Hap and Hazard and the End of the World

by Diane DeSanders

  Then GranDad, chuckling and Groucho-popping his black eyes, goes running out to the garage, then returns with a stack of gray cardboard boxes with holes in them. He opens the boxes on the lawn, and out pour a dozen live baby ducks dyed different colors, like the eggs, and all the children scream with joy.

  But Mama and Nana and Aunt Celeste are furious, saying, “Oh no!” and “We told you not to do that!” and “They’ll all just die!”

  The baby ducks spread across the yard in a swarm, quack-peeping, jerking their tiny beaks into the thick grass, looking for bugs. Margie starts chasing and spreading them farther. A red one and then a green one fall into the fish pond, then pop up and start to swim in circles. Nana tells GranDad in her headache voice to catch them, please, and to put them all back into the boxes. GranDad runs after Margie across the lawn. Trudy grabs up a blue duck to squeeze, but I’m fast enough to get it from her, and she screams in outrage.

  Annie cries, hiccupping, saying, “I hate Margie, I hate her, I hate her!” Daddy, who’s been standing by himself, picks up a yellow duck and goes over to talk to her in this sweet way, giving her some jelly beans, and I watch and am jealous.

  I see Mama and Aunt Celeste looking around, annoyed and disgusted. They aren’t going to say anything. The two of them take their drinks and stroll back inside the house.

  Each cousin tries to capture and possess one or two ducks, while also protecting her own piled-heavy Easter basket. GranDad’s attempts to control the kids are ignored. The girl Ann and the boy with red hair stand on the side, watching all of us harridans wide-eyed.

  I go back into the house to see what Mama’s doing with the other grown-ups in there. I find her with the other women, all of them standing around with fresh drinks, walking back and forth in the large kitchen, talking about shopping and clothes and parties, gesturing with their cigarettes, their red nails, their diamond rings as they move from pantry to sink to countertop to stove, changing places around the room.

  The little kids come running in and out with stories about who hit whom and who started it—a knee skinned, a chocolate rabbit smashed, a sash torn off. The women replace barrettes, look for the everyday napkins, try to joke around with Elise, who, grim-faced and sweating, but sometimes smiling, listens and nods and forks and turns the last of the sizzling and popping chicken wings, the livers, the necks, the hearts.

  In another part of the house, the men, GranDad and Uncle Ted and Daddy and Papaw and some others, stand around drinking and smoking. Oliver sits in there with the men. I go in to see if they’re ready to eat. They seem not to know what to talk about with one another. They look at the new Magnavox record player cabinet. They compare new cameras, talk about business, then cars. They have many cigarettes, many drinks. I go back out.

  I hear Papaw’s booming HO-ho-ho-ho laugh from in there. You can hear him all over the house. No one ever says anything or acts toward him in the same way they act when they say the word Jew, and I can’t see anything different about him, except that he’s always laughing loudly and somehow uncomfortably, always snorting, blowing his nose, clearing his throat, giving that little whistle when people are starting to argue or get mad, and it seems like somebody always gets mad—usually Daddy, talking loudly, shouting, then the HO-ho-ho-ho. Then the women come rushing in, shushing them, “It’s a holiday, Dick. Dick, please!” and “Don’t spoil it.”

  Soon Daddy’s standing alone again on the porch, looking out at the yard. His hand on his glass holds two fingers out straight, off the wet surface, a cigarette between them. He drinks in rapid little sips, then gulps the last down with closed eyes. Then he’s pacing through the house, pretending to be interested in things like books in the bookshelf, radio programs, his fingernails.

  He clump-CLUMPs out to the kitchen, saying, “Are we gonna eat that chicken anytime this year, Elise?” grabbing drumsticks off the pile, until Elise shoos him out to the garage, where he lifts hoods and starts tinkering with the cars.

  GranDad goes out to the garage and says, “Leave my car alone.”

  Daddy follows GranDad back in, saying, “Dad. I need to talk to you, Dad.” GranDad doesn’t answer him.

  Mama whispers in the hallway with Nana, who oversees everything nervously, saying, “It’s just a little headache. It keeps coming back.” Uncle Ted goes up to them in the hall. I see Nana look at him very differently from the way she looks at Daddy.

