Where You Once Belonged Read Online Free PDF Page B

worked there, their sardonic talk and their jokes. For the men liked him, of course: Jack was a local phenomenon. They talked football to him. They remembered each game he had played better than he did himself, and not just the scores but the individual plays and the records he had set as well. They kidded him, they slapped his back; it was a kind of grown-man’s adulation, a form of praise he needed and enjoyed.
    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,”