The Neon Bible (3 page)
Then the first sock came. It was on my head right above my eye, and I began to cry again, only this time harder. They were all on me at once, I thought. I felt myself falling backward, and I landed with them on top of me. My stomach made a sick grinding noise, and I started feeling the vomit climb up into my throat. I was tasting blood on my lips now, and an awful scaredness was creeping from my feet up my legs. I felt the tingling go up till it grabbed me where I really felt it. Then the vomit came, over everything. Me, Bruce, and the other two. They screamed and jumped off me. And I laid there and the sun was hot and there was dust all over me.
When Poppa came to get me in the evening, I was sitting on Bruce's front porch. The dust and blood and vomit were all still on me, and they were caked now. He looked at me for a while, and I didn't say anything to him. He took me by the hand. We had to walk halfway across town to get home. All the time we didn't say one word to each other.
That night is a night I'll never forget. Mother and Aunt Mae cried over me and disinfected me and whatnot, and listened while I told them what had happened, and how Bruce's mother wouldn't let me in the house but made me wait on the porch all afternoon till Poppa came. I told them that Poppa hadn't talked to me all the way home, and Aunt Mae called him names, but Mother just looked at him in the strangest sad way. He never talked the whole night, but just sat there in the kitchen reading the paper. I'm sure he must've read it over ten times.
I finally got to bed all bandaged up and feeling sore and hurt all over. Mother slept with me, because I heard her say to Aunt Mae that she couldn't sleep with Poppa, not tonight. She asked me was I feeling better, and it felt good to have her near me. It made me forget the sores and my stomach that still felt sick.
After that, I was never as friendly with Poppa as I was before, and he felt the same way about me. I didn't like it at all. Sometimes I wished we could be friends again, but there was something wrong neither of us could change. In a way I tried to blame it on Aunt Mae. At first I thought she had made him not talk to me. But I couldn't blame it on her for long, and no one could ever not trust her.
By this time I was five. I was getting around the age to go to the county school, but Aunt Mae said I could wait another year and strengthen up some. Besides our Sunday walks, she began to play with me outdoors, and I must admit she knew a lot of rough games. When she wasn't feeling well, we'd just sit in the mud and play with my toy cars. Aunt Mae would sit down with her legs crossed on the ground and run one of the cars over the little hill I had made. She was wearing slacks now because she saw Marlene Dietrich wearing them in some magazine. Jean Harlow was dead, and out of respect for her passing, Aunt Mae didn't walk like her anymore. This made me feel better, anyway. Especially on Sunday afternoons. When we played with the cars, Aunt Mae always took the truck and played the truck driver. She drove carelessly, I thought, and one time rammed her truck into my hand by mistake and made it bleed. Since I doubt if I had much blood in me anyway, it didn't make a mess.
"David," Aunt Mae would say, "you must show more spirit with your car. You go too slow. Now, let me show you how to handle this."
And she'd make her truck go so fast that it would knock up the dust all around us. And that would bury some of my small toys, so that I lost one or two every time we played cars. When we came in in the late afternoon, we were always dirty, and Aunt Mae would have to wash her hair. I sat on a chair by the tub and watched her hang her head over the basin to wash the soap out of her yellow hair. One time she sent me to her closet to get a little bottle for her. She'd rinse the stuff through her hair when she was finished washing it. I took the bottle back and put it on the shelf next to the razor blade man's picture, which was getting pretty yellow around the edges. The shaving cream in the picture, and the undershirt too, were very faded, and there were lipstick marks on his face where they never were before. The marks were so large that I knew they had to be Aunt Mae's.
I was getting bigger, and this was because of the playing outdoors with Aunt Mae. She was getting bigger too. This made her start on a diet, because she said she had to keep her "figure." But I didn't know what she meant, because she never did have anything special in the first place. Her hair was getting longer, and she wore roses in it behind her ears. In the front it was high and combed over a big false piece of cotton. From there it hung down behind her ears and behind the roses and ended on her back in a lot of curls. It attracted so much attention that a lot of the young girls in town began to wear their hair that way. Aunt Mae was very proud of this and mentioned it to Mother all the time. She tried to get Mother to wear her hair that way too, but she never succeeded.
