If You Want Me to Stay (7 page)

“Watch my poles while I run inside then.”

Thankfully nothing bit until magic caster returned with bags of chips, sausage biscuits, and corn dogs. For dessert he had bought orange pushups which by the time we got to them dripped all over Larry from Merita and Mario from Johnson Distributing. He said he was going to stay out there all night long and when I said my sister told us not to come home he asked us to watch the poles again and went to his truck and got us some sleeping bags. I was a little worried Tank would roll off into the ocean—I'd spent many a night with him in our bed at home when he got scared and came and climbed in with me and I knew what a roller he was—but the magic caster must have sensed my worry as he said he'd be right there with us, if he had to go to the bathroom he'd hang it off the side. We bedded down on the hard smelly slats and listened to the ocean waving and sucking itself back in. Wood creaked as the pier swayed. Tank slept like the baby he was. I went in and out of it but I would not have slept anywhere in the world that night as tired and worried as I was.

In the morning the magic caster bought us juice and some donuts. He let Tank drink some of his coffee which Tank pronounced sweet as pie. Tank had to go to the bathroom
so I took him down under the pier where we both peed against the pilings and then Tank took off running wild down the beach, laughing, and I loved him again and took off after him, yelling, “Hey now, hold up, Mr. Big Stuff, just who do you think you are?”

W
AITING FOR MY SISTER
to show up at the Breezeby, we sang some Otis. My daddy sometimes when he was between off and on used to talk to us from that in-between zone. I wanted to believe the things he told us and I almost could because his eyes had not yet turned into plate-glass windows you see yourself in walking down the sidewalk. Once my daddy told us that he happened to be in Madison, Wisconsin, the day that Otis Redding's plane crashed in a nearby lake and soon as word reached him he hopped in his truck and drove out there and hired some old boy fishing in a fourteen-foot Ouachita with a twenty-horse Evinrude to motor him out to where the plane disappeared beneath the icy water. He didn't even bother putting on any frogman suit because, he said, time was of the essence. He's the one dove down and pulled Otis from the wreckage of wrong plane, wrong time. The other passengers, still belted in the seats, swayed in the murky water like they were grooving to a slow jam on the radio. The plane had lost part of its engine but
the cabin was intact except some loose sheet music bobbing about like fish. My daddy grabbed a page and studied the notes. Surely it was a new song Otis was working on. He hadn't written it down though, it was in his head and such sudden death unleashed it on paper, ticking off the unsaid and unfinished thoughts before they were lost to the world forever. It's not the things you say that make you brilliant, it's the things you think that you can't say, my daddy told us. They say a man only uses a fraction of his brain, well, surely he only uses a few words. That's why I like music, it taps right into things you feel in your veins but can't just up and outright say.

“Where they at now?” Carter had asked him.

My daddy had stared at Carter like he was speaking Spanish.

“Them pages of Otis's?”

But my daddy had gone too far off to answer.

Oh but he loved some Otis. There wasn't all that many songs to learn given Otis's cut-short career and my daddy knew them all. The ones he loved best had something-another to do with a heart: “Pain in My Heart,”

“This Heart of Mine.” Also the ones featuring the word
love:
“That's How Strong My Love Is,” and “I've Been Loving You Too Long (to Stop Now)”

Tank was wanting to sing “(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay.” I guess because we were sitting on a dock behind the Breezeby restaurant, out over the sound. I was feeling okay despite my patchy night of pier sleep and did not want to
come to the chorus which no matter how okay I felt, starting in on that chorus made me feel low. In the chorus Otis basically claims nothing's going to change, everything's going to stay just like it is. The entire start-to-finish song is down-on-the-ground low but because of all that whistling people who don't know no better than to listen to the words (and Tank and them who just sing them without really
thinking
them) mistake it for a happy song. Though with songs like “Dock,” it makes some sense not to listen to every word. Just let the notes fall all over you like sweet rain. Drink it down like you do a glass of water in a shadowy afternoon kitchen on a boiling day.

