Theodore, Never Teddy (Revised June 18)

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.

After his second beer, Theodore stands up, hitches his knife-sharp-creased khaki pants, tugs down his starched, yellow shirt - cuffs always buttoned. He bumps the frame of the side door on the way out of the garage, makes his way to the patch of brown grass around back and unzips. He watches baby geese glide past him on the way to cattails at the end of the pond. He zips up, climbs into his truck and leaves.

Earnest turns to Willie.

“C’mon, how was I supposed to know no Teddy allowed?”

Willie flips open a box of Marlboros and plucks out a cigarette. “You’ll learn. He’s not leaving because of what you said. He just had enough of us. No one gets away with calling him Teddy after Gypsy Maria.” 

Willie picks up the wrench he’d left in the cup holder of his John Deere and puts it in a drawer of his red tool chest. 

“Yep, those eyes on Maria,” Jimbo says over his shoulder, on his way to the mini-fridge on top of the workbench. “Gotta say, when she smiled at you, you were done.” 

“Yeah,” Willie says, “Theodore thought he and Gypsy Maria had something solid going. Then one day, Maria’s mother opens the door and says Maria doesn’t want to see him again. After that, no more calling Theodore, Teddy. Ever. 

“So, we gotta go with what he wants after all the stuff he's been through. Especially with Gypsy Maria, he still had a thing for. Scranton cops said it looked like one punch laid her out behind that Erie-Lackawanna caboose, dead-parked with Maria, back of Stapinsky’s diner.

“After that,” Willie says, slightly hitching a shoulder. “Theodore never spoke about her and never went to Scranton again. 

Willie climbs off the Deere and sits in the red Adirondack chair he’d dragged into the garage from in front of the pond. He'd sat in that chair all summer, feeding bread to a goose with a broken wing until it stopped coming around. …. (to be continued)