Missing May (2 page)

"But it kept her in a pickle because she always feared losing her Ohio kin, too. Feared one of them would up and die, unexpected, likes her mommy and daddy in the flash flood, if she let them out of her sight for too long. So every so often she'd have to leave this place and go cheek on them."

He gave a big long sigh.

"She felt like she did when we was packing up to go to Ohio," he said simply, figuring I'd understand.

Well, I did understand, and it didn't set well with me at all. I never expected May to be back with us, and now that she'd stopped by, the least I expected of her was that she'd be able to make up her mind. I needed that from her. I needed to know that dying and going to heaven didn't involve any regrets or sorrows or worries. I wanted May to shine down on us and tell us she was having the most wonderful time, better than anything we could ever dream of. I sure didn't want her stopping by wondering if she'd done the right thing after all, and was everything unplugged and the stave turned off.

I believe in ghosts. Maybe angels would be a better word for them. But ghosts seems more to the point. So if Ob says May was here, I figure she was.

Anyway, I know May herself believed in spirits from the next world. She used to talk about her mommy and daddy watching over her after they died in the flash flood. Poor May. She was only nine when it hit. The rain came all day and all night and all the next day till finally the mountain couldn't soak up the water anymore and down it washed, down the creek bed, a solid wall of water twenty feet high, down into the valley where May and her people lay fast asleep. It hit that little valley like a tidal wave, and whole houses broke in pieces. Big trucks turned over, floated away. Trees cracked in half.

May said that her mother--May always called her Mommy--heard that awful water coming and jumped out of bed, running for May's room, She lifted little May out of her dreaming and ran and put her in the old metal washtub.

That's all May ever remembered. The next memory she had was of waking up in that tub six miles from home and pulling a tired old eat from the water she was floating in, Her mommy and daddy were gone, lost forever.

But May says they watched over her anyway. And all the rest of the time she was growing up, she'd get there strong feelings whether or not to do something, feelings that told her which way to go. These feelings kept her out of a boy's car, which that night wrapped itself around a tree. They told her not to trust her weird neighbor, Mr. Rice, who the police carted off to jail. And one day they told her to stick with Ob.

May always said that once she got with Ob, her mommy and daddy could rest easy, and they finally flew off to that big church picnic in the sky. She said her daddy would be cleaning God out of his potato salad.

May was the best person I ever knew. Even better than Ob. She was a big barrel of nothing but love, and while Ob and me were off in our dreamy heads, May was here in this trailer seeing to it there was a good home for us when we were ready to land. She understood people and she let them be whatever way they needed to be. She had faith in every single person she ever met, and this never failed her, for no body ever disappointed me. Seems people knew she saw the very best of them, and they would turn that side to her to give her a better look.

Ob was never embarrassed about being a disabled navy man who fiddled with whirligigs all day long, and I never was embarrassed about being a kid who would had been passed around for years. We had May to brag on us both. And we felt strong.

But we are not strong anymore. And I think Ob's is going to die, truly die, if I can't figure away to mend his sorry broken heart. And if Ob does go, goes off to be with May, then it will be just me and the whirligigs left. And all of us still as night, praying for wings, real wings, so we can fly away.

CHAPTER THREE

If Cletus gets wind that May's back, I know he will take it and run with it.

The last thing Cletus needs is a ghost to dwell on. As if his strange mind didn't have enough to think about.

I swear. When Ob spotted him snooping around the old Chevvy last fall, I warned Ob to have nothing to do with him. I'd been riding the school bus with Cletus for a year, since his family moved up from the Raleigh County, and I had decided he was insane. Back when he first came, he had going this collection of potato chip bag. He had practically the whole school saving their Wise and Tom's and Ruffles bags for him. Heading home on the bus everyday, people would be pulling flat shiny bags out of their history books like crazy and passing them to Cletus in the backseat. I didn't participate. I was certain the boy was a flat out lunatic.

After that it was buttons. Then it was spoons. He went through a plant phase, which didn't last long because he said his thumb just wasn't green enough. Then it was wrapping paper. Every-body who had a birthday got in touch with Cletus.

