Heading Out to Wonderful by Robert Goolrick Read Free Book Online

little later, another tramp stops by. ‘What kind of town is this?’ he asks. And the old drunk tells him, ‘It’s a wonderful town. The people are kind and good, and take well to strangers, and bring their children up right.’
    “So the tramp decides to stay a while, and he finds a handout or two, and then he finds some work, and then some more work, and pretty soon, as times get better, he’s got a wife and a little house and some children of his own. And he, like the rest of the town, brings them up right.”
    They watched the crowd for a minute, then Charlie looked at her. “Is that story about the town, or the drunk, or the tramp?”
    “I think it’s about finding the thing you expect to find. What do you expect to find, Mr. Beale?”
    “Are you ever going to call me Charlie?”
    “Lord, Alma, the man sleeps under our roof.”
    “Will, things will be this way between me and Mr. Beale. At least for a while. These are good people, Mr. Beale. I teach their children. You can tell a lot.” She turned and smiled at Charlie. “I’m just shy, Mr. Beale. Will doesn’t like it, but that’s the way I am. It’s the way you are when you don’t meet many new people.”
    “However suits you, ma’am.”
    She laughed, and touched his hand. “Just because I’m shy doesn’t mean I’m your mother, either. Call me Alma.”
    “Seems a little unbalanced.”
    “It won’t be long. One day, just by accident, I’ll call you by your name.”
    “I’m patient.”
    Will turned to him. “Alma’s right. Good people. Happy, by and large.”
    “And we have good manners. That makes up for what happiness doesn’t provide.”
    Will laughed. “Sam Mohler said to me once, when I was real young, ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I think people pretty much decide early on how happy they’re going to be. And then they just go on and be it.’ Course, that was just a month before he got run over in his own front yard by Jackson Taylor’s son, who was driving drunk at the age of sixteen. Jackson Taylor sold cars. Jack Junior had borrowed one from the dealership seven minutes before he ran Sam over. It’s not all peaches and cream, whatever Alma says.” He stood up. “Speaking of which, let’s get some ice cream. Get out amongst ’em.”
    The women, Charlie knew from the store. The men, Will introduced him to, and so Charlie gradually put the town together, husbands with wives with children, and they all greeted him with the same friendly distance, and nobody asked him how he had ended up working in a butcher shop in Brownsburg, Virginia.
    Will got three bowls of ice cream, and joined Alma and Charlie, where they had moved to a picnic table in the shade, the ice cream already starting to melt. A long black car pulled up and parked, and Boaty Glass got out of it, and went around to the other side, and opened the door—men still did that—and then she got out, and there she was. Brand new all over again.
    She was wearing a full-skirted dress, royal blue, silky, sleeveless, a cocktail party dress, not the kind of thing you’d wear to a social in the backyard of a Baptist church. She had a perfect figure, rounded, soft and fleshy for a young girl, although she seemed willowy next to her bulky husband. Her legs were long and beautiful, and her blonde hair was tied back with a ribbon in a way that reminded Charlie of someone else, some other girl, perhaps in a magazine.
    She was tall, taller than her husband. If she’d been standing next to Charlie, she would have been just slightly taller than he was, especially in those shoes.
    She looked like the kind of pinup girl men had carried pictures of off to the war, and looked at in the lonely nights, after they had written to their sweethearts. A pinup girl in sunglasses, her eyes hidden from the world. Together, Boaty and Sylvan looked important, like people you’d see in Life magazine.
    “Him you know,” said Will. “You’ll want to know about her. Tell him, Alma.”
    “I only