by Inman Majors
“I just wanted to tell you,” the maintenance man said, “that Mr. Burke is still complaining about the grass. I told him we have to keep all the yards the same length so it looks nice and neat, but he wants his at two inches, not three like everyone else.”
Missy frowned at this, then scowled, then her mouth twitched a few spasmodic times. She was struggling with the torrent of profanities that were vying to foul the air.
“Carl Junior,” she said, rubbing her face in a painful-looking way that showed the self-restraint she was employing. “How many times do I have to tell you that I don’t give a rat’s . . . patooey . . . about what that old sack of . . . something . . . wants done with his lawn. He’s been a pain in my . . . tush . . . since we got this place.”
“All right, Miss Missy. I figured you’d feel that way, but I wanted to let you know in case he came in complaining. He’s particular, but that’s just how some people are.”
Missy scrunched her face so hard about the particularity of Mr. Burke that Penelope thought her ears might blow off.
“Thank you for letting me know,” Missy said, sighing massively. “I will add it to the list. Now I need to ask you something, Carl Junior. Do you ever see Dimwit leave his place? He has to get food and necessities at some point, but I’ve never seen that rusty heap of his in actual motion.”
“Who?”
“Dimwit, Carl Junior, Dimwit.”
The maintenance man frowned until Penelope said, “She means Dewitt.”
“I said Dimwit and I meant Dimwit,” Missy said, rounding dramatically on Penelope. “If ever a wit was dim, it is his.”
Carl Jr. worked his tongue artfully in his lower lip for a spell. He was deep in thought. “Ain’t never seen him leave during the day.”
“I knew it,” Missy said. “He’s growing his own food and raising chickens in that trailer. He probably has solar panels and is fertilizing with his own waste. I knew it all along.”
Carl Jr. took in this theory. He hadn’t finished talking when Missy interrupted him. Waiting a full five seconds to ensure the floor was indeed his, he continued: “When we had that one break-in back in December and you had me on night security, I saw him leave. Every night in fact. Right around midnight.”
“Walmart stays open twenty-four hours,” Penelope said, her innate detective skills kicking in. When she wasn’t racing through raunchy romance novels, a hard-boiled mystery often called her name. She felt well trained in the arts of observation and hers was a gut that could be trusted. That gut was presently telling her that she was about to be embroiled in something stupid.
“Every night, Carl Junior?” Missy stated. “Every. Single. Night.”
She’d said this last part in the manner of a TV attorney to show that the wheels of justice were in motion. Penelope blanched at this intonation, Newtonian laws of motion being what they are.
The maintenance man popped his Hokies cap against his leg and nodded once, as was his way when confirming something he’d already confirmed.
“Thank you, Carl Junior.”
Carl Jr. nodded and said Ma’am to Penelope, then nodded and said Ma’am to Missy, then departed the office as quietly as he’d entered.
“I swear to God I’m going to marry Carl Junior,” Missy said as soon as the door nicked shut.
This was a familiar claim.
“Seriously,” said Missy. “You think I’m kidding, but I love him. I’d do him on your desk right now. You and Dimwit could watch. You could film it, I don’t care. I love me some Carl Junior.”
Ignoring this, Penelope rose and went to the window to gaze up at Dewitt’s bulbous trailer on the hill, a patch of land void of trees or plant life, where only a few lank brown weeds swayed sadly in the breeze. Penelope had seen scarier-looking houses—they’d gone looking for them in high school—but none so warty. She felt sure dengue fever grew on the premises, likely in crusty Beenee Weenee cans. Ringworm for sure. And tapeworm. Both of which Theo would definitely catch at Camp Sycamore.
“We don’t know for sure that Dimwit took our stuff,” Penelope said, turning to Missy, who was lying on the couch in the reception area, her feet resting on an end table, crumpling that month’s crisp new periodicals.
“Of course we do. He used to always come in after lunch when we were here.”
“Okay, that proves my point. Why would he change his habits if he needs us in the office to do his business?”
