NORMAN GERMAN

THE GIRL AND THE GREEN GAS CAN

     There is a certain beauty about a troubled woman, even if she
is eight years old. Her eyes, hazy with smoke or bloodshot from
lack of sleep, look through you as if they see a part of your soul
you know nothing about. And when they look away, you know
whatever they saw didn’t count for much. You feel very foolish
because you have never suffered, not like she has, and get the urge
to drive to the hard part of town, pick a fight, and get the crap beat
out of you just to feel better.
     The green gas can was a government issue my father brought
back from World War II and placed on the carport of our twobedroom
house, a house that looked exactly like hundreds of other
military bungalows on the east side of Lake Charles, south of
Chennault Air Base. Dad kept the eight-gallon rectangular canister,
a large X embossed on its front, primed for overnight shrimping
trips in Big Lake. I was six and my sister was eight before our
combined strength sprung the clamp on the lid.
     The first time my sister peered into the can, she didn’t come up
for nearly a minute. The mouth of the can circled her head
completely, and I was afraid she had gotten stuck. When I grabbed
her ponytail and pulled her out, she had a big smile on her face and
a glassy look in her eyes. Or rather in her right eye. Over the left
she wore a pink patch that was supposed to exercise her lazy right
eye.
     “Whoo-wee,” she said, “you oughta try this.” So we took turns.
She stayed down for more than a minute each time. On my turn, I
looked and looked into the darkness, trying to figure out what was
so interesting. Just when some red and blue splotches appeared,
she dragged me away.
     “Whoo-boy, that sure smells sweet,” she said. So that’s it, I
thought. Down I went, intending to do some hard sniffing. This
time the colored splotches grew into black-rimmed clouds that
burst and expanded again. When she yanked me up by my collar, I
was dizzy. Sick, in fact. I walked to the planter on the side of the
carport and sat down. Crouching over the can with her pink ruffled
panties peeking out from her black-and-white checkered dress, she
gripped the rim and deeply inhaled. The white hairs on her tanned
legs were brighter than I had ever seen them. Her chest filled up
and collapsed like a pillowcase on Mom’s clothesline. Little shiny
worms swam around in my vision.
     “Ahhhh!” she said when she stood up. It was the same sound
my father made after taking a long pull at the water jug in the
icebox. She stepped back, balanced on one foot like she was
playing hopscotch, teetered for a second, and slapped the
pavement with her tiny bottom.
     “Whee! Don’t you look funny, Cotton Top. He-he-he! Ain’t
that funny? Cotton Top.”
     Mother always called me Cotton Top, but I had never thought it
was funny. It was just my name. Suddenly, it struck me as
hilarious.
     I bent over to examine my sister’s face. It was ragged at the
edges. The worms got skinny and died off. I felt a yell coming that
I couldn’t stop: “Scooby-toots!” I pointed at her lying on the
cement and laughed. “Cotton Top!” she yelled back. We laughed
and pointed until I felt a lemony squeeze under my ears at the back
of my mouth. Then a big ball of sour heat rushed from my stomach
and spewed all over my sister. From the way she acted, this was
the funniest thing that ever happened. For me, the fun was over. I
leaned over the planter and doled another helping onto the
marigolds.
     When Mom came home from work and discovered our crime
with her exquisitely fine-tuned, trouble-sniffing nose, she was mad
as a hornet. Scooby and I had hosed each other off and splashed on
some of Dad’s Aqua Velva but were unable to mask the distinctive
aroma of gasoline and puke. In an atmosphere of guilt and doom,
we ate supper, twirling nervously on the yellow Naugahyde
barstools.
     “Wait’ll your father wakes up and hears about this.”
     As I understood it, Dad usually worked on a train called the
KCS. Sometimes, though, he worked an extra job in the graveyard
at night. “Your father’s working graveyard this week,” Mother
would announce, “so y’all stay outside and play.” Lying in bed, I
tried to imagine him digging in the dark by the light of the silver
railroad lantern he kept in his mildew-smelly work satchel.
     When Mother turned around, Scooby twisted toward me and
sniggered. Dad was always on our side. He was easygoing because
everybody liked him, and everybody liked him because he had
been an All-Star southpaw for Harry Chozen’s Lake Charles
Lakers before TV squeezed the life out of the minor leagues in the
early ’50s. On Saturday nights, Dad took us to Joseph’s Drive-In
for burgers wrapped in wax paper, then to the American Legion
hall on Third Avenue where black men in white tuxedos greeted
him at the door as Mr. Bobby and even twenty years later admirers
still called him one of the Chosen Few. Scooby and I reaped the
benefits of his lingering fame. From the gambling room we were
forbidden to enter, loud, cigar-smoking men kept a steady supply
of orange Nesbitt’s coming our way.
     As soon as Dad woke up, Mom launched her tirade. A woman
of great beauty, with jet-black hair and full, red lips—the type who
marry famous athletes—she could generate a fury that only
disappointed women can muster and only beautiful women get
away with. She had expected to be wafted into a glamorous life of
ease on the tailwind of my father’s blazing fastball, but the Gulf
Coast League collapsed, and now he was a railroad brakeman, and
she was a very unglamorous switchboard operator.
     Dad listened, faintly smiling, as if, despite Mother’s scowl, he
couldn’t wait to hear what we had gotten into this time. Wearing
the same tolerant grin, he would usually tell us what Mother had
told him to tell us. He stepped onto the carport to inspect the can.
We all looked at it together: mother, father, and children—only the
father smiling. When he snapped the lid shut, though, he said,
“Y’all stay away from this can. It’s dangerous, you hear?”
     These were the harshest words he had ever spoken to us. It
seemed to us that he was always working or sleeping, and when he
sat on the couch in his underwear, waking up with Lucky Strikes
and a pot of Seaport coffee, he would silently entertain us by
pulling dollar bills out of cigarettes or making quarters disappear
up his nose, so I knew he meant business when he spent that many
words telling us the can was dangerous.

