by Jacob White
“It don’t look like ground oil!”
“Y’all planned all this high as hell,” wheezes the fat man. “It’s got too serious.”
“Yeah, we shock-and-awed them bees, shit . . .”
“Man,” says the young one on the pallet, lifting his forearm a few inches off his black eyes so I see for a moment the lipless Panhandle face, “you done ruined the whole ground. I just wanted to come here and sit in the shade and drink. Damn.”
“My days drinking outdoors is over,” says the pourer. “I got appointments with two potential clients tomorrow, lobby of Flagler Hotel.” He pushes himself up and hands the gas can back to Dawlie. “You and yours grab y’all a beer out that bag. We Christian. I got to lie down.”
Humanities Club is at two and I won’t make it now. “Come on, Dawlie,” I say.
“Come on, Dawlie,” jeers the drunkard on the log but everyone ignores him. Dawlie’s peeled off his shirt to swat the bugs and they all see how his slick white back is wider than it is tall. But Dawlie is also most parts deaf and already reaching into the plastic bag.
I know for a fact one of the men here is a rapist. The paper said one was out and living in the woods here—roaming our yards like some neighborhood Labrador. There was a picture, Billy Graham with glasses and a wadded little mouth, and something about a fused knee. But all homeless men around here have a knee that won’t bend. The pourer’s fine little spectacles recall the rapist or a rapist from a movie, but when he stands and walks briskly to the shade he is too short, his knees fat and limber. “There’s some fume coming out of there,” he says discreetly to fat man, sitting down next to him.
Dawlie, limping about like one of them, walks over slowly and sits on the log by the drunk that mocked him, gas can between his boot heels like he’s ready to go. But he doesn’t go. He sits there chuckling with dazed slack eyes as the men around him talk holes in each other’s head. I am somehow afraid to leave him here—my presence in the grove has lightly stupefied the men—so I walk down to the marsh and watch hermit crabs skittle.
Two minutes into this reverie, there’s a scuffle behind me, then a scuttling in the woods, squeals. When I turn, three of the men are stamping around in the clearing, among them the bearded one who’d been dying in the dirt—“Hell was that?” He toes an empty plastic Diet Pepsi bottle next to a dark spot where he lay. “They throwing bottles of water at us.”
“No.” Fat man is smelling two fingers. His shoulder and the side of his hair are soaked. “No, they not throwing water.” Several plastic bottles lie around the clearing.
The Sweetwater one walks in circles, shaking his head and scratching the back of his neck. “They got us, y’all. Admit it, them kids got us good . . .” The man is crazy.
“Where’s Tully?” the pourer says. The skinny one on the pallet is gone. A few slats are stained dark.
“Gone after them,” the bearded one says.
“The kids?”
“Little head popped up over that bush there. Nailed Tully about point blank.”
“Lord.”
“Them kids don’t want to mess with no flashback,” says man on the log. Dawlie sits there next to him, still, smiling and watching, the whole left thigh of his shorts soaked. Another Diet Pepsi bottle lay a few feet away. He’s hit worse than any of them.
“Dawlie, look at yourself,” I say. “You had enough?”
Dawlie nods. He does this preemptive forward lean that he usually reserves for Thanksgivings, half a minute on the edge of Kaylee’s couch before finally rolling up on his legs and out the door. It’s the closest he’s ever managed to good-bye pleasantries.
But before he can get up, a black woman I’ve seen a thousand times but never talked to swats through the fronds and stands looking at the oily spatter, then at the men. I feel like she’s probably done this before, since neither the men nor she seems surprised to see each other.
“My girl say y’all trying to burn up the woods.”
“No,” says the pourer, standing and waving his hand tiredly. “She misunderstood.”
The woman’s eyes run all over the pile of gas and oil cans. “What she misunderstood?”
A few old boys open their mouths to answer this but can’t.
“I had just come back here to investigate what they were up to,” I say. “My husband Dawlie and I.”
The lady ignores me. “Y’all pouring stuff in the ground?”
