If You Want Me to Stay

by Michael Parker

  I did not want Tank to see her because I wanted to surprise her. I knew if she saw us outside her job she’d just open her foul mouth and let fly the filth. So I pointed to the end of the dock.

  “Looks like a shark out there in the sound,” I said.

  I kept him distracted for a good hour. It got on toward lunch. At least she’d have to feed us.

  “Come on,” I said, tugging him away from the water, into the Breezeby.

  “Why do they call it a sound?” said Tank.

  “Because it doesn’t make one.”

  “Why don’t they call it what it is instead of what it ain’t?”

  “We call you Tank and you’re not one.”

  This stumped him at least enough to come along with me.

  I stopped him in the foyer by the gumball machines and the newspaper racks. He stared at the retard candy. My sister used to tell him when he began to beg and whine for quarters that contrary to popular belief the money did not go to retards but in fact the candy would turn whoever bought it into a retard. Not that this stopped him from begging for a quarter every time we passed a machine.

  “Look, Tank,” I said, “Angie’s in there …”

  “Where?” he said, pushing his face against the plate glass.

  I grabbed him by his floppy work shirt which came to his knees and was filthy. Mine was dirty too. Also too big. We were what my always putting up some pickles grandmother used to call a blessed sight.

  “Hey, listen,” I said. “I’m not through with that sentence. Angie’s in there and I know you haven’t seen her in a while and all but I don’t want you screaming out her name when you see her like you did that fish on the pier last night.”

  “I didn’t know any fish’s name.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No I don’t.”

  I decided to switch to threats. They worked better than reasoning.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you want to eat, don’t say nothing until I tell you to.”

  I asked the hostess if we could sit in Angela’s section. She was an older, teased-haired, sun-basted local, tough as a live oak. I saw something in her eyes, a hazard flashing at the mention of my sister’s name. Angie was in trouble. This neither surprised nor bothered me. She was the one couldn’t take it so she up and left.

  We sat in a booth overlooking the sound. Tank could barely contain himself. He slid maniacally back and forth along the Naugahyde seat, playing with a stack of sugar packages.

  She made us wait. This made me smile, but it made me mad too.

  Then she was standing above us with her pad. “Have y’all decided?”

  I saw it coming, Tank bursting into his biggest tears.

  “Oh God, Tank,” she said, her mouth tightening, throwing her words like a ventriloquist. It was the softest I’d ever heard her talk. “Just hold on, baby,” she said. “Soon’s I get off work we can talk all you want. Stop crying, okay?”

  I thought I saw her eyes grow wet, but maybe it was just the sun hovering over the water, reflected in her glassy eyes.

  She said to me, under her breath, “They’re watching me today. I’m about to get my ass fired. This is all I need. You got any money?”

  “Well, no,” I said, smiling.

  She fake-waitress smiled back. “You slimy fucker,” she said. “What’s up with those shirts y’all got on?”

  “Joel Junior stold them from a rack while I made a lady take me to the bathroom,” said Tank.

  “Attaboy,” she said to me. “Where’s Carter?”

  Tank looked at me before he spoke. He remembered. Attaboy. Angie looked from Tank to me and repeated her question.

  “He’s with your father.”

  “He’s yours too,” said Tank.

  She was staring at me, trying to see in the expression I wasn’t about to give her just how bad it had gotten. I must have given her something. She wrote on her pad and disappeared, returned with a basket of toast, glasses of juice, then soon after platters of pancakes with sides of bacon and small bowls of applesauce and grits.

  We ate and ate. She brought the bill, reached into her smock pocket, and pulled a twenty from behind the ticket book.

  “Go get him a T-shirt, for God’s sake. There’s a dollar store up the block. I’ll meet you out back on the dock there at five o’clock. Bring me back my change.”

