Backyard (16 page)

Then came the change. In the front, people gasped, giggled, and turned to one another with looks of surprise and consternation, maybe even
acute
consternation. There were a few cries—more evidence of surprise—and some male tittering, which indicated, what? Guilty pleasures better left in the closet or swept under the rug?

People farther behind began to shift their bodies and crane their necks to see better. At this point, George could still just see Pat's weaving hands working those castanets like nobody's business. What else might be going on he couldn't tell. The very tall Jim Thebold, the very wide Martha Vinson, and five or six others he couldn't recognize from behind were blocking his view.

Louder gasps came from the front, and the crowd parted, allowing a red-faced, sputtering Caroline King to burst through, dragging along her twelve-year-old son, Jens, who was pulling back but losing the tug-of-war, behind her.

At this point, George decided that, as one of the principals responsible for whatever was happening on the patio, he had to get up there to find out what was causing such a hubbub. He nudged past Jim and Martha What's-Their-Names, and then Sarah and Bert Vines, who cast disapproving glances at him as he pushed past them with a whispered “Excuse me,” and a wink of recognition. There was Harry Adams (What was
he
doing here?). George struggled to squeeze between Harry, on the right, and Jenny Perkins and her boyfriend, Phil Grough, on the left. Jenny and Phil were both frowning with their arms crossed. He finally broke through the mass, into the vanguard of the semicircle of humanity that had formed a tight curve around Pat Veattle, the microphone, and the amplifier.

At last, George could see what all these signs of an impending fuss were about. Could he ever! There was Pat, who was pushing sixty-five easy, though he and Nan had never asked. In normal times, Pat had a figure most often covered appropriately with billowing tent-like outfits. Here was a transformation of the most shocking sort! Pat Veattle was all gotten up as what could only be described as a genie who'd been living off her wishes for an eternal supply of triple cheeseburgers, chili-slathered fries, and malted milks. She was wearing sheer, plum-colored pantaloons, with her exposed midriff hanging quite noticeably over the elastic waistband that was just barely holding them up.

Somehow suspended across her chest was a filmy mesh vest un-girded by anything in the foundation department, and which was decorated with little colored sequins doing a poor job of being strategically located.

At least she was wearing something on her head. That was good, since her hair had been thinning so dramatically that you could see the little bare spots from forty feet away. What passed for head cover was a precariously perched red fez trailing a fabric pennant at least three feet long that had embroidered on it
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By twirling around in various directions, and at various speeds, and somehow keeping the fez from falling off, she worked that pennant so that you could usually see most of what was on it in one long twirl. A red bandanna was pulled, desperado-style, over her mouth and all the way up to her eyes, which George figured was probably the reason he couldn't understand whatever it was she was singing.

He saw Nan. She was standing in front, not more than five feet from Pat, and flinching to avoid the more extreme and wide-ranging of Pat's moves.

Pat made a spitting sound into the microphone, which, amplified, sounded like an old engine coughing and sputtering. George wondered whether this signified a sound effects routine, but then came another groan from deep within her ample abdomen. It was low, growling, and ominous.

Then, the groaning and castanet clicking stopped. With one swooping motion, Pat placed them on the table next to the root beer kegs and picked up her Jew's harp. As Pat began twanging away, George half expected her to break into a nasal rendition of “She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain.”

“Eeeehhaw!” he yelled.

But what Pat Veattle started singing was more like a chant. And, yes, the chant marked the debut of “The Men of Livia Are Drunken Wife Beaters.”

She started to play her Jew's harp again, and a gasp rose up from the crowd. Several people, acquaintances from outside of the neighborhood, stalked off. George felt his face redden. His nerve ends sang out “Code red!” He looked over at Nan, who saw him, and jerked her head angrily toward Pat.

George steeled himself and walked over to the amplifier, which was throbbing from the noise of the Jew's harp, and which George noticed had been turned all the way up to 10. He yanked the microphone plug out of its socket with a staggeringly violent electronic squeal. Nan picked up the threadbare overcoat that Pat had brought with her and flung onto the concrete when her act began, and draped it forcefully over Pat's shoulders. She turned her away from the microphone and toward the steps leading down to the driveway, and gave her a little shove, but not before catching the full force of a vodka-fueled belch square in the face.

“Go away, and don't come back,” she said. “You have thoroughly mortified me and George, and embarrassed our guests.... You're drunk! Do you need a ride home?”

Pat pulled the overcoat tightly around her, despite the eighty-five-degree heat, lifted her head up in a show of regal disdain, and silently began to negotiate the steps, further angering Nan by kicking her much-abused pea gravel this way and that with her dainty, pointed, red dancing slippers.

“The nerve of that woman!” she hissed to George, who was winding up the microphone cord and scanning the silently dispersing crowd for signs of shock and indignation. “Could you believe that?”

George could not, but he also secretly appreciated what he anticipated to be some of the ramifications of Pat Veattle's little display. For one thing, Pat had always been pompous and temperamental, even during the years when they called her a friend. With any luck, they would never have to endure that insufferable attitude again. Nor would they have to serve as sounding boards for her compositions. George's spirits were also lifted by the knowledge that his sorry little incident in the woods from a few weeks back would now be forgotten, to be completely overshadowed by Pat's rather sorrier one.

