The Bellbottom Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  As I had been doing periodically, I got to my feet to check for Udo’s Ford Mustang—and the art bus behind it—shading my eyes from the bright sunlight with one hand. There was a steady trickle of cars on the boulevard, and a driver went past tooting the car horn in celebration of Carter’s victory, the body of the car adorned with election posters. He waved at me, and I waved back.

  “Maybe they stopped to pick up a newspaper,” I suggested as I sat back down on the yellow-edged curb between Marlin and Abigail. “To read about the election results.”

  Abigail was chewing her nails. “Where’s the fort?”

  “What fort?” I asked.

  “Well, it is Fort Myers, right?”

  “Oh, that. I looked it up once. There used to be one on the shores of the Caloosahatchee River. It was built during the Seminole Wars but was taken down in 1876 and the wood reused to build the first houses in town.”

  “I like that word, Caloosahatchee,” Abigail said.

  “I looked that up, too. The hatchee part means river, so it’s a bit redundant to call it the Caloosahatchee River.” I got to my feet again to check the road. “The Calusa Indians lived here on the Gulf Coast for more than a thousand years,” I added in a further educational note.

  “You folks are very impatient.” Marlin appreciatively stretched his toes out in Dr. Little’s shoes. “Not everyone moves as fast as your—thing.”

  The Slingshot was in my backpack, taking up most of it, and Abigail was carrying the laptop in hers. We’d had to leave out the mats and blankets and a few other things, which Marlin had accepted and hidden back at the beach.

  “We call it the Slingshot,” Abigail explained, taking a break from chewing her nails.

  “Abigail!” I chastised her.

  “What? Julia, you were the one who invited him along. No offense. I’m very glad to have you here, Marlin.”

  “I’m glad to have Marlin along, too, but that doesn’t mean we should spill everything.”

  Abigail gave a tiny shrug. “What’s that old saying? In for a penny, in for a pound. I read it in a book once. It refers to British money. Besides, I figure History will stop me if I say too much.”

  This was true. My complaint wasn’t really with her—it was the absence of the book club that had me on edge. Where were they? Had we misunderstood Udo and gotten everything wrong?

  Marlin scratched his beard. “The Slingshot and History, you say? Well, I’ve seen a lot of odd things in my seventy-three years.”

  “And?” I prodded him.

  “And that’s it. I’ve seen a lot of odd things. Don’t be thinking yours stands out.”

  Despite the circumstances, I chuckled. “Okay then. Nothing unusual about us. I suppose we just have to wait—probably the book club had to stop to fill up on gas and that’s all it is.”

  A town bus whooshed by, dousing us with a noseful of polluted air. I checked my watch. It was just past ten. I decided we needed something to keep our spirits up, not a repeat of the granola bars we’d eaten for breakfast or trail mix; something more comforting, in the cookie or ice cream category, was called for. I sent Abigail to the gift shop to see what they had on hand while Marlin and I kept an eye on the road. She came back with a box of cookies, which we all shared. They had the desired effect of buoying everyone’s spirits.

  I noticed that a tour group had started to gather outside the gift shop and had a sudden brainstorm. “Let’s buy tickets on the off chance that the book club parked elsewhere and are already on the estate.”

  The tour group consisted of a dozen or so people, from a very sunburned, sweaty man with a large camera around his neck, to three bored-looking teens there with their parents. After a few minutes’ wait, the tour guide came out the gift shop and led us like dutiful sheep across McGregor Boulevard to where the historic Edison home stood. Seminole Lodge was actually two houses, a main house and a neighboring guest house, connected by a covered walkway. The twin houses faced the wide Caloosahatchee River as it flowed past, mellow and serene. A short seawall marked the partition between land and river. The place, from its two-story, veranda-encircled lodge to its palm trees and colorful gardens, was a taste of old, colonial-era Florida.

  The estate looked a bit run-down, as if everything needed a good cleaning and a fresh coat of paint. I thought I remembered my parents mentioning on the phone that a renovation of the tourist site was just about finished in present-time, their way of trying to nudge me into a visit. Here in 1976, tourists milled around, clicking their cameras. None of them were our book lovers.

