If You Want Me to Stay

by Michael Parker

We rolled off the highway into Bulkhead. It was not a new day, it was the same old one in which I left Tank with my foul-mouthed sister without saying good-bye, the day after the one in which I left Carter on the porch with my scissors-wielding daddy. All of a sudden it hit me what I’d gotten real good at: love.

  “Donde somethinganother,” said the Mexican. We’d pulled off into the parking lot of an auto parts store. Bulkhead was a strip of chicken-and-biscuit joints, car dealerships, pawn-shops, bars, chain stores. I spied a Dollar Store. I smiled weakly at the driver, having grown tired of the mariachi music. He pointed up the road. His smile too had grown tepid and worried around the edges.

  Oh, okay, right, he wanted me to get out.

  I watched the Datsun pull away. Adios! Almost immediately I missed the mariachi music. The carnies had struck their tents and their rusty rides and taken off in the middle of the night leaving only a trampled and trash-strewn field at the edge of town. To think our town could play host to such sparkling magic only to wake of a Sunday to find we’d dreamed it all from the dirt up. The sight of the muddy field shamed us until the weeds overtook it, and, later, mercifully, Clinton Herring’s daddy who owned it planted some fast-spreading soybeans. Music fades and you’re left with nothing. A brogan trampled field. Locks of blond hair carpeting porch boards. A string of lights that switches suddenly to a line of cars bearing strangers who would not stop for a boy in a floppy work shirt, singing to himself in Spanglish.

  She would live by some water, my mama. If not the ocean, the sound or a creek. The Promise Land would promise at least a sliver of inlet. I walked the strip, followed the parade of cruising cars until I saw a sign for the so-called business district. They must have had sense enough to build a town on some water.

  I entered a neighborhood of big old houses cut up into apartments. The yards were filled with cars. Aretha sang about a rose in Spanish Harlem. The porches were filled with families or drinkers, sometimes both. The rush of cars and other night noises turned magically into a tight Muscle Shoals rhythm section backing up Aretha, the smell of exhaust and garbage and spilled beer and something slightly sulfurous which I took to be whatever body of water my mama was living on. Aretha singing “You Send Me.” Darling you do, you do, do. She sent me on down to street toward the Promise Land to find my mama. Babies say mama. No d. I was hungry again. Also bone tired. My feet swole up in my Adidas. I’m sorry Carter. I loved you but I favored Tank. If Tank was the favored why did I leave him with Angie? Let’s say that like she claimed she had none of my daddy in her. That left only my mama’s blood in her veins, my mama who had run off and left her boys in the hands of a man prone to flat-out neglect. That meant Angie herself was going to run off. She’d leave Tank with some giant of a man name of Termite. Or to fend for himself in a house trailer with beach roaches I knew to be the size of blue crabs. Tank would be one of those kids you read about discovered by a neighbor fending for themselves after having been abandoned by all those put on this earth to tend to his welfare. That would be me. What had I done? Ain’t no way that was going to happen because if I went around assuming the apple don’t fall far from the tree in the case of my sister, foul-mouthed inheritor of my mama’s tendency to run off, what then did that say about my own future?

  The idea of having to plan my baby steps within my daddy’s limits sent me staggering. Ants in my head tunneling their bad bad thoughts through the sand, visible to passersby and porch sitters as my flesh was transparent, they could see my brain. You try to hide something and the more you try to hide the more everyone notices. I staggered down that street like a blind man. Aretha sang “Amazing Grace.” She sang the ever-loving hell out of a wretch like me. The apartments fell away to a block of low storefronts. From one I heard the dim rumble of drum and bass and then a tinny organ rising out of the beat. A large woman, black and sharply dressed, sidestepped up onto the curb from a high-idling Buick.

  “Can you show me the way to the Promise Land?” I cried out.

  “Lord God, child, come right along here,” she said. She took my hand and I followed. Was she not the same woman back home in Trent who had tried to help Tank when I pushed his obstinate ass out of the pickup at the laundry so I could steal the very shirt I wore on my back? She showed up places to save us. Whenever we most needed her. If people love you and you’re in trouble that trouble rumbles in their stomach. She had changed her church hat and she had maybe put on a few pounds but she was still wearing those shiny high heels. Plus she knew where the Promise Land was.

  “I’m trying to find my mama.”

  “You getting ready to meet your Heavenly Father,” she said.

  We got closer to the music. She pushed open the door to a storefront with blacked-out plate-glass windows and we were right up inside it, that music.

