The Lives of Rocks (7 page)

If Ann was in the kitchen he could see her, and he'd call out what she was cooking, what she was nibbling on—“She's feeding her fat face with
croutons
” he'd howl; “She's just eating the croutons out of the box with her paw, like a
primate!
” he'd roar, sometimes falling backwards, and I'd have to rush up to see if he was all right, to clean up the beer he'd spilled and to hand him another—but other times he would fall silent, and downstairs, hearing the silence, I'd know that he must have the binoculars trained on the boys, if Austin was home: that perhaps they were lying on the rug in the den in front of the television, or maybe simply even doing their homework.

One time I brought drinks upstairs, Long Island iced teas in tall glasses, with another gallon of reserves in a pitcher, and some nachos, only to find him weeping, still watching
the house across the street through the field glasses, but with tears rolling down his cheeks and shoulders shaking.

The curtains were open across the street, and in the yellow square of light in Ann's living room we could see Austin trying to teach Wejumpka how to dance to some song we could not hear.

We could only watch, as if they were an old silent film, while Austin, with his raggedy blue-jean jacket and old Le-vis, his long woman's hair and earrings, shut his eyes and boogied madly, running in place, it seemed, throwing his arms up in the air and shaking them in a free, mad glee, and then stopping, suddenly, standing behind Wejumpka, lifting Wejumpka's arms, trying to show Wejumpka how it was done, growing exasperated, then, when Wejumpka did not get the hang of it. Austin stepped in front of Wejumpka once more and began dancing again, writhing and jumping, leaping, doubtless to one of Vern's old records that Ann had confiscated. All the old good ones were in there. It was probably Bob Seger, I thought, but said nothing, and pulled the shades so Vern wouldn't have to watch any longer.

We noticed that Ann was having to turn sideways to get through doorways. She was Vern's and my height, five foot eight or so, and had been a pretty plump 160 pounds at the wedding, and 185 soon thereafter; during the months preceding the divorce, Vern said, she had weighed in at around 240, and now, almost three years later, she had to be tipping them at close to 300 and was showing no signs of slowing down.

“Would you have loved her if she were not fat?” I asked Vern. He leaned back and roared with laughter, shaking with it, delighted with the thought, and with the simplicity of such an idea.

One day we watched as the carpenters came and widened all her doorways for her, so that she could fit through them more easily. I wondered if it embarrassed Wejumpka to have a mother so large; I wondered what he thought about Vern's breath, about Vern always being drunk.

But Wejumpka still seemed to be his usual self. It was almost as if he thought that these things did not matter, or that they were of a lesser importance—though I had no idea what, then, he thought
was
important. Sometimes we'd watch the house on weekends, in the broad middle of the day, though it was riskier; and we'd open the windows in the fall just to get some fresh air moving through the rented house and to listen to the street and neighborhood sounds—lawn mowers, boys raking, motor scooters, the whole fall list—and in the late afternoon we could hear Wejumpka sitting on the back porch playing his harmonica; a faint sound of which we heard only parts, while the rest of it was washed down the street along with tumbling dry leaves by the winds that moved through the neighborhood.

“He's blowing it like a signal,” Vern would say. There is no excusing a drunk, no reasoning with him, and he'd be certain of it, swearing up and down and crying that Wejumpka wanted to see him, that that was the reason he was out there by himself playing the harmonica, and Vern would jump up and go tearing down the stairs, pulling his jacket on, running as if to rescue Wejumpka from a burning house, running out into the purple gloom of dusk and across the street, out into the crisp night, and I'd be running behind him, trying to catch up and to keep him from harm.

Vern's shirttail would be out, his shoelaces untied, his jacket on inside out; he'd go tearing through the hedge toward Wejumpka, who, thank God, was always alone, always
playing the harmonica by himself and sometimes even humming or singing. Had Ann seen Vern that close to the center of the demilitarized zone, that far into it, she would surely have taken the hoe to him, with no emotion whatsoever, merely striking at him as she would a weed until he was no longer there—but she never saw him, and Vern would crawl under the bushes, through the hedge, and creep toward Wejumpka, crawling to stay out of Ann's sight, and he'd go all the way up to where Wejumpka was sitting and rest his head on Wejumpka's knee, reach up and tousle his hair, squeeze his shoulder, and say, “Hi, pal. How's it going?”

