If You Want Me to Stay (12 page)

It was interesting also that Carter favored “Tighten Up.” The lyrics don't really stick in your head. Carter is a man of action. Witness his escape from the boiling truck. I wasn't going to go ahead and go on record as saying this was what led to the loss of his earlobe. All I'm saying is unlike Tank I think Carter was sometimes impatient with that movie one can conjure on the windshield of a boiling truck, the one with fair maidens laced up at the chest like Chuck Taylor tenny pumps and the grandpa from
Beverly Hillbillies
chasing Lady
Godiva. See, he just got bored. Whereas me and Tank could contentedly sit and wait for whoever it is destined to save us to bring their lateasses on.

Tank and me, we don't get bored. Carter and Angie, they get bored. Where did their boredom derive from? Some might argue from my mama, that it was her boredom that led her to leave four kids alone and unattended with a husband who had a whole drawer full of hospital discharge papers stashed away somewhere. (That was not even counting the withdrew-against-doctor's-advice papers which I assume he balled up in the parking lot of whatever institution he had bolted from.) But I knew she was fixing to send someone by there to pick me up, bring me to her, and it would not do, my thinking bad thoughts about her right before our reunion. Accusing someone of easy boredom, that's the same as saying they have nothing inside their head but pine straw. Why would I want to make that claim about the woman who brought me into this world? Across the sound in the blinking beach town she'd rented a cottage in the dunes. Dark pine paneling and thick metal blinds which clicked against the sills, lifted both by the open-windowed breeze and the slow chop of the ceiling fan. Lingering smell of fish, cleaned right in the kitchen sink, then deep fat fried, of her beloved hush puppies, of the lemon wax she scrubbed the furniture with. A front porch overlooking the ocean with bulging and blackened screens.

Here, take these binoculars, she said to me when I entered the house. After the hugs, the pulling me into her softness which, she'd put on a few pounds.

I put the glasses up to my face. The ocean was blurry and gray. A ragged melding of water and sky. I did not know how to focus the lens and I did not see anything at all but I was so glad to be with my mama again, to have been wrapped up in her hug, that I pretended to see porpoises and whales and Glenn the surfer catching the tsunami-sized break of his dreams and hell, to make her happy, the
Pinta,
the
Niña,
and the
Santa María
.

It was true that the view from the porch of the beach cottage was far better than what she'd see from our porch at home, which was the front yard littered with Tank's sand-hauling trucks and dozers, various leaky soccer balls, holes dug by sleepy dogs; a swamp to the left where possums clung to tree tops and the soggy ground was filthy with moccasins and even red-black-yellow, won't-harm-a-fellow corn snakes and evil twin, red-yellow-black, stay-way-back coral snakes which were beautifully banded but deadly, thus the rhyme which Tank could recite well before his ABCs because we knew how he treasured beauty over danger and would certainly have tried to pick one up and pet it if we'd not beat it into him, how dangerous they were; a patchy pine forest to the right where we boys built forts and Carter went sometimes with a buck-toothed neighbor boy named William Tyndall Grice to smoke butts; and in back a big fallow field which was only pleasant in the fall when the stalks turned brown and their raspy cough was brung on sweetly by the breeze.

But even with the help of binoculars all I could see was grayness, blurriness, bleakness, loneliness, okay I'll stop.

What do you see, baby?

I told her, Dolphins. I said, Hey, look, one of those Wind-surfers!

She hugged me from behind and asked was I hungry.

Lying on that bench on the bulkhead I was damn near dying from hunger, thirst, and generalized nastiness of attire.

I could eat if you're having something but you don't have to go to any trouble.

She laughed her what-are-you-talking-about, trouble! laugh and took me inside and went in a back bedroom and came out with a man's T-shirt big on me but clean and smelling of detergent rather than sweat, road grime, Frosty's grill, my sister's cig smoke, probably a little remnant Tank pee, the Mexican's vehicle, booze fumes from Landers, and an odor somewhere between fried seafood and sulfur which I put down to just Bulkhead. I did not ask her whose shirt is this? I did not do or say anything or behave any way which might bring on in her mind boredom or otherwise cause her to put me out. Yes ma'am, no ma'am, thank you please. If you want me to stay I will be perfect, no worries, no trouble, no lip. Without my little brother to look after I was a different person. I had for one thing patience. I believe all those years of taking care of them had built up such reserves of patience that I could, well shy of them, put up with six solid months of someone's most trying bullshit. I was a battery left charging, never used until the storm knocked out the whole county. Light in this world, in this world, this world.

