Beverly, Right Here

by Kate DiCamillo

  Beverly looked at Elmer in the rearview mirror. She raised her eyebrows at him and smiled. But he didn’t smile back.

  When they got to the VFW, Iola went right through the door, straight inside, without even looking back at them. “Hurry up, you two,” she called over her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry that I bent it,” Beverly said to Elmer. “The picture, I mean.”

  “It’s fine,” said Elmer. “I don’t care.”

  “It scared me. I don’t know. It’s like I looked at it, and I recognized myself and I also didn’t recognize myself.”

  Elmer shook his head.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  She looked up at him. But he was looking away from her, staring up at the VFW sign.

  “There’s a bird’s nest right there,” she said, pointing to the V.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I see it.”

  His face was in profile to her. The skin on it looked tight and painful.

  “Does it hurt?” she said.

  “Does what hurt?”

  “Your face.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know this one. I’m supposed to say, ‘No, why?’ And then you say, ‘Because it’s sure killing me.’”

  “It’s not killing me,” said Beverly. “It’s doing the opposite of killing me.”

  Elmer was quiet for a minute, staring up at the sign, and then he nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It hurts. But so what? Lots of things hurt. It won’t last forever. Someday, it will clear up. That’s what my mother says. No one has acne on their face for their whole life, right?”

  Just then the sign sputtered to life. The V and the F and the W were suddenly lit and glowing. Beverly looked up at the letters and thought about the angel again, about how she had come to deliver important news.

  Annunciation.

  That’s what Elmer had said the painting was called.

  Annunciation.

  The angel had come to make an announcement to Mary.

  And you knew something important was happening in the painting because the angel had wings like blue fire.

  But in real life, how did you know who was announcing what?

  Maybe the VFW sign was announcing something. Maybe Mrs. Deely and her cartoons were annunciations. Maybe the mechanical horse was trying to deliver a message. And surely Doris had come to announce something.

  Maybe everything and everyone in the world should be painted with blue wings.

  “Where do you get lapis lazuli?” Beverly asked Elmer.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not sure. Somewhere far away — the Middle East, maybe? I’ll find out where.”

  She took hold of his hand and squeezed it.

  And then she tried to let go of him, but he wouldn’t let her.

  “No,” he said.

  “Beverly and Elmer!” Iola called. She was standing at the door to the VFW. She waved to them. “Come on inside and dance.”

  “I can tell you one thing,” said Beverly. “I’m not dancing.”

  “Let’s go,” said Elmer.

  Beverly walked inside with him, still holding his hand.

  Inside the VFW, it was dark and twinkly lights were strung everywhere. There was a stage with a Christmas tree on it.

  The floors were wood, and they creaked when you stepped on them. The whole place was noisy with people talking and laughing. Music was playing, and a man dressed up in a Santa Claus suit was walking through the crowd shouting, “Ho, ho, ho! Merry Christmas!”

  At a card table off to one side, there was a blue ceramic bowl full of tickets. And next to the card table, there was a very long table covered in butcher paper. There was a punch bowl on the long table, and a tower of Styrofoam cups and a big platter of cheese cubes with a little frilled toothpick stuck in each piece of cheese. Next to the food table, there was another card table with a record player on it. Someone on the record was singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

  A cloud of cigarette smoke hung over the room. The smoke made the lights and the Christmas tree and the people all seem unreal. It was like looking at someone else’s dream.

  Iola said, “Who wants some punch?”

  “I’ll get it,” said Elmer.

  “Oh, there is Frederick Morton,” said Iola to Beverly. “I haven’t seen him since the last dance. I’ll be right back.”

  “Turkey tickets,” said a little man in a blue cap holding a fistful of red flowers and a roll of tickets. “Win the world’s largest turkey. I also got poppies for sale.”

  “How much are the turkey tickets?” said Beverly.

  “Fifty cents,” he said. “Fifty cents to win the world’s largest turkey. I’ll throw in a poppy with each ticket.” The man didn’t have any teeth. He smiled at her, displaying his gums.

