Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (2 page)

The Alexander Henry was not even the same species as the rinky-dink theater in Janie's own hometown, population two thousand, with its dull linoleum lobby under bald fluorescent lights. The seats soot-colored, walls as well, the theater's single adornment an obnoxious illuminated clock advertising a car dealership. And the way you knew everyone there even if you pretended you didn't, and how you weren't allowed to take your Coke to your seat, had to drink it standing in the back, but your shoes stuck to the floor anyway. When Janie was little and she got mad, which she often did, and threatened to run away, which everyone ignored, it was to Remington she knew she would go. Remington, West Virginia, Janie saw as real life. The life real people lived and the one she'd reach after she suffered and struggled through the one she'd accidentally been plunked in as a baby. The Alexander Henry was the highest echelon of that real life, the one not many attained, but one she just might if she worked hard enough.

When she was still a kid, at least, that's how Janie saw it.

SOME AFTERNOONS, WHEN
both she and Uncle Bobby were off work, they hung out in his room and listened to his 1960s record collection. Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, the Beatles, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan—Uncle Bobby had them all, while Janie, of course, had just missed them, her born not only in the wrong place, but in the wrong time as well. She lay on the blue pile carpet with a Pink Panther for a pillow so her ears were nearer the speakers, the music rushing into the empty parts of her, never quite topping them off. Beyond the windows, humidity coated the house like liquid glass, the air-conditioning a seal against it. Uncle Bobby's room, built onto the back of her grandparents' small bungalow after years of money put away, felt like a hideout then. Afternoon time, hovering time, wait for the true time, which was what might happen at night. And coiled in the hideout, the music transfiguring her, only Uncle Bobby present, and the anticipation of drinking that night, for whole minutes Janie could kick clear of herself and be who she wished she was.

Uncle Bobby lounged in his blue recliner, nodding to the beat, his little Yorkie terrier mix, Tina, of the wise face and the bad breath, curled in his lap. Uncle Bobby had actually seen Joan Baez in concert, had seen Paul Simon, at the Remington Civic Center always by himself, and such history, along with Uncle Bobby's being more city than her, gave Uncle Bobby areas of superiority over Janie despite his other handicaps. Now Uncle Bobby was telling of his and Janie's recent exploits as though Janie hadn't been present and they'd already rushed into legend.

“And remember, I came out of the state store, and I tripped, and I fell down! But I held that bottle up! It didn't hit the ground! I didn't break it, did I, Janie? Did I?”

“Nuh-uh,” Janie said.

She turned onto her stomach, the carpet showroom clean. Uncle Bobby worked in the bigger of Remington's two hospitals, and before
he'd been promoted to laundry, he'd spent a decade as janitor. During that period, he'd collected the pennies caught up in his broom, and when Janie was seven, she'd spent a whole morning counting all of them for him. Occasionally now he found in the dirty laundry abandoned stuffed animals, and after a two-week lost-and-found probation period, he washed them, carried them home, and displayed them in his room. Most were bland teddy bears, or dogs and monkeys with fur so fake it made your fingers squeak. The Pink Panther was Janie's favorite because of the softness of his fabric skin, like flannel or beaten-down towels. It was the E.T. Uncle Bobby adored. That had been the big movie the summer before, and Uncle Bobby was first smitten, then obsessed. He'd bought her an E.T. cake for her eighteenth birthday the September before, and by some divine intervention—divine intervention was not rare in the life of Uncle Bobby—an E.T. doll showed up in the laundry in the winter. It now sat like a big-eyed god on top of an oversized jewelry box Uncle Bobby had gotten from the house of a dead “maiden aunt,” as he called her, the jewelry box in turn on top of his well-dusted chest of drawers. This E.T. was not to be handled.

“—and then there was a knock on the door!” He was onto the night her grandparents had gone out of town and they'd made strawberry daiquiris. Nathan and his girlfriend Melissa had stopped by for that one. “And here it was the church people with the church directories!” Uncle Bobby collapsed into elephantine peals, Tina vaulting from his lap, Uncle Bobby convulsing, bent at his waist. “I couldn't believe it! I couldn't believe it! Could you, Janie? Could you?” He exploded again, then abruptly swallowed the last laugh and commanded in a grave baritone: “E. T. Phone home.”

