Silent Cal Sounds Off

Silent Cal Sounds Off

By Ed Staskus

   Emma met Calvin the day after she got back from a week at piano camp in Oberlin. Her brother Oliver, the Unofficial Monster Hunter of Lake County, was still in Lithuania with their father, who had gone there on a working trip. Their father was an electrical engineer.  Oliver was on summer vacation with him scaring up shadows in the Baltics.

   She was disgruntled about the piano camp. She didn’t even like the piano anymore. The clarinet was her thing. She was getting good enough on it to make it sing. She played it in the school band.

   Emma was eating two hard-boiled eggs and licking teaspoons of hummus at a round table on the outside patio when their neighbor’s dog started barking. It was a Toto terrier kind of dog. The neighbor was an old Italian lady who always dressed in black. She tied Toto to a stake two or three times a day outside her sliding back door for twenty or thirty minutes. While he was outside he barked at anything that moved, including insects. He barked a coyote out of the neighborhood. Her father resented the dog and the neighbor. He worked out of the house two days a week and said the dog drove him nuts.

   “I don’t want to talk about it,” he told his wife. He wouldn’t talk to the old Italian lady and had long ago given up trying to reason with the dog.

   Emma put her second egg down when she saw a boy come out the sliding door and flop down on the grass next to the dog, who was barking at a bluejay. The bird was barking back at him.

   “Hi,” Emma said. 

   “Hi,” the boy said.

    “Are you our new neighbor?”

   “Yeah.”

   “Are you the boy who started school with us just before summer started?”

   “Yeah.” 

   “Are you who everybody calls Silent Cal?”

   “Yeah.”

   Calvin had moved in with his grandmother at the end of April. By mid-summer hardly anybody in the neighborhood had noticed him. It was partly the dog’s fault and partly his own fault. The dog was too loud. He was too quiet. The neighbors were disgruntled by the noisy dog. They didn’t notice Calvin, who was quiet as a mouse. 

   One day at lunch just before school let out for the summer, a girl sitting across from Calvin in the lunchroom said, “Everybody says you never say more than two words. I bet I can make you say more than two words.”

   “What bet?”

   “I bet my chocolate chip cookie.”

   “You lose,” Silent Cal said reaching for the cookie.

   “How come you don’t talk much?”

   “Because my dad said so.”

   “He told you not to talk?”

   “Yeah.”

   “How come?”

   “It was after my mom died,” Calvin said. 

   “Your mom died?”

   “Yeah.”

   “That’s terrible. How did it happen?”

   “She was driving me to school when we lived in Brecksville. A car in front of us rode over some kind of pipe and it went flying. It hit our windshield and killed my mother.”

   Emma didn’t know what to say. The only dead people she had ever seen were grandparents. They were never killed by pipes. They wore out and one morning didn’t wake up.

   “My dad went back into the army and they shipped him away to where Arabs are fighting. When I asked him when he was coming back he told me to shut up. He said he didn’t want to hear a word from me ever again. Then he dropped me off here at my grandmother’s house.”

   “Is he coming back?”

   “I don’t think so. I think he hates me.”

   “How could that be?”

   “Whenever I tried to talk to him, even before mom died, he was always giving me advice, even if I wasn’t talking about a problem, or he would start yelling at me for the bad choices he thought I was making. He was always talking down to me. I tried to tell him I wasn’t a kid anymore but he wouldn’t listen. When I asked him to listen, he looked like he wanted to hit me.”

   Emma’s parents could be bossy and strict, but she knew they would never do that. They never had. She knew they never would.

   “Did your mom listen?”

   “She always listened. We had great talks. I miss her so much.”

   “You can still talk to her if you want. She’s not here but she’s still here. My little brother Oliver is always talking to ghosts and spirits. They talk back whenever they have something to say, although you can’t always understand what they’re saying since they don’t always speak English.”

   “Oh,” Calvin said.

   “My little brother didn’t talk for a long time after he was born. When he wanted something he would point to it and make funny sounds. Finally, our mom pretended to not hear him when he was doing that. She ignored him until he started talking. Gosh, now we can’t shut him up!”

   Calvin looked thoughtful.

   “Are you going to live here from now on?” Emma asked.

    “Yeah, I think so.”

   “Well, if your dad isn’t here to tell you shut up, maybe you could start talking. That’s how to make friends. When you don’t talk it makes the other person feel bad. They feel like you don’t like them. They don’t know what you’re thinking, what’s going on. It makes it seem like you don’t care. How can I be your friend if you won’t talk to me, know what I mean”

   “I think so, but what is there to talk about?”

   “What flavor popsicle do you like?” 

   “Grape.”

   “I like orange. What games do you like?”

   “I like kickball.”

   “ I like checkers. I always beat my uncle. He said he’s going to bring a chess board the next time he visits, but I told him I don’t know how to play chess.”

   “What did he say?” 

   “He said, all the better, whatever that means.”

   “I played checkers with my mom. She was better than me, but I won sometimes.”

   “How old are you?” Emma asked.

   “I’m 12.”

   “Oh, that’s the same as me. When were you born?”

   “In September.”

   “What day?” 

   “September 1st.”

   Emma was flabbergasted. She was born on September 1st the same as Calvin.

   “You’re a blue moon baby, just like me.”

   “That’s what my mom always said. She said I was a blue moon baby because there were two full moons that month on the first day and the last day of the month.”

    “What’s your dog’s name?”

   “I call him Ziggy.”

   “Do you want to take him for a walk. There’s a trail through the woods back there. We could take his leash off. He could run around. Maybe he wouldn’t bark so much if he could run around once in a while.”

   “Maybe he’s just trying to tell us something,” Calvin said.

   “I know, but his barking makes my dad say bad words sometimes..”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A stem-winder in the Maritimes.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CVDP8B58

Summer 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. A missing rucksack full of one hundred dollar bills. Two hired guns from Montreal. One RCMP officer stands in their way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication