Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (10 page)

Gordon peeks through a knothole to see if Grandma Helen is out in her garden, planting Maidenhair ferns or clipping away at her wild rose bushes. That’s where she’s usually found in the late afternoon, but apparently not in this heat. If he weren’t so dirty, he’d stop in to see her. He likes to sit on the black swivel chair in her kitchen and drink the cups of coffee she always makes for him, diluted with milk and sweetened with sugar. Sometimes she’ll put on her cat’s-eye glasses and read the newspaper with him. On other occasions she’ll tell him stories about what his father was like before Gordon was born. Gordon has been given the impression that his father led a much more adventurous life than he has so far. His father raised his own cattle to earn spending money when he was a boy. He broke his arm trying to jump a go-kart over an irrigation ditch. He was a consummate water-skier. Gordon is just Gordon. Nothing much, in comparison–just asthma and weird dreams. No wonder his father isn’t impressed.

To the left of his grandmother’s house, in the Smiley’s backyard, there’s a loquat tree growing above the fence. It produces a dusky orange fruit shaped like a tiny pear. Gordon climbs up on the fence to get one. It tastes like a bland apricot, but to Gordon’s tongue–because it’s free–there’s nothing sweeter. He’s feeling like quite the survivalist today, feeding himself on the bounty of nature and extracting cash from garbage cans. He parts the glossy dark green leaves and plucks another loquat. As he’s doing so, he hears a dog yelp in the Smiley’s backyard.

The Smiley’s are rich. They have a stone pond with its own waterfall, expensive landscaping, and a white wrought iron table with matching chairs in their backyard–but they don’t have a dog. Gordon peers through the branches of the loquat tree, trying to see what’s going on. He can’t find an unobstructed line of sight, but he thinks he can make out six or seven adults standing in a circle in the middle of the Smiley’s patio. For the most part, what he sees is their feet. Wingtips, old canvas boat shoes, and a pair of red leather sandals like the ones his mother wears.

In the middle of the circle there’s a dog–a big, chocolate-colored Doberman pinscher. It looks like the Rowley’s dog, Raymundo. And this is when Gordon feels the first onrush of terror (hair raising on the back of his neck, a sound like the ocean filling his ears), because all four of the dog’s legs are off the ground, kicking, and even though no one is touching it.

The dog twists and contorts its body, its eyes bulging in terror. It appears to be strangling in midair. The adults just stand there watching, unmoving. Gordon thinks he can make out Doctor Smiley, with his ever-present bow tie, but through the thickness of the leaves it’s hard to see anything much above their waists. He hopes they can’t see him. The whimpering of the dog has become unbearable. It’s like a small person screaming. Then there’s a dull snap–like a piece of wood breaking under a mattress pad–and the dog goes limp. It drops to the ground with a thud. Gordon drops off the fence a split-second later and runs away down the alley.

He doesn’t even think to grab his bag full of bottles. He runs as if he’s being chased–if not physically, then spiritually, somehow…. He feels a glittering, almost invisible presence skimming along behind him–like a winged demon–ready pounce on him the moment he slows down. He doesn’t let up until he gets to his house, where he sees the garage door open (his mother’s car gone) and runs right up inside to pound on the back door. Nobody is home. The door is locked. Gordon, in his panic, can’t find his key. So he goes through the door at the far end of the garage, into the backyard, where he hides himself in Sam’s doghouse. It’s dark and hot and full of dog hair in there, but it’s the only place he can think of that feels safe.

Eventually, Sam finds him there. She comes in through the black rubber door flap, collar chain tinkling, and pokes at him with her wet, snuffling nose. Gordon pets her and talks quietly to her, listening to the rhythms of her breathing. When she lies down next to him, he puts his arms around her. He doesn’t let go until he hears his father’s car pulling into the garage.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

Who can he tell? And what would he say? And who would believe him, anyway? He’s the boy who cried Easter Bunny. No one is going to take him seriously if he says the adults in his neighborhood are levitating dogs and killing them.

If he tells his father, he’ll get the standard response: “You read too many books, kiddo…” then Mal will go right back to watching the news about President Nixon and the Watergate hearings. If he tells his mother… but there’s no way he would ever tell his mother. He keeps picturing those red sandals–the same ones he saw her wearing when he crawled out of the doghouse and went inside to find her in the kitchen making dinner.
She could have been there.

