The Best Summer Yet - Chapter 7

CHAPTER SEVEN
Summertime was going by too quickly. We had been busy and there had been lazy days. The boys had been able to stay over for more than half of the summer so far. We had been to birthday parties, movies, laser tag, swimming and numerous other outings. But nothing this summer had been as fun as the entertaining Mr. Cummings.
My Dad walked over one morning and asked Mr. Cummings if he would like to come over that evening to eat some boiled crawfish. Mr. Cummings was so touched by this offer, tears spilled from his eyes. He asked my Dad what he could bring and if he could help pay for them, but Dad said no, that we always bought too much and he was welcome to come over and share them.
We set up the picnic tables and hung some lanterns up to make it look cool. Dad pulled down the screens to keep the bugs out and Mom made her delicious dip and the boys helped to set up the cups and drinks. Dad bought some beer in case Mr. C wanted to drink some with his meal.
Dad boiled the crawfish along with sausage, potatoes, corn, onions, and garlic. We set out several kinds of crackers, paper towels and anything else we could think of. Everything was set.
Mom brought out some candles and Dad said we didn’t need them because we had enough light, and we heard her say quietly that they were in case he smelled too bad. We totally understood that.
Mr. Cummings came over, flowers in hand for Mom, and he was so clean and neat, we almost didn’t recognize him. He even had teeth. He looked amazing.
My Mom started crying when he gave her the flowers. She gave him a hug and said she would go in and get a vase to put them in and she came back with them in a beautiful crystal vase and she set them on a little table nearby. She told him she would have put them in the center of the picnic table but she was afraid the heat would wilt them. She kept thanking him and saying how beautiful they were. He was beaming. It was hard to imagine him being capable of some of the mean things he had done.
We all had a great time. All of the boys were on their best behavior because no one wanted to ruin his perfect night. We even helped to take all the heads off of the remaining crawfish and Mom and Dad insisted Mr. C take them home with him.
His eyes were shining with tears as he thanked them.
Bright and early the next morning the devil was unleashed in our neighborhood! Up to this point, Mr. Cummings had been mild. But that all changed when he met his match in a tiny little woman named Lorena Sienna Valencia.
She and her husband, Antonio, moved in with their five children, ages 5 months to 7 years old. Two girls and 3 boys, who were triplets. Ritchie, Ryan and Robbie were 4 years old. Ruthie was 5 months and Reecie was 7.
Lorena was 4 ft. 2 in. tall and weighed 76 lbs. She had the loudest voice I have ever heard in my life. She had long straight black hair and her eyes were so big
I think a cow would envy her. She was beautiful.
Antonio was a very good looking man. He was 6 ft. 2 in. tall and had a shock of curly black hair and dark blue eyes. He was friendly, funny and he smiled all the time. He was a carpenter and it was said there was nothing he could not make or repair.
Their children were all beautiful. Ruthie had her Dad’s beautiful blue eyes, but the others had big dark eyes like their mother.
　
　
We thought it would be cool having 3 little boys to play with, but those were 3 of the meanest little boys we ever knew. They broke and tore up everything they touched, and whatever they touched stayed right where they left it.
Reecie didn’t talk much but when she did she cursed like a sailor and was the most hateful girl ever. She spat on everyone. She spat right in her Mom’s face!
Her Mom slapped her so hard her body rocked, but she hit right back as hard as she could. They fought like two wild cats day and night.
From morning till very late at night, all we heard was yelling, screaming and crying. Lorena thought nothing of slapping her kids across the face, hitting them with a shoe, a pot, a spoon, or a belt. I had never witnessed child abuse before, but these kids were so bad, they made you understand why.
Mr. Cummings was sitting in his yard under the tree minding his own business when Lorena went out to get her newspaper. He glanced up when she walked out her door and he watched her go down the driveway. She was breathtakingly beautiful and it was hard not to stare. She turned around and saw him looking at her and he smiled.
　
　
“Don’t you be looking at me, you nasty old pervert! I’ll come over there and knock your eyeballs and your one rotten tooth down your throat!” and she let out the worst words I ever heard a woman say!
