Sway

by Amber McRee Turner

  The boy looked ready to snatch it right up, until his mom caught him by the shoulder.

  “I don’t know, son,” she said. “Maybe next time.”

  “Oh pllllease, Mom,” the boy said. “Let me try it.”

  “There might not be a next time,” Dad said. “And if nothing else, he’ll come away with clean hands, right?”

  “All right,” the mom said. “Go ahead.”

  Dad guided the boy to the wagon to wash his hands in the water. While the boy scrubbed and splashed, I watched carefully to see what would happen, half expecting from Dad’s buildup for there to be paint shooting out of the kid’s fingers or something. When the boy was done with his wash, Dad searched all around the gazebo for some semblance of a paper towel before turning around and offering his long coattails for the kid to dry his hands on. The boy looked a little starstruck at the notion of getting to touch the green-and-yellow jacket, like it could be magical too. But despite washing with some so-called Vincent van Gogh soap, he seemed to be just the same kid with the same chalk and the same nervous mom. And besides, I was old enough to know better about this kind of thing anyway.

  “Now then, go do your starry thing!” Dad said, nudging the boy down the steps and giving me a wink through his giant green glasses. And that’s when something amazing happened. While Dad scanned the group for his next pick, I kept my eyes on the boy, who kneeled right next to The Roast and began the most handsome picture of a brilliant night sky, all vivid and inspired, like he was some kind of born noodler. And a fast noodler he was too, making his way across a universe of chalk within minutes. From directly above the picture, if I squinted, it was like The Roast was sailing through space. Others gathered around and gave their oohs and ahhs, making the boy’s mom puff up with pride. When Dad looked up my way and smiled, I felt a tad bit starstruck myself.

  “Cassistant,” he called out to me, with a shrug. “Who do you think I should pick next?” That prompted twenty kids to turn and flail their arms in my direction. In the midst of their commotion, I spotted a miserable black-haired girl who seemed to be about my age. She stood next to a kid who looked like the boy version of her. He was ruthlessly and repeatedly poking her in the ribs with an action figure.

  “That one,” I said, pointing her out to Dad, who then invited the girl to step up to the open suitcase, which suddenly seemed to have a treasure-chest-like appeal, drawing people closer to it.

  “Uh, a pink one, please,” was her simple request.

  “No prob,” said Dad. “This one should do the trick.” He handed her a pink sliver with A O scraped on it in curvy letters. “Annie Oakley’s soap,” said McClean. “You know who Annie Oakley was, little lady?”

  “No, sir…” the girl began.

  “She don’t know diddly!” interrupted her brother.

  Dad motioned the girl over and stooped close to her.

  “Annie Oakley was the toughest gal in the Old West, and a real sharpshooter,” he said. “And you know what? You seem to me like you could be pretty tough, too.”

  “I do?” she said.

  “Certainly!” said Dad. “You’ve got that serious look in your eye…not to mention that water pistol tucked into your belt there.”

  “But it ain’t got water,” she said.

  “That’s an easy problem to fix,” he said. “And when it comes to shooting, here’s some advice straight from the mouth of Annie Oakley herself. She’d tell a person to simply follow a target with the tip of the gun, just like it was the tip of your pointing finger.”

  Dad handed the pink sliver over and said, “Ms. Oakley also said to aim high.”

  The girl took the soap and dipped up to her elbows in the wagon, keeping her back to her brother while he just stood there and rolled his eyes. Unbeknownst to him, she also dipped the water pistol in good and deep and held it there for a bit. When all her washing and filling was done, she spun around on one foot, squinted an eye, and aimed the tip of the purple pistol high. Then she shot a steady stream of soapy water right at her brother’s nose, making him squinch his face up and drop his toy into the dirt. After that, the girl shoved the water pistol back into her waistband, and with her brother spitting and snorting behind her, skipped all the way to the swings with her hands drying in the wind.

  “Hey, mister! What can you do for a scaredy-cat?” piped up a freckled, tallish girl with a trembly kitten clawed into her shoulder and a slobbery dog growling at her hip. McClean handed her a soap marked RP and said, “Here’s a soap once used by Rosa Parks, great civil rights leader and a certified expert at standing up to a bully.”

