Sweet Dream Baby (19 page)

Five minutes later, the door opens, and my Aunt Delia comes out smiling. My Grandma Hollister doesn't come out. My Aunt Delia and me play for a while longer, then she stretches and yawns and says, “I'm tired, Travis. I think I'll go up and take a snooze, okay?”

I say, “Okay,” and she leaves. I wait a while, then go up, too.

When I come in, she's sitting on her bed with her knees up under her chin. She tightens her jaw, tilts her head to the side, and says, “You're a good guy, Killer. You saved our butts.” We're like two soldiers after a battle.

“Did you get it?” I ask her.

“I got it,” she says.

“The Dairy Queen?”

“The Dairy Queen. We had french fries and Cokes and listened to the radio.”

She holds out her hand to me, and I take it. We shake, and I know it's a bargain. We lie together from now on.

• • •

My Aunt Delia and Caroline and Beulah make up on the phone. My Aunt Delia apologizes and says it was just the heat and the boredom and the long summer. They come over, and we sit up in my Aunt Delia's room listening to the radio. I see how glad they are to be here, and I know they need my Aunt Delia more than she needs them. I know they're not real without her, just like I'm not now. So much of what I know and what I am now is because of her.

We listen to the radio, and they talk about who's cool and who's not, and what Elvis is doing in the Army, and finally the talk runs down, and Caroline says, “Let's go to Tolbert's and see who's there.”

I know my Aunt Delia doesn't want to go, but she can't let them know.

Three cars are parked at the curb in front of Tolbert's—Bick's red Oldsmobile, Ronny's white Ford pickup, and Griner's midnight-blue street rod. We pull up behind the rod, and Caroline shapes her bangs with her fingers, and Beulah picks some lipstick from the corner of her mouth with her little fingernail. They both look at the cool green windows trying to see who's inside. I look over at my Aunt Delia. Her face is as pale as it was in the moonlight the night we went up to Widow Rock and I chunked Bick with a rock. Her hand shakes when she takes the key from the ignition and shoves it in her jeans.

The jukebox is playing inside. It's the Everly Brothers, “Walk right back to me this minute. Bring your love to me, don't send it. I'm so lonesome every day.” Mr. Tolbert's at the cash register selling a can of Prince Albert to a farmer in a khaki shirt and green galluses. Ronny and Bick sit in a booth. Griner's in another as far from them as he can get. He's got a cup of coffee in front of him and his face in a paperback book. Bick and Ronny are halfway through two large Cokes. Two women I recognize from church sit in a booth closer to Bick and Ronny than to Griner. They lean across the table, talking over two lemonades. We all walk through the cold, peppermint-tasting air to the fountain and take stools and dangle our feet into the room.

Everybody says, “Hey,” except Griner, but we don't sound the same. We sound like we're all suddenly strangers. Bick doesn't look at my Aunt Delia. He just stares at his Coke like he's never seen one before. The jukebox stops playing, and Ronny says, “I been feeding that thing for an hour. Somebody cough up a quarter.” He's smiling, but it's his mean smile. Beulah and Caroline look at each other and raise their chins a little higher. Beulah always says girls don't put money in the jukebox when there are boys around.

Ronny says, “Hey, Kenny, whyn't you shuck a quarter out of those greasy Levi's.”

Griner doesn't look up. He just keeps reading, but his jaw grinds, and the muscle jumps. Ronny says to all of us, “Ole Kenny'll listen all day, but he won't pay. I guess he figures he's entitled.”

One of the grown ladies looks over and says, “You can leave it quiet in here, and we won't mind.”

The other one nods like she does in church when the preacher says something particularly scriptural. They lean together and go back to talking.

Mr. Tolbert calls from the front. “I'll be with ya'll in a minute.”

My Aunt Delia gets up and goes over to the jukebox. She stands there sorting change in her hand and pretending to read the numbers and letters. It's all wrong. The stiff way she moves, the way she holds her head down between her shoulders, the way she studies what we all memorized a long time ago. She feeds the slot and punches in three songs.

The bell at the front rings as the farmer leaves. Mr. Tolbert walks over and takes our orders. I get a shake and Beulah, Caroline, and my Aunt Delia get Cokes. We turn back around and dangle our legs. The jukebox plays Pat Boone: “My lonely heart aches with every wave that breaks over love letters in the sand.”

