TARGET PRACTICE

With a handle on my stealing, I tried to squelch any visions of wickedness, but like the springtime that was blooming all around me outside, a terrible restlessness seemed to match it in my insides. My curiosity about living all of life that could be lived was eating away at my decency.

That’s the only logical explanation for my response to Carla’s mentioning the noisy chickens in the hatchery behind her house: my trigger finger suddenly got strangely itchy. The next thing I knew we were ensconced in the bushes behind the post office with our b-b guns drawing a bead on the hens all stacked up in crates across the street. (At that time, Shelby County was the poultry capital of the world.) Our idea was not to shoot the chickens themselves but to see if we were good enough to bust the eggs beneath them when the hens would stand up and stretch their legs or whatever that is they do when they prance around in circles the way they do. And we were. Mostly. But I’ll have to say that it’s a good thing that we weren’t strong enough to pump up our air rifles a few more times or we’d have laid out a few of those unsuspecting chickens. As it was, we’d either bust an egg or pop a hen just enough to shock a sudden squawk out of her. Of course we had to be sure not to fire when a car was coming up the street, and sometimes that took a lot of waiting since this was right downtown just barely off the square. You have to wonder what the men running the place thought to find all of a sudden this one day a bunch of busted eggs under their hens when this was never the case before. After the redbugs and the ants started pestering us, we decided to do something that didn’t require lying in the grass, so since it was after five and the courthouse was closed, we went around to the front for a while and shot at squirrels in the sycamore trees, and then we went across the street to the courthouse.

For some reason, probably the square dances they used to have up there, there were lights strung all around the whole area on all four sides of the square. Unlike the tough-skinned squirrels, the light bulbs succumbed easily to our b-b’s, much like the eggs but better because we could get closer, and we didn’t have to wait for hens to stretch or cars to pass. Totally disregarding the washer-pitching, tobacco-chewing, whittling old men who were camped on the benches twenty feet away, we began systematically destroying each light bulb with one of us shooting while the other would pump up her gun for the next shot. I don’t know what took them so long —probably for some sheer shock and for others pure delight — but we had almost made it to the third side when a couple of old codgers finally sauntered up to us and asked us our names.

The Bible says that there is no greater love than one who will lay down her life her friends, and that is what happened next when Carla opened her mouth and answered them: “I’m Carla Nations, and this here's my friend Mary Nell Bobbitt.”

Why, if she was going to lie anyway she didn’t just go ahead and lie about her name, too, is a mystery for the ages, but even though she put her own life on the line, she did manage to kill two other birds with one stone. First of all, Carla was jealous of Mary Nell, and I guess she mistook my pandering to her out of fear that she’d reveal that I was a thief for the desire to become her best friend, so she took shrewd advantage of this opportunity to cause her some trouble, and that was the first bird. The second bird was that she showed me loyalty by protecting me from the consequences of having the county judge, who was my cousin and right up there in his office thirty feet away, call my daddy and tell on me.

One thing you need to consider in all this is that Carla’s parents were pretty loose on disciplining her ever since her brother, Nicky, had gotten killed a year earlier in a car wreck when he was just sixteen. They seemed to think the best way to live without regrets would be to leave Carla to her own designs and let her live life to the fullest as she saw fit just in case her life was snuffed out prematurely too. What they might not have figured on was that by giving her all this slack she could wander into dangerous territory — maybe so dangerous that she might not even make it to sixteen. Carla also knew that my daddy believed in a little tighter rein and that I was likely to get worn out before dark if he had found out.

And maybe it was the Great Whisperer again, but somehow, my cousin the judge did find out, and he did call my daddy. He said, “Pep, you need to come down here and get Jen and her gun off the square.” When we got home, he bent me over Julie’s bed and gave me a lickin’ with his belt, but I noticed that as I was telling him the story, and even as he was lightin’ into me, he had a smirk on his face that looked a lot like pride. I think he was thinking that even though on July 3, 1951, I came out a girl instead of the boy he was hoping for, I was going a long way in satisfying his need to have a son to follow in his footsteps.

