Fender Lizards

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Mom said, “Oh, boy. He’s a good-looking one.”

  “Yep, his looks don’t hurt my feelings at all,” I said. “And he seems like a nice guy. Are there such things as nice guys, Mama?”

  “I’ve heard tell of them,” Mama said. “They say, they exist in the deep woods, and are rarer than fairies and unicorns.”

  “How do you think Frank is going to turn out?” I said.

  Mama wagged her hand a little, like a boat on the ocean.

  “It could go either way,” she said.

  No wonder I’m such a pessimist.

  (26)

  The days went by slow and tedious, like dragging a dead cow up a hill with a thin rope. I read some books, and was able to limp onto the couch and watch some television, but there really wasn’t anything I wanted to see. Frank usually owned the set anyway so he could play his video games. He had four of them and he had played them so much I doubt there was any real challenge. Still, he clicked away in front of the couch, jumping up now and then to sort of dance around as he worked the controls. He liked to yip like a coyote too. There’s no explaining boys.

  Raylynn had moved with the kids to her new apartment. That gave a lot more room in the trailer, but it also seemed more empty, lonely.

  It was easier to spend time in bed feeling sorry for myself.

  By the way, the shoe for my sprain had been signed by Frank without my knowing it. I hurt too bad to give him grief.

  One thing I did do was I took my laptop to bed, got it connected to the internet and looked up some things just for fun. I read about fish that could walk on land and a spider that poisoned wasps in such a way the spider could lead the wasp by one antenna like a zombie. The spider would walk it to its lair, so to speak, and feed it to its young.

  Told you I was bored.

  Every afternoon I took a walk, using crutches that Mama got me from the Goodwill, and Elbert would walk with me. We just walked through the trailer park. I couldn’t go far. Elbert carried a switch in case any dogs wanted to bite us. I think they all did. I guess dogs hate seeing a young girl on two sticks. The patch on the back of his head had gotten smaller as the days passed, and now it was gone.

  “What kind of guy was my dad?” I asked him.

  “Oh, I don’t know. He was all right I guess. You remember him. You weren’t a baby when he left.”

  “I didn’t take a lot of notes about him, though. I wasn’t expecting him to run like a deer.”

  “He was all right,” Elbert said again.

  “Can you throw me a bone here?” I said.

  “Okay. He talked about you and your sister.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That he loved you.”

  “If he loved us so much, why did he run off?”

  Elbert shook his head. “I can’t explain that. There should be some easy answer, I guess, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “Did you ask him whey he ran off?”

  “Not really,” Elbert said. “Not directly. I guess I didn’t know how to ask.”

  “You open your mouth and you say, ‘Hey, why did you run off from your girls you claim to love so much?’”

  “Yeah, well,” Elbert said, “it’s a lot easier talking about it here than it was then. Maybe he thought you’d be better off without him.”

  “Oh, wow,” I said. “That’s like the boy who breaks up with you and says it’s not you, it’s him. He has to find himself. But what he really means is he has to chase after some blonde, but he doesn’t want to say that.”

  “Is that your experience?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s really Raylynn’s experience, but since we’re sisters, I think it’s an experience close enough to borrow. Let me ask you. Was there another woman? Is that why dad left? Was he cheating on Mom?”

  “Wish I had some answers,” Elbert said, shrugging. “But I don’t.”

  “Was he nice otherwise?” I asked.

  “Nice? Yeah. I guess. I mean, he was nice enough. Me and him got along okay.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a lot of brotherly love going on there,” I said.

  Elbert looked at the ground. “We weren’t that close. Not really…Dot, I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but you should let it go. The man made a choice. A bad choice. But it’s done. There are some things you can’t fix, can’t go back on. A choice like that, it’s one of them.”

  “It would be nice to know what it was we did wrong,” I said.

  I paused to reposition my crutches. My underarms were getting chaffed. We started out again.

