Bug Hollow
by Michelle Huneven
The summer that I was eight, my brother Ellis graduated from high school and a few days later, he and his best friends Heck Stevens and Ben Klosterman drove up the coast in Heck’s ’64 Rambler American. They promised to be back in a week. “Bye, little Pips,” Ellis called as they pulled out of the driveway. My name is Sally, but he called me Pipsqueak, with variations. “See you in the funny papers.”
Ellis had thick, straight yellow hair long enough to tuck behind his ears and he wore a baseball cap to keep it there. He’d lately grown incredibly tall and skinny; his pants rode so low on his hip bones they seemed about to slip off. My sister Katie, who was fourteen, called him El Greck after we saw El Greco’s Christ on the Cross at the Getty; even our parents confirmed the resemblance.
His last two years in high school, Ellis had a girlfriend named Carla who was also tall and blonde and liked to show off her stomach. In front of Ellis, she’d say hi to me. She and Ellis studied together, but Ellis spent most of his time with Ben and Heck. For their trip, they packed Heck’s old Rambler with sleeping bags, the small smelly tent we kids used on camping trips, and a cooler full of sodas. After ten days, when Ellis hadn’t come back, Heck showed up at our door with the tent. I answered.
“Ellis met a girl on the beach,” he said. “So he’s staying a few more days.”
“Staying where?” our mother said from behind me.
“Not sure, exactly,” said Heck.
“Well, where did they meet? What beach?”
“Somewhere around Santa Cruz.”
That was all our mother could get out of Heck. “Some girl has snagged Ellis,” she told our father when he came home from work.
“Good for her,” our father said.
“How can you say that, Phil?” our mother cried. “El’s such an innocent. What if she’s trouble?”
Hinky, our Manchester terrier, cocked her head at one parent, then the other; she followed conversations; we’d tested her by standing in a circle and tossing the conversation back and forth. Hinky shifted her attention to each speaker in turn.
“What if he doesn’t come back in time for his job?”
Ellis was to be a counselor at the day camp he’d attended since first grade.
“Let’s worry about that when the time comes,” our father said.
The camp’s start date came and went. Carla showed up one night after dinner and wept noisily on our sofa. She also hadn’t heard from him. “He was supposed to come with me to my cousin’s wedding,” she wailed.
“I knew we shouldn’t have let him go off like that,” our mother said after Carla left. “One fast girl on a beach and he’s a goner!”
“I’m sure he’s fine,” our father said. “It’s high time he gave us something to worry about.”
Ellis was a straight-A student and a star pitcher, and had a perfect score on the math SAT. He always set the table, and never shut his door, even when Carla or his friends were over. He listened to sports or studied. He loved baseball above everything and spurned Cal and University of Chicago when UC San Diego and Ole Miss offered him full baseball scholarships. Our parents regarded the South with liberal loathing and tried to talk him into San Diego. He chose Mississippi.
“What if this girl’s a Moonie?” our mother said. “What if he can’t get home? He only had seventy dollars.”
Hinky looked from one parent to the other.
“Hell, I was younger than he is with only a quarter to my name and I hopped freights all across the country,” our father said.
“Oh for god’s sake. Don’t start,” our mother said.
At sixteen, our father had ridden boxcars from Denver to Boston. He told stories of his hobo days so often that our mother had forbidden him to tell them in front of her.
A postcard came showing the Monterey Bay.
Dear Mom and Dad, Katie, Peeps, and Hinky,
Hope you’re all well. I’m doing great! I’ve decided to spend the summer up here. I have a wonderful place to stay and a job. I’ll call soon.
Love, E.
Every time the phone rang, we all froze, then our parents raced to the extensions, with Hinky leaping and barking. Answer! Get the phone! It might be him!
We were supposed to go car camping on the Oregon coast, but now we couldn’t, in case Ellis called.
Our father went to work in a suit; he was a project manager at Parsons Engineering. Sometimes, he went to Saudi Arabia for a month, but he’d deferred a trip till we knew more about Ellis. Our mother taught fourth grade and had the summer off. She lay out on a chaise in shorts and a halter top getting very tan, reading mystery novels, and drinking Hawaiian Punch from a green plastic tumbler. When it got too hot, she moved inside to her bedroom. I’d peek in at her. “Stop lurking, Sally,” she’d say.
Katie stayed in her room and read books except when she practiced piano or went over to her friend Christine’s house.
I drew pictures in my room or went to play under a row of shaggy eucalyptus trees on the corner of our block. A neighborhood girl and I had built a village of tiny bark huts with a network of tunnels below, digging until our gritty fingers tangled underground. Because she was older and she no longer came so often, so alone, I maintained the village that I often found scattered. At dusk, when someone bawled my name, I’d go home.
Our mother was at the grocery store when Ellis phoned. Katie was practicing scales on the piano, and Socorro, our housekeeper, was vacuuming. Belly-flopped and coloring on my bedroom floor, I was the only person who heard the phone ring. I answered the hall extension.
“Is that you Little Peeps? How you doing?”
“It’s Ellis!” I screamed down the hall. “ELLL-ISSSS!” Then, into the phone, “Are you coming home?”
“Not yet. But tell me, Pips. How mad are Mom and Dad?”
“Pretty mad.”
“Is Mom there?” Ellis asked.
“She’s at the store. Hold on.” I yelled, “Katie!” at the top of my voice. “She can’t hear me,” I told Ellis.
“That’s okay, Pips. Just tell me, what do Mom and Dad say about me?”
I sat on the floor. Hinky planted herself in front of me. Being the one to talk to Ellis felt too important. “Mom thinks you’ve been kidnapped, and Dad thinks you’re having fun.” I tried to ESP with Katie—come here now!—but her fingers kept cantering up and down the keys. I thought of running to get her, but what if Ellis hung up? Our parents hadn’t said what to do if he called when they weren’t there. “They really want you to come home,” I said.
“I can’t. I have a great job. Guess what it is, Peeps? I work in an ice cream shop.”
“Oh.” I touched Hinky’s curved black toenails.
“And the place I live? There’s a swimming hole just out the backdoor. But real quick, Peeps. How’re you and Katie? And Hinky?”
