Wait Until Twilight (4 page)

“Do all black people live like that?” Yoshi asks me before getting out of the car.

“No,” I say. “Not all of them.”

“Yes, that makes sense. Bye.” On the way out I almost back into the brick-layered mailbox, which makes me nervous, like something bad’s going to happen. I figure the feeling will go away once I get home, but it doesn’t. And then I see it on the second shelf of my desk: the video camera and tapes stacked neatly on top of each other. I stick tape two into the video recorder and hook it up to the big television in the living room. I want to see it again. Maybe it’s just sick curiosity. Maybe it’s the thing that’s been bothering me. I don’t know. I press play and study the screen. The camera pans over the babies, then to the mother at the door, and then back to the babies. They’re squirming around, moving their little arms and legs about the best they can, reaching and grabbing at things. I can see now their bug eyes are not only different sizes but different colors: blue and gray, with hardly any white, as if it was just pupil and iris. It’s the same misshapen forms with the perfect mouths whispering. The video lasts only a minute or two before it stops and fades. It’s something I could never even imagine, like seeing a true-to-life ghost with my own eyes. It’s so creepy, yet I watch again and again before finally putting it back on the shelf. I sit there at the edge of my bed for a while. I got this cold feeling inside me. And the light in my room dims for a minute. I decide to take a nap, so I crawl under the covers for a while.

Dad doesn’t get off work from the family hardware store until late that day. He’s been running it since I can remember. I’ve spent plenty a weekend there goofing off and working the register. Since he’s coming home late it gives me time to make some beef and vegetable stew. Whoever comes home first makes dinner, and that’s usually me, unless we go out or get takeout. Mom was a hell of a better cook than me. That was a weird thing to adjust to when she died: not having someone who could cook. It was like, there’s no food and now what? Mom must have seen this dilemma coming because when
it came time for me to cook, I opened the coupon drawer, where she kept a list of recipes on a notepad, and it was all rewritten nicely in a brand-new notebook. Casseroles, stews, meat loaf, I had to learn all of it. I just followed the directions and it usually came out okay. Luckily, the stew comes out good today, and later on when Dad comes home he has two servings. I wait until he looks nice and relaxed before I tell him about skipping out on suspension. I make sure to include how Mrs. Smith was being a crow.

“She sounds pretty bad all right.” He chews on a dinner roll. “Next time just keep your mouth shut and do your time. Save yourself and me some trouble, okay?”

“Yes, sir,” I say.

“I want to see some A’s on that report card.”

“The only class there’s even a chance of me getting a B in is algebra, and I don’t think that’s likely.”

“Don’t get so cocky, son. It’ll bite you back in the end.” After dinner Dad watches television in the living room. I’m lying in bed in my boxer shorts with the phone to my ear talking to David when Dad comes into my room.

“Have you seen Trixi?” he asks me. Trixi’s a black-and-gray tabby cat we found when she was just a stray kitten meowing by the back door, hungry and dirty. At the time Dad wanted to take her to the animal shelter, but Mom wouldn’t let him do it. And we raised it ever since. At least my mom, Jim, and I did. Dad always hated that cat. Couldn’t stand the sight of it. He always wanted a dog. But ever since Mom died he acts like it’s his favorite thing in the world. He talks to it, follows it around, gives it tuna. You’d think it was his daughter or something.

“No,” I say.

“It’s been a couple of days. Something might have happened.”

“Cats do that all the time, Dad,” I say. “They disappear for a while then show up again.”

“I’m gonna go out and look for her. Do we have any chicken? She loves that chicken. Maybe I’ll go out and get some chicken.”

I hang up the phone and walk out into the kitchen, thinking that if Mom were here, she’d just say, “Leave it alone, George. Trixi will be okay.” And that would be that. My dad takes a couple of the change jars, one filled with pennies and the other filled with nickels, and pours them out onto a table. “Maybe I’ll get a live rooster and we can skin it,” he jokes before leaving for the store. He comes back fifteen minutes later with some sliced chicken sandwich meat. “Come on,” he says as he goes out the back door. I put on some flip-flops and follow him out back, still wearing only my boxers. He walks out to the woods behind our neighbor’s house. Mrs. Heard is an old lady who lives alone. Back in her part of the woods behind her yard is a little path that I used to play around years ago when I was little. Walking out there that evening, I’m surprised how far it stretches. It goes so far as to reach some more streets and houses on the other side of the woods. I follow my dad, who has gotten way ahead of me. It isn’t until I see a woman coming out of her house with the garbage that I seriously reconsider what I’m wearing.

