We played with Slim Jim every afternoon that week. Tag, hide-and-seek, whatever. He never came and he never went, always wore the same tattered clothes. As I was leaving at the end of that third afternoon, Slim Jim stopped me.
“Where you going, Tuck?”
“I’ve gotta go in for supper.”
He pulled out a small fine-toothed black comb from his back pocket and combed his hair down.
“Oh, is your mom home?”
“Yeah, and she ordered a pizza. I just saw the delivery guy leave so I gotta go.”
“Pizza! You lucky dog. You know how long it’s been since I had pizza?”
“Do you want to eat with us? I could ask my mom?”
“You don’t think she’d mind?” he asked, putting the comb back in his pocket.
“I don’t know. Probably not,” I said. “I’ll go ask.”
At home in the kitchen, I asked my mom if Slim Jim could come over for pizza.
“Who’s Jim,” she asked.
“A guy from the neighborhood.”
Puzzled, she said, “There’s no Jim in this neighborhood.”
She moved the drapes aside and looked out the kitchen window. Then she turned to walk to the living room. I followed.
“Well, he doesn’t live in the neighborhood, but he plays with us here. He plays with the kids in the neighborhood. He’s really fun and he’s nice and he hasn’t had pizza for a long time.”
“I don’t think so, Tucker,” Mom said, still walking.
“Aww, come on, Mom! He’s really nice and he’s fun. You’d like him.”
Then she snapped, “I said no, Tu—”
She gasped and stopped in her tracks.
I turned behind me to see what her wide eyes were staring at and saw a smiling Slim Jim standing on the front porch on the other side of our screen door.
Through the door, he looked even bigger than usual. He hunched over slightly, but you still couldn’t see the top of his head he was so tall. He had a hand above his brow, trying to see inside. His face was pressed up against the screen door, his face distorted like a bank robber with a nylon stocking over his head.
“Evening, ma’am,” he said.
With his hair neatly combed and parted, Slim Jim had the look of a young boy whose mother had just finished licking him clean for Sunday school, but he had a grizzly growth of hair on his face and a hole on the left side of his smile
“Um, hi,” she said after a moment. “You must be Jim.”
“I am indeed, mam. Pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said nodding his head forward and offering his right hand while his left went behind his back and held an imaginary hat.
My mother recoiled slightly but noticeably at the extended hand. She did not open the door between them.
“I’m sorry,” she said holding up guilty hands, “I was just dumping the garbage and didn’t get a chance to wash.”
“You’ve got a fine boy there,” he said pointing his head towards me, keeping his eyes on Mom. “Invited me in for pizza ‘cause he knows I like it and that I ain’t been eatin’ too good lately. He said that he had to ask you first but thought you’d be fine with it. You’re raising that boy right. Teaching him the right things, I mean.”
He had that Slim Jim smile on his face the whole time he was talking. Except that somehow it looked different. Kind of like the “I know something you don’t know” smile that my sister Heather would taunt me with whenever she had a secret.
Behind him, Old Man Keller puttered around on his Cub Cadet, cutting the Cooper’s front lawn.
“Yes, thank you. We’re very proud of Tucker,” my mother said. “Of course, one of the things we’ve taught him is not to talk with strangers. I’m sure you understand.”
Slim Jim chortled out a little laugh and said, “Oh, I’m not a stranger, ma’am. The whole neighborhood knows me.”
The handle on the screen door started to turn downward. Slim Jim was slowly turning it from the other side. His smiling face seemed to sink back into the darkening sky behind him, like he was becoming part of it—or it a part of him.
Keller and his Cub Cadet crossed back and forth behind Slim Jim like the carriage on a typewriter. Mom reached down and grabbed the door handle from the inside, held it firm in place.
“Well, that may be, but this is the first time you and I have met. Now that we’ve met, though, I guess you could say that we’re on our way to becoming friends.”
