“You’ve got a neat clubhouse,” Jeb said, tossing his head half an inch.
He was talking about her pottery studio, the little shed tacked on to a storage barn. She spent all her time there, throwing pots. She didn’t have time for little boys or anything considered normal around here—cooking, TV, church. She was sure these boys had picked all her daffodils last week.
“Do you need us to kill you any groundhogs?” Jeb said.
“I haven’t seen any groundhogs.”
“It’s a dollar-fifty for a groundhog, ten dollars for a snake,” said the younger one.
Jeb shifted his rifle. He said, “Abe specializes in snakes. I’m after foxes, but ain’t many of them. And the coyotes are whomping all the groundhogs.”
“I don’t need you little boys around here,” Mary said, hiking her coveralls up.
“Don’t you have anything that needs killing?” Abe said.
“We can help you do stuff,” said Jeb.
“I don’t need your help,” Mary said. She motioned toward the “clubhouse.” “Don’t let me catch you messing around there.”
Pointing their rifles ahead, they disappeared around the corner of the barn, where there was a padlocked door. “What’s in there?” Jeb asked when she reached the boys.
“That’s where my ovens are,” Mary said with a dangerous grin. “My ovens are so hot they would melt those guns of yours. Now don’t let me catch you fooling around here or I’ll shut you in my ovens.”
“We ain’t scared,” said Jeb.
“Don’t you know what happened to Hansel and Gretel?” she asked.
Their blank faces said no.
“That’s pathetic,” she said. “Don’t your parents teach you anything?”
She was certain these boys had killed the birds she kept finding scattered throughout the woods. Earlier in the month, she had found a pile of songbirds beside a tree. The shattered birds looked as though they had gathered for a songfest and sung themselves to death.
The next day, from the kitchen window, she saw the boys sneaking out from behind the barn. Yanking along a small wagon, they ran through the woods. They skidded into the new mound of dirt she had had delivered and began digging. She had gotten the dirt to fill in a place where an old outhouse site was sinking, but it had been dumped ten yards away from the hole. A latticework of roots covered the depression in the ground.
Again, she rushed out to face the boys. “What are you doing?” she barked. “Quit messing in my dirt.” She paused to collect herself but then blurted out anyway, “I know what you boys did to my March flowers. You’re thieves and vandals.”
She pointed to the picked patch, a few yards away. She imagined the daffodils still nodding their heads, like a reflex action.
“We want to work,” Jeb said. Their sincere faces were shining up at her like cut flowers. The younger one was pudgy, with sandy hair cut in a line across the middle of the back of his head, as though he’d had a run-in with a Bush Hog. He said, “We need to help out at home ’cause Mama’s lost her job and has to get oddities.”
“That ain’t it, Abe. It’s com-oddities,” Jeb said slowly.
“Cheese and sacks of no-’count stuff,” said Abe, making a face.
“What are you doing with my dirt?” Mary asked. Their wagon had some of the new dirt in it.
“We was going to help you move it—fill in that hole.” Jeb was suddenly a funny sight, the way he was acting like an experienced building contractor.
Mary studied the little boys closely. It had been hard to get help since she inherited this unmanageable property from her uncle. She was busy with pots. She had orders to fill for the spring catalogs, and she was behind with her outdoor work. Leaves were falling when she moved in last October. She hadn’t raked or mowed. She knew the frontage must be kept clear or she’d get fined, but the point held no urgency for her. The barn was full of machinery that she had not troubled herself to use. Recently Mrs. Hayes, a neighbor down the road, dropped by to chat and snoop. She said, “Your uncle always cleaned out the woods and picked up the limbs and kept it mowed like a park. But you’ve got all them flowerpots and sandbags. That’s not how your uncle kept this place.”
Mary, instantly spiteful, thought of the woman as the Nasty-Nice Neighbor, but she took out an ad in the paper for a yard man. One fellow said he would come and mow the woods, but he never came. Another took the job, raked leaves for two hours, and then went home with a headache. He called later to say he was allergic to leaf mold and had to quit. Then a woman called and accused her of running a sexist ad. Mary dropped the ad. Sometimes she just didn’t think, she told herself. Most of the time she just didn’t think. She had to focus on one thing at a time. She was here, not in Santa Fe. She had to make the pots, fill the orders. She had abandoned everything else, on the advice of Henry Thoreau, who said, “Simplify, simplify,” and Henry Ford, who said, “Simplicate, then add lightness.” Ford was speaking about his formula for airplanes, but it would apply to anything, she thought.
