If You Want Me to Stay (13 page)

In that case I had better not say her name.

Streetclothes was on my side, I could tell. If he'd had something to prove he would have worn his uniform. Also he took one look at me and knew I wasn't any colleague of Landers. I was just this smelly kid in a purloined shirt.

“Mario, what's your last name, buddy?” He had gotten some forms out of a file cabinet but he'd pushed them aside. He was looking at me like he really wanted to know my name.

“My name is really not even Mario,” I told him because he was as kind as the kindly Mexican. “I just borrowed this shirt because I spent the night out on a fishing pier.”

“Oh, okay,” he said, as if this made some sense to him. “You say you're looking for your mom?”

“Yes,” I said. Mom. Babies don't even know what that means.

“Say she stays down in the Promise Land?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I'd remembered Sheriff Deputy Rex saying you always addressed an officer of the law as “sir.”

“Where at down there?”

“I don't know. See, that's how come I happened to run into that Landers. He was leaning against a wall down by that pool room—”

“He'd 'bout have to lean,” said Streetclothes.

“I walked by and asked which way was the Promise Land and that's when he tricked me into cranking his car or whatever by blowing in the tube.”

“Well, that ain't no crime. What were you doing whenever Officer Weaver who brung you in found you?”

I was having dinner with my mama. She was asking me did I want some ice cream. We sat at the bar. I wanted her to put on some Aretha like she used to do at home but that was our old home, she didn't live there anymore. Maybe she'd never lived there. Maybe she'd always been like she was to me then, talking to me like I was some baby. We had a hurricane! Four-hundred-pound sea turtles! Okay, I'll have some ice cream. You asked me to call you the moment I got here. Now here I am and you act like you hardly know me.

“Listening to some music,” I said.

Streetclothes looked at me strangely. He'd been standing there when they brought me in and had watched me empty my pockets. He'd seen the nothing but nickels and pennies change, the wad of tissue I kept to wipe Tank's dirty mouth and a few pieces of retard candy I was hiding from Tank.

“In my head,” I explained. “You know how you do.”

“Un-hunh.” He had this look on his face. I'd seen the same look on Sheriff Deputy Rex. Like he wanted to feel sorry for you but would just as soon be involved in a high speed pursuit as taking care of the children of a sorryass and his run-off wife.

“Well, where's your daddy at?”

I named my town.

“He know you've run off?”

“He knows now.”

“Other words, you didn't ask his permission to come down here and visit your mama?”

“No, sir, not really.”

“How come you didn't tell him? Don't you think he's going to be worried?”

I stared at my shoes, which still had their laces. This must of meant they weren't going to lock me up. They take your laces so you won't hang yourself. I loved my daddy, my daddy was a good man. I hated to talk about his situation to a stranger. But I did not want them to send me back to him. I was just getting good at love. People aren't born with any natural aptitude in that direction. If they were, what would be the source of all the sweet songs? We're defined by what we lack. The shortfall will force you to make up a dance called the Tighten Up. Say we were all born knowing how to adequately love. Turn on the radio and there'd be nothing to listen to but that old monotone man out of Chadbourne quotes the going rates per pound for hogs, or some white-bread preacher trying to make you feel worse than you already do for tuning in to his white-bread ass.

“My daddy's sick.”

“What kind of sick is he?”

“Sick in the head.” I pointed to my temple for effect.

“Uh-hunh. So you don't stay with him?”

“I did until two days ago.”

“What happened two days ago?”

Then I felt trapped. Like I had run off in the woods and
gotten myself good and lost and was about going to have to fight my way out of it instead of stay there and wait to be discovered which was my natural inclination. I did not know what had happened back home. I had not been thinking about it, or about poor Carter or Tank either. Just me and my mama sitting at the bar, grilled cheese and buttered corn, sea turtles and hurricanes, iced tea and Fig Newtons.

“My daddy went off.”

“You mean he went off and left y'all alone?”

