CHAPTER THREE
Between seven and eleven o’clock the next morning, Hugh mowed four lawns. He was practically running as he completed Mrs. Thompson’s downgrade. She fussed at him as she counted out his money, for in his haste he had come dangerously close to her Chinese ivy. He explained that he feared it would rain later in the week, and he didn’t want to fall behind. She nodded grimly and cautioned him to be more careful.
He raced home with the mower, then mounted his bike and pedaled downtown as fast as he could. When he arrived, a fair-sized crowd was gathered in the heat of the day. There was a holiday atmosphere. People passed around iced tea and soft drinks and not a few poorly disguised cans of beer. Some folks sat on lawn chairs under big beach umbrellas while they watched the workers down at the old yellow building. More pickups were pulled in, beds laden with chairs and coolers, all facing the work going on below. Some had erected tarps over the beds to shade their occupants.
Phelps Crane moved through the center of the group, talking a mile a minute. Off by the old Railway Express Office, Grissom, the railroad man, sat in his car and glared at the festivities.
Hugh parked his bike next to the hardware store and walked over the tracks. Tommy popped up along with Ray Marcus, another teammate of theirs and one who also had gone to work for Mr. Hadnought.
“Is it raining?” Hugh looked up at the clear, hot sky overhead.
“Don’t be a wiseass,” Ray warned. “I got fired, just like Tommy here.”
“You eating beans every night, too?”
“What?”
“Nothing,” Hugh laughed and took a shadow punch at Tommy, who feinted and jabbed back. “What happened?”
“He claimed I burned out the clutch on his new tractor on purpose.”
“Did you?”
“Hell, no.” Ray looked hurt. “I mean, I thought about it. That old son of a bitch worked us all day, right up till dark. God, I hated that tractor. He had me on an old sand terrace all overgrown with careless weeds and Johnson grass that hadn’t been plowed in about a hundred years. It was just too much for a little 40-20 to pull. I hit a soft spot and sank her right up to the axles. Burned the clutch right out. I had to walk damn near five miles back to the road and hitch to the house. Lucky I wasn’t snake bit.”
“Lucky you didn’t have to take a shit,” Tommy put in, and they all laughed.
“So what’s happening?” Hugh asked as they moved over to the pylons. Three or four were occupied, and they had to walk down toward the grain elevators to find a vacant spot.
“Not much,” Tommy assessed. “They been going at it with a wrecking ball, but it won’t hardly dent it. That’s a tough old son of a bitch.”
Down in the work area, little had changed from the day before. The only evidence of a morning’s work was that more of the weeds and grass were driven down, and the crane with the wrecking ball had been moved closer to the building. Hugh couldn’t see anywhere in the side facing the crane that the ball might have struck with serious effect. Some of the yellow fieldstones were cracked and broken, exposing the raw concrete underneath, but that was generally true all around the building, so it didn’t mean a thing.
“We were thinking about going out to the Four Seasons and going for a swim,” Tommy volunteered. There had been no white people swimming in the municipal pool since integration came to town in the late sixties, twenty years before. The well-to-do like the Fitzpatricks went out to the country club. Middle-class families such as Hugh’s, steeped in the southern tradition of no mixed-race swimming, paid a twenty-five-dollar-a-month fee for their children to use the motel’s pool during the day when there were few paying guests to compete for the tiny blue water hole. Ironically, now, in the late 1980s, there were black and Hispanic people swimming in both refuges, but no one thought to return to the municipal pool or to insist that the city refurbish and restore it to its former splendor.
“Y’all go on ahead,” Hugh said. “I want to watch a while.”
“We might go over to the field, hit some fly balls after that,” Ray said. “You ought to come. You could use the practice.” Unlike Tommy and Hugh, Ray was a big hitter. He had the Civic League record for home runs in their age group. He held down third base and was proud of his natural abilities.
“Naw,” Hugh said. “I need to mow a couple of lawns this afternoon, and I really can’t take the time.”
“Work, work, work,” Ray chanted when he and Tommy moved off. “I didn’t know he was such a peckerhead.”
Some high school boys pulled into the parking lot and sat on the hoods of their cars and listened to music on their stereos until Phelps Crane ran them off. Hugh noticed a knot of girls from his own class moving into the crowd and milling around until they decided that no one would pay attention to them, and they also left. Even though he had no specific interest in any of the girls, he wanted to go on out to the motel and join them in the pool. Just the idea of being around them in their scanty suits excited him. It was a relatively new idea to him, something that had been born the summer before and grown like a weed in his heart.
It made him feel guilty a lot. But it also stimulated him beyond reason.
Down around the building little was happening. Men in hard hats moved around and drove up and down in their pickups and bulldozers. Now and then one would look intently up toward the crowd, but for the most part, things were quiet.
Just as Hugh grew drowsy in the summer sun and had about half-consciously talked himself into the long bike ride out to the motel pool, he heard Phelps shouting.
“They’re going at it again, the sons of bitches! C’mon, old gal, give ’em hell!”
The roar of a huge motor aroused Hugh from his stupor. He squinted into the bright sunlit dust and saw the crane lift its arm and move to give the ball a good swing. The large, dark orb angled out away from the building, and a small curve formed in the cable. Then the arm swung in the opposite direction, and the iron ball smashed into the side of Hendershot’s Grocery Warehouse.
