by Bob Tarte
“I was amazed to hear it. It’s so funny. He was such a tortured man—so skilled and emotive in so many styles and forms, yet at the same time he hates them for their clichés and their grip on him. His stuff is so very serious and funny and ironic and arty. It’s so derivative and so original all at the same time, and the tension ended up killing him. That’s my theory, anyway. I was kind of tingly hearing it, and it has that part where he just wails to the woman who dumped him, ‘Beep-beep, bip-bip yeah,’—you know, from the Beatles ‘Drive My Car,’ as if that’s going to win her back somehow. It’s an amazing performance. Then that awful ‘Dust in the Wind’ by Kansas came on, and as I changed the station, I said to Carol that one song I hadn’t heard in years was ‘Beep Beep’—the one about the little Nash Rambler trying to pass the Cadillac—and you can guess what song came on next.”
As if on cue, Bo interrupted us by honking, “How’s the food, guys?” But his display of enthusiasm dissipated as he plopped down on the red leatherette bench next to Bill and groused, “This weather isn’t helping us at all. If things don’t start to turn around, we’ll be lucky to stay open another month.”
The weather grew steadily more dismal as we consoled Bo with a few oblique phrases while eating around the worst parts of our meals. By the time we had jettisoned our substance-laden plates in the trash receptacle, snow covered Bill’s blue Jetta. We could barely see the road in front of us on the two-mile drive back to my house. “Don’t you think you had better head home?” I said. “Spare yourself further exposure to the perils of the world at large?”
“You wish,” he told me. “Not when there’s good television to watch.”
To Bill, “good television” meant finding the Inuit-language Canadian channel on our satellite system and watching a Frobisher Bay resident cook an apparent lump of animal fat over a campfire. “That looks better than anything we ate,” he said. “At least it didn’t sit around for a couple of weeks.”
Safely isolated from the glare of our personalities, Linda lay in the bedroom talking on the phone with the door closed. After a while, she came out to ask, “Did you hear something?”
“It sounded like a pop,” said Bill.
“It sounded like an accident,” Linda said.
Spread out across the windows of the front porch, we strained to find signs of a wreck through the swirling snow and darkness. “Maybe the ice is cracking again,” I offered. Then an SUV slowed and turned on its emergency flashers. As it pulled onto the shoulder, its headlights illuminated a car sitting sideways just off the road. Steam poured out of the pulverized engine section. A teenage boy and girl stood in the ditch with dazed expressions. As one man from the SUV approached them, another ran past them toward our barn.
Throwing on their jackets, Linda hurried outside to talk to the teenagers while Bill followed the man into the darkness. He returned quickly. “It looks pretty bad,” he said. “There’s isn’t much left of the other car.”
I dialed 911 as Bill went back outdoors. “Can you check to see if anyone’s hurt?” the operator asked me.
“There’s not much left of the car,” I parroted.
“We need to know if we should send an ambulance.”
Bill ducked his head through the door as I stretched the telephone cord toward the porch. “The guy in the red car is unconscious,” he told me. “We can’t get at him.”
“Send the ambulance,” I said.
“The people from the other car seem to be okay,” Bill added.
Linda had joined us again. “This woman who lives in Ionia just around the corner from the Chinese restaurant said the people in the white car passed her on the curve. She said they were passing everybody.”
A man in a dark blue stocking cap came into the glow of our outside light. “Call an ambulance.”
“It’s on the way.”
Bill returned to the car with the man trapped inside, while Linda crossed the road to talk to a few more people who had joined the gathering crowd. I suited up and stood in the front yard. The man with the blue stocking cap set up flares and started directing traffic. I stared down the long curve toward Lowell until I saw the first flicker of emergency-vehicle lights and heard the sirens. When I came back into the house, the phone was ringing.
“I’m sorry to bother you so late,” my mother said. “But when you get a chance, could you bring back the package that Mike left for me? I never got a chance to look at it.”
