People were hollering at him?
Not at him. But they were hollering—gathered around yelling and taunting and shouting. Throwing bottles and whatnot. Broken glass everywhere. All that terrible language. Terrible, just terrible. And taunting and throwing things and spitting and what all. I don’t trust them people, Pea.
Which people?
The people on that bus. Who else? How could they pull a stunt like that when they can see just as clear as day that a little kid was inside?
I asked you once what a Royal Deluxe tastes like. And you said that there was nothing special about a Royal Deluxe and how there was no reason to bother about me being unable to go into town and order one up for myself, because it was just a bunch of hype from uppity colored money with nothing better to do than stir up trouble. And it was right here in this very hallway that you winked at Huey and told me that a Royal Deluxe was no different than any other cheeseburger, even with all that cheese dripping down the sides of that toasted potato bun, and that it was worth neither the trouble nor the expense, and that all that fuss that people were making to eat at some stupid damned greasy spoon was idle troublemaking because everyone knows they could just as well put together a home-cooked burger every bit as good if they wanted one that bad.
Now hold on just a minute.
The back of Dad’s head was visible in the doorway. I needed to spit out what tasted like a mouthful of blood. I tried to sit up, but my head was so heavy it fell back onto the pillow. I lifted my arm and banged on the end table. I was trying to get his attention. Then suddenly the room started to spin, and every muscle in my body contracted. I pitched forward, and a spray of vomit shot out of my mouth.
And that poor boy was sitting right here on this very seat fumbling with his shoelaces, looking up at you as you spoke those words, and you winking at him and going on, saying how frankly I shouldn’t feel I was missing out on anything because it was just one of life’s “little pleasures,” you called it, and besides, that special sauce of theirs is probably nothing but a glorified French-dressing-and-mayo mix and you were sure I could figure it out eventually. Now you’re standing here telling me our boy has gone off and risked his life for something as silly as a cheeseburger?
Now hold on just a minute. First off, he wasn’t there for a burger. I told you, we went for an ice cream. He deserves it. And I figured it was high time, considering how long it’s been since the last time we went—and how good he’s taken all this craziness. Just ask him! He’ll tell you. Tyler even gave him extra hot fudge—so there. And second off, if you want a Royal Deluxe so bad, just tell me. I’d be more than happy to bring one back for you. Goddamnit, that’s what doggy bags are for!
The vomit had come in waves. When it finally subsided and I could breathe again, a tangy, viscous fluid hung from my nose, chin, and mouth. I leaned over the edge of the sofa and ran my fingers over the slimy pool spread out over the floor. That damned tooth had to be in there somewhere.
X
SINCE MY RETURN HOME, THERE had been no mention of any kind of what had happened in front of S&W. No explanation—not so much as a peep. Nothing. Part of me wanted to believe the bus had come to investigate the mysterious circumstances surrounding the closure of Mister Abrams’s pool. But that seemed far-fetched in light of the busted filter. Unless, of course, that filter story was nothing but smoke Dad was blowing in my face so that I didn’t get my hopes up about the pool reopening before Danny returned to Fayetteville for college. Common sense told me that they had to be at least a little connected—why else would a bunch of college kids have come to Akersburg? Truth is, I wasn’t sure about anything anymore. Adding insult to injury, the TLC I got for my broken arm lasted all of two days. It was as if Mom and Dad were in short supply of How you holding ups. And I was still waiting for a Don’t worry, we’ll try again for an ice-cream breakfast sometime soon. But that never came, either.
So when Dad and I pulled in one afternoon, after having finished yet another Buskin Brothers run, and he told me to spray down the truck bed like it was business as usual, I went inside and dug out one of his dirty magazines from the hall closet. I’d just about had it. The point is, my arm still hurt, and at the very least I deserved an explanation for all that had happened in front of S&W.
When I returned outside, Toby was standing at the foot of the stoop with his tool belt slung over his shoulder. He was a sight for sore eyes, I thought; if anyone knew what it felt like to be handicapped, it was him. I figured he’d stopped by to fix the leak in the bathroom. I told him it was about time.
Toby smiled. Look on the bright side, Huey. At least now it doesn’t matter that the pool’s closed. You wouldn’t be able to go in the water with that thing on.
