by Lee Smith
Right now, Drew has his camera loaded and ready to go. He wears it around his neck. Obviously he plans to take pictures at Johnny’s party. Try as she might, Paula cannot imagine a picture of Johnny captured under plastic in Drew’s orderly album. Suddenly she can’t imagine even introducing Johnny to Drew.
“Listen,” she says nervously, “I don’t really have any idea what kind of shape Johnny’s in, you know. What he’ll be like, I mean.”
“Oh, come on,” Drew says. “He’s having a party, isn’t he?”
“I just don’t know what he’s like now,” Paula says again. “I haven’t seen him for over two years.”
“Two years in which he has supported himself and stayed out of trouble, as far as you know. Give the guy a break, Paula. We all make mistakes.” Eyes on the road, Drew pats her hand. Drew believes in perfectibility and innate goodness. He believes that enough effort will make things right. He seems never to have considered bad genes, bad luck, or bad timing. If you work hard enough, you will succeed, and all things will come to you. Paula has been drunk on these beliefs for months. But now she’s scared, she feels like she’s sobering up. It’s a big, big mistake to take Drew to Johnny’s party. She knows it is.
“Have you got the directions?” Drew asks, and she takes them out of her purse. They are printed in Johnny’s childish block letters. “Get on 401, heading north toward Rolesville,” she says.
“We’re already on 401.”
“Oh. Okay. Then we start looking out for State Road 1172, going off to the left, just beyond a McDonald’s.”
In the back, Muddy Waters wakes up and starts moving around.
“I think he needs to get out,” Paula says. “Let’s pull off and stop for a minute.”
“But we’re almost there.”
“Please let’s stop,” Paula says. “Please please please.”
Drew takes a look at her and pulls over on the shoulder. Before he can say anything, Paula jumps out and runs around to open the back of the Volvo, and Muddy Waters bolts out, wagging himself all over. “Here, honey, here.” Paula puts the leash on his collar and pulls him down the bank into the deep summer woods, hot and still.
“Watch out for poison ivy,” Drew calls from the car, but now Paula can’t see him, he’s just a voice somewhere beyond the dusty curtain of green. Muddy Waters pees gratefully. Paula looks around. She likes it in here, it’s like a little fort. Nobody can find her, nothing can get in. It’s like a little temple. Paula and Johnny had a temple once, in woods like these. They had an altar covered with magic rocks from a magic river, and a fire ceremony. In fact they damn near caused a real forest fire with their fire ceremony, but nobody ever knew. Nobody ever knew they did it. Paula grins, remembering Johnny’s dirt-streaked exalted boy’s face as they stood together in the red light at the edge of the leaping flames. They had a secret language then, too, and special names: Roger and Darling.
“Paula?” Drew shouts from the road. “Paula! What’s taking so long? Come on, we’ll be late.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Paula says, but she whispers the words to herself. Muddy Waters strains at his leash. The leaves are all around her, dark green, fleshy, still. Just before a thunderstorm they will turn their silver sides out, she’s seen that, too. It’s exciting.
“Paula?” Drew calls.
She lets Muddy Waters pull her out of the circle of trees and up the embankment.
“Tell him to heel,” Drew says, but she doesn’t. She and the dog charge up the hill together. Drew opens the back door and Muddy Waters hops in, happy as can be. Paula and Drew get in. About three miles down the road, they come to the McDonald’s and then to State Road 1172 and turn onto it, slowing down. Paula feels hot and clammy, like she’s coming down with a virus. Maybe the party’s a joke. State Road 1172 is gravel; dust hangs in the air behind them. Like a dragon’s tail, she thinks. Like the train on a wedding gown.
“Honey?” Drew says. “Honey, this is a test, isn’t it?”
“Of course not,” Paula says, but of course it is.