  The Dollar Store, like all Dollar Stores, had sticky floors, flickering fluorescent lighting, disastrously disorganized shelves, a confusing floor plan, clerks who seemed to receive for a day’s work no more than the namesake buck and were not happy about it, merchandise worth at most three-quarters of a dollar, piped in Carpenters’ hits syrupy with strings, a vague smell of plastic and, near the break room, of chili dogs. We could have been anywhere; the only evidence that we were not an hour or two inland was a lone aisle overstocked with beach towels, umbrellas, lawn chairs, and sand toys. This aisle was clogged with children trying out the sand toys and their parents who ignored them while they tried to decide which sort of chaise lounge to waste their money on. Tank proceeded to stand at the head of the aisle and stare at the playing children with a kind of intense vacancy.

  I dragged Tank to the kids clothes’ aisle. He chose a purple T-shirt bearing the green gruesome likeness of an animated action figure. Since our daddy had golf-clubbed the TV we’d been out of the loop, yet Tank, I suspected, pretended familiarity with all the current shows favored among the K through 3 set just to fit in.

  “Can I wear it to school?” he said before I’d even paid for it. It made me sad, his saying this. I did not want Tank to be like the rest of the world. I bought him a three-pack of Fruit of the Looms and for myself I purchased a single pair of boxers, being too old for tighty whiteys. To kill time we went next door to the surf shop and ran our hands over the smooth, curved boards. Tank was much engaged even though he likely had never seen anyone surf. The shop was staffed by surly boys in their late teens who seemed put upon, it being nice enough outside for them to paddle about on their boards despite the fact that the ocean was glass. They would alternately ignore us to talk their surfer talk (“Dude, you would not fucking believe” was how I swear three-quarters of their sentences began) or try to harass us out of there (Y’all still just looking?) Finally, more prideful than intimidated, I spent the last of my sister’s money on the cheapest thing in the store, a three-pack of temporary tattoos for $3.49. Tank chose the Chinese lettering over other designs. On the back the script was translated. Tank wanted Peace and Tranquility. I wanted Strength and Good Judgment, though I would settle for the former, since I had sat too long in that truck in the boiling sun and had given up my little brother and could not therefore anymore claim to be even tolerable at the game of love. I guessed it was too late. But I wanted to believe it wasn’t.

  We went back to the dock. Watched the tide roll away, wasted time. Tank sensed that my mood had plummeted and lay facedown on the dock with his nose between two slats, speaking to something in the water. Occasionally an old couple would walk out on the dock from the Breezeby smelling of Captain’s Platter and stare uneasily at Tank who was muttering nonstop about starfish, the superhero on his T-shirt, Carter, his mama, the dollar store, Otis Redding’s plane which his daddy dove down to through the freezing green water. Listening to him lulled me into some dank, doubt-filled space. I will never find any girl to love me, I thought. I am going to spend my whole life taking care of my little brothers. I’m not ugly, I’m tall and my face is clear but what woman would want me? My dream had a hill in it and a brook and a cabin and no automobile. It did not have so far as I could see any woman waiting on me to walk home through the misty fields. That was just my dream. Then there was My Life starring Tank, who even though I’d got him finally to put on some clean Fruit of the Looms still needed a bath, and Carter which all I needed to do was get Tank squared away with Angela and I’d run back up there and pick him up. I used to think your imaginatio
n could save your life, that my dream with no woman or automobile in it and other ones like the store that hired me to count things like nail clippers and the broken-windowed warehouse I squatted in was what got me through those days when everything and everyone leaned up against me. But sitting on the dock, waiting on my sister, watching the old fried-fish-smelling couples step over Tank stretched ass up across the slats, my dreams seemed suddenly silly, proof of nothing, no kind of cure. Like Tank talking to the barnacled pilings and the shallows of the sound, I could retreat inside and be satisfied for hours. The difference was that Tank was exploring his growing inner life and I was saying, “Fuck all y’all.”

  My sister appeared with one of the boys from the surf shop. He had changed into jams and a T-shirt and was carrying a surfboard under his arm. They stood at the edge of the dock, clearly discussing us. The surfer boy sneered, then laughed. She did not laugh which I took as a good sign.

