The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering (5 page)

The driver was Terry Nguyen. From a cooler under the seat he offered us drink boxes in purple and orange. I took orange; Faron declined. At the Hiya gatehouse Terry waved at a guard. The striped arm lifted and we were let go from that exurb of death.

So why was my hand still shaking so hard? I could scarcely poke the sharpened straw through the membrane of my juice box.

We puttered out onto the Dixie Hiway, leaving behind the order and hygiene of Hiya City. The elevated roadway was buckled and broken. Exit ramps ended in marsh—marsh that extended for miles on either side, filling the air with the rank odors of vegetal sex and rot. There is no civilizing low tide, I suppose.

Nguyen explained to us the terms Umma and Pop had agreed to, what it would mean for our family should we decline. No release for Pop; the Gables for Umma; life in Cuba for me and Faron.

It was the most preposterous thing I'd ever heard: blast a hole in the Night Glass to visit a make-believe moon. I was sure it would fail, but I should have been worried about success as well. What if we actually made the trip and had to live on a great big snowball? But if Umma had signed and Pop, too, there must have been something in it. I said yes.

Faron wanted to have a look at the paperwork. Nguyen handed over a pile of waivers and contracts. My brother pretended to read them, then he unlatched the window and let the papers flap out over the marsh like filthy white birds.

If Nguyen took offense, he did not show it. All he did was to ease onto the shoulder and stop. He threw open the passenger door.

“I have what I require from your family,” he said. “If you do not wish to accompany them, you are free to find your own way.”

I looked out over the soggy plain of sawgrass, the cypress groves in shipwrecked malls. Looked ahead to where the hiway ended at the Miamy Ruins. I said that I wouldn't go anywhere without my brother; neither would Pop or Umma, no matter what they had signed.

Nguyen showed me a labored smile. It seemed to linger in the rearview mirror, even as he turned to address us.

“I was the only one who thought your brother suitable for this undertaking,” he said. “I spoke up on his behalf. Now I see that I should not have bothered.”

The heat was rising. It gave the insects something to chat about. A fan whirred under the hood. The sense was of a mechanical conspiracy, of cogs that click and compound eyes that parcel up the world: what was needed, what was not. Faron was fixing to be spat out.

“Go on. Get out. You may try to run,” said Nguyen. “But I suggest you save your strength and wait here for them to pick you up.” He took a walky-talk from the glove box and spoke in a deferential tone. He seemed to be asking permission; a choice must be made and Terry did not have the clearance to make it. Faron snatched the walky-talk from Nguyen's crippled hand.

“I will kill you,” my brother screamed into the radio. “After you, I will kill your Chief. Next I kill his Chief and his, and then all the way up the pole till it's just me on top and you are all as gone as Gunts!”

I felt at that moment that we had passed a threshold. A choice had been made. This was not a sport and there were no ties. There would be no point in persuading Faron to sign those papers now, I thought. Nguyen was not the sort to allow second chances. It was the Cuba Pens for us, the Gables for Umma. Pop was a dead man.

Then Faron's voice went quiet. His snarl flattened. He blinked. He said, “Yes, sir.” Tears came as he handed me the radio.

I started into my usual speech: my brother was good; he was. “He likes to shout is all.” But if I could just talk Faron down, I was sure he would sign those papers and no further trouble might be expected from us.

“Rowan.”

It was Pop on the other end.

“Where are you?” I said.

“In the Gables. You have made the right decision,” he said. I heard friction, the red roughness of Pop's beard. I pictured him rubbing it, trying to adjust his big crazy head to the new circumstance. “Sign the papers and come on home,” he said. “Your ma will be relieved to see you.”

 

4.

We gathered that night in the Gables for a big feed. It was a reunion and a bon voyage both. Umma made roast goose, fatty-meat sausage, yams, and her own papaya salad spiked with wasp chillies. She had borrowed four stools from a neighbor. The card table was covered with a striped yellow cloth I didn't know we owned. She said sit down quick because one leg was buckling under the weight of all the dishes. Pop supported the corner with his knee and chopped off a segment of sausage. The fat drained out on the trip to his plate, but he dabbed it up with a slice of bread. Umma joined us with two jugs of Haven Dark, and the family ate and drank till we got gassy, belchy, and bully wasted.

