Simple Simon

by William Poe

  The Sunday before school started, a bee stung Lenny on the hand. Finding itself caught in the netting, the angry insect attacked the moment Lenny removed his protective gloves. Fortunately, Vivian heard Lenny bump against the back door. She knew immediately that something was wrong and pulled him into the house. Ever since the doctor told Lenny he was allergic to bees, Vivian had expected the worst. She couldn’t understand why Lenny would be so hell-bent on tempting fate.

  Connie flew down the stairs at Vivian’s frantic scream. Mandy stood on the landing, watching the scene without expression. Soon, she turned away and shuffled toward her room.

  Lenny’s hands became as red as strawberries, and he choked when trying to speak. Despite their panicked state, Vivian and Connie managed to walk Lenny to the car. I crouched in the backseat as we rushed to the only person in the area who might be able to help on a Sunday morning—the local veterinarian, Dr. Morrow. People referred to him as “that atheist animal doctor.” Vivian put her concerns about the man’s beliefs behind her as she prayed aloud that Dr. Morrow would have the right medicine to help Lenny. At least, she knew, he would not be at church.

  As we sped into the driveway, Connie leaped from the car and rushed toward the veterinarian’s house. Mrs. Morrow answered Connie’s knock and directed us to the adjacent building. She said that her husband was feeding the animals. Connie’s screams had caught Dr. Morrow’s attention, and he met us at the door. After letting us in, he went to a sink to wash up.

  Connie babbled incoherently.

  “It’s my daddy,” I said when Dr. Morrow looked at me. “A bee stung him and he’s all swole up.”

  Patiently, Dr. Morrow finished scrubbing his hands. “Wait by the car,” he said, rushing into his house to get a syringe, which he jabbed into a vial as he walked toward the car. Vivian dabbed sweat from Lenny’s forehead with Kleenexes she’d found in the glove compartment.

  The doctor administered a shot to Lenny’s arm. Almost immediately, his breathing steadied. Though his hands remained puffy, they weren’t as red as before.

  “You need to get your husband to a hospital,” Dr. Morrow told Vivian.

  Lenny, feeling better, said, “I may die before my time, but not ’cause of no goddamned bee.”

  He refused to go anywhere but home.

  When trying to fall asleep that night, anxiety about starting school fell second to other fears. My mind drifted to stories I had heard about the strip mines that dotted the Sibley area, deep pits that remained after aluminum processing companies had depleted the land of bauxite ore. Turquoise water at the bottom of the pits gave them the nickname “blue holes.” People claimed that Mafia gangs controlling Hot Springs gambling casinos used them as places to dump the bodies of people they’d murdered. On the night of a full moon, legend claimed that corpses rose to the surface. Each time I dozed, even for an instant, I would see Lenny’s bones rising from the waters of the blue hole down the street from the mansion. With my eyes wide-open, I was sure I saw Lenny’s body dangling outside the window, held aloft by a swarm of bees.

  All night I worried that an ambulance would pull into the driveway and take Lenny away. I finally got to sleep when I heard Lenny snoring just before daybreak. Too soon, Vivian called to wake me up.

  Vivian hurried Connie toward the school bus stop down the road before checking to make sure Lenny was okay. Then she turned her attention to me, buttoning my shirt to the top button and cuffing the one-size-too-big jeans she had bought with the idea that I would grow into them.

  I was the first Powell to attend classes in the new brick building that replaced the one-room schoolhouse earlier generations claimed to have walked to through a foot of snow. Vivian held my hand as we entered the classroom.

  “Bubby,” she comforted, “don’t worry about your father. He’ll be fine.”

  But I wasn’t thinking about Lenny at that point. The sight of so many children had struck me with fear. I was sure they’d treat me the same way as the boys had in Sunday school. I clutched Vivian’s dress as she shook hands with some of the mothers, all of whom she knew from the grocery store. Ernie was the only classmate I recognized. He greeted me, but then rushed off to catch up with boys he knew from his own church, a local Methodist congregation.

