Original Son
By Bernie Lincicome
Dedication
To all of us who were not flushed down the toilet.
About the Author
The credentials of the author of this book include his boyhood recollections, some of which are true and some of which should have been.
Chapter 1
The Great Bus Ride
It did not bother the boys that Mrs. Elsie Mears had a chest full of scabs. They did not wonder why she always wore a blouse cut low that presented the scabs like little red and brown flags on a battlefield map. Sonny Tolliver knew his history and he thought of The Battle of Bull Run. Maybe San Juan Hill. Each day one side lost, usually the brown side because Mrs. Elsie Mears would pick the brown ones until they turned red.
“Harold Ryan. Spell ‘Recognition.’”
Pick. Pick.
Poor Ink Ear Ryan. Only teachers called him Harry, and only Mrs. Mears called him Harold. Even his mother Dixie called him Ink Ear.
His small brown eyes seemed to be even with his forehead, recessed hardly at all under his brow. The overall effect was that someone had hit Ink Ear in the face with a skillet, pushing in everything at the top and causing it to stick out at the bottom. His ears were rather ordinary, two of his better features.
A few years earlier than the day he was called upon to spell “recognition,” in Mrs. Mears’ sixth grade class, a blue ballpoint pen had leaked onto Harry’s fingers. Harry as usual had been daydreaming and did not notice the mess the ink was making even after he had bored his forefinger into this ear hole, scratching at something inside. By the time Harry had satisfied the itch, his ear was smeared with blue ink. The smearing of an ear with blue ink might not have been enough to get him the name Ink Ear, a name he carried ever after if he had immediately or even eventually washed the ink away.
But Harry did not take eagerly to bathing, and there the blue stain remained for days. Finally, after a weekend had passed with no reduction in the blueness of the ear, Principal Worthington pulled Harry off the playground by his un-blue ear and tugged him all the way to the boys’ bathroom.
No witnesses were there to recount what happened but the yelps and howls were loud enough to give everyone a good idea. Harry’s ear was scrubbed and scrubbed, and Harry called the principal several blue names that he should not have known. The ink had been there so long that it felt at home in Harry’s ear and it much preferred where it was to being washed away in a basin of the boys’ bathroom of Perry Elementary.
Some traces of blue remained in Harry’s ear throughout the rest of the school year. Duck and Sonny knew that Harry retouched the ear with a pen every now and again just to be stubborn. Sonny saw Harry once dig into the off ear with a ballpoint, staining both ears without favor.
Forever after Harry Ryan was Ink Ear to his friends and to his family.
“Harold. Spell ‘recognition,’ please.” Pick. Pick.
“Recognition,” said Ink Ear. “R-a-k…”
Mrs. Elsie Mears’s class knew that four syllables were much too far to go for Ink Ear, but they thought he could get past at least one. The class groaned and Duck Stadler threw a wad of gum at Ink Ear’s ear.
“Donald Stadler!” Mrs. Mears pointed her ruler at Duck. “Are you chewing gum?”
Duck opened his mouth so Mrs. Mears could see inside. He wagged his tongue around and stuck it out. Visible were several dark cavities, but no gum. Duck was a handsome boy, his fair hair cropped in a crew cut. Blue eyes and clear skin made him the most wholesome looking boy in the class. He had a natural grace and easy way about him. Mrs. Mears liked Duck and never punished him for anything. Ink Ear picked up Duck’s gum from where it had come to rest, between Ink Ear’s collar and his neck, and stuck it into his mouth.
Pick. Pick. The brown flags on the teacher’s chest were losing again.
Sonny Tolliver knew how to spell “recognition.” Sonny knew how to spell all the words. He was never called upon in class because Mrs. Mears knew that Sonny knew. Everybody knew that Sonny knew. When Sonny used to raise his hand without being called upon, he felt slighted. Now he felt superior and he much liked to feel that way. He was darker than either Ink Ear or Duck with straight brown hair and brown eyes set back above high cheekbones. Sonny was able to give off an air of mystery, as if he had some special, secret knowledge. Without any real effort, Sonny learned the spelling words each week and watched helplessly as his friends flailed and failed.
The special privilege that went with being the smartest kid in class was being the one who got to buy the Neccos.
Invariably, Sonny was chosen by Mrs. Mears to go across the street from Perry Elementary to Young’s Market and buy the class a roll of Neccos, the sweet pastel candy wafers that came in eight flavors and with enough wafers for each child with some left over for Mrs. Mears.
A Necco was the reward for spelling words correctly and by the time Ink Ear came close enough to spelling a word correctly, all the licorice was long gone and the chocolate, too. Ink Ear consistently was stuck with either the pink wintergreen or the purple clove.
“I don’t like licorice, anyhow,” said Ink Ear, but he did. All kids like licorice.
It is easy to understand how Donald became Duck and how Harry became Ink Ear but Sonny became Sonny for the same reason most boys named Sonny become Sonny. He was a boy and he was a son. He agreed with both facts but sometimes wished he knew who his father was.
And he much preferred Sonny to either Theodore or George, his given names. Only Mrs. Mears ever called him what she now called him.
“Theodore.”
She wanted Sonny to spell the word that Ink Ear could not. She had neither the patience nor enough scabs for the protracted war that waited between Ink Ear Ryan and Merrill’s Rational Speller, Book Two.
Sonny ripped off the spelling of r-e-c-o-g-n-i-t-i-o-n with just enough sympathy to please Ink Ear and just enough ease to reassure Mrs. Mears that whenever she needed the right answer, she knew where to go.
Being the brains of the boys gave Sonny a special responsibility. It was he who had to think of things to do. They had to be good things, too, or Duck and Ink Ear would shrug and say, “Naw,” and not do them. The other two would rarely think of things themselves but left it up to Sonny to think and think until he thought of the right thing.
