If You Want Me to Stay

by Michael Parker

  He held the matchbook up to the cigarette and looked at me.

  “Go ahead light it up, be just like him see do I care.”

  Carter held the cigarette in his hand, twisting it.

  “Dragons if you ask me have smoke coming out of their mouths, not people.”

  Carter twisted off the filter and the brown leaves pelted the floorboard.

  I HAD AN OLDER SISTER, she left, she couldn’t take it. She said, If this is love I’m joining the motherfucking carnival.

  Tank and Carter missed her but I tried to act like she was ill at everybody all the time which she wasn’t. She could make somebody laugh. Once when she was about Carter’s age she got mad at Mama and Daddy and ran away and when they caught up to her at the Family Mart playing pinball and asked her where she was headed anyway, she said, On a goddamn diet, and smacked the gum some old boy had bought her.

  IN DADDY’S TRUCK: duct tape from when he used to go to work as an assistant. He assisted: carpenters, plumbers, pipe fitters, surveyors, farmers, roofers, ditch diggers, pulp wooders. He could assist near about anyone doing near about anything. I believe he could have done most of it himself, could have hired him some assistants, but there was the pressure in his head.

  Plastic curly rings from when you open a thing of milk.

  All these receipts. What’s he doing, fixing to file his taxes?

  A couple of tapes: Creedence which don’t work anymore or I’d have it blasting and the Sound of Philadelphia featuring Teddy Pendergrass and Gamble and Huff. Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain which he used to put on whenever either Tank or Carter would not go down and he’d put one or both of them in the pickup, ride them around listening to some Trumpet Jazz, which always worked. Mama claimed it was a miracle. According to her I never had problems going to sleep, never fought it. She said I must have been born tired. What it was: I’d close my eyes and a whole other world would start to spin and I’d hang on and dearly hope.

  I’M NOT THINKING I’m going to go to college. I might get me a job counting stuff like nail clippers in bins. Dip your hands in a sink of cool metal. You will probably find me living out in the middle of some field or in some trees on the backside of a hill or near a train-track trestle or some broken-windowed warehouses. I will be up in there all alone. People might ask are you lonely? They might stick their head in my window. Might chuck dirt clods at signs out on the road in front of my house. I’ll be behind the curtain smiling.

  TANK AND CARTER were hot, hungry, tired, aggravated, smelly. I could not distract them. They wanted out of that pickup.

  “We haven’t seen him in an hour,” said Carter. “He’s sleep.”

  But there was no telling. When it ran its course he drifted off from the awful strain of it. Like running a marathon, I heard him tell Mama once. Slept like he was dead for twelve hours and when he woke up he did not know squat. Blacked out like a drunk man.

  Except he was not a drunk. With his work friends he’d drink a beer to be polite but you could tell he didn’t like the taste of it, sipping it, holding it finicky up against his chest. He’s a good man, my daddy. Did you know that in the fall he’d sign us out of school and load us up in the pickup and drive us to Raleigh for the state fair? And in the winter he’d turn right around drive us back up there for the circus? Sometimes we’d all ride over to Wilmington to attend SuperFlea and my daddy would know nearly all the people running the booths, whatever it was they were selling, old Coke signs or cassette tapes or Depression glass, he’d have them talking about favorite breakfast meat. I knew my mama loved my daddy. She must not of been feeling too good about herself right along the time of that broken up day, her one girl set up any place will tolerate her foul mouth and her three boys locked in a boiling pickup out in the no-tree-plantedest yard in the whole state and her high up in some hotel talking on the phone to some girl from work about I don’t know shoes or what kind of food you ought to order on a first date with a stranger.

  I knew she knew we were out there. If people loved you and you were in trouble that trouble rumbled in their stomach. They’d be driving along and get a ice-cream headache telling them you were in need. Happened to me whenever Tank or Carter ran off in the woods and Carter came up on a bee’s nest which, he was violently allergic, or Tank got chased by some wild I’ll-eat-any-damn-thing dog. People if they loved you, they had to leave though. Don’t ask me why, it don’t make sense to me, it’s just something that happens. But see, I must not could love right. I would not leave my little brothers there with him and I was for damn sure not about to let Sheriff Deputy Rex take them.

