by Lamar Herrin
I’m not taking offense, Walter.
Good, because I truly dislike the toad, I detest the toad, and Ellie, if we could ever trace her back to little Ellie …
Walter trailed off, expecting me to pick it up. For a moment I held off. Little Ellie before the toad and her fate had found her. Ellie when anybody other than the toad had wandered down her life’s path. Relieve her of the toad. Give her a fresh start. Perhaps that was the tack we could take as we drove back home, which would have been the sensible thing to do. There wasn’t much more we could get out of this lake. Nothing moved on it now. The air remained settled, heavy, thickening in its warmth, air right out of a humid summer’s day of my boyhood, which I had left behind the day Phil Hodge and I, as a couple of sixties casualties in our mid-twenties, had turned the car back around, bid the kudzu and a state patrolman out to do the big man’s bidding goodbye, and headed north. Walter and I should get into his car, turn the air-conditioning on, and go back home. Later I’d retell it all to Elaine, reach this point, and with a touch of gallantry that she was used to and might still credit, admit I hadn’t been able to wait any longer to get back to her, and here I was.
But it wasn’t going to be that way, and it wasn’t because I was being pulled along in the toad’s wake. The day came, Walter, when the tide turned, the waters receded, however you want to think about it, and they were confronted with bare sand, strewn with the flotsam and jetsam of all the passing boats. They weren’t broke, but they were close to being grounded. The land they bought down there on the coast they had to sell back, at a loss. They sold the horses, held on to the house, and closed it up. If you remember how Howie, how little Howie expanded the business, going offshore, going international, winning converts every step of the way, well, now the film was running in reverse. They came back to the Whalens’ hometown, sold the property on that nearby lake with the twelve-hundred-mile shoreline, and retreated to the original Whalen house. Ellie’s daughters, Jennifer and Tracy, stayed mostly with their father, who had remarried and moved to a town just far enough away that rumors of the excesses and outrages their mother and stepfather were committing didn’t reach them on a daily basis. Jennifer had her money, the inheritance Rosalyn had left her, safely socked away, but little Tracy—
I can imagine, Walter said.
Probably not. Or at least not how Ellie consented to it, urged her younger daughter to place her trust and money in Leland’s hands, he was such a good, wise man. For proof Tracy had only to look at the camp for deprived children Leland still ran. The camp’s mission was to rescue deprived children, not to exploit yet-to-be-deprived ones.
A convenient front they set up for themselves, Walter muttered scornfully.
I’m not sure it was entirely a front.
And they kept that camp going?
Through the Howard Whalen Youth Crusade foundation and on the strength of that statue out front, they did. The camp was one of the last things to go under. Eventually Leland raided his own foundation and ruined it too, but the statue …
Overgrown, hung with vines, kudzu … Walter allowed it to materialize before his eyes.
No kudzu up in the mountains, Walter.
Shame. I had an image of the toad being strangled by the stuff.
I took a long settling breath while Walter entertained his image. Then I took another. It was northern air I was hoping to breathe down, not this utterly improbable, sultry southern stuff. It did occur to me that that might be air that only I was breathing, that like so much else, air was in the nose and lungs of the beholder. My friend Walter would be happy to tell me, No, Jim, this is Adirondack air up here, pure, utterly unladen air, take a deep breath and come up clean.
Instead I said, The image of the toad you want to summon up, Walter, is of a man riding around the town where his wife’s father made his fortune not in one of his Al Capone cars, and not even a Cadillac, but in a Humvee.
You mean a Hummer, Jim?
No, I mean a real military Humvee, built low and wide and jacked up on those oversize wheels, the thing itself, minus the machine gun mounts. Color of the Arabian sands.
Spanish moss blowing in a Humvee’s exhaust?
Spanish moss farther south. I thought we settled that.
Don’t be touchy. I need to visualize the thing.
Big Howie drove down the street in his black Cadillacs and they tipped their hats. Leland Oldham drove down the street and they ran off and hid.