Had Sonny never done anything more than think up what became known ever after as “The Great Bus Ride,” he would have remained a legend in his time. And there are those who still believe that smart, studious Sonny Tolliver was too reliable and conscientious to have done it, but he did it and never denied that he did it to anyone but Principal Worthington and Sheriff John Brown.
The lone school bus of Perry Exempted School District collected students each morning for school, starting very early for some and gathering others at a more reasonable time of day.
The route began where the bus was parked at night, behind Neff’s Standard Oil station just beyond the town line. Students who lived near there had to get up and get ready a full half hour before those at the end of the line, or rather, the single student at the end of the line.
Carl “Butchie” Booker lived at the last stop, at the very top of Summit Hill, the highest point in Perry. Butchie had not lived in Perry long, had not gone through school with the rest of them. He was naturally suspected of being strange, which he was. Butchie sucked something into his lungs from a contraption he put into his mouth. It had a plunger that Butchie would press down. The plunger and his slurp of medication into his lungs made a noise that sounded very much like a wet fart.
“Sshhurrrp-ftttt.”
The sound was funny at first but over time it became annoying. Butchie had taken the fun out of farts and he could not be forgiven for that.
Butchie said that his inhaler helped his cough and the boys automatically resented that, too. Almost everyone they knew in Perry coughed. They coughed and they spit and when they needed to, they coughed and spit again. They didn’t need gadgets with plungers in order to cough.
Butchie also wore glasses, with round pinkish plastic frames that were always sliding down his nose. But none of this was the worst of it.
The worst of it was that even though Butchie could sleep in, he was always late for the school bus and Harold Ethel, the bus driver and town clerk, always had to honk and honk until Butchie ran out of his house yawning and gasping and farting. The worst of it for Sonny and Duck and Ink Ear was that Butchie did not appreciate his good fortune at being at the end of the line, and Butchie did not show proper respect for their inconvenience.
The climb up Summit Hill strained the engine and the gears of the old yellow Chevrolet. The school bus had been around longer than the children that it carried. But the ride down Summit Hill could be a thrill and the highlight of the daily ride to school.
If Mr. Ethel was feeling playful and he only felt playful on those mornings when his wife, whose name was Ethel Ethel, remained in bed instead of getting out early to plan the club menu or attend to some other duty. On those mornings he would put the bus in neutral on the way down, the children would chant, “Go, go, go,” and the bus would swing around the sharp curve at the bottom of Summit Hill, never putting any child in real danger, but with enough force to cause the children on the left side to press against the windows and cause the ones on the right side to hold onto the back of the seats in front of them, both sides squealing with the pleasure of imagined peril.
The occasional carnival ride down Summit Hill almost made the bother of collecting Butchie worthwhile. But as the boys got older, and Ethel Ethel tended to get up earlier, the rides were fewer and the thrill was not what it once was. They were now nearly 12, much too old to be screeching with third graders.
“I know how we can teach that asshole to be on time,” said Sonny to Duck and Ink Ear.
“How’s that?” asked Duck.
“Meet me down at Neff’s tonight. After midnight. And bring your dad’s tool box.”
The only light at Neff’s Standard Oil shone out towards the twin pumps on the fuel island, leaving the school bus mostly in shadow. But there was enough light reflected through the bus’s windshield for the three of them to put Sonny’s plan into action.
“Give me the socket wrench,” Sonny said to Duck.
“What size?”
“Looks like half-inch.”
“What are you doing?” asked Ink Ear.
“You’re in my light,” said Sonny.
“What are you going to do?” asked Ink Ear, moving slightly so Sonny could see the floor of the aisle leading back from the driver’s seat.
“Just a tiny adjustment,” Sonny said.
He began loosening the nuts on the bolts that held down the first seat on the right side of the bus, the seat that was always saved for Butchie Booker. Mr. Ethel would hold the door open and Butchie would slam into the seat and the bus would be off.
“We’ll see what we shall see,” said Sonny, removing the last nut. He shook the seat slightly. Rust and the grime of time kept the seat in place. Sonny shook it harder. He felt the legs give slightly. He twisted the seat sideways, pushed it, tugged until it finally broke free. He put the seat back in its original position.
“Our work is done here,” Sonny said.
The plan, as Sonny imagined it, was that Butchie Booker would come running out of his house, pushing his glasses up his nose, leap onto the bus, flop onto the seat and the seat would go sliding sideways, Butchie would fall and everyone would laugh.
“Why don’t we do ‘em all?” asked Duck.
“All? Every seat?” asked Ink Ear. “Why?”
“For the hell of it,” said Duck.
For the next 20 minutes the three worked steadily, but the novelty of the task lost out to the actual amount of work required. By the time they decided enough had been done, only the two seats on the right side of the bus directly behind Butchie’s seat had been unbolted. And the seats were not jostled loose from the grime holding them fast to the floor as Butchie’s had been.
Sonny, Duck and Ink Ear made sure to sit on the left side of the bus the next morning, and far enough back to be out of the way of any sliding seats. The bus filled at the usual pace and with the usual bodies, leaving the very front seat empty for the always tardy Butchie Booker.
Sonny noticed as the bus climbed up Summit Hill that Butchie’s seat was teetering a bit in place. But no one else seemed to be aware of it. As Mr. Ethel slowed at the very top and prepared to lean on the horn for Butchie, to his surprise and to the disappointment of Sonny, Duck and Ink Ear, there Butchie stood at the end of his driveway, on time and waiting.
“Shit,” said Duck as Butchie stepped calmly onto the steps leading up to his seat. He placed his books neatly on the space next to the window, pushed his glasses up his nose and sat quietly down.
“Go, go, go,” said Butchie. And the chant began.
The children’s voices grew louder and more insistent as Mr. Ethel started back down Summit Hill. Maybe because Butchie was on time or maybe because Ethel Ethel had lingered under the covers that morning, Mr. Ethel was feeling playful. He put the bus in neutral and gave over to the law of gravity.
