If You Want Me to Stay (6 page)

“Yes,” came his little up-under-a-blanket, about-to-cry voice.

“Well, shut the hell up then and come with me and don't say nothing.”

I figured Carla would be more likely to tell the truth if she saw Tank in his Coke-stained camping britches.

“I'm about frozen,” he said, so I wrapped him up in Ed from PCE Industries. It came down to his knees. He ran his fingers over the red-threaded letters and said, “What does this say?”

I shook my finger in his face. “What did I tell you?”

He reached for my hand while we waited at the door. A boy answered it. I'd seen him around school. He was weaving and squinting. Big clouds of cigarette smoke sucked out of the slivered door.

“What?”

“Is Carla here?”

“What do you want with her?”

“To ask her a question.”

This set him off. He had a machine-gun laugh. I knew he was high, laughing semiautomatically at nothing at all.

Carla came to the door. She stared at me like I was out of place in time. Her shirt was hanging off her shoulder,
exposing a sadly white and raggedy bra strap. She was carrying a beach ball on her hip like it was her baby.

“Who are you?”

“I'm Angela's brother.”

“Me too,” said Tank. He was eyeing that beach ball.

“Oh hey, Tank,” she said. My sister's friends loved Tank. They used to follow him around and listen to him say crazy-to-them-but-normal-to-him Tank things. He'd rub dirt on the back of a dog and when they asked him why he'd say, They like to roll in it, I'm only helping, which made sense to them because they were high and sense to Tank because he was Tank.

“Well, what?”

“I need to find Angela.”

“Why you asking me?”

“You're the only one I can ask.”

“Well, you asked,” she said, tossing the ball over our heads and pushing the door closed.

Tank started wailing. I was about to smack him but the door slivered open again and she said, “Jesus Christ, what did I say? Did you want the ball?”

“I don't want any dumb ball, I want Angie,” wailed Tank.

Good work, Tank, I nearly said.

Carla kneeled down and hugged him. She nearly fell over, she was so wacked. Tank held on to her neck but I could tell he wasn't happy. Crafty little fucker.

“I'm so sorry, Tank,” said Carla. She was crying on his
shoulder. Her eye shadow was melting. Suddenly some other mood hit her and she sniffled and rubbed her eyes dry and straightened Tank's shirt and said, “Hey, cool shirt, Tank.”

“Will you tell us where she is?” said Tank.

Carla stood up. She looked at me and said, “If you fucking tell her I told you, man, I'll have you killed.”

Yeah, okay, right, I wanted to say. There was nothing sadder to me than a seventeen-year-old girl talking street tough with her worn-out bra strap exposed. But I swore to her I'd never tell, even though Angela would know as soon as I showed up who ratted her out.

“She's down at Bottomsail,” said Carla. “She's working at the Breezeby, waiting tables. At least she was last weekend. I went down there to see her. She lives with this guy named Termite. He's not a real big guy,” she said, and then she burst out laughing and Tank smiled at her and I grabbed Tank by the oversized work shirt and dragged him back to the truck. Inside I buckled him in and said, “Thanks, Tank.”

“For what?”

“For getting her to tell us.”

“She would of told you,” he said.

So sweetly trusting dumb. I thought, I can't leave him, but I also thought, Neither can I keep him.

Bottomsail Beach was only forty-five miles away, but I had not a clue how to get there. I'd never driven farther than Moody Loop. I'd never driven in town and I'd never driven after dark. Cars had their lights on and the night eyes of cats
blinked up from the ditches. I drove with my hands tight on the wheel to the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, where I parked behind the Dumpsters.

“What are we doing?” asked Tank. “I don't have to go.”

I reached past him, slapped open the glove compartment, fished out a worn map. Daddy loved a map. He would spread them out on his lap and read them like some men read the classifieds. This one had routes inked along the spindly roads of the coastal plain, which was filled with big blue ovals signaling lakes and wavy marks telling you where the swamps were. Because of all the water you had to go around your thumb to get to your ass down here, Daddy used to say. But it struck me, looking at the map, trying to find some backroads to Bottomsail which would not be crawling with cops and would not be hard to navigate in the blackness, that he was always going around his thumb to get to his ass because some voice in his head said turn left or right or turn around and go home or lie down in the hammock and sing “Superstition” by Little Stevie Wonder or whatever it was the voices told him to do.

