“I’m gonna kill you someday,” Cookie said.
“That’s not a very nice thing to say,” Mr. Svendergard said as he and his wife stumbled onto the scene.
Cookie took a fake jab at Mr. Svendergard’s face, making him flinch. Content with having intimidated a grown man, Cookie smirked and returned to his grieving family.
“What’s got into him?” Mrs. Svendergard asked.
“He thinks ah kilt his daddy,” replied Buster.
The mister helped Buster to his feet. Mrs. Svendergard gave him a Kleenex to blot his bloody mouth. As the Svendergards climbed into their cement truck—which advertised the family company on its door panel—they couldn’t help wondering if they had made a serious mistake.
b
It was Mr. Svendergard who first discovered deposits of sand and gravel in Vanadium. He was a big believer in concrete, and the Svendergard compound was a showcase for his concrete artistry. Every structure on the property was made from the stuff—the domicile, floors, walls, countertops, showers, baths, and sleeping platforms.“Buster, they haven’t come up with anything better than concrete since the Egyptians,” Mr. Svendergard said. “Concrete is made from a filler and a binder. That binder is usually cement paste. We use normal size aggregates to make a heavy-duty product. Aggregates are the stones we quarry then wash. Am I going too fast for you?”
“No, sir,” Buster said, not understanding one thing he’d said.
“Wanna see the gravel loft?”
The gravel loft was the biggest building in the complex. Six cement trucks sat side-by-side, ready to be loaded with washed gravel from a large chute that was connected to a silo. He showed Buster a red handle that was connected to a large chain that went all the way up to the ceiling.
“Go ahead and pull it.” Buster was reluctant, but Mr. Svendergard encouraged him. Buster gave it a yank. When he did, gravel spewed out of the chute and emptied directly into the rolling tank of a cement truck.
“You just dropped a ton of gravel.”
“Cool,” said Buster.
“I designed this set-up myself,” said Mr. Svendergard. Believing that he had finally found a concrete acolyte, Mr. Svendergard’s next act was to take Buster out of school. He had decided—taking into consideration Buster’s prodigious food intake, and the clothes and boots that he quickly outgrew—that the free full-time labor that Buster offered could push concrete production 12.5 percent, which could cover Buster’s overhead. Buster became the only ten-year-old boy who was allowed to drive a cement truck, operate heavy machinery, and use dynamite. That, alone, would have given Buster considerable prestige among the boys his age, but Buster was not enrolled in school.His absence prompted a visit from Sheriff Dudival.
“Is there some problem, Sheriff?” Mr. Svendergard asked.
“No problem. I just came out to see how things were going with the boy.”
“He’s fine,” Mrs. Svendergard was quick to say.
“I was just wondering why you haven’t enrolled him in school.”
“The kids in school call him a murderer.”
“There’s worse things.”
“What would that be?” challenged Mrs. Svendergard.
Sheriff Dudival just looked at her blankly. Possibly in his experience, there were worse things than to be called than a murderer, but he didn’t say.
“Is the boy around?”
“Sure, he’s around.”
“May I talk to him, please?”
Mr. Svendergard turned to his wife.
“I’ll go get him,” she said.
“How’s the cement business?” the sheriff asked Mr. Svendergard while waiting.
“I can’t even get enough Portland to keep up with demand.”
The sheriff assumed that that was good thing and nodded appreciatively.
Now Buster entered the room with Mrs. Svendergard.
“’Lo, Sheriff.”
“Hello, Buster.”
The sheriff noticed that everyone’s eyes darted back and forth to each other as if there was something funny he was not being let in on.
“How’s it goin’?”
“Good,” Buster said.
The four of them just stood there awkwardly.
“Mind if I talk to the boy alone for a moment?”
“Sure,” said Mr. Svendergard. “I’ve got a truck goin’ out, anyway.”
The sheriff then looked at Mrs. Svendergard and smiled curtly. She got the message and followed her husband out of the room. Maybe it was a small thing, but Dudival noticed that her blouse had been put on inside out.
“I brought you something,” Sheriff Dudival said, presenting Buster with a book that had been gift-wrapped with an FBI Most Wanted flyer.
“Mrs. Humphrey’s Manners for Men. I’ve read it many times myself. Thought it might be…” He pulled up short. “Are they treating you all right here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Anything you want to tell me about?”
“Not much to say.”
The sheriff noticed something behind Buster on the Svendergard’s breakfront. He stepped forward to examine a tin pie plate that had—with ballpeen and awl—been hammered into a portrait of someone.
“Ah made that,” Buster said proudly.
“He looks familiar. Do I know him?”
“You shor do. That there’s the late Mr. Dominguez.”
“I see.” The sheriff handed the plate back to Buster. “I think you nicely captured him.”
“Thanks, Sheriff.” Then Buster whispered entre nous, “Ah’m workin’ on one a Mr. Svenergard. Gonna surprise him.”
“Well, I’m sure he’ll appreciate that.”
