Charlotte
The day Mrs. Linkabaugh moved in next door, I
cracked my pubic bone in two places. It was 97
degrees, according to the giant thermometer Karl
Bongaard had hanging on the side of his house. I
was swinging at the time, watching the men from
the moving company slide pieces of a fuzzy red
water bed out of their truck, when my outgrown
swing set pitched like a mechanical bull. A fire
hydrant loomed, and I touched down somewhere
along the curb. Through a small patch of
consciousness, I looked up into the faces of
four Mayflower movers as the sky ripped open and
all of the clouds dropped to earth like wet
rags.
At the Veterans Administration Training
Hospital, I was in Room 503 with
air-conditioning and a man named Victor Samuels,
who pulled open the separating curtain every
chance he got and started talking. He said he
was originally from St. Louis and that last year
his prostate had started hardening up into a
little missile. My mother, Bobbie, said we had
to be polite to Victor Samuels no matter what
because he was probably tortured by the
Vietnamese.
Dr. Maryland, the orthopedist, liked Bobbie
right away. When he pinned up the X rays and she
asked whether smoking was all right if she held
it out the window, he said, “Why don’t the both
of you call me Kevin, okay?”
This kind of thing happens all the time. My
father used to say it was because Bobbie could
never repulse a man no matter how hard she
tried. From the time she was seven to nineteen
and a half, my mother, Roberta Marie Peek, was
Miss Glendora Heights Southern Division, Miss
Teen Hideaway Cove, Miss Young Zuma Beach, Miss
Autumn for Sunkist, and third runner-up to Miss
La Jolla because she was skinnier then, and
nobody could tell she was pregnant.
Even now that she’s almost twenty-nine, all the
men still like her, and it doesn’t matter
whether they find out first about the trophies
and the train trips and the foot modeling. Jim
Juergens, the softball coach from the community
center, even came into the girls’ locker room
when I was changing once and said he had special
dreams about making love to Bobbie and getting
to be my father. That was the same week Coach
Juergens got arrested for walking around the
dugout without pants.
Kevin sat in a chair at the foot of my bed and
took a long time showing us the X rays.
“As you can see,” he said, smiling over at
Bobbie, “the fractures are on the left side of
the bone. To prevent a limp, I had to actually
rebreak the pelvis in the center, just to set
the whole thing back in balance.”
“This is unbelievable,” Bobbie said, leaning
over to hand me her last piece of spearmint gum.
“I thought this kind of thing only happened to
Denny.”
Kevin looked at the tan line where Bobbie’s
wedding ring used to be.
“Who’s Denny?” he asked, staring at her like she
was the first woman he’d ever seen in his whole
life.
Usually, we don’t mention Denny to new people
right away, because he has concentration
problems and can’t keep his hands off things.
The last medical bill we had from Denny was when
Bobbie took him to the Rub-a-Dub Automatic Car
Wash and let him ride through it in the driver’s
seat all alone. He got into the glove
compartment, where Bobbie left her purse, and
swallowed three sleeping pills and a half-pack
of wintergreen Certs and had to be rushed
straight to the Poison Center.
“Denny’s my little brother,” I said, and Kevin
looked relieved. He turned back to the X rays.
“Actually, this was a really easy one,” he said
to Bobbie, pointing to the problem area in the
center of the screen. “Once I had a clean break,
I used stainless steel to stitch up the bone.”
Bobbie held out her hand and I put the gum
wrapper in it.
“Metal stitches,” she said, shaking her head at
the ceiling. “Holy Christ.”
“It’s better than a broken leg, though, isn’t
it?” Kevin said. “At her age, the bones are so
soft, it’s like sewing tissue. She doesn’t even
have to wear a cast.”
Bobbie sighed into her hands, and Kevin looked
like he might cry.
“Please don’t worry,” he said to her. “The
incision will barely leave a scar.”
I asked Kevin if he was married.
“Of course he is,” Bobbie said, sliding the
window shut and brushing her cigarette ashes off
the sill. “And whoever guesses how much money
Kevin makes in a year gets a free Jell-O.”
