After the Flag Has Been Folded (23 page)

A crew of emergency personnel arrived at our door within fifteen minutes. I let them in and led them to the bathroom. They began to work over Frank, while Linda and I hovered about in the hallway. They took his blood pressure. Checked his eyeballs. Strapped him to a stretcher and went out into the black night with sirens silent but lights flashing. I called Mama back. “He's on his way to the emergency room,” I said.

“Okay.”

When I woke the next morning, Mama was in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, smoking a cigarette. Her nervous stomach was upset again.

“The doctors think your brother has an aneurysm,” she said.

“What's that?” I asked. I stood at the sink brushing my teeth.

“A blood-vessel problem. It could burst. They have him in ICU. They're watching him.”

“What happens if it bursts?” I asked. I spat into the sink.

Mama dropped the cigarette butt between her legs into the toilet. “I don't know,” she said. She was lying. Mama didn't want to tell me Frank could die. “Gawd, my stomach hurts this morning.”

“You want me to stay home?” I asked.

“No, go on to school,” she replied. “He can't have visitors. I'm going to try and get some sleep and then go back up there later.”

“Okay.”

Linda and I both prayed for Frank that day. We weren't sure that he didn't cause this aneurysm thing himself. We just didn't know what to think.

Frank spent nearly a week in ICU. Then the doctors sent him home. He slept for another couple of days in his darkened room, but he didn't put on any of his Black Sabbath records.

Mama had him pack his bags as soon as he felt well enough to eat. “You've got a few choices,” she said. “Either go to Oregon and live with Uncle Charlie, or join the Army. If you don't do one of those two things, I'm calling the police and turning you in for dealing drugs to the neighborhood kids.”

Mama had been doing some spying on her own. Before Frank got the headache from hell, she'd seen him hanging with kids from Arnold Junior High. She figured rightly that he was hustling drugs.

I didn't know much about Mama's brother Charlie, other than he didn't have any sons of his own, so I figured he'd be pretty strict. Like Lewis Jones, probably. I might have chosen the Army or jail if I'd been Frank, but he chose Oregon.

In late March 1973 Mama put Frank on a plane headed to Portland. He'd been home less than a year. He had a drug addiction and an unstable blood vessel that could burst and kill him at any minute. Even Mama was beginning to think life couldn't get any crazier for us. But sure enough, it did. And this time I was the one stirring the pot.

A
LMOST FROM THE VERY FIRST MOMENTS THAT
F
RANK STEPPED FOOT IN
O
REGON
, M
AMA BEGAN TO TALK
about moving west. She had all sorts of reasons for wanting to go—more job opportunities, better pay, she'd be closer to her brothers Charlie and Roy. “I hear it's beautiful there,” Mama said. “They've got real mountains, and the ocean's only an hour from Portland.”

But I wasn't buying it. “I'm not going anywhere,” I said. “I've been to umpteen elementary schools, three different junior highs. I don't care what you do, but I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying here until I graduate from Columbus High.”

Mama and I must've had this same argument a hundred times between the spring of my junior year and the summer leading into my senior year. She wanted out of Columbus. It had too many hard memories for her. But Columbus was home for me. It held good memories. I had a church family that treated me like I was their own daughter. I had good friends whose parents watched over me. I wasn't a great student, but I had people like Marjorie Sewell, my English teacher, who treated me as if I was as capable and intelligent as anyone else. Reading had always been one of my favorite pastimes, so I took an immediate liking to Mrs. Sewell. She taught English lit with the same passion that Miss Virginia Harwood brought to my world history lessons. In their classrooms, Edgar Allan Poe and King
Henry VIII loomed as larger and more important characters than President Nixon and John Dean.

Like church, school had become a refuge for me, a place where I could forget about the chaos of my life and focus on something or somebody else.

Once a week Lynn, Karen, and I attended the school's morning prayer group. The meetings were usually led by Sammy Ellis, a classmate and a preacher's kid. I met Sammy one spring afternoon when I was a freshman. We were both going home early. He had a dentist appointment, and I wasn't feeling well. We were waiting on the school steps for our parents to pick us up. Sammy began the conversation with a lighthearted “Hi, I'm Sammy.” But it seems to me his very next words were “Do you know Jesus?”

It took him less than five minutes to find out my entire spiritual background. Because he was so engaging and pretty cute, I wasn't offended by the interrogation. I thought he was sweet to be concerned about me.

Sammy and I became good friends over the next couple of years. We didn't have the sort of relationship that comes so easily to boys and girls today. Good girls weren't supposed to call boys at home. And it would never have occurred to me to confide any of my personal life to Sammy or any other boy. I didn't even confide much about my personal life to Lynn or Karen, my two closest friends. They usually knew when Mama and I were fighting, but they rarely knew what we were fighting about. I wasn't even sure myself sometimes.

