The kid ran off, stomping his Nikes on my tiny handprints in the top cement step, yelling at the top of his lungs.
“Mom! There’s a crazy fucker in my tree!”
He didn’t know that Steve McQueen was buried here under that tree. And he didn’t have any clue that Steve was a better friend to me than any friend he’d ever have in his entire life. He didn’t know that it was my fucking tree.
But it wasn’t. It just wasn’t anymore. None of it was. I no longer belonged there. I slumped back into the taxi, under the gaze of the driver in the rearview.
“Where to?”
I told the driver around the corner down Sandpiper Drive, and I clutched the box to my chest, trying to slow down my heaving lungs.
“Kid’s right, mister. You look like shit.”
He drove to the intersection of Bentliff and headed around toward Sandpiper and stopped at the new red light. We waited. There on the corner was my mailbox. When the taxi turned the corner, I noticed it no longer danced. It looked lame. The old bent-in leg was gone. Shorn off. An amputee that leaned lame, and farther over than ever. And immediately, no Grunt. Just tears.
“Sir?”
“Turn around, can you just turn around?”
He eyeballed me in the rearview and pulled a U-turn and headed away from Jane’s. I directed him to The Ditch, where the eight-year-old me had waited so many times for Firefly, and Kevin hid from the world. I asked the driver to wait once again as I got out to see. The waste near my old home was perhaps the only thing that got bigger with time. Under that tiny bridge, where people would at one time dispose of small items and Jack in the Box bags, were now refrigerators, lawn mowers, and even a Ford F-150 truck bed. It was dirty back when a much different me would crawl down in the creek with Steve McQueen searching for crawdads, but now it was a wasteland. I looked under the bridge where Kevin used to hide and saw the same sentences written about girls. Lilyth was replaced by Charlotte. Rattlesnakes, I guess.
My heaving chest calmed a bit under that bridge. I heard kids playing somewhere. There was life here, but I recognized none.
As we passed the Utotem on the way to the airport, I saw a tiny little record shop with a name that led me to believe I might know the owner. It read SAMMI-R’S SOUND HOUSE. So, I asked the driver if he could pull over yet again. I wondered when time had decided to accelerate. And why I hadn’t been notified. I was a man. But I was a man who wanted his Grandaddy. Finally, I realized my taxi had stopped in front of the store and the driver was looking concernedly at me in the rearview. I wiped my eyes.
“You okay, buddy?” I saw him looking at me in that rearview with the same emotion that my father had tried not to show the night I held Steve in my arms as he drifted away.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. I’ll just be a second, okay.”
“No problem. You can just leave your box on the seat. It’s okay.”
Inside the little shop I scanned the two tiny aisles for a familiar face. Seal was on the sound system, and a tan-skinned old guy behind the counter was bent over unpacking merchandise and singing, “in a whirlpool of people only some want the cry”—fucking up the lyrics. The smell of the place was hitting me, as I was about to call the man’s name. The smell in that little record shop was a spicy-sweet incense, exactly like Jane’s, and it engulfed me. All those years only Jane had smelled of this inexplicable intoxicant.
“What is that smell?”
The guy behind the counter leapt up in surprise from unpacking merchandise. He took one look at me. Suddenly he was upon me, embracing me and laughing and holding my hands. And it was wonderful to see him.
“Mic-mic!” All these years since the Utotem, and Samir had managed to save up and get his own shop. “Your timing to enter my shop is perfect, my friend, what is means ‘whirlpool of people cry’?”
“The song’s about dreamers, Samir…and that they’re rare. Hey, what’s that smell?”
“Smell is Nag Champa, my old friend. Oh the shit, I miss you, Mic-mic! So many songs you must tell me. But, Mic-mic, sister baby-baby my new friend!”
“Are those lyrics, Samir? I’ve never heard that song.”
“No! Just like you, she is loving the music.”
“Wait…who?”
“Your sister baby-baby. Little Genie…” Samir riffed the song, then explained, “She is reminding me much of little Mic-mic!” Samir told me more about Genie’s love of music. He showed me two CDs that Genie had come in and ordered from the UK and asked if I wanted to take them to her.
“Actually, Samir, I don’t really…” And I didn’t, really. I didn’t even sort of. But I knew I should. “Yeah, sure, Samir.”