Mr. Cummings stood up and said, “What did you say to me young lady?”
“What! Oh, now you’re deaf too? Well you’re already old, stupid and ugly, so maybe you’d better figure out how to go blind, cause if I catch you looking over here at me again, I might just scratch ‘em out of your frickin’ head!”
Mr. Cummings just sat there.
What could he say to that? I don’t think anyone had ever spoken to him like that.
She went inside and for the next hour it sounded like a battle zone. She was screaming, the kids were screaming. Things were being smashed. One kid told on another then was hit by the one he told on, and it went on and on and on until she fed them.
Once fed, they ran outside to play and to cause problems for everyone in the neighborhood. They hit and bit and pulled hair and scratched. No one wanted their kids to play with them.
　
My Mom made a big pan of brownies and brought them over and introduced herself to Lorena. She told mom, “What’s wrong with you Martha Stewart? Do I look like I can’t cook? Do I look like I need charity? Who the hell do you think you are, thinking I give a rat’s rear who you are? Now get outta my face and take your frickin’ brownies with you, you lousy skank!”
Mom was so stunned, she could only say I’m sorry, and she turned and walked away. She was in tears by the time she got home. I threw my arms around her neck and told her that we heard what that wicked woman said to her and she said it was okay, that maybe she just had a bad day.
While the kids ran like wild Indians and tore up the neighborhood, Lorena did her cleaning. When she was done with her mopping, she opened her back door and tossed the nasty water into Mr. C’s yard. Some of it splashed on his house.
Later in the day, she cleaned her trash bin and let the
trash and the foul water run into his yard.
In the evening when Antonio returned home he saw Mr. Cummings outside and walked over and introduced himself. He asked Mr. C if vandals had messed up his house and yard and he offered to help him clean it up. Mr. Cummings wasn’t sure what he meant, but he said thanks anyway.
Saturday morning Antonio was off from work, so he got up early and grabbed some paint remover and went up onto the roof and proceeded to remove the red paint. He then removed all of the paint from the house where Mr. C had painted on the house numbers. When he was done, he used his pressure washer and cleaned the entire house from top to bottom.
Mr. Cummings was away for the weekend, so the house was completely done when he came home. Lorena lost her mind and cursed and screamed at her poor husband the whole time he worked on Mr. C’s house.
“Come on, honey. What does it hurt to help a lonely old man out?” said Antonio. She did not want to hear it.
Mr. Cummings returned on Monday morning and he didn’t notice his house right away. When we saw him out in his yard, we had to go right over to see what he thought of it. He looked at the house in amazement. He couldn’t decide if he was happy or angry about it. We told him that Mr. Valencia had done it for him and that he thought he was helping.
When we said that Lorena had helped him to remove the paint from his bricks, he looked like he was going to have a stroke!
“That confounded B-B brained no good for nuthin’, hateful, spiteful woman! I’ll get even with her if it’s the last I do or my name isn’t C. M. Cummings.
IF SHE SEES ME COMING, SHE’D BETTER MOVE ACROSS TOWN! THIS IS WAR!!!”
I wanted to ask him why he was so angry about her doing it but he didn’t seem to mind her husband doing it, but I was afraid to. I didn’t want the wrath of Mr. C. M. Cummings coming down on me. Instead I ran in and told Mom what had taken place. Mom looked out of our back window towards the Valencia house and she said, “If you ask me, she’s gonna get what she deserves.”
That night Mr. Cummings began with the dead fish. He not only buried some in her flower beds, he poured some of the liquid under the hood of her car.
The more she drove around town, the worse it smelled. The next night he painted it onto her window screens and painted it on to the lower half of her car.
Another night he sprayed weed killer in various places in her yard in the shape of their house numbers, 323. She had beautiful rose bushes in her yard and he even took the time to paint some of the leaves with weed killer and made perfect 323’s in them.
He let the air out of her tires, he chose one particular rainy night when her car was covered with road film and he took car wax and worked it in with the road film in perfect circles.