While she washed dishes Pop fired up a weed. He touched the one-hitter pipe to my mother's lips. Her hands sank in greasy water but her eyes wandered free. She wanted to go anywhere but here, this last night. Pop and Faron were braced for anything; I was afraid; Umma, she was only sad. We folded up the card table and lowered my brother's bunk to make a sofa. We had one closet in that apartment, a vestibule really, hung with an Oriental bathrobe. Pop rummaged inside and by the humming under his breath we knew what he was looking for. We had not had a family sing-along for a year, and though I was no performer, I missed the together feeling when Pop busted out his Roland AX.

After a few minutes he had his rig all set up. Pop was rusty, but he played so loud and grinned so broad you couldn't complain. From a hand-copied songbook he picked out tunes from the days of our ancestors. His people had come from West Texas, and they were musical cowboys with drug problems. One great-great something-or-other had written a number of sad and strange ballads, a few comedy songs in the “talking blues” style that was tremendously popular at the time. I have heard the man himself only once, in a degraded recording, and he could not sing. Still, there was a miserable strain to his voice that made you feel you were the only one left in the world who was listening. I do not know how this ancestral Van Zandt looked, but I picture the Fake Man, an Orange Tan with a guitar singing about all the things that are easier than waiting around to die.

Pop was proud of his Roland AX. He loved to sing its praises. Generations of musicians had worn grooves in its pitch-bend wheel; the case was crazed with age and exposure. He had restored it using vintage parts and improvised electronics. The neck, which he'd fractured in two places, he had mended with plastic sealant. He polished its sparkle black finish after every sing-along. Part of the fun was watching him work its keys with a roll of toilet paper and a bottle of Old English, knowing those injurious hands of his could care for something, too.

My father was born in Houston but did not remain there long. The Van Zandts had always been a Bosom Industries family, and they lived in a Bosom condo block. His pa, Oak, worked as a fisherman in the Mexy Gulf. In those days the water boiled with flavorful sea life, like soup. Saltbats, sargasso snakeheads, and delicate tubeworms you could eat like licorice whips. Oak worked mostly on jellyboats, and Pop said he hauled in tons of that sweet translucent flesh to sell in the Yucatan Company commissaries. The deal was to sign on for three-week runs and come home months later with thousand-dollar bills stuffed in your boots.

Not even Grandma knew when he was coming home. He'd burst through their front door and fall to his knees, throw his arms wide for a hug, but Pop would always hide behind the loveseat. He was afraid of his daddy's arms, so red from the stings, so puffed up that they resembled a pair of fatty-meat sausages. Oak would laugh at his boy's cowardice, chase him around the den till he caught him, and then Pop would fall asleep on his father's belly, smelling wrack and money. Whenever Umma served fatty-meats we were treated to another story about Grandpa Oak. Never heard much about Grandma.

The story Pop told that last night in the Gables was terrible sad with a hopeful ending. It was the summer before my father turned ten. Oak needed the cash so he took a late-season job with a rival outfit, Consolidated Fisheries. A string of shark rigs ran the length of a sunken island called Gallstone. The trap was brutal and clever: four metal rods protruded from a cement piling, bait balls attached to the end of each one. Those rods carried 20,000 volts of electricity delivered from a generator on the platform. Oak and his partner worked them like crab pots, boating from one platform to the next to goose the generators, load the rods, and collect fried sharks from the sandy bottom.

Whatever rig they had reached by nightfall, that is where they would camp out. Every time a shark got zapped, an orange signal lamp flared. Grandpa said it was near impossible to sleep.

He had taken a long weekend home in Houston before setting out for his second rotation of the season. First night back on the job, the dispatcher urged them to hurry through their rounds. A tropical was bearing down on the Texas coast and the Chief wanted to gather as much shark meat as he could in case his rigs blew down.

By the time they reached the last platform, the swells were so high, they couldn't see the pilings. They tied off as best they could and radioed the dispatcher. The job was done but they would have to hunker down on the platform for the night. The dispatcher suggested they tether themselves to the ironwork tower. Oak told the man he intended to cut the boat loose; if it blew onto the platform, they might be crushed. The dispatcher refused to authorize; doing so would be a breach of contract. Consolidated Fisheries would no longer be responsible for their welfare.

