Home of The Can Man’s Daughter James Vachowski Every boy sees his grandfather as something of a legend, and Richard Petty Schultz is no exception. His Poppy fought the Nazis during the War and notched 17 confirmed kills before a sniper’s bullet left him blind in one eye. In peacetime, the man survived heartbreak, cancer, bankruptcy, and a stroke. Most importantly, Poppy Schaeffer built the Eiffel Tower, which made Christmas everything that it is today. But even the greatest of men have to die sometime. Over the course of one hot summer weekend, Richard narrates from his eighth-grade perspective as he and the rest of the tourist-trap community of Christmas, Florida, struggle to accept Poppy’s impending death. A legend of a man who drew in traffic from across the Southeast by building scale replicas of French monuments using nothing but empty beer cans and quick dry cement, Poppy Schaeffer’s passing marks the end of an era for a town that has itself been dying for years, thanks to an untimely Interstate bypass.
One Over the years, I’ve gotten in the habit of getting up as early as possible since the morning traffic around Christmas can still get pretty thick sometimes. Noisy, too. But it wasn’t that way on this particular Sunday. It started off just about the same as any other. I woke up at five-thirty, just a second before the alarm was set to go off, on account of I didn’t want the noise of the buzzer to sound out through the trailer. I dressed in the dark, then slowly pulled the bedroom door open. You had to remember to open that one door slowly, on account of those rusty hinges creak like the devil. I didn’t hear the scratchy French voice of Charles Trenet coming from Poppy Schaeffer’s record player, so I guessed that he must have been sleeping late. A couple years back, my dad had been thinking about surprising Poppy by getting rid of that wobbly old phonograph and replacing it with a brand new compact disc player for his birthday, but thankfully he came to his senses before actually going out and putting down good money on one. Poppy Schaeffer’s not the kind of person who takes kindly to surprises. You certainly didn’t want to be the one who moved his things without asking his permission beforehand. I carried my sneakers, tiptoeing down the narrow hallway in my socks so as not to wake him. Now my dad, he could sleep through a hurricane and actually did one time, but Poppy Schaeffer? Just a strong wind pushing along the trailer’s aluminum siding could have him up and out of bed in a cold sweat, and running for the artillery bunkers if he had been in the middle of dreaming about the War. Just to be on the safe side, I pressed against the opposite wall as I crept past Poppy’s bedroom door and made extra certain to avoid stepping on that sagging patch of linoleum on the floor. The kitchen was dark. Through the window, I could see all the way down the Champs-Elysses outside. The street was empty. My dad’s truck wasn’t parked out front. He had never been an early riser, so I
knew that he must not have come home the night before. That made three times in two weeks. I slipped on my Reebok hightops and laced them up, fixing to ease out the front door, when I remembered the coffeemaker and went back to flip the switch. You didn’t want to be anywhere near Poppy Schaeffer until he’d been through at least his first pot of the day. Poppy always drank Maxwell House. He took it black. Outside, I saw that the dollar-store bulb screwed into the floodlight hanging above the front deck had burned out again. I had to pause for a second and let my eyes adjust to the dark before walking over to the Arc de Triomphe, where I had chained my bike to the latticework fencing. The sun was starting to think about rising, but I still turned on the headlight for safety. State Road 50 is generally a pretty quiet route, but you can never tell when some fool trucker’s going to come blasting past, trying to make up time hauling his load down to Orlando. I pulled out of our dirt lot and pedaled along, heading down towards Christmas proper. As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one getting an early start on the day. A few hundred yards ahead, Preacher Wallace had his pickup truck pulled up on the shoulder, its engine idling and knocking from a blown cylinder, while he opened up the gates to The Holy Land. The Preacher drove a Ford, just like everyone else in Christmas. I squinted in the dim light, trying to make out the stickers plastered across the truck’s bumper even though I had read them at least a thousand times before. The one on the left had been there for years. Faded and peeling, it read “Christian Bass Fishermen of Central Florida: Get Hooked on Fishing, not Drugs.” The one on the right was newer. The Preacher had only bought it a year earlier to cover up the big dent left behind after he had rammed through our stockade fence. It read “Attention Tailgaters: Do you follow JESUS this closely?” Preacher Wallace was always the first one to show up at The Holy Land every morning, and the last one to leave work at night. My dad used to say that I could learn a thing or two from a hardworking man of the Lord like the Preacher, at least back before the two of them stopped speaking. But that was my dad’s business, not mine. I coasted to a slow roll and stopped in the road alongside his truck.
