Читать книгу Coasters - Gerald Duff - Страница 9

There was nothing to eat in the refrigerator except a plastic bowl of a concoction his father called patio beans, one of the three or four one-dish meals he had cooked off and on for the last forty years. “It starts,” Waylon remembered his father always announcing at the onset of one of his culinary fits, “with one ordinary dead chicken.” Charlie would then always wait for Waylon and his two sisters to groan in disgust before he went on to name the other ingredients, and if they didn’t respond, he’d begin describing the cooking process all over again until they did.

Waylon shook the container back and forth, but the brown foodstuff had seized up during its time in the cold on the second shelf and would not move, not even when tilted at a ninety-degree angle. He pushed it away, drank a glass of water at the sink and headed for the door.

The sun had sunk below the horizon, and the sky was dark enough for Waylon to see the glow of the burning flares at the Arco refinery as he drove down Proctor Street toward the Nederland Club. A bank of clouds rolling in from the Gulf picked up the reflection of the light and gave it back to all those who cared to look, pinks and roses and oranges that would deepen to a steady red when full darkness settled over the Golden Triangle of Texas. It had been that way since the first excess gases were lit to burn off when the petrochemical plants went into operation, and it would continue as long as people used fossil fuels in their internal combustion engines.

Waylon sniffed at the air pouring into his Chevrolet through its vents and smelled the tang of esters, congruents, reagents and ozone working together in the thin soup of the atmosphere, and signaling a turn, pulled into the parking lot behind the Nederland Club, comforted.

The domino tables were filled with retirees from Gulf, Pure, Exxon, Arco, and Texaco, slapping their dotted counters down briskly in the unending bouts of Forty-Two, one foursome over in a corner doing additions in their heads at the site reserved for straight domino, while in the back part of the building two younger men were studying what the break had left them on one of the four pool tables.

“Five,” one of them said to the other, “side pocket,” as Waylon made his way behind them toward the bar. He heard the click of the cue and the shooter’s curse as the five ball lipped the hole and skittered away.

“You still make hamburgers?” Waylon asked the man behind the counter watching him sit down on a stool a little too high for comfortable mounting.

“Up to seven o’clock. No fries. Potato chips.”

“All right. That and a Regal,” Waylon said and turned to look back at the pool shooters, again silent as they considered the possibilities on the green field before them.

“Woo!” one of the retirees at the closest Forty-Two table yelled. “Shoot the moon.”

“Don’t you bust another domino in two, Arleigh,” the bartender said in a voice so low even Waylon could hardly hear it, as near as he was. “I’ll make you buy your own.”

“These old boys are rough on the bones, huh?” Waylon said, but the bartender had stepped away to speak to somebody through the pass-through cut into the wall to the kitchen and didn’t answer.

“Yes, they are,” Waylon said aloud to himself. “They get excited, understand, when they see their numbers adding up to something.”

“I get you,” he said in a higher tone, answering himself. “You put things so clear.”

“Who the fuck you talking to, McPhee?” came a voice from two or three stools down the bar. “Ain’t nobody listening to you.”

“Who’s that?” Waylon said, turning to look to his left. “Who’s taking my name in vain?”

A few feet away a small man was looking up from his beer to return Waylon’s stare, his right hand cupped around the glass in front of him as though he was afraid the bartender would snatch it away if he let his attention wander. Waylon couldn’t make out the man’s face in the dim light, and he leaned forward to see better, giving a little grunt of recognition when he saw the man’s flat-top hair style outlined against the window behind him.

“That you, Shepard?” he said. “Hard to tell without my glasses.”

“Yep,” Bobby Shepard said, turning back to his glass and taking a measured sip from it. “It’s me, all right.”

“I knew you by your haircut,” Waylon said. “Takes me back to the class of ’68.”

“You see something wrong with my haircut, McPhee?”

“No, Bobby, to the contrary. It fits you right down to the ground.” Waylon heard the clunk of the Regal bottle next to his elbow and turned to observe the bartender return to his lonely station near a stack of soft-drink cases.

“Promise me something, Bobby,” Waylon said.

“What you talking about?”

“Don’t go changing,” Waylon said. “That’s what I’m talking about. Stay just the way I see you tonight.”

“Crazy fucker,” Bobby Shepard said and allowed himself another sip from his glass. After a minute he spoke again. “What you doing in town? I thought you was working at BP up in Beaumont.”