  “Abigail,” I whispered as we followed the tour guide down a path that led to the main house of Seminole Lodge, “keep an eye out for anything that might be considered a CSI.”

  “What’s that you said?” Marlin asked quite loudly.

  “Shh. A CSI. It’s, uh, a good spot for people with varied viewpoints and backgrounds to come together and put their differences aside.”

  Marlin nodded sagely, as if what I had said made perfect sense to him.

  I considered ditching the tour group so we could look around on our own, but History had other ideas—we shuffled along with the others in the tour group and stopped on the river-facing porch of the main house. The guide, an older woman with hair in a bun, embarked on a history of the estate. Under other circumstances, it might have been very interesting to learn more about Edison’s life, but I shuffled my feet impatiently as she listed factoids—“Edison purchased the fourteen-acre property in 1885, when Fort Myers was nothing but a one-road cattle town, population three hundred forty-nine…Lumber was shipped from Maine to build the two red-roofed houses and a small laboratory…Edison, his wife Mina, and their children lived in the main house, on whose porch we’re standing. The guest house had many visitors, including President Herbert Hoover, and Henry Ford of the car fame…After Edison died in 1931, Mina deeded the property to the city of Fort Myers for one dollar.”

  One of the teens on the tour yawned. The guide gave a vague wave to her right. “Ford purchased the neighboring property, The Mangoes, in 1916.”

  “Are there mangoes at the Ford house?” Marlin asked.

  “I’m sorry? Yes, there are, in the garden.”

  “Does the town have any plans to acquire the Ford house, too?” one of the tourists, the man with the bad sunburn, asked. He peered around a porch column and snapped a photo of the Ford house. The Mangoes wasn’t part of the tour.

  “I suspect they will,” I said, knowing that the name of the tourist site in 2012 was the Edison & Ford Winter Estates.

  The guide shot me a withering glance. “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” she said, seemingly annoyed by our wavering focus, and went back to her spiel as though it had never been interrupted. “There’s a way to do it better—find it!” She waved her arm to encompass the estate—only the Edison part, of course. “That was the great inventor’s philosophy. He sketched out the estate in great detail, including the gardens, before building commenced…”

  She continued on in this vein as Abigail and I tried to zero in on something, anything, that might indicate where on the estate Udo had envisioned his CSI. Marlin simply seemed to be having a good time and occasionally raised his hand with a question, most of them odd ones that stymied the guide.

  “There’s a way to do it better—find it. That’s a good saying,” Abigail whispered as we filed into the house through a french door, moving past Mina Edison’s case of stuffed birds. Once inside we saw the dining room, with its elegant table and hand-painted china, and the parlor. The guide explained that Thomas Edison had been mostly homeschooled by his mother and could read a book in fifteen minutes. I couldn’t help but think that documenting the inventor’s early life would make for a perfect STEWie project, something for the History Alive exhibition at the campus museum.

  The parlor, with its books and easy chairs, presented the most natural place for a book club to congregate. Granted, there was no tree, which had seemed to matter to Udo for s
ome reason, but otherwise the location, a historical node of invention, felt like a perfect CSI for our students to meet up at. They weren’t there.

  We moved on to the guest house, after which the guide took us past a gnarly fig tree that grew on the line between the Edison and Ford properties. Udo’s tree? I had no idea. Still stuck with the group, we followed the river wall under more trees, past a narrow wooden pier that jutted out into the water, and over to a banana tree–lined swimming pool that was original to the property. “Florida’s first pool,” the guide said. One of many to come. The pool was about fifty feet by twenty feet and reflected the foliage around it. We learned that it was made of cement and bamboo, had waterproof electric switches, and had apparently not leaked since it had been built in the early years of the twentieth century.

  I had half expected to find the book club students frolicking in the pool, but it wasn’t open for public use and, more importantly, it hardly seemed like an appropriate literary destination. I was starting to get itchily impatient, partly from the warmth of the sun in my coat, but also because we were wasting valuable time. I checked my watch again. It was nearing eleven…We were but two hours away from the car going over the bridge.

