Hearts Left Behind (8 page)

The same summer that Katie Cooper came to Willow
Grove, a tall thin transient we came to know as Slim Jim also drifted into
town.  The first time I saw Slim Jim, he was playing with Jeff and Mary Jo
Welp
.  I thought he must be a visiting uncle or
something, because I had never seen him before.  Mary Jo was on top of
Slim Jim’s shoulders and Jeff was chasing them around the yard.  He caught
them and they all tumbled on the ground together in laughter.

A couple days later, Katie and I were playing outside
when Slim Jim again showed up at the
Welp’s
and began drawing a crowd.  This time, there
were three or four other kids from the neighborhood, including Charlie

Katie and I watched from the other side of the street
as Slim Jim and the other neighborhood kids played tag.  Slim Jim seemed
to be the main target to be “it” for most of the kids and he was an easy target
as he did not run very fast.  Because of age or intention, I wasn’t
sure.  After
Charlie tagged him,
Slim Jim chased after Mary Jo who, when caught, laughed uproariously as Slim
Jim tagged her by wrapping his arms around her from behind and tackling her to
the ground.

“I’ve got you now,” he roared as they fell together.

“Help me!” she laughed out.

And all the kids jumped on top, pushing and pulling at
Slim Jim to free Mary Jo from his grasp.  When the laughter subsided, Slim
Jim looked over at me and Katie.  His eyes darted back and forth between
us, but finally settled on me and he asked me my name.  I shrugged my
shoulders.

“Tucker!” my friends all shouted.

Standing up, he brushed himself off and finger-combed
the top of his head, fixing the left-to-right part in his hair.  There was
a hole in his jeans at his left knee and his grimy white t-shirt was
half-tucked, half-
untucked
.  He must have been
six-foot-two, but was very thin and not physically intimidating.  His eyes
seemed unnaturally wide open, the right one more so than the left, and his lips
were parted in a perpetual smile.  He had a very neighborly quality about
him. 
Almost Mr. Rogers neighborly.
  He
stuck out his hand in a gentlemanly way and introduced himself.

“Tucker, I’m Jim.  Your friends here have taken
to calling me Slim Jim on account of how I’m so skinny, I
s’pose
. 
Pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said.

He
offered a
hand and I took it.

We played with Slim Jim every afternoon that
week. 
Tag, hide-and-seek, whatever.
  He
never came and he never went, always wore the same tattered clothes.  As I
was leaving at the end of that third afternoon, Slim Jim stopped me.

“Where you going, Tuck?”

“I’ve
gotta
go in for
supper.”

He pulled out a small fine-toothed black comb from his
back pocket and combed his hair down.  “Oh, is your mom home?” he inquired.

“Yeah, and she ordered a pizza.  I just saw the
delivery guy leave so I
gotta
go.”

“Pizza!
 
You lucky dog.
  You know how long it’s been since I had
pizza?”

“Do you want to eat with us?  I could ask my mom?”

“You don’t think she’d mind?” he asked, putting the
comb back in his pocket. 

“I don’t know.  Probably not,” I said. 
“I’ll go ask.”

At home in the kitchen, I
asked my mom if Slim Jim could come over for pizza.

“Who’s Jim,” she asked.

“A guy from the neighborhood.”

Puzzled, she said, “There’s no Jim in this
neighborhood.”

She moved the drapes aside and looked out the kitchen
window.  Then she turned to walk to the living room.  I
followed.  “Well, he doesn’t live in the neighborhood, but he plays with
us here.  He plays with the kids in the neighborhood.  He’s really
fun and he’s nice and he hasn’t had pizza for a long time.”

“I don’t think so, Tucker,” my mother said, still
walking.

“
Aww
, come on, Mom! 
He’s really nice and he’s fun.  You’d like him.”

Then she snapped, “I said no, Tucker!” and stopped
walking with a bit of a startled gasp.

