A Short History of a Small Place Page 19

  “Well,” Mr. Eaton said back to him, “just looks to me like somebody’s knocked these bristles loose.”

  “May look that way,” Pinky said, “but I hadn’t knocked them loose. They come loose on their own and stuck all over my window shutters.”

  “Window shutters?” Mr. Eaton said. “You been poking this up between them louvers?”

  “No other way I know of to get the paint there,” Pinky told him.

  “And what you been using to clean the brush with?” Mr. Eaton wanted to know.

  “Varsol,” Pinky said.

  “Varsol?” Mr. Eaton asked him.

  “That’s right,” Pinky said.

  “And painting louvered window shutters.”

  “That’s right,” Pinky said.

  “Uh huh,” Mr. Eaton said back to him, and laid the brush down directly in between them on the countertop. “Well, there’s your problem then. You’ve got bristle stress compounded by an improper solvent, and I don’t know of any brush that’ll hold up under such as that.”

  “Bristle stress?” Pinky said. “That’s right,” Mr. Eaton told him. “Let me show you something.” And Mr. Eaton led Pinky on back to the paint shelf and took up a quart can of tripolene. “Here’s what you been needing. Gentle on the bristles, gentle on the glue that holds the bristles,” and he handed the can to Pinky, who read the backside of it while Mr. Eaton went off down the aisle where he plucked another can off the shelf and handed it to Pinky too. “Linseed oil,” he said. “A man who cleans his brush in tripolene and soaks it in linseed oil won’t ever have a speck of trouble with it.” And as Pinky tried to read the linseed oil can, Mr. Eaton fetched a brand new three-inch hoghair brush off the pegboard on the back wall and stuck the handle of it between two of Pinky’s fingers. “Now I’m going to sell you the tripolene and the linseed oil outright and regular,” he said, “but I’m going to give you this new brush at half.”

  “Half what?” Pinky asked him.

  “Half price,” Mr. Eaton said, and set out for the front counter, leaving Pinky to follow him on up there.

  But Pinky just stayed where he was, Daddy said, and looked at the can of tripolene and at the can of linseed oil and at the new hoghair brush, which was just like the one he already owned but in far handsomer shape, and when Mr. Eaton turned around and discovered he was all by himself at the front of the store Pinky said to him, “You mean I come in here with a week-old brush that’s falling all to pieces and you’re going to sell me a new one?”

  “At half price,” Mr. Eaton said.

  “At half price,” Pinky said right behind him, and then he set the tripolene can and the linseed oil can on the floor, laid the brush across the top of them, and made for the door. And when he got to the front counter he picked up his own bristle-stressed and improperly solvenated paintbrush, Daddy called it, and said to Mr. Eaton, “I don’t believe I’ll be needing a new brush this afternoon. Seems I might be traveling to Eden. Seems I might have some business there.”

  “Eden?” Mr. Eaton said, and commenced to rub his head again.

  “Seems so,” Pinky told him.

  So Daddy said Pinky got the brush for nothing and linseed oil and tripolene for half, which Daddy supposed did not seem like much of a victory on the surface but was in fact a fairly staggering concession from a man who considered hardware to be the glue of the universe and who wore his creed on the front plateglass for folks to gawk at. And so after the paintbrush imbroglio, which Daddy said is what Pinky called it, it was Throckmorton/Epps, Throckmorton/Guilford Creamery, and Throckmorton/Eaton, which amounted to two Findings and one Settlement. Now as far as Pinky himself was concerned the paintbrush imbroglio advanced him most considerably in the public mind, especially once he set back in to painting the shutters with what folks called the fruits of the dispute, or with one of the fruits of the dispute anyway, which would be the paintbrush, while he kept the other two fruits in the crawlspace under the house until evening when it was time to clean up and he got the whole crop together. Daddy said throughout most of a Saturday or towards twilight during the week people would pass by Pinky’s granddaddy’s and Pinky’s daddy’s and now Pinky’s house and they would find Pinky in the frontyard with one of the shutters he’d taken from its hooks and leaned against an elm tree, and Daddy said people would think to themselves how pleasant it must be to get satisfaction, how proper and fitting it must feel to get a finding or a settlement, and Daddy said some people even began to think that maybe there were worse things to be than a Throckmorton.

