MERILEE ROWLING stayed over one more night. I slept in my nest on the floor beside her bed. She asked me as many questions about Maureen Balderson as she did about Chief Leopard Frog.
I spun yarns about both.
I told her Maureen Balderson was Chief Leopard Frog's illegitimate daughter, that she was actually a princess in the Sac and Fox tribe, and that she had helped her father get his first book of poetry published by the leading publishing company in the Cayman Islands by trading a priceless necklace made of wolves' teeth.
I found the snapshot that I had made of Chief Leopard Frog and gave it to Merilee Rowling to publish in her magazine. I explained to her that Chief Leopard Frog lived off the land and preferred to stay out of sight, hiding in abandoned houses, of which there were many, except when he had a bundle of poems to deliver. That's when he'd come to see my mother and me, because we knew how to use the U.S. mail and he, being a primitive, didn't.
I explained to Merilee Rowling that all of Paisley was once Indian territory but it was taken away from them by unscrupulous late-nineteenth-century railroad barons, who tricked the Native Americans into thinking that they would get free passes to ride in the plush sleeping cars forever.
I could hear Merilee Rowling scribbling very fast in her notebook. Eventually, I got sleepy and forgot the exact details of the blarney that I was spewing.
Finally both Merilee Rowling and I fell asleep. By then it must have been well past midnight.
The next day when I awoke I remembered having told Merilee Rowling that I had been married to Maureen Balderson in a Sac and Fox ceremony under a hedgeapple tree but that the marriage could not be made legal until I turned eighteen. This "fact" didn't exactly fly with Merilee Rowling.
At one point during the evening she had gotten up to go to the bathroom and stepped on my leg. On the way back, she stepped on my leg again and fell down on top of me. At that moment we were both on the floor, our bodies touching, face to face.
"You're a cute kid," Merilee Rowling said, "but I think you're not the one for me."
"Well, good night again," I said.
"Good night, Spencer," she replied. "What a strange life you live."
As she was getting up to climb back into bed, Chief Leopard Frog walked into the room, picked up my camera, and took our picture with the broken lens.
"Yi!" Merilee Rowling screamed. "This place is freaking haunted."
"I'll take care of it," I assured her.
"What's going on in there?" my mother hollered.
"Bad dreams," I called back. "Good night."
Merilee Rowling left just after a great country breakfast that consisted of naturally cured ham, biscuits and gravy, and homemade apple butter. I helped her pack up her stuff and stood like a hitching post in the driveway while she pulled onto the gravel road. She honked the horn twice and was gone. That's when it dawned on me that she was wearing my peach-colored Columbus Catfish baseball cap, the one that had been my father's.
Such treachery from a trusted houseguest! I thought. Why, it's downright Shakespearean.
Code of honor, indeed!
At least Paisley was back to being Paisley.
The weather had changed Now the early mornings were cool, with a patchy fog, which for years I had thought was called Apache fog given my orientation to Indians and my limited homeschool education.
The pumpkins were ripe, the spiders fewer in number, and one morning there was frost on the three mailboxes.
I threw myself into business, shipping the last of the celebrity look-alike pumpkins to Milton Swartzman and another gross of bad luck talismans carved by Chief Leopard Frog. I also sent on the poetry book orders for him to handle according to the terms of our contract, keeping only a dozen copies of the book for myself.
The money was rolling in.
A fortnight later Dwight Earl the FedEx man showed up for lunch with a big package under his arm. It was from Sparkle Snapshot in St. Louis.
A letter was glued onto the outside of the box.
It was from the office of the president of Sparkle Snapshot.
Dear Valued Customer, it read.
As you know, here at Sparkle Snapshot we take great care in what we do. Indeed, we have processed some of the best of the best from the world's finest photographers: Annie Leibovitz's cross-eyed sister, Sally Anne; Diane Arbuss cataract-challenged mother, Louise; Gordon Parks's blind cousin, LaFrange O'Reilly; Walker Evans's next-door neighbor Big Turley Hawthorne, to cite but a few.
That's why, in 1974, we established the Sparkle Foundation and the Annual Sparkle Snapshot Award to call attention to our customers' achievements and to encourage the pursuit of photographic excellence.
Your photograph "Romeo and Juliet" has been selected as this year s winner. Congratulations! You may be pleased to learn that the judges' decision was unanimous.
What can I say?
You could have knocked me over with a lens tissue.