The South Side Tour Guide

by Shelter Somerset

  Olivia and Mason dashed back to the porch. Mason looked dry, but the front of Olivia’s clothing was soaked.

  “Mason, why didn’t you watch her?”

  “She’s a slob, Dad. I tried.”

  “Okay, you guys, you might as well head inside and get baths before bed. Mason, you can use my bathroom.”

  The kids gave a mild protest but caved to their father’s orders. The storm door slapped behind them, followed by four feet stomping up the steps. Several seconds passed, and Harden planted his feet to stop the swing. “I better get upstairs before Olivia floods the bathroom.”

  Andy grabbed his pop. “I’ll finish cleaning up the kitchen.” He edged behind Harden inside the house, letting the storm door close on his backside to reduce the slamming. A comforting pat, like a man slapping his teammate’s rear end after hitting a home run.

  Chapter 14

  HARDEN tossed a lit match onto the coals and almost leaped into the arms of his coworker from Marshall Farming Enterprises to escape the hot flames.

  “I told you, too much lighter fluid,” Arty Ficklemeyer said.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Harden grunted, straightening his shoulders before the flaming grill.

  “Watch out, Harden,” Harden’s neighbor from a quarter mile down the road, Burt Anders, said with a chuckle. “You don’t want to lose those nice eyebrows of yours.”

  “Get those gas grills,” his brother, Lance, said. “Those work real nice.”

  “No hassling me,” Harden barked.

  “We’re not hassling,” Arty said. “Merely giving you some handy information.”

  “You should get those new charcoals that already come with fuel on them,” Burt said.

  Harden turned to the men, brandishing his stainless steel grill fork as the smell of smoking lighter fluid hovered thick over their heads. “Back off, you guys. A real barbeque chef uses none of those newfangled things. We authentic barbeque chefs have been known to behead anyone who suggests such a thing.”

  “Let the king reign over his grill,” Lance said, patting his younger brother’s back. “He’ll banish us if we don’t.”

  Standing apart from the men, Andy lifted his sunglasses for a clearer view. The “grill sergeant” (as Andy had teased Harden earlier, to the delight of the others, when Harden had stepped up to the grill, wearing his apron and clutching his utensils) absorbed Andy’s attention.

  Although Andy hadn’t really looked forward to the corn roast when Harden had mentioned it while they had sat on the porch swing yesterday evening, he liked watching Harden at play. Pride welled inside Andy as Harden stood his ground before his grill with a hint of self-effacing humor. He’d always admired Harden. He embodied a disposition Andy wished most men possessed, especially Ken. Decisive, laidback. All-American. Andy’s kind of guy.

  He dropped his Oakleys over his nose and tried to disregard the spontaneous notion that pinched him like one of the black flies buzzing around his bare legs. He hadn’t meant to fantasize Harden in such a desirable way. Of course, Andy had thought Lilly had made a nice find when she’d first brought him to Streamwood and introduced him to the family. But that didn’t mean anything then. Harden had belonged to his sister.

  He’s not off limits anymore, Andy Wingal.

  Harden threw his head back and laughed. His eyes squeezed toward the blue sky, where smoke from the grill and the fire pit loaded with sweating cornhusks disappeared among the tree branches. Andy concentrated on his wobbling and protruding Adam’s apple. The veins on his neck coiled like slim roots.

  Andy carried his weird thoughts to the beer vat. He raked for one of the low calorie beers and snapped open the can, but his eyes remained pinned on Harden. What did it mean, if anything, that Harden acted differently around him than his friends and brother? Andy noticed many heterosexual men sometimes demonstrated a gentler consideration with him. Maybe some kind of subconscious awareness, a pheromone, motivated them.

  Harden had always doted on him with an interested attention, like a protective big brother, despite being only a year older. Perhaps he cared enough to step in as Andy’s male role model once he’d learned Andy’s father had run off to live in New Mexico with a woman from Thailand when Andy was about Mason’s age.

  And there was that time Harden had kissed him full on the mouth at the kitchen sink back in Streamwood….