I turned behind me to see what her wide eyes were
staring at and saw a smiling Slim Jim standing on the front porch on the other
side of our screen door.  Through the door, he looked even bigger than
usual.  He hunched over slightly, but you still couldn’t see the top of
his head he was so tall.  He had a hand above his brow, trying to see
inside.  His face was pressed up against the screen door, his face distorted
like a bank robber with a nylon stocking over his head.

“Evening,
mam
,” he
said.  With his hair neatly combed and parted, Slim Jim had the look of a
young boy whose mother had just finished licking him clean for Sunday school,
but he had a grizzly growth of hair on his face and a hole on the left side of
his smile

“Um, hi,” she said after a moment.  “You must be
Jim.”

“I am indeed,
mam
.  Pleased
to make your acquaintance,” he said nodding his head forward and offering his
right hand while his left went behind his back and held an imaginary hat.

My mother recoiled slightly but noticeably at the
extended hand.  She did not open the door between them.  “I’m sorry,”
she said holding up guilty hands, I was just dumping the garbage and didn’t get
a chance to wash.

“You’ve got a fine boy there,” he said pointing his
head towards me, keeping his eyes on
Mom. 
“Invited me in for pizza, just ‘
cause
he knew I like
it and that I
ain’t
been
eatin
’
too good lately.  He said that he had to ask you first but that he thought
you’d be fine with it.  I can see how you got to have yourself such a fine
young man there.  You’re raising that boy right.  Teaching him the
right things, I mean.”

He had that Slim Jim smile on his face the whole time
he was talking.  Except that somehow it looked different.  Kind of
like the “I know something you don’t know” smile that my sister Heather would
taunt me with whenever she had a secret.

Behind him, Old Man Keller puttered around on his Cub
Cadet, cutting the Cooper’s front lawn.  Alvin Keller had been mowing
lawns in this town since he was a kid, back when lawn mowing was a much quieter
whirring and snippy activity.  When the Old Man didn't have a lawn to mow,
he just rode around town on that old tractor. 
Sightseeing,
for lack of a better term.
 

“Yes, thank you.  We’re very proud of Tucker,” my
mother said.  “Of course, one of the things we’ve taught him is not to
talk with strangers.  I’m sure you understand.”

Slim Jim chortled out a little laugh and said “Oh, I’m
not a stranger, ma’am.  The whole neighborhood knows me.”

The handle on the screen door started to turn
downward.  Slim Jim was slowly turning it from the other side.  His
smiling face seemed to sink back into the darkening sky behind him, almost like
he was part of it.  Keller and his Cub Cadet crossed back and forth behind
Slim Jim like the carriage on a typewriter.  Mom reached down and grabbed the
door handle from the inside, held it firm in place.

“Well, that may be, but this is the first time you and
I have met.  Now that we’ve met, though, I guess you could say that we’re
on our way to becoming friends.”

Old Man Keller shut down the Cub Cadet and Willow
Grove was suddenly very silent again.  I could see him talking to Katie,
but the only thing I could hear was the sound of Slim Jim wheezing thick air in
and out of his nose.  I looked back up at him and the world around him got
darker still, but in a way that was not familiar to me.  Not dark like an
approaching storm or a passing shadow.  It was dark like doom.  Slim
Jim slowly pulled his hand away from the door and shifted his stare down and to
the right, then his eyes sort of jittered side-to-side real fast.  The
perpetual smile curled down and his nostrils flared, like an angry cry might be
coming.  When he lifted his head up to look at us again, he looked lost.

Then from the side of the porch came this, “I think
it’s time you leave, mister.”

It was my Grandpa Gaines, sounding like the tough guy
sheriff from some tumbleweed town in the old west.  How long had he been
standing there, I wondered?  If I was surprised, Slim Jim was flat alarmed
to hear the voice of the law.  Grandpa had a gallon of milk and a grocery
bag in his arms.  He must have been on his way home from the Spotlight and
seen Slim Jim trying to make his way in.

“That’s fine.  I understand.  Maybe I’ll
come back later.  Some other time, I mean.”

