He fires and fires and cries, and then just turns and walks home. And Nathan will never tell me what it’s about, but I just accept that in the way I accept everything about Nathan.
The next day, Nathan and I sit on the porch, watching a dust storm blow across, the wind and stinging dust, the sun high and white as a hole at the top of the brown tepee of the sky.
“I’ve seen it before,” Nathan says.
Then Nathan remembers other places he has lived, other mothers and daddies and houses he’s had at other times, because he was six years old by the time he came here, and by now he is almost eight. Usually, he won’t talk about it, but on this day he does. The next day he is going to start building a treehouse in the woods behind his clubhouse, and he starts saying how he’s seen another kid build one when he lived with some people who had a ranch in East Texas, and how he’d worked on it with that kid, but then that kid had gotten mad at him about something and had gotten him into trouble for trying to ride one of the calves, which turned out to be a prize calf, and it went crazy and hurt itself after that and had to be shot.
And then those people sent Nathan back to the orphanage. Every place he went, he would do something to get sent back.
“Which place did you like best?”
“That one with the ranch and this one,” he says, “about the same, I guess.”
But Nathan never tells me what his real name was.
“But why not?” I beg, “I cross my heart and hope to die, stick a thousand needles in my eye, I won’t tell.”
“The Calders wouldn’t like it,” he says.
“But is it a secret?”
“It might hurt their feelings.”
After that, the drought breaks. Dark clouds bump each other along the upper air, fat raindrops tap-dancing down the streets, marching into culverts and thirsty creeks, steam rising from the hot tar road.
Nathan and I make a run for it from the culvert, where we were crawdad fishing with safety pins and bacon. We make a dash for it past the tumbleweeds driven bouncing against the fences, past the faces at window and porch screens gazing out gratefully at the longed-for summer rain.
By the time we get close to Nathan’s house, we’re so wet and giddy, we decide to stay out and play in the rain, then go back and catch more crawdads. All arguments are forgotten. The happy toads and soaked pink earthworms are coming out. But they’re clang-clanging the back-door bell, which meant, Come home! Come home! Come home right now!
On Saturdays, we go to the Kid Show at the Inwood Theater. It costs twenty-five cents and we’ll be there eating popcorn and candy and running up and down with other kids until we get picked up at dinnertime. There are cartoons, serials, newsreels, and a feature film, and we sit behind teenagers to watch them make out with their dates, which is not easy, because the older ones sit up in the back row. We move around, seeing which ones are best. Finally, we get behind this one couple, a girl with bleached bangs and a guy with a ducktail. He moans and groans and tries to get into the seat with the girl, and she moans and groans and squeals, “No, Bobby-Ray, no!” It is very exciting.
“Nathan, do you think I’m pretty?” I ask.
But then Nathan goes running up into the balcony and starts dropping things on them and on me, and we wind up getting thrown out of the theater. The manager says he has “had it with this sort of thing.” He calls Nathan’s mom, and when she comes to pick us up, she is really mad. She won’t speak to Nathan all the way home. We sit in the backseat, and all the way home, Nathan rocks himself back and forth and back and forth, and he puts his face out into the wind just like a dog.
After that, I don’t see Nathan out in his yard or at his clubhouse for a long time, and none of the other kids are seeing him, either. I go to the Calders’ front door and peer through the screen a few times, but never do see him. Mrs. Calder comes out and says Nathan is being punished and cannot come out to play. The next day, she says the same thing. I’m afraid to ask how long it will be, afraid he’s not even in there, afraid they’ve already sent him back, and I will never see him again.
I never ask Mama, because she doesn’t like Nathan anyway, and she starts saying things to me about how I should invite some of the little girls in my class over to play, or how I need to make more new friends. But instead, I get interested in the books in the bookshelf, where Daddy showed me how to use The Book of Knowledge. Then Mama starts complaining that I always have my “nose in a book.”
And Daddy starts sitting in the living room in his bathrobe all the time again. No one will tell me anything. There’s no one I can ask about anything.
