Slocum Healy sat in a sweetgum tree in the back yard of his parents’ rented home on Pine Grove Avenue in Biloxi, Mississippi. He was up above the roofline, watching the neighborhood. Violet Healy, his mother, was inside the house, resting her back. She was giving her spine and neck and wits a breather. This was her afternoon routine since the car wreck. Slocum’s daddy pulled out in front of a Chevy and the rear end of the family’s VW Bug got squashed. The car spun like a pinwheel. Violet’s head collided with the windshield and her brains bounced around in her skull. The children and the dog boing-boinged against the sides of the cab while their mom’s head was cracking glass up front.

Violet’s Aunt Grace and Uncle Bertrand owned a motel in Biloxi. The Healys were pulling out of their parking lot onto Beach Boulevard when Parker Bull made his boo-boo. The sky was as blue as a robin’s egg, and as clear as a glass of tap water. The Gulf of Mexico was right in front of him, and the sun was not in his eyes.

The husband and wife were having a discussion about money, and why the Healys didn’t have any of it. Aunt Grace and Uncle Bertrand did.

“Parker, you could rub two nickels together and they’d disappear,” the wife said.

Parker turned right. He saw the big American automobile heading for his family in their little import. It was a maybe fifty feet away when he saw it. Then it was ten feet. Then ka-bam. He watched the face of the mother of his children compress into the pane and her lips kiss the glass. Then it ricocheted into the back seat.

It was too late to wonder why they came to Mississippi.

They were in Biloxi because of drought. Though the country was at the beginning of an economic boom, the Healys lived paycheck to paycheck. Parker was a door-to-door appliance salesman, a trade he selected instead of that of a logger. His father and his people were timbermen. Most of them were dead from trees falling on them, or had been forced into sharecropping or factory work. His pa died from tuberculosis. Parker wanted something better for his wife and babies. It wasn’t working out the way he’d seen it at the start. Parker Bull Healy knocked on hundreds of doors each day. He lived by the Two Per Cent Rule of The Cold Call: every one hundred attempts to make a pitch garnered two responses. Not a check or a signed contract, but the mere chance at one. Cold canvassing doesn’t use advertising, just footwork. There are only so many doors on which you can knock, or on which you can hang a flyer or an appointment card. Eventually, there are no more houses to scout, and the herd must move on. Grazing dries up. That’s what the Healys did in late fall 1962. Like so many nomads before them, they pulled up stakes and moved to the place of water, the Gulf Coast, the Riviera of the South. Mississippi.

It was now the early spring of 1963, and they were foreigners, outsiders who hailed from the North. Just about anything above Memphis was the North, the Aggressor’s hideout. Missouri was a border state, so you might also be a traitor to The Cause. If you weren’t an Aggressor or a Yellow Belly, you were probably descended from a passel of Carpetbaggers. None of this was known to the grown-ups, but Slocum knew all about it. In fifth grade civics lessons, the Civil War was called The War of Aggression by the North. Not so much in the textbook, but by the teacher. Mrs. Mackleroy was very specific about it. She led the field trip to the home of Jefferson Davis, where every child received a five, a ten, or a twenty-dollar bill of Confederate money. Each bill was crisp, like it was new. Was it worthless original Confederate currency, or was the museum counterfeiting Confederate bank notes? The Secret Service never came around to ask.

Slocum sat behind a girl in school who was born on the exact same day he was. They came out of the chute at the identical moment, like twins of a sort, but they landed on opposite sides of the tracks.

“My great-great-great grandfather was Alexander Hamilton,” she told him the day they met. Her first name was Alice, but her last wasn’t Hamilton. “Are you related to anyone famous?” she asked.

“My ma’s cousin plays the mandolin in a blue-grass band in Kansas City,” Slocum said. “He’s played with Bill Monroe.” He thought that beat the tar out of any Alexander Hamilton. What he didn’t tell her and Slocum only vaguely knew was his great-great-great grandfather on his daddy’s side was a forgotten Cherokee Indian, who walked his way across the country from Georgia to present-day Oklahoma and the plague that awaited his people; the ones that survived. The Indian Territory was a palace of death that made the internment camps in World War II Arizona look like country clubs. President Andrew Jackson was the architect of the Trail of Tears. In the Healy family, it was tradition to spit at the rare mention of his name, strange behavior during history lessons in any school outside the Indian Nation.

“What are we supposed to be doing with these journals?” Slocum asked Alice. The teacher gave one to him on his first day in her class.

“You’re supposed to write about the Carpetbaggers and how they’re all burning in hell,” she whispered over her shoulder. “Page hundred forty-two in the book.”

“Okay,” he said. That was simple enough. “Thanks.” He didn’t notice anything about Mark Twain or Jesse James in it. He’d have to do some searching to find a description of the Cherokees.

There wasn’t a whole lot of what you’d call learning going on in this school, and Slocum and his siblings breezed through there without ever picking up on how to diagram a sentence. He aced the first spelling test he took, the second he parked himself in Mrs. Mackleroy’s class. She graded his test and then looked at his entrance card. Her eyebrows furrowed as she railed on about the laziness of her charges. How could a lily-livered Yankee, lacking any gentility, walk in off the street and get every word on her test correct, when her students couldn’t?

“By what means is the South ever to rise again, considering none of you can spell?” she said. Everyone turned around and stared at the new kid.

Being the center of attention on the first day at school didn’t score any points with his peers for Slocum Healy. One of the bigger boys caused some trouble for him during recess.

“Where you from?” the big kid asked.

“Springfield, Missouri,” Slocum answered.

“Where’s that?” the boy said.

“Up north,” he said.

The big kid balled up his fist and poked Slocum in the jaw. All the boys piled on him and beat him about the head and pounded his stomach while one of them held his arms. He got in a few good licks before they pinned him down, but there was too many of them, and his brother Arnold wasn’t there. Slocum yelled out “Shit!” as the teacher broke up the fight. She grabbed him by the ear and yanked him into the classroom, the two of them alone. She hauled off and slapped the boy across the face with the flat of her hand.

“Don’t you let me hear you cussing again,” she said. She bent down into his face. “You Northerners need to know your place.”

“I thought you said I could spell,” Slocum said.

“That’s different,” she said. “That makes you a dictionary. You’re still a Carpetbagger.”

He learned that day what lily-livered, yellow-belly, and polecat meant. He caught on. He knew the score. He didn’t go into the playground anymore without Arnold, who was a head taller than everyone. Together, they could bust some lips and black some eyes.

And he only said shit when he knew old lady Mackleroy wasn’t around.

Slocum was a skinny boy with straight, oily black hair, who liked to torment his mother by lifting his shirt, taking a deep breath, and showing her how many ribs he had.

He almost died from childhood diseases, and the idea he couldn’t put on any weight preyed on Mrs. Healy’s mind. He stopped doing this since the wreck, but thought maybe someday he’d resume it.

He looked over the fence next door from his vantage point in the tree. Through the budding leaves he spied a Shetland pony there in the back yard, penned in a twelve-by-twelve foot contraption. This square thing was made of four by four lengths of wood and chicken wire. The wire was wrapped around the perimeter several times, like they were trying to swaddle it with a blanket. The gate was constructed of the wire, like a flap of fat hanging over someone’s belly, tied with twine. The ten-foot posts were planted deep into the ground.

The pony didn’t have a name. Slocum asked after it once and the son said they never thought to give him one.

“That pony got a name?” he asked.

“Naw, he’s just here ’til we figure what to do with him,” he was told. “We just call him the horse.”

It reminded Healy of Roy Rogers’ palomino Trigger. That would be a good name for it, he thought. He got up at seven a.m. every Saturday morning to watch Roy Rogers on New Orleans television. He liked everything about The King of the Cowboys. He liked this little horse too. It had a light brown body and a blonde mane and tail. They were matted and dirty. If it was brushed every day, Slocum was sure it would be a handsome thing. It never got any exercise and its hooves were curled up. No one ever filed them down. They never even rode him. These neighbors didn’t know much about animals, much less horses and how to keep them. Healy often got up in his roost in the gum tree and watched the poor creature bump against the fence sides to try to get out, but it never did. As ugly as the contraption was, it was a good prison. Slocum’s pa went to talk to the man about it, but it didn’t do much good.

“There are a lot easier ways to get manure for your garden, mister,” Parker Bull Healy told the neighbor, Frank Jimjammer. Jimjammer was a manager at one of the hotels on the beach, Edgewater Plaza or one of those. He was shorter than Slocum’s dad, bald, and as pale as Frankenstein’s monster. He looked like someone broke his nose once. His fingers were thick and stubby, the kind that could never play the piano. He said, “I ain’t got no time to worry about no pony that was a gift. I’ll get around to doin’ right by my horse when I get to it.” There was a stress on the word “my” that wasn’t wasted on either Parker or his son, watching from an upper limb of his lookout.

