Collected Short Stories: Volume IV

by Barry Rachin

  “Not ours – the idiot’s.” The idiot, of course, was Mr. Hooper and the lawn in question was the eight-foot wide parcel of unruly wilderness on the far side of the property.

  Sade raised her fork and shook it at her father. “You go over there, and he’ll call the cops and have you arrested for trespassing.”

  Mr. Richardson grinned at his daughter, but the man was all bluff and vacuous bluster.

  Sade understood perfectly well that her father was just blowing off steam, a favorite pastime. He would throw back his shoulders, assume a menacing tone; once he had everyone’s undivided attention, he would make a rash, provocative pronouncement. But nothing ever came of it. With Sade’s father, threatening to do something homicidally reckless was more recreational pursuit than clinical pathology.

  Melvin Richardson was a handsome black man with boyish, photogenic features. Like his daughter, the skin was smooth and clear with high cheekbones and sensuous lips. Deep-set eyes framed a broad forehead. When he smiled, the man looked ten years younger than his wife who was born the same month thirty-eight years earlier. Mrs. Richardson, by contrast, was light-skinned and rather plain with a nervous, petulant set to her thin lips.

  “You shouldn’t have called Mr. Hooper that bad name,” Sade picked up where she had left off. “You keep saying Billy Ray’s a racist and bigot, but up until you started harassing him, the man treated us decent enough.”

  “Whose side are you on anyway?”

  “I’m just saying maybe you should go over there and bury the hatchet.”

  Sade’s little brother, Leon, kept looking back and forth as the conversation progressed. At ten years old, he was still too young to have an opinion one way or the other. “Yeah, I’ll bury the hatchet one of these days,” Mr. Richardson snickered. “I’ll bury it right between his - ”

  “You seem to be spending an awful lot of time lately,” Mrs. Richardson interrupted, “with the Wiener boy.”

  “George,” Sade confirmed. “He’s always got his nose buried in a book.”

  “The Wieners – they’re Jewish.” She turned to her husband. “The People of the Book - that’s what they’re called, because they’re always reading, studying, advancing themselves intellectually.” Fetching the coffee pot, she warmed her husband’s cup and placed a peach cobbler on the table. “The wife brought a chocolate cake over by way of a housewarming present the week after we settled in. Such a nice gesture, don’t you think?” Her husband shrugged noncommittally and nibbled at the dessert.

  “He wants to be a writer… a novelist or something,” Sade ventured.

  “Who does?” Leon finally entered the conversation.

  “George. He reads these highfalutin, literary books, gets all excited and tells me about them.”

  “What books?” Mrs. Richardson offered her husband a second helping of the peach cobbler.

  “I don’t know. It’s all too complicated.”

  Through the kitchen window, they could see Billy Ray Hooper wearing jeans and cowboy boots sauntering over to his truck. He fired up the engine, pulled out of the driveway and disappeared down the street. “Here’s your golden opportunity,” Sade said in a good-natured, teasing tone.

  Mr. Richardson scowled. He placed his dirty dishes in the sink, went back and retrieved his coffee. “I’ll deal with that redneck hooligan another day.” He retreated to the den and the evening news. Leon also brought his plate to the counter and trailed away after his father.

  After he was gone Mrs. Richardson said, “You take great pleasure aggravating your father.”

  “Mr. Hooper isn’t a bigot. He doesn’t care one way or the other about black people. Daddy got him all riled up, and then he had to go and call him an asshole.”

  Mrs. Richardson usually brought her daughter up short for using foul language, but the woman sighed and stared at her slender fingers. “You know how your father is.”

  “Daddy doesn’t like white people.”

  “No, it’s not that,” her mother protested. “He gets agitated… frightened and acts impulsively.” She began wiping down the kitchen table with a damp rag. “He shouldn’t have said that to Mr. Hooper, but he’s got too much pride to admit that he did anything wrong.”

