Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (28 page)

“Do you all want anything to drink besides water?” Tasha said.

Cal scanned the menu. Somehow during the ban, he'd forgotten the outrageousness of Rita's coffee prices. “Just water,” he said, the Courtly Gentleman doused. “And a sausage biscuit for Theodore Munney and a bowl of oatmeal with brown sugar for myself.” Tasha scribbled on her pad, unsmiling. “And”—a mute button went off in his brain, but the signal didn't reach his mouth in time—“for a dollar fifty, it better be a big bowl of oatmeal.”

Tasha swished off without comment.

Calvin settled back in the booth and tucked his napkin in his collar. “Well, Theodore,” he began in his most expansive patronly tone, “would you like to cut a little grass today?” No sooner had “little grass” crossed his lips than a flash of Floodie flitted by. Cal swiveled to the window and watched Floodie slow for an instant at the stop sign.
Ten dollars would buy you a lot bigger breakfast than a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of water
.

“D-d-d-d-d-didchahearwhathappenedatthedumpyesterday?”

“What?” asked Calvin.

“Bigpilecinderblocksblewup.”

“Hmmm,” said Cal. He had spied, on a table that two of his acquaintances had just vacated, a piece of scrapple the dimensions of a Gideon New Testament. He said nothing.
I'm on my best behavior today
. Lou Seaton walked in, followed by his daughter, a friend of Calvin's youngest daughter's. Cal withdrew into his cap. His own children were very busy these days. They didn't often come home. It was hard to get to Berker. The nearest airport was a hundred miles away. The last time they'd come for Bygone Days, the son who had a few problems exercised poor judgment and forged three checks with Calvin's name. The other children were unhappy when Calvin refused to press charges, and their spirits were only moderately lifted when the son was arrested that weekend anyway for a gas driveaway at the 7-Eleven.

Cal surfaced from his cap to address Theodore Munney about the matter of grass. But Theodore Munney was gone.

Theodore was sprint-strutting out Rita's front door where a motley squadron of reenactors trudged down the center of Shute Street. Centuries and wars collapsed into four rows across and six down, their ranks including not only Confederates and Federals, but a few representatives from World Wars I and II and one musket-bearing
French and Indian remnant, Vietnam notable by its absence. A largely bedraggled and spiritless bunch, especially for the very first morning of Bygone Days, but Theodore Munney and now a couple of regulars from the VFW next door stood at attention on the sidewalk, one VFW denizen cocking a hand in salute. Lou Seaton was remarking to Tasha, “I hear they're actually going to reenact a battle this year. For the train.”

Calvin shook a packet of Sweet'n Low into his ice water. The Republicans held a real allure for the mentally deficient. He frowned. He was fairly certain the comment about the cinder blocks was not an unequivocal yes to the grass-cutting.

Theodore scooted back into the booth, his eyes directed inside his head.

“I need you to cut some grass today, Theodore,” the Stern Father pronounced.

Theodore Munney spit an ice cube back into his cup.

Now Tasha was setting Theodore Munney's biscuit on the table, the oatmeal nowhere to be seen, and Calvin glared.
Not coordinated enough to carry both at one time, shouldn't even be a waitress
. Theodore powered into his biscuit like he hadn't eaten since the dollar-twenty-nine one at McDonald's yesterday morning when Cal knew Nicole fed him Nip-Chee crackers and Sun Chips at the video store and that there was usually a pot of beans going in the back of the BP. But now Tasha was returning, bearing a gigantic orange tray possibly stolen from an all-you-can-eat buffet. Calvin unturtled an inch out of his hat. Tasha placed the tray on the table from which she'd recently cleared the enticing scrapple, then painstakingly transferred to Calvin—her effort not to spill so momentous she had to hold her breath—a bowl the size of the pan he used to feed Silas brimming with oatmeal and brown sugar.

Calvin Bergdoll sat back. Blinked. He mumbled thank you. But Tasha was already gone, and he hadn't even had the wherewithal to make his obligatory demand for more napkins. He leaned over the oatmeal to confirm it was real, his brain layers bubbling and burping, and through the mire beamed a ray of suspicion that some kind of joke was being played on him or revenge taken. But a bowl of oatmeal this big? For a dollar fifty? As revenge? Nothing made any sense.

