by Ann Cummins
Crazy Yellow
Pete Lochte lay on his mother’s bed watching a wad of aluminum foil. The wad didn’t move. He’d stuffed it under the sliding door that separated the kitchen from the bedroom. Mice lived behind the wall. They hadn’t checked the stove before they moved into this place, but if they had they would have found a tray of droppings. When they did, they stuffed every hole in the apartment with newspaper. Then last Sunday morning Pete watched a mouse tear newspaper piece by piece out of the hole under the kitchen door. Once the mouse crawled in the hole, Pete stuffed it with aluminum foil, a tightly wadded silver bomb that no mouse could possibly break through. Still, he watched the bomb every day, just in case. So far it hadn’t moved a bit.
He got up and walked over to the foil. His mother said that by now the mice would be carpet behind the wall, that they all must have died, but there was no funny smell. He reached down to touch the bomb, wiggled it like a loose tooth, was wiggling it when the phone rang.
“Hi, sweetie.” He could hear traffic behind his mother’s voice. “How’s everything?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m still in Portland,” his mom said. “Hamburgers tonight. You and Lynn are going out. How about that?”
Pete didn’t say anything.
“Peter,” she said, “the doctor wants to keep me overnight for some tests. Honey? It’s nothing serious. Just some tests.”
She must be in a phone booth. He could hear voices behind hers.
“Let me talk to Lynn,” she said.
“She’s not here.” He could hear horns blast.
“Where is she?”
Pete had spent the afternoon on the beach with his aunt Lynn. She lived in Tillamook, just five miles down the road, and she would drive over when his mom had to go to Portland. But today when they returned to the apartment and found his mom still not home, Lynn had to leave.
“She went to work.”
His mom was silent. Finally she said, “She just left you there?” She told him to call Lynn at work, to tell her to come and get him, but then she changed her mind and said she was coming home, that she’d tell the doctor they’d do it another time.
“I’ll call her,” Pete said. “It’s okay.”
She was quiet for a long time. Finally she told him that he should call Aunt Lynn right now, and that she’d call Lack in ten minutes. “And Peter,” she said, “it’s nothing serious. Just some tests.”
“I know.”
Pete put the receiver back in its holder. He picked up the phone book, flipped to the back where his mom had penciled Lynn’s work number. She’d have to wear a hospital gown since she didn’t have any clothes with her. She’d have to wear one of those things that tied in the back, and if you walked around everybody could see your naked backside.
The first time she was in the hospital his dad took him to visit, and they saw a woman walk down the hall in one of those things. His dad said, “Now that’s a vision.” That was three years ago. Pete hadn’t seen his father in nearly six months. He was working in Alaska on a fishing boat.
Pete picked up the receiver and dialed 3–4–7—but then stopped. He would be nine in two months. He put the receiver back down.
He went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. He made his right eyebrow go up and his nostrils flare. His mom teased him when he made faces in the mirror. “Are you handsome?” she’d ask him. “How handsome are you?”
He curled his lip and made his monster face. He thought about the sleeping bag in the empty apartment downstairs. She didn’t know a, thing about that. There were lots of things about this place that she didn’t know. He’d seen the rolled-up bag through the porch window yesterday, and he walked around the house and found a broken window in the back. In the woods once, farther down the beach, he stood shadowed by trees and watched a man and girl hammer out the glass from one of the rentals, then slide into the house. A few days later he watched a man in a suit and a uniformed cop pick the glass from the sand, hold it in their hands, and stare at the hole in the window. He didn’t tell them about the man and the girl, though, and he hadn’t told his mom about the sleeping bag downstairs because he liked being the only one who knew.
The phone rang, and he ran back into the bedroom.
“Is she coining?”
“Yes.”
“She got off work?”
“She’s coming.”
“Good. I’ll be home early tomorrow,” his mom said. “Tell Lynn I’ll pay her back. Tell her you can eat whatever you want, that I said so.”
If he had money, he’d walk to Quik Stop and buy something to eat. There was nothing to eat in this house. Just mochi and miso and seaweed in the cupboards, carrots and wheat grass in the refrigerator. His mom said brown rice and carrots were the perfect foods, that they brought balance and harmony to the body. When she first got sick, she threw out everything good to eat in the place and stocked up on mochi and seaweed. She told Pete and his dad that these things would taste good, too, once they developed their taste buds. Pete and his dad used to sneak out when his mom was napping. His dad would whisper, “Let’s get some dogs.” Then they went to Quik Stop and stuffed themselves on hot dogs.
