Taft

by Ann Patchett

  "He's your son," she said.

  "Funny how that works. Sometimes you think he is and sometimes you're not so sure."

  But I knew Marion. She could find her way without my money and without me, so I paid. I worried about that payment all the time. I was always checking to make sure I had enough to cover it. When I put it in the envelope I'd write a note to go along. This is for half the electric bill, for class trips, for a new pair of jeans. Something along those lines.

  When I got home from work the day I hired the girl in the puffy jacket and the striped stocking cap, it was nearly three in the morning. I'd stayed open late because there were a couple of guys still drinking at the bar and I figured there was no point in throwing them out. I was in no hurry. Two minutes after I walked in the door the phone started to ring. I could only think it was bad news. When it was Marion on the other end and she was crying, I knew it as fact.

  "Franklin," I said to her. "Tell me."

  She took a breath. "He's okay."

  "Marion, why are you crying? Settle down, tell me what you're crying about."

  "He fell," she said, then started up again. "Where were you till three o'clock? I've been trying all night."

  "He fell how?" I said. There was no spit in my mouth and I sat down on the edge of the bed, which I hadn't made once since Marion left.

  "Where were you?"

  "Work," I said, trying not to be short with her. She wouldn't call me at the bar. Not if a life depended on it. "Fell how?"

  "At the beach. He was running with some boys. They pushed him or he fell, I don't know. He fell on some glass, a piece of Coke bottle he says. It cut his face. The side of his face." She was crying. "It was by his eye, but it didn't cut his eye."

  I looked at the carpet, a bad orange and brown shag left over from the seventies. I should have found a day job, something regular, found a nicer place to live. "Where is he now?" I said, thinking maybe in the hospital.

  "Right here, asleep. He's fine now. It just scared me to death is all. Then you weren't home. When I got the call I thought he was dead at first."

  "Stop that."

  "Everything's fine, but I thought—I didn't want to call my parents. I didn't know who to call."

  "You call me," I said. Was there a bandage around his head? Was it only taped up over the cut? Did the white from the tape make his skin look warm and rested up the way his mother's uniform made her look?

  "Don't fight me about this," she said, tired.

  "Who were the boys? Who was he with?"

  "Boys from around here. There're boys everywhere. He has friends from school. They play."

  "Are they rough kids? Do you know them?" I wanted to blame her, but only because I felt too far away. I wanted to go into his room and see him sleep. Miami was drugs and guns and gangs, packs of half-starved refugees who'd kill a boy like mine for the sneakers he was wearing.

  "Some of them," she said, "but there's no sense in wondering. It's nobody's fault, unless it's my fault."

  "You shouldn't have taken him so far away," I said.

  "I need some sleep," she said. "I have to work tomorrow."

  I started to ask her if she'd heard me, but she hung up.

  I sat there with the phone in my hands, not able to put it down in case I thought of another question. I didn't know what things were coming to, how things had gotten so far away from me. This wasn't terrible. A cut near the eye was not a lost eye. I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes, touching the side of my face where I imagined the cut would be. I hadn't asked her if it was on the left side or the right. I saw my son's head. It was oval-shaped. His hair was as short as it could be and still be hair, but it wasn't shaved off on the sides and the back. There were no lines shaved into this boy's head, no thin braid at the nape of his neck. His skin was darker than mine or Marion's. It was not an inky black, a blue black. It was a warm color, brown black. His eyes were lighter than his skin. I thought about the shape of his eyes. I thought about his mouth, which was wide and bright. I thought of every tooth that mouth contained, every one of them straight and hard and white as chalk the way new teeth are. The phone began to make that awful sound phones make when they're off the hook and no one is at the other end. It startled me, and then I hung it up.

  I thought about Franklin's face so hard I gave myself a headache. I wanted to know what happened. I wanted to know all of it. I pictured the day hot, even for this time of year in Miami. From a distance I could make out some shapes and then make out that they were boys. They were coming from every direction. The boys gathered up together like some sort of dust storm moving down the street. Haitian boys, West Indian boys, lighter Latino boys with black silky hair. They wear red tank tops, T-shirts that say Batman or Desert Storm. They are barefoot, in tennis shoes and flip-flops as they run down the street laughing. Boys picking up boys like dogs packing together. Then all of a sudden Franklin is with them. He's not wearing a shirt. He's wearing some shorts that are so big they cover his knees. They are electric blue. He is hollering with the boys and I can't hear what he's saying. They're on their way to the beach, which isn't far. They cut through the traffic, not waiting for anything, cut across the parking lot, weaving in and out between the cars, trying to hide and scare one another. They make their way down to the sand and across the sand to the water. They run back and forth with the waves, trying to keep their feet dry, acting crazy. One boy gets in the water and pretends to drown. He cries for help in a foot of water and the pack goes in to save him, but he struggles because everybody knows a drowning man will fight off the person who is trying to save him. Franklin reaches down to him, but when he does the drowning boy slings out his arm and catches Franklin hard on the side of the face. Franklin, hit, falls back into the water. Now the game changes without anyone saying anything about it. It is to drown someone instead of to pretend you're drowning. All at once they reach out to catch Franklin's arms and pull him under. Franklin gets the change in the program just as fast as they do. There are so many boys, eight counting Franklin, and they get all tangled up together. One boy pushes him under by the neck and he shuts his eyes tight against the salt water. The water fills up his nose and ears and blocks out the sound of the voices. Franklin is terrified, scared like an animal. He kicks up out of the water with everything he's got and his foot makes contact with something and for a second he is let go. He takes that second to make his break. In the water he is slick and he slips between them. He digs his heels in the wet sand and takes off running, twice as fast as before, and the boys run after, screaming. He's pretty far away, past the empty lifeguard chair, halfway to the parking lot, when he takes a look behind him for one quick second, loses his balance, and goes straight down into the hot, soft sand. The broken bottom of a 7UP bottle, a flat disk of green glass with a quarter inch of jagged edge, cuts a half circle on the side of his face near his left eye. When he raises his face out of the sand he doesn't know he's bleeding. The sight of the blood stops the wild boys dead and turns them all back into regular boys again. Just like that. They forget that things had gotten out of hand or that Franklin is the one they were chasing, and Franklin forgets too, as soon as he touches his hand to his face because there is something, riot water, dripping into his eye.

