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MY LITTLE BROTHER Carter’s favorite song was “Tighten Up,” by Archie Bell and the Drells. He had it all memorized. Me and Tank had to perform this routine he’d worked out on the porch or in our room or wherever to “Tighten Up.” He always got to be Archie Bell. Me and Tank were the Drells.
“What’s a Drell anyway?” Tank was always wanting to know.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Tank,” I was always happy to tell him, “a Drell don’t get paid as much as a Archie Bell.”
We Drells doubled up as musicians and roadies. Archie Bell fined us if we took too long to tune his guitar or came in a half second late on the bridge. My daddy told us James Brown did this to his band too. The Hardest Working Man in Show Business sounded to me like the meanest boss in it too.
Archie Bell would holler at me. I’d throw down some rolling chords.
“Tighten up on that bass,” Archie Bell would point at Tank. Tank would thump-pluck his air bass. It was twice the size of him. He could barely hold it if a wind was to blow across the porch.
There was the sweetest horn break in “Tighten Up.” The thing about it is, I never would of tolerated being a Drell if I did not dearly love “Tighten Up.” You could not listen to it and sit still. If you could you were either a dried-up schoolteacher, a man like fat Frosty, too big to shake it, or perhaps I don’t know a eunuch.
I went down to Bulkhead trying to find the Promise Land. Old Landers had me blow the breath of life into his butt-ugly hybrid. That half-bull/half-man we studied in Myths and Legends was another ugly sapsucker. I don’t know why I prefer things all one way or all the other but it aggravates me no end to see something stuck in between. All this time Tank had been waiting on me to tell him did houses live inside or outside. Since Landers and his hybrid, Tank’s question had come back to buzz me like a mosquito in the night. Bulkhead aggravated the question. Which is it, Joel Junior, said the still nighttime streets and open-mouthed alleys of what they wanted to call downtown Bulkhead. Inside or outside? It was like we won’t even talking houses anymore. Can a boy be big damn brother and steal named shirts and negotiate with Frosty for a half tank of gas and some Ruffles and also answer to the song up inside his head? Or does he got to choose between the two to make his way through this world?
Carter lost his earlobe and worse than that to him I bet, his hair. Therefore, wandering around Bulkhead, I put “Tighten Up” on the box in his honor even if, as Archie Bell, he was all the time telling somebody what to do.
There are people in this world you just want to help but something in them won’t let you. I believe Carter was like this. I wanted to be his brother and to love him like I did Tank, my daddy, my foul-mouthed sister, my mama, but Carter did not listen when I said stay in this boiling truck.
I loved Tank so I had to leave him behind. If you love someone, set them free. What does that mean? It’s not for me to question, I’m just one of the Drells, it’s not like I’m Archie Bygod Big-Time King-Bee Bell.
Bulkhead, Bulkhead: why’d you get so all of a sudden quiet? I walked up the one-way street going the wrong way. Kids my age and older cruising in their jacked-up, fat-tired vehicles called me names. You want to help people but they won’t let you. “Tighten up on that guitar,” I yelled at one of them, which this cracked my tired ass up big-time.
Oh I was so old. I just wanted to reach whatever body of water dead-ended this miserable town. Nothing’s promised you in the Promise Land. It’s just a low-lying area where people’ll tell you low lies.
I came to a strip of grass resembling a park and there, rolling black with strips of white breaker, lay the sound. I stood on the bulkhead, staring out at the water, wondering couldn’t they think up a better name for this place? Why not, say, Sidewalk?
Did my mama come here because she craved the Sanitary hush puppies. That sounds like a question but I’m going to go ahead and leave off the mark because I don’t want to know the answer. Something probably like: here is where my crazy-ass husband and aggravating boys particularly are not.
She didn’t want to see us, said my sister. I remembered that and it liked to make me cry. What kept me from breaking down was old Archie Bell barking at me to tighten up.
A bench appeared to which I availed myself. It was way dark. But you could see the surf and the lights of the tankers headed up to the port and you could see across the water tiny beach towns twinkling. Maybe my mama had gone over to one of those places for the evening. Maybe she had located some tastier hush puppies. It pained me to think that tastier hush puppies were all she had on her mind. So I conjured up those “Tighten Up” sessions on the porch. We’d put the speakers in the window, sling open the screens so nothing would be in the way of that sweet horn break. Carter would choreograph the bridge, me and Tank sidestep swaying while I pantomimed trombone and Tank, sax. Carter, I meant to say Archie Bell (he’d get mad at us if we just called him Archie), would be hollering phrases he was wanting us to respond to: Hole up, he’d say and we’d repeat it. Check that out, check that out, What’d I say? What’d he say? I talked back to Carter for a while which put out of my head the idea that my mama had nothing in hers but the satisfying of some taste buds.
