Malcolm’s father was in tires.
The Oranges moved around a lot, all across America with a backseat full of grandparents.
Papa Orange died in New Jersey. Great Grandma never made it back across the Brooklyn Bridge. Malcolm’s Step Nana – a hulking blister of a woman who loved to fill the Volvo’s cramped backseat with the vomit-inducing stench of pipe smoke and eggy farts – quit this mortal coil twenty minutes into a Ghostbusters matinee.
(By the time the movie ended, rigor mortis had set in, making it all but impossible to remove a family-sized popcorn sack from its habitual spot, nestled into the crook of her right arm. Mr Orange reluctantly buried his grandmother fully prepared for the possibility of afterlife snacking.
‘It’s a definite first for me,’ remarked the local undertaker, viewing the corpse laid out in its enormous coffin, ‘never buried nobody with popping corn before. Sure does look a little odd to me. Maybe it’s one of them new-fangled ideas from China. I guess you live and learn in this business. You live and learn.’
‘What can I say?’ replied Mr Orange. ‘My grandmother was a tremendous lover of popcorn.’)
Step Nana’s untimely demise came just six short weeks after Malcolm’s maternal grandmother had left the dinner table to powder her nose and never returned. They’d left her propped against the bathroom wall in a downtown Dairy Queen. ‘She’d have wanted it this way,’ Malcolm’s father claimed, and bought each of the remaining Oranges a CheeseQuake Blizzard. ‘To take the edge off the grief,’ he’d said, plastic spoon already poised over his cup.
Malcolm’s mother never finished her Blizzard. It turned to ice cream water and dribbled all across the dashboard like a river of seagull poop. No one said anything about the Blizzard river. They just kept driving, state to state, rented room to room, swapping wheels when the tires fell off. The Oranges left their elderly relatives like signposts all the way back to California. By the time they got good and proper east only four Oranges remained: father, mother, Malcolm and his soon to be smaller brother, still gestating thickly under Mrs Orange’s shirt.
‘What say we get ourselves a pet?’ Malcolm would ask his father every time the opportunity arose: birthdays, Christmas, funeral services. ‘What say we get a big, dumb dog, or a kitty – a smart little kitty with green, grey eyes – a rabbit even? It’ll take the edge off the loneliness. It’ll make the backseat seem more like home.’ (Malcolm Orange was not, for one second, speaking truthfully about the rabbit. While dogs and cats and killer whales roam the planet unloved, no self-respecting child will ever be properly satisfied with a rabbit).
‘Nope,’ his father consistently replied, and eventually bought him a substitutionary tennis racquet. ‘No pets for you, young man. Pets die and I can’t afford another funeral this year.’
The racquet would not hit right. It was abnormally holey, even for a tennis racquet. At the time Malcolm Orange suspected it the
dumbest present he’d ever got given. Much later, when his father had finally disappeared – pointing the Volvo in the general direction of Mexico and leaving them stranded in Oregon with little more than a heap of balding tires to keep the child support coming – Malcolm got to reconsidering his tennis racquet. Resurrecting it from the laundry basket, he played endless, angry games of Wimbledon up against the gable wall of the retirement chalet which would come to pass for home, all the time punishing his racquet for the very fact that it could not talk back.
Less than two weeks after the giving (and ungrateful receiving) of Malcolm’s tennis racquet, the Oranges had left town again.
Waking early one morning to find his parents already up and glaring furiously at each other over the breakfast table, Malcolm Orange was already anticipating an unsatisfactory outcome. At eleven years old (almost twelve), with eighteen states trailing behind his backside, Malcolm knew his father’s moving speech better than the Pledge of Allegiance, the Lord’s Prayer and the opening scenes of Star Wars combined.
When it arrived – one minute and forty-five seconds into Malcolm’s daily bowl of Captain Crunch – the speech fell predictably flat on the kitchen floor, dropping like one side of an ill-timed high five.
‘The east coast is not for us,’ insisted Malcolm’s father. ‘There’s an honest-to-God fortune awaiting us on the west coast. Let’s get rolling, Oranges.’ The speech, as tradition dictated, was accompanied by a peal of nervous laughter, a politician’s smile and a thick, paternal hand placed on the back of Malcolm’s neck; one part disciplinary pinch, one part half-assed hug.
Malcolm Orange was, as usual, unconvinced but, for the time being, eleven years old and therefore incapable of anything but forced consent.
