Running on Red Dog Road Read online

  At Romney, in addition to the usual reading, writing, and arithmetic, students were taught a trade. The boys who were average or below were trained to be bakers. Another choice, reserved for the smart ones, was to work in the print shop. There may have been other choices, but those are the ones I remember.

  My brother was trained as a printer.

  I could spell the alphabet on my hands before I knew how to say my ABCs, and I learned a lot of signs, but I never got real good at it. Because my brother had already learned how to talk before he was deaf, his speech was pretty good and he read lips, so we could talk with him without signing.

  Besides, I was seven years younger, and he ignored me as much as I’d let him.

  Although I was always glad to see him, I sometimes liked it better when he wasn’t there. My brother sucked up all the attention when he was home. And Grandma liked him best, although she’d never admit to it.

  “Why, look at the shape he’s in,” she’d say.

  I was never sure what she meant by that. Hursey looked in fine shape to me. The hearing girls in East Beckley were always trying to get him to notice them. They’d come around pretending to have an interest in me and Vonnie, teaching us to twirl a baton, or play badminton with us in the yard, all the while casting glances to see if Hursey was watching. He was.

  Hursey liked to play the field. I never knew him to go steady with anyone while he was in school, but he may have at Romney and I didn’t know about it. He only dated Rayjeana for a month or so before he lost interest and started seeing Dorothy Wiseman, who sometimes taught Sunday school at St. Mary’s. Grandma liked to see him going out with good Christian girls like Rayjeana and Dorothy, even if both of them were Methodists, but Dorothy was her favorite—maybe because she lived right next door and Grandma could keep an eye on them. She also liked two other East Beckley girls he dated, Sue Cox and Eldana Jones. But like most teenage summer romances, they all ended when summer did and Hursey had to go back to school.

  Mother was driving Hursey back to Romney, and Grandma and me and Vonnie had come along to keep her company. Besides, we weren’t ones to turn down a trip out of town. He’d just got his driver’s license, so Mother let him drive before we hit any bad roads. We couldn’t find an Esso station, but we spotted a Sunoco where the sign said gas was thirteen cents a gallon. Grandma said she expected we could get it cheaper on down the road a piece. She always said that, but we pulled in anyway. Mother leaned over to tell the man to fill it up and please check the oil.

  “What’s wrong with him? He deaf and dumb?” The man was asking Mother, but he nodded toward my brother.

  My brother could read lips, so he knew what the man said. He also knew that dumb meant a person couldn’t speak, but it was still a word he was sensitive to. Besides, he wasn’t dumb. He knew how to talk before the meningitis left him deaf, so he could speak quite well.

  Hursey was used to being insulted and slighted. Usually the offender didn’t intend any insult, although some did, but Hursey didn’t make any allowance for ignorance—he took offense either way.

  I saw the red rising up his neck.

  He threw the car door open and got out. “Excuse me,” he said, brushing past the man. He walked over to the pop machine and lifted the lid, putting coins in the slot before jerking out a bottle and using the opener attached to the machine to pry off the cap. When he started back, the man turned and hurried inside the station, leaving his helper to finish up. After my brother was back in the car, I asked him if he was fixing to punch that man in the nose.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “I hadn’t quite decided.”

  The boy picked up a pop bottle of vinegar water and a crumpled page of yesterday’s news to clean the windshield and then opened the front door and swept the carpet with a whisk broom that was worn down almost to the handle. When he looked back at me and Vonnie, I noticed he was double cross-eyed, both eyes pointing toward his nose. He wore glasses that magnified his eyes, making them the one thing on his face you had to look at, especially if you tried not to. I stared back because I didn’t get to glance away before he caught me watching him. If I looked away, he’d think it was because of him being cross-eyed. I got out of it when Mother came back from paying for the gas and passed around a pack of Black Jack gum.

  Vonnie told me later she thought the boy was kinda cute. I didn’t mention about his eyes.

  That was just between me and him.

