Plainsong (18 page)

Guthrie.

Lloyd Crowder called him early in the evening. You better come down here. It looks like they’re going to try to blindside you. You better bring your grade book and any papers you have.

Who is? Guthrie said.

The Beckmans.

He went out of the house and got in his pickup and drove across town to the district office next to the high school and when he went in he saw them immediately. They were sitting in the third row of the public chairs off to the far side. Beckman, his wife, and the boy. They turned and looked at him when he entered. He took a seat at the back. The school board members were ranged about the table at the front of the room, each with his name tag facing the public. There were framed pictures of outstanding seniors from the years past on the walls behind them. They had already gotten beyond the minutes of the previous meeting and the approval of the bills and the various items of communication and were now finishing discussion of the budget. The superintendent was taking them through each step. They voted on matters, if that was called for by regulation, and it was going smoothly, all cut and dried since they’d prepared for it earlier in executive session. Then the board chairman called for public concerns.

A thin woman stood up and began to complain about the school buses. I’d like to put a plea out there, she said. My kids used to get on at seven and off at four, now it’s six-thirty and four forty-five. The bus driver gets disgusted and starts driving slow, that’s what it is. What happens is those kids, all their cussing and getting out of their seats. Well, all their language is cussing. If we took that away from them they wouldn’t have a thing to say.

The board chairman said, Safety is the big concern. Isn’t that right. That’s what we have to think about.

I’ll tell you, the woman said, one time the bus finally had to pull over. The driver had to stop and she come back in the row and said to this girl, You been yelling at the top of your lungs all morning, now go ahead and yell. And the girl did too. Can you believe that? Well, my daughter didn’t appreciate her yelling at the top of her lungs. I don’t think she should have to put up with that.

Riding the bus is a privilege, the board chairman said, till they violate the rules. Isn’t that right? He looked at the superintendent.

Yes, the superintendent said. After three misbehaviors they’re off.

Then somebody better learn how to count to three, the woman said.

Yes ma’am, the chairman said. You need to come in and talk to the principal about this. About your concern here.

I already did that.

Did you, he said. Maybe you can talk to him again. I appreciate you coming here tonight. He looked around the room. Anything else? he said.

Mrs. Beckman rose up and said, Yes, there’s something else. And I can see somebody called him to be here already. She looked at Guthrie. I don’t care if he is here, I’m going to say it. He hates my boy. He flunked him this past semester. Failed him out of American history. You know that can’t be right.

Ma’am, what are you talking about? the chairman said. What is this?

I’m telling you. First he fights him in the hall over that little slut. Then he keeps him out of the basketball tournament which might cost him his scholarship to Phillips Junior College, and then he flunks him for the whole semester, that’s what I’m talking about. I want to hear what you’re going to do about it.

The board chairman looked at the superintendent. The superintendent looked at Lloyd Crowder who was sitting off to the side at another table. The board chairman turned to the principal now. Can you give us some background on this, Lloyd?

He don’t need to, Mrs. Beckman said. I just told you.

Yes ma’am, said the chairman. But we’d like to hear from the principal too.

Crowder stood up and explained in some detail what each party in the dispute had done, and remarked on the five-day suspension the boy had been given.

Is Mr. Guthrie here? the chairman said.

That’s him sitting back there, Mrs. Beckman said.

I see him now, the chairman said. Mr. Guthrie, would you care to say anything?

You’ve already heard it, Guthrie said. Russell hasn’t done the work required of him. I told him that several times. That he needed to improve or he wouldn’t pass the course. He didn’t, so I gave him a failing grade.

You hear him? Mrs. Beckman said. That’s exactly the lie he keeps telling everybody. Are you going to sit there and have him lie to you like that too?

I have the grade book if you think you have to see it, Guthrie said. But I’d prefer not to show it in public. I’m not even sure it’s legal to do that.

Let him show it, Mrs. Beckman cried. I hope he does. Then everybody can just see what he’s been doing to Russell here. He makes it all up anyhow.

The board chairman looked at her for a moment. Now ma’am, he said. I’ll tell you something. We don’t like to interfere too much with what a teacher does in his own classroom.

Well you better interfere. Guthrie there, is a liar and a son of a bitch.

Ma’am, you can’t talk that way in here. You better bring this up with the superintendent if you have a complaint to make, and we’ll talk about it in executive session. We can’t decide all this in public this a-way.

I see now, she said. You’re just like the rest. We voted you in and you turn out like this.

Ma’am, that’s my word on it. For now.

Can he graduate then?

Not without American history. I don’t believe so.

Can he at least cross the stage and pick up a blank diploma?

Maybe. But I expect he’ll have to take the class in the summer for what he failed. For the time being, he better take the rest of American history with somebody else individual. Isn’t that right, superintendent?

Yes. That can be arranged.

