She was another one who didn’t have too much upstairs. We’d see her down at Coleman’s, buying coloring books, most likely for herself, asking the cashier if she had enough money. Sometimes she’d have to put the coloring book back, sometimes another customer’d overhear and chip in a dime or nickel to make up the difference. Sylvia was short, with a rickety body that made her look like her bones had just missed falling into their right place. Atop that body sat a miniature skull, like a shrunken head, with a jutting chin and tiny bright eyes. She lived in town, over in the Beehive apartments, on the road to the dump.
Willy started coming into town, going over to the Beehive for Sylvia. Then the two of them would walk down the road toward the dump, or sometimes in the other direction, toward downtown, he lagging behind just a little bit, she pushing that carriage with a dumb, miserable look, neither one of them speaking a word. And so it was, Willy Gleason came out to join the living.
We were sitting around Rinaldi’s hardware store waiting for the mail to go by with our social security checks. You could call Rinaldi’s our retirement club, of sorts. He had a card table set up in the back near his baling wire and we’d sit there playing cards, drinking coffee, and shooting the bull. I was the youngest member – I’d only had my gold watch six months.
“Anybody ever seen that baby?” stone-faced Aldin Cleary said, right in the middle of talking about the car accident on the Milestrip. We looked around at each other. “I got my ideas,” Aldin said, “that there ain’t no baby in that carriage.”
“What they got in there?” Grove said. “Antiques from the dump?”
“I got my ideas.”
“What ideas?”
“Could be a few things,” Aldin said, drawing on that pipe. “Could be something illegal. Maybe drugs, I was thinking.”
“When you’re a Biddle or a Gleason,” Clarky said, “what’s drugs going to do for you that ain’t already been done?”
Aldin tamped on the pipe and relit it, drawing hard. “Then I was thinking,” he said, “well, maybe it’s for somebody else, those drugs, and they’re just after making money.”
“You’re crazy,” Rinaldi said..
Aldin nodded. “So then I figured, maybe there ain’t nothing in that carriage. Maybe they’re up to something, going somewhere they ain’t supposed to, or else planning to. But even that takes brains.”
“Maybe they’re walking around trying to figure out what they got to do to put a baby in that carriage,” Grove said.
“Just the same,” Aldin said, “something’s not right about it. You be sure to tell me, now, if you ever see them with a baby.”
And that’s how we got started on the baby carriage stories. From what I heard, even the school kids were coming up with their own versions. From then on, whenever Willy Gleason and Sylvia Biddle walked anywhere, you could see people nod their heads at each other, or wink, as if to say they knew what was going on, which, of course, nobody did.
Just when those stories were really getting good, the sheriff had an early morning call to get out to the Gleason house fast. Willy Gleason had a shotgun and had let loose with it on his mother while she was hanging out clothes. Word was, he’d got her in the legs, but she’d made it to the chicken coop.
Me, Aldin, Grove, and Clarky followed the sheriff out there, part of the volunteer firemen’s contingent that goes on almost any call. Willy kept firing at the coop while the old man, already past drunk, hollered at him to stop and at his wife to come out, the boy didn’t mean anything by it. The rest of the Gleasons lined up on the porch, swinging their legs over the side, watching the whole thing. When the old man realized he had an audience – us – his voice went sweet and high-pitched, like he was trying to coax a dog out from under the porch. “Come on, Vallina, come on out now, it’s all right,” he was saying to her, and to his son he was saying, “Be a good boy, Willy, put that gun down, Willy,” until what he was saying turned into a singsong that even the old man got tired of, and he finally gave up and sat down on the porch with the kids.
Willy took no notice of anything. He blasted away at the coop like he was shooting at a row of tin cans, stopping only to reload, while the sheriff held his own gun trained on Willy’s back. He called to him a couple times, but Willy didn’t even turn his head. We were wondering what the sheriff ’s next move would be, when Willy stopped. He’d run out of shells. He dropped the shotgun on the ground and stood there for a minute. Then he turned and headed for the house, like nothing had happened. We jumped him, and he went down like a rag doll, just collapsed. Sheriff handcuffed him, stood him up, and walked him over to the car, asking, “What the hell’s going on? What the hell you trying to do?”
Willy let himself be led over. He kept his head down, looking at his feet, not answering, like he was walking along by himself thinking of something.
While the sheriff pushed Willy Gleason into the car, the four of us went over to the chicken coop for the old lady. We carried her out, one of us on each limb, and even then we could barely lift her, she was that big. Blood had streamed down her legs and filled her shoes. Her rear end bumped along the ground as we carried her, and she moaned all the way, her eyes fluttering.
As we heaved her onto the porch, Clarky shouted to the old man to call the ambulance.
“No phone,” he said.
Nobody moved. The family sat there like they were watching a TV show. “Look at her shoes,” one of the kids said.
Finally the sheriff radioed for an ambulance. He left Clarky watching Willy Gleason in the car, and he sent a kid in for some towels to stop the bleeding. The kid came back with a filthy army blanket, and we dabbed at the blood with the blanket while she moaned. Then she got quiet and lay there with her eyes closed.