“Go, go, go.”
And down the bus went, full of laughing, happy children, approaching the curve at the bottom with more enthusiasm than usual. Mr. Ethel hit the brakes just a little harder than needed to slow for the curve. Just as Mr. Ethel began to turn the wheel to make the curve, he felt something bang into his shoulder. Butchie’s seat had begun to slide sideways. Behind Butchie the seats that had been firmly held by years of grunge began also to move.
Two seats behind Butchie, the one holding the Frash twins, a boy and girl in the fourth grade, began to slide. The seat right in front of them, with Martha McLaughlin and Jenny Rolle, jerked forward.
Butchie Booker was already down in the door well and Freddie Frash had dragged Sally Frash on top of Martha and Jenny. Mr. Ethel had Butchie’s seat half in his lap, half up on the dashboard and the bus was not making the curve at the bottom of Summit Hill. The bus was careening straight off into the field that held Walter Gorby’s livestock, in particular his award winning Holstein, Cammy Lynn, who gave enough milk to feed the whole of Perry Exempted School District, and she had the ribbons to prove it.
“Ohhhh, shit!” shouted Ink Ear, watching his schoolmates tumble towards the front of the bus, feeling the bus leave the roadway and knowing soon that if something did not get in the way the bus was going to crash into Cammy Lynn and her full udder. The bell around the cow’s neck dinged and clinked as Cammy Lynn calmly chewed her cud. Her big wet eyes stared straight at Harold Ethel.
Duck had the best view of what happened next and whenever he told the story he would finish the same way. “She was like a deer in the headlights, only fatter.”
Duck would then pause to get to his punch line.
“She just wouldn’t Moooooove,” Duck would always add, giving the word his best Holstein accent.
Chapter 2
Why Did the Moron Help?
Ink Ear Ryan loved to tell moron jokes. He was not sure what a moron was but he figured it was someone dumber than himself. In every moron joke was the reassurance to Ink Ear Ryan that he would never do anything so stupid.
“Why did the moron throw the clock out the window?” Ink Ear asked Sonny.
“I give up,” said Sonny.
“He wanted to see time fly. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Get it? Time fly.”
Sonny and Duck always got it. They laughed along with Ink Ear and contributed their own moron jokes to Ink Ear’s repertoire.
“Why can’t the moron see the sun at night?” Duck asked Ink Ear.
“I give up,” said Ink Ear.
“Because it’s too dark.”
“I don’t get it,” said Ink Ear.
It was not that Ink Ear Ryan was stupid. Or maybe it was. He did have his own way of seeing things. He was asked by Mr. Snyder in geography class to name the capitol of Ohio.
“Oh, that’s easy,” said Ink Ear. “It’s the letter ‘O’.”
Little injury resulted from The Great Bus Ride other than to poor Cammy Lynn, the unfortunate Holstein. The damage to the bus was minimal. A cracked windshield, a broken headlamp, and a few new dents that were indistinguishable from the old dents.
Butchie Booker’s glasses were broken and Martha McLaughlin’s lunch of two mayonnaise sandwiches, a half eaten Mallomar and a small jar of home canned peaches was smashed and scattered. These were the main casualties.
The bus was already in need of an overhaul. Butchie learned that he really did not need glasses and Martha and Jenny shared Jenny’s lunch, a single package of Neccos, under the schoolyard slide and wouldn’t let anyone else have any, especially the licorice.
Only Sid Frash, the father of the twins, raised any stink at all. He owned one of the four remaining potteries in town, making a profitable line of stoneware. He was listened to when he talked. He talked the town council into firing Harold Ethel, from both his town clerk’s job and as driver of the school bus.
Ethel Ethel was humiliated and did not join Harold when he moved to Coshocton to become a bookkeeper for CEMEX, a hydraulic cement company.
It was not that the other parents were unconcerned about the safety of their children. But most of them had faced danger themselves at one time or another. They adhered to the no-harm, no-foul rule of living. A mine cave-in or a kiln explosion, either would be of concern, but a harmless ride down Summit Hill did not seem to be a big deal.
Ron Miller, Sonny’s stepfather, carried the scars on his back from a saggar of soup bowls that had fallen off the conveyer belt at Perry Pottery. Ron was fishing through his pockets for small change to pay for snack crackers at the employee’s honor bar at the time. Had he not been fishing by feel for a nickel to pay for a pimento cheese sandwich that cost a quarter, Ron might have noticed the fireclay container wobbling down the conveyer belt.
The conveyor belt was elevated above the floor at that point, coming out of Kiln 3, just beginning to head down to the production line. Ron himself had complained that the change in direction of the belt was too abrupt.
“Someone’s going to get hurt one of these days,” Ron told foreman Jeff Wilkins.
“I’ll bring it up with the committee,” said Wilkins, but he never did.
A saggar is a crude clay container used to hold the production pottery while it is fired in a kiln, protecting the finer china from the open flames. A saggar full of dishes weighs 35 to 40 pounds. The saggar toppled off the conveyor belt just as Ron found the nickel.
Had Ron not been so pleased with himself at the prospect of cheating his friends out of 20 cents for the pimento cheese sandwich, he would not have done a little twirl of satisfaction and the saggar would have landed directly on his head.
As it was, the falling saggar caught Ron’s right shoulder, scraped down his back, hit his left calve, and chewed out a chunk of muscle the size of a large plum. The saggar settled onto the floor without breaking or chipping a single piece of the fine china inside.
“Nobody was hurt?” Ron asked Sonny when he heard of The Great Bus Ride. “No? Let me show you what hurt is.” And Ron pulled off his shirt, pulled up his pants leg and told again the story of the day he cheated death.
