I still don’t know why he let me stay.
I gotta admit he was the only person I had ever even looked at. He had the darkest eyes. I loved him. I already knew it.
I loved him the day I dropped that big-assed box of T-shirts at Jos’s and he was buying wings for his sister. I didn’t think I’d ever see him again after he and his family moved away and left their house stone empty.
I looked.
Everybody did, ’cause they just seemed to disappear.
But that day I dropped a big-assed box on my foot, Curtis helped Jos ice my foot, and all I wanted to do was touch his beautiful brown face. And I almost did. But it felt too crazy—even for me.
His T-shirt said HIRAM COLLEGE and the only thing he said to me was, “You okay?”
After they put ice on my foot, he took his wings and left.
If you asked me now, I’d say we just ran into each other accidentally.
If asked now, I’d say that’s just the way it was supposed to be.
We sat next to each other in a movie—Brodie, Marley, and Butchy on the one side of me. And three guys with Hiram colors on the other side of him.
I smiled and he asked about my foot.
Then he gave me a dollar at the carnival to win Butchy a kangaroo that I swore looked just like him. Butchy, that is. I was fishing for change, and there he was. Then he was gone.
Later he was buying birdseed at the hardware store when I came in looking for two-sided tape to put a poster up.
Our last run-in was when he pulled alongside me on the road when Alice decided to run out of gas.
He said, “If you’re okay to come to my house, I live up the road. I think I have enough gas to get you and your truck home. Or stay here and I’ll be back in a minute.”
I’m not crazy—even though he had the darkest eyes, that didn’t mean he wasn’t a serial killer.
I waited.
He smiled, left, disappeared into some trees and bushes about one hundred yards up the road, and came back a few minutes later with gas. We were both happy that Alice was so old she wasn’t fuel-injected and needed a gas station.
As I pulled away he said, “Good night, Sweet.”
And I said, “Later, Curtis.”
Curtis loved to sit in an old rocking chair and read books on the porch of the cabin. He said his uncle stayed here when he was hunting; now the place belongs to Curtis. When it got dark, he brought out candles—and at first the only thing I was thinking was he was going to mess up his eyes and would go blind…. (Does every thing your mama says stick?)
But soon enough when I got home from Jos’s or from school, I’d be on the cabin porch with or without him—reading.
And I didn’t go hungry, ’cause I ate whatever he put in front of me.
Reading and eating—that’s mostly what we did in the beginning.
One night might be corn on the cob with lots of melted butter and black pepper, sliced tomatoes, and some Lake Erie fish he’d bought from some man up the road with an ice chest and fishing lures all over him.
Another night it might be sweet corn bread, red beans and rice with sweet onions, and sun tea—honey sweetened. I’d watched him from the window shirtless and barefoot take the huge canning jar out one morning, fill it, and put it in a sunny spot by the wild roses.
But the dinner I remember most was the wild salad filled with fruit and nuts and some kind of sweet creamy dressing that made me want to eat it by the bowlful. Then we crunched crusty bread that was moist and buttery inside—Curtis talked about poetry and fishing.
That night, after eighteen nights, we shared the big bed, and I fell asleep next to him.
This poem fell out of a book about the history of the buffalo soldiers.
I am too young to have gone
to seven funerals this past year.
I have stopped wearing black
because the Ohio heat
rips through me to
cook me to
the bone.
Three classmates at one time
nine months ago
when their car flipped over.
Three
separate
funerals.
A cousin’s heart gave out in front
of his whole family.
Graveside
services
only.
A girl who was my
first crush
lost a brother
to the pipe.
They had to carry
her mom out the church.
And during a cold
snap one of our
neighbors slept
forever because of a faulty
heater.
And I thought that
would be the end
of it all.
Death—
and said so to my
grandma.
But she looked at me with red eyes
that said
it
was
only
the beginning.
18
CURTIS LOVES TO WALK THROUGH THE woods. But I have a fever and don’t think I can make this walk. Earlier, all I wanted to do was curl up on the bathroom floor and feel the cool of the toilet bowl just as I was about to throw up again. I got to know the bathroom real good.
Curtis stood outside the door and every few minutes asked how I was doing.
I didn’t answer. Didn’t have to.
He could hear me hurl, and I guess that was enough for him to know I was still alive.
At first he’d shadowed me. He stood behind me to make sure I didn’t fall in the toilet. But after my second dive—even I got to be embarrassed that he was seeing me in the toilet bowl.
You’d think being that kind of sick would make a person lose all kind of modesty—a word I learned from my mom, but not usually in my dictionary.
Not so.
Curtis was still walking around upright ’cause he didn’t go “old-food-in-the-refrigerator diving” with me. I didn’t eat anything green or blue, but I guess I was off by a week or so about how old some of it was.
Even though I still feel sick as a dog, I go into the woods with Curtis anyway.
