The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  He got up and put on his overalls and started breakfast. When Robin came back, he said, “Maybe things is gonna get better. You didn’t wet the bed last night.” She had to go see for herself, but came back from the bedroom with a big pout on her face.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “The Tooth Fairy didn’t come,” she said, biting her lip as if once again she was just on the verge of having a good cry. “I left one of my teeth under my pillow last night.”

  “The pillow on your pallet?” he said. “Well heck, no wonder. That wasn’t your pillow last night. I was your pillow last night. What does this here Fairy generally leave you?”

  “Fifty cents.”

  “Well, if I was your pillow the Fairy must’ve left it under me.” And he went to the davenport and pretended to fish around with one hand while with the other hand he found two quarters in his pocket. “Sure enough, what did I tell ye? That old Tooth Fairy thought I was your pillow, which as a matter of fact I was.” And he gave her the two quarters. “I can’t imagine what you could spend those on, though.”

  “I’d put them in my piggy bank,” she said. “At home I have a razorback piggy bank, and I probably have a whole lot of money in it. Maybe ten dollars.”

  “You wouldn’t need a piggy bank around here,” he said. “One of these days I’ll tell you where there’s all the money you could ever dream of.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I’ve got it stashed away in a good place. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

  “You’re kidding. Where’d you get it? Did you rob a bank?”

  He wondered if he ought to tell her. There was never going to be any chance for her to tell on him. He wanted her to know that as far as money was concerned he was her sugar daddy, even though there would never be any need whatsoever for money. So he went ahead and told her the whole story about the drug runner he’d stopped on the highway who had taken a few shots at him and been killed in return. He wasn’t bragging but he hoped it would increase the respect she had for him. He’d never told the story to anyone and it was good to be able to tell it to somebody.

  When he was finished, all she said was, “If you spent so much money buying all that stuff you’ve got in there, why didn’t you get some scissors and some paper and some crayons?”

  “Crayons?” he said. “Well now, I do believe we’ve got some of them.” And he went into the storeroom and fished around in the bags and sure enough there was a big yellow box of Crayolas. A real big box, with maybe over a hundred Crayolas in it, of every color you could imagine. She was real tickled to have it, but made that pout again and said, “If only I had some scissors.”

  “Tell you what,” he said. “You help me out around the house this morning, and this afternoon I’ll take my pocketknife and get it real sharp and see if I can’t cut out for you anything you want to trace on a piece of brown paper.”

  So they had them a deal. Since the rain had left it too wet to work in the garden, and it looked like it was a-coming up another rain anyhow, he put her to work sweeping the house and washing windows, although she had trouble reaching some of the cobwebs. “I’ve never seen a cob,” she said. “What do they look like?” While she worked in the house, he went out to the cooper’s shed and started to saw some pickets for building a picket fence to surround the garden, to keep the chickens out of it. And maybe the rabbits and any other critters that Bitch wasn’t smart enough to shoo away. He ought to have thought to bring along a good big roll of chicken-wire to make a garden fence, but that was one more thing he hadn’t even thought about, and besides he was going to have to learn how to make do. A picket fence, even if he didn’t have any paint to paint it nicely white, was a lot more sightly than chicken wire anyhow.

  There was old tools in the cooper’s shed that he wanted to learn how to use to shape the pickets for that fence—adzes and froes and augers—but every time he went into that workshop he felt a kind of strange feeling like as if there was somebody else there, although there sure wasn’t. Once, in there, he had without even thinking about it said “Hello?” as if he expected somebody to answer.