I thought about asking Tank to help me navigate but when I looked at him he was sneaking his hands up and down the seat cushions in search of some stray Ruffles. He'd chugged his whole bottle of Coke. He'd be up all night, peeing. Which reminded me, he needed some underpants. It was too much. I made him a peanut butter sandwich by the streetlight, ripped off the crust like he liked. I rationed him a sip of my Coke for every fifty chews. Counting would keep him busy.
I could not have that boy chattering and filing his wild blue yonder supremely unanswerable questions when I was trying to negotiate the strange dark countryside.

On the road I started singing “Mr. Big Stuff.”

“Who do you think you are?” I sang to myself driving my daddy's truck down the nighttime streets.

“Daddy sings that song,” said Tank.

“I know. He taught me it.”

“Wonder what they're doing now.”

I started to make something up. It seemed like that was my job, to tell reassuring lies. But Tank was worth more than a Band-Aid lie. Plus he was too smart for it. He'd come right back at me if I was to put him off with a patch.

“I don't know,” I said.

“I bet Daddy made Carter sweep up all that hair.”

“I bet so.”

We were only five miles out of town. The shoulders of the road steamed. Tank's innocent blather cut through me like the headlights diced the swamp-foggy dusk. I could have turned back. I could have done the right thing, by law at least.

But I looked over and caught Tank sneaking sips of my Coke. The right thing by law of the truck was to belt his sneaky ass.

Tank sat there pouting after I popped him. He wouldn't talk. He wouldn't sing. I could have switched on the radio but I did not need the distraction. He slumped there chewing his peanut butter sandwich. Finally he fell asleep against the door. We passed through Chinquapin and Holly Springs
and crossed 17 and reached the big ribbed bridge over the sound. The tires of the truck sang loudly and the body shimmied and I held on terrified to the wheel. From the highest hump of the bridge I saw all the island lit up with night lights, the motels with their neon signs, the fishing piers strung out into the black old ocean, a Ferris wheel spinning. I slapped Tank on the shoulder. He made his whining don't-mess-with-me, I'm-asleep noise: unnh.

“Wake up and look at this Tank.”

He rocked up so violently I nearly lost my grip on the steering wheel.

“Dog,” he said. “Where we at?”

“Bottomsail Beach.”

“Mama's here?”

“No, buddy.”

“There's a roller coaster,” he said, stabbing his finger toward the Ferris wheel.

“That's a Ferris wheel.”

“Naw it ain't.”

“Okay, Tank.”

“Where's the ocean?”

“See those lights,” I said, pointing to the pier. “That's a fishing pier. It's built out over the water.”

“Can we go down on it?”

“Okay,” I said. I didn't know where the Breezeby was. I'd need some time to figure out what to say to her, what to say to Tank. I knew she wouldn't want to take him. I knew he wouldn't want to stay with her either.

The parking lot of the Jolly Roger Pier was filled with beat pickups just like my daddy's. Many of them sagged with crusty old campers. Between them in lawn chairs sat old fishwives wrapped in blankets. It was chilly in the ocean breeze. I grabbed Mario from Johnson Distributing for myself and Larry from Merita to wrap around Tank in case he got cold on the pier.

Out on the pier the wind whipped our too-big shirts into flappy capes. A storm had just passed and the pier fishermen had layered themselves puffy to guard against wind and bait slime. Though it was only eight or nine o'clock at night we stepped over snoring lumps in greasy sleeping bags. Tank stared openmouthed at a coveralled man hunched over the railing eating cereal out of the box.

“Can we sleep out here, Joel Junior?”

