Sweet Dream Baby

by Sterling Watson

  My Aunt Delia says, “Hey, Mr. Barnes. This is my nephew Travis from Omaha. He’s spending the summer with us.”

  Mr. Barnes looks down at me. “Travis.”

  “Hey, sir.”

  Mr. Barnes’s left earlobe is split in two. He sees me looking at it and reaches up and divides the two parts. “Travis,” he says, “I was fishing with a man one day, and he was throwing a top-water plug for bass, and he got a little lengthy with his backstroke and stuck a treble-hook in my ear.” He twiddles the two parts of his earlobe with his finger and smiles at me. “But that wudn’t the bad part. The bad part was when he made his cast.” He laughs and lets me think about it.

  I say, “I bet that hurt, sir.”

  “Not as bad as his head after I got through with him.”

  My Aunt Delia says, “What you asking to rent a boat, Mr. Barnes?”

  Mr. Barnes says, “All day with gas, five dollars. Back before dark.”

  My Aunt Delia reaches into her jeans and pulls out a ten-dollar bill.

  • • •

  My Aunt Delia steers us upriver. She sits facing me with her arm over the tiller of the five-horse kicker. The motor is loud, but I’m used to it now. I like the way it smells and the way the blue smoke floats over the water behind us and the way the brown water boils white as we cut through it. At first it was strange in the boat, the way it moved under me. My Aunt Delia could see I was worried. She said, “Just sit in the middle facing me, and that’ll keep us balanced. The worst that can happen is we fall in and have to swim.”

  Now I’m used to it, and I’m sitting up on the seat instead of down in the bottom. Away from the fish camp, the river is wild. The banks are steep and rocky, and we see cooters slipping into the water from logs and rocks ahead of us. Birds roost in the tall cypresses along the bank, and my Aunt Delia says, “Look, Travis, there’s an osprey. People around here call them fish hawks. And that bird with the big black wings is an anhinga. Some people call them snake birds because they swim underwater and they wiggle like a snake.”

  I like the way the wind cools my face as we move, and the way it lifts my Aunt Delia’s black hair from the shoulders of her white blouse. We slow down and idle along the bank, moving from one patch of shade to another.

  Then I see the big tangle of white driftwood, and beyond it, the sandbar glimmering under the coffee-colored water. I say, “Is this the place where we…?”

  My Aunt Delia smiles and nods. “What do you say, Killer? You want to pull in and perfect the fine old southern art of skinny-dipping?”

  I nod and smile, and my throat gets thick thinking about it.

  My Aunt Delia points the boat at a sandy place on the bank below the driftwood, and she says, “Move back toward me, Travis.” I crawl along the bottom of the boat toward her and crouch at her feet. She says, “We need the weight back here so we can slide her up on the sand.” We hit with a crunch and a gritty slide, and my Aunt Delia cuts the motor, and it coughs and dies in a cloud of blue smoke.

  We do it like we did before. I strip and fold my clothes, and my Aunt Delia goes down to the driftwood to undress. I watch her hand rise up white with her white blouse and hang it, and then again with her bra, then her jeans. I turn away and look up river toward the white shelf of Widow Rock. I touch my thick throat and take a deep breath and let it out and feel the thing heavy and hurting and wonderful in my chest. I love her. I’m only twelve, but I’m a teenager in love.

  My Aunt Delia shouts, “Yoo-hoo, I’m coming, Killer,” and I dive into the river, keeping my face to Widow Rock. I go under the cold coffee dark, and the cold makes my chest seize, and I open my eyes and hold my hands in front of me like two white fish. I surface and swim upstream to get warm. When I turn, my Aunt Delia is sitting on the sandbar with her back to me. She hugs herself in the cold, but she says, “Ooh, isn’t it delicious, Killer. I wish this river ran through my room at night, and I could just roll off the bed and flop around in it a while.”

  I drift down and sit beside her on the sandbar, and we let our arms point downstream in the current and wiggle them like snakes. We kick off and race again, and she beats me again, and I like watching her white shoulders ploughing and her black hair fanning over them. We walk back pushing against the current and sit on the sandbar again, and I say, “Do you like Bick Sifford?”