  He couldn’t do it. Not because of whatever or whoever was haunting the place, but because the effort of sawing just wore him completely out. He didn’t have the strength to take a spit. It was all he could manage just to drag hisself back to the house and plop down on the davenport, where he could only laze around and watch busy Robin redding up the house. For such a little thing she did a fair job, and then she even got some lunch for both of them, and after lunch, true to his word, he took his pocketknife and used one of the whetstones from the shop to get the point real sharp so he could cut into pieces of paper on which she traced the outlines of teeny-tiny clothes: dresses and hats and pants and coats and what-all. It wasn’t easy, and he felt dizzy with fatigue. It sure would have been a lot easier with a pair of scissors, but he rolled his tongue out and bore down and managed to cut up enough clothes for one paper doll.

  “I wish you had something stiff,” she said, and his eyebrows lifted in search of her meaning. What she meant was that she needed pasteboard or something to make the actual paper doll with. He suggested they could empty a cardboard box in the storeroom and use the cardboard but she said cardboard was too thick. “I have an idea,” she said, and went out to the privy and came back with the almost-used-up roll of toilet paper. She unwrapped what little was left on it, and took the cylindrical tube or core and picked at it until she found the seam that kept it in its shape, and she unrolled it and flattened it out and showed him how it made a kind of diamond shape of thin pasteboard! Then she took her pencil and drew a paper doll within that diamond shape, head at one point, feet at the other, hands at the others. “Now, can you cut this out?” she asked, and he took his knife and bore down and managed to cut into the outlines of her drawing and liberate the paper doll from the toilet paper tube. How about that? Wasn’t she some kind of genius? And then she took the pencil and the Crayolas and gave the doll features and skin color and a pair of panties. “This is me,” she said. And she dressed it with some of the clothes that had already been cut out of a paper sack.

  “Are you a-fixing to make me too?” he asked.

  “You’re too big to be made out of a toilet paper tube,” she pointed out. “But I have another idea,” she said, and she went and got the board game called Dealer’s Choice and said, “I don’t like this game,” and she showed him how the bottom of the box was just the right size and shape and thickness for making the paper doll of him. He kind of liked Dealer’s Choice himself but if she didn’t he could learn to live without it. So he let her use the box the game had come in. She traced the outlines of a paper doll three times the size of the one she’d done of herself on the toilet paper tube.

  “I reckon you’re right that we sure could use a pair of real scissors,” he remarked.

  They were interrupted by some loud barking right outside the door, and Sog managed to get up and fetch his rifle, and decided to get his revolver too while he was at it. He told Robin to get behind the davenport and stay down. He looked out the window but didn’t see nobody. So he slowly opened the door, and there was old Bitch looking up at him with one of her grins on her face. And she barked again, at him, that silly kind of bark that sounded like “roffa”.

  “What is it, Bitch?” he asked her, but she just said that roffa again. And then he noticed. At her feet, on the porch floor, was a pair of scissors! “Lord God Almighty!” he exclaimed. “Who brought them?” His first thought was that somebody had sneaked up onto the porch and left them there.

  As if to demonstrate that she herself had put them there, Bitch gripped the scissors in her teeth, picking them up. She trotted past Sog into the house, and presented the scissors to Robin. Roffa, the dog said to Robin.

  “Don’t that just beat all,” Sog exclaimed. “Didn’t I tell ye she was the smartest dog on earth? But where did she find a pair of scissors? Bitchie babe, where’d you get them
scissors?”

  Robin was just overjoyed with the gift, and even gave the dog a hug. Imagine that. Here she’d been bent on killing the dog and now she was hugging it.

  Well, the scissors needed some work. They was somewhat rusty, but Sog summoned the energy to scrape and clean and file them good as new, and he oiled them, and then Robin was really in business. She went right to work, cutting paper dolls and paper doll clothes all over the place and you never saw anybody happier.

  A good thing she had all that paper doll stuff to keep her busy, because it commenced raining again, raining pitchforks with tines on both ends, and there were howling winds. Sog had meant to get up on the roof while it wasn’t raining and try to patch that one leak, and now he couldn’t do it because it was raining too hard and also because he just didn’t feel like doing anything.

