by Paul Griffin
“Me? Why?”
She didn’t say. She hugged me until the conductor yelled out the window, “Let’s go.” She went in, and she didn’t look back.
Marty squealed softly, his eyes on the train as it got smaller and smaller.
“Okay, Marty, c’mon now, boy.”
He wouldn’t budge. I sat cross-legged next to him on the platform. He leaned into me and we stared down the empty line of track.
How in the world could I be Paloma Lee’s hero? I was the guy who wasn’t good enough to go to music school. I wasn’t headed for anything or anywhere particularly special, I was pretty sure.
It was almost a hundred degrees that morning. It was a scorcher all right.
28. THE GROWING PROBLEM
Mr. Taylor called Mom to tell her he got sober and got religion. He wasn’t asking us to drop the charges. He wanted to thank us for waking him up. So of course we dropped the charges. After that Mom hadn’t seen him at church. The judge said the Taylor boys and muscle head Tommy had to keep five hundred feet away from me and my family, and that included Marty.
So I wasn’t too worried about getting beat up when Mom asked me to sell peaches from our roadside table a week after Pal left for music camp. “If folks see the actual fruit, maybe they’ll stop,” Mom said.
They didn’t.
The problem with working a slow peach stand is, you have too much time to think. If I had any chance at figuring out my future, I had to know my past, like my dad said in his letter. I kept going back to what he wrote on his guitar, My heart is a drum. It was eating at me. What did that mean?
Mom brought me lunch and Marty. “He keeps staring at you from the window and oinking,” she said. He ate my lunch and napped at my feet.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that Hana person either, the one who donated blood again and again. My dad described her as an angel on earth. Mason said Dad was honorable, not the type to fall in love with someone else besides Mom. But then again, Mason took pride in being a good liar.
Marty nudged me with his snout and put his hoof in my lap. That was his way of telling me I was wondering too much again, but I couldn’t stop wondering what Pal was up to.
We talked for an hour the first night she was at camp, about how miserable she was, missing everybody. The next night we talked less, because she was tired after singing all day. The night after that, she didn’t call. I got a hold of her the next night, but she was off to bed because they had an early class the next day—a movement class.
“Who needs somebody to teach you how to move, Marty? You just do it, right, boy? You just keep moving.”
On a day this nice Pal and I would have gone tubing in the river. And then tonight we’d have watched Chasing Mavericks and riffed with our guitars. I hadn’t picked a note since she left.
A month into that slow-motion summer, Marty started to get into trouble of a more serious kind.
By now he weighed three hundred and fifty pounds. He ate anything—stray grass, wild hay, acorns, all the peaches too ugly to sell. Mom’s church friends dropped off slops by the pound. Feeding him was never a problem. The problem was he still thought he was a puppy.
One afternoon I came in from working the orchard. Marty jumped up to kiss me and knocked my front teeth loose. Double made a brace out of a Popsicle stick and dental floss, and I was walking around like a goof for a week while my teeth tightened into place, just as crooked as they were before too.
Another time Marty went for his ball and ran over the neighbor’s mailbox. That one cost me eighty dollars for the replacement and half a day to dig a new hole and then mix the cement and set the new pole, all in ninety-four-degree heat. While I worked, Marty chased field mice. He cornered one in a weed-collecting bucket. Whether it turned on him or just had nowhere else to run but at him, Marty got scared and hid behind me, and that was the end of mouse chasing.
But it was the morning I went to cut Mrs. Branchinelli’s lawn that the trouble really kicked up a notch. Marty just had to come with me, of course. When I finished up, Mrs. B wanted to treat Marty and me to Fro-fu. We were fanning ourselves on the bench out front of Mrs. Carmela’s when Mrs. B and I got to debating the difference between strawberries-nuts-strawberries versus nuts-strawberries-nuts.
“How is Pal?” Mrs. B said.
I didn’t know. The past couple weeks we’d barely talked once. “She’s in two musicals for the summer stock,” I said.
