Music of the Swamp

by Lewis Nordan

  Douglas said, “Ask me now.”

  Roy Dale said, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  Douglas stopped crying. He was about four and had a round moonlike face, streaked with dirt. He said, “Apple.”

  This was a joke the two of them seemed to share.

  Roy Dale smiled and said, “Okay now, take off.”

  Douglas said, “Ask me the next part.”

  Roy Dale sighed. He said, “Do you want to be a cowboy?”

  Douglas said, “No. Apple.”

  Roy Dale said, “A fireman?”

  Douglas was giggling now. He said, “Apple.”

  Roy Dale said, “Astronaut?”

  Douglas said, “Apple. Now say the best part.”

  Roy Dale said, “You’ve got no ambition.”

  Douglas said, “Say the next part. Say it right.” Douglas was laughing now, really hard. He lay down on the cot and kicked his feet while he laughed.

  Roy Dale said, “You’ll always be white trash.”

  Even Roy Dale was laughing now. Both of them were cracking up. Douglas laughed so hard he got the hiccups and Roy Dale had to say, “Boo!”

  Douglas said, “Okay, okay, I don’t want to be an apple any more.” Both of them were tickled but they were holding back.

  This was their favorite part. Roy Dale perfectly imitated his mother’s metallic voice: “My darling ambitious child!” he mugged. “My sweetest, most normal, most non-white-trash little angel!” he said, in his mother’s voice. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  Now both of them were rolling on the army cot. They were pounding each other on the back. They fell on the floor. They were hysterical. Douglas tried several times and was too tickled to speak. At last he blurted it out: “I want to be a dog!” They hooted, they screamed, they guffawed, they chortled and lost their breath.

  And then Douglas dried his eyes and got up off the floor. He was finished with the laughter. Roy Dale watched him, looking for something, I’m not sure what.

  Douglas said, “That was a bad one.” He meant the fight between Runt and Fortunata.

  Roy Dale said, “Your tongue is the snake that swallowed a frog.”

  Douglas did not laugh. He said, “Yeah. Right.” And then went on to bed in another room.

  IT WAS a good night for me to spend the night away from home. A steady rain had begun to fall and the clouds were dark and as low as the cottonwood trees in the bare grassless yard. Roy Dale and I sat alone in his room and played cards with a greasy deck of Bicycles and listened to the rain in the trees and on the roof and heard it puddle up in the yard. Life in the Conroy family went on and rarely touched the two of us. Supper was never mentioned, and my stomach gnawed on its own emptiness. It felt good to be hungry and to expect no food to relieve the hunger. It was easy to pay the small price of a night’s hunger for the sweet isolation that Roy Dale and i were allowed to share. It frightened me to enjoy these moments with a white-trash child who, until now, I had believed was put upon earth only for my manipulation.

  A few times family members stopped by our door and looked in. The twins who spoke in unison stopped for a moment and said nothing. Cloyce and Joyce.

  At last Roy Dale said, “You can’t come in here.”

  In unison they said, “We know that.” They shared their mother’s nasality, but in them it was sweet beyond belief.

  Roy Dale said, “Sugar is my friend, not yours.”

  In one voice they said, “We know that.”

  Roy Dale said, “You’re not really talking at the same time. Cloyce is talking first and Joyce is talking right behind.”

  In perfect duet they said, “You think you are so smart, Mr. Smartypants.” Then they went away.

  Roy Dale said, “Just be lucky you don’t have sisters.”

  Later Dora Ethel, the freak sister who wore makeup and got good grades, stopped at Roy Dale’s door. She said, “Hey, Sugar.” Talking to me.

  Dora Ethel was very pretty and I was surprised to find myself speechless and in love. I said, “Huh, huh, huh.” She said, “You’re cute.” The rain was drumming on the house. It was a tropical rain, a jungle rain. There was a prophet’s voice in the rain. It said: You will grow up to marry a white-trash girl Water stains were broadening across the ceiling.

  Dora Ethel really wanted to speak to Roy Dale, though.

  She said, “I’m going out.”

  Roy Dale said, “So?”

