20
So that was June, and I didn’t have any school to bother with. I was free to do pretty much as I pleased. The ditches were running, heavy and smooth, filled to the brim, that water the color of thick green tea, the surface flat and untroubled, which was a deception because that water was pulling fast to be sure. Not all the ditches ran at the same time. Some were empty; then you might go by on another day and there they were full. That was a time to take care about being down there. They kept that water moving all over the place on account it was hot and the earth was thirsty and there had to be water now here and then there and all over.
I still had choir practice on Thursdays at First Baptist in the afternoon, but that wasn’t much so I decided I’d get a paper route. I could make fifty dollars in a Month, the guy told me when I signed on, that is, if I was careful not to be wasteful and if I could be quick and steady with my time—which I could. Turned out The County Guide was quick and regular themselves. You got charged for every paper. Everything was written down in a book and come the end of the month you owed them whether your customer paid up or not. Somebody moved away and didn’t pay, well, that was your pocket that got picked, not The Guide’s. Quick and steady—you paid them no matter.
Still, I had plenty of time to keep an eye on Glen, which is what I wanted to do most and I did. He liked the way we’d painted his room and had said, And you picked the colors, Dave? Though he knew that I did because we’d told him. I knew he was just making a fuss to show he appreciated it ’cause his happiness was more studied than not. And you painted some, too? And I’d smile in spite of myself, proud and red in the ears and foolish, his words like a hand petting me down.
He was sleeping up there in his room again and working around the house and working odd jobs when he could, though at that time with the men out of the plant people did their own odd jobs and weren’t paying for that. He drove up to the VA hospital sometimes. I don’t know why that was a secret, why nobody talked about it when I was around, though I’d overheard him asking to take the van up to Fresno to see the doctor. Wasn’t long he didn’t have that stuff covering up his ear anymore. He looked normal.
One night sometime after he was back, I was at the kitchen table working in my notebook on a drawing I’d started maybe a few weeks earlier. I’d copied it out of my book with pencil, and I was trying to get it right using colors I’d found in the basement, ones my mother had used when she’d taken a class, these oily professional crayons. I was making a Paradise flycatcher. I’d wanted it the same red its body had in the book, like cayenne pepper, and I’d had some fierce trouble with that, though the match wasn’t bad. I was filling in the head and the long, long tail feathers with black when Glen came in and sat down to watch me. It was hot, being summer, and he wiped his forehead carefully with a dishtowel and slurped on the glass of iced tea he had with him. He lit a cigarette and let a little ball of blue smoke roll up just outside his mouth before he pulled it in and down in his lungs, his face a little sigh of pleasure. “Never saw one like that,” he said, meaning my work.
I looked at him. His hair was starting to come in, nubs of lead gray, just like the points of pencils. He had on a blue t-shirt and old Levis, soft from the wash, and he was more relaxed than I’d seen him, but not much. I wondered if he hadn’t been round to his passion’s or if he’d forgotten her.
“Over there you saw mostly chickens, unless you were on patrol out somewhere in the trees. That’s where you had to go to see ones like that,” he said nodding toward my Paradise bird. “Those kind, the colorful ones, they stick to the canopy, the tops of the trees and you only hear them. Then, once in awhile, all of a sudden, a whole flock of one kind will zip by, their wings flashing, and then they’re gone. You have to look quick.” Then his eyes went up, tracing the kitchen ceiling, following those birds off into the distance, one eye squinting some as if it pained him. And he wasn’t there in the kitchen anymore, he’d flown off thousands of miles and it gave me a chill, because I saw then that’s what he wanted and there wouldn’t be any stopping him, whether he wanted to or not, as he wouldn’t be looking back once he went, not even for me.
So I did something foolish, said, “Don’t you want to see that MaryAnn Sheeney?”
