He wore a long ponytail, which I guess he grew what with his official, given name. Sometimes Pony Robbins got drunk and said, “I’m glad my daddy didn’t name me Mohawk or Fu Manchu. I’m glad my parents didn’t name me Beehive or Bob.” Pony said, “You just missed Eddie and Arnold.”
“There’s a little kid next door who’s lost his parents. You know anybody around here named Wyatt Speight?”
Pony shook his head. “Only locals and regulars today. You can pretty much tell if an out-of-Calloustowner’s been in here by examining the bottom of this.” He held up an empty tip jar. He handed me a glass of draft beer. “You look like you seen a goat,” Pony said. He always told people how a goat’s eyes scared him more than a wisp of specter crossing an empty street, say from the old florist’s place over to the bar.
I drank my beer, ordered another, and placed a five-dollar bill on the bar. “I’ll be right back,” I said, and went to the diner and called out, “Wyatt Speight Sr.?” then repeated the process up and down the street, sticking my head in storefronts.
Nothing.
Somebody at Calloustown Diner said, “Wyatt Earp” immediately after my summons, evidently thinking I wanted to start up a bastardized game of word association.
When I returned to the Side Pocket fifteen or twenty minutes later, Carol and Dottie stood beside my empty stool. They had Wyatt Speight Jr. with them. The kid had a piece of yarn tied to his wrist, which, I learned later, originated from a potholder Dottie had knitted. My wife held the other end of the yarn.
“I told her you weren’t in here,” Pony said, “but she recognized the five-dollar bill you left.”
I thought he joked. I said, “No one showed up at the pet store? We need to call the police.” To Wyatt I said, “Did someone drop you off and leave you? Did you hit your head? Do you know your address?”
Pony said, “Your wife goes through your wallet and memorizes numbers on the bills. Then she can go to places you say you haven’t been and trade money from the register in order to look through all the serials.”
Dottie said, “How old are you, Wyatt Speight Jr.?”
He said, “Five and a half.”
“Hey, didn’t you have a miscarriage five years and eight months ago, Carol?” Dottie stomped one foot down and opened her mouth wide. “If you ask me, this is the Lord’s way of giving you the baby back. And that’s how good Jesus is! He’s saved you from dirty diapers, vaccinations, a breast pump if you so chose that option, potty training. The list goes on! Jesus probably saved y’all’ses marriage, seeing as old Duane here didn’t have to lie and sneak out of the house when he couldn’t take the kid howling from colic anymore. Jesus saved you a fortune in having to buy gripe water.”
I looked at Carol, hoping she’d be able to read my eyes, with which I tried to say two things: “We need to ditch Dottie somehow,” and “Do you really go through my wallet?”
Wyatt Speight Jr. said, “Are you my new mommy?” Maybe he had some kind of wall-eye problem, but he appeared to be asking Pony.
_______
Out of everyone involved, Spence—who may or may not have bought and sold cobras, inland taipans, black mambas, bushmasters, cottonmouths, and diamondbacks to questionable breeders and collectors—called up the sheriff’s department and the Department of Social Services to report the situation. When Deputy Leonard Marder showed up to ask questions, we left the bar and returned to the pet store in case anyone—namely the kid and me—needed to reenact the scene.
We let Spence give the appropriate answers. In a place like Calloustown, die-cutters were considered much more reliable than housepainters, roofers, or pulpwood drivers, but not shopkeepers. There were a number of occasions wherein I allowed someone else to talk to an authority figure, mainly because Die-Co came out Dyke-o to most people’s ears, and a cop or meter reader might be prejudiced immediately.
“What time did you first notice the boy?” Marder asked.
“I don’t know. What time was it, Duane?”
Dottie said, “I come over at noon.”
My wife said to Dottie, “Let’s let them figure it out. Let’s go get some coffee.” I don’t know if I said, “Thank you, Carol, thank you,” audibly. To Marder I said, “Yeah, I’d say about noon.”
The kid said, “I had Cocoa Puffs for breakfast.”