  So Pinky had advanced himself in Neely and had become fairly well thought of by way of his two proceedings and one imbroglio, and even though he didn’t go to court again or even get imbroglioed anymore before the mayor’s monkey hosed him down Pinky did manage to surrender an appreciable degree of public good will in an episode that had nothing whatsoever to do with jurisprudence. Daddy said near about midway between Throckmorton/Eaton and Throckmorton/Pettigrew, which were themselves slightly over a year apart, Pinky engineered what Daddy called the great pigeon fiasco, which Daddy said was probably a fairly good idea at the beginning but turned itself into a fiasco almost entirely because Pinky was Pinky. The trouble was the pigeons, Daddy said, and the pigeons were at the post office where they roosted on the windowsills. Now when Pinky worked the stamp window he wasn’t bothered much by the pigeons since the stamp window was far enough removed from the front of the building to be nearly out of earshot of all the cooing and scratching around that the pigeons did there. But once Pinky got promoted to route supervisor he took an office on the second floor where he had his own window and his own windowsill and his own assortment of pigeons and pigeon droppings.

  Daddy said there has never been any great hue and cry against pigeons in Neely, and he didn’t imagine Pinky started out much less inclined towards them than anybody else. He said pigeons simply aren’t the sort of thing people tend to get worked up over. They walk through them when they have to and feed them when they want to, and Daddy said as for the pigeons themselves they generally aren’t even the slightest bit engaging and don’t offer hardly anything to ponder or admire except maybe the near miraculous way they have of turning four ounces of seed and breadcrumbs and hulled peanuts into two pounds of pigeonshit, which mostly gets left on windowsills or on Colonel Blalock’s sword or the top of his head and so is generally removed enough to be wondered at without having to be smelled too. So Daddy said as far as he could tell, nobody much in Neely has ever been charmed to tears by a pigeon. But then nobody much had ever been set into a rage by one either, at least not until Pinky who moved upstairs assuming he would be alone there and then discovered that he wasn’t. What he thought would be a private office turned out to be a sort of duplex with him on the inside of the glass carrying on postal service business and anywhere from one to a dozen pigeons on the outside of the glass carrying on nature’s business in addition to the usual preening and squawking and gurgling at each other the way pigeons do.

  Daddy said Pinky couldn’t stand the commotion right off, didn’t even have to wait not to like it, and he spent the best part of his first week upstairs walking back and forth from his desk to the window where he would tap on the glass with his finger and so spook the pigeons off the sill. But soon enough, of course, Pinky saw that this was no way for a thinking man to do things and so took himself down to the post office basement where he hunted up an old mophandle and some twine and rigged himself a window-tapping device by suspending the mophandle horizontally from the ceiling and near enough to his desk so that he could draw it back without having to get up and then let it loose to swing against the window glass like a battering ram. And at first, Daddy said, every time the rounded end of the mophandle thunked against the pane the pigeons liked to killed themselves getting away, and after a day or two a thunk from the mophandle would still empty the window sill but the pigeons were a little more casual about it than they had been previously, and after a solid week of near constant thun
king all the pigeons who had any claim to Pinky’s windowsill got to the point where they knew nothing was coming aside from the thunk itself and so didn’t bother to go anywhere but just sort of looked at the mophandle and appeared rather annoyed on account of it. So whereas Pinky started out by swinging the thing back and letting it loose, he began pushing it some to get a louder report, and once the pigeons got accustomed to that he pushed it harder still, and once the pigeons got accustomed to that he threw it once and it sailed on through the window light and dangled against the side of the building but did drive the pigeons off the sill temporarily.