Calvin saw no choice but to stir the sugar in good and eat.

As he did, a conversation from six months ago roiled up. He and a visiting daughter, the two of them sitting in this very booth, and Calvin, because he considered the morning a special occasion, spooning extra brown sugar on a much smaller bowl of oatmeal, and his daughter, shaking her head, saying, “I don't think you should eat that brown sugar. It might make you crazy.”

Suddenly, everything went dark. A cool sogginess settled in the seat of Calvin's pants. And then, from the odor and the specific strain of clamminess, Cal deduced that he sat in Floodie's passenger seat, whose cushions still held a reservoir of floodwater, and now Calvin could see, with cornea-polished clarity, his son who used to have a few problems swinging out the driver's door, and Cal's heart sank to his belt. Son daydreams were the worst of the lot.

Calvin bobbed behind the son, at a slightly greater distance than the gap between him and Theodore Munney in the daydreams that featured Theodore, but his hearing just as obliterated—he might as well be standing on a Newfoundland bluff in a nor'easter—while the son slunk up a short sidewalk, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, his legs and rear end lost in the once well-fitting billows of the belt-cinched jeans. They halted in front of a door with a torn screen, and there Calvin's vision broadened. It was the threshold of Berker's Unwed Mother HUD housing. No, no, that wasn't it, it was Single
Mother Housing now, but no, the Progressive Mental Health Worker scrambled to keep up. They had arrived at Berker County's Alternative Family Apartments.

The son pushed an arm through the ripped screen and knocked. After he dropped the arm, both hands quivered against his thighs. “Shakes,” the son's contemporaries called him, and the first time Cal had answered the phone and “Shakes” had been requested, Cal had turned and shouted it into the upstairs without even thinking, so natural the nickname was. The door swung open by apparent remote control until Calvin dropped his eyes and spied behind it a heavy-browed boy of about six with a strange growing-out haircut that made his head look shingled.

Here his son's stride transmogrified from a slink to a cool side-of-the-foot-rolling amble, a nonchalant stroll down a hall with tile identical to the grade school cafeteria's. Calvin floated behind, the odor of burnt frozen-pizza cheese jumbling his appetite. At the end of this hall the son stopped, Cal did, too, before a monstrous easy chair. In this chair lounged not a single mother, but an aged boy.

At the son's entrance, the old boy in the chair smiled as broad and as false as a jack-o'-lantern, and he did not rise. Something about this gnome put Calvin in mind of a certain hyperactive eighth-grader on the son's junior high basketball team. But the present face looked as if a flash flood had gulched it and left the long hair permanently wet. The son eased over and clapped his hand right below the other's elbow, a kind of one-sided arm shake, and the shingle-headed child dropped on the floor a nose-length from a chalkboard-sized television to observe robots killing each other in metal compactors.

From a vantage point now to the side of his son, Calvin could see his mouth moving, the flood-faced boy's moving back, the old boy never shedding the smile and never desisting in shaking his head. The
son who used to have a few problems extracted the ten-dollar bill that had so recently slept in Cal's wallet along with a fan of soggy ones, and he offered, too, an expression he'd offered Calvin infinite times. A face that had never told a lie, a face chagrined that it needed a favor at all, just this time and I'll never ask again, the son not yet unhandsome despite his decay, his eyes blue and baby-big, and into those eyes swam the son at fourteen,
everybody in my whole class is going, please Dad, Danny's mom will be there the whole time,
then the son at six,
please Daddy, will you buy me a milkshake, please Daddy, can I have a milkshake?
and lastly a chubby wailing infant, clenching in and out its trembling fists, a younger Cal trying to dam the noise with a pacifier. But the old boy, pumpkin grin fixed, never stopped shaking his head.

And then Calvin's vision held only his own hands, scraping oatmeal remains into a big Styrofoam cup. The hands began to shake.
Like father, like
—Calvin nudged the cup away and pressed his fingers on the table rim. Across from him, Theodore Munney was staring out the window as though he could see leftover imprints of the disheveled reenactors, apparently oblivious to both Cal's absence and his return.

