Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (26 page)

Calvin set aside his saucepan. He shifted his hips and extracted a faded rump-shapen wallet. Shielding it from his son's eyes, he thumbed through bills until he crossed a ten. He worked it out of the wallet and
laid it on the couch beside him without looking at it or at the son as he picked it up.

The back door slammed.
Probably has some work in town
. A starter shrieked, the familiar cry of Floodie, a burgundy Chevy Ciera who had gone through the '96 flood and, seven years later, still had river silt drifted in the bottom of her gas gauge and speedometer. Most of her engine had had to be replaced part by part, but Floodie ran.
That Floodie
. Calvin nodded and rotated his legs onto the couch for a rest.
She's a survivor
.

ON HIS WAY
back to the house two hours later after a disappointing Senior Center lunch of shriveled Salisbury steak and hefty chunks of white cake he'd had to decline on account of his sugar—and quite proud of himself he was for declining—Calvin decided he had no choice. A clandestine inspection of the Lions Club booth was his duty as a lifelong, if currently boycotting, Lion himself. Inhaling stiffly through his nose, he positioned his cap over his face. Yes, they'd recognize his vehicle, but, with luck, mistake its driver as his bride or his son. “All right, Blackie,” Cal whispered. “Gee haw.”

Main Street's metamorphosis was complete, craft booth canopies erect, the Bygone Days banner rippling in the spring breeze, porta-potties neatly twinned in opportune alleys. Cal and Blackie wheeled by the Athletic Boosters' dunking booth, a funnel cake truck rushing by in the opposite lane, more truant Cub Scouts with buns—and there it was. Calvin's heart twisted.

Lion Halsted was wrestling the used-eyeglass barrel into position, Lion Stephens tacking a price sign over the fund-raiser brooms, and they were going to sell chili this year, Cal remembered. Blackie tugged towards the curb where Calvin could at least throw out a few encouraging words to his fellow Lions if he couldn't pitch in with the setting
up himself—and he couldn't, he had no stamina for such anymore, not with this sugar—and now was certainly the time to stop, if ever. Before Helen Smithster got off work from her secretary's job and arrived to boss and cow her aging Lion man-slaves.

Calvin Bergdoll gritted his molars.
Helen Smithster
. He plunged the name into his mind muck and gave it a punch for good measure
Helen Smithster Helen Smithster
it bobbed back to the surface,
Helen Smithster
, he swatted, it scooted,
Helen Smithster Helen
—

A bawl-mouthed mad-eyed Republican woman with a last name no one had heard of, who, on the tide of out-of-state imports seeking the peace of West Virginia, then infecting it with their hyperactive hubbub (and worse), had moved to Berker County from New Jersey thirty years ago. At first she'd meddled in others' business, Calvin had been spared, but then she'd set her improvement sights on the Lions Club,
and what does she think the Lionesses are for?
Cal couldn't resist a last glimpse in his rearview, Lion Stephens' price sign already gusting away. The sleepy, unsuspecting Lions had, to Calvin's horror, fallen under Helen Smithster's spell, and Miss Machiavelli had risen through the ranks like a house afire, seizing the offices of secretary, tail twister, finally president, at which point Cal, his heart heavy, had no choice but to go on strike. After forty years of every-other-Thursday meetings, Calvin only attended now when the club met at Grassy Creek Chapel, to remind himself of how bad things had got and because the Grassy Creek Chapel women-of-the-church baked the best hot rolls he'd ever eaten.

But there was Theodore Munney, a half-block away, hen-pacing in front of the video store. Brightening, Calvin punched a little honk that Theodore Munney pretended not to hear.
Backwards
. This time Calvin let Blackie pull all the way over.

Theodore Munney was staring at the courthouse across the street. When Cal called to him through the open passenger window, Theodore
spasmed his head like he'd not known Blackie was there. After a few seconds, he pullet-jerked to the window, still not making eye contact, his face as serious as a funeral home.

“Hello, Theodore,” Calvin offered cheerily. In his rearview mirror he could see Theodore Munney's ostensible girlfriend, Nicole, arranging an armload of history-flavored videos on a rack she'd pushed outdoors. And then—Cal twinged—Floodie swelled in the mirror; escaped it; and passed Blackie at a good ten miles over the speed limit. The son who used to have a few problems tossed Calvin a nonchalant two-finger wave. Theodore Munney's gaze was tracking a ring of coffee stain on Blackie's dash.

