Also Known As Harper

by Ann Haywood Leal

  “You kind of look after Dorothy, don’t you?” I shifted the strap of my backpack onto my other arm.

  She nodded and slowed her feet down a little to wait for me.

  “I look after Mama and Hem like that, too,” I said.

  She tilted her head to the side in a thinking way.

  “I’ve always done it,” I said. “Even before Daddy left. Daddy used to do it way back when, I suppose. But he got so he wasn’t doing that good of a job at it. And Mama and Hem are the kind of people that need taking care of.”

  She bit her bottom lip and waited for me to go on.

  “I think that fire of yours licked its flames every which way . . .” I paused in my words for a second and watched her face, hoping it was okay to mention it.

  Her eyes stayed on me, so I kept going. “My daddy used his whiskey that way. It tore into everything to the left and right of him. Me. Hem. Mama. The more he poured it, the more he wanted that whiskey. And the worse things got.” I breathed out a ragged breath. “He’s gone now, and most times, I’m plenty glad about it.”

  It felt strange to finally say it out loud, but it made my whole body relax.

  She opened her mouth as if she was getting ready to say something, but then she closed it and got real sad about the eyes.

  “Your daddy gone, too?” I almost didn’t ask it, but I think she wanted me to.

  She put two fingers up.

  “Two years ago?” I asked. Randall was right. She didn’t have to speak her words out loud once you got to know her awhile.

  She pressed her lips together.

  “Before the fire.” I started to ask it as a question, but I knew it to be true when she lowered her eyes.

  “Mama knows I’m good at taking care of things,” I said. “But I think she forgets I can’t be doing it all the time.”

  The corner of my notebook was poking its way through my bag and into my side. “I know you and Randall are on a long school vacation right now.”

  She nodded and didn’t seem to be upset by it.

  “But the thing is,” I said, “I’m not.” I ran my hand along the strap of my backpack. “I think Mama’s been forgetting that, and I think it’s time she starts remembering.”

  Lorraine raised one eyebrow like she might not have been expecting me to talk about Mama like that.

  “I’m not sure how I’m going to do it yet, but I’m going to get myself back to school.” I patted my notebook through my backpack. “Tomorrow, if not sooner.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Words are just one way

  To get people to listen to you.

  I can listen to Flannery

  Without any words at all.

  Her softness pops into my brain

  At the best times.

  It moves around inside my head

  To cover up the sharp parts of Daddy

  Like a fluffy peach-colored blanket.

  LORRAINE READ the last line over my shoulder as I wrote it in my notebook. I hoped the peach part wouldn’t make her upset, since it was the color of the outside edges of a fire.

  But she smiled a little and raised an eyebrow, like she had when she’d read my poems on Dorothy’s porch.

  I put my pen down on a chunk of asphalt beside me. “Hem waits for Daddy every night.”

  Her eyes didn’t have one bit of surprise in them.

  “He doesn’t understand why Daddy left, but Mama and me do.” I twirled the pen in my fingers.

  The tears came from way back inside my head, as if they’d been pooling up there for a good long time.

  Lorraine tilted her head to the side, which I knew her to do when she was listening carefully. She handed me a skinny roll of toilet paper from her pocket, and she waited patiently.

  My tears came in heavy bursts, shaking my whole body. Finally, they lost steam and left me with quick, gulping breaths.

  I tore a few squares from the end and wiped at my face. “I saw the mean part of Daddy, but Hem didn’t.” I thought back to Daddy yelling at me from my doorway and flicking my light switch. “Daddy never got Hem up in the middle of the night with his carrying on. Just Mama and me.” I shook my head. “Hem always pretended not to hear him.”

  I remembered going into Hem’s room to make sure he was okay. He’d always be making like he was sleeping, with his eyes squeezed tight and his hands gripping the top edge of his blanket as if he was slipping off a cliff.

  I put my hand up to my ear, surprised for a moment that I could still hear Daddy’s voice ringing in my head.