  He watched Harden poke the charcoal, then wave the fork around his head, laughing with his buddies. Star of his own show, grounded on his stage of soft soil, surrounded by corn that, if steadily nourished and left unharvested, might grow until it choked the world.

  Where did Andy stand among the Iowa farmland? Already, he separated himself from the men at the grill and their wives who sat in foldout chairs in a snug circle under an elm tree. They had been kind to him, but in a dismissive way. Harden’s brother, Lance, had shaken his hand with a firm grip, but behind his robust greeting lurked suspicion and possibly fear.

  Lance, the fireman. Taller than Harden. But the same posture and disposition. He came across more condescending than genuine. Whenever Andy spoke to Lance or made a comment that Lance had wanted to respond to, he never answered Andy directly. He’d raise his voice and seemed to speak to the crowns of the trees to ensure the entire gathering could hear.

  He wondered how much they might understand about Lillian and Harden, and how they might blame him and the entire Wingal family for Harden’s suffering. Such a small community knew everyone’s business. Certainly, they held sympathy for poor Harden. But not for Andy. Maybe some in their cluster had been the ones who’d tried to fix up Harden with their unwed daughters and female friends.

  One of those meddling females sitting with the small sphere of friends raised her dark eyes and called to Andy.

  “Sit with us, you,” Arty Ficklemeyer’s wife said.

  Boisterous with the flare for Midwestern gab and familiarity, Loretta waved Andy over, her flabby triceps wobbling like globs of jelly. She had farm matriarch blazoned on her puffy face, adorned with nothing fancier than a pair of pearl-framed round eyeglasses. “You look just like Olivia,” she said as Andy edged closer. “We were just talking about it, don’t you know.”

  Andy stood by a chair vacated by a woman he’d overheard earlier announcing her plans to shop the fairground for handmade clocks and artisan cheese. Only when he noticed the crumpling of the aluminum can in his tightening grip did he relax his fingers. “You think so?”

  “You betcha! We used to think she was a spitting image of her mother.” The shadow that passed behind Loretta’s eyeglasses vanished faster than the condescending smile that appeared in its place, and she lifted her eyes like squeezed lemons. “You two weren’t twins, huh?” Loretta said.

  Andy sipped his beer, savoring the icy burn. “I’m one of a kind, you’ll be glad to know.”

  “The kids are lucky to have you back,” another woman with fierce red hair and freckles said. He’d forgotten her name and hoped one of the women might mention it. But Andy had noted they seldom addressed each other by name. It seemed they knew by intuition when someone addressed them. A gentle roll of the tongue or a voice inflection replaced the need for names.

  “I betcha you’re having loads of fun with them,” Burt Anders’s wife, Alicia, said with a tight, lippy grin. (Andy remembered the Anders as the people whose cornfield he and his mother had driven through that embarrassing Easter.)

  They were trying to be kind. A kindness that Andy was unused to. Were they sincere? So difficult to judge. Best he went along with them, one way or the other.

  “I haven’t had this much fun in…. I don’t know when,” he said, shrugging. “Those kids are something.”

  “Just yesterday they went to the aquatic center in Dubuque County,” Lance’s wife, Holly, said. Like her husband, Holly used the most animated voice, always the kindest words, while speaking to Andy—but never would she hold his eyes. She spoke to the wind, as if Andy were a moth fluttering from view. Yoo-hoo! I�
�m over here, yoo-hoo! he’d wanted to shout many times in either of their company. She smoothed over her jeans legs and peered at the tips of her white sneakers. “We know just about everything that happens around here. Little birds tell us things.”

  Loretta tapped the thigh of a chunky dark-haired woman named Betty. Betty’s knees protruded from under her skirt like two ripe melons. “Way things are around here, huh?”

  The women laughed, and Andy’s legs tired. He sat and sipped his beer, keeping a furtive eye on Harden. It’s because he’s the only adult I really know here. Psychologically, it’s called imprinting.

  “My mother used to say she couldn’t burn coffee without someone from town asking her if she’d cleaned the pot okay,” Betty said.

  The redhead whose name Andy couldn’t remember said, “Things are much better today. I’ll say that, for sure. You’re too young to understand.”

  “People are nosy today too,” Holly responded. “Maybe not as bad, but they’re nosy.”