Old Man Keller shut down the Cub Cadet and Willow Grove was silent again. I could see him talking to Katie, but the only thing I could hear was the sound of Slim Jim wheezing thick air in and out of his nose. I looked back up at him and the world around him got darker still, but in a way that was not familiar to me. Not dark like an approaching storm or a passing shadow. It was dark like doom.
Slim Jim slowly pulled his hand away from the door and shifted his stare down and to the right in a defeated manner, and then his eyes sort of jittered side-to-side real fast. The perpetual smile curled down and his nostrils flared, like an angry cry might be coming. When he lifted his head up to look at us again, he looked lost.
Then from the side of the porch came this, “I think it’s time you leave, mister.”
It was my Grandpa Gaines, sounding like the tough guy sheriff from some tumbleweed town in the old west. How long had he been standing there, I wondered? If I was surprised, Slim Jim was flat out shocked to hear what sounded like the voice of the law.
Grandpa had a gallon of milk and a grocery bag in his arms. He must have been on his way home from Ike’ and seen Slim Jim trying to make his way in.
“That’s fine. I understand. Maybe I’ll come back later. Some other time, I mean.”
As he turned and started to walk away, the world came out of its shadow. The Cub Cadet came back to life and grumbled home. Kids passed by on their bicycles. Life resumed. When he got to the sidewalk, Slim Jim turned back around and looked at us. Less sinister this time, he smiled sadly. Like he was sorry for things that had and had not happened. He finger-combed his hair left-to-right and winked at me.
Grandpa walked up toward the porch.
“You two all right?”
“Yes, we’re fine, Hollis. Thank you,” Mom said. Then turning to me she added, “I don’t want you near that man again. You hear me, Tucker Gaines? He gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
“I’m sure he’s harmless, Tuck, but your mom is right. No need to be messin’ around with some stranger passing through town. He’ll be on his ways somewhere else in a couple days.” And then he added with a wink, “Maybe sooner even.”
That was the last time I ever talked to Slim Jim. Mom called some of the neighbors that night and warned them about the “creepy drifter” who had been playing with the kids in town.
My Aunt Paula—who lived two houses away from Grandpa and Grandma—had grown hydrangeas for as long as I can remember. They stood tall and beautiful at one end of what was otherwise a perennially neglected garden. But the hydrangeas required little care, which was fortunate because that’s exactly what they received. And some they flourished against all odds and circumstance. Fat little flower heads bouncing and bobbing on flimsy green neck stems. Held upright by the buoyancy of their very beauty perhaps. The splendor that red and white and pink brought to an otherwise green world. As a kid, I remember thinking that Heaven must be like that. Like your whole life you know nothing but green and then you die and it’s like—BAM! White! Pink! Red! It’s kind of what Katie Cooper was like—the color in my world of green. Maybe it was that thought that led me to sneak out of bed past midnight and cut a few of Paula’s hydrangeas to give to Katie.
Mrs. Cooper opened the door that Saturday morning to find me holding the dozen flowers I had liberated from Aunt Paula.
“Oh my,” said Mrs. Cooper. She waved a dishcloth at the bee buzzing over me and said “shoo” a couple times before ushering me inside.
“Well, good morning, Tucker,” said Mr. Cooper over the top of t
he newspaper. “What’s got you up so early on a Saturday morning?” He and Katie were sitting at the kitchen table with clean plates in front of them.
“Um, nothing really,” I said. Glimpsing at Katie out of the corner of my eye, I added, “Just out walking around, I guess.”
“What do you have there,” Mrs. Cooper asked, indicating the flowers.
“Oh, these? These are just some flowers I found while I was walking around. I found them and thought, maybe … I don’t know, thought they looked nice I guess and …” Suddenly I was warm. My shoes were untied.
Mrs. Cooper jumped in. “Well, um … yes, they are beautiful. Would you like me to put them in water?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
She filled a vase with water, cut the stems, and put the flowers inside. Then she put the vase on the kitchen table in front of Katie.
“There, now, that’s just lovely. Don’t you think so, Katie?”
“They’re beautiful,” said Katie, her face looking as red as mine felt.
