Jane Two

by Sean Patrick Flanery

  “How do I do that, sir, when I just tried to steal off ’em?” he said.

  “Miss Shelby!” Grandaddy called out, “Bring us a pen and paper placemat, will ya?”

  Miss Shelby rushed back to the table as if summoned by royalty, laid a placemat and pen on the table, then drifted back to the front door as a patrol officer finally showed up. I saw the uniformed officer walk briskly in through the front doors with his hand on his holstered weapon, then he called for my Grandaddy.

  “Fine, Macky, no need, go back ta business,” my Grandaddy responded without even looking up. “Now, what’s your name son?”

  “Lenny Frank, sir,” said the man.

  “You write, son?”

  “Yessir, a bit,” he responded.

  “Write this down. It’s three things you gotta do every day. My own daddy gave me these. Three easy shit little things and I promise you they’s gonna wanna keep you here at The Piccadilly Cafeteria. You ready?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Lenny, as he picked up the pen with his hands shaking like he was freezing to death.

  “Number one, you gon’ show up early.” My Grandaddy took another scoop of beans as he waited for Lenny’s pen to catch up. “Number two, stay late…and number three, volunteer for the hard shit. You do them three, and you already ahead of the whole field. You do those three every single day for that month, and they gon’ ask you ta stay and they even gone pay you. Now, you wanna know how to stop cleanin’ and move up in this company? One simple rule: For every dollar Mr. Jarman pay you here at his Piccadilly, you give him two dollar of value. You understand me? I come back here next month and you don’t work here for pay and I’ll know you’s lazy garbage. You lazy garbage, boy?” asked my Grandaddy.

  “No, sir, I’m not,” answered Lenny.

  “After I come back in three months, you still cleanin’ and not moved up, I know you just lied to me…You a liar, boy?” he asked the man whose hand still shook like it was diseased.

  “I’m not, sir,” responded Lenny.

  “Three simple things to tell a boss you’ll do, and you get any job in the world…and one extra if’n you wanna be a boss,” said Grandaddy leaning in toward Lenny, whose face was now down practically touching the placemat ready to write. “Shake my hand and get yourself home, you gonna be here shit early, son.” The man’s hand came up in front of my Grandaddy. “Ain’t no shake you don’t look a man the eye, son. You look him in the eye and you give him the truth’re you don’t shake at all. You give me the truth, boy?” my Grandaddy asked him. Lenny’s head slowly came up from pretending to write on the placemat. Two full eyes of tears and he offered my Grandaddy his hand. My Grandaddy scribbled on the blank placemat, stood up, shook his hand, and said, “Now get outta here, lemme finish my beans with my boy…you tell your momma you had good talk with Charlie and that shit gon’ change…but leave out the shit, you don’t curse your momma, hear me?”

  “Sir,” he said, and the man held his gaze for a moment and slowly walked for the door.

  “You get your second macaroni, son?” my Grandaddy asked me.

  “No, sir, I forgot,” I said.

  “Finish that green plastic sugar cube’n we’ll have Miss Shelby get you one ta go. Double macaroni don’t come around enough.” My Grandaddy turned and gazed out the window as Lenny walked across the Piggly Wiggly parking lot. “And don’t you tell your Mamau what we done today.”

  “No, sir, I won’t,” I promised.

  Lenny was working at The Piccadilly Cafeteria every single time I ate there until it got bought out by the ice cream chain. I wish I could control my emotions when it’s time to not have any compassion, like my Grandaddy did. He was cold and calculated, and he still had access to his logic and reasoning. But instead, my fists had a sort of physical Tourette’s when my emotions got the best of me. To this day, I don’t think I’ve ever struck someone in hostility without a tear in my eye. Where my Grandaddy was the definition of cool in those moments, I just turned into a vicious infant. In this way, I thought my Grandaddy’s rattlesnake analogy was a bit flawed, that the cool had somehow skipped my generation. Emotionally, my dad and my Grandaddy were both very different than me, or so I thought.