Snow White
My dime-store Snow White costume is carefully folded in an overnight bag for Halloween at Granny’s house this year. Mama and Daddy are going out. Daddy doesn’t like Granny’s house, so Mama’s dropping me off there.
There’s always something going on at Granny’s house. Aunts and uncles and cousins drop in or stay over at Granny’s house, having just driven in from some flat, dusty small town, miles of two-lane blacktop away—Granny’s sisters, Granny’s friends having drinks, neighbors playing cards, and sometimes even Papaw’s other family, who wear funny dark clothes and have beards, and who are never there at the same time as everyone else. We hardly ever see them.
I run in and hear Granny talking on the phone on the porch about different horses, calling them by name, as if the horses were friends of hers. She’s sitting with a blond woman, and when Mama comes out to the porch, the blond woman gets up and goes out, leaving her drink unfinished and her lipsticked cigarette burning in the ashtray. A radio is on, blaring horse-racing results.
Granny looks at me. “You’re getting so tall! We’re gonna have to put a brick on your head if you don’t watch out!”
Mama says it looks like the two of them were sitting on the back porch drinking and throwing money away all afternoon.
Granny says, “I’m not hurting anyone!” and walks away into another part of the house. We hear her singing, “I don’t want to play with you . . . you’re just a little tittle-tattle-tale,” then moving on to the one about “You won’t see me anymore, sliding down your rain barrel,” then the next of many old school-yard songs she sings in her deep trembly voice, often looking right at me, as if telling me something I should already know.
But I am not a tittle-tattle-tale, never have been one, knowing already from neighborhood kids, from Mama, and from everything else that a tattletale is the lowest thing you could be, so why does she sing that song to me? I didn’t tattle when Bob Lynn shot his BB gun at Nathan from across the yard, a thing breathtaking with wrongness, we all three knew, and were awed at his being so enraged that he was willing to do something so wrong. But that was between the two of them, the three of us.
I didn’t tattle when the Breard boys tied me to a tree and stole my Raggedy Ann, or when George tried to show me his thing, or when Granny let me get into bed with her, or anything else. All that was between me and them.
But what if something was so bad, worse than a compound fracture, that it had to be told? Would a person have to keep that secret even if it went on eating a hole up inside of them and warping their entire life, even affecting the lives of other people in their family over all the years? Would a person be a traitorous tattletale if they let that thing with all its damage out of themselves and into the world to do more damage? Are there things that won’t go on into forever being untold?
And what if the things are told? Is that the end of it? Or might that be just a new beginning of a whole other cycle of telling and retelling and damage to this one and that one—and then this one and that one have to go on spreading the damage, until it’s a thing that never ends, but having been started who knows how long ago, decades, centuries—it just goes on and on and it seems we humans are helpless to stop it. And you yourself are helpless to stop doing your part of one way or another passing the evil of that thing on and on?
Mama leaves, saying, “And don’t you let h
er get into bed with you!” as she gets into her car.
“Okay, Dear, okay,” Granny says as she goes back in. I sit on the front steps, watching Mama’s Cadillac drive away up Beverly Drive, hearing Nona’s radio through the kitchen window playing Amos ’n’ Andy, then she and Granny are talking and cooking and laughing in there while Granny plays solitaire on the kitchen table.
Papaw takes me on an errand down to the Dallas Morning News, where he works. We enter through the basement and watch his cartoonist friend speed-draw cartoons for the next day’s paper, and I think of Daddy’s cartoons, which he draws fast like that. Papaw loves the newspaper, and he especially wants to show me the huge inky machines that turn out the papers, so I can see it all happening. All the way back, I ask Papaw over and over again how I can get to be a cartoonist for the paper, too, but he just keeps shifting in his seat, clearing his throat, and going, Ho-ho-ho-ho, ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho!
When we get back, I’m excited about tagging along with Oliver and his friends for Halloween, but they don’t want to take a little kid like me off to their party somewhere for bigger kids to have fun among themselves.
