Sweet Dream Baby

by Sterling Watson

  I go to the front yard to leave him room to visit Marvadell and get her money. After I hear the backdoor bang shut, I go to the side of the house and look up at my Aunt Delia’s open window. I can hear the radio playing faint, and I know she’s still asleep. I walk down to the park and look at what the rain did to the tennis court. The clay is washed all the way out into the grass near the Confederate monument. The white chalk lines are gone. The net is wet and steaming like everything else.

  Some green shingles are missing from the roof of the Presbyterian Church across the street. The whole town looks tired and beaten down. Times like this I wish there were kids around so I could make friends. But I know it’s too late for that. Even if there were kids, I’m leaving too soon to get to know them. And I’m my Aunt Delia’s best friend now, and that’s taking up most of my time.

  I walk back to our house looking at the sky. A strange, gray-yellow light glows from behind the clouds. My dad says it’s the light you see before a tornado comes. But that was in Omaha. I don’t know what that light means here in Widow Rock. People are staying indoors, away from the steamy heat. As far as I can see, there are no cars and no people. I wonder if it’s gonna rain again.

  When I walk into our driveway, I see a cigarette butt over by my Aunt Delia’s car. I go over and look at it. It’s wet but not falling apart. Somebody dropped it last night after the rain stopped. I don’t know when it stopped, but I know it was late, late at night. I look into my Aunt Delia’s white Chevy, and there’s something lying on the seat. My heart starts to rattle even before my eyes are sure what it is. I open the car door a few inches and look back at the house. Nobody. I open the door all the way. It’s a small white envelope. I don’t know why it scares me so much.

  I try to tell myself it’s my Aunt Delia’s. She left it there. But she hasn’t been in her car since we got out of it together yesterday. Someone put the envelope there last night while my Aunt Delia and me were sleeping in my bed. Someone who smokes. I know it’s trouble, and I know I have to take it to her.

  • • •

  My Aunt Delia doesn’t wake up easy mornings after it storms. I go to her bedside and lay my hand gently on her hair. I stroke her black hair, and she sighs, and it’s almost like a cat purring, and then her eyes come open, and I like it that she meets me with a smile. But then her mouth pinches, and her eyes go hard, and she says, “Something’s wrong.”

  She sits up fast, and my hand falls from her hair, and I show her the envelope. “I found it in your car. Somebody must’ve put it in there last night.”

  She blinks and takes the envelope and holds it to her chest, but she doesn’t open it. She rubs some sleep from her eyes with her free hand and pulls her legs up under her. She looks at me hard and says, “Tell me again where you found it.”

  I tell her. She puts the envelope down on the bed and her eyes are bright awake. She looks like she did the day she drove the boat down the river, like she’s looking off into the distance for what might come around the bend. “All right,” she says, “open it.”

  I do. There’s a piece of notebook paper inside, the kind kids use in school. The words are written in pencil. It’s a boy’s handwriting. The note says,

  Delia,

  Meet me tonight behind the gas station, 9:00. I’ll be waiting in my car. Don’t bring the little boy you like so much. Come or the whole town will know how you like to swim.

  There’s no name at the bottom.

  “It’s him,” my Aunt Delia says.

  “Yeah.” My mouth is dry. I can see her trying to swallow and the next word sticking in her throat.

  “What do you think he wants?”

  She gives me a look I’ve never seen from her before. It’s the look a dog gives you after you kick it. It’s the look Marvadell had on her face when Eddie walked into her kitchen and took the money from her purse. I look away at the window.

  She says, “What do you think he wants?” Her voice is so low I can hardly hear it. It’s like she’s talking to herself. “He wants me. He wants me to…do it with him. If I do, then he’ll keep his filthy mouth shut.”

  We talk about it for an hour, until we have to go down for lunch. We talk until Marvadell comes to the bottom of the stairs and hollers up, “You chirrins come on down here an’ eat! Don’t make me wait fo you!”

  I ask her what she’s going to do, and she says she doesn’t know. I don’t want her to go. I don’t say it yet, but she knows I don’t, and she knows why, I guess. I keep trying to think about what’s best for her and not for me. I keep asking her what she’s going to do, but she keeps talking about him.

