Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing

by Patrick F. McManus

  Rancid’s lecture set the class grade average back where it had been before. Probably lower. I doubt there was a boy in the class who wasn’t considering Rancid’s lifestyle as a serious career option. I know I was.

  Riding home with Rancid after school, I raised a few of my concerns about his lecture.

  “I don’t think not doing any work at all was what Miss Deets expected you to tell the third grade,” I said. “She looked pretty shocked.”

  “Thet’s okay. The brats seem to enjoy it. Clapped and cheered fer me afterwards, didn’t they? Mebby Ah helped shape some of their miserable little lives. Thet’s what teachin’s fer, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah, I guess so, Rance. You certainly shaped my life. You did really well, no matter what Miss Deets might think. But then you did that awful thing right in front of the whole class!”

  “Ah did? Must’ve jist slipped out without me noticin’. Gol-dang, Ah gots to be more mindful of thet whan Ah’m out in public.”

  “Oh no, you know what you did! You asked Miss Deets would she go to the Saturday dance with you! I was horrified! She was too!”

  “Ha! Kinder give her a shock, all right. Put a little color in her cheeks, too. But like Ah keeps tellin’ you, boy, faint heart never won fair maiden. It don’t hurt to try. All can happin is, you git turned down.”

  “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. But that isn’t what horrified me.”

  “It ain’t?”

  “No! What horrified me is, she accepted!”

  Mrs. Peabody II

  Retch Sweeney and I were grounded during our freshman year in high school, not by parental decree but because our mountain car, Mrs. Peabody, had perished. We had named the car after our favorite high school teacher, an honor we were sure she cherished, although obviously not enough to show her appreciation in the form of higher grades. We weren’t surprised by her failure to reciprocate, but it had been worth a shot.

  Mrs. Peabody, the car, could not have been more lovely—something, by the way, that also could be said for the teacher after whom we’d named the vehicle. We had practically stolen the car from Budge Honeycut, owner of a local wrecking yard. Budge said so himself, wetting his thumb and counting out the wad of forty $1 bills we’d handed over. He even went so far as to say that he’d never run into two sharpies as shrewd as Retch and I. “Shucks,” he said, “if every client was like you fellas, I’d likely go broke in no time at all.”

  Three months after the purchase, Mrs. Peabody blew up, not something you’d expect from a $40 car. Budge Honeycut admitted as much. He said we must have forgotten to put oil in it. That wasn’t true. When we mentioned to someone that we got twenty miles to the gallon, we were talking about oil, not gas. Retch suggested to Budge that he might want to give us a refund on the car, but that was a dangerous thing to suggest. When you make a man Budge’s age laugh that hard, he could easily have a heart attack. But I’ve written about the Peabody tragedy in Never Sniff a Gift Fish, and it would make me too sad to dwell further on it here.

  Six months later, we had scraped together another $40. A neighbor had an old junker out in his back lot, and he said he reckoned he might be able to let it go for $100. We told him we had only $40 and change. “How much change?” he asked. “Sold!”

  For $40, of course, we didn’t expect any of the usual automotive accessories, such as doors, fenders, headlights, taillights, a complete floor, or a backseat. But the car had all the essentials, like a motor and wheels and, uh, well, a motor and wheels. It did have brakes, too, which quite often actually worked. We always drove the car flat out, or about fifteen miles an hour. That may not seem like much in this speed-crazed age, but it was a lot better than pedaling a bike up into the mountains with all your camping gear tied on behind.

  As soon as we’d made the purchase, we rushed into Mrs. Peabody’s classroom and told her we were naming our new car after her, too. She said, “Be still, my heart.” So we knew she was pleased, although probably not enough to affect our grades.

  As with our first car, naming the vehicle after our English teacher apparently resulted in a certain amount of confusion in our small town of Blight. The possibility of such confusion never occurred to Retch or me, of course. Otherwise, we’d probably have named the car something else.

