Free Spoonwood by Ernest Hebert Page A

and you know it, Freddie boy,” Old Crow says.
    â€œDon’t call me that name.”
    â€œAll right, Frederick,” Old Crow says. “Look at Howard—overbearing piggish. He’d kill to advance his trash collection business.” After a pause when I hear the road under my feet, Old Crow says, “Who do you hate the most?”
    â€œPersephone.”
    â€œNo, partner,” says Old Crow. “You don’t hate her. You merely loathe her as she loathes you.”
    â€œIt’s Garvin.”
    â€œIt’s the baby you hate most. Here’s what I propose. Lose the kid, change your name and identity; new, I, you, we will have no guilt for the crimes of the old Frederick Elman. You could mail Birch’s body to Garvin’s law office. That would get their attention.”
    â€œWhat do you mean ‘their’?”
    â€œEverything is about getting attention. Don’t you understand anything? Attention, the quality of it, makes you you.”
    I hear Dad laugh out loud. I laugh, too. Or anyway try to. I’m working on my sense of humor. I’m not sure what’s funny and what’s tragic, but I do enjoy listening to laughter, which strikes me as an interesting thing to do with vowel sounds. I practice laughing every day, not that anybody notices. My grownups often confuse my laugh with calls for food or cries of discomfort, or even the untreatable disorder of infantile hysteria.
    By the time Dad and I reach the interstate highway Dad is drunk and crazed by rage, which has gone from hot to cold. He turns off at the Putney, Vermont, exit, which winds around to a gas station. He stops at the end of the parking lot near the dumpster.He goes into the rear of his truck and comes back with a plastic trash bag. He puts me in the trash bag and lowers the bag into the dumpster.
    â€œSee you later,” he says to nobody.
    It’s hard to breath in the plastic bag, but it’s warm and the darkness is a comfort. I try to voice my ambivalence but am frustrated by sticky plastic on my lips; still, I’m not panicky. After living nine months in a submarine an infant does not fear suffocation. However, from the heat and the taste of my own breath I know something is wrong. I send my thoughts into the deep. The response is almost immediate. I hear Spontaneous Combustion in my head.
    â€œBooze and anger have combined to make your father something other than your father,” he says, no sympathy at all in his tone. “Such swift changes in identity brought on by the accidental collusion of events can happen to any human being. It can happen to you; perhaps it is happening in the storm years hence, where you are waiting for that moment when the chrysalis breaks apart and the new you flies off to bring your kind a major motion picture or, better yet, a snapshot of reality taken with a pinhole camera, an epic[urne] feast of literature or a few delicate[ssen] lines of poetry, something better than your telepathed thoughts to me or your mother, such thoughts being already weaker . . . weaker . . . weaker.”
    I’m about to drive onto the interstate when I see a bent figure by the side of the road, an old man with his thumb out for a ride. Hitched to the back of his knapsack is a never-washed cast iron stew pot.
    I stomp on the brake, stick my head out the window, and holler, “Cooty, what are you doing here?”
    â€œBumming the entry ramps,” says Cooty Patterson. “They won’t let you hitchhike the interstate.”
    â€œGet in. Where you going, old man?”
    â€œBrattleboro, to get on the Amtrak to Texas.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you call Howard or Pitchfork for a ride?”
    â€œGood idea. I never have good ideas.” He gets into the truck. “You look peculiar, Freddie, like you bumped your head. What’s going on?”
    Cooty has always had a sedative effect on me, and the old hermit works his magic now. I’m still