In With The Old
A year and a half ago, I entered a short story competition with some rather unusual rules. The publishing house sponsoring the competition provided the first and the twentieth paragraphs of the story, and the contestants would write the story around these two paragraphs. Oh, and the story had to be exactly fifty paragraphs in length.
I learned of the competition the day before the closing date. Since the cash prize was a nice one, I decided to give it a spin. I sat down at my desk with a cupful of sharpened pencils, opened a fresh notebook, and started scratching words onto the paper. I wrote all day, taking a few meal and stretch-my-legs breaks.
My submission eventually received a polite rejection, which was not a surprise. It’s not a great story, but I did pour an entire day into its creation. So in the interest of not wasting graphite, I will share it here.
The first and twentieth paragraphs (again, supplied by the publisher) are here:
1. Beyond the cracked sidewalk, and the telephone pole with layers of flyers in a rainbow of colors, and the patch of dry brown grass there stood a ten-foot high concrete block wall, caked with dozens of coats of paint. There was a small shrine at the foot of it, with burnt out candles and dead flowers and a few soggy teddy bears. One word of graffiti filled the wall, red letters on a gold background. Rejoice!
20. When the ride ended, she was lifted again. The kid slid her body onto a soft pile of clothing among the boxes in the garage. He pulled an old coat over the top, creating a cave that emanated the sweetness of old ladies who frequently powdered themselves – a light rose motif that played ironically well in the deep recesses of Rainbow’s ancestral brain. The pizza kid lifted her head to help her lap water from a hubcap. He broke bits of pepperoni and crust into bite-sized pieces and left them where her tongue could reach them. Much later, she heard him practicing his orations like songs. Like monks chanting in the distance, they were a comfort.
~ S.K. Orr
Hands Across
by
S.K. Orr
Beyond the cracked sidewalk, and the telephone pole with layers of flyers in a rainbow of colors, and the patch of dry brown grass there stood a ten-foot high concrete block wall, caked with dozens of coats of paint. There was a small shrine at the foot of it, with burnt out candles and dead flowers and a few soggy teddy bears. One word of graffiti filled the wall, red letters on a gold background. Rejoice!
The wall was situated at the end of Catalpa Street where the road comes to a T. It was all that remained of what had once been a newsstand, run by an elderly man with a harelip. The man’s son, who never married, had helped his father run the newsstand for several years. Like his father, the son had a harelip, and like his father, he had concealed his flaw with a brushy mustache. And for all the years the father and son worked together, the son would arrive at six a.m., lift the steel roller doors, crank open the green awnings, and slice open the stacks of newspapers and magazines for the day. The son had slipped on the icy sidewalk one February morning and died after striking his head on the curb. The old man had retired a month later, and the newsstand had been demolished a few years after that, the concrete block wall a mute reminder of the two suffering men who had passed so many quiet days in front of its flat surface.
Legs passed the wall several times every day. He never paid it much attention when driving on 4th Avenue, the street on which the wall stood. But whenever he was on Catalpa Street and came to the stop sign and looked across at where his grandmother had once bought her magazines, he remembered the way things had been. And he always thought of the numerous wrecks at the wall, lives ended or maimed when a driver misjudged his speed or ignored the stop sign and slammed into the metal-and-concrete fence or the telephone pole or the steel utility pole in front of the wall. The pizza kid had seen several teddy bears propped in front of the wall over the years, as well as crosses and candles and wreathes and flowers, and even football jerseys.
His name was Peleg, but he detested his name and had asked his teachers and peers and even his family to call him “Legs,” and some did, though he had to do a lot of reminding. But most people in Pine Bluff called him the pizza kid. He was twenty-two years old and had been working for the Ukulele Pizza Parlor since he was sixteen. He had delivered on bicycle at first, and then later in the rattletrap car his Mamaw had bought him his junior year. After graduation he had gone to work at The Uke full time and had eventually been named assistant manager. That was as far as Legs wanted to proceed, though – he did not want to be fully responsible for the restaurant. And as assistant manager, he still got to sometimes make deliveries, which broke up the monotony of the shift.
