After I’d cleaned off the table, I took Punky’s medicine down from the cupboard and stuffed it in my pocket. It was nitroglycerin, the same ingredient used in dynamite. Punky and dynamite. What a combination.
He came out of the bathroom, plastering his hair down with a wet washcloth.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Wait a minute,” he replied, puttering off to his bedroom, his lunch box under his arm.
I followed, knowing it wouldn’t have made any difference if the house were on fire. He wouldn’t set foot outside until he had packed his belongings. I didn’t offer to help, though, because of the unwritten rule—hands off the cowboy hat and the lunch box.
Punky opened the box and removed all the clowns except Jellybean. In their place went the clown glass, a handful of broken crayons, and a small American flag. I’d have to watch him like a hawk, to be sure he didn’t make a swap. When he had donned his cowboy hat and admired himself in the mirror, he said, “Ready.”
I didn’t dare hurry Punky, because of his heart and the heat, so we poked along to the highway. At the intersection, workmen were eating lunch in the shell of an unfinished building.
“Hi, boys,” Punky called.
The men laughed, and I felt their eyes boring into us as we passed.
Half a block from the supermarket, I said, “Remember now, all we want is shampoo. No dog biscuits, no toilet bowl cleaner, no toothpaste or after-shave.”
“Yeah, D.J.”
The store’s big door opened automatically when we stepped on the mat. Punky never could figure out how the door knew we were coming, and it always made him giggle.
I took his arm, intending to steer him toward the beauty aisle, but he stopped at a lighted glass cubicle beside the gumball machines. “Look, D.J. Chinny,” he said.
Inside the cubicle was a big plastic chicken, sitting on a mound of plastic eggs. For a quarter, the sign said, the chicken would lay an egg and you would get a prize.
I gave him a quarter, which he fed into the coin slot. The light in the cubicle started flashing, and the chicken flapped its wings and let out a series of terrible squawks. Every egg in the case shifted as one purple egg clattered down a chute.
My cheeks burned with embarrassment as customers and cashiers turned to see the commotion.
Punky laughed and clapped his hands. He pried open the egg, which held a green plastic whistle on a string. Before I could stop him, he stuck the whistle in his mouth and blew—a loud, shrill sound that scared him and made my stomach lurch.
I grabbed Punky’s arm and steered him down the nearest aisle. My heart was pumping fast. If I have a heart attack, I thought grimly, at least there’s nitroglycerin in my pocket.
“You have it,” Punky said, thrusting the whistle at me.
I took it, grateful beyond words that he didn’t want to blow it again. After snatching up a bottle of shampoo, I hustled Punky to the checkout lane. Thank goodness, he was satisfied with his purple egg. The last thing I needed was for someone to accuse us of shoplifting.
Mom and Dad came home with several antiques for the shop but without the roll-top desk.
“It brought twelve hundred dollars!” said Mom, sinking into a chair in the kitchen. She and Dad were both so sunburned they looked like they’d been fried in hot oil.
Punky came up behind Mom and kissed the top of her head. He placed his hands on her shoulders and said, “Hi, pretty girl.”
Grimacing from the pain, she eased his hands away. “How’s Punky?”
“I’m starved.”
“Punky Holloway, you’re always starved,” said Mom, laughing.
“How about if we eat at McDonald’s?” Dad suggested.
“Yeah,” said Punky. “Big Mac.”
I didn’t say anything. There’d be too many people out on Saturday night to suit me.
There were three flagpoles outside the restaurant, flying the American flag, the Missouri flag, and the McDonald’s banner. As usual, Punky paused to salute.
The place was crowded, but I didn’t see anybody I recognized. There were mostly families with small children, all sunburned as if they’d spent the day at the Lake of the Ozarks.
Mom and I told Dad what we wanted, and went to find a booth. Punky stayed with Dad, and I could see him showing off his coupons to customers in the line.
One lady smiled at him, but the small boy she was holding piped, “Mama, what’s the matter with that little man?” The lady turned away quickly and told her son to hush. Another customer, a wrinkled old woman with bleached hair, short shorts, and six pounds of makeup, moved to a different line. To me, she looked stranger than Punky.