That little record store felt warm and familiar. And Samir was a wonderful constant in that town of change. Samir wanted to pretend fight me for fun, and serve me tea, and talk about bands that most people had never heard of. But I had to go. I hugged him and took the two CDs. And then I left smelling like Jane and I hoped that scent would never leave.
“You’re looking like shit, man, what you are doing to yourselfhood?” Samir’s Bollywood accent extracted a wan smile from me, as he inflected syllables where there were none, and arranged their tones like the sound of a calliope.
“You know, I’m not really sure, Samir.” He tipped his head quizzically. “I gotta go, man, take care.”
“Don’t forget Samir, Mic-mic. You come back, my friend. My door is always here, is open for you.” Samir stood there hollering and waving.
* * *
I went full circle. Across the street from the address that my mother gave me, I asked the cabbie to pull up. It was about four houses down from the Carvel Bridge over Kevin’s ditch, where I had just been. And all the kids’ voices that I had heard while down there were in my sister’s front yard, playing football. The driveway served as an end zone and had a familiar car up on blocks with a For Sale sign in the back window. There were five boys around ten or twelve years old scrambling around the yard, another younger one on the sidewalk, and three girls watching from the porch. Little Genie was obvious. She was a clone of Kevin. Introspective and shy, she sat apart from the other two girls on the porch. I didn’t remember her birthday, or even the year she was born, but she looked to be about eight. I watched her watch the game, and then I watched her watch that boy on the sidewalk, until he watched her, and then she watched the game some more. And I knew about them as much as I did not know about myself as a child. They were both separated from groups that I hoped that they would never join. I watched Little Genie for about twenty minutes just sitting across that street parked in that taxicab, and I knew she was different. I could see so many questions in her eyes that had never been in Lilyth’s, so many ideas, secrets, and dreams. I couldn’t believe that she was Charlotte’s daughter—who was Lilyth’s daughter.
“How much do I owe you?” I asked as I collected my box.
“You sure you want me to leave you here, mister? An hour ago we were headed to the airport. Shit man, you sure you’re all right?”
“Yeah, I’ll be all right. I’ve got a car here. How much do I owe you?”
I walked across the street with my box and Genie’s CDs from Samir’s as I heard the cab drive away behind me, and I breathed in the same neighborhood that had raised me so many years earlier. I imagined how I would sit on that porch with Genie and watch the game that I had played so many times before, but a cautious little girl stared back at me as I approached.
I took a step back. And then I held up The Verve’s Urban Hymns and Portishead’s Dummy and she knew.
She patted the step for me to sit, and I told her everything I knew about porches, and I think she understood. And then I went over to that boy sitting on the sidewalk and introduced myself. He was everything he appeared to be, clearly cut from a different cloth than that neighborhood usually produced. He shook my hand like a gentleman, and looked me in the eyes. Periodically his eyes would flicker over to make sure that Little Genie was still on the porch, and I
could tell that he was petrified of her catching him looking. He told me his name was Porter, and even at eight years old he told me that he understood his name’s meaning. And although he had never heard of a porthole before, he promised me that if he ever saw one, he’d jump through it immediately.
Then I walked up to the door and knocked. My sister Lilyth was forty pounds heavier and leering at me like a banshee until her eyes focused. I stepped back in the same moment she reached out to embrace me. My sister had been a huge influence on my perception of people: what I want no part of, what I don’t want in my life. From the fire truck she rolled into the street when I was a toddler, to the scar on the inside of my elbow and all the other crap for which I was never allowed to physically retaliate, so anger and powerlessness were still there, but so was disgust. Lilyth did not have my back then and, I was willing to wager, probably not now, either. And I was sure Lilyth resented me.
