America

by E. R. Frank

“I must have done it when I was looking for something in my drawers.”

  “You messed it all up.”

  “I’m sorry, America.”

  “Why weren’t you more careful, man?”

  “I don’t know. It was an accident.”

  “If you don’t want to play, why don’t you just say so?”

  “Hmm.”

  “You suck.”

  “You’re really mad at me.”

  “You fucking suck, man.”

  * * *

  They get on me in group.

  “How long has he been here, anyway?” some kid goes.

  “America, do you want to answer that?” the group lady goes.

  “Do you want to eat shit?” I go.

  “That just cost you rec room tonight,” she goes.

  Who needs to watch Ping-Pong, anyway? I go to the main hall instead. I walk up and down, looking out the windows, watching the last of those damn leaves dripping off those trees.

  * * *

  I’m leaning my head way over the back of the chair. “Whatever.”

  “You seemed pretty invested in finishing this game last week.”

  “I said, ‘whatever,’ doc.” Those little gray soldiers are aiming straight for my upside-down face. Every last one of them.

  “You were so angry when you saw I’d gotten our piles mixed up.”

  “So?” They look like they’re getting ready to shoot my eyes out.

  “So you’ve changed your mind.”

  “Yup.”

  “You don’t care about the game anymore.”

  I sit up. “Nope.”

  “I guess this means we’re not playing today, then.”

  “Well, congratulations, genius. You guessed right.”

  Then

  SHE CAN’T COOK anymore, but Browning says no problem because nine is plenty old enough to learn how to fix a good meal. So I read out the recipes, and Browning and me follow the directions, and Mrs. Harper lies on the living room couch and calls out the parts they don’t write down anywhere.

  “Squeeze out the vegetables after you shred them. They go watery, otherwise!” she’ll yell. Or she’ll go, “The back left burner smokes up some! Be careful it doesn’t set off the fire alarm!”

  “The best chefs are men,” Browning likes to say.

  At school, Liza says that’s true. “Make me some cookies,” she says. “M&M chip.”

  “Maybe,” I tell her.

  “Just the green ones. The green ones make you horny.”

  She still reminds me all the time of Brooklyn. Sometimes I wonder about him and Lyle. I wonder what they would think of my naked lady lighter and Liza. She could beat down Lyle, I think, but maybe not Brooklyn. Me and her get into a fight when I start to catch up to her at reading, and she pins me down, but instead of smashing my nose, she kisses my mouth.

  * * *

  I like the way Browning takes care of things. I like the stuff he tells me, too. He talks to me like I’m grown, and everything.

  “Mrs. Harper tells me I need a job,” Browning says sometimes, after we’re done reading, and we’re just hanging out, squished together in my bed. “She doesn’t know taking care of her is a full-time job, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I say. He turns his head sideways so I can start up his cigarette with my naked lady lighter. I’ve lost count of how many I’ve had, but between him smoking and me watching the flame, we use up lighters pretty fast.

  “She doesn’t know how hard it is looking after an old lady.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “There’s lots of stuff to do.”

  “My point exactly,” Browning says, inhaling. “Like shopping and cooking and taking her to doctor’s appointments and keeping her clean and whatnot.”

  “Yeah,” I say, feeling sorry for him.

  “It’s not like I have a personal life anymore, either,” Browning says. “I haven’t had me any in forever.” He sighs a stream of smoke toward the foot of the bed.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  He laughs. “You don’t even know what I’m talking about,” he says.

  “Yes, I do,” I tell him. “You’re talking about sex.”

  “What do you know about sex?” he tells me.

  “I’ve got a girlfriend,” I tell him, thinking about Liza.

  “Oh, yeah?” he says. “You two getting it on already?” I shrug. I think about her lips on my lips. “I got a sore muscle,” Browning says. He rolls onto his stomach. “Give me a rub, man.” I sit on his butt and rub the back of his neck. “A little to the left.” He taps his ash into an empty beer can on the floor. “Yeah. Right there.”