The November sky was as gray as brain matter and clouds were scuttling across it from the northeast, driven by the ever-mutable wind. A low gust caught a plastic grocery bag and cast it across the street just as the pizza kid was passing the wall. He stomped the brakes and cursed, then stared at the bag as it was flattened against the concrete block wall. His throat was dry as he sat with the engine idling, one foot on the brake pedal and one slightly depressing the gas.
Damn. Thought that was a cat, he mused, still looking at the bag against the wall. Good thing there’s no ice. He checked his rear view mirror; no one behind him. He shook his head, closed his eyes as the engine almost stalled, then shifted into park and revved the engine a bit. Looking at the wall again, he noticed a large teddy bear crumpled at it’s base on the far end. The wind had shifted and the bag had settled on the teddy bear, still fluttering a little. The engine seemed to smooth out, and the pizza kid dropped it into DRIVE and pressed the accelerator with a tentative foot. The engine didn’t stall; he drove on.
Pine Bluff had been a lovely, tree-laced town in past decades, but the relentless corrosive forces that have eaten away the beauty of so many small towns had done their mean work, and the streets through which Legs piloted his halting Ford showed the scars and the shock and the bitter sadness that remains when loveliness is marred and ruined. Many of the trees – the majestic elms and oaks and maples, the delicate mimosas, and the regal magnolias – had been neglected or destroyed. The sensible solid homes along the streets were no longer shaded in summer, and the garbage of the rootless and uncaring was strewn across too many of the lawns where children had once chased lightning bugs and searched for four-leaf clover.
Legs turned right on Oak and slowed when he saw Cody, the sullen traffic cop who dispensed citations with the fervor of an evangelist handing out gospel tracts. He drove past the squad car with seeming indifference, watching in his mirrors, and was startled by a yell in front of him. A lanky boy had stepped out from between two parked cars and the pizza kid’s car had almost struck him. The teenager took his time walking in front of Legs as he crossed the street, and before he reached the other side, he wheeled around and took two quick hopping steps towards the idling car and bounced a cup full of ice and soda off Legs’ hood. The pizza kid jumped again, his attention having been fixed on the police officer in his rear view mirror. The lanky kid blew Legs a kiss and rolled on.
A few blocks later and he was home. He parked on the street under the dead magnolia and sat for a moment, listening to the engine and looking around at the neighborhood. A gust of chilled air blew a dirty disposable diaper, stiff with frozen human filth, into the front yard of the bungalow. The boy killed the engine and got out and closed the door with a slight push, mindful of the loose window. He found a stick by the curb and carried it to where the diaper was laying against the bricks beside the front steps. He used it to lift the garbage and carried it like a disgraced regimental pennant to the large plastic trashcan on wheels blocking the weedy driveway. He dropped it in, turned back to the house, and trotted up the steps.
The house was warm with the gas from the furnace and the scent of soup beans and cornbread. His brother David sprawled on the couch wearing earphones stolen from a coworker, eyes focused in dull pinpoints on the video game he was playing. Legs moved past David without speaking, saving the effort, headed for the kitchen. On the way he passed a small, chipped table of red lacquer on which stood a tiny lamp and seven crimson-bound books. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare was etched in gold letters on their spines. Legs touched his breastbone with one finger as he glanced at the table in the dark room.
His mother sat at the kitchen table with a neat deck of bills and a calculator with an oversize keypad. A cigarette in a furniture store ashtray sent a thin ribbon of blue smoke straight up to the yellowing ceiling. His grandmother sat at the table also, taking a sip from a coffee cup, a pile of beans on a piece of newspaper on the table next to a plastic colander. The pizza boy went to each woman and kissed her on top of her head, then nodded at the door adjoining the kitchen. “Is he awake?”
“I ‘spect so,” said his mother, her lean face luminous as she watched him. “You go on in and see him. I know he’ll perk up with you in for the evening. He’s always worried when you’re outta the house. Come on back when you’ve visited and I’ll fix you a bite.” Legs nodded and went to the bedroom door, tapped softly, and went inside.
