Chips of Red Paint Read online

  Chips of Red Paint

  By K. Martin Beckner

  Text copyright 2012 K. Martin Beckner

  All Rights Reserved

  For my parents, Phillip and Mary Beckner

  Special thanks to the following friends, family, and mentor for their valuable opinions and suggestions that helped make this a much better book:

  Bill Franklin

  Joshua McCombs

  Professor Mary Ellen Miller of Western Kentucky University

  Shaun Powers

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 1

  See this place? This used to be my favorite place to play when I was a kid. My friends and I would spend half of our summers up here creating worlds of our own away from the grownups. We’d hike through the woods on that dirt path over there to reach this barren little hilltop, with its wavy patches of bluegrass and weeds of many colors. If you look closely over in that direction, you’ll see an old, rusty truck. It’s difficult to see, but look closely at the bubble-shaped hood, rusted so badly that a few thistles have mockingly poked their purple heads through the holes. The top of the cab still remains desperately intact like the last dry piece of a sinking ship just before the ocean swallows it completely. If you stand on one of these rocks, you’ll get a better view, but keep your distance, for an old, abandoned truck can be a dangerous thing.

  We called this place Truck Mountain, named after the old truck, of course, although it wasn’t really a mountain, just a knob. I was young then, and a lot of knobs seemed like mountains.

  If you look through that clearing of trees over there, you’ll catch a glimpse of the town I grew up in, a little Kentucky town on the Tennessee border called Rocky Creek, about a forty minute drive from Nashville Tennessee, once you get on Highway 31W.

  When I was growing up, the heart of Rocky Creek, like most small towns around this part of the country, was the town square, a square piece of land surrounded by banks, churches, restaurants and other businesses. The beautifully landscaped piece of land in the center of our town square was called Fountain Square Park. We called it Fountain Square Park because of the large black fountain in the center. This fountain was surrounded by cherubs spitting water into a surrounding pool. A statue of a serious-looking woman, a flowing dress and outstretched arms, stood guard on top of the fountain.

  This was the seventies, and businesses were starting to move away from the square in favor of more cheaply-built structures, devoid of character, that seemed to pop up overnight along Highway 31W. Like a car that’s old enough to be old but not old enough to be a classic, it would be years before people would again appreciate the old town square. A few of the older establishments remained, but they were fading fast. Taylor’s Drug Store, on the east side of the square, still had a little soda shop that served hamburgers, French fries and cold coconut pie. No one, however, seemed in a hurry to replace the cracked red vinyl that covered the stools. I’d go there occasionally with my friends when we had a little extra money, but we didn’t see why our parents had loved the place so much when they were kids. We thought McDonald’s was a lot better place to eat.

  On weekends, to the dismay of the older members of the Methodist church, who got tired of picking up beer cans before Sunday morning service, the older kids would drive around and around the town square, most of them in beat up teenager mobiles, a few flaunting expensive sports cars financed by their well-to-do parents. When I got old enough to drive, I too found myself driving around that little square, nowhere in particular to go, all the time in the world to get there.

  In those days, at least in my small town, parents didn’t seem to worry so much about what their kids were doing, as long as they made it home in time for dinner. We’d ride our bikes or walk all over town without a care on earth. We found it a thrill on hot summer days to stand in the back of a pickup truck and scream as our parents drove sixty miles an hour down the road to the local Cedar Hill swimming pool. They’d drop us off, and we’d swim all day without a lifeguard in sight. If it was early summer, we’d be burned to a crisp by the time our parents came to pick us up, and we’d have a miserable trip back home trying not to touch our backs to anything.

  Yes, we were as free as squirrels back then, not a worry on earth. Short of my apprehension that the monster hiding under my bed might actually reach its arm out one night and grab my leg, I felt invincible.

  My thinking changed that summer when I was eight, however. That summer I learned a lot about people: I learned that some people are better than they seem; some people are worse than they seem; and some people are exactly as they seem. I learned that there is a lot of meanness in the world, but there is also a lot of kindness. I learned that everything we do matters, and I also learned another important thing: unlike the monster under my bed, some monsters actually are real and really do hide in dark places.

  Most of my learning about life that year didn’t start until school had let out for summer vacation. It was early that summer, and I had been riding my bike all around town. I was wearing Toughskin Jeans, a tie-dye t-shirt, and red Converse tennis shoes. Unlike a lot of kids at the time, my dark brown hair was cut short. My parents never did go for the hippy look and wanted to make sure I didn’t either. After buying a Coke and a Payday candy bar at Piggly Wiggly, I sat down on one of the wooden benches in front of Square-Deal Lumber Company. Square-Deal Lumber Company was an older establishment, just south of the square, that reminded me of the Olsen’s store on Little House on the Prairie. It was a plain white building that had a porch all the way across the front. As I sat on the bench, I listened to three old men gripe and cuss about everything from their tobacco crops, to politics, to cows dying.

  “Look, there comes the new judge executive, Betty Crenshaw,” I heard one of them say. He was a large man with a baldhead and a reddened face. “I wouldn’t trust her no further than I could throw that Cadillac she’s driving.”

