If You Want Me to Stay (3 page)

G
IVE IT UP
won't y'all please for the Greatest All-Time Hits of Sweet Soul Legends. Slow jams to melt your bones, throwdowns to make you shake it. You can let your mind wander since there's one song right after another, and besides, what is music for if not to make you remember?

Some things I remember now that I did not yet explain:

Tank had this Tonka toy tanker he used to pine for nights in his crib. Stuffed bears and blankets bored that boy. He clung to the bars of his cage, rattling that crib, walking it toward the middle of the room, wanting his tank. All night long he cried out for it. Used to it would have taken a graduation ceremony or an emergency room accident for me to remember his real given name which is bygod Lawrence.

Carter dearly loved his long yellow hair. So did some girls love that hair.

The last and worst of it is that whole afternoon in the boiling truck I had the key to the pickup in my pocket. Soon as my daddy showed signs of going off I grabbed the keys off the
mantel like I always did. Sitting in the truck, singing Curtis and “Theme from
Shaft,
” the keys melted into my thigh like keys'll do, a lump no more noticeable than kneecap, elbow. I forgot all about them being up in there. They were just a part of me like the not-good-at-love part. But Carter's eyes were switching around looking at mine and I couldn't help him but nor could I leave him, being so sorry at love. My mama, good at it, called to me to come by her hotel room. I had a choice to make: go to her and get in the process good at love or stay where I was, which, I had those keys in my all-day-long pocket and could of at any time pulled them out and cranked up that vehicle and driven us all three off down Moody Loop. But where to? See, I did not want Tank or Carter along when I next laid eyes on my mama. I had questions I wanted to ask her in strictest privacy. All alone up in some motel room, iced tea and Fig Newtons.

Yoohoo, Joel Junior, up here, my mama called down from her room. So I pulled the key out of my pocket and held squealing Tank down in the seat and got him buckled and fit the key in the ignition, cranked the engine, dropped that baby into gear, and dug deep dual trenches in the yard leaving out of there.

I might have only been fourteen but I knew good and well how to drive. When our daddy (and we love our daddy) was golf-clubbing evil infiltrators out of television sets we would help ourselves to his big thicket of keys and drive up to 692 which we lived just off of, down a dirt road called Moody Loop.

Tank wailed till 692 when Frosty's cinder-block store with the pink polka dots stenciled on the side rose above the cornfields. Tank at the sight of it said he wanted a fried pie please.

I knew right then I'd have to leave him somewhere. I couldn't keep him. I'd left Carter and now I knew I'd have to leave Tank too behind.

“Also some Funyuns,” said Tank. He went on down his list. “Squirrel Nut Zippers, a whole handful. That's dessert if I eat all everything else.”

I believe he licked his lips and that I heard the licking over the rumble of the truck and the windows open, blowing all the receipts around the cab. Crazy little off-his-rocker fucker.

“You need your diaper changed,” I said.

“I don't wear no damn-it diaper,” he said. He couldn't cuss for spit.

Frosty's slid by outside as I reached over to pop his mess for attempting cussing, its polka-dotted walls talking about Last Chance! Funyuns! Stop and make old Mr. Frosty rich! Old Frosty used to try to talk trash to my sister but he had one of those bulging-out waists old men get like the barber my daddy took us to who pressed his slope up against you when he was cutting your hair. Frosty wore pants shaped like the wide-open bell of a tuba. Carter wanted a trumpet. He was saving for one. We picked bottles from ditches in the afternoons. Carter had maybe half a trumpet in a coin jar hid under his dresser. Maybe Carter had took his trumpet money and paid my daddy for the haircut and my daddy had let him
go and he was walking up the road almost to 692. Maybe I ought to of turned around. I couldn't take Tank's wailing for the next however many years until he got grown enough for me to leave him and not feel bad. I left Carter with his earlobe snipped off. I saw when Daddy did it, I saw the pink flesh hit Carter's shoulder and bounce and then I lost track of it when it landed in the carpet of blond hair spread out across the warped porch boards.