Mr. Healy backed-off and returned to his side of the divide. Slocum jumped down from his post and ran inside to see what his dad was planning.

“You going to whip that fellow, Pop?” he asked. “I think you can take him.” Slocum’s dad was an MP in the Army Air Corps right after the war, and his son was convinced he could whip Sonny Liston if he got the chance. He had broad shoulders and massive arms that ended with delicate fingers. He might have played the violin in another world, and won the heavyweight crown too.

“I’m not getting into a fight with anyone, Slocum,” he said. “That’s a foolish idea. What’s come over you?”
He messed up the boy’s hair and pulled it down into his eyes and swished it around.

“If he was treating our beagle like that, would you smack him around then?” the son asked.

“Of course I would,” he said. “Dogs are part of the family.”

Today, the Jimjammers were moving the pony. The father had a rope around the horse’s neck and was pulling him out of the pen and into the driveway, where a 1960 Dodge Dart sedan was sitting, with its passenger doors open and its fins gleaming in the sun. The Jimjammers were trying to put the Shetland into the back seat of the Dodge. Its eyes were bulging out of its sockets and its hooves were clanking all over the concrete. It fell over once. Then it got on its feet and made a run for it. It was brought up short by the rope. It turned and gave a lunge at Mr. Jimjammer and almost got one of his ears between its teeth. It missed by a hair and its haunch landed a good one on Frank, Jr.’s jaw, sending him sprawling. After they thought to put a blanket over its eyes, they got the horse into the compartment. Folks from around the block came out of their homes and watched the event, but no one lifted a finger for the horse.

Slocum moved down to sit astride the top rail of the fence, intent on seeing everything. The car drove off, the back of it weighted down and the bumper sending up sparks as it scraped the asphalt. The neighborhood went back to its own business. Slocum ascended to his perch and noted the grass gouged out like a trench and the string of horseshit and urine that trailed from the pen to the place they packed the pony up. Who knows where he was being taken? He thought of the upholstery in the Dodge Dart, and was glad he didn’t have to sit there.

“What in creation is going on out here?” Mrs. Healy came out the back door to complain about the noise that woke her from a sound sleep. The new maid, Myrtle Johnson, was in the den at the rear of the house, ironing the wash she’d taken off the clothesline just a few minutes before the commotion started. Myrtle was the third one since the accident. They’d never had help before. The other two were lazy and you had to hover over them to get them to do anything. The first one was a big auburn-haired woman who spoke with a lisp. She was hard to understand and liked to spend more time watching television than doing the dishes. The second one caught the flu and didn’t come back. Myrtle cleaned and washed clothes from the moment she arrived until she left. She was a colored lady, looked to be a few years older than Slocum’s mother. She lived in Gulfport, west of the airfield near the railroad tracks. She never spoke to anyone but Violet and once or twice to Parker when he was home during her time, to see if he wanted a glass of sweet tea. Myrtle made the best sweet tea. She loaded lots of sugar and honey into it while it was boiling, then mixed it with cold water and ice in the pitcher and dropped peeled lemon slices into it. It came out better than anyone could remember. Even their grandma didn’t make tea as good as Myrtle.

“They just about killed the Shetland getting him into the Jimjammer car,” Arnold said. He’d seen the whole thing too.

“What’s that got to do with us?” Mrs. Healy said. She massaged her temples with her wrists. Violet had a violent headache most of the time these days. The official diagnosis for her condition was whiplash. This caused all types of problems. Violet had discovered chiropractic medicine. The chiropractor was making a wreck of her back. It didn’t stop there. She’d lost forty pounds since this all started. Every bit of clothes she owned hung off her like she was a wire hanger. Myrtle brought her a couple of aspirin and a cup of hot coffee.

“Aspirin with coffee work when sometime nothing do,” she said. Violet took them.

“Thank you, Myrtle,” she said. She looked at the wall clock in the den. “Isn’t it time I took you home?”

“Yes’m. I be ready in a minute,” Myrtle said. She began putting the folded wash away.

“You and Slocum get Lillian and head for the car,” the mother said. “We’re going to take Myrtle to Gulfport.”

The kids were waiting in the family’s other car, the one they should have been in on that Saturday morning, a 1960 Pontiac Bonneville four-door. It was electric blue with a white top. The interior was much roomier than the Bug and the children liked the leather upholstery. This was Slocum’s favorite car. Every other automobile his father ever owned paled in comparison to this one. The crushed Volkswagen was replaced with a new American Rambler, but Slocum didn’t think much of it.

Myrtle sat in the front passenger’s seat, and the three children rode in the back. Mrs. Healy spent as little time as she could on Beach Boulevard, the road that paralleled the Gulf. She turned within several blocks onto Eisenhower Drive and made her way to Pass Road. This street was less congested and nothing disastrous was associated with it in Violet’s mind.

One of the things that struck the Healy children about Biloxi was the enormous number of Cadillacs on the road at any given time. It spoke of a lifestyle of which they were unaware. To them, air conditioning was what the good life was about. They experienced it in Woolworths and at the movies. They had yet to go through the heat and humidity of a Mississippi summer. They might ask to go to the cinema more often than usual very soon. Even though Sedan de Villes and El Dorados were as common down here as Plymouths were in Missouri, the Healy children developed a fascination with German cars. They yelled “Ka-boom!” each time a VW was sighted and kept score, holding up their fingers in each other’s face in pride of their superior eyesight.

The troop rode in silence for a while, with the exception of the children crying out at the sighting of targeted vehicles. Pass Road cut through Biloxi into Gulfport. They turned north on 26th Avenue. Violet turned left on Arkansas Avenue and then left again at Washington Street. Then Myrtle pointed out her street, Indiana Avenue.

When they pulled in front of Myrtle’s house, Slocum saw it was a small shack with no paint on its sides, up on stilts. The front door was covered with a rusted screen, and was open. Myrtle’s four children came outside with an old rat terrier. They were a three-year old boy, a seven-year old girl, another boy of ten-years, and a girl of about thirteen.

“Momma, you’re home,” one of them said as they ran up to the car. They were barefoot and dressed in clean clothes, but the raggedy condition of them reminded him of a scene he’d nearly forgotten, from the time of his grandpa’s funeral. He was no more than five years old when it happened. His father made a detour to an Indian reservation in Oklahoma to see his sister Polly before going into Arkansas to pay his respects to his father. This was the first time Slocum ever saw his Aunt Polly, and he would never see her again. She came from working in the fields as the family drove up. The yard where they lived was covered in gravel. There wasn’t a blade of grass to be seen. His aunt’s home was a covered wagon, like in some John Ford western. She lived there with her husband Jason Lowine, a Seminole Indian she married when she was fourteen, and her three children, Hannah, Salina, and a boy named Hollins. They all lived in this hovel. The children were sitting in front of this converted cart that was accommodated to the needs of a settled group, but still, looking back on his memory of it, he could see why they were resting on the stoop. There was a canopy over what was a porch anywhere else, but the inside of the wagon was so small, it looked like all they could do in it was bed down.

Aunt Polly came up to the car and stuck her head through the window and looked at her niece and nephews.

“So this is what your young-ins’ look like,” she said.

She straightened up and inspected her brother’s new car, a pink 1958 Pontiac. Parker liked Pontiacs.

“You get me one of these, Parker,” she said. “You’re a rich white man now.” Parker rolled his eyes.

She was as brown as Myrtle. Parker was also brown, but Polly’s skin looked like broiled steak. She had a kerchief wrapped on the top of her head, and a straw hat with a large brim covering that. She wore a faded print dress and boots were on her feet. Slocum stared at her in wonder. She was the most interesting thing he’d maybe ever seen, and she was relations. It was difficult for him to believe she was younger than his daddy. At five, anyone over fourteen looked ancient to him. He’d swear she was fifty, maybe a hundred or more. She had lines all over her face, and her teeth were falling out. In contrast, Violet Singleton Healy was, before the accident at least, a tall, handsome redheaded Irish woman, with broad hips and large breasts. That’s what attracted Parker to her in the first place. She was drawn to his almost animal maleness, his incredible tan, and his wavy black hair. He was just discharged from the service when she met him, and he was a sight to see. Women whistled at him as he walked down the street.

