Eli the Good (5 page)

B
y the end of the song, my mother was fully spellbound. She held her arms over her head, shook her hair, let her head sway with the beat of the song. I was still dancing in front of her, but my heart wasn’t really in it. I was more concerned with watching her, as if I was seeing her true spirit for the first time. Just as the song went off, we noticed that Daddy and Nell had slipped in, standing in the doorway between the living room and kitchen.

My father stood there with his hands on his hips. He was a big presence even though he wasn’t a particularly big man. He had a natural charm that caused people to like him right away, as he seemed to always know the right thing to say. He thought out his sentences and then delivered them in a careful way that made people respect him, too. He was dark in every way except for his green eyes, which were green as walnut husks. If a person looked at them too long, they might be hypnotized. Daddy’s whole face was smiling, and I knew it was because he liked to watch Mom dance. He looked only at her. But Nell winked at me.

“What’re you all up to?” Daddy said in his laughing voice, the voice he had on good days, when the war wasn’t right there behind his eyes. Although he was addressing both of us, he was really only speaking to my mother. He took a single step forward and gave her a kiss. Their lips lingered longer than necessary, long enough for her to bring her hand up and put her pointing finger into the cleft in his chin. This was her favorite part of his face, a fact she made well known. Daddy was still dressed in his work clothes, although the gas station he owned had been closed since five o’clock that afternoon. His hands were stained by work but she pulled them up to her face and kissed them although they were grimy with oil and gasoline. “I love it when you come home dirty,” she said in a Mae West voice, and put her lips to each of his knuckles. Usually he washed up at work, but sometimes when he was in a hurry to get home, he came in like that. He kept a big plastic jar of hand cleanser that felt like lard and smelled like oranges on his shelf in the bathroom.

“Hey there, buddy,” Daddy said to me.

I didn’t answer at first, miffed that our dancing had been interrupted. But then I reconsidered, thankful that his voice was so easy tonight. “Hey,” I said, but I could tell he didn’t even hear me.

Mom folded Nell up in her arms. Nell shut her eyes and looked as if she were about to cry, both her hands lain so flat on my mother’s back that I thought the cigarette stuck between Nell’s fingers might ignite Mom’s hair. Just when I thought Nell might shed a tear, Mom released her and held her by the shoulders. “Everything’ll work out,” Mom said, quiet. “I’ll see to it.”

Nell stepped around Mom and held both arms out for me. “You better come here, buddy.” Her cigarette bobbed up and down in her lips when she spoke. “I need me some sugar.”

“I’m too old to give sugar,” I said.

Nell rushed across the room and lifted me onto the couch, her weight on me as she tickled my belly. “I’ll have to steal it, then,” she said, and twin lines of smoke escaped her nose as she laughed.

After tickling me for a while, Nell finally fell back against the couch, out of breath. She kept her arm stretched out across my shoulders. “I missed you. Haven’t seen you in six months.”

“Where you been?” I asked.

“Oh, Lord, baby,” she said. “To hell and back, that’s where.” Nell was quiet long enough for me to study her properly. She had long red hair and freckles all over her body, strewn out across her nose like a constellation. I liked that about her. She looked younger than she was, most likely because she acted so much younger than I thought a woman her age should act. Her lips never quite closed, so that you could always see her two front teeth, and I liked that about her, too. It made her look wild and carefree, which she was.

“Y’all must be starved,” Mom said to Nell and Daddy. “I’ll fry you some pork chops.”

Daddy followed her into the kitchen, and this movement brought Nell back to earth, so she sat up and clucked me on the arm with her knuckles. “Hey, why don’t you help me get my stuff out of the truck? I brought all my records, and you’re allowed to listen to them anytime you want to.”

She squatted down so I could latch my arms around her neck and be carried on her back. She stomped out of the living room and into the kitchen, where Daddy was sitting at the table, sipping a cup of coffee while Mom worked at the stove, warming up the macaroni and setting the cast-iron skillet on the stove. Daddy barely glanced our way as we went out the back door.

I buried my face in Nell’s hair. She always smelled like the woods, like trees and rocks and wild things. Hers was a clean scent, spicy and green. I thought: I should remember this moment. I could write it down in my little composition book, the one that contained all my secrets that no one would ever read. I didn’t know why, but I always felt the need to write about times like this evening when I had danced with my mother and rode Nell’s back. Whole scenes of your life can slip away forever if you don’t put them down in ink.

There were no streetlights out here in the country, ten miles from town, so the night was black and it took our eyes a moment to adjust. Nell caught sight of the starred sky as we stepped out into the yard, so both of us were looking up as she bounced me on her back out to the driveway.

“Country people sure do have more stars than anybody else,” she said. “We ain’t got much, but we got the stars.”

The hills were full of the calling cicadas and katydids and crickets, but there was also the sound of an engine ticking in the driveway. Just as Nell reached the back of Daddy’s pickup and let me drop onto the ground behind her, we both realized that Charles Asher’s Mustang was parked in the driveway, too.

Then the sound of much fumbling about and the door popped open and Josie practically fell out, scrambling to run and hug Nell. Charles Asher fired up his engine and backed away. Josie was so caught up in her reunion with Nell that only I waved good-bye, his headlights sweeping over me.

“Oh, Nell, I’m so happy to see you,” Josie said, then leaned down and kissed me on the forehead. She smelled like Hai Karate, the cologne she had bought when we went to the Rexall for Charles Asher’s birthday. She had sprayed it on my wrist to test it.

“Don’t you know better than to neck in your own driveway, though?” Nell asked. “What if your daddy had come out?”

“Shoot, he worships Charles Asher. He wouldn’t care.”