“Hey wait, stop,” said Tank. He turned around and stared at Frosty's as if turning around and staring would slow the truck down. I had all the windows rolled down to sift out the pee smell. My head was half out the window like when people vehicle their dogs. Dogs don't want to be vehicled, you can tell by the way they stick their heads out the windows. A dog would prefer to chase a chicken, not cruise out to Little Pep to gawk at cheerleaders. I stuck my head farther out the window doggy-style. Pee smell rolling over the fields in a cloud. Mexicans pulled cukes in the fields. We passed by them and the pee smell rolled out in a cloud and I felt sorry for them Mexicans.

“Where we going where we going where we going?” said Tank.

Out the window into the wind I howled, “Where we going where we going where we going?”

Up 692 a ways was a fishpond with some nasty catfish and a trailer park which the bus we rode to school would not stop at because once someone shot out the windows (somebody said later it was a woman who didn't want her kids coming
home and interrupting the stories she liked to look at after lunch) and then, a little off the road and upside a ravine, a chicken house belonged to Luby Dudley, owner of Appliance Town. The chicken house was filled with Luby's used refrigerators, freezers, stoves, televisions.

At Luby Dudley's Appliance Town chicken house I parked the truck on an overgrown two-track leading to the ravine. People dumped their shit down that ravine. It's just something about a ravine makes you want to dump shit down it. Perhaps peculiar to the coastal plain from which I and my brothers and potty-mouthed sister derive but perhaps maybe not, this habit of I-see-a-ravine, let's-dump-some-shit-down-it. Maybe it is in fact a habit of rural folk everywhere, there being no monster-armed trash trucks roving like they do up in Trent. Often you have to drive many miles in order to dispose of your waste. A ravine starts to looking real good after ten miles cooped up in a car with some humming-to-high-heaven garbage.

Allow me a long-winded example of the country dweller's love of ravines. My mother's mother was one pickle-making fool. She thought nothing of spending her weekend putting up seventy-five jars of pickles. Once fateful Friday I believe it was eight, nine months ago, my mama took us over to our grandparents' house so she could go away for the weekend. This particular weekend my mother when we asked her where she was going to be staying at said the Sanitary Restaurant in Bulkhead which had the best hush puppies she knew of. It sounded like a lie even to Tank.

“Mama, Mama, hold up, you're spending the night in the restaurant?” he asked her.

“If it's hot I'm sleeping in the walk-in freezer,” she said.

We were let out of the truck at my grandmother's house, my sister carrying her
Beauty and the Beast
suitcase leftover from when she was the only child and got what she wanted, me and my brothers slumping under school backpacks bulky with underpants and Q-tips and army men. I was halfway to the house when my mama called me back to the car.

“Why are you walking like that?” she said to me.

“Like what?”

She sighed what my daddy called her Sigh of Royalty. She was beautiful in the afternoon sun, her brown hair thickened by driving open-windowed down dusty Moody Loop. She was so pretty she could pull off riding around in my daddy's pickup. We could not stay with him because he'd gone off. She'd herded us out of there fast as she could, told me to pack for Carter and Tank, ordered Angie to get her act together. Then she let us out at her parents' farmhouse and called me back and sighed her royal sigh.

“Walking like how?” I said.

And my mama, so beautiful with the dusty wind-ruffled hair, behind the wheel of the very pickup me and Tank would employ as our escape vehicle, said, “Like you're a puppet with half your dangling strings broke.”

I just shrugged and rested my chin on the slot where the window disappeared on down into the door. My head half in, I studied her outfit, noticing for the first time how she had
taken some care dressing when the rest of us were wearing whatever we always got caught in when my mama herded us off, dirty-kneed jeans and Stretch & Sew striped shirts my mama made herself with the oversized neck holes, in Tank's case old pee-stained underpants, and yet wasn't it odd that she herself was got up in a jean jacket, a flowery dress, some cowgirl boots?

And all the way to Bulkhead for a weekend just for some hush puppies?

“Get in here for a second,” she said, patting the seat next to her.

“You take good care of your brothers,” she said when I climbed in.

“Angie last time I checked the birth records was older than me.”

“Angela is Angela,” she said. “She lacks patience. She does not have your heart.”

“She's got a mouth on her, though.”

My mama laughed. “Don't pay any attention to her mouth. Just take care of your brothers and hold your shoulders up.”

