All Over but the Shoutin' (16 page)

Three: Try hard not to kill nobody else, but if you have to, better if it ain’t fam’ly.

She might as well have been talking to a telephone pole. We built gocarts and minibikes and motorcycles out of junk—well, actually, Sam made them, but I was always the test pilot—and wrecked them all in spectacular fashion. I burned myself so bad in one wreck, from the hot muffler, that I lay under the cold spray of water from the outdoor hydrant (Yankees would call it a faucet) because it was the only thing that stopped me from screaming.

Once, Sam came into possession of an old moped, a boring, half-bicycle, half-motorcycle conveyance that looked better fit for some Parisian sissy or an old woman. But we stripped it down to—near as I could tell—a seat with a motor under it, attached it to two wheels, and then he gave me a push-start. It would run sixty miles an hour on a straightaway. I jumped ditches with it. I should have worn a helmet, but that would have slowed me down. My momma thought I was crazy, and would run, screaming at me, until she disappeared in a cloud of red dust and the
grrrrrroooooowwwwwwwwwlllllllllll
of that sawed-off, two-inch muffler. On every slope, on every hump, I was airborne, and I thought, as I cheated gravity, that I was Captain Zoom. It had no fenders, either, so it covered me in a red film of dirt from my ankles to my eyebrows. I tasted grit and did not give a damn.

I rode the same road, from my house to Germania Springs, over and over and over again. Back then, Germania Springs was a beautiful, crystal-clear stream full of crawfish and watercress and lined with oaks. People used to picnic on the ground—sometimes the younger ones would sneak in a little smooching—and enjoy the peace and quiet of it. At least, they would have, if a red-dirt-encrusted demon boy had not been slinging sand and dust into the air and chasing the serenity from the trees with the noise of his, well, they were not real sure what it was. I guess I was a distraction to them. Anyway, somebody called the law.

I was about a mile from home when I saw the sheriff’s cruiser turn on its flashing blue lights, and I headed straight for Momma. I was almost home when I realized that bringing the law into her house might make her cry. I decided, as the dust flew and the siren wailed, that I had to escape justice on my own. I went rocketing down the dirt road and right on past the house, under the clothesline, around the barn, past the apple tree and straight into the cotton field, slewing around in that soft dirt, the green bolls of cotton beating my hands bloody, but I was free. I looked back over my shoulder and saw one of the deputies out of his car, bent over, laughing. I was eleven going on twelve. I reckon, if caught, I wouldn’t have done much time.

Life was sweet, often, and the crises were small. There was the time we all loaded into my aunt Nita’s Chevrolet Biscayne—Sam, Mark, me, Momma, my grandma, Aunt Nita, my cousin Jeffery and our mean-spirited little dog, Barnabas—for a trip to Pensacola, and forgot the dog somewhere south of Montgomery when we all had to go into the woods to pee. We were twenty miles down the road when somebody said, “Where’s that damn dog,” and we rushed back, to find Barnabas looking bewildered at the side of the road, where we left him. He never did trust us much after that, and refused to get in a car at all.

There would have been no crises at all, if we had just had a slightly better understanding of the broader world. On that same trip, I was sitting in the bathroom of the $12-a-night Castaway Cottages, reading the Pensacola Visitor’s Guide, and I heard a siren and then, immediately, a pounding on the door. “Fire, Fire, Fire!!!” I heard my momma and Aunty Gracie Juanita scream, in harmony. Before I could even put my britches on my momma and Aunt Gracie Juanita had jerked it open, ripped me out of the bathroom and shoved me, naked as Marlon Brando, out into the hotel courtyard, where people stared in obvious wonder at why those two women had hurled a naked eleven-year-old boy out of their Castaway Cottage. I tried to cover myself and looked around for the blaze and the fire trucks. But all I saw was a mosquito sprayer on back of an old pickup, which blared its siren every few minutes to warn the old people with lung ailments that it was comin’ through.

We were poor, but we were not dull. Momma and the kinfolks and the welfare made childhood sweet and warm. Uncle Ed even bought us a pony, a mean-spirited little midget of a horse named Buster, who ultimately ran away and got hit by a transfer truck. When Sam and I made the basketball team at Roy Webb, we had new high-topped sneakers, Converse. Our aunts hauled us to the games and, after a while, we stopped wondering or even caring if our momma came.

