by Tom McNeal
All of them.
Even Ginger, with the first bite of Prinsesstårta still on her tongue.
Laughter erupted from the two girlfriends—the notion that Ginger had just fallen under Jeremy’s enchantment seemed to them unmatched for hilarity. But Ginger merely smiled. “Could’ve done worse,” she said. “At least I didn’t look at a tail-less ape.”
“Thanks heaps,” Jeremy said, which drew more laughter from the girls.
After a moment or two, Ginger held suddenly, theatrically, still. “Uh-oh.” She stared at Jeremy. “I already feel the reversed polarity. The powerful, irrefutable pull of my body to yours.”
At this, the girlfriends laughed happily, but oh, poor Jeremy—his face was again blazing.
Let us go now, I said to him. Home to feed your father and return to your studies.
He seemed ready to push back from the table, but Ginger laughed a merry laugh. “ ’Gads, Jeremy. You are such an idiot! That first-look, heart-stealing stuff isn’t true! It’s just a goofy story your mother told you.” She gave him a saucy smile. “Not that I see why you’re so stressed about it.”
Maddy issued a snorting laugh. “I can see why he’d be stressed. I pity the fool who draws the Ginger card.”
The girls chortled merrily at this, but here was an interesting something. When a silence developed, Jeremy said, “The first-bite stuff reminds me of a story called ‘The Lady and the Lion,’ where a man gets caught trying to steal a lark from the kingdom of a lion, and the lion gives the man the choice of giving up his life or returning home and giving over to the lion the first living thing that lays eyes on the man.”
Jeremy stopped talking and resumed eating.
“And then?” Ginger said.
“Oh,” Jeremy said. “The man takes the deal. He doesn’t really want to, but his servant tells him the first living thing that will look upon him when he comes home will just be a pig or a sheep or a cow. But the servant is wrong. The first living thing to look upon the man turns out to be his youngest and most beautiful daughter.”
Again Jeremy fell quiet, and again Ginger said, “And then?”
So Jeremy told the whole of the tale, from the girl returning to the kingdom in the forest and marrying the lion to following him all over the world, rescuing him from a dragon-turned-princess, and flying home on the back of a friendly griffin. Ginger and the girlfriends sat attentively through these several episodes until Jeremy was finished. Then, after a moment or two, they snapped back into their customary roles.
“Same old story,” Ginger said, pushing her empty plate away. “Girl meets lion, girl loses lion, girl gets lion back.”
There was some laughter. Then Marjory said, “Where did that story come from? I’ve never heard it before.”
Jeremy looked away. “It’s just an old story I read in one of my mother’s books.”
So! He did not want to say that this was a fairy tale collected by Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm?
“Like a book with damsels and dragons and all that stuff?” Maddy asked.
A second passed before Jeremy nodded yes.
Then, when the girls were again chatting, he said to me in the thinnest whisper, “Sorry.”
But Ginger heard him, and she pounced on his whispered word as a cat would a mouse. “What?” she asked.
Jeremy went blank for a moment but then recovered. “I burped. Then I said, ‘Sorry.’ ”
Ginger was again studying him. “Must not have been much of a burp.”
“No,” Jeremy said, his eyes sliding away. “It wasn’t.”
And then Ginger kindly released him. “That’s okay, though,” she said, casting a look at her two girlfriends, “a little politeness is a nice change from what I get out of the Queens of Slobopolis.”
The two girlfriends beamed as if they’d just been paid a fine compliment.
And so our little group ate and joked and enjoyed their repast. Before they departed the bakery, Ginger used a napkin to write the following promissory note:
We Owe the Baker 1 Big Favor
OR
$12,
whichever comes first.
The girls all signed their names.
Then Jeremy signed it, too.
I will report one further observation. As the group stepped from the bakery and turned down Main Street, I happened to look back, and there, within the bakery, the slightest movement drew my eye. Deep in the shadows of the bakery’s wide window, Frank Bailey stood holding a tray of dirty dishes and staring fixedly at Jeremy and the girls as they disappeared from view.