  “I don’t want a poppy,” said Beverly. She handed the man a dollar. “Two tickets.”

  “What you want to do is write your name on the back of each ticket,” he said, “and then drop them over there in that bowl, and you could win yourself the world’s largest turkey.”

  “Got it,” said Beverly.

  “You ever heard of the trenches?”

  “What?” said Beverly.

  “The trenches,” said the man, “that’s where I was. In the trenches. You don’t never forget it.”

  Elmer came over and handed Beverly a cup of punch. She looked down into the cup and saw something floating at the bottom.

  “It’s a maraschino cherry,” said Elmer.

  “Right,” said Beverly.

  “You know about the trenches?” the little man asked Elmer.

  “Yes, sir. I’ve read about the trenches.”

  “Sure you have. Gonna buy a poppy?”

  “Okay,” said Elmer. He handed the man a dollar and took a poppy and pinned it to his jacket. He said, “‘In Flanders fields, the poppies blow,’ right?”

  “Don’t bother reciting that crap to me,” the old man said. “I am ninety-two years old. Ninety-two! I don’t never want to hear that stupid poem again. I lived through it.” He pounded his fist on his chest. “I lived through that war. I was in them trenches. Nothing describes it. Nothing touches it.” He shook his head. “And now, here I am in Tamaray Beach, Florida, selling tickets for the world’s largest turkey. Ha-ha-ha. See? That’s how life jokes with you. There ain’t no sense to it. No sense at all.” He smiled, displaying his pink gums again.

  “I’ll take two tickets,” said Elmer.

  “That’s a dollar. Like I told your girlfriend, you got to write your name on the back of each ticket.”

  “Thank you,” said Elmer.

  “You know what I learned after being here on this earth for ninety-two years?”

  “No, sir,” said Elmer.

  The little man leaned in close to them. He whispered, “I ain’t learned a thing. Not one thing. Except that there ain’t nothing in this world that can’t happen. That’s it. That’s the whole of it.”

  And then he turned away from them and shouted, “Turkey tickets! Get your tickets for the world’s largest turkey!”

  Beverly finished her punch and went up to the card table. There was a woman sitting behind it knitting a tiny pink sweater.

  “Can I borrow something to write with?” said Beverly.

  The woman handed her a pen, and Beverly wrote “Iola Jenkins” on the back of each ticket. She dropped the tickets in the blue bowl.

  “Thank you, sweetheart,” said the woman. “Good luck to you.”

  And then Iola was behind Beverly, clapping her hands and saying, “The band is here! The band is here! Now the dancing can start.”

  “Oh, boy,” said Beverly.

  The band started with “Chattanooga Choo Choo.”

  Elmer stood beside Beverly. They watched Iola dance with a man wearing a checked jacket. His hair was dyed black.

  And then a song called “Moon River” started, and Iola came and took Elmer by the hand and said, “We can waltz to this one, honey.”
r />   “I don’t know how to waltz,” said Elmer.

  “A waltz is easy to learn.”

  “Okay,” said Elmer. He put down his punch cup and went off with Iola.

  The ninety-two-year-old turkey-ticket man came up to Beverly and smiled at her with his gums.

  “Guess how old I am,” he said.

  “I know how old you are,” she said. “Give me twenty dollars’ worth of tickets.”

  “Twenty?” he said.

  “No,” said Beverly. “Actually, I want forty dollars’ worth.”

  “You want forty dollars’ worth?” he said. “The turkey ain’t that big.”

  He counted out the tickets slowly and handed them to Beverly. She went back to the little table.

  The knitting woman said, “Well, look who’s back!”

  “Yeah,” said Beverly. “It’s me. Can I borrow that pen again?”

  “Certainly,” said the woman.

  Beverly took the pen and got busy writing Iola’s name eighty more times.

  Elmer was still out on the dance floor in Iola’s arms. The room smelled like cigarette smoke and perfume and the ocean, because everything smelled like the ocean in Tamaray Beach.