“Hinky’s right here,” I said. “Say hi.” I held the receiver to Hinky’s ear until her little black brow wrinkled. “Just come home, El,” I said into the mouthpiece. “Mom’s getting mean. And we can’t go camping…”
A clatter of tumbling coins and an operator’s canned voice said Three minutes. “Got to go,” Ellis said. “Tell Mom and Dad not to worry. I love you Pips.”
Love? When had Ellis ever said he loved me or anyone? (Maybe he’d said it to Carla but I never heard.) In our family we never said I love you to each other. If I kissed or hugged our mother, she would draw back and say, “What brought this on?” I smoothed Hinky’s ears back and kissed the two tan dots of her eyebrows. When the front door whined open and I heard the rustle of grocery bags, I ran into the kitchen. “He called! He called!”
Our mother sat on a kitchen barstool still holding a bag in her arms. Hinky leapt around her. “Is he all right?” she said. “What did he say? Did you get his number?”
“He works in an ice cream store,” I panted. “He says don’t worry.”
“So where is he?” our mother said, still embracing the sack. “Did you find out?”
Katie came into the kitchen. “What’s up?”
“Is he coming home? What about college? Did you ask him anything?”
I stood there.
“Goddamn it, Sally. What’s wrong with you?” She heaved the sack of groceries off her lap. A muffled crack, and a pale pink liquid leaked through the bag and spread on the kitchen floor.
Katie left the room. I began to cry. Hinky leapt on our mother’s lap, but she pushed her off. I ran out of the house, then, and around the corner to the eucalyptus trees. I curled against one shaggy trunk and vowed never to go home. I’d steal towels off the neighbors’ clothesline for blankets and live on the pomegranates and guavas growing in the abandoned sanitorium up the street. Sleepy from crying, I pulled a large shard of bark over my face to make it dark. I woke when Hinky pawed my shoulder. Our father lifted the bark off my face. “Come on now Sally,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
Dear Mom and Dad,
I hope Pips told you that I’m doing great and not to worry. I’ve decided to spend the summer here in a big house with eight other people. The rent is very cheap. We take turns cooking. I’ll make my famous tofu-mushroom burgers for you someday. My job is a lot of fun and my boss already wants me to be manager. I told him no because of Ole Miss—and yes, I am training every day. A girl here has a great arm and catches everything I send her.
I would say where I am, but you might come and try to take me home. I’m extremely happy here, so please don’t worry. I’ll be back in time for college.
I think of all of you all the time. Tell the Hink that the dogs here are big galumphing woodsy dogs and not prancy-dancy smartypants like her.
I’ll call soon.
Much Love to Everyone,
Ellis
Much Love! Again, I’d never heard him say that to anybody before.
Katie said he had to be in a cult, because he had to be brainwashed to cook. The Ellis we knew ate Pop Tarts right out of the box because he was too lazy to toast them.
Our mother said, “Not sure a cult would let him take a job out in public. But something’s fishy.” Our father said nonsense, that Ellis was separating, which was natural. “He’s making his way in the world.”
Carla must have gotten a letter too because she came over and cried again.
Ellis’s letter had a postmark: Los Altos, CA. Our father phoned the sheriffs there, but they wouldn’t look for Ellis—this was in the early 1970’s and there were far too many runaways for law enforcement to take on. A desk sergeant told our father to place a classified ad in the local small-town papers.
Missing since June: Our son, Ellis Samuelson, 17 years old, 6’2”, blonde hair, brown eyes, athletic, smart, funny, and greatly missed. Reward.
The ad went in six different small-town papers and now, when the phone rang it was even more of a shock. Our mother wept to her best friend. “We’re on pins and needles here!”
She had become a yanker; she yanked the phone when she answered it; she yanked open doors and drawers to rummage madly, then slammed them shut. She yanked me into the car, to the table, away from the comics display at the Safeway. Sometimes, she yanked me to her and held me, kissing my head and wetting my hair with her tears. Blue bruises in the shape of her fingerprints dappled my upper arms.
Katie, who was fourteen, said, “Just stay out of her way.”
But I couldn’t. I had to see where she was, if she was okay. Because she refused to leave the house in case Ellis called, our father did the shopping, and the fridge filled with new brands of cheese, lunch meat, mayonnaise, juice. The fancier brands.
Two days after Ellis’s eighteenth birthday on August 2nd this came:
Dear Mom and Dad, Katie, Pips and Hinky,
I saw your ad in the paper. Please don’t do that again. It embarrassed me. I’m eighteen, now and can live where I want. I miss you too. Please don’t worry about me. And don’t try to come get me because I really can’t leave till Aug. 25 because
1. I promised my boss I’d stay till then
2. I am saving money for school and won’t hit my goal till then
3. I am very happy in this house with my friends and the dogs.
4. I am training very well. I now run an eight-minute mile. Flat. Everyone in the house comes out for pitching and batting practice every night.
I’m sorry to worry you and hope you aren’t too mad at me, but I am really truly okay and happier than I have ever been.
Please pet Hinks for me. I’ll see you soon. I love you all very much!
Ellis
“I don’t understand why we just don’t drive up there and go to every ice cream store we can find,” our mother said at the dinner table.
“I would if I felt he was in danger. And he’s right: he can live where he wants.”
“You just won’t lift a finger,” our mother said.
The air stilled. I studied the tiny beige, tan, and white hexagons in the Formica tabletop until my father said, “Here, Sally, let’s finish these tater tots.”
A woman phoned at dinner time. She’d been wrapping china in newspaper and happened to read our father’s ad. She was Ellis’s neighbor in the woods near Boulder Creek in the Santa Cruz mountains. Ellis—“a darling boy”—had done some weed whacking for her. She supplied an address—“I have a son myself so I know,” she said, and refused a reward.
Early the next morning, we loaded the VW bus with duffels and pillows and snacks as if for any weekend jaunt. “What if Ellis won’t come home with us?” I asked.
“He won’t have a choice,” our mother said.
“We’ll play it by ear,” said our father.