                                         * * *

     There’s something about childhood that makes us all
accomplices. Even while disapproving, we enjoy watching the
delinquencies of our friends and brothers and sisters. So when
Scooby got bored after school one day the next week and asked me
to help her pry the lid off, I said, “No way, José,” and sat on the
edge of the planter waiting to see what would happen. She finally
popped the lid with a butter knife. Down she went, surfacing now
and then to say, “Ahhhhh!”
     The sweet, mellow odor of gasoline reached my nostrils, but I
was not tempted. The sickness I recalled overpowered the allure of
the pleasing fragrance. I was awakened from my meditation on
pleasure and pain by the sound of my sister’s head hitting
concrete. I thought, That’s it, she’s dead. I shook her and shook
her, begging her to wake up. “Please don’t be dead,” I repeated
many times, already imagining the scene. I would be standing over
the pale, lifeless form of my sister while looking way, way up at
my parents, trying to explain how I had sat right there and watched
my own sister kill herself. My face was itchy hot from crying
when Scooby sleepily lifted her unpatched eyelid, her left cheek
smudged with oily grit.
     She spread her arms out to keep from sliding off the carport,
then sat up. “Whoo, that was really something. The last thing you
see is a big blue spring that turns round and round.”
     Mom was out of the question, but I did want to tell Dad what
had happened. He listened to everything we said, serious or not,
and always with a smile. Winners are like that. Somehow, though,
what Scooby was doing kept me quiet.
     For endless days, she and I caught honeybees in Blue Plate
mayonnaise jars in the front yard clover patch or competed to see
who could toss the most clothespins into the rotund, silver-bladed
air vent spinning over the bomb shelter in our back yard. On sunny
afternoons, wearing Chiquita banana stickers on our faces, we
spread out her painted-tin tea set in the shade of the front porch.
There were four settings: one for me, one for Scooby, one for a
large, unkempt wooden doll she called Philodendron, and one for
Pheety, her imaginary friend she held long conversations with. I
looked hard where Pheety was supposed to be sitting. Although
Scooby thanked her for saying she liked the tea and poured some
more, which was also imaginary, I never saw Pheety lift a cup.
     This, my first grade year, was a puzzling time for me. Everyone
seemed to take as common knowledge things I hadn’t the faintest
clue about. Like “Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease
porridge in the pot, nine days old.” What the heck does that mean,
I wondered. Since everybody else seemed to know, I was
embarrassed to ask. So it didn’t surprise me that I could neither see
nor hear Pheety.
     In those, my ignorant days, I spent most of my time thinking of
ways to keep Scooby’s mind off the green gas can. I did whatever
she wanted. I even began to talk with Pheety, who day by day grew
more real to me. She had three children, and her husband was
away for months at a time hunting in Africa. She had terrible
headaches and often talked about wanting to go to the moon with
the first astronauts. She liked cats, but not dogs. She occasionally
cursed.
     On Friday nights, we folded the couch down and stayed up
with Dad eating popcorn and watching Alfred Hitchcock in the
dark. At the scary parts, Scooby buried her head in a blanket,
crying, “Save me, Daddy, save me!” On her knees, she covered her
head with her arms and thrust her butt in the air. From the time she
was a baby, we were told, she had done this. By a long series of
mutations, the name Scooby-toots had evolved from the original
Doodlebug. Dad said she had looked like a little doodlebug balled
up in her crib. Mostly, Dad called her Scooby-toots, but now and
then he switched to Scootle-toots, Tootle-bug, Buggy-scoots,
Tooty-boots, and dozens of other variations whose bafflingly
similar differences ran through my head at night.
     Long days passed, the green can a tiny fear in the back of my
mind like an ominous hole covered by weeds deep in center field.
Then, without warning, Scooby would be draped over the can, and
my heart would surge with Hitchcock fear. Soon, I noticed a
pattern. Every time she had a bout with the gas can, she was
wearing the black-and-white checkered dress. So whenever I saw