  I had such a wave of sickness come over me that I thought I was going to throw up, but by the time I walked into the bathroom it had calmed some and I poured myself a glass of water from the tap and went back to the bed. Four in the morning. I held my eyes open to keep from seeing the part where he was falling.

  Then for no reason at all I thought of that girl Fay. I didn't know where she lived. I didn't have her phone number so I could call her and tell her that she couldn't have the job, if I was to decide not to give it to her. I couldn't call to find out if she was okay if I was to go in tomorrow and not find her. It wasn't that I wanted to think about her, but by seeing her face I could make myself not see Franklin's, so I thought about her. I could barely fix her in my mind, the thin skin on her
temples, the red that the cold put on her cheeks. I couldn't remember the color of her eyes or if her straight hair that wasn't blond or brown was cut into bangs the way so many girls her age like to wear their hair these days. I wondered where in the east she came from. I wondered who was looking out for her. Who made her that ugly hat. I remembered how careful she was when it came time for her to cross the street and it made me feel comforted. Someone taught her what to watch for. But then, they didn't teach her well enough if she was wandering down to Beale looking for work in bars. There was no watching them every minute, Marion. We can't be everywhere. What are you going to do but teach them to look?

  IT WAS VERY MUCH like a hangover, but the dry, luckless kind that didn't follow any wild night of drinking. It was a hangover from not sleeping, from worrying about a cut near the eye but not in the eye, which led to bigger worries I didn't have names for. I lay on top of the covers all night with my clothes on until the room got slowly lighter. I stayed in bed, watching the clock while people went to work and came home for lunch and the woman in the apartment next door turned her soap opera on, which was always my sign that it was time to get up. Before long I was thinking I should head back to the bar. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and wondered if I should take a shower and change. It didn't much seem like a next day, but I decided to clean up all the same, more in hopes it would make me feel better than any notion about what I ought to do. By this time I was feeling doubly bad, bad about Franklin and bad about not having slept. It wasn't so many years before that I could stay up for nights on end and then fall into a dead sleep on some strange sofa in some strange living room. I would have stayed at home, let things at work take care of themselves, if I thought for a minute that I'd have any better luck sleeping.

  Muddy's opened for business a little before noon every day, but I rarely saw the place then. The day manager was a man named Eugene, who went and got the money out of the bank and put it in the cash register. He took the chairs off the tabletops and put them on the floor and served lunch with his own set of waitresses. The deal was that we would switch off, nights and days, but it turned out Eugene didn't like staying up. When I started coming in earlier, he started leaving earlier, until we developed the fine art of always missing each other, until I stopped thinking about him altogether.

  So when I came into the bar it was more or less running itself, which it seemed to do just fine. If you felt like you had a hangover to begin with, a bar was as good a place to be as any. The few people who were there at two o'clock looked about like me. They weren't making any noise. They were finally getting around to coffee and maybe a quiet shot beside it. They kept their eyes down, not because they were shamed that here it was, only Thursday but because they felt like keeping things private. I turned the music off, and then went to sit at the kitchen end of the bar, having a coffee myself, not pretending to read the newspaper in front of me. I was working hard to not think about anything.

  Cyndi was no fool, or if she was she at least knew when to stay out of somebody's way. She swept up the floor without my having to tell her and when she filled my coffee cup she didn't look at me directly. She acted like she was a waitress and I was any customer who'd come through, and that made me think she knew how to do her job. Cyndi was in the bar more than anybody else except me. She started working off the clock, just for tips, when I told her I wouldn't pay overtime. At first I thought she must need the money like crazy, but it had to be more than that. She was trying to keep busy. As I watched her wipe down the bar, it occurred to me that I saw more of Cyndi than I did any other person. I saw her more than any woman I ever slept with, more than my son, and what worried me was that maybe she saw me more than anybody too. On top of everything else I started worrying about Cyndi.

  "The hell with this," I said, and pushed off of my stool.