“No, he didn't leave. He's there, he just ain't there.” I tapped my temple again. I made sure to act bored when I did so, like it had happened so many times before. That same-ass cactus.

“Okay. And did somebody come get him, take him to get some help?”

“I don't know. I left.”

“How did you get down here?”

I looked at a spot behind my interviewer's head and stuck my thumb out, exhibit B. It seemed like I was communicating mostly with gestures. Soon I'd be down to shrugs.

“How come you didn't just call your mama on the phone?”

“I don't believe her number's listed.”

“You don't believe, or you checked and it ain't?”

“Well, sir, I didn't think calling her up and announcing my arrival would be the best strategy.”

“Okay, I hear you. You were wanting to take her by surprise.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Either that works or it don't,” he said, as if this could not be said of most anything. “What's your mama's name?”

She's the one named me after him. She must have known. Babies don't call their mamas full given Christian names. Her name is Joyce. Joyce Dunn. But I have never heard her called such a thing. I felt myself unraveling, tried to tighten up. Flatly I said her name. Streetclothes wrote it down, leaned over, pulled a phone book from a bottom drawer. He licked his finger and paged loudly through it while I felt myself unraveling, tried to tighten up.

“Nope,” he said, holding the book away as if he'd forgot his glasses. “Could she of got remarried?”

“She loved us so she had to leave, “ I said. “She could not stay because she loved us so much it would of killed her.”

“Okay,” he said. “Who's we?”

“Me. Tank and Carter. Also Angie but she left too.”

“How long's your mama been gone?”

I am no good at calendars. I was tired of words. I shrugged, exhibit C.

“So your mama and daddy, they ain't in contact?”

I wanted to say that I heard my daddy talking to her all the time and that he sang to her all the time too. Whatever song he was listening to at the time? It was sent directly from his heart to hers. That's the thing about music if it's any damn good. It's like it's coming straight out of your heart, not from some boxy console record player.

“Okay. I take it you don't know the answer to that one. I
guess we'll have to try harder to find her then. We got ways other than looking her up in the phone book.”

“I imagine you do,” I said. I was glad my fate rested in the hands of Streetclothes. But I was all of a sudden so hungry my stomach cramped. I doubled over, holding it.

“You need to go to the bathroom?”

I thought of Tank, how much he hated it when I asked him did he have to go.

I said I did. He led me down the hall to it. There were some rights and lefts. He told me how to get back. But I took a wrong turn. There was some plate glass and, outside it the sidewalk, the streetlights set to blink until dawn. There was Bulkhead and my mama who he could not locate in his computer because she had done nothing wrong. I went on. But I took a wrong turn. There was the plate glass and, outside it, the sidewalk, the streetlight set to blink until dawn. I stood there with my hands on the door, my fingerprints smudging the glass. Then I realized where I was and lifted a corner of Mario to wipe clean the prints. I was wiping still when Streetclothes come up behind me.

“There you are,” he said. “Cleaning up?”

“Somebody missed a spot.”

“Get lost?”

But I took a wrong turn.

“Follow me then,” he said. There was something different in his voice. Back at his desk two or three men hung about, staring at me. I could tell from their faces that my status had changed during the time I had been gone. Fat Frosty must of
turned me in for running off with his tank of gas. They were fixing to make me remove my laces.

“You never told me your name, did you?”

“You never asked. Fat Frosty don't know me, though.”

“Who's Fat Frosty?”

Then I thought: Something happened to Carter. More than lost an earlobe.

“What happened to Carter?”

“Hold up. Who's Carter?”

Then it was, Oh you idiot! The only one who knows you're down here is Angie. She doesn't want Tank hanging around cramping her foul-mouthed style what it is. So she notified the authorities. No telling what kind of crime she'd hang on me.

“Angie's friends use marijuana,” I said.

“You got to stop talking about people I never heard of. My wife does that same thing. At least explain to me who these people are to you.”

