Читать книгу All The Young Men - Ruth Coker Burks - Страница 8

Chapter Two

It was spring, so the dogwoods were in bloom. White flowers filled the hills, which were dotted with lavender and pink dots of redbuds. That’s when the white bass start running. They’re mating, and everyone else in Hot Springs is too. If you find a creek where they’re at, you can literally dip-net them. The fish, I mean, but that was also my friend Sandy’s approach to men. In 1986, she was on a mission from God to get a husband. She was so fun, and she was the one who taught me how to be blond.

“I saw Richard last night,” Sandy told me, adjusting her bikini straps for the sixteenth time to avoid tan lines and ensure a little attention. We were lying out on lounge chairs by the pool, sunning ourselves at work and not knowing how lucky we had it. We sold time-shares on the weekend at the Lake View Resort on Lake Hamilton. We did a two-hour tour of the condos at nine in the morning and then another at two. The middle of the day was ours to do with as we pleased at the resort, and we were encouraged by our bosses to sunbathe and get beautiful. Two blonds in bikinis, coming attractions for what you’d see here every day if you rented for a week.

“How’s Richard doing?” I asked. He was a merchant marine bringing supplies from one ship to another in the Gulf, so he would be gone for weeks at a time. He’d arrive at Sandy’s door, a man just out of prison.

“Good as always,” Sandy said, sighing out the always and throwing her hands back.

“I like Richard,” I said, which was true. It was hard to find a man worth a damn, and he was nice. Good-looking and funny, like Sandy.

“Ruthie, when are we gonna get you a man?”

“Aren’t you the one who says I can’t see any man you dated?” I asked. “You’re not leaving me many to pick from.”

“I can’t help it if I’m popular.”

“You can’t help it, is right.”

She would think I was stealing her man, and with the type of men Sandy dated, that would be petty theft. Not worth losing a friend like Sandy over. She was the only one I’d found as outdoorsy as me, and we could go on twenty-mile hikes in the hills and not run out of people to talk about.

“You gotta go where the men are,” said Sandy.

“The only men interested in me have wedding rings,” I said. If Sandy’s was the I-saw-him-first rule, mine was no married men. “I didn’t even like my husband, why on earth would I want someone else’s?”

“How is that bastard?” she asked. We never said his name. It was a sort of superstition, and you’re still not gonna hear it from me. It’s like inviting the devil. “He’s late on Allison’s money again,” I said. He was supposed to pay a hundred dollars a month, but the only thing reliable about him was that he wasn’t going to come through. I married him when I was a month shy of twenty, because he was the first person that asked. He was thirty-five then. My mother had done a good job of convincing me I was born ugly and would die ugly, so I thought I wouldn’t get another chance at saying yes to any man. My mother’s plan for me was to marry the retread-tire man’s son, because he would always have a job. On top of being just evil, Allison’s daddy couldn’t keep a job, so maybe I should have listened to her.

“Well, we need real men,” she said. “Get Allison a better daddy than the one she got.”

I shrugged. And there he was, right in my head. Jimmy. I pulled my hair back, trying to distract myself. I’d done this all week, ever since I buried him on Daddy’s grave. I was so close to him in that hospital for all those hours. My hand still felt like his skin was on it. The look on the nurses’ faces . . .

“Sandy, tell me again you’d take Allison if something happens to me.”

“I do so swear,” she said. “I’d raise Allison as my own . . . maid.” She laughed, and I gave her a chuckle even though I didn’t want to.

“I just don’t want her daddy’s family involved if . . . You know. Not that they would want her.” One time, when Allison was a year old, we were out eating with her daddy’s parents. They were taking a break from watching Pat Robertson on the TV. Their friend stopped by the table and oohed at Allison. “Oh, where’d she get that pretty red hair?” she asked. My mother-in-law didn’t wait a beat: “That’s what we wanna know.”

Sandy sat up and lowered her sunglasses, but I wouldn’t look back at her for fear she’d see I was really scared. “Nothing’s gonna happen to you, Ruthie.”

