Unable to breathe, Amorette shrank back deep into the seat of her car and whispered for Lucy please to call her doctor for her because she felt like something very scary was happening.
“Well, just take it one day at a time,” Lucy advised her neighbor. “And look on the bright side.”
“Lucy, Lucy, don’t leave me!”
But Lucy slammed the door and began to walk rapidly along beside the oleander hedge. She was pulling off fistfuls of oleander petals as she went, throwing them down on the sidewalk ahead of her. The teenage girl on Rollerblades came zipping close, eyes and mouth big as her skates carried her within inches of Lucy’s red face. She shot by the car quickly and didn’t notice that Amorette Strumlander had slumped over onto the front seat.
Lucy walked on, block after block, until the oleander stopped and lawns spread flat to the doorsteps of brick ranch houses with little white columns. A heel on her beige pump came loose and she kicked both shoes off. Then she threw off her jacket. She could feel the maniac on the loose right beside her as she jerked at her dress until she broke the buttons off. She flung the dress to the curb. Seeing her do it, a man ran his power mower over his marigold beds, whirring out pieces of red and orange. Lucy unsnapped her bra and tossed it on the man’s close-cropped emerald green grass. She didn’t look at him, but she saw him. A boy driving a pizza van swerved toward her, yelling a war whoop out his window. Lucy didn’t so much as turn her head, but she took off her panty hose and threw it in his direction.
Naked in her panties, carrying her purse, she walked on until the sun had finished with its daytime tricks and night was back. She walked all the way to the outskirts of Helen Keller’s hometown.
When the police car pulled up beside her, she could hear the familiar voice of the scanner dispatcher on the radio inside, then a flashlight was shining in her eyes and then Deputy Sheriff Hews Puddleston was covering her with his jacket. He knew Lucy Rhoads from the Painton Town Hall, where she clerked. “Hey, now,” he said. “You can’t walk around like this in public, Mrs. Rhoads.” He looked at her carefully. “You all right?”
“Not really,” Lucy admitted.
“You had something to drink? Some kind of pill maybe?”
“No, Mr. Puddleston, I’m sorry, I’ve just been so upset about Prewitt, I just, I just...”
“Shhh. It’s okay,” he promised her.
At the police station back in Painton, they were handcuffing a youngish bald man to the orange plastic seats. Lucy shook loose of her escort and went up to him. “Are you the one from the shopping mall?”
The handcuffed man said, “What?”
“Are you the one who shot his wife? Because I know how you feel.”
The man tugged with his handcuffed arms at the two cops beside him. “She crazy?” he wanted to know.
“She’s just upset. She lost her husband,” the desk sergeant explained.
Prewitt’s lawyer had Lucy released within an hour. An hour later Amorette Strumlander died in the hospital of the heart defect that Gloria Peters had always sarcastically claimed was only Amorette’s trick to get out of cleaning her house.
Three months afterward, Lucy had her hearing for creating a public disturbance by walking naked through the streets of Painton, the cheerfulest town in America. It was in the courtroom across the hall from the trial of the Mall Maniac, so she did finally get to see the young man. He was younger than she’d thought he’d be, ordinary-looking, with sad, puzzled eyes. She smiled at him and he smiled back at her, just for a second, then his head turned to his wife, who by now had filed for divorce. His wife still had the scar on her chin from where the plaster piece of the swan had hit her in the florist shop. The florist sat beside her, holding her hand.
Testifying over his lawyer’s protest that he’d tried to kill his wife and her lover but had ‘just messed it up,” the maniac pleaded guilty. So did Lucy. She admitted she was creating as much of a public disturbance as she could. But unlike the maniac’s, her sentence was suspended, and afterward the whole charge was erased from the record. Prewitt’s lawyer made a convincing case to a judge (who also knew Lucy) that grief at her husband’s death, aggravated by the shock of the car accident from which her best friend was to suffer a coronary, had sent poor Mrs. Rhoads wandering down the sidewalk in “a temporarily irrational state of mind.” He suggested that she might even have struck her head on the dashboard, that she might not even have been aware of what she was doing when she “disrobed in public.” After all, Lucy Rhoads was an upright citizen, a city employee, and a decent woman, and if she’d gone momentarily berserk and exposed herself in a nice neighborhood, she’d done it in a state of emotional and physical shock. Prewitt’s lawyer promised she’d never do it again. She never did.
A few months later, Lucy went to visit the maniac at the state penitentiary. She brought him a huge box of presents from the going-out-of-business sale at The Fun House. They talked for a while, but conversation wasn’t easy, despite the fact that Lucy felt not only that they had a great deal in common, but that she could have taught him a lot about getting away with murder.
<
~ * ~
FRED MELTON
Counting
from Talking River Review
I toss the first shovelful of crumbling dirt into the grave. They say it’s an honor to be the first, like throwing out the first baseball of the new season.
Snow twirls and twists its way into the dark rectangle as if sucked into the earth’s gaping void. No one says a word. John Bouchard, the soul-bankrupt banker, Lucille Emerson, the widowed neighbor with fifteen hundred acres of slumbering wheat land, Orville Mansfield with his cheap toupee, and the two to three others stand with their hands clasped neatly in front, heads bowed. I’m the only family present.
