Mr. Was (9 page)

“Well, don't disappear like the Boggses.” He grinned, and for a moment his face seemed familiar.

I opened the car door and stepped out, then turned and took a closer look at him. “How come you get called Scud?”

He seemed surprised at the question. “That's my name, why d'ya think?”

“Cause Mr. Murphy called you Franklin.”

“My last name's Scudder, okay? Only thing I ever got from my old man.”

I shut the door. “Thanks for the ride.”

Franklin Scudder waved and drove off.

And I came back through the door.

M
om found a job in Lake City working for a pick-your-own-berries farmer. It was a temporary job and it didn't pay much, but she was happy to get it, and we got lots of free berries. A few weeks later someone knocked on the front door. Mom was literally up to her elbows in raspberry preserves, so I answered it. It was a delivery guy with the biggest bouquet of flowers I'd seen since Skoro's funeral. I looked at the note attached.

These roses are red
But I'm feeling blue
I'm off the sauce now
And I really miss you.
—
Ronnie

I was thinking about hauling the bouquet out to the compost bin when Mom came up behind me wiping her hands on a towel.

“For me?” she said.

It made me sick to hear the hope in her voice.

I didn't say anything, just handed her the roses and went up to my room.

• • •

Dad showed up at Boggs's End three days later.

“How's it going, champ?” he said, faking a punch at my shoulder. He'd shaved off his mustache and put on a few pounds.

“Okay, I guess.” I didn't look at his eyes. The thing was, I was glad to see him, but at the same time I was mad at myself. I'd tried to forget him, to write him out of my life, but he was my dad and it's pretty amazing what a dad can do and still have you like him.

He said he hadn't had a drink since the day they let him out of jail. Since then, he'd been driving a delivery van and going to AA meetings seven nights a week. He said he hadn't called us before because he was ashamed, and he wanted to be absolutely sure he had his drinking problem licked before he saw either of us again. He said it had been the hardest three months of his life. We were sitting at the kitchen table listening when the strangest thing happened.

He started crying.

Now, I know that men cry sometimes, and there's nothing wrong with it, but to see
my
father cry, it was like the sky had turned from blue to red-and-green polka dot. I'd never before seen him with so much as a teary eye, and here he was snuffling like a lost child.

After that, there wasn't much to say. Of course, Mom said he could stay.

The next morning they were all lovey-dovey, like nothing bad had ever happened between them. I
walked into the living room and found them sitting tight together on the sofa, smiling like Romeo and Juliet. It made me feel good, but more than that it made me feel weird. I came right out and said it.

“Hanging out with you guys is like being in the Twilight Zone.”

There was a time when if I said something like that my father would've smacked me and my mom would've started crying. But it didn't faze them. Dad laughed, and Mom sort of let her head fall on his shoulder.

I took my baseball bat and went out to the orchard to hit the wormy apples. I liked the sound they made when splattered by a hard-swung aluminum bat.

In the mornings, Mom would go to her job at the berry farm, and Dad and I would go to work on Boggs's End. A house that big, there's always plenty to do. We replaced cracked windows, unstuck stuck doors, scraped and repainted the veranda, fixed the loose banister at the top of the stairs, put new washers in the leaking bathroom faucet. We went to work outside, too, cutting back the young walnut and ash trees that were invading the orchard, and trimming dead wood off the apple trees. Mom wanted us to put up a clothesline so she could dry the laundry outdoors, so we found some rope in one of the sheds and strung it up between two of the apple trees. As he pulled the rope tight, my dad looked critically at the misshapen fruit weighing down the branches.

“Too late to do anything about them this year, champ. If we haven't sold the place by spring, we'll start spraying them. That's when you have to stop the worms. Next year maybe we can make cider, if we don't sell this place first.”

“Does Mom want to sell the house now?” I wasn't sure which way I wanted him to answer.

