A Slipping-Down Life

8

She cut herself a set of bangs, long enough to cover her eyebrows. Her eyes without eyebrows looked worried and surprised. And because her hair was puffy at the sides, she sometimes had the feeling she was living under a mushroom button. “There’s my girl,” her father said. “I’m going to find you a plastic surgeon, too. Would you go? I always knew you would come out of this, if I just let you be.” Then he went off to paint the back porch, whistling a tune she couldn’t recognize.

She threw away her black skirt and blouse, her snapshot of Drum at the Unicorn, Fay-Jean’s pencil drawing and the posed photograph his mother had given her. That was all that was left of him. She walked downtown under Clotelia’s huge umbrella and laid in a stack of school supplies for the coming year. On the way home she bought a Tar City newspaper. “Like everything else,” she read, “night-life seems to be suffering from the heat wave. The Manhattan Club has no entertainment at all this week, and the Parisian’s Drumstrings Casey is strictly amateur.” She refolded the newspaper and pushed it through the swinging door of a trashcan.

Afternoons, she visited Violet. All summer she had stayed home and let Violet come to her, and now she felt as if she had returned from some long hard trip that no one else knew about. The off-hand clutter of Violet’s room and her smiling fat family had a clear and distant look. New china horses had joined the parade across Violet’s bureau. On the closet door was a life-size poster of a movie star she had never even heard of. “What have you been doing all summer?” she asked Violet.

“What do you mean? You’ve seen me every day, haven’t you?”

“Well, yes.” She sat forward on the bed, cupping her chin in her hand. “Seems like I had two summers,” she said. “Two different ones. Sometimes I think, was that me, riding large as life between two boys to a road-house? Why, I never was on a date, even, except with that peculiar Buddy Howland whose voice never changed. I can’t believe I did it all.”

“Oh, remembering things is always that way,” Violet said.

“Not for me. Nothing to bother remembering, before. And I would rather not remember this. Why was I such a fool? You should have stopped me.”

“The best thing now is just to drop the subject from your mind,” Violet said.

“You’re right. I will. Let’s talk about something else. Did you know my father is taking over Miss Cone’s class? He said that she—”

“You told me that.”

“I did?”

“Last month.”

“Oh. I forgot.” She rose sharply from the bed, causing Violet to grab for her bottle of nail polish. “You see what I mean. I don’t remember telling you a thing about it. Oh, how am I going to get over all this? I wish I had spent the summer swimming or being a camp counselor. Or just snug in my house reading books, even. I wish someone would give me back all the time I’ve known Drum Casey, and I would change everything I did.”

“You were going to drop the subject,” Violet said.

But she couldn’t. She spent her mornings skating a slick surface, keeping busy, but afternoons she sprawled across Violet’s unmade bed and said the same things again and again, and Violet listened with a sort of cheerful tolerance that made it seem safe to say them.

On Monday morning, over a week since her fight with Drum, Evie settled down to cleaning out her desk. It helped to do things with bustle in them. Just as she started on the second drawer she heard Clotelia call, “Evie? You wanted down here.”

“Coming,” said Evie. She came out and looked down the stair well to the front hall. Clotelia stood waiting there with her arms folded and her feet apart. “You got a guest,” she said.

“Who is it?”

“Come on down, I told you.”

“Oh, all right.”

“Your father be home any minute, now.”

“Well, what about it?”

But Clotelia only jerked a thumb toward the living room. Downstairs, Drum Casey was sitting on the couch with his boots on the coffee table. His head lolled to one side, as if he were asleep. Evie stopped short in the doorway and stared at him. She felt separated from him by a wall of glass, protected by the thick new bangs on her forehead and the days she had spent removing him from her mind in bits and crumbs. His eyes were closed; she could look at his face without feeling he might blind her by looking back. His mouth was relaxed, almost open. He needed a shave. His hands, with their nails cut short for the guitar strings, lay loosely curled on his legs. When she saw his hands she made a small movement, only enough to smooth her bangs down, but Drum rolled his head toward her and looked from beneath lowered lids. “Hey,” he said.

“Hello,” said Evie.

He sat up and moved his feet off the coffee table. The silence grew to the point where it would be hard to break. “I didn’t know it was you,” Evie said finally. “Clotelia didn’t say. Do you want a lemonade? You’re hot, I bet—”

Behind her, Clotelia said, “Your father be home any minute, Evie.”

“Oh. Yes, my father’s coming,” Evie said.

But that didn’t seem to mean anything to Drum. He sat forward and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I ain’t slept since Saturday,” he said.

