Malcolm Orange Disappears

by Jan Carson

  Should the Center’s medical staff have taken the time to examine the reverse of the second Post-it note, they might have noted a brief, handwritten memo: ‘Don’t believe a word he says,’ magic-markered in the spidery hand of the ambulance driver responsible for his delivery. However, the Center’s medical staff barely took the time to note their patients’ names. Later that afternoon as she folded and stacked Junior Button’s clean pajamas, Martha Orange discovered the Post-it note. Unable to find the correct cell in which to input speculation on a patient’s trustworthiness, she compromised with a question mark doodled beside his name. Thereafter Junior Button – a fibber of transatlantic renown – found himself all of a sudden believable as the Bible, yet constantly interrogated about his name.

  (Though inconsequential to the life and times of Martha Orange, it should be noted that Junior Button, fifth generation freeman and purveyor of top-quality dental products, had inherited this surname from his great-great-granddaddy.

  Elias Button had been a peculiarly silent man, gangly tall and bent like an old-fashioned lamppost. He’d spent forty-eight of his most formative years picking cotton for a Kentucky-based landowner with naught but a Christian name to differentiate him from all the other poor souls tending field. On the Christmas Day previous to Elias’s fifty-fourth birthday the Kentucky-based landowner, motivated in part by his youngest daughter’s dangerous obsession with the New Testament and partially by the new thinking swooping in from the east coast, suffered an uncharacteristic fit of benevolence and offered all his slaves three days’ holiday, a copy of the Holy Bible (incomprehensible to all but the household servants), and the opportunity to choose for themselves a family name with which to mark their births and deaths.

  Whilst the other fieldworkers picked names as exotic and unachievable as continental holiday resorts – Honest and Capable, Steadfast and Temperance – Elias chose Button. Decades passed, and many years after Elias had worked his way to freedom and then – five short months later – the family plot in the paupers’ graveyard, his second son, a grandfather now himself, asked the question, ‘Why Button?’ And his mother, already fading the goose-grey color of death, had smiled and answered as best she remembered, ‘When your daddy was a small little thing in the fields, the preacher come and read from the Word of the Lord on the Sabbath day and he always beginned his readings with the book of Genesis, “But on the Sabbath day thou shalt rest.”

  ‘Well your daddy had no more sense than a wild buck rabbit, he never done no schooling, never learned to figure or read the Word for hisself and when the preacher man readed about the Sabbath all he heard was, “Button, the Sabbath day thou shalt rest,” and he figured that this here fella Button was on to a good sure thing, having the Lord hisself urging for him to put his feet up. Your daddy worked forty-odd years for Mr Williams, sweated salt and blood six days a week in them fields, but he never did forget about that fella, Button. One particular Christmas Day Mr Williams gathered all us pickers up in the back barn and says, bold as parlor brass, “Choose you this day what you and your folks will be known as.” Your daddy turns to me, quick as Christ and says, “Button. We’ll be the Buttons from this day on, and if the Lord Almighty is tellin’ me to put my feet up, ain’t no white man in Kentucky gonna make me work.” Buttons we were, from that day on.’

  By the time he’d turned twelve Junior Button could retell this particular family legend with the pinching exactitude of a Benedictine monk reciting the Pater Noster. He was the fifth in an awkward line of Elias Buttons, going by Junior for his own grandfather had claimed Senior Button, and his father was simply Elias, born fourth and fortunate enough to be free from the need for alias. Though both men were dead before he hit his teenage years and he’d produced no further baby Buttons, Junior was far too uncomfortable with the responsibilities of maturity to risk a name upgrade. Junior Button bobbled through seventy-eight years of small-town living ill-disposed to grow up, a giant man with a name like a tip-toed pixie.)

  By Wednesday of his first week in the Center, the last of the Guinness had dribbled its way out of Junior Button’s system and his insulin levels were finally balancing out. The old man, sobering up for the first time in almost six months, became slowly aware of his surroundings. First the pastel-blue curtains came under his scrutiny, then the carpet, the ‘damn coffin of a bed’ and the ‘God-awful vomit you folks call art’, gilt-framed and globby on three out of four bedroom walls. On Wednesday evening, bored with the aesthetics, he turned his attention to the young woman who’d been bringing his meals three to five times a day.

