Stop-Time

by Frank Conroy

  “I’ll eat it up here.”

  “Well, tell Jean.”

  I stood up and yelled to him at the other end of the roof. “Lunch!” I waved unnecessarily, as if we were playing a game in which he was supposed to be even farther away. He stood up on his knees and put down the tongs. “Lunch!” He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm and gave a little nod to show he understood. After a moment he went to the edge, swung onto the ladder, and lowered himself out of sight. I kept on working until Tobey came up.

  Carrying a canteen of water and some sandwiches, he ran easily up the incline, his bare feet gripping the wood securely. “Wow! This is a spooky place. I went all around.”

  “Find anything?”

  “Some old fire extinguishers. They’re lots of them laying around. And a rusty old bed, and a broken-down piano that doesn’t play.”

  “Where’s the piano?”

  “Over yonder.” He gestured toward the center of the base. “A big spooky old room.”

  Straddling the peak of the roof, we unwrapped the waxed paper from the sandwiches. Tobey hung the canteen from a halfdrawn nail.

  “What’d you get?” I asked, looking up.

  “Ham.”

  “Me too. Shit.”

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “It’s all this fat. I hate fat.” I took the sandwich apart and began to pluck the white strips with my fingers. By the time I finished flinging the meat away onto the ground, there was almost nothing left. I ate the bread and margarine, still suspicious.

  “Let’s get her to make peanut butter and jelly tomorrow,” Tobey said.

  “She won’t.”

  He opened the canteen, drank, and handed it to me. “What are those little pills they eat?”

  “Salt,” I said between swallows. “Salt pills because of sweating so much.”

  “Oh.” He finished his sandwich, licked his fingers, and wiped them against his jeans. “Let’s go.”

  Running down the wide, empty avenue between the barracks. Deserted buildings fall behind us as our toes drive into the hot sand, hundreds of dark buildings in long rows folding majestically on the periphery of vision, sealing off escape.

  “Yipee!”

  “Fuck the armeee!”

  Rushing through the hot air, ripping it apart with speed, wind cramming our open mouths and ears, racing neck and neck, stride for stride in wild harmonious abandon. At the sweetest moment our legs give out, suddenly trembling, and we fall sliding into the sand, tumbling for the fun of it, rolling like dogs in the crystalline cloud.

  I spit the dead grains from my mouth and shake my head. Looking up I see the twin lines of our footprints stretching back into a white glare. Hunched over in rapt absorption, Tobey picks at the calloused soles of his feet.

  Pushing hard. The door swings easily and bangs against the inside wall. An enormous room, empty, the sun streaming in long bars across the wooden floor. My eyes search the corners, expecting something, but the place is bare. “Fuck the Army!” My voice resounds marvelously. “Up your mother’s ass hole!” I stand as if waiting for an answer. The silence is oppressive and I run to the next building.

  A fire extinguisher lies on its side on the floor. I pick it up to throw it across the room, but it’s too heavy and all I can do is let it fall a few feet away.

  “Hey Fraaaank!” Tobey calls from another building. I run outside and stand in the center of the avenue. I can’t tell which building his voice is coming from. “Frank!” He calls again, waving from a doorway. “Over here.”

  “Find something?”

  “Over here.”

  He takes me into a building that seems darker than the others. Some of the windows are broken and boarded up.

  “Look at this.”

  A carving on the wall, lines chipped out with a knife, very elaborate and skillful.

  “Wow!” I reach out and touch it. It’s a woman, lying with her thighs spread apart and an immense disembodied phallus halfway inside her. She gazes over her breasts and belly at the viewer, eyes popping in a caricature of lust, tongue hanging. The detail is painstaking, down to the fine lines of pubic hair.

  “Holy mackerel,” says Tobey. “You think we can get it off the wall?”

  “We’ll need tools. We can do it tomorrow.”

  “Wouldn’t it be great in the tree house.”

  “We can get it off there,” I say, taking my hand away.

  “It’ll be safe in the tree house.”

  “We can’t show it to anybody. Not even your brother.”

  “Hell, I wouldn’t show it to him. He’d just take it. It’s ours.”

  We step back to let the light fall cleanly against the wall.

  “Wow.”

  “Holy mackerel.”

