Fender Lizards

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “Can you guess?” I said, and there was catch in my voice. Maybe I was coming down with a cold.

  “I think he was scared. I think he ran and didn’t know how to go back. Then life changed, and he kept on changing with it. It’s no kind of answer, but that’s all there is, I think. But I knew, had I ever been fortunate enough to have a family that loved me, I’d have stuck with it. Hell or high water.”

  “So you decided to borrow one,” I said.

  “I did. He talked well about you. All of you. I said to him ‘You get out of here, go home.’ But he wouldn’t have it. He said he was through because he had already walked.”

  “He couldn’t walk back?”

  “I guess not,” Elbert said. “Anyway, we got out of jail and went our own ways. But I kept thinking about your mother and you and your sister and brother. I thought I’d go see you, and tell you your father was fine. That he wasn’t dead. That maybe he’d come back. Because, you know, I thought it was possible. Though unlikely. Sometimes, you can just tell someone is done. That they’ve given up. But, I got there, and your mother and brother and grandmother were out in the yard, and well…”

  “You started lying,” I said.

  “That’s right. And once I told the lie, I couldn’t stop lying.”

  “The clown story?”

  “True.”

  “The roller derby bit?”

  “Everything else true. I didn’t rob a bank and I didn’t go to prison, but the rest of it is true. Well, the parking meter was almost true. I put that in the story because that’s where the beauty parlor lady caught up with me the first time she hit me with the hair dryer. I was right by one.”

  “You’re not my uncle,” I said.

  “And there’s that,” he said. “Sometimes, though, it’s not the blood in the veins that matters, it’s the intent in the heart.”

  “Is that a quote you memorized?” I said.

  “Pretty much,” he said. “Yeah. I never meant to lie… Well, yeah. I did. But I never meant to hurt anyone. I just wanted to be part of a family. And you’re part of a good family.”

  “You think that even after you met us?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I do. It’s him. Your dad. Not you.”

  I suppose that was supposed to make me feel better. It didn’t. I looked out the windshield. I said, “Just don’t talk to me anymore.”

  We didn’t talk after that. I couldn’t talk. My throat was too tight. I thought about dad, and how he had been in that yard, ready to mow, and how there was a tricycle in the yard, another kid and a woman in the house. How he had a job and was maintaining. And yet, me and my family, his own blood, we weren’t enough.

  When we got back to Marvel Creek and pulled into the mobile home park, Elbert pulled up in front of our house and gave me the keys to my car.

  He said, “I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. I slid over to the driver’s seat, put the keys in, backed out and left him there in the yard, watching me go away.

  I drove around for awhile. Then I drove out to the hill where I had freaked on Herb. I sat there for a long time and watched the night crawl down from the daylight like a cat from a tree. The night was starless because it was still full of rain clouds. I sat there a long time. Finally a car parked near me, and that was my cue. I started up the car and drove around some more, and then finally back to the house.

  It was late when I got there.

  (32)

  The world seemed to tilt as I walked into the trailer. When I did the light came on over the kitchen table. Mom was sitting there in her flannel night gown, her hand on the wall light switch. I could see Frank asleep on the couch, covered up in light blanket, a teddy bear for a pillow.

  “You’re late,” Mom said. She said it softly, but there was an edge to her voice that you could have used to open envelopes.

  I crutched over to the table, sat down, poked my injured foot out in front of me.

  “I know,” I said.

  “And the reason is?”

  I paused for a moment. And I won’t kid you, I started to lie. I didn’t want to tell her where I had gone or who I had seen, because at first I thought it would just make her feel worse. But that wasn’t fair. She deserved to know what I knew.

  “I saw Dad,” I said.

  It was like the oxygen got sucked out of the room. I could hear the light thumping of the battery-powered clock on the wall near the kitchen sink. I could hear myself breathe.

  “You actually saw him,” Mom finally said.

  “Yeah.”

  She nodded. She got up and went to the refrigerator and pulled out a large bottle of cheap soda and got a couple of glasses out of the cabinet and brought it all back to the table. As solemn as she was, you would have thought she had pulled down a bottle of whisky.

  She sat down and opened the soda and poured us both a glass. She carefully put the lid on the bottle. It was like a ritual. I had seen her do it before. She got nervous, worried, she went for the big soda. It was one way I knew the bills were overdue or that maybe a piece of furniture was going to be repossessed, or we had had to let the layaway go back.

  “What did he have to say?” she asked.

  “Well, he’s sorry. He has a new home and family. He’s not coming back. And he hasn’t got enough sense not to mow a yard when the grass is wet. That’s pretty much it.”

  “To the point,” Mama said.

  “Yep,” I said. “It was pretty direct. And the good stuff just keeps on coming. He was in jail. And Elbert isn’t any kin to us at all.”

  “Figures,” Mama said. “Typical. Perfect. I really liked him.”

  I told her about the whole trip in detail. What Dad had said, what Elbert had said.

