Squid Corners

by Ed Helenski

  “You know how many vacant properties I have listed now?” She asked me, nervously digging in her purse and coming up with a pack of Salem Ultra Lights. I had never in my life seen Amy smoke before. She looked vaguely guilty as she lit the cigarette, and I took in the less than perfect makeup, the hair out of place, the rumpled look to her outfit. This was a changed woman, that was for sure. She took a long suck on the smoke and then exhaled out her nose noisily. “Over fifty. OVER FIFTY! There are only about 125 properties in the whole damn county. Why the hell did you come back here anyway?”

  I was taken aback by the question. It was one thing for a few of the old timers to mutter about me, or for Vera Carrone to make vague statements about Los Chorrea, but here was an educated woman, the town manager’s wife, and she was asking me point blank why I had to ruin the town. Before I could frame a reply she went on.

  “Oh shit. It’s not your fault.” She sucked greedily on her Salem. At least she was talking sensibly again. “It’s mine. I’m the one that leased you the place, and made it possible for you to come. I was greedy. I wanted the business. I should have listened.” Maybe she wasn’t talking sense. Listened to who?

  She seemed to realize I was still in the room. “Oh. Well, fine. You go ahead and quit now. I think you have done all you were supposed to do anyway. Kind of finished things up, don’t you think? Just leave the keys in the desk there when you move out. I don’t really want to see your face again.”

  I was shocked by the hatred and disgust I saw in her eyes, but I had had enough. Without another word I left, and I haven’t seen Amy since. She and Charlie moved away about a month later. The real estate business was broke by then, and well, Charlie sell his lures from anywhere. The joys of the internet. But I get ahead of myself.

  On Wednesday I finalized arrangements with an auction house from DuBois. They would hold an estate sale in early January at my dad’s house. Everything left there would be sold, one way or another. I decided to take the paper bins and the few other items from the office that were too bulky to sell on ebay and leave them at the house to be sold at the same time.

  When I opened the front door the house had that stale smell of unoccupied dwellings everywhere, particularly those that were last occupied by the elderly. After bringing in the stuff from my office I decided I had better take a look around, and see if there was anything I wanted to keep before it was too late. I wandered about the rooms, looking at the accumulation of a lifetime. Very little evidence remained of our childhood years. The photos in frames, the plaques and awards, the mementos, all were gone. I don’t know when these things disappeared from the house, it was probably shortly after Mom died. The things here were utilitarian and spartan, with little or nothing to indicate who the inhabitant had been.

  In the living room a worn and beaten Barcolounger, a sofa, a couple end tables devoid of anything except a lamp, and the TV. The walls were bare other than a rather hideous faux painting of a waterfall on the wall behind the couch. The kitchen had empty counters, a table with a dusty bowl of wooden fruit, four chairs and that was it. No little appliances, nothing. I wasn’t sure how much of this was how my father lived and how much was the result of Cora cleaning up and putting things away. She had made this seem a lot more like a home, and now she was gone too. No trace remained.

  It was upstairs where I found the remnants of our family. Not in Dad’s room, that was as picked clean as the others. In what had been the boys’ room. Our room. Twin beds sat neatly made on either side of the window, as they always had. The dressers were empty and bare. But in the closet there were three cardboard boxes. That was what our entire childhood, indeed, my father’s whole marriage to my mother, had been reduced to: three dusty cardboard boxes. I could tell that was what was in them even before I opened them. Labeled with red magic marker in my father’s curiously childlike hand were the words Candy’s stuff. Candy. My mom. Utterly unexpected tears ran from my eyes.

  I opened the first box, and discovered on top a framed photo that, until that moment, I had forgotten entirely, it had once sat on the buffet, as fixed in place as all the other little details now missing from the house. It showed my mom and dad leaning against an old car, both of them smiling and happy. Underneath that was the old photo album, its cardboard cover faded, its pages yellowed and crumbly. I remembered sitting with Mom, looking through all the old black and white images. There were pictures of her when she was a child, even one of Dad. I was fascinated with the idea that these children, frozen in some past time, were somehow connected with the adults I now knew as my parents. There were even a handful of ancient photos, of her mother and father, and her siblings, most of whom were dead now.