Hugh expected to hear a loud crash when the heavy ball struck the building, expected to see brick and dirt explode from the point of impact. He couldn’t imagine that any structure would withstand such a blow. But when the ball hit the side of the fifth floor, just under a bricked-up, arched window, there was almost no noise at all. The ball smashed into the side, and a few fieldstones flew up and outward, but then it bounced off, struck it again on the rebound, and then hung uselessly.
“Ol’ Hendershot was more afraid of moisture’n thieves,” Jonas Wilson’s voice spoke to Hugh’s right. Hugh wasn’t at all surprised to find the old man standing beside him. He looked up and learned that Wilson wore the same costume from the day before. If he had slept in it, it looked no dirtier or worse for wear.
“They’s seven floors in that building,” Wilson went on as if Hugh had asked him to explain. “A basement and six stories. The basement’s all full of trash, likely. But it’s got walls poured four feet thick all the way ’round and lined with stone, just like the outside. Every floor’s got two foot of concrete, triple reinforced with steel rebar, by golly, and the walls all the way ’round her is three foot thick.” He smiled down at Hugh. “They’s forts in the world not built that tough.”
“Why?” Hugh asked. “Why did he want it that way?”
“Wasn’t no air conditioning in them days,” Wilson looked down at the building. “Hendershot hired a man—architect, he was—name of Grady to go all ’round the country and make a study of what would be cool in the summer, warm in the winter. Being anywhere in that building any time of day any time of year, the temperature was the same: sixty-five degrees. You could count on it. He had big thermometers stuck up all over the place to make sure. If one was off a degree or two, he’d call up Grady and have him come down and figger out why and fix it.”
“So it kept the food he stored longer.”
“Longer and fresher.” Wilson smiled. “Back when folks couldn’t get no ice, he had fresh vegetables, meat, all sorts of stuff stored in there. Fresh as could be. It wouldn’t keep forever, course. But it’d keep a long spell. He was a smart one, ol’ Hendershot.”
Hugh looked out where the crane was winding up for another try. The workers stood around and watched as the wrecking ball bounced off the building one more time.
“You see,” Wilson went on as the ball made its harmless rebound and hung slack and the workers slapped their thighs and threw down their hard hats in disgust, “They’s over a hundred thousand tons of concrete poured in for every floor in her. Floors and walls. Solid concrete. Look over yonder.” He pointed to the hardware store, where, behind the false front, Hugh could see the uneven brickwork stretching back toward the alley for both floors.
“That’s adobe behind fieldstone facade. It’s not bad. Pretty good, really, for the time when it was built. Cheap, solid. But it don’t last. All them buildings is made of it. All but them they put up in the last fifty years or so.” Hugh spotted large cracks running down the sides of several buildings. “Water, wind, every durned thing you can think of eats away at it till it just falls away.”
He looked once more down into the construction site. “Hendershot didn’t want that to happen. ‘I’m building this’un to be here,’ he told us when we went to work. He knew, don’t you see, that there wasn’t another grocery warehouse in a hundred miles. All the little stores in the area, general stores and country crossroads and the like, had to get their foodstuffs from someplace. He wanted his to be that place. Saw a fortune in the making. He brought in cypress trees—not cut lumber, whole durned trees—all the way from east Texas. He had us haul ’em out to Blind Man’s Creek and soak ’em for six months ’fore he’d let us use ’em. We nailed ’em in as cross beams while they was still wet. Heavy dickenses, I can tell you. Took a team of mules to haul ’em up. We nailed ’em in place with railroad spikes, and then he had concrete poured all over ’em. Solid.”
Hugh nodded. He looked around for Goodlett and spotted her asleep next to the foundation of the hardware store. The gray of the concrete there was mottled, and she stuck out clearly.
“Then he floored each story with sheet iron, covered that with concrete, then laid in second-growth hickory he brought in from Tennessee. Don’t have any idea how much all that cost him. Wasn’t no regular railroad here, then. Just a spur line. Everything come in by wagon. Cost a fortune. Said he didn’t care. Big-time, cross-country railroad was coming, and he knew it. He was building it to be here when it come. And come it did.
“Only thing on that building that comes from this county is the fieldstone and the adobe covering. The stone’s granite from down ’round Marble Falls. Hard enough by itself, but we put it on with wet cement, and we held it in place with poles till it dried in place. They’re having a heck of a time even knocking that off.”
Hugh looked down again and saw the third and final attempt of the morning fail. The crane’s motor shut off all at once, and the men stalked in disgust toward the little trailer.
“Them’s the bookkeeping offices where they’re trying to break in right now,” Wilson explained. “But up there on the sixth floor, that arched window was right behind old Hendershot’s desk. Had frosted glass in it, till he figgered out it was letting in too much draft. So he had it bricked up the same way as the rest. I was in there once. It was blacker’n midnight in there, like a big ol’ cave. He never would light a lamp. Said it made things too hot to have that kind of light. Maybe that’s what drove him crazy, made him run off the way he done. Maybe not, though. That’d been back during the war.”
“My granddad was in the war,” Hugh offered, wanting to keep Wilson talking.
“Not that war, boy,” Wilson chuckled. “The big war. The war in France.” His eyes looked into the distance. “The bad war. Course, there never was a good one,” he concluded.
“He was in France,” Hugh insisted. “During the war. He was in Paris. I have a picture . . .”
