Safe from the Neighbors

by Steve Yarbrough

  I wondered how our land, and the house we lived in, could be “public.” The school I went to was public, and it said so on the side of the bus I rode: LORING PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM. That meant anybody could go to school there, as long as they were white. In that sense, all of us owned it. But if our land was public, and our house, too, that must mean that they belonged to everybody, not just us. This made me wonder if everything else I’d thought was ours was public property as well. Did my father own the pickup we were riding in? What about our tractors, our cotton trailers, our combine? And all the stuff in our house? Did Eugene have as much claim to my clothes and toys as I did?

  Up ahead, on the left, the Calloways’ place came into view. Mr. Calloway’s truck wasn’t there—he’d driven away from the barbershop in the opposite direction, as if headed downtown—but Nadine’s sky-blue Tempest was parked in the driveway. I’d gotten to know that car fairly well, having ridden to town in it on numerous occasions with her and Eugene and Maggie. She always let me sit up front beside her, making her own kids ride in the back. “Luke’s company,” she said if either of them complained, “though he’s also family.” She’d reach across the seat after saying that, giving my hand a little squeeze and following it up with a wink.

  I waited to see if my father would slow down and look across the yard, as it was common to do when you passed a neighbor’s house. Whoever was inside might glance out the window when they heard you driving by, and it would be offensive not to wave. You even waved at people you didn’t know, if you passed them on the road, or at least you raised your hand, unless, of course, they happened to be black. If they were, waving seemed to be optional, but my father always did it, so I did, too.

  Not only did he fail to slow down that day, he actually sped up, as if he wanted to put the Calloways behind us just as fast as he could. He continued to stare straight ahead.

  I looked over the gun rack in the rear window, thinking maybe Nadine had stepped outside when she heard us, but I couldn’t see through the cloud of dust. “Daddy?” I said.

  He acted as if he hadn’t heard me. Though he was known to be the slowest driver in the county—something the men in the barbershop joked about sometimes, claiming they’d fallen asleep at the wheel while creeping along behind him—he pressed the accelerator to the floor.

  Cotton fields dissolved into a white blur. The wind whipping in through the window took my breath away, and I had to turn in his direction to fill my lungs. What I saw scared me. His jaw was locked tight, his bottom lip quivered, and his right cheek looked damp, though it wasn’t hot out.

  When we got to our house, he wheeled into the yard so fast that for a moment I thought he intended to drive right into the living room and knock all the walls down, since apparently they weren’t ours anyway. As I braced myself against the dashboard he finally slammed his foot on the brake, throwing up dirt and gravel. Later that afternoon, while he was out in the field, I inspected the deep grooves in the driveway.

  I expected him to jump out of the truck, slam the door and storm inside, but he didn’t. My mother was home, and my grandmother was there, too, and I doubt he was in a hurry to give them any news. On the other hand, he must’ve been afraid that I wanted to ask him about the conversation in the parking lot. It’s nice to think that if I had known of his apprehension I would have kept my mouth shut, but that gives the child I was then too much credit. I was interested in only one thing: how all that talk about our land being public would affect me.

  “Daddy?”

  He didn’t answer right away. What he did was turn loose of the steering wheel, resting his left hand on his thigh. He turned his right hand over and studied it for a moment, as if he’d never noticed it before. Then he reached across the seat and patted my knee. “Yeah, son?”

  The whine I heard in my own voice only scared me further, but taming it was beyond my control: “Was Mr. Calloway saying he might take our house? Is that what all that stuff about things being ‘public’ was about?”

  “Arlan ain’t nothing but a blowhard,” he said. “You know what a blowhard is?”

  “No sir, I don’t.”

  He puffed his cheeks out until it looked as if they’d explode, then blew all the air out at me, and it smelled like coffee and cigarettes. He lifted his hand off my knee and mussed my hair. “That was just a waste of breath, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes sir. I guess so.”

  “Well, sometimes that’s what Mr. Calloway likes to do. Wasting a little breath’s just his way of staying amused. Didn’t do that, he’d bore himself to death. He’s not going to take our house, don’t you worry.”

  Just like that, he put it out of my mind, which I believe he would’ve said is what a father’s for, had we ever discussed that topic in later years, after I became a father myself. “Well, good,” I said. “He doesn’t need another house anyhow. He’s already got one of his own.”

  “Yeah, and he probably ought to spend a little more time worrying about what goes on there. But that’s for him to decide, not me.” He glanced at his watch. “Come on,” he said, “and let’s eat us some Viennas and saltines. I believe I saw a big bottle of RC in the refrigerator. That still your favorite soda water?”

  “Yes sir, that and Dr Pepper.”

  So we got out of the truck and walked towards our house. And if he sagged any beneath the weight I’d deposited squarely on his shoulders, it was never apparent to me.

  THE DAY MY DAUGHTERS almost caught me in bed with Maggie, I waited until I saw their friend’s car turn the corner at the end of our block. Then I ran through the kitchen and out the back door onto the porch.

