Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (43 page)

Even after Mal’s death, the sibling rivalry continued. What other reason could there be for Gerald moving in with Mal’s hateful wife, Cynthia? Self-centered, sinful Gerald, a perpetual bachelor who up to that point had only fornicated with his young and lovely secretaries.
(Which left him wide open to sexual harassment claims, but did Gerald give two hoots? No, he did not. And none of them could type worth beans, either….)
What could Gerald be getting from Cynthia that he couldn’t get from any of those other women?
(He couldn’t possibly want to become a surrogate father to Gordon. He’s always treated Gordon like dirt….)
And what was Cynthia getting out of the arrangement? A widow spreading her legs for the brother of the man she’d been married to–didn’t that make her feel somehow…
polluted?
Certainly the comparisons would be odious. Helen suspected her youngest son would never be able to live up to his deceased older brother in the bedroom department. Gerald was more than adequately endowed, but Mal had been born with a sea monster between his legs. A mother knows these things.

It makes her sad, but she’s also fairly certain she knows why Gerald and Cynthia teamed up together now. It’s such an ugly reason that she almost can’t look at it straight on. She wants to keep denying it, but there’s no use. Gerald keeps rubbing her nose in it these days, with all of his talk about nursing homes and power-of-attorney agreements.
They want her cabooses!
Those two scheming greedy-guts want their grasping paws on the lumberyard’s profits. They want her bank accounts and safe deposit boxes, her money markets and CDs, her stock portfolios and real estate deeds–
everything!
They want all the cabooses and they don’t have the good graces, or even the common human decency, to wait until she dies.

She’s sure this sinister plot is mostly Cynthia’s doing. Helen’s daughter-in-law has done nothing but despise her since the day she married Mal. And Mal’s death left his family’s finances in disarray. He died without life insurance. To make matters worse, his liquor store investment went belly up, draining Cynthia’s cash reserves and ruining her credit rating. The only assets she has left are the house and Mal’s lumberyard stock. Gerald, on the other hand, still has plenty. But he has the soul of an accountant. It’s not just a job for him. In Gerald’s mind, there’s no such thing as
enough.

Both of the boys inherited stock in the lumberyard after Milt died from prostate cancer a dozen years ago, but Helen remains the controlling shareholder. And even if Cynthia and Gerald combined their shares, they still wouldn’t have voting rights. There’s only one way for them to gain control of the business
.
They have to get power-of-attorney and then get her declared legally incompetent.

They must think of her as an ailing bag of bones, a decrepit old goblin with a leaky bladder, hell-bent on chewing up their inheritance with outrageous medical bills and ill-considered charitable donations. But her bladder is
just fine,
thank you. And the money is safe. Safer than it’ll ever be once Gerald and Cynthia get their hands on it. She’s always been a conservative investor. Milt taught her to steer clear of puffed-up stockbrokers and two-hundred-dollar-an-hour attorneys who always want to work in her “best interests.” She manages her own money, buying dividend-paying stocks and corporate bonds in companies she can understand, like Plum Creek Timber and Pacific Gas & Electric. Even in down years she makes at least a 6% return on her investments.
Enough to live on….
Plus, she does her own housekeeping and Medicare takes care of all her doctor bills, so it’s actually cheaper for her to stay where she is than to take a room in one of those horrendous nursing homes.

She’s seen inside a few of those places–and they’re not pretty. There’s always a depressing Recreation Room full of old biddies sitting around in spill-proof vinyl lounge chairs, nodding off in front of a blaring television tuned to some insipid game show like
The Price Is Right!
A couple of white-whiskered geezers in creased navy blue suit jackets and flannel pajama pants–over-the-hill Lotharios–might be swanning it up with their canes over by the potted palms
(boys she probably grew up with and had no desire to kiss, even when they were young).
Usually there’s a foul smell of unchecked bodily fluids and the buckets of Lysol used to mop them up. Open-mouthed drooling seems to be quite fashionable. Palsied limbs are all the rage. There’s no way she’s going to spend her last few years cooped up in one of those places.
Not while there’s life in this old bird yet!

