“Oh yeah, we’re doing a project thing at school, um…about the postal service.”
Mom smiled and handed me the bound letters. Before she closed the door, the postman waged a long, sharp look at me, as if a warning to me to convey that neither snow, nor heat, nor gloom of night, nor Lew Hoagie’s rain could stay this courier from the swift completion of his appointed rounds. Nor even Jane. I stood in the hallway as Mom’s words sloshed in my ears where my tears were hiding. The postman turned and disappeared.
“Your dad and I talked about it, and we decided that it’s okay if you ride your bike to school, Sug. BUT, the first time I hear that you’re late for class…” Mom kissed the top of my head as she dashed back to the kitchen. “Here’s your lunch and a quarter. The mower gas tank is full, too. You all right, Sug? Lord, have mercy, what’s in the sink?” I couldn’t answer. “What happened to your records, Sug?”
“Lilyth,” I mustered, teetering back into the kitchen as the front door closed on the vanished postman.
“Oh, it’s fine, Sug, Lilyth duddn’t mean it bad. I’m sure it was an accident. She’s a nice girl. It’s fine. I’ll wash ’em off for y’Sug.” Mom dried my eyes.
My mom was wrong. It wasn’t fine and Lilyth wasn’t nice.
* * *
I rode my bike to school, cataloguing all I wanted to tell Jane. My homeroom peers were rowdy, jumping around out of their seats, unsupervised because the new homeroom teacher hadn’t arrived yet, and so I palmed a stamp from the teacher’s desk where they were kept in the top-right drawer for writing to our congressman.
The smell of mothballs sent everyone to their seats. Mr. Totter, our principal, entered with a tall, exquisitely beautiful woman with long, wavy, brown-black hair.
“Lest you forget, children, the sooner y’all start acting like adults when no one is around, the sooner no one will need to be around to remind you that you’re not adults.” The conundrum of the principal’s cyclical reasoning was lost on us.
Smiling amiably, our pretty new homeroom teacher turned her attention to the principal, saying bemusedly, “Mr. Totter, well, if that’s not the tree falling in the forest!” He grunted and she continued to smile patiently at him. “I can introduce myself to my new class, thank you.”
But Mr. Totter stood his ground.
“Okay, people, as you know, Miss Flinch has gone to teach at the new Quail Valley Elementary School. And this lovely young lady is your new homeroom teacher, whom I’m sure we will all grow to love. I’ve advised her that any misconduct should be directed to my office immediately, so that her transition will be as seamless as possible. Any questions?” No one in the class responded; they just stared at him. “Good, oh, and lest you’ve forgotten, tomorrow is Halloween so no one gets into class without a costume, but I don’t want to see ONE piece of candy or gum, understood? Don’t hesitate to send for me if you need to, Lola.” Mr. Totter’s unctuous drone pattered to a close while the new lady thanked him and held the door open for him to leave already as he eyeballed her up and down.
I liked her way immediately. She was so familiar.
“Well, I will start off by apologizing for Mr. Totter’s introduction of me. I usually don’t go by ‘lovely young lady,’ but by my name. Y’all are welcome to call me by my first or my last, whichever makes you feel more comfortable. You can call me Lola or Mrs. Bradford.”
* * *
After school, I skulked around waiting for Mrs. Bradford until she approached an orange ’73 VW Vanagon, climbed in, and sputtered away. Then I pedaled my Sting-Ray as fast as I could, taking every shortcut, even the one past The Hole. I knew that if I was right, she had to make a stop before coming home, and if I was right, I knew where her home was. On Bentliff Street, I ditched my bike just as the orange VW Vanagon pulled into Jane’s driveway, and Jane and Mrs. Bradford got out and went into the house. I had known for sure where that van was going before it got there. I knew it. Mrs. Bradford was Jane’s mother. From then on, most of the things I learned about Jane came from her mother. Mrs. Bradford spoke of her daughter often, and because she went to the new school in Quail Valley, I was sure I was the only one in homeroom who knew who her daughter was.
Through the bushes, I watched the garage light come on and the door come up to reveal Jane placing paintbrushes in a jar of turpentine to soak off the pungent oil paints. She had a small canvas on her easel that was an entire field of green. The blades of grass in the foreground were defined with a tack-sharp clarity. And I wanted to play on a field like that someday—a field like Jane’s.
