Odie was on the alert that morning, sitting beside me on my porch step, scraping the label off an old beer bottle. (Odie wouldn’t think of drinking on duty.) He snapped the bubble gum in his mouth. Odie is a long-time bubble gum fan, probably something to do with all those baseball cards he used to buy. When he quit smoking last year, he became a certifiable addict. Giving up cigarettes had been George’s idea. When he died, George was pestering Odie to launch a regular running program.
Odie’s visit was one of many by my friends and neighbors. My farm had become the Grand Central Station of Round Corners. People dropped in night and day. They interrupted meals. When they didn’t come in person, they telephoned. And they all had the same thing on their minds: the painting.
“It’s a virtual campaign,” said Thomas, who was still bunking on the couch in his sleeping bag. In a week, he’d taken over the cooking and the laundry. Ella and Wynn think he’s cute. Reverend Swan wants to know how long Thomas intends to stay. T-Bone just growls at him. And Sheriff Odie Dorfmann, protector of the innocent and artists who don’t know better, doesn’t trust him.
“You can’t take in everyone who comes to the door, Maud,” Odie said, attacking the beer label with his thumbnail.
“I took in George,” I said, watching Thomas. Across the yard, he raked leaves into one pile after another, pushed the piles together, then whisked them onto an old blanket. When the blanket became full, he dragged it to the road and dumped the contents on a bigger pile, a mountain of leaves as high as a snow drift, ready to burn.
The autumn sun was deliciously warm if you were relaxing on a porch trying to ignore nosy public servants, but plumb hot if you were bullying around thousands of leaves. Thomas flung his flannel shirt on a bush. Underneath the shirt he wore a gray T-shirt with the words “Rock Is On a Roll” printed on the front. Underneath the T-shirt were young, healthy muscles. They were not as massive and well-defined as T-Bone’s muscles, nor as sculpted as George’s.
Odie glared from Thomas’s back to the shirt on the bush. “That was different.”
“How? George just showed up at my door one day, too. Just like Thomas.”
“George was a man, not a boy. He liked baseball. He was a veteran, for chrissake.”
“And he didn’t like rock ’n roll.”
Thomas leaned on the rake, smiled at us, and waved. Odie harrumphed and blew a bubble. I waved back.
Odie freely admits there are some people he just doesn’t understand. I am one of them. He can’t comprehend why I refuse to paint the mural. Artists, he says with disgust, are always waiting for the muse. “Ordinary people can’t afford the luxury of a muse,” Odie says. “Do you think I wait for the muse to chase down tax evaders, rapists, and murderers?” Those were Odie’s priorities. In some ways, he was very much like George.
Thomas raked under the maple, banging his head on a birdhouse made by Odie. The dangling aviary swung and twirled. Odie chomped on his gum, probably doing irreparable damage to his bridgework. “That kid probably doesn’t know one end of a purple martin from another,” Odie growled.
When Odie wasn’t capturing criminals or pitching shut-outs for the Round Corners Royals, he built birdhouses. Simple birdhouses for robins and complex birdhouses for cardinals. Apartments and condominiums for communal birds such as the purple martins. Sometimes, when he was in the mood to run the jigsaw, he decorated them with gingerbread and Victorian curlicues. Odie’s wife Arlene shakes her head when he gets carried away. Like the time, during the Reagan Administration, when he built a birdhouse that was the exact replica of the White House.
I don’t think Odie goes off the deep end with the bird accommodations, but then I didn’t think anything about painting a huge Andy Warhol/Campbell Soup can on the side of the refrigerator either. I think Odie would go a little cuckoo without his birdhouses. No one wants a repeat of the winter of ’89 when Odie broke three fingers arresting an unruly drunk. In the tussle and heat of apprehension, Odie slammed his hand in the door of the squad car. For six weeks, life was hell in Round Corners. A frustrated, bored Odie set up license checkpoints and speed traps. It took forever to get anywhere.