I do not think that Wejumpka ever associated his harmonica playing with these appearances by Vern. I do not think he ever realized that he was
summoning
Vern, like a bad genie from a bottle, by blowing the wistful notes; I think he merely played the harmonica and hummed as a way of breathing, of
feeling;
in the evenings, when it began to grow dark and things were not quite so clear, he would go sit with his dog, and hum, and sing. He had a fine, clear voice, though his harmonica playing was still a little unsure, a little quavery.

He was always glad to see his father, though I could tell by the way he looked back at the house that his mother had instructed him, in her fat intuitiveness, what he should do if his father ever
did
approach him. But then he would look back down at Vern and put his harmonica down, smiling, and would pat Vern's mussed-up hair, smoothing it into place, patting Vern as if he were a dog, while he patted Ossie with his other hand.

They'd sit there like that, with night coming down and stars coming up through the trees, until I could stand the tension no longer; and I'd come out of the bushes and help
Vern sit up, and tell Wejumpka that we had to go now, and, strangely, Vern always let me take him, never put up a struggle. It was not that he feared Ann, I think, but more that he was simply relaxed at having seen his son again, at just having
touched
him and talked to him for a while, petted the dog together with him and asked him how school was going, if the other kids were treating him okay, so that Vern would then do anything I told him to: he'd be tired from the drinking, but, more important, just out and out utterly relaxed, utterly happy, and I could lead him away, back the way we had come, crawling into the dark hedge and then sneaking back across the street to our rented spy house.

“You'll remember not to bother your mother with this, right?” I'd ask my godson, and he'd nod, looking down at his feet, too soon an adult, and say, “Sure, sure.” At first he'd wanted to call me Uncle Mac, but Vern and I had gotten him to drop the Uncle, and it made him seem like even more of an adult, sometimes.

Vern was still working, right on through his illness; there would be the insurance money afterward, but until then there was always the alimony, and some months it was such a tight squeeze, he could barely make it.

We'd watch Ann in the evenings, sometimes eating a whole brick of cheese in front of the kitchen window, staring over the sink, gnawing at it, eating the whole slab, looking back over her shoulder to see if either of the children was coming. Or angel food cake—she'd buy them at the grocery store instead of making them, and simply bury her whole face in one, eating her way through the middle until her face appeared on the other side, looking like some sort of clown's, and Vern would begin howling again, slapping his leg and laughing, falling out of the chair again, but I did not think
it was so funny, sometimes; even from across the street, I could feel Ann's panic, and it made me hungry, made me want to eat something, too—but instead I would get up and fix more drinks.

 

I slept so late that morning in November not because of the previous night's drinking but because it was raining and I liked the sound of it. I liked having the big rented house and the chance to help someone out, even if I was on the wrong side. It made me feel like an outlaw, a desperado, which I had never been before, and I liked it. The rain on someone else's house, with me warm and dry inside, made me feel like a bank robber holed up in a cave somewhere.

I was against the law, though not as much as some, and I liked it; and I was only a renter, borrowing someone else's house. If things turned sour, I could flee; I could leave like a leaf tumbling down the street, tumbling into the woods, away from the sliding houses.

So I slept, smiling, warm and dry, with my hands behind my head, and I was a little frightened of what would happen when Vern passed on, when his liver finally stopped straining and I was responsible for his son—that thought would come at me from all directions, frightening me—but then I'd remember that Vern's liver had
not
stopped straining and filtering, not yet, that he was asleep downstairs, and he would be until three or four in the afternoon, and I could go back to sleep, listening to the rain, which was coming down in a steady, soothing wash.

