I Love You, Miss Huddleston

by Philip Gulley

  It worked precisely as Peanut had predicted. A few citizens grumbled on the first and fifth days, muttering at us about trick-or-treating outside the proper Halloween parameters, but most of them forked over candy just the same.

  “That’s the only bad thing about it,” Peanut said. “If somebody doesn’t give us candy, we don’t have time to soap their windows.”

  As well as it worked, our enterprise was not without its setbacks. I’d worn a hobo mask, a gross miscalculation, resulting in homeowner after homeowner trying to guess my identity, which threw off our schedule. “Who is that under there? Petie York? James Martin? Is that you, James? Mildred, come here and see if you can tell who this is.”

  “It’s me, Phil Gulley. Norm and Gloria’s boy,” I’d say, hoping to hurry them along.

  “That can’t be. Why, the last time I saw you, you were knee-high to a grasshopper. Mildred, would you come here and see how this boy has grown.”

  We’d covered less than ten homes in twenty minutes, when Peanut ripped off my mask and threw it in the bushes. Within fifty houses we were back on track and finished the first night at the strike of nine.

  Shortly before six the next evening, Peanut appeared at our doorstep, his map of Danville in hand. “We hit the west side of town tonight. Fewer houses, the lots are farther apart. We’ll have to hurry.”

  The west end of town was where the hoodlums lived. After three hours Peanut and I had each amassed a bagful of candy, but were mugged in an alleyway by Danny Millardo and his band of thugs. Long before Osama bin Laden ever thought of terrorizing anyone, Danny Millardo and his minions were seasoned hands. They bent our bicycle rims, then dumped our candy on the ground, pawing through it looking for Clark bars—Danny’s favorite—stomping on the candy, then on us.

  “This is my part of town,” Danny said, twisting our ears. “Stay out of it.”

  We staggered home, our ears throbbing, our bicycles striking off in one direction then another.

  “I forgot all about Danny Millardo,” Peanut said after a few blocks. “This has thrown off our whole plan.”

  Ever since then, I have calculated the odds of tyranny into my plans.

  “What happened to you?” my father asked when I walked through the door.

  “Danny Millardo beat me up and stole my candy,” I said.

  “You should have popped him in the chops,” my father said.

  My father was forever advising me to pop someone in the chops, never considering the possibility I might be popped back. Then he launched into a story about when he was a kid and a bully had hit him. “I popped him right in the chops and that took care of it,” he said, finishing his story with a flourish. Dad had a repository of childhood stories upon which he could draw at a moment’s notice to fit any occasion, most of them ending with his popping someone in the chops.

  The next day was Halloween, and the trick-or-treaters were out in full force, slowing us down. Peanut and I covered the north side of town, moving from one house to another, workmanlike, but fell short of our goal. We caught a brief glimpse of Danny Millardo, operating outside his turf, shaking down a group of ghosts, but we hurried past and escaped his notice. That night I ate several pounds of chocolate and woke up the next morning with severe diarrhea, my colon ratcheted into overdrive by all the caffeine I’d consumed. I stayed home from school, which knocked me out of the Halloween marathon.

  The fifth night was a bust, candywise. By then the good candy had been dispensed and people were reduced to giving us the dregs from their pantries, mostly fruit and candy corn, both of which I despised. I especially hated candy corn and would have happily spit on the grave of George Renninger, the man who’d invented it in the 1880s. Nevertheless, candy corn was wildly popular in my youth. It was cheap, selling in fifty-five-gallon drums at the Danner’s Five and Dime or could be delivered directly to your home, dumped down the coal chute and into your cellar. It had a shelf life of decades and was routinely held over from one Halloween to the next. Peanut loved candy corn and persuaded his aunt to use it as the key ingredient in a variety of dishes and desserts—candy corn pie, candy corn cake, candy corn cookies, and candy corn pizza. In the months following Halloween, he happily subsisted on a steady diet of it, his skin turning a waxy orangey-yellow. After a few years, he began to resemble candy corn, wide on the bottom tapering to a point at his peanuty head.