She shakes her head and yells, “Ya should cover yourself up some before going out like that. Something bad might happen.” It almost sounds like a threat.

“Yeah, I know, that’s why I’m going home!” I yell back at her. I turn around and start jogging back, but I’m thinking to myself,
Lady, get a grip. I’m not naked or anything
. On my way back an old guy with a gray beard’s standing outside his fence smoking a pipe, and he nods to me as I jog by in my boxers. Dad comes home thirty minutes after me without the cat. I hope it comes back, because if something were to happen to that cat, I think it’d tear my dad up pretty bad.

A
ROUND THE TIME
T
RIXI SHOWS UP
at the back door the next morning, Principal Reeves has called and told Dad everything I’ve already told him. As punishment for my actions I’m to be suspended for the week at home. I get the worst of it because I’m the supposed “instigator.” My school assignments are to be picked up in the office early in the morning before classes start. “They’re hammer-ing down on you this time,” Dad says.

“That’s fine with me. I can finish a whole week’s worth of assignments in a few days and have the rest of the time off. I wish they’d suspend me forever.”

“That means you can help out at the store then?”

“Well…maybe one day.”

I drive over to the school’s main office after breakfast to pick up the assignments. Mrs. Janson, the secretary, is sitting behind her desk
along with a couple of senior girls who assist her, you know, the pretty kind who get away with murder.

“Mr. Reeves wants to have a word with you,” she tells me. I knock on his open door and peek into his office. Principal Reeves, who’s talking on the phone, gestures for me to come in. He’s a really big fat guy—I’m talking real unhealthy fat, with a big wart on his cheek and his thinning hair slicked to one side. He keeps saying, “We’ll do that. We’ll do that,” into the phone. After a few minutes he hangs up and gets to lecturing me.

“I know you’re a good student, Samuel. You’re a smart kid, I know that. All the teachers know that. We all like you. But you can’t talk back like that. Everything else you do we can live with…but not the talking back. That’s disrespecting a teacher. It doesn’t look good, you see?”

“Yes, sir.”

“No matter what, these teachers have to get respect from the students. Even Mrs. Smith. I know what she’s like but she’s still a teacher here at Central of Sugweepo.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Just let it go back to the way it was before. That’s all I’m saying. Back to the way it was before.”

“Yes, sir,” I say. “I think Yoshi and Cornelius are gonna need rides home. They both take the bus, but they don’t get out till four.”

“Who?”

“They were in lockdown with me.”

“I don’t want you seeing those boys for the rest of the week. At least not on school grounds. After a week you can take ’em wherever you want.”

“Yes, sir.”

I take my assignments and leave. By the time I get home I expect Dad to be gone already. But he’s still there standing in the driveway
talking to Mrs. Baker, who lives across the street. My mom and her were kind of friends. She’s a good-looking, middle-aged woman with brown curly hair who always wears low-neckline clothes that show off her cleavage and skirts that give a nice view of her legs. She’s kind of short like my mom was but has a nice figure, much better than David’s mom’s. I have to confess, I’ve imagined having sex with her a whole bunch of times. Naturally, there’re plenty of girls at school I’ve imagined having sex with, teachers even, but when a nice-looking woman lives right across the street from you, a neighbor, it’s hard to beat that. Sometimes I found her kind of annoying, the way she asked Mom to lunch or movies even when Mom was sick and tired. Mom said she was kind of needy that way.

“So here’s the troublemaker,” she says when I get out of my Ford Tempo. She looks me up and down. “Your father tells me you got in some trouble at school.”

“I was provoked.”

“I’ll be sure not to provoke you.”

“Mrs. Baker, I’m sure Samuel will help you as much as he can. I’ve got to go open up the store.” Dad takes off, leaving me with Mrs. Baker, who just stands there for a while. “Your dad tells me you’ve got a computer and printer you make use of,” she says.

“Yeah, sometimes.”

“I got one, too, but the printer is in repair. I need about ten pages printed and was wondering if you could do it for me.”

“Sure, just e-mail it to me,” I say.

“I got the disk at my house. I’ll just give it to you.”

“It’d be easier if you just e-mailed it and I’ll bring over the papers.”

“It won’t take a second.”

I walk across the street over to her house and meet her partner, this brunette woman who’s attractive but not as attractive as Mrs.
Baker. They have a small, makeshift office in the house. She hands me a mini Zip disk.

“There’s a file called Test_1.”