“Where'd you go yesterday afternoon, Uncle Bobby?” She hadn't expected to say it even though she'd been speculating since it happened.

“Huh?” He sobered immediately. Like her, he'd been caught off guard. “What do you mean, Janie?”

“Yesterday afternoon. After you took your shower. After work. Where'd you go?” Janie raised up on her elbows to watch his face.

“Oh.” He paused. Closed his mouth with a loud smack. “To visit a friend of mine.”

“Who?”

“Just a friend of mine. You don't know 'em.” The face armored up. The tone a challenge. “Anything wrong with that?” Then she saw him whisper the same words afterwards, as he sometimes did, as though the spoken words left a shadow in his mouth that made him have to say again.

Often Janie visualized the uneven operations of the uncle brain, which, according to family lore, had been damaged by dehydration when Uncle Bobby fell deathly ill as an infant. Some parts had melted in the heat, Janie saw them tarnished and clotted together like clock guts after a fire—the part that did numbers, the part that managed cause and effect, the part that gauged how funny things really were—while other parts in that dark, crowded space still gleamed and whirred, unscathed—the part that could sustain a conversation, the part sensitive to her grandmother's tireless social skill drills, the part that remembered things. The memory had overgrown in compensation, and Uncle Bobby could recite his grandmothers' phone numbers and addresses clear back to the 1950s, even though one grandmother had moved several times and both had been dead for almost a decade. He knew the ages and birthdays of most people on Kentworth Drive, and he recalled trivial incidents from ages ago with the most unlikely details in brilliant relief. As he was doing now, Uncle Bobby retelling, as Janie put away Joni and plunked down Janis, a favorite story twenty-five years past of how his sister and her friends had put a water
sprinkler on the porch of a mean neighbor lady, knocked, and ran. It was a story Janie had heard at least twenty times before. Because this was another characteristic of the uncle brain: certain clock innards had melted into granite-hard configurations—Uncle Bobby was “set in his ways,” her grandmother would say, he “had his routines”—and for this reason and others, most people found dealing with Uncle Bobby someplace between irritating and maddening.

“I think she deserved it. I do, Janie. I think she got what she deserved. Don't you, Janie? Don't you?” And there was another reason, the imprisonment in the tag question, his snaring of others in tedious conversations by demanding a response to everything he said by adding “Huh, Janie? Huh? Huh, Janie? Huh?” until you said, “Yeah,” back. The tag questions were an offshoot of Uncle Bobby's know-it-all-ness, a quality Janie found fascinating given his IQ, Uncle Bobby's treasure trove of authority gleaned mostly from the black-and-white movies he watched on cable TV. “How do you know?” Janie would ask. “Saw it on one of these old movies,” he'd say.

And now he was onto a lady at work who'd been rude to him, another fixation of the Bobby brain, the infinite slights, the corresponding self-righteous indignation. Different family members had different Uncle Bobby survival techniques, and most family members used a combination of several: avoidance, stoicism, humor and teasing, almost always at his expense, and when none of those worked, the occasional no-longer-suppressible outburst. But Uncle Bobby, for some reason, had never bothered Janie much.

Janie knew it didn't bother people at all when they were little. You noticed it then, the difference, but it didn't get on your nerves. It was when your own brain grew to where it passed Uncle Bobby's that the trouble started. First the struggle for control—who was boss of whom? who child? who adult?—and then, it never entirely resolved,
the impatience with him, the frustration, the exhaustion. She'd seen it in each of her older cousins when they became teenagers, she'd seen it in her brother Ben. She'd even felt it a little herself when she was thirteen or fourteen. But this summer, she felt it hardly at all. Part of the spell of the summer, Janie recognized it even then, was the way she and Uncle Bobby almost matched.

“. . . . and he said they broke up.”

“Huh?” Janie said.

“I was talking to Nathan last evening while you were at work, and he said him and Melissa broke up again. But they got back together the next day.”

“Oh,” Janie said.

