Theodore, Never Teddy
Theodore parks his pickup next to Willie’s green dumpster outside, on the far side of the garage. He eases - kind of pours himself - out of the cab and shuffles, wobbling side to side, somehow not falling, as he makes his way into the garage past new-guy, Earnest. Nobody speaks much about how Theodore’s wobbles and garbles are getting worse, but they all know, except Ernest, that it’s because of the steel plate in his head.
“Hey, Teddy, how’re they hangin’?” says Earnest, leaning against the garage door frame, an American flag on the outside wall hanging level with his head.
Theodore makes it around Terry’s camo-painted side-by-side parked halfway into the garage and stumbles but manages to flop onto the seat of the string-bean-green La-Z-Boy - orange stuffing poking from a seam - that Willie gives up for him. Theodore pops the tab on a can of Busch and takes a swig while looking across the road at Buddy’s house with the gray metal roof the Feds put on two years earlier.
“Mama named me Theodore,” he says to the air, embarking on a rare run of coherent words he manages, or bothers, to string together these days. “Named me after her stepfather, took in Mama and her brothers and sisters back in the day. God Bless. If shedda wanted me to be Teddy, shedda said so. So, call me Teddy all you want. I’m not answering, ‘cause you’re not talking. Was Teddy once to somebody long time ago. No more.”
“What's with you?” Earnest says. “All I said was how you doing?”
Theodore looks across the road, tips the can between his lips, two fingers raised delicately. A gust of wind catches the flag next to Earnest and pastes itself to his face. He sputters air from beneath the flag, furiously claws it away and takes a deep breath as if he’d been underwater.
Theodore sips his beer still looking out of the garage across the road, where Buddy’s oldest sister thinks she’s hiding behind the fat elm tree next to the driveway while spying on the guys at Willie's. Theodore raises his beer in toast to her. She yanks her head back and her butt sticks out from the other side of the tree. Her second youngest sister Ramona - a run-off-ballot homecoming queen at Blue Ridge high school this year - marches out of the house in pink short-shorts and a yellow tube top, grabs her sister’s arm and tugs her back inside. With Buddy not mucking out and repairing Richie’s barn and keeping his machines running anymore and Buddy’s old man dying two months earlier, the family’s money pool without the old man’s Welfare check kick-in, isn’t going to be enough to keep all six of them - packed into two bedrooms and a small living room - going much longer.
At 51 Buddy’s’ never held a job and doesn’t drive, except the quad he cobbled together from a variety of junked machines. A genius, the guys call him, how he can build anything from junk and sell it from his front lawn. Only to people he approves. There aren’t a lot of them these days. He has rules. No shiny, mint-condition pickups, no clean workboots, no bumper stickers like, “I ride with my friends - Smith&Wesson.” And if you have a sticker, warning “Baby Aboard,” he spits on the ground and turns his back.
“All the stuff is sold.”
After his second beer, Theodore stands up, hitches his knife-sharp-creaseed khaki pants, tugs down his starched, yellow shirt - cuffs always buttoned. ….