‘I’ll pack my stuff,’ he said, already wondering if his brand-new tennis racquet would make it into the Volvo’s trunk when so many perfectly reasonable sticks and thrift store bicycles had tried, bravely pleaded, and failed.
His mother remained at the breakfast table, absentmindedly drinking from an already empty juice glass. ‘It’s extremely odd,’ Malcolm had thought (even though these were early days, long before his absent father left, succinctly explaining all abnormalities in the Orange household), ‘despite the baby growing inside her mom seems to be shrinking. With every state she appears smaller. I’m not sure if this is considered normal for pregnant women.’
Having no previous experience in this department, Malcolm Orange made a mental note to stop the very next enormously pregnant lady he came across and enquire as to exactly what was considered normal when having a baby.
That afternoon when the Volvo – heaving under the extra weight of unborn passengers, tennis racquets and antique dressers – finally left the east coast for west, Malcolm’s mother was carrying nothing more than a carrier bag full of recipe books and the clothes she’d been sleeping in for the last two weeks. She was tremendously fat and very uncomfortable, struggling to wedge her belly underneath the Volvo’s crummy dashboard.
‘It’s you or the dresser, sweetheart. We’ve only got room for one or the other,’ joked Malcolm’s father as he watched his wife slowly maneuver into the passenger seat. ‘I’m guessing the dresser will come in more useful in the long run.’
It was not a very funny joke. No one laughed.
Malcolm’s brother had appeared somewhere outside Chicago, struggling to make his presence known in the parking lot of a Ross Dress for Less. ‘How convenient,’ his father exclaimed, shaking his wife’s hand wildly, ‘you can buy yourself a cheap frock to fit your new flat belly.’
With no input from Malcolm Orange – who had for the greater part of his mother’s pregnancy been rooting for Wolverine – they named the baby Ross. Sensing the battle already lost, Malcolm made one final stab at ownership.
‘What about Wolverine for a middle name?’ he proposed, mere minutes after the placenta had slithered free, disappearing forever into the bark dust beneath a parking lot palm tree.
‘Shut up, Malcolm,’ his father replied, turning to glare at him over the Volvo’s seat back. ‘This baby only needs one name. What would it do with a second one? Second names only make folks uppity and far too big for their own britches. One name was good enough for your ma and me. It was good enough for you when you were a tiny critter and it’ll suffice for this little guy. You need to shut your mouth and fix your ma a cigarette. Stop talking nonsense or we’ll leave you here in Chicago for good. Truth be told, that’s not such a bad idea. We only ever wanted one kid anyway, didn’t we Martha?’
Malcolm’s mother said nothing. She was busy cleaning the goop off the baby with a packet of Kleenex and a half-drunk bottle of Evian. She had already deflated to half the size she’d been in Denny’s that morning when Malcolm and his father had wedged her into a corner booth and watched, stupefied, as she clawed her way through three helpings of buckwheat pancakes and syrup. It was a mystery to Malcolm, for Ross was only one-third the size of his mother’s belly. Perhaps, he eventually concluded, some of the breakfast pancakes had slipped out while she was pushing.
‘I’m going to call him Wolverine anyway,’ Malcolm Orange announced, pettily.
‘Over my dead body you are,’ his father replied. ‘Call him anything but Ross and we’re leaving you at the next Greyhound station.’
It was at this point in the conversation that Malcolm Orange suddenly, and without hope of retrieval completely lost interest in his new brother and turned his attention to the pursuit of a proper pet; a crocodile ideally.
Malcolm was entirely justified in his indifference.
Ross would prove to be an absolutely mediocre baby, given to neither miracles, misbehavior, nor any of the more disgusting infant illnesses which might have allowed him some room for growth in Malcolm’s estimation. Ross expanded at the normal rate for an average boy child, slept a lot, occasionally barfed and developed the charming habit of smiling when spoken to. Malcolm couldn’t have been more disappointed. He’d hoped for conjoined twins, a brother with tentacles or at very least a couple of extra digits, something to impress strangers with. Unfortunately the new baby’s only redeemable feature seemed to be its ongoing lack of hair. Ross would remain bald as a coot ’til the day he turned three and woke freakishly and unexpectedly hairy with enough wild auburn curls to justify a ponytail.