“Why don’t you have a seat, Tucker,” said Mrs. Cooper. “We were about to have breakfast—pancakes and sausage.”
Mr. Cooper pulled out the chair between him and Katie. Mrs. Cooper stacked our plates high with pancakes and framed the pancakes with sausage links. They asked me a lot of questions that I was proud to be able to answer. I told them about Mrs. Bianchi, who would be my and Katie’s teacher in the fall. Supposedly, she was a grouch, but she graded pretty easy. I told them what hours the post office and Brenda’s Hometown Café were open. I told them about my Aunt Paula the mayor-beautician and stumbled into confessing to taking the flowers from her garden.
“And if you ever need any wood or lumber or anything, you’d get that from Pease Lumber uptown. Let me know, though, because Mr. Pease’s granddaughter is in my class and she likes me so I could probably get you a discount.”
Mr. Cooper shot me an impressed look and said, “I’ll keep that in mind.”
And then he said, “What’s the granddaughter’s name? This girl who likes you.”
“Um, Sheri, but I didn’t mean that she likes me. We’re friends is all.”
“Of course, you’re friends. You like each other.”
“Yes,” I said. Then looking at Katie, “Well, no. I mean, I don’t like her.”
From the stove, Mrs. Cooper said, “Howard, behave yourself.”
I chanced a look over at Katie who was staring straight down into her lap and stifling a giggle.
“Tucker, your Grandparents live in town here, don’t they?” asked Mrs. Cooper.
“Yep. Grandpa and Grandma Mueller both died a few years ago, but Grandpa and Grandma Gaines live three blocks away from us. He’s a truck driver. Hauls cattle and pigs for the farmers around here. Mr. Patterson does, too, but Grandpa’s better. He gets up real early in the morning. Also, he’s real safe. His handle is “Snail” on account of how slow he drives. I don’t have a handle yet, but I’ll get one when I’m older and can help drive some loads for him.”
“So, you’re going to be a truck driver when you grow up?” asked Mr. Cooper.
“Oh, no sir,” I said. “That would only be part-time. To get money for college and stuff.”
“Well, then, if you’re not going to be a truck driver, what are you going to be?”
I could feel my forehead and eyebrows crinkle up as I thought seriously about that question for a minute, which was about a fifty-eight seconds longer than I had ever previously spent on that question.
“Well, sir. I guess I’d like to be a baseball player, but I suppose I can’t count on that. Not too many people get to do that and they don’t even have baseball at the high school. So, if I can’t do that, I guess maybe a writer.”
“A writer? You mean like an author?”
“Yes, sir. I think I’d like to write stories and stuff. I won the Junior Writer’s award for 4th grade. Plus, I’ve written some poems my mom says are really good.”
After saying this, I snuck a look over at Katie who I found smiling widely at me.
“Poetry, huh?” said Mr. Cooper. “You mean like love poems? Stuff like that?”
“Howard, if you’re done eating will you clear the table please,” interjected Mrs. Cooper. “Katie, why don’t you and Tucker go and play. It looks beautiful outside.”
“We’re in the middle of a conversation here, Betty. I was going to ask Tuck to recite some of his poetry for us. How ‘bout that, Tuck, would you read us one of your poems?”
“Another time,” Mrs. Cooper said. “Outside you two.”
Stepping off the porch together, Katie said, “Sorry about my dad. He likes to tease is all.”
“That’s okay. My dad does the same thing.”
“He likes you, I can tell,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Always calling him ‘sir’ like you did. That’s good. He likes that.”
After a few minutes of walking in silence and kicking at rocks, Katie spoke up again.
“So you write poetry, huh?
“I don’t know. Some, I guess.”
“Can I read it?”
“Read it? Why? It’s not very good.”
“That’s okay, I want to read it anyway. Besides, I’ll bet it’s a lot better than you say.”
“I don’t think so, Katie.”
“Well, can I read it anyway?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, come on! Please!”
I squirmed, looked around, stomach turned, look at her. I couldn’t believe what this little girl could get me to do.
