From there it wasn’t far to where my mother lived. The rain had died completely, and I trudged along slowly, my whole body itching from the dirtiness of the ditchwater. Maybe if she was nice she’d have a new set of clothes I could wear; maybe she’d take me in and run hot bathwater. But I wasn’t counting on it. It was awfully late, and she’d probably be asleep in the same bed as him. I’d have to be careful to wake just her. If he caught sight of me, he might do to me what he’d done to my daddy. I didn’t care none, though. He’d probably had his fill of slaughter.
A wooden stump split the dirtalley into two directions, and I took the path that bordered the ditch. It led me through some garbage barrels, and a stack of corrugated cardboard boxes, and when I saw the twittering light of a streetlamp I knew I’d reached the house where she lived. It was painted green and lit up funny by the light of the lamp, almost like a house in a cartoon. I jumped the fence that bordered their backyard and came to rest beneath the window of their bedroom. Maybe I could have been a little quieter, because I heard them discussing my arrival inside.
“Honey ?”
“Huh …”
“Darlin’, get up!”
“Wha … what is it? I don’t wanna go there anym—”
“Quiet, honey! Listen. I heard something out there. I heard somebody at the fence. You’ve gotta get up and check it out.”
“T’ain’t nothin’… swear it…’s just yer ’magination’s all.”
I could hear the bed jiggling then, and the shadows of the bedroom window fled as a bedside lamp flickered on.
“No, it ain’t my imagination. Now you get up!” Disgusted, Bohannon grunted. The springs of the bed relaxed as he threw himself out of it. Above me, I could see the silhouette of my mother outlined in the white moonlight, and behind her I heard Bohannon cursing and grumbling.
“You want I should get the gun?”
“I don’t know. Oh, do what you have to do!”
He slammed around through the dresser drawers for a while, then I heard my mother draw her breath. “Where’d you get that, for Christ’s sake?”
“Gun store.” Something clicked. “It’s my new toy.”
Her silhouette at the window disappeared toward him.
“Do you really think you need all that?”
“You never know. Could be a big ’un.”
She was all confidential whispers.
“You be careful with that thing.”
“I will, I will. Now get on back in bed.”
“You promise you’ll be careful?”
“Oh, for the love of—! Yes, yes. I promise I’ll be careful.”
“Good.” The bed sagged again as she got back into it; I could hear the springs. “As long as you promise.” The bedroom door slammed.
Quickly, I skittered away from the bedroom window and came to hide behind the weeds beneath the oil tank. He couldn’t see me from where he was, but I could see him. He came out to the backyard holding that toy of his, the kind of thing a wildman would own, and he used it sort of as a walking stick as he surveyed the tool shed, the garbage cans, and pine trees. If there’d been a burglar, Bohannon would’ve been easy enough to see, the backyard being so well lit and all, but he was rather lackadaisical about his whole approach. Bohannon twirled the gun around like a baton, let it slip from his hands once or twice, used it like a broom handle to knock down a couple of hornets’ nests, and hooked it behind his shoulders and hung swinging from the clotheswire like an overstuffed scarecrow. Satisfied that my mama’d been imagining everything, he sauntered back into the house, and when he’d disappeared from view I hurried back to my position beneath their window.
My mother was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “You shore you didn’t see nobody nowhere?”
Bohannon sighed. “Yes. God, yes. I’m posolutely absitive.”
“Good,” my mama said. The springs moaned as she lay back down.
I did not move.
“Honey?”
“What.”
Their bedroom light was out now.
“I was just thinking.”
“Uh-hum.”
“I was thinking and—” She gathered her breath. “Well. Maybe it was him we heard outside.”
At that, Bohannon rolled over; I could hear his body turn.