Then it was the end of the list. I did not know anyone else. My daddy would not yet be back on. Carter would have been glad to see me gone, frankly. I didn't always do him so good.

“Anybody else could take care of you?” he said. “Aunts? Grandparents? Neighbors?”

Then I understood. He had talked to her while I was gone. They had ways of finding people other than the phone book. It did not take her long to make her wishes known. About the time it took me to wipe my prints off the plate glass. To go to the bathroom.

“Son,” he said, and I did not like Streetclothes saying that. Especially because even though she was dead to me from that point on no matter what he said I didn't care to hear him insinuate I wasn't hers nor my daddy's. I was not his son. I was still theirs even though one was sick and the other, dead.

“How did she die?” I asked him.

He tried to look like he wouldn't of rather been in a stakeout. He was doing the best he could. I could tell he might have gone into law enforcement to help people at the start of it, though that wasn't what kept him in it now. But there was some left over from when he was just starting out.

“We can't make her take you, okay? We can see to it you get some shelter but the one thing we can't do is make somebody feel the way they ought to feel,” he said. “I sure as hell wish we could.”

Have you ever tried to stop your mind from going where it believes it ought to go? Like a dog digging a sleeping hole up under a shade bush, my mind kept seeking out that cold secret sand.

“In a house fire you say? She died in a house fire?”

Streetclothes looked at my dirty shirt. “It'd be a lot better on all of us, I swear, if we could just tell somebody to act right and that be the end of it,” he said.

“Well,” I said. I swallowed. It staved off the tears so I did it again. Then I just sat there swallowing, the fire crackling in her basement. Down there so close to the ocean she said it would fill with water before you could even shovel out the sand. But she was wrong: she had a basement down in the
Promise Land and it was filled with things people thought they were through with which still had some good use left in them. People'll dump perfectly good shit down a bygod ravine. A basement or attic is filled with items which have whole other lives left in them. People just get bored is what it is. They just give up. Or they say I'm tired of fighting with this toaster, I'm just going to chuck it in the basement or up under the attic eaves and get me a brand-new one. Watch it sink down in the thick pink blanket of insulation, the sucking mud behind the furnace. Whole chicken houses filled with items fallen prey to somebody got good and bored. Oh the waste in this world. All I wanted was a space below and up above me so I could keep it clean of the kind of castoffs known to clog such spaces and turn them into Deadly Firetraps. See, it's hazardous to your health, abandoning things, allowing boredom to take hold. It's that same-ass cactus.

Some old boy wearing a T-shirt, blue with a Hawaiian lei border, drops by to visit in her house down in the Promise Land. You got to go outside to smoke, Ronnie, she says to him when he shakes a Vantage from a crumpled pack. But it's cold outside or spitting rain or just general Bulkhead fish-gill gray. He waits until she's in the kitchen cooking to cranked up Aretha, then slips down the basement steps. He'll be goddamned if he'll stand out in the elements just for something as wispy as smoke. At the foot of the stairs he lights up, blows smoke toward the shadows where there are ass-busted chairs, one-legged tables, light fixtures, and fireplace grates, all of it dusty and tarnished but none of it beyond repair. You don't
just up and leave it all behind. Ronnie smokes his smoke. He does not even notice the whole other left behind world lurking inches away in the cool up-underground dog-dug shadows. When he finishes his cig he flicks it in those same-ass shadows. Let's say he decides right then and there to leave, okay? Let's let him leave. She ought not to have had him over there in the first place so we'll clear Ronnie right on out and let my mama lie down on the couch while the cigarette smolders and catches on some prematurely discarded somethinganother down there which snaps and blisters and all of a sudden busts up in blue dancing flames, sending smoke upstairs to where my mama breathes in those things people ought not to have throwed away in the first place. This is what kills her: lethal inhalation of second chances.

Will you take me by there? I was about to ask him, but I knew there won't nothing to see. Burned to the ground. I saw the lowly residents of the low-lying Promise Land standing around the charred brick and ash. I got up close enough to listen.