by Lon Frank
* * *
Although Olive and Elmo usually took meals at the red Formica-topped table in the kitchen, tonight she set out her Aunt Myrtle’s good dishes on the large mission-style table in the dining room. Like the little bedroom, this room had an exterior wall of thick adobe, plastered and painted a soft white. But the interior walls were paneled with knotty pine planking that filled the room with honey-colored light, reflected from the antler chandelier that hung above the table.
In the daytime, the room would be brilliant with light from three small, deep-set windows. Like the rest of the main house, the ceiling was high and almost flat, with huge cedar beams which protruded through the thick adobe walls. Only the interior walls were given over to decoration, and were hung with various photographs and items of familial history.
A few old sepia-toned photos of grizzled ranchers and faded wives were displayed in frames of hand-carved wood or store-bought gilt. The men sat bolt-upright and stared above flowing mustaches. The women stood by their sides, typically with one hand resting on the shoulder of their mate. The young brides, with already old faces, wore their high-necked and heavy dresses and looked at the camera with a terrified certainty that it could not recapture the beauty of their irreclaimable youth.
Only one photograph was exceptional. It hung alone in a place of honor at the end wall, in a large oval frame inlaid with hand-blown and slightly concave glass. It was perfectly focused through the lens of one of those incredible old cameras that itinerant photographers brought West in the early 1800s. Looking closely, one could make out the detail of his horn buttons and the tortoise shell comb in her hair. He was ruggedly handsome and smiled with youthful optimism as he casually cradled a Winchester rifle across his lap. And standing beside him was a painfully beautiful Spanish maiden; her aristocracy unmistakable, her pride of carriage overwhelming the setting. It bore the mark in flowing script in a lower corner of ‘Eden Studio, San Antonio’.
The man now called ‘Lucky’ studied the pictures momentarily and chose a chair at one end of the rectangular oak table. He could not remember when he had last eaten, but he could certainly remember how. He sat down and immediately stuck a huge spoonful of refried beans into his mouth. They carried a smoky, buttery flavor and coaxed a barely audible moan from his throat. He looked up at his hosts in gratitude and noticed that neither of them were likewise employed with their silverware. In fact, Elmo was grinning like a brat who just realized his sister had farted in church. Olive wore a soft, kind smile and reached across to place her hand on Lucky’s forearm.
“We shall thank the good Lord for His bounty and for bringing you to safety.”
Lucky nodded his apology, glanced at the still-grinning Elmo, who bowed his rather shaggy head as Olive began a long and impassioned saying of Grace. But holding the refried beans in his mouth proved to be more than his empty stomach could take. It growled with a ferocity that brought back sepia-toned memories of caged circus cats and the sudden smell of grease paint. Startled more by the fleeting pictures in his head than by the sound of his complaining viscera, he suddenly swallowed the whole mouthful of beans in one resounding gulp.
Elmo was squirming in his chair and trying unsuccessfully to suppress a chuckle that would not be denied. So, Olive graciously cut short her recitation of gratitude and ended with as charitable a benediction as she could muster.
“And we thank Thee, O Lord, for the music of our lives. Music that even now calls us to partake of Your gracious and overflowing bounty. Amen.”
As the slightly embarrassed guest and the quietly chastised rancher began to eat in earnest, Olive slowly reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out a folded piece of paper. Mentioning something on the far wall of the room, she quickly slipped it over in front of Lucky’s plate. When he returned his gaze to the meal at hand, he was mildly surprised at its miraculous appearance. It was a pamphlet titled ‘Return to Eden’.
* * *
Lucky sat on the bed in the little room and pondered the ragged images which were scurrying in and out of his defunct memory. Large cats and the smell of grease paint seemed unmistakable, but others less clear were more troubling; the wavering barrier he had glimpsed, and just now, a strange electric smell, as though a million-watt toaster was overheating.
But he smiled when he thought of the kindnesses of his hosts. Elmo and Olive had immediately taken him in and made him feel like an honored guest, even though his circumstance was, at best, highly suspicious. They didn’t ask too many questions and believed him when he could not provide answers to even the simplest ones. They shared their food, clothes and convictions with him in an unassuming attempt to fill his most obvious needs.