  Beverly realized she was happy, as happy as she had ever been in her life.

  It didn’t make any sense.

  It was stupid.

  But she was happy.

  She wished that Raymie were at the VFW.

  And Louisiana. Louisiana loved a party.

  Beverly looked up and out the narrow window that was above the knitting woman’s head. She almost expected to see bare branches, snow falling. Instead, what she saw was the lit-up letter V and the flutter of wings.

  Her heart skipped a beat.

  It was the bird returning home — bringing something back to the nest.

  She wrote Iola’s name so many times that her hand started to cramp up.

  Iola Jenkins. Iola Jenkins.

  Iola Jenkins.

  One time in third grade, Beverly had punched Tinsley Amos in the nose. Tinsley was the kind of girl who did everything right, and who was always helpfully pointing out how everybody else did things wrong. Her hair was a shiny gold.

  It felt good to punch her.

  There was a lot of blood, and Beverly refused to apologize, so she had to stay after school and write sentences on Mrs. Fenstep’s blackboard.

  I regret my actions.

  That was the sentence she wrote. But even after writing the words two hundred times, she didn’t regret her actions.

  “I hope that you’re properly sorry,” Mrs. Fenstep said when Beverly was done.

  “Not really,” said Beverly.

  Which meant that she had to write I am properly sorry five hundred times on the chalkboard.

  Writing Iola’s name eighty times was easy in comparison.

  It was nothing.

  She was happy to write Iola’s name.

  Underneath the sound of the band playing, there was another kind of music — faint and far away. It sounded like angels singing. Beverly stopped writing for a minute.

  She held very still, and then she realized that it was the record player, still spinning. Some choir was singing “Angels We Have Heard on High.”

  The happiness inside of Beverly got bigger, wider.

  And just after she finished writing Iola’s name on the last ticket, Iola appeared beside her, her chest rising and falling. Her face was red. She said, “It’s time to dance, honey.”

  “No,” said Beverly. “It’s not.”

  “I taught Elmer, and now he can teach you.”

  “No,” said Beverly.

  “Yes, honey,” said Iola. “You won’t regret it. I promise you.”

  Beverly stood up.

  And then Elmer was there, too.

  “There you are,” Iola said to him. “Here she is. Here is your Beverly.”

  “I’m not his Beverly,” said Beverly. “And I don’t want to dance.”

  “I can talk you through it,” said Elmer. “It’s not hard. It’s mostly just counting. You can count, right?”

  “Ha-ha,” said Beverly.

  Elmer put his left arm around her waist. “Is that okay?” he said.

  “Of course it’s okay,” said Iola. “You can’t dance without touching each other. Teach her the box step. That’s the best place to start.”

  Elmer moved Beverly off, away from Iola. “Okay,” he said. “What you should do is imagine a box. We’re going to make a box together, with our feet. Look at my feet. Watch.”

  He moved his feet. He counted to four. “Four sides to a box,” he said. “So you count to four.”

  He made the square again. He counted out loud as he did it. The floor creaked under his feet. The air was heavy with smoke.

  “You do it,” he said.

  Beverly looked down at her feet. She made a square. She didn’t bother counting.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now we’re going to do it together. Follow me.” He pulled her closer. He started counting in her ear. “One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.”

  She followed him.

  “Good,” he said. “Good.”

  She looked up at his face, and then past it, out the window of the VFW. She could see the moon.

  “The moon is out there,” she told him.

  “I know it,” he said. “I saw it. Oh, world, I cast my dappled light upon you. Right?”

  Suddenly, Beverly thought she might cry. She bent her head, and Elmer pulled her closer. His shirt smelled like soap and sweat. She could feel his heart beating.

  “That’s it,” said Elmer. “You’re doing great. One, two, three, four.”

  She leaned her head against his chest. She listened to his heart.

  “You don’t need to keep counting,” she said. “I’ve got it. I understand.”

  Elmer kept counting anyway.

