“Mic never woulda done it if you didn’t deserve it,” said Andy, and I smiled.
Firefly broke in with self-deprecation, “I ain’t ever gotta worry then ’bout Felicia leavin’ me, ’cause I ain’t got a pool t’piss in. C’mon fellas, Jell-O shots for old time’s sake!”
Everyone dove for the tray of Jell-O shots, purple and pink like at our swim meets, and Firefly stuck his finger in every single shot before anyone could grab one, laughing insanely that he hadn’t washed his hands after the Porta-Potty.
“All right, when’s the last time you’ve gone out with just the boys?” asked Clatterbuck. Firefly could not recall.
“That’s all right, we get it. We’re just not important anymore.”
“Firefly’s pussy whipped.” Jonathan’s air of superiority had not tempered with age.
“Bullshit, that’s just bullshit,” said Firefly, searching to find the words to explain. “I wanna wake up next to Felicia, I just wanna wake up next to her, that’s all, and I’d never do anything with you guys at night that might jeopardize my mornin’s with her.” Firefly looked up mischievously. Then reached for Clatterbuck. “AW, HELL, SOMEBODY HOLD THA C-BUCK DOWN, I’M FEELIN’ ROMANTIC!!” The guys busted up laughing, as Clatterbuck wriggled out of reach. “Hell, Clatterbuck even managed to get laid. It took him till senior year in college, though!” announced Firefly.
“Bullshit, I was just picky. Besides, all the chicks were head cases,” declared Clatterbuck.
“Hey, here’s a weirdo!” injected Jonathan. “Who here went to Quail Valley? Anybody remember that love child Jane?” And with that, I could not move, I just stared at this intruder. All other noise faded away as Jonathan’s mouth continued to move. Jane’s name on Jonathan’s lips was blasphemy enough, but he then proceeded to address the whole group with some other shit he called language. “I heard she’s got cancer,” said Jonathan.
I could not move my eyes from Jonathan and I felt my lungs shrinking. I had never wanted to club the consciousness out of a person more in my life, but that claustrophobia had now spread to my fingers, and I could no longer make a fist. I hugged Firefly quickly and started running, his voice behind me shouting about “where the fuck was I going?”
I found myself hyperventilating in my rental car and fumbling with my cell phone. It was dead and I had no charger. I pulled over when I found a pay phone out in front of the Utotem. The polished chrome face staring back at me on the pay phone, I dialed. A homeless man sat on the Utotem window ledge about ten feet from the phone, watching me intently.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Mom.”
“Hey, Sug.”
“What are you doing?”
“I was sweepin’.”
“Sweepin’ the kitchen floor, or sweepin’ in your bed?”
“The kitchen floor.”
“Liar.” I chuckled.
“You still coming over tomorrow before you leave?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Sug, didn’t you go to Lawrence’s party?”
“Hey, be cool, man. You got any change?” asked the homeless man. I stared him down.
“No, sorry.”
“You didn’t, why not? I thought you were excited.”
“Uh…yeah, no, I went. Sorry, Mom, I was talking to someone else here.”
“How was it?”
I kept looking down, but occasionally met the eyes of the homeless man.
“Good, Mom, it was good.”
“Weddin’s tomorrow morning?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, we’d love to see you after, Sug. Come by? See the new house? Your father’s done so great, Sug, you’d be proud. And he finished restorin’ his MG. And in lieu of babysitting Lew, he took up paintin’ my portrait, too, you gotta come see, I look twenty years younger, just like my old self.”
“I bet it’s pretty, Mom.”
“Aw, Sug.”
“Hey, where is he?”
“He’s right here, can’t you hear him?”
“No, is he snoring?”
“Here, I’ll put the phone closer.”
“Damn, Mom, how do you sleep with that?”
“Oh, Sug, I can’t sleep without it! If he goes racing for the weekend I don’t sleep at all. Hang on, let me go into the kitchen so I don’t wake him up.” My father’s sawing cordwood at the other end of the line made me smile. Mom hovered over his health like a twenty-first-century helicopter mom.
