Phantom Strays

by Lorraine Ray

With the flood of images from that day, a strange sight emerges, still fresh in my mind, of a young man whose name was Smitty sitting in the corner of that hall, and surely he came in and wasn’t always there in the liquid sunlight of a Saturday desert morning. But suddenly the door through which we’d entered stood open and a man sat on a tan metal folding chair surrounded by a lot of teenagers, male and female. These characters sitting in the corner of the grand room that day were the adopted son of the owners and his covey of young men and women admirers.

  I could best describe Smitty as a degenerate Elvis, incredibly short with coal black hair and a weird widow’s peak. He wore pancake foundation and drew a fake mole on his cheek with an eyebrow pencil. Smitty had a smile that petrified and shiny black hair. His male minions that surrounded him wore almost the same clothes he did, all black T-shirts and jeans. The girls around him had tight skirts, low tops, and spiky high heels. Rumors about Smitty floated about the clinic, and one such rumor claimed he lived on his parents’ property.

  Smitty got a kick out of watching us asthmatic kids, perhaps a sick relish. The girls joked with him, gawked over at us (several of us were wrapping chests with that rubber material and turning on the cocktail mixers to tickle the stomachs of a few victims) as though we were actually the subject of their jokes. They danced before him, he watching us through them quietly as his adopted mother’s employee talked to us about asthma. He had a sad, bored expression on his face as though he knew everything the lady said was false.

  Mother speculated to Jack and me about this Smitty character on the way home that day. “There he was, that strange kid. Wasn’t he an enigma? Did you see him? By cracky, this is the second time he’s been there. Sitting in the corner of the room. Why, I believe that he might be an illegitimate child of the lady who runs the place or her sister or a nurse, but don’t quote me on that. Well, what an interesting character he is. Very charismatic.”

  She drove on silently for a few minutes, mulling him over in her mind. “Charismatic. That’s what he is. He could be someone very famous in the future. Mark my words. Possibly a star, oh, actor, singer, or a general entertainer. It’s difficult to predict. Very strange, though. He is one step from being a star, or maybe a culprit. I don’t know which, frankly. I could believe either of him. He is one of those people on the cusp of greatness, though. I don’t think he is actually bad. My instincts tell me he is going to be a very great and good person. All those teenaged kids gathered around him to hear what he had to say, but I never heard him say anything. Did you? I don’t think he said a thing, just nodded. And his Mother came in and spoke to him once, harshly. Did you see her? She wore that hand-tailored suit. Wonderful clothes. Cut so beautifully. Such a sense of elegance. There were boys and girls there. That’s what I saw.”

  She drove silently for more miles as the saguaros began to disappear and we were on the outskirts of town where grocery store strip malls with names like El Gigante, Rancho Village and Cow Town Merchants began to sprout up in the thick desert scrub. “He’s a strange character, in my book. What makes him tick? What’s under all that pancake makeup; that’s what I’d like to know? By cracky, that is one odd boy. I suppose they think that too. The adopted parents, I mean, I tell you there’s a mystery somewhere in there if you could only find it. A mystery that would make a good story. Oh, I don’t believe stories have to have evil in them to be worthwhile, why, I like a good honest story about honesty, also. Take Little Women. Now, there’s a good story with a lot of wholesome excitement in it. For example, the way they have fun in the simple, old fashioned manner with cooking and sewing. You kids don’t know a thing about good simple fun on a farm. That Little Women story is completely wholesome. But a gruesome story might just interest me. I’m not excluding it. Saying that it is sensational is not a sin, exactly. I like that Lugar story about the fellow in Indiana who we used to know.”

  “The mean guy? The one who scared you?” I asked.

  She ignored me. “There are so many wonderful Indiana stories, come to think of it. You ought to think about them a little bit. I think you could get very interested in them if you tried. They have a lot of intrigue to them. A lot of them are stories about good people, and some are about bad people. Lugar was a bad fellow, but you could get people interested in him pretty easily. That’s what I mean about him. People like to know a little bit about something or somebody evil. So you could tell about his little wife and how he beat her and she worked in the restaurant and everybody knew what was going on and they shipped him off to the penitentiary eventually. Well, a lot happened in between his wife and the penitentiary. You’d have to fill that in somehow with your own ideas of what happened. I’m not certain of all of it, but it was pretty bad. I can say that. My mother employed Mrs. Lugar because she would have starved to death without help from someone because that Lugar was a no good provider, that’s for sure. He wasn’t good at much of anything except hitting women and probably drinking rot gut by the case full. He came into the store hunting for her and that was a scary time for us all. He meant business. Mother stood up to him and said, ‘don’t you lurk around here with your hang dog ways.’ But he didn’t have any business, such as a job, I mean, and it was a fine day when he got taken away to jail. Well, that’s Indiana for you. That’s a story such as you’ll find in most central Indiana small towns. But I can see my stories don’t interest either of you. You have to get down off your high horses someday. Maybe you’d rather hear about the white button that popped off the blouse of one of the kitchen workers in the restaurant in Indiana and fell into the mashed potatoes?”