Charlie Stadler, Duck’s father, wished he had been on the bus himself and made Duck retell the story over and over. Charlie knew danger and accepted it with a grim fatalism. He was sure the mine would get him one day and he was sure that would not be nearly as much fun as riding a school bus down Summit Hill. Whenever Duck told Charlie the story, he never included his part in dismantling the bus seats, but Charlie was pretty sure Duck was involved and he felt, for one of the very few times, pride in his son.
Butchie climbed back up from the steps where he had finished falling. He had lost his glasses and his inhaler. Butchie peered out through the cracked windshield and was immediately aware that his eyesight was now extremely sharp.
He never had to wear eyeglasses again, and his breathing problem got better. He still used his nebulizer even when he didn’t need it, just to make the farting sound. But now the children would laugh and ask him to do it again. So relieved were his parents, Twyla and Tim Booker, that they bought Butchie a new bicycle, a red Schwinn Ranger, and Butchie was the envy of the school.
Butchie’s eyesight was so good he could count the hairs on Cammy Lynn’s left hind leg, now resting on the hood of the school bus. The rest of Cammy Lynn was somewhere out of Butchie’s newly improved vision. Tilly James, the town butcher who prepared Cammy Lynn for Walter Gorby’s freezer, was very impressed with the surgical precision of Mr. Ethel’s cut.
“I couldn’t have done it better myself,” Tilly said. “Not with a 10-horsepower Hobart.”
Walter Gorby was not happy to lose his prize cow but his relief that no child had been harmed was greater than his regret. He pressed no charges and sponsored a barbeque featuring the best of Cammy Lynn.
With the bus now at rest, Butchie heard laughter and turned to look back at the children behind him, most of them squealing and whooping and pushing at each other. Butchie had a very clear view of Ink Ear Ryan, who was not laughing at all. Ink Ear was tight-lipped and wet cheeked.
Ink Ear had quickly wiped away the tears, or thought he had, so that Sonny and Duck had not seen them. But he knew Butchie had seen them and now he had a whole new reason to hate the little creep.
Sheriff John Brown investigated the incident with all the tools of the Perry criminal justice office. That is, he called in those he thought might have done it and accused them of doing it.
He suspected the older boys of Perry High School of pulling the prank. He questioned the ones he usually questioned when things happened, boring in particularly on Dean Ryan, Ink Ear’s older brother. But Dean had been out of town for a week helping his father, Woody Ryan, with a road paving job, though his real job was to keep Woody sober long enough to get a paycheck. Dean left his father serving 30 days in the Dayton city jail for drunk and disorderly, but he brought home what was left of Woody’s pay.
“The last I saw him, he was curbing it,” Dean told his mother Ida. ‘Curbing’ meant sitting on the curb, too drunk to stand, until the police picked Woody up.
Badgering and bullying got Sheriff Brown no confessions on who was responsible for the Great Bus Ride so he reported to the town council that it was probably the work of those punks from Loganville, a neighboring town and the main rival of Perry.
“I really think it was those Szabo gypsies up at Jericho,” Sherriff Brown confided to his wife Laura.
Laura nodded silently, not because she agreed with her husband but because she had heard it before. Whenever anything went wrong in Perry, it was either those punks from Loganville or the gypsies in Jericho.
Loganville had more to boast of than did Perry, since it was the county seat and it had a courthouse, a three-story heap of red bricks and white turrets with long windows and a clock tower poking above the center arch. Next to the extended tier of stone steps that led to the vaulted entrance, a Civil War cannon rested between two huge wheels with a plug in a barrel that was pointed in the general direction of Perry.
Perry had no structure as impressive, and none as picturesque as the Loganville Courthouse. Public business was conducted in Perry from a plain two-story office block, practical but without the least bit of flair. In addition to the clerk’s cubicle and the mayor’s office, the building also contained the firehouse, the jail and a meeting hall/courtroom that was usually stacked with wooden folding chairs. Sheriff John Brown’s office was in a temporary plywood annex that had long since become permanent.
Loganville’s fairgrounds staged dirt track stock car races in the spring and held the county fair in the late summer. Perry’s only park was barely large enough to hold a traveling carnival or the occasional tent revival.
Loganville was most importantly upwind from the slag piles, thus being geographically more pleasant, both in aroma and appearance. The local newspaper, the Messenger, was published in Loganville. Perry had its own section for news, but the weight of reporting went to happenings in Loganville.
Ethel Ethel, who remained head of the Women’s Library Club of Perry, wrote weekly letters to the editor complaining about the lack of attention paid to the goings and doings of the WLCP.
“Dear Editor: Our annual paper drive raised $130 for charity which amount shall be used to help clothe and feed the less fortunate children in our community. I must point out that we have fewer of those in Perry than in Loganville. When Maude Walters of the Loganville Ladies Garden Club gets a front-page picture holding her pathetic geranium and the WLCP’s fundraiser is relegated to page 12 below a story on cleaning gutters, I must protest and question your sense of news judgment and fair play. Enclosed is a recent picture of myself which you may use if you have the intestinal fortitude to print my letter.”
The Messenger ignored Ethel Ethel’s letter as usual but the newspaper did devote several inches of front page space to The Great Bus Ride, emphasizing the destruction of the cow Cammy Lynn under the headline: “An Udder Mess.”
The day after The Great Bus Ride, Principal Worthington assembled the children and ordered any child who had any part in it to come to him. If any child knew anything about who had put them in danger, they were to come to him. He said it was their duty. He growled from behind a podium that had been set up in the school cafeteria, “All of you could have been killed. It is your duty to tell what you know.”
Darla Hamilton, the class snitch, was tempted to rat out the boys but the hand she would have raised to be called upon was pinned behind her back by Ink Ear Ryan.
“Don’t you dare,” whispered Ink Ear.