  “Here’s the thing, and this I’m certain of, girl,” Elbert said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. None of you did. Frankly, your dad loved you, but not enough. And that was his fault. Not yours. He’s a low-life bastard and that’s all there is to it. Same as Raylynn’s boyfriend. What’s that dip’s name?”

  “Tim,” I said.

  “Same as him. That’s how he is. Maybe he didn’t hit your mother…I don’t know. Didn’t hit you… Again, I don’t know.”

  “He didn’t,” I said.

  “All right,” Elbert said. “He had that going for him. But he didn’t have any character. He didn’t know how to do the right thing because he’s one of those that doesn’t know the right thing exists. Not really.”

  “Is it how you two were raised?” I said.

  Elbert stopped walking. He turned and looked at me as I stopped and leaned on my crutches. “You know what I think?” he said. “I think we’re all responsible for what we do. It isn’t someone else’s fault. It isn’t always genetics or how our parents’ treated you, because there’s plenty born to bad circumstances with all manner of things wrong with them, and they don’t all turn out to be crumbs. We choose to be who we are. We make ourselves into who we want to be.”

  “Are you who you want to be?”

  “Not by a long shot,” Elbert said.

  (27)

  I don’t know exactly why I hadn’t thought of it before, but now with nothing but boredom to fill my days, it occurred to me that I might make a search for my dad. It was either that or sit with Grandma in the living room and watch game shows and smell her gas, or play video games with Frank, the Booger Eater.

  The search had no real expectation on my part, but I thought it would be something to do; as always, it was on my mind. It was just that now I had slowed down long enough to give it some true consideration. I thought, what if I use one of those search engines that locates people on the internet?

  The idea bounced around in my head, and finally I got the one credit card I have, one that holds about two hundred dollars, and propped myself up in bed with my old laptop. The card was one of those they like to offer high school students so they can get them hooked on using credit cards and going into deep debt. Or that was what Mama said. She said, first it’s two hundred dollars, but if you use it and you pay it off, then your credit score rises, and the next thing you know you’ve booked a trip to Berlin and bought a Siberian Husky, a parakeet and clothes you’ll never wear, and you owe the credit card company a zillion dollars, not counting the interest.

  I considered all of that, and decided I was only going to use it to get on one of the search sites, and then pay it all off when the bill came in. I didn’t think it could cost that much, and by then I would have some money stored away.

  Considering how little money I made, this was a chancy enterprise. Still, I wanted to know what had happened to Dad. I figured the bottom line was I’d owe a bill and find out absolutely nothing for my troubles.

  I used the card, got logged in, typed in his name, and immediately it came up. Now, our last name isn’t all that odd, but my dad’s first name, Jethro is a little more unlikely. But still, it’s not that someone else couldn’t be named that. This man with the same name lived in Bullard. That was near Tyler. I had been through Bullard, or at least its outskirts, just the other day when I went shopping in Tyler.

  I held my breath.

 
Could it be?

  Surely not.

  Nothing could be that simple. He went out for a pack of cigarettes and ended up in Bullard, Texas? Not far from where we lived right now?

  It had to be a different Jethro Sherman.

  If it was him, the idea that he had only gone a few miles away from us somehow hit me harder than if he had moved to Alaska to study polar bears.

  I looked to see how many Jethro Shermans popped up. There were only two, and one was listed as being seventy-three. That wouldn’t be him unless he had gotten caught in a time warp, lived somewhere else for years, and came back to our time and decided to live in Bullard. But that Jethro was listed as living in Little Rock, Arkansas, not Bullard, so time travel was most likely out. The man in Bullard was exactly the right age to be Dad. He was listed as a Handy Man. Dad had been good at fixing things, when he wanted to do it, which wasn’t that often. He hadn’t had a job the day he went out for cigarettes, just a nicotine habit.

  I looked at the address some more and thought about how easily I could drive over there and find him. I thought about what I would say to him if it was in fact Dad. I figured the real truth was it would be a different man.

