by Joan Opyr
August 11 was a hot day, about a hundred and four degrees. A dirty miasma rose from the stagnant green water of the fishpond. The tobacco in the sandy fields around us had turned golden yellow, and it smelled sticky and sweet, like raisins. We’d stopped at a bait shop on the way out so Hunter could buy a can of worms and two bamboo fishing poles. The poles rarely survived more than one or two trips. Hunter and Fred dropped them into the pond, or left them on the ground and ran over them when we left. Saving unused bait was also not done—that would’ve meant we wouldn’t need to stop at the bait shop the following week. The bait shop was where Hunter bought the beer. Two six-packs of Budweiser, tucked into the Styrofoam fish cooler.
We parked in the shade of the willow tree, and Fred unloaded the van. Fred always unloaded the van. He was a natural-born flunky. If he’d ever had a thought, he kept it to himself. He answered every question in the negative with “Nope” and in the positive with “Might as well” or “Don’t mind if I do.” I suspected he was simple-minded, but Nana insisted that he had low cunning. When she and Hunter were first married, they came home from their honeymoon to find that Fred had gone through my grandfather’s bedroom at Miss Agnes’ house and sold his guitar, his second-best suit, and the quilt off his bed.
Fred set up the lawn chairs and fishing poles and sat down. Then he mopped his face with a dirty red bandanna, a gesture that was alcoholic semaphore for “I need a beer.” Hunter took his glasses off, ran a hand across his forehead, and wiped the sweat onto his trousers. This was alcoholic semaphore for “Help’s on the way.”
Hunter put his glasses back on and squinted up at the sun.
“It’s a hot one, ain’t it, Fred?”
“It’s a hot one,” Fred agreed.
“Hot enough for you, Frankie Lou?”
This summertime rhyme was getting to be an old joke. I drew a target on a paper plate and nailed it to the willow tree. “Hotter than the blue gates of hell,” I said. “You’d better get yourself something to drink.”
This was not part of the game. I’d blown the cover. For my punishment, I had to listen to another five minutes of complaints about the weather.
Finally, Hunter felt the back of his neck. “Look at that,” he said, shaking the sweat off his hand. “The water’s just pouring off me. I must be getting dehydrated. You want a cold one, Fred?”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
Fred never said no to a beer. He never said no to anything. According to Hunter, he paid flesh rent to the landlady at his boarding house, an old woman with one leg who looked like a Bonobo monkey. I’d rather have died than picture the two of them together. Fred looked like he routinely slept outdoors in a puddle of urine. His face had the weathered, gnomish look of a hardened street bum, and his eyes were permanently bloodshot. He wore his hair in a greasy black pompadour that was, except for the dandruff, an exact replica of Ronald Reagan’s. Deep wrinkles crossed the burnt red skin of his forehead like slashes in a dirty tarpaulin. Why any woman would want him, even the landlady at his boarding house, was beyond me, and yet he claimed to have three ex-wives and a host of children for whom he paid no child support. Hunter said the reason Fred didn’t have a driver’s license was for fear that one of his ex-wives might track him down and make him pay.
He had a job washing cars at the Chevy dealership where my grandfather worked as a mechanic, and it was entirely thanks to Hunter that Fred kept it from week to week. Hunter picked him up every morning, drove him home every night, and tried to keep an eye out in case anything disappeared from a customer’s trunk or glove box. He was his brother’s keeper. It was the price he paid for a built-in drinking buddy.
I took aim at the paper plate and fired. The BB struck an inch to the right of the bulls-eye, so I adjusted the sight with my Swiss Army knife and fired again.
“Bulls-eye,” Hunter said. “You see that, Fred? She’s Annie Oakley. She could shoot the balls off a housefly.”
I pretended I hadn’t heard him, and I tried not to look pleased. Sober, Hunter was sparing with compliments; drunk, he was often effusive. This one meant something. I fired ten more shots into the paper plate and then sat down at the edge of the pond.
“Here,” Hunter said, “see if you can shoot the cork on that fishing line.”
