Citrus County (15 page)

“Do you have anything that’s not harmful to humans?”

“None of them are harmful to be around. You can’t ingest them, though.”

“What do you recommend? I can’t make another trip out here.”

The guy put his hand through his hair, sweeping across with the grain. “They’re all good quality. If you don’t like something you buy here, you can always bring it back. Return it to customer service. That’s our policy.”

“I don’t want to return it to customer service,” Toby said. “I want to kill ants with it.”

Another presentation. Toby’s topic was pole vault. Shelby watched him as he handed out headbands and stuttered through a brief physics lesson he’d found in that library book of his. He capped his talk with a biographical sketch of the man considered the greatest pole-vault talent of all time, a man who’d quit the sport at age twenty-four to become a sculptor. For political reasons, he’d sat out the Olympics. At his funeral, eight women, all claiming to be the love of the pole-vaulter’s life, showed up stunned and weeping.

“
Just
the eight women?” Mr. Hibma asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“It’s better if it’s the eight women and no one else. It should be the women and a priest, and then you find out the priest is in love with him too.”

Toby shrugged. His involvement with the story of the great pole-vaulter was over.

Mr. Hibma released him back to his desk. The following two presentations chewed up most of the period—one about iguanas, one about glass-blowing. Mr. Hibma craned his neck to see the clock and decided there was time for one more. Shelby raised her hand. She went to the back of the classroom and removed a stack of quiz maps from the seat of a stool, then dragged the stool to the front of the room. She pulled a small bottle of ginger ale from one pocket and a highball glass from another, opened the soda and poured it. She dove into the informational portion of her presentation, rushing through the various styles and shticks. She named the great comics, mentioned the hallowed clubs. She wanted to make sure she had time for the demonstration, during which she would concentrate on a particular genre: insult comedy.

“The comedian comes out and chooses people at random to make fun of,” she said. “The fear of being singled out is what makes this type of comedy thrilling.”

Shelby took a sip of her ginger ale. She glanced at Mr. Hibma, who was looking at the floor, his mind somewhere else. She gestured toward a big kid named Luke. For a moment, it seemed, he thought he’d won something.

“Holy hell,” Shelby said. “A cowboy.”

Luke’s wardrobe consisted of boots, jeans, T-shirts from country music concerts, and a beat-up ball cap with a fishing hook on the brim. Between classes, he dipped snuff.

“Boy, the closest you been to a steer is burger day in the cafeteria.”

A chuckle or two.

“You may be a butt-ranger, but you sure as hell ain’t a cowboy.”

Shelby was winning the class over. She moved on quickly, hoping to get a couple more shots fired before Mr. Hibma stepped in. Maybe he’d let the bell stop her.

“Grady, my man.” Shelby hopped up from the stool. “Pussy-whipped by a seventh-grader. Ain’t that something?“

Shelby felt Mr. Hibma’s grip on her shoulder, not firm but cold.

“We get the idea,” he said.

Shelby took a last sip of her soda and set it on the stool. Grady was smarting, relieved Shelby had been reigned in, his face mired in mirth. Shelby did not feel shaky. She felt sturdy.

Mr. Hibma looked at her. “Stay after class, please.”

The bell sounded and the kids formed a scuffling procession. Toby grinned dumbly at Shelby as he left, a look she couldn’t interpret. When it was only Shelby and Mr. Hibma, he came and sat next to her, in a student desk.

“I think you said some stuff that needed to be said.”

“Am I getting another detention?”

Mr. Hibma shifted in the smallish desk, making room to straighten his legs. “You’re not in trouble, but I had to keep up appearances. If anyone asks, I was frightfully angry.”

“Should I apologize to those kids?”

“I wouldn’t.”

Shelby nodded.

“You didn’t go for the easy targets. You didn’t go for the kiss-asses or the fat kid or Vince.”

“Writing jokes is difficult.”

A car with a loud stereo passed outside the window. Its thumping faded but didn’t go away completely.

“What kind of graffiti is this?” Mr. Hibma was tracing something on the desktop with his finger. “It’s a lost art, rebellion.”

Shelby felt closed in. She stood up and went to the window.

“I don’t want those Bellow books,” she said. “I can’t read them right now.” She tipped her head toward her desk. The books were stacked sloppily underneath it.

“Leave them right there when you go. If you tried, you tried.”

