With both hands she held it out full length. It looked as long as a school ruler and fat as a man’s thumb. She poured it into her jug and flashed five fingers five times. Twenty-five cents.
David started crawling and was promptly rewarded with a long, fat one in his own path. In his haste, he moved too fast, jerked the flashlight, and — httthhhpp — the worm was gone. Primrose made a mocking snort. David stuck out his tongue and pushed on. He’d show her.
The next nightcrawler he came to, he did it right: slow, silent, clamp the tail. Yes! He had it. It looked longer than hers, maybe a world record. He reached over and waggled it in her face, dumped it into his jug, and paused to calculate. Counting the two-inchers, he was up to fifty-five cents now.
He plowed on, ignoring weeds and wet, spurning the two-inch runts, flicking them aside. He was going for big game now. There was one. Got it! There. Got it!
Compared to Easter eggs, worms were a snap. They were still following parallel paths, but they were no longer side by side. When one stopped to nab a worm, the other moved ahead. It was a race.
Quarter by quarter, David’s total rose. Unlike Primrose, he had nothing particular in mind to spend his money on. He just loved the idea of accumulating it. If there were so many nightcrawlers in this small area, think how many there were all up and down Tulip Street. He could make a million!
He was up to three dollars and sixty cents when he spotted the next victim, a fat ten-incher up ahead and a little to the left. Closing in slowly on his prey, he pounced on one end — just as another gloved hand — Primrose’s — snatched the other end. They lifted together, the worm like a short slick jump rope between them.
“Let go!” hissed Primrose.
“You let go,” hissed David.
“I saw it first,” growled Primrose.
“I did,” growled David.
Primrose pulled. David pulled. The ten-inch worm became an eleven-incher.
“I need the money,” snarled Primrose.
“So do I,” snarled David.
“I’ll spit on you if you don’t let go!” screeched Primrose.
“I’ll spit on you!” screeched David.
They stood. Primrose pulled. David pulled. Twelve inches.
“It’s mine!” roared Primrose.
“It’s mine!” roared David.
She pulled. He pulled.
Thp.
Each now held six inches of flailing nightcrawler.
“See what you did!” yelled Primrose. She smacked David with her half.
David threw his half at her. “You did it! You’re greedy! It was my worm and you took it!” With the hand speed of a yo-yo ace, David flipped the lid off Primrose’s jug, turned it over and shook it.
By the time Primrose reclaimed the jug, a half-dozen ten-inchers were on the ground crawling back into the night.
In the beam from David’s flashlight her eyes burned like a demon’s. She stepped toward him. He backed up. She was about to take another step, but halted. She smiled evilly. She held her flashlight before him. “Take a good look,” she said. As David stared, he was impressed by the perfect red roundness of the disc. He wondered why worms couldn’t see it. Primrose’s voice, seeming to come from the red disc, said liltingly, “Have a nice night.” And the light went out.
David raised his own light, pointed it. She was moving off, reduced already to a shoulder and a jug rope at the dissolving limit of the red beam. He tore off the rubber cap and jabbed the fresh light outward. She was gone. He heard a rustle. There? . . . There? . . . His light showed only weeds and night.
21
The clock on the wall said 10:55 when Refrigerator John heard the screams. A moment later he was lurching down Tulip, cursing his bad leg. He veered into the weeds, the beam of his flashlight probing the night, homing in on the shrill cries.
He found the boy screaming with his eyes shut and his flashlight thrust upward, its pitiful beam vanishing mere inches above his head into the black vastness. “David!” John barked and took hold of him; impossibly, the screaming got louder. The boy fought, flailed his flashlight. Only when John pinned his arms and gathered him in and smothered him to his own body did the boy release his terror and sob, “Mommy . . . Mommy . . .” into his chest. The boy clung to him with surprising strength.