MARÍA SITS ON THE BATTERED SOFA WATCHING JOHNNY fly around their half of the cinder-block duplex like a tornado, cleaning up. He grabs old newspapers and pizza boxes and throws them into the closet, opening the door then slamming it fast as a whiz so that everything will not fall out, as in a funny movie. María giggles. He is one wild guy! Es un gringo loco. She shakes her head, her long black hair rippling around her shoulders like water. Johnny wears a big red sombrero with mirrors all over it, a hat her brother left here. It is a hat for show, a crazy hat, not a hat to wear. María giggles. She gets up to help him, but Johnny motions her to stay right there, right on the couch. He wants to do everything for her, he will not let her lift a hand. In the mornings he wants her to stay in bed while he brings breakfast to her hot from McDonald’s, the Egg McMuffin and the hash-brown potatoes. María loves McDonald’s, she loves all the paper boxes. Breakfast in bed. It is American. It was different in María’s country, the woman did everything.
Now María must sit on the sofa while Johnny picks up his work clothes and takes them into the bedroom. These clothes he dropped on the floor yesterday after work and then he came to her on the sofa, this sofa, she was watching TV. María loves the TV in the afternoons when all is disaster and chaos, miseria, so many unhappy affairs of the heart. And the beautiful clothing of the stars!
Now Johnny pulls the chairs around, wipes off the coffee table, picks up a big empty Fritos bag. Only, whoops! The Fritos bag was not quite empty, the Fritos go everywhere. Now it is a bigger mess than ever! Johnny scrambles around, picking up Fritos. He is so funny. María is laughing. Johnny opens the screen door and throws handfuls of Fritos on the ground; the chickens come running to get them. He bought the chickens at María’s request. A house should have chickens, she said. And sunflowers in the yard.
The chickens make María feel better but still it is strange, America. There is so much to understand, and she does not have the language. No es importante, Johnny says. We have the language of love. María wonders what her grandmother would say, Abuelita, in her long black dress, what would Abuelita say of Johnny? María wonders when she will see her beloved Abuelita again, but this does not matter too much right now, it seems a distant problem, as on TV. For María is here in America with Johnny, and Johnny fills up the whole world like he fills up this little house. Sometimes it seems to María that he fills it up so much she cannot see another thing.
For Johnny is always laughing, joking, moving around fast. He is cooking. He is playing tapes. He is talking a mile a minute, María cannot follow what he says. He is dancing María around and around the living room until she is dizzy and has to beg him to let her stop for breath. But Johnny never gets tired. He can paint houses all day long and come home and work in the garden or in his workshop or cook a huge dinner, just for the two of them! Leftovers for the dogs. Johnny does everything in a big way. It is American.
One night last week he made the dinner in the middle of the night, a big pot full of spaghetti, María had to laugh at him then! Lucky that he makes mucho dinero, more money than María has ever seen, he throws it down on the coffee table on Fridays when he comes home, and lets out a whoop like a rodeo cowboy. “Take it!” Johnny says. “Take it all!” And then on Saturdays he will bring her shopping at Crabtree Valley Mall. María’s closet is full of clothes, enough for a village full of girls. María’s pet name for Johnny is Mijo, the sun. Because his hair is golden like the sun, and because he has brought her out from the darkness into the light. If she is sometimes blinded, what is that? She can shield her eyes, she can wear a big hat. Johnny kisses her all over, even in the afternoon. He brings her flowers that she does not know the names of. Qué importa si María will not see Abuelita again, as she is beginning to understand. Old, old Abuelita, mumbling curses and prayers, sits in the shade of her hut in Mexico, far away.
Here it is America, and now Bo is at the door with a bag of ice, which he takes into the kitchen and
dumps in the sink. For the fiesta. Bo brings also Coca-Colas and cervezas. Bo is a friend to Johnny for many years, long time. He smiles and does not talk much. He is nice. Johnny and Bo paint houses together, they go off in the truck every morning. Bo used to live here with Johnny. Now he lives over on the other side with Pete and Lulu and Lulu’s brother Dallas. Dallas is not nice. Dallas vive aquí poco tiempo, and María wishes he will go away. Sometimes he is looking at her from the house when she hangs the clothes on the line or sits in the chair in the sun, as she loves to do. He is not a good man, Dallas, María thinks but does not say. He is just visiting.
