Good Buddy

by Dori Ann Dupré

  Off to the side, there was a man in a “Jeff Gordon 24” ball cap and a red tank top. His arms were thick with tattoos. His hands were resting on top of a blue and white polka-dotted stroller, and a woman sat next to him, helping a little boy clean up his mouth from a chocolate doughnut. The two men nodded at each other.

  “Looks like you and me picked the wrong day to wear a red shirt,” the tattooed father said to Buddy.

  “Yeah,” he answered back, trying not to start laughing at their mutually awkward situation. “Looks that way.”

  Waiting in line for the Aladdin Magic Carpet ride, gay couples and groups of friends were everywhere. Buddy did not see anyone behaving in a non-family friendly way. He was pleasantly surprised at that good fortune because he had no idea what he would do if all the gay stereotypes played out in front of Molly.

  “Have you ever been on this ride?” a young blond man, who appeared to be college-aged, asked Molly as he looked down at her. “I like that visor you’re wearing. Did you make it yourself?”

  “Thank you! Yes, I made it in school,” she replied, her hopping starting to pick up steam again.

  “I’ve been on this ride two times, and it’s so scary. But you look brave to me,” he said to her, winking.

  Julie asked him where he was from, and as he answered “New York,” a small plane flew overhead with an advertisement reading, “Club Pickle in Downtown Orlando! Hot fun all night!” Buddy hoped Molly wouldn’t look up and read it. She loved pickles – it was a borderline obsession with her. She would want to know why she couldn’t go to a place called “Club Pickle,” and Buddy did not have a prepared answer for such a question.

  A few hours later, as the three of them made their way around the park, they happened upon Space Mountain. Molly had been talking about it nonstop since Buddy made the plans to take them all to Disney. She was so excited to go on the “scariest roller coaster there” because several kids she knew in school had been on it already with their own families. She hopped over to the wooden Mickey Mouse with his big gloved hand stretched out, designating the approved height for riders, and Buddy suddenly realized that Molly wasn’t going to be able to go on Space Mountain. She might be entering the Third Grade in August, but she was one of the smallest kids in her class. She was flat-out too short for this ride.

  Standing as straight and as tall as she could possibly stretch herself underneath Mickey’s big white hand, she still came up as too short – by like a half inch. Buddy couldn’t believe it. All this excitement, all this anticipation for weeks, and the poor kid was not going to be able to go on the one ride she wanted.

  “I’m sorry, Pudge, but they’re not gonna let you get on,” Julie tried to explain. “You’re not tall enough.”

  Molly’s face was obviously upset, and while she wasn’t the kind of kid to whine or cry because she couldn’t get her way, she was clearly disappointed. One half inch. Ridiculous!

  “It’s a safety thing. If you’re too short…” Julie continued and then stopped as she watched Buddy walk over to a gay couple sitting on a bench.

  “Hey,” Buddy said to the two men. They both wore nondescript red shirts and Philadelphia Phillies ball caps. If Buddy didn’t know that it was Gay Day, he would’ve thought they were brothers headed to Veteran’s Stadium for a ball game in Philadelphia. Hell, maybe they were brothers. Wearing red shirts.

  “Hey yourself,” the man on the left replied. He looked to be in his forties, a bit overweight and sweating profusely from his forehead and underneath his armpits. There were wet patches outlining his gut.

  “I was wondering if you guys were done with your bottled water,” Buddy said, eyeballing the two empty bottles on the bench next to them.

  “Uh, yeah, I guess so,” he answered, handing the bottles to Buddy, who proceeded to take off the caps.

  “Are you the Disney garbage man, sweetie?” the sweaty man asked.

  “No, just trying to finagle a way to get my kid onto Space Mountain,” he explained, tossing the two bottles into the trashcan and pocketing the bottle caps. “Thanks.”

