by Haven Kimmel
I had taken to sucking on gravel, which didn’t go over well with my sister. I couldn’t explain why I wanted to do it, but once a day, when I thought no one was looking, I’d go out and sit by the fence dividing our house from the Newmans’ Marathon station, gather up a handful of gravel, and stick it in my mouth. Sometimes I washed it off with the hose, and sometimes I just rubbed it on my shirt. I’d get it in there, move it around. Pea gravel makes a lot of noise in a mouth. It tasted exactly like rock. I’d see how much I could hold in one cheek, then fill the other, too, a game I had played with popcorn, marshmallows, and BBs. I might spit the rocks out one at a time, like watermelon seeds, or if I saw Melinda coming, I’d drop them all at once. This nearly always left a little trail of gravel dirt on my chin, which vexed Lindy no end.
One afternoon I was sitting by the fence, mouth filled with gravel, when a car pulled up I’d never seen before. It stopped right in front of my house. It wasn’t just a stranger’s car, it was a strange car — long and white and fabulous-looking. The horn honked, and I stood up a little and looked inside. There was my dad, driving.
“Hey, Zip!” he said, happy as could be. “Spit your rocks out and come take a ride with me.”
I left my gravel over by the fence and walked toward the passenger door. I didn’t even try to hide my whistle, or the shock on my face. This was a long, white Cadillac Coupe de Ville if ever I’d seen one, and it had red leather interior, and there was my dad, sitting down low in the driver’s seat, his cigarette arm out the window, wearing his new deputy sheriff aviator sunglasses. I sat down and kept sitting and sitting. I sank into the seat as if it were made of leather-covered Miracle Whip. The car smelled of cigarette smoke and something I’d never met before. I looked around and saw it: a little metal tub of air freshener, like strawberry-scented Vaseline.
“You buy this car?” I asked, as we sped off down Charles Street. The engine made absolutely no noise, and I was thrown back against the seat as if a team of carburetors had spooked. I was trying to imagine the look on my mother’s face when she discovered he’d purchased another vehicle, as he periodically did, and always to great surprise and peril.
“Nah, it belongs to my new partner.”
I glanced over at him but he was not the sort of deputy who gave anything away. I knew for a dead fact that this was a pimp car, and I couldn’t see how Dad was going to get by with it. The sheriff of Henry County, Joe Harris, a man I loved like the Great and Powerful Oz, did not cut anyone a piece of slack. He had once stopped a woman for speeding and noticed on her driver’s license that she was supposed to be wearing glasses. He reprimanded her and she said, “I have contacts.” He shouted, “I don’t care who you know, you get your glasses on!”
“Your new partner?” The car had electric everything, and in the midst of pressing buttons I ended lying completely down in the backseat.
“Yep.”
“Where’s Sam?” I’d been rather fond of Sam, because he was slick and a liar and always gave me presents.
“Gone undercover. Vice.” This was how Dad talked now.
“So who’s this guy?”
“Fella named Parchman.”
I raised the eyebrow. “Parchman?”
“Parchman Williams. Goes by Willy. Want to use the car phone?” He pointed to the floorboard. Sure enough, there was an old almond-colored phone sitting there. No cords attached to anything.
I picked it up and pushed some numbers.
“Who’d you call?”
“Julie.”
“What’d she say?”
“Same as ever.”
We drove out onto Highway 36 and sped up. I leaned back against the seat, watched the speedometer climb past 60, 70, 80,95.The wind rocketed through the open windows and I wanted to laugh out loud but that wasn’t really deputy behavior. My hair got all in my face and poked me in my eyes. I’d forgotten I had hair and vowed to do something about it.
“Got any scissors in this car?” I shouted over the wind noise.
“Nope. There’s a bowie knife under the seat,” he yelled back.
I shook my head. I’d taken knives to my hair before and it was nothing but a bunch of sawing.
We passed a county cruiser and my first thought was,This is it, we are finally going to jail, but the cop just flashed his lights and drove on by. Then we came up on a little old man in a Buick driving about forty miles an hour, and Dad slowed down, relaxed even further in the seat. I’d begun to think of old men as Raisins, and their wives as Raisinettes.
“You could pass this Raisin in about two seconds,” I said, wishing we were back to driving so fast it felt like space travel.