A Jamaican Utotem guy came out the front door and approached the homeless man. I wondered what had become of Samir and his music.
“Hey, you!” yelled the manager to the homeless man. “You know what time it is?”
“I try not to,” replied the homeless man
“Well it’s late. And I think it may be time for you to move the hell on. There’s nothing free here.”
“Sug?” asked my mother, concerned.
“Well, I am. I’m as free as a bird, man. And this bird’ll never change,” murmured the homeless man as he got up and gathered his things.
“Sugar, you there?” As the homeless man shuffled around the corner, he turned and looked right at me…then he slowly disappeared from view.
“Yeah, Mom, sorry. I’m here.”
“You scared me, ’cause I could still hear people talking.”
“No, sorry, I’m here…Um, listen, I might be kinda late getting in, okay? There’s just, there’s just some things I think I need to do here.”
“Is everything okay, Mickey?”
“Yeah, Mom, I hope so.”
“Okay, well, call us when you know when you’ll be arriving.”
“I will.”
“Mickey, one more thing, Sug. Your sister’s really hoping you can make it by while you’re in town. You know she’s just a block from the old house.”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
“Charlotte’s grown up since you last saw her. Ya won’t recognize her.”
“Course I’ll recognize her, Momma.” I wondered if my niece would be more like Kevin or trashy like Lilyth.
“You know she’ll be twenty-five next month, and her own little Genie’s already eight years old. Your niece grew up without a father, Mickey; she needs you in her life. Come by after? It’ll be fine. Lilyth’s so nice now.”
“I understand, Mom. I, we’ll see, I just…”
“Hey, is there anything I can do for y’darlin’?”
“No, I promise, I’m fine. I’ll call you when I know more.”
“So nice hearin’ your voice. I love you, Sug. You sure yer fine?”
“Yes, I’m fine. I love you, too, Mom.”
* * *
About an hour and a few phone calls later, I was outside Jane’s hospital room trying to control my heart rate before telling my hand to knock. I remembered Kevin’s words the night we had sat in the stranger’s driveway hiding from the police. And I remembered standing at Jane’s door the day Mr. Troy Bradford had opened it to a shy little boy. I felt my arm positioning itself to knock. I glanced at a muscular arm, and the large fist of a man. It was my own. My God, how had so many years gone by?
Jane’s mother opened the door with her lips moving, but no sound coming out. I touched her hand as I walked past, and I saw Jane on the bed seated Indian-style, looking more beautiful than I could have possibly remembered. And I could hear the bass of my heartbeat just like Kevin could that night in his car, and I could hear hers. Barefoot, pedicured in purple, Jane was seated with perfect posture and an arched back in a graceful lotus position, one hand rested in the other, palms up. Jane’s thin frame was wrapped in a winter-white cashmere cowl-neck sweater scooped enough to allow her delicate clavicles to peek out. Gray knit silk warm-up pants covered her long, shapely legs. A black wool beanie cap topped off her long, dark brown hair she still parted in the middle. Purple flip-flops were under her hospital bed. Glittering and gorgeous, Jane looked at me as if she couldn’t believe her eyes, soft and green-brown as I’d memorized, an
d her full lips broke into a wide, welcoming smile.
Then she said it: “Mickey.” And, at that moment, the viscosity of my blood changed and I was locked in place. She not only remembered me, she knew my name. Her hands flew to her mouth just like her mother’s had when I walked in, and I saw all the things I ever wanted in her eyes. In that moment, I understood everything that she wanted me to know. I just stood there until she said, “How’d you know I was…?”
“…I just…” I didn’t even know how to get from that door to her arms, but that’s where I needed to be. Jane’s little giggle poured out of her like tiny Christmas tinsel bells, and she held her arms open for me. For me. With tears welling up in her eyes, I slowly approached her and we hugged like we’d never let go. In the window’s reflection, I could see Mrs. Bradford standing by the door watching, holding steady a trembling lip.
“Oh my God, Mickey, how did you even find…”
“I just…did.”
