Buddy

by M. H. Herlong

  When we get home that night, I’m telling all about the refrigerator truck and this other truck that came along with a little Bobcat. That little Bobcat hustled up to our washer and dryer and picked both of them up at the same time—side by side just like they always were in the house. It carried them to the truck and set them down in the trailer and off they went, side by side forever.

  Tanya falls out laughing, and then Baby Terrell grabs one of her dolls and whops her, and Mama starts fussing, and Daddy shakes his head, and Rover starts barking, and to tell truth, I can’t help but laugh a little bit myself. I laugh and then I get out my books.

  A couple weeks after that, Daddy say’s there’s so much work to do, we’re going to start staying overnight soon as my grades get better.

  “They’re already better,” I say. “School ain’t hard.”

  “Then you’re a bigger fool than I thought making Fs.”

  “I ain’t making Fs no more. I’m up to Bs now.”

  “Then I guess we can stay overnight. You can bring your books with you. But if you go down—”

  “I ain’t going down. I promise.”

  Mama’s standing there listening with her arms crossed over her chest. “So now you’ll be gone Saturday and Sunday,” she says.

  “I guess,” Daddy says.

  “Then you can take that dog with you. Nobody’s taught him any manners yet, and I can’t watch him and my babies, too.”

  Baby Terrell’s kicking to get down out of his high chair. Mama picks him up and while she’s still holding him, she turns around and looks at Daddy.

  “Why are you doing all this, T Junior?” she says.

  “We’re going home, baby,” Daddy says. “When I get that house fixed up, we’re going home.”

  So Daddy and me start camping in the old house on Saturday nights. We get us a couple of air mattresses and a battery-operated lantern and a cooler so big I can almost lay down in it. Daddy fixes up a kind of hideaway spot in the backyard where we can do our business and we’re ready to go.

  Mama cooks us something to take that we can eat cold. We stop at a store on the way in and get a supply of drinks and two gallons of water. Daddy always has it figured out what we’re going to do. Maybe we’ll be tearing out the plaster in the living room. Maybe we’ll be ripping out the carpet. When it gets too dark to work, we each get one gallon of water to wash up. Then we eat what Mama cooked, stretch out on those air mattresses, and don’t move until morning.

  Not even Rover. He spends the whole day hunting rats in the yard or keeping cool under the house. When we wash up, he stands under the drips and tries to bite them. When we go to sleep, he snugs himself down in a spot he’s made under the house right below my mattress. Soon as he hears my feet hit the floor in the morning, his tail starts whopping on the dirt, and then we get busy all over again.

  One Saturday Daddy sets me to work in the old bathroom banging out the tiles and adding them to the pile in front. He gives me a little mallet and a face mask and he tells me to knock off every last piece. Daddy goes over to Mrs. Washington’s house to help some men from the church get her refrigerator wrapped up and on the street. Her nephew’s coming back soon they say and at least that much will be done.

  I’m swinging that mallet like there’s no tomorrow and sweating hard. Those tiles are flying. Every once in a while I stop and catch my breath and then I get going again. That bathroom’s getting full of dust. I’m finding the same thing on every stud—black mold growing at the bottom. Daddy says when we get everything cleared out, we’re going to wash every stick of wood in that house with bleach. That’s going to be some kind of hard job.

  Eventually, there’s so much dust in there I can’t hardly see. I’m covered in white from head to toe. I decide it’s time to take a break. I go outside to sit on the front porch.

  Soon as the screen door bangs, Rover comes zipping around from the backyard. He loves coming to New Orleans. He kills a rat twice a day almost, and that’s way more fun than dragging that old doll around. Sure enough, he’s carrying something dead now and he wants me to see it.

  “Put that down, you fool dog,” I say.

  He just stands there looking at me, his tail slowing down a little bit.

  “You can’t come up on the porch with that,” I say, and his tail starts going again. He takes one step forward and I hustle down the steps.

  “Drop it!”

  He don’t budge.

  “You got to learn, Rover,” I say. “We just can’t have dead rats lined up on the porch anymore. Drop it.”

  He’s kind of whining and trying to decide what to do. I’m thinking I wish he spoke English. I wish he knew what to do like Buddy did. I wish somebody had trained him.

  And then—pow!—it hits me. Ain’t nobody trained Rover because he ain’t never been anybody else’s dog before he was mine.

  I’m standing there looking at that dog and his tail whapping away and that dead rat hanging out of his mouth, and I’m thinking, It’s all on me.

  He’s watching me right back and his tail is speeding up. I notice his eyes are sort of like Buddy’s. They’re dark, dark brown and they’ve got black going all around them. Rover stretches out his front feet and bends down and looks up at me, and I can’t decide whether he’s laughing at me or not.

  “Drop it,” I say, making my voice sound like Daddy. I point to the ground.

  Rover ducks down a little farther. He shakes his head like I must think he’s a fool if I think he’s going to let go of that rat.

  And then—boom—he drops it.

  I can’t believe it. I go down on my knees. His eyes ain’t laughing at me at all. They’re just laughing. I rub him all along his neck and say, “Good dog. Good dog, Rover.”

