DENNIS VANNATTA

Strict Accounting

LARRY CRENSHAW WAS DOING ALL right with his life until something happened when he was working at Foley Industries over in Memphis.    Foley did a lot with defense contracts, and Larry had to have a security clearance—no problem since he’d gotten out of the army with a good record.  But then something happened involving the Memphis Police Department, and Larry lost his security clearance, and his job, too, of course.  He never told even his parents all the particulars.  It was nobody’s business but his own.
            He moved back in with his parents in the white clapboard house he was born in, on Sardis Road just south of Little Rock, where he spent a solid year looking for a decent job.  But a man who’s lost his security clearance can’t be trusted with any more than flipping burgers—that’s what Larry himself said.  He’d say it defiantly with his head up and chest out, looking you right in the eye.  But it was a hard posture to maintain.  In a moment he’d sag, his back warping around that hump that became more pronounced over the years, like a man who knew his life was over.  That was in 1980, and Larry was twenty-four.
            So you could divide Larry’s life almost perfectly around the incident in Memphis.  The first half you’d think the more important, certainly the richer of the two, with its childhood joys and sorrows, adolescent crushes, JV baseball, his first car, then the army signal corps and some good times in Panama and West Germany.  But Larry didn’t see it that way.  He had a hard time remembering that early stuff; it seemed to belong to a different life, a different person.  The only thing important to Larry was Memphis, then afterward on Sardis Road.  Of that, he kept a strict accounting.
            “I keep track of everything,” he said to his father once.  This was in reference to flashlight batteries, two of which Larry “borrowed” from the pack of six Duracells above the old man’s workbench.
            “Keep it up here, huh?” his father said, tapping his head with a forefinger.
            Larry just smiled as if there was much he could say, if he only would.
            They didn’t find out what “keeping track” meant until years later when his father bought a little mobile home—one of those old-timey silver jobs that look like an upside down bathtub—and parked it behind the house.  It was for Larry.  As far as his parents were concerned, Larry could stay as long as he wanted right there in the bedroom that had been his since he was out of the crib.  But they worried that a grown man in his thirties would feel bad about still living his parents’ house.  His pride was so easily wounded.
            That same fierce and tender pride might cause him to reject the gift of the mobile home, though.  At least that’s what his mother thought.  But Larry came home that evening from the Chelsea Apartments where he was doing some part-time maintenance work, took one look at the mobile home, and before he’d even seen the inside said, “This is for me?  Hot dog!  How much did it set you back, Ray?”
            When Larry returned home from the debacle in Memphis, his father had insisted Larry call him by his first name from then on.  He wanted Larry to think of himself as an equal, not some man-child leaching off his daddy.
            “Don’t worry about it, Larry,” Ray said.
            “I ain’t worried about a thing,” Larry said.  “I just want to know how much it cost.”
            “Aw, it was just a little over four thousand, a real steal.  Has some rust spots and needs a little work, but we’ll have it in shape in no time.”
            Larry nodded:  “Sounds like a good deal.  Four-thousand and what, exactly?”
            Ray found the bill of sale on the telephone stand where the junk mail piled up.
            “Four thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars.”
            “Four two five oh.  Gotcha.”
            Larry disappeared into his bedroom.  On a whim—his parents usually treated his bedroom as forbidden territory—his mother followed him in.  He fished a royal blue spiral notebook out of his chest-of-drawers, flipped it open, and began to write.  Then he closed the notebook with a definitive pop.
            “What’s that?” his mother said.
            Startled, Larry whirled.  “What’s what?”
            Nodding at the notebook:  “That.”
            “This?  My accounts, of course.”
            “What do you mean, Larry—your ‘accounts’?”
            Larry looked at his mother with a puzzled frown.  “You mean—?” he started to say, then abruptly turned, knelt, and reached under his bed. His father came into the room.  Then Larry stood up, a stack of spiral notebooks clutched to his chest.  He held them out, first to his father, then mother.
            “You really think I’ve been living here all these years without keeping track?  I keep track of everything.”
            His mother took the top notebook off the stack.  On the yellow cover, written with a Sharpie, was a year:  1990.  Inside was a column of dates beginning with Jan. 1, followed by notations—always “breakfast,” “lunch,” and “supper” but sometimes additional entries such as “razors” and “underwear.”  Beside each entry was a figure in dollars and cents.  A few pages into the notebook was a summary for January with other notations, all in caps for RENT, UTILITIES, COOKING, CAR RENTAL, and so on, followed by a GRAND TOTAL DEBIT and a GRAND TOTAL CREDIT.  She flipped to the last page of the notebook where she found the final entry:

