If You Want Me to Stay

by Michael Parker

  “Where y’all been?”

  Tank was shaking. He still had those knees so tight I could hardly breathe, much less talk. I wasn’t so much in the mood to talk to him anyhow. I wondered what we ever come back there for.

  “We were just down to Frosty’s for some snacks,” I whispered from between Tank’s knees.

  He was wearing work pants and a white T-shirt. Same thing I’d seen him in last. The T-shirt was splotched with blood. His face was so dirty there were streaks of clean from where sweat had run down him. Otherwise his face was nearly black in places, from where it looked like he’d rubbed it in the mud.

  He was staring at my chest. He looked up at me and smiled.

  “Mario, hey? I like that. Y’all seen my truck?”

  Tank, I could tell, was warming to him. He had loosened his legs around my neck. But it was that same-ass cactus. He might be All Clear now but that cactus was going to crop back up directly. If this is love I’m joining the motherfucking carnival.

  “Y’all go outside and play,” I said to Tank.

  “Who’s y’all?” my daddy said. “And where’s my truck, Joel Junior?”

  I hated he called me that. I hated him and loved him too. It won’t his fault, and it won’t mine. People do they best they can except when they don’t and then they claim to have been doing the best they can. Tank let me dismount him regular, not fancy. Fancy given the circumstances would have seemed a little frivolous I believe.

  “Go outside for a minute,” I told Tank.

  “I want you to come with me.”

  “I’ll take you out there,” I said. “Then I’m coming back in.”

  My daddy smiled at us through his streaky face. Dried mud lining his forehead cracked when he smiled.

  I took Tank by the hand and led him out to the yard. We kept going past where the truck was before I stole it. I led him out to the road. I told him stand right there in the middle of Moody Loop and wait for me. He said something but I couldn’t hear him over that song. I kneeled down and hugged him. Holy Moly that boy hummed.

  “I love you, Tank, you know I love you,” I said.

  “I love you, Mario,” said Tank.

  “Look,” I said. “If I don’t come out and daddy does, you just race him, okay? I bet you can beat him in a race.”

  “How far a race?”

  “Up to the Jackson’s trailer house.”

  “That’s too far.”

  “He can take you in a short race but not all the way up to the Jackson’s.”

  “I can beat him,” Tank said.

  “Just go right inside, tell Mrs. Jackson I said let you stay with her for a while, okay? Wait there for me and if I don’t come ask her to call Sheriff Deputy Rex.”

  “Ain’t it a race anymore?”

  “No,” I said. “Not when you get there. Then it’s just an errand.”

  “I guess so,” said Tank. He seemed disappointed that a race would end up an errand. I hated to disappoint that boy. He always had good questions but when he went to asking them more often than not I’d just get ill at him. I’d slap the bejesus out of him. Bejesus, if he’s the same as Jesus, he can’t be all bad as there’s a sweetness in the songs that bear his name. Maybe he’s just in those songs and that’s all and that’s enough.

  What it was, when I walked back up in the yard, all the songs I loved seemed like they were playing at once. I could not hear jack. Like someone was twisting the tuning dial on the radio. I’d hear a note or two from Sly, then same from the Staples, Reverend Al, Marvin, J. B., Aretha. I even heard some white boys my daddy thought could sing some soul music: Steve Marriott, Van Morrison, Eric Burdon. I heard it all, organ, bass, chicken-peck gospel guitar, I heard drums and sax and trumpet, Otis called to me from the deep of a Wisconsin lake, Al Green hollered when those boiling grits hit his lap. I felt for all my sweet singers who came to sad ends, but Marvin Gaye, his was the death that got away with me the most. I could not hardly listen to him knowing he was shot by his own flesh and blood while he’d gone off.

  My daddy was sitting in his chair. He had put on an album. He was playing Sam and Dave. Sam and Dave were singing “Let It Be Me.” I stood there a minute, trying to tell Sam from Dave, but I could not.

  “Where’s Carter?” I said.

  “Carter?” My daddy had his eyes half-closed. Looked like he was drifting off to sleep sitting up.

  “Yeah, Carter. You know, Carter?”

  My daddy’s eyes struggled to stay open. He sang along with Sam or Dave, whichever one it was, didn’t matter, it was the same song.

  “Carter needed a haircut. I gave him a haircut, then he went to sleep out in the hammock.”