  She hugs herself and looks downstream. I don’t look at her face. She lets out a shivery sigh and says, “I told you I do, remember? The night I came home from the party.” I look over at the place on her chest. The scratch Bick gave her is almost gone. There’s a faint red line in the white skin. I wonder if the trace will always be there. I wonder if he marked her. I say, “Yeah, you told me.”

  She says, “I’m confused, Killer. I want to like a lot of people. I want to do a lot of things, a lot of things you wouldn’t understand. I like him, and I don’t like him. He’s so…young.”

  I have to say it. “I don’t want you to like him.” I try to make my voice sound old, but it comes out young.

  My Aunt Delia looks over at me. She stops hugging herself and puts her arm around my shoulders. It’s warm on my back, but it makes me shiver. She says, “I know, Killer. I know.”

  I say, “Remember when you asked me what I know about boys and girls, and I said I didn’t know anything, and you told me about how you and Bick got excited under the magnolia tree, and you weren’t going to get excited anymore like that, and you were waiting for him to go to Princeton?”

  She says, “I remember.” Her voice is small, and her chin is down almost to the water, and it’s like she’s whispering to the river. I don’t know what to say now. I want to tell her I’m excited. I’m a teenager in love. Her arm is around my shoulders, and she gives me a squeeze, and her side is warm against my side in the cold river. She says, “Travis what is it you want to ask me?”

  I say, “Tell me where babies come from.”

  I don’t know where the question came from. I didn’t think it was there. It wasn’t what I wanted to ask. But now I know I had to ask it. Because it’s what everybody knows, and I don’t know. It’s what Bick and my Aunt Delia and Caroline and Beulah and Ronny know. It’s what my parents whisper about when I walk past their bedroom door on Sunday afternoons and my mom has her head on my dad’s chest, and the radio is playing Peggy Lee and “Fever.”

  My Aunt Delia doesn’t say anything, and I can’t look at her. I can feel my face is red. Finally, she sighs and says, “Poor Killer. Things are so confusing, aren’t they?”

  I say, “Yeah,” and it barely comes out.

  She says, “Well, we’re all confused. Remember that, Killer. No matter how old you get, or how much you know, you’re still gonna be confused. That’s just…life.”

  I wait, and she sighs again, and says, “Where do you think they come from?”

  I can’t tell her what I think. One boy at school said he thought babies came from kissing. Another boy said he thought if you were in a room with a girl and you farted she could have a baby. One of the boys used to live on a farm, and he told us what he thought. He tried to show us what horses and pigs did, but we didn’t believe him. I can’t tell my Aunt Delia. I just say, “I don’t know.”

  She takes me by the shoulders and turns me toward her. I look into her eyes, and they’re like two cats watching me out of the dark, and I can’t keep my eyes on them, so I look at the green wall of trees behind her. I hear the river moving around us and rubbing along the bank and rustling the tree limbs that dip down low. My Aunt Delia pulls me closer to her, and I can feel her chests touching me, our nipples brushing together. She reaches down and takes my hand and says, “Touch me, down here.” She pulls my hand down and under until my chin is in the water and she’s looking up at the sky. She turns my hand upward and fits it between her legs. She says, “Here. They come from here, Killer.”

  She holds my hand to her, pushing up
ward, and then she lets go and puts her hand on my shoulder again. My eyes are closed, and I’m dizzy, and I’m seeing her in her underpants the night she came home from the dance at Bick’s house, and I’m seeing her dark shadow through the white cotton cloth, and I’m feeling in the cold river the hot place where the dark color is her hair, and it’s stiff and coarse, and she’s warm and open, and I wonder if the river’s flowing into her. I hold my hand against that warm open and close my eyes tight and feel my thing growing hard as the bone in my arm. My Aunt Delia rests her chin on my head and whispers, “Do you see, Killer?”

  I’m dizzy. I can’t think. I want to stay with her like this forever. I find my voice way down in the hollow bottom of me and say, “No.”

  My Aunt Delia’s hand moves, and I feel her fingers close around my hot, hard thing. She says, “Now do you see?”