  * * *

  Liza and me cut school and go to the 7-Eleven. Liza steals gum, and then we stand by the Dumpster outside. Liza chews her gum for two seconds and then takes it out of her mouth. “You want some?” she asks, holding it up.

  “Give me a new piece,” I tell her.

  “Take this one.”

  “It’s nasty,” I tell her. “Give me a fresh one.”

  “Don’t be a baby,” she says. I take it from her and pop it in my mouth. “Kiss me,” she says, and she puts her mouth on mine. The next thing I know, she’s got the piece of gum back. She blows a bubble with it. “Can you blow a bubble inside a bubble?” she asks.

  “Can you?” I go.

  “We know I can. Can you?”

  “We know I can. Can you?”

  “Stop it, America.”

  “Stop it, America.”

  “Shut up!” she yells. She hits me in the chest. I try to hit her back, but she punches me, and I run. She chases me.

  “Get off!” I’m yelling.

  “Don’t run away!” she shouts, but I keep going, and when I turn around to see if it’s safe, she’s on her knees in the 7-Eleven parking lot, crying.

  “What’s the matter?” I call. She keeps crying, and I want her to stop, so I get next to her and try patting her head, and then I end up hugging her, and she hugs me back. She smells like dishwash soap.

  * * *

  When I get home, Mrs. Harper’s on the couch downstairs with the TV off.

  “You’re in trouble,” Browning tells me from the kitchen.

  “You left out of school today,” Mrs. Harper announces.

  “No, I didn’t,” I say.

  “Don’t you lie to me,” Mrs. Harper says.

  “I thought we had a half day,” I tell her.

  “Your lip is bleeding,” Mrs. Harper says.

  “No, it’s not,” I say.

  “America,” Mrs. Harper says. I catch sight of the workroom behind her. There’s only a couple of angels on the shelves, and the paint lids have crusty rings all around their edges. “Do you realize that you are in trouble?” she asks me. Then she closes her eyes. “Browning,” she says. “Take care of it, please.”

  * * *

  I help him chop vegetables to go with the roasted chicken.

  “I don’t care if you cut school,” he says. “But Mrs. Harper does. If you piss her off too much, she’s going to get sicker. Do you want to make her sicker?”

  “I don’t care,” I lie.

  Browning sighs. “School will be better when you catch up all the way.” The rice starts to boil over, and he lowers the heat on the burner and takes the top off the saucepan. “We’ve got to get your reading on a higher level. More on a man level than a boy level. You’re still reading kiddie stuff.”

  I scrape a fork down the sides of a zucchini the way Browning showed me, to make fancy ridges in the slices. “Mrs. Harper’s magazines aren’t kiddie,” I say. “And I read chapter books in school.”

  “Yeah, well, our flash cards are kiddie, and so is that chapter garbage your teacher has you reading.”

  “Nuh-uh,” I say, even though it’s true.

  “And you’ve got to relax a little,” Browning tells me. “You’re too tense, man. It’s hard to learn when you’re tense.”

  “How am I going to relax?”

  Browning smiles
. “It’ll be another secret,” he tells me. “Because Mrs. Harper wouldn’t like it.”

  “Like what?” I say.

  He hands me a beer. “Try it,” he says.

  It tastes like the smell of his bad breath. I spit it right into the sink. Browning sighs. He pulls out his vodka from his special shelf, unscrews the cap, and hands the bottle to me. The little swallow I take burns my throat. I cough. Browning takes a bottle of Coke out of the refrigerator and mixes some of that in a glass with some vodka. “Try that.”

  It mostly tastes like Coke. “That’s okay,” I say.

  “Okay,” Browning says.

  * * *

  He gives me a vodka and Coke every night. After dinner I feel warm and lazy. It’s nice. It’s relaxing.

  “He needs milk,” Mrs. Harper says when she sees the Coke at dinnertime.

  “He drinks milk every day at school for lunch,” Browning goes, winking at me.

  Liza is jealous. “Bring me some,” she says. “Bring a bottle in your knapsack and then keep it in your locker.”

  I ask Browning, but he says no. He says if I get caught, it’ll make Mrs. Harper sicker.