“We doing some work,” says this Sweetwater.
“Y’all doing work,” she nods.
“You won’t believe this,” I say, “but—”
“Y’all aren’t setting to burn nothing, are you?”
The pourer quickly stands, hand out, shaking his head. “No, no, no”—Newww, newww, newwww, like you say to a small dog hopping at your candy bar. He walks to the center of the clearing. “No, ma’am. This is a work site and frankly ain’t safe for kids.”
The others like this and nod.
“You putting stuff in the ground there? What y’all doing?” Her eyes finally fall on Dawlie and the gas can between his heels. He doesn’t notice. He doesn’t even care he’s wet. He sits there staring at nothing, mouth shut with that half-attentive grin. He looks odd here in the forest, younger. Awake.
“We trying to bring in some development,” the pourer says. He cleans his spectacles in his shirt, shaking his head. “We trying to bring a little money to the neighborhood.”
“The neighborhood? What neighborhood? I done called the police.”
“Your little girl threw pee at us, lady,” says the drunk on the log next to Dawlie. “Pee.”
The woman gives that electric stink glare that black women can give when they are offended. I am tired of this glare.
“Ma’am,” I say, stepping forward, “the children did come back here throwing pee. They hit my husband Dawlie—by accident, I’m sure. We live right up the street—”
“They live back ’air,” says the bearded man.
She looks at me like I’m a talking tree, then takes a step toward the pourer, thumbing over her shoulder. “And your friend—one come blazing out after them Hope House kids—”
“He’s a veteran, ma’am. He’s a good boy.”
“Well the dog on him now.” She shook her head. “Was in my yard creeping.”
“The dog?” fat man says. “It attacking him? He getting attacked?” No one stirs.
“Tully been through a lot,” says the pourer. “He can’t handle no dog.”
“Go on get him then,” says the woman. “He in the garage with Max. White house, green shutters.”
Still no one moves. Fat man yawns. “That dog at bay, then?”
“Long as he don’t move.”
“How long you going to leave him there?”
The woman looks at Sweetwater. “Till the police come, darlin.”
“Lady, we covered with pee,” says the pourer.
The woman nods. “Might help cut that oil.” And it’s only now I get it. She is going easy on them.
“Listen,” I say loud to Dawlie, “I got to get to Humanities Club,” even though Humanities Club is over and the lady’s already turned and swatted her way out of the clearing, without once acknowledging Dawlie and me even though she knows we live right down the street and always have.
“Y’all come on back any time,” the pourer says, and Dawlie follows me out of there as the men resume their boardroom gibberish. Walking back up the path, we hear kids racing through the thickets alongside us.
“They pouring gas back there!” one yells from the street.
“They ‘bout to burn it up!” the other yells, tearing loose of the brush ahead of us—his sneakers going pow-pow-pow on the pavement. Across the street, the other Hope House kids run circles around the house, yelling, “Burn it up! Burn it up!”
We ease b
ack up the street, Dawlie limping and me slowing to his pace. Somehow I’m carrying the gas can. “I feel a little loose today,” I say.
“The heat.”
“I feel like trash.”
He nods. “Paid me pump rate for that gas—you believe that?” He shakes his head.
Up from Hope House is a neat little bungalow with green shutters and a clean white driveway. A German Shepherd sits out in the middle, its snout pointed at the open garage, very erect and still with its triangle ears.
The dog glances over its compact Egyptian shoulder as we pass, face char black, then resumes its observation of the garage. Observation is the only word.
“There’s that ole’ boy,” Dawlie says, and I look. I have to squint, but he’s back in there, sitting on a workbench against the back wall. Hands in pockets, big white sneakers dangling and stirring. It looks cool in there.
Dawlie pauses to wave before limping on. “He ain’t in too much trouble.”
The tide is out and the afternoon has that scooped-out smell. It’s turned quiet; the Hope House kids have disappeared inside. A prop tour-plane mows the long afternoon sky. We need to get on our yard.