“You need fresh air, Two,” said mother to daughter. “The fumes from those oil paints can’t be good for you.”
“I guess, but there’s just something about the smell of turpentine that I like,” Jane protested a bit too loudly with her headphones on, gazing at her partially completed canvas from her cinder block stool.
“Well, keep the door open so you get fresh air,” said Mrs. Bradford before heading back inside the house.
I loved those headphones because they muted my world just a little bit, and at the same time amplified the most beautiful being I had ever seen. I knew I had to go home so my mom could fit me for my Halloween costume, but I wanted every possible moment with Jane. Her closed garage door was the only thing that would send me away. I spent hours watching Jane create, and something always happened to me in her presence. Jane was drugs. And she could completely reorganize my chemistry from across the yard. When the door rolled down, I headed home.
* * *
I stood stock-still, quilled on a chair as Mom adjusted pins all over Speed Racer.
“Hold your scarf out of the way, darlin’!” instructed Mom, gritting through a mouthful of straight pins.
“Are we too poor to buy him a new costume?” asked Lilyth, chewing the Cocoa Pebbles she kept waving under my nose. “Last bowl, punk.” I tried to take a bite and Lilyth pulled it away, causing me to jerk and get stuck by pins.
“His new homeroom teacher hasn’t seen this costume yet. Quit fidgeting, Sug.” Since last Halloween, I had outgrown the white pants and blue shirt, but Mom had hand-made my costume like she did all my other clothes—with enough seam allowance to give an extra size or two as I grew.
“Come over here, Lilyth, and help me pin your brother’s pants.”
“No, she’ll stick me!”
“Course she won’t, Sug. She’ll do no such thing.”
I recoiled. Yes, she would. I knew she would. To this day, I still have the scar from Lilyth’s experimentation with tailor’s shears on the thin skin of the inside of my elbow when I was two. When my parents found me bleeding from the fold in my arm and asked Lilyth what had happened, she simply replied, “I wanted to see if he’d bleed.”
“Lilyth, give your brother a bite.” Mom glowered at Lilyth.
Ignoring Lilyth, Steve McQueen sauntered into the kitchen with a half-chawed eight-track streaming tape and stared at Speed Racer on TV next to me.
“I hope that eight-track wuddn’t a good one,” said Mom as she rigged up her old Singer sewing machine.
I grabbed the eight-track and chucked it on the table, relieved it wasn’t Kevin’s “Free Bird” I’d rescued from the driveway the day of The Plank.
“Hope it’s good for something,” Mom added, looking up from the sewing machine.
It was.
I pulled the tape out in fourteen-inch lengths and cut them off. When I had a good bunch, I wrapped one end in Scotch tape, making a tassel. The smell of tuna casserole baking made my tummy rumble. Then my ears caught on fire as Mom started in again about Mrs. Bradford.
“Sug, your homeroom teacher called all the parents of her new students and gave me her number just in case. She said she lives on Sandpiper Drive, that’s right directly behind us across the ditch out back. Or, at least she will for a few more months; they’re having a house built in that new subdivision, Quail Valley, out on that new golf course. She said she has a daughter going to Quail Valley Elementa
ry, about your age.”
“Hey, Mom, how long does it take to build a house?” I avoided her gaze and kept measuring lengths for the next eight-track tassel.
“Depends, Sug.” Mom smiled more to herself, because I was still not looking right at her, for good reason. “Mrs. Bradford said that they hoped to be in their new house by summer.”
“So, how far till summer?”
“About forty feet, ya retard.” Lilyth could be counted on to bludgeon my quest for knowledge. “It’s probably right out back, ten feet down in that gorge of a cement drainage ditch. Why don’t y’all go take a good long look’n’ see if you cain’t find it underneath a crawdad, you moron.”
“That’s enough, Lilyth, y’all be kind to each other. Best friends forever, remember that, you two.” Mom repinned a section on my costume. “It’s still October, Sug, and summer duddn’t start till June…so about seven months.”
Dad came in with a pair of old flight goggles and handed them over to me proudly.
“Go, Speed! How about these for your Speed Racer costume? They’re my old air force flight goggles, virtually fog resistant, except under the most severe weather conditions, but they look like the ones Speed wears on the show, don’t they?”
