Armadillos & Old Lace (5 page)

“I believe you,” I said.

The judge sighed deeply. “But there’s more,” she said. “When I was a child I witnessed sexual molestation occurring for a period of several years within the family next door. I’m almost psychic about any aura of sexual violence in the air.”

I sipped my coffee and waited.

“I know this sounds crazy,” she said. “But I also believe they were raped.”

“Pat,” I said, “the sheriff is very well liked around here and by all accounts very efficient. In fact, as you know, she just solved a triple murder case recently. Maybe she
is
investigating and just chooses not to tell you.” I could understand why the sheriff might not take the judge to her bosom, so to speak.

“I hope to hell you’re right,” she said, “ ’cause I’m damn near worried sick about this.”

“Remember what Mark Twain said: ‘I’ve had many troubles in my life, but most of them never happened.’ ”

The judge did not look convinced. She picked up her briefcase and stood up, indicating that our little luncheon was over.

“Tell that to Nigger Jim,” she said.

The following night, ten little girls stood outside the green trailer in the moonlight. It was pushing Cinderella time. They were all in their pajamas and many of them had brought cameras. They were hoping to get a picture of Dilly. He was there, too. Dilly was my pet armadillo.

There are those who say armadillos do not make good animal companions, but they have obviously never known the joys of tickling one behind its ears or hearing it knocking on their trailer door in the early hours of the morning for a midnight snack of milk, bacon grease, and cat food. There was a note of sadness in my heart as I brought the cat food out to Dilly amidst the throng of giggling, awestruck members of the Bluebonnets. I had a lot of cat food, I reflected, for a man without a cat.

The Bluebonnets and Dilly, however, were oblivious to my own personal sorrows. Dilly was enjoying himself immensely, and quite frequently, rising to the occasion on his two hind claws. Whenever this happened, the flash of paparazzi cameras fairly lasered the darkness of the surrounding cedar trees.

There was something rather poignant, almost spiritual, about the little scene. For armadillos, as practically every Texan knows, are the very shyest of creatures, who, ironically, have been fated to coinhabit a state populated with the very loudest, brashest of human beings. Nevertheless, they’ve been here since the time of the dinosaurs, and they’re not about to let a silly race of people 86 them out this late in the game.

For those who are not intimately familiar with the armadillo, it is a small, armored creature about the size of. . . well, a cat. Its shell, as John D. MacDonald once observed, is often made into baskets and sold by the roadside. MacDonald also expressed a wish that somewhere in the universe there existed a planet inhabited by sentient armadillos who carved out humans and sold them as baskets by the roadside.

“Can armadillos hurt you?” asked Marisa.

“No,” I said. “Only people can.”

“Is Dilly going to have a baby?” asked Michelle.

“No, Dilly is a boy. And armadillos never have just one baby; they always have a litter of four. And the four are always either all boys or all girls.” I was quite an armadillologist.

“Can we pat Dilly?” asked Alene.

“Of course,” I said. “But do it gently or you’ll scare him. Armadillos almost never get this close to people. Dilly is a very special armadillo.”

The girls crowded around Dilly and he seemed to luxuriate in all the attention. Some of them stroked his armored shell. Some tickled him behind the ears. He even posed for pictures with the girls like a little primeval spirit come to save the world from itself. For some only slightly sick reason, I thought of Christ in the manger.

“Of course,” I said, “armadillos have been known to carry leprosy.”

The two counselors stiffened and recoiled a bit, but the Bluebonnets remained in their attentive circle around Dilly.

“What’s leprosy?” asked Jessica.

“Disease where your nose falls off,” I said.

The girls stopped petting Dilly and looked at me with that serious, half-believing expression children sometimes acquire when they suspect the adult they’re listening to may be insane. I shrugged.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “They don’t pass it along to people. Only to other armadillos. Besides, Dilly’s already been up to the infirmary and the nurse gave him a health check.”

As if to demonstrate his general fitness, Dilly jumped about two feet in the air, then bolted inside the trailer with about six little girls almost literally on his tail. Like a young rhinoceros, he slammed into everything in sight, knocking over the forlorn bowls of cat food and water, my guitar, and a small lamp. At incredible land speeds he scooted across the floor, back and forth, with the screaming Bluebonnets alternately running after him and then away from him. Eventually, he bolted out the door and into the night, and I began attempting to shoehorn personnel out of the trailer and back to their bunk.

“What’s this?” asked Briana, holding up a piece of paper.

I glanced at the page. It was a sketch of Kerr, Bandera, and several neighboring counties. Four black X’s appeared at various loci on the paper.

“Where’d you get this, Bri?”

“I found it on the floor,” she said.

I looked at the page again. This time, with the little girls standing around me under the moonlight, an almost palpable evil seemed to emanate from it.

“Is it a treasure map?” Bri shouted.

“No,” I said. “It’s Dilly’s health chart.”

At roughly 2:09 in the morning, in the middle of a rather gnarly nightmare about little girls transforming instantaneously into little old ladies, I woke up suddenly to hear a thump on the nonfunctioning air conditioner outside my window. Moments later, the cat jumped through the open window and, either deliberately or accidentally, landed on my testicles.

