Harold said, “Oh come on now. Are you sure? Sometimes my mother has a speech impediment.” He tried to think back to when she ever said a curse word. He said, “Well that doesn’t sound all that great. At least Spanish-speaking muchachos might not understand what she’s saying!”
“Like I said,” Berta Parks said, “it’s what we have before us. We just think it would be good if you could talk some sense into her, or see if there’s a better place for her to be.”
“I understand. Okay,” Harold said. He thought about how he’d not fire anyone today. He thought about how he probably needed to visit his brother, too, if his car could make it through a roadblock of vermin on the outskirts of Calloustown.
Ruth Lumley’s car isn’t in the carport, and she’s not home. The side door’s locked, and Harold finds her extra key hidden in the same spot where his parents kept it when he grew up: in a conch shell sitting atop a clay flowerpot filled with playground sand, previously used as an outdoor ashtray when Mr. Lumley held his annual “I Exterminated You” BBQ for the year’s clients. Harold has thought often about how, in a strange way, he became interested in herbs and vitamins due to these yearly fetes, how in between sneaking drinks from the bar he thought of how all these people would one day suffer from the effects of even the lesser pesticides and insecticides his father sprayed beneath their abodes and how one day they might be in need of something like detoxifying herbs such as burdock and dandelion root.
“Why even lock the house?” Harold thinks. “Who would break in here?”
He unlocks the door and finds the familiar smell of his childhood: Pine-Sol, boiled cabbage, cigarettes, Pledge, coffee grounds. He would think something like, “My mother hasn’t changed whatsoever,” but he finds himself mesmerized and bombarded with what she’s hung on the kitchen, then the den, walls. Ruth Lumley has, evidently, joined the computer age and — addicted to eBay — bought every available eight-by-ten promotional photo of TV and motion picture animal stars. Harold looks up at the nicely framed pictures of Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Flipper, Gentle Ben the bear, Trigger, the Lone Ranger’s horse Silver, that Jack Russell terrier Eddie from Frasier, Zorro’s black stallion Toronado, Clarence the cross-eyed lion from Daktari, and Festus’s mule. He walks into the den to find some of those same photos, plus ones of Tonto’s horse Scout, Fred the cockatoo from Baretta, the fake shark from Jaws, Willy the Orca, a bundle of rats from Willard, and a snake from one of the snake movies that Harold doesn’t know. She has three photos of Duke the bloodhound.
Then there are the animation cels: Heckle and Jeckle, Dino, Marmaduke, Scooby-Doo, Tom and Jerry, Astro, Tweety Bird, Roadrunner, the Tasmanian Devil, Wile E. Coyote, Pepe Le Pew, Yogi and Boo-Boo. Harold’s mother had gotten rid of a bookcase in order to fill the wall behind it with eight-by-ten framed cels of Deputy Dog, Droopy Dog, Goofy, Hector, Huckleberry Hound, Mr. Peabody, Odie, Pluto, Snoopy, Spike, and Underdog. He feels bad about thinking, “Good God, there goes the goddamn inheritance.” Framed photos of Br’er Fox, Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Terrapin, and Miss Possum line the very top of the wall — all from Song of the South.
He calls Kenny and says, “Hey, man, where are you?”
“I’m on Mr. Reddick’s roof because he has these rats stuck in his gutters running in some kind of race. You ought to see it, man! It’s like a living river of smooth brown hide. It’s like some kind of bizarre stock car race.”
Harold says, “I’m at Mom’s house. You been here lately?”
Kenny says, “If I’d’ve known it was this bad I’d’ve brought a Gatling gun up here with me. You ought to see these things go. Hey, come on over! I ain’t but a mile away.”
“What’s the story with all these photos on the wall? Have you been by here? I don’t know if I can even count as high as how many pictures she has on the wall.”
“Jesus, I’m going to have to go get a flute and see if I can lead these things out of here. Hold on. Let me get down off this roof, which means we’ll probably lose the connection.”
“Did you give her all these pictures? I hope to God that’s the case. Because if it’s not, then we might have a problem.”
“What pictures? Pictures like you look at, or pitchers like you pour tea out of? I might’ve given her one of each. Over time I might’ve given her one of each. I sent her a picture of me and the boys and Dora last Easter in front of that big cave opening.”
Sure enough, they lose their connection.
Harold enters the hallway to find nothing on the walls except finishing nails sticking out a half inch each, apparently in wait for more publicity shots and/or animation cels. He enters his and Kenny’s old bedroom, which appears untouched, then goes to the guest bedroom to find his mother’s laptop turned on and stuck to a page that shows an eBay auction for a Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey cel, at the moment going for $99.99 with three hours left.
“A hundred goddamn dollars? Are you kidding me?” Harold says out loud.
He looks down to an old Calloustown Extermination notepad that his father gave to clients thirty years earlier and reads, “Password — ImNotOld81” and “UserID — Im-NotOld81.”
He locks the side door and places the key back in the conch shell. Harold thinks about going over to the community center and sitting down with Ms. Parks but realizes that — in a small town — sometimes people exaggerate the quirks of the elderly.
So he drives over to the Reddicks’ place to talk to his brother first. Harold passes his mother coming toward him, a mile from his house. He waves at her, but she doesn’t seem to see him. She wears oversized sunglasses handed out at the ophthalmologist’s office, her eyes an inch above the steering wheel.
Harold turns quickly into an old logging road, backs out, and accelerates to catch up with his mother. She drives twenty-five miles an hour, so he meets up with her in a matter of seconds. He flashes his lights. He blows his horn and waves. She doesn’t notice. He veers left and thinks about pulling up beside her on the straightaway. She has a number of dings and scrapes on the back bumper of the 1988 Lincoln Continental, the last model bought by Mr. Lumley after what he labeled the Great Bee and Bat Scare of 1987.
Harold’s phone rings and he picks it up off the passenger seat without looking down. Kenny says, “I figured we’d get cut off.”
“I’m behind Mom right now,” Harold says. “I’m following behind her. I was calling you earlier about her house. When’s the last time you went inside there?”
“I don’t know,” Kenny says. “It’s been a while, now that I think about it. We meet for supper over at that Ryan’s a couple times a week. She can almost eat for goddamn free if we get there by four thirty.”
Harold watches as his mother sticks her left arm out for a turn signal instead of hitting her blinker. He thinks, “She probably thinks it costs money to use any of the electrical system. She’ll spend ten thousand bucks on weird cartoons, but she won’t use her blinker.”
“You want to come on over and meet me at the house? I believe this might be one of those intervention kinds of things that everyone’s talking about all the time. Is she drinking?”
Harold wonders if he’s lost another phone call. He pulls in behind his mother in the driveway. Then he hears his brother going, “Rat in the truck, rat in the truck!” followed by brakes screeching.