“She’ll have a hat on,” I predicted. “And she’s already seen us.” Travis shook his head, still not convinced that I knew what I was doing. But as I pulled up at the curb, an old woman came warily out of her mobile home. She was frowning.
“Note the straw bonnet,” I said to Travis, and heard him choke back a laugh.
He suddenly seemed to enter into the spirit of the enterprise though, saying, “Stay here. My bandaged hand makes me less dangerous, your swollen face makes you scarier.”
“Thanks a bunch,” I said, but let him have his way. I rolled the passenger window down so that I could hear their conversation.
Travis got out of the van and gave her his most charming smile. She was obviously still suspicious, but that smile seemed to have the effect on her that it did on everyone else-she smiled back.
Travis-suddenly possessed of an accent any matinee buckaroo would take pride in-turned back toward the van and said, “Oh! Look here, Irene. Isn’t this the most clever whirligig you ever did see?”
I waved from the van.
He crouched down beside one of them, staring at it as if it were the Shroud of Turin. “Why, it’s even better than any of the ones we saw at the fair! Excuse me, ma’am, but where on earth did you find it?”
The object of this acclaim was a harness racer; the horse trotted in the wind, and the wheels of the rig moved. That Travis’s admiration marked him as a rank amateur in whirligig appreciation mattered not one whit to the owner of this specimen.
“Oh, honey,” she said, shaking her head sadly, “the fellow that made that passed on a couple of years ago. I’ve never seen another like it myself. He made it for me because I live out here near the track.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, without the least bit of insincerity. “But you have something very unique to remember him by, don’t you?”
“Yes, yes, I do,” she said wistfully.
“I’m Travis Maguire,” he said, then gestured toward me. “And that’s my cousin, Irene.”
“Trudy Flauson,” she said.
He cocked his head to one side and said, “I’ll bet some school kids used to call you Mrs. Flauson.”
She laughed. “Yes-only it’s Miss Flauson. But I am a retired schoolteacher. How you guessed, I’ll never know.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, apparently becoming bashful, “maybe you just reminded me of one of my favorite teachers. Well, I’m sorry if we disturbed you, ma’am, but I made Irene stop the car when I saw this yard. I just love whirligigs, and here you have half a dozen of them. We were all turned around anyway, so I said, ”Look at that pretty little yard, Irene. I want a closer look at that trotter.“ And she said people in California might not like folks snooping around their yards, and were as like to shoot you as look at you, but I’m not from around here, so I said, ”This house is flying an American flag, and the yard so pretty, I’ll take my chances that the owner knows varmints from honest folks. What’s it going to hurt to stop for a minute?“”
In a lower voice, he said, “Can’t blame her for being distrustful. Husband beats her.”
She gave me a pitying look. I was going to strangle him.
“My mama asked me to come out here to try to get her to leave him. I’m also supposed to look up a third cousin of ours living here in Los Alamitos.” He slaughtered the Spanish, making it sound closer to “Last Tomatoes.”
“Los Alamitos,”
she corrected. “It means ‘little cottonwood trees.”“
He looked all around. “Cottonwoods? Where?”
“There used to be lots of them,” Miss Flauson said, laughing.
He laughed, too, then suddenly stopped, wincing and holding his hand. He looked up, smiling bravely. “I guess we should get back to business. Thanks for letting me see your whirligigs.”
“Honey, is that hand bothering you?”
“Oh, it’s nothing.”
“Don’t let him tell you that!” I called. “Wilbur was going to hit me with a hot iron and Travis stopped him by grabbing it bare-handed.”
Her eyes widened, and Travis turned bright red.
“Now, Irene, hush!” he said. “Ma’am, you don’t need to hear all our troubles. And I didn’t do anything anybody else wouldn’t have done.”
She winked at me, as if to say she knew a humble hero when she saw one.
“Well,” he said, “we’d better try to find our way over to Cousin Gerald’s place. He’ll wonder why we never showed up.”
“Gerald!” she said, scowling. “Gerald whom?”
“Spanning?” he said meekly.
“You mean to say you’re looking for Gerald Spanning?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Travis said.
“Which one?”