A stupid little cast, stop me? Damn it, Toby—shows how much you know. How many times have I told you? I can probably swim across the English Channel with a damned anvil hanging from my neck. Look at this body! I was made to float.
Toby sat down on the stoop, presumably impressed. Don’t you ever feel different from other people?
Jesus Christ, Toby. I swear—sometimes you amaze me. There’s a big difference between being enthusiastic and being stupid. And I’m not stupid. I’m perfectly aware that I have a broken arm.
Toby peeled off his ball cap and said that wasn’t what he meant. I leaned over and whispered in his ear about my hardly-noticeable third nipple, but that wasn’t it, either. I slapped the magazine down so loud the hens started squawking in the henhouse.
Toby Muncie, you got the devil in you, and I know it. I don’t know what about, and I don’t care to know, so long as you leave me out of it. Okay? Because ever since you and Pop had it out in the field, you haven’t been the same. You’ve got some sort of ax to grind, and I know it. I can tell just by looking at you. You got that look that says the world owes you something, when the world don’t owe you nothing. You think you’re the only one with problems? Well, let me tell you, I got problems, too. I got a lot on my mind, without you adding to it. If you can’t tell, I’m feeling a little down in the dumps after this here mishap with my arm. Frankly, I still don’t entirely understand how it even happened. Okay? Besides, it’s still sore and sweaty and hurts like the dickens. On top of that, I’ve gone three weeks without a dip in that pool, and I ain’t exactly happy about that, either. To make matters worse, Pop’s acting like everything’s hunky-dory. I’m struggling to keep a sense of what Mom calls perspective. What am I saying? You don’t understand that junk. Jesus Christ—when you see something from different angles, okay? Hopefully positive ones. That’s perspective. Get it? But I just can’t seem to get the hang of it. No matter how much I try to pretend otherwise, I just can’t. Not in this heat. It’s too damned sticky for all that.
Listen, Toby, I’m gonna make it real simple for you. Me and how I feel about that pool is probably like how you feel about—aw, hell, I dunno—watermelons, cheap suits, and white women, probably. Okay? And the last thing I need right now is for you to pile on with your cheap shots, teasing me every chance you get about the texture of my hair or my skin tone, or how I’m getting darker every year and how at this rate I’ll be your color by the time I’m twelve. Frankly, I don’t appreciate it. It’s not my fault I tan easily. So just hush up about that. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: Mama’s the dark one in this family. Not me. I’m normal, okay? Get that through your thick skull, once and for all. It’s not my fault my skin’s more sensitive than most. Mama says there’s not a single damned thing I can do about it except to stay out of the sun. Not after that special cream she gave me damned near burned my skin off so bad I could have sworn it was bleach. So I’m warning you—I will tell her. I don’t wanna, but I can be pushed to the brink and I know you’re just the person to get me to do it. I don’t care if she makes me put on that damned cream again, so help me God, if it gets you to shut up. Jesus Christ. You’d think a dark-skinned colored fella with half a heart would understand the misery of tanning easily, but
I guess not. Now scoot over, ’cause you’re hogging all the shade, and leave me alone.
I sat down beside Toby and flipped the magazine open and marveled at some caramel-colored woman with a bouffant hairdo sprawled out atop satiny bed linens. She looked both happy and sad at the same time. When I glanced up, Toby was still sitting there right beside me, inspecting the brim of his hat. He raked it back over his head, and we just sat there together in silence—me staring at a bunch of nudie pictures and him fondling his hat distractedly.
He took his hat off and wiped his brow, then put it back on. He took it back off. Held it by its visor and rotated it in his hands, then put it back on. I watched him do that three times in a row, before I flipped the magazine closed.
Jesus Christ, Toby. What’s with you? You’re acting like your old lady’s in the house about to pop out another one of your little chitlins. Make up your mind—either put on that raggedy old hat or take it off. All your fidgeting is driving me crazy. How’m I supposed to heal with you sitting there fussing over your cap like that?
Toby reached into his wallet and pulled out a picture. He looked at it for a moment, then handed it to me.
I took the bait. Who’s that?
Your mama.
I could tell from its condition that it was old—she couldn’t have been much older than me in the picture. I scoffed.