Drunk?
To one degree or another, always, Walter.
Am I supposed to imagine him driving that thing through the black neighborhood too?
I think you can imagine him driving it everywhere. Dressed in fatigues?
’S up to you. Everybody’ll have his own image of the toad in mind. Click on the one you want to keep.
Now that he’s gone.
Now that he’s gone.
Even though he may come back.
Unlikely.
Now that nothing’s left.
There was always something left, and something left to defend. However late, there were duties left to perform. No statute of limitations expired on them, I was about to add when I heard, as though on the mind’s ear, a long dirgelike chord, struck perhaps from Byron Wainwright’s cello, which took a moment to fade, the air being so heavy and so still.
Good, Walter, I said. Keep going.
Less than nothing? All the Whalen money gone. His wife a piggy bank he shook every coin out of and then cracked open for good measure. His kids got theirs and took off. His family did. The cash cow ran dry. His mother and her Sarge were left in a sort of game-show daze. Why hadn’t they taken the sure money and stopped there? Everything her son and his rich girl bought they had to sell at a loss—a film running in reverse. But the theater was empty by now, the empty bottles rolling down the aisle …
Have your fun. I asked for it.
You did give me that pass, Jim.
And I’ll give you another one. But just let me know when you want me to tell you what happened.
I’m ready, he said. But hang on, and he suddenly pulled himself up. Be right back.
It occurred to me that, early in the day as it was, he might be going inside to bring out the bottle and the Beam boys. Instead Walter returned with a pitcher of ice water and two glasses. He said, This heat! Where in hell did this heat come from?
So you feel it too?
He shot me an incredulous glance. If we couldn’t agree on the air we sat in, how were we supposed to agree on anything else?
He poured us two glasses of ice water and we each drank a half. For an instant the ice water—not unlike the Jim Beam—went to my head. I waited for it to clear, aware that until it did I couldn’t be held entirely accountable for what I said. My friend was an attorney, an attorney for the defense, in matters of confidentiality, yes, as sworn to secrecy as a priest. But an officer of the court, nonetheless.
I waited until I was clearheaded and then put it on the record. They moved back into the Whalen house, I said. For maybe two months they did nothing. Perhaps longer. Except drink their increasingly modest fortune down. Leland rode through town in his Humvee, it seemed with one idea in mind: to make himself as unbeloved as he could. A string of investments he’d made—and no one was clear on this, not even Harriet—went belly up. The investment that counted, though, never failed him. He invested in his wife. In her drunkenness. He invested in the booze that kept her that way, and he kept control of her life, her fortune, the foundation that had brought him into her life. Summer by summer they kept the camp for disadvantaged kids going, and they kept their version of the family reunions going up at the lake. Occasionally Leland went over and acted like a camp master. It was something he could still do. He knew nothing about nature, plants, animals, birds, and butterflies, the great out-of-doors, only that it was out there and somehow beat a disadvantaged life on the streets, and if he could put a group of kids who’d been shortchanged in contact with it long enough, something
good might come of it. Some alternative to the way they’d been might begin to take root. At a certain stage of his drunkenness he felt such a stirring himself. Unless he was imagining it. He’d look at that statue of the founder and his little girl he’d had erected at the entrance to his camp, a man in fishing garb with a fishing rod in his hand, and a little girl who bore a resemblance to his wife, and make the argument to himself that children should take the example of that hugely successful outdoorsman to heart. Grow up to be like him, and never forget to keep a sheltering arm around a little boy, or in his case a little girl. He’d smile and tell himself that that statue represented the best investment of his wife’s money he’d ever made.