“How fun!” She slapped my knee. “Listen, let me ask you something about your Double Pop. To be perfectly frank, he is one handsome man. Do you think he might want to come over to my house for breakfast sometime?”
A little girl ran up to us. “That pig’s laying in the exact same spot he was when I crossed by this way half a hour ago. Is that all he does?”
“In this heat?” I said. “Yup.”
“He’s ugly.”
“When did children become so dreadful?” Mrs. B said. “Where is your mother at, you wretched little girl?”
“Move, pig!” She pulled his tail. Marty spun on her and gave her a big fat kiss. She lost her balance and plunked on her butt. She was a screamer. Her mother materialized from the air, I swear. “What happened?”
“That pig bit me!”
“On top of being an ugly little creature, your daughter’s a liar,” Mrs. B said.
“How dare you?” the mom said. She spun from Mrs. B to me. “You make us all so uncomfortable, trudging that poor hog all over creation for the world to make fun of him.” She started off and then turned back. “You’re just lucky Caitlin’s not hurt serious. You’re lucky I don’t sue you.”
“Your daughter’s a deceitful little monster,” Mrs. B yelled as they went off. “Poor Marty,” she said, and she offered him a spoonful of her ice cream. He ate that and then the whole sundae in a bite.
Mrs. B laughed so hard she farted, and she kept right on farting. “Oh Renzo, I’m so sorry! Oh my, I can’t stop!”
Marty stuck his nose down by her butt and breathed in deeply.
“Oh Marty, you are a cure,” Mrs. B said, cackling. “You can’t be sad around him. You just can’t.”
What the heck, I farted back at her. I was sad, though. What passed for entertainment these days was a fart fight with Mrs. B.
29. THE PIG-WHO-THOUGHT-HE-WAS-A-DOG DAYS OF AUGUST
In early August I got Marty onto the barn scale. “Whoa. Three seventy-three.”
Marty wagged his tail like this was a good thing.
The mother of that tail-puller girl was right. People were gawking at Marty. I worried about taking him anywhere past the Maple Clutch fence these days. Still, folks stared from their cars at the pig in the dog collar—except dog collars didn’t come that big. We ended up using one of Double’s old Army belts.
I dumped a bucket of slops into Marty’s trough. He finished in a minute and came to where I sat against the wall. He burped in my face and settled in next to me, and then we watched the heat flies zigzag past the barn door.
That night I woke up in the crack between the mattress and the wall. Marty and Bella were spread over the rest of the bed. I shoved my way back onto the mattress, and Marty grumbled. He hopped down and curled up on top of the dog bed he used to sleep in when he was a twenty-pound piglet. His belly covered the whole thing. Later he jumped back into my bed and broke it.
The legs cracked, and down we went.
That morning I woke to a rant from Mom. “A pig in a bed, and a broken one no less. I have a mind to turn him into a pig in a blanket. Look.” She held out a peach pie, what was left of it. “I put it in the fridge specifically so he wouldn’t get at it. The pig has figured out how to open the icebox door now. Marty, bad boy!”
Marty shivered and looked away. I swear he was thinking, If I can’t see you, then maybe you can’t see me.
“Marty?” Mom yelled.
He put
his head under the pillow.
“Lorenzo Ventura, it’s not funny.”
“Then why you laughing, Ma?”
“That pie was for the church bake sale, Renzo! Goodness gracious, this pig. This poor pig. How does this end?” And now she was crying a little. She went out, and it wasn’t funny anymore.
I waited until the front door slammed and the sound of her truck faded. I climbed out of my broken bed and moped to the kitchen. Double had brought home a box of Lucky Charms that’d been run over by the forklift. The manager at the Wal let him have it quarter price, which made me wonder why the forklift drivers didn’t run over stuff all the time. I poured the box into two bowls, one for me, one for Marty, and then I flipped open Mom’s laptop and checked Pal’s Instagram.
Summer up in the mountains looked a lot more fun than summer in Maple Clutch. In one picture she was on stage dabbing with a boy as tall as I was, and a whole lot thinner. He had a ukulele strung over his shoulder. She’d already found her new backup man.