When she visited here as a little girl, the shed was her playhouse. She played in these woods, where these little boys now explored. The woods were thick then, shielding the outhouse from the road. One year when she came back to Kentucky to visit, Uncle Bob and Aunt Reba had a new bathroom with lime-green imitation tiles. That tileboard had now buckled from the mildew behind it.
“Well, maybe I could use your help,” Mary said to the boys.
They wore loose, baggy jeans and had their baseball caps on backwards. Their little wagon was rusty, and in one end it had yellow scum and wads of clotted comic books.
“We can weed-eat,” Jeb said to Mary.
“We weed-eated our fencerow yesterday,” Abe said. “Mama said we done it good.”
“Let’s just fill in the hole,” Mary told them. “It’s where an old outhouse used to be. I want to fill it in where the tree roots are showing.”
“We need us a dump truck,” Abe said solemnly.
Maybe his hair had been trimmed with a weed-eater, Mary thought. “Do you know what an outhouse is?” she asked.
They shook their heads.
“I’ll bet you’ve never seen one.”
Their faces lacked all curiosity. She might have said, “Environmental Protection Agency” and aroused more excitement.
“All right,” she said to the boys. “If you can move that dirt and fill in the hole this afternoon I’ll pay you five dollars.”
“Ten,” said Jeb. “There’s two of us. Five dollars apiece.”
She grunted an O.K.
The boys got to work. She watched them from the clubhouse, where she was shaping a medium-sized pot. Her pottery was simple and functional, not like the useless multi-textured art pieces she used to make out in Santa Fe. She had O.D.’d on artiness—all moonshine and selfishness, she decided. Her pieces were no better than the glitter-dusted ceramic frogs and elves Aunt Reba had collected. Now she supplied plain clay pots to a mail-order company that sold them as bread-loaf bakers, with recipes. She tried baking bread in one of them, but it seemed a silly and clumsy thing to do.
Every few minutes she glanced up, to check on the boys. What an odd pair they were, with old-men names. They even spoke like old men.
It was hard to concentrate on the spinning mud while the boys were there. She gave up and went outside. She began burning leaves in the trash barrel. Then the boys came up behind her, startling her.
“You can’t burn till four-thirty,” Jeb said. “When the wind dies down.”
“Is this any of your business?” Mary asked, heaving leaves into the flames.
“They’ll get you. They fly over in helicopters a-looking for people burning.”
“And they look for Mary-Juanita,” said the little one.
“How do you know that?”
“Daddy said.”
“How much dirt have you boys moved? I’m not paying you for Sunday-school lessons.”
“We need your riding mower to pull o
ur wagon, so it’ll be faster.”
“That’s silly.”
“We can make twice as many loads.”
The idea tempted her. She could get the mower out. She had filled it with gas before the yard man’s two-hour visit. A two-hour yard man ought to be twice as good as a sixty-minute man, she thought, remembering the raunchy old song. She always thought it should be the theme song for 60 Minutes. Her mind was flying around loose. She was suddenly eager to look at the equipment in the barn.
She went indoors for the key to the barn. Uncle Bob and Aunt Reba’s decrepit old house resembled an antiques mall, with random collections of grimy old stuff. Mary had cleared out a couple of rooms for her needs and crammed the bric-a-brac into the other rooms. She shoved away the needlepoint pillows, the artificial flowers, the Coca-Cola memorabilia—Bob and Reba’s lifetime.
The boys followed her to the barn. Abe was dragging a tobacco stick. With another stick, Jeb was whipping at bushes. “Leave those bushes alone,” she said. “They’ll bloom soon, and you’re not going to pull their heads off when they do.”
She opened the barn. Inside was a treasure trove of equipment—a leaf blower, several mowers, a riding lawn tractor, and a three-wheeled all-terrain vehicle.