                        TOTAL OWED PARENTS FOR 1990 — $3,916.27

            Larry was explaining how it all worked, debits on the front and credits on the back of each page, what the total debit was for the going on twelve years he’d lived at home, how long he figured it’d take him to pay it all off once he found a decent job, etc.  But before he could finish, his mother pushed the notebook at him, put her hand over her eyes, and stumbled from the room.  Ray followed her.

*

Larry considered the move to the “tin can,” as he called the mobile home with equal parts derision and affection, the biggest event of his life post-Memphis—not because it signaled greater independence or some new relationship with his parents but because it was the largest figure in his account books.  In one bat of an eye his ever-mounting debt had leaped an addition forty-two-fifty, more than he’d ever managed in credits for a whole year.  And earning hard cash through part-time jobs—mowing the yard, running errands, doing odd-jobs around the house—was becoming more and more difficult as the gaps in his employment record became wider and more frequent.  Not that he ever volunteered such information in job interviews, but it often happened that some banty-rooster of a manager would give him the third degree over a chicken-shit, minimum-wage job, and Larry wasn’t going to lie about it.  Now, with the mobile home added to his debts, for the first time Larry began to worry that he’d never be able to pay his parents off.
            The years passed, with Larry spending most of his time in the “tin can.”  He’d cook oatmeal for himself for breakfast and eat Sunday dinner with his parents.  At all other meals he’d appear in the kitchen at about the time his mother was finished cooking, load up a plate for himself and head back to the tin can, where he’d first record the estimated cost of the meal under the debits, then eat whatever was on the plate while he watched his 13-inch color Sony.  He’d bought it back in Memphis, but it still worked fine.  You couldn’t beat a Sony.
            He didn’t enjoy his life.  Just like poverty or poor health, boredom can grind a man’s soul.  Add loneliness, and Larry’s life on Sardis Road was a mill that ground him exceedingly fine.
            He’d spend days on end without leaving the half-acre of land where the house and mobile-home stood.  If he was very lucky he’d find some part-time job that’d last for a few months, at most.  Or he’d do an occasional odd-job for Lola Smith, a hefty widow-woman who lived by herself across the road in a white clapboard house almost identical to his parents’, or some day labor for Mel Seifert on his farm a quarter-mile down the road.
            There you have it, years at a time:  a stretch of part-time work, odd jobs, day labor.  A lot of watching that Sony.  And keeping strict accounts, of course.  That’s all she wrote, podna.

