a non-holiday story — just because it’s so good to take a break from the festivities now and then…

On the day Canary’s father was sent to prison for grand theft and manslaughter, a tornado passed through Exodus, Kentucky and dropped a leg from the traveling carnival’s Scramblin’ Octopus ride in the Hewlitt backyard. It rose from the upturned earth like a giant, crimson lobster claw, its bucket seat-for-two still awhirl when the family returned from court, and after Canary put her mother to bed with two Valium and a glass of buttermilk, she crept outside with a flashlight and can of Skoal to take a better look.

The magnificent appendage was planted firmly in the ground, as if shot from Orion’s bow, and was sturdy enough to hold the weight of a ninety-six-pound tomboy in need of some reflection. If Lewis Heckerling, her beloved trigonometry teacher, hadn’t run off to Galveston over spring break with typing instructor Rhonda Russo, he could have joined Canary for some stargazing and soul-kissing, but instead she was left alone to pack her bottom lip with tobacco and stew about her shoddy life. In thirty-eight hours she was scheduled to arrive at a boarding school where she would be forced to wear a navy blazer and kneesocks and pretend like nothing had happened.

It wasn’t like things had been all sunshine and kittens before her father stole the Jaguar, downed a bottle of Rebel Yell, slammed into a family of four going thirty in their Volkswagen bus, and sent them ass-over-teakettle into Jimbo’s Holler; and it wasn’t as though life had been one cheery dance around the maypole before Lewis had chosen Rhonda’s auburn bob and silicone breasts over her dishwater frizz and plum-sized tits. No, there was plenty of deplorable nonsense without all that getting into the mix: her neurotic mother’s poodles and Bible verses; her mullet-head of a brother, Royal, with his sorry garage band and Trans Am; not to mention the death of her younger sister Sadie just two years prior. That run of black fate had been heavy enough in her opinion, but at least there had been Tuesday and Thursday afternoons in the cafeteria storage room with Lewis.

But all that changed in March when her father went and got himself into the sort of trouble he couldn’t talk, pay, or flirt his way out of. Once he was down in the holding pen waiting to see what the law would make of him, things went from bad to worse at the Hewlitt’s. Just after the redbuds had bloomed into a lavender mist along the roadsides, and Canary was thinking it might be nice to surprise Lewis with a fried chicken picnic on the banks of the river in exchange for taking her virginity, the nickname “Manslaughter’s Daughter” was coined by some Exodus High baseball players. Two weeks later the joke – How do you get a canary? Cross a cuckoo with a jailbird! – was circulating the lunchroom, and a week after that Royal found a fresh, steaming cow pie on the hood of his car at the community college.

Within days, Canary was withdrawn from school. On top of that, the family lawyer suggested Royal and Canary change their last name from Hewlitt to Tate, their mother’s maiden name. Even the family doctor got involved and advised Mrs. Hewlitt to quit caffeine and begin a bunch of pastel pills. At the time, leaving school seemed like a rational decision, but had Canary been able to foresee that Lewis would take such a liking to Rhonda’s buoyant ass in her absence, and that a bunch of Yankee admissions personnel would be so impressed with her GPA and geographic affiliation to accept her past the senior year deadline, she would have happily endured the harassment.

Instead, she spent a good portion of the spring jilted and jaded, kicking around the forty-acre farm and starring in her own version of Lamentations which was twice as miserable as the one her mother had memorized. For half of March, and all of April and May, Canary moped the perimeter of the Hewlitt property after her morning tutoring sessions wielding a good fence-banging stick and sucking on stolen pinches from her brother’s tobacco tin.

She cursed her father whom she supposed would have a hell of a time in prison – playing blackjack for tater tots, buddying up to the guards for a cigar, wearing his orange jumpsuit unzipped at the chest. She fretted over Rhonda Russo, figured she had gone double platinum by now (both upstairs and down) and bought herself a cute collection of clam diggers and jellied sandals. She damned both her guidance counselor and photographic memory for getting her reluctant self into some peacocked institution. And as for god? She just plain forgot him, crossed him off her short list of reliables. He had, after all, done nothing more than recline on his silver La-Z-Boy of a cloud, filing his nails with a thunderbolt, on the day Sadie slipped into the family pool, as easily as a tiny, lead minnow, and drowned.