  The girl dipped the kitten’s trembling feet into the soapy water, after which it sprung out of the wagon with a hiss and chased the yelping dog till they were just dots in the distance. The girl beamed with pride and squealed, “Run, Fuzzbucket, run!”

  After that, from my perch, the rest of the afternoon passed by in a bubbly blur, the crowd of kids getting smaller and smaller, one satisfied customer at a time. I watched Dad give a Babe Ruth soap to a kid who then took a stick and knocked a rock clear across the park. After that, there was a Paul Revere for a shy boy who ended up riding his scooter around hollering about the things he’d seen. Then there was a Jacques Cousteau to a girl who found tadpoles in the fountain. And last but not least, Orville and Wilbur Wright soaps to a pair of twins whose kites didn’t touch ground for an hour afterward. It seemed everyone who wanted a wash got just what they needed, and after each and every one, Dad looked up to check on me, perhaps to make sure I hadn’t trickled right off the edge of The Roast into a puddle of wackadoo. But Dad had everything so carefully planned out, it almost seemed too deliberate to be wackadoo. I’d no idea why or how he was carrying on this way, but I had a sense that the whys and the hows were somewhere needing to be found.

  As the sun dropped behind the two tallest buildings in downtown Nimble Creek, only one small boy still waited. He stepped up to the suitcase, smacking a Frisbee like a tambourine while his mother fanned herself on the sidewalk.

  “Like they always say, last but not least,” said Dad. “And who would you like to be today, little fella?”

  “You gots any bidey soap?” the boy asked.

  “Say again?” said Dad.

  “Spider-Man,” said his grinning mom. “He wants to climb the walls.”

  I wondered if this would be Dad’s first stumper of the day. What on earth would he conjure up for a request like that?

  “Errr…let’s see here,” he said, rummaging through the suitcase and grabbing a sliver marked M from under the pile. “No Spider-Man soaps in here, little fella, but I tell you what I do have. I’ve got one Michelangelo left. Michelangelo was super famous for making objects look human by his carving ability. He could take a chunk of almost anything—marble, bronze…who knows, maybe even Play-Doh—and make it look like a real person. Pretty amazing, huh?”

  The boy stood unimpressed beneath his bowl haircut, giving me a small sinking feeling. That is, until Dad, cool as a cucumber, squatted to the boy’s level and sweetened the deal.

  “And get this,” he said. “Michelangelo was a painter too. And to paint one of his biggest projects, for four years he actually had to hang from the ceiling.”

  “Like Bidey!” said the boy.

  “Like Bidey,” said Dad.

  The kid immediately squeezed the sliver into his chubby fist, tucked the Frisbee between his knees, and waddled up to the wagon. After washing his hands in what was left of the cloudy water, the boy dried them on his shorts and hopped onto his scooter with a “Danks, Mistel McWean!” I couldn’t believe I actually felt relief at the thought of my disguised dad being capable of choosing just the right antique soap sliver for a Spider-Man–loving kid.

  Once the boy and his mother were gone, all that was left on the gazebo was a wagonful of dirty water, a suitcase with a smaller pile of soap slivers in it, and a man who resembled my dad less and less.

  “Let’s call it a day,” he said as h
e took off his big green glasses and wiped the nose part with his lapel.

  I climbed down from the rooftop, feeling more than a little stunned, my ears buzzing like neon from the electric spaghetti of questions in my head.

  “Did I say there’d be some surprises, or did I say there’d be some surprises?” Dad said, sleeve-dabbing the sweat from his forehead. He closed up the suitcase with the tambourine tucked inside, dumped the dirty water out of the wagon, and carefully rolled up the banner. The sha-shasha of the Nimble Creek street sweeper passed behind us through the park, its spinning brushes turning the little artist’s masterpiece into Vincent van Gone. It seemed to me like the whole day might not have actually happened, as if it would just sweep away in a chalky swirl of imagination.

