by Lee Smith
Daddy looked at him. “Right now,” he said.
“Oh Luther,” Mama said. Her hand fluttered up to her face.
“Hmmmmm,” Johnny went.
Daddy stood up. “Son,” he said in a reasonable voice, “let’s not have any more of this nonsense. This barbecue is what bought the clothes on your back, it’s what paid for that new bike out there in the driveway. Now finish your supper.”
Paula held her breath.
Johnny took a big bite of barbecue.
“That’s better,” Daddy said.
Johnny spit it out all over his plate, all over the table.
Daddy lunged at him across the table, but he was too late, Johnny was already gone, his chair overturned. His high-pitched laughter echoed back at them as he ran out the front door.
“Goddamnit to hell!” Daddy fell forward heavily onto the table, his head hitting the hanging light fixture, his elbow in the potato salad.
“Oh Luther, oh honey,” Mama said, pulling him back. She was crying.
“I’ll show that little—” Daddy started, but Mama began to cry in earnest, big shuddering boo-hoos that required Daddy’s attention.
“I don’t know why you’re so hard on him,” Mama was sobbing.
“Aw, honey, he’s spoiled,” Daddy said. “You have to keep a boy like that on a shorter rein. He needs to know his limits. When he gets back here tonight, I’ll straighten him out.”
This made Mama cry harder than ever. “But Luther, remember what that teacher said? Mrs. Logan? What if there’s something really wrong—” Then Mama looked up and noticed Paula, who sat petrified in her place at the table, her napkin in her lap. Little black rivers of mascara ran down both of Mama’s cheeks. “Well, go on!” she snapped at Paula. “Go on, what are you looking at?” As if Johnny were somehow her fault, Paula’s fault, and so without a word Paula got up and ran out the front door after Johnny, but Johnny was long gone by then and Paula was left by herself in the summer dark, as she has been ever since. She sat on the porch steps for a long time. When she finally went back in the house, there was no sign of Mama or Daddy either one, though they had left everything exactly as it was—all the lights on, the kitchen a mess.
Now, this is Paula’s deepest image of her family: the abandoned dinette table with the hanging globe light over it swinging slightly, just quivering; two of the red vinyl chairs overturned, food uneaten. Mama and Daddy were upstairs in their bedroom with the door closed. Oh, there was no question that they adored each other in those days, Mama and Daddy. Big and rough as he was, Daddy worshipped the ground Mama walked on. He watched her in a certain way whenever she came into a room.
Paula knew that he loved them all, but sometimes this was hard to remember. Daddy had trouble expressing himself; he had trouble in particular having a son who did not fit his treasured idea of son. Mama explained to them that Daddy felt so strongly about this because his own dad had died when he was three, so he had missed out on all the dad stuff himself. Once Paula heard Mama say to him, “Honest to God, Luther, sometimes I think you just married me so you could get a son!”
Daddy was forever buying presents for the girls, and saying, “Nothing but the best for my ladies!” He would not allow them to work at the barbecue restaurants, though they begged to—first Elise, then Paula when she was old enough. His girls were too good to work at barbecue restaurants. He wanted Johnny to work there, on the other hand. He had visions of Johnny going into the business with him: “Luther’s Famous Barbecue—A Family Restaurant,” the second generation.
Johnny had his own agenda, and after he kicked her out of his club, Paula was not a part of it, either. The original club included Johnny, Paula, Lewis Straus, and Jakey Ramey, who lived down the road. Lewis Straus was a fat boy with hooded eyes who had always made Paula uncomfortable. One day when she was late for a meeting in the Rameys’ garage, she found Lewis whispering intently to Johnny. “No,” Johnny was saying, shaking his shaggy blond head. “No way.” They all stared at Paula, who sat down cross-legged facing them.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Johnny said. Then he convened the club, but Lewis and Jakey continued to stare at her until she felt funny and sat in a different way.