  I realized I wasn’t sure who was and who wasn’t gone from the family. It’s a sad thing when you don’t even know if you have aunts and uncles anymore. I burrowed under the album, and found more framed and unframed photos, and some souvenirs and such. There was a ticket stub from a performance of Elvis Presley at the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh. I had a good deal of trouble picturing my father at an Elvis concert. It must have been my mom’s. I suspected all this stuff was still around because of my mom. There was a Pennant from Hershey Park. I had the dimmest recollection of having gone there as a small child. There were flowers; I know that, and something you rode. The smell of chocolate. Funny what memories will be triggered by a simple object.

  There was another item in the box that brought back a memory. Tucked in along one side was a program from a basketball game featuring the Harlem Magicians. They were a sort of knockoff of the globetrotters, another barnstorming team of basketball players. I clearly remembered sitting in the auditorium at the Siegly High School, clutching that program in my hands, mesmerized by the black giants on the court. I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. And my dad was there, he was right next to me, and on my left was Peter. I don’t remember much about the game, but I remember the hot chocolate was sweet and good, and the three of us were like a family. Strange to think of you and your brother and father as being LIKE a family, but I recall thinking it at the time, that this must be what it’s like to have a family. I shook my head and put the program back in the box. I was about to shut it again when a photograph caught my eye.

  It was an eight by ten, black and white. It looked like some kind of company picnic or church social. A large group of people gathered in a meadow where tables had been set up. The folks were arranged in rows, with the front row mostly kids and women, all sitting on the grass. In the background was the remains of a barn, and the stone foundation of a house. Someone had put up sawhorses to either side of the foundation, and a white ribbon or rope had been strung, probably to keep the kids from getting into trouble there. I scanned the faces, but it took me two tries before I finally recognized my dad. He was young, younger than I am now by a good two decades. I turned over the photo and there on the back was scrawled “Siegly Gravel Company, July 1947”. I turned it back over and looked at the young face, the alien and yet somehow familiar face, with the kid’s chin but my eyes. I looked at the other faces, but nothing struck me. Some of them might well have been people around here, even at Dad’s funeral, but I couldn’t pin them down.

  Along the front of the group in the photo ran a dirt road. At first I couldn’t place it, but I realized I had been on it not long ago. This was the older version of the rutted wheelpath Maggie and I had walked just a couple nights ago. This was out past Tario’s, out past the Barker place. It must be one of the old farms; the ones Eustice had talked about. Looking at the photo I had the oddest feeling it was the very meadow where Maggie and I had stood and looked down at a rock left by…by whoever it was. I shuddered, suddenly cold. The notion once again struck me how objects can trigger things. Memories. Emotions.

  I tucked the photo back in the box and set it aside. The second carton contained some items I knew were saved for me. There was a ragged and dirty stuffed dog. Well it was sort of a stuffed dog. It was one of those homemade stuffed anima
ls you used to be able to get at Woolworth’s or McCrory’s, in the fabric department. The parts were printed out on the fabric, and you just cut them out, stitched the two sides together, and stuffed them. This one was roughly oblong in shape. It was all one piece, with no protruding arms or legs, just two sides sewn together and stuffed with crumbling foam. It bore a hound dog’s long mournful face on the front, with just toes at the bottom to indicate the hind legs. The nose ran most of the length of it. The back was a more or less uniform brown, with a squiggle of a tail at the base. It was Cuddles, my constant friend in my pre-school years. I can recall nights where bedtime had to be delayed until the lost Cuddles could be located and placed safely in my arms. I must have been around six or so when my dad insisted I was too old for dolls. He took Cuddles away, and I had been certain the guy had been destroyed. Yet here he was, tucked away safe and sound for me to find. A gift from across the great divide from my mom. Tears welled up in my eyes yet again, and for a moment I just stood, clutching the dog.