That’s right, the chairman said. That can be arranged. He looked out at them. Mr. Beckman, you haven’t said anything. You got something to add to this?

You goddamn right I do, Beckman said. He stood up. We aren’t done with this. I’ll tell you that right now. You can be goddamn sure of that much. I’ll go to the law if I have to. Do you think I won’t?

Victoria Roubideaux.

For a while in Denver she took a job. It wasn’t much of a job, only working part-time at a gas station convenience store on Wadsworth Boulevard a mile from the apartment, working at night for others when they called in. She had gone in for the interview and the little man with his white shirt, the manager, had walked her through the store and said, Where would you stock the Vienna sausage and the sardines? and she had said, The shelves with the canned foods, and he said, No, next to the crackers. You want them to buy both of them at the same time. There’s a reason for what we do here.

He wanted to know when she was due to have the baby and in answer to this question she had told him a lie. She said the baby was coming later than was true, that she was expecting to deliver at the end of May. You still sick a lot? he said.

No, she said. I was at first.

This is just part-time, he said. With little notice. Just when we want you, if we need you to come in. Whenever somebody calls in claiming they’re sick. All right. You still want it?

Yes.

All right. We’ll train you starting tomorrow.

She went in and trained for parts of three days with the woman on the afternoon shift and then a night with the woman on the night shift, and then she waited a week and a half for the first call. When it came it was at suppertime on Monday, and Dwayne was tired and didn’t want to drive her to work. She said she would walk. She got up from the table to leave, and that shamed him so that he drove her after all and neither one of them said anything to the other on the way. She worked through the night without incident and in the morning when she got off her shift she took the bus home since it was past the time Dwayne was due to start his shift at Gates. Upstairs in the apartment she found a note from him on the table saying,
See
you tonight I’m not mad anymore are you,
written like that other note a month ago with a pencil on a scrap of paper in a slanted child’s scrawl.

Two weeks later, the third time she was called, she was working behind the counter and a man came in at one-thirty in the morning when she was the only one in the store. He loitered in the aisles picking up different things, putting them back. A skinny man with a badly wrinkled face, with lank brown hair. Then he came up to the counter with nothing in his hand to buy and said, I guess you know Doris, don’t you?

Who?

Doris. She works here.

I met her, yes.

What do you think about her?

She’s nice.

She’s a bitch. She locked me out and called the cops on me.

Oh, the girl said. She watched him, to see what he was going to do.

What do you think I got in the car? he said. Go ahead, think about it.

I don’t know.

I got a gun out there, he said, looking straight into her eyes. With three shells loaded in it. Cause there’s three of us. Her, me and her goddamn dog. I’d love to kill that son of a bitch. I can’t stand that son of a bitch. You think I’m crazy, don’t you.

I don’t know you.

I am crazy. That fucking dog. I wouldn’t hurt you though. When do you get off?

I’m not sure yet.

Sure you are.

No. It may be later. I don’t always know.

Here. I’ll buy some chewing gum. I got her goddamn dog anyway. I got him out in the car with me right now. She can lock me out but I got her dog. I can start with him if that’s what she wants. Okay, don’t work too hard, he said. He took his package of gum and went outside.

The girl watched him get into his car and drive away and she made a note of his license plates and gave the numbers to the manager, and in the following days she watched the newspapers for anything about the man, but nothing was ever reported. Doris, when she was told about him, said he was more or less harmless. She didn’t know what the girl was talking about, she didn’t have a dog. The last dog she’d had was five years ago.

In Denver Dwayne took her to a few parties. They attended one on a Friday night at the apartment of some people he knew from work, Carl and Randy. Randy was a big tall girl with tight jeans and skinny legs, and she wore a little tube top and had fixed breasts. Carl was a talker. By the time they got there he was wound up. There were lots of other people in the apartment too. They were all drinking and smoking and on the coffee table a basket of joints was set out for anybody’s use. The walls of the room were covered with tinfoil, with blinking Christmas lights still up, and the room was hot and the music was going so loud she could feel it in her stomach. People were dancing and laughing. One girl was dancing on the sofa, flinging her hair back and forth. A boy was dancing between two girls, in a routine of bumping hips. Randy brought her a drink from the next room and she stood back against the wall and watched, and Dwayne went into the kitchen with Carl. Randy looked at her and said, Hey, enjoy, you know? and smiled brilliantly and spread her arms in a gesture, meaning: You can have all of this, and disappeared. She stood against the wall, watching.

Later she went out to the kitchen to find Dwayne. He was seated at the table playing euchre and drinking with some others and she stood behind him, and once he put his hand on her stomach and said, How’s my little man? and patted her and drank from his glass. She watched the game for a while and wandered away to find the bathroom. The door was closed and she knocked and somebody opened it enough that she saw in quickly, and there were two boys sitting on the edge of the bathtub waiting their turn while a girl was taking on another boy on the toilet. The girl was naked from her waist down, her long white legs spread out, and the girl might have been Randy, but she couldn’t see her well enough since the door was closed so fast, the boy who opened it only saying, Wrong place. Upstairs.