Yup, she was gone for good now.
Marty plunked his head in my lap and wagged his tail. I gave him the rest of my Lucky Charms.
The hottest day of summer came in at a hundred and three degrees, no wind. The foxtail meadow across the street was so still, it looked like an overexposed picture.
I was down at the bottom of the driveway again with Marty and the so-called peaches. This time I’d brought a moldy cocktail table umbrella to shade us. The glare was so bad with the heat wiggling off the roadtop, I had to shut my eyes. I passed out for I don’t know how long.
Marty woke me with his whimpering and a nudge to my thigh, except it wasn’t Marty but Bella.
“What’s wrong, girl?” I looked around for Marty, and he was gone again.
Bella led me to a fresh hole in our neighbor Mrs. Tomasino’s fence, then through the bramble to a small pasture Mrs. T kept for a pair of dairy cows, and right then I knew it was going to be a mess.
Back in the spring Mrs. T wanted me to bring Marty over to meet Rosie and Petunia. Marty loved them. They were terrified of him. They didn’t mind when Bella ran circles around them and did the odd flyby, but when Marty did it? No, a pig acting like a dog was too much for a cow apparently. Marty chased them back into their barn that day, and this 103-degree day he’d chased Rosie into a gully too steep to climb out.
Marty oinked down at her from the lip of the gully. She lowed back at him. She was on her feet and grazing, but I had no idea how we were going to get her out of that ditch.
We made a blanket harness and ran a chain from it to Buck’s trailer hitch. Double drove the mower while Mom and I pushed on Rosie’s haunch. Bella and Marty lay down in the grass and watched.
Mrs. T thought the whole thing was pretty funny, but Mom was not amused. “I’ll let you have that pig free, Mrs. T. I’ll deliver him to you in the form of sausages.”
“Now, Jenny, nobody got hurt, and it’s all gonna be fine,” Mrs. T said.
“It’s not fine at all,” Mom said. “Renzo, push, will you?”
“Ma, what do you think I’m doing?”
“Here we go,” Double said. He revved Buck’s engine, and there was a great groaning and then a metallic snap so loud, it scared Rosie right out of that gully.
“Tell you what,” Double said. “That was not a particularly lovely sound.”
Mom got right up into Marty’s face and screamed, “Beelzebub!”
“Now, now,” Double said.
“Now nothing, Daddy! Any guesses as to how much it’s gonna cost to fix that tractor? Put me down for six hundred!” She popped a handful of Tums.
The next morning I was on the bowl reading the new Wimpy Kid when Mom yelled from the hall, “Renzo, mercy, can’t you close the door?”
Except I couldn’t. Not with Bella and Marty napping at my feet. Marty was six feet long by now, and half of him stuck out into the hall.
“When you finish up in there go help Double load the truck, and for Pete’s sake if not mine will you please light a match? Do they have to be with you in the toilet even?”
“It’s the only show in town right about now, Ma.”
Double’s war buddy had died the week before, and the man’s last request was that Double head down to North Carolina to spread his ashes at Chimney Rock.
I went out to the barn to help Double get set with his camping gear. He was with Kenny, our mechanic, who was under Buck. “You got a cracked axle here, and the struts are shot. I’d say parts and labor gonna run you close to a thousand. It’s a tough one, Dub, I know.”
“You don’t think he can go a little longer, old Buck?” Double said. “A thousand, huh? I just don’t know as we have that much on hand right now, Kenny.”
“You might wring another month or two out of him,” Kenny said. Double walked him to his van.
I slumped against Buck’s big bald tire. Marty brought me his tennis ball, pure slobber. He bounced it and caught it. “Marty, can’t you just be good?” I said. “Please, boy. Please.” I rested my forehead on his, and then I felt Double’s hand on my shoulder, and he sat next to me. Marty tried to climb into his lap.
“Marty, no!” I shoved him away. “She’s gonna make me get rid of him, isn’t she?”
“We’ll work it out, Renz. He’s not even a year old yet. He’ll calm down.”
