Where the Broken Lie (9 page)

The same summer that Katie Cooper came to Willow Grove, a tall thin transient we came to know as Slim Jim also drifted into town. The first time I saw Slim Jim, he was playing with Jeff and Mary Jo Welp. I thought he must be a visiting uncle or something, because I had never seen him before. Mary Jo was on top of Slim Jim’s shoulders and Jeff was chasing them around the yard. He caught them and they all tumbled and rolled around on the ground together in laughter.

A couple days later, Katie and I were playing outside when Slim Jim again showed up at the Welp’s. This time, there were three or four other kids from the neighborhood, including Charlie

Katie and I watched from the other side of the street as Slim Jim and the other neighborhood kids played tag. Slim Jim seemed to be the main target to be “it,” and he was an easy target, as he did not run fast. Not because he was slow, but because he wanted to be caught.

After Charlie tagged him, Slim Jim chased after Mary Jo who flopped and giggled when Slim Jim wrapped his arms around her from behind and tackled her to the ground.

“I’ve got you now,” he roared as they fell together.

And all the kids jumped on top, pushing and pulling at Slim Jim to free Mary Jo from his grasp.

When the laughter subsided, Slim Jim looked over at Katie and me. His eyes darted back and forth between us, but finally settled on me and he asked me my name.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Tucker!” my friends all shouted.

Standing up, he brushed himself off and finger-combed the top of his head, fixing the left-to-right part in his hair. There was a hole in his jeans at his left knee and his grimy white t-shirt was half-tucked, half-untucked. He must have been six-foot-two, but was thin and not physically intimidating. His eyes seemed unnaturally wide open, the right one more so than the left, and his lips were parted in a perpetual smile. He had a neighborly quality about him. Almost Mr. Rogers neighborly. He stuck out his hand in a gentlemanly way and introduced himself.

“Tucker, I’m Jim. Your friends here have taken to calling me Slim Jim on account of how I’m so skinny, I s’pose. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

He offered a hand and I took it.

We played with Slim Jim every afternoon that week. Tag, hide-and-seek, whatever. He never came and he never went, always wore the same tattered clothes. As I was leaving at the end of that third afternoon, Slim Jim stopped me.

“Where you going, Tuck?”

“I’ve gotta go in for supper.”

He pulled out a small fine-toothed black comb from his back pocket and combed his hair down.

“Oh, is your mom home?”

“Yeah, and she ordered a pizza. I just saw the delivery guy leave so I gotta go.”

“Pizza! You lucky dog. You know how long it’s been since I had pizza?”

“Do you want to eat with us? I could ask my mom?”

“You don’t think she’d mind?” he asked, putting the comb back in his pocket.

“I don’t know. Probably not,” I said. “I’ll go ask.”

At home in the kitchen, I asked my mom if Slim Jim could come over for pizza.

“Who’s Jim,” she asked.

“A guy from the neighborhood.”

Puzzled, she said, “There’s no Jim in this neighborhood.”

She moved the drapes aside and looked out the kitchen window. Then she turned to walk to the living room. I followed.

“Well, he doesn’t live in the neighborhood, but he plays with us here. He plays with the kids in the neighborhood. He’s really fun and he’s nice and he hasn’t had pizza for a long time.”

“I don’t think so, Tucker,” Mom said, still walking.

“Aww, come on, Mom! He’s really nice and he’s fun. You’d like him.”

Then she snapped, “I said no, Tu—”

She gasped and stopped in her tracks.

I turned behind me to see what her wide eyes were staring at and saw a smiling Slim Jim standing on the front porch on the other side of our screen door.

Through the door, he looked even bigger than usual. He hunched over slightly, but you still couldn’t see the top of his head he was so tall. He had a hand above his brow, trying to see inside. His face was pressed up against the screen door, his face distorted like a bank robber with a nylon stocking over his head.

“Evening, ma’am,” he said.

With his hair neatly combed and parted, Slim Jim had the look of a young boy whose mother had just finished licking him clean for Sunday school, but he had a grizzly growth of hair on his face and a hole on the left side of his smile

“Um, hi,” she said after a moment. “You must be Jim.”

“I am indeed, mam. Pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said nodding his head forward and offering his right hand while his left went behind his back and held an imaginary hat.

My mother recoiled slightly but noticeably at the extended hand. She did not open the door between them.

“I’m sorry,” she said holding up guilty hands, “I was just dumping the garbage and didn’t get a chance to wash.”

“You’ve got a fine boy there,” he said pointing his head towards me, keeping his eyes on Mom. “Invited me in for pizza ‘cause he knows I like it and that I ain’t been eatin’ too good lately. He said that he had to ask you first but thought you’d be fine with it. You’re raising that boy right. Teaching him the right things, I mean.”

He had that Slim Jim smile on his face the whole time he was talking. Except that somehow it looked different. Kind of like the “I know something you don’t know” smile that my sister Heather would taunt me with whenever she had a secret.

Behind him, Old Man Keller puttered around on his Cub Cadet, cutting the Cooper’s front lawn.

“Yes, thank you. We’re very proud of Tucker,” my mother said. “Of course, one of the things we’ve taught him is not to talk with strangers. I’m sure you understand.”

Slim Jim chortled out a little laugh and said, “Oh, I’m not a stranger, ma’am. The whole neighborhood knows me.”

The handle on the screen door started to turn downward. Slim Jim was slowly turning it from the other side. His smiling face seemed to sink back into the darkening sky behind him, like he was becoming part of it—or it a part of him.