“I didn’t, really.”

“You carried them around for weeks, and they’re very heavy.”

Shelby, once again, was not in any real trouble. Maybe Mr. Hibma was onto something. Maybe discipline did not suit Shelby and everyone knew this but her. Maybe getting in trouble was a poor goal for her. The cops and the church people knew it, and that’s why Shelby had heard nothing about her flag. The incident had been covered up.

Mr. Hibma sometimes stopped off at the cluttered drug store down the street from where he lived for no other reason than it was the last chance to delay his arrival at Sun Heron Villas. Sometimes he just wasn’t ready to drive into that weedy parking lot of long, low cars and walk past his neighbors’ little statues and put that heavy key in that flimsy front door. Today, though, he had purpose in the drug store. A greeting card for Mrs. Conner. He had decided he was no longer going to indulge in fantasies of killing this woman. Mr. Hibma felt ashamed for sending that letter to Shelby’s Aunt Dale. He wished he’d never driven to Clermont, wished he’d never stood in line at the post office for ten minutes behind that Mexican man who was wearing slippers and a robe. Dale had likely never even seen the letter. She probably had screeners for her mail. She probably had a dozen stalkers. Mr. Hibma didn’t like having that letter out in the world, having it sitting in some foreign stack on a foreign desk in a foreign nation.

Mr. Hibma was going to put it out of his mind—the letter, the feud, all of it. He was going to start being friendly to Mrs. Conner. Becoming a regular teacher was the only thing that could save Mr. Hibma. He had to stop faking everything. After he faked something, even if he was successful, as with coaching the scrimmage against the high school, he always crashed and ended up feeling lower than ever. Perhaps he had never given himself a serious chance to be a real teacher. He’d been setting himself up to fail. He had to, first off, comply with Mrs. Conner’s latest memo and host the next wing meeting in his classroom. That would be a start. He’d never hosted a meeting and, in fact, most of the other teachers had only glimpsed his classroom from the hallway. He would provide refreshments and hang a map or two. Maybe he could start smiling and gossiping. Maybe he could begin taking his lunches in the teachers’ lounge.

He approached the automatic doors of the drug store and they lurched open, scraping the ground. Mr. Hibma deserved a farmers’ market—products hand-carved, hand-blown, hand-sewn, shade-grown espresso and fireweed honey and artisan cheeses—but what he had was Thomason Drug. He entered and was slapped from all sides by chatter, voices refusing to blend, shrill calls jumping up into the light, competing. The place was packed with fifty-year-old women. The other times Mr. Hibma had stopped at the drug store, he’d been the only customer, but today it was lousy with not-old, far-from-young women, ten to an aisle, all turning item after item upside-down, looking for price tags. There was a sale taking place. Maybe the store was going under. Mr. Hibma was not going to be chased off. He was going to get his card.

He waded into the morass, no idea which direction to go, and drifted toward a rack of sunglasses. He tried on a pair, made of electric blue plastic, like for water sports. They looked comical on Mr. Hibma. He didn’t return them to the rack. They helped with the low fluorescent haze. Mr. Hibma located a central cross-aisle and read the hanging signs. Perfume and T-shirts, almost given away. Candy. Baseball mitts. Mr. Hibma felt safe behind his sunglasses. They somehow put a buffer between himself and the fragmented warbling. These women were deciding which snack foods could be frozen, whether a certain blouse was purple or more of an eggplant, whose ex-husband was the most despicable, which purses matched which jackets, whether Bailey’s Irish Cream went bad. It was liquor, Bailey’s Irish Cream, but it was also dairy.

A lot of the women were nurses, and it made Mr. Hibma wonder if the nurse who’d kidnapped him had been one of these. Not
all
women became these. Maybe becoming one of these was what that nurse had been trying to escape. She wanted a two-person family out in the desert, down in the mountains in Mexico. The only chatter would’ve been the chalky, disarming trills of the birds. Probably not. Probably she was a nutcase, and not an interesting one. A regular old nutcase.

Congratulations. Condolences. Mr. Hibma slid farther up the aisle. His eye was caught by a card revealing the top half of an almost-nude woman. She looked like she was having fun. The woman was about Mr. Hibma’s age and a lot of care had been taken with her hairstyle. Her sexy birthday wishes were going to make Mr. Hibma feel a way he didn’t want to feel, so he quickly moved on, advancing sideways through plump nurses and very skinny ones. Apology—the smallest section, five cards in total. Mr. Hibma didn’t want to apologize. He wanted to reconcile, maybe. Not even that. He wanted to make a fresh start.