I woke up the next morning to the ringing of the old bell by the office and the sounds of radio station ECHO echoing off the hills. The disc jockey, Alex Hoffman, sometimes referred to as Phallax Hoseman, ran the station out of the media room. His first selection, unfortunately, was “The Purple People Eater.” ECHO was staffed and run by the ranchers, but it still reflected Phallax’s rather eclectic influence, ranging from “Wipe-Out” to early Bob Dylan, to “Happy Birthday from the Army,” to “Schwinn 24” by a little-known Texas group called “King Arthur and the Carrots.” ECHO, at Hoseman’s behest, also played Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” at least two hundred times a day.

The cat was sleeping beside me on the bed and, except for a rather irritated look in her eye, showed no signs of joining me to face the day. It was quite evident, however, from the way she was twitching her left ear, that she did not like the song “Purple People Eater.”

“I’ll be sure to mention it to Phallax,” I told her, as I put on my boots, opened the creaky door of the green trailer, and stared at the large porthole painting of a cross section of a watermelon. The painting had been done many years ago by a talented, somewhat eccentric counselor named Jules LeMelle who’d insisted that his only free time to do the work was at 6:00 A.M. So he’d painted the door and one inner wall of the trailer in a watermelon motif over a period of about a week while I tried to sleep with some weird guy drawing psychedelic watermelon designs inside my trailer.

LeMelle had gotten the idea from a story I’d told him about a Kappa Alpha fraternity float I’d once seen in a parade at the University of Texas. The float, as I remembered it, had been a huge construction of a watermelon with live little black children dancing around on it, ostensibly representing the seeds. It’d happened so long ago that, if I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought I’d dreamed it. But it had happened, I had mentioned it to Jules LeMelle, and he’d painted psychedelic watermelons all over the inner wall and door of my trailer. The natural green color of the outside of the trailer served as a perfect giant watermelon rind for the pink porthole painting when the door was closed.

As I walked up the little road to the dining hall to get some of Rosie’s coffee, a dim memory of the Kappa Alpha float passed by in my mind again. Racism was easier to spot in those days. So was Jules LeMelle, for that matter. I wondered very briefly what ever had happened to him. I also wondered very briefly what had happened to all the rest of us.

I walked into the dining hall with the old ranch brands still on the rafters where Aunt Hilda had painted them forty years ago. The tables and chairs all looked bright and cheerful now that the kids were back. They’d been sitting alone all winter. The giant Mexican chess sets stood, with tall kings and queens, bishops, rooks, knights, pawns all in a row, each waiting for little hands. Darkened old black-and-white photos on the walls. A row of little girls standing together in front of their bunkhouse in 1953. I recognized Bunny Slipakoff, my first girlfriend, standing shyly on the right-hand side. I thought it was Bunny.

I went over to the giant lumberjack coffee urn. On the wall beside it hung the large Navajo sand painting Doc and Aunt Hilda had brought back from their stay on the reservation. The painting had hung there as long as I could remember. Now Doc and Aunt Hilda were gone and the sand painting was still there. I drew a cup of coffee and sat down alone at one of the long tables. I sipped the coffee and let my eyes gently wash across the sand painting. It was replete with suns and stars and dancers and animals and rainbows. I sipped some more coffee and noticed that the colors were still as bright as I remembered them. Forty years was a long time to a rainbow.

I looked over the counter into the kitchen and saw Elese sitting at the table sculpting orthodox rabbi heads or something out of lettuce. Rosie, the Hawaiian cook, came out of the kitchen into the dining hall and offered me one of her homemade sweet rolls.

“That’s the best offer I’ve had today,” I said.

“I can’t believe that,” said Rosie. She was a great cook, played the ukulele, and gave an excellent haircut.

“What’s for dinner tonight?”

“Hamburgers,” she said. “Down at the picnic area.”

“Sambo usually eats about twelve of them,” I said.

“He does like my cookin’,” said Rosie. “I don’t think it’s nice that some of the counselors call him ‘Cujo.’ ”

Rosie went back to the kitchen and I wandered over to the Crafts Corral, where Eric Roth, with about ten kids surrounding him, was checking out the kiln. Ceramic leaf ashtrays were always a happening thing at Echo Hill. Almost no one on the planet smoked anymore but still we turned out hundreds of ceramic leaf ashtrays. I wasn’t sure what today’s beleaguered parents could use them for. Maybe paperweights for their divorce papers.

At a far table, engulfed by a mob of eager ranchers, stood Aunt Anita. Today, Aunt Anita appeared to be teaching the kids how to make the ever-popular “monkey’s fist,” but, in truth, there was almost nothing Aunt Anita couldn’t construct out of string.

Maybe, I thought, I should put her in touch with Pat Knox.

I stood at the window outside the Crafts Corral and noticed that Eric had a new assistant. She was bending over the kiln and from where I was standing, behind her, she looked like she was going to be a big boost to a lot more than just the handicrafts program. She seemed to have been delicately formed on some celestial potter’s wheel.

“Pam’s from Oklahoma,” Eric said, following my gaze.

“I’m Richard Kinky ‘Big Dick’ Friedman,” I said by way of introduction. “And I never met a Pam I didn’t like.”

Pam had short blond hair and green, partly cloudy eyes that seemed to cut into me like dust blowing across the barren landscape of my soul.

“What’s the ‘Big Dick’ stand for?” she said.

The little repartee was interrupted by Eddie Wolff, a huge, gentle counselor and wrangler, shouting from the office like a giant, slightly agitated teddy bear you knew you’d better listen to. There was a long-distance phone call for me, apparently. Of course, being so far from the city, every call that came into the ranch was long distance.