*

On December 31, 1999, midnight approaching, fireworks going off and gunshots cracking up and down Sardis Road, Larry looked back over the ‘90’s and concluded that, if he were keeping a diary instead of an account book of the decade, other than moving in to the mobile home there were only two events he’d bother to record.
            The first occurred in the summer of 1993.  Larry had never been one to go out on the town much, but every few months the urge would take him and he’d visit a tavern or two, drink a couple of beers, check out the ladies.  (It never went beyond looking.  What would be the point, with all his debts?)  It doesn’t take much for things to go wrong on Sardis Road, hot summer nights, a bar full of good ol’ boys pounding that beer.  “Hey, there’s ol’ Crenshaw, still livin’ with his mommy and daddy!”  It wasn’t until the next day, looking over his copy of the police report, that Larry realized the guy was Eric Gorman, who Larry had played ball with on the McClellan High J.V.  Larry had whipped up on him pretty good.  Eric was slouched over on the curb behind the ambulance the last time Larry saw him, out of the back window of the patrol car.  Eric didn’t press charges, though, and Larry was released later that night to his parents.
            Back at home, his mother was almost jubilant:  “That’s it!  That’s what happened!  Our boy never was the kind to take much off anybody.  Somebody pushed him a little too far, and Larry popped him, and then the police got involved.  That’s it in a nutshell.”
            Although she didn’t say so, Larry knew that his mother was referring to the incident in Memphis. She was desperate that it be something heroic, sign of an iron will, a spirit not to be beaten down by man or law.  He understood, but it made him so sad that for weeks afterwards he never left the property.  And he never went to a tavern again.
            The second memorable event of the ‘90’s was the death of his father, October 1, 1995.  Ray hadn’t been in ill health as far as Larry knew, although the Crenshaws never went to a doctor for checkups or anything fancy like that.  He was only fifty-nine when he dropped dead one morning on the Cardboard Container Mfg. glue line.
            Larry missed his father, of course, but the chief material result of his death was an immediate improvement in Larry’s economic situation.  With his father gone Larry had to take on many more duties around the house, and in the years following 1995 credits almost equaled debits in his account books.
            Almost, but not quite.  The debt was still there, thousands and thousands of dollars, and the possibility of it shrinking seemed to fade with the years.  Worse, now it was just him and his mother.  Larry lived in fear of walking into a gas station or store somewhere and there would be Eric Gorman, and Eric would say, “Hey, here’s ol’ Larry Crenshaw, still living with his mommy!”  For some reason, a forty-odd-year-old man living with his mother seemed so much worse than one living with his parents.
            The shame of it all twisted him.  He walked with his head down, with a scowl and a slouch that made him appear hump-backed.
            He was hard to live with, apparently, for one day for no reason that he could tell his mother put her face in her hands and burst out crying.  He was too stunned even to ask her what was wrong, but she told him anyway:  “You could think about somebody other than yourself sometime, Larry!  Couldn’t you just once think of somebody other than yourself?”
            Larry tried to reconstruct the last few minutes to see what had brought this on, but there seemed to be no good explanation.  And because he could find none, suddenly he was angry.  “Who do I have to think about, huh?  Who?  I’ve got nobody in my life, nobody!”
            His mother just kept on crying.

*

She began to die sometime in 2001.  At first she thought it was just bad indigestion, and Beano did seem to help some.  She swore by it.  When the Beano stopped doing the trick, she wrote it off to “female trouble”—“problems with the plumbing” was the way she described it to Larry.  Even then, though, she suspected it was something worse.  Still, it took blood in her stool and pain bad enough to double her over before she’d see the doc.  She needed some tests.  Larry drove her to the hospital, sat in the cafeteria drinking coffee and feeling like he was in a foreign country.
            She had stomach cancer.  It took the better part of two more years for her to die, and she died hard.  Three months before the end, her body started breaking down; nothing worked right.  She went to the hospital for a few days as different things were tried, and then the social worker talked to Larry.  There was nothing more they could do for her.  Medicare wouldn’t pay for more hospital time unless there was some hope of recovery.  The only options now were home care or a nursing home.
            “It’s a death watch now, you mean,” Larry said.
            “I wouldn’t put it like that, but . . .”
            “I’ll take her home.  She wouldn’t want to be in no nursing home.”
            “OK, you can try it for a while, Mr. Crenshaw.  I’ll have the nurse talk to you, give you some instructions.  You’ll have to give her her medications, including shots.  Are you up for that? . . . OK, we can try it, but at a certain point you’re going to need in-home nursing care for your mother.”
            “At what point is that?”
            “When you can’t stand it anymore.”
            Sometimes his mother felt well enough to get up and try to help around the house, but even then she mostly got in the way.  Larry did the cooking, cleaning, and shopping, paid the bills out of his mother’s checkbook, answered the telephone and greeted the ladies from his mother’s church circle and, once a week over the last month, her minister, a sandy-haired, round-faced smiler in his thirties.
            The daily credits were now exceeding the debits in his accounts, although it was impossible she’d live long enough for things to even out.  Such considerations were meaningless in light of what his mother was going through, Larry told himself.  But he couldn’t help feeling bitter.
            Over the last month of her life she became too weak to walk.  Larry would lift her from the bed into the wheelchair and then from the wheelchair into the bathtub or onto the toilet.  The sight of her yellowish flaccid flesh horrified him, and he’d try to avert his eyes.  Soon he was having to bathe her, wipe her after her stools, and then to give her sponge baths in bed and change the bedding when her bowels failed.  She wept; sometimes she screamed; often she didn’t know who he was.
            His mother’s parents were long since dead, and she had no brothers and sisters.  She did have an aunt and a number of cousins in Arkansas, but they had paid their one visit apiece and weren’t due for another one until the funeral.  The ladies from her church circle stopped coming.  Her minister, though, came once a week, stayed long enough to say a prayer as he held her hand in one of his and Larry’s in the other.  His prayers seemed sincere, and Larry lost the desire to punch him in the face.
            After one such visit the minister stopped on the porch and put his hand on Larry’s forearm, gave it a little squeeze.  “You’re a good man, Larry,” he said.  “Not many would do what you’re doing for your mother.  You’re a good man.”
            “I don’t know,” Larry said.  “I don’t know.”
            He felt tears stinging to his eyes—not because his mother was lying in shit in her bed but because he did not know if he was a good man.