“Shit, she’s all right,” the old man said. He leaned close to her, watching her face, and said, “Vallina, you all right?”
The ambulance came, and after taking a look at her legs and feeling for a pulse, they hefted her into the back. “Flesh wounds,” the attendant said. “Lots of blood in the legs.” He nodded at the closed doors. “‘Specially when you’re like that.” Then he got in and drove off. The kids dangled their legs over the side of the porch, one of them chewing on a piece of toast. Another girl tried to ride a bicycle with only one training wheel. She was in her underpants, nothing else.
“I think you better come with me,” the sheriff told Old Man Gleason. “I got some questions to ask you.”
“What you want me for?” he said. “I didn’t do nothing. Was my boy, and you got him.”
“I’ll be asking him plenty, too, don’t you worry,” he said.
“I got to get my girls off to school,” Gleason said. “I
can’t go nowhere.” Never mind he had some older ones there, seventeen, eighteen year olds that could have taken care of things.
They carried on like that for a while, till the sheriff said maybe he’d just arrest the old man, too, if he didn’t feel like coming on his own. So he went, cursing all the way to the car, and calling to Willy in the backseat as he got in, “You son of a bitch.”
Of course, there was a lot of speculation about what had caused the shooting. Willy himself had a few different versions. At first he said he didn’t know the gun was loaded. “It went off,” he told the sheriff, which was a crock, because we all saw him reload and fire about five times. Then he said the first shot that hit her was an accident, but when she put up such a fuss about it, he got mad and went after her, which was probably a little closer to the truth. Finally he muttered something about having wanted to shoot her for a long time. “She bothers me,” he said.
“You go shooting at everybody who bothers you?” the sheriff asked him. “What’re you trying to do, kill your mother?”
Willy shrugged.
“You don’t have to stay in that house if you don’t like the people who live there.”
Willy smoked his cigarette down to his fingers. Then he snuffed it out in his hand, and he held it, lo
oking at his closed fist, and he didn’t say anything more.
The sheriff charged him with disturbing the peace, made him spend the night in jail, and fined him ten dollars.
Meanwhile, the old lady was having a fine time in the hospital. When she found out the welfare was going to cover her bill, she convinced them they should take out her gallbladder. She’d been having attacks for some time, she told them. So they ran tests, and only God and the devil know if they found anything, but they took her gallbladder out just the same.
Aldin Cleary was real happy about the way things were turning out. “I told you,” he said. “You see now if something else don’t start up.” He had the idea, he told us, that there was some connection between the shooting and Willy’s attachment to the Biddle girl. “Don’t know just what yet,” he said, “but something.”
So it was no surprise when Pete Early, out on his rural delivery route, noticed the Biddle girl near the Gleason property, walking along with the carriage and Willy. First time we’d ever known her to go out that way. They had stopped near the Bowie pond while she munched on a peach and he leaned against a tree about ten feet off and smoked a cigarette. And that’s how it went all the time Vallina was laid up in the hospital. We figured the girl was getting ready to move in, since that’s the way those Gleasons usually did things, all one big happy family living together.
But when Vallina was discharged from the hospital, after spending a little more than two weeks recovering from her flesh wounds and gallbladder operation, it wasn’t Sylvia Biddle who caused her the trouble.
When Vallina got home, Willy stood in the driveway, leaning on the handle of a pickax. He narrowed his eyes and glared at the old lady. No one else was around, even though everybody knew the county nurse was driving Vallina home that day. It was also the day of the VFW’s annual fishing derby, with rides and games and a beer tent, so, naturally, that’s where they all were. After a few minutes of having Willy eyeball her the old lady called out for her husband who, of course, wasn’t there.
“Where is everybody?” the nurse asked him.
When he answered, “Gone,” without once taking his eyes off his mother, the nurse said she thought for sure he’d murdered every one of them, and they were next.
“This is my house,” the old lady started shouting.
“Who said it ain’t?” Willy answered, and he flexed his grip on the handle.
“Don’t leave me here,” Vallina told the nurse. “The devil’s inside him.” Then she bent over double, holding her belly and moaning about her operation and how sick she was and how people were out to kill her.
The nurse shoved the old lady back in the car and took off. By the time they reached the sheriff ’s, Vallina was carrying on steady about the devil inside Willy and how her stitches were ready to bust open.
“Now what the hell you bring her back here for?” the sheriff said. “What am I supposed to do with her?”
“You do what you want,” the nurse told him. “I don’t have time for this foolishness. I got things to do.” And she got in her car and drove off.
So the sheriff had Vallina hauled back to the hospital for observation since he didn’t know what else to do with her.
The sheriff was starting to get the impression that anything he did involving the Gleasons led to a little more trouble than had been there in the first place. Still, he figured he had a job to do, so he set off to get Willy.
Willy sat on the porch, smoking a cigarette and listening to a transistor radio propped beside him. The pickax lay in the driveway.
“I hear we got a problem out here,” the sheriff said to him.
Willy pulled a long drag on his cigarette. He kept his head down, looking at something important on the toe of his shoe.
“What the hell you up to?” the sheriff said.
“Nothing,” Willy answered.