His head came back down, and his eyes climbed back down, and he looked at me steady, but didn’t say anything. His face relaxed blank as a tablet of stone, his eyes cooling off like little gas jets turned down low, getting even more narrow than God’d made them. He pulled on his smoke and his fingers were shaky, just a hair shaky, and he swallowed the smoke down and spewed it up, twisting and blue. I was looking at the tiny beads of sweat on his upper lip when he spoke. “Come again?” he said, turning his good ear toward me, though I knew he’d heard me just fine.
“The red-headed woman. The one that lives down by the ditch in that little white house.” I guess fear made me cunning and also a danger and I should have stopped right then. I should’ve been struck dumb on the spot.
He didn’t speak then. And I went back to my painting, afraid of myself. I was screwing the tail feathers up, making them too fat, my lines nervous and splotchy. He pushed back his chair, it scraping the linoleum, and went over to the sink to run the water on his cigarette and drop it in the trash. He was looking out the kitchen window, though it was so black it was a mirror, and he said very softly, “You know there’s a bird that stays in the air all summer?” He was looking at himself in the window. “Imagine that.”
“What?” I said.
“Henley … he’s a guy, sort of bird nut, I knew in the service. He was stationed in Europe for awhile; he said the Air Force tracked them on radar. He said they would circle in the evenings over this big reservoir that was out back of the base and then rise upwards at dusk. They’d just keep climbing and stay aloft all night. And get this, he said in the summer they never touched down at all.” The thought of it had him thinking, his head cocked like a dog that’s asking for an answer.
“Never touched down at all,” I repeated after him.
“That’s something, isn’t it, Dave?” he said, not turning around, still looking at his face in the window.
“How they eat?” I said.
“Catch their dinner on the wind. Get their water that way too, from the bodies of insects.”
“What do they call those birds?” I asked.
“Pretty sure he said it was a swift. Common swift. That was probably it. That’s a small bird, heart the size of a pea, I’d bet.”
“Size of a pea,” I repeated, my mouth hanging open, keen with the wonder.
He turned around from the sink and he looked at me. Then slowly he smiled, kind of weary, and said, “Don’t be in such a hurry to grow up, Dave.”
Course, that was lost on me, coming, as it did, too late.
21
Summer is hard in the San Joaquin Valley. The sky loses its blue and goes white, the red in the glass thermometer that my dad had tacked up on the porch, then, would slip up above a hundred and the middle of most days the shadows are sucked up, shriveled thin. There’s no wind at all, except in the evenings when it finally kicks up with soft sweet smells of the grass and the raisins and such. You’d think folks would slow down in that weather, but they don’t. They work harder than ever, especially out on the farms.
Summer’s when the men at the plant got the idea of a food bank. They started going out in trucks after a farmer had harvested his tomatoes or asparagus or whatever and they’d comb through the fields and get what was left. They boxed it up so people could come pick it up at First Baptist. Times are lean, is what people said and folks were feeling it, I guess. Two guys got in a fist fight right there in the hall at the church over a box of cucumbers until my dad broke it up. He split one fellow’s lip, who looked more surprised than hurt, his mouth hanging open, a spider of blood dangling wet from his teeth.
The men still hung around outside the plant every day except now they took it in turns. Maybe twenty or thirty at a time. S
ome found work picking in the fields, but not many as it was work they didn’t know well enough to do fast and fast is the only way you could make any money at all doing that sort of thing. And pruning and spraying and irrigating and such was a skill of its own. No farmer wanted to train them if they were just going to leave once the strike broke.
Lots of those boys got drunk. I know because the bars on Front Street were on my route. I was supposed to just drop the paper on the sidewalk outside, but I always got off my bike and went in to leave the paper right there on the bar. Nobody told me to do that. I just wanted to and figured I could. I wanted to know about the insides of those places.
I would walk right in, push open those doors that were upholstered like the seats of an automobile and feel the cool of the place right away. Dark and cool explained why those guys hung around in there. Of course, there was the beer, but I knew that could be had cheaper at the grocery. I never tasted beer myself as my dad had put liquor behind him and made me swear I’d never taste it while I lived in his house, and I was good to my word and never did.
