Maud's House (8 page)

I smiled at the photo and thought of cameras and Papa. My father loved cameras but was a photography klutz. When people asked him to take their picture, he fumbled with the cameras, searching for the right buttons. He would frown and scratch his head and someone would offer to help. But he would say, no, he’d figure it out. He loved to tinker. Then came the day he worked his first Polaroid. When the film rolled out of the camera like a tongue, he almost jumped out of his overalls. He watched the picture materialize with incredulity. He asked if he could do it again. That one looked a bit off center, he said. He thought he could do better. Thereafter, he always was a bit disappointed when folks shoved an instamatic or 35mm camera in his hand. They could have given him the world’s most expensive Leica and he would have looked at it with chagrin. Papa was hooked on Polaroid.

George hated living in a point of interest. He was lousy at PR. At first he was proud of the house: “I never thought I’d live inside a Niagara Falls or a Lincoln Memorial.” For awhile he even enjoyed talking to “our tourists.” But soon he grew bored with the Clydes and Sallys from Missouri and the Moniques and Todds from Manhattan. It got to the point where he ran in the opposite direction when someone even said the word “camera.” Finally, George shot his own photograph of the house, printed it up on postcards, and displayed the postcards next to a locked, slotted box on the porch. On the box was a sign:

POSTCARDS 50 CENTS

HONOR SYSTEM

NO NEED TO RING THE BELL

WE TRUST YOU

During my George Period, as Wynn the art expert calls it, the house took a turn for the worse. I wasn’t painting like I once did. The painting I did while living with George somehow didn’t seem to fit the house. The house stopped changing. Scenes began to fade. Fewer people came. And then George made that lethal suggestion at the dinner table: the Whitewash Proposal. When the pictures were gone, no one was interested in pulling out their Polaroids.

My father never owned a camera. It never occurred to him to buy one. I captured all the likenesses around our house—on our house. I realize now we should have bought a camera. We never planned for the future, for the contingency of meeting a man named George who had a fondness for white paint and a disregard for dreams. I sniffed, wiped the back of my nose with my hurt hand, and cursed at the pain.

“Are you all right?” Thomas asked, glancing nervously at me.

“Medication,” I lied, “It works like a sad movie on me.” I pointed to the picture. “You look like him,” I said. The man in the photograph was Thomas’s father. Thomas, too, had blonde hair. Not as long as the man in the photograph but just as sun streaked and thick. Thomas’s hair was short and spiky. He had a body that, as Freda would say, looks good in jeans. The license plate on his van was issued by the state of California. He had a smile you expected to see all over San Diego, a surfer’s smile, teeth white as foam and Hollywood straight. How did they get teeth like that, I wondered. It must be all the fresh fruit they eat.

“What’s your last name?” I asked.

“Mellon,” he said. It figures.

I have always had the worst teeth. Just looking at a piece of chocolate cake could make them crumble. Dr. Willard, my dentist, said decay could find my mouth blindfolded. Thomas smiled at me. I squinted into those bright, plastic-perfect teeth. He was all of the great age of nineteen. I was married at nineteen. I’d lived a whole life since then. We had nothing in common. He was just beginning.

Thomas was skipping college that semester. Sure, his parents were disappointed, but they understood. I didn’t. From what I could make out, Thomas was traveling as his father, the man in the picture, had: to find himself. It was an old-fashioned Sixties thing to do in a time when business schools were murdering the other disciplines. It seemed everyone in the world wanted to learn about account receivables. Except Thomas. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. What do you like to do? I asked.

“I enjoy looking at the stars,” he said.

That led me to the obvious career choices—shepherd and astronaut. Thomas said he’d tried Space Camp when he was in high school but found the whole experience “too technical.” Now shepherd was something he hadn’t considered. “I’ll give it some thought,” he said.

In the meantime, he planned to continue his search. He drove the same vehicle, a yellow Volkswagen van, that his father had steered more than twenty years ago. It was not keen on exploring America with another yearning, searching, stoned cowboy. It demanded new tires in Denver, a fan belt in Kansas City, a quart of oil in Ohio. It threw a fit until someone cleaned its spark plugs in Boston.