  The box also contained Peter and my report cards for our elementary school years, and a plastic patch that said “President’s Physical Fitness Award”. That was a legacy of JFK, a program to help eliminate the fat little American children from our schools. It hadn’t worked.

  The last box was perhaps the most surprising of all. It contained a number of objects, things I never would have believed were in our house. It was definitely my mom’s stuff. There were several steno pads, the old kind with the greenish tinted paper. And underneath them were several small hardback books. I tugged the first out from under the notebooks and looked at the cover. A watercolor sort of wash was done in green, and small black letters simply stated the title and the author. “Gentle Rains” by Candice Tharon. I opened the slim volume. Inside were a number of poems. Poems by my mother. Published poems by my mother. Why had I never heard of this? Why was it kept from me?

  The stormiest of clouds can

  When seen in the right time and place

  Bring forth not just thunder

  Not just a deluge, a downpour

  But can, in that time and place

  Bring forth the gentlest rains

  So it is with the one

  The one who has taken my heart

  Though many see the storms

  Many hear the thunder

  Only I, only myself alone and at peace

  Feel his gentle rains.

  My mother was a poet. Suddenly I made a lot more sense than I ever had before. My dad had always made me feel like somehow a disappointment for wanting to write. My mom had mostly kept silent, mostly let him say what he wanted without contradiction. But privately, when we were alone, she had told me to follow my dreams. That my father was a good man, but some things he just couldn’t understand. It didn’t make him a bad man; it was just a limitation. And she had never told me. He must have known about her poetry, must have allowed it, but must have insisted no one else know.

  I put the book back in the box and picked up the three cartons. I took them out to my car. I had seen enough. Overloaded with the past I didn’t have the desire to look around any further. Whatever else was left in the house, there it could stay. I drove back to my house through streets that gave no clue of the impending holiday. When I first came back I had been looking forward to seeing the houses all decked out in lights like I remembered from my childhood. But there were no lights out. It was as if, by tacit agreement, the town had forgone all signs of Christmas.

  When I got to my house I brought the cartons inside, and then I rummaged in my closet until I came up with a small box I had brought with me. Inside was a little ceramic Christmas tree, and a string of lights. I put the tree on a small table, and then I taped the lights around the edge of my front window. When I plugged them in I felt better. At least one house would not be dark this Christmas.

  That night Maggie brought over a load of things, and among them was a carton of decorations. She didn’t mention my lights, or the lack thereof in the town, but she opened the box and began to decorate the living room and the front porch. Thursday night we made love under the twinkling of the Christmas lights.

  Afterwards, Mags talked quietly to me. “I don’t know if it helps or not, Tom, but I think it does.” I asked her what she meant. “The decorations,” she replied, “The whole town is in hiding it seems. No one has even a wreath up. It’s like a hurricane was coming and everyone was battening down their hatches. But I think it helps, us putting up some lights. Maybe we can get a tree tomorrow. I know we won’t be here on Christmas day, but maybe we should. Get a tree I mean. For the town.”

  ”For the town,” I repeated, nodding. A few months ago if you had said I would believe in the talismanic properties of a Christmas tree I would have said you were nuts. Now I was nodding in agreement that maybe the town needed a tree, maybe that would somehow keep the darkness at bay.

  It was Friday before I managed to get back with Reggie. I had spent the morning in DuBois, where I had found the most lovely ring for Mags. I realized I didn’t know her size, but I made an educated guess and hoped for the best. I know that it is traditional to buy a diamond when making an engagement, but something about Mags just cried out for the icy depths of a sapphire. So I compromised. I found a platinum band that had a diamond and a sapphire in it. The band was a split spiral, so that the two ends didn’t connect, but went past each other on the top, one terminating with a diamond, the other with a sapphire. Each were nice stones, a carat a piece. I couldn’t afford it, but I bought it anyway. I also found some other things, a sweater, a sexy blue nightie, some bath crystals and sponges in a basket, and of course wrapping paper and bows. One thing I had long ago learned was that wrapping the present was as important as what was inside. My mom taught me that.

