Eli the Good (12 page)

“Well, reading’s good,” he said. “But learning how to fix a motor will come in handier for you.”

“It’s about this little girl who had to hide from the Nazis.”

He stopped chewing, offended, and looked at me for a silent moment. “I know who Anne Frank is,” he said, his whole face tightening. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

I marked my place with a postcard of the Lincoln Memorial that Nell had sent me a year ago, and laid the book aside.

It was so hot we could hear the cicadas — my father called them heat bugs — screaming even over the dirty little radio sitting atop a huge red toolbox. When “The Most Beautiful Girl” came on, my father sang along very loud while he changed tires or installed air filters. It was no wonder we could hear the insects mourning the heat, though, because my father never turned the radio up very loud. He said the customers didn’t like to pull in and be blasted away.

The thunderstorms usually rolled in later in the evening, just before dusk, but that day we had just finished our lunch break when the sky fell open. Daddy was in the garage, lying on the wooden rolling bed that enabled him to scoot up under cars, checking an oil leak on an El Camino. String had half his body hanging out of the engine of a Charger, which was also pulled into one of the bays of the garage. Jack had nothing else to do except sweep cigarette butts off the concrete slab that served as a small porch. Very few cars had come along lately, so I had settled in on the pile of tires to read my Anne Frank book. I was just to the part where Anne kissed Peter when we felt the air change. Then the low rumble of thunder. A warning, a music.

Jack looked up at the sky. “Man, it’s going to be a bad one,” he said, and pointed to the horizon over the far hills. “Look — those clouds are almost green, they’re so full.”

I ran in and put my book on the counter so it wouldn’t get wet, then came back out to see the rain moving toward us through the corn. The storm churned in like a moving wall. The tops of the corn trembled in the downpour, and a boom of thunder made the ground shudder. I looked down, expecting to see the concrete of the slab cracked open, but it wasn’t. The cloud chamber paused as the rain thrashed the road in great, round plops, so hard that the rain looked like it was falling backward, rising up out of the blacktop and sizzling skyward.

“That’s ozone,” Jack said, as if transfixed. “That smell.”

Then the storm moved forward and hit the station like an ocean wave. Jack stood on the porch, broom in hand, and flattened himself against the plate-glass window behind him, but I ran out to the gas pumps. I stomped over the hose, but its bell was lost to the sound of pummeling rain and crashing thunder.

I was drenched within seconds, the rain falling so hard that I could barely see as it flowed over my brow and down into my eyes. But I felt like I was leaving my own body, as if I were giving myself up to the storm as I turned in the rain, my arms extended, my face tilted back to receive the water, just as Mom and Nell had done.

I heard my father calling my name — a muted, dulled sound, as if he were on the other side of a waterfall — and through the rain I could see him and String standing in the shelter of the open garage, looking out at me as if I had lost my mind. Lightning flashed between us, a huge whiteness. His mouth opened again, his face gathered in anger, but all sound was lost. Jack still stood on the porch, laughing with both hands perched on the top of the broom, the way my mother sometimes stood in the garden with her hoe when she was looking around for any missed weeds.

I closed my eyes again, turned, and gave myself over to the thunderstorm. I imagined I was standing on the bottom of a fast-moving river that churned around me. And then my father’s hands were on me and his voice was loud in my ear, a great roar that was too distorted for me to understand. He scooped me up and ran back into the garage with me bobbing on his hip.

Once there, he half threw me down but I landed on my feet. I looked up at him, feeling his anger wash over me. He trembled before me, his eyes furious, full of the war. I had gotten old enough to identify it, just like my mother could. Both of us knew when the war had taken control of him. He put his hand out as if to slap me, and I flinched back, waiting for the blow, even though he had never struck me in the face before. When he got mad like this over the most unexpected thing, everything about him changed: the shape of his face, the way he held his body. His hand shook there in front of me as if he was struggling to control it, but then he pulled it back, hard, and shoved it into the pocket of his work pants. He looked down, shook his head. No one spoke. A wall of thunder shook the ground. Just when I thought he was going to walk away, Daddy bent at the waist and grabbed me by both arms, shaking me.

“Why did you do that? What’s wrong with you?”

“Puh-leez-duh-on’t-Da-ddy,” I said, feeling as if he were shaking my teeth out of my skull.

“Have you lost your mind?” Daddy boomed, his eyes wild, his grip tightening on my arms. “That lightning was running all across that blacktop. Could’ve killed you.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw String step forward as if to intervene, but before he could, Daddy stopped. He squatted down so that we were eye level, wiping water off my face. I breathed hard and rain slid into the corners of my mouth, washing down my cheeks. My feet felt heavy in my wet Chuck Taylors, and my cutoffs stuck to my thighs. I pulled my T-shirt out from my belly and found that it sucked at my skin.

“Why did you do that, Eli?” Daddy asked, calmer now, but still not right, not himself.

“Mom and Nell stood in the storm the other day,” I said.

He fretted his eyebrows as if he didn’t understand. I thought he might continue to yell at me, but then he held his hand up to my cheek and ran one thumb across the bottom of my chin. He had never touched me so tenderly before. “You scared me to death, little man.”

The rain stopped, instantly, as if turned off by a switch on the wall, and the blacktop began to steam, mists rising and snaking through the corn. The bruised clouds cleared like a curtain snatched away to reveal white clouds against a blinding sky.

Daddy was still squatting there before me, looking up at my face as if he hadn’t seen me in ages. And then I saw that he wasn’t there, really. He wasn’t behind his own eyes.

I didn’t know what was scarier to me: when he looked me dead in the eye, hollering, or when he turned away and was quiet. Lately everything about him was terrifying to me. I felt all the time like my nerves would shoot out of the tips of my fingers.