  Within a month most of my candy had gone stale. I was left with a heap of root beer barrels gone sticky. The next year I confined my trick-or-treating to two days and, preferring quality over quantity, concentrated my attentions on the north side of town where the rich people lived, far from the likes of Danny Millardo—who, true to his thuggish character, grew up and moved to Wall Street.

  Chapter 12

  Old Men

  Nearly thirty years have passed since my growing-up years, and my fondest recollections are of things that should have killed me, chief among them swimming in the toxic pools of White Lick Creek. The creek had its origins nine miles north of town in the drain tiles of Indiana farmland, where two anonymous ditches joined at Harry Helbig’s farm to form the White Lick Creek, which wound through the town park, under Highway 36, past the Texaco, skirting the field behind our home. By the time it reached town, it was a full-fledged creek, wide and swift-running in early spring, collecting in stagnant pools in August, waterbugs juking across its surface.

  The creek was the only geographical feature of note in Danville, and we kids flocked to it the way other kids with more interesting terrain gathered at their wonders. It was our mountain and beach rolled into one, the topic of conversation during the rainy spells, towns people speculating how high it might go, recalling past floods with a nostalgic yearning, the stories and hazards expanding with the years.

  Harve Ellis, the park superintendent, was the official creek historian, the man people turned to when a flood argument needed settling. A walking repository of water lore, he tracked the creek’s rise and fall the way investors studied the Dow Jones. He’d installed a white post behind the maintenance shed, at the edge of the creek. At the flood’s peak, he would sail forth in a rowboat, paintbrush in hand, navigating the boat alongside the post, dabbing paint at the high-water mark, penciling in the date above the smear of paint. The current would invariably sweep him away and he would start over, landing the boat, then dragging it upstream and launching into the current, sometimes three or four times, such was his determination to document the event.

  Peanut and I would watch him from the bridge, Peanut yelling advice, all of it singularly unhelpful, me imploring the Lord Jesus to spare Harve’s life.* Stories circulated around town of children and old people being swept away by the White Lick, their bloated bodies found days later downstream. This only increased our fascination with the creek, and we spent much of our young lives in it or on it.

  On hot summer days late in the month, when money was scarce and the cost of swimming in the town pool prohibitive, Suds, Peanut, my brothers, and I would hike to the swimming hole just above the wastewater treatment plant. I shudder now to think of the lethal stew of chemicals present in the White Lick when we played there. As I write this, these many years later, I suspect a variety of malignant tumors are forming in my body, in the innermost reaches of my organs, and that I will end my life in wretched misery.

  We spent countless afternoons at the creek, stripping down to our skivvies, swimming, then lying in the grass to dry off while Suds fantasized about various scenarios.

  “What would you do if Denise Turner showed up here one day and took off her clothes right in front of us?” he would ask.

  I know what I would have done—I would have wet my pants and run for home, but I didn’t dare say so. Like most boys, I was terrified of girls, understood nothing about them, and avoided them whenever possible. Never in the memory of anyone I knew had a girl ever taken off her clothes in front of anyone, but that didn’t stop Suds’s creekside speculations.

  We would discuss th
e many options available to us in the event Denise Turner were to disrobe in our presence, then we would return home, eat lunch, and go to Logan’s Mobil to rummage around in the junk heap behind the gas station. We’d look for inner tubes we could salvage and turn into rafts, tubes with slow leaks that would get us a mile or two downstream before sinking. We would pump the inner tubes full of air, then run to the creek before they went flat, floating past the wastewater treatment plant and under the haunted bridge, past Johnson’s farm, before washing up two miles south of town and walking home on Cartersburg Road.

  Halfway to town, at the bottom of the Cartersburg Road hill, lived a man named Cowboy Landon in circumstances we boys considered ideal—a lean-to with no electricity or running water. He and his wife had squatted there for years, their shack crowded against the road, a pipe emerging from the hillside to supply them with water. Cowboy Landon was a nice guy, but rather unconventional, and worked odd jobs around town.

