by Chris Lynch
“Really, you and I will settle this in a minute,” Darth said to her. “And slow won’t be a problem. Unless you like it that way.”
“Ah, no,” she answered knowingly, “I think we’re already settled.” She brushed past him, fairly banged into me on her way out, saying, “C’mon, you.”
Well, it wasn’t exactly sweeping me off my feet, but it would do. I followed her out.
“Fine,” Darth said, too cool to chase either one of us. “Go on. And Elvin”—he paused, I did not—“we’ll talk.”
A lot more chilling a sentence than it sounds.
I trotted down the stairs, first behind Sally, then beside her, then ahead of her. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Ya,” she said.
“But, um...
“You better run if you want to catch her... and before I start thinking again about what you did.”
“Thanks,” I said, nervously. “I bet you’ll still be able to catch Frankie too.”
“Catch Frankie?” Sally laughed. “That’ll be a switch.”
She was waiting in front of the house for her cab.
“I can walk you,” I said.
“It’s dark,” she said.
“You’ll have me to protect you.”
“And who to protect me from you?”
“Come on, Barbara.” I was sweating, like the old days. I was pacing. My heart was no longer even beating, it was thrashing.
“Listen,” she said, “my dad gave me this money to take a cab in the event you started being weird. I think this qualifies.”
“But I’m really not... okay, I’m weird, sort of, in some ways, but not like—”
I stopped and gasped, nearly choked up, when a cab drew near. When it continued past, I went on, talking faster, aware of my chance speeding away. “I’m not a weirdo like that, really. It’s just that I... I couldn’t deal with... I didn’t know how to...”
Barbara stopped me, out of sympathy I guess because I must have been painful to watch. But she stopped me by grabbing my hand, which I took to be a good sign. You don’t take the hand of a menace, right?
“I know you’re not a weirdo like that, Elvin. I know that you are really sweet.”
I stared at her mouth as she talked. That probably wouldn’t help things, but I was powerless. The thickness of her lips.
“But I also don’t think you’re ready for this. You don’t know how to act. You make me nervous. Your reactions to everything are so extreme.”
She stared at me now, and whatever she saw, I felt embarrassed because I knew I was just proving her point.
“Maybe another time,” she said. And this time I was almost relieved when the real cab pulled up. “You just like me too much,” she said before opening the car door. She shook her head, as if I would understand it then.
“I really never knew,” I said, “that liking somebody too much could ever be a bad thing.”
Then I opened her cab door for her.
“Awesome home training,” she said, slapping my hand in a nice way as she jumped in.
And as soon as the door was closed, I started running. Like a little kid. I ran and ran and ran and ran and ran home. No zigzags, no circles in the leaves. Straight line. Home.
Blame It On The Dogs
MA WAS SORT OF hovering for me in the kitchen when I came home that night, though she was good enough to make like she wasn’t. When she saw me, she was bright and anxious and happy.
For about a second.
“Can I make you something to eat?” It was her way of feeling sorry for me in a way we could both live with.
Not tonight though. I shook my head and slunk away to my room.
And not the next morning either.
“Can I make you something to eat?” she asked, still hovering, still brandishing the comfort of food. She was still dressed the same way, royal-blue bathrobe over pale-green flannel nightgown, moccasin-style slippers. She could have stayed up all night, just parked herself in that kitchen, ready to take care of me in need like my own personal National Guard. More likely she just slept a little less than I did, and returned to her post.
She was the best. Which was just what I did not want then.
“No thanks,” I said. “I’m gonna be out with the dogs.”
That definitely raised an eyebrow. But that was all. Ma acted as if everything was like always, as I made my way across the kitchen. Then my brave-little-man routine caught up to me as I reached the refrigerator. I hadn’t eaten in what felt like days.
“Well,” I said coolly, “maybe I’ll take a little something with me.”
She watched me, with a relieved small smile, as I cracked the fridge open. I turned on her. “Could you look the other way for a minute?”
