Creatures of Habit

by Jill McCorkle

  But the day at the accident was the last time I ever saw him. The boys hoped for an angry answer but Hank just shook his head and laughed. “For me to know and you to find out,” he said. “You find out and I’m likely to reward you with a dollar bill or two.” He mounted his bike and the group cleared a path for him.

  “Hey there, girl,” he drawled when he saw me standing there. “Do I know you?” He lifted his sunglasses to reveal clear blue, much-younger-looking eyes than I would ever have expected. “Are you the one been calling up to my house and hanging up? Or asking is my Frigidaire running or have I got Prince Albert in the can?” I shook my head, my face hot. I wanted to look away from him but I was afraid of making him mad.

  “Not me,” I said, while a chorus of boys behind me sang out things like Yeah right. Sure. You want us to believe that?

  “If that’s what she says then that’s what she means, you bunch of stupid boys.” He turned on them then, patted the big gun strapped to his hip. “You all look like a pack of mean old junkyard dogs to me. Damn Nazi mongrels.” Everyone froze while he twirled his gun and then eased it back into the holster on his belt, alongside his big silver flashlight and the billy stick. “The good Lord hates the Nazis and the Commies and the ignoramuses, and I’ve been put here to keep a watch. Ain’t nobody gettin’ by me.” He laughed his loud laugh and then turned back to me. “I’ve known you forever, girl,” he said. “I know your whole life like a book. I always have and I always will.” He shook his head and dropped his glasses back in place. “Don’t you ever forget that.” He made a clicking sound from the corner of his mouth, the kind of sound that someone might use to accompany a wink, though now his pale blue young eyes were hidden again. I nodded. No one spoke until he cranked his bike and rode well past the intersection as he headed out toward the service road.

  I WAS A SENIOR in college when I got word that Hank Carter had died. I was two hours and light-years away; I was in a place where my memories were something I could bend and shape into a suitable representation of who I was. I hung out at an old house at the edge of campus where there was always a gathering of students listening to music and drinking beer, discussing philosophy and religion and the fate of the world. My hometown paper said Hank died of a heart attack. Those among the huge outpouring of viewers said he looked small lying in his coffin without his hat and boots, his face shaved smooth. They said he looked like a normal person. Receding hairline. Wrinkles around his eyes and on his pale white throat that had always been protected by a red bandanna and the scraggly beard. They said he died at twelve noon, and for several months after that, when the bell of the Methodist church chimed the hour, people would pause over their lunches to comment how they missed seeing Hank riding through town. Until he died, they hadn’t taken into account how many times a week they saw him— helping at accidents or collecting litter along the highway or just riding his motorbike through town.

  AS A CHILD, I had a contest with myself to see how many times I could call the time service before the minute lapsed. It was a reassuring thing to do. And now other numbers I called often crowd my mind like secret codes: 3642 and 5756. If I could be in a Twilight Zone episode, it would be the one where the phone line has fallen down onto a grave so that calls are placed from beyond. If I could write my own episode, it would involve a phone line that could connect us back to those old places. Just dial and you get your grandfather in his wheelchair, his tired old collie curled beside him; your grandmother in her kitchen with Mason jars sterilized and ready to receive tomatoes and pear preserves; the neighbor saving her mail so when you got home from kindergarten you could use her jewel-handled letter opener —razor sharp—to slit the white envelopes of her bills and the pale ones of letters; the old aunt who kept a jar of peppermints for children and who always spoke with her hand covering poor dental work, her head tilted just slightly; fathers walking up from the eighteenth hole on late Sunday afternoons while mothers bundled their children into big warm towels as they stepped from the pool, eyes red and stinging from the chlorine; the freckle-faced boy, waiting on his bike, ready to race through the summer night with the sound of an ambulance on the highway. Won’t one of you please, please, please go with me?

  I WOULD CALL the people I knew growing up who have since died. I would ask how life had taken them there. Did they beg or did they pass in silence? Did they embrace life or reject it? Were there memories that at the very last minute filled their minds and swaddled their fears? And like a director, I would call for lights to come on in every house in town and for every person who had ever lived there to step outside and take a long deep breath on this average summer night.

