Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley: Novellas and Stories

by Ann Pancake

  Despite all the rumors, it must be said that after that, they didn’t talk about Dog Man much anymore. Even for the skeptics and the critics, the subject of Matley lost its fun. And they still saw Muttie, although he came into town less often now, and when they did see him, they looked more closely, and a few even sidled up to him in the store in case he would speak. But the dogless Matley, to all appearances, was exactly like the dogful one.

  THESE DAYS, SOME mornings, in the lost-dog aftermath, Matley wakes in his camper having forgot the place, the year, his age. He’s always had such spells occasionally, losses of space and time, but now it’s more than ever. Even though when he was a kid, Mom Revie’d only allow one live dog at a time and never inside, they did have for some years a real dog named Blanchey, some kind of wiener-beagle mix. And now, these mornings, when Matley wakes, believing himself eight in the flood-gone house, he hears Mom Revie’s dog-calling song.

  Oh, the way that woman could call a dog, it was bluegrass operatic. “Heeeeeere, Blanchey! Heeeeeeere, Blanchey, Blanchey, Blanchey,” she’d yodel off the back porch, the “here” pulled taut to eight solid seconds, the “Blanchey” a squeaky two-beat yip. Then “You, Blanchey! C’mere, girl! ’mon!” fall from high-octave “here’s” to a businesslike burr, and when Blanchey’d still not come, Revie’d switch from cajole to command. “Yah, Blanchey, Yah! Yah! Yah! Yah!” a belly-deep bass; while the “here’s” seduced, the “yah’s” insist, oh, it plunged down your ear and shivered your blood, ole Mom Revie’s dog-calling song. And for some minutes, Matley lets himself hover in that time, he just lies abed and pleasures in the tones. Until she cuts loose in frustration with a two-string riff—“comeoutcomeoutcomeoutcomeout”—rapid banjo plinkplunk wild, and Matley wakes enough to know ain’t no dogs coming. To remember all the dogs are gone but one.

  He crawls out of the bunk and hobbles outside. Guinea pokes her head from his pocket, doesn’t like what she sniffs, pulls back in. It is March, the train season is long over, but Matley hears it anyway. Hears it coming closer, moaning and sagging like it’s about to split. Hears the haunty music that train plays, haunty like a tawdry carnival ride. Train moving slow and overfull, passing the joints in the rails, beat beat, and the scree sound over the railbeat, he hears it shriek-squeal over steel. And Matley stands there between househole and Winnebago, the morning without fog and the air like glass, and he understands he is blighted landscape. He is disruption of scenery. Understands he is the last one left, and nothing but a sight. A sight. Sight, wheel on rail click it on home, Sight. Sight. Sight. Then Matley does not hear a thing.

  COOP

  THEY BUNKED IN old chicken houses jammed with older iron beds, lumpy-ticked, stained, summers and summers of homesick child urine, then the rat and the swallow dirt all empty winter. The beds pressed so tight the girls who brought suitcases had to sleep with them, so tight Carly could shift an elbow and touch the girl beside her. Feel the girl’s night breath on her own cheek. Carly held her pee as long as she could before she dared the dark walk down the splintery floor past forty-three sleepers and their forty-three dreams. After, kneeling on her bed, she peered at the cousins from Honeyvine heaped alongside her. Found the face of the littlest one and wondered again about what the bigger ones said.

  The camp was six miles off the highway down a dirt road, an old farm donated to the county by a dead bachelor. School buses carried them there, the road so narrow, the woods so close, in places leaves crushed against the windows. It was a free camp for girls, with sweaty surplus cheese in the dining hall and gallon tins of peanuts. The milk always this side of turning, and the raisins. Some girls brought their things in plastic bags, and some brought nothing at all, and behind the ruined piano on the dining hall porch were piled big garbage bags of donated clothes. The littlest Honeyvine found an ankle-length football jersey she wore like a gown until it tripped her in a kickball game, pitching her on her face. Carly watched her struggling there. Live thing in a sack. And a girl named Izzie came every year, a retarded kid with a finger missing, hard to tell if it was the second or third. She’d lie with her head at the foot of the bed and seize through the bars at the little girls passing. And if she was mad at somebody, which she generally was, she’d throw that stump like a middle finger. Only the finger wasn’t there.

