Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (36 page)

A floorboard shrieks. Daddy's splayed elbow hooks Pappy's hat rack, the rack bobs, but Daddy teeters on, balancing on the toes of his boots until he can reach into the clutter on Pappy's high chest of drawers. From the door, Mish can see only the standing-up things on the dresser. He knows there is a picture of old-timey people, of Uncle David as a grown-up, another of Daddy as a little boy, looking exactly like a Mish with blond hair. Daddy is unfolding Pappy's hip-worn wallet, and Mish flicks his eyes to the caterpillar shape under the rusty knit blanket on the bed, Pappy's head on its end. The spooky pink of Pappy's shut eyelids without his glasses over them. Mish looks back to Daddy, one hand replacing the wallet, the other tucking bills into his
jeans pocket, then back to Pappy. Mish sucks a quick breath. Pappy's blue eyes are open. They hold Mish's there.

Then Daddy is hurrying through the door, scooping up Mish as he does, and they are down the stairs and into the kitchen, where Daddy sets Mish on his feet. “Shhhh.” He grabs a block of cheese from the refrigerator, a package of lunchmeat, reaches across to the breadbox and snags one of Gran's mini-doughnuts for Mish—Mish crams it in his mouth right there—and Daddy swings Mish up again, Daddy grunting, staggering back a step, the enormous coat, the cheese and lunchmeat, Mish's lengthening legs, then he finds his footing and they slam out the back door.

It is late afternoon, the land winter-hard and unsnowed, the air hard also, Christmas three weeks past. Gran's car is gone, her at Wal-Mart in Renfield a long drive away, exchanging one of Daddy's Christmas presents. Daddy is strapping Mish into his car seat in the old car of Pappy's that Daddy has been driving since he had his wreck in Pappy's newer one—Mish was at Mommy's during that—then they are tearing out of Gran's driveway, gravel splattering, and the Cavalier leaps onto the highway.

Daddy leans into the gas. They swallow Route 30, fast, faster, spewing it spent behind, and as Gran's house vanishes and the woods close in, them alone except for the cars passing in the other lane, Mish feels the man who lives in Daddy ease down. The Cavalier insides are sealed, invisible to the other cars, just
whush
and gone, and by the time they swing onto the county back road that goes to Daddy's house, Daddy has loosened enough to scrabble in the mess on the front seat floor. “Listen, Mish,” he calls over his shoulder. “Tater made me this for Christmas.” He thrusts a cassette into the deck and begins to sing, a high, chokey string. It is not Bob. Mish reaches into his coat pockets and pulls out the Silver Surfer in one hand, a red Power Ranger in the other.

He'd waited until lunch on the couch at Mommy's in his new coat, a Dallas Cowboys coat given him for Christmas by Gran, the coat reaching almost to his knees on one end and almost to his ears on the other,
Now I got it a couple sizes too big so you can grow into it
, a Ninja Turtle shell, Ranger armor, the Dallas Cowboys coat
is
football pads. The Dallas Cowboys are his daddy's favorite team, and the noise of its nylon, the “I'm here!” crash, the blue star on its back with a white border around it, and sometimes Mish can feel the star there behind him, lit up and hot. Him on the couch and Mommy on the phone, her face bearing down as she made the fourth call to Daddy, then fifth. She sucked a breath and blew it out. “Take off that coat, Mish. You're gonna burn up.”

Carlin sat cross-legged in front of the TV, thumbing the iPod his own daddy got him for Christmas, while Kenzie, whose daddy got her nothing, perched at the kitchen bar where Mommy'd put her because Kenzie couldn't keep her hands to herself. Kenzie pitched at Mish pizza coupons folded tight and hard when Mommy couldn't see—“You look like you're a hole with your head sticking out!”—but Mish heard her voice only at a distance, didn't hear her words at all. He was watching Carlin. “Wet me wissen,” Mish said it again, low, conspiratorial, his tone simultaneously pleading and leaden with respect. “Wet
me
wissen, Cawwin,” because Carlin, thirteen, sometimes gave up a kindness if it cost him nothing (Kenzie, nine, a deerfly, poison ivy, never gave anything at all). But Carlin, bent in concentration, his mouth slightly open, two juicy scabs under his lip, the thumb scrolling, pretended not to hear even though the buds weren't in his ears. “Pwease, Cawwin, wet me wissen,” Mish tried again.

