Curds and Whey Box Set

by G M Eppers

  Roxy was still focused on her crochet project. “No, thanks, Knobby. I need a lot of light for this. Say hi to the Moon for me.”

  “I’ll come,” I said. I wasn’t at all sleepy anyway.

  “All righty then,” said Knobby. “Have a good night, Ms. Dubois,” he said, pretending to tip a hat.

  “Night, Knobby.” She managed to look up long enough to give him a smile, then went back to her work.

  I joined Knobby on the back porch, where we sat with our feet on the first step. It was dark, but there was a glow from the streetlight on the corner, and a crescent moon sat high in the sky like the Cheshire cat’s smile. Barely visible clouds floated overhead and crickets chirped, providing a soothing soundtrack to the evening. Out in the yard, I could see the vague outline of the exercise equipment. The climbing wall way in the back, the monkey bars, the horizontal ladder and balance beam, sawhorse hurdles straddling a dirt running track. Over by the shed where Nitro housed his bigger medical equipment, were a discarded Razor scooter which had until recently been used as a hurdle, and a newly installed chin-up bar secured to the exterior shed wall. I wouldn’t be allowed to use any of it for at least a week, and then probably only if I begged and signed a waiver. I’d have to do some calisthenics in my room if I wanted to maintain some muscle tone until my ribs and surgical scar healed. Funny, sometimes all that equipment seemed like a chore, almost a punishment, but now that it was off limits for me, I wanted to get out there and try all of it. And suddenly, just like that, I had a better understanding of Knobby. He probably felt like this all the time.

  “Knobby, I really want to thank you for all you did for my mother. I hope she wasn’t too much trouble.”

  “Not at all, Helena,” he said, waving away my comment. “She was good company.”

  “That’s sweet, but you don’t have say that. I know she can be a pill. She probably regaled you with extensive plot descriptions from her soap operas.”

  “Nope. She didn’t talk about that at all.” He seemed reluctant to specify Mom’s subject matter, which got me much more curious than if he had simply agreed with me.

  “She made you miss the announcement.”

  “Heard it on the radio on the way back. Nice drive. Barely any cars on the road. I know I wanted to be here, but in hindsight, it was nice hearing it that way, alone, in the quiet. I had time to think.”

  He took some more time to think as we shared a comfortable silence. After a couple minutes, I said, “I’m glad Billings got a chance to spend time with his grandmother. He doesn’t get to see her much.”

  “They did lunch. Just the two of them.”

  “That’s nice.”

  There was more silence for a bit, as we listened to the crickets. It really was an excellent night. “She talked about your Dad,” he finally volunteered.

  “She did?”

  “Yes. She misses him.”

  “Of course she does. Me, too.”

  He looked up at the Moon. “Well, we kind of, um, bonded over that. I’ve been missing my Izzy, too. A breakthrough like that makes you think about the people you lost, makes you wish the timing was different. Did I ever tell you about my Izzy?”

  I assumed Izzy was his wife, who died about the same time as my Dad, in the first big wave of OOPS deaths. “No, I don’t think you have.” I wanted to say he didn’t have to, to give him an out, a reason not to relive painful memories, but I didn’t. I sensed that he needed to talk about it. So I waited while he gathered his thoughts.

  After a time, he began, “We’d been married 23 years when she passed. Seems like 23 days, or minutes even. She was the best thing that ever happened to me. She brightened up a room just being there. Not by smiling, just by being there. Her voice was like music, and she moved like an ocean wave on a still, quiet night like this.” I smiled. I’m sure she’d had her faults, but he wasn’t seeing them. I saw moisture well up in his eyes, reflecting the moonlight in tiny crescents in his irises. “We did everything together. Seriously, no two people were so perfectly matched. Even our moods just seemed to find each other. When she felt quiet, I felt quiet. When she wanted to let loose, so did I. We went dancing. We went swimming. We even skinny dipped once in her folks’ pool. In broad daylight, too, it was. The neighbors pulled down their shades, but they didn’t complain. Yes, Izzy was something. She only had one flaw. One tiny, insignificant flaw.”

