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“Yes, but why? Why him?”
“He’s different. He sounds different.”
“It’s more than that. I’ll give you an example, but you mustn’t repeat this because it involves local people.”
I nodded.
“A few weeks ago, a father in the church came to me. He’s not a man who comes to church often, but I knew him, and I knew his family. I thought he was a nice enough guy, a well-meaning person. But he wanted me to do something for him. He asked me to talk to his daughter. She’s about your age, maybe a year or so older, and it seems they’d been fighting about her Elvis records. He said he’d put up with all the Johnny Rays and Bill Haleys and whoever else she brought home, but Elvis the Pelvis was it. She was too involved. Elvis had to go. Well, I told the man I’d be happy to talk to his daughter, but I couldn’t tell her to get rid of her Elvis collection—that was something they had to work out between themselves. So he told me to forget it. He was actually sort of irritated with me. He wanted me to be the enforcer.”
The minister reached down and swept some drops of rain off the tops of his shoes. “So that was it,” he went on. “But then, last week, I happened to run into the man on the square, and I asked how things were going with the Elvis records. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I just went in there and broke them all. Smashed them over the bedpost.’ ”
“Wow,” I said. I tried to imagine who the girl was, but no one I thought of fit.
“Yes,” the minister said. “It’s sad. And, you know, he’s not an ogre. He’s ordinarily a normal guy, with a good job. I asked him if he didn’t think his solution was a bit extreme, but he was adamant. ‘No Elvis the Pelvis under my roof.’ ”
“He’s just a dumb singer.”
“I know, but the truth is, it’s not Elvis the man’s frightened about, it’s his daughter. He’s scared to death of her.”
“Really?”
“Well, not really—but, yes, really. He’d never admit it, of course, but I think he is. It’s the same with a lot of people. They’re scared to death of you kids, and I can’t figure out why. I mean, these things come and go—the fads, the music, the clothes. But today people act as if the world is so delicately balanced that as soon as one little piece of it changes, the whole thing will collapse. You know what I mean?”
“Yes,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure.
“They get very defensive, very irrational.” He shook his head. “Smashing up a record collect
ion. Now the girl will probably want to marry Elvis, not just listen to him.”
“Maybe she should buy the records and hide them.”
“Maybe she should marry him. Teach her old man something about psychology.”
I laughed. “That doesn’t sound like a minister’s advice.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Look at the New Testament some time. There’s a lot of vindictive stuff in it. Jesus was very sure He was right.”
“Wasn’t He?”
The minister spread his arms. “Depends on who’s counting.”
Across the asphalt playground, a custodian was washing the inside of the windows in the elementary school. I’d spent six years there—seven, including kindergarten. Now, the corkboard walls had been stripped clean for summer, all the colored paper and crayon drawings and looping streams of alphabets were gone. The classrooms were barren and cold.
“Do you and your mother ever argue like that—over things like record collections?” Reverend Vaughn asked.
“No. We argue sometimes, but not over things like that.”
“I’ve never actually met your mother,” he said. “I’ve seen her, of course. She’s very beautiful.”
“I know.”
“She’s quite young, isn’t she?”
“Thirty-five.”
“Thirty-five,” he repeated in a soft murmur. “How does she feel about this, about the trouble you’ve got into? Has she talked to you much about it?”
I hesitated, trying to guess where this was going. “She’s depressed,” I said.