  I did not want to leave that room. It smelled bad the farther you went back in the house. I did not want to go to the kitchen where the bad smell was coming from. I was thinking I’d stay in that room and listen to the song out of my daddy’s head which wasn’t “Let It Be Me,” it was that wood song. But then I remembered Tank outside and I turned around and watched him through the screen door draw something in the dirt of Moody Loop with a stick he’d found. I looked over at my daddy and all I heard was Sam and Dave. I thought about my mama saying it wasn’t nothing that would dare inhabit a child and I decided I’d bygod believe her and believe that she was just doing the best she could and that if she wasn’t doing too good it was because she wasn’t capable of any more.

  I left my daddy nodding out there in the chair. Down the dark hallway it smelled worse the farther you got. And in the kitchen good God Almighty. Blood had dripped all over the floor there and led in a dried trickle to the back door. I felt Tank’s legs around my neck, choking me. For some reason I thought of Carla and her slutty self. Me and her were slow-dancing to Otis, “Pain in My Heart.” I did not look down anymore. The light in this world buzzed outside the kitchen, through the rusty screen. I pushed open the screen and saw Carter in the hammock but smelled him before I ever got outside good. I pulled blessed Mario up over my mouth and stood there on the back porch. Carter was sagging in that hammock, so heavily the ropes nearly touched the pine straw. The three of us used to get up in that hammock and it never drooped that low. I saw all his hair had been clipped off. I saw from the porch the cuts on his head and the flies and bugs feeding on him. It was an oh lovely day. Babies claim their name is Mario when really it is Joel Junior. I heard nothing at all but the wind in the pine needles.

  I put my hand in my back pocket and felt something in there. I pulled out me and Tank’s temporary tattoos we’d bought at the surf shop with my sister’s leftover money. Wasn’t that a year ago that we’d wandered around that surf shop laying hands on smooth boards and I had out of pride bought something from surly Glenn? It seemed like I had covered so many thousand miles. Strength and Good Judgment, read my temporary tattoo. Peace and Tranquility, said Tank’s. It made my stomach roll how I had not the strength and good judgment to affix Tank’s tattoo to his little pipsqueaky bicep so that peace and tranquility might follow him this day and all his livelong ones forever and ever let us praise bejesus. I carried the words around just like I did the key to the pickup in my pocket. It made me actually sick to remember how I sat in that boiling pickup all day long, the keys in my pocket, talking to my high-up-in-some-hotel mama about basement or attic instead of driving my brothers to someplace safe. Everything I needed to save us all stuck up in my pocket.

  I pulled Mario back down off so I could hurl. It wasn’t anything on my stomach but thick yellow water. I don’t like to think or talk about such. It was a horrible noise arising out of my belly. I tried to summon some other song but it was only that ugliest retching aria in the air around me. It’s a wonder I even still know the names of all the sweet songs I grew up on but do you know to this day even after all that happened down off Moody Loop I play the records my daddy bought at Dusselbach’s, I sing in my head those songs he loved and that I love too. Somebody might say, I don’t know how you can stand to listen to that mess but they just don�
�t know how glad I was to learn I did not share the song in his head. I could hear it but I did not understand note one of it.

  Then this happened: Tank got tired of waiting. He came up on the front porch and peeked through the screen and seen in the chair our daddy half sort of sleeping. Thank Jesus he had enough sense to leave him be. He came around the house on the swamp side keeping close upside it. Red-yellow-black, stay way back. When he saw Carter, Tank went to wailing. Nothing like I ever heard out of him before. I wasn’t through heaving up nothing—the lining of my belly’s what it felt like—but I had to stop my own mess and go be somebody’s big brother.

  Pardon me now if it comes back to me aswirl. Tank went to wailing but not wailing, it was like nothing I’d ever heard out of his mouth. I had an older sister she left she couldn’t take it. Dizzy and sick I grabbed Tank and tried to shush him. There is no d in Promise Land because it’s only love that can kill you down there, not house fires. Houses live both inside and outside at once and I have Tank to thank for asking the question in the first place and sorry-ass Landers for leading me to the answer by way of a half-car/half-ugly-truck. That was the trick, to keep it warm or cool inside like my dream basement but weather also the outward storms. I wanted to tell Tank but Tank was screaming and squirming and I clamped my hand over his mouth and wrestled him around the corner of the house. I have been old and I’m no younger now for having told this story but I’ll say one thing and that is: she gave up, but he was just following orders. I was weak from no sleep and a diet of garbage food but Tank had the supercurrent surging through him. All day long I sat in the boiling trunk with those truck keys lumped in my pocket like a hard-on I stroked and teased and saved as if some sweet girl was going to get a lift out to Moody Loop in the late afternoon. Tank knows I could have driven us all to someplace safe. He knows the windshield was a movie screen and that I’d just soon sing some Curtis as keep Carter from climbing out of that truck. Tank knows I kept Carter up on that porch with a scissors-wielding daddy. He sure does know I left his ass down at Bottomsail in the care of our sister who left, she couldn’t take it, if this is love. Oh it was going on the loveliest day I’d ever in my whole life seen. I wrestled Tank up in my arms and he squirmed down out of my hold. I caught up to him around the swamp side of the house. We were moving along, Tank flailing, when our daddy came around the side of the porch. We could either go back to where Carter lay dead and humming in the slung-low hammock or shoot off into the swamp. I put Tank down or tried to. After all that wriggling and screaming he was clamped to me again. But it would not do, the both of us running from him.