  Community Action had a hard time recruiting counselors, but for the three years Carly had come, they’d always got Debbie and Royal. Both had been campers themselves at one time, and Debbie was the darker, her skin pillowy, Carly saw, calling you to touch it. Like it needed your finger pressed into it. But then, underneath, Carly understood, a hardness harder than bone. Royal was leaner, lighter, a high fine freckled, berries or seeds, her beauty more boy than Deb’s beauty was. They were a kind of girl Carly had never seen outside of camp, you felt it the second they stepped off the bus, and you could not help but watch them. Carly watched.

  Mrs. Junkins, the camp director who was often tired, always called Debbie and Royal her right-hand women. Mrs. Junkins, with her plum-mottled calves under floppy dresses, and how the hug-thirsty little ones would climb all over her, poking in her pockets, palming her cheeks. How the older ones would have to remind her about the next thing on the schedule. That year, though, Mrs. Junkins didn’t come. Died, the older girls whispered. Just plain wore out, said the cook. Instead, they brought in a woman called Dr. Maxine from someplace else, Carly heard that right away in her voice. And the second thing Carly noticed was how she smiled, tight, all the time over nothing. Like she knew something to smile about none of them ever would.

  That year, Carly wasn’t in Debbie and Royal’s bunkhouse. Her coop’s counselors were 4-H volunteers, motherly, placid. She landed in a bed beside that bunch from up in Honeyvine, their first time at camp, and sisters or cousins they all claimed to be. They pushed their beds even closer and puppy-slept in a pile. They admitted they had no running water in their Honeyvine houses, and right away, they showered every chance they got, their hair all the time wet and the parts in it crooked. Them streaming naked, two, three, at a time in those slimy concrete stalls, and it was there Carly saw, the first afternoon, how the littlest had a caved place in her chest. Like someone had struck a rock to her wishbone.

  “Her,” one of the older Honeyvines said when she caught Carly looking, “she’ll leave every night.”

  Carly looked back into the Honeyvine’s glasses. Saw two of her own face. The campers were forbidden to cross the bunkhouse stoop after lights out.

  “She won’t use the door,” the Honeyvine said.

  Carly stretched her borrowed garment bag along the edge of her mattress. She slept with the bag between her and them.

  Turned out Dr. Maxine was not just a doctor, but a lifeguard, too, and all day long she wore a little robe over a strange bathing suit of jagged colors, her navy-veined thighs something any woman Carly’d ever known would have scrambled to cover up. When Debbie and Royal started to lead the songs at assembly, Dr. Maxine motioned them back to their seats with a smile and led the songs herself, swaying at her knees and strumming a guitar, her voice a high pinch in her nose. After crafts, Dr. Maxine asked all the girls to stay at the long tables, and then she passed out multiple-choice questions and number two pencils. This, she promised, is not a test. When I grow up, I want to A, B, C, D. The number of people who live in my house is A, B, C, D. There are no right answers, Dr. Maxine assured. While they filled ovals, Dr. Maxine strode around behind them and patted girls’ shoulders with a stiff hand. She lifted a strand of Izzie’s hair. Carly watched Izzie’s eyes flare, her neck stiffen. But Izzie kept her stump in her fist.

  The harder it was to like Dr. Maxine, the harder Carly watched Debbie and Royal. Royal’s sharp white hair, prickly even in its length, and the tight bow of her back when she bent down to pull socks over long leg muscles. Debbie’s tough quieter, it turned in while Royal’s turned out, and how little she smiled. How little she ever smiled, so when she did smile at you. When she did. The tough girls Carl
y had seen outside of camp were a scrabbling, desperate, seedy tough, a tough that made you shamed or scared. This tough made you want to be. And everybody watched them. The little girls scribbling notes on the backs of mimeographed sheets they stole from Vespers, True Friends Always and check the box, will you be my best? The fourteen-year-olds, after lights out, whispering, and the middle girls, like Carly, shy and achy, changing their underwear under the covers. They watched.

  It was swimming they all looked forward to the most, the release into cool and clean blue water, and at first, even Dr. Maxine on her lifeguard throne could not dampen the escape. Girls burst squealing through the gate, the bravest cannonballing off the sides, while the ones who couldn’t swim, like Carly, dropped into the shallow end, flung open their arms and pretended, then saved themselves with their feet. Carly stood still a minute, chin lifted, and scanned the deep end, where Royal’s body shimmer-ran through water. Carly’s eyes following, her heart knocking, sun flash skin, water, skin, water, which? moving. That’s, Carly thought, why they call her Royal.

