by Lee Martin
She tried to move away from Jackie, but he wouldn’t let her. He kept the song playing by imitating a saxophone, muted and raspy. To its melody, he danced with his mother there in the twilight, and the moment with Eugene in the wheat field was so far away, it was as if it had never happened at all.
Later, after Jackie’s father had replaced the blown fuse, the three of them sat on the front porch and listened to the faint grumble of thunder in the west. The sky flickered with lightning flashes along the horizon, and Jackie’s father stepped out into the yard. The days had been so hot and dry. Cars moving along the gravel roads trailed plumes of dust. The dust settled over the milkweed and the foxtail in the fencerows.
“Heat lightning,” Jackie’s mother said. “Just a fizzle and a tease.”
But then a few raindrops fell. Jackie could hear them hitting the leaves on the grapevines in the arbor. He held out his hand and felt one drop and then another.
“Maybe I was wrong.” His mother clapped her hands. “Maybe we’re going to get a shower. If it comes a soaker, I’ll kick off my shoes and dance barefoot in the rain. I won’t care how wet I get. What about that, Jackie? Wouldn’t that be fun?”
Jackie imagined his mother dancing in the rain, stomping about their yard, mud splattering her bare legs. She would slip and stumble and laugh like an idiot. He rested his head against the porch post, closed his eyes, and listened to the slow patter of the raindrops. He remembered the radio playing “You Belong to Me” in the kitchen and how marvelous it had been to dance with her.
Soon the raindrops stopped. Jackie opened his eyes and saw his father still standing in the yard, his hands on his hips, his head tipped back, face to the sky. “Not enough to lay the dust.” He looked down at his feet. He kicked at the hard ground. “This drought. I swear. It’s got me in a tight spot.”
“There are people worse off than us,” Jackie’s mother said.
His father laughed. “That’s right.” He came back to the porch and laid his hand on the post just above where Jackie was resting his head. “And they all owe me money.” There was still the distant sound of thunder. “Hear that? That’s God having a good chuckle over all us poor dogs down here, us saps.”
Jackie knew that something had happened. The good-natured fun his mother and father had poked at the drought and the tease of rain had dried up, and now there was an edge to his father’s voice. He slapped his hand against the porch post. Jackie felt the vibration in his head.
“And all we can do,” his father said, “is take it.”
Jackie started to speak, and what he told his mother and father was that Eugene Marks, that day in the wheat field, had let down his blue jeans and had shown Jackie the welts on his legs. Jackie described how hot the welts had been when he had touched them. “I think his dad did it,” he said. “I think he whips him with his belt.”
For a good while, neither Jackie’s mother nor his father spoke. Jackie saw them glance at each other and then look away. His mother crossed her arms over her chest as if she had suddenly caught a chill. His father pressed his lips together, took a deep breath through his nose, and then let it out.
“You know we love you, don’t you, Jackie?” he said. “No matter…”
His mother interrupted him. “He knows that. You do, don’t you, sweetie?”
“But Eugene,” Jackie said.
His mother opened her arms and held them out to him. “Come here and give me a hug,” she said. “Don’t you worry about such awful things.”
The next afternoon, Mr. Marks came to call. Jackie was helping his mother pick grapes. The vines were lush and green, and the Concords hung in blue-black clusters. Wasps flitted about, drinking from the grapes that the birds had pecked.
“Well, it’s cool here in the shade.” Mr. Marks took off his feed cap, and, holding it by the bill, he fanned his face. He closed his eyes and tipped back his head. “This is the greenest goddamn place I’ve seen in a long time.”
“My husband likes grape jelly,” Jackie’s mother said.
“Your husband.” Mr. Marks lowered his head and opened his eyes. “He’s a real go-getter, ain’t he? He gets his nose down a hole, he don’t say quit.”
Jackie knew, then, that Mr. Marks’s visit had something to do with his unpaid bill.
