Mark Hutto

Maudine Eckles stood among the yard statues in the bed of the old pick-up, observing, with some impatience, the various labor-shirking connivances of her husband, Nip. Unloading the truck, he moved with all the dispatch and fervor of a garden slug and she was quite ready to murder him.

"What you waitin ' on?" she erupted as he throttled down his pace to a near stop once again.

"My dang butt to catch up, I reckon." He removed his hat and swabbed his forehead, looking up at the sun as though seeing some new and fantastic object looming over him for the first time. He was a short man, lean and wiry with shallow set eyes and the leathery hang-dog bearing of a working man, long past his prime. "Ain't stopped since I got here."

"Ain't stopped loafin'," she murmured irritably. Left to him, he'd idle the day away jawing with the flea market trash while she worked her own fingers to bloody nubs.

"Well, daylight's burnin'," she barked. "Let's hit it."

Turning back to her own work, she began shifting statues, rolling them on their rounded bases from the rear bed to the tailgate for her husband to remove and put out on display. In turn, he hoisted a large gray giraffe over his shoulder and staggered dolefully off toward a meager grouping of like statues.

"Where you want this'n, straw boss?"

"Hold on now, where you goin' with that?" she fussed, realizing her mistake. She was a large and robust woman and towering over him from the bed above, she might have been a statue herself, striking a pose of pique and verve: one hand shielding her ferreting eyes from the midday glare, the other propped impassively atop the sloping shelf of her ponderous hip.

"Look it, you got four of them giraffes out already." She waved him on back. "Here, gimme that back and take this old monkey."

"Make up your mind, woman," Nip shot back, irked himself. The lengthy treelike neck of the giraffe bit into his narrow shoulders and, stopping mid-stride at her bidding, he had stumbled, jarring loose his uppers.

"Ain't no use in having five giraffes out and no monkeys," she declared. "Don't tell me no different."

"Hell then, don't set it out if I ain't 'spose to take it," he grumbled, thumbing his plate back into place. "These so'm bitches don't weigh but a ton." He guided the unwieldy load back to the truck and lowered it roughly onto the bed.

"Don't know why that boy got to use sacrete in the first place," he muttered, "heavy as this old stuff is...." Then answering himself added, "He ain't out here luggin' around this foolishness, that's how come. Got his hired hands on the job."

He retrieved a chewed toothpick from his front pocket and slipped it between his pursed lips.

"Where's he at anyhow? Off fumdiddlin' with them fairies, no doubt."

She ignored his jibes at their son, Haskel--their only child whose bizarre ways had baffled and annoyed them both for most of his sixteen years. She nudged a plump monkey over to the tailgate with the flat of her foot.

"Here, set him out by them others," she told him. "Make up kinda like a little family, and mind you put the like ones up together, taller in back. Most folks'll buy more'n one that way."

Nip huffed and bridled at the foolishness of it all but as always, deferred to her judgment in these matters of retail psychology. Maudine, he had to admit, could sell ice cubes to Eskimos.

"They ain't gonna want to separate kin is what it is," she told him importantly.

He shook his head and wondered just why she figured anybody would give a rat's red ass about the kin of a bunch of sacrete yard statues but knew his wife too well to ask. She was long-winded when it came to explanations and her convolutions and illogic exhausted him.

"Come on now, get a move on," she pressed, "them churches let out shortly. "

"I only got two hands," he mumbled, taking hold of the monkey. "Wouldn't kill us to sit awhile neither."

"Plenty time once we set up," she directed. "We done missed both the Luthern's and Methodists already, late as we is. Miss them Baptists and we just as well pack it in."

"There's other folks be along."

"Humph!" she snorted. "Pentacostals...you know a Pentecostal ain't got two nickels to rub together."

Lugging the monkey over to the other animals he noticed, not for the first time, its steely gap-toothed grin and narrow slit eyes, a striking similarity to his wife's. He smiled in spite of his irritation. He'd have to ask the boy sometime, if he ever caught him in a civil mood, that is, just how he did that, how he captured people's faces on his animals that way. There was a fox for instance, over in the truck somewhere that was a spitting image of their burial-policy man and a skunk too, whose resemblance to Maudine's sister was down right uncanny. He and the boy had never seen eye to eye about anything, but Nip had to admit, for a kid who'd sooner die than to wet a hook or spend a morning in a deer stand, he still had him a good eye for animals. He chuckled out loud, looking again at the monkey's wide gawky face and the fact Maudine had seen it a hundred times and never caught the likeness. It was like having a secret on her and that always lifted his spirits.

