Rev One: Hush, boy. Phone’s ringing.
Rev Two: Time to listen.
Both Reverends cock their heads to hear everything Mamma says. Bo wants to hear none of it. Let the Revs interpret what they want; sinners are their territory, not his. Not knowing is the only thing will leave him blameless; will leave him without the half-remembered patches of Mamma’s furtive phone call; will leave him without the guilt of not having told Pa.
Of not telling him how, between sniffles, Mamma had said, “Jethro . . .” She’d blown her nose, mumbled into the phone. “Okay,” she’d said, at one point. And, “I’ve tried to stay—” The person on the other end of the line had interrupted. Bo had heard the smile in Mamma’s reply. “I’ll be there first thing tomorrow. Around eight-thirty or nine. No—don’t worry. Rick will only notice I’m gone when his belly rumbles for a feed.”
She’d actually giggled when she hung up.
At this point, if the Reverends had been there, they would’ve urged Bo to confront Mamma. “Looks better on our record,” they’d explain, “if the pointing is done by someone else’s finger first. After that’s when we take over.” So they would’ve told him to set his alarm, to wake up early, to catch Pa as soon as he got home from work. “Secrets like these are best told immediately,” they’d say. “Over time they grow so stale it’s impossible to do anything with them. Best get it out in the open now. For her good, and yours.”
But Bo’s words had dried up that night, left his mouth empty.
No matter how many times he replays this scene, it always ends the same way. The Reverends’ advice gets drowned out by the swell of other voices. And just like he did that night, Bo presses “play” on his walkman, turns the volume up to full blast. He curls up beside HeeHaw on the cold floor. Hits “repeat” until the battery dies. Until his bones ache from the awkward position he’s in.
Until he can no longer deny that his chest is throbbing.
Just outside Bo’s bedroom door, the bar fridge’s motor kicks in, shakes him from his reverie. The sound rattles around the darkened kitchen, echoes across linoleum tiles into the adjoined living area. It trips over the collection of porcelain figurines Mamma keeps on top of the TV. (Farm animals, mostly; her favourites are pigs wearing overalls and Snoopy dogs flying airplanes.) It avoids the guitar abandoned in the corner of the room; skips to the hallway and bumps into two photo frames Pa hung there to replace the one he’d broken. Mamma hates to throw anything away, even an off-kilter frame. So she’d dabbed the damaged one with superglue and slipped a close-up of HeeHaw beneath its cracked glass. This pup is our baby, she’d said, re-hanging it between Bo’s Grade 6 picture and a faded snap taken at her and Pa’s wedding. (Only time Pa’s worn a suit; he’s leaning over the bulge of Mamma’s belly, stealing a kiss.) We can afford to give him at least this.
Bo rubs at his chest as the noise whirs, clunks, and finally rests on a crocheted blanket at the foot of an empty double bed.
Two new tentacles have grown overnight. Translucent and already as long as fingers, they itch way worse than the older three ever have. He tries snipping them off with his plastic school scissors. They simply waft like smoke around his cuts; then reassemble, resolidify, as though never disturbed. He wants to obliterate them, like Pa did that time when, to avoid doctor’s fees, he took a hammer to his own wrist and crushed the calcium deposit growing there. And with the money he’d saved, Pa had bought Mamma an Indiglo watch. Just because. Soon after, Mamma gave it to Bo. “Irritates my wrist,” she’d said.
Mamma doesn’t wear any jewellery.
Probably so her boyfriend won’t know she’s married, Bo thinks.
He knows about romance. He’s seen all the Channel 2 films Mamma tapes, seen how it works. Men tuck wedding bands inside their breast pockets before a night on the town. Women drape their figures in slinky black dresses, order martinis with olives on toothpicks. Girls wear curlers (long legs shaved, finger and toenails painted), then sit on overstuffed chairs, and try not to let tears smudge their mud masks when the phone doesn’t ring. Boys with leather jackets and too-greasy hair pretend they don’t care when really, deep down, they do. Frequently, there’s singing. Occasionally, dancing. Always, relationships are guillotined by a receiver slammed down, then resurrected with a carefully timed call.
Like the one Mamma had made that night. To Jethro.
He feels around for his watch. When he finds it, he throws it so hard HeeHaw yelps when it hits the wall.
