Baby Huey: A Cautionary Tale of Addiction

by James Henderson

  “He and them boys went hunting. I ain’t here by myself, though. Jackie and Beverly, they upstairs. They got guns too. Hear something happening to me, they come running down here looking to pop somebody in they ass.”

  I told her she had no need to fear me. “You whooped me, that was a long time ago. I was a kid. I don’t hold that against you.”

  “I whooped you? When?”

  A heavyset girl wearing a white blanket-size dress came into the room.

  “Beverly?” Last I’d seen her she was a string bean tomboy who could outrun me with a head start.

  Without hesitation she came over and hugged me. “John! Haven’t seen you in years. How’s your mother?”

  I told her mama was fine, and thought her acknowledgement of me would lay Aunt Jean’s suspicions to rest, but she pointed a knobby finger at me and said, “He say I whooped him. You remember me whooping him?”

  Beverly said, “No, I don’t remember that at all.”

  I started to argue but caught myself.

  Staring at me but addressing Beverly, Aunt Jean said, “Wonder what he done in Little Rock, come running down here early in the morning.” She squinted at me and said, “What you done did, boy?”

  “Nothing, ma’am. I couldn’t find a job in Little Rock. Mama told me Uncle CJ might have something for me to do here.”

  Aunt Jean grunted and said, “On the TV I saw a man collecting cans and hubcaps up there in Little Rock. Man can’t make it up there he can’t make it nowhere. You done something. What’s really going on?”

  The sound of engines nearing the house saved me.

  Uncle CJ, his three sons--Vince, Dexter, and Isaac--and a guy I didn’t know came inside, all wearing a bright-orange vest and carrying a rifle.

  Aunt Jean said, “Didn’t I tell you? We keep a buncha guns round here.”

  Beverly told them who I was and we all shook hands. Uncle CJ was a stocky man with a leathery face and an easy smile, graying at the temples, his skin much darker than his sister, who he also called Aunt Jean.

  Cutting to the chase I asked Uncle CJ for a job.

  He told me he was sure he could find something for me to do, told me not to worry about that now, to make myself at home, relax a spell, get something to eat. “You’re skin and bones.”

  Aunt Jean said, “Hold your horses, CJ. Ain’t it odd to you this boy come hightailing outta Little Rock all a sudden, passed all them aluminum cans on the way, to come down here and work? All you know, he mighta kilt up a buncha people. Beat up a defenseless old woman--you don’t know! Ask him what he did. Look at his eyes…sneaky and creepy. Ask him what he did. Ask him!”

  Uncle CJ said, “Aunt Jean, what way is that to treat family? Man wanted us to know something he’d tell us.” He gave me a wink. “You haven’t killed anybody, have you?” I shook my head. “There, it’s settled. Beverly, you and Jackie get some breakfast on.”

  “Wait a damn minute!” Aunt Jean said. “CJ, you joking, I’m serious. You ain’t the only one live here. First we find out what he did, then we decide if he can stay here or not.”

  Uncle CJ shook his head. “Aunt Jean, a woman read her Bible as much as you do I can’t believe would talk to family like this.”

  “You read the Bible, too, CJ,” Aunt Jean said. “Show me scripture say take a nut or a killer in your home. My eyes bad, I mighta missed it. Show it to me, CJ.”

  I said, “If it’s too much trouble I can leave.”

  Aunt Jean asked if I needed directions out the door.

  Uncle CJ told his oldest son, Vince, to show me to a room, told Aunt Jean to give it a rest, but she continued, telling him she was the one most vulnerable to an assault.

  In a small bedroom downstairs, the last room down a long hallway, I asked Vince if Aunt Jean was suffering from Alzheimer or some other mental defect.

  He laughed and said, “Aunt Jean talks a mean stick, but she’s the sweetest woman you’ll ever meet. You’ll see.”

  Huh? What type of women had Vince met that had him thinking Aunt Jean was sweet? I couldn’t imagine.

  Not an hour later, three generations of Powells sat around a large dining table laden with platters of eggs, bacon, biscuits, pancakes, sausages, and red-eye gravy. Two infants sat nearby in highchairs. Uncle CJ sat at the head of the table.

