by Brad Watson
The Alamo Plaza Motel Court’s white stucco fort facade stood flanked by low regular motel rooms around a concrete courtyard. The swimming pool lay oddly naked and exposed in the middle of the motel’s broad front lawn, one low diving board jutting over the deep end like a pirates’ plank.
We stopped in the breezeway beside the office and went inside where the floor was cool Mexican tile, lush green plants in large clay pots in the corners, and a color television on which we could watch, late afternoons and evenings after supper before bedtime, programs unavailable back home. I have a vivid memory of watching a Tarzan movie there in which Tarzan, standing in the crook of a large tree, is shot right between the eyes by a safari hunter’s rifle, and he doesn’t even flinch. Is it possible this is a true memory, not invented or stretched? Would even Hollywood in the thirties—for this was an old movie even then—have Tarzan being shot directly in the forehead with a high-power rifle, the bloody spot at the point of entry jumping out on his skin, and him not even blinking his eyes? I was, I am, as incredulous as the safari men on the jungle trail below, holding their high-power rifles and gaping at this jungle god, who just stared coolly back at them with the bullet hole in the center of his forehead.
WE RENTED A BUNGALOW in the rear of the Plaza. In the mornings we went to the beach, joining hands to cross the white concrete path of U.S. 98, the beach highway, to the concrete steps that led down to the beach on the Sound. It was not an exhilarating beach, as Gulf beaches go, its white sand dredged from beyond the barrier islands twenty miles out to cover the naturally muddy shore, where the natural flora included exposed roots of cypress and mangrove. Huge tarpon, an almost prehistoric-looking fish, cruised here between the river and the sea.
Our father, my brother, and I waded far out into the Sound, where the water was still just knee-deep to a six-year-old. We turned and waved to our mother, who sat on the white sand on a beach towel, the pale blue scarf on her head, the cat-eyed sunglasses perched on her nose. She did not swim, and though one reason we came to Biloxi instead of the more beautiful beaches in Gulf Shores or Pensacola was the cheaper prices at motels, the other reason was her fear of the water. She felt safer sitting on the edge of the Sound, which was more like a lake, than she did near the crashing waves of the Gulf. The year before, standing near her beach towel in the sand at Gulf Shores, Alabama, as if it were her sole tentative anchor to the dry world, she had seen a young man drown trying to save his little boy from a rip current. She’d watched as the rescue squad dragged the man’s body onto the beach. A year later, and for many years after that, the terror she felt still welled up in her with a regularity as steady as the ticking minute hand on the clock, and with that same regularity she forced it back down, into her gut, where it fought with her frequent doses of Paragoric.
I can still remember her in the swimming pool, at the country club they’d struggled to join, before the hard times forced us to drop out. She would step into the shallow water with a look on her face that now I understand as terror but which then I took for simple cautiousness and uncertainty. A slim hand out as if to steady herself from some unknown that could unsteady the whole deal. A cream-colored bathing cap covered her dark curls, as if she were going to plunge in with the boldness of an Olympic diver, though her pointed, blue-framed sunglasses still rested on her slim nose. And before the water reached above her waistline she would bend her knees and, holding her head up on her neck as far as she could stretch it, push herself gently forward and dog-paddle around the shallow end, her toes bumping the bottom and pushing her forward every few little strokes. Knowing her now, I’m astonished she had the courage to get into the pool, with others there who might see her and laugh at the fact that she couldn’t really swim. All those club people, who might laugh and think what a country girl she was—Did you see that? Can’t even swim! And my admiration for her swells in some proportion to my sense of her loss in the intervening years.
BUT THERE WE STOOD, far out in the tepid brown Mississippi Sound, waving to her. She was not actually distinguishable to us as herself, that far out. She was a figure who occupied the spot where we’d last seen our mother, apparently wearing the same pale blue scarf on a head of short dark hair, with the same pale skin, and waving back for a moment, then falling still. A figure in the light of the moment just a millisecond away, her image reaching us far out into the Sound, yet gone as if she’d been gone for a dozen years.
