We were walking again.
It was humid. My skin felt like a suit of rubber and sweat ran through my pants and undershirt. In all the dampness my brother’d gotten weak and he rested on my shoulder—halfwalked, halfleaned. He looked like something from another world. His jeans were stark blue from the harbor water and he must’ve been chafing on account of his cowboy walk. His hair licked up and out in every direction, disheveled by waves and set stiff by salt water. And of course he was bleeding. There was no end to it.
“You all right?”
“I am.”
He peeled a halfmoon of dried blood from the apple of his neck.
“What do you mean asking that?”
“Well,” I said, “you’re bleeding, and everything.”
He stopped leaning on me.
“I’m always bleeding.”
It was the truth. I gnawed at a fingernail.
“I know that,” I said, “but you’re bleeding more than usual.”
He picked up a rock and hurled it at a passing car.
“Not really,” he said.
From the direction of the road there came a shattering of glass. We heard brakes scream and cursing and the sound of honking horns. My brother turned a whiter shade of pale than he was already.
“I had no idea—” he began, and his eyes followed the wounded car as it made an illegal U-turn. “I didn’t mean to throw it so hard,” he said.
The car pulled off the road and onto the pavement where we’d been walking. It eyed us for a while as we stood in its headlights, then the motor kicked in and it barreled toward us. We could see gravel kicking up beneath its wheels.
“Holy shit,” my brother said.
He told me to get out of the way, which I did, but he himself didn’t move. My brother stood what ground he had, and the car seemed bent on getting even. It did not honk or flash its brights, and the driver didn’t wave a warning hand; it just barreled on. I called to my brother to get the hell out of its way, but he wouldn’t listen none. He acted like he didn’t give a damn whether he got run over or not. Let the driver get blood on his car, he didn’t care. And it was probably the casual way he handled the whole affair that saved him. As the car sped nearer and nearer, he took out a cigarette and lit it and smoked it and stood staring into the oncoming lights. He even tossed the cigarette down halfthrough, reached into his jacket, and lit another one. He had the routine down. When the car applied its brakes at last and slid a narrow inch from my brother’s beltloop, he looked over at me and grinned, as if to say, “See? See? That’s how you do it.” He also flicked ashes on the hood of the automobile, for effect.
We couldn’t see the driver of the car, but we were sure he could see us. Beneath the tinted glass of the front window, a hand reached over to lock the cardoor, and at the sight of my brother lit bloody in the headlights, the vehicle put itself in reverse and sped backward into the blackness. I could see the broken glass web of the back window, but I couldn’t make out the driver through it. It might’ve been a man or a woman; it might even have been a kid.
My brother stretched out his arms at his sides.
“Hey,” he said, checking himself out, “am I that gruesome?”
I didn’t say no.
In a while we stood across the street from the Stop ’n’ Go we planned to get our supper from. There was only one attendant, a beer-bellied redneck with eyes like dull matches and a three-day beard. He stood behind the counter leafing through a magazine. Every other page he’d stick his paw in a bowl of cordial cherries beside the register.
My brother laughed. “This shouldn’t be too difficult,” he said. “But I think we’re going to have to try something different.”
Usually how we did it was we both went into a store at the same time. One of us would strike up a conversation with the cashier while the other filled his pockets. It wasn’t awfully impossible. This time, however, my brother was in too sad a shape to remain inconspicuous. We both knew we had to come up with a whole ’nother routine.
After some time thinking my brother rose from the curb where he sat. He took off his army jacket and helped me into it. I was almost lost in the thing, and before he handed the jacket over he was careful to remove the canteen from it.
“I’ll take care of this,” he said. He shook the canteen and I heard the medicine jostle. “Now you listen carefully.” I did.
When he was in position on the side of the store nearest the traffic, I gave him the sign and went flying into the Stop ’n’ Go.
“Mister! Hey! You’ve gotta help me!”
The redneck let the magazine slip from his hands and leaned over the counter, playfully.
“Keep your pants on, tiger. What seems to be the problem?”
I acted as if I couldn’t catch my breath.
“It’s my brother, mister! He’s been hit!”
“Been hit?” He leaned closer. “Hit by a what?”
“By a car!” I cried, grabbing at the counter. “He’s been hit by a big ole car!”
The redneck made a sour face. “A car?” He shoved his hands in his pockets.
“Yeah!” I told him. “An auto-mobile! And he’s dying! I drugged him over to the side of the Stop ’n’ Go here so they wouldn’t get him again.” I held up my hands; there was some of my brother’s blood on them, and the redneck’s eyes seemed to kindle a little. “Would you come see him? Oh, he needs help plenty bad!”
The redneck chewed the inside of his cheek and looked to either side of him and brought his chin to rest in the cup of his hand. “You better not be fooling me,” he said.
“I’m not,” I lied. “Boy Scout’s honor!” I did something or other with my thumb and pinkie finger, and the redneck seemed impressed. But I’d never been a Boy Scout in my life. I’d never even seen one. “Come on, mister, quick! He’s dying!”
The redneck drew a deep breath and took off his work apron. He tossed it in a corner and trudged out from behind the counter. Then he stared down at me. I could barely see his face for his belly.