“Well, now,” continued Calvin. “How about we finish cutting that grass?”

Theodore Munney rotated his head at a right angle so Cal was looking into the gray-brown bristle tracks in the hollow of his cheek. It occurred to Cal that Theodore Munney had not simply missed a spot but had chosen not to shave.

“Cottonpickindruggieshithervan.” Theodore glowered.

An unpromising reply. Calvin set his teeth.
Good thing I didn't eat that cake
. He'd spent hours of his limited free time attempting to diagnose Theodore Munney using, despite how hard the Progressive Mental Health Worker had tried to keep up with the trends, terminology in vogue during his mental health heyday, the 1970s. Theodore was sharper than Trainable MR, this Cal knew, but to call him duller than Educable MR, even though Theodore couldn't read, was also inaccurate. Theodore Munney functioned on a plane not just outside of, but on a tilt to, all these. Some days Calvin felt optimistic that Theodore was of average intelligence and just needed to be coaxed out of his shell, a shell that had thickened and hardened during Theodore Munney's childhood up on Salem Orchard under the heavy, calloused
hand of his father. Other days, especially lately, Calvin was arriving at just plain stubborn. Nutley Randalpin had been a more cut-and-dried case, predictable and tractable, if less interesting. But one thing you had to say about Theodore Munney was that he had a robust sense of justice. At times admirable. At others, obstacle.

“Now Theodore. I'm beginning to lose my patience.” Calvin closed his eyes for a second and envisioned the National Botanical Garden of Wales. “I'm only going to ask one more time: do you want to finish your job?” Although the Garden didn't come, the violins did. Cal's irritation ebbed one degree. “I'll pay you when you're done, and we'll pick up your laundry while we're at the house.”

“Cottonpickindruggieshithervan.”

Calvin sighed. He turned his own head towards the courthouse. Roland, keeper of the stoplight, sat on his bench, one ankle cocked across his knee, his stubby arms winged out along the bench back, his mouth arrested in its permanent at-no-one smile.

“Gottatakebackthecounty. Gottatakerback.”

“All right. All right. We'll finish it tomorrow.” Cal flipped the ignition and sat a few seconds longer, Theodore Munney not moving either. “Now you behave yourself.”

Theodore Munney gave no sign he had heard.

THIS TIME CALVIN
spied Silas for certain, loping across a just-planted soybean field. He tapped the horn again, just in case Silas would pause long enough to recognize Blackie's distinctive exhaust system and then sprint back, but Silas was already an eel-colored streak evaporating over the riverbank. A hundred-pound Rott-Doberman cross who misunderstood himself as a lap dog, Silas had been acquired five years ago, by the son who used to have a few problems, and was dumped on Cal and his bride a few months later. Silas, like all Calvin's children,
was a vagabond, a wanderer. He spent most of his time running off to eat cast-off hamburgers behind McDonald's and to have sex. On porches and in yards within a six-mile radius of Cal's house, Calvin often spotted little Silases, or even big ones.
Powerful genes
. Cal nodded to himself.

He pulled into the driveway to find his wife's car snugged up near the back door. The riding mower moped in the uncut yard. Stepping into the house, Calvin made his daily stop at the gun cabinet, where he counted aloud through its glass door.

“One. Two. Three. Four.” He nodded to Biggest Rack. The same number the gun cabinet had held for the past couple months, these four survivors of the original eleven, all hunting rifles, most of them heirlooms. The one that had dropped First Buck when Cal was just twelve years old had been the first stolen, almost a decade ago, and for that disappearance and the next one, Calvin had marched into the pawn shop and demanded their return. Slope Hines had said somebody'd have to pay for them. Calvin knew that the somebody was not him. Now for a second, little mud spouts of rage at the son spurted up in Cal's mind, but then frantic, busy hands buried them like a cat in a litter box. Calvin kicked behind himself and ran.

