Me and Sweet-Ho and Veronica and her daddy all tried to be extra-loving to Gunther so's he wouldn't be aware that his mama's smile didn't mean nothing at all. By the time me and Veronica was twelve and doing the family trees, Gunther was four years old and was the sweetest little boy in Highriver even despite his homeliness and the fact that he had ringworm that September to boot.
Mrs. Hindler gave us a week to work on family trees. Me and Veronica, we got done real quick because we could work together in the evenings, and because I could loan her my cousins and all. We was all done by the weekend, but we didn't have to hand them in until Monday.
On Saturday, it was hot, like it always is in September. September's a funny time of year, because school starts but the weather still feels like summer. We was lounging around out in the yard, all bored and lazy. We had a stack of old Reader's Digests that Mr. Bigelow had brung home from his real estate office. He said his customers was starting to complain that the reading material was old. And it was; some of them magazines dated back four or five years, but shoot, a Reader's Digest don't suffer much by age. Me and Veronica, we was reading all the "Life in These United States" out loud, taking turns.
Gunther was with us. I looked over at him and smiled—he had purple medicine smeared on his ringworm, so he looked odd—and he grinned his sweet little grin back at me.
"Sometimes it seems like Gunther's my brother instead of yours," I told Veronica.
"Hey, Gunther, what's your full name?" Veronica called. He was just sitting there in the grass nearby, hiccuping and playing with a bug.
"Gunther Philip Bigelow," Gunther said, and hiccuped. He could talk real good for his age, and had been saying his whole name out full like that from the time he was only one year old.
"See, he's my brother," Veronica said. "If he were your brother, his name would be Gunther Starkey."
"Well, shoot, Veronica, I know that. I just meant it seems like he's a Starkey because he stayed at our place so long when he was little, and Sweet-Ho is motherly to him, and all."
"Sweet-Ho is a motherly sort of person," Veronica pointed out, even though I knew it already and she knew I knew it already. "And my mother doesn't seem to be, not anymore anyway."
She said it all matter-of-fact, but I knew what a sorrow it was to her. Veronica's mother was just about the biggest failure of a mother I ever knew, except for a black-and-brown spotted dog my Uncle Furlow had once when I was little. That dog had three puppies and squashed every one of them dead by laying down right on top of them after they was born, and then pretended it was an accident. Me and Uncle Furlow knew better, though, 'cause we seen her do it, and we seen that she looked around real careful, arranging herself just right, then squash. So fast there wasn't nothing we could do, it took us by surprise even though we was watching.
I don't mean to say that Mrs. Bigelow would ever squash anybody, child or grown-up, or even want to, not even Gunther, whose looks was understandably a disappointment.
It was just that she didn't care about nothing, but pretended she did by that smile, which made it worse. Veronica told me that it wasn't always that way. When Veronica was little, her mama was normal-like, motherly same as Sweet-Ho for example, hugging and whispering and singing and patting, pouring cream and brown sugar over oatmeal, brushing Veronica's hair real careful so the snarls came out easy. Same as all mothers. And grandmothers too, I know for a fact, since I lived with my Gnomie all those years.
"It happened sort of gradually. The doctor calls it depression," is the way Veronica explained it to me. "Maybe it'll go away just as mysteriously as it began."
I didn't have much faith in it going away, though I didn't say so to Veronica. To tell the truth, to me it seemed as if it was getting worse, and Sweet-Ho agreed.
She looks okay, Mrs. Bigelow does, combs her hair and all and keeps herself neat. Lately she cries some, in her room, and maybe she smiles while she cries, we don't know. She don't talk. And she don't do much—Sweet-Ho cleans the house and cooks the meals—but shoot, lots of people don't like to do much. My grandma had a sister, my Great-aunt Patsy, used to just sit in a chair and read the Bible all the time, moving her finger along the page and saying all the chapters aloud in a mumble. But she was normal, just Bible-oriented, and didn't much care for housework.
