News of the Spirit (25 page)

Johnny and Paula were free spirits, as their mother often said, refusing games and play programs, happiest in their own big backyard outside of town. Happiest in their own world. Here they played Roger and Darling to their hearts’ content for years. Roger had many amazing powers, such as the ability to see into anyone’s mind. He could also see through clothes. He could see through anything. When Roger and Darling sneaked out at night and walked down the road, Roger would tell her everything that was happening inside every house they passed, everyone’s secret thoughts and deepest desires.

When Mrs. Sissy Boone was sent to the hospital for stabbing Mr. Boone in the shoulder with a long-handled fork, Roger and Darling were not surprised. Roger had seen a black cloud full of wasps around her head, he had seen blood seeping out from under her fingernails as she stood on her front porch one day just saying hello.

When young Mrs. Johnson’s baby wouldn’t grow and
had to go live in a home, Roger and Darling were not surprised then, either. Roger had seen its bones glowing through its little baby dress when Mrs. Johnson had it out on a blanket in her yard, under a shade tree.

They knew when the big hand closed up on their granddaddy’s heart; they were almost bored by the time the phone rang and their white-faced mother came in the kitchen, where they were making peanut butter crackers, to tell them the news.

To this day, Paula has never told anybody these things, but they are all true. She remembers them in detail, as she remembers the religion of Oran, and Ungar the Magnificent and his dog Army and his Queen Orinda of New York City, and how as Ungar and Orinda she and Johnny wore towels as capes, safety-pinned to their backs, and jumped off the shed and out of trees and finally off the Boones’ garage, again and again, and were not hurt. Paula can remember even now the rush of air under her legs, how it was to fly. They were magic then. She can still feel Johnny’s soft breath in her ear when he whispers to her in their own language as they sit on the porch step, knees touching, through all the twilights of their childhood, and watch the lightning bugs come up from the grass and listen to the peepers.

How did it happen, when did it happen, when did it all go wrong? There came a time when Johnny wouldn’t stop playing games, when he wouldn’t come in for supper. By then Daddy had retired from the National Guard and put
in his first barbecue restaurant, so he was often away at mealtime. When he did come home for dinner, it was a command performance. In Paula’s memory, Johnny is always late, their father is always yelling, their mother is always on the bright verge of tears.

“Can’t you control these children?” Daddy would say in his thunderous, commanding-the-troops voice. “I swear, Corinne, I work all day and I feel like I’ve got the right to come home to a decent dinner, am I right?” Daddy was a workaholic, though nobody knew that word then.

“Sure, honey.” Mama would seem to quiver all over, under her heavy pancake makeup, her winged brows and aqua eyeliner. She was the prettiest mom in the neighborhood.

But the truth was that she did not control them at all, especially not in the summer, when she sat on the porch with her best friend Louise and drank sweet wine in the late afternoons and sewed from Simplicity patterns or looked at magazines and gave Paula and Johnny a dollar apiece to get dinner at the Quickie Mart. Paula’s favorite supper was a Dr Pepper and a Baby Ruth, while Johnny favored 7-Up and Cheetos and Red Hots.

In the early days of Daddy’s barbecue business, when he was perfecting his recipes, he often brought their dinner home with him. “Whaddaya think, kids? It’s got some extra vinegar and a little more sugar this time. Whaddaya think? Corinne? Too much sugar?”

After months of barbecue, Paula found it hard to tell the
difference, but she always made a polite comment. Johnny did not. Johnny became a vegetarian at age eleven, which was the worst thing he could possibly do to his father.

On one especially awful night, Johnny came in late, humming loudly.

“Johnny,” Mama said.
“Johnny!”

Johnny took his seat and put his napkin in his lap and stared straight ahead, and wouldn’t stop. “Hmmmm,” he went. He didn’t look at anybody.

Daddy put a helping of potato salad on Johnny’s plate. “
Son
,” he said in that voice.

Mama was giving Daddy looks across the table, looks that begged him to ignore it, which is how Mama handled everything about Johnny. Daddy put baked beans, Jell-O salad, and barbecue on Johnny’s plate. Daddy always tried to do what Mama wanted, at least at first. This time it seemed to work. Johnny quit humming and started to eat the Jell-O salad. Elise excused herself and left the table. Mama and Daddy relaxed and began talking about whether or not Daddy should expand his business by buying the little place now available out on the highway (he did), and whether or not they should have those very expensive braces put on Elise’s teeth (they did). Johnny didn’t say a word. He ate everything on his plate except the barbecue. “Hmmmm,” he went.