  My hand is on her, and hers is on me, and I see. I know how it happens now. I can’t talk, I just nod under her chin, and I hear her sigh, and I don’t want us to move. Ever. I put my arm around her and pull her toward me, and I feel us touching chest to chest, nipple to nipple, my hips against her thighs, our hands where they are, and then I hear it. My Aunt Delia hears it, too.

  A sound from the trees along the bank.

  A voice, laughter.

  My Aunt Delia goes stiff in my arms. She pushes me away hard, and the cold river flows between us.

  Twenty-seven

  My Aunt Delia whispers, harsh, “Get dressed!”

  She turns and swims downriver as fast as she can, and before I can get out of the water, I see her run up the bank, all the long white length of her, and disappear behind the driftwood clump.

  I swim to the bank and run to my clothes. I’m pulling on my uns when I hear it, “Pop-Pop-Pop!” The sound comes from out there in the woods where my Aunt Delia parked the white Chevy the first time we came here. I get my jeans and T-shirt on and look downriver. My Aunt Delia’s already in the boat, and her wet hair is squeezed into a rope that hangs down one side of her face and pours water onto her white blouse. She turns to the woods, listens, calls to me, “Hurry, up, Travis!”

  I run down to her and push the boat off the sand and wade in and jump aboard. We make a lazy turn, floating down with the current. My Aunt Delia kneels in the back of the boat, pulling on the cord that starts the outboard. She pulls and pulls, and mutters, “Shit!” She pulls, and finally it hacks and stutters and then roars, and she throttles it back and throws us into a turn so tight it sprawls me down in the bottom of the boat.

  When she straightens us out, we’re reared up and going as fast as we can, and our bow is splitting the river and sending out a long, wide V that washes up on the banks behind us. I look at her and smile and try to get her to smile back, but she doesn’t. She bites her thumbnail and feels for the cross at her throat, and a dead sick look comes into her eyes when she knows the cross is not there. After that, she bites her thumb again and scrunches down small in the middle of the seat, and we speed on down the river without saying anything.

  • • •

  We drive way out into the country to an old roadside park. There’s a rotting picnic table and a rusted-out barbecue grill, and nobody comes here anymore. A Highway Department sign says, No Dumping. The sign’s full of bullet holes. My Aunt Delia pulls us under the shade of a big oak and turns on the radio. The song is “Summertime Blues,” and she whispers, “Shit,” and changes the station from Tallahassee to Birmingham. Birmingham is playing, “Goin’ to the chapel, and we’re gonna get married. Goin’ to the chapel of love.” She leaves it there, but turns it down low.

  I don’t know if we’re gonna talk or just sit here. Either one is all right with me. I can’t get my mind off what I learned about men and women. I can’t stop looking at my hand, the one that fit perfectly between my Aunt Delia’s legs. Finally, she says, “Did you hear it?”

  I nod.

  She throws her head back against the seat and rests her arm across her eyes and says, “Oh, God.” It sounds like a curse, not a prayer.

  We sit for a while, and the radio plays soft, and the songs come and go, and I know they can’t tell me the truth about love. Not the truth I learned in the river. You can’t put that truth on the radio. I say, “He won’t tell.”

  My Aunt Delia tears her arm from her eyes and looks at me like the fish hawk I saw perched in the cypress by the river bank. “He’ll tell,” she says, harsh, cold. “He’s a boy. They always tell.”

  I turn away and look out at the rotting picnic table and the rusted grill. “I’m a boy,” I say. It’s so low I don’t know if she can hear me above the radio. “I won’t ever tell,” I say.

  I sit there listening to my own heart rattle like rain on the roof. I feel her hand on my shoulder, light, then gone. She whispers, “I know, Killer. I believe you.”

  When we get home, my Aunt Delia puts the white Chevy in the garage, and we go upstairs. Halfway up, we hear Grandma Hollister say, “Why Delia, look at you. You’re all wet.”

  My Aunt Delia says, “Travis fell in the river, and I pulled him out.” She says it without looking back. She keeps climbing the stairs. My Grandma Hollister says, “My goodness! Travis, are you all right? Delia, I hope you aren’t letting that boy do anything dangerous at the river. You can swim, can’t you, Travis?”