“Let me tell you how it is, missus.” Mr. Marks put his cap back on his head and tugged on the brim. “This drought’s about done me in.” His voice was quiet, nearly a whisper, as if he could barely say the words. “I’ll be lucky if I get enough from my crops to rub two pennies together. I don’t much have a pot to piss in. You tell your husband to leave off with his pestering me for money. Can’t get blood from a turnip.” He tried to laugh, but it came out in a hoarse croak. “Ain’t that what they say?”
“Yes, that’s the old joke,” Jackie’s mother said.
“Ain’t no joke,” said Mr. Marks. “Not when it’s you with your head in the ground.”
Jackie opened his mouth, meaning to ask after Eugene, to say something like, “How’s Eugene? Is he all right? Please tell him I said hello.” But just then a wasp swooped down from the Concords. It flew into Jackie’s mouth. He felt its papery wings brush the inside of his cheek. He tried to spit it out. Then he did the only thing he could think: he ran. He ran out of the arbor, his blocky shoes slowing him. He felt the wasp sting him on the tongue. He stumbled and fell face first to the ground. He lay there in the dust, his tongue throbbing, the wasp gone away from him.
“Jackie,” his mother called. She was picking him up from the dust. “Jackie. My word.”
“We all got our hardships, don’t we, missus?” Mr. Marks said. “No money, crops burned up. Crippled boy. We’re all just trying to get along.”
“He’s not crippled,” Jackie’s mother said.
Mr. Marks reached up and picked a grape from the vine. “No, and the sun don’t set in the west,” he said. Then he mashed the grape between his finger and thumb.
That night, when Jackie’s father came home and heard the story of the wasp, he laughed. “Partner,” he said to Jackie. “That’s the saddest goddamn thing.”
Jackie’s mother was at the stove, cooking down the grape pulp. Steam rose from the kettle and left her hair limp and her face red.
“Don’t talk about him like he’s one of your sob stories,” she said.
Jackie was sitting on a stool by the sink. His mother had made a paste from baking soda and water and spread it over the wasp sting on his tongue. He could still taste the cakey powder, and he held his mouth open and his tongue partway out as if he were an old dog panting.
“Oh, I’m just having fun,” his father said. “You know that, don’t you, partner? Just trying to take the sting out. You get it? The sting?”
Jackie wished that his father would turn away, go into the living room and read the evening newspaper. He wished his mother would go back to her canning. He loved to watch her pour the hot jelly into the glass jars and then cover it with melted paraffin. “Sealing in all the goodness,” she always said.
But now she said to Jackie’s father, “You should have heard Bob Marks. That horrible man. He called Jackie a cripple. Your son.” She banged the stirring spoon against the kettle’s rim. “Crippled boy,” she said, imitating Mr. Marks.
Jackie could hear something boiling up inside her, something that had nothing to do with Mr. Marks at all. She had done him so well, she had revealed herself. Jackie had read in his ventriloquist’s manual that people once thought that ventriloquists’ sounds came from their stomachs—belly talk—as if they had swallowed words whole, as if everything they had kept inside was now speaking.
The rage was rising in his father as well. “He said that? Goddamn him. Goddamn him to hell. He’s got his own boy to see to. What gives him the right to talk that way about mine? I ought to go over there. I ought to…”
“You’re not going anywhere,” Jackie’s mother said. The grapes were boiling and hissing, spattering juice onto the stove. Sh
e turned down the flame. “Listen to yourself. You sound just like him. Ugly. I don’t know what’s got into us.”
“Are you telling me what to do?”
“Yes, I’m telling you.”
“You can’t stop me. I’ll go over there, and I’ll take Jackie with me. I’ll tell Bob Marks, ‘Go on. Say it. Say my boy’s a cripple. Goddamn it, say it and I’ll knock your teeth down your throat.’”
The sun was low on the horizon when Jackie and his father got to the Markses’ farm. It was a red sun, the kind that on any other evening might have prompted Jackie’s father to say, “Red at night, sailor’s delight.” But he wasn’t talking now. He hadn’t said a word since his threat to knock Bob Marks’s teeth down his throat. Jackie had followed him out of their house, knowing without having to ask that this was what his father expected. His mother said, “Jackie, you stay here,” but he hadn’t listened to her. Something about the way she had imitated Mr. Marks had wounded him—something about the way her mouth had twisted and her eyes had squinted and she had spit the words as if she truly felt disgust for Jackie. He hadn’t wanted to be alone with her.