A while later, after they had finished talking, the old man closed his dreamy blue eyes and sighed, a soft evidence of peace. His grandson was lying on the bed with him, atop the covers, spooning with his slim frame pressed against his mother’s father’s even leaner body. Legs reached up and stroked the white hair, fine as a spiderweb, and hummed an improvised tune for a moment. Then he spoke the “Ceremony” soliloquy from Henry V, focusing on achieving the plummiest BBC accent he could manage in a whisper, each word clipped and popped like a morsel of memory in the old man’s large and translucent ear, and after the pizza boy had formed the last word, his grandfather was asleep again, practicing for the extended sleep that every hour of life beckoned nearer.
When he went back into the kitchen, closing the door behind him as carefully as he had closed the car door, he saw that his mother had laid out a bowl of soup beans and a plate with two wedges of yellow cornbread. The beans had a small pyramid of chopped raw onion and chow-chow exactly in the center, and butter was streaming from the cornbread’s interior. A flowered glass of buttermilk was next to the plate. He sat down and winked at his mother and picked up a spoon in one hand and a piece of cornbread in the other. His grandmother watched him across the mound of store-bought green beans as she snapped them, rectangles of light reflecting in the lenses of her glasses.
The pizza boy’s mother punched a few keys on the calculator, made an entry in the check registry, then wrote out a check and tore it from the book. She held it in her fingers, watching her youngest son eat his dinner. She put the check on top of a bill and folded the papers into an envelope and licked it, setting it next to the ashtray. The pizza boy watched his mother, chewing with slow movements of his pointed chin, then took a swig of the buttermilk and swallowed. Snap-crack went the beans between his grandmother’s arthritic fingers, and rack-rack went the clock on the wall, the one that looked like a saucepan, and chik went his mother’s disposable lighter as she thumbed it, and he saw that the woman who had given him life was about to speak once she’d lit her cigarette.
“Mister Crumpler called for you,” she said after taking a long drag and squinting at him. “He said if you can pick up those old costumes at the Black Box and take them to his garage it’ll give him room for the new stuff.” She took another drag and set the cigarette on the lip of the Hardin & Bros Furniture ashtray. “He said the props are there, too, and your new script.”
Legs smiled around his last bite of cornbread and nodded his thanks. He picked up the glass to take a swig, but the phone behind him burbled its curious robotic ring. He reached back and lifted if from the base, swallowed the cornbread, mumbled “Hang on a sec” into the receiver, and took a gulp of the buttermilk. He belched, which drew a look from both women, and wiped his mouth on the paper napkin with its printed pastel images of fruit. He put the phone to his mouth again and said, “Yeah. What’s up, Dickie?”
He listened for a minute, frowning a bit, then grunted a few words of assent and reached back and replaced the phone in its base. “Dickie asked if I could deliver a pie out on Olive Street ‘cos Kathy’s car is about to die on her and she doesn’t wanna get stranded out there.” He stood up and patted his pockets, then grinned at the two women. “He’ll pay me double just to do this one delivery on my day off. And I’ll swing by the Black Box and get that stuff for Mister Crumpler and take it to his garage on the way back. He’ll buy me a tank of gas just for that, I bet.”
The women watched him as he went to the bedroom door, opened it, peeked in, and closed it again. Legs again kissed the tops of their heads and then waved as he left the kitchen. They heard the front door open and close, and they never heard a word passed between Peleg and David. Snap-crack went the beans, and dok-dok went the calculator keys as mother and daughter waited to hear the chak-vroom of the aging engine out front.
**
When the ride ended, she was lifted again. The kid slid her body onto a soft pile of clothing among the boxes in the garage. He pulled an old coat over the top, creating a cave that emanated the sweetness of old ladies who frequently powdered themselves – a light rose motif that played ironically well in the deep recesses of Rainbow’s ancestral brain. The pizza kid lifted her head to help her lap water from a hubcap. He broke bits of pepperoni and crust into bite-sized pieces and left them where her tongue could reach them. Much later, she heard him practicing his orations like songs. Like monks chanting in the distance, they were a comfort.
