Spare Change (9 page)

For as long as he could remember Ethan Allan had known his parents to
do battle—scream and yell till a person in the next county could hear them;
cuss each other up one side and down the other; hurl heavy pots the full length
of the room—but
never
in all that time, had he seen a situation such as
this. Something was terribly wrong. He crept closer and closer to the house,
until finally his nose was pressed up against the bedroom window. He saw
Susanna’s head lolled off to the side like a broken arm.  “Mama,” he cried and
went running into the house. 

“Get the hell out of here!” Benjamin snarled.

“No!” Ethan Allen answered defiantly. “Something’s wrong with Mama!”

“She’s sleeping. Nothing’s wrong.”

“You blind, Daddy? She’s bleeding!”

“A bonk on the head, that’s all. Now, get.”

“It ain’t no bonk on the head, she’s bad hurt; can’t you see?”

“Enough!” Benjamin grabbed hold of Ethan’s arm and dragged him across
the living room to the door. “You’re gonna be hurting a lot worse than your
mama, if you don’t get the hell out of here!” He pushed the boy out the doorway
with a shove that propelled him halfway to the gate.

“Shithead!” Ethan Allen screamed as the door slammed shut. He scrambled
to his feet and headed back to the bedroom window, but by the time he got
there, the shade had been pulled tight against the sill and it was impossible
to see a thing. “Damn you, Daddy!” he yelled, “Damn you anyway!” 

Ethan Allen turned and walked back through the trees. He couldn’t shake
the image of Susanna from his mind—she wasn’t sleeping, he was almost sure she
wasn’t. Her eyes were wide open. He tried telling himself everything was okay,
but it didn’t feel okay. It was true enough that Benjamin had a mean streak
wide as the Chesapeake Bay, but Ethan knew his mama was tough and could take
care of herself. She’d done it before and she’d do it again. He thought back to
the time she stayed gone for two whole days then when she finally did get home,
ended up with a broken arm. And there was another time, when Benjamin blackened
her eye for coming home stinking of whiskey. Even after she’d been knocked flat
on her back, Mama always got up. She’d say she was real sorry for carrying on
in such a manner; then things were alright. Mama had that way about her; no
matter how mad a person might get, they’d end up forgiving her and laughing
like they couldn’t ever remember being mad. 

Edging through the open corner of the tarpaulin, Ethan Allen crawled
back inside his fort. Dog was still asleep. The game was over and Wild Joe
Bonomo was telling listeners that Jimmy Piersall’s ninth inning home run had
been a lousy break for the birds. Ethan snapped off the radio, he didn’t much
care if the Orioles lost another game, “The hell with you,” he grumbled and
curled up alongside Dog. Although he would have sworn he wasn’t the least bit
sleepy, Ethan’s eyelids drifted shut. Before long they were at Yankee Stadium,
him and Susanna, Mickey Mantle at the plate.  With a count of two and two,
Mickey swung and sent a home run ball rocketing into the stands; just as it was
about to land in Ethan’s fielder’s mitt, he woke to the sound of a car. Still
half-asleep, his first thought was that his mama had got to feeling better and
headed off to the diner.

Ethan pushed back the tarpaulin, and saw a flash of light in the
distance. With his hand latched onto Dog’s collar, he slipped through the trees
for a look. The house was still dark as a coal mine, but in the whiteness of a
full moon, he could see Susanna’s car right where it had been earlier, the door
still hanging open. Only now, there was a big white Cadillac pulled up behind
it, a car exactly like the one that belonged to Scooter Cobb. Given his daddy’s
already foul mood, Ethan felt sure this was gonna mean more trouble.      

Scooter Cobb climbed from the car; there was no mistaking him, he was a
man the size of a standing grizzly. “Susanna!” he shouted, “Susanna, you in
there?” He walked to the front of the house and began pounding a fist against
the door.

A low growl rumbled in Dog’s throat, but the boy quickly put his finger
to his mouth and made a shushing sound. They silently worked their way from the
edge of the tree line to a spot behind the wisteria. After several minutes, the
porch light came on and Benjamin cracked open the door. “Susanna’s sick,” he
said, sticking his nose through the narrow slit.  “She ain’t coming to work.”