He slipped the cards out of their slots one by one, narrowed it to two. One of the finalists was adorned with perched doves, the other had a couple of cartoon Indians dropping their hatchets in a hole they’d dug. The two nurses next to Mr. Hibma were almost screaming at each other. To stem the tide of their voices, Mr. Hibma displayed the two cards in front of them and asked which they’d prefer to receive. They were his target audience, about the same as Mrs. Conner. They seemed not to notice his outlandish sunglasses.

“What’d you do wrong?” one of them asked.

“Nothing specific,” said Mr. Hibma. “I was being myself.”

“You should never apologize for being yourself. I learned that after I got divorced,” said the second woman. She had bags of flavored coffee clutched to her chest.

“Doesn’t that depend on what kind of self you have?” Mr. Hibma said. “What if your self has something wrong with it?”

“People don’t change. They try to but they can’t. That’s speaking from experience.”

“You’re probably right. I probably won’t change.”

“I hope not,” said the woman with the coffee. “I’m never going to change for anybody ever again.”

Toby rose early Saturday morning and dragged more supplies out to the bunker. He brought a dustpan and also another pillow, because Kaley had torn the stuffing out of her old one. He’d been keeping her for two months now. What, nine weeks? What did weeks and days matter? Toby didn’t want to keep track of time. It meant nothing. He went down and did what he had to do, thankful that Kaley was ignoring him this morning, then marched back to the house.

When he opened the front door, Uncle Neal was sitting in a chair staring at him. Odorless smoke hung about the room. Uncle Neal reached back and set his pipe down. His eyes were bloodshot and the corners of his mouth were sharp.

“Seen the nail clippers?” he asked.

“I have better things to do than keep track of your nail clippers,” Toby said.

“That’s a debatable claim,” said Uncle Neal. “Not that I care to debate it, but it’s a highly debatable claim.”

Toby took a step toward his room and Uncle Neal stood and asked if Toby was hungry. Toby looked at the table and saw slices of white bread with butter, some kind of meat patties, and peaches in a bowl. Uncle Neal never buttered Toby’s bread, but today he had. The meat patties were arranged so they were slightly overlapping, like in an advertisement.

“My breakfasts don’t suit you anymore, do they?” Uncle Neal said.

The food had no aroma. It was like the smoke.

“I’ll heat up a plate in a little while,” Toby said.

He again started toward his room and this time Uncle Neal stepped right in his path.

“I feed you for years,” Uncle Neal said. “All of a sudden you’re too fancy. All of a sudden I got to eat alone. You got some little girlfriend you’re always going and eating fancy with.”

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” Toby said.

“Oh yeah? What do they call them these days if they don’t call them girlfriends?”

“You don’t need to worry about calling her anything. She’s never coming around here.”

Uncle Neal was still standing in front of Toby. He seemed engaged in the moment in a way that wasn’t usual. He still had his lighter in his hand and now he slipped it in his pocket.

“I know who she is,” he told Toby. “The girl whose sister got snatched. You got some sick fascination with her because her sister got snatched.”

“I’m not sick,” Toby said. “I’m just fine.”

“I used to think I was going to raise you.” Uncle Neal gripped Toby’s shoulder. Toby finally smelled something—Uncle Neal’s shirt. He’d been wearing the same clothes for days. “I used to think we could help each other.”

“Well, we can’t,” Toby said.

“I know what you’re doing, you little thief.”

It felt like Uncle Neal could’ve broken Toby’s shoulder. Toby tried to move. He said, “What am I doing?”

“You’re stealing from this house and selling the stuff at that rat-ass flea market. You’re a businessman, a little merchant. I brought up a boy who would rob his own flesh and blood. A little fucking capitalist.”

Toby didn’t feel like answering to this accusation. He
had
been stealing. It was a lot easier to get things from the house than to keep making extra trips to the grocery store or the drug store. And it was free. What could his uncle do about it?

“I’ll tolerate disrespect,” Uncle Neal said. “I’ll tolerate thinking you’re something special. I tolerate that stuff all the time. But there has to be a line, and I’m the one who has to draw it.”