by Ann Pancake
Started my onions in the skillet next the taters, and they said the boys was a-waiting for theirs, couldn’t have known how this family hunts. Because most people these days still-hunt, which would have made the Ryan alone, but this bunch did it the old way, drive and watch, which meant there was all kind of family along that them boys didn’t expect. Now Frankie, Bunk’s boy, was a-stepping out his coveralls, and he drop-spilled a whole box of cartridges on the floor, and if that didn’t rattle em higher. They was big men, I tell you, they got fatter as they went the generations down. They was bear-chested and bullheaded and they knowed more about guns than they did people, woods, or sense. My daddy talked good, walked tall, stood right alongside Franklin even if he never did own not one acre of land. But Chester, he told me, you watch his boys, and that was before the grands come along, and long before the greats.
Now Bunk’d got up, he was trying to talk sense to the younger ones, his brother Gordon was, too. Me with my back to em, moving onions, moving taters, I was hearing more than I could see and smelling more than either. The heat of em was beading water on the winders, water a-starting to drip, and it’d already come to me I was smelling em when before I couldn’t, but then it come to me that I couldn’t before, because before, they’d smelled like me. I flopped a liver out a bread bag and onto the heat, stepped back when the bacon grease popped high.
“Oh, he won’t say nothing.”
And there it was. Me the only one not related by marriage or blood.
“Course he won’t say nothing, but he can still tell!” Hothead Rusty talking, even fireder up than usual with the Ryan being his.
“You know what I mean,” that was Bunk again, we’d come up together, him just two years younger. But although Bunk had always wanted different, wanted us to be like Franklin and Daddy, me and Bunk could never be.
“Well, we got to know for sure, and he’s got to keep it straight,” another grandson, I couldn’t tell which, but I could hear the walleye scare of his eyes.
“Hell, I don’t even know if he can remember something for that long,” and one or two snickered despite everything else.
“He’s ever bit as bright as any one of you!” That was Kenny, the third and last son. I saw how the liver was colored like the boy’s shivery lips, jerking in the pan. Like its nerves not yet shut down.
Then somebody’s chair legs went a-scudding crosst the boards, and “Make em write it down!” and then they was thrusting for paper. Slamming through kitchen drawers and outturning dirty pockets, and they ripped off part of the tater bag, but decided that was too small. Bunk fell back into the chair, I seed him. I seed his gray face spider-held in his hands. My back still to em, water dribbling down the winder insides, and guess drug dealin’ and deer huntin’ don’t mix too good, I wanted to say, but never did.
Finally one fished a doughnut box out the garbage, and another grandson took a knife to it, and that gave them some room. Somebody grabbed my arm, “Write it down!” and I heard my spatula hit the floor. He turned me around, and then I seed them all, but their faces had done run away, they was stubble, they was glasses, they was orange and camouflage caps, and I could feel in his arm he was still holding back. He slammed my hand on the box piece, and one stubble-cap turned into Gordon and turned away, and with a nub of a pencil out of somebody’s pocket I wrote, “I won’t say nothing.” That’s what I said.
“Naw! Naw! Put, ‘I’ll say exactly like they want’!”
I felt me swaver a little on my feet. Them winders was a-swimming, they took no reflection, they let in no night. I steadied myself with my left hand on the table edge, pressed down hard to keep the mark from wiggling, and how little you all are a-knowing, I said in my head. Then it got so quiet, all of them watching my hand, you could hear the sugar crust crunch under the tip. Quiet enough you could hear Kenny or Gordon a-walking away up the stairs, I could tell it was a son by the slow in the step. Then I laid the pencil down, stepped back best I could with them all around, when Rusty yapped out “Put ‘I swear’!” How little you all are a-knowing. I pulled the pencil to the very edge. I squinched the “I swear” in. How little you are knowing, and nothing about said.
Rusty grabbed the scrap, jammed it in the thigh pocket of his canvas pants. And for about three seconds, they all of them looked at me there. For about three seconds, all of them’s faces come back, each one clear, and dark, and at a great far away. And I seed Franklin, Gordon, Kenny, I seed Bunk, even in the by-marriage ones, I seed. Then they turned from me and back on themselves. A-arguing again over what would be said.