  Finally Elise and Ross step forth with the loaded silver trays, huge mounds of fried chicken, the juicy legs and thighs, the breasts, the crispy wings, the thick peppery chicken gravy, hot biscuits, deviled eggs, relishes, jellies, string beans with bacon, mashed potatoes full of parsley and butter and milk.

  Everybody claps hands and cheers for Elise, who smiles tiredly but seems to enjoy this. She leans down and points out where she hid a wishbone for me, her face beaded with sweat.

  Then there’s the frantic jostling among all us grass-stained cousins to pile your plate with the most drumsticks and wings, and wishbones, of course, and then to get into the best places at the children’s table in the breakfast room, which means not trapped in the corner, and not next to Margie, because she grabs the food right off your plate.

  Oliver gets to sit at the grown-up table in the dining room. And he just walks in there as if he belongs with them, with no looks or even smirks at me, with no anything for me at all.

  Mama and Aunt Celeste come in and tuck napkins around each child’s neck, warning about manners, about teasing, whispering that Nana’s nervous and has a headache and that we must not upset Nana. Mama gives me a glare. Aunt Celeste looks around distastefully at the grimy little monsters that we are, then both smooth their hair and dresses and go to eat with the grown-ups in the dining room with its gilt-framed fruit and flower paintings and the crystal bell for Nana to call Elise and Ross in to serve. They close the door.

  Then we have our way with each other at the kids’ table in the breakfast room. We eat as fast as we can, Margie and I seeming to be in an eating contest, while Debbie sits in the corner next to Annie, preferring her thumb, letting Margie take the food off her plate. Annie cries about wanting to sit with Mama and Daddy in the dining room, waving her fork, getting mashed potatoes in her hair. Trudy smears gravy and grape jelly around on her high-chair tray.

  As I’m stripping my wishbone for later, hiding it in a napkin so no one will take it, we hear voices rising in the dining room, men arguing about Lone Star. I try to listen over the kids but can’t catch all the words.

  Daddy’s voice has that twisted sound, angry, struggling not to cry. “I know what I’m talking about!” he says. Then Papaw’s warning throat clearing and whistling, working up to a Ho-ho-ho-ho. Then I hear Uncle Ted’s voice, reasonable-sounding. Then I hear Gran-Dad’s voice above them all. A silence. Then the women’s voices rising, all talking at once. Nana’s is the final voice, as usual, disapproving, tired.

  And then there’s a commotion, something falling, a crash, Mama’s voice crying out as if to make him stop with the force of just that one word: “Dick, Dick, Dick!” Nana’s voice doing the same: “Dick! Dick!”

  But Daddy can’t stand it, whatever it is. My arms prickle with fear. We hear his clump-CLUMPing going out through the kitchen to the back bathroom, the door slamming. We hear Papaw in the dining room, clearing his throat over and over again, and Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho.

  Oliver comes in, kind of sneers, as if to say, Uh-oh, it’s the brats in here! Then he walks through on his way to the front bathroom. I spread grape jelly onto my biscuit.

  The little kids start whispering, and I hear Daddy clump-CLUMPing around out in the kitchen, saying something to Elise, then heading out the back, the screen door slamming, and I hear a car start up out there, hear the tires squealing away. He’s gone and left us here.

  Mama comes in and cleans us up with a damp napkin, her face pouting and closed. Annie lifts her arms, wanting to be picked up, and then Trudy does the same, but Mama just wipes their faces. Aunt Cel
este comes in and does the same with her children, squinting her eyes from smoke drifting up from the pastel blue cigarette bobbing in her red mouth. Then they go away again, making amusing remarks to each other. Time for second helpings.

  Margie’s watching my face with a grin. Why is she always watching me? She reaches over and snatches a biscuit off my plate. I try to get it from her across the table, grabbing her arm, then her hair. She yells out with this amazingly loud voice, and her mother comes rushing back in. My biscuit is in crumbs on the floor.

  I stare at my plate while Aunt Celeste says that I’m too old for such things and should set an example. When she goes out, I kick Margie hard in the shin under the table, a satisfying direct hit. She yells again, with unnecessary loudness, it seems to me, but the strange thing is how much she seems to enjoy this. Grinning, she comes back at me.

