Welcome to Fred (The Fred Books)

by Brad Whittington

  After paying for the stock, my take came out to $2.75, including tips, and I estimated I had traveled seven miles in four hours, mostly on dirt roads. This worked out to about seventy cents an hour, or forty cents per mile. While the experience had afforded me an excellent lesson in capitalism, it was hardly a resounding success, even by my modest standards. The situation called for reflection. I sipped iced tea and listened to the continuation of “Figaro” coupled with “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”

  Perhaps I could take in the backwoods loop west of the highway, which was more populated. There were the unexplored forks on the eastern route to consider. And there was always the captive audience on Sunday mornings. No need to abandon the enterprise yet.

  As the medley morphed to “Figaro” and “Funny Face,” my mind wandered back to my other dilemma, my social ostracization. Many times in the past I had made this transition with much less pain. It occurred to me that my previous moves had always been in urban areas where other products of a mobile society had learned to establish and dissolve relationships as circumstances dictated. Fred was a gift horse of a different color with its shoe on the other foot.

  I placed my hopes on the paper route to span the great divide. In my youthful exuberance and optimism, I took up the banner with the strange device and with a cry of “Grit” pursued my lofty goal. I covered plenty of ground and gathered an encyclopedia of information. I discovered that most Fredonians had never been out of Texas, even though Fred is thirty miles from Louisiana as the geese fly. Unlike those geese, I met people who had never traveled more than thirty miles from the house where they were born. Down in the Neches River bottomland were creatures who would have failed a casting call for Deliverance due to laying it on a bit thick. People of the land educated with axioms passed down for generations—how to hunt, fish, work the land. And squeeze the corn.

  On my cycling tours I became aware of the primary attraction of Fred, one I came to appreciate more through the years—the beauty of the Big Thicket. Lush pine trees towered everywhere, providing a wealth of green even in the winter. On those rare occasions when it snowed, the countryside was transformed into a breathtaking Currier-and-Ives panorama.

  Every road seemed a tunnel cut in the earth as I rode my bike through the thicket, dwarfed by the ubiquitous pines. In long treks through pastures and woods, I constantly found beautiful scenes hidden from the view of the casual passerby. I had secret hideaways scattered all over Fred—under dwarf magnolia trees with branches pressed to the ground in a wall of waxy green, or in shallow caves dug out of a steep bank by a rain-swollen creek, or in a sudden clearing in the middle of a dense profusion of undergrowth, or on an isolated knoll deep within a bog of stagnant water and fallen pines. I saw all types of animals—rabbits, foxes, raccoons, opossums, armadillos, and sometimes even deer.

  At the end of summer I reviewed my situation. I had a detailed knowledge of practically every twist in every dirt road in a two-mile radius of Fred. I knew dozens of people by sight. I had a greater understanding of the diversity of lifestyles in Fred. I averaged about $3.50 per week income from the sales. But I had not made a single friend. In fact, my classmates viewed me with greater suspicion because I was selling reading material. I was forced to conclude that the project had been a financial and relational failure.

  In the Fortress of Solitude I wondered what other factors could be leading to my isolation. The most obvious culprit was my wardrobe. I fit in like a Vegas cocktail waitress at an Amish house-raising.

  Months of Grit tour-duty gave me ample evidence that hip-huggers were in drastic contrast to local custom. It was time to downgrade the wardrobe. It was a thought that weighed on me heavily, considering how painstakingly M and I had established our position as the forerunners of fashion. But the need for assimilation joined forces with pragmatism. There were no sources of fashionable clothes, as I defined fashion, within a one-hundred-mile radius. Not a single Nehru jacket to be found in Silsbee or Beaumont. I couldn’t bring myself to capitulate to the point of jeans, but I did acquire more subdued slacks, in brown and blue.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN However, the new school year brought a change much more significant than my wardrobe. Fred was too small to support anything more than an elementary school. Everyone over sixth grade was shipped seventeen miles to Warren.

