Running on Red Dog Road

by Drema Hall Berkheimer

  She spent an extra-long time getting ready for her date, although every time I called it that she told me to quit it because it wasn’t one. After she’d tried on most everything in her closet, Mother and Vonnie and I agreed she should wear a fitted navy-blue dress with a sweetheart neckline. Grandma liked another blue dress with a flared skirt. Blue was Aunt Lila’s best color—it matched her eyes.

  Ignoring all of us, she decided on a sky-blue dress, topping it with a yellow jacket with white piping and buttons that looked like daisies, saying it made her feel like the spring chicken Mother kept telling her she no longer was. Mother was five years younger.

  “Well, you’re right about one thing,” Mother said. “It does make you look like a chicken.”

  Aunt Lila took the jacket off and put it back in the closet, and Mother nodded approval.

  Grandma said they pecked back and forth worse than me and Vonnie.

  As soon as we heard the door bang shut, we all headed to the front room. Aunt Lila was back from her date, or whatever it was she wanted us to call it. She flopped into a chair and threw her legs over the padded arm, kicking her black-and-white spectator heels to the floor and wiggling her stockinged toes.

  “He seemed all right at first, real pleasant and easygoing. But then he started in telling jokes. And every one of them about hats. Another hat joke out of him and I’d have gone plumb batty.”

  “Tell me a hat joke!” I begged.

  “Okay,” she said, “but hold your nose—I wanted to wear my camouflage hat today, but I couldn’t find it.

  “After he told that joke he’d thrown his head back and guffawed. No,” she said, “it sounded more like a mule braying.”

  I thought of Flapjack, my Uncle Vertis’s old mule, stretching his neck and pulling his lips back to show his teeth.

  “Oh, he was full of hat jokes, just full of them,” Aunt Lila said.

  “Tell some more,” I pleaded.

  “Just one more,” she said, making her sourpuss face. “I’m sick and tired of hat jokes. What did the hat say to the tie?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, eager to get to the funny part.

  “You hang around, and I’ll go on a head.”

  I threw my head back and laughed, trying to sound like Flapjack.

  Aunt Lila rolled her eyes.

  I guessed I’d have to practice.

  “There were a bunch more jokes,” she said, “each sillier than the last. After every one he made that gosh-awful braying sound. By the time he’d told half a dozen, his face started to take on the look of a mule. His teeth turned long and yellow, and an unruly hank of hair fell across his eyes like a forelock.”

  Aunt Lila told the man she felt a spell of her malaria coming on. Too bad she had to run out on him like this, but she needed to get home to take some of those horse pills that kept her from throwing up all over kingdom come. She hoped she could make it. Heaving convincingly, she’d grabbed her pocketbook and headed out of the Tip-Top at a trot, turning toward the bus stop on Main Street.

  Disheartened after her visits from Romeos One and Two, she came close to giving up. And she did for a while, but not because of them.

  Grandma had heard on the radio about a Lonely Hearts Club killer.

  The next day the story was on front pages everywhere. A man and woman who met through a Lonely Hearts Club, but not the Romeo one, had been arrested for killing a whole bunch of people.

  Grandma said the details of what those two did were too awful to speak of. Maybe so, but I’d overheard the neighbor women chattering about it like a bunch of magpies. “Little pitchers have big ears,” they’d say, and stop talking when I came around. But I had heard enough to have a good idea what they were gossiping about. Grandma, who always gave folks the benefit of the doubt, said she expected it was just idle talk.

  I had my own opinion about that.

  Then another letter came.

  When Aunt Lila noticed that his number was the same as our house number at 211 Bibb Avenue, she took it as a sign to give Romeo Lonely Hearts one more try. After all, the killers were both locked away in jail.

  Dear Miss 109,

  I am a retired New York City cop seeking friendship leading to possible marriage with a good-looking woman of wholesome background who is willing to relocate if need be.

  Respectfully, 211

  So Aunt Lila began to write to 211, and he to answer back, each letter deepening their interest. Before too long, 211 became Charles Landwehr. And then Charles Landwehr was coming all the way from Newark, New Jersey, for a visit. He was Romeo Three.