  “Sorry,” I tell Liza.

  “Can you steal it from him?” Liza asks.

  “No,” I say.

  “Chicken,” Liza snorts.

  “Shut up.”

  “Lucky,” Liza says. “You’re so lucky.”

  * * *

  I’m in the middle of reading about an actor who’s divorcing from a lady who used to be the wife of a governor when Mrs. Harper tells me to stop. So I stop.

  “America,” she says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you remember Clark Poignant?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “What do you remember about him?”

  “He liked to mow his lawn in circles instead of rows,” I tell her.

  She smiles. “Yes, he did.”

  “Once I was supposed to be sleeping but I came downstairs, and he was watching our TV,” I tell her. Then I wait for her to be mad, but she keeps smiling.

  “The Home Shopping Network,” she says.

  “He liked those little cups. Those silver-colored ones.”

  “Pewter,” Mrs. Harper says. “They were pewter cups, and he always wanted to buy them.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Real meaning is in the smaller things,” Mrs. Harper says, real soft.

  I try to think of the very smallest thing. “He liked that tie clip they had, too.” I tell her. “The red, white, and blue flag one.”

  “Let’s watch,” Mrs. Harper says. She likes me again. I know it. I go to turn on the TV, but Browning comes in and reminds me I’ve got to wash dishes and take out the garbage.

  “If you bother her too much,” Browning whispers to me over the trash bag, “you’re going to tire her all out.”

  I can hear the Home Shopping Network from the other room.

  “Maybe she’s lonely,” I tell Browning. I want to say, I think she misses me a little.

  “Nah,” he says. “I doubt it.”

  * * *

  Summer school is the same as regular school, only it’s half a day, and we take field trips once a week. Billy’s mother is the parent chaperone for the Mount Everest IMAX movie.

  “You know,” Liza tells Billy while we’re waiting in line for tickets, “you’re a lot calmer when your mom’s around.”

  Billy smiles, and we let him sit next to us. We pick the highest row, and it’s a long, deep way to the bottom of the movie theater, with all these curving lines of red seats and dark seat backs and bobbing helmet-goggled heads. Once the movie starts, you feel real small and low to the ground one second, and then real huge and high in the air the next. This avalanche falls right on top of you, and as soon as you duck, you’re right back in your seat, and then you’re looking out across the whole world with snow all around and under you, and you almost feel cold, and you almost want to jump because it sort of seems like you could fly.

  “A bunch of people died up there all at once during this storm,” Liza whispers. “The air gets so thin, it makes your brain get dumb, and you can’t think right, and you walk right over the edge of those snow cliffs.”

  “Nuh-uh,” Billy says.

  “Yuh-huh,” Liza says. “And even if you live through it, the frostbite turns your skin black until it falls off. Whole arms and legs fall off. Bang. Just like that.”

  “Shut up,” I tell them, because I like being small and big and close and far all at the same time. I like the way the movie makes you feel like a little bug one minute, and like God the next. I like the way the clouds and the snow look the same, the way the spikes in the climbers’ boots and the red of their coats are as sharp as the glare of the sun on the ice. I like the way it makes me feel dizzy and safe, both at the same time, when they show us what that mountain looks like under our own feet and over our heads. I like it better than just about anything, and I want to watch it in peace.

  * * *

  “America says you stopped painting angels because you’re too tired,” Liza says.

  “Is that right?” Mrs. Harper goes. She’s all propped up on her pillows.

  “Yep,” Liza says. “That’s too bad, because me and America think you paint them really beautiful.”

  “Is that what you think, America?” Mrs. Harper asks. I shrug. I’m afraid Liza being over will wear Mrs. Harper right out and make her sicker, just like Browning’s always warning me. But Liza says old people need company sometimes, and then she just showed up on our cement rectangle and rang and rang our bell, even after I told her not to.

  “How come nobody calls you anything but Mrs. Harper, anyway?” Liza asks.

  “I happen to have a friend who calls me Sylvia,” Mrs. Harper says.