  For me, commuting to Warren had an unforeseen benefit. Because all Fredonians were outsiders in Warren, they tended to stick together. If there were only a few other Fredonians in a class, they would cluster around me instead of avoiding me. Some of them actually spoke to me for the first time.

  But after a few months I discovered that the other Fredonians assimilated into the class quite easily, leaving me the lone molecule incapable of seeping through that invisible, semi-permeable membrane. It took most of the school year before I finally realized what it was. I talked funny.

  Meaning, I used proper grammar, and my Texas accent was slight. A person who spoke correctly was an outsider. I could have proper grammar or friends, but not both.

  I didn’t labor long over this dilemma. To my parent’s dismay, I cultivated the “ain’t” as assiduously as a violinist perfects her vibrato. I dropped g’s from ing’s. I was even “fixin’ to” in no time. I probably sounded like a white guy singing Negro spirituals for awhile, but I worked on my accent too.

  However, there were some things that I couldn’t bring myself to do. Mixing verb tenses seemed pushing it a bit far. I was never able to “seen” him do it. I always “saw” him do it. But eventually my speech ceased to be a marker of my alien origins.

  Junior high also brought another unexpected development. I sat behind Jolene Culpepper in several classes, and we became friends. She found the sarcastic remarks I muttered under my breath amusing. During band we had time to talk while standing around waiting for the drum section to learn how to play a cadence and march straight at the same time. At first I kept a cautious distance, but soon we were chatting like old school chums. Which I guess we were. Except the “old” part. I gained an intimate knowledge of Jolene’s infinite capacity for pulling legs.

  Jolene’s obsession with pranks started early. In elementary school she collected the merchandise advertised in comic books: whoopie cushions, joy buzzers, red-hot chewing gum, disappearing ink, ice cubes with bugs in them, fake doggie-doo. Bubba didn’t share her love of practical jokes, especially because he was the usual target. By the time they were in sixth grade he wouldn’t even bother to bend over if he saw a quarter on the floor. He’d found too many glued down or attached to a rubber band or a twelve-volt battery. He developed a cautious, cynical demeanor. He never just walked into a room. He pushed the door open and paused, looking before he walked in. He intuitively checked the lids on salt and pepper shakers before he used them. And he tended to flinch at loud noises.

  At first Jolene’s jokes were just a kid enjoying life, even if she didn’t allow that luxury to anyone else in the continental U.S. But during junior high she slowly transformed from a bratty little kid who annoyed everyone within the international fishing limits to a cute girl who annoyed everyone within the international fishing limits. She had a fresh-scrubbed, natural country-girl aura that New York models spent hours to achieve and that air of simplicity that is sometimes mistaken for naïveté. A fatal mistake in Jolene’s case.

  As the boys started paying attention, the jokes became a defense mechanism. Because she was very attractive, every boy in the county noticed her. Short, tall, fat, skinny, cross-eyed, buck-toothed, pigeon-toed, freckle-faced, acne-ravaged—they all took their shot. Oh, yeah, good-looking ones too. But there weren’t many of those in Fred.

  I suspect C. S. Lewis was thinking of Jolene when he wrote that men project their own feelings on women. (I know there is no record of C. S. Lewis visiting Fred, but how else can you explain the remarkable coincidence?) He said a man views a woman as voluptuous, not because she feels that way but because he feels that way when he looks at her. Jolene’s mama, recognizing that h
er beauty would draw suitors like flies, warned her that those boys all had one thing on their minds. Before Jolene even got out of junior high, she was convinced her mama was right. In fact, it seemed as if every boy in the school was doing his best to prove it.

  One night during a church fellowship, we sat side by side, our chairs perched on two legs on the tile while leaning against an institutional green wall. We swilled punch, and watched the grown-ups talking, waiting to be liberated from our boredom. Jolene turned philosophical.

  “Why do you think it is God made boys like He did?”

  “Perhaps He was feeling at the top of His form that day.” I had long since learned that one must be aggressive when dealing with Jolene.

  “In yer dreams, monkey face.”