He spray painted her headlights blood red. He cut the rubber off of her windshield wipers. He removed the gas from her tank nearly every night.
No one ever saw him but everyone knew it was him.
But Lorena had a few tricks up her sleeve as well. She turned on her water hose and let it flood his yard. She turned on his water and put the hose inside of his truck and flooded it.
She cut every screen on his house out of its frame. She spray painted the word pervert all over his house.
On his driveway, she painted it black, then in bright yellow she painted “One crazy old coot lives here!” and painted a big arrow pointing to the house.
She took dog and cat poop she collected from the neighborhood, added some rotten eggs, climbed up on his roof and poured it into the chimney and the vents on his roof.
　
　
　
She took his humming bird feeders down and punched some tiny little holes in them so that the sugar water slowly leaked out, bringing ants to his carport.
She also mixed up a sweet concoction of her own and poured it along the side wall of his carport to the house so it was soon over run with ants, She stopped up his dryer vent so that the hot air could not escape.
You wouldn’t believe the amount of screaming and cursing that went on between those two.
One of the funniest exchanges between them was a day when he called her Mrs. Venetian. He was always calling her everything but her correct name.
He called her Valentino, Venezula, Vaticana, Anaconda. All sorts of funny names.
She put her hand on her hip, stuck her finger in his face, and screamed at him. “Listen, you stupid ditz. The name is Valencia, like the oranges.
V-A-L-E-N-C-I-A Valencia. Learn it you snaggletoothed moron or I’ll beat you to a pulp and pour the juice that’s left on the carcass of a dead rotted dog!” “What’s that you say, Consuelo? You goin’ back to Mexico? Ya might as well go back. Ya got the brains of a burnt taco. An while yur at it, bring all them little burritos back with you.
Maybe you can find their real Daddy when you go back and get your green card!” She hurled her shoe at him and it just did miss his head. He picked up her shoe and refused to give it back. She screamed and cursed so much she lost her voice and he laughed until he was weak.
The next morning there were dozens of crushed oranges dumped from one end of her car to the other.
She took a glass cutter and cut V’s into his windshield, rear glass, and his windows of his truck.
The day after that he jimmied her lock, got into her car and rubbed rancid lard all over her beautiful leather seats, then patted dry oatmeal and rice all over it. She retaliated by filling his gas tank with bird seed.
His answer to that was to sneak into her house while she went on a short walk with her kids and he put shrimp heads in the ends of her curtain rods. He saved some of the shrimp water and poured it under the cushions of her sofa. He slipped out and was back home before anyone saw him. It took several days before the smell got so bad the family had to leave and spend the night in a motel. Mr. Cummings was absolutely giddy with joy.
　
　
The following weekend we had Mr. C over to eat fried fish. He ate so much you could see his belly swell. As usual we gave him the leftovers but he asked my Dad if he could have the left over grease. Dad started to say no, but we know what happens when things don’t go his way. Some time during the night, he slipped over and rubbed the grease on the inside of her dryer. He had quite a bit of it left, so he poured it down her sink drains.
He was standing out under his tree when the Valencias returned home. As she got out of the car he said, “Well, howdy there my little taquito!”
“Drop dead, troll!” she replied hatefully.
Her husband asked her to ignore him and to keep calm so she gathered her kids and went inside. Mr. Cummings had thrown the main breaker when they left for the hotel, and for days the a/c was off and so were the refrigerator and freezer. You can not imaging the stench coming from that house.
Chett, Brett and I were just about to go for a bike ride when we heard Lorena scream. She seemed to fly outside and ran at Mr. Cummings like a pro-football player and she hit him head first right in his gut. He fell to the ground, knocking the wind out of him. She ten beat him and kicked him until her husband managed to pull her off of him.
We yelled for Mom and Dad to call the police and an ambulance. Dad ran over to see about Mr. C. He could barely breathe, but he was cackling like a crazed chicken. The more she screamed and cursed and fought her husband to let her go, the more he laughed.
