Not-Just-Anybody Family (4 page)

“Is this a credit card call?” the operator asked.

“No, I’ve got money,” he said. The money was lined up on the shelf under the phone—quarters, then dimes, then nickels, neat as a bank.

“Deposit three dollars and thirty cents.”

It took Vern a long time to get that much money into the phone, but it was worth it. Immediately the phone began to ring and a voice said, “Paisano Motel.”

Vern cleared his throat. “Could I speak with Vicki Blossom?”

“Who?”

“Vicki Blossom. She’s staying there.”

“She’s not registered.”

“She has to be.”

“Nope. No Blossom.”

“She’s with the rodeo.”

“Honey, everybody staying at this motel is with the rodeo.”

“But this is my mom. She gave me this number.”

He was horrified to hear his voice break on the word
mom
. Now the motel manager would think he was a child. If his mom did come, she would say, “Your little boy called. He sounded like he was crying.”

In a mature, adult voice he said, “Well, if she does check in, would you tell her Vern called, and everything is all right here.”

“I will, hon.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

He stood, hands in his pockets, staring down the highway. The shadows were getting longer. The traffic was getting sparse. Everybody was either home for supper or going home for supper but them.

Maggie got to her feet. “I still think we ought to call.”

Vern swirled around. Remembering the incomplete phone call made has eyes even harder. “I told you I can I handle it!”

“Well, I’m the oldest and I ought to be the one to decide when we handle it and when we don’t.”

“Look, you want to call—go ahead. Be my guest. Call.”

At that moment he looked so much older than Maggie that the eleven months that separated them might as well have been eleven years. He stared at her with eyes that did not blink once.

Maggie blinked seven or eight times. She said, “Vern, I can’t call. I don’t have any monnnnnney.”

He turned and started walking. To Maggie it was the way John Wayne walked into the sunset when he wasn’t coming back. Quickly she got to her feet.

“Wait for meeeeeee.”

Vern kept walking.

Maggie hopped on one foot to get her flip-flop adjusted. Then she ran down the warm asphalt road after him.

Every time Pap slammed on the brakes of the Chevrolet, four things happened. The tailgate dropped, the sun visors flopped down, the glove compartment opened, and Mud slid onto the floor.

This time Mud was so surprised at the sudden stop that he struck the tender part of his throat on the door of the glove compartment. Then with a yelp of pain he slid to the worn floor.

His throat felt as if something were caught inside, and he gagged-coughed a few times. He looked with interest at the small wad of spit he had coughed up on the floor. Then he jumped on the seat to look around.

Pap was outside the truck. Mud jumped nimbly out the door and joined him. Pap paid no attention to Mud, but Mud was used to that. Pap knew he was there.

The next few moments were beyond Mud’s ability to understand. There was a crash, a shot, and then a struggle that sent beer cans rolling down the street and Mud under the Chevrolet.

When he realized some men were struggling with Pap, hurting him, he darted out to help. A kick from one of the policemen sent him back under the truck. Stray cans shot at him, scared him, sent him further back.

He waited between the front wheels of the truck. He was panting with alarm, his ears flat on his broad head, his golden eyes wild.

After a moment he crawled on his belly to the driver’s side of the truck. He thought it might be a good idea to get inside. The door had been closed.

Still keeping close to the pavement, he went to the back of the truck. He looked out. He didn’t see Pap anywhere.

He was getting ready to jump into the truck and lie down on a gunnysack when the tow truck arrived. As soon as the huge hook clanged under the truck’s bumper, Mud started running.

He ran right down the middle of Sumter Avenue, on the yellow line, his ears flying behind him, his tail low. “That stupid dog’s going to get hit!”

“Maybe he’s rabid!”

“Someone ought to call the dogcatcher.”

Mud kept running for five blocks until he came to an intersection, and then he turned left on a red light, causing curses and the squealing of brakes.

Mud was usually cautious about traffic because he had been hit by a car when he was six weeks old. That’s how he had become Pap’s dog in the first place. He and his mother—a big yellow farmer’s dog named Minnie—had been chasing cars along County Road 26. His mother was a great car chaser, and the first thing all her pups learned was to chase cars.