**
She was thirteen years old, and she had once been the companion of the man who had for years sold homemade apple butter at the knocked-together wooden booth across from the post office. A German Shepherd, she was relentlessly intelligent and curious, and she was troubled by the bad hips of her breed. Due to her dragging gait and her frequent whimpering, no one wanted to take her in when the apple butter seller suffered a massive stroke while in line at the grocery store and was taken from there to the hospital and later to the nursing home. The dog, who had been named Rainbow because she always seemed happiest just after a thunderstorm, had been shuffled from shelter to home to shelter to bad home and had finally been driven out to the soybean fields beyond the city limits and left to find what food and shelter and affection she could in the flat, soundless acres.
**
The boys weren’t really bad boys. In fact, they were all good students, both at school and at Sunday School – just ask their families. But as a group, they possessed the restless need for brutal amusement, because amusement meant being able to ignore the things they’d rather not grapple with, and if the amusement was brutal, it could serve as it often did to display a hard heart within one or more of the group, and a hard heart was a valuable weapon in the bleak and decaying avenues of Pine Bluff.
**
Mr. Crumpler heard the boy reciting a portion of Richard III and he shook his head as he smiled a bit, wishing that Peleg could be so passionate and uninhibited on the small raised stage in the Black Box. I’ll give him a few more minutes to get everything stowed, and I’ll call him in for a snack – something besides pizza, he thought. And then the bark came from the garage.
**
Peleg’s grandfather’s name was Zeke, and he had just awakened. The sun was an anemic gray stripe across the chenille bedspread, and it seemed to him that if he could reach it with his fingers, he could fold the gray sunshine like a linen napkin and put it in his pocket for later, or for another day or another month. He started to drowse again, but came awake when he heard a bark. Neighbor’s dog, he thought, and started working to turn himself over.
**
“Hey, thanks, ‘preeshate it,” said Legs as he closed his hand over the tip. The girl shut the door behind him as he took the steps in a single leap, landing skinny-light on his feet on the walkway. He trotted to his car which was idling at the curbside and got in. Beside him on the seat was the extra pizza Dickie had given him, a thin-crust pepperoni the new girl had baked by accident. David would munch on it later if he hadn’t gone out. Or his grandmother. His mother despised pizza and how it made his clothes smell. And his grandfather could no longer manage solid food. He turned onto Catalpa and headed towards Mr. Crumpler’s house, mindful of how the engine sounded.
**
She had slept much of the day under a cast-off camper shell in the weeds behind a small, vacant house. When she finally left in search of food, her hips began to pain her within a block. She whimpered to herself and looked up and down the streets, streets which rarely held pedestrians anymore. A cake pan full of rainwater provided a drink, but she didn’t smell any food nearby, so Rainbow decided to find a place in the thin sunshine where she might warm her bones. She crossed Cherry and headed down 4th. The wall where she sometimes sat and watched people was just down the hill, and the sun seemed to be strengthening somewhat.
**
They cursed each other with the easy coarseness that accompanies those who are rarely in the presence of someone bold enough to rebuke. And as they walked, they tossed a red kickball back and forth, sometimes bouncing it off the head of one of their number unwise enough to let vigilance falter. The wind picked up a bit and one of the boys peeled off from the group, heading home, waggling his cup of soft drink at them in farewell. The rest continued their organized swagger up the middle of the street. When they came to the Rejoice! wall at the intersection, one of them noticed the old German Shepherd dozing next to the expanse of painted concrete blocks.
“Hey, yo. Yo! Dog!” he called to the others. And they moved as one towards their pal, who was now standing over Rainbow. She raised her head and thumped her tail and sniffed the air around them to see if anyone had any food.
**
Mister Crumpler peered into the garage, wishing again that he’d put in stronger lights. He could see Peleg kneeling before a large box on its side, talking softly. A whimper issued up from the box, which was draped with some of last season’s costumes from Arsenic And Old Lace. He went to the young man, his face creased with concern.
