My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (8 page)

I was still too little to go to such a dangerous place, so Ed and Robbie tested the new red wagon by themselves. They limped home a few hours later; both the boys and the red wagon were scraped up and covered in mud. The boys healed quickly, but the wagon was never the same. Its axle was bent, and even though we used it for bottle collections, it always lurched around when we pulled it along the road.

Robbie was almost a year and a half older than me, so he started riding a bike first. It took him a while to build up his courage to tackle Billy Goat Hill on two wheels, but he was ecstatic when he finally did it. He was changed after that. He seemed older, wiser, taller … well maybe not taller, but certainly more sure of himself. It was a rite of passage for boys in this little town, and Robbie joined the ranks of those who lived to tell. After this initial victory Robbie looked for bigger challenges. He climbed up the water tower a few blocks from our house. It was huge! He had the first skateboard in town; he made it himself out of a pair of old skates. He learned to water ski on one ski, then he mastered shoe skis. Before long he could ski barefoot. But he’d always walked on water as far as I was concerned.

The high school stadium was just a few blocks behind our house, and my brothers and I had grown up in the shadows of those outdoor bleachers. We could see the lights of the football games from our backyard and hear the beat of the drums and the sound of the band practicing almost every day. We would pedal our bicycles there on Saturday mornings, then crawl through the underbrush to find the hole under the fence to get onto the football field. Once inside we could pick through whatever had fallen out of people’s pockets when they stood up to cheer the Bulldogs. If we were hungry we’d eat from bags of stale popcorn while we were scavenging.

One of the only drawbacks of living right on the highway was that it was too hard to keep our dogs safe. My first dog was named Tippy, a sweet collie who was already part of the family when I was born. She managed to stay out of the road and lived a long and happy life. My brothers and I loved animals, and there were always shoe boxes, jars, and bowls around the house filled with frogs, lizards, goldfish, and tadpoles that Robbie was always bringing home. We even had pet bees that would walk all over our arms. But I preferred the june bugs that we kept in cigar boxes and played with like toy cars. For extra entertainment, we’d tie a string to their legs and let them fly around in little circles.

For a while we had a pet crow that flew into our backyard one day and started to talk. My brothers were tossing around a football when the bird landed on the clothesline and squawked, “Play ball!” It was straight out of a Disney movie. We fed it, and the bird just hung around. When word spread that we had a talking crow, we got a call from Carson Seago, a warden with the fish and game department who lived down the street.

“Eddie, I hear you’ve got a tame crow living in your yard,” said the warden.

“That’s right, Carson,” said Daddy.

“Well you can keep it,” he said. It turned out that his sons Don and David had trained the bird to talk, but now they had gone off to college. “Our kids have grown up,” said Carson. “Let yours enjoy the crow.” We did keep it for a while, until one day it just took off again.

Along with the dump, the courthouse square was a great place to find pets. Every Saturday morning, people would park their trucks in the shade of the big old sycamore trees and hold an informal swap meet right in the parking lot. One Saturday morning we noticed some commotion around a pickup truck. A farmer had caught a full-grown alligator out at Lake Lydia and wanted to show it off. The man had taken its nest, too, so there were a bunch of eggs in the truck bed that were starting to hatch. Robbie and I, who were about ten and nine years old, hoisted ourselves up onto the side of the pickup and watched, drop-jawed, as the tiny heads poked out into the sunlight. The man was letting people take the hatchlings, and of course Robbie just had to have a baby alligator. He rode his bike home with one stuffed inside of his shirt and named it Allie. The alligator lived in a tin washtub in the boys’ bedroom until it started getting too big. One day Robbie came in for breakfast, holding up one of his fingers and wincing. “Allie bit me!” he said, astonished at the sudden turn of events. His pet alligator had hurt his feelings. We all pitched in to feed it worms and flies and spiders if we could catch them. Allie lasted about six months before she died mysteriously.

There was always something interesting going on around the courthouse and the town square. The Spit and Whittle Club congregated there every morning; that’s what we called the old men in overalls who sat on benches and traded stories. The courthouse square was like the beating heart of Quitman, where all the parades ended up. Santa Claus arrived there every year on a fire truck; there were Easter egg hunts and political rallies. Competitions were judged on the grassy lawn in front of the courthouse, including a hula hoop contest that taught me one of my first life lessons. I was a wizard with a hula hoop. I could spin it around my knees and ankles and even my neck. If I put my arms up in the air and held my hands together, I could spin that hula hoop up over my head and around my wrists. I could keep it going for hours if I wanted, and none of my friends could outlast me. So when I marched up those steps and started swinging that hoop around my hips, I was already planning my victory speech and wondering where to put my trophy. All my short life, I had played to win.

When I was a toddler, my parents took me along to an Easter egg hunt out in the country. They gave me an enormous basket and lined me up with kids of all sizes at the edge of a lawn covered with colored eggs. Before the man who organized the hunt could say “Ready, set, go!” I was out in front of everybody, scooping up eggs. They couldn’t hold me back. I had tunnel vision in a world of eggs and I wanted them.

