“I didn’t never see her, she worked all the time.”
“Somebody said she had children.”
“All I ever saw her with was what’s-his-name, used to crew for Butterball Midgette.”
“She was a pretty gal.”
“Y’all didn’t know her,” I said to the lot of them. I pushed right up among them. “Y’all can’t talk about her, she won’t even from here.”
They all looked at me. I was swallowing to keep from crying. Streetclothes said, Need some water? I said I need to go to the bathroom again. But that wasn’t what I needed. I needed to stop seeking out that cold secret sand. I knew I could of stayed there and let them sort it all out. Streetclothes would have done me right. But Sheriff Deputy Rex wasn’t a bad man either, it’s just his hands were tied and he didn’t make the rules and there was paperwork to fill out and they’d have taken me right then and there and made me a Ward of the State and I would never have gotten to see my brothers again. I walked down the hall toward the bathroom. I couldn’t hear anything in that building. No sweet horns breaking in the middle of Tighten Up. Maybe that was where I needed to be—some place where the music could not reach me. But it’s the worse kind of death, suffocated by the second chances you were too proud or bored or wrongheaded to heed. Oh I was so old. I passed by a hundred cacti. Then I came to a break room. It smelled of microwave popcorn, coffee, and cigarettes. In the refrigerator I found bagged lunches, Tupperwared leftovers. I put it all in a trash bag I found under the sink which I slung over my shoulder like a hobo. I read myself my rights: You have the right to leave behind your baggage and just climb on board. You have the right to leave, the right to get good at love.
SEVEN
THEN I WAS NOT listening to the song in my head, which leaving Bulkhead was the Staple Singers, “I’ll Take You There.” I wanted to be like Carter: could take or leave the sound track, could choreograph a half-time showstopper to “Tighten Up,” could pretend to even be Archie Bell, but knew inside it was only a song, just entertainment, nothing to live your life by. I wanted to be like Carter even when Mavis Staples started singing about Heaven or a place she knew where everybody’s happy and Pop Staples winged in with some righteous gospel chords and that bass line slapped along making sure your ass and hips knew that white people all the way back to the Pilgrims and forward to the First Prez crowning the choicest hill in town had got religion all wrong. I would have believed in anything for the three and half minutes that song lasted: Heaven, Carter, bygod Bulkhead, a ark with two of everything up in it, my daddy’s goodness.
Well, no, not that. It’s because of my daddy that I always had a song in my head and craved basement attic crawl space. Because of him I left my brothers and sought out my mother. Walking through the backstreets of Bulkhead, clinging to the yards and trees in case Streetclothes was out looking for me, I thought that these songs my daddy put in my head were nothing but moods I did not have the depth to summon on my own. And to think I was walking around judging everybody else for not grooving to some tunes. Come to find out I was a robot, a computer, every emotion programmed. You could drop quarters down my throat and punch up some selections and I’d feel whatever Otis, Sly, Aretha, Reverend Al made me feel. I damn near sat down and died whenever this thought hit me, for the scariest revelation you can have is that you cannot truly feel a thing.
I wanted to be like Carter, like Angie even, bless her goddamn motherfucking foul-mouthed self.
Tank, Tank, it’s not too late for you, buddy. It’s too late for Mario, Tank. I’m leaving out of Bulkhead with a sack of Tupperwared po-lice leftovers on my back. I don’t love my daddy anymore, I can’t feel jack but whatever Mavis and Pop tell me too. Right now though they’re saying they’ll take me there, Tank. I’m going wherever they lead.
Cops like leftover lasagna with extra meat sauce. Also they like meat loaf. They like some pizza. Vegetables don’t seem big on the menu of things craved by cops.
I ate in a little shelter someone had built for schoolkids waiting on the bus. It was dark out and quiet except for a paper man moving up the side street, his blinkers on, chucking plastic-wrapped news onto dew-dampened lawns. Each wet thwack echoed in my head. Still I ate and ate. Then I felt sick, all that meaty cop food in a stomach that had shrunk to the size of a peach pit. I near about threw up in the bus shelter. I lay out on the bench moaning. That’s Bulkhead for you, me lying on some bench, about to hurl, breaking some Bulkhead law while cops searched for me on bygod bicycles. Above the pines the sky turned pink. Mavis was fixing to take me there. I got up to follow along.