  I know how lucky I am to have had strong men in my life like my dad and my Grandaddy. But I was far too emotional to be strong like my father, and cried too often to be as tough as my Grandaddy. They did have a bit of rattlesnake, I thought, and I always wanted a little bit for myself. I had never seen either of them cry the way that I so often couldn’t help myself. But, there is always a moment in a child’s life when he realizes that his father is as big as life itself, but not actually larger. We’re all the size of life, and maybe my dad was just a more pronounced version. He didn’t take up any more space than I did, but he did it in a much more profound way.

  My dad shrank to a mortal size and I saw my lineage accurately defined the night we returned home from seeing snow for the very first time. It was soon after Lilyth’s return from being “away” and after she cut my tassels, ending our truce, and right after the trip that was intended to be a family reunion for Mom, Dad, Lilyth, and me. No mention was made of Lilyth’s baby Charlotte or the nuns. The endless drive back from the wonder of snow in Taos, New Mexico, put us in late to find my buddy Kim from next door slumped over my handprints in the cement step, crying. Kim had been feeding Steve McQueen for us and letting him out to do his business, and didn’t know what was wrong with him all of a sudden. My dog’s stomach looked like it had been inflated with a bicycle pump. Wheezing, Steve McQueen waddled stoically into the kitchen and his knees just kind of buckled at my feet. I knew something was really wrong. No Grunt came as I did not even try to stop the tears that showed up, seeing the look of apology in my dog’s eyes, like he was ashamed that he hadn’t run to the door and jumped on me like always. My legs buckled, too, and we met on the floor.

  My dad immediately slung Steve McQueen in his arms, told the girls to stay by the phone, and told me to get in the back of the car and hold Steve steady and calm so he could race us to the vet. My mom kept saying, “It’ll be fine,” and patting Steve’s head, nice dog, every time Steve released a brittle whine. She closed the door with tears in her eyes, her palm remained pressed flat on the glass until the car pulled away from her. As my dad and I drove, my dad kept assuring me we’d be at the vet soon, his voice steady as usual. My best friend never took his eyes off me as my dad drove and told me to be strong for Steve McQueen.

  “We’ll get him the help he needs, son. But you hold him tight, boy, and let him know that we’re right here and ain’t going nowhere.”

  I wanted my dad’s strength. I wanted my dad’s control. My dad spoke to me the whole way to the vet’s office, just like we were at the dinner table discussing dodging open field tackles. Steve McQueen had spent every single moment of his life with either me or my dad. I wanted my dog to know I was there for him just like I knew my dad was there for me. I wanted to be strong for Steve, but I was completely overwhelmed by the possibility of losing my best friend in the world. And that level of grief punctured my chest like a pointed helmet charging at me for an open field tackle. Where was my rattlesnake when I needed it? I needed to be cool for Steve, like my dad was. In his moment of pain, Steve did not need to worry about me, and see my chest heaving so severely that I could hardly get an “okay” out at each of my dad’s instructions. I was truly a child, but my dad was a man.

  “Almost there son, tell him we’re almost there.”

  And that was the first time I looked up from Steve. I left his eyes and caught my dad’s in the rearview mirror as he drove. He was still talking to me with the strength of a real man, but I saw that his eyes felt the same thing I felt. I saw his cheek twitching, the same way mine did as tears fell from his red eyes. And I could see him collect his heaving breaths before stoically throwing a sentence of strength back in my direction. I saw my dad that night, and he was no different than me. I saw his hand occasionally come up and
wipe away the flood of tears, but his voice never once acknowledged their presence. My Grandaddy was right about us all being the same. But he was wrong about there being no rattlesnake. There wasn’t no rattlesnake in either of them, there was maybe a couple scales and a fang in each. They cried, too, and they were the realest men I’ve ever known. I wasn’t a rattlesnake, because my mom and dad were not rattlesnakes. That was the first time I’d ever seen my dad cry, and it shook my core. He was not sure my dog would live, and it tore him to pieces that matched my pieces. He was my pillar of strength. We made it to the vet but Steve was already gone. As a courtesy, the vet pronounced him dead and ceremoniously removed Steve McQueen’s collar and prepared his body for burial, but I did not want to let go of him. My whole body could not stop crying and I remember clenching his collar to my face and inhaling my friend for the last time. My dad told me that all the years of loving him would speak far more eloquently than anything I could try and tell him now.