  So Pinky gave up on the mophandle, Daddy said, and instead consulted on the matter with Mr. Donzo Scales, the post office janitor and handy man who, at the time of the pigeon fiasco, had been in the government’s employ for just shy of half a century and appeared to get by very comfortably on his wages since in the course of the years he had managed to become nearly all stomach. Daddy said around Neely Mr. Donzo had come to be known as Lawd Scales because most every time he opened his mouth it was either lawd yes or lawd no or lawd something or other, and when Pinky got with him about the pigeons Mr. Donzo said lawd no he didn’t know just what to do about them, but lawd he guessed he’d think on it, and lawd yes he’d come up with something, which he did, Daddy said, and almost immediately. Mr. Donzo cut a piece of three-quarter-inch plywood into a rectangle the size of Pinky’s windowsill and then hammered a couple of hundred nails through it, Daddy said, so that it looked like a swami’s bed. Then he carried it up to Pinky’s office and put it in the sill and him and Pinky stood back from the window some and watched the pigeons try to land on it, which they could not do at first with any sort of success and so they would beat and flap and hover all around the thing and attempt to make out just what in the world it was. Of course, Daddy said, all the beating and flapping and hovering made more of a racket than any sillful of pigeons had managed to stir up previously, but Pinky’s and Mr. Donzo’s view of it was that as soon as the pigeons realized they could not sit very restfully atop the pointy ends of two hundred nails they would give over Pinky’s windowsill for some flatter, less pointy place. So Pinky put up with all the increased flutter and hubbub, abided it, Daddy said, not exactly optimistically and serene but with the aid of an assortment of threats and abusive phrases which he would throw up the sash and deliver to any departing pigeons and which Daddy said were absolutely unrepeatable but extremely creative and were usually punctuated by “Goddamwellbetter-leave” and the sound of the panes rattling as Pinky slammed the sash shut.

  And in the middle of the second week most of the commotion did die down, Daddy said, but unfortunately for Pinky it was just the beating and the flapping and the hovering that went away and not the pigeons who did not give up Pinky’s new spiked windowsill but simply adapted to it. After a full ten days of thorough experimenting the pigeons figured out that they could latch onto the outside row of nails with their little feet and then lower themselves onto the points and sit there on their stomachs without hardly any discomfort. So when the beating and flapping and hovering left off, the preening and squawking and gurgling picked up again, and Pinky could hardly sit down at his desk from shooing off one batch of pigeons when he’d look up to find a half dozen new ones lolling on the tip ends of the nails like Asian mystics. According to Daddy this is the best illustration he has ever come across of why the world is thick with pigeons, and it is and ever has been his theory and hypothesis that if a man could somehow manage to crossbreed a pigeon with a mule he’d have himself an absolutely indestructible creature.

  So the piece of nailed plywood wasn’t really doing the trick, Daddy said, but Pinky stuck with it for a full week after the pigeons began to occupy the nail points just in case they were not actually comfortable there but had instead all agreed to suffer for the sake of antagonizing him. Daddy said Pinky had simply begun to suspect more of pigeons than they were able to be guilty of, and when he’d enter his office in the morning and switch on the light whatever pigeons might be littered across the spiked windowsill would glance at Pinky with one eye and then coo and rustle enough among themselves to make his ears burn until lunchtime. So the pigeons got next to Pinky, Daddy said, and soon enough he became dissatisfied with merely shooing them off the sill and began to speculate on and devise a plan for the capture of a single specimen to be flushed down the men’s room toilet as an example to the others, notwithstanding Mr. Donzo’s assurances that no toilet in the building could effectively accommodate anything larger than a sparrow. But even before Pinky had entirely formulated his scheme, actually even before he had halfway finished all the speculating and devising that was called for, he slipped out of his chair and onto the floor one afternoon when the windowsill was particularly bustling with pigeons and crawled around the end of the desk and by the file cabinets along the wall and snuck undetected all the way to the window jamb where of a sudden he got up on his knees, flung open the sash, and made any number of desperate and lunging attempts to snatch a pigeon out of the air, all of which were unsuccessful but one of which, according to Mrs. Greenly, caused the trouble directly while Pinky held that three of the pigeons in conjunction were completely responsible, to which Mrs. Greenly said it didn’t matter anyway since the effect on Sweetums was exactly the same in either case, the effect having been caused by, Daddy said, the nailed piece of plywood, which, pigeons or Throckmorton, got knocked off the windowsill, fell onto the post office steps and bounced end over end down to the sidewalk where it hit pointy side foremost and very nearly aerated Mrs. Greenly’s schnauzer who had not been the same ever since Casper Epps kicked him and who got worse instantly and lit out across the street and into the square with Mrs. Greenly chasing behind him hollering,

