by Ann Pancake
Cal cleared his throat. “Yes, I did hear that.” His voice was measured now, at once autocratic and compassionate. The Progressive Mental Health Worker seasoned with a strand of Stern Father. “I never did understand why people would want to be involved in something like that, and I know you don’t either.” But in the darkest levels of Calvin’s brain sediment slurked a knowledge Cal was not even aware he was about to speak from: that his own family had favored the Confederacy. That Roland, the little man on the bench, who used to show up at Calvin’s mother’s asking for odd jobs or money, was, according to family legend, a descendant of Calvin’s family’s slaves.
“But if you had to take a side,” the Progressive Mental Health Worker continued, and now he was addressing a more general audience—a meeting of mental health workers, or a collection of handicapped people, or his six children—than he was Theodore Munney, “you’d want the Union.” His eyes flicked to the side of the road where a black and brown dog rump vanished into the cockleburs and broom sedge. “That’s the blue clothes,” he said.
THEODORE MUNNEY HAD only wanted to cut grass for fifteen minutes. After that, Calvin had generously and patiently driven him the two miles back into town where he dropped him at Theodore’s second-favorite hangout spot, the BP station, even though Cal had reason to suspect that the back room of the BP was one place Theodore was absorbing inspiration for his insubordination. Now, with Theodore Munney’s chopped-grass-colored clothes spinning in the washer and Cal’s wife in town setting up the Bygone Days’ Fine Arts Room, Calvin was having his quiet time.
He took it in the TV room with his deer heads, First Buck and Biggest Rack, looking on from their mounts as Cal watched the Arts Channel, a commercial-free station that aired segments of ballets and operas and symphonies often backdropped with beautiful scenery from European ruins. The Arts Channel not only permitted Calvin to exercise his cultivated side, not easy in a county that had just gotten its second stoplight, but also lowered his blood pressure and his sugar, too. He was enjoying a concoction of leftover beef stew, a can of peas, a can of sardines, and some past-due milk he’d picked up for a very reasonable price at the County Pride supermarket. He dipped two chunks of old Italian bread into his creation to soften them. His daughters insisted that people with diabetes shouldn’t eat white bread. Even though it didn’t taste sweet, they said, it somehow turned to sugar in your body. An interesting but suspect fact.
As Cal chewed, he eyed the carry-around phone he’d placed within reach before he’d sunk into the bog of the couch. He’d already checked the answering machine—although he had no idea how you retrieved messages, he knew a blinking light signaled one—but it had been blank. He took a long swallow of his SunnyD orange drink. Well, with the anointing of the Knight of Olde Berker not until tomorrow night, they’d probably make the nomination calls this afternoon or evening. He pictured the committee cloistered in the bowels of the courthouse, possibly in the room beside the one where Roland slept, possibly throwing their arms up in relief and in disbelief that here they’d sat for hours and had only now thought of the obvious choice. Doughnuts all around!
Someone struck the floor bottom under Calvin’s feet hard enough to vibrate his left slipper. He chose to ignore this in favor of a Wagnerian opera snippet featuring Brunhild. “I don’t think my tarn helmet covers me completely,” the subtitle read. Cal squinted. Tarn helmet. Now that’s one you don’t often see. Under the floor, someone snarled. Someone snarled back. “A woman’s anger passes quickly.” Huh. Calvin started to wag his head in agreement as he often did to demonstrate his intellectual compatibility with the Arts Channel, then stopped mid-nod.
The under-floor exploded into squeals and thrashes, concussion-hard thwacks and fratricidal growls. Calvin bared his bottom teeth in frustration, set his saucepan on the couch beside him, spread his knees, and glared into the carpet. “Quit that! You all quit that!” Growing pains. They fought down there as fiercely as his own children had fought up here, this litter of possums coming of age under the TV room, never mind how easy he’d made their lives, weaning them himself with cookie sheets of cat food they gorged on after dark. “Quit that!” the Stern Father ordered once more, stomping his slippers. The cat food was left over from his own cats, now all dead or run away. Cat food. He’d tasted it a couple times. Kind of fishy. Now the possums were obeying, or they’d run themselves down, and Calvin moved his saucepan back onto his lap. But a whole lot better than dog food.
At that moment, the back door opened and shut. Calvin thumbed the mute.