“Not that war.” Wilson reached out and put a hand on Hugh’s shoulder. It was the first time he had touched him. Hugh spotted the damaged, twisted fingers coming toward him and fought the inclination to flinch. “World’s War I. The big war.” His voice took on a sarcastic tone. “The war to end all the wars. They wanted me to go off and fight in it. Called up my name. But I wouldn’t. Me and Gene Debs, by golly. I’d of gone to jail first. Just like Debs did. Wasn’t going to go and die to save a fat man’s loans. Wasn’t no good reason for that war. Never been a good reason for any war, truth to tell.”
“They called you up?” Hugh asked, confused. “You mean they drafted you.”
“Yep. But I told ’em I wouldn’t go. Didn’t matter, though.” He lifted his left hand to illustrate the point in his missing fingers. “Wouldn’t of took me no how. Big ol’ rattler already took these. So I went to Hendershot and asked for a job as a carpenter. Said he didn’t need no carpenter, but he put me to work hauling boxes up and down in that building.”
“Lots of stairs,” Hugh said in mock awe. He couldn’t imagine what sort of labor Wilson was talking about.
“Not the stairs,” Wilson laughed loudly and caused several people to turn their heads and look at them. Hugh noticed that eating was general up and down the crowd. Many had brought sandwiches and picnic hampers. More folding picnic tables were set up, and several people were cooking over small portable grills. Phelps Crane stood next to a pickup and scowled at Wilson and Hugh over his Thermos cup.
“Elevators,” Wilson ignored the stares and went on. “Looky here.” He pointed a stubbed finger toward the side of the building. “Right there. You see where them stones is in a different pattern?”
Hugh looked and noticed that just between the biggest doors on the first floor, right where the loading dock had been, the stones were arranged in an vertical pattern as opposed to the crazy-quilt design that made up the rest of the building’s outer wall.
“Up on the roof, right at the top of that section, is a bunch of holes.” Hugh looked again. “You can’t see ’em from here,” Wilson snapped. “Used to be cables come up out of them holes and went through some pulleys counter-levered on the roof and then ran down to the yard right there.” He pointed to the spot where the semi-trailer with the crane was parked. “Where they was attached to some harnesses for a team of mules.”
“How did it work?”
“Well, behind that wall is a shaft with this big ol’ platform on it. Elevator. Only Hendershot never called it that. Called it the ‘Big Lift.’ It ran from the roof all the way down to the basement. Stuff would come in by wagon—and later by truck or on a boxcar from the railroad—there used to be a side track run right by the loading docks—and the men’d wrestle it inside, put it on that platform, and a team of mules’d move it up and down to the right floor. That was my job. Driving them mules.”
“Wouldn’t an engine have worked better?”
“Only engine they was was a donkey engine.” Wilson said. “At first, at least. Later on, they hooked up some kind of big ol’ motor to it, but Hendershot said it made too much noise. He liked the mules. ’Sides, hay is cheaper’n gasoline by a long shot.”
“So you drove the mules.”
“For a while, anyhow,” Wilson smiled. “Called it ‘hauling boxes.’ ” He dug into his pocket and pulled out smoke makings. He offered them to Hugh, but Phelps was still watching them, and Hugh shook his head.
“Maybe later,” he murmured.
Wilson rolled a smoke and looked down. “Paid two dollars a day during the war. Then things fell off a mite, and he knocked us back to a dollar a day, then fifty cents. I quit at a dollar. Anything less was exploiting, you know what I’m saying? Sweat may be cheaper’n hay, but it ain’t free.”
“My God,” Hugh said and ignored Wilson’s sudden frown at the expletive, “I get as much as fifteen dollars for mowing a medium-sized yard. That only takes me an hour. Sometimes less.”
“Well, times is changed.” Wilson lit his smoke. “Course, man could eat near a week on five dollars back then. Get a place to stay for two bits a night. Good place. Not the hotel, maybe, but a room and a meal thrown in for a dime or fifteen cents more. Working man could get by.” He sighed and smoked a moment. “Money meant more then.”
Hugh stood up on the pylon behind him for a moment and noticed Grissom’s car pulling out. Grissom drove down to the trailer and got out and went inside.
“Seems to me that it means more now,” Hugh said.
“Now it ain’t the money.” Wilson sniffed in disgust. “It’s the having of it. More you get, more you want. Never mind how much you truly need.”
Phelps Crane could stand no more, and he stalked over toward the old man and boy. “You oughtn’t to be hanging ’round here,” he snapped at Hugh. “Does your mama know where you’re at?”
“Does yours?” Wilson asked Phelps, but he received only a mean look in reply.
Hugh was struck by Crane’s audacity. He had known Phelps Crane all his life, but he couldn’t remember ever having spoken to him or having been spoken to by him. Hugh was angry, and he looked away.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you, boy,” Phelps said. “I asked you a question. Does your mama—”
“Did you snitch on me?” Hugh demanded suddenly. The words tumbled out of his mouth before he could stop them. “I saw you calling somebody yesterday. Did you call my mother?”
“What if I did?” Phelps stepped back. “You got no business down here hanging ’round with . . . with him.” He jerked a thumb toward Wilson, who looked calmly at him.
“What’s wrong with him?” Hugh demanded. He had never spoken to an adult that way. “My dad knows where I am.” The lie struck home in Phelps’s face, and Hugh grew warm all over.
“He does?” Phelps rubbed the stubble on his chin. He hadn’t shaved, but the whiskers barely covered the broken veins in his cheeks. His eyes were red and small. His breath reeked of tobacco and alcohol. “I can’t believe that.” He took thought. “I don’t believe it. I’m of a mind to call him out at the mill and ask him.”
