Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley: Novellas and Stories

by Ann Pancake

  Calvin shook a packet of Sweet’n Low into his ice water. The Republicans held a real allure for the mentally deficient. He frowned. He was fairly certain the comment about the cinder blocks was not an unequivocal yes to the grass-cutting.

  Theodore scooted back into the booth, his eyes directed inside his head.

  “I need you to cut some grass today, Theodore,” the Stern Father pronounced.

  Theodore Munney spit an ice cube back into his cup.

  Now Tasha was setting Theodore Munney’s biscuit on the table, the oatmeal nowhere to be seen, and Calvin glared. Not coordinated enough to carry both at one time, shouldn’t even be a waitress. Theodore powered into his biscuit like he hadn’t eaten since the dollar-twenty-nine one at McDonald’s yesterday morning when Cal knew Nicole fed him Nip-Chee crackers and Sun Chips at the video store and that there was usually a pot of beans going in the back of the BP. But now Tasha was returning, bearing a gigantic orange tray possibly stolen from an all-you-can-eat buffet. Calvin unturtled an inch out of his hat. Tasha placed the tray on the table from which she’d recently cleared the enticing scrapple, then painstakingly transferred to Calvin—her effort not to spill so momentous she had to hold her breath—a bowl the size of the pan he used to feed Silas brimming with oatmeal and brown sugar.

  Calvin Bergdoll sat back. Blinked. He mumbled thank you. But Tasha was already gone, and he hadn’t even had the wherewithal to make his obligatory demand for more napkins. He leaned over the oatmeal to confirm it was real, his brain layers bubbling and burping, and through the mire beamed a ray of suspicion that some kind of joke was being played on him or revenge taken. But a bowl of oatmeal this big? For a dollar fifty? As revenge? Nothing made any sense.

  Calvin saw no choice but to stir the sugar in good and eat.

  As he did, a conversation from six months ago roiled up. He and a visiting daughter, the two of them sitting in this very booth, and Calvin, because he considered the morning a special occasion, spooning extra brown sugar on a much smaller bowl of oatmeal, and his daughter, shaking her head, saying, “I don’t think you should eat that brown sugar. It might make you crazy.”

  Suddenly, everything went dark. A cool sogginess settled in the seat of Calvin’s pants. And then, from the odor and the specific strain of clamminess, Cal deduced that he sat in Floodie’s passenger seat, whose cushions still held a reservoir of floodwater, and now Calvin could see, with cornea-polished clarity, his son who used to have a few problems swinging out the driver’s door, and Cal’s heart sank to his belt. Son daydreams were the worst of the lot.

  Calvin bobbed behind the son, at a slightly greater distance than the gap between him and Theodore Munney in the daydreams that featured Theodore, but his hearing just as obliterated—he might as well be standing on a Newfoundland bluff in a nor’easter—while the son slunk up a short sidewalk, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, his legs and rear end lost in the once well-fitting billows of the belt-cinched jeans. They halted in front of a door with a torn screen, and there Calvin’s vision broadened. It was the threshold of Berker’s Unwed Mother HUD housing. No, no, that wasn’t it, it was Single Mother Housing now, but no, the Progressive Mental Health Worker scrambled to keep up. They had arrived at Berker County’s Alternative Family Apartments.

  The son pushed an arm through the ripped screen and knocked. After he dropped the arm, both hands quivered against his thighs. “Shakes,” the son’s contemporaries called him, and the first time Cal had answered the phone and “Shakes” had been requested, Cal had turned and shouted it into the upstairs without even thinking, so natural the nickname was. The door swung open by apparent remote control until Calvin dropped his eyes and spied behind it a heavy-browed boy of about six with a strange growing-out haircut that made his head look shingled.

  Here his son’s stride transmogrified from a slink to a cool side-of-the-foot-rolling amble, a nonchalant stroll down a hall with tile identical to the grade school cafeteria’s. Calvin floated behind, the odor of burnt frozen-pizza cheese jumbling his appetite. At the end of this hall the son stopped, Cal did, too, before a monstrous easy chair. In this chair lounged not a single mother, but an aged boy.