  Dora Ethel said, “So, look, I’m taking Daddy’s pistol, okay? Don’t tell, all right, but that’s where it is.”

  Roy Dale said, “Got a date?”

  Dora Ethel took the pistol out of her skirt pocket and twirled it on her finger in a funny little sexy way. She said, “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.” Dora Ethel was by far the cutest white-trash person I had ever seen.

  When she was gone I said, “She takes a pistol on a date?”

  Roy Dale said, “She goes with Grease Hodges. They shoot rats at the dump.”

  I said, “That’s what she does on a date?”

  Roy Dale said, “When it rains like this, yeah.”

  I said, “Shoots rats on a date? That’s what she does?”

  Roy Dale was not defensive. He said, “Her and Grease. It’s something they like to do together.”

  I said, “Grease Hodges?”

  Roy Dale let it drop. My heart ached with jealousy. I would never be old enough to leave the house beneath an apple-green night sky in a tropical storm, never old enough to love a girl who twirled a pistol on her finger, or to shoot rats at the dump for love. My genes had become infected with Conroy genes. I was terrified of the transformation, and I gloried in it.

  No one came in later to tell us good night. One by one the children put themselves to bed. Lights went out. Runt’s Pinto never returned, though Runt did, on foot. Maybe that was the night the Pinto exploded. Or maybe it only stalled out in the deep rainwater in the street. In any case, Runt came home, and there was no more fighting.

  Roy Dale took off his clothes and lay on the bed naked, so I got naked too, and together we lay and listened to the drumming insistent rain. The yard outside our window was a lake. Douglas, who usually slept on the army cot, slept somewhere else tonight. We turned off the electric bulb hanging from a cord in the middle of the room and lay in the loud sounds of constant tons of falling water. Even Dora Ethel finally came in, dripping wet, and skulked through the house trying to replace Runt’s pistol without being seen. The room was not entirely dark. There were streetlights far away, and the light from Red’s All Night Bar at the end of the street. I could see Roy Dale place his hand between his legs, and so in a short time I placed my hand between my legs too, and we lay and breathed and did not speak.

  It was very late now. So much time passed that I thought Roy Dale might be asleep. He said, “Runt has slept with two-hundred and seventy different women.”

  I said, “Slept with them?”

  He said, “I found a list of their names.”

  I was beginning to catch on to what “slept with them” meant.

  I thought about this for a while. I said, “Can I see it?—the list?”

  He said, “It’s in the back of Runt’s closet in a box.”

  I said, “My daddy hides a rock-and-roll suit in the back of his closet. It’s black and it’s got Rock-n-Roll Music spelled out on the back in little glittery things, sequins.”

  Roy Dale said, “Do you want a rubber? I stole some from Runt’s drawer.” He reached under his mattress and took out a few foil-wrapped packets.

  I said, “Naw, thanks. Daddy’s got plenty. I blow them up. Put water in them. You know.”

  Roy Dale said, “You ought to try jacking off in one sometime. It adds a little something.”

  I said, “Hm.”

  We were silent again. The sound of the rain was without thunder. It was as constant as the feeling of loss that suddenly I felt inside me, that now I knew had been with me all along, a famil
iar part of me since the beginning of memory.

  Roy Dale said, “Jeff Davis can pull a condom down over his head.”

  I turned and looked at Roy Dale in the weird green light of the storm sky. I said, “Get real.”

  He said, “No, really. All the way down over his face. Ears and everything.”

  I turned and looked up at the dripping ceiling. I said, “Caramba.”

  Roy Dale said, “He pretends he’s robbing a 7-Eleven. Mama won’t let him use one of her stockings.”

  I said, “That’s really crazy, Roy Dale.”

  He said, “Right, I know. You can smother with a condom pulled over your head.”

  I said, “Caramba,” again.

  He said, “I know.”

  I said, “You would look pretty funny, you know, sticking up a store with a rubber over your head.”

  Roy Dale said, “It would be on the ten o’clock news. ‘Two Caucasian males wearing condoms over their heads . . .’” We laughed pretty hard at this. We tried not to wake anybody up, but we were pretty tickled, I can tell you.

