Where You Once Belonged, Page 2

  “Get out,” Sealy said.

  Now Burdette did move. He rose up out of the Cadillac and stood onto the pavement, tall, heavy, massive, a presence above the sheriff. He was dressed in plaid shirt and dark pants; he was wearing shoes but no socks. His clothes looked as though he’d been sleeping in them.

  “Turn around,” Sealy said.

  “Now goddamn it, Bud. What the hell?”

  Sealy poked him with the gun. “Turn around.”

  Burdette grunted, but slowly he turned so that his back was toward the sheriff. Sealy removed a pair of handcuffs from his back pocket and locked them around Burdette’s thick wrists. It took some effort to get them closed.

  “Well Jesus,” Burdette said. “You mean to tell me, you mean you’re not even going to read me my rights?”

  “What rights is that? You don’t have no rights. Not no more. Now hold still while I feel you.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Burdette said.

  “That’s right,” Sealy said. “That’s just exactly right.”

  He began to run his hands over Burdette, feeling up and down his pants legs and along the fat over his ribs. He turned his pockets out. When he was satisfied that Burdette was carrying nothing more dangerous than a wallet and some pocket change, he stood for a moment behind Burdette’s wide back, staring at the massive and wrinkled shirt.

  And yet it was still that quiet hour on Main Street, that brief elusive moment of peace and nothing was moving; there wasn’t another person anywhere on the street. And so, without thought, I suppose without even knowing he was going to, while the two of them stood beside the gleaming red Cadillac in that brief tranquillity of a November evening, the sheriff smashed Jack Burdette in the back of the head with the butt of his gun. Burdette howled and fell across the hood of the car. He began to curse.

  “No,” Bud Sealy said, looking down at the blood trickling from the back of Burdette’s head. “I thought you was smarter than that. I did think you knew better than to come back here. What in hell was you thinking of?”

  • 2 •

  I had known Jack Burdette all his life. Or all of it, that is, except for the four years in the early 1960s when he was in the Army and in Holt and I was in college and then again later for those eight years after he had disappeared when no one in Holt knew him, that period when he was out in California living on his charm and that sum of money which he must have thought would last him a lifetime until one day the money gave out and he discovered he had only the charm left and not much of that. But yes: I knew him. We had grown up together. For a long time I had even liked him.

  His father, whom people here still refer to as John Senior, was a well-known figure in town. He worked at Nexey’s Lumberyard on Main Street near the railroad tracks and he was a big man too—like Jack was, or like Jack was to become anyway—with a considerable gut and a big loud voice that was exactly like a bull’s bellow and of about that appropriateness. Still he was a likable man, I suppose. People in Holt thought so. He wore pressed overalls to work at the lumberyard, and in the evenings before he went home for supper he always drank for an hour or two in the bars out along Highway 34, in the Legion bar or at the Wagon-wheel Lounge, with some of the other men in town who were his contemporaries.

  Jack’s mother, on the other hand, was a very small woman, very thin and pinched-looking. She wore scrupulously clean round wire glasses on the bridge of her nose and she combed her hair in a style that would have been fashionable in the 1920s when she was young, a kind of permanent sheared-off bob. She was a very serious woman. She never drank or raised her voice much above a whisper, so we understood in Holt that she tolerated her husband’s excesses because she was a good Catholic. She played the organ at St. John’s Church and made confession faithfully to old Father O’Brien who wore a hearing aid. She hadn’t much else in her life, so it must have been Father O’Brien and the Catholic Church which sustained her.

  They lived, during the years I am talking about, over there on the north side of town on Birch Street across the tracks. It was an old yellow stucco house and behind it they had a vacant lot, overgrown with cheat weed and redroot, which ran back for fifty yards toward the fairgrounds. This was the poorer part of town then, before the new tract houses were annexed into the city in the 1970s, but people in Holt still considered the Burdettes to be an average family with adequate income and status. If nothing else, they were interesting. There was sufficient tension in the family to make them worth watching.