Ronny looks over at us and says, “Ole Travis and his harem. Hey, Travis Buddy, you mind if I dance with one of your girlfriends?”

I don't know what to say. I can feel the red start in my cheeks. Ronny gets up and holds out his hand to Beulah, and she slides off the stool, and they start slow-dancing in the small space between the counter and the booths. The two women watch Beulah and Ronny pressing close together, Beulah's hips slipping from side to side and Ronny's butt muscular in his tight jeans. They finish their lemonades and leave, whispering.

Ronny lifts his chin from the top of Beulah's head where he's left a dent in her hair spray and says, “Hey, Delia, dance with Bick. He's too shy to ask you.”

Bick lifts his Coke and taps it twice on the table. He doesn't look at my Aunt Delia. She closes her eyes, then she slides off her stool and goes over to him and holds out her hand. Griner lowers the book to watch them. He looks like a man who hasn't eaten for a week standing outside the window of a restaurant in the rain. Bick looks up at my Aunt Delia, and I can't tell what's in his eyes. It's nothing I've seen there before. He takes her hand before he stands up, and she leans back and pulls him out of the booth, and they dance the rest of Pat Boone.

The next song's a slow one, too, and that's strange. My Aunt Delia usually mixes in the jumpy ones. It's “The Sea of Love.” Bick holds her, but not too close, and they move around in lazy circles, sometimes bumping into Ronny and Beulah, sometimes just standing in one place and swaying from side to side. I look at Griner and catch him peeking over his book at them dancing. I think he might do something. He might do it right now. I remember the laugh from the riverbank.

My Aunt Delia still isn't moving right. She dances like the floor's shifting under her. I remember her swimming, turning and curling in the water like she lived there. Like a water animal. When I think of the river, my throat gets thick, and my mouth gets dry, and I turn to the counter and take a sip of my shake. When I turn back, the song's over. Bick sits down, facing us now and looking straight at my Aunt Delia. I still can't tell what's in his eyes. It's not the same old sorry I saw coming from the back of the room at the Baptist Youth Group. He's past sorry now and into something else, and it makes me want to leave. It makes the hair come up on the back of my neck.

The next song is Buddy Holly, “True Love Ways.” It's slow, too, and Ronny dances it with Caroline. When they finish, he goes over to the booth, picks up his Coke, and finishes it. He says, “Come on, Bick, let's go.”

Beulah says, “Hey, you guys, stay a while.”

Caroline says, “Yeah, where you goin', anyway?”

Bick stands up and looks at my Aunt Delia. She doesn't want to look back, but she has to. Their eyes are like a match and dry grass. Then Bick and Ronny walk out.

Griner lowers the book to watch them leave. He looks at my Aunt Delia. She looks at him like she's been waiting for this, like it's the thing she had to do since we heard that laughter come from the riverbank and Griner's engine winding down. She swallows and says, “Kenny, would you like to dance with me? I'll put another quarter in.”

Griner looks at her for a long time. His face is pale, and I think of him in the shadows of the grease rack and working the graveyard shift out at the box factory and working on engines in the old barn behind that falling-down house in the country. He seems like something from the night, the shade, not the sun. He says, “Delia, you know I don't dance.”

She pushes off from the stool and goes over to him in that stiff, strange way. Caroline and Beulah put their Cokes down. Beulah puts her hand over her mouth. Mr. Tolbert stops washing glasses to watch. My Aunt Delia stands in front of Griner and holds out her hand. She says, “Come on, Kenny, dance with me. It's time you learned. I'll teach you.”

Griner looks at her, then down at his book, then back up. Her hand hangs in the air between them, and I hope I'm the only one who sees it trembling. My Aunt Delia says, “I'll teach you, Kenny.”

Griner looks at the green windows. Ronny's truck and Bick's red Oldsmobile are gone from the curb now. He looks back at my Aunt Delia. “You already had your dance for the day. You don't need one with me.” He looks back down at the book. He pretends he's reading, but his eyes aren't taking the print.

Mr. Tolbert says, “Kenny, be a gentleman and dance like she asked you.”

Griner doesn't say anything.

My Aunt Delia lets her hand drop. She walks straight to the front door, and we all get up and follow her. Behind us, Mr. Tolbert mutters, “Man didn't turn a lady down like that, not in my day.”

