Right by My Side

by David Haynes

  “No, I don’t know.”

  Sam nods to indicate that that’s okay, too.

  *

  From somewhere Miss Ida gets Artie some wheels: a 1975 Mustang, painted red. Well, it’s not exactly red, it’s faded to sort of a pink: Dentyne. That’s what we call her, Dentyne. A beat-up old piece of car with multi-colored flecks and hunks of rust falling off it.

  But she runs good. And Artie—who’s turned sixteen already (seeing how he was left behind one year in first grade because he’s so thickheaded)—is not the worst driver in the world as long as he refrains from showing off and can remember his left from his right and the brake pedal from the gas. Also, he will go almost anywhere you tell him to go, even though Miss Ida has specified school, the library, and the movies as the only legitimate stops. Sometimes Artie gets chicken. Then Todd and I have to twist his arm a little.

  “You might as well take us where we want to go,” I say. “We’ll just tell your mom you went there anyway.”

  Artie pouts, whines, and drives on.

  If you say the right thing, people will do whatever you want.

  A while after Sam leaves, I hear rattling and honking.

  Artie rolls down Dentyne’s window. Todd shouts, “Let’s go.”

  Sounds pretty good to me. I get the ten dollars, and we hit the road.

  As soon as we clear Washington Park, Artie cranks up the Mustang as much as it will go. Not that fast. Much over forty and you get all of this smoking and shaking. This alarms poor Artie to no end. He has already developed some sort of paternal thing toward his piece of junk.

  Artie snaps on his twenty-nine-cent fashion shades. He always wears them in the car, day or night. Betty Lou took him to some French love movie where the race car driver always wore dark glasses except when he was in bed with an actress with big boobs. That’s just the way he described it. He wants Todd and me to wear sunglasses too so we will be a whole car full of cool dudes, but I tell him I’m not about to, and Todd says he’ll have to get prescription ones, which are not listed anywhere that he knows of in the P.W.T. family budget. Pa P.W.T. gives Todd five dollars or so spending money a week. From what we hear it would not be a good idea to ask for more.

  Truthfully it is only Artie who’s got all this stuff: cash, clothes. A car, too, for that matter. There are no jobs in Washington Park except for a lawn to mow now and then. Sometimes Miss Ida hires us on to unload fresh stock at the store. Wherever we’re going today, it had better be cheap.

  Artie drives Dentyne out Colerain toward Chesterfield Mall. There, I spend part of the ten dollars on some greasy french fries, which make everyone sick. Hoping it will make us feel better, I make Artie spring for a large Orange Julius. It doesn’t.

  It’s ninety-five degrees outside, so everyone is at the mall. The high school kids all sit by the center court fountain, because that’s where you can see who else is here. They call that the meet market. The boys walk one way around the fountain and the girls walk the other. Unless you are already going with somebody. Then you parade around the upper level. The three of us sit there for a while and watch the show.

  What do you know, here comes Connie Jo with this blond freshman chick. Even though it looks like they are headed in another direction, they veer off at the last minute and walk right in front of us—just close enough to make sure we see them. Connie’s little girlfriend grabs Connie’s arm and giggles.

  Todd and I are pretending like they’re not there, but then Artie says, real loud, “Hi Connie, hi Sue.”

  This Sue smiles and says, “Hi Arthur,” which causes Connie Jo to look disgusted. She stares across the mall in the opposite direction.

  Todd and I want to crawl beneath the fountain and die. I mean, one thing you don’t do is actually talk to anyone. That’s against the rules. But you could never explain that to Artie. He just barges right ahead.

  “Having a good summer, Sue?” Artie goes on. I keep nudging him in his side.

  “Guess what?” Sue says. “We’re going to Disneyworld.” Artie’s eyes get big and she bubbles with excitement.

  What, did she win the World Series of Bimbos? Her hair is all ratted out off the left side of her head. She stares at Artie as if he were a delicious chocolate bar. Artie looks faint. Or more faint than usual.