There’s a loud whap from the garage, but when I look back the dog hasn’t moved. “That man’s going to get hurt, Dawlie.”
Dawlie reaches over as we walk; I hand him the empty gas can. He holds it on his other side so it isn’t so strong. “A German Shepherd is a smart dog.”
13. Your Father Needs More Time
The Jew
She said have a seat and went into the kitchen, a mirror image of my own down the hall, but then again, because she was seventy-five, in no way a mirror image. The kitchen was of course nothing but a pen created by the breakfast bar, if that is what they are still called, if people are still willing to call them that. People here rely heavily on the breakfast bar. Not for breakfasting or even for drinking at, but for how it holds the room together. Holds everything together. Breakfast bar sums it up.
The old Jew stood in there under a neon, twisting out ice. Her knuckled back was to me and through the dyed frizz her scalp shone. I could see the ball of her skull. “I’m going to give you lots of ice,” she shouted. “I see how you go through it.”
“The usual ice is fine.” We hollered as though from different rooms.
“You eat it. Crunch crunch crunch.”
“Okay.”
“You macerate it.”
“It makes no difference to me.”
“No difference to him,” she said coming around the breakfast bar, like she knew everything, everything. I had just dropped off my second month’s rent.
It had been during my first week in the complex, giddy still with the new catastrophe of my life, that I developed the merry habit of knocking on the jamb when I passed her open door. Just a neighbor checking in, twirling my mail key until invited in for a drink—late enough so it wasn’t conspicuous I hadn’t been at work, but not so late as to be really good-timing it. A prudent little cocktail hour we never ruptured. The window light gave way to lamplight, and I got buzzed on a mild immigrant mother fantasy, she on some sort of low-frequency flirting, or it was the other way around, or it was both ways. I was to leave when her show came on.
“You don’t have a dog, do you?” She held out over the coffee table a trembling tumbler thick as an ashtray at its base, where it was tinted a pale blue from some ribbon in the glass the eye couldn’t get at. The pebbly wrist was just managing, and as I half stood to relieve her of the heavy tumbler, cupping a hand beneath to catch the icy slosh, she teetered backward, her black eyes holding hard on me as if for balance, or just awaiting an answer. A dog? Before I could respond she shook her head and walked back to her chair. “Everybody here has dogs.”
I nodded and instead of talking tugged back the knees of my slacks and rested the drink in my crotch. It was what I always did. My little sham of down-on-heels gentility. Like a country judge who had been disbarred, or debenched, whatever, then bewildered out here for some somber penance. This sham carried in it somehow the sham of the patient son, the autumnal lover.
“Harold and I always had dogs,” she said. “I’ve had fifty dogs. There was a Scottie named Early Chester that sailed out to North Haven with us each summer. For weeks it ran rats out of the scrub brush and dashed down to the rocks and back barking. I don’t think you are supposed to let those kinds of dogs run loose. Something killed it.”
Harold, was it? We were advancing. We sipped our bourbon and ginger ales. “I don’t have a dog,” I said.
“I know that. I suppose I meant at your real home.”
Just over Buster Boyd Bridge was South Carolina and the house and the woman and boy. I shook my head. “There is no dog there, either.”
“Well. Don’t get one now.”
We drank to that. I picked up a little mahogany rhinoceros, tuskless. The Jew had built around herself crypt of such trinkage, things of tortoise and jade, china and brass. Lacquered Japanese things. Crap, really. Whether she had yachted in Europe or lived out of Northern dumpsters, it hardly mattered, she clearly wasn’t from Gastonia. I hoped it was clear I wasn’t from Gastonia. I replaced the rhinoceros on the chattering glass table. “I am having company,” I announced. She was doubled over, fumbling under the recliner for the remote.