It was five weeks and three days before the Oranges could officially call themselves west. Eight days should have sufficed, twelve at very most, but the tires came off in Nebraska, once again in Wyoming and a final infuriating time on the border of Idaho and Oregon. They were cheap tires, incorrectly fitted; the kind of tires which had kept Mr Orange rolling indiscriminately through the mid-sized towns and cities of North America for the better part of twenty-five years.
The Oranges were forced to drop temporary anchor on the Oregon border while Malcolm’s father went foraging for new tires. Tires did not grow on trees, especially in the outermost armpit of Idaho, and it would take almost an entire month for the Volvo to get back on its feet. In the interim Malcolm’s mother did laundry for the local folks, hauling their tired sheets and blouses down the main street in a stolen shopping cart. She washed, ironed, folded and stacked in the local laundromat while Ross dozed complicitly in a sports bag at her feet. Malcolm was now old enough to help with sorting colors and would do a full load for the reasonable price of one stick of Wrigley’s gum, un-chewed. Returning the freshly steamed laundry door to door with both children in tow, Mrs Orange charged five bucks more than the laundromat and though this was far from a fortune, even for the Oranges, it was enough to keep the entire family in Ramen noodles and Snickers bars.
During his month in Idaho, Malcolm Orange awarded himself an early summer vacation. Preoccupied with missing tires and other people’s bed sheets, his parents simply shrugged their collective shoulders and complied.
‘If someone stops you from Social Services,’ his father advised, ‘just tell them you’ve got yourself a dose of cancer. See, if you’ve got the cancer you don’t have to go to school. You can do whatever the hell you feel like and the Social Services can’t say a thing. We’ll be gone before they find out you’re lying.’
(Faking cancer was a trick Malcolm Orange’s father had employed on several previous occasions; effortlessly wangling his way out of various responsibilities, including jury duty and several of Malcolm’s own birthday parties.)
Though he often fantasized about being taken into care and forcibly placed with a family who did not live in a Volvo, though he was permanently ready to display bruises and boot marks (self-inflicted), and fully capable of lying his father into the county jail, no one from Social Services ever stopped Malcolm Orange.
Disinterested as the Social Services were – finding their time better spent in pursuit of teenage arsonists, stolen babies and those unfortunate children forced to sleep in fridges and family-sized suitcases – the elderly population of Milton, Idaho were greatly intrigued by the apparition of Malcolm Orange.
Perhaps it was the diminishing stature of the elderly, the curved spines and arthritic stoops, which thrust Malcolm Orange into eye line every time the older folk stepped over their front doormats; perhaps it was the fact that nothing of interest had occurred in Milton, Idaho since the enormous potato of ’65; perhaps it was God himself, drawing the two parties together, like a pair of mismatched carpet slippers; more likely it was the ever-present nature of the boy who, suddenly shot of school routine, spent entire days lingering on the curb outside the library, flicking spit balls at the wall of the post office and rooting through the Main Street garbage cans for the last dregs of soda pop cans, but the over-sixties soon began to notice him.
At first they kept their distance, observing the boy from behind the window in the local deli, discussing him delicately over their coffee cups, their needlework and short-loan library books. The next town over had recently endured a spate of crimes against the elderly orchestrated by a seven-year-old girl with a BB gun, and subsequently the older contingent held their interest at a sensible distance of fifteen feet. Having observed Malcolm without incident for the better part of a week, their suspicion gradually turned from caution to concern.
A delegation comprised of two formidable ladies and a Golden Retriever was duly formed and dispatched to the far side of the street. At the last minute a bar of out-of-date Hershey’s was added to the ensemble as a kind of peace offering-cum-conversation starter. The remainder of the elderly population congregated behind the deli’s gingham curtains to offer moral support and instant back-up should an unpleasant incident occur.
The Golden Retriever led the charge.
He was a dog of advanced days – one hundred and fifteen canine years on his next birthday – and in his old age had grown excessively suspicious of change; preferring to eat, sleep and deliver his daily shit in exactly the same well-appointed spot. (A persistent yellowing patch in the grass beneath the elementary school flagpole not only infuriated the school’s custodian but also bore witness to the Retriever’s love of routine.)
Occasionally answering to the name ‘Dog’ or ‘Boy’, and most often ‘Here You’, the Golden Retriever, some six owners into his career, had managed to remain anonymous for almost a decade, carefully concealing the mortifying truth writ large on his Kennel Club papers. His first owner had greatly admired the world’s favorite British Prime Minister and, in homage, had forced upon his dog the ridiculously pompous moniker of Winston. Not a single soul in Milton, Idaho had ever called him Winston. The Retriever was exceedingly glad of the fact. He had come to relish his anonymity. At some point in the not too distant future he fully intended to take this ugly little secret to the pet cemetery on the far side of town and bury it beneath an unmarked headstone.
