The Outhouse Gang

by Neil Plakcy

  “You said Terry was going to college in California.” Jane walked into the bedroom and Harry followed.

  “That’s true, isn’t it?” Harry asked. “Unless you don’t consider a community college a real college.”

  “He said he was taking one course, Harry.” She sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her shoes on. “Some kind of biology course, about the ocean. You made it sound like he was going for a degree.”

  Harry walked over to the window, which looked out on the main square. Already he could see a few of the guys gathering in the café across the square. The bus that was going to take them on a tour of the landing beaches was idling in front of the hotel. “I didn’t lie, Jane.”

  “And what you said about Karen.”

  He turned back to her. “I said she’d gotten married and was in Illinois. Did you want me to tell them she ran away with a bum from the garage? That we think Terry is spaced out on drugs, trying to forget what happened to him in Vietnam?” He paced angrily across the room, then turned and stopped. “A long time ago, these guys and I knew everything about each other. Every time you loaded your gun, took a crap, got a Dear John letter from some gal back home. They don’t have to know everything about me any more.”

  “I know you want them to think well of you.”

  “And do you think everything you hear is the God’s honest truth?” Harry asked. “I’ll bet you every one of those guys has had his heart ripped out by his kids.” He turned around again and opened the door. “I’ll meet you at the bus.”

  * * *

  On the tour of the landing beaches, Harry sat on the aisle across from Tony Blass, a guy he’d shared a bunker with not too far from the hotel where they were staying. While Jane looked out the window, Harry talked to Tony, who was divorced.

  “This was the last good war, you know that, Harry?” Tony said. “We knew what we were fighting for, and the whole country was behind us.”

  “My boy went to Vietnam,” Harry said.

  “Mine, too. Anthony junior. Big, tall kid, hell of a basketball player. Went in when he was eighteen. Came home six months later missing half his right leg. And you know, he’s learning to play basketball from his wheelchair?”

  Harry nodded. “Terry was missing in action for six weeks. You don’t know what that did to Jane and me. The boy they sent home isn’t the same one we raised.”

  “It’s a different war.” Tony was a big, barrel-chested man with graying black hair. “Our war, we went into it kids and we came out men. Stronger. Ready to go out and raise our families, live our lives. These boys coming home, they’re hurt, like the war took something from them.” He shook his head. “Isn’t that strange? Anthony junior says he used to listen to me telling stories about the war and he dreamed of the day he could enlist. Now he says those weren’t dreams, they were nightmares.”

  “I have to tell you something.” Harry leaned across the aisle and spoke in an undertone. “My Terry, he’s not all I said he was. He’s only taking this one course at the community college. Mostly he’s a beach bum, and Jane and I think he’s doing drugs.”

  Tony Blass frowned and nodded. “We all try and make things look better. It’s what we were brought up to do.” As the bus came to a stop in front of the D-Day memorial, Tony leaned over to Harry. “My boy, he’s not exactly learning to play basketball, though I’m trying to convince him to. Mostly he sits in his room, listens to music, and cries. I go in there sometimes, he’s sitting on the bed, this rock music is blasting, and the tears are just streaming down his face.”

  They stood up, and Harry squeezed Tony’s arm. By the time they were outside, they were telling jokes again.

  * * *

  After the reunion, Harry and Jane spent a few days in Paris, walking along the boulevards, riding the bateau mouche along the Seine, sightseeing on the Left Bank. Harry resurrected a few words of Army French, and they went to a mass at Notre Dame. On the plane home, Harry took Jane’s hand and asked, “So, are you glad we went?”

  Jane nodded. “I never realized how much more there was to the world. It makes Stewart’s Crossing look awfully small, doesn’t it?”

  “But it’s home,” Harry said. “And that counts for a lot in my book.”

  “Mine, too.” Jane took his hand and squeezed.

  * * *

  There was a postcard from Karen waiting in the mailbox when they got home, a scenic view of the Badlands. She and Randy had stopped in a little town near Mount Rushmore, where he was fixing cars and she was waitressing in a café. Harry and Jane settled back into their routines, her with her Avon customers, him with his life on the line at the plant. Summer wilted into fall, and the leaves on the trees in the Moscas’ back yard began to turn color.