“Nobody will come for you,” he said.

The following morning a Consolidated grief counselor arrived to notify the family in Houston. Called himself “Gene from settlement.” He stepped in funeral brogans over broken glass and chewed-up branches. The storm had made a mess of the condo complex. A Fanta machine lay at the bottom of the pool; a slow leak turning the water a pale orange. He employed a respectful knocking rhythm learned from the Consolidated book of comportment: knock, pause, knock-knock. Grandma answered the door, then excused herself, leaving Gene to wait on the shit scraper. She did not return.

Pop was the only boy among five older sisters. After their pa died his mother elected not to look at him anymore. People had always compared Pop to Oak; it was a compliment. But now the resemblance left him motherless. He started hitting the road and having adventures. Every time he got lonely, bored, or broke he would slink back to Houston where his ma would pretend he had not entered the room. Finally, at age fourteen, Pop set off on his last long run.

He learned to pick soybeans and poppy and peaches and to live in a tent or a bunkhouse or sleep on a barge. Migrant farming brought him east. Once you got in the tubes of Bosom Ag, the company would take you on wherever it was harvest time, even if you came from Texas. Gradually he picked his way around the Mexy Gulf and down into Floriday, where his happiest weeks were spent. Pop was a rowdy teen living rough in the orange groves. He fished cat in the rivers and ate what he wanted from the branches. At the end of the harvest he rode north with some boys to look for work in a So Caroline textile mill. When he saw the painted-over windows of that block building, he thought, with the finality of the young, that the good times were finished. A certain type of man spends his youth sure it will end by the week after next. But the truth was, happiness had just begun for Pop. It was in that textile mill that he met Umma.

Her people had been Consolidated War & Jail partisans for generations, so loyal that they had ascended to middle management. Umma's father was a man named Coylan Howard and he oversaw the cutting room. When Pop turned up seeking employment, Coylan could tell right off he was a Bosom man, so he offered him the dreariest job on the floor. All day long he'd spool fabric off an unwinding truck and layer it across a table. When a buzzer sounded Coylan would guide a saw along a chalk path, hacking out twenty pieces at a time. Pop had to load the cuts on a cart and wheel them into a long hall where ladies clicked away on sewing machines. He said the racket in that room sounded like seven-year locusts telling gossip. After the sewing was done, Pop boxed the jumpsuits and a truck took them to Miamy to meet a boat bound for the Cuba Pens. In this fashion, Consolidated dressed a hundred new prisoners a week. Some weeks they did soldiers; same jumpsuits, he said, different patches.

Umma worked in the sewing hall but the ladies all knew it was temporary. If she didn't screw up, she was guaranteed to make manager like her father. With Pop's help, Umma screwed up fast. When she started to show, he took her on the road. A weed plantation in No Caroline was hiring bud pickers.

*   *   *

That last night in the Gables, Umma called the tune: one of those sweet miserable ballads from Pop's ancestor, a song about staying put and never going anywhere in search of anything because there was nothing out there to find. Pop planted a foot on the amp, slung the strap over his head, and rested his right palm on the keyboard. He leaned into the hook so that it sounded like a flute made of soft rubber. He kneaded the notes, stretched them till you thought they might snap. Umma sang quiet and true, how she didn't need nothing. She sang directly at me, telling me I better pray that they never find me. My back, she said, was not strong enough. Umma sang to me about the precious things. Sorrow and solitude: the only words that are worth remembering.

 

5.

Next morning all we wanted was to sleep the rum and goose fat out of our tubes. All I wanted was to rise at my own leisure to Pop's drowsy laughter and dig into a pan of scramble with dry toast. But the fist on the door was persistent. Not loud, only regular. I wedged my head under the pillow and woke up minutes later gasping for air.

Outside I heard the super's voice. This man was eelish, wore a slender eel of a mustache, and spoke in a wet hiss. I heard him apologize to someone in the hall; most families in the Gables were decent, but others, well … the door swung open, and the super swept one arm across our living space to show Terry Nguyen how far some tenants could fall below the threshold of decency. “Welcome to the Four Seasons, Captain.”