Armadillos & Old Lace Read online

  “I’ll be sure to mention it to Phallax,” I told her, as I put on my boots, opened the creaky door of the green trailer, and stared at the large porthole painting of a cross section of a watermelon. The painting had been done many years ago by a talented, somewhat eccentric counselor named Jules LeMelle who’d insisted that his only free time to do the work was at 6:00 A.M. So he’d painted the door and one inner wall of the trailer in a watermelon motif over a period of about a week while I tried to sleep with some weird guy drawing psychedelic watermelon designs inside my trailer.

  LeMelle had gotten the idea from a story I’d told him about a Kappa Alpha fraternity float I’d once seen in a parade at the University of Texas. The float, as I remembered it, had been a huge construction of a watermelon with live little black children dancing around on it, ostensibly representing the seeds. It’d happened so long ago that, if I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought I’d dreamed it. But it had happened, I had mentioned it to Jules LeMelle, and he’d painted psychedelic watermelons all over the inner wall and door of my trailer. The natural green color of the outside of the trailer served as a perfect giant watermelon rind for the pink porthole painting when the door was closed.

  As I walked up the little road to the dining hall to get some of Rosie’s coffee, a dim memory of the Kappa Alpha float passed by in my mind again. Racism was easier to spot in those days. So was Jules LeMelle, for that matter. I wondered very briefly what ever had happened to him. I also wondered very briefly what had happened to all the rest of us.

  I walked into the dining hall with the old ranch brands still on the rafters where Aunt Hilda had painted them forty years ago. The tables and chairs all looked bright and cheerful now that the kids were back. They’d been sitting alone all winter. The giant Mexican chess sets stood, with tall kings and queens, bishops, rooks, knights, pawns all in a row, each waiting for little hands. Darkened old black-and-white photos on the walls. A row of little girls standing together in front of their bunkhouse in 1953. I recognized Bunny Slipakoff, my first girlfriend, standing shyly on the right-hand side. I thought it was Bunny.

  I went over to the giant lumberjack coffee urn. On the wall beside it hung the large Navajo sand painting Doc and Aunt Hilda had brought back from their stay on the reservation. The painting had hung there as long as I could remember. Now Doc and Aunt Hilda were gone and the sand painting was still there. I drew a cup of coffee and sat down alone at one of the long tables. I sipped the coffee and let my eyes gently wash across the sand painting. It was replete with suns and stars and dancers and animals and rainbows. I sipped some more coffee and noticed that the colors were still as bright as I remembered them. Forty years was a long time to a rainbow.

  I looked over the counter into the kitchen and saw Elese sitting at the table sculpting orthodox rabbi heads or something out of lettuce. Rosie, the Hawaiian cook, came out of the kitchen into the dining hall and offered me one of her homemade sweet rolls.

  “That’s the best offer I’ve had today,” I said.

  “I can’t believe that,” said Rosie. She was a great cook, played the ukulele, and gave an excellent haircut.

  “What’s for dinner tonight?”

  “Hamburgers,” she said. “Down at the picnic area.”

  “Sambo usually eats about twelve of them,” I said.

  “He does like my cookin’,” said Rosie. “I don’t think it’s nice that some of the counselors call him ‘Cujo.’ ”

  Rosie went back to the kitchen and I wandered over to the Crafts Corral, where Eric Roth, with about ten kids surrounding him, was checking out the kiln. Ceramic leaf ashtrays were always a happening thing at Echo Hill. Almost no one on the planet smoked anymore but still we turned out hundreds of ceramic leaf ashtrays. I wasn’t sure what today’s beleaguered parents could use them for. Maybe paperweights for their divorce papers.

  At a far table, engulfed by a mob of eager ranchers, stood Aunt Anita. Today, Aunt Anita appeared to be teaching the kids how to make the ever-popular “monkey’s fist,” but, in truth, there was almost nothing Aunt Anita couldn’t construct out of string.

  Maybe, I thought, I should put her in touch with Pat Knox.

  I stood at the window outside the Crafts Corral and noticed that Eric had a new assistant. She was bending over the kiln and from where I was standing, behind her, she looked like she was going to be a big boost to a lot more than just the handicrafts program. She seemed to have been delicately formed on some celestial potter’s wheel.