I thought someone else would happen by, that my mama would send them like she’d done kindly Mexican and the others. Even Landers. He allowed me to realize my potential and breathe to life a half-car/half-truck. This was something I previously had no iota I could pull off. He too was sent to me by my mama, his ugly attitude after I cranked his car for him all a part of tightening me up. It’s a sad fact that people you try to help will do you like dirt.
I stretched out on the bench, on the bulkhead, waiting. Cars beeped the horn break of “Tighten Up.” Though I am a fool for “Tighten Up” and it never fails to move me from the waist down, heading north from my belt buckle we are talking no whatsoever reaction. Ain’t nothing wrong with a hip shaker. Repeated listenings still bring on the sway. But Tank favored “Dock of the Bay” which even if you took away those deeply sad lyrics—for surely the saddest notion of all is that nothing is going to change, everything will stay the same—would still strike you somewhere between the nervous stomach and the I-can’t-take-it-no-more heart. Yet it moved your ass too. It was half-car/half-truck, much as I hated to call anything I favored after that blow-on-a-tube-to-crank-it crate.
It was interesting also that Carter favored “Tighten Up.” The lyrics don’t really stick in your head. Carter is a man of action. Witness his escape from the boiling truck. I wasn’t going to go ahead and go on record as saying this was what led to the loss of his earlobe. All I’m saying is unlike Tank I think Carter was sometimes impatient with that movie one can conjure on the windshield of a boiling truck, the one with fair maidens laced up at the chest like Chuck Taylor tenny pumps and the grandpa from Beverly Hillbillies chasing Lady Godiva. See, he just got bored. Whereas me and Tank could contentedly sit and wait for whoever it is destined to save us to bring their lateasses on.
Tank and me, we don’t get bored. Carter and Angie, they get bored. Where did their boredom derive from? Some might argue from my mama, that it was her boredom that led her to leave four kids alone and unattended with a husband who had a whole drawer full of hospital discharge papers stashed away somewhere. (That was not even counting the withdrew-against-doctor’s-advice papers which I assume he balled up in the parking lot of whatever institution he had bolted from.) But I knew she was fixing to send someone by there to pick me up, bring me to her, and it would not do, my thinking bad thoughts about her right before our reunion. Accusing someone of easy boredom, that’s the same as saying they have nothing inside their head but pine straw. Why would I want to make that claim about the woman who brought me into this world? Across the sound in the blinking beach town she’d rented a cottage in the dunes. Dark pine paneling and thick metal blinds which clicked against the sills, lifted both by the open-windowed breeze and the slow chop of the ceiling fan. Lingering smell of fish, cleaned
right in the kitchen sink, then deep fat fried, of her beloved hush puppies, of the lemon wax she scrubbed the furniture with. A front porch overlooking the ocean with bulging and blackened screens.
Here, take these binoculars, she said to me when I entered the house. After the hugs, the pulling me into her softness which, she’d put on a few pounds.
I put the glasses up to my face. The ocean was blurry and gray. A ragged melding of water and sky. I did not know how to focus the lens and I did not see anything at all but I was so glad to be with my mama again, to have been wrapped up in her hug, that I pretended to see porpoises and whales and Glenn the surfer catching the tsunami-sized break of his dreams and hell, to make her happy, the Pinta, the Niña, and the Santa María.
It was true that the view from the porch of the beach cottage was far better than what she’d see from our porch at home, which was the front yard littered with Tank’s sand-hauling trucks and dozers, various leaky soccer balls, holes dug by sleepy dogs; a swamp to the left where possums clung to tree tops and the soggy ground was filthy with moccasins and even red-black-yellow, won’t-harm-a-fellow corn snakes and evil twin, red-yellow-black, stay-way-back coral snakes which were beautifully banded but deadly, thus the rhyme which Tank could recite well before his ABCs because we knew how he treasured beauty over danger and would certainly have tried to pick one up and pet it if we’d not beat it into him, how dangerous they were; a patchy pine forest to the right where we boys built forts and Carter went sometimes with a buck-toothed neighbor boy named William Tyndall Grice to smoke butts; and in back a big fallow field which was only pleasant in the fall when the stalks turned brown and their raspy cough was brung on sweetly by the breeze.
But even with the help of binoculars all I could see was grayness, blurriness, bleakness, loneliness, okay I’ll stop.
What do you see, baby?
I told her, Dolphins. I said, Hey, look, one of those Wind-surfers!
She hugged me from behind and asked was I hungry.
Lying on that bench on the bulkhead I was damn near dying from hunger, thirst, and generalized nastiness of attire.
I could eat if you’re having something but you don’t have to go to any trouble.
