Authors: J. J. Murray
No. No they didn’t.
I smile because I may have written the last chapter of my second novel.
I
check the clock on Saturday afternoon. Four o’clock already? Where has the time gone? I haven’t been that busy today, just the usual walking of the stacks and scanning of the books, and no shaggy white men have come looking for the African American fiction section. That gives me just enough time for one more chapter of
Thicker Than Blood
, and then I have to get to work reshelving a few books.
3: Daddy’s Worm Farm
I make a U-turn and head to Pine Lake, taking a dozen country roads to Daddy’s one-bedroom shack a few feet from a little backwater cove. I honk at all the ducks in Daddy’s dirt driveway, and they part like white water, there are so many of them.
“What’s with all the ducks?” Chloe asks.
“Worm farm…ducks. They go hand in hand.”
I park under some towering pine trees next to the largest bin of worms. I call it a bin because I don’t know what else to call it. It’s like a huge sandbox raised three feet off the ground with several sheets of black tarp over it.
“Watch your step here, too.”
She slips on her sandals, wincing. “I will.”
She put those nasty sandals back
on?
Well, I guess it’s better than going barefoot.
I look around her to the dock but don’t see Daddy’s boat. “He must be out delivering worms.”
“He delivers them?”
“Yeah, and by boat. He traded in a brand-new Ford truck for this boat. You’ll just have to see it to believe it.”
“Where does he deliver them to?”
“He bought fifty old Coke vending machines at a thousand a pop, and he placed them all around the lake, mostly at marinas. All he did was use some gray duct tape to put the letters
W, O, R,
and
M
over the
C-O-K-E
on the machines. I told him that he forgot the
S,
and he said, ‘No, I didn’t.’” Which is one of the longest sentences he’s ever spoken to me. “But that’s about all anyone would get, alive anyway, if it gets too hot.”
“They’re not plugged in?”
“Yeah, they are, but not all of them are in the shade.”
“That’s…absurd.”
“But it’s not crazy?”
“Misguided maybe, but, no, not crazy.”
She opens her door carefully, a flock of ducks staring right up at her. “Do they bite?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
I pull up my pants legs, and point at several red marks. “From my last visit. I was wearing shorts.”
She shuts the door. “You go first.”
You got that right, Chloe. Rob needs to shoo all those ducks out of the way.
“Watch this.” I lean on the horn, and the air fills with ducks and feathers, and a huge greenish white splat of goo plops on the windshield. “We can get out now.”
This author is definitely visual, I’ll give him that.
We check out the biggest bin first. I pull back the edge of one of the tarps, and we see…dirt. Not much excitement at a worm farm. “Underneath all this dirt are about a million worms, and all they do is make more worms. They double every twenty-two days.”
Chloe whistles. “That’s…a lot of worms. Does he make any money?”
“Well, he’s in debt because of the vending machines and all the bins he has to build every three weeks, and this land wasn’t cheap, though I got him a pretty good deal. He sells two dozen worms for two dollars, which is a pretty fair price, and he says that each machine makes him about a hundred a week in quarters, so—”
“He makes five thousand dollars a week?”
“Yeah. In quarters. But only from late March to early November.”
“That’s…seven months, about thirty weeks times five thousand…He makes a hundred fifty thousand dollars a year from
worms?”
I am definitely in the wrong profession. They didn’t have this major at Purdue.
“Give or take.”
“That’s…that’s amazing.”
I shrug as I watch several gangs of ducks closing in. “He ought to be raising ducks. That’s where the money’s at.” I take Chloe’s elbow and guide her toward the dock. “But he’s got some major problems this year, and it’s all because of these ducks.”
We walk out onto the dock, and Chloe flops down, taking off her sandals, and dangling her feet over the edge.
“I wouldn’t put your feet in there,” I say.
“Why not?”
“Just look.”
She looks down. “I’m looking.”
