Eli the Good (13 page)

Nell looked up when the door slammed, a smile playing on her lips. “Here he is, Mother Nature’s son,” she said.

“What’s that mean?” I said, on the defense.

“You stood in the rain, didn’t you?” Nell said, turning her eyes back to her hands, where she expertly broke the beans in four singular pops. I was surprised by how effortlessly she went about this kind of work. She looked much more herself with a book in her hands. “In the storm?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You were right. It did feel good.”

“I told you,” she said. She smiled at the beans in her lap. “You’re always reminding me of that Beatles song, the way you spend so much time in the woods, and the river. And now standing in thunderstorms.”

“What song?”

Only then did her hands become still. She paused for just a moment, her fingers hovering over the pile of unbroken beans that lay spread out across the newspaper, mixed in with her discarded strings.

“You haven’t heard ‘Mother Nature’s Son’?” she asked, completely taken aback. When I said no, she looked out to where my mother was finishing up hanging the sheets on the line. “Loretta, have you deprived these children of the Beatles?”

“What?” my mother called, plucking a clothespin from her mouth.

“Nothing!” Nell hollered back, loud. Then, to me: “I’ll play it for you later on. You have to hear it.”

“Where’s Edie at, Eli?” Josie asked. She had a teasing smile on her face, as if she was so mad about having to break beans that she wanted to take it out on me.

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know where Edie is?” she gasped, acting shocked. She laughed at herself. “That’s a first.”

“I’m not her keeper,” I said. I had heard Josie say this many times about me, when I was hidden somewhere and my mother asked her where I was. I didn’t exactly know what this phrase meant, but it made sense somehow.

“You don’t know where your
girl
friend is?”

“Shut up, Josie,” I said. It wasn’t often that we fought, but when we did, the arguments were usually brutal screaming matches. Josie reserved all her kindness for me, it seemed, but when she was feeling especially cruel, she took pity on no one.

“Josie,” Nell scolded, but there was laughter in her voice.

“You
love
her,” she singsonged. “You want to
marry
her.”

“Shut up!” I yelled.

“Josie,” Charles Asher said, quiet. “Leave him alone, now.”

Josie laughed, a high, clear sound I couldn’t help appreciating, even though I was furious at her. Her laugh would save her many, many times in her life. There was no denying its beauty. “I was just kidding you, little man,” she said, but I got up and stormed away, letting the screen door slam behind me again. “Don’t be that way, now,” she called to me as I ran away. The thing that made me most angry about Josie was that I found it nearly impossible to be mad at her. She always did something like let loose of that great laugh or put just enough love into the way she called me little man, and I forgave her completely. It was a curse.

So I went to the snowball bush.

When my father returned from Vietnam, my mother had planted a snowball bush in the side yard to commemorate his survival. The bush had grown unnaturally big and by the summer of 1976 was as big as a small shed and so roomy that it served as a perfect playhouse for Edie and me. Inside, the branches made room for two little chairs we had dragged in there. The ground was hard, packed dirt. In June the blossoms were in full bloom, so often the floor of our playhouse was littered with white petals that looked like identical pieces of waxy confetti. The snowball bush didn’t have a particularly overpowering scent except in the early mornings, when the whole place smelled of vanilla.

Our family spent most of our time on the screen porch, which was out back. When people used the front porch, they usually were seeking privacy, so that the juiciest and most shocking conversations often took place there. The front porch was mostly used by Josie, since she was on constant lookout for privacy. Sometimes she would run the long yellow phone cord across the living room and out the front door, close the door, and then prop herself up on one of the porch chairs to have a long conversation with one of her girlfriends. It was also Josie’s habit to direct Charles Asher out to the front porch. People rarely passed on our road, except in the mornings and evenings, when they were either going to or coming from work, so hardly anyone would see them there. But you never knew who might show up at the back of our house. People were always walking across a succession of backyards to reach our place and congregate on our screen porch. Stella burst in unannounced all the time, as did Edie and various others. Nell had pretty much taken possession of the screen porch since her arrival, too, so any privacy that had once been found there was completely gone now, as there was hardly any time when Nell wasn’t out there smoking or reading or gazing out at the garden as if all the secrets to life were hidden beneath the damp petals of cucumber vines.

