If You Want Me to Stay (16 page)

I told Tank keep a lookout for Angie when she got off work and an hour later I heard him call out to her. It was cool inside my basement and Mavis and Pop had moved on to “Respect Yourself” and I was about around to where I could do so before Angie came flat-flooting it up the dock, no doubt thinking when she saw me stretched across the boards that
Tank had messed up big time. Maybe killed a man. A conclusion logical if shocking seeing as how she left him alone all day to play video games and allowed her no-count boyfriend to show him porno and I wouldn't be surprised if they did not get him high for their own entertainment.

She stopped dead when she saw it was me. I guess she recognized old sweat-stained Mario, my resilient shell.

“You better fucking wish you were dead,” she said.

I pulled myself up all slat-creased and sweaty and this is when she slapped, kicked, and in general reverted to that tomboy self used to beat hell out of all the boys she played H-O-R-S-E and Twenty-one with in the sandy, cone-strewn backyard courts off Moody Loop. I put my hands up to shield her blows and laughed like I always used to when she went physically off. I guess because it was funny to me. Tank wasn't laughing. It got away with him big-time. He wormed his way between us trying to break it up.

“Red-yellow-black, stay way back,” I said to him.

“What the fuck?” said Angie. She'd stopped swinging. I looked back at the plate-glass windows of the Breezeby to see the waitstaff, the cooks, the big-haired hostess, and a couple of patrons holding bottles of beer staring at the show.

“Don't tell me you've finally gone off too,” she said.

“He is not,” said Tank.

“If I were you I'd cool it,” I said, pointing to the audience.

“Excellent,” she said. “I'm sure they'll fire my ass now.”

“You don't want to stay here anyhow.”

“You don't get to tell me where to stay. Especially not now, Mr. I'm Just Going to Get Something out of the Truck.”

“He went to see Mama,” said Tank.

“He sure didn't stay long, did he?” said Angie.

I told Angie I needed to talk to her. Her sneer bled into a smirk.

“Didn't I tell you? What part of she don't want to have anything to do with us is confusing to you?”

“Who?” said Tank.

“Go play with your army men,” I told him.

“Who don't want to have anything to do with us?”

“Great,” I said to Angie. “See?”

“You'd rather lie to him, obviously. Tell him you'll be back in a minute, got to just get something out of the truck. Do you know he asked for you every ten minutes all fucking night long?”

I looked at Tank. He went back to his army men as if he was ashamed of calling out for me.

“I finally had to let him play video games,” said Angie, “just to get him to settle the hell down.”

I was so old. Now I'm a baby compared to that moment, out over the sound, in the boiling afternoon sun.

Tank was humming and moving about his army men in seconds. Angie lit a cigarette and said, “What?”

I started talking. Mavis was taking me by the hand. Wherever she was promising to take me it was a far better place than the no
d
Promise Land, where mamas denied their own
offspring to kindly must-have-some-Mexican-blood street-clothed cops.

I described the fire. “I asked him take me by there to see but he said it was nothing left,” I said. Burned to the ground. Just some charred bricks and ash.

Angie stood there staring. Her cigarette, stuck in her hand like a sixth finger, smoked like the ruins of my mama's cottage.

She never said a word about it. Just turned and walked back up the dock into the Breezeby. I watched through the plate glass. She went right up to the hostess who was still staring at us as if we were a movie playing on the windshield of the boiling truck and said something to her and the woman said something obviously smart-assed back which was a mistake because my sister pointed her cigarette at the hostess's face and then the hostess went off and my sister stood there smoking until the woman came back and handed her something in looked like an envelope and then my sister Angie walked out of the Breezeby past the retard candy and the free real estate magazines and blew out of the door and into the parking lot. Never once did she look back at us watching from the dock. This was the last time I ever laid eyes on my foul-mouthed sister.

T
HE NOISE OF HOME
crackled in my head like the static of an album where the needle catches in the last groove. The arm tries to lift itself off the album but when it sticks like that you have to put everything aside, nudge it slightly—not too hard or it will ruin the song—with your finger. You got to bygod act upon it.

