If You Want Me to Stay

by Michael Parker

  Yeah, okay, right, I wanted to say. There was nothing sadder to me than a seventeen-year-old girl talking street tough with her worn-out bra strap exposed. But I swore to her I’d never tell, even though Angela would know as soon as I showed up who ratted her out.

  “She’s down at Bottomsail,” said Carla. “She’s working at the Breezeby, waiting tables. At least she was last weekend. I went down there to see her. She lives with this guy named Termite. He’s not a real big guy,” she said, and then she burst out laughing and Tank smiled at her and I grabbed Tank by the oversized work shirt and dragged him back to the truck. Inside I buckled him in and said, “Thanks, Tank.”

  “For what?”

  “For getting her to tell us.”

  “She would of told you,” he said.

  So sweetly trusting dumb. I thought, I can’t leave him, but I also thought, Neither can I keep him.

  Bottomsail Beach was only forty-five miles away, but I had not a clue how to get there. I’d never driven farther than Moody Loop. I’d never driven in town and I’d never driven after dark. Cars had their lights on and the night eyes of cats blinked up from the ditches. I drove with my hands tight on the wheel to the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, where I parked behind the Dumpsters.

  “What are we doing?” asked Tank. “I don’t have to go.”

  I reached past him, slapped open the glove compartment, fished out a worn map. Daddy loved a map. He would spread them out on his lap and read them like some men read the classifieds. This one had routes inked along the spindly roads of the coastal plain, which was filled with big blue ovals signaling lakes and wavy marks telling you where the swamps were. Because of all the water you had to go around your thumb to get to your ass down here, Daddy used to say. But it struck me, looking at the map, trying to find some backroads to Bottomsail which would not be crawling with cops and would not be hard to navigate in the blackness, that he was always going around his thumb to get to his ass because some voice in his head said turn left or right or turn around and go home or lie down in the hammock and sing “Superstition” by Little Stevie Wonder or whatever it was the voices told him to do.

  I thought about asking Tank to help me navigate but when I looked at him he was sneaking his hands up and down the seat cushions in search of some stray Ruffles. He’d chugged his whole bottle of Coke. He’d be up all night, peeing. Which reminded me, he needed some underpants. It was too much. I made him a peanut butter sandwich by the streetlight, ripped off the crust like he liked. I rationed him a sip of my Coke for every fifty chews. Counting would keep him busy. I could not have that boy chattering and filing his wild blue yonder supremely unanswerable questions when I was trying to negotiate the strange dark countryside.

  On the road I started singing “Mr. Big Stuff.”

  “Who do you think you are?” I sang to myself driving my daddy’s truck down the nighttime streets.

  “Daddy sings that song,” said Tank.

  “I know. He taught me it.”

  “Wonder what they’re doing now.”

  I started to make something up. It seemed like that was my job, to tell reassuring lies. But Tank was worth more than a Band-Aid lie. Plus he was too smart for it. He’d come right back at me if I was to put him off with a patch.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I bet Daddy made Carter sweep up all that hair.”

  “I bet so.”

  We were only five miles out of town. The shoulders of the road steamed. Tank’s innocent blather cut through me like the headlights diced the swamp-foggy dusk. I could have turned back. I could have done the right thing, by law at least.

  But I looked over and caught Tank sneaking sips of my Coke. The right thing by law of the truck was to belt his sneaky ass.

  Tank sat there pouting after I popped him. He wouldn’t talk. He wouldn’t sing. I could have switched on the radio but I did not need the distraction. He slumped there chewing his peanut butter sandwich. Finally he fell asleep against the door. We passed through Chinquapin and Holly Springs and crossed 17 and reached the big ribbed bridge over the sound. The tires of the truck sang loudly and the body shimmied and I held on terrified to the wheel. From the highest hump of the bridge I saw all the island lit up with night lights, the motels with their neon signs, the fishing piers strung out into the black old ocean, a Ferris wheel spinning. I slapped Tank on the shoulder. He made his whining don’t-mess-with-me, I’m-asleep noise: unnh.