It wasn’t like Canary to wallow, but after all that had gone horribly awry, she felt worthy of a few months of self-pity. She had, despite everything, carved out a modest, little life with Lewis in the midst of all things gray and gloomy only to see it swept away with the spring flood of controversy. Gone was the plan that she and Lewis had romantically concocted – that of moving after her graduation to Wyoming or Montana, someplace void of billboards and hillbillies, where they would live simply and work with their hands. By day, she’d be a short-order cook and Lewis would conjure up a patch of Indian corn. By night, they’d co-host a radio conspiracy talk show, heavy on alien abductions and government voodoo. They’d discussed building a log cabin from a kit or getting their hands on one of those shiny trailers, complete with a Murphy bed and woodstove. And they’d especially dreamed about the wonder of discovering themselves and each other’s bodies under a vast expanse of pale blue sky.

But it hadn’t worked out that way. Not even slightly. And after a lonely spring of rejection and regret, summer barged into Exodus the same way Canary’s father had once entered the local tavern – sweaty, hell-bent, and without finesse – leaving Canary to captain the Hewlitt tractor while the rest of teenage world was off working at the Klean Kar, wetting their white T-shirts and jingling their tips. She mowed six hours a day — plenty of uninterrupted time to consider everything from the depth and diameter of groundhog holes to the meaning of existence.

From what she could gather, life was nothing more than one big potluck supper gone wrong. It was an event, hosted by god himself, to which all his children were supposed to show up, just as they did down at Exodus Emmanuel, smiling and pressed, offering up the best of themselves in gold-rimmed casserole dishes large enough to serve the masses. Problem was, in the real world it didn’t work out as planned, with everyone full of praise and prudence and pickled beets. No, instead of the neat, holy smorgasbord that satisfied all, life was a madcap feeding frenzy complete with food fights and heartburn.

There were some guests, like her mother, who brought three homemade dishes only to never score a bite for themselves. There were people like her father who showed up empty-handed but sweet-talked their way into eating off everyone else’s plate. There were others, like Royal, who weren’t interested in attending in the first place, so they arrived late with a six-pack of Schlitz and second-hand directions to a better party. And then there were those like Rhonda Russo who made sparkling entrances, luring diners away from practical fare with marshmallow ambrosia. It was a scene Canary abhorred, and she preferred to handle the whole thing by bringing her own ham sandwich and sitting off to the side, under a tree, away from the whole blasted mess.

It hadn’t always been her perspective. For fifteen of Canary’s seventeen years she had been a firm believer in Jesus Christ, the golden rule, and unquestioned optimism. She had even considered becoming a nun after one particularly pure summer at Camp Samaritan in the Smokey Mountains where she had taken home the “Saint of the Summer” award. But then six-year-old Sadie had gone and drowned on Labor Day of 1983.

Canary could recall the day of Sadie’s death with complete clarity. It was a silver-cast Monday, as still and damp as autumn, and the locusts and crickets chirped without interruption, mistaking midday for dusk. The clouds were low, like a close, gray canopy, and the sounds of the day were clear and contained, as though a blanket of thick snow had fallen. Her mother wore a turquoise linen sundress, with an open back that revealed a triangle of freckled skin. Mrs. Hewlitt had carried baked beans out to the pool, her hands gloved with faded lobster-shaped oven mitts, and as Canary followed behind with a bowl of homemade cole slaw, she noticed her mother’s spine flickered like a horse’s whenever a black fly landed between her shoulder blades. She watched her mother’s unsteady sandals in the grass, noticed how the heels sank into the late summer turf, then unexpectedly, at the edge of the pool, she watched as her mother collapsed in a slow, polite, semi-faint and, unable to speak, began slapping at the water with one of her helpless, pink potholders.