"What you cacklin' at over there?" she asked, eyeing him peremptorily.

"Nothin," he muttered, "just somethin I was thinkin' got me tickled."

"Well, get a move on then."

He said nothing, but carefully placed the squatting figure alongside the semi-circle display of giraffes, armadillos and alligators in full view of the passing motorists.

"Here," he said after another look. "Gimme another one of them monkeys. I bet we sell two today."

"Would, if you'd set 'em both together like I said," she agreed sagely. "Ain't they the ugliest rascals though?"

He said nothing, but chuckled under his breath.

They had parked their truck just off the road across from the Sale Barn on the lot in front of the Ben Franklin's five and dime which was closed on Sundays. Though arriving later than usual, they still had managed to get the prime spot on the busy corner ahead of the flea market trash. "They ain't got a lick of class," Maudine often stated. Their long tables and flatbed trailers loaded with flashy trifles generally sprawled out for acres, consuming every free spot like kudzu across a levee basin. "Just can't help theirselves."

"Wonder we got us a spot at all, you off carryin' on with them dogs all mornin', me having to load up all this stuff myself."

"We're here, ain't we?" was his mumbled reply.

"It's a wonder's all I'm sayin'. Artheritis is about to kill me." Over the next few minutes, she articulated this repeatedly, like a martyr on route to a painful death, inserting to maximum effect the occasional anguished groan.

They settled back into a familiar silence, each busy with their respective tasks: him setting out the remainder of the lawn statues in careful neat rows--taller items in back, shorter ones in front--and her placing brightly painted sale signs on either side of the corner, then stringing up the wide blue tarp over the pick-up bed to shield them from the intensity of the midday sun.

"You want you a samwich?" she asked him finally, bending over an open ice chest which smelled faintly of fish. It was faded a sallow pink and cracks patched with silver fingers of duct tape ran along each of its four corners.

"Yeah, I reckon I am about ready for one," he said, setting down the Sacrete Virgin Mary whose face was the very mirror of Mary Pickford. He placed her carefully next to, what were in his opinion, a rather striking grouping of opossums. He clapped the dust from his hands, brushing the remainder off on the seat of his dark blue jump suit, then sat down next to her under the shade of the tarp.

"Chicken salad or deviled ham?" she asked him. "I got us both."

"Don't matter much."

She was especially fond of her chicken salad so handed him a deviled ham and a large cup of iced tea, which he drained in several long thirsty gulps. He rattled the ice in his cup and she refilled it from the plastic milk jug in the ice chest.

They sat in companionable silence, eating their sandwiches and watching the cars drive by on the road in front of them, beckoning in potential trade with an occasional wave, both glad of the slight breeze which riffled the tarp above them.

"Reckon if Haskel ever will make us up some of them gardenin' ladies?" he asked, with a sudden flare of irritation. "That boy..." he shook his head. "I ain't asked him but a hundred times."

"Which ones is that?"

"Them ones got the fat gal bent over. You stick 'em out in front the flower beds, you seen 'em. She got her slip showin'."

"Oh yeah, them painted sign boards."

"Bet I coulda sold me a hundred this week. The flea market folks just movin' them damn things out hand over fist." He reached up with his hat and swatted at a dirt dauber who floated languidly in the air space above. "Just burns my ass."

"That and them cows with the hose pipe tails," she added, "swishes all around, waters the grass when you got the hose runnin'. You seen them? I declare they are precious though."

Nip nodded vigorously.

"I told that boy that, too. The way folks' takin' on over all them painted things, we could make us a pot a money. I told him we'd sell ever one he made-up, easy an not have to hit another lick at this old sacrete. He just gimme that look." he said, peeved. "You know how he does, don't say a thing, just give you that look."

She nodded and swiped a dollop of chicken salad off her thigh. "Wouldn't take half a day to paint up some of them signs, good as he is at art."

"Hell no, it wouldn't, 'stead he got us luggin' around all his sacrete foolishness."

He paused reflectively, rattling his ice. "He got an eye for them animals though," he conceded. "I'll give him that."

Maudine poured him some more tea and grabbing herself another chicken salad sandwich, returned the jug to the ice chest.