  Vivian stayed at my side until the teacher, Mrs. Beauchamp, asked each child to find a desk. The extroverts rushed to the front of the room. The more timid students took seats in the back row. I found a desk in the corner by the door. I wanted to be near an escape route.

  Mrs. Beauchamp promised great fun in the coming months as we learned new things. “Who knows their ABCs?” she asked.

  Not a single child responded.

  Mrs. Beauchamp then launched into a rendition of the ABC song, telling us cheerfully that we, too, would know it by the end of the week.

  I barely caught the tune, and the words seemed strange: A bee, see deaf, gee. Hate I Jake Elemeno Pea. Cresty, you, and me, W-hex and why a sea?

  At that point, I worried that school might be about learning a foreign language.

  Mrs. Beauchamp didn’t keep us sitting long before announcing break time. Vivian and Mrs. Corley were at the back of the room eating complimentary muffins and drinking coffee from paper cups. Ernie approached me with a couple of his buddies. Each gave his or her name in exchange for mine. “I’m Heath,” said a stocky boy with a tough look about him. “Lois Ann,” said the only girl to introduce herself.

  I kept an eye on Vivian for any cue that I was not behaving appropriately. Between the fiasco involving the bell pepper plant, clobbering Jay with a pipe, and finding myself an outcast at the Baptist church, I had little self-confidence.

  During the first few weeks of school, Ernie encouraged me to join the boys in their games of tag and volleyball, but the competitive nature of sports made me uncomfortable. The girls’ games were more fun. I enjoyed hopscotch and was good at throwing jacks. When the girls set up a playhouse, I took the role of butler, setting tables and pouring imaginary tea into tiny cups.

  Soon enough, I discovered that my defection to the girls’ side of the playground was a radical move, that I was not acting the way a boy was supposed to act. Even so, by a hand vote, I became king of our class for the school’s Halloween carnival. Every girl voted for me, but none of the boys raised their hands, not even Ernie—initially. His hand crept up toward the end of the voting when he saw how the majority would decide. Ernie didn’t like ending up on the losing side of any contest, even if that meant going along with what the girls wanted.

  Lois Ann won the position of first grade queen. The boys gladly voted for her. Lois Ann could best any of them at volleyball and outrun them when playing red rover. The boys treated her like a member of the club, even if she did have a ponytail.

  Though our friendship after school was as good as ever, during class Ernie kept his distance, no doubt a reaction to the that fact he had been the only boy to vote for me as carnival king. Ernie had never understood why boys’ games didn’t appeal to me. He thought I should be more like him. After all, he was able to slam the fastest dodgeball, punch a winning shot in a game of volleyball, and kick footballs the farthest. Ernie especially shined at pitching a baseball.

  If Ernie excelled in sports, I was the star when it came to reading. My problem was that I found the stories boring—nothing like the ones Mandy told me. Why did Spot never slow down? Run, Spot, run! And what about Jack and Jill? I could see them in my mind’s eye tripping over each other, not even coordinated enough to hold a bucket of water without spilling it. Who went up a hill to get water, anyway? Water ran downhill. Besides, why not just turn on the tap? Jack fell down and broke his crown. Was he a king?

  Ms. Beauchamp praised my reading skills. Her encouragement added to my slowly increasing self-confidence. Weeks after the vote, I asked Ernie why the boys hadn’t supported me for carnival king. He shuffled in place as he tried to think of an answer.

  “Well, Heath and Mark told me their dads didn’t w
ant them voting for a kid who doesn’t play sports.” He flashed a toothy grin and added, “But my daddy never said that.”

  Near the end of first grade, Mrs. Beauchamp handed each boy a mimeographed sheet of paper. She said our fathers had to sign it if we wanted to participate in baseball over summer vacation. I could beat anyone at hopscotch or jacks and outlast the best at jumping rope, but when it came to baseball, I was hopeless. When I tried to pitch, the ball ended up behind me, and I never even saw the ball coming when I was up at bat.

  Playing on Sibley’s Teeny League was a rite of passage for most boys growing up in the area. Even so, none of my classmates voiced enthusiasm about me signing up. Heath, the star batter, suggested that I serve as the water boy. I thought about how Jack fell down and broke his crown after fetching a pail of water. So much for being carnival king.