  After the tour guide had answered several questions about old-time bathing suits asked by the teens on the tour, the pool finally having roused their interest, Marlin raised a hand. “Can we swim in it?”

  The guide threw him a look of exasperation. “I’m afraid not. There are tropical fish in it.”

  “That’s all right. I don’t know how to swim anyway.”

  “Is this where the best trees on the property are?” Abigail asked, glancing from a nearby banana tree to a coconut palm and back.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean by best, my dear.”

  “You know, the most important ones.”

  “They’re all important.”

  “If you had to pick one,” I took over, “which one would it be?”

  “I like the lily pond.”

  “That’s not a tree,” Marlin pointed out. “The ladies asked for a tree.”

  “The most exotic one,” I said. “The most interesting, the most unusual—”

  “If it’s unusual you want, well, that’s where we are headed next. The research garden.”

  Having taken us back across McGregor Boulevard (whose royal palms had been imported from Cuba and planted in a configuration designed by Edison, we learned) the guide led us into the experimental plants part of the estate. Instead of going directly into the garden, she pointed first to the botanic research lab and the museum next door.

  Doubting that the book club was to be found inside, I said in a low voice to Abigail and Marlin, “Let’s try ditching the tour group so we can nose around in the experimental garden.”

  “We could pretend we work here,” Abigail suggested.

  Marlin shook his head. “Won’t work. You two are like the inside of a banana—not tan enough.”

  Whether that was the reason, or something else, we were shuffled into the botanical lab with the others. The guide explained that the lab had been built by what she called “the three”—Edison, Ford, and Harvey Firestone (of the car tire fame). “World War One had inflated the price of rubber and they wanted to find a domestic substitute for car tire production. Many latex-producing plants—more than two thousand species—were grown and tested.” She explained that the yellow-flowering weed goldenrod worked the best. “Unfortunately,” she added, crisply wrapping up the story, “goldenrod wasn’t suitable for commercial use.”

  “Isn’t there a quote from Edison about how there was nothing wrong with failing ten thousand times, because it showed you ten thousand ways how not to do it?” Abigail asked.

  “That was about lightbulbs, dear,” the guide said, as if plants were a completely different matter.

  She led us past Edison’s phonographs, a whole lot of them displayed along one wall. We were also shown his Stock Ticker, the first talking doll, a nickel-alkaline storage battery, the oldest electric lamp still around, and a Model T Ford personally gifted to him by Henry Ford, which sported the goldenrod tires. The cot in Edison’s office, where he had taken fifteen-minute catnaps, his deafness helping tune out unwelcome disturbances, was still in place.

  Abigail seemed to be drinking it all in despite the circumstances, which made me feel for Dr. Little—he would have enjoyed this part and no doubt had a lot to say about the correctness (or not) of the exhibits. Certainly a STEWie run, perhaps with a grad student or two disguised as gardeners, would yield much information about Edison and his work, helping to sort myth from reality.

  “Too bad Dr. Little isn’t here to see this,” I whispered to Abigail.

  “He’s more of a Tesla fan than an Edison one.”

  “Oh.”

  “The research gardens are next,” the guide said, and my head shot up from the turntable-mounted replica of Edison’s New Jersey movie studio. She added in our direction, “You said you wanted trees? Well, we’re about to see the Australian sea grape, the Chinese golden rain tree, the pincushion tree, the pudding pipe tree, the African sausage tree…”

  All of those sounded worthy of hosting Udo’s CSI.

  “…And, of course, the pride and joy of the estate, the banyan. We passed under its roots on our way into the museum.”

  “We passed under its roots?” I said.

  “Under its aerial roots. It’s the banyan tree—Ficus benghalensis, a gift from Harvey Firestone. Brought over from India in a butter tub in 1925. It was only four feet high and two inches wide when planted, and is now more than three hundred seventy-five feet all around. It’s where we’ll end our tour.”

  “Can we go there first? To the banyan tree?” I asked.