A body blurred past the TV room door. Calvin tautened under his plaid.
Raising his hand slowly, as one would not to startle an animal, Cal tugged down his Almost Heaven cap and retracted like a turtle, and his beard helped, too, along with large glasses so light-sensitive an outsider could see through them only in semidarkness. His tinnitus, as it did in moments of crisis, admitted a thin laser of clear sound, and, the deer heads listening with him, Calvin detected the soft pop and hiss of the refrigerator seal.
It was his thirty-three-year-old son. The one who never left West Virginia, the one who never left town, the one who had only recently left the house. The son who used to have a few problems.
The son stepped into the TV room balancing a sandwich that looked to be baloney on a paper napkin, in his other hand a 7-Eleven coffee cup the size of a two-liter pop bottle. He settled into the dog-hair-ridden easy chair, threw a leg over the chair’s arm, fixed his eyes on the television, and slurped. “Got any jobs for me, Dad?”
Calvin released the mute and feigned reimmersion in the Arts Channel. Using his hat bill as a sort of blind, he studied his son who used to have a few problems. Recently his son’s oil-splattered jeans had been hanging slack on his hips and even his elbows looked sharper than usual. His cheekbones knobbed against his skin and his eyeballs bulged, but the son had a hat bill blind of his own. Plus he almost always kept enough distance between himself and Calvin that Cal couldn’t discern if there was blood in the whites. That skinny . . . when it’s just liquor he’s into, he gets kind of fattish . . . Calvin entombed that thought in his brain soil in favor of something he’d heard his bride say to a friend on the phone the other day. “He’s just happier than he’s ever been!” And, “He looks better than he has in years!”
“You can finish up that grass Theodore didn’t get to.” Calvin plugged his mouth with beef stew and sardines.
“Okay.” The son unfolded onto his feet, already moving towards the door, taking his sandwich with him. “I can do it this afternoon. Could you pay me now?”
“And how am I to know how many hours it will take?” Cal asked peevishly. The Savvy Businessman, a legacy from his departed father. He would not be taken advantage of.
“It’ll be worth at least ten dollars,” the son said.
Calvin spooned more concoction into his mouth, his eyes trained on a string ensemble performing Vivaldi’s “Summer” in the National Botanical Garden of Wales. The son who used to have a few problems waited in the doorway. Cal reached the bottom of the saucepan and diligently scraped its sides. A second possum skirmish broke out, this one shorter-lived, but concluding with a squeal of acute injury, possibly death. The son leaned comfortably in the doorframe, also watching the National Botanical Garden of Wales.
Calvin set aside his saucepan. He shifted his hips and extracted a faded rump-shapen wallet. Shielding it from his son’s eyes, he thumbed through bills until he crossed a ten. He worked it out of the wallet and laid it on the couch beside him without looking at it or at the son as he picked it up.
The back door slammed. Probably has some work in town. A starter shrieked, the familiar cry of Floodie, a burgundy Chevy Ciera who had gone through the ’96 flood and, seven years later, still had river silt drifted in the bottom of her gas gauge and speedometer. Most of her engine had had to be replaced part by part, but Floodie ran. That Floodie. Calvin nodded and rotated his legs onto the couch for a rest. She’s a survivor
.
ON HIS WAY back to the house two hours later after a disappointing Senior Center lunch of shriveled Salisbury steak and hefty chunks of white cake he’d had to decline on account of his sugar—and quite proud of himself he was for declining—Calvin decided he had no choice. A clandestine inspection of the Lions Club booth was his duty as a lifelong, if currently boycotting, Lion himself. Inhaling stiffly through his nose, he positioned his cap over his face. Yes, they’d recognize his vehicle, but, with luck, mistake its driver as his bride or his son. “All right, Blackie,” Cal whispered. “Gee haw.”
Main Street’s metamorphosis was complete, craft booth canopies erect, the Bygone Days banner rippling in the spring breeze, porta-potties neatly twinned in opportune alleys. Cal and Blackie wheeled by the Athletic Boosters’ dunking booth, a funnel cake truck rushing by in the opposite lane, more truant Cub Scouts with buns—and there it was. Calvin’s heart twisted.
