Silent. Silent.
Two fence-posts back.
Silent.
Down the drive.
Silent.
Slam the door.
Silent.
Not even a good-bye. No sir. Not now.
And as I watch him crunching over the gravel, kicking up dust down the drive and into the nothing black night, I could jump for joy.
I could jump for joy, cause now I know I’ve got something. Fish-face. Quacky-duck’s got something. I’ve got something that cancels out too-broke Dad and cancels out dirt-lot brawls and cancels out that leaning, falling house I’m about to walk into. I got something that’s gonna throw me straight into the sun and leave this shitty little dust-bin behind and you just wait, you just wait, to see how I make it go boom.
TWO
Did you know I have a baby brother? Had one. it’s cause Tammy had a blue dress. Tammy had a baby-blue dress that came down not far enough and my dad liked her in that blue dress and then, the next thing you know, that blue dress started fitting tighter and tighter around her belly and, next thing you know, it looked like she swallowed a basketball and, next thing you know, my dad was skipping around talking about, “Luli, you’re gonna have a little baby brother, now, you’re gonna have to help your mama now, see.”
And even though I was only seven and didn’t know why Tammy swallowed a basketball or how that made a baby brother, you couldn’t help but smile when you saw my dad floating through the door and through the next, sashaying around Mama in her too-tight blue dress. And she’d say, “Now, c’mon, now, you don’t know it’s gonna be a boy, you just don’t know that, just shush.” And he’d say, “Yes, I do. I do sure know it like I know the sky is blue and I know the world is round and I know I married the most beautiful girl in the county, the state, the whole wide world, darlin, the whole big wide world.”
And this is the part where he’d sidle up behind her and start rocking back and forth and making her blush and play-swat him away, but she’s swaying, too, swaying there in that baby-blue dress, too.
And they had a Sunday with everyone coming over and bringing gifts and a cake and a little baby crib from Aunt Gina and Uncle Nipper, white with gold trim, like something you pulled out of a dollhouse and blew up life-size. And they were laughing and giggling and smiling thirty ways till sundown. And you would have been smiling, too, cause it was like all the good-mornings and all the hi-how-are-yas and all the well-hello-sunshines in the county had taken lunch all at once and decided to march down the dirt road and alight, just this once, just this one Sunday afternoon, and arrange themselves in a circle around my basketball-swallowing mama, sitting proud and pretty in that blue dress that started it all.
And maybe God and the angels took note of that blue dress, too, because when that baby came out the color of moonlight, we all knew something was wrong.
And he was a boy, all right, Dad got that part right, but he wasn’t the kind of boy you could take out front and throw a football to in four years or five or even six. No, sir, he was just born the color coming off the moon and sickly and sniffling and stiff. He was just born with a frown on his face, like he got dropped off at the wrong planet or maybe the angels left out a step or maybe he didn’t want nothing to do with it in the first place.
And he had to set in that incubator like some kind of other-world baby chick while my dad and Aunt Gina and Uncle Nipper just waited and waited and whispered and whispered and spent more and more money they didn’t have in the first place, just to keep him down on this here planet.
And there was a doctor came in from Omaha and he took one look at that baby and said we best be bringing him up there, cause that’s where they’ve got the best doctors and the best treatment money can buy, and my dad smiled and nodded and said oh-yes-Doctor, and that baby stayed right there in that incubator for three days straight before deciding that maybe this wasn’t the place for him after all. Maybe this wasn’t the right planet or the right county or the right too-broke family from somewhere out in the sticks, anyways, and so he just upped and took to floating back up into the blue sky from whence he came, back up to wherever planet you get to go to when you get born the color of moonlight and your too-poor daddy can’t afford to send you up to Omaha, where they’ve got the best white-coated smiling doctors that know what the fuck to do anyways.
You see, it’s one thing to pretend you’re James Dean and pump gas in the summer and make the girls blush before heading back to your double-wide. it’s one thing to pack mules in the fall and live in a log cabin and dip your hat down before riding off into the setting sun. But when not being able to scrape two dimes together makes it so your baby boy, born the color of the night sky, has to stay put in that glowing tin-cup incubator instead of up with the experts in Omaha, well, then, there’s nothing glamorous about that, now, is there?
