Deep Down Popular

by Phoebe Stone

  Mama opens the front door and the rain falls like a curtain in front of her. She holds her hand out to test the strength of it and then she walks right out into it, calling back, “Jessie Lou, you keep your granddaddy out of that hardware store. Old as they are, those Bailey brothers continue to be a bad influence.”

  Granddaddy and I don’t pay a whole lot of attention. He looks away and I’m wishing I could call out, “Mama, talk to Conrad’s mother. Find out when he’s going in for his operation.” But then another van pulls up along the front of the house. It is full of Martha Nottingham Cake Mix buyers waving and calling to Mama. So I let it go. And both vans drive off honking.

  Granddaddy is nodding good-bye and smiling at everybody and then, as soon as they drive off, he rubs his hands together and says, “Let’s hit the road, kiddo. I’ve got to get over to the hardware store and pick up my winnings.” Granddaddy can’t wait to see his big buddies Fred and Frank Bailey, but Mama thinks they do nothing but rile Granddaddy up, talking to him about which horse is going to win and why, when according to Mama, they haven’t got a clue about any of it.

  It is still rainy and miserable by the time Granddaddy and I get out to his big old white Chrysler Imperial. Mama calls it “an old gas guzzler.” But Granddaddy loves his car. It’s one of those ones with the stick shift on the steering wheel. Mama won’t let Granddaddy drive alone anymore. He has to have a passenger with him to keep him alert or she thinks the cops will pick him up. So he’s always pestering me to drive this place and that place with him. I always say I will, but Melinda always says she’s got to do her homework — can’t do this and can’t do that. Too busy with this and too busy with that. Too busy with nothing. That’s why it burns me up when Granddaddy covers her with kisses.

  We drive through the rain. Old windshield wipers working so hard to keep the blur out of the picture ahead of us. Old windshield wipers sound to me like they’re saying over and over again as they flip back and forth, “What-a you gonna do? What-a you gonna do? What-a you gonna do?”

  Granddaddy pulls his car up to park it downtown on Main Street and it bumps the curb and then it bumps against the car in front of us. Granddaddy looks at me and says, “Don’t you tell your mama.”

  It’s still raining terrible awful when we get out of the car. We have an old umbrella with us, but the rain is so fierce it seems to be pelting from above and below and it comes in under our umbrella like it’s raining up from the sidewalk. The wind pulls us along, drags us down the street.

  We get under the awning at Bailey’s Hardware Store and we stand there a minute looking out at the town, waiting for the umbrella to lose some of its water. It’s raining so hard all the colors along the street appear to be blurry gray or brown or black.

  We stand there a moment looking out at the rain and staring across the street at the stores over there. I’m looking right at the window of Muncet’s Clothing. Even though it’s fifty percent coveralls and hunting jackets, Melinda always goes in there and comes out with some itchy-looking lavender thing. Mama says Melinda has a knack for finding pastels. “In among those work shirts, Melinda has a way of finding pretty little ecru slippers you’d never know were there,” says Mama. “I call that a natural-born coordinating talent.”

  I’m just kind of standing here listening to the rain when suddenly I see Conrad Parker Smith and his mama coming out of a door across the street that leads to the upper floors where there are all kinds of dark mysterious offices. They’re both wearing those red T-shirts of his mama’s that say Best Things in Life Aren’t Things. His mama made way too many of that one. Conrad told me they have boxes and boxes of that T-shirt and they are looking to get rid of them.

  Now his mama’s waiting on the corner under another awning while Conrad pulls that old leg brace along in the rain. He’s moving slower than he was yesterday. His leg must already be worse. I get a terrible sorrowful feeling when I see that, but at the same time I’m crossing my fingers that wasn’t a doctor’s office they just came out of.

  Conrad doesn’t see me. Just as well. I don’t think I’d know what to do if he did see me. I stand here watching them disappear down the street in the rain, and I bite the inside of my lip and I scratch off two healed-up scabs on my arm.

  Granddaddy rubs his hands together and says, “Shall we go on in, Jessie Lou, or you want to stay out here and get soaked?”