I count the shovelfuls: twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. I can’t quit. The shovel keeps digging. I keep counting. I swore I wouldn’t cry. A man should have learned not to cry by the age of twenty-four.
A couple of pats on the shoulder, several muttered “So sorry, Amp,” and I set the spade aside. I’ve lost count now. Even in the cold, sweat stings my eyes. The folding chair creaks beneath my weight as I sit. I pull the wool collar of my coat up against my neck, shove my tingling hands between my thighs, and stare directly into the pit. The silent snow swirls like pure white confetti.
He died alone.
When he was alive, my Uncle Keven stood yardstick straight, measuring just under five and half feet short. His round, flat face barely tolerated the tangle of hair wrestling across his head. He explained it away as “cowlicks gone awry, about as combable as a pack of pigs’ tails.” His blue-green eyes surveyed people, as a farmer judges distances. His thick upper body sat atop stubby, bowed legs. He was strong — stronger than any man I ever knew. He moved as if he were constantly underwater. Slow. Deliberate.
He lived for baseball, but World War II killed his chances when it snatched him away from an imminent semipro career with Seattle’s newest team, the Rainiers. “Heck,” he’d say, “I was so short I could have caught behind the plate standing up.” But by the time he came back from the Philippines, he’d lost everything youth had ever loaned him. “You can lose it all,” he’d mutter, “but you’ll always have family.”
I grew up on a five-thousand-acre, third-generation wheat farm in eastern Washington, just outside of Endicott. The town boasted a population of more than seven hundred living on hills facing north across the Palouse, as if looking for a future that would never come its way.
My well-mannered mother and back-busting father raised me and my sister Sarah with the typical wheat farmers’ attitudes: trust no one but family; never depend on the weather to do anything except knock the stuffin’ out of you. My father ate, drank, and choked on that Palouse dirt. Home to him was standing knee-deep in a sea of waving, thick, green wheat. Dream wheat. Uncle Keven and I shared our own dreams. The Brooklyn Dodgers.
Uncle Keven lived three miles, as the c
row flies, west of us on a wheat farm handed down to him by my grandfather. Most people found Uncle Keven stingy with conversation. I never did. We had talked baseball ever since I could catch one. “It’ll be your ticket out of Endicott, Amp,” he told me. “Maybe so,” I answered, “but the old man’ll tear up the ticket before I can ever get my hands on it.”
Sarah, on the other hand, flashed her ticket around with style and grace. Bouncing blond hair, batting eyelashes. Bobby socks. Soft words and sweet smiles. Endicott High’s Rodeo Queen and voted “Most Marry-able, Class of ‘55” her senior year. She adored the title, as did mother and father. And I adored her, thinking the five years between us somehow afforded her the wisdom of kings. But even royalty suffers.
In the summer at the end of Sarah’s sophomore year a grumbling Greyhound Bus gave us Jake Fiess.
Uncle Keven and I were out tending his horses the evening Jake Fiess strolled down the gravel driveway. The horses’ ears twitched at the sound of the rocks crunching beneath his steps. Jake Fiess looked like a walking scarecrow. And he was missing an eye.
“Lookin’ for work,” he announced.
“Around here, a man introduces himself. I’m Keven Armstrong.”
“Jake.” He propped his foot on the fence.
“Got a last name?”
“Fiess.”
Purple veins sprawled across Jake’s sinewy forearms. A pack of Camels rode high on his left biceps beneath his tattered T-shirt. His Adam’s apple bobbed like a cork on the front of his willowy neck when he swallowed, and a crude mustache couldn’t hide the several missing teeth. Jake cocked his head to the side when he spoke, as if he’d heard something over his right shoulder.
“This is Amp. My nephew.”
Jake stared at me for a moment, then turned back to Uncle Keven. “Got any work?”
“Suppose so.” Uncle Keven leaned around and glanced behind Jake’s shoulder. “That all you got? Just a knapsack?”
“Suppose so.”
“You’ll find a bunk out in the barn.”
Later that evening, I sat at Uncle Keven’s kitchen table with a glass of iced tea glistening in my hands. I poured in another heaping tablespoon of sugar and watched the crystals drift in the amber color.
“You’re gonna rot out those new teeth, Amp.”
I held the glass up to my face and mentally measured the sugary mound on the bottom. “I’ll get more.”
“Not at eleven years of age, you won’t.”
“Will too.”
Uncle Keven laughed. “Hand me another hanger.”
“Why do you like to iron so much, Uncle Keven? Even all your old overalls?”
“Thinkin’ time.”
“Thinking about what?” I sprinkled more sugar across the melting ice cubes and looked over at him.
“Thinking about people, generally.” The black iron hissed, then slid the length of the ironing board like a miniature tugboat. Uncle Keven’s fingertips traced the straight edges of the denim. “I mostly think about people. Their lives. How wrinkled they are. How I wish they could just be ironed out.”