  “Come back, Sweetums, come back to Momma,” and the effect itself being, Daddy said, one frantically quivering Jump of schnauzer flesh which Mrs. Greenly hauled on into the post office with her as evidence in her complaint. And after she had finished with the two employees at the stamp window, and after she had finished with the bigger wheels upstairs, and after she had finished with the post office in general, Pinky and Lawd Scales together carried the nailed board into the basement and deposited it behind the heat plant.

  And Daddy said once Mrs. Greenly and Sweetums had left for home and once the nailed board had been safely done away with and once the pigeons had repopulated the windowsill, Pinky closed himself up in his office again where he allowed himself a half hour to stew over the circumstances of the afternoon, and after considerable mental turmoil and distress Pinky decided that the pigeons had caused him enough humiliation already to warrant anything he might see fit to do to them. So he gave Mr. Donzo a pocketful of post office money and sent him over to the FCX after a sack of any sort of poison that might be potent enough to do away with a pigeon and shortly thereafter Mr. Donzo returned with an eight pound bag of rat killer which the clerk had told him was of course designed for rats but would polish off any sort of vermin, of which he considered a pigeon to be one. And Daddy said along with the rat killer the clerk had provided Mr. Donzo with precise instructions on how to portion it out and Mr. Donzo repeated them word for word to Pinky, or as near to word for word as he could recall, and Pinky listened very close to him and said, “Alright,” once Mr. Donzo had finished, and then proceeded to distribute exactly half as much simply because Pinky was Pinky and didn’t figure there was any call to be extravagant, even with rat killer. It was Mr. Donzo that figured pigeons to have enough on the ball not to eat pure and undisguised poison, and so it was Mr. Donzo that got sent after a box of oatmeal, part of which he distributed on top of what windowsills Pinky had already baited and the rest of which him and Pinky mixed in with poison itself before they put it out on what windowsills remained. So by the time Pinky and Mr. Donzo got done with the oatmeal and got done with the rat poison, the post office was nearly one hundred percent vermin proofed, and Pinky left for the evening supposing he’d return the following day, pick up
the little feathered corpses off the sills, and then go on with his business un-plagued for awhile, and Daddy said Mr. Donzo probably supposed much of the same thing.

  According to Daddy, the morning of the great pigeon fiasco dawned bright and calm and even before the bald Jeeter had scrambled up Pinky’s eggs, half the town was out in the daylight taking the air, so when the commotion kicked up it had an audience that Daddy said was already extremely thronglike long before Mr. Donzo got around to calling the sheriff and the fire chief, probably before he ever thought he would have to.

  Daddy said Pinky stopped dead before he ever started out across the square and looked at the crowd and at the pump truck and at the top of the sheriff’s hat, which is all he could see of him, and then at Mr. Donzo, who had momentarily set onto the pavement the tin trashcan he’d been carrying with him up and down the street and who had commenced to wave his arms over his head and scream, “Lawd Lawd, Mr. Pinky, Lawd Lawd!” Daddy said the air all around and above Mr. Donzo was thick with pigeons that had bailed off the post office windowsills in twos and threes and were plummeting earthward and expiring, Daddy called it, against the pavement. And Daddy said once Mr. Donzo left off waving and Lawd Lawding, he took up the trashcan by the handles again and attempted to run under and catch as many pigeons as he possibly could which turned out to be no pigeons whatsoever since Mr. Donzo could not very agilely carry both the trashcan and his own stomach and since he could not get well underway after one pigeon without seeing four more in four different directions and setting out after them too, which meant that Mr. Donzo got no pigeons at all and hardly went anywhere. And Daddy said once Pinky made his way through the crowd and stepped into the street, Mr. Donzo stopped from his pigeon collecting long enough to say, “Lawd Lawd, Mr. Pinky, we done it now,” and according to Daddy for a moment or two it looked like Mr. Donzo might expire against the pavement along with the pigeons.