  A mechanic by the name of Heck Ramsey owned a little gas station and garage outside of town, and occasionally we’d wheedle him into diagnosing some malfunction of our car and, with a bit of luck on our part, fixing it. We stopped by Heck’s garage one day for just such a purpose. He came out of the shop wiping his hands on an oily rag, taking care to conceal his joy over another visit from us.

  “What you two want now?” he growled. “Don’t you see I’m busy?”

  “We don’t want to bother you, Heck,” Retch said. “Just stopped by for a cold pop and to chew the rag a bit. Oh, by the way, here’s something that will interest you. Mrs. Peabody’s got a bad exhaust problem.”

  “I got one myself,” Heck said, “but I can live with it. I expect she can, too.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but it’s us we’re worried about. We’re afraid the fumes will kill us. Our eyes start to burn and get all watery, and we can hardly breathe.”

  “Sounds like a real bad case all right, about the worst I ever heard of. Mrs. Peabody, you say?”

  “Yep, Mrs. Peabody. Say, Heck,” I wheedled, “you don’t happen to have an old tailpipe around that you could install on our car, do you?”

  “What’s wrong with the tailpipe you got?”

  “Probably nothing. Except it’s up on the Pack River road someplace.”

  “I’d be glad to solve that little problem for you.”

  “You would? That’s great!”

  “Yup. What I advise is, you drive with your heads out the winders, ’cause I shore ain’t installing a tailpipe on it.”

  “She don’t have windows,” Retch pointed out. “Doors neither. But the exhaust comes right up through the floor.”

  “Oh, well, I suppose I could put on an old tailpipe. But I ain’t doin’ the job for free. How much money you got?”

  “A dollar and fifteen cents.”

  “Just enough. Drive her up on the rack.”

  Retch and I hung around the garage picking up a few new swearwords while the greedy mechanic installed the tailpipe.

  “You’d think he could’ve left us with at least enough change for a couple bottles of pop,” Retch muttered.

  “You know mechanics,” I said. “Take every last dime you have.”

  Mechanics weren’t the only persons to give us problems over Mrs. Peabody II. Sheriff O’Reilly was always after us, too. We were tooling up the highway one day at fifteen miles an hour, minding our own business, when once again we noticed a red light blinking faintly through the cloud of black exhaust smoke boiling out of our new tailpipe. While we were discussing the possible source of the light, the faint sound of a siren rose above the roar and the periodic explosions emanating from Mrs. Peabody’s engine.

  We pulled over and drifted to a stop, not wanting to use up what was left of the brakes unnecessarily. Because I was the passenger, it was my job to stick my feet down through a hole in the floor and skid them along the ground to help with the braking. Retch had constructed an anchor we could drop through the hole, in case of an emergency, but we hadn’t yet had an emergency.

  Presently, the sheriff stuck his head through the window, or what would have been a window if Mrs. Peabody had possessed any. We tried to interest him in casual conversation, but he didn’t appear in the mood, or so we judged from his shouting into Retch’s ear, which he had grasped between two fingers and pulled up close to his lips.

  “I thought I was done with you two idiots after your last hazardous heap blew up,” he bellowed. “Listen to me, Retch Sweeney! If I catch you and Pat out on the highway one more time with this death trap of a monstrosity, I’m going to run both of you in! I’m going to lock you up in a cell and feed you nothing but bread and water fo
r a year! You hear me?”

  We laughed. Sheriff O’Reilly was such a kidder.

  The sheriff gave Retch’s ear a fierce little tug. “One more thing! You got to get a license for this pile of junk!”

  Retch and I were deeply offended. It was one thing to hear Mrs. Peabody called a “death trap,” but “pile of junk” was downright insulting, particularly when you consider that I have purified the sheriff’s vocabulary somewhat.

  “What for we need a license?” Retch said.

  “So the vehicle can be identified, that’s what for!”

  “You didn’t have no trouble identifying it, did you, Sheriff? “Retch said.

  It’s always a bad idea to jest with a law officer when he has hold of your ear. Retch was still yelping as I tried to placate the sheriff with some good news about our car.

  “Guess what, Sheriff?” I said. “Mrs. Peabody got her exhaust problem cured.”

