Welcome to Fred (The Fred Books) (8 page)

A month later, school ended. The entire summer lay ahead like a blank slate. But before we could implement our grandiose plans for conquering the world, the camel of reality nosed its unwelcome way into our tent. On the first Sunday of June, Dad got up to deliver his sermon. I got as comfortable as I could on the wooden pew, settling in for a long summer’s nap when Dad’s words jerked me rudely back to consciousness.

“I have an announcement that may surprise some of you. I have been doing some extensive praying and seeking the Lord, and I feel He has spoken to me and said my work here is done. It is time for us to move on.”

What?!? Move on! Like, move? Again?

I looked at Heidi and Hannah and saw an echo of my own shock and dismay. It had been a well-guarded secret.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. We had finally stayed in one house longer than a year. I had been lulled into an illusion of permanence and stability. I had violated my own personal rules of engagement, ignored my instinct for self-preservation, committed the irreversible act of getting attached to the dog that had followed me home. I wasn’t leaning on my elbows now. I was sitting up, staring at the doleful, albeit dumpy, prophet in sackcloth and ashes announcing woe and doom.

Move on to where?
My mind quit screaming long enough to let my ears return to what Dad was saying.

“. . . was in debt, and attendance had dwindled to double digits. As of January of this year, we are debt free and attendance has more than tripled. But even more importantly,” he took off his glasses and looked out myopically over the congregation with moist eyes, “we have made many dear friends and have been honored that so many of you have opened up your homes and your hearts to us.”

Right, so don’t ditch them! Isn’t that the right thing to do? Don’t ditch your friends? You stick with them, hovering on the perimeter if that’s all you have the strength to do, so you will be there if they need you.

“. . . that the excitement of a new horizon is mingled with the sorrow of leaving behind so many we have come to know and love. But we won’t be leaving immediately. We are just now starting to see what opportunities God will bring, and we will be here to assist in your transition to whomever God has for this place.”

It wasn’t much consolation, but one must cling to whatever small joys can be salvaged from catastrophe. I felt like an Israelite trudging in chains toward Babylon thinking,
But, hey, at least I get to see those funky hanging gardens! I wonder who’s playing at the Palace?

Down in the dungeon of M’s basement I told him the news. There was little to say. We both drew sparks from the spike in the rafters. That summer we savored every moment, but it was difficult to ignore the sword hanging above our heads on a thread, never knowing when the blade would fall that would cut us apart forever.

When autumn and school arrived with no change in status, we were cautiously optimistic, or maybe guardedly hopeful. We took our status as sixth-graders seriously, particularly because we were both members of the Safety Patrol. This dubious honor meant we must arrive at school thirty minutes before it opened, don a belt/sash rig with a badge, and stand on a corner, fighting against natural selection by preventing stupid third-graders from running across the street against the light.

In preparation for our exalted status as Safety Patrol members, we upgraded our wardrobe. We felt that sixth-graders had a responsibility to take a leadership role not only in traffic safety but also in fashion, as dictated by “American Bandstand.” We pulled out the stops, went for broke, grabbed the brass ring, jumped in with all four feet, and took the bull by the horns. By the end of our shopping orgy we had a pile of stylish togs that would have humbled the Mod Squad. Bell-bottom jeans, turtleneck sweaters, Nehru jackets, taper-cut shirts with no pockets, French sleeves, patent leather shoes, ankle-high brown boots—we had it all. Paisley, neon pastels, electric pink, tie-dye. I’m not sure about this, but I think M bought the horse of a different color. (It was on special.) We even picked up some love beads. I convinced Dad to let me skip a few trips to the barbershop so my hair would match my new style, and M started a long-term project—growing an afro.

All was copacetic, even while standing on the corner in November at 7:00 A.M., holding shivering arms parallel to the ice-coated sidewalks in a crosswalk-turned-arctic-wind-tunnel. We were truly cool, both within and without. Then the thread broke.