  The house, of course, had to be deep cleaned. Grandma was in charge, but she recruited me and Vonnie and Grandpa as reluctant helpers. Since it was time for fall cleaning anyway, I was prepared for the scrubbing and beating and dusting and polishing we always did.

  But this time Grandma went a step further.

  She decided to take down the beds so she could clean under and around and behind them. I blamed my friend Peggy Blevins for this. One day she mentioned taking down the beds to do deep cleaning, and I made the mistake of telling Grandma, who soon decided she needed to take our beds down too. Mattresses were stripped bare and vacuumed then turned head to foot and top to bottom before being placed back on the newly hosed off bedsprings. All the bed covers were washed and hung to dry in the sun. Grandma wouldn’t take a backseat to anybody when it came to cleaning.

  Uncle Vertis, Grandma’s only son and my mother’s big brother, had come to borrow Mother’s electric drill from her Rosie the Riveter days but got dragged into helping take down beds. Mother said it was the least he could do—always borrowing her stuff then not returning it—and he better have that drill back to her come Saturday or it would be the last he’d ever see of it. Uncle Vertis pretended to look scared.

  Charles Landwehr asked Aunt Lila to find a room for him at a nearby tourist home. Mother took Aunt Lila and me to check out the Morning Glory establishment over on the By-Pass to see if it was suitable. Although the room was full of curlicues and knick-knacks, it was both clean and close by. It would do fine.

  Finally, the day arrived.

  Aunt Lila had given herself a permanent wave a few weeks before. To make sure the smell was gone, she poured water mixed with lemon juice over her head. She pushed finger waves into her damp hair, using metal clamps to pinch them in place, then pin-curled the rest, securing each curl with two crossed bobby pins. After she sat under the hairdryer, she finger combed through the tight ringlets until she had a soft halo of curls around her head.

  When Grandma finished cleaning, the house reeked of floor wax and vinegar. She put a pan of water on to boil, adding a sprinkling of cloves and cinnamon and vanilla. Satisfied, she turned her attention to the kitchen and began fixing supper for Charles Landwehr’s arrival. She hoped he wasn’t Jewish because she’d baked a ham. Landwehr didn’t sound Jewish, but you couldn’t always be sure. To be on the safe side, she put a fat hen in the oven. There was dressing and gravy to go along with the ham and chicken, potato salad, pickled green beans, baked candied apples, and corn on the cob. Mother made strawberry shortcake and whipped up some cream. It was Aunt Lila’s favorite.

  Grandma lifted the lid on one side of the stove with a poker and filled the opening with kindling from the wood box. Our oven door hadn’t closed right for some time, so she grabbed a piece of kindling to prop it up. Busy mixing up a pan of cornbread, she turned her back on the open door just long enough for Buttermilk to crawl inside the cavernous space, still warm from the earlier baking. Without noticing, Grandma slid the pan of cornbread in, propped the door closed, and lit a match to the wood in the other side. The fire caught and began to heat up the oven.

  Before long a caterwauling started up that would have blinkied sweet milk.

  Grandma kicked the prop to one side and the oven door slammed onto the linoleum with a bang that rattled the dishes. Cornbread batter up to his knees, Buttermilk leaped out and streaked up the stairs, yowling a
s he went.

  In the middle of the ruckus, the doorbell rang.

  Aunt Lila opened the door to a tall, blond man with a big friendly smile. Romeo Three had arrived.

  “Welcome to West Virginia,” she said. “Come on in and make yourself at home. I gotta look for a half-cooked cat.”

  He said he preferred his cat well done.

  Aunt Lila looked up at him and busted out laughing.

  We searched attic to cellar, following splats of batter upstairs and down, Charles Landwehr trailing along after Aunt Lila. Eventually we found Buttermilk under the bathtub, busy licking cornbread batter off his belly. Charles Landwehr reached back and scooped him out. Other than the long oval he’d scorched bald on one side, he didn’t appear to have any damage. Mother said she didn’t know how many lives that cat had left, but he’d sure as heck just used up one of them.

  Grandma said she’d just as soon Mother didn’t use words like heck. Mother rolled her eyes and headed to the kitchen to start a new batch of cornbread.

