The Monument (4 page)

THE TRUTH was most kids wouldn’t have come to the courthouse meeting about the monument, and I wouldn’t have gone either except that Fred and Emma decided it was important for me to be “community minded.”

Which meant I had to wear a dress. It’s not that I hate dresses if there’s a good reason for wearing one—say if you’re going to the president’s
birthday party and you’ve got a written invitation. But usually I don’t like getting into one because it leaves my leg hanging out in the open where I can see it and other people can see it.

But Emma said I had to wear one and Fred nodded and it was little enough to do for them, so Emma tied me down and got me into a yellow dress that she said set off my hair and brown eyes. To be honest about it I didn’t feel bad walking between them to the courthouse. I wouldn’t have admitted it to the world, but I felt all pretty and fresh and maybe strutted a little, as much as you can strut with one leg stiff, and when I turned to the side I liked the way the dress whirled out.

Python followed along behind us, walking about four feet to my rear. If I had been alone he would have walked in to my left so I could grab his shoulder hair, but for Fred or Emma he moved away and just followed.

When we got to the courthouse it was already crowded. There were pickups and cars parked in the small lot in back of the building, so many
they were jammed in on top of each other and the overflow filled the street.

Python rumbled at the size of the crowd, “I didn’t know there were so many people in Bolton,” I said.

“Oh, my, yes,” Emma answered. “If you take in all the county around there might be four, five thousand of them.”

“And they’re all here,” Fred said, smiling. “Or almost all of them.”

“They take this all pretty seriously.” Emma stopped to straighten her dress, and as she bent down I could smell the wine on her breath but she didn’t show it.

I put Python outside by the statues of the lions that looked more like sheep near the front door, and he sat looking out across the tops of the people coming up the steps, ignoring them.

Inside the courtroom—the largest room in town except for the gym at the school—was packed to the walls. Fred worked himself in and to the left, and we followed him until we were more or less stuck against the wall.

I couldn’t see anything until Fred picked me
up and let me prop my feet on the back of one of the benches so I could see the front.

Except that there wasn’t much to see. Just old Howard Bemis, the mayor, standing up at the main bench.

“The motion has been made that we hire an artist to construct a war memorial monument in front of the courthouse. This special open public meeting has been called to discuss the motion, find its merits and demerits, and open them to public scrutiny to ensure the free operation of the public will in these matters.”

“For God’s sake, Howard, shut up and sit down and let’s get to it.” This from Wayne Conners who owned a farm north of town. “I have to be home by tomorrow to work.”

Howard seemed to rise on his feet. Since he was short and kind of round, it didn’t do much for him except seem to raise him about half an inch. “Need I remind you,
Mr. Conners
, that this is a town matter for town residents only?”

“And need I remind you,
Mr. Bemis
, that if it weren’t for my grain money and the rest of our grain money, you wouldn’t
have
a town?”

“All right, all right.” This came from Fred. I looked around to see him smiling. His voice was soft but everybody was listening. “That doesn’t do any good at all. Let’s just talk about the monument, all right?”

Which settled them right down and showed a side of Fred I didn’t know about. In the elevator he just let the others talk, mostly, and didn’t enter into any of it. I looked at Emma but she didn’t seem surprised.

“Very well,” Howard said. “Back to the issue at hand. The floor is open to discussion. Does anybody have anything to say about the war memorial?”

Which was about like throwing raw meat into the middle of a bunch of cats. Everybody had something to say about it, and they all said it at once. You couldn’t make out any words, just a roar, and Howard held up his hands. It seemed to take about half an hour but finally everybody quietened down again.

“We’ll do it by hands,” he said. “You first, Margaret.”

Margaret Balen stood up from one of the
benches in the front row and took a deep breath. She said all at once, “Just so it’s big I think it ought to be big because there are so many small monuments in the world and we want a big one so people don’t laugh at us when they drive through town.” She sat down abruptly.

“Yes. Well.” Howard nodded. “And you, Taft—what do you have to say?”

Taft was a man with no hair at all on his head except for bushy eyebrows and he coughed and said, “I think we ought to know how much money we’re talking about here.”

And so it went, talk and talk until my head was starting to nod. Fred put me down so I could sit on the back of the bench and lean against his chest and doze a little until it was over at last. I heard Howard say:

“All right, it’s settled. We do the monument as long as it falls under two thousand dollars. Mrs. Langdon will see about contacting an artist since she was the one who won last year’s art award at the county fair with her macramé piece depicting the history of Bolton County up to the
present.” He banged the gavel and we all shuffled out and worked our way into the street.

Python was waiting and slipped in behind us as we came out.

“I don’t know about all this,” Emma said. “Just because she could knot some baling twine into the shape of Bolton County doesn’t mean Trudy Langdon can find an artist.”

“Magazines,” Fred said. “She’s got tons of art magazines. Carl told me one day he about blew a truss moving them. She’s got crates of them. There’s probably ads in all of them for artists looking to do monuments.”

“Still …”

“It will be fine, Emma, just fine.”

And of course it turned out to be, but not quite in the way Fred meant it.

A WEEK PASSED, then another one, and summer rolled into the busiest part of itself. The elevator was humming, sometimes with trucks waiting in line to bring the grain in and dump it and go back for more. Farmers worked until dark, and Fred stayed open often until midnight or later so they could bring in the last trucks of grain for the day. Then the next morning they
would start at daylight and we’d have to be open not long after then to be ready for them, truck after truck rolling in to dump their golden grain, the dust so thick even inside the office you could choke on it, and no way to stop.