I knew that the other people in the neighborhood, the ones with homes, children, and futures, had to be distressed—because when the Yazoo clay got wet, when it got loaded with water, it would start to move again, sliding down the
hill, pulling the houses and driveways and foundations with it, slowly—an inch a month during the rainy seasons of winter and spring, like some inept magician's tablecloth trick—but that was none of my worry, none at all, and it was only those people's bad luck, or just plain bad planning, that had made them build there, and none of it had anything to do with me.

Still, it made me feel guilty. After about eleven o'clock in the morning I couldn't sleep anymore, and I got up and moved over to the window to see how hard it was raining, and I was surprised to see that it was raining much harder than I'd expected: a steady, straight, hard-falling rain, with no wind, a rain that was backing up the gutters and flooding the streets, and starting to lap up into the yards.

Small children in diapers were sitting out in the middle of the street, waist deep, laughing and splashing and playing with yellow rubber ducks, as if the street were their bathtub. It made me hate Mississippi, then; I thought of how the sewage system would be stopping up, losing pressure, and would be backing its materials up into these same waters. The parents were out there with their children, wearing raincoats and rubber boots, holding umbrellas, laughing, silly, oblivious—thinking, perhaps, that this time their houses were not going to slide, and that all water was clean, all water was good, thinking that they were
lucky
because their street had decided to turn into a river, a river that flowed right past their houses, not understanding how dangerous any of it was. The children could be getting typhoid, salmonella, or worse. The young parents were just standing out there in the rain, ankle deep in the water, laughing.

They should have all been feeling like outlaws—it was making my breathing fast and shallow, just to think about it.
Just because these people could afford to buy big houses and clothes for their children, to send them to private schools and such, did not mean they were safe. They were like hens, all of them, just gathered out in the barnyard, pecking grain, with Thanksgiving coming on. I was so mad that Vern was dying. When he was gone there would be no one; just his sons, but it would be a long time before they became him, before they filled his place, pouring into his space like water flowing into a footprint left in the mud, flowing across it, then covering it...

But Wejumpka's strength! He was wearing his Indian headdress and whittling on a stick of balsa wood. He looked like an adult, even with the headdress on, sitting back up on the porch out of the rain, watching the other children play. I picked up the field glasses and focused them on the kitchen behind him, and saw Ann eating chocolate ice cream out of the carton with a spoon, watching the children, too, and watching their parents. Ann ate slowly, transfixed, I think, by the sight of young couples, of married couples, of a man and a woman, together; though it's possible, too, that she was seeing nothing, only tasting the ice cream—or maybe standing very still, very firm, and trying to feel if the clay was beginning to slide under her house.

A station wagon came driving up, creeping slowly through the street's floodwaters, sending rocking muddy waves out from either side of it, washing water up into people's yards, moving down the street like a boat, and I recognized it as Wejumpka's carpool, though it was not a school day.

It stopped in front of Wejumpka's house, parking in a puddle, and children began piling out of it, more children than I ever imagined, all wearing rubber boots and
raincoats, and they ran up to Wejumpka's porch, jumping and laughing, delighted to see him, and I was amazed.

Just a year ago he had been unpopular, had been teased unmercifully—teased about his name, teased about the way he hugged everyone, teased about his father, the drunkest man in town—but this was different, this was unexpected, and they had him up on their shoulders, then, and were carrying him, headdress and all, out into the rain, and the woman who'd driven the carpool was out with them, helping set up these sawhorses, across which she and another child placed a wide plank board that had been sticking out of the back of the station wagon.

A little girl was there to take pictures; the carpool driver held an umbrella over her as she adjusted her camera, very seriously, very professionally, taking light readings and motioning the other children into their places.

Wejumpka, looking not so much thrilled or even happy, but more bored than anything, shrugged his shoulders and moved where she wanted him, into his position beneath the plank, sort of squatting, bent over, with his back pressed up against the plank, then, and all the other children whooping and shouting, pulling one another's hair and kicking, climbing up onto the plank—all of them, and I counted seven, eight, nine—and I figured that if they weighed seventy pounds each, average, that was more than six hundred pounds, and it would truly be an amazing feat, if he could do it, and I wanted to call the newspaper, the television stations, and everyone I knew.