Drink for the Thirst to Come (19 page)

That was almost it. Not quite.

Stage Eight: Finally, it was about who would lead. DeAngelo was DeAngelo’s choice. To Reinhart, there was no question. “What’s pi?” he asked.

“Three point I don’t give a crap.”

“Three point one four one five nine two...” He strung the number to a dozen places. “What’s orbital velocity?”

DeAngelo couldn’t say.

“Escape velocity? What’s the escape asymptote? Where’s the optimum launch place?”

“New Mexico!”

“Equa-tor! Dummy.”

Reinhart capped the questions. He pointed at the tiny final stage. “Okay? That gets us to the moon. What gets us home? You forget that? You and Lenz ever make it back? Or were you too busy shooting mon-sters?”

DeAngelo had not worked it out; he had not forgotten. There were reasons. Secrets. Nothing to do with Lenz or being too busy. DeAngelo didn’t say. He stared at Reinhart. Who knew pi, asymptotes and orbits; Reinhart was a book of knowing. He picked at problems but never drew solutions.

“Your buddy carries a trunk full of
not
and never has a pocket full of
why
,” Pop-pop said.

Reinhart never burned with the joy of not knowing, never seemed to feel lovely terror. He never saw monsters in shadows because he knew there were no monsters. Water bugs from basement drains? They were. He wasn’t sure, but DeAngelo was pretty sure, Reinhart had not said prayers to be first, the first to set foot upon the moon, to be that first forever.

Reinhart’s asymptotes and numbers made the moon possible. Reinhart leading, the trip could happen. DeAngelo could counter with nothing that would make sense. Not to Reinhart. How could he say, “Who’d want to go to your moon?”

What DeAngelo had was a cap and the Old Man’s captain’s bars. That was it. Captains led. No question. The trip was his. He’d wear Dad’s rank and be first. Simple. The journey to that moon was a trip of joy.

The fight was simple and terrible, fought at St. Sophie’s playground in April. Mahler was there, Hebhart, Hebhart’s dog, Crazy Lenz and others. It was about something, a game, a game of no importance. But it was about mankind’s first journey to the moon, no mistake about it, not for DeAngelo. Did Reinhart know? Who knew?

Reinhart insisted he should coach the game. DeAngelo said no, no, no, no, no. “I have the Captain’s Cap.”

“That makes you a Captain?” The Reinhart giggle followed.

They hurled at each other, grappled, rolled on the grass. Nobody hurt.

Smoking over by the pavilion, Keegan and Niewig laughed and punched each other like sissies to demonstrate how little queers fought.

DeAngelo’s nose bled a little, but it did that anyway, no punches needed. Reinhart’s glasses were knocked off his face. Lenz grabbed and held them until. After tussles and grunts, DeAngelo got Reinhart turned on his stomach. He knelt in his back, twisted his arm. He looked over at Keegan and remembered how that hurt.

“Who’s Captain?” he shouted in Reinhart’s ear. “Who leads?”

Reinhart dissolved. “You do, you do, you do you do!”

When they separated and stood, snot ran down Reinhart’s lip and made mud with the dirt there. He squinted away tears. Lenz handed his glasses back. They were bent. Not much. Reinhart twisted them to shape as he walked away. Niewig and Keegan hooted.

Reinhart and DeAngelo didn’t talk until seventh grade. By then, it was too late.

Touchdown: Vietnam. DeAngelo in the NCO club, Da Nang. The tube above the bar flickered black and white. Hisses. Cronkite shut up. What the hell was the time? The club was open. The war was on. Armstrong flickered past the camera, a slow-mo leap, touched the surface, rebounded.
Looked like
, DeAngelo thought. Sound cut in, out, breathing.

“Armstrong is on the moon…” Cronkite said.

“Say what?” someone down the bar said. “What’d he say on the moon?” guy said over Armstrong’s first words.

DeAngelo sucked his beer. He’d heard. Slick but what the hell? Everyone knew they’d make it.

“Think they’ll make it back?” guy said.

“Figure you will?” another voice said in back. “Any us?”

A thousand-yard laugh from another corner of the dark.

DeAngelo drained his beer, called in another. Tipped it to the tube. “I wouldn’t,” he said, “wouldn’t come back.”

