Gypsy Davey

by Chris Lynch

  CONTENTS

  Two Too Many

  Motion

  Sumpin’ Nice

  Like a Bird Out of Water

  Love, Sister, It’s Just a Kiss Away

  Decked Out in Cheese

  Muthuh

  They

  Gimp

  Regular Cool

  Big Now

  Us Alone Happy

  Come Dancing

  For the Good Times

  Lessa Lester

  Goin’ Where the Water Tastes Like Wine

  Great Things in Convertibles

  Hysterical

  Until He Couldn’t See It Anymore

  Like Hell to Pieces

  About Chris Lynch

  TWO TOO MANY

  My sister Joanne has a baby and sometimes after school I go over there and I help her with it and she lets me have a glass of wine and then I start to think of things.

  Things like that I’m really good with babies even though I’m only twelve and I can think of no reason why I should be after all good with babies since I don’t have any of my own but I sure would like to. Better than my sister is with her own baby that’s for sure though I don’t actually mean to be mean because she’s nice to me some of the time and it’s hard for her and I fully understand that. She’s only seventeen herself but her old man she calls him is thirty which is why there’s always a glass of wine around although from what I can see the old man himself ain’t. Around that is.

  Sometimes my sister goes out right away when I come over and comes back hours later when me and the baby Dennis are asleep. She says that Dennis is crazy because he’s loud and he’s active and he doesn’t listen but then he stops still and stares for almost ever and he makes a lot of sounds that are nothing at all like words and he moves funny sometimes more like a praying mantis than like a big baby boy and that all this is why little Dennis and me get along so good is what she says because we’re both screwed she says. And that’s why she has to leave sometimes.

  But I don’t see the problem so much to be honest and I tell my sister so. She says I can’t see it because I’m a retard myself is what she says when she’s not feeling so nice or just that Davey you don’t understand things very well is what she says when she’s better.

  But I can do things. I can change Dennis’s diaper when he needs it, and I know when he needs it. I even like it doing the changing doing the feeding like it when my sister leaves us alone because I like being the one in charge for a change. I am really responsible and I don’t think my sister changes Dennis often enough because of what I see sometimes on his little bum. Like boils. I can’t tell my sister something like that because I told her once told her after she came home from a long long time when she was out of the house. And she said how dare you to me and she hit me slapped me real hard. Then she stared at me and thought about it and just said how dare you again and hit me real hard on the same part of my face again even though I’m bigger than she is by a lot. But I couldn’t do nothing about it of course because I couldn’t. Except cry. I could cry and I did just with the water part and no sound coming out of me. And I turned so little Dennis couldn’t see because he looks up to me admires me and he’s real curious and kept stretching his neck to try to see me. So now I just wipe the cream on him all the time and I blow lightly on the red parts of his bottom to cool him because it looks hot.

  My sister says so what to all this because she did it all for me when I was little like our brother Gary who doesn’t live around here anymore did for her because she says Mom had two kids too many than she could handle. And so I owe somebody.

  MOTION

  Joanne was seven years old when she became, in effect, mother by default for Davey, who was two. That was the year Lois, their mother, started packing Joanne off to school in the morning with her lunch of a hot dog wrapped in a piece of bread, a bag of Cheetos, and a two-pack of Suzy Q’s. Following breakfast of one Pop-Tart, which the girl could either eat or not, Joanne would take a last look over her shoulder as Lois plunked Davey down in front of the TV.

  Which was where Joanne would find her brother when she came back in in the afternoon.

  “Take the long route home?” Lois said as she snatched her wet-look leather jacket off the coat tree. “Make sure Davey has something to eat at some point. He won’t eat for me today.” And she was gone.

  “You didn’t eat nothing?” Joanne said as Davey finally looked away from the screen and noticed her. He let out a squeal and held his hands straight up in the air as she ran over and lifted him up. They played their game, where she let go of him and he hung on by holding tight around her neck, as they headed right for the kitchen. Davey laughed “like a madman,” Joanne said, even though it took all his strength to hold on, and even though he fell to the floor hard more than once.