Today he is respectful, wet hair slicked back, knocking on the door, followed by Pete and Lulu. María likes Pete and Lulu. They are funny. Lulu carries a big pink and white Happy Birthday cake left over from the bakery at Winn Dixie, where she works. “Happy birthday, honey,” Lulu says, handing the cake to Johnny. “Feliz cumpleaños,” Johnny explains to María. María is surprised. “It is your birthday?” she asks.
“No, it is a joke,” Johnny says, and takes the cake and María both into the kitchen, where he puts the cake on the counter and kisses her hard. He doesn’t stop kissing her until Pete yells, “Hey Johnny, somebody’s here,” and then María goes to the window with him to see the new station wagon drive up into the red clay yard past Johnny’s truck and Pete’s truck and the other cars and trucks that Pete keeps scattered around for parts. The station wagon stops in a cloud of dust.
FOR PAULA EVERYTHING GOES INTO SLOW MOTION then, like she’s underwater. She’s scared. She realizes that sometime—maybe during the past three years, maybe on the way up 401 to Johnny’s house, maybe over the past two weeks since she got his letter—sometime, she has begun to hope again, of course she has, this is why she’s here. This is why she didn’t just crumple up his note and throw it into the trashcan, as she has done so many times in the past with so many of Johnny’s demands. Drew’s optimism has rubbed off on her. And it has been a long time—anything can happen in three years. But now that they’re here, Paula is panicking. It all looks too trashy, this little cinder-block house way out in the middle of noplace, rusting cars and parts of cars in the uncut weeds, dogs barking, chickens squawking everywhere. Chickens! Paula cannot imagine. The sun is in her eyes, she can’t really see the man behind the torn screen door. But it could be Johnny. Oh God, it’s been so long, what if she doesn’t recognize him? What if she doesn’t recognize her own brother?
Johnny was always the cute one, the funny one, the brain. Although he was two years older than Paula, they were inseparable. Everybody said they might as well have been twins. And it was true that they had the special bond that twins are said to have—an extraordinary kind of understanding. “On the same wavelength,” is how their mother put it. She could reduce anything to a platitude. It was Johnny who made up all the games, all the secret codes, all the secret maps, with Paula his willing sidekick. Years later, in college, Paula would realize that she was imaginative, too, and smart. But by then she didn’t want to know it, she didn’t want to be smart, it was too late, she did not, not, not want to be like Johnny, no matter what, and she switched her major from English to education and dropped out of the creative writing program. Of course she had other problems by then, too.
Can it really be true that everything starts in childhood, that what we will do and be is inside of us like a seed perfectly formed and growing when we are just little children like all the other little children in the world? Paula has a photograph of herself and Johnny taken someplace along the Blue Ridge Parkway: they are blond toddlers, angels both of them, gathered up against their mother’s skirts, and their mother is young and beautiful. You can see why she was chosen as Miss Bright Leaf Tobacco and Miss Gastonia. Presumably their daddy took this picture. But where was their older sister, Elise? Maybe she was off at church camp. Elise loved camp, where she always won all the medals. She loved games and sports and organized events.
Johnny and Paula were free spirits, as their mother often said, refusing games and play programs, happiest in their own big backyard outside of town. Happiest in their own world. Here they played Roger and Darling to their hearts’ content for years. Roger had many amazing powers, such as the ability to see into anyone’s mind. He could also see through clothes. He could see through anything. When Roger and Darling sneaked out at night and walked down the road, Roger would tell her everything that was happening inside every house they passed, everyone’s secret thoughts and deepest desires.
When Mrs. Sissy Boone was sent to the hospital for stabbing Mr. Boone in the shoulder with a long-handled fork, Roger and Darling were not surprised. Roger had seen a black cloud full of wasps around her head, he had seen blood seeping out from under her fingernails as she stood on her front porch one day just saying hello.