“You used to be able to see the bottom. It’s only three feet deep here.”
“Eww.” She pulls her feet under her. “What happened?”
I sit next to her. “The ducks happened. The worms attracted them, they hang out, they shit everywhere, and this cove just…died. That water is duck-shit soup.
And I was going to have some clam chowder for dinner tonight! Not anymore.
Daddy’s neighbors all recently signed a petition to have the worm farm removed so the ducks will go away and they can go swimming again. A news crew even came down here a couple weeks ago, so now folks think all of Smith Mountain Lake is duck-shit soup.” “I think I saw that story.”
“Yeah. Didn’t do much for business down here. All that publicity cut down on fishing on the lake, and that cuts down on Daddy’s sales….”
She sniffs the air. “It does smell…metallic.”
“Today’s not so bad because it rained yesterday. But go a few days without rain, and this cove smells like, well, Grandpa Joe-Joe’s yard. But that’s not the main problem. You see, Daddy doesn’t sell the worms fast enough. He might sell two million worms a season, but whatever’s left at the end of the season just…copulates all winter. Eventually, he’ll run out of land for all his bins, even if he starts stacking them on top of each other, and when that happens…well, I don’t want to be anywhere near here when that happens. Can you imagine a couple million worms spilling into that cove?”
Chloe looks down at the water. “Dag, the sunset doesn’t even reflect on the water.”
I hear a boat approaching and look out into the main channel. “Here comes my daddy.”
We watch his busted-up Chris-Craft, a wooden boat in the age of fiberglass, churn through the green water to the dock. That thing takes so much water he has to bail as he goes. I catch the front end and tie it up while Daddy ties up the back. Then he starts stacking sacks full of coins onto the dock in front of Chloe.
“Hi,” Chloe says.
“ ’Lo,” Daddy says.
“I’m Chloe.”
Daddy nods, and he keeps on stacking. She’s getting more out of him than I usually do
.
“Need any help?”
“Nah,” Daddy says after a pause. He glances at me, but he keeps on stacking.
It’s always been like this, ever since I was a little boy. He hardly ever made eye contact with me when I was growing up, hardly even spoke to me, like he was either ashamed of me or ashamed of himself. He isn’t an ugly man, just…big featured. His eyes are too wide and too round, his forehead is at least a foot across, his nose is flattened all over his face, and one ear’s bigger than the other. He isn’t exactly slow, though it takes him a couple seconds to answer any question, and I know he’s not dumb. He’s just…my daddy.
I’m beginning to like Rob. He has pride in his family, warts and all. That’s rare these days.
And since Mama died two years ago, all he’s been doing is this worm farm. He could have invested Mama’s life insurance money raising any other animal, maybe even cows or pigs or even horses over at Grandpa Joe-Joe’s. I guess he chose worms because they’re blind, they don’t make any noise, and they breed like, well, rabbits. I don’t know what he thinks about all the ducks, or even the raccoons that try to raid the worms every night, or even the petition his neighbors have signed against him and his farm. I just don’t know my daddy all that well, even after thirty years.
“So, Daddy, how’s it going?”
He looks up, the last sack of change on the dock. “It’s goin’.” He steps out of the boat and collects four bags at once, each easily weighing fifty pounds. I grab two, Chloe struggles with the last one, and we follow Daddy up to the shack. He opens the only door and goes in, extending one of his massive arms behind him to take our bags.
“Aren’t we going in?” Chloe whispers.
“No. He won’t let anybody inside.”
“Why not?”
I don’t answer her, because I really don’t know. I tried to go inside once, but he blocked the way, not saying a single thing, barely making a sound
.
Daddy comes back out with a huge plastic bag filled with Styrofoam cups and lids and heads past us to the largest bin
.
“Are you going out again, Daddy?”