“I was for several years,” Waylon said, regarding the pale green bottle before him. “Then I wasn’t.”

“Why not? Get run off?”

“Well, yes, Bobby, in a manner of speaking that captures it. But that’s not what they call it these days.”

“What? Getting laid off?”

“No, that’s not the term either, Bobby,” Waylon said, sipping directly from the Regal bottle. “I have been re-engineered. All part of the process of benchmarking and redefinition and downsizing underway at BP.”

“Shit,” Bobby said in a suspicious tone. “Re-engineering. You ain’t no engineer in the first place.”

“Bobby, you misunderstand me. I am not and never have been an engineer, no. I am being re-engineered. I am acted upon, not acting myself. Some might call me a victim of strategic planning.”

“What’d you do to get fired,” Bobby Shepard said. “That’s what I’m asking you, McPhee.”

“I ran into a narrow passage in the flow sequence, Bobby. One I couldn’t fit through, no matter how tight I squeezed myself up. The new filter they installed at British Petroleum got me. It was just too fine a gauge for me to slip on through that sucker.”

“Huh,” Bobby Shepard said and addressed his beer.

“And you know what else, Bobby?” Waylon said.

“Uh-uh, I don’t.”

“The union didn’t help me a bit when I filed a grievance against what happened to me. Just stood back and let me fight BP about it on my own.”

“And you lost?”

“Just like the Astros always do. Yessir, I did.”

“You say chips?” the bartender called to Waylon. “With that burger?”

“Is there any choice?”

“No.”

“Well, yes, I’ll say chips, then,” Waylon told him and looked back toward Bobby Shepard’s end of the bar. “What you doing these days, Shepard?”

“Same old, same old.”

“Gauging?”

“Forty hours a week at Pure Oil.”

“Uh huh,” Waylon said and addressed his Regal.

“Let me ask you something.”

“What’s that, Bobby?”

“Why do you drink that Regal shit? It ain’t but seven ounces to a bottle.”

“You got it exactly,” Waylon said. “See how little the bottle is, and how big it makes my hand look? Now, if a woman was to come in here, she’d look at that and think I was a good-sized man, the way it looks here in my fist.”

Waylon turned the bottle slowly from side to side, admiring the flash of light off the golden crown worked into the center of the design on the label. “Now if I were to drink directly from a full-sized, twelve-ounce Falstaff, I’d look like a dwarf sucking on a baby bottle.”

Bobby Shepard snorted into his glass. “You are a crazy fucker, McPhee, saying that about yourself.”

“Somebody’s going to do it,” Waylon answered. “I might as well get the jump. A little compact man has got to work all the angles, Bobby. Hell, you know that. What do you weigh these days? You don’t seem to have grown much since high school.”

“One-eighty.”

“Bullshit, Bobby,” Waylon said, looking from the top of Shepard’s flattop down his T-shirt to his jeans and to the cowboy boots shyly peeking out of their cuffs. “You don’t weigh a pound more than one-thirty, one-thirty-five.”

“Well, I don’t weigh much, see.”

“You sure as shit don’t.”

“Naw,” Bobby Shepard said after a minute of looking intently at the surface of the bar in the Nederland Club. “What I mean is I don’t get on a weighing machine. To see how much I weigh. That’s what I’m talking about.”

“There is a reason a man avoids measurements, Bobby,” Waylon said. “Of every kind.”

Waylon’s hamburger came, and he killed the rest of the beer in the small green bottle and looked down at the plate. “Where’s the chips?” he asked.

“You got to ask for them extra,” the bartender said, delicately picking up Waylon’s empty between thumb and forefinger as though performing a step in a catalytic conversion in a Gulf Oil laboratory. “In the bag’s the only way they come.”

“I thought I did ask,” Waylon said. “All right, in the bag and another Regal.”

“You ain’t been in the Nederland Club in so long a time you don’t know how to act,” Bobby Shepard called as the two men watched the bartender stretch to pull a bag of potato chips off the rack positioned over an assortment of gins and whiskeys and vodkas lined up on a shelf.

“It’s tough trying to make it back into the big leagues,” Waylon said, lifting his hamburger toward his mouth. “These lay-offs affect the hand-eye coordination adversely.”

“Huh,” Bobby Shepard said, watching with close attention as Waylon ate his supper.

