system corrupts us,” the mister continued—his wagging finger seeming to power the metronome of his wagging scrotum. “They turn us into vessels filled at the altar of consumerism!” Buster tried to digest that. A vessel was a boat. That’s as far as he got before Mrs. Svendergards’ breasts caught his attention. For a chunky woman, her bosom was firm and aerodynamic as the chromed nosecone of a ’53 Studebaker Champion. And then there was her pubic hair. It was the same color as her eyelashes, and a copse of it climbed out between her legs and encroached her belly button like summer vines over a window. “That’s why, when we take off our clothes, we’re making a statement. And do you know what that statement is, Buster?” And Mrs. Svendergard’s rear end was pink and plump and swaybacked into a perfect dimpled hollow where a fellow could lay his head—if he so desired—while taking a nap under a shade tree.
“I said, do you know what that statement is?”
All Buster knew was that he was the luckiest boy in town. And then he fainted—because in the last seventy-five seconds he had forgotten to breathe. After the initial shock, Buster accepted their enthusiasm as second nature and joined them—in the water-filled quarries where they bathed naked, riding their Shetland ponies in the buff, jumping on the trampoline and playing naked hangman at the basketball hoop. Nudity, and the adoration of the Great Aten, the Egyptian Sun God, had long ago replaced the Svendergard’s regular churchgoing.
“Hail Aten, thou Lord of beams of light, when thou shinest, all faces live. Hail Aten!”
“Hail Aten!” Buster repeated, arms outstretched, palms facing the sun. That’s how Buster and Mr. Svendergard began each day at the concrete company.
The earth circled Aten three times and as the equinox began, the Svendergards were visited once again by Sheriff Dudival.
“Good afternoon, ma’am.”
“Good afternoon, Sheriff,” Mrs. Svendergard said, quickly fidgeting with the last button of her blouse.
“I hate to bother you, but I was by the school this morning and Buster’s name came up. He hasn’t been enrolled for the fall term.”
“Sheriff, with all due respect, our position on this hasn’t changed. We don’t want to send him to a place where he’s going to be bullied.”
“Ma’am, any kid who remembers Buster allegedly killing anybody would be in high school by now.”
“He’s getting a good education here.”
“Then if you don’t mind, someone from the school will be by to test him to see how he’s getting on.”
The next day, a social worker and a school administrator came by to give Buster a test to see how well he understood the basic principals of grade school math and English.“We think this young man should be back in school,” they said, packing up their pencils and papers. “He’s sorely lacking in multiplication skills and has no understanding of punctuation.”
“He’s learning to run a business! Can you teach him that in school?” Mrs. Svendergard said, showing them the door—and for some reason, spelling out her defense in the air with her finger. “No, you don’t! Exclamation mark. Do you? Question mark.”
As for school, it started, once again, without him. Things went back to normal if one could call it that. Then one night, Mr. Svendergard didn’t turn up for supper. Buster and Mrs. Svendergard searched the entire compound, but Mr. Svendergard was nowhere to be found. Buster used his special phone number to call Sheriff Dudival. Thirty-six hours later, the naked body of Gil Svendergard was finally discovered. He had been standing on the famed steel scaffolding of his own design, rinsing off a gyrating cement truck with a high-pressure hose. Somehow the loading gate of the gravel chute had opened behind him, pushing him off the platform and inside the barrel of the truck, where he was mixed and tumbled with a fresh load of concrete intended for a condo project in Telluride.
“Any idea how that happened, Buster?” asked the sheriff, interviewing him in the Svendergard’s living room.
“Nope,” said Buster.
“No idea who pulled that gravel chute up there?”
Buster thought about that for a moment.
“Welp, there ain’t but the three of us here. The missus never go up there…”
“But you do, right?”
“Yep. Ah do a considerbull ’mount a work up there.”
“And you never saw anybody else around here…on the property?”
“Nope.”
“And if you happened to pull that cord on the chute by mistake, you’d own up to it, because mistakes do happen in life.”
“Yessir, they shor do.”
The sheriff waited for him to say something.
“So…did you make a mistake?”
“Ah don’t b’lieve ah did.”
“And you and the mister never had any harsh words or other contretemps?”
“You mean like him not lettin’ me go to school?” The sheriff thought he was finally getting somewhere.
“That’s right. Like that.”
“Truth is, sir…ah dint wanna go.”
The sheriff’s eyes fell, once again, on the Svendergards’ breakfront where he noticed that there was a second pie plate on the shelf. This one was of Gil Svendergard. The sheriff put a hand on Buster’s shoulder and pulled him closer to him so he could speak in a low voice.
“Now look here, Buster, I’m going to give you fifteen seconds to admit that you might have had a hand in this. If you did, I’ll figure something out. I swear nothing bad will happen to you. I’ll just get you some help. Understand?”
“Yessir.”
The sheriff stood back and just looked at Buster’s blank face for fifteen seconds waiting for an answer. None came. Once again, Sheriff Dudival, in his capacity as sheriff and Coroner, reported it in his journal this way: Gil Svendergard suffered an accidental death due to a contraption of his own devise for loading and cleaning cement trucks that never passed a safety test by OSHA or a certified engineering company. He was unclothed.
There was a big turnout of women for Mr. Svendergard’s funeral, despite the fact that none of them had ever been friends with the missus. Word had gotten out that Mary Boyle, owner and cook at the Buttered Roll, had prepared marinated flank steak with roasted peppers on freshly baked rolls for the wake.
Buster had liked Mr. Svendergard and had enjoyed living there for the past two years, so he didn’t have to force himself to cry when the hearse drove up from Crippner’s Funeral Home. Buster, in all the time he had lived with the Svendergards, had never cut his red hair, nor did he shave—since it was the order of day at the Svendergards to go au natural in all things. Wearing one of Mr. Svendergard’s dark suits, his white shirt sleeves stuck out a good six inches, the gestalt was that of an orangutan in cowboy boots. Sheriff Dudival gently guided the boy to the back of the hearse where he, Skylar Stumplehorst—one