  Snipe

  CAROLINE AND HER brother stood in the darkness of the woods. They held a big burlap sack between them and watched their father disappear down the path back to the house. Though the lights from the house were hidden by the slope of the hill and the thick dark pine branches, Caroline knew that she was still within yelling distance, and now she had that impulse. “Daddy!” she called, her high-pitched voice interrupting the incessant drone of crickets. She ignored Danny’s elbow digging into her hip to silence her. “Daddy, where are you?”

  “Hush up,” Danny said and she knew his teeth were gritted though she could barely make out the profile of his thin face. “We ain’t gonna catch nothing if you act like this.”

  Caroline quieted with Danny’s words as she usually did. After all, he was older; he was going to be in the fourth grade come fall and she would be starting school for the very first time. The thought of first grade and the stories about how the principal carried a big paddle through the halls burned through her body like comets, causing her to wake up at night all that summer to either a wet bed or a dizzy feeling as if she had been spun around and around like a June bug on a string.

  “The principal is a wonderful man,” her mother would say, but Danny—at the table, in a doorway, beside her in the backseat of the old blue Rambler—would glance down with raised eyebrows, shake his head, sigh, and her mother’s soothing words would fly past like Roman candles shot into the sky.

  “I’ll watch out for you at school if you do whatever I say,” Danny had told her with such forceful authority that she was able to go for thirty-minute stretches without worrying about it all. “You know, like if I hear you’ve disappeared from first grade, I’ll go down to that dungeon where he puts the bad children, and I’ll spring you.”

  But now in the prickly darkness of the woods, even with him there beside her, the fears came back. What if they did catch a snipe? What if one of those huge brown birds all of the relatives talked about did fly from the woods to the hole in their big burlap sack? Caroline braced herself, determined not to scream when it happened, determined not to be a baby. Danny was already mad at her; he was mad at everybody and had been all day long.

  She listened for her father’s and Uncle Tim’s footsteps but all she heard was the frogs and crickets. She tried to think about how she had felt earlier in the afternoon and the excitement of waiting for the relatives to arrive. The kitchen table was covered with food, big watermelons cooled on the back porch, and the box of fireworks that had been on a high shelf was down where she could see into it. But not touch them. Not even Danny could touch them.

  THE RELATIVES HAD arrived for the Fourth of July—“descended like a swarm of locusts,” Caroline’s mother whispered—their paneled station wagon so loaded down with bodies and watermelons and Tupperware that it scraped its bottom coming up the drive.

  Caroline was straddling the porch banister, holding a piece of twine tied around the post like reins, when they arrived. She had spent most of the day at the town pool and her eyes were burning. The whole world was a blur. The porch began to vibrate with music from the living room, where the three teenage cousins immediately huddled around the record player. One of them had her hair rolled up around orange-juice cans. Two others, Uncle Tim and Aunt Patricia’s daughters, had arrived with little round carrying cases fil
led with records. They sang “Where the Boys Are” and argued over who was the best-looking doctor, Ben Casey or Dr. Kildare. They marveled at the fact that Caroline’s mother had a record of “Moon River” and a Chubby Checker album, which the one in braces said was her “fave.” They argued over what was the best way to tease hair and then they whispered about Mark Eden and laughed. Caroline was taking notes in her head. This was her assignment: Hear all you can but don’t say one word, not to anybody. She knew that somewhere out in the yard Danny was hiding and watching to make sure she passed the test. If she passed today, he would let her go to the pool with him again tomorrow and he would even admit to people that she was his sister. Today she had been an orphaned neighbor child he was being paid big money to watch.