CHAPTER EIGHT
The trip down was a lot like our trips to Grandma’s house for Christmas—a one-thousand-mile, nineteen-hour marathon. We left the interstate at Texarkana and crawled down the eastern edge of Texas on state highways. By that time I had exhausted every Hardy Boys book in my collection and was looking out the window at an endless procession of pine trees. I saw signs pointing off the highway to winding, two-lane roads that disappeared into the trees. Red Lick—17 miles. Bleakwood—6 miles.

Having spent my meager eleven years living in cities, I wondered what life was like in these one-blink towns we breezed past on those trips. This time, we stopped at one of them and not just for a tank of gas. Before I knew it, I was looking from the other side of the glass at cars breezing through with noses curiously pressed to the back windows.

We arrived in the Greater Fred Metropolitan Area on a Wednesday afternoon, passing by the church on the way to the house. It faced the highway on the corner of a fourteen-acre lot. Through a pine wood and across a creek (or, in the local vernacular, a branch), the parsonage occupied the opposite corner facing a dirt road. It was a rambling ranch-style brick house with dogwoods out front, a gigantic magnolia on the side, and a sweet gum in the back. There were, of course, numerous pines scattered about, but to say so would be to say there was grass on the lawn. There were pine trees everywhere, depositing cones indiscriminately like superpowers in an arms race and laying down a carpet of dead needles that would flare up like gasoline at the drop of a match. And there was grass on the lawn. Saint Augustine, to be precise.

The house had a two-car garage and a guestroom/study at one end. The kitchen, dining room, living room, and den came next, followed by three bedrooms at the far end. There was, regrettably, no basement or attic suitable for service as a refuge from reality.

As the lone man-child in a land without promise, I was awarded the customary private room, in contrast to the semiprivate enjoyed by Heidi and Hannah. As an added bonus, my room had a sliding glass door. With such easy access and a wood so handy, I had no doubt that I would be subject to fits of nocturnal perambulations.

Contrary to my expectations, I began to suspect that my life might not have come to a horrid and dismal end. I had landed in the middle of what was the next thing to a jungle just waiting to be explored. From my room I could see at least a half-dozen trees waving at me, practically begging me to climb them. And then there was the branch.

I abandoned my unpacking to take a brief tour of the environs, the wood at the top of my list. It was sufficiently overgrown and tangled to satisfy even the most fastidious adventurer. As I slogged down the branch, I came upon desideratum. A tree house loomed before me, jutting out over the water.

It wasn’t very impressive as tree houses go, but I saw El Dorado. Based on carvings in the tree, I deduced it had been built by the previous PKs. The floor was fairly solid, although the boards had gaps between them and tended to wobble as you walked. There were walls on the two sides facing civilization (the house) and a half roof. A few improvised shelves and benches finished out the interior. I returned to my unpacking reconciled to my fate.

Wednesday evening we had the dry run of introductions at church, standing in regulation stair-step fashion at the front of the sanctuary, looking back at white pews, red cushions, faux stained glass, and a bunch of old people. Other than the accents, it didn’t differ significantly from similar events in Ohio.

Thursday was a new day and a new school. Being an old hand as the new kid, I expected to adapt and thrive in short order. I selected my favorite outfit from the shopping spree with M: black-and-white patent leather shoes, an olive-green shirt with French cuffs, white hip-hugger bell-bottoms, and a two-inch black belt sporting a square silver buckle that could have served as a counterweight for an elevator.

I’m afraid the care I had taken in shoe selection remained unappreciated, however. Subtleties such as loafer vs. lace-up were lost on my audience. The room was a sea of plaid western-style shirts with pearl-inlay snap buttons, jeans with brown leather belts, and cowboy boots. Obviously I had misjudged my audience. But fate provided compensation in the form of a loose shoelace, and before the collective mind had a chance to process the strange image imprinted on the collective retina, I was sprawled on the worn floorboards. Judging by the laughter, I was a hit.

Not that it was much of a consolation. As I brushed the dust from my bell-bottoms, the red in my face definitely clashed with the outfit.