I was thinking how good it was to be out of that truck. We had been in that truck for what seemed like a holiday weekend. I got the boys' breakfast and then Daddy went off right soon after and we had stayed in that truck until late afternoon. I was thinking about Carter, was he hurt bad or lying on the floor with a Band-Aid on his ear listening to
Goat's Head Soup
with my daddy, singing the words to “Hide Your Love” which was my favorite song on there though my daddy liked the one called “Coming Down Again” and Carter and Tank were partial to Starfucker though they weren't allowed to sing the words.

“We'll see,” I said. I realized after these two words had come out of my mouth that I could learn how to be somebody's
daddy. Defer every question they ask and hope like hell they forget to reask. But this only applied to normal kids. It didn't work on never-forget-a-half-promise Tank.

The wide planks of the pier were slick from the storm, phosphorescent from fish gut. Kids about Carter's age got to do mean things to stingrays left lying out in midpier for kids to do mean things to. These tortures were slow and cruel and drew many expressionless fishermen who sipped from bagged tallboys and watched the dismemberment soberly, as if it had been drained of all meaning from repetition but was too significant to ignore.

At the end of the pier, where the crowd thinned, me and Tank stopped to watch this old man cast. He had the magic. His reel buzzed like a fluorescent light fixture gone wrong. His casts far exceeded the armchair flicks of others which dropped limp as dangled anchors and rose in a shameful seaweedy tangle. Me and Tank watched as the line shot toward the dark horizon. In my mind I tracked the silver hypotenuse down to where the slight hook pricked the green glass and disappeared beneath to do its sly seducing, an undercover cop posing prostitute. We watched for a half hour until the man pulled in something from far out in the dark green sea. Something big, silver, beautiful.

“A fish!” screamed Tank.

Everyone at that end of the pier laughed. I loved my little brother so much right then I scooped him up under pretense of letting him see better the big silver beautiful fish
but what it was, I wanted to hold him tight. Which I did until he went to squirming and saying, Put me down, put me down.

At which point I was ready to smack him again.

Just as quickly I'd want to hug him. It was just that way with Tank, or maybe that's how it was with me and most everybody. I wanted to leave them sometimes, just go off by myself and sit and listen to whatever it was in my head, mouth the words, hum the guitar solo, but I knew how awful I was at love, I knew I'd have to just suffer through the sticky parts rather than go off by myself. It was just that other people could turn so suddenly into something like that memory that needles you out of bed in the middle of the night—say you think you might of left the toaster oven on—even when you know you turned it off and unplugged it. They aggravate you for no good reason. Take Carter. He had this way of getting away with me with just a look or a not-look, just by drumming the table when me and Tank were watching
Soul Train
or lying to Tank about something I would have lied to him about myself. People just get to me. Because I guess I let them. I sometimes envied my daddy a little when he went off, because it seemed he was at the least safe, wasn't anyone going to bother him, he was off by himself someplace nobody else could get to. Then there was my mama; she didn't even have to be like my daddy to wall herself off from everyone. I wondered how did it happen, coming from the likes of them and turning out like I turned.

The magic caster took an interest in Tank. He was nice to me because I was with Tank which was often the case when I was with Tank.

“Who you boys out here with?” he said after we'd stood there an hour watching his magic.

“Nobuddy,” said Tank. He jerked his thumb at me. “Just him and me.”

I kneed him to get him to shut up, let me do the talking, but Tank did not listen to my knee.

“Where's y'alls mama and daddy at?”

“My mama's gone off we don't know where to and my daddy's—”

“We're down here staying with my older sister,” I said. “She works over at the Breezeby.”

I had worked over close enough to Tank to grab the excess of his wind-billowed work shirt and tighten and yank it to get him to look at me. I shushed him. Fortunately the magic caster had his eyes on his lines the whole time he was talking to us. Tank nodded as he liked anything conspiratorial, even when he didn't understand it. To him it was like hide-and-seek.

“She working right now?”

“She's with her boyfriend.”

“Told y'all take a walk?”

“It's not but one room,” I said.

“Y'all had anything to eat?”

“We're good,” I said.

“I'm not, I'm about starving,” said Tank. That was the thing about hide-and-seek, it never lasted very long.

“You know how to tell if a fish is biting?” the pier fisherman asked me.

“Yes, sir,” I lied.