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Authors: Michael Parker

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BOOK: If You Want Me to Stay
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How to get him out of this trance, Mavis?

“Hey, Tank,” I said.

Nothing. Gunfire, squealing tires, spaceship noises.

“Tank. Hey, Tank.”

Nada, which is kindly Mexican for he didn't say shit to me.

“Okay, well, I'll just take a seat and wait for you to finish.”

I sat on the couch. There was a pillow and a ratty thermal blanket bunched up at one end. I wondered if Tank had to stay up until everyone left.

“Y'all have a party last night?”

Guns, spaceships, stuff exploding loudly.

“Okay, I'm just going to talk then,” I said.

I told him about the Mexican. I described the mariachi music and even sang a little but I doubt he heard me over the commotion. I told him I got off in Bulkhead. I didn't say what for. I wasn't about to tell him what for and what happened until he was at least looking me in the eye. While I talked I went over and flipped through the CDs to see if I could find something we liked. My daddy refused to get a CD player. What would I do with my records? he said. He said if we was to move to a spaceship then maybe he'd get one. But first he'd at least try to haul his boxy cabinet stereo on board. It's about six or seven feet long and heavy as Frosty's coffin will one day be.

All Angie's surfer boys had was some heavy metal. I know it's all just personal taste but I can't see how anyone can listen to some Megadeath. What does that even mean, megadeath? Like you died really big? Or a bunch of times? Metallica, that sounds like the color Landers would choose to paint his hybrid vehicle.

“Landers and the hybrid whistle, by Mario Dunn,” I announced. “Once I happened to be walking down the street in Bulkhead.” (Here I heaped scorn on Bulkhead in a big and quite eloquent though biased way. “The place smelled like megadeath.” Also: “The buildings were painted a peeling metallica.”) You wonder what I was doing there? Well, I was trying to locate a particular neighborhood.”

I looked down at Tank, who still had not looked at me, and it made me mad. I might of left him but it was not quite twenty-four hours and think of all I'd done for him prior, and
consider also how I'd come back to lead him out of there. So I reached down and grabbed that joy stick out of his hand which brought an end to his joy. He went to wailing.

It made me wonder why I even came back: Angie's apartment filled with evidence of kids trying to live on their own like grown-ups but wasting away every night getting stupid, no music to listen to except (thank you, Jesus) Mavis up in my head, Tank in the short time I had been gone, technically less than a day, addicted to video games. The evil forces had overtaken both of them. I might of hated my daddy for being like he was but I will tell you one thing, if he hadn't of gone off he'd not of let this happen. Some would maybe say he'd ruined us or at least me by depriving us of television and video games and all the latest high-tech toys and instead spinning records that were a good, some of them, thirty or forty years old if they were a day, black-washing us into believing that white boys from England might could master a twelve-bar blues (though mostly they just turned their amplifiers up real loud) but the true sound track of our lives rose out of the very land we tread upon, the fields we passed on our way to school each day, swarming now with kindly Mexicans but once tended entirely by the forebears of the singers we treasured, and the churches, half-finished or unadorned, heated with nothing but sheet-metal trash burners, you'd see back in the pine groves, and of course the county jail and the low-ceilinged, no-windowed cinder-block jukes that fed that jailhouse, sprinkled throughout the county and down the side streets of town, two to three for every church.

Just take me by the hand, Tank. Let me lead the way.

True I sometimes wandered out of range and lost the signal myself and yes I sometimes, left to my own half-formed judgment, strayed or was seduced by songs that lacked the purity of my daddy's favorites, like my brief flirtation with Motown, a label my daddy didn't much care for because, he said, with all due respect for Mr. Barry Gordy who as a businessman deserved his props, it made black music palatable to white people, lightening it up so it would cross over to the pop charts. My daddy when he was on could be an I-got-there-first snob. He could lecture for hours on the production quality of Motown versus anything out of Memphis or Muscle Shoals, the former being slick and given to the latest technology and the latter being sloppy in the way that perfect things just naturally are—filled with human error, the fuckups there to honor not Allah like the imperfection in the carpet but Jesus-I-don't-think-so, though if anyone ever came close to convincing me it was bygod Mavis callin' Mercy, telling her daddy to play on it, play on it, hollerin Whoa (to which I whispered, Whoa) All right (to which I hollered, Well, okay, all right).