My Aunt Delia hits the door with the heel of her hand, and the bell rings.

Outside in the sudden heat, she stops and looks over at Griner's street rod. I see her chin go up and her legs stiffen, then she walks to the rod and bends down into it.

Caroline and Beulah come out behind me, and Beulah says, “Delia, what are you doing
now
?”

Caroline laughs her mean laugh. “Take his keys, Delia. If he won't dance, let him walk.”

My Aunt Delia walks back to her side of the white Chevy. I get in the back like always, and Beulah and Caroline stuff themselves into the front with my Aunt Delia. We pull away from the curb, and my Aunt Delia throws her right arm over the back of the seat, steering with her left. Her hand is a white fist in front of me. The fist opens, and the gold cross falls out of it into my lap.

“It was hanging from his rearview mirror,” my Aunt Delia says.

We're sitting on her bed up under the slope of the roof. She's got her legs crossed and I have too, and we've got the window open between us. Below in the backyard, the grapes in the arbor are black ripe, and the birds are at them. Marvadell comes out the back door with a broom. “Shoo, shoo, you scounrel thieves!”

The blue jays and sparrows scatter away, but they'll come back. They always do. The black cat that ate the baby birds my first morning here sits in the tall grass over by the privy. He switches his tail and watches the birds. There's a cool breeze high in the oaks, and sometimes my Aunt Delia leans toward the window screen as we talk, and she lifts her hair away from her neck to let the air at it.

She says, “Did he put it there so I'd see it and take it, or was he just going to keep it and ride around town letting everybody see?” She puts her hand to the gold cross at her neck. She's wearing it again. She asked me if she should, and I said yes. Anything else would look funny.

I say, “It could be either one.”

Her eyes watch me for answers because I'm a boy, and she thinks I know how boys think, but I'm thinking about Griner. What he's like, what he's really like. Back home in Omaha, when we saw guys like Griner in leather jackets and ducktail haircuts, my dad told me they were hoods and greasers and drugstore cowboys. He said they were punks, and they acted tough but they were no match for a Marine hand to hand. He said the country was going to hell, and it was going there on the back of a Harley Davidson driven by some punk who thought he was James Dean. But I don't think Griner's like that. At least I didn't until he spied on us at the river and stole my Aunt Delia's necklace.

I liked the way he showed me things under the grease rack. How the pump fills the tank with air to lift the rack. How to take out the old oil and put the filter on. Maybe I'll work on cars someday. I like the way Griner reads books in front of people and doesn't care what they think about it. The doctor's wife gives my Aunt Delia books, and she hides them in the top of her closet in a hat box with her picture albums because Grandma Hollister would be scandalized if she saw them. I think they must be books about men and women. I think my Aunt Delia and Griner are more alike than her and Bick, even though Griner's poor, and Bick's rich and his family name is written with ours on the pedestal of the Confederate monument down at the park.

“Which one, Travis?”

My Aunt Delia shows me impatient eyes. She wants me to tell her what a boy would do. A boy like Griner.

I say, “I don't know. I wish he put it there for you to take.”

My Aunt Delia's mouth twists like she just bit into a sour apple. She says, “Wish in one hand and poop in the other and see which piles up faster.”

It's funny, and any other time I'd laugh.

She says, “Do you think anybody saw me take it?”

I say, “Naw.” I'm pretty sure, too. Nobody passed by on the street. The two ladies who left Tolbert's turned the other way. Beulah and Caroline were behind me coming out the door. Neither of them has the self-control to see something and not talk about it.

I say, “What are you gonna do now?”

She says, “I'm not gonna do anything, Killer. I'm gonna wait and see what he does.”

I say, “Griner doesn't talk to anybody you know.” But I'm hoping again, and her hard eyes say she knows it.

She shakes her head. “Word gets around. Somebody talks to somebody, and he talks to somebody else. Pretty soon the highest is hearing from the lowest through the people in the middle. It happens by little steps.”

“What does he
want
?” I ask.

We look at each other, and I wish I hadn't said it. We both know what he wants. He wants my Aunt Delia. I remember Griner spying over the book in his hands, watching her dance with Bick. I remember the eyes of a hungry man standing in the rain. It didn't look like a mean hunger, but what do I know about that? I'm not a man yet, and I've only been hungry for a little while.