John held him there until the sobbing and trembling ceased. Fearfully then, having no idea what had happened, he called out Primrose’s name. He prayed he would not have to call a second time. A sniffle in the dark, a rustling to the right, and his answered prayer walked into the light. Her glistening, gaping eyes; the hunched stiffness of her shoulders; and the cold terror on her face told him no reproach was needed. A lesson had been learned.
On the way back to the abode, the boy told what had happened. John marveled that such combat could result from a broken worm. He told them now what he should have told them before. “When a nightcrawler splits,” he said, “the head end grows a new tail and the tail end grows a new head, and there you go — two new worms.”
They both went, “Wow!”
Fifteen minutes later they were sipping hot chocolate. The boy had suggested it. Primrose’s response — “In July?” — was more reflex than protest, and as it turned out, the boy was right. Hot chocolate was perfect for the moment.
Thirty minutes later the kids were squabbling over the TV. Refrigerator John sat back and relaxed and found reassurance in their return to the usual bickering. He suspected it was no accident, that some instinct beyond their years was driving them onto safe, familiar ground.
An hour later the boy was braiding her hair and she was grousing because he was pulling too hard.
Painted Windows
22
The first Saturday in August featured perfect flea-market clouds: sun-blockers but not rain-makers. The tables on the gravel acre along Ridge Pike displayed everything from watches to monkey wrenches.
One of the tables was rented by Refrigerator John, who in turn donated a third of his space to Primrose. David helped arrange the wares from their Thursday night shopping sprees. One of them was a toilet seat. A sign taped to it said, wouldn’t this make a charming picture frame?
There were also two paperback mystery novels, a painting of a bullfighter on velvet, an old blue-green Coke bottle, five baseball cards, a hubcap, an orange-colored bowl, a vase, a beaded lizard-looking pocketbook, and, under the table, the child’s rocking chair that John had repaired.
Primrose was even grumpier than usual this day. John had decided not to have a bait business after all, so there was no market for worms. Primrose was still twenty dollars short on paint money, and the customers strolling by the tables were mostly the same ones she saw every week. “Lookers, not buyers,” John called them.
Lookers drifted sideways toward the table, never facing it squarely, never quite standing still, moving along even as they eyed the goods. Sometimes they gave a quick glance and were gone, sometimes a slower broom-sweep of the eyes. Occasionally a pair of eyes would land on a particular object, stare a moment, then look up at Primrose, as if to see what sort of oddball would actually ask money for such a thing. Even more rarely, someone would pick up an object and say, “How much?” Primrose’s heart would quicken as she told them the price, and sink as they set it back down and walked off.
Early in the summer Primrose had taken John’s advice and treated each table approach like a golden opportunity. She would rise from her chair, stand smartly behind the table and smile as the person looked over the merchandise and walked off. As the summer went on she dropped first the smile, then the smart pose. Now it took the sight of an open wallet to get her out of the chair. She slumped and grumped and stared into outer space and muttered with the regularity of a grandfather clock, “This business sucks.”
Half the morning had gone by on this day when a shopper finally held up something — the Coke bottle — and said, “How much?”
“What do you care?” Primrose snarled.
The shopper gaped disbelievingly at the slouching girl, set the bottle down, and left.
To the next one who said, “How much?” Primrose answered, “A thousand dollars.”
By eleven o’clock she was challenging nearly everyone who came near the table.
“You gonna look or you gonna buy?”
“You touch it, you buy it.”
“Whatta you lookin’ at?”
When he wasn’t laughing, John was begging her to stop: “You’re ruining my business.” Meanwhile, word about the rude teenager spread across the fleet of tables.
Primrose’s behavior was neither new nor entertaining to David, so he occupied himself by eating. Every half hour he visited the vending truck. By eleven o’clock his stomach was stuffed, his pocket empty of all but a dime.
What could he buy for a dime?
He wandered among the tables, scanning the goods: clothes, knickknacks, books, tools, toys, utensils. When he came to a table half-covered with framed black-and-white photographs, he barely gave it a glance — then stopped cold. He came closer. The pictures were all of people’s faces. The frames were fancy, tinted with gold or silver. They came in many sizes.