(From Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights by Jan Doke, Chapter Fifteen)

THE DEVIL'S WORKSHOP

With Johnny Paul out of the way, I didn’t have to spend time worrying about the pro’s and con’s of alleged mysteries, so I could concentrate all my energies on being civil to Mrs. Gravitts five days a week. The problem was the weekends. Just being around Johnny Paul gave me the thumps too bad to want to play football or build trolleys or go crawfishing or do any of the neighborhood things he might be involved in, so I was hard pressed to find a lot else worth doing all day long on these winter Saturdays. Reading the dictionary can only take you so far.

One night after the show was over at the Rio, I went next door to Green’s Drugstore to get a chocolate ice cream cone. I noticed on my way back to the soda fountain all kinds of new-colored ballpoint pens; there were turquoise, purple, and metallic gold pens that came not only in fine points but in those smooth-writing broad points that I just couldn’t get enough of. Not having much of a sweet tooth, except for seven or eight Cokes a day and an occasional chocolate ice cream cone, I guess a fascination with and craving for writing instruments replaced what most kids felt about candy. I spent lots of time using all different types of pens and pencils while working on trying to duplicate the writing of everybody in fifth grade. I was pretty good too: you’d have thought I had some sinister motive the way I stuck at it until I got everybody’s signature just right, but it was all completely innocent.

The thing that happened as a result of my trip back to the drugstore that night, though, was anything but innocent. It was what I would later learn to be a prime example of the saying that idleness is the devil’s workshop.

Right after I noticed all those colorful pens, I also noticed that there weren’t very many people working in the drugstore. There was somebody in a white coat in the pharmacy, a lady filing her fingernails in the cosmetic department, a couple of ladies behind the counter making malts and grilled cheese sandwiches, and that was about it.

I should have honed in on the dangerous thing that was happening inside my head because the scenario that was developing in there was the graphically focused photograph that I would inevitably turn into reality. I began picturing myself moseying over to the pen aisle and after innocently taking one off the shelf to further investigate, I’d just slip it under my blouse and into the waistband of my jeans and saunter casually out the door into freedom with a brand new broad-point turquoise pen with no one the wiser and without spending a dime. I could visualize perfectly how it would all go. Then I snapped back into reality and shook my head at such a ridiculous notion that I might ever actually steal something that I didn’t even need but if I did my parents would certainly buy for me.

But even after I had walked all the way down to the corner by the barbershop and stood waiting for someone to come pick me up, the vision would not abandon my brain. There it all was in vivid Technicolor collaborating with my conscience — trying to make some sort of sinister deal.

I should have struck up a conversation with my daddy on the way home about how things were going with his attempts to get the Birdman of Alcatraz out of prison and into Toledo Lodge, his nursing home, or what all he planned to put into his survival kits he was planning to market since we were all involved in the Cold War and under the threat of a Russian bomb. The only thing I knew for sure he was going to put in them was Kotex because all of our closets all over the house were so full of boxes of Kotex that none of the doors would even close anymore. It could have been embarrassing, but once you’ve lived through the trauma of enduring a week with a chair growing cockeyed out of the sheetrock above the deepfreeze, you get pretty immune to embarrassment.

But I didn’t inquire about any of his projects. I just rode in silence under the spell of shoplifting while he kept elaborating about the spaghetti sauce he had made that was, as he described everything he cooked, “larrapin’ –– the best thing you ever flopped a lip over.” My imagination’s foray into crime was a spell that was even stronger than the anticipation of good food. I had heard Mr. Pete read a psalm once about God’s love being better than the finest of foods. This was the devilish side of that same coin: wickedness had consumed my mind, and not even the thought of my daddy’s larrapin’ spaghetti could break the enchantment.

And sure enough the next Saturday I hauled off and became the very pen thief that the devil had shown me I could be. It went just as I had envisioned it. It was so pitifully easy that before long I was swiping pens left and right without even thinking about it. I had a whole cache of pens — one of every color in fine, medium, and broad points. Shoot, I could have set up shop at the Dairy Queen after school and made more money than you could shake a stick at, if I had needed money, that is, and of course, I did not.

That was the big, shocking shame about the whole thing: I was practicing being a juvenile delinquent not because I was desperate about needing anything and not even because of rebellion; I was becoming every bit as bad as Jesse Pugh and the Beckhams for no other reason than boredom. I just plain had too much idle time on my hands and not enough gumption or religion to know what to do with all of it.