  “Yeah,” said another old man who had a head full of white hair. He was whittling a piece of cedar, creating a mess with the wood shavings. “She probably bribed her way in using money her family made from selling marijuana. Why, everybody knows the Crenshaw’s got rich selling marijuana. And the police won’t do anything about it because they’s afraid of losing their share of the profit. She’d stab you in the back if you got too close to her and looked the other way for a minute.”

  “And she goes to the Methodist church every Sunday dressed like somebody high and mighty,” added the third old man, a black man who was dressed in overalls and had a cheek full of chewing tobacco. “It’s a wonder Hell don’t open up and swallow her as the highlight of the service.”

  Mrs. Crenshaw walked past the lumber company, and the three old men all waved politely and said, “Hello.” She gave them a courteous nod and kept walking.

  “She’d be over here trying to get our autographs if it was closer to election time,” said the old man making the wood shavings mess.

  “You got that right,” said the man with the white hair. “She’d be over here promoting her Beer for Votes program.”

  The three men laughed like there was nothing serious in the world.

  I was sitting there trying to think of something infor
mative and intelligent to add to the conversation when Stephanie Reynolds came walking up the wooden steps, puffing on a candy cigarette. Back in those days you could buy candy cigarettes at the Piggly Wiggly. At only eight years old, Stephanie was already a bad influence. I had overheard my parents say many times that she would be in jail before she was twenty. “Now, you stay away from that girl. I don’t want her rubbing off on you,” my mother would often tell me. But these images of Stephanie as someone who did things my parents disapproved of only made her more intriguing to me. “It’s a pity,” I once overheard my mom say to my dad, “The poor girl can’t help that her mother’s trash. And who knows who her father is, probably some truck driver her mother met at Bee’s Truck Stop where she works. I don’t know, though, some people think she looks a lot like Mayor Jimmy Smith. I can kind of see a resemblance.”

  “What’s going on, Brian?” said Stephanie as she approached. She had straight blond hair that touched her shoulders. Her tanned complexion accentuated her light blue eyes. She was wearing bellbottom jeans and a yellow shirt with a large pink flower across the front.

  My dog, Bruno, stood in front of me, wagging his tail and panting. He walked up, sniffed Stephanie’s leg and barked. Stephanie reached down and patted him on the head. Satisfied that he had been sufficiently noticed, the little dog sat down at her feet.

  Bruno wasn’t a fancy dog like you’d find at a pet store. He was a short, fat mutt, white with tan spots. He was at least part Chihuahua, having the same pointy face and buggy eyes. And just like a Chihuahua, he got a thrill out of barking at every opportunity. He had showed up at my house one day the previous summer. Having no collar, it was likely someone had dropped him off. He was a friendly dog, evidently having been around people before, and we instantly took a liking to each other. My mom wasn’t so thrilled at first. I brought him in the house to show her, and she started yelling for me to get the varmint outside. She said he had fleas and might even have rabies. She was ready to find another place to drop him off. It took my dad to convince her to let me keep him. My dad and I gave him a flea bath and took him to the vet to get a rabies vaccination. Bruno’s been happy ever since and barks at anybody or any creature that imposes itself on the territory of his new home.

  Stephanie took another puff from her candy cigarette, reached into her purse, brought out the rest of the pack and said, “Want one of these damned cigarettes?”

  “No, thank you,” I replied loud enough to be overheard. “I don’t smoke.” I was a little red-faced. I didn’t want those old men telling my mom and dad that I was out in front of Square Deal puffing on candy cigarettes with Stephanie. It would probably be enough to make my mother cry and my dad ground me for a month. I could just hear my mom now, “You know those old candy cigarettes are bad for you. Next thing you know, you’ll be drinking alcohol, and they’ll find you dead in a ditch somewhere. I’ll never be able to show my face in this town again. And by the way, someone also told me that you and Stephanie were cussing up a storm. Get your stuff; we’re moving!”

  “I’m sure glad school’s finally over,” Stephanie said.

  “Yeah, me too. Just think, three whole months of no school.”

  “Let’s go inside,” Stephanie said, as she tossed the remainder of a candy cigarette on the porch and stepped on it, placing the rest of the pack back in her purse. She then reached down, picked up Bruno, and placed him on an unoccupied bench. “Now, you stay out here, doggy, and be a good dog,” she said, as though Bruno wouldn’t have waited for me for a month.

  I followed Stephanie inside the hardware store. The air-conditioned air hit us like a late fall breeze. I loved that feeling on a hot day--still do.

  For some reason, although we never had any big construction projects to buy for, we kids always found the hardware store to be fascinating. It was a virtual treasure chest full of interesting things to look at. Stephanie would always point out the things she’d need to buy when she grew up and got ready to build a mansion. I had more short-term goals of building a tree house or some other type of hangout.

  “Hello, kids,” said Mrs. Huffman. “I guess you’re glad to be out of school for a while, aren’t you?”

  “You better believe it,” I replied.