Pete stared at the bomb. It did not move. He wondered where there would be money. They kept a junk drawer in the kitchen. Pete opened it, started pulling out shoestrings, a leather glove, clothespins, cards, screws. He dropped these on the floor and dropped batteries, matches, incense sticks. He found a quarter, three pennies, a Chinese coin with a square cut out of the middle. When his mom was sad, she liked to take Chinese coins and get out her I-Ching. “Whatever’s happening inside you, remember that you’re about to change. If you feel like you’re in a well, you’re about to climb out of it. That’s the nature of life.” His dad used to roll his eyes when she threw the coins and read from the I-Ching. He called it her hocus-pocus book.
Pete put the coins in his pocket. He walked into the bedroom jingling the change in his pocket, and he picked up his mom’s black purse. He found three dimes and a penny in a zippered pouch. He found tissues in the purse and mints, five pens, and an old picture of his dad. His dad’s green eyes were half closed, and his lips shone. His lazy brown hair hugged his head. He looked ready. “We’re ready, aren’t we, Pete?” he liked to say, and they’d put on their jean jackets. They were ready for anything. Pete released the picture and watched it float to the floor.
His mom kept many vitamin jars on the bottom nightstand shelf, jars filled with acrylic paint, plus two with rubber bands and two holding paintbrushes. He emptied the rubber bands and the paintbrushes but saw no coins. He picked up one of the paint jars, unscrewed the lid, brought the open jar to his nose, and sniffed. The jar was brown. The room was dusk. It was impossible to see the paint’s color, so he picked up a brush, dipped it in the paint. White. It dripped into the vitamin jar and over the lip onto the side, running down to Pete’s finger. He held the brush like a dart and torpedoed the aluminum foil bomb. White paint streaked the white wall and the wood floor. “Right on,” he said.
He put the open jar on the floor and took another. He unscrewed the lid, sniffed. He took another brush from the floor, dipped. It came out globbed yellow. “Crazy yellow.” He bombed the aluminum, hitting it square. It looked good. Even in this darkening room he could see that yellow aluminum, and it looked good. He got off the bed, taking the yellow paint with him. He picked up the brush, lay on his stomach, dipped the brush in the paint, and began to coat the bomb. He painted carefully, digging with the bristles into each wrinkle, painting section by section.
He decided to paint the bomb on the mouse’s side, too. He pulled the wad from the hole, smearing yellow on his fingers, and painted wrinkle by wrinkle, double coating it so that when he stuck it back in the hole, yellow oozed around the edges like egg yolks. He was hungry!
He dropped the brush and got up, walked to the portable wardrobe case and threw open the doors. Most of the clothes were his mom’s. He
began going through her coat pockets: raincoat, car coat, cashmere coat his dad bought her. Her city coat. Before she got sick, they used to go to Portland on dates, all three of them, and his mom wore the clothes his dad was always buying. Nasty clothes, she called them. Stockings with seams up the back and skinny dresses, a black one and a red one and a shiny blue one. All through the date his dad would say, “Doesn’t our girl look great? Isn’t she something?” They went to movies or to the Rose Garden, and before they came home, they always went to the deli for seven-layer chocolate fudge cake.
Pete stepped closer and put his face in the coats. He couldn’t remember what seven-layer fudge chocolate cake tasted like. These clothes smelled like his mom. His robe had fallen to the floor. He didn’t pick it up and hang it next to hers on the door. She should have taken her robe to the hospital so she wouldn’t have to wear one of theirs.
Well, she couldn’t have. She hadn’t known she was going to the hospital.
Pete backed out of the closet and sat on the edge of the bed. The new lumps were no larger than ants, Lynn had told him today. Smaller than the first time. Just little brown sugar ants you could smash between your fingers.