  Karen and Randy moved south, heading for Texas, and Terry got a job managing a snack stand at the beach. Chuck Ritter called to make sure Harry would be with the Outhouse Gang for their tenth anniversary adventure.

  “I can’t believe this is the ninth year,” Harry said. “I thought this’d be something we did once and then forgot about.”

  “We’re part of history, Harry. A Stewart’s Crossing tradition.”

  “It’s just a lot of foolishness, if you ask me, but as long as everybody else is joining in, I will too.”

  “Good. Then I’ll see you at the hardware store at nine o’clock.”

  Harry was the first, and he stood with Chuck under the streetlight at the front of the hardware store’s parking lot. Gradually the other men showed up—Sandy Lord with his seventeen-year-old son, Tommy, and his ten-year-old, Danny, and Paul Warner, with his son Dennis, who was fifteen. A few minutes later Nick Miller pulled up with his son Fred, also fifteen, and looking like he was going to be taller than his father, who was six-three. Charley Woodruff pulled up at a few minutes after nine. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “There’s been a crisis with Tom’s daughter. He won’t be coming tonight.”

  Charley’s wife Connie and Tom Laroquette’s wife Jenny were cousins. “I stopped over at his house to pick him up, and they were just coming out with the baby all wrapped up. They’re running her down to Philadelphia. Tom looked white as a ghost.”

  They were all quiet for a minute. It had been more than a year ago that Betsy Laroquette, now almost three, had been diagnosed with leukemia, and they’d all known it was just a matter of time until the cancer took over her body.

  “Should we go at all?” Chuck asked.

  The men looked at each other, and then they all looked at Charley, as the closest relative present. “You know, my Raymond, he’s nine, he said they were talking about us in school today. Course, he doesn’t know it’s us he was talking about, just the Outhouse Gang. The teacher had them make outhouses out of Popsicle sticks and she taught them all about indoor plumbing.” He shook his head. “This thing is bigger than us. It’s gotten so people expect it. I don’t think we should let them down.”

  Sandy said, “He’s right. The scouts in Danny’s troop were talking about the Outhouse Gang last week and it was all I could do to stop myself from correcting them. They think we’re a bunch of outlaws who ride into Stewart’s Crossing every year to make trouble.” He ruffled his younger son’s hair.

  “Then I guess we ought to go,” Chuck said. “Everybody in the truck.”

  It was still a sober occasion, none of the whooping and hollering that had marked previous occasions. The kids kept to themselves, clustering together in the back of the truck, and none of the men seemed to have much to say.

  Because the suburbs were taking over the farmlands close to town, they had to drive to an old farm nearly fifteen miles from Stewart’s Crossing to load the outhouse. When they were finished, Chuck asked, “So where shall we put this one?”

  Everybody was quiet, thinking. In previous years, they had left an outhouse by the fire station, the bank, the town hall, and several other civic landmarks. “How about the train station?” Charley asked. “We can sort of make our connection to Tom that way.”
r />   Everyone nodded. “Good idea,” Sandy said.

  The station was deserted, since the last train passed through on its way to West Trenton at nine o’clock, bringing home late workers and couples who’d gone into the city for dinner. There were only two cars in the parking lot.

  Crickets chirped loudly in the grassy stretch along the tracks. They unloaded the outhouse and carried it up to the platform, where they stood it up on the Center City side. “I’ve got the finishing touch,” Paul said. He opened his wallet and pulled out a ticket, which he stuck in the door jamb. “Now it’s all ready for the first morning train.”

  * * *

  The morning of Betsy Laroquette’s funeral was cool and gray. Most of the trees had lost their leaves by then, the Halloween pumpkins had rotted and the Indian corn hung on front doors had withered away. It was still a long way to Thanksgiving, but at the funeral the pastor reminded the mourners that the holiday was approaching. “And when we sit down at our holiday tables, and thank the Lord for the bounty he has given us, we must thank him also for Betsy Laroquette,” he said, standing at the head of the grave as the tiny coffin was lowered into the ground. “We must thank him for the time he gave us to spend with her, and thank him also for taking her back unto his bosom, where she will have no more pain, but an eternal childhood.”