  “Tank, get down now, let me talk to him.”

  “No,” said Tank. “What did he do to Carter, what’s wrong with Cart?”

  “It’s no time to talk,” I whispered to him. I had been so old. Won’t no point in whispering, my daddy was standing waiting for us at the edge of the porch. He could have heard us but from the look of him, mud-streaked face, cloudy eyes, he’d gone off again or more than likely never had come back on. Had he, he’d of turned himself in when he found Carter in the hammock and us missing. He’d have wondered if he did the same to us as Carter. He don’t remember a thing afterward. He would have called Sheriff Deputy Rex and said come get me. He was a good man my daddy. At least he has an excuse. You’d think I’d of learned to forgive him but nothing fucks you up like loving another person. They list all those means of death, call it cancer or AIDS, high blood pressure or blunt trauma, but it’s one and only love that lays you out in a dark daytime grave. Tank let me put him down but clung to my legs.

  “Go around through the kitchen,” I told him. “Bring me a butcher knife.”

  “No,” said Tank. He went to hiccuping then. It about made me laugh as it always did, his little chest leaping from the bubbling inside. But I did not laugh as I wished for Tank a lifetime of Peace and Tranquility. Daddy just stood there mud-streaky smiling. We could have run into the swamp but it was lousy with snakes to where we had to screen the chimney or they’d climb down into the fireplace and you’d find them coiled in the dark cool corners. I miss old Moody Loop sometimes. Even it if smelled like hog lagoon, even it was lousy with snakes and mosquitoes and black sucking sand. The songs in my head spill right out of that house back down on Moody Loop where my daddy stood lost listening to the voices which came on over whatever else he’d been listening to. If he was fixing to do to one of us what he did to Carter, let it be me. “Go on, Tank, now,” I said, and I pushed him and he took off running up the side of the house. I believe the sudden movement is what jarred my daddy. Maybe he was so gone off he could only distinguish vague shapes and movement. He started down toward me. I thought to lead him in the swamp where surely the coral snakes would set upon him and him too off to remember the rhyme would confuse them with the common harmless corn snake just like when I returned to Moody Loop from my worthless journey and could not distinguish between my daddy back from one of his voyages and him still way the hell off. Everybody knows it I was born this way. In the fourteen years I spent down off Moody Loop I’d never laid eyes on a single coral snake. “Red-yellow-whatever, who gives a fuck, I’ve never seen one and neither has any of y’all,” said my foul-mouthed sister. She was right, it was a song we sang, an evil we nearly coveted, but it never came and we spent our youths cowering from it. I just stood there. Let it be me. Tired of waiting, bring it on. I could feel my little brother’s appendages still clinging to me, phantom limb pain I believe is how they refer to that phenomenon. Though it was technically not my limbs lopped off, that boy was a part of me. Severed pink lobe falling through the dusty shafts of oh so lovely light. I offered no resistance when my daddy tackled me and put his hands around my throat. I figured it was what I deserved for keys up in my all-day-long pocket, for turning out so bad at love. He ground my face in the mud so that I looked just like him. She named me after him after all. For so long I worried that my daddy and I shared that same song, the one playing in his head which I was close enough to hear buzzing. I thought I would miss Tank and Carter and especially those songs playing in my head which would soon enough stop. The thought that the music would stop is what must of made me momentarily fight back enough to turn my head upward toward the lovely sky and see Tank come up behind my daddy from the front porch side and stick the knife in his back. My daddy turned around clawing at Tank which left me free to scramble up and kick him hard in the head but Tank had somehow hit just right, low and to the side so that it missed bone but struck organ.

  Me and Tank watched our daddy fall half-in/half-out of the swamp. We stood there watching him spasm and heave. Then he made a sound like train’s brakes sighing. I stepped over him and reached for Tank. We joined hands. We ran alongside the tracks and caught finally the chorus: all aboard the love train, love train.