Mississippi Sissy (7 page)

“Don't say ‘titty,' ” I'd tell her.

“Titty titty titty,” she'd tease me and defiantly puff out her titless chest as she pushed her hair behind those ears of hers, which she once let me clean with a Q-Tip she pulled from one of her cuffs. We were playing in my bedroom as our mothers sunned themselves in the warm May light out back on a quilt my grandmother had made long ago. We lay on our stomachs atop my bed in the same position our mothers had taken in the yard. We gazed upon them through my bedroom window as they pushed each other's bathing suit down on their shoulders so their tans would look more even when they wore their new strapless sundresses. We silently watched them while they carefully rubbed Coppertone suntan lotion on their smooth and lovely backs, their jutting shoulder blades like the nubs of de-winged angels grubbing around down here on earth. My mother's adored transistor
radio, nestled on the quilt next to my father's equally adored little black Chihuahua, Coco, was switched from the country-and-western station my father preferred to one that had been playing the latest hits from the Shirelles and Chubby Checker and Little Eva. Coco seemed to be dancing to the music and this struck my neighbor and me as extremely funny. We stifled our giggles and slid onto the floor. We hid ourselves beneath the window sill.

“Clean my ears for me,” she commanded when we had calmed down and she extracted that Q-Tip from her cuff, first wetting the swab with a hacked-up gob of her spit. Wax caked the bit of cotton as I inserted it over and over into her ears, careful not to hurt her. “Now whisper something to me,” she said in a voice that hinted there was evil in this world. I froze and watched her masterfully work that snaggle-toothed gap in her grin with her mean little tongue. She cupped a filthy fingernailed hand around an ear still damp inside with her own spittle. “Whisper to me your worstest secret,” she said, as if she already knew what my father and I had been up to only a few days before.

I leaned into her. She smelled of Johnson's baby shampoo and the peanut butter sandwiches my mother had made to keep us quiet. Should I tell her what had happened between my father and me even though I had promised him not ever to tell anybody? She was, after all, my best friend. Should I not share with her this first and gravest secret of my life, the one that would be the basis for all the other secrets to follow? I concluded, however, that breaking a promise, especially to my father, was much worse than lying. I decided therefore to do just that: lie through my still intact baby teeth. Don't get me wrong. I had lied many times before. Lies flow as innocently and naturally from a child as flatulence and snot and unchecked laughter. But there comes a time when a child first makes a
decision
to lie and life is forever altered. “I ain't got no secret,” I whispered.

She quickly dropped her hand and, snarling with disappointment,
pushed at my shoulders the way I had seen my mother dismissively push back her plate of uneaten food when she and my father fought over something at the dinner table. The girl pushed me a second time even harder and I fell on the floor. She then straddled me and held my hands behind my head. “What kind of boy are you? You ain't got no secret? You that much a goodie-goodie?” she asked. A long string of spit—a ritual of ours—oozed past the gap in her teeth but she sucked it up before it could hit me in the face. “We gotta make a real boy outta you,” she said. “Come on. I'll give you a secret. I'll give you a good'un,” she growled, eyeing me with both contempt and curiosity. She drilled herself into my crotch where she sat on top of me. Another string of spit yo-yoed my way. My own saliva thickened—for the very first time—with something other than thirst.

Releasing me from her grip, she peeked out the window. I peeked next. Our mothers—like my baby brother and sister on the other bed in the room—had, napping now, fallen silent. Even Coco had tired of her little jig and dozed too in the afternoon sun. The transistor radio had seemed to put the whole tired world, except for the two of us, into a perfect trance. “Follow me,” the girl said.

“What should I do with this Q-Tip?” I asked, still firmly holding the tiny instrument in my grip.

“Hide it,” she instructed.

“Where?” I asked.

“Beds are always the best for hiding stuff,” she informed me and, grabbing the Q-Tip from me, hid it beneath my mattress. “Now, come on,” she said and led me out the back door toward another neighbor's overgrown hedge.