Punky came to the table and said, “Look, D.J., clown,” as he showed me a plastic soft-drink cup with Ronald McDonald’s picture on the side. When he sat down, he stashed a couple of packets of ketchup in his lunch box.
Seeing the purple egg, Mom asked, “Did you go somewhere today?”
“The supermarket. We were out of shampoo.”
Mom raised her eyebrows at Punky.
“Gone,” he said, dipping a french fry in ketchup, then popping it into his mouth.
Punky took forever to eat, and I was nervous. I wanted to get out of there before a school crowd arrived.
School. I still had to do math homework, and Avanelle had the book. She’d said she lived behind McDonald‘s, and this seemed as good a time as any to find out where.
“I’m supposed to get a book from Avanelle Shackleford,” I said, sliding out of the booth. “She lives right over there. I’ll be back in a minute.”
I ran through the parking lot and cut across somebody’s backyard, hoping it was Avanelle’s. I went around to the front of the house and was sure of it. The yard was swarming with redheaded, freckle-faced kids. They had to be part of a matched set.
“Who are you?” asked a little girl who looked to be about four.
“My name’s Delrita,” I said, noticing the peeling paint on the house and the broken rails on the porch. “I’m looking for Avanelle. Is she home?”
The girl stuck her thumb in her mouth and sized me up with her emerald eyes before answering, “Uh-huh.”
“Would you get her, please?”
By then the whole clan had gathered around me.
“Would one of you please get Avanelle?”
Nobody moved, and I began to feel like Custer, surrounded by Indians at his last stand. Only these Indians had carrot-colored hair with masses of tight curls—the kind my dad called “moptops.”
“Are you the lady from the welfare office?” demanded a tough little guy of about six.
“No, I’m a friend of Avanelle’s. From school.”
“She don’t have any friends here,” said Tough Guy.
“She didn’t have any friends in St. Louis, either,” volunteered another boy, slightly bigger.
No wonder Avanelle wanted to come to my house to study. “Look,” I said, “Avanelle’s in my class at school, and she’s got my math book.”
Still the kids didn’t budge. They just stood staring at me with a haunted look in their eyes.
At last someone rescued me by sticking her head out the screen door and calling, “Randolph, who you talking to?”
I turned and looked at the woman, who was obviously the mother of this clan, because she, too, had freckles and a head full of tight red curls. Her bulging stomach pushed against the screen, and I realized she was expecting another little moptop to feed.
“I’m Delrita Jensen,” I said. “I’m looking for Avanelle. She’s got my math book.”
“Well, come on in and I’ll get her.”
I went inside, followed by the whole gang from the yard. The small living room seemed crowded, not because it was filled with furniture, but because of all the people in it. There wasn’t much furniture at all—just a dingy old chair, a couch hidden under a raggedy quilt, and a coffee table marred with burns and scratches. The room was clean, but the pole lamp in the corner didn’t have
a shade, and its bare bulb cast a harsh glare.
I remembered hearing a joke once about people on welfare having color TVs and Cadillacs, but that wasn’t the case at this house.
“Delrita?” said Avanelle, coming into the room ahead of her mother. Her face was flushed, as if she were embarrassed to have me there.
“I—I just came to get the math book. If you’re finished.” I understood her embarrassment. How many times had I been embarrassed about Punky?
“Yes,” said Avanelle, handing me the book but not meeting my gaze. “I didn’t know when you’d show up, so I did my homework last night. Converting decimals to fractions. It’s hard.”
It occurred to me that maybe Avanelle had tried all day to keep the living room clean, so it wouldn’t look bad when I came. Even with all these kids, there wasn’t a toy or a dirty dish in sight, but there was a fresh bouquet of brown-eyed susans in a quart jar on the coffee table.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “From now on I’ll do my math in study hall so we won’t have to worry about the book.”
“What’d you say your name was?” asked Avanelle’s mother, smiling at me.