Daddy nods, pulling back one of the tarps. The second he does, the ducks flock over and surround him. They never nip at his legs. Never. Daddy lays out a line of cups in front of him, and then he starts digging into the dirt, coming up with fistfuls of worms. I’ve never seen him count them, but I’ve never heard of anyone complaining that they were shortchanged. Every third fistful, he flings several worms into the air, and the ducks go crazy, squawking and fussing with each other. I almost see a smile on his lips whenever he does this, and it seems to be the only time my daddy is ever happy
.
Chloe wades through the ducks to stand beside him. “Need any help?”
Daddy blinks at her, then at me. “Nah,” he says.
Chloe digs into the dirt with both hands. “I don’t mind.” She grimaces as she pulls up a handful of worms. “Two dozen in each, right? ”
Daddy glances over at her hand. “You got twenty.”
“Huh?” Chloe says.
“Need four more.”
Chloe looks at me, and I shrug. I don’t know how he knows. He just does. Chloe counts out the worms wriggling in her hands as she puts them in a cup. “Twenty,” she says eventually.
“Need four more,” Daddy says again.
Chloe nods. “How’d you know?”
Daddy touches his temple. “Just do.”
Chloe puts four more worms in her container and snaps on a lid. “Come on, Rob. This is fun.”
I’ve never done this. I’ve never wanted to do this, yet here I am, walking toward my crazy daddy’s biggest worm bin, rolling up my sleeves while ducks nip at my pants legs. Daddy nods at me, and I dig in.
This is beyond gross, yet…it’s kind of relaxing. The worms massage my hands when they aren’t snotting on me,
Oh, that’s sick! I may never eat clam chowder again.
and the ducks don’t nip at me as much once I start feeding them. I find that I have “twenty-eight hands,” so Chloe and I work together to fill our cups. She digs her twenty, I dig my twenty-eight, and then she takes four from me. In less than an hour, we have several hundred cups finished and ready to go. We help Daddy get them into the boat, he nods at each of us, and off he goes into the last of the sunset.
Chloe holds up her hands. “Where do you wash your hands around here?”
“Good question.”
We end up wiping them off on an old towel in my trunk, but no amount of wiping will get all the dirt from under our nails.
“That was interesting,” I say as we return to the dock
.
“It was fun,” Chloe says
.
“Yeah?” I slide closer to her. “You aren’t kidding, are you?”
“No.”
I put my hand on top of hers. “What do you think of my daddy?”
“You mean, do I think he’s crazy?”
“Yeah.”
“What he does might seem crazy to the rest of the world, but the way he does it is completely sane. And he makes money, a whole lot more money than I do.”
“But it’s all he does. It’s all he’s been doing since my mama died two years ago.”
“So he’s just working it out. Nothing wrong with that.” She smiles. “I think he may even be an idiot savant.”
“A what?”
“An idiot savant, you know, someone who seems kinda slow but who has amazing mathematical abilities. I bet he could count all the pine cones in that tree over there in less than a second….”
I look at the stack of books that need to be reshelved and count thirty. No sweat. At any rate, I’ll be glad when I get back to the reference desk. The circulation desk gets so mind numbing sometimes.
And as I walk, I can’t help but look for duck shit on the carpet.
I read
way
too much for my own good.
“A
normal man—we’ll call him Arthur—and a normal woman named Di meet at a…”
I’m telling a story in Stevie’s—
my
(I keep forgetting)—room to Mr. Bear. Mr. Bear isn’t blinking an eye, but I can sense his disapproval. Something about the way that eye just…dangles there.
“Well, anyway, they meet somewhere, uh,
normal
, and at first, they don’t really like each other—which is
normal
—because they don’t know each other very well. We human beings are paranoid that way. We don’t like what or whom we don’t know.”
And this human being is a little drunk. That’s why I’m not talking to myself tonight. I don’t want any competition when I’m drunk. And besides, Mr. Bear isn’t nearly as judgmental as I am. I mean, as judgmental as the voice in my head is. Or something like that.