Tank was already to the whistling. He could not whistle worth a spit. His bad whistling was way better than Otis saying he had nothing to live for. Sometimes at home when we'd play
The Very Best of Otis Redding
and this song would come on with its water rustling in the opening notes I would let myself fall right down into it. I wanted to feel its sadness washing over me. But right then, waiting for my sister to show up at the Breezeby, I did not want any part of that need-to-feel-bad-to-feel-good low-downness.

My daddy used to say that when Otis brung in that song to record his people looked at him like he was gone off. They were looking hits, said my daddy, they were wanting another “I've Been Loving You Too Long” or “Try a Little Tenderness.” What other song do you know with any whistling in it but the old theme from Andy of Mayberry? But Otis kept after them, said my daddy, and after he died it became his
signature hit. My daddy knew everything there was to know about Otis Redding. He knew the name of the street he was born on in Macon, Georgia. He claimed to have once laid eyes on Otis's widow in a club in Alpharetta, Georgia. He knew who was twiddling the knobs on those Stax/Volt classics, what session men played on what single. Otis wrote “Dock” in a houseboat in Sausalito, California, he told us one time.

You want to
whistle?
I imagine Otis's producers said to him when he brung in “Dock of the Bay.” I listened to Tank's off-key, barely recognizable-as-Otis warbling and imagined myself as Otis, holding on to what felt right, winning over the world in the end.

We were sitting on the dock when I saw my sister Angela picking her way barefoot through a sandy back lot filled with sandspurs and oyster shells. She was smoking with her head down, carrying her shoes in one hand. A very strange thing had happened since I'd seen her last: she'd turned beautiful. She looked like my mama but younger and thinner. She was wearing a white waitress uniform with pockets in front of her skirt for ticket books. Both pockets bulged with boxes of cigarettes. She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. I'd never seen her hair any way other than stringy in her face. Because my sister has always known how to get what she wants out of boys she stayed tomboyish for as long as she could. At the last possible second—about the time the pack of boys who followed her through the woods to forts made out of fallen pines and stolen sheet metal started to like girls in general,
girly ones in particular—she switched over, started hanging around with slutty Carla, squeezed herself into too-tight hip-huggers and halters. She has always had excellent timing, my sister.

I did not want Tank to see her because I wanted to surprise her. I knew if she saw us outside her job she'd just open her foul mouth and let fly the filth. So I pointed to the end of the dock.

“Looks like a shark out there in the sound,” I said.

I kept him distracted for a good hour. It got on toward lunch. At least she'd have to feed us.

“Come on,” I said, tugging him away from the water, into the Breezeby.

“Why do they call it a sound?” said Tank.

“Because it doesn't make one.”

“Why don't they call it what it is instead of what it ain't?”

“We call you Tank and you're not one.”

This stumped him at least enough to come along with me.

I stopped him in the foyer by the gumball machines and the newspaper racks. He stared at the retard candy. My sister used to tell him when he began to beg and whine for quarters that contrary to popular belief the money did not go to retards but in fact the candy would turn whoever bought it into a retard. Not that this stopped him from begging for a quarter every time we passed a machine.

“Look, Tank,” I said, “Angie's in there …”

“Where?” he said, pushing his face against the plate glass.

I grabbed him by his floppy work shirt which came to his
knees and was filthy. Mine was dirty too. Also too big. We were what my always putting up some pickles grandmother used to call a blessed sight.

“Hey, listen,” I said. “I'm not through with that sentence. Angie's in there and I know you haven't seen her in a while and all but I don't want you screaming out her name when you see her like you did that fish on the pier last night.”

“I didn't know any fish's name.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No I don't.”

I decided to switch to threats. They worked better than reasoning.

“Are you hungry?”

“Yes.”

“If you want to eat, don't say nothing until I tell you to.”

I asked the hostess if we could sit in Angela's section. She was an older, teased-haired, sun-basted local, tough as a live oak. I saw something in her eyes, a hazard flashing at the mention of my sister's name. Angie was in trouble. This neither surprised nor bothered me. She was the one couldn't take it so she up and left.

