The Last Fair Deal Going Down. David Rhodes
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like trying to imagine life in Europe in 1943 without considering the war. Will was handsome. He stood over six feet two inches tall, had a face of long, well-balanced lines, high cheekbones, and hazel eyes. He walked like an athlete on the sides of the balls of his feet and spoke in a deep, rich voice that was not at all monotone. At a very young age he had artfully combined the experience of our ostracism with the late forties’ and fifties’ fascination with the idea of the tragic hero to his own advantage and there was no woman in Des Moines that he did not consider as his prey, and few that did not have a similar image of themselves reserved at least for those dark hours when their husbands had gone to sleep, and they, still unsatiated and restless, lay staring up to the ceiling, watching fantasies.
I can remember watching Will (then sixteen) gather his clothes about him late at night, slip out the door and make his way carefully between the wrecks in the front yard with long shadows lying under the tires and in the ditch, over to the bed of Mrs. Griffin who had a light showing in her attic that I could make out from the porch. Later then, only when the air was heavy, I could hear a long, winding, tiny screaming. Just as it was beginning to be light, I’d watch him leave through the front door and run back down the street and into the yard, running as though he knew someone were watching. But he couldn’t have. Soon then he did not do it anymore.
Mr. Griffin came over to the house one night and knocked on the front door. He had returned from a sale, still in his suit. We were eating dinner together as we frequently still did and Father told Paul it was probably for him. Paul walked across the room and opened the screen door. Mr. Griffin immediately jumped inside the kitchen and looked quickly over at Will, saying: “I’ve got some trouble with my car,” the projection of his voice shaking around in the cupboards. “What seems to be the problem?” asked Paul as our visitor moved toward the center of the room, his progression looking like a thousand pages of drawings in the Looney Tune Production Studio flipped over by the thumb of a janitor. “It’s my carburetor . . . my carburetor needs fixing.” Walt coughed and Griffin turned toward the table. “And you keep that boy of yours away from my place,” he yelled at Father. “Just what boy are you talking about, Mr. Griffin?” asked Father, putting a cigarette out in his coffee cup and fingering his fork with his other hand. “That one,” said Griffin and pointed a large, hairy finger at Will. “Well, now,” said Father, “that boy’s only sixteen; doesn’t seem to me that he could be doing you much harm.” I could see Walt out of the corner of my eye sliding his chair back toward the shotgun leaning against the wall. Griffin’s face turned the color of an October tomato, rotten, and he shook his fist at Father and said, “If I catch him anywhere near my house, I’ll kill him.” Then he bolted from the room. Walt began to laugh. “And so he was gone,” he said.
“I don’t want to see it happen again,” said Father to Will. “You’ve got to stop this. You’re too young anyway.”
“Too young?” jeered Will. “You mean old man Griffin’s too old, don’t you?”
“If I’d meant that, I’d’ve said it. You can’t understand anything yet — can’t see behind the act. Of course you’re old enough to grow a stiff prick and go around jabbing it into wherever it will fit; but too young to see behind that, behind where the ugly colors of emotions are. You’re too young because you don’t see that, and later, when you do, won’t want it anyway.”
“What’s wrong with using what was given to you when you were born?”
“Nothing,” yelled Father, “nothing was given to you. You just got what you have — nobody gave it to you. You just got it, and now that you’ve got it you’re in the same boat as everyone else. The kind of life you’re talking about will drive you mad; then you and Griffin can start a club.”
“And you had seven kids.”
“That’s different. Marriage is different. It’s why there is such a thing.”
“Like John’s.”
“John Charles was an idiot. I knew it from when he was little. He was too stupid to see that everything he would do was damned before he did it.”
“We aren’t vegetables.”
“No, and knowing that should teach you. Like a warning.”
These arguments between Father and Will were frequent. Nellie always left the room as soon as she could see them starting, but I always stayed — stayed and listened and tried to understand why Father hated Will as much as he did.
Father never convinced Will, but maybe he wasn’t trying to. By the time he was twenty Will had been three times ordered into court on charges of statutory rape and unlawful and lascivious actions, all of which were dismissed due to lack of substantiating evidence. Will was careful in that he never took advantage of anyone (except once), but would put himself in the position of being taken advantage of and ride along on the wave of emotion that he had festered until he grew tired of its personality and got off, leaving behind him empty accusations aimed at the ineffable part of Will that was empty itself, and there was never anything done to make that emptiness unlawful.
Father never argued with Walt. No one argued with Walt that knew him. In a half sentence of pointed words he was able to synthesize, capsulize, and ignoblize your premise, many times unknown to yourself, in such a way as to leave you nothing to do but walk away. (Only Nellie, she could laugh.) And any argument he couldn’t reduce to an absurd axiom would invoke the single response, “So what?” which was more damaging than all the rest. The steel trap of his mind took in thousands of mutilated, twisted, jumbled words, and like a machine in a junkyard that takes bent cars and smashes them into small steel cubes, fed out motionless propositions laid bare by the removal of all extraneous and colored words.
Walt was understandably the best street fighter in Des Moines and was afraid of nothing. Many times I had seen him standing out in the street in front of a tavern meticulously tearing apart some man with quick jabs and stompings. His object was one-fold, never cluttered with anger, revenge, jealousy, or envy: he was out to win, to reduce his opponent to a lifeless form on the cement, and his hate was of such a general kind that it never obstructed his view of the quickest and easiest method of achieving this end. He was not malicious though he was seldom in fights that he hadn’t provoked. Labor unions hired him during striking periods to stand in front of the factories and shops as a deterrent to scab labor, but his loyalty was never assured and he often fought with the picketers themselves. It was impossible to avoid Walt if he decided he wanted to fight with you because he had a way of looking at you and seeing just that part of you that was sensitive to the touch and then begin jabbing away at it. I do not mean to imply that this is difficult with most people because what is most suspect in them is usually surrounded by walls of protective clues standing out like street signs on the corner, and there are names for those things. But several are able to remain elusive to everyone — but Walt, who could dig up the most obscure, forgotten, seemingly insignificant characteristics, thus lighting a fire under his opponent. There was one way for the good people of Des Moines to protect themselves from Walt:
After dinner, Will and Paul and I were in the kitchen with Nellie when we heard shouts coming up the road in front. “What’s that?” said Nellie, but no one answered because the rest of us knew what it was. Will and I carried two kitchen chairs outside and Paul picked up a towing chain by the side of the house. Walt was backing up the asphalt road, holding a tire iron in one hand and a metal barrel-rung in the other. Around him circled five or six men from the Rooster Tavern trying to find a knife-blade opening between the revolutions of the tire iron and Walt.
“Son-of-a-bitches,” Walt was saying with as much emphasis as a long-distance operator at three o’clock in the morning. One of the men came too close, made a mistake and Walt caught him in the face with the barrel-rung and he fell screaming to the side of the road. “Son-of-a-bitches,” Walt said. Will and I started jabbing at three of them with our chairs. Paul was swinging the tow chain around his head but he should have known that it was too awkward to control and one of the men caught it with an ax handle and Paul backed up against Walt when we heard Father’s twelve gauge go off behind us. The five men turned around to see Nellie standing in the front yard with the gun leveled in front