  The ritual. It became the one reliable good time of the day, when Joanne made orange macaroni and cheese out of the box. He ate his share, at least half a box, every time, no matter how his mother said he’d eaten all day. Joanne ate with him, out of boredom, out of comradeship, out of whatever need still gnawed at her belly every afternoon after she finished her lunch. It started to show on both of them, the daily macs, as Joanne got more and more chunky while Davey grew like a sunflower, tall and taller and ragged and unsteady.

  “Can’t you do something else, Davey? Don’t you want to?” she first asked him when she was ten and his TV watching schedule was interrupted each day only by two and a half hours of kindergarten.

  “Ya,” he answered enthusiastically, but shrugged while doing it. It was becoming common, the mixed communication, like when he’d say “yes” to something while shaking his head, or “I don’t know” while nodding.

  “Well then come with me,” Joanne said as he jumped on her back, the new daily ritual since he’d become too big for her to carry. They ate their macaroni, then she dressed him in his winter jacket, ski mask, and mittens.

  Finally, she took him by the hand to the places she always went. To get away from the place she would teach him to get away from. She took him to the library, where she read him picture books until he got bored and started wandering, pulling books down. Where Joanne’s friend Isobel, the librarian, came over and corralled Davey back into the chair, loosened his heavy clothes in the stuffy library air, immediately relaxing him. Isobel read to them from The Wind in the Willows, and both children sat still until things got too busy and she had to get back to work.

  She took him to the cobbler’s shop, where nobody ever seemed to go anymore even though Vadala the shoe guy was completely surrounded, up one wall and down the other, with old black shoes. Joanne and Davey had a ball clomping up and down the old dry floorboards wearing fifty different people’s shoes. “They need a walk. Take ’em for a walk,” Vadala would say. He loved it and tugged away at a full white mustache growing down over his lips, pushing biscotti and hard candies on the two kids as they paraded by his bench. Joanne could go on the whole day walking the shoes, and many days she did. But for Davey the big thrill came with the workbench. Vadala set him up with tacks, a hammer, and a rubber sole, and that was the last they saw of Davey’s face. Hammering away like old John Henry, Davey was motivated. He pounded, harder and harder, faster and faster, louder and louder, letting out the occasional grunt of effort, the occasional giggle of delight. He worked so long at that hammering that even Joanne stopped her marching to join Vadala in just staring at Davey. When she finally had to pull him away to leave, there were droplets of sweat rolling off the tip of his nose.

  Davey was so supercharged by that time, he couldn’t even stay in his seat during most of the bus ride Joanne took him on. It was the long straight ride up Washington Street, her favorite of the many regular routes she rode just for the riding. For the moti
on that had become so important to her, the perpetual, numbing hum of motion. She would let her temple loll against the window as she looked over at whatever passed by. The vibration in her head such a nice soundtrack.

  She would let him roam since, as usual in the afternoon, there were only a couple of old people on the bus who didn’t want any trouble. But Joanne would break her own peace whenever Davey was too close, and too hard, on the driver’s ear.

  “Sit down, Davey, I want you to look at this,” she said, jamming him into her prized window seat. “There.” She pointed to a brown triple-decker with the porches about to drop to the sidewalk. “There is where we lived when you were born.” Davey stared silently at that house and at all the other rotting triplets that floated by. “And there,” she said one minute later, “is where we lived when I was born. And that one there is where we moved to right after, and that empty lot there used to be the house we lived in just two years ago.”

  Davey listened but didn’t react much except to say “uh-huh,” and “oh.” He was nevertheless spellbound. By the same thing that brought Joanne back to the buses to nowhere day after day. The houses flying by, the neighborhoods melting away, popping up, one blending into another, the wheezy growl of the bus engine that sounded like it was just sitting right there in the rear seat of the bus instead of outside, and didn’t sound like any other sound. Davey leaned his temple against the glass, and she knew she’d done something for him. Joanne got up out of the inside seat, swung around to the window seat right behind her brother’s, and assumed the identical position. They didn’t move when the bus pulled into the station, waited fifteen minutes, then headed back up Washington Street to where they came from.