Out on the highway a trucker stopped for me not three minutes after I set up on the misty shoulder. I’ll take you there, sang the air brakes. You’ll be wanting to know what the inside of the truck looked like but Tank I’m telling you I didn’t pay one bit of attention. A crazy kind of fear gripped me: She’d taken you back to our daddy. Who was still way off. Who was going to hurt you too.
The truck driver tried to talk to me, Mavis sang to me, Pop Staples plucked celestial chords for me but all I could think about was nothing. Still sick from all that food on an empty stomach and to top it off was the notion that my mama had gone off and died all alone in a fire which was and is still my worst fear, that I’ll end up dying all alone in an empty chicken house stuffed with used appliances. But I could not make myself feel all you’re supposed to feel after your mother dies in a house fire. I could not pay any attention to the inside of the truck, Tank, and the driver I’m sure wished he’d never stopped for my mute, stupefied ass.
I could think about nothing. The music was playing, taking me there, but it was just background, like it always was for normal people.
That I could sit up in that truck and have all these thoughts competing for time in my head and think about nothing, well, that got away with me. Robot, computer, cyborg, alien. I wondered if everybody already knew it about me anyway. If it was whispered behind my back so often it was if a breeze followed me around rustling leaves in the trees I passed. Lifting bangs off girl’s foreheads, the news that there ain’t nobody home up inside Joel Junior Dunn.
I meant to say Mario. From then on that’s what I was going to go by.
The piney woods sped by. Occasionally we came up on some pickup dragging ass along with its turn signal blinking though there won’t nowhere to turn for miles but some pulpwood trails. I’d look down at people which I did because I physically could do. It didn’t make me feel any less an alien or soothe my stomach though I did not stop myself from still doing it.
I wondered where was Landers. He was about the caliber person I ought to of been hanging out with seeing as how I could not feel any more than a dope addict morning noon and night messed up on some kind of dope.
“Where you want to be let out at?” said the trucker. It was the first time he’d said jack to me in miles and miles. Mavis was taking me, leading me by the hand.
“Bottomsail,” I said. Maybe I sounded irritated but I had told him that once already when I first got in.
“You best not expect me to turn off this highway.”
“You can just let me off at that drawbridge.”
“Was that a whole sentence you just said?”
I said, “My mother died in a house fire. I just found out.”
“Damn,” he said. Then: “O Lord.”
I said, “I’ll take the former and to hell with the latter.”
He looked at me like he was fixing to call me son and I said I didn’t want to talk about it. The only reason I told him in the first place was to shut him up. But he did not shut up.
“Where you going to now?” he said.
“To tell my sister and little brother.”
“They with your pa?”
“My pa is probably in Dix Hill by now.” I didn’t need to explain Dix Hill because everybody down east knows it’s where they stick nuts, retards, and habitual drunks.
He said, “I’ll drive you over the bridge.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Naw,” he said, “I’ll drive you.”
I watched the sparkling yachts as we crossed the bridge. Then we were on the beach road and he was taking me door to door, except there wasn’t any door on either side, he just felt sorry for me and carried me right up to the pier where once we saw the magic caster, slept sprawled out on the slats, and went down on some sausage dogs.
I searched the parking lot for my daddy’s pickup but it was gone, gone.
The trucker lifted his ass up off the seat. He pulled out his western-style wallet. I admired the stitching. He handed me a twenty.
“No thank you, sir, you already give me a ride.”
“I’m thankful my mama and daddy are still here,” he said. “You take it. I’m not going to tell you what to do because you seem to me like you’re doing all right but you might ought to learn to give God a shot.”
I smiled good-bye and thank you very much you’re so very kind at the trucker and let myself down out of that truck into the parking lot.
I walked out on the pier. Maybe the magic caster was still there, maybe he’d gone home and come back, maybe he was a fixture. Surely you don’t tighten up that much on the rod and reel by rocking all day long on a metal porch glider. He was in permanent residence. I’d be so happy to see him. Where’s Little Man at? he’d say, talking about you, Tank. I’d tell him you were taking a nap. Then I would try to pay him back what he spent on us out of the trucker’s twenty though he’d take a look at me in my same-old Mario and jeans, my hair greasy as mop water, and he would not take my cash, no way.