  “I just didn’t think he was like that,” she says. She looks at me like I can tell her what he’s like. Because I’m a guy.

  She says, “Under all that tough guy, greaser attitude, I thought he was good. I thought he was just somebody people didn’t understand.”

  I want to say I know how he could want her so much. Enough to make him do this thing. How he could get so confused wanting her, he’d hurt her to get what he wants. But I can’t tell her that.

  I say, “Well he’s not who you thought he was.” I pick up the note from the bedspread where it lies between our knees. I say, “Here’s who he is.”

  She turns to the window and looks at the trees. Even when it’s hot and still, they move. If you really listen, you hear it. The branches and the leaves fidget and fuss and rub together because they’re still growing. For a while, we listen to the oak tree talk.

  Finally, she says, “I have to go. Maybe I can talk to him. Make him see what he’s doing.”

  “You can’t go.” Now I’ve said it, what she knew I’d say. She looks at me. Her love for me is in her eyes, but it’s there only a second. I see it change to pity, then to anger. She says, “Killer, you just don’t know how it is for me. You don’t know what my life will be like here if he tells about me and you.”

  “What if you go with him, and he tells about that, too?”

  Her eyes tell me she’s thought about it. She says, “I’ll just have to take that chance.”

  Then she says the thing I hate. “If he likes me enough, maybe he’ll do what I want.” She looks straight into my eyes, and her voice goes low and sweet as she says it, and I know she’s not just talking to me. She’s practicing for him.

  I can see she wants to stop talking now. I say it quick. “I’ll go with you. Let me go with you. If I go, maybe he won’t…”

  She smiles slow and sorry. “I can’t do that, Killer. You know it wouldn’t work.” She goes over to the vanity and sits down and looks at herself in the mirror. She turns up the radio a little, and it’s Jerry Lee singing, “Breathless.” She says to the mirror, “But I can’t do it without your help. You’ve got to help me tonight, Killer.”

  That’s when I think the awful thing. Maybe she wants to go with him. Maybe a part of her wants to go. I love her. I’m her only friend. She held me in the river. She let me touch her. She showed me what love is. I have to say yes. I have to say I’ll help. “Okay,” I say, and Marvadell calls up from the foot of the stairs, “You chirrins come on down here an’ eat!”

  • • •

  The rest of the day goes by like the week before Christmas. I keep watching the clock and trying to think of something new to say, something so she won’t go, but my Aunt Delia’s eyes are shut to me. They say she’s made up her mind. She’s looking at the far away now, past tonight. She’s trying to see how things will be for her after she meets him tonight.

  All day the thing is big inside my chest. It’s the true thing I have for my Aunt Delia. We listen to the radio in her room. We don’t talk much, but the radio talks to me about love. Birmingham and Tallahassee play the songs that say they understand who I am and how I feel.

  At eight-thirty, we walk downstairs like we planned. We stop in the living room where Grandpa Hollister sits with his new
spaper like a curtain across his face, and Grandma Hollister watches Ed Sullivan. We look at Life for a while like we always do, and then my Aunt Delia stretches and yawns and says, “I’m bored. Travis, let’s you and me drive over to Warrington for Cokes.” She always says it this way. Then she waits to see what they say. It’s her way of asking without asking. We wait. Grandpa Hollister rattles his paper and clears his throat, and Grandma Hollister laughs at some Hungarian unicyclists balancing dinner plates from broom handles on their chins. We walk slowly to the front door. When my Aunt Delia opens it, Grandma Hollister calls, “You two be careful and come home at a reasonable hour.”

  My Aunt Delia calls over her shoulder, “All right, Mama.”

  We have a plan.

  My Aunt Delia drives the white Chevy to the place behind Dr. Cohen’s house and parks it. She leaves the keys in the ignition so the radio can play for me. She says, “You’ll be all right here, Killer. If anybody comes, just turn off the radio and hunker down in the seat. I’ll get back here no later than eleven.”

  She gets out and stands in the moonlight outside the window. She leans in, and her hair falls around her face, and I smell the shampoo and perfume I like so much. The moon behind her makes a glow around her face, a halo, and I think: Night Angel. The halo makes it hard to see her eyes. Her skin is white, and she’s wearing the dark red lipstick she only puts on after we leave the house. Her white blouse has a Peter Pan collar and no sleeves. She’s wearing her faded jeans and her white tenny pumps. She looks prettier to me than she’s ever looked before.