He picked up the little pamphlet which Olive slipped over to his plate at supper, and took a cursory glance at the amateurish drawing of Adam and Eve on the front cover. Something about Eve and her demure yet sensuous posture led him to open the fold to reveal the text.
At first, he thought he had also forgotten the basics of written language. The page was printed with a strange and cryptic combination of letters and symbols, seemingly typeset by a blind printer. But, skipping through to the last paragraph, the words suddenly formed a kind of focused message which bloomed into his consciousness.
‘SO IT IS=THE, RETURN, TO>EDEN YOU,MUST,SEEK!! >for only, by this, journey=will,the,reasons of the>ONE ABOVE BE REVEALED!>you shall, SEEK>FIND>UNDERSTAND!!!!and>ALL,will be=JOY=at your=RESTORATION!’
He silently made his way into the dining room in borrowed house slippers of Elmo’s, which exhibited a blowout at the left big toe. He lifted the large old photograph off its hook, and carried it to one of the little windows in the thick outer wall. By the light of a late rising moon, he reread the photographer’s mark, ‘Eden Studio, San Antonio’.
“I’ll be damn. Now just what do ya’ think of that?”
Returning to his room, Lucky felt even more confused, but somehow more confident. He now had a goal, at least. In the morning he would talk to Elmo about his grandfather, the Spanish maiden and the old photograph from San Antonio.
As he began to undress, the lime-green shirt slipped from his grasp and fell at his feet. Looking down at it, Lucky was suddenly overwhelmed by his most vivid vision yet. A mental picture of shoes—huge, bulbous, lime-green shoes. Clown shoes.
* * *
Billowing clouds of grey-brown dust rose up behind the old Ford pickup and covered the two suitcases and the one little make-up case riding along in its bed. Olive sat between Elmo and Lucky, secretly enjoying the excuse to ride with her shoulder touching the lanky rancher, as they had when they were courting. Rather than straddle the hump of the transmission, she kept her knees together in ladylike fashion, and put both feet over on Lucky’s side of the floorboard, where they occasionally touched the old house shoes he still wore. Elmo could drive the familiar dusty ruts in his sleep and spoke as he piloted the old vehicle.
“First thing, we get to town, we gonna buy you some honest foot leather. Huetterman’s Dry Goods always keeps a good selection of work boots on hand, and should be able to fix you up.”
Lucky looked down at his big toe sticking out of the hole in his left shoe, then at Elmo’s likewise worn boots and Olive’s seven-year-old dressy lace-ups and thought he should protest this further extension of generosity. But Olive anticipated this and reached over to once again lay her hand gently on his forearm.
“Now don’t you say a word, dear. We’ve got a little money saved up and precious little opportunity to help our fellow man these days. ‘Course, we give to the church and Elmo lets me send a little extra to that preacher who writes my salvation literature, but that’s not like actually having the good Lord drop someone in your lap, you know. And after what you showed us in the pamphlet this morning and what we found behind that old photograph of Elmo’s grandaddy, why I just know we’re doing the right thing.”
At the mention of the tract-writing preacher, Elmo expertly spat a stream of tobacco juice out the open
window, which impacted an unsuspecting horned toad and rolled him over in the brown deluge, the scales of his white belly glittering in the West Texas sun.
“Yeah, Lucky, I reckon Olive’s right about this; she generally throws the dice pretty good when it comes to the goldanged crap game of life. And besides, this little adventure you got us on is the first excuse for a real trip we have had in a dang-blessed coon’s age.”
Elmo knew that she would object to his reference to her as a dice-thrower as well as his habitual lame cursing, but he also knew that as long as he could manage that particular, one-sided grin that was his trademark, Olive would let him get away with murder. So, just as she took in a full breath to let him have it, he gave Lucky a ‘watch this’ kind of glance, then bathed his lady love in the magic of a smile and a wink. She shook her head slightly and sighed, as a little-girl smile arranged the laugh lines on her face. She knew it was coming, but was still surprised at her continued helplessness every time it worked.