  Returning with the mimeographed papers the very next day, the boys handed them to Mrs. Beauchamp, proudly pointing to their fathers’ signatures. My copy of the letter vanished, lost on its maiden voyage into the swamp as a paper airplane. The last few days of school, I feigned a stomachache. Vivian let me stay home, providing an early start to summer vacation.

  Most of the summer, I stayed inside, peeking out my bedroom window, watching the boys practicing in the field across the street, adjacent to the cemetery. Ernie was the star pitcher, and I enjoyed watching him as he stood on the center mound. Try as I might, though, I never caught the rules of the game. Why did the boys run sometimes, retreat other times, look dejected when someone caught a ball, cheer when a boy slid to a dusty stop? None of it made sense. When I asked Lenny to explain baseball to me, he said he was too tired and snidely added, “What boy doesn’t understand baseball?”

  I guessed it was something I should have been born knowing. There was something wrong with me.

  When the summer games ended and the Teeny League disbanded, Ernie started visiting more often. Maggie would drop him off, and we’d watch Captain Kangaroo before going outside to play. Connie was supposed to keep an eye on us until she went to work, but as soon as Vivian left, she got on the telephone with a girlfriend and spent hours talking on the extension in her room. Mandy remained upstairs all day, sitting in front of a window fan to battle the heat.

  Away from sports, Ernie and I were best friends. We had each grown several inches since we first met and had become more adventurous. We enjoyed dashing into the woods to hunt snakes or climbing through the barn’s rafters looking for the place where the bats slept. When the hundred-degree temperatures drove us indoors, we explored the cobwebbed basement. We tried to find the effigy that people said used to hang from the tree in the front yard every Halloween. The basement had remained a maze of furniture, cardboard boxes, and wooden crates, which made our search slow and dangerous.

  One afternoon, we spotted a loose board protruding from an inner wall and, behind it, discovered a crawl space containing a single crate filled with straw that cushioned glass bottles of fragrant oils. Each one held the aroma of a natural substance. Ernie and I discerned the odors of rose, orange, and lavender. Beneath the oils, in a cigar box packed with dried flowers that served as bedding, lay a cornhusk doll wrapped in linen. A fragile strip of paper, attached to the doll with an old-style straight pin, bore a faded name written in fancy script. I could only make out the “S” that began the name. Upon closer inspection of the cigar box, I found a printed name that easily spelled out O-P-A-L.

  Ernie’s eyes grew wide as I read aloud, “Simon,” tracing through the script on the doll’s label with my finger. In a flash of inspiration, I told him that my aunt was a witch and that this must be a voodoo doll intended to bring me good luck. Ernie fled up the rickety stairs in fear, but I remained in the basement to continue digging through the straw to see what other treasures the crate might contain. All I found were mothballed clothes and a few old books. Still, the doll was a big enough find. It made me feel close to Aunt Opal, who, I figured, must be protecting me from the Great Beyond. Replacing the loose plank, leaving the oils behind, I repacked the desiccated flowers in the cigar box, made a blanket of the strip of linen, and laid the cornhusk doll on top. Aunt Opal’s lucky quarter, stored in a small white box between pads of cotton, kept the doll company in my dresser drawer.

  That August was the hottest I had experienced. Many nights, I lay awake with my arms and legs propped on pillows to allow air from oscillating fans to circulate around me. Lenny eventually installed a window air conditioner in the den, one discarded by a customer of the plumbing company, but which he had been able to repair and get running. The next night, I slept on the couch. What a luxury to feel cool air on my face all night! Even the Corley house couldn’t boast such an extravagance.

  “It’s not fair you have an air conditioner,” Ernie said, having walked over when the thermometer on the back porch read 105 degrees. Ernie could always jump in the pool to cool off, but not during the night. I had a way of keeping cool, even at night! Ernie began throwing tantrums until his mother agreed that he could sleep over, as long as Vivian was okay with it. Vivian was happy to have Ernie visit. She knew how lonely I had been. Ernie and I set up a folding bed in the den and zipped together two sleeping bags as a blanket to make it seem as though we were camping out.