  I sat there and thought about a lot of things, and finally I dozed, and when I awoke, it was to Grandma moving around in the room.

  “You might want to get up and crutch into the kitchen,” Grandma said. “Alma’s home and she’s fixing dinner.”

  “Can she bring it here?” I said.

  “She could,” Grandma said, “but she told me you’d ask, and she told me to tell you no.”

  “I have an injured foot,” I said.

  “Yes, and it’ll get well faster if you don’t nurse it all the time.”

  “It’s not like I’m going to walk on it,” I said. “I’ll use crutches. Why can’t I just stay in bed?”

  “Because you sound depressed and you don’t need to be depressed,” she said, “your mother and I do enough of that for the entire family.”

  The lap top was still resting on my lap, so I put it aside, and was about to get out of bed when Mama came into the room with a tray. Grandma looked at her like a mongoose looks at a cobra.

  “I thought you said she had to get up,” Grandma said.

  “I did,” Mama said. “But I changed my mind. I feel like spoiling her a little.”

  “And I feel like being spoiled,” I said.

  “Well,” Grandma said, “I’ll leave the two of you to the spoiling. I’m going to join Elbert and Frank at the table.”

  “I’ll be there in a moment,” Mama said.

  “Suit yourself,” Grandma said, and went out of the room.

  I positioned myself up in bed, and Mama put the tray where the lap top had been. It was pinto beans and cornbread, a side of creamed corn. My favorite.

  “Thanks, Mama,” I said.

  “Fixed it just for you,” she said. “Are you doing all right?”

  “Just bored. Mama, when Daddy left, did you look for him?”

  Mama sat down in the chair by the bed. She said, “Not much. I figured he wanted to be here he would. That doesn’t mean I didn’t miss him, but it meant I didn’t think I ought to chase him down.”

  “Are you going to divorce him?”

  “I think about it. But you know…and I don’t like this about myself…I keep thinking he’ll come back. And worse, I keep thinking I’ll be glad to see him.”

  “Do you think something happened to him?” I asked.

  Mama shook her head. “No. I think he left because he wanted to leave. I think he’s out there.”

  “And you still want him to come back?” I asked.

  “It’s foolish, but I do. The heart is a really complicated and not too smart instrument.”

  “It’s actually the brain that decides these things,” I said. “Not the heart.”

  “Yeah, well, I like to think it is actually the heart,” Mama said, “because I prefer to believe my brain isn’t so stupid as to put up with the idea of him coming back. How do you feel about it?”

  “I miss him. And I’m mad at him. I’m mostly confused.”

  “Sometimes life isn’t fair, baby girl,” she said.

  She stood up from the chair. “Should I shut the door?”

  I could hear the TV blaring in the other room. “Sure, shut it. That would be fine.”

  When she was gone I ate my food, moved the tray and put the laptop on my lap again and looked up my father’s name one more time, looked at the address in Bullard.

  Later I crutched outside and found Elbert sitting in his chair, nursing a can of beer. I pulled up the other lawn chair, said, “You used to be a detective. Can you find your brother? My daddy?”

  “I wasn’t a very good detective,” he said.

  “Well, let me put it this way, I’ve already found him.”

  “Then why would you ask me?”

  “Because I don’t really need someone to find him, but it seemed like a conversation starter.”

  “What do you need?” Elbert asked.

  “Company.”

  “You’re sure it’s him, Dot?”

  “I think I’ve found him. I have the name and the address, and it isn’t far from here.”

  “Perhaps you should leave well enough alone,” Elbert said.

  “He’s your brother,” I said. “Don’t you want to see him?”

  “No. As I said, we’re not that close.”

  “All right, then,” I said. “That’s okay. But me, I’m going anyway.”

  I got up and started crutching toward the car.

  “You’re going now?” he said.

  “No time like the present,” I said.

  When I got to the car, I heard him coming up behind me. “You shouldn’t be driving with that foot,” he said.

