by Andrew Smith
We were working at Lily Putt’s Indoor-Outdoor Miniature Golf Course on Saturday, the day after the terrible dance. Dad liked to take advantage of slow times, like when I was cleaning up, to give me pep talks about his plans for me.
He also made me wear my kilt that day, so I came up with excuses to stay behind the counter at the snack bar, just in case any kids from Dick Dowling showed up.
Who was I kidding? Kids from Dick Dowling were there pretty much all day on Saturdays, and hiding when you’re a boy and also in Texas, and wearing a kilt, is impossible.
Still, on kilt days at the golf course, I always refused to climb up the volcano or the T. rex hole to dislodge any stuck balls. Climbing up anything as tall as our volcano or T. rex was far too dangerous in a kilt.
Along with a two-screen movie house and a diner called Colonel Jenkins’s Diner, which was owned and operated by Kenny Jenkins (father of the murderer James Jenkins), our miniature golf course was the biggest attraction in Blue Creek. Actually, those were the only three attractions in Blue Creek, unless you included as attractions the three schools, a church, the post office, the creek, a stuffed calf at Blue Creek Feeds, and a few hundred homes and farms.
We inherited Lily Putt’s Indoor-Outdoor Miniature Golf Course from my great-grandmother, whose name was Lily Abernathy. I never knew her, but she had been a very popular gospel singer, and even won a Grammy for a song called “I Will Walk with Him in the Garden of Blood.”
Needless to say, my great-grandmother’s song always made me think of James Jenkins.
As usual I wasn’t enthusiastically listening to Dad about my future at Blue Creek Magnet High School. I was preparing a yogurt-and-mint sauce for the lamb burgers on psomi bread that were featured for the weekend in the snack bar.
So I said, “Sounds like a plan, Dad.”
Our snack bar did a lot of business on weekends.
My dad looked puzzled. “Is something wrong?”
This was a potential breakthrough.
I inhaled deeply and looked up from the mint I was chopping. Finally, I had an opportunity to actually talk to my dad about what I wanted to do. At last I could tell Dad how much I hated living in Blue Creek, where I would always be THE LITTLE BOY IN THE WELL—the kid everyone was supposed to pray for. Finally, I could let Mom and Dad off the hook for all their planning—all their obsession about making sure I’d never have the freedom to fall into unseen holes in my future. And maybe doing so would free me from my quiet submission to never do something as foolish as fall into a hole and disappoint my parents ever again.
I said, “Yeah, Dad. I was . . . um . . . thinking about Blue Creek Magnet, and I—”
“No. I mean, where are Rigo and Maribel?” Dad asked.
Rigo and Maribel ran the golf course when we weren’t there.
“Someone got some balls stuck in the T. rex,” I said. “You know, I probably shouldn’t climb up something like a T. rex with my kilt on, and all.”
Dad laughed. “Ha ha! That’s my boy! Heh. Maybe one day you’ll invent an autonomous robot and program it to retrieve stuck golf balls!”
“In a kilt,” I added. Then I pointed over to the main counter and said, “Dad, there’s a line of people waiting to play.”
COOK’S RIOT!
Sunday starts with a breakfast of negative feedback.
Once a week, on Sundays, the people of Blue Creek receive the Hill Country Yodeler, our local paper that mostly recycles stories about how people from out in the cities drive too dangerously through our town, how much rainfall we received during this month last year, and when the next Dumpster Day will be held at the community center.
Dumpster Days are opportunities for people to discard things like old refrigerators or transmissions—things that are too enormous to just leave out on the street for garbage collection, and that don’t look good getting rusty piled up for years on the side of your house.
The other thing that is a regular feature in the Yodeler is a food column—a critique of local eating establishments—called Cook’s Riot!
The column is written by James Jenkins’s father, Kenny, who also owns and operates the only Blue Creek eatery, Colonel Jenkins’s Diner.