  After settling in at the tourist home, we ate lamb stew with the family that lived there. That was something we didn’t eat at home. I was willing to give it a try, but Vonnie, always a picky eater, wouldn’t eat a bite. Grandma said she guessed it wouldn’t hurt if she skipped the meat this once, but Mother said she at least had to taste it. “Just one bite,” she said, holding out a fork with a little piece of meat on it. Vonnie refused to open her mouth. Mother, not wanting Vonnie to show herself at the people’s house, let her get away with it.

  Vonnie started singing under her breath, “My sister ate a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb, My sister ate a little lamb . . .”

  Grandma gave her a look and she stopped.

  We took Hursey back to his dormitory before curfew, while we slept in four-poster beds so tall we had to use steps to climb in and out.

  Romney had a football game the next afternoon. My brother was on the team and this was the first game he’d played. The weather had turned from fall crisp to winter cold overnight. Vonnie and I wore undershirts and scratchy wool sweaters layered under heavy coats, and two pairs of socks. We folded scarves into triangles and tied them under our chins. We looked like the round Russian dolls someone had given me, the little wooden ones that fit inside each other. I lost a glove climbing up the bleachers and had to keep my hand in my pocket to keep it from freezing. Vonnie told me to use one of my socks as a mitten, and that helped.

  She gave me a quick once-over.

  “You look queer as a clown. Put the other green sock on so you’ll have matching hands instead of one red and one green. Thank goodness no one I know is here to see you right now because if a one of them did I would simply die.”

  According to my sister, I spent a good deal of time trying to embarrass her.

  Hursey, smaller and younger than many of the other players, sat on the bench most of the time. Toward the end of the game he was sent in to kick the extra point after Romney tied the score. He lined up behind the ball and kicked it wobbling toward the goal where it hit the goalpost and fell short.

  Romney lost the game.

  Hursey, overly sensitive and impulsive, never played football again.

  There was to be a dance in the Romney gymnasium. Since Mother had volunteered to chaperone, she said Vonnie and I could go, although Grandma was dead set against it. I promised myself I would pout for a whole month if Grandma talked her out of letting us go.

  “Kathleen, you go on ahead and leave the children with me,” Grandma said. “I’ll see to it they have their baths and get to bed on time. They don’t have any business being around a bunch of teenagers wiggling to music that’s not fit to be heard anyway.”

  I held my breath.

  Mother turned from helping me with a broken shoelace and looked straight at Grandma. “They can walk through the doors of this school or their own anytime they’re open,” she said, “and it doesn’t matter what for, be it a ballgame, school play, or a dance where everybody there is wiggling. That’s the end of it so far as I’m concerned.” She went back to tying my broken shoelace together and putting it back in my shoe.

  Grandma didn’t say one word.

  It wasn’t in her nature to fight losing battles.

  “Come back over here and let me fix your hair so you don’t embarrass your brother,” Mother said. “You look like you been wallering around on your head.”

  I was always getting accused of embarrassing somebody.

  Hursey got all spiffed up in a new olive-drab suit. The cuffs of his white shirt shot past his jacket sl
eeves to show off gold-colored cufflinks with onyx stones. His tie was a paisley of gold and blue and black. Just like our father had done, he wore his belt buckle skewed off to the side and the face of his watch turned to the inside of his wrist. When Mother noticed, she smiled and shook her head.

  The girls, dressed in pastel taffeta and netting, huddled on one side of the room so the boys couldn’t read their hands as they signed. The boys did the same thing, acting like they could care less, but glancing over their shoulders to see if any of the girls were looking their way.

  The Victrola was placed on the hardwood floor of the basketball court, the volume turned up full blast. You couldn’t hear yourself, but not many cared. “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B” blasted out, the sound pounding in my head and vibrating through the soles of my shoes up to my knees.

  My feet started tapping all by themselves.