Behind us, as we sneaked away, the sound of the radio began to fade, the Four Seasons nasally insisting that big girls don't cry. We crawled through the neighboring flower bed that snaked with snap-dragons and daffodils and rose bushes along the Simpsons' ersatz log cabin that sat next-door to my little green shingled house. No matter
how many times Frankie Valli sang, faintly now, that big girls didn't cry, I sure wanted to, because the sudden stabbing memory of the secret I shared with my father filled my eyes to the brimming. I bit my lip, however, and staunched the flow as I crawled on, following behind my neighbor's butt, which burst forth with one of her patented farts right in my face: a trumpet blast of gaseous bliss. I held my breath—my eyes brimmed even more from the odor—as she almost choked on her own swallowed chortle. “Shhh-shhh,” she instructed us both. “The Simpson Lady might be watching As
the World Turns,”
she said, using the name we had come up with for Mrs. Simpson, who was so much more dignified than all the other women on our street, her manner more highfalutin, her clothes always just a little too nice. “Don't want to scare her. My mama says the Simpson Lady is more nervouser than usual since all them policemen was here last week.” We stood and, bushing ourselves off, scurrried to the hedge where she quickly pushed me face-first into the branches. “Put your hands over your eyes. Don't look,” she said, her voice taking on the bossy cadence she used so often when we were alone together. I, as always, obeyed and felt the sudden whoosh of her pulling down my shorts around my ankles. She leaned in and clamped her hands over mine. “Now pull your panties down yourself,” she whispered as I slipped my hands from beneath hers and pushed my underwear down to where my shorts waited. “Don't look back,” she said as I felt her kneeling now behind me. Her hands, like my mother's on the biscuit dough as I watched her on Sunday mornings, readying it to be rolled out and cut in circles for the baking sheet, kneaded my exposed butt before her fingers separated my cheeks to take a look at where I puckered. “Shoot. It looks just like mine,” she said, her voice oddly disappointed. “I seen it, my butt hole, in my mama's hand mirror when I held it down yonder ‘tween my legs and peeked at myself.” She gave me a sniff. “Hmmm . . .” she said, considering the smell. “Figure that—you don't really stank. You sure you a boy?” she asked, giggling,
then pulled me down on my knees and took my face-first place in the hedge. She pushed down the latest pair of jeans grown too small for one of her older brothers. She pushed down her panties. “Your turn,” she said. “Go on. Look at my butt hole.” I could not move. “Scaredy cat. Here,” she said. She spread her cheeks with her own hands and pushed herself toward my face. My nose brushed against her and I got my first whiff of the sickening sweet stench of someone else's ass. “See? I stank worse'n you,” she bragged. “I'm more a boy'n you are.”

“Who's out there?” came the Simpson Lady's frightened voice from within the house. “Anybody out there? I'll call the police again! I swear to God I will. Who's there?”

The girl and I hurriedly pulled up our pants and rushed across the street before we could be found out. We ran up a hill in the back of her house toward a weedy field where there was an old deserted baseball diamond on which the Baptists had once played softball. I was mortified by our adventure so far, but my friend was holding her sides, she was laughing so hard. She led me into one of the field's creaky old dugouts and collapsed in a convulsive heap on the dirt floor next to a pile of IMPEACH EARL WARREN yard signs. I sat down beside her and silently waited for her laughter to subside.

________________

The last time I had been in a baseball dugout was a couple of weeks earlier, at Battlefield Park out toward Jackson between the GE plant and an ice cream parlor where I ordered only vanilla cones no matter how much my father tempted me with other flavors. He was on a summer baseball team (he had played for a short time in a semipro league over in Louisiana when he first returned from New York after his tryout for the Knicks) and enjoyed being once more on the field of play instead of having to sit on the sidelines, where he rather frustratingly now found himself working as a high school coach. He let
me sit in the dugout with his team that night. It was from that vantage point I had seen him, showboating as usual, slide head-first into second base and knock himself out—injuring his neck and suffering a concussion—for not only had he collided with the second baseman, but he had also been hit in the head by the ball thrown from behind home plate by the catcher trying to make the inning's final out.

My mother screamed and ran from the stands, pushing past the umpire and the catcher whose face was now showing real concern, exposed as it was by the discarded mask that lay on the red clay dirt at his spiked feet. There was complete silence in the crowd except for my mother's voice. “Howard!” she screamed. “Howard! Is he all right? Howard!”