  Or else the music was inside of us. If you were lucky enough to hear it it never left you, which was why those people without it (like my sister, who could give a spit what was on the radio and never seemed to care about my daddy’s records which was why she had to leave, why she was maybe on the money when she suggested she was not really our sister) couldn’t just up and let it in their hearts. Aretha strayed, according to my daddy she had some hard times, but she never really left the church. She was at heart always a gospel singer. About Jesus I don’t think so but how could you not know how deeply my daddy’s music sprung right up out of the church? You could hear it in those high notes Aretha nailed, a rapturous spirit pouring out of her. It would touch you, too, if you let it. You didn’t need to be, like Aretha, a preacher’s daughter. You didn’t even need to go to church.

  There were only six or seven people in the pews, more than that up on the crude plywood stage. A preacher sweated in the corner. Every one of them looked long at me when we entered the room. A dirty stringy white boy holding hands with their Miss Whoever she was, I never did catch her name. Well, he look like he in need of some salvation, that’s for sure. Ain’t no way he don’t need God’s love. The band was just bubbling, all instrumental, I could feel a chorus coming on, but they were waiting on the water to boil, which directly right after we sat and my tired-ass toes started to tap, the water surely did. The chorus broke, the two women singers beat the ever-loving hell out of their tambourines and broke right up into something high and soaring, a single phrase sung over and over until it made, each time, more and more and finally the most ever sense: light in this world, light in this world, light in this world.

  Everyone knew the words and lifted their voices up to the dropped ceiling of the storefront.

  God in Heaven I felt lifted myself. The ants went away, I was a handsome sapsucker not wearing a work shirt bearing the name of Mario which I outright stole, my little brothers were fine, my mama was back home in the kitchen cooking and listening to Aretha build with her very breath a bridge over some deeply troubled water, girls wanted me, no pimples, nobody pointing to my exposed shins in the hallway of the high school and hollering, Where the flood at? And the only off my daddy was? Off to work of a morning.

  For some the world they walk through is more than enough. They know to make their way through it, know exactly how to. For me it was always like that showroom in the back of Dusselbach’s: someone else’s furniture, phony living rooms, stiff and new-smelling, uncomfortable and unfamiliar. If I inherited anything at all from my daddy it was a desire for music to make me to feel at home in this world. Sam and Otis and Curtis and Sly, Rufus and Carla and Aretha and Isaac, the brothers Isley and the siblings Staples—they let me in my own house. See, I’d get locked out a lot. And I’d have to call them up and listen to them unlock the door and let me back in.

  When the singing stopped, the ants came tunneling back. I felt real white. Some small children who had come during the singing were staring at me in a way only small children can stare. Tank, please forgive me. Did she even have enough sense to make his ass go to bed at a decent time? If not she’d pay for it tomorrow as he would be crosser than hell. I had a sudden flash
of the living room where my sister and her surfer boyfriend were hanging out. A low, sprung-seat couch upon which sat Angie, surfer Glenn, and a whole other couple. Tank sprawled out beneath them on the beer-stained carpet. The television was on but the sound was turned down. Back and forth goes the bong. Someone, Glenn I guess, has given him a Game Boy to play with. He’s thumbing that cheap piece of green plastic and my sister is playing the bygod radio, not even the oldies station which even Tank knows is the only station worth listening to. Some station called Beach 95 which is mostly ads for car dealerships and tanning booths and occasionally some Top 40 trash of the most useless sort.

  I felt my lifted spirit plummet, thinking of Tank and that cheesy music and him the only one in the room half-listening to it as the others were too caught up in their stoner dialogue which in my sister’s case consisted largely of upper-case obscenities. Carter, you only went along to get along. I could tell you were faking it. You would sing with us but the words were only coming out of your mouth, not your very being. Carter, I’m sorry, it’s no reason not to love somebody. It’s just, why did you have to climb out of that truck?

  “It’s not my fault,” I said aloud in the quiet of the church, in the middle of the fiery preaching. I was hardly aware of the preacher up there in front of me, stomping around, quoting scripture, looking stern like we’re all of us about to die.

  “Hush now,” said my savior.

  The children snickered.

  “I have to go,” I said, and before she could answer I was up and out of that room.

  Well, the music had stopped. I owed nobody nothing when it ceased. Just got to get on down the road to a place where I can receive the signal full on.