IN THE EVENINGS, we went out to eat oysters on the half shell, platters of fried shrimp, fish, french fries, and hush puppies, and returned to sleep in the luxurious window-unit air-conditioning of our room. Our mother would almost never let us use the a/c at home, as it cost too much on the power bill.
Mornings and late afternoons, we went over to the beach and frolicked. I so love that word. Sand castles, not such artful ones, of mounds, moats, and tunnels. A tall woman with big blond hair and tits like pale luminescent water balloons walked by in a green two-piece bathing suit, walking so carefully she seemed to be treading along the shore through a very narrow passage only she could see. We glanced at our father, and he bobbed his eyebrows. We fell over into the sand, yipping like hyenas.
I once told my mother of being propositioned by a lascivious young country girl at a filling station in Buckatunna, Mississippi, on my way home for a visit. I’d been filling up my little Honda coupe and this woman kind of ambled over and stood there leering at me. You sure are good-lookin, she said. I’m having a party at my house, you want to come on over?
Did you go with her? my mother asked me when I told her the story. Of course not, I said. I didn’t know her from Medusa. Well, that’s the difference between you and your father, she said.
At this time they had been divorced for about seven years.
MY BROTHER AND I danced barefoot across the white-hot parking lot to the center of the Alamo Plaza’s interior court—its plaza, I suppose. There beneath a small shed roof sat a humming, sweating ice-making machine. We would tip open the canted lid to the bin and scoop out handfuls of ice crushed so fine it seemed shaved. We packed it into snowballs and threw them at one another, tossed them into the crackling hot air and watched them begin to shed water even as they rose and then fell to the sizzling concrete, melting instantly into a wet penumbra that shrank and evaporated into smoky wisps. We opened the bin again and wedged our heads and shoulders in there for the exquisite shock of freezing cold. For at least a few moments as we reeled in the white-hot courtyard on burning bare feet, our heads felt as dense and cold as ice cubes on top of our icicle necks.
WE DROVE TO A GROUP of small cabins on a cove and a grizzled man rented us a skiff. Our father sat at the stern and gunned the motor, buzzing us out into the stinking Sound, bouncing us through the light chop, our mother holding on to her sun hat.
We drifted half a mile or so off the shore, baited hooks, and cast out. For a while there was nothing, just the little boat rocking in the gentle waves of the channel, the hazy sky, gulls creaking by and checking us out with cocked heads, a beady black eye.
My brother pulled up the first fish. He swung it over my head and into the boat. It was a small fish, with an ugly face. As soon as it popped from the water it began to make ugly, froggish little sounds. Croaker, our father said. He unhooked it and tossed it back into the chop. I asked about the strange noise it made and he said it was the sound they made trying to breathe out of water.
The truth is the Atlantic croaker makes its sound by tightening the muscles around its swim bladder, and uses the sound for general communication and to attract a mate. It’s said to be a “prodigious spawner.”
I reeled one in, the fight leaving it. Up it came, into the boat. Croak, croak. A brownish fish with a little piggish snout. A small mark on the back of its eye gave it an angry look, a what-are-you-looking-at? kind of look. These fish looked pissed off to be interrupted in the middle of their prodigious spawning.
Soon we were all pulling in croakers. The boat floor crowded with flapping, c
roaking fish. A chorus of their dry frog noises rose around us. After a while, my father had had enough and started tossing croakers overboard. Some smacked dead on the surface and floated away. Others knifed the water with a final croak and were gone, back to their spawning and general communication with their kind.
