Authors: Jill McCorkle
When the children’s home down around Ferris Beach was burned to the ground by one of the children, who on local TV said he was tired of living in the hellhole, Mrs. Poole rented out Brown’s Econo Lodge on Old 301, which had gone bust with the building of 1-95, and they all moved in until a new home was built. In 1968 when Santa Claus, also known as Mr. Beef Hucks, was stumbling drunk down in front of the Goodyear Tractor and Tire store where Misty’s daddy was manager, Mrs. Poole stepped from her white Lincoln and proceeded to make her way over to him, finger shaking all the way. Mr. Landell, the black man whose job was to drive her around all day while his wife cleaned her house, just stood by the car and shook his head from side to side.
“This, children, is NOT, I repeat, NOT really Santa Claus, but a man who took on the role as a means to make money. Those who offer to help Santa, just as those who offer to help the Lord, must have their hearts in the right place. If they don’t,
well then”—she gasped for breath—“well, not only have they not done GOOD work, but they have done BAD work. You are dismissed on behalf of the town of Fulton, Mr. Hucks.” Her hand was down and rummaging through her purse, looking for a cigarette I was sure, though I was also sure she would not smoke one right that minute. She always followed the rule about a Southern lady smoking only while seated, with a roof over her head; the Lincoln counted as a roof and she was just getting ready.
“That ain’t what your old man said when I ran eighty yards against Clemmonsville.” Mr. Hucks pulled off his white beard and threw it onto a big tractor tire. He started unbuttoning the front of the red suit, revealing a dingy white undershirt. “Ain’t what he said when I pitched a no-hitter against Sandy Bluff.” A small boy stared in horror at the stripped-down Santa before releasing a shrill scream and burying his face in his mother’s coat. “No sir, me and Mr. Bo had a fine time that night. Yeah, Mr. Bo was quite the baseball fan.”
“You are not in high school, Mr. Hucks,” she said. “You are not playing ball but serving the public and you are dismissed. If Mr. Poole were here he’d tell you the same.”
“If Mr. Bo were here, he’d say, ‘Well, Beef’”—he paused and spat off to the side—“‘let’s us ride out into the county and see what we can find to drink.’” People laughed nervously and then things got even quieter than before.
“You are a filthy, lying man who cannot even support his family.” Everyone waited, expecting him to hit her or to pull up all those poinsettias, tell all those sniffling children to shut up, something, but he just stood and watched her walk away. When she got to the car, she turned back to the crowd; by then Misty and I had crept up near the office of Goodyear so we’d be near Mr. Rhodes in case a fight broke out. I saw a flash of green and knew she had a pack of Salems in her hand.
Old Merle was red in the face like at school when he got
called on, and mothers were dragging their children away so they wouldn’t see Santa Claus weave off to his old beat-up Chevrolet without taking their Christmas orders. He beckoned for Merle to follow but it was like Merle hadn’t even noticed, just stood there kicking the side of that tire and making the poinsettias shake. His hair was just as slick and dirty-looking as it had been at school the day before, when he won the fifty-yard dash, and he was wearing those same black jeans, way too short, that he wore nearly every day of the fifth grade. It was like he didn’t even see his daddy there waving to him, and we knew Merle was just waiting and hoping that somebody would say something so he could beat that person up.
“Now, dear people of Fulton,” Mrs. Poole announced, her mouth like a tight fuchsia line. “I am going to get the REAL Santa Claus. Mr. Landell?” He opened her door and off they went. Within two hours, she was back with a big fat Santa Claus from the Clemmonsville mall, who spent the next week taking orders and giving away candy and reminding everyone that Christmas was to celebrate Jesus’ birth and not to get all carried away with a Big Wheel or Barbie or such. If he forgot to say all of that, Mrs. Poole was there often enough to remind him. Misty’s daddy said he couldn’t wait for Christmas to come and go, he was so tired of dealing with her.
Nobody in fifth grade mentioned Merle’s daddy getting fired, but who would’ve? Merle said he kept a switchblade in his scratched-up mock-leather boot, and since he was a Hucks, nobody had a reason to doubt it. “My old man should’ve punched the shit out of that bitch,” he finally said, and all the boys in class nodded in agreement. They knew better than to disagree. Merle had been caught drinking a beer up in a tree on the school yard the year before, and we had heard many times how Dexter Hucks had put a firecracker up a cat’s butt and blown it to bits. I used to go to great pains to keep my own cat from roaming out
of the yard, fearful of what would happen if he wound up on the wrong side of the kudzu.