  “The kitchen worker fell into the mashed potatoes?” said Jack, snorting quietly.

  “Only they couldn’t find it no matter how hard they explored; they spread the potatoes out on plates and everybody in the kitchen helped, but no… they couldn’t see a thing of that button and it wasn’t on the floor. Well, they couldn’t throw the whole pot of mashed potatoes away because there wasn’t time to cook more and mashed potatoes were on every plate at the restaurant, lunch and dinner, and people in Indiana expected their potatoes. Then your grandmother said, ‘serve it anyway. We can offer to give the person who finds the button a free meal.’ ”

  “I don’t think that would make a very good story,” I said, popping off in my new, impudent style. “There isn’t any story. A lost button isn’t of much interest to people. If there were a lost person or—a lost soul, it would be better.”

  Mother studied me in an unflattering way for several difficult minutes. By adding the soul comment, I hoped I’d cut her off at the pass with a little religion ladled in and maybe end her criticism of my criticism, though I didn’t hold out much hope of that.

  She drove on stoically. Finally, she had made up her mind about how to put me in my place. “I wish you would get down off that high horse of yours someday. If you did, you’d find you could do something worthwhile. Probably with an Indiana story. A good wholesome Indiana story. You have very peculiar ideas of what makes a story interesting. Very peculiar, indeed. I don’t think you’ll find yourself successful with those peculiar ideas, kid.”

  We drove on toward home. The ‘49 Chevy bottomed out a few times in muddy arroyos and Mother exclaimed about the oil pan and tire punctures. Eventually she worked her way back to the peculiar teens at the clinic.

  “Now, I wonder if the mother makes that Smitty boy stay in the clinic so she can keep track of him. Letting him live in that little house on their property is mighty odd, if you ask me. Almost an odd Elvis character. I believe I saw Elvis once when we lived on Allen Road. I hung out clothes and this huge Cadillac with the strangest characters stopped by and asked where a certain street was. I believe Elvis rode in that car as big as you please. I saw in the papers that he gave a concert that weekend and it caused a sensation. Of course, this was when he first came up, so to speak.”

  At last we arrived home and pulled into the semi-circular gravel drive with its arc of stunted bottle brushes in front o
f our ranch-styled brick home.

  “How was the asthma clinic, kid?” asked Meredith when I walked into our bedroom and flopped on my bed. Her talking to me left me thunderstruck; this was a temporary reprieve from her usual indifference or outright hatred.

  “Oh, it was so dumb. Jack and I had to run around in this big room. It was full of these pale, sickly kids, mostly of them were older than Jack and me, and we could run faster than any of them. They were probably stupid Easterners or something from the way they acted. A lot of them were begging not to run and they sounded like they were from New York City when they talked. One of ‘em wouldn’t stop crying. He was boo-hooing. Gee whiz, it was awful. We beat them all easily,” I said, manufacturing the correct level of disgust at the mention of the East Coast, and bragging about myself in the bargain.

  But of all the peculiar things in all this peculiar world, Meredith, it appeared, had changed her opinion of Easterners without telling me!

  “You shouldn’t hate them simply because they’re Easterners,” said Meredith sternly.

  This impacted me as nothing else had. “What? Didn’t you used to? I thought you did.”

  “I don’t think so. That was childish if I did. I don’t think I ever really did.”

  I filled in the awkward moment, when I knew she refused to remember her own opinion (from only a few years earlier), with self-deprecation. Hatred of Easterners had been Meredith and Jack’s cherished shibboleth. Now she didn’t remember it!

  “Maybe I’m a nut,” I said, eagerly offering to be one if it would make me acceptable to her. “A little rotten nut.”

  “Sure you are. You’re a very, very nutty little kid.”