At the moment Odie was building a miniature Swiss chalet, similar to a home built on the other side of the mountain by a Wall Street executive. It had the feeling of a hideaway about it, Odie said. The idea for the hideaway birdhouse came to him in the middle of the night. He woke up one morning and knew exactly what to do. The way he described it, it sounded like some kind of muse, but Odie doesn’t believe in muse.
Odie believes in birdhouses, baseball, and America, in that order. Odie, a scared 18-year-old grunt, arrived in Vietnam in the fall of ’73. Twelve weeks earlier he had been strutting down the halls of Round Corners High School, making crude jokes with his football buddies. Nothing had prepared him for Vietnam. Years later he and George would sit watching a war movie in our living room and shake their heads at the cinematic fiction; war was nothing like television, they said. Odie may have hated Vietnam, but he loved the Army, he loved the idea of “serving.”
The concept of serving, that Odie so wholeheartedly bought into in the Army, laid the foundation for Odie the sheriff and town selectman. He was proud of his job and sincerely loved the town and the people in his care. Also, it didn’t hurt that he was built to be a lawman. His appearance lent itself to the illusion of intimidation. Just about everyone—except the schoolchildren who met him on Career Day—knew if it didn’t concern the flag, birdhouses, or baseball Odie was seldom riled.
Odie was never out of earshot of an AM radio. He worshipped baseball and the Astroturf on which it was played. Baseball was sacrosanct to Odie Dorfmann, politician, lawman, creator of homes for birds, most valuable player of the Round Corners Royals (1979-81). So, it was understandable why Odie almost had a heart attack the summer of ’92. He had to sit and listen to all his favorite teams slide, while a Canadian upstart clawed its way to The Playoffs. Do you know what this means? he asked his wife Arlene. Do you have any idea what this could do to baseball? My God, he said, Canadians in the World Series. Arlene said she hoped the Canadians won; that would shake up things. You don’t know what you’re talking about, Odie said.
Arlene got her wish. The Canadians won, sending Odie into a two-day funk. He retreated to his workshop and could be heard hammering and sawing long into the night. On the third day, he emerged with a scraggly beard, a new birdhouse, and a smile. Those birdhouses have saved Odie’s health, mind, and marriage many times.
To tell you the truth, I never had much patience with Odie until one evening when I overheard him talking with George. He was reminiscing about his childhood (the kind of stuff no one’s ever interested in) and he said something, described a sound that I wished I had heard.
“I love to hear the crack of the bat,” Odie said.
Apparently, to hear the kiss of ball and bat through the static of the radio was all it took to put Odie over the fence into the dreamland of his childhood, to a time when everything was baseball gloves and statistics. Name a record and he’d tell you the fellow who made it and the guy likely to break it. If you were looking for a certain baseball card, all the kids used to say, you went to Odie; he had a regular vault under his bed, until his mother made him clean his room. Yogi, Roger, Mickey. He knew them all and someday, he dreamed, they would know him.
Someday, he told his mother, I’m going to hit a ball out of this world. Plop. Did you see that? It landed in a crater on the moon. Eat your cereal, Odie, his mother said.
Odie told George what it would feel like to hit that ball. “I will know it’s the one the moment I connect. Its greatness will reverberate down my arm. I’ll feel it in my muscles; it’s impossible not to feel something that smooth. I’ll stand for a moment and watch it, contemplate the ball I sent to the stars, then I’ll skip once, twice, and head for first. I’ll take it easy, a token run for the crowds, but still the bases will disappear under my feet like the steps of an escalator. And when the reporter
s grab me and ask how it felt, I’ll just say, ‘It was heaven, boys, heaven.”’
Odie divulged to few people the rest of the dream. There was a feeling, he said, that always came over him at the end, just as the ball was almost out of sight, a feeling that it didn’t matter who had hit that ball, that it was headed for the universe at that particular moment in time and he just happened to be the guy who gave it a lift.
