by Bob Thompson
I was suffering from the late-summer schoolboy blues, multiplied this morning by having been twice passed over as a fishing buddy. The day had started out promising. I had been alone on the porch when Bunk pulled into the gravel parking lot looking for a buddy to go crappie fishing with, but he hadn’t even gotten out of his 1957 Chevy pickup when Chink Price pulled up next to him with a boat in the back of his Dodge looking for the same thing. They didn’t even come over to the porch. Chink got out and walked around the front of his truck to Bunk’s window, where they had a short conversation. Bunk moved some fishing gear into Chink’s boat and they were off.
I was still alone when Henry Turner stopped in and got my hopes up again. The back of his truck was empty, but I knew he kept a boat locked up down at Crawford Lake. Nodding to me with a “Morning,” he went in the store for a drink, but before he could get his Coke and come back out to deliver the coveted invitation, darned if Humpy Morehead didn’t come strolling up on his daily walk. Any glimmer of hope was lost when Humpy informed both of us that “old Arthur,” his term for arthritis, was not traveling with him today.
I was alone again and depressed when Fuzz stopped, giving me little hope since his boat wasn’t loaded and I knew he didn’t keep one down at the lake.
I followed him into the store as he walked to the back to greet Granny, bent over her quilt frame. I asked her if I could have a Pay-Day from the candy rack. It was a perfunctory question, but an honored tradition between us. Fuzz told Granny, “I’m laying a dime here on the counter for a Coke, Miss Myrtle.” She looked up and nodded at us both. I went past her out the back door to the tool room that occupied half the back porch. If I couldn’t fish, I’d hone my slingshot skills. When I joined Fuzz back out front, I had the slingshot and half a Mason jar full of round rocks.
I always had my eye out for good slingshot rocks, and the light brown river-washed gravel of the parking lot yielded a few specimens every day. I’d stick good ones in my pocket, hoping to remember to move them to the jar before Mom washed my pants or, more likely, found them in her pre-laundry check and laid them on my dresser to eventually fuss at me about.
I fished a discarded Gulfpride can out of the receptacle we called the “empty-oil-can barrel,” setting it upright on the concrete at the south end of the porch, and returned to the bench. I fitted a stone in the leather pouch of my slingshot, stiffened my left arm in the direction of the can, pulled the rubber back to my ear, and let fly. The rock struck the side of the can dead center, knocking it a yard off the porch into the parking lot.
Fuzz nodded approval. “Can you do that again?” he asked.
The can was now lying broadside to us. My second shot answered his question, spinning the can backward and to the left. It came to rest with its round top facing us, in line with Bunk’s truck.
I loaded up another rock as Fuzz warned, “You better be careful. If you don’t watch, you’ll knock the windshield outta Bunk’s truck and Granny won’t like that.”
“There’s not much danger in that,” I said as I let the third missile fly.
The rock hit the can a little high and instead of smashing squarely into the flat end, it skipped high off the top edge, gaining altitude before whacking into the passenger-side windshield.
“Holy crap!” I jumped up and ran out to the truck to stare at the deep divot with spiderweb cracks radiating out in all directions, reaching from top to bottom and side to side.
Fuzz was watching from the porch as I walked back, flopping in a heap on the bench. “Nope, not much danger in that,” he said, putting a hand to his mouth, covering the chuckle as he turned away, making a comedic show of not laughing in my face.
We sat in silence for a moment as I contemplated my options. Looking over at Fuzz, I saw the obvious advice in his eyes: You better go tell your Granny. Condemned, I dragged myself off the bench to go inside and tell her. She came out and inspected the damage with Fuzz while I stayed on the porch in self-imposed exile, a dog scolded without words.
Fuzz stayed with me for what seemed like days before Bunk got back. Chink pulled into the lot next to Exhibit A, and they got out and started unloading Bunk’s gear without noticing the windshield. They thought Fuzz and I were coming out to admire the full stringers of silver-sided crappie. We inspected the fish before I told Bunk he needed to look at something. As I showed it to him I apologized and told him to get it fixed and I’d pay him back with tobacco-cutting money later that summer.
