Cicada (13 page)

“Nugget?”

“Um, yeah. Yeah, I suppose people do call ‘im that, don’t they?”

Tippen squinted and leaned in on his elbows. “So what? Ain’t they both got kin buried out there? Ain’t near everybody for that matter? Hell, myself, I got two aunts and all my grand-folks out there stayin’ with you. Don’t never visit ‘em none. Don’t see no point. But what the hell business is it of yours who does?”

Dennis Hart got up. He stood for a second staring blankly at the deputy. Tippen leaned back, pleased with himself. Dennis bit his lip for a moment and then asked, “You planning on being Sheriff someday, you reckon?”

“Maybe.
I reckon
,” Tippen said.

“Case you haven’t caught on, Sheriff is an elected position,” Dennis Hart said, and turned to leave.

Tippen puckered his lips and wanted for some pithy comeback, but his foul temper could only imagine expletives. As he reached the door, Dennis decided no matter that the deputy was an ass, the authorities should know what he knew and Tippen was the authorities.

“See, Deputy Tippen, it’s not that they came out,” He said, turning back. “You’re right on that count. Lots of folks do. Folks who know the decency of paying their respects to those who have gone on. So it isn’t that. No. It’s who they came out to see.”

“Yeah? And who was that?”

“They both come out…well snuck out would be to say more accurate…to see that colored man…Raymond Stout. I don’t see how either could’ve known him, do you? Him being new to town and all. Him being…well, traveling in different circles, if you take my meaning. Wes even cried, I do believe.”

Tippen leaned forward and his mouth fell open a bit. “Nugget….”

“Yep. Two white men sneaking out to see the grave of a murdered colored man. And a stranger to ‘im, at that. Just thought the Sheriff should know. Have yourself a good day there,
deputy
.”

As Dennis Hart climbed back into his pickup to return to the cemetery, he chastised himself for being a little too glib about the whole affair. That usually wasn’t his manner. The deputy had provoked Dennis into getting away from himself. “Should’ve waited for the Sheriff,” he sighed. “Ah, cripes, Dennis, let ‘er go. What’s done is done.”

Deputy Tippen poured his third cup of coffee for the day and was thankful the Sheriff hadn’t been there to hear what Dennis Hart had come to report.

“And he never will, neither,” Tippen said aloud, watching out the window as Dennis Hart drove off. Scurrying across the window pane between the two men, the trapped and exhausted housefly made one last futile flight to be free before quieting as if to accept its fate.

All along the one side of the goldfish a spray of white flecks peppered its otherwise brightly orange and perfect mail. They were the scars of an infection that had nearly killed the fish. Buckshot imagined them to be the reminders of an almost fatal shotgun blast.
This fish is a survivor
, he told himself. The proprietor of Melby’s House of Exotic Pets, Mrs. Stella Humble, had been foolish enough to give Buckshot a discount on this particular specimen since she considered it flawed. Nothing could have been further from the truth as far as Buckshot was concerned. Vitamin D was perfect.

He’d named the fish in honor of all the milk money he’d saved to purchase it. He’d made the majority of the money from his allowance for chores, but by far it’d been those milks he skipped that’d pained him the most. Oh, how he’d suffered. Almost as much as the gunshot wounded Vitamin D, he supposed. Of course, his greatest financial windfall had been the dollar bill his mother had given him to assuage his grief on the day he’d found Raymond Stout, a memory he was determined to erase.
No, that didn’t bother him
, he’d argued silently with his fear each night since.

“Weren’t nothin’ but a dead man,” he’d nonchalantly told Casey over the crackle of their campfire nights before.

Dead men and shotgun wounds be damned, all that was behind them; the boy and his pet fish were united at last.

Buckshot fogged the glass of the fishbowl as his hot breath heaved with the excitement of the moment. Inches away, yet in a world all its own, Vitamin D floated languidly, but not at all indifferent to him. As Buckshot peered in close—the tip of his nose moving from side to side—little Vitamin D followed the motion with casual strokes of its gossamer tail and fins.

“Ain’t you a sport model?”

He pinched a few more flakes of food into the bowl. Vitamin D rushed up to take them in. Mrs. Humble had warned that too much food could kill the fish, but Buckshot wondered if maybe she wasn’t just having some fun with him.