  For days and days it rained off and on, more on than off, and sometimes so mighty on that he feared the whole place would wash away. Robin was happy with her paper dolls but he had nothing much to do except watch her and drink his Jack D and smoke too much and sometimes get up from the davenport and show Robin how to fix some supper. He tried to show her how to bake bread but it turned out wrong and they could only throw the bread to Bitch, who sort of liked it. Sometimes Robin went out in the rain with a slicker on (the Wal-Mart lady had recommended a yellow slicker) to do her chores: bringing in firewood and water and gathering eggs, either in the henhouse or sometimes just out in the grass somewheres. Sog taught her how to fix reasonable scrambled eggs for breakfast, although once she burned herself on the stove and he had to get out the first aid kit and put some ointment and a bandage on it.

  When she was just giving all her attention to her paper dolls and not paying him any mind where he sat drinking and smoking on the davenport, sometimes he’d take out his sorry prick and fool around with it and study it and try to get it to solidify just a little bit. But he might as well have been playing with a dead man’s cock, and the thought of that—touching another man’s cock, even if the man was dead—gave him a bad case of fantods.

  In time he realized that probably he would have to see a dick doctor, one of those specialists who could give you something for it or do something that would correct the plumbing. But that was out of the question, of course. The very thought of it set him to brooding about what would happen if either one of them, him or her, was ever to really need a doctor for something. Or even a dentist. In time she lost a couple more of her teeth, and he dutifully played the Tooth Fairy, but what if she ever got cavities and needed some drilling? He felt selfish and mean for wanting a dick doctor when she might need something even worse.

  Hell, if any kind of doctor was needed it wasn’t a peter specialist anyhow but just a plain old ordinary sawbones who could look him over and find out what was generally bothering him, that he didn’t have no strength to speak of lately, and had dizzy spells besides and just generally felt like shit. He couldn’t even walk right any more; his left leg had started dragging behind him. He never in his life had such problems before. He’d never taken a single day of sick leave the whole twenty years he’d been with the state police. He’d always prided himself on being fit and hearty and he was contemptuous of people who allowed some silly little illness to hold them back.

  Now he didn’t know what could be causing him all this distress. His feet were numb, he had a backache troubling him, and sometimes he couldn’t tell whether his arm was up or down and even when he looked to see if his arm was up or down he couldn’t make it out clearly because there would be two of them, one up and the other down, and both of them the same arm, the left one.

  Even Robin noticed his discomfort, and asked him, “Are you feeling okay?”

  He hated to admit it. “It don’t appear that I am,” he said. “But how come you to ask?”

  “Your hands are shaking a lot,” she said.

  It sure was a good thing that such a smart and brave little girl had the ability to take over the running of the household, which was the only hold that needed running, what with the constant rain.

  The garden was begging something terrible for its weeds to be pulled but he couldn’t send her out to do it even if he could explain to her all the ways of knowing the difference between a useless weed and a useful plant.

  After that night of the terrible storm when she’d come to sleep against him on the davenport, she decided that she liked that arrangement, or maybe since she couldn’t have that old Paddington bear to sleep with that she’d claimed she could never sleep without, she decided to sleep with him. But the davenport was too small for both of them, and they couldn’t really stretch out proper, so one night after she’d fallen asleep he took her to the featherbed, and lay down beside her, and that’s the arrangement they had for sleeping from then on, although he wasn’t good for nothing but sleeping.

  He lost track of time. He’d decided from the beginning not to own a calendar, but even if he had one he’d have no inclination to get up and go take a look at it. And if he hadn’t thrown away his timepiece he wouldn’t bother to glance at it. He had a notion, but just a notion, of when May turned to June and June turned to July, et cetera. There were even some mornings when he felt like getting up, at least long enough to do something useful like go out and chop the head off a chicken. Not being able to work in the garden and not being able to put a fence around it had one advantage: the critters of the woods came out to nibble the garden stuff, and he could get up and fetch his firearms and show Robin how to use them, even the shotgun, which knocked her down the first few times she pulled the trigger. But in the course of time she managed to shoot a couple of rabbits who was pestering the garden, and he had just enough strength left to show her how to skin the critters and put ’em in a stew pot and cook ’em. Robin didn’t like beef jerky and she didn’t care for Vienna sausages or a lot of the other stuff they had in cans or jars, and she didn’t much like the idea of eating bunny rabbits, but it was that or starve. Robin was skinny and he wished she’d eat more but she just didn’t have an awful lot of appetite, or maybe it was just too much trouble for her to do all the fixing of all the meals.