  *****

  A week later on a Sunday morning, George went downstairs for breakfast but his parents were nowhere to be found. He glanced out the kitchen window. Mr. and Mrs. Weiner were standing over by a profusion of straggly lilacs in full bloom, jabbering with the Richardsons. They were breaking the news about the fence. The ‘privacy’ fence – that’s what they had decided to call it. Not an exclusion or security or I-hate-colored-people fence but a sturdy, six-foot cedar stockade that would sit just inside of the Weiner’s property line and give both families a measure of ‘privacy’.

  Mrs. Richardson was all smiles. The willowy woman even laughed graciously, her head bobbing up and down in agreement with some point that Mr. Weiner had raised. Mr. Richardson was smiling too, but the expression was anything but congenial. There was much gesticulating plus several loud belly laughs and high-pitched titters that carried all the way across the back lawn and into the kitchen. It was grownups acting silly and totally out of control.

  It was pure, one hundred proof, straight-from-the-bottle E.M. Forster!

  On the far side of the lawn, Sade’s torso was framed in an upstairs window. She had been watching the freak show from a loftier vantage. When she saw George staring at her, the girl placed her fingertips over her lips and blew George a silent kiss.

  No one noticed. They were too engaged in fence diplomacy. It was at that moment that George understood – an epiphany of sorts - that he loved Sade Richardson. Totally. Completely. Utterly. The kiss at the reservoir was shockingly pleasant enough, but this long-distance, whimsical gesture struck him at a far deeper level. Some inchoate thread of intimacy which had been nurtured over the past few years burst into life – like forcing dormant seed with warmth and light to germinate in the middle of a wintry deep freeze. And that, too, was so very E.M. Forster!

  He would have to tell her at the earliest convenience – not that Sade would give a hoot. She would roll her walnut-colored eyes and make a snotty remark, suggesting he was a total buffoon. And then she would practice left-hand layups and fall away jump shots, dribble between her chocolaty legs and life would pursue its lopsided, irregular course.

  When his parents returned to the house, Mrs. Weiner announced, “Well, what do you think?”

  George’s father shook his head emphatically. “Things went as well as could be expected. They know that we’re not hate mongers and that the fence benefits all concerned.”

  “I wish you hadn’t quoted Frost’s poem about Mending Walls,” his wife noted. “That was a bit melodramatic.”

  Mr. Weiner made a face. “Look, we all got to live together in this goddamn community so you gotta do whatever it takes.”

  “There’s no reason for profanity,” Mrs. Weiner’s tone darkened noticeably. Everyone’s nerves were on edge. “It’s over and that’s all that matters. They agreed in principle that a fence is a good idea.”

  Mr. Weiner put the coffee on to boil and got a cup down from the cabinet. “I’ll call the fence company in the morning.”

  Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

  That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

  And spills the upper boulders in the sun, ...

  In the middle of the following week a truck towing a huge auger from the Providence Fence Company pulled up in front of the Weiner’s home. With a Stanley twenty-five foot tape measure and can of spray paint, the crew measured and marked the locations of each of seventeen posts. They fired up the noisy, gas-operated auger and drilled down two feet into the rocky soil. By the early afternoon the crew packed up and left. George went out to inspect. The four-by-four posts stood perfectly plumb in a slurry of gravelly cement mix. The chalky gray liquid near the street had already begun to set up and cure. George bent d
own and scratched the rough surface with a fingernail. It was already hard as rock.

  The next day the workers returned to finish the job. The individual sections of stockade fence were fastened in place using an elaborate system of metal fasteners, nuts and bolts. Gradually the rows of wooden slats crept across the grassy lawn dividing the two properties, and by the late afternoon the beautiful cedar fence stretched to the far end of both yards. Each post was fitted with a decorative crown, a graceful, scalloped pattern defining each individual slatted row. Mr. Weiner was very pleased when he returned home from work. “Money well spent!” he announced with an exultant grin.

  “Yes, it’s a lovely piece of workmanship,” his wife agreed.