  At the son’s entrance, the old boy in the chair smiled as broad and as false as a jack-o’-lantern, and he did not rise. Something about this gnome put Calvin in mind of a certain hyperactive eighth-grader on the son’s junior high basketball team. But the present face looked as if a flash flood had gulched it and left the long hair permanently wet. The son eased over and clapped his hand right below the other’s elbow, a kind of one-sided arm shake, and the shingle-headed child dropped on the floor a nose-length from a chalkboard-sized television to observe robots killing each other in metal compactors.

  From a vantage point now to the side of his son, Calvin could see his mouth moving, the flood-faced boy’s moving back, the old boy never shedding the smile and never desisting in shaking his head. The son who used to have a few problems extracted the ten-dollar bill that had so recently slept in Cal’s wallet along with a fan of soggy ones, and he offered, too, an expression he’d offered Calvin infinite times. A face that had never told a lie, a face chagrined that it needed a favor at all, just this time and I’ll never ask again, the son not yet unhandsome despite his decay, his eyes blue and baby-big, and into those eyes swam the son at fourteen, everybody in my whole class is going, please Dad, Danny’s mom will be there the whole time, then the son at six, please Daddy, will you buy me a milkshake, please Daddy, can I have a milkshake? and lastly a chubby wailing infant, clenching in and out its trembling fists, a younger Cal trying to dam the noise with a pacifier. But the old boy, pumpkin grin fixed, never stopped shaking his head.

  And then Calvin’s vision held only his own hands, scraping oatmeal remains into a big Styrofoam cup. The hands began to shake. Like father, like—Calvin nudged the cup away and pressed his fingers on the table rim. Across from him, Theodore Munney was staring out the window as though he could see leftover imprints of the disheveled reenactors, apparently oblivious to both Cal’s absence and his return.

  Calvin squeezed his eyes open and shut a few times and repositioned his glasses. Oh, the mature brain. He emitted a chuckle that petered out in a cluck. The crazy tricks his mind played anymore, no doubt because it had so few outlets for his creativity, intellect, and spiritual proclivities. Just two weeks ago, his daughter in Colorado had called, and before thinking, he’d asked, “How’s your hip?” For a moment, she’d been silent. Then: “How on earth did you know about that?” Calvin had swallowed. He remembered in yet another daydream following her up a mountain trail, granite and aspen, no West Virginia hill, then watching her boot slip and her fall hard on her hip. He’d stayed long enough to see her pick herself up and limp on.

  His temperature had risen. He removed one layer of plaid and laid it across his arm. No time to wallow in mystery with his charge a half-arm’s-length away. The Benevolent Landowner cleared his throat.

  “Okay, my fine-feathered friend. Let’s get to that grass.”

  HIS WIFE’S CAR was gone, and on the kitchen table, a note: “Cal. Please move TM’s clothes to dryer.” He’d enticed Theodore onto the Cub Cadet by mentioning how often and loudly it had been backfiring lately—“lately” applied loosely, but no harm—and now Calvin was stowing his oatmeal safely in the refrigerator. He paused. The landscape had shifted. A fresh take-home box his wife must have carried in last night. Calvin fumbled with the lid—onion rings, a real find, ideal for his midmorning snack in thirty minutes. Smiling and stroking the small hump of his belly, Cal was halfway to the TV room when he picked up the reek of river algae and faint cow manure, another happy surprise. Silas had come home.

  “Oh. You decided to come home?” Calvin said gruffly as he dropped into the couch. Silas was spiraled up in his chair, his big head hanging over the chair’s front so that he resembled a sedated python. He wagged his wrapped-around tail as best he could while Cal took the remote into confident hand,
whispered a prayer, and—the third sign in five minutes that this day would go so much better than yesterday, oatmeal daydream aside—conjured “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies,” of all things. In May, of all times.

  Much to be grateful for. Much, much, indeed. The pleasure of the oatmeal. Of Russian tutus and Christmas. Silas un-run-over and home. The grass shortening under Theodore Munney’s rotations, onion rings in the kitchen. And the greatest blessing of all, his revelation about the median age of past Knights of Olde Berker. Quite proud of himself he was for that mathematical insight. Now whenever the Knight pierced his thoughts, Calvin felt only a short sharp twinge before wisdom salved it. And then there were the gratitudes to come, tomorrow’s pancake breakfast, and a mere thirty-six hours after that, Bygone Days would be bygone. Calvin would recover his routine, and his bride hers, and without the bad influence of the reenactors and the general overstimulation of the celebration, Theodore Munney would return to tractability.