  "What?" Cyndi said.

  "I'm going out."

  "Sure," she said, nodding a little.

  "You think you can manage things all right while I'm gone," I said, not as a question, more to be ugly since I was suddenly feeling sentimental.

  "I expect so." She looked at me with a limited amount of patience, tapping a pencil against the bar. I took my jacket off the hook next to the door and hurried out into the cold before I said anything else.

  What I wanted was a drink and one of the few rules I had in the world was not to drink in the bar you worked in. This came years ago, when I was still playing and the house was always more than willing to stand you a tab that would wind up coming out of your pay. After two sets it was perfectly possible for a man to have drunk up his split of the whole night's work without even knowing it; pretty girls coming up to the stage with trays of drinks, always Jack Daniel's or something other than well to make the money go faster. Some nights I just broke even. I knew plenty of guys who were handed a bill by the time it was all over. It was always best to take your business where they weren't naturally inclined to cheat you. I decided not to change my ways even when I was the one running things. It wasn't good to drink in front of the people who worked for you. It was no good coming to think of that long, lit-up bar as your personal liquor cabinet. Never pour yourself a drink from the working side of a bar, that was a safe rule of thumb.

  There was not one kind word to be said about Memphis that day. The pavement was the color of the sky, which was the color of the grass, which was the color of the Mississippi. It was all the same, no matter which way you were looking. The wetness in the air that made it painful to breathe some days in August was still there in February, but it was bitter now and it got up underneath your shirt and froze next to your skin.

  Up on the corner was a boy named Eddie who was doing flips even though there was nobody around. In the summer and on some winter weekends when it turned warm, Eddie could have the street so packed the cops had to move through and break things up for traffic. He must have been eight, nine even, though that's hard to believe. He was a little guy, small as Franklin was at six. He made his living and his father's living by doing backflips and walkovers and all sorts of no-hand things that involved him tossing himself up in the air so fast and so often that I got sick to my stomach just watching him. There were plenty of little boys who tumbled to make money off of crowds, but none of them could stand with Eddie. He was something of a little genius when it came to making people hold their breath.

  "Hey there, Eddie," I said as I walked up towards him. "What're you doing out here in the cold? Get yourself inside, son. There's nobody coming down here." I saw his father tucked just inside the doorway of a bank. He wasn't much older than me, but he looked hard hit. He was sitting in an aluminum lawn chair with strips of green fabric crisscrossed to make a seat and back. I nodded to him and he made a little movement with his head that didn't count for anything.

  "Give me a buck and I'll go inside," Eddie said.

  "You've got more money than God," I told him. "You've got enough to buy Vegas three times. I've seen what sort of hat you're passing."

  Eddie smiled a little. At heart, there was something shy about him, despite his talk. I reached into my pocket and peeled off two dollars. He took the money and threw himself up and backwards and down. His feet went all the way over his head and then landed in the precise same spot he started from. It bothered me because I'd given him that money so he wouldn't jump, so I wouldn't have to worry about him missing his mark and cracking his head all over the sidewalk. The way I saw it there were two types of people who gave Eddie money: those who did it to make him start and those who did it to make him stop.

  "Two o'clock in the afternoon," I said, and leaned in to show his father my watch. "That's when boys are in school."

  His father stood up slowly and folded his chair. As soon as he was up Eddie moved on ahead of him and together, but not together, they headed up the hill in the general direction of the Peabody.

  I got myself out of the cold and took my seat at the bar of the Rum Boogie Cafe. I was thinking about catching up with them
and taking Eddie's father by the throat, stretching his head off his neck an extra inch or so and slamming him hard into something brick. Stupid bastard. I closed my eyes and savored the feeling of real violence. It was something I'd given up a long time ago. There were still plain fistfights when I was young. Now everybody over the age of ten seemed to be in possession of a gun. You couldn't hit a guy the way you used to because you never knew what he might have waiting for you in his back pocket. Not that those flstflghts alone didn't kill plenty of people, but at least then there was a chance. You give somebody a gun and there isn't a whole lot of chance to it anymore. I thought about it until the subject started to turn my stomach. I was ready for a drink.

  The bartender appeared from the other side of the world and was no one I knew. He was a college white boy. Big bulky arms and a square face, the kind that college girls liked. It was a mean kind of face. My never having seen him before could only mean he was new.

  He put a cocktail napkin on the bar in front of me with a little bit of a slap and he just looked at me, not angry and not friendly. There was no wasting time with "What'll it be, buddy?" and maybe that was fine. He and I both knew why I'd come. What I couldn't figure was what he was in such a hurry about. The bar was dead. This one, the one I left, these bars were sleeping babies.

  I ordered my drink with water on account of the hour. When he told me what it would be (and it was a quarter more than the same drink costs you down the street), I told the college boy I'd run a tab. That didn't suit him. He said they didn't run tabs. He made the mistake of thinking that just because he was new, I was new too. I reached into my wallet and paid him, even told him he could keep the healthy tip. I didn't give him the news, that I have a very long memory and one day he'd be looking for a job. The memory I inherited from Marion. You don't spend all those years with a woman without learning something.