Lion Halsted was wrestling the used-eyeglass barrel into position, Lion Stephens tacking a price sign over the fund-raiser brooms, and they were going to sell chili this year, Cal remembered. Blackie tugged towards the curb where Calvin could at least throw out a few encouraging words to his fellow Lions if he couldn’t pitch in with the setting up himself—and he couldn’t, he had no stamina for such anymore, not with this sugar—and now was certainly the time to stop, if ever. Before Helen Smithster got off work from her secretary’s job and arrived to boss and cow her aging Lion man-slaves.
Calvin Bergdoll gritted his molars. Helen Smithster. He plunged the name into his mind muck and gave it a punch for good measure Helen Smithster Helen Smithster it bobbed back to the surface, Helen Smithster, he swatted, it scooted, Helen Smithster Helen—
A bawl-mouthed mad-eyed Republican woman with a last name no one had heard of, who, on the tide of out-of-state imports seeking the peace of West Virginia, then infecting it with their hyperactive hubbub (and worse), had moved to Berker County from New Jersey thirty years ago. At first she’d meddled in others’ business, Calvin had been spared, but then she’d set her improvement sights on the Lions Club, and what does she think the Lionesses are for? Cal couldn’t resist a last glimpse in his rearview, Lion Stephens’ price sign already gusting away. The sleepy, unsuspecting Lions had, to Calvin’s horror, fallen under Helen Smithster’s spell, and Miss Machiavelli had risen through the ranks like a house afire, seizing the offices of secretary, tail twister, finally president, at which point Cal, his heart heavy, had no choice but to go on strike. After forty years of every-other-Thursday meetings, Calvin only attended now when the club met at Grassy Creek Chapel, to remind himself of how bad things had got and because the Grassy Creek Chapel women-of-the-church baked the best hot rolls he’d ever eaten.
But there was Theodore Munney, a half-block away, hen-pacing in front of the video store. Brightening, Calvin punched a little honk that Theodore Munney pretended not to hear. Backwards. This time Calvin let Blackie pull all the way over.
Theodore Munney was staring at the courthouse across the street. When Cal called to him through the open passenger window, Theodore spasmed his head like he’d not known Blackie was there. After a few seconds, he pullet-jerked to the window, still not making eye contact, his face as serious as a funeral home.
“Hello, Theodore,” Calvin offered cheerily. In his rearview mirror he could see Theodore Munney’s ostensible girlfriend, Nicole, arranging an armload of history-flavored videos on a rack she’d pushed outdoors. And then—Cal twinged—Floodie swelled in the mirror; escaped it; and passed Blackie at a good ten miles over the speed limit. The son who used to have a few problems tossed Calvin a nonchalant two-finger wave. Theodore Munney’s gaze was tracking a ring of coffee stain on Blackie’s dash.
“Well, now,” continued Calvin. “How about we finish cutting that grass?”
Theodore Munney rotated his head at a right angle so Cal was looking into the gray-brown bristle tracks in the hollow of his cheek. It occurred to Cal that Theodore Munney had not simply missed a spot but had chosen not to shave.
“Cottonpickindruggieshithervan.” Theodore glowered.
An unpromising reply. Calvin set his teeth. Good thing I didn’t eat that cake. He’d spent hours of his limited free time attempting to diagnose Theodore Munney using, despite how hard the Progressive Mental Health Worker had tried to keep up with the trends, terminology in vogue during his mental health heyday, the 1970s. Theodore was sharper than Trainable MR, this Cal knew, but to call him duller than Educable MR, even though Theodore couldn’t read, was also inaccurate. Theodore Munney functioned on a plane not just outside of, but on a tilt to, all these. Some days Calvin felt optimistic that Theodore was of average intelligence and just needed to be coaxed out of his shell, a shell that had thickened and hardened during Theodore Munney’s childhood up on Salem Orchard under the heavy, calloused hand of his father. Other days, especially lately, Calvin was arriving at just plain stubborn. Nutley Randalpin had been a more cut-and-dried case, predictable and tractable, if less interesting. But one thing you had to say about Theodore Munney was that he had a robust sense of justice. At times admirable. At others, obstacle.
“Now Theodore. I’m beginning to lose my patience.” Calvin closed his eyes for a second and envisioned the National Botanical Garden of Wales. “I’m only going to ask one more time: do you want to finish your job?” Although the Garden didn’t come, the violins did. Cal’s irritation ebbed one degree. “I’ll pay you when you’re done, and we’ll pick up your laundry while we’re at the house.”