  “Only in letters,” I go.

  “Everybody calls you Mrs. Harper,” Liza goes. “Even Browning.”

  “I guess that’s true,” Mrs. Harper says, but then she doesn’t say why.

  “America says you don’t like him so much anymore because he’s dumb and bad.”

  “Liza!” I go. She’s not supposed to say that.

  “America is not dumb or bad, either one,” Mrs. Harper says.

  “Duh,” Liza says.

  “I never said that,” I lie.

  “It’s not true,” Mrs. Harper says. Then she looks at Liza, and she won’t look at me, and she points her finger at Liza, which she’s always telling me never to do because it’s low class, and she says, “You tell America that I always liked him, before, and now, and forever, and I don’t know where he got such trash from except it’s false and the filthiest lie I ever heard in this life.” Mrs. Harper puts her finger back into her hand, and sinks onto the pillow, and Liza opens her mouth to say something else, except Mrs. Harper sits up again quick, and points her finger out again straight at Liza and says, “And you tell America I love him.”

  “He’s right here,” Liza says. “You could tell him yourself.”

  But Mrs. Harper goes, “Good-bye now, Miss Liza,” and then she shuts her eyes.

  * * *

  We play baseball in the park. Browning can’t find an official team, but we collect kids.

  “Sure you can play,” Browning goes loud, whenever anyone asks. “Anybody who wants can play.” Enough kids start to join in that we have a game every afternoon. Browning refs and coaches.

  “Unspring that coil,” he calls out. “Eye on the ball, guys. Eye on the ball.” He gives a dollar for every home run.

  “Is he your father?” a kid asks.

  “You got it,” Browning answers for me.

  “You don’t look like his father,” a couple of kids say.

  “You don’t look stupid,” Browning tells them.

  New kids ask all the time. “That dude is cool,” they say. “Who is he?”

  “He’s my father,” I tell them, proud. “But I call him Browning.”

  I like catching pop flys and pitches. In the out
field, I like the beat of my feet running to get underneath the ball, and the line of the ball as it drops out of the sky right to me, and the sound of the smack and the almost sting on my palm when it hits my glove. At the plate I like crouching behind my mask with Browning standing by me, coaching, and telling me I’m good, and pretending I’m his.

  * * *

  “Listen,” Browning says after he pours me my vodka and Coke. “We’ve got a couple of things to talk about.”

  “Okay,” I say. “What?”

  “We’ve got to take more pressure off Mrs. Harper.”

  “What pressure?” I ask. Mostly, she stays in her room or watches TV on the couch. We do the shopping and cooking, and Browning helps her in the bath.

  “We can’t really talk about too much with her, you know?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “It’s better if you just leave her be. It’s better if you don’t wear her out talking so much.”

  “I don’t talk to her all that much,” I say.

  “Yes, you do,” Browning says. “You and Liza get in there and wear poor Mrs. Harper to the bone. That’s got to stop. You want to do right by her, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “But doesn’t she need company, sometimes?”

  “Yes and no,” Browning says. “I keep telling you about old people. Mostly they like to be left alone.”

  * * *

  I don’t want any pressure tiring her out too much, but still, when Browning’s out, I think about when Mrs. Harper laughed with the letter and when she smiled at me remembering Clark Poignant, and I think of things to do in her room.

  “You have certainly come a way,” she says to me after I turn off the vacuum cleaner. Browning is out shopping. “No more of that foul mouth.” She’s all small from underneath one of her scarves. “Catching yourself up in school. Taking care of chores.” She grabs my hand, and I stare at hers. It has way little patterns of way little lines curving over and over and over. Her skin looks like it would feel real rough and hard, like a lizard or alligator, only she’s softer than anything I ever touched. She is so soft that every time her hand brushes mine, I’m surprised all over again.

  “I’m blessed,” she says, “to have two men taking such good care of me.”

  When she says that, touching my hand with her softness, it seems like the angels are lined up all over again downstairs, and Brooklyn and Lyle never happened, and I never got sent away. When she says that, I feel like a balloon, bright and floaty and full.