“Tell that to Mom.”
“Oh I have, believe me,” Double said.
“Can I see them?” I nodded at the tin container in his hand. It was exactly the size of a Coke can.
“I don’t think Carlos would mind.” Double screwed off the lid.
“Wow. That’s really him?”
“Part of him,” Double said.
He let me hold the can. It didn’t look any different than fireplace ash. I don’t know what I was expecting. Something more . . . Something more. “Double, tell me something I don’t know about my dad.”
“You’re having a rough summer, aren’t you?”
“Tell me about Hana,” I said.
“Hana. Yes. Renz, I think you have a right to know everything you can about your dad, but it’s not for me to tell you about Hana.”
“So there is something there, though.”
“Your mom made me promise that she should be the one to tell you, when and only when she thinks you’re ready.”
“I’m ready. I want to know. I don’t mean to put you in the middle of it, but can’t you tell me? I won’t say anything to Mom.”
“Now son, I wouldn’t do that to your mom, and the Renzo I know wouldn’t do that to his mom either. I’ll talk with her after my little trip here, and we’ll make time for the three of us to sit down, and your mom will answer your questions or tell you why she can’t. And Renz? It’s hard for her too, son.”
“I know,” I said.
“I know you do. Give it a few more days, ’til I get back from Chimney Rock, okay?”
“What about Marty?” I said.
“Do your best to keep him out of trouble until I’m home, and then we’ll see what we can do, all right? It’ll be fine, all of it.”
Marty nudged my knee. He did the rollover and then took a bow. I laughed.
“There you go,” Double said.
30. HELLO AND GOOD-BYE
Those three days Double was away were the longest of the summer and my life. I didn’t let Marty out of my sight. I had him carrying peach buckets to the table stand. He lugged bag after bag of waste fruit to the mulch locker. He hauled pails and pails of water to Mom and me as we moved a bunch of baby pines from the woods down to the welcome sign, where the hose didn’t reach. If it had a handle on it, Marty could carry it.
Mom hadn’t said boo to me since the mess with Rosie and the ditch and most of all Buck. She’d landed a job at the Costco Lawn and Garden. Her shift didn’t start until eight a.m., but she wa
s out of the house by six to avoid me. I don’t know where she went, because even the church didn’t open until 7:30. But now she seemed to have cooled off a little with the weather. We were looking at low 70s and a nice breeze as the sun went down.
“Mom, please don’t take him to auction.”
“Put some more mulch in,” she said. “Renz, I just don’t know how it ends, you know? He’s gonna hurt somebody bad someday. It isn’t fair to him, putting him in situations where he can get into trouble.”
“So we kill him then,” I said. “Yup, that’ll be the best thing for him. And the fact that we’ll get seven hundred dollars for his meat is beside the point.”
“You don’t think I know he’s family now? Look at him hauling that water down here, wagging his fanny all over the place. He breaks my heart. I want him to win, you know? I do. I don’t want him to die. I just don’t know how it ends is all I’m saying.” She slapped the dirt off her hands and went up to the house.
I cleaned up and grabbed the mail from the box.
I got a letter.
My heart rate doubled in a beat, because it had to be from Pal, except it wasn’t.
It came without a return address or even a message, just a picture of a pig midway through the slaughter line.
After Mom went to bed I got onto her computer and tortured myself by looking at Pal’s Instagram again. She posted shots of the musicals she was doing. The costumes and sets could have been from the movies, perfect lighting, cast and crew laughing away, and in the middle of it all was Pal, the star.
I wanted her to succeed. I just couldn’t believe she’d stopped talking to me. After all those years of being best friends, how could she forget about me so fast?
Marty put his hoof in my lap and licked me right on the mouth, but that just made everything worse, because I knew he was leaving too, and soon.
He was looking up at me the way he did when he imprinted on me or whatever it was he did that first night in the barn, when he just flat out decided we were going to be friends. From then on that pig wanted nothing more than to love me and have me love him back. The worse things got, the more he was there for me. He really was just plain true, and I couldn’t figure out a way to save him.