And even if I were sober, I couldn’t possibly make that last bit make any sense.
I had gone to Food Lion to buy some fingernail clippers and some more Kleenex, and it had a whole refrigerator section dedicated to Kris Kringle Eggnog, twelve-proof and half off, limit of four, be sure to use your MVP card.
I took four, and three are already…somewhere.
“So these exceptionally
normal
people are wary of each other at first, you know, checking each other out, maybe occasionally catching the other’s eyes.” I take a swig. Too sweet! “Or, in your case, Mr. Bear, catching each other’s
eye
. You really ought to see a bear optometrist.”
Mr. Bear seems to grin. I blink. Wait a minute. He always seems to grin. He’s frozen that way. It’s why I don’t trust him. He smiles too much.
“Oh, ha-ha, Mr. Bear. I didn’t mean you ought to see a bear
naked
optometrist. I meant that you needed to see—”
A phone rings somewhere in the house. I wonder where I put it. Probably next to the Kris Kringle Eggnog bottles.
The phone stops ringing by the time I get to the kitchen. Figures. I turn to go back to Mr. Bear, and it rings again.
I snap up the phone, but I don’t speak. Sometimes you can catch people off guard that way.
“Hello?” It’s a woman’s voice, one unfamiliar to me. I keep silent. “Is anyone there?” she asks.
I can’t resist. “I’ll check.”
“Excuse me?”
“Did you burp?”
“I must have the wrong number. I was calling about a Mustang.”
The damn car. “You have the right number, and no, I haven’t sold the car yet, and yes, it has a lot of mileage on it, and no, it’s never been in a wreck, and yes, the back windows leak.”
“Uh, okay.”
It’s one of those long “okay”s, like o-kaaaaaaay. It’s a cute “o-kaaaaaaay,” though. It’s even kind of sassy.
“Is there a place where I can drive by and see it?”
A unique choice of words. “You want to do a drive-by?”
“Um, yes.”
“Then come by twenty-eight Frances Avenue anytime. It’s sitting in the driveway, and it’s yellow. You can’t miss it.”
“Okay.”
Another long “o-kaaaaaaay,” even cuter and sassier than before.
“When is it convenient for you?”
I blink. “When is
what
convenient for me?”
“For, uh, for me to come by to see the car?”
For a minute there, I thought she meant something else, something full of dramatic, guilty pleasures. “Oh, anytime is convenient. Just not now.” I’m in the middle of a long story with Mr. Bear, my story critic, and we can’t be interrupted.
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly come by this evening. How about tomorrow, say, around ten?”
Tomorrow is…Sunday. I should be going to church. I’ve been saying, “I should be going to church,” for the last six months. I wonder if they miss me at First Baptist…or if they even know I’m not there. Oh, I’m sure they do. We were members, and Stevie was in the children’s choir—
“Hello?”
“Okay.” I say it short like “okay” is supposed to be said.
“And if I like what I see, can I take a test-drive?”
“Sure.” Now go away.
“See you tomorrow. Bye.”
Click
.
I return to Mr. Bear and stare him down.
He wins. Note to self: never have a staring match with a stuffed animal.
“Now where was I? Oh yeah. Let’s say that Arthur is a man like me.”
Mr. Bear doesn’t look too sure. He’s such a skeptic sometimes.
“I’m normal. Most of the time. I think. But what really is normal anyway?”
Mr. Bear looks bored.
“Okay, okay, no philosophy tonight, I promise.” I go to the window and see what’s left of the snowman. The sun, that yellow sun, is so cruel sometimes. My snowman has become a watery gray amoeba with brick feet. “Mr. Bear, you’re being very tight-lipped tonight. You need to learn to communicate better. So, tell me, how are we going to get these two together? How are they going to meet?”
He could be selling her a car
.
I squint at Mr. Bear. How’d he do that without his lips moving? Or do bears even have lips? They have jowls, don’t they?