her put on the dress, I tried to engage her in one of the pressing
duties of post-war childhood: picking up the long metal bristles
behind the street sweeper, or catching mosquito hawks by their
drooping wings as they perched on rosebush thorns, or riding our
bikes into the eye-stinging fumigation and cumulous exhaust that
billowed from the weekly mosquito truck.
     Or I tried other distractions.
     “Pheety wants to come over for tea this afternoon,” I attempted
one day when I found her embracing the can. She looked up at me
with a murky, nearly-closed eye.
     “You dope, Pheety ain’t even real.”
     This was my sister. This was my dad’s Scooby-toots, her cruel
words forced by the evil in the green can.
     I whimpered, “Why do you do it, Scooby?” A lazy, heavy smile
spread slowly over her face.
     “When you reasha certain point, smells like wallamelon.”
     The episodes grew progressively worse. This time, she passed
out and peed in her pants and went around all day smelling like a
rest-stop potty.
     It was to be a bad year for Scooby-toots. At recess one day, she
tried to skip two bars on the horizontal ladder. She was doing fine
until half way, when she lost her rhythm and fell, breaking her arm
in three places. At home, she usually washed the dishes standing
on a wooden footstool while I dried them from a dinette chair. For
the next couple of months, I had to wash to keep her cast from
getting wet. One day we were going through our paces, talking and
laughing. I handed her a plate, and when it wasn’t taken from my
hand, I almost dropped it. Scooby was looking out the window, far
away.
     “Oh, Lord, life is so hard,” she said. “I could really use some
gaz-o-line about now.” Hitchcock horror gripped my throat. Then
she sang. “Born to lose, I’ve lived my life in the sink. Bor-horn to
lose, and now I’m loozin . . . you-hoooo.” She sighed, her eyes still
far away out the window. A long tear trailed from her good right
eye down to her chin, where it gathered in a fat, quivering globe
and dangled for a while before dropping into the sink.
     Then she looked at me with a big smile. “That was good,
wasn’t it? I just learned how to do that. All you have to do is keep
your eyes open, no matter what, even if they burn, and the tears
start falling like rain.”
     So she was acting. I felt like laughing and crying at the same
time. A few more days of relief.
     Friday after school, I was beating banana leaves with an old
fishing rod when from around the corner I smelled gasoline. Oh
God, please, no, I thought. When I reached her, she was already
drunk.
     “Scooby, please stop it! You’ll get hooked like a dope fiend.”
     She looked up, said, “Oh, thassa bunsha bool-shit!” and bowed
her head once again in strange devotion to the green can.
     “I’m gonna tell Mom!”
     “I dare you,” she said with a metallic echo, her head still
engulfed by the can. “You do and I’ll crack your skull with this
cast.” She waved the L-shaped weapon above her head like a
fiddler crab’s mutant claw.
     “I will tell. And I double-dog dare you to hit me.”
     “Triple-dog dare you,” she said, lifting her face from the rim.
     “Four-dog dare!”
     “Five-dog!”
     “Six, seven, eight!” we said together. Then she let out that
high-pitched scream only little girls can produce. She was going to
kill me.
     I ran alongside the house and cut into the banana trees at the
corner. I heard her slapping the leaves behind me. I jumped over
an azalea bush and dove through the space under Dad’s oil-drum
barbecue pit. “Whung-klang!” I heard behind me. It was the
sickening sound of a human body hitting metal, followed by
plaster on metal.
     Dazed, Scooby sat with her legs splayed out like a Raggedy
Ann doll propped on a bed. Blood was spattered all over her dress
and cast.
     “Don’t just stand there, you stupid, get Dad!” Dad had worked
in the graveyard the night before and was asleep in the back
bedroom. While running to get him, I marveled at how calm and
adult-sounding Scooby was, like she wasn’t drunk or hurt or
anything.
     Whenever we injured ourselves, as soon as Mother found out
we were all right, she got mad. “What were y’all doing? You were
into that gas can again, weren’t you?” We never even had to reply.
Mom knew the answers to her own questions. When she started
yelling at Dad, he said, “Lighten up, Honey, it’s just a phase.”