  Loretta seesawed her broad shoulders. “I don’t mind a little interest in my life from a kind neighbor.”

  “Never quite thought of it that way,” the redhead said. “You got a good point, doesn’t she?”

  Alicia Anders nodded in agreement. “She does. I’d hate to think about taking ill or growing old with no one to care for me.”

  “Get one of those Life Alerts,” the redhead said.

  Loretta extended her arms and wiggled her fingers. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”

  The women howled with laughter. Andy couldn’t help but join in. He pictured the television commercial that sold medical alerts to the elderly and shut-ins and shook his head. He wondered if the old woman who lived above him in Chicago carried one, and how long she might lay dead before her stink alarmed neighbors.

  Then he saw himself after his beating, mere steps from the front door to his apartment building. Not one of his neighbors had bothered to come to his aid or check on him during his recuperation.

  “Back in my grandmamma’s days,” the red-haired woman said, “nosy sometimes meant living a way others told you to. A girl only had so much liberty back then. Remember the story of what happened to my grandmamma?”

  “Sure do,” Betty answered.

  “What happened?” Andy asked, leaning forward in his chair.

  The redhead brought her hands to her round, freckly face. “Grandmamma lived with her husband and his mother and his only surviving brother. Newlyweds when her husband died of tuberculosis. Two months later, her mother-in-law passed on. Grandmamma found herself living in a house with just her and her brother-in-law. Scandalous back then that a widowed woman would live alone with a man not her husband, even an in-law.”

  “What did she do?” Andy asked.

  “She had no choice but to move out. The brother-in-law inherited the farm, so she lived alone in a motel outside Waterloo, living off beans, working whatever odd jobs she could get, or so she said. Her family had all died from polio, except for one younger brother who lived in an iron lung till he died at thirty. Hardly had much of a pension or whatever she got from her husband’s GI Bill.”

  “That’s horrible,” Andy said.

  “Nowadays we mind our own businesses more,” she said, “but you can picture back in those days, things like that were… well… scandalous.”

  Andy massaged the condensation forming over his beer can. “What eventually happened to your grandmother?”

  “She wound up marrying her brother-in-law,” the woman said, nodding with her chin flush against her freckled neck. “That’s my grandpapa! After that, Grandmamma could move back into the farmhouse, about the only home she’d ever known, and they raised a family, which eventually included my mother. Oh, she told us she grew to love Grandpapa, in her own way. He was five years younger than her but provided well. Never said a mean thing to me in my life, never even recall a sour face. He’d done her a great favor by marrying her.”

  Andy widened his eyes and drew in his lips. “Wouldn’t that be even more scandalous? I mean, marrying your brother-in-law?”

  Loretta adjusted her eyeglasses “Honey, in those days, widows used to marry their deceased husbands’ brothers all the time. People considered it proper, even encouraged it. Come a long way from the days a woman had to run off because she couldn’t live unwed in a house with a bachelor. Nowadays, two bachelors can up and marry each other.”

  The ring of women laughed, and Andy’s cheeks burned. He understood Loretta had referenced Iowa’s same-sex marriage law. But how much did they care? Loretta and the others hadn’t expressed condemnation. Arty Ficklemeyer’s wife had merely stated a fact, along with a rather shrewd philosophical observation. He figured most of the women seated among the casual circle were Catholic, as were virtually everyone in that part of Iowa, yet Loretta’s brazen comment had set them giggling like schoolgirls, rather than fuming with religious zealotry.

  Somehow, the discussion of same-sex marriage evolved into chatter about a new stitch the redhead had learned during her crochet circle.

  Disinterested in needlecrafts, Andy took the opportunity and excused himself to join Harden and his man friends around the grill. Harden greeted Andy with a light pat on his shoulder, and the other men’s smiles widened. Too wide, Andy thought. Anxious, twitchy grins.

  “Guess I’ll go see what’s got those women all giggly over there,” Burt said, backing off.

  Arty and Lance straggled behind him. “They’re having too much fun,” Arty said.

  “You have enough room on there for all that food?” Andy asked Harden, wanting to keep the mood uplifted, although he feared he had pissed on Harden’s fun.