Mr. Marks and Eugene were in the wheat field, and Jackie could see that they were finishing their supper. There were chicken bones in the wheat stubble at their feet and Mason jars of sweet tea and the spiral of an orange peel. Mr. Marks had the orange in his lap. He pulled off a section and used the point of his pocketknife blade to pick out the seeds. Then he held the section out to Eugene, who tipped back his head and opened his mouth the way Jackie had seen baby birds do. Mr. Marks laid the orange section on Eugene’s tongue and then went to work on another piece.
Eugene closed his eyes and held the orange section in his mouth, sucking at it, his cheeks folding in and out. Jackie knew he was letting the juice trickle down his throat, making the sweet taste last. The grain truck, and the tractor and combine behind it, cast long shadows over the wheat stubble, and the aroma of the orange put a pleasant tang into the evening air.
The scene was something Jackie hadn’t expected: Mr. Marks feeding orange sections to Eugene there in the shadows, so cool after the day’s hot sun. Jackie could tell his father was startled, too, because he stopped walking through the field as if he were suddenly ashamed of the sound his boots were making in the stubble.
Finally Mr. Marks spoke. “Boy don’t like to feel the seeds in his mouth.” He finished picking out the seeds in the last piece of orange and then wiped his pocketknife blade across his leg. “It don’t cost me nothing to work ’em out.” He put the last orange section in Eugene’s mouth and then turned his attention to Jackie’s father. “I told your missus for you to back off. Now here you are again.”
Jackie followed his father into the shadow. The scent of the orange was stronger there, and Jackie thought about how sweet his own home had smelled—the grapes cooking down on his mother’s stove—while she told the story of Mr. Marks and what he had said that afternoon in the arbor.
“I hear you said more than that when you were over to my place today,” Jackie’s father said. “You had no call to talk about my son the way you did.”
“What was it I said?” Mr. Marks used his pocketknife to trim the top off a callus on his forefinger. “I don’t hardly recollect.”
Jackie understood immediately what had happened. Mr. Marks, with his question, had cornered his father. He would have to say what he had come to dare Mr. Marks to say—crippled boy—and when he did, there it would be, the saddest goddamn thing.
But his father hesitated, unable to bring up the words. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other as if the wheat stubble had suddenly poked through his shoe leather. Jackie thought how long a straw would have to be to penetrate the shoe on his own foot, the one with the built-up heel, the thick sole. He couldn’t bear the way his father danced about and couldn’t find his voice.
Finally, Jackie told Mr. Marks, “You said I’m a crippled boy. That’s what you told my mother.”
There was something about the fact that Jackie had said the words himself—said them simply and with no hint of judgment—that cooled the heat that had been building between his father and Mr. Marks. Jackie could see it right away. He saw it in the way Mr. Marks closed his pocketknife and wrapped his hand around it and made it disappear. He saw it in the way his father glanced back over his shoulder to their car, idling in the lane, as if he were now anxious to leave.
Eugene leaned over and spit an orange seed, one that Mr. Marks had missed, onto the ground. “You hadn’t ought to have said that about Jackie,” he told his father, and Jackie saw Mr. Marks’s knuckles whiten on the hand closed around the pocketknife. Jackie wished, then, that he had kept quiet. Eugene had been sitting there in the cool shadows enjoying the sweetness of the orange, and then Jackie had said what he had, and everything had soured. “He can’t help himself,” Eugene said, and Mr. Marks told him to hush.
“I mean it, Eugene.” Mr. Marks reached down with his free hand and snapped off a fistful of wheat stubble. “Don’t be poking at me. Not tonight. I’m burning a short fuse.”
Jackie’s father took a step toward Mr. Marks, and Mr. Marks rose to meet him. “You pay me that money you owe,” Jackie’s father said. “You pay me by the end of the week, or I’ll make it rough for you.”
