by Jan Carson
(Malcolm Orange had, from an early age, enjoyed a laissez-faire relationship with the truth. Given the choice between honesty and the opportunity to evoke sympathy, devotion or a standing ovation, Malcolm almost always went with fantastical lies.
He had inherited this trait from his father, who at the tender age of twenty-three had developed acute appendicitis during a spring break trip to Cabo San Lucas. Chronically short of cash, Jimmy Orange (or Clem, as he’d been known in his college days, the guys in his dorm taking all of two days to make the subtle leap from Orange to Clementine and finally Clem) had found himself unable to afford a trip to the local tourist hospital. Powered by resolve and a full bottle of Mexican tequila, Mr Orange had had his appendix removed by a ‘qualified’ doctor who spoke only three terse words of English and operated out of a local funeral parlor.
Mr Orange latterly claimed that the Mexican surgeon, incapable of understanding his instructions, had removed not only his diseased appendix but also half a rib, two suspicious-looking moles and the small gland that controls truth-telling in all normal humans.
‘Don’t blame me, Martha,’ Malcolm often heard his father yelling, ‘I’m medically incapable of telling the truth. Malcolm too. It’s not his fault. It’s genetic.’
Mrs Orange’s response was most often indecipherable, a whirling barrage of four-letter words and flying fists. Seemingly, despite her lifelong devotion to medical dramas, both Mexican and normal, she simply did not understand the complexities of the human body.)
In Milton, Idaho, with his flip-flopped feet balancing up on the countertop, Malcolm Orange drew breath, placed his hand on the exact spot – just below his right shoulder blade – where his father had often pointed out the missing truth gland, and lied like all future meals depended on it.
‘The doctor says I’ve got two weeks at the most,’ he stated bluntly, mumbling through a mouthful of butterscotch sundae and chopped nuts. ‘I could go at any second though.’
The original ladies, those reluctant pioneers who’d first approached him on Main Street – or Etta and Letty, as Malcolm had come to know them – fished a pair of lace hankies out of their sleeves and simultaneously cried into their china teacups; salt water mixing with their old-fashioned Earl Grey. Mr Wilson, penitent in his candy stripe apron, fixed a whole plate of pastrami and banana sandwiches, exactly the way Malcolm liked them, and Winston the Golden Retriever, who was blessed with an over-developed ability to sniff out bullshit, both canine and human, retired to the front stoop to gnaw, deeply frustrated, on his own hind leg.
Thereafter, the residents of Milton, Idaho struggled to preserve a sense of normalcy, all the time aware that tragedy lurked, imminent and inevitable, just around the corner. Mr Wilson kept Malcolm’s stomach constantly full, heaping fresh treats onto the tabletop every time his plate ran empty. Etta, armed with a floral notebook, helped him to compose an epitaph suitable for his coming funeral. Letty, motivated by a particularly earnest made-for-TV movie she’d recently seen on the Hallmark Channel, asked Malcolm if he’d like to have a park bench constructed in his honor. Malcolm Orange politely declined, saying he’d prefer a swing seeing as he wasn’t greatly inclined to sitting still. Letty immediately left the Milton Deli, vindicated and eager to find a suitable local swing upon which to nail a commemorative plaque.
It was only on the eleventh day of Malcolm Orange’s final fortnight on earth that the truth came leaking out.
Mrs Orange, who had become semi-permanently based in the Main Street laundromat, was up to her elbows in the second white wash of the day when she found herself facing down a delegation of elderly ladies with notebooks. Having spent the better part of fifteen years in the company of Jimmy Orange, Martha Orange (an Orange by marriage rather than blood) had grown adept in the spotting, and subsequent avoidance of, sticky situations, long before they became attached to her person. Without so much as drawing breath she quickly twisted her waist-length hair east, west and finally south, securing it atop her head with the help of an unpaired tube sock. After which she began to stuff dozens of vests, underpants, mismatched socks and graying brassieres, still dripping, into a pair of ancient carrier bags. Then, hooking the bags into each elbow like a set of old-fashioned water pails, she hoisted the sports bag containing a sleeping Ross into her arms and attempted to exit the laundromat.
The Golden Retriever cut her off at the door.
