Hap and Hazard and the End of the World

by Diane DeSanders

  I go back over the fence and play fetch with Hap and Hazzy, two brother and sister honey-colored cocker spaniels that are our dogs at this time. They play together all day, rolling in the grass. I tease and tease, trying to make them fight with each other, but they will not fight. I run back and forth across the yard. I am the Girl.

  The Girl leaps over the fence, the chasm, the roaring river! The Girl escapes the hungry wolves! No one can stop the Girl!

  The older baby comes running to play with me and the dogs. Her name is Annie, which is also the name of other people in Granny’s family. She always wants to do what I do, have what I have. But she has already taken everything of mine.

  I tease her. It’s easy to get her to the point where I can just look at her a certain way and she’ll cry, and nobody can tell it was me who did it.

  “No!” I yell in my meanest voice. “You’re just a baby!” She stiffens in the grass and screams. I lure the dogs away. She toddles back to May-May, crying.

  Then the smaller baby starts fussing, as well. Her name’s Trudy, because it was I who wanted to name her after that girl everybody was always talking about who was in The Wizard of Oz, and May-May spoils Trudy the most. May-May hugs them both and pets and kisses them and lets them lie all across her huge pillowy body. I think they are someday going to find out that no other grown-ups will ever let them do this when they get older. It’s disgusting, I think.

  “Why you have to be like that?” says May-May, looking at me with her mad face. May-May likes the babies better than she likes me, just like Mama. I am out here on my own. I am the Girl. I stick out my tongue at all of them, and May-May yells again, and the babies cry, but I don’t care!

  Like a Drawing

  Bright sparks dance and twirl; bits of ash curl and lift on billows of rising heat. Flames snap in and out of the blackened incinerator, itself planted in a piling heap of powdery ashes, paper, raked leaves—spring cleanup, a chilly day—all this out near the dog pen, near the woods. Each spark shoots, then blooms, a live thing dying.

  Scraps and twigs glow orange, then crack, pop, fade all the way to bits of nothing as I watch, peer in, hot-faced wild child circling the flames, close, closer, closer, close as a dare.

  “Stand away from that fire!” Mama calls from the other side of the hedges, where I’d thought she wouldn’t be able to see me.

  And here she comes, carrying her small hoe, head down, walking the square flower bed, arms going, her whole body working up to what is on her face as she stands mother-high over me, and with that look.

  She takes her hoe and drags a careful V-shaped trench around the edges of the ashes, walking it around, leaving her back-and-forth good-mother footprints like dance instructions in the ashes and dust around the incinerator, closing the circle.

  She doesn’t have to speak. We both already know the meaning of this line of hers already drawn here and everywhere—the line between me and everything else.

  She doesn’t have to point to the line. She doesn’t have to say the thing she says or look at me the way she looks at me with that face of hers.

  I look back. I do not know how to come right out and say the words to certain things in the face of her.

  I just stand, and I watch her walk back across the yard, busy, always busy, head down to her important present task.

  She doesn’t have to look back at me. She can go right back to her flower bed, where bulbs and seed packets are laid out on the ground, according to plans of my mother’s that were in place long ago.

  I scuff some ash into her little V-shaped trench with my scabby bare toe. The incinerator fire seems to go flat now. The power fades, the force. It seems to recede now, and to turn into something like a drawing on paper of some long-ago incinerator fire.

  I turn and walk into the woods.

  I Call Him Nathan

  The first time I saw Nathan, I thought he was tall. His eyes slanted over at me. His head tilted as if with a question. He stepped onto higher ground next to the mailbox, where he looked down at me.

  It was blinding-hot summer then, and I was nearly six. I’d been playing the Girl under the weeping willow in the yard next door to ours, and had been dancing around the Calders’ faded blue Ford, wondering how come we were so friendly with the Calders when Daddy said people who bought Fords were idiots with no taste.

  And there was this strange boy fooling with the Calders’ mailbox. Had he been watching me? I walked over.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting the mail.” He pulled out a small stack.

  “That’s the Calders’ mail.”