At least half of them — ten, he counted — were pictures of the same man, like TV sets in a store all turned to the same channel. And here was the shocker: each one looked exactly like the little one in Primrose’s pocket and the bigger one on her dresser in her four-wheeled room. The same handsome face. The same mustache. The same sly, slightly tilted smile. The same black, shiny, combed-back hair. Primrose’s father.
What was a picture of Primrose’s father doing here? Why were they selling it? Why would anyone other than Primrose or her mother want to buy it?
“See something you like?” said the lady behind the table.
David didn’t know what to say.
“Looking for a present for somebody?” The lady was eating a hot dog. A spot of mustard gave her upper lip a yellow mole. “Your mother maybe?”
“No.”
She let him look awhile. She bit into the hot dog. “This ain’t used junk like most of the tables. This stuff’s new.”
David said nothing.
She pointed with the hot dog. “That there’s a nice one you’re looking at. Only three bucks.”
Three bucks for Primrose’s father’s picture.
“Okay, for you, two-fifty.”
David said, “How come you’re selling his picture?”
“I’m not,” said the lady. Her tongue, like a nightcrawler, slid out, poked around her upper lip till the yellow spot was gone — httthhhp — back into its hole. “It’s the frames I’m selling, not the pictures.”
“I just want a picture,” said David.
“Two bucks, you get the whole shebang.”
David held up his dime. “This is all I have.”
A voice croaked, “Give the kid a picture.” The voice came from an old man in a lawn chair. He was eating something out of a plastic cup.
The lady growled, “What am I, Santa Claus?”
“Give it to him.”
The lady glared at the old man, glared at David. She snorted like a horse and snatched one of the small silvery frames. She worked out the picture and jabbed it, scowling, at David. “Merry Christmas.”
David took it and walked away. And now he wondered: Why? Why had he asked for it? What was he going to do with it? He didn’t know. He stared at the picture. Could he be wrong? No. Thanks to Primrose, he had seen the face too many times to be wrong. This was the man, all right. Her father. Bob.
So why wasn’t he racing to her and shouting, “Primrose, look, your father’s picture! It’s all over that table there!”? Because something didn’t feel right. Something so wispy it would not fill the hollow of a thought. Something that made him want to drape a sheet over the table of gold and silver frames.
Across a dozen tables he could see Primrose. She was lobbing popcorn at the backs of people who failed to stop at her table. He put the picture in his pocket.
Minutes later it was Primrose who came running. She was waving money. “Look! Twenty-five bucks!” Some lady bought the orange bowl. She said it’s called Fiestaware and she has a whole set of it except for the bowl, and she said would I take twenty-five dollars for it.” She grabbed his arm. “Come on. We’re packing up. We’re going for paint!”
23
David just could not make himself do it. He put down his brush. “Primrose, are you sure?”
She looked down from the roof. “If you ask me that one more time.”
“But it feels so weird.”
“You’re going to look weird with a white face in about two seconds.”
“But who ever heard of a bedroom without windows? You have to have at least one.”
“Why? So the egg throwers can look in at me?”
“So you can look out.”
“There’s nothing to look out at. Paint.”
It had been hard enough to paint the side windows. But the last remaining window? The most important window of all?
Primrose thumped across the roof on her knees and with an angry swat left a three-foot track of Buten’s white primer across the front windshield. “There go your excuses,” she growled. “Now finish it.”
Reluctantly, David took up his brush and, standing on a chair, began painting the windshield. The last thing he saw inside before the last brushstroke was the propped-up picture on Primrose’s dresser. He had wanted to ask his father about it, but he would not be home for days, and David did not have the patience to wait. So he had resorted to his grandmother.