Till finally he settled into pictures, and that seems to have stuck.

Everybody in seventh grade, probably everybody in Deep Water Junior High, knows about Cletus and his pictures. And ever since Cletus came snooping around Ob's old Chevy last November, Ob and me know about them, too. Only too well.

Wonder what May would think of us, sitting on the sofa, Cletus squeezed in between, and passing back and forth covers from paperback books, the front panels of cereal boxes (those with the faces), and Life magazine cut to shreds. We've looked at newspaper photos of the Kiwanis and those chubby little bears off herbal tea. Dream homes from real estate circulars and cats off 9-lives.

"Anything with a story to it" is what Cletus says he's leaking for. He keeps telling me I ought to be writing these stories to go with his pictures, since Mrs. Lacey at school has been bragging on those thing, I wrote for English.

But the last thing on earth I plan to do is go digging through the pictures in Cletus's beat-up vinyl suitcase so we can collaborate, as he puts it. I can just see it: me and Cletus looking at the front of a cornflakes box, searching for deep meaning. Holy bejeezus.

Cletus had been investigating the Chevy because he thought there might be some old news papers lining its floorboards. Ob looked out at him that Saturday morning after Thanksgiving (which had been a tough holiday without May) and he said, "Who is that boy?"

"That's Cletus Underwood," I answered, my mouth completely dropped open in wonder at the sight of him in our yard.

We watched Cletus try the handle of one of the back doors.

"He trying to steal that banged-up old thing?" Ob asked.

"Uh-uh" was all I could say.

Ob watched Cletus a while longer; then he reached for his coat on the back of a kitchen chair.

"Where you going?" I asked.

"To get acquainted," Ob answered, and he pushed open the door and went out.

Well, of course he didn't come back alone. There he was, coming in to the house with that crazy Cletus Underwood, who had fished his old suitcase from the bushes beside the Chevy and was holding it up against his chest.

"Hi, Summer!" he said with too big a smile.

I wasn't about to encourage him. "Hi," I answered dumbly, trying to look too boring to be worth staying for.

But he did. He stayed. He stayed seven solid hours. We fed him lunch just after he got here and dinner just before he left. Seven ungodly hours of crazy Cletus Underwood.

Thing was, though, Ob really liked him. I hadn't seen Ob interested in one solitary thing since May left us last summer, and here his face was kind of lit up, kind of full of interest and sparkle, as Cletus made himself at home and told us his life story in between showing us the pictures in his suitcase. It turned out that even though Ob didn't know Cletus's parents personally--

them being from Raleigh County--he did know some of Cletus's Fayette County relatives and he seemed genuinely interested to know that Joe Underwood was working in a machine shop down in Durham and that Betty Underwood had dyed her blonde hair black and turned her garage into a combination ceramics shop and religious bookstore.

I found out that Cletus's parents were pretty old, nearly as old as Ob, and they didn't get out much. Maybe that's why Cletus and Ob had such an easy time of getting to be friends. Cletus was used to older people. And Ob appreciated anybody crazier than him.

We sat on the sofa looking at Cletus's pictures while the Lawrence Welk show went on past us on the TV. All those Welk shows were really old, but people loved them, so the station kept on playing them. The only time we lifted our eyes from Cletus's suitcase was when Ob wanted to watch those two Barbie and Ken dolls dance the tango. Ob loved the tango. Cletus smiled through the whole dance and clapped his hands when it was done. Then we all went back to the pictures.

"This one here I got from the barber shop," Cletus said, pulling out a heavy piece of paper with a picture of a slick-looking man advertising Brylcream.

"I think the story here," he explained, "is that Brylcreem guy's nerves are bad. He's always cleaning under his fingernails and tweezing out his nose hairs and picking at his teeth. Probably got a whole box of toothpicks in his glove compartment. Bet he sniffs his armpits, too."

I was speechless at all this. Just struck dumb. But not Ob. No, he was curious about this Brylcreem guy, now you mentioned it, and he took the picture from Cletus's chunky hand and studied it.