  “He knows, son.”

  And I let go of my best friend. It was well after midnight when we finally drove home with Steve McQueen’s empty body wrapped up in the backseat.

  And I remember there was a tall building just off the freeway whose top floors were completely engulfed in flames. My dad pulled off the freeway about a block from that blazing building as fire trucks screamed by. There was a police car sitting sideways in the middle of the street right in front of a House of Pies deflecting what little traffic there was at that hour. My dad pulled into the lot, told me to stay in the car, and walked over to talk to the cop. I wondered if any people had died in that building on the same night that Steve did. And I wondered what my dad was saying to that cop. When he came back, he reparked the car, backing it into a space in that empty parking lot facing that flaming building, and just said, “It ain’t time ta go home yet, you hungry?” I waited in the car until he came out of that House of Pies holding a large box. I climbed out and onto the hood as my dad reclined on the windshield right next to me.

  He opened that box to reveal a large orange pie and said, “No chocolate, pumpkin’s all they had left.” That night, we sat on the hood of his car and ate an entire pumpkin pie as we had one of the longest conversations I’ve ever had in my life with the fewest words. Around three in the morning, long after House of Pies had closed and the firefighters had rolled up hoses to go home to their families, I was slowly drifting off to sleep from the emotional exhaustion of Steve’s departing. I heard my dad say, “It goes by so quick, son…please tell me you’ll take care of it.” I took a minute to think about what he meant, although I knew I already got it. And as we pulled out of that parking lot, that same officer whose cruiser had been sideways in the street waved our car over and stuck his head next to my dad’s open window.

  “You know, I spent the last three hours over here just watching you and your boy, and I seen his tears. I think you already know you got a good one there, sir. But sometimes the young’ns don’t know till too late who their daddy is. All night long, only one car stop’n ask if they’s somethin’ they can do. That your daddy, son.” And then he offered his hand out to my dad, who shook it in kind. “Pleasure to meet another who don’t just keep driving by in a time of need. Y’all have a good night and God bless.”

  “God bless.” And we drove. He knew exactly who my daddy was…and so did I.

  “I will, Dad.”

  My dad and I watched the sun come up in the front yard, because it had taken us another couple hours to bury Steve. We put him right at the foot of the bean tree where he had always waited for me to come down. There was a Steve-sized circle of dead grass where he had been lying beneath me in that tree for years and that is where he lies still. Before I finally fell asleep that morning, I vomited up every ounce of pumpkin pie that I consumed.

  When I woke up later in the day, I found that Lilyth had already found a way to punctuate my grief in her own uniquely sociopathic way. Every bit of Steve McQueen was in the trash: his bowl, his chew bone, his blanket from my bed, his brush.

  “What, y’retard, don’t look at me that way, y’ingrate, I was being helpful. Mom!”

  “Oh, darlin’!” Mom came in from the garage followed by Dad. Lilyth burst into tears crying loudly, so Mom hugged her instead of me. “Aw, Sug, it’s fine, Lilyth didn’t mean it bad.” Dad looked bewildered and fatigued. I headed for my room.

  “Paul, fish the dog’s things out the trash, darlin’, will y’?”

  “Mickey blames me for everything! I didn’t kill his dog!” Lilyth wailed, tearing away dramatically to rush off to her room in hysterics as if she had been misunderstood. As she stomped past my room I saw her through the crack in the door. The hair on the back of my neck stands up even today as I recall the look of hatred in her eyes as she winked at me, dry eyed, and whispered with a smirk, “Your dog stunk up the house. I’m glad it’s dead.”

  I was powerless, immobilized by fury. She had been gone for months and home had felt safe and easy. Now I was right back to where I had been all my life, on guard, waiting for Lilyth’s proverbial shoe to drop.