“Shit,” Bo says, wriggling out of his sleeping bag. Pa had pasted newspaper (cheaper than curtains) over his bedroom window when they moved in; though dried and yellowed, it’s thick enough to trap night inside. Reaching over, he picks at one corner until a triangle of light creeps in. Behind him, the walls change from pure black to pale grey, striated with a wood veneer pattern. Pages he’d torn from magazines to decorate his room now shine in pale orange patches, reflecting the sun’s first rays.
He looks to the highway. Two dots of yellow bob along its black length, slowly getting bigger. “Shit shit shit—” Holding the cold metal frame of his bunk, he stretches down with his toes, releases his grip and slides with a thump to the floor.
“Move,” he tells HeeHaw, shoving the dog off the lower mattress so he can lift it. Hidden beneath are several long strips of calico stolen from Mamma’s sewing box, a handful of safety pins, and a crusty tube of calamine lotion. He grabs the cream, smears gobs of it onto his chest. Listens for the sound of car tires crunching on gravel. Prays the headlights won’t streak through the gap in his window paper too soon. Wraps a cherry-patterned strip of fabric round and round his chest. Flattens his tentacles, forcing them to lie still. Pins the bandage in place, jabbing himself twice, then throws on a hooded sweatshirt and jeans without checking if he’d drawn blood.
A pot of baked beans bubble on the stovetop and two slabs of pressed ham sizzle in the frying pan by the time he hears a jangle of keys outside the trailer door. Mamma would’ve had the kettle boiled by now, and a tray of ’tater tots grilled too; but Bo hasn’t had much practice getting Pa’s daybreak dinners ready. He doesn’t always have the timing down.
A blast of cool air follows his father into the living room, carrying a waft of stale coffee and the vinegar of exhaustion. Bo pops two slices of bread beneath the grill as the shower squeals on in the bathroom. The toast is plated, covered in beans and meat, and set on the table thirty seconds before Rick, wearing nothing but a bleach-spattered towel, sags onto the bench beside it.
“Coffee?” Bo stands halfway between the sink and table, hands shoved in his pockets to keep himself from scratching.
Rick shovels a forkful into his mouth, wipes sauce from his goatee with the back of his hand. “Nah,” he says, storing food in one cheek like a chipmunk, scooping in more.
Bo watches his father eat. Sweat and steam drip down the man’s shoulders and the wide expanse of his back as he hunches over the plate. His forehead stretches to the far side of his crown; stubble clings like dirt to the back of his roughly shaved head. Pa’s skull has always been ringed with that two-inch imprint, red and shiny from the security guard’s hat he wears for work. Not too long ago, Bo liked running his hand around its almost plastic smoothness, then over the Velcro roughness of Pa’s scalp. He loved pushing the bristles around with his palm, feeling them both soft and sharp.
Why did Mamma choose Jethro?
“What?” Pa looks at Bo through mushroom-puff eyelids. Knife and fork clink on the plate. He exhales sharply through his nose, stops chewing. Waits.
“Nothing.”
Pa grunts. The chair legs scrape new grooves in the linoleum as he stands. He readjusts his towel, then takes the dishes to the sink for Bo to wash later.
You look tired, Bo wants to say, but instead he just crosses his arms. Beneath his bandages, the tentacles tug and stretch, resisting their confinement. I got to tell you something. H
e tenses his arms to squash the feeling, then goes to the pantry to get some kibble for HeeHaw.
The dog pads into the kitchen as soon as the cupboard door squeaks open. He sits tense and stiff, the way Pa taught him, as a cupful of pellets clatter into his plastic dish. Tail swishing from side to side, his eyes and nose lock on the food. His neck strains as he tries to stay still while also yearning to reach the bowl. The wait is too much: he lets out a double-yip, chastising Bo for taking so long.
“Take HeeHaw out when you go,” Pa says. “Fucking mutt kept me awake all afternoon, yapping.”
“All right.” There’s a buzzing in his father’s voice that makes Bo spill kibble on the floor. Static and echoes, like those from a radio tuned to two stations at once, crackle through Pa’s words. It’s garbled, but audible. The discord of everything he’s not saying.
“You going to see her today?”
Bo can’t miss the emphasis Pa places on her. It rises above a wave of other sounds: the picture glass shattering; a heart beating wildly; Rick and Mamma saying I do; tin cans dragging on strings behind a burnt orange Mustang, clanking a shivaree. Beneath it all, his mother’s name, unspoken within these walls for two weeks, dripping electricity.