And she didn’t have to say it, my mama, when the bones fell out her body all at once and Aunt Gina and Uncle Nipper tried to hold her rag-doll body up by the elbows. She didn’t have to say it, my mama, when it was like God himself had his heel into her back, holding her head down into the linoleum. She didn’t have to say it, my mama, when my dad tried to shush her sobbing into the tile, when she pulled back, recoiled at just even the inkling, the beginning, the thought of his hand on her arm. She didn’t have to say it. None of it. We all knew. We all knew.
And Uncle Nipper knew to go to the house and get rid of that white crib with gold trim, before Mama could set eyes on it, please Lord, just do it. And Aunt Gina knew to take that baby-blue dress and just bury it, bury it deep in the back of her closet far, far away, before Sunday visits and swallowing basketballs and boys born the color coming off the moon. And I knew, this is when I first knew, this is when I learned how to throw myself over to the other side of the room and watch my dumb little life like I was watching a movie and you get the popcorn and we’ll sit a spell and see what else goes by.
And there goes Dad, he’s been slumping around for three weeks straight with his head hanging off his shoulders. And there goes Mama, she still can’t eat but bring her this macaroni salad, just in case. And there goes most of my little-kid playmates, cause no one wants a fucking thing to do with this house anymore, that’s for damn sure. And here comes Aunt Gina and Uncle Nipper with a few kind words and making sure I got at least some Malt-O-Meal and Chef Boyardee to tide me over, they’ll be back tomorrow. And there goes my baby blue brother, somewhere into the night sky above me, and I wonder if I get to see him someday and tell him about the white crib he missed out on and that I know it wasn’t much but we were real proud to have him and wanted him to stay, just wanted him to stay a spell, and I would have played whatever silly little dumb game he had in mind, really, I was just happy to have him, my baby brother born the color of dusk.
And you better just learn to throw yourself twenty feet across the room and let it play, just let it play. You better just learn to put each day and night up onto that screen and just keep on watching. Here’s what you’ll see. You get to see the incredible shrinking man. You get to see a man six foot tall turn in on himself and slump forward into nothing and then gone. Poof. You get to see a great tale of revenge and lust with a beautiful blond with flip-up hair. You get to see her get gussyed up each evening and put on lipstick and giggle loud and bat her eyelashes at strangers, straying a little bit behind the Alibi on a Saturday night, no, better, make that Sunday. Hell, she might run off with the devil himself if he walked in, leaned his elbow on the jukebox and tipped his hat just so.
You get to see all these attractions and then some. You get to see Elvis-style dreamboats and slutted-up little girls and eyes swirling wild by the side of the road. You get to see naughty pink parts and coming attractions and wait, just wait, there’s more, keep watching, keep watching, let it play, let it play.
THREE
People think we’re poor but I made a list of things we have, just to set them straight.
We have one seventy-year-old f
armhouse, complete with barn, shack and an acre of tall wheat with weeds sticking up. We have all this luxury thanks to my grandpa who gave it to my mama when he died, on account of she was marrying a no good, ne’ergonna-make-nothing-out-of-his-skinny-bone-self like my dad. Despite the fact that it is, at first glance, a farmhouse, we don’t farm it or anything like that. We wouldn’t even know where to start. Tammy’s been trying to grow an avocado tree out of a pit for three years.
All told, we got a yellow farmhouse and a green barn and a blue shack but they’re all faded to about the same color anyways. The paint’s cracked and the wood on each of these little monuments that make up our own private village is washed out to gray, light gray, gray-blue or dark gray. The barn has a huge loft in it full of hay and smelling like horses, even though there haven’t been horses here for twenty years. Just about the only animal life in there are the bats that flutter around thirty feet up top the loft making it Halloween all year round.