“One copy?” I ask.

“Yes, and if you could check the grammar and spelling, that would be great.”

“It’ll be a lot faster if you use grammar and spell check. I can print it out for you though,” I say flatly. I can tell they’re annoyed at my answer, but Mrs. Baker puts on a happy face. I don’t mind because I’m annoyed at them for asking me to do their work for them.

“Okay, just print it then. How about I buy you lunch for this?”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to. After you bring the papers we can go.”

“I don’t know if I can make it today,” I say. “I’ve got a busy schedule.”

“Give us your number, then. I’ll call you and we can set something up later.” On their wall is a little white board with some markers in the tray. I take a marker and write down my number on the board. Then I go straight home and print up their document. As soon as it’s printed I place it along with the Zip disk in a manila envelope and put it on their front doorstep. I crawl back into bed.

T
HE RINGING OF MY CELL
phone wakes me up. It’s Mrs. Baker wanting to take me out for lunch. She seems hell-bent on taking me, so I tell her fine, let’s do it today so as to get it out of the way. Since I’m awake I get up and study some algebra, which isn’t that bad. Once the formulas and techniques get memorized, it’s just a matter of plugging in the numbers without screwing up, which is the hard part. But history and biology, it’s just memorizing tons of facts. I just have to dig in.

Mrs. Baker picks me up around noon and drives toward town. “I hardly ever see you these days,” she says. “Not since your mom…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so casual.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m fine with it.”

“That’s good. Just like your mom. Sensible. You know you look an awful lot like her. I don’t mean you look like a girl or anything.”

“I know what you mean.”

“She was a good friend to me.”

“I thought we were getting lunch,” I say as she pulls into the parking lot of the bowling alley.

“You’ve never eaten here?”

“It’s a bowling alley.”

“I know, but the food’s good, too. Me and your mother ate lunch here sometimes.”

At the entrance Mrs. Baker hands the cashier at the counter a card with a bar code on it. The cashier scans the card, and there’s a buzzing sound. We walk through some turnstiles and get a seat at a table at the front next to some large windows. Behind the registers and down the way I can see the actual bowling alley through the corridor. I can hear balls rolling down alleys and pins getting hit with a loud
crack
!

I order a turkey club sandwich, and Mrs. Baker a salad. She lays her red handbag in the middle of the table after taking something out of it. “I gotta go to the restroom. Could you watch this for me?” Then she walks off.

I sit there looking out the window, getting hungrier and hungrier. The boredom of sitting there makes it worse. In the meantime her purse has tipped over to where I can see inside of it. With my finger I lift the top edge of the opening and have a look around. I can see at the very bottom some wrappers and a bunch of little chocolate candies in there. There’s no way she’ll know if I take one. I put my hand in and bring out a candy. My mom sometimes would give me candies
just like it. She must have been getting them from Mrs. Baker. I put it back in the bag. Mrs. Baker comes back and sits down. “How old are you, Samuel?”

“Sixteen.”

“Wow, you must be having some fun.”

“No, ma’am.”

“You don’t have to ‘ma’am’ me. I’m your neighbor. My name is Betty.”

“Betty Baker?” I said with a smile, then realized how that sounded.

“It’s okay. Yes, Betty Baker, but Betty to my friends.”

“All right…Betty.”

“Thanks for the copy. We had a deadline, and the printer died last night. We’re still a small operation, so we did fine with one printer, but we’re going to get another so this doesn’t happen.”

“What do you guys do?”

“We’re a small Christian publishing company.”

Oh no, not a Jesus freak.
As I’m thinking, this thin, stubbly-faced man wearing a tight black T-shirt sitting at a table behind Betty waves at me. I look at him and follow his line of sight to the large plate-glass window to the outside, where there’s an even thinner well-dressed black man looking in. He’s got a flattop that stands about an inch above his head. He waves back to the stubbly-faced white guy and goes to the front entrance, where he’s stopped by the cashier at the counter. The white stubbly-faced man yells to the cashier, “He’s with me!” There’s a loud buzz, and the black man goes through the turnstile and over to the white guy. Within minutes they begin arguing loudly about the black man being late all the time and the white man being sick of it. The black man then says, “Is this about getting revenge?”

And then the white man says, “No, it’s about you being a bitch and not giving a shit about anyone else!”