We drove up to northern California on freeways through yellow dried out hills and sometimes along the crinkled sea. We ate hamburgers in the car, driving, driving in the summer heat with the windows open, which made it too loud to talk. Not that Katie would’ve talked to me. She took the middle seat and read her book the whole time. In the far back seat, I colored on a newsprint pad, but mostly I stared out the window and imagined living in different houses we passed. Or I looked at the backs of the others in the car and thought, Who are these people, and why aren’t they nicer? For as long as I could remember—from my very first remembered thought—I’d had a sense of coming from somewhere else, a place of kindness and good humor and justice, where people weren’t so grouchy and annoyed. I’d learned to keep eye on my mother to see what was coming, while at the same time trying not to make her mad. Ever since Katie started junior high, she couldn’t stand me, so I steered clear of her. Ellis could be kind. Our father, when he was home and not working, was also kind and occasionally even interested in what I did—he liked watching me draw my “cartoons” as he called them. My mother was hardly ever loving. She used to be, when I was very little, before I began to bother her so much.
Boulder Creek looked like other mountain towns we’d seen on camping trips: a short main street of wooden buildings with tall fake fronts. I spotted a log-sided burger stand called the Kandy Kone that had a big soft serve ice cream cone on its sign. “Hey,” I said, “Maybe that’s where Ellis works,” but nobody listens to the eight-year-old, and then the town was behind us.
“We’re looking for a row of mailboxes,” our father said, and there they were, a straggling line of them, some with their mouths open, tongues hanging.
We bumped down a narrow gravel road. Bushes brushed the camper’s sides. The road ended in the dirt yard of a huge, shingled house the black-brown color of telephone poles. Crumbling concrete steps led to a wide deep porch with several slumping old sofas on it, and on those sofas slept various dogs, very large dogs who, hearing us, sat up, stretched, then bounded down the steps barking. Five dogs.
Hinky sprang window to window, front seat to back, clambering all over us and barking back.
Hi! Hi! Come out of that car and let’s smell you, the big dogs said.
Nobody opened a door. These were big shepherd mixes. One Doberman.
Two young women came out the front door, both in cut-off shorts and peasant blouses. One was tall with long rippling red hair and the shorter one had smooth brown hair in a swishy ponytail. They waded through the boisterous dogs calling, “They’re friendly! They don’t bite!” The ponytailed one came to the driver’s side and our father rolled down his window a few inches. “We’re the Samuelsons. Ellis’s parents.”
“Oh, Ellis is at work,” she said. “He’ll be home in an hour. I’m Julia. That’s Randi. Why don’t you come in and wait. I just made some iced tea.”
She and Randi held what dogs they could until we were out of the car. Then it was a smell-for-all, snouts all over us as we headed to the house. Randi, at the top of the steps, turned and said, “Welcome to Bug Hollow.”
Inside, the hot and dark house smelled like old smoke. But I knew right away why Ellis liked it here: the front room with its log rafters, fat sofas and tatty taxidermy looked like our favorite mountain lodge, the one near Yosemite where, after camping for a week, we’d spend a night to take showers and eat a dinner our mother didn’t have to cook. The big, bearded, laughing owner served us kids huge slices of blackberry pie a la mode, and gave Hinky her own scoop.
Julia asked if Katie and I wanted to cool off in the swimming hole. Our mother came out to see if it was safe. Dammed with rocks and logs, overhung with thick-limbed oaks, the pool was dark and calm. Water spiders rippled its surface. Half a dozen inner tubes had stalled against the opposite bank. “It’s only deep by the boulder there,” Julia said.
Katie and I could wear our t-shirts and panties, our mother said. “And no swinging from that.” She pointed to a thick rope you had to climb the boulder to reach. She left then with Hinky, yanking the leash every time Hinky tried to sniff something.
I waded into the cool water. “I bet Julia is Ellis’s girlfriend,” I said. “She’s nicest.”
“No way. The other one’s so much prettier.” Katie said, still on the bank. “This water looks kind of scummy.”
I could see rippled sand and pebbles on the bottom. “It’s perfectly clear,” I said.
She came in, bit by bit. We hauled the sun-heated black tubes over our heads then drifted and kicked around the swimming hole for a long time and nobody checked on us. “I wonder why Ellis likes it here. It’s so hot and that old house smells,” Katie said, then gave a little scream.
A man with a yellow beard stood on the path. Who knew how long he’d been there. “Oh my god, it’s El Greck,” Katie cried and started slogging out of the water.
He gave us both one-armed hugs. “I missed you toads,” he said. “What have you been doing all summer?”
Katie said, “Wondering where you were, dumbo, and never going anywhere but the backyard in case you might call.”
“Jeez, Katie. Thanks for the guilt trip,” he said.
“You should feel guilty,” she said. “So which one is your girlfriend?”
Ellis, looking around, called softly. “Julia?”
She came up the path and slid her arms around him.
“I just wanted to say hi to you guys before I get into it with Mom and Dad,” he said. “But I better get it over with.” He squeezed Julia and turned toward the house. “Cover me God, I’m going in.”
Katie grabbed her shorts and ran after him. I walked back to the house with Julia, who answered all my questions: Yes, she was in college, at UC Santa Cruz; she was majoring in art to become an artist. And yes, she was older than Ellis, two years and two months older.
“Wow,” I said. The boys two years younger than me were just starting first grade, very small and dopey. I couldn’t imagine liking any one of them.
“Ellis is very mature for his age,” Julia said. “He says that you like to draw. Shall we draw some pictures together?”
We sat at the long wooden dining table with some thick paper and her big box of oil pastels. We could hear the murmur of El and my folks talking above us, on the second floor, but not what they were saying. At Julia’s suggestion, we drew squiggles for each other. Of the two long narrow loops I gave her, she made an alligator with a wide-open pink mouth and gross yellow teeth. Of her wiggly, vertical balloon I made a tree with birds in their nests. “El’s right,” she said. “You are a good artist. Is that what you want to be when you grow up?”
Something inside me clanged. Nobody had ever called me an artist; yet by that clang I knew that’s exactly what I was. I nodded and ducked close to my paper, abashed and wildly pleased.
Julia said, “Good. You and me. We’ll be the artists in the family.”
I have thought of this moment since, thousands of times.
