By June she was a mess. She was completely lost and pitiable. And people in Holt did pity her too—the women, in particular, but some of the men as well, when they thought about it. They all felt sorry for her. But no one knew what to do for her either. Finally, however, some unexpected help came from the outside. It came in the guise of a little mousy middle-aged man who wore horn-rimmed glasses and a white shirt and tie: a Mr. T. Bleven McGill. He was a telephone company supervisor and it turned out that he had a heart. T. Bleven McGill persuaded Wanda Jo to apply for a transfer to another office. Thus, at the end of June in 1971, she moved to Pueblo. And so far as I know she is there still.
But before she left she did one thing—something which has become a part of Holt County legend too—she delivered that last brown paper bag of clothes to Jack. They were all clean and dutifully laundered of course. In fact they still smelled faintly of soap. She had washed them during that week just prior to the time that Jack had gone down to Tulsa to the manager’s convention, and naturally when he returned he hadn’t thought to pick them up. Now Wanda Jo presented them to him one afternoon while he was at the elevator office. Bob Thomas and several other men were there too. She didn’t say anything to Jack, nor to any of the others. She merely set the bag on the counter, looked at Jack, stared at him, met his eyes, and then swept her glance over the other men. Finally she turned and walked out.
After she had gone Burdette looked inside the paper bag. He recognized the contents; they were his clothes all right, but they had been changed. They had been cut by a razor or by a pair of scissors, sliced methodically, bitterly, into tiny pieces, the biggest of which was no larger than a single square in a checkerboard or a little girl’s hair ribbon: all his socks and shirts and pants and underwear. Burdette dumped the things out onto the counter.
“Huh,” he said to other men in the office. “You reckon this means we’re through? You suppose this means she won’t be doing my laundry no more?”
Bob Thomas and a couple of the men laughed.
“But hell,” Jack said. “She was a nice girl. Only she always was a little short on a sense of humor.”
PART TWO
? 6 ?
She was the exact opposite of what people in Holt thought she would be. That is, she was the exact opposite of what people in Holt thought she would have to be. If Burdette was going to marry her, if he was going to leave someone as beautiful and selfless and long-suffering as Wanda Jo Evans was and then marry someone else, she would have to be something. At the very least she would have to be some husky-voiced Oklahoma version of Jayne Mansfield or Marilyn Monroe.
She wasn’t, though. She wasn’t like that at all.
Still from the very beginning Burdette himself misled people about her. That Thursday morning in April, after he had come back from Tulsa the night before and had then returned to work at the elevator the next day, he told Arch Withers about her. And what he told Withers at least implied that she was the kind of woman people still expected her to be. Also, since it was from him, from Arch Withers, that people first heard about her and since no one had met her yet or had seen her on Main Street, and wouldn’t see her or meet for another three or four hours—not until noon when she would leave the Letitia Hotel and meet Burdette at the Holt Cafe for lunch—for the length of that one morning (which was still the same morning that Wanda Jo Evans was crying privately, miserably, in the telephone office rest room) people in Holt assumed that she would have to be blonde at least, even if she wasn’t also brassy and vacuous and loud, a kind of empty-headed lipsticky Sooner starlet.
That Thursday morning back in April, Arch Withers had been waiting for Burdette near the rough plank steps leading up to the elevator office. He was standing on the gravel in the morning sun, leaning up against the fender of his old black pickup, chewing on a flat toothpick and cleaning his fingernails. By the time Burdette arrived at eight o’clock that morning Withers had been waiting for him for nearly an hour. Then Burdette drove up in the company vehicle he had taken down to Tulsa. He got out and walked over to Withers.
“Well,” Withers said. “What happened? Did you get tired of motel food and decide it was time to come home again?”