by Lesley Kagen
She lets go and looks down at me, hurt and confused.
That’s when I get what she was gesturing to from the window. It had to be the Minnow place. “Woody, don’t cry.” She’s still sitting on my tummy, her chest heaving and her hair going every which way. Suddenly, I realize I don’t care anymore what Papa will say or do if he catches me. I’m doing what he should’ve done for his little girl. Getting her what she wants, what she needs. “If you would let me up, it might be easier for me to go over and fetch Ivory. That’s what you’re tryin’ to tell me, isn’t it?” I ask, positive that it is.
Her tongue darts out from between her lips again.
“Don’t even think about it,” I say, bucking her off. “One lick of appreciation is fine, but I do not want this to become another one of your peculiarities. I mean it.”
My sister starts happy wagging, not just her tail, but her arms and legs, even her head.
“All right then.” I slip on my sneakers and head out our bedroom door. “Get out the soap and start running the tub. That pup takes after Clive. He’s gonna look like hell and stink to high heaven.”
Chapter Seventeen
Ivory Minnow is small for a Lab.
Looks like he’s got some Corgi in him. Or maybe like what happens to people, he’s just shrunken with age. He’s lying between the bentwood rocker and Mr. Clive’s metal-detecting device that’s propped up against his house, which is about the same size and shape as a boxcar.
That’s how our neighbor spent most of his day when he was still alive. Rocking in his chair or wandering around in the woods that’re between his place and ours, using his metal-detecting device to unearth what he called, “Buried treasure. Free for the taking.” He found scads of Civil War coins and other left-behind-in-the-heat-of-battle momentos. Muskets and snuff boxes, lots of uniform buttons from both sides, belt buckles and swords. If Clive found something he thought was extra valuable, he would snap a picture of it and then ask me to bring Mama over. She’d take what he found into town for him the next time we went. Artesia Johnson, who owns What Goes Around Comes Around, would place Clive’s find in her store and some enthusiastic tourist would buy it.
The money he got from those doodads would help supplement the check Clive got each month from the government for his service to our country. When he was a younger man, he was in the U.S. Coast Guard and got tossed overboard during a hurricane. He didn’t get rescued for two whole days. Clive told me at least once a week, “You think we’re alone in the universe, but we’re not. I saw four flying saucers whish over my head while I was bobbing in that ocean waitin’ to get saved. Not one, not two. Four.”
I’d sit out here with him some nights on this very porch, because just like me, Clive loved the sky. Not for the same reasons, though. He didn’t mind me pointing out the constellations to him, but would tell me to hush if he saw something that looked like an unidentified flying object. That was his passion. UFOs he called them. “They’re up there. They’re watchin’ us,” he’d say, real creepy. Thinking that there might be aliens peeking down on us would about scare the undies off me, but for him, it was a comfort. Since he had few friends on this planet, I think he believed there might be beings from far, far away who would be willing to visit him. (I’ve seen aliens in movies. None of them are that good-looking either, so Clive and those UFO beings would have a natural jumping-off point.)
He’s going to be so disappointed that he died and didn’t get to see the men land on the moon. He was really looking forward to that.
The wind has kicked up a notch and is pushing his rocker to and fro. The sky is on its way to going deep gray and I can hear thunder trumpeting from the other side of Elephant Mountain. A storm is moving in.
“Hey, boy,” I say to Ivory as I come up the porch steps, holding out my hand so he can get a whiff of me. Even though I told Papa that the dog was starving to death to try and elicit some sympathy from him, I’d told E. J. that it would make his wife-to-be happy if he’d go over to the Minnow place once a day and feed the poor thing. That’s why there’s clean water in a dish and a bowl half full with the food Clive kept in a garbage can out back. Just like I thought, the dog smells worse than wet wool and brambles have worked themselves into his chocolatey fur. Below his eyes, there’s fudgey trails. “Remember me? I was the one that used to play checkers every Wednesday afternoon with your master.”