* * *
The three of them walked together into Huetterman’s Dry Goods and Elmo went directly up to the young girl working with her back to him and embraced her in a friendly bear hug.
“Hi there, Arby, you pretty little cottontail, you.”
The girl grinned with delight and gave an exaggerated groan.
“Hi there, Mr. Elmo, you handsome old snake, you.”
Olive knew that Arbena Huetterman, like just about every other young girl thereabouts, thought of Elmo as something between Elvis and Santa Claus. They always giggled when he came into a room, and unabashedly flattered him with girlish attention whenever possible.
Olive played her part in the dry goods drama.
“Now stop that, you two! Elmo, you’re gonna bruise her ribs. And Arbena, please don’t encourage the old fool, or I’ll have to have Doc Edwards start sedating him again.”
Arbena affected her best evil grin and took the older woman by the arm.
“I don’t know, Miss Olive, you better keep an eye on him. A lot of us girls would like to have a broken-down old reprobate of our very own, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah, you girls are gonna give me a dog-blasted complex, with all your sweet talk and all. Anyway, Arby, this here’s Lucky. While me and Olive tend to some bankin’ business, see if you might fix him up with some of your goldanged overpriced boots and such. Put it on the ranch account, darlin’, okay?”
As the couple left the store, Arbena turned her gaze, as well as her impressive and locally famous feminine physique, fully to bear on the stranger in house shoes. She retained just a hint of her evil grin.
“Kinda pale for a wetback, ain’t ya’?”
As Arbena helped him select a sturdy pair of boots, some socks, shirts, jeans and other necessities, Lucky unnecessarily explained to her that he was not a ranch hand, but that he had gotten lost in the desert while on vacation from Canada and wandered up on his new friends quite by accident. He didn’t tell her of the emptiness behind his eyes or of the visions roaming there like desert creatures in the night. Nor did he tell her of the mysterious message in the pamphlet or of the key hidden in the back of an old photograph.
“Well, Mister Lucky, I didn’t really take you for an illegal. Not many of them have such a mane of gray hair and I’ve never in my life seen one waddle like you do. Naw, I knew right off, you weren’t no alien.”
Her last sentence ricocheted off something in his mental darkness and as he looked at the eyes of the voluptuous young girl for the first time, Lucky felt a metallic shiver begin at the base of his spine.
* * *
Early that morning Lucky showed them the mysterious paragraph in the religious tract over a substantial breakfast of huevos rancheros and homemade tortillas. Olive, who had spent her adult life dusting and caring for the old photograph, made the connection immediately, and went to fetch it from the wall. But it was Elmo who took up the nearby paring knife and casually slit the brown parchment that sealed the back of the frame. Ignoring the immediate gasps of the other two at the table, he slowly peeled back the brown covering and reached in to remove a yellowed and folded piece of paper.
As he and Olive now waited in the green vinyl booth at City Drug for Lucky to finish his shopping, Elmo again opened the brittle square of paper. One of the seams split when he first unfolded it at the breakfast table and it was starting to crumble around the corners. But it still bore a remarkable pen-and-ink drawing of a magnificent Low Country plantation house. Across the bottom was written in an old and flowing hand, ‘Maison du Jet D’eau’, and although he didn’t know why he knew, Lucky whispered, ‘House of the Fountain’. Below the title was the reddish stain from a small, hand-forged iron key that was wrapped inside.
* * *
Lucky wore his new boots, but asked Arbena wrap up the other clothes along with the old house shoes. As the girl entered the charges into the account book, he felt a renewed pang of guilt for spending so much money. He gave her a sadly apologetic look.
“You know Elmo and Olive are awfully nice folks, but I really hate to take these things. I know that they probably have barely enough to get by on and some museum somewhere is lusting after that old truck. At least tell me how much all this comes to so maybe I can pay them back when I get back on my feet.”
Arbena placed her elbows on the worn old counter top and leaned over towards the old man, giving a view of cleavage that made his head swim.