“Sick?” Cobb repeated dubiously.

“Yeah, sick!”

Cobb slapped his huge paw against the door and pushed it open. “Funny,”
he said, “she was feeling fine this afternoon.”

“She ain’t now.”

“Suppose you let
her
tell me that.”

“She’s sleeping.”

“How about I see for myself!” Scooter Cobb pushed Benjamin aside, left
the front door hanging open and tromped into the house. He switched on the
living room lamp then continued through to the bedroom like a man familiar with
where he was headed. In the darkness, it first appeared Susanna was sleeping,
but when Scooter went to her, he saw the pool of blood beneath her head. With
him not being a terribly quick-witted man, it took the better part of a minute
before he came to understand she was dead. Once he knew that the woman who
brought his blood to a boil and caused the hair on his neck to rise up was lost
to him forever, he let out such an agonizing cry that it rattled the walls and
made the floors tremble. He turned back to the living room and grabbed hold of
Benjamin’s shoulders, “What have you done?” he screamed, “What in God’s name
have you done?”

“Not me,” Benjamin stuttered as he was lifted from the floor. “It
wasn’t my fault. She made me—”

“You
killed
her, you stupid son of a bitch! You killed her!”
Scooter shook Benjamin so violently that his head ping-ponged back and forth
and a spurt of blood shot from his nose. Over and over again he moaned, “You
killed her, you killed her.”

Benjamin began crying and pleading like a man afraid for his life, “It
wasn’t my fault,” he sobbed, “it was her…she was the one…always saying she was
gonna leave…always talking about how she was going to New York…”

Perhaps it was the mention of New York, perhaps it was knowing that Susanna
was leaving to spend the rest of her life with him; there’s no telling what finally
caused Scooter to snap—but he suddenly lifted Susanna’s husband into the air
and hurled him through the plate glass window. Not even the sight of Benjamin
lying on the front lawn, a spear of glass rammed through his shoulder and his
face covered in blood, was enough to quell Scooter’s rage. He stormed outside
like an angry bull and stomped on the man’s head, time and time and time again
until the left side of Benjamin’s skull cracked open and his face was no longer
recognizable. Scooter Cobb then got into his white Cadillac and drove off.

Ethan saw it all. He heard the screams and cries. He tasted blood
trickling down his own throat, the same as his daddy. He felt a stream of urine
run down his leg; yet through it all, he stood there too petrified to move.
Ethan wanted to make himself small, so small he could burrow into the ground
like an ant or a beetle bug, small enough that Scooter Cobb would forget he
ever existed. He curled himself into a ball, rolled under the wisteria and
stayed there for hours after the white Cadillac’s headlights had faded from
view.

Olivia Doyle

S
ome people
think superstitions are pure nonsense, but I say they give a person fair
warning; if you choose to pay them no heed, then stand back because all hell is
likely to break loose. I know in my heart, if I’d taken that opal necklace and
thrown it into the ocean the very second Charlie gave it to me, he’d still be
alive today.

I suppose happiness can make you blind to reality.
That’s what happened to me. I was so busy focusing on my blessings that I
glossed right over the significance of our being in Miami for eleven days; me—a
woman who has lifelong knowledge of the tragedies hovering around the eleventh
of anything. I still remember when I turned eleven—in that one year I had
whooping cough, measles, mumps and chicken pox. Then I was left back to spend
another year in the sixth grade, which resulted in my being the tallest,
gangliest girl in Miss Munroe’s class. Being called Wall-Tall-Westerly leaves
its mark on you! It makes you have a keen eye for avoiding any sort of eleven.
Why, I’d no more eat eleven jelly beans than take off flying, yet, I wasn’t all
that watchful of poor Charlie on the eleventh day of our Miami Beach
honeymoon. 

Letting down my guard as I did, I suppose I could say
I deserve what I got—but, the thing is it happened to Charlie, not me. I’d have
been better off if it had happened to me—being dead all over is far better than
walking around with just a dead heart inside of you.