“Awww, baby! Why’d you have to go and—”
She was crying. “I know!” she sobbed. “Oh, don’t I know?” She said a whole bunch of things then, things I could barely understand, about how she was worried and she knew she shouldn’t be, about how he was such a crazy fool and would try anything, about how she feared for her darling’s life after what he’d done. I could tell from the noises the bedcovers made that Bohannon was holding her, trying to calm her down. His voice kept saying “Shhh !his baby didn’t have to be afraid of anything; she’d be safe as long as he was there to protect her; they’d get everything that was coming to them if only they let life play itself out proper. It was sort of sad listening in—my mother’s voice so hard and broken, Bohannon trying to stay sweet and encouraging—and I knew from the tone of my mama’s voice that there was nothing Bohannon could say, nothing a fella could do. In the quiet of the night my mama’s sobbing rose from a whisper to a moan. The lights of the house next door came on, and I spied an old man sticking his nose through two pink curtains. All the while poor Bohannon kept saying, “Shhh! Shhh, baby!”, and the sheets whispered as he held her.
It did not take much courage for me to knock at the door. It would’ve taken courage to have walked away, but I was afraid. I knocked at the door.
He answered.
“Why, it’s you!” he said. He did not seem awake enough to be angry. “What’re you doing here at this time of the night?”
“I’d like to see my mama.”
“Hold on,” he told me. “Wait one minute. I’ll get her.
He had not asked me in and I was happy of that and in no time at all she appeared at the door, dressed in a blue robe, eyes smudged with tears and tapwater.
“What’re you doing here?”
“I don’t know.”
She took me by the wrist and tried to lead me into the house, but I wouldn’t budge.
“All right,” she said. “You do what you want.”
A long silence unraveled in which I didn’t know what to say and stood looking at the ground. She didn’t know what to say, either, and I supposed had I looked up she would’ve been looking at the ground herself. When I did look up I saw Bohannon in the kitchen window scooting around making a pot of coffee. He looked like he’d been licking a sore tail.
“Well,” I said, “I best be going.”
I turned to leave and she called out to me.
“Yes’m?”
She bit one of her nails.
“Come here.”
“What, ma’am?” I asked her.
“I said, ‘Come here.’”
She closed the frontdoor behind her and squatted on the porch and held out her arms, and I went to her and let her take me. She said my name over and over in a way I hadn’t heard it said before and she smelled like warm soap and I didn’t want her to let go. With her free hand she stroked my hair.
“Honey?”
“Yes’m.”
“Did he send you here?”
“Who?”
“Your daddy.”
“My daddy?”
“Yes.”
I shook my head.
“No’m.”
She sighed, deep.
“Then why’re you here?”
“I don’t know, ma’am.”
“Yes,” she said, laughing. “You told me that already.”
She stopped stroking my hair and held me at arm’s length.
“Ma’am?” I said. I thought she wanted to ask me a question.
She coughed.
“You said you don’t know why you’re here.”
“That’s right,” I told her.
She stared into me.
“W
hy don’t you know why you’re here?”
I closed my eyes.
“I don’t know. You know why you’re here?”
She smiled, and I felt like I’d been baited.
“Yes,” she said. “To take care of you.”
I tried to look away, but her eyes held me fast. “That’s nice,” I told her. “But Daddy can take care of me.”
“Can he?”
“Yes’m.”
She touched my eye with her finger. It stung.
“Is he the one who took care of your eye there? Is he the one who took care of your lip?”
“No’m.” I told her it was him that hit me, not Daddy, not this time.
She bowed her head.
“I don’t believe it.”
“You don’t have to.”
She touched my torn lip with her littlest finger. “No, I don’t. I don’t have to, do I?”
When she let go of me I shoved my hands in my pockets. We looked each other over good but didn’t say much of anything.
“You gon’ come in?”
“No, ma’am. Thank you.”
She bit her thumb.
“All right,” she said. “All right.”
After a while I said I had to go. She asked me if I’d seen my brother.
“Yes’m.”
“When?”
“Couple hours ago.”
“Where is he now?”
“With Daddy, I ’spect.”
“With your father?” she asked.
“Yes’m,” I told her. “With Daddy.”