I tried and missed. So much for Annie Oakley.
“Balance the pistol on your knee,” he said. “Here, give it to me, I’ll show you.”
I handed him the gun and he sat down next to me. Ten shots later, he said, “Goddamn son of a bitch. Throw that in the pond and I’ll buy you one that shoots straight.”
I took the pistol back from him, took aim at the cork, and fired. This time, I hit it.
“Well I’ll be shit,” he said. “You see that, Fred?”
Fred nodded and cracked open another beer. I shot several more paper plates, a couple of corks, and an old piece of roofing tin. Then I moved into the shade and whittled a stick with my Swiss Army knife until I put a gash in my thumb. I borrowed the van keys from Hunter and drove the Econoline up and down the dirt road past Miss Agnes’ bedroom window. She looked out twice. I didn’t stop. When driving lost its charm, I went back to the pond and picked up the now sizeable collection of empty beer cans. These I set up in the branches of the willow tree. The sun was now directly overhead, forcing Fred and my grandfather to abandon their lawn chairs and seek shelter in the back of the van. Hunter whistled to himself: Once in A While, Deep Purple, and You Are My Sunshine. When he got to Lady of Spain, he’d be out of beer.
Checking to make sure that the safety was on, I spun the gun around on my index finger and then rammed it into the pocket of my shorts. I practiced a few more spins and quick draws before closing my left eye and taking aim at a can. The BB hit with a satisfying ping. I turned quickly to my right and shot two more cans.
It was the fourth shot that did the damage. The BB ricocheted off the can and struck my left eye. I dropped the gun and covered my eye with my hand. For a moment, I was afraid to move, afraid the BB was lodged in my eyeball, afraid it had gone straight through to the back of my head. It wasn’t until I felt the blood trickling down my palm that I took any action. I picked up the gun and threw it into the pond.
I heard the pop and hiss of two more beers being opened and thought for a moment about throwing myself into the pond as well. In a crisis, my grandfather only had two readily accessible emotions, anger and panic. I decided there was no help for it. With my hand still cupped over my eye, I walked around to the back of the van. Hunter and Fred were sitting on the floor with the cargo doors open, their feet resting on the bumper. Fred had taken off one of his zippered ankle boots and was holding it out for my grandfather’s inspection.
Hunter held up his hands to ward it off. “Jesus Christ, Fred. That smells like a fart in a vinegar bottle. Why don’t you wear socks?”
Fred shrugged and slipped his bare foot back into the boot. “It’s nice, ain’t it?”
“I’ll give you some goddamn socks,” Hunter said.
“I didn’t pay but twenty dollars for that boot,” continued Fred.
My grandfather shook his head in disgust. “You bought them at that pawn shop, didn’t you? What have I told you about that? Somebody might have died in them boots. He might’ve pissed in them. Why can’t you go to a goddamn store . . .”
“Excuse me,” I said as calmly as I could. “I think I need some help.”
Hunter looked up. He didn’t drop his beer can in shock. He didn’t even put it down. He said, “What in the sam hell have you done to yourself?”
The pain in my eye had given way to a dull throbbing, so I cleared my throat and took my hand away. When the light hit the pupil, I felt like I’d been stabbed. I put my hand back up quickly and said, “I shot myself.”
There was a long pause and then he said, “What did you do that for?”
“It was an accident.”
“Goddamn it to hell—what are you doing playing half-assed with that gun?”
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I ignored this, as it was a typical five-beer response. There was no logic to it. “Can we go now?” I said. To press home the urgency of my request, I took my hand off my eye again for just a second, making sure Hunter got a good look at the bloody eyelid. He crumpled up his beer can and tossed it into the cooler.
“Come on, Fred,” he said. “We have to take this fumble-fingered fart to the hospital.”
For the next twenty-two miles, all the way from the farm to Wake Medical Center, Hunter carried on a stream-of-consciousness narrative.