  Joanne had to shake Davey, then pull him, when it was time to get off the bus. Then all the way up the street toward home he was excited, agitated, like an animal needing to run. Joanne hadn’t seen much of this in Davey before, but she liked it, saw it somehow as a good thing even if she wasn’t sure why. She wanted to take him out some more, to let him run, to simply stand and watch him do it, but it was starting to get dark and they had to get home. One time she grabbed him in a bear hug, his arms flattened to his sides, to play at restraining him. He kicked and twisted until finally he exploded out of her arms and sprinted, Joanne laughing and pursuing him.

  “Get your little ass in here,” Lois growled as she threw the front door open.

  “What, Ma? What?” Joanne pleaded, already trembling as she followed her mother’s backward steps. When they’d all gotten inside, Davey, bringing up the rear, turned and shut the door.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Lois screamed, smashing Joanne on the side of the head with the heel of her hand. “Who the hell do you think you are, Joanne? The boss? Are you the boss around here now? I was worried sick.” Every time she said “hell,” or “sick,” or “boss,” or “child,” she slapped Joanne in the same spot, the patch of the cheek that was already pink from the outside air. “You think you can just take this child, and whisk him away when you feel like it, like a toy?”

  Joanne stood frozen, still in her knee-length navy-blue coat. Her nose ran almost as fast as her tears, over her lips, her chin. “I thought he might like to go out,” she whimpered. Davey stood behind her, clutching the coarse wool of her coat like a bat.

  Lois leaned right down into Joanne’s face. “You mean you thought you might like to go out.” Joanne turned her face half away, not all the way away because she was afraid of offending her mother. But she had to turn, not so much from the words as from the odor, of men’s cologne, of something bitter, of onions and sweat and smoke. The scent that followed her mother home on the worst days.

  “Well, wake up, little girl.” Lois breathed at her as she squeezed her face. “Those days of come and go, and do what you like and la-di-da, are history. Do you hear me? You’ve got a lot of responsibility now, and it’s time for you to start growing the hell up.”

  Lois roughly brushed Joanne aside to get to Davey, who quaked like an old washing machine behind her. “Come here, dear,” Lois said, and started pulling his hat, mittens, and coat off. He looked at her like she was a stranger on the bus, undressing him like that. Joanne ran as fast as she could, down the hall to her room, and slammed the door.

  When Davey gently pushed the door open ten minutes later, Joanne was lying facedown on the bed, with her coat on.

  “Joanne?” he whispered. She didn’t say anything. “Joanne?” He was the kind of kid who would stand there and say her name a hundred times, assuming she hadn’t heard him. “Joanne?”

  “Go away, Davey.” She sobbed into the pillow.

  He stood for a few seconds, looking at her, then looking at the door thinking he might leave, then looking at her some more. Then, as if he’d never called her name before, or he forgot that he had, or maybe he wanted to talk even though she told him not to, he called her low again.

  “Jo? Joey? Okay, well, I had, okay, the best time today that I ever had before, is all, Jo. Okay?” He backed out of the room when she didn’t lift her face. “Okay? Joey. Bye I’ll leave you alone now, Jo.”

  SUMPIN’ NICE

  People always spoke to Davey like he was a baby. They did it when he was a baby, did it when he was no longer a baby. Some people never stopped talking to him that way. Davey’s mother Lois was the one who set the tone. She didn’t mean anything by it, had always spoken to her other children that way when they were small ones. This time around, though, it was just one more thing she couldn’t quite snap out of.

  “You wan’ me bring you back sumpin’ nice, sweetie?” was Lois’s standard refrain whenever she would leave the house without him. She never left him as an infant, unless five-year-old Joanne was there to take care of him. But later, when Davey was a big lump of a four- and five-year-old and Lois was running low on the patience, physical strength, and unflinching devotion it took to keep hauling him in and out of the car, to the grocery store, to the bank, to the mall, to stop at bathrooms, to answer his questions, to eat at the “family” restaurants she was damn sick of, she began to slip.