  ‘You been sucking lemons, girl?’ he asked as Martha Orange positioned a plate of lukewarm cannelloni on his lap tray.

  Martha Orange ignored him. She noted his dinner choice on the information chart, faked his vitals in blue ink and hung the clipboard from the foot of the bed.

  ‘Look at me when I’m speaking to you, girl,’ he continued. ‘You look miserable as sin.’

  She paused by the end of the bed and offered Junior Button a watery smile. It was easier, Martha Orange had found, just to smile, to laugh or permit the residents to call her all the spiteful names of the day.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘long day. I’m just a little tired.’ She turned to go, grabbing as she left an armful of used towels, hoping this might save her the after dinner laundry run. At the sound of her voice, diluted though it was by fifteen years of hard travel, Junior Button sat bolt upright in his bed. ‘Hold your horses,’ he said. The cannelloni made a break for it, slipping first from the tray, then the plate, and finally his lap, so it landed in a glutinous, bloody lump on the carpet. Martha Orange dropped to her knees by his bed and utilizing the damp laundry began to scoop the worst of the pasta off the floor.

  ‘You’re an Oklahoma girl?’ he asked, making no effort to assist her.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ replied Martha Orange, still scooping cannelloni into a wash cloth. ‘Haven’t been home for years, though.’

  ‘What part?’

  ‘You wouldn’t know it. Tiny little town in Grant County.’

  ‘Try me, sweetheart. I’m an Oklahoma guy, born and raised. I know that state like the back of my own hand.’

  ‘My daddy had a homestead three miles out of Jefferson. Like I said though, I haven’t been home for almost fifteen years.’

  Junior Button swung his legs sideways so they escaped from the crumpled bed sheets. His naked feet dangled like a pair of polished prunes, toes just brushing the carpet. Upright now, he bent slowly forward and using a single finger tilted Martha Orange’s chin towards his face. It was an oddly intimate gesture. For a moment she thought he might try to kiss her. It was weeks since she’d last been touched with such obvious intent. She dropped the soiled washing, leaving a secondary tomato stain on the carpet, and drew back.

  ‘Sweet Jesus, you’re Marcy Underdown’s kid, aren’t you?’

  Martha Orange felt the room fold in upon her; lampshade, curtains and flower-print wallpaper, pounding like piston fists on the dome of her head.

  ‘Course not, you can’t be more than thirty-five.’

  ‘Thirty-seven,’ she found herself correcting.

  ‘You’re much too young to be Martha’s kid. You’re some sort of kin though. You’re the cut of her.’

  ‘She was my grandmother,’ Martha Orange mumbled. ‘I’m Marion’s kid. How did you know? I don’t think I look that much like her.’

  The old man smiled and placed his hands, open-palmed, upon his pajama-clad thighs. He seemed terribly satisfied with himself.

  ‘I can see you’ve the flight in you too,’ he said. ‘Am I right, girl?’

  And though she could not have explained exactly what Junior Button meant by the flight and that Post-It note warning had risen like a shipping flare, flaming at the back of her mind, and she wanted more than anything to get the laundry done and be home in time for the Mexican soaps, Martha Orange found herself nodding greedy assent.

  ‘I can see that,’ he said. ‘I seen
it in your mama too though she did her best to swallow it.’

  Martha Orange dropped her laundry at the foot of the bed. She slipped her feet clean of the dirty white Keds she kept for work and perched on the edge of Junior Button’s bed. Their feet, resting side by side on the stained carpet, formed a set of empty quotation marks. Neither party turned to face the other. Without speaking Martha Orange reached into her overall pocket for a stick of the nicotine gum she’d been chewing for the last six weeks. Rarely a smoker, the untimely departure of Jimmy Orange had left her hankering after an addiction. Gum was far less expensive than cigarettes. She levered a stick free with her thumb, ripped it in half and silently passed the larger section to Junior Button. The old man, a hoarder by birth and habit, slipped the gum into his pajama pocket and nibbled on a hanging fingernail. Martha Orange chewed her gum into a rubbery paste before breaking the silence.