  Tobey gives a long, low whistle like a sharpy in the movies and we crack up simultaneously, moving around the room, bent over, laughing, and slapping ourselves.

  Down the avenue in an easy trot toward the largest building. The sun is gone. Immense clouds from the ocean move swiftly overhead, their tops white and voluptuous, their undersides black with rain. (Florida weather is sudden and dramatic. I once saw a high cloud rain into a lower one, with no effect below.) The air smells peculiar, and in the filtered light, colors fade. Distant thunder as we run into the building.

  An old gym. The hardwood floor had been taken up but the basketball backboards remain, a few strands of webbing hanging limply from the hoops. Our voices echo off the high roof.

  “Find anything?”

  “No. It’s been cleaned out.”

  In a corner stands an old upright piano. The keys go down under my fingers but there is no sound. I open the top, and standing on a broken-backed chair, peer down into the strings. The hammers are there, like a line of soldiers, and the strings are rusty but taut. Carefully I lower my arm into the piano, get my finger behind one of the hammers and give it a gentle flip. A note sounds weakly.

  “It works,” I yell to Tobey. He is shimmying up the basketball pole.

  Examining the front of the piano I find a small lever set into the wood. A corroded metal plate is readable after I rub it with spit. It says “Practice-Play.” I push the lever slowly to the Play position and then strike a chord. The rooms fills with sound.

  LEP-rosy (va-room), eee gods I’ve got Lep-rosy (va-room), there goes my eye-ball (plink), into your high-ball (plink-plink)....

  Bump-a-dada, bump-a-dada, bump-a-dada, Just the way you look to-night.

  Jada ... Jada ... jada jada jing jing jing.

  Tobey sits on the basketball hoop high in the air. He stretches out his arms to show he isn’t holding on. At just that moment an explosion rocks the earth. My chair trembles and the windows rattle in their frames. We wait breathlessly, Tobey with his arms still outstretched, myself motionless at the piano. A wall of water is falling from the sky, growing heavier with every instant of silence, gathering speed to drive deep in the sand. A drop on the drumlike roof. Another. And then, with a roar, the full load crashes down, shaking the building.

  Tobey lowers his tail through the basketball hoop like a man sitting in a garbage pail. He hangs there for a second, then pulls himself up and drops silently to the floor. He yells something I can’t hear.

  “What?”

  His lips move as he shouts. He wants to go out in the rain. I nod. He knows I’d rather stay with the piano so he doesn’t wait, turning and running to the door which he throws open. Standing there, his body is a dark silhouette against the white lines of rain. He moves through the doorway and the white lines fall behind him like a curtain.

  At the window I watch him running down the avenue, his jeans already black and soaking, his bony shoulders shining with epaulets of spray. He trots, slows down, staggers, his arms straight up as if the rain were a rope he could climb. Turning slowly, head lifted and mouth open to catch the drops, his back bends like a smooth, stringless bow.

  Evening is approaching and the sky has cleared. Yello
w light skims over the tops of the pine trees and strikes the side of the barracks, making the wet boards steam lazily. Fat drops of water sparkle with prismatic colors as they drop from the eaves to the pocked sand.

  “One more load,” Jean says to us as he stands over the stacked lumber. “All right, Dagmar.” They lift four or five boards and move, in step, toward the truck.

  “Let’s take seven this time,” Tobey says.

  We count seven boards and scrabble for a grip. My fingers hurt when he picks up his end. Finally we lift them away.

  “Too many,” I say without breathing.

  “We’ll make it.”

  Our heels digging into the wet sand, we sidestep to the truck. Every nuance of Tobey’s movement is transmitted to me across ten feet of boards.

  “Watch it!”

  “Look out!” we yell, enjoying the sight of Jean and Dagmar scurrying out of the way.

  “Don’t take so many,” Jean says. “It only makes it harder. Why knock yourself out?” We don’t explain that each time we’ve added deliberately another board, searching for the limit. We know it’s harder, but it’s more fun.

  I put my end on the truck with relief and run to help Tobey. Jean joins us and we push the boards forward, sliding them in over the others.

  “Okay. That’s it,” Jean says, taking off his apron.

  “Can we ride on the running boards?”

  “Not on the highway.”

