“Who?” Waylon asked in a hoarse voice, yearning for the kitchen door and the cool air inside the house.
“The ex. Tit Boudreau.”
“His name is Tit? Good God.”
“That’s what they call him. Some kind of a French name, I reckon. It doesn’t mean what it sounds like. He’s bad to drink. And can’t hold his liquor, never could, Hazel told me. And smoke, Godalmighty, like a chimney, in this day and age after what all we know about tobacco.”
“Sounds like a bad hombre,” Waylon said.
“She only sees him when she has to. You know, holidays sometimes or when she’s over to her daughter’s and he shows up.” Charlie pointed toward the hall off the kitchen. “Your room’s down yonder where it always was. Take your stuff down there before you set anything down. Hell, they’re grown anyway and never there.”
“Who’s grown?” Waylon said, gathering himself for the last push down the hallway toward the bedroom where he felt like he’d spent most of his life. “The daughter?”
“No, the ex-step-grandkids. Hazel Boles’s ex-step-grandkids. Her ex-step-daughter’s almost as old as you are. Her real daughter, now she’s some years younger. Name’s Louise.”
After he had dumped the box of clothes on the floor by the single bed against the far wall of the room, Waylon went back to the kitchen to get a drink of water, wondering as he walked down the hall why his father always directed him to rooms in the house he’d grown up in. It was probably a reminder that he was just visiting and shouldn’t assume himself entitled to the knowledge of a permanent dweller.
Charlie was standing in the door to the garage, moving his head systematically from side to side as he checked the front of his white knit shirt for possible contaminants.
“I thought you said the woman’s name was Boudreau,” Waylon said between glasses of tap water. “What’d you just call her? Boles?”
“That’s her maiden name,” his father said, looking up from his shirtfront. “She went back to it after she filed her papers. That’s the way they do nowadays.”
“She wasn’t worried about her daughter having a different last name from hers?”
“Everybody’s got their own particular name now, Son,” Charlie McPhee said and leaned over to look at his reflection in the glass of the microwave oven above the counter. “You figure out what handle fits you, and then you know what?”
“What?”
“You go with it. That’s what.” Charlie stuck his left hand in his pants pocket and jangled his keys. “Speaking of which, I’m gone.”
“An English woman,” Waylon said. “Name of Hazel Boles. Meet her at a tea party?”
“No, not hardly. It was the funniest thing, Waylon. We run into each other twice in the big grocery store there by the produce department. Got to talking and one thing and another, and the next thing you knew we started going around together.”
“So you met cute? Over the broccoli, just like in the movies.”
“That’s right, Way. Only it wasn’t the broccoli. It was the herb section. And let me tell you something else. These old-world types like Hazel, they will flat eat a man up.”
“Damn, Daddy,” Waylon said.
“And you know something else?”
“No, and I’m scared to ask.”
“Hazel may be English to start with,” Charlie McPhee said, his eyes dancing as if he had just drunk two cups of Christmas eggnog, “but that hasn’t stopped her in the least from being just a little bit French.”
“Well, what you’re saying seems to fit the new pattern,” Waylon said. “Have you noticed the moon today? The weird way you can see it in the daytime? I believe some kind of a warp has set in.”
“No,” Charlie McPhee said. “I haven’t got time to be looking up at the moon, whether or not it’s weird or whether it’s day or night. I got places to go.”
“And people to see,” Waylon said, thinking to beat his father to the punch, but Charlie was already out the door into the garage and on his way into the light of midday by the time his son was able to get the words out.
After he had brought in the two other boxes from the trunk of his car, the one filled with papers and receipts and guarantees and the other holding the cassettes and paperback books, Waylon lay down on the bed. He would get the stuff from the backseat later, he told himself. It wasn’t going anywhere, and besides it was hot enough outside to make the asphalt soft in the cracks of the driveway. Walk around out there long enough and he’d get his shoes stuck to the pavement and shrivel up in the sun like a squashed toad.
From where he lay on the single bed, he could move his eyes to the right and see the front edge of the roof line on the house next door, the one where Paula Popp used to live with her parents and her two brothers. Donald, the older one, had become a hairdresser in Beaumont. The little brother had barely registered in Waylon’s consciousness, or in the world at large, as far as he knew. He tried to remember his face, but all he could call up of the young Popp was a blond flat-top haircut and a continual whine as the older brother worked various torments on him.
Little Popp is probably a stockbroker in Houston by now, Waylon thought, making a million bucks a year and whining into portable telephones all day while big Donald is teasing love knots into women’s hair in a beauty parlor somewhere on Calder Street.
Waylon let his eyes drift left, past the door frame and the light switch, onto the left wall all the way to its center where the outline of the Jimi Hendrix poster had left a pale rectangle still visible the last time he had moved back home to the house on Helena. Not this time, though. Covered up by a new coat of flat white paint the old man had laid down sometime in the last few years.
Charlie had done the ceiling, too, Waylon noticed as he looked directly above the bed where he lay, obliterating the discolored stain that had always looked to him like the outline of a duck riding a motorcycle those long afternoons he had studied it for meaning, watching the shadows change as the sun sank steadily behind the house full of Popps to the west. Now there was nothing above his head but a perfect blankness, not a hint of texture or variety in its surface, no more message to it than the endless rows of waves marching toward the beach from the Gulf of Mexico twenty miles south of where he lay.
Closing his eyes, Waylon tried to remember how Paula Popp looked in the face during the time she lived next door, but all he could bring to mind was a sort of oblong with a lot of teeth in it. He knew she had a nose and eyes and hair and the rest of it, but that part of her was not what people wanted to see during her days in the Helena Street subdivision. And it sure wasn’t the part Donald Popp had sold him a glimpse of one afternoon when Waylon was a tenth grader in Thomas Jefferson High School.
“She’ll be in the family room,” Donald had told him, whispering out of the side of his mouth as they sat together in last period study hall, the gaze of Mrs. Garner sweeping over their table as it moved steadily from one side of the room to the other like the searchlight from a watchtower. “At four o’clock, I tell you. On the dot.”
“Yeah,” Waylon whispered back, his eyes fixed on a stated problem in his Algebra 1 book, something about two trains leaving from Chicago and New York headed toward each other at different rates of speed and stopping along the way for an hour here and there, for what purpose it didn’t say. “At four o’clock, all right, but with the curtains closed up.”
“Not if you got the five dollars.”
“I got the five dollars.”
“You be there in the side yard of your house, then,” Donald had said, and Waylon had tried to turn his attention to the