George and Nan, and a few others lingering in the backyard, watched with mingled contempt and amusement, and even a little pity, as Pat wove down the side of Sumac Street toward her home, three blocks away. A block down the street, she stopped to adjust and readjust her overcoat. Then, she plopped down violently onto her rear end on the Atchinsons' lawn.

“Well, this party will go down in the annals of Livia history,” Nan said with a sigh. “I just hope the teachers were all gone before it started.”

She surveyed what was left of the crowd. Most of the guests were straggling toward their cars or forming little processions down Payne Avenue and Sumac Street.

Those walking down Sumac, she noticed, were all crossing to the other side of the street to avoid Pat, who sat there clutching her overcoat, her head bowed down between her splayed-out knees. She considered asking George to walk down and offer her assistance, but his attentions were focused elsewhere at the moment. He was gazing, worriedly, at the angel's trumpets, next to which two children and two adults were standing, their backs turned to George and Nan.

“Hey!” shouted George, flapping his hands wildly. “Hey! Get away from that plant! It's dangerous!”

“George!” Nan said. “What on earth are you doing? They're just looking at the plant. People do that when they come over here.”

“But it's angel's trumpet, and it's dangerous, and I was going to tell you that something has gotten into the seeds, and I tried to mash the rest of them into the ground, so it's dangerous to be walking there, too, 'cause you can get all that mash on your feet.”

Nan sighed.

“Oh, don't be absurd. Jesus, George, you're so paranoid.”

“Paranoid? You're the one who told me to wear gloves before I touched the blasted things!”

The clot of visitors slowly moved away from the angel's trumpets without having eaten any of them that George could tell. Still worrying that they had nibbled some leaves on the sly, he nevertheless turned to watch with Nan as the distant Pat finally roused herself, got up off the Atchinsons' lawn, and wobbled off toward home. A few remaining friends were gathering around now. They pressed in closer, smiling and sniggering, wanting to revel in the details of what had just happened.

“That woman was drunk as a skunk,” said Juanita Winthrop, chortling as Steve beamed with mischievous pleasure beside her. “And what in God's name was she doing? And those lyrics! Did you catch those?”

“I thought it was pretty sensuous myself,” blurted Steve to laughter as he caught a Juanita elbow to the rib.

“Quite the show this year,” came a familiar voice from behind them. “Glad we didn't miss it.”

George and Nan turned, startled. Alex and Jane McCandless were standing there, right behind them in their backyard instead of on the banks of Lake Louise, having appeared magically, it seemed, out of thin air.

“The McCandlesses!” cried a delighted Nan. “When did you get here? We didn't see you. We thought you'd be gone.”

“And, boy, are we glad we got here in time,” said Alex, whose tall, stooped stature, somewhat skewed wire-rim glasses, and clipped, rapid-fire speech made him the perfect complement to Jane, who was short, stood upright and rigid, had eagle vision, and spoke slowly, in very measured and complete sentences. “I was wondering when Pat was going to jump off the deep end, and jeez, did she ever do that or what! Talk about toasted! Have you seen her lately? She'll go down to the lake and do some kind of wacky Chinese exercise. She'll spend two hours down there doing that and dressed up like . . . like . . . well, once, she had a moose costume on.”

“Alex!” said Jane. “You're just making that up. I never saw her in a
moose
costume. Maybe I saw her dressed up like a ballerina once, and come to think of it, in reverse drag, with a tux and tails once, but a moose? You're just making that up.”

“Swear to God.”

“He's not making it up,” Steve said. “I saw her in that costume, too. It has goofy, antenna-looking antlers and everything. It's a really bad costume but if you look closely you can tell it's meant to represent a moose, maybe an abstract moose. It looked homemade. Anyway, when I saw her, she was walking down Sumac right over there.”

Steve pointed to a spot just to the west of Sumac's intersection with Payne.

“Or
stumbling
would be a better word for it. I was driving along, minding my own business, when I saw this human moose kind of weaving along.” The others were laughing now. “I saw this human moose, and I stopped because I was scared I was gonna hit whoever was in this human moose costume.” More laughter. “So, I pulled up alongside and said, ‘Hey, you need to be careful walking along the street like that.' She turned toward me, and I could tell looking at the holes for the orifices it was Pat. So I said, ‘Pat, what the hell are you doing dressed up like a moose?' It was ninety degrees out there, and she was panting inside that costume. And she said . . . she said . . . ‘I'm gonna go scare some fish. I'm gonna go scare some fish.' ”

The laughter erupted across the patio and echoed against the Grunions' house. The few other guests remaining in the yard glanced over, puzzled and smiling.

“Jeez, could I ever smell the liquor coming out of her mouth. Then, down the slope she went. I don't know how she kept from falling over. Down the slope she went, to scare some fish or small children, I guess.”

“I saw her dressed up as a medieval lady once,” said Juanita once the laughter had died down enough to be heard over it. “With the pointy hat and everything. She just stood there with her arms stretched out all crooked like tree branches. I guess she was trying to be a medieval lady tree.”

There was another round of laughter. Nan was laughing so hard the tears were welling up and dripping down her cheeks.

“Well, it would have been nice if someone had told us about all those things,” she said once she regained her composure. “Instead of letting us fall prey to her eccentricities, and causing a scandal right here in the backyard.”

“What the hey,” George said. “Scandals can be fun. But I sure as hell am not going to pay her fee.”