“There’s been an accident outside,” I told her. Flashing red lights swept the living room walls as a fire truck rumbled into position. “I talked to Mike already. Remember? We discussed this earlier today. He told me that he didn’t leave anything at your house. There isn’t any package.”
“It might not have been Mike,” she said, “but somebody left something somewhere.”
I couldn’t really argue with that. It was as succinct a summing up of the seeming randomness of events in life as I had ever heard. “Call Joan and ask her about it. Maybe she knows something.” I certainly didn’t. In fact, I knew a little less about the world every day.
I went back outdoors. The snow had begun to let up a little. Headlights lined the road in both directions as far as I could see. “I’ll never get out of here,” said Bill’s voice from behind me. While firemen worked on the crushed car, an ambulance driver convinced the teenage boy and girl to go with him. As he ducked his head and climbed into the back, the boy held his elbow to his chest as if he had been hurt.
Bill followed me inside. “Beep beep,” he said.
CHAPTER 10
Underwater
My mother’s house was drowning in little slips of paper. She could have worked for a fortune cookie company, although most people, upon finishing their moo goo gai pan, might have been perplexed to crack open a cookie and encounter the message “Bring back my aluminum mixing bowls.” One note caught my eye as I hauled myself upstairs to hunt for the sixteenth pair of scissors we had bought her. Poking out of the back of my dad’s antique-style clock on the archway overlooking the living room was the merest hint of the corner of a yellow sticky-note. I popped open the battery compartment to find a memo from four months earlier, which reported, “Purse is behind the humidifier, 12/29.” If my mom couldn’t remember where she had hidden the purse, I wondered how she could recall where she had hidden the reminder about her purse.
Returning downstairs sans scissors, I spotted a spiral-bound notebook topping a heap of junk mail on the dining room table. At first, the taped-together advertisements commanded my attention. I had torn them into pieces and thrown them away the previous week so that my mom wouldn’t confuse them with her bills and try to pay them. But she had retrieved them from the wastebasket and reconstructed them with the care of a museum curator. As I stuffed them into a plastic trash bag for immediate conveyance to the garage garbage bin, my eyes wandered to the open page of the notebook; then I sat down to read the entry in full.
“When I was talking to Linda on the phone, Bob asked if he could see the watch that my husband gave me for our anniversary,” my mom wrote. “He stuck it in his pocket and took it home with him. I want that watch back. If he doesn’t return it, I will call the lawyer and remove him from my will.”
“What’s this?” I asked my mom as she bustled around the kitchen.
“Oh, that.” She casually ripped out the page and crumpled it up. “You haven’t seen my anniversary watch, have you?”
“The one that’s upstairs in your dresser drawer? Why on earth would you think I’d take that home?”
She chuckled guiltily. “I just get worked up sometimes. You know me. If I put it in the drawer, it was probably because I didn’t want those little boys from next door to find it.”
“Which boys?” I knew of no little boys on my mom’s street at all.
“Those brats that live next door with what’s-their-names. They came over again last night and kept moving my things around. I even caught one of them going through my purse, and I had to
hide it.”
This account troubled me deeply. Two different friends of mine had parents who had started complaining about nonexistent children shortly before suffering a serious decline. As soon as I got back home, I phoned Joan and told her what had happened.
“I’ll schedule her for another mental evaluation,” Joan sighed. “But, Bob, we have to be grateful for how well she’s doing overall despite whatever is wrong with her.”
Bett gave me similar advice. “She still gets her own meals, looks neat and clean, keeps up the house, and she seems happier lately than she has in a long time. The best we can do is let the doctor know what’s going on and watch for any signs that she’s a danger to herself. I’m coming in next weekend,” she added, “so I’ll keep an eye on her to see if she’s acting any different.”
I felt better after these conversations and realized that visits from imaginary boys weren’t significantly worse than neighbors purportedly making off with grass seeders or sons allegedly absconding with electric trimmers. And if seeing little people who weren’t there indicated a mental breakdown, then I had slipped a serious cog two decades earlier.
