by Victor Allen
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Some things are better Left alone and not monkeyed with and I guess that’s the way it is with my old home. I saw it today, The Brownest One home for orphans, for the first time since I graduated fifteen years ago. Dave Richland, class of ’78, that’s me. I was part of the last crop of seniors to graduate from the home. It closed down in 1979; not enough money to keep it going.
It’s funny, but nobody has ever considered the land the home sits on to be worth developing. And they couldn’t be more right. The Brownest One home sits on a sandy plain not half a mile from the Gulf of Mexico in southeastern Texas. It’s only real claim to beauty comes from the seashells that somehow turn up half a mile from the ocean. They lie in the sand, gazing up at you like empty eyes or the halves or pearlescent castanets that have lost their mates.
And there’s nothing else around the home. The nearest town is seventeen miles away and there is a lone power pole with a single cable that stands out in the sand, sometimes swaying in the wind, like a lonely child waiting for a playmate. One odd road leads to the home from highway 77 down around Armstrong and it’s become pretty well nonexistent since the home closed.
The home (and I really should take a second to explain the name. It was actually named the Brownestone Orphanage, but long ago one new six year old initiate with glasses so thick they weighed nearly a pound had first peered at the name written over the door and carefully uttered the words “The Brownest One Orphanage,” and the name stuck) was state-supported and nobody ever seems to want anything to do with the state or anything given to its care. So there it still sits, its two wings mired in the sand and its long entry hall swept only by wind and salt.
It’s still standing, though a little the worse for wear. Even when hurricane Alicia stormed ashore and destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of high-rise apartment buildings and posh city shops, the old home held up like a lighthouse that weathers the worst of storms to guide its charges home.
I might never have come back except for the fact that I lost almost everything in a futures stock that went sour on me. Too many eggs in one basket, I guess. But there are two types of people in this world: those who have all the luck, and those who have none. I’m one of the latter, though it wasn’t always like that. I’m not complaining. Not really. Life will deal you some dirty cards and you take them and try to bluff your way into a pat hand.
But I came back, driving over the chuck holed, washed-out road to the only home where I ever had a chance. It’s sad to see what’s become of it. It looks shabby and bewildered, like an old man who has outlived his usefulness and been left to die.
Even thinking of the good times I had in the two bunkhouses that nestle behind the home like the forepaws of the sphinx isn’t enough to lift my spirits on this bitter day. It doesn’t seem right that the home where I learned to live should become disposable like the Styrofoam cups and aluminum cans that litter the highways.
Looking at the door to the entrance hall- and knowing that its hinges would grate on sand if I pushed it open- I can almost relive the first day that I came here. It was September 4th, 1974, and I was thirteen years old. My own pet social worker, Willie, a big man with curly red hair, led me into the entrance hall on that cloudy Monday.
For a place not so far from the Gulf, that day was startlingly cool and the wind blowing off the ocean was enough to chill my scalp through the buzz cut on my head. Willie hustled me into the foyer and the smells inside were those of wood and oil. Polished banisters smiled at me soothingly and I felt a warmth like fingers of cotton curl around me. The brass clock on the mantelpiece above the fireplace shone like spun gold. The hardwood floor runners glowed with a rich, amber sheen, silent testament to the sweat and toil of a lot of young boys. The door closed solidly behind me.
Willie introduced me to Mr. Fish, the headmaster. His name was the most appropriate label I’ve ever heard hung on anyone because he did look like a fish. A Flounder. He was a stubby, rotund man with a jutting lower jaw and thick lips. And his eyes were too close together. He leaned toward me and offered his hand.
“You must be Mr. Richland.” His voice was the most handsome part of him and I surprised myself by taking his hand and smiling. I hadn’t had much to smile about, but I started to believe this home might be just what I needed.
“I’m sure you’ll be very happy here, Mr. Richland,” Mr. Fish said in tones that sounded like cold wine would taste. “It’s something of a privilege to be here. Not everyone can get in.” A strange look came over his eyes that I didn’t understand then, but I think I do now.
“This is the best home around, I think. I’m only sorry you had to be placed under such… unfortunate circumstances.” He straightened up and addressed Willie.