I am familiar with the temperament of vans. T-Bone and I found my olive eyesore in a field five years ago. It was decorating some guy’s back forty. The moment I flung open the doors I knew I wanted it. The insides had been gutted. It was a great green metal shell. My footsteps echoed as I climbed in and paced off the distance from end to end. The owner said he could get it running, and even threw in a passenger seat, scrounged from the adjacent pasture, for free. What a bargain, I said to T-Bone.

What a mess, George said. He wanted to know how T-Bone could let me buy such a thing. T-Bone said, he kind of liked it. George fumed. I smiled and T-Bone smiled. The van started pinging three days later and hasn’t stopped since. I listen to the talk shows on the radio where drivers call in with questions about their cars. From those shows, you’d think America was one big automotive anomaly, full of cars that you’d rather put up with than give up. That’s the way I feel about my van. Mechanics from all over the world could look at my van—the way it pings on uphills some days and downhills others, how it starts on cold mornings without a hitch but won’t even roll over on warm summer days that seem like a Bahamas vacation— and not figure it out. But I don’t care.

We took Thomas’s van to the doctor. I hunched in the back, out of sight, amid a sleeping bag, a huge backpack, a cardboard box of books and cassette tapes, a pair of binoculars, several posters of stars and celestial systems taped to the wall, two dumbbells, a computer, and a half bushel of apples.

The doctor pronounced Thomas fit despite his queasiness, but insisted on putting nine stitches in my palm. I was afraid of that. I hate needles, hypodermic, sewing, knitting. The last time I had to be stitched up was when I was seven. Odie Dorfmann was the king and I was about to be his new knight. He lifted the snow shovel to tap my shoulder, missed, and knighted my head. Ten stitches and a new hairdo. My father was frantic, turned to Jell-O by my tears and the sight of blood pouring down my face. He held me all night, rocking in the rocking chair, watching over me as I slept off the painkillers. My hand pulsed with pain. Suddenly I was sad that there was no one to hold me that night.

When we pulled in the drive, I saw T-Bone waiting for us, tilling the front yard with his nervous feet. He rushed to the van as Thomas parked, pulled my door open, and helped me out.

“Why didn’t you call me?” he said, walking me toward the house. Thomas followed us. “I walked right into the house—you’ve got to start locking your door, Maud, anyone could walk in. I found the blood upstairs and nearly went out of my mind. Your van was here but you weren’t. I called Odie, Freda, Wynn, even Reverend Swan. He suggested the doctor. The nurse said you were already on the way home. She said you’re all right. Are you?”

“Thomas drove me to the doctor after we wrapped my hand up so he couldn’t see it.”

“I never could stand blood,” Thomas smiled.

“The doctor said Thomas would be fine as long as he stayed away from automobile accidents, wars, and sharp knives.”

“Sound advice,“ T-Bone said, his arms crossed over his chest now.

“Even after my hand was wrapped, Thomas made me sit in the back of the van. He wasn’t taking any chances. He didn’t look in his rearview mirror once the whole way.”

“So much for defensive driving,” Thomas said sheepishly.

T-Bone turned white. I knew what T-Bone was thinking: that Thomas could have killed us both, could have pulled out to pass when the guy behind him already was passing; that, from the looks of the van, he’d been in a few wrecks; and that he probably didn’t even have a license.

“Show T-Bone your license,” I told Thomas, leading them into the house. I headed for the refrigerator. Thomas complied with a big white smile and T-Bone frowned.

“You’re growling,” I said, passing T-Bone a beer. He took it and downed half in a gulp.

“You should have called me.”

“T-Bone, nine stitches, for gawdsake! It was nothing.”

“Did the doctor give you a tetanus shot?”

“Yes, dear T-Bone.” I turned to Thomas. “T-Bone worries about me.”

Thomas smiled. “He’s a good friend.”

Eventually, after two beers, T-Bone began to relax. We talked of other things, the weather and vans and apples. Thomas said he bought the bushel in the back of the van at a roadside stand. Apples for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. When he was a child, he said, his father told him he could brush his teeth by eating apples. But only on camping trips.

It was growing dark when T-Bone stood to leave. He looked pointedly at Thomas. I told Thomas he was welcome to stay the night. He accepted the invitation with a flash of teeth. T-Bone grunted.

Without comment, he walked outside. I left Thomas nursing a soda at the kitchen table. T-Bone’s hands were shoved in his pockets and his head was turtle-sunken into his jacket. We waded through the leaves to his truck. At the truck, he faced me.