A few years before meeting Linda, I had briefly dated a woman, Jolene, who claimed to be a witch. One summer afternoon, we sat at a card table in her living room working on her résumé for a job as a substitute teacher that didn’t explicitly require spell casting. While struggling to fill a yawning chasm between her periods of paid employment, I glanced around the room in search of inspiration only to notice a small person staring at me from the foot of the stairs. For an instant, I assumed it was her Vietnamese roommate. But when I blinked, the figure vanished.
My face must have worn the classic pop-eyed, just-seen-a-ghost expression, because Jolene stopped riffling through her sheaf of papers and asked, “What’s the matter? Are you feeling okay?”
“Over there,” I managed to squeak as I gestured with my thumb. I decided it wouldn’t be a problem admitting a strange apparition to a witch. “By the railing. There was a little person, about three feet tall, with slanted eyes and a bowl haircut.”
I might as well have reported a ladybug on the windowsill. Jolene turned her attention back to the résumé and in a blasé manner said, “I left the back door wide open, and it probably wandered in from the garden.”
“What wandered in?”
“A fairy,” she explained, as if speaking to a child. “They help me grow my flowers and vegetables.” I resisted asking her if they might possibly assist with résumé writing.
Certainly they couldn’t have topped my mom in the note-writing department. I knew that Mom’s mental powers had begun to deteriorate, but I hadn’t expected them to take a nosedive so quickly. I felt as if my sisters and I were standing in water up to our chins, and the level would rise before it came down. That was the most profound metaphor that came to mind as I stood in our dining room staring out at the Grand River, which had just flooded its banks. A pond was forming down the hill, and while this meant the arrival of wood ducks before long, it also promised hordes of mosquitoes and a population of vicious alligators hell-bent on tearing me into pieces. Well, maybe they weren’t exactly alligators. Someone had recently told me that spring peepers were frogs, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
THROUGHOUT THE WINTER MONTHS, there had been two constants: wretched weather and relentless phone calls from Eileen Kucek. She had taken a proprietary interest in Lulu, and the haze of an accusatory tone hung over every conversation about the previously pampered white duck, who had become a contented member of our flock. “Are you feeding her enough fresh greens? I can bring over a few bags of kale if you’re not giving her any,” she had told me more than once, despite my protests that we treated our waterfowl and poultry to fresh produce every day. On another occasion she had said, “I want to make sure you’re keeping her pool water clean. The last time I saw Lulu, the water looked dirty.”
“That’s because she brought a beakful of mud into the clean pool with her,” I explained. “That’s the nature of a duck. We empty and refill each of the four pools at least twice a day. But if you like, I’ll try to divert the Grand River into Lulu’s pen.” I didn’t bother telling her how easy that would be if the flooding followed its usual course.
Mostly, I let the answering machine weary its silicon heart with Eileen’s droning voice. But I immediately returned her call the morning she left a message about bringing us two new geese. “The woman who owns them has to give them away, because she’s moving. I’ve got a friend who can take ducks,” she added, in a development we would soon hear more about, “but the geese have nowhere else to go. And they’re really sweet.”
We had the space in the backyard pens, we were crazy about geese—having recently added a new gander named Matthew—and I couldn’t think of a belligerent primate I’d rather have drop by for a visit than Eileen. So after a quick consultation with Linda, I agreed. “As long as you’re sure the geese would be happy living with us,” I said. “Lulu’s been a little grumpy with us ever since we took away her bedroom slippers.”
“I’m bringing their owner-companion, Marcia, and I’ll let her decide whether or not she wants to let you have them. But I’m glad you brought up Lulu. We’ll talk about her when I see you.”
“I can’t wait,” I muttered after I hung up.
While I bided my time until the promised goose-and-pest arrival, Linda buzzed into town for groceries and brought back news of our former master gardener, Henry Murphy. “I saw him walking down the street carrying his laundry, so I gave him a ride to the Ammo Shack. His bumblebee died over the winter.”