This was the most attention Ink Ear had ever paid to Darla and he was not really hurting her. She could have broken free at any time. Or raised her other hand. Darla liked the touch of Ink Ear’s hand gripping her wrist. If Ink Ear had been sensitive to such things he would have felt her pulse beating faster.
“Don’t worry,” Darla whispered. “I won’t say.”
“You better not.”
“I won’t say if you pass through the gate with me.”
Passing Through the Gate was the ceremony at the end of each school year that marked the promotion of the children from one grade to the next. As even Ink Ear understood, it represented passage from one time to the next, from today to tomorrow. Ink Ear understood because it meant going from a smaller number to a larger one. One side of the gate, sixth grade. Other side of the gate, seventh grade.
For the sixth graders it served as their elementary school graduation ceremony and each child was given a diploma of completion. The most outstanding student in the sixth grade received the Doerr Prize, named for Frankie Doerr, who had never completed the sixth grade. Frankie became famous for being killed during a high-speed chase of the only bank robbers who had ever bothered with the First Bank of Perry.
Sheriff John Brown, then only a deputy, saw the whole thing. He was waiting to catch speeders when the robbers sped past him. John Brown spun through the gravel behind the large bush where he had parked and turned on the single blue light on the top of the cruiser. The siren was broken so John Brown made the sound himself, leaning out the window of the cruiser and screaming, “Woooooeeee, wooooooeee.”
Frankie was delivering the Loganville Messenger on his bicycle when the green Packard sedan driven by Roger Simmons with Larry Boyer and the money, $7122, in the backseat, careened around Three-Mile Turn. The Packard caught little Frankie with the right front fender, sending him into a stile that was no longer needed since it had been replaced by a gate in the fence between Phil Newell’s farm and Janice Hoover’s garden. Everyone agreed that without Frankie, the robbers would have gotten away.
John Brown’s capture of the robbers boosted him into the sheriff’s office and his tale of the heroic sacrifice of little Frankie caused the Perry Exempted School District to create the Doerr Prize for scholarship, although what being run over by a green Packard had to do with scholarship was never made clear.
Sonny Tolliver was to get the Doerr Prize because he was the smartest kid in the sixth grade, and that meant he was the smartest kid in the school. Sonny liked knowing that.
Sonny suggested to Principal Worthington that they ought to change the name of the ceremony to Climbing Over the Stile. That would honor little Frankie and there was no actual gate to pass through anyhow. The children walked under an arched trellis that was always covered with spring flowers from Imlay’s green house. Principal Worthington patted Sonny on the head and said he would still get the Doerr Prize.
“Why did the moron pass through the gate?” Ink Ear had thought this up all by himself.
“Give up.
“To get to the other side. Ha, ha, ha.”
The students passed under the arch in twos, paired by boy-girl when possible, holding hands. Because there were more girls than boys in the school, boy passers through were highly prized. Boys had to dress in clean clothes and comb their hair. The girls wore new dresses and ribbons. The girls liked it more than the boys.
Ink Ear Ryan always avoided the ceremony. All the Ryan children did and there were seven of them, Ink Ear square in the middle of the order. The Ryans had neither the clothes nor the consistent hygiene to be part of such a ritual. Ink Ear had not passed through the gate even one time in all the years he had been in school. If he were better at arithmetic Ink Ear would have known it was half of his life, counting kindergarten. Yet he managed each year to pass on to the next grade. As long as he had Sonny to pass him answers during tests, Ink Ear was certain he could pass through any gate that he needed to.
“What am I going to do?” Ink Ear asked Sonny. “Darla will squeal if I don’t walk with her.”
Sonny was no better informed on matters involving girls than was Ink Ear but it seemed to him a small sacrifice. Hold a girl’s hand for a couple minutes. Even Darla Hamilton’s.
“Why did the moron hold the girl’s hand?” Sonny asked.
“I give up?”
“To save his friends.”
No one ever told who was responsible for The Great Bus Ride, and the final, official judgment was faulty equipment due to the bus’s age. Principal Worthington got the Perry Exempted School Board to give him money enough to repair the bus. The bus got a new paint job at the same time, something Principal Worthington had been trying to get done for several years.
As long as no one was hurt, Principal Worthington wished the bus had been more extensively damaged. Maybe then he could have gotten a whole new bus. He had his eye on a Gillig C-180, flat front with air conditioning and automatic transmission. Loganville had nothing to match it.
Chapter 3
Just the Ticket
Another thing that Loganville did not have was a movie house. Not any more. What was once the Logan Theater was now an empty lot. At the back of the lot near the alley, stacks of rubbish had grown into scattered mounds, some of substantial size. A chewed mattress and a set of inner springs leaned again the outer wall of Trotter’s Fine Dining. Stained shingles on the building were a reminder of where the Logan Theater had once stood next door.
The fire that ruined the theater was limited to the structure itself, leaving the buildings around it touched only by soot. It was almost as if it were planned that way. But the insurance paid and the owner, Henry Rodenour, took the money and moved to Fort Myers, Florida, with his new wife, Cheryl, once a very good waitress at Trotter’s.
For several years, then, the only movie house in the county was in Perry. It was the most distinctive structure on Main Street. The wedge shaped marquee came to a point over the sidewalk providing space on two sides and in two directions for the names of the movie features. The name of the theatre was lit vertically down the front of the wedge, each letter illuminated in small yellow lights, all except for the final letter of the name which never seemed to light up no matter how many electricians fooled with the wiring.
Thus Perry’s movie house was The Globe in the daytime and The Glob at night. Everyone had called it The Glob for so long that the owner and manager, Andy Sloan, stopped worrying about fixing the sign.
Andy Sloan was a big man with a big belly and a big voice that could scare any kid at a Saturday matinee into keeping his feet off the seat in front of him.
“Ink Ear Ryan!” boomed Andy, “you kick that seat one more time and you’re out for a month!”
