Welcome to Fred (The Fred Books)

by Brad Whittington

  The battle raged for days, and time was running out when Jolene discovered his weakness. Romance lurks in the most unlikely places, and it seems Bubba was hopelessly smitten with Turner’s younger sister, Marianne. Jolene deduced his secret when she walked into his room one night without knocking and found him enhancing his fledgling mustache with mascara.

  He was staring intently into the mirror. “Marianne,” he said in an unnatural baritone voice, “would you like to go out with me Friday? No, that’s no good.” He assumed what he evidently felt was a sophisticated expression, one eyebrow suavely raised. “Marianne, how ’bout takin’ in a movie Friday night?”

  Then he saw Jolene in the mirror. “Hey! Didn’t you ever learn ta knock?” he demanded.

  “Didn’t you ever learn ta ask before you borrow my makeup?” Jolene retorted, waving the mascara in his face. Bubba flushed a glowing scarlet and leaned on his elbow, casually covering his mouth with his hand. “Don’t try ta hide it, now. It’s too late.”

  “Dang it, Jolene.” He slammed his hand on the dresser. “There’s such a thang as privacy.”

  “Calm down, Bubba. This is your lucky day.”

  He eyed her suspiciously. “How’s that?”

  “Obviously you’re sweet on Marianne McCullough, right?”

  “So?”

  “So, I’m going with Turner to the homecoming dance. You can take Marianne, and we can double.”

  “You’re forgettin’ one very important fact. I’m takin’ Judy to the homecoming dance.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” Jolene thought for a moment. “But you’d like ta take Marianne out, wouldn’t you?”

  “Sure, who wouldn’t?”

  “OK. How about if I get a double date set up with the Culpeppers and the McColloughs?”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, quit being so cautious, Bodean. Would you like for me ta do it or not?”

  “Sure, as long as you don’t screw the whole thang up by embarrassin’ one of us.”

  “You worry about the silliest things, Bubba. Look, if you’ll help me finish my dress, I’ll set you up with Marianne.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “On a single date, just you and Marianne.”

  “What are you gonna do? Ask her yourself?”

  “OK. I’ll invite her over and arrange for you ta be alone with her fer a few minutes. How’s that?”

  Bubba relented, his passion overwhelming his ego. Jolene led him to the den and the sewing machine. He locked the door and closed all the curtains. Then, with second, third, and fourth thoughts and protests too numerous to relate, he gingerly donned the formal and stood on a telephone cable spool while Jolene pinned and taped and stitched. As she worked, he complained bitterly about the indignities he was forced to suffer in the name of love until Jolene flung the curtains open wide. Bubba shrieked and disappeared into the closet. The fitting session proceeded thereafter with only minor grumbling.

  The next day at school Bubba was very quiet. Thoughts of the dress haunted him. He couldn’t shake the feeling that people could tell just by looking that he had been wearing it. They didn’t actually say anything, but he felt like somehow they knew. Normal events took on sinister aspects. Every smile seemed like a veiled taunting. Every huddle of whispering, giggling girls was a cauldron of rumors threatening to overflow and destroy his reputation. He was certain even the workers in the cafeteria knew. He saw the way the cook looked at him. There was no mistaking that!

  That evening it took Jolene an hour to convince him to endure a final fitting. Anxious to get it just right, she gave him a pair of her shorts and had him fill out the hips with extra fabric. She wanted him to wear her bra stuffed with socks to fit the top, but Bubba drew the line at that. Wearing a dress was bad enough, but he absolutely wasn’t going to wear girl’s underwear! She finally settled for simulating the curves by hanging two squashes around his neck with a length of twine.

  Standing on the spool in padded shorts, a formal, and two squashes, Bubba felt he had sunk as low as a man could go. His face was hot, no doubt burning with shame. The longer he stood, the hotter it seemed to get. Then he realized his head was only a foot from the ceiling. Naturally it would be hotter up there. He sniffed suspiciously. “Hey! Somethin’s burnin’.”

  Suddenly Mr. Culpepper burst into the room. The sight of Bubba in drag on a pedestal stopped him dead in his tracks with his mouth open. Black smoke rolled in along the ceiling above him.