  The back door slammed.

  Calvin Bergdoll stiffened like a doe at a branch snap.

  He tilted forward, his concentration searing a tunnel through the eternal ring in his ears. The lawn mower still throbbed in the near distance, and then a branch did snap, or rather, Theodore Munney ran over a rock. The footsteps to the kitchen had been too quick for his wife’s. The refrigerator unsealed with a lip-smacking suck, and Calvin collapsed back into the couch, his sugar galloping, and affixed his gaze on the Prague Symphony. His son with a few problems swung open the TV room door, the onion ring box in his hand.

  “I was just coming to finish up the grass. How come you got Theodore doing it?”

  Calvin concentrated on Prague. “You were supposed to finish it yesterday.” His ears flinched. In his head, it had been a growl, but somehow the TV room air ironed it into a whine.

  The son rested the onion ring container on top of the television. No sign of onion ring protruded over its rim. The son rubbed Silas behind his ears, Silas responding with pre-orgasmic groans, the decimated onion rings a mocking crown over Czech cellos and violins.

  “Got any other jobs?” said the son.

  At that moment Theodore Munney stumbled-strutted in—“BustedeightathemdruggiesupSeymourHoller”—and Silas broke into maudlin whines meant to seduce Theodore Munney near enough that the dog could bury his muzzle in Theodore’s rich aromas. Theodore didn’t take the hint. Silas didn’t give up the chair. An elf was striking Calvin’s eardrum with the end of a baton.

  “I’ll finish up the grass, and then I’ll weed the hedges.”

  “EightathemtheybustedupSeymourHoller.”

  “Can you pay me up front for the hedges? You’ll be gone to lunch by the time I get back.”

  A skull smacked under Cal’s feet and the Prague Symphony faded, now the son massaging Silas’s chest, Silas rubberized, his limbs gangling out of the chair, and the head-smacking doubled, while Theodore Munney poked two fingers into the onion ring box and came up with a scrap of breading. Red splotches swam across Calvin’s eyes while the Arts Channel began its three-minute-long plea for donations. Calvin clenched his butt cheeks, a fort around the wallet. One hand gripped the couch arm and the other a pillow embroidered with AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE, WE SHALL SERVE THE LORD. But up from his mind sediment reeled an image of the son, in the striped shirt, black pants, and mask of a cat burglar, crawling through a window belonging to the wealthiest lawyer in town, the one with the penile implant, and behind the window image, a dimmer one, but distinct: the aged boy, his flood-face bisected by a pistol in his hand. A deer head nodded.

  Calvin Bergdoll shifted his hip. He turned away and hunched over the wallet, drawing the Serve the Lord pillow closer to serve as shield, too. None of any of their businesses, not the son’s, not Theodore’s, not Silas’s, not the possums with the knots on their heads. Two ones. Three twenties. He thumbed through again. No tens. No fives.

  Pulling out the twenty was as painful as extracting a tooth. Calvin laid it on the couch beside him. The son departed, taking the bill but leaving the onion ring box.

  Cal slumped back. He lifted his face to Biggest Rack, then First Buck. Both avoided his gaze. Silas squirmed out of his chair, stretched, padded to Calvin, and pushed his front paws, head, and sixty pounds’ worth of his body into Cal’s lap.

  “Any of those onion rings left, Theodore?”

  “Takebackthecounty,” said Theodore Munney. “We’retakingerback.”

  BEFORE THEY REACHED the BP station, Calvin pulled Blackie over into the Baptist Church parking lot. He parted his lips to begin his talk with Theodore Munney, then prudently closed them against the pot of words boiling over in his throat. He noticed a potentially comforting Little Chug of chocolate milk resting in Blackie’s cup holder. He tasted it. Keeps better in winter.

  “Theodore, I’m losing my patience with you.” Blackie shed another of the several hundred staples that held his headliner in place and a new sag drooped onto Cal’s cap.

  “If you work for me, you have to finish your job.” Still the Stern Father, whom Calvin knew would fail with Theodore in this mood, but the appropriate personality would not present.