(Winston, driven by the desire to see the Oranges disappear, was greatly inclined to chew the baby as it slept noisily in its sports bag. However, having realized that no one – not even the elderly, and soon to be irate, inhabitants of an Idaho backwater – looks favorably upon a dog who eats small children, he found himself acting as a tactical roadblock instead. ‘A confrontation,’ he concluded, ‘will inevitably lead to a lynching and then things can return to normal round here.’ He glanced surreptitiously at his hind legs which were chewed raw round the ankles, and his previously lustrous tail which was beginning to go the same way, and decided to stand his ground even if the Orange lady kicked him in the teeth.)
The elderly ladies shuffled forwards and grouped around Malcolm’s mother. They were a terrifying breed to look upon, with eyes saucering behind their prescription lenses and corrective footwear burrowing into the laundromat floor and floral notepads poised like a gaggle of preshrunk paparazzi.
Martha Orange – who had in her pre-Orange days been an Oklahoma farm girl and, for the most part, unfenced – shook right down to her mismatched ankle socks, shook like a boxed cow and fought the inclination to bolt, scattering elderly ladies like bowling pins all along Main Street. She hefted Ross higher in her arms, silently reminded herself of the fact that she had once shot a jackrabbit at a quarter mile distance and, thus armed, gathered her resolve like a downtown bulldozer.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, attempting to elbow her way through the forest of walking aids, ‘I was just leaving.’
The elderly ladies, resolute as the Red Sea, showed no inclination of parting.
Martha Orange stepped forward, swinging her sleeping son with intent. The Golden Retriever, previously upright, stretched out on the graying linoleum, blocking the door. The eldest and most forthright of the elderly ladies took a step forward to meet her.
‘You forgot your shoes, dear,’ she shouted, adjusting her hearing aid to a more sociable level even as she yelled.
In her haste to avoid the lynching party Mrs Orange had indeed abandoned her tennis shoes by the tumble dryer. She realized, with a weariness far beyond her thirty-seven years, that the battle was not only lost but already coasting towards out-and-out disaster. Deflated, she lowered herself onto a plastic seat, gently placed Ross, still encased in his sports bag, on the seat opposite and slipped her feet into her unlaced sneakers.
Etta and Letty, anxious to block her exit route, positioned themselves on either side of Mrs Orange and introduced themselves, Etta first, and by proxy Letty, who’d been taking a supporting role since nineteen hundred and thirty-three and felt no inclination to rattle the boat in this, her eighty-eighth year. After which, having elicited no response from Mrs Orange, Etta, by way of an icebreaker, offered the young woman a Red Vine from the box she always carried in her apron pocket.
Mrs Orange accepted. The three women sat on the laundromat seats with their naked ankles extended towards the washing machine screens, sucking and slurping quietly for the better part of two minutes. From a distance Martha Orange admired her own Southern-fried ankles, two brassy doorknobs protruding from a pair of girlish shins. She had been blessed at birth with both an unfortunate boxer’s nose and a pair of Hollywood legs, capable, even at thirty-seven, of shaming girls half her age as she cut up dance floors, sidewalks and, more lately, the bargain aisles of Walmarts, all across the United States. Etta glanced down at the younger lady’s ankles and felt the feeble sting of fading jealousy. Etta, who had, in the summers of nineteen hundred and fifty-three and -four, won the Miss Lovely Legs Idaho competition, who had once prided
herself on mile-high stilettos and whore-red toenails, who could turn the farm boys’ heads with a single flash of naked heel, now tottered round town in a pair of orthopedic sandals, her ankles ham-pink, swollen and criss-crossed with varicose veins as fine and furious as spiderwebs.
Whilst the three ladies polished off their Red Vines, the rest of the delegation regrouped, forming a nosy semicircle around their feet. A reverent hush descended upon the laundromat floor, settling into the spaces between the soap powder stains and dryer fluff. Overcome by the heat and the anticipation, Emmy-Kate Barrett, a substantial lady currently located to the left of Martha Orange’s shoulder, felt herself about to succumb to one of her infamous turns and, lowering herself to the floor in preparation, adopted the supine pose of a zealous worshipper; hands clenched, knees braced against the unforgiving linoleum, eyes cast heavenward in the hope of respite or divine vision. The ranks parted to make way for her mammoth backside, now angled upwards in contemplation of the ceiling fan. A fevered hum worked its way through the ranks. Cotton handkerchiefs were unfurled and raised to mop sweating lips. Dentures were adjusted, high coiled hairdos patted into place and the occasional shirt sleeve slid high to meet an eager elbow. Somewhere towards the back of the group an elderly lady, one-time photographer for the local rag, produced an aging Canon and prepared to commit the coming incident to film.