Myrtle got out of the car, thanked Violet for the ride, and went to greet her children. Slocum turned around in the back seat as they drove away, and his eyes met the older girl’s. He’d done the same thing when he left the reservation. His eyes locked on his cousin Hannah in her arid surroundings, the dust kicked up by the tires causing her image to fade out like the last scene in a movie. He wondered what she was doing right now, if she was hoeing a cabbage row, or running off with another Indian, to get away from the covered wagon and to find some indoor plumbing.

Mrs. Healy stopped for ice cream cones for her children and herself on the way home. They all enjoyed the ride and the vanilla ice cream with the frozen chocolate shells. The ice cream melted and made a mess on the seats, and stained the leather upholstery. Violet didn’t notice, and the kids weren’t going to tell.

When Slocum got home, he ran to the back yard and climbed his special tree, scaling it like a squirrel, digging his fingers into the bark to reach the first limbs, and hoisted himself up to his usual site. Their beagle pup, King, yip-yipped to get him to come down and play with him, but he stayed up there. After a while, the neighbors came home, father and son. He watched them clean up the horse droppings and begin to dismantle the contraption. The boy was limping where the horse stepped on his foot. Slocum took it all in, silently, but before too long got their attention.

“Hey, where’d you take Trigger?” he said.

The Jimjammer lad turned around at the sound of the disembodied voice. He found the source and looked up for an instant. Then he bent over to grab a bucket and carried it to the trash barrel. The contents made a thud when they hit the bottom.

To be continued…

Copyright © 2009 David Greg Taylor

Slocum Healy sat atop a perch in a sweetgum tree in the backyard of his parents rented home on Pine Grove Avenue in Biloxi, Mississippi.  A low-lying cloud had drifted off the Gulf of Mexico and enveloped this ten-year old boy in a moist blanket of mist. Just six feet below him was the bottom of the soggy bank, like a cotton blanket suspended over his neighborhood, but if you looked up, you wouldn’t have seen what was sitting up there. Where the boy had planted was all humid fuzziness, a kind like he’d not experienced since the womb, and he didn’t recall that. Coming from Missouri to the new job his pa had been offered down here, they drove through a heavy fog embankment near Memphis that made traveling precarious, until they hit a clear spot where Graceland was across the valley. Slocum’s mother Violet wondered out loud if Elvis was at home right then, and it seemed a happy coincidence that Presley’s latest song, U.S. Male, was on the radio as they came through the haze.

“I bet he’s got a dozen Corvette’s,” Arnold said. Slocum’s brother was aiming to get a Stingray for his first car, one of many illusions he had, though he was not to be chided. He was only twelve years old.

Little sister Lillian wanted to know if Priscilla was at Graceland, and you’d suppose she was, probably doing her homework, but that wasn’t anywhere near Slocum’s mind today, in the middle of this new fluffy Gulf Coast mantle. It was the first time he’d ever been smothered in a cloud, and he was taking it in. He couldn’t see his hand if he stretched it full out, so he sat there studying the way the murk moved past him, in clumps of a sort, not steady like pouring water out of a bucket, but in waves that gently pummeled his face and made his hair and clothes and everything else soak up the wetness.

Arnold came out the back door right then, looking for his brother to show him his latest car drawing, not anything but a Chevy or some such. Arnold was getting real good at this, and had even gotten Slocum into it, but the little brother drew pictures of Roy Rogers he copied from comic books, along with Bullet, Roy’s German Shepherd. Trigger was very difficult to do.

Big brother was yelling at the top of his lungs. Roosted up in the gum tree, hidden in plain sight, there wasn’t any way in Dixieland  he was going to be found. Arnold couldn’t see him, and he couldn’t see Arnold, but he’d have given a lot to get a gander at his face turning purple as beet juice.  The problem was suppressing the giggles. His mother swore every child in her family was fitted with a giggle-box that, when turned over, was uncontrollable. That was Slocum’s problem now. His giggle-box was tipping, teetering, and about to topple. He was nigh to letting go with a laugh when a rustling sound to his left attracted his attention. There he saw a large red-tailed hawk, its wings spread out, talons coming straight at him, landing on the limb next to his head. It let out a screech that nearly split the boy’s ears, and knocked him out of the tree.

Arnold heard the shriek of the bird and turned his sight upwards just as Slocum punctured the bottom of the cloud, looking to all the world like Icarus lost his wings.  He dropped fifty-feet, flat on his back, and lay there. His eyes were staring at the place he’d just come from, at the hawk that dropped down a branch to see what happened. Arnold jumped straight up, let out a yelp and bounded into the house to get his pa.

While Arnold and Parker Bull Healy were coming outside, Slocum Healy was locked on the bird that nearly killed him. Their eyes met and fixed on each other. It didn’t last but thirty seconds before his father came to see what was up, but to Slocum it seemed like an awful long time. The hawk jumped up into the cloud as Mr. Healy emerged from the house to see how bad his son was injured. He stood over him a second, then bent down to examine him more closely. He saw his son’s eyes were open, looking upwards, and he asked him if he was hurt and what he felt. The boy said, “No, Pa, I’m not hurt. I feel just fine.”  He moved the boy’s legs up and down, testing to see if they were broke and Slocum didn’t know on account he was in shock.  He was amazed and grateful when he saw the boy was whole, and was about to give him what for. Then Parker stopped and spied what he saw was in Slocum’s left hand.

“Where’d you get that hawk feather, son?” he asked him.

Slocum looked at his hand. It was the first time he realized he was holding onto something.

“I guess I must’ve snatched it off the bird that was up there,” and he pointed up.

Before his pa could answer, Mrs. Healy came out of the house, hobbled as she was, recovering from the auto wreck on Beach Boulevard. A few months ago, she’d given a visiting Jayne Mansfield a run for her money at male attention on the beach just three blocks away, but now she was getting around with a cane, as the chiropractor she’d found was grinding her vertebra every week, using some gizmo to check on whether electricity was flowing from her spine out to her joints. The whole family was centered on Violet’s misery. She was slipping down the slope, but putting up a good fight.

“What has happened to my baby?” she screamed loud enough to wake any neighbor napping. Despite her pain, she threw herself on the still-prone form of her second-born. Parker stood up, now holding the orange and white feather in his hand, gazing up at the cloud where the hawk was still concealed, watching the scene below with keener eyes than a person could imagine.

“He appears to be all right, Violet,” he said.

“How do you know?” she wailed. “How would you know?” she continued, with a trace of the car accident in her voice, and Parker’s responsibility for all the agony that followed.

“Ma, I’m okay,” Slocum said. Then he passed out.

He woke up as he was being loaded into an ambulance. His head was strapped to a board with some kind of tape, and a huge attendant was on either side of the gurney on which he lay.

“Something in you busted,” the smaller of the two said. “Aint no way you not really messed up.”

“They are going to operate on you, no doubt,” the other said.

“My head hurts,” Slocum complained.

“It should. You fell out the top of a tree, boy,” the first one said.

“No, I mean this thing you strapped me down with,” he explained. “It’s mashing the back of my head against this board.”

“Regulations, son,” was the answer. “We got to keep you stable in case you broke something important. And you did. I seen this stuff before.”

“You going to be on TV at six,” the other said. “Child falling out of a tree is a big deal around here. They sent out a reporter and a TV truck.”

Slocum got woozy again and went blank, but not before hearing his mother give instructions to the driver to avoid getting into any traffic mishaps on the way to the hospital.  When he came to again, a nurse was stripping him of his clothes in the emergency room and handing them over to his pa. He was glad he washed his feet the night before and wore clean socks and underwear. His heart was thumping over the thing being done by a good-looking girl who couldn’t have been over twenty years old. Mississippi women sure were beautiful. You had to give them that. This was the first time anyone but his parents or maybe Arnold had seen him in the natural state, and it wasn’t what he might have wished for. She turned from his feet to his head when she heard him let out a long sigh.

“Are you in any discomfort?” she asked.

“Not at all,” he answered. “You’re as beautiful as anything I’ve ever seen.” Parker smiled and was proud his son had noticed the girl.  A child can get away with statements like that, considering the context, because they have no clue what the next step would be in flirting with a woman. It’s doubtful this was the first time a little boy had told her this, and she took it in stride.

“You try not to move until the doctor can evaluate you,” she said, and patted him on the head.

“Okay,” Slocum said. He’d run out of slick lines already.

They got him up to a private room right after the doctor looked him over. The MD brought the parents out into the hall and expressed concern that their son’s kidneys might be damaged. He said he’d give him until five that afternoon, but if he didn’t eliminate his bladder before then, he was going to operate.

Parker and Violet were pretty shook. They went back into the boy’s room and up and told him what the doctor said. “If you don’t piss in the next few hours, they’re going to go in and see what’s the matter,” his pa said. He handed him a plastic urinal and said they’d give him a few minutes to mull it over.

