A Prince of a Fellow
A Prince of a Fellow by Shelby Hearon
(Page 3 of 3)
He drew in his breath. It excited him to call when I was on the air, knowing he couldn't be heard by the audience but knowing it rattled me. He liked getting a reaction from me whenever it appealed to him—the usual attitude of a man to his mistress. "I can be at the cabin at a quarter to seven." Breathless, aroused by his call, he proffered the weekly rendezvous.
"How long will you have?" I did not relish the drive to our hideaway, a trip that took me more than an hour.
"I don't have to be at the reception until nine. Plenty of time for what I have in mind."
"I'll try to come."
"See that you do." He laughed titillated by the double meaning. He knew I would appear; after a year it had become a foregone conclusion.
After a year he knew that he could count on my weekly treks to hear how things were going with his boys. He had surmised that whatever thrill the clandestine provided him, I was willing to settle for the feel of a man again.
As the music faded and Otto stroked his mustache in disapproval of the call, I invented a final question for our writer. "How long have you had this story in your mind?"
Through the pane of glass he acknowledged my invention, meeting my eyes above my flushed cheeks. "The blind old man surrounded by others," he concluded, "represents the primal scene of my life. I have never been without it."
If he writes badly, I admitted, I cannot bear it.
"Thank you for being with us, Gruene Albrech, and now stay tuned while Otto brings you news of the outside world from our fertile field among the mooing Angus."
Out in the front, I shook the writer's hand in thanks.
"Otto is Mexican, isn't he?" he studied the newscaster through the glass.
"His name is Ramirez. He's the cemetery sexton."
"He does a good imitation of the language."
"None of us is really German, are we?" I looked about the studio where we had each performed in costume. "Not to the grandfathers, anyway."
"I guess not." He looked away.
I studied his face, not knowing how to proceed. I had never known how to make overtures to men. If they wanted you then you either said yes or you said no, but it was their question before it was your answer. I had never learned how to move things along with the ones who didn't ask.
In Kentucky where I taught drama there had been a school principal who supported me in my attempts to get the mountain children to loosen their bodies, to wrestle a smile to the floor, or to pretend to be a caterpillar crawling in the dirt. He was one of those rumpled, dedicated men you always mean to end up with, conscientious and underpaid. Educated but with some flaw visible as a rip in his jacket which meant he had settled for a poor rural school in a backwater. In three years we never got past his encouragement and my redoubled efforts in the classroom. We never got past ending up at the same lunch table with our sacks of sandwiches and apples.
The one who finally did ask, the extravagant actor, had also, as Gruene had, rechristened himself. He had given himself, as he liked to pun, three given names. Called himself Charles Henry David in a take-off on the famous whose parents give them three surnames at birth (Custer Lincoln Grant). To his delight, people could never remember whether he was Charles David or David Charles. I called him Henry; I never knew his real name. At least this time, with the writer, I had got that far.
"Do you have time for another cup of coffee?" I asked, finally. "We could go watch the cows eat grass."
"Sure. I set the morning aside from my work."
We took our refills outside and leaned against the fence. There were no Angus in sight, nothing in the rolling green fields but air waves whispering messages.
"What did Billy Wayne do to eat in Connecticut?"
"How do you mean?"
"Nothing deep. English faculty?"
"Uh—yeah. The usual stuff. Teaching. Writers' workshops."
"Does Texas seem changed to you?"
"Everything stays pretty much the same down here."
I tried another tack. "When we were on the air, who were you talking to?"
He cast his eyes about, as if trying to visualize. "Just someone out there, I guess. Someone I don't know."
"I beam myself to a woman who is clearing a table, grabbing her things, getting into her sports car to go to work, taking me along with a fresh cup."
He considered. "I couldn't imagine anyone specific like that. If I did I would get involved in where he was going to work and what kind of car he had and then I would get into his wife and kids and their fights and that personal business and then I couldn't talk to him. I guess I was talking to the same person I write to: just someone out there."
"How long do you have at Dobie?"
"Six months. Isn't that standard?"
"Sometimes they give the grant for a year—"
"I figure if I can't get my book started in six months then I can't do it anyway."
"Do you write every day?"
"The research is what slows me down. I thought I knew my people but it is taking me longer than I planned."
It couldn't be going slower than my research on him. I could only guess that he had put on the new country clothes in order to leave behind the world of the teacher and method act his fictional villagers. "You made your tale very convincing to our listeners."
"I have never been on radio before."
Which was where we came in. Stymied, I watched as his hazel eyes focused on some scene out there past the fields.
Unexpectedly, he asked a sudden question of his own. "Who were you talking to?"
"I told you. Just a woman in her car—"
"I mean on the phone. When you made up that question for me."
"Oh." I felt the red come back again. "The mayor of San Antonio. A friend of mine." Which I guess spelled out the whole thing for him. But I didn't know what else to do but tell the truth; I did not bill myself as what I was not.
"You got opaque."
"How do you mean?"
"You closed up."
"I may do that a lot."
"That's not good for you."
I shrugged. Some things it was better not to stay open to. "It's self-defense."
"I know about that," he said.
"Around here you have to—" But he must remember all that.
"—Well," he said.
I asked one parting query. "Do you write in those clothes?"
"I never wore these before."
I didn't press further. Maybe he wrote in turtlenecks and corduroys, or, emulating the grandfather, in an old man's nightshirt. Maybe he got up every day and sharpened all the pencils in his cigar box, in the nude. Maybe I would never know.
We emptied our cups and scanned the horizon—toward Prince Solms and the lavender hills to the north, toward Veramendi and distant Mexico to the south. I had run out of inquiries. If not out of all I wanted to know, at least what it was possible to ask. Holding out my hand one last time, I called it a morning. "Thank you for coming. Otto will have to move onto ag news and polkas if I don't rescue him."
"Here—" He tugged the bandana from his back pocket and stuck it in my hand. "I don't need this."
I tried to leave things open. "Stop by on your way back to see the folks in Veramendi."
He left them closed. "Right now I'm working out the village in my head." Getting into a car as new as his name, his Levis, and his performance on my show, he backed out onto the unpaved access road.
I tied the bandana on my tow head. Sometimes you had to make do with souvenirs.
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