I watch Oliver from across the kitchen. He’s as tall as a grown-up now, graceful, gentle-seeming, with thick wavy hair. His dark eyes seem to have a sweetness in them, and yet a distance.
One of his friends has small and watchful eyes, and his initials are the same as mine. I try to get this friend to talk to me, but he’s hurrying out the door and won’t look at me. I hear them all say they’re coming back later to change clothes. Then I have this great idea of a way to show them that I am bigger and smarter than they think I am. I know how to be one of the boys.
I go back to Granny’s desk for paper, and I make a cartoon drawing the way Nathan would do it, a long thing and a short V-thing with a line up the middle. It’s just the kind of thing the boys in my neighborhood always giggle at. Then, laughing to myself at my clever prank, I fold this piece of paper, put Oliver’s name on it, and leave it at the back door, where I know he’ll come back later, pick it up, unfold it, and see my little pencil cartoon joke. He will see that I am wise to boy talk. I think this is a good joke.
Then I forget all about that. I run up the stairs, take out my Snow White costume, get Granny’s nail scissors and cut out the eyes and the mouth of the dime-store painted cheesecloth and paste mask so I can see better, and so later I can put candy into the mouth without it getting frayed and gooey, or at least not so much.
I dance around the room, pretending to be Snow White in the dark woods, imagining the “Who is the prettiest?” magic mirror, the Wicked Witch, the Seven Dwarfs, the apple, the curse, and especially the long sleep waiting for the prince to come to see the beautiful girl asleep in the forest. I like the part with the kiss at the end, when the princess wakes up.
I go downstairs and find Granny made up as a witch. The sofa bolsters sit up in costumes and wigs, rubber masks looking crookedly over at me, at the door a giant jack-o’-lantern Cleveland carved with a gap-toothed grin just like his own, and wicker baskets of sugarcane sections and homemade candy apples all ready for the trick-or-treater kids.
Granny’s her funniest self, singing, whistling, joking around with me and with Nona in a way that’s not what a person usually expects from a grown-up, even a grown-up you might turn around and see down on the floor at the checkout stand in the grocery store, looking for something down there. Then leaving, she would cackle and whisper in your ear that she liked to look up that checkout woman’s dress to see her panties and her fat legs under there.
Everyone in the family rolls their eyes when they talk about Granny. But everyone does laugh a lot at her house.
The moon is low and glowing orange through the trees, night falling as I go out by myself to trick-or-treat. Papaw follows me, as Granny told him to do, but then he wants to go back to the house. He finds a group he knows, tells me to follow them, to stay with them, then leaves me alone to tag along with these strange people. I follow first this group, then another group, but I don’t know them. I’m not part of them. I’m not part of anyone now. At first, I am scared, but soon I like it.
Soon I am running through shadows stretching deep and dark between houses, pretending to be part of each group, following people I don’t know, up and down the street, Trick or Treat! Trick or Treat!
I tie up the skirt of my costume so I can be more quick and invisible in the dark. It’s a game of being on my own, not even being the Girl, but being me, a wild thing, magical and bad, wishing to belong but enjoying not belonging, in and out of bushes around the lit-up houses lining the long cathedral of giant elm trees with branches arching and meeting high above Beverly Drive, treetops lit from beneath all up and down the blocks, scampering ghosts and goblins slipping across connecting streets from house to house, the carved pumpkins, flickering candles, dopey smiles, evil grins.
People give out homemade cookies and fudge, store-bought candy and sticky popcorn balls. People invite you in to see their kittens, want to give you a kitten to take home. But you cannot take a kitten because Granny does not like animals at her house—she says animals are nasty.
Here in Highland Park the houses are closer together, and the kids are tamer than out where our house is, where we trot across moonlit stubble fields like a nervous pack of dogs, the boys carrying stuff for soaping screens, egging cars, papering houses if no candy’s left out. Treats for us or a trick for you!
