Great Beyond Belief

1951. Roy Flumm, his wife Fern, and their two children, Tom (4) and Irving (3), lived three houses from us. Because the children were younger than I was, I didn’t have much to do with them. And parents didn’t have that much to do with each other when their children didn’t.

They got my attention, though. There was something oddly intriguing about this family. They all seemed to speak in slow motion and, probably, to think slowly as well. And they never asked, always answered, and often seemed a sentence or two behind.

“Roy, how are you?” my father might call out, and Roy would look up slowly, as if gauging the likelihood of rain. “Mmm,” he’d say eventually. “And you?”

“Doing fine,” Dad might say.

“Mmm,” Roy would respond. “Weather,” he might add.

“Yep,” Dad would say. “That’s one sure thing we’ve got here,” he’d add, beginning to sound a bit folksy. “We’ve got weather.”

“Mmm,” Roy would affirm. And Dad would make a hasty retreat to our house or garage, afraid of spending the rest of the day caught up in Roy’s slow, incessant “Mmm’s,” trapping the truth beneath their meaninglessness the way a lawnmower grinds grass.

“Wow,” Dad might say, shutting the front door behind us and moving into the living room. “He’s a bit scary.”

“Mmm,” I’d quietly.

“Don’t say that, son,” Dad would bark.

I didn’t say a word. Or make any other sound. It was Sunday afternoon and I could hear my Lincoln Logs calling.

>>> 

I overheard my Mom and Dad’s conversations about Roy and Fern several times.

“They’re really, really poor,” Dad said once.

“I know,” Mom said. “The whole neighborhood knows. We try to take them food sometimes—maybe a cake or a tray of cookies or even a meatloaf—but it seems so hard for Fern to accept our kindness that we’ve mostly stopped trying.”

“Really?” said Dad, trying to remember if we’d had a meat loaf within memory. “You cooked some extra food for them?”

“Well, no,” Mom admitted. “I just helped pay for it.”

“Oh. Well, that was good of you.”

“Some people are hard to help,” Mom sighed.

There was such a deep sorrow to these observations that I found them hard to listen to and, without thinking about it, I began to ride my bike past the Flumms’ house, looking in their windows, hoping to see something that might make me happy.

“What you doing, Fisher boy?” Fern called out to me from the backyard one afternoon. I had foolishly ridden my bike nearly within her reach as she trundled out to hang up her laundry. Against all expectations, the woman was oversized like a St. Bernard, overweight, and very loud. Unsurprisingly, though, she moved slowly, and I could ride my bike away before her beefy hands grabbed my steering wheel.

“I’ll getcha next time,” she would call out.

“No you won’t,” I’d call back, and much to my relief, she would laugh. So I’d giggle loudly and speed home.

In time, I was riding past the Flumm’s accompanied by T.J., who remained a good deal more afraid of Fern Flumm than I did. One day, Fern tripped and all but threw her body, laundry basket and all, in front of us, and we wound up in a tangle on the grass of the front yard.

“Hey!” she said. “Why don’t you watch what you’re doing?”

“Why don’t you watch what you’re doing?” I replied, as T.J. sped off toward his home.

“Help me up,” she said, and I made a valiant effort to get her body off the ground. “Come on,” she urged. “Pull!”

I did and, in time, she was standing again. She smelled of soap and hot dogs.

“Can I go now?” I asked.

“What’s your name?” she asked slowly.

“You already know,” I responded.

“Tell me why you never stop by and play checkers or something with my Tom.”

“He’s too young,” I answered.

“Don’t think so,” she responded. “Bet he can beat you.”

“He here now?” I asked.

As if by magic, Tom appeared with an old, ragged checkers board and box of checkers in his hands. And he beat me. As his father would have said, very slowly, “He up’n beat the tar outta you.”

>>> 

There was something about The Flumm guys that reminded me of Br’er Bear, always on the verge of knocking my head clean off for no obvious reason other than the slow, seething anger inside of them.

Fern Flumm, on the other hand, seemed to appreciate me for some reason. “You like butterflies, don’t you?” she said one day.

“Yes, I do,” I said. “Used to collect them.”

“I saw,” she said.

The more I was around Fern, the more I became aware that she saw things. She noticed. I liked that, and I’d lost any trace of fear for her.

Tom’s Dad, Roy, on the other hand, seemed like an explosion that was slowly and ominously developing. My fear of him had no bounds.

He spoke about how unfair the world was, often talking about people who had money and other people who, like Roy, didn’t have money. “Could be a good life,” he would say slowly, “if the rich people didn’t keep all the good to hisselves.” He thought for a moment. “I could probably be a star or something,” he added. “On TV.”

I was glad, in that moment, that I wasn’t a rich person. I wouldn’t have minded being better at checkers, though, because Tom continued to beat the tar outta me.

>> 

One year, very spontaneously, our neighborhood created a Fourth of July picnic, the sort of hot-dogs-and-burgers-and-mustard-and-mayonnaise meal that makes us glad to be Americans. For the second annual picnic, Roy Flumm astonished the entire neighborhood by insisting that we all gather in his backyard. He asked us to bring chairs, food and fireworks. “Seems like maybe he wants to join the human race,” my father said.