“Wet we wissen. Wet we wissen,” Kenzie simpered, and Mommy yelled, “Lay off, Kenzie! Mish, Steve's pulling in.” Kenzie threw a
refrigerator magnet at Mish. “Just three hours late. I guess that's not bad, a busy man like he is. Mish, let's get that coat zipped up—”

Now they are looping down Bonehaul Ridge, the last hill before the last curve before Daddy's house. Daddy's singing trickles to a hush. He brakes, and as they creep up on the curve, Mish slips his men back into his pockets. The car comes to a stop, the man who lives in Daddy back on his feet, finger to his lips, and Mish watches, too. Late afternoon, just this side of dark, Mish holds his breath. But the road in front of Daddy's house is vacant. No taillights of waiting cars. No figure slumped on the crumbly steps. They lurch forward, turn into the dirt tracks by the side porch, and pull around back, where they park right up against the chimney. The yard brown waves of high winter weeds, dogless doghouse coughing bright garbage. Mish strokes with his thumb the Power Ranger's chest.

Their breaths steam around them while Daddy quivers the key in the side door padlock. Mish encases himself deeper in the coat, higher in it, his hands in his pockets to his forearms, his shoulders hackled to his ears. The man in Daddy is full raised now, Mish can see him, behind Daddy's bones. The man is flat and black, out of heavy construction paper snipped, a shape only, and only recently has Mish learned, from a Marvel Comics coloring book, the man's name: Quickshiver. The lock unslots, and Mish trails Daddy through the dim, stale kitchen, into the window-blanketed front room, dark as a groundhog burrow, and Mish, coat whispering, feels right away with his feet for the men he left on the floor last Sunday. Daddy squats to prime the kerosene heater, a stubborn cast-off of Gran and Pappy's, and all around Mish, as ever-present and familiar as the house's sour smell, presses the house's black burring, a static not ear-heard in the way Quickshiver is not eye-seen. Mish finds a man, then two, with his toes, and then he stands still, careful not to smash. With the men safe, he can let
down a little, take his hands from the coat. He can feel Bob Marley behind him on the wall, tracing warm the rim of the star on his coat. The heater finally flares, Daddy scrambles upright, and in the pink-orange glow, Mish does his quick accounting: the Blue Power Ranger, Spiderman, the Hulk, Dash Incredible, Luke Skywalker, and a swarm of tiny knights. Mish's shoulders ease.

Then he turns around, and out of the dark, Bob soars. Bob a beam through the static, radiant and still, and although the heater lights only Bob's chest, chin, and mouth, Mish sees the rest clear. Bob has made his face the colors he likes, red, yellow, and green, something Mish'd like to do, something even Jesus cannot, and under the toboggan hat-thing, Mish knows, three little birds nest in Bob's blacksnake hair. Bob does not worry, you see it in his smile, smoke curling it like Santa Claus's in Gran's
Night Before Christmas
book, only Bob is real. When Mish turns away, he feels the heat again on his back, and he starts to kneel to his men, to reach, when a hand closes over his shoulder.

“C'mon, buddy. Let's eat.”

Mish sits cross-legged on the kitchen table with a bowl between his legs, gulping Froot Loops as fast as he can. Daddy is watching the window, dipping into a mustard jar some pickle loaf slices he's rolled into tubes, a Budweiser humming in his other hand. Quickshiver crouches. Between bites, Daddy rubs his eyes, pulls now and again on their lids. Mish blinks. Daddy has opened the oven door for heat. They eat in the red U of its element and in a disk of light from a small, goose-necked desk lamp. The room is off the road, but from the side window where Daddy sits, you can see a car's headlights glint off the aluminum
NO HUNTING
sign tacked to the fence before the car pulls up by the house. Mish hits the bottom of his bowl and slides off the table.

“Keep that overhead off,” Daddy says. He watches the window.

Mish stands in the dark doorway. From the floor, the men pull, invisible. To see them at all, he'll have to sit very near the hot cylinder of heater, but right after he thinks that, it doesn't matter anymore. Kneeling, he draws the Silver Surfer and the Power Ranger from his pockets and sets them among the others in their scattered circle. The air over the men is static-less, Mish can feel, and glassy. The black burring pushed up and away. For the first time since this morning, he wriggles out of his coat and lets it drop behind him. Bob has his back. He picks up the Hulk.

