Chinaberry Sidewalks (3 page)

My father wasn’t buying it. “Sleepin’ sickness, my ass,” he’d scoff at the news report on the ever-rolling black-and-white television screen. “I wish one of ’em would put
me
to sleep. I sure as hell ain’t gettin’ no rest with them noisy sons-a-bitches buzzin’ around bitin’ me all night long.” Meanwhile, the attic fan served us up like hors d’oeuvres.

But I was taking the epidemic seriously and had
The Tingler
and
House on Haunted Hill
, the Vincent Price double horror feature my cousin Larry and I sat through twice at the Capitan Theater, to thank for my diligence. I knew for a fact that only a fool would fail to keep a sharp eye out for things supernatural. Seeing a human spine rise from a bathtub full of blood, or a giant crab monster luring unsuspecting victims into its seaside cave by crying out for help using the voices of people whose heads it had recently bitten off, furthered my resolve to never let my guard down. To blame these deadly mosquitoes on an abnormally rainy summer was to ignore all the signs pointing to their planned takeover of the world. Any self-respecting Vincent Price fan knew this was the reason they were putting us all to sleep.

I refused to be a hapless victim. Beneath a sheet, three blankets, and two of my grandmother’s handmade quilts, I braced myself for the long night with the belief that the deadliest insect could never penetrate my fortress of layered cotton. Sleep, when it came, usually from lack of oxygen, was fitful. The moment I nodded off, the covers hit the floor, and most mornings I awoke with bleeding ankles. From the sweat-soaked womb of my nightly sauna, I listened to the mosquitoes’ pre-feeding frenzy, a bloodthirsty swarm whose intentions were clearly audible: to start biting me the second I dozed off.

Insect repellents were a waste of time and money, a fact of life my father spent countless hours trying to disprove. With a can of Off! in one hand and a bottle of 6-12 Plus in the other, he fought a losing battle at every window in the house, emptying their contents for naught. Hurling insults—“Ya’ll are just like them Mexicans at the damn Alamo”—and threatening to burn the house to the ground did more to dent the nightly onslaught than all the cans of Raid and Black Flag put together.

When at last my father’s white flag was raised in defeat, my mother seized the opportunity to pour salt on his wounded ego. “Why, J. W. Crowell, you ain’t been doin’ nothin’ in the world but makin’ them skeeters mad,” she told him with a smirk. “Now they’re gonna take it out on the rest of us.” She wasn’t above highhanded admonishment when given a chance to have the last word. When I asked why he let her remark pass, my father responded with rarely seen resignation. “Hell, son, somebody around here’s gotta win at somethin’.”

Burning the circular incenselike repellent called PiC was a tonic for his flagging spirits. The black-and-white commercial for this product, shown between features at the Market Street Drive-In, depicted a cartoon mosquito with a squeaky voice saying, “P-I-C, don’t believe it, it don’t work.” A giant wooden mallet with “PiC” written across its head would then flatten the bug, leaving Xs where its eyes had been—subliminal advertising for dumb asses, and my father loved it. Laughing all the way to the snack bar, he’d load up on packages of PiC they sold right on the spot.

I’ll admit that watching
Sink the Bismarck
and
Run Silent, Run
Deep
through a cloud of PiC smoke did enhance the wartime feel of the battle scenes. But from where I sat in the backseat of the old Studebaker, the mosquito was telling the truth when he said it didn’t work. I’d be choking on the smoke while my arms and legs were being gobbled like popcorn, and I made a point of saying so. But my father, unswayed, started burning PiC throughout the house day and night. For him, smoke smudges on what was left of the ceiling signified a moral victory. I came to understand that debating the merits of various insect repellents with him was as pointless as all that smoke. But by learning to go along with his futile attempts at supremacy in his own home, I found I loved my father more than I hated mosquitoes.

