Bang! (9 page)

THERE’S MEN IN boats way out in the middle of the lake. And there’s little boys standing in the water between their fathers’ legs, holding fishing rods twice their size. Me and my dad fished like that once when I was little. He dressed me while I was still asleep, drove me to a lake outside of town, and him and me fished till the sun came up.

“Catch something,” my dad tells me. He walks into the water till it’s up to his thighs. He’s got on boots and plastic pants. He tells me to come. I don’t want to. I’m wearing Timberlands and I don’t want my feet getting wet. He walks deeper into the lake. “You scared of guns. Don’t like water. What are you, a girl?”

I step into the cold water, thinking about the fishing we did in the bathtub. Thinking about the fishing we did when I was little. Wondering why my father got me out here now, when he knows ain’t no fish jumping this time of day.

Sand slides into my boots and floats between my toes. Mosquitoes stick to my neck and crawl up my arm. After a while, I’m picking gnats out my ear like wax. “The water’s too cold.”

My dad pulls me by the arm. “Get over here!”

I shove him. He shoves me back. Hard. I fall into the water. I stay down longer than I gotta because I don’t wanna come up and be with him. But when I do, my dad’s got the fishing pole high up in the air like a switch. “Boy, don’t make me . . .”

Before Jason died, my father never hit me. He carried me on his shoulders and bought me paints from the old garage where his friend worked sometimes. He never hollered. He was as quiet as one of Jason’s plastic soldiers.

I walk into the water up to my waist. Things slide in between my legs and bite me under my ribs. Red bumps pop up like measles, but I don’t say nothing.

I keep the pole in the water three hours straight, not talking to my dad, not complaining, not having fun neither.

I’m shaking when I get out. Pulling green slime off my skin and scared to look too long at the red welts on my arms.

“I seen you in the water,” Kee-lee says. “So I took off the other way.” He’s got red candy stuck to the front of his teeth. “Candy apple,” he says, picking it off. “Sara makes them.” He pats his stomach. “That white lady can cook!” He digs in his pocket. “She made me pancakes and sausage. Gave me lunch too.”

I ain’t ignoring Kee-lee, I’m just watching my father. He’s walking in front of us, carrying both the poles. No fish though. Three hours and no fish. When we get back to camp, Ralph says he coulda told my father wasn’t nothing biting this time of day. “Gotta get there well before the sun shows itself,” he says, inviting us to a fish supper with them.

“We got plenty of food.”

Sara pushes my dad out the way. “Oh, Lord. Ralph, get some iodine.” She’s touching my legs. Pulling my shirt up.

“It hurt?” Kee-lee asks.

“Ralph!” Sara yells. “Go next door and borrow more iodine. Cotton balls too.” She grabs my hand and pulls me. “He’s warm, you know.” She stares back at my father. “Got a fever from the heat or the bugs.”

My father is taking off his boots. Sitting down and looking tired. “He’ll be all right.”

“He’s
not
all right! He’s hurt. And you should be ashamed of yourself.”

My father’s eyes roll. “Lady . . .”

“Sara!” she says, opening the door. “My name is Sara.”

“Well,
Sara
,” he says, pulling off a boot and throwing it in the dirt. “Boys round our way don’t die from bug bites. They die because . . .”

Sara keeps her back to him. “Boys are not supposed to die.” She takes my hand. “They’re supposed to grow into fine young men.”

My father throws his other boot and knocks over the grill. Coals and ashes fly. “Get over here. Now.”

Ralph speaks up. “Now, William . . .”

My father’s toes and feet turn gray when he walks through the ash and up Sara’s steps. He pulls me by the arm. “He’s fine.”

Sara won’t turn me loose. “He’s sick. And you—”

“Lady . . . Don’t.”

Ralph’s standing up now, and people walking by are staring. Wondering, I bet, what this black man’s doing yelling at a little old white lady. If we was home, the police would be here and my father would be in ’cuffs. “It’s all right, Sara. The itching’s stopped anyhow.” I twist my hand free from hers and walk toward my father.

“It’s gonna rain tonight,” she says. “He ought to be inside. Dry. Not in
that
tent.”

My dad keeps walking. Me and Kee-lee know better than to say one word to him, so we shut our mouths and follow him to our side of the road. Sara’s right though. Our tent ain’t made of much. It’s old and taped in spots.

“It ain’t gonna rain too hard,” Kee-lee says, looking up to the sky. “Is it?”

I keep walking, acting like I don’t see black clouds moving round overhead.

BOOM! BOOM!