  Hursey’s best friend, Billy, black pompadour slicked high with Brylcreem pomade, took the long walk across the oak floor to a girl in a yellow gown. He led her onto the open floor where he started twirling her out and back and under his arm, all the while shifting his feet to match the beat.

  “I didn’t know Billy could jitterbug like that!” Mother said.

  I’d never heard of the jitterbug before, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the two of them. When the song ended, they walked off to stomping feet and waving hands. Other couples ventured out for the next dance, a slow number Billy danced with a pretty dark-haired girl. Hursey sat on the sidelines and moped the whole time, begging until Mother agreed to take him back to the dormitory. When Vonnie and I complained about having to leave early, Mother said it was time to go anyway. She wouldn’t want Grandma getting herself all in a tizzy about us being out half the night.

  Still sulking about missing the extra point the day before, Hursey hardly said a thing when we picked him up for breakfast. Hardly ate anything either, which was a shame because Mother always treated us to breakfast at a pancake place before we left.

  After we said our goodbyes and promised to write, although I never did that I remember, nor did Hursey, we started for home.

  It was a trip we made many times over the years.

  One that started out full of promise, but always ended feeling empty.

  Even though Hursey hadn’t started to school at Romney until he was seven, he still managed to graduate when he was seventeen, skipping a couple of grades along the way.

  After he graduated, Hursey got a scholarship to Gallaudet College in Washington, D.C., where again many of his classmates were several years older. As part of freshman hazing or maybe it was a fraternity, he had to stand on a busy street corner holding a sign with a picture of a naked woman on it. And he got arrested. Well, not really arrested, but picked up by the police. The local police gave the Gallaudet kids some leeway, so they simply escorted him back to campus and left him with the dean, who gave him a talking to. My brother’s black-and-white sense of justice required that everyone involved be punished, but for some reason he was the only one who got in trouble, or so he claimed.

  That’s when he decided to leave.

  Unable to realize how that foolhardy decision would affect his life, leave he did. Mother had sent him money to buy a typewriter for his birthday. Instead, he bought a one-way Greyhound ticket home.

  No matter what Mother said, he refused to go back.

  So my brother would not be a doctor, lawyer, merchant, or chief.

  Instead, he got a job working as a printer. He was good at it. Good at layout, and lightning fast on the linotype machine. So good that when his supervisor left, he was asked to train the new one.

  “If I can train a new boss, why can’t I be one?”

  It was a question he asked many times over the years.

  But there was no good answer—at least none that satisfied him. Haunted by his deafness and his dreams, my brother lived between what he called the living and the deaf, never feeling at ease in either world.

  21

  Lonely Hearts Club Man

  The man standing at our front door clutched a forlorn bunch of posies in his fist. Through the screen I watched the small animal squatting on his head scooch forward, ready to leap onto my face and chew my nose off. I took a quick step back and stepped on Aunt Lila’s toe, causing her to yelp—or it could be the varmint caused it. Then I realized it was only a ratty toupee, no longer matched to the graying tufts that stuck out over his ears.

  I admit to feeling a little let down.

  Aunt Lila smiled her toothiest smile. “I’m Kathleen, Lila’s twin,” she lied. “No doubt you’d be the gentleman from the Romeo Lonely Hearts Club.” She kept right on lying, not allowing time for him to answer. “Lila felt terrible she couldn’t be here to meet you in person, but she had to travel to Bluefield to get the children on real short notice. Of course you wouldn’t know a thing about them, now would you? Our Aunt Pearlie went on to Glory sudden-like, rest her soul, and left her brood to Lila, her being barren and all. Eight boys, and quite a handful if I do say so. Be a nice ready-made family for some lucky man, don’t you think?”

  He squirmed and inched back toward the steps as she spoke.

  “I’d ask you in for a cup of coffee, but of course you’ll be wanting to get back to your busy life in Wichita. If you back-track up that red dog to Worley Road, you can catch the same bus back to town if you don’t dawdle. It does a turnaround over by the Pinecrest TB Sanitarium and ought to be heading this way any minute now. I’ll be sure to give Lila your regards. Don’t you be a stranger now,” she hollered after him.