In its ongoing war with encephalitis, the Harris County Health Department unwittingly introduced a new brand of fun and games. The “Mosquito Dope Truck,” as it was fondly dubbed, was responsible for one of the strangest rituals that Gulf Coast living could offer a child in the early sixties. Come dusk, from May to October, six days a week, a green round-nosed 1947 Army-issue Plymouth pickup with a diesel-driven fogging apparatus in its bed would make a left turn onto Norvic from Hart Street. The driver, obviously aware of his role in the evening’s frolic, paused to let the truck’s rumbling idle alert the neighborhood to its arrival. Then, like a giant smoke-belching prehistoric land crab, the truck crawled slowly up the street blasting blue boiling twenty-foot plumes of sweet-smelling DDT and triggering a tribal dance void of all inhibition. Barefoot heathen children, some with baby brothers or sisters on their hips, ran, skipped, rode bicycles, pushed scooters, pulled red wagons, roller-skated, bounced on pogo sticks, or walked on stilts to get close enough to inhale great lungfuls of the toxic blue smoke.

I kept my Indianapolis race car, made from a medium-sized cardboard box with a hole cut in the middle and bright red 8s painted on both sides, stashed in the one dry corner of the garage. When the truck’s rat-a-tat rumble set screen doors slamming up and down the street, I’d dash out there, pull the homemade racer over my head, and lay strips of imaginary rubber as I joined the happily huffing throng. My friend Dabbo and I could always count on each other to go the extra two or three blocks to ensure a properly scorched respiratory system and nauseous buzz.

In my opinion, the mosquitoes scoffed at these genocidal foggings and in fact thrived on DDT. Still, it must be said that for a half hour or so afterward, they showed little interest in blood sucking. Eventually, when the narcotic effects wore off, the bugs and I would prepare for another nightlong skirmish.

In spite of their dominating the newspapers and airwaves, for me the Gulf Coast mosquitoes deserved second billing behind the region’s most tenacious entomological headliner: the cockroach. I’m not referring to the clunky loners who present themselves like lost puppies, one or maybe two at a time, in the bathtub or behind the sink. No, “La Coo Coo Rotcha” (as Dabbo called them) were slender, brown, lightning-fast, and, at the peak of summer, teeming in the darkened corners and hidden crannies of our kitchen. To flick the light on there in the middle of a scalding July night meant entering a dimension where every available inch of surface space was swarmed by their translucent, root-beer liquidity, giving the table, chairs, stove, and refrigerator the look of a living, breathing, and grotesque organism. A mere 75-watt bulb sparked an exodus beyond biblical proportions in less than four seconds. This incredible disappearing act—millions of bugs gone,
just like that
!—was woven into the fabric of our lives on Norvic Street with the same indifference bestowed on buckets of rain and fatal encephalitis. It became commonplace to flip on the kitchen light, walk to the sink, and rinse out a glass that seconds before had been crawling with cockroaches, then drink your fill of water without a second thought.

Our nonchalance, in hindsight, seems robotic. Not once did one of us turn to another and say, “Gee, there must be at least six million cockroaches scurrying around the kitchen. Doesn’t that seem strange?” Instead, we went about our lives as if honoring a foresworn oath never to call the exterminator.

So the kitchen belonged to the cockroaches. The rest of the house we shared with the mosquitoes.

Chinaberry Sidewalks

I
n yet another burst of cost-cutting brilliance, Frank Sharp’s engineers came up with the bright idea of constructing, along both sides of the street, concave concrete troughs that served the dual purpose of sidewalk and shallow drainage ditch. As ditches went, these were excellent for the post-rainstorm races Dabbo and I contested with battleships made from discarded two-by-fours. Since the course emptied into something akin to a sewer system at the end of each block, considerable dexterity was required to pluck your ship from the raging rapids the moment it crossed the finish line, before it got flushed.