But he was living on islands, and since he never got in the water, no one was sure he could even swim. One island was up in the mountains, another was down on the coast where they’d restored the Whalen home there, the third was the Whalen home back in the pines and dogwood trees in the town the Whalens had put on the map, and there may have been a few islets scattered here and there, Harriet wasn’t sure about that, there had been such lavish spending back at the start. But the tide of their debts was rising fast, and those were the only land masses Leland and his wife had left. They managed to sell the house on the coast, at a significant loss. They retreated to the lake to lick their wounds. Another reunion took place, and the fruitfully multiplying Oldhams showed up and ran amok. Harriet was there to keep an eye on Ellie, and during that time our Oldham, the toad, sought Harriet out. He had a plan. He wanted to pay another tribute to his wife. The toad, when he had to, could muster a humble sort of gallantry that might fool most people, if not Harriet. He wanted to open a business back in the Whalen hometown, not manufacturing and selling head-to-toe apparel wholesale, those days were past, those days belonged to Big Howie and his apparently born-to-it son, but an apparel business nonetheless, and since what most people looked at first to tell one article of clothing from another was the label, Leland’s company would dedicate itself to designing and then stitching in the most appealing labels money could buy. In the higher-priced range they could do a sort of embroidering. They could make labels and monograms that would outclass the clothing itself. There’d be an art in this, and there’d be a moment when Ellie would come to see it as the crowning touch to the empire her father had built. What did Harriet think? Did she think enough of the idea to come work for them to see it get off the ground?
Walter stopped me. He raised his hand and took a breath deep enough for both of us. The air, if anything, had become more oppressively heavy and hot. Why, he said, wouldn’t the Chinese or the Bangladeshis or the Sri Lankans or wherever the clothing was then being made have thought of the same thing? The label a work of art, the clothing itself a piece of shit. Did the toad research this?
How do you research a brainstorm, a bolt from the blue, Walter? Exercise outfits, all that high-end sportswear. You could even stitch “Made in the USA” on it and it wouldn’t be an outright lie since the label itself would be homegrown. This was something Ellie’s father—
—your uncle—
—by marriage, never paid much attention to. Who bothered to design a high-end label back then? That I know of, Little Howie didn’t do it. I’ve still got that suit he made for me, and I can’t remember what the label looked like. It’s an old idea, Walter, but embroider it, in stylish gold thread, in some Old World font you could get off the Internet—
Not too stylish, not too Old World. Not if we’re talking about a sweatshirt.
The point is, he was going to do it, the toad was. Harriet never believed in it for a minute, but in the beginning she allowed herself to be roped in. To get it going, though, Leland made a colossal nuisance of himself with the Town Board and the Planning Committee to get them to give in—I’m not sure why. Probably because he wanted to locate it on land too close in, not zoned for business, or because he wanted it done yesterday and would run over them in his Humvee unless they hopped to it. What I do know is that he sank every cent of little Tracy’s money into it, and it wasn’t until Tracy came of age and asked for her inheritance that Ellie found out what her husband had done with it. Leland blamed a couple of thieving salesmen for embezzling them and their labeling business into ruin. Harriet said there might have been something to that, one man’s thievery inspiring more of the same, but the story she told was of Ellie sending out word to cousins, no matter how remote, to come by the showroom so that she could pile the most artfully labeled sweatshirts into their arms. These were all factory rejects—I’m not sure why. I wasn’t there. Badly labeled, mislabeled, labels whose thread was unraveling by the time they reached the showroom floor. When Rosalyn piled shirts and pants into our arms, if we’d told her the labels were coming apart, they weren’t worth the thread they were stitched with, she would have kept laughing and piling it on. Ellie took it hard. Perhaps she’d wanted to be her mother then. Perhaps she’d wanted it so that, regardless of what her husband said, she could give it all away. She drank herself into a stupor every night. Leland, angry with the world and with all the ungrateful dollars that had eluded his grasp, did put his wife to bed before he passed out himself. That was the one investment he’d managed to protect, all that scotch paid off and his wife’s day came drunkenly to an end.