  He stopped there, waiting. I knew he wanted me to ask. “Okay, what was her one flaw?”

  He grinned, having tricked me into asking. “One of the things Izzy liked to do when she felt quiet was jigsaw puzzles. You ever do jigsaw puzzles?”

  “Sure. When Billings was little.”

  “I don’t mean little kid puzzles. I mean big ones. A thousand pieces or more.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think I have.”

  “Izzy loved them. We had one going all the time, for when she felt quiet. And she liked a challenge. We did the really hard ones. We did one once that was a polar bear in a winter scene. There were about six pieces with black on them, the rest were all white. Took almost a year, but we did it. Worked on it at least once a week, sometimes twice. Another one was just one big red square, on both sides. That one took eighteen months. Of course, that was only in our spare time, but we had more of that than most people.” I wasn’t sure what flaw this was heading toward, but I had confidence that he’d get there. Lack of tenacity or persistence was not it.

  “You can tell a lot about a person by the way they work a jigsaw. Most everyone starts with the border pieces, of course. But after that, you got your inside outs and your outside ins, and your clumpers, your neverminds what won’t even do a puzzle, people who sort all the pieces by color and people who sort by what they think the picture is. There’s all kinds.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m an outside in,” he said. “I find the pieces that connect to the border and work my way in. Izzy, she was an inside out. She’d find the pieces that went together no matter where they belonged in the puzzle, worked them in the middle, moving around big chunks when she saw where it went. Inside outs are usually clumpers, too. Drove me nuts.”

  I laughed a little. After all that sweetness, to hear him say something negative was amusing.

  “Thing is, though,” he continued, “that’s the best way to do a big puzzle like that. One working in, the other working out, and eventually they meet up and you see this, this picture come together like the pieces were magnetic. I imagine my way drove her nuts, too,” he admitted.

  “You sleepy yet?” He asked suddenly.

  “No. Not at all.”

  “I want to show you something.” He stood and offered his hand to help me up. I took it, and he pulled gently, not letting go until I had my balance. “Follow me,” he said turning around and heading into the house.

  As we passed through the house, I glanced into the living room. The TV was still on, with the sound low, tuned to the telethon. Noreen von Von was showing the national tote board which was displaying $3,765,980. But Knobby didn’t go into the living room. From the kitchen, he turned toward Nitro’s room, then stopped and opened the basement door. He switched on the light and looked back at me. “This way.”

  Living in a group home atmosphere, the rules of privacy are strictly enforced. I’d had no more than inadvertent glimpses of anyone’s room in passing and really had no desire to intrude on their space. I could hear Nitro turning on his mattress. Quiet classical music floated in the air. I think it was Brahms, but I could easily be wrong. It wasn’t the famous lullaby, but was reminiscent of it. Knobby waited at the top of the steps, unsure of my hesitation. “It’s all right, Helena,” he whispered. “There’s no spiders. I promise.”

  The basement steps were bare wood, stained to a dark cherry finish. Surprisingly, they didn’t squeak as we descended. A single bare bulb illuminated the bottom of the stairs, a full dozen of them, and they opened onto a finished sitting room. It wasn’t wall-to-wall carpeting, but a l
arge striped area rug covered the floor almost completely. Here, a modest 30-inch television stood on a walnut entertainment unit facing a small blue couch. On the other side of the couch, tucked into the corner, was a large square object covered with a faded, flowered bedsheet. Knobby led me to the corner and gently lifted the sheet, folding it back from the top of the object with reverence.

  It was a card table, with two folding chairs on adjacent edges. On the card table was a jigsaw puzzle in progress. The border was finished, and a very few random pieces extended toward the middle. In the empty space inside the border, there were three clusters of pieces, but not enough to reveal the picture. Then, as Knobby finished removing the sheet, I saw the box cover.