The basketball games were the event of the week in the community, if you discount church. Our uniforms were purple and gold, and having one meant that you were part of something important. The floor was dark wood, waxed so many times that the planks seemed to float under a blurry haze of ice, and I can still remember the sound the rubber-bottomed sneakers made as we shifted direction. One boy, nicknamed Chewey because he was always getting caught in back of the lunchroom with a jaw stuffed with Red Man, didn’t have any toes, so his sneakers made a different, more muffled sound. I think it was the old sock he stuffed in the toes of his sneaks, to account. All I know is, if you weren’t careful Chewey would sneak up on you from behind and steal the ball, because you couldn’t hear him coming.

I was a shooter. I saw little point in defense, so I rested then. I saw little point in any part of the game that did not involve the ball in my hands, heading for the hoop. It might have been the single most significant reason why I didn’t get to play too long in any given game. “Don’t give it to him, he’ll shoot it,” my teammates would yell out to each other. But what got me into trouble most was the backing up. Because there was more glory in it when you knocked the bottom out from twenty feet than from two feet, I would dribble
away
from the goal. I would look over at the bench, all full of myself, only to see Coach Orville Johnson crooking his finger at me.

I think one of the proudest moments in my young life was a big game my eighth grade year—I believe it was Websters Chapel—when the coach looked down the bench, said, “I need a shooter,” and motioned to me.

I took the pass from way, way, way out, beyond the top and to one side of the key, and let her fly. The ball couldn’t arch very high—the damn roof was too low—but it swished so sweetly, so softly through the net that, I am certain, grown men in the bleachers had to wipe their eyes at the pure beauty of it. It was before the invention of the three-point shot, so they only gave me two, but if that shot wasn’t worth three I’ll eat a bug. I missed the next one clean, a brick, a rock, air-ball. I guess the first one could have been luck.

Naw.

Life was rich. On Fridays, in the lunchroom, we had hamburgers and chocolate ice cream. I had a new girlfriend every year from first grade on—I was a smooch ’em and leave ’em kind of boy—and one year, I was crowned King of Second Grade, or Third, I cannot remember, at the Roy Webb Junior High School Halloween Carnival. My queen was Debbie Grantham, who thought I was cute and didn’t care that we were on public assistance.

I turned twelve in the summer of 1971. I was what I had always been, the son of a woman who did all she could do on her own, and needed a little help. I had given very little thought to being poor, because it was the only realm of existence I knew. The lives I read about in books or saw on the black-and-white TV were disconnected somehow, not real. We were never invited into the nicer houses, never shopped in nicer stores. The ritziest place I had ever been inside was the dime store on the old courthouse square. It was run by two ancient sisters. I would walk the aisles, looking at the toys and worthless knickknacks and magazine rack, which I was not allowed to touch. The old women tracked me with their eyes, every step I made. At ten-minute intervals one of the old women would ask if they could help me. “No ma’am,” I would say, “I’m just lookin’.”

Once, at Christmas, I was looking for a present for my momma. They had some ceramic angels to hang on the wall, spray-painted gold. They broke easy, I guess. I picked one up and turned to the counter and one of the old women met me, saying, “You ain’t got enough money for that.” To this day I don’t know how that old woman knew how much money I had.

I
got a lesson in who I was at Christmas, I believe in 1971. A fraternity at Jacksonville State University threw a party for the children of poor families. They bought me a coat, a pair of shoes, a football, and a transistor radio. They held the party in their fraternity house, all the sugar cookies you could handle, and the 7 Up flowed like water. Mark and I sat together, surrounded by strangers, and I drank it all in. I was twelve, but I remember everything about that night. I wasn’t old enough to be ashamed about being the charity these glowing young people had gathered around, like a Christmas tree. But I was beginning to realize the difference between me and them.

The men, who called themselves Brothers, drove up with their dates in fastback Mustangs, Camaro convertibles and cream-colored Cougars, high school graduation presents, for sure. The women were all pretty—I cannot remember a time when every single woman in sight had been so damned pretty—and they all smelled very, very nice. They wore sweaters over their shoulders and they kept wantin’ to reach out and mess up my crookedy haircut. The men all had on penny loafers and blue jackets with ties, more ties than I had ever seen, and smelled strongly of High Karate. It was like they had a big bottle somewheres and passed it around.

