by Haven Kimmel
“Even though it ain’t true?”
“Don’t say ain’t. Most people don’t care if it’s true or not, as long as you’re sitting there with your money in your hand for the offering.”
“Well, she for sure knows you’re not a Christian because you don’t even go and pretend.”
He ratcheted a minute, grunted, stopped, and studied. “Oh, Edythe always hated me, even when she and your mom were so thick. And I never liked her, either. She used to call our house and pretend she was going to commit suicide if your mother didn’t run over there every evening. One night she called and said she drank a whole bottle of iodine. I knew she didn’t, but I called an ambulance and told them that she had, that she would deny it with her dying breath, and that they needed to just go ahead and pump her stomach, and they did.”
“You did not!”
“I did. And she never forgave me, either, nasty old bat.”
I stood looking at Edythe’s yard. PeeDink just wouldn’t stay out of it, and every day she went hunting him with her rake. I couldn’t even imagine how sweet my life would be if someone would just come along and haul that old woman on down the line.
Dad was looking at me. “Are you going to talk to me all day?”
“I might.”
“Well, don’t. I’m about to lose my temper and start cussing, so go find something to do.”
“Okay, then. See ya, Daddy.”
“Take care, Zip.”
I TOOK OFF ON my bicycle. I intended to head down to the post office and play a little rodeo. There was a ramp that led to the back door, about three feet off the ground, and Julie and I could ride up it full speed and go right off the end. For about a year we’d been having some good times in that parking lot.
I was almost there when I passed Ruth Huff walking down Broad Street with her hideous old collie, King. She waved. I waved back.
I decided to ride around the block and give some thought to Ruth Huff. Now she was as old as Edythe, easy, and just as disgusting. In fact, I believed they shared the same dresses. And she lived in a huge, falling down, scary haunted house that didn’t even have any lights, on a lot right next to our church. There were cats swarming all over that house, like bugs. Nobody knew how she fed them. And she walked around town all day, every day, with King, who was five hundred dog years old and was just one big clump of matted fur, except on his snoot and around his butt, which were both naked. King could only pant and gasp for air. He never had a good day, as far as oxygen went.
I passed Ruth again. She waved. I waved.
Ruth also went to my church, and like Edythe, she had a powerful stink. All the stinky old people went to my church. Ruth maybe even had double the odor of Edythe, because of all the cats and the constant presence of King’s mange. She carried a little black-beaded purse with her everywhere she went, which looked like she’d been carrying it since Christmas Eve of 1872, and in it she kept a plastic baggie filled with quarters. No one knew what they were for.
When I approached Ruth again, she waved me over. Her hands were all gnarled up, and dirtier than Edythe’s.
I rode up next to her, then leaned over and very reluctantly patted King on top of his head, where I could completely feel his bony skull. On impulse I checked the sky for buzzards, but it appeared that King would escape for another day.
“How are you, angel?” Ruth asked, patting me on the arm with one of her claws.
“I’m fine, ma’am, and how are you?”
“You’re a Jarvis, am I right?” One of her rheumy eyes was looking at the post office.
“That’s right.”
“You’re the little Jarvis?”
“I’m the baby of the family. I’ve been seeing you in church my whole life, ma’am.”
“Well.” She nodded, as if a great mystery had been solved. “You want a quarter?”
“Oh, no—” but she was already scrambling in her purse.
“Here you go, take it.”
When she handed it to me I was filled with the spooks about her dirty fingernails touching me, and there was something in the moment that seemed to make it hang suspended. One of Ruth’s eyes was looking right at me, and the quarter was touching my hand; one of her fingernails was just grazing my palm, and even King had raised his head for the transaction. Everything was going wrong for King except whatever was behind his eyes, because when I glanced at him I saw nothing but smarts.
I rode away, toward the drugstore. I always kept a penny in my shoe. I turned back and waved at Ruth. She waved.