  Then he’s trying to climb me, and it’s all I can do to stay out of the way of his tongue and his scratching, wet paws when all a sudden I hear somebody say, “That ain’t Buddy.”

  I whip around and there’s J-Boy, standing at the gate.

  My heart leaps up in happiness. “You’re home!” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says, and nods his head a little. “I’m home.”

  I’m standing up, and Rover’s jumping on me and still licking me and letting out little barks, and I’m trying to push him down, and he thinks it’s all a game just like Baby Terrell when he whops you with his toy and thinks it’s so funny.

  “That ain’t the three-legged dog,” J-Boy says. “What happened to him? He drown?”

  I don’t feel like answering that. I push Rover down again, and lucky for me and J-Boy, he hears something scratching under the house and goes sniffing after it.

  We stand there a minute, watching Rover’s back end sticking out from under the house and his tail whacking back and forth. When I look up at J-Boy, I see his eyes are half-closed and he’s got a piece of lint stuck in his hair.

  “Where have you been?” I ask him.

  “We ended up in Houston.”

  “We’re in Mississippi. But we’re coming home once we fix up the house. Are you fixing your house?”

  “Nah,” he says. “It ain’t our house anyway.”

  “Where’re you staying then?”

  He nods his head to the side a little. “Down the street.”

  “Where’re you going to school?”

  “I ain’t.”

  “You ain’t going to school?”

  “I’m finished with school.”

  “You graduated?”

  He rolls his eyes. “You always was a fool. I’m sixteen. I don’t have to go anymore. I’m through with school.”

  “You’re sixteen?”

  “Almost.”

  “When will you be sixteen?”

  “Ain’t none of your business.”

  “Your mama s
ays you can quit school?”

  “Ain’t none of her business.”

  “She ain’t calling the cops on you?”

  “She ain’t here. She’s in Houston.”

  “So you’re staying in New Orleans by yourself?”

  “I got company.”

  “Your mama says that’s okay?”

  “She can say what she wants. I don’t care.”

  We’re standing there at the gate just looking at each other. Then he looks up at the house. “So you’re living here now?”

  “No. I told you. We’re just here on the weekend. Then we go back to Mississippi.”

  “You fixed the roof,” he says.

  “Daddy mostly did that.”

  “You got electricity?”

  I laugh. “You’re the fool now.”

  He looks up the street. “I got to go.” He hikes up his pants and he eases off.

  I sit down on the porch. I look at all the houses up and down my street. There ain’t nobody living in any of them. I wonder where that boy Rusty is now. And where is that boy I never talked to that was always reading books. And that girl who was taller than me but who was nice. And my teacher. And all the other kids and all the other teachers. Of all those people, I’m thinking, why is J-Boy the only one who’s made it back?

  29

  When it gets to be almost Easter, Mama says, “You aren’t going to New Orleans for Easter Sunday, are you?”

  “I’m going to church on Easter,” Daddy says, “but I’m going to my church in New Orleans. Me and Li’l T, we’ll take a break long enough to go to church.”

  Mama’s standing with her hands on her hips.

  “Do you want to come with us?” Daddy says.

  “And what am I going to do with a toddler baby in a house full of rusty nails and holes?”

  Daddy shrugs up his shoulders. “Suit yourself,” he says.

  “I think you’re crazy,” Mama says, “living in an empty city in a rotten house with a half-wild dog and a boy no more than thirteen years old.”

  Daddy looks at me. “Do you think I’m crazy, Li’l T?”

  I shake my head.

  Mama stomps off to the kitchen.

  Daddy sits there watching her walk off. Then he looks at me. “Sometimes, Li’l T,” he says, “you just got to do what you got to do, even if it don’t make sense to anybody but you.”

  “It makes sense to me, Daddy.”

  Daddy shakes his head. “But not to your mama.”

  When we pull up on Easter weekend, Rover jumps out of the car and shoots straight for the back, barking up a storm.

  Daddy laughs. “He’s already after a rat.”

  We unlock the front door, Daddy walks in, and all a sudden he starts up saying things I can’t write down in this story. I’m right behind him but he holds out his hand to keep me back.

  “Don’t look, Li’l T,” he says, but I look anyway.

  There’s a man laying on one of our air mattresses. There’s food trash laying all around him. There are needles and plastic tubes and spoons. There are candles all burned down. There are rags piled up in one corner. There are six empty wine bottles lined up under the window.

  “Is he dead?” I say.

  Daddy inches over to him and pokes him with his toe. The man opens his eyes. He looks up at Daddy.

  “Get out of my house,” Daddy says.

  The man stands up and I see he’s not a man, not quite.

  “And take all this—stuff—with you.”

  The boy don’t say anything. He’s just looking at us. Then he looks down at everything laying around the room. “I don’t want it,” he says. Then he stumbles out the door.

  Daddy’s following right behind him. The boy gets to the steps and Daddy hollers after him, “If I ever see you in my house again, I’ll kill you. You hear what I’m saying?”

  The boy waves his hand at us like we’re mosquitoes or something. He grabs hold of the fence so he won’t fall and then he heads on down the street.