  Buddy, Julie, and Molly stood in the long line for Space Mountain. After an hour, they approached the end, and Buddy could make out the Disney worker holding the height measuring stick for questionably sized youngsters. He bent down and had Molly pull off her sneakers. Sticking the bottle caps into the bottoms of each one, he helped her slip them back on so her heels were resting on top of the improvised height enhancers.

  “Now stand up your tallest, like before.” Yup. That’ll do it. She’ll be tall enough now.

  She stood up, legs stretched to their max and whispered, “Buddy, this isn’t real comfortable. I don’t know if I can walk like this.”

  “It’s okay; I’ll carry you,” he said, picking her up into his arms and holding her like she was just another little girl at Disney, tired from walking and standing in line all day.

  As they finally got up to the measuring stick, Buddy put Molly down in front of it; she stood tall and made height by a quarter inch.

  Fireworks

  Julie handed Molly a Fourth of July tee-shirt that she bought from a new store downtown near her church. It was blue with glittery white and red stars plastered across the front. Molly yanked off her dirty tank top and pulled the new one over her head. Bo started licking her bare legs.

  “Poor boy, I wish you could come see the fireworks with us,” she cooed at Bo, petting the top of his head.

  “He’s afraid of them,” Buddy hollered over from his office, a strange echo accompanying it. “If he hears neighbors setting them off tonight, he’ll start howling and hide under the bed.”

  “But he’s too big to be scared.”

  “Yeah. A big baby.”

  Molly hugged his neck and gazed into his big brown eyes. She always thought that it was neat how Bo never looked away from her. They could have a staring contest, and she would lose every time. When Buddy and her mom get married next week, she wanted Bo to be there, too. He was a part of their new family just as much as she was, and he might feel a little weird to be living in another house.

  She sat back on a box resting along Buddy’s living room floor and next to other boxes ready to be carried to the pickup truck outside. It had been a tiring day with all the back-and-forth between houses, moving Buddy’s things into her house and making space for all of it. But they were almost done. He didn’t have a whole lot of stuff for an adult, but his office was the worst of it. Books and papers and files and big fancy furniture that his mother bought for him when he became a lawyer a long time ago.

  Buddy’s friend James from Welby came to help move him, along with Grandpa Joe. Mr. Ray the mailman stopped by but couldn’t help because his back was giving him problems. He gave us a plate of cookies. He was sad to lose Buddy on his postal route but promised to stay in touch.

  Bo followed Molly to the box and continued to lick her legs.

  “Mom, do you know why Bo does this?” she asked Julie, who sat on the floor closing an old fruit box full of Buddy’s CDs. The zipping noise of the tape slapped along the opening and her mom’s hand smoothed it down to keep it from popping up.

  “Well, your legs are sweaty, so maybe it’s the salt.”

  Molly wrinkled her nose at the thought of that. Salty legs. Like meat. Bo was being loving but gross. She supposed that was the very definition of dogs: loving and gross.

  “Why are you taping that shut? We’re just carrying it a few miles away in James’ pickup truck.” Molly was always told that she was too smart for her own good.

  “Because I don’t want his CDs to break. They need to be protected from the other boxes.”

  “But if we drive slow, then nothing should fall.”

  “Well, there’s no promises on that when we go over that new God-forsaken speed bump in our neighborhood.”

  Later that evening, her family m
et with one of her mom’s friends from work and her family at the Fort Bragg Fourth of July celebration. There was an open field on Post, full of locals and military families, food trucks, games, Army equipment and vehicle displays, and some country music band on a stage. They were singing a bunch of songs Molly had never heard before. Soldiers were stationed all around the outside of the field area in their starched camouflaged uniforms, probably sweating to death from the sweltering summertime North Carolina humidity. Some of them looked so scary with their straight mad faces and big arms. Molly wondered if any of them knew her daddy before he died.

  As the Golden Knights Parachute Team appeared in the sky and fluttered neatly to the ground after doing a few stunts with red, white, and blue colors while in the air, Molly’s heart rose into her throat, and she held her breath and shut her eyes. Would one of their parachutes fail? Would one of them fall like a rock to the ground? Would someone die? Would someone leave behind a wife and a little girl?