One day I was riding down the sidewalk downtown about to cross the alley next to Jack’s Place and Erin Bleacher pulled up in a yellow Pontiac Firebird. He had some brand of ugly on his face and this plump girl with fuzzy hair and a gap in her teeth sitting next to him, giving off this phony smile as best she could.
That Pontiac was rumbling and snorting enough to shake bolts loose and Erin Bleacher motioned me over to him. I didn’t get off of my bike. I just hopped down from the seat, and straddling it, walked it and myself to the curb.
“Hey, squirt,” he said. I was looking at his face, seeing it close for the first time. He must have had pimples bad when he was a kid as it looked all pitted and scarred like as if at one time he’d been hit with bird shot pointblank. He had bug eyes sitting out on the ledges of the holes where they were supposed to go. One of his big arms was slung out the window and hanging down along the door of the car like a side of meat.
“Whadda ya hear?” he said.
“Nothing,” I said, squinting from the sun.
He smiled real big and I saw one of his eye teeth was gray and going black.
“That Jew in there?”
I looked over at Jack’s and then back. “Don’t know,” I said.
“You know who I mean? The one with the hot-shot shoes. Mr. Bigmouth.”
I just looked at him, dumb.
“You taking the paper in?” he said.
“No. Just drop it out front.”
“Oh,” he said, “that his car?” he pointed to a dented Ford Falcon parked across the street.
“Don’t know.”
“Why don’t you go on in there and tell him I want to talk to him. Tell him I just want to talk to him by himself. Right out here on the sidewalk. Tell him there’s plenty of people around. Tell him it’s just to talk.” He said it like he knew I was going to do it. That made me mad, but I parked my bike anyway and grabbed a paper and went in and walked straight to the bar and left it there. The guy behind the bar asked me, “Kid, you want a Coke?”
I just shook my head and looked around and I saw the guys smoking and playing cards, some of them quiet and sullen, some of them loud, and over by one wall, he was there leaning over the jukebox, smoking. Thin, twin plumes of smoke streaming out of his nostrils. I thought I could tell them Erin Bleacher’s outside as I knew each of them hated him and there’s plenty of them, but I kept my tongue still.
I quit my watching and walked back toward the bathroom, but then cut around the end of the bar and slipped into the kitchen and out the back door. I just left my bike there. Somebody must’ve stolen it as it wasn’t there next morning when I checked, and those papers, the ones I still had left to deliver, never got out. I had to walk my route after that. But I guess I found out I wasn’t no scab, and I had my own work in this world and Erin Bleacher had his and he’d have to do it himself.
22
I didn’t even say anything to those old ones out front when we walked right into Nelson’s Hardware. Glen sort of nodded at one of them, Mr. Garland, his shop teacher from long time ago. We went directly over to the glass counter where Allen Nelson, Mr. Nelson’s overweight, forty-year-old son, was standing in his shirt sleeves with his flabby arms showing and his little red bow tie. He recognized Glen and perked up his black, bushy eyebrows and said, “It came in yesterday.” Then he disappeared into the back, and I looked up at Glen, and he knew I was looking at him, but he wouldn’t let on while we waited, but his eyes swung down once, those eyes of his dark and shiny as the coffee beans my teacher once showed to my class. They were shiny with pleasure, way they used to be all the time.
I was looking up at him, and I remembered when I was really little and Glen was a kid and it snowed. The only time on record they said it snowed, and Glen woke me up and got me dressed, piled on two sweaters, a scarf, a hat and some mittens, and zippered up my jacket so tight, me so swollen, I could hardly move. Then he took my hand and led me outside and all round our place, holding my hand because I was that small and might fall and showing me everything like he’d stayed up all night himself to make it for me. I cried when I first saw it, everything white, the whole world erased, the air hushed and hurting my cheeks. But he just laughed and showed me it was OK. Sat down in it and rolled over and then jumped up and laughed like a monkey dusted with flour. And I shined with the wonder of him, all that he knew, and I forgot to be scared.