We looked blankly at one another.
“Junior or Senior?” she asked.
“Junior?” Travis said, looking at me with unfeigned surprise.
I stepped into the batter’s box and called out, “I told you, Travis, that ever since Cousin Dolores passed on, nobody has been able to keep track of all the births in the family. Sorry, Miss Flauson, we didn’t know we had a fourth cousin.”
“Well, you may wish you never did learn about it. This one is no blood relations of yours, she’s his wife. That’s just what we call her around here. Her real name is Geraldine, and she’s old Gerald’s wife. So we call them Gerald Junior and Gerald Senior. Just nicknames.”
“Oh” was all either one of us could manage.
“I have nothing to say against Gerald Senior,” she went on. “He is one of the hardest-working men I ever hope to meet on this side of heaven. Drinks a little, but not more than most fellows around here. That’s how he met her-she’s a cocktail waitress. Mostly they keep to themselves, but Gerald Senior’s always willing to lend a hand to a neighbor if need be. But that wife of his is another story.” She paused, then said, “Well, I won’t carry tales about your family. You’ll see for yourself, I’m sure.”
“They been married long?” Travis asked.
“No, not so long. Four or five years, perhaps.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Travis said. “It would have been awful if we’d acted too surprised when we met her. Uh-I don’t suppose I could ask you to point us in the right direction to my cousin’s place?”
She was happy to oblige, describing not only the route, but the trailer itself. “I think I may have seen Gerald going to work this morning, but maybe he’s back by now.”
We thanked her profusely, and she waved to us as we drove off down the lane.
Once we were out of sight, Travis started laughing. “God, you are a sorry liar!”
“Me?”
“Wilbur? Caught a hot iron bare-handed?
Puh-leese.
And we already told her neighbor that I cut my hand. They might talk to one another.”
“Oh, yeah? What about the fact that the guy with the cut hand has a sister that lives here? And doesn’t have a rodeo accent?”
He grinned and shrugged. “We’ll have to be more careful.”
“No kidding. By the way-how did you know she was a teacher?”
“She had a small teacher’s union sticker on the rear bumper of her car.
I congratulated him, then said, “Going back to the subject of being more careful-how many people know you’re already in possession of your father’s money?”
“Very few. My parents knew, of course. My father’s lawyer, and Ulkins. And now you. That’s it.”
“You’re sure?”
He nodded. “My father didn’t trust many people.”
We spotted the mobile home Miss Flauson had described to us: a large white double-wide with flower boxes full of red geraniums bordering the carport, which was empty.
“Doesn’t look like they’re home,” Travis said.
“We’ve come this far; let’s at least knock on the door.”
There was a small, shady patio on the opposite side of the structure, under which sat two lawn chairs and a small, low table. There were no whirligigs on the Spanning lot, but there were wind chimes hanging from the carport awning.
The area around the trailer was neat and clean, uncluttered. We climbed the steps on the carport side and rang the bell.
The door opened, and as I first looked in through the screen, I thought we were being greeted by a young man. The reddish-blond hair of the person standing before us was shaved in a ‘50s-style flattop; a half-smoked Lucky Strike dangled from one corner of her hard mouth. She was either part armadillo or had spent too much time in the sun- I figured it to be a fifty-fifty bet either way. She wore absolutely no makeup; her eyes, squinting from the smoke, were small and dark beneath black brows that nearly met over her sharp nose. She was thin, wearing a man’s sleeveless undershirt, a wide leather belt, blue jeans and leather work boots. There was a tattoo of a scowling pirate waving a sword near her collarbone on her right shoulder, the words “Pirate’s Dream” scrolled above it. If the tattoo was a self-mocking joke, it referred to the old schoolboy’s taunt to flat-chested girls: a pirate’s dream was a girl with a “sunken chest.” The appellation fit. Even with her arms crossed as they were now, she had the door, but absolutely no knockers. “What the fuck do you want?” she said by way of greeting.
22
Travis gave me the briefest of glances, but enough to make me understand that he wanted to handle this. That rankled a little, but when I thought of how much he had seemed to enjoy playing out his little drama with Miss Flauson, I relented.
