Sway (21 page)

T
he Roast was so far away from us, it looked like a toy model of itself, and the walk from the flea market was twice as hot as the walk to it. Especially since Roy Biddum had left me feeling like someone took me by the shoulders and shook me real hard.

Looking straight ahead toward the tiny RV, McClean said, “You know, I believe it was Abe Lincoln who once said, ‘It's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.'” Then he turned to me and smiled. “Good advice for our friend Roy, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess the Abraham Lincoln soap really didn't do anything for him,” I said.

“You can say that again,” he said. “No one would accuse Mr. Biddum of being a statesman, that's for sure.” He pinched a mosquito off my arm. “Forget all that back there, Cass. Abe Lincoln might not have been the right soap for Mr. Biddum anyway,” he said, flicking the bug to the ground.

“Or maybe it
was
the right one and it's going to kick in later,” he continued. “Like when he gets home tonight, he may very well stuff all the family's important papers into his hat, like Lincoln liked to do.”

“You mean the soap might work even if he's not a believer?” I said.

“You never know,” said McClean. “Maybe Sway is more powerful than we thought.”

I held tight to the suitcase so the sun-warmed soaps wouldn't jostle and stick together as we walked.

McClean shed an unnecessary piece of his uniform every minute or so. Glasses, hat, jacket. By halfway across the field, he was looking Dadish again.

“So isn't it a major lie?” I asked. “Saying things are antique when they're really not?”

Dad coughed like he'd inhaled a dandelion fuzz.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“That junk Roy was selling in his booth. You could totally tell he just took some new things and tried to make them look old.”

Dad looked at me like he was surprised I'd even noticed.

“Yeah well, it's no secret the guy's a jerk,” he said. “But let's give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe his stuff is genuine. At least some of it.”

“Probably not,” I said. “And I think it's terrible what he does, tricking folks like that. People like him don't even deserve Sway.”

Dad's arms suddenly went all loosey-goosey, and he started dropping one thing after another on the ground as we walked, letting go of one thing every time he bent to pick up another, like something had rattled him good.

“You okay, Dad?”

“Sure I am,” he said. “Um…just watch where you step.…I think I saw some fire ant hills on the ground.”

I sure didn't see any anthills, but I still stepped high to avoid them, making every lift of my legs thump the suitcase hard against my ribs. When we finally got back to The Roast, Dad helped me unstrap the suitcase from my shoulders, and we lifted the wagon in through the side door.

“Cass, I'm afraid it's too late in the day to find us another stop before dark,” he said. “How about we settle here tonight?”

It was just as well. My legs, my back, and my thoughts were all equally achy.

“Sorry about the disappointing day,” he added.

“It's all right.” I flopped myself onto the couch. “I'm just sad that we might have missed helping somebody who really needed Sway today.”

“That's always a possibility,” said Dad. “But look at this past week. You can't let what Sway didn't do take away the importance of what it did. Which reminds me.” Dad picked up the open suitcase and laid it on his lap. He reached his hand behind the lid's silky lining and pulled a little something out. “I'm sorry I didn't do this sooner,” he said. “Here you go.”

“What's that?”

“Something I think you've been holding out for,” he said, opening his fist to reveal a pale pink soap with the letters
T B N
written across it.

“Toodi Bleu Nordenhauer,” he said.

Hearing him say her name was good and gross all swirled into one. Like sugar and sardines.

“No thanks,” I said. “I don't want it anymore.”

I tossed the soap into the suitcase.

“And that's precisely why I'm sorry,” he said. “The thing is, Cass…just like us, your mom had limits too. Limits that made her doubt herself to the point of losing hold of everything.

“The other day on the battlefield,” he said. “When you asked me if that
T N
soap was a Toodi one…Well, knowing what I knew at the time about your mom, I let myself get all in a knot just thinking about the way you idolized her. I guess what I'd never considered is that, despite her
wrength
, as you would call it, there is still a history of good, honest heroism that she has accomplished in her life.”

Dad handed me the sliver once again.

“And I figure that gives a daughter more than enough reasons to want to be like her,” he said.

“Thanks, Dad.” I held the soap loose so it wouldn't make accidental suds in my sweat.

“But keep this in mind when you wash with it,” he said. “It's okay if you don't feel a…a…now, what did you call it?”

“Zingle?” I said.

“Yeah, a zingle,” he said. “Don't worry if you don't feel a zingle right away. I've heard that sometimes the zingle happens later too.”