There at the bottom of the pool was Sadie, resting like a baby mermaid, her silky hair waving about her head like a strawberry-blonde sea fan. She was easy to bring to the surface, as light as a stray sycamore leaf, and by the time Canary lifted her to the side of the pool, her father was wading clumsily through the shallow end dressed in plaid pants and a barbecue apron emblazoned with “Kiss My Grits.” The cole slaw had made it into the pool with the rescue, and while her father tried to slap the blue out of Sadie’s lifeless face Canary treaded water with the shredded cabbage. Her father was deliberate in his smacking and pounding, beating Sadie just as he had when she broke the crystal chandelier with her silver baton. His face turned scarlet from his efforts, his mouth in on itself, lipless with intent.

Royal sauntered onto the tragedy, late and oblivious, dragging his girlfriend Josie by the wrist. In the distance, Canary heard them giggle, then Royal pointed and wagged his index finger. “Well, looky there,” he said. “Sadie’s gettin’ a country whupping.” Josie flashed her braces and tugged her way up Royal’s arm as if she’d like one herself, or at least a kiss. And before either one of the lovebirds could take in the gravity of the scene, Mr. Hewlitt dropped Sadie like a landed fish, made his way across the lawn to Royal, and punched his son square in the nose.

The ambulance arrived soon after that to take away Mrs. Hewlitt, Royal, and Sadie. Josie sat on a pool chaise and cried. Canary and her father stood for a few silent moments in the yard watching the empty driveway. “You stay here and wait,” her father said. “And call that pitiful girl’s mother to come and take her home.” He looked back at the swimming pool in disgust. “And see if you can do something about all that blasted co-slaw.” Then he walked away, his apron damp and untied, threw his basting brush over the fence at an on-looking cow, and squealed off to the hospital.

Canary sat with Josie until her mother arrived. The girl’s green eyeliner had made a mess of her face and Canary wiped it off with a paper napkin noticing, that without makeup, Josie looked twelve instead of eighteen, a virgin instead of a slut, her po-dunk bravado having melted away to little-girl fear. Once she was finally alone, Canary went back to the swimming pool. In the dusk’s peculiar glare, she could see the salad dressing had formed an oil slick and several dozen flies were able to walk on water.

By Halloween the pool was drained and filled with gravel, and by Thanksgiving Mr. Hewlitt had turned to gin, Mrs. Hewlitt to the New Testament, and Royal to a buck-toothed girl named Tammy who carried most of her weight up top. Canary was the last to give in, but at the start of the New Year, she surrendered, switching her bible for a book on tractor maintenance and her radio tuner from WGOD to an AM station that speculated on John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

But it hadn’t been until Lewis Heckerling’s math class that she finally felt certain that dropping her religious path had been the right decision. Not only did Lewis wear just the right amount of Bay Rum and lovingly explain sine and cosine, but he also had an obsession for flyaway hair and flying saucers, and claimed she was the only person he’d ever told about the UFO he’d seen one night over an Indiana cornfield. With the fear of eternal damnation aside, Canary found her own improved version of heaven after school propped against a case of industrial baked beans in the lunchroom pantry while she removed her doll-sized bra.

But even better than the delightful hanky panky was Lewis’ ability to touch that soured part of Canary’s being. He acknowledged her pain, justified her anger, enlightened her to the absurdity of modern culture, and in doing so, she welded her heart to his in a desperate communion that brought her an unexpected sense of wholeness.

“But don’t you see?” Lewis had explained one rainy afternoon in the math lab. “America is a hoax, with all its neon this and plastic that. Everything’s been commercialized – Jesus, French fries, shiny hair. Everything from coffins to kitty litter. They even bottle the aroma of amber waves of grain, of purple mountains majesty. You’ve got to see, Canary. With your eyes

“Life is hard enough without having them tell you who to be and what to think. I mean, look at yourself. You know what life can throw your way. Didn’t your sister die? Just like that, huh?” Lewis paused, shook his head, moved his stapler from east to west on his desk. “That’s the kick in the crotch I’m getting at. Life is short and it ain’t always sweet. You’ve got to make it tolerable by doing real stuff. It’s all here.” Lewis tapped his heart (or rather the pocket protector that rested above it). “The heart. Love. That’s what’s life’s about, sister. Not chrome bumpers or mini skirts, drive thrus or video games. Honest life. Honest shit.”