Last summer, Kenny Jenkins devoted two complete months of his column to comparing and criticizing the different subtle successes and failures of the Whataburger locations in Taylor, Hutto, Pflugerville, Georgetown, Cedar Park, Bastrop, Giddings, and Lakeway. It was riveting stuff, for example, when Kenny Jenkins did such things as claim, “The green chile double in Pflugerville drips with despair and a Chernobyl-like afterbirth. If I saw one of these monstrosities in my yard at night, I would have no choice but to shoot it, and then burn down my house in an attempt to halt the spread of whatever contagion it undoubtedly transmits.”
The main feature of Kenny Jenkins’s column is the author’s unswerving confidence in his expertise, and unapologetic cruelty to any dining establishment that is not his own.
Kenny Jenkins was a kind of celebrity in Blue Creek because of how intimidating and simultaneously classy he was, and also because he’d been on a Food Network cooking competition show, even though he was eliminated in the first round for serving a taco on an unheated corn tortilla.
Blue Creek normally did not have any celebrities unless it was late in the high school football season.
I got into my Clan Abernathy kilt and knee socks, pulled on a T-shirt, and went down to breakfast.
While Dad was getting into his kilt, and Mom hunted for his misplaced sporran, which is another name for “Scottish man purse,” Dylan smeared scrambled eggs and ketchup in his hair, and my sister Evie poured herself a bowl of cereal, just as I opened up the Yodeler to read the latest installment of Kenny Jenkins’s Cook’s Riot!
I read the opening paragraph and stopped. Then I read it again to be sure I hadn’t lost my mind.
This Sunday’s Cook’s Riot! column was about the food served at Lily Putt’s Indoor-Outdoor Miniature Golf Course.
Kenny Jenkins wrote an entire column of nastiness about me, particularly about the food I prepare for the weekend menu at the golf course.
At Lily Putt’s Snack Bar, one might endeavor to be daring and try the Lame (on-site, it is mislabeled “Lamb”) Burger, which is served on a pair of roofing shingles that are on an apparent meandering journey through Blue Creek and traveling incognito as psomi bread. If that were not sufficient cause to make one consider expatriation from the planet, the yogurt-mint sauce, which tastes suspiciously of insecticide and acetone and finishes off with a flourish of hot asphalt, is bound to do the trick. The best course of action to pursue with one of Lily Putt’s Lamb Burgers? Drive it out to a desolate portion of the panhandle, drop it off there, and pray it doesn’t succeed in following you back home. You may want to bring a shovel, to bury it first as a precaution.
Mom and Dad told me it was great publicity for the golf course, despite my argument that there was no such thing as publicity in Blue Creek.
But I was confused. I should have been mad at Kenny Jenkins, but, oddly enough, I wasn’t. The column just made me feel mopey and depressed about everything. I knew Kenny Jenkins was wrong about the food I made at Lily Putt’s, and that he was just a mean, nasty person, but pointing that out to anyone would be like pointing out that Texas was a pretty big place, sizewise. The thing is, I could have just as easily penned a publicity piece about Colonel Jenkins’s Diner—about how the restaurant used frozen everything, and liberally seasoned their output with two exclusive flavors, salt and margarine, but it would have been a waste of my energy. Everyone in Blue Creek knew Kenny Jenkins couldn’t cook to save his life, but people still ate at his diner because being lazy about cooking a meal is the foundation of human nature, and people generally agreed that Kenny Jenkins’s column was funny and acerbic. Also, just like I was with his son James, everyone in Blue Creek was afraid of Kenny Jenkins.
Mom drove Dad and me, in our kilts, into town to open up the golf course that morning.
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She reached over the seat and patted my knee. It felt weird, being in essentially a skirt and all. I sat between Dylan and Evie and their car seats.
Mom said, “You’re awfully quiet, Sam.”
I just nodded and made eye contact with her in the rearview mirror.
She said, “Well, don’t feel bad, sweetie. Everyone adores the burgers you make.”
Dad turned around and looked at me.
