Mudville

by Kurtis Scaletta

  We all say “Goodbye” and “Thanks” and “See you soon,” and eventually I grab my bags and climb over Shauna and out of the car. I hustle up the walk like it's a base path but still get pretty drenched.

  “I'm home!” I drop my bags by the door and use my hand to squeegee the water off my head. Then I step out of the foyer into the living room and stop dead in my tracks.

  There's a kid about my own age stretched out on the couch, watching television. He's wearing a flannel shirt and corduroy pants, even though it's over eighty degrees out. One of his loafers is held together with duct tape. He's tanner than anyone I've ever seen, and his hair hasn't been cut in a long time.

  So there's my dad's surprise, I think. I don't know what it means, though. Maybe some homeless people he knows are visiting from out of town?

  “Still raining?” the boy asks, seeing how wet I am.

  When I get a better look at him, I see his face is a mess of scar tissue on the right side. His ear is unnaturally pink, and I realize it's a fake one.

  “It's been raining for over twenty years,” I tell him. “It never stops.”

  “I know. I was kind of kidding.” So he's a comedian, too. I should ask him who's on first.

  “I'm Roy,” I tell him. “I live here.”

  “Hey. I'm Sturgis. I live here, too. As of about”—he looks at the clock on the cable box—“two and a half hours ago.”

  “Huh?”

  “I'm like a foster kid. Your dad didn't tell you about me?”

  “Nah, but it's good,” I say, as though I'm used to coming home and finding the living room strewn about with new siblings. “Where are you from?”

  “Between here and Sutton,” he says, which is funny. I don't think there is anything between here and Sutton.

  “So where's my dad?”

  “In the kitchen making dinner.”

  I shudder and know I'll miss the excellent camp food I've gotten used to.

  The kitchen looks like a small tornado has tried to make a spaghetti omelet. There's something boiling on the stove, and the counter is cluttered with open cans and dripping bowls. Our old orange Manx cat, Yogi, is licking a broken egg on the floor. He's a weird cat. We've had him since before I was born. He's probably about 112 in cat years.

  “Roy!” My dad gives me an awkward hug and gets some-thing sticky on my shirt. “Sorry I didn't hear you come in,” he says. “Hey, can you please get me the Dijon mustard and Tabasco?”

  I nudge Yogi aside to get the condiments out of the fridge while my father adds big chunks of Spam to the blender and pushes a button.

  “Did you meet Sturgis?” He spoons mustard and Tabasco into the mixture and gives the blender another spin. “He's only two months older than you, you know. You guys are practically twins.”

  “Yeah, I met him.”

  “Great. Hey, can you put those noodles in a baking dish?”

  “So what's the story with him anyway?”

  “The noodles, Roy! They're overcooking!”

  I pour the boiling contents of the pot into a colander to drain. When the steam clears, I see that it's manicotti tubes. I peel them apart and lay them out in the baking dish.

  “So what's going on?” I ask again.

  “Well, his mom passed away, and his dad … Well, you know about some kids’ dads, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Darn it, I was supposed to put tomato sauce on this.” My dad looks forlornly at his Spam manicotti. I hope he tosses the whole mess and sends out for a pizza instead. “Well, I'll put tomato soup on it. That'll be just as good.” He grabs a jar of Campbell's from the cupboard and dumps it over the manicotti.

  “Anyway, Sturgis was living with his grandma, but they decided she couldn't take care of him anymore. She could barely take care of herself anymore. Serious health problems. So now he's living with us.”

  “But when—when did you do all this? Like, sign up to be a foster dad?”

  “I didn't really mean to,” he explains. “I just asked about it, thinking … I don't know, that I could get information and see if we qualified, then you'd come back and we'd talk about it and see where it went.”

  “So why didn't you?”

  “I think once they have your name, you're in some kind of database. Like, if they have more kids than they have places, they go to that database and start making calls. Sturgis, he was an emergency situation. One more kid than they had any room for. So they called me out of the blue and asked me if I could do it for the time being.”