THERE WERE SO MANY animals buried in our backyard that every time we planted a tree or rototilled the garden a handful of smooth white bones got churned up into the light. It was disturbing. We were only allowed by law to bury animals under a certain weight, but everyone defied the code.
For instance, when Big Dave Newman’s most beloved horse, Navajo, died from eating a piece of barbed wire fence, we left him lying where he was until the middle of the night, then we all snuck out and helped drag him on a tarp to the top of a small hill, where we sat quietly while Dave dug a grave for him, grief stricken.
Our German shepherd, Kai, was buried in our backyard. Many of the dearly beloved dead were buried where they shouldn’t have been.
County law dictated that we should call a company called Bausback. They picked up dead animals for free, and were paid by the state. Bausback had a fleet of big yellow trucks that were as heavy and rounded as trucks made by Tonka, and the contrast between their cartoon shape and their mission made them all the more sinister. As with garbage trucks, the bed was covered and had a door that opened to reveal the machinery where the animals were transported.
Every time I saw a Bausback truck in town I couldn’t help following it. This was a good way to keep up with animal gossip, and also to see some of the more shocking aspects of nature. I had seen cats, dogs, birds, and rabbits slung into the Bausback maw, and once a whole goat, which really surprised me, because I didn’t know of anything that could kill a goat.
I was riding around in the cemetery at the edge of town when I saw the Bausback truck go by that Saturday afternoon. I was waiting for Julie to get off duty pumping gas and join me, but I didn’t stick around and wait for her. I took off after the truck, my legs pumping and the streamers at the end of my handlebars flying out behind me like circus-colored hair.
I was still a block from Ruth Huff’s when the smell hit me, which was the usual smell of her house multiplied many, many times. The whole volunteer fire department was gathered outside, plus Astor Main’s scary hearse, the Bausback truck, and sixteen assorted townspeople, including my dad, who met me halfway to the commotion.
“Zip, you just turn around and head home. This is no place for you.”
“Nuhn uhn, there’s no way I’m going home,” I said, scrambling off my bike and heading for the conflagration.
“Now wait a minute,” he said, grabbing me by the arm. “Since when did you start telling me what you’re going to do?” He was serious. He was all bent down in my face with his big eyes and smoky breath.
“Since just this one time. If you’re going to whup me, go ahead, because I’m planning on staying right here.”
He let go of my arm.
“Okay?”
He crossed his arms over his chest and looked down at me like a big Injun. He was thinking of the kind of what-for he was going to give me.
“I’m going to say this one time: are you listening?” His voice was so deep it made my chest rattle. I nodded.
“I’m going to let you stay down here but you have to hold my hand, and if you turn out like your sister I’m going to turn you upside down and spit in your butt, are we clear?” I nodded again, without cracking a smile. He’d been making the same threat my whole life.
The fact that Ruth Huff was dead was of no great concern to most; we had seen it coming for a while. People weren’t even especially titillated by the fact that it appeared that some of the cats had been snacking o
n her in the four or five days she lay undiscovered (although this bothered me immeasurably, since I thought I had seen just about all of nature there was to see, and this was truly new). The reason that so many people were gathered across the street from the dead woman’s house, and the reason that two more Bausback trucks had been called, was because some number of expired animals had been found in Ruth’s basement—not buried, just thrown down there.
I stood across the street holding Dad’s hand as the Bausback men (whom I hoped would someday be sent treasures straight from God) began bringing up the corpses, one at a time, and throwing them into the waiting trucks. I finally had to tie Dad’s hanky around my face to keep from fainting, and I noticed that in addition to smoking extra fast, Dad kept sticking his Vicks Inhaler up his nose.
They brought up dogs and cats, some that barely retained their original shape, some that I had seen alive only a few days before. I counted them as they were tossed in the truck: twenty, thirty, forty, fifty. Sixty-seven. There were sixty-seven dead animals in that dark house. She lived with them. She never told anyone and she never asked for any help. Then I realized what I had unconsciously been waiting for, and pulled away from Dad, heading for the Bausback men.