“Delrita. Delrita Jensen.”
“Honey, you didn’t mention anybody by that name,” said Mrs. Shackleford.
“There wasn’t anything to say,” replied Avanelle, and I felt a pang of guilt. There might have been something to say if I hadn’t been so unfriendly.
“I’d better go,” I said. “My folks are waiting for me.”
“Okay,” mumbled Avanelle. “See you Monday at school.”
The little girl who sucked her thumb followed me onto the porch. “You have a pretty name,” she said.
“I do?” As far as I knew, nobody but my parents had ever liked the name Delrita. “Thank you. What’s your name?”
“Birdie.”
“Birdie? You mean like a bird that flies?”
“No. Birdie. Gil-birdie.”
“Oh, Gilberta. That’s a pretty name, too.”
“Will you come back and see us?”
“I don’t think so. ”
“’Cause my daddy stoled?”
“What?”
“’Cause my daddy stoled and the police comed and took him to jail?”
“No,” I said, confused. “I—I—I just don’t visit other people.”
“Why?”
“I just don‘t,” I said uncomfortably, jamming my free hand into my pocket. My fingers closed around something small and hard, and I pulled it out. It was Punky’s whistle.
Birdie’s eyes lit up when she saw it, but she didn’t say a word. She was probably used to seeing things she couldn’t have.
“Here, Birdie,” I said, placing the string around her neck. “This is just your size.”
She lifted the whistle to admire it, and I turned to go.
I was at the corner of the house when I heard a loud, shrill blast. I looked back and waved, and Birdie called, “Bye, Velveeta.”
“Who is Avanelle?” Mom asked when I got back to McDonald’s. “Is she in your class? How long has she lived in Tangle Nook?”
All evening, she kept hinting that I should invite Avanelle over to the house. I knew she just wanted me to have a friend, but she nearly worried me to death.
I went to sleep thinking about Mr. Shackleford’s being in jail, and I dreamed that Avanelle stole my purse out of my locker. We had a hair-pulling fight, and Birdie jumped out of the locker and started blowing on a whistle. Students formed a circle around us and taunted Avanelle, “Thief and liar, hair’s on fire!” When the principal came to break up the fight, all he saw was Avanelle writhing around by herself, because I was invisible.
SEVEN
The Moptops
On Sunday morning, I pulled back the curtain and saw clouds gathering as if they meant business. I hoped it wouldn’t rain. Rain and organ music were the only two things I could think of that made Punky cry—probably because he associated them with monster shows on TV.
After showering and washing my hair, I hid the shampoo out of habit, even though the bottle was brand-new.
I dressed in a light green blouse and a denim skirt with a ruffle on the bottom that did a fair job of hiding my skinny legs. Pulling the sides of my hair up into a barrette, I let the rest of it hang straight and loose down my back.
In the living room, Punky was rolling crayons on his sawed-off table, watching TV, and trying to tune the static out of his radio. “Call the news,” he said. “Don’t want no rain.”
I picked up the telephone and pretended to dial. “Hello, KRCG-TV Thirteen? This is Delrita Jensen in Tangle Nook. I’m calling for Mr. Punky Holloway, who is tired of you guys fooling around with the weather. He wants sunshine every day until Christmas, and then you can throw in a little snow. What’s that? Okay, I’ll give him the message.”
“Oh boy,” said Punky as I hung up the receiver. “Snow, Christmas, Santy Claus.”
“The weatherman said to tell you they have to clean out the clouds once in a while, but they’ll try not to do it on our house.”
“Thank you, D.J.,” replied Punky, selecting more crayons from his basket.
Later, in the car on the way to church, I stared out the window of the backseat and let my thoughts wander. Why hadn’t Avanelle had friends in St. Louis? How long had her father been in jail?
As we passed the school, Mom said, “It can’t be much fun for Avanelle, being the new kid in eighth grade. You’ve said yourself that school has so many cliques.” She looked at me hopefully, her eyes asking me to please make friends with Avanelle.
