“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.”