However, when the Red Vines had been sucked right down to their bloody nibs and sticky fingers wiped surreptitiously on sweater fronts, and a confrontation seemed all but inevitable, Etta rose awkwardly, leaning on Malcolm’s mother for support, and shooed the audience reluctantly through the front door. They moved like soup through the summer heat, canes and sandal heels catching on the laundromat floor. Etta persevered, thin-lipped and silent, employing the same stoic thunder she had, in nineteen hundred and fifty six, used to stare down a stampeding bull. Once relegated to Main Street, the group instantly reformed, cackling like a gaggle of ill-tempered geese, veiny noses pressed against the window.
Etta Mae Wheeler, fast approaching her eighty-sixth year, had seen more than her fair share of confrontations. During the preceding eighty-five years she had been yelled at, punched, kicked, insulted and occasionally baptized with a vitriolic pint of local brew. For the most part Etta Mae Wheeler received exactly what she deserved, for, as she often said, ‘Folk round here walk their size nines all over a gal if she don’t give as good as she gets.’ Occasionally, however, she’d found herself the innocent victim of unfortunate circumstances. As a small girl, growing up thin and filthy on the family’s North Dakota chicken farm, Etta had once lost two teeth and the tip of her left earlobe in an impromptu shotgun battle between her elder brother and the hired hand. The instigating incident – something vague concerning the unjust consumption of the last pickled onion – was long forgotten in the annals of Wheeler history. The consequences lingered on, forever measured out in half sets of earrings, in prosthetic teeth and hair-cuts eternally swept to the left side.
An almost century of American arguments had developed in Etta Mae Wheeler a thicker than usual skin, the ability to withstand tremendous shocks – including gunfire, swinging fists and hurtling baseball bats – without so much as flinching. An argument, she’d come to realize, was a dish best served with limited sides. Neither Etta nor Letty (who was for all intents and purposes a slightly less vociferous extension of Etta, having long ago developed verisimilar opinions on all subjects including capital punishment, Mexicans and the best way to cook sweet potatoes) were cruel women. Both ladies had experienced enough home-cooked suffering to recognize their own kind. Eager as they were to see justice rain down on the unsuspecting shoulders of young Malcolm, they held no particular beef with his mother.
Etta cracked open a fresh pack of Red Vines, offered one to Mrs Orange and, when declined, cleared her throat and launched into the lynching. She started slowly, as was her policy on most everything except lovemaking, which at the righteous age of eighty-five needed to be instigated with extreme and excessive speed lest the moment pass into yet another void of senile disappointment.
‘Lord Almighty, girl,’ she said, allowing the air to whistle slowly through the gap in her dentures, ‘them’s a mighty fine pair of pins you got there. Kind of legs’ll get a girl in trouble, turn the wrong kind of fella’s head if you know what I mean?’
(Martha Orange nodded slowly and thought of a hay shed in Oklahoma and her overalls puddling round her ankles as two swords of blind blonde sunlight bounced from the balding pate of her father’s foreman. She pictured her own blue eyes reflected enormously in his prescription sunglasses, cut as they were to resemble Elvis’s.
‘This is it,’ she’d thought, even then, just gone fifteen and frantic to be shot of Oklahoma. ‘These legs’ll walk me right out of this godforsaken state if I play my cards right.’
Thereafter, she’d played her cards fast and loose and found herself twenty-five years old waiting tables in a mid-sized market town just forty-three miles from the place of her birth. By twenty-five her fresh blue eyes had turned sap gray from wishing, her breasts were beginning to slip towards her waist and her shoulders leaned perpetually forward as if angling for any escape route out of Oklahoma. Only her legs remained, peeking from the hem of a heavy-frilled waiting skirt; two towering reminders of her junior high potential. Permanently encased in a pair of sinless white sneakers these very same legs had been ready for running the precise instant that Jimmy Orange walked through the diner door and charmed her sleepy heart with the unforgettable opener, ‘A slice of the Key Lime. Heavy on the cream there, honey. Show a bit more leg, and make the pie to go.’)