“Well it’s good you should,” she said, subtle as queen, no way ever to decipher the inflection—whether it bespoke the delicately dismissive patrician authority I had originally suspected and that last month made me feel I’d joined some colony of reposing expats, or was just more of the practiced gibberish that had begun to recur over the weeks, like the silken blouse with its soiled cuffs, revealing beneath its frayed veneer something crepuscular and empty that I was coming to suspect more and more lately and that, upon suspecting, made me feel at times that I was sitting alone in a room with a dressed up cockroach. The show she watched every night was Hee Haw.
“I think it probably is good,” I said to myself.
“Company,” she said. Her sandaled foot had begun to stir and erect itself and bounce as it did before the show came on. She had found the remote and was holding it in her lap. A palsied thumb caressed the red button. I chewed the rest of my ice to snow. I raised the tumbler and turned it in the lamplight. “What would you call this?”
She looked through the murk at me, blinking, the black eyes little pebbles at the bottom of time. “In Jerusalem, I think.”
“I mean, this color. This blue.”
“Dead Sea.”
The Village
Outside, the walkway rumbled with bass. As I neared Dale’s open door the walkway’s aluminum railing rang with each concussion. My feet vibrated, my fillings.
“Mr. Hawthorne,” I said, lingering in the doorway, bass bouncing into me like big rubber wrecking balls. I had smelled the pot from the Jew’s.
He danced up from the couch, bandy in his baggy jeans, and turned down the stereo. Here was one of our obsequious Southern drug dealers, mantis-faced, with eyes of the cleanest white, the thinnest blue, piercing and empty. “What up, Cleve?” My name sounded bright and simple in his mouth, like I were made of Nerf. He delivered a swooping handshake.
“Is this the party?” I craned in and gaped around his apartment, a bungling father crashing a kegger. It was my line.
“Yeah dog. Word, word. Yo Cleve, I need you to do something for me.”
“You got it, bud.” He’d borrowed a drill gun from me last week and returned it the same day, battery charged. Around here, we borrow something, we bring it back same day, he’d declared. I was starting to like my little village. “Shoot!”
“That spot they gave you out there in the lot? I need you to use it.”
“I take your place again?” I shook my head. “Hell. Lot on my mind, I guess. Lot on my mind.”
He lifted his chin and smiled as though
I were standing about ten feet back. “It’s just, you know, I had to park up at the third phase. Then walk back down.”
“Third phase?” The third phase was a quarter-mile off. “Jesus.” I pictured a tiny little figure in the distance, working his way down the steep berms that separated each phase. Tiny little baggy jeans. I shrugged. “I guess someone was in my spot.”
“That’s what the Condo Association’s for, Cleve. That happens, you call them up.” He made a thumb and pinky phone next to his head.
“Well, now I feel like an ass,” I said, glaring hard so he’d feel like an ass. Condo Association? How about a joint, man?
“It’s okay, Cleve, but you been here over a month now and I won’t mention it again. It’s only, I had to park up at the third phase. Then walk back down.”
“Loud and clear. Anyway,” I smiled, “I’m expecting some company.”
“Cool, cool. Just, you know, keep it straight out there.” He didn’t quite laugh. “We good?”
I stepped out into the hallway and squinted off toward my own door, as though contemplating fairway yardage. Certainly I wasn’t going to apologize to this kid, standing before me bare-nippled with the milky tan of a teenager. “You got it,” I said and walked off. His door eased shut behind me, the bolt shot a little hard, then the throbbing bass and a little voice inside. “. . . That’s right we good, Jack . . .”
The Arborist
It was already dusk as I approached my own door. With a little inner shiver I saw my neighbor’s door gaping open, which was rare. I had seen him exactly twice since I’d moved in. He was in his forties and wanted to be left alone. Once in a while I heard the low murmur of a TV. He cleared his throat in his sleep.
I passed the doorway quickly, slipping a glance from the side of my eye. The apartment was dark but for the dull light of the sliding patio door in the back, open, a thin white curtain lifting into the room. The breeze wafted through the apartment and out the doorway, stirring my hair. A silhouette rounded the couch toward the patio door, a shirtless, bulky torso; the neck of an emerald bottle glowed at his side. The curtain filled and rose and spun like a bell to receive him.
