by Mary Karr
Morning brings a gray wet you crank yourself stiffly up into. Neck crack. Shoulder shrug. Stand and stretch backward: a half-assed yogic salute to the nonexistent sun. Doonie’s already in his black wet suit kneeling like a postulant to scrub wax on his board. Everybody must have tripped or snorted speed all night, for through the mist, people’s movements resemble the jerky efforts of the extremely dingy. Bell’s still ringing, no one’s home. Critter’s draped his Mayan warrior form in a chenille bathrobe the color of a honeydew melon. He’s squeezing toothpaste from a single tube onto the outheld brushes of Flash and Maddog and two boys you don’t recognize who must have wandered up this morning or driven out last night after you crashed.
You drape the unzipped sleeping bag around your shoulders like a sodden cape and walk down to the water’s edge where Melonhead’s sitting cross-legged on a self-styled throne of driftwood adorned with coiling ribbons of brown kelp. At first it seems he’s wearing some peculiar Samurai helmet. But on closer inspection you can see he’s scooped the tentacles and innards from a cabbage-head jellyfish and slapped the translucent casing on like a skullcap. You say, Whoa, Melonhead.
He says, Don’t call me that no more.
Why not? you say.
That ain’t who I am no more, he says. He stands with regal posture facing the breakers. The skeletal hull of a shrimp boat ducks and rises in the fog.
Well you sure as hell look like Melonhead to me, you say. He doesn’t blink, so you push a notch further. Who are you then?
Doonie hollers over, Leave it alone.
Melonhead stares imperiously into gray mist. Turning from him, you speculate about your own unsupervised self, if you could be acting out some equivalent strangeness and be as blind to it.
Doonie’s done scrubbing wax and is balancing his board carefully against a piling when you stroll over. What’s Melonhead off into? you ask.
Who the hell knows? Doonie says. He wants you to call him Robert.
His name’s Robert?
I don’t know. Flash says that’s not what teachers call him at school.
What warms your countercultural heart about this fraternity is such total lack of judgment, for you all learned at home how to ignore the blatantly peculiar. How to let it ride. In this company, any eccentricity warrants sanction. That sense you feel in town of being some freak whom passersby have secretly bought tickets to gawk at—that just doesn’t bubble up here. Who cares if these surfers don’t seem to read like you do? Most don’t seem to read at all that you notice. Still, nobody squawks about lending you a flashlight if yours goes dead in the night, and on more than one occasion, guys you barely know have without question driven you thirty miles to buy a pen or extra paper, never asking what you’re scribbling or to whom, with no mockery inherent in the not-asking either.
Bianca is picking her way barefoot across the sand, tiptoeing around razor shells. She’s holding out a bag of bread and a jar of peanut butter Forsythe must have run to the store for.
Are you hungry? she says.
Flash also appears through the mist about this time, his toothbrush in his breast pocket, a clown’s mouth of white foam around his lips. You marvel at the oddness of him. His strangely chinless face wears a gape of perpetual wonder, seeming almost slack-jawed, with little pegged teeth like a hamster. You decide in that instant that Flash is the quintessence of Leechfield, untranslatable away from these environs, borne of burning pot and scorched refinery air. You can take fresh bread home from the bakery and warm it, but to lift it from the wooden paddle right from the brick oven, to break it open steaming in your hands inside that hot room—that’s something else entirely.
You’re spreading peanut butter on white bread, having these benevolent thoughts when Flash turns his gape-mouthed face at you.
Can I fuck you? he says. Howls of laughter seem to start ashes blowing around everybody, gray moths loosed from some long-unopened armoire. The ocean roars applause.
Hell no, you say, laughing. Then you say, You’re still tripping. You’re on dope. Meanwhile, you keep spreading peanut butter, jar between your knees, open bag of sliced bread between your feet.
Oh come on now, Flash says, pleading. A tremor of giggles around the ragged circle.
Don’t get sand in it, Critter says in reference to how you’re handling the peanut butter.
It’s in a jar, for fuck’s sake.