  Connie Jo has the good sense to drag Sue away before the two of them can announce their engagement.

  “See you in September,” she calls as she’s hauled away.

  Artie’s all smiles. “We have classes together,” he says.

  “Your mental retardation classes,” I say.

  “Learning disability,” he says, all prim and proper. “And I ain’t shame. People do the best they can. You’re just jealous cause they spoke to me and not you.”

  Todd puts on his deepest drawl. “Son, her daddy’ll have you and your learning disabilities strung up from the tallest tree in Ballwin.”

  “She’s a nice friend,” Artie says. “And everybody’s not that way.”

  “Sure,” I say.

  How could someone like him get a girl to even think of talking to him? What’s the deal on this? Artie’s got some rich white gal talking to him, and the bimbos out here follow Todd around like kittens.

  What am I, invisible?

  “Look, look,” Artie says. “It’s Heather and Jennifer.”

  Todd suggests we get Elmer Fudd out of the mall before we all get lynched. We start to drive back up Lindberg. Artie spots Sue’s car, so we have to go follow them around for a while. We go from the McDonald’s to Steak and Shake to the Shell Station. Back around the mall. Every once in a while we pull up beside them. Sue and Artie wave moronic little waves at each other. Todd finds imaginative and unobvious ways of giving Connie Jo the finger. She doesn’t see. She’s hiding behind some Hollywood-sized dark glasses. I believe she is what is called mortified, which I am, too. I put my hands on both sides of my head like blinders.

  “Can we just drive some place else, please,” I say.

  But that’s the problem. There is nowhere else to go. It’s hard to find creative ways to kill time.

  *

  Another Saturday Todd makes us stop at the main branch library on Lindberg. Todd carries loads of books these days. Books such as The Fate of the Earth and Hunger in America. Titles from the list Ohairy gave him for summer reading, books full of grim and awful information about the state of things. Some days Todd is impossible to talk to.

  “Did you know,” he asks, “that after a nuclear holocaust all that would survive would be grass and bugs?”

  Another time: “What about nuclear winter? All of life would be dead. All of it.”

  That sort of thing.

  Artie and I have to shut him up quick, because who wants to be depressed? I mean, we all have our own problems. For example, I was wondering how come it is that a person’s life should turn out to be one way instead of a different way. I was really lying there on my bed thinking about that one. I mean, take for example all of those starving people over in the desert of Africa. If I had money for them or food for them, I’d give it to them in a second. I would, and I know that almost anyone else would, too. But, the point is, how is it that I got to be here in Washington Park, and they had to be there. What if it was just an accident? What if I woke up tomorrow and I was there, in the middle of nowhere, hungry? Instead of here with Sam? What would that be like? Would I think about McDonald’s? Would I even know what that was? Or, you could wake up a soldier half-dead on a World War I battlefield. Or trapped under the rubble of a building in Pompeii. I think about that stuff sometimes until it starts to drive me crazy. Then I just stop. Sometimes it’s best to think of nothing at all.

  Todd persists, though. He reads in the car while we drive. You’d think he’d be carsick, especially with all this technical stuff he’s reading—about chemical waste and nuclear reactors.

  “I don’t understand this,” he whines, but he won’t give up, ruining his already ruined eyes.

  *
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  Every afternoon we go driving. We stop any place that might be free: any museum or park. We watch planes take off at the airport. We drive by all the rich people’s houses in Ladue.

  One stone house in Ladue has three or four stories, must have a hundred and fifty rooms. The swimming pool could hold two crackerboxes.

  “Look at these joints,” I say. I just can’t imagine having so much dough. “Who lives here? Where do they get the money?”

  “From poor people,” Todd says. “People like you and me.” I feel one of his new lectures coming on. Todd goes on and on as to how he read in one of his books how rich people get money by making poor people work for them. He says there have to be poor people because there are rich people. He says a lot of other crap, too, and he says it in this real smug way—as if he knew what he was talking about.