  And wouldn’t you know it, Aunt Jean sat her mean ass directly in front of me. Everyone bowed their heads when Uncle CJ said grace. He thanked the Lord for the food before us, the weather, last year’s crop, everybody’s good health, and on and on and on…Thinking the food would be cold by the time he finished, I looked up and, shit, locked eyes with Aunt Jean. She glared at me, and for some reason I couldn’t look away.

  Uncle CJ finally said amen and broke the witch’s hypnotic spell. Ravenous, I immediately started piling eggs, bacon, and pancakes on my plate.

  Over the sound of spoons and forks clattering, Aunt Jean said, “I called your mammy, had a long talk with her.”

  I knew she was talking to me, but didn’t look up.

  “Your mammy thinks a little hard work and the smell of cow dung might set you straight. She told me you had a good-looking wife, a church-going woman. You had a little money in the bank. A future. Then you got hooked on that crack!”

  That made me look up. She was buttering a biscuit, top, bottom, sideways, staring at me all the while. A glance around the table I noticed everyone else, including Uncle CJ, was still eating, as if they hadn’t heard the witch insult me.

  Aunt Jean said, “Like Miss Piggy said, ‘You feel froggy, jump.’”

  She didn’t have a clue how badly I wanted to pick up a plate and break it over her head.

  The biscuit dripping butter, she said, “Yo mammy said crack drove you crazy--you jumped on your wife. Her brother tagged your ass for doing that. Guess you ran out of crack that day, didn’t have the will to fight no more. Guess he’s the one knocked out your grill, didn’t he?”

  Appetite gone, I gave her a check-yourself look, and she tossed it back, kept talking.

  “I don’t know much about crack so I had Jackie look it up on the Internet. There it was, right there in black and white: Crack makes you nutty than a fruitcake. Didn’t it say that, Jackie?” Jackie didn’t respond. “It sure did. Had a picture of a little bitty sickly baby, called it a crack baby. Sad, just sad. It also said you smoke enough of that crack you start acting like a paranoid schizophrenic. You know what that is, don’t you, CJ?”

  Uncle CJ said, “I know, but I’m sure you’ll tell me whether I knew or not.”

  “Paranoid schizophrenic, that means you think folks looking to do something to you when they ain’t studying your crazy butt. Who knows what it’ll make a fool do. Say, for instance, a little old defenseless woman like myself sitting alone in her room reading her Bible and knitting socks for her family, and a schizophrenic crackhead is lurking through the house late at night looking for crack, can’t find none, get it in his head the little old defenseless woman might have a dollar or two under her mattress, all he gotta do is take it.

  “Crackhead tiptoes to her room, opens the door real quiet-like, sees her sitting in her chair, rocking and sewing socks to keep her family’s feet warm in the winter, reading scripture, and crackhead eases into the room and…kaboom!” She slapped the table and upset a glass of orange juice. “Both barrels! Twelve-gauge Remington! Buckshots! Crackhead didn’t know what hit him.”

  Uncle CJ said, “Are you finished, Aunt Jean?”

  She bit into the biscuit, worked her mouth like one of those cows outside, crumbs dribbling down into the V of her bathrobe, staring at me all the while.

  Old heifer.

  My throat felt dry. Head ached.

  Vince and Uncle CJ struck up a conversation about a big buck that got away during the hunt. One of the babies dropped a bottle on the floor and started bawling. I pushed my plate away, said excuse me, and went to my room.

  Several retorts ent
ered my mind the second I started packing to leave, each prefixed or suffixed with Kiss My Ass, Grandma. Aunt Jean didn’t know how lucky she was: she’d talked that shit to anyone else but me she’d have made herself immediately eligible for one of those electric scooters advertised on TV.

  The rock in the trunk whispered to me, said Come get me, promised to lube my dry throat, alleviate my headache, calm my nerves.

  Uncle CJ walked into the room and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “Three rules,” he said. “One, you a man you work or go to school. Two, attending family meals is mandatory. Three, if you put it on your plate, eat it. Wasting food is my biggest pet peeve.”

  The Caddy was almost on E, not enough gas to get out of town.

  “Hard to eat with someone talking to you like a dog, Uncle CJ.”