I mean the bread, Critter says.
It’s wrapped in plastic. What are you little Lord Fauntleroy or something?
Everybody stares blank-eyed.
Doonie fashions a translation. He says, So, Critter, you think you James Bond now instead of some raggety-ass freak? Think you got on a tuxedo? Not some funky-assed shirt from Penney’s you had on for two days?
Well look, she’s got sand on her arms there. Critter’s pointing at you.
You pass the jar and loaf off to Maddog, saying, Critter, anything you eat on a beach is gonna have sand in it. Grind your teeth. It’s the Sa-fucking-hara.
Maddog passes the bread along with his pinkies held out, saying to Doonie in a prissy voice, Don’t get sand in it.
Then Flash pops out with, Can I fuck you when you dead?
You choke on a wad of sandwich, and a few guys howl out second dibs or third dibs. But that’s pro forma, meant to make you feel, let’s say, attractive. (Though in fact, none here will ever broach courtesy by laying an unwanted hand on you.)
Great guffaws are dispersing when you notice that Bianca’s stood up, one hand clamped across her mouth as if forcibly containing a cry. Forsythe’s whispering to her intensely as she jerks away and heads down to his car, from which she won’t emerge the rest of the day but to pee.
You have this urge to run after her, to explain how this brute crack—seemingly designed to offend—is actually a testament to the grim loneliness Flash suffers for being so mutt ugly. A brave public admission of it. He meant somehow to charm the two girls into feeling easy about his presence when he’s so malformed.
Doonie says to him, See what you did now, motherfucker?
Which causes Flash to cock his noggin in this bewildered angle, like a chickadee. How about, he asks of Doonie, Can I fuck you when you dead?
Doonie hikes his board under his arm, saying to Flash, You a sickity-ass motherfucker.
Flash keeps after it, saying, Come on now. Let’s go on down to Motor Vehicles. Have them put it on your license. Get two witnesses to sign off. Your money goes to you mama and your kidneys and all that shit can go to science. But Flash gets to fuck you.
You wave both hands to stop him, coughing lungfuls of sea air out across your hash-scorched throat. You’re not even eighteen months into high school.
Who saw it all coming?
It’s only later that you’ll marvel at how fast things changed since you strode with forced boldness into the high school auditorium wearing that daisy-spattered dress, scanning for the right place to sit. That poise was empty, of course. But the shrill hilarity that underlies this beach gathering is also built on restlessness. A swart and skittering wind cuts under the glib surface. The changes are coming fast and blind now, and in your skull sits an hourglass with a grainsize hole through which numb seconds are sliding.
Chapter Eighteen
IN THE FIRST BLURRY TV SHOT longhaired boys trudge down a brick corridor. In the next, they edge into a paddy wagon. A few pull shirts up to hide their faces so their bare chests show. But the picture is nearly indecipherable, rolling and etched over with static, since the rabbit ears were broken off long ago in a foiled attempt to refine the bastard reception—the worst part being that no one could recall whose fit of anger did it. So at moments like this, there’s no culprit to curse. You stand in the living room wearing only your plum-colored Dewey Weber Pig Board T-shirt and underpants. You’re cussing the rotten fucking weather in this anus of a worm-eaten town for the snowy reception, trying to swivel the coat hangers twisted into vague rabbit-ear shapes and jammed down into old antennae hole
s as if a working angle existed. If it did, you could see which compadres were being led off amid the forty-odd dope fiends picked up in the county’s biggest drug bust.
Is that Meredith’s little boyfriend? your mother says.
How would I know? you say. Am I psychic? Do I look like the Great Mesmer? The coat hanger you’re wrangling comes loose in your hand. In the process of ramming it back in, somehow a blip of clarity is raised: you can see a ponytailed Frog Johnson looking all hangdog while some highway patrolman cuffs his hands behind his back. Three other boys enter the frame similarly cuffed when the snow blows back in.
You had it there, Mother says.
You turn to deliver your cold flat look full force, for there is no scorn greater than that of a sixteen-year-old girl for her mother, particularly if the task at hand is being performed with one lick of competence while the mother stares sleepily on.
