“I ain’t upset. Okay? Now pour in the tomatoes first because you’ve got to cut them up some. I’ll help you open the rest of these cans.”
“I can do it.”
Vernon slowly opens the other cans with the can opener while Wesley stands back and waits. Then Vernon pours the tomatoes into a cooking pot. “Do you leave all the juice in there?” he asks.
“Yeah. That’s what this is, man. Soup. Now just cut them up some.”
Vernon cuts up the tomatoes, holding the knife by the blade and getting his fingers in the juice. “Looks like you wouldn’t mix all them juices together.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. It just don’t seem right.”
“Now, you got to . . . I’ll peel the potato while you cut up that cabbage. Can you cut up cabbage?”
“I don’t know.”
“Here. I’ll just do one slice. This cabbage is the secret of the whole thing.” Wesley cuts off a slice of cabbage, sections it, chops it.
“Who taught you all this?”
“That Mrs. Rigsbee I used to live with.”
“You going to live with her when you get out of that house?”
“Oh . . . I don’t know. I don’t know. I probably will until I get my job figured out. My career. You know. Then I’ll probably live in Myrtle Beach for a while. She . . . ah, she taught me about shaking people’s hands, too—looking somebody in the eye and shaking their hand.” Wesley lays down the knife, wipes his hand on his pants. “Like this. You walk into a room, see, and you see somebody standing over there that you want to meet. You walk up like this, look them straight in the eye, stick out your hand and get a firm grip like this, see, and say, ‘How do you do? I’m Vernon Jackson.’ Pump it a couple of times, turn loose, and that way you get along better in the world. Now, why don’t you go in there, walk back in here and do the same thing. Practice.”
Vernon looks over at the door. He doesn’t move. He stands, rocking slowly. “I don’t want to meet anybody. I already know everybody I want to know.”
“Well, I mean...” Wesley rolls his eyes to the ceiling. “Like, you might need another music teacher or something when I’m gone.”
“I don’t want you to go.”
“I got to go sometime.”
Vernon stops rocking.
Wesley feels funny. Why did he say that? He’s got a whole daddy, who lives with him in a house with four walls.
“You going to peel them potatoes?” says Wesley. “No, I’ll peel them. You know, you never know when it might be a good idea to meet somebody. Like what if we were having a gig and you had to meet somebody.”
“I’d just have to play the music right. I wouldn’t have to shake their hand no certain way.”
“You’re hardheaded, man.” Wesley is peeling a potato. He looks to see if Vernon is clouding up, if his eyes are getting bigger. They’re not. “But you’re all right.”
“I’m a killer diller,” says Vernon.
“Just pour that in there. . . . All of it, get it all. Now do the onions the same way. This will be good stuff. You won’t believe how good it is. There ain’t nothing better on a cold day. See, what gives it a little bite and makes it so good is the cabbage and the tomato, and then the onion makes it sweet and, man, it’s good stuff. It’ll be about ready when your daddy gets in. . . . Yeah, just go ahead and dump that in there. Right. Now, put it on the stove. I’ll turn on the stove. You just turn it to medium-high and when it starts boiling you turn it almost off so it just simmers for a long time. It’ll be ready when he gets in and then every day it’ll get better until you finish it, and by that time you’ll be tired of it, unless it goes real fast.”
“You’re a killer diller,” says Vernon. “You ain’t dull in your head.”
That night, just before lights out, Wesley and Ben are in their beds talking. It’s raining hard and lightning flashes.
“Vernon’s old man has got over thirty tapes of blues he’s recorded off old albums and stuff. That’s how Vernon learned to play piano. Maybe I can get you over there sometime. There were some good ones we listened to tonight. One was that ‘If It Looks Like Jelly, Shakes Like Jelly.’ Our version is a little bit too fast. And Vernon, you know, will say that. He’ll be standing around in the shop and his daddy will ask him to get something and he’ll be fumbling around in this tool chest over there on a table going, ‘If it looks like jelly, shakes like jelly...’”
“That’s what I think about Sears and them.”
“What’s that?”