One of her flip-flops flew from her feet as she ran toward second base. I picked it up as I followed after her. “Daddy!” I too screamed. “Daddy!”

My mother pushed away the second baseman, who was kneeling over my father's body. She turned my father over. “Don't move him,” the second baseman told her.

“Is he paralyzed? Is he dead?” she asked. I stood beside her holding her flip-flop and shaded my eyes with it in the glare of the infield lights that ringed the bases atop their creosote poles, gnats and moths and their wattage-hungry brethren throbbing in successive swarms at each globed flood lamp that, if I listened closely enough when I was bored by the game, seemed to buzz right back at them. “Somebody go call an ambulance,” my mother said through her tears. “Why won't he move? Why won't he open his eyes?”

The umpire lumbered up and took her back to the dugout so she could calm herself. “Let the boy stay by his daddy till the ambulance comes,” he had ruled before grabbing the flip-flop from me so he could kneel before her back at the dugout and slip it on her foot, her red toenails caked even redder with the infield's clay. I sat down
at my father's side. I stared at his handsome face and the black streaks of pine tar he had let me finger there for the first game of the double-header, two bold streaks, one beneath each eye, the same war paint major-leaguers used to cut down on the sun's annoyance, he explained to me, so he, like they, could field the ball better.

The second baseman placed his gloved hand on my head and let it linger, the smell of the well-oiled leather enveloping me in the sticky night air, a first hint that another Mississippi summer was not waiting for spring to step aside. “He's gonna be okay, kid,” the second baseman kept saying.

“Kevinator?” my father groaned, instantly groggy, when he began to gain consciousness and saw me staring at him. That look of perplexed fear he always had when looking my way was even more pronounced as he tried to decipher what had just happened and how his sissy son had become part of the game he was playing.

“He ain't dead!” I shouted back at my mother in the dugout. “Daddy ain't dead!” I called, my voice sounding as oddly disappointed as my tomboy neighbor's had sounded when she had discovered our butt holes bore such similarities.

________________

“What you thinkin' ‘bout?” she asked me now as she sat up, pulled a half-smoked cigarette from her cuff, and fired it up with a purloined kitchen match. Smoke filled the old dugout.

“My daddy,” I said.

“He still wearing that neck thing?” she asked, mentioning the thick plastic cumbersome white brace he was having to wear until his neck felt better from the baseball collision.

“Yeah. He don't like it, neither,” I told her. “Says he wished he'd a
just a'gone ahead and broke his neck if he was gonna have to wear that thing. Makes him mad all the time.”

The girl eyed me with a bemusement too advanced for her years. “Take your clothes off,” she finally said.

I shook my head no.

“Go on. Do like I say,” she said. I continued to hesitate but she moved in closer. “Do it,” she demanded. I reluctantly obeyed and lay down naked before her in the coolness of the dugout's dirt floor. Slats of light billowed over me from between the weathered shreds of wood on the walls. She took the cigarette butt from her mouth and flicked it away before reaching down and flicking my penis with the same bit of haughty disdain. “That thing grow any bigger?” she asked, narrowing her already narrow eyes. “Make it grow bigger,” she said.

“How?” I asked.

“Think of something you like. That's supposed to work,” she suggested.

“Captain Kangaroo?”

“Mr. Greenjeans. Tom Terrific. I don't give a shit,” she said, loving to shock me with her easy use of scatology. She continued to flick my penis, each flick taking on the rhythmic jingle of Captain Kangeroo's big set of keys that accompanied his program's theme song, which she was now singing with a one-word gusto: “Jing-jing-jing-jing. Jing-jing-jing-jing. Jinga-jing. Jinga-jing. Jing-jing-jing.”

I sat up and crawled over into a corner of the dugout. “Stop it,” I told her. “Stop it.” I balled my knees up toward my chest and held them there.

“Don't be a baby,” she said with the troubling, grown-up flair she could employ when the situation called for it. “You really are a weirdo. Go outside for minute,” she told me. “I gotta pee.”