Daddy stopped talking and stared at him. Daddy looked tired, circles under his black eyes, gray hair peppering his crew cut. “Son, eat your barbecue,” Daddy said.

“Now, Luther,” Mama said. “Plenty of people in the world are vegetarians. It’s a whole religion in India.”

“This isn’t India,” Daddy said, tight-lipped. “This is the U.S. of A.”

Johnny was humming.

Daddy looked at him.
“Right now,”
he said.

“Oh Luther,” Mama said. Her hand fluttered up to her face.

“Hmmmmm,” Johnny went.

Daddy stood up. “Son,” he said in a reasonable voice, “let’s not have any more of this nonsense. This barbecue is what bought the clothes on your back, it’s what paid for that new bike out there in the driveway. Now finish your supper.”

Paula held her breath.

Johnny took a big bite of barbecue.

“That’s better,” Daddy said.

Johnny spit it out all over his plate, all over the table.

Daddy lunged at him across the table, but he was too late, Johnny was already gone, his chair overturned. His high-pitched laughter echoed back at them as he ran out the front door.

“Goddamnit to hell!” Daddy fell forward heavily onto the table, his head hitting the hanging light fixture, his elbow in the potato salad.

“Oh Luther, oh honey,” Mama said, pulling him back. She was crying.

“I’ll show that little—” Daddy started, but Mama began to cry in earnest, big shuddering boo-hoos that required Daddy’s attention.

“I don’t know why you’re so hard on him,” Mama was sobbing.

“Aw, honey, he’s spoiled,” Daddy said. “You have to keep a boy like that on a shorter rein. He needs to know his limits. When he gets back here tonight, I’ll straighten him out.”

This made Mama cry harder than ever. “But Luther, remember what that teacher said? Mrs. Logan? What if there’s something really wrong—” Then Mama looked up and noticed Paula, who sat petrified in her place at the table, her napkin in her lap. Little black rivers of mascara ran down both of Mama’s cheeks. “Well,
go on
!” she snapped at Paula. “Go on, what are you looking at?” As if Johnny were somehow
her
fault, Paula’s fault, and so without a word Paula got up and ran out the front door after Johnny, but Johnny was long gone by then and Paula was left by herself in the summer dark, as she has been ever since. She sat on the porch steps for a long time. When she finally went back in the house, there was no sign of Mama or Daddy either one, though they had left everything exactly as it was—all the lights on, the kitchen a mess.

Now, this is Paula’s deepest image of her family: the abandoned dinette table with the hanging globe light over it swinging slightly, just quivering; two of the red vinyl chairs overturned, food uneaten. Mama and Daddy were upstairs
in their bedroom with the door closed. Oh, there was no question that they adored each other in those days, Mama and Daddy. Big and rough as he was, Daddy worshipped the ground Mama walked on. He watched her in a certain way whenever she came into a room.

Paula knew that he loved them all, but sometimes this was hard to remember. Daddy had trouble expressing himself; he had trouble in particular having a son who did not fit his treasured idea of
son
. Mama explained to them that Daddy felt so strongly about this because his own dad had died when he was three, so he had missed out on all the dad stuff himself. Once Paula heard Mama say to him, “Honest to God, Luther, sometimes I think you just married me so you could get a son!”

Daddy was forever buying presents for the girls, and saying, “Nothing but the best for my ladies!” He would not allow them to work at the barbecue restaurants, though they begged to—first Elise, then Paula when she was old enough. His girls were too good to work at barbecue restaurants. He
wanted
Johnny to work there, on the other hand. He had visions of Johnny going into the business with him: “Luther’s Famous Barbecue—A Family Restaurant,” the second generation.

Johnny had his own agenda, and after he kicked her out of his club, Paula was not a part of it, either. The original club included Johnny, Paula, Lewis Straus, and Jakey Ramey, who lived down the road. Lewis Straus was a fat boy with hooded eyes who had always made Paula uncomfortable.
One day when she was late for a meeting in the Rameys’ garage, she found Lewis whispering intently to Johnny. “No,” Johnny was saying, shaking his shaggy blond head. “No way.” They all stared at Paula, who sat down cross-legged facing them.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Johnny said. Then he convened the club, but Lewis and Jakey continued to stare at her until she felt funny and sat in a different way.