When young Mrs. Johnson’s baby wouldn’t grow and had to go live in a home, Roger and Darling were not surprised then, either. Roger had seen its bones glowing through its little baby dress when Mrs. Johnson had it out on a blanket in her yard, under a shade tree.
They knew when the big hand closed up on their granddaddy’s heart; they were almost bored by the time the phone rang and their white-faced mother came in the kitchen, where they were making peanut butter crackers, to tell them the news.
To this day, Paula has never told anybody these things, but they are all true. She remembers them in detail, as she remembers the religion of Oran, and Ungar the Magnificent and his dog Army and his Queen Orinda of New York City, and how as Ungar and Orinda she and Johnny wore towels as capes, safety-pinned to their backs, and jumped off the shed and out of trees and finally off the Boones’ garage, again and again, and were not hurt. Paula can remember even now the rush of air under her legs, how it was to fly. They were magic then. She can still feel Johnny’s soft breath in her ear when he whispers to her in their own language as they sit on the porch step, knees touching, through all the twilights of their childhood, and watch the lightning bugs come up from the grass and listen to the peepers.
How did it happen, when did it happen, when did it all go wrong? There came a time when Johnny wouldn’t stop playing games, when he wouldn’t come in for supper. By then Daddy had retired from the National Guard and put in his first barbecue restaurant, so he was often away at mealtime. When he did come home for dinner, it was a command performance. In Paula’s memory, Johnny is always late, their father is always yelling, their mother is always on the bright verge of tears.
“Can’t you control these children?” Daddy would say in his thunderous, commanding-the-troops voice. “I swear, Corinne, I work all day and I feel like I’ve got the right to come home to a decent dinner, am I right?” Daddy was a workaholic, though nobody knew that word then.
“Sure, honey.” Mama would seem to quiver all over, under her heavy pancake makeup, her winged brows and aqua eyeliner. She was the prettiest mom in the neighborhood.
But the truth was that she did not control them at all, especially not in the summer, when she sat on the porch with her best friend Louise and drank sweet wine in the late afternoons and sewed from Simplicity patterns or looked at magazines and gave Paula and Johnny a dollar apiece to get dinner at the Quickie Mart. Paula’s favorite supper was a Dr Pepper and a Baby Ruth, while Johnny favored 7-Up and Cheetos and Red Hots.
In the early days of Daddy’s barbecue business, when he was perfecting his recipes, he often brought their dinner home with him. “Whaddaya think, kids? It’s got some extra vinegar and a little more sugar this time. Whaddaya think? Corinne? Too much sugar?”
After months of barbecue, Paula found it hard to tell the difference, but she always made a polite comment. Johnny did not. Johnny became a vegetarian at age eleven, which was the worst thing he could possibly do to his father.
On one especially awful night, Johnny came in late, humming loudly.
“Johnny,” Mama said. “Johnny!”
Johnny took his seat and put his napkin in his lap and stared straight ahead
, and wouldn’t stop. “Hmmmm,” he went. He didn’t look at anybody.
Daddy put a helping of potato salad on Johnny’s plate. “Son,” he said in that voice.
Mama was giving Daddy looks across the table, looks that begged him to ignore it, which is how Mama handled everything about Johnny. Daddy put baked beans, Jell-O salad, and barbecue on Johnny’s plate. Daddy always tried to do what Mama wanted, at least at first. This time it seemed to work. Johnny quit humming and started to eat the Jell-O salad. Elise excused herself and left the table. Mama and Daddy relaxed and began talking about whether or not Daddy should expand his business by buying the little place now available out on the highway (he did), and whether or not they should have those very expensive braces put on Elise’s teeth (they did). Johnny didn’t say a word. He ate everything on his plate except the barbecue. “Hmmmm,” he went.
Daddy stopped talking and stared at him. Daddy looked tired, circles under his black eyes, gray hair peppering his crew cut. “Son, eat your barbecue,” Daddy said.
“Now, Luther,” Mama said. “Plenty of people in the world are vegetarians. It’s a whole religion in India.”
“This isn’t India,” Daddy said, tight-lipped. “This is the U.S. of A.”
Johnny was humming.