After that, the club was not the same. The games got to be scary games, bad games, especially when Ken became a member. Nobody except Johnny could really see Ken—at least Paula couldn’t see him—but he told them all what to do, and Lewis and Jakey went along with it. Paula did, too, until the day when Ken told her to run home and never come back, and she obeyed. She bought some paper dolls and started playing with Ruthie Jackson instead. Later, after the club got in so much trouble, all the other neighborhood children were told to steer clear of Johnny, and Paula got him back, temporarily; but Johnny seemed preoccupied, even bored. He was always riding off someplace on his bike. School came as a relief for Paula, ordering her days, bringing her friends of her own.
But school was hard for Johnny, though he was “brilliant,” according to the guidance counselor, who made him take so many tests. He was constantly in trouble—trouble for talking, trouble for not sitting still, trouble for lying. Trouble for not turning in his assignments, trouble for talking back. Johnny loved to draw and was said to be talented in art, but he never would draw what the teacher said. He wouldn’t follow the assignment.
Since he was two years ahead of Paula, she didn’t see him much. Her heart would race whenever she did—from a distance, on the playing field, running faster than anybody else; or across the parking lot at junior high, in the middle of a gang of the roughest boys. His friends in junior high were the worst boys in school, and it seemed he was always out with them, never home. Daddy didn’t know this, since he was at the restaurants so much, and it was okay with Mama. It was a lot easier than having Johnny at home.
It was okay with Paula, too. School went well for her. She had three best friends and made junior high cheerleader. Mama sewed all their cheerleader skirts. Paula took band and learned to play the flute.
By the time Johnny was in high school, Paula knew that he was doing a lot of drugs. Later, she could not figure out how she knew this. She never saw him doing any drugs, not even smoking marijuana. By this time Johnny and some other boys had a rock band, the Mystic Cowboys. Johnny played bass. After he flunked junior year, Daddy grounded him for two months. Paula remembers very well those two months, which Johnny, oddly acquiescent, spent lying on his back on the waterbed in his room, listening to music and watching the sun shine blue and red and orange on his walls like a kaleidoscope through the crystal he’d hung in his window. He refused to work at the restaurants. He wouldn’t do anything at all. Several times, Paula went to his room because she thought she heard voices, but there was never anybody else there. Nobody but Johnny. At the end of the two months, Daddy kicked him out of the house and Mama started having migraine headaches and bursting into tears at the slightest provocation. Then she got a job at Nails ’N Notions in the mall, and seemed better.
While Paula was in high school, Johnny’s band became locally famous. “Oh, your brother is one of the Mystic Cowboys?” her friends would say. “Really? Which one is he?” and Paula would say the cute one with the long blond hair, and she was proud of him and gave him money whenever he came around asking for it. Once she gave him two hundred dollars she had saved up for Christmas.
Sometimes Johnny left elaborate messages with her, for people he said were looking for him, but they never showed up. One time he left an unfinished note tacked on the front door that read
Darling,
I’m in a lot of trouble and
That was all. No explanation, no signature. Paula pulled it down before her mother could see it. She tried to call Johnny, but his phone had been disconnected. She called some of his friends, and nobody knew where he was, but one of his friends said it was cool, for her not to worry about it. When she saw Johnny the next time, she asked him about the note, but he didn’t remember. This hap
pened shortly before Paula went away to college.
The first time Johnny flipped out was when he and his band were doing really well—they had a gig at the Granfalloon in Atlanta. The story went that Johnny got on the drums and wouldn’t stop. He wouldn’t quit drumming. Finally they closed the club and took him away in a strait-jacket. That first time, they called it drug psychosis.
JOHNNY WENT TO A STATE HOSPITAL THAT LOOKED LIKE a college campus with its green rolling hills and brick buildings with white columns. If you didn’t notice the chain-link fence around the grounds, that is, with the barbed wire at the top. Johnny’s room was in a low flat building with a broad concrete stoop in front, where several of the patients sat outside in the October sunshine amid the falling leaves. Other patients walked among the pecan trees, bending to pick up pecans. “That’s something, isn’t it?” Johnny said. “Nuts for the nuts.” But he wouldn’t talk much. He looked past Paula and kept his head cocked, as if listening to something. He seemed—how could this be?—busy, as if he had a lot going on in his head and Paula’s visit was just a distraction. Johnny was skinny and his hands shook and his tongue seemed thick. The nurse said it was the medicine. They had cut off all his beautiful long blond hair.