  *****

  The following week Sade’s Wildcats were playing the Donovan School. George walked a half mile to the gymnasium and sat in the bleachers next to a Cambodian woman, whose daughter was on the opposing team. By the end of the first quarter the Wildcats were winning fourteen to five, Sade having scored half the points and picking off a dozen rebounds. When the buzzer rang, the coach made substitutions and the score became more respectable. After the half, Sade went back in the game, made a series of easy layups and, from that point on, the outcome was never in doubt.

  George waited outside the gym for his friend, who emerged after a few minutes still wearing her uniform. Rather than go directly home, they stopped by the athletic field at the end of the street where a soccer match was underway. “There’s gonna be fireworks,” Sade announced, “and I’m not talking Fourth of July or the Eighteen-Twelve Overture.”

  George had a vague intimation what was coming. Earlier at the basketball game, Mr. Richardson had walked by the bleachers where George was sitting next to the squat Asian woman. Noticing George, his face puckered in a brusque scowl and the black man glanced away.

  “My father’s angry as hell over the fence,” Sade continued. “He says your dad’s a hatemonger worse than Billy Ray Hooper.” After saying this she draped an arm around his waist and leaned into the boy with her body.

  “But my parents spoke to your dad just the other week and he agreed the fence was a good idea.”

  “No, he only agreed that they had the legal right to put it up.”

  “Did he tell my folks that?”

  “No, of course not! My father’s totally nuts... a crackpot” She said this with unassuming finality.

  He felt her grip tighten. He wanted to kiss her – to forget about cedar fencing, folksy Robert Frost poems about mending stone walls, racial reparations and all the other intrinsic stupidity that cluttered his thirteen year-old existence. But then, someone might see George Wiener kissing an attractive black girl, and he would have to relocate to another part of the country, abandoning scenic New England altogether. “We have nothing in common.”

  “That’s true enough.” Sade didn’t bother to look at him. She was watching the soccer game. “But then you talk some moronic nonsense that I’m not even remotely interested in and then maybe a week and a half later, I get to thinking about E.M. Forsner or whatever the hell his name is and it makes me feel as though the craziness in my own family is manageable which, of course, it isn’t.” Only now did she turn and look him full in the face. “I’m warning you. My father’s gonna do something really stupid.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know and don’t especially care.” She kissed him full on the lips, a leisurely, unhurried kiss. Several of the soccer players scrimmaging off to the side of the field gawked at them queerly. “Let’s go home now before we start an ugly scene of our own.”

  *****

  “How was the basketball game?” Mrs. Weiner asked.

  “Good,” George responded absentmindedly. He went upstairs to his room and shut the door.

  It was all about muddles.

  According to the world’s leading authority on the subject, E.M. Forster, everything that was wrong in society and between people had to do with muddles – states of confusion, bewildering ambiguity, emotional messiness, mystifying jumbles of chaos and perplexing disorder. A hopeless muddle was at the root of most problems, whether it be running a sturdy, hardwood fence across sixty feet of property or settling grievances that dated back to the Civil War. You couldn’t talk it through, since rational conversation offered no solution whatsoever and frequently only made things worse.

  When things were going poorly, George felt his brains all in a muddle. There were days strung together, end-to-end in a dismal row, where George felt like a bit player, an ill-prepared character actor in a tacky melodrama not of his choosing. But then Sade came to visit him at the secret cove and the muddle dissolved, evaporated, was blown to smithereens by her infuriating loveliness and utter disregard for what mattered to everyone else.

  Each fulfilled an unmet need.

  He was the gossamer glue that held her fractured, dysfunctional universe together; she was the Nubian princess who – abracadabra - banished muddles. All that was required was a kiss on the lips from a black girl with hands so strong and malleable that she could palm a regulation-size basketball. Or, better yet, what was needed was a mystical novel of last-minute redemption written by an introverted Englishman born well over a hundred years ago.

  A week later, the Wieners discovered the depth of Mr. Richardson’s paranoid rage

  George’s mother was in the back yard hanging laundry. Mr. Weiner had fitted the pressure-treated T-shaped poles with an adjustable mechanical device. The far end of the cotton clothesline was fed through a small hole ringed with metal ball bearings. As the line began to stretch and sag from the weight of the wet clothing, a quick tug on the end of the rope would raise the line back to its original height. Mrs. Wiener had just fixed a pair of her husband’s Fruit of the Loom boxer underwear on the line with a pair of wooden clothespins, when she saw a huge, almond-colored missile sail up and over the fence, coming to rest with a frightening crash among the tiger lilies in her rock garden.