After another inspection and a conference with Granny, Bunk and Chink left. Fuzz said I had done right by fessing up because pretending I didn’t know anything about the damage would have made the situation far worse.
We sat silently for a while and then he began telling a story with a smile. “When I was a boy, Humpy and Mag Morehead had about a dozen kids and several of the boys were around my age. I practically lived down there with them. One day, three or four of us were playing around in the hayloft when we saw Mr. Pidge and Minnie Duncan pull into the front yard in their old Model T Ford, a prized 1918 two-seat open runabout.”
The Duncans went in the house for just a few minutes before coming out with Humpy and Miss Mag and James, one of the older boys who already had a driver’s license. They all got into the Moreheads’ sedan and left, probably going to Bandana or La Center for some shopping.
When their car was out of sight down the gravel road, Fuzz and the boys piled out of the loft and swarmed over the old car. It looked like a toy compared to modern 1940s cars. It took a considerable amount of pushing the three pedals on the floor and moving the hand brake till the old car was in some semblance of the neutral position so that they could push it around. It was so light the boys could roll it around with little effort. With two boys pushing the Model T and one in the driver’s seat, the yard quickly became too small for their enjoyment, so they moved the race track to the cow pasture just through the yard gate.
They took turns driving and pushing the old car all over the field. In one of Fuzz’s opportunities at the wheel, in a tight right-hand turn, he felt a pop come up through the steering column and shake his hands. He said, “It felt sorta like when you pop a joint outta place. Not a good thing.” In retrospect, he explained that a loose bolt had allowed the Pittman rod at the end of the steering shaft to rotate past where it was supposed to stop; now pointing in the wrong direction, it caused the old car to steer opposite of normal. Turning the steering wheel right sent the front wheels to the left and vice versa. It was more than the mind could handle, and he yelled for the boys to stop pushing. They all took turns trying to drive the car, but they were mystified, wracking their brains for a solution, to no avail.
Panicked, muddled teenage thinking made them accept a very flawed premise: if they put the car back in the exact spot where they had found it and aimed it straight down the road toward the Duncans’ house a quarter mile away, Mr. Duncan would never even have to turn the wheel. Why, he probably wouldn’t even notice for a day or two. “We thought there wasn’t any danger in that,” Fuzz explained to me. So they went back to the hayloft and waited.
Later that afternoon the grown-ups came back from their outing. The boys watched as they transferred bags and boxes and said their good-byes. Mr. Duncan helped his wife up into her seat before he went around to the hand crank at the front. It started with a half turn on the crank and he came around to climb into the driver’s seat.
The boys were tense and quiet before the action started, the complicated process of advancing the spark and throttle, releasing the hand brake, and finally pushing in on the low-gear pedal. That was all according to plan, but then Mr. Duncan turned the steering wheel ever so slightly to the right.
“Noooooo,” came the collective moan from the boys. Pidge was looking to his right as the old car lurched to the left across the yard. Mr. Duncan’s brain proved no better at handling the problem than the boys’ had been. In supposed compensation, he jerked the wheel farther to the right and the car responded by darting fa
rther left, crashing through the feedlot fence, breaking a post off, and stopping only when its front wheels mired down into the muddy edge of the stock pond just in front of the barn.
The boys scrambled down out of the barn to assist as everyone else came running from the house. It took a while but finally James hitched the tractor to the back of the car with a log chain and pulled it out, with Pidge and Minnie never leaving their seats. Once on dry land, Mr. Duncan retrieved a blanket from the trunk and laid it on the ground under the car before taking off his go-to-town coat, rolling up his sleeves, and sliding under the car. He came out twice, once to get a stick to poke mud away and finally to get a rag and wrench. It took only a few minutes before he called out for James to test the wheel. Everything was back to normal. Mrs. Minnie never left the car and surprisingly no one ever said anything about it afterward—except Humpy made it very clear that once a week for a whole year all the boys, Fuzz included, needed to go down to the Duncans’ and wash and wax that old car.