Somebody probably should have been teaching me skills like how to clean the bathroom, change the sheets, or sweep the floor because not only was I flirting with a lifestyle encumbered with lots of trouble, I was at a total loss at Girl Scout Camp, Whispering Pines, every summer when it came time for our cabin to clean the dining hall and I drew sweeping as my chore. But nobody was teaching me any of that because we had a maid named Hearice, and so I was teetering on the brink of true hoodlumism.

But then just as suddenly as it had struck, it ended. God reached down and took hold of me by the scruff of my neck and brought my thieving ways to a screeching halt. Nanny used to say that God worked in mysterious ways, and I believe it because He chose to deliver me from evil through blackmail, or at least alleged blackmail which works just as good as the real thing when you believe it’s real as much as I did.

One day at recess Mary Nell Bobbitt hollered across the playground, “I know ALL about your little secret, Jen Crocker!” The only other person who knew about me stealing was Carla Nations, whom I had decided to teach the ropes so that I would not rot away in jail alone, and I was pretty sure that she wouldn’t have told Mary Nell. But still, you could just tell by her voice that somehow she knew. I wondered if maybe it was the Great Whisperer again, letting Mary Nell in on our secret in a supernatural way so that she could scare at least this part of the devil out of us. It surprised me that I cared so much about what other people might think about me doing this, but something about being labeled an out-and-out thief put enough fear in me that I quit thieving but fell into something even more shameful: I pretty much became putty in Mary Nell’s hands.

Even though she never came right out and named the sordid secret she hollered across the playground about knowing, I was so scared that she would blab all over Azalea Heights that I was a kleptomaniac that I fake-laughed at all her corny jokes and told her everyday how pretty she looked for a whole year. She might not have really had any idea about my ever having even a dishonest thought, much less a vision of becoming a thief that had come true, but it was enough to set me on the straight and narrow about stealing stuff.

A little later on I read this saying by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.” As I thought back on those days when I was lured by ink pens and thus bewitched by thievery, I wondered how I had been lucky enough to have fallen out of Mr. Emerson’s deadly cycle so that my destiny was not to end up a hardened criminal behind bars for the rest of my life for armed robbery.

( Chapter 14- Out of the Chute in Azalea Heights, by Jan Doke)

OUT ON THE WRONG LIMB

Miraculously, Janie and I managed to get away with our hooky-playing escapade. The next day Mr. Peeler rang the fire drill bell without warning the teachers at the exact time we were supposed to go watch a Weekly Reader film, and the whole school got sidetracked, so Mrs. Gravitts and Mrs. Byrd never got around to asking anybody for their absent notes. I had a story ready, but I’ll bet Janie was on pins and needles and probably praying. Maybe it was her praying that caused Mr. Peeler to decide to have a fire drill that morning.

We were excited all week because her mother had given her permission to come spend the night with me on Friday. Since my mind was so consumed with trying to be good because of Mr. Gravitts’ disease, when the rest of the class was studying long division and reading Longfellow, my brain felt the need to retreat into visions and dreams of a more restful nature. That week they included what activities Janie and I could entertain ourselves with that might change her mind about my taste in fun. By the time Friday rolled around, I had everything planned out.

After supper Julie went out on a date with old Travis Wayne. That was at seven, so we had a few hours for me to get Janie trained for the great caper that wouldn’t actually begin until a little before 10:00, which was Julie’s curfew. For the first hour, I taught Janie how to cook Rice-a-Roni (the San Francisco Treat) because it dawned on me in the middle of supper that we didn’t usually have dessert, and most people, like Janie, did. Both my Mother and Daddy were better cooks with one hand tied behind their back than anybody else’s parents, and by the time we had eaten their shrimp gumbo, t-bone steaks, or Italian spaghetti, none of us ever wanted dessert. The way I figured it, Rice-a-Roni could count as dessert, since that was my best thing to cook, and at the same time I could announce to Janie, “Hey, how about a lesson in the culinary arts?” (“Culinary” was one of my new “c” words, and I was anxious to try it out.)