  “Exhaust problem? Oh yeah, Heck Ramsey mentioned it to me. Said it was the worst case he’d ever heard of. And by golly, if Heck says so, I got to believe it was downright terrible. Thank goodness she’s cured. A thing like that can knock the devil out of your social life.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t mention that Retch and I had very little social life anyway.

  “Well, you boys get this heap off the highway and don’t let me catch you out here again.”

  “Uh, one more thing, Sheriff,” Retch said, trying to work his ear back into its original shape. “How about giving us a boost to get started? That way we won’t have to get out and crank her.”

  One of the things I hated worst about the sheriff was that long, cold, silent stare. It could lift the hairs on the back of your neck.

  We managed to avoid the sheriff most of the time. Fortunately, we had to drive only about three miles down the highway to get to a road that took us up into the mountains. No one ever bothered us or Mrs. Peabody when we were up in the mountains. That’s one of the things I’ve always loved about the mountains. Oh, occasionally, when we had Mrs. Peabody parked alongside the road, a logging truck would stop and the driver would yell out the window, “You boys dang lucky you didn’t get kilt. That’s the worst accident I ever seen.”

  Loggers have a cruel sense of humor.

  During the six months or so we had her, Mrs. Peabody II served us faithfully, hauling us hither and yon on fishing and camping trips and just wandering about on the mountain roads. But then one day, tragically, she conked out.

  We were up near the end of the Pack River road and practically flying down a steep hill. I was skidding my feet as much as I could stand, and Retch was yelling, “Throw out the anchor! Throw out the anchor!” But then, suddenly, all the working innards of Mrs. Peabody seized up and the car came to a grinding, shuddering halt. As if that weren’t bad enough, a fire broke out in the engine compartment. We doused the flames with sand, but it was too late to save her. She was done for. Retch theorized that she had blown a gasket, although neither of us was quite sure what a gasket was or if Mrs. Peabody possessed one. It sounded good, though. Sadly, we started the long walk home.

  Presently, a logging truck came by and picked us up. We rode along in silence.

  “You boys look a bit down in the mouth,” the logger said. “Can’t be all that bad. What’s the problem?”

  “We just lost Mrs. Peabody,” Retch said. “She’s dead as a doornail.”

  “Mrs. Peabody! Good heavens! I didn’t even know she was sick. Must have happened just like that.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It was pretty sudden. Something went haywire with her innards.”

  “Oh, that is just so terrible,” the logger said. “She was such a beauty, too.”

  “We thought so,” Retch said.

  “I doubt she was a day over thirty,” the logger said, shaking his head.

  I was surprised the logger would think our car so old, but I didn’t see any point in correcting him.

  The logger shook his head sadly. “Come to think of it, I did hear from the sheriff she had some serious kind of, uh, gastric problem. Probably had something to do with it.”

  “I reckon so,” Retch said. “She blew a gasket.”

  “Good grief!”

  The very next week Retch and I stayed after class to break the bad news to Mrs. Peabody about the demise of her namesake. I thought she took it rather well, judging from the way she leaped into the air and clicked her high heels together.

  Cereal Crime

  Of all the crime fighters in our county, none was more dedicated than Crazy Eddie Muldoon. Everyone said so. His reputation was based on the fact that Eddie had single-handedly eaten about five thousand boxes of Yum-Yum cereal in order to qualify for The Famous Detective Crime-Solving Kit. Other kids, myself included, had tried for the crime-solving kit, too, but not one of us made it through a single box of Yum-Yums. They were bad. I guess the cereal company’s idea was, if you could eat that much Yum-Yums, you had proved you were tough enough to be a crime solver.

  Six weeks had passed since Eddie had mailed the cereal company his five thousand box tops, along with a quarter for postage and handling, and we were beginning to suspect the Yum-Yum people of a crime of their own, stealing Eddie’s quarter. Then one day Eddie came running into my yard.

  “It finally came!” he yelled. “Now I can start solving crimes!

  “Wow!” I cried, glancing about. “Where is it”

  “I got it right here in my pocket.”