  “I know, I’m getting their mail for them.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Nathan. My name is Nathan.” He said it the way a grown-up would say it. He said it like someone from somewhere else.

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Six and a half,” he said, his hand on the lid—a rough hand, scuffed knuckles, bitten nails.

  “I’m visiting the Calders.” He closed the mailbox, starting for the house.

  “Are your parents visiting the Calders?”

  “Nope. It’s just me.”

  As he walked away up the driveway, I saw how his ears stuck straight out, and the sun shone bright red right through them.

  He’s a bony, pale, thin-skinned, undersized but scrappy little kid, much scarred, ugly, red at the joints, with sticking-out ears and a swollen lip and eyes that look as if he’s been beaten on, or like he’s been crying, or both. He has stiff dun-colorless hair full of cowlicks that stick up like Dagwood’s in spite of being combed flat every day with greasy hair stuff, and it seems he’s always acting the way he thinks happy and nice people would act.

  But he actually is happy and nice most of the time, in a way, at least to me.

  I’ve never known Nathan to lie, though there is a lot he won’t tell about the different worlds he came from. He just tells about how he kept getting sent back.

  And I never see Nathan cry, except in a fight, of which there are many. But Nathan always wins in a fight because he goes crazy, becomes a purple dervish of hitting, kicking, pinching, biting, cursing, giving out a high-pitched tortured-animal whine. Even much bigger boys back off.

  Just before Easter, Nathan and I overheard a bigger kid’s dad whipping him with a belt in their garage as we were just leaving their fancy house and yard. This was a kid we never saw around the neighborhood. He was always in the house and was a little bit fat. The father was weirdly angry and was whipping that kid because he’d gone down in defeat to a runt like Nathan.

  The kid had been showing us around their property, bragging about things, picking on and teasing and trying to get a rise out of Nathan, eyeing him as if having finally found somebody he thought he could beat. It did work; he got the fight, but then, of course, Nathan went crazy, and the kid backed off. This was always happening. They didn’t know Nathan like I did.

  When we heard his dad whipping him, we decided to feel sorry for that kid, even though he was a jerk. We walked the steep white-rock creek bed on the way home, looking for crawdad holes to come back to later, collecting crystals from the long veins of quartz in that part of Bachman’s Creek in our ongoing search for gold. Because Nathan always said he knew he was going to find gold.

  Nathan was the first kid on our block to ride a bike, the first to build a tree house. He can shimmy up a tree with no low branches, jump straight down and land like a cat. He’s not like anyone else around here. He collects things. He has a BB gun, cap pistols, holsters, firecrackers, a Scout knife, a Texas flag, a rebel flag, a Don’t Tread on Me flag, and a chipped plaster Palomino like Trigger from the State Fair on his dresser. He won it at the baseball toss. I was there and saw him talking to the grown-up carny people with their missing teeth and tattoos, showing them his arrowheads, like he was one of them. I follow Nathan everywhere to be part of his adventures.

  He lines up his treasures on shelves around his room—arrowheads and foss
il shark’s teeth found at Scout camp near Cedar Hill, rattlesnake rattles he got in a trade, rocks and stamps and coins and comic books and baseball cards and other trading cards and pinup-girls in stacks of cigar boxes in his clubhouse—and is not really your friend in a trade. He’ll look at you like a creature from outer space and make things go his way.

  Lots of things he’ll never trade—like the bird and snake and cat bones he’s gathered in the fields, cleaned, wired, and glued together. He has old marbles and buttons, rusty penknives, broken pipes and lighters, busted wire-rimmed glasses, tools, bullet casings, and shotgun shells he found while walking the creek beds, the windbreaks, the barbed-wire fences way beyond where Mama will let me go, bringing his found objects home, showing them all to me. When he goes out, he selects a few items to carry for the day. He combs the countryside for storied treasure, going far beyond our area to play with the colored kids and the Mexican kids who live farther out there, saying how he really likes them best.

  He comes home talking Spanish and slang he gets from the colored kids, calling everybody “man,” and his mother gets mad about that in a way you hardly ever see.