She laughed her what-are-you-talking-about, trouble! laugh and took me inside and went in a back bedroom and came out with a man’s T-shirt big on me but clean and smelling of detergent rather than sweat, road grime, Frosty’s grill, my sister’s cig smoke, probably a little remnant Tank pee, the Mexican’s vehicle, booze fumes from Landers, and an odor somewhere between fried seafood and sulfur which I put down to just Bulkhead. I did not ask her whose shirt is this? I did not do or say anything or behave any way which might bring on in her mind boredom or otherwise cause her to put me out. Yes ma’am, no ma’am, thank you please. If you want me to stay I will be perfect, no worries, no trouble, no lip. Without my little brother to look after I was a different person. I had for one thing patience. I believe all those years of taking care of them had built up such reserves of patience that I could, well shy of them, put up with six solid months of someone’s most trying bullshit. I was a battery left charging, never used until the storm knocked out the whole county. Light in this world, in this world, this world.
I did not ask her whose shirt but I wondered. You know I bygod wondered who wore it before me.
It was just a blue T-shirt bought obviously at a surf shop, a border of what looked like Hawaiian leis running down one side. Nothing my God-bless-him daddy would have worn. He favored work clothes though not like the Mario I wore— he ripped off the name patches, left ghosts of names, a darker oval where the rest of the shirt had faded from much laundering. He had this one favorite T-shirt he got at the National Hollerin’ Contest at Spivey’s Corner the first year they held it, before it got big-time and the hippie college kids started driving down from Chapel Hill with their pot and their Hacky Sacks. My mother made like she hated the shirt but of course she loved it to death when he wore it which was nearly every day. She just had to pick. On the porch she sat on the bottom step and he held her in place with his knees. But she wanted to be there. She looked radiant rather than trapped. Whose shirt was this, I thought but did not say.
She hadn’t asked me anything about Tank, Carter, or my daddy.
On the water I heard voices. Party people on a yacht. I sat up and saw lights way out across almost to the blinking beach town where in my mother’s cottage I sat down at the Formica bar separating the kitchen from the rest of the one not-bedroom room. My mother grilled a cheese sandwich and boiled some white corn. She fixed me a ginger ale which bubbled in its glass. My stomach ached deeply, I thought at first from hunger but do you know what it was in fact from? The questions she had not asked, my mama, about her other children, about her husband, about bygod me and what I was doing there.
The cheese sizzled. The ginger ale bubbled. I had left both my brothers behind. So had she done the same damn thing. Therefore we were walled off in this place together. What we shared was liable to take us in one of two directions: make us talk about nothing but, or go hard the other way: anything but. My natural inclination would be to get behind door number one, because to me, see, it feels better to confess than it does to deny but I was sitting there eating a grilled cheese sandwich and twirling my ear of white corn in a lake of salty butter fixing to eat it too and my mama had yet to say one word about anyone but me which led me to believe had it been Carter (aka Archie Bell) showing up at her duneside getaway instead of me, hell, my name would never have come up either. You’d think it would, sort of naturally. But it wouldn’t of because instead of tell me how’s everybody, is Carter getting along okay in school (because he mixed his letters up and therefore hated to read though that boy could tighten up on some arithmetic) and is Tank putting on weight (because he only liked to eat string cheese, Cheerios and Funyuns from Frosty’s), she said, They saw some turtles laying eggs ashore the other day and one of them weighed close to four hundred pounds, and We had Hurricane Ida down here in late September but I came out all right, I just lost some shingles. These were things that might of interested Tank, hurricanes and monster washed-ashore turtles, but I wasn’t interested in any of that. She’d forgot how to talk to me if she ever did know in the first place. What I wanted to hear out of her mouth was what I’d come all this way for: why she’d left, how she did it because she loved us, how I was now that I had left them behind also terrific at love.
Somebody had a hold of my leg. I jerked up off my mama’s barstool. It was a Bulkhead policeman, straddling a bygod bicycle.
“Get your ass up,” he said. “This is a public park, not a flophouse.”
I said I never mistook it for a flophouse and besides I wasn’t flopping.
“This park is closed,” he said. “It’s three o’clock in the morning and this park has been closed.” He pointed to a sign. posted: park hours, 8 am to 11 pm. I started to say, Well you can read, that’s better than Carter, but can you do the Tighten Up? I decided right then that I missed Carter. I’d been hard on him. Daddy cut his ear off. He mixed his letters up. He also had something in him made him bored easily. Except one thing about that I didn’t understand: he could watch Road Runner for hours, or could before daddy golf-clubbed the TV, and it never bored him. Road Runner, if you asked me, was the boringest show, and very aggravating. It was the opposite of entertaining to see how much the coyote and Road Runner love to mess with each other. What happened in the first place to make them do each other like they do? History as usual goes begging. To me the worst thing about Road Runner was the laziness of the dude who drew it. I hesitate to call him an artist. Over and over he drew the same old rock, the same cactus. It didn’t matter whether there was Acme Explosives involved, or a anvil, or a highway painted on the sheer rock face of a mountain to mislead Road Runner, you were going to be staring at that same-ass cactus.
“What are you on, boy?” asked the policeman. I said to the Bulkhead bicycle policeman, “I ain’t on shit.
If you want to catch somebody under a influence you best go after Landers.”
If You Want Me to Stay Page 9