Welcome to Fred (The Fred Books) (9 page)

“I see.” I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to chew tobacco, at school or anywhere else, much less risk punishment for it, but declined to share my perspective with Ralph. My clothes already marked me as an outsider. Why exacerbate the issue by sharing radical viewpoints on smokeless tobacco? A voice from behind me interrupted my reflections on controversial opinions.

“Hey!” This time I could tell this wasn’t a greeting; it was an attempt to get my attention. I turned around. The scrawny black-haired girl stood looking at my belt. She was taller than I had expected. “Did that belt come with a pair of holsters and a six-shooter? Where’s the star?”

“Star?” I stepped back defensively. She had a pale face and large eyebrows that gave the impression that two caterpillars were line-dancing on her forehead. Her eyes were as black and shiny as a hamster’s. Strands of pine straw jutted from her tousled jet-black hair.

“Star. Sheriff’s star. Ta go with the belt. And the six-shooters.” Her eyes sparkled. She took a step back, spread her feet into a wide stance, and bent her knees slightly. I took another step back, wondering if this was some kind of hillbilly kung fu. I glanced over at Ralph, noting that he also seemed wary. I looked back at the girl, alert for any sudden motion. She held her hands out from her scrawny hips, bony elbows poking out to either side. “Draw,” she hollered.

The penny dropped. She was comparing my belt to a play cowboy outfit. Her ignorance of stylish ’60s dress was lamentable, of course. However, her attempt at ridicule only highlighted her own naïveté, and I felt it my duty to defend myself by pointing this out. I tossed the hair out of my eyes. “This isn’t a . . . obviously you don’t know . . . I mean . . .” My voice trailed off into second thoughts. What if she interpreted my correcting her as “messing with her?” She might feel moved to punch me in the gut.

“Oh, don’t pay her no mind,” Ralph muttered. He turned to my accuser. “Jolene, don’t be so ignernt. This is how Yankees dress. Ain’t you ever seen pictures of the Pilgrims?”

I felt the need to correct the record on one particular issue. I didn’t see the value in pursuing the slight 350-year gap between Plymouth Rock and acid rock, but my point of origin was an important distinction. “Uh, I’m not a Yankee.”

“Oh, yeah,” Ralph said. “I fergot.”

“Yer not?” Jolene asked.

“No. I was born in Fort Worth,” I replied with a touch more asperity in my voice than is customary for such an admission.

“Then why do you dress like one?” Jolene asked.

It was a good question, but I didn’t have an answer. At least, not one I could relate before the bell signaled the end of recess. As I stood under the pines in all my sartorial splendor, Jolene facing me in a gunslinger’s stance, I began to get an inkling that things might prove a little more difficult this time out.

CHAPTER NINE
The following Sunday I discovered that, contrary to the impression formed on Wednesday night, humans younger than thirty attended the church. The fifth- and sixth-grade Sunday school class had a handful of kids in it, including Ralph, Jolene, and her twin brother, Bubba. The predictable routine of lesson and crafts was followed by the church service, where we were all introduced, again, and then a dinner in our honor in the fellowship hall.

As the guests of honor, our family went through the line first. I bypassed the pimento cheese sandwiches and piled my plate with fried chicken, potato salad, pork and beans, and corn bread. Heidi, Hannah, and I sat down and sampled the goods. We were joined by inmates from our respective classes. Ralph, Jolene, and Bubba plopped down near me. I realized I had neglected to pick up a drink. I left to get a plastic cup of sweetened tea and was joined by Ralph. We returned together and sat down to enjoy the home cooking of Fred’s finest kitchens.

The chicken was of the first water, a crispy batter drained of the taint of excessive grease. The potato salad featured mustard, which suited my palate more than mayonnaise. And I strongly suspected that one would not taste finer corn bread until we all gathered at the Marriage Feast of the Lamb, where even the chitlins would be heavenly. I tended toward optimism about the possibilities of life in this wilderness, filled with the warm glow of beneficence engendered by good cooking.

I was talking to Ralph as I sampled the pork and beans, intent on my story about crashing into a mail truck, when he grabbed my wrist, stopping the fork en route to my mouth. I looked at him, annoyed, and jerked my arm away.

“Stop!” he yelled with an inexplicable urgency.

I froze, my mouth open, fork poised inches from my expectant taste buds.

Ralph pointed at my fork. “Look.”