“I told you to be careful when I gave you that thing, and what do you do? You shoot your goddamn eye out. You one-eyed fool—you think you’re Sammy Davis, Junior? What the hell were you playing at?”
“I wasn’t playing.”
“My fanny, you weren’t. You want to play something dangerous? Stick a blowtorch up your ass and play Buck Rogers.”
Mild stuff coming from Hunter; I didn’t interrupt.
“I’ll send you to live with your goddamn daddy. You’re nothing but a pair of half-assed Polacks. How about I take you out and shoot your other eye? Then you’ll match.”
I let him carry on the rest of the way without comment. It felt like my eye had been whacked with a hammer.
At the hospital, I learned that the blood came from my eyelid and not from the eye itself. The BB had struck at an angle, done its damage, and fallen onto the ground somewhere. The good news was that I would lose neither my eye nor my sight. The bad news was that my pupil might be permanently dilated. I wouldn’t know for a week or so.
This information was delivered by a pretty blonde ophthalmologist with a tiny waist and big boobs. She bandaged me up, gave me a prescription for pain, and told me I was free to go home. When she was out of earshot, Hunter leaned close to me and whispered, “Dolly Parton says you’ll live, but your mama’s going to kill us both. You’re going to look like a goddamn lizard.”
“I won’t look like a lizard,” I protested, ignoring the more serious concern of what my mother was going to do. “I’ll look like David Bowie.”
“Like who?”
“David Bowie. He’s a singer. From England. He’s got one eye just like mine.”
Hunter snorted. “You’ll look like a pirate. From Poland. A goddamn half-assed Polack Popeye.”
Chapter Five
Abby was the first to ask. We met in ninth grade biology class when we were seated at the same lab table, the one in the far back corner, next to the barrel filled with preserved dead cats. At some point during the school year we were supposed to dissect them, but we never got past the fetal pig.
“How did Popeye become Poppy?”
“My grandmother. She believes in making the best of a bad situation. Poppy sounds more feminine than my real name.”
“Your real name is Mary Frances.”
“Yeah, but no one ever called me that. It was always Frankie or Frank.”
“Frank. I can see how Poppy would be more feminine than that.” Abby chewed the end of her pencil. All of her pencils and pens had teeth marks in them. Her mother wouldn’t let her chew gum because of her braces. “Do you like Poppy?”
“I don’t hate it. It’s better than Popeye.”
“Or Frank,” she agreed. “Your eye, you know—it’s cool. It doesn’t look dilated. It looks like you’ve got one brown eye and one blue.” The bell rang. We shoved our books into our knapsacks and went out into the hallway. “Abby is a nickname, too. My real name is Abia. It’s an Arabic word meaning great.”
“That’s cool.”
“My dad was a Muslim. He died before I was born.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
The high school we attended was a Magnet GT, the G standing for gifted and the T for talented. It was called a magnet because it was designed to draw rich white kids into poor, predominantly black neighborhoods. The idea was to create a more appealing system than busing for integrating white and black kids while at the same time serving a specifically academic purpose.
It half-worked. The magnet part worked like a charm; white kids were drawn to the school from all over Wake County. Once they got there, however, the school had its own form of internal segregation. The students in the GT classes were ninety percent white and ninety percent rich. The year we graduated, Abby was one of only ten black students in the Magnet GT class, and she and I were the only ones in our small circle of friends and acquaintances who worked fast-food jobs out of necessity. We moved in a bubble within a bubble. In the academic classes, like English and Math, we rubbed elbows with people who lived in enormous houses in North Raleigh and drove sports cars their parents bought for them. In typing and gym class, we mixed with the general student population, many of whom regarded us with suspicion and resentment as the recipients of special treatment.
Though I didn’t realize it at the time, negotiating the various levels of segregation was especially hard on Abby. At the beginning of high school, she had friends on both sides of the aisle, black kids she’d grown up with and white kids, like me, that she’d met in class. As time wore on, it became increasingly difficult to balance these two groups. In ninth grade, she ate lunch with Shalia and Bonita and studied after school with me and Kim DiMarco. In tenth grade, she ate lunch with me and Kim. Abby was good-looking and brilliant, and her expectations were high. She expected to make the long climb to the top on sheer willpower and ability—valedictorian, scholarship, medical school, success. It was an unfair exchange, trading friends for aspirations. Either way, she lost something she valued.