She stood to go inside and I started off to leave, but just as the frontdoor was about to shut I heard footsteps falling toward me.
“Darling!” she called. “Come ’ere now. Be sweet to your mother and come on over here!”
I let her hold me again; I didn’t mind.
“Honey,” she said to me, whispering, petting my hair, “if your brother decides to come live with us, would you want to come and stay with us too?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I mentioned my brother’s name. “Did he say he was gonna?”
“No, dear. Not yet. But he will, I just know it!” She was holding me very tight.
“Are you sure he will?”
She nodded her head. I could see Bohannon staring at us through the kitchen window.
“Yes!” she said. “I’m just sure of it!”
I shook my head, slowly, drew myself away from her. My face felt flushed, and things were going fast.
“I don’t think he’ll stay with you, Mama.”
“How do you know, darlin’? How can you know?”
I shook my head, faster now. “He won’t,” I said. “I just know him. I think he’d rather die than live in this house, Mama. And he’s with Daddy now. Like me. I’m not saying that’s right, but I know that’s how it is. And besides, I don’t think it’s his choice.”
She looked at me funny then, like I was speaking some kind of language that was foreign to her. “What do you mean, ‘his choice’? What do you mean by that?” I took a few steps backwards, beyond her. I was trying not to lose myself. “I’m not sure,” I said. “But I know it’s the truth, that we ain’t got no choice and we’re with Daddy now, that we ain’t had no choice from the beginning, now, or ever. We’d come to you, maybe, but we couldn’t if we wanted to. I’m not sure what it all means, but it’s the truth, all of it!”
She had that look about her, the look of someone who’s been spun around on a playground swing one too many turns. She held out her arms, as if she needed something to steady her, but I stood still.
“In a lot of ways,” she told me, “you’re just like your daddy.”
“Our daddy,” I told her.
She went inside.
______________
I looked at the night and wondered if maybe it wasn’t too late to head back home.
Daddy might be sleeping, and him too. With both of them dead out, I could rest myself behind the davenport where neither of them would think to look come the morning. It was a comforting thought, me stretched out on the pee-smelling pile of the living room rug, safe in the shadows where no one could see me. I certainly was tired enough. The last time I’d really slept was more than twenty-four hours ago, and though I’d been knocked out twice during that period of time, I couldn’t bring myself to calling it sleep.
A clean cold nightwind blew straight through me and above me the sky hung wasted and unspent. Through the darkness I could see a gray patchwork of clouds, the last of the evening gathering together, and I knew that before the early morning broke there’d be one last storm less merciful than its brothers.
My chest heaved like a rusted whistle and I felt my forehead and found I had a fever. It must’ve been all the ditchcrossing, and running, and living off nothing but sandwiches and Gatorade. Of course, getting hit in the chest and stomach a couple dozen times didn’t help matters neither, but my sickness was nothing sleep couldn’t cure.
I took the quickest route to getting home there was—through the playground at Ulysses S. Grant, down Dellray Road to the Vale of Tears Funeral Home, through the home’s backlot to the West Rail gas station, and past the West Rail onto Pennymont Boulevard. It was a good two miles’ walk, and my head was light. I hoped that I’d make it.
Ulysses S. Grant was a day school for rich kids that wasn’t in operation no more. A bunch of men had set fire to it a couple of years back when the school had been out of session, and all the buildings with the exception of the library had burned to the ground. A man and his wife from the north had founded the school. They only took about fifty kids a year, but they swore they’d give them the best education money could buy, and supposedly they had. My mother wanted me to go there, but we couldn’t afford it, and whenever we told our daddy we were going to the Ulysses S. Grant playground to play, he’d wrinkle his nose like somebody’d cut the cheese. A lot of folks didn’t like the school much, and I supposed that was why they’d let it burn down. Some folks even claimed that the northern couple had planned it, that the school had been a failure and they’d wanted the insurance on it, but after the place got torched I noticed that they hadn’t stuck around to collect whatever was coming to them.