“Heard from who?” I said.

Dad hesitated for a moment.

“Don't mind that,” he said. “Just trust me.”

“Okay, Dad.”

“That all being said, I anticipate us having a big Sway day tomorrow,” Dad said. “Don't you fret. You and I will make a real difference somewhere.”

“But we don't have much soap left,” I reminded him. “What happens if we run out?”

Dad looked like he'd been put on pause while he searched for an answer. I kind of hoped he'd know that one right off the top of his head.

“Not a problem,” he said. “I told you before that our inheritance is limitless, and I meant it. You just let me worry about all that.”

“Why? Do you have a secret stash of freshies with us?”

Dad paused again and bit at his bottom lip. “You bet,” he said. “Now, you just hang tight. I spotted a Huddle House in the lot of that hotel across the way. I'm going to go fetch us some dinner. Remember, I may be a little while if they're crowded.”

I watched Dad wait patiently to cross the highway, his hair blowing from the blast of the passing cars. All the while, I played back the things he'd said about Mom, realizing it was the first time he'd talked sweet about her since before she left. As I felt the buttery smoothness of the pink
T B N
soap in my hand, Dad's words played over and over in my head:
Maybe Sway is more powerful than we thought
.

Without hesitation, I went to my room, stopping only to stash the Toodi soap in the backest back of the top pantry shelf, where I didn't have to look at it. Then I pulled the rhubarb man postcard from under my bed cushion, pleased to find that the Mother Teresa soap was still intact and stuck tight to the card. I had a good feeling it would survive a trip to Florida.

There was no sight of a supper-carrying dad out the side window of The Roast, so I took the opportunity to make my own dash across the road and drop that postcard into what may have been Patakatish, Tennessee's only big blue mailbox. The card fell to the bottom with a hollow-sounding thunk.

I checked to make sure the coast was clear before crossing back over to The Roast. But the coast was not clear at all. In fact, just a stone's throw away stood Dad in the parking lot of the Econo Lodge motel, where he was talking to a woman pushing a maid's cart stacked high with towels. Nervous I'd be caught not holding down the fort, I hid myself behind the mailbox like a spy and watched as the woman handed Dad a plastic bag. Dad nodded a thank-you and walked off, disappearing into the Huddle House.

What in the world was he doing? I waited there wondering that very thing until I could see Dad through the window of the restaurant, waiting in line to pay. Then I ran back to The Roast and got myself all settled at the coffee table, pretend-reading a magazine by the time he opened the door.

“Sorry for the long wait,” he said, setting each of us out a plate of everything anyone ever thought of mixing with hash browns. “The Huddle House was standing room only.”

He twisted the Econo Lodge bag shut and set it on the floor between his leg and the couch as he sat.

“I bummed us a few mini-shampoos off the maid,” he explained, then raised his cup of orange juice to the ceiling, and waited for me to do the same. We clinked our cups together in the best way Styrofoam knows how to clink.

“Here's to making a splash tomorrow,” he said, sloshing a little juice over the edge.

“And here's to Sway,” I said, trying to make another toast; but Dad, totally preoccupied with shoving the hotel bag under the couch with his heel, left me waiting way too long with my cup in the air.

A
fter dinner, within minutes of patting the hash brown grease from his beard, Dad fell asleep sitting straight up. I let him be and retired to my room, where I was thrilled to find an almost full, perfect-for-noodling moon beaming into the little back window of The Roast. Careful to tilt each Sharpie so it wouldn't make a squeak on the wall, I rooted and branched my tree like crazy for almost an hour, until a fresh rustling around from the other side of The Roast startled me so, I dropped my marker cap at my feet. It sounded as if Dad was right there, outside my curtain, rummaging through the rolltop desk for something. I held my marker and my breathing as still as I could to listen.

“Cass? You awake?” he whispered, and in response I made the most realistic sleep noise I could conjure. After Dad stopped calling to me, there wasn't another peep from him, other than a little bit of shuffling around the RV and some page-turning here and there.

As I carefully pressed the Eiffel Tower flat against the wall and taped the bottom corners onto their spots, I noticed that I'd accidentally noodled beyond the borders of the poster. Pieces of tree crept out from under it in all directions. I'd have to put off making a plan to keep that hidden, though, since capping the Sharpie was the most pressing task at hand. To aid in my search for the missing cap, I dangled upside down off my bed and fumbled around on the floor for a good while, until I was totally distracted by a small spot of light glowing right through my tablecloth curtain. I watched the little light flit to and fro for at least a minute before I talked myself into stepping up onto my box-bed and steadying against the back wall of the RV to have a better look.