We sat in a booth overlooking the sound. Tank could barely contain himself. He slid maniacally back and forth along the Naugahyde seat, playing with a stack of sugar packages.

She made us wait. This made me smile, but it made me mad too.

Then she was standing above us with her pad. “Have y'all decided?”

I saw it coming, Tank bursting into his biggest tears.

“Oh God, Tank,” she said, her mouth tightening, throwing her words like a ventriloquist. It was the softest I'd ever heard her talk. “Just hold on, baby,” she said. “Soon's I get off work we can talk all you want. Stop crying, okay?”

I thought I saw her eyes grow wet, but maybe it was just the sun hovering over the water, reflected in her glassy eyes.

She said to me, under her breath, “They're watching me today. I'm about to get my ass fired. This is all I need. You got any money?”

“Well, no,” I said, smiling.

She fake-waitress smiled back. “You slimy fucker,” she said. “What's up with those shirts y'all got on?”

“Joel Junior stold them from a rack while I made a lady take me to the bathroom,” said Tank.

“Attaboy,” she said to me. “Where's Carter?”

Tank looked at me before he spoke. He remembered. Attaboy. Angie looked from Tank to me and repeated her question.

“He's with your father.”

“He's yours too,” said Tank.

She was staring at me, trying to see in the expression I wasn't about to give her just how bad it had gotten. I must have given her something. She wrote on her pad and disappeared, returned with a basket of toast, glasses of juice, then soon after platters of pancakes with sides of bacon and small bowls of applesauce and grits.

We ate and ate. She brought the bill, reached into her
smock pocket, and pulled a twenty from behind the ticket book.

“Go get him a T-shirt, for God's sake. There's a dollar store up the block. I'll meet you out back on the dock there at five o'clock. Bring me back my change.”

The Dollar Store, like all Dollar Stores, had sticky floors, flickering fluorescent lighting, disastrously disorganized shelves, a confusing floor plan, clerks who seemed to receive for a day's work no more than the namesake buck and were not happy about it, merchandise worth at most three-quarters of a dollar, piped in Carpenters' hits syrupy with strings, a vague smell of plastic and, near the break room, of chili dogs. We could have been anywhere; the only evidence that we were not an hour or two inland was a lone aisle overstocked with beach towels, umbrellas, lawn chairs, and sand toys. This aisle was clogged with children trying out the sand toys and their parents who ignored them while they tried to decide which sort of chaise lounge to waste their money on. Tank proceeded to stand at the head of the aisle and stare at the playing children with a kind of intense vacancy.

I dragged Tank to the kids clothes' aisle. He chose a purple T-shirt bearing the green gruesome likeness of an animated action figure. Since our daddy had golf-clubbed the TV we'd been out of the loop, yet Tank, I suspected, pretended familiarity with all the current shows favored among the K through 3 set just to fit in.

“Can I wear it to school?” he said before I'd even paid for it. It made me sad, his saying this. I did not want Tank to be
like the rest of the world. I bought him a three-pack of Fruit of the Looms and for myself I purchased a single pair of boxers, being too old for tighty whiteys. To kill time we went next door to the surf shop and ran our hands over the smooth, curved boards. Tank was much engaged even though he likely had never seen anyone surf. The shop was staffed by surly boys in their late teens who seemed put upon, it being nice enough outside for them to paddle about on their boards despite the fact that the ocean was glass. They would alternately ignore us to talk their surfer talk (“Dude, you would not fucking believe” was how I swear three-quarters of their sentences began) or try to harass us out of there (Y'all still just looking?) Finally, more prideful than intimidated, I spent the last of my sister's money on the cheapest thing in the store, a three-pack of temporary tattoos for $3.49. Tank chose the Chinese lettering over other designs. On the back the script was translated. Tank wanted Peace and Tranquility. I wanted Strength and Good Judgment, though I would settle for the former, since I had sat too long in that truck in the boiling sun and had given up my little brother and could not therefore anymore claim to be even tolerable at the game of love. I guessed it was too late. But I wanted to believe it wasn't.