When the two girlfriends peeled off to the Corner Pocket (where a friendly employee would let them play pool free of charge), Ginger and Jeremy walked on alone, and their slack pace soon caused me worry. Studies awaited. This was the last week of classes before the summer holiday, the week of critical cumulative examinations.
The studies, Jeremy, I said. The studies, the studies, the studies.
If he heard me, he gave no indication of it. Ginger folded a stick of chewing gum into her mouth and said, “ ‘So how’s your father?’ she asks, just to be polite.”
Jeremy gave a small laugh. “The same, more or less. How about your granddad?”
“Same. Goes to bed every night at eight o’clock and gets up every morning at four. Eats his Grape-Nuts, drinks his Sanka, leaves his dirty dishes on the table—for me to wash—then goes out to the barn, letting the screen door slam at exactly four-thirty a.m. Every day. Truly. You can set your watch by it.” She looked at Jeremy and shook her head. “Now, why would a human being live like that?”
So that he might get his work done! I said, but it was clear that the girl believed there was no good answer to such a question, and indeed, Jeremy offered none.
A few moments later, she said, “Any news on the eviction front?”
Jeremy turned in surprise. “Who told you about that?”
“C’mon, Jeremy. Small towns come with big ears. Everybody knows everything.”
This was not quite true. Nobody knew, for just one example, who the Finder of Occasions was. But evidently everybody did know that Jeremy and his father were only months away from losing the store, which was also their home.
“So?”
“No, nothing new. It’s pretty straightforward, really. We have until August to pay the money or else the bank gets it.”
“Wow,” Ginger said quietly. “That’s awful.”
“It’s my own fault, really. I should never have let my father talk himself into taking out a loan with a huge payment due at the end.” He glanced at Ginger. “He thought he was going to get this inheritance and it would all work out fine, but the money went to a different cousin.” He shook his head.
“You do yard work, though, right?”
“Yeah, and I’ll try to get more when school’s out. But that won’t be enough.”
She seemed to be considering the situation. “Maybe I can think of something,” she said, and she gave him one of her frisky looks. “I’m pretty good at hatching things up.”
This drew a small laugh from Jeremy. “Yeah, I bet you are,” he said, which seemed to please her.
After passing Elbow’s Café, Ginger said, “So, what are you doing tonight?”
“Studying.”
She pulled a leaf from one of the trees planted along the street and teased it across her lips. “Yeah, me too, I guess. But probably not as much as you.” She gave him a longer look. “You really want to go off to some fancy college, don’t you?”
“Not fancy,” Jeremy said, but it was true that, with my encouragement, he had been studying hard so that he might be admitted to a fine university.
“I wouldn’t mind going off to school someplace far, far away,” she said.
It was quiet enough to hear the scuff of their shoes on the pavement. No one else was on the street, but that did not mean that there were not eyes peering from windows.
Ginger said, “My grandfather says there’s no point in traveling. He says all that
happens when you go far, far away is that you discover you’ve brought yourself along.”
Well, there is truth in that. Look how far I have traveled, and yet here I am.
Jeremy said quietly, “Something like that might have happened to my mother.”
Ginger turned. “Yeah? Do you ever hear from her?”
Jeremy shook his head no.
“Isn’t her name something glamorous like Zondra or Zelda?”
“Zyla,” Jeremy said. “Her name was Zyla.”
“Was?”
“Is. I meant is. It’s just that it’s been, you know, a long time.”
From his odd expression, Ginger might have glimpsed the tip of a secret, but she was not looking at Jeremy. She broke the leaf in her hand, brought it to her nose to smell, then cast it aside.
“Maybe your mom’s out on some big adventure, seeking her fortune like they used to do, and before the bank note is due she’ll come home and dump a huge bag of … doubloons or something on the table, and you’ll be able to keep your place and everybody will live happily ever after.” She glanced at Jeremy as if expecting him to chuckle at this idea, but he didn’t. “Guess you don’t think it’s so likely, huh?”