  He practically tripped over his feet scurrying down the porch steps. Aunt Lila closed the door, grinning at me like a possum.

  I had a new level of admiration. That lie had come to her all in one piece.

  It was a relief to know I got it honest.

  The ad was in the back of a magazine: “Alone and lonely? Looking for a pen pal? Or maybe more? Sign up to Romeo’s Lonely Hearts Club and correspond with the likeminded utilizing our safe and confidential service. Romeo Lonely Hearts Club guarantees your satisfaction one hundred percent or double your money back.”

  Here’s how it worked. For a small fee, the folks at Romeo’s Lonely Hearts Club would act as a go-between, relaying messages back and forth. Aunt Lila invested two dollars in her future and sent off the application, including a few words to stir up some interest: “Gay divorcee ready to find true love—this slim, blue-eyed beauty operator is seeking to meet a man of substance. No louts, boozers, gamblers, lotharios, unemployed, or left-handed.”

  I asked her what a lothario was and what was wrong with being left-handed.

  “Nothing personal against the left-handed,” she said. “It’s not their fault. But bumping elbows with a leftie the rest of my life would sooner or later get on my nerves.”

  She didn’t tell me what a lothario was, and I forgot to ask her again.

  Before long the Romeo Lonely Hearts Club sent Aunt Lila a letter telling her about the men who were waiting to make her acquaintance. She could write to as many as she wanted, signing each letter with the number the Romeo people assigned to her. You could keep your real name a secret.

  She’d done exactly what they said—and she’d told the truth about herself too.

  Well, pretty much.

  She hadn’t said that she was a smoker or that she’d been married not just once, but twice before. I wasn’t sure leaving out those details was the same as lying, but I hoped she’d crossed her fingers just in case.

  After the toupee man, her responses came in batches:

  Dear 109,

  Let me introduce myself proper-like. I’m a man of medium height and build and means. My job for the better part of two years is to travel around the town filling vending machines with different brands of cigarettes. But I am quitting it since I recently broke the vile habit that I acquired in the U.S. Army, which I am no longer in since I lost my right eye in the War. No more coffin nails for me. Only
nicotine-free need answer.

  Number 554

  She wadded that one up and did an overhand shot into the wastebasket.

  Aunt Lila was a smoker, although she pretended not to be, while I pretended I didn’t know a thing about the Lucky Strikes she kept in her purse at all times.

  “Nothing worse than a recently reformed man,” she said, looking to me for agreement.

  There were two other letters in this batch:

  Dear Miss,

  I’m a God-fearing man who is seeking holy matrimony with a thrifty woman of quiet nature who is a excellent cook, keeps a orderly house and performs other wifely duties without a rebellious spirit as dictated by scripture. If you doubt this is the true word of God, search out Ephesians 5:22–24.

  No. 368

  That letter was wadded up too.

  Aunt Lila said she hadn’t been divorced twice for nothing.

  “I haven’t kowtowed to anyone so far, and I’m not about to start now. Don’t you ever kowtow either,” she told me.

  I promised I wouldn’t.

  Along with harlot, which Grandpa had used in his last sermon, I added kowtow and lothario to words I needed to look up in the dictionary.

  The next letter sounded a little better:

  Dear #109,

  You must be a beautiful woman with a name such as that. Ha Ha. My hope is that you will wish to further our acquaintance. I am in retail sales with Sears Roebuck & Co. where I am in haberdashery. So, hats off to you. Ha Ha.

  #716

  After a suitable period of time of letters going back and forth, Aunt Lila decided to meet #716. She liked a man with a sense of humor.

  Having learned her lesson by letting the man we called Romeo One come to the house, she arranged to meet up with Romeo Two at the Tip-Top Café downtown. If things didn’t go well, she could make a getaway.