When Norvic Street was named host sidewalk for the 1960 grubbug summer Olympics, jumped-up snot-heads from as far away as Flaxman Street (nine blocks over) showed up, seriously expecting to dethrone our legendary thousand-leggers, their miserable stable of losers contained in assorted hand-painted cigar boxes and coffee cans. D’Artagnan Doolittle—a name I partially plucked from an old Three Musketeers movie—would retire undefeated. He handed Wing Zay Wyklefunk, Dabbo’s prized champion, his only loss in a photo-finish heartbreaker, D’Artagnan inching out the big guy by a nose, and the next day a size-13 steel-toed work boot belonging to Dabbo’s daddy put an end to Wyklefunk’s illustrious career. Anyway, when darkness halted the competition, the validity of chalk marks identifying the next day’s starting positions were argued with clenched fists, and neighborhood mothers took turns breaking up the free-for-alls. With reputations on the line, a busted lip was a small price to pay for a good track position. As for the practicality of these sidewalks’ design, two adults couldn’t walk comfortably side by side, so pedestrians preferred the street.

One day in the spring of 1958, my mother had enlisted my help in planting three young chinaberry trees along the sidewalk’s edge. Coaxing these saplings into thriving on our property was an exotic proposition, a concept that called for initiative previously unheard-of in the Crowell-Willoughby bloodline. For a while, I became sufficiently engrossed in my mother’s unprecedented attempt at landscaping to forget the endless trips I’d made to the trees growing by the back fence to cut switches for my own whippings. Not until we stood back to admire the early stages of our handiwork did the notion of planting more trees for more switches for more whippings strike me as pure madness.

Perhaps the most Philistine of all southern customs is the one that sends children in search of a suitable tool for their own bloody torture. According to Grandma Katie, the ritual’s therapeutic value lay in the journey to and from. For the spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child contingent, the heightened state of awareness brought on by the miscreant’s sense of impending doom made every solemn trek to the chinaberry trees an invaluable tool of heathen reform, and the ass-blistering that awaited your dutiful return of little importance. I loved and trusted my grandmother more than anyone in the world, but her defense of this practice was pure hogwash, and I told her as much.

The only thought I could remember crossing my mind during all those switch-cutting expeditions was to choose as many weak, flimsy sprigs as possible in hopes my mother would lose interest in whipping me. Once, hoping that humor might dismantle her resolve to punish me for cussing or some other minor offense, I tied a white dish towel to a broken limb. She laughed and beat the hell out of me anyway.

In possession of a firm, fresh-cut switch, my mother was nothing short of a left-handed Zorro. She liked the sound and feel of sliced air. Her interest in raising bloody welts on the back of my legs bordered on the sadistic. To whip the daylights out of me and leave it at that was something she simply couldn’t do. Until the markings on my legs and butt were examined and pronounced of a quality in keeping with her high standards, the tanning of my hide was never considered complete. I can’t help thinking that it’s a shame she didn’t apply such perfectionism to other areas of her life.

Lacking imagination to match our industriousness, my mother and I named the trees J.W., Cauzette, and Rodney. Perhaps it was the intoxication of accomplishment that prompted us to christen the trees with our own names, or maybe the trees symbolized for the two of us a new chapter in our family history, in which case we wanted our names displayed front and center. Either way, our buoyancy was short-lived.

In matters concerning my mother, my father was a master of dismissal. And for me, a pat on the head and a “Well done, son” was as foreign to his nature as a taste for caviar. Approval was apparently beyond his ability to give.

From time to time, having stopped after work for a few rounds at whichever icehouse he was frequenting at the time, my father missed the driveway strips by a wider margin than usual and he and the Studebaker would come to a noisy, jaw-rattling stop.

Were my mother still alive, she’d be the first to admit that on many occasions she was hopelessly incapable of reading my father’s mercurial disposition. “When it comes to your daddy, sometimes I don’t know whether to shit or go blind” is, I believe, how she put it. Based on my ability to decipher, by sight or sound, the subtle and not-so-subtle variations in his driveway etiquette, I became the acknowledged expert in gauging the slant of his mood. “He drunk?” she’d ask. “Sounds like it,” I’d answer. “How bad?” she’d want to know. “Not good,” I’d conclude. On this day, judging by his revving the engine three times before switching it off—a signal meant to convey that he’d sooner crash the Studebaker through the garage’s back wall than take an interest in whatever it was we numbskulls thought we were doing out here—I already knew what she would soon find out: out little tree-planting project was about to take a big hit.