  Lorraine leaned forward and raised her eyebrows.

  “Then Daddy got deeper and deeper into his angry until one day he wasn’t Daddy anymore. His eye color even changed up. His eyes used to be green, like Hem’s and mine. It was all that whiskey that turned them gray. Dark gray, like old concrete.”

  Lorraine nodded, because she was someone who understood about color.

  I closed my eyes. “There was plenty of yelling going on that last day.” I remembered how the wall had formed a perfect circle. A perfectly round hole where Daddy had punched his balled-up fist. “There was so much hollering going on that in the end I wasn’t really sure if he went because Mama told him to go or if he just up and went on his own.”

  But Mama’s voice had sounded different that day.

  It had been low and careful, like she was stepping around pieces of broken glass. You take yourself out of here, Wayne. She’d had one hand on the telephone and one hand on the silverware drawer. I won’t have you and your nasty drinking infecting my children anymore.

  Hem’s face was clear in my mind as Daddy hurried toward his pickup, and it made my tears start up again. I wiped at my nose with the back of my wrist.

  “The thing is, Lorraine . . .”

  She leaned in closer.

  “I wanted him to leave,” I said. “But what I really wanted was for him to say good-bye to me. It didn’t even have to be words. Just a wave.”

  Daddy had locked eyes with Hem for half a second. But just with Hem. And Hemingway had stood at the top of the porch steps, his whole face looking scared and sad at the same time.

  Daddy had pulled out of the driveway without looking both ways. “He was afraid the angry part of him would get too big, so he had to get away,” I said.

  Lorraine pressed her lips together and nodded.

  “I don’t really want him to come back.” I couldn’t believe I’d actually said the words out loud again.

  “’Cause he makes me get a big streak of angry inside of me, and I don’t like feeling that way about anyone.”

  I thought for a minute maybe I’d said too much.But she didn’t look to be leaving. She smiled a slow smile. The kind that makes a person feel better about things. The kind I think Flannery might have ended up having.

  “That was the first time Hem waited.” I let out a long breath of air.

  Lorraine just sat, her body still and quiet. She didn’t push a person.

  “Hem wouldn’t come in off that porch. No one could make him. It was way after dark that night when Mama finally scooped him up and took him inside to his bed.” I shook my head. “That boy was dead asleep right on that top step.”

  Clang!

  Lorraine stood up real quick like and pointed in the direction of the metal ringing sound. The direction that Hemingway and Randall had gone.

  “It sounds like they’re throwing rocks at a stop sign.” I grabbed my backpack and took off running down the broken-up road. All I needed was to have to explain to Mama a gash on the side of Hem’s head.

  As we hurried down the old road, the trees and sticker bushes around us were getting thinner. The road took a quick turn to the right and widened into what looked to be an old parking lot.

  Hem was perched on top of a shopping cart, turned over on its side. From the looks of all the rust and the two missing wheels, I could tell it had been a while since that cart had held any groceries. He reached down and dropped a rock onto the top of a r
ound pile beside him.

  Randall was a pretty good shot, I had to admit. He hurled a rock at a low pole with a metal box on top. Clang!

  Hem put two fists in the air above his head. “Three in a row! Go to the next ones.” He pointed to a long row of metal poles in front of Randall.

  Randall looked to be getting ready to hurl another one when Lorraine marched up to him and wrenched the rock right out of his hand. She grabbed it so hard it knocked him off-balance and into a tall cluster of weeds.

  I could tell Randall knew better than to complain. Lorraine stood over him in that cluster of weeds and her eyes narrowed and darkened, as if she might be thinking about planting the rock right between his eyes.

  “I’m sorry!” He stood up and brushed the dirt from the backside of his jeans. “I won’t bother your precious theater anymore.”

  She kicked at a rock on the ground.

  “I said I won’t bother it again!” He walked back to the shopping cart, as if Hemingway could defend anyone against anything.

  I finally figured out what I’d seen from the pool. The white flags blowing in the wind were actually the bits and pieces left over from the old movie screen.