The nurse said Paula could take him for a walk, but Johnny wouldn’t go any farther than the end of the road in front of his own building. “Let’s go back now,” he said urgently, for no apparent reason, and they did; and when Paula left him sitting on the stoop among the others, she could see that he was comfortable there, that he wanted to stay. This broke her heart.
The next visit was better. Johnny seemed more himself. His eyes were brighter. Now he was in another building, and had the run of the hospital grounds. He was smoking cigarettes nonstop, a habit he’d picked up in the hospital, where everybody smoked. The fingers of his right hand were stained yellow. But he was better, Paula could tell. He talked more. When they got back to his building, a big black woman named Jewel came up to Paula and said, “Me and Johnny’s going to get married, did he tell you?” Paula was startled. Jewel must have weighed more than two hundred pounds, and her hair stuck out on one side. She was wearing those fuzzy bedroom shoes.
Johnny grinned, a trace of the old Johnny in spite of his yellow teeth. “That’s right, Jewel,” he said, “you and me.”
“She’s going to marry everybody,” he told Paula. “She talks about it all the time. Don’t pay any attention to her.” They walked to the snack bar for a Coke. When they returned, as Paula was getting ready to leave, Jewel came to the door and yelled out, “Me and Johnny is getting married, honey, just as soon as I gets my divorce.”
“Who you married to now, Jewel?” asked a man who sat smoking in a lawn chair under the trees.
“I am presently married to James Brown,” Jewel hollered, “and let me tell you, honey, he can do the deed!”
Everybody—even the nurse outside on duty with the smokers, even Johnny—was laughing as Paula left.
JOHNNY STAYED IN THE HOSPITAL FOR A YEAR, WHICH included some of Paula’s freshman year and most of her sophomore year in college. As soon as he got out of the hospital, she went home for a weekend to see him. The plan was that Johnny would stay with their parents until he got “squared away,” as Dad put it energetically on the phone. Dad seemed to be running Johnny’s recovery. Paula thought that was sweet, another chance for Dad; but as soon as she got home, she could see it wasn’t working.
It was a cold, bright March day. The big forsythia bushes on either side of the garage were blooming wildly. Paula parked in the driveway and ran to the door, her heart pounding in her throat, her eyes blind with tears. Johnny Johnny Johnny, was all she could think, but it was her dad who met her at the door. Usually he was not at home in the daytime. He looked older and fatter than she remembered, any old man in a short-sleeved white shirt.
“Paula!” He was surprised. “Hi, honey.” He peered past her, out the door. She could see in his face that he was looking for Johnny, too, as she had been. He had forgotten that she was coming home. Was this going to be the story of all their lives, then, all of them forever looking for Johnny? What about me? she wanted to shout. Me, Paula? Remember me? I’m home for the weekend, doesn’t anybody care? Doesn’t anybody want to know how I’m doing? Obviously not. Her father was gray with worry.
“Honey, is it Johnny?” Corinne’s wavery voice came down from the head of the stairs.
“No, it’s only me,” Paula said. She brushed past her father and went into the downstairs bathroom and washed her face, scrubbing at it furiously with a washcloth until it stung. On the bathroom wall hung a cross-stitched plaque her mother had made: “Love be with you while you stay, peace be with you on your way.” Paula was composed by the time she went into the den, where her mother and father sat far apart from each other on the Early American couch, like bookends.
Johnny had been out all night, they didn’t know where he was, he hadn’t phoned, they didn’t know who he was with.
“Don’t you think we should call the police?” Corinne asked. It was the first time Paula had seen her without eye makeup.
“Just what would we say?” Dad was sarcastic. “That our twenty-two-year-old son just stayed out all night? Big fucking deal, am I right?”
“Don’t curse at me, Luther.” Corinne had a squinched-up Kleenex in her hand. She was beating this hand softly against her knee.