Feeding off the dregs of whatever had been the cause of his vinegary disposition, my father appraised our gardening skills with sarcasm soaked in beer and whiskey. “Aw, hell,” he sneered, “them shit-ass twigs don’t stand a Chinaman’s chance of growing out here next to the street.”

Refusing to be bullied, I shot back, “You don’t know nothin’. These are chinaberry trees, and if anything stands a Chinaman’s chance of growin’ out here, it’s a damn chinaberry tree.”

He fixed my mother with a cold stare. “Is this how you’re teachin’ him to act—”

“You leave her alone,” I interrupted. “We were gonna name one after you, but we wouldn’t do it now if you begged us. You don’t deserve to have a tree named after you.”

As much as I’d like to say this rebuff was intended to calm my father’s hostile temperament, I can’t. It was nothing more than dumb luck. By chance I’d struck a chord close to the heart of his schoolboy vanity. When it came to the possible lionization of his name, he couldn’t resist any opportunity, no matter how small, to bask in the glow of hypothetical glory.

He softened, and to reward our beloved man-child for yet another of his dazzling mood swings, my mother and I reinstated his name. Unfortunately, in spite of my constant attention, his namesake and hers died, whereas mine took root.

.  .  .

The first week of sixth grade, I come home from school to find a black panel truck idling in front of our house. No less puzzling than the sight of its running with no one behind the wheel is how little its curbside vigil alters the ebb and flow of neighborhood routine. On a street where shell-shocked war veterans ran naked with machine guns exploding the ground at their heels—Mr. Plowman, from down the block, had had hallucinations ever since he came home from helping storm the beaches over in France—a double-parked rattletrap choking on its own exhaust actually must have seemed pretty normal.

But in addition to its advanced state of disrepair, something about this truck, seemingly poised for a quick getaway, strikes me as peculiar. Faded signs stenciled with Battleground T.V. Repair linger on either side like sun-bleached petroglyphs. Cartoon murals illustrating the before-and-after effects of a house call adorn the rear-door panels. In one, a kindly-looking San Jacinto Monument, complete with a surgeon’s mask and headlamp, zaps Reddy Kilowatt lightning bolts at the rabbit-eared antenna of two sickly televisions. In the other, the same monument does a flying-stethoscope version of the jitterbug while the much-improved televisions kick up their heels in eight-legged joy.

Seventh-grade algebra will be only slightly more difficult for me to understand than the possibility that this traveling TV medicine show might put my pajama-bottomed butt back in front of our set, hugging a bowl of soggy Cheerios and ignoring my mother’s pleas not to sit so close and ruin my eyesight. But if there’s any truth to be found in the van’s weather-beaten graphics, restoring
Sky King
and
Fury
to their regular Saturday morning time slots is a matter no more complicated than dialing Orchard 6-2626, the office number given on the driver’s door.

As was the case with the roof over his own family’s head, my father’s penchant for half-assed remedies precluded actually placing such a call. The lack of sport in proper procedures bored him silly; instead, he believed that from the cultivation of loose ends came the fruits of the unexpected. For example, how he stumbled onto this opportunity in the first place: “I was sittin’ at a red light on the corner of Market Street and Federal Road studyin’ how to get that dang thing fixed,” he mused, “when that old truck come a-rumblin’ through the inner-section. Well, sir, I made a right-hand turn outta the left-hand lane and chased him a mile ’fore I run him down. Told him my set was on the blink, had been for two months. And I be dang if he don’t turn right around and follow me to the house and fix it while I’m sittin’ there watching. That’s how you get something done around here.”

When the concept of TV repair finally hits home, it’s with the force of a big gum eraser bouncing off my head. Any questions concerning the eyesore parked out front disappear like invisible ink as visions of Mighty Mouse saving Pearl Pureheart from Oil Can Harry fill me with the urge to see our blessed savior in action, so I take the sidewalk, yard, and porch in about four long strides.