There were several annoying constants Winston had lately come to detest. These included dry dog food (of the variety favored by younger couples and veterinary clinics), outfits for animals, and little boys in thrift store pants who, in Winston’s one hundred and thirteen years of accumulated experience, were always up to no good.
Approaching Malcolm Orange at a righteous clip, Winston slid to a halt in front of the boy’s scabby knees and verified his suspicions with a lusty sniff of Malcolm’s crotch. As he’d expected, the sugary stench of Kool-Aid cut with piss emanated from the child’s marl-grey pants. Winston lowered his snout, ready to nip the problem in the bud and scare the kid straight out of Idaho. Instead he found himself manhandled roughly by the ears, caught in mid-attack, unable to advance or retreat.
‘Hello boy,’ Malcolm Orange whispered, ruffling Winston’s ears. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Grrrrr,’ slobbered Winston, still pinioned five inches above the boy’s lap, ‘grrrrrr.’
Misinterpreting the dog’s hostility as an invitation to instigate a long-term friendship, Malcolm Orange christened the dog Wolverine in his head and hooked both arms around its shaggy neck, hanging there like a skinny-dripped bandana.
The elderly ladies, sensing that imminent danger had been sufficiently diffused, shuffled forward to address Malcolm. Their walking aids reached Malcolm’s toes two beats before their orthopedic shoes. They viewed the boy anxiously from the towering heights of five foot three and two, respectively. The second of the elderly ladies felt a keen need to come down to the child’s level. She made a preliminary stab at bending and, having advanced no further than an arthritic half-inch closer to the ground, levered herself back to full height and wearily gave up on the curb. It had been almost sixteen years since either of these two women had bent in the fashion usually associated with bending.
‘Son,’ the first lady asked, offering the chocolate bar like a silent explanation, ‘shouldn’t you be in school?’
‘Where’s your mama?’ the second lady asked and, because nerves had got the better of her and consequently erased their preplanned script, repeated the first lady’s question. ‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’
(The Golden Retriever wisely held his tongue and lowered his backside onto the curb beside Malcolm Orange, where he made short work of the chocolate bar, still enclosed in its foil wrapper.)
‘No ma’am,’ Malcolm Orange replied, affecting an Idaho drawl, ‘I got myself a dose of cancer and I don’t want to be giving it to the other kids.’
The second lady, troubled by nerves and the recent loss of a perfectly good husband – her third of the decade – promptly burst into tears and, finding herself uncharacteristically caught without a handkerchief, dripped snot all the way down the leg of Malcolm Orange’s school pants.
Twenty minutes later Malcolm found himself permanently installed in the back left corner of the Milton Deli where he held court for four weeks straight. During these halcyon days a constant stream of ice cream, expensive cheese and pastrami sandwiches made its way from the counter to Malcolm’s gingham-clad table and eventually, subject to his perverse whims and affectations, the inner chambers of his ever-expanding belly.
Over the course of his month-long stay in Milton, Idaho Malcolm Orange grew fat on the generosity of the elderly. His school pants, salvaged from a Brooklyn-based thrift store, began to pinch at the middle. His T-shirts rose in resistance, crawling towards his armpits. By July Fourth both his school slacks and the second-hand Levis which completed the lower echelons of Malcolm’s wardrobe could no longer be buttoned across his waist and, with no money for spare pants forthcoming, were subsequently worn hip-hop style coasting two inches beneath his pancake butt.
‘Man oh boy,’ Mr Wilson, elderly proprietor of the Milton Deli, was heard to mutter over the latest in a towering mountain of handmade pastrami and banana rolls, ‘if I didn’t know better I’d say that kid’s a darn sight healthier than anyone else in this store. Look at him there chowing down ice cream sandwiches like the Lord himself was coming back tomorrow. He’s ten pounds heavier than he was two weeks ago. Funniest cancer I ever seen.’
When the muttering could no longer be ignored and Malcolm’s demands for tuna on rye with barbecue sauce, though never denied, were met with increasingly resentful looks, he hopped up on the counter, feet straddling a large jar of homemade jelly, and made it known that the cancer drugs caused bloating, and his ever-expanding belly, far from being a sign of health, was in fact a sure indicator of his imminent demise.
