Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (6 page)

“Janie, Bobby can't handle drinking.” She looked Janie in the eye, but not mean like her own mother would have. She looked worried and even awkward. She was only a year older than Uncle Bobby, much younger than Janie's mother, and she'd always been the cool aunt. Janie, her face warm, shifted her eyes to a dandelion in a driveway crack. “You understand that, right?” the aunt asked.

“Yeah,” Janie said. Then mumbled, “But he loves it when we go out.”

“And Nathan Simmons,” her aunt went on, not responding to the Uncle Bobby excuse, “he doesn't treat you right.” She looked hard at Janie again, and Janie thought she saw her mouth start to move, but then her aunt stopped.

As Janie, Uncle Bobby, and her grandparents waved to her aunt backing into the street, Janie hung back, a dark quaver in her chest. Then she reminded herself that her aunt was approaching forty and couldn't grasp the nuances of either the Uncle Bobby or the Nathan situation.

ONE HOT SATURDAY
morning after two days of Nathan's keeping his distance, he called her and asked her to go with him to the lake. She hadn't known there was a lake.

She stepped cautious into the driveway where he was hitching the aluminum fishing boat to his father's truck. She paused there, uncertain whether he'd noticed her or not, him bent over the ball hitch and his white T-shirt riding up his back. The narrowness of his waist riding out of his Levi's, the gap between denim and skin. Janie raised her eyes and tried to read his mood from the side of his face, but then he finally turned, and his smile broke out full, and in the light off him, Janie lightened, too.

Then they were pulling away down Kentworth Drive, and the sky actually blue, exceptional for a late-morning July in Remington, West Virginia, where summer sky was usually the color of pale metal. Janie was drunk before they hit the city limits, as though the half-beer she put in herself as they headed out of town ignited the alcohol left in her body from the night before, and she dropped her head back and gazed into that uncommon blue sky. Over her eyes settled a kind of squishy glass, something that often happened when she got drunk in broad day, so that she saw everything, but saw it pleasantly distorted and at a padded distance. And all along, Nathan was talking to her, gentle-teasing, a mood almost as extraordinary as the sky, and Janie heard
herself, more extraordinary, talking, and she understood Nathan was listening, and Janie thought,
this is how couples are
.
Couples who love each other
.
This is how couples are together
. Now they were winding through daylit hills that before they'd only ridden at night, and Janie, with the abysmal sense of direction of those who've lived their whole lives in one little place, became, as usual, completely disoriented, and that lostness, as usual, forced her to give over even more to Nathan, and she felt the savor of the fear in that giving over.

They finally reached the lake, not much more than a pond, Janie saw, its parking lot crawling with people like themselves. Then she and Nathan were putting in the aluminum boat with all the other people putting in their aluminum boats, all the others, too, with heavy loaded coolers and fishing poles like props, everyone else, too, drunk, but lazy drunk, not fighting drunk. Nathan was behind her now, his hand on the muted chuffing of the outboard, them moving just faster than a drift. And Janie bask-lazed in that similarity between themselves and the other couples, in the miracle of Nathan's contentment, in how he wanted her there in full light, how seldom they did anything together in the day. The two of them in a comfortable silence now, the kind that settles after you have had a conversation and followed it to its natural easy end. The squishy lens still padding her eyes, Janie leaned over the boat edge and towards the water, a second layer to look through. The grasses slimy waving under them and the algaed stones on the bottom, hypnotic.

It might have been fifteen minutes, it might have been forty, when she heard Nathan, his voice like ice water but with just a hint of taunt. “Miss Melissa Kendrick.”

Janie's head snapped up. Sliding by, not ten feet distant, was another aluminum boat. A boat so like their own boat that if Janie had come up on them side by side in the parking lot, she wouldn't have been able to tell which from which. The other boat moving exactly
parallel to theirs, but in the opposite direction, and in its bow, as Janie was in theirs, sat Melissa.

