It was July, so I was off to Palestine to my cousin Betsy’s house for two weeks. Betsy was a year older than me and lived with her divorced mother who was running a beauty shop built out of their garage and going to college at the same time to become a school teacher. Needless to say, with Aunt Leona either working, going to school, studying, or sleeping, she needed to be able to trust us when she couldn’t keep a watchful eye on us. I don’t know how anybody smart enough to get a college degree and run a beauty shop singlehandedly could have been so deep in denial as to believe that when she wasn’t looking we were behaving in a respectable and honest way, but it seems like she did.The kind of adventures I indulged in in Azalea Heights were questionable, to say the least, but the things my cousin Betsy thought up put me in the shade. Shoot, next to her, I was a model citizen. She had so much trouble waiting in the wings that she was eager to get into that she didn’t even have time to sleep. Last summer when she took me out to the lake to spend the night with her dad and new stepmother, she pulled me out of bed in the middle of the night and threw me on the back of a moped with no lights and drove us all the way around Lake Palestine where two boys I had never seen met us in a hayloft in the top of a random stranger’s barn. One of them was her boyfriend, Dwight, and while they held hands and kissed in one corner of the barn, I was left alone in the dark to talk to some faceless boy named Donald Ray. It was so dark that he could have had fangs, three orange eyes, and an ear in the middle of his forehead, and I’d have never even known it. Finally she let us leave, but on the way home we ran out of gas, so we had to walk the moped for four or five miles back to the house.
This particular year as soon as I got to her house, she pulled me into the bathroom and told me that tomorrow night we would wait until her mother got home and sneak the car out of the driveway and go have some fun. I couldn’t help but remember last year’s moped incident and how I was so tired by the time we got home that when Aunt Leona took us the Green’s Pool the next afternoon, I nearly fell asleep and drowned while floating on my back, so I wasn’t shot in the head with another nighttime adventure with Betsy. But since I was a year younger and couldn’t stand the thought of her thinking I was a baby, I pretended to be excited and fell right back into the deceptive routine we had perfected a year earlier. Sure enough when her mother went to bed, Betsy pulled me out the back door, stationed me in front of her mother’s Buick, climbed in, put the gearshift into neutral, and told me to push.
Another thing you need to know is that besides my age, I had eyebrows that were working against me in a serious way. After about a month of swimming everyday and having my blonde eyebrows bleached out to the color invisible by a combination of sunshine and chlorine, Mother decided something had to be done, so she took me to her beautician and had them dyed black. Doris told me to sit real still and try not to even breathe much or she might slip, and I would go blind. So even if I had decided to throw a fit to keep this from happening, I couldn’t without spending the rest of my life in utter darkness, so they pretty much had me over a barrel.
Since Mother had only my eyebrows dyed black and left the hair on my head blonde, I had a startling appearance, even to myself, who was not very discriminating about looks. I thought I looked remarkably like Evil-lyn, the witch with the wicked laugh that came on TV at midnight every Friday night. Sometimes kids would stop and stare at me, and the little ones who didn’t know any better than to be rude would ask me which of my hairs were the color I was born with, my head hairs or my eyebrow hairs. All this caused me to feel nervous about myself, especially around kids that were older than me, so I was even more willing to try to do anything it took to prove to them that I wasn’t really strange or different; I just looked that way.
So when Betsy told me to push her mother’s Buick out of the driveway in the dead of the night, I didn’t ask any questions. Once she got both pairs of our shoes up underneath her so that she could see over the steering wheel, she wasn’t such a bad driver. She drove down to the school where we picked up the same two boys that met us in the barn last summer, but this time they weren’t just faces in the dark; this time they were faces in the dark that were telling us that in the sack they were carrying were some cans of beer. Beer was something that I absolutely hated, and I knew this because Daddy had given me a sip of his when I was about five, and it tasted worse to me than the rotten Kennel Ration that I had accidentally taken a bite of when I mistook it for leftover meatloaf when we were at home with a babysitter.
But what could I do? There I was looking like a little kid blonde-headed witch-freak who was so short that I wouldn’t have been able to see over the steering wheel even if we had put six pairs of shoes under me. So I held my breath and took a swig of beer. Since I was in the back seat and it was dark, Betsy couldn’t tell that I was fake-drinking it, and as soon as we got to Brush-a- Creek to our deceased great-grandparents, Mama-and Papa-Over-Yonder’s, old deserted dog-run house, I opened the door and poured the rest of it out and then burped real loud to throw everybody off.