I looked. The beans were restless. Closer inspection revealed a stinkbug covered with juice. It circumnavigated the mound of beans, searching for an escape from this island suspended in the air. I followed Ralph’s gaze to Jolene, who seemed unusually interested in the Lottie Moon missions poster on the wall next to her. I looked back at Ralph and raised my eyebrows. He nodded. I flicked the bug off my beans in her direction, but she didn’t acknowledge it as it sailed past her and bounced off the poster, leaving a smudge of pork and beans in the middle of China.

“Thanks.”

“No problem.” Ralph began salting his lima beans, but the lid dropped off the shaker and his plate took on the look of the bottom half of an hourglass. He bit off his exclamation in midsyllable. We looked back at Jolene, who was intently evaluating the thermometer on the poster that gauged the donations given to date. I looked at Bubba. He gave me a sympathetic smile. I looked at Ralph. We exchanged knowing nods.

I dumped the tainted beans to the side and took a healthy bite from the opposite side of the pile of beans. Just before my head exploded. At least, that was the impression I got. It didn’t actually explode, but it was several minutes before I had the spare time to confirm this fact. I had the distinct impression that Mount Fuji had relocated operations in the general vicinity of my mouth and was open for business. If that wasn’t fresh lava pouring down my throat, I didn’t know what it was. Three glasses of tea later, I found the empty bottle of Tabasco sauce at the end of the table. I looked for Jolene, but her place was vacant. I saw her peering from the door to the hall, a gleeful smile of satisfaction on her impish face, and then she disappeared.

I still felt a warm glow, but it wasn’t the same warm glow of human kindness I had felt before. Obviously, I wasn’t out of the woods yet. My instincts had been correct. This transition was not to be like those that had gone before. The weeks and months that followed confirmed my suspicions.

Conversations with my classmates were rare. When I joined a group, I would get noncommittal nods acknowledging my presence or, sometimes, frank stares. All I knew of these kids was what I could learn from a distance, like an astronomer studying a star.

Seating for lunch was predicable. At the far end of the table the three Furies that Ralph cataloged on day one—Squeaky, Jolene, and Thelma—sat huddled together, whispering like a convention of sprinklers and self-consciously ignoring the boys, who sat as far away as possible.

I usually sat next to Ralph Mull. Since his family went to my church, I saw him on weekends. His older sister, Janet, was in high school, wore short dresses and plenty of makeup, and sometimes smoked cigarettes behind the church. I knew him better than anyone else at the table, which wasn’t saying much.

There was Darnell Ray. He had straight, blond hair cut in a style reminiscent of Adolph Hitler and wore thick glasses that always seemed to be as greasy as his hair. His lunch conversation consisted primarily of details about his latest project. The son of a trucker, he had an entire stable of go-carts and motor bikes in various stages of disassembly.

Bubba Culpepper had short, dark hair and a cautious demeanor, always checking the salt shaker before using it. His apprehension was due to a lifetime of anticipating and enduring the assaults of his twin sister, Jolene. His real name was Bodean, an unfortunate by-product of his twinness, but only his family was allowed to call him that. I always wanted to call him String Bean Bodean because he was long and lanky, but I didn’t run fast enough.

Thelma’s brother, Jimbo, with his round head perched atop an equally round body, only lacked a scarf and carrot nose to be mistaken for a snowman. His pie-face was completely devoid of expression. Department store mannequins had more personality than Jimbo, also known as Jumbo Perkins. He rarely talked at all, but when he did, he specialized in one-syllable words, particularly of the four-letter variety. Jimbo was the only kid who openly chewed tobacco at school, undeterred by official censure. Down on the river bottom he lived a life of fierce independence like his misanthropic ancestors, an embodiment of the legacy they passed on—an existence of voluntary isolation interspersed with violent encounters with civilization.

Late in the school year Darnell amazed the entire populace by riding a go-cart to school. The surprise was that he actually had one in working order long enough to ride it anywhere. He parked it under a corner of the school building, and during lunch he let some of us ride it in the field until the principal appeared and impounded it. We spent our time clustered around it in admiration until the bell rang and we reluctantly returned to the classroom.

The warm May afternoon was not improved by a spelling test. I struggled to stay awake in the long pauses while everyone labored to spell “mischievous” and “conscience.” Flies buzzed through the windows, and the ceiling fans spun ineffectually in the heights above us. Suddenly a raucous din echoing in the hall broke the silence. We looked up to see Jimbo Perkins flash past the door in the go-cart, his normally expressionless face suffused with a look of fiendish delight.

How the teacher failed to miss Jimbo was a mystery, but Darnell didn’t pause to contemplate this particular conundrum. He leapt from his desk with a cry of dismay, the matter of the number of m’s in “immediate” temporarily tabled to pursue new business. He bolted to save his treasure from certain destruction.