My sister, Jean, saw her once during this time and said the cheerful front Ellie tried to keep up seemed ghoulish, she was like a member of the walking dead gossiping on about the most embarrassing trivia. How could she talk about her daughters, about Leland and his children and grandchildren, as if they were a normal family with all their endearing little ups and downs? The instant she stopped talking, she’d have to look around and admit she was absolutely alone. So Jean and Harriet and Beatrice had to let her talk, and they’d get phone calls at almost any hour of the day or night. While the Titanic was sinking, Ellie chattered on. Or she’d call one of them while driving through town and neighboring towns with her speaker phone on, and tell you everything she saw beside the road, and everything that everything she saw reminded her of, until, inevitably, something would remind her of something close, something dear, she’d go into a nosedive and begin to cry. It seemed as though the road gave her the illusion she could drive out from under herself, she could give it an extra burst of speed and roar through whatever hick town and leave her sadness behind her, until she couldn’t anymore. She got pulled over in a neighboring town. Not for the first time, but this time she happened to have Harriet on the speaker phone and Harriet heard it all. The cops knew Ellie in that town. They might not have recognized her in the flesh, what little flesh she had left on her bones, but they knew of her, probably knew who she had the deep misfortune to be married to, and the cop who stopped her had his partner drive her the ten or twelve miles back home while he followed in their patrol car. They gave her a serious but still subservient talking-to, and Harriet, who might have intervened and pleaded for her cousin, heard it all and didn’t have to say a word. Ellie got let off. Later Harriet tried to talk some sense into her, but by then the evening’s scotch had had its way with her and her speech was so slurred she might have been speaking under water. It didn’t make any difference. It was a tale of woe Ellie told, a monologue interrupted by a few self-applauding and sentimental observations. Harriet didn’t believe Ellie realized how fast the money was running out. Leland might disgrace himself, but the following day his reputation for being an inspired investor was restored. That didn’t keep the investments from failing, or businesses from going under, or creditors from hammering at their door. Ellie was not at home.
As I said, they sold the house they’d remodeled on the coast plus a few other properties they owned. They were down to the Whalen home and the houses on the lake. And the camp, which Jean insisted, getting it through Harriet, continued to thrive, not so much as a moneymaking concern as a bulwark of respectability. But even as Harriet was making that claim, Leland had begun to raid the foundation’s coffers, which was the same as stealing money directly out o
f Big Howie’s pocket, just as Leland in assuming Big Howie’s place had stolen his daughter. And Jean, for one, put the pieces together that Harriet had left jumbled, that we as children might have left jumbled on the puzzle table up there in the mountains, when an afternoon rain ended and the sun came back out and all of us, all the cousins, in impressive numbers long before Ellie was born, were allowed to go running back into the water.
Walter held up his hand, not as though he had a question to ask but a contribution to make. You’re back where you began as children, he said, and somehow that camp for orphaned children, for disadvantaged children, is like a stockade you can all retreat behind when things in the outside world get too tough.
Really? I said.
What’s it doing up there anyway? As coincidences go—
I’ve never seen it. I’ve never set foot inside it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all hearsay. I’ve been told that Little Howie’s original cabin up there is now the camp headquarters, but I’ve never even been in it. The closest I got—
I know the closest you got. Your cousin’s wife lifted her head off the pillow and with her hair falling across her cheek wished you good luck fishing and you went out and caught a lunker in her honor, the last time you had Howie around to show you how it was done.
Walter!
I’ve been listening, Jim. It hasn’t just been the Beam brothers. It’s been the Pritchard girls feeding into the Whalen saga and leading you by the hand. It’s been paradise, as you said yourself, and paradise lost. And here we are with the toad squatting where a Whalen once stood and the last child of the last of the Pritchard girls wasting away on the bone. And a camp for deprived—or was it disillusioned?—children standing close by. Just how much disbelief am I supposed to suspend?
I had no answer for him, but the heat was suddenly all over us. All over me but all over Walter, too, for we both reached for the pitcher of ice water at the same time. I poured, Walter’s glass first, and a little slopped over the rim. But it was my throat that was parched. I was about to propose to Walter we suspend this story while I regrouped when he asked the single question I couldn’t answer, not yet, and couldn’t avoid.
