If You Want Me to Stay

by Michael Parker

  I said I was talking about forever.

  “And ever,” said Tank.

  “A pot of boiling grits!” I said as we came to the end of “Let’s Stay Together.”

  “In his dang lap, what I mean,” said Tank.

  All our singers of songs suffered. You can hear the light in their voices, though, the sweetness of having survived. Nothing like song to breathe air into a puncture.

  It wasn’t so hard as I thought to get a ride with two because one was a pipsqueaky boy in camping britches swinging a bag of plastic army men. Sing your aria, Tank! Backed by a cast of thousands, yes sir, who cares if they’re armed and green. A couple picked us up. We hummed up their Taurus and it shamed me to have to do so. So me and Tank told them a joke.

  “Two peanuts were walking down the road,” I said.

  “One was a salted,” Tank chimed in, perfectly timed, high-pitched, earnest.

  “What do Eric Clapton and McDonald’s …” he started after they laughed politely but I shushed him and kicked his knee. These old people didn’t know no Eric Clapton. They were middle-aged country. Churchers, I’d say, out doing the Lord’s work picking up two stray boys though they never in our face testified. I say bless them for stopping as many a God-fearing man and woman had switched lanes when they seen us obviously dirty and wild-haired boys standing on the shoulder just out of Bottomsail. Carter’s hair was his favorite thing about himself. He told us many times. My sister Angie had turned beautiful but it was meanness which burned off her baby fat. The couple drove us all the way to Moody Loop. I called on Reverend Al Green for another lift up your hearts in song. Here is where things tend to jumble and collide. You will pardon me if it comes back to me aswirl. Al Green found Jesus after the pot of boiling grits. The girl who dropped them in his lap went in the other room and shot herself. I never told Tank this part of the story, just the pot-of-boiling-grits-in-the-lap part. She had a history of mental problems said my daddy with the straightest face. As if he was telling us she hailed from Terre Haute, Indiana. I did not tell Tank everything. For instance, what kind of sickness it was in my daddy’s head and why our mother left us. For a minute we stood at the intersection of 692 and Moody Loop as if waiting for the school bus while I wondered whether to tell him about the house fire. Burned to the ground. Charred bricks and ash. He didn’t need to be worrying about her coming back for him. It was the right thing to do. Angie knew.

  “I’m hungry, can we go to Frosty’s?”

  “We’re almost home,” I said.

  “I want Frosty’s.”

  “We can’t go to Frosty’s.”

  “How come?”

  “He don’t like us anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just forget it Tank, okay?”

  “But I want Frosty’s.”

  I was fixing to slap him. I called on the Reverend Al Green. He winged in sweetly, “Call Me” interrupting all the buzz in my head. I sang it loud I sang it proud. It gave me the courage to put one foot in front of the other. Tank followed me on down Moody Loop. I had no idea what we’d find. Carter’s hair carpeting the porch boards, the lobe of his left ear lost among the curls he so treasured. Banana stems and peelings, the fluffing from the mattress, Daddy is snowing and so am I.

  So too were the fields, white with cotton. What a beautiful day it was, the sky so crisp, the fields curved slightly, the way farmland looks in children’s books. I’m so tired of being alone. Call me, come back home. Tank had this book I used to read to him in which you left the bustle of the city on one page and on the next traveled country mouse out to the boonies which were so clean and spacious, miles of fields gently rolling and curved neatly as tucked bedsheets into low stone walls and bordering brooks. Silos and bright red barns, green tractors, farmers dressed in overalls and flannel shirts. Where were the lagoons of hog waste that gagged us when the wind blew? The ravines with all grades of shit dumped down them, from pickles to sectional sofas? Goitered old women cussing at chickens in grassless yards, trailers listing on cinder blocks which one day while we were at school blew into a thousand pieces, some parolee’s batch of crystal gone wrong.

  Oh what a glorious day. Dusty mutts bounded down the farmhouse lanes to herald our triumphant return. Red flags on mailboxes saluted us.

  Oh Angie fuck you too, girl, I love you, you foul-mouthed bitch.

