Kool like that

Kool Like That

Rosa Lee and Albert the Drumstick had painted themselves a pair of antique Schwinn bicycles, Chicago built, circa 1967. They painted them only because the poor things were so rusty and nasty that even their classic lines and super smooth old paints just did not look any good anymore. His was a metallic blue, hers a metallic lavendar.  Rosa Lee stole some chain protectors off an old asshole that lived in the rich people’s subdivision off antique bikes that he had for no reason, and Albert the Drumstick sweet talked a particularly dorky bike mechanic into cleaning up the transmission systems and giving them a couple nice but used chains.

Now they had gone out riding the Schwinns. It was a nice time for a ride out on the outskirts of their country town. They had rolling hills, but very gently rolling. So gently rolling that cows did not think anything of walking up and down them, and cows are not really ones for exercise.

Albert the Drumstick, who was handsome in a fatty sort of way, had remarked to Rosa Lee in the past that he never understood how animals could be so fit and healthy all the time. Why can cats move so ably? Why can dogs run for so long? “It’s not as if you ever see them out doing laps or taking cardio classes,” he might say. Cardio classes were something he had read about in the Utne Reader at the library at some point.

Rosa Lee would hum and smile, as she tended to do. She might pull a piece of lovely origami paper out of her purse and fold for Albert a crab or a dragon or maybe even a fish - if his observation struck her as pithy then. Albert liked the fish best, but he always told Rosa Lee that whatever she folded for him was his favorite thing that she would fold. She might have been a mute but she wasn’t stupid. She knew he was lying but she also knew he knew she knew he was lying, which made it cute.

So.

Outside of town sometimes you’ll run across a road you haven’t noticed before (because maybe it was overgrown or maybe you thought it was a drive or maybe you didn’t care much for that piece of country and kept moving right on through). At the slow going pace of two old Schwinn bicycles from 1967, on a nice little afternoon with some breeze and sunshine that looks like it had passed through your mama’s window, then… then you notice those other roads.

Albert the drumstick wore a great pink dress shirt with a green handkerchief in his pocked and blood red driving gloves. His pants were light but black and pinstriped and his shoes had once been of a wonderful leather. He often commented that he’d like shoetrees for them. Rosa Lee dressed eccentrically even for her. She had men’s ties tied all up and down her arms and a sort of tank top she had cut out from a discarded orange traffic cone. She had sewn a cotton lining on the inside so that it wouldn’t feel so uncomfortable or so strange. She had on pink, as well, as in her large pink had and her wild pink skirt that only came to her knees, as she was riding after all, and she had green leggings on beneath them. Green, with a yellow rope looking design printed onto them so it looked like a length of hemp were wound around her leg like a snake.

Perhaps their dress and the rare ride on bikes in the country had them feeling grand and brave. The strange road ran down to their right through a bit of weeds that had mostly overgrown it, but the dirt had that unmistakable look of a truck having recently passed. Perhaps it takes the country eye, but you could tell because it’s wheel had caught a blade of long grass or two and ground it into the dirt. The crushed grass still looked green.

They rode back through there perhaps three quarters of a mile and they never found the truck, but they did find a man dressed in overalls and a t-shirt from a softball team that could not have existed for many years, and he had a small wagon pulled by a donkey and he was moving things into a shed that stood all alone, somewhat forlornly, in a wide and empty field of grass that appeared to be of no use to anyone at all.

“Rocky soil, here, Rosa Lee,” Albert the Drumstick said sagaciously. Too which Rosa Lee smiled and bobbed her head and then caught her hat before it flew off.

When they got closer, they could see that the man with the cart and the donkey was loading carton after carton of Kool-Aid into the shed. You could see by the doors now that it was normally kept tightly locked, with a chain and several locked bolts besides. The locks appeared reinforced inside. But all he had inside was carton after carton of Kool-Aid.

“Hi-ho! there — stranger!” said Albert the Drumstick. “I’m known as Mr. Drumstick, but friends call me Albert. This is my bosom friend Ms. Rosa Lee. Rosa Lee, indeed!” Rosa Lee hopped off her bike and bowed with a flourish. She had two baskets hanging over the back wheel of her bike. In one she had many, many flowers that she had grown and cut and she also had two water bottles, the hiker’s sort, for her and Albert. In the others she had a brightly colored quilt she’d woven that summer though she had not known quite why.

“Well it causes tooth decay, it does!” the gnarly man in the overalls said as a reply, though no one had asked about the Kool-Aid. He was an old man. Looked to be a poor man. But he had lovely teeth for his age. Dry and cracked skin on his face and eyes that looked sunken and abused. Hair like the straw on the bottom of a barn, but lovely teeth. So it goes.

Rosa Lee danced over to him with a handful of flowers and handed them to him. She also had both of the water bottles. If she could have, she would have squeaked with delight when she found the carton of the long discontinued Berry Blue Kool-Aid in that shed. She opened it up to the madman’s horror and poured some into each water bottle, shaking them up by spinning her whole body around.

The hermit’s eyes went as wild as they could, but that wasn’t much at his age and mental condition. He could not even manage a protest. Look at him! He’s so gray. Which only made it kinder or perhaps more hilarious that Rosa Lee replace the water bottles in her basket, shook out that quilt done up like 17 rainbows and put it about the man’s shoulders.

“We brush daily, sir. Most times, twice a day. Rosa Lee won’t ever let me forget.” Rosa Lee shook her head and smiled. No, she would not let Albert the Drumstick forget to take care of his teeth.

The hermit just looked away from them and said, “Well, it does cause awful, awful decay, it does.” He kept loading the Kool-Aid back into his shed.

It was a nice shed.