I followed him up the front walk and up three stairs to the porch, and he lifted the enormous, rusted horseshoe knocker on the front door and let it land with a heavy thud. We waited. I watched snowflakes touch down on the Explorer’s windshield and instantly melt. The knocker squeaked as he lifted it again, but then, from somewhere deep in the house, came a woman’s voice, “I hear you, I’m coming.”
Her footsteps padded near and Vernon edged back until he was practically hiding behind me. “Who’s there?” the woman called.
I looked over to Vernon, waiting for him to respond. He had the look of a dog who’d strewn trash through the kitchen and knew he was about to be punished. “It’s your granddaddy,” he said at last, weakly.
“Who?”
“Vernon Wallace.” He kicked the porch concrete. “Your great-granddaddy.”
The door opened a couple of inches and a woman’s face appeared, eyebrows raised, hair wrapped in a towel above her head. She was in maybe her early fifties. Through a pair of oversized glasses, she took a long look at Vernon, sighed, shook her head, and said, “Granddaddy, what’re you doing up here in the wintertime?” As he cleared his throat and began to respond, she said, “Hold on, let me get my coat.” The door closed and for a half minute Vernon painted hieroglyphics with the toe of his old shoe in a pyramid of drifting snow, looking suddenly frail and ancient. Exhaust panted from the Explorer’s tailpipe out on the street, and I could make out the hard-rock bass line rattling its windows but didn’t recognize the song.
After a moment, the door opened again and the woman stepped out and joined us on the front porch, hair still tucked up in a towel. Over a matching pink sweatsuit she wore a puffy, oversized, black winter coat, and her feet, sockless, were stuffed into a pair of unlaced low-top Nikes. She gave Vernon a big, friendly hug and said, “I love you, Granddaddy, it’s good to see you,” and then turned to me and said, “Hi there, I’m Darla Kenney,” and once I’d introduced myself she said, “Well, it’s good to meet you, I appreciate you bringing Vernon by.” She turned back to face him and crossed her arms. “What you been drinking tonight, Granddaddy?”
He flinched slightly but didn’t respond.
“Listen,” she said, “I love you, but I ain’t got no money. You know my whole situation. You’re gonna have to stay with your friend here, ’cause I can’t just invite you in.”
Vernon nodded deeply, unable to meet her gaze. “I was just hoping we could spend time together,” he said, growing sorrowful.
“We can!” she said. “But not tonight. I got all kinds of shit to deal with tonight. I can’t even get the damn car started. You got to learn to call people ahead of time so they know you coming.” She softened. “How long you gonna stay in town for?”
Vernon shrugged. “A week or two?”
“Okay, then. Look, you give me a call tomorrow, or the next day, and we’ll go for a drive, we’ll play cards at Calvin’s. He know you’re in town?”
Vernon shook his head.
Darla looked past us, to the Explorer out on the street, its motor revving, Chris Henderson behind the wheel, slapping his hands on the dash and crooning to himself. “That your friend?” she asked me.
“Yeah. That’s Chris.”
Darla tugged her coat closed and fought with the zipper. “Hey, listen,” she said. “I got cables. Think I can get a jump?”
*
Ten minutes later, Chris was shouting instructions to me, banging under the hood of Darla Kenney’s ’84 Lincoln Continental with a wrench while I pounded the gas and jammed the ignition. Is there any sound more full of frustration and futility than a car that won’t start when you turn the key? Click-click-click-click-click. All I could think of was Lauren Hill’s dismayed expression in the bar when she’d first seen me.
“Okay, cut it!” Chris shouted. I felt his weight on the engine block as he bobbed deep within. A ping and a clatter. “Now try.”
Click-click-click-click.
“Cut it!”
I heard Chris disconnecting the jumper cables, and then he dropped the hood with a magnificent crash. “I’ll tell you what’s happening, ma’am,” he said to Darla, who stood in the street, looking on, still in her unlaced sneakers and coat with a towel on her head. “Your battery cable’s a little frizzy, down by the starter relay. We get this in the shop, it’s nothing—ten minutes, you’re on your way. Tonight, though, no tools? Ain’t gonna be easy.” He passed her the jumper cables and put a consoling hand on her shoulder. “I’m really sorry. Usually I can get anything moving.” I was touched by his level of kindness—if this was how sweetly he treated a woman he’d just met, it was hard to imagine there was anything he wouldn’t do for his friends.