“Okay, he could be selling her a car.” I pause to collect what few thoughts I can catch. They’re running away so fast tonight. “But it’s not just any car, oh no. It’s his dead wife’s car, and…he tells her that right up front. He says, ‘Before you go any further there, Di, there’s something you should know. This is my dead wife’s car.’”
Mr. Bear seems to look away. I can’t blame him. This is all so painful for him.
“‘That’s right,’ I’ll tell her, ‘this is my dead wife’s car, and as you can see, it’s a car to die for, Di.’”
You don’t want to sell that car.
“No, I don’t, Mr. Bear, but I have to. It’s far too yellow for this neighborhood.”
I flop onto the bed, my head clearing some. Sadness will do that, you know. “Okay, uh, seriously now, we’re going to take a sad, divorced man…Yes, a sad
divorced
man who really didn’t want to be divorced at all, a man who still loves his wife and son dearly, and they’re still alive, and…and we’ll hook him up with an equally sad and lonely woman named Di at…a church?”
Mr. Bear seems to shrug.
“No, that’s been done before. How about a restaurant?”
Mr. Bear seems to roll his one good eye.
“You’re right. That’s been done before, too.” I turn to Mr. Bear. “Well, you’ve been far too quiet all this time. I want to know what you think. Where can we have them meet?”
Mr. Bear only looks out the window.
“Outside? You want them to meet outside? In this weather?” I laugh. “You bears are all alike. Humans are fur challenged—I keep telling you that!”
Mr. Bear still stares out the window.
“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.” I follow his line of sight out the window and see two trees. “You want them to meet in some trees? Like Tarzan and Jane?”
Mr. Bear doesn’t laugh. He has no sense of humor. It’s probably why they had him stuffed.
“Okay, you’re being stubborn, but I can see by your eye that you’re on to something. Okay, trees, trees, trees…are used to make paper.” I turn to Mr. Bear. “A-ha! You want them to meet at a newspaper stand!”
Mr. Bear doesn’t bat his eye.
“She might not have the correct change—those stands don’t give any change, you know—and he might have an extra quarter and a dime…”
Did Mr. Bear just blink?
“I’m warmer, though. I can feel it from the softening of your eye. Let’s see…” I pace the room. “Paper, paper, paper…is used to make…toilet paper. You want them to meet in the bathroom?”
Mr. Bear doesn’t seem amused.
“My editor would find
that
dramatic. She’d say it was kinky-cool-
chic
or some other screwy New York phrase.” I lie back on a pillow. “She’d probably even like this conversation we’re having. A drunk man having a conversation with a stuffed animal. It would be
très chic.”
I open my eyes, and the room spins to the left. “Just think of all the cameras they’d need to film this little scene, all those angles. You’d get all the close-ups, Mr. Bear.”
The phone rings, and it’s ringing somewhere close by. Did I bring it in here? I see it behind Mr. Bear on the dresser. I reach for it, but it doesn’t fly through the air to me. It always works in those
Star Wars
movies. I get up, stumble once, and take the phone.
“Jack’s Party Mart, Jack speaking.”
“Mr. Jack…Browner?”
Close enough. This man has a strange accent. Is he even American? “Yes.”
“Mees-ter Browner, I eem call-ing from Ci-ti-corp in Sout
Da
-ko-tuh. How are you today?”
I look at the Caller ID. It’s an 866 number. Is this how they talk in South Dakota?
“Mees-ter Browner?”
“Yes?”
“We would like to offer you a spee-ci-ul plan in case you are ever dis-
ah
-bulled and cannot pay your bill.”
Dis-
ah
-bulled? “Are you really calling from South Dakota?”
“No, I eem call-ing from Sout
Da
-ko-tuh.”
“It’s Sou
th
Da-
ko
-ta.”
“That’s what I said.”
I roll my eyes at Mr. Bear. He understands. “No, you said Sou
t Da
-ko-tuh.”