  The picture was mostly black and white. In 1931, Universal Pictures released the now classic Frankenstein and this was a still from that film. In the film, Frankenstein’s monster, played by Boris Karloff, encounters a little girl, who, in her innocence is not afraid of him. She gives him a flower. It was that scene, but instead of a flower another object had been inserted. A bright yellow block of cheese, labeled Muenster.

  “This is the last puzzle Izzy worked on. I pulled it out again last week. I sit here and work it my way,” he said, touching one chair back, “then the next time I sit here and work it like I was Izzy,” he added, touching the other seat. He left it uncovered, but looked away, walked away, allowing me to get closer. He turned his back. “Tell me what you see.”

  “Knobby,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

  “The puzzle is called Frankenstein’s Muenster. It was a promotional thing, when the new cheese was really big. You bought a wheel of cheese and you got something to go with it. Izzy liked Muenster.” I remembered. With the cheddar you got a collectible plate showing a landscape from the village in England. And with Swiss, a model of the Alps. But you had to buy the entire wheel to get the prize and even though new cheese was not much more expensive than the old cheese, an entire wheel was still a large investment. Dad had wanted to get the Gouda. It came with a butcher’s block cheese board that said “Gouda For You.” But he’d had to get a new car that year, and he was giving Butte and me financial assistance with Billings’ education, so he couldn’t justify the expense. “See anything wrong with it?”

  I did. “Muenster is a white cheese,” I said. “I guess they wanted the drama of the only color being the cheese, like Spielberg did with the girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List.” I shrugged. “Marketing ploy, that’s all.”

  “Anything else?”

  “What is it, Knobby?” I could keep guessing all night and not pick up on what he was getting at.

  “It’s not finished.”

  “Of course it isn’t. Puzzles take time.” He was staring down at the puzzle, but I put a hand on his shoulder and turned him toward me. “What’s going on with you, Knobby?”

  “Unfinished business, that’s what.”

  I picked up a piece. “You want me to help you with it? Looks like I’ll have the time.”

  He shook his head. “No, that’s all right. I do intend to finish it. I need to finish. I need to finish a lot of things.” I didn’t know where he was going with this, but I felt I had all the patience in the world just then. I waited, and he went on, “Your Mom told me it took her a while to move on, too. Longer than you realize, I’m sure, but still long ago. And you, you moved right on into CURDS and started defending your father’s life. That was absolutely the right move. And dumping that Butte. Don’t go back to that lout, Helena. He’s fighting for the wrong side, you know that.”

  Part of me agreed with him. But I didn’t consider Butte to be a lout. I felt obligated to defend him. “He’s not a lout. He’s just . . . passionate. From his perspective, he’s fighting for freedom and there’s nothing wrong with that. Freedom is very important to him.” My ex, Butte Montana, works for an organization called WHEY, which promotes the freedom for everyone to buy whatever cheese they want, even if it is tainted. He’d always been very patriotic. He had boxer shorts sporting the American flag. He made an MP3 CD of over 200 patriotic songs like Simon and Garfunkel’s America and Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. He had a wall shelf devoted to statues of Uncle Sam. He carried a Pocket Constitution and wore a flag pin whenever he dressed up. He had great confidence in the average adult, American and otherwise, to make their own decisions in an unlimited fashion and felt that it was the fight against Uber that was complicating the issue by forcing the market to go underground. He felt it encouraged criminal activity like counterfeiting and Uber running and that’s what was endangering the public, not the existence of a lethal additive in an innocuous substance like cheese.

  Butte was currently working for WHEY throughout Europe, using funds mostly from a right-wing political activist group founded by the Krochedy Brothers, owners of Krochedy Brothers Department Stores. On our most recent mission, we had ended up working with Butte and I’d even, um, fraternized with him, but we had parted the same as always. “I’m not getting back together with Butte, Knobby. It’s a mutual decision. It wouldn’t work now any more than it worked then.” Then why did I feel sad about it? Why did it seem like I had regrets when my brain kept telling me we were doing the right thing? I put down the piece of the jigsaw I’d been holding, but was still consciously looking for where it belonged.