I climbed from the car and joined Chris and Darla. Vernon was sitting in the Explorer, keeping warm up front, scratching off lottery tickets.
“Well, it was nice of you to try,” said Darla. She looked back and forth between us. “How do you guys know my granddaddy, anyhow?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer—I felt it might incriminate Vernon (and me) if I explained that we’d bonded over a flask of whiskey on the Greyhound bus. Instead, I gave her a less comprehensive version of the truth. “Well, we met on a Greyhound bus once; we were row-mates.” The word “once”—tossed in there—made it seem like this was years ago.
But Darla saw through it. “Oh, okay, when was that?”
“Well. Tonight.”
She weighed this for a second. “Is he staying with you guys?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think he was saying something about the Y.” The way my awesome surprise had gone over with Lauren Hill, I’d probably end up in the next bunk.
“I stay with my brother,” Chris piped up. “But we got a cot at the garage, right around the corner. It’s heated. I mean, that’s where we work. Shit, he can stay in my room and I’ll stay on the cot.”
“We’re not gonna leave him on the street,” I said. I meant to be reassuring, but realized a second later that my words could be taken as an accusation.
Darla toyed with the clamps of the jumper cables in her hands; the metal jaws, squeaking open and shut, looked like angry, puppet-sized gators shit-talking back and forth. As little as she seemed to want to deal with Vernon, she also seemed aware that he was her responsibility as much as anyone else’s, and she wasn’t ready to ditch him with two white kids he’d met an hour before. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “He can’t stay at my house, and I got no money to give him right now. But I’ve got a tenant that owes me four hundred fifty dollars—I was gonna stop there tonight anyhow. We get some of that money together, I’ll give my granddaddy half and put him up a week at the Front Park Inn.”
Me and Chris nodded. “That’ll work,” I said. Fuck the Y—maybe at the Front Park Inn there’d be an extra bed for me.
Darla went to the Lincoln, heaved open the back door, and tossed the jumper cables on the floor behind the driver’s seat. She turned back toward us. “Can I get a ride over to this house with you guys? It’s really close, like ten, fifteen blocks from here. Larchmont, just the other side of Lake Drive.”
“Ain’t no thing,” said Chris.
I asked Darla if she wanted to get dressed first, at least pull on some socks, but she was already climbing into the backseat of Chris’s Explorer and sliding over to make room for me. “We’re just going and coming right back,” she said. “Come on, hop in.”
*
The snow kept falling. On the way to her tenant’s house, Darla filled me in on a few things while Chris blasted music up front. It both irritated and charmed me that he kept the radio going max-force no matter who was in the car with him. Even when he’d stayed with me in Chicago all those weekends, every time we were in my truck he’d reach over and crank the volume. Vernon rode shotgun, dozing, the dwindling spool of lottery tickets in his lap.
Darla had four children, she told me. She’d had the same job—quality control at a metal-stamping plant—for almost thirty y
ears, and as she was careful with her money, she’d been able to buy homes for each of her children in nearby West Buffalo neighborhoods. “Nothing fancy,” she said, “but a roof over their heads.” One daughter had split up with her husband two years before and moved to Tampa, Florida. Darla rented out one half of their house to a friend from work, and the ex had stayed on in the other half, though Darla had begun to charge him three hundred bucks a month in rent, which was more than fair, she said, and less than what she could get from somebody else. But her daughter’s ex, whose name was Anthony, and who was, overall, a decent, hardworking man, had fallen behind—he still owed her for January, and now half of February. It was time for her to pay a visit, Darla said.
She coached Chris through a few turns. We crossed a big four-lane road, and beyond the neighborhood deteriorated, making Darla’s street look regal by comparison. Every third house was shuttered or burnt out. On a side street I glimpsed four guys loading furniture out of a squat apartment building into a U-Haul trailer. “Okay,” said Darla, “take this right and it’s the first one on the right.”