So I felt that things had gone from bad to worse. When we went out on Sundays, Aunt Mae's hair and the slacks got more attention than the Jean Harlow walk had ever done. She told me that maybe she could make some "contacts" now that she had the new style. I didn't know what she meant, but there were more winks at her after that, and she wore her feather boa higher so I couldn't see her face at all.
It was about that time Aunt Mae got her boyfriend. I had seen him around town before, and I think he worked in one of the groceries. He must've been seventy years old. We first met him one day when we were out walking. We were looking in a window display when Aunt Mae whispered that someone was following us. We started off again, and I heard this shuffle-shuffle-hop behind us. I turned around and saw this old man following us. He was looking straight at Aunt Mae's buttocks, which at the time were pretty flabby because she wasn't sucking them in anymore. When he saw that I saw him, he looked away quick and started studying one of the window advertisements. It made me feel funny to know that he was looking at Aunt Mae in that particular place. Next Sunday he stopped and talked to us, and Aunt Mae acted like I had never seen her act before. She acted cute and giggled at everything he said. This won him over, or seemed to anyway, because he began calling on her at night the next week.
At first they just sat in the living room talking and drinking tea. Poppa seemed to like it, because he knew the old man and said he was good for Aunt Mae. I didn't tell Poppa what he had been looking at that day on the street. I didn't tell Aunt Mae either. She seemed to like the old man, and I knew she wouldn't believe me if I told her. I didn't know what he wanted, but I did know that it wasn't nice to look at anyone in that place.
After he had come around about a month, they started sitting on the porch, and I remember hearing Aunt Mae's giggle below me as I went to sleep at night. The next morning she would come down to breakfast late and usually be angry at everything. This went on all during that summer, and the old man, whose name was George, was at the house almost every night. He smelled of Lilac Vegetal, and between him and Aunt Mae I wondered how the two of them could be together without choking each other. I didn't know what they did on the porch. I never thought they could be making love like young people did in the movies. When the nights of Aunt Mae's giggling passed, those two began to be very quiet on the porch. And one morning, before dawn, when Mother was taking me to the bathroom, we passed Aunt Mae's room and she wasn't in there yet. I never asked Aunt Mae why she was still on the porch at three in the morning, but I remember wanting to.
During this time I saw very little of Aunt Mae. After she came to breakfast, she would play with me in a halfhearted way for a while, and then return to her room to get ready for George that night. I could smell the perfume coming from her window when I sat in the yard watching Mother hang the clothes up. I could hear Aunt Mae singing, too, but none of them were songs I knew. Except for one, and that was one I'd heard coming from the barroom in town when Mother and I passed it once going shopping. I never knew how Aunt Mae learned it. When I asked her, she said her nurse had sung it to her when she was a little girl. But I knew that nurses never sang like that.
I didn't like George from the first time I saw him. His hair was long and gray, and it was always greasy. There were red marks all over his face, and it was a very lean one. He stood pretty straight for being about seventy. His eyes were shifty and never looked straight at you. In the first place, I was mad at him because he took almost all of Aunt Mae's time away from me. He never paid much attention to me, but I remember when one night I was sitting in the living room and he was waiting for Aunt Mae he said I looked like a very tender one, and he pinched me so hard on the arm that the spot was colored for a week. I was always too afraid of him to scream, but I screamed at him enough in my dreams when I would see him riding my train over me as I was tied to the track.
He carried on with Aunt Mae all through that summer and into part of the fall. Aunt Mae never spoke of marriage, so I didn't know why he was courting her, because all that normally leads to marriage somehow or other. I knew that Mother and Poppa weren't feeling so easy about it as they had been. At night when Aunt Mae and George were on the porch or out for a walk, I would sit with them in the kitchen and listen to them talk. Mother told Poppa that she didn't like George and that he was up to no good and things like that, and Poppa just told her that she was silly, but I could understand that he was wondering too.
One night Aunt Mae and George went for a walk in the hills and didn't return until about six in the morning. I couldn't sleep that night, so I was sitting at my window, and I saw them come into the yard. They didn't talk to each other, and George left without even telling Aunt Mae good night, or maybe good morning. Mother and Poppa never found out. I was the only one who knew, but I didn't say anything. I saw Aunt Mae pass by my bedroom when she came upstairs, and there were leaves all tangled in the back of her hair. I thought maybe she fell down.