  Theodore Munney feigned fascination with a pair of elderly women, their dress marking them as out-of-staters as distinctly as if they’d been in tribal costume, forging fearlessly into traffic towards a yard sale. Calvin Bergdoll’s children were very busy. They didn’t often come home. When they were growing up, he’d had a whole stable of yard tenders, Calvin had taught them the value of work. That accounted for why they were so successful now.

  Theodore made a muffled noise about a flue fire.

  “I pay you four dollars an hour and buy you breakfasts.” Theodore Munney opened the glove box, toppling out a roll of toilet paper and a Baggie containing a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich.

  “Now, Theodore. Does that sandwich belong to you?”

  Theodore shoved the sandwich back into the glove and slammed it shut. Then he straightened at the waist, stretching his legs as far as they could go, and dug into his pocket. He wrenched out his fist. Calvin peered without turning his head. Theodore spread his fingers.

  The two musket balls Justin Ripper had given him.

  Theodore Munney snapped his palm over them, dropped out of Blackie’s door, and pulleted to the BP without looking back.

  Within Calvin’s brain sludge rose a spiraling funnel cloud, the musket balls dancing on top it like plastic popcorn in a lottery bubble machine. Cal jiggled his head, then cocked it to one side and thumped it as though he were clearing water from an ear. Happy thoughts. Happy thoughts. He gripped the steering wheel and narrowed his eyes.

  Friday. This is Friday. Calvin reset his cap, shoved some headliner fabric into a slit, and left the lot.

  Because the Senior Center didn’t serve lunches on Friday—and whose idea was that, and was it laziness or stinge?—Calvin usually visited his stroke victim friend to see what his helper had fixed. From the street where he parked, Cal could see Petie and his wife and the helper all sitting in the carport around the hood of Petie’s Cavalier taking in the fresh May air. Petie’s little terrier dog, Picky, sprung from lap to lap, darting his tongue at lips, and when he spied Calvin, he raced to him as well, scrabbling at his pants cuffs. The wife and the helper hailed Cal’s approach with less enthusiasm.

  “Oh. How are you, Cal?” Well, it’s not them I’m here to see.

  He stood behind Petie’s wheelchair and placed a hand on Petie’s shoulder. Petie smelled like baby powder. He did not turn around. The ladies continued their conversation, ignoring Calvin, although he noticed that the helper was carrying on her half of the dialogue as she backed towards the kitchen inside the sliding glass door. Cal patted Petie, a scraping motion across the top of his back. Petie didn’t respond. In Lions Club, he and Petie had shot napkin spitwads at each other during speakers, catapulted butter pats off forks like the other Lions with healthy senses of humor. All that had ended with the finality of . . . yes, with the
finality of a stroke, at the arrival of Helen Smithster.

  “Here you go, Cal.” Petie’s helper placed a plastic picnic plate before him on the hood. Calvin squinted. A tuna sandwich. And why hasn’t she prepared something hot? The Petulant Cousin from the City. What pleasure does Petie have besides food anymore, and why does she think she’s drawing a paycheck? The helper, Peggy used-to-be Powell—Calvin couldn’t recall who she was married to this time—had graduated from high school with Cal but now seemed a good bit younger than himself. Well. Hasn’t gone through half of what I have. Now a female neighbor dog on the loose was sniffing with gusto the shrunken privates of the neutered Picky. Peggy looked at her kindly. “Honey,” she told her, “he can’t have no intersection.”

  I’d like to introduce that young lady to Mr. Silas.

  “I think Helen has a real good chance,” Nonie was saying.

  Calvin’s ears iced over. “Of what?”

  Nonie looked a little surprised. “Getting Knight of Olde Berker.”

  Calvin’s plastic plate collided with the fender.

  “Oh, I don’t even know who the nominees are,” said Peggy formerly Powell.

  “I didn’t tell you? Lloyd Hines, and Maribel Summers, and Randolph McDouglas, Helen, of course,” Nonie ticked them off on her fingers, “and . . . let’s see, I’m forgetting someone . . . But I think Helen has the best chance of winning, everything she’s done for this community. Especially after the Lions Club highway cleanup, all the organization and work that took.” Nonie wagged an awestruck head. “They say almost every child in the county participated in that.”