Welcome to Fred (The Fred Books) (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO
In 1964, when Mom and Dad returned to Fort Worth with the news that we were moving to a place where snow stayed on the ground until after Easter, I was skeptical. Who did they think they were kidding? At eight years old, even I knew that snow didn’t hang around until April, not even in the Panhandle where they always got snow in the winter. The March ice storm that had accompanied my birth had been a fluke, like the lions whelping in the streets and men on fire strolling through Rome the night before Caesar got it in the neck.

Yet my parents insisted they had actually seen the stuff, right there on the ground. Snow, I mean. Not lions and flaming men. And parents are never wrong.

I wasn’t particularly anxious to go north. I felt that living on Felix Street gave me a special connection to Felix the Cat and his bag of tricks, and I was loath to abandon that magical location. Plus, there was a cute girl down the street I wanted to look at a few hundred more times. But, alas, it was not to be.

Heidi didn’t welcome the idea either. She was two years older than I was and looked more like Dad—brown hair, green eyes, and tending toward plumpness. Unlike Dad, she was shy and didn’t make friends easily. The announcement struck her like a prophecy of exile. No sackcloth and ashes were available at J. C. Penney’s, so she had to settle for gloomy looks as she moped around the house.

Hannah didn’t share Heidi’s outlook. At six years old, she had the inverse apportionment—Mom’s looks (slim, blond hair, blue eyes) and Dad’s disposition. She looked forward to the trip, her only regret that the snow would be melted before we got there.

As seems to be my lot in life, looking backward at what I was leaving behind left me unprepared for what lay ahead—the change in status from obscurity, as son of a graduate student in theology, to prominence as a preacher’s kid. PKs, like preachers themselves, seem to have a spotlight perpetually trained on them, highlighting their every success or failure. But there’s one minor difference: preachers are, hopefully, prepared to live in the limelight. Given their choice of careers, perhaps they prefer it.

Somewhere in the seminary curriculum must certainly exist a course explaining that as a member of the congregation an open fly might be noticed by twenty or thirty people, but as the pastor a similar lapse in vigilance in the pulpit will result in hundreds of devout Christians discussing it for weeks, if not years. I suspect the students are required to sign a statement absolving the seminary of all blame in the event of dire embarrassment from undue public exposure. They accept it as part of the territory when they take the gig.

PKs get this fringe benefit with or without prior knowledge or consent. Or signing the form. This gives them plausible deniability, but that is little consolation to those who suffer under a weight that proves too great for many. They break under the strain and tumble into a life of dissipation, taking up bad habits such as spitting and scratching in public or leaving their beds unmade, and they eventually run off to join the circus and fraternize with undesirables such as hurdy-gurdy hustlers and actresses, or other people of that sort.

But my immediate future didn’t include actresses, hurdy-gurdies, or even spitting.

The long trek to the North culminated in my first moment in the spotlight. Sunday morning arrived and, as per custom, I found myself in a church. But this was not a large brick building of imposing proportions, with pipe organ, white pews, scarlet carpet, and matching seat cushions. Instead, it was a white nineteenth-century frame building on the edge of downtown, all wood and stained glass, and able to accommodate about three hundred souls, penitent or apostate. Instead of sitting in relative obscurity somewhere in the middle, I sat on the first row in the semigloom. The man in front wasn’t some imposing silver-haired gentleman; it was Dad, a pale man, short and dumpy, with a crew cut that made no attempt to disguise the receding hairline, and glasses recovered from the estate of Buddy Holly. He called us up to be introduced. Heidi, Hannah, and I stood in stair-step fashion next to Mom and faced a crowd of perhaps one hundred people who got a good look at us, as though to be able to pick us out in the lineup afterward should there be any trouble.

Little old ladies came by and patted my head and held my hand with their withered claws and told me how cute I was and how happy they were to have the chance to say so. I nodded gravely back at them. Buxom matrons wearing too much powder and perfume hugged me messily and told me how much I looked like my mother. I nodded gravely back at them. Deacons, smelling of aftershave or coffee or cigarettes, slapped me on the back and told me what a fine specimen I was, as if I had been captured and placed in a jar in a natural history museum for their amusement. I nodded gravely back at them. They all had one thing in common: age. Not a kid in sight.

The next day I made the first of many grand entrances into a strange classroom. I didn’t encounter much difficulty, other than the fact that all the other kids had learned to write cursive in the second grade, something I was expecting to do in third grade. The teacher dealt with this problem by giving me some books and telling me to figure it out.

The house Dad had located on short notice was a two-bedroom farmhouse, which posed problems for a family of five. I muddled through the third grade with cramped quarters and cramped handwriting. The next summer Dad found a more suitable house in the suburbs, and we moved to another school district. My first day in fourth grade caught the teacher shorthanded when it came to desks. Since I was built along the lines of a soda straw (only with larger hands and feet), she found another slender student and we shared a desk. The other student was a cute girl named Sheila. I approved her plan.

When we finished our lesson, we got a book on birds and leafed through it together, snickering when we got to the picture of two lovebirds. I saw this as an omen, but the next summer our family moved yet again, to a white-flight neighborhood. Just as I was getting around to writing a note that said, “Do you like me? Check a box. ⬜ Yes ⬜ No.” (OK, I never said I was quick off the line, but I heard somewhere that slow and steady wins the race.)