An oven door twanged in the kitchen and pots were shoved around on a stove. Randi and a couple of other people were cooking. Julia and I drew new squiggles for each other. Down the long table, beside jars of honey and jams, a fat gray tiger cat flicked its tail perilously near to a plate of melting yellow butter. I turned my paper sideways and made the big S Julia had given me into that cat. “Clever,” Julia said. “So tell me, Pips, will your folks make Ellis go home with them?”
“Probably,” I said. “They’re afraid he won’t go to college.”
“Of course he’s going to college,” she said. “We were going to drive down next week and camp along the way.” She stilled, listening to the murmur from upstairs. “We wanted to spend our last few days together.” She lifted her arms to tighten her ponytail and I wondered when I too would have lovely curls under my arms.
Ellis called to Julia to come upstairs. Of the scrawl of coils and points I’d given her, she’d made a long-haired girl atop a tower.
I couldn’t find Katie anywhere, so I petted the big dogs—my mom still had Hinky—and examined some dusty seashells on a window ledge till someone rang a triangle. My parents and Ellis and Julia came downstairs, and six or so other people appeared, and the people in the kitchen. We crammed around the long table on stools and plastic lawn chairs and a picnic table bench two of the guys lugged in. Everyone was around Julia’s age, except for a couple who were older, though not as old as our parents. (I later heard they owned the house and rented rooms.) The cooks brought out a salty soup with green onions floating on top that you sipped from bowls—no spoons! After that came a loaf thing made of nuts and beans that looked and tasted like dirt, and some beets, ditto; then a weed salad that tasted like weeds, sour and peppery. Ellis ate everything: Ellis, who wouldn’t touch a vegetable at home.
“It’s Ellis’s last supper,” said the older man. “We hate to see him go. But the man has baseball to play. We’ll see you in the majors, brother! To Ellis!”
And everyone raised pint Mason jars full of a tea made from twigs. “Ellis!”
On our way out of town, we stopped at the Kandy Kone so Ellis could tell them he was leaving. His boss, a short bald man, came out to the van and invited us in for ice cream. We left with our cones—our mother said we had no time and miles to go. The boss gave Ellis some money and kissed the side of his head.
Ellis stretched out in the far backseat and put a pillow over his face. That meant I had to share the middle seat with Katie, but she was not as annoyed as she usually was because she was dying to tell me stuff. She’d hidden in the bathroom next to where my parents talked to Ellis and she’d heard everything. She cupped my ear, whispering. “Mom said Julia could be charged with statutory rape because Ellis wasn’t eighteen when they met. Ellis said if that happened, Mom and Dad would never see him again for the rest of their lives. Then Dad said that if Ellis came home with us now he could phone Julia any time he wanted—though Mom said only when the rates were low. Also, Dad said Julia could come for Thanksgiving, he’d buy her a ticket. Dad also said that Ellis could save all his ice cream store money; that they’d pay all his expenses that the scholarship didn’t cover. But only if he came with us now. Ellis said he and Julia planned to come down next week anyway and why couldn’t they have that time together? Mom said they couldn’t trust him after he’d been incommunicado all summer. Then Ellis went to get Julia and Mom and Dad argued. Dad said that Ellis should stay, that he was having a wonderful summer and he should finish his job at the Kandy Kone. Mom said that Julia would brainwash him into blowing off Ole Miss—hadn’t she already gotten him to hide from his family for three months? Julia was too much of a rebel, Mom said—didn’t he see? All the black hair on her legs? After a while, Ellis brought Julia upstairs. Dad talked to her out in the hall and then Ellis did—I didn’t hear any of that, but Ellis agreed to come home so long as he could call Julia whenever he wanted, even during the day. Then Julia made a little speech about how she didn’t want our parents to be mad at her because she and Ellis truly loved one another and would be together forever, and she hoped to love and be loved by his family, too.
I thought then, So that’s where Ellis got all that love talk.
At home, Ellis shaved off his beard. His chin was pink and inflamed and his eyes had a new, weird light. He spent a lot of time on the phone with Julia, and also in my room, sitting against the bed with Hinky on his lap while I colored on the floor. He talked to me about Julia because I was the only one who liked her. I more than liked her: I wanted to be her: calm and kind and an artist. Ellis said when she finished college in two years, they’d probably get married.
Having Ellis home didn’t make our mother any happier. She kept on yanking things, including me—“Get off the damn floor, Sally!”—and kept harping about how big the phone bill would be.
“I said I’d pay it,” Ellis yelled. “Just tell me how much.”
One night Ellis wouldn’t come to the dinner table.
“All I said was, he’d get over her,” our mother said. “That once he got to college, he’d meet girls who were much more his speed.”
“Why would you even say such a thing?” our father said.
Ellis was with us for only six days before he left for Mississippi. They were not happy days for him, though Hinky and I loved having him there. Our parents had bought him a standby ticket and once he found out he could use it anytime, he left a week earlier than planned, on the first day he could get into the dorms. Our father said, “We’ve barely had any time with him,” but our mother said, “The sooner he’s there, the better I’ll feel.”
We took him to the airport as a family. There were no security checks then and you could walk right to the gate and wave till your traveler disappeared down the gangway. “Bye Little Squeaks,” Ellis said to me. “Take care of yourself and Hinky.”
“Bye, Ellis!” I called. “See you in the funny papers!”
Five days later, on a Sunday afternoon, someone from Ole Miss phoned our parents. Ellis and some of his dorm mates had gone swimming in a granite quarry; he dived into the water and never came up. Someone had dumped a load of logs there illegally and Ellis got lodged in them and couldn’t free himself. The police had to bring in heavy equipment to pull the logs away to get his body out.
Our father flew to Mississippi and was gone for two days.
Our mother was in her room and Katie was at her friend Christine’s house when our father came home. I ran to the kitchen to greet him. He stood at the table in his rumpled seersucker summer suit, his suitcase at his feet. He was flipping through the mail; stacks of letters and magazines and junk mail and already some condolence cards had accumulated. “I missed you, Sally, hon,” our father said, and bent to hug me. He smelled as he always did coming home from a trip, a sour smoky mix of cigarettes, oily food, and whiskey. He’d brought a present, I saw: on the table by all the mail sat a box wrapped in shiny ivory paper and tied with a thick purple ribbon. For a bright moment, I hoped it was for me. Oh, but it was probably candy, and for everyone, another big assortment of chocolates he’d bought at the airport. When he picked up his suitcase and went down the hall to see our mother, I took a closer look. A typed paper label was pasted on one end of the box. It was Ellis. That was how the crematorium had packaged him, and how my father had carried him home.