  ‘Did you know my mama well?’ she asked. There were other questions, larger and less likely to attract answers, which she wished to ask and yet instinctively knew not to. These questions were not yet ready to be coerced into words. They dwelt in the pit of her lungs; insecurities as slight and dewy as the odd urges which never let her be. If pushed she might have asked, ‘why can’t I hold still?’ or ‘what’s the matter with me?’ and perhaps the older man could have fashioned a kind of answer and yet she knew, with ungrounded certainty, that no such answer would fully satisfy. This was not a conversation for words.

  ‘Do you remember my mama?’ she asked, approaching the question in reverse.

  Junior Button raised a single hand, putty pink and creased as an elephant ear.

  ‘Enough for today,’ he said, ‘I gotta sleep,’ and without further explanation or warning, fell fastly asleep bolt upright on the edge of his bed. Martha Orange was disappointed. People died in the Center every day, unexpectedly. The inclination to shake Junior Button out of his sleep and interrogate the answers out of him was overwhelming. However, six weeks of senior care had taught Martha Orange that the very elderly, like other flighty creatures – cats and sheep for example – could not be forced, only coaxed and occasionally bribed. She tried to swing his legs sideways but could not maneuver him into the tiny bed. The weight of him was too much for her. She was a slight woman, her muscles wasted from a full decade of Volvo living, and could barely open a screw-top jar unassisted. Arms aching with the effort, she tucked the comforter around Junior Button’s knees and left him dozing on the bed’s edge. It was Center policy to raise the residents’ bed rails at night but Martha Orange had neither the strength nor the inclination to bother.

  Returning the next morning with the breakfast tray, Martha Orange was shocked to discover Junior Button, backside thrust to the ceiling, face crumpled into the carpet. She presumed him dead on discovery but quickly noted his buttocks rising and lowering with each shallow breath. Her first thought was self-preservation, her second the reassuring suspicion that the night shift had not been carrying out their hourly obs. She tugged on the emergency cord and when the doctor on call arrived, huffing down the corridor with a cardiac arrest trolley, quickly exonerated herself.

  ‘He was fine when I left him last night, all tucked up in bed. He must have tried to climb out by himself.’

  Junior Button was too dazed to elaborate further. It required three grown men to hoist him back onto the bed. Though no permanent damage had been done he was in no mean mood for reminiscing. From Thursday to Sunday he refused to utter a single word. He ate and slept, groped his way to the downstairs bathroom and endured, with tight-lipped stoicism, the daily humiliations of senior care. Martha Orange kept up a constant barrage of chatter; a running commentary which left her thoroughly shriveled by the end of each shift. She made little progress. Each time she attempted to steer the subject homewards, the old man would stroke his bruised face tenderly and groan as if she was somehow to blame for all life’s latest misfortunes.

  Junior Button was a determined old goat. For four days he perched on the edge of his bed and stared intently at the tomato-colored stain blooming beneath his toes like the bloody reminder of a car crash. His mouth set in thundering rage, yet he said nothing. Such behavior would have worn down a weaker woman but Martha Orange was cut from grit and iron. At first she suspected some kind of stroke. She clipped her consonants, elongated her vowels and delivered every sentence with the sort of patronizing volume usually reserved for the deaf or internationally foreign. By the third morning she recognized in Junior Button the smug resolve of the pig-thick stubborn. She formulated a fresh plan of attack. Though far from mean, Martha Orange was not adverse to a little torture, correctly administered for the good of the whole.

  On Friday she withheld Junior Button’s meals, scooping them, right in front of his wide-eyed face, into a black garbage sack. On Saturday she hid his comforter and flicked the air conditioning into overdrive. Visibly shivering, he refused to complain yet fell asleep wrapped in a pair of slightly damp bath towels. On Sunday, though she had no intention of following through, she dangled his insulin shot from the open window and held it there, drooping slightly, until the battle was finally won.

  ‘OK,’ he huffed, ‘I give up.’ Lowering the waistband of his pajama pants he winced slightly as the needle went in. Martha Orange tossed the syringe into the sharps bin, washed her hands with antiseptic soap and perched beside him on the bed’s edge.

