“Your Daddy ain’t prepared for me,” Edgar said.
“Food too,” said Paulie.
Edgar looked down at him again, his eyes turning bigger than the moon. Now that Paulie thought about it more, it reminded him of the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. That was the way the wolf looked when it was waiting for Riding Hood, sitting in her grandma’s bed dressed in a nightgown, licking his chops as he waited for his trick to pay off. Paulie never looked at that storybook because it scared him too much. That and the one with the little kids lost in the woods by themselves, the ones that are taken by a witch until they throw her in the fire. Paulie couldn’t help thinking about those mean stories lately.
“Yes, m’boy. Show me that food. If it’s half as impressive as that there stack of logs, I’ll be sticking around here awhile. I reckon you and I will get to know each other real good.”
Paulie liked the sound of that. Edgar was a really nice guy, and he talked real interesting too. Not to mention those fancy boots he wore.
Edgar, after all, was a scallion.
Chapter Five
Paulie looked out the window, longing for the wonderful springtime his father had promised him. He could remember what it was like… only a few months ago before the cold had invaded. There was an absence in his life, of being outside, taking in fresh air and enjoying the warmth of the sun. He would always wake up on sunny days, working in the garden with his father, digging for worms, and he would tell his mother, “It’s bee-ute-tee-ful outside, Mammah!” She would laugh when he said that. He missed his mother’s infectious laugh, even more than the way she tickled him and nuzzled him when the scary monsters crept around the world of his dreams.
The world seemed different in those days. The world was changing, no matter what his father would admit.
It’s just a little snow, kiddo. It’ll let up any day now. Once it starts to melt, you’ll forget all about this. Once your mom gets back, it’ll be like none of this ever happened. The world isn’t ending, no matter what those cuckoo birds said on the radio.
The man on the radio said something about the a-pok-a-lips. Paulie still couldn’t decipher what that actually meant, but it seemed pretty bad. The guy’s voice was all shaky and gravelly, like he was scared of some kind of ghoul that lived in the closet. He said that all the people were going crazy, fighting over heating oil and food and all the things that people needed to survive. The guy on the radio had scared the heck out of him, even more than the dream-monsters.
When his father found him listening to the radio, he snatched it away, unplugging it and hiding it away at the top of the bathroom closet. Paulie loved to listen to the radio, so he was pretty cross at the time, but now that their electricity was gone, it didn’t matter much anymore. They had plenty of batteries stashed in the basement, but his father said they needed to conserve those in case things got worse.
Paulie had asked what worse meant.
Don’t worry about it. I didn’t mean that. Things won’t get worse. I promise you.
His father never answered questions like Paulie hoped he would.
What’s worse? Paulie asked a second time.
Daddies were always full of promises, but Paulie supposed that went with the job. Not everybody had good fathers, and his mom had assured him that his father was better than most.
As he stared at the pretty crystals hanging from the roof, Paulie wondered where all the mailmen had gone. It was bad enough outside that even the mailmen were scared to go out now. Paulie imagined their mailman (a chuckling man with a long black mustache who called himself Skipper) walking around with their letters, chasing them down as they blew out of his hands from the wind. And when the letters were scattered on the ground, he’d have to go after them in snow that went all the way up to his tummy, not to mention that the letters were mostly white, so they would blend in with the snow. Like those silly lizards called kuh-mee-lee-ons. Poor Skipper, he might catch a cold hunting down all those letters. Paulie laughed out loud at this image. His imagination was pretty goofy at times.
Paulie gathered up some of his action figures and his bright red fire truck, and then walked to the stairs to visit Eggah and his father. He really wanted to get a better look at Edgar’s boots again. He wondered if his father would wear boots like that if he got his mother to buy him some for Christmas next year. It would be an amazing Christmas present, if his mother helped him find some. Or maybe, if he had enough money in his piggy bank, Eggah would sell them to Paulie. He seemed like a nice guy who might do something like that, but he was also pretty in love with those cool boots.
Placing his truck on the floor at the top of the stairs, Paulie turned back towards his bedroom, ready to pop open the little plastic piece on the bottom of his red, white, and blue piggy bank. There probably wasn’t enough money in there, not enough to buy the boots from Eggah. After all, they seemed to be Eggah’s favorite thing. They were worth far more than the change he had. He didn’t know much about money, but he knew things like boots required the green pieces of paper, not just the shiny ones.
Chapter Six
Paulie could barely keep his eyes open. The day seemed a distant memory to them both. Even though he’d napped by the fire earlier in the day, his energy was dwindling. The chilled air was getting the best of Christian’s son.
“You like Eggah, Daddah?”
“Edgar. Yeah, he seems all right,” Christian answered his son, thinking back on the oddities of the day. Only thirteen hours earlier, the stranger had showed up at their window. And in record time, the man settled in as a regular in their household. Something in that fact disturbed Christian. Some people were just comfortable no matter the situation. Given that Edgar was a self-purported rambling man, perhaps that was his unique way of living.
“He’s a scallium,” said Paulie, but Christian couldn’t understand the word. “He said so.”
“Stalin?”
“No,” Paulie replied, his eyes drooping as he shook his head from side to side. “Scallion.”
Christian nodded, pulling up the blankets close to Paulie’s chin. “A stallam,” he said as if it was a common enough phrase, admitting defeat in deciphering the word. Annie was great at translating for Paulie’s sometimes jumbled up four-year-old speech.
Annie kept drifting in and out of his thoughts, especially as he watched Paulie slipping into the tranquility of sleep. Once upon a time, Annie would have been by his side, assisting in the transition to bedtime. Not now, and not recently. They separated in their parenting duties more and more, opting to be two separate entities raising a child on shifts. He wondered if Paulie ever suspected that they were the same person (two wardrobes, two masks) playing two roles in the theater that was their life.
What would Annie think if she returned before Edgar was on his way again? Sure, he was a wanderer, but that didn’t mean he didn’t grow roots every now and then. In fact, Christian was more than happy to have another adult by his side, even if it wasn’t his wife. Edgar could bring value to their survival. He would be a drain on their resources, but he could also procure further resources, if things got really desperate. They’d guzzled down a half pint of bourbon during Paulie’s naptime, reminiscing on their very different lives—Christian as a domesticated house cat, Edgar as a free spirited drifter without a place to lay his head. They’d had a damn good time, even with Edgar’s peculiar sense of humor and distractingly bizarre comments (“You ever smell yourself smile?” or “Sometimes I feel like Jesus is living in my mouth.”)