When the big night came, we all brought food and drink and Red Devil Fireworks Assortments and settled into the Flumm yard. Then a silence settled stubbornly over everyone. No one could think of a thing to say.

“Hey, everyone!” Fern finally called out. “Cat got your tongue?”

“Meow!” I called out, and soon T.J. and several of his siblings joined me, and Fern joined us, and the cat noises rose until everyone was just laughing loudly, and suddenly we were all talking about normal things, like the weather and school and work and washing machines and the sound of Rice Krispies when you first pour milk on them.

It was a good feeling, and I looked over at Fern and smiled. She smiled back and scratched the air like a cat.

Roy, meanwhile, must have eaten five hamburgers. “Haven’t eaten like this in years!” he declared to his wife, who visibly shared his pleasure. “Wait until you see the fireworks I got,” he added.

Why, I’m not sure, but Roy’s enthusiasm worried me. It felt as if everything were moving along in an orderly way but, without warning, it might all whirl out of control. Look out!

Soon, it was dark enough, and Roy called out slowly, “Tom, go get our fireworks!”

Tom obediently dragged his oversized body into the Flumm garage and emerged with the biggest box of fireworks anyone had ever seen, much less contemplated buying.

“That’s an $8.98 Red Devil Special,” Tom McGarry uttered in reverential tones. Nearly everyone was astonished, filling the air with the sound of involuntary “oooh’s.”

“Eight ninety-eight!” T.J. mouthed to me as if he had never even imagined such a huge sum of money for fireworks. “My God!” he cried involuntarily, and his mother, Mary McGarry, cuffed him on the ear. “Don’t cuss, T.J.!” she declared. “How many times do I have to tell you? Seven ‘Hail Mary’s’ this week, okay?”

T.J. nodded absently. Then young Tom Flumm handed the box unceremoniously to Roy, who laid it on top of the other assembled boxes, which Roy’s box dwarfed. “I been looking at this box of whoppers down at the stand by the gas station for a month now,” Roy told us. “Wanted to make this a very special night.”

And with that, he cleared his throat and began to sing, “Oh-oh, say can you see….” And we stood and sang with Roy Flumm. And when we were through, we clapped our hands enthusiastically. Roy Flumm, to everyone’s surprise, really didn’t sing badly at all.

“Tom!” Roy called. “Irving! Bring me the matches.”

Irving, with exaggerated solemnity, walked the box of matches to his father with Tom just behind him. Clearly, they’d had to rehearse.

“And now, friends, neighbors, and countrymen,” Roy said, “I propose to begin this here ceremony with the best firecracker in my collection, the Red Devil Garden of Absolute Bliss.”

“Ahhh,” we all declared, deeply impressed.

Roy carried his prized firework as far from the other boxes of fireworks as he reasonably could and placed it on a flat piece of wood. He held up the matches, pulled one out, lit it, and lit the fuse on the firework.

For a few moments, it was a garden of bliss, indeed. But then it suddenly sputtered like an infant unexpectedly and violently losing its dinner and two flares flew from the end of the garden of bliss, one of them landing on my shirt and the other one smack dab in the middle of Roy’s $8.98 Red Devil Memorial Collection.

Soon the other fireworks in the box began to ignite. Neighbors rushed to pull their own fireworks from the conflagration and my stomach began to burn. Suddenly, there was Tom, blubbering a bit, pulling off my shirt, uncovering my belly, putting out the fire that was threatening to consume me. With his own hands.

I was incredulous. We rolled on the grass. I heard the familiar overwhelming sound of a Piccolo Pete flying just beyond my ear. Tom grabbed a CocaCola and poured it on me. I kept thinking, “This boy is risking his life. For me!”

Then we just watched in stupefied enjoyment and pain as a few dozen fireworks competed with each other for our attention and admiration. By now, everyone there—the whole neighborhood—was shouting, “Wow! Wow! Wow!”

As the last firework offered up its own unique, sputtering cascade of dancing fire, though, we noticed Roy, lying in a fetal position on the ground, wailing, crying, overwhelmed by pain. “Just once!” he said. “Just once I wanted to be the star.”

I ran to him. T.J. followed, as did a few other kids. “No, Roy!” I said. “You don’t understand. That was great! That was tremendous! It was the best fireworks display we’ve ever seen!”

But Roy wailed and cried and yelled at us, “Out of my yard, bastards. Out!”

And I know that every one of us, for many years if not forever, found ourselves waking from fondest dreams, saying, ‘No, Roy! It was great!’”

We never had the chance to convince the man, though. He and his family moved within three weeks. At least I had a chance to tell Tom before he left what a hero he’d been. I was pretty badly burned, but without his help, I might have spent a day or so in the hospital. And even that, maybe especially that—even the remarkably surprising experience of Tom’s bravery—was great. Great beyond belief!