He regarded the woman before us now with open disapproval, but without speaking, staring long enough to make her nervously remove the cigarette from her mouth. But before she could speak again, he held up his left hand with an unmistakable air of authority and said, “Oh, no, please don’t.” The refined diction would have shocked Miss Flauson. He turned to me, slightly inclined his head in a thoughtful manner and said, “Apparently you were given the wrong address. I’m sorry. This is not Gerald’s home.”
It was all I could do not to bow and say, “Begging your grace’s pardon.”
He started back down the stairs. I followed.
“Hey,” she called, opening the screen, but we kept walking.
“Hey, you!”
We had almost reached the van.
“You looking for Gerald Spanning?” she called.
He stopped and turned. “Do you know where he lives?”
“Right here.”
“Impossible,” he said.
“What?”
“Gerald Spanning would never greet a visitor to his home in the manner in which you just greeted us.”
She scowled, then said, “Don’t get your nose out of joint. What’s your business with him, anyhow?”
He moved a little closer to her, and said in a low voice, “No one says something so vile as they open the door to complete strangers unless they are-one, intending to put someone’s nose out of joint-or two, suffering from Tourette’s syndrome. Are you suffering from Tourette’s syndrome?”
“What the fuck is that?”
“Hmm. Difficult to say which the case may be-but I don’t think I’ll leave a message for Gerald with you. I hate to think how it would be translated.”
“You look familiar,” she said. “Do I know you?”
“As I said, we are complete strangers. Good-bye.”
“Hold it, hold it!”
He waited.
“What do you want with Gerald?”
He sighed. “We aren’t making progress here, are we?”
“What do you want, an apology? Okay, I’m sorry. There. You’ve got your damned apology.”
“A very heartfelt and handsome one,” he said. “Thank you. Now, where might we find Mr. Spanning?”
“He’s not home. He’s over at the house.”
He arched a brow. “I beg your pardon?”
“We bought a house. Over on Reagan Street.”
“Here in Los Alamitos?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s right,” she said, apparently much happier to talk to me. “We can’t live there yet, ”cause he’s fixing the place up. Hang on.“
She hurried inside. After a few minutes, she came back out with a slip of paper. She handed it to me. It had the number “10682” written on it. “That’s the address. When you see him, tell him his wife said to get his- to come home,” she amended, after glancing back at Travis.
She looked back at me and seemed suddenly unsure of us, eyeing the scrap of paper as if she wanted to take it back. I quickly put it in my pocket.
“He hit you?” she asked, indicating Travis.
“Do you find that likely?” he asked.
“Who are you guys?”
“Long-lost relatives, looking through the family tree,” I said.
“No fooling,” she said suspiciously, but then studied Travis. “He does look a little familiar…”
Travis thanked her and we were about to leave, when she suddenly shouted, “Wait! Here he comes!”
A big pickup truck with a construction toolbox on it pulled under the carport. A large, gruff-looking man wearing a T-shirt and shorts got out. She ran to him. He was tanned and muscular, his face weathered and his dark hair turning silver on the sides. He picked her up off her feet in a big bear hug, saying, “Hey there, sugar.” He looked over her shoulder at us, puzzled for a moment, until he saw Travis.
His eyes widened, and he gently set his wife back down. She was starting to babble out an explanation to him, but Gerald seemed not to be listening. Looking straight at Travis, moving slowly forward, he said, “Good God in heaven… you’re… you’re Arthur’s boy, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Travis said quietly-so quietly, I wondered if Gerald heard him. It seemed to me that all the mischief of a moment ago had been replaced by an anxiousness that he didn’t quite manage to hide.
“Travis?” Gerald asked.
Travis nodded.
“Well, Travis,” Gerald said, his voice breaking, “you’re the spitting image of your dad.” By the time he reached us there were tears running down his cheeks. Travis stepped forward, and Gerald extended a hand, but then, seeing the bandages, moved to one side and hugged Travis around the shoulders. “Lord ‘a mercy,” he said, looking down at his nephew. “Lord ’a mercy.”
I watched Travis carefully; he returned the embrace, if a little awkwardly.