Charlie said, rearing back in his chair until its legs scraped on the floor. “You haven’t touched a musical instument since you was going to college.”
“That’s a joke, Dad. I figure I’ll go over to the high school and see if they’re needing a substitute teacher. That’s my plan short-term. Long-term, I got to study on it.”
“Teaching arithmetic’s not what it used to be, Son,” Charlie said. “Let me tell you. Kids are a different breed nowadays.”
“Let me tell you something, Dad. It never was, and they always have been.”
Charlie picked up the plates and forks from the table and headed for the sink, clearly in a hurry. Viewed from behind, the tight gray pants he was wearing, the tan shoes on his feet, and his pink polo shirt looked to Waylon as though they were garments hanging on a sixteen-year-old boy whose hair had suddenly turned white.
“What am I supposed to tell Terry or Beth when they call here checking into your whereabouts?” Waylon said to his father’s back. “They seem to have developed a real interest in knowing where you are all the time.”
“I know they have, Son. The girls mean well, but they’re all stirred up for no good reason.”
“Don’t like to see Daddy with a woman other than Mom, huh?” Waylon said.
“That’s part of it, I imagine. That’s a natural thing. It comes with the final stages of the grieving process.”
“The grieving process?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said. People have made a study of what happens to survivors, Waylon, in their mental makeup when a loved one dies. We know a whole lot more than we used to about what makes folks tick.”
“You talk like you sure do,” Waylon said.
“Learn or die, Sonny. Adapt or wither away. It’s the law of life.”
“Uh-huh,” Waylon said. “Well, I don’t want to slow you down any more on your way out. What do you want me to tell these surviving daughters of yours when they get on the phone?”
“Say I’m working day shift starting tomorrow, and I don’t know where all I’ll be before then. In and out, around and about.”
“I’ll write it down just the way you told it,” Waylon said. He had not finished his glass of water before Charlie left the house, jingling his car keys in his pants pocket and whistling as he hit the door. He ought to have some coffee around here, Waylon told himself, at least instant. Or maybe a couple of tea bags or a bottle of Coke.
Waylon decided to walk to the high school, figuring that if he took his time he wouldn’t get too sweated up along the way and that there might be some luck in retracing the route he had taken twice a day for four years, sometimes with his sisters and increasingly, as he had gotten older and more advanced in the grade structure of Thomas Jefferson High, alone.
Reaching the intersection of Helena Street and N, he automatically turned right and trudged on, remembering the first time he and Beth had made the journey together. It hadn’t been as hot a day or he hadn’t noticed the weather most likely, not yet accustomed to living in habitations subject to air conditioning and central heat.
He and his sister had started out from the house on Helena a little before eight, too late to make it to the high school on time for the first bell of that opening day in late August. The delayed start had been at Beth’s insistence, she two years older than Waylon and already thinking well ahead to consequences.
“We’re going to be tardy,” Waylon had told her, feeling a tight little ball of panic kick up just beneath the center of his chest where his rib cage started as they stood on the sidewalk in front of the house and waited.
“Of course we are,” she had said. “You little dummy. We’re not about to get to that school before the bell rings for everybody to go inside.”
“Why not?” Waylon said. “It’s done past time for us to leave. We’ll be late.”
Beth hadn’t answered him at first, looking down instead at what she was carrying bundled up against her chest in both arms. Walking steadily along the edge of N Street now, Waylon couldn’t remember what it was she had been taking to school that first day. It couldn’t have been books because the school people wouldn’t have issued them yet. Maybe it was just a purse. Maybe a notebook and paper.
When he had asked her again why she was making them late, Beth had turned to give him a long look, her mouth twisted down at the corners in the same expression their mother had always used when forced to explain herself. “Because, Waylon,” Beth had said, “we are new here. And do you know what those high school kids are going to be doing before the bell rings to make them go inside the building?”
“Waiting?” he had offered.
“Standing on all those steps in front, watching everybody that comes walking up, and if we get there when they’re doing that, they’ll be looking right at us the whole time. Understand?”
“Oh,” he had said, instantly in his sister’s debt for what she was saving him from, and he hadn’t said another thing to her all the ten blocks to the high school.
Charlie McPhee had moved his family to the coast two months before from Linden, a county seat over two hundred miles away from Port Arthur, deep in East Texas where the good lumber was all cut and no oil had been discovered and the land was fit for growing nothing but grass burrs and volunteer scrub pine. The Gulf Coast was flat and humid and close to the Cajuns in Louisiana, but there was work back then for anybody who could turn a valve and add numbers in the refineries of the Golden Triangle of Beaumont, Orange, and Port Arthur. So the McPhees had come to live near the big water.
All the way to the high school that morning over thirty years ago, Waylon had pictured how those Gulf Coast kids clustered on the steps of Thomas Jefferson High School would have looked at him and Beth in their new school clothes, if his sister had not had the sense to make them late enough to miss the bell.
The women behind the counter in the principal’s office had complained about their tardiness when he and Beth had wandered in a few minutes after eight o’clock, but Waylon had not been bothered by that. Instead, he had dwelled upon the blessedly empty way the steps in front of the building had looked and how wonderfully vacant of Gulf Coast kids the hallways had been, and he had been grateful, feeling the tight knot in his chest loosen and slide away as he stood before the counter and listened to the annoyed woman behind it tell him where to go.
At the end of the next block of N Street, his feet told him to turn left and cross the street, and Waylon did so, looking both ways and pausing to let a City of Port Arthur dump truck roar by before he crossed.
The big white frame house on the southeast corner of N Street and Myra was still there, but something seemed wrong about it, and it wasn’t until Waylon had gone past it and looked back that he realized the porches which had once encircled it were long gone in some renovation scheme. The sycamores in front were still there, though, and he kicked at a few of the brown puffy balls they had dropped on the sidewalk he traveled. He lifted his gaze, followed the path his body told him to take, and felt sweat begin to trickle down his back as he walked the last two blocks to Thomas Jefferson High.
Waylon had to try four of the glass doors at the top of the steps leading up to the