  I stop and look back. Grandma Hollister stands there with her hand at her neck twisting her strand of pearls. I say, “Yes, ma’am, I can swim.” I start to tell her not to worry, but my Aunt Delia says, “It’s all right, Mother. Come on Travis.” She pulls me by the sleeve of my wet shirt.

  Grandma Hollister says, “Delia, come down here. I want to talk to you.”

  My Aunt Delia says, “Mother, I’ve got a headache,” and keeps on walking.

  Grandma Hollister doesn’t say anything more, but I know she doesn’t like it. When we get to the top of the stairs, I hear her walking toward the kitchen.

  In my Aunt Delia’s room I sit on the bed, and she sits at the vanity with her back to me. I can see her face in the mirror, and she can see mine. She says, “We have to talk.”

  “Sure,” I say.

  She says, “Did you see anybody? My back was to the bank. You were facing that way. Did you see anybody?”

  I was facing the bank, but my head was under her chin. My eyes were closed, and I was in a place I never wanted to leave. How could I see anybody? I say, “No.”

  “Tell me what you heard.”

  “It was somebody laughing, maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “I think it was somebody laughing.”

  She lifts her chin and looks at herself in the mirror, and it’s like the night she came home from Bick’s party, only worse. She’s looking in a window at somebody she doesn’t know, and now it’s somebody she doesn’t want to know. Somebody she doesn’t like. She says, “That’s what I heard, too.” She lowers her head and whispers, “Damn it. Damn it to hell.”

  I say, “Don’t worry. It’s gonna be all right.”

  She turns so fast on the chair that it twists the rug under her. “Don’t say that.” Her eyes are flame, and her voice is ice. “You don’t know that, and you shouldn’t say it. Say things that are true. Isn’t that the way we are?”

  I look into the heat of her eyes. I know she’s right. I know I shouldn’t have said it. I nod. “What are we gonna do?”

  She watches me, and finally she smiles. It’s a smile I’ve seen before. It scares me, and I like it. Then I remember where I’ve seen it. It’s Grandpa Hollister’s smile. She says, “I don’t know. We can’t do anything yet. We have to wait and see what happens. We have to wait and see what he does.”

  “You mean, Griner?”

  “If it was Griner.”

  “It was his car.”

  I’m the one who wakes up nights hearing that car go by. I’m the one who hears that engine backing
down, Pop-Pop-Pop, in my dreams.

  My Aunt Delia closes her eyes and says, “Yeah, it was his car.”

  She turns on the radio. It’s Tallahassee. The Killer singing, “You shake my nerves, and you rattle my brains. Too much love drives a man insane. You broke my will. What a thrill. Goodness, gracious! Great balls of fire!”

  My Aunt Delia lies on her bed. She puts her arm over her eyes, and her fingers drop to the side of her neck, and they try to find the gold cross. When they know it’s not there, her hand seizes into a quick white fist.

  I say, “Did it come off when you were swimming?”

  “No,” she says. “I think he took it. I hung it on the driftwood with my clothes. He must have been hiding down there for a while, and he took it.”

  It makes my stomach drop like it did on the plane. It makes my knees so weak I’m glad I’m sitting down. It makes my eyes so small I’m seeing my Aunt Delia like she’s on the other side of a keyhole. And then it makes me mad.

  A week goes by, and we stay close to home. Bick doesn’t call, and we don’t know why. My Aunt Delia thinks maybe he’s out of town. Caroline and Beulah come over, and my Aunt Delia asks if they’ve seen Bick. Caroline says sure they’ve seen him. She says her and Beulah go see who’s there, and he’s there, just like always.

  “We haven’t seen much of you, though,” Caroline says.

  Beulah says, “What’s the matter, Delia? You say Bick’s a dork, and now you’re all curious about him.”

  My Aunt Delia gives Beulah a look that could burn through a manhole cover. It’s like a death ray. She says, “I’m not all curious about him. I just asked if you’d seen him around.”

  “All right,” says Beulah. “I don’t know what you’re getting so pissy about.”

  My Aunt Delia picks up Beulah’s tenny pumps from where she shucked them off over by the door. She shoves them into Beulah’s middle. “Go home, Beulah.”