“What happened?”

“I got fired.”

“What?”

“Fired, I said.”

“Oh, well, they don’t know,” said Evie, thinking of the reviews. “It’s the weather. In this heat they can’t tell good music from bad.”

“Music, hell. That was just an excuse. I was getting on good with the manager’s daughter and he didn’t like it, that’s all. Said I hadn’t worked out well. ‘Goddam man that hires these people—’ he said. I said, ‘Nobody does that to me.’ End of it all was a fight.”

“A fight? With fists?”

“What else. Fists and the police station and the works. He was just peeved over his daughter is all.”

Evie blinked, cutting off the daughter forever with a single movement. “That’s illegal,” she said. “You can hold him to his contract.”

“Contract, what do you think I am? A movie star?”

“Well, he can’t just fire you.”

“Guess again.” Drum took a comb from his shirt pocket. “Now they got my name on the books, down at the police station. Just what I needed. You ever seen those movies where the mother tells the cops, ‘He’s a good boy?’ That’s what my mother did. ‘He’s a good boy,’ she says. Then she paid the damages and yanked me outdoors and said she might’ve known this would happen. Said I had disgraced them all, what would my daddy say, if she had had any sense she would have put me to work like everyone told her to. Now, I ask you. Won’t my own family even stand by me? When I got home my daddy wouldn’t let me in the house. ‘I am just too pissed off to look at you right now,’ he says. ‘Sleep down in the car. I’ll talk with you in the morning.’ ‘Well, if that’s the way you feel,’ I said, and walked right off. I don’t care if I never see the place again.”

“Where is David?” Evie asked.

“David. Home, I reckon. He didn’t get in no fight, not him. I would’ve gone and spent the night at his house but you know his mother, she hates my guts.”

“What for?”

“No reason I know of. I never did a thing to her.”

Out in the hallway, Clotelia gave a sudden sharp sigh. “Go fix some lemonade,” Evie told her.

“Evie, your father going to hit the roof if he find him here.”

“Never mind, fix some lemonade.”

Clotelia pivoted on one heel and left. Drum seemed not to have noticed her. He combed his hair, ran one hand across it, and put the comb back in his pocket. “I spent the night on someone’s porch,” he said, “but didn’t sleep none. Now my eyelids feel scratchy. I don’t know what my daddy has against me, but he never will listen to reason, not for one second. Never asks my side of nothing. Oh, well, him I’m used to. But Mom? ‘Bertram, you have just killed my soul,’ she told me. ‘I ain’t got no more faith in you.’ Mom! What would you say to that? I went by home this morning after I saw his service truck pull out and, ‘Mom,’ I said, ‘could I just have some biscuits and a little side meat for my breakfast?’ She said, ‘Yes, here, I done saved you some, but you better not come by no more, Bertram, until you set it right. Meaning make up the money and apologize and get you a steady job.’ Well, I never thought I would live to hear her talk that way. ‘Now you know it wunt my fault,’ I told her. ‘That man is just real possessive over his daughter and for no good reason either, since she is right wild and always has been. But he just won’t see it,’ I said, ‘and up and fired me on some manufactured cause.’ Mom says, ‘Oh, Bertram, where are you going to end up? Sometimes I feel you won’t even amount to a hill of beans,’ she says, and then she pushed a little brown bag of food on me. Well, it was like I had just heard something crack, the final floorboard I was resting on. I won’t be going back now.”

He stood and began walking around the edges of the room. Every now and then he took a hand from his back pocket to pick up a figurine or a photograph. “Who’s this?” he asked.

“My mother.”

“She dead? Who’s this?”

“My uncle.”

“You got a real nice place here. You reckon your father might let me sleep on the couch?”

“Well, no, I doubt it.”

“How about your porch?”

“Not there either, I’m sure of it.”

“He’d never know.”

“He might,” said Evie. “If a neighbor saw you, or he went out on the porch some night.”

“I’d be real careful.”

“But I was just getting all straight,” said Evie. “How can you ask me a thing like that?”

All Drum did was pick up a china goose girl and lay it against his cheek, as if it cooled him.

“Oh, go ahead, then,” said Evie. “I don’t care.”