  Nathan came from an orphanage to live with the Calders for good after that. They’d wanted a child, and finally Nathan was what they got. They said he wasn’t what they had wanted, but when they saw him at that orphanage, they just couldn’t leave him there. And then they couldn’t send him back, because he’d been sent back so many times.

  Nathan calls his mother “Momsidoodle.” Her real name is Epsie. Epsie—Mrs. Calder is what I call her—is an angular woman with horn-rimmed glasses, sensible brown shoes, and cardigan sweaters, and she actually enjoys the company of children.

  Last summer, she was out there in the heat running back and forth in the road with one after another of the kids on our block until she’d taught every one of us to ride his or her bike. She laughs and laughs about little things. She is what they used to call a “good soul.”

  Mama likes Mrs. Calder, but she doesn’t like Nathan. I can tell. Daddy thinks Nathan is okay but says the Calders are ruining him because they feel sorry for him. But I’ve never felt sorry for Nathan.

  Some kids in our neighborhood won’t play with Nathan because he just doesn’t fit in. And maybe because you can never tell when he might all of a sudden go crazy, or all of a sudden start saying in this weird voice how one day he is going to go looking for his real mother, and when he finds that “nasty bitch” who sent him away, he’s going to stretch her out on a cranking torture rack, and turn and one-more-turn that crank while she begs and cries. He will laugh while she begs and cries. He will have it all planned. He’ll burn her with matches and slice off her “tits.” He’ll cook those tits on a huge bonfire, then feed them to some vicious black dogs he’ll have around the place he plans to have, and lots more things like that. And when Nathan says things like that, he gets redder and bigger, his eyes turning black. And this can go on and on unless his mom is in the next room saying, “Stop that!”

  I just wait for it to pass.

  The Fish Pond

  High on a slope of thick grass above wide, curving Armstrong Parkway, two-story fat white columns, double doors, two car–width driveway up the side to a three-car garage full of Cadillacs—more Cadillacs and Chevys parked all down the block. It’s Easter Sunday at Nana and GranDad’s house.

  Brick walkways, boxwood, English ivy, a bed of purple pansies, the smell of frying chicken coming from the back door and wafting out over the covered porch, and there’s the sizzling, the laughing, the talking, ice clinking in glasses, children chasing one another in grass-stained organdy pinafores, screen doors slamming, and there’s Elise sweating over and forking sizzling chicken from two popping iron skillets onto greasy paper bags.

  Elise whispers she’s saving a wishbone just for me. Daddy grabs a drumstick, stands over the sink bolting it, burning his mouth, Elise saying, “Just get out of my chicken, Mr. Dick!”

  You walk through the kitchen, a butler’s pantry, and a breakfast room before you get to the garden room at the back, where a crowd of grown-ups stand around with drinks. At first, we all mill around in church dresses and white cotton gloves and patent-leather shoes, aunts, uncles in suits, cousins, Granny and Papaw, friends of Nana’s, everybody with big smiles, eyeing one another.

  I see Oliver across the garden room, and I see him see me. He turns and walks away into the living room. I go around the other way.

  While the grown-ups are talking and the little ones are picking out Easter baskets, I go into the foyer to look at Nana’s snuff box and pillbox collection, which is in a glass case under the stairs. I pick out in my mind the ones I would like to take. From there, I drift around into the living room, but Oliver’s already gone.

  Nana’s house is more perfect than Granny’s house or our house or any house I’ve ever seen. It’s filled with antiques, paintings, books, toys, music, flowers, cut-crystal dishes of candy. There’s a wide curving staircase in the front hall with a polished brass banister you’re not supposed to touch. Everything is beautiful. We used to come to Nana’s house after Sunday school every week, but after all the babies born at the end of the war grew big enough to constantly chase each other and fight, Nana would always be standing on the staircase, saying she had a headache. Then GranDad started taking us to feed the ducks on Lakeside Drive instead, and then to Beck’s Fried Chicken after that. Now we come here for Thursday-night dinners, or for Christmas, or for the big Easter egg hunt every year, like today.