“Well, I think I’ll go down to the cafeteria and get a juice, let y’all talk. Mickey, it’s really wonderful to see you, darlin’.”
I saw her mother slip out of the reflection and we were alone. Jane felt so wonderful in my arms. She wouldn’t let go, and neither would I. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to say, but I knew everything I wanted her to know. Jane’s lips were touching my ear when she whispered, “Thank you.” Regret wrapped its noose around my throat, and I took far too long to loosen it enough to finally tell her what I wanted her to know. None of the emotional training ground of my youth could prepare me for this moment with Jane. My Grandaddy had always told me to look for truth in behavior, and not words, and everything that I saw in those initial moments gave me all the information that I needed. I knew right then that Jane was where I had always belonged, and she with me.
“I shoulda been here a long time ago,” I whispered back. And then I felt her face hide in my neck as her whole body tightened around mine. I felt her lungs quickly spasm the way mine did when I was a child when my grief from Steve McQueen had given me a heaving, silent sob. I felt a Jane tear follow my neck all the way down my chest, and I knew. I was right—I should have been here a long time ago. “I came in town for a friend’s wedding, and I, I just overheard that you might be here.”
Jane glanced into my eyes, and shook her head, then pulled me close again. I knew that what we saw in each other’s eyes was that same look of wonder and fear, that maybe as children we had just misinterpreted. I saw a look of wondering endearment in her, and hope, and all the things I had always wanted to see forever. You know, that night I prayed. My God, did I pray.
“I’m glad you came, Mickey. I didn’t think you even, I mean.”
“Well I did. I spent my entire fourth grade trying to work up the courage to tell you, and then the next couple years.”
“You…Really?”
“Jane, I remember the exact day I found you bouncing over a fence across from mine, and the exact day you stopped.”
“Oh, Mickey, I used to walk home in front of your house just to try and see you, and I even remember one time you just appeared out of a car trunk, like magic…and I just…I just wanted to…”
“So did I.”
That night Jane and I spoke for hours, and made up for years. I told her all the times I watched her bounce, and that I thought about stealing her Charlie’s Angels T-shirt from her room while their house was still under construction, and she admitted responsibility for leaving the copy of Yaz’s “Only You” on my doorstep that year for my birthday, and that she had gone back and removed it because she thought it might be too weird, but then put it back and prayed that I would like it and know, and that she had read all of my school papers that her mother would bring home to grade, and that that bastard who took her to every festivity and even the Gary Numan concert was her cousin David because all the other boys thought she was weird, and that I was the only one David had ever given the “nod” to when he first saw me skimming the pool that evening when they went to her prom, and that she saw me standing in line that Halloween at her haunted pirate ship and jumped behind the Cap’n Bolan barrel so that she could be the one to hold my hand and place it in the bowl of oily grapes while whispering in my ear that they were eyeballs, and that she had felt the scabs on my knuckles that night and had known what they were from, and that she’d watched me ride wheelies in front of her house from the bottom-floor living room window, and I told her that I always looked up at her second-floor window as I rode by to see if she saw, and that I had run to her in that yellow dress for my first touchdown, and she told me that she had wanted me to keep on running, and that she watched me cry in my bean tree as her father drove past my house and that she just wanted to give me a kiss, and that she saw me place her 95s in her mailbox and prayed I’d knock, and I told her about the note I left under the insoles, and that I’d wanted to knock—that I really wanted to knock, and that I watched her paint, and she told me that bouncing high gave her a better view into my yard, and into me, and that she was angry that she’d missed out on so much of my life, and why the hell didn’t we talk to each other sooner?
I didn’t have an answer for her. I had known Jane my entire life, and she wasn’t a rattlesnake, either. She was something else—the same else that I was. Before she fell asleep, I told her I would send her a box that contained the last twenty-eight years of us inside. I leaned over the pillow that she was dreaming on and kissed her good night at 6:43 a.m., having promised to attend her gallery opening in two weeks, after a brief return to LA. In that hospital I experienced the most intimate moments of my life. I had never felt closer to nature, never felt more comfortable. The gold standard exists, I experienced it, and I nod in appreciation. When I FedExed the 187 RETURN TO SENDER ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN letters from LA to Jane’s hospital room in Houston, all were still sealed. I had never opened them, never reread them. Had I opened them, I somehow felt that it would have let something escape. Keeping them sealed all those years, I guess, was my way of keeping the hope locked inside. And I’m glad I did.