WHEN I WAS TOO young to remember, now, how young I was, I began to have a recurring dream, or nightmare. The air in the dream was electric, very much like the electron-buzzing screen of our television when the station went off the air. Jumping with billions of little black dots. A charged, nervous air, the atmospheric equivalent of the feeling you get when you knock your funny bone. In the dream I felt very weak, and very heavy, as if my mass were compounding, draining my strength. I was aware of a hellish din of angry voices, though there were never any distinct words. I began to see I was in a very small room, the only door a tiny one in the corner, little larger than a mouse hole. Other times, the dreamscape changed to one of dreadful empty vastness, all gray, in which the horizon seemed impossibly distant and I seemed very small, and the pressure of the air was heavy upon me. I suppose it was a simple dream of anxiety, though I have sometimes fancied it a latent, deeply buried, sensorial memory from the womb, and who knows but that this is possible on some level? I was too young, it seems to me, to create such a memory from what little I’d heard about gestation. I probably knew nothing of that when the dream began. I may have been told where I came from. I don’t remember. In any case, I have no firm idea where such anxiety in one so young, where that could have come from. Except that I’d had, from a very young age, the sense and fear that my parents would divorce and force me to choose between them. Maybe I had picked up on some general unhappiness. I don’t know. But I spent much of my alone time worrying that something terrible and heartbreaking would happen.
AT THE POOL there were a couple of ladies laughing and sipping drinks at the little round table beneath the green-striped umbrella, and a very big fat man, not overly fat but very big, was taking huge vaults off the little diving board, leaving it bouncing on its fulcrum like a flimsy plank of pine siding as he hit the water in a cannonball, showering the laughing ladies with water, again and again. The ladies cried out, Stop! Oh, stop it! Their laughter rose and drowned in the humid salty darkness and the clacka-clackity-clacka sound of cars cruising past on the cooling white-slab highway along the beach. I listened to the cars long into the night, in my bed, along with the faint surf, my father snoring lightly, my mother and Hal lying still as the dead. The Gulf breezes puffed against the windows, slipped through seams, and drifted through the chilled air of the room like coastal ghosts released from their tight invisibility, sustained for a while by the softly exhaled breath of the living.
MY BROTHER MET ANOTHER boy and began going off with him, around the Alamo’s grounds or at the pool or, when I’d followed them there, across to the beach, where I couldn’t follow without an adult. He became more of an absence, and so I drifted into the same safe quietude where I spent most of my time, anyway, where most middle children spend their time.
At some point in my childhood I wanted out of my family, although I loved my mother and father and tolerated my brothers as well as anyone else. I didn’t want never to see them again, but it would have been nice to live with some other family, possibly across or down the street, instead of my own. An imaginary one, maybe. When you are quiet, you are different, which makes everyone a little nervous and suspicious, if you are the only one that way. I was at ease if left alone in my room to read comics, or alone in the large tract of woods bordering our cul-de-sac street. I loved spying on others walking in the woods when I was hidden and could see them without their seeing me. Sometimes I looked into windows at night, but only at ordinary things. People eating supper, or watching television. No undressing or showers or such. I only wanted to experience the mystery of seeing things as they really were, when you yourself did not enter in. It seemed frank and honest in an exciting way. There was nothing to fear in terms of yourself in such moments. If you were quiet and still, it was almost as if you weren’t there. It was like being a ghost, curious about the visible world and the creatures in it. As if you were dreaming it, and not a part of the dream but there somehow, unquestioned.
ONE DAY HAL ASKED permission to go out with his new friend’s family on a charter fishing boat. They would have to leave very early, before dawn. I determined to rise then, too, and see him off. But I wasn’t able to, and no one woke me, so I didn’t get up until light was seeping into the sky over the Sound. I rushed outside onto the motel lawn, stood there barefoot in the dew and cool heavy breeze, and looked out across the water. On the horizon I could see the gray silhouette of a ship, a big ship, which in my memory’s surviving image appears to be a tanker of some kind, an oceangoing vessel. But at that moment, on the lawn, I thought it must be the boat Hal had gone on with his new friend and family—these people I’d never spoken to, whom I’d only watched from across the lawn, complete strangers to me and already fast friends with Hal. Watching the ghostly ship far out in the Sound, I had the strongest feeling that he’d gone away and would never return. It was something I couldn’t quit grasp, just yet, someone going so far out in the water on a boat that you can’t see them anymore, and then coming back in. I was very sad, I remember, thinking that he was gone forever. And I have lost the memory of his returning from the fishing trip to the motel. I’ve wondered why I felt so much sadder then than I did when he died. Anticipation is expansive in the imagination. Memory is reductive, selective. And any great moment must be too much to absorb in that moment, without the ameliorative power of genius or mental illness. When Hal died, years later, it seemed like the completion of something I’d been watching and waiting for all that time.
