shorts he was wearing two days before. His hair was wild with curls and mats from his head laying sideways on a pillow. He stared out at us with genuine surprise. All I could think of was how short he was. He couldn’t have been more than five-five or so. It hadn’t made an impression on me the first time.
After a few seconds he seemed to recognize me and said, “Still trying to give away that million dollar inheritance, eh? You can leave it with me. I’m happy to take it off your hands.”
Jendrek gave me a curious look and I stuck out my hand. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name before.”
The old guy hesitated for a moment and then shook my hand. He looked like he didn’t shake hands too often. Then he flashed a sheepish, embarrassed smile and said, “Roger. I’m Roger Barton.”
“Roger, I’m Oliver Olson. We met the other day? This is Mark Jendrek and this is Liz Winslow.”
He shook Jendrek’s hand, a little wide-eyed, and looked visibly embarrassed when he took Liz’s hand. His free arm pulled down on the end of his T-shirt, as if to straighten it out or somehow hide his large, round belly. The shirt was white with the words “Jesus Loves America” stenciled on it.
“Roger, we’re here to see if we can ask you a few more questions about your old neighbors, the Longs. Is that okay?”
He took a step back into the room behind him and said, “Sure. Don’t know what I can tell you.” He turned his head and looked at the room and seemed to think through what to do next. Then he asked, “You guys want to come in?”
I doubted Roger Barton had many houseguests. Our presence seemed to make him nervous. He seemed like a lonely and shy old man, far different from when I’d seen him on his porch. He took a few more steps out of the doorway and motioned us inside.
The room smelled dusty and was cluttered with piles of papers and magazines on nearly every surface. The carpet was old, nearly threadbare, and stained around the bottoms of the chairs and couch. The furniture had a similar feel. The lamps too, and the coffee table, piled with old newspapers, appeared to have been there for decades. But the room was not dirty, just worn. Worn so well, in fact, that it was nearly worn out.
Roger rushed to the couch to clear away a stack of papers. He did the same with the La-Z-Boy chair. It was a futile effort at straightening up for company, but oddly endearing. I studied the old family pictures on the wall, arranged in an arch with a much younger Roger Barton and his wife at the highest point. There were two other pictures on either side, trailing downward, and I asked him who they were.
“Oh,” he said, hands on hips, as if struggling to remember them at all. “That’s my family. Linda, my wife, she died in ’83. Dick, my oldest boy, he lives in Houston. Bill, next youngest, he died in ‘Nam, the Tet Offensive. Last I heard, Janice was somewhere in Florida. And this one,” he pointed to the last picture, which hung cocked slightly to one side, revealing the much darker original color paint behind it.
“This is Emily. She’s my baby. She lives down in Orange County.” He raised his eyebrows at me and said, “Married herself a dentist. Got three kids.”
Then he started to cough and turned away from me, covering his mouth with one hand and resting his weight on the La-Z-Boy with the other. I could see Liz debating whether to try to help the guy. Jendrek just stood and watched, passive, as if nothing was happening at all. When he recovered, Roger went to one of the old walnut end tables and got himself a cigarette and lit it. Two puffs later he looked good as new.
“Please, have a seat,” he said, motioning to the couch and chairs. Then he bent over and picked up a jug of wine from the floor beside the couch. “Can I offer anyone a drink?”
And then it struck. Roger Barton was sober, and a totally different man from the one I’d met before. Did that make him less ugly? Did it make his racism less offensive? Could bad behavior be excused so easily? What about one terrible act followed by a lifetime of being a better person? I was thinking of Don Vargas