After that, the club was not the same. The games got to be scary games, bad games, especially when Ken became a member. Nobody except Johnny could really see Ken—at least Paula couldn’t see him—but he told them all what to do, and Lewis and Jakey went along with it. Paula did, too, until the day when Ken told her to run home and never come back, and she obeyed. She bought some paper dolls and started playing with Ruthie Jackson instead. Later, after the club got in so much trouble, all the other neighborhood children were told to steer clear of Johnny, and Paula got him back, temporarily; but Johnny seemed preoccupied, even bored. He was always riding off someplace on his bike. School came as a relief for Paula, ordering her days, bringing her friends of her own.

But school was hard for Johnny, though he was “brilliant,” according to the guidance counselor, who made him take so many tests. He was constantly in trouble—trouble for talking, trouble for not sitting still, trouble for lying.
Trouble for not turning in his assignments, trouble for talking back. Johnny loved to draw and was said to be talented in art, but he never would draw what the teacher said. He wouldn’t follow the assignment.

Since he was two years ahead of Paula, she didn’t see him much. Her heart would race whenever she did—from a distance, on the playing field, running faster than anybody else; or across the parking lot at junior high, in the middle of a gang of the roughest boys. His friends in junior high were the worst boys in school, and it seemed he was always out with them, never home. Daddy didn’t know this, since he was at the restaurants so much, and it was okay with Mama. It was a lot easier than having Johnny at home.

It was okay with Paula, too. School went well for her. She had three best friends and made junior high cheerleader. Mama sewed all their cheerleader skirts. Paula took band and learned to play the flute.

By the time Johnny was in high school, Paula knew that he was doing a lot of drugs. Later, she could not figure out how she knew this. She never saw him doing any drugs, not even smoking marijuana. By this time Johnny and some other boys had a rock band, the Mystic Cowboys. Johnny played bass. After he flunked junior year, Daddy grounded him for two months. Paula remembers very well those two months, which Johnny, oddly acquiescent, spent lying on his back on the waterbed in his room, listening to music and watching the sun shine blue and red and orange on his walls
like a kaleidoscope through the crystal he’d hung in his window. He refused to work at the restaurants. He wouldn’t do anything at all. Several times, Paula went to his room because she thought she heard voices, but there was never anybody else there. Nobody but Johnny. At the end of the two months, Daddy kicked him out of the house and Mama started having migraine headaches and bursting into tears at the slightest provocation. Then she got a job at Nails ’N Notions in the mall, and seemed better.

While Paula was in high school, Johnny’s band became locally famous. “Oh, your brother is one of the Mystic Cowboys?” her friends would say. “Really? Which one is he?” and Paula would say the cute one with the long blond hair, and she was proud of him and gave him money whenever he came around asking for it. Once she gave him two hundred dollars she had saved up for Christmas.

Sometimes Johnny left elaborate messages with her, for people he said were looking for him, but they never showed up. One time he left an unfinished note tacked on the front door that read

Darling,

I’m in a lot of trouble and

That was all. No explanation, no signature. Paula pulled it down before her mother could see it. She tried to call Johnny,
but his phone had been disconnected. She called some of his friends, and nobody knew where he was, but one of his friends said it was cool, for her not to worry about it. When she saw Johnny the next time, she asked him about the note, but he didn’t remember. This happened shortly before Paula went away to college.

The first time Johnny flipped out was when he and his band were doing really well—they had a gig at the Granfalloon in Atlanta. The story went that Johnny got on the drums and wouldn’t stop. He wouldn’t quit drumming. Finally they closed the club and took him away in a strait-jacket. That first time, they called it drug psychosis.

J
OHNNY WENT TO A STATE HOSPITAL THAT LOOKED LIKE
a college campus with its green rolling hills and brick buildings with white columns. If you didn’t notice the chain-link fence around the grounds, that is, with the barbed wire at the top. Johnny’s room was in a low flat building with a broad concrete stoop in front, where several of the patients sat outside in the October sunshine amid the falling leaves. Other patients walked among the pecan trees, bending to pick up pecans. “That’s something, isn’t it?” Johnny said. “Nuts for the nuts.” But he wouldn’t talk much. He looked past Paula and kept his head cocked, as if listening to something. He seemed—how could this be?—
busy
, as if he had a lot going on in his head and Paula’s visit
was just a distraction. Johnny was skinny and his hands shook and his tongue seemed thick. The nurse said it was the medicine. They had cut off all his beautiful long blond hair.