Spare Change

O
livia,
a blushing bride just twenty-two days ago, was now a widow.  Not just a widow,
but a widow stranded over a thousand miles from home.  And as if that weren’t
bad enough, there was also the problem of transporting the powder blue
convertible and Charlie’s body back to Virginia. Olivia did the only thing she
could think of at the moment—she had Charlie cremated so that he’d be a
somewhat smaller package and she locked herself in the room at the
Fontainebleau and cried for five days straight. She cried till her heart was as
hollowed out as jack-o-lantern and her arms too heavy to lift, and still she
kept right on sobbing. She’d close her eyes to sleep but there, on the inside
of her eyelids, was the picture of Charlie, face down in the lobster bisque—
dead before he landed, according to a doctor who’d left his wife on the dance
floor and rushed over. No matter what she tried to concentrate on, she couldn’t
erase that image.

Olivia felt certain Charlie’s untimely death was her fault. She had a
number of jinxes that followed her around, attached themselves like fleas to a
dog; then when it was least expected, jumped over to take a chomp out of
someone close by. It wasn’t just the number eleven that was unlucky, it was any
multiple or divisor of eleven. She’d been on the lookout for trouble on the
eleventh day of their marriage, but she’d slacked off on her watchfulness when
they’d been in Miami for eleven days. Then, there was the matter of the opal—Lord
knows she should have expected the
worst
from a thing such as that! 

The hotel manager who’d told Olivia there’d be no charge for her room
and she could stay for long as need be, began to show concern when day after
day went by and she didn’t so much as stick her nose out into the hallway. He
sent pots of tea and platters of croissants to her room, but the trays remained
outside her door, untouched. On the third day, Olivia’s sobbing became so loud
that a couple at the far end of the hall asked to be moved to another floor.
When on the fifth day Charlie’s ashes arrived from the crematorium, the manager
feared the worst, and justifiably so. That night Olivia’s sobbing was louder
than it had ever been before. She held his remains in her arms and howled like
the wind of a hurricane.  Throughout the night she remained in front of the
window watching a black and stormy ocean; when morning came, she packed her
bags and left. “This is no place for us,” she said, “we’re going home.” She
placed the silver urn alongside of her in the front seat of the convertible and
drove off. On the first day of her trip home she had to stop thirty-seven times
to wipe the blur of tears from her eyes because every time she thought of
Charlie bottled up as he was, she’d start crying all over again.

The next nine days went along pretty much the same way. When Olivia
finally crossed the border into Georgia, she figured it to be a milestone and
decided at two o’clock in the afternoon to stop for the night. 

Welcome to Hopeful, Georgia—Pop. 387
the sign at the edge of town read. After she’d driven past numerous
peanut farms, Olivia came upon the town. She was hoping for something such as a
Howard Johnson Motel—a place with air conditioning and room service, a place
where she could throw herself onto an overstuffed mattress and cry for as long
as she wished. Of course, there was nothing of the sort in Hopeful. The town
was barely two blocks long; there were no restaurants, no movie theatre, and most
certainly no Howard Johnson’s. The only place to offer a person an overnight
accommodation was the Main Street Motel. Given the state of her weariness,
Olivia parked the convertible in front of the weathered building, slipped the
bottled up Charlie into her overnight tote and walked inside. 

There was no one behind the counter, so Olivia rang the bell and
waited. She stood there a good five minutes and still no one came, she then
tapped the bell a second time. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” a voice hollered out.
Minutes later a woman, bent from the waist and leaning heavily on a walking
stick, poked her head out from behind a calico curtain. “Sorry,” she said, “I
was tending to business in the johnny.”        

Olivia had expected a young man wearing a uniform, or at the very least
a badge with his name spelled out in bold letters. This woman was wearing a
flowered housecoat; she was little more than a skeleton with a top knot of snow
white hair and a coverlet of loose skin—how, Olivia wondered, could they expect
a person such as this to carry bags in?

“Need a room, Sugar?” the woman said.