“Ah, Mic-mic!” I liked that Samir called me Mic-mic with his accent from Injah. “Question for you, Mic-mic. You are knowing this lyric? Why you must lay down? Song says you must lay down!” His accent sent Eddy and Firefly into a giggle fit. If I am honest, it made me laugh, too, but I always managed to keep the giggles inside out of respect for Samir. I had often wondered the same thing about her lyrics, and that is probably why I liked Samir so much. I wanted to answer him, but I didn’t understand Melanie’s lyrics all that well, either. But answers or no answers, my two friends thought I was an even cooler kid when Samir was asking me stuff.
“I don’t know, Samir, and I’m not sure I know how to let my white birds smile, either. But I’d like to.”
I shot Samir a peace sign like Kevin might have only weeks before, when Tommy marched inside gnashing.
“Bullshit, come on, guys, I know where Andy lives.”
The feebleness that I displayed that day still haunts me, because I followed them straight into the beautiful subdivision of Quail Valley that I had come to know so well and onto the dense velvet golf course heading straight for the trampoline at hole eighteen and the intended bludgeoning of Andy. I prayed that his house was nowhere near hers. I was deeply mortified at the chance that a unicorn might witness my senseless beating of one of her neighbors.
I suffered this point of contrast, and later it would drive home a mission to live consistently with my convictions and refuse to compromise them for any reason. But in those drawn-out minutes as I approached hole eighteen, I accepted that I was going to hell. Most people haven’t a clue as to what to do with their lives, but they all want another that will last forever. I, however, just wanted to die and be done with it.
How Tommy knew exactly where Andy’s house was, I have no idea, but he strode straight down the golf cart path. As we followed, I saw a fire engine red golf cart that was made to look like a Rolls-Royce. It was parked at the Halfway Food Hut in between the ninth and tenth holes. Seated in it was an obese man just resting like a giant tumor behind the wheel of that golf cart as he chatted up another Titly-est waitress. He had on a blue alligator shirt with bright orange stains smeared all over the front. As we neared, I saw that he was eating Cheetos, and after every bite, he would wipe his hands down the front of the pale blue fabric. I don’t know why, but in that very moment, just briefly, I hated that man. Then, just as we passed him, he stopped talking to the waitress, looked right at me like he knew what I was up to, and turned up the volume of his little in-dash stereo as if he were trying to drown out the inevitability of my callow attack on Andy. His eyes made tiny pinpricks in my chest and I found it hard to breathe. I knew he knew, and disapproved of what I was about to do. Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” blazed louder and louder on the fat man’s radio as my leaden legs took me closer and closer to the residence of Andy and his family, and slowly out of that fat man’s gaze.
We arrived at Andy’s house and Tommy rang the front doorbell. Impatient, he rang it again. Nothing. Inside, I rejoiced. No Andy!
“Come on, let’s go around the back.” Tommy strode onward. My heart sank. We walked all the way around to the other side of his house, right on the golf course with no fence to impede the view. I could see the trampoline a few houses down, and that is the first and only time I have ever prayed to not see Jane since she had bounced into my life. The back of Andy’s house had a big sliding glass door that hid nothing of the kitchen and living room. Tommy knocked on the glass. Then he knocked harder. It reverberated. Finally, Andy’s mother came down the stairs and upon seeing us, broke into a grin whose image burned itself onto the back side of my eyelids.
She flung open the sliding glass door and graciously said, “Hello!” Tommy rudely cut to the chase and immediately asked if Andy was home, without even a hi, how are you today, ma’am. And then, the impossible happened. Andy’s mother’s grin turned into a full-on smile. It was a smile that I recognized from my own parents. It was the smile of pride. Pride at the realization that “cool” kids were finally coming to visit her son. My heart shriveled up to the size of a small, sun-dried raisin, and I accepted as fact that I was probably never going to make it to heaven. The residue of the dried raisin left a stinking picture, and some stinking pictures you just cannot unboil. Andy came walking down the stairs as his mother kept smiling and talking to us. My tunnel vision was on Andy: Our eyes finally met as he finished his descent.