They stood there for a moment. Buster was to offer nothing more.
“Okay, then. I guess I’ll be going. I’ve written my phone number on the inside of that book cover just in case you ever need it.”
“Okey doke,” Buster said.
Buster had not been exactly forthcoming with the sheriff about his living conditions. The Svendergards, as it turned out, weren’t just about cement. On a warm day a few weeks after moving in, Mr. Svendergard purchased several bales of hay and had instructed Buster to stack them one on top of the other by the gravel silo. Zella cheerfully rolled out a large archery target.
“Ever shot a bow and arrow before?” said Mrs. Svendergard.
“Nope.”
Then Mr. and Mrs. Svendergard disappeared giggling into the maintenance barn. When Buster was finished hoisting the target up onto the hay bales, he turned around to find Gil and Zella reappear from the barn completely naked except for the hawk feathers in their Indian headdresses.
“Oh gosh…” Buster guffawed and covered his eyes.
“It’s okay, Buster. You can look at us.” Buster peeked between the crack in his fingers. So much for the pinkness of the Svendergards’ skin.
“Jiminy Christmas, Mrs. Svendergard,” Buster said.
“Buster, take your hand away from your eyes. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” Mrs. Svendergard said. “Look, I’m not embarrassed.”
“Everybody’s got the same equipment, son.”
“Buster, it’s clothes that are the problem. They hide us from our real selves.”
“Mind if ah keep mine on, for the heck of it?”
“Of course not. We just thought it was time for you to know who we were. And that you should never be ashamed of your own body. Buster, no matter what they’ve taught you at Sunday school, just know this—the human race enters the world in an innocent state,” said the uncircumcized Mr. Svendergard.
“Uh huh.”
“The system corrupts us,” the mister continued—his wagging finger seeming to power the metronome of his wagging scrotum. “They turn us into vessels filled at the altar of consumerism!”
Buster tried to digest that. A vessel was a boat. That’s as far as he got before Mrs. Svendergards’ breasts caught his attention. For a chunky woman, her bosom was firm and aerodynamic as the chromed nosecone of a ’53 Studebaker Champion. And then there was her pubic hair. It was the same color as her eyelashes, and a copse of it climbed out between her legs and encroached her belly button like summer vines over a window. “That’s why, when we take off our clothes, we’re making a statement. And do you know what that statement is, Buster?” And Mrs. Svendergard’s rear end was pink and plump and swaybacked into a perfect dimpled hollow where a fellow could lay his head—if he so desired—while taking a nap under a shade tree.
“I said, do you know what that statement is?”
All Buster knew was that he was the luckiest boy in town. And then he fainted—because in the last seventy-five seconds he had forgotten to breathe. After the initial shock, Buster accepted their enthusiasm as second nature and joined them—in the water-filled quarries where they bathed naked, riding their Shetland ponies in the buff, jumping on the trampoline and playing naked hangman at the basketball hoop. Nudity, and the adoration of the Great Aten, the Egyptian Sun God, had long ago replaced the Svendergard’s regular churchgoing.
“Hail Aten, thou Lord of beams of light, when thou shinest, all faces live. Hail Aten!”
“Hail Aten!” Buster repeated, arms outstretched, palms facing the sun. That’s how Buster and Mr. Svendergard began each day at the concrete company.
The earth circled Aten three times and as the equinox began, the Svendergards were visited once again by Sheriff Dudival.
“Good afternoon, ma’am.”
“Good afternoon, Sheriff,” Mrs. Svendergard said, quickly fidgeting with the last button of her blouse.
“I hate to bother you, but I was by the school this morning and Buster’s name came up. He hasn’t been enrolled for the fall term.”
“Sheriff, with all due respect, our position on this hasn’t changed. We don’t want to send him to a place where he’s going to be bullied.”
“Ma’am, any kid who remembers Buster allegedly killing anybody would be in high school by now.”
“He’s getting a good education here.”
“Then if you don’t mind, someone from the school will be by to test him to see how he’s getting on.”
The next day, a social worker and a school administrator came by to give Buster a test to see how well he understood the basic principals of grade school math and English.“We think this young man should be back in school,” they said, packing up their pencils and papers. “He’s sorely lacking in multiplication skills and has no understanding of punctuation.”
“He’s learning to run a business! Can you teach him that in school?” Mrs. Svendergard said, showing them the door—and for some reason, spelling out her defense in the air with her finger. “No, you don’t! Exclamation mark. Do you? Question mark.”
As for school, it started, once again, without him. Things went back to normal if one could call it that. Then one night, Mr. Svendergard didn’t turn up for supper. Buster and Mrs. Svendergard searched the entire compound, but Mr. Svendergard was nowhere to be found. Buster used his special phone number to call Sheriff Dudival. Thirty-six hours later, the naked body of Gil Svendergard was finally discovered. He had been standing on the famed steel scaffolding of his own design, rinsing off a gyrating cement truck with a high-pressure hose. Somehow the loading gate of the gravel chute had opened behind him, pushing him off the platform and inside the barrel of the truck, where he was mixed and tumbled with a fresh load of concrete intended for a condo project in Telluride.