  Tank said, “He’s sleep.”

  Carter pried up the door lock and put his hand down to open the door. Myself I slapped the merciful Jesus out of that boy. About Jesus and all, I don’t think so, but what I like is prayer, even if it’s just singing or moaning while chewing the edge of your pillowcase when you’re fixing to flood the sheets with tears.

  Tank went to thrashing so I slapped his mess too. Then it was a tangle and crisp hot slaps on sweaty skin and grunted cussing of boys too young to know how to cuss and Carter pulling up the lock and me locking it back down. Finally he got it up and opened the door and flew out across the sandy yard up the steps into the dark-mouthed house.

  “Holy moly,” I said.

  Tank went to wailing. I hugged him quiet. He was shaking so hard the springs in the seat were singing.

  I had to crack the window wider because me and Tank, waiting to see what was going to happen, breathed up all the oxygen. It was straight nervous fumes up in there. Tank’s quart had gone to really humming. Neither of us could breathe good.

  Then Carter came strolling out on the porch. Screen door slapped his leisurely ass like it’ll do a slow old back-leg-dragging dog. He held his hands up All Clear.

  “He ain’t even in there,” he hollered.

  Tank made a noise in his throat, a half-strangled hiccup, when we seen the shadow darken the rusty screen. Carter was shrugging and fixing I could tell to strut his cocky stuff, I told you so, son, us sweating away in that pickup all day and he ain’t even in here.

  Daddy had Carter in a headlock before the screen door popped closed. Carter stared sadly at the bunch of bananas Daddy was carrying. With his free hand Daddy put the whole bunch up to Carter’s mouth. “Eat, monkey,” he told Carter.

  Tank was up in my lap, wedged hard against the steering wheel. He had his arms around my neck and I could feel the laughter welling up in his slight little chest. It vibrated and spilled out across the cab.

  “Eat monkey, eat monkey.” Carter opened up his mouth, took a peel-and-all bite.

  “Let me hold one of them bananas, Cart, I’m starving,” said Tank. He laughed and laughed.

  “Shut up now,” I told Tank. “That ain’t funny.”

  Daddy crammed the banana stem in Carter’s mouth. Carter’s face was wrinkly red. Tank’s crazy laugh sucked continuous into sobbing.

  “What’s he doing what’s he doing what’s Daddy—”

  “Hush,” I told Tank. But he wouldn’t so I squeezed so hard he choked. I don’t know why. I guess because I knew I had to get out of the truck and stop Daddy and let me ask a question: What about those people who leave you with some sweet, ancient, set-in-their-ways, been-years-since-they-even-thought-about-children grandparents and claim they’re going to come back for you and you don’t hear jack from them for going on, what’s it been, eight or nine months? What about somebody who would drop you off one Friday at dusk and act like they’ll see you in a matter of days and then don’t even write or call or nothing? Who do they think they are? I felt Tank choking under my squeeze, looked over at Carter choking on bananas not ten feet away and I wondered why in the hell she ever named me after my daddy.

  Daddy had somehow one-handedly wrenched off his belt. He snapped the fat buckle against the porch boards. I let go of Tank and for a few seconds he was quiet, too stunned to know I’d hurt him. I was big-time wishing his silence wou
ld linger.

  Daddy had Carter up against the porch column, tightening his arms to his sides with the belt. Daddy was singing a loud tuneless something out of his head. I did not recognize it. I had not a clue about that song out of my daddy’s head.

  My lap grew warm and wet. Tank said, “He’s got some scissors,” and I looked up into Carter’s eyes, wild, trying to search out mine. I wanted to roll down the window, say, I told you to stay in here with us, but I could not say a word even to Tank who was crying all out of breath, “Joel Junior, Joel Junior.”

  Carter’s yellow hair, wavy down to his shoulders, turned porch boards into carpet. Daddy’s singing got louder. I did not understand note one.