Me and Tank, men of action, marching inland in the boiling sun, against the tide of pickups pulling boats, campers, vans with beach chairs, and coolers bungeed up on luggage racks. It must have been Friday, judging by the beach traffic. I'm no good at calendars. I only knew it was hot and I was tired and Tank was heavy as halfway across the drawbridge I had to piggyback him when he up and stopped walking. The sun boiling, beachgoers streaming by, Tank clutching his bag of army men. He'd got mad at me earlier for running Angie off which he said was my fault and then she beat it out of the parking lot into the sandy lot and over the protected no trespassing sand dunes without a look back or a last fuck y'all.

“I am going to beat your ass,” he said, after I got him to stop screaming her name.

“You and whose army?” I said.

What shut him up was he never heard the expression and had to right then and there have it explained to him. Obviously he'd not reached that point in his schooling where all you learn is
your mama
trash talk. My daddy was no good at math but the local schools did allow him to commit to memory twenty uninterrupted minutes of the infamous legend of Dolomite of which we could only hear three or four sanitized verses. He claimed black guys taught it to him during shop class when they were supposed to be building bleachers for the new stadium. The woman he married, may she rest in peace, maintained he made it up himself. For some reason she could not fathom such a story passed down orally over generations in parking lots and mechanic's bays and lunchrooms by kids who could scarcely read. Then again, aside from Aretha, she could take or leave music which we all know what that means.

“Me and this right here army,” said Tank after I explained the phrase, shaking his bag of green men.

Crossing the drawbridge, trying to drown out that stuck record static, I thought of learning Dolomite from my daddy next time he's All Clear and teaching it in turn to Tank. Then I made a list of all the other things I'd like to teach him in the short time we had left. I knew it would not be but days before they came and took Tank away if we showed up
home. I knew I had to go look for Carter though, now that Angie and the woman my daddy married were lost to us.

THINGS I NEED TO TEACH TANK
:

— Difference between Stax/Volt and Motown

— A little bit of Dolomite: the legend of

— Some manners?

— East north south west

— How to light the pilot on the furnace which it's always me lights it every fall

— Pee and brush your teeth at same time so you don't miss bus

— Beef stew recipe I got off the back of a can of tomato soup

— He knows it already but the coral snake rhyme

I thought of stories to tell Tank my daddy and some even my mother had told me, I thought of songs he needed to know, though he already knew more about music at his age than most people four times it. I wanted him to know that even though I would not actually physically right-beside-him be there always, I wasn't about to ever let him totally alone. I'd feel it if he was hungry or hurting, I'd know if he needed me, and wherever it was I happened to be I'd—no, I won't going to tell him this, I wasn't going to go promising something I could not deliver, I've always hated worse than her leaving the way my mama used to tuck us in nights with her big promises.

Al Green came on the waves, “Let's Stay Together.” I started singing it aloud, Tank bobbing heavy on my shoulders, thinking I'd teach Tank that you could be walking down a Bulkhead backstreet and get whisked into a store looks like auto parts on the outside and up in the dim windowless inside, heavenly voices sing sweetly of the light in this world. When you are in need, the lights in this world line up to dice through the darkness, illuminate your path: magic caster, kindly Mexican, church lady, Streetclothes, moneylending trucker, what links them? Just knowing a traveler's in need, Tank.

I said I was talking about forever.

“And ever,” said Tank.

“A pot of boiling grits!” I said as we came to the end of “Let's Stay Together.”

“In his dang lap, what I mean,” said Tank.

All our singers of songs suffered. You can hear the light in their voices, though, the sweetness of having survived. Nothing like song to breathe air into a puncture.

It wasn't so hard as I thought to get a ride with two because one was a pipsqueaky boy in camping britches swinging a bag of plastic army men. Sing your aria, Tank! Backed by a cast of thousands, yes sir, who cares if they're armed and green. A couple picked us up. We hummed up their Taurus and it shamed me to have to do so. So me and Tank told them a joke.