*

“You’re a good man, Larry Crenshaw.”
            Larry was so startled he almost dropped the casserole dish Lola Smith had just handed him.
            They were standing on the porch.  Lola came over about every day now, bringing him a casserole or cold fried chicken, a Crockpot full of chili, Jell-O salad, sliced candied apples, homemade pimento cheese spread for sandwiches.  He’d done a few odd jobs for her over the years—tilled up her garden in the spring, cleared brush after the big ice storm, put up a pre-fab metal shed behind her house—but he really didn’t know much about her.  He thought of her as a widow but couldn’t say for sure that was the case.  She worked in town but he didn’t know where, exactly.  He guessed her to be about forty, but he was no judge of ages.  All he knew for sure was that she was hefty, that she went barefooted in warm weather and always had bug-bites on her feet and ankles, and that she’d talk your arm off.
            He’d stand on the front porch cradling whatever dish she’d brought him, holding the screen door ajar with his shoulder while waiting for her to pause long enough for him to mumble an excuse and duck back inside.  Not that he wasn’t grateful for the food, and stepping outside that house even for a minute was a joy akin to a drowning man’s breaking above the waves for one more breath.  But she made him nervous.  He never knew what to say to her.  He half suspected she had designs on him.
            Generally, then, he didn’t pay much attention to what she was saying, but when he heard her call him a good man, echoing almost verbatim the preacher’s words, he was stunned.
            He didn’t know if he was a good man, he told her.  He didn’t really think he was.
            “Sure you are.  Look at all you’re doing for your mother.”
            “I’m just doing what anyone else would do in the same situation.”
            But he knew that wasn’t true.  Most people would ship the dying relative off to a nursing home or at least hire someone to do the dirty work.  Larry didn’t blame them.  Caring for his mother was a daily, hourly, minute by minute horror marked by no tenderness or gratitude but only piss-scented drudgery that tortured both of them.  Yet when the social worker had told him just last week that now was the time, that he couldn’t handle it alone anymore, he’d rejected outright the notion of nursing help.  Why?  Why did he do it?  He didn’t know.
            “You have a tender heart,” Lola said.  “You don’t want to put your mother in anyone else’s hands at a time like this.  You’re a man with a good heart.”
            He looked away, searching the horizon as if the answer were there. 
            “And I know you’re not just trying to save money because Medicare would pay for a nurse,” Lola went on.  “Good thing.  A nurse would cost you four, five hundred dollars a day.”
            “How much?”
            “Four or five hundred, easy—if she lived in, and that’s what you’d need at this point.”
            Caring for his mother had taken so much of his time and energy that Larry hadn’t done his accounts for a week, but that night he spent two solid hours on the books.  The result of his tabulations—in light of this new information from Lola—showed that he was out of the hole.
            “Mom, you now owe me twelve-hundred and twenty-eight dollars,” he told her, holding up the emerald-colored spiral notebook for her to see, like a little boy bringing home a test that he’d gotten an A on.
            But it didn’t seem to make much of an impression on her.