“Sorry,” she said.
As she turned, I scooped an armload. A whole pack of American cheese slices, a chunk of salami that must have weighed three quarters of a pound, and even Ma’s secret little can of chocolate creme ready frosting that she saves in the vegetable bin for watching sad movies. If the “calories from fat” section on the label didn’t read at least 80, I wasn’t having it.
“You can look now,” I said just as I was closing the back door.
I sat with the food, and the dogs, replaying it all just as if I had a commemorative tape of my foolishness. Barbara was so right. When was I going to grow up? I unwrapped the cheese. One slice for mama dog, one for Elvin dog. One half slice for Fusilli-face puppy, one half for Corkscrew, one for Elvin.
“Yo, don’t bogart that cheese,” came the voice from above. Above being the one-foot-by-one-foot square of windowless window on the back wall of the garage. I looked up to the spot to see Mikie’s pup, Tortellini, standing there on her two hind legs. Apparently with some help.
Tortellini filled the rotted wooden frame of the window nicely. She looked at me. That is, her face looked at me while her eyes looked at the ceiling. She pointed one paw at me while the other rested, humanlike, sort of on her hip.
“Hey you.”
“Shut up,” I said, and looked down to concentrate on my eating.
“No really”—desperate hoarse whisper now—“Pssst.”
And because I am a sap, I looked.
“Have a look at these,” the dog said. “Whoppers. They’re killing me. I hear you’ve got the stuff. Go on, slather me, slather me...”
And because I had very little else left, I laughed.
“Good. Now gimme a piece of cheese,” he said.
I got up and crossed the floor, and held out a slice of cheese, once the dog had gotten herself into a dining position. I leaned against the wall underneath the high window. With one hand I reached up and fed her the cheese. With the other I fed myself.
“Glad you’re here,” I said.
She turned her rear to me, but this time dog-greeting style. “Ah go on, gimme a sniff. You know you want to.”
“Mikie,” I said, sort of snapped, really.
“Damn, you knew it was me.”
“Mike. I got a whole new hurt problem this morning, Mike. And it feels worse than all the old ones combined.”
He waited.
“I’m not coming out of here today.” I said. “Not all day.”
“You want me coming in?” he asked.
“Maybe. What if I start to bawl? Then what would we do?”
“Hmm. Then you just grab up one of us ugly pups and hold it to your eyes. We’re just like onions, you know. We’ll make like that’s what it is, blame it on the dogs.”
I liked it. That would do.
“Well, am I coming in, or what, El?”
“Okay, but you have to promise not to make fun of me.”
A loud sigh.
“Don’t be stupid, Elvin. What else would I want to come in there for? Open the door, butt-boy.”
I opened the door.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Elvin Bishop Series
1 I Think, Therefore I Am, I Think
WHO ARE YOU
?
How do you figure?
How are you supposed to know anything, really, but specifically, how are you supposed to know who you are?
Who am I, and what am I, and if I think I have worked that out, what happens if something new falls into the gumbo and changes it? Does that make me something new entirely? Should I get new clothes?
I found my mother sitting on the footboard of my bed with her back to me. It was an unsettling thing to wake up to, and I knew she hadn’t come to tell me there were no blueberries for my pancakes.
“Elvin, have we ever talked about your father’s brother Alex?”
The simple questions are always the worst. If you think you know the answer right off, then for God’s sake dive into your laundry hamper. If you’re completely lost, you’re probably okay.
“Ya. The one who died in the plane crash, right?”
A brief, buzzy silence.
“Oh. So I did say that, then.”
Should a mother really have to check and see what she has told you in the past? I’d have to say no.
“Um, ya, you did say that. Ma. Because he died. In a plane crash.”