About a month after that, we never saw George anymore, and Mother told me he left town. I didn't think anything about it. As a matter of fact, I was happy, because now Aunt Mae and I could be together more. But it changed her. She never took me walking on the street anymore. She only played in the yard. She wouldn't even go around the block to the drugstore but sent me there to buy what she wanted. Poppa and Mother didn't invite friends over much anymore, or maybe they didn't want to come. I got used to staying right in the yard and began to work up quite an imagination with my cars. Now it was Aunt Mae who was the slow one. Sometimes she'd just stare up over the trees for a long while, and I'd have to nudge her and tell her it was her turn to move her truck. Then she'd smile and say, "Oh, I'm sorry, David," and begin pushing it along. But she either went the wrong way or did something wrong so that I ended up playing by myself while she just sat and stared at some nothing in the sky. One day she got a letter from George, but she just tore it up when she took it out of the mailbox and read the handwriting. I found out it was from him when I got older and could read and found it taped together in her dresser drawer. I never read what it said, because I had been taught not to do that kind of thing, but I was always curious about it. In eighth grade I found out what happened. George hadn't really left town but had been arrested by the sheriff on a morals charge because some girl's mother made some kind of complaint.
So here I am riding on this train. It's still dark out except for neon signs we pass sometimes. The last town went by too fast for me to see the name. The clicking on the rails is getting faster, and I can see the trees crossing the moon quick now. The years before I went to school passed by just about as quick as those trees are passing by the moon.
Two
Then we moved. Something went wrong at the factory and Poppa lost his job, so we had to move to an old farmhouse-like house up on a hill right where the town ended.
It was a tan and brown place, but the paint was so faded you couldn't tell what color it was at first. There were so many rooms that we locked plenty of them up and never used them, and the whole place made me think of the hotel down in town, except it wasn't quite so large. The furniture in the other house came with the price of the rent, so we really didn't have any of our own worth mentioning, just things like the toilet seat Aunt Mae bought when she said the old one pinched.
About the saddest place was the living room, really the front room, with only an old couch Mother got from some friends and two old-fashioned chairs of Aunt Mae's. At first we didn't have any curtains, but Aunt Mae had some beautiful old stage costumes that she tore up to use instead. I can't say that they looked bad, though, even if they weren't wide or long enough for the big windows. Every window in the front room had a different curtain. The big one that looked onto the porch had one made out of an evening dress with big pink roses and lace. On one of the smaller windows Aunt Mae put a curtain she made out of a shroud she wore in some murder play, and on the other one she had a red satin costume from a minstrel show. When the sun came through all three windows, it made the room so red and bright that Poppa said it reminded him of hell, and he would never sit with us in there. I think this was because the curtains were Aunt Mae's costumes, too, and he didn't want the sun to shine on him through them.
Upstairs in the bedrooms we had some old beds someone had left in the house, and they were so hard and smelled so much that I never fell asleep till I had tossed around for about an hour. Anybody who got close to them could tell that they must have been used by little children ever since they were built. Aunt Mae got sick from the smell of her mattress the first night we slept there. She slept on the couch that night and then threw all of her powder on her bed the next day.
Inside the house there wasn't much more to see, but you could see almost the whole country from the front porch. You could see our town down at the bottom of the hills, and over from the side of the porch you could see the county seat pretty well on clear days, and you could tell where it was anytime if you looked for the factory smokestack, because it was painted orange. There was a big black mark on it that was a big R when you got close to it. It stood for Renning, the people who owned the factory. I always remember the smokestack because Poppa would sit on the porch and look at it and say, "Those Rennings are the people that are keeping us poor. Damn those rich buggers. They're the ones keeping this whole valley poor, them and the damn politicians they get elected to run us." His work wasn't too steady now, and he sat on the porch most of the time and looked out over the county.
Our own yard was just cinders and a few weeds that grew around the steps and the porch. It was hard to play in the yard because there wasn't much to do, and if I fell down on the cinders they'd stick in my skin and have to be washed out with soap. I couldn't play back in the hills either, because they were full of snakes, so I got used to playing on the porch and in the house. The only time the cinders were fun was when it rained. Then you could pack them tight like cement and make dams, which was easy to do with all the water that came down from the hills when it rained.