“I’ll be back in a minute, Mom.” He crossed right past us into their backyard as if he was just going out to mow the lawn or lead us off to play a round of golf. We all walked resolutely out toward the seventeenth green, away from the trampoline, for which I was grateful.
“Come on back when you’re done and I’ll serve y’all some sandwiches and cupcakes.” His mother’s voice tapered off.
“Yes, thank you, ma’am, we’ll be right back. We won’t be long,” hollered Firefly.
Neither Andy nor I spoke the entire walk out to the green, but Tommy, Eddy, and Firefly were like three Caesars in a coliseum. When we arrived at what felt like the right spot, Tommy took out the seventeenth hole flag just like they do for the final putt. I dropped my books on the ground as Andy and I turned to face each other. The only thing I wanted at that moment was for Andy to apologize so we could all go home. I heard Tommy start to say something right before I felt Andy’s fist impact the side of my head right by my left ear. I stumbled to the right and immediately tackled him before he could swing again. Straddling him, I grabbed Andy’s head in a tight vise and asked him if he gave up. Led by Tommy, Eddy and Firefly yelled, “Punch him in the face!” and “Kick his ass!” I held him down with all my weight and switched my grip on him to a conventional headlock to free up my right hand. I raised my fist up over Andy’s face and yelled at him to please give up goddammit. He would not, I promise you, he would not give up. It is always good to strive to be like people whom you respect. Conversely, I also feel that there are not many things more depressing than finding out that you have things in common with people you detest. I punched Andy on the forehead and asked him again to give up. Nothing. I punched again. Nothing. I threw again for his forehead, but he squirmed and I caught his nose. It opened up, and blood flew everywhere.
“Say you give up and I’ll stop hitting you, Andy!”
But he just wriggled and stared up at me. I threw a couple loose-knuckled shots right above his eyes and tried my best to make them look vicious, but I barely connected. Then I asked Andy again. Nothing.
And that’s when I got mad. I got really mad. His silence was forcing me to kick his ass. And no, the irony is not lost on me. It infuriated and frustrated me so much that he would not utter the three simple words that would allow me to stop bludgeoning him. I got so irrationally pissed off that I tightened up my fist, and I cracked him right in the nose. I cracked him hard. There was blood all over his face and my hand, and I smashed my face right against his.
“That’s it, stay down!” I whispered, then I screamed, “Don’t make me hit you again!”
I felt his body relax, and I knew it was over. I got up and grabbed my three-ring binder and social studies book off the ground and stalked off to the other side of the golf course and did not look back. I got about ten yards and all I could hear was “The Hurdy Gurdy Man” and the putter of the red Rolls-Royce golf cart as those Cheetos stains drew closer. Then Tommy, Eddy, and Firefly ran up to me with praise, asking me where the hell I was going. I couldn’t even turn to look at them, because I did not want them to see me crying.
I started running and shouting that I was late, that I had to take a shortcut back to my neighborhood. I just ran. I ran the hell away from the seventeenth hole, even hole eighteen, away from Jane, from myself, in between two houses directly across the golf course opposite Andy’s house. There, I slid down between a Tudor-style turret and a big AC unit on the side of what looked like a palace to me. Andy was still sprawled out on the green as the guys’ voices drifted off toward the cart path
. The music was still there. And I cried until empty. I tore a leaf off a banana plant beside the house that I was leaning against and wiped the blood that had now mixed with tears off my face and hands. When I looked up, I saw Andy watching me from across the fairway as he struggled back into his yard. I have no idea how long he had been watching me cry. He stared, then glanced down and picked a few leaves from his mother’s garden and began wiping his face off in the same manner that I had. When he was finished, he buried the bloody leaves in the dirt and looked up at me again. Andy raised his hand about chest height. I raised mine by my ear where he had punched me. And then he turned and walked inside. My Grandaddy used to tell me, “It ain’t okay just to right a wrong. It ain’t okay just to correct it. No, you gotta correct it ten times over.”