“Cottonpickindruggieshithervan.”
Calvin sighed. He turned his own head towards the courthouse. Roland, keeper of the stoplight, sat on his bench, one ankle cocked across his knee, his stubby arms winged out along the bench back, his mouth arrested in its permanent at-no-one smile.
“Gottatakebackthecounty. Gottatakerback.”
“All right. All right. We’ll finish it tomorrow.” Cal flipped the ignition and sat a few seconds longer, Theodore Munney not moving either. “Now you behave yourself.”
Theodore Munney gave no sign he had heard.
THIS TIME CALVIN spied Silas for certain, loping across a just-planted soybean field. He tapped the horn again, just in case Silas would pause long enough to recognize Blackie’s distinctive exhaust system and then sprint back, but Silas was already an eel-colored streak evaporating over the riverbank. A hundred-pound Rott-Doberman cross who misunderstood himself as a lap dog, Silas had been acquired five years ago, by the son who used to have a few problems, and was dumped on Cal and his bride a few months later. Silas, like all Calvin’s children, was a vagabond, a wanderer. He spent most of his time running off to eat cast-off hamburgers behind McDonald’s and to have sex. On porches and in yards within a six-mile radius of Cal’s house, Calvin often spotted little Silases, or even big ones. Powerful genes. Cal nodded to himself.
He pulled into the driveway to find his wife’s car snugged up near the back door. The riding mower moped in the uncut yard. Stepping into the house, Calvin made his daily stop at the gun cabinet, where he counted aloud through its glass door.
“One. Two. Three. Four.” He nodded to Biggest Rack. The same number the gun cabinet had held for the past couple months, these four survivors of the original eleven, all hunting rifles, most of them heirlooms. The one that had dropped First Buck when Cal was just twelve years old had been the first stolen, almost a decade ago, and for that disappearance and the next one, Calvin had marched into the pawn shop and demanded their return. Slope Hines had said somebody’d have to pay for them. Calvin knew that the somebody was not him. Now for a second, little mud spouts of rage at the son spurted up in Cal’s mind, but then frantic, busy hands buried them like a cat in a litter box. Calvin kicked behind himself and ran.
He could hear the staccato peck of his bride holed up in her office on her laptop, no doubt doing computer mail to his children, receiving news he’d never hear about, dispatching reports on his bad behaviors. Compu
ters. Secret stuff. Calvin had never learned to type. He drifted into the doorway behind her. His wife, he had always known, was smarter than he was. She, however, had not come from a well-established family like his. That made them even. He had just separated his lips to ask her if she’d checked the answering machine when she said, without turning away from her screen, “Are those Theodore Munney’s clothes in the washer?”
Calvin gently cleared his throat. “Yes, my dear.” The Courtly Gentleman. Perhaps not even a West Virginian gentleman, perhaps not even Southern. Perhaps Russian. A Russian gentleman.
“Well, move them into the dryer. I have a load to do myself.”
The Russian Gentleman transcended this. “Any phone messages for me?”
This time she did turn around. “Who were you expecting to call you?”
His bride. At moments like these, it was best to perceive her as a vague presence with temperature, an ambulatory heat. It was when she rippled into focus like she was under the influence of tracking on a VCR that he and she got into trouble. He backed away to hobble up the stairs for his afternoon nap. If his wife had time to fool around with computer mail, she had time to move Theodore Munney’s clothes.
On the way to the room where he’d slept alone for ten years, he passed the door to hers. A pink and white quilt was pulled square over the bed, her dresser orderly, the fragrance of powder and face lotion tendrilling out the door. She complained she could smell his room from all the way down the hall. Calvin understood. Women’s sense of smell was overly developed, they were overly evolved in that way and in others, which made it harder for them on this earth. Cal eyed the answering machine she kept hostage on the far side of the bed.
With his best ear tuned to his bride’s little office beneath him, Calvin placed a foot over the threshold. He leaned onto it. It held his weight without a creak. Emboldened, he swung his other leg in. Still silence. In studied slow motion, he lurched across the room, resisting the roll of butterscotch Life Savers on her dressing table, until at last he stood over the answering machine.