  Cowboy’s wife wore a wedding ring with a fake diamond, which she told us was real and worth millions, so we thought they were rich.

  “What we ought to do,” Suds said one day after we’d visited Cowboy and his wife, “is knock her on the head and steal her ring. I bet we could get five hundred dollars for it.”

  Five hundred dollars was the most money Suds could imagine. He would often come up with some scheme to make us rich, all of them netting exactly five hundred dollars.

  “You moron,” Peanut told Suds. “If they had a ring worth five hundred dollars, you think they’d be living in that dump? Don’t be stupid.”

  “Maybe they live like that so people won’t know they’re rich and rob them,” Suds said.

  I sided with Suds, suspecting they were crazy rich, that their shack sat on top of a vault full of money.

  If they had wealth, they were masterful at hiding it. They didn’t own a car. Cowboy rode a red bicycle into town to the store, his groceries in a set of baskets that straddled his rear tire, raccoon tails dangling from his handlebars.

  He and his wife apparently ate a lot of raccoon, and one fall day, when we’d stopped to visit, they invited us to join them for a raccoon dinner. “It tastes like chicken,” she told us, spearing a chunk of gray-brown meat and presenting it to us. We declined her offer, but she was insistent. “You can eat it with just about anything,” she said. “We like it in a stew, but you can have it with dumplings too. Squirrels taste good that way too. Cowboy, he can eat four or five squirrels at a time.” She looked at Cowboy and beamed. He smiled modestly.

  “Would they be eating squirrels and raccoons if they were rich?” Peanut asked Suds on the way home. “Don’t be an idiot.”

  Across the road and up the hill from Cowboy lived Ralph Huber. Ralph was crazier than a bedbug, one of these guys you see on the news who shows up at work and shoots twelve people. Ralph’s weapon of choice was lawn mower blades. He had a volatile temper, which caused children to taunt him for entertainment. Ralph would pull a lawn mower blade from the trunk of his car and chase after the children, hurling the blade at them.

  Ralph had an inexhaustible supply of lawn mower blades. Every spring, our old blade being dented and dulled, I would provoke Ralph until he threw a blade at me that fit our mower. Even now, I recall the blade’s boomerang flight, turning end over end, the faint whoosh as it sailed past my ear, nicking the lobe.

  In all the years Ralph and I battled, he never caught me. I now believe that is the way he preferred it, that it was the chase he savored, not the capture, so he held back. To catch me would have altered the game, would have deviated from the script. Like the dog that finally catches a car, Ralph wouldn’t have known what to do with me.

  Ralph knew the mind of adolescent boys well and kept girlie magazines on the dashboard of his car, his way of baiting the trap. Teenage boys would reach in and snatch them from the car, and Ralph would leap out from behind a bush, swinging a lawn mower blade in wide arcs. It wasn’t unusual to see a boy running through town carrying a Playboy, with Ralph on his heels slashing away. It had an unsettling effect on me. In my formative years, I associated nudity with mutilation and wore underwear even when I showered.

  Parents liked Ralph, since he served as an example of what we might become if we didn’t do our homework. “You want to be like Ralph Huber?” my mother would ask. “You keep ignoring your schoolwork and you’ll be just like him.” My mother lacked even the slightest insight into the psyche of a typical teenage boy. We considered Ralph’s life idyllic. He lived in a shack in the woods, had a carload of girlie magazines, and wasn’t weighed down by regular employment. At Career Day in high school, the girls wanted to be nurses or teachers or some other useful vocation. Mr. O’Brien, our guidance counselor, would smile and commend the girls for their earnestness.

  “What do you want to be?” he asked Suds.

  “I haven’t decided,” he said. “I either want to be like Ralph Huber or be a photographer for Playboy.” Every boy in the room laughed until snot blew out our noses. Suds was a hoot.