  I can’t help it. I say, “Please let me go with you.” I lean close and smell her hair.

  She shakes her head, and I’m glad I can’t see her eyes. She says, “What would you do with me tonight, Killer? Think about it. What would you do?”

  I want to ask again, but I don’t. I want to say please again, but I don’t.

  She reaches in and puts her hand on my cheek, and her fingers burn my face with the names of our secrets. She strokes me and leans in and gives me a kiss. She says, “Thanks for covering for me, Killer. You’re a great guy.” Then she’s gone, and I’m sitting with the taste of her lips on mine and the radio playing, “Save the Last Dance for Me.”

  Thirty-one

  I think of her walking to meet him. It’s only three blocks down and one block over. I think of him sitting there in the alley behind the grease rack in his street rod with the midnight-blue paint and red flames coming from the engine. Lakes Pipes and the moon discs gleaming in the moonlight. I see him in his leather jacket, and his white T-shirt and the ducktail haircut and the scar above his eye. I wonder if he’s doing this to her because Grandpa Hollister hit him. I wonder if it’s his way of getting revenge.

  I think of him taking out the silver Zippo lighter as he sits there waiting for my Aunt Delia. I see him light the cigarette and throw his head back and draw a big chestful of smoke and blow it out into the still night air.

  And then it comes to me.

  The cigarette on the driveway this morning had a filter. Kenny Griner smokes unfiltered Camels. I lean forward and turn the key, and the starter whines, and the white Chevy comes to life around me. I reach down and pull the lever that moves the seat forward and strain my legs down to the pedals. I turn on the lights and put the Chevy in reverse and back out of our hiding place behind Dr. Cohen’s house. I’m driving slow on the empty streets, past the parked cars and the houses with open windows and flickering screens where Ed Sullivan is saying goodnight to America.

  I keep the speed down to twenty. Three blocks down and one block over.

  I turn into the alley behind Mr. Dameron’s ESSO station, and all I see is the shut door at the back of the grease rack and moonlight on a stack of empty oil cans. I sit there with the engine idling and the radio telling me, “No muscle-bound man can take my hand from my guy. There’s not a man today who can take me away from my guy.” I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where they are. I try to think, but my mind is whirring like the big Westinghouse mixer Marvadell uses to make frosting, and the things in the mixer are pictures of my Aunt Delia with Griner. I rub my eyes with the heel of my hand, and my mind goes still, and I try to get a message from my Aunt Delia about where she is. But nothing comes. I hit the steering wheel with my fists, and then the radio says, “Under the boardwalk, down by the sea. On a blanket with my baby, is where I’ll be.” And I get it. There’s only one place they could go.

  I know I can’t go the way they went. I have to go the other way, the way me and my Aunt Delia went when she took me swimming. I’ve never driven at night, and it’s scary. The headlights bore down the county hardroad, and the broken white line rushes at me, and the wind pours through my window with all the wild smells of the country night. The white faces of cows are sudden and then gone as my lights sweep the fields, and I hope there won’t be any people. Everybody in this county knows my Aunt Delia’s white Chevy, and all the kids are out driving at night, going to see who’s there.

  I cross the bridge and take the narrow hardroad that runs with the river a few miles, then I turn again on the two-rut track with the weeds growing up tall between my wheels and lashing underneath the Chevy. Night bugs zip through my lights like tracer bullets I’ve seen in war movies, and a red fox runs ahead of me for twenty yards, then stops to watch me pass. I find the place where me and my Aunt Delia parked. I kill the Chevy’s engine and leave the keys in the switch. I run to the river. Standing on the bank with my shoes sinking into the wet sand, I see the white clot of driftwood downstream in the moonlight. I take off my shoes and socks and wade out and look back upstream at Widow Rock. It’s white and dreamy in the moonlight, and I can see something, something up there. I stare hard at it. I try to make my eyes reach long and bore through the dark, and maybe I see something move. I can’t tell. It’s too far and too high. I know what I have to do now. All the way out here in the car, driving with my hands claw-tight on the steering wheel, I’ve been thinking about it.