His arms are wrapped around my shoulders while I suck water out of a bottle and hope he’ll walk slow. He does—and keeps asking if I should be resting. He could show me what he wanted to later, when I feel better (which is to say when I’m too empty to throw up anymore). I now take the walk as a dare and say so.
He laughs.
We walk over fallen trees and go off the path by the creek. Most of the underbrush is mossy from lack of sunshine.
I’m starting to feel a bit better.
Don’t want to throw up at all now.
We keep walking, though—and I squeeze his hand hard and look up through the leaves on the trees. I can see the sun trying to shine down through them. The trees look damned tall as I gaze up, but we go farther in the woods, and it gets darker and cooler, until finally I can’t hear the creek or any crickets.
The woods are as quiet as the first minutes of sleep.
But I am with Curtis, his hand around mine, when the old wooden shack appears between two old oaks. I look at Curtis, but I never ask why we’re here. It ain’t like me.
Scares me when I think about how much I sometimes think not like me anymore.
But I trust him, and being sick doesn’t help. Maybe I’m just too damned tired to question as we stand outside the old wooden shack with the flat roof. Wildflowers grow around it—tiny flowers that appear purple in the twilight. Curtis opens the door and pulls me into the dirt-floor shack—I look around and step back out. Curtis follows me.
“It’s an old storage shack. My pops’s friends used to keep their extra rifles locked up in here when they were out in the woods.”
“I like it. It reminds me of the cabin, only miniature.”
The moon streams down through a clearing in the trees and comes down right beside the little shac
k. Curtis pulls a blanket out of his pack and puts it down against a wall so I can lean against it. Then he sits down beside me. I lean against him, and he feels my forehead.
“Ooh—fever germs,” he says.
I rub my face against his. “A few sick cooties for you …”
Curtis closes his eyes.
“I dreamed about this, ya know.”
“You dreamed about me having a fever and you dragging me into the woods to an old storage shack?”
“No, no. I dreamed about coming back here when I was over there.”
“Oh,” I say.
“I dreamed of rain, pine trees, and these woods. Sometimes I almost started to think that real color didn’t exist anymore. I mean, you don’t see wildflowers like these in the desert.”
He runs his hands over the carpet of purple flowers surrounding us and the shack. Curtis barely ever wants to talk about Iraq, so I listen quietly.
“I dreamed about sitting on the porch. I dreamed about the quiet. I don’t think I’ve ever missed this quiet so much. The quiet of birds chirping and midnight train whistles. There was another kind of quiet in Iraq. A quiet I never got used to.
“And sometimes you could almost feel when something was gonna happen. I mean, you knew. You felt it coming.”
I want to ask him if he was scared most of the time—but I stop myself, because I figure it’s a stupid question. Who wouldn’t be scared with people trying to kill them?
So I just say— “You need to stay home and sit on your porch.”
Curtis gets up and starts pacing in front of me; then I guess he remembers where he is and sits down to soak in the woods and the quiet.
“I don’t want to go back, but if I have to—I have to. It’s me or some other poor fool.”
“Why can’t it be nobody?” I say.
Curtis feels my head.
“Are you delusional?”
“No—just hopeful and pissed, I guess.”
Curtis laughs, but I’ve seen him happier, or maybe I really am delusional.
He lies back on the blanket, and I sprinkle grass on him.
“I dreamed about this. I really dreamed about just being here, and it was perfect, just like it is now. I don’t want anything else. No food, no house. I just want to be here. It’s perfect, Sweet. I could die here just like this.”
19
WHEN CURTIS STARTED SCREAMING IN HIS sleep, it was like the end of the world.
At first he would just breathe hard in his sleep. Usually it would stop there. Or he’d wake himself up. But mostly it was just the breathing hard.
I’d watch him until his breath slowed.
It was no big deal at first. Just a dream. Maybe a nightmare.
But then the screaming started, and on top of that it looked like he was trying to carry something in his hand. All I could do was try to wake him up. It was hard to do that. Especially with him screaming for people to stop or run or help him take something away.
When he finally did wake up, he’d complain that his arms hurt.
He’d say— “Man—my arms are sore.”
Then he’d look over at me next to him like he was asking me if I knew the reason. And I could have told him that it looked to me that in his dream he was always trying to pick something up.
I could have told him that, but I didn’t.
I didn’t, because I wouldn’t have been able to stop there. I would have wanted to know when the dreams started and were they because of something that happened over there in Iraq (which he never wanted to talk about). So when he finally tries to get to sleep again, this time I just lie beside him and stare into the dark until I only hear his slow breathing and the creek outside.
I should ask him about the nightmares.
But I don’t think that will keep them away. And when it comes to bad dreams, all anybody ever wants is for them to stay away.
A letter from my mama:
Sweet,
I wanted to send you this on your birthday, but it didn’t seem like something you would appreciate. I haven’t really found that thing, have I? But I promise, I think about you all the time. You are never out of my mind.
