Aubrey nodded, grinning at him. “You know what that means?”
Mick shrugged, shook his head. “Never done anything like this before.”
“The thing is, you submit up to six pictures and a panel of judges goes through them with an extremely critical eye. If you’re lucky, they pick one of your photos. I’ve had one of mine selected on three different occasions—out of nine shows. One year they picked two of mine, but in all the years I’ve been doing this they’ve never taken three. It means they like your work. A lot.”
* * *
Walking back up the dirt road toward home he felt like his feet weren’t touching the ground. Nothing like this had ever happened to him, and it felt like he was living somebody else’s life. He couldn’t wait for Layne to get home so he’d have somebody to brag to, but his kids had a way of bringing him back to earth. Ben found a sailfrog on the side of the road, and Mick showed him how to throw it.
It was a good, big sailfrog, nice and flat from being run over by a thousand cars, parched hard and dry by the summer sun. In Mick’s day they played with sailfrogs all the time; it was sort of a country boy’s Frisbee. Toad and Ben got the hang of it right away and were having a blast flinging that thing back and forth across the road, but the first time Mick turned his back he heard both of them yelling at Dylan. What he saw when he turned around made him scream.
“DYLAN!! DO NOT BITE THE SAILFROG!!”
Dylan got his feelings hurt and started bawling, so Mick had to carry him on his shoulders the rest of the way home, wondering how his life had come to such a place. He felt like he was losing his mind. For years he’d commanded the respect of grown men in a trade where such respect wasn’t easy to come by. Now he heard himself yelling things no man in his right mind should hear coming from his own mouth, and booming out these absurdities with all the conviction of Winston Churchill getting up volunteers for Dunkirk. He walked home fuming, spitting and muttering, replaying in his mind all the things he’d heard himself shout.
“Those are NOT Frisbees, they’re compact discs!”
“You agreed to eat seven green beans, and you will have NO snack until you have eaten SEVEN GREEN BEANS!”
“How many times do I have to tell you, you will not put jelly-toast in the VCR, you will not put furniture in the pool, and you will never, ever, ever, ever again put tadpoles in the blender!!”
Now he could add a new gem to the list.
Layne got home from work while he was putting supper on the table. He had calmed down by then and couldn’t stop thinking about what Aubrey had told him. He was proud as a puppy when he broke the news to Layne about getting three of his pictures picked for the show. She was pleased at first, although she knew even less than Mick about photography and juried shows and what it all meant. But then Toad tugged on her arm.
“Dylan bit a sailfrog,” she said. She just ran it right out there, the little tattletale. She was kind of happy about it.
“Sailfrog?” Layne gave him a sideways glance.
Bacteriology was a major issue with Layne. New rules concerning the biting of sailfrogs dominated the dinner conversation while Mick’s photography show faded into obscurity.
28
* * *
Of shoes and ships.
HE WAS out cutting grass when Layne heard the lawnmower running and decided it would be a good time to have a chat. It had always seemed to Mick that she preferred to talk to him when the vacuum cleaner was running or she was at the other end of the house. They would sit in the same room for two hours while she read a book and he watched a ball game, with neither of them saying a word. But then she’d lay her book down, get up, go all the way back to the bedroom and start talking to him in a normal tone of voice. A minute later, she’d come back down to the den and ask why he didn’t answer her. She told people he was hard of hearing.
She fell in step beside him while he pushed the mower.
“Have you been washing my”—she ducked as the lawnmower plucked a blue plastic toy from the lawn and whisked it past her head—“things?” she screamed over the roar of the mower.
He shook his head. He never touched the hamper in the center of the closet. It was forbidden.
“Well, some of my underwear is—”
She yelped and hopped sideways as the mower fired a piece of orange plastic between her feet. Mick loosely calculated that they owned roughly four tons of assorted, unidentifiable, brightly colored plastic doodads, each a part of some long-forgotten plastic doodad set. Hap said their front yard looked like a Fisher-Price cargo plane crashed in it. The kids couldn’t help it; it was in their genes—they had to take everything apart. And scatter the parts. Zorf the Alien Ninja Leprechaun could be found naked, armless, and buried head down in the sandbox, his battle-axe stuffed between the couch cushions, and his hauberk stopping up the downspout on the southeast corner of the house.
“—missing!” she shouted.
The lawnmower roared on for a few more feet before it clanged and clattered as if it had sucked up a pipe wrench and ground abruptly to a stop. Mick shoved the mower out of the way, bent down and pulled something from the grass.
“I wondered where this got to,” he said, wiping off his pipe wrench. He nodded toward the mower. “If I find your bloomers out here they aren’t likely to be worth much.”
“It’s not just that,” she said, gripping his forearm with that worried look on her face. “A couple of my shoes are gone, and there are other things missing. Weird things—a toilet brush, the top to the humidifier, one of my new red shoes. I’m just afraid our little friend is back.”
She meant biker boy, the burglar-in-training. But what would he want with a toilet brush? Mick couldn’t picture him breaking into somebody’s house and cleaning their toilet.
“Any cash missing?” he asked.