“Sometimes when I build birdhouses,” Odie told George that night in a whispery voice, “I get the same feeling, that I’m an instrument, a channel. It’s not a helpless feeling, not an out-of-control feeling,” and here I had to practically put a glass to the wall and lean my ear against it to catch Odie’s words “because I seem to be not only the tool but the person using the tool.” Silence. “Weird, huh?”
* * *
I called to Thomas, “Take a rest.”
He mounted the porch. “You watch, they’ll multiply while I’m gone,” he said with a grin, then entered the house.
“I don’t trust people who smile that much,” Odie muttered.
I laughed and called to Thomas to bring another beer with him when he came.
Odie chewed his gum. “About this painting, Maud…”
“No.”
“Now, don’t go getting on your artistic high horse.”
“I mean it.”
“Think of the greater good.”
“Forget it.”
“This artistic stubbornness does not become you. George would want you to do this, you know he would.”
“George was a stinker.”
“There’s no talking to you when you get like this.” Disrespectful, he meant. “I ought to lock you in a cell with some paint and throw away the key.”
I offered my wrists to Odie.
“You know, Maud, you’re awfully cocky for a former shoplifter.”
I gasped and dropped my hands.
“Maybe I ought to run you in. You can think about the errors of your ways and my painting, too.”
“How’d you find out?”
Odie shifted. He studied the toes of his boots. “George had too many Rolling Rocks one night. The Expos were whipping the Bosox. You know how he loved the Bosox. It just sort of slipped out. He was mad at you about something or other and we got to talking…”
“George told you,” I said faintly.
“Maud…”
“He promised he would never tell anyone.”
Odie blew a bubble, a dinky one, hardly worth puckering for. “Look, forget I ever said anything, okay? We’ve got to concentrate on this painting…”
The CB radio in Odie’s official sheriff’s car crackled and buzzed. Odie ignored it until it spewed the voice of screeching Wisconsin Dell Addleberry across the yard.
“Calling Sheriff Dorfmann. Calling Sheriff Dorfmann. BM, you got your ears on?”
Odie cursed and lifted himself off the step with a groan. “Someday I’m going to strangle that woman. With the cord of a CB radio.” Dell was his dispatcher.
“Sheriff Dorfmann. BM, you out there?”
Odie swore, grabbed the microphone, and shouted at his dispatcher. “I told you not to call me that!”
“Sheriff, is that you?”
“Goddamn, Dell, of course it’s me.”
“Please identify yourself with the proper badge number. This is official police business. We can’t give out this information to just anyone, you know.”
Odie struggled to control himself. His hands shook. He opened one fist and discovered he had crushed a tiny birdhouse shutter he’d found in his pocket.
Wisconsin Dell, conceived in the resort of her namesake of parents who never saw each other after that weekend, was born with a stutter. She was raised by New England grandparents, who never encouraged her to talk for fun much less profit. I don’t know how she landed the job of police dispatcher. But I know she’d never leave it.
When Dell first came to work for the sheriff’s department, Odie gave her a manual of police codes. She loved the officialness of the book, the state seal on the cover, the idea of talking in some secret language. But, most of all, she loved all the syllables the codes saved. Dell figured she saved thousands of sounds a year. That was important for someone who considered speech her enemy.
The only problem was Dell couldn’t remember the codes. She studied the book day and night. And still, when time came to relay crucial information, her brain went blank.
When it became obvious that his new dispatcher would never master the manual, Odie decided codes weren’t that important.
Of course, they were, said Dell.
So, Dell made up her own. BM was Boss Man in Dell’s private code book.
“Please give me your authorized badge number. That is if you are the real BM.”
Odie began to speak slowly through gritted teeth. “I’ll give you numbers. Take this number down. Three, seven, zero, nine. Form three, seven, zero, nine. That is a form for dismissal and, if you don’t start talking to me, you can just get one of those forms out of the filing cabinet and fill it in with your name. In triplicate. As in the number three. Fired, fired, fired.”
There was a pause on the airwaves.
“You plan to work on one of those beautiful birdhouses today, Sheriff?”
Odie sighed and shook his head. “What’s up, Dell?”