“Nah,” Jeremy said. “Not that likely.”
They walked past Rawhouser’s Western Wear toward the Twinkle Tub Laundry, where a hand-lettered sign, yellowed and crinkled, was taped to the lower corner of the front window:
Possy I Am Still Here
Behind the window, a strange figure bent over a raised ironing board. Despite the warmth of the day, she wore a hooded cloak. As Ginger and Jeremy drew near, she straightened her back and stared mutely out from within her hood.
“Hey, Mrs. Truax,” Ginger called out with a small wave.
The hooded figure made no acknowledgment. She stared at them for another moment, then looked down and continued her ironing.
“Wow,” Jeremy said when they were beyond her. “You say hi to Mrs. Truax? She gives me the willies.” To be truthful, Mrs. Truax made everyone somewhat uneasy. Hers was a sad story, full of dark corners and odd circumstances. Long ago her son, Possy, only five years old, disappeared, as if into thin air. “Has she ever said hi back?” he asked.
“Nope,” Ginger said, and she gave a careless laugh. “But I don’t give up easy.”
They walked on. When several men sitting in the Intrepid Bar & Grill paused in their drinking to pointedly watch Ginger pass, she faced the open glass window, stuck out her tongue, and gave her unruly hair a violent tossing, a strange performance that sent some of the drinking men into laughter and made others shake their heads in disapproval.
“Blockheads and idiots,” she muttered.
I agreed, and at my prompting, Jeremy chimed in with, “Vollidioten and Dummköpfe.” Ginger gave him a quizzical look, so he translated: “Blockheads and idiots.”
She studied him for a few moments and said, “Everybody thinks you’re funny-strange, but I’m thinking maybe you’re funny-mysterious instead.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I think.”
When they reached the corner of Main and Elm, they lingered a moment before heading off in separate directions. They watched as a black-and-white patrol car slowly passed by—Deputy McRaven’s massive head could be seen in silhouette—then Ginger stared off toward the pale blue sky. “Know what language I’d like to learn? French. There’s just something about it—how soft and beautiful it sounds. It’s not as guttural and grating as German or whatever that was you were speaking in.”
Mein Gott! Well, I might have given Jeremy something pleasant to say in my native tongue, but it would have merely prolonged the conversation and distracted him further from his studies. And perhaps this was the girl’s intention! Almost without notice, she had drawn close enough to Jeremy that I could detect the tangy cinnamon scent of the flavored gum she was chewing!
“So,” she said, “does any French just come to you, like the German or Martian?” Something saucy slipped into her voice. “Because if you could talk to me in French, you might really kick that whole enchantment thing into high gear.”
Poor Jeremy’s tongue was tied, and the color in his cheek was again rising.
Ginger laughed. “It’s okay. I didn’t really expect you to.”
Well, what could I do? As she turned to go, I whispered a few pleasing words for Jeremy to say: “Au revoir, mademoiselle aux jambes longues.”
Ha! Exzellent! Exzellent! Now it was Ginger who was dumbstruck. A few seconds passed before she found the voice to say, “So you do speak French?”
Jeremy made a modest shrug of his shoulders.
She eyed him. “It sounded like you said, ‘Good-bye, maiden of the … logjam.’ ”
Long-legged.
“Legs,” Jeremy said uncertainly. “It might’ve been ‘maiden of the long legs.’ ”
A small, satisfied smile appeared on Ginger’s lips, and with that, she turned on her heel, gave a quick shake of her coppery hair, and used her long legs to stride away.
Well, I said. At last that is over. Now let us hurry home to our studies.
But Jeremy stood watching the girl’s progress until she threw a quick, smiling glance over her shoulder to let him know she knew he was watching her.
Jeremy, with face burning bright, ducked his head and turned toward home.