  I had decided on one other gift for Mags. I would wrap up one of the books of poems I had found and give it to her. I thought that would be just about perfect. I was nearly out of town on the way back to The Corners when I turned around and went back to the mall. I picked out an extra large flannel shirt for Mags’ Dad, a DVD player for her brother and wife, and identical dolls for the girls. I had to get used to this family thing, more shopping to do. It made me feel really good to do it, too.

  When I got back to town I pulled up in front of the Municipal building and went in, hoping to find Reggie. I was in luck. He was sitting at his desk smoking, a sheaf of papers spread out in front of him. And lo and behold, on the desk was a ceramic Christmas tree identical to the one I had at home. An interesting coincidence. Reggie jumped when I stepped in, scooping up the papers and stuffing them back into the folder.

  “Merry Christmas, Reggie” I said, offering my hand. He shook it and then sat back down, indicating a chair for me.

  “Well, Felice Navidad to you.” He opened a drawer in the desk and pulled out a thermos. Now that I was seated I could just make out the sounds of a carol coming from a battered AM radio that sat on the table with the coffee maker. Looked like Reggie was a sentimental fella after all. He grabbed a couple of mugs from the table and poured what turned out to be eggnog. Heavily spiked eggnog. I took a sip and felt the rum burn its way into me. Only four O’clock, but it felt good anyway.

  “I’m glad to see someone besides me is in the holiday spirit.” I indicated the tree, but really meant all the little things.

  Reggie nodded. “Was your lights that reminded me to do it, and that’s a fact. Seems like Christmas is just kinda being forgot this year here in The Corners. But I suspect you noticed that.” He drank the rest of his nog, and then got out a fresh cigarette and lit it. There was no longer any pretense of not smoking in city property. “So what brings you down here on this Friday afternoon?” Before I could answer he went on. “It’s the business about Sioban isn’t it? I figured you would be wondering if I had found out anything. And I’m not sure I have, and that’s a fact.”

  “So Tastler helped you out?”

  “Well, after a fashion. At first he stonewalled,
see? But then I had Cindy give a call over to county health. Seems communicable diseases like that have to be reported. Just by number, not by name, but it was a little wedge you see. So I found out there had been four cases reported by Tastler this fall. When I went and asked him again, I kind of reminded him that he owed me one.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “For…?”

  “For shootin’ off his mouth about Bobby Schwartz” Oh, I thought, payback is a bitch, but not nearly a bitch enough. “Anyway he gave me what I wanted. So I’ve just been pondering what to do with it. I am gonna have to go see these folks, but I think it will be best to wait a few more days. I’ll knock on some doors on the 26th. That week between Christmas and New Years, folks treat it like a vacation. Be a good time to come upon ‘em unawares. Might get lucky.” He looked at me. “More likely a wild goose chase.”

  I took the barb without rebuke. I would rather find out it was a wild goose chase, the alternative was unspeakable. “Can you tell me…?” I asked, indicating the files.

  “Best to let me talk to ‘em first. But I imagine you can guess one of ‘em, since he no doubt got it from her.”

  “Mac?”

  “Well now without betraying a confidence I can’t come out and say. But there is certainly a Mr. Taylor being treated by our good doctor.”

  “And the others?” My curiosity was outweighing my politeness.

  “Best to let me check it out, Tom.” He leaned back in his chair. “More nog?”

  I shook my head. “I have to go find a Christmas tree. You will let me know what you find out?”

  “I will let you know IF I find out anything. There’s a place on 6016 outside Siegly. Got all kinds of trees there.”

  I stood to go. “Merry Christmas, Reggie.” I was nearly to the door when I turned and added, “And be careful.”

  Reggie nodded as he absently got out a smoke. “I will indeed. And you ought to be, too, Tom. Careful that is. Merry Christmas”.