  Next door, Mrs. Hopper was stretched out in her lounge chair even though it was after four. Her sprinkler sprayed water over her ugly brown yard and over her huge ugly son who lay out in the grass with his big bare feet propped on the end of her chair. Occasionally Mrs. Hopper laughed and shook her head from side to side. Just the two of them lived there. Mrs. Hopper was a divorcée who had once lived in Chicago. Her son’s name was Bo and her cat’s name was Cat, after one in a movie she’d seen. She wore big round sunglasses and colorful beads and taught biology at the community college. These were the facts Caroline had gathered for Danny on another assignment. Mrs. Hopper looked normal enough but Danny said that at sundown her yellow hair stood straight up and her teeth grew long and mossy green. He said that her husband hadn’t really left like the grown-ups said he had; she had eaten him.

  NOW CAROLINE WAS thinking about that in the dark woods on this black moonless night. The picture in her head of Mrs. Hopper’s teeth growing made her shaky, and then came the sick wave of school thoughts: the teachers with their paddles, the squat-necked man in charge. She tried to shut out of her head all the stories she had heard by reciting things. She knew “This Old Man” and “When You Wish Upon a Star.” She knew the words to “Don’t Say Ain’t,” which used to be Danny’s favorite poem before he learned “Beans, Beans.”

  Don’t say ain’t,

  your mama might faint.

  Your daddy might fall in a bucket of paint.

  Your brother might die.

  Your sister might cry

  and your dog might call the FBI.

  But she knew the scary things just would not let her alone. In fact, only yesterday she’d caught herself needing to cling to her mother’s bare legs while she stood in the yard talking to Mrs. Hopper.

  “Go on now, honey,” her mother had said. “Let me talk to Mrs. Hopper for a sec.”

  “Lord, please let her call me Gail,” Mrs. Hopper said, lifting those big sunglasses. Her eyes were crayoned to look like a cat’s. “I was never cut out to be Mrs. Hopper.” Her mother and Mrs. Hopper both laughed. Mrs. Hopper said she couldn’t wait to get a load of those relatives, and Caroline’s mama said that she could.

  “I’ll tell you about the relatives since you might not remember them so good from last time,” Danny had said that very morning, his spoon poised over a bowl of Cocoa Puffs. “They all eat like hogs and Aunt Patricia wants to hug and slobber all over you. Those girls,” he whispered the word like it was a swear, “are just stupid, all of them. Uncle Tim is fat. The only boy cousin is Randy, who’s okay except last time he brought a girl.” Danny knew these things. If he said Mrs. Hopper was friends with the devil and put him up in her basement then it was so. It gave Caroline a shiver to think of all the secrets he told her late at night when their parents were asleep: hunks of hair from dead people found in the cafeteria ravioli, kids’ fingers bent backward by the principal until the bones snapped, parents getting arrested and sent to prison when their children talked too much.

  Caroline’s mother sometimes referred to the relatives as the dog people because they spent their lives going from show to show with these big scary Dobermans. They were always talking about “the circuit” and such. They had wanted to bring along some of the baby dogs but Caroline’s mother said they could not.

  “I don’t blame you at all!” Mrs. Hopper had said, her tanned bare foot swinging back and forth while she sipped a glass of tea. She had a thin silver chain around her ankle. Caroline was hiding under the bushes near where they sat, a cowgirl hat pulled low to disguise herself. “Just who does this sister-in-law of yours think she is?”

  “Doris Day.” Caroline’s mother laughed and sat down. “Doris Day on the darkest night of her life.”

  “I have never missed my ex-relatives,” Mrs. Hopper said. “Divorce is good for something.” Then they began talking about their yards. Mrs. Hopper said next she’d like to pave hers and then paint the grass and flowers in place. Caroline’s mother said she pictured something different altogether: new place, new town, new weather.

  Not an hour after that the station wagon scraped its awful sound, the car horn blasted several short notes, and Caroline’s mother rushed past, her perfume sweet and clean in the still summer heat. Her father followed, the screen door slamming shut behind him. Mrs. Hopper was out in her yard just as she had said she would be, to catch a peek, her hair wrapped in a white towel as she sat in a lawn chair letting the sprinkler spray her tanned legs. Danny made a face and shook his head back and forth when Mrs. Hopper lifted her hand in a wave. Caroline was still looking for some sign that she really was a witch but aside from the big purple beads around her neck and the black thumbnail, which she said she got when she accidentally hit herself with a hammer, had not come up with anything.