“Where—” Dad started, trying to catch my arm.
“They haven’t brought out King, Dad, what if he’s alive in there, I just think someone ought to check,” I said, stumbling forward.
“Sweetie, stop. Stop. I mean it—turn around.” His voice wasn’t louder, it was softer, which was twice as bad. “They’ll find him,” he said. I put my head in his stomach and he patted my trembling back. “They’ll find him.”
King had been in bed with her, and they brought him out last. Sixty-eight.
UNFORTUNATELY FOR ME, Edythe lived on and on, through some unholy pact made with the universe. Every morning at seven she left her house and marched to the post office, where she saluted the flag and whistled “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Once a year she took down her gruesome hair and washed it, then sat out in her yard in a straight-back chair, swinging her hair from side to side, a process my dad called Blowing The Stink Off. Her whiskers got longer, then turned white. She never stopped hating me.
One afternoon, as Dad and I dawdled in the porch swing, I saw PeeDink hunting in Edythe’s yard.
“That cat doesn’t have a lick of sense,” I said, sighing.
“Well, honey, he’s not right in the head,” Dad said, flipping his cigarette into the front yard.
I glared at him. “And just what do you mean by that?”
Dad counted on his fingers. “He’s cross-eyed; he jumps out of trees after birds and then doesn’t land on his feet; he sleeps with his head smashed up against the wall, and the tip of his tail is crooked.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, how about this: he once got locked in a basement by evil Petey Scroggs in the middle of January and survived on snow and little frozen mice. When I’m cold at night he sleeps right on my face. Of that whole litter of kittens he came out of he’s the only one left. One of his brothers didn’t even have a butthole.”
“I stand corrected. PeeDink is a survivor.”
While we were talking PeeDink had climbed up a pine tree next to Edythe’s house and was walking around on her roof. We watched helplessly as he jumped on her chimney and looked curiously inside, then took one step too many and went straight down. Vanished.
“Ooh, I can’t watch,” I said, pulling my knees up in front of my eyes.
“On the count of three—ready? One. Two. And three!”
And PeeDink came sailing out of Edythe’s front door. He did a little somersault, then stood up and shook himself off, as he had the last six times he had fallen down her chimney. He was sooty and a little crooked, but my cat, and alive, all the same.
Dad stood up. “I’ll go get a towel.”
As I was wiping him off PeeDink made his crazy, rumbly purr and looked at me lovingly with his crossed eyes. “She just doesn’t know what a good stew you would make, does she, punkin’?” I whispered to him, and what I felt toward Edythe was grateful.
“Daddy, can I ask you something?”
“Shoot,” he said, flicking the lid of his lighter open and closed, nervously.
“Do you love Lindy more, you know, because she’s your real daughter?” It pained me to say it, but I had to know.
“Aw, honey,” he said, scratching the back of his head and generally looking miserable. “I guess we should have told you before now.”
“What?! What?!”
“Melinda isn’t really my daughter. Slim Jenkins is actually her dad.” He said it as if he’d found his peace a long time ago.
“Slim Jenkins?! That old drunk? The garbageman?! Daddy, he sleeps in a shed with a bunch of coon dogs! He can’t be her father! He smells like a dead possum!”
“Well, this is probably something you should take up with your mother, Zip. After all, it’s really her story.” And he walked off into the backyard to inspect the fledgling peach tree he was trying to save, mysteriously, with Mother’s pantyhose.
I lay down in a worm hole and looked at the sky. I had plenty to think about. A bob-white was calling from the meadow behind the Mooreland Friends Church. A chigger nestled into my leg. It would be another warm night.