“I appreciate all my new students, Mr. Shore. We need fine young men like this to keep our standards up.”
“Dave’s a good kid,” Willie told him. “I’ve gotten to know him over the past month and I think he’ll fit right in.” He spoke to me. “I don’t think you’ll have any problems at all, Dave. Mr. Fish and his staff are quite capable and there are lots more young men around here. Doubtless you’ll find them. I’ll be around periodically to check up, but if you have troubles before then, tell Mr. Fish. He’ll get back to me.”
He squeezed my shoulder with a beefy hand and I thought he looked as if he hated to leave me. But leave he finally did.
Just as the door closed him away from me, a shrill voice squealed from down the hallway.
“Mr. Fish! Mr. Fiiiiisshhh!”
Mr. Fish turned towards the uproar. To this day, I’ll swear that he swiveled on his lower back and it was very close to being comical. I turned with him and saw two other boys, both about ten years old. They were dressed in identical blue uniforms that looked as if they had been lifted from Little Lord Fauntleroy’s private wardrobe.
Both were disheveled and one had his lower lip stuck out like a diving board. The other had skinny cheeks and a huge, narrow blade of a nose. He reminded me of a buzzard.
“Is there a problem here,” Mr. Fish said dangerously. He glowered as menacingly as a short man could.
“I saw Tommy smoking behind the bunkhouse,” diving board lips alleged. “He beat me when I said I was going to tell!”
“That’s a lie,” the buzzard shouted. “We were just playing around and got a little bit rough, that’s all.”
Mr. Fish straightened himself to his full height of five feet, three inches and glared at the buzzard with a look that would freeze a blowtorch.
“Is this true, Tom?”
The buzzard tried to make himself smaller while diving board lips smirked beside him. That was enough of an answer for Mr. Fish.
“Into my office,” he cried. “The both of you. Such behavior, and in front of a new student. It’s scandalous. I am profoundly disappointed.” He looked back at me.
“I apologize, Mr. Richland.” He glared at the two boys. “Not a very good first impression, I’m sure.”
He indicated a door to my right. “Just go through there. Mr. Sellers will attend to you. And now,” he said, turning his attention back to the two delinquents, “into my office.”
He hustled the two boys down the hall and that was the last I saw of Mr. Fish that day.
That was my introduction to The Brownest One home. You might not think it an auspicious beginning, but I felt I could abide the place as long as I didn’t bend the rules too badly. It was obvious that Mr. Fish like discipline, but wasn’t vengeful about it. He just liked a tight ship. I had no particular ax to grind and I was too emotionally deflated to care much. I was just a ward of the state of Texas, biding my time until it was time to make a living for myself.
Scarcely a month before, my parents had died in a fire. It was pure bad luck that my dad stayed out of work that day, and pure bad luck that a wire in the wall of my house got gnawed by a rat and started the blaze. I don’t know why, but they didn’t have time to get out. But they’re dead, that
’s all. I’ll never know why and maybe that’s for the best.
I had just come home from school, running most of the way because I had seen the smoke. I got to my house just in time to see a soot-covered fireman in a yellow suit drag my mother out of the flaming storm that had been my nice, residential home in a nice, residential section of Beaumont. The fire engines’ red lights swirled around in the smoke and the crackling red flames made the scene look like something out of “Inferno,” though I was yet to read it. I remember little else besides waking up in the hospital three days later. My doctor told me I had run into the house when a fireman shouted that there was still a man in there. A flaming timber had fallen on me, or so they said, and I believe it. I’ve still got a long, three inch wide burn scar across my back where the board hit, after cracking my head and putting me into a semi-coma. I’ve always considered it a kind of purple heart; trial by fire in the most literal sense. But it cut zero ice with the Man upstairs. I prayed for Him to bring my parents back, but they had been buried by the time I got out of the hospital. The doctor said it was a miracle that I hadn’t been killed, too. A fireman, possibly the same one who had rescued my mother, had dragged me out.