When Dwayne took her home it was about four in the morning. By that time she had been coaxed into drinking four or five vodka Squirts and taking hits from the joint whenever it came around. She was so out of place and so lonely she couldn’t care for a while, she wanted something like everybody else did, and in time she ended up losing herself to the music and the crowd-feeling, and danced and danced, holding herself under her stomach, supporting the baby while she twirled around the room. When she woke the next morning she felt sick immediately, as she had in the first months, except it was for a different reason now. There was a red bruise high up on her leg that she could feel with her fingers though she had no memory of where it had come from. She turned in the bed. Dwayne was still sleeping beside her. She lay for a long time feeling sick and sad. She looked at the bar of sunlight that showed thinly along the edge of the window shade. She didn’t even know what the weather was doing anymore. The sun was shining but what else was there? She drifted into a daze of sorrow and disbelief. She didn’t want to think what any of the night before might have done to her baby. She could only remember the first of it. She could remember the dancing, but there were other things too. She didn’t want to think about them. But it was what she couldn’t remember that scared her most.

McPherons.

There came a night at the end of winter when Raymond McPheron went into town for a meeting of the board of governors of the Holt County Farmers’ Co-op Elevator. He was one of the seven farmers and ranchers elected to the board. When the meeting was over he drove out with some of the men for a drink at the Legion, and he was sitting at a table with them when the man across from him, not one of the farmers but a man in town he knew by name only, said:

Too bad that little girl didn’t work out.

I think so, Raymond said.

You got some good out of her anyway, I guess.

What do you mean?

You taking turns with her, I mean. Was that how it was? Tell us the truth now. Was it sweet? The man grinned. He had little even teeth, well-spaced.

Raymond looked at him for a time, not saying anything. Then he leaned over the table and took hold of his wrist just below the shirt cuff and said, You say something like that again about Victoria Roubideaux and I’ll cave your fuckin head in.

Well what in the hell? the man said. He tried to pull back. Let go of me.

You heard what I said, Raymond told him.

Turn loose. I never meant nothing.

Yeah. You did.

I’m just saying what others have.

I’m not talking to no others.

Turn loose of me. What the hell’s a-wrong with you?

You mind me. Don’t you even think something like that again about her.

Then Raymond opened his hand and let go. The man stood up. You dumb old son of a bitch, he said. I was joking.

You got some of that right, Raymond said.

The man looked at him, then walked over and stood at the bar and spoke to the bartender and a second man standing there. They had seen what happened. He talked to them, rubbing his wrist, looking back at Raymond.

At the table Raymond finished his beer and got up and went outside to his pickup and drove home in the moonless late-winter night. When he was back inside the house again he walked into the girl’s bedroom and switched on the overhead light and stood looking at the old double bed with the quilt on it and the new crib against the wall with the new sheet stretched tight over it and the blanket folded down, all of it in readiness yet for the girl and the baby just as it had been before the girl had left that other morning and not come back. He stood looking around the room for some time. Thinking, remembering, considering different things here and there. Finally he switched the light off and went upstairs and paused in the hall. He stood in the open door to his brother’s bedroom. You awake? he said.

I am now, Harold said. I heard you come up the stairs. You must be flat perturbed about something, for the racket you was making. The room was dark, with just the light from the hall shining in. A pale square of window at the back wall gave out onto the yard and barn and corrals. Harold raised up in bed. What’s the matter? Something go wrong at the board meeting? Corn prices gone to hell?

No.

What then?

I went out for a drink afterward. At the Legion there with some of em.

Yeah? They haven’t made that a crime yet. What about it?

You know they’re talking, Raymond said.

Who is?

People in town. They’re talking about Victoria. About you and me with her. Saying things about the three of us.

So that’s what this is about, is it? Harold said. What did you expect would happen? Two old men take in a girl out here in the country, with nobody else around to look in on em. And the girl is young and good-looking even if she is pregnant, and the two old men that’s keeping her are still men even if they are about as old and dried up as some of this calcified horse shit. It’s going to happen. People are going to talk.

Maybe they are, Raymond said. He looked at his brother in the dark room with the window squared behind him. Only I don’t care for it, he said. They can keep their goddamn mouths off her. I don’t care for it even a little bit.

There isn’t a whole hell of a lot you can do about it.

Maybe not, Raymond said. He turned to cross the hallway to enter his own room, then he turned back. I might even come to understand that too, he said. But that don’t mean I got to like it. That don’t mean I’m ever going to get so I got to like it.