I close my eyes and try to act cool, but who wants to be in a tent when it’s storming. This isn’t even our tent. It’s an old army tent borrowed from a neighbor who hasn’t used it in ten years, so there aren’t any vents to look out and see what’s really going on.

Boom!

My fever is worse. I know that even without a thermometer. I’m hot, wet, and sweaty—shivering too.

Boom!
The ground shakes when thunder and lightning hits.

“You okay, boy?” my father asks. He’s lying next to me right on the wet cold ground. Earlier, he put his sleeping bag over me. “To take away the chill.”

“I’m fine.” I turn to Kee-lee. “You okay?”

“When we going home?” he asks.

Boom!

We both jump. I close my eyes and listen to our jar fill up with water pouring from a hole in the top of the tent.

Pow! Snap!

Something got hit. A tree, most likely. My dad unzips the tent and sticks his head out.

I crawl over to him and stare out too. It’s raining sideways. Branches as tall as my dad are lying across the road, or hanging from trees like broken arms.

“Where they going?” I ask. A man is running with his wife and kids to the car. Other people run by us, slipping and falling in the mud. Dripping wet. Looking scared.

Kee-lee elbows me in the back. “They getting outta here.”

My dad tells us not to worry. They are just waiting the storm out in their cars. He puts on his shoes and sticks his wallet in his back pocket. He throws socks at me and a green plastic jacket Kee-lee’s way. “I’ll pull the truck in front of the tent and blow the horn for you two.” We’re not leaving, he tells us. We’ll just dry out in the truck.

The truck is a few trees over. My dad says to give him a few minutes to warm it up and clear the leaves off. I change outta my wet socks and pants.

Boom!

“Don’t be gone long,” Kee-lee says, even though my dad’s already gone. He’s shaking, but I can’t tell if it’s from the cold rain or because he’s scared. He pulls his pants on over his pajamas and frowns when he puts his soggy sneakers on. “If your dad don’t know nothing about camping, why he bring us out here?”

I’m listening for the horn. But all I hear is thunder and lightning, people yelling at each other, and every once in a while, girls screaming.

“We’re by the forest, you know. Trees everywhere.” Kee-lee sticks a flashlight down his pants. It’s shining up in his face. “Lightning’s got a thing for trees. And trees don’t mind falling on people and killing them.”

I wish he would shut up.

After a long while, he unzips the tent. “Maybe the truck won’t start.” Rain blows inside.

“Close it!”

He steps outside. Me too.

“I don’t see the truck.”

Rain hits me like sticks. I open my mouth and it blows in. I look up and down the road, and it pours in my eyes so I can’t see. Kee-lee looks down at me. “He left us!”

“No . . .”

He points to tire tracks.

I see ’em leading up the road. “He’ll be back.”

Cars start up and headlights go on. People run, holding on to their kids. Me and Kee-lee stand stuck in the rain like totem poles and try to figure out what to do.

HE LEFT US. He took the truck and left us in the pouring rain and mud with nothing to eat, no money, and no way home. Me and Kee-lee know it’s true because the truck was parked not far from the tent. Now it’s gone.

My father’s been gone all night. Long enough for the rain to stop, my fever to end, and for people to come out their cars and tents and start picking up what the rain knocked down.

“It’s a mess. But the sky’s always prettier after a good hard rain,” Sara says, looking up. She’s walking in the mud in her green granny boots, filling trash bags with leaves and dead animals that the rain washed in front of their camper. “Where’s your father?”

Kee-lee looks at me. He lies. He says he’s up the road using his truck to pull somebody’s car out a ditch. I’m picking up rocks and dead frogs, birds with busted wings, and bugs I ain’t never seen before, and throwing them into a patch of trees behind our tent.

Sara looks up and down the road. “You’ve got quite a mess to clean up here.” She presses her hand to my forehead. “Your fever’s gone, so you’d best go looking for your dad.”

Kee-lee looks at me. “Yeah. We better.”

Sara puts ham and sausage on the grill. “Your father won’t have time to cook up a decent meal.” She reminds me of Ma Dear when she takes my hand. “We have room if you want to take a nap right after you eat.”

I follow Kee-lee up the road. Him and me spend a long time looking for my dad. It’s hard walking with mud sticking to your sneakers, and leaves and trees blocking every step you take. People are wringing water out of clothes and hanging them up on lines, across trees, and on top of running cars. Kids are sliding down mud hills and making mud pies and having mud fights. “He took off and left us,” Kee-lee says again.

I’m standing in the middle of the road, trying to figure out what to do. We tell Sara or anyone else my father took off and they gonna call the state on us. We ask to use their phone to call my mom or Ma Dear and the state’s gonna show up before anyone else can come get to us. “We gotta act like we found him,” I tell Kee-lee. “Act like we found him and he was going to drive somebody off the campground to get something.”