“What the hell you doing with that thing, then?” He pointed to the pickax.
Willy looked over at it. “Fixing the driveway,” he said.
“Look here, Gleason,” the sheriff said. “I can get you for aggravated assault. Or would you rather go for attempted murder?”
Willy put the cigarette out in the palm of his hand and held it.
“You save us all a whole lot of trouble,” the sheriff told him. “You be off this place in forty-eight hours.”
Willy almost looked surprised for a minute. Then he stared the sheriff straight in the eye. “What’s that bitch told you?”
“Forty-eight hours, you hear? I’ll be back, too.” And the sheriff turned to go. That’s when Willy said something about somebody getting hurt bad.
“What’s that?” sheriff asked him.
“Don’t blame me, that’s all,” Willy told him.
Back in the car, the sheriff started working up to a good rage. He was madder at himself for getting involved than he was at Willy for causing trouble. But must be he was more curious than mad because when he swung by the fishing derby and spotted the old man outside the beer tent, he pulled over and got out. The old man sat on the grass with his legs sprawled, a paper cup in his hand. Some of the Vets were picking up garbage and taking in chairs.
“I just came from seeing your boy Willy,” the sheriff told him.
The old man looked up, blinking, like he was just coming out of a coma.
“What’s going on between him and your wife?”
“The no-good son of a bitch,” Gleason said.
“He’s looking to hurt somebody,” the sheriff told him.
“She done it,” the old man said. “It’s her fault.”
“What’s she done?”
“Look at her.” He waved his hand as if she was standing right there, which to his drunken eyes she may have been. “Look at her.” He crumpled the paper cup. “It’s okay if I don’t want none of her. I’m a filthy drunk, she says. But if he don’t. It’s her own fault.”
“If he don’t what?” the sheriff said. “Who?”
“The son of a bitch,” Gleason said. “Willy. Who you think I’m talking about?”
When we got the news, we figured either the sheriff had heard wrong or else the old man was too drunk to talk straight. Nonetheless, we saw Vallina Gleason – the whole Gleason clan for that matter – in a new light. What we couldn’t figure out, though, was why Willy was such a son of a bitch in his father’s eyes if it was the old lady who was going after him.
“Maybe,” Aldin Cleary offered, “the trouble is the boy don’t want her and the old man’s insulted. You want to figure a Gleason out, you got to think like a Gleason.”
“You’re just the one to do it, too, ain’t you?” Grove said, and Aldin shot him a look that could make a dead horse get up and walk.
Cranky old men, I thought, and I prayed to God retirement didn’t do that to me. It made me want to get looking for a job all over again.
“I wonder what other kinds of perversions they do out there,” Clarky said. And we thought about it.
Two days later, the sheriff stopped at Rinaldi’s. He was headed out to see if Willy Gleason had cleared off his mother’s land. Since the volunteer fire department is about as close as he’ll come to having a deputy, a few of us went along.
There had been a problem, though. When Vallina Gleason heard the sheriff had ordered Willy off her property, she put up such a fuss they thought they were going to have a first-class riot right there in the hospital. Word was, even after they’d given her a couple of hefty shots to quiet her down she was sitting up in bed moaning, “My boy. My Willy. They’re taking my Willy from me.” When a nurse reminded her that he had tried to kill her, she said, “He never hurt nobody. He likes to have a little fun, that’s all.” This was her thirty-year-old son she was talking about, the one with the shotgun and the snake eyes. The one who held burning cigarettes in his bare hand.
So now the sheriff was in something of a bind, since the old lady swore she didn’t want Willy kicked out.
“My mistake was sticking m
y nose in their business in the first place,” the sheriff told us. “I should have left them alone to kill each other off, if that’s what they wanted to do.” But he was worried about his reputation. He couldn’t go around giving orders, he said, then not following through on them. So we drove out there, and even then we could see how the Gleason business was beginning to wear him down.
The first thing that took us was finding Sylvia Biddle sitting alone with her legs dangling off the porch, nobody else in sight. Moved right in, I figured. When we got a little closer, we saw she was holding a baby, and that about did us in. “I’ll be damned,” Clarky kept saying. “I’ll be goddamned.”
But Aldin, who’s always got an answer for everything, said, “How you know that ain’t one of Vallina’s babies?” We didn’t know, since the old lady had started having them when she was thirteen or so, and there was no telling when she’d stop. We stared hard at that baby, trying to figure it out. It could have been Sylvia and Willy’s, it could have been Vallina and the old man’s, and if it was possible, it could have belonged to all four of them.
Sylvia acted like it was the most natural thing in the world to see us out there. She was chewing – bubble gum or something – swinging her legs, and holding that kid on her knee like it was a bag of dirty laundry and she was waiting for an empty machine at the laundromat.
“Where’s Willy?” the sheriff asked.
She looked at him like she didn’t understand, and when he asked again, she pointed real slow to the trees at the end of the lot and said, “In the shed,” like there was something wrong with us that we didn’t naturally know where he was.
Never mind we couldn’t see a shed, we headed where she’d pointed. I think we all tensed up a bit as we walked across that lawn, thinking any minute somebody was going to take a shot at us.
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