And I wish I hadn't asked the question. I look at my Aunt Delia, and she leans to the cool air coming through the window screen, and she lifts the black hair from her long white neck. Her hand trembles, and I know we're scared but we're not gonna show it. It's like we've been told we're sick. We have to live with this and it's gonna take a long time to get well.

• • •

Lightning strikes close, and I wake up. I'm sweating, even in the cool wind that blows in with the rain. When my head clears of dreams of home, I know there's a storm. It's another black howler boiling up out of the Gulf of Mexico sixty miles south. Marvadell told me they'll come all summer, but some summers are worse. She said, “The Lord be punishing his servant's iniquity. He be sendin' the high wind and the hard water and fire from the sky to knock down the bad man's house. The house built on the soft sand.”

I asked her if she meant our house. Grandpa Hollister's house. She just looked at me and smiled and started singing one of her over Jordan songs, “Deep River.”

I get up and close the windows so the rain won't come in and then lie down again in the still, close air. I could go to my Aunt Delia's room. She might be crying. I know she might need me, but I'm scared. I'm not scared of the storm. I'm scared of what we might do now. I'm scared, but I want to know what the next thing is, the next thing we might do. It's that way with knowing. You can't stop once you start, and I guess you start the second your eyes open in your mom's arms in a hospital bed. Maybe you start before that, lying under her heart in the cradle of her bone, in the warm bath of her blood. The preachers don't say it, and no book I've read yet tells me, but I know curiosity is heaven and hell.

I lie in the dark with the storm blowing and shoving the trees around outside, and I can't decide. I can't make myself get up and go. Then I hear a soft sound, and I turn and see the white shape of my Aunt Delia's nightgown at my bedroom door. She stops there and watches my bed. I could pretend I'm asleep, but I don't. I move over to the window. I throw back the covers for her. She crosses to me, moving the still air and bringing me the smell of her hair and her skin. She lies down beside me with her back to the door, and I turn to the window, and she pulls me to her chest. She reaches around me and puts her hand on my arm. We lie that way for a while, and then I reach back and feel the tears on her cheeks.

She kisses my fingers and moves her face down to my ear, and I turn my head to her mouth. She whispers, “Listen, and I'll tell the rest of it.”

Her voice is breaking a little, and I can tell she's pulling the words up from a long way deep, from the deepest secret place. I press my ear against her mouth. I whisper, “Okay.”

She whispers, “Because I have to tell somebody, and it has to be somebody I trust, somebody who knows me, and now you're the only one.” She stops, and her breathing goes quick and ragged, and she whispers, “But you don't have to, Killer. You don't have to listen. I'll go if you want me to.”

I move my ear against her mouth. I whisper, “I want to.”

So we lie that way, our heads together, her mouth to my ear, and she tells me.

“Remember what Quig Knowles said about me and Morgan Conway?”

I nod. Her whisper makes the hair behind my ear buzz, and the gold cross around her neck pricks me. When I nod, she squeezes my arm with her hand.

She says, “And I told you Susannah Cohen helped me?”

I nod. The storm outside is rising. The lightning is coming closer. When it hits earth, the sudden light shows me the window and the trees lashing and heaving.

My Aunt Delia says, “And I told you something happened, and I couldn't ever write or talk to Morgan again?”

I nod.

She says, “Remember what we said about secrets?”

I remember.
When you tell someone a secret, you earn a promise from them. Secrets are worth something.
I nod again. I don't want to talk. I just want to lie here and listen in the warm of her body with this window between us and the storm.

She says, “I never felt anything like it before, Killer. I've read about drug addicts and how they crave the drug or they'll die. That's the way I felt about Morgan, and that's the way he said he felt about me. We met one night when a bunch of us girls snuck out, and some boys did, too. They were all senate pages. One of the boys had some whiskey, and we passed it around, and I ended up in the corner of a cloak room with Morgan. It was dark, and there was a lot of whispering and giggling, and then it got quiet, and we knew what the people around us were doing, and then he kissed me. From the first taste of his mouth, I knew I had to have him. I had to have him always.”

