Like I said, I learned the entire story on Monday. I had called in sick and figured it safe to go buy a newspaper to check out both Saturday and Sunday’s scores.
I read where Wyatt Speight’s father promised his son that corn snake, as it ended up. And right there on page 2A under Local News the father mentioned how his son really wanted a “pine gator,” but a snake would have to do, after this ordeal. He said, “I want to thank all the people who helped bring my boy home,” and said that he wouldn’t be pressing charges against his father-in-law, a man who “fought some demons.” Evidently the grandfather thought Wyatt Jr. liked dinosaurs more than snakes, thus the “Rex” ploy.
My wife and I ate Alpha-Bits for supper that night, as we had most nights, spelling out words to each other and waiting without complaint.
Is There Anything Wrong with Happier Times?
Harold Lumley needed to check out his mother’s reported lapses in judgment. He had received a call from the executive director of the Calloustown Community Center — a place where Ruth Lumley had volunteered for the past six years reading to the children of migrants, offering English lessons to the workers, and basically being a joyful person in a variety of capacities. She’d refereed Liga Pequeña basketball games up until her hip replacement surgery and had taught a roomful of Latina women how to cook a number of Southern staples when it came to funeral foods, from potato salad to chicken pot pie. Ruth Lumley’d conducted seminars on how to open bank accounts, pass the DMV’s written test, and talk to a child’s teacher without having the teacher feel threatened. She had offered baton-twirling lessons so the little girls could one day feel good about themselves as majorettes.
The woman — Ms. Pickens? Ms. Pickering? — had told Harold over the phone that, although she didn’t want to pry into the Lumley family’s way of treating their elderly relatives, perhaps he should drive down and observe his mother’s recent peculiarities. She said, “I don’t want to judge you or nothing, but I believe your momma might be getting to that point where a retirement facility’s the best option. When they start acting peculiar, it’s a sign. I don’t know for sure, but she seems to have befriended some puppets, and turned her back on the rest of us.”
Harold cradled the phone to his ear. He needed to talk to his franchise owner about firing three people — one for ineptitude, one for stealing herbal Viagra, one for sexual harassment. He managed a place called Other Medicine — a small chain, a constant for Buddhists and Unitarians distrustful of pharmaceutical companies and reassured by the OM in the store’s name. “Can you be more specific?” Harold asked the woman. “Say your name again?”
“This is Berta Parks. I’m the executive director of the Calloustown Community Center down in Calloustown.”
Harold thought, “How did I get Pickens or Pickering out of this? Maybe I’m the one who needs to be reported for dementia.” He thought, “Wasn’t the old Miss America master of ceremonies named Bert Parks — man, how much crap did this woman get for her name?” He said, “Is my mother all right?”
Harold felt guilty about not visiting more often. Evidently his brother, Kenny, visited her two or three times a week. But with a divorce, two high school kids on weekends, and an ever-present rotation of minimum wage — earning high school graduates who confused Niacin with acai, vitamin B with bee pollen, and nickels with quarters, it seemed as though he spent eighteen hours a day outside of his own apartment. He brought his mother up for every other Christmas, for every other birthday. “I can’t come down to spend two or three days in Calloustown,” he used to say. “First off, it sends me into depression and flashbacks of growing up there. Two, I’d get stolen blind if I left someone else in charge of the store.”
To Berta Parks he said, “Okay. Okay. I talk to my mother all the time — almost daily — and she doesn’t sound any different to me. Kenny says she’s doing well, too.”
He’d not spoken to Kenny, who lived in Calloustown still after taking over their father’s extermination business, since he didn’t know when. Berta Parks said, “The elderly find ways of masking their frailties and insecurities. They find ways to adapt, you know. If you start talking to them about an open wound on their head, they can find a way to veer the conversation into something that happened to them in 1945 when open wounds were all the rage.”
Ever the salesman, Harold said, “I can get you some ginseng, gingko biloba, gotu kola, yerba mate, and rhodiola rosea if you think it would be a good idea to have some on hand for any of the older people who frequent the community center. These are all fine herbal supplements. They’re not necessarily approved by the FDA, but we all know the FDA is holding back the American public when it comes to valid, non-traditional antidotes to some of the more common ailments from which the public suffers these days. In our fast-paced modern world.” He had taken a community college public speaking course, and the instructor had advised everyone to use “fast-paced modern world” whenever possible.
Berta Parks said, “I’m just saying. I’ve been taking notes, and I’m about to start tape-recording some of the things that your momma’s saying. I tried to call your brother, but he got all choked up and said he couldn’t deal with it. He also said he had enough going on what with the field rat infestation we got going all over here.”
Harold tried to imagine a plague of rats overtaking the Calloustown Community Center, or Tiers of Joy Bakery, or Worm’s Bar, or the clapboard house where he grew up. He could imagine the fear that must have consumed a dwindling population on its way to attaining ghost-town status, and could smell the ammonia of a rat-infested abode, seeing as a teenager he’d been forced to exterminate with his long-deceased father. He envisioned his mother sitting in that La-Z-Boy chair in front of the TV — maybe one of those competitive cooking shows airing, or a Green Acres marathon — with rats flitting back and forth unperturbed.
“What’s she doing that’s so peculiar?” he asked Berta Parks. “I mean, Jesus, old people — sometimes they finally realize they can say anything they want to say. I hope I get to that point. I want to get to the point where I can look a customer in the eye and say, ‘No amount of milk thistle is going to heal that enlarged liver of yours, ma’am.’ You know what I mean?”
“I might as well go ahead and get to the point,” Berta Parks said. “You can do what you will with it. Let me say right off that we appreciate the hours and hours Ms. Lumley’s put in at the community center as a volunteer. She’s done more than anyone else around here. That being said, she’s started using a lot of profanity that we think is unnecessary. Somewhere along the line she became convinced that the little Mexican children should hear Br’er Rabbit stories in order to understand English better — you know those stories by Uncle Remus? — but she keeps adding all these curse words in between that aren’t part of the original stories.”
Harold didn’t hear, exactly, all of Ms. Parks’s complaint. He got stuck on the “that being said” part, which was another thing his community college public speaking instructor advised using whenever possible. Harold wondered if Berta Parks might’ve been in the same class he took. He said to her, “I remember those old Br’er Rabbit stories. We used to have some kind of storyteller woman show up and tell those stories to us back at Calloustown Elementary. Something about Br’er Rabbit living in the briars all his life. Or Br’er Rabbit going down into a well, stuff like that.”
“Uh-huh. But you probably don’t remember Br’er Rabbit saying stuff like, ‘I’mo blank your blank sister if’n you don’t get that blank tar baby outta my blank field of vision, you son of a blank.’ Ms. Lumley’s saying those kinds of things to the little Mexican children. We have come to believe that — illegal immigrants or not — they don’t deserve such lessons.”