Chapter 5

Buck turned the radio to NPR and listened to a discussion about depression in women as he pulled through the intersection by the Taco Time. He was heading out of town with a pet-port cat carrier that he had picked up at the hardware store while on Candy’s errand. He didn’t know why he felt the urge to do everything that Candy said. Even in 9th grade science class when they first met, she had been lazy and domineering. She would drag her ass into Mr. Belwood’s biology class at nine in the morning with toothpaste on the front of her dress and her hair in whatever style the pillow had dictated. She never bothered to tie her shoes, and yet she looked pretty, sitting up as straight as a princess and smiling like a fool, while Mr. Bellwood drawled on about photosynthesis.

“SO, how are we doing?” she would ask Buck each morning, as if checking on the progress of a lower level employee at her multinational corporation. Then, she would casually flip through his notes and smile approvingly. Buck, at that time, had thick, black glasses and wore a Beatles haircut modified with white sidewalls, as was the trend in Greenbelt. He would let her copy his lab work for no better reason than he didn’t know how to stop her. Candy was like a force of nature. You didn’t question why the hail killed your tomatoes every year, you just replanted, and hoped for the best. Same thing with Candy. She railroaded him with no apparent concern for his humanity, no interest in his thoughts or feelings. But he just couldn’t imagine that she could be that shallow and self-serving forever. Eventually she would realize that she was crazy about him. He just had to be patient.

That had been years ago, and they hadn’t really been in touch while he was away at college. The last time he’d seen her she was working at the lunch counter on Main Street, serving coffee to the old timers. When he returned, he’d heard that she was away in Hollywood, being an actress. Despite his better judgment, he took to watching St. John’s Arms every day, hoping he’d catch a glimpse of her. He had never managed to catch her episodes, but he watched religiously behind the counter at the feed store until he got caught up in the plot.

He knew his fascination with Candy wasn’t healthy. He could have chosen any number of nice girls who could cook and didn’t go outside in their socks, but they all seemed so boring in comparison. And what if he did get married, and then finally Candy saw the light and fell madly in love with him, but he would be stuck in another relationship? He tried not to think about it much. He just figured if he went along and didn’t worry about it, things would eventually work out for the best.

The day that Candy appeared in the feed store to buy cat food for the feral cat that lived in her mom’s granary, Buck had felt his stomach jump. He had heard that she was back in town and living in the old Campbell house on Fourth Street, but he had played it cool, waiting for her to come to him. Now that he saw her, wearing the same untied pointy-toed tennis shoes from high school, he nearly wept with delight. None-the-less, he didn’t want to scare her off. He simply said, “That’ll be 27.50, Nice to see you, Candy.” At that, he was afraid he’d said too much.

It was so much simpler to do something than to say it. He would make himself so indispensable to Candy that she would walk into the feed store one day, and say, “You know, Buck, I can’t live without you. Let's make mad passionate love right here between the sesame trail mix and the calf halters.”

The cat search was the first in a series of bold unbidden favors that Buck planned to do for Candy. It was time, he had decided, to do some leveraging. And if that meant ingratiating himself with Mrs. White, then so be it.

His station wagon was running a bit rough and he was embarrassed to take it to the garage. Every time he had to have car repairs he made excuses. “I’d do this engine rebuild myself, but the boss has me so busy at the feed store, I just don’t have time.” He certainly wasn’t about to go in some afternoon and tell Mike Woods, the mechanic at Grand Street Exxon, that his car was making some “eeech, eeeech” noises when he turned left and going “brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr” right after he turned the key off. They’d be onto him for sure.

Buck’s terrible secret was that he didn’t know the first thing about auto mechanics, or physics, for that matter. When he had received a full ride scholarship to a big college back east, everyone, including his Dad, believed Buck’s story that it was due to a perfect mathematics score on his SAT. He packed up his stuff and disappeared for six years, occasionally surfacing for summer jobs at the Idaho Barley Inspection Bureau or Blue Ribbon Feeds.