The door closed behind his parents. Slocum looked at the container in his hand. He tried and tried to get something out, but didn’t have any luck. Maybe it was being propped up in this bed. It was strange, because he’d never had any problem going to the john. But he never had to do this laying down, either, and they wouldn’t let him get up. The dread of surgery was hanging over him, and he was getting tired from the straining. He decided after fifteen minutes of the ordeal to take a breather.  Positioned there, uncomfortable as could be, feeling lost on the third floor of Biloxi Hospital, he looked out the window and was jolted to see a red-tailed hawk flying from the mist outside the window, and landing on the wide window ledge, not more than nine or ten feet from where he was. He looked him straight in the eye, and despite red-tailed hawks being the most plentiful breed of their kind in this hemisphere, he was sure this was the one from his back yard. Their eyes latched like at the house, and the red-tail’s eyes were like a laser beam boring a hole through him.  It must’ve had an effect.

All of a sudden, he had to pee.

He grabbed the urinal and produced a pint of bright yellow liquid, and was then careful to put the lid on tight. He didn’t want to wet the bed at his age, with these nurses hanging about. Slocum grinned real wide, held up the jug, and looked out the window to share his triumph, but the hawk was gone, with only the results as testimony.

His pa came back into the room. “I see some privacy did you a world of good,” he said.  Slocum kept the incident of the hawk quiet. He’d put his parents through enough today. Time enough to tell secrets after he got out of this fool hospital. Even with curvaceous women taking his pulse and waiting on him hand and foot and all, he wasn’t keen on an extended visit.

But that’s what he got.

They kept him for a week, to make sure nothing came loose inside and started to drift around. They said he could have a clot somewhere waiting to break loose and kill him. This news nearly felled Mrs. Healy, and she hovered over him constantly and slept next to his bed every night.

By the next Monday he was sick of the food they were serving. It dampened the pleasure of being surrounded by females.  They wheeled him outside and sent him on back to his family. The next few days his mother kept him home, and then she figured it wouldn’t hurt to keep him there for a couple days more and then it was Saturday. She wanted to be nearby if he collapsed from a stray clump of blood traveling to his lungs or brain.

Slocum spent the time watching Captain Kangaroo after Arnold and Lillian were sent off to school, and watched reruns of I Love Lucy with his mother. President Kennedy interrupted Art Linkletter’s show with a news conference on Thursday. He spent the afternoons reading Green Lantern comic books or Louis L’amour westerns while his ma either rested herself or watched soap operas. She could finally bear to let him out of her sight at the onset of the next week, and drove him to school herself, along with the rest of the brood, and delivered him to Mrs. Mackleroy’s classroom personally.

It was Slocum’s bad luck to be five minutes tardy.

“Welcome back to class, Mr. Healy,” Mrs. Mackleroy said as she closed the door in Violet’s face.  “You appear to be none-the-worse for your famous fall from grace.”

“I guess I’m alright,” Slocum replied.

“I would think so,” the teacher said, wiping her wire rim spectacles with a tissue. “In fact, I would like to know, and I’m sure the class would too, why, when driving by your parents’ home last Friday after school, I saw you running around your front yard, chasing your brother and sister like a veritable bobcat?”  She put her glasses on again and trained her vision on her least-favorite pupil.

Slocum cursed his luck.  He was sure this snooty-nosed old woman was checking up on him, poking into his affairs.

“Well, my ma was worried sick about me and kept me around the house one or two days extra to make sure I didn’t up and die,” he said.

“Oh really” You certainly didn’t look like you were near death’s door last Friday afternoon,” she said, tapping her foot, with both hands planted on her hips.

“I was in pretty bad shape there for a time at the hospital. They were about to cut me open and see what was up with my kidneys,” he said, trying to blunt the sarcasm coming from the teacher”s desk.

“So, you’re saying you had internal injuries?” she said. “If they operated on you, how were you able to jump like an antelope just three days ago?”

Slocum was starting to get mad and his ears were burning.

“I was healed.”

“Really?” She advanced toward the boy a foot or two. “Are we in the presence of a medical marvel, the recipient of a new cure for falling out of trees? How exactly did this healing happen, Master Healy?”

He didn’t have any plans regarding how the world would catch on that he’d been visited by the miraculous. He had no aim to ever share the incident with the hawk with anyone but his pa and ma. But old lady Mackleroy was going over the line, making it seem he’d been slacking off while he was laid up in the hospital. Pride goes before a fall, and knowing something about falls, he should’ve kept his mouth shut.

“I was healed by a red-tailed hawk.  I snatched its feather when I fell and it owed me a favor.”  It sounded crazy, but that’s as near he could figure happened, and his father confirmed it. There was a connection now between Slocum and the hawk.  Couldn’t be denied.

Mrs. Mackleroy stood there for must have been half a minute, hands still posed on her pelvis, staring at this boy, her eyes getting wider by the second until they couldn’t stretch any more.

“What kind of pagan fool are you, Slocum Healy, and who put that outlandish idea in your head?”

“I don’t know what a pagan is, but when you take a feather from a hawk, you get some of its power, and it helps you if it can,” he said.

Slocum took his sight off of the teacher for an instant and looked at the class. Several had their jaws dropped, like they were looking at some space alien just landed from the neighboring galaxy. The rest of the children guffawing and slapping their desks with their hands joined the sound of the teacher laughing. He didn’t know whether they thought he was telling a joke, or was a loon.

“Sit down, Slocum,” Mrs. Mackleroy said. “We’ve had our foolishness for this morning.” She then turned her attention to her students and informed them they had a pop quiz in geography for their first task. Slocum went to his seat, through a gauntlet of stares and whispered insults, “hawk-butt” and “red-tail” being chief among them. He took Mackleroy’s test and made 100%, even though he hadn’t studied any of it. The teacher graded it, but by now knew to avoid pointing out the precocious nature of this strange creature from northern parts. She looked him over, seated in the first row nearest the window, and wondered what he was staring at.

Slocum was peering at a red-tailed hawk, which had soared down as he finished the test. It was at rest on a telephone line outside the schoolroom, and he could have sworn it was his friend, come to comfort him.

When recess came, some of the kids saw the hawk sitting up on the phone pole too, and began throwing rocks at it, taunting Slocum, asking him if this was his bird and could it heal them of blisters and plantar warts. But it was too smart for them. The bird of prey took off and circled the playground, far above the reach of their missiles. He could clearly and distinctly see every one of the ground dwellers below. Only one of them had any interest for him, the small black-haired boy who glowed with a light he recognized with an old, deep instinct creatures of his species knew.

He had found one.

To Be Continued

David Greg Taylor

An old toad broke the surface of the creek to peak at a boy of nigh on eleven years old, sitting at the edge of a stream in the middle of a pine forest outside Biloxi, Mississippi. The child was staring at a copse of trees across the water. Behind the lad was his back yard, where his sister Lillian was chasing fireflies and holding them in a dungeon designed from a Mason jar.  Lillian was three hundred sixty-four days younger than her brother. She was born exactly one year after Dwight D. Eisenhower was sworn in as the thirty-fourth president of the United States. She had black shoulder length hair with bangs cut in a straight line above her eyebrows, and wore a yellow dress with grass stains that marked where she fell during her pursuit of glowing insects. She had a little pug nose that resembled her Aunt Polly’s sniffer, which at that time was located on the Seminole reservation at Wewoka, Oklahoma.

Slocum Healy shrugged off the feeling of being watched and got up to take the jar from his sis so he could look at the bugs turning their tailtips on and off. He strained his eyes on the dusky sky above him, where the first stars were coming out. He knew he was looking at the past, at nuclear explosions that happened sometimes thousands or millions of years ago. He read it in a Robert Heinlein science-fiction novel he’d picked up at the library. He could see, though, how his ancestors might have thought the flickering specks were lightning bugs, or a spider woman or some such creature. He handed the jar back to his sister.

“Why don’t you let them go?” he asked.

“I will in a little bit,” Lillian said. “I don’t want to smother them or nothin’.”

Their older brother Arnold stuck his head out the kitchen window. “You two get in here. Ma’s got supper ready,” he said. “And she said get rid of those lightning bugs right now!”

Slocum and Lillian scampered into the house as soon as they let the fireflies go. It took awhile longer than needed. Some of them didn’t catch on they were free.

The frog returned to his world, kicking his legs to submerge and join his kind.

“Ma says to wash up before dinner,” Arnold added. He gave Slocum a shove as he passed him.

“Runt.” Slocum pushed him back.