  Our backyard isn’t fenced—few in this part of the world are. I could see our picnic table and the little shed where I kept the lawn mower and the few hand tools I knew how to use. Ten or twelve years ago, somebody, probably one of the neighbor kids, got in there and stole a set of screwdrivers and a power drill, so I put a padlock on the door. In the dew, still heavy that early in the morning, I could see a trail of footsteps leading right up to it, then they veered off into the yard next door.

  I went back inside and dialed Maggie’s number on my cell phone. I got her voice-mail, and rather than leave her a message I threw my clothes on, jumped in the car and started down the street, trying to imagine what route she’d take if she’d decided to walk home.

  I didn’t get far before my phone rang. When I answered, she said, “You looked terrified when you heard those kids in the living room. I felt so sorry for you.”

  I was just passing Ellis’s house, so I drove a little farther before pulling to the curb. “Yeah,” I said, “it scared the hell out of me. Not much point in trying to conceal that.”

  “No, there certainly isn’t.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At my place.”

  The only way she could have gotten there so fast would’ve been to sprint the whole distance, and even that was pushing it. “How’d you get there?”

  “Caught a ride.”

  “A ride? With who?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It might.”

  “Your friend Ellis. He just left here a couple minutes ago. I invited him in for coffee, but he said he had to go run some errands.”

  “Ellis Buchanan? Jesus, where did he see you?”

  “He was pulling out of his driveway when I walked by.”

  “What did you tell him you were doing over here?”

  “I told him I woke up at five-thirty, couldn’t go back to sleep and decided to take a long, long walk.”

  “You think he believed you?”

  “Of course not, but he’s too polite to show it.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He just said that it was a nice morning for a walk and that if he were a little younger, he might’ve taken one, too.”

  It occurred to me then that before the day got much older, I probably ought to do something smart and quit sitting in the car in front of somebody else’s hous
e, talking on the cell phone. So I told her I was going home to take a shower and I’d call back once I’d had some coffee. She said that was fine and hung up.

  I pulled around the block and went back to my house, where indeed I took a shower and put on a pot of coffee. Waiting for it to brew, I phoned my wife.

  When she answered, there was noise in the background that sounded like a marching band. “Hey,” she said, “what have you been up to?”

  At a moment like that, what do you think of? A thin-shouldered girl sitting on a stack of books in the aisle of a library. What a doe’s eyes look like when she’s dying. The amazement you heard in the voice of your young wife when she told you she was pregnant, and how you felt as you sat beside her in the operating room, holding her hand while a doctor and several nurses hovered over her performing a C-section. The sweat that ran down your back when your daughter stood in the hallway sniffing a strange odor. It’s a wonder I got any words out. “Nothing much. What’s that I hear in the background?”

  “We’re at a café. They’re having some kind of parade outside on the street. I think maybe there’s a home game today.”

  “How’s the conference going?”

  “Just fine. I read last night, at an open-mike thing.” Until now, she’d always been harsh about stuff like that and poetry slams. If your work’s any good, she claimed, a stranger sitting alone in a room with six hundred poems on his or her desk should be able to recognize it. And if no one did, maybe you should quit writing and go grade some more papers. You could never accuse her of getting too romantic about her poems, though she always acted as if she thought I was about to.

  “It’s great you got up there and read,” I said. “Did they like it?”

  “It seems so.”

  “Hey, that’s fabulous. I’m proud of you.” She didn’t say anything, so I kept talking: “The girls dropped in on me this morning.”

  “I know. Candace just called me.”

  “She did?”

  Until then she’d sounded cheerful, though now I thought I heard that querulous note creeping in. “I just said she did.”

  “She had a gigantic guy with her, and unless I’m dreaming he’s her new boyfriend.”

  “I think you might be right. Look, I should probably go—there’s another session in fifteen minutes. We’ll talk tomorrow, when I get home.” And just like that, she was gone.

  I poured myself a cup of coffee, then went into the living room and sat down on the couch. But I didn’t want to look at those champagne bottles and cups right then, so I carried my coffee into the study, where I called Candace and got her voice-mail and told her to travel safely and let me know when they were back in Oxford. Then I called Trish, with the same results. And then, because I wasn’t ready to call Maggie yet and couldn’t think of anything else to do, I dialed my dad.

  I hadn’t been over there since Wednesday and hadn’t even talked to him since Thursday morning. I’d promised to come by on Friday afternoon, but in my excitement about having an evening alone with Maggie, I’d forgotten.

  The phone rang six times before he lifted the receiver. “Yeah?”

  “Hey, it’s me. How’re you doing?”

  The answer was a long time coming. “How could I be doing?”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t make it by yesterday. There was an issue at work, then I came home to grade some papers and damn if I didn’t fall asleep. By the time I woke up, it was too late to call.”

  “Too late for you, maybe. Over here we didn’t sleep.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Well, to start with, your momma took another fall.”

  That got me up off the couch. “What kind of fall?”

  “Is there more than one kind?”

  “I mean, how did it happen?”

  “It happened just like it did,” he said.

  “When?”

  “Whenever it happened. Son, you think we time everything? Over here it’s always sunset.”

  “Listen,” I said, “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said. “Five minutes or five hours, it won’t make much difference.”