(Malcolm Orange had, from an early age, enjoyed a laissez-faire relationship with the truth. Given the choice between honesty and the opportunity to evoke sympathy, devotion or a standing ovation, Malcolm almost always went with fantastical lies.
He had inherited this trait from his father, who at the tender age of twenty-three had developed acute appendicitis during a spring break trip to Cabo San Lucas. Chronically short of cash, Jimmy Orange (or Clem, as he’d been known in his college days, the guys in his dorm taking all of two days to make the subtle leap from Orange to Clementine and finally Clem) had found himself unable to afford a trip to the local tourist hospital. Powered by resolve and a full bottle of Mexican tequila, Mr Orange had had his appendix removed by a ‘qualified’ doctor who spoke only three terse words of English and operated out of a local funeral parlor.
Mr Orange latterly claimed that the Mexican surgeon, incapable of understanding his instructions, had removed not only his diseased appendix but also half a rib, two suspicious-looking moles and the small gland that controls truth-telling in all normal humans.
‘Don’t blame me, Martha,’ Malcolm often heard his father yelling, ‘I’m medically incapable of telling the truth. Malcolm too. It’s not his fault. It’s genetic.’
Mrs Orange’s response was most often indecipherable, a whirling barrage of four-letter words and flying fists. Seemingly, despite her lifelong devotion to medical dramas, both Mexican and normal, she simply did not understand the complexities of the human body.)
In Milton, Idaho, with his flip-flopped feet balancing up on the countertop, Malcolm Orange drew breath, placed his hand on the exact spot – just below his right shoulder blade – where his father had often pointed out the missing truth gland, and lied like all future meals depended on it.
‘The doctor says I’ve got two weeks at the most,’ he stated bluntly, mumbling through a mouthful of butterscotch sundae and chopped nuts. ‘I could go at any second though.’
The original ladies, those reluctant pioneers who’d first approached him on Main Street – or Etta and Letty, as Malcolm had come to know them – fished a pair of lace hankies out of their sleeves and simultaneously cried into their china teacups; salt water mixing with their old-fashioned Earl Grey. Mr Wilson, penitent in his candy stripe apron, fixed a whole plate of pastrami and banana sandwiches, exactly the way Malcolm liked them, and Winston the Golden Retriever, who was blessed with an over-developed ability to sniff out bullshit, both canine and human, retired to the front stoop to gnaw, deeply frustrated, on his own hind leg.
Thereafter, the residents of Milton, Idaho struggled to preserve a sense of normalcy, all the time aware that tragedy lurked, imminent and inevitable, just around the corner. Mr Wilson kept Malcolm’s stomach constantly full, heaping fresh treats onto the tabletop every time his plate ran empty. Etta, armed with a floral notebook, helped him to compose an epitaph suitable for his coming funeral. Letty, motivated by a particularly earnest made-for-TV movie she’d recently seen on the Hallmark Channel, asked Malcolm if he’d like to have a park bench constructed in his honor. Malcolm Orange politely declined, saying he’d prefer a swing seeing as he wasn’t greatly inclined to sitting still. Letty immediately left the Milton Deli, vindicated and eager to find a suitable local swing upon which to nail a commemorative plaque.
It was only on the eleventh day of Malcolm Orange’s final fortnight on earth that the truth came leaking out.
Mrs Orange, who had become semi-permanently based in the Main Street laundromat, was up to her elbows in the second white wash of the day when she found herself facing down a delegation of elderly ladies with notebooks. Having spent the better part of fifteen years in the company of Jimmy Orange, Martha Orange (an Orange by marriage rather than blood) had grown adept in the spotting, and subsequent avoidance of, sticky situations, long before they became attached to her person. Without so much as drawing breath she quickly twisted her waist-length hair east, west and finally south, securing it atop her head with the help of an unpaired tube sock. After which she began to stuff dozens of vests, underpants, mismatched socks and graying brassieres, still dripping, into a pair of ancient carrier bags. Then, hooking the bags into each elbow like a set of old-fashioned water pails, she hoisted the sports bag containing a sleeping Ross into her arms and attempted to exit the laundromat.
The Golden Retriever cut her off at the door.
