Super America

by Anne Panning

  “Here, I’d like to give you this pie as a housewarming present,” Denise said. She handed the foil pan to Bigs. “It’s key lime pie. I got the recipe when I was in Florida a few years ago.” Bigs nodded and thanked her.

  Still they didn’t move to go.

  “Well, it’s been fun,” Denise said. “I should go change Jen-Jen, I suppose.”

  Ty came over and shook her hand. “You’re good neighbors,” he said. “We haven’t heard a thing from anyone else. Haven’t even met ’em. Seems like no one else is too friendly.”

  “Well, we know how it is to move to a strange, new place,” Denise said. “It’s a challenge. We’ve got to stick together.”

  “Amen.” Ty saluted her and turned to leave with his brothers. “Thanks again,” he said.

  Denise watched them walk slowly, side by side, across the big yard and breathed a sigh of relief when they were out of sight.

  Later that night, as the dishwasher churned and splashed and groaned, Denise could hear the Hillbillies outside in their yard. Firecrackers exploded; laughter erupted. She thought of the guns hanging on the garage walls. She thought of Cole, who could’ve reached up and grabbed one. She wouldn’t put it past him. Larry was downstairs doing his Saturday evening ritual: ironing his pants, his shirt, and his socks for the following work week. He actually ironed his socks, even though Denise told him only OCD people ironed their socks. She heard another loud explosion and felt her heart rate escalate.

  “I’ll be right back!” she yelled down to Larry. In her bare feet, Denise went outside and started walking across the yard to the Hillbillies’ house. Her feet sunk into the moist grass and got stuck in the muddy soil. One of her ankles was sucked down to the bottom of what felt like a sinking, wet hole. “Help me!” she called out. “I’m sinking!” But the Hillbillies kept on lighting their firecrackers and singing their songs. Finally, Denise pulled herself out and ran, light-footed, over to their garage.

  “Excuse me,” she said, out of breath, “but this is a family style community. Can you please be quiet?” Ty pulled up a chair and offered it to her, but she crossed her arms.

  “I mean it,” she said, and stomped her feet. She saw that Mort held a long rifle in his lap, buffing it with a pair of old underwear. “Guns, I’m afraid, aren’t allowed in Cherokee Bluff.”

  “The right to bear arms,” Ty said, “comes before Cherokee Bluff rules. We checked that one out before we got here.”

  Denise glared at him.

  “Besides,” Bigs said, “this place is going down anyway. You might as well just ride it out like we are. You know, let your hair down. Have some fun.”

  “It’s not going down,” Denise said, “but you’re bringing it down. Why can’t you just behave like everyone else? Can’t you do that? What’s the matter with you, lighting firecrackers all the time? I’ve got kids trying to sleep.”

  “We all make our choices,” Ty said, not unkindly. “You do your thing, we do ours.” He adjusted his cap and whistled through his teeth.

  “Well, next time you disturb my peace, I’m calling the cops,” Denise said, and could think of nothing to do but walk away. She ran quickly over the wet, mushy grass, trying to stay on top of it, trying to stay afloat. In the back of her mind, she thought they might shoot.

  Inside, the whiteness of her house soothed her. She heard the dishwasher ticking dry. The kids were asleep, and she found Larry in the bathroom, trying to seal a crack above the toilet.

  “It’s not sinking, is it, Larry?” she asked. She sat on the edge of the tub and rinsed her dirty feet.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. He smoothed spackling over the cracks. It stretched between the space like toothpaste. “Not if I can help it.”

  “Good,” Denise said. “That’s good.” She thought she heard firecrackers again and sat up, ears pricked. A dozen or so went off in succession. She froze, but the noise quickly stopped. She looked up at Larry, her husband, the father of her children. “There,” he said. “That ought to do it.” He stood back, tub of spackle in his hand, backwards ball cap on his head. Denise placed a hand on his shoulder; they both stared at the wall in silence.

  For a moment, you couldn’t even tell where the crack had been. It looked brand new, pristine, perfect.

