Jane Two (4 page)

Why fortune sent Jane walking home by my front sidewalk on this very day haunted me for decades, but she stood there staring at me from no more than ten feet. Still as a bell in the shadow of my giant bean tree by the sidewalk, Jane was everything. It wasn't until then that I realized that Jane was nothing less than an alien being who had been beamed down for the sole purpose of making a mockery of our female population. Her presence caused me to slip into inarticulateness, and after an inordinately long pause, I searched my vocabulary for a word while we looked at each other and came up with, well, “Hi” with my laces still twisted around the latch.

Jane looked like she was aware of so much magic that people haven't yet discovered, like she knew all the secrets. Like she inhabited a secret room walled in velvet, like the little boxes that expensive jewelry comes in. I bet her velvet was purple. She took a moment, then answered back with an equally if not more gusto-filled “Hi,” the only difference being that it was followed—what seemed like three weeks later—with a devastating “Bye.” She took a step backwards and then a step forward, as if to wind up a little extra speed before her shadow followed her out from under my giant bean tree…and Jane was gone.

My mind never left Jane as my mom smoked up a storm next to me while she drove me to school in the Dodge Dart. I hung out the passenger window for air and stared at the houses in various states of disrepair. Most of them had broken-down cars in the driveway and trash. Mom reminded me that my dad wasn't coming home today until after practice, so he'd pick me up from football. The radio knob was broken, so I asked Mom if the guy at the gas station could fix our car radio.

“We'll see, Mickey.”

“When's that new school open, Mom?”

“Couple weeks, maybe before Halloween.” We pulled up to my school. “And, Mickey, in lieu of me driving you to practice today, Miss Flinch's driving you, so you be sure to tell her thank you for driving. Hear? We won't see her after today.”

“Why does Miss Flinch have to go to the new school? She's so nice.”

“You'll have a new homeroom teacher, darlin' and I'm sure she'll be just as nice.” But I didn't want a new one.

“When can I ride my bike? Everybody else rides their bike.”

“You're not everybody else, Sug.” My mom patted me lovingly. “And every day a bike gets stolen from this school. We'll see.” We stopped in front of the school as kids of all ages filtered in from buses and cars. I hugged my mom good-bye. “Wait, don't you want to take off that—Sug, your scarf!”

I heard her, but I was already committed to a dead sprint toward the front door of Missouri City Elementary School, straight to homeroom, minutes late for my first day. And school or not, I liked to wear it for Speed.

“Okay, Lawrence, you can sit right down, thank you for that poetry,” said Miss Flinch to the fat redhead. “And Emmalyne, you're next.” Unruffled, Miss Flinch smiled and swept her feathered Farrah Fawcett hair dramatically as she turned to see me enter, out of breath, and gently close the door behind me. I waited at the door for Emmalyne to finish reciting her poem. When Emmalyne was done quoting “The Night Before Christmas” I proceeded to my chair, but my head was immediately jerked to a stop because I had accidentally closed my scarf in the door. About thirty students at folding-top desks gaped back. While my feet had kept going, I was momentarily hanging by my neck. Giggles assailed me. Finally, I was able to right myself. I reached my hands behind my back to open the door and freed my scarf. Breathless, I gently shut the door behind me. I glanced over by the windows and saw the kid with the red crew cut who looked swollen all over. He and his friends had stopped mouthing off and throwing paper airplanes, and just stared. I did my best to hide my embarrassment as I continued on to the last empty chair during a long, uncomfortable silence all the way to the far row by the window.

“Mickey, you're next. So Mickey, make us smile, please,” said Miss Flinch.

No sooner had I sat down and escaped the stares and giggles, I had to stand again and start all over. Awkwardly, I disentangled myself from my desk, slowly stood up, and searched my memory banks. The entire class stared at me, awaiting something…then, I blurted out some words about a loon and a balloon, as if the quicker I went the less mortification I would endure. Everyone stared as if I had just spoken a foreign language.