  Jack was born in 1941. His parents were already in their mid-forties then. They had been married for more than twenty years. So I assume they had long ago stopped expecting ever to have children and had settled into that fractious kind of truce that childless couples often accept in place of real marriage. Then Jack was born. And he was quite unexpected, of course. Consequently his parents tried to patch it up for a while. His father is said to have stopped drinking in the bars for an entire year and people say his mother looked almost pretty for a time, that she appeared to have a kind of glow. But it didn’t last. She never became pregnant again. And soon the old man was drinking regularly in the bars once more while Jack’s mother went back to playing the organ at the Catholic church on Sunday mornings, where in that weekly hour of temporary peace she could watch Father O’Brien from behind those clean little wire glasses of hers. It was all as if nothing had changed—except that there was a new source of tension now, and consequently more arguments.

  Well, he was a tough kid. He had a shock of black hair and he was always big for his age. Then when he was six they sent him to school. With his hair combed flat on his head and dressed in new shirt and pants, he entered for the first time that old red three-story brick building on the west edge of town, with its wide foot-hollowed stairs and its tall windows and that familiar smell of swept dust, and he didn’t like it. At school they expected him to sit still, to raise his hand and be quiet. So at recess he walked off the playground and went home. He did this about once a week. And when he arrived at home Mrs. Burdette, that serious little pious woman, would take him by the back hair, lean him across the kitchen table and hit him with the spatula. Then she would send him back. Except that he didn’t always go back; instead he often wandered about town, through the back alleys behind the Main Street businesses and out along the railroad tracks into the country. So in April they decided that another full year of the first grade and another complete term with Mrs. Peach would do him good. I don’t think they believed that Jack had been fully socialized yet.

  Still I can’t imagine that Mrs. Peach had any part in this decision or that she was excited by it personally. But, in any case, it was because of that routine first-grade truancy of his that Jack was there again the next year when I entered school in 1948. And since his name came after mine in the class rolls he was assigned the desk behind me. He was already there that first morning. He had arrived early; his wet-combed hair was stiff on his head and he was sitting at his desk with his hands folded as if he were bored with it all already and was merely waiting for a chance to escape. We didn’t interest him at all. He was a veteran of the first grade and beyond us. Besides he was at least twenty pounds heavier and a good head taller than we were. We didn’t even exist for him yet.

  But later, on the second or third day of school—in the middle of the afternoon when it was hot and still in the room and when the old high windows were open to the air and there wasn’t any air, and while we were sweating over the alphabet, copying out the letters onto lined sheets of paper—Jack popped me on the head. I turned around. I don’t know what I expected. But on his desk there was a dead gopher. He had it stretched out over his attempts at some As and Bs. He had squeezed out a drop of gopher blood onto the paper below his name. “You want him?” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want him.”

  “Well I’m done with him.”

  “I don’t want him.”

  Then Mrs. Peach was standing over us. She was standing back a little
too. She ordered Jack to deposit the dead gopher in the trash immediately.

  Jack stood up and walked to the front of the room. In the far corner, beside the pencil sharpener where the wastebasket was, he turned and faced us. We were all watching him. He raised the gopher by the hind leg and held it there at eye level for a moment, suspended, as if he were about to make a little magic or as if the gopher itself still knew a trick or two. Then he let it go. It seemed to dive into the wastebasket. When it hit bottom it made a satisfactory bang.

  “Jack,” Mrs. Peach said. “You sit down.”

  Jack walked back slowly to his desk. At his desk he faced straight ahead and grinned. So we were not just watching him now. We were staring at him—in wonder and awe, and shocked admiration too.

  Meanwhile Mrs. Peach had begun to shout at us: “Children.

  Children,” she shouted. “Get back to work.” She began to clap her hands at us.