  “It doesn’t sound fair to me,” I say. “If it’s true.”

  “Oh, it’s true, all right. And, it’s not fair to you or to anyone else, either.”

  Artie says, “Prob’ly some of them get the money from their parents. Nothing wrong with that.”

  “Where do you think their parents got it, bonehead.” I say. I say this because Todd is all of the sudden so sincere, so convincing. So much so, I feel like I should be on his side.

  I add, “The point is they got it and we don’t. Maybe not ever.” I stare up the lawns at all these joints and think about the life me and Sam could have there. We’d have cooks and maids for sure, I know that much.

  “You don’t have to be so mean,” Artie whines. He drives us by a famous architect’s house, by a house with a stable, by a five car garage.

  “Do you think having all this stuff is worth it?” I ask.

  “Worth what?” Todd asks. “The suffering of others? The guilt?”

  “Worth whatever it costs. However they get it.”

  Todd thinks for a while. “All I know is it is worth doing whatever you have to do to make things more fair in the world.”

  “You’ll never change the world.” I say.

  “But I’ll try. What about you?”

  *

  One day there’s Todd in the back seat, big tears rolling down his freckled cheeks. Artie pulls over in the Target parking lot.

  “So what are we going to do?” Todd wants to know. “We have to do something. How can they do this? How can they leave it like this for us?” He’s seething.

  “Do about what?” I ask.

  “About any of it. Were part of this shit, and we got to do something.” He shouts.

  “No reason to get upset,” I say. “Maybe there’s nothing we can do.”

  “That’s not good enough for me,” he answers.

  *

  This is how we spend the whole summer I am fifteen. Artie driving, cool and smug, Todd getting angrier and more frightened by the day. Me just watching. Almost dead from boredom. Nothing ever happens to me.

  Todd sees stuff going down all around us—poisoned air, nuclear bombs, all kinds of stuff. Some of it too awful to imagine. For some reason I cannot get excited about it. All that happens somewhere else, to someone else. Sometimes I think I don’t have much of a life at all.

  Oh, poor Marshall, you’d say. But that’s not what I mean at all. What I’m talking about is how stuff can go on all around you and you don’t know about it at all. And when you find out about it, you just feel used and stupid.

  Take Sam and Betty Lou Warner, for instance.

  All summer long.

  Right under our noses.

  You’d think I didn’t know my father at all.

  7

  WHAT YOUR PARENTS do is none of your business. Or maybe that should be a question.

  I guess to their credit Big Sam and Betty Lou Warner were discreet. No one—meaning me—suspected anything.

  Paying attention I’d have found clues at every turn. All of the time when Sam would be gone, and then I’d hear that Betty had been gone, too. Once or twice I’d joked that something was up, and I remember feeling just a little uncomfortable, since you just don’t joke about something like this when it involves your parent. I mean what if it were true? But, then, Sam’s a good ten years older than Betty, and what would he possibly want with someone like her anyway. She must know some tricks or something. Betty has a reputation, kind of a bad one. She always had a lot of different dudes around—lots that Artie himself doesn’t even know. When these dudes show up, Artie either comes up to my house, or stays up at Miss Ida’s. The one time I asked about them he told me to mind my own damn business. That’s how close he is to Betty. I know better than to meddle in family business anyway.

  But, what about when his family business becomes my family business?

  Which brings us to what ought probably to have been a major indication something was up. In July we decided we were going to the Cards game and we decided to sit in the bleachers because it’s cheap, and also because on a hot day in the bleachers when the niggers and the honkies get tanked up on Busch, out there in the sun anything’s likely to happen. Big Sam himself says this, and the day we were there, in fact, this big black dude stands up and hollers at Ozzie that they ought to send his black butt back to the farm, at which point this redneck just up from Kentucky stands up and hollers that niggers never could hit worth a shit, at which point punches were thrown, and beer and all kinds of stuff starts flying. Us boys hustle up to the concession stands because here is a major race riot in progress and we want a place we can see the whole thing. The riot fizzled out when folks got tired of shoving around in all that heat, and also because there was a double play on the field.