  “They didn't have anywhere else for him to go?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “So what would happen if you said no? Would he go to a homeless shelter? Or would he sleep on a cot in someone's office until they found a place for him?”

  “I don't know,” my dad admits. “Just drop it, okay? He is staying with us, so it doesn't matter.”

  “I was just wondering.” What does happen to kids no-body wants? I don't think there are orphanages anymore. “Do you know what happened to him? His ear and every-thing?”

  “It's a lucky kid who makes it through life whole. Hey, maybe you can get Sturgis settled a bit before dinner? We'll eat in about half an hour.”

  “Sure,” I tell him. “Um … where's he going to sleep?”

  “I thought your room?” He's looking at me closely, to see how I'll react. The fact is, I like having my own room, even if it's big enough for two. I don't really want to share. It's hard to hold it against a kid who's an emergency situation, though.

  “I'm just not ready to give up the home office,” my dad explains. “It's my only office.”

  “It's okay,” I tell him, acting like it's no big deal. “I have to go unpack anyway. I'll carve out a space for him among the stuff.”

  “You're a great kid, Roy.” He puts the pan in the oven and prepares to do something with a bag of frozen spinach and a can of mandarin oranges.

  “Darn it,” he says, looking in the fridge, “I'm out of Miracle Whip. Now how am I supposed to make the spinach salad?”

  I dump my clothes from camp into the hamper, then open the bottom dresser drawer, which is all sweaters and stuff, and pack them into the suitcase. I don't know what I'll do come winter if he's still here, but it'll do for now. I also clear out a shelf on the bookcase, just by moving things around. I have an extra bed in my room that buddies use when they stay over, so at least that's not a problem. Until one of my buddies wants to stay over, that is.

  I go into the living room when I'm done. Sturgis is still sprawled out on the couch, and Yogi is sprawled out on Sturgis, gingerly rubbing his nose on Sturgis's chin.

  “What happened to his tail?” Sturgis wants to know. Everybody asks that. Yogi doesn't have much of a tail—just a fuzzy little bump. Manx tails are just like that, but people who don't know much about cats think he met with an accident.

  “It's a lucky cat who makes it through life whole.” I usually tell company all about Manx cats when they ask, but maybe Sturgis will feel better thinking he's not the only one with a missing part.

  “He's nice. I never had a cat before.” He smiles at Yogi and scratches his cheeks until Yogi is all squinty-eyed and blissful.

  “So you want to unpack?”

  “Okay.” He gently nudges Yogi aside and gets up. I realize he's taller than me. I'm kind of tall myself, but Sturgis towers over me. It's because he has freakishly long legs, I think. He grabs a couple of department store bags from the corner. For a second, I think he's brought us presents, but then I see they're full of old clothes and stuff. Those paper bags are his luggage.

  “You can put your clothes in the bottom drawer,” I tell him as we go into the bedroom. “Let me know if you need another drawer. I can probably clear one out.” I probably can't, but I want to show off what a good host I am.

  “I'm good for now.” He shoves the bags back into a corner by his bed.

  “I cleared off a shelf, too.”

  “All right. Hey, what's all t
his?” He walks over to my side of the room and pokes at my trophies a bit. “Are you a star jock or something?”

  “I play baseball. They give out a lot of trophies.” I wish he wouldn't touch them, but I don't say anything.

  “How do you play baseball if it rains all the time?”

  “My buddy Steve and I used to play in Sutton Little League.”

  “You don't play anymore?”

  “Not in Sutton. Steve decided it was too much work, and his dad was my ride.”

  “You don't have room for any more trophies anyway,” he snorts.

  “Do you play?”

  “Nah, not really.” He seems fascinated by the trophies, though, touching them and reading the engravings until my father calls us in to dinner.

  I think of my father's cooking the same way I think of rain and school. I have to live with it, but I don't have to like it. The Spam manicotti does nothing to change my mind. Sturgis gobbles it right up, though. What's worse, he forks the whole mess into a mush and mixes it with the spinach, eating it with four or five slices of garlic bread and washing it all down with about a quart of milk.

  “You like that, eh, Stuey?” my dad asks.