“Eatin’ don’t kill nothin’. It’s starvin’ what’ll do ya in.”

He let another pinch of flakes lily pad the surface. At first Vitamin D raced away to the rainbow colored gravel lining the bottom of the bowl, only then to dart back to feed some more. Buckshot was enjoying the fish as much as he could, but he was also discovering that interaction with a pet fish quickly finds its limits. There would be no petting or playing of games.
A pet fish is more of a
sit and watch deal
, Buckshot came to realize. After a few minutes of lip-chewing contemplation he accepted the fact without buyer’s remorse, however. Letting slip another pinch of food, he nodded to himself, satisfied that having a secret fish had its own rewards.
Far better rewards
.

There were a number of reasons Buckshot had kept his fish a secret, but primarily it was because he didn’t think he’d be allowed a fish in the first place. Over the course of the past few years the boy had managed to navigate some pretty hot water due to his poor pet judgment.

Last year it’d been the mice. Four, to be precise. A little nest he’d found in the barn one winter morning after milking the cow they now no longer had. The brood of mice were just ready to leave their mother’s teats, although still a little unsteady and clumsy on their feet. Buckshot easily caught them up in his milk pail without really thinking about why or what he could do with them, and by the end of the day they’d been safely relocated to a shredded newspaper-filled shoebox under his bed. That night after dinner he fed them cereal, bits of dried apple, raisins, and of course cheese. He’d even used an old eyedropper to give them a little water.

In no time at all he had to keep an old dictionary on the lid of the shoebox to keep his rapidly maturing charges contained. After just three days, things were going so well with his secret gang of mice that he considered telling his mother about them. But then he came home from school only to discover a mouse-less shoebox with a ragged hole gnawed through one corner.

He didn’t want to confess—he knew the trouble it’d bring him—and so at first he didn’t. But when his mother saw two of the more brazen mice rushing along the floorboard one after the other the next morning as she was coming in to wake Buckshot, he had no choice. Frances immediately began setting out spring traps, to break their little necks and spines, and so Buckshot broke down and pleaded with her.

“Mama, don’t! They ain’t bad mice. They mine!” he’d cried.

He cried more later that evening when John whipped him for sneaking wild mice into the house, and then he cried four more times when each spring trap did its work. It had proved to be a painful experience for Buckshot all the way around.

And then there had been the ants. Fire ants. Two mason jars filled with hundreds of the cantankerous things. Buckshot had sense enough to keep those in the barn. He’d learned his lesson with the mice. But he didn’t have sense enough to keep from getting stung. Over and over again. Unscrewing the lids to feed his colonies their lunches of crickets and grasshoppers, it was inevitable that a contingent would scurry free, starved skirmishers whose instincts compelled them to go forth. The more Buckshot fought to catch and contain them, the more his efforts failed and ended in painful welts. They were legion and his efforts were akin to sandcastles against the tide. After a while his hands and arms were a mess, fresh pimply, pus-filled whiteheads peppered amongst the previous day’s well-scratched scabs. When his mother asked him to roll his sleeves up one night for dinner, the jig was up.

Thankfully he didn’t get a “whoopin’” for that, however. Actually, Frances was too upset at the site of her little boy’s swollen arms to think of causing him any more pain. And John, well, the remembrance of his brother Walter, covered in similar welts, compelled him to leave the dinner table early. Without a word he went straight out to the barn, found the jars of ants, and took them out back where he poured kerosene on them and set them ablaze.

Buckshot watched from his upstairs bedroom window. It didn’t make him too upset to lose those pets, however. They’d already worn out their welcome with the boy, actually.

“We gotta think of a good place to keep ya, Vitamin D.”

He first thought just to keep the bowl hidden under the bed.

“Naw…that’d be stupid. Mama is always lookin’ under the bed.”

The great thing about a goldfish—the reason he’d settled on the idea almost as soon as he’d learned of the new exotic pet store—was that goldfish don’t sting and bite, and they most certainly didn’t gnaw through their bowls and run loose in the house. The bad thing about keeping a secret goldfish was the bowl full of water; hardly inconspicuous.

“Yeah!” Buckshot whispered in exhalation as he hit upon what he considered a brilliant solution to his dilemma.