  Suddenly, Molly felt Buddy’s hand grab onto hers, and when the Golden Knights landed, he squeezed it tight three times to let her know that all was well with those brave men falling from the sky.

  When it finally got dark enough, her mom lined up their blanket next to her friend’s family, and they all sat down together to wait for the fireworks show to begin. The heat, along with all the moving from earlier in the day, were taking its toll on Molly. She wanted to stay awake for the fireworks but was starting to get worried about making it because she was so sleepy. Crawling in between Buddy’s outstretched legs as he sat comfortably on the blanket next to her mom, she leaned back onto him, her head resting on his chest, her eyes slowly closing. A few minutes later, she was startled right out of her sleep to the sound of loud, happy, and patriotic band music coming from behind them, followed by big explosions of American colors in the nighttime sky.

  The next morning, when she woke up and came down to have some cereal, Buddy showed her the local newspaper, which had been delivered early that morning. Right there on the front page was a picture of Buddy sitting on the blanket, with her sitting in between his legs, looking up at the fireworks show at Fort Bragg. The caption read, “Father and daughter enjoy the fireworks at Fort Bragg’s annual 4th of July celebration.”

  Buddy winked at her. Father and daughter, Molly thought to herself.

  Chapter 7

  March - April 1975

  Delta’s Hair Salon

  Retta’s fingers were brushing through Mrs. Sanders’ thick and slightly overgrown salt and pepper hair. She had been complaining about her “good-for-nothin’-dumb-ass son” who “knocked up a teenager” named Sally. Sally “got knocked up on purpose because she needed to keep herself a man somehow and get out of her house where her mama’s good-for-nothin’ perverted boyfriend was tryin’ to get with Sally because Sally’s mama was goin’ through the change and not puttin’ out like she used to.”

  Mrs. Sanders was not happy about becoming a grand-mama when she was “barely forty” herself and the last thing she wanted was “to have to raise some damn kid” when she was “done raisin’ damn kids.”

  Whenever Retta did Mrs. Sanders’ hair, she always got a mouthful of colorful stories involving her husband, her husband’s sister, her mama, her dumb-ass son, and of course, her perfect daughter. The perfect daughter’s stories were always colorful because she was a nineteen-year-old who had won some kind of local pageant a few years ago and was destined to be “goin’ places.” Retta thought of the perfect daughter as the kind of girl who knew she had her mother’s heart above all others, so she took advantage of that with the hopes of getting out of Killeen, Texas someday – maybe on top of a white horse ridden by an older politician or a Texas Ranger or an oil tycoon or a professional baseball player. The perfect daughter was going to capitalize on her beauty and have the kind of life Mrs. Sanders always thought she should’ve had herself but never found.

  All this time Mrs. Sanders had come into Delta’s Hair Salon for Retta’s hair and makeup skills – and sometimes Marlene’s skills if Retta was out sick again – and she never asked Retta about her life. She never asked about little Buddy or big Kenny or her people or her South Jersey accent. She never asked about where she learned how to do hair and makeup, if she had any siblings or why she was always covered in strange bruises and cuts and missed so much work for illness. She never asked Retta why her hands started to shake uncontrollably one day as she washed her hair in the sink, and she never concerned herself with the time Retta did not come into work for three whole weeks…mysteriously.

  Mrs. Sanders was a self-absorbed, bitter, and lonely woman, and Retta would rue the day she ended up like that. It didn’t matter to her what kind of cockamamie horseshit that life was throwing her way, she would never allow herself to become the kind of selfish white trash who sat in salon chairs and ran their mouths about the sordid details of their lives and the lives of their families…and never once caring about the young mother wearing down her fingers every day, trying desperately to make her pretty, just so she could make the rent payment for the month. She would pay attention to the people she met on her walks of life. She would notice when they were gone for a while. She would ask after their children. She would say something about their accident-prone nature. She would ask if they were doing okay.

