Kent Haruf - Where You Once Belonged

So now, once he had left his mother’s house, he had all of that again, every day. But also, for the first time, he had a room he could call just his and the liberty to come and go from it as he would, with a steady diet of free meals, or at least cheap ones, and enough money left over in his pocket to spend on beer and poker and nickel cigars, and still enough left over to buy gas to put in his pickup and then occasionally even something yet remaining to spend on Wanda Jo Evans. Because he wasn’t cheap: if Jack had money he always spent it. So he might take her out to a movie, say, or treat her to a hamburger at the Holt Cafe, with an order of French fries on the table between them to share equally. Then we would see them together: Wanda Jo leaning toward him across the table, her hand with the gripped hamburger arrested before her face, while he talked and ate and chewed and while she went on watching him out of those gray and wondering eyes.

But what I remember most about that time were those evenings in the hotel room. Jack and the rest of us would be playing poker. We would be betting our nickels and dimes at a wooden box upended in the center of the room, under that high old ceiling, under that single dim light bulb suspended from a cord, while off in the corner sitting on the bed Wanda Jo Evans would be bent over the books and the cheap tablets on her lap. She would be attempting to complete Jack’s and her own English and math assignments in time to hand them in the next morning, and only now and then would she even stop long enough to look up from under her strawberry hair, to glance quickly at Jack when he laughed or thought to say something that included her.

We played most of these poker games on Sunday nights. There would be beer then too. Jack was nineteen and the rest of us were eighteen now. We were legally of an age not only to be drafted to fight this country’s wars but to buy beer too, which if we drank enough of it, and God knows we tried, would give us the necessary recklessness and the urge to shout that we believed were essential for any poker game involving high-school boys.

We had a good time that winter and spring. At school it became a point of honor and a matter of high privilege to say that you had been allowed to sit in, that you had entered Jack’s room at the hotel and had lost your dollar or two at cards on Sunday night and had drunk a six-pack of beer. It gave you the right to boast the next morning — on Monday, at Holt County Union High School — to boast and complain of a headache while old Mrs. Lindquist tried once more to explain to us The Importance of Being Earnest .

But there was at least one snag in these Sunday night proceedings: the beer was warm. It had to be bought on Saturday night because none of the bars or liquor stores was open in Holt on Sunday. And since Jack’s room didn’t have an ice chest or a refrigerator (and since none of the rest of us was quite fool enough to store the beer at home in his own refrigerator where his mother would sure as hell find it and ask questions), the beer, by Sunday night, was approximately the temperature of blood.

We attempted several solutions to this problem. We tried, for example, stacking the cartons of beer on the window ledge outside Jack’s room. And that kept it cool overnight, but sometimes it kept it too cool: it froze. Then we had Popsicles while we played cards. Which was a funny thing for a while. But the bite was gone out of the beer. It was like kissing your own sister, Bobby Williams said.

“Hell,” Jack said. “It’s more like kissing my old lady. Which ain’t even worth trying once.”

In the middle of that next week, then, after midnight, Jack Burdette and Tom Crossland and Bobby Williams and I crowded into the cab of Jack’s old pickup. Wanda Jo Evans was there too. Jack was driving and Wanda Jo was sitting on my lap — which was about as close to a high-school boy’s notion of heaven as I was ever to come. We drove across town that way. Then Jack eased the pickup into the alley behind Burcham Scott’s old house. When we entered the alley Jack turned the lights off and coasted to a stop. Then we got out and whispered to one another and slunk along in the dark away from the pickup into the old man’s backyard, past his cement-block incinerator and his fallow garden and finally up onto his back porch, where, pushed off into a corner, there was an ancient Majestic refrigerator which everyone in Holt County knew about. It was a part of the legend we’d all grown up with. We all knew that Burcham Scott was a fisherman, that he was an old freckled-headed man who had long ago retired from the pretense of ever doing anything else but fish and we knew the refrigerator was a part of his equipment. He kept his night crawlers and red worms in the refrigerator so they would stay lively and unspoiled until he needed them.

But it was only the middle of March now, too early for Burcham to begin fishing again, so the refrigerator was empty and unplugged. We began to slide it away from the wall. Then we tried to pick it up. But we were fumbling in the dark and the porch was narrow and we kept bumping into one another. Finally Jack hissed:

“Get back, you damn morphadites. I’ll do it myself.”

And he did. He was that big, that strong. He stooped in front of it, threw his arms around the old Majestic as if it were no more than some heavy tractable farm girl who had come into town for a squeeze and a dance, and then stood up with it. He turned, pivoting, and waltzed off the porch with the refrigerator hugged up into his arms and carried it out to the alley, while behind him Bobby Williams and Tom Crossland and I followed like children, punching one another and giggling.

At the pickup Jack said: “You think one of you runts could at least open the goddamn tailgate?”

So we drove back across town that night with the old refrigerator riding up white and square in the back of the pickup, the four of us sitting around it while Wanda Jo Evans drove, and at the hotel we didn’t even attempt to help him. We merely held the hotel door open while he lifted the refrigerator out of the pickup once more and then carried it against his chest, as if it were still only a farm girl or a crate of peaches, say, on up the stairs to his room. There we opened that door for him too and watched him set it down.

He was panting a little now. There was a thin sheen of sweat on his face. While he caught his breath Wanda Jo plugged it in. Then Jack produced a six-pack of beer. He centered the beer ceremoniously on a shelf in the refrigerator, shut the door, looked around at us, then opened the door again. “There,” he said. “Now don’t that scratch your ass? Which one of you boys wants a cold beer?”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “It’s all the comforts of home, Jack.”

“You goddamn right it is.”

“And there ain’t no place like home,” Bobby said.

“No, there ain’t,” Tom Crossland said. “Oh Dorothy, come and fuck me.”

“What in hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Home,” he said. “The Wizard of Oz .”

“Well watch your goddamn language,” Jack said. “There’s a woman present.”

We all looked at Wanda Jo. Wanda Jo looked lovely. She was smiling at Jack as if what he had said was not only chivalrous but clever.

And that set us off. Snorting and laughing, we pounded Jack on the back and shared the six-pack of beer out among ourselves. And though the beer wasn’t cold yet, it didn’t matter. It was cold in theory. So we began to tell and retell the story, inventing new twists in the string of events and speculating frequently upon the look on Burcham Scott’s old face the next morning when he would walk out onto his back porch. He’d scratch himself and look flat dumbfounded, we said. He’d misplace his worm, Bobby Williams said.