“Peleg? What’s that you’ve got, my boy?” He reached the boy and the box, and he looked down at the battered dog, who was looking back at him with her one good eye. Her sides were heaving as she panted and sniffed the air. “My lord, son, what’s all this?”
“She needs help, Mister Crumpler. She won’t eat or even drink. Some kids had been beating her when I found her. I let her rest when I first brought her here, and I didn’t even see what they did to her eye until she started crying a few minutes ago and I came over to check on her. She needs help, and I wasted time in here on this…” His throat seized up.
**
When he came to the T-intersection of 4th and Catalpa, he looked over at the wall (“Rejoice!” it proclaimed in its blood-red letters on the fool’s gold background) and noticed the old teddy bear that had been crumpled there earlier. But now the teddy bear moved. It lifted its head and Legs could see, could tell, could be alarmed. A noise to his left drew his eye and Legs saw a clutch of boys walking with quick strides towards the community center. One of them looked back over his shoulder but didn’t seem to notice the car or the pizza boy inside. Legs shouldered open the door and ran to the dog. A plastic bag was fluttering near her, flattened against the wall.
**
Zeke opened his eyes again, his hip hurting from lying on one side for so long. He turned with a slow jerking movement onto his back and laid there, looking up at the water stain on the popcorn ceiling. ”Would you be well?” he whispered. “Would you be free of this affliction?”
The door opened and his daughter appeared. “Are you okay, Daddy? Do you need anything?” She stood watching him, ensuring that he had heard and understood her. He was staring at the ceiling, and his lips were moving but he was not speaking. Finally, he turned his head towards his daughter.
The old man shook his head no and smiled at her, his gums glistening in the shadows of the bedroom. She closed the door softly and Zeke rested there, blinking like a metronome. He could hear the television playing in the front room, and he noticed that the cloth covering the bedside table was dancing from the pressure of the warm air coming up from the vent beneath it. The old man reached his hands towards the ceiling, extending his arms until his elbows crackled. He looked at the backs of his hands, then lowered them towards his face and looked at the palms for a long moment. When he put his arms at his sides, he was breathing deeply within a few seconds and running across a vast hardwood dance-hall floor in his dreams, snoring within a minute-point-five.
**
Mister Crumpler looked from the boy to the dog and back to the boy, watching his face. Peleg seemed like a concrete pillar sprouted up out of the garage floor, slender and immobile. He didn’t seem inclined to speak, and Mister Crumpler’s nature took over. “I’m happy to pay for the emergency vet in Sheridan, but that’s almost an hour away. If we’re going to take her there, we have to get moving. Now. Peleg?”
The pizza boy blinked and came back to the garage where the dog lay and the theater manager stood. He looked down at Rainbow, who in his mind he had begun to call Ophelia, and said, “Can we take your car, Mister Crumpler? I’m afraid mine will die between here and Sheridan.”
Mister Crumpler nodded. “Of course. Let me go turn off the kettle and get my things. I’ll call ahead and make sure the clinic in Sheridan is open. I’ll let them know we’re enroute. I’ll get some clean blankets, too. Maybe some bottled water.” He paused, he fingers at his temples. He was breathing as if exerted. “Can you manage her by yourself?”
Peleg nodded and Mister Crumpler turned and went inside. The pizza boy knelt and stroked the dog’s head with a light touch. She seemed to be sleeping. He hoped she was just sleeping. He gathered up the untouched pizza fragments and dropped them into a basket by the doors and bent again to move the hubcap full of water. As he did, the dog yelped and Peleg jumped, spilling the water. Mister Crumpler appeared in the doorway leading into the house and pulled the door shut behind him and checked to make sure it had locked. He turned to Peleg in time to see the boy lift the dog and then step in the puddle of spilled water. Peleg fell hard on one side, but managed to keep the dog up and off the garage floor. Mister Crumpler hurried to them.
