Blossoms Meet the Vulture Lady (2 page)

“How much is it?”

“A hundred dollars.”

“Shoot, for a hundred dollars I’d make a trap myself.”

Vern’s last raft had now gone successfully over the fall, and Vern watched his fleet of rafts, four of them, sailing down the creek, moving in and out of the long shadows of the trees.

“Are you really going to make a trap?” Maggie asked. “I’ll help.”

“No, I’m helping Pap this afternoon.”

“Doing what?”

“Collecting cans.”

Every Monday afternoon Pap went around the county collecting beer and pop cans that people had thrown out of car windows and left at picnic sites. It was his job, the most satisfying he had ever had. He started when he wanted, quit when he wanted, and got paid for what he collected. Vern was his assistant.

“Oh, I forgot it was Monday. Anyway, Junior probably used up all the hog wire. Did you see how big his trap was? Big enough for a pony.”

“Junior never was one to conserve.”

“No.”

Vern’s rafts were out of sight now, on their way—he liked to think—to the ocean. He imagined them bobbing in the first gentle ripples of the tide, then riding the curling waves out to sea. Although he had never actually seen the ocean, the picture was clearer than a lot of things he had seen.

He climbed out of the creek without using his hands, by digging his toes into the cool slimy mud and turning his feet sideways to take advantage of rock and root ledges. At the top he waved his arms in the air in a rare moment of imbalance.

Seeing her advantage, Maggie yelled, “Race you!” She broke into a run for the barn.

“That’s not fair. I wasn’t ready!” he called after her. Then he couldn’t help himself. He broke into a run and began to overtake her.

Mud was following Junior into the woods. Three times Junior had turned around, hands on hips, and said “Go home, Mud. Go home! I mean it. Go home!”

So Mud knew he was not wanted. Still he followed. He could not help himself. He knew Junior had a ball of raw hamburger meat in his back pocket.

Mud had been lying under the kitchen table, taking a nap, when Junior slipped into the house. Without opening his eyes, Mud knew it was Junior. Junior in the hall … Junior in the dining room … Junior in the kitchen. When it was Junior opening the refrigerator door, Mud opened his eyes.

Junior was on a straight chair, reaching into the freezer. Mud crawled out from under the table, stretched, and sat attentively.

Junior took out a frozen package of something and began working on it with a butcher knife. Finally Junior cut off a chunk. Frozen chips sprayed onto the linoleum floor.

Mud moseyed over. He smelled one, licked it up. Hamburger! It was hamburger! Mud’s nose began to run.

Raw hamburger was Mud’s favorite thing to eat in the world. The only time he got it was when Pap wrapped it around a worm pill. “Catch!” Pap would say. Mud always caught. He thought all balls of hamburger came with a hard, foul-tasting center that you weren’t allowed to spit out, but still he loved it.

With eager care Mud sniffed the floor until he was sure he had gotten every crumb. By then Junior was gone.

Mud pushed open the screen door with his front paws, bounded out, and, ears flapping, ran for the woods. He could not see Junior, but the faint scent of hamburger followed Junior like a wake.

He caught up with Junior in the pine trees. “Go home!” Junior said immediately.

Mud was surprised. He was almost never sent back to the house. He sat down.

“I did not say ‘Sit,’ I said ‘Go home!’”

Mud pretended to obey. He took a few steps toward the house. When Junior was once again pushing his wheelbarrow, Mud followed again.

Junior spun around. “I said ‘Go home!’ Watch my lips. Go home! I do not want you scaring off my coyote. Go home.”

Again, Mud pretended to obey. Then, again, he followed. Sooner or later Junior would break down and give him a piece of hamburger meat.

Following as closely as he dared, nose wet with desire, Mud went deeper into the woods.

Maggie came up short at the door of the barn. “Where did Junior go?” she asked.

Hopping on one foot, she picked a burr from the side of the other. Vern ran past her and tagged the sagging barn door. “I won!”

“You did not. I quit!”

“Well, I didn’t.”

“That’s your problem.” Maggie spit on her finger and cleaned the spot where the burr had been. She looked closely at the round clean spot on her dusty foot. Then she glanced up at Vern. “So where do you think Junior went?”

“He probably went to set his trap.” Vern walked forward, looking carefully at the ground. “See, here are wheelbarrow tracks.”