* * *
PROFESSIONALS
I couldn’t always go to Julie’s farm, and so I also had a best friend in town called Rose. There were a number of benefits to Julie’s silence, and one of them was that we never exchanged a cross word. Rose, though. She spoke her own mind, and she didn’t want to be a farmer or ride in a rodeo. Rose was going to be an artist. She was left-handed, which was very rare in Mooreland. She was also a Catholic; her family were the only Catholics in town. I believe it is safe to say that she was surely the only left-handed Catholic any of us had ever seen, so it made sense she would be artistic.
Her specialty was a long, skinny flower with a stem that curved in a left-handed way. It was unusual. She decided to branch out into portraits, and asked me to sit for her. We were in her bedroom in chairs that faced each other. They were excellent strong chairs: just that week Rose and her younger sister Maggie had hung upside down from them, as Bob and Betty Bat, as I, Preacher Bat, had joined them in holy matrimony. When it was time for them to kiss I had to quick slip a piece of paper between their mouths.
I sat very still. Rose looked up at me, then down at her sketch pad, where she made little scritchy sounds. She looked up at me again; down; scritch. I realized I had absolutely no idea what my face was doing. I could have been drooling for all I knew. The room was completely silent except for Rose’s pencil, as if we were wrapped in gauze. I could no longer control my face because something amazing was happening to my body. It started with a kind of tickle at the back of my neck which spread like heat to my limbs. I was so thoroughly relaxed I might have actually been asleep, except my mind was perfectly clear. This whole thing, the process of being drawn, was so pleasurable it had to be wrong.
After that first day I wanted Rose to draw me all the time. I didn’t care about the portraits—they were all kind of left-handed. I sat for her a few more times, and then one afternoon she announced she had decided to collect boxes instead. I asked her how many boxes she had and she said four. She had the little white box Tone soap came in, a box that had held a tube of lipstick, a smallish but entirely standard cardboard box, and her prize, a very small, square jewelry box her mother had brought home from Acapulco. Her parents were very worldly, and here was the evidence: the box was not only lined with red velvet, the outside was entirely covered with little shells. They poked up a bit sharply, which some might consider a design flaw, but the overall effect was captivating. I tried to figure out how to steal it. I tried to effect a trade—I told her about all the fabulous boxes just lying around at my house—but she said she couldn’t trade it because it was a souvenir. I told her if she was a real friend she’d trade it. She said if I was a real fr
iend I wouldn’t ask, which made me spitting mad, so I had to go home.
As I was walking down the stairs I turned back and looked at her sadly. “And I thought you were an artist.”
At that time Maggie also knew what she wanted to be when she grew up. She was going to be a disc jockey, and toward that end she spent many hours saying, “Solid Gold. WLBC, 104 FM. Solid Gold. WLBC, 104 FM. Solid Gold. WLBC, 104 FM.” She was very convincing, and I found myself in awe of her prematurely deep voice.
One afternoon I took my little blue tape recorder with me to their house. My dad had gotten it for my sister, who competed in speech contests, so she could record her speeches and listen to them later. I had quietly and extra sneakily made it my own. Besides my bicycle and PeeDink, there was nothing in the world I loved more. It had only one knob, which you moved around like a gearshift (left to rewind, right for fast forward, up to play, down to record), and a detachable microphone. Hiding behind the couch in the den I had recorded whole conversations between my parents, without them ever knowing. I had yet to discover all of its uses.
“Now look, Maggie. Just say your piece right here into this little microphone and I’ll tape it, then you can hear what you sound like.”
Maggie wasn’t the least bit shy. She tried it with the microphone far away, and with the microphone right up against her mouth. She must have said Solid Gold for ten solid minutes. When I played it back for her she looked absolutely pleased. Recording only confirmed her vocation for her. We both felt so festive that we invited Rose to join us in singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” into the microphone. We were all great singers.
I SPENT A LOT OF TIME trying to figure out what I was going to be when I grew up. There were just so many things I was good at. For instance, I could run across the living room and dive into a headstand on the couch, with my legs slapping the wall behind it. Sometimes I would make my parents sit and watch me do this fifteen times in a row.