Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley

by Ann Pancake

  “Oh,” he said now. “A friend of mine.”

  Then, to Janie’s surprise, he stretched out his leg and, squirming a little, wiggled the necklace out of his pocket. With great delicacy, his breath held, he laid it out across the yellow callouses of one palm.

  The chain part was thickish, with large links, a little tarnished. Hanging from it was a large artificial red jewel like a screw-shaped tail.

  “She’s gonna like it,” Janie finally said.

  “Mmm-hmm,” said Uncle Bobby. “I already know that.”

  THAT NIGHT WHEN she and Uncle Bobby got home at nine after riding around without even drinking, Nathan was sitting on the wall along his driveway. Janie pretended she didn’t see him, and Uncle Bobby really didn’t, but Nathan arced off the wall and strolled across the street. Without speaking, he took Janie’s hand and laid it on his cheek. Her limbs loosened. Maybe he was done with the stucco house. Maybe after watching it like he had last time, they would move on to something else.

  They did not. They stood again, bike between their legs, in that untraveled road between corn. The sky starless, the high summer clouds, invisible now, still pressing down heat. The house again with its single light, its single truck. She waited for Nathan to light a joint, but tonight he was so rapt he didn’t even think of that. Then, as though Nathan had conjured it by his intensity, the front door opened. The door shielded by those high shrubs, Janie saw it open only by the light spilling out of it onto the grass. In front of her, inside Nathan, Janie felt the fuse ignite.

  Two figures stepped out of the door, through the light, and towards the truck. All Janie could discern was that one was taller than the other. There was nothing else she could tell. Everything else was blotted, was drowned, by Nathan’s body before her, the body dilating, taut as rock, the swelling strained, the high desperation, a shrill to it you could feel but not hear, the fuse flaring, and Janie saw again the unnerved face of the man in the boat, saw again the foam on Nathan’s lips, saw again the banker’s hand in the garage, cocking back.

  Abruptly, Nathan arched his body like a wing and crashed all one hundred and fifty pounds down on the kick start. Janie lost her balance, grabbed his belt, and the engine roared, and at the same time, to Janie’s disbelief, Nathan screamed, “Look!”

  She never knew if they did look, because he’d already thrown the bike around, his body married to it low and tight as though he were injecting it with his fury, the better to charge the speed, the volume, and it was true, the bike was flying faster, screaming louder, than Janie could ever remember it before, and she had to wrap her arms around his waist despite herself or she would have toppled off, and she felt in her skin how she’d skid across the pavement, she felt the burn. The banks, the trees, spinning past, Nathan leaning into turns at an angle too deep, the bike canting to where she feared their hips would scrape ground, Nathan, who always drove fast, now driving dangerous, and Janie, whom Nathan’s driving always scared a little, but in a thrilling way, realized she was scared for real. She was terrified. The bike just holding the curves like a marble in a low-rimmed slot, now them cresting the highest hill, and Janie saw the rusty guardrails, the dark-humped crown of trees under them, and Janie saw, too, the motorcycle sailing over those guardrails, her body, his, impaled on branches. Janie ricocheted between staring aghast over Nathan’s shoulder, her eyes so wide they hurt, and squeezing her eyes shut and begging under her breath. Until finally she just balled all of herself into the very top of her chest, right under her throat, right under a scream, and held on and waited for the end. But she did not scream, not any more than she yelled, What the fuck are you doing? Slow down! Are you crazy? And why? Because her fear of appearing uncool was still more real to her than the fear of dying? Or was it fear of pissing him off that was more real? Or was it simply not wanting to call attention to herself?

  Then suddenly, they rounded a curve, and there was a coal truck. Nathan did brake. But it was too late, Nathan had to pass on the right, the graveled shoulder, Janie felt the guardrail graze her ankle, and that Nathan kept it upright Janie could only attribute later to how hard her grandmother prayed for her each night, and the shoulder narrowed, them running out of space, and at the last possible moment, they cleared the truck, Nathan jerked the tires back onto the pavement, didn’t even skid, and Nathan and Janie ripped on towards Remington.