We all traipsed around the house in the dark dodging holes in the floor for about thirty minutes and then went back to the school to slide down the fire escapes. Doing this at night was a pretty smart idea because as much tantalizing as those fire escape slides always looked in the daytime, we couldn’t have done it then even if we could have managed not to get caught because they were made of tin and would have fried our legs. I guess the only daylight time you really want to slide down these things was if there really was a fire up there on the second or third floor, and your only two options were burning all the hide off your legs or staying inside and having every bit of your hide melt into a puddle. After a while, we left the boys there and went back and rolled the car back up into the driveway.
After we got inside I noticed that my new Estee Lauder perfume had fallen out of my purse. I imagined it underneath Mama- and Papa-Over-Yonder’s house being swarmed by millions of Daddy Longlegs and crawled over by copperheads. This was the first time I had ever had any perfume of my own, and Julie had given it to me for my birthday only a week earlier. I don’t know why losing perfume would be so upsetting to a tomboy like me, but it could have been that I thought since I looked so freaky with my multicolored hair, at least I could compensate by smelling good.
After I left Betsy’s, I went out in the country to Cayuga to stay with my grandmother, Mama Leta. She was a widow trying her best to raise our aunt Babette, but this was not as easy as you might think. Just because someone is an aunt does not mean they are old and wise and responsible like the word “aunt” seems to suggest. Babette was wilder than even Betsy, and since she was also five years older, she was a lot smarter about ways to get into trouble than either one of us or even both of us put together. Most of the time I was safe because Babette would leave me at home when she went places with her friends, but the Saturday before it was time for me to leave on Sunday, Mama Leta talked Babette into taking me with her riding with her boyfriend, Coy. I don’t know why somebody who isn’t even a policeman would have handcuffs, but Coy had picked up a pair from somewhere, and he was chomping at the bit to try them out. There must have been a shortage of little kids to victimize in Cayuga, so when I ended up being part of their carload that day, they didn’t waste any time striking while the iron was hot. They talked me into letting them try the handcuffs on me, and the next thing I knew I was handcuffed to the back door of the high school cafeteria. Then to make matters worse for me but funnier for them, they started throwing some Black Cats at me that Coy had found under his car seat leftover from the Fourth of July. Something inside of me kept wondering if they would have done this to somebody whose eyebrows were not dyed black or to someone who was grown-up and sophisticated enough to carry her own bottle of Estee Lauder perfume around in her purse. After they got tired of laughing and throwing firecrackers at me, Coy tried to turn me loose, but the key he had in his pocket that he thought went to this pair of handcuffs didn’t fit this particular lock. It was the middle of July and there wasn’t even a breeze, and the longer I stood there the hotter those handcuffs got against my skin.
When they both left me there alone to go find the guy who had the other key, I started thinking about the story Mr. Pete had told us about Jacob. He played a mean trick on his brother, and for a while it seemed like he was just going to go on through his life without suffering for that, but then later on he got a big dose of his own medicine when he got scared stiff about meeting up with that brother and even a bigger dose later when his very own kids threw his favorite son in a hole and convinced him that he had been killed by a wild animal. I thought about shooting ink all over Tina’s coat and ruining all those eggs at Western Hatchery, about stealing the pens from Green’s Drugstore, shooting out all the county’s light bulbs on the square, and picking a fight with Kate just because she didn’t grow up in Azalea Heights. I thought about putting pennies on the railroad track, never considering the possibility of burning down a whole town until the train hit the penny and threw out a spark that ignited the pasture behind the Agnews’ house and required three fire trucks to put out the fire. I thought about diving into the swimming pool and ruining my Easter dress Mother worked so hard on and Betsy and me risking our lives in the middle of the night in my aunt’s car when she thought we were sleeping safely in the next room. All these things marched through my head like a parade as those handcuffs burned into my wrists, and I began to understand what Janie Simon’s mother meant when she would nod her head and say “Just remember. What goes around comes around.”
Yep, there were things that had been going around and around for years that I just figured were making their way steadily on out to the horizon, but now here they were coming marching back around like the Azalea Heights Rodeo Parade right up into my lap.
Right then I began to catch on to the reason for Sunday school: If I had paid more attention to what happened to Jacob, I might have been spared the trauma of being chained up to the Cayuga High School cafeteria in a hundred-degree temperature like some black-browed convict.
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