He wasn’t out there. I sat on his same-ass bench for a long time staring up the coast to Bulkhead. I was trying not to listen to Mavis. I wasn’t even sure that song was about Heaven—as much grunting and moaning there was, it seemed like some other kind of ecstasy—but wherever she was wanting to take me I was wanting to go, and it was distracting me, I needed to think what next. I was older than the magic caster, sitting there wrinkled and shivering on his very bench.
Twenty minutes later I was standing in front of Angie’s scummy apartment. The screen door was ajar. Mosquitoes were letting themselves in and out. I could smell the spilled beer and bong water in the carpet from near about back at the beach road. Tank sat on the floor in front of the television playing a video game. He looked up at me when I knocked and went back to his screen. Wasn’t no more than him dragging his eyes across my face. Everybody already knew it about me anyway. A breeze followed me around rustling leaves in the trees I passed, lifting bangs off foreheads: He can’t feel a thing, it whispered. He’s no more human than that video game’s got you sucked in same as he will.
Even before my daddy golf-clubbed the evil infiltrators out of the television set we would never have spent our days sitting in front of it trying to shoot mutants or racing spaceships. We’d rather play our records or visit in the woods near our house a chicken house stuffed with used appliances. In a corner we’d grouped some stoves and fridges together and had our own short-order grill. I’ll take you there. I let myself in the apartment. Tank slapping at buttons, twisting a joy stick, not looking up. Who could blame him? There were empty beer bottles and heaping ashtrays on every inch of the coffee table. Tank in the same clothes I last saw him in. His hair all woody-woodpeckered. Not looking at me. First his sister then his mama then his daddy now his brother. I could not blame him for taking refuge in a Nintendo or whatever you call it. This was Angie’s way of stepping up to the bygod plate I reckon, leaving him alone with a joystick all day long. I saw what I wanted to see in the way she hugged him after she thought he’d drowned. But I craved attic basement crawl space my mama and it made me blind. Did I actually in fact assume Angie would have purchased with her cigarette money matching striped shirt and little blue shorts for Tank, that his hair would be wetcombed instead of coxcombed, that he’d be sitting quietly in a circle of lamplight in a spotless living room reading Rikki-Tikki-Tavi or Wind in the Willows and that when I appeared in line with the mosquitoes to gain entry into the apartment he would hop up and run to the door and jump into my arms?
What I come back to was a different Tank. Not-Tank. Lawrence I guess I ought to call him from here on out. That being his name.
I’d thought I’d lost him and everybody else, forever. I should have stuck with Streetclothes. He’d let me stay in his new ranch house out on the edge of Bulkhead, bordering the soybean and cabbage fields. His wife would keep that house icebox cold as it would sit out in the fields without a tree in sight, baking in the Bulkhead sun. Skinny people are meaner, but big people like it nearly freezing inside. Sometimes we’d need gloves to open the coolers in Frosty’s, so cold did he keep that place. When Streetclothes and the wife would drive off to work I’d set up shop in his metal storage shed and watch the crop dusters daredevil down onto the fields and spray their poisonous potion and jerk it just in time back up into the sky. At night the mosquito man would come chugging down the street, leaving his clouds of DDT for me to watch disperse over the crabgrassy yards of the neighborhood. Mrs. Streetclothes would fix me some meaty cop food for dinner and whatever was left I would tupperware for school the next day. Maybe the kindly Mexican would send for me to stay with him and his family down Guadalajara way. I’d sell fruit by the roadside and smile at everything I didn’t understand. I would get with a sweet brown Mexican girl and we’d climb in a hammock in a dark corner of a windowless room when everyone was gone off to work in the fields and we’d make the same noises Mavis makes in a song that might just not be about that kind of Heaven at all, which is why I love it, for the borderline way it brings together the inside and the outside, sacred and the get damn down.
How to get him out of this trance, Mavis?
“Hey, Tank,” I said.
Nothing. Gunfire, squealing tires, spaceship noises.