“You do that,” Hugh fought back panic and turned away again, unable to hold Phelps’s accusing gaze. “He’ll just tell you to mind your own business.”
Phelps spun on his heel and started back to the crowd, who had all stopped eating and talking to observe the confrontation. Hugh knew he was in deep trouble. At least half the people there knew his mother well, and before supper was half cooked, she would know all the details of the conversation.
“I hear you’re getting up a petition of some kind,” Wilson spoke up and caused Phelps to stop. The station owner didn’t turn around, however.
“That’s right,” he said over his shoulder. “You want to make something of it?”
“Might want to sign it,” Wilson said in his steady, calm voice.
“No, thanks,” Phelps took a step and started moving more rapidly away. “They might want to check the signatures, and they don’t allow loonies’ names to count.”
Hugh looked up at Jonas Wilson. Something passed behind the old man’s eyes. It was gone in an instant, and he pressed his chapped lips together in a tight smile. He ground his cigarette butt out under his boot heel, sighed, spoke softly. “C’mon, boy. Let’s go have us a bite to eat.”
“Let me try to explain it to you,” Edith said in a quiet, even tone. They were sitting in the living room. They used it only when something serious was happening, and he inevitably associated it with Larry’s funeral. Then, it seemed, he spent an eternity sitting on the pink sofa, rising and enduring hugs from women and handshakes from men he was too young to know, to care about. It was a room of tears in his mind, filled with whispers and furtive glances. It was a room Hugh hated. When he came through the door that evening, though, his mother was already seated on the sofa, his father perched uncomfortably on a Queen Anne chair. Both had tumblers full of iced amber liquid that Hugh assumed was whiskey, and both were smoking. Edith’s hair was done up high on her head in the manner she wore it when she went visiting, and her makeup was heavy. In between sips of her drink and puffs of her cigarette, she put her hands in her lap and shredded a Kleenex.
Hugh’s father slumped—or tried to slump—in the undersized armchair. Hugh knew that he hated the chair and had bought it only because Edith insisted that it matched the pink in the sofa. It was harder than concrete. Harry sipped his drink, puffed his Camel, and looked miserable. Hugh could smell what had been supper throughout the house: meatloaf. Now it and the mashed potatoes and English peas were growing cold on the stove while they had this family talk.
“We’ve always brought you up to respect older people,” Edith went on. Her hands were now fisted around the wadded Kleenex in her lap. She was working to be strong, Hugh knew, working to put up a good front, but her fragility was showing. He was overcome with guilt for causing her to go through this.
“But this is different,” she said. “Jonas Wilson is not a normal person. He has strange ideas. He’s a . . . well, he’s not a nice person.”
“He’s nice to me.”
“That’s not the point,” Harry grumbled. “He’s probably nice to you because he wants something.”
“What could he want from me?”
“Has he asked you for anything?” Edith’s eyebrow shot up with a look at Harry.
“No, nothing.” Hugh looked at his sneakers. Grass stains covered the white rubber toes. A tear raced across the shredded seam where the sole joined the vamp. They were wearing out. That was new, he idly thought. Usually he outgrew shoes long before they fell apart. “In fact, he gives me things.”
“What things?” Harry was alarmed.
“Oh, sandwiches.” Hugh frowned with the concealed fact of the tobacco. “Stuff like that. He’s got a neat dog.”
“That mongrel,” Harry sighed.
“You eat with him?” Edith’s voice raised, and she forcibly calmed herself and sipped her drink.
“Well, sure,” Hugh confessed. “I eat what he eats. Sandwiches.”
“Sandwiches made of what?”
“Vegetables.” Hugh smiled as Harry rolled his eyes. “Squash, tomatoes, beets, stuff like that.”
“You don’t like ‘stuff like that.’ ” Edith stared at him with an accusing look in her eyes. “You won’t even let me put onions in the meatloaf.”
“I never had any onions like Jonas’s,” Hugh said. “They’re not hot! They’re sweet. And he puts them in a sandwich with sourdough bread and mustard and beets—”
“ ‘Jonas’!” Edith almost dropped her cigarette on the carpet as her hands groped for the Kleenex strips and her knuckles turned white in their grip. “He calls him ‘Jonas,’ ” she said.
“Onions and beets?” Harry muttered. “That sounds awful. God, Edith, I’m hungry. Couldn’t we finish this after supper?”
“He calls him ‘Jonas.’ ” Edith repeated in a rising tone. “I can’t believe you’re thinking of supper while your son is running around with a psychopath and calling him by his first name.”
“What do you want him to call him?” Harry drained his drink. “Jesus, Edith, I think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill, here.”
“Me! You’re the one who called me this afternoon after Phelps Crane called you. You’re the one who made me worry all day about where he was, who he was with. You’re the one who suggested we might call the sheriff.”
“The sheriff?” Hugh shouted involuntarily. His head spun. Phelps Crane had called his father, after all. His hands formed into fists. “Why would you call the sheriff? He hasn’t done anything.”
“It’s not what he’s done.” Edith settled back on the sofa and took her glass. Her shoe was loose on her foot as she crossed her legs, and she twirled it around on her stockinged toe rapidly. “It’s what he might do.” She glared at Harry. “I can’t believe you think I’m overreacting. After what you said . . .” She trailed off, drained her glass, reached for another cigarette. Her previous smoke still burned in the ashtray.