He suffered 4 broken ribs, a broken finger on one hand and 3 broken fingers and a broken wrist on the other hand. The last tooth in his mouth had been knocked out, his nose was broken, and he needed his top lip stitched. She blackened both of his eyes and he couldn’t hear out of one ear for nearly a week. Yet with all of these injuries, he seemed to be the happiest little man in the world.
Antonio Valencia was afraid to walk into that hospital room that evening. They waited for the police to take her to jail, but Mr. Cummings gave them instructions not to. They asked if he wanted to press charges against her and he said, “Not today. Let her sweat!”
He carefully entered the room and asked if he could come in. “Yes, yes by all mean young man, come in.” Antonio started to ask how he was doing, but at the sight of him, Antonio broke down and cried and kept saying he was so sorry.
“Don’t be sorry. That was the most fun I have ever had in my life! I LOVE that little spit fire of yours!”
“But, I don’t understand…” said Antonio.
“Oh, sonny boy! I am one cantankerous old fool, and I strive to make life miserable for most everyone I meet. And I do a pretty good job of it if I do say so myself. But when that tiny little hot tamale moved in next door, I knew I had met a female me! She made me feel alive again.”
“But sir, the damages that she did to you and your property, and the damages you did to us.”
“Oh, don’t worry one minute over that stuff my dear friend,” said Mr. Cummings. “You see, son, I am a multi-millionaire. Made my fortune in copper. I’ll pay for all of the damages to your property and mine. As a matter of fact, you probably won’t get the smells out of your house, so if you want to tear it down and build what you want, I’ll foot the bill. And buy her and them little ones a brand new car and I’ll pay for it.”
“I don’t know what to say, Mr. Cummings. That is so very generous of you. But why are you so mean to most people? Why go to such drastic lengths to cause so much trouble?”
“Cause it’s fun,” said Mr. C.
“Thank you, Mr. C. Thank you so much,” said Antonio.
“Don’t mention it.”
My Mom and Dad and the twins and I came to visit and Mr. Valencia left. Mom and Dad were talking to Mr. Valencia in the hallway when a nurse came in to Mr. C’s room.
“And who do we have here today? Let’s see, Mr. C. M. Cummings. How are you sweetie? And may I ask, what does the C M stand for?”
I looked at her and said, “If you see him coming, you’d better go the other way!” The old man laughed so hard tears were flowing down his cheeks. “That was great, Mac!” he said. “You’re the only person who had ever said that to anyone besides me, so I think that now you can know what the C M stands for.”
“Really?” said Mac.
“No, dang blast it all, it don’t stand for ‘really’!
snapped Mr. C. “It stands for Chauncey
Montgomery. Guess my folks had a real sense of humor.”
“I like it,” said Mac. “But you have to admit, when you say, ‘If you see me comin’, that’s humor!”
　
The rest of the summer was quiet after that. Mr. C
needed time to heal. His house smelled so bad he decided to have it torn down too, and he hired Mr. Valencia to build him a new one. He paid for them to stay in a suite at the hotel until their house was finished.
Mom wanted him to stay here with us so he could heal and he said the only way he would stay was if he could stay in the fort. I jumped for joy when I heard that.
We set him up in one of the bunk beds and Mom bought him 2 packs of brand new white undershirts and a few pair of Khaki pants and some nice dress shirts and 2 pair of pajamas.
While she was gone, he had some men come in and finish the kitchen in the fort. A brand new stove and oven, a brand new side by side refrigerator and freezer and beautiful cabinets and drawers and a dishwasher were built in for Mom.
Mom was so stunned when she saw it, she very gently gave Mr. C a kiss on his forehead and thanked him.
“Galldurnit, woman!” he snapped and it startled Mom. “Whadjagoandothatfer? Now I’m gonna have to be nice for a change!” He winked at her and smiled and told her that he had to keep folks on their toes.
Summer’s over now, or at least our break from school is over. I’m kind of sad about having to go and leave Mr. C all day, but I can’t wait to go to school and tell the teacher and all the kids all about him.
The End