  Without consistent adult companionship for slightly more than the duration of Davey’s life, Lois was more and more anxious to be shed of the boy for whatever minutes she could carve out of a day. The checks always set her off, the child support that sometimes came in the mail from Sneaky Pete, and sometimes didn’t, and sometimes came in at three times the amount he was supposed to send if Old Pete had a particularly good run of luck at Hialeah. The money, though it didn’t last long, got the itch going for Lois as soon as the mailman arrived.

  First, she started leaving Davey in the car for the two minutes it took to punch up the automatic teller machine. Davey didn’t mind that. He was that kind of kid, that a few minutes of staring out the landau window at passing cars and pedestrians was not an unpleasant thing. That worked out well enough that the money from the machine could be spent during a fifteen-minute spin through CVS without it hurting the boy much, as long as the doors were locked, and a juice box was within Davey’s reach.

  Lois loved Davey through it all. When she broke out in a sweat at the checkout counter and made a frantic dash back to the car, sometimes leaving every item unbought on the counter, it was because she could see his face. She could feel, actually feel, the throbbing of his little boy’s heart in her own racing, palpitating heart. “Never, never, never, never again, sweetheart,” Lois promised as she squeezed him, hugging him close to her without removing his seatbelt, making him groan and grip his juice box so hard it gunned apple juice all over the car windows. He smiled and hugged back, though he didn’t understand the fuss.

  She did, did love him. Only she wasn’t very good at it anymore. She was a grown woman, lonely, and very weak, she knew. Just for a minute, or maybe ten or twenty, she had to make her little escape and find out, after all these years, who she was, what she was thinking, to hear the sound of her own voice and not the sound of her mother’s coming out of her mouth and ricochet
ing around the walls, off the dirty dishes, into the cavernous empty refrigerator.

  The problem was that it got easier. When fifteen minutes, and then forty-five, didn’t seem to faze the unflappable, serene Davey, it seemed okay to leave him in the house—which was after all much more secure—during those same errands.

  “I bring you back sumpin’ nice, Davey, okay?” Lois would say as she held Davey’s cheeks between her hands. And she always did bring him something. Usually candy or a whole small pizza which she told him he didn’t have to share with her or with Joanne when she came home from school. He adored pizza and he adored having things of his own, having things he was in charge of, and Lois reveled in sitting quietly on the couch as he ate it all up in front of the TV.

  When Joanne came home from school, Davey proudly showed her the empty box, which he’d always save to show off. Joanne pretended to be jealous, then took him into the kitchen for their daily macaroni and cheese, which he would eat no matter what else he had in his belly. And she made sure to glare defiantly at her mother, knowing by now what the pizza box meant. Lois would not acknowledge the look, and snapped at Joanne to remember not to leave her brother alone which she was out. The more Lois herself left him, the more insistent she would be that Joanne stay with him.

  To fill the days before Joanne came home, hours that she knew were getting longer and longer for Lois, Joanne started picking things up for Davey at junk shops and yard sales. She bought him Chutes and Ladders, which he played by himself and never cheated at. She bought him as many G.I. Joe dolls and Matchbox cars as she could afford with her own, irregular, secret, Sneaky Pete monies that came addressed to her. She bought him an Etch-A-Sketch, which for some reason had a bald spot in the middle where you could not get the magnetic sand to stick so Davey had to draw everything with a big donut hole in the middle of it.

  Davey was interested in everything and he worshipped Joanne, so that every little gift, every broken-down something that somebody didn’t want (Joanne was not above picking a thing out of the trash on her way to school and carrying it around with her all day if she thought it would be good for her brother), turned out to be something he loved. But he somehow couldn’t manage to love anything for long. Not that he didn’t appreciate it, he just couldn’t sustain anything. One day a game was the most important thing in his world, the next it was just one more decoration on the carpet, strewn around him with everything else as he returned to the thrall of the TV screen.