“Say what?” someone said from the side. “Why not?”

DeAngelo snorted. “Hell, getting there’s the fun.”

THE BOY’S ROOM

Everybody loved Rafe Tozier. Who wouldn’t love a boy so filled with mischief and life? First she saw of him, though, Melissa Patricia Tozier thought he was awful, just awful. Later, considering her Mississippi cousin from the distance of her home in Chicago, Melissa Tozier realized he was the handsomest boy she’d ever seen, if awful.

Then Rafe went off and died in the war, still only a boy, so everyone loved him forever. “That’s the way,” someone said. “Live beloved, die lamented.”

Sixty-some years after, Melissa Patricia realized the ghost story she had held to since childhood was not about “why”—hauntings always are about unfinished life, aren’t they? No, the ghostly business served up that one night in the Boy’s Room turned on the “who” of the haunting, not “why.”

Her first night sleeping in handsome, awful, cousin Rafe’s room, the so-called Boy’s Room (called so by the southern Toziers), had been during the war, 1943. That first night, Melissa had lain, tingling, ready to jump. Bugs and such worried her, but her heart’s fear was centered on what the family’d say, their looks, knowing she and Barbary Ann (who should have known better) had assaulted the sanctity of that old Boy’s Room. Melissa lay in darkness, imagining scowls and squints on rawboned Tozier faces. Those folds, dewlaps and jowls worried her more than the thought of creatures creeping over her in sleep.

Phooey to it.
She shoved fear aside.
That’s me
, so she thought. Maybe she ought not be there, but Criminies, cool air pleased her so. Seen from the heat of the big house, the rotting curtains of Spanish moss that draped the twisted oaks hung determinedly still and far off in breathless night. In that little shack, though, further even than the old outhouse, small breezes could be seen to stir the moss. From there, the air gathered some measure of chill from the shadows of those trees, then sighed across her body.

Melissa spread herself in damp moonlight. She crowded Barbary Ann into a sliver of bed. Lying wide, night breeze drew the sweat heat right out of her.

Well, cousin Rafe was gone, after all. No, she ought not to be there, Melissa Patricia knew, but phooey to sleepless night under the hot roof of the big house.

She dozed.

The shack at the foot of Tozier land always had been the Boy’s Room. There never was more than one boy per generation, but always the place was where Tozier—that is said “TOE-zher” with a voiced z-h—it was where boy Toziers lived when they came to an age to be by themselves. “Gets them out of the home with their smells,” Gran Nana said. “No man should be to home all th’ time. Livin’ there saves them a walk to the back building.”

She meant it. If Old Strog, her mostly crippled husband (“One arm and no reliable leg.”), chose not to use the back house down the property, why he or any man Tozier could certainly use the “Whites Only” at the Cities Service to do their uglies. (“Just a short quarter mile ’long Bay St. Louis Road, down by the Five Corners where Boulevard Parfume brushes the canal, ’long the near edge of Monocle? There you see the Cities’ sign and cannot possibly miss it.”)

Gran Nana Tozier hated a grown man, any man, all his scents and ways, living fully under her roof. She was firm on the issue. Never mind she was not Tozier-born, roof, house, and land hers by Christian ceremony only. Never mind Old Strog had had the indoor facility made so he might not have to hobble all the way to that old back house. No, the indoor necessity was for ladies. Even if the indoor facility was hardly more than an indoor back house with a chain-pull flush and was barely indoors at that, being on a closed porch right by the kitchen window.

Understand, the Boy’s Room was not a sanitary facility. It was a shack where a boy could grow and do things, things boys do coming to manhood. Those things. And from there a boy could use the back house, only a couple dozen feet away, for his necessaries. Washing up he might do in the big house. That might be all right, depending.

Toziers lived beyond the edge of the town, Monocle. To Melissa Patricia, Monocle was a sagged-down affair, a busted old town in a land full of the dead.

“God,” she thought aloud when first she stood at the end of the dirt road that widened from country-breadth and opened into that dusty corridor of scabby white buildings and flopped-down dogs that was King’s Road, Monocle, “this place was born dead!” She may not have said it for cousin Barbary Ann to hear, but so it seemed.