  One learned to endure such things if one was to enjoy Ms. Culpepper’s company. If enjoy is the right word. I let the comment pass, took another sip of punch, and swung my legs. A trifle too exuberantly. My quick reflexes saved me from collapsing with the chair, but cost me some red stains on my shirt.

  Jolene snorted, as if vindicated in her assessment. I reestablished my position at a less acute angle and resumed my silent observation of the human drama unfolding in the church fellowship hall. Such as it was.

  “I mean, what is it about boys?”

  “You know, I have often wondered the same thing about girls.”

  Jolene seemed to take this as a personal affront. “Do girls come up ta you, lookin’ at you like yer a car on the lot they want ta take out for a test drive?”

  I didn’t like the personal turn the conversation had taken. And I didn’t understand the tone she was using. I would place a full-page ad in the Silsbee Bee if a girl displayed that kind of interest in me. I declined to answer the question directly. “And your point is?”

  “Boys just see the outside. Don’t they know there’s a inside too? Like that lady in the sermon.”

  “What?” They were coming across the plate too fast for me.

  “The lady who poured perfume on Jesus’ feet and washed ’em with her tears.”

  “Mary Magdalene. What about her?”

  “The guys just saw the outside, some lady makin’ problems. Why are guys like that?”

  It seemed like a good time to take another sip of punch. I did.

  “Girls have a inside and a outside. Can’t boys figure that out? Don’t they have a inside?”

  I didn’t have an answer. I thought I had an inside. The problem was, when I saw a girl that looked like Jolene, my inside performed acrobatics that would have passed muster for the Ringling Brothers.

  The situation was not improved when she became a twirler, a position with a wardrobe designed to accent her more compelling features. But since I had a self-image a few points above plant life, I didn’t attempt to move our interaction beyond the jousting companions we had become. As a result, she came to view me as “safe.” No teenage boy wants to be considered safe, especially by an attractive girl, but since I was more likely to be struck by lightning than become the object of Jolene’s affection, the point was moot. In the bus on long band trips or when church fellowships got boring, Jolene would entertain me with stories of tricks she had pulled on her dates.

  I was constantly amazed by her creativity. One particularly obnoxious suitor came by her house, intent on landing a date and refusing to take no for an answer. Somehow she managed to spill bacon grease on his boots, which may have been sufficient to cool the ardor of a less-determined cowboy, but not this one. She finally told him if he would go hide in her father’s deer stand, she would come meet him after supper. He left, convinced his persistence had won. However, Jolene knew her father had plans to fill the deer feeder that evening, and he always took a dog or two in the back of the truck. As she had anticipated, the bacon grease drew the dogs, and their barking drew Mr. Culpepper. The suitor got such an interrogation in his tryst-turned-trial that he didn’t speak to Jolene for a week.

  Jolene became my primary source of entertainment and conversation during junior high. I did develop some level of friendship with the guys, but it remained far from intimate. Try as I might, I couldn’t find someone to replace M as confidant and coconspirator in my private universe. But with such amusements as Jolene and the rest of the populace could provide, I survived until junior high graduation and spent much of the following summer cultivating the family newspaper business. One Saturday afternoon I set out to hustle a few old copies of Grit.

  I’d had a glutton’s diet of dust when a low rumble growled in the distance. I saw a cloud on the horizon with a dark dot marking its source, a dot that was growing much faster than usual. By the ferocity of the cyclone trailing it, I knew I should take cover or be covered.

  I scanned the roadside frantically for a break in the barbed wire. Before I could ditch the bike and vault the fence, the cloud was upon me. Pulling the newspaper bag over my head, I heard a whoosh punctuated with staccato rattles. When the pinpricks of sand pelting my arms abated and I could feel the cloud settling on me like a blanket, I peered from under the bag.

  A truck that looked vaguely familiar had come to a stop and was now careening toward me in reverse. I jumped to a fence post as the truck ground to a halt, one wheel in the ditch. When the dust cleared, I saw Darnell Ray leering from the window. In defiance of all known laws of physics, he had managed to get the ’52 Ford running.