  “This is Glenn,” she said to us.

  “Hey, Glenn,” said Tank. All smiles, staring at the surfboard.

  Glenn said, “Your name’s Tank? “He turned to me and said, “What’s your name? Submarine?”

  Angie still did not laugh.

  “Come on,” Angie said, and she and Glenn took off down the pier. The way she talked to him let me know exactly what my sister was up to. Even though Glenn, with his board and his tan and his curly blond down-to-his-shoulders hair and his surf shop job was way cooler than I would ever be, I felt sorry for him. I knew Angie. I was born knowing that girl. I could hear in her voice how she was making him feel like he was the One when in fact he was nothing but the Next Fucking Rung as her potty mouth would describe him.

  “Do you think Glenn’ll let me ride his surfer?” said Tank.

  “Surfboard,” I said. “He’s the surfer, or wants people to think he is. No. He won’t.”

  “I like Glenn, Glenn is nice,” said Tank. I wondered if he liked Glenn because he was a little kid and couldn’t distinguish between assholes and saints or was it because he was the type who was born to see only the good in everyone which is to say superficial and maybe naive. The idea that he was one of the latter brought back the chorus of “Dock of the Bay.” I tried to focus instead on the Steve Cropper guitar part which was classic Stax/Volt gospel-inflected, thank-you-Jesus Truth, but the weary sentiment of the chorus rolled in like those never ending waves.

  We crossed the highway and walked out on the beach. It was low tide and the sand was shell-less and hard packed. Near the water Glenn stripped off his shirt and sunglasses, handed them off to Angie, and strutted down to the ocean. I could feel Tank’s excitement even though I was not looking at him. He perked up like a dog who smells a squirrel in the brush. Where was my own interest in the mess I’d left behind? My daddy had gone off for the worst time. A small chunk of my brother’s ear was lying among his shorn locks on the porch boards. Stolen truck, stolen shirts. Surely Frosty had alerted the authorities, claiming I stole all that merchandise. I’d serve time for a bag of Ruffles not a single ridged chip of which I actually got to savor. They’d hang me with kidnapping too. All this to worry about and here I was following my sister down to watch her surfer-cool boyfriend paddle around in the total lack of surf.

  Angie had stripped off her waitress uniform, laid it out on the sand, and was stretched out in a bikini, smoking and shading her eyes from the sun. Tank ran down to her and said, “Can I go get in the water?”

  “Ask your daddy,” she said.

  “He ain’t my daddy. My daddy is your daddy.”

  She rolled her eyes behind her sunglasses. I remembered her story about my mama’s affair, how that was what was wrong with my daddy. I felt sorry for her, making up such a story when it was clear that it was something in his blood that made him act the way he did. I understood it though. Believing it meant she had the power to make a man lie out in the dirt yard howling for a way dead dog. Golf-club televisions.

  “You can get in up to your knees, okay?” I told Tank. “But take your shirt and shorts off.”

  “Go in my underwear?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. He stripped to his brand-new Fruit of the Looms and ran bowlegged down to the water.

  I sat down in the sand next to Angie. She ignored me for her cigarette. Sometimes she shielded her eyes to watch Glenn, who had yet to catch a wave.

  “What’s he waiting for?”

  “At least he’s out there.”

  “I don’t want to be out there.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t want you to be here. I’m fucking going to kill that Carla bitch.”

  “She didn’t tell me,” I said.

  “God, you’re such a hopeless liar.”

  “Don’t you want to know what happened?”

  “You’re going to tell me anyway.”

  She smoked. She shielded her eyes. I watched my little brother Tank play in the surf. It was hard for me to believe the way my sister acted. She was so different from me. If I was mudcreek, she was chlorine. Knowing her made me feel at a very early age that I knew nothing about people. I have vowed many times not to speak to them or look them in the eye for surely when you do, it’s all over, the trouble begins. At the same time the only means of death I truly fear in this world is loneliness. When my classmates on the bus back out to Moody Loop used to argue over what was worse, drowning, burning to death, suffocating, falling, etc., I never said how none of those things scared me so much as dying unloved or alone.