“Oh, it's by T. Rex.” I immediately sat down again, willing the teacher to just move on.

The room was utterly silent.

“Who's T. Rex?” blurted the inflated kid who kept fuzzing his red crew cut with the palm of his hand, over by the windows behind me.

“Shut up, Firefly,” said Emmalyne.

“Lawrence, did you mean to raise your hand first, dear?” asked Miss Flinch sweetly. Before I could reply to what struck me as a completely stupid question, a voice came from the back of the class, soft as velvet.

“Marc Bolan.” And just like that she spoke.

I turned around slowly to find, way in the back…Jane, her raised hand gracefully descending to her lap. She never even looked up after she spoke. I didn't want her to catch me staring, but I couldn't get my eyes to leave her. I wanted to know every detail of her world, and I wanted to start yesterday. Jane was mine—mine alone to translate.

“Who's Marc Bolan?” persisted the loud, fat kid with the red brush-top, Firefly. “He's the singer of a rock group called T. Rex,” Miss Flinch replied. Before Firefly could tell me I was a stupid shit, Miss Flinch interjected. “Lawrence, you might've heard ‘Bang a Gong (Get It On)' on the radio?”

“That duddn't count!” pouted Firefly.

“Of course it counts,” declared Miss Flinch cheerfully, and I sighed in relief. Just at that moment, Jane lifted her eyes and looked right at me with a sliver of a smile. She didn't scan the room and eventually find me. No, she lifted her head, and her eyes came right to me. “Songs are just poetry put to music. Just because it's something you hear…” Miss Flinch kept on explaining somewhere off in the far distance.

It only lasted a moment, and it was gone. Jane sat back there drawing on a sketch pad. She didn't look up again after that. I wanted to know everything about her, and I would've asked if it weren't for the sudden paralysis that gripped my body when I saw her. I hoped it would go away by the time class ended, and that maybe I could follow her down the hall to some place quiet and ask her…about her. But suddenly, another voice slammed into my head, preceded by the smothering stench of mothballs.

“Jane?” Wooden paddle in hand, Mr. Totter stood in the doorway, drab as death, smoke from the cigarette he had just quashed right outside the door shooting from his nostrils as he spoke. Practically bellowing, the principal continued, “Jane, we need to get you through registration and into a homeroom for the people transferring to the new school.”

And then Jane just floated out the door without a sound. She glanced back at something very near my desk just as her eyes crossed the doorframe, taking her from my view. I wanted it to have been me. I'm almost positive that other things happened that day, but I don't remember any.

Jane mattered, and I knew she contained a lot of things I needed. That night I sent her a letter. With care, I put it in my favorite mailbox on the corner of Bentliff Street and Sandpiper Drive, where the two intersected before Sandpiper curved around in a ninety-degree dogleg that eventually posed Jane's house directly behind mine. I looked at that mailbox every day on my way to school because it was tilted, and one of its four legs was bent inward at a weird forty-five-degree angle so it almost looked like it was dancing…or dying. But I'd always chosen dancing. I'd never seen a happier mailbox. And my Grandaddy had always said that happiness is the only magic in the world. That mailbox had to be magic. I patted the happy, federal blue box as I fed it and thought that Jane's unicorn magic might even mend its leg if it delivered my letter. Even though I deliberately sent it to the wrong address, I hoped for Grace to stand and deliver. I hadn't a leg to stand on, really, but I reasoned The Dancing Mailbox had three.

S
ome might say it was cowardly of me to send Jane's letter to a pretend address. At the time, it was a magic precaution that, with time, just sort of stuck. But there comes a time in every young dude's life when he's got to reach down between his legs and see if there's actually anything down there—anything that'll make him realize that there might just be something that's more important than what he's afraid of. That night, at my Grandaddy's behest, I reached down. After that utterance from Jane in Miss Flinch's homeroom—after I'd almost hanged myself by my red scarf caught in that damn door right in front of Jane. I'd ride a wheelie on my Schwinn Sting-Ray every night when I rode past her house, and not once did I ever see her watching me. But if ever I slipped and let my real self out, she was there to see me in all my ordinariness. The “me” that only I knew. The “me” that locked myself in my dad's trunk. She saw a lot of those moments that contained the type of humiliation that only tenure can cure. That first day of school, I had just gotten back from football practice and raced out of my Grandaddy and Mamau's Cadillac Coupe de Ville because it turned out Dad had to work late again. Mamau smooched me, told me to stay off the concrete, and promised me her best fried chicken, like every time they visited.