“Good morning to you, Preacher Wallace.” He raised up his bald, brown head to peer down at me over his foggy, thick-framed spectacles. It was the same kind of long, thoughtful gaze that teachers give when they’re trying their hardest to find some kind of reason to disapprove of you, never mind whether you’ve done something wrong or not. He couldn’t find anything worthy of criticism, though, and turned back to the gate. “Richard,” he said. He spoke my name in a deep, serious voice, the one he usually reserves for Sunday sermons, as he went right back to fumbling with the key ring in his sweaty hands. It looked like the Preacher was trying to find the right key to open the front gate of The Holy Land. It was slow going, since he was working only by the dim light of his truck’s headlamps. The little Ranger’s passenger side bulb was busted out into a pop eye. I cleared my throat. “Looks like it’ll be another hot one today, Preacher.” That one there stopped him. He turned again to look at me head-on, his face set firm in dark granite. It was the same serious look he’d had just a moment ago, only a slight bit happier now that he’d found something to glower about. “It’s always the same temperature in Hell, Mr. Schultz. And you can tell your daddy that I said so.” “Yes sir, I surely will.” The Preacher turned back towards the gate and held the ring up to the light again, picking through those keys one by one. “I got to be going, Preacher Wallace” I said. “You have a blessed day now, sir.” His back still turned. “To where do you venture off so early, young Richard?” “Just up the road, Preacher. To Mister Jiminy’s.” I wiped my sweaty forehead with the back of my hand and looked pretty hopefully at the empty bed of his pick-em-up truck, then down at my bike and over to his Ford again. I was hoping that he’d catch the hint and offer me a ride, especially since I still had near to a mile left before I reached downtown Christmas, and it was already getting hot. That, plus you never know when some old gator is going to have a mind to come on out of the
swamp alongside the highway and make a slither across the blacktop in front of you. “There’ll be some work for me if I can get there early enough, sir.” I tried to recollect one of his sermons about the evils of sloth, but it had been some time since we’d been to a Sunday service. The Preacher held up another key. He thought for a moment before speaking. “It would behoove you to recall the first epistle of Timothy. Specifically, Chapter 6, Verse 10. ‘For the love of money is the root of all evil.’” I should’ve known better than to get my hopes up. Preacher Wallace had been boycotting the Flea Market ever since Mr. Jiminez had applied for a liquor license. That was when the operation expanded to include the only karaoke bar in all of Christmas, and the only Beer Pond in all of Orange County. The Beer Pond was really nothing more than a set of picnic tables lined up alongside a flooded irrigation culvert, but in the Preacher’s eyes, it was a den of sin. For me, all it meant was that a ride was to Jiminy Christmas! was most definitely not in the picture. “Yes sir” I said. “Good morning, now.” He held up one more key to the light, raising it high in the sky above his head. “Good morning to you, Richard. And when you return home, would you be so kind as to give my regards to your Poppy Schaeffer?” I rode off without a reply, but gave a sharp wave backwards to say that I would do just that. I pumped my legs as hard as I could, trying to put some distance between me and The Holy Land with its big billboard that pointed out towards the highway and asked all the drivers who passed by, “Does the road you’re on lead to JESUS?” It had been nearly a year to the day since Preacher Wallace and Dad had their falling out, but somehow the Preacher still got on just fine with my Poppy Schaeffer. Whenever the Preacher was driving by on State Road 50, and he saw my Poppy out there having a sit on the front porch sofa, he would make certain to slow down and give Poppy a wave as he passed by. Not just sometimes, either. Every time he passed. Come to think of it, most everyone in Christmas seemed to get on well with Poppy Schaeffer. That thought was on my mind as I rode to work, just how a man could come to command so much respect from so
