Spare Change (7 page)

Once, just days after he’d seen Scooter grab hold of his mama’s butt in
full view of everyone, Ethan Allen asked, “Mama, are you gonna leave us for
Mister Scooter?”

She was sitting on the porch at the time, giving her toenails a second
coat of Cherry Blossom Pink. “Dear Lord,” she sighed and set the nail polish
bottle aside. “Come on over here,” she pulled Ethan Allen up onto her lap as if
he was still a baby. “I know there’s times when I’m not a real good mama,” she
said, “but honey, I love you and your daddy. Why, I’d
never
run off from
you, never ever, not long as you live.”

Ethan Allen squeezed himself a bit closer. Susanna smiled and tightened
her arms around him. At times his way of thinking seemed so grown up that it
was possible for her to forget he was still a boy who needed his mama’s hugs.
“Honey,” she sighed, “you simply got to understand this business with Mister
Cobb don’t mean nothing. He’s my boss and I butter him up a bit so he’ll take a
liking to me.”

“But, Mama…”

“Uh-uh,” she put her finger to his lips. “No buts. Mama knows what
she’s doing and me working for Scooter Cobb is what’s gonna get us to New York
City.”

Ethan Allen gave her a wide smile. He’d been listening to stories of
New York City for as long as he could remember and never tired of hearing them.
He never grew bored of watching his mama’s eyes sparkle as she talked about how
the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall could kick their legs higher than a
man’s head. While other toddlers were listening to stories of Peter Rabbit, he
heard about how the women in New York were paid hundreds of dollars every week,
just for singing and dancing.  

“You’re gonna love New York,” Susanna said, “It’s like nothing you’ve
ever seen before. More lights than a downtown Christmas tree and the partying—why,
it goes on all night long.” She smiled and waited for him to ask the question
he always asked. It was a game they played; she wove tales of fame and fortune,
he urged her on, hoping to prolong those moments of intimacy.

“Are we
really
gonna move to New York?” he said with a grin.

“You betcha boots! Mama’s gonna get a job singing, maybe even on the
radio, then we’re gonna move into a fine apartment building with an elevator
that carries people up and down anytime of the day or night they’ve a mind to
go.”

“What about Dog?”

“He’ll come with us. We’ll get him a fancy rhinestone collar and let
him poop right out in the middle of Fifth Avenue.”

For a few minutes Ethan Allen was laughing like a kid; then the overly
mature look of worry slipped back onto his face. “Is Mister Scooter going with
us?”

Susanna shook her head. “Of course not,” she answered. “It’s gonna be just
the three of us—you, me and your daddy.”

“Good!”

“Good?”

“Yeah; I don’t like Mister Scooter. He’s too fat and he grabs hold of
your boobies in front of everybody.”

“He don’t mean nothing by that, it’s his way of acting a fool. He’s
been real good to you Ethan, and he’s good to me too. Why, he’s paying me twice
as much money as they did at the five and dime.” She started to tickle his
belly. “Besides,” she said, “I get lots of tips and you get all that free
pie!” 

“I wouldn’t care if I didn’t get no more free pie,” he answered.

“Well, I’d care if I didn’t get that tip money!” She smiled proudly,
“Do you know I’ve got almost one thousand dollars saved up already.  Come summer,
we’re off to New York City—and, that, my little man, is a promise!”

Susanna Doyle

Summer of Rage

T
he year Ethan Allen became eleven was when things
between Benjamin and Susanna turned rancid as a week old pork chop. It had been
a summer of one-hundred-degree days with hardly a drop of rain.  Morning after
morning, the sun came up hotter than a fireball threatening to blister any
foolhardy soul who dared venture outside. Housewives kept their window shades
pulled down and refused to fetch laundry that had been hanging on the
clothesline for weeks. Men, accustomed to spending their days in the field,
stood in front of their refrigerator gasping bits of cool air. “Why bother,”
they’d tell their wives, “The corn’s too puny to bring to market.” 

There was not a single
person on all of the Eastern Shore who was not irritable and out of sorts, but
Benjamin was by far the worst. Not only was he dealing with a crop of soy beans
that wouldn’t take root, but the tractor had suddenly taken to acting
temperamental. He was in the barn, replacing a rubber belt that had become
drier than a dinosaur bone, when Susanna walked in and announced it was time
for them to start thinking about that trip to New York City. “Don’t bother me
with such nonsense,” he answered, “You see I’ve got problems with the tractor.”

Susanna, certain she’d never get to New York if she took into account
every negative thing Benjamin had to say, continued; “I’m thinking maybe late
August, early September.”

“Well, I’m thinking a year or two down the road,” he growled back.

“I ain’t waiting no year or two! I got enough money saved to go
now
.”

“When are you gonna give this up, Susanna?” Benjamin dropped the wrench
he’d been holding and glared at her in the most hateful way imaginable. “You’re
a grown woman now; it’s high time you forgot about such foolishness.”

“Foolishness?”
she answered.  “Thinking I can be somebody is foolish? In case you haven’t
noticed, I got a real good singing voice, everybody says so. ‘Susanna,’ they
say, ‘you ought to be singing on the radio.’ But no,” she rambled on, “you want
to keep me stuck on this farm, where I ain’t got the chance of a snowball in
hell of being discovered.”

“You know what you got? Big tits.” He
picked up the wrench and turned back to the tractor. “Big tits and not a speck
of talent. I ain’t interested in going to New York to watch you parade around
and make a jackass out of yourself.”

“You think you’re so smart don’t you, Benjamin? Well, you’re not. 
You’re stupider than me. Stupid and blind. If you wasn’t so blind, you’d see my
singing is a way for us to get a better life, have more money, and live in an
apartment building that ain’t run over with ground hogs and crickets!”