  “Wake up and look at this Tank.”

  He rocked up so violently I nearly lost my grip on the steering wheel.

  “Dog,” he said. “Where we at?”

  “Bottomsail Beach.”

  “Mama’s here?”

  “No, buddy.”

  “There’s a roller coaster,” he said, stabbing his finger toward the Ferris wheel.

  “That’s a Ferris wheel.”

  “Naw it ain’t.”

  “Okay, Tank.”

  “Where’s the ocean?”

  “See those lights,” I said, pointing to the pier. “That’s a fishing pier. It’s built out over the water.”

  “Can we go down on it?”

  “Okay,” I said. I didn’t know where the Breezeby was. I’d need some time to figure out what to say to her, what to say to Tank. I knew she wouldn’t want to take him. I knew he wouldn’t want to stay with her either.

  The parking lot of the Jolly Roger Pier was filled with beat pickups just like my daddy’s. Many of them sagged with crusty old campers. Between them in lawn chairs sat old fishwives wrapped in blankets. It was chilly in the ocean breeze. I grabbed Mario from Johnson Distributing for myself and Larry from Merita to wrap around Tank in case he got cold on the pier.

  Out on the pier the wind whipped our too-big shirts into flappy capes. A storm had just passed and the pier fishermen had layered themselves puffy to guard against wind and bait slime. Though it was only eight or nine o’clock at night we stepped over snoring lumps in greasy sleeping bags. Tank stared openmouthed at a coveralled man hunched over the railing eating cereal out of the box.

  “Can we sleep out here, Joel Junior?”

  I was thinking how good it was to be out of that truck. We had been in that truck for what seemed like a holiday weekend. I got the boys’ breakfast and then Daddy went off right soon after and we had stayed in that truck until late afternoon. I was thinking about Carter, was he hurt bad or lying on the floor with a Band-Aid on his ear listening to Goat’s Head Soup with my daddy, singing the words to “Hide Your Love” which was my favorite song on there though my daddy liked the one called “Coming Down Again” and Carter and Tank were partial to Starfucker though they weren’t allowed to sing the words.

  “We’ll see,” I said. I realized after these two words had come out of my mouth that I could learn how to be somebody’s daddy. Defer every question they ask and hope like hell they forget to reask. But this only applied to normal kids. It didn’t work on never-forget-a-half-promise Tank.

  The wide planks of the pier were slick from the storm, phosphorescent from fish gut. Kids about Carter’s age got to do mean things to stingrays left lying out in midpier for kids to do mean things to. These tortures were slow and cruel and drew many expressionless fishermen who sipped from bagged tallboys and watched the dismemberment soberly, as if it had been drained of all meaning from repetition but was too significant to ignore.

  At the end of the pier, where the crowd thinned, me and Tank stopped to watch this old man cast. He had the magic. His reel buzzed like a fluorescent light fixture gone wrong. His casts far exceeded the armchair flicks of others which dropped limp as dangled anchors and rose in a shameful seaweedy tangle. Me and Tank watched as the line shot toward the dark horizon. In my mind I tracked the silver hypotenuse down to where the slight hook pricked the green glass and disappeared beneath to do its sly seducing, an undercover cop posing prostitute. We watched for a half hour until the man pulled in something from far out in the dark green sea. Something big, si
lver, beautiful.

  “A fish!” screamed Tank.

  Everyone at that end of the pier laughed. I loved my little brother so much right then I scooped him up under pretense of letting him see better the big silver beautiful fish but what it was, I wanted to hold him tight. Which I did until he went to squirming and saying, Put me down, put me down.

  At which point I was ready to smack him again.