"But I tell you what," he bristled. "them other doings, them big old eyeballs with wings and that other, like that bare-assed fellow, had the snake coming out his tail end...." He shook his head, perplexed at the very idea.

"That's his art, Nip, don't mean nothing."

"Well, who ever hearda such?" He sat up and rubbed his head in irritation.

"You don't see none of that flea market trash over yonder with art like that, do you?"

"No and they ain't a soul in this town gonna put that foolishness in the yard neither, and here him cranking out that old stuff by the truck load. But you just try telling a thing to that boy. He just give you that look."

They chewed reflectively on their sandwiches and watched the heedless cars dart on by, the familiar heavy thoughts of their son beginning to gather in like storm clouds on the horizon of their minds.

"Why you suppose it is that fellow wears him a dress to work in?" Nip asked uneasily. "What's his name, one helps him pour up his animals."

"Lester?"

He shrugged. "Fat fellow, walk like he got the piles."

"Yeah, that's Lester. Well, that ain't a dress exactly. More like a frock, see, all that pipin' and fancy needle work. Him and Haskel done all that up themselves. It's right pretty stitchin', I think."

"What the hell's the difference, frock or not, he's a man, ain't he? S'posed to be anyhow. Now why'd a man wear a get-up like that?"

"Nip, what's a fellow big as all that gonna wear knockin' around in all that sacrete. Got to move don't he? Ain't a pair of britches made gonna hold up on that boy."

"Him walkin' that away, they not."

"Well, that's true enough..."

"'Sides, it ain't got nothin' at all to do with all that other I seen out there last night...painted up lips and high heel shoes on a man."

"I 'spect not," she said, and not wishing to linger on that image added, "He's a personable boy though, Lester is, always asks after my artheritis. Carried me a load of peas out to the freezer just the other day. Real nice manners."

"And that other one," Nip said angrily. "the hair lip, got him that red mop on his head, I forget his name. Look like Woody Woodpecker."

"Skinny fellow with the tic? One got them chains hung off his ears?"

"Yeah, that one."

"That's Timmy."

"What in the hell is wrong with that boy?" He shook his head, perplexed again.

"Bad nerves, what Lester says. Needs his peace and quiet."

"Needs a boot up his ass, more like. Takin' on so bad the other morning I thought I was gonna have to knock him in the damn head. Seen a spider or somethin', near as I could make out."

"But don't he have the most beautiful blue eyes though? You seen his eyes?"

"They made up to look like that, that's why, all painted."

"They ain't natural?"

He stared at her, his mouth agape. "Woman? That's all that eye paint stuff. It ain't a bit natural."

"Well, I never seen 'em up all that close, him flittin' around the way he does, and Haskel don't like me back there when they're workin'."

"Workin', hell," Nip snorted and began chomping thoughtfully on a chunk of ice from his tea glass. "No telling what them three get up to back there all day," he mumbled. "But I got an idea it ain't natural either, better part of it."

"Lord," Maudine said, flustered at the thought. "I don't know why Haskel's got to hang around so many them funny types. He's such a smart boy. I keep thinkin' he'll meet him a nice girl."

"That's the whole damn problem." Nip interrupted, wagging a finger in the air. "He ain't interested in girls. No kinda girls."

Maudine shot him a challenging look.

"That ain't a bit true. He an' the Teddeton girl get on real good. She come out the other day, spent a good while out there with them boys. They was laughin' and cuttin' up, havin' the best time back there."

"Teddeton girl? She the one got the mustache? Rides that motor bike, built like a Texas bull?"

Maudine nodded uncertainly. "The sturdy one, Freida."

"Sturdy, hell," he said with some respect. "I do believe that old gal could take out a grizzly, bare fisted. Scare it half to the grave, one. That face'd bust the bark off a hickory tree."

"Hush now, can't every girl be a prom queen."

Nip chewed his lower lip in thought.

"Well, he wouldn' get nowhere with that one anyhow. Looks of her, she ain't anymore inclined to romance than he is."

"You ain't giving him a chance, Nip, he ain't but sixteen."

"Ain't but sixteen!" He shook his head and looked at her. "When I was that boy's age, the only one thought in my head was how to get my dang pole greased."

She raised a hand and shushed him. "I don't want to hear any that ugly talk, here it is a Sunday."