  “I’ll go in too, Granddaddy.”

  As I walk in the store, I look to the back and see the long wooden counter and silver cash register and both Bailey brothers, and I can see their big old great-nephew Tiny sitting behind them in a rocking chair reading a comic book. On second thought, maybe it isn’t a comic book. Looks more like a how-to book. Wish I could see from here just what he’s reading up on. Today Tiny looks all drowsy and innocent just sitting there in his great-uncles’ store reading away, like he isn’t secretly working on anything at all down in that pretty little meadow.

  I follow Granddaddy toward the back of the hardware store. It’s dark and smells of oil and metal and there are walls and walls of bins full of nails and bolts and tools — tools to build birdhouses, to fix plumbing, to rake leaves. You come in here with all the plans you have in your heart and these tools will help you bring those plans to life, like the time Granddaddy built me that doll dresser. He made the plans and then he came in here and bought all the stuff and then he built the doll dresser for me and I still have it. I’ll keep it till the day I die.

  I don’t go all the way to the back to the old cash register where Granddaddy is talking to Frank and Fred Bailey. They are talking low and fast. Granddaddy is acting all important about the various horses, coming on like an authority ’cause he won. Then Fred or Frank Bailey opens the cash register and the bell rings and he pays Granddaddy in cash.

  I’ve been in this town my whole life and I’ve never been able to figure out which brother is Frank and which is Fred. They’re not twins, but you can’t tell them apart. Now that they are in their early eighties, they look even more alike. Mama says one of the brothers, Fred, got married out of school, settled down real nice, and stayed married, while the other brother, Frank, had a sports car, dated all kinds of women, and stays married even today just by the skin of his teeth. He’s the one who has the moped. Makes Mama crazy when he drives over on it and picks up Granddaddy and they shoot off together in all that smoke and noise.

  “You stay on back there, Jessie Lou. I’ll be right with you. You be a good girl now,” Granddaddy calls.

  Well, I’m standing by a wooden tray filled with big chunks of soft blue chalk to use when you’re dropping a plumb line down a wall. Granddaddy told me you mark your line off with this nice big blue soft chalk. The blue is almost the color of the cornflowers that grow along the road in August. I pick up a piece and I kind of draw a line along the wooden bin. I wonder as I stand here waiting for Granddaddy, I wonder if Big Box Home and Hardware would ever have a wooden bin full of nice old big pieces of chalk like this.

  When Granddaddy and I get back from the Tex-Mex Restaurant, it’s raining even harder. A deer sails right over the hood of the car and I can see its face up close, its eyes wild and frightened. But it makes it, leaps right over the big Chrysler Imperial, and disappears into the woods not far from the old abandoned house.

  At home Mama and Melinda are playing cards at the kitchen table, drinking ginger ale with ice cream in it, using straws. Other times in my life I would have been miserable at such a sight, but I have other things to think about.

  “Conrad’s mother go tonight?” I ask soon as we get in the door, half hoping she’d been on her way over there when I saw them earlier.

  “No,” says Mama. “She’s on one of her down cycles. Doctor wants her to go on low carbs.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “Did you enjoy the new restaurant, Granddaddy? Jean Duster says it’s excellent,” says Mama, sipping her ginger ale float.

  “Well, it was all right except that it wasn’t a Tex
-Mex place at all,” says Granddaddy. “There weren’t any Texans running it. They were a bunch of folks from Buchram, Virginia. I saw them back in there. They cooked up the fakest Mexican food I ever had. I thought I was eating hush puppies.”

  “Granddaddy,” says Mama, standing up for a minute and throwing her arms around him, giving him a big kiss, “I knew you wouldn’t like it. You never like any restaurants. Fact is, you don’t like anything.”

  “That’s not true,” says Granddaddy. “I like you and Melinda and Jessie Lou.”

  “Sure would be better if you’d open up your heart to the world around you, Granddaddy,” says Mama, sitting back down and looking at the cards in her hand.

  Then Melinda looks at me with her prizewinning green eyes going all shady and dark. “Did you and Granddaddy have a good time?” she says.