I did not understand the concept of “fraternity,” but I knew that these were the rich folks. They were not rich folk by Manhattan standards, merely by Possum Trot ones. They were nice rich folk—they had to be to empty their pockets for children they didn’t know—but were as alien to people like me as Eskimos and flying saucers.

These were the sons and daughters of small towns around Alabama and Georgia, the offspring of real estate brokers, insurance barons and English professors. They were members of their town’s First Baptist Church, give or take a Methodist or two, and just because they had a six-pack after the JSU Fighting Gamecocks whipped Troy State’s ass in football didn’t mean they did not love the Lord.

Their Christmas tree was the biggest one I had ever seen, even bigger than the one in church. It was piled three feet high with presents, and after singing “Silent Night” and sipping punch they handed them out to the sons and daughters of pulpwooders and janitors and drunks, who all sat perfectly still, like my brother Mark and me, afraid to move. The jacket they gave me was gray plaid wool, and the transistor radio already had batteries in it.

They were Southerners like me, yet completely different. I remember thinking that it would be very, very nice to be their kind instead. And I remember thinking that, no, that will never happen.

We were part of it, of that night, because we were poor and because we were children, and I like to think that the frat boys and their Little Sisters still do that for the poor children in and around town. But you simply outgrow your invitation into that better world, as your childhood races away from you. You reach the age, ultimately, when that barrier slams down hard again between you and them, and the rest of the nice, solid, decent middle class. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad, if it was a wall of iron instead of glass.

You see them every day on their side. On their side, the teacher calls their name in homeroom and they walk with their heads up to her desk, to leave their lunch money, and pay their own way. On your side, the teacher calls your name and you stare at the tops of your shoes, waiting for her to check the box beside your name that says “Free,” wishing she would hurry. On their side, the summer glows with bronze beauties in bathing suits at the beach. On your side, people step away from you as you wait in line at the hamburger stand, because you smell like sweat and fertilizer and diesel fuel.

On the other side are cars that don’t tinkle with the sound of rolling beer bottles, and houses that don’t have a bed in the living room. But what really kills you on that other side are the people—the smiling, carefree people—who can just as easily look over into your side, and turn their face away.

Only the oxygen is richer on your side. It has to be. Because your childhood burns away much, much faster.

A
ll I had to do was look across the Formica-topped kitchen table to my brother Sam, to see my future. At thirteen, he had done a man’s job, shoveling coal, pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with rocks, mucking out hog pens, loading boxcars at Dixie Clay with an endless line of fifty-pound bags of clay and lime. Some nights he would go to sleep sitting in that hard-backed chair, and Momma would lead him to bed. The work was his birthright. It was what he got instead of a Mustang.

11
Under a hateful sky

Y
ou begged the sky for a single cloud.

The sun did not shine down, it bored into you, through your hat and hair and skull, until you could feel it inside your very brain, till little specks of that sun seemed to break away and dance around, just outside your eyes. It turned the shovel handle hot and baked the red dirt till you could feel it through your leather work boots, radiating. Your sweat did not drip, it ran, turning the dust to mud on your face, soaking your T-shirt and your jeans, clinging like dead skin. The salt in it stung your eyes, until your lids were bright red and the whites were bloodshot, like a drunk man. Every now and then you or some man beside you would uncover a ground rattler, and you would chop it to little pieces with your shovel or beat it to mush with rakes, not just because it could bite you, kill you, but because it got in your way, because you had to take an extra step, to raise your arms an extra time, under that sun.

We did the hand labor in clearing land and building roads and grading lots for construction, digging out rocks and stumps and sawing down the pines, making room for new three-bedroom brick ranch houses with two-car garages and above-ground pools, working mostly for our uncle Ed. We scurried around the big, loud yellow International Harvester bulldozers and battered Chevrolet dump trucks, like worker ants scrambling around their fat queens, trying to keep our feet from being crushed under the trucks, looking out of the corner of our eyes for Mr. Bivens, the truck driver.