Sweet Dream Baby

by Sterling Watson

  She smiles and says, “Killer, I told you to call me Delia. If you don’t, I’m going to start calling you Nephew Travis. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

  I say I guess not, and we walk to the car, and my Aunt Delia starts the Chevy and turns on the radio. She backs out of the red-dirt parking lot and turns toward the house on Bedford Street, and I look over to my right, into the dark shade under the trees, and I see red flames on midnight-blue metal. As we go around the corner, I see black leather through a gap in the branches and a puff of cigarette smoke, and I wonder how long he’s been there. I wonder if he saw me playing tennis with my Aunt Delia, then her talking to Bick Sifford and me sitting alone on the bench.

  Eleven

  It’s night, and my Aunt Delia and me are sitting out on the porch. My Grandma Hollister calls the porch the gallery. She calls the one upstairs the upper gallery. My Aunt Delia says Grandma Hollister puts on airs and tries to keep up with the ladies in town who have money. She says a sheriff’s wife has social position without money, and that’s what gives my Grandma Hollister headaches. Marvadell made banana ice cream, and Aunt Delia and me are eating two big bowls. Grandpa Hollister is inside reading the paper from Panama City. We can see his head through the window screen. Grandma Hollister is down at the Presbyterian Church singing at choir practice. Sometimes when the wind blows this way, we can hear the choir.

  I like sitting out here at night with my Aunt Delia. It’s cooler than inside, and some nights the wind brings the smell of the ocean, and it makes me think of my boat. Some nights the stars are as bright as rock candy sprinkled on dark blue paper, and my Aunt Delia says that’s one of the good things about living in the country. You can see the sky at night.

  “When are we going to the ocean, Aunt Delia?”

  “It’s Delia, honey.”

  I look at the window screen. Grandpa Hollister isn’t listening. “Okay,” I say, “Delia. When are we going to the ocean?” It still feels funny calling her Delia, but it feels good, too.

  She says, “I don’t know, Travis. But don’t you worry. We’ll go some time. We’ve got the whole summer ahead of us.”

  “Am I gonna get to swim and catch fish?” I don’t dare ask about the boat. Not yet.

  “You’re gonna get to swim and try to catch fish. It’s a matter of some skill, you know.”

  I like the way my Aunt Delia talks to me. She doesn’t make things simple because I’m a kid. I lower my voice and ask her, “Delia, why were you crying the other night?”

  She looks at the window screen, sharp, then puts her finger across her lips and shakes her head. “Not now, Honey. I told you I can’t talk about that.”

  We sit for a while in the quiet. I hear a whippoorwill cry. “To-whit, to-whee, to-whit, to-whee.” I look at my Aunt Delia and she smiles at me, sorry, like we have a sad secret together. We hear a rumble and a radio playing far away, getting closer, then a pop-pop-pop, and I know who it is.

  Griner’s street rod comes around the corner and idles slowly up our street. I look over at my Aunt Delia. She puts down her bowl of ice cream, and her hand goes to her hair and then to the gold cross at her neck. I don’t know what’s in her eyes now. I don’t know if Griner’s gonna stop and talk to us. It’s Bobby Darin coming from the radio: “Dream lover, where are you, with a love oh so true.”

  My Aunt Delia whispers, “Don’t stare, Killer. He’s just a big showoff.”

  The hotrod with the red flames coming out of the engine passes under the street light up the block, and I can see Griner’s pale face and his slick black hair and his leather jacket.

  “Delia, what’s he doing here?”

  My Aunt Delia jumps. I don’t know how Grandpa Hollister moves so quiet. I don’t know how he got out here through the screen door without me hearing him. He puts on his steel-rimmed glasses and watches as Griner’s rod goes by. Griner looks over and sees him, and the look on Griner’s face doesn’t change. It’s a smile my dad calls insolent.

  Grandpa Hollister says, “Delia?”

  My Aunt Delia twists the cross at her throat, and I remember what she said about this town. How it makes her want to jump out of her skin. She looks up at Grandpa Hollister and says, “He’s driving, Daddy. It’s a small town. He’s bound to take our street some time.”