Mrs. Bigelow wouldn't be called normal. Depression, that don't seem the right word. Shoot, everybody gets depression now and again, even me, especially if it's raining out or if I didn't do my homework. I think empty is what you'd have to call her, and isn't that the saddest thing, her with that smile and all?
She does empty things. Things that don't hurt nobody but at the same time don't mean nothing. Things like—well, here's one: Sweet-Ho told me that Mrs. Bigelow goes around the house smoothing the beds all the time. You know how a bedcover sometimes get wrinkled up, or maybe it has a bump in it, like if someone set something down and then took it away? So you smoothe it over with your hand.
Mrs. Bigelow smoothes all the beds, again and again, all day, even in the guest room, and no guest has been in that house, ever, as long as I've been living in the Bigelows' garage.
There was that one time after Gunther was born, and they thought Mrs. Bigelow was acting normal. But when she asked to have him back, and tried to care for him herself, she smiled and smiled and shook all over and then cried, Veronica said, when they put him in her arms.
"Don't you dare eat that bug, Gunther," Veronica said. Shoot, she knew he wouldn't. Gunther never ate nothing but bananas and hard-boiled eggs and Chef Boyardee spaghetti. He was just fooling with the beetle, making it walk on his arms and poking it with a twig to change directions.
Gunther messed with his little pet bug, and me and Veronica with the Reader's Digests, and it was hot, one of those real hot days with no air to it except thickness that you breathed in.
I think Mrs. Bigelow was laying on the glider on the back porch. Sweet-Ho was worried about her because she seemed worse. Maybe the hot weather was doing it. She smiled more and cried more, in her room, and walked around more, in the house, back and forth, back and forth. Sometimes, lately, she'd say things, religious-type things, usually, but they didn't make no sense to anybody. "He who believes in me shall not perish," she'd say to herself again and again. "Blessed be the pure in heart. The pure in heart." Then she would lay down, maybe pick up a book, but she wouldn't read; she'd flip the pages first slow, then faster and faster, and finally get up and walk again, as if she was always looking for something that she couldn't find.
Anyways, I think she must've been laying there on the porch beyond the kitchen. She was all dressed up that day in one of them filmy dresses she liked—Sweet-Ho says it's nothing to wash them, right in and out of the washer and dryer in no time, they're all synthetic—and maybe she would've had a book in her hands. But she wouldn't be reading it, only staring at the pages, talking about the pure in heart, as she flipped through. I think she must've been doing that, but I can't say for certain.
We got bored with the Reader's Digests, and Gunther got bored with his bug. But there wasn't much else to do.
"Wanta go talk to Sweet-Ho?" Veronica asked.
"She's ironing. It makes the whole kitchen hot. I don't think I could stand it in there. I might faint."
Veronica nodded. "Anyway, we're supposed to watch Gunther, and Gunther's supposed to stay outside and let fresh air get to his ringworm."
Poor old Gunther. Nobody but Gunther ever had so many ailments, one after another. Sweet-Ho said it was nothing short of amazing that he had such a good disposition, because most people who had pinkeye and ringworm and impetigo all in the space of one summer would get pretty grouchy, but not Gunther. I guess he was just used to it. Gunther thought it was normal to eat canned spaghetti for breakfast and then have medicinal ointment smeared on him. Shoot, he never knew anything else from the time he was a baby.
"Let's go down to the creek, then. Maybe it'll be cooler down by the creek. We can take Gunther wading, and we c
an look for frogs."
So we decided to do that, and I ran in to tell Sweet-Ho where we was going, while Veronica stacked up the Reader's Digests so's we could look at them later and maybe do the "Humor in Uniform" out loud.
Sweet-Ho was ironing, like I thought, but she gave me some cookies for me and Veronica, and a hard-boiled egg for Gunther. Both refrigerators, house and garage, had a special supply of Gunther's eggs, with "HB" penciled on the shells.
The porch was right off of the kitchen, and Mrs. Bigelow must have been on the porch, like I said. But I don't remember. I didn't look. Mrs. Bigelow wasn't the kind of person you seek out. But I think this: that if she was on the porch, laying on the glider smiling at a book, she must of heard me tell Sweet-Ho that we was going down to the creek with Gunther. She probably heard that, and lay there smiling, and maybe after a long time it began to take shape in her head, so that she began to think behind that empty smile: the creek. They took Gunther to the creek.