  “Pam’s from Oklahoma,” Eric said, following my gaze.

  “I’m Richard Kinky ‘Big Dick’ Friedman,” I said by way of introduction. “And I never met a Pam I didn’t like.”

  Pam had short blond hair and green, partly cloudy eyes that seemed to cut into me like dust blowing across the barren landscape of my soul.

  “What’s the ‘Big Dick’ stand for?” she said.

  The little repartee was interrupted by Eddie Wolff, a huge, gentle counselor and wrangler, shouting from the office like a giant, slightly agitated teddy bear you knew you’d better listen to. There was a long-distance phone call for me, apparently. Of course, being so far from the city, every call that came into the ranch was long distance.

  I went over to the office, picked up the blower, and heard Pat Knox’s secretary, Paula, tell me to hold on for the judge. I hadn’t thought about the judge for about nine hours and I was feeling pretty good about it.

  “Have you gone over the material I gave you?” Pat asked.

  “I’ve started,” I lied. “Been kind of busy here lately unpacking my Frisbee. Doing squat thrusts in the parking lot.”

  “Get crackin’,” she said. “There’s gonna be a full moon out tonight. Lots of strange critters’ll be stir-rin’.”

  I walked out of the office, past two new counselors I didn’t recognize who were taking down the big WELCOME RANCHERS sign on the bulletin board. Walking along the dusty road to the green trailer I heard a New York angel whisper in my ear. “Don’t get involved,” it said.

  I opened the door to the trailer and saw that the cat was in precisely the same position she was lying in when I left. As I walked across the floor to the little desk she opened her eyes.

  “Pat Knox is as crazy as a betsy-bug,” I said.

  The cat looked at me, yawned, then closed her eyes.

  “I know what you mean,” I said.

  CHAPTER 10

  It was almost Gary Cooper time and I was sitting out behind the trailer in the hot sun alternately watching the river flow and forking through the folder Pat Knox had given me. It wasn’t clear that I was getting anywhere but at least I was working on my tan. All I was wearing were my Jesus boots, the same bathing suit I’d owned for twenty-five years, and an increasingly surly expression.

  “I don’t understand the purpose of the exercise,” I said to the cat, who sat on the large wooden spool that served as a table.

  The cat said nothing. She didn’t understand the exercise either. She didn’t even understand why we’d come to Texas.

  “If I keep reading these morbid, stultifyingly dull coroner’s reports,” I said, “I’m going to jump in the river and drown.”

  The cat stared at me, then gazed out at the river. Her placid, agreeable expression seemed to indicate that she thought it might not be such a bad idea.

  “We don’t really consider it a river,” I said. “Around here folks call it a crick. Big Foot Wallace Crick, to be precise. Named after Big Foot Wallace, a famous frontier scout who lived with the Indians.” The cat took on a very bored countenance. The only remote interest she had in Native Americans was that they occasionally wore feathers.

  Reluctantly, I returned to Pat Knox’s papers. They didn’t exactly make for riveting summer reading. As she’d already told me, three of the four deaths had occurred outside her bailiwick, and there was no firsthand information here relating to them. What there was were sketchy, hearsay little short stories that you could’ve read to a bu
nk of kids if you wanted to bore them to sleep. Worse, from my point of view, there was not even the whiff of a nuance of foul play in any of the three. The closest to it was the first case, the lady who’d drowned in her bathtub in Bandera. A neighbor of the deceased told Pat’s mother, Dot, that she could’ve sworn the woman never took a bath.

  The death by fire in Pipe Creek was nothing but smoke and mirrors, and every time I looked into one of the mirrors I saw Pat Knox staring back at me like the Mad Lady of Chaillot.

  “She is crazy as a betsy-bug,” I said to the cat. The cat lay like a waxen figure on the tabletop.

  “One of us is crazy as a betsy-bug,” I said.

  The cat did not respond.