They sat down to poke salad and fried okra. They’d gone poke hunting that afternoon, finding it growing mostly in roadside ditches. It had to be washed real good and soaked and drained a few times before boiling. Their mother diced onions to go along with it, and threw in some bacon to add to the flavor. The okra was grown in the garden they planted the week they bought the new house. Cornbread and milk were also on the menu. She baked the bread in a cast iron skillet her ma gave her before they’d headed for the wide open yonder.

Violet Healy sat down gingerly after serving her children. She was going downhill from the auto collision that made her a regular patient at Dr. Palmer’s chiropractic medicine clinic. She brought all the young ones with her and got them spinal adjustments at the same time. Dr. Palmer had convinced her their backs were seriously out of alignment. At each visit, his nurse ushered the mother into the examination room, and the doc then put her on a treatment table, and bent her leg way up while she was lying on her side. He would proceed to roll the leg to and fro until he could feel a pop in her back and then she’d have to turn over and do it again. The others got their turn and the same routine. The doctor said energy was being blocked from spreading all over their bodies by having imperfectly positioned vertebra, and he aimed to fix them. As her treatments progressed, Violet’s reliance on her cane did too. No one saw the relationship at the time. Most everyone lives their life going forward blind.

A drop of sweat was about to fall off the tip of Mrs. Healy’s nose, but she caught it before it landed. She led her children in saying grace, thanking the Lord for the blessing of their own home, and this mess of poke salad. Slocum was grateful they had ketchup to go on it all, but he too was thankful for the bigger things, like getting away from Mrs. Mackleroy and the schoolyard bullies that bedeviled him in the fifth grade. He was happy to be out in the boonies, where he could play in the woods during recess at Woolmarket Elementary School and watch tadpoles in the crick behind their new house.

He was at the head of his class, even though he skipped a year in the second grade. His classmates didn’t frown on making good marks, and the teacher was kind and didn’t knock him around. He had three friends named Billy Cooper, and none of them were related. They weren’t even third cousins. They taught him how to play marbles, and he was amassing a collection of shooters.

Life was looking up. He was thinking of joining a Boy Scout troop at school, if he could convince his parents to buy him the manual and the uniform and a tent and a bunch of rope.

The family ate in silence. It was tradition in their home to let the adults do the talking at the table. Their father and mother were full of tales about what it was like when they were young. Their pa told stories of his days as an M.P. in the Army Air Corps, right here at Keesler Air Base over in Gulfport. He swam with dolphins in one of them. In another he was sent to guard a downed airplane in the Louisiana swamps, and spent the night by a campfire, surrounded by wolves, staring into their eyes and daring them to come closer. He said as a boy he owned a black stallion that near killed him when it threw him and wrapped him backwards around a tree. Their mother would recount how she skipped school with Eudora Blankenship and ran around town trying to escape truant officers, or when she saw the Alton Giant at a supermarket when she was eight years old, or saw a bear going after the hogs when she was four.

Arnold broke the quiet. “When’s Pop getting home?” he asked. It was Friday night and everyone was excited on account they might go to town on Saturday. If they went was Parker Bull Healy’s decision. Somewhere along the way, the kids caught on there was a big paycheck that week, but it was more than that. Any time their pa was gone, they missed him something horrible.

“He’ll be here directly. Your father may have an appointment tonight at seven,” the mother said. “Anyone want seconds?”

Everyone said they did, and she piled their plates with more food. There was plenty to go around, since none of it cost much of anything. Slocum and Arnold wolfed theirs down and each put the cornbread in their glass of milk, all crumbled up, and ate the mixture with a spoon. They liked it as much as any dessert.

After eating, the boys went to the living room to watch television, while Lillian helped her mother clean up. Violet sat in a chair and gave instructions to her daughter, while the girl stood on a step stool and washed dishes. There was peace in the house until the boys started fighting over whether to watch Bob Hope or Route 66.

“Frank Sinatra is on Bob Hope this week,” Slocum said. “He’s Chairman of the Board.”

Arnold grabbed his little brother by the shirt collar and told him he had another use for the Board, and it might flatten his face. Swing jazz didn’t seem so important all of a sudden. Slocum slouched down into the sofa and tried to tolerate Arnold’s obsession with Corvettes.

“I’m gonna have three Stingrays when I grow up,” he said.

“I want a Pontiac like Pa’s,” Slocum said. “It’s a Pontiac or nothin’ at all.”

Arnold turned and popped him a good one on his arm for saying that, so Slocum decided to go outside and play with the dog, since returning evil for evil always got him a collection of bruises. He was going through the door when their father turned into the driveway.

“Pa’s home,” he yelled through the screen door.

“You get inside, Slocum,” his mother called from the kitchen. Slocum did what he was told. Arnold had a fit, but turned off the TV. Their pa didn’t like to have a lot of noise in the house when he got off work.

After five minutes, Violet went to the front door to see what was holding up her husband. She looked outside and saw him sitting in the car, smoking a cigarette in the dark.

“Give me my cane, Slocum,” she said. He ran into the kitchen and delivered it to his mother. She opened the front door and walked out and got in on the vehicle’s passenger side, letting her legs dangle. She sat there and waited for the husband to speak.

“My seven o’clock appointment cancelled on me,” he said.

She looked at him sideways and raised an eyebrow. “Why don’t you come into the house? The kids have wanted to see you all afternoon since they come in from school.”

Slocum was in the front bedroom with the intent to watch the goings-on through the window. He saw his parents talking for a few minutes and then kiss each other with a long slow smooch. They got out of the car then and Parker helped his hobbled wife into the house. He scrambled into the living room to greet his father’s return from the world. Lillian reached him first, and he bent down and kissed her, then turned to his boys and gave them both a hug, while they planted one on his cheeks. Their father smelled better than anyone even though he smoked like an paper mill stack. His aroma was a musky yet sweet odor that no one else had, maybe on the whole planet. Their pa bathed twice a day, shaved twice a day, and used to make love to their mother more than that if he could manage it.

Everyone retired to the kitchen, where Violet heated up Parker’s dinner and everyone listened to stories of the day and the distant past.
___________________________________________

Slocum woke up early, at sun up. He usually got out of bed before everyone else to get a good start on cartoons, and would watch the test pattern Indian until sign-on. He turned on the television to get it warmed up and then went to the kitchen to get a drink of orange juice and let the dog out to do his business. He only had on a pair of blue jeans, the kind whose cuffs rolled up like they did in the westerns, but he was out in the country, and didn’t think much about getting full-dressed this early.

He pulled on some tennis shoes and stepped out onto the back porch and stood there while King rooted around and hiked his hind leg. The beagle came up for some petting, so he sat down on the stoop to scratch his ears. It was starting to get light. The tops of clouds in the distance were beginning to shine with the sun’s reflection. Slocum looked around the lot this house was set on. It was a couple of acres, full of weeds at the beginning, but they spent the summer pulling them. They didn’t have any neighbors close by. It was quiet, peaceful-like, what his pa had been looking for since he left the service and chose the wandering life of a salesman. Most of the trees were southern pine, but there was a huge swamp maple growing beside the stream. The limbs were hard to get to, but Arnold had strung a thick, knotted rope from the second lowest branch to aid in climbing. When that was reached he could go almost all the way to the top, a good sixty-five feet, and see for miles. Slocum was hoping someday to be allowed to climb up there too, but after falling out of the sweetgum tree last spring, his parents said they’d skin him alive if he even thought about tree-climbing.

He got up to go back in when he heard the slightest rustle to his right, whereupon he spied a white-tailed doe and its fawn come around the corner of the house. He froze, not wanting to spook her off. The doe was small, but in the half-light of dawn, she was impressive. Her tail, ears and snout had smatterings of white on them, the latter contrasting with her black nose. Her eyes were ringed in white, everything else a brownish gray. Under the jaw, on her upper neck, was a half oval of white also. She turned and looked at the boy for perhaps a minute, then ambled on. The two crossed the creek after stopping to drink, then twisted around, as if to say “Follow me.”

Slocum did, unprepared for the journey as he was. He moved as stealthily as he could, and then noted that King was still on the porch, dead to the world. King bawled at just about anything that moved. But there he was, dropping off to sleep, oblivious to the game that intersected his path.

He crossed the stream, soaking his jeans up to his thighs, and climbed up the bank in tracks the deer made in the mud, following them at about twenty yards distance. The ground was still blanketed in a thin mist through which they seemed to float. The brambles and thicket underbrush cut at Slocum’s ankles, but he never noticed the scrapes.

Not a quarter mile on the way he came to a canal, deeper than he could cross, but over which someone built a makeshift bridge of fallen timbers. He saw the deer easily leap over the stream. As he was making his way over, he looked down and could swear he saw a gator surfacing, his eyes just piercing the top of the water. Slocum scurried on, his eyes trained on the beady ones below.