He considers telling his Grandma Helen. When he goes back down the alley the next day to get the bottles he left beside her fence, he looks through the knothole and sees her watering the ferns on her back porch. He climbs up on the fence to say hello.

“Gordon! What are you doing up there, honeybug?”

“Hi, Grandma. I was just out collecting bottles.”

“Did you find many?”

“Yeah, a lot. How’s your garden?”

“Just fine, Sweetie. I still love the little pagoda you made for me. It’s the prettiest thing in the whole place.”

Gordon had made a miniature pagoda, about two feet high, out of old lumber scraps for his grandmother’s birthday a few years ago. Looking at it now, it strikes him as rather shabby.

“Hey, Grandma? Did the Smiley’s get a dog?”

Grandma Helen, always pale, seems to go a shade paler. “No–not that I know of. Why?” She tugs on her gardening gloves.

“I just thought I heard a dog back there when I was walking by the other day. But I didn’t see anything.” Gordon silently congratulates himself on that bit of subterfuge. If anyone is listening to his conversation from the Smiley’s backyard, they won’t think he was a witness to their evil dog murdering.

“I don’t think the Smiley’s are the kind of people who’d own a dog. They’re very nice, but they travel a lot.” She points her watering can in the direction of the Smiley’s yard, which seems ominously silent. The only sound is from a sparrow flitting around in the loquat tree.

“I guess I was just hearing stuff then,” says Gordon. “Probably someone else’s dog somewhere.”

“That could be…. Y’know, Gordon, Doctor Smiley’s supposed to be a brilliant pediatrician. Maybe he could help you with your asthma.”

Gordon thinks,
Maybe he could kill my dog while he’s at it.
“I like Doctor Brockett just fine,” is all he says to his grandmother.

“But Doctor Smiley’s up on all the latest medical advances. I was talking with him in the driveway not too long ago. I was amazed by what he said they can do with surgery these days.”

A creepy tingle runs up and down Gordon’s spine. His mother has been telling him for years now that she’s going to volunteer him for exploratory surgery when he’s a teenager, so the doctors can open up his lungs and see how his asthma works. Gordon has told his mother that he doesn’t want to be operated on–the thought actually gives him nightmares–but she insists it’s his duty to all the other poor, asthmatic children of the world. She gets a very noble look on her face whenever the subject comes up, as if she’s imagining herself bravely sacrificing her only son to the cause of science. Her only son apparently doesn’t have any say in the matter.

“Okay, Grandma. I guess I’ll go turn in those bottles now,” Gordon says, feeling the first tickling of an asthma attack at the base of his throat.

“Can’t you stay and have some coffee?”

“I should go. I’ve got stuff I have to do at the lumberyard right after this.” That’s not precisely true. Gordon intends to steal a hatchet from his father’s hardware store after he returns his bottles, but he can do that any time. There’s just no reason to hang around with his grandmother now that he’s decided not to tell her about what he saw in the Smiley’s backyard last night. She thinks they’re nice neighbors. He might as well let her keep thinking that. She doesn’t have a dog for them to murder, anyway. “See ya later,” he says, and hops off the fence.

It’s about half a mile to the grocery store. By the time he gets there, Gordon is dripping with sweat again. He catches the attention of the first person he sees wearing one of the dark blue checkout clerk’s smocks. It’s a woman with big pores, drawn-on eyebrows, and scary beet-colored hair piled up in the shape of a beehive. She doesn’t look pleased. She tells Gordon to wait outside by the automatic glass doors until she can find the time to count his bottles. Twenty minutes later, she finally comes out and empties Gordon’s bag into a shopping cart, adding up the bottles as they clank and clang against the wire frame. “Fourteen… eighteen… twenty-three….” Her big, meaty red lips are flaked with old lipstick. Deep creases ring her too-tan neck and loop along the underside of her collarbone. Gordon can smell old cigarette smoke wafting off her clothes. She seems exhausted by something beyond just her job. She also seems very mean.

“Two dollars and thirty cents, kid. Take it or leave it,” says the beehive-headed beet-hair lady. The whites of her eyes are shot through with red veins.

“I thought I had more,” Gordon says.

“Like I said, ‘Take it or leave it.’”

Gordon takes it and gets the heck out of there. He’s not sure he has enough money for the Troll Doll now, but he decides to go to
Gunnarsson’s Toy Shoppe
, anyway. It’s just up the street.