After dessert, we took turns pantomiming records using a banana as a microphone and then it was time for me to begin her training in climbing on top of the house. The plan was to spy on Julie and old Travis Wayne when they came home and parked in front of the house after their date. Being in the ninth grade, they had pretty much gotten to be creatures of habit, so I could predict exactly when they would drive up and exactly where they would park. There was a perfect limb to sit on and spy, but the only way to get up to it was from the roof of the house. Mother had the Coke truck make regular stops at our house every week to deliver seven cases of Cokes to us just like they did to the stores, so if Janie couldn’t climb, we could have just stacked up Coke cases as high as she needed us to. Turns out, Janie, being a country kid, was a pretty good climber, so we just sat up there in the cold and practiced our howling for that extra twenty minutes before they got home instead of knocking the Coke cases over several times until she could achieve her balance, as I had envisioned that morning during reading class.

Then there they were, pulling slyly up the curb and cutting off the headlights. We had a good perspective, but all we could see was them snuggling way over on his side. It looked like four or five more people could have fit in the front seat beside them; that’s how close they were. It’s funny that in all that time I never thought about them like I thought about me and Johnny Paul kissing on the front porch after the Black Cats ran out; all I could think about was how on earth Julie could let somebody like Travis Wayne even talk her into getting into the same car with him, much less kiss her. That was probably more of a mystery to me than I had ever been to Johnny Paul. After only about five minutes, the windshield got all fogged up, and fog is a pretty boring thing to watch, so in grave disappointment and embarrassment, I told Janie we might as well climb down and go inside.

Janie seemed like she had a good time, but for some reason I could never figure out, she told her mother everything we did. Then after she got going, she lost all her inhibitions and told her about playing hooky the week before.

And that is why Janie was forbidden to set foot on our property after that weekend.

“Janie,” her mother told her, “you have no business skipping school, you have no business smoking cigarettes, and you have no business being on the roof of a house. And furthermore, people deserve their privacy, and it is wrong to sneak around and spy on them. If you are going to be friends with Jen, it will have to be out here on the farm. You may not go to her house anymore.”

This was a grave disappointment to me because Janie was somebody I really wanted to be close friends with. She was smart and interesting and knew how to be funny without ever doing anything wild or wrong. I thought that was pretty clever of her. It seemed like that if I could spend lots of time with her, I would have less of a chance to be bored into the kind of adventures that could send me to jail.

And not only that, but wouldn’t you know it? No sooner had Mother bought me that expensive necklace to help me save face with Johnny Paul than he discovered another mystery girl, my good friend Ruth Ann Foster. And the thing was Ruth Ann could not have cared less about Johnny Paul or any other boy. She was cute and spunky and I can see why he might have wanted to be her boyfriend for those reasons, but really and truly, I don’t think he even noticed her cuteness and spunk. I think he liked her because she did not like him, and that is both strange and stupid, if you ask me.

SCROUNGING FOR FUN

Maybe it was because I never sat still long enough to think about anything, much less deep things like divine providence, but life had just always seemed so random — like there was really no plan at all, maybe not even a Planner. You might go outside to recess, and since the pittypat court was already full, you might go over to the swings and start playing with somebody you’d never even seen, all the while thinking how all this was just a notion that was causing you to walk northwest to the swings rather than east to where they were pitching washers. But then when that person you start swinging with turns out to be your new best friend, you begin to wonder if maybe Somebody you can’t see whispered to you, “Don’t pitch washers today. Swing.” You wouldn’t think that right at the moment, of course, because some time would need to pass before you knew she would turn out to be that friend. But gradually, little by little, if you were ever still and quiet enough to think about things like why you do this and that and whether or not decisions are all a series of chances, you would probably come up with the concept of The Great Whisperer.

This is what was secretly happening to me the day that I began playing with Janie Simon. Janie was not in the band, and so she was in Mrs. Byrd’s room memorizing the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and “The Village Blacksmith” (the latter of which was written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whom I later learned was one of my dead relatives) while all of us musical kids were getting whacked day in day out by Mrs. Gravitts’ infamous board. Janie told me later that she worried so much when she heard all of that violence going on down the hall that whether she knew who was out there getting hit or not, she would immediately start praying for whoever it was.

She was a quiet girl whose daddy had died recently, and she lived out in the country with her mother and her five brothers and sisters. She even rode the bus to school, which is something I cannot say anybody else did that I was friends with. I also cannot say that anybody else I knew would have thought to just haul off and start praying for somebody they didn’t even know right in the middle of memorizing the Declaration of Independence when they weren’t even at church, about to eat a meal, or about to go to sleep at night. But this is pretty much the way Janie was. She seemed to know who I was even though I didn’t know her, and she certainly didn’t have any reason to want to play with me that day since I had not ever even bothered to know who she was like she knew who I was. But she was as friendly to me as a speckled pup; in fact, she was so nice you would have thought I had pulled her out of a burning building.