Looking back, I realize what a confusing time it was for Mama and me. We didn't seem to have any common ground from which to form a relationship. It was during this time that Mama hurled burning words at me, accusing me of wishing she had died instead of Daddy. She never understood how truly terrified I was of losing her.

For the most part, Mama had quit partying. She went out with her girlfriends occasionally, but that wasn't a regular part of her routine anymore. Sometimes she took pills to help her sleep or get through
the day. She wasn't using drugs recreationally, the way my brother had, but she was self-medicating her pain as best she could.

Her moods seemed to be more pronounced to me than in the past. She was quick to anger and often impatient. Mama isn't a cross person by nature; she usually isn't high-strung. But she was during this period of her life. Everything I did seemed to agitate her, and I pretty much felt the same way about her.

My world caved in one night when Charlie and Gail Wells announced that they were moving to Memphis. Charlie had grown weary of his battles at Rose Hill. They were expecting their first child. They would be gone before summer's end.

Hot tears rolled like a flash flood and heavy sobs racked my body. Karen and I were on the phone, trying to figure out what church would be like without Charlie and Gail. Neither of us could stop crying. I hung up when I saw the headlights of Mama's car in the driveway. I was lying across my bed, still crying, when she and her friend Betty walked in. “What's the matter with you?” Mama snapped as she flipped on the overhead light in my room.

Sucking back yet another sob, I said, “Charlie and Gail are leaving Rose Hill.”

“Oh God!”
Mama replied. “The way you're carrying on I thought somebody had died.”

“Mercy, Karen,” Betty chimed in, “there's no need for all this crying.”

“You don't understand!” I cried out.

“You're right, I don't,” Mama said matter-of-factly. “People move on, Karen. Get used to it.”

I cried harder that night than I had since Daddy died. In many ways, Charlie represented a father figure to me. I think he understood that role and took it seriously. He was never too busy to take a phone call from me and never too weary to listen to the struggles I was having, even though he had forty other kids with other problems to deal with. He never said a discouraging word to me regarding my family.
He once told me that he didn't know how to help Frank because he'd never known anybody with such a severe drug problem. But instead of despairing over it, Charlie just bowed his head and prayed for me, for Frank, for Mama and Linda, one more time.

Sometimes Charlie's humor was biting. Like the time he told me I had on so much green eye shadow it looked like mold was growing around my eyes. Or when he asked me for the pattern number for a new dress a friend had made me. The dress was smocked at the bodice. “That's a perfect maternity dress,” he said.

I'd been self-conscious about my size since my art teacher, Mr. Dozier, informed me I was built more like a defensive lineman than a girl. But Charlie was such a funny guy, it was easy to dismiss his remarks as just more of his silly humor.

I didn't realize it then, but Charlie and Gail's leaving marked an irrevocable shift in my own life. It was like a small earthquake that caused fissures deep below the earth's surface. All I could see was the brokenness of my life. Nothing made any sense to me any longer.

I had never really resolved my anger at God, my anger at Daddy and Mama, or even my anger toward Frank. Charlie and Gail's leaving made me feel utterly abandoned. Despite all my efforts to be a good kid, to make others happy, the investment wasn't paying off. No matter how hard I tried, people still found reasons to leave me. By the time August rolled around, I was in a fit of despair.

I'd quit going to church so much. Several of my good friends from church were headed off to college. Lynn Wilkes went to Berry College near Rome, Georgia. Steve Smith and Sherri Davis were across the river at Auburn. The Burke boys, Jimmy and Jerry, were attending Columbus College, as was Andy Kelley. Patsy Ward was working a full-time job.

I started spending more and more time hanging out at my old haunt—the Crystal Valley trailer park—with Wes Skibbey. Wes's sister, Angie, was a student at Hardaway, where my good friend Beth McCombs also went. Wes was confined to parochial school at Pacelli
High, because that was Pauline Skibbey's solution to dealing with her son's waywardness.

Wes and I had nothing in common, except for absent fathers and hardworking mothers. Even more troubling, Wes was a pothead. He usually had a joint or beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I didn't smoke pot, ever. Not once. And because of those foul experiences with both Uncle Joe and Mama, I hated the stench of alcohol. I hadn't smoked a cigarette since trying my first and only one in seventh grade.

Yet I was still physically and emotionally drawn to Wes. He was a handsome boy. He'd cut his eyes at a person rather than turn his head and look straight at you, and his smile crept up slowly whenever he thought something was funny. Since he smoked so much pot, Wes thought everything was funny.

Although he attended parochial school, Wes didn't go to church and had no use for God. Most of my friends couldn't figure out what a nice girl like me was doing with a fellow like him. I didn't ever talk about him with Karen or Lynn. I knew that they would never approve.