First he asked her if she knew that picture frames were sold with people’s pictures already in them. His grandmother, who was snipping the stems of flowers from the backyard, simply stared at him for a moment, shocked — and overjoyed — that he would ask her a question. She quickly recovered and said yes, she knew that. David walked away. If he had to speak to her, at least he would do it in pieces, and if possible at her inconvenience.
Later he caught her as she was talking on the phone. “Why do they do it?” he said.
“Just a second,” she said into the phone, not at all irritably, and cupped her hand over the receiver. “Do what, David?”
“Put pictures in the frames.”
“So they can give the customer an idea how their own picture would look in the frame.”
She was heading out the door for her evening walk when he asked what kind of people they used for those pictures. “Oh, usually models or movie stars,” she said. She waited at the door, her expression saying, I like you talking to me. Please ask me more.
As she watched her favorite TV show that night, he thrust the picture at her. “Know who this is?”
She hesitated, then dared to take it from his hand. She lowered the volume with the remote control. She nodded, smiling. “This is Clark Gable. He was a movie star many years ago.”
He took the picture back. It bugged him that he could not annoy her. “How old is he?”
“Oh, he died some time ago. If he were living, I guess he’d be in his nineties, maybe older.”
“His name’s not Bob?
“Bob?” She stared at the picture. “No, I’m sure it’s Clark Gable. He was known as the ‘King of the Movies.’ ” And not Primrose’s father, David had fully realized in bed that night. Primrose thinks he’s her father — but he’s not. She’s wrong.
It took them most of the day to lay a primer and final coat. Nothing on the outside showed that wasn’t white: wheel stumps, windows, fenders, everything.
“Looks dumb,” said David.
“It won’t,” said Primrose. “It’s nowhere near . . . uh-oh.” She was looking toward the street. A long, chromey car was pulling up to the house. A lady in black skintight pants got out, followed by a small, yipping, long-haired brown-and-yellow dog. The lady pointed to the front yard, which was indistinguishable from the dirt and gravel driveway. “Poop here, Mimi,” she said. Mimi pooped, and the two
of them went to the front door. The dog looked at Primrose and David, the lady did not. The dog yipped. They entered the house.
Primrose picked up a paint stirrer, walked over to Mimi’s warm sculpture, lifted it carefully from the dirt, and deposited it on the backseat floor of the long car. “C’mon,” she said. “Wait’ll you see this.”
She led him (by the hand, to David’s surprise) around the house — “Shhh . . . tiptoe” — and in the back door. At the drapery wall to the reading room, she knelt and pulled him down. She drew the drape aside an inch or two.
Madame Dufee, Mimi the dog, and the black-legged lady were sitting on the rug. Madame Dufee had one of Mimi’s paws in her hand. She appeared to be intently studying the paw. She began to nod. “Yes . . . yes . . . I see wonderful things. A long and happy life.” The dog yipped.
Primrose got up, no longer trying to be quiet, said aloud, “You believe it?” and went out the back door.
They sat in the van, the doors left open as they had been all during the painting. “I don’t know who’s worse,” said Primrose, “my mother or that weasel lady.”
“She came before?” said David.
“Yeah. She comes a couple times a year. First time she came she had a different dog. Guess it didn’t have such a long and happy life after all.” Primrose lay back and stared at the ceiling. She balled her fists and pounded the floor. “Damn!” She jumped up. She swatted her House Beautifuls and sent them flying like paper ducks. “Why can’t I just have a nice, normal mother like everybody else?” She stared at David, yet seemed unaware of the irony of her question. “A mother that cooks dinner. That takes me places. That buys me stuff. Hah!” Her laugh was cold.
“Those rings on her feet you saw? Know where she got them? From me. I found them. I was going to sell them at the flea market. It’s everything. Clothes. Combs. Hah — the stupid teddy bear?” She rammed her thumb into her chest. “Mine!” She flung herself outside, ranting. “She takes my stuff. My mother. Who’s the daughter around here anyway? I’m supposed to take her stuff!”