Ellis had thick, straight yellow hair long enough to tuck behind his ears and he wore a baseball cap to keep it there. He’d lately grown incredibly tall and skinny; his pants rode so low on his hip bones they seemed about to slip off. My sister Katie, who was fourteen, called him El Greck after we saw El Greco’s Christ on the Cross at the Getty; even our parents confirmed the resemblance.
His last two years in high school, Ellis had a girlfriend named Carla who was also tall and blonde and liked to show off her stomach. In front of Ellis, she’d say hi to me. She and Ellis studied together, but Ellis spent most of his time with Ben and Heck. For their trip, they packed Heck’s old Rambler with sleeping bags, the small smelly tent we kids used on camping trips, and a cooler full of sodas. After ten days, when Ellis hadn’t come back, Heck showed up at our door with the tent. I answered.
“Ellis met a girl on the beach,” he said. “So he’s staying a few more days.”
“Staying where?” our mother said from behind me.
“Not sure, exactly,” said Heck.
“Well, where did they meet? What beach?”
“Somewhere around Santa Cruz.”
That was all our mother could get out of Heck. “Some girl has snagged Ellis,” she told our father when he came home from work.
“Good for her,” our father said.
“How can you say that, Phil?” our mother cried. “El’s such an innocent. What if she’s trouble?”
Hinky, our Manchester terrier, cocked her head at one parent, then the other; she followed conversations; we’d tested her by standing in a circle and tossing the conversation back and forth. Hinky shifted her attention to each speaker in turn.
“What if he doesn’t come back in time for his job?”
Ellis was to be a counselor at the day camp he’d attended since first grade.
“Let’s worry about that when the time comes,” our father said.
The camp’s start date came and went. Carla showed up one night after dinner and wept noisily on our sofa. She also hadn’t heard from him. “He was supposed to come with me to my cousin’s wedding,” she wailed.
“I knew we shouldn’t have let him go off like that,” our mother said after Carla left. “One fast girl on a beach and he’s a goner!”
“I’m sure he’s fine,” our father said. “It’s high time he gave us something to worry about.”
Ellis was a straight-A student and a star pitcher, and had a perfect score on the math SAT. He always set the table, and never shut his door, even when Carla or his friends were over. He listened to sports or studied. He loved baseball above everything and spurned Cal and University of Chicago when UC San Diego and Ole Miss offered him full baseball scholarships. Our parents regarded the South with liberal loathing and tried to talk him into San Diego. He chose Mississippi.
“What if this girl’s a Moonie?” our mother said. “What if he can’t get home? He only had seventy dollars.”
Hinky looked from one parent to the other.
“Hell, I was younger than he is with only a quarter to my name and I hopped freights all across the country,” our father said.
“Oh for god’s sake. Don’t start,” our mother said.
At sixteen, our father had ridden boxcars from Denver to Boston. He told stories of his hobo days so often that our mother had forbidden him to tell them in front of her.
A postcard came showing the Monterey Bay.
Dear Mom and Dad, Katie, Peeps, and Hinky,
Hope you’re all well. I’m doing great! I’ve decided to spend the summer up here. I have a wonderful place to stay and a job. I’ll call soon.
Love, E.
Every time the phone rang, we all froze, then our parents raced to the extensions, with Hinky leaping and barking. Answer! Get the phone! It might be him!
We were supposed to go car camping on the Oregon coast, but now we couldn’t, in case Ellis called.
Our father went to work in a suit; he was a project manager at Parsons Engineering. Sometimes, he went to Saudi Arabia for a month, but he’d deferred a trip till we knew more about Ellis. Our mother taught fourth grade and had the summer off. She lay out on a chaise in shorts and a halter top getting very tan, reading mystery novels, and drinking Hawaiian Punch from a green plastic tumbler. When it got too hot, she moved inside to her bedroom. I’d peek in at her. “Stop lurking, Sally,” she’d say.
Katie stayed in her room and read books except when she practiced piano or went over to her friend Christine’s house.
I drew pictures in my room or went to play under a row of shaggy eucalyptus trees on the corner of our block. A neighborhood girl and I had built a village of tiny bark huts with a network of tunnels below, digging until our gritty fingers tangled underground. Because she was older and she no longer came so often, so alone, I maintained the village that I often found scattered. At dusk, when someone bawled my name, I’d go home.
Our mother was at the grocery store when Ellis phoned. Katie was practicing scales on the piano, and Socorro, our housekeeper, was vacuuming. Belly-flopped and coloring on my bedroom floor, I was the only person who heard the phone ring. I answered the hall extension.
“Is that you Little Peeps? How you doing?”
“It’s Ellis!” I screamed down the hall. “ELLL-ISSSS!” Then, into the phone, “Are you coming home?”
“Not yet. But tell me, Pips. How mad are Mom and Dad?”
“Pretty mad.”
“Is Mom there?” Ellis asked.
“She’s at the store. Hold on.” I yelled, “Katie!” at the top of my voice. “She can’t hear me,” I told Ellis.
“That’s okay, Pips. Just tell me, what do Mom and Dad say about me?”
I sat on the floor. Hinky planted herself in front of me. Being the one to talk to Ellis felt too important. “Mom thinks you’ve been kidnapped, and Dad thinks you’re having fun.” I tried to ESP with Katie—come here now!—but her fingers kept cantering up and down the keys. I thought of running to get her, but what if Ellis hung up? Our parents hadn’t said what to do if he called when they weren’t there. “They really want you to come home,” I said.
“I can’t. I have a great job. Guess what it is, Peeps? I work in an ice cream shop.”
“Oh.” I touched Hinky’s curved black toenails.
“And the place I live? There’s a swimming hole just out the backdoor. But real quick, Peeps. How’re you and Katie? And Hinky?”
“Hinky’s right here,” I said. “Say hi.” I held the receiver to Hinky’s ear until her little black brow wrinkled. “Just come home, El,” I said into the mouthpiece. “Mom’s getting mean. And we can’t go camping…”
A clatter of tumbling coins and an operator’s canned voice said Three minutes. “Got to go,” Ellis said. “Tell Mom and Dad not to worry. I love you Pips.”