  I breathed to four-barreled life a half-one-thing/half-the-other which hybrids, now that I was far enough away to think about it, made some serious sense, seeing as how it’s never wholly car nor truck. I believed I almost had an answer to Tank’s question had stumped me for all those years. It seemed like the answer was waiting in the woods just off Moody Loop.

  On the dashboard of my daddy’s truck: receipts, wobbly old water-stained cigarette, coffee stirrer from sucks-without-Eric-Clapton McDonald’s, withdrew-against-doctor’s-advice papers, prescriptions for pills he don’t take because he says he ain’t living his life that way, feeling like a big chunk of potato in a thickly whisked batch of potato onion soup.

  “I’m hungry,” said Tank. I smiled at his timing, potato onion soup up in my head.

  “We’re almost there.”

  “I got to go too.”

  “Can you hold it?”

  Of course he could not. We left the road, veered into the cornfield. Tank wanted to go between the rows but I made him keep walking. It’s a matter of pride. We followed a drainage ditch to a stand of trees. Number two, said Tank. First, I said, I’m no good at math. But he looked so lost and pained so I told him since we’re almost home just take your underpants off, use them to wipe with. I walked up into the rows, left him squatting and grimacing, ashamed for him and angry that I had to think about what number it was and what he ought to use to clean himself. I don’t like to think or talk about such. Nobody ever talked to me about it. Listen to this, Joel Junior, my daddy would say when I was littler than Tank and for some reason inconsolable; he would drop the needle down on old Eddie Holman, “Hey There Lonely Girl,” and according to legend I would settle all soothed down in seconds. I stood looking up the road. A Dr Pepper truck blew past. Dust trailed it like the noxious fumes of the mosquito man. Tank when I looked back to check on him was assiduously cleaning himself with his worn-only-once Fruit of the Looms. His intensity scared and depressed me. But it was an oh lovely day, straight out of a children’s book. In a field off Moody Loop. Tank calling me asking me some question I couldn’t hear. Inside or outside? A song rose out of the woods. Not the Reverend Al Green nor “Hey There Lonely Girl” which memory had brought back a snippet of, then drowned out as if I’d lost the signal between the rows of corn. Not the diminishing rumble of the Dr Pepper truck. This song rose out of the same woods bordering the back of our house. Tank was hollering at me. Finally I heard him. I don’t like to think or talk about such. Nobody ever talked to me about it. “What do I do with them?” he hollered again.

  Then the song washed over him so I could not answer. When I turned to look back at the woods the song died out. Like one of those movies where the babysitter hears something in her closet but when she opens the door it’s just dresses boxes and shoes. I turned to look up the road and here came the song, low in the background, familiar as that same-ass cactus.

  Y’all go outside and play, my mama said. How to stop your mind from going where it believes it ought to be? You summon up the words of Streetclothes: the one thing we can’t do is make somebody feel the way they ought to feel.

  Tank came up alongside me slapping himself on the neck. I stood there and watched him with all the sound turned down except that song, seeping out of the woods. What was it called? I tried to picture the album cover. Tank’s mouth was moving.

  “What is it?”

  “A fuck mosquito,” he said, slapping. He didn’t know how to cuss yet, despite having spent some quality time with his sister.

  “It’s fucking,” I corrected. “A fucking mosquito. Do you hear that music?”

  “Wha
t music?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, what music?”

  I said nothing.

  “What music?”

  “Goddamn it, Tank,” I said. I hauled off and slapped him. Mosquitoes rose off him in a cloud. I slapped until his skin was pink. He stood there wailing but he didn’t run. Who was he going to run to? Carter climbed down out of that truck and look what happened to Carter. I was awful to Carter sometimes but not really to Carter, he was just standing in, he didn’t know that though. I told him if he didn’t hold the pee bottle he could go back inside, hang with daddy. He turned his head and held the god-durn bottle.

  Then the most beautiful music rose from the woods. The sun came out from behind a cloud and Jesus could not have come up with a finer light in this world. Tree leaves strained it. Dust danced in its shafts.

  The song was about the drift atop daddy’s dashboard. It was about the no d Promise Land. You blew in a tube under a dashboard and the song roared to life. Then you climbed in it and floored it, pedal to the metal, and it took you where ever you wanted to go.

