After Bathing at Baxters Page 9

  But there were other reasons, I discovered, why it would be difficult to get Howie’s prodigy up there on the national circuit with Greg Foster and Skeats Nehemiah. Two nights later at the big La Grange invitation meet he came second to a fading thirty-year-old from Mississippi who had hung around the fringes of the ’76 Olympic squad, but he did it in thirteen seven zero. I skipped the post-race celebrations – there were letters I needed to write to the other big repro houses in the East – and was heading out through the empty foyer when a girl’s voice pulled me up.

  ‘You know where I can find Clyde Hopkins, mister?’ She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. There was a dirt bike propped up against the foyer’s glass exit gate with a Snoopy pennant fixed to its handlebars. I explained about the party.

  ‘You want to come along? I can take you up.’

  The girl twisted her fingers uncertainly for a while. She had very pale blonde hair that reminded you of Cissy Spacek. ‘I guess not,’ she said finally. ‘Listen,’ she went on. ‘Next time you see him you could tell him that Terry was waiting.’

  I watched her riding off through the rows of Lincolns and Pontiacs in the stadium forecourt and out on to the highway. Next day I gave the message to Clyde but I needn’t have bothered. She was round at the stadium in the morning and the two of them stood there arguing while the hurdles Howie Jasper had lined up for a demonstration race in front of cable TV got taken down and the local reporters kicked their heels and drank whiskey sours in the hospitality suite.

  Summer dragged. The heat rose up over the parched grass and the cotton died in the fields, so that there were rumours of hardship funds and the insurance company travellers sat in the roadside diners selling fifty-dollar policies against drought. I had cool, non-committal letters from the East, from Philadelphia, Boston, Pittsburgh, from big repro houses who said they wanted college graduates or ten years’ experience and told me to write again in the Fall. Then a week into August Barrett wrapped his car round a fire hydrant over near the Tennessee border and broke his thighbone, so I took a day’s holiday, borrowed Howie Jasper’s pick-up and drove over to the hospital at Union City to see him.

  ‘One of those things, my man, just one of those things,’ Barrett said. He was grim and irritable because the nurses wouldn’t let him smoke and there was a rumour that his mother was arriving that afternoon from Memphis. There was a copy of the Tennessee Sports Illustrated lying on the bed with a picture of Clyde rising up effortlessly over a hurdle, the bunch of perspiring also-rans seen dimly in the distance behind him. ‘You heard the latest about Lightin’? Looks like Howie’s sending him West for a couple of months. Catching the big LA meets and the Prairie Games. Plus a five-thousand-dollar sponsorship deal from some sportswear manufacturer Howie reckons owes him a favour.’

  I told him about Terry. Barrett laughed. ‘Uh huh. I heard. You know he ran thirteen five eight midweek over at Lafayette? Beat Missouri Joe Constantine into third. And another thing, old man Hopkins comes up for trial at Jackson tomorrow on a repossession order. Put those two together and see what they come to.’

  After that I didn’t stop hearing about Clyde Hopkins. About how his pa was a dirt farmer ruined by the drought, about how his mother had to wash dishes at the diner in Degville. You couldn’t stop at a gas station without some wisecracking ancient hawking his gum in the dust to tell you that he’d known Grandpa Hopkins way back in the Depression when he’d gone out West to pick oranges in California. Howie Jasper was very great around this time, bustling about in a new Fox Brothers suit, though the temperature hit 92 that week, and hosting afternoon-long lunches for the company shareholders. There were other signs, too, of this new-found confidence. Come mid-August a couple of NBC lawyers showed up for a meeting and anyone who worked full-time at the stadium had to wear a scarlet and blue uniform mocked up to look like a track-suit with the La Grange jack-rabbit logo on the back. Then, when Clyde got accepted for the September meets at UCLA and Frisco, he bought airtime on the Memphis radio stations to advertise it. And though the kid hated drinking and the air conditioning had stopped working in the heat, Howie made him put on a suit and sit in the stadium bar three nights a week talking to the fans.

  I saw him there one Sunday night when it was getting late and the barman was already putting the towels over the Seven-Up dispensers and corking up the barrels of root beer which Howie bought at a discount from a supplier in Nashville and which nobody would drink. He looked a little uncertain amid the fading fight, mightily uncomfortable in the suit Howie had bought for him, tie yanked up against his throat. There was a cup of coffee on the table in front of him with the surface stretched into a skin and a packet of the Bluegrass cigarettes which the farmers used to smoke.