  WEDNESDAYS AT RAMELLA’S was happy hour all night long, and Janie ordered another tequila sunrise while Uncle Bobby complained about the lazy ways of the sub-eating laundry manager. “And he just sits in there talking on the phone to his girlfriend, Janie. Just sits in there talking to his girlfriend, and I’m telling you, I’ve never seen anyone so fat. She’s as fat as those three ladies we saw climbing into that Volkswagen outside of Ponderosa all put together!” and him harr-ing, jungle roaring, she could hear all kinds of animals in it, and by the end of the second drink, Janie could shove away what had sickened her all day—that Nathan was more willing to kill himself and her than to confront Melissa’s lover, yes, but also things even oozier than that. Now those things faded, and by the third drink, Janie was enveloped in glow, for Uncle Bobby, for the bartender, even for the Halloweenishly mascara’d woman in the Styx T-shirt the bartender was hitting on.

  Then, at a distance from herself, Janie heard herself talking, the words coming easy as a creek running in her mouth, only when she was high and only with Uncle Bobby could she talk this way, and as she did, every bad feeling in her washed clear. She talked loose, with no regard for grammar, talked how almost everyone in McCloud County talked, including most of the teachers at school, and the way Janie talked when she wasn’t at home or at her grandparents’, and she heard her mother saying, “You keep talking like that, you’ll never find a job away from here,” then that, too, washed away. She was telling stories of college, all the wild parties, them wildening further in the telling, things she had actually done, and things she had heard other people had done that she wished she’d thought of, them now done by her in the telling, and Uncle Bobby howling with laughter and admiration at all the right places and then some. “Oh, I can’t believe that, Janie! I can’t believe it!” “Oh, I think that’s so funny, Janie!” “Did you tell him, Janie? Did you tell him off?”

  And then she let Uncle Bobby have his turn. He continued in the vein of the risky and the outrageous, repeating the story of the man at church who carried his wife’s purse for her, a hilarious and unthinkable violation of Uncle Bobby’s “ways.” Next revisiting the time he came out of the liquor store, tripped, fell, but saved the Southern Comfort, and when he reached spots in his tellings where he had no words, he’d just improvise—“and so forth and so on and what have you”—Janie mmm-hmmming him right along. She glimpsed for an instant the pair they made in the mirror behind the bar, then jerked her gaze away and tossed back her head and crowed at the latest thing Uncle Bobby had said even though she hadn’t really heard it.

  Then he got into the keg party Nathan had thrown in high school while his parents were at Hilton Head and how Uncle Bobby had fallen in the bathroom and ripped off the shower curtain. Janie swallowed a gulp of tequila, the day’s ruminations creeping back like bad light seeping under a door. But it was not just the mention of Nathan, Janie understood that. Something new was going on; it had happened the day at the lake and had been happening ever since. Earlier and earlier than it should, than it ever had, the liquor was dragging her down instead of raising her up. Leaving her even more unprotected than she was when she was sober. Uncle Bobby ordered another White Russian while Janie shook her head and picked at her coaster, as dread came witch-fingering into her. She felt herself pushing the time card into the clock tomorrow at 12:15, the tedium that would follow broken only by the cold sweat of the bathroom check and by Tommie Sue’s monologue. The return to college, in just three weeks, and the loneliness there. Janie had graduated high school with two hundred other students—fewer than twenty had gone to college, and Janie knew that fewer than that wo
uld finish. Again, Janie caught sight of them in the speckled mirror, their faces broken by liquor bottles and beer logos. Uncle Bobby’s enormous glasses, his mouth contorted in desperate glee. Janie dropped her eyes to the cocktail napkin on her lap.

  And she realized—a paradoxical clarity the post-drunkenness carried—that it wasn’t that she was simply tired of Tommie Sue’s talking or even scared of her death stories. Janie understood, had all along, that under Tommie Sue’s drone lived a secret knowledge that Janie was both horrified she would eventually pass to and, on the other hand, frightened of what might befall her if she didn’t ever know. It was a secret knowing familiar to Janie because it was held by so many women of her childhood in McCloud County and by most older women she’d worked with in food service and on line jobs since she was fourteen. The Tommie Sue kind of secret knowing was more familiar to Janie than the sorority girls’ secret knowing, but at this point, no more penetrable. One component of that secret knowing was an offhand disdain for the college-going and the college-educated, for manager types, for anybody who didn’t work with their hands, but a disdain Tommie Sue and the others didn’t bother to actively exercise because the objects of the disdain weren’t worth it. And the disdain, Janie grasped, was borne of Tommie Sue and her people’s matter-of-fact insight that they lived in reality while the others only believed themselves to do so. And while Janie feared ending up in Tommie Sue’s reality, she also suspected that ignorance of that reality could expose a person to consequences more dangerous than those Janie could yet comprehend.