“Goldie, goddammit, stop flappin' y'jaws and waggin' y'tongue and let that boy go play. He ain't no sissy, woman!” And with that, he went to join James, who was already in his lawn chair and waiting for my Grandaddy.

“Y'all gon' be the death of me, Charlie.” Mamau straightened up to face him with her usual worried pout, but her eyes were full of amusement and she squeezed my face before she let me out of her mother-bear embrace.

I ran under my giant bean tree and across the street, past an orange VW Vanagon parked in our neighborhood, and over to Trent's front yard, where I could play more football, because in Texas there is no such thing as too much football. So I joined in on a game with twelve or so local boys and my tomboy neighbor Kim on the sideline, who always begged to play but who no self-respecting Texas boy would tackle on account of her being a girl. The gang was already playing “tackle the man with the ball.” Mr. and Mrs. Milan were sitting right next door to Trent's, holding hands, watching from their Kmart aluminum lawn chairs on their manicured grass. They didn't seem to mind if our tackles spilled over onto their lawn, which Mr. Milan kept so nice. They didn't have any kids of their own. So when we did tumble over and tussle on his grass—which was always remarkably softer than Trent's scrubby lawn—Mr. Milan would laugh and cheer and raise his can of Miller to us and take another swig, then lean over and kiss Mrs. Milan. I really liked them. And their smiles told me more than our handful of conversations ever could. My Grandaddy said they were “good folk,” and that was enough for me.

Back then there was no such thing as flag football, except when the cheerleaders would play their annual game of “girl-ball.” There was only one kind of football, and that was full contact. No one wore pads, and we tried, sometimes very successfully, to hold off tackling a guy until he was right on the sidewalk for added pain and lacerations. The goal of the game was to get the ball and scramble around for as long as you could until you got tackled or stripped of the ball. Most of the kids were older than me, and all were bigger. I did have one thing in my favor, and that was speed. While collision presented a fairly big problem due to my size, collision avoidance was easier for me.

It wasn't long before I scooped up a fumble and eluded my pursuers. On my third or fourth lap around the yard, with my bigger pursuers running out of diesel, Eddy—who was ten at the time—reached up just as I screamed past him and grabbed a handful of hair on the back of my head. My upper body stopped right in its tracks, while my legs and lower body flew out from underneath me until I was completely horizontal before slamming to the sidewalk. My head hit the concrete first and I was dazed for a moment.

Now this sort of completely illegal way of bringing an opponent to the ground was always frowned upon, and even had a name. It was called “red-necking.” It was like clotheslining, only with a fistful of hair. I got up off the ground with tears in my eyes and told Eddy that that was “no fair” and not to do it again. He just laughed at me for crying and told me to shut up. Every part of my body was willing the tears to creep back up my cheeks and into my sockets again, but I could already taste them.

“There's a hardheaded boy, Mickey!” hollered Mr. Milan encouragingly over his potbelly as I ran home past him and Mrs. Milan, the orange Vanagon in my way, and my bean tree. When I ran crying all the way up to my front door, I smelled Grandaddy's Pinaud French men's powder as I was rounding the hedges to go inside. From the front step right behind a row of bushes, he had been watching Eddy's battery and bullying play out. After I explained what he had already seen, I learned exactly the correct way to deal with this same situation when I would someday be a father. My Grandaddy didn't march over there and give Eddy an earful of, “don't treat my grandson that way” crap. What he did was this: He simply wiped my eyes with one giant, scarred knuckle, told me he'd give me a one-time profanity exemption and to go back over there, look Eddy right in the eye, hold my trigger finger an inch away from his nose and say, “If you do that again, I'll crack you in the fuckin' face.” I heard James shifting, still in his lawn chair, muttering, “Uh-huh, you tell dat granbabby.”