The class crowded to the door and spilled into the hall as Jimbo careened with abandon down the hall and Darnell, hampered by his cowboy boots, tried vainly to stop him. Jimbo skidded around a corner. Darnell plunged after him. We heard the screeching of tires and Darnell emerged seconds later, Jimbo following close behind like the Hound of Heaven with deliberate speed, majestic instancy.

The chase ended when Darnell bolted back toward the great cloud of witnesses in the hallway and Jimbo failed to negotiate the turn. The go-cart slid through the open doors of the library, past a startled librarian, and slammed into a shelf, bringing down a rain of books. One of them hit the throttle and killed the engine. Silence washed through the school.

Then, from the sea of silence, a wailing, inarticulate ululation emerged. It gradually resolved into a litany of curses emanating from Darnell as he dug his way through the mound of books, disinterring the object of his fury. The breadth of his vocabulary was impressive—informed, as it was, by his dad, the trucker. The principal pulled Darnell aside, revealing the figure of Jimbo sitting motionless, like a lawn jockey in a pile of leaves, transcendent joy shining from his face. Not even the principal in all his administrative glory could fail to be taken aback by the ecstatic bliss newly awakened on that perpetually impassive face. It was as though Jimbo heard the distant trumpet sounds from the hid battlements of Eternity.

Then the mists closed round the half-glimpsed turrets and Fred, Texas, reasserted itself. I blinked as if awakening from a dream. The hand of authority that was not restraining Darnell delved into the fallen chaos of literature, drew Jimbo forth, and delivered him unto the halls of justice for a proper reckoning. But even the administration of the dreaded paddle failed to remove the glow from Jimbo’s countenance. It took several days for the fading glory of his mountaintop experience to completely dissipate, and by that time, school was out.

CHAPTER TEN
When summer arrived, I found myself isolated at the parsonage. I would see Ralph and the Culpeppers at church, but there were six long days between, and I might go the entire week without seeing anyone under thirty. Except for my sisters, who didn’t count.

I used my spare time, an item I had in shameful abundance, to upgrade the tree house. I added some embellishments, most notably a secret compartment where I hid a waterproof metal can I had picked up at the Army surplus store in Beaumont. In it I stored the AM radio, my journal, and the Oscar book, which still held Pauline’s Bible and the newspaper clipping.

The only two stations I could pick up on my cheap radio were almost at the same frequency. One was a country station; the other, a college station that played just about anything known to man, and some that weren’t. The radio tended to vacillate between them. It made for strange and unintended medleys.

I spent much of the summer in the tree house, which I christened the Fortress of Solitude, after the Arctic refuge of Doc Savage, Man of Bronze. (This must be spoken with a deep, masculine, ringing voice. It’s a rule.) I pondered life’s imponderables while sequestered in my Fredonian equivalent of an attic hideaway. Half a year had passed, and I still felt like a poster boy for a carnival sideshow.

Then I discovered
Grit
, the newspaper—a weekly publication of human interest stories, jokes, recipes, and puzzles. The ad described how I could amass wealth beyond my wildest dreams at twenty-five cents a whack. Before you could say “Horatio Alger,” I was cutting the string from a bundle of
Grit
papers and foisting them on unsuspecting Fredonians. I hoped that the pen was mightier than the hammer and would crack the adamantine surface of this alien culture.

I began by hitting the few dozen houses actually between the city limit signs on the highway and made several sales. Encouraged by my initial success, I ventured south past the city limits and came upon a mailbox that looked like a miniature house, complete with shingle roof. It bore the name Culpepper. I turned down the dirt driveway and eventually found a house one hundred yards from the highway.

It was a rambling hodgepodge of logs, rough vertical planks, smooth tongue-and-groove slats, aluminum siding, asphalt siding, bricks, stone, and cedar shingles. Bay windows and huge sliding doors were scattered indiscriminately along the exterior. I later discovered that the inside was as varied as the outside, finished with paneling, Sheetrock, fabric, Formica, logs, and brick. The startling appearance was due to the fact that Mr. Culpepper was a construction contractor and used whatever he had left over from a job to remodel his own house.

Jolene answered the door with a dangerous look in her eyes, in my estimation, but when she learned of my mission, she deferred to her mother and disappeared. I made a sale and a hasty exit, uneasy about where Jolene might have gone and what she might be planning.