  “Cass, would you pick the back end of this thing up?” Dad lifted the front of the loaded wagon into the side door of The Roast. “I promise this will be the last help of the day.”

  A few clumps of wet glitter from the wagon smeared onto the front of my shirt. M. B. McClean plopped onto the couch and eased his feet out of his shoes. The Douglas Nordenhauer part of him looked exhausted.

  “I think these things must be made from a rubber snake,” he said, tossing his loafers aside and rubbing his heels. “I’d have been more comfy in a couple of mismatched shoes from that box back there.” He folded the big green glasses and tucked one stem down into his shirt.

  “So what did you think?” he said. “I know you must be full of questions.”

  Full of questions was putting it mildly. It was more like my head was an endless Pez dispenser of mysteries. And my body stood there stiff to match.

  “I don’t…What was…How did…Dad, why are you doing all this?”

  Dad stopped and stared at me kind of flat-mouthed, like he was undecided about his next sentence.

  “The question is, why would I not do all this?” he said. “Seems to me it would be a shame to turn down an opportunity that one of our Nordenhauer ancestors saw fit to preserve and pass on.”

  He picked up the yellow top hat, tossed it Frisbee-style all the way to the dashboard, and patted the couch for me to join him.

  “You know, Cass, my original plan was to share this family secret with you when you turned the big 1-1, but frankly, due to the turn of events with your mom this past week, I figured you needed an advance on some magic in your life.”

  “You mean magic like a fake lady being sawed in two, right?” I said, trying to balance my behind on the narrow hard edge of the couch.

  “Nope. An entirely different kind of magic.”

  “So there really is no meat?”

  Dad shook his head. “There’s no meat, Casstrami.”

  “No steaks?”

  “Not one.”

  “But you’ve sold meat before, right? Like to the church people and stuff?”

  “Yep,” Dad said, mixed in with a groan. “But I’m tired of meat.”

  I looked all around at the sure-enough no-meatness of the RV.

  “So this is all about old soap?” I said.

  “Old soap, yes, but not just any old soap,” said Dad, his voice brighter. “Special old soap.”

  He pulled the brown suitcase from the wagon and laid it across his lap.

  “Cass, ever since you had knuckle dimples, you’ve been a bright, kind, and curious girl,” he said. “That’s why I feel like I can trust you with this knowledge at a young age.”

  Then he suddenly got all hushed.

  “Let me tell you about a little something I like to call Sway.” Dad said it slow, like a teacher calling out a spelling word.

  “Sway?” I asked.

  “S-W-A-Y,” he said.

  I thought he meant like when my whole fourth-grade class once had to sway back and forth with our hands in the air while we kazooed “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”

  “You mean like this?” I waved my top half left and right, nearly swaying myself onto the floor.

  “No, no.” Dad leaned in close. “Sway,” he said. “As in power…As in influence.”

  Despite the thick summer heat of the evening, I felt chills scatter up and down both my arms. I scooted onto the cushiony part of the couch and gave Dad my full attention.

  “These here soapy remains, each in its own way, have the power to change the people they come in contact with. Inspiring a person to do more, to be more,” he said, drumming his fingers on the top of the suitcase. His promising words echoed bittersweetly in my head. Do more, I thought. Just like Mom.

  “How does that happen?” I asked.

  “Surprisingly, it’s really a simple transaction,” he explained. “You wash your hands with one of these here soaps, each one once belonging to a notable historical figure, and poof! you begin to take on that person’s best qualities. Just like you witnessed from high atop The Roast this very day.”

  Dad was right. I had just witnessed some pretty nifty things. Even so, I still had a lump of doubt in my throat that felt like I’d gulped down the dry yellow middle part of a boiled egg.

  “But van Gogh and Michelangelo…didn’t they live like hundreds of years ago? How could their soaps be kept for so long and not be all crumbly?”

  “By the gentle and careful efforts of those who came before us,” said Dad, softly knocking at the case with his knuckles. “Granting us our own unique Nordenhauer way of changing the world, one hand-washing at a time.”