“No.”
“Diamond stud earrings?”
She shook her head.
“Cartoon videos, superhero action figures?”
“There’s no way to know for sure without an exhaustive inventory, but I don’t think so.”
“Then it’s not him. We need to look closer to home. The kids are probably just gathering parts to build a spaceship or something.”
“My underwear?”
He shrugged. “Bungee-launched spaceship?”
* * *
Over the next few days the pilfering increased. When the spark-plug wire from the mower disappeared Mick began to suspect Andy, even though he didn’t find the wire next to the pool. When one of his rankest old tennis shoes went AWOL Mick was sure Andy was the culprit since he’d always shown a fondness for the smell. The kids swore they were innocent, and for once he believed them, so the four of them mounted a massive search for the missing items. They moved mountains and looked under beds. They searched the yard, the garage, Hap’s pond, the doghouse and the chicken house.
“The goat might have ate that stuff,” Toad said. “He eats everything.”
This was true. He even ate the junipers. “But the goat hasn’t been in the house, as far as I know,” Mick told her. The goat left telltale signs everywhere he went.
They found nothing. No trace of the missing items.
Ben talked about wormholes in the fabric of time and space, doors to other dimensions. They cornered Andy in the garage and gave him the third degree, but he wouldn’t talk. He just grinned. He was a tough dog. He only had one weakness:
He was terrified of thunder and lightning.
When the storm first rumbled in from the east the hardwoods slapped each other’s shoulders, the light dimmed to a dusky yellow and the temperature nosedived. Mick stopped for a minute by the sliding glass door and watched Andy pace back and forth on the deck, tail tucked, nervous as a cockroach at Riverdance. Their eyes met. The dog pleaded.
“No,” Mick whispered. “You can’t come in. You have a doghouse—go there. Thief.”
Fat chance. Mick played computer games with the kids and forgot about the dog. Whe
n it rained they always watched movies and played games. There was this one game they played on the computer where they fought off an invasion and shot a lot of aliens. Dylan loved it. He’d sit on Mick’s lap and work the Fire button while Mick did all the complicated moving and dodging. What Dylan liked best were the lunatics running around waving their arms and yelling a lot of nonsense.
“They’re everywhere!”
“KILL ME!”
“I’m out of ammo!”
And Dylan’s personal favorite “Frog less a pin core!”
It was complete nonsense, but the kids got a huge kick out of it. Dylan started mimicking the lunatic lines first, but pretty soon they were all doing it. Mick would be putting clothes in the washer when, from out by the pool, he’d hear, “Kill me!” Then an answering shout would come from the backyard, “I’m out of ammo!”
Then Dylan would chime in, “Frog less a pin core!”
“We didn’t have all this stuff when I was a kid,” Mick once told them.
“All what stuff?” Ben asked.
“Computers, video games, DVD players.”
Ben’s eyes went wide. “What did you do?”
“We played outside. We stayed outside till dark every night, and all day Saturday.” It was true. He told them all about how there were always lots of kids outside back in the olden days, but they had to invent things to do. They played baseball every day until cold weather set in, then switched to football. He could remember wearing the cover off of a baseball, then wrapping it with electrical tape to keep the string from unraveling, duct-taping a cracked wooden bat, sharing gloves, using rocks for bases.
They couldn’t imagine such a world. He tried, but he knew for a fact that no child of his would ever understand what he was talking about when he told them how highly prized was a brand-new baseball. They looked at him like he was crazy, but there was no doubt in his mind it was their loss. There was a golden sense of community in those days—a time when kids could play outside without parents having to watch for predators.
“Did your dad teach you to play ball?” Ben asked, and a memory came flooding back. It hit him like a brick—the memory of his father’s face, laughing. Mick could hear his actual voice in his head, though he hadn’t heard it in years.
“Catch it in the pocket, son. You have to learn to use the pocket.”
He remembered very clearly the first time he caught the ball in the pocket of the glove—how it felt and how satisfying it was. It triggered something inside Mick the child, like a light coming on. He had loved baseball ever since, and way down deep some part of him knew that he loved baseball because his father loved baseball. It was the only good memory Mick had of him. The only clear one. Mick wasn’t afraid of his father’s hands so long as he had a ball and glove in them.
“Yeah,” Mick said, nodding slowly. “He did. My dad taught me to play.”
* * *
The thunderstorm swept through in great rolling waves so thick Mick couldn’t see more than fifty feet in any direction. At the height of the storm lightning shattered the woods close to the house a dozen times, and only then, with a stab of regret, did Mick remember about the dog. He went to the picture window in the den because it commanded a wide view of the backyard, but he couldn’t see Andy anywhere. He could see the goat curled up asleep on the laying shelf in the henhouse, and he could see a chicken’s behind poking out the door of the doghouse. All was right with the world, except he couldn’t see Andy anywhere. The doghouse and the chicken house were the only safe, dry places in the whole backyard—well, except for the tree house.