  Now Uncle Bobby was saying, “Remember the time I took you and Ben to Black Beauty and Ben lost his mittens?” and fountaining into peals so shrill that even the bartender, who was accustomed to her and Uncle Bobby, looked away from the Styx fan to make sure all was well. “Why don’t you write a story about that, Janie? Why don’t you write a story about that?”

  And now, her glass squeezed between her hands, her mired in the blank, ground-bound sadness that always came after a drunk if she wasn’t quick enough to fall asleep first, Janie understood one part of the Nathan ooze. That the drugs, the alcohol, had never really dissolved barriers, never brought her closer to others. They just generated an insulation whose padded distance made her feel safe enough to make believe intimacy.

  TEN DAYS PASSED after that last drive to the stucco house without a word from Nathan, twice as long as he’d ever vanished before. Janie stayed off the porch this time. She watched from the window only. A Ferris wheel revolved through her head, each car pausing for her to sit in its feeling a while: rage at his ignoring her; relief that she possibly wouldn’t ever talk to him again; pride that she did not reach out to him (she suppressed the fact that her not reaching out was more fear of rejection than anything noble); but, suffusing all of that, and this not suppressible, her desire for him anyway.

  Only once did Uncle Bobby notice anything was amiss. “Wonder where Nathan’s been keeping himself at these days?”

  Then, a week before she was to return to college, when she and Uncle Bobby had already started saying good-bye to their places, she was upstairs pulling on her black popcorn girl pants for the evening shift when her grandmother called from downstairs, “Nathan’s on the phone.”

  Janie held the receiver a little ways from her ear, as if this might help. She stared through her grandparents’ living room window, at the brick walls across the street. But Janie could not picture him, invisible inside that near room.

  He told her his parents had gone out of town.

  “You and Bobby want to come over for dinner tomorrow night?”

  No, a rigidness inside her hissed, say no. But that part was too brittle, too grown-up, to overcome the other. The seductive teasing in his voice, she heard it even in two sentences as bland as those. The nonchalant confidence, his wanting her and Uncle Bobby there. What’s there to lose? Janie thought, and said, “What time?”

  Nathan opened the front door, extended one arm, and pulled her to him. He turned his crotch into hers for a moment like a promise. In those ten days, he’d grown back the beard he’d shaved during the Melissa breakup, and she flinched at the prickliness. “Whatcha gonna put on the grill, Nathan?” Uncle Bobby was saying. “I could smell the coals clear in my bedroom. I could smell the coals clear in my bedroom, Nathan,” and as they passed through to the kitchen, Janie was aware of the garage a story under their feet. How seldom she’d been in this part of the house except in secret, while his parents slept, she and Nathan tiptoeing up to his single bed.

  “Sirloin, Bobby. Only the best,” Nathan said. Uncle Bobby had dressed up, his nicest blue and green polo shirt, his new khaki shorts the requisite one size small, them riding high on his tree-trunk thighs. “You all want a beer or a rum and Coke?”

  “Beer, please,” said Uncle Bobby.

  “Rum and Coke,” said Janie.

  “Yeah, that’s what I want, too,” Uncle Bobby said.

  She saw right away that Nathan expected her to pull together most of the meal from groceries he’d bought—iceberg lettuce, baking potatoes, bacon bits—while he fretted over the three steaks on the grill. She set her drink on the windowsill and scrubbed potatoes while Uncle Bobby hovered between her in the kitchen and Nathan outside, Uncle Bobby knowing better than to help with hot things. All afternoon had been pumping up to storm, Janie could smell the lightning making, she didn’t have to look at the sky, and the air-conditioning at Nathan’s was a good five degrees cooler than her grandparents would run it, the chill lifting bumps on her upper arms. Each time Uncle Bobby opened the door, the humidity bulged in like a man-sized blister.

