Little Boy Blues

by Malcolm Jones

  Because the funeral was at two in the afternoon, no one had had time to eat dinner between church and the funeral service. So when we got back to the house where Uncle Buddy had lived with Uncle Robert, everyone fell on the food as though it were the last meal they would ever see. I was secretly glad to see the mob in the tiny kitchen, because this meant I could postpone eating and maybe avoid it altogether. I hated eating in front of my relatives, because those occasions brought out the bully in my mother: she would make me eat anything just to prove that her boy wasn’t picky. Standing in the living room, I noted that for the first time, the house lacked the stale man smell that I had come to expect as soon as I crossed the porch and entered the front room. The aromas of food filled the neatened, tidied space: ham and salad, cold fried chicken, frosted cakes, jugs of iced tea. The curtainless windows were open because there was no air-conditioning, but someone had pulled the shades on the sunny side of the house, preserving its habitual, ambered dimness. The only other child there was one of my girl cousins who was too nice to play after a funeral and who had gone back to the kitchen and found a job pouring tea into glasses. The men took their food out to the front porch and the unpainted front steps that led down to the bare dirt yard. The women stayed back in the kitchen.

  I drifted from one group to another until Mother swooped down, filled a plate and told me to eat. I found a spot on the end of the sofa, in a dark corner away from everyone, where I pushed food around on my plate and listened to the women murmuring back and forth in the kitchen while they fussed over the food. After a few minutes, my father’s sister Mary came and leaned on the door between the kitchen and the living room with her back to me. I watched while she rooted in her purse for a cigarette. I heard the match strike, heard her inhale. She was talking to my mother.

  “Is he still playing with those dolls?” I flinched, waiting for Mother’s reply.

  “You mean his marionettes?”

  “The puppets, yeah.”

  “He gave a performance at his school last month. A photographer from the paper came out. I sent a clipping to Mack. I’ll send you one, too.”

  I didn’t wait to hear more. I left the living room by the door that led to the hall that ran the length of the house. At the back of the hall, when I was sure no one could see me, I threw the paper plate, still full of food, in the trash and went out the back door.

  My cousin Mary Maxwell was sitting on the steps. I got her to go with me to look at Uncle Robert’s mule, but it stayed on the far side of the paddock and we couldn’t tease it into charging us where we hung on the fence. When my cousin got bored and went back to the kitchen steps, I decided to go up front where the men were sitting. As unobtrusively as I could, and without looking at anyone, I found a scrap of shade thrown by the porch and squatted down, balancing thighs on calves and rocking back on my heels.

  “Hey now,” one of my uncles said, “don’t he look just like a country fella, a-settin’ there on his heels in the shade. I reckon he must be a real Jones after all, right, Mack?”

  I heard my father’s familiar laugh—as much a tobaccocured bark as laugh. “Yes sir,” my uncle said, “he’s gonna be a country boy. Just like his daddy.” I tried not to grin and I kept my head down while I made a show of casually doodling in the dust with a twig I found lying at my feet. But when I heard my mother at the screen door calling my father’s name, I jumped up like I had been slapped, losing my balance and setting off a chorus of chuckles from the porch. “Still getting the hang of it, are you, boy?” someone asked. I grinned and looked down. “‘Ats all right, you stick with your daddy, he’ll teach you.” Mother called Daddy’s name again. I wondered if she had heard what the men had been saying.

  “Come here, boy,” Daddy said from where he was sitting on the worn, unpainted steps that led up to the porch. I found a seat on the bottom step, right between his knees, in his shadow. Even there, I thought I could feel my mother’s gaze on my neck. Daddy was smoking and talking to the other men on the porch. Craning around Daddy’s knee, I took a quick peek at the porch, but in the deep shade, all I could make out was a sea of white shirts, dark slacks and shiny black oxfords. I recognized most of the men there by their voices: Uncle Richard; Uncle Steve, who was married to Aunt Lib; and Uncle Charlie, who was married to Aunt Mary. Uncle Robert, the brother who had shared the family home place with the deceased, sat alone at the end of the porch, not saying anything, and there were two or three men I had never seen before. I was afraid to turn all the way around and stare, for fear they would tease me some more or, worse, interrogate me. I was even more fearful that my mother would call me into the house. Teasing or no teasing, I would take my chances there with the men. Finally I thought I heard her heels clicking back down the hall. My father reached down and roughly massaged the top of my head.

  “Time for a haircut.”

  “Yes, sir.” I liked the feel of Daddy’s calloused hand. Then I lost myself in the easy flow of talk swirling around my head. All of the men were in their shirtsleeves. Some had loosened their ties, and a couple had dispensed with them altogether. The cane-bottom chairs brought out from the kitchen creaked as each man finished eating and set his plate on the porch. It was the time of day when most of these men might have been grabbing a nap, and the conversation had a drowsy tone. No one spoke directly to anyone else. Instead, each in his turn, and taking his time about it, embellished the last statement that still hung in the hot, windless summer air. The theme of the conversation passed from one man to the next, like a fugue, subtly transforming from topic to topic as it meandered up and down the porch. I was trying to make sense of what they were saying—something about someone drowning in a swimming pool—when my mother’s voice knifed through the screen door.