When the trick-or-treaters thin out and mostly go home, I walk up and down the street, feeling it can’t be over yet, that something exciting has to happen, that something more is out there waiting to happen, but porch lights go out one by one, and the street goes dark. A group of older kids cross the next block over, where a streetlight glows, making their shadows stretch out long and wicked as they walk along. They don’t see me. No one sees me, and no one calls me in.
I’m Snow White alone among clutching branches in the deep woods, branches curving into claws reaching out to snatch me. I see a witch’s face in the leaves; then I see a demon’s face looking as if it knows me and knows my fortune. Many faces seem to come around me, watching, following, knowing something bad about me, getting too close to me, until I jump back onto home base at Granny’s lit porch and look back. But then all I can see are moths and flies foolishly flapping around the hot bulb.
Looking up to overarching branches, now shadowy, I see another face near where the streetlamp shines on the leaves, evil around the eyes, evil around the mouth, even evil around the nose and ears, but something in this demon’s eyes seems to be my friend. I look and look, can’t take my eyes away from its gleaming eyes, as if something is about to become clear to me.
This has been the best Halloween ever, new freedom, new power, new omens of life being exciting and mine to hold in my own hands, to take to heart. It’s going to be MY life. Mine.
That constant ongoing inquiry at the back of my mind about what’s it going to be like to grow up, what’s life going to be like as it becomes really mine—a question at the back of my child mind that seems to undergird and surround everything: What will it be like? How will it be?
The overarching elm trees, the dancing and comical-scary flitting and dancing ghosts and goblins, the soft Texas-October cool breezes, the adventure of being alone out there among the shadows, the low orange moon—it’s all a fantastic adventure and I am strong and good in it.
I hear the voices of Granny and Papaw in the living room, where they’re listening to the radio. She still has her makeup on, her drink in her hand. It seems Granny’s wicked witch act was the hit of the neighborhood and all the kids came here more than once.
I go up the stairs. It’s late, but I’m not tired. My clothes feel gritty. I take everything off. I scrub my face and arms and legs with a wet washrag and put on my nightgown without bathing. Time to go to bed, but I’m wide-awake, and all the grown-ups are busy somewhere else.
I grab the wrinkled, velvety, fraying paper bag, dump my candy
loot onto the floor, divide it into piles, then start eating the caramels first, the dark ones and the light ones, unwrapping the sticky cellophane, until everything seems sticky. I take a handful to the bedside table and sit on the turned-back bedspread, chewing them and wishing Nathan were here to enjoy this with me. I hear the crickets outside, the sound of the radio downstairs.
Knock knock knock knock knock.
Oliver bursts through the bedroom door, stands there looking at me. There’s something wrong with his face.
He steps in and closes the door quietly behind him. He stands looking right at me, speaking right to me for a change, but his voice is angry, his eyes are dark, and he’s holding a piece of paper, the same piece of paper I drew on earlier.
I had forgotten all about that. I must have wanted to tease him into having to deal with me. Now he’s here, holding the paper out, shaking it at me.
“Did you do this?” His anger seems over-done, like it couldn’t be real. This might be a little game.
“Yeah, I guess so.” I start to laugh.
“This is so dirty! This is so low! This is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen!” he goes on. “How could you have even drawn this, much less given it to me? You are disgusting, you are just plain bad.”
He crumples it up and puts it in his pocket.
He seems serious. I know it’s bad, but surely it’s not all that bad. I did not expect this. I’m caught. We’re alone in this room together, something is about to happen, and I’m caught.
“I’m going to show this to your mother and to everyone, show them how bad and disgusting you are. Unless you do exactly whatever I say.”
This does not scare me. It’s the sort of thing kids say.
He’s coming toward me diagonally across the room. The moment freezes as I see him coming toward me and coming toward me across the room diagonally again and coming across the room again, and again, at this point where I could still put a stop to this, because something seems funny about this.
Hap and Hazard and the End of the World Page 19