‘Don’t I know it, ma’am,’ Martha Orange whispered turning to face the older lady, ‘there are days I wish I’d been born with elephant stumps instead of these legs. They’ve done me nothing but trouble, the pair of them.’
Etta placed a solitary hand on Martha’s bare knee, cupping it like a mashed potato scoop, just below the skirt line. Thus situated she administered a series of slight, reassuring pats. Letty held her distance as she had been long accustomed to, twisting her cotton handkerchief silently in a gesture of unspoken solidarity.
‘The Lord himself giveth and then he done turn round and take away,’ Etta pronounced, using her spare hand to tug on her missing earlobe. ‘You be glad of the hand you got dealt, girl.’
‘Yes ma’am, I’m glad of everything I’ve got. There’s people around here much worse than me.’
‘You’re speaking the truth there, honey child. You’ve still got your health, not to mention a fine-looking baby, and Malcolm, and a good man to support you.’
At the mention of her husband, Martha Orange colored slightly and twisted her wedding band three complete circuits of her finger. Etta Mae Wheeler – who had in her eighty-six years of toil and sorrow been blessed with more than her fair share of no-good husbands and their no-good kin – noted the problem instantly and steered the conversation well away from Jimmy Orange’s doorstep.
‘Let me cut to the chase, honey. It’s Malcolm we come here to talk to you about,’ Etta continued. ‘The child’s got the whole town in an uproar.’
‘Lord Almighty,’ muttered Mrs Orange, absentmindedly disentangling Ross from the bowels of his sports bag. ‘What has he been doing now?’
‘He’s dying of the cancer,’ interjected Letty, suddenly unable to contain her vindication. ‘And I done bought him a swing set for to put a fine-lookin’ plaque on after he’s passed.’
Martha Orange raised her infant son to her face and moaned deeply into his bald, pink head.
‘And Isaac Wilson’s been feeding him up on pastrami sandwiches and root beer … and Etta’s here’s got the funeral all sorted … and week after next, if the child’s still alive, Emmy-Kate Barrett’s plannin’ on drivin’ up to Moscow to get the child a funeral suit,’ Letty continued, firing forwards on eighty-odd years of self-contained steam.
‘Oh dear,’ whispered Mrs Orange, ‘there seems to be a
bit of confusion here, ladies.’
‘A bit of confusion, my white, cotton arse!’ Etta stated bluntly. ‘The child’s been taking us all for a ride.’
‘Folks round here ain’t too happy.’
‘They’re fixing for a lynching of sorts.’
‘Best thing you Oranges can do is leave town tonight. Hell, leave the county if you can. You’re not best welcome in these parts.’
Somewhere, miles above the laundromat roof, Martha Orange allowed herself to smile, just a little, in moderation. Malcolm, she remembered for the first time in many years, in several states and three time zones, though blessed with his father’s arbitrary grasp of the truth, was also the son of an Oklahoma farm girl. His world was wide and unfenced. His imagination could not be contained by an aging Volvo.
Malcolm Orange, she realized with the greatest of delight, was not quite entirely ruined just yet.
Within three hours the Orange Volvo was once more rolling, winding its way slowly towards the Oregon border. Malcolm Orange – lodged in the back seat between Ross, an entire week’s worth of strangers’ laundry, unreturned, and the ever-present dresser – sat gingerly on his recently pulverized backside and chewed surreptitiously on a two-day-old pastrami and banana sandwich, part of the stash he’d long been saving for the day of his downfall.
Malcolm’s father, fuming in the driver’s seat, had, upon hearing a greatly downplayed version of the laundromat lynching, whipped the living daylights out of his son with his own tennis racquet. The crisscross pattern would remain embellished upon Malcolm’s buttocks all the way into the next week, whereupon it would be almost instantaneously replaced with the fine perforations of his future days.
‘Dammit,’ Mr Orange muttered, as the Oranges rolled into Portland, Oregon, ‘I’ve just about had it with the lot of you. Eating me out of house and home, fighting, causing consternation every town we stop in, never content with what you got. I’ve a good mind to leave you all to fend for yourselves. See how you like it on your own.’