Mud had inherited from his mother a lot of natural ability for chasing cars, but he still had a lot to learn.

On that particular morning Mud and Minnie had spent a lot of time lying in the shade, waiting for the hum of motor.

About noon Minnie heard a loud roar. It was a car Minnie particularly liked to chase, a BMW. She got up from her hole under the tree and jumped the ditch. Mud did too.

Minnie got down low in the weeds—she liked to take cars by surprise.

Mud was beside her, down low too. His mother’s body was trembling with excitement. His was too.

The car roared into view. Minnie and Mud sprang out of their hiding place.

But this time the car didn’t gain speed as it usually did. This time it didn’t race Minnie. This time it swerved right at her.

Minnie got out of the way with a graceful, twisting backward dive, but Mud didn’t. Mud was hit and flung into a drainage ditch beside the road.

Pap came by about a half hour later, on foot. He was whistling “Camptown Races.” He stopped after the first
doo-dah
because he saw Minnie. She was whining and taking anxious steps back and forth at the far side of the ditch.

It was clear to Pap she was worried about something in the ditch.

“Well, let’s see what we got here,” said Pap.

Mud was so covered with mud that Pap didn’t see him at first. Then he said, “Well, well.”

He put one foot down in the ditch, and he touched Mud’s throat in a certain place to see if he was still alive. When he saw that he was, he said, “Let me help you, pal,” in the same voice he would use if he was helping one of the children.

“Not another dog,” the kids’ mom had said when she saw him carrying Mud through the doorway.

Pap nodded.

“I wish one time you’d bring home something worth looking at, like a French poodle.”

“Where’d you find him, Pap?” Vern asked.

“In the mud. His leg’s broke.”

“Well, as soon as it heals, you get rid of him. I mean it.”

“I know you do.”

Mud spent most of the afternoon running around town, dodging cars and trucks and people. At dusk he dropped like a bag of bones under the carryout window of a Dairy Queen. He lay there, so spent, so miserable, that during the evening people began dropping pieces of their hamburgers around him, the way people drop coins into a beggar’s hat.

Here
was the word he heard again and again, but even if someone had presented him with a sirloin steak, he would not have had the heart to eat it.

“What’s wrong with you—really?” Junior asked. “I’m serious. I have to know.” For two hours Junior had been trying to get Ralphie to tell him why he was in the hospital. “I told you what was wrong with me,” Junior went on in a bargaining voice.

“No, you didn’t. The nurse did.”

Junior said, “Well, I would have.”

“You’ll find out when I go to therapy.”

“What’s therapy?”

“Don’t you know anything?”

“I guess not.” Junior sounded so low that Ralphie relented.

He said, “Oh, all right. Here is what’s really and truly wrong with me. I swallowed watermelon seeds and now watermelons are growing inside me, and when they get big, I’m going to bust open.”

“No,” Junior said.

“When I bust open, you better get out of the way or you’ll get watermelon and guts all over you.”

“No!”

“After I bust open, they’re going to put a zipper in my stomach so I can zip myself open and shut.”

“No!”

“Now, Ralphie.” It was the nurse again—more little paper cups, more pills. “What lies are you telling Junior this time?”

“He told me he had watermelons inside him and marbles in his head. He told me he was going to bust open and then you were going to put a zipper in him.”

Junior tossed his pink pill down like a pro.

“Just don’t listen to him, Junior. Don’t believe a word he says. He’s—”

“Excuse me.”

Junior looked up in alarm. Everything about the hospital alarmed him, put him on his guard—carts, needles, hammers; and now a policeman was standing in the doorway. The only good thing so far about being in the hospital had been getting away from the police!

The policeman said exactly what Junior was afraid he would say: “Can I talk to the Blossom boy for a few minutes?”

“Me?” Junior asked. He pulled his covers up higher on his chest. He wanted to pull them over his head.

The policeman nodded and came into the room. “How are you feeling this morning, son?”

“I’m fine.” Junior’s voice was high and thin as a reed.