  ‘Nicotine gum?’ she asked, splitting a stick in half.

  ‘Sure,’ he replied, pocketing his share.

  ‘Do you know why I can’t hold still?’

  He nodded slowly and the action seemed to exhaust him. His head and shoulders slid sideways, toppling like a drunken skittle to meet the pillow. His legs continued to dangle awkwardly over the bed’s edge. He looked painfully twisted in the middle. She felt bad about the food and the comforter, worse still about the insulin.

  ‘Sorry about your face,’ she began. ‘I should have tucked you in properly. I really am sorry. You won’t tell the Director, will you?’

  Junior Button did not seem to hear. His eyes were already closed.

  ‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘It’s too big a story for one telling. Come back tomorrow when I’m not so done in and I’ll start in the old days.’

  Junior Button was a meticulous storyteller. Five sittings in, the mystery was only beginning to take shape. The old man’s capacity for distraction was awe-inspiring. Whilst Martha Orange did her best to hold him to the highway, he favored the by-ways and cul-de-sacs, molding myths around minor characters, formulating legends from the footnotes, dwelling for hours on loosely related anecdotes. Averse to out-and-out lies, he took great pains to embellish. It was difficult at times to tell truth from over-leaping imagination.

  Martha Orange grew thick on the stories.

  Rushing through her other duties, she spent lunch breaks, evenings and every free moment chewing nicotine gum at the end of Junior Button’s bed. She neglected the children, emotionally and then nutritionally. (By the week’s end breakfast cereal formed the bulk of the Oranges’ meals, and Malcolm had all but wiped the troubling memory of vegetables from his mind.) She let the laundry pile up in enormous flannel mountains. She wore a hat to work, concealing her hair as it cruised towards its second unwashed week.

  As she listened some things slid, others settled. The religion of Church and Bible remained infinitely problematic. Eternity was an implausible concept and, if true, less reward than never-ending punishment. God, she assumed, had long since run out of patience with the folks who kept trying to get away. The Heaven of Martha Orange’s imagining floated unanchored somewhere just above the cloud line, liable to bolt at the slightest provocation. However, Junior Button’s long-labored stories offered her a brand-new religion, a realm of possibility beyond the unyielding stasis of her own experience. Martha Orange had never felt more inclined to believe.

  Whilst the old man talked she scribbled notes at the back of the Gideon’s Bible which had languished in his bedside l
ocker, untouched by the room’s last five residents: names and dates and bullet-point anecdotes. She laid her questions like fishing nets, carefully cutting him off in full stream, clarifying the details, untangling facts from the fauna, tracing a breadcrumb trail through his meandering rambles. Nights were different now. Though Martha Orange sat open-mouthed in front of her Mexican soaps, her mind twitched constantly, sewing Junior Button’s cul-de-sac mumblings into a single, start to finish story.

  On the tenth day, when the old man paused to contemplate a conclusion, Martha Orange finally admitted that this was her story too. A line, as long and lost as the Arkansas River bed, kept her bound to the folks who’d flown previous and those who’d pierce the sweet hereafter. Martha Orange could not be held responsible. She was not, as she’d always suspected, a bad mother or a negligent friend. Martha Orange was ill with a flying disease. The need to bolt ran in her blood, a parasite passed from one generation to the next: latent in her mother, loud as hell in her own thundering heels.

  Where she’d understood in part, Martha Orange now knew in glorious technicolor. Salvation sank its feathered teeth into her shoulders. It was not long before she flew.

  Junior Button was not surprised. He had always seen the number 39 coming. If it had not been a bus it would have been a taxi, a plane, a single person pedal bike or a steamboat, churning through the gloomy Willamette. Martha Orange would always leave. He’d forecast an early departure in the very particular way she entered a room, feet betraying her love of retreat. The flight was heavy on her, and as Junior Button picked his way through her family tree, tossing out stories and anecdotes like advent calendar candies, he led her closer and closer to the unavoidable moment when she herself was bound to fly. There was nothing triumphant about bolting, but Martha Orange’s folks had been making a name out of it for the last two hundred years. Reviewing the story as he spoke, Junior Button found himself amazed that Martha had managed to avoid the number 39 for so long.