For a short time Sonny Tolliver had a job at The Glob. It was not much of a job, sweeping up on Monday mornings after the week’s trash had piled too high under the seats. Sonny was allowed to run the projector every once in a while.
For pay Andy Sloan let Sonny keep anything he found of value, even though he was supposed to drop it into the lobby box that had crude lettering identifying it as Lost and Found. Sonny did not keep eyeglasses or gloves or wallets that had no money in them, but loose change was his. Sonny pried the odd quarter off the sticky theater floor. But for pennies, even nickels, Sonny gauged the goo before deciding.
Sonny had found three cigarette lighters, two Zippos and a Ronson shaped like a small pistol. If he ever started smoking, Sonny thought, he was set.
Andy Sloan also allowed Sonny to see any movie for free, as well as allowing him to have a small bag of popcorn. Sonny had to buy his own drink.
Andy himself manned the concession stand at the Glob. The stand was a small space barely large enough for Andy to fit inside. The stand was located next to the left door entrance to the theater with one window opening to the inside of the theater and another opening to the street. Passersby could choose from the collection of Paydays and Milky Ways without going into the movie house itself. Andy made change from a small apron he wore around his middle, an apron that tended to disappear under Andy’s very large stomach. Andy’s mother, Irene, sold tickets at the box office and, unknown to Andy, kept the money from every third admission for herself.
Irene’s little bit of graft was contributing to the bleak future of the movie house. The place had been opened several decades before by Irene’s only husband, a small, quiet man who was allowed to believe he was Andy’s father. The new drive-in movie down at Three-Mile Turn, the curve in the road roughly half way between Perry and Loganville, was eating into Andy’s profits more surely than was Irene. The real killer would be television, of course, and even Andy had one of those.
The Glob was open from Thursday through Sunday, with matinees for children on Saturdays and Sundays and a double feature on Thursday nights. The movies were not first run, or even second run, but the movies did not matter much because Thursday nights between features The Glob offered Skreeno, a low-grade way to gamble.
Each Skreeno card cost an extra fifty cents and players could play up to five. After the first feature, Andy SLoan would announce from the back of the theatre, “Get your cards out. It’s time for SKREE-EE-EE-NO.” He had no microphone but his booming voice carried well. Andy was what Sonny’s mother, Clara, called “theatrical,” and Sonny took her at her word.
Clara Miller was at The Glob every Thursday night. Clara walked the mile from the Miller home to the movie house, clutching a purse that contained almost nothing, a compact with a fold out mirror, a tube of lipstick, a small change purse and her mother’s heirloom hatpin. Clara did not wear a hat and had not worn one since she was a teenager. She used the hatpin to punch out numbers on the Skreeno cards. Clara did not know how to drive, and even if she had known, there was no chance that she would ever have been allowed behind the wheel of Ron Miller’s pride and joy, a nearly new white Dodge Town Wagon panel truck.
Pastors in churches in both Perry and Loganville preached against the evils of Skreeno, not as gambling but because it cut into their crowds for Friday night Bingo. Warren Lund, the radio preacher, called Skreeno “the devil’s dice.” The Glob gave away actual cash while the Methodists and the Presbyterians only gave coupons.
Sonny hated more than any other part of his job getting up the tiny pieces of paper that were punched out for the Skreeno games. The Glob had no vacuum cleaner and the punch holes resisted every cleaning device available, which would include one broom, a rag mop and Sonny Tolliver’s fingers. Over the years the little punch holes were simply ground into the general grime of the theater floor.
Skreeno, Andy Sloan had thought, was the way to save The Glob, and though it was an old movie house gimmick, it was new to Perry. Andy had changed the spelling of the game, substituting a “k” for the “c” in order to avoid copyright and to make it seem as if his Skreeno was Perry’s very own game. “Nothing like it anywhere else,” Andy boasted.
A large numbered dial, resembling a clock face, was projected onto the movie screen. A spinning needle would revolve around the dial until it stopped on a number. Cardholders would punch out the number on their cards if they had it, using toothpicks that Andy provided or, as was the case with seasoned players, their own personal hatpins.
There were 10 games between features, with a total prize purse of $50, or $5 a game. Clara Miller had never won a Skreeno game, even though she made sure to use her mother’s lucky heirloom hatpin.
Clara Miller was an optimist. In a town with horizons lowered by the perpetual slag smoke, Clara could see a brighter day. She was certain she would win. One day, she said, her ship would come in, even though she had never seen a ship nor had she any idea where ships came in.
It seemed to Sonny that not only did his mother Clara not win at all, few ladies—and the Thursday night audience was mostly made up of women—won at Skreeno. Not as many won as should have been the case. Some games would go entirely through the cards with no one having enough numbers, up, down or sideways, to claim the prize.
Of the $50 that could have been won, usually only $30 or at the most, $35, was paid out. And the money not won one week was not carried over until the next. It seemed to Sonny that Andy Snead was holding back $15 to $20 each week.
Once a month The Glob held Bank Night. All movie tickets that were sold during the month were eligible for a drawing and a prize of $100. Patrons were advised to keep their ticket stubs and show up on Bank Night for the announcement of the big prize.
The presentation on Bank Night was more elaborate than for Skreeno. Andy Sloan dressed in a tuxedo, maybe the only tuxedo in Perry. He would draw the winning number from a huge glass fish bowl where the stubs for the month had been deposited. Andy wore white gloves when he fished through the bowl for the winning number.
Just to show everything was on the up and up, Andy would occasionally call a member of the audience to the stage to pick the number, usually a small boy. The kids were not given gloves.
Sonny noticed that at least half of the time, the winning number was not in the audience.
“Oh, my dear. Oh, no,” Andy would say. “You have to keep your stubs and you have to show up to win. The more stubs, the greater your chances. Be here for the movies and be here for Bank Night next month.”
The money not won was money that stayed in Andy’s pocket.