For the rest of his life, that story set the tone for my relationship with my uncle. When I’d go back to western Kentucky I made it a point to go see him and, usually in an offhanded way, ask for his advice about things. I’d tell him what I was doing or thinking about doing, and subtly ask for his opinion. We’d developed a little code.
If he had reservations about any of my plans or adventures, he’d never tell me that it was wrong or that I was crazy for even considering it. He’d just say, “Why, yeah, that’s a good idea. There’s not much danger in that.”
The Entertainer
On her thirteenth birthday, the day Hitler invaded Belgium, my pretty, piano-playing city-girl mother moved into a house built on the back of a country grocery store. Her presence on that public stage made ice cream, cold drinks, and bubblegum sales soar. By the time I came along, she had been on that stage for ten years and it took another five or six for me to begin to appreciate her command of the audience.
There were two performance venues at the store. Mom appeared daily on the inside stage, which featured seating for twelve or so on fallen-from-grace church pews, 1950s-era metal lawn chairs, and a miscellaneous array of surplus construction furniture arranged around the big Warm Morning stove. She appeared less frequently on the store’s front porch, where audience seating consisted of a wooden bench retired from government wartime service, a Fairbanks-Morris platform scale, and two Gulf gas pump curbs. The porch could accommodate about eight comfortably.
For generations, “outside” was considered a man’s purview and women were expected to stay “in the home,” so Granny and Mom presided over the mostly quiet dignity of the store’s inside spaces. Outside on the porch, it was a bit more boisterous, with conversations and jokes inhibited only by the risk of what I might later recite to Granny or Mom. Outside was where I learned many of the facts of life.
Inside, on a piano whose soundboard had survived the 1937 flood without cracking or warping, music flowed from Mom’s fingers in perfect order and rhythm. She was like Lucille Ball of I Love Lucy fame: innocent, funny, and musically talented, but not as good with the spoken word. Mom was a natural comedian and entertainer, but not a storyteller. She was great in unrehearsed free-flowing conversation, but she could not be constrained by the set script of a joke or anecdote, and she had no business at all messing with a cliché. Despite the obvious flaws in her delivery, her tangled and wrongly timed lines always got more laugher and audience response than the joke would have, correctly told. I’ve seen her immobilize full living rooms with helpless hilarity, an unintended double entendre sometimes emptying the grocery store of polite male patrons, sending them stampeding out the front door to the safety of the front porch before doubling over in laughter.
Her daily congregation at the store consisted of the male patriarchs of the community; the store served as their community elder day care facility. In addition, there could be any combination of farmers, field hands, sawmill crews, utility linemen, hunters, preachers, and salesmen who stopped by for lunch, an RC and a Moon Pie, a half gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, a spiritual checkup, or a restock order.
The first time I really noticed her talent for entertainment was on a hot August day when she decided she could not stand the color of the bathroom in our house any longer. After Dad went off to work, she launched into a scraping and painting frenzy.
Dedicated and focused, as her Taurus sign would indicate, she did not notice the already dried paint splatters on the wooden toilet ring until she was cleaning up. The scraping and sanding that was required to get the spots off the white perch dictated that the entire thing had to be repainted with the same white enamel she’d used on the baseboards.
Finally finished and admiring her work, she chuckled at the scenario of Dad coming home from work and, before she could remember to warn him, plopping down on the still-wet ring of relief.
Satisfied with her work and with a few minutes to spare before supper preparations began, she went next door to the grocery for a cold drink and to give Granny a break in minding the store.