  I take off the rest of my clothes and pile them on top of my shoes and step into the river to my waist. It’s colder than in the daytime, and the sand slips away downstream as my feet sink in, and I can feel the riverbed sloping out to the deep water. The river pulls at me. It wants to take me downstream, all the way down to the Johnny Barnes Fish Camp where me and my Aunt Delia rented the boat. It wants to take me all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. I lean down and push off and swim hard in the cold. I swim as hard as I can to get warm and to reach the far bank without landing too far downstream.

  It’s a long, cold swim, and out in the middle of the river, my mind tells me there’s no other side. It whispers to me as I churn and kick and open my eyes to the dark sky when I breathe. It says I’ll just swim on forever, and then my arms and legs will seize, and my breath won’t come anymore. It whispers I’ll sink, and no one will ever know what happened to me. My arms and legs get thick and slow, and my stomach goes sick, and my mind mixes pictures of Griner and my Aunt Delia naked together up on Widow Rock, and then I see my body blue and scraped and limp washing up on a beach somewhere along the coast where the river ends.

  I know it’s panic. I know I can’t give in to it. There is no river without two banks. I keep swimming, pulling my head up every two strokes and sucking in cold, river-smelling air, and my mind goes dark, and I’m only legs and arms beating water, and finally trees lean out over me with moonlight silver on their leaves, and my fingers claw sand, and I lie full flat naked, retching for air on the river bank.

  When my breath comes back, and my legs warm, and the cramp in my stomach eases, I walk back upriver, looking across for the white driftwood clot. I walk maybe a hundred yards, picking my way along in the shallows careful of the rocks and the claw hands of tree roots reaching out from the bank. I see the driftwood clot like bleached and tangled bone across the river. In the moonlight, it looks like the skeleton of some huge beast that died and rotted huddle
d there against the bank. It tells me where I am.

  There’s a way up somewhere. I know it because Griner came down this way the first time my Aunt Delia took me to Widow Rock. After he drank whiskey and gave my Aunt Delia some, and me a sniff, and we heard Bick and Ronny and Quig Knowles and Beulah and Caroline calling from below to my Aunt Delia, Griner stepped into the trees heading downstream. My Aunt Delia said, “Careful, Kenny. It’s slippery that way.”

  I know I’m only a hundred yards downstream from the rock, and I know there’s a way up.

  I turn into the woods feeling with my hands. I’m a naked boy in the woods at night, and the vines and branches claw and catch at me. I stumble and cover my eyes and my parts and keep pushing ahead looking for the path. Fifty yards into the woods I stop and grind my teeth in rage and stop my mouth from howling in it, too. I turn back toward the river, going upstream. I promise myself I’ll find it. It has to be here. I’ll step out into a clearing and see the path snaking into the trees, rising with the land up to the bluff. It has to be here.

  I’m about halfway back to the river when I fall and cover my eyes and slide on my butt down a bare clay ditchbank into a culvert of roots and rocks. My feet stop me hard at the bottom, and I know they’re cut. I get to my hands and knees and look up. A silver line of moonlight falls through the trees. I’ve found it.

  From here on, I have to be quiet. I go up on all fours. I’m an animal now, climbing four-legged, nose to the ground, smelling my way up the rocky, rooty track to the top of Widow Rock. My breathing is hard and fast but silent, my bleeding feet make no sound as they find their holds on the soft clay, the rock, the bark. I see where the trees open at the top. I see the moonlight bright, glancing from white limestone. I slow and creep. At the top, at the tree door, I rise to my feet and become a human boy again, but a mad boy, and resolute. Yes, that’s it: resolute.

  I see them lying out on the rock, their bodies glowing in the white moonlight. They’ve made a bed of their clothes. He’s on top of her and moving. I can see the muscles of his arms taut and wet with sweat as he holds himself up over her, his head hanging and buried in her hair. I can see her throat white and her head thrown back. I can see her knees rise and her heels dig into the rock, and his legs taut and straight as his feet push behind her heels. I can hear him breathing hard and ragged, and worst of all I hear her moan. I wish it were the moan of her sorrow, her abuse, her cry for someone lost, but it’s the moan of her pleasure, and though I’ve never heard the sound before, I know its name.