I picked my spatula up off the floor. I lifted that liver out, still bleeding a little, and I laid it on a plate. Shoved the taters on a back burner, figured if they scorched, the eaters wouldn’t notice much. Then I walked to the door and out of the said.
My daddy’d been a few years older than Franklin; I was older than all his sons. Old enough to listen. Old enough to not have said. Franklin called that an accident, too, but only one man pulled the trigger then. And that story didn’t have to get made and straight, because the woman didn’t just get winged and she couldn’t run away, and she was from back in the hills anyway, her good looks didn’t save her there. And no one seed it happen but Franklin hisself, and just one man, Franklin’s tenant farmer, my daddy, seed it after, as he helped to clean and cover up.
My daddy told only me. Me a wee little boy, but already understanding way ahead of where my mouth would ever get. Somehow Daddy knowed that then. He said to me just oncet what happened, but he said to me the other many times more. That he never knowed forever afterwards if he was a friend or a debt.
I grabbed me a broom, dropped Kenny Lee’s tailgate, felt it sharp in my knees when I swung up in. I waited a second for the pain to ease. Then I walked the bed to the cab.
The Ryan laid crumpled on the bench seat there. Teary face part up and his hands between his legs. He looked at me out of an eye and a half, and I looked at him. Then I turned, set my broom between the liner ridges, and swept the deer blood out. Nothing yet said.
SUGAR’S UP
THE SAUSAGE BISCUIT at McDonald’s was supposed to cost ninety-nine cents, but Calvin Bergdoll saw they’d raised it to a dollar twenty-nine. He knew they were using the county’s Bygone Days celebration as an excuse for the hike, and he knew, too, that they thought nobody would notice when it stayed upped afterwards.
“They got their prices up so high now I don’t know if we can eat here anymore,” Calvin said in a stern voice to Theodore Munney, putting enough loud in it that not only the cashiers would hear, but also the day manager Eddie Sloan, there in his saggy McDonald’s pants juggling the drive-through headset, two sleeves of hash browns, and a drink cup the girth of a steer’s neck. Theodore Munney already had his biscuit bit into and was grinding along as they walked to their table, bearing down hard on the sausage’s gristly parts. Theodore was fifty-six, and his back teeth were eroding, but Calvin Bergdoll knew from a career as a mental health social worker that you’d be surprised what all people could eat without teeth. Took that one boy out of Weston, and he ate a whole pizza first stop we made. Cal toured his own teeth with his tongue, all but two in their places despite their daily labors, and he flashbacked to the second Italian sub he’d taken on while the boy he was ferrying home from the state mental institution polished off that twenty-two-inch pepperoni and mushroom.
After they slid into the booth, Calvin eyed the McDonald’s receipt with indignation, but also with a calculating concern. The truth was, if Calvin could no longer eat at McDonald’s, he was out of breakfast places in town. He’d gotten into a tussle with Irene, the head lady at the Hilltop Truck Stop, when he marched behind the counter and turned down the music she was playing too loud, and he’d been banned from Rita’s Diner for ordering Rita to reheat for him a couple bacon strips abandoned on a plate by a departed customer. Well, I hate to waste. Such skirmishes had become more and more common for Calvin in the past couple years. Times and tides had changed
, people on edge and quick to seize the upper hand with tender-hearted types like him. I am no fighter. He underscored this proclamation with a throat-clogging swallow of biscuit. Yet the second the proclamation came, there whirlpooled to the top layer of the sediment he carried in his brain a sentence he’d overheard his wife say on the phone the other day: “When his sugar’s up, there’s no telling what he might do.”
From within his biscuit absorption, Calvin half-noticed hobbling towards them the well-dressed midriff of an elderly woman. “Well, hello Cal.”
Cal looked up. Miss Dola Wysapple, an esteemed Presbyterian lady and one of his late mother’s younger cronies. This recognition brought with it the taste of Miss Dola’s covered-dish-dinner-famous Mississippi Mud Pie. Calvin cleared his mouth and wiped his hand on his napkin, gathering himself for what might come next. He carried within the cylinder of himself a half dozen smaller cylinders, reminiscent of chambers in a handgun. Each cylinder housed a different personality, and Calvin was never entirely sure which personality would present itself, making moments like these a kind of character roulette.