  When I was finished, Mama said, “You know, when I was a girl, I wanted to be a princess, marry Prince Charming. Later I just wanted to have a job and someone to come home to that would be here and at least wasn’t a frog, and if things were really working right, they’d have a job too. Hell, maybe even a good-natured frog with a job would be okay. I didn’t picture myself at my age living in a trailer wearing a flannel nightgown wondering where my husband had gone, then finding out he had gone about an hour or so away and wasn’t coming back.”

  Her eyes had tears. I reached out took hold of her hand. “You’ve done all right by us, Mama.”

  “Sure,” she said. “We’re living in the lap of luxury.”

  “We’re together,” I said.

  “Elbert actually thought we were a good family?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “He envied us. Wanted to be a part of it.”

  “Even after meeting us?” Mama said, giving me a smile so weak I thought it would fall off her mouth.

  “What I said, and he said yes, even after meeting us.”

  “If that ain’t something,” she said.

  (33)

  When I crawled into bed, I could hear Grandma snoring like a chainsaw cutting up lumber. I lay there and listened to her for a long time. I was worn out, and yet I couldn’t sleep. It was like there were needles in my brain, and every time I started to drift off, they poked me and woke me up. I tried to come up with a good dream to sleep by, but when I got one started, I would come awake again.

  It began to rain. It wasn’t a hammering rain, but it was a brisk rain. It hit the roof of the trailer and there was a rhythm about it. A soft, steady rain helps me sleep sometime, but not this night, not this hard, mean rain.

  I lay there confused, but in some way, oddly satisfied. I hadn’t felt all that satisfied just moments before, but after talking to Mama I did. After thinking about all she had done, all she had given up to hold the family together, I felt different.

  I wasn’t happy at what I had found out, or hadn’t found out, as Dad hadn’t exactly been crystal clear as to why he had done what he had done. But a short time earlier I had felt as bad as I had ever felt, like I was lost in a great woods and it was full of hungry animals and
I was what they wanted for dinner.

  But as I lay there, listening to the rain, I realized that life wasn’t always a bed of roses for anyone. Or maybe it was more like you had to realize that the roses had thorns. You could pay all your attention to the thorns and hate the roses, or you could give them a wider look. See how pretty they were, how good they smelled.

  And maybe I was so tired I was delirious.

  I listened to the rain with my eyes open, staring up at the roof, trying to imagine that I was able to see through it, see out into the night sky full of rain. I tried to imagine it washing away everything that bothered me. This time the trick worked and the hard sound of the rain didn’t bother me anymore. I finally fell asleep.

  When I got up in the morning, I could hear the TV going faintly in the living room. I rolled out of bed slowly, and found I could stand on my foot without the crutches. I glanced at the clock. It was ten o’clock. I limped to the window and looked outside.

  Elbert’s van was gone.

  (34)

  I walked carefully, so as not to put too much weight on my foot. The swelling was gone, and there was just a sharp pain from time to time. It made me feel a little more optimistic. Last night, as I drifted off, I had felt really good for a while, and I was afraid all of that would be gone when I got up. Some of it was, but there was a bit of it left, like milk on my lips.

  In the kitchen Grandma was sitting on the couch watching TV.

  “About time you got up,” she said. “Me, I was up at six a.m.”

  “So you could sit on the couch and watch TV?” I said. “I’m not sure what the rush is.”

  “Well, your mother got up early and went to work,” she said.

  “I’m off work,” I said. “Injured.”

  “In my day we worked no matter what,” she said. “I had been you, at your age, I’d have been working on crutches.”

  “Thank goodness you’re making up for all that hard work now by sitting on the couch,” I said. “Where’s Frank?”

  “Bible camp,” she said.

  “Like he’s read it,” I said.

  “Read what?”

  “The Bible,” I said.

  “Well,” Grandma said, “at least the little turd is gone for a week.”

  I went in the kitchen and filled myself a bowl of cereal. I got the milk out.

  “That was a good thing you did?” Grandma said.

  “What?” I said.

  “Your Dad. Finding him like that.”

  “I don’t know how good it was,” I said.

  “I think it made your Mama feel better to just know he wasn’t dead and rotting in a ditch somewhere. I was kind of hoping for that, but I’ll settle just knowing he was as sorry as I thought he was.”

  “That’s so nice of you,” I said. “You should write greeting cards.”

  “It’s the spelling that gives me a problem,” she said.

  I poured milk into my cereal bowl and sat at the table. I was finishing it up when there was a knock on the door.

  “You better get that,” Grandma said, not moving anything but her mouth.

  I went to the door, and when I opened it, there was Herb.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  I hadn’t even looked in the mirror, but I had an idea I wasn’t exactly aces. The fact that he looked like a doll didn’t help my feelings much. If his clothes had been any crisper you could have used the crease in his pants to shave with. Not that I need to shave, though I do have this one pesky chin hair I have to work on with tweezers now and then.

  “We can talk here in the doorway, or you can come outside, or maybe you’ll invite me inside,” he said.

  I turned and looked back at Grandma, lounging on the couch like a bear. When I looked back at Herb, I eased out the door and closed it. “Let’s sit in lawn chairs.”