We pulled up in front of a tiny, ramshackle house with cardboard taped over a missing window and its gutters hanging off, dangling to the ground. Still, the dusting of snow softened its features, and there were hopeful signs of upkeep—Christmas lights draped over a hedge by the side door, and a pair of well-stocked bird feeders, swinging from low branches in the front yard, which had attracted a gang of sickly but grateful-looking squirrels.
“I’ll be back in a couple minutes,” said Darla, stepping gingerly down to the snow-filled street. She closed her door, picked her way across the lawn to the side of the house, knocked a few times, and disappeared inside.
Chris’s cell phone rang and he answered it and had a quick, angry spat with his older brother. He’d explained to me that he’d been in hot water with his brother all month. His brother had a rule that anytime Chris boosted a car he was supposed to get it immediately to their shop to be dismantled (or at least stripped of its VIN number) and resold. Chris admitted that he had a habit of keeping stolen cars for a while and driving around in them to impress girls. A couple of weeks before, another guy who worked with them had landed a cherry-red PT Cruiser in Pittsburgh, and Chris had whipped it around Buffalo over Super Bowl weekend while his brother was out of town. His brother found out, of course, and had been hounding him about it ever since. Now he seemed to be giving Chris grief for driving the Explorer; I could hear his brother on the other end of the phone, shouting at him to bring it back to base. “Fuck that motherfucker!” Chris shouted, hanging up and slamming his phone on the dash. “Who the fuck does he think he is?” To me, there was something ecstatically rich, appealing, and sonorous in someone who acted so gangsta but sounded so Canadian; at the same time, I could see in the rearview mirror that Chris’s eyes had gone teary, and I felt a guilty and despairing tug of responsibility for dragging him around town and sticking him deeper into his brother’s doghouse.
The shouting roused Vernon from his mini-nap, and without missing a beat he resumed his dedicated work scratching off the squares of each lottery ticket. A heaviness had settled over him, as though he understood that he’d become a burden on his great-granddaughter and other people in his life. He inspected a ticket after scratching it off, sighed greatly, and let it slip from his fingers. We were like some sad-sack version of the Three Musketeers—loveless, homeless, and, if Chris didn’t patch things up with his brother, soon jobless.
In the front yard of the house next door, a band of ragtag little kids wrestled in the snow and hurled snowballs at parked cars and each other, shouting, “I’ma blast you, nigga!” The oldest of them, a boy around ten, was trying to rally the rest of them through the early stages of building a snowman. I powered my window down a few inches so I could hear his pitch. “Start with a giant snowball,” he said breathlessly, as he worked on packing one together, then placed it on the ground. “Then we keep rolling this thing, and rolling it, and rolling it, until it’s as big as a house, and then we’ll have the biggest snowman in all of Buffalo!” The other kids dove in to help him, and they slid around the yard, accumulating more snow, then breaking off chunks accidentally as they pushed in opposite directions. Everyone shouted instructions at everyone else: “Roll it that way!” “Get those Doritos off it!” “You’re fucking it up!”
Lauren Hill had been about the same age—nine or ten—when her dad was killed by a drunk driver. She’d told me the story in the most recent letter she’d sent me—her mom had appeared at the park where Lauren was playing with her friends and pulled her away and told her the news. Even though that had happened in summertime, I couldn’t help but picture a fifth-grade Lauren Hill building a snowman with her neighborhood pals, her mom galloping up, crazed and wild-eyed, and dragging her away to a sucky, dadless future in a grim apartment complex near the Detroit airport, populated by creepy neighbors and a steady stream of her mom’s low-life live-in boyfriends. When you first got involved with any girl who’d been punctured by that kind of sadness, I’d learned, you had to be extra-cautious about flooding them with goodness and light. A gentle and steady kindness appealed to them, but too much love straight out of the gate was uncomfortable, even painful, and impossible to handle. I felt like a fucking idiot for coming to Buffalo and freaking Lauren out.
“Hey, Vernon,” I said, leaning between the front seats. “Did you ever get married?”