Dad stood with the pruning saw in his hand, staring up into the twisted branches. “I don't know, Jack. What do you think? It's going to be a long winter. You want to spend it here?”

“Mom likes it.”

“Are you sure? Maybe what she liked was just being away from me while I was drinking. She liked it in Skokie as long as I was on the wagon.”

These conversations made me uncomfortable.

“I don't care,” I said. That usually stopped a conversation dead. It worked like a charm. Dad pressed his lips together and went after another limb with his saw.

We finished the orchard, then cut back the hydrangeas that were taking over the south side of the house. I hacked at the fibrous stems with hedge clippers and tried not to look too hard at the doorshaped patch of mismatched siding.

O
ne afternoon I was sitting in the study flipping through some of Skoro's old copies of
National Geographic
when I looked out the window and saw my mother in the orchard talking to somebody. But there was no one there. She stood holding her basket of wet laundry, shirts and towels hanging from our improvised clothesline, talking to some invisible person, smiling too hard the way she would when meeting someone new. It gave me a hard-to-describe feeling, something like having your body climbed by a thousand ice-cold centipedes. The one-sided conversation didn't last long—she slowly rotated her head as if she was watching someone walk away, then let go of the laundry basket with one hand and waved. The basket fell. Wet laundry spilled onto the grass.

That night at dinner, as she was shaking Parmesan cheese over her spaghetti, my mom mentioned that we'd had a visitor.

“That older gentleman we saw at the funeral. You remember him, Ron. He had an eye patch?”

That brought the centipedes back.

“What did he want?” Dad asked.

“He was hunting mushrooms. He said his name was Mr. Was.”

“I don't like it. He's got no business coming on our property.”

“He seemed harmless enough, Ron. I told him he was welcome to hunt mushrooms on our land.”

Dad frowned and spun a wad of spaghetti onto his fork. “I don't like it,” he mumbled, his mouth full of noodles. “The guy gives me the creeps.”

The whole situation was giving
me
the creeps.

I rode my bike down the hill to Ole's one afternoon, just looking for something to do. I figured I'd play some pinball, maybe rent a video. The Gleason twins were sitting on their usual stools, nursing their beers, looking as dumb and old and ugly as ever. They still hadn't figured out how come I looked so familiar, and I wasn't about to remind them. Ole slouched behind the counter, a smoldering cigarette between his nicotine-yellowed fingers.

“Well if it ain't the master of Boggs's End,” he said.

“That's right,” I said. It didn't pay to argue with Ole, I'd learned. He was a jerk, and pretty much everybody in town knew it, but since he owned the only retail operation within ten miles, people put up with him.

“I hear your old man's doing a lot a work up there.”

“We're all working on it.”

“He stopped by this morning, talking about how your granddaddy let everything go to hell. Sounds like he left you with a real rat hole.”

I didn't like that, him calling our place a rat hole, but I knew he was just trying to get under my skin, so I walked over to the video rack and tried to find a movie I hadn't already seen twice. It was hard to concentrate, though, because something else was bothering me worse than Ole's insults. Dad had left that morning to go into Rochester to rent some scaffolding so we could start painting up under the eaves.

Why had he driven down the hill to Ole's?

I didn't have to wonder long.

Ole said, “You tell your daddy, next time you see him, you tell him I'll be stocking his brand from here on out. Okay?”

“What brand is that?”

“That fancy lemon vodka he likes, son. Appears my house brand ain't good enough for you city folk.”

I got on my bike and started pedaling. I'd just got up to speed when suddenly I ran into something and went flying through the air and landed flat on my back. For what seemed like a long time I lay staring up at the cloudless blue, feeling the road pressing up against my body, trying to get some air into my flattened lungs. When I was finally able to sit up, I looked to see what I'd hit. There was only my bicycle, handlebars twisted to one side, chain broken.

But I knew I'd run into something. Or somebody. Somebody invisible.