  “That Busch got em,” as Big Sam would say.

  The three of us just stood there and laughed our asses off.

  On the way home we get off the highway on Old Olive Street and that crummy Dentyne gets a flat. Well, that happens a lot. We’re experts at fixing them fast.

  Then here comes the weird part: Sam says to me, “I hear you fellas had a little excitement.”

  “Sir?”

  “Little business with a flat tire?”

  And I quick wonder how he knew about that, since, generally speaking, flat tires don’t make the evening news. But Sam’s not the sort of person you ask how he knows anything.

  I ask Artie if he mentioned the flat tire to anyone. He says no.

  “Not even Betty?” I ask him, knowing full well that he tells Betty everything. Even when his bowels move.

  “Well, yes,” he says all sheepish. I tell him that Big Sam also knew, but once again real life gets written off as coincidence. We figured they’d run into each other at the gas station.

  Mostly it was lack of imagination that blinded us.

  *

  Then late in July there was this major distraction. A letter from Rose. It said:

  Marshall,

  Wish there was a way to make you read this. Couldn’t even if I was there with you, could If You know I’d try. I’ll write anyway. I feel like I need to.

  You’re about the only person lean think of to write to. I made lists and lists of all the folks I know. Your name came up on the top of every one. Figure it must mean something. Guess I got some things to tell you.

  Kinda funny, ain’t it. You and me about as angry at each other as two people can be. I’m trying to work it all out. Hope you are, too.

  So I’ve landed out here in Vegas. Bet everybody knew that but you. Ever body protects little Marshall.

  Course, first thing I learn is, you can run but you can’t hide. From your people, that is.

  First night I’m here I have a dream and it’s my mama. Like a ghost. Looking just like the last time I seen her alive.

  “What you think you doing, girl?”she says to me. “Running off like this.”

  So I tell her I need some time to myself and she tells me I better grow up.

  Here’s the facts: I’m thirty four, been married since eighteen. When was my time to grow up? Married half my life and you and Sam bout the only f
olks I know in the whole world.

  So busy being a good girl. Doing what everybody says. Mama and daddy. Nuns at school. Sam. You.

  So here I up and done something on my own. I did what they do in the movies, what they tell you to do in the women’s lib books: I got up and got out. It’s the hardest thing I probably ever will do. Maybe the only thing.

  And even the ghosts don’t leave you alone.

  The only thing I done except have a baby. You were a cute baby. A baby needs you all the time. Gives you a reason to be. And then one day you turned into Marshall. And what then?

  What is it Marshall wants from me now?

  I looked up one day and found myself sitting in some crackerbox in Washington Park, all day long, with not a damn thing to do. That’s what Sam wanted, see. Someone sitting up waiting for him to get home. And don’t think of trying to do something like go to school or get a job. You just sit and be looking fine. Like you was a doll or a paper cut out.

  To hell with that. There I was getting crazier than a circus monkey. Talking back to Big Bird on Sesame Street.

  You knew I was crazy, no? You acted like you did.

  When you were a little boy I’d wait for you to come home and tell me about your big day at school. We’d color and draw together. That and Days of Our Lives was about the high point of my day.

  Then all of a sudden one day Marshall’s an overgrown moose, and it was as if to you I had disappeared. So I decided to hell with that little nigger. I read my books, did my nails, and watched TV. In the back of my mind I thought I ought to get a skillet and bash your black brains in. Here you get to go out in the world and be somebody, and Vm locked in like some damn prisoner. I’d see the butcher knife and I’d dig my nails into my palms and pray for God to help me. Such a thin line between love and hate.

  I want you to remember it’s me I’m talking about here. I saved my money and left. Ain’t nothing to be proud of, I know. Sometimes you gotta save your own self.