“Are you going to be all right? Did the doctor give you some painkillers?” I nodded. “Eat some supper, okay? Promise.” I promised and he sighed. I touched his arm.

“You know there isn’t a motel room to be found this time of year,” I said. “They’re probably already putting up people in the National Guard Armory. It’s only for one night.”

“I know.“

I watched him out of sight. I stood in the twilight, trying to see him clearly, long after he’d gone. Finally, I noticed the night chill and my throbbing palm. I turned back toward the house and Thomas.

T
he day went down in Odie Dorfmann’s case book as the beginning. The note read in the typically dramatic style of the books he reads:
Someone is stealing Round Corners’ art.

If it smacked too much of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, you had to remember that Odie the lawman sees everything through the grimy pane of crime. His nose constantly sniffs for the smell of gunpowder. His ears are perpetually perked, like a cat’s, for the sound of the hammer of a gun being stealthily cocked behind him. Except for when he’s building birdhouses, he hardly ever relaxes.

Odie was on the alert that morning, sitting beside me on my porch step, scraping the label off an old beer bottle. (Odie wouldn’t think of drinking on duty.) He snapped the bubble gum in his mouth. Odie is a long-time bubble gum fan, probably something to do with all those baseball cards he used to buy. When he quit smoking last year, he became a certifiable addict. Giving up cigarettes had been George’s idea. When he died, George was pestering Odie to launch a regular running program.

Odie’s visit was one of many by my friends and neighbors. My farm had become the Grand Central Station of Round Corners. People dropped in night and day. They interrupted meals. When they didn’t come in person, they telephoned. And they all had the same thing on their minds: the painting.

“It’s a virtual campaign,” said Thomas, who was still bunking on the couch in his sleeping bag. In a week, he’d taken over the cooking and the laundry. Ella and Wynn think he’s cute. Reverend Swan wants to know how long Thomas intends to stay. T-Bone just growls at him. And Sheriff Odie Dorfmann, protector of the innocent and artists who don’t know better, doesn’t trust him.

“You can’t take in everyone who comes to the door, Maud,” Odie said, attacking the beer label with his thumbnail.

“I took in George,” I said, watching Thomas. Across the yard, he raked leaves into one pile after another, pushed the piles together, then whisked them onto an old blanket. When the blanket became full, he dragged it to the road and dumped the contents on a bigger pile, a mountain of leaves as high as a snow drift, ready to burn.

The autumn sun was deliciously warm if you were relaxing on a porch trying to ignore nosy public servants, but plumb hot if you were bullying around thousands of leaves. Thomas flung his flannel shirt on a bush. Underneath the shirt he wore a gray T-shirt with the words “Rock Is On a Roll” printed on the front. Underneath the T-shirt were young, healthy muscles. They were not as massive and well-defined as T-Bone’s muscles, nor as sculpted as George’s.

Odie glared from Thomas’s back to the shirt on the bush. “That was different.”

“How? George just showed up at my door one day, too. Just like Thomas.”

“George was a man, not a boy. He liked baseball. He was a veteran, for chrissake.”

“And he didn’t like rock ’n roll.”

Thomas leaned on the rake, smiled at us, and waved. Odie harrumphed and blew a bubble. I waved back.

Odie freely admits there are some people he just doesn’t understand. I am one of them. He can’t comprehend why I refuse to paint the mural. Artists, he says with disgust, are always waiting for the muse. “Ordinary people can’t afford the luxury of a muse,” Odie says. “Do you think I wait for the muse to chase down tax evaders, rapists, and murderers?” Those were Odie’s priorities. In some ways, he was very much like George.

Thomas raked under the maple, banging his head on a birdhouse made by Odie. The dangling aviary swung and twirled. Odie chomped on his gum, probably doing irreparable damage to his bridgework. “That kid probably doesn’t know one end of a purple martin from another,” Odie growled.

When Odie wasn’t capturing criminals or pitching shut-outs for the Round Corners Royals, he built birdhouses. Simple birdhouses for robins and complex birdhouses for cardinals. Apartments and condominiums for communal birds such as the purple martins. Sometimes, when he was in the mood to run the jigsaw, he decorated them with gingerbread and Victorian curlicues. Odie’s wife Arlene shakes her head when he gets carried away. Like the time, during the Reagan Administration, when he built a birdhouse that was the exact replica of the White House.