*

Finally, it got to be too much for him.  He gave up and took his mother to the hospital, where she died two days later.
            Larry had never thought about funeral arrangements.  The hospital social worker helped some, but mostly it was Lola Smith.  She took him in hand and walked him through the whole thing.  In the funeral home director’s office Larry sat there like a simpleton.  It was Lola who asked all the questions, and she accompanied Larry into the big room where the coffins were arranged from most to least expensive.  She encouraged him to choose one of the cheaper ones.  You had to be careful not to get carried away with the emotion of the moment and commit yourself to something beyond your means.  If it wasn’t one of the expensive ones, though, the coffin Larry chose was a real pretty one, lilac with silver handles.
            “She’ll rest peaceful in it,” Lola said.
            After the funeral was over and all the relatives and friends who’d attended the services were gone, Larry, exhausted and grateful, pressed Lola’s hand between his own and said, “I owe you, Lola.”
            “Get out of here.”
            “No, I owe you big time.  I didn’t know anything about funerals.  Didn’t have a clue.  You were a real pro.   Guess you must have had some experience—when your husband died, I mean.”
            Lola was taken aback.  “Who, me?  I’ve never been married!”  She laughed like it was just the funniest thing but then, remembering the occasion, stopped and excused herself.  Neither seemed to know what to say then, so Lola said to call her if he needed anything and crossed the road to her house.
            Larry watched her close the door behind her, then he snapped his fingers as if he’d just remembered something.  He gathered up the spiral notebooks, took them out back, and burned them in the rusted-out trash barrel.  He was out of the hole, man.  He didn’t owe anybody a damn thing.  To celebrate the occasion, he drank half a bottle of Jim Beam and passed out on the kitchen floor.

*

He was still there when he woke the next morning.  He lay very still.  It was pleasant enough on the cool linoleum, and he knew as soon as he moved the hangover would visit him with pain and nausea.
            But it wasn’t a hangover that came to him.  It was Lola Smith.  She was knocking on the screen door that led from the kitchen to the back porch.
            “Are you all right, Larry?”
            “I’m all right,” he said.  “I think.”
            He tested it, sat slowly upright.  Surprisingly, he didn’t feel too bad.
            “I kept knocking on the front door but couldn’t raise you.  I was worried about you.”
            “Oh, I’m all right.”
            He opened the screen door and joined her on the porch.  He expected to find her with a casserole dish or plate of food in her hands, but she had nothing.  She seemed to guess what he was thinking.
            “I figured you probably had food left from what folks have been bringing you these last few days.”
            He nodded.  “Yeah.  I’m pretty well fixed for now.”
            “Good, good.  But I was thinking, you know, probably you shouldn’t be alone all the time so soon after—well, you know.  So maybe you’d like to come over to my place for supper tonight?”
            What Larry wanted more than anything right now was to be by himself, but he owed Lola too much.
            “Hey, that sounds good.”
            Lola had him in her crosshairs, that was for sure.  And while he was grateful to her for all she’d done, he didn’t want to do something damn silly and wind up paying out more in return than he’d received.
            Larry crossed Sardis Road that evening, then, determined to be polite but on his guard.