I did not ask her whose shirt but I wondered. You know I bygod wondered who wore it before me.

It was just a blue T-shirt bought obviously at a surf shop, a border of what looked like Hawaiian leis running down one side. Nothing my God-bless-him daddy would have worn. He favored work clothes though not like the Mario I wore— he ripped off the name patches, left ghosts of names, a darker oval where the rest of the shirt had faded from much laundering. He had this one favorite T-shirt he got at the National Hollerin' Contest at Spivey's Corner the first year they held it, before it got big-time and the hippie college kids started driving down from Chapel Hill with their pot and their Hacky Sacks. My mother made like she hated the shirt but of course she loved it to death when he wore it which was nearly every day. She just had to pick. On the porch she sat on the bottom step and he held her in place with his knees. But she wanted to be there. She looked radiant rather than trapped. Whose shirt was this, I thought but did not say.

She hadn't asked me anything about Tank, Carter, or my daddy.

On the water I heard voices. Party people on a yacht. I sat up and saw lights way out across almost to the blinking beach town where in my mother's cottage I sat down at the Formica bar separating the kitchen from the rest of the one not-bedroom room. My mother grilled a cheese sandwich and boiled some white corn. She fixed me a ginger ale which bubbled in its glass. My stomach ached deeply, I thought at first from hunger but do you know what it was in fact from?
The questions she had not asked, my mama, about her other children, about her husband, about bygod me and what I was doing there.

The cheese sizzled. The ginger ale bubbled. I had left both my brothers behind. So had she done the same damn thing. Therefore we were walled off in this place together. What we shared was liable to take us in one of two directions: make us talk about nothing but, or go hard the other way: anything but. My natural inclination would be to get behind door number one, because to me, see, it feels better to confess than it does to deny but I was sitting there eating a grilled cheese sandwich and twirling my ear of white corn in a lake of salty butter fixing to eat it too and my mama had yet to say one word about anyone but me which led me to believe had it been Carter (aka Archie Bell) showing up at her duneside getaway instead of me, hell, my name would never have come up either. You'd think it would, sort of naturally. But it wouldn't of because instead of tell me how's everybody, is Carter getting along okay in school (because he mixed his letters up and therefore hated to read though that boy could tighten up on some arithmetic) and is Tank putting on weight (because he only liked to eat string cheese, Cheerios and Funyuns from Frosty's), she said, They saw some turtles laying eggs ashore the other day and one of them weighed close to four hundred pounds, and We had Hurricane Ida down here in late September but I came out all right, I just lost some shingles. These were things that might of interested Tank, hurricanes and monster washed-ashore turtles,
but I wasn't interested in any of that. She'd forgot how to talk to me if she ever did know in the first place. What I wanted to hear out of her mouth was what I'd come all this way for: why she'd left, how she did it because she loved us, how I was now that I had left them behind also terrific at love.

Somebody had a hold of my leg. I jerked up off my mama's barstool. It was a Bulkhead policeman, straddling a bygod bicycle.

“Get your ass up,” he said. “This is a public park, not a flophouse.”

I said I never mistook it for a flophouse and besides I wasn't flopping.

“This park is closed,” he said. “It's three o'clock in the morning and this park has
been
closed.” He pointed to a sign. posted: park hours, 8 am to 11 pm. I started to say, Well you can read, that's better than Carter, but can you do the Tighten Up? I decided right then that I missed Carter. I'd been hard on him. Daddy cut his ear off. He mixed his letters up. He also had something in him made him bored easily. Except one thing about that I didn't understand: he could watch
Road Runner
for hours, or could before daddy golf-clubbed the TV, and it never bored him.
Road Runner,
if you asked me, was the boringest show, and very aggravating. It was the opposite of entertaining to see how much the coyote and Road Runner love to mess with each other. What happened in the first place to make them do each other like they do? History as usual goes begging. To me the worst thing about
Road Runner
was the laziness of the dude who drew it.
I hesitate to call him an artist. Over and over he drew the same old rock, the same cactus. It didn't matter whether there was Acme Explosives involved, or a anvil, or a highway painted on the sheer rock face of a mountain to mislead Road Runner, you were going to be staring at that same-ass cactus.