The white double doors to
Gunnarsson’s
have diamond-paned windows. Orange and yellow painted tulips curl around the door handles and a little silver bell tinkles as Gordon goes inside. Mr. Gunnarsson sits behind the cash register with his back against a wall of model ships and airplanes. As always, he’s wearing a bright red Swedish vest and smoking a little black pipe. He’s old, with a long Scandinavian face that shows two or three days’ worth of bristly, gray beard. He frowns when he sees Gordon, but he’s always frowning, even when he’s happy.

“Young Master Swannson,” Mr. Gunnarsson greets him, taking the pipe from between his teeth. “What can I help you with today? Another Corvette model? Or perhaps some freakish hot rod?”

Revell puts out a line of model car kits designed by Ed “Big Daddy” Roth that has fascinated Gordon for quite some time. The boxes advertise slavering, hairy eyeballed monsters driving pinstriped hot rods with oversized gearshifts. They go by names like Mr. Gasser, Drag Nut, Rat Fink, and the Beatnik Bandit. Gordon bought one of these kits a few months back and was disappointed to find out that the monster wasn’t included. Consequently, his next purchase was a scale model of a 1958 Corvette, just like the one his father used to drive. He thought it might be something his dad would be interested in–maybe they could even build it together. But from the time Gordon covered half of the kitchen table with old newspapers and got out his modeling glue, until he cleaned up a few days later after putting a final coat of varnish on the Corvette’s cherry red exterior, his father never paid the slightest bit of attention. Gordon put the finished model on the desk in his bedroom, but for some reason it made him sad to look at it, so he eventually hid it away.

“I think I want a Troll Doll this time,” Gordon says.

“Oh, those are terrible, beastly things,” Mr. Gunnarsson says with what almost amounts to glee.

There’s a whole shelf of Troll Dolls on display in a glass case. They look like squat, deranged toddlers–all of them naked, devoid of genitalia, but endowed with bloated little bellies and enormous shocks of purple and pink polyester hair. Why Jimmy likes them so much is a mystery to Gordon. He just finds them creepy. They remind him of Freud’s thoughts on polymorphous perversity, a kind of open-armed lewdness that says,
“Give me a hug while I hump your leg.”
Gordon selects the least creepy Troll Doll from the lot–the only one with blue hair–and asks Mr. Gunnarsson to help him get it out of the case.

“That comes to a grand total of six dollars and thirty-five cents,” Mr. Gunnarsson says, back at the cash register.

Gordon forgot about sales tax. He’s almost sure he doesn’t have enough money now. He empties his pockets, putting handfuls of change and a few crumpled dollar bills on the counter. He watches with increasing anxiety as the old man counts it.

“You’ve got five dollars and ninety-six cents here, Gordon. You’re about forty cents shy.”

“I guess I’ll have to come back tomorrow,” Gordon says, embarrassed. But 40-cents worth of bottles shouldn’t be hard to find.

“No, I’ll tell you what. I’ll make up the difference out of my own pocket.”

Now Gordon is
really
embarrassed. Mr. Gunnarsson must sense his discomfort, because the next thing he says is: “You can pay me back later, if it troubles you. But you’re my good customer, and good customers deserve a break every now and then.”

A flood of gratitude almost brings tears to Gordon’s eyes. It’s so unusual to find a grown-up who wants to do anything nice for him. The hostility of the beehive-headed beet-hair lady at
Ivan’s Swedish Market
is closer to Gordon’s everyday expectations. He feels a wild impulse to reach across the counter and give Mr. Gunnarsson a hug. Instead, he just says, “Thanks,” with a shy smile. Then he takes the Troll Doll in its white paper sack with the
Gunnarsson’s
logo and runs outside.

Blinking in the bright sunlight reflected off Kingsburg’s wide sidewalks, Gordon decides to head to the lumberyard next. He enters through a gate in the cyclone fence out in back, where he finds Johnny Hoss sitting in the cool shade of the nail shed, rebuilding an alternator from the air conditioning crew’s van. Mike Shriver is there, too, perched on a nail keg watching him while practicing sailor’s knots on a length of grimy twine.

“Gordo! Crown Prince of the Swannson Lumber Empire. Little Lord of the Two-by-Fours. How may we assist you?” With a snaggle-toothed smirk, Mike gives a crisp salute from the brim of his Benjamin Moore Paint cap. Somehow, as if he’s clairvoyant, Mike seems to be mocking what just transpired between Gordon and Mr. Gunnarsson.