There was so much paperwork that I had to be there almost all the time with Fred just to keep up, totaling the grain amounts and filing them in the old wooden filing cabinets next to the peanut machine.

I didn’t think it would ever end, and I took to taking morning walks just after we opened the doors. There was a short quiet time just at dawn before the trucks started to come in from the fields, just an hour or so, and I would take Python and we would walk through the town. Bolton was so small that after a couple of times you’d think you knew it all but there was always something different happening. The birds were always singing and the sun wasn’t hot yet and I wasn’t covered with grain dust yet and Python seemed to like it. I let him pick the way to go, just moving along next to me, his shoulder against my leg, and on one of the morning walks
he took me so that I met the artist Mrs. Langdon had sent for to make the war memorial.

Mick.

Although at first I didn’t know he was the artist.

At first I just thought he was a pervert.

Python and I always walked a different way. Sometimes we’d move through the small downtown area because Hopper’s bakery would be taking out the first rolls of the day. The smell of fresh bread came out of the back doors of the bakery into the alley and made our mouths water. Hopper would come to the door and give us each a roll, and Python would take his ever so gently, and we’d eat them hot and steaming.

Sometimes we’d go down in back of Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium because Lyle had a thing about cats and must have had a dozen of them, and Python liked to put them up the power poles. He didn’t catch them and maybe even didn’t want to, but it was fun for him once in a while to decorate the power poles with them, and it probably kept the cats from getting too careless.

This morning Python had taken me by the bakery and Hopper had given us each a sticky cinnamon roll. Python wasn’t much on manners so he’d taken his down kind of in one gulp. I ate mine slower, and when I was done my hands were all over sticky so I let Python lick them. We were standing at one end of the alley, and I looked up while he was licking my hands, and there was Mick.

Actually there was an old station wagon with rust so bad it looked to be falling apart. The back window was rolled halfway down and the left front fender was patched over with silver duct tape until you couldn’t see anything but tape. Jammed into the driver’s-side window was the bottom of a man.

It had clothes on, the bottom, but there it was, filling the window, and I stopped. Python made that sound low in his throat so you thought the ground was shaking.

I knew all about perverts from what the nuns had told us—or sometimes hadn’t told us—in the orphanage and also what we learned in
school so I thought naturally I was seeing a pervert.

I also thought—just as naturally—how that pervert would feel if I let Python go and he took about half of that bottom off for a snack to follow up his cinnamon roll.

But something held me back. It didn’t seem right for a pervert to be sitting with his bottom propped in the side of an old station wagon window at dawn in Bolton, Kansas.

Plus it wasn’t moving.

“It’s dead maybe,” I said to Python. “It’s a dead bottom.”

Python rumbled again.

I moved closer.

I know how that sounds. Stupid. Everybody says if you see a pervert get away from him, and everybody is right. But I moved closer. Maybe it was because I was dumb or maybe because I half figured nobody in his right mind would bother me with Python standing next to me. Whatever the reason I moved closer.

Two steps, then two more.

Still the bottom didn’t move. Just stood there
in the window. I thought maybe the joke was bad because somebody really
was
dead, the way it was so still.

When I was ten feet away it moved. Just a bit to the side, a lean, and I heard a moan, so low there was almost a chop to it, kind of, “Oh-oh-oh …”

Then there was a fumbling sound, a click as somehow he reached back through between his legs and operated the door handle. The door creaked open and I was looking at a man standing on his head in the front seat of the station wagon looking at me back between his knees.

Only he didn’t see me. He saw Python.

“Oh God, it’s death, death coming for me. I’ve gone too far this time. I’m gone. Gone.”

Then he saw me, looking still up and back through his legs, and he smiled—that is his mouth seemed to smile, upside down—and he coughed. “Tell me—are you with death?”

I didn’t say anything. It still was in my mind that he was a pervert, and I was ready to run or put Python on him, either one.

“No,” he answered himself. “Death wouldn’t
come with a girl. Why, then, why are you with that … that thing?”

“It’s not a thing. It’s a dog. His name is Python, and if you’re a pervert, he’s going to make lunch out of your rear end.”

“Pervert?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ve been called lots of things and will be called many more but pervert isn’t one of them.”

“How is it, then, that you’re standing upside down in a car with your bottom sticking out the window if you’re not a pervert?”

“It was the way I happened to be,” he said, “when I fell asleep.”

Passed out, more likely, I thought but I didn’t say anything. Hell, I thought, any old pervert worth his salt wouldn’t tell you if he was a pervert anyway. He’d just wait and do his pervert things, and I thought for half a second about turning Python loose anyway, just on general principle, when the man suddenly moved. His feet had been propped somehow on the ledge next to the door, and with the door open there
wasn’t anything to hold them on the ledge and they slipped off.

Both feet—he was wearing tennis shoes that looked to be made of rags—dropped to the ground, the legs and bottom followed, and he bounced off the seat with his face, kicked sideways off the back of the car seat, rolled half over and was sitting on the ground by the car looking up at me right side up.

“Hello.” He squinted. “My eyes are bleeding.”

“No they’re not. You’re just drunk.”

“Not true. I was drunk. Now I’m not. And my eyes are bleeding. You wouldn’t have a bottle somewhere, would you?”

“No.” I thought of Fred’s bottle at the elevator but didn’t say anything about it. “You don’t need it anyway.”

I think I was going to say more about how he drank too much but he wasn’t listening to me.

“God, look at that. See the light?”