  I said, ‘You don’t want to let Howie see you with those things.’

  He shrugged. ‘Howie went off to Degville, a while back. Said he had to talk to my daddy.’ When I didn’t answer he went on, ‘You know, I ain’t ever been out of Cook County before. Never did leave it, ‘cept to go to some fancy farm convention once away in Kansas, time the old man thought about buying a new seed drill. What do you reckon it’s like in California?’

  ‘Some people seem to like it.’

  ‘Uh huh. My grand-daddy went there, picking oranges in the Depression. Seems a funny thing to do in the Depression, don’t it? Picking oranges.’ He shrugged again. ‘You know, I don’t even want to see that five thousand dollars. Don’t care if Pa gets it or it goes straight to the bank. Just don’t want to see it, that’s all.’

  And after that he disappeared: driven out to the airport first thing in Howie Jasper’s pick-up, people said, off on the charter flight to San Francisco. There was a charity meet two nights later at La Grange, with a one-lap wheelchair race and a thousand-dollar invitation steeplechase, but there was no sign of him amongst the crowd of kids in their red track-suits by the electronic scoreboard or standing with Howie’s guest stars in the celebrity enclosure. Old man Hopkins came into the office a couple of times but he had that furtive, hang-dog look of the man who can’t understand why people are doing him favours and he didn’t want to talk. No one had seen Terry in a month.

  I was keeping my head down around that time, writing letters and buying air tickets – Pictureworld in Philadelphia were finally giving me an interview – and I had to wait a few days to catch up with the sports papers. The news was mixed. He won a couple of inter-state meets in thirteen eight, thirteen nine five, then he bombed out in the West Coast games against a row of Olympic trialists and there was a story that he’d injured himself, torn a hamstring, that sort of thing. September came, but the drought lasted through: the roadside verges were white-coloured now and all along the horizon you could see the dust from the army lorries bringing water in from the big reservoirs across the state border, and Howie Jasper worried that the tarmac would crack before his big end-of-season meet. The day I got the acceptance letter from Pictureworld they let Barrett out of the hospital and he limped into the office to catch up.

  ‘Guess what, my man? Terry got married last week. Over at Choctaw.’

  ‘Who to?’

  Barrett smiled that lazy, insouciant smile. ‘Oh, just some hillbilly with a wallet. Some farmer.’

  ‘How’d Clyde take it?’

  ‘How would you take it, my man? Leastways, he’s advertised in Howie’s end-of-season special. The ads came in at the Sentinel this morning. “Local boy comes home”, that sort of thing. Plus two national record-holders and an NBC camera team. They reckon Howie gets a network contract if it goes OK.’

  The evening before the meet I stood on the pine-ridge two miles outside the stadium and watched the grey clouds roll in from Baton Rouge and the Gulf: the drought broke early next morning and covered the La Grange track in three inches of water. The athletes shivered and fretted but they went ahead anyhow, with Howie Jasper cursing and shouting and the NBC team filming from behind polythene shelters. By the time the hurdles came on most of the crowd had gone and t
here was an inevitability about the way Clyde sauntered out of the blocks with an odd, sick smile on his face, battered his way through half a dozen hurdles or so and then stopped dead to head off on to the trackside where Howie was yelling and hit him in the mouth. I watched them for a while as the rain fell and the cameramen drifted away and a couple of the La Grange investors stood around with disappointed faces, while Clyde squatted absently on his hunkers and Howie raged at him with the blood and the water gumming up the collar of his shirt. Barrett was saying something and the old announcer’s voice cracked through the tannoy but I headed off thinking, of all things, about Terry, about the dirt bike propped against the foyer door and what it must have been lick to pick oranges, in the Depression, in California.