  “Hey, doll. Whatcha up to?” he barked from the cab.

  I tossed the hair back from my eyes. “Citizen’s driving safety patrol. You lose your license.”

  “What license?”

  “Right.” I began gathering the newspapers I had dumped in my haste to protect myself, slapping the sand from them before I carefully slid them into the bag.

  “Whatcha doin’ on that bike?”

  “Trying to sell papers. You wouldn’t want one. They’re things you read.” I dragged the bike from the ditch, shook off as much dirt as possible, and swung my leg over it.

  “Say, doll, throw that bike in the back ’n’ I’ll take ya ’round.”

  I considered his offer. It would be a faster way to sell papers, but given the manner of his arrival, it might be a faster route to the emergency room as well.

  He spat into the ditch. “I got a extry Coke in the cooler.”

  That cinched it. “Sure.” I slung the bike into the back and climbed into the cab, where the radio was alternately playing “The Impossible Dream” and an explanation of how to worm cows, with an appreciable amount of static in between. Stretching my legs, I groaned, “That’s a lot of miles for a twenty-inch bike.”

  Darnell popped the clutch and lurched from the ditch, spraying sand across the road in a feathery arc. “Why don’t ya drive it?”

  “Hey, I’m only fourteen!” I looked at him indignantly.

  “Yeah, me too.” He looked back at me with a faint air of confusion. “So?”

  I was immediately self-conscious. “Well, I mean, I don’t have my license yet.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Oh. Well, we don’t have insurance on me yet.”

  “Me neither.”

  I became desperate and frantically groped for any excuse at all. “My dad took the car to Silsbee.”

  “That’s a bum deal.”

  “Yeah,” I mused, relieved I had finally found an answer to satisfy him. However, I nearly drowned in Coke as Darnell gunned the truck into second to take a curve sideways.

  Suddenly a log truck loomed in front of us. Of all the hazards to be found on the dirt roads of Fred, log trucks ranked at the top of the list. Being paid by the trip, they came tearing down those turtleback roads with little regard for other traffic. Since they were considerably larger than anything else on the road, they commanded a grudging respect. Few things are more intimidating than rounding a corner on a bicycle to see several tons of fresh-cut timber bearing down on you, trailing a dusty cyclone. In those unfortunate cases where I encountered one, I would hit the ditch as if dodging mortar rou
nds and try to protect my face from the dust cloud that trailed any vehicle moving faster than five miles per hour.

  Encountering a log truck in Darnell’s truck instead of on my bike wasn’t a source of consolation or confidence. My exclamation of dismay became a shower of Coke, which sprayed the dash and windshield. As gutsy as he was, even Darnell knew he was no match for a log truck, the undisputed monarchs of East Texas roads. He straightened out the wheels, and since we were already sideways in the road, we shot through the ditch, out of the path of the truck and into a field of corn, which choked our momentum to a halt. The log truck roared by like a Tyrannosaurus Rex in search of meatier prey.

  “Did ya see that truck hoggin’ the road?” Darnell demanded. “The nerve of that guy!”

  I sat speechless, an admittedly rare condition.

  Darnell reached down to the ignition. “There oughta be a law against folks drivin’ like that!”

  He started the truck, which had died when we cleared the ditch. I didn’t blame it. I had almost done the same thing myself. I opened the door and slid to the ground on shaky legs.

  Darnell tossed his greasy hair from his eyes with a jerk of his head. “Hey, doll. Whatcha doin’?”

  I stared back at him vacantly. “Look. I just remembered I’m going the other way. See you later.” I slammed the door.

  Darnell ground the gears into reverse and shrugged. “OK, doll. It’s yer nickel.” He bounced the truck back on the road and barreled off, drowning out my cries about my bike in the back. Fortunately I was far enough off the road that I wasn’t enveloped in the cloud. However, I had a long walk ahead of me. I occupied my time by fashioning new names for Darnell Ray, the mildest of which was Darn ElRay.