Harry rose wearily and took both of their empty glasses into the kitchen. “I know what I said,” he called from the other room. “And I’m sorry I said it. I was busy when that old fool called me, and I didn’t have time to think it through. I shouldn’t have called you. It only upset you, and I don’t think there’s anything to be that upset about. Right now, I think you’re scaring the boy.” Hugh heard ice clinking. “And I’m not sure there’s good reason.”
“I think that old man’s reputation is plenty of good reason,” Edith shot back. She folded her arms and looked at the wall.
“Well, he hasn’t done anything, and Hugh seems all right.”
Hugh opened his mouth to shout that he was still in the room, to remind them that they didn’t need to talk about him as if he were gone. It reminded him of the way they spoke of Larry. It made him feel invisible.
“I mowed all my lawns today,” he put in. Actually, he was still three lawns behind, but he was sure he could make them up. Two of the families were on vacation. They wouldn’t notice if he was a day or two late.
Harry ignored his comment when he came back into the room, set down the replenished drinks, and took his wife’s ashtray back to the kitchen. She remained silent, smoking, staring at the wall.
“I’ll admit I was pretty excited when I called,” he said.
“Excited! You were in a blue-collar panic,” she shouted. Hugh remembered his father explaining that “blue-collar panic” was a Navy term used to describe what happened when things went wrong and there was no officer around to take charge and calm down the sailors.
“All right, Edith. I was in a panic,” Harry spoke from the kitchen. “But I’ve settled down, now. I’ve thought about it. I don’t see that any harm’s been done. Hugh’s a good boy, and I trust him.” He came back in and replaced the ashtray, took up his drink, and tried to settle himself once more on the uncomfortable chair.
“Phelps Crane said—”
“Phelps Crane doesn’t know shit from Shinola,” Harry said suddenly.
“Harry, watch your language!”
“Well, he doesn’t. He’s a bitter old busybody and a damned fool besides. He’s had a burr under his saddle ever since he retired, and if you ask me, there’s more to worry about from him spying on Hugh than there is from some old hermit sharing an onion sandwich with the boy.”
“I think he was doing us a favor,” Edith sniffed and took up her drink.
“I think he was butting in. Phelps is unreliable and half-crazy. Ask anybody. The only reason he runs the Chevron station is that his brother-in-law owns it. Nobody else would hire him. He’s too old and too nuts, and you know as well as I do that he’s drunk half the time. If there’s anybody we need to tell Hugh to stay away from, it’s probably Phelps Crane. I doubt that anything Jonas Wilson might do would be worse than any influence that foolish old drunk would have on the boy.”
“I’m still here, remember,” Hugh said darkly.
“Don’t you smart-mouth me!” Edith yelled at him. She jumped when she shouted and spilled her drink all over her dress. She came to her feet. She looked wild. Her eyes were wide, and her hair came out of its coiffure and sprayed around her head. “You think you’re a little big for your britches, don’t you?” she shrieked.
“Edith,” Harry started, sitting up. Hugh could see fear in his face, and he heard a sharp warning in his voice.
She glanced nervously at him, physically gathered herself together by pushing her hands back over her hair, and lowered her voice. “Well, if you’re so satisfied to take nourishment with that filthy old man, then you can just go to your room without supper.”
“Seems to me like we’re all going to bed without supper,” Harry grumbled. He sat back and sipped his drink.
“Go on,” Edith ordered. Her painted nail pointed down the hall, but her voice was now calm, her face back to a controlled mask of anger. “I don’t want to hear from you until you apologize to your father and me and promise—word of honor—to stay away from that old man from now on!”
Hugh rose and shuffled down the hall. He wasn’t very hungry, anyway, and cold meatloaf didn’t appeal to him. As he shut the door to his room behind him, he could hear his parents continuing to argue. His father’s voice never rose to a yell, but he heard his mother’s tones break into tears after a while. They were hurting each other, and it hurt him that he was the cause of it, but he didn’t know what he could do.
He wanted to please them, to promise to stay away from Jonas Wilson, but the only way he could do that was to stay away from downtown. The thought of that, he realized with a start, was almost as painful as his guilt for causing trouble in his own house. He had somehow become involved with the attempted demolition of the old warehouse building—personally involved. He wanted to be there when it came down. He couldn’t stand the thought of going by there and seeing a clean vacant lot where the old building had once stood, not without having seen it go. It was history, he told himself, and he didn’t want to miss it.
He threw himself down onto his bed and looked around the darkened room. Only his closet light was on, and the room was gloomy as the late June darkness descended on the house. Model airplanes—biplanes from World War I and fighters from World War II—dangled from the ceiling, and posters of motorcycles and cars and baseball heroes—Hank Aaron, Mark McGwire, Ken Griffey Jr., Juan Gonzalez, and Nolan Ryan—dominated the wall over his desk. In the center was a small picture of the coveted mountain bike, but he couldn’t make out the details in the dark, and he turned over and inspected the rest of the room.
The Rudd house had three bedrooms. When Larry was born, the third was converted to a nursery, but Hugh had been informed that as soon as Larry was old enough, it would be changed into an office for his father’s work. Bunk beds were installed in Hugh’s room, and his posters and models were shoved off to one side in anticipation of Larry’s eventual transition from baby to little brother. It never was to be.
Larry’s death had happened seven years before, in July. Hugh still remembered his mother’s shrieks when she came running out of the nursery with her younger son’s limp body in her arms. Hugh was seated at the kitchen table, mooning over soggy cornflakes, when she raced in and thrust Larry into his lap. She dialed the kitchen phone, screamed out her name and address and a demand for an ambulance, then snatched up Larry’s body and raced out the door to meet the vehicle when it arrived. She ran the whole two miles to the hospital before the confused ambulance drivers wheeled up to the Rudd driveway.