A short while later Vitamin D was transplanted in his new home, a Maxwell House coffee can that Buckshot had kept his marbles in. Buckshot opened his bedroom window and winced as he gently tossed the bowl out. Thankfully, from the sound of its thud off onto the dark lawn below, he didn’t think it broke. He’d hide it in the barn tomorrow morning when he did his chores, he decided. Maybe later, once he managed to convince his parents to let him have a fish, he’d retrieve it. After all, he’d paid good money for that bowl, and Vitamin D was much more fun to watch in a glass bowl than in the coffee can.

Buckshot was quite satisfied with things as he turned off the light and climbed into bed with his flashlight and several comic books. School was over and the entire summer lay ahead. He had his fish—finally—and perfectly hidden away at that. Even better, because of what had happened with his finding the body of Raymond Stout, his father had hardly given him any of the chores he’d been expecting around the farm. But best of all, more than any one of those things—or perhaps even better than all of them put together—his mother and father weren’t fighting for the first time in weeks. Granted, they weren’t speaking, or speaking very little if they did, but at least they weren’t arguing and yelling.

Buckshot didn’t know what had brought on the change. How could he? Frances hadn’t shared the discovery of the letter with John, deciding instead to go cold and silent. For his part, John was simply thankful not to spend another night sparring with her, dancing around the truth of his indiscretions while she lobbed her faulty accusations. In his innocence, Buckshot misread all of this and concluded that the quiet meant things were going to be better.

…

While John Sayre spent another night downstairs on the living room couch, inexplicably finding sleep with little trouble, such peace eluded Wes Nugget Crocker.

Nugget would have liked to have been able to blame the heat for his insomnia.

“Lord knows this goddamned house is hot ‘nough to bake taters!” his stepfather, Earl, moaned again.

“Quit yer bitchin’,” was his wife’s repeated reply.

Nugget could hear them complain to each other back and forth over the television screaming in the next room. He would have liked to blame it or them for his restlessness as well, but that was just as much a feeble excuse to avoid the truth as any other. The sound of another can of beer popping open didn’t help matters either. It was like a little demon whispering, “Pisst!” into Nugget’s ear. Nugget squeezed his eyes shut tight but he still saw the bottles hurtling through black air to strike Raymond Stout, pelting the dead man over and over just as in the nightmares that kept him too afraid to sleep. Nugget had heard the term ‘night terrors’ tossed about by his aunt on many occasions, but until recently he’d always considered such to be hyperbole, more of what his uncle called her “hissy-onics.”

Nugget gave in and clicked on the lamp on his nightstand. The light from the bare bulb washed over the little room revealing the spartan furnishings. He took the New Testament from the drawer of the nightstand. It and the Old Testament were the only books his parents permitted him. He’d been allowed others as a boy, but with each passing year his questions had become too much for the simple woman and her third husband to bear. When Nugget’s curiosity took their religious beliefs to task, Nugget’s stepfather whipped him and burned his school books in a fit of drunken rage. There would be no more talk of evolution or other nonsense such as Schrödinger’s cat. Not in the Crocker household. To be certain of this, Earl had gone so far as to approach the science teacher who’d fed Nugget the textbooks to begin with. Actually he did more than approach the man. He bloodied his nose and chipped one of his front dentures.

“Now tell my boy we come from the goddamned monkeys again, you smarmy pants Yankee mother fucker!”

Three weeks later the well-intentioned science teacher packed his things and wisely put Melby behind him.

Nugget yelped with fright when he paused in his reading and noticed Raymond Stout seated in the chair in the corner. The man was as Nugget last saw him, eyes and tongue protruding grotesquely. Nugget convulsed in terror and threw himself back against the headboard to escape the vision.

“Please go ‘way,” he whimpered.

From the living room the sound of more fussing rose above the television’s din to assure Nugget that they were unaware of his dilemma.

“Please….”

And then he felt the hand around his throat. He desperately tried to fight back but his arms were lead, refusing to move. His breath was cut short and so he was unable to cry for help. Then, as suddenly as the apparition had appeared, it was gone. Nugget broke from the dream he had faded into with a thrash that sent the lamp careening off the nightstand, shattering the bulb with a ‘pop’ against the floor. That and his waking scream did get his parents’ attention.