But then my sister opened her arms even wider for me with a smile that I decided to neither trust nor fear. I took another step back.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Mickey, are you eight years old? Get the hell over here.” I stood there and hoped for the horizon, wishing Grandaddy were there to tell me what to do. “Get over here, I’ve changed, I’ve been saved by Jesus Christ our Lord, already, fuckin’ A! I’m a nice person now. I’m fine.” Snake-eyed, Lilyth studied me coldly for a reaction. I didn’t believe her for a second. If that was her Jesus she was on then, no thanks, I’d take my own. The gleam in her eyes was not fun or playful or even wickedly mischievous, it was disturbingly like that of a sociopath, like the TV interviews with Charles Manson in prison. Reluctantly, I stepped forward to hug my sister and followed her inside, too numb from grief to feel the cold autumn wind that made it hard to close the door whose haunting clunk reminded me of Steve McQueen’s tail hitting my bedroom door. But that smell. I walked straight to the back sliding glass door that was just like ours from years before and opened the window to dilute the redolent bouquet of Lilyth’s latest perfume disaster that mixed with the bubble gum effluvium on which she gnashed furiously. The rush of cold air caused her pink Bazooka gum bubble to burst, and the brittle membrane enveloped her nose, hiding its booze-enlarged pores. “Fuck!” exclaimed Lilyth. My sister had arranged the kitchen just like our old house. I stared out the window at all the decay as Lilyth and Charlotte sat at the round kitchen table and explained all.
“Charlotte’s wise like Grandaddy, and a slut like me, fuckin’ DNA; figures, right? But her daughter ain’t a slut, case you’re wonderin’, Mickey. My granddaughter’s out front, she’s as good as Goldie. A swimmer, too, Mickey.”
“Mom, will you fucking stop already with the oversharing!” Charlotte’s edge sparked against my sister’s.
“Oh, darlin’ it’s fahn, he’s ma’ dumbass lil’ brother,” Lilyth slashed back at her.
“Be nice, Mom.”
There they were again, the F and N words.
“I am nice, Charlotte. You know, Mickey, Genie’s even got Totter this year. Can you believe that shit? He’s probably still talkin’ about my bra, that fuckin’ perv! Miss Flinch left him for Coach Randall, boy can she swim now, looks hot as him. Hey, you dickhead, you’re setting my shag on fire!”
I turned around to detect where the smell of smoke was coming from, and for the first time noticed a man lying on the couch in front of the TV flicking a cigarette into the shag carpet. He must’ve been there the entire time, but hadn’t spoken a word. And I immediately wanted to drag him straight into the front yard and kick the fuck out of that piece of shit. But Lilyth smacked him and poured his Budweiser on the smoldering hole in her old white shag carpet.
“That’s Genie’s father,” said Lilyth indifferently. “Piece’a crap, but at least he sticks around and pays rent.”
Genie had a chance, and I didn’t want it ruined by garbage that should have been collected yesterday. But I realized that some children, the few survivors, have the uncanny ability to self-parent, and Genie was one of them. This idiot would not stop her. She was already an alien in that house. Some parents show you exactly what to be, and others show you exactly what to flee. Genie had plans. I could see them.
I asked my sister why she was selling the car in the driveway and tried to convince her to keep it. But I knew she wouldn’t. She just wanted it gone. I told her I would pay her whatever she wanted and take it with me so it wouldn’t be scrapped for junk or left somewhere for dead. Then that slimy fuck on the couch sat up and started to tell me what the car was worth. My fingers and cheek both twitched and I left the window, but my sister saw my eyes and Lilyth jumped up and told him to, “Shut up and sit the fuck back down!” He opened his mouth to protest, and then Charlotte shouted, “My uncle will smear your face on the fucking driveway if you don’t shut the fuck up and sit back down right now!” My God, they were exactly alike. But Charlotte was right. In that moment, I would have. And he slumped back into the couch.
My sister drove me to an ATM and I paid her for the car. She then loaned me her tiny little rusted-out Geo Metro to run back and forth to the auto parts store as I collected the parts to get the car running. I couldn’t fit the wheels and tires in the little Metro, so I had them delivered. From the porch, together Porter and Little Genie watched me work until the sun went down. Then I drove the boy home about two miles away. Not once had anyone called to look for him, nor did he have a bike. I asked him how he had gotten to the house, and without missing a beat he said he had run and that it only takes him eighteen minutes when the crosswalks hurry, and could he come over again tomorrow? I knew I would be gone tomorrow, but I told him that I hoped he would. Like Genie, he would be okay, despite everything else being anything but fine and nice. He was a climber. When I got back to Lilyth’s driveway, I got the car to fire after fluids, plugs, and a battery, but it still would not idle. So, I spent about two hours adjusting the floats and cleaning the carburetor. But when I was done, it shook the driveway just like I remembered.
I slammed the hood and saw that the relic text ghosted through an off-shade of red spray paint: I was based on a true story. A rotting piece of wood, much smaller than I remembered, was peeking through the cracked grille.
