Oddly, she looked straight at her husband. Did I mention that he never set down his plastic cup throughout the spooky entrance, or how a pint bottle peeped out of his left back pocket?
“We was just playing a game,” one of the Munson boys said.
I quit laughing long enough to say, “Playing Pin the Pecker on an Armpit,” and, perhaps affected by a jigger’s worth of good bourbon, lost my balance and fell back down the hole, half-sliding down the ladder’s stringers.
You’d think that I’d’ve heard one of the adults say, “Uh-oh” or “Are you okay?” I swear, though, between terra firma and the cement floor I heard my sixth-grade teacher say, “No wonder Sherman swerved from this wasteland.”
I regained consciousness with my head against a dirt mound built for Matchbox car coasting. Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee stood beneath my eyes, and Jeb Stuart covered my up per lip. Ms. Whalen held the three in place, delicately. What would’ve been our little surprise treats sometime between the Finger Museum and the Stuffed Wild Animals petting zoo — Kool-Aid frozen in ice-cube trays, with plastic confederate soldiers frozen into them to be used as handles — now worked a secondary mission, namely to keep the swelling down from the tumble I took down Mr. Whalen’s imaginary ice hole/vagina.
I woke up and said, “What day is it?” like that, like I always had done in the past after getting knocked out.
My teacher shushed me and said, “You’re a different kind of Calloustowner, Luke.”
Upstairs, though I didn’t know it at the time, all the Munson and Harrell boys had been locked up inside the Fresh Meat on Wheels refrigeration truck in order to keep them out of the way and unable to call their parents. Somehow, if I knew the parents of Calloustown, the entire Noxzema incident would be interpreted as the Whalens’ fault. She’d get released from her teaching duties, and every Harrell and Munson would go back to eating non-fresh meat bought from a grocery store chain’s amateur butcher.
“I called his parents but didn’t get an answer,” Ben Whalen said to his wife.
I sat up and said, “I like the ambulance best,” referring to the Lomas Ambulance #14 Matchbox car that Mr. Whalen — during playtime — had backed beside a #57 fire truck, both of which were in front of a #13 Dodge wrecker, which seemed to be aiding the grenade-throwing army man who had just wrecked his #73 Mercury station wagon.
“You don’t need an ambulance,” Ms. Whalen said. “By the time an ambulance gets here you’ll have healed these bumps and grown new ones.” She took Jeb Stuart off my lip and put him in her own mouth. “You’re okay, comparatively.”
I said, “I think my parents drove down to Columbia to see a movie, that’s where they are.” I got up and said, “I’m okay.”
Mr. Whalen didn’t offer me another sip of George Dickel. He said, “I got a good mind to leave them boys in the truck for the rest of the night. We got any Pine-Sol? I need to go scour down the den from whatever emissions those boys made up there.”
My teacher leaned in to look at my pupils. I thought she wanted to kiss, but she said, “What’s the capital of Florida?”
Immediately I said, “Miami.”
“He’s all right,” Ms. Whalen said, and her husband nodded.
We walked out the crawlspace door. When we passed Mr. Whalen’s work truck he banged on the panels hard a few times. Inside the house my teacher put on some rubber gloves and covered the hole in the floor, then the rug, then scooted a table over the hole. She told me to try my parents again, I think just to see if I could remember the number. My mother answered on the first ring. She said she and my father had decided against going to a movie, that they’d been there all night, that the phone hadn’t rung. I told her she needed to come get me, and when she asked why I didn’t say, “Because I know anatomy,” or “I don’t fit in,” or “There’s a chance I’ll turn to alcoholism if I stay here much longer,” or “My teacher doesn’t know state capitals.” I said, “I hit my head when we were playing freeze tag.”
Ms. Whalen took the receiver from me, finally, and said to my mother, “Luke was It,” among some other things. Again, in retrospect, I think she might’ve been speaking metaphorically.
So I missed another ceremonial burning of the Calloustown Courthouse. I heard later that Mr. Whalen’s minibus didn’t start up the next morning and that he had to drive my classmates around in the back of his work truck. Those idiots said they were surrounded by hanging meat for the entire day, by carcasses meant to be bought by their kin. I shrugged a lot over the next six years and lied back at them. I told them my father let me take dates out on his cherry picker once a year to see our hometown fake burn, and it worked in regards to getting girlfriends amorous. When, finally, I told my parents the truth about that one night I had with the Whalens, my father made a point to order a gigantic box of sausage, though he only cooked the patties and set them out for crows to eat, then fly around our hometown fouling windshields and rooftops. My father believed that a modern-day Sherman might act likewise.
Gripe Water
I assumed that my wife’s childhood friend, Dottie, never encountered an etiquette handbook, or never had the common sense and decency to consult any number of social skills experts who offered advice in daily newspapers or Internet web sites. How hard is it to take a deep breath, drop the knitting needles, and contact a grief counselor or birth consultant in these days of omnipresent bloggers? You’d think that the first half-dozen times Carol miscarried would’ve taught Dottie to stay home and wait for an all-clear. I don’t want to accuse my wife of impatience, but maybe — with three early miscarriages behind her within two years, six or eight since we officially married — she shouldn’t have told her friend Dottie, or my relatives, or even me. One time I got on the Internet and found a pregnancy authority who said that, until every childhood disease had a cure and car seats got deemed foolproof and failsafe, an expectant mother shouldn’t announce her pregnancy until the kid enrolled in second grade. Maybe the specialist exaggerated. I’m beginning to think that a number of everyday bloggers like to show off their sarcastic viewpoints, that they sit back in their rooms alone laughing over what people might undergo in the realm of bad luck and poor judgment.
“You might as well leave now,” Carol told me right before Dottie showed up the early afternoon after the last miscarriage. This was a Saturday. Two nights before, Carol went to the bathroom. We didn’t go to the emergency room, or call an ob-gyn. I always said, “Do you want me to take you to the ER?” because it worried me. I would always say, “We need to see someone more specialized than a general practitioner.” I think I stole that line from a husband character I saw one time in a made-for-TV movie.
She and I didn’t even have regular GP doctors. It’s not like we were Christian Scientists. Carol and I, it seemed, were the type of people who believed that bad news and worry caused sickness and premature deaths.
“It’s nothing,” my wife always said. “It’s not even noticeable. There’s not much difference than sitting down first thing in the morning and finding out your period started in the middle of the night.”
I’d looked up some information myself, quietly. I ruled out some kind of Munchausen syndrome, seeing as Carol would more than likely deliver a child and then push it down a flight of steps if that were a valid diagnosis.