Benjamin twisted loose a bolt he’d been working on and said nothing.

“Well, I’m going to New York! Me and Ethan Allen, we’re going to New
York and I don’t give a rat’s ass whether or not you come!” Susanna whirled on
her heel and tromped out of the barn. She didn’t hear Benjamin mumble that such
a thing would only happen over his dead body.

The very next day Susanna began making plans for the trip. “You start
getting ready,” she told Ethan Allen, “Because we’re leaving here the first
week of September.” Every morning when she got home from work, hours before the
sun came up hot enough to burn a hole in a person’s head, she’d wake the boy
and they’d swish back and forth on the porch swing, talking about what they
were going to do in New York City. 

“Can we climb to the top of the Statue of Liberty?” Ethan Allen would
ask, “Ride the subway? Maybe go to Yankee Stadium?”

“We’ll do all those things and more!” Susanna answered gleefully.  “Of
course, I’ll have to get some auditions, first. But once I get a singing job,
we’ll go hog wild, paint the town from one end to the other, do whatever we
want!”

“You think maybe I could get Mickey Mantle’s autograph?”

“Sweetie, I’d bet on it!”

Such talk infuriated Benjamin and he turned nastier than ever. When the
tractor broke down for the ninth time and refused to budge regardless of how
many parts he replaced, it certainly didn’t help matters. Three weeks before
they were to leave, on the very same day Susanna came home with the sequined
dress she was planning to wear for auditions, he discovered the tiller was
rusted through. “That’s it!” he screamed and kicked over the toolbox. Although
it was well before noon, he marched himself into the house and sat down at the
kitchen table with a full glass of whiskey.

“Ain’t it a bit early?” Susanna asked.

Benjamin glared at her like a man thinking of murder and poured himself
another.

“Even if you could get the tractor fixed,” she said, “this heat’s
already burnt those soy beans to a crisp.”

He drained the whiskey glass and then refilled it.

“Just give it up and come to New York with me and Ethan,” Susanna said,
not noticing the way Benjamin’s left eye was twitching. “We’re gonna have the
time of our lives! And, once I’ve got a singing job…”

Without a word of warning, Benjamin’s hand flew up and whacked Susanna
across the face so hard she tumbled to the floor.

“No, Daddy!” Ethan Allen shouted and grabbed hold of his daddy’s arm.

“You thinking you can stop me, boy?” Benjamin growled as he shook his
arm free. “Try it, and I’ll split your head open.”

“I didn’t mean nothing by it, Daddy. Mama didn’t neither. She was just
hoping you’d come to New York with us.”

“Ain’t nobody going to New York—not me, not you, and most of all, not
your mama!” Benjamin turned and stomped out the door.

Susanna got to her feet and slid her arm across Ethan’s shoulder,
“Don’t worry,” she said with a nervous smile, “when the time comes, we’ll slip
off without him knowing.” 

 After that incident, they avoided any outward talk of New York.
Susanna whispered bits and pieces in Ethan Allen’s ear every so often and he
kept imagining himself at Yankee Stadium, but other than that, very little was
said. Benjamin remained in a foul mood for a week because of the broken
tractor, then he finally went out and bought a brand new John Deere with four
times the horsepower of his old tractor.

“This baby can do twice the work in half the time,” he told Susanna.  “Next
year I’ll be able to put in an extra field of soy beans, maybe even a crop of
radishes.”

“Seems a man who can afford a
new tractor, ought to be able to take his family to New York City,” she
commented sarcastically; then she went back to thinking about whether or not
she should buy a pair of silver shoes to wear with her sequined audition dress.

S
cooter Cobb, claiming that
Susanna was one woman who deserved a nice vacation, slipped a fifty dollar bill
into her brassiere the week before she planned to leave for New York. “Baby,
you have yourself one helluva fling,” he said, “then get your butt back here,
‘cause I’m gonna be missing you something fierce!” In the past year Scooter had
come to feel about Susanna as he did his arms and legs—he couldn’t do without a
single one of them. When she smiled, his heart started doing jumping jacks and
when she pressed her body up against his, he could no longer remember his
wife’s name, or for that matter, the names of his children. If Susanna were
willing, he would have walked off and left everything—his wife of thirty years,
a house that no longer had a mortgage, even the diner. One nod from her and
halfway through frying up an omelet he would have thrown down his apron and
followed along, leaving the egg to turn black on the griddle.

“Oh, Sweetie,” Susanna sighed, “you know how
crazy
I am about
you, but I’ve got Ethan Allen to think about. Maybe when we get back from this
vacation…” Not once did she mention she’d be looking for a singing job in New
York, or that she’d be staying there forever if things worked out.

The Friday before they planned to leave, Susanna drove into town to
withdraw her trip money from the bank. So far, things were moving along without
a hitch; Benjamin had grown so preoccupied with his new tractor, he’d stopped
watching her every move and switched over to thoughts of planting some winter
squash. He never once noticed the valise of travelling clothes pushed up under
the bed, nor did he think to ask why Susanna had all of a sudden decided on having
her hair permed. He paid no attention to the way she’d dance around the house
belting out song after song; and when she drove off Monday morning to register
Ethan Allen for the new school term, he wouldn’t think to question it. Susanna
figured by the time he discovered they were gone, she and Ethan Allen would be
halfway to New York, having their lunch served by a Pullman Porter in the
dining car.  She had only two more nights of working in the diner,
then,
she told herself,
that’s the end of that!
Of course, she’d miss Scooter;
he was a man who truly appreciated the things she had to offer, but…  Susanna
parked in back of the Eastern Virginia Savings Bank and all but skipped in.