  Harry and Jane Mosca stood in the middle of a group of mourners, holding hands. A tear streaked Jane’s cheek. We always lose our children, Harry thought. We hold onto them for as long as we can, but we always lose them in the end.

  Paul: 1973

  It was time once again for the Harvest Fair on the grounds of the Friends’ Meeting, on the north side of Stewart’s Crossing. Craftsmen and artists and people cleaning out their attics and cellars rented tables for the festival, which was held on a Saturday in early September.

  The meeting house was rimmed by tall oaks which were just turning gold. Two teenaged boys stood in the middle of Main Street, directing traffic in and out of the parking lot. Looking out from the passenger window, Paul Warner noticed that the creek seemed to be running high. It ran down from the hills above town, past the lumber mill and into the Delaware, where it joined in the rush to the ocean, and had swelled with the recent late-summer rains.

  As they got out of the car in the parking lot, sixteen-year-old Dennis asked, “Can I have some money?”

  “For what?” Elaine slung her purse over her shoulder and locked the car. Paul started walking toward the first tables.

  Dennis shrugged and followed. “I won’t know until I see it.”

  “When you see something you want, come and ask me. If it’s worth it, I’ll buy it for you.”

  Though he clearly didn't want to, Dennis stuck close to his parents as they walked over the grass, looking at flowered wreaths, handmade Christmas ornaments, and stained glass sun catchers. Every so often there was a table full of junk, and all three Warners would pause to look carefully.

  Paul was always looking for tools. He was amazed at how many people owned tools they didn’t know the value of and didn’t know what to do with. He had dozens of wrenches, screwdrivers, pairs of pliers and hammers and mallets. He owned many tools intended for obscure jobs, and some that even he didn’t know what to do with.

  Dennis looked for books. At every flea market he walked away with armloads of paperbacks, so many that his father wondered if he ever read them all. He’d buy nearly new ones, old books so tattered their covers were gone and their bindings frayed, and everything in between.

  Elaine was more general in her taste. She looked for antique silver and china, although she also had a passion for old lace and linen hand towels. She also picked up bargains on office supplies like paper clips and envelopes, and occasionally boxes of detergent, batteries, or bottles of hand lotion, things that looked like they had fallen off the back of trucks in multiple units.

  The lawn was crowded, everybody wearing bell-bottom pants and tie-dyed t-shirts, Nehru jackets and peace symbols on leather thongs. Even the older men were wearing jackets with funky lapels and wide ties. Many women looked like earth mothers, in flowing dresses of gauzy material.

  The Warners ran into Sandy and Helene Lord at a table selling quilted potholders. Sandy was running for Town Council, against an elderly man who’d been on the council for nearly twenty years, and whose thinking was still back in the fifties, so he was shaking hands and asking people what was wrong with the town.

  “How’s the campaign going?” Paul asked.

  “I think it’s going well. I’m meeting a lot of people, and learning a lot about what Stewart’s Crossing needs.”

  “Such as?”

  Sandy held up his hand and ticked off the fingers as he spoke. “More police. Smaller classes in the elementary schools and more electives at the high school. We have to regulate the developers who are buying up the farms within the town limits and make sure they pay for upgrading streets and sewers. Better storm drainage. And more street lights on secondary roads.”

  “Seems like you’ve got a lot on your agenda.”

  Sandy nodded. “We need to take control, to make sure that our community is run the way we believe it should be.”

  The Warners continued to wander through the festival, and eventually walked into the meeting house proper, where members of the congregation had set up a kitchen and were selling hot dogs, baked beans and sodas. “Is it all right if I go outside?” Dennis asked, holding his plate. “I saw Lisa Ritter and a bunch of other kids out in back.”

  “Sure,” Paul said.