Rain was something we were always afraid of at the hill house. After we moved there, we heard that the other people left years before because the house was too dangerous when it rained. Of course the roof gave trouble, not having been taken care of in so long, but the real trouble was with the foundations. The hills were nothing but clay, and when the rain came down them, the foundations would sink in the soft mud. That's why the cinders were in the yard, so that you could walk around there after a rain. If you went back into the hills after a rain, though, you had to wear boots.
When I first looked at the house, I could tell it was leaning and not straight, but it wasn't until after the first spring we were there and the first real rain came that we knew why. All night that night the house rumbled, and we thought it was just the thunder. In the morning the kitchen had dropped down on one side and there was wet clay under the stove. We had plenty of empty rooms downstairs, so we made another room the kitchen and left the old one just dropping there at the back of the house in a crazy way. When the hurricanes came in off the Atlantic that fall, we lost that old room and half of the front porch too.
I set up my train in one of the empty rooms upstairs, and I made all kinds of scenery for it to pass through. I made a tunnel and a hill out of some old boxes, and made a bridge with some of the trellis that was nailed to the front porch for climbing roses. Everyone could tell that climbing roses would never grow in that clay and cinders. It made Aunt Mae mad, though, because she liked the trellis and said that she could sit and imagine there were roses on it, even if there weren't.
My train was a beautiful thing, though. It ran all through the room. First it went under the tunnel, then over an old shoe box which I covered with crepe paper to make it look like a green hill, then it came down off the shoe box over the trellis bridge, which looked just like the steel bridge they had over the river at the county seat. From there it had a clear stretch over the floor in a circle and stopped back at the tunnel.
The same fall that we had the hurricane off the Atlantic was the fall I entered County Elementary. That was the name of the grade school down in town. It was far from our place. In the morning I had to go down the hill and across town to get to it, because it was at the foot of the range of hills opposite from ours. When it rained, I wore my boots to get off the hill. Then I had to carry them with me through town, and they were always wet and covered with clay, and they'd get me dirty and ruin my homework papers.
The school was a wooden building in the middle of a big yard that didn't have any grass on it. It had four rooms. I went into the first, second, and third room, but they had a fourth, fifth, and sixth room and also a seventh and eighth. I don't know what the last room was used for, but a big boy told me what happened there sometimes at night when he and his friends used it, and I didn't understand what he was talking about.
There were three teachers, two women and a man. The man had the seventh and eighth room. He was from out of state, but the two women were from town. One was our neighbor when we lived in town, and she didn't like Aunt Mae. I got her for my first teacher.
She recognized me right away and asked if the hussy was still living with us. I asked her what she meant, and she said that I should stop trying to pull her leg, that she knew my smart-aleck kind, that I was a perfect nephew for Aunt Mae, sly and tricky. When she said "sly and tricky," it sounded like the kind of words the preacher at church used, and I didn't like him. Her name was Mrs. Watkins. I knew her husband too, because he was a deacon at the church. I don't know what he did for a living, but his name was always in the paper trying to make the county dry, trying to keep the colored people from voting, trying to take
Gone with the Wind
out of the county library because so many people were reading it and he just knew it was "licentious." Someone wrote a letter to the paper asking if Mr. Watkins had ever read the book, and Mr. Watkins answered it saying that no, he would never lower himself to such a degree, that he "just knew" it was dirty because they were going to make a movie of it and therefore it had to be dirty, and that the man who had questioned his activities was an "agent of the devil." All this made the people of the county respect him, and a group met in front of the library in black masks and went in and took
Gone with the Wind
off the shelf and burned it on the sidewalk. The sheriff didn't want to do anything about it because he'd get into too much trouble with the people in town, and anyway, the election was next month.
Mrs. Watkins knew how the people felt about her husband after he did this to protect county morals, and whenever someone played around in the room, she'd say that she was going to talk to Mr. Watkins and see what he would do to punish such a person. This made all the playing in the room stop, because we were afraid Mr. Watkins would do to us what he did to the book. Anyway, at lunch one day the little boy who sat next to me told me that he was positive Mr. Watkins would burn anyone who was bad in his wife's room. After this really got around, Mrs. Watkins had the quietest room you've ever heard, and it was the wonder of the other two teachers, because when someone finished three years so quiet in Mrs. Watkins', he just naturally got a lot noisier in the next room.