“B and E. Breaking and entering.”
It was early for people to be breaking into camps. Vandalizing vacation homes was the usual form of crime in Round Corners—bored kids or cold transients who pried open a window to the summer place of a stockbroker from New York or a stockbroker from New Jersey or a stockbroker from Boston. They prowled around, ate the food that had been left behind, smoked any cigarettes they found. Sometimes they slept there. Sometimes they took a radio or an electric can opener. They never did the dishes before they left. The drunk who smashed Odie’s fingers in the car door was a bum who’d jimmied open a cabinet of Grand Marnier in a camp on Pine Tree Road.
This call, however, wasn’t someone’s camp.
“Wynn Winchester says someone stole her knitting needles—her lucky needles.”
“Dell, is this some kind of joke?”
Even across the yard, I could hear Dell bristle over the airwaves. Nothing about the law or Dell’s part in its maintenance was humorous to Odie’s dispatcher.
“I do not joke about the big B and E, BM.”
When Odie investigated the report, he found that the thief had walked past a color television, a video cassette recorder, a new exercise bike, and a silver tea set belonging to Harvey Winchester’s great-great-grandmother—all to get to Wynn’s knitting basket near the wood stove. The needles Wynn used to make all those sweaters for Harvey, the needles that were to knit the clothes for her precious unborn child, were last seen in that basket.
7. Living with an Electronic Mailman
Of course, given my criminal past, I was the first person George suspected.
I may have been a petty shoplifter at one time, but I was never a knitting needle thief, George. Besides I’m reformed. And Wynn is my friend. And I hate needles.
It’s true, George, she’s been bugging me, almost as much as Odie, about this mural thing, but I wouldn’t steal her lucky knitting needles. It’s too terrible to even consider. Everyone knows what those needles mean to Wynn. She’s so superstitious about this pregnancy that if someone held those needles for ransom, she’d clean out her bank account without giving it a second thought.
Not even for spite. I am not spiteful, George.
I didn’t put your underwear in with the navy blue sheets to get even with you after you called one of my paintings antediluvian. It was a mistake. Jesus, George, haven’t you ever made a mistake? What do you mean no?
I was looking up antediluvian in the dictionary when I put the underwear and sheets in and they just got mixed up. I wasn’t paying attention. That’s all.
Navy blue underwear is very sexy, George.
I wond
ered what color underwear T-Bone buys.
* * *
Freda and I hitched up our skirts and flopped into the empty booth like two fish. She lit a cigarette, sighing at the taste of nicotine. I wiggled my toes. The service station attendant across the street closed up for the night, cutting the lights in the station and over the old pumps, locking the door. He left illuminated the big Exxon sign floating in the sky.
“I’m worried about Wynn,” Freda said.
“I’ve never seen her like this.”
“I was in the shop yesterday and she was just sitting under one of the hair dryers staring off into space. It was running full blast. And this was after she’d styled her hair.”
“Harvey doesn’t know how to handle her. He’s spending more and more time at work. I don’t understand it. He loves her so much and he’s so excited about this baby.”
“Lewis Lee says he’s afraid.” Freda shifted and her polyester whispered. “Lewis Lee says most men don’t know what to do with pregnant women; it’s all those hormones raging about.”
“I wish there was something I could do.”
“Wynn’s just lost without her knitting.”
“She says she’s tried other needles, but everything gets full of knots. Muddled somehow.”
“It’s all mental.”
“Isn’t everything?”
Two tall sodas sweated between us. Each had a straw. Freda’s straw was branded with the imprint of her Sensuous Midnight red lipstick. I lifted the soda with the clean straw to my lips and filled my taste buds with Mountain Dew. “So, what do you get mental about?”
Freda smiled. “I get mental over Lewis Lee in our big brass bed.”
I shook my head and laughed. “All you ever think about is Lewis Lee and sex…” I stopped and stared out the dark windows at our reflection, Freda so content and happy and fulfilled, me so confused and empty and full of unrest. I quickly glanced away.
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