It was still pouring down rain when I went out on the upstairs sleeping porch and tuned my radio to the local station so that I could hear Mrs. Poole’s advertisement. The rain misted through the screen mesh as I sat on the glider, my knees pulled up to my chest. There was one streetlight at the back end of the cemetery, but other than that slight glow, our yard was dark. The windows of the pastel houses were black. People were not even home from work yet, but the sky was like night, and leaves were blowing everywhere, sticking to the screens. A shirt was hanging on the Huckses’ clothesline, and I watched it whip back and forth like a banner of surrender.
The night they drove old Dixie down.
The DJ. was singing along with Joan Baez, in an obnoxious off-key way. Up and down the back street, lights began to come on, and headlights were turning into driveways. “I am Mrs. Theresa Poole and I am speaking to you live from my living room, where I am hosting a number of our community’s finest citizens in a little tea, where we are planning our annual Halloween carnival, which will be held October 31st, which is Halloween, down at the Pinetop Elementary School cafeteria.” Mrs. Poole talked on and on, and I could tell that by the end she was being hurried to finish. Finally in the last second, she managed to say, “All the funds go to UNICEF.” Prior to that she went on and on about what would be served at the carnival, how apples donated by Mr. Thomas Clayton would be bobbed for, and finally how there was more to Halloween than dressing up like little goblins and begging door to door. The obnoxious D.J. was a welcome relief after Mrs. Poole finally finished.
I went downstairs to put the roast in the oven—my father was still not home from work—and when I returned, a blanket around my shoulders, there was a light on at the Huckses’ and I could see the mother passing back and forth, maybe from stove
to sink or sink to refrigerator. Again, I wondered about Dexter Hucks’s patches and who had sewn them, especially that nasty skull and crossbones on the seat of his worn-out pants. Dexter Hucks was in a gang, or so Merle had told people, a biker gang where he was much younger than all the others. When Todd Bridger asked about the gang, what they called themselves, Merle said it was none of his business. Todd Bridger was one of the most popular guys in school and had been since kindergarten. He was squeaky clean, with short hair, and was always elected president of
something,
a club, the class. He was always the teacher’s right-hand man, and for years he had been the ultimate dream of a boyfriend. I was not alone in the fantasy of having Todd Bridger’s heavy silver ID bracelet around my wrist. He was the catch of our class, though it seemed during that year he was trying very hard to impress Merle Hucks, who was not easily impressed.
I caught a glimpse of white at the top of Mrs. Poole’s fence, and then there was Merle, swinging his leg over and then dropping with a splash into my yard. Mrs. Poole would’ve fired him just like she fired his daddy if she had seen. It seemed he paused there a minute, and then he walked quickly through my yard to the edge, where he disappeared momentarily in the overgrowth. When he came up on the other side, he turned and stared over our yard. The rain was just a fine mist by then, but I still felt certain it was too dark for him to see me sitting there. Still, I held my breath, waiting for the search to end. I half expected to hear him scream like an alley cat, though it had been years since he’d done that to me, and then my father’s headlights turned into our drive and blinded him, one frozen moment like a frightened animal before he bolted.
“Meerrroooowwwww!” Merle had yelled. It was three years before, a springlike day. I was stretched out in the sun, thinking about Angela and Ferris Beach. The memory was harder and
harder to grasp those days, Angela’s face coming and going, distant and then near, much like the shapes and colors on my eyelids as I faced the sun, my schoolbooks tossed to one side, my old tabby cat, Oliver, rubbing his nose against my cheek with a strong wheeze of a purr. We were both alarmed by the loud catcall. I sat up suddenly, and poor Oliver clawed my chest and then took off under the house where it was safe. I knew it was Merle’s voice, but all I saw at the far end of my yard was the thick hedge of abelia, the small white blossoms already appearing with the approach of spring, and then the tangled overgrowth, strawlike weeds and briars that tumbled around old discarded boards and pieces of chicken wire which did not belong to us. I felt my heart beating faster and faster as I waited, almost holding my breath, and then slowly I got to my knees, began gathering my books.