Missy shrugged. “Maybe Dimwit needs a little romance. His powers of concentration aren’t what they once were, so he needs a little totem from his ladies in his life to remind him of the good old days when love was fresh and new. You can’t blame him. I couldn’t tell you the last time I had sex with a man when I wasn’t imagining someone else. It’s been years. Am I alone in this?”
It had been so long since she’d had sex that Penelope judged the question moot. With a gun to her head, she’d admit that her boss wasn’t alone in carnal imaginative wanderings. She wouldn’t have survived the last year of her marriage without a few Jedi mind tricks. How else to negotiate James and his tiny kimono? During these outings, often with the yellow geisha robe above or below her and whishing this way and that, she’d envisioned she was the protagonist from her latest naughty book. In those instances, the material she kept feeling about her was not a shorty robe but an expensive silk shirt, left on in their hurry to turn the executive’s office into a nasty boudoir. Other times,
the kimono became the satiny touch of a sail as she and Dmitri tumbled about on deck en route to Morocco. There they would meet the mystery man in the red hat, but in the meantime Dmitri worked the rudder, and her too.
Of course if she was tired, and her imagination wasn’t firing on all cylinders, she’d just picture a boy she knew from high school, one who knew his way around the inside of a Mazda RX-7. On these occasions it was difficult to account for the satiny swish that kept intruding on her trip down memory lane, and she’d have to remove the kimono in order to fully enjoy the leather passenger seat, the mag wheels, the kickass spoiler.
“So,” said Missy. “I’ll take that as a No, you are not alone in this.”
Penelope smiled but didn’t respond. Winston Hackler and his RX-7 were still parked out by the lake in her mind and she felt no real hurry to depart.
“Listen,” Missy said, popping off the couch like a submerged pool toy breaking the surface. “We’re going up there and finding our stuff. He’s probably eaten the candy and gum. But those socks of yours? They’re hanging in a Hello Kitty frame in the sex dungeon beneath his trailer. We find those tee-tiny socks and presto-bango—he’s busted and I’m out of the lease.”
Penelope didn’t care for this vision of the ill-fated anklets. They were new and still smelling of fabric softener when they’d gone missing. In fact, they’d freshened the whole bottom drawer of her desk with their lemony-fresh scent and brightened her day every time she saw them. Truly, they were cheerful socks. She hated the thought of them being utilized in an indecent fashion. Now these old panties she was wearing? That was a different story. Dimwit would be a mere babe in the woods in their presence. They’d seen plenty.
“There would be no way to prove those were my socks even if we found them.”
“He could have swiped anything,” said Missy. “I have no idea at any given moment what’s in my purse or desk. He could have stolen my son’s bronzed baby booties and I wouldn’t know.” Missy checked her watch. “Anyway, details about Operation Dimwit to follow. Right now, those ultraviolets are calling my name down at Tammy’s Tanning Shack.”
“You know . . .” Penelope began.
Missy raised a hand. “I know, I know. And I have one word for you: Whatever. I’m addicted. And now Carl Junior’s got me all riled up. Unless you can get him in here right now to show me all the tools in his belt, I’m going to have to strip down in a booth and get tropical.”
“It’s so bad for your skin.”
“Correct. I’m going to end up lookin
g like one of those shriveled-up raisiny ladies you see at the beach. I’ll be pulling bread crumbs out of my wrinkles and tossing them to the gulls every morning when the sun comes up. But don’t you worry about ole Missy. She can always get a man if she needs one. And some fellows like that beat-up shoe look. A lot, in fact. So ta-ta, doll, I’m off for some radiation love down at Tammy’s. I do some of my best concentrating down there. I’ll have our Dimwit plan formulated by tonight, guaranteed.”
4
As Friday quitting time approached, Penelope vacillated between anticipation of the wide-open weekend before her and continued worry about Theo. The poor kid had just survived a year of school bullying and now they were packing him off for an extended spell with strangers? How much supervision did Camp Sycamore offer? And what was the counselor/camper ratio? Theo was as sweet as they came, but perhaps a little odd to some boys. Not everyone wanted to hear long discourses on PlinkyMo and trilobites. Would counselors pick up on this?
