by Phoebe Stone
Quentin’s trying on the boots still in his own shoes and he’s clumping around making dumb jokes, and Conrad’s lying on the daybed with his arms up behind his head just taking it easy.
Then Quentin ups and says, “Hey, Conrad, what’d you think of Moon n’ Stars Montgomery’s drawing of a horse today? She draws good, doesn’t she? Horses are hard, aren’t they?”
“Yep,” says Conrad.
“You like her?” says Quentin. “Come on, admit it. You want to marry her.”
Before you know it, Conrad’s tackling Quentin again and they’re punching each other and knocking stuff over and then soon enough it turns into a bullfighting game where Conrad’s holding up a red cloth that was lying on a chair and Quentin’s being a bull and charging at it and they’re carrying on like two idiots, so I just go in the kitchen and stand at the old sink and wonder who lived here.
I just stand here full of awe. I turn the old faucet on and let rusty water run over my hands. Looks to me like this house hasn’t been used much in fifty years or more. Feels like it’s just waiting for someone to come back, to pull up along the road in an old pickup.
In a matter of seconds through the window I see Tiny Bailey coming up into the lower yard with his big old Vocational Center tool kit in hand. He would be hard to miss, being six foot something and weighing in at who knows what. His great big T-shirt says Junior Tractor Pull, Shenandoah State Fair. I can just see Tiny at the tractor pull last year growling and shouting and gunning that motor on his tractor as they loaded on more and more weights in the back, till his tractor tires gutted out deep trenches in the mud and the tractor slid sideways and backwards. Still they kept putting on more weights.
“Tiny’s in the yard,” I say.
“Quick,” says Conrad, “get under the bed.”
“I’ll take notes,” says Quentin, ripping a piece of paper out of a notebook and stuffing it in his pocket.
My heart starts thumping like a bumper car at the state fair, and Quentin rolls under the bed. Conrad pushes in after him and I squeeze in at the end, holding my breath, then letting it out slowly, so I won’t make a sound. Now I’m lying in the dark, looking up at a bunch of broken-down old bedsprings and listening for footsteps, but I don’t hear any.
“Conrad,” whispers Quentin, “is this what they call breaking and entering? We could end up at Weeks School making leather wallets.”
“Hush,” says Conrad again, “not a sound.”
We are lying here like sardines in a can. And Quentin’s all wiggly and breathing loud, and I bet as soon as Tiny steps foot in this house, he’ll pull Quentin out from under here like a rabbit out of a hat.
“Maybe he’s not coming in,” says Conrad, rolling his eyes over toward me. I am looking at Conrad’s face, how the shadows change it. He has two dimples, one on either cheek, so he always looks like he’s about to laugh, but now I can see clearer the little indentation on his chin. Is it called a cleft? I haven’t seen Conrad in the dark like this before. It’s like seeing him for the first time all over again.
“How old do you have to be before they send you up to Weeks School?” says Quentin.
If I were to die under this bed, I am thinking it would be about the best way to go, scrunched up so close to Conrad I can breathe in his very essence. Up close Conrad smells what I can only describe as popular. What I mean by that is, I smell a T-shirt fresh out of the dryer, warm right down to its fibers with a memory of soap hovering around it. There’s an air around that T-shirt that says nothing matters ’cause you know who you are, where you’re going, and what you’re gonna do.
“What’s the age limit up there?” says Quentin again.
But I don’t answer. I’m breathing the deep down popular air that surrounds Conrad Parker Smith. No matter whether Brice Buttonwood looks through him like a broken screen door or not. No matter whether every popular kid in the class goes to some party and Conrad doesn’t get invited. ’Cause you just can’t take it away from Conrad. You just can’t.
And I am thinking to be a sardine right now with Conrad Parker Smith is the closest thing to heaven. Except for Quentin. He is looking crabby and like he’s about to swat somebody and shout out, “Move over, turkey!” We lie under those old crazy-looking bedsprings for going on five minutes and there’s no sign of Tiny and there’s nothing to take notes on.
Finally Quentin rolls out and looks around and says, “Tiny disappeared. Vanished. Now how does a great big teen like that just disappear?”