You say, I had it when you were standing over by that end table. Go back over there.
Lemme get my cigarette lit. Goddamn, you’re bossy, she says. She sets down her coffee cup, on which Bitches of the World Unite is emblazoned in red type.
You edge the coat hangers gingerly now, trying to coax the picture, and sure enough Skip Deslatte’s face appears outside the Burger King on Gulfway Drive. Then blizzard and rolling.
She says, I know your daddy has a transistor radio somewhere from the last hurricane. Maybe they’d say their names on there. (It doesn’t occur to you that your mother has not batted an eye over your pals being marched through a drug bust.)
You know for a legislative fact they wouldn’t say the names of juveniles on the radio (when did you learn stuff like this?), but you prefer to blast your sister. You say, Lecia ran the batteries down last week tanning out in the yard.
Don’t you miss her? Mother says, a dreamy look on her face.
Like you miss smallpox, you say. Like you miss a cyst or a goiter. In truth, you miss her so bad that you sometimes cry going to sleep at night. She gave you a surprise party for your sixteenth birthday, making pans of lasagna for the odd gaggle of heads gathered at your house. But when you call her apartment, either the line’s busy or she says she’s just walking out the door. Go by her house, she flounces around in hot pants with her roommate and some pair of muscle guys they’re dating. Big pinheaded fellows with razor-cut hair and sharp creases ironed into their jeans. They drive Corvettes and wear senior rings the size of half dollars.
The phone rings, and Mother says, I’ll get it.
You sigh and stretch, and for an instant the reception clears. It clouds again when you go back to your normal stand. You lift an arm at a right angle from your body, and the rolling stops. Suddenly you can see Clifford James and Cooter Dupris walking out of some liquor store. They’re hiding faces under their shirts, but they’re unmistakable.
It’s for you, Mother says.
Tell them I’ll call back, you say, for your outstretched arm seems the only antenna that can pick up this broadcast.
It’s Meredith, she says. Then your mother stage whispers, She sounds upset.
Mother, do you mind standing here with your arm out?
For how long?
Just till I’m off the phone. She looks wearily at you until you say please. Then she assumes your post by the TV, arm outstretched. But the rolling snow comes back anyway in a blizzard.
Meredith says, Michael got busted. She’s not crying, but her voice is thick with having cried. Her brother Michael always led your panoply of crushes, being lean with long fair hair loosely curled around gray eyes.
What for? you say. It’s odd that your question sounds (in memory) so flat, no spike or terror in it, but Michael’s cool demeanor always suggested to you that no blatant tragedy could touch him. Also, this police and jail stuff that’s been edging steadily closer to your immediate circle still rings of fantasy. Bang, bang, shoot-’em-up.
Your mother whaps the set hard on one side, and you wave at her to shush. She gives you the finger, and you give it back. Jeez.
They say he was dealing drugs, Meredith says. Which is stupid. He’d have had money if he dealt. There’s also this weird conspiracy thing. They knew he opposed the war, and they’re saying he was gonna blow up the state capitol. (The SDS to which Michael belonged—Students for a Democratic Society—was rumored to be the public arm of the terrorist Weather Underground, which had members on the FBI’s most wanted list.)
Why? Where’d they get that? you say. None of this has touched you yet. Inside, you’re daydreaming how sometimes, sleeping over at the Brights’, you roll over and press your ear against the cold plaster to better hear him playing on his unplugged electric guitar delicate arpeggios.
I don’t know, Meredith says. They found some cherry bombs or blasting stuff in the house.
Hell, Daddy’s got old cherry bombs rolling around his sock drawer, or he used to anyway.
I know, she says in a voice that’s clearing, as if she’s washed her face and had a long gulp of clear water.
And I’m way more likely to blow something up than Michael.
Tell that to the pigs, Meredith says.