“Nah,” Dad said, tossing his cigarette onto the road. “We’re just cruising on a lovely afternoon.” He turned off the highway and headed back toward Mooreland.
“I won’t tell Mom about the ninety-five miles an hour,” I said, sticking one of my bare feet out the window.
“Your mom couldn’t care less about where you are or what you’re doing,” Dad said, just stating the facts. “She’s Mrs. College now.”
I didn’t say anything. We passed the house at the edge of town that set up a hard longing in me, but I couldn’t say why. My sister had such a house, too, at the other end of town. I turned and looked away from the house, at a field of beans just shooting up bright green, like a carpet you could walk and walk across. We passed the house where my sister’s friend Janet had grown up, and the patch of field with the lucky horse, then turned at the Masonic Lodge on Broad Street and Dad drove extra slow, as if hoping for someone to notice us.
When we pulled up in front of our house I saw that he was right — my mom’s little Volkswagen wasn’t there, and wouldn’t be there.
“You staying?” I asked Dad.
“Nope. Gotta return the car.”
It looked to me like a car that more than once had not been returned, but I didn’t say so.
Dad winked at me, pointed to the phone on the floor. “Call if you need me,” he said, then drove away.
I walked over and sat down, put the rocks in my mouth one by one. There was always the question of who would feed me, and somehow it always got answered. Rose’s mom, Julie’s mom, my sister. 33-55.
Like every other man I knew, my dad hated all black people and loved Bill Cosby. We had all of Cosby’s records and he was one of the few comedians who could make my dad laugh out loud. For a brief time Dad was also for Sammy Davis, Jr., but then he found out that (a) Sammy had only one eye, and (b) he was a Jew. A one-eyed Jewish black man who hung out with Dean Martin was more like a pet to Dad, so he gave Sammy up.
For a little while, a littletiny while, no one said that Parchman Williams was black, not even I said it and I’d seen the strawberry-scented Vaseline. Dad would come home in the evenings, or he would not come home, and he’d tell stories about himself and Willy, and Mom would laugh politely. Now as she read she made notes in the margins of her books, something she hadn’t done before. And she wrote in spiral notebooks, line after line of her beautiful handwriting, so I assumed she was being punished for something. Mom laughed politely and didn’t say anything about how much my dad and every other man in Mooreland hated black people, and I didn’t say it, and then one night it was announced that the coming weekend we were going to Willy’s house for dinner, and I was going to have to wear shoes.
My dad had gone to the special trouble of picking me up a pair of sandals at Grant’s department store. They were just flip-flops, but they were covered with denim, and had a daisy where the two straps met. They confused me. On the one hand they were shoes, my mortal enemy, and on the other, they were covered in denim, my dear dear friend. Then there was the daisy to contend with. I tried pulling it off but it was attached hard. I thought maybe I could ruin the daisy off. I put them on, went outside, and ran the hose over them, then stomped around. I made a mud puddle, stomped around in it, rinsed them off. A terrible thing happened: the flip-flops grew to my feet in a way that reminde
d me of my old cowboy pajamas, the way I could put them on and they were just cowboy-printed skin. These were shoes, and I loved them. I had to sit down on the swing and try to take the news in. If I could love these shoes, shoes with a flower on top, I was capable of pretty much anything.
That made me think about my hair, so I got on my bike and rode down to Linda’s Beauty Shop, still wearing the shoes. I thought I’d just take my chances. If Linda Lee noticed and said something, I’d not only throw them away, I’d maybe cut my feet off. I’d also give her daughter Laurie, one of my best friends, a chance to mock me, though that wasn’t really Laurie’s way. She was a cousin of the Hickses on her mom’s side (everyone but me was a cousin of Hickses, a sad fact), and she was just naturally funny about everything without being mean. I don’t know how it happened in that family that most everyone was kind and everyone was just flat-out screaming, falling-down funny, but it was. In my family if you inherited something it was bad hair and a big nose, and if you came from that particular holler in Tennessee, you got everything good, including being pretty.