  The middle-aged woman’s legs turned to mush as she collapsed onto the grass in a terrified daze. Through a chink in the new fence she spotted Mr. Richardson wearing a lime green Izod sport shirt sauntering up the back stairs to his deck before disappearing into the house. The projectile, which he had launched like a shot putter whirling faster and faster in concentric circles, was a metal propane tank that he borrowed from Mr. Wiener at the beginning of July.

  Weeping hysterically, Mrs. Wiener abandoned the laundry basket full of damp clothes, staggered into the house and called her husband. “It would appear,” she spoke in a faltering falsetto, “our neighbor wants reparations.”

  Following the propane tank incident, Mr. Wiener went to an attorney and got a restraining order against his neighbor. The legal document stated in terse, no-nonsense language that Mr. Richardson and his wife were not to speak to the Wieners except through proper legal representation; Mr. Richardson could not ‘throw, drop, hurl or otherwise jettison any miscellaneous belongings’ onto the neighbors’ property under threat of civil litigation; and the parents were to ‘cease and desist’ from making any obscene, inflammatory or threatening gestures when entertaining on their deck. Other than the bizarre incident with the propane tank and a few withering stares, Melvin Richardson had done nothing of the sort, but – like a warning shot over the bow – the Wieners’ lawyer threw the last statement in for good measure.

  *****

  Saturday night Sade shuffled into the bathroom where her mother was blow drying her hair. She overhead heard her parents talking earlier in the afternoon about the letter from the lawyer, which was delivered certified mail. “Is Daddy going to jail?”

  Mrs. Richardson pulled a wide-toothed comb through her damp hair, waving the dryer over the limp strands. “No. He’ll just keep a low profile... be on extra-good behavior and things will eventually blow over.”

  “What he did was stupid as hell.” Sade lowered the toilet seat and sat down on the terrycloth lid cover.

  “Yes,
well your father has a penchant for making dramatic statements without considering the consequences.” She repositioned the hair dryer on the opposite side of her head and began to comb out the snarls and tangles. “That’s why he needs us women,” her mother replied with an undertone of gravitas tinged with humor. “To keep him of the straight and narrow ... to make him realize he’s acted really wacky and needs to go into the witness protection program.”

  Sade had no idea what her mother was talking about except that, since the bizarre incident with the propane tank, her intemperate father had been uncharacteristically meek and obliging. Unfortunately, the eerie calm wouldn’t last. Once the crisis had blown over, Mr. Richardson would begin bellyaching about some newly-imagined fault or injustice. “I kissed that Wiener boy.”

  The girl’s mother shut the dryer off and stared at her daughter in disbelief. “You what?”

  “He’s very weird,” Sade ignored the original question. “Always talking about books. Books, books, books. He thinks the solutions to all the world’s problems can be found in some musty novel written a thousand years ago.”

  Mrs. Richardson turned the dryer back on full speed and directed the nozzle at the nape of her neck. The hairs floated lazily on the upstream of warm air. “You and I need to have a little talk.”

  “About what?” The girl thought a moment. “Oh, yeah, that.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s anything in George’s moldy books about dealing with irascible, short-tempered black men.”

  Sade smiled at her mother’s backside. “Not likely.”

  Someone had turned the television on and Sade could hear the theme song from Hannah Montana drifting down the hallway. “I appreciate your telling me about the kiss,” there was a note of urgency in the woman’s voice. “I hope you will have the good sense not to share that last bit of news with your father.”

  Sade headed for the open door. “Not in this lifetime.”

 

  *****

  “You can’t go over the Richardsons’ house anymore,” Mr. Weiner announced in a peremptory tone. They were sitting down to a supper of meatloaf, mashed potatoes and butternut squash. “That crazy black man tried to kill your mother.”