  “The best,” I say, smiling.

  Monday morning on the school bus seems like more than I can stand today. Kids are all riled up, still bragging about how many sausages they ate on Friday and what they saw on TV last night. I’m way toward the back of the bus keeping clear of the flying peanuts somebody’s throwing. From where I am, I can see Conrad and Quentin sitting together up toward the front of the bus. Quentin is talking away, while Conrad’s turned around trying to include everybody around him.

  Brice Buttonwood is making jokes and handing out selected white envelopes having something to do with his daddy’s second bowling alley in the new shopping mall and the grand opening coming up there next month. Kids like Tiffany B. just got handed a white envelope and she looks all happy and important. I can see Conrad looking around smiling, expecting the best. He waves to Brice and Brice kind of nods back, but I don’t see any envelope being passed up that way.

  Sitting all alone back here feels like what I’m used to, and when I look up ahead at Conrad and Quentin, they seem a million miles away, like that sausage festival was a dream, a fluke, a wild card that got tossed my way by mistake. I almost wish it was after school right now and I was just getting off the bus and going into the house smelling those quick-thaw Shake ’n Bake chicken snacks cooking, getting ready to play a hand of crazy eights with my granddaddy. But I guess he isn’t gonna even be home today ’cause he’s going on a senior citizens’ walkathon over in Waynesboro.

  All the rest of the way to school, I keep my head low, looking out the window, thinking about those discovery reports and feeling unsure ’cause I don’t even know if I’ll be talking to Conrad again.

  When I finally get off the bus and go into my class, the teacher is just leaving the room. Everybody’s kind of sitting there while she goes off to talk with the principal about something “very exciting.”

  As soon as there’s a pause, who goes up to the blackboard but Quentin Duster himself. He starts drawing a big gooney boy’s face and then a gooney-looking girl’s face and under it he writes Conrad Smith and Moon n’ Stars Montgomery. Then he writes underneath it, TRUE LOVE. Conrad wads up last week’s math homework into a ball and throws it at Quentin’s head.

  Just then we hear some heavy footsteps outside the door, and we turn and see Tiny Bailey lumbering on down the hall nice and slow. Quentin’s head spins around. He looks like a human question mark standing there. He drops his chalk on the floor, and our teacher comes back into the room smiling. She steps unknowingly right on the chalk and I can hear it go crunch and shatter under her foot. She keeps on smiling. She’s wearing her Lewis and Clark forest and lakes dress, and the way she’s leaning forward with her arms crossed in front of her and her hands lying up near her throat, it looks like there’s something important inside her, like a bird that’s pressing to fly out.

  She says, “Today because of a mix-up in a schedule and a cancellation, we have been told that this year we will be hosting the All-State Marching Bands here in West Taluka Falls! Those of you who are taking band will be able to participate in All-State even if our band hasn’t normally qualified in the past.”

  Mrs. Duster might be putting that mildly. There are some who say our band is the absolute worst in the state. But everybody cheers and thumps the floor with their feet. Mrs. Duster swallows and smiles and folds her hands together in front of her like they are just a pair of soft, pliable gloves.

  “This is upon us very quickly,” says Mrs. Duster. “We will be hosting All-State next week! We have to move fast and we have to move with precision. This is indeed an honor for us.”

  Almost every kid in the class is taking an instrument. This fall I told Mr. Muzzle, our band teacher, that I wanted to play the trumpet, and I’m the only girl in the trumpet section. Mama always looks a little strange when I go to practice and she usually says, “Honey, would y’all mind practicing out on the porch tonight? I have what you call an over-the-counter stress headache.”

  “This will mean,” our teacher goes on, “even at this late notice that all students in the band will be receiving some kind of marching band outfit.”

  Everybody cheers again and Ryan Ferguson throws his John Deere tractor hat up to the ceiling and it falls back down and lands perfectly of all places on Quentin Duster’s head. Quentin stands there with his arms out to show amazement. He turns in circles, making like everyone’s cheering for him.