“Good morning, Miss Dola!”
The tone was solicitous and grand all at once: the Courtly Gentleman. A fortuitous appearance. Struggling to his feet, Calvin took Miss Dola’s cold hand, and Miss Dola, wedging her cane between her knees, placed her other spotted hand on top of his. Now she was gazing at Theodore Munney with the small, quizzical smile a person offers when waiting to be introduced. The Courtly Gentleman took a step back and swept his free arm towards the booth.
“This, Miss Dola, is Theodore O. Munney,” Calvin announced, and although at that point his mind stopped, his mouth kept going. “My gun-bearer.”
Miss Dola’s friendly smile passed into one of bepuzzlement. She nodded, lifted her free hand, and gave her cane a trial tap. “You and Theodore have a good Bygone Days,” she said, and she clapped Cal lightly on the shoulder before she staggered on.
Calvin sidled back into his yolk-colored seat, took up his sandwich, and smiled at Theodore Munney, who immediately averted his gaze. Gingerly, gingerly. “Well, Theodore,” he began in a tone one might use to suggest a joint business venture. “Would you like to cut a little grass today?”
Theodore Munney squashed a few biscuit crumbs on his fingertip and popped the finger into his mouth.
“Looks like nice grass-cutting weather,” Calvin tried again. “And we’ll stop down at the trailer and pick up your laundry.”
“RealbadwreckupSlanesvillelastnight.” Theodore wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve.
Based on the absence of sour in Theodore Munney’s response, Cal decided to interpret it as a “possibly,” which was more than Theodore had given up in several days. Calvin had a good acre of lawn that needed mowing weekly in the early part of the season, and since his children had mostly moved away, finding a reasonably priced grass cutter had been a trial. In past summers, Theodore had seemed to enjoy the tranquilizing orbits of the riding mower, but recently, something had been afoot in Theodore Munney, something that had caught Calvin off guard. This complicated even further the diagnosis he’d been trying to pin on Theodore since he’d taken him into his oversight two years ago after his former charge, Nutley Randalpin, had died on him. Suddenly Theodore jerked to his feet, tray in hand, and dumped biscuit wrappers and senior-sized coffee cups down the garbage chute. Calvin scrabbled after him—learning initiative, yes, he’s maturing—and then the two of them were snarling the Bygone Days traffic in the parking lot on their way to Cal’s eighteen-year-old Blazer, Blackie.
It was early May, still cool in the mornings. Theodore Munney wore his usual work clothes, both his shirt and his pants the color of grass when it gets gobbed up around lawnmower blades, a timeless outfit no one in the town of Berker would have looked at twice in 1953 and one no one looked at twice now in 2003. Calvin Bergdoll, in contrast, dressed like an onion, in layers he could subtract and add depending on temperature. The deepest strata were T-shirts with frayed necklines, thin as Saran Wrap, and over those, several layers of plaid in varied styles, colors, and check schemes, including always at least one pajama top. On his pate rested his current favorite cap, one he had paid for, gold mesh ventilation in the back and a navy blue front with the words Almost Heaven and a silhouette of the state of West Virginia. Noticing an out-of-state car waiting for Blackie’s parking space, Calvin stopped, stretched his back, and ran his hand over the slight push-out of his belly, the only interruption in his otherwise svelte figure. This mystery, he knew, was the talk of many in the town of Berker, how could anyone eat like Calvin Bergdoll did and still preserve such slimness? Package that and you’ll be a millionaire, one of his daughters had told him once. Just good genes. Calvin humbly smiled.
