Spare Change (22 page)

“Not very well,” Olivia
answered.

“But good enough to maybe
get by?”

“I suppose.” She shooed the
dog from her chair and sat down, ready for the start of
The Red Skelton
Show.
It was her very favorite hour of television, because his antics
usually had her laughing so hard, tears slid from her eyes. It was virtually
impossible for a person to think sorrowful thoughts when they were watching
Clem Kiddlehopper.   

“How about we play a few
hands?” the boy asked.

“Play cards? Now?”

“Yeah,” he answered, “It’d
keep me from dwelling on how I been orphaned.”

Olivia, under any other
circumstance, would have flatly refused, but the boy seemed to be so needy
that, without complaining, she walked over and snapped off the television set.
“Okay,” she sighed, “you want to deal?”

Ethan nodded, his grin
stretched out wide as could be, “Penny a point?” he asked.

Olivia agreed, and before
she could change her mind, there were five cards lying in front of her. “Looks
like you’ve played this game before,” she said.

“I used to play with Mama. She
was good as they come—even if she was holding a royal flush, you couldn’t know
by the look on her face.”

“Royal flush? What exactly
is that?”

“How about we up it to two
cents a point?”

Olivia shrugged, “Okay,
if
while we’re playing, you tell me a bit about yourself.”

“I reckon that’s okay,” he
said begrudgingly, “but, don’t ask me no questions about Mama or Daddy’s
murder, ‘cause I done told you I didn’t see nothing.”

“Not a word about that,” she
crisscrossed her heart.

After an hour of playing,
Ethan had won ninety-eight cents, but Olivia had learned almost nothing of any
significance—certainly nothing about his having any other relatives. What she
did learn was that his mama had a fine voice and high hopes of one day becoming
a Radio City Rockette.  “You ever been to New York City?” he asked; when Olivia
answered she hadn’t, he simply shrugged and said, “Me neither.”

It didn’t take a terribly
astute person to see the boy was hiding something—he’d start out talking about
one thing or another; rethink it, then stop in the middle of a sentence. He did
that most every time Olivia hit upon questions about his mama and daddy’s
relationship. “Were they real happy together?” she’d asked and for a moment it
seemed he was on the verge of letting go of something; then he smacked the
cards down and snarled some comment about how he was tired of the game.

Olivia started wishing she’d held back a few of the
peppercorns given to her by Canasta Jones—one or two of those in a bowl of okra
soup and Ethan Allen might get to feeling better.

 
T
hat night Olivia tossed and turned until the sheets were
tangled into a knot and the blanket slid off the bed. Every time she closed her
eyes and settled into a comfortable spot—there it was, the image of Charlie
walking hand-in-hand with this miniature look-alike. There was no wondering
whether or not the boy was actually related; they both had eyes sloped down at
the corner and colored the shade of blue that drifts across the sky just
minutes before nightfall. Long about three o’clock in the morning, Olivia,
badgered by the voice of her conscience, decided that she owed it to Charlie to
look out for the boy. Minutes later she bolted upright, wondering if she’d lost
her mind
entirely
. For the remainder of the night, she was haunted by a
picture of herself looking like Francine Burnam—A dozen Ethan Allen look-alikes
dangling from her arms and legs like the ornaments on a Christmas tree. Still,
she kept telling herself, she owed it to Charlie to do
something
.

By morning, Olivia had come
to a somewhat shaky decision; she would watch over the boy—not forever, but
until she could find a place where he truly belonged. As soon as they’d
finished breakfast, which was cereal for her and potato chips for him, she
loaded both boy and dog into the car and headed for Clairmore—a town nine miles
from Wyattsville, a town where there’d be less chance of being spotted by
someone on the building’s Rules Committee. “We need to get you some clothes,”
she told Ethan, “you can’t go around wearing the same thing day in and day
out.”

“Why not?” he answered, then
said he’d prefer to have a new ball seeing as how his Spaulding had disappeared
through the kitchen window.

“You shouldn’t be playing
ball inside the house,” Olivia replied without taking her eyes from the road.