“Tank. Hey, Tank.”
Nada, which is kindly Mexican for he didn’t say shit to me.
“Okay, well, I’ll just take a seat and wait for you to finish.”
I sat on the couch. There was a pillow and a ratty thermal blanket bunched up at one end. I wondered if Tank had to stay up until everyone left.
“Y’all have a party last night?”
Guns, spaceships, stuff exploding loudly.
“Okay, I’m just going to talk then,” I said.
I told him about the Mexican. I described the mariachi music and even sang a little but I doubt he heard me over the commotion. I told him I got off in Bulkhead. I didn’t say what for. I wasn’t about to tell him what for and what happened until he was at least looking me in the eye. While I talked I went over and flipped through the CDs to see if I could find something we liked. My daddy refused to get a CD player. What would I do with my records? he said. He said if we was to move to a spaceship then maybe he’d get one. But first he’d at least try to haul his boxy cabinet stereo on board. It’s about six or seven feet long and heavy as Frosty’s coffin will one day be.
All Angie’s surfer boys had was some heavy metal. I know it’s all just personal taste but I can’t see how anyone can listen to some Megadeath. What does that even mean, megadeath? Like you died really big? Or a bunch of times? Metallica, that sounds like the color Landers would choose to paint his hybrid vehicle.
“Landers and the hybrid whistle, by Mario Dunn,” I announced. “Once I happened to be walking down the street in Bulkhead.” (Here I heaped scorn on Bulkhead in a big and quite eloquent though biased way. “The place smelled like megadeath.” Also: “The buildings were painted a peeling metallica.”) You wonder what I was doing there? Well, I was trying to locate a particular neighborhood.”
I looked down at Tank, who still had not looked at me, and it made me mad. I might of left him but it was not quite twenty-four hours and think of all I’d done for him prior, and consider also how I’d come back to lead him out of there. So I reached down and grabbed that joy stick out of his hand which brought an end to his joy. He went to wailing.
It made me wonder why I even came back: Angie’s apartment filled with evidence of kids trying to live on their own like grown-ups but wasting away every night getting stupid, no music to listen to except (thank you, Jesus) Mavis up in my head, Tank in the short time I had been gone, technically less than a day, addicted to video games. The evil forces had overtaken both of them. I might of hated my daddy for being like he was but I will tell you one thing, if he hadn’t of gone off he’d not of let this happen. Some would maybe say he’d ruined us or at least me by depriving us of television and video games and all the latest high-tech toys and instead spinning records that were a good, some of them, thirty or forty years old if they were a day, black-washing us into believing that white boys from England might could master a twelve-bar blues (though mostly they just turned their amplifiers up real loud) but the true sound track of our lives rose out of the very land we tread upon, the fields we passed on our way to school each day, swarming now with kindly Mexicans but once tended entirely by the forebears of the singers we treasured, and the churches, half-finished or unadorned, heated with nothing but sheet-metal trash burners, you’d see back in the pine groves, and of course the county jail and the low-ceilinged, no-windowed cinder-block jukes that fed that jailhouse, sprinkled throughout the county and down the side streets of town, two to three for every church.
Just take me by the hand, Tank. Let me lead the way.
True I sometimes wandered out of range and lost the signal myself and yes I sometimes, left to my own half-formed judgment, strayed or was seduced by songs that lacked the purity of my daddy’s favorites, like my brief flirtation with Motown, a label my daddy didn’t much care for because, he said, with all due respect for Mr. Barry Gordy who as a businessman deserved his props, it made black music palatable to white people, lightening it up so it would cross over to the pop charts. My daddy when he was on could be an I-got-there-first snob. He could lecture for hours on the production quality of Motown versus anything out of Memphis or Muscle Shoals, the former being slick and given to the latest technology and the latter being sloppy in the way that perfect things just naturally are—filled with human error, the fuckups there to honor not Allah like the imperfection in the carpet but Jesus-I-don’t-think-so, though if anyone ever came close to convincing me it was bygod Mavis callin’ Mercy, telling her daddy to play on it, play on it, hollerin Whoa (to which I whispered, Whoa) All right (to which I hollered, Well, okay, all right).
If You Want Me to Stay Page 11