Probably stole it, for all I know. Big whoop. I’m gonna tell her you been going through her stuff.
We used to be close.
I leaned over and sniffed Toby, figuring that he must have been drunk. If I hadn’t been so sure about him being a bellyaching, muckraking boozer with more pride than good sense, who after twenty years on the job still hardly knew how deep a posthole should be, I would have sworn that he smelled just like calamine. Or was it lye? Oh, hell, I dunno. Something soapy. All I knew for sure is that it made my nostrils pucker.
I examined the photo more closely. There was no mistaking her: bright, intelligent eyes. Radiant smile. Perfect teeth. Pigtails. She was beautiful, that much was for sure. The odd thing was—well, never mind that I hadn’t ever heard him talk about Mom before; they didn’t exchange more than ten words with each other in a week.
How close?
Toby and I were sitting in a luxuriant patch of mid-afternoon shade. A breeze wafted in from the road and dried my lips. It was a sleepy summer afternoon, one of those very hot ones that’s strangely pleasant as long as you can stay out of the sun. Toby sat back and took his time. He spoke in clear sentences and enunciated each word with relish as well as candor—said he and Mom had been very close friends once upon a time. Not boyfriend and girlfriend. Rather, like cousins. The little morsels of his youth that he volunteered up sounded as if from a past life. And just in case I had any doubts about Mom’s character as a youngster, roaming wild and free with the likes of Toby as she had, he assured me that my mom had been chaste right up to the time Dad had entered the picture. He said that she was given to look upon boys with indifference and young men with outright suspicion, then detailed her abiding interest in school, nothing working quite so well to debunk suspicion of a tramp as a love of books.
Toby described the lengths Mom had gone to in order to cast off Dad in the early days of his courtship. Dad was fourteen years her senior. She’d mocked him and called him a cradle robber to his face when he refused to stop his advances. But Dad was nothing if not persistent. He worked every angle of advantage available to him. Where his wit failed, he used money. When that didn’t work, he used his family’s influence. Thus, there came the day when Dad asked young Toby if he could deliver Mom unto him. Toby said that at sixteen, he had little choice but to do as his boss had asked. He’d tried to warn Mom with as light a touch as could be managed, without leaving a doubt in her mind as to what he considered Dad’s true nature.
If Toby had technically satisfied Dad’s request, he considered himself to have failed Mom. In the end, Dad got what he had wanted. Too bad, then, that when Dad’s mother had learned of it and spoke reproachfully about Mom, as she was expected to do, Dad lacked not only the common decency to defend his young sweetheart’s reputation among those who had previously thought well of her but the courage to do so among those who had never been inclined to think well of her to begin with.
Toby toed at the dirt and said that he had decided to level with me, as he put it, because I deserved to know about the man whose family assumed the absolute worst about my mother, and the man who had never, at any time, shown the slightest inclination to stand up for her.
I shifted uncomfortably atop the stoop. I was staring into those bright, intelligent eyes, wondering what I saw there. She looked so damned smart—fiercely so. I flipped open the magazine and hid my face. It’d only been a couple of days since I’d sobbed in Mom’s arms and Dad had warned me that he hadn’t cried nearly as much when he was my age.
Dad poked his head around the screen door and asked Toby to come in. Didn’t even notice me. Toby got up and took his picture back. He returned it to his wallet and reached out his hand. I peeked over the top of that magazine but refused to take it.
• • •
DAD AND I loaded up the truck without Toby that night. We headed out to our fields without him, too. Dad pulled over beside our field and ordered me out. I slammed the door behind me and dragged my feet, mad as hell that I was the one helping him instead of Toby. I was the one with a broken arm, not him. I thought I should have gotten the night off. I deserved it. I slid out two stack poles from the back, clattered across the road with them splayed in my arms like giant scissors. I dumped them in the flower strip, knowing full well how careful Dad had told me to be—not with my cast but with those poles.
On the way home, he refused to tap the horn on our way past Derrick’s, so I leaned over and did it myself. I was starting to worry about that, too. I’d known it might be a while, Missus Orbach having come over to our house twice in as many weeks to give me grief. But it was going on eight days since I’d last seen him, and now he wasn’t even coming to the window. I was worried that I might not have a chance to show my cast to him before the darned thing came off.