Kee-lee’s making mud balls and throwing ’em at kids he don’t know. “Tomorrow, when he’s still gone, they gonna know he left us.”

He’s right. So we gotta be gone in the morning, before everybody else wakes up, I tell him. He wipes his runny nose with the back of his hand. Mud smears across his face. “We don’t know where we at though.”

“So?”

“And we don’t have no money.”

“So?”

“And . . .”

“Shut up, Kee-lee.”

When we get back to Sara’s place, we tell them the story we made up. She lets us eat in her camper. Man, she can cook. Cheese grits, sausages, scrambled eggs, pancakes, syrup, apple juice, and sticky buns. When we done, all we can do is sleep, right there on the floor. We play Tonk when we wake up. Come supper time, my dad’s still gone. Me and Kee-lee look for him again and come back with another lie. Sara and Ralph look at each other, but they don’t say nothing.

“Glad for the company,” Ralph says, pulling back a kitchen chair so Sara can sit down.

Kee-lee’s doing just like me, licking his lips and forgetting his manners. Reaching halfway across the table and picking up the hot fried chicken with his fingers. Dropping three pieces on his plate.

“Can I have two biscuits?” I ask. “And . . .”

Sara smiles. She reaches for my plate. When she’s done, I got mashed potatoes, fried fish, and okra piled on my plate. Sweet tea sits in a plastic pitcher in the middle of the table. It’s gone ten minutes later.

After we eat, we try to find my dad again. The sun’s going down. Campfires are burning and families are all together. Kids laugh, holding marshmallow sticks over red-hot fires. Me and Kee-lee keep walking, even though we know my dad ain’t never coming back.

RALPH FORCED US into letting him help us find my dad. He said something wasn’t right, and he was gonna get to the bottom of things. It was eleven at night. He said it wasn’t right for him to be gone all day long, not even to help out other folks. So he made us get in the truck with him. For the last hour we’ve been circling the campground. “I hate to say this,” Ralph says, scratching his bald head, “but do you think he took off?”

We both say it together. “No.”

Kee-lee sticks half his body out the window and yells, “He’s here. But it’s dark. We can’t tell where we saw him last.”

Ralph drives real slow, rolling over sticks and dead things and through mud so deep the car spins it all over the place. He turns the car around. “I guess he could still be out here, but he ought to be with you two.”

When we get to the camper, Sara says for us to sleep over. But we go back to our tent. It smells like an old basement. “I’m sleeping in my clothes,” Kee-lee says.

“Me too.”

We put down the clean, dry blankets Sara gave us and lie on top of them. We keep the flashlights on, making shadow puppets on the ceiling. We’re leaving this place by sunup.

Kee-lee says he’s ready to go home anyhow. I ask him how far he thinks we are from home. He don’t answer. When I ask again, I hear snoring. I come out from under the covers and start packing stuff. We can’t take everything. So I roll up my father’s sleeping blanket. Put two water jugs in my backpack. Dump Kee-lee’s stuff on the floor and pack up as much candy and food as I can, which ain’t much. I lie down. Cover up and turn over. “What the—” It’s one of Jason’s toy soldiers, lying on the ground.

* * *

“Let’s go.”

The sun is almost up. Campfires are nothing but smoke. “I said, let’s go.”

Kee-lee wipes his baggy eyes and feels around inside his pajamas. “I gotta go,” he says, opening the tent flap and whizzing. He wipes his fingers on his pajamas and lies back down.

“I told you—shhh! Quiet.” I’m walking over to the tent door and looking out. It’s Ralph. He’s outside watching the sun come up, I guess. “See? You took too long.”

Kee-lee wants to go back to sleep. I kick him. He turns over. He don’t care if they call the police. He figures the cops will just call our moms. “The police never call your parents first. They call the state. They put you someplace where your parents can’t find you. They ask you stuff you can’t answer. . . .”

He sits up. “How do you know?”

“I just know.”

Ralph’s gone, so Kee-lee puts on his clothes and picks up his backpack and a roll of toilet tissue.

“I said, let’s go!”

“I ain’t using leaves like they do in the movies.” He steps out back and does his business. He comes back in and grabs the brown paper bag.

I make him drop it. “No guns.”

“We might need it,” he says, sitting the bag on the ground.

I kick it to the side of the tent and tiptoe outside. I run up the hill, fast as I can. Kee-lee takes a while, but then he’s right beside me, shooting his mouth off, like usual.