“Wow,” said Jeb. “A three-wheeler!”
“Gah,” said Abe. His mouth hung open.
She sent them to work with the riding mower, but before long they were back again, bursting right through her clubhouse door. She was about to spin off a pot. She kept working with fierce concentration.
“You need to get that three-wheeler out and ride it some,” said Jeb.
“No, I believe not.” The pottery wheel slowed to a whisper.
“It’ll rust out if you don’t ride it.”
Abe said, “I want to ride it.”
“Have you got that dirt moved?” The pot gleamed, shiny and fresh.
“We need that three-wheeler,” Jeb said. “It’ll pull the wagon better.”
“The tire’s flat,” she said.
“We’ve got a pump at home. We’ll go get it!”
They took her vague nod for “yes” and went flying home.
She loaded some pots into a crate to carry to the kiln. She liked the way you could bake something into place. She liked the illusion of permanence in something so fragile as pottery.
In a few minutes she saw the boys coming through the woods with a pump. They had entered the barn and pumped up the tire of the three-wheeler by the time she reached them. Jeb had the gas cap off and was feeling inside the tank with his fingers.
“She’s good to go!” he cried.
She thought how satisfying it would be to take a willow switch to these boys.
Jeb said excitedly, “Our papaw said he ain’t seen none of these three-wheelers since heck was a pup.”
“Papaw’s at our house,” Abe said. “He sleeps all day, but he woke up and got us the pump.”
“I don’t have a key to this thing,” she said.
“It don’t use a key. It has a button,” said Jeb. He was already starting it up. “If we hook it up to the wagon, we can pull the dirt a lot faster.”
“We’re good workers,” said Abe. “We’re worky-holics.”
They were already driving away, like a bus she wanted to catch, pulling away without seeing her signal. They were racing across the woods. Abe held on behind Jeb. The three-wheeler was buck-jumping. She ran along behind them to the pile of dirt.
“You’ve got too much dirt,” Jeb said. “We need to take some down to the creek down there.”
He pointed beyond the bushes to a small creek on her boundary. Even in April, it was only a trickle.
“If we had a bale of hay, we could load it on the wagon and we could ride it down there and make us a dam,” Jeb said.
Mary shook her head. “If you dam that up, you’ll flood the whole bottom.”
Jeb said, “If we had some beavers to come, they could make a good dam.”
“They could make it with sticks,” said Abe. “And trees.”
“We could catch some fish if we had a pond,” Jeb said. “We could catch some beavers, too, if there was a dam.”
“Now don’t you go damming that up,” Mary said calmly, as if they were having a reasonable discussion. “There are no beavers here, and if you dam up the creek, Mr. Smith’s pond over yonder will dry up and we’ll have a pond here. That’s like stealing somebody’s pond.”
She saw the gleam in the older boy’s eyes jump like an electrical spark over a synapse to his brother’s eyes. She said, “Now go on and finish spreading that dirt like I hired you to.”
She went back to her work. She had to spin another set of pots. She cut the clay and slapped it angrily on the table. She didn’t believe the boys would fall into the pit where the outhouse had been, because of the tree roots, but if they did it was their own fault. They were pestering her. She slapped the clay down. She pumped the wheel and helped the mud spin into shape. The little boys were moving dirt. They wanted to make a dam. Making a dam would be like making a clay pot. Had they really said the three-wheeler would rust out if it wasn’t ridden? She shivered. She thought about the last time she had had sex. Her doctor said regular sex kept the tissues healthy.
The next time Mary glanced at the woods it was full of boys—at least a dozen of them, all sizes. A raggedy-haired one was driving the three-wheeler pell-mell through the bumpy woods. The boys whooped and squealed. The woods reverberated with their ruckus. The dead birds suddenly jolted her mind. She could imagine the pile of bluebirds and robins, their decomposing bodies clustered as if they had come together for a sacrifice. She felt remote from the scene, as if it were happening on TV.
She went inside the house to the bathroom. She was startled to see a vague hag in the mirror. She thought she should try a mud pack on her face. She had plenty of clay for it. There ought to be a glazing technique to preserve the face.
The telephone rang.