Hugh had never eaten breakfast since without feeling his brother’s body lying across his thighs. Larry had been dead weight, still and heavy, and Hugh couldn’t ever forget the sight of his brother’s half-open blue eyes or his head lolling helplessly as Hugh squirmed beneath him. It didn’t haunt him. He had no nightmares about it, and it had all happened so quickly that he remembered it as only a bare outline of spasmodic events. But whenever he felt the cool wood of the kitchen chairs on the backs of his bare legs, the images swam up to meet his eyes, and he shuddered.
Hugh’s parents had waited only a month after the funeral before selling all the baby furniture from the nursery and the bunk beds as well. Hugh’s room was restored to his own personal domain. The third bedroom now had a daybed and a desk with a typewriter on it. They called it an office, but Hugh couldn’t recall his father ever going in there to do any work of any kind. When his father had time cards to go over or paperwork from the mill to study, he sat in the dining room.
Now and forever, though, Hugh’s bedroom was his own. He had never shared it. Not since Larry’s death had he had an overnight guest, although he had spent the night at Tommy’s and Ray’s and others’ houses from time to time. He kept the room neat, his bed made. His father had shown him how to make “navy corners,” and he religiously tightened the bedspread across the single mattress every morning but Mondays—wash day.
As his eyes roved from shadow to shadow in the room, though, Hugh began to see his room with different eyes. It didn’t seem to reflect his personality at all any longer. The posters bored him, and he wondered what about them made him think that he wanted them on the walls in the first place. He studied the model airplanes as if he was seeing them for the first time. They weren’t very good, he acknowledged. The decals on most of them were crooked, and his attempts to paint camouflage patterns on others were childish and awkward.
His eyes roved to his bookshelf. Several model cars were arranged between forgotten toys and paperback joke books, binders full of baseball cards, and other junk. He was disgusted with everything in the room. He got up and glanced down at the quilted bedspread. It showed cartoon characters prancing in typical poses. It, too, repulsed him. He vowed to demand some changes as soon as things in the household cooled off and he was in a position to ask for anything.
He went to his closet and began digging through old clothes, toys, games, and puzzles. He made a pile of discards that grew larger while he worked. Light from the overhead bulb spilled into corners he hadn’t inspected in years, it seemed, and he was amazed at how much childish junk was stored in shoe boxes and bags in the nether regions of the walk-in closet.
When he worked through a built-in shelf, ridding himself of boxes of crayons and coloring books and broken parts of toy cars, he discovered a stash of his parents’ stuff in a shoe box. He opened it and discovered some pictures of them when they were young. His father stood proudly, muscular and sunburned in a chief petty officer’s dress blues, and his mother looked girlish and awkward in a dressy suit with a short skirt that revealed more of her legs than Hugh had ever seen. Her hair was long and straight, her eyes clear. His father’s smile was bright, confident. Behind the posing couple was the superstructure of a ship. To his father’s right, a palm tree cast a shadow across the seawall at Corpus Christi Bay.
There also were pictures of his grandparents Rudd—dead before Hugh had a chance to know them—standing on the porch of a farmhouse with chickens and some cattle in the background. Next in the stack were grainy sepia-tone snaps of people Hugh didn’t recognize, mixed in with shots of old cars that were new when they were photographed, of houses that resembled the ancient unpainted and dilapidated structures that ringed the better neighborhoods of the small town, of railroad cars and engines with proud crewmembers standing out front. There were church parties, weddings, and one photograph of a group of dour people standing in a cemetery in front of a flower-laden coffin. Hugh took the box to his bed, turned on his reading lamp, and was still sorting through the old photographs when the door opened and his father came in.
“How’s it going, Sport?” Harry sat down on the bed and arched his eyebrows in surprise at his son’s activity. “Where’d you find all that junk?”
“In my closet,” Hugh replied. His father smelled of whiskey and tobacco. It reminded him unpleasantly of the odor surrounding Phelps Crane. Hugh wondered if his father had managed to eat anything. Hugh picked up the picture of the cemetery scene. “What’s going on here?”
“That’s your great-grandfather Rudd’s funeral.” Harry picked up the photograph and looked at it. “I’m the kid in short pants, here. I wasn’t but six or so.”
“Do you remember him?”
“Not much. He was pretty sick by the time I came along. Grandma Rudd, my Grandma Rudd, died the summer before him. He never got over it.”
“They’re the ones buried by Larry, aren’t they?” Hugh studied the picture. He saw the cotton compress in the background and now recognized the spot. A small sapling on the left was now a huge shade tree crowding the lot.
Harry nodded briefly. “Your grandparents Rudd—my folks—are in the plot next to them. You know that.”
They were silent for a moment. Hugh’s father’s parents had been killed in a traffic accident when Hugh was still in diapers. That loss was something Hugh and his father shared. Hugh always felt it drew them closer, but the mention of it always made him uncomfortable.
“What’s this?” Hugh pulled another picture from the box. It showed a steel suspension bridge spanning two limestone buttes.
“That’s the old bridge over Blind Man’s Creek,” Harry explained. “Look, here,” he dug around in the box and found another shot. It was identical to the first, but this time there were small puffs of smoke coming from either end of the bridge. “And there’s another one, somewhere.” He fished around once more and came up with one that showed the buttes from the same angle, but now the bridge was nothing but a pile of twisted metal.
