“The beetles in my yard,” Asthma ignores her, “have a special key. Brightfellow has seen it.”
“That’s stupid.” Pea Pod is scratching at a scab. She works her scabs with diligence. The air around them swims with the sounds of locusts rising and falling and rising. .
“The key is to a laboratory,” Charter persists, “deep beneath the earth. And it is here, in this secret laboratory, that precious things are made and astonishing things happen.”
“Precious things,” Pea Pod muses, suddenly mollified. “Like dollies.”
“Dollies!” Asthma snorts.
“Better than that. Things like. . cinnabar. Which is a kind of scarlet sand you can find in the cliffs above the river. The ants love it — no one knows why — and grain by grain carry it in their jaws to a hidden place beneath their hill. Once inside, they grind the sand down to a fine powder and then they wash it in a copper bowl — copper, too, they manufacture, no one knows how — and then they wash it again.”
Now the air is charged with a vivid interest from Asthma and Pea Pod both. They are sitting on a large flat stone that leans out above the woods below. Asthma and Pea Pod sit side by side, at peace with one another.
“Then they go to sleep,” he continues. “And when they wake up the cinnabar has settled at the bottom of the bowl. They drain off the water and allow it to dry. It’s now a bright scarlet of great depth and beauty. The Papesse—”
“Is red!” Asthma chimes, wildly excited. “Pea Pod! She’s red!”
“Exactly so!” Charter musses Asthma’s hair affectionately. “How very quick you are, Asthma. So. . now do you know why she is so beautiful and why she needs the key?”
“Not really.”
“Here’s why. The ants knead the cinnabar with soft beeswax into a paste. .”
“I don’t understand what you are talking about!” Pea Pod shouts and, in a rage, scrambles to her feet. “I want to go home!”
“Don’t ruin it, Pea Pod!” Asthma cries, leaping up. “I bet the beetles wax her, Pea Pod! Like you wax a piano!” She doubles over with laughter. “Right, Brightfellow? They wax her? They wax her!” she says, barely able to get the words out.
“But what about the key?” Pea Pod cries, on the verge of sobbing. “What about the key?”
“It doesn’t matter!” Asthma is out of patience. “Obviously they use the key to get into the laboratory to steal THE RED WAX!”
“Who? who?” Pea Pod screams. “WHO NEEDS THE KEY?”
“THE BEETLES!” Asthma shouts. “GODDAMNIT, Pea Pod!”
“The ants make a paste,” Charter explains gently. “They roll it into little balls the size of peas and put it in a cabinet. The cabinet is locked. When the ants go to sleep, the Papesse sends her butler—”
“Not her butler,” Asthma complains. “It can’t be her butler. It has to be her. . her. . I don’t know what!”
“You’re fast, Asthma,” Charter says. “He’s called the butler — and you’ll see why — but in fact he’s a footman, and like all beetles he has sticky feet. Once he’s snuck into the laboratory and opened the cabinet, he collects the balls of cinnabar with his sticky feet and then he carries them to the Papesse. Who has been waiting for him all night long impatiently. Because her color is fading and she needs him to—”
“WAX HER!” Asthma exults. “See? Pea Pod? WAX her all over!”
“Which is why he’s called ‘the butler,’” Charter interjects triumphantly. “It’s his way of dressing her. He’s also called: the Butterer.”
“It’s not a story!” Pea Pod screams. “IT’S NOT A STORY! Let’s go to your room! Like Goldie said we were supposed to.” She stomps off.
“I’m staying here with Brightfellow,” Asthma says, pressing a little square of pink bubble gum into the palm of his hand. “The Butterer.” She smirks.
The philosophers warn us that our perceptions are not to be trusted, yet we must assume that the mother is soused when she slurs her consonants, that the child is making fudge when the heavy copper pot is brought out and set on the stove. And it is a fine thing when our perceptions pan out. As when Asthma appears at Billy’s door with that very fudge, still warm, and the next thing you know, you’re sitting on Blackie’s lawn between two little girls smelling of summertime, eating fudge with your fingers.
It is Saturday; the sound of ice tumbling from freezer trays shatters in the air. And here is Goldie, gin and tonic in hand, dressed to the nines, her face painted within every inch of its life, and with a plan for the rest of the afternoon. She will take us to town for a movie, the girls and I will have our supper at the soda fountain. (Cheers at all this.) After, Goldie will fetch us and bring us all home. She’s footing the bill, she assures me.
The impossible unfolds. We are in Goldie’s car. We are leaving the Circle, driving past the library, the empty classrooms, the outlying woods — and then the road is flanked for long minutes by trees — the clam shack, gas station, Annie’s next; the little houses painted white and green. The scarred place where my father’s house once stood. Farmland and then Hawkskill, its grocery, its five-and-dime, its bar, and the very heart of downtown. And we are walking into the Moonlight Theater. I am handing our tickets over to a boy who tears them apart. I am buying Tootsie Rolls, overseen by a brass sphinx and an eighth-grader in braids, then guiding the girls past a plaster obelisk carved with dismembered feet and hands, sacred ladders, pancakes, and birds. We are treading the Moonlight’s indigo carpet, a carpet swarming with putti and stained with root beer. Sitting at last in the blue shadows, the girls at each of my elbows, taking in a shimmering red curtain, watching it part like something melting away, watching the stars orbit the mountain, the rabbit chomp his carrot and evade death; watching Jimmy Stewart, his binoculars so like my own, his habits so familiar. I sit on my little velveteen upholstered chair, fully realized: a designated guardian of little girls! And here is the irresistible Jimmy Stewart immobilized by a broken leg, just as I’ve been immobilized by a broken whatever-it-was that was broken! My soul was it? My mind? I sit as happy as I believe I was intended to be, as the girls ferret in their pockets for Tootsie Rolls and Wax Lips without once looking away from the screen.
Later, over toasted cheese sandwiches and vanilla milkshakes, the girls discuss the movie. They both disapprove of Jimmy Stewart’s nipples—“men should not have nipples!” (Asthma); “no one should have nipples!” (Pea Pod). They wonder about the logistics of cutting up a body and taking it out the door one piece at a time. They suppose the thighs look like hams and that there would have only been room for two in the suitcase. They wonder if the knees would have been attached to the thighs. They think it unjust the dog was murdered. “It was not a whiner” (Pea Pod). “It was the wife that whined” (Asthma). She turns to me, says, “Jimmy Stewart reminds me of you.”
“But I don’t have nipples,” I manage.
“Looking out that window, stupid,” she says.
“We all do that,” I tell her. “That is what windows are for.” I make a strange noise in spite of myself, something like a frog being strangled.
“You do so have nipples!” Pea Pod says ragefully. “Everybody does! It doesn’t make any sense!” She decides.