Wait Until Twilight

by Sang Pak

  “Damn man, you look like you just saw a ghost,” says Reed Callahan. He and Chip Callahan are standing there watching me catch my breath. They’re guys from Sugweepo City High School, the crosstown adversaries to our Central of Sugweepo High School. We’re the Central of Sugweepo White Camels, and they’re the Sugweepo Trojans. Their school is twice as big as and much nicer than ours. If I had lived within the city limits, I would have probably gone to Sugweepo. Living outside city limits as I do requires a stiff tuition fee, which I know Dad can’t afford, so I don’t even ask. I’ve played against Reed on the junior-varsity basketball team. He comes off the bench like me, but when he gets in the game, the whole Sugweepo side would yell “Reeeeed!” He’s the most popular guy in the tenth grade over there. Chip is his cousin, not as athletic but prettier in the face. And also more ruthless. I heard he’d go down to Florida on spring break and ride around on scooters randomly punching people. They both would have made good Nazis: blond, blue-eyed über-boys. Still, they were always cool with me when I ran into them.

  “Shit,” I say, and wipe the sweat off my face with my shirt. “I got a serious case of claustrophobia in there. Whew!”

  “Claustrophobia? What’s up with that?” Chip says. Reed and Chip are flanked by some of their cronies. They all have pretty girls with them, cheerleader types. From behind me a young couple comes out of the funhouse laughing and talking about how corny that place was. I catch my breath and realize how silly I was being in there. It was all just shadows and light.

  “Hell if I know,” I say. “Maybe it was the mountain dew going to my head.”

  “Is that what that is? I can smell it a mile away,” says Chip.

  “Mountain dew. Homemade by Barry,” I say.

  “Who’s Barry?”

  “Barry’s a real nice guy, lives way down south. Sorry, it’s all gone.”

  “We got our own stuff,” says Chip.

  “Hey, I guess I might be seeing you on the basketball court. You goin’ out for varsity?” Reed asks.

  “I doubt it,” I say.

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t feel like it.”

  “That’s cool, man. You should hang out with us sometime. Maybe play some ball.”

  “I’m down with that.” We exchange numbers, and I walk back over to the spinning tea cups. Brad and Will are sitting on the ground looking pale. David’s already puked and wiping his chin with his sleeve.

  “Come on,” I urge them. “We’ve still got to go on the rock-climbing thing.”

  “No more rides.”

  “I’m definitely gonna climb that thing,” I point at the rock-climbing wall that has been set up down the way by the cotton candy machines. There’re four walls ranging from kiddy all the way to expert, which is not only extremely high but has a rock face jutting out from it. That means at some point I’ll have to hang off the thing without the help of my legs. I want to try it, though. I’m still all worked up from the funhouse. “Come on.” There’s quite a crowd around the wall, even a few local celebrities. I recognize the town mayor and a local radio guy I met once at one of our basketball games. We wade up to the front so I can give the operator my ticket. He soon has me suited up in a harness and helmet.

  “Boy, you been drinking?” he asks me while suiting me up.

  “No, sir,” I say. “This harness works, right?”

  “Just hurry it up.”

  The operator hooks the rope to my harness. The rope goes up and loops around a pulley at the top of the cliff and comes back down to a man holding it. Two climbers compete at a time. I’m paired up with a very fit-looking woman who has a cheering section of a husband and three little kids. It’s too bad I’ll have to kick her butt in front of her family. We both start off real slow. It must be her first time, too. My coordination is a little off, but once I start moving I feel okay. The truth of the matter is that the guys and I haven’t drunk that much, just enough to make us feel drunker than we actually are. Once I find the grips, pulling myself up is a piece of cake. I learned from playing basketball that it’s all about using your legs.

  The outcropping is where it gets hard. It’s all about arm strength, as you have nowhere to push with your feet. The lady falls off and screams but is caught by the rope and then lowered slowly. I start hearing some cheers.

  “Keep goin’, Samuel!”

  “Spiderman!”

  “Come on, you fuckin’ monkey!”

  I have to pay attention now because one misplaced grip and game over. With each successful move I grow more confident, and that confidence is magnified by my slight drunkenness. Once I work my way out from under the outcropping I climb up fast. Down below they’re cheering. The operator and harness guys start yelling at me to come down. I’m supposed to ring this bell at the top and then let go, allowing the harness holder to ease me down, but I go ahead and climb all the way to the very top. On top of the cliff there’s a toolbox and a bottle of water sitting on something engraved into the surface. It looks like a bird or phoenix. They’re still yelling at me from down below, so I grab the bottle of water and throw water on the whole lot of them. The crowd is really getting excited. I pour the remainder of the water onto the engraving. And then for a split second I see or at least I think I see a familiar-looking blue baseball cap floating at the far end of the crowd. It disappears among the excited faces looking up at me.