She pulls her mouth back from my ear and buries her face in the back of my neck, and the gold cross sticks me hard. Lightning touches earth somewhere out on the edge of town near the river, and across the street a limb breaks and I hear it fall with a crack and a thump. Rain runs hard in the gutters along the roof like the blood of this old house, pumping hard as it fights the storm.

My Aunt Delia trembles and puts her mouth back to my ear and says, “After that, we snuck out alone, just the two of us. We had to find places, and it wasn't easy. We spent a night in a trailer full of old newspapers that had been collected for a paper mill. We spent a night in a senator's office after Morgan crawled in through the transom and unlocked the door for me. And we didn't just kiss, Killer. We did the things men and women do, and finally, we did what I showed you in the river.”

I nod. I think of my Aunt Delia and me in the river. What she showed me and how it felt, and how it feels now to know. I can't help hating that she learned it first with him. I want to turn and say I hate it, but I know I can't. It happened before she knew me. I'd erase him from her mind if I could, but you can't do that. Part of knowing is knowing that, and it's part of hell, not heaven.

She says, “We were only together two weeks, but it was our story, and it had to have the right ending, and we both knew it, and the ending came one night in the senator's office when we did what I showed you in the river. We made love, and it was my first time and his, too, and I loved him more than anything in the world that night, and the next day we had to say good-bye.

“We'd planned to meet, but at the last minute Morgan learned his parents were in town. It was a surprise for him. They'd come to take him home with them on the train. He couldn't get a message to me about leaving early, so I went to the place where we'd agreed to meet and say good-bye, and I waited, and he didn't come. At the last minute, he'd left a note for me with another boy. The note said he'd write, and it gave his address.

“I came home to Widow Rock, and we wrote to each other for a while. We wrote promises and told secrets, and planned to meet again, and then the thing happened.” My Aunt Delia squeezes my arm tight and digs her nails into me so hard I think I'll bleed. She presses her mouth hard to my ear and says, “I learned I had a baby inside me. Morgan and me had made a baby.

“I wrote to him and told him. I asked him to tell me what to do. I don't know what I wanted, but I wanted him to do something. More than anything, I wanted him to say he loved me. I kept writing, but I never heard from him again. I didn't know what to do then, and that's when Susannah helped me.

“I don't know why we talked the first time. I didn't really know her. We'd passed on the street and said hey and talked about how hot it was and when fall would finally come. But one day I was in Tolbert's, and she was, too, and we both had books with us. I was reading something dumb by Frances Keyes, and she saw it and came over to my booth and sat down, and we talked about reading for a while, and then she got this really impatient look on her face and said, ‘Delia, by all accounts you're an intelligent girl. Why don't you read something a little more serious?' And she showed me her book. It was a novel by Edna Ferber. I took it from her and read a few lines, just wherever the book fell open. And I could see it was different from anything I'd read before. And then I looked up at her, and I just started crying. I didn't know why. I still don't know exactly why. I must have seen something in her eyes. Maybe I saw that she wasn't from here. That she just wasn't from Widow Rock, and she'd understand I was a stranger, too.

“When she saw me crying, she got this very severe look on her face and stood up. I thought she was angry with me. I thought she was about to leave. But she said, ‘Come on, Delia. Take a walk with me. We have to talk.'

“I told her everything, Killer. All about Morgan and the baby and when I finished, the first thing she said to me was, ‘Well, you've got to stop writing him. That's the first thing you've got to do. It's clear he doesn't care, and the more you write, the more you put yourself in his hands.'

“I didn't know what she meant. I still wasn't sure until Quig Knowles came to town. Even after Morgan cut himself off from me, I didn't believe he'd talk about me.

“Susannah told me there were just two things I could do, and that she could help me with only one of them. The first was tell my parents and let them do with me and the baby what they wanted to do. The other was go with her to a friend in Jacksonville. She said this friend could take care of me.

“I didn't think about it very much then. I was so confused. I agreed to go with her. One Saturday afternoon, I told Mama and Daddy I was going to Panama City, and I drove out of town and met Susannah, and we hid my car and drove to Jacksonville in hers. All the way we talked about books and reading, and she told me about a woman named Margaret Sanger who was a pioneer in women's rights. She said Margaret Sanger was a saint to modern women. I listened, but I don't know how much I heard. It was more important to me then that I was with Susannah and that she liked me and believed I could do what I wanted, not what my parents wanted me to do.