“No, he wears a bubble shield, but these’re even better, Dad.” I slid out of my iron maiden Speed Racer costume so Mom could have at it on her two-hundred-pound black machine. I noticed the first thing she did was stitch up the Made with Love by Mom tag in my collar that had been dangling by a thread since last year when Lilyth tried ripping it out.
“Seedlin’, get out here!!” So, out I went.
My Grandaddy had been on the porch with a pencil and a single sheet of paper. I had wondered what he had been writing on it, and why it had taken him so long to fill up a single sheet. Maybe it was the dozen ponies at his feet that slowed him down, but I always knew that the lack of pace was almost always made up for by a willingness to hand over early an insight that I’d take with me for the rest of my life. He sat in his lawn chair right next to James’s empty chair, whose webbing looked as if it had had a bowling ball dropped right through it. Grandaddy leaned way back in his chair to ease a hand into his right front pocket and extracted that single sheet that now looked like it had been folded and unfolded and pocketed and unpocketed about a hundred times.
“James’s big ass broke the webbin’ so you gotta stand, but this only take a second. Mo’ ingredients go in the Boudin to feed my great-granbabbies. I wrote ’em down for ya. You gone have ya own, but these is mine, ta give ya idea what I’m talkin’ ’bout. That list there is the most important peoples in my life. On the left is what they do. On the right…who do it. You need a goddamn gardener, I don’t care, write it down. A momma for ya babies, write it down. Everything that you need for tha’ good life that ya either ain’t capable give to yaself or you don’t wanna give to yaself. Next to it, ya gon’ see tha name o’ who I found ta git it from. Now, I got a big list there, but you see you Mamau’s name next to th’ majority of ’em…That why she a unicorn. That the qualifier for when you ready to wife-up…you don’t quit lookin’ till you find one that right. List all the important people in ya life on tha left…but ya wife need ta fill more than half of ’em ’fore you chapel her up, hear me, boy? Don’t matter how many people on that list you got, so long as the one you plan ta wife-up more than half of ’em. Maybe one or two of them people gonna seem more important to ya early on, but know that some’a the least important peoples on ya list is gonna become tha most important later on. Plan for that shit. Don’t neglect today, but plan to please the person you gonna be when you’s old like ya Grandaddy. I plan that shit perfect with ya Mamau. Time’s right, you gonna know. Any damn mirror’ll show ya. Right one’s gonna do somethin’ with ya face. You gon’ try, but cain’t hide it. Now, you see that you’s tha last one? That why I call these porch meetin’s when everybody else inside. I pick you ’cause you ain’t the kind ta ever have nobody do his gardenin’ for him. I plant this shit in you ’cause I trust you gon’ take care of tha sprouts and hand ’em down proper. I ain’t gon’ be around, so it gotta be someone I trust. Put this in the Boudin and feed it to my great-granbabbies. Now get t’hell inside’n’ git t’bed fo’ ya Mamau come holler.”
* * *
“Two! Three! Five!” hollering out back somewhere over on Sandpiper Drive woke me up the next morning with a start, and I smelled autumn. I stared at the ceiling where all my World War II model airplanes were perfectly hung in various dogfight positions with fishing line, and I watched them gently sway in the humid Texas breeze. When Dad had time off from work, he and I had painted one of my bedroom walls white, one forest green, one celery, and the ceiling baby blue as a backdrop for a perpetual airstrike. My shelf held my favorite football, and race cars. Having been in the air force himself, my dad had a love of all things airborne and helped me to build squadrons of 1/48th scale World War II model airplanes to hang from my ceiling. Each plane was a piece of art. I knew every fact and spec of everything that flew in World War II. From fishing wire on I-hooks there hung in mid-fight two German Messerschmitts, two Focke-Wulf fighters, a gaggle of Japanese Zeros, Corsairs, a B-17 Flying Fortress, Hellcats, Spitfires, P-38 Lightnings, Thunderbolts, Douglas Dauntless dive-bombers, and others. My dad had used a hot sewing needle of Mom’s to strafe some of the airplanes, like machine-gun holes, and made them look like they were on the losing end of a dogfight. He pulled cotton into one-inch strands and blackened it, then added bits of yellow, red, and orange paint to create a fiery smoke that came out of the cowling of a shot and limping fighter. But my absolute favorite, the P-51 Mustang, had come loose and was now dangling by its tail in a sort of death dive, as if it had been shot down by a Messerschmitt, of all things. But the P-51 was the baddest thing in the skies in World War II. That Mustang put fear in the hearts of everything it came into contact with.