Physically, she’s still in tip-top condition, aside from her asthma and arthritis, which she’s lived with for years. Her new forgetfulness is what she has to watch out for. Lately, she’s been forgetting even the names of simple, everyday things. But Gordon has been helping her there. He checks in on her every morning on his way to school, and again when he heads home from work. He makes sure the stove hasn’t been left on and he puts the chocolate-chip mint ice cream back in the freezer. He’s such a good boy. He even helps her with her gardening.
(So sad that the little pagoda he made for her is almost in ruins! Is that what started all this ruminating?)
She sends Gordon a check for two dollars every week, as a Thank You for all of his hard work, even though she knows she doesn’t have to. He’s family. He’d do it for nothing.

She notices it’s getting along toward dusk. The sky above the Smiley’s loquat tree has turned a deep sea blue with a high, thin layer of flesh-colored cirrus clouds running away toward the horizon.
How long has she been out here?
It feels like her whole life has just flashed in front of her eyes–like the stories one hears about skydivers with failed parachutes who are miraculously saved by landing in hay bales–but she can’t remember if the whole show took mere seconds, or if she’s been sitting outside all day. It’s getting cold. She’s only wearing a bathrobe over her negligee.
Where’s Gordon?
she wonders. He usually helps her with dinner.

As she gets up to go inside, she sees a calico squid leap up onto her backyard fence. Surely it’s odd, if not impossible, for a tentacled sea creature to be climbing fences in the middle of land-locked Kingsburg. But without thinking, Helen purses her lips and twitters like a parakeet. Then she calls out,
“Here, squiddy-squiddy-squiddy….”

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

Halloween in Kingsburg smells of wet, uprooted weeds and car exhaust fumes. Gordon has been out with Derek, taking him on his first round of trick-or-treating. It was a kick watching Derek dart from door-to-door in the early twilight, collecting candy with his little black cape flapping behind him and a sweaty rubber Creature from the Black Lagoon mask suctioned to his three-year-old face. Derek had insisted on wearing their dead father’s sombrero as part of the costume, even though he was almost lost under it. He also wore a pair of Day-Glo orange Flintstones Underoos over black Oshkosh jeans (in the proud superhero tradition of wearing underwear on the outside of one’s clothes) and he carried a dozen red roses in a cone of green tissue to give to his grandmother later. Judging by their neighbor’s reactions, the costume made quite an impression.

Now they’re walking up their grandmother’s steep concrete driveway to deliver the roses. Gordon can hear the muted accordion thumping of a polka coming through the diamond-paned stained-glass windows in the double front doors. He rings the doorbell, but there’s no response, so he lets himself in with his own key. Derek follows, yelling, “Grandma! Grandma!” from behind his rubber gill slits.

Inside they’re greeted by the vision of their grandmother standing on top of the plastic-covered cushions of her living room sofa. She’s wearing a clinging seashell pink negligee and moving about like a spastic flamingo, flapping her arms and shaking her pale, blue-veined legs, dancing the Watusi. Lawrence Welk is on the console TV set, all smiles and soap bubbles, with his particular brand of polka music blasting at distorted volume from the tweed-covered speakers.

Helen waves to them with a demented grin and shouts: “I recorded it on Betamax! Isn’t it glorious?”

Although his grandmother’s dance moves appear frail and feeble, there’s enough rump-shaking going on to make Gordon nervous. Derek, without hesitating, hops up on the sofa and joins his grandmother, bouncing around underneath the big sombrero like a Mexican jumping bean.

Someone could break a hip here
, thinks Gordon. He goes over to the television and turns down the volume.

The dancing peters out. “Party pooper,” Gordon’s grandmother says, blowing a wet raspberry and, outrageously, flipping him the bird. Her middle finger quavers like a cornstalk flung up into a tornado.

“More dancing!” Derek shouts. He bounces high off the springy sofa and lands, headfirst, on top of a pile of Harper’s Bazaar and McCall’s magazines fanned across his grandmother’s coffee table. (The sombrero, meanwhile, spins away toward the fireplace like an alien spacecraft set loose from a Tijuana chop shop.) There’s a loud, hollow thud and then Derek tumbles to the floor.

“Jesus, Derek! Are you all right?”

“Ouchy-wawa…” Derek says, crawling up from the carpet with a hand to his rubber-clad skull. His flustered grandmother leans over and kisses his radioactive green fishmonster brow, cooing,
“Oh, my little halibut. Do you need a Band-Aid?”