“I iron sometimes, Uncle Kev. But mostly I just iron right over all the wrinkles. Makes ‘em worse.”
“You don’t say.” He chuckled. “At least it shows you cared. That’s what I like about ironing — you get credit for trying.” He pressed the iron down so hard the ironing board’s metal legs squeaked. He lifted the iron, turned toward me, smiling, and said, “But, then again, wrinkles aren’t so bad, really.”
I watched him for a few more minutes.
“Do you like girls, Uncle Kev?”
“Sure.”
“How come you never married one?”
“Planned on it.” He folded the overalls against his waist, making sure the legs were equal length, then sat down with them in his lap and fumbled with the brass buttons. “But she made other plans when I went off to war. I got the letter a month before I was shipped home.” His fingertips stopped moving. “I thought goin’ off to war would be” — he sighed — “the hardest thing a man could do.” He stood back up, put the overalls neatly against the pile of folded wool socks, and reached for a cotton shirt. “Sometimes,” he nearly whispered, “coming home is worse than anything you’ll ever do.”
I watched him fiddle with the buttoned-down collar for what seemed like minutes. Uncle Keven finally turned around. “But, maybe . . He winked. . . ironing’s worse.”
“You think this Jake’s ever been married?”
“Can’t say.”
I stepped over to the sink and turned on the hot water. I scraped at the mound of sugar with my spoon, licked the end of it, and rinsed the glass. “He’s kind of scary. That one eye and all.”
Uncle Keven’s iron hissed again. “Ain’t a one of us that’s perfect, Amp.”
“Do you ever get scared, Uncle Keven?”
Uncle Keven smiled at me. “Count, Amp. Just count anything when you’re scared. Remember?”
“Like you said you did in the war, right?”
Uncle Keven’s smile faded. “Count the number of times you breathe if nothing else.” The iron stopped moving. “At least that way you’ll know you’re still alive.”
“S’pose he can see out of it? That one eye, I mean.”
“Can’t say, Amp.”
“I’m goin’ to bed.”
“See you bright and early.”
As I turned the corner, I stopped and said, “Can I sleep in your room tonight? Just tonight?”
Uncle Keven smiled. “Go ahead.”
~ * ~
I didn’t see a lot of Jake those first two weeks. I stuck to the side of Uncle Keven like a newborn foal to its mother. Nearly every morning Uncle Keven would let me make coffee while he fried up crackling bacon and the sun still slept. I’d beg for his homemade biscuits— tell him I’d do the dishes if he’d make them. “You’ll do them anyways,” he answered, shaking his head. “That’s our agreement for you staying here this summer. Remember? But first, go out there and fire up that old truck.” I bolted out the door, hearing him shout, “Hustle makes muscle.”
I sat in the idling flatbed Ford and pretended I was the sole owner of Uncle Keven’s farm. The sun’s rays gilded the three grain silos sitting up on the hill, just above the barn. They stood like monstrous metal paladins guarding the house. Each held more than 500,000 bushels when full, and rose stories high. Horizontal augers rested across the bottoms of the silos, waiting to corkscrew the tons of wheat into empty trucks come fall. Uncle Keven told me that his neighbor to the south, Forrest T. Manly, once had a distant cousin who accidentally fell into a half-empty silo and was buried there for over two years beneath the wheat before anybody suspected what had happened to him. “If the auger hadn’t spit out that flattened boot, he’d have never been found,” Uncle Keven told me.
He called his three silos “The Holy Trinity.” Said they were the Father, the Son, and the Holy Mother of God watching over him. Over us. Years later, he’d tell me, “Don’t ever empty the Holy Mother. She keeps us out of the jailhouse.”
After the last chipped coffee cup was set upside down in the drainer, we’d drive the miles of dusty roads cutting past the fields. Uncle Keven would often stop and point out the white tail deer. They always turned their proud heads our way, their ears flickering, their tails at attention, for one last look before trotting over the horizon. We’d listen to the radio man’s scratchy voice read the latest weather forecast as we bounced along in the Ford. Most days Uncle Keven would let me ride in the back as long as I promised two things: to hold on like my life depended on it and to never tell my mother. I’d close my eyes and fill my nostrils with the sweet summer air as we topped the hill coming home. This was how I wanted to live my life forever, with my Uncle Keven.
One cool evening after a light summer rain, when the damp wheat smelled of wet rope and the scent hovered like an invisible mist, Jake found me feeding the chickens out in the corrals. I sat on the top rail, perched above the b
usy feathered heads, and scattered the seed like rice at a wedding, then watched the pointy beaks bobbing and pecking, beady eyes darting. I had a couple of favorites I saved bread for while the scrawnier chickens scratched furiously at the soft dirt for their meal.
“What the hell kind of name is ‘Amp,’ anyways?”
“Huh?” I nearly dropped the bread. Jake came and stood beside me, his head near my waist. “Uh . . . they’re my initials,” I said.
“Hmm. Got names for any of them ban ties?”
“Huh?”
“Names. Chickens like names.”
“Uh-uh,” I said. “Not these. They’re way too dumb.”
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