Even before the slamming screen door pronounces me home from school, I’m stopped dead in my tracks by the Grand Canyon of butt cracks now on display in our living room. The owner of this anatomical anomaly is in the process of plucking some derelict tube from the dust-caked entrails of the cantankerous old Philco my father bought off some guy in a barbershop. Where his green khaki pants and shirt have been separated by the hands-and-knees positioning required to reach into the back of the television, there is now a gross white chasm.

A lumbering voice, a cross between Bronx brogue and Cajun bumble, sends words like “Now I gotcha” and “C’mon outta there” rattling around in the electronic gadgetry. When the head the voice belongs to emerges from behind the set, I nearly swallow my wad of bubble gum.

The color of orange soda water, a horseshoe-shaped hedgerow that looks more like clumps of used Brillo pads than sprigs of hair has attached itself to what looks like an oversized version of the plastic Cro-Magnon skull Mr. Weiss keeps on a shelf in the back of his classroom. Matching steel-wool eyebrows punctuate an impossibly white dome where one green eye stares down an exact replica of W. C. Fields’s swollen red nose. The other eye, blond as buttermilk, alternates between a sideways glance and St. Vitus’s dance. The demands on my attention have never been so clownishly divided. The very sight of him decrees that I try to focus on one eye over the other, but I can’t figure out which one to go with.

When he rubs his catcher’s-mitt hands together to commemorate a job well done, I notice just below his rolled-up shirtsleeves a pair of jailhouse-quality ship-anchor tattoos on his forearms. Noting my interest, he cranks up a mumbling chuckle.

Unable to muster a suitable response, I excuse myself and go spit my wad of gum into the commode. When I return, I can’t decide if it’s Popeye the Sailor Man, Jack in the Box, or Bozo the Clown assuring my father that
Gunsmoke
will once again be a stationary target and his Sunday night motion sickness a thing of the past. “I put some lead in yer picture tube’s pencil,” he says. “That oughta hold her still for a while.”

While the repairman focuses his green eye on my father, his blond one sizes me up like a radar dish. I’m thinking up excuses to go to my room when he starts rattling off answers to questions he thinks I’ve been dying to ask. “Like to leave her runnin’. She runs like the dickens but she’s hard to get started. Drawed up her advertizin’ myself. I taken after my daddy’s side and reckon you taken after your daddy’s side, too. ’Preciate ya’ll’s business.”

As I stand in the doorway watching his truck rumble away, the phrase “fallen into ruin or partial decay” comes to mind and I recognize it as the definition of “dilapidated,” which I’d memorized in Mr. Weiss’s class earlier that day. I wander farther out into the yard to gauge the strangeness of this repairman’s visit and find the evening settling into a kind of barometric hyperstillness. I don’t recognize it as such, but its eeriness has calm-before-the-storm written all over it. So I drift back into the house hungry enough to eat the fried baloney and sauerkraut my mother has no doubt made for the fourth night running. My father’s admiring his newly resuscitated television when a news bulletin announces the impending arrival of Hurricane Carla.

This sends Jacinto City residents into a frenzy of preparation. Masking-tape crosses appear in windows, sheets of plywood seal up screened porches, new batteries make old transistor radios work just fine. Everybody stocks up on food and water, blows cobwebs off kerosene lanterns, and replenishes liquor supplies. So many people scurrying around in a frenzy reminds me of the Ant Farm Mrs. Cain keeps in the back of her fifth-grade classroom.

Such fastidiousness offends my father’s sensibilities and is as unlike him as being a bird-watcher. He dismisses his conscientious neighbors as a nervous pack of limp-wristed do-gooders. Lighting up a Pall Mall and spitting tobacco strands from the tip of his tongue, he scoffs, “Aw, hell, I ain’t afraid of no hurricane. It can blow the dang roof off for all I care.”