(Winston, driven by the desire to see the Oranges disappear, was greatly inclined to chew the baby as it slept noisily in its sports bag. However, having realized that no one – not even the elderly, and soon to be irate, inhabitants of an Idaho backwater – looks favorably upon a dog who eats small children, he found himself acting as a tactical roadblock instead. ‘A confrontation,’ he concluded, ‘will inevitably lead to a lynching and then things can return to normal round here.’ He glanced surreptitiously at his hind legs which were chewed raw round the ankles, and his previously lustrous tail which was beginning to go the same way, and decided to stand his ground even if the Orange lady kicked him in the teeth.)
The elderly ladies shuffled forwards and grouped around Malcolm’s mother. They were a terrifying breed to look upon, with eyes saucering behind their prescription lenses and corrective footwear burrowing into the laundromat floor and floral notepads poised like a gaggle of preshrunk paparazzi.
Martha Orange – who had in her pre-Orange days been an Oklahoma farm girl and, for the most part, unfenced – shook right down to her mismatched ankle socks, shook like a boxed cow and fought the inclination to bolt, scattering elderly ladies like bowling pins all along Main Street. She hefted Ross higher in her arms, silently reminded herself of the fact that she had once shot a jackrabbit at a quarter mile distance and, thus armed, gathered her resolve like a downtown bulldozer.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, attempting to elbow her way through the forest of walking aids, ‘I was just leaving.’
The elderly ladies, resolute as the Red Sea, showed no inclination of parting.
Martha Orange stepped forward, swinging her sleeping son with intent. The Golden Retriever, previously upright, stretched out on the graying linoleum, blocking the door. The eldest and most forthright of the elderly ladies took a step forward to meet her.
‘You forgot your shoes, dear,’ she shouted, adjusting her hearing aid to a more sociable level even as she yelled.
In her haste to avoid the lynching party Mrs Orange had indeed abandoned her tennis shoes by the tumble dryer. She realized, with a weariness far beyond her thirty-seven years, that the battle was not only lost but already coasting towards out-and-out disaster. Deflated, she lowered herself onto a plastic seat, gently placed Ross, still encased in his sports bag, on the seat opposite and slipped her feet into her unlaced sneakers.
Etta and Letty, anxious to block her exit route, positioned themselves on either side of Mrs Orange and introduced themselves, Etta first, and by proxy Letty, who’d been taking a supporting role since nineteen hundred and thirty-three and felt no inclination to rattle the boat in this, her eighty-eighth year. After which, having elicited no response from Mrs Orange, Etta, by way of an icebreaker, offered the young woman a Red Vine from the box she always carried in her apron pocket.
Mrs Orange accepted. The three women sat on the laundromat seats with their naked ankles extended towards the washing machine screens, sucking and slurping quietly for the better part of two minutes. From a distance Martha Orange admired her own Southern-fried ankles, two brassy doorknobs protruding from a pair of girlish shins. She had been blessed at birth with both an unfortunate boxer’s nose and a pair of Hollywood legs, capable, even at thirty-seven, of shaming girls half her age as she cut up dance floors, sidewalks and, more lately, the bargain aisles of Walmarts, all across the United States. Etta glanced down at the younger lady’s ankles and felt the feeble sting of fading jealousy. Etta, who had, in the summers of nineteen hundred and fifty-three and -four, won the Miss Lovely Legs Idaho competition, who had once prided herself on mile-high stilettos and whore-red toenails, who could turn the farm boys’ heads with a single flash of naked heel, now tottered round town in a pair of orthopedic sandals, her ankles ham-pink, swollen and criss-crossed with varicose veins as fine and furious as spiderwebs.
Whilst the three ladies polished off their Red Vines, the rest of the delegation regrouped, forming a nosy semicircle around their feet. A reverent hush descended upon the laundromat floor, settling into the spaces between the soap powder stains and dryer fluff. Overcome by the heat and the anticipation, Emmy-Kate Barrett, a substantial lady currently located to the left of Martha Orange’s shoulder, felt herself about to succumb to one of her infamous turns and, lowering herself to the floor in preparation, adopted the supine pose of a zealous worshipper; hands clenched, knees braced against the unforgiving linoleum, eyes cast heavenward in the hope of respite or divine vision. The ranks parted to make way for her mammoth backside, now angled upwards in contemplation of the ceiling fan. A fevered hum worked its way through the ranks. Cotton handkerchiefs were unfurled and raised to mop sweating lips. Dentures were adjusted, high coiled hairdos patted into place and the occasional shirt sleeve slid high to meet an eager elbow. Somewhere towards the back of the group an elderly lady, one-time photographer for the local rag, produced an aging Canon and prepared to commit the coming incident to film.