Since my parents were dead and I had no living relatives anybody could find, I became a ward of the state. I was still luckier than most. Instead of having my life placed in abeyance by being put in a foster home, I was given a chance to attend a special place. I jumped at the chance. I was thirteen years old and had been too devoted to my own parents to ever make a go of it with another family.
So that’s my tale of sorrow and you can take it or leave it. I know you could hear a hundred of them every day and they would all drip with maudlin sentiment and sappy overtones but life is like that, isn’t it? Events in the past are always romanticized and I’m not the one to tell you I’ve suffered any more than the next guy down the line. The crown of the martyr doesn’t sit well on my head. I only wanted you to know that there is always a ray of sunshine somewhere in the darkest storm, and my ray was The Brownest One home.
The buzzard, Tommy Overton, had been orphaned at age six. He had been found wandering in an alley, perusing the culinary offerings of several trash bins. No-one knew, or was ever able to find out, how long he had been living like that, sleeping in the bushes and eating out of trash cans.
Ricky Smith, he of the diving board lips, had suffered a fate similar to mine. His parents had also burned in a house fire.
There were a hundred others. Some heart wrenching, some tawdry, but they all came down to being alone in the world. So it wouldn’t be presumptuous to say that The Brownest One became our world. We all felt welcome there, safe. And we grew up. There were endless lessons, endless lectures, and endless nights when we all wondered what it would be like when we left the world of The Brownest One.
I can’t speak for the others, but I always wondered what the verse that was tacked on the bulletin board in the entrance hall for the four years I attended The Brownest One meant:
Worlds wild blown through night’s summer heart; Fate, your own, a time to part.
I never asked anybody about it, and I don’t think anybody else did, either. It was something, I believe, that the teachers wanted us to see for ourselves. And over the years I’ve come to understand it as a farrago of memories locked me into a stranglehold of self-realization. It was such a basic thing. It was always summer at The Brownest One.
I’ve heard all the romantic notions about the schooling experience. I believe they’ve been called halcyon days, or the best days of our lives, but those are only words that have no bite. Words can’t really express the way you feel when you see your headmaster at the annual cookout dressed in baggy green Bermuda shorts and black, nylon knee socks when you’re accustomed to seeing him dressed to the nines in a three-piece suit so sharp it could cut you. And words won’t tell you how you feel on the night the candles are lit and you file into the auditorium to be given the final laurel of a job well done. Words can’t convey the fear you feel at being kicked out of your own safe world to land unceremoniously on your ass in the real one that grinds and batters you from dawn till dusk. And words won’t explain how I feel when I say “It was always summer at The Brownest One.”
On days like today, sitting in my car with a lit cigarette sending out blue spirals of smoke into the breeze that churns past my open vent, I wonder what Mr. Fish is doing these days. I wonder if he is showing kindness to another boy whose world has gone topsy turvy as mine had. Is some other young man listening to his melodic voice and benefiting from his knowledge of pain and his everlasting hope for better things? I hope so. It would be a criminal waste if it wasn’t that way.
But it wasn’t always roses at The Brownest One. One time, Ricky Smith and I found a girlie magazine stuffed in a trash can and we showed it around the bunkhouse. Mr. Rogers, our algebra teacher, had come in and caught us all goggling over pictures of women in a magazine that would be considered prudish today.
“Where did this come from,” he had thundered. He had puffed up like a blowfish and his face looked like a beet beneath his sandy red beard. “Don’t you boys have better things to do than drool over shameless examples of feminine pulchritude?
“You,” he raved, pointing at Freddie Bewley. “You failed my algebra I exam last week. You should be studying.” He had snatched the magazine up and promised to find the ringleaders. He had. Ricky and I were hauled up on that one. An inquest was made and confessions extracted. It earned us a week of detention. I can still see Mr. Fish shaking his head and railing at us while the only woman at the home, Mrs. Hart, the secretary, snickered behind her hand. She had a face like a freshly-turned cow that was commandeered by a huge glob of Jell-O that had been plonked between her eyes in place of a nose.
I hoped she wasn’t a shining example of the distaff side of the species. I was due to graduate in two years and I couldn’t stomach the thought of a world filled with Mrs. Harts.