“If it looks like a asshole, smells like a asshole, then you got to believe it’s a asshole. Nasshole. Nasty nasshole.”
“Did you know that Ted, the president, was a fighter pilot? Flew jets.”
“So what?”
“I don’t know. He just flew jets. I’ll bet that was fun.”
“There’s somebody in the hall,” says Ben.
The wood in the hall floor creaks, then creaks again. “Wesley,” calls a voice. It’s Carla.
“Just a minute.” Wesley gets out of bed, slips on his jeans, opens the door. “What is it?”
“You got a call at the front desk.”
There is a black phone on the table by the front door. It sits on the phone book beside a big desk calendar where the duty schedules are written. The receiver is lying on the calendar.
“Hello. . . . Yeah. . . . When? . . . Where is she now? . . . No, I, I got curfew, but I can come in the morning. First thing.”
Back in his room, Wesley asks Ben, “You think you could drive me somewhere in the van?”
“What you mean?”
“My grandma’s sick. She had a heart attack. She’s in the hospital.”
“It’s after curfew, man. We locked in here.”
“Yeah, but I . . . I need to get on over there to see how she is. She probably needs to talk to me.”
“You have to wait till tomorrow, unless you want to jump off the roof or something. Why don’t you just wait till tomorrow? It’s raining. Hard.”
“Oh, I don’t know. She could die. She’s pretty old—I told you.” Wesley needs to do something for Mrs. Rigsbee—get on over there and see her no matter what, even if he has to dress up like a doctor and sneak in the hospital.
“I ain’t going to give you no ride, man. The van keys is locked up and I ain’t leaving this place during no curfew. Not to take you to no hospital. But you do what you got to do. I got to go to the bathroom.” Ben throws back his cover and gets out of bed.
Wesley looks up at the water stains on the ceiling and thinks. She might need him more right now than she ever has in her life. He could go down and talk to Mrs. White, see if she’d say okay, or he could just leave through a window or something, borrow Vernon’s daddy’s truck. He’d say okay.
Ben comes back in.
“I could go out through the window there—then jump or climb down,” says Wesley.
“You’re crazy, man.”
“I’m going. That rain is easing up. Can I borrow your raincoat?”
“Well, I guess. Don’t leave it somewhere. I ain’t got but one.”
“I’ll go down that downspout on the side.”
Wesley puts on his denim jacket, and then Ben’s raincoat—a very old navy blue London Fog. He pulls up the window, unlatches and opens the screen. The rain suddenly starts coming down hard again. Lightning flashes.
“Why don’t you go to bed, then get up in the morning and go like you supposed to?” says Ben. “She ain’t gon’ die.”
On hands and knees Wesley crawls out onto the porch roof, stands, and looks back in at Ben. His hair is already slicked down wet.
Ben latches the screen, lowers the window not quite all the way and sits down in his chair. The rain spatters in through the open window. He reaches to close the window and as he lowers it he hears a low, metal-moaning sound, then sharp raspy scraping sounds. He pushes the window back up. Something bad is happening. He opens the screen, climbs out and stands on the p
orch roof, looking for Wesley. The rain is cold through his shirt.
Wesley is not in sight—gutter nails are popping out of the gutter one after another on toward the front of the house and on toward the back of the house as the entire gutter system begins to move, as a piece, out and away from the house. Then it stops. Lightning flashes and lights up Wesley, out about six feet from the house, on top of the long metal downspout. He is looking down. Gutter nails are holding somewhere toward the front and back of the house.
Ben steps over to the edge of the roof, near Wesley. “Hey.”
Wesley looks. Lightning flashes. Ben and Wesley’s eyes lock. In Wesley’s eyes is a great hunger to be over there where Ben is.
“Don’t move,” says Ben.
“I ain’t.”
“I told you not to do it.”
“I know you did. That ain’t important now.”
“There ain’t but a few nails at each end holding this whole thing onto the house. You better not move.”
“I ain’t. Don’t worry. Can’t you get something to pull me in?”
“Well, yeah. But I don’t think I’m going to have time. Like I say, you hanging by about two or three nails. Maybe if you get a good tail wind you’ll blow back in.”