Laurie was walking around outside with her dog, Pooch. Pooch was a little bit bigger than a Chihuahua, with a tail that curled over his back, and he ruled the town. He went where he wanted, when he wanted. He was like a dog with a pocket full of money and a group of powerful friends. Laurie spent half her time with him and half her time looking for him. She had a way of calling him that was a variation on his name — “Beee - ooo - uuuutch! Beee-ooo-uuuutch!” — that was so funny he’d come home against his will. He walked up to me and smelled my shoes, then wagged his curly tail. I thought to myself,Hmmmm. But Pooch and I naturally got along, so maybe he was being courteous.
“I gotta get this hair outta my face, Laurie,” I said, scratching Pooch’s head.
“You don’t hardly have any hair to talk about,” she said. I thought about saying, You haven’t seen it in a stolen Cadillac going 95 down the highway, but I kept that to myself. Laurie’s own hair was silky blond, wavy, and long. But that didn’t make me hate her. I didn’t hate her even though she owned one of the single most enviable pieces of stuff I’d ever seen in my human life: a fireplace made out of cardboard (with drawn bricks and everything) that got set up at Christmastime. There were cardboard logs and cardboard flames — pretty big ones — that lit up when it was plugged in. When I’d seen it for the first time last Christmas I couldn’t tear my eyes away until I was offered a bunch of candy.
“I doubt Mama can cut it today,” Laurie said, watching Pooch amble off down the street. “She’s got three sets and two perms, and a rinse later in the afternoon.” Hair came easy to Laurie, like nothing came easy to me.
I thought about it. I didn’t have long before we were going to Parchman Williams’s house, and between the hair and the shoes, I didn’t want him to get the wrong impression. I only had two other options:my sister, who was likely to stab me in the neck then blame me for it, or Susie’s Cut & Curl, on the other side of town. One didn’t go to Susie’s, even though she was so sweet. She dressed like the Grand Ole Opry and in fact bore a passing resemblance to Loretta Lynn. The more I thought about it, the more she had something of the heartsick miner’s daughter to her. But the reason one didn’t go there was because of Linda Lee. Linda could be funny, she could slap you in the face if you happened to convince her son to eat dirt, she could be terrible mean, she could give you a good dinner if you needed one, she could comb your hair too hard or just right. But you did not cross her. I knew this as sure as I knew not to steal one of my dad’s guns, though I was often and sorely tempted. Also Linda would cut my hair and let somebody else pay later, and I never looked a credit horse in the mouth.
“See ya, then,” I said, starting to pedal away.
Laurie waved good-bye, called out “Bee-ooo-uuutch!” and I about had to stop my bike for laughing.
At home I did the worst possible thing, something I did almost every day. I broke into one of my mom’s dresser drawers and stole from her collection of John F. Kennedy money pieces. I didn’t know how much they were worth, fifty cents, a dollar, something like that, but I knew they added up to a lemon phosphate and a bag of chips if I was starving to death. She collected them not the way my dad collected things — because they were solid silver or pewter or fired raw gunpowder or whatever — but because she had grieved so mightily over Kennedy’s death. She had been vacuuming when the news was announced, and she happened to be passing the television and could see that something was going on without being able to hear what it was. She turned off the sweeper, heard the news, and had to sit down on the couch before she fainted. I’d never heard her say that or anything like it before, that she nearly fainted. So I felt guilty some, every day stealing Kennedy’s face out of her little plastic bag of Kennedys, but not very much, because money is money. Also the whole thing, the sweeping and the fainting, had happened before I was even born so it didn’t count.
I grabbed a few moneys and hopped back on my bike and rode the opposite direction from Linda’s Beauty Shop. I felt guilty about that, too, but again, just barely.
“How much of a haircut will this buy me?” I said to Susie as she opened the door of her shop, handing her the Kennedys.
“Sit down, honey,” she said, in her thick Kentucky accent. Mooreland was absolutely nothing but hillbillies, but some of our flatbed trucks had arrived later than others. She barely glanced at the change, just put it in a jar on her counter. As Linda did, Susie cut hair in the front room of her house, which had been outfitted with tilty chairs and sinks and hair dryers shaped like UFOs. Susie tipped my chair back and washed my hair, and unlike Linda, she didn’t scrub at my scalp with her fingernails until I was certain blood was streaming away with the soap. When she’d toweled off most of the water, she held up pieces of my hair and said, “Whatchoo want me to do here?” with that same tone of hopelessness I’d heard my whole life. On the other hand, she looked in general as if her husband had run off with both her best friend and her coonhound.