“It’s not a house,” he
grumbled.

“Okay then, you shouldn’t be
playing ball inside the
apartment
.”

“There’s nothing else to
do.”

“There is too,” Olivia said.
But after watching television, she was hard pressed to come up with a second
suggestion; which is why she ended up purchasing five comic books, a set of
checkers, a Monopoly game and a jigsaw puzzle picturing the entire Baltimore
Orioles Baseball Team, in addition to a selection of underwear, tee-shirts and
dungarees. At first she’d thought the comic books, mostly about monsters and
superheroes, were somewhat unnecessary, but then she remembered games required
a partner’s participation.

When the clerk finished
tallying the cost of everything, which was more than Olivia had planned on
spending, she turned and saw the boy balancing himself on a bright red Schwinn
bicycle. “Now this,” he said, “is something I could
really
use.”

She took a peek at the price
tag and shook her head.

“But,” he reasoned, “if I
had this bike, I’d be riding it morning till night. I’d
never
be inside
dirtying up the house.”

Although such a prospect was tempting, Olivia shook
her head again. She led the boy out of the shop and across the street to the
luncheonette.  After lunch they made one last stop; at the pet shop she bought
a small bag of dog food, some flea control shampoo, a leash and a harness. “You
could of saved your money,” Ethan Allen said, “cause he hates baths and
really
hates being tied down.”   

W
ithin days of his arrival, the boy and his dog became
the best kept secret at Wyattsville Arms. Everyone knew but no one uttered a
whisper, lest the Rules Committee catch wind of it. Residents who spotted a
shaggy-haired dog darting down the back staircase would hold the door open,
then signal when the coast was clear. People on the seventh floor began to
discreetly pluck loose dog hair from the hall carpet and carefully dispose of
it in their own waste basket. Others began stopping by to bring some silly
thing Olivia would never in a million years have need of.  First it was Bessie
Porter, who came trotting in with a sack of Hershey bars that she supposedly
brought just in case Olivia was to have a craving for sweets. Next Harry
Hornsby dropped off a baseball mitt his grandson no longer used. Fred McGinty,
who found it in his heart to forgive the boy for thinking of him as a dead man,
brought over eight cans of dog food then stayed for hours playing checkers with
Ethan. “He’s a fine lad,” Fred whispered into Olivia’s ear, “why,
anybody
would enjoy having
him
around.”

“Maybe so,” Olivia sighed,
in a way that had questionable undertones. “But remember, his being here is
temporary. Once I’ve located his
real
family, he’s sure to be moving
on.”

Fred shook his head. “That’s
unfortunate,” he said, “losing a lad like this, what a shame.” Olivia, however,
remained blank-faced and voiced no opinion.

True, she’d noticed the way
the boy had made an effort to cut back on his cussing and spoon up some cereal
for breakfast, but that didn’t change the fact that he was
eleven
! Not
just eleven, but also attached to a scraggly looking dog which, likely as not,
would get her evicted. Olivia could name a thousand reasons why it was better
for the boy to move on, but although she never once mentioned it aloud, the
number one reason was the nightmare that kept recurring. It was a painful thing
to imagine you could turn into Francine Burnam, and even worse when the thought
haunted you all night long and caused you to wake up gasping for breath.  

In an effort to speed up the
finding of Ethan’s true family, Olivia began spending more time with the boy.
Night after night they’d sit together and play poker or work on fitting pieces
into the picture puzzle he had spread across the dining room table. “This looks
like Hoot Evers’ ear Ethan would say, and while he was fixing that piece in
place, Olivia would start asking about his mama and daddy.  

“Did your mama ever mention
wanting to go to some special place?” she asked, “Her hometown, maybe?”

“New York City,” Ethan Allen
answered, as he rummaged through a pile of pieces in search of Brooks
Robinson’s nose. 

“New York; was that where
your mama was from?”

“Uh-uh,” he answered,
shaking his head but focusing his concentration on the finding of a foot.
“That’s where she wanted to go.”

“She ever mention any
cousins? Distant cousins maybe?”