  III. Disturbance at the Heron House

  His mother, old Lila-Mae Fuller, had been the great grand-daughter of a Confederate general killed outside Vicksburg in 1863, and it was this that gave the family its status. Twenty years ago busloads of Yankee tourists had arrived to loiter round the Fuller mansion at Choctaw Ridge and peer at the sepia portrait of the old gentleman surrounded by his Louisiana 7th Company Militia, the Tennessee Civil War Re-enactment Society had staged a mock skirmish in the big pinewood at the west end of the family estate, and Lila-Mae had wondered about getting a grant from the State Heritage Commission and putting in a coffee room and an amusement parlour. But then the old lady had got Alzheimer’s disease, the State Heritage Commission had decided to fund a battle site near Nashville instead, and though the occasional researcher in a pick-up still drove purposefully over the dirt-track roads to the Fuller estate the grass grew up six feet high outside the tall windows and there was no one to cut it. ‘Kind of sad,’ people said in the tones they used whenever a State congressman went down under an embezzlement charge, ‘and kind of unnecessary’.

  The gloss was significant, for there was a symbolism about the Fullers’ decline. Thirty years ago you couldn’t travel a mile in Cook County without coming across some vagrant memento of the war, a roadside diner, say, with a Confederate flag hanging listlessly on the pole outside, called the Robert E. Lee, or a granite memorial stone fenced off from the fields by picketwire and hung round with flowers. The last registered state veteran didn’t die until as late as 1957: they had a funeral service in Johnson City lasting three hours and two thousand people turned up to stare at the old dirt farmer’s grizzled corpse – he’d been a bugler boy who joined up under age – and run their fingers over the faded calico fatigue jacket they buried him in. But after that people forgot. The woodcut illustrations of the Battle of Gettysburg that used to hang round the walls of the Stonewall gentlemen’s drinking club cracked in their frames and got taken away. The Cook County Sentinel stopped printing its April 9 memorial edition. Driving round the county with the mobile photolab I used to pull up sometimes at the sight of an abandoned screw-gun rusting in a field, a flock of crows rising up off ancient, tarnished metal, think for a moment how frail the present was in the face of past solidity. But it didn’t last. The fields got cleared, the county war museum closed down through lack of funds, and people started saying that the Fuller children were thinking of selling up to a real estate company in Memphis.

  There was only a handful of Fuller kids by this time. Since old Miz Fuller had taken sick they had all fallen away, in the way that ancient Southern families sometimes have when the old man dies and there isn’t anyone left to hire the farmhands or tell you to button your shirt properly, gone off to Canada or out West to take jobs in motel management or fire insurance. By the early eighties when the shutters went up over the windows of the big house there was only a single daughter left and then even she disappeared, lit out East somewhere, propping up a bar-stool in Florida, people said: the Fullers were famous drinkers. That left Travis. Even to the tolerant Choctaw neighbours Travis seemed an unlikely custodian of the the Fuller heritage. ‘Looks like a farmer,’ Barrett the journalist had pronounced, and it wasn’t meant as a compliment. Taking the photolab out over the ridge towards the state border I used to see him sometimes, ambling along the backroads with a dog at his heels, head down against the sun, wearing an old wide-brimmed straw hat to keep the flies off. He never returned a wave. Once a month maybe he drove into town in an old Dodge convertible with the number plates dragging in the dust and stood silently in the grocery store queues and the line at the bank with his head tilted awkwardly to one side. ‘A real meat-head,’ people said, and eventually in that quiet, gradual way, the Fullers became a talking point, something to be taken out, argued over and eventually disparaged over the long tables at Brackus’s bar and diner or in the card room at the Stonewall. People said that the old lady was still alive somewhere in the big house with the shuttered windows and they wondered what had happened to the money old man Fuller had made selling timber to the government back in the fifties. Barrett sometimes talked big about finessing his way onto the Fuller estate, writing the place up for the Sentinel, but no one ever answered the letters he wrote and the Fullers had never got round to putting the phone in. Meanwhile the real estate company surveyors came over from Memphis, stuck a few posts in the ground alongside Choctaw Ridge, and then went away again. Travis had decided not to sell, they said.