I know that you are still going to school and working at your friend’s store. I know because I check up on you. I have not left you completely.
But I knew I had to let you go. You’ve been leaving since you were born. I could never put my arms around you enough to get you to stay. I guess I could have continued forcing you like I have been doing all these years. But I can’t do that anymore. You have made up your mind.
I trust that you are happier where you are than you were with us.
Are you?
Are you understood? Do you laugh more? Does this young man make you know that you are loved?
Everyone, your father included, thinks I’m crazy for not dragging you back. But they don’t understand. You’d run further and faster. At least this way you are within my heart’s reach. And my hands if they might be helpful or needed.
Do you drive by the house? I think I see you sometimes.
Do you? I hope so.
Maybe one day you will drop by, come in, or just come back….
Love,
Mama
Come and Gone
20
I GAVE BUTCHY A RIDE HOME FROM school and talked to Marley for a few minutes, then—’cause Marley said he’d asked about me—drove over to Bobby’s to check out him and Feather. It was a good day.
I even stopped and talked to my brother Jason, who was coming out of the drugstore. I pulled over and opened Alice’s door for him to get in and talk a bit. And to save my life I don’t know what we talked about.
But it made me happy as I drove on back to the woods and Curtis. And when I got back to Curtis and the cabin, the place smelled good. Food was cooking, and Curtis was smiling and singing as I put my car keys on top of an official-looking opened envelope.
I got a twinge ’cause I was so happy right then. I got a twinge ’cause I was feeling a little guilty. I never told Curtis about the soldiers who showed up. Maybe he knows, though. Maybe he saw them coming. Maybe he watched them and me from the woods. He’s not a fool. He knows he’s AWOL. But I don’t want to break everything up now.
I just can’t.
Curtis had put on some zydeco music I’d never heard but liked a lot.
He kept looking at me. Dark-eyed. Dark-eyed and smiling.
Every now and then he’d remember the groundhog bowl and put vegetable peels in it.
“So what do you want for dinner?” he asked.
“Whatever you got in the oven or on the stove,” I laughed. He always asked. I’d eat the wood off the side of the cabin if somebody put cheese on it. I love to eat.
We ate, talked, and laughed. And after that I helped him clear the table and wash the dishes. When we were done, we sat on the couch entwined and listened to the woods.
There were long arms all around me, and I just knew I was going to get in trouble for not getting home. Then I remembered this was home and fell back to sleep. When I woke up again, he wasn’t there.
I looked everywhere in the cabin, then out in the yard.
I was barefoot and felt the chill.
But I decided to keep looking for him.
It’s pitch dark in the woods when I finally come out. My feet are so cold it’s like they aren’t even attached to me as I watch them scratched and bleeding. And if I looked in a mirror, I know my hair would be full of leaves and who knows what.
I walk through the front door and drop the flashlight on the couch.
I remember the groundhogs and take their scraps out to them. I feel like I’m sleepwalking, though.
The couch is calling me, ’cause I know I can’t sleep in the bed. I ache.
I decide I’ll ache on the couch or maybe not in the cabin at all. When I walk over to the table to get my keys, I knock all the mail off, and a letter floats to my feet from the army.
I read it, drop it, then cur
l up on the couch and listen to the leaves blowing in the breeze outside and think about how I feel that I might never be warm again but don’t have the strength to go get a blanket.
When I wake the sun is dragging itself from behind some clouds, and there’s a blanket around me, but in my heart I know I am all alone, even if I can’t remember if I covered myself in the first place.
21
BRODIE ISN’T IN CLASS TODAY. EVERYBODY is saying it has something to do with cops and career day. And I think about my criminal activity on career day and wonder what Brodie might have done.
I don’t even want to start guessing. Everybody in this school is so bored they make up half the stuff they say. But I do start to wonder where Brodie is. I miss him at lunch when no one comes up and eats half the bad food that’s on my tray.
I miss him in Jameson’s class, ’cause I don’t have anybody to pass notes to or egg on to disrupt the class before I pass out from boredom. Angry Goth Boy has been a real disappointment lately. Maybe he’s on medication. He wears a lot less black.
Lately.
Too bad.
It’s sad to see a body stop raging into the dying of any light.
Sorry, Angry Goth Boy.
The halls have emptied out for fourth period, and I’m late as usual when I see Brodie walking slow down the other end of the hall. I wave to him, then slide down against my locker to wait for him. In about a minute he’s sitting next to me on the floor.
“I’m heading to the store,” I say.
Brodie takes off his sunglasses.
“Good I saw you before you broke out….”
He takes a banana out of his shoulder bag, starts to peel it, then offers me a bite.
I say, “Nope—too banana.”
He snorts.
I snort back.
“So what’s up with everybody talking about something happening to you with career day?”
“Damn! These people must have spies on every corner.” Brodie jumps up and looks under his arms. “Do I got bugs on me or what?”
I smile, and he sits back down beside me.
Sweet, Hereafter Page 4