Maggie.
Bo shivers and nods, afraid to speak. What if his own sentences come out multilayered? His chest whiskers (please let them be whiskers) hiss and seethe.
Pa walks into his and Mamma’s room. He turns down the sheets. “Boeing?”
Bo swallows, nods again.
“Yeah,” he says. He keeps quiet for a second, and listens. There don’t seem to be any spare thoughts piggybacking the word. “After school.”
The mattress springs whine as Pa droops into bed. No extra meaning there either. Bo concentrates as the bed groans and exhales under his father’s weight. Just normal creaking.
“Tell her—” his father begins. The volume of Pa’s static-messages explodes in Bo’s eardrums: I miss you—Twelve years; twelve long years—Not again, Maggie—Please. Not again.
Leaden circles of Pa’s confusion spin down the hallway, across the linoleum, and into Bo’s head. The boy closes his eyes against the onslaught, tries to catch his breath.
He can’t find out about Jethro, Bo thinks. The realisation makes him sick. His stomach churns and his saliva turns acidic. His jaws clench around his secrets.
“Tell her she owes me forty bucks for the last phone bill,” Pa says, flicking off the light. He falls silent, but isn’t asleep. Bo grinds his fists into the sides of his head. Chest strands pulse, vibrate beneath his clothes. He blink-blink-blinks to keep himself from crying as his father’s anger swells, then slowly, finally, begins to ebb.
“You busy later?”
Bo takes a drag on his cigarette, looks up through the gaps in the bleachers, and waits for Charlie’s response. School seems a million miles away, even though there’s only a flimsy set of plywood seats and a football field between them. He exhales. Smoke hangs in the damp air; it strobes grey, yellow, grey as it drifts up through shafts of sunlight to the grandstand overhead.
“Give me your sweater,” she replies. “My butt’s freezing to the concrete here.”
She grabs the back of Bo’s hoodie, goes to pull it over his head.
“No!” He jumps up, jerks the shirt from her hands. HeeHaw’s collar jingles as his head whips up; Charlie’s expression matches the kelpie’s. “What the hell, Bo?”
His face burns red. Tugging at his waistband, he sits down again. Wraps his arms around the dog, uses him as a furry barrier between him and Charlie.
“Hush up, HeeHaw,” Bo says. “You’ll get us in trouble.” He looks sideways at his friend, forces a laugh.
“Idiot,” she says, rolling her eyes.
“I’m not the one wearing shorts.”
This time his smile is genuine. Charlie snorts and Bo feels the tension in his chest ease a bit. There’s nothing but silence behind Charlie’s words, behind her laughter. Her opinions are only tuned to one frequency; her comments are one-dimensional. Honest. When they’re together, Bo can’t hear anything but what’s being said. It’s a relief hanging out with her.
“So, anyway.” He passes her his backpack. While she settles on top of it, Bo looks for his cigarette. Finds it broken on the ground. “Want another one?”
Charlie shakes her head. “Save it for later.”
“I’m going to visit Mamma,” he says. “See if she needs anything. Want to come?”
Charlie shivers, draws her knees up to her chest. “No point sticking ’round here all day, I guess.” She ruffles HeeHaw’s ears until the dog rolls over and offers his belly. “But I got to be home by five. What time’s your Mamma get off work? Can she take us home after? Reverends are coming over to talk about the twins’ naming ceremony, and Daddy says we all gots to be there for Shelby ‘cause Ted-the-asshole’s done a runner.”
Bo jumps in before she gets warmed up. Lately, Charlie takes any chance she can get to heap abuse on her sister’s ex. He hates to think what she’d say about Mamma.
“Let’s take our bikes,” he says. “Who knows when she’s coming home.”
“Pass me a cig, babe. They’re in my purse.”
The acoustics of Mamma’s thoughts are more complex than Pa’s. There’s more feedback in her phrases, more echo. Bo looks at Charlie: she doesn’t notice anything unusual, just sits there chatting with his mother in pure, singular tones. Cargo trucks roar down the interstate beside Mr. Dewinter’s motel, rattling the glass in Room 2A’s only window as they go. Between clinks Bo hears the need for nicotine wheeze in Mamma’s lungs. He feels the discomfort of her orange polyester skirt and snug matching blouse scratching at the back of his mind. She hasn’t worn a uniform since before he was born. It doesn’t look good: the fabric makes her look sick. She’s lost weight to fit into it. And it clashes with her hair.