They followed the dusty trail with their eyes. “He went to the house, probably to get something—bait, most likely—and then he headed for the woods.” Vern always seemed to have a sixth sense about Junior.

They put their hands over their eyes so they could see the trail as it curled beyond the old rosebushes. “Let’s follow it and see where he went. Want to?” Maggie asked. “Maybe we can find some kind of joke animal to put in the trap—that would be funny—a turtle or something. A skunk would be perfect, but I know we can’t—”

Pap came out of the house yawning. He paused on the top step to stretch. “Vern, you ready to go?” he called across the yard.

“I been ready.”

“Maggie, you want to come?”

Maggie hesitated. It would be more fun to follow Junior’s trail into the woods, but only if Vern or somebody was along for company. This summer, being alone didn’t give her as much pleasure as it used to.

“Oh, all right.” She moved closer to the pickup truck. Then she yelled, “But I get to sit by the window,” and she broke into a run.

“I sit by the window!”

“First one there gets it!”

Maggie ran across the yard and jumped on the running board. Vern was struggling with Pap’s door while Maggie struggled with hers. They got them open at the same minute, but Maggie ended up in the window seat and Vern behind the steering wheel.

Maggie grinned.

Pap came to the car, looking from left to right. “Where’s Mud?” he asked. “Anybody seen Mud?”

“He probably followed Junior,” Vern said. Reluctantly he slid over so Pap could get in. He hated to ride in the middle. It was unmanly.

“Followed Junior? Where?”

“Into the woods.”

Pap paused. Every day, when he took his after-lunch nap, Mud took a nap, too, under the kitchen table. It was an unusual thing for Mud not to be waiting right there when Pap got up.

Pap climbed into the truck and swept the empty yard with one final glance. “This ain’t like Mud. He knows it’s can-collecting day.”

Pap sounded Mud’s signal on the horn of the pickup: one long, two shorts. He waited. He sounded it again.

“Well, if he don’t want to go …” Pap sounded hurt. He started the engine and steered the pickup out of the yard. On the timber bridge he paused to sound the horn one last time. Then the truck bounced over the rutted road toward the highway and disappeared into the pines.

“I said ‘Go home!’”

Junior turned again and put his hands on his hips, his mom’s pose when she meant business. He glared at Mud. Mud slunk toward the nearest tree. Head and tail lowered, he watched Junior through the leaves.

Junior nodded his head for emphasis. “And I mean it. No coyote in his right mind wants to be around dogs.”

Junior turned. Actually he loved for people to follow him, even to spy on him. It was flattering. He heard Mud’s footsteps behind him, and he grimaced with false annoyance. He loved to have to tell people again and again to leave him alone. His saddest moments were when they did.

“I mean it, Mud,” he sang out, this time without turning. He pushed the wheelbarrow over some tree roots and cried “Whoa” when it almost tipped. When it didn’t fall, he said to the invention, “Don’t scare me like that.”

Mud was coming slower now. He was ashamed. He had been told to go home so many times that it had made him feel bad, genuinely unwelcome.

Suddenly far away, in the distance, he heard the truck horn. It was his beep—one long, two shorts. His ears snapped up. His head lifted.

Junior swirled. He heard the horn, too, and he knew he was in danger of losing his only audience. He swirled and reached for his back pocket as quickly as a gunfighter in a showdown.

“I got something for you,” he said. He knelt.

Mud’s head was up; he was listening. He heard the sound of the horn again. Wrinkles appeared in his forehead.

Junior rattled the paper as he opened the ball of hamburger. “See, it’s hamburger. You want some hamburger? Your favorite, Mud, ground round.”

Mud hesitated. He wagged his tail, but it was at half mast. Junior pinched off a piece and held it out so Mud could smell it. “Here you go.”

Mud came forward. His nose was running. He couldn’t help himself. He accepted the small pinch of hamburger meat and swallowed it. His golden eyes watched the rest of the meat in Junior’s hand.

Junior twisted his fingers around Mud’s bandanna so Mud couldn’t pull away if he wanted to. He put the meat in his pocket and patted it. “There’s more where that came from,” he said. When he realized he had Mud’s full attention, he released his bandanna and stood up. He picked up the wheelbarrow handles and pushed.