Continuing down the highway, I saw plenty of pines but a distinct shortage of houses. At last I discovered a large dirt road heading east. I took it toward the river, which was five miles back as the crow flies and an eternity as the bike rides. I figured where there was a road, there were people. And there were, just not many. I went a mile before I hit the first house, brick with a large carport and a bass boat next to it. The mailbox revealed that the Walkers lived there. A set of legs jutting from under a fairly new F-150 pickup revealed that at least one Walker was present.

I paused, unsure whether to address the legs or ignore them and knock on the door, when my dilemma was solved for me. The door opened and a short slender man in jeans and sport shirt came out carrying a large glass of iced tea and a can of beer. I recognized him from church, where he taught the high school Sunday school class along with his wife, Peggy. Heidi gave them good reviews, especially the cookouts they held for the youth group at the pond on their farm. I sometimes played with their one-year-old daughter, Kristen, when Heidi was baby-sitting. She smiled for everyone else, but usually just looked at me with a blank expression. I have that effect on kids.

“Hey, Mark.”

“Hey, Mr. MacDonald.”

“Just call me Mac. Everybody else does.” Everybody I knew called him “Old MacDonald,” which was hardly surprising given his name and the fact that he ran the family truck farm. I decided to keep this information to myself for the moment.

Mac placed the drinks on the hood and kicked the boots protruding from the shade of the truck. “Wake up, Parker, looks like you got company.”

A few cuss words came from under the truck, and Mac looked at me, shrugging his shoulders. Parker slid out from under the truck, holding an oil pan, and then saw who I was.

“Uh, sorry about that.” He pulled himself to his feet on the front grill of the truck. His jeans and white T-shirt were a montage of dirt and grease. He towered over Mac, stocky and sunburned, thick black hair pushed back in a cowlick over his dirty forehead.

“That’s OK.” I held out a
Grit
. “Would you like to buy a newspaper, Mr. Walker?”

“Mr. Walker? Geez, kid, just call me Parker. This ain’t no finishin’ school.” He shifted the oil pan to his left hand and drank half of the beer, leaving black prints on the can as he set it down.

“OK, Parker. Want to buy a paper? Only twenty-five cents!”

“Well, now, that is a bargain. You got two bits on yer, Mac?”

Mac fished out a dollar. “Here, give me two and keep the change.”

“Thanks!” As I turned to leave, a car arrived, two women and a baby in the front seat and a large number of paper grocery sacks in the backseat. I nodded politely at the new arrivals and, while waiting for the dust to settle, saw Parker grab a few sheets of the newspaper, drop them on the grass, and lay the oil pan on top of them. I suspected other patrons might find even more creative uses for their reading material, but in the interest of propriety left the thought unexplored.

Two more miles yielded five houses and one sale. By now I had turned left and was riding north. I found a rambling, ranch-style house with a new truck parked in front. The lady invited me into the air-conditioning for a drink. I shuffled across olive-green shag carpet into a paneled den where a huge console color television blared the
Dialing for Dollars
movie. I watched a few minutes while she dug around in her purse. She gave me fifty cents and told me to keep the change.

Half a mile down the road I came upon a decaying shack flanked by a dirt yard in which skeletal dogs scratched indifferently. A rusted-out Depression-era pickup jutted from the waist-high weeds in the backyard. With shaking hands, a frowzy man in overalls fumbled a quarter from an ancient coffee tin to buy a paper I suspected he couldn’t even read. I thanked him as he absently scratched at the gray stubble on his chin, his smile resembling a rotting picket fence in front of a haunted house. I recognized a couple of scrawny girls from school peeking around the porch, their ears poking through stringy hair. In the backyard a kid was perched in a rusted metal lawn chair, amusing himself by shooting flies off the table with a BB gun.

This incongruous juxtaposition of affluence and poverty repeated itself as I inched through the sand in search of customers. After what seemed like an eternity of pedaling through the Sahara, interspersed by few houses and even fewer sales, I discovered a branch of the road headed back toward the highway. I entered it cautiously, fearful it might be a mirage, but the sand on it was as real as the
Grit
in my pouch and my teeth.

About a half-mile before the highway I discovered a mobile home surrounded by numerous vehicles in varying stages of assembly and degrees of rust. A carport of impressive height housed a tractor rig with “Ray’s Trucking” painted on the side. I hardly needed the sight of Darnell up to his elbows in the hood of a mottled 1952 Ford pickup to realize where I was.

“Hey,” I called. Darnell looked up, squinting through greasy hair and greasier glasses. “Think your mom wants to buy a paper?”