I stood teetering on my toes to see over the curtain. There was Dad, in a torn undershirt and some cutoff sweats, sitting quietly at the rolltop desk. On his head he wore a sweatband with a tiny flashlight stuck down through the side, and the light shone down on a lap tray made from our Scrabble box. The rolltop was wide open, and inside it were the scattered tools of a manicure kit. An encyclopedia volume lay stretched open across the desktop.

Dad covered his eyes with his left hand, like he didn't trust himself to just plain old shut them. Then he made his right hand into a fist with one finger pointed, circled it in the air above the book, and lowered it in a mini-twister. When his finger landed on the page, he peeked from behind his hand to see where he had landed. He cocked his head just right, to aim the weak flashlight at the page, and leaned in close to the book. From so high up, I couldn't begin to tell what he was reading, but then I saw his lips say and say again, almost without a sound, “‘Thomas Edison, American inventor, developer of many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting electric lightbulb.'”

And then he repeated, like he was memorizing for a test, “T E…Thomas Edison…inventor of the light-bulb…T E…Thomas Edison.”

My legs stuck together as I stood there watching, and sweat beaded on my dad's brow. Closing the book ever so quietly and still saying “T E, T E, T E” to himself, Dad leaned as far and low as he could to grab something from off the floor. He came back up with the plastic Econo Lodge bag, turning it upside down by its corners real slow and careful, like he didn't want the little shampoos to make a racket. But what poured out of that bag was definitely
not
shampoos, and I had to rub my eyes to believe what I was seeing. It was soap, and a whole pile of them, all blank and white as my own face. No way no way no way, I thought. There's got to be a good explanation for this.

Dad grabbed a pair of tweezers from the manicure set, picked a small soap from the pile, and laid it gently on the Scrabble box in his lap. Softly in the background, Gordon Lightfoot sang about feeling like he's winning when he's losing again. My dad laid down the tweezers, grabbed the nail file, and with the edge of it shaved the soap down to a sliver. And right there, in the glow of his tiny spotlight shining down, with the sharp point of the file, Dad scraped the letters
T E
into that soap sliver. When he was done, he blew on the soap, blasting the shavings onto the floor and shoving them beneath the desk with his sock foot. As he stood to carry the box lid over to the couch, my tummy growled and almost gave me away. I squeezed on my gut so tight to shush its growling, baby stars danced in front of my eyes.

I hoped hard that my late-night hunger was making me imagine things. Or maybe that I'd dangled upside down too long looking for the marker cap, and now my mind was playing tricks on me. But when the growling stopped and the stars cleared, I looked again to see my dad pop the latch on the MBM suitcase, open it wide, tilt the Scrabble lid up like a slide, and send the newly carved soap sliver sledding into the case. Suddenly, my hope and my joy and my legs all failed me at the same time, sending me sliding down the back wall of The Roast. As I sunk to the floor, a lightbulb of understanding zutzed on and off above my head, with a different cruel flash of thought each time.
It's all fake. The soaps. The case. The suit. Everything.

I crumpled myself into a ball next to my bed, in a spot right between the beauty box and my backpack, and right on top of the lost Sharpie cap. Then, from my pack, I felt with my thumb for the sharpest pencil in there, pulled my curtain tight, and poked the biggest hole possible right through it. Sitting with my back to the big shoe box, I watched my dad squint, point, and carve, again and again. Every time, it was the same. He'd grab a fresh encyclopedia, flop it open, and do an eeny-meeny-miny motion until he found a name, any name. Then he'd pick up a blank soap from the desk, shave it down, carve the initials right in, and slide it into the suitcase. When he scraped, some of the soaps would bust in two, and with his fingertips, he crumbled those into tiny crumbs and piled them on one of the napkins.

The whole time I watched, it felt as if I, Dad, The Roast, and everything in it were tumbling down a mountainside, like all things good and nasty deafeningly clanking against each other. All I could imagine were flicker-flashes of the faces of people helped by our so-called magic; memories that had suddenly become tangled in sickening questions.
How could he? How did he? Had he fooled me? Had he fooled us all?

After closing and shoving the case back into place for the last time, Dad stepped gingerly past the desk and into the bathroom, grabbing the napkin full of broken soaps on the way.

And in one big flush, the crumbles…and Sway…were no more.