Lewis exhaled, loosened his short tweed necktie, pushed Canary’s math book to the side, and beckoned to her. “You’re my kind of lady,” he said as though presented with a blank check. “Yessiree bob. My kinda lady.” Canary smiled and slid onto the edge of his desk. “No eyeshadow. No drama. Just pure frigging substance and a willingness to learn.”

Then Lewis brushed a lock of Canary’s untamed curls behind her ear, made a few algebraic references, and slipped her a tongue more probing than his questions.

Lewis believed in the possibility of utopia, had an appreciation for jazz, socialism, nudist colonies, and endangered species, and allowed himself a nightly toke of homegrown marijuana just after brushing his teeth. Lewis liked to think of himself as a traveling intellectual, a man that moved around the country to teach at schools in locations he considered “in need of enlightenment,” but all that was about to change, he told Canary.

“Now that I’ve met you – my bright shining soulmate – all this teaching is coming to an end,” Lewis said holding her hands in his as if they were something he’d caught that might fly away. “As soon as you toss that mortar board next spring it’s Cheyenne or bust.

The Rhonda Russo thing, therefore, had been one hard knock – the icing on the shit cake. Of all the things Canary had grown suspicious of since meeting Lewis Heckerling, he personally had not been one of them.

Now the night was as still and eerie as an empty stadium, and the Scramblin’ Octopus’s humid metal seat had sealed itself to the backs of Canary’s legs. In the east, purple heat lightning shuddered in the sky, a silent fireworks display that reminded Canary of the past Fourth of July, just seven weeks ago, when she had finally had enough of yardwork and injustice.

The day had gone poorly from the start. At breakfast her mother had collapsed into a useless heap on the kitchen floor after burning an English muffin, which took three pills and an hour of baby talk to undo. During her fourth hour of mowing, Canary ravaged a nest of rabbit kits and was forced to put them out of their misery by passing over them five additional times. Then at eight o’ clock, as Canary stood blinking in front of her bathroom mirror with a dead gnat trapped under her eyelid, the telephone rang. It was Lewis Heckerling, calling from a Texas pay phone to just to say “howdy” and to wish her well on her journey north.

“Don’t let those Yankees get the best of you,” Lewis said. His voice was sing-songy and upbeat. She imagined his life in Galveston was as frivolous and surreal as an endless Saturday afternoon and that Rhonda catered to Lewis, bringing him crawfish po-boys and lemonade while he tinkered on his new motorboat and lived out a lifelong dream he’d only recently invented after seeing Rhonda bend over to file something in April.

“Well. If it isn’t Lewis Heckerling.” Canary’s voice was curt and she could sense the gnat working its way across her iris. She was angry at Lewis for not only calling, but for taking so long to do so. “I expected to hear from you about three months ago. You’re quite the escape artist.”

The receiver went fuzzy, as if cupped by a hand, and when Lewis returned his accent was less pronounced. “Listen, there’s a perfect reason for all this nonsense, babe. Trust me.”

Canary pursed her lips. “Is that so?”

Lewis sniffed. “The faculty, man. They had my number. Our number. They knew what was going down between us.”

Canary chewed her thumb and spat out a sliver of fingernail. “So that’s the case, huh?

Lewis sighed. “It sure is. This whole Texas thing. This whole. . .” Lewis paused. “This whole Rhonda thing. It’s just a cover up. I had to leave while you were still safe. I mean, no newsflash to you, sister, but you had a lot going down already. Am I right or what?”

Canary shrugged. “So what if I did.”

Lewis shifted the phone around on the other end with a rustle. “Look. I was. Still am. Trying to protect you.”

The gnat had freed itself from Canary’s eye and she pulled the black speck off her lower lashes. “I’m not an idiot, Lewis.” She smeared the body of the insect onto the bathroom countertop. “I know this has everything to do with a tight ass.”