My Grandaddy then held up the calloused palms of his hands, his life line so deeply visible despite the calluses, and let me throw a couple combinations at his hands. It was a crash course in boxing right there on my front step. After my quick lesson in fighting and philosophy from Grandaddy, I marched under my bean tree, back across the street past the orange Vanagon with the fluttery little curtains in the back window, past the Milans, and right up to Eddy. I pointed my tiny trigger almost straight up his nose, as I was a head shorter than he, and said exactly what my Grandaddy had told me, minus the “fuckin'.” I don't know why I left that part out, but it just didn't seem right in front of the Milans. Eddy giggled and walked away calling me a crybaby. Although most of the kids there were my friends, no one stood up for me since Eddy was the biggest kid in the neighborhood. He usually got away with picking on whomever he wished undeterred, because all the parents thought he had this squeaky-clean persona like Eddie Haskell, the kid in “Leave It to Beaver.” Like you'd expect him to come out and say, “Hi, Mr. Cleaver,” all polite and polished.

That day, the only adults who knew what a shit Eddy was were Mr. and Mrs. Milan and my Grandaddy. The game resumed and I soon found my opportunity, grabbed a loose ball, and swept right past Eddy knowing that he couldn't catch or reach me unless he grabbed a handful of my hair again. Well, he did just that. This time I was dragged back to the ground with a patch of hair missing, leaving a bloody mottled spot right behind my right ear. Immediately, I started crying again.

“I told you not to do that again, Eddy!” I wailed.

“Or what, you pussy?” I wanted to know what my
or what
was, but I just didn't.

You see, there comes a time in every kid's life when he either starts on a path of responsibility and self-sufficiency, or becomes just that—a pussy. And what did I do? I ran home crying again. And my Grandaddy was right where I had left him, looking through the ficus bushes. He checked out my head and wiped the blood off with his kerchief this time.

“Y'want me t'go over there?” A question whose tone translated to:
What the hell kind of a man will you end up becoming?
Although I knew my own dad would have gone over there if I wanted him to, my Grandaddy never would. I could see in his eyes what needed to be done, and I answered without flinching.

“No, sir.”

“Time you tell 'im how ta pull out tha' nigger-cock,” said James in between sips of his Miller pony.

“Now you hush that, Jame', it too early.” But I had to know. And so he told me.

Finally, I asked Grandaddy to hold up his hands again, took another couple swings, and headed back across the street. This time I couldn't hold back the tears. There was nothing “macho” about this. I was petrified. Again, I walked past the orange VW Vanagon, then on past Mr. and Mrs. Milan—on the edge of their lawn chairs now, holding hands, Mr. Milan clapping his Miller can on the aluminum chair arm and hollering, “Go get 'em,” at me—and up to Eddy, pointing right in his face and delivering the exact same line as before. But this time, I took my Grandaddy's PE. I couldn't help it. That
fuckin'
just became necessary, and no other word could've replaced it. Eddy slapped my hand away and giggled. I looked over my shoulder to see if Grandaddy was there, but I couldn't see through the bushes. I turned back to Eddy.

“Let's play,” I said, trying to sound as tough as I could between sniffles.

“Start running, pussy,” sniggered Eddy, and then he Joe Namath'd a spiral right into my chest, which I surprisingly caught without getting the wind knocked out of me.