Calvin squeezed his eyes open and shut a few times and repositioned his glasses.
Oh, the mature brain
. He emitted a chuckle that petered out in a cluck. The crazy tricks his mind played anymore, no doubt because it had so few outlets for his creativity, intellect, and spiritual proclivities. Just two weeks ago, his daughter in Colorado had called, and before thinking, he'd asked, “How's your hip?” For a moment, she'd been silent. Then: “How on earth did you know about that?” Calvin had swallowed. He remembered in yet another daydream following her up a mountain trail, granite and aspen, no West Virginia hill, then watching her boot slip and her fall hard on her hip. He'd stayed long enough to see her pick herself up and limp on.

His temperature had risen. He removed one layer of plaid and laid it across his arm. No time to wallow in mystery with his charge a half-arm's-length away. The Benevolent Landowner cleared his throat.

“Okay, my fine-feathered friend. Let's get to that grass.”

HIS WIFE'S CAR
was gone, and on the kitchen table, a note: “Cal. Please move TM's clothes to dryer.” He'd enticed Theodore onto the Cub Cadet by mentioning how often and loudly it had been backfiring lately—“lately” applied loosely, but no harm—and now Calvin was stowing his oatmeal safely in the refrigerator. He paused. The landscape had shifted. A fresh take-home box his wife must have carried in last night. Calvin fumbled with the lid—onion rings, a real find, ideal for his midmorning snack in thirty minutes. Smiling and stroking the small hump of his belly, Cal was halfway to the TV room when he picked up the reek of river algae and faint cow manure, another happy surprise. Silas had come home.

“Oh. You decided to come home?” Calvin said gruffly as he dropped into the couch. Silas was spiraled up in his chair, his big head hanging over the chair's front so that he resembled a sedated python. He wagged his wrapped-around tail as best he could while Cal took the remote into confident hand, whispered a prayer, and—the third sign in five minutes that this day would go so much better than yesterday, oatmeal daydream aside—conjured “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies,” of all things. In May, of all times.

Much to be grateful for
.
Much, much, indeed
. The pleasure of the oatmeal. Of Russian tutus and Christmas. Silas un-run-over and home. The grass shortening under Theodore Munney's rotations, onion rings in the kitchen. And the greatest blessing of all, his revelation about the median age of past Knights of Olde Berker. Quite proud of himself he was for that mathematical insight. Now whenever the Knight
pierced his thoughts, Calvin felt only a short sharp twinge before wisdom salved it. And then there were the gratitudes to come, tomorrow's pancake breakfast, and a mere thirty-six hours after that, Bygone Days would be bygone. Calvin would recover his routine, and his bride hers, and without the bad influence of the reenactors and the general overstimulation of the celebration, Theodore Munney would return to tractability.

The back door slammed.

Calvin Bergdoll stiffened like a doe at a branch snap.

He tilted forward, his concentration searing a tunnel through the eternal ring in his ears. The lawn mower still throbbed in the near distance, and then a branch did snap, or rather, Theodore Munney ran over a rock. The footsteps to the kitchen had been too quick for his wife's. The refrigerator unsealed with a lip-smacking suck, and Calvin collapsed back into the couch, his sugar galloping, and affixed his gaze on the Prague Symphony. His son with a few problems swung open the TV room door, the onion ring box in his hand.

“I was just coming to finish up the grass. How come you got Theodore doing it?”

Calvin concentrated on Prague. “You were supposed to finish it yesterday.” His ears flinched. In his head, it had been a growl, but somehow the TV room air ironed it into a whine.

The son rested the onion ring container on top of the television. No sign of onion ring protruded over its rim. The son rubbed Silas behind his ears, Silas responding with pre-orgasmic groans, the decimated onion rings a mocking crown over Czech cellos and violins.

“Got any other jobs?” said the son.

At that moment Theodore Munney stumbled-strutted in—“BustedeightathemdruggiesupSeymourHoller”—and Silas broke into maudlin whines meant to seduce Theodore Munney near enough that the dog
could bury his muzzle in Theodore's rich aromas. Theodore didn't take the hint. Silas didn't give up the chair. An elf was striking Calvin's eardrum with the end of a baton.