  Becky Huffman and her husband, Fred, owned the hardware store and lived next door in the big two-story white house with green shutters. They always did make us kids feel welcome. They weren’t like Mr. Gentry who owned Gentry’s Furniture Store. He always looked as nervous as a cat when we walked in, lurking around, popping up out of nowhere to remind us not to touch anything. My mom said the Huffmans were so nice because they had lost their five year-old son years ago and weren’t able to have any more children, but I always kind of believed that they would have been nice anyway. I felt sad that their son missed out on having such great parents. Mrs. Huffman always had a treat waiting behind the counter for us kids. Sometimes she gave us a sucker or some other cavity inducing treat, and sometimes she gave us a little toy or some craft she had made, like the wooden gingerbread man that got tossed in the bottom of my closet along with the GI Joes, Legos, and the Willie Talk puppet that had a string hanging from the back of its neck. I never did figure out how to make that dummy talk without moving my lips.

  Stephanie walked towards the back of the store, and I followed, the wood floor popping and squeaking beneath our feet.

  “Look here,” Stephanie said, holding up some paint samples she had selected. “Don’t you like this deep purple color?”

  “Well, not particularly. I like the blue colors the best.”

  “When I get to be a rich and have my own mansion, I’m going to have a huge bathroom painted purple, and the tub will be the size of a swimming pool.”

  “Why not just have a regular size tub, and you can put a big pool in the back yard?”

  “Oh, I’ll have one of those too. My mom’s rich enough to have all that stuff now, but she likes to save her money and keep it in the bank. That’s why we don’t live in a big mansion because mom’s saving her money. But she’s really rich, you know. She just don’t like anybody knowing about it. She’s got plenty of diamonds she keeps locked away where no one can find them.”

  She placed the paint sample in her purse, walked over to a display of switch plates, and said, “I’m going to cover every light switch in my mansion with these fancy gold covers. That’s what rich people do, you know. They don’t like them plain old ordinary plastic light-switch covers.”

  I went a little further down the aisle and inspected a display of round wooden dowels. I pulled out a quarter-inch dowel; it was too small, so I put it back and selected a half-inch dowel. I held it up like a sword and at the same time noticed Mrs. Huffman staring intensely above my head. She was staring into one of the bubble-shaped mirrors suspended above the end of each aisle. I looked over at Stephanie in time to see her slip one of the fancy gold switch plates into her purse. My stomach felt suddenly hollow, and I heard the oak clock, hanging on the wall behind the counter, ticking crazily in the otherwise dead silence. I walked slowly up to the counter and placed the wooden dowel, I had not previously intended to buy, in front of Mrs. Huffman. I was a paying customer.

  “That’ll be fifty cents,” she said, distractedly. I gave her the money, picked up the dowel, and headed to the door.

  “Don’t run off without me,” said Stephanie, walking quickly towards me.

  Ignoring her, I opened the door and tried to make my escape.

  “Wait!” said Mrs. Huffman.

  I froze. The end was near.

  I was thinking about how my mom was always saying that Stephanie would be in jail before she was twenty. “I guess she was right,” I thought. Stephanie was going to be carried away with her head down and her hands cuffed behind her back. I’d probably never see her again.

  “You can’t leave just yet,” she continued, “not without one of these Tootsie Pops.” She pulled out a handful of Tootsie Pops from behind the counter. I was so relieve
d I thought I’d faint.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Huffman,” I said, grabbing a chocolate Tootsie Pop. Stephanie grabbed a cherry one.

  Once outside the store, Stephanie said, “How about we head over to Gentry’s Furniture Store and see what kind of new furniture they got. I’m going to need a lot of furniture when I build my big house.”

  “Oh, heavens no,” I said. I knew Mr. Gentry wouldn’t be as nice as Mrs. Huffman if he saw Stephanie stealing something, not by a long shot. He’d have us locked up in the cellar until the police got there. “I’ve got to get home and eat supper.”

  “It’s a long time until time to eat supper.”

  “My mom’s fixing it early today, but I’ll catch you around later.”

  “Okay, I’ll talk to you later.”

  I picked up my bike and headed home, Bruno running along on his short legs behind me. I had to slow down every little bit to let him catch up. All the way home I replayed the scene of Stephanie stealing the switch plate. I had never seen anyone commit an actual crime before, although one time I was riding somewhere in the car with my dad, and he got pulled over by a policeman for driving too fast. The policeman wrote him a ticket. I had thought that was a pretty big crime until I told my best friend, Charlie, about it, and he thought it was the coolest thing ever. He said his dad got pulled over all the time, and it wasn’t a big deal. But stealing wasn’t one of those small crimes like driving too fast or telling a small lie to make someone feel better. Stealing was one of those big crimes that they put people in jail for. I was disturbed by Stephanie’s behavior and wasn’t sure if I wanted to see her again. Maybe my mom had been right about Stephanie.

  My brick ranch house was in the country but was an easy walk or bike ride away from town. It was a nice new home my parents had built a few years earlier. The house was along Pawnee Road, which connected to West Cedar Street. If you turned onto West Cedar Street and drove east, you’d soon be at the town square.