  After Vivian and Lenny went to bed, the den became ours. I told ghost stories, placing a flashlight under my chin and describing in grisly detail how the marauders had hanged my ancestor, telling Ernie that the mummified body wasn’t in the basement, as we had thought.

  “The corpse is at the bottom of the blue hole down the street,” I said. “He’s waiting for a descendant of one of those murderers to show up.” I paused to gauge the startled expression on Ernie’s face. “But old JT doesn’t have to wait for that. When there’s a full moon, he rises to the surface and roams through Sibley, looking for people with the last name of his killers. He wants revenge,” I said. “He’ll drag those marauders’ kin right to the bottom of that dark water.”

  With Ernie under my spell, I told him that my Aunt Opal really was a witch and that she mixed potions with the oils we found. Some were for luck, and others brought a curse.

  “There was another doll in that crate,” I said, making up a story. “Your name was written on it. Aunt Opal must have foreseen that I would meet you.” I turned off the flashlight, throwing the room into pitch-blackness. “There’s something you should know,” I said softly. “The doll didn’t have any eyes.”

  Ernie scrambled through the room to find the light switch. “I hear footsteps,” he said, breathlessly rushing to the basement door and throwing the latch to secure it. “Someone’s down there!” Ernie ran back to the den and dived under the covers.

  I was glad I hadn’t told him that one of the marauders’ names was Corley. That was going to be in my next story, if he hadn’t been so afraid.

  One evening, I overheard Vivian explaining to Lenny that Mrs. Corley had filed for divorce. Dr. Corley was living in Little Rock, “shacked up with another woman,” as Vivian put it.

  I worried about Ernie. When we watched television, he simply stared at the screen, not even laughing when something was funny. He had always had a short temper, but now he got angry for no reason. Sometimes he refused to sleep on the foldout bed with me, instead taking a blanket to the couch and wrapping up in it as if making a cocoon. One night, I woke up with Ernie shining the flashlight in my eyes. I asked him to stop, but instead, he pulled the covers off and began to move the beam around my body, outlining my arms and legs in the darkness.

  “Jay taught me a game,” Ernie said, setting the flashlight on its end, which cast a dim glow throughout the room. “Want to play?”

  “All right,” I agreed.

  “This is super secret,” Ernie began. “You can’t tell anyone. Cross your heart and hope to die.”

  “Okay,” I said, drawing a cross over my heart.

  “Give me your foot.” Ernie held his hands toward my folded legs. “This is important. You ca
n’t laugh.”

  I stretched out my right leg and rested my foot in Ernie’s hands. I was giggling already. When he touched the sole of my foot, I burst into laughter.

  “You lose,” Ernie said. Next, he placed his foot in my lap. “Now do me.” Ernie drew a deep breath and held it. I ran my finger along the arch of his foot. Ernie was struggling, but he didn’t laugh.

  “I’ll bet I could make you laugh if I really wanted to,” I said.

  Ernie stuck his chin in the air. “Bet you can’t.”

  Without warning, I squeezed his leg. “Knee-gnaw,” I said, laughing.

  Ernie went into a fit of giggles.

  After we settled down, Ernie fell asleep. I wondered why tickling each other had to be kept secret.

  A few days later, Ernie stayed over again.

  “Want to play the game?” Ernie asked, demanding that I repeat my oath. I did, halfheartedly, figuring it was just something to put me off guard. I was determined not to laugh.

  “You have to mean it,” Ernie insisted. “No one can know—not your sister, not Mandy, and especially not your mom or dad.”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die,” I swore, holding back a giggle.

  “Take off your shirt and lie down on your back.” Ernie’s voice sounded strange.

  I slowly pulled off my Mickey Mouse pajama top, sure that, at any second, Ernie would start tickling me.

  “Don’t laugh,” Ernie said.

  I held my breath as Ernie ran his finger along the contours of my face and neck the way he had run the flashlight beam around my body. He continued along the outside of my arm and then up the inside. I knew I couldn’t hold back if he reached my armpit.