When he graduated, his family didn’t have the cash to attend the commencement, but his Aunt Tracy had sent him a card with $20 in it, and his Dad said he could have the station wagon when he got back. Nobody back in Greenbelt had been specific in asking him what his degrees were in, and he bore his BA in Literature with all the pride of a deforming sexually transmitted disease. As long as he could make a living at the feed store nobody would ever have to know that he had a Masters in Cultural History.

Something had just come over him when he got the letter from the office of admissions. After all those years in Greenbelt, bucking bales and trying to fit in with his sunburned friends, he suddenly had the inspiration that there was no way his parents would find out what he got his degree in. He had spent his whole life hiding the secret that he had no interest in engineering or physics or crops or livestock forage. He just didn’t have it in him to explain this turn of events to his family. The truth was, he had received a music scholarship for performance recorder. His music teacher had taken the liberty of sending off a demo tape of some compositions that Buck had performed, and he had been invited to study with the music department at The Berklee College of Music in Boston.

The rest was a blur of Renaissance Festivals and wearing strangely bulbous velvet pants over tights, and sitting in circles with pale, auburn-haired young ladies all over the East coast. The only trouble was that he didn’t really like any of the other people dressed in tights, and he simply had nothing to talk about with the scrawny women who he accompanied on 15th century favorites like “Willow Willow.” He loved music, but the people he played with were either ridiculously pompous or mind-bogglingly boring -- or both.

He had actually dated one of the women in the ensemble for awhile, but between her hobbies of genealogy and aromatherapy, she kept him knee deep in lavender and dead relations. Sex with her was like trying to get it on with one of those conversation deprived old ladies from the Greenbelt rest home. (Not that he knew exactly what THAT was like.) At every pause in the action she would start rambling, “The way you just stroked my thigh reminds me of a story about my great, great, great, great, great third cousin, Katherine Rowans. I just read it on the Internet the other day. Apparently, she and the Twelfth Duke of Winchester…Well, you know he fancied himself as quite a ladie's man… According to ‘Dukes and Dukedoms’ by Errol Fince-Wevvins…”

So after he received his Master’s degree he did what any self-respecting recorder virtuoso and cultural history expert would do. He called up Frank Peters at Blue Ribbon and asked if he could have his job back. Aside from car trouble and the occasional smart ass who wanted to talk about aether theories, his secret was safe. The only thing that he thought might blow his cover was that he had forgotten how to dress like a Greenbelt guy while he was away. He tried to fit in by buying western wear at the X Bar Q Wholesale, but he was pretty sure it looked fishy on him. He had caught Candy staring at his neck scarf like it was some kind of poisonous snake one time, but now that he had invested in his Greenbelt wardrobe, he felt kind of funny about making a sudden change. He didn’t want anybody to get suspicious.

The spring snows had pocked the gravel road to Mrs. White’s house with deep puddles. As he swerved to miss the biggest pot holes, Buck’s thoughts returned to Candy. She had been acting pretty weird lately, even for her. He wondered if she was using drugs or in some kind of trouble with the law. While he had been skipping around in maroon tights, she might have been up to anything in LA. He had rented Pulp Fiction at the Pump and Pack just the other night, and he couldn’t get over that scene where they inject Uma Thurman with adrenaline.

“Crap,” He thought, as he pulled over to the side of the road and opened the can of tuna.

His plan for cat catching involved riding around to likely patches of brush in the vicinity where Candy had hit the cow and stopping to waft his hand over the tuna can sending the irresistible odor of tuna drifting on the breeze to poor Snuffy. Buck expected to hear his pitiful meow at any moment locating him so that he could be coaxed into the car. He had pulled off where a dirt road lead off into a fallow field. There were weeds and some of last years grain along the unharvestable margin of the field. Buck squatted near this waving his hand over the tuna can calling, “Here kitty, kitty, kitty” in his tried and true kitty calling voice.

“Here kitty, kitty, kitty.” He heard a rustling along the ditch by the edge of the field. It looked like things were going great. He congratulated himself on finding Snuffy so quickly. “Here Snuffy, you poor little kitty-witty.” Buck parted the grass and fell backwards, spilling the watery tuna down the front of his pants, as the huge male raccoon hissed and lurched away.

“Jesus!” Buck bellowed.