Discontent is what led me back to my trailer park buddies. I was miserable after Frank and Charlie Wells moved on. I was often lonely and depressed. Trading one obsession for another, Mama became a workaholic. She left Linda and me to ourselves much of the time. For six weeks that year, she was off in Saint Petersburg, Florida, taking a class on cardiac care at the Rogers Heart Foundation. Her friend Betty checked on us while Mama was away, but otherwise, there was no one providing any supervision or care for us. I grew increasingly bitter toward Mama.

In August, after a particularly heated screaming match, I threw myself across my bed and railed against God and the situation he had put me in: “I have tried so hard to do everything right, but nothing I do seems to matter!” I cried. “Frank is gone. Charlie is gone. All my school friends are leaving me. I'm just sick of trying to be a good
girl. I'm not even sure you pay attention to me anyway, God. I wish Daddy had never died. And I want you to go away and leave me alone.
Just leave me alone and let me live my life the way I want!”

There. I'd dared to say what I really felt. My sobs subsided and I went quiet and listened. I was half expecting lightning to crackle or thunder to roar. Nothing happened. At least not outwardly. But inside I felt a sense of calm. Resignation, perhaps? Empowerment? I got up and washed my face, determined that from that moment on I would live my life to please me. Not Mama. Not Frank. Not Charlie Wells. Not all my friends. I was going to do whatever it was that made me happy.

The first thing I did was to get in my baby blue Dodge and head out to the trailer court to see Wes again. Mama had bought the push-button Dodge to replace the Simca Frank destroyed. It's hard to strip the gears of a push-button car. By November our relationship turned a corner—from friends to lovers. I'd never had a steady boyfriend before, a source of much consternation for me. Mama had more boyfriends than I did. Even Linda at age thirteen did. I desperately sought the affirmation of a male in my life. In the past, I'd turned to my brother or Delmer Floyd, Charlie Wells or Pastor Smitty, for assurance. But as my own sexuality surfaced, their reassurances were no longer good enough. I wanted a romance. Of course what Wes wanted was sex. I was naïve enough to think I was the first girl he cared about, and he was savvy enough to let me think that.

Wes and I never really dated. In other words, it wasn't a matter of going places together. Most often he would come to my house while Mama was at work, or I would meet him at his place. By then his mother had moved across the river to a small trailer court outside Phenix City. But more often than not, Wes could be found at Crystal Valley hanging out with his pothead buddies.

Wes made his first serious attempt to relieve me of virginity's burden in a darkened cul-de-sac of a subdivision that was being constructed near Crystal Valley. Up until then, our serious petting had
amounted to extended periods of French kissing, a couple of hickeys, and his constant effort to fondle my breasts. For me, these sessions were always more like wrestling matches than anything else. I was always trying to stay one move ahead of Wes. By this time, I was almost seventeen and had been playing make-out games since I was eleven. I thought I was experienced enough to keep Wes interested and my virginity intact.

I was wrong.

We were sprawled across the front seat of my Dodge, and it was pitch-black out. Since it was a new development, there were no streetlights up yet. Tall pine trees provided a blanket of thick shadows. The condensation on the car windows added another screen to the outside.

Or so I thought.

Suddenly, a football-stadium-sized spotlight flashed through the windshield near the driver's door. Wes's white butt lit up the night like a harvest moon. He grabbed for his pants, which where somewhere between his knees and his ankles. My jeans weren't yet below my knees, but they were below my hips. I yanked them back up.

Two police officers—one a rookie, one a gray-haired veteran—stood knocking at the driver's door. The older fellow moved his flashlight over to peer into Wes's face. By that time Wes had managed to get his pants pulled up, although his belt remained unbuckled and his pants were still unzipped. He rolled down the window and greeted the officers.

“Can I see your license, please?” the old cop ordered. Wes's wallet was on the dashboard. He reached for it and handed over his license.

“And yours, young lady?” the cop said, pointing the light into my face.

“I don't have my license with me,” I lied.

The rookie cop was smirking. But I wasn't the least bit amused. That light was jarring. I was afraid they were going to arrest us. How was I going to explain
all this
to Mama?

“What's your name?” the wizened cop asked.

“Leslie Johnson,” I said, combining two things from my past—a friend's name and the street I used to live on.

Wes whipped his head around and stared at me like I was plumb crazy. I could tell he was upset with me for lying to the cops. I didn't care. I was more afraid of Mama than I was a squadron of Columbus police officers. My nickname for Mama was “Dragon Lady” because, as I told my girlfriends: “Mama can spit fire.”

The older cop handed Wes's license back to him. Then, keeping to his oath to honor and serve the public and to lecture all scantily clad people under twenty-one, he gave Wes and me a scolding not unlike the one I had gotten from the drugstore owner when I stole that box of eye shadow. He finished his tongue lashing by ordering Wes to take me straight home.