“Yes I did. Wanda May. Fifty years we were married.” He paused, passing a scratch-off to Chris. “I think this one wins a free ticket.” Then, to me, with a sudden touch of melancholy, “She died in 1964.”
“Damn. That’s way before I was born.”
Vernon slipped his whiskey bottle out, touched it to his lips, and peeked back at me. “You want some advice?” he said.
“Definitely.”
“You should marry this girl you came to see. Marry her right away. Tomorrow, if you want. You don’t know how much time you get with someone, so you might as well start right away.”
“The problem is, it’s not up to me. She gets a say.”
“It’s more up to you than you think.”
I let that sink in, watching the kids in the neighbors’ yard. Their snowman’s round trunk had quickly swelled from the size of a soccer ball to the size of a dorm fridge. It took all of them, pushing and shouldering it together, to keep it rolling across the lawn. Finally they ran out of juice and came to a stop, slumping against their massive boulder of snow, tall as the oldest boy. There seemed to be two opinions about what to do next. The boy in charge wanted to go down the street and recruit his older cousin and some of his cousin’s friends to keep pushing. But one tiny girl pointed out that the snowman had already gotten too big to add a middle and a top. Also, she suspected that if the boy’s cousin and his friends glimpsed the half-built snowman, all they’d want to do is destroy it. “We made it, we should get to knock it down,” she said.
Vernon passed his bottle to Chris, who took a long gulp and passed it back to me. I drained the last of the whiskey down, and watched as the kids gave their big, round heap of snow a pair of stick arms, then collaborated on the face—two deep holes for eyes, a Dorito for a nose, and, strangely, no mouth.
By now, Chris and Vernon were watching them, too. “You want some more advice?” Vernon asked.
“Yes, I do.”
“Okay. Don’t outlive your wife.”
The oldest kid pulled off his red winter hat and plopped it on top of the snowman’s rounded head, just above the face, and at last the whole crew of munchkins stood back to silently admire their handiwork, reverential and proud as Boy Scouts at the raising of a flag. It was surely the saddest, fattest, strangest, and most beautiful snowman I’d ever seen.
After a few long moments, there was the sound of voices, as Vernon’s great-granddaughter Darla banged her way through the side door of the house she owned. The towel on her head had been replaced by a black baseball cap, and she was tr
ailed by two others in heavy winter coats with their hoods pulled up. Her appearance seemed to somehow release the kids in the neighbors’ yard from their spell. The oldest boy let out a mighty cry and charged the snowman—he plowed into its shoulder, driving loose its left arm and a wedge of its face, before crashing to the ground. The other kids followed, flailing with arms and feet, and even using the snowman’s own arms to beat its torso quickly to powdery rubble.
Darla and her two companions crossed the yard toward us.
Vernon turned to me and Chris. “That’s how long I was married, feels like,” he said, eyes blazing. “As long as that snowman was alive.”
*
We took on two new passengers—Anthony, the ex-husband of Darla’s daughter who owed Darla all the back rent, and his shy, pregnant girlfriend, Kandy. They squeezed in back with me and Darla and we circled around the block and headed back the way we’d come. Our next destination was a Chinese restaurant where Anthony worked as a dishwasher, on the east end of town, not far from Lauren Hill’s bar. Anthony told us that his car was dead, too; apparently, one of the few operational vehicles in all of Buffalo was Chris’s Explorer, which he’d driven off the lot of a body shop in Rochester the night before.
Anthony and Darla continued a conversation they must have started in the house. Anthony—dark-skinned, small and compact, with a thin mustache, roughly forty years old—spoke softly but had a thoughtful, commanding presence. He was explaining why he hadn’t quit his job, even though he hadn’t been paid in a month. “Here’s the thing about Mr. Liu,” he said. “Last winter, business got so slow, sometimes there was no customers in there, he could’ve sent me home. But he knows I got bills, and I’m scheduled to work, so he gave me the hours and found shit for me to do. You know, shovel the parking lot, clean out the walk-in cooler. Sometimes he paid me just to sit on a stool in back and watch basketball. Now that he’s in a pinch, business down again, how’m I just gonna walk out on him?”
My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays Page 3