  I said, “You wouldn’t be able to talk. You couldn’t say ‘Stick ’em up.’”

  Roy Dale said, “You’d have to go, ‘Ump ump ump.’”

  We laughed our damn heads off. We said, “Shh, shh!” And then we laughed some more.

  THERE IS not much more to tell. The storm outside was without wind and without lightning or thunder. The rain fell straight down and its falling did not diminish. The sound was constant, a pounding like heavy hammers that we could forget to hear. For a long time Roy Dale and I said nothing. He lay on his back, and I lay on my back. He did not touch himself and did not move. His breathing was soft and regular and I thought again he might be asleep. In the stillness a thought came to me like a friendly voice. The voice said: We are all alone in this world

  Just then Roy Dale said, “Your daddy has got a rock-and-roll suit?”

  I turned my head in his direction and could see his body outlined in the green light of the storm-sky outside the window. I said, “In the back of his closet.”

  Roy Dale said, “So, like, what does he do?—like, puts it on and dances around, or what?”

  I said, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think he just, you know, has it.”

  Roy Dale said, “Will you let me see it?”

  I thought about this. No one had ever seen the rock-and-roll suit but me. I sneaked looks at it when no one else was in the house. Still I said, “I guess so.”

  Roy Dale said, “Great.”

  I said, “We wouldn’t be, you know, like making fun of him or anything.”

  Roy Dale said, “No way. Uh-uh.”

  I said, “Well, okay, yeah, sure. I’ll show it to you sometime.”

  Roy Dale said, “Tonight?”

  I said, “Tonight?”

  Roy Dale settled back on his pillow. He said, “You’re right, it’s a bad idea.”

  I said, “No, its all right. We could do it tonight.”

  We did not go out that night, of course. We only lay in the dark and in the sound of the rain.

  In a while Roy Dale said, “Come on,” and the two of us stepped out of bed and moved quietly through the house and opened the cellar door. We were careful to wake no one. Jeff Davis might have called for the pumper trucks, the REO Speedwagon. Douglas might have wanted to be an apple. Cloyce and Joyce might have god-knows-what, in unison. Dora Ethel might have broken my heart. Roy Dale had a flashlight, which he shined into the darkness. At first I could see nothing, only the sturdy solid beam of light like a long pole. I followed behind Roy Dale, through the cellar door, down the steps, only two or three steps down before he stopped. He sat and I sat beside him.

  Roy Dale shined the light out into the basement and I understood for the first time what I was looking at, not mere blackness but deep water. The basement was four or five feet deep in rainwater. Roy Dale swept the light back and forth across it. I might as well have been Hernando DeSoto discovering the Father of Waters, the mighty Mississippi, for all my amazement at the sight. It was an interior sea, an indoor elementary mystery as dangerous and filled with evil meaning as any cavern, any water-filled cavity of the underworld.

  Then on the face of the deep I thought I could see something else, some moving thing, or things. I imagined eyeless fish, I imagined mermaids, I heard their song. Roy Dale caught them in the beam of his flashlight. Earnest little faces and diamond-bright eyes, moving through the water, swimming for dear life, no doubt, but as if for pleasure. It was rats. A dozen or more of them. Large doglike barn rats, swimming quietly and without desperation along the black surface of this cellar sea.

  Roy Dale said, “If Runt was awake he might let us shoot them with his pistol.”

  We took turns holding the flashlight on their sweet earnest evil little comical faces. I thought of the collie-size rats at the town dump. They were burrowed deep in the garbage. They were waiting for the rain to end. I thought of that time a few hours from now, when this jungle storm would be finished. I thought of the Delta moon shining in the after-storm sky, with its ragged slow-moving clouds. I imagined the collie rats creeping from their hiding places in the rank waste-pits of human misery and into the soft air. I saw them sit along riverbanks and scratch behind an ear or shake rainwater from their fur. I saw the collie-rats look up at the miraculous moon and howl and bay at its light. They barked and sang like mythical beasts and I heard the little town of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, fill up with their strange rodent harmony. I thought of the swamp-elves, happy in their marshy cozy dens. The deer bedded down in cane, the muskrats and the beavers and the ropey-whiskered catfish in the mud. One of us held the flashlight on the little swimmers while the other pointed a finger like a pistol and made pistol sounds—balooey, or ptoosh, or blammo!—and we passed the night in the belief that feeling love for each other and for this single incredible moment in time was all in the world that was important, and that it needed no acknowledgement, not even with a single word.