“They blew it up,” Harry said. “I wasn’t much older than you when they did it. My dad took these pictures. He said it was a shame for them to destroy it, but it was too narrow for modern cars, trucks and all, so they tore it down.”
“Blew it up?”
“Well, they tried to dismantle it, but it was rusted up in places, and it was costing too much to take it apart. Some folks had the idea to reconstruct it someplace else.”
“Why?”
“It was historical,” Harry wrinkled his forehead. “They said it was built especially for Teddy Roosevelt to use.”
“C’mon, Dad.”
“No, seriously. Back before he was president, Roosevelt came out here on a wolf hunt. He was governor of New York then, and there were all sorts of people with him. Security people, I guess. Press, photographers, that sort of thing. Anyway, the best hunting was in the western part of the county, and there wasn’t a good road, no way to cross the creek without getting wet, anyway, so the government sent down some engineers and, I guess, some money, and they built that bridge. They called it ‘Wolf Hunt Bridge.’ ”
“Wolf Hunt Bridge.”
“Yeah.” Harry stretched his back. “See, Roosevelt hunted wolves from horseback, but all those other people rode in wagons or carriages—or maybe in cars, I don’t know. Anyway, they could follow him right out to the hunt across that bridge.”
“But they tore it down.”
“Blew it up. I remember it. Whole town came out to watch. They put in that concrete job they have out there now. The mill’s just the other side of it.”
“Right there!” Hugh came up to his knees and pointed to a spot on his bedspread just over the top edge of the photograph.
“Yeah, Sport. Right there.” He smiled at Hugh.
“Is there anything left of it? Could we go out there—”
“There’s nothing left of it. It was all hauled away years ago. You’ve crossed that creek hundreds of times.”
“But you got to see it go,” Hugh said. “The old bridge. You were there when they blew it up.”
“Yeah.” Harry rose and studied the stack of discarded toys and games on the closet floor. “Say, what’s going on here?”
“I’m just cleaning out some stuff I don’t want.” Hugh looked at the three pictures again. The bridge was gone. Just as if it hadn’t been there. He had the disturbing feeling of helplessness. Someone should have saved it, he thought. Someone should have done something to stop them from destroying it.
“You’re not doing this to be mean, are you?”
Hugh looked up, confused.
“I mean, you’re not just making a big mess for your mother to clean up? Like to get back at her or anything?”
“No,” Hugh said. “I’m just getting rid of some old junk I don’t want anymore.”
“Making room for the new?” He offered a smile.
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Guess you’re growing up, Sport.” He picked up a coloring book, examined it with a sad expression, then dropped it back onto the stack. “Just don’t make a mess. And hang onto those baseball cards. Might put you through college, you know. Unless you can learn to hit an inside curveball,” he grinned. “Wish I still had mine. I could probably retire.”
“Dad?”
“Yeah, Sport.”
“You said that when they blew up the bridge, some people wanted to save it.”
“Yeah. Don’t know much about that. I was too young. There was a committee of some kind. Grandpa Rudd—your Grandpa Rudd—was on it. They tried. Wanted to move it out to the country someplace. Find a spot and rebuild it.”
“Why didn’t they?”
“Well, like I told you, the Highway Department was in a hurry to get the bridge widened. There had been some bad wrecks. It was too narrow for two cars to pass safely.” He thought for a moment. “Guess they didn’t have the money, either.”
“But it was important. I mean, Teddy Roosevelt and all.”
“Well,” Harry smiled wanly. “There’s likely as much bull in that story as truth. It was sort of a local legend. Don’t know of anybody who claimed to have seen Teddy Roosevelt go anywhere near the bridge. Matter of fact, I’m not sure he was ever really here.”
“But it was still a monument. It was important. Like the old Hendershot building. Right?”
Harry sat down again. “Not exactly. It’s not the same thing.”
“Why not?” Hugh came up on his knees in the middle of his bed. “I mean, that’s one solid building. Mr. Hendershot built it to be there forever. He said so himself.”
“Who told you that?”
Hugh hesitated, then almost whispered, “Jonas Wilson.”
Harry shook his head. “You can’t believe everything that old man says. You can’t believe anything. Old Man Hendershot was . . . well, he was crazy, too. The story is that he killed his wife and ran off with a waitress, but all anybody knows for sure is that he and a lot of money disappeared. That was a long time ago.”
“But that doesn’t change the building,” Hugh argued. “The building’s important.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s there. Because it’s always been there. It’s part of the town. They’re just tearing it down because it’s old. Somebody ought to try to stop them.”
“From what I hear, Phelps Crane and his bunch are doing just that.”
“Oh, they’re just making noise.” Hugh flopped back on his bed. “They stand around and talk and make ugly faces at the railroad man—”
“What railroad man?”
“Mr. Grissom. A guy in a white car who comes over and argues with them.”
“Oh.” Harry frowned.
“Anyway, they’re not going to do anything.”
“Well, what do you do down there?”
Hugh scowled and thought deeply. “I just watch.”
“With Jonas Wilson.”
“Not with him. Not exactly. We’re just there at the same time, that’s all.”
“So, you’re not hanging around with him?”