“Two peanuts were walking down the road,” I said.

“One was a salted,” Tank chimed in, perfectly timed, high-pitched, earnest.

“What do Eric Clapton and McDonald's …” he started after they laughed politely but I shushed him and kicked his knee. These old people didn't know no Eric Clapton. They were middle-aged country. Churchers, I'd say, out doing the Lord's work picking up two stray boys though they never in our face testified. I say bless them for stopping as many a God-fearing man and woman had switched lanes when they seen us obviously dirty and wild-haired boys standing on the shoulder just out of Bottomsail. Carter's hair was his favorite thing about himself. He told us many times. My sister Angie had turned beautiful but it was meanness which burned off her baby fat. The couple drove us all the way to Moody Loop. I called on Reverend Al Green for another lift up your hearts in song. Here is where things tend to jumble and collide. You will pardon me if it comes back to me aswirl. Al Green found Jesus after the pot of boiling grits. The girl who dropped them in his lap went in the other room and shot herself. I never told Tank this part of the story, just the pot-of-boiling-grits-in-the-lap part. She had a history of mental problems said my daddy with the straightest face. As if he was telling us she hailed from Terre Haute, Indiana. I did not tell Tank everything. For instance, what kind of sickness it was in my daddy's head and why our mother left us. For a minute we stood at the intersection of 692 and Moody Loop as if waiting for the school bus while I wondered whether to tell him about the house fire. Burned to the ground. Charred bricks and ash. He didn't need to be worrying about her coming back for him. It was the right thing to do. Angie knew.

“I'm hungry, can we go to Frosty's?”

“We're almost home,” I said.

“I want Frosty's.”

“We can't go to Frosty's.”

“How come?”

“He don't like us anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Just forget it Tank, okay?”

“But I want Frosty's.”

I was fixing to slap him. I called on the Reverend Al Green. He winged in sweetly, “Call Me” interrupting all the buzz in my head. I sang it loud I sang it proud. It gave me the courage to put one foot in front of the other. Tank followed me on down Moody Loop. I had no idea what we'd find. Carter's hair carpeting the porch boards, the lobe of his left ear lost among the curls he so treasured. Banana stems and peelings, the fluffing from the mattress, Daddy is snowing and so am I.

So too were the fields, white with cotton. What a beautiful day it was, the sky so crisp, the fields curved slightly, the way farmland looks in children's books. I'm so tired of being alone. Call me, come back home. Tank had this book I used to read to him in which you left the bustle of the city on one page and on the next traveled country mouse out to the boonies which were so clean and spacious, miles of fields gently rolling and curved neatly as tucked bedsheets into low stone walls and bordering brooks. Silos and bright red barns, green tractors, farmers dressed in overalls and flannel shirts.
Where were the lagoons of hog waste that gagged us when the wind blew? The ravines with all grades of shit dumped down them, from pickles to sectional sofas? Goitered old women cussing at chickens in grassless yards, trailers listing on cinder blocks which one day while we were at school blew into a thousand pieces, some parolee's batch of crystal gone wrong.

Oh what a glorious day. Dusty mutts bounded down the farmhouse lanes to herald our triumphant return. Red flags on mailboxes saluted us.

Oh Angie fuck you too, girl, I love you, you foul-mouthed bitch.

I breathed to four-barreled life a half-one-thing/half-the-other which hybrids, now that I was far enough away to think about it, made some serious sense, seeing as how it's never wholly car nor truck. I believed I almost had an answer to Tank's question had stumped me for all those years. It seemed like the answer was waiting in the woods just off Moody Loop.

On the dashboard of my daddy's truck: receipts, wobbly old water-stained cigarette, coffee stirrer from sucks-without-Eric-Clapton McDonald's, withdrew-against-doctor's-advice papers, prescriptions for pills he don't take because he says he ain't living his life that way, feeling like a big chunk of potato in a thickly whisked batch of potato onion soup.

“I'm hungry,” said Tank. I smiled at his timing, potato onion soup up in my head.