As I got up to brush myself off, I heard the music approaching. But the song had changed. It was immediately familiar feeling. I looked up and saw that the obese man was driving straight up to the seventeenth hole in his red Rolls-Royce cart. He stopped directly on the green where Tommy had removed the marker pole, and stepped out and looked around, scrutinizing our impact on the fabric of dense velvet green. Finally, he spotted the flag, waddled over to pick it up, and gently placed it back in its cup embedded in the turf. He walked back to his cart, but before he climbed in, he scanned the horizon in all directions until he spun completely around and landed his laser eyes right on mine. Laying a finger aside of his nose, the fat man blew snot out of one nostril in my direction. I wanted for him to look away, but he would not. And then his head slowly started to shake in disapprobation, almost imperceptibly, and then he tapped his ear, without ever taking his eyes off me. He took a moment, then climbed in the red Rolls, turned up the volume of that song—that song that crept into every one of my pores, and puttered off down the cart path. I could not get that song out of my head, or take my eyes off that man until he disappeared into a tiny blotch of color on the Texas horizon. The words to that song looped over and over again in my mind all the way to Samir’s, where I wanted desperately to sing it to him to find out its name and author. I had to know. But Samir had closed early, so my legs never stopped. I just wanted home.
That night after swim practice, when I got home, Steve McQueen turned his back on me and wandered off under my bean tree to nap. Steve knew. If your own dog can’t look at you, then you have done something wrong. I felt like everyone knew.
I sat out on the front stairs of my house completely alone, my ankle aching, my butt freezing against my cold cement handprints. An entire knuckle longer now, I traced a scarred finger along my three-year-old impressions in the top step. There was still no sign of the Milans except their two chairs, steadfast in the tall grass. I thought Grandaddy and Mamau would be here already for fried chicken but they were late, and Mom and Dad were not home. Lilyth was home—I could tell from the moaning coming from her bedroom window—but she would not unlock the front door for me. After Kevin’s death, Lilyth’s way of dealing with her grief was to do a lot of sleeping…with everyone. It was dark outside, and the cold night air had rooted its brittle fingers into my bones by the time Mom got home. The house was still locked, and Lilyth did not even try to hide anything from our parents. Maybe a half-assed try. She got attention, all right. It’s no wonder the jocks had nothing to do with Lilyth. The “heads,” “freaks,” and dope smokers all went for Lilyth like scoring a free nickel bag of Maui Gold. I gathered my sister was the gold in their eyes.
When Mom finally got home and let the two of us in, I heard the theme song from Doctor Zhivago playing. It could only mean one thing, and it made an already appalling situation even worse. Mom’s black lacquer jewelry box, which never left her bedroom dresser, was open and in the clutches of this greasy-haired blond guy slumping out of Lilyth’s bedroom. He pawed through my mom’s personal jewelry collection, not bothering to zip his fly or look up at us. He sat down at our little white wooden kitchen table and lit up a smoke as he continued to dig through my mom’s private treasures, sometimes putting an especially sparkly brooch or ring on the table to get a better look as he picked and itched at his scalp and private parts. No shoes, few teeth, grimy. And the stench. I was ashamed of Lilyth. I saw the look on Mom’s face as her lip trembled. I immediately heard myself shouting at him exactly where I wanted to see him go, laced with far too much profanity for my mother’s presence and ending with “NOW!” Without a word, the dirtbag got up and shut the lid of Mom’s jewelry box. Silence pierced the frozen air between us as he scratched and slouched across the carpet to the front door. I struggled against my desire to pull that piece of shit’s hair out by the roots.
“You’re mean, man.” His bloodshot blue eyes shot me a dejected look, and he kept picking and scratching and itching himself all over.
“No, you’re dirty. Leave my house now.” I followed him to the door and slammed the door on his back.
“It’s fine, Sug, be nice.” Mom’s F word and N word rankled. That dirtbag did not deserve Mom’s fine and nice. He had no respect. He had nothing but self-pity.
“No, it ain’t fine, Mom! And that dirtbag ain’t nice.” Mom did not reprimand me for losing my temper, or even for the profanity, instead sending me to the shower, and quietly telling Lilyth to put her bedsheets straight out in the trash behind the garage. My mom was her mom, and my dad was her dad, so I believed that Lilyth should be the same…but she was not.