Lewis exhaled. “So, you don’t believe me?” His end of the phone rattled around again and Canary heard the muffled laugh of a woman.

“So is the little cupcake there now?”

“Who? Rhonda?” Lewis cleared his throat. “Yeah. She’s here. But she’s not a ‘cupcake’ and it’s not what you think.”

“Oh, really? And what’s she up to down there in Galveston? Showing the lifeguards how to use the shift key?”

Lewis gave a hurried groan. “Come on, hon. It’s not like that. She’s having a tough time of things herself. I’m just being a friend to her while she needs one.”

“And how long is that going to take?”

Lewis took a moment, and Canary gathered he was deciding whether or not to tell her something. “Listen. I’ve got some debt to take care of. Six thousand to pay off. Then it’s all about us. The West. Like we planned.”

Canary frowned. “Six thousand? What’d you go and buy? A little houseboat for two or something?”

Lewis was quiet. Canary could hear the ocean, a car horn, the sounds of a boardwalk-and-souvenir universe. Lewis returned, along with his cheery accent. “Look. I gotta get a move-on. Just wanted to say to keep up your constitution in the Constitution State.” Then he hung up with a clumsy clatter, and in the split second between goodbye and the dial tone, Canary felt certain she heard him giggle as though he was being tickled.

In her father’s study, she poured herself a tumbler of hot gin and perused her father’s desk to find: fountain pens, stale cigard, carbon receipts, loose rubber bands. And then, something fantastic, housed in a small glass case on a bed of red velvet – a lady-sized, pearl handled pistol. It was petite, flirtatious, and the loop of the trigger fit around Canary’s index finger as nicely as a silver ring might. She pointed it at the fireplace, pointed it at the encyclopedia set, then she pointed it toward the window in the direction of Exodus High. Fifteen minutes later, she sat in the main circle of the school behind the wheel of her mother’s Mercedes and listened to the explosions and bangs of Fourth of July celebrations echoing all about town. It was a good night to do some shooting.

Rhonda’s room was still where it had been before the seduction, at the back of the school overlooking the football field. Canary peered in at the ghostly, abandoned Smith-Coronas, her mouth dry with rebellion and liquor. She shot two hard pops, one that in the dim night seemed to spin a space bar from Station 3’s typewriter, and one that lodged in the center of the chalkboard, which, had Rhonda had been instructing would have either killed her or, at the very least, sprung a mortal leak in her pricey set of boobs.

Afterward, Canary sat on the football field’s fifty-yard line with her waning bottle of gin and watched the Exodus Municipal grand finale. The low-budget screaming meemies were her favorites, partly because of noise, but mostly because they seemed too weak to gain much altitude and the possibility of them wreaking havoc on the crowd brought a smile to her face.

On the way home, she topped out her mother’s sedan at eighty-five miles-per-hour and caught enough air on the last bump in the road to knock a good idea in her head; some way or another she would get herself to Galveston and get Lewis back. Get him back before Rhonda put on one too many macramé halter tops and had Lewis’s brain reduced to she-crab soup. Get him back before he traded his police scanner for a margarita blender, his calculator for Mardi Gras beads, his soul for a surfboard.

Canary leaned back in the Scramblin’ Octopus’s last leg and looked up at the heavens. She felt quite positive there wasn’t a god, certainly not one dressed in a white robe with an impressive beard and gilded harp. And if there was one, he sure as hell had some shifty ideas up his choir-robe sleeve – flinging carnival parts around town, giving her a bird’s nest of a hairdo, denying half the people she knew of enough sense to make a good decision.

Over at the Blueberry Hill trailer park, some folks were having a hell of time. She heard a banjo twang, a few “yee-haws” and “yeah, boys,” the sound of breaking glass. Then across the field, a voice carried from the chaos, sounding as close and clear as though a white-trash muse had joined her on the Scramblin’ Octopus.

“I say go and git ‘im, now. Go on, now. GIT ‘IM!”