  Then Royal hauled herself up the ladder, calling over her shoulder to Debbie, a dark head only. Carly hung on the shallow-end side, watching through splash and spray. Royal doubled on herself on the ladder, halter top to knees, water sluicing off the arc of her back. Royal climbed out, pounded her cocked head to drive water out her ear, and sauntered towards the shallow end. The nonswimmers shrieked.

  Royal dropped into the middle of them, while the small ones reached, famished for touch, and Royal picked a couple up, then chose a tiny one and lifted her lengthwise in water. Royal steadied her, one hand on her back and the other hand underneath, Royal slid her, balanced her, the others hollering, look, look, you can swim, my turn! my turn! Then the second chosen one, lifted, the small of her back, her stomach, her swimming between Royal’s two big hands.

  Carly, too old to be picked, felt someone else watching Royal. Carly swung her head. Dr. Maxine in the lifeguard chair, her whistle squeezed between her fingers, fingers poised between her breasts. Then the littlest Honeyvine was right there. Shivering on the pool edge, her feet almost on Carly’s hands, water streaming down to make a puddle like a shadow at her feet. Her bathing suit drooped around her rock-struck ribs, the tiny nipples peeking out. She left every night, they all said it. She didn’t use windows, didn’t use doors. Carly pushed off to run away through water, the weight of it against her a quicksand dream.

  That was Wednesday. Soon the black girls from Piedmont were calling Dr. Maxine Mrs. Reagan because of all the speeches she made. Although she’d said she was a doctor, when Rhonda Funkhouser sprained her ankle, it was the cook had to wrap it. That night at campfire, a puny nick in the heavy heavy woods, Dr. Maxine and her guitar led the songs again, Izzie howling the refrains, while Royal sat on the front bleacher with a stick in her hand, drilling the end into ground. “Amazing Grace” and “Almost Heaven,” and what did Dr. Maxine know of Jesus and West Virginia? Debbie crouched a few girls away from Carly where Carly could see only the waves of her hair. Carly had overheard the older girls before Vespers, something about Dr. Maxine and Royal and the pool, and the darkness rose behind Carly like a hood. After the fire, the campers walked in scattered clumps back to the coops, the Honeyvines moving in a huddle under a shared blanket, Carly at their edge, near enough but far enough. Overhead, ridges drew closer together. You don’t touch them there. That’s what the big girls had whispered Dr. Maxine said.

  Maybe the last night would have gone differently if nobody had told on the Honeyvine girls. Carly’s bunkhouse was the one the boys used when boys came, and on Thursday morning, the two littlest Honeyvines washed their hair in a urinal, just seeing they were shiny things, porcelain and white. Somehow Dr. Maxine heard, and when she did, she blew her whistle and assembled the whole camp into that bathroom and gave them a lesson on what urinals were. Then she went further.

  Smiling, she told a 4-H girl to fetch a washcloth, and when the girl got back, Dr. Maxine used her as a model for how to take a proper shower. Dr. Maxine instructing the counselor, fully clothed, to scrape the soap in the washcloth, then run the washcloth over different body parts. The milk-blue counselor, obedient, shamed horror in her rabbit eyes, rubbed the dry washcloth under her arms, and Carly’s stomach curled. In the front of the crowd leaned the Honeyvines. Shadows like thumb-pressed bruises under their eyes.

  After lunch, the Piedmont girls, lounging on top a picnic table, smoothing lotion in their knees, started telling about the special soap.

  Got in that robe pocket a plastic box with a germ-killer soap, said one.

  It’s green, said another.

  Every time she gets too close to one of us, sneaks back in her cabin and scrubs herself.

  Carly remembered the feel of Dr. Maxine’s hand on her upper arm at lunch the day before.