“What are you in such a big hurry for, Quentin? Looking to stop off at Moon n’ Stars’s house and give her a kiss?” says Conrad, standing up and brushing the dust off his sleeves.
“I’ll leave that to you, Conrad,” says Quentin. “I gotta get home. I got four cousins coming up from Memphis, Tennessee, today. And if I’m not there, they all go after my dinosaurs. The five-year-old they call the ‘Holy Terror’ usually leaves nothing but dust in his wake.”
I’m the last one to get out from under the bed and as I’m lying here alone, I see right there stuck in the molding along the wall is a piece of paper. I pull it out but it’s only an old envelope, says on the outside of it To Vera Bailey, and there’s a stamp on it with a postmark from 1940. I put the envelope in my pocket and then I roll out from under the bed. Quentin makes a dumb joke about me being like a skinny rolling pin, which I ignore.
We go to the door of the old house and as we’re leaving, I take one more look at my granddaddy’s Day-Glo vest hanging over the chair. Then we’re out in the yard.
Two seconds later we think we see Tiny’s overgrown shadow stomping behind the bushes and we make a run for the barn. The big doors are open, and we kind of dive in and roll along the hay on the floor. We lie there flat out for a while settling into the darkness of the barn, our eyes slowly growing accustomed to the velvet black air.
I can hear coyotes shrieking across the road down in the swamp. Like I said before, we have a whole lot of coyotes around here and people like to hunt them, going in big lines cornering them, cutting them off like an army, and then shooting them. But there’s so many they can’t seem to get them all. They say coyotes don’t bother people, but their howl is the wildest loneliest sound I ever heard. It’s such a mournful screaming coming up out of the swamp, calling their mama, calling their daddy, screaming, “Take me out of this world, nobody loves me, nobody wants me. Oh, lonely, lonely, lonely me.”
Now our eyes are used to the darkness and we look around the barn. There are four empty horse stalls and a loft full of old sagging hay. A bird lets loose in the darkness, sings a few notes, and we look up, up toward the pitched tall ceiling. There in the high rafters we can see something shiny. Two huge glistening aluminum metal things hidden up there high in the rafters. They are so big as to take your breath away, spanning the whole width of the barn. They are so polished, every rivet tight, every bolt oiled.
“Well,” says Conrad, “just look at that.”
“What?” says Quentin. “What is it?”
“Airplane wings. Those are the wings to an airplane. Wings to an old 1930s barnstormer,” says Conrad. “I did a bunch of drawings of old airplanes last month. Looks just like one I drew.”
“Is that what Tiny’s been fixing up?” I say. Conrad leans his head back and looks up, like he can handle anything, making me feel like pure girl, all protected in his know-how.
“Yep,” says Conrad. “Looks like Tiny’s fixing up that old airplane in secret, like somebody’s planning to fly somewhere.”
When we scramble on our hands and knees out of the barn and make it up to the road, Quentin says, “I know this sounds spooky but I feel honestly like Clark is with me. I feel like I am really becoming him, now that we’ve finally made a true discovery.” Then he makes like he’s a ghost waving his arms and he takes off after me trying to scare me, and we waver and hover down the road at Conrad’s pace like three spooks.
When we get to my house about a quarter mile farther, it’s all lit u
p, glowing orange in the dark windy night. I stand on the porch and wave to Conrad and Quentin. I watch them sail over the hill like two dark little boats. Then I go in the house knowing I’ve missed dinner.
As soon as I hit the door, I can smell the Martha Nottingham shepherd’s pie. With that mix, all you do is add hamburger and a package of frozen vegetables, stick it in the oven, and you’ve got a like-to-die shepherd’s pie. The house smells so good and it’s warm and Granddaddy and Mama and Melinda are in the sitting room. Melinda is practicing reciting the poem I’ve loaned her. It’s the one called “Big Old Lazy River.” And she is repeating the line “The river’s long and lazy.”
Mama is saying “Melinda, put your emphasis on the word long. Draw the word out so it sounds long: The river’s LONG and lazy.”
It is odd to hear my mama reciting a line from a poem of mine. She thinks it’s Melinda’s poem, which is fine with me. She doesn’t even know I write poems. Nobody knows I write poems. I didn’t even know Melinda knew. I don’t write them for anybody to read anyway. I just write them to write them.