A hush fell on the room as the dust I had raised drifted lazily through the beams of sunlight streaming through the ten-foot windows toward the fifteen-foot ceiling. The teacher directed me to a seat in the back.

I walked through bands of dark and light and the smell of dust, pencil shavings, hair oil, grass stains on denim, and sweat. The shoes chosen for their aesthetic qualities creaked ominously in the silence as every eye followed The-Creature-from-the-North-at-Large-in-Fred-Texas. In an attempt to mitigate the interminable walk, I feigned indifference. I flipped the perennially troublesome shock of hair from my eyes with a toss of my head and glanced impassively around the room at the regulation crew cuts. The scarred wooden desk I slid into had a hole in the upper-right corner for an inkwell. I felt like I had stepped through a time warp.

Evidently everyone else felt the same way. They peered at me as if I were Buck Rogers from the twenty-fifth century. Turning heads rippled through the room like wind through a cornfield. I didn’t meet the gazes; I was too busy in a mental comparison with the Ohio schoolroom I had left behind—visions of metal, Formica, and tile contrasted with wood, wood, and . . . wood. Snow-covered skeletons of trees loomed outside the window in my mind’s eye; the green of pine that had yet to know a coating of snow towered outside the windows of my new world.

It appeared that I was the advance guard of the Cultural Revolution. Or more like a lone scout lost deep in enemy territory. The indigenous population eyed me with the same mixture of fear, curiosity, and distrust as I did them. On the surface I wasn’t that remarkable. Granted, the dishwater-blond hair that hung over my collar and into my eyes didn’t conform to the prevailing tonsorial whim. Granted, my skeletal frame made me seem a walking science project. The true source of their morbid fascination was clear: one didn’t see olive-green shirts and white bell-bottoms every day in Fred. Or ever, until my arrival.

I was startled from my reflections on the vagaries of fate by the kid sitting to my right.

“Hey.”

I flinched and jerked my head toward him. He had a burr haircut, round eyes, and a curved nose. If imitation be the sincerest form of flattery, somewhere in these piney woods lumbered a very proud turtle. “Yeah?”

“Hey,” he repeated, slightly confused.

“Hey, what?”

He looked at me, seeming to search for a sign of something. “Just hey, that’s all.” He turned back to face the front of the room.

I shrugged. “OK.”

I suddenly had an image of Andy Griffith saying, “Hey, Barney,” and a response of, “Hey, Andy.” It had always struck me as odd because everybody I knew greeted each other with “Hi” or “Hello.” So Turtle-Head was just trying to be nice. So much for first impressions. Or maybe third or fourth impressions by this stage.

During recess, while the other boys stood around eyeing me like I was just visiting this planet, Turtle-Head walked up.

“Hey.”

I was granted a second chance. I used it wisely. “Hey.”

Turtle-Head took in the totality of my ensemble, an expression of confused wonderment on his face, as if he were looking at a sequence of hieroglyphics on the wall of a pyramid, trying to cipher the story. He glanced at my eyes and looked away, his expression changing instantly to studied indifference. He spat in the dirt.

“So, this is yer first day.”

“Yeah.”

“What wuz your name again?”

“Mark.”

“Yeah, that’s right—Mark. I knowed the other preacher’s kids, the Pricharts. Did you know ’em?”

“No, I’ve never met them.”

“Oh, that’s right. You’re from Ohio, ain’t ya?” When he said “Ohio,” his eyes got harder and his voice changed slightly. Kind of like the way it does in a Western where someone says, “Not from around these here parts, are ye, boy?” and the next thing you know, they’re looking for a rope.

“Well, not really,” I corrected hastily. “I’m from Fort Worth, but we lived in Ohio for a few years.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” We lapsed into an awkward silence, the noise from the playground suddenly seeming very loud. “You’re from here, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, I thought so.”

“Yeah.”