  “Mack, can I talk to you?”

  The porch fell silent. You could hear the birds in the trees across the road.

  “In a little while,” Daddy said, knocking the ash off his cigarette. This time she didn’t wait long. I heard her walk away. The men resumed their conversation.

  When she came back the third time, Uncle Charlie stood up and came down the steps to where I was sitting. Tapping me on the shoulder, he said, “Let’s you and me take a walk.”

  Uncle Charlie ran a gas station. He was one of those men who are neither tall nor short, fat nor thin, so vague in aspect and outline that you had to remind yourself that he was in the room with you. In this he was the opposite of his wife, who, like her mother, was all angles and bones. Like my father and her sister, Aunt Lib, Aunt Mary had dark eyes and dark hair, and she talked to children in a joking, grownup way that let you know she took you seriously. I liked riding in her car and watching her smoke while she drove. There was something glamorous about her. But I didn’t like her the way I liked Charlie. Charlie never said much, but he was always calm and good humored. When I was much smaller, he had given me a little gas-station-attendant’s suit, a one-piece pullover with the Pure logo sewed onto the front. I liked wearing the gas-station suit when I played with my trucks, even though I was never sure what men did in a gas station when they weren’t pumping gas or putting cars up on the hydraulic lift.

  When we came around the side of the house, my cousin was still on the back steps.

  “Come on, Mary Maxwell, take a walk with us,” Uncle Charlie said. We followed him down the path behind the house that wound through some trees and came out at the pond. You couldn’t see the house from there. There was a dam at one end, where you could stand and fish. The other end of the pond was marshy and littered with downed trees that obscured the bank, the water stagnant and covered in algae. Here and there turtles dozed on the logs that broke the electric green surface of the pond scum.

  “Let’s set awhile,” Charlie said, lowering his compact bulk down in the grass that edged the pond. Mary Maxwell had on a dress, so she didn’t sit. When I sat down beside my uncle, the dry, shardlike grass stabbed me through the thin cotton of my Sunday pants. I raised my knees and clasped my hands ar
ound my legs. I was a town boy, and I felt uncomfortable out here. Still, I liked being with my cousin and my uncle, away from the porch and the food I was afraid to eat, casseroles and slaws.

  I watched a turtle for a minute or two, trying to decide if I could hit it with a rock from where I sat. I scouted around on the ground at my feet, but just when I found a rock that I thought would work, I heard a plop in the water, and when I looked up, the turtle was gone. My uncle had been talking since he sat down, and suddenly I heard a sentence end with a questioning tone. I hoped he wasn’t talking to me, and I was relieved when I heard my cousin say, “Yes, sir.”

  “And we don’t always know why He does what He does,” Charlie was saying. Who was he talking about? My father? I had thought that this was going to be one of those talks about my parents where people commended me for being a brave little boy, although while I was quite willing to be brave, I had no idea what they meant. That was all right, though, because no one was mad at me and no one was after me to do anything. All I had to do in those conversations was pretend to listen. But Charlie was talking about something else and it took me a couple of sentences to figure out my place in the conversation.

  “God takes us to be with Him. We don’t always know when He’s going to do it. Sometimes it’s real sudden, like with Buddy. He was here and then God took him. And you shouldn’t be sad, because now he’s with Jesus.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, proud that I knew the South Carolina relatives set a high store by good manners. Not that my mother didn’t, too. But I could slip at home and get away with it the way I knew I couldn’t here, and I wanted my mother to be proud of me and not get in trouble with my grandmother and the aunts whom she didn’t like because they didn’t like her and who treated my father like a baby and that was why they could never have a marriage.

  “You know Jesus loves us all, don’t you, son?”

  “Yes, sir.” Red and yellow, black and white.

  “We just have to trust Him to do the right thing, don’t we?”

  “Yes, sir.” They are precious in his sight.

  “So we should be happy that Buddy is in heaven with God and Jesus, even if we’re sad he’s not here anymore.”

  “I know.” Except Buddy was fond of my mother the way the other relatives weren’t. He thought she was a fine lady and that Daddy treated her wrong and shouldn’t drink, and now he was dead, so she didn’t have anyone on her side anymore.

  I wondered if Uncle Buddy had left me his silver dollars in his will. Death to me then was no more than a shadowy thing that took away the shadowy people in my life, but wills I knew all about. My mother’s mother had died the year before, and ever since Mother and her sisters had debated, in letters, longdistance calls and kitchen-table conversations, the provenance of a host of items, from pianos to pie plates. It was also the first will in which I had been included. I got a quilt.

  “Is your school out up there?”

  “No, sir. We got another week.”

  “Been out here a week, I think they said.”

  “We had snow days to make up.”

  “You get a lot of snow up there, way up north?” Uncle Charlie laughed at his own joke.