Granddaddy is asleep in the La-Z-Boy recliner. He’s always asleep in that recliner. He never believes that he actually falls asleep in that chair, always says he doesn’t. So I took a picture of him sleeping one time with his digital camera. “Now do you believe me, Granddaddy?” I said to him, showing him the photograph. “You sleep in that chair all the time.”
“I wasn’t asleep, Jessie Lou. I was just resting my eyes,” he said.
Tonight I go in the kitchen and get a bowl of shepherd’s pie and I climb the stairs with it, hearing Melinda reciting my poem over and over again. “‘Big Old Lazy River’ by Melinda Ferguson,” she says as I hit the top stair.
By the time I get to my room, it’s starting to storm again. The black rain is pelting against the glass and our house is shaking in the wind. I sit at my little desk for a minute and get out my writing pad that my granddaddy gave me that says on the top From the Desk of Jessie Lou Ferguson. Then I put the pad back in the drawer because I don’t have that tingly feeling telling me a poem is on the way.
It’s getting late, and Melinda just came upstairs and went to bed. I can tell it’s her by the way she slammed the door. I’m waiting for Mama to go to sleep now, so I can go downstairs. Usually she watches late-night TV reruns of Decorate with Suzi Anne, a program that shows you how to decorate your old crummy house and turn it into a palace with almost no money.
I wait till Mama’s light goes out and then I slip downstairs and sit by my granddaddy at the kitchen table where he’s doing another jigsaw puzzle of a president. (He frames all the presidents when he’s done and hangs them up in the living room.)
I lean my head against Granddaddy and watch him put in part of Jimmy Carter’s eyebrows. Then I turn over some of the puzzle pieces for him, looking for dark brown sections of Jimmy Carter’s suit.
“Sugar pie, you need to be sawing wood right now. Why don’t you go on up to bed,” says Granddaddy.
“Granddaddy,” I say. “What do you suppose Tiny Bailey’s working on a 1930s airplane for?”
Granddaddy looks at me for a while with his nice old granddaddy eyes that remind me of that special soft blue chalk up at Bailey’s Hardware.
He keeps on looking at me and finally he says, “Well, sugar pie, you’ve played Monopoly before. What do you think happens? You get one big fat winner and everybody else starves. It isn’t that different here in West Taluka Falls. What do you think is gonna happen to the Bailey Brothers’ Hardware when that great big superchain hardware store opens up?”
“Don’t know, Granddaddy,” I say.
“Well, I’ll tell you what’s gonna happen. Nobody’s gonna shop there anymore. So we gotta fight back a little. You can keep a secret, can’t you, Jessie Lou?”
“You know I can, Granddaddy,” I say.
“Well, old Frank Bailey’s gonna surprise everybody by flying that plane during the big air show that’s coming up for the opening-day celebration of the shopping mall. He’s gonna pull a big banner across the sky for Bailey’s Hardware. We don’t want people to forget the store that’s been here fifty years. Do we, sugar pie?” Granddaddy looks sad, and when he does, the blue in his eyes goes gray and shimmers like water.
“Granddaddy,” I say, “is it a mean old world?”
“Yes and no,” says Granddaddy, putting in a white flower on Jimmy Carter’s lapel. “Yes and no, sugar pie.”
Next few days, it continues to rain. The Cabanash River near our house has swollen up big and fat. Cows are standing in fields of water. Our driveway has grown muddy. And we’re looking at the spring state fair coming up by the end of the week. I can’t imagine them putting up their tents in all this rain. I don’t know how they will set up all those rides.
Mama says Granddaddy’s the only old man in the state of Virginia who likes to ride on the Screamin’ Demon with all those teenagers who don’t have any sense of danger. I’ll ride with him on most of the rides but not all of them. Granddaddy likes the Sky Bullet the best, and I won’t go with him on that one ’cause they say it’s so mean and scary you throw up and your throw-up flies back around and hits you in the face. Everybody’s looking forward to the fair for different reasons. If I get a chance, I’m going to try to get myself hypnotized, find out if I was a dog or a bird in my past life.