“Now I’m gonna go look at your brother,” he said, “see if I can help.” He pointed to the glass doors. “What I want you to do is stand there. Don’t move, for one thing, and don’t let anybody in, for another. Is it a deal?”
I nodded.
When he was gone I went to the deli section and took four sandwiches. Then I went to the drink aisle and got a bottle of Gatorade. We could share it. I also got my brother a pack of cigarettes, because he’d like that, and a brown bottle of mercurochrome, because he needed it. It didn’t take me but thirty seconds to get everything I wanted, because I didn’t want much, and all of it fit nicely in my brother’s army jacket. By the time the redneck came out from around the side of the store, I was standing guard how he’d told me. The redneck looked like he’d seen a ghost.
“He all right?” I asked. “He gonna be okay?”
“I don’t know,” the redneck said. “He’s awful bad.”
On cue, my brother moaned. A chill seemed to spider up the redneck’s spine.
“You get the license plate number of that car?” the redneck asked.
“No,” I said. “It was going too fast.” I looked at the redneck. “Hey, mister. Aren’t you going to call an ambulance or something? You ain’t just gonna let him die there?”
The redneck ran a hand around his stubble and tried to grin a toothy grin, but his face fell all apart in the process. “Jesus!” he shouted. He slammed his fist into his hand and squatted down before me. He had breath like a catbox smells.
“Listen, darlin’,” he said. He was sweating regular bullets. “I’ve got to mind the Stop ’n’ Go. That’s my job. It’s all I have to do. I’d like to help you, but company policy says I can’t.” His face was red and he looked ashamed. “Now I can witness your brother dying. I can do that for you if you want me to. And maybe I can even lend you a dime out of my own pocket so you can phone an ambulance yourself. But as far as making your brother better, I can’t t
ry a thing. I can’t move him, nor touch him, nor prop a pillow underneath his head, nor do one dog-helping thing to him. And that’s the God’s truth. If I did, little buddy, this here Stop ’n’ Go might be held legally liable, and you know what that would mean?”
“What?” I asked him.
He bowed his head.
“I’d lose my job.”
With that, my brother moaned again. It was a terrific moan.
“But he’s dying!” I cried. “Can’t you even hear him?”
The redneck looked at his catcher’s mitt hands, stood up and folded his arms across his chest, and said he was very sorry. He disappeared into the Stop ’n’ Go, breathing sparsely.
I brought the sandwiches to my brother.
“What took you so long?” he said. “Couldn’t you hear me moaning?” He moaned again and laughed. It was a pretty decent moan, I had to admit it.
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
I got up and walked around the corner of the store and stood there staring through the glass front of the doors. When I walked in, the tinkling of the bells nearly gave the redneck a heart attack.
“What!”
The magazine in his hands trembled. It was a wrestling magazine.
“Mister,” I said, “I don’t think my brother’s going to die.”
“That’s good,” the redneck said.
He did not look at me.
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
As soon as I left I went back in.
“Mister?” I said. “Could I have that ten cents you said you’d lend me for an ambulance?”
He looked at me and nodded slowly, then he put his magazine down and searched through his trouser pockets. I went to the counter and watched him. He emptied the contents of his pockets out before me and separated the coins from the lint and cordial cherry wrappers.
He had nine cents to his name.
“A penny short,” he mumbled, sadly. He stared off into the distance. “A penny short.”
I looked at the cash register. He saw me looking
at it.
“Is that a cash register?”
He studied it for a moment, like it might have been anything.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, it is.”
“Is it yours?” I asked him.
He shook his head.
“No. It ain’t mine. It belongs to the store.”
“Oh,” I said, not looking at him. I took the nine pennies and arranged them in an incomplete circle. “Does the cash register have any pennies in it?”
He nodded his head yes. He was a very honest man.
I looked at him.
“Can I have one?”
“What?”
The question seemed to stagger him.
“Can I have one?”
He steadied himself. His eyes went dull and glossy. “Son—”
“Just one?”
I looked at the incomplete circle.
“One?”
“Only one.”
He clenched his teeth and gathered his will.
“Son, I just… can’t.”
Turning away, he shuffled over to the other side of the counter and pretended to straighten the dirty magazines. I watched him for a while, not saying a word, and as I left I slipped a couple of Slim Jims in the pocket of my pants.
“Don’t worry!” I shouted. “He probably won’t die!”
I wanted to reassure him.
The Double D was cheap, but cheap is never free.
“Two dollars a carload,” my brother whistled. He lay on the side of the Stop ’n’ Go with a copy of the day’s paper in his hands. He’d found it in the gutter and it was filthy with gutter water. “Two dollars,” he repeated. He was surrounded by broken glass and cellophane sandwich wrappers. A bottle of Gatorade tottered on his stomach. “Mmm, mmm, mmm. That’s cheaper than a worn-out mop.”
He was feeling better. Stripes of mercurochrome covered his face and he looked like a painted Indian. Beneath his army jacket his stomach bulged. I supposed he wasn’t hungry anymore.