  Carter’s eyes switched off. Any hope I would save him leaked right out of him. I could see it, hope sifting off the porch like cigarette smoke while I sat in warm stinking pee. Tank took to shivering. I palmed his forehead to see did he have a fever. Then he said the word “mama.” I said: “Babies say ‘mama.’” I said, “Anyway, that’s only a word.” He wailed, not like a seven-year-old, but in that desperate hilly way toddlers cry when something gets taken away from them. Blood dripped down Carter’s neck. Train’s brakes sighed and sighed as it slung right into the station. I said, “Let’s sing some Curtis, Tank. I ain’t going nowhere. I ain’t leaving on that train. It’s been decided, everybody knows it, I was born this way, I’m awful at love.”

  TWO

  GIVE IT UP won’t y’all please for the Greatest All-Time Hits of Sweet Soul Legends. Slow jams to melt your bones, throwdowns to make you shake it. You can let your mind wander since there’s one song right after another, and besides, what is music for if not to make you remember?

  Some things I remember now that I did not yet explain:

  Tank had this Tonka toy tanker he used to pine for nights in his crib. Stuffed bears and blankets bored that boy. He clung to the bars of his cage, rattling that crib, walking it toward the middle of the room, wanting his tank. All night long he cried out for it. Used to it would have taken a graduation ceremony or an emergency room accident for me to remember his real given name which is bygod Lawrence.

  Carter dearly loved his long yellow hair. So did some girls love that hair.

  The last and worst of it is that whole afternoon in the boiling truck I had the key to the pickup in my pocket. Soon as my daddy showed signs of going off I grabbed the keys off the mantel like I always did. Sitting in the truck, singing Curtis and “Theme from Shaft,” the keys melted into my thigh like keys’ll do, a lump no more noticeable than kneecap, elbow. I forgot all about them being up in there. They were just a part of me like the not-good-at-love part. But Carter’s eyes were switching around looking at mine and I couldn’t help him but nor could I leave him, being so sorry at love. My mama, good at it, called to me to come by her hotel room. I had a choice to make: go to her and get in the process good at love or stay where I was, which, I had those keys in my all-day-long pocket and could of at any time pulled them out and cranked up that vehicle and driven us all three off down Moody Loop. But where to? See, I did not want Tank or Carter along when I next laid eyes on my mama. I had questions I wanted to ask her in strictest privacy. All alone up in some motel room, iced tea and Fig Newtons.

  Yoohoo, Joel Junior, up here, my mama called down from her room. So I pulled the key out of my pocket and held squealing Tank down in the seat and got him buckled and fit the key in the ignition, cranked the engine, dropped that baby into gear, and dug deep dual trenches in the yard leaving out of there.

  I might have only been fourteen but I knew good and well how to drive. When our daddy (and we love our daddy) was golf-clubbing evil infiltrators out of television sets we would help ourselves to his big thicket of keys and drive up to 692 which we lived just off of, down a dirt road called Moody Loop.

  Tank wailed till 692 when Frosty’s cinder-block store with the pink polka dots stenciled on the side rose above the cornfields. Tank at the sight of it said he wanted a fried pie please.

  I knew right then I’d have to leave him somewhere. I couldn’t keep him. I’d left Carter and now I knew I’d have to leave Tank too behind.

  “Also some Funyuns,” said Tank. He went on down his list. “Squirrel Nut Zippers, a whole handful. That’s dessert if I eat all everything else.”

  I believe he licked his lips and that I heard the licking over the rumble of the truck and the windows open, blowing all the receipts around the cab. Crazy little off-his-rocker fucker.

  “You need your diaper changed,” I said.

  “I don’t wear no damn-it diaper,” he said. He couldn’t cuss for spit.

  Frosty’s slid by outside as I reached over to pop his mess for attempting cussing, its polka-dotted walls talking about Last Chance! Funyuns! Stop and make old Mr. Frosty rich! Old Frosty used to try to talk trash to my sister but he had one of those bulging-out waists old men get like the barber my daddy took us to who pressed his slope up against you when he was cutting your hair. Frosty wore pants shaped like the wide-open bell of a tuba. Carter wanted a trumpet. He was saving for one. We picked bottles from ditches in the afternoons. Carter had maybe half a trumpet in a coin jar hid under his dresser. Maybe Carter had took his trumpet money and paid my daddy for the haircut and my daddy had let him go and he was walking up the road almost to 692. Maybe I ought to of turned around. I couldn’t take Tank’s wailing for the next however many years until he got grown enough for me to leave him and not feel bad. I left Carter with his earlobe snipped off. I saw when Daddy did it, I saw the pink flesh hit Carter’s shoulder and bounce and then I lost track of it when it landed in the carpet of blond hair spread out across the warped porch boards.