On days that I didn’t eat Billie’s hamburgers, I would go home for dinner. (I later learned that most other people called dinner “lunch,” but we didn’t say that word in Azalea Heights. It seemed to us like one of those hoity-toity practices like pronouncing almond “ahlmond” or calling a frog a “frahg.” For us there was just breakfast, dinner, and supper, always in that order, and I wouldn’t hear folks really use the “l” word on a regular basis until I was eighteen and in college out in West Texas.) This was at the beginning of when I had vowed to give Mrs. Gravitts some peace, and let me tell you, by dinnertime every day I was worn out from disciplining myself. I was having to tell my very own self “Shut up,” “Be still,” “Get to work,” and “Be nice,” and it was exhausting. I was used to other people doing it for me, and this was a whole new ballgame. Every day when I went home for lunch, I would be as creative as any ten-year old could be about new sudden-onset diseases, but there seemed to be no way to get Mother to buy any of what I was saying. She had learned well to distrust antics like this way back when I was a second-grader and had broken several thermometers in a week’s time by exploding them in the space heater. Nothing could break her skepticism.

So one day I decided to take the law in my own hands and began around ten-thirty in the morning to make a plan for the afternoon. I would play hooky. And since I had been wanting Janie to come over, this would be the perfect time to take her home with me for dinner.

I was pretty sure Janie wouldn’t go along with the hooky-playing idea, so I just went over to Mrs. Byrd’s room as soon as the dinner bell rang and asked her go eat with me at our house. After dinner, we left to walk back to school, but on the way, I delicately suggested that we just take a break this afternoon. She looked really confused, and for a minute, I thought I had made a bad choice for an accomplice, but after I promised to have her back in time to ride home on her bus, she allowed me free rein with her next three hours.

I knew exactly what we would do; it was all part of the vision I had dreamed up during arithmetic: we would wait until Mother and Daddy went back to work, go back to the house, get some of Daddy’s cigarettes and matches, and head for the ravine over behind Woodrow White’ house, who was the ex-mayor of Azalea Heights. I had always thought those woods were particularly pretty with their wild redbud and dogwood trees commingling with the tall pines that seemed crammed full of singing robins. They were all part of my vision.

But right off the bat, reality took a sharp turn from my dreams when Janie started asking lots of questions. The first one was “Now why do we want to smoke?” It was asked innocently and without judgment. She just thought she must have missed something in the explanation of our fun-filled agenda. I didn’t know WHY; it seemed pretty self-explanatory to me. We wanted to smoke because we COULD smoke. We had made a plan that would work; we had worked the plan, and now we just plain DESERVED to smoke. Next came the realization that unlike my dream scenario of loveliness, this was not springtime, the redbud and dogwoods were not blooming, there were no birds as far as we could see, and if there were, they were sleeping or mute. This was January, we were sitting in a ravine in the dark woods, and it was cold. Janie took an obligatory puff from her Lucky Strike, cocked her head, and asked me next, “Is this the fun you were talking about?”

We had almost two hours to go, and the prospects for having any real thrills suddenly looked bleak. We couldn’t go back to the house and get my b-b gun because my mother came home early from work many days, and we couldn’t go back to school because being tardy was worse than being absent. You’d get ushered up to Mr. Peeler’s office and he would start using his telephone to ruin your life. And then while you waited for your meanest parent to come to the school, he would bend you over his desk and paddle you with a heavier board than even Mrs. Gravitts had. So we just sat in the ditch shivering and occasionally jumped around and smashed chinquapins to generate a little heat.

You’d think that Janie would have decided then and there that she could find a better caliber of friend among all her choices at Azalea Heights Elementary School, one that she wouldn’t have to follow into perdition or retrain from scratch about how to have fun, one that she wouldn’t have to interrupt her memory work in order to pray for every time she heard Mrs. Gravitts wielding her paddle out in the hall, but for some reason — maybe it was The Great Whisperer again — she decided to stick with me and come over and spend the night the next Friday.