  “I told you somethin’ was burnin’,” Bubba hollered, jumping down from the spool.

  The noise broke Mr. Culpepper’s trance. “Hurry! Climb out the window! The house is full of smoke!”

  Bubba kicked out the screen and helped Jolene climb out as Mr. Culpepper pulled the phone to the floor and called the constable. Bubba followed Jolene out of the window and ran to the side of the house. The pine trees seemed to jerk fitfully with a flickering light. The flames had already eaten through the roof.

  “I think it started in the attic,” he hollered to his dad, who was running around the corner. Bubba twisted on the faucet, grabbed the water hose, and ran, but it caught on a bush and jerked him flat on his back. Water spurted up like a geyser, soaking him. It was then that he realized he was still wearing the dress.

  He jumped up and turned one way and then the other, in a quandary about which disaster was greater, the fire or the dress. The urgency of the fire finally won. He pulled the hose to the side of the house and did his best to discourage the flames, the dress soon forgotten. Jolene looked in dismay at her formal, now streaked with mud, soot, and water.

  The glow of flames in the trees attracted the neighbors and folks passing on the highway. Before long a crowd stood watching the spectacle. Bubba stood his post resolutely, his back to the masses. An old F-150 rolled to a stop just out of the light cast by the fire, and Parker stepped out, walking past the onlookers to stop next to Bubba.

  “Lady, that hose ain’t doin’ a bit a good,” he said. “Is there anybody in there?” The flames dancing on the roof reflected from his good eye, which was bloodshot.

  “Nope,” Bubba muttered through clenched teeth.

  Parker jumped back, took a closer look at Bubba, and whistled, the smell of alcohol strong on his breath. “It don’t look like it spread that quick. Didn’t you have time ta find somethin’ besides a dress?” Bubba didn’t answer. Parker considered the contour of the two squashes, the dress soaked and clinging to them like a wet T-shirt contest. He let it pass.

  “Kinda makes ya think a hellfire, don’t it?” If it did, Bubba didn’t say so. “Sure feels hotter’n hell.” He swayed gently in silence for awhile. “You may as well turn off that piddlin’ hose. You can’t save this house with that anymore’n you can stop the fires a hell. Devil’s gonna take it just like he’s gonna take them that’s his own. Nothin’ you can do about it now.” He gave Bubba one last distracted glance. “Nothin’ you can do about it now,” he muttered and slouched back to his truck as the volunteer fire department arrived.

  Harlan Johnson, Harmon’s boy from the gas station, came running up, dragging a hose. “Watch out, miss,” he hollered, “we’re comin’ through with the hose.”

  Bubba glared at him but didn’t move. Harlan had been devoting his attention to the hose, but when Bubba didn’t move, he looked up. “Excuse me, miss . . .” His voice trailed off as he caught sight of Bubba’s face. It was as blank and masklike as Bubba could make it, but from the depths of its neutrality two eyes burned like twin coals ignited by the very fire they were fighting. And it was obviously masculine.

  “Well, I’ll be durned,” Harlan said, or something to that effect. That’s all he had a chance to say because that was the moment water came shooting out of his own hose and he lost control of it. It just about beat him silly before they got it turned off and tried again.

  Compared to the fire hose, Bubba may as well have been spitting on the fire, but still he stood his ground with the garden hose. Eventually Jo
lene grabbed his hand and pulled him across the lawn.

  “Come here, Mr. Hero. You’ve done enough already.”

  He was soaked from the runaway fire hose. His hair was plastered to his head. The dress clung to the squashes at the top and slapped against his legs at the bottom as he walked. He was definitely a sorry sight and felt every inch of it. Jolene pulled him to a stop in front of a girl on the edge of the crowd.

  “Bubba, I’d like you ta meet Marianne McCullough. Marianne, this is my brother, the fireman.” She joined their hands and walked away with a grin, delighted to keep her promise. Bubba spluttered out a confused greeting to an obviously amused but discretely quiet Marianne and tore off after Jolene.