“What you going to do now?” he said in the middle of Waylon’s next-to-last bite of the sandwich. “Try to get on Pure Oil?”

“No, Bobby,” Waylon said, swiping out the last crumbs of potato chips from the bag. “Once you try to run a grievance on one of these companies, they enter your name in a special file in the data bank.”

“They do?”

“Yep, it’s called the keep-this-asshole-running file, and let me tell you, partner, that storage file is hell to get out of.” Waylon took an after-dinner sip from his new Regal and then went on. “No, I believe I might try to do a little substitute teaching again, Bobby. See what might turn up in the field of education.”

“You went to college, didn’t you?”

“If you want to call it that, Bobby. Yes, I did. And I outlasted the fuckers, no matter how much they tried to run me out of the place.”

“You graduated at Lamar? I never heard you did.”

“Not with my class, Bobby,” Waylon said. “That bunch picked up a three-year jump on me. But once I learned how to change majors and got myself into the education track, I finally nailed that sucker down.”

“You say you already been teaching some?”

“A few years back, yes, indeed. I was at Cypress-Fairbanks High, out in the marshes over yonder toward Houston for four years. Taught five classes of remedial math every day of the week to that bunch of webfooted kids.”

Bobby Shepard motioned toward the bartender with his empty beer glass, his head tilted to one side as though he were trying to dislodge a thought caught somewhere on one side of his skull. After he had been refilled and had taken another sip, he turned back to look toward Waylon. “Well,” he said, “let me ask one other thing, then, Mister Math Teacher.”

“Something about the quadratic equation? I can’t help you there, Bobby. I’m not current no more.”

“No,” Bobby said, waving a hand back and forth, “I want to know if around all them high school girls you ever got you any strange pussy.”

“You wouldn’t believe it, Bobby,” Waylon said, “how strange it was. Country kids like they are out there in the marshes—you know they’re swampbred and they don’t get into town much—those big old strong girls will just overpower a small man teacher. He doesn’t stand a chance against one of the stout ones that’s got her blood up.”

“You trying to shit me, McPhee.”

“I got no reason to, Bobby,” Waylon said. “I’m a newly re-engineered man looking for a job without a single reason to lie.”

“Tell me something else,” Bobby Shepard said, waving one hand as though to dismiss Waylon’s complaint. “What kind of cheerleaders they got at Cypress-Fairbanks? I bet they’re all ugly as hell.”

“Cheerleaders?” Waylon said. “I didn’t notice them much, Bobby, to tell you the truth, but I was a good citizen of my school. I imagine they’re about like the rest of those swamp children. Big and strong and have to shave their legs real close everyday. Why do you ask?”

“Because I bet you didn’t get any strange stuff from no cheerleaders, that’s why. They wouldn’t have to settle for for a high school teacher. Cheerleaders wouldn’t.”

“I have to admit,” Waylon said, “that in the heat of the moment I never asked any of them their rank or military classification out there in the marshes. Those old girls were always too wrought up to want to converse much anyway. See, Bobby, it wasn’t a verbal interaction we were having.”

“You carrying it too far now, McPhee. I bet you didn’t touch a one of them. Not no cheerleaders for sure.”

“I’m not a man to kiss and tell, Bobby,” Waylon said. “But I believe I’ve revealed enough about my teaching career at Cypress-Fairbanks. You tell me something now, though.”

“What?”

“You still married to Myrlie Hudson?”

“Yeah,” Bobby Shepard said in the direction of his beer glass. “What of it?”

“Well, nothing. I just figured from your expression of interest in cheerleaders of the swamp variety that you still had to be a married man, that’s all.”

“Yes, I am, and that ain’t got nothing to do with nothing else.”

“Bobby,” Waylon said and killed the last swallow in his Regal bottle, “that is the very definition of the married state.”

The message light was blinking on the answering machine as Waylon walked through the kitchen, but he knew it had to be for his father so he didn’t slow down on his way to the hall leading to his room. The last thing he wanted to hear before he tried to sink into sleep was the voice of some female being coquettish with Charlie McPhee.

He cast his voice into the higher ranges and began to speak out loud as he imagined whoever the lady was as she recorded her message to his father. “Hello, Mister Man,” Waylon said as gained the door to his room. “This is you-know-who just wondering why you haven’t returned my call. Are you the kind of man who doesn’t keep his promise? You said you had a reason to ask for my telephone number at the. . . .” Waylon stopped to think of a good location for the imagined meeting between Charlie and his lady friend to have taken place before going on. “At the, at the,” he said and then forgetting how he achieved the particular tone of female coyness in his voice, dropped the attempt and stepped through the door.