  Just as quickly I’d want to hug him. It was just that way with Tank, or maybe that’s how it was with me and most everybody. I wanted to leave them sometimes, just go off by myself and sit and listen to whatever it was in my head, mouth the words, hum the guitar solo, but I knew how awful I was at love, I knew I’d have to just suffer through the sticky parts rather than go off by myself. It was just that other people could turn so suddenly into something like that memory that needles you out of bed in the middle of the night—say you think you might of left the toaster oven on—even when you know you turned it off and unplugged it. They aggravate you for no good reason. Take Carter. He had this way of getting away with me with just a look or a not-look, just by drumming the table when me and Tank were watching Soul Train or lying to Tank about something I would have lied to him about myself. People just get to me. Because I guess I let them. I sometimes envied my daddy a little when he went off, because it seemed he was at the least safe, wasn’t anyone going to bother him, he was off by himself someplace nobody else could get to. Then there was my mama; she didn’t even have to be like my daddy to wall herself off from everyone. I wondered how did it happen, coming from the likes of them and turning out like I turned.

  The magic caster took an interest in Tank. He was nice to me because I was with Tank which was often the case when I was with Tank.

  “Who you boys out here with?” he said after we’d stood there an hour watching his magic.

  “Nobuddy,” said Tank. He jerked his thumb at me. “Just him and me.”

  I kneed him to get him to shut up, let me do the talking, but Tank did not listen to my knee.

  “Where’s y’alls mama and daddy at?”

  “My mama’s gone off we don’t know where to and my daddy’s—”

  “We’re down here staying with my older sister,” I said. “She works over at the Breezeby.”

  I had worked over close enough to Tank to grab the excess of his wind-billowed work shirt and tighten and yank it to get him to look at me. I shushed him. Fortunately the magic caster had his eyes on his lines the whole time he was talking to us. Tank nodded as he liked anything conspiratorial, even when he didn’t understand it. To him it was like hide-and-seek.

  “She working right now?”

  “She’s with her boyfriend.”

  “Told y’all take a walk?”

  “It’s not but one room,” I said.

  “Y’all had anything to eat?”

  “We’re good,” I said.

  “I’m not, I’m about starving,” said Tank. That was the thing about hide-and-seek, it never lasted very long.

  “You know how to tell if a fish is biting?” the pier fisherman asked me.

  “Yes, sir,” I lied.

  “Watch my poles while I run inside then.”

  Thankfully nothing bit until magic caster returned with bags of chips, sausage biscuits, and corn dogs. For dessert he had bought orange pushups which by the time we got to them dripped all over Larry from Merita and Mario from Johnson Distributing. He said he was going to stay out there all night long and when I said my sister told us not to come home he asked us to watch the poles again and went to his truck and got us some sleeping bags. I was a little worried Tank would roll off into the ocean—I’d spent many a night with him in our bed at home when he got scared and came and climbed in with me and I knew what a roller he was—but the magic caster must have sensed my worry as he said he’d be right there with us, if he had to go to the bathroom he’d hang it off the side. We bedded down on the hard smelly slats and listened to the ocean waving and sucking itself back in. Wood creaked as the pier swayed. Tank slept like the baby he was. I went in and out of it but I would not have slept anywhere in the world that night as tired and worried as I was.

  In the morning the magic caster bought us juice and some donuts. He let Tank drink some of his coffee which Tank pronounced sweet as pie. Tank had to go to the bathroom so I took him down under the pier where we both peed against the pilings and then Tank took off running wild down the beach, laughing, and I loved him again and took off after him, yelling, “Hey now, hold up, Mr. Big Stuff, just who do you think you are?”

  FOUR

  WAITING FOR MY SISTER to show up at the Breezeby, we sang some Otis. My daddy sometimes when he was between off and on used to talk to us from that in-between zone. I wanted to believe the things he told us and I almost could because his eyes had not yet turned into plate-glass windows you see yourself in walking down the sidewalk. Once my daddy told us that he happened to be in Madison, Wisconsin, the day that Otis Redding’s plane crashed in a nearby lake and soon as word reached him he hopped in his truck and drove out there and hired some old boy fishing in a fourteen-foot Ouachita with a twenty-horse Evinrude to motor him out to where the plane disappeared beneath the icy water. He didn’t even bother putting on any frogman suit because, he said, time was of the essence. He’s the one dove down and pulled Otis from the wreckage of wrong plane, wrong time. The other passengers, still belted in the seats, swayed in the murky water like they were grooving to a slow jam on the radio. The plane had lost part of its engine but the cabin was intact except some loose sheet music bobbing about like fish. My daddy grabbed a page and studied the notes. Surely it was a new song Otis was working on. He hadn’t written it down though, it was in his head and such sudden death unleashed it on paper, ticking off the unsaid and unfinished thoughts before they were lost to the world forever. It’s not the things you say that make you brilliant, it’s the things you think that you can’t say, my daddy told us. They say a man only uses a fraction of his brain, well, surely he only uses a few words. That’s why I like music, it taps right into things you feel in your veins but can’t just up and outright say.