  That weekend Ralph, Bubba, and I hiked out to our hideout, a campsite we created in the middle of a swamp out near Ralph’s place, although we never spent the night there. The mosquitoes were too fierce. Ralph broached the subject of the dress, and I declared the ensuing wrestling match a draw. We were walking in a strained silence when I slipped from a moss-covered log and splashed waist deep into a stagnant pool of algae and weeds. I muttered a few choice words preferred by Jimbo Perkins and pushed the hair from my face with a slimy hand.

  “Hey,” Ralph said indignantly. “Yer the preacher’s kid!”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So, you shouldn’t swear.” A frown creased his freckled face. “Right, Bubba?”

  “Right.”

  “Wait a minute.” I clawed my way out of the water and got into Ralph’s face, my hair the only thing that screened him from the full force of my fury. “What did you say back there when I let go of that branch and it whacked you in the face?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So, you shouldn’t swear either.” I delivered the point with an air of finality.

  “But I’m not the preacher’s kid.”

  “What difference does that make? You go to church, don’t you? You consider yourself a Christian, don’t you?”

  “Of course, but my dad’s not the preacher. Right, Bubba?”

  “Right.”

  I don’t know which drove me to greater distraction, Ralph’s relentless but irrelevant logic or Bubba’s monosyllabic echo. I stormed off the path and kicked at a rotted branch. It crumbled silently in a cloud of fungi. The fact that it made so little noise frustrated me further.

  “So what?” My voice cracked like a yodeler. “A Christian is a Christian. What difference does it make what your dad does for a living?” I wanted my words to echo through the woods with the ring of truth. Instead they fell flat like a feeble excuse, hushed by the cloak of pine needles, moss, and algae that covered everything. I turned on Ralph, shrieking. “Why is it any more wrong for me to swear than it is for you?”

  Ralph winced. “It just is. I don’t know why.”

  I would have poured forth a fountain of profanity, but I didn’t know enough cuss words to make up more than a trickle. Words failing me, I sputtered an inarticulate retort, stomped off in a rage, and promptly fell from another log. Ralph declared this a sign from God that he was right. And perhaps it was.

  At the camp I sat on a stump in my underwear, my pants hanging from a branch in a futile attempt to dry them out in the humid air. The excuse for a fire that we built with damp rotting wood produced a vile smoke that hung around the camp in the still air. We rolled up baloney slices, impaled them on sticks, and attempted to roast them over the smoldering mound.

  Ralph pulled out his Red Man and offered it around. I declined, Bubba accepted. “I seen Parker the other day at the gas station.” He put away the pouch. “That scar is wicked lookin’. And that patch don’t help none.”

  “Makes him look like a regular pirate,” Bubba said. “He looked pretty scary at the fi—” He cleared his throat and changed directions. “I’d hate ta meet that in a dark alley some night.” We sat in silence for awhile. Smoke curled around the baloney slices.

  “He was drunker’n Cooter Brown too,” Ralph said. “Not sure how he drives that pickup, but he seems ta do it OK anyhow.”

  “Yep, it’s kinda amazin’,” Bubba agreed. “But I think I’d hate ta meet that even more on a dark alley.”

  “Ain’t seen Sonia much. Since the funeral, that is. I think ever’body saw her there.”

  I decided to join the conversation, having recovered from my fit. “I’ve seen her.” Bubba and Ralph looked at me expectantly. “Just sell her papers, that’s all.” We stared at the baloney for awhile; the only sounds were Bubba and Ralph spitting and the mosquitoes buzzing. “Seems kind of nervous though.”

  “Janet says she heard that Sonia showed up at the beauty shop with a black eye. Or at least what looked like might be a black eye under all that makeup,” Ralph said. “That would explain it.”

  Bubba nodded. “Yep, Jolene heard the same thing, plus somethin’ about bruises.” He pulled his baloney slice up to his nose, sniffed it, and slapped it into a hot dog bun. “I don’t think this sucker’s gonna get any warmer.”

  Ralph followed his example. “Probably could get it warmer just by rubbin’ on yer pants leg.”