  While Charles Landwehr and Aunt Lila cleaned up the batter Buttermilk had tracked through the house, Grandma went to fetch a jar of piccalilli from the fruit house, a cinderblock building that housed our stores of canned fruits and vegetables. Piccalilli is a golden relish of vegetables and fruit that goes just right with ham and most anything else you think to put it on.

  Grandma didn’t get far before she rushed back in, hollering for Grandpa.

  “Come quick, Clev! He’s got the butcher knife!”

  Old man Dunkley, all crippled up with lumbago, was hobbling along in his yard trying to catch Granny Dunkley. They were our next-door neighbors. She hopped onto the cinderblock Grandpa had put next to her side of our fence, hitched her dress up and threw her leg over, barely able to reach the block on our side without impaling herself on the picket fence.

  The old man hadn’t managed to catch up yet.

  Grandpa came out of our house holding a pop bottle of vinegar water left over from cleaning the windows. “Now Zeb, you put that knife down and go on back to the house.” His voice was calm.

  Old man Dunkley either couldn’t hear him or didn’t want to.

  The closer he got, the bigger that butcher knife looked.

  “Zeb Dunkley, you stop or I’ll be obliged to douse you with this poison,” Grandpa said, a little louder this time. “Kill you deader than a rattlesnake. You’d be wise to quile yourself down.”

  The old man kept coming.

  All of a sudden, Charles Landwehr leaped over the fence and grabbed the knife before the old man even realized what had happened. Disarmed and out of breath, the old man quieted right down. Charles Landwehr handed the knife to Granny Dunkley.

  “I’ve a mind to poke a hole in that old man and let the meanness spill out of him,” she said, “but I don’t want it turning my grass yellow.”

  There was a mole on her chin I’d never paid any attention to, a great big one. She had tied a coarse black thread around it and finished it off with a bow, the ends of which hung down and waved back and forth when she talked. It was awful hard not to stare. About then Grandma came out with two plates of food she held on to until Charles Landwehr helped Granny Dunkley climb back over the fence.

  “Come on, old man, let’s go to the house and thank the good Lord for providing this fine supper,” she said, starting down the path with the plates. “After you eat your fill, I’ll read to you from the Good Book. Maybe some of it will sink in.”

  “Yes’m,” he said, just meek as a mouse.

  He tucked along behind her, following the tantalizing smells in her wake.

  It was a peace that he would disturb again, but hopefully not that night.

  After we ate supper, Mother went with Vonnie and me to check on the Dunkleys, taking strawberry shortcake as our excuse to visit. The old man was sitting in his favorite rocker smoking a pipe. Granny Dunkley sat opposite him on a mohair settee. She was smoking too, a homemade corncob pipe with a reed of some kind for the stem. They each smoked a pipe of applewood tobacco every evening after supper. The earthy sweetness that hung in the air lingered on me long after I went home.

  Old man Dunkley’s ponytailed hair and handlebar mustache made him look for all the world like Wild Bill Hickok, but it was Buffalo Bill he talked about all the time. He told tales of working in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, traveling around Colorado, and then going with the show to New York. He was old now, senile, my grandma said, and sometimes didn’t know what he was talking about.

  I believed every word he said.

  “Be quiet, old man, these young’uns have heard enough of your yarns,” Granny Dunkley said, going off to bring us a piece of the hard candy she kept in the icebox, one of several still in use on our street.

  She reached up and loosened the string tied around the mole on her chin. “I expect this big old mole ought to be falling off before long,” she said. “This string here’s cutting off the blood to it.” Holding both ends she pulled the knot a little tighter and retied the bow.

  She held out two peppermint sticks for us to take. I noticed her long fingernails were yellowed and dirty. I’d wash the candy when I got home.

  “I’ve got to keep candy hidden,” she said, nodding in the old man’s direction, “on account of he gets choked easy. I’ve got to keep an eye on him while he’s eating it too.” She handed him a piece of twisted peppermint. “Now you just suck on that, you hear?”

  The candy was our signal to leave. It was time for the six o’clock news.

  Like most everybody I knew, the Dunkleys never missed it.

  The familiar voice of Gabriel Heatter came over the radio as the screen door banged closed behind us:

  “Ah, there’s good news tonight.”