“Were you one of the policemen who was there when he fell?” Ralphie asked. He was turned on his side now, propped on his elbow, watching with interest. He did not wear hospital gowns, and he had on a T-shirt that said Genius Inside.

The policeman said, “Yes.”

“Then why didn’t you catch him?”

“What?”

“When he fell, why didn’t you catch him?” Ralphie spoke each word as carefully as if he were talking to someone who was dull-witted.

“It all happened pretty fast, son,” the policeman said.

“Yeah, but you guys are supposed to be pretty fast, have quick reactions. What if it had been a burglary? If you can’t move any quicker than that, you wouldn’t even have your gun out till the robbers had escaped. Part of your training should be in fast reactions,
bang-bang;
and if you haven’t got them, you should get a desk job or work in a cafeteria. On TV the cops—”

“We do our best, son.” The policeman turned his back on Ralphie. “Are your legs giving you a lot of trouble?”

“No,” Junior lied.

“They’re broken,” Ralphie told the policeman’s back. “Sure, they’re giving him trouble. You think it’s fun to have broken legs?”

Junior kept his eyes on the mound his toes made under the sheet. He was very, very grateful to have Ralphie in the next bed. Ralphie was better than a lawyer, taking his side, bringing up points Junior had not even thought of. He would have given Ralphie a look of gratitude, but the policeman was standing between them.

“The reason I was out at your place yesterday afternoon,” the policeman was saying, “was because earlier in the day we had to arrest your grandfather.”

“Pap?” Now he looked at the policeman.

“Your grandfather was disturbing the peace. He pulled out a shotgun and fired it on Spring Street.”

“Did he kill anybody?”

“No.”

“Hit anybody?”

“No, but he’s in jail, and he’s going to have to have a hearing. The hearing’s day after tomorrow, and after that, depending on how things go, he’s liable to spend a month or two in the county jail.”

“Pap? Jail?” Junior couldn’t fit the two pictures together.
“Pap? Jail?”

“He has a right to a court-appointed lawyer,” Ralphie said. “By the way, did you read him his rights?”

The policeman ignored Ralphie and gave Junior a look of regret. He took out pencil and paper.

“Now, son, what we need to know is where your mom is and how to get in touch with her. Your grandfather—Pap, as you call him—told me there were two other kids, your brother and your sister”—he checked a notepad—“Maggie and Vern, and we need to know where they are.”

Junior looked up at the policeman with his mouth hanging open. He couldn’t have said a word if he’d wanted to. It was as if words hadn’t even been thought of yet.

Ralphie leaned around the policeman. “Under the law,” he said, “you aren’t required to tell him—one—single—thing.”

“Thank you,” said Junior.

Maggie was at the bus stop, sitting on the bench that had been put there by the Parkinson Funeral Home. She was swinging her legs back and forth.

She wished, as she usually did, that she had on a pair of cowboy boots. Her mom had bought her lots of boots when she was little—Maggie even had a picture of herself coming home from the hospital with a pair of tiny cowboy boots sticking out from under the blanket.

But this year her mom had said, “Maggie, your feet are growing so fast, it would just be wasting money.”

“I can’t go around without boots,” Maggie had said. It was like going around undressed.

“They’d be too little in six months.”

“Then buy me a big pair. I’ll grow into them. Buy me a cheap pair at Shoe Mart.”

“I don’t even have the money for that, shug.” Her mom’s voice when she said the word
shug
always sounded so sad, so regretful, that Maggie could never keep on begging.

Maggie imagined how much better she would look if she had boots on now instead of worn green flip-flops. Cowboy boots made any outfit look classy, even a worn T-shirt and cut-off jeans.

Across the street her brother Vern was walking slowly up and down in front of the city jail, pausing every now and then to give the secret birdcall.
Bobwhite. Bobwhite.
Four more steps.
Bobwhite.

Vern was listening for an answering whistle from inside the jail. This was the only way he could think of to find out if Pap was inside.

He whistled again and waited. His head was cocked to one side, like a bird’s, listening.

Maggie thought Vern looked so suspicious, he would probably end up getting arrested himself. No one in his right mind stood in front of the city jail whistling like a bobwhite.