  “No,” said Knobby, grabbing my arm gently and pulling me away. He could tell what I was doing even though I wasn’t touching any of the pieces. “Not yet. There’s something else I want to finish first.”

  “Something else?”

  He waved me to follow again and went up the stairs. I followed him and soon we were back on the porch, standing this time, staring out at the yard. He leaned behind me and flipped the switch that turned on the floodlights, and the entire yard brightened. All the equipment was clearly visible, all the way back to the climbing wall. And suddenly I knew what Knobby was talking about. He wanted to finish his climb. “Knobby, you’re crazy. I can’t let you do that.”

  “Listen, I’m doing it. If you won’t help me, I’ll get Nitro. Anything gets hurt he can fix it.”

  “Even if you succeed, you still won’t be able to join a field team.”

  “I know that. But it’s unfinished business. And I’m not getting any younger. I can do the puzzle when I’m old and gray if I have to. But the sooner I get to the top of that wall, the sooner I can move on.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to just sit down and do the puzzle?” I pleaded.

  “’Course it would. Doesn’t make it the right thing to do. I think I can do it, Helena. The knees have been really stable lately.” He lifted one leg at a time, bending each knee in turn. “Haven’t popped in months, almost a whole year. And worst that can happen is they both pop at once, you get Nitro, he pops them back in, and that’s that. I’ll try again next week. Or the week after. But I’m getting to the top.”

  Well, I thought, when you put it that way . . . I looked into Knobby’s gray eyes and saw a determination there I had never seen before. It was true that this wall wasn’t nearly as high as the one at the Academy, where Knobby had had his accident. And that one had been made of concrete whereas this was fiberglass. This one also had a grassy landing area rather than asphalt. I didn’t really feel qualified to witness such a climb, but if I got Nitro he’d be ethically obligated to report it or stop it. I suppose I was obligated, too, but I wasn’t risking my medical career, and if Knobby could do it, just between us, no one else would ever have to know. He wasn’t trying for public recognition like a commendation or a medal. It was just for himself. He could have tried to do it when we were gone. Eventually, we’d get another mission and he’d have the house to himself. But he still wanted a witness for both verification and safety.

  “You owe me a favor, you know,” Knobby reminded me. “Will you spot me?”

  “If you fall and kill yourself, I’ll kill you,” I said.

  “Come on.” He went down the steps and walked directly to
the wall, and I followed. We stood in front of it, staring up. It seemed much taller from here. “Help me with the harness. I’ve watched you guys but never done it myself.” He grabbed the safety rope and gave it a tug. The crickets paused in their chirping as if they, too, were nervous, then resumed. They were probably just disturbed by our unexpected presence, but it didn’t feel that way.

  I strapped the harness around Knobby’s waist and made sure it was good and tight. “I’ll be right here. I’ll catch you if you fall.”

  He stepped back and looked at me. “Don’t you even try. You’d bust your stitches and then where would we be? Besides, if you catch me, then everyone will know you were right here. We’d both get thrown out of CURDS. If I fall, you let me fall. You can say you heard a thump and found me. It’s that, what do you call it? Plausible deniability. Just be ready to call Nitro. Promise?”

  I was still hesitant. Catching him would be a reflex. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stop myself. “Okay, I promise,” I said anyway. “Don’t fall.”

  “That’s the plan,” he said, reaching for his first handhold.

  The wall wasn’t designed to be easy. There were big stretches where the next holds were just out of reach even for the tallest of us. I had to make lateral moves and stretch to my limit. I licked dry lips as I watched Knobby ascend. He stopped about a third of the way up. “Don’t look down!” I said.

  “Just resting,” he said.