“What are you
on,
boy?” asked the policeman. I said to the Bulkhead bicycle policeman, “I ain't on shit. If you want to catch somebody under a influence you best go after Landers.”

He was trying to look menacing from the get-go but he got especially aggressive after I mentioned Landers. Flushed, big-breathed, put his hand on his bygod gun. He had me up off that bench and spread-eagled against a tree before the name Landers got blown off by a breeze. I supposed Landers won't exactly the name to drop to a Bulkhead cop, bicycle or otherwise, and that I ought not to have probably cussed the old boy, though I did not know that cussing a cop or stating the name of a known criminal would result in arrest. I guess I was too busy waiting on my mama to ask after my brothers and daddy to get right inside what they call the moment.

He cuffed my hands. He tightened the cuffs to where I had to ask Archie Bell to back off, I needed loose, not tight. He called for backup which I was wondering how he was going to haul me in on his bicycle.

He read me my rights.

You have the right to a record player, he said. The right to tighten up on that organ, bass, guitar, drums. You have the
right to get right inside whatever moment you want or need to, use whatever sweet song will take you there, to avoid that same-ass cactus which, harmless though it may seem when it flashes past the road runner, is a deadly factor in many a wasted life. You have the right to get on board that train, the right to leave behind your baggage and just climb on board. You have the right to leave, the right to get good at love.

“What did I do?”

“The charge is loitering, vagrancy, resisting arrest.”

“I never resisted any arrest.”

“Also suspicion of other illegal activities associated with your buddy Landers who is a suspect in several unsolved crimes.”

“I don't even know Landers.”

“You damn sure know how to drop his name for not knowing somebody.”

“I just met him walking down the street. I'm not even from this town.”

“Tell it all to somebody who's going to give a damn.”

Who would that be? I wondered.

A cop car showed up, blue lit, brakes squealing. I started to ask what all the fuss was about but I was aware of how sensitive these cops were because I knew them from the school bus. They were the ones who could dish it all day long, talk all grades of trash about your mama and your high waters but give it back to them and they turn sputtering and bullified. I knew everyone from the school bus—the entire spectrum of humanity rode my Moody Loop bus, the girls I'd never get
with, the pure loyal ones and the I'd-do-my-husband's-best-friend sluts, the future lawyers and cops and the video-game-loving nerds, the druggies and the drunks. I could look at them and see them in ten years' time. I could see all this despite the sound track constantly blasting in my inner ear.

I rode in silence to the so-called City Complex, which was brand-new and bland as a office park. I spoke when spoken to. It was a while before anyone spoke to me. A street-clothed cop sat me down at a desk and asked me questions. I told him the exact God's truth. That I was down here looking my mama and I stopped to ask this guy Landers where the Promise Land was and he promised to show me then tricked me into breathing some half-ass neither car nor truck to life which obviously he stole.

“He didn't steal it, it's his,” said Streetclothes. “He's not supposed to be driving it if he's had a drink, which Landers is always messed up on something.” He explained to me how this Landers had a problem drinking and driving and how the judge had ordered this contraption put in his car measuring his alcohol levels and all this time I thought it was magic. I felt stupid. Babies say mama. I wanted to go home. They'd get me for blowing to life a butt-ugly vehicle that might of for all I know run over a little girl on a Barbie bike.

It occurred to me to wonder why I would care to find my mother if she had no more sense than to stay in Bulkhead. Perhaps they would find her and throw her in jail for being my mother since I was being held in connection to a crime committed by a man who had tricked me into cranking his
hybrid. Bulkhead being the sort of place where guilt by association is a literal letter-of-the-law-type situation.