The arm from a white shirt in the closet stuck out, handless but stiff. Yellow streaked the cuff. Pete looked at the paint on his hands. He walked back to the closet and rubbed the cuff, but more paint smeared on from his hands, and now he noticed that there was yellow paint on the cashmere coat and on a gray turtleneck, and—there was yellow paint on everything he had touched. He wiped his hands on his jeans, then put them behind him. He walked into the bathroom and turned the light on. When he looked in the mirror, he saw a littles yellow mustache above his lip, and when he took a towel and rubbed it, the mustache stayed but his face where he rubbed turned red, and when he soaped it and his hands, turning the water on as hot as he could stand, his hands and face turned very red but the yellow stayed. He shoved the towel in the hot water, turned the faucet off and took the dripping towel into the bedroom. He rubbed the cuff with the towel as hard as he could. The wetness made the paint look green, but it didn’t make it go away. He wedged himself between coats, dropped the towel, and scraped the cashmere with his fingernail, but the paint smeared then, and he remembered it took a long time for this kind of paint to dry, how his mom always said, “Don’t touch the paint,” when she finished a canvas because it took so long to dry—Pete pushed the clothes as far apart as his arms would stretch. He backed out and sat on the bed.
The phone began to ring. He stared at it. On the third ring the answering machine clicked on and he heard his mother’s voice saying they weren’t home, please leave a message, and then he heard her: “Hey, you guys, are you there? I bet you’re at dinner. I bet you’re eating something trashy,” she sang, and Pete hated it, suddenly, the singsongy tone she sometimes used when she talked to him, as if he were a child. As if he were two. He stared at his own fat cheeks in his mom’s Paradise painting on the wall. His three-year-old self with its fat cheeks, his little smiling self, and his little crying self, and his little sleeping self—all the angels in this painting had his face, though his mother had changed the hair color. And the elf on the horse in the painting next to Paradise had his face. His four-year-old face. She had made his hair golden and his eyes green. And in the next painting, the little prince had his five-year-old face.
This room smelled. It smelled like paint. “I’ll try back in a few hours,” his mom was saying. Pete pushed himself off the bed, banging his arm on the bedpost. He headed for the stairs. He could not stand this place.
Through the screen on the porch door he could see a man sitting on the step. There was a small, smoking grill on the ground. The grill had only two legs. The man had propped the third side up on rocks. Pete had seen a broken grill just like it farther down the beach.
This man was completely bald and wore a dirty white T-shirt and jeans. He was drinking a beer. Beside him a fish—wide, flat, swollen-lipped—leaked onto a paper bag. There was a section of newspaper next to the fish, and the man kept leaning over and peering at it. Now he picked the paper up, brought it close to his face. Before Pete could think, the man was standing and coming toward him across the porch.
“Well, hello.” He grinned. A tooth was missing on the top. “Is there a porch light in there?” Pete flipped the switch. “I’m your new neighbor. Charlie Alexander.” He motioned toward the empty apartment with his thumb. “Just moved in.” Pete didn’t say anything. The man peered through the screen. “And who are you again?” He poked his tongue through the gap where the tooth should’ve been, and looked Pete up and down. “Cat got your tongue?”
After a minute, the man shrugged, turned, and walked back to the porch step. He sat half-turned so Pete could see the side of his face. He held the newspaper close to his face, studying it.
Pete opened the door and stood leaning against the door frame.
“Know what it says here?” this Charlie Alexander said. His skin puffed and folded around his eyes like an old man’s, but the rest of him didn’t look old. “It says, ‘Ruling a large kingdom is like cooking a small fish.’ Now what do you suppose that means?” The man poked the fish. “Would you say this is a large fish or a small? I mean for cooking.”
“Where’d you get it?”
The man smiled. He crumpled the beer can and threw it on the ground with two others. “Caught it off the rocks.” He pulled another from its ring in the six-pack. “You ever seen one of these? These are lucky fish. Sunfish.”
“If you found it dead on the beach, you shouldn’t eat it.”
The man took a drink, watching Pete. He put the can beside the fish. “No?”
“A bad taste to her,” Pete said. Last week he and his mom were walking on the beach and saw a man pull in a fish that looked like a perch, though it wasn’t, and from its stomach, little fish dripped out, dozens of tiny little fish the color of nothing. It lay there in the sand, and it didn’t flip because it was dead already. “She’s no good now,” the fisherman had said. “A bad taste to her.” He told them to take the babies to the water because they had a chance, so Pete and his mom scooped them up and ran to the water with them.
“Well,” Charlie Alexander said. “And who are you again?”
Pete didn’t answer. He walked to the porch railing, threw one leg over, mounting it. There was a spot of yellow on his tan shorts, almost invisible, almost the color of the shorts. Pete put his hand over it, but the spot was wet. He rubbed the wet fingers on his blue shirt. He couldn’t see the yellow on the blue, not really. Just a bare streak of yellow that looked green.