The land was steeped in ghosts, parched by tobacco, and vexed by reality. The town seemed fed by the same charred, eerie reality. The old barge canal lazed across Tozier land, its surface thick and green, its only business that of frog, fish, and mosquito egg. Closing on all sides were twisted oak and magnolia that seemed to arise already rotting from pale earth.

The Tozier home was pure white-folk. Not grand and antebellum, just a house that was built then grew by rambling during the years between Secession and sharecrop days that followed. Coloreds had lived across the old canal that connected Tozier fields to the world.

When Young Strog—whose proper name was Captain Strother G. Tozier—came home from Over There, still a boy, he limped horribly and his right sleeve arm was pinned to his shoulder. He stumped around the house a few days, then took residence in what had been the nearest Negro shack. So not to be a burden and to be closer to the back house and not have to limp so far.

He continued there even after his mamma died.

When Daddy Strog, the original Strother G., passed, Cap hobbled up to the big house and took command. He married soon after and sired the boy, Bindle, who, at 12 year’s age, went down to the Old Shack by the trees. Which is when it got to be called “the Boy’s Room.” By then, the canal had been abandoned in a burst of enthusiasm for road building, caught from Huey Long next-door in Louisiana. Where it crossed their land, the Toziers absorbed the waterway, towpath, and bridge across. The Boy’s Room became just a nice little walk from the house.

In his time, Bindle grew and moved up to the home place and married himself a Wallace.

And so on.

Over decades, Cap Strog’s war limp gave way to higher and higher amputations. Soon he was Old Strog. It was Bindle’s son’s boy, Raphael (Rafe), who was growing in the Boy’s Room when Melissa Patricia—called by her southern kin, “M’lissa Trish?”—first came visiting from Chicago. There always was that hint of a question whenever any of the southern Toziers called her by name. “M’lissa Trish?” As though they could not quite understand just what she meant or where she was. Just a bitty-thing at the time, M’lissa Trish remembered pieces of the visit. What she remembered, she did so vividly. One memory was peeing (and worse) down at the stinky awful falling-down outhouse her cousins called “the back house,” a thousand miles at least, and across a rickety bridge from where they lived. This was before Old Strog built the inside toilet.

Melissa remembered that long walk, crossing a trembling bridge. She remembered her cousin, the boy, Rafe, at whom she had just plain stared at the station and later at the house.

That memory had help. The day she’d arrived, Rafe came sneaking up to lean his long self against the back house door to block her in, trap her among smells and bugs. Rafe even covered the sickle-moon cutout in the door with his hand and made the whole black stinky place blacker and stinkier yet.

Trapped in dark, M’lissa Trish positively knew those million-legged things she knew skittered under the too-big wooden hole under her bony bottom would take this opportunity to come crawl between her legs.

“They gon’ getcher,” Rafe whispered through the dark, “black Woof spider gon’ getcher little tee-tee place down there. H’ll climb up inside ’n wringle out y’nose.”

Melissa yelled and yelled. No one heard. A long acre smothers much on a buzzing summer day.

In a minute, cuz’ Rafe got anxious about a game of toss-ball being missed. He left off covering the hole, propped a rake head against the handle and went off to do boy things.

Melissa banged and yelled and even then did not get free until her other cousin, Rafe’s younger sister, Barbary Ann, came to use the facility. Ten, twenty minutes was all.

“That old Rafe, he does the same to me, cuz,” Barbary Ann, sometimes called B.A., said, “same doggone thing! That Boy’s Room place of his is so close, he knows every time you and me are, well, let’s say he knows when.”

That was one of Melissa’s vivid memories.

Another was of heat. Her first night, she lay dying under the tin roof of the big house. Mississippi heat was a fierce something, a whole country, real and hard and mean. No breath of air crossed her body (nor, she gathered, was it likely to for the whole long August of her announced visit). Resentment fumed from Melissa as she shared a hot bed with cousin B.A. Rafe’s “hospitality” indeed, and her, a guest, made to walk so-far just to you-know. Wretchedly awful (tousle-haired, golden) Rafe, beast-boy that he was (aglow in wriggly southern light), his awful smile (that dazzled her) that did not fool her put a pretty face on a dark, dark heart. “A boy like that.” Melissa shook her head. “Southern hospitality. Hospitality indeed!”