  I wander through the house, looking at every single thing. I don’t dare steal anything at Nana’s house; I’m just checking out the many things to look at, everything so interesting and so grand. There are cherubs and porcelain ladies in fancy dresses—the Dresden and Meissen that Nana talks about collecting. All the women talk about the things to have in your beautiful house. You have to be careful not to break or to stain or to scratch or to leave your greasy child prints on anything at Nana’s house. I have become an expert at erasing my tracks, even worrying later about having left a clue. But I never steal anything but candy.

  In the living room, I go first to the amber cut-crystal candy dish with the little swirl-top chocolates on one side, on the other side the cellophane-wrapped jelly nougats. It’s like a secret pact between me and Nana that my favorites are there for me to get into before anyone’s thought to watch me. I put a few in my dress pockets.

  I sit down at the big black grand piano where Nana once said she used to play and sing, but now she doesn’t play and sing anymore. And I wonder why not. I touch the keys, hearing Nana talking in the next room. Everyone listens when Nana talks. Everything Nana says seems to be serious and important, even when she’s making a joke, instead of just funny like the things Granny says. And when you’re listening to Nana, if you start to feel worried something’s wrong, or might soon go wrong, even though she’s only talking like anybody talks, telling her story, you have to just ignore it. Everyone ignores it because we all know this is Nana talking, and nothing on earth could ever be wrong with Nana.

  I pretend not to be listening while Nana talks about her sister Zella, how Zella was “the pretty one,” and how she, Nana, was not the pretty one—too skinny, a face too long and “horsey,” teeth too big, hair too wiry and red—and how GranDad came to their house to date Zella first, but how she, Nana, snapped him up. And I don’t even look over at her when she says how, when they had the firstborn son, by which she means my daddy, Zella would spoil him and make him hers, and how all her family loved spoiling him, but how she, Nana, hated that. Then Nana talks about old family fights between sisters and brothers who never spoke to one another again.

  Mama says, “A shame they couldn’t just forgive and forget.”

  Then Nana looks stern and says, “Well, if they could do that, it wouldn’t have meant much to them, would it!”

  When she says this, GranDad, who is standing in the middle of the room with his camera ready, turns around and snap
s a picture of her. Then he walks out of the room.

  Mama looks surprised, and then both of them look right at me, and I pretend I wasn’t listening.

  Nana always talks about who is pretty and who is not. She looks at me and says, “Such a pretty child.” And then she says, “Don’t be like Zella.” But I’ve never seen Zella and don’t know what this means, so I just pretend not to listen while Nana keeps on talking about her family in Salt Lake City, so many people I’ve never seen, just like Granny talks about her own old family, but different, too. Nana tells about the Mormons back in Utah, whose people went there in covered wagons, like in the movies, how they will just give you anything they have, and then she says, “I’m not a good Mormon,” and lifts her chin and looks sad.

  Now Nana is telling Mama that her cousin in Utah researched their family back to Scottish kings and queens. Then they stop talking again and both look at me. I leave the room.

  I step carefully up and down the wide, curving staircase, being good, not touching the brass banister, holding out my dress. The Girl is a princess in a grand palace, beautiful and beloved by her people. She commands all that she sees. Pale carpeting on the staircase goes up to the beautiful rooms.

  When I sleep over with Nana, I stay in a guest room up there that’s far away from their rooms, but for some reason I am never scared of the dark at Nana’s house. The beautifulness of everything comforts me. Also Nana reads to me from Pinocchio, and The Wizard of Oz, and talks to me about the meanings of the stories without hurrying to do something else, like about how Pinocchio had to go back home and know that he did love his father Geppetto, who’d made him, before finally the Blue Fairy would turn him into a real boy.

  In Nana’s bedroom, everything is even more beautiful, with mirrors and pink satin and gold. Except there is this one plain unframed black-and-white photograph that sits propped at the back of a group of framed photographs on a low table. I go in and look at this photograph. Nana told me it was taken on the day she and GranDad got engaged, when they believed.