  ALL-U-CAN-EAT

  It all started when my sister Stella tried to convince me that frog legs would be the next big American food craze. “Trust me,” she said—she, an animal enthusiast to such an extreme that her freezer had become a pet morgue. “I predict that frog legs,” she said, hands on her hips, “will be to 2000 what sun-dried tomatoes were to the eighties! They’ll be to western New York what coffee shops were to Seattle! Like sushi in shopping malls. Think about it.” She paused to scratch her elbow; she was forever itching with rashes, bug bites, pet hair. “Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mickey D’s ends up carrying them on their menu. McFrog Legs Happy Meals. What kid wouldn’t go crazy for that?”

  “Umm, this kid wouldn’t,” I said, pointing to myself, though I was no kid. Stella—in addition to being thrice divorced, an alcoholic, a liar, and extremely persuasive—was broke. She worked as the cafeteria manager at our town’s elementary school but blew most of her wages on lotto tickets, pet food, and bad luck business enterprises, in that order. She often got so excited about her current money-making scheme (most recently: Native American beaded jewelry made in your own home!) that she’d come driving over in her cafeteria whites, plastic food service gloves still covering her sweaty hands. She was as predictable as most con artists, though: no matter what she said, she wanted money, money, money. Unfortunately for me, her “enthusiasms” often rubbed off on my husband, Kenner, and it was all I could do to keep them both under control.

  I was—in addition to being hardworking, frugal, a little high-strung, and extremely wary of Stella—flush with cash. When I tell them why, most people are surprised I got such a nice settlement from my lawsuit. The short version is this: about a year and a half ago, I was going about my business as a dutiful letter carrier in a pretty crummy neighborhood when a pit bull attacked me. The thing had been after me for days. I’d warned the owners in one of our special dog-warning letters slipped into their box. It threatened “the cessation of U.S. postal delivery” if they did not take care to “confine” their dog. But I, being how I am—did I forget to mention “pushover” as one of my traits?—gave them one last chance. It was Christmas time, after all. And I had a nice package to deliver for them.

  Part of my right foot is now missing. I still walk with a limp and rely on a cane. When the weather gets cold, I’m often in serious pain. Need I say more? But Stella—though she expressed sympathy and concern, brought me magazines and doughnuts, loaned me her VCR and a bunch of stupid movies—has been burning to get her hands on my money ever since. She’s a money grubber with grubby little paws, she is! She’s a conniving little animal herself (a squirrel? perhaps a rat?), which is what makes her predilection for animal enterprises—in this case, frog legs—so funny. Or should I say ironic?

  Despite my refusal, she kept at me for weeks. “We’ll have Kenner farm the frogs, then you and I’ll serve them up at the restaurant.” We were hanging out in my driveway on a humid night in early July. I leaned against her truck, and she sat in my small, scrappy yard.

  “What restaurant?” I asked. I had to wear a special shoe on my right foot that made me look like a disabled toddler. It was white with Velcro straps that got grass-stained and crusty all summer long.

  “The one we’re gonna open!” she said. She ripped clumps of my lawn out by the fistful, then threw them over her shoulder. “God, Faye, how many times do I have to go over this with you?”

  Sometimes she could actually manage to make me think I’d forgotten something important. She tried to claim I’d become forgetful after the pit bull incident, but the fact was we had never discussed opening any restaurant, and I told her that.

  “Bingo!” she said, and pointed at me like I’d s
aid exactly the right thing. Her hair was cut short and boxy just like my husband, Kenner’s, and she looked like a man in a white button-up and jeans.

  “Bingo what?”

  “Bingo to the restaurant we’re going to open.” She took a swig of her beer after toasting me, although I had no drink in hand. “We’ll call it Chez Menagerie, get it? Because we’ll serve all kinds of exotic animals. Frog legs’ll be just the beginning.”

  I snorted. “Yeah, right.”

  “We’ll serve ostrich, of course,” she said. “Buffalo burgers. Octopus. Stuff like that.” She hoisted herself up on all fours to get to a standing position.

  “Stella, I am not giving you one cent of my money,” I said. A mosquito drilled into my leg and I smashed it, felt blood sticky against my skin. “You know I’m saving it for—”

  “For what?” she interrupted, rude, loud, and smug. She stretched her hands above her head and looked bored.