A slight pause. “Dis plan gives you peace of mind should you ever become dis-
ah
-bulled, and it only costs twenty-nine ninety-nine a mont.”
“A mont!” I repeat, with a giggle. He got the money amount just fine. “I eem not inter-
est
-ed. I eem already dis-
ah-
bulled, and I don’t have a balance on my Visa anyway.” I don’t even know where my Visa is. Probably hiding out with the fingernail clippers I couldn’t find earlier today.
I hear a few pages turning. I know he’s reading from a script.
“Dis plan—”
“I know, I know, it gives me peace of mind. Like I said, I eem not inter-
est
-ed, so please don’t call me again. Good-bye.”
I turn off the phone and the ringer.
“Now, where were we?” I stand in front of Mr. Bear. “We’re going to have Arthur and Di meet…in…a…bookstore and that’s final.”
Mr. Bear’s eye seems to brighten.
I sit on the edge of the bunk bed. “Yes. They…both like to read, so they meet in a bookstore, but not one of those new megabookstores with a billion books, because their workers don’t know where any of their books are! No, it has to be a small bookstore, a dusty bookstore, an intimate bookstore where the owners give recommendations of books they’ve actually read and know where every single book is.”
Mr. Bear is unmoved.
“You’re right, you’re right. If Arthur gets the recommendation from the bookstore owner, Di can’t—Wait a minute. Di either owns or works at the bookstore.” I jump up and shake Mr. Bear’s paw. “You’re brilliant!” I pace the room again. “Okay, so Arthur asks Di to recommend a book, just like Diane did today, and Arthur follows her to the right shelf. He can comment on her beauty here, of course, you know, watching her walk, filling his head with all sorts of nasty thoughts, the perfect place for a guilty pleasure or two. You know, ‘nice ass,’ or something like that. And when she hands him that special book, their eyes will meet, and she won’t be able to let go of the book right away, which Arthur will take as a sign that she’s interested in him, only it’s really because he has a green booger dangling from his left nostril.” I smile at Mr. Bear. “But, of course, Arthur doesn’t know what to do because he hasn’t dated anyone but his wife in what seems like forever, and he still loves his wife, and it’s awkward for both of them, and—”
Is Mr. Bear asleep? Maybe he’s just holding his breath. He’s good at that.
I shake my head. “You’re right, you’re right. It’s too much like that movie with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.” I sit again. “The bookstore is out.” I look at the bottom of the top bunk. “But…maybe…the library…is in.”
Where’s my steno pad? I run to the kitchen, can’t find a steno pad, and end up writing on the back of today’s Food Lion receipt:
D. works in library; A. goes to library to return overdue books; likes what he sees; decides to research her for his next novel; tells her he’s researching
Researching what? Black history? No. Too obvious. His own history? A white
Roots?
Too…bizarre. Maybe he’s just researching a book on local history for now. Maybe Di is a longtime resident who knows everything about Roanoke.
Tells her he’s researching local history. D. a longtime resident who…
Who what? She has to be black, and I know so few black women. I am so out of touch with black women. Should I interview Diane? No, that would be pushy. I can just observe her, see what she does, talk to her every now and then, maybe use some of the conversations we have in the novel. But, is there anything romantic about a library? So many walls of books, so many dark corners, so many places where no one ever looks at books. But, it can be quiet with lots of lights, yet…it’s also an anal place with too much organization. And if Arthur is flaky like me, she has to have a button-down mind. But they both have to be normal, average people—no “beautiful people” this time—who are simple, down-to-earth, pragmatic, honest, and sincere.
But who would believe that scenario?
I look down at my notes and lamely finish with:
…who helps him
It’s a start anyway
.
Where have you been?
Your buzz wore off
.
Oh.
And it is a good start.
Maybe that’s all I need.
True, but what does Di help Arthur do?
Start over.
And find love again
.
Yeah. That would be nice.