After I’d watched my reel of Jane on her trampoline, hidden everything in my Charles Chips can, and prepared her letter about seeing her at the football game, I stood up on my bed and restrung the P-51 Mustang’s wings to the ceiling and righted that Mustang’s trip of vengeance on its foes. It was Halloween morning, so I raced to school on my bike wearing a perfect Speed Racer costume, complete with helmet and goggles. Leaves were pretty much off the trees by then, but some still fluttered around me, joining the others to crunch under my tires. The eight-track Steve McQueen had mauled had turned into two perfectly constructed streamers on the end of each handle grip. I passed other kids on their bikes all in various costumes that were cool, but I was Speed Racer. I was always Speed Racer, from the earliest Halloween that I can remember.
As I left my bike in the rack outside school, police sirens were splitting my eardrums. Kevin tore past with his plank in the Firebird racing a ’70 Chevelle, followed by the cop car. Kids were still hooting and cheering when Mrs. Bradford appeared out of nowhere in front of me, dressed up like an Indian medicine woman.
“SPEED RACER! Did you bring a record?” The only thing I wanted more than to see Kevin race that Chevelle was to talk to Jane’s mom.
“Yes, ma’am, I did, ma’am.” But that was too many ma’ams for her to tell her daughter that I was cool. I had music that I wondered if Jane had ever heard. I tried to pull my records out of my brown paper lunch bag while holding the door for Jane’s mom and just barely missed accidentally letting it go too early. “I got ‘You ain’t nuthin’ but a Hound Dog’ by The King and ‘Sunshine Superman’ by Donovan.”
And Mrs. Bradford smiled that lopsided, smirky Jane way as we entered our classroom. “By The King, huh? So, you’re an Elvis fan, Mickey?” She plugged in the box record player that sat on a stool by her desk.
The classroom writhed with a monster mash of ghouls, characters, witches, and fairy princesses. Emmalyne was Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and Firefly was the bionic man, with circuits and wires coming out of his arm.
“So Speed Racer is the only one who brought a record
today? Mark my words, in a few years you’re gonna wish your teacher would let you listen to music in class.” Emmalyne raised her hand. “Go ahead, Dorothy. As long as we are all polite to one another, we won’t have to raise our hands.”
“Oh, well we don’t have any records at my house, Mrs. Bradford. My dad threw them all out when we got our new cassette tape player.”
“Shut up, Emmalyne, showin’ off yer daddy’s got money!” nipped Firefly.
“Don’t you see my blue gingham dress and pigtails? I’m Dorothy, stupid!”
“Okay, there, Mr. Austin. Well, Dorothy, let’s hope that your father at least gave them away and didn’t just throw out the vinyl with the bathwater.”
“Huh? Yeah, I think he did.”
“Well, class, we have two from Speed, and I brought one. Since we only have three, we can probably get to them all.”
Mrs. Bradford turned the lights off and placed one of the records on the turntable, with two of them above it waiting to drop.
“The first one is my daughter’s. It’s her favorite. It’s called ‘The Sounds of Silence’ by Simon and Garfunkel.”
The room got very quiet as we listened intently to the crackle of the needle waiting for the song to start. After a bit, most of the kids were fidgeting with their desks or each other. Except me. I was listening to what Jane heard. I was hearing The Silence Jane loved. I wondered if she had ever heard mine when she was jumping. Though it was barely audible, I could hear Mrs. Bradford singing along.
When I woke up, Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” was finishing as the bell jangled me back into the classroom.
“Mickey? You fell asleep?” I raised my head off my desk to see that Mrs. Bradford and I were the only ones left. “I think your ‘Hound Dog’ was the big hit, huh, Mickey?”
I didn’t even remember it playing.
“Mrs. Bradford, do you think I could trade you my two records for Jane’s ‘Silence,’ just for tonight?”
I already had my own, but I wanted Jane’s. I wanted to touch her “Silence.”
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