  “For Kenner’s and my retirement,” I said. “I’ve told you a million times! We’re going out with a bang! Cruises, winters in Florida, Winnebago.” I tried to get her to look me in the eye to see that I was serious, but she was twisting around, trying to crack her back. “Anyway, I think I’ve earned it.” Kenner and I had no kids. We both worked for the United States Postal Service, though I had been assigned to “light duty” after the accident. I now spent most of my days looking up addresses for expired forwards and answering the phone for zip code requests. I missed my route, though, and especially the people. One little old lady had me change her light bulbs and fetch food from her freezer in the basement. A blind man who lived in a collapsing pink house asked me how to run his VCR. You ran into all kinds of odd requests as a letter carrier, and I missed the surprises. I also missed driving my little white truck all over town and waving to everyone.

  Stella hung her thumbs in her belt loops like a guy. Her face was dark purple from the stretching. I could see her eyes squinch up in a way that scared me. Then she laid into me. “You think just because a pit bull attacked you, you’re better than everyone else!” She was so worked up she was out of breath.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s exactly what I think.” I gripped the bed of the pickup instead of her neck.

  “That is what you think,” Stella said. “People who have accidents are always acting like victims.” She hobbled around the truck with an imaginary cane. “‘Oh, poor me! My poor leg! I have it so rough! Waaa!’”

  When Stella got like this, I had to make a fast exit or things could get ugly. We’d been known to fistfight or wrestle when we were younger, if driven to it. I was almost driven to it now. Bigger than me, Stella usually won and would sit on top of me, her big butt bouncing up and down on my stomach, making me want to puke.

  Just then Kenner drove up on his motorcycle. He’d removed the mufflers, and the noise his bike made ripped down the street like machine-gun fire. Dogs tested their chains. Neighbors came running out their front doors, pissed off. Someone yelled, “Not in this neighborhood!” though we were not exactly a high-end block of real estate. He parked it at a jaunty angle right beside us. The engine ticked as it cooled. Its chrome shined bright in the dying day-end light.

  “How we doing, ladies?” Kenner got off the bike and popped the helmet off his head like an astronaut. He held it cupped against his side as if he were toting a toddler. “Babe,” he said, and kissed me. I saw him raise his eyebrows at Stella in a way that made me feel left out.

  “Did you tell her?” he asked. He put the helmet down and crouched on his haunches. I could see his crack and the striped band of his underwear. “Ribbit, ribbit.” He stuck his tongue out but looked like a snake, not a frog. I kicked him in the butt with my gimp foot, which probably hurt me more than him.

  “You guys are crazy,” I said. “Nobody’s gonna eat frog legs in this town.” I wanted to get inside. I was hungry, thirsty, and cranky. It was a good TV night, and I longed to stretch out in front of its glow. “Are you guys under the illusion that this is Paris or something?” I headed for the back door, which, for me, took considerable effort. “I’m sorry, but the last time I ate out in Rathburg, I was seeing a lot of burgers and fries. Am I right or am I right?”

  “You’re wrong,” they both said in unison.

  “Jinx!” Kenner said, and clipped her on the arm. Then they giggled, or at least Stella did in her high-pitched, teeth-grinding way. I went inside, stewing. They could both be so stupid, I thought. Frog legs and buffalo burgers and octopus, in our little town? As if.

  In bed that night, Kenner revealed to me that he’d already spent $6,000 of my $50,000 settlement: $5,000 to Stella, to help with a down payment on Chez Menagerie (formerly the old VFW club next to the bowling alley); and $1,000 to Bud “Jupiter” McCombs from Willacoochee, Georgia, the cost of his “Frog Legs: An Informational Video & Starter Kit for the Adventurous Entrepreneur.” You’d think the check to Stella would have burned me worse than the frog leg kit, but it was oddly the latter that got my goat. The fact that Kenner had blown a thousand dollars of my money on something so incredibly stupid was more than I could bear. I had my limits. The money, after all, was mine, and since I was the one who’d suffered the injury, I wasn’t about to let him squander my stash on another one of Stella’s half-assed, get-rich-quick schemes that always, and I mean always, ended badly. How many examples I could pull out of a hat in case he’d forgotten! Tie-dyed T-shirts to sell at our town’s Noodle Days celebration had put her in the red. Buffalo Bill aprons, hats, teddy bears, potholders, and bibs had never quite found their market (I still had a couple of stained potholders in the kitchen). Probably her biggest flub was trying to sell deveined filet mignons (from Omaha!) door to door. Her freezer (and mine) had overflowed with them faster than she could move them, and they’d rotted, stinky and brown, on her back porch: another couple grand, which she didn’t even have, down the toilet.