“No,” Hugh lied. He thought about their dinner that afternoon. It was the second in a row, and Wilson had taken it for granted that Hugh would join him. The period had been quiet, both of them lost in individual thoughts as they munched their sandwiches, had their smokes. Wilson took his shots of whiskey, cleaned up their litter, and they had lain back in the grass and looked at the sky while Hugh scratched Goodlett between her scruffy ears. Then they had gone back to watch the afternoon’s continuation of the workers’ futile attempts to dent the Hendershot Grocery Warehouse with their ball. The workers gave up at five, just as they had the day before, and the crowd cheered when they climbed into their pickups and drove out to their motel.
“There’s a lot of people there,” Hugh continued. “Jonas said that he figured there were nearly a hundred in the crowd by the time the men quit today.”
“Any other kids?” Harry asked while he pretended to sort through the other photographs.
“No,” Hugh admitted. “Tommy and Ray were there for a while, but they went swimming.”
“But you didn’t?”
“I meant to, but I never got around to it.”
“What about your work?”
“I’m keeping up.” Hugh avoided saying that he had already made that claim once that evening.
“Well, you need to do that.” Harry picked up a baseball card. “Thought you were going to work out some, too. High school’s only a few weeks away.”
Hugh ignored a quick spasm of guilt. “Then I can keep going down there?”
“I don’t like it. I don’t like it that you’re down there with all those layabouts who have nothing better to do. I don’t know why you feel it’s so important. And I have to agree with your mother: I don’t like your hanging around with Jonas Wilson.”
“I don’t know why I want to watch, but I do,” Hugh mumbled. “I just feel that it’s important. You know, Dad, I don’t think they’re going to do it.”
“Do what?”
“Tear it down.”
“Of course, they are. Unless Phelps and his crowd can come up with something they haven’t tried yet, that building will be gone by the Fourth of July.”
“They aren’t having much luck.”
“They’ll find a way. They’ll blow it up if they have to.”
Panic rose inside Hugh. His father was right. They would blow it up. Just like they blew up the bridge in the picture. In his mind he could see the puffs of smoke coming from the glassless windows of the six stories, the hesitation, and then the explosion. The whole thing would just go up. Hugh had watched enough old war movies to know that there was no building that couldn’t be demolished by dynamite, by bombs.
“I have to see them do it,” Hugh said quietly.
“Why, son? Why do you feel that way?”
“I just do. You saw them blow up the bridge, didn’t you?”
“What has that got—”
“Well, it’s the same thing. That building is important, and they have no right to tear it down. But they’re going to anyway. I want to see it happen.”
Harry Rudd studied his son’s face and said nothing for a few moments. Finally he stood and sighed. “You’re going to have to stay away from Jonas Wilson.”
“I can’t promise that.” Hugh set his jaw. He was defying a paternal order. He had never done that before. He couldn’t imagine what sort of storm was about to break.
“For your mother’s sake. For her peace of mind.” Harry offered one last chance.
“I can’t promise, Dad. Don’t make me promise.”
Harry’s face darkened, then the storm passed without breaking. He sighed. “At least promise me you’ll be careful. That you’ll watch out. Don’t listen to everything he says.”
“There’s nothing to watch out for,” Hugh said. He was pushing, but he suddenly softened, pulled back. “But I’ll watch out.”
Harry’s shoulders slumped. “Okay, I’ll settle for that.”
“Dad,” Hugh asked. “What’s wrong with him? With Jonas Wilson? That everybody hates him so?”
“He’s . . . he’s just crazy. Or so everyone says. I don’t know him, don’t know anything about him. He’s just got a reputation, that’s all. Some things happened a long time ago. Before we moved here, but even when I was a kid there was talk . . .”
“What kind of talk?”
“Oh, you know.” Harry looked up at the ceiling as if searching for help with his explanation. “Gossip. He used to be some kind of socialist, I think. Preached on street corners.”
“You mean he’s a preacher? A minister?”
“No, not that kind of preaching. When I was a kid, there were stories about how he tried to unionize the farm workers in the county.”
“What’s wrong with that? There’s a union at the mill. You’re a member—”
“Times were different, Hugh. It was a long time ago, and there was a depression. And there were other things.” He started to say something, then took thought and changed his tone. “He talked about socialism a lot, tried to get people worked up about things.” Harry trailed off. “I don’t know. It was all before I was born.”
Hugh didn’t say anything.
“Then,” Harry said reluctantly. “There was some trouble about twenty years ago. Something to do with some college kids. But we didn’t live here then, and I only know parts of that, too. And I don’t believe most of it. Sheriff Anderson says he’s harmless enough.”
“You did talk to the sheriff?” Hugh asked, shocked.
“Just for a minute,” Harry confessed with a crooked smile. “I had to check on you.”
Hugh looked away. He knew he couldn’t argue that point.
“Just be careful, Hugh,” Harry said abruptly. “Your mother worries. Be damned careful around him.”
“I will.”
Harry rose, started to leave. Then he stopped when he reached the door. “Say,” he turned. “I’ve got to run back out to the mill tonight. I forgot something. Want to come along?”
Hugh sensed that this was an important invitation. “Sure,” he said, jumping up and tying his sneakers. “Can we stop by where the bridge was?”
“No.” Harry frowned and opened and shut his fist. “That’s a lie. I mean, we’ll drive out to the mill, and we can stop if you want, but the truth is that your mother fed supper to the disposal and went to bed. I’m starving. How about a cheeseburger from the Dairy Mart?”
Hugh brightened and smiled conspiratorially. “Chocolate shake?”
“Malts,” Harry grinned back.
“Let’s go,” Hugh said.