  “Hey wait, stop,” said Tank. He turned around and stared at Frosty’s as if turning around and staring would slow the truck down. I had all the windows rolled down to sift out the pee smell. My head was half out the window like when people vehicle their dogs. Dogs don’t want to be vehicled, you can tell by the way they stick their heads out the windows. A dog would prefer to chase a chicken, not cruise out to Little Pep to gawk at cheerleaders. I stuck my head farther out the window doggy-style. Pee smell rolling over the fields in a cloud. Mexicans pulled cukes in the fields. We passed by them and the pee smell rolled out in a cloud and I felt sorry for them Mexicans.

  “Where we going where we going where we going?” said Tank.

  Out the window into the wind I howled, “Where we going where we going where we going?”

  Up 692 a ways was a fishpond with some nasty catfish and a trailer park which the bus we rode to school would not stop at because once someone shot out the windows (somebody said later it was a woman who didn’t want her kids coming home and interrupting the stories she liked to look at after lunch) and then, a little off the road and upside a ravine, a chicken house belonged to Luby Dudley, owner of Appliance Town. The chicken house was filled with Luby’s used refrigerators, freezers, stoves, televisions.

  At Luby Dudley’s Appliance Town chicken house I parked the truck on an overgrown two-track leading to the ravine. People dumped their shit down that ravine. It’s just something about a ravine makes you want to dump shit down it. Perhaps peculiar to the coastal plain from which I and my brothers and potty-mouthed sister derive but perhaps maybe not, this habit of I-see-a-ravine, let’s-dump-some-shit-down-it. Maybe it is in fact a habit of rural folk everywhere, there being no monster-armed trash trucks roving like they do up in Trent. Often you have to drive many miles in order to dispose of your waste. A ravine starts to looking real good after ten miles cooped up in a car with some humming-to-high-heaven garbage.

  Allow me a long-winded example of the country dweller’s love of ravines. My mother’s mother was one pickle-making fool. She thought nothing of spending her weekend putting up seventy-five jars of pickles. Once fateful Friday I believe it was eight, nine months ago, my mama took us over to our grandparents’ house so she could go away for the weekend. This particular weekend my mother when we asked
her where she was going to be staying at said the Sanitary Restaurant in Bulkhead which had the best hush puppies she knew of. It sounded like a lie even to Tank.

  “Mama, Mama, hold up, you’re spending the night in the restaurant?” he asked her.

  “If it’s hot I’m sleeping in the walk-in freezer,” she said.

  We were let out of the truck at my grandmother’s house, my sister carrying her Beauty and the Beast suitcase leftover from when she was the only child and got what she wanted, me and my brothers slumping under school backpacks bulky with underpants and Q-tips and army men. I was halfway to the house when my mama called me back to the car.

  “Why are you walking like that?” she said to me.

  “Like what?”

  She sighed what my daddy called her Sigh of Royalty. She was beautiful in the afternoon sun, her brown hair thickened by driving open-windowed down dusty Moody Loop. She was so pretty she could pull off riding around in my daddy’s pickup. We could not stay with him because he’d gone off. She’d herded us out of there fast as she could, told me to pack for Carter and Tank, ordered Angie to get her act together. Then she let us out at her parents’ farmhouse and called me back and sighed her royal sigh.

  “Walking like how?” I said.

  And my mama, so beautiful with the dusty wind-ruffled hair, behind the wheel of the very pickup me and Tank would employ as our escape vehicle, said, “Like you’re a puppet with half your dangling strings broke.”

  I just shrugged and rested my chin on the slot where the window disappeared on down into the door. My head half in, I studied her outfit, noticing for the first time how she had taken some care dressing when the rest of us were wearing whatever we always got caught in when my mama herded us off, dirty-kneed jeans and Stretch & Sew striped shirts my mama made herself with the oversized neck holes, in Tank’s case old pee-stained underpants, and yet wasn’t it odd that she herself was got up in a jean jacket, a flowery dress, some cowgirl boots?