And could James be trusted to pack properly, especially in the preventive care department? She’d offered to gather toiletries and medicine and let her ex handle the rest, but he’d insisted on the whole enchilada. He had the official Camp Sycamore list of provisions, after all, and Penelope knew he’d been checking those items off with a well-sharpened pencil for weeks now, reliving a cherished part of his Tarheel upbringing when all angels looked homeward. It would be mean-spirited to deprive him of that.
Still. Theo would be loaded up with knives, canteens, flashlights, headlamps, compasses, and other doodads from James’s suburban survivalist collection. But would James remember the underwear? The soap? The toothbrush and nonallergenic pillow? And most importantly, the Benadryl, itch cream, and inhaler? If ever there was a living, breathing histamine magnet, it was Theo. Even looking at a mosquito on TV would cause fiery red bumps to explode on his leg. These bulbous reminders of the dangers of Anglo-Saxon inbreeding would then be scratched to bleeding, scab over, the scab picked, in an infinite cycle of bloody, crusty summer grossness.
Penelope would take any odds given about Theo and his future date with impetigo. She could practically see his iodine-stained legs from here.
She was brooding about how to ask James about his packing without getting him on his commonsensical high horse, where he spent most of his day, when Carl Jr. knocked lightly to interrupt all this mulling.
“Come in, Carl Junior,” she yelled. “It’s just me in here.”
He entered, taking off his cap, and stood just beyond the door, a rolled-up newspaper in his hand, a sly smile on his face.
“Come on in and cool off, Carl Junior,” Penelope said. “It’s burning up out there.”
“Not too bad,” said the maintenance man. “Getting a little breeze off the mountain.”
“Take a seat. Rest them dogs a bit.”
He nodded and tentatively made his way over to the least nice chair in the waiting room. He checked the back side of his pants legs to make sure no grass particles had managed to escape his eagle eye, then sat down with the satisfied sigh of a hardworking man.
“What did you do to your forehead?” Penelope asked, pointing at the Band-Aid.
“The old lady finally had enough.”
“I’ve been waiting for Lorraine to do that. You’ve had it coming for a while.”
“Naw,” said Carl Jr., grinning. “Dr. Hagood just froze off one of them pre-melanomas. Nothing to worry about. And if Miss Missy inquires, I’m putting on sunscreen three times a day.”
Penelope nodded, pleased with the answer.
“Did you hear Hagi made the paper again?” Carl Jr. said with a smile. It was the sly grin that accompanied any comment he voiced about his nephew, the HHR.
“No I didn’t,” said Penelope, returning the smile.
Carl Jr. got up, shaking his head, and made his way over to the desk. As he did, Penelope tried to catalog all the nicknames she’d heard for the HHR. To his mother’s side of the family, he was Hagi. To his father’s side, Zeke. The following groups also had their pet names: bowling buddies (Clacker), fastpitch buddies (Cha-Cha), fishing pals (Otis), friends on the police force (El Duque), friends on the herbal enthusiast side of things (Ziggy). How many of these nicknames had marijuana as their etymological prompt, she didn’t know, though she guessed quite a few. Otis and Ziggy for sure. She’d been there when those were coined beneath mushroom clouds of smoke.
As Carl Jr. stood beside her, grinning expectantly, Penelope took the paper. That day’s headline in the Hillsboro Daily Record read:
LOCAL MAN RESCUES BEAR CUB
Below it was a photo of a handsome, athletic, shirtless man pointing up at a tree. According to the story, the HHR had found the cub by a creek bed, bawling for its mother. After waiting an hour for the mother to return, he’d decided to take the lost waif’s cause as his own and had carried the cub—fireman style—in an eastbound direction for reasons known only to himself. His instincts were proven correct, however, for bear and man soon met in a clearing near an electrical tower. He placed the cub down “as lightly as I could and said, Here you go, Momma. Your little baby’s safe and sound.”