The rain suddenly slows almost to a stop.
“Well listen.” Wesley is breathing hard. He allows himself to look down again. Far below, almost three stories down, the quiet light from the front porch reflects from puddles in the grass. “Maybe the ground is soft.”
“You gon’ be going pretty fast when you hit. You might just drive on down to the dry part.”
“Stop talking. Do something.”
The rain picks back up.
“Maybe you could kind of pump yourself on back toward the house.”
“I ain’t moving, man. Go get something to pull me in. Now.”
“Pull you in? Like what?”
“I don’t know. Oh, God, help me get back over to that house.”
“I can get them extension cords and lasso you.”
“Okay. Anything. Just do something. Now.”
“Or I could kind of pull these gutters back in and hope you’d come with it.”
“Don’t touch those gutters. Get the extension cords.”
“Okay.” Ben starts back in through the window and says to himself, “Now we gon’ hang his ass.”
Ben crawls under the bed and unplugs one of the three or four extension cords that are around somewhere in the room. There’s another one in the end of this one, or is that the lamp cord? No, that’s an extension cord. That’s the lamp cord. Okay, two. Now. As he slides back out from under his bed, a blast of thunder tumbles and rumbles away, far away, and dies to the sound of the rain picking up again. Under Wesley’s bed, Ben unplugs another extension cord from the wall and then from a lamp cord. He slides back out from under the bed, stands, then moves the dresser out from the wall and gets the last one. He plugs them all together and heads back out into the rain. Wesley hasn’t moved.
“You want me to make a lasso?” says Ben.
“Yes.”
“Why don’t I just throw it to you.”
“I can’t catch it, Ben. My God, I can’t move or this whole thing will fall. Can’t you see that?”
“How do you make a lasso?”
“Ain’t you ever seen one on TV?”
“Well, yeah, I seen one, but I ain’t ever seen how to make one.”
“You got to make a loop. And then put a loop through that. Make a little loop, tie it, and then run a loop through that. Oh God, please save me.”
“Okay, let’s see.” Ben starts working with the cords. “Wait a minute,” he says. The rain has slowed to a soft drizzle—in the dark. “This ain’t going to work.”
“Why not?”
“When I get you lassoed, and start to pull you in, they’ll just unplug.”
“Tie the goddamned extension cords together, Ben.”
“Hey, watch it.”
“Just tie them together.”
“Give me a minute.”
“I don’t know whether I got a minute or not.”
“You’ll be all right. I told you not to do it. Okay. Here we go. Okay, all set. Can you kind of stick your neck out a little bit, so I’ll sort of have a knob to aim at?”
“Ben, lasso me. NOW.”
Ben steps to the edge of the roof. Lightning flashes, but it seems to be far away. The rain has stopped. Drops of water fall from the big, old oak tree in the yard out behind Wesley and down onto its hard, gnarled roots.
Ben tosses the lasso. It misses. He pulls it in, tosses, misses. He slides his toe out over the edge of the roof, and on the third try the lasso lands around Wesley’s neck.
“Now, pull me in, but do it slow, Ben.”
Ben pulls. There is a metal-groaning sound toward the front of the house, and instead of moving toward Ben, Wesley is slowly moving away. A nail pops from a gutter somewhere.
Now there is no slack in the cord.
“Turn loose,” says Wesley. Ben does, as Wesley’s weight starts him picking up speed on the inevitable quarter circle arc toward earth. Sections of gutter break loose and fall along beside him.
Halfway down, Wesley turns to face the ground. Now he is going as fast as gravity will allow and his movements to somehow change his fall into a jump have no effect on anything. Lightning flashes, and Ben sees, trailing in the wind, the tails of his raincoat, wet blond hair, and an extension cord—all streaming out behind this white boy as he heads on down toward the ground below—toward those hard roots, as a matter of fact. The gutters, and Wesley, face down, with his legs still tight around the downspout, crash. Then all is still in the wet night. The drizzle falls. Thunder rumbles far, far away. The porch light shines out across the quiet mess. Ben watches from above. There is no movement at all. Then just as Ben turns to head downstairs there is movement. He see Wesley’s right arm rise slowly into the air. The fingers snap once, then again, then again. The arm drops back.