  We went to bed before the chickens stopped squabbling, leaving Aunt Lila and Charles Landwehr in the front room talking and drinking a second pot of coffee. And that’s where Grandma found them when she came downstairs the next morning. They’d talked the whole night through. She sent Aunt Lila upstairs to bed and Charles Landwehr to the guest room downstairs.

  The Morning Glory Tourist Home was cancelled.

  Charles Landwehr called his sister back in New Jersey to tell her he’d been invited to stay another week and he was taking us up on the offer.

  “I’m having too much fun to leave now,” I heard him say. “Here, they cook cats and chase each other with butcher knives—and the whole lot of them think they’re normal.”

  It was a lightning-quick romance.

  He proposed fast and Aunt Lila said yes fast. Grandpa asked if they were sure what they were getting themselves into.

  “Absolutely not,” Charles Landwehr replied, “but sometimes you have to take a deep breath and jump in the deep end.”

  Aunt Lila said she couldn’t swim a lick, but she was jumping.

  Grandma made the bride a blue-velvet suit to wear for the wedding, and Vonnie and I held boughs of greenery tied with strips of the blue velvet. Grandpa lent the groom a blue striped tie.

  And so it happened that before the two week visit was up, Grandpa married Aunt Lila to Charles Landwehr in our back yard, autumn leaves drifting down on them like blessings.

  22

  There Be Dragons

  The half-man, half-woman stood at the back of the stage. He or she, I wasn’t sure which, wore a full skirt and a shirt and tie. I thought I noticed a slight swell of breasts. A dozen or so people milled around waiting for something, but I didn’t know what. The men, coal miners most of them, wore overalls or blue jeans. They bent forward and hacked shards of blackened lungs into red bandanas to hide the blood. Their women, some holding children by the hand, wore pageboys and clean print dresses.

  The carnival was in town, and Vonnie and I had talked Grandma into letting us go. We each got a dollar to spend, plus we’d broken our piggy bank and split another dollar and eighty-two cents. Grandma was still hanging in the car window giving my brother Hursey instructions as Grandpa pulled out o
f the driveway. This was the first time she’d let Hursey be in charge of us. He was sixteen, my sister, Vonnie, eleven, and I was nine.

  As soon as Grandpa got out of sight, Hursey took off with his best friend, Billy Johnson, making us promise to meet them in an hour at the big beacon light that fanned over the town every night, beckoning people to come.

  Madame Vadoma had set herself up near the entrance to the carnival, which was only a short piece down the hard road from the gypsy camp. Her “KNOWS ALL, SEES ALL, TELLS ALL” sign leaned against a table where she sat, long bony fingers splayed around a clear glass ball set in the middle. The gypsy man standing nearby sawed away at his violin, trying to drum up some business, but the people hurrying by hardly gave them a glance.

  They’d probably seen the gypsies before.

  Now they had a need for something new.

  The barker called out to us. “Try your luck right here! Bust three balloons and take your pick from that bottom shelf for just one thin dime. Everybody wins and nobody loses. Come on over here, Blondie, win that kewpie doll you been eyeing.”

  Flush with money and raring to spend it, Vonnie tried for the kewpie doll with the curl on its forehead, but after spending thirty cents and only winning a paddle-ball and two kazoos, she gave up.

  The man’s eyes followed my sister as she walked away.

  We stopped at the carousel and Vonnie climbed on a palomino that matched her hair, while I mounted a wild black steed with flashing red eyes. We scuffed through the sweet smelling sawdust to the refreshment stand and bought ten-cent hotdogs and pink cotton candy for another dime each, eating as we gawked up at the rusty old Ferris wheel. Although I wasn’t too keen on the idea, I let Vonnie talk me into getting on it. The old wheel lurched and screeched up and up as riders were loaded into the swinging seats below. Just as we got to the top, it shook itself like a wet dog and stopped dead, holding us captive high above the midway while the operator cussed and kicked at the gunked-up machinery to get it started again. Vonnie, who tended toward a nervous stomach, began to heave. I told her to stick her head over the side, and she did, just in time to puke up pink cotton candy. I didn’t see where the throw-up landed, but I imagined it splatting down all warm and gooey on somebody’s bald head. When I told her that, she heaved again, and a froth of pink bubbles came out of her nose. I laughed and she got so mad she didn’t speak to me until I bought her a bottle of RC pop to settle her stomach down.