  “Just till we get there.”

  “All right. But you have to get in back at the highway.”

  Tired, my mother leans against a fender for a moment of rest. She is two months pregnant.

  The truck bumps along down the narrow coral road, chasing its own shadow. I see my head and shoulders racing along the surface of the road, rippling like wash on a line. As we pass an overhanging branch Jean spins the wheel to climb onto the crown and I press against the hot cab. The needles whip by, just touching, stinging my back. The wind washes it away in an instant.

  On the other side Tobey extends his arm over the top of the roof. I reach out and take his hand. As the woods fall back and the truck picks up speed we lean out nalms locked together, free arms triumphantly in the air like trick riders standing on the backs of horses. The wind roars.

  “But darling,” he almost yelled at her, “don’t you see what I mean?”

  Mother and Jean were having an argument about Carlton Fredericks, the soap-opera nutritionist, and it was clear that if I waited around for supper I’d miss my ride to the fair. I slipped out of the house on tiptoes, carefully closing the screen door behind me, wincing as the spring creaked.

  It was good to be out. It was always good. Their voices faded away as I walked up the moonlight road toward Tobey’s. Every now and then a dog barked—close by, from across the road, from the fringes of the woods. Yard dogs, talking over great distances like telegraphers at sea, waiting, cocking their heads to listen to the silence, haunches trembling for the answering yip or the long, atavistic howl. Steel guitars came from a kitchen radio, slippery tremolos drifting out across the warm air like slow birds. I counted my change in the moonlight. Seventy-three cents.

  As Tobey’s house came into view I broke into a run. In a yellow window I could see his mother washing up after dinner, her body rocking gently back and forth as she shifted her immense weight from one leg to the other. Popeye, the old dog, jogged halfway across the yard to investigate me. Popeye was blind so you had to tell him who you were.

  “It’s me ’peye. Just me.”

  Tobey’s father was sitting in front of the house, reclining in a tattered deck chair we’d found at the dump. He was drinking from a wine bottle, holding it up in the bright moon after each slug to see how much was left. “Evening, boy.”

  “Evening, sir.” I stood before him for a moment, waiting for him to speak. It was a tradition and he got annoyed if you didn’t honor it. Having seen him mean drunk on more than one occasion, I always did. (The quietest thirteen-year-old boy in the world is the boy who finds a raving, half-blind, red-necked, out-of-work hillbilly house-painter between himself and the door.)

  “You coming with us to the fair?”

  “Yes sir. If I can.”

  He took a drink and smiled, his mouth stained with wine. “Course you can. Course you can,” he said. “You’re a good boy.”

  “Is that Tobey taking a shower?” Someone was in the stall by the outhouse.

  “That’s Sean.”

  We heard the rattle of a pail and then a splashing sound. “Shee-ut! It’s cold.”

  “Sean!” The old man’s voice rose suddenly, like a load of coal dumped in a chute. “Hush up your mouth!”

  “Well, it’s cold, Pa.”

  Not bothering to answer he slumped down in the deck chair. “Go on, boy,” he said to me. “Tobey is inside.”

  At just that moment the screen door opened and Mrs. Rawlings threw out a basin of water. It flashed through the air and struck the ground where the light spilled from the window. A thousand gleaming flies lifted from the greasy sand the instant the water hit, and fell back the instant afterward, like a green blanket.

  “Well, look who’s here,” she said, smiling. “Ready to go to the fair?”

  “Yes ma’m.” I followed her into the house, my head down, watching her elephant legs. I smelled a cake in the kerosene oven.

  “You boys go in back now so you won’t be underfoot,” she said, wiping the oilcloth on the table. “I’ve got to get ready.”

  “Is the cake for tonight?” I whispered as we pushed through the curtain.

  “I think so,” Tobey said.

  We sat on Tobey’s bed and played cards in the flickering light. The house was one room, divided by a dark curtain strung up on a length of wire stretched from wall to wall about six feet high. The kitchen, dining table, and chairs were on one side, and the beds on the other. There were four beds, taking up almost every inch of space. One had to turn sideways to walk between them. Tobey, his older brothers, Sean and Pat, and of course Mr. and Mrs. Rawlings all slept there. Their clothes and personal belongings were neatly crammed into open shelves high on the walls. The family shotgun hung on two nails over the only window.