  Later, when we had finished the game and only sat and shined the light onto the water, the old cat crept down the stairs and passed the two of us on the steps, first holding her tail up as she rubbed past, and then going all the way down to the last step visible above the surface of the waves. Roy Dale held the light on her, and we watched her test the water only once, briefly, one second, with one paw, before entering it in a kind of slow, mad cat-dive outwards, sploosh. The cat swam out into the cellar sea, holding her head high above the water and then relaxing some and swimming with confidence and ease. She was trying to corner one of the rats in the flood. Roy Dale and I cheered the cat. We shouted whispered directions—“This way!” and “Behind you!”—and we tried to direct the cat to individual rats with the beam of the flashlight. It was no use. The cat was a good swimmer but no match for the experienced rats. This was their home, and there were frequent heavy rains in the Delta. Finally she gave up and left the water, back up the steps the way she had come, defeated and cranky and soaking wet, not even shaking herself to dry her fur. An apathetic, lazy, white-trash cat.

  Roy Dale and I were finished. We were tired and sleepy. We turned off the flashlight and went back up the stairs. Roy Dale eased shut the cellar door, so that no one heard. We went to bed then and snuggled close to each other. I felt his rough white-trash alligatory skin against my own softer skin and was comfortable and drowsy and I listened to the rain and I knew that it was falling more softly now, coming to an end, and that tomorrow everything that had been thrown underneath my own home a few blocks away—the empty whiskey bottles, the soup cans and empty paint buckets, a dead battery, a hairless doll, a slick tire, scraps of paper, indescribable garbage, the ice pick my father once stabbed himself in the chest with while I watched him, the towels he bled into as his face turned white while my mother closed the window shades so that no one else would see—all this would have been washed out from under our house by the jungle rain. It would lie in the yard and on the sidewalk a
nd in the street for anyone to see. And then my mother would gather it all up again and toss it beneath the house again, and again we would forget.

  I moved my body close to Roy Dale. I reached in the darkness, afraid even to open my eyes, afraid he would disappear, and I held him to me. I embraced him. I encircled him. We were like spoons together. We were like swamp-elves. And in this way we went to sleep, bare-assed children, the two of us, and in my memory not blameworthy for any sin and not even victims of the sins of our sad fathers, but, only that moment, in love with what is and what has always been or what might forever be.

  Porpoises and Romance

  AFTER THE hurricane, beach houses along the Gulf coast rented for a song, and so that was when my daddy got the idea of taking my mama on a second honeymoon. My mama said she never had a honeymoon in the first place, what did she want with a second one.

  Daddy said they would take long walks and watch the sun rise and eat crabs and rent bicycles and browse in shops. He said they would put the zip back in their marriage.

  Mama said, “Crabs! No way, José.”

  Daddy said it would be like having their own private beach.

  Mama said, “I don’t know why you want to be riding on a bicycle.”

  He said, “Come on, baby. Let’s fall in love all over again.”

  Mama said, “Well, all right. Can Sugar go along?”

  Daddy said, “On our second honeymoon?”

  I said, “I ain’t studying no second honeymoon.”

  Mama said, “I’m not going on no second honeymoon less Sugar comes along.”

  Daddy said, “It don’t seem right, falling in love all over again right in front of your own boy.”

  Daddy was right about one thing anyway. The beach was deserted. It was worse than deserted. The hurricane had blown most of the sand five miles inland, not to mention the hotels. The beaches were mud, the hotels were hideouts for murderers and swamp-midgets. Daddy said, “Well, wouldn’t you think they’d have got this place cleaned up a little by now?”

  We were standing on the beach, which was filled with dead fish and other animal carcasses, including a whale full of buzzards.