I didn’t think anything of the statement, but Deputy Marder might’ve had better training than I understood. He said, “So you’re not from Calloustown, are you? We don’t sell Cocoa Puffs around here.”
I said, “What the hell’s gripe water? Dottie—the woman who just left with my wife—said something earlier about babies needing gripe water.”
Leonard Marder said, “Where you been, Duane? I thought you and your buddies took your bourbon with gripe water. Go on over to the Bag ’n Pay and look in the formula section. Or in Mixers.”
He seemed unnecessarily adamant about his directive. Maybe I breeched the law enforcement officer/witness protocol.
Spence said, “Every minute counts, I’m thinking.”
Wyatt Speight Jr. said, slowly, a series of numbers. It wasn’t little-kid-trying-to-count numbers, either. He didn’t go, “One, two, three, eight, fifty!” He counted out seven digits, which Leonard Marder wrote down while I concentrated on a defense strategy, seeing as that’s how I ran my life daily with Carol and my boss.
Spence said, “You can use my phone here.”
Leonard Marder said, “I don’t know why they went and got us all cell phones. Got to drive out of the county to get a proper and reliable signal.”
I learned later, on Monday, that everything worked out for little Wyatt Speight Jr. and his parents. There had been some disharmony in the family, evidently, and Wyatt Sr.’s father-in-law tried to scare his daughter. The old man kidnapped young Wyatt, young Wyatt escaped, and his grandfather chickened out and drove two counties away. Was he going to ask for ransom money? Did he plan on reinventing his life elsewhere, complete with very young son? Eventually, I felt certain, Leonard Marder or the Department of Social Services caseworker or a minister would recognize the entire story.
My wife and I had returned home without saying much to each other. I don’t want to say there was a tension between us, but something caused us both, I felt sure, to feel a need to be alone and with one another simultaneously. Perhaps it was guilt—I beat myself up for owning seed that couldn’t grip for more than a month, and I got that Carol, too, underwent a sense of hopelessness in regards to our ever filling the extra bedroom with a crib, mobile, and stuffed animals reminiscent of what thrived in tiny cages at Southern Exotic Pets.
Carol sat down in the den and tried to teach herself how to knit.
I stared at her more often than not for the rest of the weekend, in hopes that should words come out of my mouth I wouldn’t say something that might make her cry.
We didn’t answer the telephone when a television news reporter called from fifty miles away. I kept the TV tuned to the Weather Channel and concentrated on a documentary about Hurricane Hugo, which had affected Calloustown peripherally twenty years earlier. Carol and I didn’t answer the phone when a newspaper reporter called, or when Dottie called, or even when Wyatt Speight Sr. called and left a message of gratitude.
I said to my wife, “We would make the best parents ever, more than likely.”
Carol’s needles clacked out a noise that—if I remembered rudimentary Morse code well enough from back in Boy Scouts—spelled out either S-O-S or S-O-N.
Like I said, I learned the entire story on Monday. I had called in sick and figured it safe to go buy a newspaper to check out both Saturday and Sunday’s scores.
I read where Wyatt Speight’s father promised his son that corn snake, as it ended up. And right there on page 2A under Local News the father mentioned how his son really wanted a “pine gator,” but a snake would have to do, after this ordeal. He said, “I want to thank all the people who helped bring my boy home,” and said that he wouldn’t be pre
ssing charges against his father-in-law, a man who “fought some demons.” Evidently the grandfather thought Wyatt Jr. liked dinosaurs more than snakes, thus the “Rex” ploy.
My wife and I ate Alpha-Bits for supper that night, as we had most nights, spelling out words to each other and waiting without complaint.
Is There Anything Wrong with Happier Times?
Harold Lumley needed to check out his mother’s reported lapses in judgment. He had received a call from the executive director of the Calloustown Community Center—a place where Ruth Lumley had volunteered for the past six years reading to the children of migrants, offering English lessons to the workers, and basically being a joyful person in a variety of capacities. She’d refereed Liga Pequeña basketball games up until her hip replacement surgery and had taught a roomful of Latina women how to cook a number of Southern staples when it came to funeral foods, from potato salad to chicken pot pie. Ruth Lumley’d conducted seminars on how to open bank accounts, pass the DMV’s written test, and talk to a child’s teacher without having the teacher feel threatened. She had offered baton-twirling lessons so the little girls could one day feel good about themselves as majorettes.