  “Gin.”

  “Oh shucks. I was almost there.”

  “All right now, come out here while I get dressed.” Mrs. Rawlings pulled the curtain back and waited. “Just one piece each,” she said. “No snitching when I ain’t looking.”

  “Ahh,” Tobey sighed. “Coconut.”

  On the round table were two plates of cake, and resting on the stove the mother lode, fresh icing rippling down its sides.

  “Ma. You didn’t wash the bowl?”

  She laughed from the other side of the curtain. “No, honey. It’s there on top of the icebox.”

  Sean pushed through the door, dressed in jeans and a freshly laundered shirt. The cuffs were folded back twice to show his muscular forearm. His wet hair was slicked back over his head, revealing a pale white band at the top of his brow.

  “The bowl’s ours!” Tobey said.

  “Hell, you’re welcome to it.” He sat down by the old radio (tall, with carved wood, like a miniature cathedral) and fiddled with the dial till he got some music. Then, suddenly impatient, he turned it off and went to the door. “Pa, when are we going? It’s getting late.”

  The old man didn’t answer. Tobey and I ate our cake and listened to Mrs. Rawlings moving softly on the other side of the curtain.

  She stood at the side of the road, her plastic purse hanging from folded hands. A small straw hat was placed straight on her head, pinned to her hair with two long needles like antennae. She wore a print dress she’d made from twenty-pound flour sacks.

  The old man, Sean, Pat, and I stood behind the old DeSoto, leaning up against it like the victims of a police frisk. “Be sure it’s in second,” Mr. Rawlings yelled over the rear fender.

  “I know what to do, Pa,” Tobey answered from inside.

  “And
don’t turn the ignition on until we get up some speed!”

  “I know, I know,” he said.

  “And don’t talk back to your pa!”

  Pat, the eldest brother, a big, gentle man who always spoke softly, turned to me. “There ain’t too much room back here, Frankie. See if you can get a purchase up there on the doorpost.”

  I ran to my position. Through the window Tobey looked absurdly small behind the wheel. He had to crane his neck to see over the hood. His white teeth gleamed in the moonlight as he smiled.

  “All right now ... HEAVE!”

  The car began to roll immediately, coral crunching under the tires as it picked up speed. Soon I found myself running just to keep up. After twenty or thirty yards the old man yelled, “Now!”

  Tobey snapped out the clutch and the car pushed back at me, almost knocking me over. The engine coughed, died, coughed, and caught. I heard him cry “yipee” as he pulled away in a sudden burst of power, rear tires spinning and engine roaring. In a split second he was far up the road, without lights, shifting into third.

  Breathing heavily, I came to a halt. Ten yards behind me the three men stood in the middle of the road, bent over, half-bent, their arms hanging at their sides. And behind them, way back in the distance where we’d started, Mrs. Rawlings took a step forward to look after us.

  “Where in hell does he think he’s going?” the old man asked, but he wasn’t angry.

  We could barely fit in the car. The springs sank alarmingly as Mrs. Rawlings eased herself into the front seat, making the old DeSoto look as if it was headed for the center of the earth, but things straightened out when Sean and Pat got in back. Tobey sat on my lap and we were off.

  It didn’t take long to drive through Chula Vista. Doc’s grandiose plans notwithstanding, the neighborhood had failed to grow. Very few houses ever reached completion and most people lived in a state of impermanence, as if afraid to commit themselves. (Perhaps that was the key. Chula Vista looked like a failure, there was the feeling the whole place could be knocked down and carted away in a single night. The people were poor. What little money they had couldn’t be risked on a failing venture. More important, they couldn’t risk their energy. These people breathed failure, moving from town to town in an endless cycle of disillusionment. They had learned to hold back, to never put too much of themselves in any one place because when the road was built, or the schoolhouse painted, or the forest cleared, or the oranges picked, they might have to move on.) They didn’t want to waste themselves, and so they lived in frame shacks with tarpaper walls, or concrete pillboxes without glass in the windows. There was even a five-room house without a roof. The family lived at one end under an Army surplus tent. They lived in trailers, lean tos, and quonset huts, and the years slipped by.