When he reached the other side, he couldn’t see where the two deer had gone. There was a column of dust rising around a stand of pines fifty yards distant, and he could hear the sound of hooves beating against the ground, so he started to lope over there, hoping to catch up. Slocum stopped in his tracks when he saw what was causing the dust and the noise. A large, lone stag with a huge rack of antlers was coming at him full speed from the other side of that stand. The boy stood there. There was no place to retreat. The deer came to within twelve or so feet of him and stopped, almost bouncing on his forelegs and rearing up like a horse might do. He began to circle him, raising and lowering his antlers, swinging them side-to-side. He kicked up enough dust to choke Slocum, who turned, matching the pace of the large buck. He kept his attention trained on his eyes gone wide and his head bobbing to and fro.

After several revolutions like that, the buck stopped the circling and stood close to the unusual creature. He breathed deeply the smell of the boy, shook his head, then snorted and backed off. He tore at the ground with his back hoofs, like a dog does when it marks its scent. He slowly turned, and picking up the pace, almost flew away. He left Slocum Healy there, wondering what in Sam Hill had happened. On one level, his heart was running like a racehorse. Never in his wildest dreams did he envision an encounter with a stag out here. On another level, he was watching himself, almost like going to the movies. He saw this beast charging him, and it did not matter. All he saw was the glory of it all, even if it killed him.

It began to dawn on him how strange that was.

Slocum traced his way back to his parents’ home. He crossed the bridge of trees, but whatever he thought he saw in the water was gone. He waded over the frog creek and climbed back up into his own backyard, next to the massive maple tree he was forbidden to climb. The old toad snuck a look at the peculiar critter that took up residence some time back. King was still asleep on the back porch, snoring and passing gas. He opened the kitchen door and snuck into the house. His brother Arnold was lying on his stomach in front of the television, watching Bug Bunny cartoons. That meant he’d been gone but an hour or so and maybe he could avoid a switching if he was lucky.

“Where you been, gimel-butt?” his brother asked, not taking his eyes off of Elmer Fudd.

“I dunno, just out in the woods,” he answered. “I thought I saw some deer over there.”

“Fat chance they’d let you see them,” he said. He rolled over and got up on the sofa. “Me and Pa’s been all back there and all we ever see are deer tracks and cat tracks over those. I ain’t never seen hide nor hair of the real thing, except maybe some dumb coyote skulking around and runnin’ away the minute you catch sight of him.” He looked at Slocum. “You’re a mess.”

“I guess so,” Slocum said.

“You better clean up before Ma and Pa get out of bed, ‘fore you find yourself pullin’ weeds all weekend,” Arnold said, and then picked up the TV listings from the coffee table. “Which channel shows the Three Stooges?”

“None of them. They come on weekdays at four,” Slocum whispered as he tiptoed by his parents’ bedroom on the way to the bath. He closed the door behind him very softly, and ran a tub of steaming hot water. He took off his blue jeans and sneakers and lowered his body into it. It was nearly scalding, but Slocum liked to get it as close to intolerable as he could and almost submerge himself. He dipped to his upper lip, closed his eyes, and gritted his teeth. He stayed like that for a spell, soaking and boiling in the fierce heat. He was jostled out of his cloud by the sound of Lillian banging on the bathroom door.

“Hey Slocum, get outta there,” she shouted. “I gotta pee!”

“Alright, sis,” he said. “Give me a minute to dry off.”

“You better hurry or I’ll do it on the floor.”

He hopped out of the tub and dried off as quickly as he could. He didn’t dawdle like he might any other time, torturing his sister into a war dance that ends up with her crumpled in a heap. He opened the door after wrapping a towel around his waist.   Lillian ran past him and pushed him out into the hallway. He could hear her sigh of relief through the thin panel, then turned to look at his reflection in the hallway mirror.

TO BE CONTINUED

In the midst of a pine forest outside Biloxi, Mississippi, a black-haired boy of nigh on eleven years old was sitting by the bank of the creek that ran past his back yard.  He was bare-chested, wearing only his pajama bottoms, sitting on the wet grass, gazing at an old toad.  The frog was looking at him too.

It was a drizzly morning.  A fine mist was falling on the child, sitting there since twilight began at six a.m.  The rain didn’t bother the toad, and Slocum Healy didn’t mind it either.   He spent that time looking at the water flowing and the droplets that produced minute, intersecting waves on the rippling surface. Why he was fascinated by this small spectacle, he couldn’t say.  The frog happened by, interrupting his reverie, shifting it onto something else.

“Hello, Brother,” the amphibian said to Slocum.  The boy saw the waves reflected in the creature’s eyes, like a spider’s web of sorts.  He was about to respond to the frog without expressing awe at a talking toad, when his big brother came up behind him.

“Hey, stupid!”  Arnold Healy turned his soaked sibling around by grabbing his right arm and twisting it.  He jumped on top of him and held him by the neck.

“How many times do I have to find you out here before Pa kicks your bony butt?”   Arnold was a head taller and weighed sixty pounds more than his brother, and all of that weight was now positioned on his chest, while his hands were doing a number on his windpipe.  Slocum did not resist.

It was a good day to die.

The small boy was starting to turn blue when his brother came to his senses and let him go.  He rolled off and gave him a kick in the side.

“Get inside before everyone wakes up,” he said, then got up and ran to the back door.  He looked over his shoulder as he was entering, and saw the goober he called brother stooping over a frog, checking it for what he couldn’t tell.

“I’ll never let him ride in my Corvette,” Arnold thought and slammed the door after him.

Slocum got up and shook the water off of him.  “Thank you,” he said, and then walked up to and entered the house.  His father was making coffee.  He had his back to Slocum, filling the percolator with water.  Arnold was in the hallway entrance to the kitchen, giving his brother a mad look, barely containing his fury.

“You gonna make some blueberry pancakes, Pa?” Arnold asked through gritted teeth.  Slocum walked into the living room and then into the hall and stood next to his brother.

“Yes, Arnold.  I’m giving your mother the morning off,” he said, and then turned to his sons.  “Go get Lillian out of bed, and dry yourself off while you’re at it.  Both of you.”

Arnold followed his brother.

“You’re gonna get a lickin’ if you don’t get your head on straight,” he whispered.

“I didn’t do anything wrong, did I?” he replied.  He walked into his sister’s room and turned on the light.  She was still asleep, and he nudged her a few times to get her to wake up.

“Oh no,” she said, turning over and sitting up.  “Is it morning already?”  She flopped down and put the pillow over her head.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” Arnold said.  “You’ll live.”

The two walked out into the hall, where Slocum rushed by the mirror hanging there.  He turned his face away from the reflection as he passed, tired of seeing that near bald-headed kid with the hawk feather.  He saw him when he brushed his teeth.  The other one brushed his too, matching every stroke.  When he passed by a window, he saw that faint image of the other boy.  Riding to school in the morning, he looked at the rearview mirror up front and this head with the elephant ears and the silly smile pasted on it looked back at him.  It might’ve been better if he’d said something, but every time Slocum said “What you lookin’ at?” he got no answer.

Not until this morning.  That frog outside gave him some advice and he was of a mind it was good advice.  He was stewing on it, as he didn’t fully understand what he said, but it was serious stuff.

“At least we’re having blueberry pancakes,” he muttered as he entered the kitchen.

“I thought I told you to get dried off, Slocum,” his father said.

“Sorry, Pa.  Slipped my mind,” Slocum said and then ran back to the bathroom to towel down.  He messed up and looked in the mirror above the lavatory.  Slocum Junior was pulling his lower lip over his chin like a chimp at the zoo.

As he walked out into the hallway, a sound was coming from his parent’s bedroom; one he had heard before.  He could just make out a moan, long, slow and accented at the end with a drawing in of the breath.   He tiptoed over to the door and opened it gently.

The room was unlit, with the only illumination coming from a parted curtain.  Slocum couldn’t see much other than the slight silhouette of Violet Healy turned to the wall.  Her shape was heaving up, heaving down, silently now.  He made his way over to her side of the bed, hoping to see her face.

“Ma, you alright?” he whispered.  She turned toward him; he could swear her eyes were full of tears.

“I’ll be fine, son,” she said.  “You get to school and have a good day, you hear?”

“You sure?”

“Of course I am.  You go make some good grades and do me proud.”

“Yes’m,” he said, and moved forward and kissed her on the cheek.

“I love you, Ma.”

“I love you, too, Slocum.”