  The description of the third death, near Mountain Home, in which a gun was found near the body, at least demonstrated a colorful command of the vernacular on the part of that town’s octogenarian justice of the peace, John Hill. “The bullet,” Hill reportedly had said, “didn’t have no reverse on it. It went in the back of her head like it had eyes, but when it went out, I’ll be damned if it didn’t have a nose.”

  The fourth death, the one that had taken place in Judge Knox’s precinct, was the most recent, having occurred just two weeks earlier. The good judge had not only composed a mordant document that was as interminable as a Homeric lyrical poem; it might as well have been Greek. Her notes looked like they’d been written by a mariner crab.

  The cat got up, stood on the paper, and gazed down with a quite perplexed expression.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Somebody gave me the wrong Torah portion.”

  The cat said nothing. She was of an extremely secular bent and could not be drawn easily into conversations of a religious nature. This was, quite possibly, to her credit. I’ve known a lot of cats in my life who’ve gotten all worked up on the subject. Of course, when you have nine lives, it doesn’t matter if you’re dead wrong eight times.

  The lady who’d died recently, the fourth in the supposed string that stretched between Pat Knox’s ears like the lonely string of colored lights they always hung across the road in Medina at Christmastime, was seventy-five years old and had required a special oxygen supply. Maybe the bottle had become disconnected accidentally, or maybe someone had deliberately ...

  “Goddamnit,” I said. “Move your foot!”

  The cat glared at me, then, rather grudgingly, moved off the paper. Cats have an uncanny ability to find precisely that particular patch of paper which you’re trying to read. They find it and they proceed to stand, sit, or lie down on only that portion which is germane. Indeed, if editors, lawyers, and amateur private detectives were more patient, they could avoid reading reams of irrelevant material. They could just light up cigars, sit back, and let cats settle on the document in question.

  In this case, it wouldn’t have worked. There was nothing in the judge’s papers that suggested any pattern, any foul play, or, I might add, any particular grasp on reality. The part the cat had obscured merely noted that the victim, Prudence South, had, as a hobby, made little hats for cats. The fact that the cat had chosen this information to obfuscate might be cosmic, or might’ve had a certain significance to the cat, but it meant nothing to me. Except that I was damn sure going to let Pat Knox attack her own windmills.

  I stacked the papers neatly and placed an eighty-million-year-old fossil on top of them as a paperweight.

  “Wish I was that well preserved,” I said.

  The cat did not reply. Tact was not her long suit, but she knew better than to poke fun at the middle-aged.

  I leaned back and lit a cigar and for a while the two of us sat peacefully behind the green trailer in the sunshine of that little valley and watched the river flow. It flowed under a little red wooden bridge, past sycamore and cypress trees, past beautiful banks of natural rock, over the dam that Earl Buckelew had built over fifty years ago, and on down to Big Foot Falls, also of course, named after Big Foot Wallace.

  As I sat there, a great sense of peace and calm invaded my somewhat weatherbeaten spirit. The travails of New York City, the urgent scrawlings of Judge Knox, my own private loneliness of heart, began to float away on the currents of the little sunlit stream. It seemed almost to be murmuring to me, and I thought of the old camp song my mother had always liked: “Peace I ask of thee, O river, / Peace, peace, peace.”

  The next thing I knew the bell was ringing and the quiet of siesta was over. What appeared to be at least three bunkhouses of ranchers began boisterously descending upon the green trailer and the little stream beyond for their shallow-water swimming tests. The cat, a black and white cartoon character, shot off the table and into the bowels of the trailer like a missile seeking peace. But peace, as so many children of the world have learned, is harder to find than tits on a mule.

  CHAPTER 11

  The first few days of camp went by like a scorpion skittering across a bunkhouse floor. The troubled outside world disappeared and was replaced, for all practical purposes, by cookouts, water fights, horseback riding, softball games, and isolated spates of homesickness that soon gave way to unbridled fun. The gray, desperate adult world all but vanished in the world of sunshine and childhood at Echo Hill.

  As for me, the specter of murder and mayhem had been pushed to a dark corner table of my mind and the cruelty and suffering that grown-ups routinely inflicted upon other grown-ups was simply not on the menu. The most serious altercation I’d allowed myself to become involved in was one night when I entered the Bronco Busters bunkhouse and broke up a pillow fight. My universe was demarcated by a circle of hills; the only things that mattered were the ones that occurred within that little green valley.