  “If you don’t get your ass down here right now, we’re calling the cops!”

  “Okay, okay!” I say.

  “Back up and we’ll let you down!” I slowly back up, holding on tightly to the rope while looking up at the night sky with all its stars. Hell, how many blue baseball caps are floating around out there right now? “Don’t try to climb down! Just let go! We’ll catch you—don’t worry about it falling.”

  I let go with my arms out. The crowd oohs and ahs as I slowly descend with the water on the engraving dripping down off the cliff onto my head. A couple of guys immediately grab me when I land. It’s Will and Brad. They help me out of the harness. “He’s with us,” they say, and start pulling me along. We start running back to the parking lot. “You crazy bastard. What were you doing up there?”

  “I just wanted to see,” I say as we run back to the car.

  Though we haven’t drunk that much, and it’s been over an hour since we began drinking, Will takes the wheel for David, who isn’t the most reliable driver in any state. They drop me off first. I notice on my way in a big stack of long white tubes in the garage. They look at least ten feet long and wide enough to fit a softball through. Looks like Dad’s going to do some plumbing work. When I go inside the house, Dad’s in the living room watching television.

  “Where ya been?” Dad asks.

  “The traveling fair at the Kmart parking lot,” I say, and go straight to the bathroom to brush my teeth and take a shower.

  As I make my way from the bathroom to my bedroom, Dad asks, “How was the fair?”

  I stand in the hall doorway. “The rides are for kids, you know, but it was still fun.”

  “Yeah, it’s always like that,” he says, and then adds, “The spaghetti was good.”

  I go to my room and check the model airplane, which is now all dry. I take it from the windowsill and carefully place it on the dresser. I go to bed early and make sure to look at the plane one more time before I close my eyes. The last thing in my mind as I settle into sleep is a blue baseball cap sitting there in the darkness of my mind.

  CHAPTER 6

  I GET UP EARLY SATURDAY MORNING TO HELP DAD out at the family hardware store, where my main duty is manning the register for most of the morning. It’s pretty slow. I like it best when there’re customers to deal with, otherwise it’s pretty boring. So I read the paper from front to back and look out the store window at the passing cars. Luckily Cornelius and Yoshi pull up on a dirty old motorcycle that sounds like a lawn mower going thump thump thump. Cornelius is up front steering, and Yoshi’s holding on behind him.


  “Whose dirt bike is that?” I ask when they come in.

  “Mine,” says Cornelius. “Me and my cousin fixed it up.”

  “Cool,” I say.

  “You wanna ride?” asks Cornelius.

  “I got to stay behind this register or my dad’ll kill me. What’re you guys doing?”

  “Cornelius is going to show me the dirt track where everyone rides,” says Yoshi.

  “By the gravel pits?” I ask.

  “Yeah. We wanted to see if you come, too. We all ride together.”

  “You think you can squeeze three people on that thing?” I ask.

  “Sure, I done it before,” says Cornelius.

  “I don’t know, man.”

  “This your store?” asks Yoshi.

  “Yup.”

  Yoshi and Cornelius walk around the aisles and then come back to the counter and hang out. Dad shows up later in the morning, and I introduce Yoshi and Cornelius to him. He shakes their hands and asks Cornelius, “Is that your dirt bike out there?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He fixed it up himself,” I say.

  “I don’t see any helmets.”

  “We ain’t got none.”

  Dad just shakes his head and then tells me to take a break. “You’re not gonna ride that thing without a helmet,” he tells me.

  “I know,” I say.

  I take Cornelius and Yoshi around back, past the bathroom and office where there’s an old emptied-out storage room. While Cornelius and Yoshi snoop around I do some light stretching and sit down on a concrete slab. It’s quiet in there, real quiet and dusty, except for Yoshi and Cornelius talking about who’d win a fight between a grizzly bear and a tiger. “A tiger has claws and teeth, man,” says Cornelius.

  “A bear has claws, too.”

  “As big as a tiger?”

  “Yes, I saw on a nature show…”

  I’d like to join in on their debate, but I don’t feel like it. Yoshi and Cornelius know about those babies, but they haven’t seen them. Not like me. They haven’t felt the way I feel about them. And those feelings just seem dark and wrong. At that moment Yoshi and Cornelius seem in a completely different world, where I’m just an occasional actor. A double agent for real. A phony. I cross my legs and lower my head. Then, in with Yoshi and Cornelius’s ramblings, I think I can hear some music. It’s very faint, but I recognize it immediately. It’s “Moon River.” A wave of memories comes flooding in…My mom playing this song on her old record player while Jim and I are in his room playing video games on the Atari…Me asking Jim if I can play, but he’s too involved in playing Defender even to answer me…I walk out of Jim’s room and when Mom sees me in the living room, she pats the seat beside her on the sofa for me to come and sit down…She’s got a big smile on her face and a newspaper in her lap. It made me happy to see her happy. But this music I’m hearing isn’t the record or even the original recording, it’s too clumsy and all the instruments are wrong, not to mention Audrey Hepburn isn’t singing.