He could hear the staccato peck of his bride holed up in her office on her laptop, no doubt doing computer mail to his children, receiving news he'd never hear about, dispatching reports on his bad behaviors.
Computers
.
Secret stuff
. Calvin had never learned to type. He drifted into the doorway behind her. His wife, he had always known, was smarter than he was. She, however, had not come from a well-established family like his. That made them even. He had just separated his lips to ask her if she'd checked the answering machine when she said, without turning away from her screen, “Are those Theodore Munney's clothes in the washer?”

Calvin gently cleared his throat. “Yes, my dear.” The Courtly Gentleman. Perhaps not even a West Virginian gentleman, perhaps not even Southern. Perhaps Russian. A Russian gentleman.

“Well, move them into the dryer. I have a load to do myself.”

The Russian Gentleman transcended this. “Any phone messages for me?”

This time she did turn around. “Who were you expecting to call you?”

His bride. At moments like these, it was best to perceive her as a vague presence with temperature, an ambulatory heat. It was when she rippled into focus like she was under the influence of tracking on a VCR that he and she got into trouble. He backed away to hobble up the stairs for his afternoon nap. If his wife had time to fool around with computer mail, she had time to move Theodore Munney's clothes.

On the way to the room where he'd slept alone for ten years, he passed the door to hers. A pink and white quilt was pulled square over the bed, her dresser orderly, the fragrance of powder and face lotion tendrilling out the door. She complained she could smell his room from all the way down the hall. Calvin understood. Women's sense of smell was overly developed, they were overly evolved in that way and in others, which made it harder for them on this earth. Cal eyed the answering machine she kept hostage on the far side of the bed.

With his best ear tuned to his bride's little office beneath him, Calvin placed a foot over the threshold. He leaned onto it. It held his weight without a creak. Emboldened, he swung his other leg in. Still silence. In studied slow motion, he lurched across the room, resisting the roll of butterscotch Life Savers on her dressing table, until at last he stood over the answering machine.

0 Messages.

Calvin didn't bother to sneak as he left.

In his room, the mattress and box springs squatted directly on the floor so that Cal had to crawl down instead of up to get into bed, and once there, the frame rose around him like the bed rails in the mental hospitals he'd visited so often in his work. The enamel pot with a wire handle that he'd kept under the bed until the mattress fell through stood off in a corner. When nature called in the middle of the night, that was where the call came from. Calvin peeled off shoes, jeans, and two layers of plaid shirts, draping them over the bed frame, lastly swapping his Almost Heaven hat for his nightcap, a blaze-orange toboggan he kept on the bedpost. Stepping down onto the mattress, he stretched his envied physique full-length, folded his hands over his breast, and sighed.

His view from here was the dresser top across the room. On it Calvin'd propped a photo of his late mother and departed father in a frame of metal ivy, and he'd scattered around that small pictures of his kids at younger and more controllable ages. All of them except the son who used to have a few problems had moved away and found good jobs. They returned to Berker less and less often with every year that passed.
Busy
. He'd scrunched up and folded into the edge of the mirror the newspaper announcement of his election as Lions Club Tail Twister a decade ago, a final golden era before Helen Smithster. Tallest among the photos was a card featuring a buxom tom turkey that Theodore Munney had given him for his birthday last summer. Over top the turkey glittered the words “For a Special Grandpa on Thanksgiving.” Inside it read “Thanks, Grandpa, for all the happiness, joy, and special memories you've given to our family.”

Calvin rolled over to forage in the stale twist of covers for his book on the Russian royal family, found first a Donner Party book he'd completely forgotten and saw was nine months overdue at the library, plus two slices of Italian bread of the same brand he'd had earlier that
morning but apparently from a much older loaf. At the foot of the bed, strangled in a T-shirt, he did unearth the Russian book, one of his all-time favorites and the source of his concept of the gun-bearer, a notion both he and Theodore Munney liked a lot.

He propped the book on his chest and thumbed to the chapter he'd been savoring since April. His wife, who zipped through five murder mysteries a week, ridiculed Cal's reading pace of two or so pages a day.
If you move slowly, you'll notice more things
. Calvin's eyebrows raised, and he tipped his toboggan to a personality he hadn't seen in a while. The Seasoned Woodsman. He polished off the first piece of found Italian bread, half-consciously patting himself on the back—a lesser roof-of-the-mouth would have needed stitches—and motored into the second.