I peer through one of the front windows of the house. Clive wasn’t the best housekeeper, but this is the worst I’ve ever seen his place. The parlor looks like General Sherman marched through. Sofa cushions are split open and lying catawampus on the floor. The oak mantel above his river rock fireplace has been swept clean. Maybe some burglars got in here, knocked him on his head, drug him to the creek, and rifled through his stuff. If that’s what happened, they weren’t real professional. The pipe rack is still on the end table next to his favorite chair. Clive told me a bunch of times, “Keep your germy hands off my white pipes. They’re from Germany. They’re worth something.”
Or maybe it wasn’t burglars at all.
Sheriff Nash told Papa out on the porch this afternoon that he thought our neighbor might’ve been murdered. It was probably the sheriff and his deputy, Homer Willis, who messed up the place looking for clues. But who’d want to kill Mr. Minnow? He was practically an antique. Doesn’t seem like anybody’d go to the trouble to do away with someone who the Grim Reaper already had on his folks-to-visit-next list. Clive didn’t have any family that I know of, (except for Ivory) or a lady friend (no one but Jesus of Nazareth could be that charitable), so his death could not have been the result of what is known in legal circles as a “crime of passion,” which means that you’ve got to love somebody a whole lot in order to murder them.
Ivory hasn’t moved from his post. He’s watching me in that same distrustful way Clive did.
“Quit lookin’ at me like that,” I say. “He told me I could have the ring. You heard him.”
The front door has a handwritten KEEP OUT BY ORDER OF THE ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY SHERIFF sign posted, but it’s unlocked, and my curiosity is getting the better of me.
Stepping over the threshold and into his parlor, I think, This is a dead man’s house. It feels different from just empty. It’s like all his belongings know that Clive is never coming back and they’re in mourning, too. The plants he had near the front window are limp. Everything that should be standing upright isn’t. The floor lamp is living up to its name. Lightbulb bits are scattered around its crushed shade. Clive liked to read science fiction books and they’ve been pulled out of the bookcase. The screen of his fancy colored television set has been smashed in with a fireplace poker that’s still stuck inside.
Last summer, Clive must’ve found something real rare because he got flamboyant. Ordered this nineteen-inch colored television set out of the Sears Roebuck catalog and a fancier camera with a long lens to take better sky pictures with. I was over here the day his new and improved detector and camera got delivered.
“All the bells and whistles,” he said, thrilled.
Of course, I was happy for him, but also concerned. I knew before Mama vanished that she’d been slipping him some of her household money because he was having a hard time paying his bills. So I pointed down to the empty delivery boxes and told Clive, “Don’t you think ya might’ve gone a bit overboard?” which, in hindsight, might’ve been a poor choice of words, considering his Coast Guard experience.
He got very wound up and told me back, “Don’t worry about me, little girl. I got what you’d call a long-term investment,” and then he ran off into the woods hither-nither and I didn’t see him for a few days after that.
I hop over the mess of pictures carpeting his living room floor. Whoever was in here has also upended the old sea chest where Clive kept his photo collection. There must be a thousand or more pictures. Mostly of the sky, but there are ones of Ivory and some of his metal-detecting finds and trees and dirt.
What I’ve come for
, besides Ivory, is in the starfish box that’s lying untouched next to his special chair where he smoked his pipes. Clive got the box from the Far East on his travels. “The Chinese are very tricky and inscrutable. They love puzzles and hidden drawers,” he told me. He’d always turn his back to keep me from seeing how the box secretly opened, but there’s a mirror above his fireplace and I could see him just fine.
I fell deeply in love with the ring the morning Clive discovered it under a birch tree with his metal-detecting device. I begged him for it and kept asking every time we played checkers, “Please?” but each and every time he told me, “The day you get the ring will be over my dead body.”
So there you go.