I didn't realize I was hollering All Right until I looked down and saw Tank staring.

“What's all right?”

“Just listening to a little Mavis and Pop.”

“‘Respect Yourself'?”

“Up next. Right now we've got ‘I'll Take you There.'”

I thought I had him, but he was still smarting from my
leaving him. It was going to take more than the mention of the Staples to win him back.

“Let's go eat,” I said. “Then let's run by the Dollar Store and get some candy.”

“I want my mama,” he said.

“I told you about that, Tank.”

“Well,
you
got to go see her.”

“Who said?” But I knew damn well who.

“Angie said. She said that's where you run off to, see Mama.”

I didn't want to tell him. It wasn't time. But I wanted to tell Angie. She did not deserve my lie—she'd tried to warn me, she'd told the truth before I left out of there for Bulkhead,
She don't want to see us,
she'd said—but I was mad at her for leaving and mad at her for telling Tank where I'd gone and big-time pissed at her for not stepping up to the plate, leaving him all day long in her smelly apartment with its centerfolds from surfing magazines and beer posters Scotch-taped to the walls and its empties all over the place.

“Let's go get something to eat.”

“I want McDonald's.”

Oh Tank. I know a place.

“There ain't any McDonald's down here.”

“Then I ain't hungry.”

“I'll buy you a toy at the Dollar Store.”

This worked enough to get him out of the house at least. He wanted to go by the Breezeby for lunch but I was not yet ready to face my sister and besides I was jealous that he
wanted anything to do with her, suspicious as I was of the way she treated him. Sometimes when my daddy had been off for a while and then climbed shakily back on, my mama treated him like he'd returned from bloody combat. She spoiled him. Grilled us steaks, twice-baked some potatoes, boiled some green beans. She was no kind of cook but this was her one meal, welcome back, daddy, won't you stay with us awhile? Callin' mercy, mercy, mercy. We'd eat out on the porch if it was not mosquito season. Then my daddy would put on James Brown
Live at the Apollo 1962
side one with the crazy intro listing all the songs and the surf guitar and horn prelude and crank that bad boy up so loud you could stand in the bathroom in front of the toilet and not hear the blessed stream hit the water. Then he and his bride would disappear into the bedroom and lock the door behind them. Angie and Carter would sometimes put their ear up to the door but all they could hear was JB knocking them out the aisles of the Apollo. I doubted Angie had the decency or the aforethought to crank up even Megadeath before her or Glenn or whoever she had got with since I'd been gone (perhaps the massive Termite had reappeared on the scene) went at their nighttime lights-out bidness. I hate to admit it but thinking about this led me to imagine myself with that smoke-for-brains hip-huggered Carla. I was singing some Sam Cooke to that girl and it was working as she had been subjected to a steady diet of REO Speedwagon which beats me what a REO Speedwagon even is and she was swaying to my tune, slipping out of her halter and then inching down
those huggers and kicking them off finally to shimmy out of these lovely low-cut panties when Tank said, I'm hungry, Joel Junior, where we going to eat?

My name is Mario. I will take you there.

We walked down the beach to the pier. They had a grill built out over the dunes. We sat at the counter and ate cheeseburgers and fries and drank Mr. Pibb while the counterman told us and an old retired navy man about the time there was a grease fire started in the kitchen of the rival pier (because he claimed their fries were so greasy if you were to throw an order in the ocean they'd cause a slick bigger than that Exxon
Valdez
) and a land breeze fanned the fire and drove it out over the pier where it continued ablaze, trapping twenty-some-odd fishermen out at the dead end where some surfers who had been banned by Bottomsail law from surfing within five hundred feet of the pier paddled over to jeer and urge the old boys to jump.

Tank listened to this story, his eyes crazy wide.

“I wonder was Glenn one of those surfers,” he said.

“Sounds like him.”

“Glenn let me look at his dirty magazines.”

“That's it,” I said. “Come on, we're going to see Angie.”