However, when the Red Vines had been sucked right down to their bloody nibs and sticky fingers wiped surreptitiously on sweater fronts, and a confrontation seemed all but inevitable, Etta rose awkwardly, leaning on Malcolm’s mother for support, and shooed the audience reluctantly through the front door. They moved like soup through the summer heat, canes and sandal heels catching on the laundromat floor. Etta persevered, thin-lipped and silent, employing the same stoic thunder she had, in nineteen hundred and fifty six, used to stare down a stampeding bull. Once relegated to Main Street, the group instantly reformed, cackling like a gaggle of ill-tempered geese, veiny noses pressed against the window.
Etta Mae Wheeler, fast approaching her eighty-sixth year, had seen more than her fair share of confrontations. During the preceding eighty-five years she had been yelled at, punched, kicked, insulted and occasionally baptized with a vitriolic pint of local brew. For the most part Etta Mae Wheeler received exactly what she deserved, for, as she often said, ‘Folk round here walk their size nines all over a gal if she don’t give as good as she gets.’ Occasionally, however, she’d found herself the innocent victim of unfortunate circumstances. As a small girl, growing up thin and filthy on the family’s North Dakota chicken farm, Etta had once lost two teeth and the tip of her left earlobe in an impromptu shotgun battle between her elder brother and the hired hand. The instigating incident – something vague concerning the unjust consumption of the last pickled onion – was long forgotten in the annals of Wheeler history. The consequences lingered on, forever measured out in half sets of earrings, in prosthetic teeth and hair-cuts eternally swept to the left side.
An almost century of American arguments had developed in Etta Mae Wheeler a thicker than usual skin, the ability to withstand tremendous shocks – including gunfire, swinging fists and hurtling baseball bats – without so much as flinching. An argument, she’d come to realize, was a dish best served with limited sides. Neither Etta nor Letty (who was for all intents and purposes a slightly less vociferous extension of Etta, having long ago developed verisimilar opinions on all subjects including capital punishment, Mexicans and the best way to cook sweet potatoes) were cruel women. Both ladies had experienced enough home-cooked suffering to recognize their own kind. Eager as they were to see justice rain down on the unsuspecting shoulders of young Malcolm, they held no particular beef with his mother.
Etta cracked open a fresh pack of Red Vines, offered one to Mrs Orange and, when declined, cleared her throat and launched into the lynching. She started slowly, as was her policy on most everything except lovemaking, which at the righteous age of eighty-five needed to be instigated with extreme and excessive speed lest the moment pass into yet another void of senile disappointment.
‘Lord Almighty, girl,’ she said, allowing the air to whistle slowly through the gap in her dentures, ‘them’s a mighty fine pair of pins you got there. Kind of legs’ll get a girl in trouble, turn the wrong kind of fella’s head if you know what I mean?’
(Martha Orange nodded slowly and thought of a hay shed in Oklahoma and her overalls puddling round her ankles as two swords of blind blonde sunlight bounced from the balding pate of her father’s foreman. She pictured her own blue eyes reflected enormously in his prescription sunglasses, cut as they were to resemble Elvis’s.
‘This is it,’ she’d thought, even then, just gone fifteen and frantic to be shot of Oklahoma. ‘These legs’ll walk me right out of this godforsaken state if I play my cards right.’
Thereafter, she’d played her cards fast and loose and found herself twenty-five years old waiting tables in a mid-sized market town just forty-three miles from the place of her birth. By twenty-five her fresh blue eyes had turned sap gray from wishing, her breasts were beginning to slip towards her waist and her shoulders leaned perpetually forward as if angling for any escape route out of Oklahoma. Only her legs remained, peeking from the hem of a heavy-frilled waiting skirt; two towering reminders of her junior high potential. Permanently encased in a pair of sinless white sneakers these very same legs had been ready for running the precise instant that Jimmy Orange walked through the diner door and charmed her sleepy heart with the unforgettable opener, ‘A slice of the Key Lime. Heavy on the cream there, honey. Show a bit more leg, and make the pie to go.’)
‘Don’t I know it, ma’am,’ Martha Orange whispered turning to face the older lady, ‘there are days I wish I’d been born with elephant stumps instead of these legs. They’ve done me nothing but trouble, the pair of them.’