The drawer on the side of the box that you can’t see unless you know it’s there pops open to reveal the mother-of-pearl sitting prettily on red velvet like it’s been waiting for me. Just for a second I have the most fanciful thought. What if the reason Clive was so adamant about me not having this ring was because he was intending to give it to Gramma Ruth Love? Wouldn’t that be something? I think he had a fat crush on her. He gave himself a spit and polish on the days he knew she was coming for a pie visit.
When Clive was alive, being suspicious like he was, he wasn’t that big on letting me see too much of the house. I want to look around now that I got the chance. I leave the parlor and go around the corner to the bathroom door, which is shut. The doorknob sticks, but when I finally jiggle it loose, I’m knocked backwards by the odor.
From the look of things, the sheriff is wrong (big surprise) about Clive getting murdered. He’d been complaining about stomachaches off and on, but I didn’t take that hypochondriacting seriously. I guess I should’ve because it looks like a real sickness is what did him in. Probably influenza. There’s a bad one going around. Old upchuck covers the toilet, the sink, and the green tiled walls. This room also doubled as Clive’s darkroom and his expensive developing equipment is right where he left it, untouched by his retching. The last photographs he took are hanging from the crooked shower rod, held in place by red plastic clothespins. There’s one of me and that’s the most upsetting part of all. Clive really did like me. Sometimes he called me “Peaches.” And he gave me the Lost in Space lunch box after he found it in a ditch by the road.
“Mercy,” I say, moving into the kitchen. The cupboard doors are flung open and what was inside is now on the outside. Dented cans of Campbell’s pork and beans, Clive’s absolute favorite, and a couple of jars of Kraft pimento cheese because sometimes he’d make me a sandwich when we’d play checkers, are lying on the tile next to a bunch of other food items and a whole family of dead mice. Their rotting bodies are part of the real bad stink. The rest of the putrid smell is coming from the overflowing trash can.
The house shutters have begun rattling. The windows, too. It usually takes time for a storm to climb over the mountains and settle into the valley, but every once in a while, one can surprise you like this. I get jumpy around lightning, so I hurry back out to the porch, shut the door of the house, and get Ivory by the collar. “C’mon, ol’ boy. We gotta get home. Something nasty is comin’ our way.”
Chapter Eighteen
Branches are beating against the four-paned window. Our house has gone deep black, which always happens when the wind comes up this fierce. We lose our power. Lou tells Woody and me that it’s a ghost playing a trick on us. I half believe her, because Mr. Cole has tried to fix whatever is wrong in the fuse box time and time again with no luck. I’ve lit a couple of stubby candles, let the wax drip onto the porcelain sink and stuck them.
My shadow is dancing across the white bathroom wall like a chorus girl in a movie musical when I sing for the fifth and, I swear, last time, “When you walk through a storm keep your head up high and don’t be afraid of the dark. At the end of the storm is a golden sky and the sweet silver song of a . . . bark.” This song from the Carousel album is another one of Woody’s all-time favorites. I have sung it to her enough times down in the root cellar that I know perfectly well that last part’s supposed to go—the sweet silver song of a . . . lark, but I knew changing it up like that would make her smile.
I already took my bath. Now my sister’s in the claw tub beneath a scattering of bubbles, her freshly shampooed hair floating like seaweed in the ocean. I’ve already inspected her for the dime-sized marks.
The first time I found the purple splotches, I scrubbed and scrubbed and when they wouldn’t come off I asked her, “Did you do a swan dive into a blueberry patch or something?” It was mysterious. And got more so when I noticed that the marks kept showing up even when there weren’t any berries blooming. I figured it out the afternoon I saw Woody running down to the animal cemetery behind the barn. She was going to bury a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. When I got down to the barn, Pegasus was pawing in the cross ties. Out the door, I could see that Blackie who was here to shoe Papa’s horse had caught Woody. He pried the dead bird out of her hand, threw it as far as he could, and when it landed up against a tree, he laughed and said, “Guess it needs some more practice.” He mimicked Woody’s flapping. “Ya can fool your idiot father, but ya can’t fool me. You’re just puttin’ this shit on.” That’s when he started pinching her all over the place. He only stopped because I yelled out to him, “There’s a woman on the telephone for you, Uncle Blackie. Got a voice like Marilyn Monroe’s. You better come quick.” I wanted to tell Papa on him, but I knew if I did, Blackie would get back at me. The next time he got ahold of my sister, he’d pinch her quarter size.