  Then it was afternoon rest period, everyone back in their coops. The aroma of antiperspirant over teenage girl sweat, and Izzie lying in wait like some lunatic zoo animal, working terrible her green-apple gum. At the end of the building, the oldest girls held counsel on three pushed-together beds, their voices like bees, each painting all twenty nails the color of blood. Carly slid off her bed. Slipped towards that climate of tampons and turquoise eye shadow, the bed bars cool in Carly’s hands. If Izzie really wanted to scare you, she’d sit and stroke her stub. Shaping the air where the finger was not. Carly sidled up on the older girls before they could see. Heard something dirty about Dr. Maxine. Something about Debbie and Royal she couldn’t quite make out.

  Carly. How old are you?

  ’Leven.

  Go on. You’re too young to hear this.

  Back beside Carly’s bed, the Honeyvines knelt on their mattresses in a train and brushed each other’s long slick hair, that hair no color at all but dark.

  “Guess where she went last night?” The one with the glasses pushed them back up her nose.

  Carly shook her head. “What do you mean?”

  “She don’t just have dreams,” the glasses said. “She is one.”

  Carly climbed onto her own bed and pulled her sleeping bag around her shoulders. Cowled it over her head.

  After supper, Carly and the next-to-the-biggest Honeyvine leaned against the propane tank across from the director’s cabin. The Honeyvine pulling petals off a daisy in a he-loves-me, he-loves-me-not, the mildest rise in her tube top where the breasts would come. Then Debbie and Royal burst out of Dr. Maxine’s cabin door, stumbled down the steps, Royal bent forward with her hands fisted, her skin blaring red from her forehead to her chest, and when Debbie touched her shoulder, Royal swung. But it wasn’t at Deb.

  Then Carly felt herself creeping. Felt herself slinking past the cabin steps, into the ivy and weeds strangling up the cabin wall. Stealthing back to where she knew the director’s bathroom would be, and although the window was above her head, Carly could hear the sink. It gushing hard, and the squeal in the pipes when the spigots turned high, and Carly saw the soap. A green turning in Dr. Maxine’s hands. But then she was just against the propane tank again, the Honeyvine still beside her mumbling love and not. Carly only brave enough to make the trip in her head.

  It was tradition to stay up late that last night and have a dance. “We Will Rock You” and the Bee Gees and “Desperado.” The slow songs, little girls dancing with little girls, Izzie dancing with herself, and the Honeyvines wallflowered up in the folding chairs. But it was the fast songs that counted. Knee-pitching, arm-cocking, they danced like they were skewered on wires, frantic windup and hurtle their bodies just short of relief, their bangs matting on their foreheads and kids punching each other in the water fountain line. Royal and Debbie danced with a half-dozen girls at a time, more girls circling off those girls like moons off moons, they hammered the floor with the soles of their feet like they could make the building split. Until, drenched, Carly threw herself outside, felt the night air on her, and twanged in her chest.

  Not long after Dr. Maxine’s lights-o
ut whistle, they heard a strange noise not from the woods. Carly raised up on her elbows to listen. Dozens of dull ringings, muffled, and girls started to murmur. At least one started to cry. But not until the howling started did Carly understand what the ringing was: the beating of sticks on bed-frame bars. Now girls surged to the door to see, Carly swept along, the howls an orange funneling, a come-here and a fright, and Carly heard them not people, people, not people, people, and all along, the underbeat of sticks on bars. Big girls, the counselors, too, jammed the doorway, suspended over the stoop they were forbidden to cross, and a couple littlest kids crawled through their legs to see, but Carly could not. Izzie plunged up and down on her mattress, intent and twirling, her eyes run off someplace else. Carly wheeled back to her bed and hung out the window, the Honeyvines at her heels, what? what? what? and then she saw the orange flame in the howling, the flame tattered and thready and thin. The girls throbbed in the doorway, four or five deep, the girls throbbing, the howl a blood-orange come-here spiral, the girls piled, arms thrown across backs, heads over shoulders, and everyone quivering against the rule. Throbbing. They never broke it.

  Come morning, they found that the other coop had tried to burn their bunkhouse down. Got it going with toilet paper, empty half-pint milk cartons, and a poster of Peter Frampton. It didn’t amount to much, though, but a couple scorched mattresses and a whole lot of hollering. But Debbie and Royal were gone. Dr. Maxine, no longer smiling, ordered everyone to sit cross-legged in a pack on the front field while the sheriff’s department searched the woods. They got Debbie by noon, but when the school buses showed up at 2:30 to take the campers home, Royal was still missing.