“Sure, doll, why not?” He nodded toward the trailer. His mom was a short, wide, genial woman who bought a paper and then talked to me for thirty minutes. Since Darnell’s dad occupied himself driving, sleeping, or working on the truck, she was starved for conversation and would use any ruse to trap a victim. I noticed Darnell stayed well out of range, working on the motley collection of rust and grease that comprised his truck. I didn’t mind. I was practically dehydrated, and the cookies and Cokes flowed along with the monologue. However, after the first year of my route, I avoided selling her papers around Christmas because she insisted I have a piece of her fruitcake. It had a half-life of five thousand years, inside or outside the stomach.

I left the Ray estate rested and well provisioned for the final miles to my house. Being highway miles, they were inconsequential compared to my ordeal by baking on the sandy back roads, and I sailed along, glorying in the higher density of houses and greater cold-call-to-sale ratio that seemed to be directly proportional in proximity to the highway. In no time I was lounging in the Fortress of Solitude with a keg of iced tea, listening in quiet reflection to a poignant blend of “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”

After paying for the stock, my take came out to $2.75, including tips, and I estimated I had traveled seven miles in four hours, mostly on dirt roads. This worked out to about seventy cents an hour, or forty cents per mile. While the experience had afforded me an excellent lesson in capitalism, it was hardly a resounding success, even by my modest standards. The situation called for reflection. I sipped iced tea and listened to the continuation of “Figaro” coupled with “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”

Perhaps I could take in the backwoods loop west of the highway, which was more populated. There were the unexplored forks on the eastern route to consider. And there was always the captive audience on Sunday mornings. No need to abandon the enterprise yet.

As the medley morphed to “Figaro” and “Funny Face,” my mind wandered back to my other dilemma, my social ostracization. Many times in the past I had made this transition with much less pain. It occurred to me that my previous moves had always been in urban areas where other products of a mobile society had learned to establish and dissolve relationships as circumstances dictated. Fred was a gift horse of a different color with its shoe on the other foot.

I placed my hopes on the paper route to span the great divide. In my youthful exuberance and optimism, I took up the banner with the strange device and with a cry of “Grit” pursued my lofty goal. I covered plenty of ground and gathered an encyclopedia of information. I discovered that most Fredonians had never been out of Texas, even though Fred is thirty miles from Louisiana as the geese fly. Unlike those geese, I met people who had never traveled more than thirty miles from the house where they were born. Down in the Neches River bottomland were creatures who would have failed a casting call for
Deliverance
due to laying it on a bit thick. People of the land educated with axioms passed down for generations—how to hunt, fish, work the land. And squeeze the corn.

On my cycling tours I became aware of the primary attraction of Fred, one I came to appreciate more through the years—the beauty of the Big Thicket. Lush pine trees towered everywhere, providing a wealth of green even in the winter. On those rare occasions when it snowed, the countryside was transformed into a breathtaking Currier-and-Ives panorama.

Every road seemed a tunnel cut in the earth as I rode my bike through the thicket, dwarfed by the ubiquitous pines. In long treks through pastures and woods, I constantly found beautiful scenes hidden from the view of the casual passerby. I had secret hideaways scattered all over Fred—under dwarf magnolia trees with branches pressed to the ground in a wall of waxy green, or in shallow caves dug out of a steep bank by a rain-swollen creek, or in a sudden clearing in the middle of a dense profusion of undergrowth, or on an isolated knoll deep within a bog of stagnant water and fallen pines. I saw all types of animals—rabbits, foxes, raccoons, opossums, armadillos, and sometimes even deer.

At the end of summer I reviewed my situation. I had a detailed knowledge of practically every twist in every dirt road in a two-mile radius of Fred. I knew dozens of people by sight. I had a greater understanding of the diversity of lifestyles in Fred. I averaged about $3.50 per week income from the sales. But I had not made a single friend. In fact, my classmates viewed me with greater suspicion because I was selling reading material. I was forced to conclude that the project had been a financial and relational failure.

In the Fortress of Solitude I wondered what other factors could be leading to my isolation. The most obvious culprit was my wardrobe. I fit in like a Vegas cocktail waitress at an Amish house-raising.

Months of
Grit
tour-duty gave me ample evidence that hip-huggers were in drastic contrast to local custom. It was time to downgrade the wardrobe. It was a thought that weighed on me heavily, considering how painstakingly M and I had established our position as the forerunners of fashion. But the need for assimilation joined forces with pragmatism. There were no sources of fashionable clothes, as I defined fashion, within a one-hundred-mile radius. Not a single Nehru jacket to be found in Silsbee or Beaumont. I couldn’t bring myself to capitulate to the point of jeans, but I did acquire more subdued slacks, in brown and blue.