By the opening day of the fair, the rain hasn’t subsided at all. I know Conrad and Quentin are getting to go up there together tonight. I am miserable jealous about that ’cause I know I have to go with Mama and Melinda and Granddaddy to make a family presentation. When you win something like a Junior Teen Beauty Pageant, your whole family gets involved. “It isn’t anything anybody ever does alone,” says Mama. “It’s a whole group of people behind somebody. It’s a group effort.”
This afternoon Mama is in the kitchen ironing Melinda’s dress and slips. “She’s just a little doll,” Mama says. “Isn’t she sweet?”
“Pretty as a picture,” says Granddaddy, counting his dollar bills on the table, separating out his state fair money, licking his fingers and peeling off another dollar bill.
“I don’t think you’ll be able to take Jessie Lou on any rides in this weather, Granddaddy,” says Mama. “The radio’s going on about flood warnings. I’m sure those rides will be out of commission. The wind and rain are too strong.”
“They don’t pack up those rides just ’cause of a few drops of rain,” says Granddaddy.
Melinda comes downstairs wearing curlers and an old sweatshirt and holding her satin shoes. Those shoes lying there in her hands seem to glow, to emanate light, to shine like a pair of magic slippers from some other world. The glow from those shoes seems to light up Melinda’s face. She’s looking down like she’s holding something so precious, something alive, like those slippers are two pink birds sleeping in her hands. “Granddaddy,” she says, “Mama and I went over to Roanoke to get these shoes dyed professionally.”
“I know that, sweetheart,” says Granddaddy.
“Aren’t they a pretty pink? Matches my dress exactly.”
“Honey,” says Mama, “they’re salmon-colored, not pink. There’s a big difference. Can’t you see the warm tones and how they bring out the highlights in your cheeks?”
I’m lying on the couch already wearing my stupid blue-and-white-checked dress that Mama got me at JCPenney. I hate it. It’s too big for me and there’s a white collar hanging down in front that looks like a bib.
“Jessie Lou, sweetie,” says Mama. “You’re getting your dress all wrinkled lying there.”
“Who cares?” I say. “I don’t think anybody’s gonna die if they see an imperfection in this old thing that looks like a big tablecloth.”
Granddaddy looks real nice though. He’s all spiffed up wearing a new plaid shirt and a jacket. He’s got his money folded neatly in his wallet. He’s got big plans for him and me and the Sky Bullet and the Screamin’ Demon. I’m not gonna do it. Love ya to pieces, Granddadd
y, I’m thinking to myself, but I’m not going to get hit in the face with my own throw-up.
My feet are squeezed into these white plastic shoes, and it’s still raining. Walls of it are melting against our windows. The living room feels hot and muffled. Melinda’s all pinned back in her curlers and creams, pinned back like a bud before it blooms. If only I had Granddaddy’s digital camera right now, I’d take a picture of her. She looks so awful, she reminds me of Quentin Duster that time he got a Mohawk haircut and totally fried his chances for popularity all in one swoop. “Granddaddy, where’s your digital camera?” I say, looking over at Melinda and smiling.
She says, “Don’t even think about it. Even done up like I am now, I’d still come out ahead of you.”
“I would never be in a beauty contest,” I say. “Be about a big waste of my time.”
We can hear thunder in the distance and Mama says, “Sounds like it’s over in Culpepper County.”
“Yeah, we’ve had too much rain,” says Granddaddy. “Either we don’t get enough or we get too much.”
I remember looking at the Cabanash River on the way home from school. It was big and fat and swollen, pressing at its edges, getting wider and greener with the rain falling in it. Rain hitting the surface of it, making little bubbles and knicks and splashes across it, trees bending over it, hanging down low and heavy, dancing and crying with rain.
Mama finishes Melinda’s dress and lifts it off the ironing board and then slips it on a padded hanger. It’s like a soft pink floating rose, gauzy like angel wings. The room smells sweet and smoky of freshly ironed fabric, pressed perfectly. Mama is good at ironing and sewing too, and once she entered an apron she made at the state fair in the Crafts Division. She took home a little old blue ribbon for it, though nobody made a fuss over it. You can still see that blue ribbon pinned to the wall above her dresser or maybe it isn’t there anymore. It seems like we took it down and used it for some game we were playing back when Melinda and I used to be friends.