That was another thing that came to mind when I said The Brownest One was our world. We had very little commerce with women. That might lead you to believe we were a home full of pansies, looking down our noses at the straight world and hobnobbing with the fags, but it wasn’t like that. If anything, the students and the teachers seemed to be married to the home. And isn’t that what your alma mater is? Your soul mate?
It was probably the sheltered live I led at the home that led to my own downfall with women. I had but one serious romance and that was five years ago, ten years after I left The Brownest One. Her name was Gail and that was what she was. She blew into my life, swept me off my feet, then dumped me back on the ground. It was a hard fall, and most likely the thing that turned me into such a whimpering pisher. Of all my weaknesses, that one is the worst: being soft headed about women. If blame is to be laid, it should be on me. I’ve never been a whole man since my parents died, except for those four magical years at the home.
When I left The Brownest One, I left that part of me behind. That’s why I try not to think about Gail when I can help it. It seems like the last hopeless defeat in a life filled with failure and inadequacy. I think Mr. Fish and the others would be mortified if they knew the life I’ve lived since I left.
I’m not proud of it. Traipsing around the country in a beat-to-hell old Ford, twenty dollars in my pocket and a Salvation Army coat on my back is no life to lead for anyone. I’m ashamed, disgusted, and loathful of myself by turns when I look in the mirror and see those dead eyes looking back at me. I tried never to let it get me down, surviving away from my safe world for a decade and a half, always believing there was another ray of sunshine in the storm. Like The Brownest One.
But I’ve breathed my last gasp, I think. Managing to save five thousand dollars along the way and investing it in soybean futures at a ridiculously high price was my last chance. That year was the biggest bumper crop of soybeans in thirty years.
So my five thousand has dwindled to two, but that’s only a phone call away. The money
’s not even important to me. What use is money to a dead man? I’ve been dead inside since I was thirteen, literally or figuratively doesn’t matter. They’re both an empty existence. They say you can never go back, and maybe you can’t.
Now I stand here in the sand that has run over my ankles and into my shoes and wish for things I would like to see. I wish I could see Mr. Fish frowning down at Tommy Overton in his Little Lord Fauntleroy getup, or see Tommy staring at the floor along his buzzard nose, probably with a slingshot dangling out of his back pocket, trying to wriggle his way out of another detention. And maybe Freddie Bewley would be doing his imitation of Mrs. Hart, rolling his hips in a bawdy parody of her walk with a large blob of silly putty spread over his thin nose.
Or I could start up my car and drive away, trying to forget that once you’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel there’s nothing left but family, where they always have to take you in. I know I can’t do that and that’s why I’ve trudged through the sand that drags at my heels up to the large, double-wing doors of the entrance hall. The knocker on the door has tarnished so badly it’s closer to black than coppery green, and the doors themselves are swollen in their frames so that it’s hard to push them open. I push harder and they swing into the entrance hall, gritting against fifteen years of accumulated sand and rust just like I thought they would.
I take a step inside, then another, the wind whistling around my back and flapping my collar against my neck. Everything is as it was. The brass clock ticks on the mantelpiece, marking off the seconds and hours of my life. The floor runners gleam elegantly amidst the smells of wax and lemon oil. Mr. Fish is standing just inside, dressed impeccably as always in a charcoal-gray suit with a diamond tie clasp.
“Mr. Richland,” he says warmly. “Come in, come in. Always a pleasure to see you. Your friends have been here for quite some time.”
I look down the hall and see Freddie and Ricky squabbling over a homework assignment. Tommy Overton is standing at the bulletin board with a furtive gleam in his eye and the telling bulge of a cigarette pack in his breast pocket. He is staring at the same verse that has been on the bulletin board since I was at The Brownest One, perhaps forever.
Worlds wild blown through night’s summer heart; Fate, your own, a time to part.
I turn to close the door and I see that my car is gone, in its place only a sandy plane, shaped and sculpted by the wind, but still pure and unblemished, unspoiled by litter or carelessness. I turn back to my friends.
They are all there, standing in the yellow light of the hallway, smiling at me.
I smile back.
I feel wanted.