  “So does it work on grown-ups too?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Have you ever tried one?”

  Dad paused for a moment and twisted his mouth from side to side.

  “Honestly, Cass, I haven’t decided which one I’d want to try first. So many available options make for a tough decision. You see, it’s very important to choose the right soap for the right person.”

  “Then, if you haven’t tried one, how’d you know they would work?”

  “Let’s just say there was some top secret testing done before we left,” he said.

  I remembered overhearing him and Uncle Clay talking about wishing they had this stuff when they were kids. But then I also remembered how when I was five, Dad used to tell me he could pull his thumb off and put it back on again. How he made it look so real. And besides, I’d never known Dad to use words like power and influence. Those were Mom words.

  “Come on,” I said. “How did you really make all that happen today?”

  Dad set the suitcase on the table in front of him and looked at me real serious.

  “Looks like you’ve given me no choice,” he said, fumbling around in his big jacket pocket until he pinched out a teeny brass key.

  “I’m going to have to implement Rule of The Roast Number Five: Keep away from the Sway.”

  Dad struggled to turn the key in the rusty suitcase lock, making me feel like I did the other night when he’d snatched the phone from my hand.

  “How come?” I said.

  “Because you’re not ready.”

  “But those kids got to try it.”

  “Because they believed,” he said. “The power these slivers can have over a believer is strong.” Dad looked me in the eye. “Sway is not for doubters, Cass.”

  “But…”

  “You’ll have your own taste of it when you are good and ready,” he said. “When you’re feeling more open to the possibilities.”

  He paused a moment. “Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.” But it was a Yes, sir that was as No, sir as a Yes, sir could be.

  “Until that day,” he said. “As we travel, this case will be locked tight. Only when we are working will it be opened.”

  When he leaned to push the case back under the driver’s seat, I saw two damp ovals on the couch where he’d sat on his wet jacket tails. A small part of me wanted to laugh at him, but the rest of me was busy searching my brain for far-fetched things I knew of that had turned out true. Fainting goats. Lizards that spit blood. Babies who can name all the presidents. But magical soap? Could Dad even mak
e all that up? Because making all that up might be the ultimate in wrength.

  “We’ll hit the road again tomorrow in search of shoe-o numero two-o, and then we’ll get to see Sway in action again. And just imagine this: someday soon, you’ll be choosing the sliver you most want to use. And as my partner, you’ll have the pick of the whole collection.”

  “When will that happen?” I said.

  Dad gave a test sniff to his armpit.

  “Soon enough,” he said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to air out this sweaty suit.” Dad squeezed his way through the bathroom door and turned all sorts of ways to try and get it shut behind him. His changing back into Douglas Nordenhauer sounded like not-so-distant thunder. While I waited, Dad’s mention of someday choosing my own soap sliver had me feeling more than a little muddled. I mean, trying the soap could maybe be compared to finally being allowed to open one of Aunt Jo’s jars from the storm shelter. Like it would be cool to read all the notes inside there, except for they might end up being nothing but a big bummer.

  When Dad came back out in the Roll Tide T-shirt and faded jeans I’d seen so many times before, he warned, “I had to hang the suit from the ceiling light in there. Don’t let that lemon-lime scarecrow spook the soul out of you in the middle of the night.

  “Now, what do you say we buckle up and find ourselves some supper?” he said. “You starvin’ like a Marvin?”

  I’d only eaten snacky stuff all day, so I was very much starvin’ like three Marvins. Thankfully, by the time I’d even gotten into my seat good, we’d already pulled into a place called Sup ’n’ Go. It was one of those restaurants with a flat roof over a drive-up area where people on skates used to bring out the food. Dad thought long and hard about parking up under there with everyone else, but ultimately decided that The Roast was too tall for it. Mainly our bumping the roof with the top of The Roast helped him make that decision. I ate a whole catfish sandwich they called a po-boy, and he had two of the same. With his mouth half full between bites, Dad said, “So be honest, Cassparagus. I know this is a lot to take in all at once, but didn’t you think those things you saw out there today were pretty impressive?”