many people. I guess that respect was well-earned, on account of how much we all owed to him. I mean, before Poppy Schaeffer came along and left his mark there was nothing much to mention about Christmas besides State Road 50, and maybe the alligators that would scoot their way across the highway on sunny days. But for being such a successful man of the community and all, I can’t ever remember having seen my Poppy Schaeffer smile. See, Poppy suffered the stroke back when I was real young, and it left all of the muscles in his face paralyzed. The man lost his voice to the throat cancer before I was even born, so I never actually heard him speak neither. But even those handicaps never seemed to hold Poppy Schaeffer back much. He’s got this way of letting you know what he’s thinking, without having to say one word. Most of what I know about Poppy Schaeffer comes from what my mom told me. Before she left, anyway. Like me, Poppy was the tallest kid in his eighth-grade class at Nathan Bedford Forrest Middle, but when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, Poppy dropped out of school and went to enlist in the Army. He tried to lie about his age but too many people around Orlando knew him, so he had to hitchhike all the way up to Daytona Beach. The recruiting sergeant there mistook him for a noaccount drifter, and he found Poppy a seat on a bus headed up to Fort Bragg that very same day. Turned out, Poppy Schaeffer was a born hero. He finished basic infantry training and volunteered for jump school, winding up as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division. The Army shipped him off to Europe after that, to occupied France of all places, where he dropped down behind enemy lines on two separate occasions. All told, he notched up seventeen confirmed kills and a whole lot more suspected ones. When I was a kid, my mom would count them out on her fingers and toes as she tucked me into bed. Mom said that Poppy Schaeffer sent eleven dirty Nazis to meet their maker by lining them up in the iron sights of his trusty M1 Garand rifle. Another two went down with the bayonet that Poppy still kept at the ready on his bedside table, and he dispatched one more using nothing but his bare hands. The last three unlucky souls? Well, Poppy set into those Huns with a collapsible
shovel after they ambushed him in while he was trying to dig a foxhole after the invasion of Normandy. My mom said that Adolf Hitler himself was so scared of Poppy Schaeffer that he sent out the top sniper in all of Germany with strict orders to either take my Poppy down or die trying. That Nazi tracked Poppy through the woods for three straight weeks before he finally got off a clear shot, and it was a lucky one. Poppy had let his guard down for a minute trying to rescue a bunch of little French kids who were trapped inside a burning orphanage that had gotten hit by a stray five hundred pound bomb. Those little French kids made it out alive all right. So did my Poppy Schaeffer, but he lost his right eye where the shrapnel hit him. The Army wouldn’t let him stay a soldier anymore on account of his heroic war wound, so Poppy Schaeffer had no choice but to take his discharge papers, but the war was still on and there was work to be done. Poppy took a pass on his homeward bound freighter in order to stay in France, working as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. That’s where he taught himself to drive the big diesel trucks. When Germany finally surrendered, Poppy found himself out of work again. He spent a while hitchhiking across France, mostly staying near to Paris, just walking around and looking at all the places he’d read about in school before he dropped out. A couple months later, he found himself down on the Mediterranean coast, in the city of Marseilles. That’s where he met my Grandma Lucille and of course it was love at first sight, so when he asked her to marry him what else could she say but yes? And everyone knows the story from there: Poppy Schaeffer single-handedly built the Eiffel Tower, which made Christmas everything that it is today.
About the Author James Vachowski leads an itinerant life as a quality assurance technician for an independent traveling circus, where he strives to ensure that your next ride on the Cyclone is in full compliance with most, if not all, applicable safety regulations. During the carnival’s off-season, James lives in Massachusetts and writes mediocre fiction. For the latest news about James’ life on the road, be sure to check out http://www.jamesvachowski.com.