Love? When had Ellis ever said he loved me or anyone? (Maybe he’d said it to Carla but I never heard.) In our family we never said I love you to each other. If I kissed or hugged our mother, she would draw back and say, “What brought this on?” I smoothed Hinky’s ears back and kissed the two tan dots of her eyebrows. When the front door whined open and I heard the rustle of grocery bags, I ran into the kitchen. “He called! He called!”
Our mother sat on a kitchen barstool still holding a bag in her arms. Hinky leapt around her. “Is he all right?” she said. “What did he say? Did you get his number?”
“He works in an ice cream store,” I panted. “He says don’t worry.”
“So where is he?” our mother said, still embracing the sack. “Did you find out?”
Katie came into the kitchen. “What’s up?”
“Is he coming home? What about college? Did you ask him anything?”
I stood there.
“Goddamn it, Sally. What’s wrong with you?” She heaved the sack of groceries off her lap. A muffled crack, and a pale pink liquid leaked through the bag and spread on the kitchen floor.
Katie left the room. I began to cry. Hinky leapt on our mother’s lap, but she pushed her off. I ran out of the house, then, and around the corner to the eucalyptus trees. I curled against one shaggy trunk and vowed never to go home. I’d steal towels off the neighbors’ clothesline for blankets and live on the pomegranates and guavas growing in the abandoned sanitorium up the street. Sleepy from crying, I pulled a large shard of bark over my face to make it dark. I woke when Hinky pawed my shoulder. Our father lifted the bark off my face. “Come on now Sally,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
Dear Mom and Dad,
I hope Pips told you that I’m doing great and not to worry. I’ve decided to spend the summer here in a big house with eight other people. The rent is very cheap. We take turns cooking. I’ll make my famous tofu-mushroom burgers for you someday. My job is a lot of fun and my boss already wants me to be manager. I told him no because of Ole Miss—and yes, I am training every day. A girl here has a great arm and catches everything I send her.
I would say where I am, but you might come and try to take me home. I’m extremely happy here, so please don’t worry. I’ll be back in time for college.
I think of all of you all the time. Tell the Hink that the dogs here are big galumphing woodsy dogs and not prancy-dancy smartypants like her.
I’ll call soon.
Much Love to Everyone,
Ellis
Much Love! Again, I’d never heard him say that to anybody before.
Katie said he had to be in a cult, because he had to be brainwashed to cook. The Ellis we knew ate Pop Tarts right out of the box because he was too lazy to toast them.
Our mother said, “Not sure a cult would let him take a job out in public. But something’s fishy.” Our father said nonsense, that Ellis was separating, which was natural. “He’s making his way in the world.”
Carla must have gotten a letter too because she came over and cried again.
Ellis’s letter had a postmark: Los Altos, CA. Our father phoned the sheriffs there, but they wouldn’t look for Ellis—this was in the early 1970’s and there were far too many runaways for law enforcement to take on. A desk sergeant told our father to place a classified ad in the local small-town papers.
Missing since June: Our son, Ellis Samuelson, 17 years old, 6’2”, blonde hair, brown eyes, athletic, smart, funny, and greatly missed. Reward.
The ad went in six different small-town papers and now, when the phone rang it was even more of a shock. Our mother wept to her best friend. “We’re on pins and needles here!”
She had become a yanker; she yanked the phone when she answered it; she yanked open doors and drawers to rummage madly, then slammed them shut. She yanked me into the car, to the table, away from the comics display at the Safeway. Sometimes, she yanked me to her and held me, kissing my head and wetting my hair with her tears. Blue bruises in the shape of her fingerprints dappled my upper arms.
Katie, who was fourteen, said, “Just stay out of her way.”
But I couldn’t. I had to see where she was, if she was okay. Because she refused to leave the house in case Ellis called, our father did the shopping, and the fridge filled with new brands of cheese, lunch meat, mayonnaise, juice. The fancier brands.
Two days after Ellis’s eighteenth birthday on August 2nd this came:
Dear Mom and Dad, Katie, Pips and Hinky,
I saw your ad in the paper. Please don’t do that again. It embarrassed me. I’m eighteen, now and can live where I want. I miss you too. Please don’t worry about me. And don’t try to come get me because I really can’t leave till Aug. 25 because
1. I promised my boss I’d stay till then
2. I am saving money for school and won’t hit my goal till then
3. I am very happy in this house with my friends and the dogs.
4. I am training very well. I now run an eight-minute mile. Flat. Everyone in the house comes out for pitching and batting practice every night.
I’m sorry to worry you and hope you aren’t too mad at me, but I am really truly okay and happier than I have ever been.
Please pet Hinks for me. I’ll see you soon. I love you all very much!
Ellis
“I don’t understand why we just don’t drive up there and go to every ice cream store we can find,” our mother said at the dinner table.
“I would if I felt he was in danger. And he’s right: he can live where he wants.”
“You just won’t lift a finger,” our mother said.
The air stilled. I studied the tiny beige, tan, and white hexagons in the Formica tabletop until my father said, “Here, Sally, let’s finish these tater tots.”
A woman phoned at dinner time. She’d been wrapping china in newspaper and happened to read our father’s ad. She was Ellis’s neighbor in the woods near Boulder Creek in the Santa Cruz mountains. Ellis—“a darling boy”—had done some weed whacking for her. She supplied an address—“I have a son myself so I know,” she said, and refused a reward.
Early the next morning, we loaded the VW bus with duffels and pillows and snacks as if for any weekend jaunt. “What if Ellis won’t come home with us?” I asked.
“He won’t have a choice,” our mother said.
“We’ll play it by ear,” said our father.