He stood by the picture window staring out at the playhouse, up there on its stilts. Such a waste. The kids never played there. Mick still thought it looked like a pirate ship with all those timbers and ropes, the heavy-duty bolts and sixteen-penny galvanized nails, the camouflaged roof, and . . . the child-size door with a dog’s nose sticking out of it. . . .
* * *
They found all the missing stuff up there—the shoes, the spark-plug wire, Layne’s underwear, the top to the humidifier. He was pretty sure Andy ate the toilet brush. When he asked Ben why he hadn’t noticed the mound of unusual chew toys the dog had accumulated, he just shrugged.
“I haven’t been up here in months,” he said. “There’s no TV.”
Mick wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it himself. Andy had figured out how to climb a ladder. He must have decided that he liked the look of the tree house, sized up the ladder and thought, “I can do this.” So he did. It was no easy climb, either—six feet high and practically straight up, with rungs of three-quarter pipe.
While Mick and the kids were up there, they called Andy. He was sitting in the sandbox watching them, wagging that big otter tail. He never hesitated, he just hooked his shoulders into the ladder, scrabbled for a hold with his back feet and up he came, all by himself. When he was ready to come down he used the sliding board.
Mick loved that dog. At least he had good taste in housing.
Late that night Layne woke him up because she heard a noise.
“I think there’s somebody on the roof,” she whispered.
“It’s probably just the dog,” Mick muttered. “Go back to sleep.”
29
* * *
The show.
ARTS Clayton held the photography show on the weekend of July 4th. Layne dressed Mick in a new suit and made him put on a tie. She said he needed to look professional. She even made the kids dress up, and they didn’t like it a bit. They had an unwritten law about not dressing up in the summertime, but she insisted that they attend. In Layne’s mind, Arts Clayton was having a photography show so people could see pictures of her kids.
They picked up Aubrey, and on the way to the gallery he told Mick what to expect.
“The panel of judges probably won’t be there today,” he said. “They choose the winners when nobody’s around. Today is the culmination of that whole process—the awards ceremony where they announce the winners.”
“Is Daddy gonna win?” Toad asked from the back seat.
Aubrey chuckled. “Well, I suppose anything’s possible.”
“Yeah, right,” Mick said. He still didn’t share Aubrey’s confidence.
“Don’t sell yourself short, Mick. We already know the judges liked your style. Still, it’s good not to get your hopes up—there are some very good photographers out there. I’ve been getting my hopes up for years and so far I’ve only got two honorable mentions. Just relax and keep in mind this isn’t the big leagues. It’s not the High Museum, it’s only a small-town juried show. There are hundreds of these around the country every year. Think of it as a good place to test your mettle, to see how your work stacks up against professionals. A good place to start. Plus, there will be a lot of art patrons at the show. If you’re lucky, maybe you can sell a few prints. Sometimes they go for two or three hundred dollars.”
“Apiece?” This was surprising. He really didn’t expect to win anything, but if he could come away with a little money in his pocket he figured the trip might be worth it after all. Every now and then it still hit him that apart from the occasional side job he wasn’t bringing home a paycheck.
“Yes, apiece,” Aubrey answered, laughing. “And you never know what else might happen. I’ve heard stories about people from the big museums nosing around these little shows looking for local talent. I’ve even known people who got magazine contracts out of events like this one.”
* * *
The gallery was in a brick building on Main Street in Jonesboro, a typical old southern town whose main claim to fame was its connection with Gone With the Wind. Anybody in town could tell you, and would if you stood still long enough, about the love affair between Doc Holliday and his cousin, who spurned him and ran off to a convent. She was the real-life inspiration for Melly in the novel. The building housing the gallery had actually been rebuilt on the original foundation after Sherman burned it. Down in the basement there were still
some hand-hewn beams with charred places on them. In Jonesboro, nobody ever forgot “the war of northern aggression.”
The curator, a matronly lady named Lillian, spotted Aubrey at the reception desk as soon as they came in, and rushed over to say hello. She was nice, but she made the mistake of guiding all three of the kids to a side room and showing them a table loaded with cookies and punch.
Aubrey dragged Mick and Layne around introducing them to people for a while. There were clusters of folks in suits and Sunday dresses, standing around sipping punch from little crystal cups and chatting politely. It made Mick nervous. He couldn’t recall ever in his life standing around in a crowd like this one, chatting politely. He wasn’t quite sure how to go about it so he kept quiet, smiled, nodded a lot, and followed Layne’s lead. She seemed to be enjoying herself. Mick kept looking over his shoulder to see what the kids were up to.
There were pictures hung around the walls, each one given its own space and lighting. In keeping with the slightly rustic Civil War theme of the town, they had left the old brick walls bare and the rafters exposed. Rows of pinpoint track lights accented the photos on display without drawing attention to the lights themselves. Mick’s three pictures, which Aubrey had developed and matted and framed just for the show, had been hung one above the other on one of the freestanding walls in the middle of the floor. Aubrey had doctored the final prints to make them even better—bringing up the background details without losing the contrast or dimming the focal point. They looked fantastic.
The gallery had even made up a nice little card for each photo, with the title and a byline. Mick stood there for a long time just admiring the card next to the picture of Toad.
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