  We’re standing there watching him go. “That’s the dregs, Li’l T,” Daddy says. “Now we have to clean up after him.”

  Except Daddy won’t let me touch anything. He says I’m too young. He tells me to go on to work in the kitchen. We’ve got to haul out those cabinets this weekend. I go in the kitchen. I see the kitchen door has been broke open and there’s another nest with our other mattress and all the same stuff.

  I holler to Daddy, “There was two of them.”

  Daddy comes and looks. “You suppose this one was just a boy, too?” he says. He pokes his toe in the rags. “What are we coming to, Li’l T, if our children are living like this?”

  I look up and Rover is standing there in the back door with a shoe in his mouth and grinning like he thinks it’s a rat.

  “Drop it,” I say, and he does.

  I rub him all up. I tell him he’s a good dog and throw the shoe back out in the yard. “Now go find a real rat,” I say, and slap him on the behind.

  He hops off down the steps, sniffing and jumping and barking and wagging his tail like there’s no tomorrow.

  I stand there on the back stoop, looking across the backyards with all their crushed fences and collapsed sheds and upside down cars. It’s so quiet on the street, I can hear music playing a long way off. And then I hear a bird, the first one I’ve heard in New Orleans since the storm. From somewhere in somebody’s backyard, he’s singing and singing. I don’t look for him. I just close my eyes and listen.

  Easter morning, we wake up early in our camp in our house. Daddy says we got to go to the sunrise service even if there ain’t no sunrise to see inside the building. We don’t dress up. Daddy says people in New Orleans don’t worry about that stuff now. I’m following him out the front door when I realize the Easter Bunny didn’t come. I’m wondering if maybe there’s a basket for me at the apartment. And then I hope not. I hope the Easter Bunny knows I’m too old for that stuff now.

  Me and Daddy walk real quiet into the church. It’s darkish in there but that church is full of people. Daddy puts his hand on my shoulder and guides me to a seat near the front just like where we used to sit.

  I hear the people all around me breathing.

  Then the light starts to come in through the windows. It’s coming in slow and steady. The sun is rising and we’re all sitting there waiting.

  All a sudden I hear a big rustle and a bunch of people at the front of the church stand up.

  Then I hear a voice lift up in song. It’s Brother James. And then the people behind him join in. And the church fills up with light and we all stand up. All of us. And I look around.

  It’s all different kinds of people. Some faces I know, but there are lots of faces I ain’t never seen. Black faces. White faces. Young faces. A few old faces.

  “Who are all these people?” I whisper to Daddy.

  “They’re our neighbors,” he says.

  “But I thought nobody was here.”

  “You thought wrong,” he says, and we start singing, too.

  When that service is over, everybody comes pouring out the door, hugging and kissing and praising God right and left.

  There’s a man standing off in the shade of the porch wearing army clothes. Daddy goes up to him and shakes his hand and pats him on the shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” Daddy says. “She was a fine woman. A good woman.”

  Then I know that’s Mrs. Washington’s nephew. He’s back from Iraq but she ain’t there to see him.

  Now he’s nodding his head and pressing his fingers in his eyes. “I miss her,” he says real quiet.

  “It’s like that sometimes,” Daddy says, and pats his shoulder again.

  Then up comes Mr. Nelson. “Whoo-eee!” he says,
and stops right in front of me. “This ain’t Li’l T!” he says.

  “Sure is,” Daddy says, and they’re shaking hands and hugging and talking about how Houston’s a fine place, but it ain’t New Orleans, and Daddy’s glad to be working but he wants to come home something awful. And Mr. Nelson’s house only had three feet of water but it was ruined. And—God be praised—the church is okay. And where’s our family anyway? And how is old Mr. Roberts? And then they’re quiet and Mr. Nelson says, “May he rest in peace.”

  Then Mr. Nelson looks at me and says all over again, “I know this ain’t Li’l T!”

  “It sure is,” Daddy says again.

  “What are you feeding him, T Junior?” Mr. Nelson says. “He’s done shot up like a weed.”

  “He’s got a good start,” Daddy says, “but he’s got a ways to go.”

  “You’re going to be like your grandpa, boy,” Mr. Nelson says, “tall and skinny.”

  “I’m tall!” Daddy says.

  “But you ain’t skinny!” Mr. Nelson says, and now everybody’s laughing and slapping each other on the arm, and then Mr. Nelson turns to me and says, “How about that three-legged dog? Where is he at?”

  And all a sudden I feel like it ain’t spring anymore.

  Daddy looks at me and puts his hand on my shoulder. Mr. Nelson ain’t laughing now.

  “We had to leave the dog behind,” Daddy says. “He’s gone.”

  “But he ain’t dead,” I say, looking down at my shoes. “He’s alive somewhere. We just don’t know where.”

  “I’m sorry, son,” Mr. Nelson says. He shakes his head. “So much is gone. I’m sorry I asked.”

  30

  Before we know it, school is over. Mrs. Watson’s giving me a hug and saying she’s so proud of me and I’ve got a lot of potential and all kinds of stuff like teachers always say. I’m just thinking what am I going to do this summer, sitting in that apartment all day every day.