I was twelve years old, in a yellow gingham skirt with a frayed hem that brushed the bandaids on my knees, scratching pork and pepper gravy off the good porcelain in the sink. Though Parson Millard passed back in March, we carried on the tradition of inviting the new Parson over for Sunday dinner each week. He floated into the kitchen, his feet soundless beneath his robes. He stood beside me, twice my height, and swished the ice cubes in his strawberry lemonade.
“You know, Miss Rickie,” said Parson Moss, “you do have the prettiest hair. The prettiest, prettiest hair.” His voice was too soft for my liking. There was an oily sort of swing to it that those of us from Noxapater didn’t have. We twanged, we hawed and whined, but never did we slide or swing. He sounded like he was from Georgia, maybe. Or South Carolina. “I knew a few young ladies back in Templeton who had hair like that, all pretty red-blonde like yours. Of course, they made well sure to keep theirs covered. Mm-hm.”
He showed up to conduct Parson Millard’s funeral and never left. Proclaiming assured salvation through his own church, The Brotherhood of Josephes, he clung to the pulpit and nobody saw fit to remove him. He was nothing like Parson Millard, who was round and sunny with a cloud of cottony white hair and deep dimples in his cheeks. Parson Moss didn’t care about Momma’s old vinyls and didn’t clap along to the music the one time she showed him. He was sallow and wore round black glasses outside the chapel. However, he was not an altogether ugly man. From my family’s habitual second-row pew, I found myself admiring the prim lines of his face, the stark and fascinating contrast of his complexion.
Even now, as he loomed beside me in the kitchen while Momma and Poppa listened to the vinyls in the next room, I wasn’t ready to despise him. But I did take offense to his notion that I ought do something different with my hair.
“Why keep their hair covered, though? Seems like it’d be awfully warm.” I played innocent, the one way I knew to challenge him without seeming outright rude.
“Your hair, the top of your head, is something sacred, Miss Rickie.” Parson Moss moved his hand as if he were going to stroke my head, but hovered his palm just close enough for me to feel the heat coming off of it. “It’s the part that God’s looking down on, mm-hm. Don’t you think he’d rather see a pretty clean cap than all of the bedbugs and chiggers you have up there?”
He fluttered his fingers against my scalp. His nails were sharp. They felt brittle, as if they were chipping and breaking into my hair. Though I’d washed it the night before, I’d convince Momma to let me wash it again.
“I haven’t got any bedbugs or chiggers!” I turned to him. He was just so sure that I was like all the other kids who showed up sermons, with their blunt, drab hair all buzzing with lice and dust. He said it himself that my hair was pretty. The prettiest.
“Oh, most certainly you don’t, Miss Rickie. Not now. But if you covered your hair, you wouldn’t ever have to worry about them.” He set his glass on the counter, the ice almost completely melted. I poured the lemonade down the sink and rinsed the glass. He didn’t protest. Instead, he plucked one of my ringlets from where it fell on my collar and coiled it around his fingers. “Won’t you please ask your Momma to find you a nice scarf to wear over your hair next Sunday? If just to keep the bugs out?”
“Yes, Parson Moss, I’ll do my best.” I nodded. He let the curl spring back and smiled. I decided that I would wear something on my head the next Sunday, though not for fear of bugs.
When Ma called the casino to tell me of my brother Benn Stoomie’s plight, she elected to phrase the news in no uncertain manner: “Your brother’s stupid-ass cat cartoon got cancelled.” She exhaled directly into the receiver, a sigh of annoyance both Benn and I would recognize from our adolescence. I could smell the nicotine and bean dip on her breath from two timezones away.
“You oughtta go see him,” she told me, “cheer him up. Maybe do a magic trick for him. And tell him what a piece of shit that cat cartoon was. I still say he oughtta do something with talking ducks. Or my neighbor’s daffodils. They kinda look like they got mouths.”
While I was off making my meager fortune as an audience-volunteer-plant for magic shows in bedazzling Las Veggie (my boss, Lou Carino-Davies, says my calling it that makes him want to punch me), Benn was raking in the dollars as a paunchy yet successful cartoonist.
Pilfer’s Plunder, his series about bargain-hunting pirates, boomed overnight. Not a week after the pilot aired, local grocery store chains were contacting him asking—no, begging—permission to use Captain Swee Pilfer as a spokespirate. Benn told me that one chain, VixMart of Tipper County Iowa, even proposed some slogans that he was “free to use” should he fork over permission to use Pilfer’s likeness: “When I’m looking for a great bARRRGHain, I look no further than VixMart!” and “The prices at VixMart are all that AND a bottle of rum!”
He scoffed at these slogans, assuring me that Captain Pilfer would never say anything like that. I trusted him. After all, in the land of Pilfer’s Plunder, Benn Stoomie was nothing lesser than God. “Although,” he followed up, “that one about bARRRGHains is pretty good.”
The fast-accrued profit from Pilfer’s Plunder swooped Benn up and all over the sweet, wet world. He sent me envelopes containing photos (some duplicates after a while) of him boozing it up with famous talk show hosts, chowing down with TV chefs in their own personal seafood establishments, and rubbing scaly elbows with celebrities who kind of looked like they didn’t want to be touched. In one picture, he was meeting the President of Our Great Nation on the whitewashed deck of a cruise ship. The accompanying letter explained that he and the President sang an enthused rendition of “Kokomo” but the President messed up the lyrics at one point.
After a month and a half of wild, swinging fame, Benn grew increasingly bored of Pilfer’s Plunder. He told me that he was sick of being approached by yar-har-har-ing housewives, brandishing their coupon books and offering “consistently foot-centric” sexual favors in exchange for autographs. A new project—or an amoebic haze that occasionally took on the vague silhouette of a project—awaited him on the horizon. He just had to ride his fame-wave in its general direction, hoping the hype would peter out in close proximity to the shifting specter of passion renewed.
He telephoned me late in the evening, when I was rubbing a soothing antibacterial salve onto a shallow cut across my midsection. It seemed that I still couldn’t get the hang of that whole “getting sawed in half” trick.
“This is big,” he said.
“Hi, Big. This is Paul.” I laughed. He did not.
“I’ve really got something here,” he continued. “The Adventures of Inspector Cedric Sootpaw. He’s a cat who solves crimes.”
“I don’t follow.” The wound was starting to sting. “Cats don’t solve crimes. My cat Buggy can’t even figure out that the little white thing he’s chasing is the glint of my watch in the sunlight.” By that point, Buggy had long since run away. For all I knew, he might’ve sorted the whole watch-thing out by then.
“Well, pirates don’t hunt bargains. It’s a cartoon, Paul. And it’s gonna be a big one.”
From that night onward, Benn called frequently, not once bothering to ask how that whole saw-wound infection was healing (not well). He told me he had a piece of a script ready to send off for a second-opinion. Unfortunately, I couldn’t receive it because I was living in a hotel and had no true address. I eventually saved up to get myself a PO box. While I was delighted to get the scripts, I was not as impressed with the sudden influx of junkmail and hospital bills.
The first chunk of script was barely a page long and typed on paper watermarked by the Farnes City, Michigan Public Library. I had no idea where Farnes City was or if Benn was even living there, but I made a mental note to look it up later.