The woman—Ms. Pickens? Ms. Pickering?—had told Harold over the phone that, although she didn’t want to pry into the Lumley family’s way of treating their elderly relatives, perhaps he should drive down and observe his mother’s recent peculiarities. She said, “I don’t want to judge you or nothing, but I believe your momma might be getting to that point where a retirement facility’s the best option. When they start acting peculiar, it’s a sign. I don’t know for sure, but she seems to have befriended some puppets, and turned her back on the rest of us.”
Harold cradled the phone to his ear. He needed to talk to his franchise owner about firing three people—one for ineptitude, one for stealing herbal Viagra, one for sexual harassment. He managed a place called Other Medicine—a small chain, a constant for Buddhists and Unitarians distrustful of pharmaceutical companies and reassured by the OM in the store’s name. “Can you be more specific?” Harold asked the woman. “Say your name again?”
“This is Berta Parks. I’m the executive director of the Calloustown Community Center down in Calloustown.”
Harold thought, “How did I get Pickens or Pickering out of this? Maybe I’m the one who needs to be reported for dementia.” He thought, “Wasn’t the old Miss America master of ceremonies named Bert Parks—man, how much crap did this woman get for her name?” He said, “Is my mother all right?”
Harold felt guilty about not visiting more often. Evidently his brother, Kenny, visited her two or three times a week. But with a divorce, two high school kids on weekends, and an ever-present rotation of minimum wage–earning high school graduates who confused Niacin with acai, vitamin B with bee pollen, and nickels with quarters, it seemed as though he spent eighteen hours a day outside of his own apartment. He brought his mother up for every other Christmas, for every other birthday. “I can’t come down to spend two or three days in Calloustown,” he used to say. “First off, it sends me into depression and flashbacks of growing up there. Two, I’d get stolen blind if I left someone else in charge of the store.”
To Berta Parks he said, “Okay. Okay. I talk to my mother all the time—almost daily—and she doesn’t sound any different to me. Kenny says she’s doing well, too.”
He’d not spoken to Kenny, who lived in Calloustown still after taking over their father’s extermination business, since he didn’t know when. Berta Parks said, “The elderly find ways of masking their frailties and insecurities. They find ways to adapt, you know. If you start talking to them about an open wound on their head, they can find a way to veer the conversation into something that happened to them in 1945 when open wounds were all the rage.”
Ever the salesman, Harold said, “I can get you some ginseng, gingko biloba, gotu kola, yerba mate, and rhodiola rosea if you think it would be a good idea to have some on hand for any of the older people who frequent the community center. These are all fine herbal supplements. They’re not necessarily approved by the FDA, but we all know the FDA is holding back the American public when it comes to valid, non-traditional antidotes to some of the more common ailments from which the public suffers these days. In our fast-paced modern world.” He had taken a community college public speaking course, and the instructor had advised everyone to use “fast-paced modern world” whenever possible.
Berta Parks said, “I’m just saying. I’ve been taking notes, and I’m about to start tape-recording some of the things that your momma’s saying. I tried to call your brother, but he got all choked up and said he couldn’t deal with it. He also said he had enough going on what with the field rat infestation we got going all over here.”
Harold tried to imagine a plague of rats overtaking the Calloustown Community Center, or Tiers of Joy Bakery, or Worm’s Bar, or the clapboard house where he grew up. He could imagine the fear that must have consumed a dwindling population on its way to attaining ghost-town status, and could smell the ammonia of a rat-infested abode, seeing as a teenager he’d been forced to exterminate with his long-deceased father. He envisioned his mother sitting in that La-Z-Boy chair in front of the TV—maybe one of those competitive cooking shows airing, or a Green Acres marathon—with rats flitting back and forth unperturbed.