“Nope. I’m tough….” Derek prides himself on his ability to tolerate physical pain without crying. Only nightmares and farts rattle him enough to bring tears. And now not even farts scare him anymore. He laughs at them. (Here he lets off a sputtering
rat-a-tat
burst of flatulence to demonstrate his steely nerve.) He thinks of himself as heroic in his bravery, a three-year-old do-gooder with otherworldly powers. Perhaps someday soon he’ll be recruited into the great pantheon of superheroes and live out the rest of his life battling evil in scenes of Saturday morning cartoon violence:
Mexican Lizardfishman vs. the Killer Robot Women From Mars!
Of course, Derek is only three, so these thoughts are rather inchoate, more intuited than articulated.

“I think somebody here needs to go poo-poo in the potty,” his grandmother says, taking Derek by the hand.
“Phew-whee!”

“No potty! I–I–not need to!” Derek says, struggling, his superhero dreams already lying in rubble.
Pendejo Fishmonster decimated in battle against the Legion of Hygiene and the Poo-Poo-in-the-Potty Brigade
….

“Just don’t do it in your pants, okay?” Gordon says as their grandmother lets Derek go. “I don’t want to have to clean you up later.”

“I can go poo-poo by self,” Derek says with grim finality.
And leap tall buildings in a single bound….

Helen invites them to stay for dinner. She’s having pork chops. But the pork chops are frozen and after defrosting them in the microwave, then frying them in a skillet, they end up tasting like chewy cardboard. Gordon and Derek enjoy the meal, anyway. They much prefer spending mealtimes with their grandmother, as opposed to sitting at a table with their scowling, naked mother and their cryptically muttering (and often itchy) nude uncle, both of whom make Gordon and Derek feel as though they’re resented for eating the food placed in front of them. As if that food was too costly and dear to waste on such annoying, undeserving children. As if that food represented all the fun and bare-assed frolicking being denied Gerald and Cynthia because they had to devote so much time and energy to raising said children. If Gordon had had the financial means to move out on his own, he’d have done so by now–and taken his little brother with him. Instead, he spends as little time at home as possible, and in consequence, more time taking care of his sweet but addled grandmother.

“Have some ambrosial grease,” Helen says, passing Gordon the gravy tureen. “There’s a pope’s nose in it for flavor.”

Addled isn’t even the word for it.
Borderline lunatic
is more like it. Helen is spinning off into full-blown senile dementia, and there are days when she doesn’t even recognize Gordon, or say anything that makes any sense. But there are other days when she seems to possess a kind of oracular wisdom and expresses herself in ways that strike Gordon as more spiritually enlightened than almost anything he’s ever heard or read. He’s beginning to believe that Alzheimer’s functions as a sort of pre-flight check for the
Bardo
, a way of preparing one’s soul for experiences that take place on a higher plane.

Gerald and Cynthia have made no bones about wanting Helen locked away in a nursing home. Gordon has heard his grandmother say over and over that she’d rather die than rot away in one of those places. He’s definitely on her side, doing all he can to help her. It makes him glad to see her kicking back at death and decrepitude, refusing to become another fearful, helpless victim.
Screw that
, his grandmother says. In her more lucid moments, she shares with Gordon what her dreams have been telling her: that each of us is in charge of our own de- and reincarnations, and at the end of life there’s nothing to fear. But the priests, judges, politicians, hospital administrators, and even her own relatives (present company excluded) don’t want her thinking that way. If she believes she has a handle on her own destiny, and if she doesn’t fear death, then she’s much less likely to be victimized. And that’s bad for business.

“So have you had any good dreams lately?” Gordon asks his grandmother. It’s their favorite topic for discussion.

“All my dreams these days are about the ocean. This little one here would fit right in.” Helen pats Derek’s shoulder as he tries to stuff an overloaded spoonful of mashed potatoes through the breathing hole in his Creature from the Black Lagoon mask. “Y’know, sometimes I think you’re just the spitting image of your father,” she says to him with a grin.

“Rawwwrrrr!”
replies Derek, raising his hands to her face like dinosaur claws as he makes scary monster sounds.

“You should take off your sombrero while you’re sitting at the table,” Gordon tells him. Derek mumbles a vague protest through another mouthful of mashed potatoes, but removes the offending hat. “So what happens in these ocean dreams?” Gordon asks his grandmother.