                                             * * *

     I’m looking at a black-and-white photo propped on my desk.
It’s Easter. I’m wearing black shorts, a white shirt with dotted bow
tie, and a toothless smile. Scooby is wearing a frilly dress and the
pink eye patch. Her upper lip is bruised and distended. The spider
beneath her nose is made of stitches poking from a black scab. Her
Easter basket is hooked on the blood-stained cast. She is not
smiling. Our feet are cut off, and we’re way over on the right edge
of the picture.

                                             * * *

     Every five seconds for the next couple of weeks, Scooby made
a nasty sucking noise to clear her mouth of the continuously
flowing saliva. These were her lowest days. After school, at the
kitchen sink, I washed and rinsed while she dried and stacked.
Thoughtfully, she expounded her views of life, pausing every few
seconds to vacuum the spit down her throat.
     She would talk awhile and then, as if to give a musical
demonstration of her pain, sing songs we heard in Dad’s big black
Plymouth at night on our way to the American Legion hall. The
glowing green numbers and red lines that lit up the dash evoked in
me a sad anticipation for the sharp taste of orange and the raucous
sounds of men chanting those mysterious phrases—earned run
average, knuckler, low and inside, grand salami, tailing fastball,
ground rule double, no-hitter, Triple-A. The Big Show. I
remembered the songs well enough to know Scooby wasn’t getting
all the words right and often mixed several songs into one, but
somehow her words seemed better than the original.
     “I’m crazy for crying and I’m crazy for crying and I’m crazy
for crying . . . ah-hall day.” Patsy Cline.
     “Oh, baby, why’d you leave? I’m waltzing the floor over you,
I’m so hurt what can I doo-hoo? Oh, come back and walk across
Texas with me.” Ernest Tubb.
     “I’ve loved and lost again, oh, what a crazy world we’re li-
hivving in. Oh, if you’ll come back, I’ll shine your shoes again.”
Patsy Cline. I don’t know where the shoes came from.
     “Moon river, wider than a smile. I’m crossing you in style, toodaaay.
And that lucky ole sun just keeps rolling a-huh-waaay.”
Andy Williams and Ray Charles.
     Her short versions of the songs made me very sad. Such pain
coming from the voice of a little girl.
     In late April, her stitches were removed. Soon, she took to
striking matches, blowing them out, and, after they had cooled,
eating the black residue. “Mmmm, tastes like Saltine crackers,”
she said. Whether her new habit was related to the gasoline
compulsion or not, I never knew, but I prayed she wouldn’t strike
the matches around the green can. I had heard of people sitting in
recliners or just walking along and suddenly bursting into flames.
This, Scooby told me, was called spontaneous combustion, and I
feared one day finding by the gas can a small pile of cinders that
would be the charred remains of my daring sister, who had finally
pushed her luck too far.
     A week later, I came upon Scooby flirting with disaster. She
would sniff from the green can, then light a match, blow it out, and
suck on the black, crusty ashes. I yelled at her from a safe distance.
“Please don’t do that, Scooby, you might spontaneously combust!”
Unmoved by my pleas, she went right on striking matches and
sniffing until she got woozy and crawled off the carport onto the
lawn and fell asleep in the grass. Don’t ask me how, but Mom
found out and spanked us both with a fly swatter, like I was
responsible, too.
     Dad was barely out of the car when Mom started a tirade that
carried into the house and dragged on through supper and after.
Most of it we’d heard before, but there were some new things: “If
you hadn’t got drunk every damn time you won or lost, you’d have
signed a Big League contract and we’d be in Boston now instead
of this piss-ant little town. And about that damn hussy down at
Pete’s Bar, don’t think I’m blind or stupid. You keep that up and
I’ll divorce your ass right quick.” On and on it went, right up to
bedtime.
     In our room, standing with her hand on the light switch,
Scooby looked at me, frowning hard. “Something’s cooking
between Mom and Dad. We best make ourselves invisible for a
while.” Then she turned off the light.
     In the dark, I wondered what she meant. Could we, like Pheety,
really make ourselves invisible? As I was fading into sleep,
Scooby, imitating Mom’s argument voice, said, “It’s that damn
Philodendron causing all this trouble. I’m gonna fix his ass, and I
mean the next chance I get.”
     I was awakened that night by Scooby crying in her sleep. I got
in bed with her and woke her up and held her, because she had
done the same thing for me plenty of times.
     The next morning, I found an invitation, scrawled in green
crayon, tucked inside one of my shoes.