  “It’s so peaceful,” I said to Pam as I stood by the window of the Crafts Corral. “Makes you want to just resign from the human race. Maybe I’ll retire.”

  “What is it you’d retire from?” she said.

  “That’s a good question. I see you’re ignorant of my talents.”

  “Totally,” said Pam, but she smiled a quick, mischievous smile to mollify what she imagined to be my wounded ego. She didn’t realize that I’d left it on a curb in New York many years ago.

  “Had a country band once. In the early seventies. Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. We toured the country and irritated a lot of Americans. Now I sing mostly at campfires, whorehouses, the occasional bar mitzvah.”

  “The only thing I remember about the seventies,” said Pam, “was getting my first tricycle for Christmas.” She turned her back to me for a moment and bent down to select some paint from a cabinet. I almost swallowed my cigar.

  “It stands to reason you never heard of me,” I said. “You were jumping rope in the schoolyard when I was ordering room service. Also, Oklahoma isn’t the bar mitzvah capital of the world.”

  “Not like Texas?”

  “There’s a lot of Jews in Texas, actually. I’m just the oldest living one who doesn’t own any real estate.

  But I’m glad you never heard of me. I’ve had my share of groupies.”

  “I don’t think you’ll have to worry,” she said.

  I had her right where I wanted her, I thought, as I wandered away in the direction of the Nature Shack. She probably didn’t realize that, after a few more weeks of isolation from the outside, Echo Hill took on almost the sexual ambience of a bar at closing time. All I had to do was play my cards right. I didn’t know of anyone who’d really done that yet, but there was always a first time. In life, they don’t always remember to cut the deck.

  That night I stood in the shadows of the campfire and watched the children watching the fire. Their eyes reflected a bright hope you didn’t see much on the streets of the city. Any city. I was about to play a song for the kids and Marcie was introducing me. The atmosphere backstage was quite relaxed, more so even than when I drank a very large amount of Jack Daniel’s at the Lone Star Café in New York and had to be rolled onstage on a gurney.

  Except for the few kids who always shine their flashlights in your
face, it was a pretty good crowd. Some familiar faces, some new ones. Not your glitzy New York-L.A.-type audience. Just a large, cheerful group of young kids sitting on blankets in their bunkhouse groups, far away from home but close to the campfire. The ceiling was glittering with stars and the crickets provided a nice little rhythm section. It was a good room to work.

  I sang a song that was always quite popular at camp. I’d written it when I was just eleven years old, standing backstage rehearsing for my bar mitzmas with my little yamaha on my head. The lyrics went as follows:

  Or Ben Lucas Had a lot of mucus Cornin’ right out of his nose.

  He'd pick and pick 'Til it made you sick But back again it grows.

  When it's cotton-pickin' time in Texas Boys, it's booger-pickin' time for Ben.

  He'd raise that finger; mean and hostile,

  Stick it in that waiting nostril

  Here he comes with a green one once again.

  Everybody sang the “01’ Ben Lucas” chorus several more times, then I ankled it out of there with Marcie shouting, “Let’s give Kinky a big 1-2-3 HOW!!!” The ranchers all joined in on the 1-2-3 HOW part, which was the equivalent of applause in the city, and they shouted it as loudly and as sharply as they could, an act that generated coundess echoes off the surrounding hills.

  I wasn’t as pumped up as James Brown after a show, but it did feel good hearing the echoes as I packed up my guitar and slipped off into the dark, beautiful, anonymous night. Every performer, no matter how great, is a ham at heart. Whether you’re playing Carnegie Hall or a campfire for kids, it’s still another show in your hip pocket.

  Part of my job at camp, along with the overwhelming responsibility of being hummingbird man and occasionally dropping off laundry in town, was security. Not that anyone expected six Islamic fundamentalists in a blue sedan to drive up to the flagpole. I was just supposed to walk around, turn on some of the lights at night, and, as Tom says, “maintain a presence.” It wasn’t very difficult. I’d been doing it most of my life.