  Outside I kept looking over my shoulder to see did she send one of those children to bring me back in but she must have thought there is some that don’t even know how to take His love in they hearts. Or else she was glad to be shy of me. I thought she’d maybe turn up again before it was all over. Or maybe she’d storm in that trailer where my sister and her surfer friends were goofing on some TV with the sound turned down. Dude, you would not fucking believe what happened last night at the crib, they’d say to everyone who wandered in their surf shop the next day. I could see Tank look up from his Game Boy. His face when he got startled was so pure and baby-looking. Frozen, innocent, it was the only time he was ever really still. The church lady pulls her girth up the stairs and pushes in the trailer. My sister’s friends cower as she plants herself in the doorway. Give me that Game Boy, she says to Tank. Or maybe it’s give me that play toy, I don’t know, all I know is she slips the thing into her pocketbook which swings threateningly from her arm, takes Tank by the hand and thunders into the night, bringing my little brother back to me.

  Out on the street the other storefronts were shut tight. Only light in this world was the streetlight and the lights of cars passing steady as a river inches away from me. The street was one-way which struck me as exactly right. I only needed one choice. I felt lost and lonely and all I wanted was a bath and to find my mother. How could I fall so swiftly from that rapturous height? I imagined wandering the rest of my life in search of a stronger signal, a place where the music reached me without static or disturbance. I was not like him, not at all, it was voices he heard, not Aretha, Arthur Conley, Deena Parker. Music for him was a drowning-out of those voices telling him to stuff bananas in the mouth of his middle son. Therefore we were exact opposites. There was one spot in the room I shared with my little brothers where at night when we were supposed to be sleeping we could pick up WLS out of Chicago, 890 on the AM dial. It was over by the dresser drawers, a dip in the floorboards where moonlight fell on a no-cloud night. I’d put a little bit of masking tape there for my bare feet to feel. I would wait for them to fall asleep and then I’d shake their sideways-sleeping asses off me and wiggle out to that sweet spot, switch on the transistor my daddy bought me when I wasn’t but Tank’s age, listen to the Classic Soul hour, midnight to one in the morning, the signal traveling all the way down through Ohio across the river into Kentucky, bumping over the hills and hollers of West Virginia, shooting straight down the Valley of Virginia (I looked it up on one of my daddy’s maps) to cross the red-clay piedmont and reach me up home, just a spit from the sea. Just as people who love you feel your trouble rumbling in their stomachs, a song broadcast hundreds of miles away will be summoned by your need to hear it. I myself was not a boy in clothes about ready for the rag bag, half of them purloined, but radio waves coming through the swamps and pocosins, summoned down to Bulkhead by a mother’s undying love for her oldest boy.

  Have you seen the Promise Land? I asked a boy who looked to be lingering at the ass end of teenaged, as if he hadn’t quite got it together to pass over into his twenties. His sideburns were bristly and sharply razored to hide his extended chin, which all they did was exclamation point to it if you ask me. A tight T-shirt when he ought to of gone relaxed fit. The reason I asked him was, he was the only one to ask.

  “You know, I just did see it,” he said, proof that I asked the right question at the right time. Proof of my mama, drawing me closer. Look: Frosty, Carla, magic caster, Angie, the kindly Mexican, the church lady, all of them when you think about it form a line orchestrated by my mama’s desire to see me again. Even my daddy going off could be considered in this light. What it was, she’d hung out her wash between that high-rise hotel and another building and it was fixing to pour and she was reeling in her line. I was being passed from person to person on my way back into her wide-open window.

  “You wanting to see it?” he said.

  Sometimes I want to be Tank. Spread-eagle facedown on a pier mumbling to crustaceans about Otis. People stepping right over me as if nothing’s wrong with this picture. Tank don’t have to act right. He’s got me to look out for him, asking him does he got to go, stealing shirts, buying him Sweetarts so he can walk around humming off-key and asking crazy questions and deciding he likes people randomly like surfer Glenn who he ought not to like and the kindly Mexican which he got that one right. He was half-right. But not all there. They say that about my daddy but Tank is not supposed to be all there. All of him has not even supposed to have arrived yet. That’s why I wouldn’t mind being Tank sometimes. I can claim that part of me gives a damn is in the mail.

  “Yeah, I do,” I said. “I want to see the Promise Land. “

  “Well I will take you straight to it,” he said, “but first I got to ask you a favor.”

  “Okay, ask.”

  “Well, I got to show you.”

  “Show me a favor?”

  I didn’t have time for his mess. I could smell the beer on him when I got up close and the longer I talked to him the drunker he looked.

  “Naw, man, un-unnh. You got it all wrong.”