  I wish I could have left with Daddy, but now he’s off somewhere again, alone and sad in the car. Where does he go?

  Elise comes through the swinging door, bringing more chicken, serving each of us brats from our left, looking as though she doesn’t intend to talk about anything, looking at me as if I know something about that, but I do not know a thing.

  I get up from the table, put my wishbone in my pocket for later, and follow Elise back out to the kitchen, looking to see if Daddy’s really gone, and Elise shares her own cleaned wishbone with me. I wish that Daddy will come back and be okay. But then Elise lets me win, which I know doesn’t really count for getting your wish.

  Nana’s friends with the two children leave right after lunch, and while everyone’s saying good-bye and getting ready to leave, and while the cousins are pounding up the stairs to the attic playroom, I sneak out to the porch and raid the overflowing baskets, already having noticed the ones I want to steal. I look for the beautiful ones, the unusual ones that I know the little kids won’t even notice. I put some eggs back into Debbie’s basket. Then I find four eggs that say Margie and I throw them out into the alley behind the pond, all the while knowing she won’t notice or care, but it feels good doing it, even though I do know that this is more evidence that there’s something wrong with me. Then I hide my own basket outside near the back door.

  Oliver’s standing in the doorway, looking at me when I come back in. He smirks and says, “Think you’re invisible, don’t you?”

  And I say, “Sometimes.” But he’s already turning away.

  Granny and Papaw leave now, and he goes with them. I watch them walking down the driveway, Oliver in front.

  Daddy has still not come back with our car, so there’s talk in the kitchen about who’s going to drive us home. Or maybe we’ll wait awhile, since there’s no answer at our house and no one knows where Daddy went. Nana says she’s going upstairs to lie down. Everyone’s worried. When I come into the room, they stop talking and look at one another. I go out and sit on the steps to listen through the screen door, but nobody says anything about Daddy.

  I find Mother in the kitchen, where the women walk around the room drinking, smoking, talking. Little kids come downstairs and run in and out with their rustling boxes of baby ducks.

  GranDad comes into the kitchen and sits on a chair, stooped and tired, holding his camera up once in a while as if to snap a picture, but then not doing it, turning his heavy head back and forth, watching the women move around, listening to them. He seems to be listening intently. He seems to have a question in his mind.

  Is he thinking of other women, other kitchens, when he was young maybe, kitchens peopled with poor Italian women in another place, another time? He has nothing to say to these women, and they seem to have nothing to say to him.

  “Still so handsome.” That’s what everyone says about GranDad—“Such a good-looking man.” He sits there with his thick hair, his angular nose and white teeth, his dark eyes watching his young daughters-in-law as if there’s something he’d like to understand, but he never has much to say. He just sits listening, with his head hanging like a dog.

  A few times he’s talked to me while walking block after block after dinner at their house, telling me how he quit school in fourth grade because his own father was “too good to work.” Then he’d get angry, saying “what bums poor people are,” how you can’t help them because they’re “bums, who just want a free ride, and to drag you down to their level.” Then he’d look at me with tears in his eyes and say, “You look exactly like my sister, Rose.”

  He doesn’t join in the discussion about who’ll take us home “way out there,” since Daddy took our car, but he just stares up at the ceiling fan rotating steadily above, at the bars of late-day light slanting through the blinds over the sinks, at the arc of stripes flaring across the wall.

  Finally, GranDad says quietly, “I’ll take them home.”

  He says he’d enjoy the long drive on such a nice day, and when they talk about Daddy, he says, “Just leave him alone.” Nana turns and looks at him like she does not agree with this.

  On the way out to our house in GranDad’s Cadillac, I sit in the front seat with him, and I look at the Cadillac crest on the dashboard with the little ducks on it.

  Mama sits in the back with the babies, who both fall asleep, and nobody says a word the whole way out to the country, where our house is. I have our baby ducks and our Easter baskets full of eggs with me on a newspaper on the floor of the front seat. The ducks rustle and squeak in their box, and the car radio plays swinging band music, but no one sings. I keep looking back at Mama, who looks out the window sadly, as if thinking of something very far away.