  “This here’s a drive-in, Harper Lee!” Hem pointed up ahead.

  The frame was all there, and I tried to imagine how it had once been, with a movie playing across the wide white screen.

  Lorraine tried to right a speaker box on top of the pole next to her.

  “Lorraine’s going to fix it back the way it was.” Randall was trying to talk nice to get back on her good side, but I could tell she wasn’t having any of it. She wouldn’t even point her face in his direction. She was going from pole to pole, trying to straighten the speaker boxes.

  Hem pointed at the one next to his shopping cart. “Cars used to pull right up here and put the speaker in their window!” He acted like Randall had thought of it all himself.

  I ran my eyes over the broken-up metal boxes with the frayed scraps of wire trailing out of them, and I wondered how Lorraine was going to go about fixing them.

  Lorraine came back toward me and motioned for me to follow her.

  Off to the left was a low stone building with a flat roof.

  Randall and Hem ran ahead of us. “It’s the projector house.” Randall patted a ragged piece of plywood that had been nailed to the front.

  It was a good thing neither one of them could read much, because there were some words painted on the side of those dirty white cinder blocks. The kind Mrs. Early and her sister liked to use.

  Lorraine led me to a side door and looked to be getting ready to go on in when the door swung open with a hollow bang.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I REMEMBERED THAT tangled black hair from somewhere. And when I saw the spear teeth, I remembered straightaway where I’d seen her. It was the girl from the motel. The one with the pointy elbows and the nasty Winnie Rae Early voice. She plowed out of the projector house, elbows out, just like she had barreled ahead of me into the end unit of the motel.

  “Get off my property.” Her voice pointed at each one of us, but she didn’t look at any of us. “And don’t even think about going in my house when I’m gone.”

  Lorraine rolled her eyes at her.

  “Who you talking to, Alma?” The tall, skinny woman came out of the door behind Spear Teeth, with a baby on her hip like at the motel.

  Spear Teeth poked her nose up at the sky, which made her teeth jut out even more. She grunted and went around the other side of the building.

  “Alma’s had a rough day.” The woman had far too kind a voice to be Spear Teeth’s mother, but she had the same long coal-black hair. “She had to get up early to pack.”

  She reached around to pick up the corner of an old baby car seat and dragged it along behind her.

  “I’ll get it.” I picked up the seat, since she was carrying the baby and all, but I didn’t want to have to talk to Alma again. The last thing I needed in my life was another Winnie Rae Early.

  I looked down, hoping to avoid eye contact, and followed Spear Teeth’s mom around the side of the building.

  But Alma didn’t even try to talk to me. She sat in the back seat of a tan station wagon. It was piled high with bags and boxes, with only a small space left open next to her for the baby’s car seat.

  “Wish us luck,” Spear Teeth’s mother said to the air above my head. She had those same worry lines like Mama had between her eyes, so I knew she was going to need every bit of luck she could muster.

  “Where you going?” I knew it was just plain nosy, but I had to ask it.

  “We’re going to Massachusetts.” She smiled back at Spear Teeth. “To my sister’s house.”

  “She doesn’t really want us to come!” Spear Teeth shouted from the back seat.

  “Oh, it’ll be fine.” She was smiling with her mouth, but not with the rest of her face.

  Alma gave the seat in front of her such a hard kick, I could see it jump forward. “Uncle Lloyd says he don’t have room for any freeloaders!”

  I wasn’t for exact sure what “freeloader” meant, but I was pretty sure it meant they couldn’t pay their rent. Like us.

  “Thanks for helping, honey.” Spear Teeth’s mother gave me a little wave and set to work buckling the baby into her beat-up car seat.

  I looked back at Spear Teeth. Real quick like. And I saw it in her eyes. Without really knowing me, she knew about me and about what had been traveling through my head lately.

  I didn’t want to end up nasty and angry at everyone like Alma. Like Daddy.