  “We had a foot last year once,” I said, turning to look up at my uncle, afraid he would think I was bragging. Bragging was on Mother’s list of things I wasn’t supposed to do. But then I remembered that Charlie didn’t know about the list, so maybe it would be all right.

  “We better get back,” Charlie said. “They might be missing you.”

  Sure enough, when we got back up to the house, my mother grabbed me by the arm as soon as I came around the side of the porch.

  “Where have you been? You know better than to go off—” But she stopped when Charlie appeared behind me.

  “We just went for a little walk,” he said.

  “Well, that’s all right. But you should tell me when you’re going off like that,” she said to me. “Now hurry and get in the car, we have to be on the road.”

  “Stop by the station, Margaret,” Charlie said. “Tell ‘em I said to fill you up.”

  I knew my mother was in a hurry to leave, because she didn’t make me go inside and kiss my grandmother goodbye. When I looked around for Daddy, I couldn’t see him anywhere, but there was no time to go hunting for him, Mother said. “Mack doesn’t want to have anything to do with us today.”

  Mother didn’t do what Uncle Charlie had told her, just drove straight through Lancaster and gunned it when she hit the highway. It had taken us five hours to drive down that morning, so even if we hurried we were going to get home long after dark.

  By the time we got to the outskirts of Charlotte about an hour later, she had to stop for gas. She gave me money to buy a Coca-Cola and some crackers from the vending machine outside of the greasy service station.

  “Go to the bathroom,” she said, as I climbed out of the car. “And wash your hands!”

  At the vending machine, I discovered that I had enough change left over for another drink, which I presented to her when I got back in the car. Now she would see that I wasn’t being selfish.

  “Lord ha mercy,” she said and waved me off. “How do you expect me to drink that and drive?”

  “I’ll hold it for you,” I said.

  When she had pulled back onto the highway, she asked, “Did you go to the bathroom like I asked you?”

  “No’m. I forgot.”

  She made a face.

  I stuck one drink between my legs and put the other one against my forehead when I wasn’t taking sips. I wasn’t sure how long I could hold it, so I measured the sips out as slowly as I could. Even so, I was well into the second bottle a half hour later when Mother took a curve too fast and the empty bottle clattered across the floorboard of the car.

  “What were you thinking, buying two drinks? And now you’ve got crackers all over your nice pants.”

  Uncle Buddy had died on Friday night, but because no one had called to tell us until Saturday morning, there was no time to get to Lancaster in time to visit the funeral home on Saturday. “Those Joneses do everything in such a rush. I guess that’s the country in them.”

  “Like hillbillies?” I asked.

  “No, not like that,” she backtracked. “They just have their way of doing things.”

  “Do I do things the Jones way?”

  “No, sugar, you don’t. Mack Jones can’t even be bothered to get on the phone and call himself, oh no sir, he has to get his sister to call and tell me about Buddy. He sends one letter in three months, never calls and now he can’t even get on the phone to tell me the funeral arrangements. When you get married, I hope you have better sense than to treat your wife like that.”

  We had just picked up the four-lane on the other side of Charlotte when we hit heavy traffic. For a mile or so it was slow, and then it stopped completely. When we reached the crest of a hill, I stuck my head out the window to see if I could tell what was causing the tie-up, but all I could see was a double line of cars stalled in the northbound lane all the way to the next hill shimmering in the late-afternoon sun. It was already after five.

  From there on we crept, my mother never shifting above second, for most of an hour. Even when we were moving, we went so slow that we were being passed by people who had gotten out of their cars to walk forward on the shoulder to see what was holding everything up. Just before six—we had covered less than two miles in the last hour—we came to the top of another hill. From there we could see the Charlotte Motor Speedway in the distance. But since neither my mother nor I knew anything about such things, we did not immediately understand that the racetrack was the cause of our trouble. Not until we had drawn almost even with the gate and saw the cars pouring in antlike streams out of the parking lot did we realize that we had blundered into the traffic exiting the race. There was a lone highway patrolman waving traffic into the sluggish stream.

  “What is the World 600?” I asked.

  “It’s a race, honey,
a car race.” She did not sound very certain.

  “Like the demolition derby?” A mile or so from our apartment, there was a huge lot, fenced inside a fortress wall of corrugated sheet metal, that was turned over to demolition derbies every Saturday night. I had seen pictures. The cars in those events were old clunkers that looked even older than the one my mother drove or like the car in the movie ad in the paper for Thunder Road, the one that had the picture of Robert Mitchum looking like he was out of his mind. My father had promised to take me to the demolition derby once, but I was pretty sure that he didn’t mean a word of it and was just trying to get my mother riled up, because he laughed when she got mad and never brought it up again. I was secretly relieved. There was something frightening about the idea of men driving cars into other cars, destroying each other as a means of winning. I did not like fights. I had enough of that at home. More than that, I was unsettled by the words that people who knew cars used: hemi and header and gasket and cam and rocker panel and dual carbs and all that. Whenever I was around men and boys talking cars, it was like listening to a foreign language.