“It’s all right, Stanton,” String said, standing behind Daddy. String took another step toward my father, then stopped, as if he knew better than to get too close. “Come on, now, buddy.”

Daddy rose as if pulling up a great load and moved past me, going in the side door that connected with the room where the cash register stood on the counter. He shrugged through the doorway and into the register room. The door had two glass panels, so I could see him in there, leaning on the counter near the register with one hand, staring at the back wall. His face was dry, but his body held the language of defeat and maybe even weeping: his shoulders arched, his head shook back and forth.

String didn’t walk away, as I thought he might, but pulled a piece of Fruit Stripe from his pocket. “Here ye go, buddy,” he said.

“Why’d he get so mad?”

“One of his friends got struck by lightning over there in Vietnam,” String said in his slow, easy way. “They was walking across a big rice field, knee deep in water. Didn’t you know that, squirt?”

“No,” I said, and put the orange gum into my mouth. “He never talks about the war.”

String dipped his fingers into the tub of hand cleanser sitting atop the tire changer and soaped up. “Yeah, he don’t talk much about it, for sure,” he said. His face was so lined by weather and life that some of the furrows seemed like knife scars. “But every once in a while, he’ll tell a little something if you listen real close.”

“I listen all the time. To everything.”

“Well,” String said, and went back to the Charger and peered in at the engine. “Listen some more.”

A car pulled in and the bell rang, announcing its entrance. It was Charles Asher and Josie in his fine Mustang. I walked out to them slowly, this new weight of knowledge slowing me down, and before I could even speak to them, Jack stepped down off the porch and tousled my wet hair. “You’re a sight, man,” he said.

Daddy told me to go on home with Josie and Charles Asher since I was soaked and would be of no use to his customers if I looked like a drowned rat. He had stayed by the register a few minutes before coming out to greet Josie and Charles Asher.

On the drive home, I sat on the edge of the backseat so I could prop my chin right behind Josie’s head. She sat close to Charles Asher and didn’t turn to say anything to me. Instead, she looked through the rearview mirror when she questioned me about why I was so wet, what had happened during my day, what Jack was up to. Everybody in the family was always giving her grief about her inquiries on Jack. I knew, as they all did, that she had a secret crush on him, but he was nineteen and not at all interested in her. Besides, I would have died if she had ever broken up with Charles Asher.

Eventually all conversation ended when the Spinners came on the radio. Josie turned it up and moved around in her seat a bit, singing every word. She was in a good mood today, which was unusual for her these days.

“Hey, y’all prepare yourself for the Rubberband Man,”
she sang. This song made absolutely no sense to me, but it had a good beat, so I scooted back against the seat and sang, too, watching as the hills and houses rushed by, the river coming up next to the road as we neared our house. But I stopped singing, weighted down by the fact that I had once again been sent off to be with the women.

I wondered if my father had really had me go with Josie because I was wet or if he had sent me away because he was ashamed of me.

The music and Josie’s singing and the sound of the rushing wind coming through the open windows and everything else faded away from me. And then I was all alone, sitting in the backseat of some unmanned car racing down the highway. There was nothing but the road and the hills and the river. I’m not sure if they were ghosts or my imagination — I still don’t know — but when I looked down to the riverbank, I could see a line of soldiers, their machine guns held out in front of them as they moved cautiously through the water toward some uncertain death. Or maybe even life.

M
y mother snapped a pillowcase out onto the hot, still air. “Why are you wet?” she asked. It was so hot that my hair and shirt had already dried, but my denim shorts were still heavy with rain.

She listened as I answered, standing at the clothesline, a full basket of sheets at her feet. One fitted sheet had already been latched to the line, so that our backyard had been overtaken by the scent of detergent and Downy.

“Well, are those wet shorts rubbing your legs raw?” she asked, and pinned the pillowcase to the line. Apparently she didn’t think my dancing in the rain was particularly strange, or interesting.

I shook my head no.

“Then stay outside and play. You’ll dry soon, hot as it is. I’ve got enough clothes to wash without adding more to the pile.”

I ran away across the yard before she could think of something else for me to do besides play. As I scampered away, I heard Mom tell Josie and Charles Asher to go help Nell break up beans. Josie responded with an exaggerated sigh, but Charles Asher said “Yes, ma’am,” in his polite way that didn’t seem so much like brown nosing as actual respect.

The midday rain had only made the day hotter. The air seemed like a solid thing.

I went to Edie’s and pounded on the back door, but nobody answered. An empty bottle of Dr Pepper stood in a wet ring on the small table by the door and Edie’s copy of
The Outsiders
lay on the porch swing, so she couldn’t have been gone long. She was on her third reading of this book, as she said it was her favorite of all time, and I opened it to find places I had seen her marking with a red ink pen. On the first page she had scrawled “loneliness” and then, farther down the margin, she had written, “He’s different.” I laid the paperback down where I had found it, sure that Edie would punch me for having looked at her thoughts, and went around to her bedroom window and peered in. The shades were drawn to keep the heat out, but when I pecked on the window frame, there was no answer, either. This was unusual, as Edie usually chose to stay home alone even when her parents went somewhere.

I let the screen door to our porch slam behind me and found Nell sitting in her usual place on the glider. A newspaper was spread across her lap to catch the strings she peeled away from the green beans. She tossed the broken beans into a bowl that had been placed on the floor. Josie and Charles Asher had pulled the rockers up close to the bowl. Josie looked put out by this chore, but Charles Asher was happy, as usual. He broke the beans carefully, but Josie snapped them in a hard-rhythmed blur.