“Any idea how that happened, Buster?” asked the sheriff, interviewing him in the Svendergard’s living room.
“Nope,” said Buster.
“No idea who pulled that gravel chute up there?”
Buster thought about that for a moment.
“Welp, there ain’t but the three of us here. The missus never go up there…”
“But you do, right?”
“Yep. Ah do a considerbull ’mount a work up there.”
“And you never saw anybody else around here…on the property?”
“Nope.”
“And if you happened to pull that cord on the chute by mistake, you’d own up to it, because mistakes do happen in life.”
“Yessir, they shor do.”
The sheriff waited for him to say something.
“So…did you make a mistake?”
“Ah don’t b’lieve ah did.”
“And you and the mister never had any harsh words or other contretemps?”
“You mean like him not lettin’ me go to school?” The sheriff thought he was finally getting somewhere.
“That’s right. Like that.”
“Truth is, sir…ah dint wanna go.”
The sheriff’s eyes fell, once again, on the Svendergards’ breakfront where he noticed that there was a second pie plate on the shelf. This one was of Gil Svendergard. The sheriff put a hand on Buster’s shoulder and pulled him closer to him so he could speak in a low voice.
“Now look here, Buster, I’m going to give you fifteen seconds to admit that you might have had a hand in this. If you did, I’ll figure something out. I swear nothing bad will happen to you. I’ll just get you some help. Understand?”
“Yessir.”
The sheriff stood back and just looked at Buster’s blank face for fifteen seconds waiting for an answer. None came. Once again, Sheriff Dudival, in his capacity as sheriff and Coroner, reported it in his journal this way: Gil Svendergard suffered an accidental death due to a contraption of his own devise for loading and cleaning cement trucks that never passed a safety test by OSHA or a certified engineering company. He was unclothed.
There was a big turnout of women for Mr. Svendergard’s funeral, despite the fact that none of them had ever been friends with the missus. Word had gotten out that Mary Boyle, owner and cook at the Buttered Roll, had prepared marinated flank steak with roasted peppers on freshly baked rolls for the wake.
Buster had liked Mr. Svendergard and had enjoyed living there for the past two years, so he didn’t have to force himself to cry when the hearse drove up from Crippner’s Funeral Home. Buster, in all the time he had lived with the Svendergards, had never cut his red hair, nor did he shave—since it was the order of day at the Svendergards to go au natural in all things. Wearing one of Mr. Svendergard’s dark suits, his white shirt sleeves stuck out a good six inches, the gestalt was that of an orangutan in cowboy boots. Sheriff Dudival gently guided the boy to the back of the hearse where he, Skylar Stumplehorst—one of the biggest ranchers on the mesa—and two contractors, who were still owed concrete jobs, lined up behind the back door of the open hearse. Mr. Svendergard had requested that he be buried in a simple pine box—convinced that his worldly remains would quickly be carried off by Isis to begin its long journey home to the sun. This turned out to be a big mistake. To begin with, when the man from Crippner’s Funeral Home rolled the coffin out the back of the hearse into the waiting hands of the pallbearers, the weight practically tore each man’s arms out of their sockets. The people at Crippner’s had had little success in removing Mr. Svendergard from the cement chunk that he was originally delivered in. Their chief embalmer wasn’t trying to be ironic when he said that it would take a better man than he—Michelangelo’s hammer and chisel perhaps—to free Gil Svendergard from the chunk of cement that enslaved him. His first half-baked attempt ghoulishly separated a foot with the shoe still on it from the corpse, so Crippner’s decided to quit while they were ahead, or at least while the body still had a head.
The pallbearers took half a dozen wobbly steps under the weight of what surely was four hundred pounds, when Mr. Svendergard’s body suddenly broke through the bottom of the pine boards and fell to the ground. The gravediggers, it turned out, had gon
e for a drink. With the limited manpower on hand, the pallbearers had to resort to flopping the cement-encrusted corpse end over end. Mrs. Svendergard gasped and wailed with each flop, until, like craps, seven was the lucky number and the conglomerate that was Mr. Svendergard fell into the grave, head down.
Buster shoveled a spade of dirt over his second adopted father, hoping that, after a short period of mourning, everything would return to normal. Would Mrs. Svendergard still read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped to him while cleaning his ears in her naked lap? He certainly hoped so. Mrs. Svendergard cornered Sheriff Dudival before he could close the door of his patrol cruiser.
“I don’t think I can keep Buster.”
“Why not?” Sheriff Dudival asked.
“I don’t… I don’t feel comfortable being alone with him.”
“Do you believe Buster was responsible for your husband’s death?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then what is it?”
“I think he’d be better off in a family with a male role model.”
Improbable Fortunes Page 6