But you’re picturing some witness stand to rush onto. How you’ll plead tearily to the judge till the bailiff unlatches Michael’s handcuffs, and he briefly rubs his wrists before sweeping you into his arms. In this way, you take the seeds of cold fact to grow the scenario you need to focus on. (In retrospect, in light of Michael’s plight, such self-absorption will boggle your mind.)
You know who else got picked up? you say.
No, she says, then goes quiet. If she was grieving when she called, now she’s neatly packaged that up and backed off it. The flat tone of her voice is reassuring to you. (How stupid this comfort level is doesn’t hit you till decades later.)
Are you all right? you ask, knowing she’ll say nothing but sure. Which is a relief, a button she can press to return your world to normal. That Meredith’s world may well have spun irreversibly past that point may never enter into it. (In those years if you were fine, everyone you cared about was fine by extension.) In the background, you hear Mrs. Bright’s call.
I gotta go. Aunt Wilhemina’s here, she says.
Where are y’all going?
Could you find out if there’s a study sheet for chemistry? Talk to Stacy. I guess we’ll be at the courthouse. Root around in my locker if you need to.
You manage to blurt out, Tell Michael I say hey—before the dial tone starts moaning at you.
You wish you could boast of having hurried to the courthouse to stand by Meredith. Or that you fried up a chicken for when they got back. Wrote a note. Offered to drive somebody somewhere. You didn’t. Such a thing would never have occurred to you, and Meredith would never have asked. If her hair was on fire, as the saying goes, she wouldn’t ask for a glass of water. Such requests were beyond her ken. Neither did you expect from your parents basic showing up at track meets or school plays. The one time Lecia dared ask for such a thing (back when she had the lead in ninth grade), Mother vanished into a three-day binge. The not-asking reflected the great powerlessness you were all mired in.
In fact, Meredith’s placid guise of bearing up remarkably well means you’re losing her.
You put the phone in its notched cradle and see that your mother has managed to noodle the TV into some watchable form. But the local news is long past. It’s just fat old Gus Remus poking at the greaseboard weather map with a stick. Your mother is staring at you in a way that makes you want to run. Finally you say, What? What is it? Why are you looking at me?
Her hazel eyes are bright with tears. She says, Reckon they’re gonna pick you up. I mean, should we hide you or something?
Oh for chrissake, Mother. Come here, you say. When you hug her, she feels oddly pliable in your hands. She draws back to look at you with that abstracted expression she brings to her sculpture. She tucks a strand of hair behind your ear, pinching a caress along your jawline like it’s clay she’s shaping. But she’s not s
haping you anymore. She long ago asked you to shape yourself, occasionally tossing out a shard of worry for you to dismiss.
From the first, you handle Michael’s arrest as you handled most troubling events—you ignore it. Meredith helps by vanishing into appointments with the court-appointed attorney, or spending hours at the central library checking out books to bring up to the jail. While none of your close pals get indicted in that first round, plenty of peripherals you’d smoked joints with made the arrest muster.
Somebody must have fingered Doonie and his cohorts though, for in subsequent weeks a patrol car emerging from behind a billboard or hedgerow with siren flailing becomes common, as do elaborate car searches. Once two fairly clueless Bubba-type cops pull a carload of you over, then need help from the longhairs in unbolting the backseat so they can survey the floor with a magnifying glass in search of a pot seed or crumb of indictable substance while all of you stand around making Sherlock Holmes jokes under your breath. You hear about but never see pot-sniffing dogs used to search cars, though Doonie claims to carry a flip-top can of Alpo to steer hounds off the dope.
No one knows anymore where Donnie’s stash is, but he’s cocky enough to tell the cops as they pry the hubcaps off his tires, You got the right guy, officer, just the wrong day.
One night you’re all bouncing along the beach road toward home in Doonie’s packed Torino when a siren starts rotating red through the back window. You turn around and can almost feel the red blade’s swipe across your throat. You’ve been stoned all weekend, so you have the vague sense of your body’s having melted down entirely, leaving only your head afloat on your neck stem like an ungripped balloon. Everyone pats around to see who’s holding, but it’s Sunday night. Everything that could be smoked or snorted or eaten has been.