By the time Janie looked, Melissa was directly across from her. Melissa's blonde hair in drifts of perfectly executed curls clear to her shoulders, the hair immobile yet not stiff, her face meticulously, but not excessively, made up. Her features sharper than Janie's, Melissa had grown into them, they fit her, while Janie's face still floated in baby and beer fat. Melissa wore a bikini, her body big and small exactly where it should be, Janie in a one-piece with a pair of shorts pulled over to hide her thighs. Melissa was beautiful in the way favored by both Remington and McCloud County, so the way favored by Janie, too, and under the foundation, behind the mascara, Janie looked for surprise, anger, hurt, jealousy. But by the time Janie saw Melissa, the face had already been blocked off.

Janie registered all this in just a few seconds, both boats moving on their slow, opposed courses, and now Melissa was gone altogether and it was the man in the stern Janie faced. Him turned halfway, like Nathan was, with a hand on the tiller, his thick, earth-colored hair buckling out from under a black Walker cap. There was a heaviness to his body, to his bare torso, although he was not at all fat, his skin the kind of brown, layers deep, of men who work outside. His face was not as fine as Nathan's, the face had a heaviness to it, too, and a pair of grooves from the sides of his nose to the corners of his mouth. The face of a man. Which—it occurred to Janie for the first time, there'd been no reason for it to occur before—Nathan's was not.

After Nathan's “Miss Melissa Kendrick,” the whole tableau unfolded in silence.

When stern had passed stern, the two boats completely clear of each other, Nathan gunned their motor. He straight-lined it back to the ramp, their wake wobbling and shaking the peacefully drunk others
bobbing about, it all happening so quickly, Nathan moving so fast, that only a few even had time to muster a “Hey!” or give them the finger.

They drove all the way back to Kentworth Drive without exchanging a word, Nathan silent-screaming from every pore. Janie, tiny on her side of the seat, soberness fast overtaking her, and how she hated to go sober when she was still awake, and this in the worst of circumstances. The squishiness melted from her eyes, the sweet distance it imposed collapsed. And she knew Nathan's rage, his pain, had little to do with her, and she waited to feel pain herself, or jealous, or mad, but nothing came. Aside from a general miserableness, nothing came but the other man's face. That face she had read. Surprise, yes, but brighter than that, guilt. And she saw too, despite the bulky brown body, despite him being so much bigger than Nathan, you could tell that even when he sat, despite all that, Janie saw he was scared.

“YOU KNOW THOSE
box seats they've got stuck up on the side walls?” It was late Sunday afternoon after the Saturday lake incident, that dead hour before her grandmother would call them to help her with supper. Janie lay on her stomach on Uncle Bobby's bed, her head at its foot, her bare feet on his pillows where Tina curled. Fresh from his shower after his shift, Uncle Bobby rocked in his recliner, Old Spice flavoring the room, and the air conditioner throbbed in the window, the sky outside cement-colored again. When her grandmother called them, Uncle Bobby would set the table, the napkin rings, the cloth napkins, the water pitcher. Janie would construct the salad, Jell-O squares in little nests of iceberg lettuce, or, her favorite, Seven Layer, with bacon and frozen peas. Napkins in their laps, they'd say the blessing before they ate, they'd please and they'd thank you, and every second, without looking, they'd feel the other's strain to be finished and go out.

“Yeah?” Uncle Bobby said.

“Well, they're fake. There's not even a door to get into them. That's just paint.” She hadn't seen Nathan since he'd told her to go home when she tried to help him unhitch the boat. He'd left twice on the motorcycle after that. Once shortly after they'd returned from the lake. Again, Uncle Bobby had reported when she asked, while she was working Saturday night.

“I know that, Janie.” It was the soft studiedly understated tone, both pitying and slightly embarrassed for her, that he used when she didn't know something he thought she should. When he knew more than she did, he was always sympathetic. “I thought you knew that. I thought you knew that, Janie.”

“Also”—Janie pulled Tina down to where she could stroke her back—“Tommie Sue says the basement and the bathrooms aren't as deep as the Alexander Henry goes.”

“What do you mean, Janie?”