  Griner’s rod makes the corner and backs down, pop-pop-pop. Grandpa Hollister says to himself, not to me or my Aunt Delia, “Those pipes are illegal in this county. That boy’s gone push me too far one of these days.”

  My Aunt Delia looks up at him, and her eyes are scared. “Daddy, it’s just a car for crying out loud. What’s the big deal?”

  Grandpa Hollister watches the place where Griner’s rod disappeared into the dark. “To me, Delia,” he says, “the law is a big deal.” His voice is soft, but it’s colder than the ice cream in my bowl.

  • • •

  My Aunt Delia and me are on an errand for Grandma Hollister. We get out of the white Chevy and walk down the main street of Widow Rock, and we pass an alley, and there’s smelly water running down the alley, and halfway down there’s a red neon sign that says, Whiskey, and a man is leaning up against the wall. He’s got a greasy hat pulled down over his face, and he’s holding a brown paper bag. My Aunt Delia reaches down and takes my hand and pulls me close. “Come on, Killer, walk a little faster.”

  We get down the sidewalk some more and someone calls, “Hey, Delia. You there! Delia Hollister!” My Aunt Delia stops, and we turn around.

  It’s the man. He’s got his hat pushed up now, and I can see his long, gray face and that he didn’t shave. He takes a drink from the paper bag, and his eyes are all wrong. I know he’s drunk, but it’s not funny drunk like I’ve seen in the movies. This is mean whiskey. The man says, “Who’s that with you there, Miss Delia?”

  My Aunt Delia sighs and says, “You know very well who it is, Mr. Latimer.”

  The man throws back his head and laughs, but it’s a nasty laugh, and he says, “Oh, it’s Mr. Latimer is it? Ain’t that sweet. Sweet little Delia Hollister and her half-nigger nephew.” The man takes another drink from the paper bag. He’s got greasy sweat on his face, and his pants are dirty around the pockets, and one of his shoes has been cut with a knife so his toe can stick out of it. He’s not wearing any socks. My Aunt Delia squeezes my hand hard. She says, “Mr. Latimer, you better go on now and leave us alone.”

  The man smiles mean again, and squats down. He rocks back and almost falls over. He leans against the hot brick wall and puts the bottle in the paper bag down beside his knee. He says, “Little half-nigger boy, come over here. Let me get a look at them eyes. I want to see if you got your mommer’s Jap eyes. You shore got her brown skin, ain’t you?” He holds out his hands to me, and his eyes tell me to come.

  I don’t. I look up at my Aunt Delia. If he tries to hurt her, I’ll kill him. I’ll kick that bottle against the wall and take up a piece of glass and cut his eyes.

  My Aunt Delia pulls me away with her. She says over her shoulder, “Mr. Latimer, I’m not going to tell my father about this.”

  The man shouts after us. “Boy, your daddy was Mr. God High Everything around here, an’ he went off just like I did to fight them damn little Jap monkeys, an’ damn if he didn’t come back wiff a Jap wife and a half-Jap kid.” I look back, as we turn the corner. The man falls over into the alley and knocks over the bottle, and it spills under his leg. The last I see, he’s trying to get up, and he can’t, and his pants are covered with whiskey.

  My Aunt Delia pulls me down the block to the Curl Up and Dye Beauty Parlor. We go in and get a bottle of rinse for Grandma Hollister, and then we get in the white Chevy and we drive. We go fast, out to the country, to the road where Delia said there’s a decision to make, and this time we turn downhill into the dark pines. After a while, I can smell the river.

  We turn onto a sand road, and then onto another on
e so narrow that tree branches brush the car. We stop in a wide place with tire tracks in the sand where people have come in cars. In front of us, a path leads into the woods. My Aunt Delia shuts off the engine and turns to me and pulls her legs up on the seat and hugs her knees. “Are you okay, Killer?”

  “Sure,” I say. “How about you?”

  She nods. I think I can see tears starting in her eyes, then I don’t know. Maybe not. She doesn’t say anything, so I say, “I wasn’t going to let him hurt you.”

  She smiles, sad, and says, “I know, Killer. I wasn’t worried.”

  I say, “How come he called me a…you know?”

  “That’s right,” my Aunt Delia says, “don’t say it. If we say that word, we become like him. All the people like that.”

  “Why?” I ask her. I want to know.