So he slept on the porch, on the heavy, flattened cushions in the wooden swing. Not just one night, but all week. Evie would lie awake until midnight or so, when she heard through her open window the rusty sound of boots on the floorboards and then the creaking of the swing as he settled himself. The creaking died away immediately, with nothing following. He seemed not even to turn in his sleep. He would be one of those people who lay down without a fuss and lost consciousness until morning, frustrating whoever was with them, the way Violet did when she spent the night. It was Evie who stayed awake. She listened to crickets and breaths of music and other people’s parties, and she thought of a hundred different things that could happen if her father came upon Drum. Would he shout? Call the police? Or only apologize for disturbing Drum’s sleep and tiptoe back to bed? She expected to have nightmares about it, but when she finally slept her dreams were of struggling in water as thick as gelatin, running from a fire on boneless legs, climbing a ladder which swooped backwards under her weight but never quite fell over. When she awoke in the mornings, Drum was always gone.

After the first night she came out on the porch in her bathrobe and stared at the swing, whose cushions were not even dented. She was still there when Clotelia came. “He gone?” Clotelia asked. No one had told her Drum was staying there, but she seemed to know anyway. Evie nodded.

“Well, go on get dressed. Nothing attractive about sitting out here in your bathrobe.”

At ten o’clock, her father went off for an errand. As soon as his car was out of sight Drum opened the front screen door a few inches and slid into the hallway. “I wonder if I could have breakfast?” he said. Evie was at the foot of the stairs, sorting out the mail. It was the first time all morning that Drum had not been in the center of her mind, and she raised her head and stared at him a minute. Then Clotelia called, “Come on out, it’s on the table.” She had set a place, even — a dinner plate heaped with ham and biscuits, which Evie and her father never ate. When Drum walked in, Clotelia looked up from the sink to say, “It’s waiting on you, over there. I know you.” Then she emptied the dishwater and walked out, peeling off pink rubber gloves. Drum shrugged and sat down.

“She is a mite uppity,” he said.

“Did you sleep all right?”

“Sure. It’s little short, but better than the ground. You got any syrup?”

Evie handed it to him and then sat down. “Have you been to see David yet?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

“How about your friends?”

“How about them?”

“Well, you do have some.”

“Sure.”

“Are they worried about you?”

He frowned at her over a biscuit. “What you getting at?” he asked.

“I’m not getting at anything.”

“You want me to clear out?”

“No, of course not.”

“What you asking about friends for, then?”

“I just wanted to know—” said Evie. She drew rays out from a coffee ring, with Drum watching. “I was wondering why it was me you came to,” she said finally.

“Oh. I don’t know.”

“There must have been lots of other people.”

“Sure.”

She gave up. She waited until he had finished eating, and then she brought him an ash tray. Drum tipped back in his chair to smoke a cigarette. At his elbow was the back door, unlocked and waiting in case her father should appear. There was no telling when he might walk in. She sat braced to move suddenly, her mind tracking down and identifying every sound from the street, so that when finally Drum decided to answer her question she didn’t take it in. “You and me really had some fight that night,” he said. Evie said, “Mmhmm.” She was listening to a jingling noise that could have been her father’s Volkswagen. When it passed she said, “What?”

“You and me really had some fight, I said.”

“Oh, well.”

Drum blew out a funnel of smoke and watched it dissolve. Then he said, “I thought about it later. That fight is where I went wrong, I thought.”

“Oh, well, it’s over now,” Evie said.

“It came to me the night I got fired. I said, Oh, damn, I missed all the signs, will you look at that?’ ”

“What?”

“Are you listening to me?”

“I just don’t see what you’re saying,” Evie said. “It’s all right about the fight, really. I’m the one that should apologize.”

“I ain’t apologizing, I meant every word. You weigh on my head. But you bring luck, too. Or take it away, like when you hoped I would mess up at the Parisian.”

“Well, wait—” Evie said.

“If I’d of took you to the Parisian like you asked, they wouldn’t have fired me.”

“That’s just silly,” Evie said.

“Nothing silly about it. Except I wish if you bring me luck you wouldn’t have to weigh on my head. Don’t you ever smile none?”

“Of course I do.”

“Not to notice. Just sitting there paper-faced with your forehead showing. Now you’ve cut bangs.”

“I thought it was time to.”

“Does that mean you were serious?”

“Serious about what?” Evie said. “I don’t understand what we’re talking about.”

“The fight. When you said I couldn’t play the guitar.”

“Oh, that.”

“I can play one hell of a lot better than Joseph Ballew, I’ll tell you that. And sing too. If you don’t agree, you got no ears.”

“Well, I was just angry,” Evie said. “I never really meant it.”

“Did you know I took lessons? Up at Farnham’s Music Company, where I got my guitar. Then I won a talent show before I had even finished my lessons. Fifteen dollars and a medal.”