                                   Tea Party With Pheety
                                        Saterday Noon
                                          Please Come

     Two days later, after spending the morning netting crawfish at
the ditch, I went to the front porch where Scooby held the tea
parties, but she was nowhere in sight and the dishes weren’t set.
An odor of something burning charged me with Hitchcock fear,
and I ran for the gas can. I reached the side of the house too late.
Scooby was draped over the green can, black smoke billowing
from her slack form.
     Then someone with a water hose pushed me out of the way and
started aiming a feeble spray of water at my dead sister.
     “Scooby!” I yelled.
     She glared at me. “Well, don’t just stand there, you stupid! Go
get the kink out the hose!”
     Laughing and crying, I ran until I traced where the hose was
crimped and opened the flow. Returning to the gas can, I saw a
soggy mass of clothing over the remains of Philodendron.
     “Scooby,” I said. “I thought you was dead! But that’s just
Philodendron.”
     She scornfully looked at me with her one good eye. “You
stupid, that’s Pheety!” She stared at me until her eyes filled with
tears and her bottom lip quivered. “Philodendron killed her
because Pheety wouldn’t let him have a turn sniffing the gas.”
     Scooby ordered me to get a shovel from the storeroom, then led
the way to the field behind our house, carrying Pheety’s remains in
a cardboard box from a case of Jax beer.
     We took turns digging with the unwieldy shovel, and when
Scooby placed Pheety in the hole, she picked up some dirt and
sifted it through her fingers. “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” she
said, “if the fire don’t get you, the smoke must.”
     After Scooby packed the dirt with the shovel, I asked, “If these
are Pheety’s ashes, where’s Philodendron?”
     For what seemed like an hour, she stared right through me with
one eye.
     “You really are ignorant, aren’t you? Philodendron excaped
across the border to Mexico. We’ll have to send a posse after him
and bring him to justice.”
     As confused as I was, I got more confused half an hour later
when Scooby set three places for our tea party and asked Pheety if
she wanted one or two sugar lumps in her tea.
     “Scooby, I thought Pheety died.”
     Exasperated, she said, “You really don’t know anything, do
you? How many times have I told you that Pheety was my
imaginary friend? This,” she pointed, “is Pheety’s evil twin. She
just goes by the same name to fool everybody, but I know the
difference. This Pheety’s my imaginary enemy.”
     This truly amazed me, my sister’s inexhaustible capacity for
making up total nonsense.
     Scooby molted her cast in May and was again able to wash
dishes. I thought there would be more pain, more singing the
blues, more gas sniffing. Instead, she was distracted by her new
interest in hunting down Philodendron in Mexico, which was
located in a stand of pine trees just beyond the ditch where I
crawfished.
     Then I feared the end of school, which would give the can
more time to lure Scooby into its evil snare, but she started
dividing her time between excursions to Mexico and tormenting
her imaginary enemy for clues as to the location of Philodendron’s
hideout.
     In just the first week after school ended, Scooby flushed the
evil-twin Pheety down the toilet, scalped her with an oyster shell,
made her eat mustard on a banana, put sand down the front of her
bathing suit, and made her walk barefoot on fresh, hot blacktop.
Then we gave her a cold so we could put Vick’s salve up her nose
just like Mom did to us.
     I thought there would be no end to this sort of fun.
     But then at the end of July, Scooby was talking about the
beginning of school as if she’d be sent to jail. She started sneaking
Lucky Strike butts from Dad’s ashtray and smoking them till her
eyes were red.
     I thought her next move was going to be for the green gas can.
     A week before school started, Scooby sat the evil Pheety at the
kitchen table with a discarded math book missing its cover and
made her do long division for a whole afternoon. By September,
Scooby no longer wore the pink eye patch. Without the stitches,
cast, and patch, she could have passed for anyone’s little girl.
     Her life as a child derelict was over.
     And the rest of her life was just beginning. Things got better
for a long time. Then worse. Then much better. And so on, until a
month ago, when her life would never get better or worse again.