The mother bear had thanked him warmly by giving chase “for a mile or better,” an adventure which ended only when the HHR had shimmied a large oak to approximately forty feet. The bear, weary from the chase, had only made it twenty feet up before calling it quits.
Penelope now read out loud for Carl Jr.’s amusement: “I don’t mean to boast, but they’ve yet to build a tree I can’t climb.”
“He’s a mess,” said Carl Jr., shaking his head fondly.
“He slept all night in the tree?”
“Yep. He’d probably still be up there if that park ranger hadn’t come and woke him up. You know how he is. He’ll sleep through Judgment Day, you just watch him.”
Penelope continued to read, thinking that for someone who claimed to live off the grid, he sure got his picture in the paper a lot. Bowling three hundred at Twilight Lanes, pitching a no-hitter in the fastpitch county championship, catching a fifty-pound catfish down by the dam, finding a well-preserved Civil War pistol during another trek through the woods. He was in the paper every other week, now that she thought about it.
And still he refused a cell phone for fear of government surveillance. Or was it concern about a low sperm count? Sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending on what exposé he’d recently read on the Internet.
She read aloud again: “The local man claims to be an avid hiker.”
She and Carl Jr. exchanged smiles at this one but said no more, for the only hiking the HHR did was to check on the assorted pot plants he cultivated in George Washington State Park, which abutted his property. That he was stoned out of his mind while negotiating with the mother bear, and while sleeping in the tree, and even when talking with the park ranger and the newspaper reporter went without saying. He went nowhere out of doors without Otis Jr., his trusty one-hitter.
Penelope finished the article then looked back at the photo.
She thought: I was married to that man. The one who slept overnight in a tree.
It was like a fact from a dusty history book.
Penelope was in the Kroger parking lot after work, a cold bottle of chardonnay at her side, loading her groceries into the trunk. The pendulum had swung and she was again excited by the child-free zone that awaited her. She’d miss her son, sure—the little survivalist, the brave Histamine Boy—but she was about to live for two weeks as an unfettered, badass single gal, as often depicted on television shows set in New York City. She planned to make hay in the home decoration department, namely by painting her new den. While she worked, she’d play music as loudly as she wanted without Theo asking her to change to some lame pop song that was the latest elementary school rage. How she could be raising a child with such bad musical taste, she had no idea. But there it was: Imagine Dragons.
If so inclined, she could spend the night with a man or have a man spend the night
with her. Who would know? Who would wake up, as Theo did as toddler, and complain of sounds coming from his parents’ bedroom like people walking around in wet flip-flops? The thought of an intimate adult sleepover—the first since her divorce—was foreign, exotic, and also a little tiring, so she decided to give it a rest. She closed the trunk, pondering her date with Fitzwilliam Darcy the following evening. She noted that it was possible to force thoughts of sex from her mind while still contemplating Fitzwilliam. That likely said something right there.
She’d met the older gentleman on the dating service her mother gifted her with on her fortieth birthday, a few months back. He didn’t really share his name with the love interest in Pride and Prejudice, but that was his online moniker and she couldn’t think of him by anything else. She’d even called him that on their coffee date at Starbucks a couple weeks back, first in a joking way, then later because he really did seem to act and talk like a nineteenth-century aristocrat. Or at least the ones Penelope had seen on TV. Penelope had heard quite a bit about his cat, Algernon Moncrieff, that day and felt sure that he’d be as particular about his scones and jam as Fitzwilliam himself.
Anyway, for now he was Fitzwilliam. A name change would require a performance a lot less Fitzwilliamish than the first.
She got in the car, started the engine, and checked the oil light as was her paranoid habit. Another problem with the car would spell financial doom, and she still hadn’t paid back her stepfather, George, for fixing her head gasket the last time. But no lights—oil, temperature, or factory-issue dashboard middle finger—appeared and she breathed a sigh of relief. As she did, her phone buzzed with a text from Missy:
Master plan begins with you pretending to seduce Dimwit.