  “Because he’s ignorant, that’s why.”

  “It’s because I’m half-Japanese, and he thinks that’s the same as Negro?”

  My Aunt Delia nods. She waits. I say, “Delia, do you know what’s wrong with my mom?”

  My Aunt Delia looks at me for a long time. She hugs her knees tight and closes her eyes, and when she opens them, she says, “Probably people like Mr. Latimer, Travis. That’s probably what’s wrong with her. That and she misses her family.”

  I know she means my mom’s family in Japan. My Grandma and Grandpa Kobayashi, but I still don’t like it. “I’m her family,” I say. “Me and dad are.”

  My Aunt Delia says, “Maybe she needs more than that. Like I needed you the other night in the storm, and you might need me some time.”

  I just nod. I have to think about it. I say, “What’s wrong with him, that Mr. Latimer? Why does he hate me?”

  My Aunt Delia shakes her head and looks out the window at the trees. It’s quiet and hot, and I can smell pine cones, and there’s no wind. I can smell the river, too, and I know it’s close, and I want to see it. She says, “He was in a place called Bataan, Travis. And the Japanese put him in a prison camp, and a lot of bad things happened to him there. He hasn’t done much since he got back but drink whiskey and bother people.”

  “Did he really know my dad?”

  “Everybody knew your dad, Travis.”

  “Were they friends?”

  My Aunt Delia nods and hugs her knees. “They played football and baseball together. All the men around here did. Mr. Tolbert, too.”

  I think about it. I don’t like Mr. Latimer, but I’m not going to hate him like I thought I was. I don’t want to hate anybody here. As long as he doesn’t hurt my Aunt Delia, I won’t do anything. I say, “Does he hate my dad now?”

  My Aunt Delia says, “No, honey, I don’t think so. I think he’s just confused and drunk and full of what’s hurting him.”

  I ask my Aunt Delia if we can go to the river, but she says no, not today. We’ve got to get that bottle of rinse home to Grandma Hollister.

  • • •

  We’re sitting in the third pew on the right in the white church across the park from the red-clay tennis court. Beulah Laidlaw’s father is preaching about the parable of the prodigal son. He’s a tall, fat man with gray hair and a red face, and he’s wearing a black robe, and he’s telling us about this boy who runs off and spends all of his dad’s money and gets drunk. When he tell us that the boy “consorts with women of ill fame,” it gets quieter in the church, and some of the women reach up and touch the gold crosses at their necks. I don’t know. Maybe it means women like the one who got kidnapped by the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Women who look at you like they know what you’re thinking. The boy finally ends up eating with pigs, and he gets sick of it and comes home, and his dad hugs him and takes him back. His dad has a big dinner for him, and everybody celebrates but his other brother. The other brother is mad because he stayed home and worked hard and didn’t get drunk or spend money or consort. The point of it all, according to the Reverend Laidlaw, is forgiveness. We have to care more and worry more about the ones that stumble and wander than about the ones that stay put and do things right.

  I’m thinking about Mr. Latimer and what he said about me and about my mom and dad. I’m thinking about the Japanese and what they did to him, and I’m as confused as all get out.

  I’m sitting between Grandpa Hollister and my Aunt Delia. Grandpa Hollister has on his same black suit and white shirt, and a blue and red bow tie. Only it’s not the same suit. I know now he’s got three of them, all the same. Grandma Hollister has on the black dress with the little white dots on it that she wore to pick me up at the airport in Panama City, but she’s up in the choir loft, wearing a white robe, and I can see the sweat on her forehead and under her chin, and I know she’s miserable, and it’s gonna give her a headache. She’s smiling her miserable-but-not-letting-on smile.

  My Aunt Delia’s got on her white Sunday dress. It’s made of raw silk, she told me, and it has a crinkly feel to it, and I like the way she looks in it. She’s got her black hair up on the back of her head with combs, and her neck is as long as my whole face. She doesn’t look at the Reverend Laidlaw. She looks at the big wooden cross behind him and the stained glass window that says INRI. Or she looks at Beulah and Caroline Huff. They sing in the choir along with Grandma. Sometimes when the Reverend Laidlaw gets real worked up over the prodigal son, I can see Beulah roll her eyes, and I know my Aunt Delia’s got that look on her face she gets when she and Beulah and Caroline Huff talk about how provincial Widow Rock is. And I know I better not look at my Aunt Delia, or I’ll start laughing or something. Grandpa Hollister is watching. Sometimes I think he can see what’s going on behind him.