  “The thing that strikes me about your generation? Feelings. My day, feelings were a luxury. We were too busy working, wondering where the next meal was coming from.”

  “Uncle CJ…” I started to ask for ten bucks for gas, but I couldn’t. “Uncle CJ, I think I should just leave. Aunt Jean, I’ve never met someone like her.” A witch.

  “You’re a man, do what suits you. When you find a place where everyone likes you, call me, okay?” His fingers were twice mine, cracked and calloused. “Thirty years ago a young man your age fell in love with a woman didn’t mean him no good. Married her. Had three boys and two girls by her. Everyone knew what kinda woman she was, but they didn’t tell him. It was his problem, not theirs. Everyone but Aunt Jean. As you know she doesn’t mince words. She got in his face, told him things he didn’t want to hear, things that got him good and ticked off.

  “Aunt Jean didn’t care, though. She kept at him, so much so he started looking into things. Discovered a scheme by a woman who told him she loved him every night and another man, plotting to take everything he had, including the farm passed down from his grandfather. That was a dangerous time, somebody could’ve got killed.” He started to say something else but didn’t. Getting to his feet he said, “Michael thinks it’s okay to allow little boys in his bed. That other young man thinks it’s cool to videotape a fourteen-year-old girl and him having sex. You ask me, we need a lot more Aunt Jeans.”

  Chapter 18

  Aunt Jean couldn’t find the money that she kept in a knotted piece of pantyhose pinned to the inside of her shirt. She looked for it all of two minutes before deciding I stole it.

  Uncle CJ said, “Now, Aunt Jean, maybe you misplaced it. You look in your room?”

  Uncertainty in her eyes, she said, “Rock Star stole it. I know he did.” Someone had told her rock star was another name for crackhead. “Make him strip, CJ. I betcha he got it on him. It didn’t get up and walk away.”

  Uncle CJ gave me a suspicious look and I said, “You want me to strip, I’ll strip.”

  Aunt Jean said, “What’s the holdup? Start peeling em off.”

  It was five o’clock in the morning, still dark out. Aunt Jean rarely slept, up all night patrolling the house, talking to herself, conjuring up ways to make my life miserable. She’d taken her stale butt to bed early, and kept her nose where it belonged, she probably wouldn’t have lost her money.

  Uncle CJ told her to look for it again. “Ask Beverly to help you when she wakes up. Time for us to go to work.”

  In his truck, a new Ford 150, I held his coffee cup as he started the engine. Usually Uncle CJ told me stories as he drove. Today, however, he was quiet. Too quiet. Which meant he was entertaining the lie that I’d stolen Aunt Jean’s money.

  A few blocks the dogs ran alongside the truck, barking, darting in and out of the headlight beams, almost but never getting hit. The cattle followed the truck, too, though at a much leisurely pace, in a long strung out line. The sun would be high in the sky by the time they all arrived to the feeding spot where Uncle CJ unloaded a bale of hay.

  Uncle CJ drove straight to the big Quonset hut, less than a mile away from the house, where all the machines were kept. One combine, two John Deere tractors, five thrashers, two rear-end loaders, a Nissan forklift, four riding lawn mowers, and five four-wheelers.

  Parked on the right side of the building was a 1984 International hooked to an empty flatbed trailer.

  Yesterday Uncle CJ sat in the passenger seat as the truck bucked and conked out under my control. “You’ll get the hang of it,” he said. Finally I did, somewhat, jerking the gearshift into fifth, the transmission wailing in pain, the tachometer shooting into the red, and the smell of diesel exhaust drifting into the opened windows. Uncle CJ told me not to worry about running into anything.

  “A thousand acres, you can’t hurt anything here,” he said. “Catch another gear.”

  A loud pop and then the sound of metal grinding as I shifted to sixth gear. As we rode along at fifteen miles an hour, Uncle CJ told me about his father, Glenn Powell, a wino who didn’t look after his family.

  “Wasn’t for your mother and me working day and night, Daddy would’ve lost this farm.”

  “What about Aunt Jean? She didn’t work?”

  Uncle CJ laughed. “She worked, but she didn’t sweat.”

  Today, however, Uncle CJ wasn’t even smiling when he stopped the Ford.

  I said, “You want me to crank up the International?”

  He shook his head. “No, I need you to do something else today.”