As he turned and started to walk away, the world came
out of its shadow.  The Cub Cadet came back to life and grumbled
home.  Kids passed by on their bicycles.  Life resumed.  When he
got to the sidewalk Slim Jim turned back around and looked at us.  Less
sinister this time, he smiled sadly. 
Like he was sorry
for things that had
and had not happened.
 
He finger-combed his hair left-to-right and winked at me.

Grandpa walked up toward the porch. 

“You two all right?”

“Yes, we’re fine, Hollis. Thank you,” Mom said. 
Then turning to me she added, “I don’t want you near that man again.  You
hear me, Tucker Gaines?  He gives me the
heebie-jeebies.”

“I’m sure he’s harmless, Tuck, but your mom is
right.  No need to be
messin
’ around with some
stranger just passing through town.  He’ll be on his ways
somewhere else in a couple days.”  And then he
added with a wink, “Maybe sooner even.”

That was the last time I ever talked to Slim
Jim.  Mom called some of the neighbors that night and warned them about
the “creepy drifter” who had been playing with the kids in town. 

Aunt Paula has grown hydrangeas for as long as I can
remember
.  They stand tall and
beautiful at one end of what is otherwise a perennially neglected garden. 
But the hydrangeas required little care, which was fortunate because that’s
exactly what they received.  And some they flourished against all odds and
circumstance.  Fat little flower heads bouncing and bobbing on flimsy
green neck stems. 
Held upright by the buoyancy of their
very beauty perhaps.
  The splendor that red and white and pink
brings to an otherwise green world.  As a kid, I remember thinking that
Heaven must be like that.  Like your whole life you know nothing but green
and then you die and it’s like – BAM!  White! Pink! Red!  It’s kind
of what Katie Cooper was like - the color in my world of green.  Maybe it
was that thought that led me to sneak out of bed past midnight and cut a few of
Paula’s hydrangeas to give to Katie.  Paula never knew it was me who had
destroyed her flower garden.  Katie and her parents kept my secret.

Mrs. Cooper opened the door that Saturday morning to
find me holding the dozen flowers I had liberated from Aunt Paula’s garden.

“Oh my,” said Mrs. Cooper.  She waved a dishcloth
at the bee buzzing over me and said “shoo” a couple times before ushering me
inside.

“Well, good morning, Tucker,” said Mr. Cooper over the
top of the newspaper.  “What’s got you up so early on a Saturday
morning?”  He and Katie were sitting at
the
kitchen table with clean plates in front of them.

“Um, nothing really,” I said.  Glimpsing at Katie
out of the corner of my eye, I added, “Just out walking around, I guess.” 

“What do you have there,” Mrs. Cooper asked,
indicating the flowers.

“Oh, these?
  These are
just some flowers I found while I was walking around.  I just found them
and thought, maybe…I don’t know, thought they looked nice I guess and...” 
Suddenly I was very warm.  I noticed that both my shoes were untied.

Mrs. Cooper jumped in.  “Well, um…yes, they are
beautiful.  Would you like me to put them in water?”

“Yeah.
  Sure.”

She filled a vase with water, cut the stems, and put
the flowers inside.  Then she put the vase on the kitchen table in front
of Katie.  “There, now, that’s just lovely.  Don’t you think so,
Katie?”

“They’re beautiful,” said Katie, her face looking as
red as mine felt.

“Why don’t you have a seat, Tucker,” said Mrs.
Cooper.  “We were just about to have breakfast – pancakes and sausage.”

Mr. Cooper pulled out the chair between him and
Katie.  Mrs. Cooper stacked our plates high with pancakes and framed the
pancakes with sausage links.  They asked me a lot of questions that I was
proud to be able to answer.  I told them about Mrs. Bianchi, who would be
my and Katie’s teacher in the fall.  How she had a reputation as being a
bit of a grouch but she graded pretty easy.  I told them what hours the
post office and Brenda’s Hometown Café were open.  I told them about my
Aunt Paula the mayor-beautician and stumbled into confessing to taking the
flowers from her garden.