Mr. Marks poked the blunt tip of the pocketknife casing into Jackie’s father’s chest. “Mister,” he said, “you don’t know what rough is.”
“End of the week,” said Jackie’s father, and then he turned, and Jackie followed him back to their car.
It was the scent of the orange that Jackie remembered the next day when his father came home with the news that Eugene was dead, that sometime in the night Bob Marks had beat him to death with his fists. Jackie was in his room, but he could hear his father and mother talking on the porch.
“Cracked his skull,” his father said. “His own boy. I heard it in town.”
Jackie’s mother didn’t answer right away, and when she did, it was in a whimper that chilled Jackie. He could imagine her at the moment when she first learned he was crippled, and he understood that everything he felt when he spoke to himself in front of his mirror—goddamn gimp—belonged to his parents, too.
“We knew all about it,” his mother said. “We knew Bob Marks was whipping that boy.”
“A lot of people knew. It wasn’t just us.”
“Yes, a lot of us, and not one of us said a word.”
“Just Jackie.”
“And I told him not to think of it. Doesn’t he have enough to face? Don’t we all? How ugly can the world be and any of us still be able to stand it?”
Jackie listened closely, not just to what his parents were saying but also to the silences around their words, to the shadows of breath. What he heard amazed him. He had no words for the feeling that came over him, but he recognized it from Eugene’s kiss on the playground, from the quiver in his stomach when he had touched the welt on Eugene’s leg, from the way his throat had filled when he had watched Mr. Marks feed Eugene that orange. It was theirs now, Jackie thought—his and his mother’s and his father’s. This trembling.
“Sweet Jesus,” he whispered in Eugene’s rasp and lisp.
He listened to the screen door creak open and then close with a faint tap against the jamb. He heard his parents’ footsteps on the stairs—his mother’s light scuff, his father’s heavy tread. He waited for them to open his door.
“Sweet Jesus,” he said again, this time in a voice so full it could be no one’s but his own.
BAD FAMILY
EACH WEDNESDAY, MISS CHANG DRIVES DOWNTOWN TO THE YMCA where, for two hours, couples practice the waltz, the swing, the Texas Two-Step. Often, she stands at the fringe of the dancers because she comes alone and must wait until she has worked up enough nerve to say to another woman, “You must excuse, yes?” Usually, the other women relinquish their partners to her graciously, but from time to time someone will hesitate, obviously annoyed, obviously wishing Miss Chang wo
uld choose some other couple to disturb. “That Chinese woman,” she hears someone say one night. “Why would a Chinese woman want to learn the Cotton-Eyed Joe?”
She wants to learn because she has never been graceful. When she was a girl, Mao sent people to the countryside to learn the meaning of work from the peasants. Miss Chang traveled to Inner Mongolia. She was fifteen, and for eight years she dug ditches and water wells. She wore men’s trousers, the legs rolled to her knees. She slogged through the muck, her steps heavy and thick. Even now, her feet on solid ground, she carries the hobbled motion in her legs. All day at the Mane Attraction Beauty Salon, she moves in halting steps as she shampoos, cuts, and perms. Only her hands, small and delicate, are agile and quick. She rarely drops a comb. Her fingers massage other women’s scalps. Sometimes she remembers how Mao’s Red Guard, because her parents were intellectuals who had gone to the university, cut her mother’s hair and shaved one half of her head so, when she went out on the street, everyone would know she came from a “bad” family. Now Miss Chang’s customers tilt their heads back into the cupped groove of the shampooing sink. They close their eyes. “Mmmmm,” they say, and Miss Chang closes her eyes too, and tries to feel the same luxurious motion they must feel when her fingers dance across their heads.
She has tried T’ai Chi, but she lacked discipline and balance; yoga, but she tired of tying and untying the knot of herself. She likes to watch Club Dance on The Nashville Network. She marvels over how women who have no natural claim to grace—who are too old, too heavy—can become so radiant, so lithe, in their cowboy boots and sequined shirts, bright scarves tied around their necks. The women spin and step, all of them smiling, never once looking down at their feet, as if this is a snap, this dancing, this beautiful liquid motion they have become.