I sit on the edge of the tub and bury my toes in Ivory’s chocolate back. He looks up at me and gives me a very jolly look. “I were you, I’d wipe that smile off my face. You’re next,” I tell him. “Get out now, Woody. We got to get up to the fort before the rain comes.”
When she stands, I notice how we’re not flat anymore. Our chests are budding. And between our legs wispy hair has come in and we’ve got gentle curves at the waist. Tears spring to my eyes when I do Mama’s job of wrapping my sister up tight in a towel. Woody and I are changing into little women without her.
Due to his unusually small size, Ivory was easy to stuff into the Bucket Express.
Mama was the one who came up with the idea of jerry-rigging a rope to a branch on the tree fort, placing a pully on top and an old wash pail down on the bottom so we could haul stuff up without having to leave the fort. “Mother is the necessity of invention,” she said when she stood back to admire her work, and I just loved that.
Woody, me, and Ivory are snug like spoons in the sleeping corner of our fort, so maybe that’s why the rhyme that Papa liked to recite to us when we’d come up here together to view the spring constellations is popping into my mind no matter how hard I’m trying to push it away.
Hey diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon,
The little dog laughed to see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
“Right there, girls. See?” Papa would speak softly, like he was hunting and might scare the stars away. “The cat is your birth sign—Leo the lion. And the fiddle is Lyra—the lyre. The cow the rhyme is referring to is Taurus the bull. The little dog is Canis Minor, you see him? And the dish is Crater running away with the spoon, who is the Big Dipper.”
Memories are so two-faced.
One minute they’re hugging you like a long-lost friend, the next minute they’re ripping you apart like your worst enemy.
I whisper into my sister’s hair, “I’m gettin’ so grimmery. ’Bout everything.”
Woody and I are having our pillow talk time the way we always have. I wish she’d start holding up her end again. My thoughts come so fast and furious this time of day. I desperately miss my twin telling me when I would get like this, “Ya know what your problem is, Shenny? You think way too much. Hushacat.”
We came into this world knowing a foreign language. Mama thought it was cute and would try to
chitter-chatter with us, but Papa made us quit because he said we sounded like little monkeys. So, just like anything else you don’t keep up, we mostly forgot how. We still remember some of the twin talk and use it when we are alone. Before Woody went mute on me, that is. You already know that hushacat means everything is going to be all right no matter how bad it seems at the present time, but what I just told Woody? That I’m feeling grimmery? That’s hard to define in regular English. The closest I can get is—“catastrophically worried to death.” Meetone—means “I’m hungry.” Rabadee—“I’m sorry.” The best twin word of all, though, has got to be boomba—“love.” Not the dependable kind, like when your mother and father who still care for each other are sitting on the back steps discussing their day and their voices come drifting through your bedroom window where you’re sleepy between hung-in-the-sun sheets after a warm bubble bath. And not the kind of romantic love that E. J. feels for Woody and I feel for Bootie Young. No, a boomba is more like how you feel when you get an unexpected gift. Me getting Ivory Minnow into my sister’s arms, for instance. That gave her a boomba.
Speaking of which, poor Clive. I wish I hadn’t run out of Rolaids . Just thinking about him is making my stomach leap about the same way his must’ve before he died. Deceasing all alone like that must’ve been terrible.
Or maybe my tummy’s jumpy because I’m having one of those gut instincts that Sam is always going on about. “If you two girls begin to feel like something bad is about to happen that means it probably is. Trust your gut,” he tells us all the time. “You start feeling that way, come to the station as fast as you can.”