We drove up to northern California on freeways through yellow dried out hills and sometimes along the crinkled sea. We ate hamburgers in the car, driving, driving in the summer heat with the windows open, which made it too loud to talk. Not that Katie would’ve talked to me. She took the middle seat and read her book the whole time. In the far back seat, I colored on a newsprint pad, but mostly I stared out the window and imagined living in different houses we passed. Or I looked at the backs of the others in the car and thought, Who are these people, and why aren’t they nicer? For as long as I could remember—from my very first remembered thought—I’d had a sense of coming from somewhere else, a place of kindness and good humor and justice, where people weren’t so grouchy and annoyed. I’d learned to keep eye on my mother to see what was coming, while at the same time trying not to make her mad. Ever since Katie started junior high, she couldn’t stand me, so I steered clear of her. Ellis could be kind. Our father, when he was home and not working, was also kind and occasionally even interested in what I did—he liked watching me draw my “cartoons” as he called them. My mother was hardly ever loving. She used to be, when I was very little, before I began to bother her so much.
Boulder Creek looked like other mountain towns we’d seen on camping trips: a short main street of wooden buildings with tall fake fronts. I spotted a log-sided burger stand called the Kandy Kone that had a big soft serve ice cream cone on its sign. “Hey,” I said, “Maybe that’s where Ellis works,” but nobody listens to the eight-year-old, and then the town was behind us.
“We’re looking for a row of mailboxes,” our father said, and there they were, a straggling line of them, some with their mouths open, tongues hanging.
We bumped down a narrow gravel road. Bushes brushed the camper’s sides. The road ended in the dirt yard of a huge, shingled house the black-brown color of telephone poles. Crumbling concrete steps led to a wide deep porch with several slumping old sofas on it, and on those sofas slept various dogs, very large dogs who, hearing us, sat up, stretched, then bounded down the steps barking. Five dogs.
Hinky sprang window to window, front seat to back, clambering all over us and barking back.
Hi! Hi! Come out of that car and let’s smell you, the big dogs said.
Nobody opened a door. These were big shepherd mixes. One Doberman.
Two young women came out the front door, both in cut-off shorts and peasant blouses. One was tall with long rippling red hair and the shorter one had smooth brown hair in a swishy ponytail. They waded through the boisterous dogs calling, “They’re friendly! They don’t bite!” The ponytailed one came to the driver’s side and our father rolled down his window a few inches. “We’re the Samuelsons. Ellis’s parents.”
“Oh, Ellis is at work,” she said. “He’ll be home in an hour. I’m Julia. That’s Randi. Why don’t you come in and wait. I just made some iced tea.”
She and Randi held what dogs they could until we were out of the car. Then it was a smell-for-all, snouts all over us as we headed to the house. Randi, at the top of the steps, turned and said, “Welcome to Bug Hollow.”
Inside, the hot and dark house smelled like old smoke. But I knew right away why Ellis liked it here: the front room with its log rafters, fat sofas and tatty taxidermy looked like our favorite mountain lodge, the one near Yosemite where, after camping for a week, we’d spend a night to take showers and eat a dinner our mother didn’t have to cook. The big, bearded, laughing owner served us kids huge slices of blackberry pie a la mode, and gave Hinky her own scoop.
Julia asked if Katie and I wanted to cool off in the swimming hole. Our mother came out to see if it was safe. Dammed with rocks and logs, overhung with thick-limbed oaks, the pool was dark and calm. Water spiders rippled its surface. Half a dozen inner tubes had stalled against the opposite bank. “It’s only deep by the boulder there,” Julia said.
Katie and I could wear our t-shirts and panties, our mother said. “And no swinging from that.” She pointed to a thick rope you had to climb the boulder to reach. She left then with Hinky, yanking the leash every time Hinky tried to sniff something.
I waded into the cool water. “I bet Julia is Ellis’s girlfriend,” I said. “She’s nicest.”
“No way. The other one’s so much prettier.” Katie said, still on the bank. “This water looks kind of scummy.”
I could see rippled sand and pebbles on the bottom. “It’s perfectly clear,” I said.
She came in, bit by bit. We hauled the sun-heated black tubes over our heads then drifted and kicked around the swimming hole for a long time and nobody checked on us. “I wonder why Ellis likes it here. It’s so hot and that old house smells,” Katie said, then gave a little scream.
A man with a yellow beard stood on the path. Who knew how long he’d been there. “Oh my god, it’s El Greck,” Katie cried and started slogging out of the water.
He gave us both one-armed hugs. “I missed you toads,” he said. “What have you been doing all summer?”
Katie said, “Wondering where you were, dumbo, and never going anywhere but the backyard in case you might call.”
“Jeez, Katie. Thanks for the guilt trip,” he said.
“You should feel guilty,” she said. “So which one is your girlfriend?”
Ellis, looking around, called softly. “Julia?”
She came up the path and slid her arms around him.
“I just wanted to say hi to you guys before I get into it with Mom and Dad,” he said. “But I better get it over with.” He squeezed Julia and turned toward the house. “Cover me God, I’m going in.”
Katie grabbed her shorts and ran after him. I walked back to the house with Julia, who answered all my questions: Yes, she was in college, at UC Santa Cruz; she was majoring in art to become an artist. And yes, she was older than Ellis, two years and two months older.
“Wow,” I said. The boys two years younger than me were just starting first grade, very small and dopey. I couldn’t imagine liking any one of them.
“Ellis is very mature for his age,” Julia said. “He says that you like to draw. Shall we draw some pictures together?”
We sat at the long wooden dining table with some thick paper and her big box of oil pastels. We could hear the murmur of El and my folks talking above us, on the second floor, but not what they were saying. At Julia’s suggestion, we drew squiggles for each other. Of the two long narrow loops I gave her, she made an alligator with a wide-open pink mouth and gross yellow teeth. Of her wiggly, vertical balloon I made a tree with birds in their nests. “El’s right,” she said. “You are a good artist. Is that what you want to be when you grow up?”
Something inside me clanged. Nobody had ever called me an artist; yet by that clang I knew that’s exactly what I was. I nodded and ducked close to my paper, abashed and wildly pleased.
Julia said, “Good. You and me. We’ll be the artists in the family.”
I have thought of this moment since, thousands of times.
An oven door twanged in the kitchen and pots were shoved around on a stove. Randi and a couple of other people were cooking. Julia and I drew new squiggles for each other. Down the long table, beside jars of honey and jams, a fat gray tiger cat flicked its tail perilously near to a plate of melting yellow butter. I turned my paper sideways and made the big S Julia had given me into that cat. “Clever,” Julia said. “So tell me, Pips, will your folks make Ellis go home with them?”
