The next day began like any other, until it took an ominous turn. The Buells came in with their regular doubles partners. After their game, they sat at their favorite table overlooking the courts and ordered lunch and Bloody Marys from the main clubhouse. The lunch went on for a couple hours and the drinks kept coming. Eventually, the waiter, who’d been shuttling back and forth, just left a pitcher of Bloody Marys in our refrigerator. He also left a bottle of Scotch the men had ordered.
At some point, the women left, and the men kept working on the Bloody Marys until the pitcher was empty. Then they started on the Scotch. It was the slow time of the afternoon when the Friends program used to be scheduled, so Bing took a break since no one was around. I felt safe enough, because Kay was back in the storage room taking inventory. I hadn’t been alone with Clyde since the last horrible incident but he’d been behaving—or at least he’d been ignoring me, which was just fine as far as I was concerned.
After a while, I looked outside and noticed Clyde’s friend had left but Clyde was still there sipping his Scotch. It occurred to me he must have a liver the size of a basketball.
From this point forward, I remember everything in slow motion though it probably only took three or four minutes from start to finish. Each time I’d been in the same place with Clyde was like a domino, one leaned against the next one, barely propping up its neighbor, barely avoiding total collapse. In the end all it took was the flick of a finger, or that last sip of Scotch, to bring the whole thing down.
__________
I was folding shirts, the ones we sold. When customers check out our merchandise, they pull shirts from the shelves in order to look at colors and sizes. The next thing you know the area looks like someone’s dirty laundry pile, so part of my job was refolding the shirts and stacking them according to size.
I knelt on the ground to pick up a shirt from the floor when I heard someone behind me. It was Clyde—I’d missed those jingling door bells. I stood up but he had me boxed in against the shelves where I was working in the back corner of the room.
“You’re a little vixen, arn choo?” He was so drunk he couldn’t contain all the spit in his mouth and I was getting hit with flying globs of it. “You know what a vixen is, don’ cha?” I swear, he was almost slobbering.
Yeah, I knew. He wasn’t the first idiot to point out the color resemblance of my hair to a fox’s.
“You’re drunk, Clyde.”
“Oh! We’re on a first name basis now?” He leaned against the shelf, using one hand for support, forcing me back even further. “You’re a seductress . . . a little . . . temptress!” He was seriously slurring.
And then swooping in for the kill, his flabby lips pressed hard against mine, his red-faced, boozy breath invaded my lungs. I was in a bad position for a knee to the nuts but I had a free hand and I pulled it back as far as it would go before I let loose to make contact with his softly unprepared solar plexus. He deflated like the bag of wind he was. And sometime in the middle of that slow-motion moment—almost like in the movies—LeGrand walked into the shop.
“The fuck are you doing, Dad?!”
When Clyde wobbled around to face his son, LeGrand was waiting with a haymaker of his own. And even though I could never reenact it if I tried a thousand times, somehow, some way, I was able to intercept LeGrand and prevent him from taking the swing against his father he’d have to live with for the rest of his life.
“Are you okay, Babe?” He pulled me away from his father and put his body between us.
Clyde just stood there, sort of swaying. He was breathing pretty hard and his eyes went in and out of focus.
“I think you’d better leave now.” I hadn’t seen Kay who must have stepped out from the inventory room when she heard the noise. She could just as easily have said those words to me, but she didn’t. She said them to Clyde.
He swung around to look at Kay, mumbled something I didn’t understand to LeGrand, and then sort of lurched out the door. That was the last I ever saw of him.
__________
I had to extract a promise from LeGrand not to go after Clyde or do anything that might end up with my parents losing their jobs. He was furious, but once he calmed down he got it. He did tell me, though, that he’d be letting his mother know what happened. Not much I could do about that.
He left soon afterward to face what kind of hell, I couldn’t imagine, but I knew it was going to be a lot worse than mine. Then when Bing came back, Kay sat him down and told him exactly what happened. I didn’t expect everything to be wonderful going forward, but in my mind I’d already won. For that one moment, LeGrand and Kay had my back while I stood up to Clyde Buell. And I was the one who came out on top.
Bing suggested transferring me to the golf clubhouse where I could work with my parents. He even offered to lay me off if I wanted to file for unemployment.
“You tell me, Babe. How do you want me to handle this? I can go all the way with it if you want.”
“What do you mean all the way?”
“To the board. I don’t know exactly how the process works, but we can lodge a complaint, even though Buell heads up the board.”
Bing looked miserable and I knew the predicament he was in. I knew the predicament my dad would be in too. Another job. Another move. Another high school before I even started this one. Even if I pursued action against Clyde Buell, with all the resources he had at his disposal, I knew it would be a long and painful process. I didn’t want to expend any more negative energy on that man and, like Earl had once said, working in a tennis shop wasn’t exactly my career goal. I could easily find another equivalent job.
“Summer’s almost over,” I finally said. “School’s about to start. Let’s just say this summer job has reached its natural conclusion.”
__________
When I told my parents that night they wanted to call the police and file charges against Clyde Buell.
“Just for once let me decide the course of my own life,” I said, maybe a bit too loud. Maybe with a bit too much anger. “I don’t want to move again. I want to finish high school in this place with my best friend. I’m strong, stronger than LeGrand. Stronger than a lot of people. You and Mom have always protected me, so for once, let me protect you.”
They respected my decision, so we agreed to move on. If they decided to leave at the end of my school year, that would be up to them. They appreciated the logic of what I had to say, and I meant it. Every last word of it. But the main reason I put it behind me was simple. I wanted to protect LeGrand, who’d been so willing to protect me.