“You know I never meant it,” Evie said. “It was just one of those things you say when you’re angry. I could listen all day when you play.”

“Well, then,” said Drum. It seemed to be what he had come for. He stubbed his cigarette out and then just sat there, tipping his chair against the wall, until they heard Evie’s father climbing the porch steps. “See you around,” Drum said. He was up from his chair and out of the house before Evie could answer. He must have taken note of that door right from the beginning.

When he was gone, she felt she had made a mistake. He had come to make sure she still liked his singing; if she had had any sense, she would have kept him wondering. She plodded from room to room pulling sharply on one strand of hair, muttering under her breath when she was sure she was alone. “Was I serious? I don’t know. I’ve forgotten what you sound like by now.” Clotelia passed her several times, and threw her a look but said nothing. Her father asked if she were bored. “No, why?” Evie said.

“I thought you looked restless.”

“Oh, no.”

“Well, school will start soon. Summer always drags about this time.”

He looked so cheerful nowadays. He had made her an appointment with a plastic surgeon for September, and at supper he had grown talkative and sometimes made small jokes. What she should have said was, “No. I don’t like you anymore, I don’t like your music, I don’t want you sleeping on my porch.” Then life would be simple again. No more hanging around waiting and wondering, no more secrets hidden from her whistling, unsuspecting father.

Drum set up a pattern. He came whenever her father was gone, as if he kept close watch on the house, and he seldom spoke. Conversation was up to Evie. If she was silent he seemed irritable, tapped his fingers or swung his foot, left before he had to. If she talked he seemed not to listen, but kept very still. He rested the back of his head against the wall and watched the ceiling while she searched for any words at all to fill the space. “You mustn’t mind Clotelia. Does she get on your nerves? Once I went home with her when my father was out of town and I met her boyfriend, not the one she has now but another one, who sat around drinking beer all the time and matching pennies, living off her money. She thinks all men do that way. That’s the only reason she acts so snippy. His name was, wait a minute. Not Spencer, no—”

She had never been given so much time before. No one interrupted her, no one shifted impatiently. She could choose her words as slowly as luxury items in a department store. “Not Steward, not Stengle. It will come to me in a moment. Spindle. I knew it was something peculiar. Have you ever heard of anyone named Spindle? He had a black knitted skull cap on in the middle of summer. His shoes were the big high kind with metal toe-caps.”

Drum stubbed his cigarette out and passed a hand over his eyes. “Are you tired?” Evie asked him.

“No.”

But his face was pinched and tight, and his tan was turning yellow. Sometimes, lost in what she was saying, she forgot that anything was wrong. Then she would look up accidentally and notice how he sat, limp and heavy-limbed, not bothering to protect himself from the net of words she had wound around him. She would break off and say, “Do you want something? Iced tea?”

“No.”

“Are you not sleeping nights?”

“I’m sleeping fine. Go on talking.”

“How can I talk if I never get an answer? You talk to me. What’s been happening? Have you been back to see your mother?”

“No.”

“Are you going?”

“No.”

“She can’t still be angry with you.”

“I don’t care if she’s angry or not, I’m not going.”

“What, not ever?”

“I’ve had it,” said Drum. “All this time telling how famous I’m going to be, and then she goes to pieces at one little setback. I’m nineteen years old. I got a right to get fired once, don’t I? Oh, it looks like I will never get anywhere in this life. Never do a thing but bag groceries on Friday nights. A lot she cares.”

“If you’re not going back,” said Evie, “where are you going?” She was careful about her tone of voice. Even a sudden movement, she felt, might frighten him away. But Drum only shook his head. He didn’t seem to care what she said.

He spent five days moving between her house and David’s, where he was allowed to visit but was not asked for meals. He shaved in the restroom of an Esso station, borrowed a change of clothes from David, and kept his guitar in David’s tool shed. At Evie’s house he saw only Evie and Clotelia. Once Violet came, pink-cheeked with curiosity after what Evie had told her on the phone, but Drum left immediately. “I believe he doesn’t like me,” Violet said.

“No, that’s not it. It’s some mood he’s in,” Evie told her. When Violet was there, she could draw back from things and see how strange they were: Evie Decker making excuses for a rock guitarist, protecting a fugitive sitting boldly in her kitchen chair. She said goodbye to Violet as soon as she could and went out back to signal toward the tall grass behind the house.

On Friday afternoon Drum’s mother called. “This is Mrs. Ora Casey,” she said stiffly. “Is that you, Evie?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Evie.

“I am trying to get ahold of Bertram. He’s wandered off somewhere. Has he been by your house?”