  “Where they at now?” Carter had asked him.

  My daddy had stared at Carter like he was speaking Spanish.

  “Them pages of Otis’s?”

  But my daddy had gone too far off to answer.

  Oh but he loved some Otis. There wasn’t all that many songs to learn given Otis’s cut-short career and my daddy knew them all. The ones he loved best had something-another to do with a heart: “Pain in My Heart,”

  “This Heart of Mine.” Also the ones featuring the word love: “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (to Stop Now)”

  Tank was wanting to sing “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” I guess because we were sitting on a dock behind the Breezeby restaurant, out over the sound. I was feeling okay despite my patchy night of pier sleep and did not want to come to the chorus which no matter how okay I felt, starting in on that chorus made me feel low. In the chorus Otis basically claims nothing’s going to change, everything’s going to stay just like it is. The entire start-to-finish song is down-on-the-ground low but because of all that whistling people who don’t know no better than to listen to the words (and Tank and them who just sing them without really thinking them) mistake it for a happy song. Though with songs like “Dock,” it makes some sense not to listen to every word. Just let the notes fall all over you like sweet rain. Drink it down like you do a glass of water in a shadowy afternoon kitchen on a boiling day.

  Tank was already to the whistling. He could not whistle worth a spit. His bad whistling was way better than Otis saying he had nothing to live for. Sometimes at home when we’d play The Very Best of Otis Redding and this song would come on with its water rustling in the opening notes I would let myself fall right down into it. I wanted to feel its sadness washing over me. But right then, waiting for my sister to show up at the Breezeby, I d
id not want any part of that need-to-feel-bad-to-feel-good low-downness.

  My daddy used to say that when Otis brung in that song to record his people looked at him like he was gone off. They were looking hits, said my daddy, they were wanting another “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” or “Try a Little Tenderness.” What other song do you know with any whistling in it but the old theme from Andy of Mayberry? But Otis kept after them, said my daddy, and after he died it became his signature hit. My daddy knew everything there was to know about Otis Redding. He knew the name of the street he was born on in Macon, Georgia. He claimed to have once laid eyes on Otis’s widow in a club in Alpharetta, Georgia. He knew who was twiddling the knobs on those Stax/Volt classics, what session men played on what single. Otis wrote “Dock” in a houseboat in Sausalito, California, he told us one time.

  You want to whistle? I imagine Otis’s producers said to him when he brung in “Dock of the Bay.” I listened to Tank’s off-key, barely recognizable-as-Otis warbling and imagined myself as Otis, holding on to what felt right, winning over the world in the end.

  We were sitting on the dock when I saw my sister Angela picking her way barefoot through a sandy back lot filled with sandspurs and oyster shells. She was smoking with her head down, carrying her shoes in one hand. A very strange thing had happened since I’d seen her last: she’d turned beautiful. She looked like my mama but younger and thinner. She was wearing a white waitress uniform with pockets in front of her skirt for ticket books. Both pockets bulged with boxes of cigarettes. She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. I’d never seen her hair any way other than stringy in her face. Because my sister has always known how to get what she wants out of boys she stayed tomboyish for as long as she could. At the last possible second—about the time the pack of boys who followed her through the woods to forts made out of fallen pines and stolen sheet metal started to like girls in general, girly ones in particular—she switched over, started hanging around with slutty Carla, squeezed herself into too-tight hip-huggers and halters. She has always had excellent timing, my sister.