Keller and his Cub Cadet crossed back and forth behind Slim Jim like the carriage on a typewriter. Mom reached down and grabbed the door handle from the inside, held it firm in place.

“Well, that may be, but this is the first time you and I have met. Now that we’ve met, though, I guess you could say that we’re on our way to becoming friends.”

Old Man Keller shut down the Cub Cadet and Willow Grove was silent again. I could see him talking to Katie, but the only thing I could hear was the sound of Slim Jim wheezing thick air in and out of his nose. I looked back up at him and the world around him got darker still, but in a way that was not familiar to me. Not dark like an approaching storm or a passing shadow. It was dark like doom.

Slim Jim slowly pulled his hand away from the door and shifted his stare down and to the right in a defeated manner, and then his eyes sort of jittered side-to-side real fast. The perpetual smile curled down and his nostrils flared, like an angry cry might be coming. When he lifted his head up to look at us again, he looked lost.

Then from the side of the porch came this, “I think it’s time you leave, mister.”

It was my Grandpa Gaines, sounding like the tough guy sheriff from some tumbleweed town in the old west. How long had he been standing there, I wondered? If I was surprised, Slim Jim was flat out shocked to hear what sounded like the voice of the law.

Grandpa had a gallon of milk and a grocery bag in his arms. He must have been on his way home from Ike’ and seen Slim Jim trying to make his way in.

“That’s fine. I understand. Maybe I’ll come back later. Some other time, I mean.”

As he turned and started to walk away, the world came out of its shadow. The Cub Cadet came back to life and grumbled home. Kids passed by on their bicycles. Life resumed. When he got to the sidewalk, Slim Jim turned back around and looked at us. Less sinister this time, he smiled sadly. Like he was sorry for things that had and had not happened. He finger-combed his hair left-to-right and winked at me.

Grandpa walked up toward the porch.

“You two all right?”

“Yes, we’re fine, Hollis. Thank you,” Mom said. Then turning to me she added, “I don’t want you near that man again. You hear me, Tucker Gaines? He gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

“I’m sure he’s harmless, Tuck, but your mom is right. No need to be messin’ around with some stranger passing through town. He’ll be on his ways somewhere else in a couple days.” And then he added with a wink, “Maybe sooner even.”

That was the last time I ever talked to Slim Jim. Mom called some of the neighbors that night and warned them about the “creepy drifter” who had been playing with the kids in town.

My Aunt Paula—who lived two houses away from Grandpa and Grandma—had grown hydrangeas for as long as I can remember. They stood tall and beautiful at one end of what was otherwise a perennially neglected garden. But the hydrangeas required little care, which was fortunate because that’s exactly what they received. And some they flourished against all odds and circumstance. Fat little flower heads bouncing and bobbing on flimsy green neck stems. Held upright by the buoyancy of their very beauty perhaps. The splendor that red and white and pink brought to an otherwise green world. As a kid, I remember thinking that Heaven must be like that. Like your whole life you know nothing but green and then you die and it’s like—BAM! White! Pink! Red! It’s kind of what Katie Cooper was like—the color in my world of green. Maybe it was that thought that led me to sneak out of bed past midnight and cut a few of Paula’s hydrangeas to give to Katie.

Mrs. Cooper opened the door that Saturday morning to find me holding the dozen flowers I had liberated from Aunt Paula.

“Oh my,” said Mrs. Cooper. She waved a dishcloth at the bee buzzing over me and said “shoo” a couple times before ushering me inside.

“Well, good morning, Tucker,” said Mr. Cooper over the top of the newspaper. “What’s got you up so early on a Saturday morning?” He and Katie were sitting at the kitchen table with clean plates in front of them.

“Um, nothing really,” I said. Glimpsing at Katie out of the corner of my eye, I added, “Just out walking around, I guess.”

“What do you have there,” Mrs. Cooper asked, indicating the flowers.

“Oh, these? These are just some flowers I found while I was walking around. I found them and thought, maybe … I don’t know, thought they looked nice I guess and …” Suddenly I was warm. My shoes were untied.

Mrs. Cooper jumped in. “Well, um … yes, they are beautiful. Would you like me to put them in water?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

She filled a vase with water, cut the stems, and put the flowers inside. Then she put the vase on the kitchen table in front of Katie.

“There, now, that’s just lovely. Don’t you think so, Katie?”

“They’re beautiful,” said Katie, her face looking as red as mine felt.

“Why don’t you have a seat, Tucker,” said Mrs. Cooper. “We were about to have breakfast—pancakes and sausage.”

Mr. Cooper pulled out the chair between him and Katie. Mrs. Cooper stacked our plates high with pancakes and framed the pancakes with sausage links. They asked me a lot of questions that I was proud to be able to answer. I told them about Mrs. Bianchi, who would be my and Katie’s teacher in the fall. Supposedly, she was a grouch, but she graded pretty easy. I told them what hours the post office and Brenda’s Hometown Café were open. I told them about my Aunt Paula the mayor-beautician and stumbled into confessing to taking the flowers from her garden.

“And if you ever need any wood or lumber or anything, you’d get that from Pease Lumber uptown. Let me know, though, because Mr. Pease’s granddaughter is in my class and she likes me so I could probably get you a discount.”

Mr. Cooper shot me an impressed look and said, “I’ll keep that in mind.”

And then he said, “What’s the granddaughter’s name? This girl who likes you.”

“Um, Sheri, but I didn’t mean that she 
likes 
me. We’re friends is all.”

“Of course, you’re friends. You like each other.”