  “It’s gonna pour, huh, Janie? I hope he gets those steaks done before it pours, don’t you, Janie?” She and Uncle Bobby had spent most of the day together, and the tag questions—I am here, Tell me so—were starting to get on her nerves. Janie poured herself another rum and Coke. Uncle Bobby wandered outside to “huh” Nathan awhile. Janie ripped the lettuce into a bowl.

  Through the window, she watched Nathan’s self-important fussing over the steaks. She felt the pressure of his groin against hers, and she was suddenly so angry her hands shook. She snapped the last leaf into the bowl and swallowed the second half of the rum and Coke. But it wasn’t working. Like those tequila sunrises at Ramella’s had not worked, the alcohol was plateauing. She looked at Nathan again, and again, her hands shook, her teeth clenched. But shot through that, complicating, confusing: the normalcy, the domesticity, of standing at this sink preparing food. That Nathan had invited them upstairs, invited them for a dinner he at least thought he was preparing, and he’d asked Uncle Bobby, too. For Nathan, there was nothing strange about having Uncle Bobby, too. And it dawned on her that this was the only event she or Uncle Bobby had been invited to all summer with the exception of church functions, and this flooded her with such embarrassment and desolation her fist went to her chest.

  Shrieked giggles bugled from the patio, Uncle Bobby’s high apparently escalating in inverse proportion to hers falling. Through the glass door she saw him doubled over, clenched hands pounding his shorts, his face forced purple, and she knew it was because he’d remembered her grandmother was right across the street and might hear. Janie knew he was trying to gulp down the laughter, flatten it into pressurized shrieks. And finally they were sitting down at the dining room table, famished and agitated, Nathan not having understood how long potatoes took to bake. Janie put her napkin in her lap and surveyed the room.

  Its casual fineness made her small. The polished wood of the furniture, the paintings on the wall, the Oriental rugs under her feet, the dark gleaming bookcases evenly rowed with hardback books. Other things she didn’t even have a name for, only knew that they were expensive. All of it, Janie understood, exactly what her grandparents’ house wanted to grow up into. But almost certainly would not have time. And then Nathan at the head of the table in greasy cut-offs, bare feet, and a Johnny’s T-shirt with its collar frayed, and two months ago Janie would have marvel
ed at how hard it was to reconcile him with his house and that would have made her want him even more. Now she understood that his subversion was deliberate. The air-conditioning churned, the storm still had not broken, and Uncle Bobby commented three or four times how lucky they were the steaks had gotten done before the rain. They’d only eaten a few bites when the phone rang. Nathan sauntered into the kitchen and lifted it from the wall.

  Janie strained to hear past Uncle Bobby—“And I told him, you should keep your dog tied up, German shepherds are mean dogs. And I was right, wasn’t I, Janie? Wasn’t I?”—but she could tell only that the exchange was muffled, sharp, and short. The clobber of receiver back on the wall. And the second she glimpsed Nathan’s face again at the table, Janie winced in the base of her throat. It had something to do with Melissa.

  Nathan pulled his plate right under his chin, wrapped one arm around it, and began spearing into his mouth bits of steak he’d already cut up. Every sane impulse in Janie screamed “stay quiet,” but the part of her that had asked “What time?” on the phone instead of no, she heard that part softly inquire, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing!” Nathan jammed another chunk of meat into his mouth.

  Uncle Bobby took him at his word.

  “Man. It’d sure be nice to have a nice homegrown tomato with this dinner.”

  Nathan’s jaws worked like an animal’s. Janie could hear the cartilage, the hinge. She lifted a forkful of lettuce, Thousand Island, and bacon bits to her lip, then set the fork back down.

  “Man, it’d be nice to have a nice fresh tomato. I just love homegrown tomatoes. Those store-bought tomatoes, they taste like plastic water. Huh, Janie? Huh?”

  “Yeah,” she said. Nathan smashed his baked potato with the back of his fork.

  “This dinner would be perfect with a tomato. A nice, fresh, red tomato.” Uncle Bobby demolished his food as he talked without choking on a word, his astounding skill at talking with his mouth full without anyone hearing the food, years of practice under her grandmother’s vigilant ear and eye. “I know where there’s a homegrown tomato, you know that, Nathan? You know that?”