“Who’re you calling a bitch?” Their argument escalates to where they’re bumping chests and pointing fingers in each other’s faces. It’s just two guys fronting each other, but still, I can’t help thinking one of them might take out a knife or start choking the other. I don’t know why I’m thinking that, but I do. I get a cold, nervous feeling like when I was at Mrs. Greenan’s house. The light even seems to turn down, the same way it does when clouds cover the sun. And then a weird thought pops in my head:
Those babies of hers are better off dead.
In a place where there’s no pain, no worry, no loss. That’s it right there. You don’t lose anything, not even your mom because you never had one in the first place. Better yet, not even born.
What’s the point of coming into the world like that?

It’s like in the back of my mind this is what I really thought from the first moment I saw them, but I didn’t want to think it. And I hate the way it makes me feel. Like there’s something not right with me thinking that. It’s just not something normal people think, people at school, my friends, family…it just doesn’t fit.

Mrs. Baker looks back to me and smiles. She’s been turned around and watching the spectacle along with everyone else. They seem to find it amusing. I guess it is, come to think of it. They’re both skinny little guys, dressed well, not too threatening at all, really. A server gets in between them, and the two settle down easily. After a minute the room lightens back up, and everything is regular. Our food comes, and I eat slowly and methodically, taking big bites out of the sandwich and stuffing my mouth full of fries. Mrs. Baker nibbles on her salad.

“You were hungry!” she says. I nod my head. “Do you have a girlfriend?” she asks me, but I’m watching the other table. The black guy has walked off and come back with a flower. The white guy looks around and grabs it and throws it down. They look around and shake hands.

“I don’t have one,” I say with a mouthful of food.

“Why not?”

I shrug my shoulders and just keep eating, but I can feel my face redden, and the more I try to make it stop the hotter it gets.

“Where’s your partner?” I ask.

“Kathy had a previous appointment. Do you think she’s pretty?”

“No…I mean, I didn’t think about it. She’s gotta eat lunch, too, right?”

“I think she’s very pretty,” says Mrs. Baker.

I continue eating with my eyes lowered until I’m finished. “Thanks for lunch…Betty,” I say.

“My pleasure. Next time maybe I’ll make something for you.” We walk out into the parking lot, and the sun is really shining down hard. But it isn’t super hot like it will get soon when summer comes around. I get in her big red SUV and put on my seat belt. It feels good to be full.

“Whaddya thinkin’ about?” she asks.

“Nothin’,” I say.

She drives me home and parks in the driveway. “Aren’t you going to invite me in for a cup of coffee?” she asks me. It’s the same kind of stuff she would ask my mom, getting her to do things she really didn’t want to do. My mom was a lot more patient than me, though.

“Mrs. Baker. Don’t talk to me like I’m my mom. I’m not my mom.”

“I didn’t mean it that way…”

“You didn’t mean it that way, but that’s the way it is, isn’t it?” I say. “Try laying off a little.” I go inside the house and wait for her to back out and go back to her place. I’m sure I hurt her feelings, and I don’t like it. But I knew I had to nip her attempts at replacing my mom with me in the bud right there. I get in the Tempo and head on out. I take the back roads, just wanting to kill some time, breathe in the country
air. I think about those chocolates, and I get this sick feeling as I go out over the bridge past the swamp, and after a couple of turns I find myself back in Underwood. I’m an idiot for coming back, but I can’t help myself. It’s this sick curiosity in my guts that brings me back here. That’s the only way I can explain it to myself—sick curiosity. I park along the street in front of Mrs. Greenan’s house. Looking at that gray house, I can’t help but wonder what the hell it’s like to live in there. I get out, walk up the way, and knock on the screen door, but no one’s there. I peek through the windows, one of which is now all duct-taped up, but the drapes are closed. If they’d just repaint and take better care of the place, maybe it wouldn’t look so damn sinister. At least the weather is fine. I don’t feel like going back home just yet, so I take out my American history textbook from my car and sit on her front porch steps, where the rotted gray wood shows through all the white peeling paint. I’m on the chapter about slavery and the impact it had on the Civil War. It’s hard to imagine there was a time like that in America. A car comes on by, but it’s not Mrs. Greenan. A couple more cars pass while I’m reading. One of them, a white Dodge Charger with blue stripes along the side, slows down, so I get up, thinking it’s going to stop. There’s some bearded man behind the wheel looking at me through the window. I can’t get a good look at his face, but before he speeds past I can see he’s wearing a greasy-looking blue baseball cap. Standing there on her porch steps, I wonder for a moment if I’m doing something suspicious or even illegal, but I can’t think of anything, so I sit back down. It’s back to my studies.