  After school we are all supposed to go over to the library meeting room upstairs and get our music and instructions from Mr. Muzzle. Soon as the bell rings, everybody goes in the coatroom next to our class and starts grabbing trombones and flutes and French horns and taking off. I get in there and all I see are heads and hands and black instrument cases flying every which way. When the dust settles, I’m standing there looking straight at Conrad Parker Smith. He’s got his saxophone case and his backpack and his jacket and a couple of extra books in his arms and right now he’s reminding me of an old-fashioned loaded-down coat-rack about to tip over. I grab a bunch of extra stuff from Conrad, and Quentin Duster pops up from behind a pile of coats. Then the three of us kind of fall in together, heading down the hall, dragging our old instrument cases over to the library.

  Quentin Duster looks like he’s gonna need a U-Haul truck to get his big tuba over there, but it turns out he’s got little wheels on his case. (Quentin Duster has a way of getting around any kind of work, in my opinion.)

  “Hope to take a minute to get on the computer at the library and play some Pac-Man,” says Quentin. “There may be bigger and better computer games out there, but I’m the undisputed Pac-Man expert and champion.”

  “Yeah, Quentin,” says Conrad, “I’ve seen you over there, playing Pac-Man for hours on end till your eyes are just two big glazed-over cookies right out of the oven.”

  Halfway across the soccer field, we see big old Tiny Bailey working his way toward the library too. Then Conrad and Quentin and I look right at each other like we’re seeing gold stars on our discovery reports, like the gold stars are just falling from the sky and all we have to do is reach out and catch them.

  “What the heck is old Tiny coming around here for?” says Conrad, lugging his leg brace and his saxophone.

  “Beats me,” says Quentin, “but I think it might have something to do with the fact that he plays the jumbo bass drum and Mr. Muzzle says we don’t have any jumbo bass drum players this year.”

  “Could be,” says Conrad.

  “But it’s not gonna help much ’cause our band still sounds like a bunch of sick dogs,” I say.

  “Hey, Tiny, nice day!” Quentin calls out, kind of shoving ahead of Conrad.

  I nudge Quentin with my elbow and he squeals like a stuck pig, and Tiny goes into the library and shuts the door. By the time we get in there, he’s gone.

  We walk into the nice old library, same one my granddaddy used to use when he was young. Immediately Quentin and Conrad start giggling ’cause we’re supposed to be quiet. A teenager who helps out here comes over to us and says in a real hushed tone, “You’re supposed to wait over there till the trombone players come down from the upper reading room.”

  “O
kay,” I say, nudging Quentin again. There are fourteen trombone players at Cabanash County Elementary and they’re all tone-deaf. With a trombone, you slide that lower piece back and forth, and in my opinion it’s just pure dumb luck if you hit the right note.

  We go over near the tall window, and Conrad sits down and puts his saxophone case up on the big oak table in front of him, old oak panels all around us on the walls.

  Along the other end of that table is Moon n’ Stars Montgomery sitting there doing her homework. Today her hair is the color of the moon in an early morning sky. I look over at Conrad and then I look at her and a cold wind blows through my heart.

  Moon n’ Stars gets herself all A-pluses and never misses a day of school even though she does have a hippie for a mama. Last spring on Earth Day when she came to school to pick up Moon n’ Stars, her mama was wearing a big green Earth outfit, a big fat globe kind of thing, bulging out all around her. She had a sign hanging around her neck that said SAVE THE EARTH. She had a hat on her head that was supposed to represent our damaged ozone layer, but it just looked like a big dirty old hat to me.

  Conrad looks over at Moon n’ Stars now like the sun nodding to the moon. I look away, trying to think about something else like All-State coming up next week and how I can’t wait to march along playing my trumpet as loud as I want to with the wind in my face.

  Quentin says, “Wonder where Tiny went now.”

  Conrad says, “I don’t know, Quentin. Put a discovery report on two legs and what have you got … nothing but trouble.”

  I lean over to Conrad and whisper across the table to him, “Go over and ask Miss Ferguson if she knows what kind of books Tiny’s been taking out recently. Well, I saw him reading a book at his great-uncles’ store, didn’t I? Tiny’s not the kind of guy to go out and buy a book.”