To avoid the hubbub of the Bygone Days setup on Main Street, Calvin cut behind the Coke plant, skirted the Little League field, and then shuttled the sidewalkless backstreets on the rump side of Berker. Theodore Munney rode in silence, his face turned out the open window. Was Bygone Days a good thing or a bad? The biscuit travesty forced the question again. Now they were passing the house where Calvin had lived until he was eight, Cal scowling over how they’d let the porch screen shred, and three blocks later, the little house his mother had occupied in her final years, the two big water maples out front violated to stumps by the current owner whose name Calvin would not deign to mention. Bygone Days did generate civic pride, something sorely diminished over Cal’s lifetime in the town of Berker, once a proud little village named by young surveyor George Washington himself, in honor of the county’s fine Berkshire swine. But Bygone Days meant his bride of forty years was away all weekend helping at the Fine Arts Room, and it lured hordes of gawkers to town and threw off Calvin’s schedule. Further, almost all the food at Bygone Days was out of his price range, and he couldn’t help but suspect that the overstimulation of the celebration was at least partly responsible for Theodore Munney’s recent behaviors.
As they neared Theodore Munney’s trailer, the houses got narrower, the dogs grouchier, until the pavement gave up altogether and they were rutting through the potholes of Roundhouse Hollow. “Take your time, my boy, take your time,” the Benevolent Landowner offered as Theodore Munney dropped out the door, but Cal kept the engine running. Growing grass did not wait. Yes, the only Bygone Days food Calvin could afford were the Cub Scout hot dogs, and those upset his stomach. He did, however, look forward to the pancake breakfast at the Fire Hall on Saturday morning, reasonably priced, all-you-can-eat, and a fund-raiser, satisfying Cal’s stomach, pocketbook, and liberal leanings all at once. And over the past couple years, as Calvin was aging into a county elder, Bygone Days held one other allure—the anointing of the Knight of Olde Berker.
Theodore Munney recrossed his yard with his distinctive gait of an unconfident chicken. He swung into his seat, the stuffed pillowcase of dirty laundry perched in his lap like a chubby beheaded child. “Now that’s a good lad,” lauded the Benevolent Landowner.
“WreckupatSlanesville. Themboysdealindrugs.”
As they neared Main Street again, Calvin directed Blackie down a parallel detour. Despite the seduction of the Bygone Days setup—no, not even Cal was immune—he could risk not even a peek. Not with the matter of the Lions Club booth. But Calvin could feel Theodore Munney’s eyes straining to penetrate through the intervening block, and at each intersection, Cal fought the urge himself. Then, at the corner of Bluebonnet and Shute, Blackie took his own wheels, veered left. And spilled them plop into the brouha.
Stout women poled up canopies for the crafts fair while apprentice volunteer firemen pushed brooms through gutters and veterans speared American flags into parking meter tubes. Those storeowners who’d weathered Wal-Mart wheeled wares out of doors, porta-potties were wrestled off trucks, and overhead, cousins Tick and Carroll Might dangled from ladders, precarious cupids in camouflage pants, stringing the Bygone Days banner. Roland, the little man who lived daytimes on the bench in front of the courtho
use and nighttimes in the courthouse furnace room, oversaw it all from his seat at the stoplight. Theodore Munney thrust his head and shoulders into the stir, someone shouted his name, he pretended not to hear, and the Lions Club booth loomed.
Calvin Bergdoll’s sugar squirted up. He yanked his eyes to the opposite side of the street. Where, yes, a lone Cub Scout towed a red wagon piled with hot dog buns, Truant! Cal’s guts soured—
“Gonnashootoutupthetracks.” Theodore Munney’s machine-gun stutter bumped Calvin from his demons. He glanced out the windshield on Theodore Munney’s side. In the field beside the grade school milled men in blue and gray, the uniforms baggy in peculiar places and clingy as long underwear in others. Cal’s face tightened. Republican stuff. A few were pitching canvas pup tents the color of putty, and a copper cauldron already dangled from a tripod of sticks. Here was another bad side of Bygone, and Theodore Munney needed no such influence, having just a few weeks ago asked Calvin to drive him to the high school to talk to the recruiter who trolled the halls as a kind of Republican-funded guidance counselor.
“Gonnashootoutupthetracks,” Theodore Munney fired again.
By now the tents were behind them, Blackie rolling down Town Hill and into the valley where Calvin lived. In Cal’s head jarred something he’d overheard at the Senior Center then chosen to forget. This year, along with their usual encampment and marching in the parade, the Civil War reenactors were to perform some kind of fake battle for the benefit of the tourist-train gawkers. The battle would be staged in a defunct cornfield a mile up the river behind Calvin’s house.