That's the only thing I can figure out about what happened later, that she heard me talk to Sweet-Ho, and that it took a long time to take shape in her mind, what she heard.
Anyways, I put the cookies and Gunther's egg in my pocket and went back out to the yard. Veronica had tidied up the Reader's Digests, and Gunther had placed his pet bug in a safe spot and was standing there hiccuping, with a look of anticipation on his homely ointmented face. He always got this sweet look of anticipation when something was about to happen, and Veronica had told him we was going to take him to the creek to look for frogs.
He trotted along behind us like a puppy and we headed down the driveway. The creek isn't far from the Bigelows' house, but first we had to get past the Coxes', where Norman was usually lying in wait, up to no good.
Norman has a whole storehouse full of bad things that he yells at Veronica and me. Here's a couple I've collected in my mind over the years:
"Veronica-Bonica Pigelow and her rotten piggy-wiggy brother, nyah nyah!"
"Parable Starkey-naked, nyah nyah!"
That's the kind of stuff he yells, and sometimes he throws stuff, like chestnuts from the tree by his house in the fall, or if he can't think of anything else to throw, he has this endless supply of paper clips because of who his father is. He has this way of zinging paper clips and it really hurts.
Norman's father is the head minister of the Highriver Presbyterian Church, and he has this office in their house, with all these paper clips and erasers and stuff. I do covet all that office stuff, but I would never in the world let Norman know that.
"Hey, Starkey, what's it like to live in a garage instead of a house, huh?"
That's what he yelled that day, when we passed on our way to the creek with Gunther.
And this: "You sleep in a car, Starkey-Parkey?"
At least he wasn't throwing stuff. Shoot, I don't much care what he yells, it only shows his terrible upbringing.
Veronica yelled back: "At least she doesn't sleep in a garbage can like you!" but I poked her and made her quit because yelling back only pulls us down to his level, that's what I think.
Gunther, he just trotted along behind, not even listening to Norman Cox because he was thinking about catching frogs, I expect.
When we got past Coxes' we had only Millie Bellows's house to pass, and she was sitting on the porch like she always does in good weather. Millie Bellows is the oldest person I know, so old I can't even put a number to it in a guess. Maybe ninety would be as close as I would try. Old and pink and evil-tempered, like a big old grumpy-faced doll setting there in the rocker on the porch, watching what goes by.
It is almost hard to believe what they say about Millie Bellows, that she had three different husbands along the way, all of them dead now. Looking at her propped up there all pink and scowling in her rocker, with a blanket over her legs on the hottest day so far this September, who'd ever think that someone would even want to marry Millie Bellows? Evil-tempered old thing.
Veronica and me, we always called out greetings politely to Millie Bellows, in hopes that good manners would rub off on her, even in her advanced years.
"Hello, Mrs. Bellows," we called.
"I declare, isn't it hot?" I added, because a comment about the weather is always a courteous thing, according to this column on etiquette I read in the newspaper.
"Don't let that boy tread on my grass," Millie Bellows called down from her porch in that old-lady, evil-tempered voice.
We looked back at Gunther, and he wasn't even nowhere near Millie Bellows's grass. He was tippy-toeing right down the middle of the sidewalk, watching for ants as he went, and hiccuping now and then.
Her dumb-ass grass was all brown from the heat anyways, and if old Gunther Bigelow was to step on it, it wouldn't show a bit. But Veronica took him by the hand, just to show Millie Bellows that we was watching out for him.
We nodded politely to her to call her attention to what good manners is like, and then in a jiffy we was past her property and headed down through the vacant lot to the creek.
4
The best time for the creek is spring, with the water rushing over the rocks, and it's ice cold then, too, so that if you dip your feet in they turn downright numb. In spring, around the creek, bright green grass shoves up all ferny and thin, trembling-like if the wind blows, and sometimes pale yellow flowers peek out, bashful, all through it.