  He felt totally worthless and having lost his manfulness didn’t help, at all. Things got so bad that Sog Alan began to wonder if it was God’s punishment on him. Under ordinary circumstances he would never have given a thought to such a thing.

  Chapter seventeen

  Even the dumbest of dogs possesses the basic talent for minding, which, Yowrfrowr had once explained to her, most decidedly does not mean the ability to obey, but rather the faculty of knowing what is in one’s master’s mind. Not exactly mind-reading, Yowrfrowr had said, nor so-called telepathy, no, nothing so magical as that, but purely a sense of being in tune with the workings of the master’s thoughts, which is necessary, after all, as a substitute for verbal communication. So. Hreapha’s minding of her master quickly alerted her to the fact that he was sick as a dog, so to speak.

  Searching for a reason for feeling like hell, you start with something you ate. And Hreapha didn’t have to look far to find that: he had killed and eaten that nice hen who had kept Hreapha from starvation by providing an egg, and who Hreapha had spared from the clutches of the hawk. For several days after that event, Hreapha had felt morose and angry. And out of sympathy for that hen she had lost her appetite so completely that she wondered if maybe she herself was coming down with something as a result of having eaten the hawk. But she got over that. It remained to be seen whether he would ever get over having eaten the nice chicken. She sort of hoped not. He deserved punishment for numerous wrongdoings, including, Hreapha was beginning to believe, the taking and keeping of a very young female person against her will. Hreapha was convinced that the person, whose name was Robin, had not been a stray at all, nor even a willing companion to the man, but had been stolen! Theft should always be punished, and possibly the man’s grave illness was what he had coming for snatching the girl.

  Despite the general mood of gloom
and doom that had befallen the place along with the impossible rainfall, Hreapha was at least cheered by the fact that the girl was no longer attempting to murder her. In fact, the girl had become caring and even affectionate, and had taken over the chore of making sure that Hreapha always had her dish filled with doggy nuggets once a day. And the girl always gave her a pat on the head and some kind words at mealtimes. This radical change in attitude was obviously the result of Hreapha’s having presented the girl with the pair of scissors.

  It was a dirty deal that Hreapha had never received any credit for having rescued the chickens from the woods or for killing the hawk or her various other good deeds, but her first thanks had been for something she didn’t deserve credit for. It had not been she who had found the scissors. She had only brought them to the house and given them to the girl. She might never have known the location of the scissors (although she had looked all over the place, including the dangerous barn) if it had not been for the in-habit who inhabited the cooper’s shed.

  Hreapha had been asleep and thought she was just having another of her vivid dreams when she distinctly heard the word scissors, and looking around but seeing nobody, heard further, Come go with me, old girl, and I’ll take ye to some scissors. It was rather difficult to “come go” with him, the in-habit, because she couldn’t see him nor smell him, and couldn’t tell which way he was coming or going, but he clucked his tongue occasionally to let her know where he was, and thus she followed him out to the cooper’s shed, and to a dark corner of it where beneath a workbench was a wooden box containing assorted old thingumajigs, whatchamacallits, and diddenfloppies, among the latter a pair of scissors. I reckon that’s what she’s a-hankerin for, the in-habit said, and sure enough, when Hreapha presented them to the girl she got a hug, a real hug. Thenceforward Hreapha could take a nap without fear of being slaughtered in her sleep.