Because she said I was a bad influence, Mrs. Watkins made me sit in the front row "right under her eye," as she said. This made me mad at Aunt Mae, but then I realized I was happy that she hadn't been friendly with Mrs. Watkins. I knew no one could be unless he was a deacon or a member of the Ladies' Aid, and Aunt Mae didn't like that kind either.
After a few days I began to notice that Mrs. Watkins was cross-eyed. That was something I had never noticed before, and when I told Aunt Mae, she laughed and laughed and said she hadn't noticed it either.
I memorized Mrs. Watkins' whole body the first week, along with a few pages out of the primer reader. Where I sat, my head came just a little above her knee, and I never felt a bonier knee in my life. I was just looking at her legs and wondering why she never shaved them the way Mother and Aunt Mae did when she hit me on the chin with her knee and told me to pay attention. My front tooth had been loose for a week, but I had been too afraid to let Mother or Poppa pull it out. When Mrs. Watkins' knee hit, I felt it pop loose and I let out a little "ouch," which I think pleased her. She didn't know she had done me a favor, and I never told her. I kept the tooth in my mouth until after class, then I spat it out and kept it, and I looked in the mirror at home and saw the new one coming through.
I wondered why a woman had such a straight body, because both Mother and Aunt Mae were round, and you could lay against them and be comfortable. Mrs. Watkins was straight all the way, with two big bones sticking out near her neck. You never knew where her waist was. Some days her dress would make it look like it was at her hips, but then it would be up across her chest or else near to where a waist should be. She must have had a big navel, because thin dresses sank way in near her stomach.
One day she was bending down over my desk to correct a paper, and I smelled her breath for the first time. I didn't know where I'd smelled that smell before, but I knew I had. I turned my head away and tried to cover my nose with my reader. That didn't do any good, though, and I could still smell it on the way home. It was a kind of odor you can't forget, the kind that reminds you of something or someone, like the smell of flowers always reminds me of funerals.
I don't know what I learned that year with Mrs. Watkins, but whatever it was there wasn't much of it, and I didn't like what there was. With three classes in the same room, she could only spend a little time with each one. I do know that I learned to read a little, because the next summer when I went to the movies with Aunt Mae I could read the name of the movie and people in it pretty well. I could add, too, and knew how to print. Poppa said that was all I had to know and I didn't have to go back the next fall. That was alright by me, but Mother wouldn't let me listen to him. Poppa was trying to grow some crops back in the hills above the house, and he needed someone to help him plow the clay, and Mother said that was why he didn't want me to go back to school.
When I heard that, I was glad to return in the fall, even if it was to Mrs. Watkins. Poppa couldn't grow anything in the hills, and Mother knew it. Anything was better than having him sit on the porch all the time the way he did. He was working part-time down in town at a gas station, but the hours were short, and when he came home he just sat there on the porch and looked onto the town and back into the hills. I thought he was crazy when he said he was going to start farming up in the hills. When the clay hardened after a rain, it was like cement, and anyone would know that no seeds would be able to come through. Aunt Mae had tried to start a garden behind the house, but when she didn't have time to water it, the mud got hard and began to crack just like it did all through the hills.
He spent all one week's salary, and it wasn't much, to buy some seeds and a little plow that a man could work by himself. He got a rake, too, and a shovel and a little hatchet to cut the small pines that grew all over. I was sitting in the front room doing my spelling for Mrs. Watkins the night he came home with all this. It was the regular pay night, and Mother had only some hush puppies and fried fish because it was near the end of the week and we didn't have any money in the house. I had twenty-three cents in my bank, but Mother wouldn't ever take that even though I had told her she could have it.
Aunt Mae was still upstairs, probably still sleeping from her afternoon nap. The sun was setting right behind the Renning smokestack, which looked like a black matchstick in front of an orange lightbulb. The sunset made the room look all orange, except for the bright light I was studying by. Outside I heard Poppa coming across the cinders in the front yard, making the heavy crunching sound that he always did, and there was a lighter crunch behind him. I saw him carrying some bags over his shoulder. Behind him was a colored boy with some big things wrapped in hardware paper. Poppa took these, and the boy went off across the cinders down to town.
"Mother." I put my pencil down on my copybook. "Poppa's here."
I heard the fish frying back in the kitchen as she opened the door into the front room.
"Good, David." She was wiping the greasy cornmeal on her apron. "He has his money with him."
She hurried to the door and met him as he was about to open the door.