  But for the rest of the afternoon, at least twice each hour, one of us would break the lead in his pencil so he could rise and walk to the front of the room and peer down into the wastebasket and see the gopher. It was lying on its back with its paws curled bitterly over its fawn belly. Finally, after enough instances of this, Mrs. Peach announced that if just one more kid broke the lead in his pencil we would all stay after school. We were not getting off to a good start with the alphabet at all, she said.

  Thus for eight years he was passed from one grade to the next, from one old local spinster or balding man to the next one, passing, being promoted each spring not so much by his own efforts with books and maps and pencils as by the absolute refusal of our teachers to have anything more to do with him. (Because the experiment with Mrs. Peach had failed, of course. Holding him back hadn’t improved on his deportment. And none of the other teachers would even consider taking him twice.) No, he wore them all out. In fact when it was their year to have him in their classrooms our teachers, by the middle of September, were already counting the days until the end of May. They had big calendars fastened to the walls with heavy Xs scratched and double-scratched through the accumulation of finished days, and one of them, Miss Ermalline Johnson, actually resigned during Christmas break rather than return for another half year. “I won’t,” she told the school board. “I couldn’t be responsible if I did.”

  Then we entered high school. At Holt County Union High School—it was redbrick too and three stories high as the grade school had been, but it stood at the south end of Main Street and it was more ambitious architecturally; it had square turrets at both ends and the roof was red tile so that it looked a cross between a prison and somebody’s notion of a Mediterranean palace; you could see it from a distance, risen up above the stunted elm trees and hackberries, standing alone at the end of Main as if blocking passage out of town, the practical and symbolic notion of what Holt County thought about higher education, standing there for fifty years and more until in the middle 1960s it was condemned and they tore it down and sold off the old redbrick for backyard patios and borders for zinnia beds and replaced it with a new low one-story pedestrian affair that had a scarcity of windows—it was there, at Holt County Union High School, that Jack Burdette was even more of a presence. And I don’t mean just in our lives, but in the life of the entire town.

  Because he was bigger now. He was taller and stronger—taller and stronger than anybody else in school. By the time we graduated in the spring of 1960 he was six feet four and weighed two hundred and forty pounds. But he wasn’t fat then. He was still heavily muscled, broad-shouldered and thick-boned. So at least physically he was more than just that one year ahead of us. He was like a full-grown man among mere children, a colossus among pigmies. He had already begun to shave the bristle on his chin in the eighth grade—at a time when the rest of us hadn’t even begun to contemplate peach fuzz yet—and in high school he had a thick mat of black hair on his chest. It stuck out through his white tee shirts like little black pins. He was a kind of high-school boy’s high-school boy: the supreme example of what was possible in the absolute.

  The most obvious evidence of this, though—to us and to all of Holt County—was the fact that he was an excellent athlete. He started every high-school football game for four years. He played fullback and linebacker and almost single-handedly made us worth a damn. The rest of us weren’t much good. I wasn’t. (I played end. I was skinny, slow-footed, nearsighted, ignorant of technique and reluctant to cross the middle; I might manage to catch a pass if nobody was breathing down my neck, but only if the ball hit me square in the hairless chest.) But Jack was. Jack was something. He was a superb athlete. He was the hotshot that made it all go. When we were juniors he won the northeast conference for us. And when we were seniors he took us to the state championship, through the conference and then the playoffs and finally to the last game—which in the end we managed to lose anyway. We were playing a team from the Western Slope and they had us at a disadvantage: they were able to field more than one real player.

  But in high school our teachers had that at least as leverage. Like the rest of us, he was required by state rules to pass at least three-fourths of his classes if he expected to play football. And Jack managed that in his own fashion too. He feigned attentiveness during math and history and English classes—that is, he didn’t actually go to sleep—and when he was called on to recite he rose up and made jokes. Then there were shouts of laughter from the boys in the back rows and tittering among the girls up front. In short time our teachers learned not to call on him at all.

  Still he had to take tests and turn in papers as we all did. And that’s where Wanda Jo Evans came in.