Allen Nelson came out and placed a long white cardboard box on the counter. It had Remington stamped on it in red letters and then I knew. Glen asked for two boxes of shells and then paid him twenty-nine dollars and ninety-four cents and signed some papers and we left. I carried the box that had a nice weight to it, and I just sailed past those old ones out front, though I know they wanted bad to see what we had and were hungry to make some conjecture.
Driving out towards the country, the van wound out loud like a bucket of bolts spun in a dryer, Glen telling how it was all mine but that I wasn’t to shoot it unless he was around. He was enjoying the telling, and me too, his voice easy and low. We pulled off the two-lane and took a dirt road out into a vineyard and after awhile of bumping along, we stopped and got out.
It was a one-shot bolt action .22 with a mahogany stock. Glen showed me how to drop the shell in and snap the bolt down. I already knew how to shoot from my pellet gun, but Glen went through it all anyway. How to breathe slow and squeeze off the rounds gentle. He said a single shot was the best because it made you slow down and think what you were doing, how a gun was like all things important, and you had to learn patience and respect for the power that it was.
I shot up both those boxes we had, taking my time, shooting down into a dried-out slough at some piles of old grape stakes that were stacked there for burning, the rounds kicking up little bursts of splintery dust where they went in, Glen nodding when he thought I’d done it right. He wouldn’t shoot when I offered, said, “Not today,” that faraway look he’d had lots of times since he’d been home climbing back over his face, and I wished I hadn’t asked him.
Driving back we went a different way, me knowing why and not saying. The wind seemed to be out of his sail, and he was just watching the road and his driving. He caught me looking glum, which I suppose I did look, so he socked my arm, soft, and smiled in the old way, but then went on back to his own special quiet, his own type of worry, and I felt alone and just counted the mailboxes that were sunk every so often out along the road, and when we passed by her place, I saw him look off up that way, and I looked, too, and that Ford Falcon was parked up there in the grass, and I knew that was no comfort to either of us, that we weren’t kids anymore, though we’d tried.
23
There were some said she left because she’d got preg nut. That’s how they said it. Anyway, that’s what I heard. But I know different. I mean, later, I found out myself it was true she was going to have a baby, but that’s not why she left. Some said it was ’cause all t
he trouble the police gave her about the Jew after he was dead. Some said it was because she couldn’t bear to be near where my brother had lived. Some said she should have never been let to leave, said, Bitches in heat ought to be locked up. I never thought that, but that was their wisdom, and like most of the stuff people think and repeat, it was just everyday ignorance going round and round as it will.
I didn’t give much thought to it, as by summer, I was set to working on my own life, my drawing, and my route and the part that gave me some genuine solace, the choir. Mr. Cobley was working us hard for our fall concert. Over and over we practiced those songs, some of them hymns, some of them just ones he thought would go over well. Everything from This Land Is My Land to The Old Rugged Cross. I was no talent, but I had a good enough ear and could stay with my part and never got whacked around the ears with Cobley’s baton which is something he’d do time to time, especially if the practice went long. When that happened he’d start to get sweaty and nervous. More and more he’d tug at his collar and rake his hair with his fingers, and then you knew you’d better not falter because somebody’s ears were going to sting.
Actually, I liked him. He was partial to laughing and crying and was an entertainment unto himself. He was what most would call strange in particular. Sometimes, he wore a red jacket, dark as blood, made out of velvet and a white silk tie with a big showy knot the size of a fist. His teeth were yellowed from tobacco and his hands had fingers as long as wax candles with the nails filed down very pretty.
He was a large man, a fact that was set off by the short, quiet one that was usually with him. Young Mr. Perch, as Mr. Cobley would say to that one when he wanted to make some change in what was to be played on the piano. Young Perch was as quiet as Mr. Cobley was loud. Young Perch dressed in gray flannel pants and white shirts, black penny loafers and a gray sweater vest he wore even in summer. He hardly spoke or even smiled. Just went along on the piano, his eyes soft, kind of mournful and watchful for Mr. Cobley.
My Brother's Passion Page 5