He didn’t know how Charlie Alexander, this Charlie, got here. There was no car parked in the dirt drive nor under the trees out back. In the weird porch light Charlie’s tanned face was the color of mustard. Pete thought about how he’d run out toward the water if the man pulled anything. Pete could feel live fish flipping in his palms. Right now he could feel them.
Charlie stood, walked down to the grill, and put his hand over it. He had used driftwood instead of coals for the fire. He walked back to the porch, picked up the fish by its tail, and flipped it onto the grill, and it sizzled. “First time out, I catch me a damn sunfish.” He wore a knife in a belt holder, and now he took it out, opened the blade, sat on the step, and began shaving his thumbnail. “One problem with me?” he said. “I got no feeling in my extremities. So you tell me if I’m bleeding.” He held his thumb out to Pete and Pete jerked back. The man laughed. “You’re white, boy. Did I scare you?”
“No.”
“White as an albino coyote.” He slid his knife under the fish, lifted the tail, and looked at its underside. The fish began to drip onto the coals, and flames shot up through the grill, licking around the fish’s sides. The man didn’t wear shoes. He squatted, balanced on his toes, and Pete could see that his heels were cracked, the cracks filled with sand. His legs didn’t shake. Pete had tried to do yoga with his mother, and they sometimes squatted jn that kind of
half-squat, but they couldn’t do it for long because their legs shook. This was a strong man.
He flipped the fish over. The tail was black but most of the fish was rosy brown, and there were stripes from the grill. He blew on his fingers and grinned. “Am I burning?” he said. “You’ve got to tell me if I’m burning because I got no feeling in my extremities.”
“Why not?” Pete said.
“Frostbite. Got it up in Canada a few years back, which is how I lost my toe.” He held out his left foot. There was a bony stump where the toe should’ve been. “Lost my toe and all feeling in my fingertips, which should make me a good cotton picker, don’t you think?” He laughed, his mouth wide open.
He asked Pete if he’d ever been camping, and Pete said sure. “I mean real wilderness camping.” He looked Pete up and down. “Up to Canada they got whole packs of these albino coyotes. You ever seen one of those?”
“No.”
“You probably don’t have the eye,” Charlie said. “They’re all over the place but most people can’t see ‘em.”
The fish on the grill hissed and flames leapt all around it. “Come here, hold this bag for me, will you? Come on, I won’t bite.” He slipped the knife under the fish and started lifting it from the grill.
“Once,” he said, “I’m driving, this was on an Indian reservation over in Arizona. Pick up the bag and hold it real close. That’s it. Fish’ll fall apart, we don’t watch out.” Pete got the paper bag and the man slid the fish onto it. The bag felt heavy and warm. “You eaten? You’re welcome,” he said.
He sat back on the porch. “Yeah, so it’s dark. Come on,” the man growled when Pete didn’t sit. “You scared of me?” Pete shrugged. He sat down to show Charlie he wasn’t scared of him. Charlie took his dirty knife, wiped the blade on his jeans, held the fish by the gills and sliced from neck to tail. Pete wondered if a fish dead off the beach would smell this good. He didn’t think so. Charlie took hold of the tail and began loosening the bones from the flesh. “I’m driving along, and I see this white dog running on the side of the road. That’s what I think at first, but then I notice how it’s running. It’s running toward me, but this dog isn’t spooked by my lights, and it knows where it’s going. You ever seen a coyote hunt? Smart animals. They’re pack animals. They’ll corner a deer, deer or antelope, surround her, back her into a canyon, and then just sit there and howl. Paralyzes the prey.” The man put the bones on the edge of the porch. “I mean, the coyotes take their time, and when the prey’s paralyzed with fear—” He cut into the fish, spearing a chunk, holding it on the tip of his knife to Pete’s mouth. Pete jerked back. Charlie laughed. Pete opened his mouth and took the fish. He held it in his mouth, tasting it. It tasted good, and he bit into it, letting the juice run over his teeth and down his throat. Charlie speared a chunk for himself and swallowed it with beer. “So anyway, this white animal is running toward me like he owns the highway, and I say to myself, I say, ‘Charlie, slow down.’ Because see, it’s a coyote, but no ordinary coyote. I got the eye.” He touched the skin near his eye with the knife point. “Five miles down the road, you know what?”