Episode Five: It's Earl Again

I am walking aimlessly down 78th Street one sizzling summer day when Earl and another man turn the corner from Earl’s house on Woodrow Place. Earl is a short man but wiry, what used to be referred to as bantam weight. THe and Dolly have two sons, Jimmy and Reb.

Earl calls me over and introduces me to his friend, who is carrying a burlap bag, and then whispers something in his ear. I still don’t realize Earl is drunk, though that is a common thing, so I should have been more alert. Earl offers me a quarter – a QUARTER – to shut my eyes, keep them shut, and stand still for a few minutes. I agree then hear the two of them giggling wildly. I feel something heavy and kind of ropy being draped around my neck. Suddenly the stink of dead hits me and I jump sideways, dragging that dead black snake off of my body and throwing it onto the road.

Earl and his friend can hardly stand up, they’re laughing so hard. And as happens in many transactions with Earl, he doesn’t have a quarter. He gives me a dime.

I run home and wash the snake off my neck.

To make matters worse, my brothers like to sneak up behind me and grab my neck, shouting ‘CHOKE” when Mom is out of the house. So even as an adult, I can’t stand to have anything tight around my neck

Earl is a man with plans. One of them is to exploit the child labor in his neighborhood. He calls five or six of us over and promises to take us to High’s in Glen Echo for ice cream if we clean up his back yard.

We take the bait and diligently pull weeds, clean the back grill, rake leaves and pick up some trash. By the time we are finished, though, Earl is drunk, far too drunk to drive. He stumbles to his outdoor freezer and returns with a tray of suspicious looking frozen rum buns, which he hands out to us like money. We are disgusted, and the rum buns are already sodden and droopy. All of us except Tyler. He thinks they are pretty good.

Unbelievably, six months later, we fall for the same scam and end up with more of the dreaded rum buns. We are ashamed of ourselves, except Tyler.

Earl sometimes takes us down to the canal to fish. We don’t get very far from Lock House 8. Generally, the fishing is better when the water isn’t too stagnant. We crowd together by the side of the canal to get our fishing poles set up.

I don’t like skewering a worm on the hook, so Tyler does it for me. I have no such qualms about tossing the line into the water for the worm to meet an unhappy end if it hasn’t already. In general, all we catch are catfish, since we aren’t fishing in the river. We come back to Earl’s back yard to gut the fish and fry them up on his brick grill.

Once when Jimmy brings me mine, I bite into it and gag. Turns out he’s left the guts in as a joke.

“Jeez, Jimmy, I can’t believe you did that,” I say, throwing my plate in the trash.

“Tough titty said the kitty, but the milk tastes fine!” Jimmy says smirking.

Jimmy thinks he’s shocking me, but I’ve heard that many times before.

Elephants with the Ringling Brothers circus.

Earl often brags about his job with B&O railroad, and he is particularly proud when the Ringling Brothers Circus comes to Washington. He loves to describe how the performers, animal handlers and the animals themselves come in on a very long train and the tremendous bustle they create.

One August day, the temperature is 92° Fahrenheit, with the humidity hovering at 80 percent. I’m on our back porch and see Earl speeding down 78th Street with a large load in the bed of his truck. He backs into his driveway, jumps out, and pulls the covering from the top of his steaming cargo.

“You won’t believe what the circus is giving away,” he crows. “All the elephant shit you can shovel!”

Elephant shit.

I wonder how many people have taken Ringling Brothers up on this generous offer.

By now the smell of it is already beginning to bloom and drift over the fence toward us. This is fresh, unprocessed elephant shit. A lot of it. Earl enlists his sons with threats and promises—perhaps frozen rum buns are in the offing—and the three of them spend hours spreading the elephant manure into all the flower beds and around the bases of all the trees, shrubs, and the grapevine. Wisely, Dolly declines to get involved. The stink, spurred on by the heat and humidity, is life changing. Within days, the manure kills all the plants to which it has been applied, including the 50-year-old grapevine. The mature trees survive but are nonetheless weakened. The stench settles over the neighborhood.

When our sometime cleaning lady and babysitter Sadie arrives one morning, she finds me on the back porch, reading and holding my nose.

“Hooowee! What in tarnation is that smell?!” she says, glaring instinctively at Earl’s back yard, where withered shrubs and the dead grape vine can be seen. Upon being told, she says, shaking her head, “That Earl Huntington is a God damn fool!”

And she’s a woman of God.