  “Okay,” I said, as if this made some sense. It dawned on me he wasn’t allowed back in that pool room. I thought of going in there myself for it seemed like someone in there would know the whereabouts of the Promise Land.

  “Follow me,” he said. He took off down a alley.

  “Hey, wait,” I said.

  “I thought you were wanting the Promise Land.”

  “I am.”

  “Well, it ain’t gonna come to you.”

  “It’s down there?”

  “I told you I got to something a favor.” The word he used where I have substituted “something” was swallowed, or something else stomach-or throat-wise was going on and I didn’t care to ask him please repeat that. He had stopped and was looking at my shirt. “Mario, I’m Landers,” he said. He looked at you after everything he said in a lingering way as if expecting some sort of reaction. But there wasn’t anything to react to. I have seen this type tic before but only in people who say shit you don’t know what to say back to them about.

  Then he took off again, thank goodness. We came out on another street. It was one way going the opposite from the one we’d been on. Away from the water. Away from the Promise Land. Away from m
y mama.

  I stopped at the sight of it.

  “What’s the matter?” said Landers. “Come on, it’s just a little ways.”

  I felt so anxious I could not move. I felt like every small thing I ever had was lost to me. All because I had detoured slightly down a alley following drunk-wanting-a-reaction Landers, thinking I was for just a little while Tank.

  Landers pointed to a car. Rather, it was one of those half-car/half-trucks. I don’t care for hybrids. Broccoliflower, Ray Charles’s country album. My daddy didn’t care for that album and neither did I. The half-car/half-truck put me in rueful mind of Modern Sounds in Country Western Music, Vols. 1 and 2 by Ray Charles. I know it’s not the same thing, Ray Charles and what they call a crossover, but to me it’s similar. It’s hard enough to be one thing, be it truck or big brother or landmark soul stirrer.

  “I got to show you something,” said Landers.

  I had to stop thinking I wanted to be Tank because I was too old to be acting like Tank. Okay, what you got to show me? Tank would say. But I was too old. I had got sidetracked and was going upriver, away from the signal, opposite direction of that sweet music. I have been old for so many days. Which is why mostly I just want to go live on a hill near a silo. My kitchen will be in a basement. The house will slant down the hill so that the ass end will be level with the planet earth. The head of the basement will be up under ground. In the heat of the summer I will take all my meals in the kitchen plus sleep, do puzzles, and listen to music up in there. A car ought to be a car, truck all truck. Once when he was three Tank asked me did houses live inside or outside. His question got away with me big-time, liked to made me cry, I don’t know why, I guess because I could not answer it and also it stirred up something so deep inside me only music could normally reach it. The walls of my basement kitchen will be of an ancient, dusty brick and quite thick. Rugs on the floor would be nice in the winter. Landers was walking right out into traffic. I was watching from the safety of the sidewalk. The Queen of Soul was singing “Call Me.” My mother stood at the sink running water into a teakettle. I don’t trust any hybrid. You either live inside or outside, either you hear the song or you got no ear. The thick and ancient dusty brick will retain heat in the winter and keep me cool in the heat of the summer. The water bubbled over as my mother stared out the window. Call me the minute you get there, my mother sang along with Aretha. In the summer I would pull up the rugs so my toes could feel the earth up under the brick floor. Cars were swerving around Landers who had kneeled down and was fiddling with something up under the dashboard. It’s either a car or a truck it seems to me. The water bubbled out of the teapot and on down the drain. “Come here, come here,” said Landers. He was waving me out into the road and cars were providing a horn section to the song in my head and in my mother’s which was “Call Me.” I got to show you something, sang Aretha. I stepped out into the road. Landers waving me over to where he crouched holding a tube connected to the dash. That half-car/half-truck was all over ugly. “Blow on this,” said Landers. “Do what?” I said. “Just blow on it, I want to show you something.” “Show me what?” “Goddamn, country, just blow on the motherfucker if you want to see the Promise Land.” I took it in my hand and looked at it. “It won’t fucking bite just blow like you would a whistle.” Cool in the heat of summer, toasty in the dead of winter. Call me, my mother sang with Aretha as I blew into the tube and Landers said, “Or like you would your boyfriend, you little redneck,” and pushed me away nearly into a pickup which though it damn near ran over me was all-the-way pickup, not half Chevrolet or something, I couldn’t tell what half the car was because Landers had that ugly specimen cranked and had pulled out into traffic before I could even move out of the middle of the river of cars going the wrong way from babies say mama I hate a hybrid call me call me I don’t care what time it is day or night just call me the moment you get there.