Jeremy’s home was unlike anyone else’s in this village. He and his father lived in a small apartment attached to the Two-Book Bookstore, of which Jeremy was the sole proprietor—and sole employee. The store was his inheritance from his grandfather, and its shelves were stocked with just two books, volumes one and two of his grandfather’s autobiography.
No one wondered why Jeremy’s father hadn’t inherited the store. Harold Johnson had not worked a day for the past five years, nor even left their apartment. It had not always been so. As a young man, he built caskets for Jeremy’s grandfather’s Coffin Shop, and when that was converted to a bookstore, he began driving a truck for the delivery of heating oil to citizens throughout the countryside. Though a quiet man, Harold Johnson liked to sing as he did his solitary work. One day, a young woman came out of her farmhouse to sit on the wooden fence and listen to him sing his songs while he pumped the heating oil. She was called Zyla Johnson, and though she and Harold Johnson shared the same last name, they were in no way related. They had never before exchanged a word, but on this day Zyla’s presence so distracted Jeremy’s father that he forgot some of the songs he had always known by heart. When he made ready to leave, Zyla looked at his delivery truck and told him she’d always wanted to ride around the countryside in a big truck like that. After several days of riding together, Harold Johnson asked Zyla Johnson to marry him. She thought about the proposal for half of half a second and then said the answer was yes because at least she wouldn’t have to change her name.
They went to live in the apartment behind the bookstore on Main Street. Within the year, Jeremy was born, and his mother gave him the middle name of “Johnson,” so that he would be sent into the world as Jeremy Johnson Johnson, a redundancy Zyla thought both amusing and befitting the marriage of one Johnson to another. She also passed on to him her fondness for fairy tales, which she had collected since childhood, as had her mother and grandmother before her. She was not very interested in Jeremy during the day, but at night she would let him sit in her lap and she would read him a tale. When he reached the age of five and could climb a ladder, she built into the attic a little library full of tales. Jeremy’s father helped with this construction and even converted a gabled window into a half door and tiny balcony, where on pleasant evenings Jeremy could sit in his mother’s lap and stare out at passing cars on Main Street while she read him tales. For a year or so, this attic was where his mother could most often be found if she went missing from other parts of the building. But there soon came a time when his mother no longer stole away to the attic, but instead drifted farther from home, and one September night, at the annual Harvest Festival, she be
gan to dance with men other than his father, who finally drew her aside. Their conversation started softly but grew louder. “Because I am your husband!” Jeremy’s father was heard to say, a declaration that drew the attentive eyes of other citizens as well as a laugh of contempt from Zyla. “Husband?” she said. “I would call you more of a minor inconvenience.”
Well, that is how it can sometimes be between unhappy men and women.
Not long thereafter, Jeremy came home from his first-grade classes and, to his surprise but perhaps no one else’s, found his mother absent.
“She’s gone,” Jeremy’s father told him.
“Gone where?” Jeremy asked, and his father’s eyes slid away.
“I don’t know. In search of a happy ending, I guess.”
Jeremy did not understand. “When will she be back?”
“I’m not sure,” his father said. “When she’s ready, I guess.”
In time, Jeremy learned the story that had kept him from entering the Green Oven Bakery until the very day on which our own tale has begun, for that was where, on her final day in the little town of Never Better, Jeremy’s mother had been sitting and eating a slice of Prince Cake when a traveler from Canada walked through the door. Minutes later, she followed the man to his car and was heard asking him for a ride out of town. No one could explain this behavior—her manner was described by one villager as “mechanical” and by another as “confounded”—and Jeremy had always wondered if she had looked up from her first bite of Prince Cake when the man from Canada walked through the door, if the legend of the first bite had come true for his mother because she really believed it could.
That night, Jeremy climbed the ladder to the attic. Her books were all there.
“That was why I thought she would come back,” Jeremy said when he related this sad tale to me. He looked down. “I wasn’t sure she’d come back for me, but I always thought she’d come back for her books.”
It was not long after his mother’s disappearance that Jeremy began to hear voices, though none of them would be the voice he wanted most to hear: the voice of his mother.