“You really have been out in the sun too long. Why, them two funny old lovebirds owned half the land that went into the Big Bend Park. Some folks say Elmo’s grandaddy was the richest man in four counties when he came west, right after the Civil War. Man, they got money older ‘n dirt.”
As Lucky opened the door to leave, he paused and looked back, partly in confusion and partly hoping to again see the magnificent vale of female topography.
“But, why the old truck and such?”
“I guess it’s just their ways, Mister. Rich or not, they are still ranch folk, and I figger they woulda’ bought all that stuff for you anyway, even if it meant they had to eat coyotes all winter. It’s just their ways.”
As he slid into the drug store booth beside Olive, the once-lost stranger that she had named Lucky quietly reached over and placed his hand gently on her forearm.
* * *
Lucky swatted the dust from the tattered upholstery and held the door open so Olive could scoot into the center of the seat in the old truck. He had worried ever since that morning when they decided to try and find the old Eden photographic studio, that the ancient vehicle would leave them to die a slow death in the desert. Taking his place beside his benefactress, he slammed the passenger door, which refused to catch, forcing him to reach out the open window and open it with the outside handle before slamming it again.
“You know, Elmo, I really do like this truck. Has a really, uh, solid feel about it, you know. Not like they make them today, no sir. But I been thinking, you know, in case you don’t feel like drivin’ all that way, maybe we could just ride the Greyhound. They got pissers, oh, sorry Olive, I mean they got restrooms and air conditioning and everthin’ on them big busses nowadays.”
Elmo and Olive stared at him blankly for a moment, then looked at each other and broke out laughing at a private joke only they shared.
Elmo turned the wheel of the old truck and bounced off the highway into the parking lot of Frontier Ford, where a faded sign assured the passerby that ‘You can afford a Ford at Frontier’.
“Don’t worry, bud, we ain’t loco enough to try and herd this ding blasted old rattle trap out on the highway. We’re gonna take Olive’s car.”
As Elmo went into the building to have the car rolled out, Olive explained that it had been a wedding present from Elmo, and that they kept it in the garage because of sentimental value, and to keep it from rusting away in the desert sun. She drove it quite a lot when she was younger, but now they just saved it for an occasional pilgrimage to El Paso, to get a new supply of pamphlets.
A fly had flown in and buzzed around for a full three seconds before Lucky realized his mouth was open. He absentmindedly snapped it shut and swallowed the unfortunate aerial insect without taking his eyes off the car now glistening in the sun before him like some sort of teenage-hormone-induced mirage.
It was a 1965, cherry-red, Ford Mustang Fastback. Two wide white racing stripes ran over the hood and across the roof, with smaller ones on each side, across the bottom of the doors and the two exaggerated air scoops. In the side stripes was the lettering ‘GT-350’, and across the rear were small chrome letters saying ‘SHELBY’. It had dully gleaming magnesium wheels and wore a set of high performance Goodyear Eagle STs with white raised lettering. Four-inch chrome exhaust pipes stuck out slightly ahead of each rear tire and filled the parking area with a distinctive purring growl.
Lucky swallowed again, this time fortunately devoid of any further wayward morsels of indigenous protein.
“Holy Mother’s bunions! Is this it? Olive’s car?”
Elmo just grinned as he held the passenger side door open so Lucky could contort his sizable girth into the lightly padded rear seat. Elmo hiked up his jeans and followed in the same door, taking the ‘shotgun’ position.
They sat and watched as the little lady in her blue flowered cotton dress walked around and kicked the tires with her black dressy lace-ups. It seemed to Lucky that her skirt hem fluttered a little higher up still-shapely calves, and the kick was a little firmer at each successive tire. But little did he guess that this was just a preamble to the most amazing transformation he would ever witness.
Olive finally slid expertly into the driver’s seat and began to unbutton her sleeves and collar. She slid an antiquated 8-track Beach Boys cassette into the dash as Elmo rummaged in the glove box and fished out a large pair of rhinestone-studded sunglasses. As he held them out to her, they smiled at each other in celebration of the completion of their little silent ritual, and their eyes held for a second as if they were the only two people left in the world.