  Ralph had a brother named Lenny who lived in the Hotel Jones above Meazel Jewelry. Lenny did odd jobs around town, mostly tending yards. In the winter, Ralph moved into town to live with Lenny. By spring, they had tired of one another and would bicker, two old bachelors with loose dentures yelling incoherently, the sound of clacking teeth settling over the town square, the sign that winter was over. Ralph would migrate back to his shack on Cartersburg Road, cool down over the summer, and move back into town the next fall, taking his meals at the Coffee Cup Restaurant, clearing out the place whenever he entered, so foul was his odor. A zone opened around him wherever he went, people suddenly finding a reason to depart, remembering an important task back home that required their immediate attention.

  When the Hotel Jones closed, Lenny went to live in the county home, up the hill and across Main Street from White Lick Creek. Sometime in the early ’80s, he went weak in the head. It took awhile for people to notice, Lenny being a bit eccentric to begin with. He would escape from the county home and wander about town, visiting the people whose lawns he’d tended, stopping now and then to weed a flowerbed. On a winter day, he stumbled into the White Lick Creek, downstream from Harve Ellis’s measuring post, and drowned. The police found his body the next day, resting up against a log, frozen, another story to add to the already considerable body of creek lore.

  Chapter 13

  My Many Shames

  In 1878 our town appropriated the Central Normal College from Ladoga, Indiana. Its president, a Mr. William French Harper, was twenty-three years old, brilliant, but impulsive. He moved the college to Danville in the middle of a spring night. The following November he disappeared. When he returned home a year later, he claimed to have been abducted by Indians and held hostage in Wyoming before stealing a pony and escaping. His explanation was greeted with skepticism. It was the consensus of the towns people that a woman was involved. The next year Harper moved to Los Angeles, became a Baptist minister, and wooed hundreds of women to the Lord.

  The college died in 1952, but not before graduating sixty thousand teachers, some of whom tried to teach me. Our town inherited the campus and used it for a high school until 1973, when it became our junior high. The school was four blocks from our home, up Broadway to Wayne Street, across Main, past the Victory Bell to the school.* I would detour two blocks to Logan’s Mobil each morning to buy ten pieces of Bazooka bubble gum. When I got to school I discreetly chewed them, then stuck the wad beneath my desk, adding to the mass of calcified gum clinging to its underside like barnacles to a boat.

  Junior high school was a study in humiliation. Each day presented fresh opportunities for embarrassment and degradation. The tender oversight of elementary school was dispensed with, the brutality of life squarely faced. This was especially apparent in Mr. Johnson’s eighth grade P.E. class, where we had to do the two things designed to strike fear into the heart of any adolescent boy—shower nude in front of others, and learn to dance.r />
  Of the two, the showers were worse—standing naked among your peers while the football players snapped you with a towel and laughed at your winkie. Dancing ran a close second. In anticipation of the junior high dance, Mrs. Dollens, the girls’ P.E. teacher, borrowed a phonograph from Mrs. McNeff in the library, trooped the girls down to the gymnasium, and seated them on the bleachers. The boys milled around, studying the girls like farmers inspecting horses, looking over their teeth, scrutinizing their hocks for slewfoot.

  The protocol, I soon grasped, was to select from among the trove of beauties the one perfect specimen with whom to dance. Then, in order to avoid first-hand rejection, have your best friend ask for the pleasure of her company on your behalf.

  “Who do you want to dance with?” Tim Hadley asked me.

  “Jane Martin,” I said, taking care not to select a girl so stratospherically popular I would face rejection, but not so homely I would be embarrassed. It was a fine line to tread. Tim petitioned Jane on my behalf. She eyed me warily, then nodded her head in agreement, though with little enthusiasm. Since my overtures to girls had customarily been met with scorn, her indifference was a welcome improvement.

  The rest of the class paired off. There were more boys than girls, so Roger Varble and Billy Gibbs were forced to dance with one another, a humiliation from which they never recovered.

  The only dance I knew was the waltz, from watching old movies with my dad. Apparently, Jane Martin hadn’t watched the same movies. I put my right arm on the small of her back and inadvertently touched the clasp of her bra.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, shrinking back, her voice cold.

  “Dancing,” I said, helpfully.

  “You pervert!” Jerry Sipes said, punching me in the arm. “You’re not supposed to touch ’em.”