A husband and wife walked by us, so Sandy and I got quiet. He was doing that thing men do when they’re trying to face front and not get in trouble with the wife, but they’re straining their eyes to see you. The wife grabbed that hand of his real quick, so I made sure to say, “Hi there,” just to her. People came here to look at the time-shares for the free lunch and use of the pool, and my job was to sell them something they didn’t need. A week cost sixteen thousand dollars in the summer red week, but I was good at selling. Hot Springs actually had five seasons when you counted the racing season, and those were red weeks too. You could get a blue winter week for five thousand dollars, but I would always work to upgrade the renter and then get the sale from that too. Blue weeks were all Sandy really sold, but it was only because she thought she couldn’t sell higher. “Sandy, you think that’s a lot of money,” I’d tell her every time she lowballed herself. “You need to quit thinking like that. They don’t think it’s a lot of money.”

Larry swung by behind the couple and winked at us. “Ladies,” he said. Larry Nelson was our boss, and he was a good one. One of the few I’d ever had who let me work and left me alone. I’d get a job, and they’d expect sex on top of my other work, so I’d have to quit. From the start with Larry, I had that “I’m not sleeping with you” air about me, so he didn’t bother asking. I knew Larry’s wife, and I also knew she thought I was sleeping with him, but I never was.

“Well, we should get moving,” I said. There was an empty condo where we could shower and change back into our “let me sell you a time-share” clothes.

“Let’s go make some more money,” said Sandy. “Put on our lucky selling dresses.”

Larry had us all up in this great big room we called the office. There were about sixty of us working selling time-shares, each at a little table, side by side. You could hear everybody’s conversation; it was kind of like a circus. You took whomever came to your table, but if the people looked like they were going to be a waste of time, there were ways some sales people had to deflect them, like looking busy or suddenly having to run to the bathroom.

One time there was this little old man who came in wearing a stained T-shirt and overalls that were frayed at the bottom where he’d cut them. You could practically hear people saying, “I don’t want him. All yours.” Well, I didn’t care what you looked like. He had come over from the Delta, and as he walked toward me I saw he had on these steel-toe boots that he had cut the toes out of.

He caught me looking. “Diabetes,” he said.

“Well, it is a pleasure to meet you,” I said. “I’m Ruth.”

The guy didn’t look like he had a penny to his name, but I gave him the same tour I gave everyone else. At the end, he reached into his overalls and pulled a snuff bag from behind the bib. And from that he pulled out sixteen thousand dollars in cash and put it on the table.

“I think I want one of these,” he said. Everybody was just gobsmacked. So I had a reputation.

This couple I had that afternoon was more the usual type. They were in their thirties, he in a dark blue polo and she in a summer dress that looked new. They had a little money, I could tell, but these ones had their arms crossed tight, so I knew I had to warm them up. The tighter the buyers’ arms were crossed, the tougher they were to crack. You knew they’d made a pact that morning that they weren’t turning loose any money and they weren’t listening to you. So you would sit with your arms crossed exactly the way they had theirs crossed. And you would just eventually, throughout the conversation, uncross your arms. A little bit at a time. And they would uncross their arms, a little bit at a time. Then, sometimes, they would pull them back up, and you had to start all over again. You had to keep breaking that pact, and it was always about the money.

I put my right hand over my left and leaned in. “Look,” I said, lowering my voice as if I was leveling with them, even though I was about to tell one heck of a little white lie. “I bet you did the same thing my husband and I did when we first came here. ‘Honey, we’re not buying a thing today. We’re not making a decision today, I don’t care how great it is or how much we like it. We’re not buying today.’”

They looked at each other and laughed, their bodies relaxing. It was always the same.

“I get it,” I said. “Now that we’ve got that straight, let’s do the tour.”

As we walked over to the model condo, I talked up Hot Springs. I know a lot of people who love Hot Springs as much as I do but nobody who loves her more. My grandmother’s grandfather, Grandpa Gardiner, came here from England in 1836 and opened the first general store and saloon. Well, one of the first. Everybody says theirs was the first. He owned the land from Central Avenue to Mount Riante, and he was always having somebody at his homestead digging a grave. “He lost another slave,” the locals would say. “That boy from England, he doesn’t know how to keep a slave. He buys ’em, and then they die on him.”