“What’s she doing that’s so peculiar?” he asked Berta Parks. “I mean, Jesus, old people—sometimes they finally realize they can say anything they want to say. I hope I get to that point. I want to get to the point where I can look a customer in the eye and say, ‘No amount of milk thistle is going to heal that enlarged liver of yours, ma’am.’ You know what I mean?”
“I might as well go ahead and get to the point,” Berta Parks said. “You can do what you will with it. Let me say right off that we appreciate the hours and hours Ms. Lumley’s put in at the community center as a volunteer. She’s done more than anyone else around here. That being said, she’s started using a lot of profanity that we think is unnecessary. Somewhere along the line she became convinced that the little Mexican children should hear Br’er Rabbit stories in order to understand English better—you know those stories by Uncle Remus?—but she keeps adding all these curse words in between that aren’t part of the original stories.”
Harold didn’t hear, exactly, all of Ms. Parks’s complaint. He got stuck on the “that being said” part, which was another thing his community college public speaking instructor advised using whenever possible. Harold wondered if Berta Parks might’ve been in the same class he took. He said to her, “I remember those old Br’er Rabbit stories. We used to have some kind of storyteller woman show up and tell those stories to us back at Calloustown Elementary. Something about Br’er Rabbit living in the briars all his life. Or Br’er Rabbit going down into a well, stuff like that.”
“Uh-huh. But you probably don’t remember Br’er Rabbit saying stuff like, ‘I’mo blank your blank sister if’n you don’t get that blank tar baby outta my blank field of vision, you son of a blank.’ Ms. Lumley’s saying those kinds of things to the little Mexican children. We have come to believe that—illegal immigrants or not—they don’t deserve such lessons.”
Harold said, “Oh come on now. Are you sure? Sometimes my mother has a speech impediment.” He tried to think back to when she ever said a curse word. He said, “Well that doesn’t sound all that great. At least Spanish-speaking muchachos might not understand what she’s saying!”
“Like I said,” Berta Parks said, “it’s what we have before us. We just think it would be good if you could talk some sense into her, or see if there’s a better place for her to be.”
“I understand. Okay,” Harold said. He thought about how he’d not fire anyone today. He thought about how he probably needed to visit his brother, too, if his car could make it through a roadblock of vermin on the outskirts of Calloustown.
Ruth Lumley’s car isn’t in the carport, and she’s not home. The side door�
��s locked, and Harold finds her extra key hidden in the same spot where his parents kept it when he grew up: in a conch shell sitting atop a clay flowerpot filled with playground sand, previously used as an outdoor ashtray when Mr. Lumley held his annual “I Exterminated You” BBQ for the year’s clients. Harold has thought often about how, in a strange way, he became interested in herbs and vitamins due to these yearly fetes, how in between sneaking drinks from the bar he thought of how all these people would one day suffer from the effects of even the lesser pesticides and insecticides his father sprayed beneath their abodes and how one day they might be in need of something like detoxifying herbs such as burdock and dandelion root.
“Why even lock the house?” Harold thinks. “Who would break in here?”
He unlocks the door and finds the familiar smell of his childhood: Pine-Sol, boiled cabbage, cigarettes, Pledge, coffee grounds. He would think something like, “My mother hasn’t changed whatsoever,” but he finds himself mesmerized and bombarded with what she’s hung on the kitchen, then the den, walls. Ruth Lumley has, evidently, joined the computer age and—addicted to eBay—bought every available eight-by-ten promotional photo of TV and motion picture animal stars. Harold looks up at the nicely framed pictures of Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Flipper, Gentle Ben the bear, Trigger, the Lone Ranger’s horse Silver, that Jack Russell terrier Eddie from Frasier, Zorro’s black stallion Toronado, Clarence the cross-eyed lion from Daktari, and Festus’s mule. He walks into the den to find some of those same photos, plus ones of Tonto’s horse Scout, Fred the cockatoo from Baretta, the fake shark from Jaws, Willy the Orca, a bundle of rats from Willard, and a snake from one of the snake movies that Harold doesn’t know. She has three photos of Duke the bloodhound.
Calloustown Page 18