I guessed a million dollars and Kevin smiled.
“I’m afraid we’re only a government hospital
around here,” he said. “I guess I get the
Jell-O.”
Later, after Victor Samuels came back from his
radiation and went to sleep, Bobbie scooted her
chair up next to the bed and told me two things:
I had to call my father collect right away to
tell him I almost died, and that yesterday she
had entered me in a preteen beauty contest. I
reminded her that my pubic bone was broken, but
she said she had already tracked down a sponsor
who assured her I would not have to appear in
the swimsuit section with any of the other
eleven-year-olds or be required to go up or down
the auditorium stairs on my crutches.
“They said they’d even put in a ramp if we
want,” she said, handing me the telephone before
she went off with a nurse to sign more papers.
“Isn’t that terrific?”
My father was supposed to be living in Coos Bay
by the water, and most of the time I was the one
in charge of calling him. He wasn’t usually at
his house very much, but since we were in a
hospital, I had the operator ring for as long a
time as she could, just in case he picked up.
“How did his voice sound?” Bobbie asked when she
got back from her errands.
“Okay,” I said. “It sounded all right.”
On my last day at the Veteran’s, Peggy, the
physical therapist, taught me how to use the
crutches. My job was to practice limping up and
down the hallway on alternating legs while she
and Bobbie kept the rhythm going with loud
claps. In the pharmacy on the first floor, I
chose purple armrests for the crutches, and
Bobbie bought me flower stickers to paste on the
wood. Then, when it was time to go, Kevin walked
us over to our car and gave Bobbie his telephone
number.
“There are a few choices on here,” he said,
ripping her off an extra page from his
prescription pad, “so give me a buzz anytime.”
On the drive home, Bobbie told me everything she
knew about our new neighbor. Her name was Mrs.
Linkabaugh; her ex-husband, Bill Linkabaugh, was
not allowed within 1,000 feet of her house by
order of the Oregon State police; and on the day
she finally moved in, Mrs. Linkabaugh handed out
at least fifty flyers with Bill Linkabaugh’s
picture on them just to warn everybody.
“And I want you and your brother to be very
careful of characters like these,” Bobbie said,
cutting off a delivery truck on her way into the
carpool lane, “because North Willamette is going
downhill.”
North Willamette is our street. When we were
with my father, we lived on North Amherst, North
Lombard, and North McCrum. Now Bobbie says
she’ll never move again, not even if North
Willamette becomes a slum.
Mrs. Linkabaugh’s new house used to belong to
Oliver Grevitch, who died trying to put up his
storm windows. One Saturday he got out his
ladder and climbed all the way up the side of
his house and had a thrombosis. Bobbie’s
boyfriend Dale was in the driveway when it
happened, and he says Mr. Grevitch hung on to
his ladder the whole time and the two of them
fell together, just like a chopped-down tree.
“Light me a cigarette, will you?” said Bobbie.
“This bitch in the Gold Duster won’t get off my
ass.”
When I got it lit, I tapped her, and she held
out her hand so I could stick it between the
right fingers. The woman in the Gold Duster
leaned on the horn, but Bobbie ignored her and
smoked with her tip out the window. When the
honking got louder, she stuck her middle finger
in the rearview mirror.
“This woman can eat me,” she said, punching down
the automatic lock button and pulling us back
into the exit
lane. “Now, roll up your window and hold on,
we’re taking Killingsworth.”
I turned down the radio and kept my eyes on the
floor mats, because Killingsworth and Alberta
were bad avenues. The summer lifeguard at
Peninsula Park used to tell everybody in the
free swim that carloads of men from
Killingsworth kidnapped girls like us all the
time and did it to them over and over in the
double-doggy style.
When we got to Lombard Street and into downtown
St. John’s, Bobbie drove past the Coronet store,
where Dale was the assistant manager.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Big Cats
by Holiday Reinhorn
Copyright © 2005 by Wil-Horn Enterprises, Inc..
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Free Press
Copyright © 2005
Wil-Horn Enterprises, Inc.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7432-7294-3