  “Do you hear that?” I ask.

  “Hear what?” says Yoshi, who stops bouncing a small rubber ball he found on a counter.

  “I can hear it, too,” says Cornelius. “I thought it was a stereo or somethin’.”

  I get up and they follow me out the back door of the store to find a guitarist, a trumpeter, and a guy playing a recorder, performing in the empty lot behind the store. “Is that ‘Moon River’?” I ask.

  “Yeah, sure is,” says the trumpeter.

  “Sounds good,” says Yoshi.

  “What the hell are you?” asks Cornelius.

  “We’re the Abandon Mints,” says the guitarist with curly brown hair and black-framed glasses.

  “What are you doing playing here behind my dad’s store?”

  “We’re practicing. We’re supposed to be in the Spring Fling Band contest at the West Georgian College. We need to practice playing out so…we’re playing out. We just randomly chose the first spot we could find just driving around. I hope your dad doesn’t mind.”

  “Hey, do you sell thread? I told my mom I’d get some thread for her,” says the trumpeter.

  “We have twine. I’m not sure about thread, though.”

  “Are we finished then? We’ve been doing this for an hour,” asks the recorder player.

  “I don’t know? Are we?” asks the guitarist.

  They all look at one another again.

  “Okay then. Tomorrow at three?” says the recorder player.

  They all nod and dump their instruments in the back of a station wagon parked along the road. The recorder player and the guitarist get in the car and leave while the trumpeter comes back.

  “My car’s parked out front,” he says.

  “Just follow me.” I lead him, Yoshi, and Cornelius through the back into the store. I walk them to the shelf with all the twine and wire and tape. “It’s for your mom, right?” I ask.

  “Yeah, she wanted me to get some while I was out of the house.”

  “Here, just take it.” All three look a little taken aback. “I hate being salesman, anyways.”

  “Are you sure you can do that?” he asks.

  “So generous a man!” says Yoshi.

  “Damn,” says Cornelius.

  “It’s nothing. Just go out the back.”

  I walk him to the back, where he stops and takes out three dollars. “Here, take it, man. You should come out to the concert. It’s at the college in two weeks.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I say, and take the three dollars. Once he leaves, we three go back up to the front.

  “Here,” I say to Dad, “I just sold a spool of twine to this musician guy I just met.”

  “You what?”

  “There were some college guys in the back lot. They were playing music—”

  “Playing music? Son, you can’t just sell our stuff like that. It needs to be done up here at the register…”

  “Uh, we should be going,” says Cornelius. “Come on, Yoshi, we gotta go.”

  “Okay, ’bye.” He waves at me, and they both head out. Dad’s going to lay into me some more, but Cecilia, this red-headed lady who buys big amounts of supplies at a time, comes in to save me. She works for a bunch of contractors who get their supplies from the store.

  “Samuel, you’re growing up like a weed,” she says when she walks in.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say.

  “You ready for some heavy lifting?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She gives me the yellow order form, which I take to the back where we keep all the bulk items. I use the dolly to take all the boxes out to her van. Then I load them while Dad and she talk. I can overhear her talking about referring some other contractors to his store, which I’m sure Dad loves. After I load all the boxes into her white van, she tips me a five-dollar bill.

  LATER ON AT LUNCH DAD doesn’t mention my under-the-counter sale of the twine. He even takes us to get some steaks at a local steakhouse nearby called the El Rancho. The whole family used to go there on Sunday afternoon. Mom and Dad would pick Jim and me up from the house after church, and we’d all get the buffet and stuff ourselves. Mom would make sure we’d fill ourselves up, encouraging us to eat more and more until I thought I’d explode. It was fun, almost like an eating competition between Jim and me. These days it’s just Dad and me. Jim wouldn’t come anymore even when he’s home.

  Instead of the buffet, Dad and me both order T-bones with baked potatoes and mixed vegetables. Then we sit and wait. Across the aisle from our booth are three middle-aged black men in a heated conversation about money. The two sitting together wear nice-looking suits, the kinds with open collars without the ties. The guy across from them is bald and wears a black leather jacket.

  “Did you ever find something for the video project?” Dad asks. I’m surprised because usually we don’t talk much when we’re eating here.

  “Yeah, that’s what got me that first lockdown. I skipped classes so I could finish it up.”

&
nbsp; “Oh,” he says, pulling out a newspaper. “What were those kids doing back there behind the store?”

  I explain to Dad how they were practicing in an open public space for an upcoming performance. He seems confused by the whole thing as I try to explain, so I change the subject to something more suited to his understanding: plumbing. “Is that what you’re going to do with those pipes I saw in the garage?”