Coasters. Gerald Duff

“That bunch picked up a three-year jump on me. But once I learned how to change majors and got myself into the education track, I finally nailed that sucker down.”

      “You say you already been teaching some?”

      “A few years back, yes, indeed. I was at Cypress-Fairbanks High, out in the marshes over yonder toward Houston for four years. Taught five classes of remedial math every day of the week to that bunch of webfooted kids.”

      Bobby Shepard motioned toward the bartender with his empty beer glass, his head tilted to one side as though he were trying to dislodge a thought caught somewhere on one side of his skull. After he had been refilled and had taken another sip, he turned back to look toward Waylon. “Well,” he said, “let me ask one other thing, then, Mister Math Teacher.”

      “Something about the quadratic equation? I can’t help you there, Bobby. I’m not current no more.”

      “No,” Bobby said, waving a hand back and forth, “I want to know if around all them high school girls you ever got you any strange pussy.”

      “You wouldn’t believe it, Bobby,” Waylon said, “how strange it was. Country kids like they are out there in the marshes—you know they’re swampbred and they don’t get into town much—those big old strong girls will just overpower a small man teacher. He doesn’t stand a chance against one of the stout ones that’s got her blood up.”

      “You trying to shit me, McPhee.”

      “I got no reason to, Bobby,” Waylon said. “I’m a newly re-engineered man looking for a job without a single reason to lie.”

      “Tell me something else,” Bobby Shepard said, waving one hand as though to dismiss Waylon’s complaint. “What kind of cheerleaders they got at Cypress-Fairbanks? I bet they’re all ugly as hell.”

      “Cheerleaders?” Waylon said. “I didn’t notice them much, Bobby, to tell you the truth, but I was a good citizen of my school. I imagine they’re about like the rest of those swamp children. Big and strong and have to shave their legs real close everyday. Why do you ask?”

      “Because I bet you didn’t get any strange stuff from no cheerleaders, that’s why. They wouldn’t have to settle for for a high school teacher. Cheerleaders wouldn’t.”

      “I have to admit,” Waylon said, “that in the heat of the moment I never asked any of them their rank or military classification out there in the marshes. Those old girls were always too wrought up to want to converse much anyway. See, Bobby, it wasn’t a verbal interaction we were having.”

      “You carrying it too far now, McPhee. I bet you didn’t touch a one of them. Not no cheerleaders for sure.”

      “I’m not a man to kiss and tell, Bobby,” Waylon said. “But I believe I’ve revealed enough about my teaching career at Cypress-Fairbanks. You tell me something now, though.”

      “What?”

      “You still married to Myrlie Hudson?”

      “Yeah,” Bobby Shepard said in the direction of his beer glass. “What of it?”

      “Well, nothing. I just figured from your expression of interest in cheerleaders of the swamp variety that you still had to be a married man, that’s all.”

      “Yes, I am, and that ain’t got nothing to do with nothing else.”

      “Bobby,” Waylon said and killed the last swallow in his Regal bottle, “that is the very definition of the married state.”

      The message light was blinking on the answering machine as Waylon walked through the kitchen, but he knew it had to be for his father so he didn’t slow down on his way to the hall leading to his room. The last thing he wanted to hear before he tried to sink into sleep was the voice of some female being coquettish with Charlie McPhee.

      He cast his voice into the higher ranges and began to speak out loud as he imagined whoever the lady was as she recorded her message to his father. “Hello, Mister Man,” Waylon said as gained the door to his room. “This is you-know-who just wondering why you haven’t returned my call. Are you the kind of man who doesn’t keep his promise? You said you had a reason to ask for my telephone number at the. . . .” Waylon stopped to think of a good location for the imagined meeting between Charlie and his lady friend to have taken place before going on. “At the, at the,” he said and then forgetting how he achieved the particular tone of female coyness in his voice, dropped the attempt and stepped through the door.

      Just then the telephone on the table beside the bed made a muted chirp and he moved to pick it up. “Hello,” Waylon said. “I’m not the one you want. This is not Charlie McPhee.”

      “Well, I know you’re not,” the voice of the younger of his two sisters said. “You think I don’t know who I’m talking to?”

      “Terry,” Waylon said. “How you doing?”

      “Fine, but that’s not the question. How long have you been there? Is he around?”

      “No, do you want me to tell him something for you?”

      “That’s the problem, Way. I can’t tell him anything anymore.”

      “Well, whoever could?”

      “Mama, that’s who.”

      “That’s true, all right,” Waylon said, calling up an image of his mother dropping her head to look over her glasses at her husband fixed half-turned before some door leading to the outside. “But she’s not around anymore.”

      “Don’t tell me that. You haven’t been here to be able to say anything to me.”

      “I am now, though.”

      “For how long this time?”

      “Don’t worry, little sis. Just until I can lick my wounds and achieve escape velocity.”

      “Don’t get me wrong,” Terry said. “I don’t care if you stay there the rest of your life. That’d suit me and Beth just fine.”

      “What’d suit you and Beth’s not what concerns me, Terry,” Waylon said and sat down on the edge of the bed. “I’m thinking about my own prospects.”

      “Is that a change?”

      “Nope. Just a reminder.”

      Terry was silent for a space, and Waylon was about to move the conversation toward farewell when his sister spoke again. “Have you met her yet?”

      “Who?”

      “You must not have talked to Dad yet since you moved back in if you have to ask who. I mean Hazel. Hazel Boles, that’s who.”

      “The lady from Groves? Charlie mentioned her to me.”

      “Well, if he was awake when you came in the house he mentioned her all right. And he only just met her less than two months ago.”

      “No, then. I haven’t met her yet. I guess you have the way you’re talking. What’s Mrs. Boles like?”

      “She is like the first cousin to the Queen of England,” Terry said. “To hear the way she talks and carries on. The way she acts and all.”

      “So she has lots of occasions to refer to the old country, huh?”

      “Every other breath she draws,” said Terry. “If you call that lots of occasions. Tell me something, Waylon. You been over there before. Do they all, the English people now I mean, just talk about their country and their customs and how they do just all the time?”

      “Well, Terry,” Waylon said. “I didn’t notice it all that much. I mean when they’re over there in their own country, they don’t have a good reason to talk about being where they are all the time. They’re there, you know. They’re not like Texans living in Texas.”

      “I know about