It’s so thick with cobwebs up there I’m surprised the bats don’t get caught and eaten up by some imaginary spider of hideous proportion with sinister, darting eyes. On the other side of the cobwebs, facing out into the wheat dusk air, is a white-circle silhouette of a horse centered on each side of the barn, staring proud off into the setting sun.
In front of the barn is our humble abode, which is faded yellow inside and out, with tiny-blue-flower wallpaper on a white-and-gold background in both the entry, which we never use, and the dining room, which we use even less. Everything in our rickety faded buttercup house, dead straight across from the biggest cemetery in Lancaster County, built around 1910, for the gravedigger and his wife, actually still runs properly, with the one exception of some hullabaloo about the water.
Some orange-vested worker men from Lincoln came out here a few years back, noodled with the well tap and warned us that we had too much lithium in our water, declaring that it’d be best for everyone if we just relocated. This is something we never did, of course, because we didn’t have nowhere to relocate to, and Mama says, “Shit, wull, if we have lithium in our water we might as well see it as some kinda healing bonus and make the best of it . . . some people might even pay extra for that.”
Sides all that, we got one RCA color TV with wood on the sides and that sky blue Chevy Nova my dad takes pride in scurrying around and underneath on weekends, fixing and tinkering and muttering to himself about trannies, alignment and pistons.
And I know that these things may not seem like much to some la-di-da snooty-pants from Omaha but there are plenty of people in Lancaster County who have less than that, so I know, for a fact, that we’re not poor.
Okay, this is what there is. Sometimes there’s macaroni and cheese, with tuna, for protein, but that’s pretty much as good as it gets. If you’re still hungry you can have blue frosting on graham crackers for dessert. There’s also the option, sometimes, of a sugar sandwich, which involves two slices of white bread, buttered thick and spread with plain white sugar. And then other times, depending on how many days my dad’s been gone, there’s even the possibility of me just stealing our dinner from the Piggly Wiggly in Fremont or Wahoo or Alliance in case it’s a special occasion . . . birthday, Christmas, Easter . . . usually something involving ham. Ham means it’s a holiday and wear a shirt.
Tammy did a fairly reasonable job of teaching me how to steal when I was ten, but the knack I have for it comes mostly from my last three years of experience and has little to do with her slightly naive take on shopkeepers and advantage-taking. You may be thinking, oh my good Lord, what kind of a mother would put her own offspring up to such mischief and certain jeopardy? But, in all actuality, there’s a trick to it.
You see, this way, if I get caught, she can scold me and pretend like she’s so ashamed, she raised me with the Lord Jesus Christ in my heart and how could I betray her, the baby Jesus and the blessed Virgin Mary like that. Believe me, she knows how to showboat.
By the end of it, she’d have the shopkeeper so caught up in his own journey, or lack of journey, towards Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior that they’d just go ahead and let us go. They’d be too busy feeling sorry for me that I had such a pious mama that was surely going to spend this lifetime and the next dragging me through fire and brimstone before flying up to heaven on a puffy Charmin cloud.
I am proud to say that, with the help of Jesus Christ and the Bible, I’ve stolen our special-occasion family dinner for three years straight and not once had to face up to any power higher than the day clerk at the Piggly Wiggly.
It’s the little things like that I try to think about when I know I’m about to start feeling sorry for myself in my little yellow house with my stupid life and nothing to eat.
Lookit, if you think you can just march out to the kitchen and say a fine howdedoo this morning, you got another thing coming, that’s for damn sure. No sir, here’s how it’s got to be if you know what’s good for you. Peek. Tippy-toe. Tippy-toe. Down the hall. Peek. Tippy-toe. Tippy-toe. Down the kitchen. Peek. Investigate the ashtray. You can read that ashtray like a weather-vane.
You know how most people turn on the TV to figure out the weather and how the day’s gonna turn out? Well, round here the ashtray is gonna tell you who’s three sheets to the wind and if the storm’s rolling in or already passed. You best learn to read it if you know what’s good for you.
Empty ashtray means partly sunny. Empty ashtray means the coast is clear. Go about your day. Nothing to see here.
