Chores of Pocket-Money Summer

I earned pocket money helping our neighbor clear out her basement. She was a hoarder, but an interesting one. She had a lot of army surplus equipment, including gas masks and a bomb disposal suit. Everyone called her Sarge. Every hour, she’d call me to the kitchen for lemonade. She always had little clumps of black modeling clay sitting around on the tables and shelves. She said she was an artist and sketched in three dimensions. At the table she smoked Chesterfields, and I rolled pieces of clay into balls and set them in a row. One day she said, “They look like eyes.” Sarge said she’d seen such a thing at the Ohio State Fair as a girl. A sideshow act called Doctor Occulario of the Inner Vision. She and the rubes watched him float his eyeballs out of his head, and on command, gaze down upon the crowd like ping pong drones. She swore she saw them grow, and blink. “But Sarge, how could they blink,” I asked. She only blew a cloud

of Chesterfield over her head. She said, then, the worst part of all, that Doctor Occulario commanded the eyeballs to turn around and look at himself. His empty sockets were black caves.

She stopped and squinted through smoke.  “Don’t assume because I’m crazy, what I say isn’t true.”

“I don’t think you are crazy, Sarge.”

She nodded under the cloud, tilted her head back and blew another cumulus. 

“I believe entire worlds come and go in this smoke. There was a thing about this smoke being a dream, but it is a dream that kills.” She fanned the air. “This is not fair to you. I’m sorry.”

I said it was ok. She opened the kitchen door to air out the room. Cicadas shook the bright air. I pressed my thumb gently into the top of the kneaded eraser, then flipped it for the other side, then the other, urging it into the rounded Mr. Peanut form. I remembered an old sign downtown of Planter’s Peanuts with Mr. Peanut swanky in spats, cane, monocle and top hat. The anthropomorphism of Mr. Peanut was horrifying, his head an Elephant-Man swell. I felt pity and disgust, and the taste of peanuts was nauseating for many years. 

Sarge told me I could keep the gas mask from the basement. It looked at us on the table. “Did you make masks, Sarge? Or wear them? In the war?”

“Oh sure. I did time in the mask factories. A lot of us did.”

It wasn’t clear if this was somehow related to defense factories, or civilian factories, or some strange middle ground between the two, which I felt were in a bewildering straddle right now. Sarge said, “Speaking of Occulario, what have your eyeballs been seeing outside of your head?”

I didn’t understand, and she laughed until she coughed. I asked her about the bomb disposal mask and suit in her basement (now in my basement recreation room, on my wall of masks). She said, “Gas, bombs, radiation poisoning. Or as best as they understood radioactivity at the time.” She smacked the tablecloth. “That reminds me!” She went on with the urgency of a smoker struggling to light her cigarette in a whistling wind to tell me she had a lot more work for me in the garage and the basement, if I was interested. Boxes and shelves and crates and footlockers. Riches in the dark. Buried treasures. X marking the spot. 

Gregg Williard’s recent work can be found in Denver Quarterly, Collidescope, The Metaworker, Arcana, and elsewhere. His website address is williardart.com. He lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin.

A Song for Gregg