The calm almost instantly comes, like a vein from the Hulk into Mish's palm, then up his arm to his heart. The other men begin pulling, showing Mish, and Mish knows what to do. He divides them into the sides they ask for, setting them up for their fight, and as he does, the glassy dome settles, Mish barely notices it with his mind, but the rest of him knows. The dome cupping over, embracing, and inside, only Mish and the men. And soon, Mish hears the murmur, the quiet telling, it comes from his mouth and at the same time from outside of him—

“Mish! C'mere!”

Mish stops.

“Mish!” An amplified hiss. “C'mere!”

Mish leans back. He looks at his men. Then, pulling on his coat, he climbs to his feet and rustles to the kitchen.

Daddy's face is squashed against the window glass. “Look out here.” Daddy reaches behind him and snaps off the lamp. Mish rests his chin on the sill and circles his face with his hands like Daddy is doing.

“Look hard. Let your eyes adjust.”

Mish stretches big his eyes.

“Do you see something? There by the sycamore?”

Mish strains.

“Somebody moving?”

“I jush see a buncha weedj.”

“You're sure?”

Mish looks a little longer, for the sake of Quickshiver. “Nuh-uh. Nuttin dere, Daddy.”

Daddy angles his hands around his face, desperate to confirm it. When Mish turns back to his men, Daddy gives up and follows to his own front room spot, the straight chair with the stained pillow drawn up to a crack between blanket-drape and window-frame. He lights his nerve medicine. Mish strips off his coat and studies his men. Half of them sleep in the roofless Lincoln Log house, the other half in the Hot Wheels garage. It is Spiderman wants to be picked up first. Mish does.

Again, the immediate grounding, the vein from man to heart. Whoever Mish holds in his hand, he enters, the man pulling, a speaking way under words, Mish simultaneously following the man and directing him. The men strap on their weapons, pump their muscles, toss back their heads—the Hulk, Luke, Spidey, Knight—Mish both Mish and men and more, the dome settling good now, the block of the black burr. The further he sinks, the calmer he deeps, the good real weight of the men's real world, anchor weight, ballast weight, so different from the daddy weight. Mish speaking not only the men's parts, but the story in between, and always, every word of the murmur understood. Now the men are shouting challenges to each other, girding for the fight, Mish and the men completely endomed, Bob unworrying overhead like a tricolor moon. The first man dies, the second one, the first man resurrects, the dome holding away—

“Mish! Do you have to pee?”

Mish's mouth crackles, two knights crashing.

“Mish, I said, do you have to pee?”

Mish blows out a breath and sits back on his thighs. While one hand has been moving the men, the other has been holding his crotch. “Uh-uh,” he mutters, almost to himself.

“Yeah, you do. Do you want me to come up with you?”

He's let go of his pants and picked up Spiderman, trying to follow him back.

“Mish, do you want me to come?” The voice sharpens. “I'm not cleaning up another mess, I'll tell you that.”

“Nooo,” Mish groans.

“Well, watch that hole. Hear me?”

Up the dark, narrow steps, Mish climbs. The hole in the bathroom floor finally opened all the way through a month ago. The hole's right in front of the toilet, so to pee, you have to straddle it, which Daddy can do, or you have to sidle around and pee from the side, which Mish has to do. Many a time, in daylight, Mish has squatted over the hole and peered down to the stove. Its black coils, its scaley, unwashed pans, the streaked dishtowels borrowed from Gran. Once he dropped a man through to see what would happen, one of the faceless olive army men—he wouldn't have done it to most of the others. When it hit the stovetop, Daddy jumped and cussed. Sometimes, looking through, Mish imagines the what-if of falling himself and frying on a burner. Sometimes, in the night, the bathroom lit, the downstairs dark, like now, Mish sees the hole as not dropping into Daddy's kitchen at all. Mish sees it leading right out of the house to someplace else.

THE DAY AFTER
Christmas Mish stood on the footstool in the bathroom off Gran's kitchen, his men battling in the sink. Through the dome arched over them, the shut bathroom door, Mish heard Gran and Uncle David walk into the kitchen and their chairs scrape. Then the grown-up talk,
of no more import than the toilet running, as Rescue Hatchet dove off the faucet to save Dash from Darth—when, suddenly, Mish heard his real name. He stopped.