Jack "Be Nimble" Anderson

Ian meets another member of Gabe's childhood club and discovers that the club members are keeping a secret.

I arrived at Jack's house at around seven PM and a petite, sixty-ish woman answered the door. "Hello," I said. "Is this Jack Anderson's house?"

"Yes it is, can I ask what you're here for? I didn't know he was expecting company."

"Well he wasn't, I just...I was hoping I could talk to him about one of his old friends."

"I'm not so sure that's a good idea," she said, shrugging.

"Anne?" a raspy voice sounded from another room. He coughed. "Who is it?"

"Oh, nobody! It's just a package." she said.

"I didn't order anything," he said. I could hear unsteady footsteps as the man hobbled into sight behind a walker.

"Dad, sit down now!" the woman commanded.

"Now why would you tell me nobody's here?"

"Do you know this man?"

I stood awkwardly, beginning to think maybe I should come back another time.

"Yes! It just so happens that this is my good friend...Johnny!"

She looked up at me now, frowning, and the old man winked at me. "Where did you meet him?"

"At the library," he said.

"You hate reading!" she protested.

"Well not anymore! And it's all thanks to Johnny!"

"Who took you to the library?"

"I walked!" he croaked.

"You did not walk, Dad! Why would you lie to me?"

"I think you've done enough, darling. I can take care of myself from here, thank you very much. Just go back home, will you?" He coughed a hard, phlegmy cough and his dentures flew out of his mouth and landed at the woman's feet. She bent to pick them up and he barked, "Leave it!"

Anne scoffed and left, slamming the door. The man grumbled something incomprehensible and tried to pick up the dentures from his spotless tiled floor. I picked them up and handed them to him. "Thanks," he gargled, and rolled his eyes in annoyance. He put the dentures back in his mouth without even looking at them, then said, "She thinks she's my mother." He motioned for me to come inside, and I sat down on his couch beside him.

"Are you Jack Be Nimble?" I shook my head. "I'm sorry. Are you Jack Anderson?"

"What did you call me before? I be what?"

"Nimble. Sorry, it just came out."

"Who are you?" He began coughing and hacking again and I noticed the source of his problem. There were, I kid you not, three ash trays in the one room, and every one of them was almost overflowing.

"I'm Ian Smith. I'm here to talk to you about an old friend."

"What old friend?" he whispered, between coughs.

"Gabriel Watson."

"You know him?"

"Not exactly. I haven't met him, but I bought a house from him. But I had some questions and I was wondering, since you know him-"

"No, I used to know him. A long time ago. Really long."

"Do you remember being in a club with him and some other kids?"

"Of course I do! The Maniacal Song! Haha-" his laughter was interrupted by more coughing.

"I'm sorry, what?"

"Yes, I remember. It was-"

"What did you say it was called?"

"The Maniacal Song! It was sort of our code. When we wanted to meet, we'd say 'Let's go listen to the maniacal song', and we'd go in Gabe's treehouse in his yard."

"Do you remember any other code words besides that?"

"Maybe...let me see. Pirate was code for Gabe, Burglar was Tommy, I was Double-Dutch, Frank was Hammer, Caterpillar was Eleanor, and Insect was T-" He paused here and conjured up another cough, the loudest one yet, but it was dry and clearly deliberate. Then he shook his head, as if surprised by the volume of this fake cough. "And that's it," he said, and I noticed that his fake cough had knocked his dentures slightly loose on the top, and I could see his toothless gums when he spoke.

"What do you mean, that's it? Who was Insect?"

"Insect wasn't anybody."

"Then why did you say that?"

"Insect wasn't a person, it was code for...stupid."

"Why did you have a code word for stupid?"

"So the boy we were talking about wouldn't know what we were calling him."

"What boy?"

"Oh, you know, any of the boys in the club."

"But you just said those were the code words that the club used. And I know Tommy and Frank know the code and obviously Gabe does, so who would they be talking about?"

He took a long, shaky breath and started coughing up a storm again. Then, amazingly, he produced a fat cigar and a matchbook from the pocket of his too-big dungarees. He lit the match and sucked in the smoke, seemingly holding it in for as long as he could, before releasing a thick cloud directly into my face. I coughed and wiped my leaky eyes, then repeated my question. "Who were they talking about? It couldn't have been any of the club members. Unless there was another member of the club...?"

"How do you even know about the club, Johnny?" I gawked at the bothersome gap between the top of his teeth and his gums. I didn't correct him because I was pretty sure he knew that wasn't my name. I have always been good at detecting lies and trickery, so I just went along.

"Tommy told me. But he didn't mention the name of it."

"And he only mentioned the five members right?"

"Right."

"Well there you have it." He sucked in another stream of smoke, the end of the cigar spitting ashes which fell to the floor.

"Actually, Tommy only mentioned the five, but I think Frank may have told me there were six. Yes, I'm almost certain he said six members. He didn't tell me any of their names except his and Gabe's, but he definitely said six."

