Buddy

by M. H. Herlong

  I’m thinking I want to bang a spoon. I’m thinking I want everybody to just shut up.

  I can’t help it.

  All a sudden I stand up. I turn around and go in my room and slam the door. Everybody sitting at the table gets real quiet. I hear somebody’s chair scrape against the floor. I hear my door open and I flop over fast so I’m facing the wall.

  “Son?” It’s Daddy’s voice.

  “Leave me alone!” I yell.

  I pull my pillow over my head as quick as I can and wait for the smack.

  My room is quiet and I’m waiting. I hear Daddy breathing.

  Then I hear the door close real easy, and the voices start up again at the table.

  I squeeze my hands into fists and I hit my pillow over and over again until I’m finally too tired to move at all.

  Don’t nobody knock on my door or come in my room for a long time. I lay there in the dark and listen to them clean up the kitchen. When the TV goes on, I hear my door open. The light flips on. I turn over, and there’s Granpa T.

  “Are you going to lay there like a bump on a log for the rest of your life?”

  I don’t say nothing.

  He sits down on Tanya’s bed. “I must be getting old,” he says. “I’m always tired.”

  “I’m tired, too.”

  “You’re young. You ain’t got nothing to be tired about. Sit up.”

  I lift myself up on my elbows.

  “That ain’t sitting up.”

  I swing my legs over the side of the bed and sit on the edge. “Is this up enough?”

  “Watch your lip.”

  He’s holding his box of pictures. He hands it to me. “Open it.”

  There’s only a handful of pictures inside. They’re all of one woman. “You ain’t never seen her in person,” he says. “Your grandmama passed before your time, but you can see she’s the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  I look at her. She’s pretty all right, but she’s not the most beautiful woman in the world.

  “Her name was Alice,” he says.

  “I know that,” I say.

  “She could sing like a bird.”

  I’ve heard that, too. Everybody says Tanya’s going to sing like that someday.

  “Did I ever tell you how I met her?” he says.

  I’m thinking, Probably, but I don’t say nothing.

  “It was Sunday morning, the thirtieth of July, nineteen hundred and sixty-one.”

  Here comes a story, I’m thinking, and I sit back.

  “I was finally out of the army and back home in Mississippi,” he says. “My pockets were full of money. I bought me a nineteen fifty-nine Cadillac. I was driving right smack through the middle of town. This very town we’re in now.”

  He shakes his head. “You should have seen it then. There weren’t more than five or six stoplights and some railroad tracks. Now you can’t get across town in less than half an hour.”

  He stops and I wait.

  “So I’ve got the windows rolled down,” he starts up again, “and I’m passing by the church. I hear them singing, and I decide to go inside. Turns out every seat is full. I’m standing in the back, holding my hat and wondering how to sneak out, when this girl—” He looks me up and down. “This girl not too much older than you are now, she stands up and starts to sing.”

  Granpa T closes his eyes and raises his hands beside his face. “My heart lifts up,” he says. “My heart lifts up on the wings of song.”

  He’s swaying back and forth real slow like he’s listening to something. Then his eyes pop open and he looks at me again.

  “When I leave out of that church, Li’l T,” he says, “I’m so in love, I swear I’m going to marry that girl if I have to wait a hundred years.”

  He looks down at the picture for a minute. He’s smiling.

  “Of course, I had to wait for her to grow up first. I moved on down to New Orleans for a job and before you know it, I was playing the fool. You name it, I did it. I was spending all my money on foolishness. I got the sharpest clothes. I got the sharpest car.”

  He stops talking and looks at me hard, his eyes squinching up just a little. “I ain’t going to tell you about the other stuff. You ain’t old enough, and your mama would kill me.”

  He shakes his head. “Um-hm,” he says.

  Then he keeps on going. “But even with all that craziness, every Sunday morning, I drove that old car up to Mississippi, and I listened to her sing in the church, and I tried to get her to notice me.”

  He draws a deep breath. “It didn’t work. Even when she got old enough, she wouldn’t give me the time of day. I’d speak to her at church. I’d pass by her house in the afternoon. I even wrote her some letters. One day, she finally gave me the lowdown. She said she’d heard all about me. She said she’d heard I didn’t have the sense I was born with. She said she had better things planned for her life than passing time with me.

  “I remember that like it was yesterday. She was sitting there as sweet and polite as can be. Then she looked up and shot me dead with those words. I jumped in that car, and I went spinning out of her driveway and barreling down the road. It was getting dark and I was somewhere in the woods halfway home when the car just started going slower and slower, and then it stopped.

  “Li’l T, I was out of gas. That needle was sitting right on top of that big red E.

  “I started cussing. That car wasn’t going nowhere soon but I was still jerking at the steering wheel and banging on it and yelling at the top of my lungs.”

  Granpa T stops talking. He’s just sitting there, his mouth closed and his head nodding slightly. Then he looks at me looking at him. “All a sudden, I stopped,” he says. “I wiped my face, and I sat there holding on to the steering wheel and looking out at that darkness all around me. And I thought to myself, Tyrone Elijah Roberts, is this how you want to live your life? And right then, everything changed.