At this point I had overestimated Eddy's speed, because he was nowhere near me. So I immediately turned around and ran right past him again. Without hesitation, he grabbed a handful of hair from the back of my head and leveled me onto the ground. Now, the image of what happened next will be tack-sharp in my memory forever, because I saw a Picasso-esque portrait of the definition of false bravado. I yanked Eddy's hand off of my head before I even hit the ground, sprang back to my feet immediately, and turned to face him. The purity of the venomous rage displayed on my face turned his laughter and finger-pointing instantly into him running the hell away from me. It only took me a couple milliseconds to catch that lunking tub of shit and tackle him right there on the sidewalk. I straddled Eddy, forgetting every single punch my Grandaddy had shown me, and proceeded to hammer-fist him in the face until his nose completely exploded. He was screaming and crying and flailing his arms as I was beating him with the pinkie sides of my fists. I was so enraged that I was bawling my eyes out while bludgeoning this kid.

I heard Mr. Milan yelling, “That's enough, boys” and my Grandaddy echoing him, but swearing his head off. Grandaddy spoke Cajun, the Frenglish ghetto talk of the bayou.

The next thing I knew, I was swept up into the air with my arms still pinwheeling wildly but connecting with nothing. My Grandaddy had watched, then lumbered across the street to stop the fight before it got uglier. When we got back home and I finally stopped crying, he tried to teach me the difference between standing up for myself and actually maiming someone. However, in my freshly released fury, I could tell no difference.

When I finally stopped heaving and sobbing, and at my Grandaddy's request went back outside, I walked across the street to apologize to everybody for having lost my temper. Now, I had seen the look on all their faces every single time I walked back across the street after having been run off by Eddy, but this time was different. What I saw in their eyes this time was completely different. They saw me as a different person. The same way adults view others who stand up for themselves, ones who don't suffer fools gladly. That evening, there was only one person who could solve my problem right then and there, and that was me. No words to Eddy from my Grandaddy would've done anything except make him a bigger bully next time. And yes, it's a shame that bullying happens, but it exists, so my Grandaddy taught me to deal with it head-on, and with a fist, right between the eyes.

That evening changed the trajectory of my life. It was that cathartic moment. It's a moment in life when a boy reaches down and either finds balls, or he finds a useless, generic, Barbie-and-Ken-smooth plastic bulge. Blood was shed that day, but sometimes blood needs to be shed. I'm a better man, and so is Eddy. I guess it was Grandaddy's way of kicking me off the teat. I had clung too long, and that was the dawning of self-sufficiency. It was that very day I reached down there and I was lucky enough, thanks to my Grandaddy, to find two solid rocks. Well, I was only a kid, so maybe they were more like pebbles, but they were there, right where they were supposed to be. That very next Sunday, Mr. and Mrs. Milan, fingers intertwined, drank Miller beer with their free hands, kissing and smiling to each other as they witnessed the front-row drama unfold.

“There's my soldier!” bellowed Mr. Milan.

I was chosen to be a team captain and got first pick for my team in Trent's front yard. My first draft choice? Eddy, who is still a dear friend today.

Over the years, I lost count of how many times I got knocked down and dazed. But every time, I'd get up and dust off and keep going. I was the youngest on the team, and still the smallest, but almost always the fastest. Flat on my back, I'd stare up through the grille of my football helmet into the faces of my teammates all suited up for football and looking down at me.

“I think he's dead,” Firefly would announce, picking his nose right above my face. “It looks like he got flattened by a T. rex!”

“He ain't dead. Practice ain't over till we're all off the field. Off yer ass, son! Tell you one thing, Tommy wouldn't have been caught like that. We need some more ‘Tommy speed' on this team's what we need,” said our head coach Gasconade, eyeballing my Grandaddy disapprovingly as Grandaddy lit up a cigarette and yelled “off the field” through a puff of smoke, his neck muscles flexing powerful as a dragon.

On the days he was able to be at practice helping out, my Grandaddy never played favorites and worked me even harder than the other boys on the team, but Coach Gasconade directed every play around Tommy. Cars and parents awaited their sons returning from battle on the turf, a cluster of eight fields that served both football and baseball, depending on the season. On the other side of a winding four-foot hurricane fence was a border of trees that marked a stone-hard mud crevice in the ground—that crevice was The Hole.