“He smells Charles Asher’s cologne all over you, he’ll care. Believe me, I know him well.” Nell pulled a blue milk crate full of record albums out of the pickup and put them into Josie’s hands. “He was my big brother and used to police every boy I went out with.”

“He’s still your big brother,” Josie said, laughing, her face lit with the dim yellow light of the truck’s interior light.

“All I’m saying is you better be careful.” Nell left the door open and then climbed into the back of the truck, swinging her legs over the tailgate. “Here, Eli,” she said, and handed me a small blue overnight case.

“You shouldn’t have left the way you did tonight,” I told Josie. “You hurt Mom’s feelings.”

“I don’t
care,
” she said, and even to me, she sounded like a spoiled brat.

“You should care,” Nell said, hopping off the bumper, carrying a record player and several pairs of Levi’s stacked atop it. As she went by the truck, she slammed the door shut with her foot. “Your mother has been through a lot for you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Josie said, following Nell through the black yard.

“That means she’d do anything for you, and I know what I’m talking about,” Nell said. “Be good to your mother.”

We followed her back around to the screen porch through the black June night.

E
veryone was talking about freedom that summer, but I knew what freedom truly was: riding my bicycle as fast as I could down the road, then letting go of the handlebars and gliding along with my arms outstretched. When done just right, this felt like flying. There is no freedom like one a child possesses, and that summer Edie and I were about as free as two people can be.

Every day was the same: we rode bikes up and down our road, back and forth, or carried rocks in the creek to work on our dam, or sat within the shade of the big snowball bush where we drew pictures or played war with little plastic soldiers or tried to read each other’s minds. But mostly we rode bicycles.

Sometimes the heat spread itself out over us without our noticing. Before we knew it, the world was baking and we were sweating so much from riding up and down the road that we decided to go down into the shoals of the river to cool off. That’s the way it was the day after Nell arrived at our house.

We parked our bikes and sat right down in the shallow water that ran over round black rocks. I loved the way denim felt when it got wet, so heavy and full of water. Once you got blue-jean cutoffs wet, you could be cool for a long while; it took them forever to dry. We pulled off our tennis shoes so the water could wash between our toes.

After some splashing and then a long, thinking silence, Edie looked up at me with concern. “I’ve been thinking, about your daddy,” she said. “What that must be like, to hold all that in.”

“Hold what in?”

“All that. About the war,” she said, watching her toes as she leaned back on her hands. Her arms were very straight and long, already tanned a deep golden brown. “We studied about Vietnam last year, in school. The worst things happened during that war, Eli. It’s too awful to think about, some of the things that happened.”

“Like what?”

“Like little kids would come up to the men and have bombs strapped to them and they’d blow up. And monks burned themselves in the streets. And soldiers had to go into villages and kill everybody because they didn’t know who was their enemy and who wasn’t. And the men walked for ages and ages.”

“Daddy’s feet are all messed up because of that,” I said, quiet. I had studied his feet many times. Some of his bones looked as if they’d poke right through the skin, and all his toes were mashed together, with his second toe popped up to rest atop his big one. They were awful to look at, so he rarely went barefoot, although the rest of us never wore shoes inside the house. Seeing his feet didn’t disgust me, though. They made me feel like I was regretting something, but I didn’t know what. You could see the war, right there in his feet.

“I heard him tell Mom that he once went for two whole weeks without pulling off his boots.”

Edie leaned back on her elbows and brought one foot up out of the water, arching her leg so that it was high out in front of her. “I have really nice feet.”

“There’s no such thing as nice feet,” I said.

She considered her foot, turning it this way and that, as if trying to catch the perfect light. “They’re the only thing I’m vain about.”

“What does that mean,
vain
?”

“Like stuck-up,” she said. “It’s a good word. I found it in the dictionary.” Edie was always finding words in the dictionary and trying to work them into everyday conversation. She slid her foot back into the water and looked at me. “Did he ever get shot?”

“No, but his back is full of shrapnel. My mother squeezes it out sometimes.” Edie didn’t know what it was, so I told her. “Little slivers of metal from the grenades. It looks like pencil lead.”

Edie didn’t reply, considering this. The sound of the water — like sizzling grease — churned between us, so we had to speak up to hear each other. “My aunt Nell came back home last night. She’s going to live with us.”

“They don’t get along, though, do they?” Edie said. Last fall she was the one who had rushed onto the school bus, taken her seat beside me, and flipped open her history book to show me that Aunt Nell’s picture was in there. Edie read the caption below the photograph: “This picture of a young protester became one of the most recognizable images of the anti-war movement and was instrumental in changing the nation’s attitudes about the war in Vietnam.” Edie had said that the most powerful thing was the way Nell wants people to look not at her but at the peace sign. If I looked at the picture long enough, I could imagine everything about that day. The way the street must have peeled away the skin of her face when they dragged her, the roar of the people, the police on their megaphones, the smell of the tear gas.

“Naw, they don’t get along too good,” I said. “But there’s something wrong with her — I don’t know what — and she’s his sister, so he can’t turn her away. That’s what Mom told Stella.”

Edie plucked a little rock from the riverbed and held it up to her face, looking for quartz. She turned it in the sunlight and brought it up to her mouth. Her tongue darted out and touched the skin of the stone. She had the habit of touching and tasting everything.

“My parents are getting a divorce,” she said, just like that, then looked at me. I had heard of lots of people getting a divorce but had never known anyone who had. My parents didn’t even like for me to watch
One Day at a Time
because the mother on there was divorced. I didn’t know what to say, so I just looked at her. If I had been older, I might have told her how sorry I was or something. But in that moment I was helpless. There was no use in asking why, because everyone knew. If anyone needed to get a divorce, it was Edie’s parents. They fought all the time. Loud. Sometimes on the front porch or in the yard. And even when they kept their fury contained to the house, we could all hear them screaming at each other.