  The Reverend Laidlaw finishes his sermon, and the choir stands up to sing, “He Leadeth Me,” and we all stand up and sing with them. I hold the hymn book, and Grandpa and my Aunt Delia lean over me and sing with me, and I like their voices, and I like looking at the women in the choir loft. They look like angels. They’re the same women I see on the streets of Widow Rock, and in the stores, and some of them are not very pretty, but in their white robes and singing like that, they’re pretty, and their voices and ours out here in the pews are so loud I bet they can hear us all the way to Panama City.

  But we’re not as loud as the Baptists.

  • • •

  All afternoon it’s cloudy, and then a big blue storm rolls up out of the Gulf of Mexico, and I’m sitting on the porch after dinner eating Marvadell’s ice cream with my Aunt Delia. I know she’s not happy. I ask her, and she says, “I’m just moody sometimes, Killer. It’s the female prerogative. Don’t you know that?”

  I say, “Do boys get pre…pre…”

  “Prerogatives. Yes they do, Killer. Boys get to be mean and jealous and stubborn, and they think they get to tell girls what to do, and they think they get to run around acting like jackasses and scoundrel dogs, and girls are supposed to stay home and sit with their knees together and do needlepoint or something. Until the boys come calling, that is.”

  “I don’t want any of those pre…prerogatives.”

  “Good, Killer. I knew you’d say that.”

  But I know my Aunt Delia isn’t just moody, she’s unhappy, and there’s a storm coming.

  Late at night, the rain comes. First there’s a rush of cool air through my window, and I’m lying outside the covers, and it feels good on my legs and chest. Then I can smell the air from way up high, and it smells like it does out in Omaha before the tornadoes come, and then it starts to rain. Big drops, and they hit my window with a sound like Marvadell smacking pie dough with her rolling pin. Then the trees begin to lash, and the limbs start to push each other around, and the birds complain in their nests, and I know I have to go to my Aunt Delia’s room.

  I get up and close my window and go outside into the hallway. I can see through the bathroom doorway and out the bathroom window into the moving trees. I walk down the hallway quiet and careful and stan
d outside my Aunt Delia’s doorway. Her door isn’t open this time, and I think maybe she’s all right, and I should go back to my room. But I can’t go back. I have to go into my Aunt Delia’s room. I don’t know why. I just have to. She might need me.

  I don’t knock. Someone might hear. I just open the door, and I can see her bed there under the slope of the roof. It’s like a white boat floating on a sea of moving leaves and branches. I can see her head on the pillow, her black hair spread out. I don’t hear her crying. I think she’s all right. I turn to go.

  “Come here, Killer.”

  I walk over and stand beside her bed. She reaches out and touches my arm like she did before. She says, “Are you okay? Did the rain scare you?”

  I say, “No. I’m not scared.”

  My Aunt Delia doesn’t say anything. She just lies there on her side, and I can hear her breathing, and she’s touching my arm with her fingers. Then she says, “Did you come in here because you thought I’d be sad?”

  I say, “Yes.”

  My Aunt Delia says, “I’m okay tonight, Killer. I’m just a little sad. The rain, it makes me sad.”

  I say, “I’m glad you’re okay, Delia.”

  We wait for a while, and the storm gets bigger outside, and I wonder if it’s going to tear shingles from the roof or blow the glass out of my Aunt Delia’s window. Delia whispers, “It’s really rough out there, isn’t it, Killer?”

  I say, “Yes.”

  She throws back the covers, and her good smell pours across my face in the still room. She says, “Why don’t you get in here with me for a while, Killer? If the house blows down, we’ll help each other crawl out of the wreckage.”

  I say okay. I climb into my Aunt Delia’s bed. I turn my back to her like I did before, and she rests her chin on the top of my head, and I can feel she’s not wearing her nightgown. I guess it’s too hot for that. I can feel her chests pressing against my back, and it makes my breath come quick. My Aunt Delia says, “How’s that Killer? You okay?”