  • • •

  I unlocked the front door, but it was still chained, so I rang the bell and hollered, “It’s me.” When he finally let me in, I saw what shape he was in and knew I needed to get him to the doctor. It looked as if he hadn’t shaved in days. He was barefooted, he’d buttoned his shirt unevenly, and the odor coming off him made me gasp. Most disturbingly, his right eye was full of blood.

  “This is how things get towards the end,” he said. “If it’s any comfort to you, it ain’t half as bad as I was scared it might be.”

  “What happened to your eye?”

  “Blood vessel busted, I imagine.”

  “When’d you first notice it?”

  He actually laughed. Then he shook his head. “Lord God,” he said.

  I didn’t see what was funny about my question, and said so. All that did was make him chuckle again. “Let me tell you about something I read one time,” he said. “I can’t remember the name of the book, but it belonged to an old boy I bunked with in the navy. Took place during the French Revolution. There’s a scene I never will forget, just because of my reaction to it. See, they’re about to use the guillotine to execute this fellow for being an aristocrat or something, and two of ’em grab him by the arms and throw him down face-first on the board he’ll be layin’ on when the blade falls. And when I read it, I thought, Now ain’t that awful, making him hit his nose so hard?” He stuck his hands in his pockets. “You think I’m worried about having a red eye? Lord, boy, you got some learnin’ left to do.”

  There wasn’t much point in asking him again how my mother had fallen. He wasn’t going to tell me, and I could figure it out anyway. He’d gone into a stupor, probably because of his diabetes medication, which was a diuretic that often left him drained. And at the end of her bed, there was a small space between the foot and side rails that she was thin enough to slide right through.

  The question was, how badly was she hurt? “You think she broke anything this time?” I asked, as casually as I could.

  “I don’t believe so. I remember how her hip looked last time, and I’m not seeing anything like that now.”

  “Of course, you’re not a doctor.”

  “No, and neither are you.”

  He hadn’t moved since I came in. As old and stooped as he was, he still filled the hallway. To get to my mom’s room I’d have to get past him, and he didn’t seem inclined to yield any ground.

  “Okay if I go in there and see her?” I asked.

  “She’s your momma,” he said, then stepped aside and let me by.

  She was lying on her right side, facing the wall. Her right hand stuck out behind her body, in a position no one with any control over her muscles would have tolerated for more than a few seconds. I won’t try to reproduce the noise she was making. The best I can do is to say that it reminded me of how a scratched record sounds when it starts skipping.

  I walked around the foot of the bed so I could see her face. She had a purple bruise on her forehead and a small gash on her bottom lip.

  “Momma?” I said.

  She never looked at me, just kept staring at the wall and making that sound. I pulled the covers back and scanned her legs and ankles to see if they were bruised or if there was any obvious sign of a break, but nothing caught my eye. I knew I ought to lift her gown and look at her hips and her rib cage but couldn’t bring myself to do it. I knew, too, that her diaper was full and needed changing. I couldn’t make myself do that either, not even by thinking of how often she’d changed mine.

  My father was standing in the doorway. “If you got something to say,” he said, “go on and say it now.”

  “You know what I’m going to say.”

  “Yeah. You’re about as easy to read as Zane Grey.”

  I stepped back around the bed. “Dad,” I said, “the first thing is, b
oth of you need to see the doctor.”

  “I’ve seen him. He’s a two-hundred-and-forty-pound package of conventional wisdom. Ain’t nothing he can tell me I don’t already know.”

  “Look, it’s getting to the point where you can’t handle it.”

  “No, it’s gettin’ to the point where you can’t. I’m handling my part just fine. That’s what I said I’d do when I got married. I said I’d care for her, and later on I said I’d care for you, as long as you needed me to. Looks like maybe you still do.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “You really want me to answer that question?”

  I knew from how he’d put it that I didn’t. There was no chance he could answer it without spelling out some qualitative differences between the two of us. And what could I say in return? That unlike him, I’d never called another human being a “nigger” or voted for candidates who, if allowed to, would’ve rolled back every single civil rights initiative since the 1950s? That I hadn’t supported failed wars or sent twenty dollars a month to the NRA so it could maintain its choke hold on our political system? Those things were true, and they were not insignificant, but they dealt with public affairs. And what we’d end up discussing, I suddenly felt sure, was a private misdemeanor. “I guess maybe not,” I said.

  My father stepped over and put his arm around my shoulders. “It ain’t all perfume, son,” he said. “We sign on for the smelly parts too.”

  I went out and did some shopping for him and bought him a couple newspapers, and by the time I got back he’d changed my mother’s diaper and she’d finally fallen asleep. I kept an eye on her long enough for him to take a shower, then made him a ham and cheese sandwich and sat with him in the kitchen while he ate it. Momma was still asleep when he finished, so he told me to take off and let him get some rest. He’d call me if he needed me, he said, and if he didn’t I should assume things were all right. I promised to drop by again the next day.

  It was midafternoon when I got home. I stripped off the bedclothes, put them in the washer, opened all the windows and turned on the attic fan. Then I found some brandy in the kitchen and poured myself a big slug that I downed in three or four gulps and finally sat on the couch to call Maggie.