  “I can’t explain it. I just know what happened. I’m a man, I thought, and men don’t act like I’ve been acting. Men take things on their shoulders and carry them.

  “And so I picked up my load. Right then. Right there. And I started carrying it.

  “When I got back to New Orleans, I stopped all my foolishness. I saved my money and two years later I bought a house, the very one that just got flooded.

  “Six months after that, I carried your grandmama over the threshold. She was wearing a white wedding dress she made herself and a little round hat stuck on with bobby pins. She passed just before your daddy got married.”

  “How come y’all only had Daddy?”

  “That was God’s plan.”

  He ain’t looking at the pictures anymore. He ain’t looking at anything. “I miss your grandmama,” he said. “I miss her every day. She was the most beautiful woman in the world and she could sing like a bird.”

  We just sit there for a while, looking at the wall.

  “Why did you tell me that story, Granpa T?”

  He stands up and puts the pictures back in the box. “It’s time for you to pick up your load, son.”

  “I ain’t a man, Granpa T.”

  “You’re close,” he says. “You’re getting awful close.”

  23

  But being a man ain’t easy and I can’t do it. I go off to school every day and I do my homework like I’m supposed to. I make sure I don’t fuss with Tanya and I’m quiet when Baby Terrell’s sleeping. But that’s all I can do. No matter what, it seems like I can’t get happy. My mind can’t help flying back to New Orleans, zooming over that black water and trying to see through the roof of our house. It’s been almost two months and there ain’t no way that bag of food could last that long.

  I can’t think about that but it’s the only thing on my mind. />
  Then one day toward the end of October Daddy comes home from work and says he’s got some news. We’re sitting at the table eating, and he says the mayor made an announcement. The mayor says people can come in and look at their houses now. The water’s gone way down, but there ain’t no electricity and the water in the pipes is poison. There ain’t no gas for heating because the flood filled up the gas pipes. There ain’t no stores to buy food. There ain’t no schools. There ain’t no firemen and the National Guard’s doing most of the policing.

  “But,” Daddy says, “the mayor says if we want, we can come in the city. We can go to the house and look. We can look, he says, but we’ve got to leave. Everybody’s got to be out of the city by six o’clock.”

  “And so?” Mama says.

  “And so,” Daddy says, “I’m wondering if anybody in this family wants to go look?”

  “There’s nothing left,” Mama says. “There’s no point in driving all that way just to look at dead trees and a house rotting into the ground.”

  Daddy pushes his food around on his plate. Mama makes an airplane fly a couple of green beans into Baby Terrell’s mouth.

  “I want to go look,” Daddy says. “A man at work said he’d give me a ride on Saturday morning. He said anybody wants to go is welcome.”

  Another airplane load of beans is hanging right outside Baby Terrell’s mouth but it ain’t going in. Mama stops it in midair. “That’s foolishness, T Junior,” she says. “We’re making a new start here. You’re going to let all that rot and ruin drag you down.”

  “I grew up in that house,” Daddy says. “I want to see it. At least one more time.”

  Mama puts down the plane-load of beans and snatches off Baby Terrell’s bib. “Well, I’m not going back,” she says. “I’m not ever going back. I don’t have the stomach for it.” She hoists Baby Terrell out of his seat, and he goes rocking off to his pile of toys.

  “What about you?” Daddy’s looking at Granpa T. “Don’t you want to see your house now?”

  Granpa T shakes his head. “I’m too tired,” he says.

  “It’ll be good for you,” Daddy says.

  Granpa T shakes his head. “I ain’t going.”

  Daddy leans over toward Granpa T. “Come on, Daddy. You need to get out of this apartment. Get up on your feet.”

  “I ain’t going,” Granpa says again. “Comes a time, T Junior, when you got to let go.”

  Daddy leans back. He and Granpa T are looking hard at each other. “I hear what you’re saying,” Daddy says. “But this ain’t that time.”

  Then everybody’s sitting quiet at the table. After a while, I raise my hand like I’m in school. Daddy looks at me.

  “I want to see,” I say. “I’ll go.”

  Daddy frowns. He knows what I want to see. Then he nods. “Okay. If you were old enough last time, I guess you still are.”

  This time we start out when it’s already light. This time I ain’t surprised at the broke trees and the air don’t smell like a Christmas tree lot anymore. This time Daddy’s carrying a cooler with a big lunch packed inside and I’m carrying a box of trash bags.

  In the city there still ain’t no working traffic lights but it don’t matter because there ain’t hardly any cars. When we get to where there used to be a light, the handful of cars all stop and take turns going.

  Daddy and the man are shaking their heads the whole way. “Look at that,” they’re saying. “Look at that.”

  We pass by a house where one side just fell into the street and all the furniture is still sitting there like in a dollhouse. At one store, there’s a front loader parked halfway through the front glass window. It’s easy to see there ain’t nothing left in the store.

