I said, of course, “Well I sure would like to take a look at the things.”
Ruben Orr said, “I tell you what, Finley. Do you mind if I call you Finley, or Fin? Raj told me your name. I tell you what. I’ll go home, get the ukuleles, and bring them back over to Rajer Dodger’s. I shouldn’t’ve left all my blackberries there in the first place. You drop on by later and I’ll have them there waiting for your inspection.”
I closed my truck door so that Ruben couldn’t see my nunchucks, sawed-off bat, or copper-wire-and-rubber billy club. I said, “I got some work to do around here, but I’ll come back on by about after lunch.”
“Sounds good,” Ruben said. He stretched his back. “You got a nice little setup here,” he said. “Damn, son, you look like you done good for yourself.”
“In a previous life,” I said, which was true, seeing as I’d married up. “Used to have a rich wife and a regular job.”
Ruben Orr straddled his moped and turned the ignition. “I hear that,” he said. He turned the ignition off and on again. “Same story as me, except for the rich wife and regular job.” He shook his moped, then opened the gas tank lid and peered down close.
I said, “Let me guess.”
“Goddamn it. This wouldn’t’ve happened if you’d’ve pulled over when I kept buzzing my horn and flashing my lights. Man, I took off following you before I could even fill up at Rajer’s. You know, they all drop their prices from about nine in the morning until when people get off work. I seen a thing on the news about it.”
I had zero cans of gas in my possession, seeing as I feared my ex-father-in-law showing up, spreading it around, and burning me clear out of the state. Or of dousing the place myself and sitting in the middle of it all, surrounded by custom-made ukuleles that weren’t selling like a year earlier. I said, “Let’s get that thing in the back of my truck and I’ll drive you over to Rajer’s. I don’t have gas here, and I fear siphoning out of my own tank.”
“Goddamn it,” Ruben Orr said. “I hate to put you out.”
He picked the moped up by himself and laid it down on its side. Ruben strode over to the passenger side of the truck while I closed the tailgate. I said, “I’m not in a giant hurry today.”
“Hey, what are all those weapons of questionable destruction doing on your bench seat?”
I couldn’t lie. It’s a fault. Not being able to lie ruined my marriage. Making and selling ukuleles doesn’t require lying, since they are what they are. I dropped out of college first semester junior year because I enrolled in an acting class, and as it ended up I couldn’t conjure up a dialect outside the one I owned, or memorize lines I’d’ve never said in a social situation.
I said, “Well. I don’t own a gun. I don’t own rifles or pistols.”
Ruben Orr laughed. He banged his giant hand on my dashboard. “I had an old boy hit me upside the head with a two-by-four one time and I didn’t even swerve off the road.”
I tried to visualize a man getting whacked thusly while straddling a moped. I said, “I don’t even know how to use nunchucks, to be honest,” and backed out onto the road.
“I got this idea,” Ruben said. “I don’t live far from Rajer Dodger’s, and I got gas at my own home.”
A fireplace poker would fit nicely beneath my truck seat, I thought, and made a mental note to ask if he’s got fireplace pokers for sale when we get there.
“Mahogany’s good for a ukulele, isn’t it?” Ruben said as we pulled up to his mobile home, which appeared to be surrounded by four single-wides, two Airstreams, and two yellow school buses plugged without wheels into the clay yard. When viewed from above, I imagined that his arrangement of aluminum abodes looked similar to ancient hieroglyphics, or one of Carl Gustav Jung’s mandala examples, or a carton character’s slit eyeball with crow’s feet. “Over the years I think I had a couple oak wood ukuleles. One time I had one built out of balsa wood but I had it outside on a windy day and never seen the thing again.”
I said, “If you have a mahogany uke — like a Gretsch, or a Harmony Company Vita-Uke signed Roy Smeck — I’d be interested. I’d be surprised, and I’d be interested.”
Ruben pulled his moped out of the truck bed, straddled it, turned the ignition, and rode it forward when it started. He steered it thirty feet to a four-foot-high, tin-topped, three-sided enclosure of sorts and pulled the kickstand back down. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “I guess I had enough gas in it after all. Must be a jiggle-needy starter that’s the problem.”
I can’t lie, like I said. I said, “I think you brought me out here on a ruse. I’m thinking that my ex-father-in-law hired you out to kill me.”
He smiled. “You got you some kind of paranoia going for you, son. Look. I will confess to a thing or two, Finley Kay. First off, I know who you are. Two, I’m about broke. I just thought that if I could get you over here, you’d be the kind of fellow who’d appreciate my collections and possibly want to buy something. Everybody knows how much money you getting for custom-made Finley Kay two-tone soprano ukuleles, plus that monetary award you got from the arts commission for Craftsperson of the Year, beating out all the basket weavers down in the low country. That’s it, I promise.”
I believed him, I suppose. A mixed-breed dog came out from beneath the livable trailer, stretched, then slunk back in. “How come you didn’t just show up at my house and ask me, then? Have you been hanging out at Rajer Dodger’s waiting for me? Did someone say I could be lured by thorny-vined fruits?”
Ruben Orr pulled a ring of keys from his blue jeans and opened the door to the closest storage trailer. He propped the door open, then walked counterclockwise to open the other ones on the property.
I closed my truck door, finally, after feeling for my knife. “You start rummaging in that first one. Yell if you got any questions. I’mo go inside and make us some special Old Fashioneds. I hear you got a thing for the bourbon.”
Fuck, I thought. I thought, Who drinks Old Fashioneds these days, outside of ninety-year-old Kentucky women and twenty-six-year-old hipsters obsessed and nostalgic for Brylcreem, money clips, cuff links, Vitalis, manual typewriters, turntables, cat-eye eyeglasses, and vintage paneled station wagons? I thought, my wife somehow got ahold of Ruben and told him how I never understood the notion of moderation, except in matters of love and mother-of-pearl inlay.
“I hope you don’t have any raccoons holed up in here,” I said, but Ruben had already entered his abode. I said to myself, “Go in, pick out a couple things, pay for them, and get the hell out of here.” I walked up three concrete steps to what had once been a classic, off-silver and aqua single-wide, probably one of the remaining few manufactured circa 1960 that hadn’t uprooted and flown away via tornadoes. Pick two things, pay what he asks, go home, and call somebody to install a home security system. Call up Rachel and tell her I’m not planning any surprise trips to Raleigh, should she worry, unless a knot of ukulele troubadours request some specialized instruments worthy of viable amplification.
I looked back at my truck to make sure there wasn’t a visible bomb strapped to the undercarriage. And then I turned my head to inside the trailer: stuffed bobcats, coyotes, wild turkeys, hawks, owls, coons, skunks, a river otter, maybe a badger, groundhogs, one small pony, a nutria, foxes, two armadillos, and coiled venomous rattlers roamed the floor. I’m talking, again, that this was a sixteen-by-eighty-foot trailer. Mounted heads of deer, wild boars, one moose, and a two-headed calf adorned the upper parts of the walls. I looked in between and saw no ukuleles, for one, or anything else I might be interested in transferring to my own living conditions. I should say that in between there were stacks of popsicle-stick baskets, tools, single- and doubletree yokes, a history of the boom box, and enough vacant wasp nest stucco apartments hanging from the ceiling to satisfy a homeopathy-leaning Chinese woman masterful in ancient reliable tonics and salves.