Downstairs, Ben is pounding on Mrs. White’s door. The message for the week is BLOOM WHERE YOU’RE PLANTED.
Chapter 17
It’s the next morning and Mattie Rigsbee is propped up in her bed in Intensive Care. A person walks unsteadily into the room. The head, completely wrapped in white bandages, is wearing mirrored sunglasses.
Lord have mercy, thinks Mattie. It’s something come to get me for good.
The head speaks. “It’s me. Wesley.”
“Wesley? Lord have mercy. What in the world happened to you?”
“I fell off BOTA House and broke my face and some ribs.” Wesley can see that Mrs. Rigsbee looks pale and drawn.
“How?”
“I was trying to come see you—coming down a downspout after curfew.”
“You know better than that, son.”
“Well, no, I don’t. It’s all right. Ben told them I was after a cat. How are you doing?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Somebody said a heart attack, but I don’t know if that’s right or not. Did you break anything?”
“My nose and my cheek in three places and two ribs and I got maybe a concussion and some cuts and they can’t hold the bandages in place unless they wrap my head. The ribs hurt worse. I have to breathe deep so I don’t get pneumonia. And man, that hurts. I’m on some medicine I’m not supposed to walk around with but I wanted to get down here to see you. They don’t guard you very much up there. I wanted to get a wheelchair but I couldn’t find one. I always wanted to ride in one of those things.”
“How about your teeth?”
“They’re fine. They’re all there. My partial is okay. That thing could of got drove up in my brain. Here’s something I brought you.” Wesley hands Mattie an oatmeal cookie.
“Oh, good. It don’t seem like they believe in food around here. Hide it in that drawer. Thank you. Well, Lord have mercy. Don’t you hurt anywhere?”
“Not much, now. My ribs, like I said. I did hurt. I snapped my
fingers until my hand gave out. But they gave me something for pain. I got a room upstairs. I’m supposed to be in bed. They’re going to give me some tests or something.”
“Why don’t you sit down over there.”
Wesley sits in a chair against the wall. “Are you hurting in your chest or anything?” he asks.
“Not really. Did Elaine tell you about it? Is she out there —and Robert?”
“They’re out there. She said congestive heart something. They said I could come on in for a couple of minutes. They said they don’t get but five minutes every hour. I probably better get on out.”
“Wait. Let me tell you what happened. Alora was over at the house and I just started coughing. And couldn’t stop. I’ve never had anything like it. It was like nothing you ever seen in your life. It took all my breath and I couldn’t stop and what it was was congestion of the heart—fluid, like you hear ‘congestive heart failure,’ you know. I think that’s what they finally figured out. I guess they know.”
“Does it hurt?”
“No, not now, not bad. There’s some soreness from the coughing, and I do feel pretty wiped out. Did Elaine tell you what I did last night after they got me up here?”
“No ma’am.”
“Well, they give me something to take, I don’t know what it was or why for, but it sent me out of my mind, got me thinking I was home, and down the hall out there was the kitchen and you and Elaine and Robert were down there trying to cook some fish. And y’all didn’t know how, so I had to get up to show you because y’all were fussing about it, so I did, and the nurse came in, put me back in bed, and put up these sides to the bed here—all four of them—and I tried to explain to her but she wouldn’t listen. So I ended up crawling over the railings, and they all come in here and got mad at me. I pulled all these tubes and things loose. It’s just wiped me out bad. Whatever it was they gave me did all that to me—sent me out of my head.”
“You look kind of wiped out.”
“Well. The doctor said he wanted me to get a long rest after I get out of here—some place I could rest.” Mattie closes her eyes, doesn’t open them right away.
“You okay?”
“Oh yes.” She opens her eyes. “I always wanted to play the violin. For a long time I wanted to, then I stopped wanting to.” She closes her eyes again. “Oh, me, me, me.”
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