Etta placed a solitary hand on Martha’s bare knee, cupping it like a mashed potato scoop, just below the skirt line. Thus situated she administered a series of slight, reassuring pats. Letty held her distance as she had been long accustomed to, twisting her cotton handkerchief silently in a gesture of unspoken solidarity.
‘The Lord himself giveth and then he done turn round and take away,’ Etta pronounced, using her spare hand to tug on her missing earlobe. ‘You be glad of the hand you got dealt, girl.’
‘Yes ma’am, I’m glad of everything I’ve got. There’s people around here much worse than me.’
‘You’re speaking the truth there, honey child. You’ve still got your health, not to mention a fine-looking baby, and Malcolm, and a good man to support you.’
At the mention of her husband, Martha Orange colored slightly and twisted her wedding band three complete circuits of her finger. Etta Mae Wheeler – who had in her eighty-six years of toil and sorrow been blessed with more than her fair share of no-good husbands and their no-good kin – noted the problem instantly and steered the conversation well away from Jimmy Orange’s doorstep.
‘Let me cut to the chase, honey. It’s Malcolm we come here to talk to you about,’ Etta continued. ‘The child’s got the whole town in an uproar.’
‘Lord Almighty,’ muttered Mrs Orange, absentmindedly disentangling Ross from the bowels of his sports bag. ‘What has he been doing now?’
‘He’s dying of the cancer,’ interjected Letty, suddenly unable to contain her vindication. ‘And I done bought him a swing set for to put a fine-lookin’ plaque on after he’s passed.’
Martha Orange raised her infant son to her face and moaned deeply into his bald, pink head.
‘And Isaac Wilson’s been feeding him up on pastrami sandwiches and root beer … and Etta’s here’s got the funeral all sorted … and week after next, if the child’s still alive, Emmy-Kate Barrett’s plannin’ on drivin’ up to Moscow to get the child a funeral suit,’ Letty continued, firing forwards on eighty-odd years of self-contained steam.
‘Oh dear,’ whispered Mrs Orange, ‘there seems to be a bit of confusion here, ladies.’
‘A bit of confusion, my white, cotton arse!’ Etta stated bluntly. ‘The child’s been taking us all for a ride.’
‘Folks round here ain’t too happy.’
‘They’re fixing for a lynching of sorts.’
‘Best thing you Oranges can do is leave town tonight. Hell, leave the county if you can. You’re not best welcome in these parts.’
Somewhere, miles above the laundromat roof, Martha Orange allowed herself to smile, just a little, in moderation. Malcolm, she remembered for the first time in many years, in several states and three time zones, though blessed with his father’s arbitrary grasp of the truth, was also the son of an Oklahoma farm girl. His world was wide and unfenced. His imagination could not be contained by an aging Volvo.
Malcolm Orange, she realized with the greatest of delight, was not quite entirely ruined just yet.
Within three hours the Orange Volvo was once more rolling, winding its way slowly towards the Oregon border. Malcolm Orange – lodged in the back seat between Ross, an entire week’s worth of strangers’ laundry, unreturned, and the ever-present dresser – sat gingerly on his recently pulverized backside and chewed surreptitiously on a two-day-old pastrami and banana sandwich, part of the stash he’d long been saving for the day of his downfall.
Malcolm’s father, fuming in the driver’s seat, had, upon hearing a greatly downplayed version of the laundromat lynching, whipped the living daylights out of his son with his own tennis racquet. The crisscross pattern would remain embellished upon Malcolm’s buttocks all the way into the next week, whereupon it would be almost instantaneously replaced with the fine perforations of his future days.
‘Dammit,’ Mr Orange muttered, as the Oranges rolled into Portland, Oregon, ‘I’ve just about had it with the lot of you. Eating me out of house and home, fighting, causing consternation every town we stop in, never content with what you got. I’ve a good mind to leave you all to fend for yourselves. See how you like it on your own.’
Twenty-four hours later, the idea having germinated thickly under his baseball cap, Jimmy Orange slipped out the door of their motel room, filled the Volvo’s tank with gas and left town with Mexican intentions.
In a fit of never-before-witnessed generosity, he stopped to pay the week’s motel bill in advance.
This, Martha Orange would later recount to her only remaining relative – a Boston-based stepsister – was the nicest thing her husband had ever done for her.