  Climb in, Tank. I’m tired of being alone.

  Down past the silos and bright red barns, the green tractors, muddy Moody Loop transformed. We were almost home. Tank talking to me but I could not hear him for the song I inhabited as much as it inhabited me. I knew it but could not call its name. Guitar baptized in a back-roads church, praise the Lord chords soaked in rotgut from some downtown juke, a song that would leave grease stains on the walls of any room where you played it. Organ chords swirling in like waves down at Bottomsail. A woman lifting her voice high up to Heaven, singing about parts of her way south of the border and what done happened when she left somebody and how she had wandered the ends of the earth feeling low and could not find nothing to fill the hole in her heart and here she was fixing to come back home. Glorious homecoming sound track. Do you hear it, Tank?

  But Tank didn’t hear jack. I had slapped the ever-loving hell out of that boy. Mosquitoes had swarmed him and his skin was red from my slapping and puffing up welts from the bites. He was sweaty and crying, his whole head soaked. We stood in the middle of Moody Loop. There is where I woke up, a breeze winging in the odor of hog lagoon.

  I had to carry Tank the last half mile. He wasn’t talking to me. How could I explain the music in my head, that wood song seeping? I tried to get him back with the O’Jays “Love Train.” A train had come for us earlier and I’d promised not to get on it but looked like I had and took him with me. Then I learned how not to love. I left him with my sister and went to Bulkhead. I went off by myself and it was for myself. I got good at love. But there was nothing in it but loneliness and Tupperwared leftovers.

  I tried to get Tank to catch that train.

  From above a weak little whiny monotone declaring tell them all in Israel too.

  We ran alongside the tracks and caught finally the chorus, climbed up on that love train, love train.

  I looked for smoke above the trees. Maybe they’d died in a fire also. Then I remembered I hadn’t told Tank. I couldn’t remember why not. I couldn’t remember what was a lie and what actually had happened. I just could not remember. We’d been gone only two days and it seemed like months. We wore the same pants but were changed. We hummed and were hungry and we shat in the cornfield and threw brand-new underwear in the drainage ditch. There were no green silos, only the swamp sulking on one side of the house, those smoky woods on the other from which that song once again seeped, so low I could barely hear it.

  That reminded me. I told Tank some Tank jokes.

  “Would you like me to sing a solo?”

  “So low I can’t hear you, that’s fine with me,” said Tank.

  “How about, would you like me to sing tenor?”

  “Ten or fifteen miles away please,” said Tank.

  I could not see Tank’s face but I could hear him smiling above me. We passed alongside those woods, the song growing louder. She’d left and been gone, now here she was coming on back down home. Then it seemed like the song got stuck. We passed alongside the cactus woods and then the fields and then those same-ass cactus woods. Save me save me save me, sang my songstress. We were almost there and almost there.

  “What’s wrong, Joel Junior? Why we stopping?”

  You could stop and keep going. Wasn’t it weird, the way you could stop walking and keep walking in your head?

  He was on my shoulders still. He was the jockey and I was the horse on the home stretch. Wasn’t anybody betting on my tired ass, you got that right.

  There it was, our daddy’s house. No smoke, no charred brick and ash. No police line do not cross. Frosty never did call any law. People are too stuck up behind their counters to be anybody else’s savior. It’s like I told Sheriff Deputy Rex, you got to go ahead, do it yourself, don’t lie in bed awake forever worrying why did you not. No pickup parked out in the no-tree-plantedest yard in the whole state. A common criminal was likely driving it up and down the beach in Bulkhead, Tank’s remnant Ruffle dust lingering in the cab, my daddy’s Top of the Stax tape on the box.

  I felt Tank tense above me. I tried to pick him off my shoulders but his knees clamped around my neck. We had two dismounts established from prior shoulderings: regular, in which I simply lifted him off and set him down, and fancy, a flip-off with a circus ring flourish.

  “Fancy or regular?” I asked.

  “No,” he said like a three-year-old. Mostly ns in it, hardly any o.

  “You got to get off,” I said.