"All I'm saying is, he just don't think about girls that way, the way he's meant to." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "That boy just ain't right. I know it and deep down you know it too." He took a chunk of sacrete and flicked it out towards the road. "I'll tell you something else too, and see if this don't make you wonder. When me and Haskel was at the hardware store, Stuckey Blue's girl come along chattin' up Haskel, flittin' them eyes the way girls will, and when she leaves, I say 'She got a nice hide on her! What you think son?' He says 'Well, I do like her pumps.' 'Me too,' I say, 'a right fine set of pumps. That what they call 'em now days?' Come to find out, that boy was talking about them high heel shoes she wore."

He let this revelation wash over them. She was silent, looking away from him.

He shifted his weight uncomfortably, composing his thoughts before pushing on. "We gonna have to talk about this sometime, you know."

"I don't want to hear no more about it!" Maudine said through clenched teeth.

"Well you're damn sure gonna hear it," Nip flared, "and I reckon right now's as good a time as any."

"Well, go on, say it then," she said setting her jaw, "just say what it is you gotta say against that boy. Don't mean it's right."

He shook his head angrily and wiped the corner of his mouth on his sleeve. "Look, you and me been walkin' around on eggshells for too long where that boy's concerned. Beatin' around the bush the both of us, looking the other way at his strange doings, saying "Old Haskel, well he's just a artist, he's just wired up different or this and that."

He crossed his arms and leaned his back against the pick-up's fender well. "Point is," he said looking away, "that boy's queer as a football bat and its high time we get our head out our asses and face up."

"We don't know that for sure." she said sourly.

"The hell we don't, Maudie. Every other boy around here's off huntin' and fishin' by the time they old enough to shit behind shoes and what was that boy doin'? Huh? You remember?" He spat over his shoulder, shaking his head. "Runnin' around down at the highway dressed up like Mary Pickford or some damn thing, blowin' kisses at truckers, that's what. You remember that?" He wagged his finger at the recollection. "I shoulda knew that boy wasn't right, then."

"He grew right out of that." she said sulkily, though vividly recalling the horror of seeing her son at the age of twelve pancaked in white face make up and lipstick, dressed in one of her old slips, being escorted home by a smirking sheriff's deputy. "Right outta that..."she murmured, "just one of them things kids do, play acting."

The problem was, she recalled, he'd grown right on into something else equally bizarre and inexplicable. It was that screaming hippie woman she'd remembered off the Mike Douglas show, the one who sang about color TV's and Mercedees Benzs and died from taking too many drugs thirty some odd years ago. She could only scratch her head and wonder as Haskel locked himself in his room with her records and screamed along for hours about "Bobby" something, then emerge haggard and spent, eyes swollen and red with tears. He'd go for days at a time without eating or bathing and grew his hair long and stringy. She thought if he'd said "Peace, man. Like wow...freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose," just one more time, she'd have snatched him baldheaded.

"He's a artist, Nip, is all it is," she said, though with less conviction. "It ain't every kid likes to spend his wakin' life trompin' around shootin' up the woods like he ain't got any damn sense."

"Looka here, Maudie, we done run that old horse in the ground. It ain't about that. If the boy don't want to hunt or fish that's his own business. I don't understand it myself but that's for him to decide. What I'm talkin' about is all this other goings on, this dressin' up mess and traipsin' around with them other fruit pies for instance. It's time you and me call a spade a spade. Our son's a fairy."

She pulled a wadded paper towel from her pocket and wiped her brow and sighed, gazing out across the road at the sale barn where a rancher had just pulled up with a load of beef heifers for tomorrow's auction.

"Just cause he's a artist don't make him a fairy, Nip," she reiterated, holding out. "Anymore than you messin' with them dogs makes you a hound. "

"That ain't what I'm talking about," he said quietly. "And you know more'n you're lettin' on."

She watched as the rancher, a tall rangy fellow, lowered the trailer's gate and coaxed and cajoled his cattle down the narrow ramp and into the large wire holding pen where they would eventually be sold for slaughter. As the spindly legged calves scrambled happily along at the heels of their mothers, she thought about her own progeny and then of the quirky nature of the entire human animal. She thought about genetical wiring and its endless possibilities for entanglements and short circuits in the process of reproduction.

"Ain't it enough to worry with, just gettin' a child into this world with ten fingers and toes?" she wondered out loud. She looked at Nip.