“No, ma’am.”

“If you see him, will you say I’m looking for him?”

“All right.”

There was a pause.

“I’ve called David too,” Mrs. Casey said. “He’s not seen him. Now, where would a boy go off to like that?”

“Well, I ‘ll certainly tell him you were looking for him.”

“Evie, I’ll be honest with you. I been looking for him all week now. Since Sunday. We had a little falling-out. Oh, it was all over nothing — a misunderstanding at the Parisian — but you know how sensitive he is. I told him he had let me down — well, I had my reasons. We may not be college-educated in our family but we are law-abiding, we don’t give no one cause to complain about us. I did speak sharp to him, but only because I was disappointed, nothing permanent. What call did he have to take it to heart so?”

“Well, if I see him—” Evie said.

“Yes, yes. All right. Good-bye.”

Evie hung up and went back to the living room, where Drum and Clotelia were watching soap operas. Drum had grown bolder now. When the television was on he sat watching it as if he were an invited guest, talking back to all the actors. “This here doctor,” Clotelia was telling him, “think he’s the center of the universe. Selfish? Watch.” Drum nodded, probably not listening, concentrating on the screen so hard his eyes had turned to slits. He and Clotelia shared the couch. Clotelia had grown used to him, although she still said he was trash. “Now, here is what I want to know,” she told him. “When that doctor mince in such a stuck-up way, is it his way? Or do he just act like that for the play? Which? Pull your gut in, Evie. Who was that on the phone?”

“No one,” said Evie.

“If I don’t get on her tail,” Clotelia told Drum, “she would go around looking like a old bedsheet. What am I going to do? I tell my boyfriend, ‘Brewster,’ I say, ‘you ain’t going to believe it, but I know a white girl seventeen years old need a full-time nursemaid. Maid ain’t enough,’ I say. ‘She need a nursemaid.’ ”

Drum rolled his head back on the couch and watched Clotelia. During commercials he would listen to anyone. It didn’t have to be Evie.

“ ‘Why won’t you quit then?’ he say. I tell him I will. Nothing more disgraceful, he say, than me spending my lifetime picking up over Evie Decker.”

“I wish you would quit,” Evie said.

“Oh, I will, miss, I will.” She made a face and twisted her watch around sharply. “Week to week I say I will. Only if I could find me something else to do. Factory job. Do you know how long I wasted on her? Four years. Now I got to say it was all for nothing and quit. My land.”

“Go to some city, why don’t you,” Drum said.

“Sure. Be glad to.”

“I would too, if I had the money.”

Evie stood above him, folding her hands on the back of the couch and looking down at the top of his head. There was no part in his hair, just a dense sheet of black separating into thick strings. Sometimes, watching him sprawled in her house, she felt an unpleasant sense of surprise hit her. There were things about him that kept startling her each time she noticed them: the bony, scraped look of his wrists, the nicotine stain on his middle finger, the straggling hairs that edged his sideburns. He was sunk into the couch cushions as if he were permanent. If her father walked in right now, what would Drum do? Raise his hand no more than an inch, probably, say “Hey” and let the hand drop again.

“Drum Casey, what do you want from me?” she asked him.

“Huh?”

“What do you want, I said. Why are you hanging around here?”

“Evie, well, I never,” Clotelia said.

Drum had turned to face her, with his mouth slightly open. “Well, if that’s the way you feel,” he said.

“I didn’t say one word about the way I feel. I asked you a question.”

“Some question.”

“Well, have you ever been known to answer one? Have you ever had a real conversation, one that goes back and forth like it’s supposed to? I asked you something. I want to know. What do you want out of me?”

“Watch now,” Clotelia said loudly. “The lady in black going to cry; she’s cried every show. How do you reckon she makes tears spurt that way?”

“It’s fake, it’s only water,” said Drum. He stood up. “Talk like this just gets me down. If you don’t like me sleeping on your porch, come out and say so. None of this roundaboutness.”

“Porch! Who said porch? I asked you—”

“I got ears, I can hear.”

“I wonder more about that every day,” Evie said.

But Drum was already leaving, stuffing his cigarettes into his shirt pocket as he crossed the hallway. “So long,” he said.

“Well, wait a minute—”

She saw his back as he loped down the front steps. Anyone could have seen him. Her father could have run into him on the sidewalk. When he reached the street he paused for a minute and then turned to the right, where he was half hidden by the hedge that bordered the yard. “I don’t see you running after him,” Clotelia told the television.

“I don’t know if I wanted to,” Evie said.