He stood there a second, looking for something he couldn’t put his finger on.  His mother had been getting sicker and sicker since the car wreck last spring.  It started out with whiplash and migraines, but she’d been seeing a chiropractic witch-doctor who ran an electromagnetic gadget over her spine to gauge the energy flowing through her vertebra and outwards, and she barely got around with a cane anymore.  She spent more and more of her time in bed, barely able to move.

He went to his room and got dressed in dry clothes for school.  By the time he returned to the kitchen, breakfast was in full swing.  His father had both pancakes and scrambled eggs and bacon on the stove, juggling each of them onto the plates on the counter like he was short order cook.  Lillian was standing next to him, watching the acrobatic actions of her father, and funneling food to Arnold as it got ready.

“Did you flip a lot of flapjacks when you were a soldier, Pa?” she asked him.

“I mostly peeled potatoes, Sweetie,” he said.  “Your mother taught me how to cook.”

Slocum sat down at the table and sipped on a glass of grape juice.  Arnold was on the other side, wolfing down his serving as soon as it was supplied.  Eating usually soothed his nerves and cleared the idea of throttling his little brother from his mind.  That notion was especially present recently, with Slocum’s behavior taking a turn inward.  He hardly spoke a peep anymore, and it got on the big brother’s bad side.

Lillian put a plate in front of Slocum.  He put butter and maple syrup in between each pancake and coated the top one too.  Then he picked at it for a few minutes before his sister and father sat down.

“Is Ma gonna eat?” he asked.

“I thought I’d let her sleep awhile and then fix her something after I take you all to school,” Parker answered.  “Eat what’s on your plate, Slocum.”  His pa was real clear about eating what was put before them, so he picked up the pace and finished off the fixings.

“We got a three-day week next week, Pa,” Arnold said between mouthfuls.  “Can we go look at cars after Thanksgiving Day, like Friday maybe?”

“I think we can fit something like that in,” his pa said.  “You have several years to go before you can think about getting anything to drive, or getting a job to pay for it.”

That wiped the smile off of Arnold’s face.  He was for sure his sixteenth-birthday present would be a new car, right off the Chevy dealership lot.  The idea he might have to buy it himself took the sheen off his dreams.  He stuffed his mouth with bacon and looked across the table at Slocum.

“What’re you all watery-eyed about?” Arnold asked him.  Everyone turned to hear the answer to the question.

“I dunno. Maybe I’m coming down with a cold,” he fibbed.  He wiped his eyes with his shirtsleeve and returned Arnold’s gaze.  His pa broke it up with orders to get set for the ride to school.

“I’ll wash the dishes when I get back, but you three haul yourselves out to the car while I get my keys,” he said.  ­

Slocum was ready to go before the other two, so he went outside to see about King.  The dog was curled up on the front porch, and rolled over on his back and raised his paws in the air when he came out the door.  He bent down and rubbed his belly and chest.  King swayed side to side in ecstasy.   Slocum peered at him close to see if his beagle had been talking to the frog any.

Didn’t look like it.

Lillian came out then and they got in the back seat of the Pontiac.  Arnold rode shotgun whenever there was just one adult in the car, on pain of pain, as he liked to say.  Might makes right was his philosophy, but since he kept Slocum from getting his clock cleaned by bullies on numerous occasions, he felt he’d earned his special place, despite the choking he received this morning.  Slocum didn’t envy him none.

The drive to school was uneventful.  Slocum turned the frog’s words over in his mind, and made a pact to give weight to the toad’s counsel, since it was the first time he’d ever talked to an animal and it talked back.

The morning session was full of activity, as the teacher wanted to cover a lot of ground before next week’s four-day break.  They were doing square roots in math.  Perfect squares like 81, 121,169, and 289.  It was just memorization.  He finished it real quick and read from the class library a book about Thomas Edison, and how he was mostly deaf and that it might’ve helped him concentrate.  He thought it was a poor way to set your sights on a subject.

First recess was reserved for playing marbles with the three Billy Coopers.  The Coops weren’t greedy when playing, since they had thousands of shooters and cat-eyes, and Slocum only had a few hundred.  If they took them all he wouldn’t play with them any more.  They were good boys anyhow.  They made up for all the jerks in the city school.  They drew a circle in the dirt and put their marbles in, trying to pop someone else’s out of the ring with their big, cat-eyed orbs anyone would drool to get their mitts on, and claim the other’s like chess pieces, except this was for keeps.  You had to have thumbs like Hercules to win.

Slocum was just finishing up a game when he looked up to see if the teacher was at the door to ring the bell.  That’s when he saw a glimpse of none other than his big-eared friend, freed from the mirror, peering around the corner of the fourth-grade classroom.  That big bird feather stuck in his hair, and his red-painted face gave him away.  It was a shock for sure, but the words from this morning were with him, and he didn’t let on.  When the bell rang, he went back to the sixth-grade class like nothing was the matter, and got ready for civics.

The teacher this year was Mrs. Horseman, a thirty-year-old who graduated from the University of Mississippi just two years before.  She was everything old lady Mackleroy was not, which is to say she liked Slocum.  She reminded him of Miss Helen Martin, his first-grade teacher in Eugene, Missouri.  They only lived in that town for five months before they packed off to Conway, Arkansas, where his pa was promised a good job that didn’t pan out.  What he recalled was the way she taught him to speak clearly, and how pleased she was that he could spell when he reached her class, even though he didn’t go to kindergarten.  He thought she was some young movie star, but she was forty-two, and taught school in Asia and Europe and pretty much all over the world before settling down outside Jefferson City, Missouri.  She was a master teacher and recognized Slocum for a gifted child, and he responded in kind, soaking up everything he could from her before fate dragged him away from her care.

Mrs. Horseman was like that, except she wasn’t pretty and didn’t make Slocum’s feet curl up and his head spin with love like the other schoolmarm, but she was a good woman, and he appreciated her.  She got into the day’s lesson about the government, how it was by the people and for the people, but seeing his reflection in the flesh had unnerved him some, and he didn’t catch much of it.  He kept spying at the windows and the door to see if he could catch sight of that runt, but he didn’t show up.

At lunchtime, Slocum sat between Billy Dan Cooper and Billy John Cooper, but he didn’t talk, other than to ask for the ketchup from Billy Kyle Cooper across the table.  They finished up and went outside to play catch.  Slocum got out his glove and the four of them loped baseballs one to the other, until Billy Kyle threw a high one up at Slocum whose arch coincided with the top of an old oak tree, and isn’t it fitting that the floppy-eared boy, decked out in war paint and buckskin, was standing on the top limb, waving at him?

The ball smacked Slocum in the head and made him stagger a bit, but the angle wasn’t very acute and it bounced off his ball cap and into Billy Dan’s glove.  They all laughed at it, since Slocum never missed.  He took the cap off and looked up to check if he’d been seeing things, but the scamp had vamoosed.  Disappeared.

“Maybe I’m nuts,” he said to himself.

He sat down on the second step of the bleachers behind the baseball diamond and rubbed the spot where the ball beaned him.  He looked up at the oak again, and wondered if he was doing things right.  The bell rang and he got up to go back in.

His mind wasn’t fixed on science that day.  Mrs. Horseman was talking about the capillaries within leaves and carbon dioxide turning into oxygen.  He knew that already, and was doodling in the margins of his three-ring binder, when he heard a wail from outside.  It snapped him out of his doldrums.  The teacher from across the hall, Mrs. Daley, opened the door, breathless and heaving sobs, and behind her came his constant companion, caterwauling, almost mimicking the teacher, but set to a singsong that was different than hers.

The teacher told Mrs. Horseman to turn on the television, but Slocum was fixed on the chant he heard coming from the boy.  He looked around real quick and no one noticed him.  He didn’t think anything of that.  No one ever did.  The boy was yowling in some foreign tongue. It went up high and then went low, high then low, high and low.   He danced up to Slocum in his seat in the middle of the third row, and got right up in his face, his eyes wide and wild.  He jumped clean over his desk to the other side and repeated the routine.  He did this three more times in the space of a minute.

Slocum watched him, making sure not to react to what he was seeing.  He didn’t want to stand out in this school for anything but grades and baseball, being his marble collection was no big deal.  His tormentor stopped and sat down cross-legged on top of the desk facing Slocum Healy.

“Do you not recognize this song?” the flop-eared boy said.  Slocum didn’t say anything, but looked him straight in one crooked eye.

“You said this is a good day to die,” he said.  “You remember that, do you not?”  He let out the same whoop, lifting his head and swinging it slowly, to and fro.

Slocum responded by returning to his doodling.  The boy stopped the singing and jumped down from the school desk.  He squatted next to it, face-level with Slocum.