Jack wiped his mouth with his free hand and put his cigar into his mouth again, this time leaving it there, so he had to talk around it. I wondered if this counted as putting something between himself and me. That's one of the things people subconsciously do when they're lying. He squinted at my forehead and I swear I saw his pupils enlarge when he said, "There were five members in the club. Me, Gabe, Tommy, Frank, and Eleanor. That's it."

"So...if insect means stupid, then what does 'infested' mean?"

The cigar he was holding in the corner of his mouth bobbed up and down as he spoke. "Um...extremely stupid? Hell," he coughed through his dentures, "I don't know." He sucked on his cigar again, and when he exhaled, the puff of black leaked out between his dentures and his now blackened gums.

I noticed in the corner, between a grandfather clock and a shelf of decorations that seemed far too delicate and feminine to be Jack's, there was a glass cabinet containing a collection of pipes. I also noticed a similar cabinet in the kitchen, which was connected to the living room and not completely closed off. This one contained various decorative ash trays. I asked Jack where his bathroom was, and he told me that the downstairs one was temporarily out of order, but that there was one upstairs. I walked back and forth through the hallway, snooping through every desk and every box in every room. I looked through the black and white pictures on the wall and gathered that Jack was once married and had five other children in addition to the daughter Anne, who I'd met.

Another picture featured a large treehouse, open in the front. A banner hung from the roof, spelling "The Maniacal Song" in various symbols, including a hammer for Frank as the T in 'the', a pirate captain hat drawn around the letter M that I assumed represented Gabe, a caterpillar for Eleanor was the letter I, a bag with a dollar sign for Tommy was the S, and the O was a jumprope for Jack, but there was nothing that seemed to portray an insect other than Eleanor's caterpillar.

Then I saw another third cabinet that matched the other two. It contained, among other seemingly valuable things, a pair of matching gold chains. The first one's charm was a boy who seemed to be skipping. The boy had the necklace's tiny chain held in his hands like a jumprope. The second chain had an ant charm.

I found a box full of photo albums in the closet of one of the bedrooms. One album was filled with pictures of who I imagined to be Gabe and his friends as teenagers. There was a very pretty girl who I presumed was Eleanor, and in most of the pictures she was the only girl. Several pictures were in or around the treehouse. But I never saw more than the five friends.

I puzzled over this for a while, looking over the pages of the album multiple times before I noticed something on one of the pictures near the end of the album. It only featured four of the club members, excluding who, if I had to guess, I'd probably say was Tommy, just because he looked older than the rest of them. But there was a large, hairy hand brushing against Eleanor's hand. The rest of the person wasn't in the shot, but I could tell that the callused hand was way too big to belong to any of the boys I'd seen in the other pictures. And that's when it occurred to me. Who had taken all of those pictures?

I removed the photograph and put it in my coat pocket, then moved the rest of the pictures up so Jack wouldn't notice anything, since the last ten or so pages were empty anyway. I put everything back where it was and took some pictures with my phone, then hastily returned downstairs and hoped that Jack hadn't noticed I'd been gone too long.

"That must have been one massive s**t," he said as I reentered the living room. His dentures were back in place and his cigar had been replaced with a black pipe. "Did you flush?"

"Yes, sir," I said.

His eyes narrowed. "Are you sure?"

He looked at me quizzically. "You know, maybe I'd better double check," I said. I went back upstairs to the bathroom, flushed the toilet, and went back down again. Now I understood. I could hear the water running from the living room. "You were right," I said. "I guess I forgot." I sat back down. "So, when Tommy talked about the club, he didn't mention you that much."

"Well I was kind of the nerd of the group, a bit quieter. More self-conscious. I don't even remember why Gabe ever asked me to join in the first place." He drank something from a mug that I hadn't noticed before, then started choking, probably from another cough attack. I went over to see if I could help, but he gestured for me to stay back. He regained his composure.

"So why didn't you ever bring girls up?" I asked.

"A couple reasons. For one, I was a nerd, like I said. I didn't get a lot of girls. And two, if I did take them up there, they'd end up being more impressed with Gabe or Tommy or Frank than me. I was always the one who was slightly out of place."

"How did you get along with the other boys?"

"I was annoyed by Gabe as much as Frank and Eleanor were. Before Eleanor was courting him, of course. I tended to lean towards Frank more when they fought, whereas Tommy leaned towards Gabe. And that stupid name, 'Jack Be Nimble'. There's another reason, if a girl heard them calling me that it might catch on. Tommy was alright. He was always the calm one, a couple years older than all of us. He was like the big brother of the group, I think."

"What about Eleanor?"

"I was the only one who wasn't fixated on her, and I think she appreciated my company. I didn't treat her like a girl, I just treated her like Eleanor. Like nothing had changed. Because nothing had."