to be the right one, and it wasn’t until he reached nearly to the end of the building that he decided it had to be in the other direction. The woman behind the table watched him come back again with a sidelong look, he noticed, and as he came into hearing range Waylon told her he had gone the wrong way, but she kept her head down and didn’t answer.

Two people were behind the counter talking as he stepped into the office labeled Administration, but neither looked up until he had stood with his chest jammed up to the barrier between them for nearly a minute. Waylon finally coughed, said excuse me, and the male of the two swung his head around toward the counter.

“I’m looking to apply for substitute teaching,” Waylon said. “Is there somebody I can talk to?”

“English?” the man said. He was wearing a blue shirt with a floral print and loose khaki pants. His eyes were set wide apart, and the man was blinking them more rapidly than Waylon would have thought normal.

“Social studies, more likely,” the woman said, still not looking out from the sanctuary of the area behind the counter.

“Well, no,” Waylon said. “Math. Algebra, trig, general arithmetic. Not pre-calculus. Not that.”

“Huh,” the woman said, glancing his way for a couple of beats and then looking back at the flower-shirted man to finish her comment. “Not many of that kind around.”

“Texas certified?” the man asked.

“Used to be,” Waylon said. “Temporary, I mean.”

“We could maybe get a six-month waiver of certification,” the woman said to the man beside her. “If he qualifies.”

“Recent employer,” the flower-shirt said.

“Yes,” Waylon said.

“Huh?”

“There was one,” Waylon said. “A recent employer.”

“Who?”

“British Petroleum, the Beaumont plant.”

“Reason for leaving?” the woman said.

“Career change,” Waylon said carefully, remembering the line from some newspaper column he’d once read in the business section. “To pursue other opportunities,” he added.

The woman walked over to the counter and opened a drawer Waylon couldn’t see and pulled out some blank forms.

“Fill this sheet out,” she said, pushing a piece of paper across the slick surface of the counter. “Attach any and all official transcripts of college level credit attempted and achieved, and return with a cover letter describing your philosophy of education in an urban public secondary school setting.” She said all this in one breath and was not winded by the effort.

Waylon picked up the sheet and looked at it, not focussing on a single word. “Will you need references?” he asked.

“Just do what it says,” the woman said, pointing with all five fingers toward the sheet in Waylon’s hand. “Any appropriate questions you may have are answered on that.”

“It sounds like you might have said that before,” Waylon said. “It’s a real pleasure to be back in the principal’s office at TJHS again. Thanks a bunch.”

Neither of the two across the counter responded, except that the flower-shirted man increased the blink rate of his eyes a fraction.

Waylon started for the frosted glass door and then stopped with his hand on the knob. “Either one of you the principal?” he said.

“Good God, no,” the woman said and looked up astonished at the man beside her as though he had been the one who had asked the question.

As Waylon left the building, the woman with the great amount of hair sitting behind the table waiting for adolescent counselors kept her gaze firmly fixed on the stack of name tags before her.

“Bye,” Waylon told her. “I hope you find that counselor you’re looking for.” That wasn’t the least bit funny, he said to himself. I don’t know why I even tried.

The woman still didn’t look up.