In my ignorance, I thought I knew better. I thought I could take the “I have a dream” speech and smooth it all out for her. One day in the cafeteria, I spied Shalia and Bonita sitting at a table with three empty chairs. They looked up as we came in and waved. Abby and I waved back.
“Why don’t we sit with them,” I said. I’d eaten at their table a couple of times during freshman year. They were funny. We cracked jokes on one another and seemed to get along well.
Abby shook her head and looked away. “No,” she said. “They couldn’t be themselves with you there. You’d all be playing like you were someone else.”
“I’m not a bigot.”
“I didn’t say you were. But you’re also not black.” She handed me a tray from the stack at the beginning of the lunch line and took one for herself. “Sometimes,” she said, “black people sit together just so they can be black, on their own, without an audience. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“No.” We continued moving through the line, choosing the same things, hamburgers with extra pickles, red Jell-O, plain milk. When we came to the cashier, we both paid with reduced-price lunch cards. I hesitated. “Do you want to sit with them? It’s okay if you do.”
“No,” she said. “These days, I make them just as uncomfortable as you do.”
We didn’t speak about it again. Shalia and I took typing together, and Bonita and I were on the basketball and volleyball teams. Abby and I went on to college, and we didn’t see them again. Neither of us attended our ten-year high school reunion.
The traffic on the Durham Highway was a nightmare, bumper to bumper, with cars weaving in and out, speeding along at sixty and seventy miles an hour and then slamming on the brakes, stopping just short of a rear-end collision. I was glad not to be driving.
Twenty cars ahead, the police had a Trans Am pulled onto the shoulder. Abby signaled for a lane change as car after car swung out from behind and passed us. “I wish I had a cigarette.”
“You don’t smoke.”
“I know. I really wish I had a pistol and no fear of consequences.”
She gunned the Explorer into the left-hand lane and then slowed back down to the speed limit, causing the car behind us to ride up to within inches of our back window. I watched him in the vanity mirror of the passenger side visor.
“He just called you a stupid fucking bitch,” I said. “Should I turn around and give him
the finger?”
“No,” she said, glancing in the rear view mirror. “No need. A fat guy, about forty-five, tight collar, bright red face. He’ll have a heart attack at Fat Daddy’s over a plate of biscuits and gravy. Should we check in first or do you want to go straight to the hospital?”
“I don’t know. I’m exhausted.”
“So am I.” We passed Crabtree Valley Mall and negotiated the maze of straight arrows and turn lanes leading to Glenwood Avenue and the Beltline. Abby turned onto the Beltline.
“Hospital it is?” I said.
She nodded. “Let’s get really tired. Then, we’ll go straight to sleep. Besides, why waste those beers you drank on the plane? You’ll be nice and numb for your first family encounter.”
I glanced at my watch. “Let’s see, it’s five o’clock Portland time, which makes it eight o’clock here. Unless my grandfather is in the throes of dying right this minute, Ma and Nana won’t be there. They’ll have gone home to let the dogs out and settle in for the night. Nana doesn’t like to get home after dark.”
“I think it’s nice of her to go to the hospital at all.”
“They were married for nearly forty years.”
“That was twenty years ago. It didn’t end happily.”
“Tell me about it.” I closed my eyes and reclined the seat back. “I can’t stand watching this traffic. I’m going to pretend I’m back on the airplane, only this time, I’m sitting in first class.”
The woman at the reception desk spoke with a thick accent I couldn’t identify. It might have been Caribbean or perhaps Gullah. Her voice was low and lilting. “Mr. Hunter C. Bartholomew,” she said. “Room 418C, but you’d best be checking at the nurses’ station before you go in.”