  Eyeing May Ellen’s empty salon chair as her fingers quickly moved through Mrs. Sanders’ hair, Retta noticed that the drawer in May Ellen’s spot was slightly opened. She would need to mosey over there and close it shut, so no one would notice the pistol May Ellen kept in there for safe keeping. Retta liked knowing there was a pistol inside of that small drawer – just in case she ever decided to take it home. Just in case she got punched one time too many. Just in case she felt like she needed to defend herself and her son…once and for all.

  Today, she was sporting a new gash near her eye and was not able to cover it very well this morning, no matter what tricks she tried. However, the gash was nothing compared to what she inflicted upon Kenny, all by herself.

  Kenny had been out of work since Christmas due to a dust up at the warehouse. He and Bob McGinley got into it for the third round, and this time, Kenny sent Bob to the hospital with a broken jaw and an immediate future that included drinking his food through a straw.

  He was still drunk from the night before and had been warned several times about showing up to work intoxicated. His supervisor, Hollis Foster, knew that something hadn’t been right with Kenny for a long time, something to do with the war…like maybe he was dealing with shell shock. Some of the vets who served in the Infantry came back from war and had a bad case of shell shock, according to Hollis. But he couldn’t allow the drunken behavior and the fist fights to continue in his warehouse. He had a business to run. And since Kenny couldn’t clean up his act after second chance and second chance, Hollis fired him on the spot, just a few days before Christmas. It was probably one of the worst times for a man to lose his job when he has a family to provide for.

  Kenny had been drinking some kind of homemade whiskey while in the living room, and Retta was cleaning little hairs, from buzzing Buddy’s head earlier, off the bathroom sink. Buddy was outside playing with a neighbor boy, and it would turn dark soon. As she bent over to pick up the cleaning rag she accidently dropped, Kenny stumbled into the bathroom, catching her by surprise. He grabbed her by the waist with his strong, calloused hands and proceeded to pull up the back of her skirt with such force, she screamed in horror. While she took the slaps and punches and the occasional throw-down, he had never forced himself on her sexually – he never raped her.

  Kenny knew that Retta wanted nothing to do with him when he’d been drinking. She had been balancing this battered-but-concerned wife act for so long now, all with the hopes that Kenny would come out of this mental fog which had a firm hold on him, and instead become the man she thought she married: the thoughtful, hard-working, attentive, and good, solid person.r />
  But this man? She didn’t know how much longer she could last like this, just waiting and hoping he’d get some help and get better. She knew he wasn’t a bad man, that he didn’t mean the things he did to her. She knew it was something deep and scarring, something that plagued him, something he saw or experienced in Vietnam. The night terrors, the screams, the many times she found him, dripping in sweat, shaking on the floor and sobbing “I didn’t save her” or “Wake up Han!” The time he cried for his best friend Teddy, who died in an explosion while they were on a weekend pass. The time she found him sitting on the bathroom floor, banging the back of his head on the toilet and yelling, “Make it stop! Make it stop! Make it stop!” She knew. It was a darkness that was choking the life out of him every single day, turning him into a monster. But it was a monster who might kill her.

  Retta would soothe him, hold him, and after a while, he would be alright. His tears were real. His pain was genuine. She helped him through it. He’d be sweet again, eventually, but he would never talk about the war to her, and he never explained who “Han” was.

  She begged him to go to the veteran’s office to see if he could get a medical or mental test. He went one time, but since the lady there wanted to put him on some medicine, Kenny told her that he would do without instead. He wasn’t taking any drugs that would destroy his brain and make him feel sick. He would find a way to manage his madness himself. But apparently, he had no problem drinking alcohol to excess and drowning in his pain – and then taking his torment out on her.

  Retta found the strength to put down her foot on certain things, and Kenny seemed to respect a few of them. Sex with her when he had been drinking was one of her no-nos. And so far, Kenny never crossed that line in the sand, and certainly not with any kind of force. Not that he wanted to often anyway. The story about the alcohol ruining a man’s sex drive was true. At least for Kenny it was.