“I mean, either he’s well, or he’s sick, am I right? So which is it? If he’s sick, he needs to be in the hospital, and if he’s well, he can damn sure act like a decent human being. Is that too much to ask?” Dad’s voice rang out in the den. Paula sat in his recliner and stared at the arrangement of artificial flowers in the middle of the coffee table, something else her mother had made. It struck her as pathetic, all Corinne’s little crafts, even her sewing, even her job at Nails ’N Notions, just a way to fill the time while Dad was at the restaurants. Paula stood up. “Does anybody want a Coke?” she asked, heading toward the kitchen.
“I’ve got to go,” her father said. “I’ll see you ladies in about an hour. Hang tight,” he said.
Corinne came to stand in the kitchen door.
“What does he mean, ‘Hang tight’?” Paula asked.
“Oh, who knows?” Corinne’s pretty face was pale and distracted. “Maybe I will have one of those Cokes, honey, with a little sweetener in it.” She pulled a bottle of bourbon down from the highest pantry shelf.
“Johnny’s not doing drugs again, is he?” Paula watched her mother pour the drink.
“Oh no,” Corinne said. “Oh no, that’s not it, that’s not it at all, that was never it, this is what the doctors say. Of course he can’t ever do any drugs again, or drink so much as a beer, because of the medicine he has to take. This is what’s got me worried right now. I just wish I knew where he was. I mean, he’s on so much medicine. You should see all the bottles in the bathroom right now. It’s just awful, for a young person to need that much medicine. I don’t see how he can keep it straight.”
“What kind of medicine?” Paula asked.
“Oh, I don’t know, but it’s very strong medicine, Paula, it has all these side effects.…” Corinne trailed off, sipping her drink. Her face looked blurry and vague. Then she seemed to pull herself back together; she sat up and straightened her shoulders. “Oh, but you know what I think, honey? You know what I really think?”
“What?” Paula leaned closer.
“I think that’s all a lot of hooey,” Corinne said. “Young people go through these phases, everybody knows that. Boys will be boys!” She smiled brilliantly at Paula. Corinne drank that drink, and then another, and was asleep on the sofa in front of the TV when Johnny came in later.
“Shhhh!” Johnny said, tiptoeing elaborately past Corinne. “Shhhh!” All his movements were exaggerated, like a mime’s.
“Johnny!” Paula stood up. “Where have you been? Everybody’s been just frantic.” Her magazine slipped to the floor.
“Oh, hi
, Paula,” Johnny said as if he saw her every day. “What’s up?” He wore a blue knit shirt like a golfer, and khaki pants that were too short. Paula had never seen him in clothes like these. She couldn’t imagine where he’d gotten them.
“What’s up!” she repeated. “Where have you been? That’s the question.”
“Oh,” Johnny said airily, “I’ve just been making a few investments, that’s all.”
“Investments!” Paula said. “With what?” She followed him into the kitchen. Johnny didn’t answer. Instead he opened the breadbox and took out a long loaf of white bread, Rainbo bread, the kind their mother always bought. He unwrapped the bread and got four slices of it and squeezed them together in his hands, forming a ball, and grinned at her.
“Oh, Roger,” Paula said before she thought.
He handed the loaf to her, and she took it and squeezed three slices into a ball for herself. When she bit into it, the taste was just like she remembered, yeasty and delicious. A thrill shot through her. They ate handful after handful. Then Roger put what was left of the loaf back in the breadbox and took her hand. “Come on,” he said. “I want to show you what I found.”
He led her into the hall and down the stairs into their old rec room, now mostly taken over by Corinne’s craft materials. He switched on the overhead lights. In one corner of the orange linoleum floor was the old record player, surrounded by albums. “Wait,” Roger said, placing her in the center of the floor. “Just listen to this, you won’t believe it. This is really, really old stuff. It must’ve been Mom’s. It’s so funky.”
He put on a Percy Faith album, then went back and took her in his arms, ready to slow-dance. The needle dropped. She could feel his shoulder bones like wings beneath the golf shirt. “Unchained Melody” filled the basement. Roger leading, they swooped across the floor. They were perfect, perfect together—they could have been on TV. Once Roger dipped her back and back and back, nearly to the floor, but Paula was not scared, not a bit, she knew he wouldn’t drop her. On and on they danced. It was wonderful. They danced until the door at the top of the stairs opened and Corinne came down, pausing midway.