“Promise you won’t make fun?”
“Promise.”
“Promise not to tell anyone?”
“Promise.”
“Promise to like it?”
She squeezed my arm above the elbow.
“I already do.”
It’s hard to keep secrets in old houses, what with all the moaning and groaning they do. What with all the tattletale creaking of wooden floors and old doors swinging on cranky hinges.
Still, I manage to sneak out without waking Grandpa or Grandma Gaines.
It’s well past midnight and I’m still buzzing on vodka when I step off the back porch and look up at that nosy old moon. It’s low in the sky that I almost feel as if I’m looking down at it, which makes me feel like God a little bit.
I say a prayer of apology for this blasphemous thought, but then point out to God that He is the one who made me this way. And so I say another prayer of apology.
Sin and redemption.
Buried inside me there is an eleven-year-old boy who still loves Katie Cooper and he has something he wants me to do, so I let him be in charge for a while. He takes me to the garage and puts a pair of hedge clippers in my hand. Then he walks me through the Cooper’s backyard and into my Aunt Paula’s, where the hydrangeas still thrive against all botanical logic.
I am much more careful than I had been the first time I did this, those many years ago. Back then, I had grabbed the flowers by the stem and yanked. This time, I gently bend them over and clip, almost surgically.
Back then, I had tossed them to the ground, piled on top of each other. This time, I gently lay them down in a bouquet.
Back then, I had run away, flowers clutched in fists. This time, I cradle them in my arms and walk.
Back then, I had given them to Katie Cooper. This time, I would do the same.
I hide them among the bushes behind Grandpa and Grandma’s garage. I would rise early the next morning and take them to the cemetery.
With a fistful of flowers in one hand and a travel mug of coffee in the other, I leave for the cemetery around 6:30 the next morning. Rather than walk along the roadside, I trudge through Bruner’s field and enter the graveyard from the east.
Upon arriving, it’s immediately evident that my letters to Beatrice Hart and Phyllis Ross seemed to have started something of a trend, as there are a handful of headstones adorned with letters.
Some are stuc
k on with masking tape. Others have been carefully placed in the plants and bushes surrounding the graves. I see one that has been clipped to the chains on a wind chime. Another has been placed in the open palms of a weeping angel.
And those were just the ones I could see. Perhaps there were others more discretely hidden. Perhaps others that had already been read and removed. What a weird little phenomenon I had unwittingly instigated. And what a weird little sense of joy it brought me.
As I approach Katie’s grave, a bird taking flight from a tree branch above startles me. Wings flap mightily and it takes an arched path downward, spreading its feathery arms wide and gliding parallel to both heaven and earth.
It lands atop a headstone about thirty feet away and faces the opposite direction. On the ground in front of it, an envelope sticks out from beneath a small heavy rock.
The bird looks to be a falcon or a hawk of some sort. I stand silent and marvel at its majesty. What a curious flight it had taken.
Then that bird does a remarkable thing. It turns around and it faces me from atop its stony perch. The eyes seem human, old and wise. Its white and brown-speckled chest heaves. Our eyes lock for a second, maybe two, and then it expands and flaps its wings mightily and flies away.
In its wake, a single brown feather floats back down and lands on the ground on top of that partially hidden envelope.
Watch for feathers.
Dropping the flowers I had brought for Katie, I walk to the grave and pick up the feather. Then I look for the name on the headstone it had fallen in front of. A simple engraving on a small and simple stone.
James Johnson
1953-1982
… First Katie, now Slim Jim. Couldn’t Tucker see that nothing good could possibly come from this. He was going to mess up a lot of lives going down this path. Including his own. In fact, it had already started …
James Johnson? Did I know that name? And then I realized … this was Slim Jim. Something about seeing his real name made me sad. Whatever James Johnson had been in 1953, he was something completely different by 1982. From James Johnson to Slim Jim. From love to hate. From a hopeful beginning to a tragic ending.
Where the Broken Lie Page 6