Dad said, “Don’t take it too seriously, buddy. It’s just food, after all. Making stuff like food, just to make people happy, is not worth getting all sensitive about. It’s not like it’ll change the world or make people’s lives better—like designing some new kind of gadget that saves time and effort—maybe one that will automatically tune up your car while you’re asleep or something. Wouldn’t that be a great idea? You should write that down, so you remember it when you get to high school next year. The whole point of our campouts is to affirm to the world that all a man needs is a knife and some fire and he’ll be perfectly fine, am I right? Kenny Jenkins can’t criticize that, no matter what success and survival taste like!”
But I wasn’t listening to Dad.
I was thinking up a way to prepare a crispy-pork-belly burger, and how I’d maybe serve it on a warm cornbread-inspired roll with a grilled-pineapple-and-mango salsa, and wondering if we had the right stuff for it in the kitchen at Lily Putt’s.
THE FIRST NIGHT IN THE HOLE
I WILL WALK WITH HIM IN THE GARDEN OF BLOOD
It all starts with pitch-darkness, singing, and cold rain.
People from all over had come to see the hole I’d fallen into. Above, they’d been pushed back behind a ribbon of plastic yellow caution tape. The rescuers were concerned that the weight of all those post-Thanksgiving-dinner Texans might affect the stability of the well.
A thick black cable was snaked down into the well. A white-hot light beamed from the end of it, and there was also some kind of speaker on it too, which is where my dad’s voice came from.
“Sam? Sweetie, if you can hear me, can you please say something? Let us know you’re okay? Can you see the light? We can’t see you on the camera.”
The cable with the light on it had gotten stuck on the same ledge I hit on my way down, about fifteen feet above me.
“Dad? I fell down here. I’m sorry for ruining Thanksgiving,” I said.
My voice sounded gritty, like the dirt from the well had formed mud clots in my throat.
Then came the noise of dozens of people cheering above me. I didn’t know why everyone was so happy; I was miserable.
“Sam? Where are you? Are you hurt? Does anything hurt, buddy?” my dad asked.
I turned my head to look around the bottom of the well. I saw a quarter and the cap off a plastic water bottle. In the light that shined from the end of the cable, I could fully see how filthy I was, and how confined the space around me was too. I looked for Bartleby, convinced that he was about to play a trick on everyone and laugh at us for being fools, but he was gone. It kind of made me mad to think that Bartleby had abandoned me, after what I’d put up with from him.
What a coward, I thought.
My dad’s voice echoed again, “Can you move your hands and feet?”
Of course I could move my hands and feet, I thought. I’d just crawled through a tunnel to Ethan Pixler’s coffin and back.
I wiggled my hands and feet.
“I don’t think I’m hurt, Dad. I’m just stuck, is all.”
I started crying. I couldn’t help it.
Above me, the cheering got very quiet.
But something cold and wet began dripping on my legs. And I got really mad at first because I thought it was Bartleby making (excuse me) “unicorn pee,” but it turned out to be only rain, which was probably worse. And as the rain fell, and the bottom of the well transformed into a cold pudding of mud, my father reassured me they were in the process of putting up a tent to stop the runoff from coming down the hole, while the other people who were waiting up above for some kind of miracle—perhaps me or Ethan Pixler to rise up and thank them for being so kind and waiting in the rain for something miraculous to happen—began to sing.
They sang my great-grandmother’s song, “I Will Walk with Him in the Garden of Blood.”
On my passing I will walk in a garden
Awash with the blood that grants heaven’s pardon.
A fragrant rose from ev’ry sin I’ve committed
Will bloom and sing out, “This sinner’s been acquitted.”
Unlike “Deep in the Heart of Texas”—where you get to clap and stuff—it was not a very cheerful song.
I knew every word, too, but nothing about my great-grandmother’s Grammy-winning gospel song made the first bit of sense to me at four years old. But if armadillos could talk, I suppose blood-soaked roses could sing.
Then my dad said, “Sam? Just hang in there, buddy. We’re going to get you out of there. Just try to stay calm.”
I tried being calm, but nobody up there could possibly understand what it felt like to be down here. The muddy water was cold, and I couldn’t raise myself up out of it.