Mom was thirty-seven years old and didn’t have one close friend, but what bothered her was that I didn‘t, either. She hadn’t ever had many friends, and she’d survived it. I would, too.
Mom was the oldest of four children, and life on the farm had been hectic after Grandpa died and Grandma went to work at a factory.
“I never had a chance to be a kid,” she always said. “I had to grow up too fast.”
Right after graduating from high school, Mom married Dad, who was five years older than she was. Shortly afterward, Grandma died and my folks moved into the farmhouse to take care of Punky, then sixteen, and the two younger children. Bert and Donna finished school and went their own ways, but Mom was left in charge of Punky.
If she ever resented having all the responsibility, she never let on, but she sure made it rough on me. “I want it to be different for you, Delrita,” she’d said a dozen times. “I want you to play tennis in the park, swim in the pool, join the Scouts, and hang out with your friends.”
I must have been a disappointment to my mother. I’d never been very good at making friends or shown much interest in activities away from the farm. I’d gone to school because I had to, and every day I’d hurried home to play with Punky. I’d thought that maybe in Tangle Nook things would be different, but now I was a total hermit.
It felt terrible not being able to tell Mom the truth—that I couldn’t make friends with Avanelle because I was ashamed of Punky, thanks to Georgina’s acting as if he were a creature from Star Trek.
Punky reached across the seat to straighten the ruffle on my skirt. “I love you, D.J.,” he said, as he often did when I was blue. “You love me?”
“Sure do, handsome,” I said, my mixed-up emotions eating me alive. How could I love Punky and be ashamed of him at the same time?
Punky grinned and adjusted his cowboy hat. He was wearing his best red jogging suit and new white sneakers that Mom had bought in the children’s department at Wal-Mart, and he looked like one of Santa’s roly-poly elves. I couldn’t imagine what it was about him that would scare anybody.
“Looks like there’s a pretty good crowd today,” Mom said as Dad drove into the parking area of Countryside Church.
“Yeah,” Dad replied, shutting off the motor. “Maybe twenty-five, thirty people, counting us and the preacher. I hope there’s room for us to sit inside.”
“Oh, Sam,” said Mom,
giving his arm a playful push.
The church had only an old upright piano, so there was no organ music to make Punky cry. The congregation was mostly old folks, and the preacher’s three preschoolers and I were the only children. Sometimes I helped Mom teach the little ones, but usually I stayed in the sanctuary with the adults.
Brother Hicks was standing at the top of the steps, shaking hands with people as they came in.
Punky wasn’t satisfied with just a handshake. He slapped the preacher on the back and said, “Hi, buddy,” before going inside to greet everybody in sight.
I smiled when he hugged Miss Myrtle Chambers and told her she was a pretty girl. Miss Myrtle was a tiny, stooped woman of about eighty, but I knew what Punky meant by pretty. Everything about her reminded me of a delicate antique doll—onionskin flesh, faded blue eyes, wispy white hair, and a pastel dress that smelled faintly of lavender.
“Why, Punky, you make an old woman like me wish I was young again,” said Miss Myrtle with a giggle.
“Hey, Punk-Man, that’s my girl,” boomed a voice behind me, and I turned and saw Uncle Bert. He and Aunt Queenie were members here, too, because Aunt Queenie believed that families should worship together.
“She’s my girl, you old goat,” said Punky, placing his hands on his hips.
“My girl,” Uncle Bert said over his shoulder as Aunt Queenie pulled him toward a pew.
Catching up with Aunt Queenie, Punky said, “Hi, pretty girl,” and thumped her on the back.
I didn’t notice my aunt’s reaction because just then I spied a whole row of carrot-colored moptops in a center pew. It couldn’t be, but it was—the Shackleford family! Avanelle and her mother were trying to get the little ones to turn around and stop staring at us.
Sitting closest to the aisle was a boy I hadn’t seen before, but he had to be Avanelle’s older brother. His orangey-red hair was a tangle of curls, and the muscular arm resting along the back of the pew was spattered with freckles.
“Wonald McDonald,” cried Punky, striding up to the boy and tousling his woolly hair.