" I mean, why you reckon it is people come out the way they do?" she asked him. "I'm talkin' about Lester and Timmy for instance."

"An' Haskel too."

She nodded. "You remember Callie Wickam? Nigra wash woman lived out at Downsville? Helped out when I was expectin' Haskel? Remember what she said?"

"I remember she was dumb as dirt is about all. Always jawin' on about somethin' or 'nother, t'wasn't none of her concern."

"She told me not to pray one way or another for a child except it to be a healthy one. You remember that? Said, 'a child gonnna be what God want him to be, boy or girl, and not to go confusin' that baby by prayin' for a boy when the child in your womb might just be a girl. That where them homosexual come from.' You remember she said that?"

"Like I said, dumb as a stick."

Maudine though, hadn't recalled praying at all, just the perpetual restlessness and deep seated annoyance of finding herself pregnant at the advanced child bearing age of forty five. It was Nip who'd wanted him a boy.

"You want somethin else to eat?" She asked him.

He shook his head and sat up as a young family, Baptists no doubt, flush from church pulled their car onto the lot towards their display and jettisoned two children, still fussily starched, bow-tied and festooned with ribbons. They streamed over to the menagerie of animals, pointing and squealing while the parents coolly examined one of Haskel's hand crafted bird baths. It was a bit too fussy, Maudine had always thought but they sold them by the truck loads, to the Baptists especially, around Easter.

"Let us know if we can help." She trilled over to them, nodding and smiling stiffly.

She watched as the little boy picked up an armadillo whose dull eyes and slack jaw secretly reminded her of Nip. She'd never mentioned it, but it had always made her smile the way Haskel had caught the look just right.

"Put that thing down, ''fore we got to buy it." The little boy's mother chided. Fearing disaster she herded her brood back into the car while the father hung back for a moment pondering the jack ass whose buck teeth and long ears reminded both Haskel's parents of their preacher.

"Look real good in your flower bed." Nip said.

"That's right, be real nice amongst some Shasta daisies in a bed like I got." Maudine said.

The man nodded absently then tromped off to join his family.

"Sell it real cheap..." She said plaintively after him. Normally she would have stepped over and cut off his retreat, chatted the man up, even given him a sob story if it came to it and he would most certainly have left with that jackass in his trunk whether he'd wanted it or not, but today her heart was just not in it.

They watched as the clean wholesome car drove out the parking lot and down the street and she wondered briefly what curves and whammies life held in their future.

"How come you to let him off that easy?" Nip asked. "You seen he wanted it didn't you?"

"Yeah, I seen it." She squinted in the afternoon sun and fanned herself with a cardboard box flap.

"Hell woman," he mumbled.

She set the box flap down suddenly and turned to her husband.

"Nip, I ain't ever asked this, but you don't reckon it was something we done? About Haskel I mean, the way he turned out."

He shrugged and swatted at the dust on his leg. She continued, tears beginning to well in her eyes.

"Preacher told me its a demon in him and that the bible says if Haskle don't repent he's goin to hell because of it. But I can't help but wonder how if it was something we done, how the Lord could take that out on Haskel."

"Preacher's a jackass." Nip said angrily. "Oughta go to hell himself, kickin a family in the teeth that way." He took the tooth pick from his mouth and placed back in his front pocket.

"What if he's right though? Remember him preachin about the sins of the parents visiting on the children?"

"Wouldn't surprise me what that two bit gas bag had to say but you listen here, way Haskel is ain't nothing but fluke of nature, no different than that featherless chicken, Homer Blakeney had hatch out or one of them white gators you hear about once in a great while." He paused a beat, gathering his thoughts. "Hell, I can't explain that b'ass ackwards boy, but you listen here, he's my boy and the Lord saw fit to give him a life to live, ain't that right? Even made him a artist."

She nodded, reluctantly.

"'Course it is, and with all the other meanness in this world, a fellow who don't know where to put his pecker can't be too high on His list of worries, is the way I figure it."

"I reckon." She said after a moment and reached over and took his hand in hers.

They sat for awhile longer in the quiet of the afternoon, hand in hand, watching the shadows lengthen and the sun, a hazy ball of orange, hover over the Sale barn.

"Them Baptists be headed back to church fore' too long." She said, her spirits rising. "See if we can flag us one or two down."

SACRETE STATUES

by