Chapter Ten
Jane died on November 10th, eight days after I had seen her. Her mother apologized for not accurately communicating the fragility of her condition, and also the danger of her upcoming procedure. The one that I had thought was just a formality. She said that Jane had received my box of letters, and that she read every one of them. Mrs. Bradford gave me the information for Jane’s memorial service, and told me that when I was there, she would give me a package that, she said, Jane had wanted me to have. You know, I was welcomed into this Jesus time-share experience when I got here. And I knew some stays would be shorter than others, but somehow now I felt betrayed. Jane’s stay was short, but she drove her point home, straight into my heart. When I returned to Houston for Jane’s memorial, the crisp smell of autumn was in the air. The service was a blur of words, just a lot of kind words I could not hear, spoken by people I never knew loved Jane or even knew her. To me it was a continuum of blurred silence—Jane’s silence. Jane’s silence was mine, and I didn’t want to share anything of ours with any of them.
She was gone. And I would live. I would live with her plank shoved straight through my grille. It hurt seeing her mother and father hurting. It hurt when Mr. Troy Bradford came up to me and shook my hand with both of his, the same way he did on his front porch so many years ago when I still had time. “Sunshine Superman,” he murmured, drawing me into a fatherly embrace. It hurt more than I could have ever imagined it could hurt.
After, there was food to be served in the rectory. I couldn’t stay. I wanted to go home. But first, I had the cabbie stop by The Pole. And that’s where I was. The taxi driver had grown impatient and actually followed me down the long gravel road all the way to that schoolyard flagpole. Although he was only about five feet from me, I did not come out of my dream until the horn honked.
“Hey, you coming or what?” yelled the cabbie.
I was glad he had waited, but now I had to climb ba
ck in and tell the cabbie where I really needed to be. I just needed those memories back…at least as many of them that would fit in my pockets. Out the taxi window I stared at Grandaddy’s horizon of open fields, cattle, horses, and subdivisions in various stages of construction. Crops were dying, like they had given up and died with Jane. No rain was expected. There was even some water rationing for showers and lawns that was supposed to ensure the harvest would not die, but I couldn’t care. I drank some Gatorade in the taxi to nurse my dehydration, and my lifetime with Jane welled as a cloying bitterness like the residue of a pumpkin pie. I choked and spat it down the front of my clean white shirt. And it didn’t matter. I felt like I was hungover from grief, like it had poisoned every loving cell in my body.
I told the cabbie to drive by Bentliff Street. In my lap, I hugged the box that Jane’s mom had given me, as we passed the Milans’. It was boarded up and overgrown. A mangled aluminum lawn chair stuck a jaundiced elbow through the long grass, a corpse reaching up from the grave to grasp whatever became of happier times. At my old house, my bean tree was the first to greet me, bigger than ever. The dirt of Steve McQueen’s grave had long since blended with the untended yard, where our lawn had prospered. Mom and Dad had moved to Galveston after Dad started doing well years ago. It looked like no one was home, so again, I asked the cabbie to wait. I got out and climbed my bean tree still in my suit and sat on the same giant branch where I’d slept after Kevin. I’m not sure how long I sat up in my old tree, nor how long its new owner watched me.
“Hey, what’re you doing in my tree?” a kid yelled up at me. He couldn’t have been more than eight years old. I wondered if that boy was anything like me, and then I wondered if I had said it out loud, like I did back in the boys’ room to Jonathan over Jane’s 95s. “What the fuck do you mean, weirdo? You spilled some shit all down your front didn’t you? Pig. You better get the fuck out of my tree, mister, or I’m calling the cops. I ain’t shittin’ you, pal!”
“No, you’re nothing like me, are you?” I heard myself mumble toward the kid.
Jane Two Page 23