We pulled into our drive, and I headed straight for the kitchen. Mom wasn’t there. Dad came in a minute later, checked the oven for dinner, then disappeared into the bathroom.
Mister Swanson’s Plymouth pulled in later that night. I turned down the TV at the sound of footsteps crunching out front. Mom opened the front door quietly and passed down the hall. She made a racket clearing dirty dishes from the kitchen table. I turned the TV back up and hollered out for her to quiet down.
Everything went silent save for the TV. When I looked up, she was standing in the doorway in her coat, holding a dinner plate wrapped in tinfoil. She asked why I hadn’t set out Toby’s dinner. I said I had and turned back to the movie.
So why didn’t Toby touch his food?
I dunno. But tell Pop Toby lets me toss our stack poles out from the back of the truck so long as I reach the flower strip. He made me get out every twenty yards and walk them over. Jesus Christ, if everything doesn’t take ten times longer with Dad than it does with Toby.
I wasn’t happy about having had to stay out placing stack poles around our field until it was too dark to go on. Dad had blamed the fact that it took us so long on how slow I was. I blamed it on him making me work with a life-threatening injury. We’d gone round and round like that for half the night.
Dad came in from the bathroom with his face covered in shaving cream and announced that Toby was no longer working for us. I whipped around so suddenly something popped inside my cast. Mom stormed off to the kitchen and slammed the oven door shut amid a clatter of pots and pans. I squeezed my eyes shut so tight I saw stars. When the worst of the pain in my elbow had passed, I opened them to the trample of fleeing mustangs and the war whoops of the Indians riding them and the pop pop pop of rifle fire from the cowboys shooting at them. I slid down from Dad’s easy chair cradling my cast. I turned o
ff the TV, picked up one of Toby’s biscuits that had fallen onto the floor, and asked why.
Dad said that Toby had decided it was time to have a go at it on his own, adding that it was a surprise that a man with his experience and talent hadn’t done so long before. Then he returned to the bathroom.
XI
I REMEMBER I WAS LYING in bed the next morning, in this god-awful state of not wanting to get up and not being able to fall back asleep, when Dad appeared in the doorway and told me to get up. I told him to get the hell out and leave me alone. I knew that he was going to expect me to fill those size-twelve rain boots that Toby had abandoned out on the back stoop.
Dad strolled in, snapped up the window shade, tugged me out of the cocoon I’d made for myself, and sat me up. When I finally dragged myself out into the living room, Mom was lying on the sofa in her rumpled nightgown watching The Donna Reed Show. It wasn’t until nine thirty that she trudged off to the kitchen, complaining about a crick in her neck. Dad picked up the pillow and bedsheet from the sofa, fluffed out the crater-sized indentation in the cushion, and grumbled something about it being her own damned fault.
I sat down at the kitchen table and delicately propped my cast up on it. I decided that I needed to level with Dad.
Pop. I know this is the first summer I’m not just getting in the way, and how proud you are of me for it. Because even little boys have to grow up sooner or later. Like you did, when you were my age. But—but—I just wanna say . . . If . . . I mean. You let Toby go because of what happened the other day—in Mister Noonan’s orchard, I mean—I just want you to know . . . Well—for the record—that it had nothing to do with him. I swear. I know how every time Derrick lights something afire, next thing you know, one of the Orbachs’ hands gets the ax. But Toby wasn’t even there. It was all me. You gotta believe me. That can was just lying there in the grass, and one thing led to another, and Derrick started daring and double daring me, and the next thing you know, we’d drank the whole thing. I dunno. I guess I was just trying to act like a grown-up. Aw, I don’t know what my hurry is. But I learned my lesson and I promise it’ll never happen again. I’ll do whatever you need me to to prove my boozing days are behind me. I swear. Just please please please please don’t expect me to pick up Toby’s load, is all I’m asking. There’s no way I’m ever going to measure up. Please. Because after two hours of sorting, stack poles all start to look the same to me. I get confused looking out at all those different piles. I forget which is which. I know I’m supposed to be better than Toby. But I’m not. Never will be, probably. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Pop, but I’m not. Okay? I’m just not!
They Come in All Colors Page 8