“Yeah! I see London, I see France!” I looked that time to see a flash of bright yellow-white hair and pale skin. Once a boy at school said that the Huckses were albinos, and when Merle got wind of that, he beat the boy in the stomach until the principal came to break it up and sent Merle home for the day. I had never had the nerve to speak to Merle, tried not to look at him, and if I felt I had to look at him, made certain I did it while he wasn’t looking. And there were times when I felt that I did have to look; there was no good reason except that I had to. It was like I imagined poor Lot’s wife must have felt when she had to get just one more glimpse of Sodom; she had no good reason for looking back except that she was able to swing her head around and do it. I felt sometimes I had to look just to make sure he didn’t have pink eyes as a real albino would have.
“Yeah! I see London, I see France, I see old puss face’s underpants.” His hair was unusually clean that day as if he had just taken a shower or gone swimming; instead of being slicked back, it looked like pale thistles, like a fluffy baby duck’s down. There was no shaking to Merle’s voice by then. He still got called out of class once a week to go out to the little mobile classroom where
the speech teacher stayed, and we all assumed that it was
because
of these visits that his voice was so clear. It was rumored that he also met with the guidance counselor every single week, but nobody had seen him come out of the counselor’s trailer and nobody dared to ask.
“Meeerrroooowwww.” I heard a laugh and leaves shredding from branches as he slid from his perch and landed just within vision on the other side of the hedge. “What’s your problem?” he yelled, but I ignored him and went quietly up the back steps. I prayed that Oliver would stay put, up in the cool shadiness beneath the house. I had such a clear picture in my mind of the cat that was supposedly destroyed by a firecracker that it made me jerk to think of it, my hand automatically reaching and covering my cheek.
“Why you hiding your face?” Now he had disappeared behind the bushes, and I could only hear the faint rustle of his feet and and knees in the brambles. “Trying to hold in the ugly?”
“Go away!” I yelled, my voice high and foreign-sounding as I crawled up under the house where the cat had gone. Then I just sat there for the longest time, leaning against the high brick pillar, that damp musty smell comforting in that it reminded me of all those rainy afternoons or hot summer days when Misty and I had played under there, drawing Barbie-house floor plans in the dirt. I had one day taken a red Magic Marker and very carefully colored in my Twist-n-Turn Barbie’s left cheek, thinking it would make me feel better, but when I looked at her, I hated her. I knew she would never be touched again. I pulled her head off and threw it out into the kudzu.
“Buttermilk might make your place go away,” Misty had offered. She was sincere and yet her choice of words—
your place,
like a scab or some unfortunate accident—stayed with me. “I bet it’ll be gone by the time we’re in high school,” she told me, her eyes the palest blue I’d ever seen, her skin china-white without a trace of the freckles like on her legs and arms. “And I’m going
to be thin and glamorous.” Her plumpness and thin fuzzy hair were only reminders of my own imperfections and still I clung to Misty every step of the way. She didn’t seem bothered by her own appearance; if she ever did cry about the way she looked, she did it behind a closed door at 202 Wilkins Road, where no one could see or hear her. I sat under the house feeling trapped, wishing that Misty would come over, that I’d hear her familiar steps on our long gravel drive.
“Just make me,” Merle yelled, and I spied pale yellow hair as he crawled up closer to our hedge, but I didn’t move from my spot under the house. I scooped Oliver up in my arms and held him there, my breath warm in his fur. “I know you’re under there! Hey!” He stood then, just his eyes and the top of his head showing over the bushes. He waited for what seemed like forever. “Hey girl, I know you can hear me!” His words were slow and deliberate. If Misty had been there she would have asked him if that’s what he learned in the mobile speech trailer. “Do you hear me?”
“I don’t know if she does.” It was my father I could hear his footsteps just over my head as he crossed the back porch and stepped out onto the steps, the screendoor whining and held open. “But I sure do hear you and I can’t hear myself think.” I saw Merle’s head disappear and then there was that same scrambling sound as when he’d crept up to the hedge. “I think he’s gone now, Kitty,” he said. “Where are you? Under the house?” I heard him shuffling there, waiting, and I knew exactly what he looked like: coarse hair disheveled, pants baggy and wrinkled, faded bedroom shoes, but his white dress shirt with sleeves rolled three-quarter would look like it had just been starched and pressed. Even my mother pondered this phenomenon, this perfectly clean creased shirt like the eye of a storm, still and untouched. “Under the house,” I heard him say and the door creaked shut over my head. “Of course, the body is under the house. It came in a roll of
insulation the day after the murder. Kitty? Kitty, are you down there?”