  “There’s no accounting for taste,” I said, and ate the baloney right off the stick, like a corny dog.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN After my four years’ hard labor in the cultural assimilation chain gang, another inmate with the unlikely name of C. J. Hecker was transferred to the Big Thicket Unit. He arrived from Houston wearing a paisley shirt, bell-bottom jeans, and boots that looked like they had been stolen from Van Morrison’s hotel room on his last tour. Before the end of the day he was informed his collar-length, dark-brown hair was in violation of the dress code. He returned the next day with a haircut that required a micrometer to measure compliance.

  With the innate caution of the outsider, I maintained a polite distance, both intrigued and amused by the discontinuity Hecker must have been experiencing. It was an echo of the cultural whiplash I had experienced back in the time when Nixon was hounding Johnson out of office, but now amplified by adolescence and the fact that this was the first move of C. J.’s life.

  During those four years, Tricky Dick had slowly schemed his way toward Watergate, and I had slowly accommodated my wardrobe to local custom. As a result, I was not immediately identifiable as the outsider I really was. But it didn’t take more than a few weeks in algebra and English classes for me to realize that C. J. was as close as I was likely to come to finding a replacement for M. We eventually joined forces in our shared fate as outsiders.

  C. J. had an air of confidence about him, as if there were no question in his mind that the environment in which he found himself was the anomaly and he was the norm. He had a dark complexion that was more Latin than the name Hecker allowed, and his left eye had a silver-gray fleck that ran vertically across the iris. It made me wonder if he could see out of it at all, but I was too timid to ask.

  He lived in Warren, so getting together meant twenty minutes if I was driving or fifteen minutes if he was driving. Of course, there was nothing to do at either his house or mine, so we usually followed prevailing custom and haunted Beaumont, which meant another hour on the road. Our relationship was formed in the cocoonlike security of a car ripping through the piney woods at seventy-five miles per hour. We probed each other’s minds and souls, our faces illuminated by the green glow of the dash lights.

  Both being addicts to music, our deep and searching discussions were carried out at the top of our lungs, shouting over the eight-track as it blared out the Stones, the Beatles, Guess Who, Grand Funk Railroad, or, when I couldn’t hide the tape before he got in the car, the Doors. We tunneled through the towering pines with the windows down, headlights shooting into the darkness and ZZ Top’s “La Grange” echoing through the woods.

  In those hours of traversing the cultural wasteland of the Big Thicket in search of diversion, I found a confidant for my dilemma with Becky. I cautiously divulged the outlines of my obsession. C. J. had a solution at the ready.

  “What you have to d
o is act like you’re not interested in her. Then she’ll get interested in you.”

  “But I am.” I tried to hold my hand steady. The washboard dirt road we were bounding down made the car rattle like a kid dragging a stick down a picket fence. It not only had the effect of setting up standing waves in my bottle of Dr Pepper, it also made Bob Dylan sound like he was auditioning for the Bee Gees. “Interested in her, I mean.”

  “I know that and you know that, but she doesn’t have to know that. You pretend like you’re not.”

  I paused to listen to the closing bars of “All Along the Watchtower.” “Why would she become interested in me if I ignore her?” I asked before the next song started.

  “Because that’s how it works,” C. J. hollered over the stereo. “Look, I didn’t make up the rules. That’s the way girls work. Hormones and all that stuff.”

  “But why should I play all those games?” I hollered back. “Why not just be honest?”

  “Major mistake. Remember Hecker’s Rule of Romance #1: Never tell the truth. It’s too boring.” He took a sharp curve in a four-wheel skid and whipped the car back straight. I held my breath but didn’t panic. C. J.’s driving may have been aggressive, but it was nothing to a person who had been privileged to ride with Darnell Ray.

  “Besides, you know how you start talking for no apparent reason and continue with no apparent motive for an indefinite period of time?” He squinted through his aviator glasses in my direction.

  “I beg your pardon,” I replied with asperity, tossing my head from habit, even though my hair wasn’t in my eyes.

  “Well, that doesn’t go over with icons of beauty anymore than it does with mere mortals. Better to appear unattainable. Then they’ll kill themselves trying to get your attention.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” I complained, deciding in the interest of romance to ignore the insult to my conversational skills.