Later I could hear through my bedroom door as Mom and Dad disciplined Lilyth, but she had never understood them. I don’t know where she learned it, but I knew by then that she only spoke rattlesnake.
“Your mother and I didn’t raise you t’be a heller, goddammit. You hang around nine losers and I guarantee you this: your ass will be the tenth.”
“He ain’t a loser, he’s misunderstood.”
“Oh, for Christ sakes, Lilyth! That boy is shit, plain and simple shit. If you can’t see that, then I got no hope for you. And I don’t give a rat’s ass about him, Lilyth, it’s you we care about. Can’t you get that?”
“Paul, be nice, Lilyth’s a fine and thoughtful girl. That boy ain’t had proper care, is all.”
“Our daughter ain’t carin’ for a loser, hear me?”
It was all fine and nice, and then it wasn’t. I know the truth was somewhere in the middle, but the middle was a no-man’s-land that I was completely unaware of at that age.
Out the front window I caught a glimpse of my Grandaddy with his giant index finger in that loser’s face before he sent him on his way. Then Grandaddy, James, and Mamau came inside, Mamau singing George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” like she always did, stopping short of the Hare Krishna part she didn’t care for, and she reached to crush me into her great bosoms. The night was getting on and everyone was tired. Grandaddy took one look at the scene in the kitchen and turned right around saying, “Woman, we gonna need some ponies out on the porch.”
Mamau fetched the tiny beers out of the fridge for him and James, and then set to making fried chicken. Dad and Lilyth continued to argue, and Mom continued to cry. Lilyth tried to hide herself under Mamau’s big flabby wing disguised in a gauzy gold-sleeved dress, looking so fancy and pretty, but Mamau shooed Lilyth away on account of spitting grease on the hot stove. Lilyth kept blaming everyone but herself, so Dad finally got up to say he was washing his hands of Lilyth. That’s when Mamau stopped singing. That golden puff of femininity set down the cover on the fried chicken so quietly everyone turned to look. Hellfire seared away the kindness in Mamau’s eyes as she turned to face her own son.
“Boy,” Mamau said to my dad, real soft and quiet like a crooning dove, a dove whose olive branch had been charred clear off by the coal of brimstone in its beak. “Boy, Lilyth is yo’ own blood. You don’t never let me hear you say you’s gon’ wash yo’ hands of yo’ own blood.” My Mamau whispered that never so soft. And the quieter Mamau spoke, the more my dad heard every word. Then she said what should have been obvious to everyone in the room. “Besides, Paul, you cain’
t up’n dispose of a child with two hearts beatin’ inside her.”
My mom choked on a sob, and my dad went ashen. Lilyth kept her eyes on Mamau for safety. Mamau, having arrived at our house mid-argument, had made some assumptions about the cause of the argument. Having seen a few things over the years, Mamau had observed Lilyth’s changes in the past few months and she had clearly assumed everyone else saw it, too. From a sickly gray, Dad’s face turned a new shade of purple I had never seen before—not even on Jane’s paint palette.
“Good thing that drug uh-dikt is already dead, ’cause I’d kill ’em,” raged Dad. “Or do you even know who the father is? Or are you gon’ sneak off t’get another goddamn abortion?”
As shitty as Lilyth was to me, I had always believed it was Magda who was the bad influence on Lilyth. While Mom wept, Mamau had an idea for a plan: a special school for special girls, as she put it in her own sweet way.
“I ain’t goin’,” sobbed Lilyth, but Mamau just kept right on embracing Lilyth in her ancient cloud of golden candy floss and love, like a fat old magic fairy princess in whose arms no bad could ever happen to you, ever. Turns out, the special school for special girls was an orphanage where Mamau had begun her childhood. And even my dad had not known till now.
“Seedlin’, get the hell out here!” So I limped out onto the porch, but I kept an ear turned on my Mamau through the opened window screen.
Jane Two Page 17