"I think you got something there," Ob told Cletus with a confident nod of his head. "Except the part about the armpits. This man's too delicate a constitution to be sniffing at his armpits. But all the rest I figure is right on the money."

It's those kinds of conversations we've been having since November, Speculations about the armpits of Brylcreem men.

Still, I guess I am grateful for Cletus. He got Ob through an awful Christmas by bringing over a one-thousand piece jigsaw puzzle of the Great Pyramids Christmas morning. (Cletus said he and his parents ate turkey and opened all their presents on Christmas Eve and by morning the holiday was over at his house.) He got Ob to sit with him for twelve hours straight putting the puzzle together. Practically all the pieces were brown--brown pyramid, brown sand, brown people. It looked like pure torture to me. But Cletus and Ob were as enthralled as cats in front of a fish tank, so I just kept them happy by cooking five turkey TV dinners in a row and refilling their RC's. I spent the rest of my time reading one of the Phyllis Whitney paperbacks Ob got me. I can't ever get enough of Phyllis Whitney. And reading kept my mind off May.

So here we are now, two months later in the heart of dark February, with May slipping in, Ob slipping out, and Cletus and me just grabbing at anything we can save. May used to laugh about moving here to Deep Water, West Virginia. She had a helpless kind of fear about water, about ram, and she'd say God was testing her sense of humor, setting her up in a place called Deep Water. She never failed Him, May would tell strangers where she was from, and I would see her glance up at the sky with a sassy kind of grin on her face when she said the words "Deep Water." Like she was giving God a friendly nudge with her elbow.

May would tell Cletus and me, if she was here right now, that it's okay to grab for something or somebody that's being swept away from you. She'd tell us to hold on tight because we're all meant to be together. We're all meant to need each other.

She'd just remind us that there's more places to be together than this one.

She'd tell us we don't have to give up if this life doesn't give us every thing we want. There's always another one.

But that's where May and me always parted company. Because I never could count on another chance at happiness. When I got Ob and May after all those years of having nobody, that was my idea of dying and going to heaven. I never expected something that big to happen to me more than once.

Cletus says I think like a tired old woman. He says I'm going to turn into one of those green-eyed ladies at the Kmart checkout if I'm not careful.

"Summer," he said to me once, "drop some of them bricks you keep hauling around with you, Life just ain't that heavy."

I think I must have got old and heavy when May left us. Ob needed somebody to fill the empty hole she left, and 1 reckon I thought if I aged about fifty years, I might--could fill it for him.

But the only person who seems to be giving Ob anything these days is crazy Cletus. And now, if she plans to stay a while, May.

CHAPTER FOUR

"Look here at this." I reached across the aisle of the school bus and took what Cletus was handing me.

It was an old photograph, fading away like a dawn that leaves you little by little, and it was of a child. A baby in a Bowing white gown, arranged on a tall chair out in the middle of a field. The baby's gown was draped so that the chair was practically invisible, and the only thing you saw was this child hovering in midair, looking at the camera.

"Weird," I said, handing it back.

"I think something like this ought to be in a museum," Cletus said, pushing a greasy strand of hair back from his eyes. Cletus's black hair is long, straight, and, from my point of view, slimy. I don't think Cletus bathes much, though he never exactly stinks. He just seems to me the type who'd layer on the Right Guard for days before he'd finally break down and take a shower.

"It's what they call surreal," he went an. "Taking something real and sort of stretching it out like a piece of taffy into a thing that's true but distorted. You know. Like old lady Henley's facelift."

I smiled. Mrs. Henley was our seventh grade art teacher who just couldn't handle getting old. She was the only person in Deep Water who'd ever had a face-lift--went off to Charleston to get it--and anybody from out of town could have guessed it. She just had this look on her, like she was going to spring loose all of a sudden and snap clear across to the other side of town.

"Where'd you get it?" I asked, leaning over to take another look at the photograph. "I was up at Mrs. Davis's house, seeing if she needed anything from the store. I showed her my suitcase, and she brought me in and pulled a great big box off the top shelf of her closet. It was crammed full of stuff like this. I thought I'd struck gold."