I walked my broken bike all the way up the bluff to
Boggs's End, arriving long after the sun had set. Dad's car was still gone. Mom sat alone at the kitchen table, three places set, all the food still in its serving dishes. She hadn't touched a thing.

I wasn't hungry, but I sat down and helped myself to cold mashed potatoes, cold pork chops, warm milk. Once I started eating, Mom took one of the pork chops, cut off a small piece, chewed it slowly. She was staring at Dad's empty plate.

I can't explain to you how she knew. There was a time when she might have thought he'd had a flat tire, or that he'd gotten lost, or broken down, or killed in an accident. Not anymore. I didn't even have to tell her about what Ole had said. She knew.

All of a sudden Mom picked up Dad's plate and sailed it through the kitchen door like a Frisbee, all the way into the living room where it hit the chandelier with the sound of a thousand breaking glasses. The plate and a good part of the chandelier crashed to the floor. Glass shards were everywhere.

I said, “Mom?”

“No more,” she said, her face white and hard. “I'm not going through it again.” She got up and put the chain on the front door, then did the same to the back.

“Maybe he'll just go back to Skokie,” I said.

She shook her head. “He'll be back. But he won't get in.”

S
he was half right.

I lay awake in bed that night until well past midnight, waiting. Sometime around two I fell asleep. At about four o'clock in the morning I woke up to the sound of the door banging against its chain, hard and repeatedly.

I could hear his hoarse shouts, then my mother's footsteps. I tugged on a pair of jeans, shoved my feet into my Nikes, opened my bedroom door. Mom stood halfway down the stairs, looking at the front door.

“Don't talk to him, Mom,” I said. “Let him yell.” She didn't answer, just stood there holding her bathrobe closed with one hand, gripping the banister with the other, staring down the staircase.

I knew if she listened to him too long she wouldn't be able to resist. She would go down and yell back at him through the crack in the door. That was part of the problem. She couldn't help but listen to him, to his foul accusations and crude insults. When he called her names she couldn't just walk away, couldn't leave it alone, even when it meant she would get hurt. He knew how to punch her buttons, and she responded like a trained animal.

She started down the stairs. I ran after her and grabbed her arm.

“Get off me!” she snapped, as if I was my father, then shook me off with a violent shudder. I watched her descend the stairs, feeling helpless and angry at both of them.

The hell with them, I thought. Let them fight. They could kill each other, for all I cared. I went back to my room, sat on my bed, and waited for the explosion.

I didn't have to wait long.

First, there was the predictable exchange of hoarse profanities. Most of it was coming from my father, but Mom was getting in her licks, too. Having a chained door between them seemed to inspire her. Then there was a minute or so when I heard only my mother's voice, then about thirty seconds of silence. Then the roar of an engine, screeching tires, and a tremendous crash—the sound of splintering wood and breaking glass.

My mother screamed.

I heard a car door slam.

I couldn't just sit there in my room. I don't remember grabbing my baseball bat, but I must've because when I got downstairs it was in my hands.

The front end of Dad's Jeep was in the foyer. The double front doors we had just refinished had been blasted open, one of them torn off its hinges.

I could hear them in the kitchen, my father's voice
hoarse with rage, my mother saying, “Go away, leave us alone! Go away, leave us alone!”

I came around the corner.

She had a knife, holding it in both hands, waving it back and forth.

My father had a chair in his hands, holding it out like a lion tamer. He jabbed at her with the legs, then swung it hard, knocking the knife away. He dropped the chair and fell on her with his fists, hitting her on the face and shoulders, driving her down onto the floor.

I let out a yell and charged him with the baseball bat held high, swinging it down as hard as I could. He heard me, twisted his body, dove to the side. The bat caught him on the hip, but he somehow got his hands on it and wrenched it from my grasp. I backed away. My mother was curled up on the floor, her arms locked over her head.

He limped toward me, his face blotchy red with fury.

“You little blindsiding coward. You sneaking little bastard. C'mere, you little piece a crap. Let's see how you like it.”