Even though Ulysses was fried and all, my brother and I liked to scavenge through it. My favorite place was the library. It was only partially burnt, and a lot of neighborhood folks had looted chairs and desks and library curtains, but most of the books still sat on the shelves. I’d climb in through one of the busted windows, grab an armful, and sit outside the library reading them; I’d always return them even though I could have taken them home with me, so it was just like a regular library. My favorite book was about a lightning bug that scribbled messages in the sky to warn people of coming danger. The messages looked like chain lightning, and they saved the lives of little kids who played in night traffic or hung around railroad tracks or slept on roofs in thunderstorms or whatever. My brother liked this one book about Benjamin Franklin because of the pictures, but I looked at the writing and it weren’t no good.
At night the grounds of Ulysses lay like a sleeping man who’d been set on fire. Its arms and legs were ash, and its burnt-out body was black broken rubble. You could see the limbs of chairs and desks sticking out of windows like upended children, and across the brown weed-eaten ground a layer of glass glimmered dimly in the moonlight.
I didn’t stop to do any adventuring, but as I walked by I did chance to look through the window of one classroom that wasn’t as damaged as the others. There were a couple of uncharred desks, and a blackboard stretched from one end of the far wall to the other. I could tell some neighborhood kids had decided to make a clubhouse of the classroom because there were dirty words written on the chalkboard and someone had spray-painted a skull and crossbones across the American flag. It was a pretty decent skeleton, and you could barely see the blood of the flag for all the ivory bones.
Once past the schoolgrounds I came to Dellray. Though I knew a pol
iceman might see me, I stuck to the sidewalk. I’d checked my face in one of the Ulysses windows and noticed that the ditchwater had washed most of my cuts clean, so I wasn’t bleeding as much anymore. The only noticeable thing was my black eye, and if a cop stopped to ask me how I’d gotten it, I’d tell him the truth. To arrest my brother he’d have to find him first; and it wasn’t like most cops to come between family.
Dellray led to the Vale of Tears Funeral Home. It was a box-shaped building with signs around the parking lot that read “Visitors Only.” I took to the side alley of the building and found my path blocked by the light of an open window. Someone was singing, and I was afraid that if I passed by they might take me for a grave-robber and shoot me and salt me. I crept to the window and got some kind of orange crate and stepped up on it and peered above the sill. I wanted to see what I was up against.
Two large Spanish women were leaning over what looked like a metal dinner table. One of them had a canvas bag of makeup strapped around her shoulder, and the other one kept stepping back and squinting her eye. Their hands worked the whole while, busy on something I couldn’t see. Every now and then they’d stop their singing to tell each other stories. I supposed they were telling jokes because whenever the stories finished the women’d throw up their hands and hug each other madly and huge laughing tears would roll down their faces. They were too occupied to notice me passing by, so I left as quick as I’d come and jumped the fence that separated the Vale of Tears from the West Rail backlot. I heard them singing a song again, something about “la luna, la luna.”
The West Rail was an all-night filling station owned by a young guy named Wilson. He always dressed like an ice-cream man, in white cotton trousers and a white Oxford shirt, but that’s not to say he didn’t look good. He was sharp all-around, Wilson was, and folks often wondered what a guy like that was doing working at a dirty old gas station. He had a winning way about him—didn’t smoke or cuss but didn’t mind folks who did—and whatever time of the day you saw him, whether early in the morning or late at night, he’d be sitting in a lawn chair outside the station office with a book the size of a cinder block sitting in his lap. He was awful smart, and made good conversation, and he kept his blond hair greased and parted down the middle so it fell in two long V-shaped flaps over the sockets of his eyes. His only trouble was he didn’t pay enough attention to what was going on around him, and a lot of times when you talked to him you had to repeat yourself till you were blue in the face. But that didn’t matter none to me. Even though Wilson was a lot different from other folks, there wasn’t nobody I’d rather get bluegilled talking to.
Life in the Land of the Living Page 11