  Wanda Jo Evans loved him. I believe, if such a thing is possible, that she even loved him more than he did himself. She adored him, idolized him, worshiped him, hung on him. All of that and no exaggeration either. She wasn’t even the only one; she was merely the most obvious and conspicuous about it. Well, she was a nice girl, really pretty and creamy, and still a little plump then too in a high-school-girlish sort of way, a little given to baby fat yet, with strawberry blonde hair and soft gray eyes the color of clouds. She had full breasts too and round white arms. So if she was in love with Jack—and she emphatically was—the rest of us were more than a little in love with her and would gladly have sacrificed that proverbial left appendage of ours to have changed places with him. But Wanda Jo didn’t even notice us. She didn’t see us. We were mere background and bit-players to her. Or just smoke maybe. For it was Jack alone that she loved.

  So of course she helped him. She made neat little precise crib sheets for him and she learned to compose his term papers in his own sprawling and childish hand, receiving as reward for this constant adoration and these daily efforts at school the exclusive right to ride beside him, to hang on his arm in the middle of the front seat of his old Ford pickup while he raced and helled up and down Main Street on Friday and Saturday nights with the gear-shift stuck up between her creamy white knees.

  We envied them all of that then. Such things matter in high school. They seem primary at the time, essential. At least they seemed that way to us who were Jack’s classmates.

  But it was on the football field that he made his real mark during those years. In public, I mean. For, as I have said already, he was a hell of a football player: peerless and incredible and brutal. The whole town thought so. Indeed there are men in Holt today who will still tell you, even taking into account what he did later, that Jack Burdette was the best fullback and linebacker that Holt County ever produced. And no doubt they are right. The coaches from all the area colleges and universities thought so too; they began to pay attention to him when he was still only a sophomore.

  Consequently it was about then that his father, old John Senior, began to pay attention to him as well. The old man came to all of the games and when something happened on the field you could hear him yelling obscenely from the stands. Afterward he came down into the locker room and stood around between the benches, smelling of beer
and whiskey and slapping us on the shoulder while we got out of our pads. He made drunken little speeches to us. “By god,” he’d say. “Goddamn it, you boys, you sure …” And so on. His face would be inflamed with the drama of it all, with his own high emotion and the pregame mix of liquor, and then the spit would begin to fly. Meanwhile we would be waiting for him to finish, or at least to get out of the way, so we could take a shower. But he was proud of all the boys, though he was proudest, of course, of Jack. There was a lot to be proud of. In the fall during those years the old man made money by betting on all of the high-school football games with the men from other towns.

  Then in the winter of 1959, about a month after we had played our last game, the old man died. That is, he was killed. By a freight train in the middle of town. Later the railroad company would put up crossing guards and flashing lights, but there were neither of these then.

  It was early in December on a Saturday night. The old man had been drinking as usual in the Legion. He had been telling stories at the bar in his loud voice and leaning drunkenly on the barmaids whenever they stood beside him to give their orders to the bartender. Pulling the young girls toward himself into his thick arms, he had kissed their cheeks and had asked them his salacious little joke: don’t you want to come out to my car and test my heater? When the girls had said no, he had thrown his head back and laughed.

  Thus he had had his usual satisfactory time of it, people say. Then the Legion closed. But outside, when they left the bar, they found that it had begun to snow; it was coming down under the streetlights and beginning to collect along the gutters. So the old man drove home in the snow, just as everyone else did that night, except that driving north up Main Street he would have passed the three blocks of stores, shadowy-looking and quiet now, with the store windows decorated for the holiday with cotton and tinsel and the lamp poles at the corners festooned with Christmas lights. And so, feeling pleased with it all, perhaps even feeling a little satisfied with his own place in the great scheme of things, he must have begun to sing. For he was a great singer when he was drunk. Consequently when he came to the railroad tracks at the center of town he didn’t hear the train at all or even see it coming. He drove directly onto the tracks and was hit at once.