  We stood in the yard, his knees clamped around my neck. That song building up now. Coming on home to you, she sang. I tried to argue with her. Home to whom? I said. But I couldn’t be arguing with her. She was the light in this world. She was the green silos the shafts of dusty light the whistle you blow to crank the hybrid. She was another in a long line of saviors: Frosty bless his fat, bag-flapping self, kindly Mexican, magic caster, I don’t need to go through the whole list again, y’all got it, she was the last, she’d delivered me and Tank too, though he claimed he couldn’t hear her. I did not know then how good it was that he heard only his own quickened breath and maybe the breeze through the trees of those surly woods.

  “Is anybody home?” He whispered this. It felt like something he wanted to holler though, some line he’d heard on TV before my daddy golfclubbed it.

  I edged up in the yard. Close enough to see the golden locks of Carter’s hair carpeting the porch boards. I thought, If I can just find that earlobe. Then I thought, And do what with it? I had heard you could attach a severed something-another if you scooped it up and took it along with you to the emergency room but I imagined it was a time limit on it and, besides, I wasn’t the one going to save anybody, I’d run off and left that boy to the care of my daddy with a pair of scissors in his hand.

  “You stay out here in the yard,” I told Tank.

  “No,” he said, clamping tighter.

  “Join hands then,” I sang.

  We were so tall. What would my daddy look at us and see? A eight-foot two-headed cyborg alien robot? I didn’t like it one bit. But I could not get Tank down off of me. I had took him to raise. His little legs liked to strangled me. We picked our way across the porch boards, through my brother Carter’s hair, which muffled our footfalls. The woodsong of my savior drowning out the O’Jays. I tried to search for that lobe but you could say I was distracted.

  Tank smelled gamey like little boys do when they play outside and don’t never wash. He hummed and his legs were clammy. He went to wildly scratching his legs. “Stop it,” I whispered to him, and Lord God Almighty he actually stopped.

  The door was open. We stood at the screen. It was rusty and inside was dark and all I could see at first was the row of albums stretched across the wall. I had missed our music. But I didn’t need it because I had it all in my head. I was thankful for that gift. I was for a few seconds full of praise for that song inside my head.

  But then it got louder. So I pulled ope
n the screen door. The inside of the house smelled at first like ashes left in the hearth heated up by the first hot spring day, then more like the inside of someone’s mouth. It was dark and the windows were closed and then it hit you how it wasn’t bad breath but something else far deeper down and more awful. I tried to take Tank down and he would not come off of me. I said, Get down now, Tank, and he said, No, and I tried to pry his legs off me and he wouldn’t let go. His legs were pinching my neck so hard I couldn’t breathe good. I was gasping and trying to pull his legs off and that little fucker had some kind of superhero cartoon strength shooting through him. I could not get him off of me. He liked to choked me to death. We were struggling and making all sorts of racket. This won’t good, this was real real bad. We needed to get back aboard that train. One train left because I let it and then we left and another brought us back but then we got off and as soon as we did I wanted back on.

  Carter came out on the porch and called to us. He ain’t even in here, he said. Me and Tank sat in the shut tight pickup and I felt like a fool for staying out there all day long in the boiling sun with nothing to eat but Pop Rocks and Nabs when he ain’t even in there. But Carter didn’t come out from his room where he was maybe reading comic books or playing with army men up under his bed. He must be gone too, else he’d of heard our mess and come running.

  Sheriff Deputy Rex come and got him, I thought, and it’s a good thing he did. I wondered why I didn’t let him take us months ago when she left us here with him but then I remembered how it was when my daddy was All Clear. I remembered how good people can be. Light in this world. Baby it’s good to see you, sang my songstress. Lord I’m glad to be back home, she sang, and then here come the organ, unrolling its thick chords like carpet across the floor of the front room, knocking over all the records, slapping the warped floorboards of the farmhouse, get out the way now, here it comes, that song again which then I recognized it for what it was: that song out of my daddy’s head.

  He must of come in while we were struggling. I didn’t even hear him for the song. If Tank heard him he didn’t let on until he spoke to us, “Hey there, Joel Junior, hey, Tank,” and we turned and there he stood behind us, the screen door slapping against his backside, a smile on his face.