I think it was Lonnie Harrell who said, “My grandmother has a beehive in her backyard.”
“I got pictures of my grandmother with a beehive hairdo,” one of the Munsons said.
“I ain’t talking about real birds and bees,” Mr. Whalen said. “Let’s pretend that I’m talking about mice and, and…I don’t know. Let’s just say I’m talking about mice, seeing as they reproduce like all get-out.” He took a big swig from his cup.
My sixth-grade teacher came in the room carrying a tray. She wore blue jeans, which kind of freaked everyone out, and said, “Who wants some Pepsi?”
You’d think none of the Munson or Harrell kids had ever had Pepsi, which might’ve been true. Half of them dropped their poles down into the hole and rushed our teacher. They grabbed and kicked each other out of the way. Me, I sat there thinking about something else my parents had told me: “Pepsi Cola” rearranged came out “Episcopal.” So I said, loudly, “We drink Pepsi Cola all the time at our house because it’s ‘Episcopal.’ That’s what we drink. At my house. Because it’s a Christian drink.”
Everything seemed to stop. It wasn’t my imagination that all of my male classmates shut up and turned to me as if I’d spoken in tongues. Ms. Whalen — I should mention that her maiden name was Munson — said, “What did you say, Luke?”
I said, “I mean, we drink Gatorade.”
I didn’t think I had said anything blasphemous — in retrospect, I think all these children of Pentecostals had never heard of another denomination, except for maybe Baptist. I was glad that Mr. Whalen broke the tension by yelling, “I got one, I got one, I got one,” and then pulling up a fake mouse that, like a blue crab breaking the surface and experiencing air, he somehow got to let go of the cheese and drop back down into the crawlspace.
My sixth-grade teacher screamed and took off running for the kitchen. My classmates brought their Pepsis back, and one of them said, “Hey, Luke, go under the house and get our poles we dropped.”
I said, “You dropped them down there. You go get them.”
“You scared to go under the house, son?” Ben Whalen said. Yeah, Mr. Whalen. You’d think that Lonnie, Donnie, or Ronnie would’ve dared me, not my sixth-grade teacher’s husband, a man I’d up to that point thought to have escaped inbreeding disasters.
“Luke rhymes with puke,” Bobby said.
I don’t know why I thought it necessary to prove myself, to say, “Somebody at least give me a flashlight.”
I walked outside the Whalens’ house and didn’t look back to see if anyone stared at me through the window. I could’ve walked home — it wasn’t but a mile — but I knew my parents would’ve been disappointed. Somewhere between my father mumbling, “A fronte praecipitium a tergo lupi” and “Ubi fumus, ibi ignis,” he always said to me that enduring frost only made one stronger. I walked up to Mr. Whalen’s six-wheeled truck — this is why I thought he had escaped the normal Munson/ Harrell mindset — a silver refrigeration vehicle that he drove around a few-county area with FRESH MEAT ON WHEELS written on the panels. He offered people rib eyes and filets and hamburger patties, chicken and fish and pork chops, for prices much lower than Winn-Dixie, Bi-Lo, or the A&P — grocery stores that might be thirty miles from Calloustown.
I went around the side of the house and paid attention not to get snagged by briars or the Whalens’ neighbor’s pit bull on a long chain, and then the back of the house where a short door led to the crawlspace. I turned on the flashlight and thought, somehow this is going to keep me being made fun of. In a normal world kids would say, “That Luke — he’s brave.” But in the land of Calloustown, a day before the “What Does Sherman Know?” celebration, it would probably come out that I was one with Satan, what with my non-fear of all things rabid that live beneath our abodes.
I got in and waved my light around. As it ended up, the Whalens’ crawlspace was nearly high enough to count as a basement — six feet high, at least, where the hole stood — with a hand-troweled cement floor. I found the dropped bamboo poles right away, and saw light streaming in from above. I took a few steps and heard Stonewall say, “That’s not how I learned how it works,” then took a few more steps. Mr. Whalen yelled down, “Are you there, Luke?” but I didn’t respond.
I walked right to the edge of the bastardized ice hole and heard my sixth-grade teacher’s husband say, “That is how it works. It’s just like this here hole. The sperm’s the cheese, and the hole’s the hole, and once the cheese hits the hole it don’t take long for a baby to come out of the hole. The rat.”
I was twelve. We were all twelve. Mr. and Ms. Whalen didn’t have children at this point, and perhaps this was why. I yelled up at the hole, “Here,” and started shoving poles upward. Somebody, one of my classmates, yelled back down at me, “Don’t step on any of the babies down there.”
Somebody else said something about a stork, and then Mr. Whalen said loudly, “I give up,” and “Monetta, I’ve done my job here.” Then he might’ve fallen over, for there was a noise, and one of the Harrell kids said, “Are you all right?”
I wasn’t paying attention much. I’d come across a cache of Matchbox cars — vintage ones, though I didn’t know the difference at the time. Someone had built a miniature Grand Prix road course of sorts, complete with barriers, army men onlookers, trees fashioned from those colored-cellophane toothpicks, and what appeared to be the Calloustown Courthouse that never existed in the first place. I might’ve said, “Hey, can we play down here later?”
Or I might’ve kept it to myself, thinking that if Mr. and Ms. Whalen ever die in a fiery wreck, I’m coming back down here to get some things before anyone else finds them. Again, my parents hadn’t gone over those Ten Commandments at this point, especially the one about coveting your neighbor’s 1:43 scale die-cast toy cars.
I walked into the circle of light and looked up at all the little Munson and Harrell blank faces looking down at me. I said, “What’s going on up there?”
Mr. Whalen reappeared and said, “Hey, I got an idea. We might as well go through the whole nine-month process,” and he told the boys to throw their hooks back down. To me he said, “Hey, Luke, do me a favor. This is going to be fun! Place all the hooks around your belt loops. Go ahead! I won’t let you get hurt none.”
Ms. Whalen’s sixth-grade boys pulled me up through the hole in her den floor. I have no clue what kind of test line they used, or how the bamboo poles didn’t break under my weight hanging there in the crawlspace, but Ben Whalen told me to start screaming like crazy, and I did. What else was I supposed to do? I couldn’t see any of my unlikely deliverers, for they’d had to back down the hallway pulling.
Mr. Whalen stood there leaning against a bookcase that held a dictionary, a number of ashtrays, some candles, and framed photographs of dead deer. He yelled out, “Okay, y’all run back in here,” as I gathered myself on the lip of the hole, surrounded by ice bags.
No one said, “Are you all right?” Ms. Whalen yelled from a back room something about how we needed to settle down so as not to fall back in the hole.
Ben Whalen said, “And that’s how a baby is born, but without the ice or clothes that Luke is wearing.”
My teacher’s husband shoved what ice hadn’t melted over the hole’s lip. He slid the makeshift hatch over his own crawl-space, and covered the exposed wood with a rug that wasn’t much bigger than the jagged edges it needed to hide. “I’m going to make a spiral staircase down there one day,” he said, apparently to himself.