Land of a Hundred Wonders

Miss Cheryl and Miss DeeDee have been visiting Hundred Wonders every Sunday afternoon for over two months now. Miss DeeDee cannot believe the improvement she has been experiencing in her eyesight.

I scootch Keeper over a bit. He’s such a bed hog.

Miss Cheryl, Miss DeeDee’s good friend, has this to say about their visits. “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes… well, it’s a miracle.”

Miss Cheryl’s right about that. Miss Lydia can perform miracles. During our VISITATIONS, and I’ll swear to this on my Bible, I can feel Mama’s presence so strongly. Miss Lydia makes Mama come alive again for me at Hundred Wonders.

From outside the porch, there’s a rustle rustle and a snap. Clever is much earlier than usual. (I am not sure if I have mentioned this before, but her given name is Carol Lever. I saw it written down like this before I was properly introduced to her-C Lever-and I assumed, proof once again that the road to hell is paved with good assumptions, that her name was Clever. She liked it, so it stuck.)

“Whatcha doin’?” she asks, separating the bushes and sliding up to the other side of the screen. She’s fussing with a sweetheart rose. She almost always has got one pinned to her hair. Her and Grampa love those flowers to death. If I was writing an article about Clever for the Gazette and had to come up with a hobby of hers, besides western-movie watching, of course, I’d say it’s either tending the gardens along with him, pruning and watering and pinching and all. Or attending funerals. (She finds the newly dead real interesting.) Or stealing. Clever is what one might call light-fingered.

“I was tryin’ to get a few more words down in this story ’fore you showed up,” I tell her through the screen.

“ ’Bout this evenin’…,” she says in a drawl so finger-lickin’ sweet you could frost a birthday cake with it.

Almost every night that I can remember, and some I can’t, we perform what Clever has dubbed Gadabouts: Reckless adventures or escapes from confinement. This can mean anything from us taking the boat out on the lake during an electrical storm to trespassing where we’re not supposed to. Sometimes Billy still pals along if Clever gets it in her mind that she wants to steal something bulky, like that Jim Beam liquor sign off the highway. The girl truly excels at coming up with spine-thrilling activities.

“What’d ya have in mind?” I ask her since there is no sense in my resisting. Clever is the boss of us this time of night and she has been since the old days. Only it was the four of us gadding about back then. We tried to come up with a good nickname for ourselves, you know, like, the Four Musketeers or Running Four Cover. Something snappy like that, but me, Clever, Georgie Malloy,and Little Billy could never agree, so we just quit trying. And then Cooter Smith, Miss Florida’s grandbaby? He started to tag along with us, so even if we coulda agreed upon one of those Four nicknames, it wouldn’ta worked out.

“We could play some cards with Willard,” Clever suggests, raggedy-looking in the lantern light. She’s a slip of a gal with tawny hair to her shoulders that waves like a piece of corrugated tin. Shallow-water eyes. Same age as me. Her front tooth’s chipped and her nose’s got a bump up top from when she fell off the side of the Leghorns’ silo during a previous gadabout.

“Can’t play cards tonight. I really gotta get this story wrapped up,” I say, pressing my eraser to the paper. “What’s new?”

“I mighta fallen in love.”

This is NOT hot off the presses. Clever falls in and out of love faster than Miss Elizabeth Taylor. (That’s where I got my idea to move to Cairo, by the way. From that movie Cleopatra.)

“And,” Clever says, “Mama kicked me out of the apartment this mornin’.”

This also happens on a semiregular basis. Mostly right after Janice gets herself a new love interest. Grampa says the Lever girls remind him of oil and vinegar dressing. They’re hard to keep together and separate easy.

“Ya know, if I were you, I might try blendin’ better with my mama,” I say.

“Well, ya ain’t me, are ya?” Clever shoots back.

In my way of thinking, even a bad mama is better than no mama at all, but I know better than to say that out loud. Everybody knows that Janice Lever, although a top-notch waitress at Top O’ the Mornin’ Diner, the kind that can carry two dishes on each arm, stinks to high heaven in the mothering department. But if somebody else besides her insults her mama, Clever’ll give ’em an Indian burn that stings like the dickens.

“Ya stayin’ here with us then?” I ask. She’s been living off and on with either Miss Florida in Browntown or here at the cottage since she was little.

“Believe I’ll stay over at Willard’s.” Clever picks out the last cigarette butt from the bag she keeps in her rolled-up sleeve. She steals the leftovers outta the ashtrays down at the diner when she can. “For now, anyways.”

“Mr. Frank Reynolds from ABC News in New York City says smokin’ can give you cancer.”

She holds a match to the tip, breathes in. “Gettin’ cancer is the least of my problems,” she coughs out. “I’m… ah… in trouble.”

Also not breaking news. Probably she’s in Dutch again with her boss over at the ice-cream stand. That’s fine. If she gets herself fired, maybe Mr. Cubby, the taxidermist, will hire her. She’s been wantin’ to work for him.

“I’m knocked up,” she says.

“I know how you favor those knock-knock jokes much as Grampa,” I say, swiping off eraser crumbs. “So I’m real sorry, but I don’t have time to be honing my sense of humor right now. It’s vital I get this story done.”

“Being knocked up don’t have nuthin’ to do with a joke. It ain’t funny.”

“Well, what does it have to do with then?” I ask, fussy. Besides feeling like a full-out failure when I don’t understand what something means, I fear Mama’s gonna wear her pacing feet to the bone if I don’t figure out who murdered Mr. Buster soon.

“Knocked up means”-Clever stops to hawk and spit-“I’m gonna… I’m gonna have a baby.”

“You’re what?” Whipping my face to hers, I can tell she’s expecting me to say something more, but what would that be? I have no idea what the “appropriate” thing is to say in a situation like this. Would it be, “Congratulations”?

“Mama says it’s gonna ruin my life the same way I ruined hers. She agrees with Willard, who says I should give it away.”

“Give what away?” I ask, completely confused.

Her words sound like they’re wrapped in tissue paper when she answers, “The baby.”

“You can do that? Like… like… they give away those free samples of fudge at Candy World?”

“Willard says there’s a social place in Lexington that’ll take it. If I give it away, he’ll let me stay with him long as I want. Maybe even take me to New York when he goes back.”

A social place? I consider myself to be fairly knowledgeable in the social ways. This does not sound like anything I know about.

“Ya don’t wanna play cards. Ya wanna go to Browntown?” Clever asks, shooing off the baby subject and moving back onto the gadabout subject. “I could get a little hooch off Cooter.”

Just in case you don’t know any Negroes, you definitely should get to. I am acquainted with quite a few of them because Miss Florida Smith, our helper at the diner, she is the Queen of Browntown even though the rest of Cray Ridge does not treat her like royalty. Except for when they are eating some of her pie. I am not allowed to go over to Browntown at night anymore. Miss Florida told Grampa last week to keep me away until things simmer down. But staying away, it breaks my heart. The way that place smells of barbecue and how the houses are hugged together so close that you can hear when somebody is mad at somebody or when they’re giving each other a little sugar. All the little children running around with their nappy hair and dusty toes. And that music.