  Steve McQueen had been my companion and guardian since I was a toddler. It had been this gargantuan Weimaraner who buffered the mail truck’s blow when I chased my toy fire truck that Lilyth had deliberately rolled into traffic for me to chase. Though I did end up in the emergency room that day, it was Steve McQueen who had taken the majority of the blow by putting himself between me and the oncoming vehicle. When Mom had left Lilyth alone with me in the hospital room that day to “keep me company” while she was out in the hall with the doctor, Lilyth had leaned in real close with that look in her eye, hissing the four most terrifying words a toddler could try and wrap his little brain around: “You stole my mother.” Lilyth, then age six, punctuated with, “Steve McQueen’s gon’ die, y’know, y’lil retard, all ’cause’a you.” Steve lived to protect me and never left my side. It was Steve who first revealed Lilyth for what she was. He knew. I don’t have a single memory from my childhood that Steve McQueen is not in. And it was Steve McQueen who helped me see other truths, like my true lineage displayed that night in that rearview mirror.

  Each time Lilyth elected to rend the fabric of my childhood with her fine-tuned sociopathy, I took a step back before going forward without her. I retreated further from my sister, learning to deploy strategic forethought before I would tell her anything at all, and I became more covert in my actions whenever she was watching me. Lilyth was the opposite of Jane, but truly a motivator to me. I credit Lilyth with my keen ability to spot a con-artist or a freeloader. Thanks to Lilyth I never did rely on a bully’s charity to not get my lunch money stolen, but I had also learned to behave as though absolutely anyone could potentially kick the shit out of me. Except that day at hole seventeen. That fight with Andy I wanted to neither finish nor start. That fight I have always been ashamed to tell you about. But here, you know, I had to tell you. And I’ve adjusted. I hope I’ve made my Grandaddy proud that he taught me right. Grandaddy’s Right, that is, according to The Law. And that he’d recognized ten corrections. Still, I could not hit my sister, though at times I wanted to hit her more than anyone else.

  Lilyth was my point of departure for understanding women, and because of that, maybe I was gun-shy and misunderstood the signals from other girls in high school, including Jane. Where Lilyth was lawless, Jane was flawless. Flawless, but a misunderstanding left unchallenged, nonetheless. Misunderstandings left unchallenged have wrought isolation between me and the people I care for on more than one occasion. And I hated that. When I was sixteen and my pal Eduardo was seventeen, he had me meet him at the Utotem to show me something “really cool” before heading off to college. He had been on every one of my sports teams. And although we were not best friends, we had each other’s back. I liked and respected him. He pulled up in a badass primered ’68 Chevy Nova SS and got out beaming, as I circled the car in awe. Man, I knew more about that car than he did. I saw that it had the highly revered 396-cub
ic-inch engine rated at 375 horsepower under the hood attached to the rare M-21 close ratio four-speed manual. We spoke about our dream cars just about every day in school, and this one was a fast and very rare bird for some small-town Texas boys. He told me that his dad had bought him two Pioneer #6905 6X9s for the back, a couple smaller Pioneer five-inch door speakers and a “blue light” Alpine in-dash stereo with a cassette player, and he wondered if I would help him install it in my driveway.

  “Hell, yeah!” I said. I knew that the angle of the rear window in that Nova would produce some killer acoustics. I circled the car, taking in every inch, and he finally said with a smile, “So what do you think?” I just looked at him and shook my smiling face back and forth knowing that he already knew the answer to that. I could see him crushing that four-hour freeway drive all the way to his college in Kingsville with that Alpine deck throwing out Zeppelin all over the I-59 South. I finally stopped gawking and pulled away from that gem, looked up at him.

  “How much?” I asked.

  Eduardo took a moment before his face just went blank.

  And he climbed into that beautiful Nova and slowly drove away from the Utotem—and me. I never heard from him again until I saw him at Firefly’s bachelor party years later. I asked him why he had left that day, and why he had never spoken to me since. He said, “Shit, Mickey, you just really hurt my feelings, man. I asked you what you thought about it, and goddamn, man, no one knew cars like you did, and you took a long time to answer, and when you did, you just said…‘It’s not much.’”

  “Holy shit, Eduardo. You’re wrong. I’ve run that scene in my head a thousand times wondering what happened that day, and I can even tell you how I’d planned to mount those 6905s on your back deck to project directly to the driver’s seat, or how that cam made that 396 lope. No, goddammit. I asked ‘How much?’” And I did. I really did. I figured his silence was just compassion for my Toaster next to his SS. Some lessons come early, and some come late. More compassion. Fewer misunderstandings left unchallenged.