Although he’d eased off the
snippiness of his answers, Ethan Allen still claimed to have no knowledge whatsoever
of any other relatives; which exasperated Olivia to no end. Finally, after
running out of questions relating to the life of his mama, Olivia asked how
exactly her death had come about. The boy turned red-faced and bolted from the
chair like he’d been charged through with electricity. Before Olivia had time
to think, he swept his arm across the table and sent the pieces of the puzzle
they’d been working on for almost a week, flying to the floor. “Just leave it
be!” he screamed. “I was sound asleep when it happened, and I don’t know
nothing! Nothing!” He turned on his heel and slammed out the door, leaving Dog
behind.

Tom Behrens

I
sure hope little Jack Mahoney got hold of his grandpa
in time to get help for his mama. It’s an awful thing, seeing a boy small as
him, saddled with more worry than a grown man ought to have. 

I can still remember back
when my own Mama died. I was the same as that kid. There wasn’t a single soul
to look out for me, not even a grasshopper to care whether I lived or died. It
ain’t right for a boy to go through such a thing, it ain’t even the littlest
bit right.

Human beings ought to
look out for one another. If I was a decent sort, I’d do something to help that
boy out.

Maybe, by God, I will.

Righting a Wrong

A
fter Tom Behrens watched the boy ride off in the
chicken truck, he returned to the ESSO station. That afternoon he swept the
office floor five times without recalling he’d done it before; then he opened
up a second case of oil cans, figuring to stack them in a display rack which
he’d already filled. Tom thought he had forgotten that summer when his life
took such a terrible turn; but now, here it was—back again, haunting him with a
slew of memories bitter as hardpan kale.

Even now, some twenty-two
years later, he regretted not running his daddy through with a pitchfork. Tom
moved a stack of tires from one side of the doorway to the other, all the while
wondering if he would have been able to do it. At the time, he was taller and
more filled out than this boy, but still a kid.
Tommy,
his mama had
said, wiping the tears from her eyes,
you’re the man of the house now—
but
such a responsibility should never have been shoved onto a kid’s shoulders.
What, he wondered, did she expect from a thirteen year old boy? What could he
do? Nothing, that’s what!

Tom Behrens turned to wiping
down the front window of the station; oblivious to the sound of sloshing water
and the squeak of the squeegee as it slid from the top of the glass to the
bottom. The memories were pricking pins at his brain, and the only thing he
could hear were the moans of his mama—lying in bed day after day, her color
growing pastier, her breath more shallow. When it got near the end, he’d have
to lower his ear to her face to determine if she was breathing at all. “You
want a pill, mama?” he’d ask nervously; then he’d try to steady her trembling
hands as she lifted the glass of water to swallow it down. 

For several hours Tom
fiddled around, moving things from one side of the station to the other,
straightening storage cabinets and cleaning things that didn’t need cleaning.
Long about four o’clock his fingers began twitching like he had an itch to play
the piano, so he hung a
‘closed’
sign on the door of the station and
grabbed hold of his fishing pole.

Alongside of a creek with
the sound of water splashing against rocks was the one place a person could go
for clear-headed thinking. Tom Behrens knew that as well as anybody did; it had
been his salvation, even though it was also the very same spot his Daddy had
let go of the fact he’d be leaving. It was an August afternoon when the sun was
a ball of fire that would blister your face if you turned to look at it, but
still they’d gone fishing. Tom remembered his mama saying it was too hot for
such a thing, but nonetheless his daddy loaded him into the truck and headed
for Donnigan’s Creek—a place thick with weeping willows and cypress trees, a
place so quiet you could hear the chipmunks breathing. They sat together on a
rocky overhang, Tom lying on his back watching a family of squirrels scamper up
and down the tree, his daddy drinking beer after beer. Without any conversation
whatsoever, his daddy stretched his legs toward the edge of the rock and
dropped a line in the water, even though he knew it had been a summer when the
fish were too lazy to bite. They sat there all afternoon without speaking a
word to each other, but on the drive home his daddy grumbled,
you gotta
understand,
it ain’t my way to stick around and watch what’s happening
to your mama.