I said, “I want to go home.”
“We’ll get you, Sam. Just breathe easy. The fire department is here, and the TV news came out, all the way from Austin. You should see what it looks like up here, Sam. There must be two hundred people out here praying for you,” Dad said. “Can you see where the light is coming from?”
That sounded like the title to a gospel song, I thought. Maybe one where you could clap, or at least maybe snap your fingers or do arm movements, like the Chicken Dance.
The flow of water down the well slowed to a trickle and then finally stopped. They must have gotten the tent up to cover the hole, because I could still hear the drumming of dime-size Texas raindrops marching like a military parade on the canopy above, but I was still soaked and muddy. And trapped.
People were singing again.
I said, “The light’s stuck on a rock or something, up above me pretty far. I can’t reach it.”
And that sounded like a gospel song too, I thought. Great-Grandma Lily Abernathy must have had an easy source of inspiration here in Texas.
Dad said, “That’s okay, buddy. You just relax and stay still. We’re working on it. We’ll have you out in no time.”
I had no choice but to stay still.
I heard my mother. She must have been standing right next to Dad. She was crying, and it made me feel terrible. It was all my fault. If I ever got out, I swore I would never do anything to disappoint Mom and Dad ever again.
Remembering this time, I suppose that up above me Mom and Dad were also determining how they would never again let me out of their sight long enough to fall into another hole. And that’s pretty much the explanation of my life, when I think about it now. I wasn’t going to disappoint them, and they weren’t going to let me have that opportunity, not ever again.
I rested my head against the side of the well, shut my eyes, and tried to go to sleep.
FINDING A CHOCOLATE YOU
Then it starts with a discussion on aging.
Bartleby had come back.
I cannot say whether or not his return cheered me up. I was beginning to believe that things would work out just fine without him.
It must have been very late. There is a certain kind of quiet that only happens around two o’clock in the morning—and that was exactly the kind of quiet that had settled down, covering me like a thick blanket inside my well.
The light was still shining at the end of the rescue cable, and the rain continued its patter against the tent above the hole, but the singing had stopped. There were no sounds coming down the well at all from the people who’d been gathered earlier.
I figured whoever had been up above me had all decided to go to bed and get a fresh, dry start in the morning, and maybe eat leftovers too.
My stomach growled.
“I like mud,” Bartleby said. “I think mud is
the best way to get soft, youthful-looking skin. It’s the most effective method for reversing the aging process, if you ask me.”
I did not ask Bartleby.
Also, there was so much mud on my face that my eyes had been crusted shut. I felt them crack apart like dried tempera paint when I opened them. And there was Bartleby, right in front of me, his whiskered snout so close to my own nose that the bristles on his face tickled me.
Somehow, Bartleby had managed to smear mud all over his face too.
He looked ridiculous.
I must have looked like a pond catfish trapped in slop during the final stages of a drought.
“Thanks for leaving me,” I said as sarcastically as I could manage, which was not very sarcastic at all, considering I was not that kind of commentator.
Bartleby flicked his snout up in the direction of the light.
“I’m camera shy,” he explained. “I can’t deal with crowds of people. They don’t get me. But look at you, Sam! You look like a chocolate bunny! Well, except for the ears and maybe the tail. But besides that, looking at you makes me think of one thing—finding a chocolate you in my basket on Easter morning!”
The thought of Bartleby eating me—even a chocolate version of me—was somewhat disturbing.
“So now you’re going to tell me that armadillos get Easter baskets too,” I said.
Bartleby shook his head. “You’re such a negative little chocolate boy,” he said. “You should embrace the fact that the world has many more pleasant things than you’re probably capable of realizing, Sam.”
But Bartleby was right: I was negative, and I was covered in mud. Completely. It felt awful—all that wet grit inside my clothes, everywhere. Somehow, the sock on my shoeless foot had come off, and I thought, now Mom and Dad were really going to be disappointed with me for falling into a hole and losing one of my socks.
Bartleby took a deep breath and exhaled a satisfied sigh. “Mud. It’s so nice!”