  The lawn chairs had turned over in the night and they were damp with rain, so we went and sat in my car instead, me behind the wheel, Herb in the passenger seat.

  “I’ve been calling you,” he said.

  “My phone is dead,” I said. “I’m out of minutes. I told you about it.”

  He nodded. “I forgot. Look, I can help you out there.”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “That’s your pride again,” he said.

  “It’s one thing I’ve kept,” I said, “though right now it, like my foot, has a limp.”

  “I just want to talk to you,” he said.

  “And I want to talk to you,” I said. “But I don’t want charity.”

  “All right,” he said. “All right.” He looked at my foot. “You going to be able to skate?”

  “Another day or two I should be back to work.”

  “I mean in the derby.”

  “You have been talking to Bob,” I said.

  “And the other girls,” he said. “They all want to try it.”

  “It was a stupid idea,” I said. “No way a handful of small town girls who skate at a drive-through are going to beat a team of professionals.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But do you have to beat them for it to matter?”

  “I think so,” I said. “Yeah, I think we do.”

  “Doesn’t it matter that you try and beat them?”

  I thought about that. “I don’t know. Does it?”

  “I can’t answer that for you,” he said. “It would mean something to those girls. They think of you as their leader.”

  “They do?”

  “Even your sister. They think you’re coming back on fire and they’re going to take it to those derby girls.”

  “They do, huh?”

  “They do,” Herb said. “Well, maybe not Gay.”

  “Of course not Gay,” I said. “I just got their hopes up. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “You were thinking you wanted to matter,” Herb said.

  “That’s it, huh?”

  “From what you told me. Yeah. That’s what I think.”

  He studied my face for a long while. I feared it might be that pesky chin hair I told you about.

  Leaning forward, he kissed me lightly on the lips. I didn’t fight.

  “I haven’t brushed my teeth,” I said.

  “You tasted pretty sweet to me,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, and leaned forward and we kissed again.

  “Okay,” he said, “maybe some toothpaste wouldn’t hurt.”

  We laughed.

  (35)

  The next few days I tried to exercise my ankle, sitting on the bed, flexing it, turning my toes first to the right, then the left. I went for short walks, and I tried on the skates.

  They were new skates. Herb bought them for me. I didn’t like that at first, but he said they were for my birthday. It wasn’t my birthday, but what the heck. I took them with the idea that maybe I could get back to work. I needed the money

  As for the derby, well, I hadn’t seen any of the girls. For some reason, I didn’t really want to see any of them. What I had found out about my father seemed to me like it had left a sentence written across my forehead that said: My daddy dumped me and got a new and better family.

  I went out and skated along the trailer park drive. I skated up and down it, carrying a dog stick with me. I skated up and down that drive so much the dogs stopped barking at me after the third day. I stopped carrying the stick. I started skating for speed. My ankle was strong. I felt strong. Out there on the wheels, the wind blowing on me, I felt swift and powerful. I might not play in a roller derby, but at least I had those moments going for me.

  On the third day I was skating, when I turned and came back to our trailer, Elbert’s van was parked in the yard. He was leaning against the front of it. Herb’s car was parked in the yard too, and Herb was standing outside of it, leaning on his fender. They looked like two hit men waiting for me.

  As I skated up, out of Elbert’s van, stepped Raylynn, Sue, Gay and Miranda. They all went around to stand near El
bert. Except Herb. He stayed at his car. I had a car like that, I’d stay with it too.

  When I stopped skating between van and car, I said, “Who’s minding the store?”

  “Bob and a couple of new girls,” Raylynn said.

  “What are you goobers doing?” I asked.

  “We’re here to kidnap you,” Raylynn said.

  “We’ll grab you and take you away if we have to,” Sue said.

  “I’ll just watch,” Gay said. “I’m not getting in on that.”

  “What are you meatheads talking about?” I said.

  “You,” Raylynn said.

  “You got our hopes up and said we should go after those roller derby girls. That we should try and win that money.”

  “I was out of my mind,” I said.

  “You said it,” Sue said, “and we believed it.”

  “That you could win?” I said.

  “Maybe not that we could win,” Raylynn said, “but that we mattered. That all of us mattered. We had just been hanging around, like fruit rotting on a limb, and then you gave us hope.”

  “What hope?” I said. “That you might get picked fresh?”

  “Okay,” Sue said, “the fruit thing maybe doesn’t work, but the truth is you gave us hope, and now you’re taking it away.”

  “How am I taking anything?” I looked at Elbert. “He put you up to this.” I turned and looked at Herb. “Or him. One kiss, and now he’s running my life.”

  “Two kisses,” Herb said, “and your teeth weren’t brushed.”

  “They been training,” Elbert said. “Bob has been giving them time off, and I been helping them.”

  “You girls do know he was a skating clown,” I said, pointing at Elbert.

  “We do,” Raylynn said, “and I know he’s no kin to me and you. But we also know he was in the derby, and he can skate, and he’s been teaching us. In fact, right now, I think we wanted, way we been training, we could hand you your head.”

  “You think so, huh?”

  “Oh yeah,” Sue said.