  GranDad doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t sing his funny songs or say anything at all the whole way out.

  Hap and Hazard and the End of the World

  I hate it when Mama cries. Her face screws up and she looks at me with begging eyes, and then it seems like everything might be about to turn into something else, and I don’t know what I will do if that happens.

  Mama loves to bathe, brush, train, and play with the dogs more than just about anything. Her face looks so young when she gets down on the floor with them and starts telling me how babies are born. We try to count how many are in Hazard’s—Hazzy’s—swollen belly. Hap lies nearby, the daddy of these puppies—even though they’re brother and sister cocker spaniels, which Mama says is okay for dogs. She looks so happy saying “Six or more, I’ll bet,” and Hazzy will need help, since it’s her first time, and Mama says I can be there and watch when they’re born!

  Daddy comes bursting in the door and flinches when he sees us down on the floor. Mama and I flinch, too. We thought he was still back there taking one of his long naps that last all day. He looks down at the dogs and at us on the floor.

  “You’re not planning to let that dog accidentally give birth in the house, are you, Jane?”

  “No, Dick, I was just about to put them out,” she says

  Sometimes it seems that Daddy likes dogs, too, but not in the house. He used to like to ride horses, but he’s nervous and afraid of falling because of his war-injured feet and bad balance. He wants everything to keep away from him.

  At a friend’s house, their big dog jumped on him, long tongue slurping, and he fell reeling back onto the grass; then he clump-CLUMPed off to the car as fast as he could, and we all had to follow him, and then listen to his shouting all the way home that those people were “idiots” to have a dog not trained right. And anyone who’d own that big stupid breed of dog in the first place had to be a “jackass,” somebody he could never ever have for a friend, or even speak to, “ever again.”

  I hate it when Daddy gets crazy. It’s not all the time. Sometimes you can talk to him, ask him things. Sometimes I almost forget to be afraid of him. Sometimes if I say something funny, he gets this certain look in his eye, as if I hit the bull’s-eye. It’s a look that is like a small salute. But lately he’s not doing it. Lately, he is always yelling about this or that.

  Sometimes Mama goes out and sits with the dogs, and sometimes I hear her talking to them
, telling them how she feels, but in words I usually can’t pick out.

  I hate it when Mama tells me how she wanted a different kind of life. She tells how when she was a kid like me, she used to visit Aunt Lee and Uncle Edward out in Brady, Texas, how Aunt Lee is Granny’s sister, how they had all kinds of animals, how they had five tall sons, Mama’s cousins, such sweet men.

  She tells me about their farm while she’s putting the carrots, the onions, the radishes, the tomatoes, and the strawberries into our “truck” garden out back. She tells me about her cousins when she’s putting our clothes through the wringer, then hanging them out on the line one by one. She tells me of the wonderful people as she’s feeding our dozen chickens and gathering our eggs, simple country people and yet so smart and creative out there in Brady, the heart of Texas.

  When she puts me to bed at night, she tells me how they would read a Bible story and a Saturday Evening Post story every night, and how she always wanted to be just like them, have a life exactly like theirs. Then her tears dry up as she opens the Bible to the first chapter.

  The Bible stories are interesting, about families, problems, fathers and brothers always fighting or killing one another, or sending one another away. Especially brothers always wanting to be the favorite. Long lists of families. God appears. The Devil and different angels appear to certain chosen ones of them. But the ones who are chosen don’t seem to be all that good. They are just chosen, that’s all, and we don’t know why. They don’t explain this in Sunday school, and Mama doesn’t like questions. Also, some of those angels are not as nice as you would normally think angels are supposed to be.

  It’s hot summer now, and people say drought, week after week, no rain. We take naps, sleep in our underpants in front of fans; we get wet and sit in the shade; we drink water. We have mosquito and chigger bites old and crusty, bites new and swollen, poison ivy, and heat rashes.

  Clouds of gnats stand in the shimmery air. The black dirt is as cracked as a scab. Our grass is brown, as if going back to desert because we’re not allowed to water enough. The grown-ups talk about “Okies” and the “Dust Bowl” and each one has a story about it.