“I don’t know. Just cut it,” I said. “I don’t like it getting on me.”
Susie sighed, and turned the chair away from the mirror, starting on the back. Tammy Wynette was playing on an eight-track player in the corner. I had that tape, too, and in fact, d-i-v-o-r-c-e was the only word I could spell backward and forward. Susie cut and cut, sighing, and at one point said something about giving me something “modern.” That meant completely zero to me. Then she turned the chair around, and I looked in the mirror.
I was speechless. Susie was speechless, though her eyes seemed filled with tears. I kept on saying nothing. Tammy Wynette got her heart broken a thousand times. Finally I swallowed. I looked exactly like a rooster. I said, “What do you call this haircut?”
“A Rooster,” Susie said, and wiped the tears off her face.
I rode to my sister’s little house, praying she was home. I prayed like this:Jesus, if you don’t make Melinda be home, I’m gonna make those forty days in the desert look like a cakewalk. Ithreatened the Lord. She was there all right, and when she opened the door, instead of saying, as she generally did, “What do you want to eat?” she said, “Oh my God, I’ll get the hat.”
I’d been the one to find the hat at Grant’s last winter and it was like stumbling on a pile of rubies. It was just a white yarn bowl, like a white ball cut in half, elastic around the rim, but coming from the crown, where on a normal hat there’d be a puffy ball, there wasa long red yarn braid. This was a hat that came with its own hair. I don’t know why it hadn’t been thought of before. In many ways it was better than my wig (which was a “fall,” and so held on with a comb) because the cats were less likely to steal it. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d seen my wig flying out the door in PeeDink’s mouth. Sometimes he just sucked on it and sometimes he tried to kill it. I think it was a combination of a rat and a baby to him. Of course, he had fallen out of many a tree, and so his relationship with a wig was bound to be complicated.
I
put the hat on as if it would save my life. Lindy said, “It’s awful doggone hot outside for that hat.”
“You got another suggestion?”
She studied me a minute. “What happened? Did you try to mow your head?”
“I’ll have you know this is a modern haircut, Melinda, called a Rooster.”
Melinda covered her mouth. “Did you go toSusie ?”
I nodded.
“Oh ho ho, oh this is going to be rich,” she said, sitting down at the kitchen table. She was filled with glee: a very bad sign.
“Linda don’t have to know.”
“Shedoesn’t have to know, and yes, she does. How many people do you think walk around Mooreland sporting the Rooster? Exactly one little idiot child. And could you tell me…are you wearing shoes? Is that a FLOWER?”
I stood up to leave. I swung my head around so my long, bright red braid nearly hit my sister in the face. She just batted it away, and as I slammed the screen door she was still tapping on the table with her fingernails, another of her signs of evil happiness.
On Saturday evening we got in the truck to go to Parchman Williams’s house. I sat between my parents and put one denim sandal on either side of the gearshift. I pulled my red braid over my shoulder so I wouldn’t sit on it. We drove out of town silent, Mom thinking her thoughts, Dad smoking. I for one was desperately trying to imagine what was about to happen. I figured the best plan would be for me to act like everything in my life was just black, black, black. Here were the black things I knew:Sanford & Son. “We was robbed! We was robbed!” Very funny.Good Times. Funny + disturbing. The dad in that show, for a reason I couldn’t put my finger on, reminded me exactly of my brother. He had the same uprightness and intensity; he flared his nostrils when he was vexed. I mean helooked like my brother to me, even, a fact I had not yet told anyone. Maybe I could say that, I could say, “Ah, of course, my brother is black.” Black people ate things but I didn’t know what. I could say, “This week at the Newmans’ I had my favorite breakfast, fried beef brains and scrambled eggs, and then afterward we went out and did black farmwork.” Black people wore clothes, but surely not the same ones I wore, and they lived in…that was it. They lived in tenements, andso did I. Sure, the Sanfords had a junkyard, but we had my dad’s shed. And okay, inGood Times the elevator never worked, but at our house we often didn’t have running water. I started to feel slightly more comfortable. Mom asked did I want to sing, and I said yes, I always said yes to singing. I meant to ask did she happen to know any Negro spirituals, but she chose “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” a good choice because it had two parts, and we ended up in a little vaudeville harmony that pleased my dad, although he never said so.