  A pack of dogs comes trotting around the corner. I sit up straight and look hard. One of them is black but he’s got all four legs.

  It’s hard to figure out where we are because all the signs are down. Finally we pass the corner where the Tomato Man sits. There ain’t nothing there. Just sidewalk and weeds. Weeds as tall as me with white flowers on the top.

  All the yards are brown. All the grass and bushes are dead. Brown and gray tree branches are piled up as high as my head on the corner lots where they put them after they pulled them out of the streets.

  Somebody’s fishing boat is sitting on the neutral ground. I see cars knocked every which way—some up in people’s yards, some with wheels sitting on the front stoop, some upside down. One looks like it’s driving up a tree. It’s just standing there on its back end with its front wheels resting high up on the trunk of a big old oak tree. Every single car used to be covered in water. Their windows are smeared over with white and brown mud like they’ve been painted with it.

  Mud is on all the steps and porches. There’s a black line going around every house. Actually, there are a bunch of lines, one above the other. That’s where the top of the water was, Daddy says. I’m looking at it way above my head. Way above the top of the truck we’re sitting in.

  All the houses have spray paint marks on the front. They’re all the same: A big X.

  “What’s that mark?” Daddy says.

  “The rescuers made it,” the man says. “They painted one on every house they checked.”

  We watch the marks go by. We figure out they wrote the date at the top. We figure out they wrote what they found at the bottom. Most houses have a zero at the bottom. We figure that means they didn’t find anything. One house says, “Three cats.” Another house says, “One dead in attic.”

  I’m thinking, One what? Then I remember Mrs. Washington. I stop looking at the Xs.

  The man pulls up at the corner of our street and drops us off. Now Daddy and me are walking exactly where I walked with Buddy.

  It was shady then but now there’s too much sun. Half the branches are gone and what are left have been stripped of their leaves.

  It was noisy then but now it’s quiet. There ain’t no sound anywhere except our feet crunching on the little twigs all over the sidewalk. There ain’t any cars. There ain’t any air conditioners. There ain’t any ambulances in the distance or trucks backing up. There ain’t any squirrels. There ain’t even any birds.

  We pass by a pile of trash washed up against somebody’s fence. Daddy and me both gag at the same time. The smell is like a wall you walk into. It’s like rotten cheese and spoiled chicken and horse droppings and dead rats and other things you don’t even want to think about, all sitting there together for weeks and weeks in the hot sun.

  We cover our faces and run past but it feels like the smell sticks to us.

  We’re looking up at all our neighbors’ houses. They’re all the same. That water mark sits just under the roof line of the one-story houses. Some of the houses have holes chopped in the roof. That’s where people climbed out of the attic, Daddy says. Sometimes maybe that’s where the searchers climbed in.

  On the two-story houses, the water mark is about as high as the floor on the second story.

  Our house is a two-story, I’m thinking, and I feel my heart start to pound.

  That bathroom is on the second floor, I’m thinking, and I feel my heart go even faster.

  And then there it is.

  All Mama’s flowers and bushes are brown and dead. The driveway is covered up with mud. Half the pecan tree crashed through the attic roof. The other half has smashed the shed. My new bicycle is somewhere under there but there ain’t no point in trying to fish it out. It’s been crushed and soaked in water for weeks. It ain’t going nowhere even if I found it.

  The front porch is covered in mud and twisted a little sideways off the front wall.

  The swing has come off one chain and is dangling halfway over the rail. The other porch chairs are gone. The pots of plants Mama had on the front steps are busted.

  And there is th
at X. There is that X painted up above the front porch roof where the rescuers had tied up their boat.

  I stand on the street and stare at the X.

  On the top it says, “9/12.”

  On the bottom it says, “One dog.”

  24

  We try to push open the front door. It won’t budge. Daddy kicks it as hard as he can. It still won’t budge.

  “It’s swoll up,” he says.

  He steps over to the window opening onto the porch. He’s got to be careful of the gap between the porch and house. He takes off his T-shirt and wraps it around his hand. He taps on the glass and breaks it just enough to undo the lock. But when he tries to lift the window, it won’t budge either. Finally, he just breaks out all the glass. He’s careful to get all the pointy pieces out. He drops them in the hole between the house and the porch. Then he crawls in.

  “Sweet Jesus,” he says, and I come in after him.

  This is the living room. Mama’s sofa is upside down on top of the turned-over table. The curtains are pulled off the wall. One set is laying in a heap in the corner. Another set is draped over the TV, which is laying on its back beside the stand it used to be on. The stand is broke to pieces and flat out on the floor. The floor is covered in mud. The rug has floated up and made wrinkles of itself. Underneath the rug, the wood flooring strips are buckled and popping up, and some of them have floated off and got caught in a tangle with the sofa.

  Clothes from Granpa T’s bedroom are stuck on the floor. A hat is laying upside down by the window. A doll is sitting inside like she’s riding in a boat.

  The house stinks, and black stuff is growing everywhere. On the cushions and furniture, on the walls and on the ceiling.