Silence, again. I looked past Turtle-Head to the school, a redbrick building built on a hill. A wide set of concrete steps descended from the middle toward the highway. On the left a circular driveway met a door at ground level. The hill sloped down to the right, leaving the windows ten feet above the ground at the other end, where a covered walkway led to a white frame building at the edge of a pine wood. Fifty yards into the woods, a creek marked the bottom of the hill. The woods continued up the other side toward the church, redbrick and white steeple barely visible between the trees.

I tried to jump-start the conversation. “So, what’s your name?”

“Ralph.”

“Ralph.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.”

The silence seemed to be relentless. It was finally broken by Ralph.

“Want some Red Man?” He dug in a pocket.

“What?”

“Red Man.” He held out a crumpled red-and-white pouch.

“I don’t know. What is it?”

Ralph froze for a second and looked to see if I was serious. “Chewin’ tobacca.”

“Oh.” I stared at the brown shreds dangling from his fingertips. “No, I don’t think so.”

He shrugged and crammed the tobacco in his mouth. “Suit yerself.” He rolled up the pouch, crammed it back into his pocket, and looked around.

Three kids were bouncing a red ball against the wall to the right of the steps, the metallic whang sounding like the ricochet of a bullet. Further up the hill, a circle of boys huddled around a circle of marbles. I looked toward the trees between the school and the highway. Playground equipment was scattered on a bed of pine needles and sand.

On the monkey bars a girl hung upside down, chunky thighs and calves hooked over a bar. Her brown ponytail dragged in the dirt, and two pudgy hands gripped her plaid skirt in a halfhearted attempt at modesty. Large pink panties were plainly visible fore and aft. She was staring directly at me; her inverted smile, filled with crooked teeth the size of piano keys, hung over her large nose like a bad moon rising over Stone Mountain. A Milky Way of freckles blazed a trail across the sky of her face. Even upside down it was evident that this was a girl who had taken homeliness to a level I had never considered possible. The mind boggled. Or at least mine did, as an involuntary shudder ran through my frame.

Ralph followed my gaze. “That’s Thelma Perkins. Don’t pay her no mind.” He spat carelessly into the dirt. “I done kissed her last year.”

I looked at her mouth, teeth pointed crazily like vandalized headstones in a neglected graveyard.

“Where?” I asked in fascinated horror.

“Behind the lunch room. Twict.” He offered the information in such a matter-of-fact tone that I was at a loss as to how to interpret it. Was he bragging? Warning me to stay away from his property? Giving me a hot tip straight from the stable? Or compulsively cleansing his soul of foul deeds committed in a moment of passion via confession to a stranger?

I felt obliged to offer some response. Gagging, while appropriate, seemed inadvisable. The best I could muster was a vague, “Ah.”

“Now that one,” he said, spitting in the direction of a scrawny black-haired girl on the top of the monkey bars, “I wouldn’t mess with her. She’ll punch you right in the gut.”

“Right.” I took note of her features, adding her to the list of girls to avoid on the off chance I were to launch a kissing rampage in this strange land. She didn’t seem to be much more than hair and bones covered with a flower-print dress. And she was tying together Thelma’s shoelaces around one of the bars.

“Then there’s that one.” I followed his gaze to a swing set. A girl hung at the top of the arc, red hair and skirt temporarily in free fall. As we watched, she whisked away from us, hair and skirt following in a blur of red. “Main problem is keeping her quiet.”

“Ah.” I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be taking notes. We seemed to be moving through the roster of the gentler sex, identifying those characteristics most notable to Ralph. “Talks a lot, does she?”

“No, she squeaks ever’ time you try ta grab her.” He turned his head to one side to spit but caught sight of the teacher not far away. Checking himself in mid-expectoration, he walked toward the trees, muttering a quick “Come on” between clenched teeth. I followed. Safely behind a large pine, he discharged a large quantity of saliva, which overwhelmed a troop of ants and settled into a clear, brownish pool between the roots. Ralph looked around the tree at the teacher, who was looking elsewhere. With a nod of satisfaction he turned back around. Noting my puzzled expression, he said, “Tobacca ain’t allowed at school.”