  “It's okay,” Sturgis says through a mouthful of food. I figure he just hasn't had a meal in about two months.

  “So …” My dad rubs his hands expectantly. “Are you going to tell us about baseball camp? Did I hear something about a trophy?”

  “You know, they give out a lot of trophies.” I really don't want to come off as a bragger, especially in front of Sturgis. I don't even know if I like him yet, but I do want him to like me.

  The three of us lapse into a silence, and I wonder if any-one will tell me the whole story about how Sturgis got hurt, and how he became an emergency situation, and what happened to his parents, and why he doesn't have anybody else to take him in, and exactly how it became my problem. There's just the clattering of forks on plates, though.

  “I don't know what I'm going to do the rest of the summer,” I say instead. “Maybe play summer basketball? Do you play, Sturge?” I figure, with his height, he could be a natural.

  “Sturgis,” he corrects me. It's pretty formal for a guy who's crashing in my bedroom and uses paper bags for luggage. “I don't play basketball,” he adds.

  “Well,” says my dad, “I thought maybe you two could come to work with me anyway. I could use some help.”

  “Will we go up on the roofs?” I ask. Guys have to crawl around on high, wet, angled rooftops, assembling the frame of the rainproof sheeting, then attaching the sheeting to the frame. I think it would be pretty cool to do that kind of work.

  “We can't have you on the roof,” my dad says. “It's too dangerous. A strong wind can pick up a sheet of plastic and carry it off like a kite, and a grown man with it. I've seen it happen.”

  I've heard that story before. I used to imagine that man, doomed to sail high above the earth, shivering from the cold, lonely and hungry, clinging to the plastic sheet as if it was a magic carpet. Now I think my dad is making it up.

  Sturgis believes it, though. He's staring at him with his mouth agape. “I'll go up there if you want,” he says at last. “I'm a good climber.”

  “You'll be digging ditches for now—and I mean digging the old-fashioned way.”

  My dad once bought a machine to do it, but the muddy conditions made it hard to drive the thing. It was always getting stuck, and drivers were always crashing into fences and the sides of houses. So they went back to shovels and wheelbarrows.

  “Maybe over time you can work your way up, though,” he adds.

  “Work my way up!” Sturgis laughs and slaps the table. “Good one.” It's kind of a fake laugh, and I guess that he's trying to get in good with his new family. My dad just beams, though. He's found the perfect son: someone who likes his cooking and laughs at his jokes.

  “I'll clean up. You guys take it easy,” my dad offers after dinner, which is weird because usually I have to clean up.

  “By the way, Roy!” he shouts from the kitchen. “You have mail on the end table by the couch!”

  I go to the living room and find it. There's three issues of Sports Illustrated, one letter from St. James Academy, and a postcard from my mom. I sit down on the sofa to read the postcard and the letter. Yogi wanders over from the far side of the couch to sit in my lap.

  “Hey, buddy,” says Sturgis, coming into the room to sit on the other side of the sofa. He's talking to Yogi, not me. The cat goes back over and lets Sturgis pet him, sticking his butt up in the air the way he does when he's happy.

  The postcard is from Victory Field in Indianapolis. My mom is a flight attendant and never passes through a city with a baseball park without sending me a postcard.

  “Had a day off in Indy. It was raining, so I didn't see any baseball,” she's written on the back. “There's a zoo next door, and I saw giraffes. They are beautiful animals. Love, Mom.”

  “Giraffes are beautiful animals,” I tell Sturgis by way of conversation.

  “Giraffes are all right.”

  The letter is from the admissions guy at St. James Academy, in Sutton. I scan it quickly.

  “St. James needs to know if I'm going!” I shout to my dad.

  “I know!” he hollers back, over the crash and clanging of washing dishes.

  “It's this school in Sutton,” I tell Sturgis.

  “I know. I've heard of it.”

  “I'm supposed to go next year.” The Moundville school only goes through sixth grade. We're not even big enough anymore for a junior high school, let alone a senior high school.

  “You'll have to wear a uniform.”