**
Rainbow was inside the halls of mystery, the well-lit place between waking and sleep, between knowledge and oblivion. She was running flat-out hard, her tongue trailing out of her mouth, and a tiny blonde girl was in front of her, squealing and laughing. She was nearer to the ground now, like when she had been a puppy, and she could see soft clouds in a shocking blue sky above. Rainbow whirled and leaped, and the little girl clapped her hands, and an older man’s voice called from somewhere beyond the hill they were on. Rainbow could smell a fire, a good fire, a cooking fire, and when she started to lift her snout to locate it, she saw all the soft clouds coalesce into one black and towering thundercloud. The storm will catch us, thought the dog, but it will be beautiful on the other –
**
Zeke opened his eyes. He had awakened himself snoring. It always happened when he was lying on his back. With pain and caution the old man managed to roll onto his side. The light outside had shifted and no longer qualified to be called sunlight. He closed his eyes again and could hear the residual voice from his evaporated dream. Faith healer, said the voice.
“Faith healer,” he said aloud in a whisper. “So I was. Rejoice.” He opened his eyes and remained still. What? Who was laughing? Where was she? His eyes searched the room, trying to find something onto which he could hook a memory, a reference, something to help him come back to the hidden something that his mind had almost taken hold of.
**
Peleg spread the blanket on the back seat and turned to take the dog from Mister Crumpler, who was very pale. He put Rainbow or Ophelia down on the seat and covered her with another blanket. He got all the way in and looked back at Mister Crumpler. “I’ll ride back here with her. Mister Crumpler?”
The older man was clutching his left arm and breathing hard. A sheen of sweat showed on his forehead, and there was a rime of vague fear in his eyes as he stared at the boy. Peleg slid across the seat and jumped out. Opening the front passenger side door, he took Crumpler by the shoulders and helped him sit in the car. He held out his hand, and Mister Crumpler understood. He fished in his pocket and produced the keys, which Peleg took. The boy ran to the other side, jumped into the driver’s seat, and started the car as Mister Crumpler thumbed the garage door open with the remote.
“I’ll be all right, Peleg. Just lost my wind when I helped pick up the dog. Heavier than I thought she was.” He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “I heard you declaiming in there. In the garage. Before the dog barked. You’ve got the voice. We need to find you the nerve, Peleg.”
“I wish you’d call me Legs,” said the boy, and backed out of the garage. The door was coming back down by the time the back tires met the road’s surface, and when Peleg shifted into DRIVE, the remote fell from Mister Crumpler’s hand and onto the seat. Peleg glanced at it, at Mister Crumpler, and then turned to look at Rainbow or Ophelia. He punched the gas and the Audi whipped up the road, heading east.
**
What? The pizza boy’s mother muted the tv with her thumb and sat very still. Her mother was asleep in the recliner and the house had been quiet and placid since David left earlier. And then she heard her father’s voice call her name and ask her to help him sit up. She dropped the remote on the floor and knocked over her glass of tea in her haste to get to him. Did he say Joyce, or rejoice?
**
“Don’t you dare,” said Mister Crumpler. He had opened his eyes and had seen that the boy was driving towards the hospital, on the road leading to the emergency room entrance. “I”m fine, Peleg. Let’s help this dog. Let’s get…let’s get to Sheridan.” He closed his eyes again.
Sheridan. Might as well be Saturn, thought the boy. He turned and stole a fast glance at the dog, whose remaining eye was open and fixed on him. He looked at Mister Crumpler, who had a bit more color in his face. He cursed silently, then turned the wheel and floored the accelerator. The Audi was moving fast, but not towards the Sheridan highway.
**
She held her father’s hands in hers, bending over him as he sat up in the bed, and she looked over at her mother, who was watching Zeke’s face. The old man didn’t seem to be breathing and was as still as a book on a shelf. She turned her face to the window at the sound of a car pulling up outside and the engine going silent. She saw her son exit the driver’s door and run around the front to the other side Someone was in the passenger seat, a silver head pressed against the window glass. And a muffled dog’s bark arrowed into the dim bedroom’s air as she swept her eyes from loved one to loved one, understanding none of it and wanting so much to stand up and shout.
The End