  “In your pocket?” I had expected the crime-solving kit to be at least larger than a deck of cards. The illustration on the Yum-Yum box had implied the kit might be somewhat larger, possibly of a magnitude requiring delivery by a freight truck.

  “Yeah,” Eddie said. “Look at this!” He pulled a flat black box from the bib pocket of his overalls and from it extracted a gleaming badge with the words “Junior Detective” clearly discernible, if you held it up close to your eyes and tilted it so the light hit it just right. I could feel an envy shade of green creeping over me.

  “And this here is my detective identification card,” Eddie said, holding up a piece of paper quite a bit larger than a postage stamp. His name was printed on the card. I recognized his printing, with “Eddie Mul” neatly penciled across the top of the card and “doon” running down the right edge. Clearly, the ID cards were intended for detectives with short names. Eddie reached into the box again.

  “Tah-tahhh!” He held up a gleaming pair of handcuffs. “Aren’t they great!”

  They were great! Real handcuffs! They looked as though they might work, too, if you apprehended fairly small suspects. But that was no problem. There were lots of small suspects around in serious need of apprehension.

  “But here’s the best part of all,” cried Eddie. “Tahtahhh!” He held up a magnifying glass, its lens easily the size of a dime.

  By now I was little more than a green quivering mass of envy and shame. Why hadn’t I had the ambition and fortitude to eat five thousand boxes of Yum-Yums so that I, too, could have acquired a Famous Detective Crime-Solving Kit!

  Crazy Eddie instantly sensed my disappointment and, taking only a few moments to savor it, said, “Don’t feel bad, Pat. You can be my assistant crime solver.”

  “Really, Eddie? You really mean it?”

  “Sure.”

  “And I get to use your handcuffs and magnifying glass?”

  “No.”

  Eddie said I could watch him solve crimes, though, and that was certainly better than nothing. Not much better than nothing, but, as Eddie astutely pointed out, beggars can’t be choosers.

  Eddie and I immediately went out looking for crimes to solve. He said the first thing we had to do was round up some suspects.

  “Don’t we have to find a crime first?” I asked.

  “It works either way,” Eddie explained. “First you find the suspect and then you figure out what he did.”

  “How do you know he did anything?”

  “Well, he wouldn
’t be a suspect then, would he?”

  “I guess not,” I admitted. Eddie clearly was already a master of deduction. “What do we do with the suspects after we’ve rounded them up?” I asked.

  “Oh, we get them all together in a big room, and then I go around and irrigate them one by one.”

  “You irrigate them? How do you irrigate them?”

  “Don’t you ever listen to Sid Sleuth on the radio? He’s always irrigating suspects. It’s easy. You just ask them a bunch of questions. Pretty soon one of them slips up. He says something like, ‘I didn’t shoot the victim.’ And then Sid Sleuth says, ‘Ha! How did you know the victim was shot? I never mentioned that he was shot. You’re going to get the chair.’”

  “What chair?”

  “It doesn’t matter what chair, dummy. There’s always a chair of some kind around. By the way, it might be a good idea for you to call me Sid Sleuth.”

  “I’m not going to call you Sid Sleuth, Eddie.”

  “I’ll let you use my magnifying glass.”

  “So, Sid Sleuth, do you have any suspects in mind?”

  “Just one. Rancid Crabtree.”

  “Rancid? How come Rancid is a suspect?”

  “Mostly because he’s handy,” Eddie said. “Let’s go over to his shack and I’ll irrigate him.”

  Rancid was sitting on his chopping block smoking his old corncob pipe as we approached.

  “I see he smokes a corncob pipe,” Eddie whispered. “Very interesting. Jot that down.”

  “I don’t have anything to jot it down with.”

  “Remember it, then.”

  “Okay.” It would be pretty easy to remember, because Rancid always smoked a corncob pipe.

  Rancid studied us with a good deal more suspicion than we did him. “So, what in tarnation brings you two over hyar? Ah ’spect it’s got somethin’ to do with ruinin’ maw day.”

  “I’m investigating crimes, Mr. Crabtree, and I have a few questions to ask you,” Eddie said. “Here’s my Famous Detective Identification Card.”