I woke up with the sun and Little Genie tapping me on my cheek as I had fallen asleep in the front seat of her Grandaddy’s car. I told her that I’d return it to her, where it belonged, completely restored on her sixteenth birthday, and yes, I’d come inside for some Eggo waffles. All I could think of was what James would say to my own Grandaddy, every time we’d eat waffles for breakfast at The Piccadilly Cafeteria. James would pour about half the syrup bottle onto his plate before my Grandaddy would say, “Goddammit, save some for Seedlin’ and me.” But James would just keep pouring with a big toothy grin and sing out, “Aunt Jemima…and I ain’t ya daddy neither!” After breakfast, I said my good-byes in the driveway. I hugged Little Genie and whispered in her ear all the things I hoped she would remember. She asked me what was in the box on the passenger seat. I didn’t know. She took a moment to really look at me and then asked me if I wanted to. She was a beautiful child, and really was based on a true story—Kevin’s. Lilyth yelled something from the porch, laced with profanity that I did not quite understand, and then blew me a kiss, of all things.
“God, it’s okay, Uncle Mickey, don’t listen to Granny,” squealed Genie flipping her wild blond hair, the texture and color of Kevin’s. Everyone else had gone inside as I drove her Grandaddy’s red Firebird away, and Little Genie just got smaller and smaller—a colorful blossom on my horizon, still waving in that rearview mirror. My mom was right about Lilyth’s house being only a block from our old house. For the last time, I pulled up alongside Steve McQueen’s grave under the bean tree. I had wanted to see all the places of my youth, to pack up my memories to take with me, but they just didn’t live there anymore. I pulled slowly into the driveway and brushed myself off as much as possible. But I was a greasy mess in a suit, with Gatorade slopped down my ches
t. You could still see the patchwork in that old garage door from when the Firebird’s grille had plunged through. And this was where all the memories lived. I wanted that door to raise and see that gorgeous Schwinn Sting-Ray again. I wanted the “Free Bird” to fall out when I opened the car door. But mostly, I just wanted to see her again from my own backyard. I knocked on the front door and explained myself to a lady that appeared far too nice and understanding to have raised a child like her feral son. I told her that the tiny hands in the concrete under her feet were mine, and that where she lived was my vantage point of everything important in my life, and could I just sneak into her backyard for a moment and I’d be gone? “I can go ’round the back. I don’t have to come inside, ma’am.”
“That’s the crazy one, Mom, don’t let him…” And then his protest suddenly stopped. He just gazed at me like there were things he recognized and questioned at the same time.
His mother smiled after a cautious look, and then opened her door to me. I ignored the boy as he followed me the whole time in watchful silence, and I stood just outside that sliding glass door through which I had first seen Jane bounce and I had the emotions of a shy, little eight-year-old all over again. But the fence was much closer than I remembered, and I imagined the few remaining rusted-out pieces of her trampoline where she had bounced could no longer propel her skyward. The bushes were gone from where I had first filmed a stunningly beautiful young girl floating gently above her rear fence. I stood impossibly close to what once seemed so far away, and it hurt. And I just wanted a fucking do-over. It’s all I wanted. I felt a warmth touch my palm and I looked down. The foulmouthed boy that I couldn’t fucking stand stood quietly beside me looking out at my horizon, holding my hand…and I could stand him. After an impossibly long moment, I patted his head and I let myself out the side, saying good-bye to a house I no longer recognized.
* * *
I had only ever ridden my bike to Jane’s new house, cutting across fields and fairways, even when I dragged my mower bungee-corded to my sissy bar, so I had to guess at directions and navigate my way down streets I had never been on before to finally pull up in that Firebird. Jane’s butter yellow house did not seem quite so fancy anymore after all the years, but seeing it made me want it, even the rusted trampoline crouching in the backyard by the sand trap that protected hole eighteen where I sold my first golf ball. The house had a Century 21 key lockbox on both doors, and looked completely desolate, so I took my box out back to the trampoline and sat. Wherever Lew Hoagie was, I knew his balls were out, because I could smell the rain coming. The clouds moved visibly, and a cleansing Texas drenching was near. But with 1,600 miles of I-10 between me and home, I couldn’t wait.
Jane Two Page 24