“You will never see your mother again.  This is her day.”

Slocum snapped his eyes up and met his.  He stared into them, trying to bring the words into his mind.  Around him was the sound of the two teachers talking, watching the television they turned on to a news flash.  For everything else but the thing crouching by his side, he had milk in his ears.  He could see nothing but this creature that was threatening his mother.

“You leave my ma alone,” he said in a low voice.

The other boy squinted his eyes.  “I am honoring her by singing her death song.  I do not sing it for sport.”

Slocum tried to clear his thoughts, to get a hold of what was happening.  His vision was clouding with tears, like he was watching the world from underwater, his throat shut tight, seeking the surface for air to fill his lungs.

With all the commotion around the television at the front of the room, his reaction went unnoticed.  He was the only child that remained in his seat.  He didn’t hear the breaking report or Walter Cronkite telling the country the news from Dallas.

Slocum was on the border of another world, sitting in the third row, fourth seat of a sixth-grade classroom at Woolmarket Elementary School outside Biloxi, Mississippi.

The two sat there for what seemed to Slocum an eternity, until he noticed the waves from water drops, intersecting and canceling each other, in the eyes of this imp.

“Take me instead.”

The spirit inched closer to the boy.  “What are you saying, Slocum Healy?”

“I’ll do anything to save my ma.”

“Anything, young one?”

He whispered, “Yes.”

“Would you give-away your life for hers?”

“Yes.”

“Would you leave everything and everyone you know, and go with me?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

The bugbear lifted his hand and touched Slocum’s forehead.  He felt a chasm opening before him.  Within it was a dark hollow, and he seemed to descend into it, where he saw innumerable people, young and old, male and female, bound and blindfolded, as if waiting for wild beasts to tear them apart.  He could hear screams and the roar of animals and gunfire nearby.

“Would you willingly journey here?” he heard in his ear.

Slocum swallowed hard, and whispered, “Yes.”

He landed on the ground before a young woman holding a child in her arms, just before it was snatched from her and impaled on a sword.   The infant’s blood splattered on Slocum’s face.

He turned to face the killer.

“The flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at one p.m., two o’clock Standard Time, some thirty-eight minutes ago.”  Walter Cronkite took off his glasses and wiped his eyes, looking up at the clock on the wall.  Slocum directed his attention to the sound of the news bulletin on the television.  Mrs. Horseman came up to him and put a handerkerchief over his face.

“Please go take care of that nosebleed, Slocum,” she said, and returned to the   front of the room.  He could taste the blood on his lips and feel it on his chin.  There was a stain on his shirt.  It was semi-circular and splayed out like a boot had splashed water from a mud puddle onto his clothes.

He went outside to the restroom.  He washed his face and tried to get his shirt clean, but all he could do was make it pink against the blue plaid.  He looked at his image in the mirror, but he was alone.

The teacher called for recess.  Slocum begged off on account of his nose and went to the woods where the children played tag amongst the trees.  There was a clearing with a canopy of shade, and almost knee-deep orange and brown leaves.  He sat in the cushion of debris and tried to think.   He thought of the frog’s instructions.

“Make no bargains today with the boy who is following you,” it had said.  He put his head in his hands and pondered how he might have done it different, but he could see no other path than the one he chose.  The only thing that dismayed him was all this blood.

He’d never had a nosebleed his entire life.

He sat there until the bell rang to come back.  School was kind of ruined for that particular Friday.  Mrs. Horseman regained her composure during the break, and decided the news reports were too graphic and disturbing for her charges, so they practiced writing and penmanship for the remainder of the time left to them.  Everyone was well behaved, making sure to create cursive letters in the way they’d been instructed.

The end of the day came and Slocum went to the front of the school.  Lillian was already there, waiting for their father to pick them up.  He sat down on the bench next to his sister.

“Did you hear what happened?” Lillian asked him.

“Yeah.  It was awful,” he said.  “I wonder what’s gonna happen now.”

They fell silent and waited for their ride.  It was a good twenty minutes before the Pontiac pulled up beside them.  Everyone else was on the way home on the bus, or their parents picked them up already.

“Mama!” Lillian exclaimed, and jumped up to open the door on the passenger’s side.

“Hey, Sweetie.  Get inside, you two,” she said.  “Arnold gets out in a few minutes. We have to hurry.”  Big brother was in middle school a few miles away.  He didn’t like to wait for anything.

The two children piled into the back seat.  Lillian wanted to talk about the news and what it meant.  Slocum spoke over her.

“How you feeling, Ma?” he asked.  He poked his head over the front seat next to the driver.  “I was worried about you this morning.”

“Oh darling, don’t fret about me.  I got up this afternoon when your father left for his appointment, and I swear I haven’t felt this good in years,” she said.  “I cleaned up the house and baked a chocolate cake.”

“You sure you’re okay?” he said.

Violet brought the car to a halt at a stop sign and turned around to face her son.

“I told you.  I feel like a new woman.“ She looked at the stain on his clothing.  ”What happened to your shirt?”

Slocum didn’t answer.  He didn’t see his ma’s cane in the front seat.  He sat back and let Lillian talk.

“Is the President really dead, Ma?” she asked.

“Of course not.  How could that be?” Violet said.

“Somebody shot President Kennedy, Ma,” Lillian said, and then began to cry.

“That can’t be true,” she said.  “Who told you such a story?”

“It’s all over the news,” Lillian answered.  “It’s on television, but they shut it off and wouldn’t let us watch it.”

Mrs. Healy turned on the radio, and heard about the assassination for the first time.

“Lord have mercy on his soul and his poor family,” she said.  They came up to Arnold’s school.  He was just getting out and ran to the car and got in the front seat.

“Didja hear what happened?” he said, between breaths.

“Yes, just now, son,” his mother said.  “It’s horrible.  What’s this world coming to?”

“They blew his brains out!” Arnold was nearly yelling.

“You stop that!”  Violet grabbed hold of Arnold’s arm and swung him around to her.  “I don’t want you talking about this dreadful thing that way.  You have some respect, or you’ll be hearing from your pa.”

Arnold drew back and rubbed his arm where his ma had nearly wrung it in two.  He turned to look out the window and stayed still the rest of the ride.

When they arrived home, they turned on the TV.  It was on all three channels.  The cartoons and The Little Rascals were pre-empted by the ongoing bulletins, which announced that the assassin murdered a police officer before he was caught in a movie theater a few miles away from Dealey Plaza.  The family was glued to the reports, and would be the rest of the weekend.

Toward sundown, Slocum went out to the back yard to spend some time with the dog.  He fed him and brushed his coat and checked him for ticks.  He picked a few, told them he was sorry and squished them between his fingernails.  He then retired to the creek, where he found the frog.

He waited for quite a time for it to speak, but was disappointed.  The toad sat and looked at him like he did that very morning, but said nothing.  Eventually, it hopped into the stream and swam away.

“Be like that,” Slocum said, and threw a pebble into the water after him.  A commotion was coming from the house.  His father was home, but he stayed put.  After a bit, Parker Bull Healy came out the back door with a bundle under his arm.

He came to where Slocum was sitting and gathered up some dry twigs and leaves into a pile.  He unwrapped his package and took out a length of wood and a rod made of what looked like the same material.

He set the long piece on the ground, and in a burnt-looking hole on one end put the stick into the notch, and positioning his hands at the top of it, twirled it between them as they traveled down its shaft.  Applying a lot of force, he did it very quickly several times.  Before Slocum could figure what was happening, a small ember appeared at the base, which his pa picked up and placed on the tiny mound of leaves and twigs.  He bent over and blew on it until it burst into flame.

When it got going good, he tossed more stems on the fire and then larger pieces until he had a compact blaze.  He picked up a handful of the grass and laid it in the midst of it.  A trail of smoke began to rise into the windless air, and Parker began to chant a singsong and sway his head from side to side, with his eyes closed.  It went up high and then went low, high then low, high and low.

It continued on like this until the grass was spent and the fire died some.  Parker then went over to the stream and picked up handfuls of water to douse the fire, and stirred the ashes until he was sure the fire was  all finished.  He took his fire bundle and wrapped it up securely, and placed it under his arm.  Then he got up and went to the back porch, where he bent down to pet King.  He looked back into the pitch black night as he went in, to make sure he’d put out the fire completely.

When he entered the kitchen, supper was on the table, and Violet and Parker and their children sat down to eat Friday night cheeseburgers, a treat the whole family looked forward to.  The four of them sat and ate quietly, the events of the day weighing heavy on them all.

THE END OF BOOK ONE

to be continued in
Book Two
of
Driving Down Pass Road

©2011  David Greg Taylor