Edie and I had a few select toys we left in three tin boxes beneath the snowball bush. One box held a collection of silver and blue jacks, along with a raggedy deck of cards. Edie had taught me to play rummy, and even though she always beat me, I still loved to play there in the hidden world where nobody could see her get the better of me. In another tin there were several colored pencils (last summer we had left crayons out here but despite the shade they had still melted into one multicolored, square clump that we spent the rest of the summer prying out with my pocketknife) and a small pad of paper.

In the other tin was our entire collection of plastic cowboys, which were blue or orange; Indians, some yellow and some red; and soldiers, which were all green. We had outgrown them but I actually missed playing with them, so I chose them to entertain me until Josie and Charles Asher made their way out onto the front porch. I was sure this would happen before long; my sister was predictable in most matters.

I lined all the soldiers up in one line, clumped the cowboys on a small hill I formed by raking dirt into a pile, then took two fingers to dig out a wide trench where the Indians waited in hiding.

I made shooting sounds by pursing my lips and blowing out air, raked all the cowboys down, flicked the soldiers over one by one by using thumb and forefinger the way Nell sent cigarettes flying across the yard when she was finished with them. Then I ran each Indian up the hill and had them dance over the slaughtered masses. I always let the Indians win. I don’t know why.

Josie and Charles Asher made their way out onto the front porch and the chains of the porch swing clinked when they sat down. Josie kicked at the floor with a bare foot to get them swinging. She put her right leg up over both of his and then a hand up to his face and drew him into her lips. Soft kisses at first, then her head moved around the way necking couples did in the movies. She chewed at his lips, arching her body in toward his, although they were sitting in an awkward position, being on the swing together. He sat very stiff and ran his hand up her back until his fingers disappeared beneath her hair. I imagined this to be a cool place, in the shade. Like the space beneath the snowball bush.

Josie put her hand on Charles Asher’s chest and slid two fingers in between the buttonholes on his madras shirt, and with her other hand she held on to one side of his face, holding him as close as she could. I nearly gagged when I caught a brief glimpse of their tongues knocking at each other. I couldn’t understand how this was at all pleasurable, but I recognized the hunger in Josie’s tightly closed eyes, in the way she kept digging her leg into his.

But then Charles Asher pulled away, turning his head from her, and put a hand up to his mouth.

“You bit me,” he said, as if amazed. He ran a forefinger over his lip, checking for blood.

Josie got up, and halfway through the front door she said, “I’ll be right back.”

While she was gone, Charles Asher again ran a forefinger over his lip, then held his hand out in front of him. I couldn’t see if there was any blood or not, but he kept putting his lips together as if they were numb and he was trying to get the feeling back.

Josie came back out, one hand up under her shirt. She pulled her hand out and I saw that she was holding the small bottle of Jim Beam that she kept in her hiding place. She offered the whiskey to Charles Asher, but when he wouldn’t take the bottle, she unscrewed the cap. Standing there before him with her feet planted apart on the porch, she tipped her head back and took a drink like an expert. She brought the pint down, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, and widened her eyes to show him she was wild and crazy.

“Put that away,” Charles Asher said in a loud, angry whisper. “Loretta’ll catch us.”

“No, she won’t,” Josie said, and sat down heavily on the swing, causing the chains to pop and screech. “Here, take a drink,” she said, handing the bottle to him. He wouldn’t.

“I don’t want to,” he said, looking around the yard to make sure no one was close by. “I’m not going to do that at your parents’ house.”

“Goody Two-Shoes,” she said, and took another drink. He grabbed the bottle and pulled it away from her mouth, causing a few amber beads to fall out onto her shirt.