“Something smells at The Glob,” Sonny said to Duck.
“Yeah. I think it’s a dead rat or something.”
“No, I don’t mean that,” said Sonny. “I think somehow Andy is fixing Skreeno. And Bank Night is just as fishy.”
“How did the moron know where to go back to catch a fish?” asked Ink Ear, not waiting for the answer. “He marked an X on the side of the boat. Ha, ha, ha.”
Andy kept the fish bowl used for the Bank Night drawing in his office, a cramped room up a twisting set of stairs next to the projection booth. He kept the door locked, not the usual thing to do in Perry.
Door locks in Perry tended to be the kind with keyholes, the kind you could see through. Perry was not a dead bolt kind of place. And any key that fit any similar lock would, with just a little bit of jiggling, unlock any other door. This is how Duck got into his father’s liquor, which is another story and the scar across Duck’s left cheek tells some of it.
Sonny creaked open the door to Andy’s office, pushing back a large mixed Abyssinian cat that was sleeping behind it. Goldy was the reason there was a dead rat smell in The Glob. While a good mouser, Goldy was not a tidy housekeeper. She would kill a mouse or a rat and drag it somewhere to let it rot. Odors leaked from various corners of The Glob, especially near Row D on the right side. Sonny never bothered to clean there and only on Bank Night did anyone sit there. Goldy jumped up, hissed and ran out the door before Sonny could close it.
“Christ,” muttered Sonny. “Now I’ve got to get her back or Andy will know someone has been in here.”
The office was not much. A folding card table with a splint on one leg served as Andy’s desk. A three-shelf metal bookcase held whatever records Andy kept and a series of numbered file boxes. The wooden swivel desk chair was the nicest piece of furniture in the room. It was the only real piece of furniture in the room. It was very like the chair Mrs. Mears sat in. The fish bowl was on the table, empty. Beside it was the trash bag that Sonny had dropped behind The Glob earlier in the day.
Fished out of the trash bag were ticket stubs that had been discarded. These stubs were thrown away by the kids, mostly, and by anyone who did not care about Skreeno. Sonny would clean up dozens of the stubs each week.
Andy was increasing his odds by adding both halves of sold tickets to the drawing. If both halves were in the bowl, the other half could not be in the audience. Andy could be sure no one would have the winning ticket if, as he fished through the bowl, he picked one that had been on the filthy floor of The Glob.
“That’s why he wears the white gloves,” muttered Sonny. Sonny said this not without some admiration.
Peeking from underneath the trash bag was a film can. The trash bag had been plopped on top of it. Sonny scooted the can out. Scrawled on a piece of white adhesive tape, the same lettering that identified the Lost and Found, was the word “Skreeno.”
Sonny was sometimes asked to be the projectionist, usually for matinees when Andy had to be the theater warden. Sonny could thread the film and change reels, do whatever was needed to get through previews, cartoons, and the feature. Of the film cans he used on the days he ran the Brenkert Deluxe BX-80, he had never seen any film can marked “Skreeno.”
Sonny removed the film from the Skreeno can. He projected it onto a piece of gray cardboard instead of onto the theater screen down below. The familiar dial and numbers flickered and moved from game to game. Nothing seemed wrong. The dial would spin, stop, spin, stop.
Before each game of Skreeno a number would flash briefly. Where had he seen those numbers? Back in Andy’s office, Sonny pulled out one of several small file boxes from the metal bookshelf. Inside the box were Skreeno cards. Marked on the box in the same Lost and Found scrawl were numbers. They were the same numbers Sonny had seen flash on the Skreeno reel.
And then it clicked in Sonny’s head. He realized if you knew which numbers the spinner would stop on, you could know which Skreeno cards had the best chance of paying off.
And which ones did not.
“Scrawkkkk.”
Sonny jumped. Goldy the cat was back. She had dropped a half eaten rat at Sonny’s feet. Goldy arched her back and rubbed against Sonny’s leg. Sonny picked up the cat and scratched behind her ears. The cat closed her eyes and purred.
“You got your rat,” said Sonny. “I got mine.”
Chapter 4
Pot de Chambre
For as long as Sonny, Duck and Ink Ear had been alive, Perry’s town slogan was painted on the tank of the town water tower. “Perry, Happiness, Prosperity” each word getting its own line.
Only one of the words was accurate, the name “Perry,” and there are those that would argue that Perry was not the name of the town at all. It should be known as Forge, the name it had gone by after the first kiln was fired up to make the first pot.
It was widely assumed that the name was changed to Perry to honor the hero of Lake Erie, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry. But it was actually named for Harry Perry, the man who signed the application for a post office. Harry Perry had mistakenly put his last name where the name of the town was supposed to go.
A ladder led up to a metal platform that encircled the water tank. Every so often Sonny and Duck would climb up and sit there, feeling superior to all those little people leading little lives below, and when the slag haze was blown in the other direction they would get a fine view at the same time.
They could see all the way down to Winslow’s Bend, the curve that was named for a turn in the Jericho River. Back when the town was still known as Forge, a man named Jeremiah Winslow had lost his mule Jocko in the river. This was when the river’s water was clear, before silt had clogged the bottom and the current moved more rapidly. Jocko was pulling a wooden raft up river, walking along the bank while Jeremiah urged him along with a willow branch. Jeremiah’s son Lud was on the raft, guiding it with a crude tiller. A player piano was the only cargo on the raft, tied down by rough twine, the same inadequate rope that connected the raft to the mule. The reason the Winslows were trying to float a player piano up river has been lost over time.