She selected a few canned goods while Granny took the opportunity to get a few things taken care of in her house next door. When she returned, Mom hurried back to the kitchen and, immersed in cooking, forgot about the bathroom trap until it was too late. It wasn’t until the instant her rear end plopped on the seat that she remembered.
Laughing at herself, she reasoned that it was going to hurt anyway so she might as well finish her business before she got up. She had no idea that enamel paint was the superglue of its day, so it was a total surprise when, in her first casual attempt to stand, the front of the rim rose a few inches with her before the hinges at the back yanked her solidly back down. She was stuck hard. It was only after many minutes of painful wiggling and lost epidermis that she freed herself. It was an early and primitive hot wax treatment.
The pain was so bad it made her cry, but she was so tickled by the irony of the situation that she laughed through the tears. Putting cream on the irritated area and laughing about it all through the rest of supper preparation, she rehearsed her story. When the food was done and staying warm in the oven, she came back to the grocery, ready to share her mirth with an audience.
In addition to the regulars, the old guys who had been born in last decades of the nineteenth century, there were a couple of farmers and a crew of high-line workers, finished for the day after servicing the big towers down at the river.
Laughing as she made her entrance through the back door, she immediately launched into the story and told it well enough until the end where, for emphasis, she made the error of gesturing toward her damaged areas. Sensing the audience’s sudden attentiveness, she tried to finish with the flourish of a cliché. It was a perfectly innocent phrase she’d heard many times, a variation of which even Shakespeare and Kipling had used, but considering her all-too-precise hand gestures, any reference to “hide and hair” was bound to be open to a variety of interpretations.
At the time, I didn’t fully understand why there was a short awkward silence, followed by the clearing of throats and mouth-covered coughing, as the construction crew “had to get home” and the old guys suddenly needed to be out the door, scurrying to the safety of the front porch.
I can deliver lines better than my mom, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be as good an entertainer.
Threads
My family’s country grocery was a natural gathering place. Before my time, the store had one of the first community radios; people regularly came in to listen to their favorite programs, and by the time I was a kid, it had the neighborhood’s first black-and-white TV, which drew incremental business.
There were people who came at the same time every week to watch their favorite programs. Ricky Hamilton, several years older than I, always showed up for the Gillette Friday Night Fights, for Gunsmoke on Saturday nights, and on Tuesday afternoons for Combat! I watched all of those shows with him and he told me it was good training because he was goin
g to be a boxer someday and he might join the army when he got old enough. Considering that school was never his strong suit, I thought his vocational choices had merit.
Ricky always sat in the same sturdy construction-site plywood seat left over from the nearby atomic plant and watching him was nearly as entertaining as the shows themselves. He always become emotionally and physically immersed in the action, throwing punches alongside Sugar Ray Robinson and Marshal Dillon and diving off his chair to dodge German bullets.
One day I decided to add a bit of realism and excitement to our Tuesday afternoon viewing. I always liked building models of World War II airplanes and my air force included P38s, P40s, and P51 fighters as well as B17 and B24 bombers.
Long before, I had discovered that sewing thread, of which there was an endless supply around the store, was strong, nearly impossible to see, and had many uses. I had a storied history of using it to surprise store customers by making things levitate and fly around the store.
One Tuesday afternoon, I rigged up four separate glide strings, anchoring each one up near the ceiling where the Midwest Dairy clock hung on the wall behind the counter; then, across the thirty-foot-wide store, I tied the other end of the threads to the shelf directly above and behind Ricky’s chair, just high enough so no one would walk into them but low enough that I still had about a six-foot drop in elevation. I devised a release mechanism using an old alarm clock, so that about twenty minutes into the show, as we watched the Second Platoon of K Company battle its way across France, the warplanes would automatically start their bombing and strafing run, raining metal death from the skies.
My timing could not have been better. At the last moment, when Vic Morrow’s squad was about to be overrun by a coordinated German counterattack, a flight of Thunderbolts came roaring in and my squadron of planes dove straight toward Ricky’s head.