His last words, I was told, were a blurted, Look out!
My father’s last words, I was told, were, Something’s wrong.
If my mother had any last words, they are a secret, as she was old and alone. And if any words were formed in her mind as she lay unconscious and slowly dying on her bedroom floor, no one will ever know what they were.
IT’S HARD TO REMEMBER Hal in very specific ways. He was a small boy, and then a small man. I did not remember him that way, since he was four years older and so until I was into my later teens he was larger than me. I remember how shocking it was when, a couple of years after his death, I went into his room and tried on one of his shirts. It was tight across the shoulders, too short in the sleeves. This was shocking because I had thought he was at least as tall as I was and stockier, but he was not. He had always carried himself like a larger boy and man.
A second child will always feel displaced by the first. People say it’s the other way around but it’s not. Later in life there are the photographs you discover of your older sibling, before you were born, with one or both of your parents. It’s then, after you’ve had children yourself and know the experience in your own life, that you understand the bond between the new, young parents and their first child. You understand how miraculous and illuminating it is. You know how the experience has remade the whole world for the parents, and how the only child’s world, entirely new in the magnificent, solipsistic way only an only child’s world can be, eclipses all else, and when the second child comes along it is only as if the eclipsing body has moved aside, moved along in its path. The wonder has passed, leaving the washed and dazed sense of deep and cathartic change, an experience that will never be repeated for anyone in that little world. And, in truth, it leaves everyone feeling a little bit diminished. You realize this, when you are older and you have memories and these memories are informed, in a slow infusion of understanding, by the old photographs taken before you were even conceived.
Hal was a prodigy, in many ways a typical first child in that he was precocious, gregarious, fearless, bestowed at birth with the grandest, most natural sense of entitlement. Every first child is a king or queen. A prince or princess, an enfant terrible of privilege and favor. And Hal was tal
ented. When he was three, he learned the words to the popular song “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier” and sang it so adorably that our parents secured a recording session for him down at a local radio station.
He was introduced by George Shannon, a local radio and television personality. I imagine Hal wearing his cowboy outfit, a black hat and black, sequined shirt, black pants, black, filigreed cowboy boots, a toy six-shooter in a toy holster on his belt. He probably wasn’t wearing this outfit, since it had nothing to do with Davy Crockett, but there’s a framed photo of Hal at about that age, wearing that outfit, that hung for decades on our mother’s living room wall, and so that’s how I see him, then. A musical cousin, Doc Taylor, strummed the song’s tune on a guitar, and Hal sang the song in his piping voice.
Born on a mountain top in Tennessee,
Greenest state in the land of the free.
Raised in the woods so’s he knowed every tree.
Kil’t him a b’ar when he was only three.
Davy, Daavy Crockett.
King of the weeld frontier.
I write “wild” that way because that was how he pronouced it, like some kind of flamboyant elf.
In the background on the recording, toward the end of the song, you can hear a baby crying a little fitfully, fussing. That was me, only a few weeks old, trying as would become usual to assert myself, to little avail.
This recording was of course a precious possession, always, but it became all the more so after Hal’s early death, when he was a young man only recently married. It disappeared after the accident, and my mother bitterly accused Hal’s widow of having taken it for herself. I took this for the truth. And then, many years later, after my mother’s death, I found it beneath a stack of papers and documents in a dresser drawer in her bedroom.