DURING HER FIRST
few weeks in Remington, she'd gone out with two boys, one with an eleven o'clock curfew who kissed with his teeth, the other the kind of well-behaved smart boy who reminded her too much of her secret self. She and Uncle Bobby spent more hours in the garage across the street with Nathan and his bikes.

Nathan had two motorcycles, the one he worked on and the one he rode. The one he worked on, a 1972 Harley-Davidson, he loved with a nearly feral ferocity and hated even harder. Sometimes he'd stroke his hand across its cam cover, its forks and fender, explaining to Uncle Bobby and Janie its extraordinariness while Janie nodded gravely and said, “Wow. Huh.” The way she did with McCloud County boys when they talked about football, cars, and deer hunting; the way she had more recently with WVU frat boys as they talked about football, keggers, and “brothers.” Other times Nathan cussed the bike with a fury like a fuse had burned up from his stomach and detonated a bomb in his mouth, and once Janie had seen spit, not fly from his mouth, but bubble up at its corners, she'd seen it foam. While she and Uncle Bobby
sat at a safe distance in their lawn chairs near the garage door in silent, but sincere, sympathy.

A full-sized stereo sat up on a shelf—there was another one, Janie would learn, in Nathan's bedroom, yet another one in the living room—tuned to WAMO, the Tri-State's classic rock, and Nathan always had in his dorm-sized refrigerator a case of Budweiser, which he'd share with them even when he wasn't talking. Now and again he'd share his pot, too, skinny roaches in little stamped-tin ashtrays he'd lifted from Johnny's, his favorite biker bar, the dirty ashtray, its slender string of smoke, a tantalizing aberration among the tools Nathan'd neatly rowed across the floor. The garage was unlike any working garage Janie'd ever seen, its sterility, its orderliness, the smell of clean concrete, not even an oil stain on the floor, and she'd wonder was it Nathan or his mother who kept it so. “Wacky weed,” Uncle Bobby would snigger. “Left-handed cigarettes,” then snuffle-squeal with laughter. Janie with one ear pricked always for Nathan's mother to come down from the living room, but his mother never came. Often Nathan paid little attention to them, but it was enough to know he wanted them there. Plus, the never knowing what he might do next. It was hard not to watch.

Once, when she and Uncle Bobby were sitting by themselves in the dark on her grandparents' front porch, Janie said, as offhandedly as she could muster, “What do you think about Nathan?”

“Nathan?” Uncle Bobby paused. “Oh, Nathan's a good friend of mine.” He paused again. Janie heard his rockers stop. Then start. “I've known Nathan since he was born. I've known Nathan since he was born, Janie.”

There were photos at her grandparents' house of her and Nathan and some other neighbor children playing together as little kids, but he was way bigger than she was in those photos, and she could barely remember Nathan before this summer she'd moved in. He was four
years older than Janie, but now he was exactly her height, Uncle Bobby a full head taller than they were. But when he wanted to, how big Nathan could make himself. A fuse for that, too. Janie never hung around guys that much older than she was, and normally, she'd have been too shy, but with Uncle Bobby along, and the Budweiser, the pot, after half an hour, she felt as cool as anybody else. Besides, Nathan had a girlfriend, Melissa, who was a year older than he was. They'd already been together three years, and Melissa wanted to get married, but Nathan wasn't ready. “I'm just not ready to settle down,” he'd tell her and Uncle Bobby, head hung, his voice glistening with pain. “Why can't she understand that?” Janie and Uncle Bobby nodding, growing a little, glowing, in their role as Nathan's confidantes.

He worked from seven to three as a bank teller, and if Janie didn't have an afternoon shift herself, at 3:20 she'd hear his '76 Scout slamming down Kentworth Drive. She'd slip to the window of the front bedroom to watch Nathan park and walk to his house in long heavy strides as though invisible boots weighted his feet. Him leaning forward from his shoulders, his head tucked down, his brow, too, the posture at all odds with the three-piece suit. A half-hour later he'd emerge from the garage on the riding bike in black leather. Then what that Yamaha would do. To the quiet street, the respectable yards, the middle-class 1920s brick homes with their mostly elderly residents, hardworking, churchgoing, now honorably retired. In one instant of ignition, that motorcycle slashed the whole scene to shreds.