Page 75 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 45

you’re sure.”
“But if you’re not sure...” Charley-Pop was playing devil’s advocate.
“We think maybe you should wait until after high school.”
“High school?” Ryan said. The word embodied everything they had
suggested to him was worldly and tempting and bad. They had them-
selves, high school sweethearts, talked of high school as the place that had
stopped their progress dead.
“If Charley-Pop could have gone on to college after high school,”
Annie Laurie said, “he would never have worked at the dairy. He wouldn’t
have driven that awful truck for Mid-American.”
“I wouldn’t be selling washers and driers now,” Charley-Pop said. He
was proud of the living he made. He was the department store appliance
salesman with the distinctive bow tie, in fashion or out. Customers might
forget his name, but they always came back asking for the man with the
bow tie. He wanted more for Ryan and Thom.
It was in high school Kenny Baker learned his first year to smoke
and drink. “Kenny’s gotten too wild for his own good,” Annie Laurie
said, and she meant for Ryan’s own good. He knew she wanted him to
drop his friend. It was in high school that Donna Hanratty had gotten
pregnant. Ryan was sorrier than his mother when Donna, his Madonna,
proved them all right about sin in the flesh of young girls. It was in high
school that Kenny Baker’s older brother, a short muscular varsity wrestler,
was killed during his senior year. He was drunk and speeding and drove
his car at three in the morning over the embankment of the new concrete
expressway, rolling end over end, thrown finally from the disintegrating
car, impaled through his guts on the steel post of the cyclone-mesh retain-
ing fence. Dying, most likely, in a state of mortal sin, while his screaming
girlfriend tried to pull him off the post with both of her broken arms.
High school was pagan sex and Death.
“I might lose my vocation if I go to high school here,” Ryan said.
His father took him for a ride the Sunday before he was to leave for
Misericordia Seminary. “Ry, I want to tell you something,” Charley-Pop
said. He stopped the ’57 Plymouth Belvedere in a turnaround glade on
the dusty country road. They sat parked deep in the forest, shaded from
the hot September sky. Leaves waved in the soft breeze and made dappling
spears of sun motes come and go on the dusty hood of the dark blue car.
“When it first happened to me, I thought I was hurt.” His father stared
straight over the steering wheel and through the windshield. Ryan had
no idea what it was exactly, but he sensed Charley-Pop leading him into
dangerous territory. “I thought something was wrong with me. When it

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