  “Yeah, but they have great athletics. Their baseball team is one of the best in the state. It would be really good for me.”

  “Hey,” he says, looking up.

  My dad brings in a lopsided cake and sets it on the coffee table. He tried to put on the chocolate frosting while the cake was still hot, so it's half melted into a glaze.

  “I don't know how to do letters in frosting, so you have to pretend it says ‘Welcome Home, Roy and Sturgis.’”

  The cake is about as soft and moist as a hockey puck. I put a little mound of ice cream on my piece to soften it.

  “So, Sturgis,” my dad says, “do you want to tell Roy more about yourself?”

  Sturgis gives me a long, careful look. He's chewing his cake, and it takes him a while to finish chewing.

  “I'm a foster kid. You've probably seen TV movies about us.”

  “I don't know. Maybe one or two.”

  “Well, there you go.” He goes off down the hall to use the bathroom.

  “Hey, does Mom know about Sturgis?” I ask my dad. Since he's never technically divorced my mom, I wonder what she'd say, coming home and finding a whole new kid hanging around. Sure, she's been gone for four years—nearly five years, actually. Still, shouldn't she have a say? Now she's abandoned a whole nother kid she doesn't even know about.

  My dad looks kind of thoughtful, trying to figure out how to answer. “Sturgis is my, uh, my project,” he says at last. “Do you want some more cake?”

  I head to bed after Sunday Night Baseball and find Sturgis crashed on his bed, listening to his tape player and looking at one of my dad's books on landscaping. Yogi has knocked over one of his brown paper suitcases and is now nested in a pile of laundry.

  “You actually have a Walkman? Most everyone I know has an iPod or at least a CD player.”

  “Huh?” He lifts the headphone over his good ear.

  “Just saying the Astros beat the White Sox.” On second thought, the whole bit about iPods sounds obnoxious.

  “Good for them.” He turns off the player. “There's nothing in here about the stuff we're going to be doing.” He tosses the book on the nightstand with a resounding whomp.

  “That's because my dad invented it.”

  “No kidding?”

  I tell him the whole story: A year or so after it started rainin
g, my dad realized there was a profit in it. At first, it was an odd job, like mowing lawns. He went door to door, offering to cover people's roofs with plastic. He'd just lay it out flat and tie the corners to the eaves. A few customers lost shingles and drainpipes when strong winds pulled on the sheets, though, so my dad read engineering books and did experiments at home and came up with a better way of doing things. So was born the Rain Redirection System. He got a patent for it and everything.

  “Wow. Are you guys rich?” Sturgis asks.

  “There's not many places that need that much protection from rain. He does okay, though.”

  “Yeah.” He looks around, maybe thinking about our house and stuff. Maybe, compared to him, we are rich.

  He gets up and strips down to his undies. Before he flicks off the light and gets into bed, I see more scars along his right side, from his shoulder down to his thigh.

  “My dad used to be a professional baseball player,” he says suddenly.

  “Really?” I wonder if he's making it up. “So are you guys rich?” I don't see how he could be, but you never know.

  “That was a long time ago and not for very long,” he ex-plains.

  I'm curious to know more, but he's already asleep, snoring along with the familiar rhythm of rain splashing down on the plastic-covered roof.

  We go to the work site bright and early the next morning. Okay, it's not exactly bright—just early. Sturgis and I are both wearing the candy-apple-red raincoats everyone wears when they work for my dad. They have his company logo on the back, silk-screened in gold.

  My dad's the only one with an umbrella instead of a rain-coat. Then again, my dad's the only one wearing a suit. He drives around a lot, meeting customers and suppliers and so on. If he wore a raincoat, those people wouldn't even know that he was wearing a suit.

  “Who lives here?” Sturgis wonders, looking up at the house in awe. It's more like a mansion, but it's pretty run-down.

  “Nobody lives here. It's being flipped,” my dad explains. It's what my dad calls a derelict home—one that was abandoned by its owners in the rain. Lately, some real estate guys have been buying up the derelict houses, fixing them up, and selling them. More and more people from Sutton are buying houses here because they're relatively cheap.