I had, by this time, learned how to write at least as well as a doctor. I had also learned that classmates are like the dog that follows you home. Better not get too attached. When a little dark-haired cutie named Carolyn batted her eyes at me, I didn’t even have time to organize my note-writing materials before she became the stuff of memory. In September, a two-story frame house opened up in town a few blocks from the church. But the distance from the white-bread-America suburb to the inner-city neighborhood was a lot further than the twenty miles we put on the Vauxhall driving in.

By now, Heidi was in a perpetual state of mourning, which helped me understand the reaction of the Israelites to Jeremiah. I refrained from digging a pit for her, sensing that the plan might not meet with universal approval. Hannah bounced from one school to another with the flexibility of a switch-hitter.

Settling into the house was an adventure. It had a full basement and attic. In my bedroom I discovered the door to the attic stairs. I abandoned unpacking to explore, which I did with the thoroughness of a cartographer. I climbed and crawled over rafters and under dormers, blazing a trail through decades of dust and disintegrating newspapers. I noted the grimy window in the hidden alcove that I claimed, silently, as my personal refuge. It overlooked a mass of housetops and trees with the receding leaf-lines of fall. Next, the basement, which yielded little beyond flaking paint, the smell of mildew, and a monstrous beast Dad identified as the furnace.

The backyard was a rectangle of weeds and crabgrass surrounded by a vine-covered chain-link fence. Dead leaves sloped against the garage. I went to the back fence and peered through the vines. A large set of brown eyes peered back from a dark face. I jumped back, tripped, and fell backward. A strange sound emerged from behind the curtain of leaves. I rolled to my knees and looked through the bottom of the fence.

A Negro boy was rolling on the ground, snorting like a pig and kicking up leaves and dust. Evidently he had also been startled and was having a seizure of some kind. I tried to remember what to do, something about making sure he didn’t swallow his tongue. I wasn’t sure how to do that, but I assumed time was a critical element. I was halfway over the fence, trying to disentangle my shoelace, when the snorting changed to a thin, rising and falling wail. I paused, puzzled. Obviously he wasn’t swallowing his tongue. As I stood in frozen indecision, the noise became a sound that left me both relieved and annoyed. Laughter.

I straddled the fence, shoes crammed pigeon-toed into the wire, glaring with impatience and pique. The convulsions of glee subsided into tremors of giggles, like the fading thunder of a passing storm. I waited, looking down from my exalted position with royal disdain. However, each time the boy looked up at me, the sirenlike noise erupted, and he flopped about on the ground, mottled brown and black, dust on skin.

My ankles complained of the impossible angle I had forced on them. I shifted my weight to my hands, but the vines were too insubstantial to support even my meager weight, and I tumbled into the yard onto the laughing boy. This development, while alarming me, only served to increase his amusement. He suffered a relapse of the snorting stage, rolling around and slapping weakly at me as he laughed.

I struggled to my feet and looked down at him with as much amazement as annoyance. How could he sustain such spasms without internal injury? He grabbed at my leg and used me as a support to crawl to his feet, leaning against me and laughing. Odors of grass, dirt, and the musky smell of the boy’s sweat mingled in the air. I felt him quivering as he staggered against me. As if it were spread by contact, I began to be infected by his laughter and, against my will, found myself chuckling. The boy looked up from his bent stance and pawed feebly at my chest, trying to catch his breath between barks of delight. This struck me as rather amusing, and I began to laugh in earnest. We spurred each other on to greater heights of hilarity until we both collapsed on the ground and surrendered to an ecstasy of elation. It gradually faded in fits and giggles, replaced by the contented silence of exhaustion.

I sat up. “Mark,” I said, holding out my hand.

“Yes?” He looked at my hand. Bits of grass and leaves adorned his close-cropped hair like Christmas ornaments. Now that we had recovered from our convulsions, I was able to get a look at him. He was very dark, like the dark chocolate Mom liked but none of us kids did. He was a little shorter than I was, and much stockier, which was no great feat. I had seen walking sticks with more meat on their bones than I had. His head bulged out in back as if to counterbalance his large nose and lips. He was wearing a brown V-neck T-shirt under a nappy burnt-orange sweater. Black high-tops protruded from his frayed jeans.

“I’m Mark. What’s your name?” My hand hung out between us.

“Marc.” He grabbed my hand and shook it as vigorously as he had laughed earlier.

“Right. And you are?” I vibrated from the energy of his handshake.

“Marc.” He continued to shake my hand, smiling hugely.

I began to wonder if I had tumbled into the grounds of a private lunatic asylum. I looked at him blankly while developing an appreciation for the rigors of the life of a pump handle.

He finally quit shaking my hand and stood up. “Only youse guys prob’ly spells yours with a K, as in Mark Twain. Mine has a C, as in Marcus. Marcus Malcom Marshall, to be exack, as in Garvey, X, and Thurgood, respectively. No relation, though. But everybody jus’ call me M.” The torrent of words gushed from him with no discernable pauses for breathing.

I hated to admit I didn’t follow any of it. I latched onto the one part I did understand. “M?”

“Yep. Man, you talk funny. Where you from?”

“
I
talk funny?
Youse
guys talks funny.”

“Alabama? I bet it’s Alabama,” he declared, undeterred by my comments.