They didn’t know his slaves weren’t dead. He was secretly putting them on the wagon train to the Indian Territory and freeing them. He hated slavery, didn’t understand it at all. He would get the slaves when they came up the river, and he would buy them through his store, and then he’d help them escape.

“This used to be known as the Valley of the Vapors,” I told the couple as we walked up a hill. “The warring Indian chiefs, way back about five hundred years or more, they would come into the valley where the hot springs were. It was the healing valley, so they couldn’t bring their weapons in.”

I paused for effect. “They would divert the water. I think there are forty-seven springs coming down from Hot Springs mountain, about a million gallons a day. It’s hot, 147 degrees Fahrenheit, and they would divert the creek so that the hot water would come down and mix with the cool water. That way the chiefs just had their own little bath. They would soak out the problems and talk out what they needed and wanted. Instead of fighting about it. It was a sacred valley. It still is to me.”

That was for her. I saw her put her arm in his as I continued. “You probably know Hot Springs was the original home of spring training for baseball. Babe Ruth loved it, but did you know Al Capone loved Hot Springs too?”

“No shi—” he said, and the wife pulled his arm but good. “Really?”

“Oh sure. He used to stay at the Arlington Hotel, and he even had his worst enemy living here at the same time: Bugsy Siegel. Hot Springs was neutral territory.” Here came the trump card. “And Owney Madden, of course.”

“Who?”

“Owney Madden? They called him ‘The Killer.’ The Mob sent him down to Hot Springs to cool off after he killed someone he shouldn’t have. That was the thirties, and by then Hot Springs was the place to be in the South for organized crime. Wide open.”

My grandfather was Owney Madden’s doorman. I remember when Papa had his leg amputated and was recovering out at our house, and Owney used to visit him. This big black Cadillac would pull up, and a man would be standing by the car at all times. Owney always gave me graham crackers. I thought he brought them because he liked me, but when I got older I realized it was because I would just sit and be quiet because I had a mouth full of crackers.

We entered the condo, which was nice and big. Two-bedroom, two-bath—Larry really did do a good job. “Now, see how it feels to live here,” I said. “It’s not a museum.”

She walked out on the balcony to look at the lake, closing the glass door behind her to keep in the air-conditioning. He sat on the couch and turned on the TV to find a ball game. This is how a lot of people want to live. Alone together.

“It’s the life,” he said to me, but more to himself. She turned back to look at him through the glass, and I busied myself straightening a pillow. I caught her nodding.

“Sold,” he said.

I had the windows open the whole drive home in my little gray Toyota Celica. I’d never bought a new car, but I kept this one shiny enough that it passed. This was the first time I had four take-offs that were the same brand of tire, so I knew I had made it. I pulled into the driveway of my house, a buff-brick ranch, a thousand and change square feet.

I was doing all right on my own. Sandy was right though: I did want a husband. Just because you don’t really need something doesn’t mean you wouldn’t like to have it.

I could hear the phone ringing as I got out of the car.

“Is this Ruth?” It was a stern voice.

“Yes?” I said.

“This is Sister Angela Mayer.”

“Oh,” I said, starting to straighten the kitchen counter as if this stranger could see me. “Hello, Sister.”

“I’m an administrator at St. Joseph’s Regional,” she said. “I was given your name.”

St. Joe’s was the Catholic hospital in Hot Springs. “Yes?” I said, drawing it out.

“We have a patient that we need removed,” she said. “We cannot care for him here.”

“Do I know him?” I said.

“I don’t know who you know,” she said. “This hospital is not equipped to handle people with AIDS. It is not safe. And we don’t want the reputation.”

“Well, I don’t see what I . . .”

“You’ll come tonight?”

“Uh, let me . . .”

She hung up. I realized I hadn’t asked his name.

I sat in the kitchen. The room was already darkening from the sun setting. I’d rushed in to answer the phone and hadn’t turned on the light. Allison would be away until her daddy brought her back in time for me to take her to Sunday services.

I cradled my head in my hands for a minute. And then I picked up my keys.

“Well, shoot,” I said to no one.