  I was away out of the country that summer, running the picture desk for a Nashville sports paper, but Travis turned up occasionally in the bulletins of local gossip Barrett communicated late at night over the phone from the Sentinel office. In town two or three times a week now, Barrett said, buying corn at the agricultural suppliers, and there had been delivery trucks with New Jersey numberplates calling at the Fuller estate. But then Barrett got sent out on tour with the Cook County Pirates baseball team and the news died away, so that coming back into Brackus’s one night in Thanksgiving week I had to think for a while to register the identity of the tall man sitting on his own at a corner table drinking his way steadily through a jug of Joe Brackus’s Tennessee whiskey. But it was Travis all right. He had that faraway long-sighted look in his eyes, characteristic of all the Fullers, that suggested he didn’t quite see you, that he was looking at something else away on the horizon. We talked for a while about the weather – it had been a wet summer in Cook County and all the farmers were putting in crop failure claims with the local insurance offices – and how there had been a D.A.’s investigation at the Comity Treasurer’s office, but it was obvious that his mind wasn’t on it. Finally he said:

  ‘I’m wearing this badge on account of my great-great grand-daddy.’

  I hadn’t taken any notice of the medallion he had pinned onto the strap of his farmer’s dungarees, but now out of politeness I took a look. It was a design you saw quite a lot in Cook County, that the country bands who played at the local beer festivals wore or state politicians fixed onto their suit lapels when they were going all out for the agricultural vote, the stars and bars of the Confederacy and a pair of crossed cavalry swords above the motto ‘The South Will Rise’. Travis nodded.

  ‘I guess you heard about my great-great grand-daddy. Guess you knew he was a real Johnny Reb.’ Then he said unexpectedly: ‘Heard you take photographs?’

  I started explaining about the photolab and the job in the Nashville picture desk, but he cut me off with a wave of his fist.

  ‘Uh huh. I heard. You ever take photographs of birds?’

  ‘What kinds of birds?’

  ‘Let’s see now. Cranes. Herons. Couple of Kentucky Orioles.’ He made a gesture with his hand, a movement that was almost poetic in its suggestion of billowing, lofted feathers. ‘You reckon you could take photographs of them?’

  I nodded, not sure whether he was stark crazy or whether this was some piece of wiseacre’s practical joking, like the way Barrett used to call up the local radio station phone-ins sometimes and pretend that he was a big Nashville producer looking for talent. Travis guffawed. ‘Catch you later, boy,’ he grinned as he got up and slid past the big pinewood table to the door, and the way he said boy convinced me that he w
as administering some sort of rebuke.

  As usual Barrett had the details. ‘Seems Travis been making a name for himself,’ he said when I called at his office a couple of days later. There was an advance copy of that month’s Dixie magazine lying on the rickety horsehair sofa where the Republican mayoral candidates sat unhappily in expensive, badly-fitting suits while they gave Barrett their views on the freeway extension. Barrett jabbed at it with his finger. ‘Take a look at that, my man.’

  I looked at the grainy, wide-angle picture; of huddled waterfowl, Canada geese flexing their wings high up over their heads like pieces of origami, a final shot of Travis staring sheepishly out across the grey water of the lake. His eyes were hardly focussing. Barrett went on: ‘Yeah, I was over there Tuesday checking it out. Artificial lake, heronry, breeding pens, the works. Biggest bird sanctuary in the state, I guess. And Travis standing there rubbing his hands like he’s embarrassed, telling everybody that he’s prepared to make it a county amenity provided they let him call it the General James T. Peterson Memorial Reserve out of respect to his great-great grand-daddy. You never saw anything like it.’

  When I explained about the conversation I’d had with Travis, Barrett looked irritated. ‘The guy’s ancestor died at Vicksburg,’ he said severely. ‘Least you could do was to show a little respect.’

  I was back in Nashville on and off for the Fall, but it was never far enough away to stop hearing about Travis. The county leisure and recreation department sent a surveyor out to the Fuller estate who sat on the back porch – he wasn’t allowed in the house – drinking whisky sours with Travis for an hour or so, and pretty soon there was a licensing board up, a couple of vending machines selling Coke and Seven-Up, and a kiosk offering sepia postcards of the old general. A few families struggled out there on weekend afternoons while the autumn weather held and said that it was OK if you liked that sort of thing. In between talking about the scandal involving the County Treasurer people remembered old man Fuller the timber merchant and reckoned that it was kind of public-spirited what Travis was doing with his money. Then, when the bad weather came and the snow blanked out the approach roads over by Choctaw, he disappeared: holed up for the winter, people said, hibernating. I looked for him once or twice in town, but there was no sign of him in the grocery crowds or in the bank hunching his shoulders down as he came up level with the teller’s window.