  “Kenner,” I said. We usually slept naked, but tonight I punished him by wearing my stiff cotton pajamas with pigs on them. “I thought you’d be smarter than this! You should know by now that Stella’s got about as much business sense as a plate of mashed potatoes.” I scrunched up the covers, punched back my pillows. Our two cats, Harley and Davis, got scared by my sudden movements and leapt off the bed in tandem, like synchronized swimmers.

  “This time I think she might be onto something,” he said. He was propped up on one elbow, and I could see the puff of his dark armpit hair. I could also smell the raw onions from dinner on his breath. “Is it so wrong to want to reach for your dreams? If you don’t take a chance, you’ll never know what might have been.”

  Was he reciting from an inspirational greeting card? It sounded like it. “Why do I feel as if I have absolutely no say in this when it’s my money that’s at stake here?” I watched Kenner reach for a cigarette, steady it between his lips, and light it. I hated when he smoked in bed.

  “It’s about trust,” he said through a scrim of smoke. He folded one arm behind his head, gesticulated with the other. “I mean, I can understand your lack of trust after the pit bull thing, but this is me here!” he said. He thumped on his chest with his thumb. “And your sister. I mean, come on. We’re all kin.”

  “Nobody says ‘kin’ anymore,” I said. “Plus, you’re not kin.”

  “You know what I mean,” he said. “Don’t overanalyze.” He tapped my hand. “Just think of it as an investment. We could double, triple, even quadruple our money, then retire early once the thing takes off. Think about it!”

  I turned out the light, though he was still smoking. “I hereby banish you from the checkbook,” I said. “You don’t touch it until I say so.” I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. I turned away from him and watched headlights arc across the wall, the ceiling, and the comforter, then hit me in the eyes.

  Finally, he settled in behind me, gathering himself against my butt, cupping his knees behind mine. “Tomorrow night me and Stella are going to the Bergen Swamp to scope out some bullfr
ogs,” he whispered. His voice was smoky and soft. “You should come.” He grabbed me around the waist, let his hand rest on my curved flank. “Come,” he said. “It’ll be fun.”

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  The next night, the three of us headed out after dark, a friend’s borrowed boat roped to the top of Stella’s car. As we turned off onto Old Orchard Road, families of bats swooped away from our headlights. Fallen branches snapped under our tires. I didn’t get out when we parked but sat listening to Kenner and Stella grunting and huffing as they untied the boat from the roof. Kenner was educating Stella about amphibian reproduction. In July, Kenner claimed, the frogs were screwing like crazy and making tadpoles left and right. “They’ll be lazy and sluggish and tired after all that sex,” Kenner claimed. “Should be easy targets.”

  “And since when are you such an expert on frog behavior?” I said from inside the car.

  “Three words.” He leaned into my window. “Bud ‘Jupiter’ McCombs. Best money I ever spent.”

  I did get out of the car after that, ready to strangle him, but I couldn’t see my own hand in front of me and got scared. Plus, I hadn’t brought my cane and didn’t feel entirely steady on my feet. “What goes around, comes around,” I said, unsure of what I meant.

  “Exactly,” Kenner said.

  “Touché,” Stella said. As a sister, she could be such a traitor.

  Stella carried two spears, a filet knife, a bunch of plastic bags, and a bottle of red wine. I carried two yellow flashlights, big as bricks and just as heavy. Kenner, somehow, bumped the boat along behind us.

  We put in at the soupy eastern end of the swamp; the spongy ground pooled up around my ankles. I was sure snakes were weaving their way between my legs; in fact, I cried out when I felt a slick wetness against my calf, but it was only a string of algae slime. Kenner took control of the flashlights while he let us “ladies” get situated in the rickety boat. I kept feeling invisible things brushing against my face and hair, but when I swatted, I grabbed only air.