  I needed to get back to school to show Mrs. Rodriguez my poems. It seemed so simple. I’d never put one thought into getting myself to school before. I hadn’t had to figure out one thing about it. I just got up and went. How did it ever get so mixed up?

  Alma’s station wagon moved off across the weeds of the drive-in theater parking lot, and I headed back around the corner of the projection room.

  Lorraine was trying to prop a torn-off piece of cardboard in front of one of the swears painted toward the bottom of the building. She held it in place with rocks and stood back to study it.

  Randall tried to pull the piece of cardboard away, but his hand snapped right back when Lorraine gave him her glare. It was a lot like my Mrs. Rodriguez look that I gave Hem. It was plenty hard to do, because you had to squint your eyes up and make one eyebrow tilt up at the same time. The first time I saw Mrs. Rodriguez do it, I knew I had to practice it. You couldn’t use it very often or it wouldn’t have as much bang. It always made Hem freeze in his sneakers and pay attention, and I could see it worked on Randall, too.

  Hemingway was tugging at the ragged piece of plywood nailed to the side of the building.

  “Get away from there,” I said. “I don’t have time to be digging splinters out of your hands.”

  “This here’s the snack bar.” He pointed at the plywood. “Me and Randall are going to see if there are any leftover hot dogs.”

  It made me sick to think about how old those hot dogs would be if there were any still back there.

  He looked to be reaching back for the plywood until Lorraine gave him one of her hard glares. As soon as she stepped into his line of sight, he dropped his hands down to his sides and took two galloping side steps away from the building.

  When I saw those eyes of hers, I knew I had the answer to my problem. It had been staring me in the face so hard, it was a wonder I hadn’t thought of it straight off. Lorraine could watch Hem for me!

  My stomach and head were fizzing like I’d had two or three cans of soda. By tomorrow morning, Mrs. Rodriguez could have my poems in her hands. I could almost feel my desk under my elbows and the dusty, slick linoleum under my feet.

  I’d have to start out plenty early, since they weren’t about to let me on the school bus without the papers from Mama. But I could walk it. If I didn’t have Hem with me, I knew I could. If I started getting Hem ready after Mama left, I could have him dropped off wi
th Lorraine and get myself to school with time to spare.

  Before I even went over to ask her, I knew she’d say yes. Bits and pieces of her reminded me of Mama. Lorraine was the sort of person you could count on. The sort of person that would stick around and take another job when the rent money ran out.

  She smiled at me when I asked her, in a serious way, as if she knew right off how important it was to me.

  “I could try to come back home at lunch.” I turned and searched out Hemingway, off by the projection house. “He can be a handful sometimes, but he’ll do what you tell him.”

  She shook her head when I said the lunch part, and waved the air in front of her like it was no big deal.

  It felt as if my poems were burning a hole right through my backpack, they were so aching to get read.

  “I really need to be getting Hem back to the motel.” I pointed across the parking lot. “I’m thinking we need to head that way?”

  Lorraine looked at Randall, and he nodded. “You can follow us to the tents, then you’ll know the rest of the way back, right?”

  I grabbed her hand. “Thank you so much, Lorraine. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  She patted my backpack and led the way between the rows of speakers.

  The only thing I was worried about was the path past the pool. Especially if Hem had it in his mind to do some begging. I had to get back and get my poems ready for Mrs. Rodriguez. I wouldn’t have time for him to stop off and take a dip in the swimming pool.

  But it turned out I had nothing to worry about. As soon as we left Randall and Lorraine off at their tent, Hem picked up the pace. It was time to do his waiting, and he was looking anxious. I didn’t tell him he was staying with Lorraine and Randall in the morning. He’d be all excited, and he might let it slip to Mama. She didn’t know them like I did, and I was thinking she’d never be letting me drop Hemingway off with people she hadn’t spent time with.

  “Hurry up!” Hem had picked his legs up to a good trot, and it was getting hard to keep up with him. He didn’t even stop and try to take a swing on the old swing set in back of the motel.