One time we were visiting some family friends out in West Texas, where we’d swim all day in the pool on their big ranch. Our host would throw silver dollars into the deep end and challenge me, my brothers, and cousins to dive in after them. I was one of the youngest, but I could hold my breath the longest and swim the deepest, so I got them every time. I would let my eyeballs explode and pop out of my head before I would risk losing one of those silver dollars. I was the champion.

So I couldn’t imagine not taking first place in the hula hoop contest in front of the county courthouse. I watched in horror as the hoop started to wobble and then dropped around my feet. I could hardly believe it. I had lost. My mother would have said, “Never count your chickens before they’ve hatched, Sissy.” I’d say: “Never celebrate before the trophy’s in your hands!”

The event we most looked forward to was the Old Settlers’ Reunion, held in Jim Hogg Park every August since 1900. Part carnival, part county fair, it was set up on the sandy ground amid tall oak trees. The same company would come every year, and they knew exactly where to put the midway and the rides and the Ferris wheel, the colored lights draped throughout the leafy canopy and rising up above the branches, transforming the park into a magical landscape. People came streaming in from everywhere in Wood County and beyond.

I’d load up on Cokes and hot dogs, frozen custards, cotton candy, and my personal favorite, candy apples, before getting on the rides. The scarier the better. Somehow I never got sick, which is kind of amazing for someone who couldn’t even sit in the backseat of the car without turning green. My favorite was “The Tubs”—a diabolical contraption where you were strapped into big metal buckets that spun around on huge mechanical arms, which were also whirling and dipping crazily. I’d ride the Tubs over and over, then move on to the Ferris wheel, which spun at a leisurely pace and lifted you up for a bird’s-eye view of the fair. If you were lucky, or cute enough, the carnies would let you stay on for an extra turn while they let everyone else off, and then make sure you stopped for a long time at the very apex of the wheel, rocking in your cart, breathing in the tree-cooled air, taking in the lights below and the stars above.

The Old Settlers’ Reunion lasted for almost a whole week. But the traveling circus that came each summer would only stop in Quitman for one enchanted day and night. The circus would arrive in Mineola by train, and the keepers would walk the elephants, trunks holding tails, along eleven miles of hot dusty asphalt to Quitman. My brothers and I would pedal our bikes to the great big field near the courthouse square to watch the spectacle. First we’d ride out to the field and marvel at the tall green grass swaying in the breeze and the quiet empty space—where we knew there would soon be a circus! Then we’d watch as the wagons arrived and the workers set up the big canvas tent. In the daylight, everything was a bit shabby and tattered, both the animals and the circus workers looked flea-bitten and malnourished, like they had really hard lives. Finally the elephants lumbered into town, shimmering in the heat like a mirage from the African plains. While the keepers watered the animals, and the performers put on their costumes, my brothers and I would rush home for supper. Then we’d rush back with the whole family for the evening show.

But once the lights came up, it was all magic. The lions and tigers seemed sleek and supple, jumping through naming hoops while the ringmaster cracked his whip. The clowns and trapeze artists dazzled us as we stuffed ourselves with popcorn and cotton candy and cheered from the benches. Then it would be over. The next day my brothers and I would pedal back to the green field and find it empty and wonder: Had we imagined it? Had the circus really come to town? Then we would see the trampled grass where the big top had been, and elephant poop where the pens had stood, and some trash blowing around: proof that it wasn’t a dream, the circus had really come to town.

… 4 …

Quitman was luckier than a lot of small towns; it had its very own picture show called the Gem Theater. It belonged to an older couple named Mildred and Theo Miller who were friends of my parents. The entrance was in a boxy storefront on Main Street, and the only thing fancy about the theater was the art deco sign out front that said
GEM
in neon letters and stuck out from the brick facade like a single feather in a headdress. Theo always manned the front booth, where we paid 15 or 25 cents to get in. It was tiny inside, with a black-and-white checked linoleum floor that rose up as it funneled you to the popcorn counter and the theater itself. My favorite thing was to buy a big dill pickle for 5 cents before the movie started.

At first I would go with my parents, and sometimes I’d end up in the “cry room,” a place set aside for mothers to take their babies and young children when they acted up. As I grew older, I was allowed to tag along with my brothers to matinees. We’d watch old Tom Mix cowboy movies, or ones with scary dinosaurs chasing people, or Zorro, which I loved. What was going on up on the screen seemed so real to me that I believed that stuntmen who died in the movies were actually condemned prisoners who had volunteered for the job. I could lose all track of time and forget everything else for an hour or so, sunk down in the dark seats and pulled into the flickering magic world on the screen. I sometimes had a hard time focusing my attention on any one thing for a long time, but at the Gem I was completely absorbed.

When Mildred and Theo retired and shut down the Gem, we’d have to drive to Mineola to watch movies in the Select, a bigger, more modern theater. Once I was a teenager, my date would pick me up at six-thirty in the evening, and we’d drive to Mineola to go to the picture show. We never thought to find out what time the movie started and would stumble down the aisle trying to find two empty seats in the dark. We would watch the end of the movie, then stay for the beginning of the next showing, leaving when we’d gotten to the part where we’d first come in. The challenge was to figure out what the movie was about. It was like solving a puzzle. Years later, when I got to New York, I learned how real film lovers watched movies, from beginning to end, and I thought,
Gee, this is easy!