“I’ve seen what’s going on in your woods,” said the Nasty-Nice Neighbor. “I’m afraid those little boys are going to get hurt.”
“I’m watching them,” Mary said impatiently.
“Bob Burney used to let the boys around the neighborhood ride that three-wheeler, but then they passed a law against those things. Didn’t you know that? What if one of them little boys gets hurt? Have you lost your mind?”
“Are you going to call the police?” Mary shot back. “Why don’t you have us all arrested?”
“I don’t want to fool with the police,” the Nasty-Nice Neighbor said. “You can’t trust them.”
“How do you know I didn’t give that three-wheeler to those boys?” Mary said. “If they own it, then what they do with it is their responsibility.”
“Well, I was just calling to let you know somebody might get hurt and they’ll sue you to kingdom come. I don’t like to meddle, but I figured I’d call you instead of the police. That’s not how we do things around here.”
Mary slammed down the telephone. Her muddy handprint wrapped the receiver like a sleeve.
The three-wheeler was headed for the creek. A skinny, dark-haired boy was driving, and he was picking up speed. The machine bucked and snorted. The troop of boys was running behind, trying to catch him. They jumped the creek with him, splashing through the shallow water. The boys were all yelling and shrieking, clamoring for rides. She hadn’t realized that three-wheelers were outlawed now. Where had she been? But why should she know such a thing anyway? She realized that if they were illegal, it was probably illegal to buy or sell them. She had counted on getting some money eventually from the yard equipment. She shivered at the cold possibility that if she were angry enough, she could let a kid get hurt.
The mud on her hands was caking dry, drawing her skin taut. The leaf fire was almost out. The smoke had turned in her direction. If she hollered, the boys wouldn’t hear her—the wind was wrong. They weren’t listening anyway. She was just a strange, unkempt woman, baying at the
wind. In another setting she would be taken for a bag lady. The bag part would be easy. Aunt Reba had saved paper grocery bags, a thousand bundles of them.
“Let me show you how to drive this thing,” she said when she reached the boys. They surrounded her—hard little bodies, steamy and dirty, all in droopy clothing. She said, “I know a few tricks. I can ride this thing like a broomstick. Remember that scene in E.T.? The bicycles in the sky? Do you realize what witches can do on a contraption like this?”
Jeb shoved the dark-haired boy off the seat and let Mary take it.
“That would be funny, to see you ride,” said Jeb, with his Humphrey Bogart manner. “Come on, y’all. Let her ride.” Let’s see the dame give it a whirl.
“She might take off on it and we’d never see it again,” one of the little boys said with a worried pout.
“Is she really a witch?” a boy with a burr-cut said to Jeb.
The burr-cut boy’s T-shirt said,
SEVEN DAYS
WITHOUT PRAYER
MAKES ONE WEAK
“Witch isn’t even the half of it,” she said. She settled herself, grabbed the handles and tested them. Giving it gas, she aimed at a line of open-mouthed boys, little pups who jumped as she headed for them. She gunned the overgrown tricycle over the rough ground through the trees. She passed the stump where the bluebirds and robins lay heaped like Jonestown victims. Skirting the outhouse hole, she shifted into a higher gear, then higher. She drove the three-wheeler out into the road, picked up speed, and waved good-bye.
As she rode, she dreamed about David McAllister’s Harley, how she had mounted it behind him and they thundered down a dark country road rimmed by low natural walls of red rock. It was the spring of 1983, in New Mexico. She hugged his hard stomach and smelled his back, her face on his seasoned leather. She recalled that night on the motorcycle as vividly as if she were seeing a movie in her head. There she was, riding snugly behind him, feeling unafraid and buoyant and blessed with youth. Earlier, she had heard the Harley growl to a halt outside her house, and he came in carrying a dozen hot tamales wrapped in newspaper. He waited while she dried her hair. He microwaved a cup of coffee left in the pot from that morning. She asked about his dog, who had run away. He was happy, because his dog had come back. She was happy because he was happy. The grease from the hot tamales smeared the kitchen table, where they sat for a long while, falling in love. And then they went for the night ride through the canyon, undulating with the road.
Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail Page 10