  “Maybe so,” I said. “But I’m going anyway.”

  “Dang it,” Elbert said. “Get in. I’ll drive.”

  (28)

  We had barely reached the edge of Marvel Creek when a black cloud came rolling over our heads and started dropping rain and spitting lighting, coughing thunder.

  “Another day might be better,” Elbert said.

  “I can take you home,” I said. “But I’m going if I have to push the gas and the brake pedal with my crutch.”

  “You’d do it too, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are the most stubborn person I have ever met,” he said.

  We drove on, but the rain got really bad, and we had to pull over to the side of the road for awhile. We sat there with the motor running and the windshield wipers swatting, but not really managing much against the rain. The windshield was a sheet of water.

  “You find him,” Elbert said. “If it is him, things might not be how you want them.”

  “They’re not how I want them now,” I said. “Could they be worse?”

  “They could,” he said.

  “You seem pretty determined to talk me out of finding him.”

  “I’m just trying to prepare you, Dot.”

  “I want answers,” I said.

  “There isn’t an answer to everything,” Elbert said. “Sometimes there’s just a bigger mystery.”

  I let that thought whirl around in my head, but didn’t have a response. I sat there and tried to remember all the good things about my dad. I hated to admit it, but it was a short list. I didn’t really recall all that much at all. I remembered how he looked and that he had a good smile. I remembered how he had carried me to bed. I remembered him watching The Wizard of Oz on TV with me. I remembered him at the table eating. Mostly I remembered him going out and coming in. I remember always feeling like I was waiting for him. Then there was the time he went out and didn’t come back.

  We sat there until the rain slowed. I rolled down my window and felt the cool wind on my face, the smell of wet dirt. We were parked near a little culvert that ran under the highway, and water was running out of one end of it over some rocks; it made a sound
like someone doodling around on a piano. Leaves washed along. One of them had a green and blue beetle riding on it, like a boat. After awhile the water quit running so fast. The leaves began to bunch up in the culvert. The beetle took that moment to make his escape onto the solid earth.

  “I think we can go now,” I said.

  Elbert started back out on the highway, still letting the wipers slap at the rain, otherwise cruising in silence. I sneaked a glance at him from time to time. His forehead was wrinkled and his head was bent forward, as if he were about to close his eyes and push through a mess of cobwebs.

  When we got to Bullard we stopped at a gas station and I got out on my crutches to pump gas in. Elbert took the nozzle from me and put it in himself. When he finished, he took out his wallet and started in to pay.

  “I don’t want you to pay,” I said.

  “I want to,” he said. “And I don’t want an argument.”

  “All right,” I said. He gave me a look like a man standing on the deck of a sinking ship with his feet in leg irons, then went inside. I crutched in after him.

  I asked the guy for directions to the street I wanted. I got back in the car and told Elbert how to get there, and away we went.

  As we rode along, Elbert said suddenly. “You and me are friends, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “I mean, friends sometimes see things different ways, right?”

  “I suppose,” I said. “What are you talking about, Elbert?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  The street wasn’t really in Bullard. It was back and beyond the little town, and it was a dirt street with a bit of asphalt that had mostly washed away and left holes big enough to lose a volley ball in. There were trees along the streets, and they looked tired and sweaty from the rain. Already the sun was out, and it was hot, and things were drying fast. Heat mist came up from the earth.

  Finally we came to the house. We drove past it and down the street, and back in front of it. We stopped across the street and took a look.

  It wasn’t a nice house. It was white but needed fresh paint. There was a red tricycle in the yard, or it had been red once. Now it was mostly rust-colored. There was a carport and an old Ford in the carport. The grass in the yard was grown up and damp with rain. One of the windows by the front door was taped over where it had been cracked. The roof was peeling, as if it had been sunburned bad and now the skin was coming off. There were birds in the yard, a bunch of them, pecking in the grass for insects and worms.