“Probably,” I said. “They’re afraid he won’t go to college.”
“Of course he’s going to college,” she said. “We were going to drive down next week and camp along the way.” She stilled, listening to the murmur from upstairs. “We wanted to spend our last few days together.” She lifted her arms to tighten her ponytail and I wondered when I too would have lovely curls under my arms.
Ellis called to Julia to come upstairs. Of the scrawl of coils and points I’d given her, she’d made a long-haired girl atop a tower.
I couldn’t find Katie anywhere, so I petted the big dogs—my mom still had Hinky—and examined some dusty seashells on a window ledge till someone rang a triangle. My parents and Ellis and Julia came downstairs, and six or so other people appeared, and the people in the kitchen. We crammed around the long table on stools and plastic lawn chairs and a picnic table bench two of the guys lugged in. Everyone was around Julia’s age, except for a couple who were older, though not as old as our parents. (I later heard they owned the house and rented rooms.) The cooks brought out a salty soup with green onions floating on top that you sipped from bowls—no spoons! After that came a loaf thing made of nuts and beans that looked and tasted like dirt, and some beets, ditto; then a weed salad that tasted like weeds, sour and peppery. Ellis ate everything: Ellis, who wouldn’t touch a vegetable at home.
“It’s Ellis’s last supper,” said the older man. “We hate to see him go. But the man has baseball to play. We’ll see you in the majors, brother! To Ellis!”
And everyone raised pint Mason jars full of a tea made from twigs. “Ellis!”
On our way out of town, we stopped at the Kandy Kone so Ellis could tell them he was leaving. His boss, a short bald man, came out to the van and invited us in for ice cream. We left with our cones—our mother said we had no time and miles to go. The boss gave Ellis some money and kissed the side of his head.
Ellis stretched out in the far backseat and put a pillow over his face. That meant I had to share the middle seat with Katie, but she was not as annoyed as she usually was because she was dying to tell me stuff. She’d hidden in the bathroom next to where my parents talked to Ellis and she’d heard everything. She cupped my ear, whispering. “Mom said Julia could be charged with statutory rape because Ellis wasn’t eighteen when they met. Ellis said if that happened, Mom and Dad would never see him again for the rest of their lives. Then Dad said that if Ellis came home with us now he could phone Julia any time he wanted—though Mom said only when the rates were low. Also, Dad said Julia could come for Thanksgiving, he’d buy her a ticket. Dad also said that Ellis could save all his ice cream store money; that they’d pay all his expenses that the scholarship didn’t cover. But only if he came with us now. Ellis said he and Julia planned to come down next week anyway and why couldn’t they have that time together? Mom said they couldn’t trust him after he’d been incommunicado all summer. Then Ellis went to get Julia and Mom and Dad argued. Dad said that Ellis should stay, that he was having a wonderful summer and he should finish his job at the Kandy Kone. Mom said that Julia would brainwash him into blowing off Ole Miss—hadn’t she already gotten him to hide from his family for three months? Julia was too much of a rebel, Mom said—didn’t he see? All the black hair on her legs? After a while, Ellis brought Julia upstairs. Dad talked to her out in the hall and then Ellis did—I didn’t hear any of that, but Ellis agreed to come home so long as he could call Julia whenever he wanted, even during the day. Then Julia made a little speech about how she didn’t want our parents to be mad at her because she and Ellis truly loved one another and would be together forever, and she hoped to love and be loved by his family, too.
I thought then, So that’s where Ellis got all that love talk.
At home, Ellis shaved off his beard. His chin was pink and inflamed and his eyes had a new, weird light. He spent a lot of time on the phone with Julia, and also in my room, sitting against the bed with Hinky on his lap while I colored on the floor. He talked to me about Julia because I was the only one who liked her. I more than liked her: I wanted to be her: calm and kind and an artist. Ellis said when she finished college in two years, they’d probably get married.
Having Ellis home didn’t make our mother any happier. She kept on yanking things, including me—“Get off the damn floor, Sally!”—and kept harping about how big the phone bill would be.
“I said I’d pay it,” Ellis yelled. “Just tell me how much.”
One night Ellis wouldn’t come to the dinner table.
“All I said was, he’d get over her,” our mother said. “That once he got to college, he’d meet girls who were much more his speed.”
“Why would you even say such a thing?” our father said.
Ellis was with us for only six days before he left for Mississippi. They were not happy days for him, though Hinky and I loved having him there. Our parents had bought him a standby ticket and once he found out he could use it anytime, he left a week earlier than planned, on the first day he could get into the dorms. Our father said, “We’ve barely had any time with him,” but our mother said, “The sooner he’s there, the better I’ll feel.”
We took him to the airport as a family. There were no security checks then and you could walk right to the gate and wave till your traveler disappeared down the gangway. “Bye Little Squeaks,” Ellis said to me. “Take care of yourself and Hinky.”
“Bye, Ellis!” I called. “See you in the funny papers!”
Five days later, on a Sunday afternoon, someone from Ole Miss phoned our parents. Ellis and some of his dorm mates had gone swimming in a granite quarry; he dived into the water and never came up. Someone had dumped a load of logs there illegally and Ellis got lodged in them and couldn’t free himself. The police had to bring in heavy equipment to pull the logs away to get his body out.
Our father flew to Mississippi and was gone for two days.
Our mother was in her room and Katie was at her friend Christine’s house when our father came home. I ran to the kitchen to greet him. He stood at the table in his rumpled seersucker summer suit, his suitcase at his feet. He was flipping through the mail; stacks of letters and magazines and junk mail and already some condolence cards had accumulated. “I missed you, Sally, hon,” our father said, and bent to hug me. He smelled as he always did coming home from a trip, a sour smoky mix of cigarettes, oily food, and whiskey. He’d brought a present, I saw: on the table by all the mail sat a box wrapped in shiny ivory paper and tied with a thick purple ribbon. For a bright moment, I hoped it was for me. Oh, but it was probably candy, and for everyone, another big assortment of chocolates he’d bought at the airport. When he picked up his suitcase and went down the hall to see our mother, I took a closer look. A typed paper label was pasted on one end of the box. It was Ellis. That was how the crematorium had packaged him, and how my father had carried him home.