Because her back was to me, I was reading her shoulders. They slumped. They slumped and gradually sort of folded forward in a gesture of deceit and shame and awfulness before she finally stood and, keeping her back to me, said, “Except that he didn’t, die in a plane crash. He is, more specifically, on the couch having a cup of tea and an English muffin with marmalade. Would you like an English muffin with some marmalade?”
Well then. What does one say?
“Not dead, you say?” is what I said.
Her sorry shoulders shrugged. But at least she turned around to face me. “It was really for your own good, Elvin.”
“I know, and I’ll understand someday, and I’ll thank you when I’m older, and you had always intended to tell me when the time was right, but the time was never right, blah blah—”
“Oh God, no, I was never going to tell if you didn’t catch me.”
Sometimes her refreshing honesty really bunches me up. Especially when it’s woven with great, whopping lies.
All this and I wasn’t even out of bed yet. It was a wonder I ever woke up at all. Someday, I figured, I just wouldn’t. Possibly tomorrow, if it’s not really sunny.
“You know, Ma, stuff like this is the reason I’m fat and mental.”
“You are not mental; you’re just big boned. Put on your bathrobe, because your uncle is waiting to meet you.”
Just the words. Just the thought and the words banged up together like that, about my father having a brother, and his brother having an English muffin. Right downstairs. Waiting for me. Wanting to see me. What could he want from me? I had a ghost uncle, and he was waiting for me. It was like a total Shakespeare tragedy.
And I was no tragic hero.
My uncle. All my father’s people were gone, and most of my mother’s, apart from a few distant stragglers clinging to the rocks of our family history. I thought we were all we had, and you know, I had gotten okay with us being all we had. I even liked being all we had.
I was told that by my mother. You hear something like that from your mother, you have to think you’ve got it from a fairly reliable source. But that would be your mother; this was my mother.
So if she made up the plane crash... what else wasn’t true? How many other dead people were out there roaming the landscape waiting to come sit on our couch? Could I be infested with all kinds of grandparents and cousins and things that I never knew I had and that, frankly, I didn’t want?
When something is too much to contemplate, there is only one rational way to go. I would not contemplate it. The story of the plane crash that killed my father’s brother Alex was true. It was tragic and romantic and didn’t hurt me one little bit. There was no Alex anymore.
“Who are you?” was my icebreaker before I was even all the way down the stairs.
“Hi, Elvin, I’m Alex,” he said when I walked through the living room door. He sprinted to me and started pumping my hand wildly. His hand was marmalade sticky.
“No, you’re not,” I said, pulling my hand back gradually.
The guy turned back toward the couch, where my mother was now sitting with a cup of tea. She shrugged.
“I told you he’d say something like that,” she said.
“Why are you letting yourself be conned?” I demanded of my normally fabulously skeptical mother. “He’s a fake. He probably just wants our money.”
“We don’t have any money, Elvin.”
“Really? Still?” the guy said. He had concern, both on his face and in his voice. He was nearly convincing. “Well, maybe I can help you all out with that, too.”
“Oh... jeez, Ma, look what you did now. You embarrassed us in front of the con man.”
“I am not a con man. And you have no reason to be embarrassed in front of me.”
As if she heard that as an invitation, or a challenge, or her cue, my dog came slouching into the room. Grog.
“Oh mercy,” the guy said. “What have we got here?”
“Grog is what we have here. That’s our idea of a dog. So you see, we wouldn’t have anything you’d be interested in.”
He recovered quickly, and I had to give him points for actually crouching down to pet her. Most people just pull their hands up into their sleeves. “Don’t believe I’ve ever seen a breed like him before. What is he?”
“He’s a she, that’s what he is.”
“No offense, but I think I know a penis when I see one.”
“That’s not a penis. We’re not sure what it is, but we are sure she has had puppies. They’re not here anymore. The Smithsonian took most of them, and Roswell has the rest.”
Still crouching, still politely stroking the hairy slab of mystery meat that was Grog, he turned once more back toward Ma.
“Why is he doing this?”