*

It wasn’t the same Lola Smith, though.  Instead of being loud and sort of pushy—in a nice way, but still pushy—she seemed shy, unsure of herself, alternately chattering nervously and lapsing into awkward silences.  It threw off Larry’s plans to keep his guard up, and he found himself trying to put her at ease.
            Things got better once they got to the food, which gave them something to talk about.  The main dish was grilled pork chops.  Larry had never had them that way before since his mother fried about everything, but he said they were great.  He’d never had wild rice, either, and asked Lola how she made it.  She blushed and said it just came in a package, add a little water and butter is all, there wasn’t anything to it.  The tomatoes were Early Girls from her garden, and the ice tea was sun tea, which Larry had her explain although he knew perfectly well what sun tea was.  Larry had a bad moment over dessert, German chocolate cake, the icing loaded with coconut.  He’d always hated coconut but managed to get it down and pronounced it good stuff.
            “I’m kind of getting used to cooking for two, what with bringing you over a dish every day or so,” she said.
            Larry said, “I’m real grateful for that.”
            “Oh, I didn’t mean that,” Lola said, flustered.  “I wasn’t trying to say you should be grateful for anything.  I was just saying about cooking for two is all.”
            “I know, I know, but I am grateful, and I want you to know that.  I owe you a lot.”
            “Well, if you ever owed me anything, you’ve paid it all back tonight.”
            “How’s that?”
            “I mean, coming over here, having supper with me.”
            Lola seemed even more flustered now, as if she’d revealed more than she’d meant to.  She jumped up and grabbed the dessert plates, took them to the sink, and stood there with her back to Larry as she fiddled with the dishes.
            Larry watched her.  She wore a pale rose sleeveless top that made her hammy arms look even bigger and a sky blue skirt, short enough to accentuate her broad hips and thick thighs.  She was wearing hose, a color that made her pasty legs look tanned.  Still, they didn’t hide the chigger bites on her ankles.
            Larry couldn’t kid himself:  she wasn’t attractive.  If he saw her on the street he wouldn’t give her a second look.  But then he had a thought:  would she give him a second look?  He straightened up, pushed his chest out and his head back.  Did that get rid of that hump on his back?  There was no reflective surface that he could check himself in, but sitting like that was too painful, anyway, so he slumped again.
            Lola returned to the table with two cups of coffee.  She fetched sugar and milk, then sat down.  She stared at her coffee without touching it.
            “Funny that you should think I was a widow,” she said. 
            “I don’t know where I got that idea.”
            “I’ve never been married,” she said, as if she hadn’t already told him.  This time, though, it sounded like a confession.  “When a person goes long enough without being married, they get kind of marked, you know?  There she is, forty years old and never been married.”
            He knew exactly what she meant.  He also knew he had to watch his step here because they were getting to a dangerous point, emotions getting high, and the wrong word here and no telling where you’d wind up.
            What he’d meant to say was that he understood what she was saying but what other people thought didn’t mean crap.  But before he knew it he was saying something entirely different.
            “I got arrested once, in Memphis.  This was way back when I was in my twenties.  It wasn’t any big deal, I didn’t do time or anything, but it cost me my job with Foley.  Damn good job.”
            “What did you do?”
            “Aw, kid stuff, really.  Me and this other guy had had a few, came out of a bar and right there at the curb in front of us was a police car, engine running, no one inside.  The cop had run in to buy a pack of cigarettes or something.  Anyway, we jumped in and took it for a ride.  They caught us heading over the bridge into Arkansas.  I guess I was coming home to show off my new car.”
            Lola laughed.
            “You laugh,” he said, “but it cost me my job, and it’s right there on my record any time I apply for a job today.”
            But Lola couldn’t stop laughing. 
            “Keep on laughing,” Larry said, irritated but at the same time fighting a grin, “but I tell you it screwed me good.”
            “Oh, Larry, it’s way in the past,” Lola said, reaching over and patting his hand.  “It’s a new day every time the sun comes up.”
            “Yeah, well, the past’s still there.”
            “Sure, but it’s a different past every day, too.”

*

At a certain point in the evening Larry said he guessed it was time he was getting home.  Lola said he could stay if he wanted to.  He knew what she meant by “stay,” but he said there were some things he had to take care of.
            He crossed the road to his place.  Yes, it was his place now, all of it.  He gave the house a wide berth, though, and entered the mobile home.  He’d slept in the house for the last several weeks to be near his mother, and the “tin can” had that musty, unlived-in smell.  He sat down and stared at the TV a moment without turning it on.  Then he crossed over to a little chest and opened the top drawer.
            It wasn’t until he saw the empty drawer that Larry remembered he’d burned all the spiral notebooks the day before.  What he’d intended to do was take the notebooks and hug them to his chest; he thought they’d give him some comfort.  Now that was impossible.
            He started to close the drawer and then noticed it wasn’t completely empty.  There was a sheet of paper in the bottom, the very last page of his accounts showing the grand total debits and credits for all the years he’d lived with his parents, then the final figure, one thousand two hundred and twenty-eight dollars.  There was a big plus-sign to the left of it, and it was underlined three times, the last underline spiraling down the page in a flourish.  Even though he’d written the figures only days ago, they bemused him now, like some childish scrawl, something he’d done in kindergarten, later thrown into a drawer and saved by a doting parent.
            He wadded the paper into a ball and tossed it across the little room at the trash can in the corner.
            “Bingo.  Two points.”
            Larry squared his shoulders and took a deep breath.  Took another.  He was a little nervous, he had to admit.  A little scared, a little excited like someone about to leave the country of his birth for a new land.
            Then he turned off the light, locked the door behind him, and crossed back over Sardis Road.

Belle Arti
by Richard Stephens