Full ashtray ain’t bad either. Full ashtray means the storm’s passed. Don’t worry. They’re all in bed now, it’s over. Just hope for full or empty ashtray.
Full ashtray with lit cigarette?
Well, you can’t win em all. That lit cigarette means the storm’s rolling in. Brace yourself.
Now, if you think that’s bad, just wait till you find a full ashtray with more than one lit cigarette. That is the last thing you want to see. If there’s more than one lit cigarette in that ashtray, you might as well tippy-toe back down the hall, pull the covers over your head, huddle and wait out the storm. More than three lit cigarettes in that ashtray and you best evacuate. More than three cigarettes means it’s gonna be a doozey. Hold on tight. Category 5.
Look here, it’s bad enough if you get one lit cigarette. That means the night before got piggy-backed over into this morning and the drinks are still going strong. They could be out there carousing with drink number eight to thirteen, for God’s sake. Who’s even counting anymore anyways? Might as well just drink out the bottle.
But if you get more than three lit cigarettes in that thing, that means Dad corralled some barflies over in a fit of generosity, probably somewhere near the third chorus of “That’s Life.” Hey, folks, let’s go to my place, we’re all amigos here.
They’ll be sitting there, round the kitchen table, unwitting, smoke coming up off their fingers, dazzled by my dad. Sitting ducks. He’ll be telling them all about that day he got stuck in the mud down by Wahoo and then this happened and then that happened and can you believe he got out, no one thought he could. They’ll be in love with him just like I am, just like Tammy used to be. They’ll be thinking this guy is the greatest guy since sliced bread, that’s for sure. If there’s a lady in the crowd, she’ll be thinking bout how she can sidle up to him on the way to the bathroom, maybe. she’ll be checking her lipstick and hiking up her bra every time he looks away. she’s got plans for him. Big plans.
They’ll never see it coming. No sir. I almost feel sorry for them, smiling dumb round that ashtray. They don’t know that drink number eight or nine are gonna be dropping by soon, looking for a brawl. They don’t know they’ve got a date with drink number ten that involves a lot of hollering, throwing bottles and knocking that front door off its hinges. They got no idea. That front door has been slammed off its hinges so many times we haven’t even bothered to put it back since June.
Maybe tomorrow.
But this morning I am breathing a sigh of relief because
that ashtray is empty, thank God. Bout time we had a little peace and quiet around here.
There is one little thing wrong with the kitchen, though, at present, which is that there happens to be a man in a gray suit sitting smack-dab in the middle of it. that’s a new one.
It’s not that a beaten-up farmhouse ten minutes outside of Palmyra, Nebraska, is an especially dangerous place to be, but it has happened. Twenty minutes east of here, in Alliance, there was a whole family got shot in cold blood about five years back. Two guys from Dodge sashayed into town, walked in, lined all four of them up on the floor and fired, but not until each of them had taken a turn with their fourteen-year-old daughter who happened to be runner-up Modern Miss Teenage Nebraska.
She was wearing a light-blue nightgown when it happened and in the pictures of the aftermath it looked like it had a flower pattern on it from all the blood, dark-brown and red flowers, abstract and huge. The blood down the inside of her legs was crackled and dried up into little pieces. Her eyes were wide open and she looked like a shattered doll.
Not me.
I slink back to my room and get something girls aren’t supposed to have but I do. Uncle Nipper gave it to me for my thirteenth birthday, along with a T-shirt that says, “Take Me Drunk I’m Home.” it’s a cockroach colored .45 and just looking at it makes you feel mean. It looks bad and looks like it’ll bring bad with it.
It’s my pride and joy.
I got some hot moves I picked up from Clint Eastwood and here’s my chance. I must have practiced this scene ten times since my birthday. Watch me sidle down the hall, hugging the wall, eyes froze. Make him turn around first. that’s what Clint would do. You gotta wait till they see you and make yourself big. You gotta show them your soul got left back, long ago, before handing them their walking papers from this shiny life to the next.
Hick Page 2