“Most of them do.” Stanley Sue was performing sentry duty, stalking the tops of the bunny cages. When I handed her a grape fresh from the store, she crushed it in her beak and let it fall onto Walter’s back below.
“So without a car, he’s not able to do his gardening consultation now.”
“That’s a shame when so much soil needs testing.” On hands and knees I retrieved the pulped grape before Walter had a chance to eat it and foul his touchy digestive system. “Maybe he could test the water in our pond for phosphorus, nitrogen, and potash.”
Linda’s crinkling of plastic grocery bags offended the delicate sensitivities of our parrot Ollie, who voiced his disapproval of the innocuous noise with a series of grating chirps. Barely missing a beat, Linda covered his cage with a light blue bedsheet from the hall closet, transforming his outburst into contrite squeals. “Nobody feels the least bit sorry for you,” she told him. “I wonder what kind of people would use Henry for financial services? That’s what he said he’s doing now. Anyway, he seemed kind of pathetic, and I said we might help him out.”
“With financial services? You’ve got to be kidding.”
“No, I offered to do his laundry once in a while.”
THE APPEARANCE OF two women in our backyard interrupted our discussion of Henry’s professional prospects. “This is my good friend Marcia,” said Eileen in a sickeningly sweet singsong when we greeted them outside. Then her voiced dropped an octave to convey the burden of her acquaintance with us as she hurriedly told Marcia, “This is Bob and Linda.”
“What a nice pen,” Marcia said as Eileen elbowed past us to throw open the door.
“Peewee!” Eileen called to an unimpressed Lulu, while pointedly failing to peewee the other flock members.
“It’s goose paradise,” Marcia proclaimed. An energetic woman in her forties, she had tightly curled hair that gathered above her ears only to terminate abruptly below them in an awkward truncation that suggested a mushroom cap. I wondered if she had made off with my mother’s electric trimmer for the job. Her coif seemed subdued compared to Eileen’s, though. Instead of the usual tightly wrapped bun, she had arranged her straw-colored hair into a wildly sprouting topknot reminiscent of a troll doll on a bad ‘do day. The styling incited muttering among the ducks whenever she inclined her head toward them. I imagined that they associated the tuft with a raised crest, sig
naling provocation.
Chatting excitedly about her geese, Marcia led Linda to her van while I counted to myself, waiting for Eileen to say something ridiculous. I managed to make it to eleven.
“Something’s wrong with Lulu. She’s very depressed. She won’t come to me.”
“Of course she won’t come to you. She doesn’t know you from Don King,” I told her, diplomatically avoiding any mention of her hair.
“Well, I was talking to Kate this week, and she decided it would be best if Lulu went to live with Henrietta.”
“Or Henrietta could come here,” I suggested, uncertain who Henrietta might be.
Shunning Eileen, the ducks and geese retreated into their shed, quacked and honked among themselves in hasty conference, then filed out again. Leading the flock was our white Embden goose Matthew, whom our rehabber friend Marge Chedrick had taken in from an apartment-complex parking lot and given to us a month earlier. At first sight of the intruding Eileen, Matthew propelled himself at her with outraged hissing, outstretched neck, and serrated bill poised for biting. Ignorant of basic waterfowl body language, Eileen extended a welcoming hand. She pivoted her wrist at just the right moment for Matthew’s jaws to clamp onto her jacket sleeve instead of latching onto flesh.
“What a nasty duck,” she observed as she backed out of the pen. Taking exception to the dual insult, the goose pursued her and would have chomped her once again if I hadn’t whisked him off the ground and deposited him in the bunny enclosure. “Lulu,” she called frantically. “Lulu, are you okay?”
Linda and Marcia padded into the yard carrying a large goose apiece in their arms. Spotting the newcomers, Matthew honked a baritone saxophone solo and easily hopped over the rabbit fence to gallop toward Linda, wings flapping. Marcia’s geese burst free of human embrace and with exuberant caroling joined Matthew on the grass.
“Watch out, he’s dangerous,” warned Eileen.