  Focused on the smoldering charcoals, Harden said with a snicker, “I’ll be here most of the afternoon. Patty after patty, chicken breast after chicken breast.”

  “I’ll keep the ice cold beers coming for you.”

  Harden swigged his can empty and shook it upside down. “Keep the grill sergeant well nourished.”

  “I’ll go get you another one.”

  Andy grinned, thinking that Harden had adopted his nickname. But a young woman approached the group, and a sudden—and unsettling—bright burst of energy smacked the smile off his face. The friends raised their heads and voices while the younger woman chatted with them. Their laughter lifted high above the local cornfields and merged with the neighboring partiers.

  The new arrival, wearing tight jeans and a yellow half-sleeve shirt that showcased her tanned shoulders, set a pie on the table and strutted over to Harden. Only when he noticed his burning hand submerged in the vat’s slushy ice did he accept that he’d been glowering at her. Andy found Harden’s favorite brand, shook the blood back into his frigid hand, and beelined for the grill. “Here you go, Harden.”

  “Thanks.” Harden snapped open the can with a spit of foam. “Lucinda, have you met Andrew? Andy, this is Lucinda Jamison. She’s a coworker from Marshall.”

  “Nice to meet you, Lucinda.” They shook hands. He noted her blond hair pulled into a bun to accentuate her long neck and the hoop earrings that captured the sun. “Sorry, my hand’s a bit cold.”

  “That’s okay, mine’s a bit warm.” She laid her fingertips (her nails were painted hot pink with flecks of gold) to the back of Harden’s neck, and he flinched and chuckled. “I was baking all morning. My pie’s still warm.”

  “Sounds great,” Harden said. “What kind?”

  “Strawberry rhubarb.”

  “My mouth’s watering just thinking about it,” Harden said.

  “First time I tried baking one of those.”

  Harden stated that some farmers refer to rhubarb as “pieplant” because of its popularity with bakers. Lucinda mentioned her girlfriend’s grandparents grew rhubarb in Minnesota, and “they earn gross profit returns of up to seventeen dollars per crown each year.” Andy worried his phony smile might melt onto the grill.

  Someone shouted his name, and he turned to see Mason and Olivia rushi
ng toward him. His grin felt more genuine, and he asked what the fuss was about. Breathless, Mason told Andy about the corn maze, insisting he come along. Andy had never heard of a corn maze, and when he asked, Harden poked the charcoals and said, “You don’t want to know.”

  “It’s a maze they cut through the cornfield so it looks like a crossword puzzle from an airplane,” Mason explained. “You have to find your way through, that’s all.”

  “That’s simple,” Andy said. “The entire city of Chicago is a maze. A maze of super-tall buildings, and I can find my way through that pretty good.”

  Olivia grabbed Andy’s hand. “Then let’s go.”

  Andy held back, hesitant to leave Harden and Lucinda alone. But he shook himself, realizing the foolishness of his sentiments. He guzzled what remained of his beer, tossed the empty can into a receptacle, and relinquished himself to Olivia’s hold until they stood before what looked like the maze’s front entrance.

  Flanked by cornstalks, the entrance deepened into darkness.

  “Let’s go,” Mason said.

  Andy placed his sunglasses atop his head and stepped inside the maze behind Mason and Olivia and a few other kids. Dry duff and green clover crunched under their sneakers as they made their way down the first row. The sun barely penetrated the tall stalks, two heads taller than Andy. The maze consumed the kids’ voices, and a vacuous, strange hush slowed his movements. His nose tickled from the smell of sweet earth and fertilizer.

  The first turn, they hit a dead end. Giggling, the kids retraced their steps and proceeded down another row.

  “This way.” Mason and a companion raced off.

  “Slow up, guys.”

  “Don’t worry, Uncle Andy. We’ll stay with you.” Olivia took hold of his hand, and they, alongside another little girl whose features resembled Kamila’s, shuffled down the row.

  The rows filled an arm span of about two yards, enough room for one adult and two small children to walk side by side. Andy gripped both girls’ hands. They winced and let go. More children raced ahead. Indistinguishable shouts came at him from unseen mouths.