  “Fat as ever,” Danny said and nudged Caroline when Uncle Tim caught their mother up in a big hug and lifted her right up off the sidewalk. “Posse’s coming,” Danny said and sniffed the air, pointed to the walk where they all stood. Caroline counted eight of them if you included that baldheaded spit-up-smelling baby.

  “I smell ’em all right.” Danny swung his legs over the banister. “You keep a watch while I blaze the getaway trail and set up camp.” He pointed to the rubber tomahawk strapped to his belt. Then he jumped down behind the box shrubs and was gone, scrambling on hands and knees to the back of the house.

  Caroline was on the verge of following when her parents called to her, all the relatives lined up and waiting, baskets of food and a box of diapers at their feet. It was like playing firing squad that time when Danny tied a dish towel over her face and leaned her back against a tree and had all those boys from his neighborhood club lined up and ready for his signal. “When you hear the shots, you gotta fall out and be dead,” he had whispered, and then she waited. She waited until the whole yard was silent, bracing herself for the jump. “I’m getting tired,” she finally called. “Go on and shoot, okay?” No answer. “Danny!” She had screamed his name until her face felt hot. The yard was silent, and when she finally got free, Danny and the Indian Scouts were nowhere in sight. It was against all the rules to tattle so that night she asked Danny why he had tricked her. He said it wasn’t a trick, it was a test. It was the first test, being still and being quiet, and she had passed.

  The relatives had gotten out of the car and stood around nodding exactly like those spring-neck dogs that the man who owned the meat market had in the back window of his car. “I ain’t having nothing to do with these relatives,” Danny had said last night when he crept into her room and knelt by the bed. He said the word “relatives” the same way he spit out “love,” so quick it didn’t linger in his mouth. “I’m pretending they ain’t even here and you better do the same, Caroline.” He pronounced her name with two syllables, Care-line. She could see by the yellow glow of the night-light as he knelt there how his jaw clenched as he reeled off the rules. “You gotta ask Uncle Tim how much he weighs. Ask Patricia how come she looks and smells so much like her dogs. Don’t talk to the girl with the baby at all.”

  “CAROLINE.” HER MOTHER was smiling but Caroline knew from the tone in her voice that she was getting impatient. “And where did Danny run off to?”

  Caroline
gripped the banister and stepped slowly onto the second step. This was test number two and she knew that Danny was somewhere watching, at the corner of the house or up the pine tree where he kept his secret information. But even worse than that was the fact that Mrs. Hopper was watching, her big slick magazines hiding her bare stomach as she waved.

  “What have you done to your shirt?” Caroline’s mother smoothed the wrinkled collar. “And where are your shoes? Where is your brother?” Caroline shook her head, shrugged. Danny was watching, and if she messed up, he’d never let her be the maiden scout; she’d have to represent the posse of white men for the rest of her life. Mrs. Hopper had her eyes closed now but that didn’t mean anything. She could cast a hex any old time.

  “My, my, grown like a weed,” Uncle Tim said and shook his head. “You’re a cute little boy now aren’t you?” They all laughed and Caroline stared at him, reached down to her hip where very soon she’d have her own tomahawk.

  “Don’t tease her. She’s a pretty thing. Got hair like us, Jimmy.” Aunt Patricia patted Caroline’s father on the arm and then she stepped closer, her arms swooping like a great white hawk as she caught Caroline in a cloud of highsmelling flea powder. Caroline pulled and twisted away before the Great White Hawk could begin to slobber.

  “Caroline, can’t you say something?” her mother asked and she nodded and again touched the place her weapon would hang at her side.

  “You remember Cousin Randy.”

  The tall one, long legs like a posse rider and hair hanging to his shoulders, stepped forward. He wore his hair long and beads around his neck to trick the real Indian Scouts. He had round black eyes.