  When he drove off I waved at him with the paintbrush he’d given me to paint the white fence that stretched for miles. The white fence that didn’t need painting.

  Damn!

  The three weeks I’d been here my job, at least I thought, was to ride along with Uncle CJ and give him a hand whenever he needed it, a rarity since he preferred doing almost everything himself.

  The sun was rising. It wasn’t cold, but morning dew frosted the grass. A rooster called out and a flock of blackbirds in a dogwood tree cawed in response.

  Uncle CJ wouldn’t be coming back anytime soon. His three boys were either on their way to high school or college. Beverly and Jackie were probably asleep.

  I could walk back to the house, lure Aunt Jean out into the backyard--“Look! Isn’t that the smelly thing you keep your money in?”--and when she bent over I would rear my foot waaaaay back and…That wouldn’t work. Still no money to buy gas for the Caddy.

  The Powells might not mind if I punted the witch’s ass, but I couldn’t be sure of that, and would need enough gas to make Little Rock if they got pissed off.

  Brushing the paint on thick, too thick, large drops dripping on the ground, I started thinking about Dokes and Doreen. A thousand times a day I thought about Dokes and Doreen.

  The thought of them simply holding hands made my head hurt--but my imagination went further than that.

  They were doing it!

  A thousand times a day they were doing it. In the bed, on the couch, floor, kitchen table, in the shower…Shit, I was driving myself crazy.

  Maybe Dokes was telling the truth. Yeah, right. Man sitting on your couch with a gun in his lap asking if you were sleeping with his wife, of course you lied. No. Dokes didn’t lie; the most honest brother I’d ever known.

  What the hell was Doreen thinking?

  She was hurting, needed someone to talk to, Dokes was there, simply there. Dokes, confused already with all those faggy thoughts circulating in his head, misinterpreted the situation, thought foolishly that Doreen wanted him instead of me.

  “John, you’re nothing but a crackhead.”

  I still couldn’t believe she’d said that. I wasn’t a crackhead. The rock in the trunk of the Caddy verified that. A true crackhead would’ve smoked it by now. Naw, uh-uh, crack didn’t move me; I could take it or leave it.

  The sound of a car door slamming startled me. Uncle CJ walked up.

  “Man, once you start working, you start working,” he said, and I looked down the fenceline and realized I’d painted a long way from where I started. “Aunt Jean
found her money. She forgot she hid it inside a pillow.”

  “Oh, yeah? She thought I took it.” You did too.

  “That’s enough of that. Let’s go get some lunch.”

  At dinnertime I fully expected the witch to apologize.

  First time she sat on my side of the table, between Beverly and Shep, a family friend who showed up during mealtime and didn’t talk. First time she didn’t spice the meal with farfetched tales of her being attacked by a crazed crackhead and blowing him away with a shotgun.

  First time I was able to eat my food in peace. Leaning forward I looked at her and she looked away.

  Rotten heifer.

  * * * * *

  That night I couldn’t sleep, horny and missing Doreen something awful. It was two-thirty in the morning. After much thought I decided that I’d let Doreen go too easily.

  There was a phone in the kitchen. Call her, talk calmly, apologize again, tell her how much I love her, how much I miss her.

  “Baby, I don’t use drugs anymore, honest.”

  A fat mouse scurried across the kitchen cabinet and hid behind the dish rack near the sink. Listening for footsteps, I picked up the phone and called Doreen’s mother’s number.

  If a half-eaten plate of food disturbed Uncle CJ, I couldn’t imagine what a long distance phone call would do to him.

  Ten rings before a groggy voice said, “Hello.”

  Whispering: “May I speak to Doreen?”

  “She’s not here,” and then the line went dead.

  Not there? Where the hell is she this time of night?

  Dialed again, this time Doke’s number. Three rings before a kid picked up and said hello. Wrong number. Wait a minute. “Lewis?”

  “Yeah. Who’s this?”

  “It’s me, Lewis. John. Where’s your mother?” I heard a TV in the background.

  “I got suspended at school. Wasn’t my fault. Boy took my lunch sack, wouldn’t give it back. I hit him in the nose.”

  The kid was lucky: messing with Lewis’ food was a life-threatening stunt.