“She says there are levels under the bathroom that run all under the whole city block.” Janie hadn't believed this at first, but reliable Ronnie, with his rubber-band legs, his transparent moustache, who'd worked at the Alexander Henry for five years, said, yes, he went down there all the time to check the heating and air-conditioning.

“Do you think you could go down there, Janie?” Uncle Bobby rocked faster now, she could feel a little breeze off it. “What if you got to go down there?”

“And she says there are still dressing rooms somewhere behind the stage, and under those, a bunch more rooms that are caving in.” Tommie Sue had spoken of snakes, which Janie didn't mind so much, and of rats, which she did. “Tommie Sue says sometimes the rats get so bad they have to shut the theater down for a few days and spread poisoned popcorn all over the floor.”

“Ooooo, Janie! That's awful! That's just awful, now!”

Janie let go of Tina, turned her head to the side, and propped it on an elbow. That's when she noticed that the laundry E.T. no longer occupied the place of honor on the maiden aunt's jewelry box. That E.T. now sat on the surface of the dresser itself, and on the jewelry box sagged a second E.T., a cheaper version made of a smooth synthetic material, well-used, with shiny black streaks. An E.T. that had never seen the inside of a washing machine.

“Tell me about the cat shit,” Uncle Bobby was saying, then pealing into giggles.

“Where'd you get that E.T.?”

“What?” The giggles collapsed.

“Where'd you get that new E.T.?”

“Oh.” He paused. A cloak fell over his voice. “Friend of mind gave it to me.”

“What friend?”

“Oh. Just a friend of mine.” Now he'd recovered himself, retreated into exaggerated nonchalance. Janie watched his face. “You don't know 'em.” He wasn't looking at her. “You don't know 'em, Janie.” His brow furrowed. His lips moved.
Just a friend of mine
.
You don't know 'em
. The shadow say.

A place in Janie's chest twisted. She pulled the liner notes out of the album nearest at hand,
Tommy
, and pretended to read. Only once had she slept in this room, in Uncle Bobby's bed. She was ten years old, and her great-grandmother had died. The house was overfull with relatives home for the funeral, and Uncle Bobby had been moved to a couch because his bed would hold three children. Janie slept there with her two younger cousins, them five and six at the time. When she'd been told of this arrangement, she'd feigned annoyance, but she was secretly relieved because she suspected Great-grandmother's ghost might be coasting the house at night.

A generous and bony woman who'd grown skinnier and skinnier until there wasn't enough to her to hold her up, Great-grandmother had lived in a small brick house in the city and wore dresses like those the other old ladies in Remington wore, but Janie's mother had told Janie many times that Great-grandmother had grown up in “dire poverty.” Up a dirt road out in the country, the daughter of a pipe-smoking woman and a half-Cherokee man with the un-Cherokee name “Alan.” “Dire poverty,” her mother would say. “Your great-grandmother would take me out there to visit them when I was little, but your grandmother was ashamed of them.” “Your great-grandmother only went to the third grade,” her mother also told her, this the most fascinating piece of all, especially because when Great-grandmother died, Janie was in fourth grade so had passed her.

After Janie's mother turned out the light the night she slept in Uncle Bobby's room, Janie drew as close to her little cousins as she could without raising suspicions. Then she prayed.

She hadn't known she'd fallen asleep when a rapping woke her. She snapped to, rigid in every digit and limb. At first she thought she'd imagined it, she'd been told since she could talk that her imagination was too big, but then the rapping began again. Against the window pane, an insistent, a confident
tack tack tack
. She had jerked the covers over her head and was reciting “God is Great” when she heard a call-hiss as loud as a voice can get and still be under breath: “Bobby!”

“Who's that?” blurted her cousin Ellie, her voice as clear as though she'd never been asleep, and then she was crawling over Janie towards the window.

Janie followed instinctively to protect her and so as not to appear more cowardly than a kindergartener. Ellie was now pulling back Uncle Bobby's plaid curtain and rising to her tiptoes, Janie huddled behind, both of them leaning forward. And then looking down into
the upraised and shocked face—she could see one side of his face quite well in the light off the back porch next door—of a blotchy, tubby man with greasy graying red hair.