“God, now I’ll smell like an alcoholic,” she said, wiping at the splotch of brown dots. A moment of silence passed between them before she put the cap back on the bottle and laid it between them on the swing.

“Why do you want to act that way, Josie?” he said. “Drinking and always biting everyone’s head off and being mad all the time. What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with
you,
Charles Asher?” she said, and scooted away from him, close to the arm of the swing. “I’ve never seen a boy who wouldn’t do
any
thing. This is never going to last if you keep right on boring the mortal hell out of me.”

Charles Asher shook his head. He looked weary, beaten. “I wish you’d answer me.” And then: “What are you so mad about?”

“I just want to have some fun,” she said.

“No, it’s like you want to get caught with that liquor so you’ll get in trouble,” he said. “Just like with them flag pants. I believe you want to wear them just to make Loretta mad. You act like you’re making a statement with them, but you’re not. You’re just stirring up —”

“Whose side are you on?” she said, scowling at him.

“I didn’t know there were sides,” he said. “But I’m getting tired of you treating everybody bad and acting like something you’re not. I love you, Josie, but you’re turning into a different person from who I first loved.”

Josie looked away from him. Up until this point she had kept her eyes on his, but now she turned her face to the wall of the house as if she couldn’t bear the sight of him. “You don’t know anything about love,” she said. “You don’t know what it means.”

“If anyone don’t know, then it’s you,” he said. “You’ve got a good family and you’re beautiful and you’ve got anything a person could want and you just stay mad all the time lately.”

“How would you feel if you all at once found out you didn’t belong to your father?” she said, turning to him. It took me a long time of looking back on that evening to realize that by finally making this known to someone else she had freed herself in a small way. And so that was the beginning of my sister healing. But at that time it was also when the fire of her anger was burning the brightest. That showed in her eyes, too.

So she does know,
I thought. A pang of grief for her ran all through me. And then I realized that it really was true. I had read this in Daddy’s letters, had overheard Mom talk about it to Stella, but until that moment of hearing Josie say this thing, I hadn’t really believed it. I had tried to deny it to myself, I guess. Or maybe it was just that learning my sister was only my half sister didn’t matter to me because it didn’t change anything. I loved her just the same, and so I understood that Daddy did, too.

“Well?” she said. “Does that surprise you, that my mother got knocked up by somebody else and then Daddy married her, knowing that? That he raised me as his own and nobody told me a damn thing until I was grown?”

“Why did they finally tell you?”

“
Why?
Because I had a right to know, that’s why. That’s what they said. They sat me down and told me and expected me to just say okay and go on with my life. But I’ve been lied to all these years. Why didn’t they tell me before, when I was little?”

Charles Asher put his arm around her and she laid her head on his shoulder, her hair falling down in her face like a straight, shining curtain of black. “I’m sorry, Josie,” he said. “But Stanton worships you. Just because he’s not your blood father don’t mean he loves you any less. Anybody can see that, man.”

Josie put her hands up to her face and her shoulders began to tremble. “I know,” she said, her voice hoarse. “But it’s killing me.” She was trying her best not to cry, but now she was and there was no turning back. She was finally letting it out. “It’s my history,” she said.

It felt like I should do something, but I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood there and tried to not look at them for a while. I don’t know what my worst crimes were that summer — the times that I didn’t do enough or the times I did too much. I’ve studied on it for years and can’t arrive at the answer.

Charles Asher was trying his best to comfort her — kissing the top of her head, rolling the ball of her shoulder around in his hand, whispering into her ear — but there was nothing he could do to make her feel better, and he knew this. His face was pale and blank, like a piece of unlined notebook paper. But he was off the hook before long because the real Josie returned. The Josie who believed in being strong and defiant.

She straightened herself. Ran her long fingers over her face, then through her hair, and then wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She got up from the swing and stood in front of Charles Asher with her back to me, her fingers slid into the back pockets of her bell-bottoms. “You’re a good guy, Charles Asher,” she said. “You’re
too
good. It drives me frigging crazy.”