  “Just don’t leave without telling us,” Elaine called to his back.

  “When do they grow up?” she asked, as she and Paul sat down on a picnic bench. “He’s sixteen years old.”

  “I wonder if we don’t hold him back sometimes. Maybe we should encourage him to go out more.”

  “I worry about the trouble these kids get into. Drinking, and smoking dope and running around in cars. He should be happy to stay home with us.”

  Paul put down his hot dog in exasperation. “You can’t have it both ways,” he said. “If you want him to grow up, you have to let go of him.”

  “That’s fine for you to say,” Elaine said, dabbing at her mouth with a paper napkin. “You let go of him years ago.”

  “Let’s not start that again, Elaine. You want to live in a nice house, have nice things, send the boy to college, then I have to work. And sometimes I have to work long hours. Dennis understands.”

  Dennis was back a few minutes later, still holding his plate. “What’s the matter, sweetheart?” Elaine asked.

  Dennis shrugged. “I guess they left.” He sat down next to his parents and started to eat.

  They walked around for a while after lunch, and then Elaine saw a couple who had listed their house with her and she went over to chat them up. Paul and Dennis walked back to the car to wait for her.

  “Can I ask you a question, Dad?”

  “The answer’s no,” Paul said. “If you don’t like that, then ask your mother.” He started to smile, but when he saw Dennis’ face he stopped. “I’m sorry. Go ahead.”

  “Do you think smoking dope is bad?”

  “Has somebody been trying to sell you drugs?”

  Dennis frowned. “Dad. Answer the question.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think dope is dangerous?”

  “Yes. Well, I don’t know that for sure. I’m not a scientist. I only know what I read. But I think anything that makes you lose control is bad. And that’s what dope does to you.”

  “Isn’t alcohol like that?”

  Paul leaned up against the car. “Responsible adults can drink alcohol in small doses, and still be all right. I don’t think that’s the case with dope. But I’ll be honest with you, I’ve never tried it.” He paused for a minute. “Have you?”

  Dennis shook his head. “There’s kids at school who smoke. You can smell it in the bathrooms, and out on the bus dock. But usually they’re bad kids.�
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  They were both quiet for a minute. The air was full of sound, though, little kids squealing, cars starting, and somewhere the music of a calliope. “So what’s this about?” Paul asked finally. “You must have had a reason to bring this up.”

  Dennis was silent for a while. “I went out to where Lisa Ritter and those other kids were hanging out,” he said, after a while. “They were still there. But they were getting high. They asked me if I wanted to and I said no. So Lisa said I had to leave.”

  “You did the right thing. But I thought Lisa Ritter was a good girl.”

  “I think she is, pretty much,” Dennis said. “I mean, she’s pretty smart and she’s on the debate team.” He paused. “Are you going to tell her father?”

  “If it were you, I’d want to know.”

  “Please don’t say I told you about it. I don’t want the kids to call me a narc.”

  Paul looked grim. “You did the right thing. Don’t worry about it.”

  Elaine came back a few minutes later and the Warners went grocery shopping, then back home. Paul put off calling Chuck Ritter for a few days, hoping that he’d forget, or that the whole thing could just blow over.

  Wednesday night, Elaine was reading the paper while Etta, the live-in housekeeper, was finishing dinner. They had hired Etta a few months after moving to Stewart’s Crossing, when Dennis was a small child and needed looking after, and Elaine was eager to get her real estate license and start selling houses. Now that Dennis was old enough to look after himself, they didn’t feel right about just letting her go, even though she was old enough to retire and collect Social Security.

  “Anything interesting?” Paul asked, coming in to the dining room and loosening his tie.

  “Something you might want to see.” She handed him section B, the Local section. “Look at the bottom of page three.”

  Paul dutifully opened the paper and noted an article about the new police chief, who promised to crack down on crime at all levels in Stewart’s Crossing. He was setting up Neighborhood Watch programs to reduce burglaries, putting more policemen on patrol, and creating a special drug team. But the most interesting part of his new program concerned the Outhouse Gang.