“Well, he’s doing this because this is what Elvin does. But also, he is mostly telling the truth about Grog.”
“And you want to know what else,” I said, because he was still here, “yesterday afternoon Grog covered the whole family, but mostly me, and not you at all, in glory by getting beat up by another dog, not just any dog, but a tiny dog wearing a tiny tartan rain jacket.”
I had, of course, seen pictures of my father, though not many, and not lately, and not easily. And not only did this stranger fail to not look like my father, he failed to not make my funny and gabby mother stare at him in near silence and even nearer awe, whenever he wasn’t looking.
“So you see, stranger,” I said, “there is danger here. You’d probably better be on your way before I turn the beast loose on you. He only lives next door. He can have his jacket on in a second and be over here.”
He stood up. The guy stood up, the stranger, after giving Grog a last extra-scratchy shake of her big, unnatural head, and he talked to me serious and warm and not bothered by my stuff.
“Maybe I could help you out, with training up the dog a bit. Maybe I could help with a few things. I would like to do that, help out. I came here to help, Elvin Bishop.”
“Whoever he is, he’s not here to help. I don’t care if he is out buying blueberries.”
“He is not buying blueberries; stop talking about blueberries. He’s taking a walk around the block because I asked him to so I can try and stabilize you. Who he is, Elvin, is your uncle. Alex really is your late father’s brother.”
I sipped my tea. I took a bite of my muffin. I do not like marmalade. There is a reason people compost orange peels.
“I guess you have some explaining to do,” I said.
“I guess I do. I told you Alex was dead, because that was what Alex wanted.”
“Why would he want that? Was he so ashamed people would know we were related that he needed to play dead about it?”
“No, no, nothing like that at all. In fact, it wasn’t us he was ashamed of, but himself. Your uncle Alex did some pretty lousy
things, back when.”
I sat up straight on the couch and stopped chewing. “He did?”
Here’s a thing. When I heard my mother say my uncle did some bad stuff, something clicked. Something not altogether unpleasant. I ever so slightly liked him better for a second, or liked the idea of him better, even if he scared me more at the same time. I felt the tiniest little babbling stream of badness running through my blood, my bloodline, and I wanted to know more about it.
Or maybe it was simply the rush of suddenly having a bloodline to learn more about, with the bonus that it was not a boring bloodline.
“Did he kill somebody?”
“Of course he didn’t kill somebody. Do you think I would have a killer in this house, Elvin?”
“You? I don’t know what you’re capable of at all. Maybe he is a killer. Maybe you’re a killer. You did kill my uncle before bringing him back to life. I don’t think I know you at all anymore, that’s what I think. Who are you, lady?”
She listened, lips pinched tight together, until I ran out of stuff. Then she went to the kitchen and came back with a fresh cup of tea for herself and a blue ceramic saucer with orange segments fanned around the perimeter. She never leaves any of those white veins on the surface of the orange, which is pretty great, whoever she is.
“Right,” she said. “He didn’t kill anybody.”
“Hijackings? Kidnappings?”
“No.” Sip of tea. “No.” Orange segment. “Want one?”
“Yes, please. Gunrunning? Smuggling? Did my uncle topple a government?”
“Steady, boy. Alex didn’t do anything like that. He was guilty of... indiscretions.”
I stared at her. Grog stared at me. The dog wanted the slice of orange I was holding. I wanted a meatier answer.
I passed on my fruit to my dog, hoping that maybe karma would then dictate I got what I wanted.
It was not, by a very long shot, the first time karma shortchanged me.
“Ma?” I made the come-here hand gestures like I was helping her back up a truck. “Indiscretions? What’re indiscretions? I am guilty of indiscretions. Grog is guilty of indiscretions. But bringing a doggy bag to an all-you-can-eat restaurant is not something you want to be erased from history for, and neither is getting a hedgehog stuck to your nose. So what is the deal here?”