“No, no, Dollar Store, Dollar Store,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. I put off asking about the magazines until my food digested. It was the only real meal I'd had aside from Tupperwared police leftovers and I was dog tired from nothing but bench sleep. What I really wanted was to curl up in my very own bed. I supposed I had already made up my
mind to go back but I hadn't yet let myself aloud say it or even totally inside spell it out. It was just a suction pulling me. Faintly did the signal grow stronger when I strayed away from the surf and steered Tank westward ho toward the dunes. Let me let me let me. Then that harmonica riff that was like jumping off a building and trusting whoever's blowing that harp (Was it old Pop Staples? My daddy, he'd know) to keep on blowing because the moment he ran out of breath was the moment I'd drop to my certain death. What they call a leap of faith. About Jesus I just don't know now. I want something up there besides my high-up-in-some-hotel mama. Somebody lining up my rides. I'd let kindly Mexican reign supreme, Streetclothes, hell, even Landers if he'd clean himself up, unlike Otis I believe in people's ability to change. Just let me get home and crawl in my bed which after Angie left I did get my own room, though Tank when he's scared of the pine needles scraping the shingles or the coral snakes popping up out of the heating vent at night when he's too groggy to remember the rhyme we taught him before we ever bothered with his ABCs has been known to come sliding in my bed. Used to before my sister left in a cloud of comic-book asterisks, exclamation points, and question marks, I shared a room with Tank and Carter. They had bunk beds with wagon-wheel headboards to which they'd bind each other with my daddy's two ties I not once saw him wear. Cowboy and Indian, a far healthier for you pursuit than any video game as it involves the creation in what they call your mind's eye of that same-ass cactus, tumbleweeds blowing down
the dusty main street of Dodge, swinging saloon doors, give me a sasparillo in a dirty glass. I begged off playing because it was for babies but occasionally I would cameo in the role of high sheriff which I ain't bragging but I feel I brought more integrity to the role of public servant than the preoccupied and often downright mocking Sheriff Deputy Rex.

I let Tank loose in the aisles of the Dollar Store which had not shifted a dust mote since I'd last patronized it. The same Muzak version of James Taylor's “Fire and Rain” leaked like nuclear fallout from the dropped ceiling. Thank God for Mavis. I deliberated over the purchase of a three-pack of Fruit of the Looms for Tank which would leave us with only five dollars to get Tank a toy and us home on, the Dollar Store being in fact a damn lie, most of the stock costing considerably more. Tank chose finally, after I had to suffer through string-only versions of “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac, “I'm Not in Love,” by 10cc, and “Baby, I Love Your Way,” by Peter Frampton, a package of green plastic army men.

“You got this same pack at home,” I said.

“But I want it.”

“We're going home today.”

“This,” he shouted, shaking it in my face.

“Okay,” I said. I was going to pay big-time for leaving him behind. Also I figured he wanted to feel at home until he arrived there safely. Safe seemed the wrong word considering no telling what we'd find when we arrived there. I tuned into Mavis, not wanting to consider what we'd come home to find. I remembered that morning we left Tank and Carter
had been playing with their plastic army men up under the bed. That is what he'd been doing when my daddy went off. I'm no shrink but it makes some sense to me that he'd want to take up where he left off. Besides the army men were nearly the only thing he was considering which cost in fact not much over one buck.

We went to the dock on the sound behind the Breezeby to wait for Angie to get off work. It was hot and breezeless and I only wanted to sleep but I did not want to go back to Angie's apartment which made me sad, livid, and itchy all at once and putting aside my own feelings I did not want Tank thumbing that joystick in front of that box. I craved my house on a hill, its basement up under the cool earth, the sweetly simple logic of an overheated dog: dig down to stay cool. Tank set his army men up on the railing and commenced his play-by-play of their epic struggle to rid the world of evil. In turn, Tank-like, I lay facedown on the dock, my nose slotted in the space between slats, smelling the fishy waters of the sound, rooting around in my basement, drifting off toward that space in my head where I don't have to take care of nobody and the music is chosen for me by a DJ I believe to be (even though I hate him) I-love-my: daddy.

BOOK: If You Want Me to Stay
12.46Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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