  “Certainly not. The garden tour does not begin at the banyan, it ends there.”

  But we were able to give the tour group the slip on the way out of the Edison Museum. The tour guide didn’t seem very sorry to see us go.

  We stepped over a short wooden fence and found ourselves under the banyan.

  The tree was immense, sprawled like some exotic organism between the museum and the estate parking lot. As the guide had said, we had passed under its aerial roots on the way in, but I hadn’t noticed, since the tree didn’t obey the standard algorithm of a single trunk with traditional branches. It was hard to tell where trunks began and branches ended. There were multiple trunks—dozens, too many to count—and thick branches with their own gnarly roots shooting down into the ground. The words sprawling and majestic didn’t do it justice. The tree had an almost alien quality to it, as if it had existed since time began and would remain in place eternally. It was one crazy tree. If there ever was an object that embodied living connections, this was it.

  The ground beneath the banyan was mostly bare, devoid of grass below the extensive canopy. And there, under its twisty branches, on the side abutting the parking lot, was the book club.

  26

  The book club must have just arrived. They’d formed a loose circle, with some of the students on their feet and others cross-legged on the ground. Udo was passing out pages.

  Abigail grabbed me by the elbow and drew my attention away from the banyan. She pointed. Sabina was in the parking lot, leaning against the Ford Mustang and studying the banyan from there, as if unsure she wanted to approach it at all. I didn’t blame her. Like I said, it was one crazy tree.

  “That her?” Marlin asked, nodding toward Sabina. She was not in Dr. Mooney’s lab coat anymore—it was now warm enough that she didn’t need it—and her simple Roman dress and sandals made her look like a sixties flower child. She was still frowning at the tree under a hat someone had given her, a straw one with a pink band.

  “It is indeed,” Abigail said in a voice that revealed her relief.

  “Let’s go get her,” I said.

  It was all very well for me to say the words, but it was not to be. We tried the most straightforward route, through the tree’s br
anches. And when that didn’t work, we went around the tree and past the restrooms to the parking lot, even going so far as to return to McGregor Boulevard and try the car entrance. No matter what we did, we were gently propelled backward, as if an invisible hand was firmly saying, No. Always we ended up back where we’d started. Like Edison’s ten thousand tries, we now knew how not to get to Sabina.

  I thought Marlin might comment on the strangeness of it, but he only said, “Well, now” a couple of times, as if he, too, was trying to figure out the puzzle.

  Maddeningly, Sabina had glanced in just about every direction other than the one where we happened to be. We watched as she cautiously shuffled to the banyan and entered its shade. She took a seat on the ground with her back against one of its many tree trunks, her legs folded to the side.

  Meanwhile, the book club had embarked on a reading of Udo’s work. I overheard bits of dialogue, enough to realize that he had written an ending. He must have stayed up as a crisp and cloudless dawn broke over the beach, scribbling down pages. I guessed that the students had stopped to photocopy the handwritten pages, and that was why it had taken them so long to get here. It was a dialogue-heavy scene, a council meeting of skeletons to determine the fate of humanity, with a hierarchy of roles: some of the skeletons—Missy and Gigi among them—had more lines than the others. Soren was the narrator and Nathaniel didn’t seem to have a role at all.

  As to Udo himself, he stood off to one side, arms in an L, his thumb and forefinger framing his chin as he watched and listened, like a one-man audience.

  We were by a bench, concealed by some ornamental (and, no doubt, exotic) shrubbery. Abigail frowned and suggested, “Maybe we’re the problem. I mean, you and I, Julia. Marlin, why don’t you give it a try? Tell Sabina that Abigail and Julia are here to bring her back home. We’ll wait.”

  It was worth a try.

  She and I took seats on the bench. Marlin’s back bobbed up and down as he stepped around the shrub and over to the tree. We could see what was happening through the thin gaps between the shiny green leaves of the shrub. Abigail shook her head and said to me, “I don’t want to be a downer, but if the bubble is still here, Dr. Little might be right that Sabina’s options are locked in because of Udo’s fate.”