At the turn in the river, Jocko stopped to munch on a patch of creeping thyme and no matter how Jeremiah whacked him, Jocko was not inclined to move. The twine from the raft pulled at Jocko’s harness and Jeremiah tanned Jocko’s flanks but fresh thyme is the devil’s own dinner to a mule. The current in the river began to turn the raft around and Lud could not hold the tiller. Jocko’s head was wrenched away from the thyme by the tug of the raft as it began to go back downstream. The mule dug in and stretched his neck to get another bite. The rough twine broke just as Jocko was losing his footing on the bank. The raft rocked and the player piano tinkled to life, breaking into a jaunty version of “Dew-Dew-Dewey Day.” The raft began floating back down river. Jocko tumbled into the water, submerged and did not reappear. The last glimpse of his mule by Jeremiah Winslow was of a happy animal with a tuft of thyme sticking out of the corner of his mouth. Lud and the player piano made it to shore but Jocko was never seen again.
Beyond Winslow’s Bend, the Jericho River squirmed its way to an eventual union with the Muskingum River, picking up additional flows from Stonecoal Creek and Laurel Run. At a point in the center of downtown Marietta, the liquid mixture from Perry would blend with the Ohio River, though the boys could not see that far away.
Two ridges cradled the river and the town—Flint Ridge to the north and Brimstone Ridge to the south. The boys would often explore Flint Ridge looking for Indian arrowheads. The name of Flint Ridge came from discoveries of arrowheads and flint tools generations earlier. Traces of flint mines, dug out by prehistoric tribes, still existed, though they were now entirely overgrown by ash, hickory and maple. None of the boys found any Indian arrowheads, but Ink Ear had dug out a sharp piece of chert that he imagined once was on the end of a spear.
Brimstone Ridge was sun blessed. Stands of oak and hickory had been cut from it, leaving splotches of open fields. From the Perry Water Tower the treeless spaces looked like stains on a carpet. Brimstone Ridge was named after a rock formation called The Devil’s Tea Table, and the boys understood that creepy things happened there. They had been told, or maybe they just imagined, that the immigrant clan known as the Szabos preformed satanic rituals on the flat rock that was the Tea Table itself. They promised each other that they would go some day and find out if the stories were true.
Off to the west, the general clutter of Loganville was sometimes visible from the Perry Water Tower. The boys had to admit, when the sun was setting and a golden glow silhouetted the buildings of their rival town, Loganville seemed to be blessed in a way they could never see in Perry.
Ink Ear did not climb up the tower with them, preferring to stay below and throw pieces of gravel to see if he could hit either Sonny or Duck. Ink Ear did not have Duck’s arm nor his aim and Sonny and Duck never felt threatened.
“Come on up, chicken shit,” yelled Duck.
“I ain’t neither,” Ink Ear shouted in return.
“He is,” Duck said to Sonny.
The evening before the unveiling of a new water tank, the sun nipped at the tops of trees along State Street. The light fully illuminated the water tower as Sonny and Duck sat on the platform, their legs dangling over. A ceremony was planned for the next day and a small stand of bleachers had been erected over the gravel lot at the base of the tower. A raised platform faced the bleachers with several folding chairs and a podium. Sonny leaned back and crossed his arms behind his head. He was looking straight up under the tarpaulin that hung loosely over the water tank. A slight breeze lifted and wafted the tarp. Sonny had an idea.
“How about this,” and he told Duck his plan.
“Jesus, that’s great. That’s just fantastic.”
Perry’s water tower functioned as water towers do, storing and dispersing fresh water. Perry’s tower was unusual because of its planned new shape. It was to be shaped like a cookie jar, the same as one of the cookie jars made at the Perry Pottery. Cookie jars were the biggest sellers of any single piece of pottery in Perry.
The design was simple, a rounded crock, with foot and lid, covered with a classic glaze the color of sand. Like the Model T Ford, it came in only one color. If you wanted a Perry Pottery cookie jar, you took the tan one.
The new tank of the Perry Water Tower was a copy of the cookie jar. Four angled legs with struts and crossties supported the water tank. A ladder had been fastened to a central shaft, which contained the feeder pipes that brought the treated water from the Perry Reservoir several miles away and the pipes that fed the water into the homes of Perry.
The system worked efficiently and those with indoor plumbing in Perry had no complaint. Those without indoor plumbing sneered at those who had it.
“Won’t be any outhouses left by the time you’re grown,” Clara Miller told Sonny. “You’re sitting on history, so to speak.”
Sonny hated sitting on the seat in the Miller outhouse. The small shed with a star cut in its door was 40 yards below the Miller house, a cold walk in the winter and generally inconvenient at all other times. What Sonny hated the most were the flies from below that bombarded his bottom and buzzed around his squirter. What other creatures dwelt amongst the Miller deposits Sonny did not want to think about. He had dreams of spiders, deadly black widows, and scorpions. He had never seen a scorpion but he imagined a fierce creature with sharp teeth.
He did not use the outhouse unless he absolutely had to. If Sonny could not do his business at school, and he was regular, after lunch each day, he waited as long as he could until the next day. To urinate Sonny simply stepped out the back door and treated the lawn much the same as did Clara’s chickens. A bare slope of dead grass and caked dirt reeked of urine. His mother used a chamber pot and it was Sonny’s job to empty it each day.
The idea to shape the water tank like a cookie jar was that of Sid Frash, grandson of the founder of Perry Pottery. Sid had kept the pottery profitable despite competition from Japan and other foreign potters. Perry Pottery was notable not only for its cookie jars, but as well as for its creamers, sugar bowls, gravy boats and mixing bowls.
The more delicate china was made at Gilbert and Trent China Company, on the other end of State Street. Had the GTCC a view of the Perry water tank, the new tank might have become a cup and saucer. But as it was the window of Sid Frash’s office looked out onto the tank, sticking up 150 feet above ground, a half mile away.
When Sid looked up from his drawing board, the place where he fiddled with designs for new lines of pottery, the tower was always in his view. The same day that he was designing a new sugar bowl and creamer, the tower seemed to him more prominent than usual, more obvious, almost as if it were trying to tell him something.