The horn sounded again—one long, two shorts. Junior put his hand in his back pocket and rattled the hamburger paper.

Once again, Mud couldn’t help himself. He followed.

Since Maggie was by the window, she was the first to spot Mad Mary. “There she is! There she is!”

“Who?” Vern asked without interest. He was still unhappy about having to sit in the middle. Usually his only competition for the window seat was Mud, and they shared.

“Mad Mary!”

Vern leaned forward. His mouth dropped open. Maggie had said the one word that could cause him to look out the window. He had promised himself he would not look out HER window no matter what or whom she saw. But he could not miss a chance to see Mad Mary. He leaned across his sister.

Mad Mary was standing at the side of the road. She was looking at something in her hand, something she had just taken up from the road. She stuffed it in the bag she kept slung over her shoulder, and without a glance at the pickup truck, she started walking.

Mad Mary was known for her cane—a long stick, curved at the top like a shepherd’s hook. Kids were scared of that hook. “She’ll grab you with it if you get close,” they said, and they believed it. The cane moved like part of Mad Mary, an extra arm or leg. She was never seen without it.

“What was that she put in her bag?” Vern asked. He spoke in a whisper even though she was too far away to hear him. He had always had a dread of Mad Mary. If he was by himself when he saw her, he ran into the woods rather than pass her.

“I couldn’t see. It was either a dead squirrel or a rabbit. It was too flat to tell.”

“She’ll eat it,” Vern said. “She doesn’t care what it is. She’ll eat skunk.”

“Maybe she doesn’t eat it,” Maggie said, leaning back thoughtfully. “Maybe she just collects it to make potions and stuff, magic spells.”

“She eats it,” Pap said.

Maggie leaned around Vern to look at him. “Pap, people in my school says she’s a witch.”

“She’s no witch. I went to school with her.”

“You went to school with Mad Mary?”

Both Maggie and Vern were leaning forward now, staring at Pap. Both mouths were open.

Pap nodded. He steered the pickup into a picnic area and pulled on the brakes.

“What was she like, Pap?”

“Back then I don’t remember her being no different from anybody else,” Pap said. “Except that her family had more money than anybody in the county and they always kept to themselves. Now let’s pick up cans if we’re going to pick up cans.”

“How do you know she eats the stuff, Pap?” Maggie said, sliding out. The seats of the pickup were worn as slick as a sliding board.

“We had a conversation one time. I was getting pop bottles—it was bottles back then. You got two cents apiece for them. I was walking along looking for bottles and I came on Mary. She was scraping up something off the road. DORs she calls them, dead-on-roads.”

“Gross,” Maggie said.

“She thinks of it as dried meat—sun-dried meat. She said it’s better than beef jerky. Course, most of the time she cooks her meat—varmint stew, she makes.”

“Supergross,” Maggie said.

“She invited me over one time.”

“To her house?”

Pap nodded. “She was more sociable in those days. ‘I make the best varmint stew in the county,’ she said. I said, ‘It would have to go some to beat my mama’s varmint stew. It was known statewide. You put red peppers in yours?’ ‘Red and green if I got them,’ she said. We went on like that for a while, swapping recipes, and then she went her way and I went mine.”

Maggie and Vern were staring at him as if he didn’t have good sense. Finally Maggie shook her head in disbelief. “Pap, let me get this straight. Mad Mary invited you over to her house?”

“Yep.” Pap opened a bag of trash in the first container and pulled out two Diet Pepsi cans.

“Where does she live?”

“At that time she lived in an old shack by the river. She built it herself, built it out of what was left of the old home place after it burned. Then she had to move when they put in the dam. After that she got less sociable, talked to herself instead of other people. I don’t know where she lives now—in the woods somewhere.”

“Did you go to the old shack, Pap?”

“No, I never got around to it.”

Maggie shook her head in amazement. “I wish you’d gone. Then you could tell us about it.”

"Well, I didn’t, so I can’t.”

“Anyway, people in my school say she’s a witch.”

“I’ve heard that too,” Vern said.

Pap was going through the second trash can. “Plastic bottles,” he said, his voice deep with disgust. “I hate them things.” He moved on. “Ah,” he said at the next can. “Here we go.”

He began dropping can after can into his plastic bag. He smiled. The sound of pop cans falling into a plastic sack was music to his ears.