Just then the telephone on the table beside the bed made a muted chirp and he moved to pick it up. “Hello,” Waylon said. “I’m not the one you want. This is not Charlie McPhee.”

“Well, I know you’re not,” the voice of the younger of his two sisters said. “You think I don’t know who I’m talking to?”

“Terry,” Waylon said. “How you doing?”

“Fine, but that’s not the question. How long have you been there? Is he around?”

“No, do you want me to tell him something for you?”

“That’s the problem, Way. I can’t tell him anything anymore.”

“Well, whoever could?”

“Mama, that’s who.”

“That’s true, all right,” Waylon said, calling up an image of his mother dropping her head to look over her glasses at her husband fixed half-turned before some door leading to the outside. “But she’s not around anymore.”

“Don’t tell me that. You haven’t been here to be able to say anything to me.”

“I am now, though.”

“For how long this time?”

“Don’t worry, little sis. Just until I can lick my wounds and achieve escape velocity.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Terry said. “I don’t care if you stay there the rest of your life. That’d suit me and Beth just fine.”

“What’d suit you and Beth’s not what concerns me, Terry,” Waylon said and sat down on the edge of the bed. “I’m thinking about my own prospects.”

“Is that a change?”

“Nope. Just a reminder.”

Terry was silent for a space, and Waylon was about to move the conversation toward farewell when his sister spoke again. “Have you met her yet?”

“Who?”

“You must not have talked to Dad yet since you moved back in if you have to ask who. I mean Hazel. Hazel Boles, that’s who.”

“The lady from Groves? Charlie mentioned her to me.”

“Well, if he was awake when you came in the house he mentioned her all right. And he only just met her less than two months ago.”

“No, then. I haven’t met her yet. I guess you have the way you’re talking. What’s Mrs. Boles like?”

“She is like the first cousin to the Queen of England,” Terry said. “To hear the way she talks and carries on. The way she acts and all.”

“So she has lots of occasions to refer to the old country, huh?”

“Every other breath she draws,” said Terry. “If you call that lots of occasions. Tell me something, Waylon. You been over there before. Do they all, the English people now I mean, just talk about their country and their customs and how they do just all the time?”

“Well, Terry,” Waylon said. “I didn’t notice it all that much. I mean when they’re over there in their own country, they don’t have a good reason to talk about being where they are all the time. They’re there, you know. They’re not like Texans living in Texas.”

“I know about Texans in Texas,” Terry said in an annoyed tone. “I see them every minute of the day everytime I go out of the house. I just don’t know a thing about Englishmen in England. That’s what I’m asking about.”

“It’s different,” Waylon said. “Best I can remember about it. They’re not the same as each other, either. Everyone of them’s got his own personality.”

“Is there anything to eat in the house over yonder?”

“In England?”

“Ha ha,” Terry said. “Is there anything to eat there?”

“Yeah. Patio beans. A great big old bowl of them.”

“That’s what I figured. You can come over here and get something.”

“I had my supper already. Thanks, anyway.”

“What? Not those beans, I know.”

“A hamburger at the Nederland Club,” Waylon said, “and it was real good, too.”

“Yeah, and you’re liable to coil up and die by morning from it,” Terry said pensively. “Listen, call me as soon as you’ve met Hazel Boles. Better yet, come over here. We got to talk about this business.”

“What business? Dad dating this English lady?”

“Don’t say dating. It just sounds infantile to call it that when a man his age is running around chasing a woman.”

“I’d say it’s dating when a fellow dresses up in spiffy clothes and leaves the house whistling to crawl behind the wheel of his car and go pick up his girl.”

“Oh, hush, Waylon,” Terry said. “That’s not really the part we’re concerned about. We’ve got serious business to discuss, us three kids. Money business.”

“Money?” Waylon said. “I’d rather talk about the mother country myself.” By the time he got that out, though, he was speaking to a dial tone, so he hung up the phone.

“Hello, walls,” he said, looking around about him and beginning to unbutton his shirt. He hoped it was late enough to go to sleep and regretted that he had drunk only the two seven-ounce Regals at the Nederland Club.