Mamma sits on the sill, resting her stockinged feet on the edge of the brown-quilted bed, runners abandoned on the floor. She leans back, quells the window’s rattle. Chewing gum pops between her molars as she alternately gnashes it and bites her fingernails.
Bo reaches over the armchair, its yellow upholstery decades beyond cheery, and grabs Mamma’s purse. Causing a clatter of keys and lipsticks, he rummages for the cardboard pack that inevitably sinks to the bottom; swipes the cool plastic of her lighter, and hooks it with his fingertips.
Smelling the over-used, but not lived-in, scent of the room emanating from the carpet, he wants to say, What are you doing? You can’t live here forever. Mr. Dewinter has been too nice, giving her a job, paying her in room and board. She should come home. Then he could tell her about the tentacles, about how they itch, about how they hurt, about how they scare HeeHaw. How they scare him too.
He opens his mouth. Closes it. He inspects her neck for evidence of hickeys. Looks at her mouth to see if her lipstick is smeared. Stares at her hands, her clothes, her unpainted eyes; as if they’ll be different now that Jethro’s got his paws on her.
A lump forms in his throat, so big it’s hard to light Mamma’s cigarette. It takes three tries, but eventually he gets it. He passes her the smoking white tube, cherry-tip pointed up, then snags another two from the pack. Gives one to Charlie, and lights the other for himself.
“When’s your break over?” he asks, just as Mamma says, “How many of them you had today?”
“Three,” Charlie says.
“Five,” Bo admits.
“Five,” Mamma echoes. She leans forward until she’s silhouetted against the late afternoon light. The tips of her curls glow with sky fire. He sneaks another peek at her through the thin trail of his exhalation. Is that a love poem slipping beneath her phrases, spun from words as red as her hair? She taps her cigarette against the bin dangling from her housekeeper’s trolley, watches the ash lilt to the bottom of a clear garbage bag.
“You shouldn’t smoke these things, you know,” she said, taking a long pull. “Stunts your growth.”
An image of Mr. Dewinter’s runty form accompanies Mamma’s warning. It vibrates up Bo’s chest-strings and stings him right in the heart. Mamma’s boss looks handsome when she thinks of him. Hot, even. Like the guy from all those Channel 2 movies; the one who always seems nice, even if he’s playing a scoundrel, because his eyes are so blue and his hair so ridiculously floppy. Mr. Dewinter’s doppelganger runs his hands through his unruly fringe. Smiles a dimple into his cheek as he calls Mamma Margaret. Not Maggie.
“What’s Mr. Dewinter’s first name?”
Charlie pipes up. “Andy. Right, Mrs. Stearman?”
Mamma raises an eyebrow. “Yeah. Why?”
Two ghostly men drip from the corners of Mamma’s mouth. The bald and soft one is Pa, no doubt about it. Beneath his shirt and bandages, Bo’s tentacles rasp with friction, sending messages of near-recognition to his brain as he focuses on the other man. He’s fair-haired, like Bo. Lean and tall. Rugged.
Fucking Jethro, Bo thinks.
Mamma coughs. Mr. Dewinter and Pa dissolve into motes, float into the air. Jethro clings to her lower lip, then peels away like a stolen kiss.
“You seeing him tonight?” The question blurts out before Bo can stop it.
She chuckles and picks a shred of tobacco from her tongue. “Get out of town, babe. Andy? He’s old enough to be my father. Besides, he’s my boss.”
Mamma’s throaty laugh is infectious. Soon Charlie joins in, giggles, “And what about your Pa? The Reverends would blow a gasket!”
Smoke sputters from Mamma’s nostrils as she swallows, falls silent.
That’s right, Bo thinks. You know what you’re doing is wrong. The filaments throb beneath his hoodie with a pitch so high he’s amazed HeeHaw doesn’t start howling outside. They push against their floral-patterned constraints; tug at something buried deep inside his ribcage; begin to snake in cool lengths down his belly. Pressure pulses across his torso as the strands pull and reach toward the far side of the room. Toward the window, and Mamma. The highway. Beyond.
Bluegrass Symphony Page 22