  I looked at my sister and saw her years from now behind a cash register, her eyes flat, the fire having burned out from a constant and high temperature ire. She would talk nonstop to strangers and friends alike and their responses, if she even heard them, would never matter to her. We were as different as could be. I was actually a decent listener. It’s just that I dreaded talking to people because so often they would turn out, like my sister, to be talking to themselves. I would sit there, like Otis, watching the tide roll in, wasting time.

  “Well?” she said. “Where the hell is Carter?”

  “He stayed with him.”

  “Why? He hates him. It’s you two who think he hung the fucking moon. Carter’s the only one of y’all with any damn sense.”

  She was right to think that Carter was more like her and less like me and Tank. But he did not hate my daddy. He loved my daddy. She loved him too. We all loved each other, even as scathed and unraveled as we were. If at any time we didn’t, the hell with us all.

  “He does not either hate him.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “Just tell me what happened.”

  I told her. She kept stopping me though.

  “Wait,” she said, “What do you mean he stuffed bananas in his mouth?”

  “He just crammed them in, stem, peel, and all.”

  “Fucking gorilla. Go on.”

  But she stopped me again.

  “What do you mean his earlobe?”

  I described what I saw.

  “Why didn’t you leave if you had the keys?”

  “You know how he is. Sometimes it doesn’t last long.”

  “You can’t ever tell by looking at him how long it’s going to last. Therefore you really fucked up.”

  “What happened to Termite?” I asked. I guess I wanted to take the pressure off. I didn’t care to hear how I’d fucked up since she’d run off not long after my mama and we’d yet to hear word one from her and I knew she would do what she could for us but that she’d act like we were the biggest pains in the ass she’d ever known.

  “Fucking Carla,” she said. “What do you care what happened to him?”

  “I guess I’m not the only one who fucks up.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Termite or anyone else I date is none of your goddamn business. That’s number one. Number two, where is Carter now? Is he safe? What happened to him? How could you leave him?”

  “How could you?”

  “I don’t recall anyone holding a pair of scissors to anybody
’s throat the day I bolted.”

  “All kind of bad things could have happened since you left.”

  “Could have or did?”

  “All I’m saying is, how would you know? We never heard from you again. Her either. Seems like you can’t go around acting like you give a damn if you run off and we never hear jack from you.”

  “Maybe I was about to call? Anyway I don’t have to take this shit from you. You might share his name but you’re not my daddy.”

  When she said that, it made me scared.

  “I never thought he’d do a thing like that,” I said.

  “Me neither,” she said. “I never would of left y’all with him if I thought he’d take it out on anything but the television.”

  “She didn’t know either.”

  “Of course she didn’t.”

  “She needs to know.”

  “Needs to know what? You don’t even know what happened after you left. You need to go back up there and get Carter.”

  “How come I have to do it? Why can’t you?”

  “Because I have a goddamn job and I didn’t steal anybody’s truck.”

  “Those sound like piss poor reasons to me,” I said. But she wasn’t paying attention. All of a sudden she stood up.

  “Hey,” she said in a far less bitchy and more urgent tone. “Where’s Tank?”

  I’d been drawing in the sand with my fingers the whole time I’d been talking to her. Angie was on her feet and I followed. She ran to the water’s edge and called to Glenn, who was paddling around just past the breakers as if every wave that passed were beneath his awesome level of skill. I thought Tank had tried to swim out to him. But Tank could not swim.

  Glenn was paddling around, Angie was screaming, and I just stood there at the water’s edge, the tide rolling in, the sun on the water, my little brother’s ear falling from the high white clouds, Otis singing “Dock,” a little voice seeping up out of the water and then a hand, tiny and wet, grabbing my own.

  I looked down and saw Tank.

  “Where the hell did you get to?”

  “I went up there to pee,” he said, pointing to the dunes.