  And I am pleased to announce that Iola Jenkins has won the world’s largest turkey. Iola, are you here tonight?” said the man in the Santa suit. He was holding up a ticket and looking around the room.

  “Oh, my heavens!” shouted Iola. She waved her arms in the air. “That’s me! I’m Iola Jenkins, and I’m right here!”

  Later — much later — when the punch bowl was empty and the record player had been silenced and the band had packed up and gone home, Elmer carried the turkey out of the VFW and heaved it into the back seat of the Pontiac.

  “I think they might be telling the truth,” he said. “I think it might be the largest turkey in the world.” He was breathing hard. “I almost couldn’t carry it.”

  They all got in the car — Beverly in the driver’s seat, Iola up front next to her, and Elmer in back with the turkey. On the drive home, Iola hummed “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” several times in a row. And then she said, “Now both of you children know how to dance. Ain’t that something?”

  “Right,” said Beverly. “It’s something, I guess.”

  “Just imagine,” said Iola. She reached over and patted Beverly’s leg. “Imagine if you hadn’t found my trailer. Imagine if I didn’t need someone to drive the Pontiac. Then me and you wouldn’t’ve become friends, and you wouldn’t know how to dance. Oh, I’m glad I needed you. I’m glad you needed me.”

  “I didn’t really need you,” said Beverly.

  “Yes, you did, honey,” said Iola.

  “Yes, you did,” said Elmer from the back seat.

  “Okay,” said Beverly. “Whatever you people say.”

  When they got to the Seahorse Court, Elmer lifted the turkey out of the back seat and started up the stairs to the trailer. He said, “I hope the world’s largest turkey fits through the door of this tiny trailer.”

  He was halfway up the stairs when Iola called out, “Wait, honey.”

  “Wait?” said Elmer. He turned around and looked at her. He was holding the turkey low in his arms.

  “Well, I just thought: now, where in the world am I going to put that bird? It
surely won’t fit in my refrigerator.”

  “Let’s try,” said Elmer. He turned and started back up the stairs.

  “Oh, no, honey. Don’t bother. The more I think about it, the more I know I am right. That turkey won’t fit. I know that refrigerator. And not only that, I doubt it will fit in the oven. It’s a small oven.”

  “Good grief,” said Elmer. He turned again. “It’s heavy. Hurry up and tell me where to go.”

  “Put it on the steps,” said Beverly.

  “The steps?” said Iola. “We can’t leave a turkey setting on the steps. The raccoons will get it.”

  “I can’t hold it anymore,” said Elmer. He started to laugh.

  “Oh, don’t laugh,” said Iola. “Now, don’t you dare start laughing.” She started laughing, too.

  Beverly laughed with them.

  “Oh no, oh no,” said Elmer, still laughing. He walked to the top of the steps. He leaned his head against the door. “I can’t,” he said.

  “Wheeeeee,” said Iola.

  “Elmer,” said Beverly.

  He turned and looked at her, and the turkey slid out of his arms and went bouncing down the steps and landed on the grass.

  Iola whooped. She bent over and held on to the lawn chair and laughed and laughed.

  The turkey sat at the bottom of the steps, and Elmer stood at the top, laughing and wheezing. His tie was loose. His shirt was unbuttoned. His face was lit up.

  “It is,” he said, “the world’s largest . . . turkey.”

  Beverly sat down on the ground and laughed until she cried.

  A light went on in the trailer next to Iola’s.

  Maureen opened her door. Her red hair was in curlers. She had on a nightgown.

  “What’s going on out there?” she shouted. “Iola?”

  “Wheeeeee,” said Iola.

  “World’s largest turkey,” said Elmer to Maureen. He pointed at the turkey. “Won’t fit,” he said. He pointed at Iola’s trailer door. And then he started laughing again.

  “Should I call the police?” said Maureen.

  “No, no, no,” said Iola. She stood up straight. She wiped at the tears on her face. “It’s funny is all. I won the turkey at the VFW, and we don’t have a place to put it. It’s too big.”