“When you coming back on Sunday?” I asked her. I wanted to say the word “Sunday” because it had happened before, this dropping us off at my grandparents for a so-called weekend that started out the weekend but dipped big-time into the week. I hated to hear she was leaving us at all, much less for the weekend which she must of gotten mixed up with the week. Sunday Sunday Sunday say it again so she'll hear you say it Sunday.

Instead she answered a question I never asked her. As she talked she looked out the window at the woods behind the house she grew up in, as if these woods held old, favored shadows, or dreams of someplace wider. I knew she was speaking to me but not to me too.

“I just want a stretch of days where I know exactly what's going to happen next. He's worth it, I love him still, I love all y'all but it's just so hard not knowing whether he'll be there when I get home from work. And even if he's there half the time he's not there. I just need some time. They'll take good care of ya'll. Not that he wouldn't.”

She turned her head away from those woods, toward me. “He's not going to hurt any of you, you know that. He's not capable of that. He loves you all just the same whether he's off or on, it's just, well, he's sick's what it is, baby. You know that. That's why I brought y'all up here to stay awhile. It'll be better for everybody, you'll see.”

“What time on Sunday, though?”

“Go on now,” she said. “Mama said she's got something she needs y'all's help with,” she said.

“See you Sunday,” I said.

I got out of the truck and went back to walking broke-string puppet but she slapped that truck in gear and was gone.

Inside my grandmother immediately put us to work making pickles. But then she discovered something wrong with the cukes, I forgot what, but the whole batch was bad. Ceremoniously did she call out for my grandfather. He came out of a back dark bedroom blinking from a deep-down nap.

“Take these children and dump these pickles down a ravine.”

He looked at her like what the hell's wrong with them. She put her hands on her hips, indignant. Seemed like they'd been married too long to trust words. Or maybe they'd used up their allotment and were down to threadbare gestures. The only word that seemed to matter was “ravine.” My grandfather was wore out from years of baking under the sun in his tobacco and soybean fields but he perked up a little at the mention of the magic word.

“Hot damn, I get to go looking a ravine to dump some pickles in,” said my sister under her foul-mouthed breath. We loaded the smelly half-pickled cukes in the pickup and lit out for the ravine. He made all four of us ride in the cab so we wouldn't get clobbered by pickle jars. My smart-assed sister kept right on ribbing my granddaddy.

“How come we got to dump them down a ravine? There's some sweet-looking woods right there,” she said, pointing to the trees flashing by the pickup. My grandfather lit a Lucky Strike and fingered a flake of tobacco on his tongue, his only acknowledgment of her comments. My sister kept right on, though, and I had the idea that this would be her way with the world, with men particularly: She would wear them down with her questions. Slap them around with words. Mostly foul ones. We kept circling the county looking a ravine. “Don't you even know where one's at?” said my sister. She spit out the “at.” What she meant was, What kind of laconic, born-and-bred-down No Head Bottom Road old
turkey-necked man are you anyway? You'd think he was from Newark, New Jersey, the way he could not put his fingers on the exact location of a ravine.

Turned out he was looking for just the right one. I admit I admired his perseverance. Wouldn't any ravine do for this batch of spoiled pickles. He had an audience also. What would we think of him if he'd of dragged us to a ravine any fool could find, one strewed with old shirts and bottles and plastic diapers and a couple of stoves half-slid down the mud-slick plummet? I sensed he cared what me and my brothers thought, less so my smart-assed, why-won't-any-old-woods-do sister.

Finally on a dirt road down near Ivanhoe he slammed on the brakes, jerked his turkey neck around, threw his arm up along the seat behind us, bobbed his Lucky between his teeth, and floored the truck. We fishtailed to the side of the road, fell out to check the ravine. Pure virgin, deep as a well, not one iota of previous trash. I confess it touched that part of me craved basement, attic, crawl space. I wondered did I inherit this from the old ravine locator, who I vowed to pay more attention to from that point on, though I never did imagine myself or my brothers or sisters living with him or my grandmama who I don't think were ever informed of my mama's plans to let us stay with them awhile or if they were did not seem to know how to deal with three smelly boys and a foul-mouthed smart-assed girl. It was like Ringling Brothers had detoured down No Head Bottom Road and pulled up in their drive and unleashed half their wildest animals in
my grandparents' front yard with nothing but a tip of some truck driver's hats.