But this was September, and the creek was always low by then. Warm and sloggy and brown, with the grass thick and scruffy by the edges where the rocks are. Dragonflies was everywhere, dipping and flying around, all shiny and breakable-looking. The rocks was warm and mossy and smelled of decay, laying out that way in the heat where stuff—plants or even small animals and such—sometimes died. Once me and Veronica found a snake laying there, hot and dry and dead. And once a frog.
But there was always billions of live frogs, too, and we could hear them chugging and burping even before we got to the creek, when we was still pushing through the high grass in the vacant lot. Gunther was holding onto both our hands, Veronica's and mine. He was scared of the high grass because he disappeared in it, and I sure don't fault him none for that. I'm scared of disappearing, too.
We sat down on the flat rocks by the edge, took our shoes off, and tested the water with our bare feet. In spring, that's the time when we all yell and squeal from the surprise of the coldness. But now, at the end of summer, it was like poking your toe into the bathtub. The difference was, your toe came out muddy and slick from the creek.
"Here, Gunther, hold my hand tight," Veronica said, and she walked with him across the slippery bottom, round the rocks.
"Here, frogs, here, frogs," old Gunther called in his little voice. He was only four, remember, and even though he was smart for four, still he thought them frogs would come and jump into his hand if he called.
"Sit here, Gunther, and be real still," Veronica instructed him. She lifted him up and set him down on a big rock in the middle of the creek. "You be real quiet and try not to hiccup. Just watch, and maybe we can get some frogs to leap."
Good old Gunther, he always done whatever you told him, and always with a look of pleasure like it never occurred to him that someone might do him wrong. Of course he hadn't ever known nobody but me and Veronica and Sweet-Ho and his mama and daddy. His mama had done him a disappointment when he was two weeks old and she couldn't pick him up for shaking, but he didn't remember that. And every day since he was two weeks old, people was nice to him, giving him bananas to eat and putting medicine on his ailments and stuff like that. His mama had that problem with emptiness, but he wasn't around her much, and when he was around her he probably enjoyed that smile because he was too young to understand the strangeness of it.
So Gunther sat up real still on the rock, with his little feet skootched up under him, and looked down at the water, holding back his hiccups and waiting for frogs to jump.
Veronica waded over to the other side of the creek, and me, I stayed on my side, with Gunther skootched
up on his rock in the middle. I commenced to turn over some small rocks, because sometimes that made the frogs leap out all burping and offended at being dislodged. Veronica was doing the same on her side.
All of a sudden Gunther yelped, like a puppy.
"Shhhhh!" Veronica shushed him so's he wouldn't scare off the frogs.
But he whimpered, the way a puppy does after a yelp. When I looked over, I seen his face was bleeding. Not severe or nothing, just a trickle of blood coming down across his cheek. He was still just setting there the way Veronica told him to, not moving or nothing, but he made little whimpering noises and held his hand up to the place where blood was running on his face.
Then he got hit again, and this time Veronica and me both seen it. It was a pebble chunked out of a set of thick bushes downstream a ways; it came full speed out of them bushes and zinged old Gunther right on the back of his neck so's he started to cry, and I sure can't fault him none for that.
I seen who did it, too, because he was looking out of the bushes.
"It's Norman Cox!" I yelled at Veronica.
Veronica and me, we both hesitated. Gunther was setting there on his rock, bleeding and blubbering. We could go out there and get Gunther, but then Norman would have all of us for a target and he'd still be in that bush with a whole supply of them pebbles.
"Let's get him!" Veronica yelled, and she started charging down the creek, wading through that sloggy water as fast as she could. "Stay put, Gunther!"
Good old Gunther, he always obeyed, even when he was in danger of getting chunked again by a stone. He skootched down smaller on his rock, like a bullfrog hunkered over on a lily pad, and watched. Blood was still running across his face, but he wasn't crying no more. He was too interested in watching what happened.
I followed after Veronica, heading for the bushes where Norman was hiding. He zinged a stone but it didn't hit nobody, just shot past my shoulder and landed in the creek with a plunk.