“But we don’t have a car to drive in with,” I told him. “How we going to get into a drive-in without no car to drive in with?” I didn’t even mention the two dollars we didn’t have; I didn’t say word one about them.
“We don’t need a car,” he said. “I just ain’t sure I want to walk all that way if it ain’t going to be a worthwhile movie.”
“Can’t you find the listings?” I asked.
“I’ve got them in my hands, don’t I?”
That didn’t answer the question. The problem was my brother couldn’t read the first or last half of the American alphabet. The only reason he knew it was two dollars a carload was because he could see the big “2” with the dollar sign next to it on the advertisement in the paper. He also knew it was two dollars a load because every Saturday the previous summer our daddy’d taken us to the double feature at the Double D. We’d sit in the frontseat while he fell asleep in the back, and if he were still out by the time the movie ended, my brother’d get to drive us on home.
“Hand me that paper,” I told him.
He did. I scanned the listings.
“The Double D,” I read aloud. “Cleanest and most beautiful drive-in theater in the South. Tonight, James Dean revival. At eight o’clock, East of Eden, followed by Giant at eleven. Two dollars a carload. First come, first serve.”
I looked at my brother. It was like somebody’d told him he’d just won an all-expense-paid trip to heaven.
“Come on!” he cried. He tore off.
I must have gotten there about fifteen minutes after him. It was a long run and I had short legs. I saw him standing by the redclay road that led to the box office. A sign was posted in the ground beside him: “Deadheads will be prosecuted.” Deadheads was slang for people who snuck into movies without paying. My brother and I were deadheads, or at least we were going to be. It was only a matter of time.
A long column of punk trees separated the Double D parking lot from the rest of the world, and the peeling punks were held in line by a tall barbed-wire fence. Through the brush we could see the weedpocked cement lot with its rows of rainbeaten radio speakers, and already a bunch of folks had gathered. Some sat crosslegged on cartops drinking beer, and others sat buried in frontseats, exchanging Junior Mints, popcorn, and preliminary kisses. At regular intervals station wagons and lightbed trucks loaded down with ten or five or fifteen kids would speed past my brother, leaving him to cough amid a claycloud of red dust.
He saw me. “Pah—what took you so long?”
“It was only about a thousand mile run,” I told him. “Why didn’t you slow up?”
He scratched his ankle with the toe of his shoe and waved his arms in the boiling dust. “I didn’t want to be late,” he said. “You got to learn to set your feet to my clock.”
We started walking toward the box office at the dead end of the Double D road, which was nothing more than a wooden shed with a dusty plastic screen, lit from within by a blue revolving buglamp. The usherette in charge was pale and poorfed with eyes the color of wet lumber, and we stood in the shadows so she wouldn’t see us.
My brother turned to me.
“You ever seen a James Dean movie?” He asked it like you might ask someone whether they’d ever tried glorified rice. “I ain’t never taken you to a James Dean movie?”
I looked at him.
“Who’s James Dean?”
We snuck around to the punk trees that grew beside the box office. My brother gave me a leg up and we began to climb. The dying wood flaked from the trunks like reams of faded wrapping paper, and when we reached the uppermost bough of the tree my brother took a deep breath and leaned hard outward. I got nervous; we were pretty high up.
For conversation I asked him what was so great about James Dean. My brother spit and it stretched to the ground.
“Well,” he told me, “he’s the coolest, for one thing. And in East of Eden he’s
just like me.”
“How come?” I asked. His answer came quick.
“’Cause his father hates him and his mother’s a whore.”
My breath fell fast. I looked at him, hard.
We hung about five feet from the platform of the box office, shrouded in a quiltpatch of moonlight and leaves. Just as my brother was about to make his move, a man in a white station wagon came driving down the clayroad. He was curious as to what we were up to, so he pulled to a halt and flipped on his brights. “Christ!” my brother said, diving beneath some foliage. “That son of a bitch want to get us killed?” I thought we were done for, but nothing happened. The man dimmed his lights and drove on through.
My brother sighed. “Come on, now.” We dropped onto the platform and nobody heard us.
For a few moments we lay there. There was a nice wind and the air smelled like melted butter. From the box office below us rock ’n’ roll played, and the usherette kept herself company singing. After a while I turned over. My brother lay with his head in his arms, and I stared at him.
“Take back what you said.”
He didn’t answer.
“Take it back, goddamn it. Take it back about her.”
He stood and stretched and scratched beneath his arms.
“Be quiet,” he told me. “Another car’s comin’.”
He crouched down low and a long dark Cadillac with a makeshift sunroof pulled up soundlessly. I peeked over the lip of the platform and saw a twenty-dollar bill pass from the car to the box office window.
“Wait while I get your change,” the usherette said. We heard her exit through the backdoor and saw her walk across the lot to the concession stand.
“Now it’s time,” my brother told me, putting a finger to his lips. He stepped from the roof of the box office to the Cadillac cartop. The automobile sank a bit, but the driver inside did not notice. My brother stretched himself lengthwise and with absolute silence, and his face came to rest above the unopened sunroof. He held out his hand. “Come on,” he whispered.
“You go to hell.”
“Come on, you idiot.”
Life in the Land of the Living Page 3
