If You Want Me to Stay

by Michael Parker

  I didn’t realize I was hollering All Right until I looked down and saw Tank staring.

  “What’s all right?”

  “Just listening to a little Mavis and Pop.”

  “‘Respect Yourself’?”

  “Up next. Right now we’ve got ‘I’ll Take you There.’”

  I thought I had him, but he was still smarting from my leaving him. It was going to take more than the mention of the Staples to win him back.

  “Let’s go eat,” I said. “Then let’s run by the Dollar Store and get some candy.”

  “I want my mama,” he said.

  “I told you about that, Tank.”

  “Well, you got to go see her.”

  “Who said?” But I knew damn well who.

  “Angie said. She said that’s where you run off to, see Mama.”

  I didn’t want to tell him. It wasn’t time. But I wanted to tell Angie. She did not deserve my lie—she’d tried to warn me, she’d told the truth before I left out of there for Bulkhead, She don’t want to see us, she’d said—but I was mad at her for leaving and mad at her for telling Tank where I’d gone and big-time pissed at her for not stepping up to the plate, leaving him all day long in her smelly apartment with its centerfolds from surfing magazines and beer posters Scotch-taped to the walls and its empties all over the place.

  “Let’s go get something to eat.”

  “I want McDonald’s.”

  Oh Tank. I know a place.

  “There ain’t any McDonald’s down here.”

  “Then I ain’t hungry.”

  “I’ll buy you a toy at the Dollar Store.”

  This worked enough to get him out of the house at least. He wanted to go by the Breezeby for lunch but I was not yet ready to face my sister and besides I was jealous that he wanted anything to do with her, suspicious as I was of the way she treated him. Sometimes when my daddy had been off for a while and then climbed shakily back on, my mama treated him like he’d returned from bloody combat. She spoiled him. Grilled us steaks, twice-baked some potatoes, boiled some green beans. She was no kind of cook but this was her one meal, welcome back, daddy, won’t you stay with us awhile? Callin’ mercy, mercy, mercy. We’d eat out on the porch if it was not mosquito season. Then my daddy would put on James Brown Live at the Apollo 1962 side one with the crazy intro listing all the songs and the surf guitar and horn prelude and crank that bad boy up so loud you could stand in the bathroom in front of the toilet and not hear the blessed stream hit the water. Then he and his bride would disappear into the bedroom and lock the door behind them. Angie and Carter would sometimes put their ear up to the door but all they could hear was JB knocking them out the aisles of the Apollo. I doubted Angie had the decency or the aforethought to crank up even Megadeath before her or Glenn or whoever she had got with since I’d been gone (perhaps the massive Termite had reappeared on the scene) went at their nighttime lights-out bidness. I hate to admit it but thinking about this led me to imagine myself with that smoke-for-brains hip-huggered Carla. I was singing some Sam Cooke to that girl and it was working as she had been subjected to a steady diet of REO Speedwagon which beats me what a REO Speedwagon even is and she was swaying to my tune, slipping out of her halter and then inching down those huggers and kicking them off finally to shimmy out of these lovely low-cut panties when Tank said, I’m hungry, Joel Junior, where we going to eat?

  My name is Mario. I will take you there.

  We walked down the beach to the pier. They had a grill built out over the dunes. We sat at the counter and ate cheeseburgers and fries and drank Mr. Pibb while the counterman told us and an old retired navy man about the time there was a grease fire started in the kitchen of the rival pier (because he claimed their fries were so greasy if you were to throw an order in the ocean they’d cause a slick bigger than that Exxon Valdez) and a land breeze fanned the fire and drove it out over the pier where it continued ablaze, trapping twenty-some-odd fishermen out at the dead end where some surfers who had been banned by Bottomsail law from surfing within five hundred feet of the pier paddled over to jeer and urge the old boys to jump.

  Tank listened to this story, his eyes crazy wide.

  “I wonder was Glenn one of those surfers,” he said.

  “Sounds like him.”

  “Glenn let me look at his dirty magazines.”

  “That’s it,” I said. “Come on, we’re going to see Angie.”

  “No, no, Dollar Store, Dollar Store,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. I put off asking about the magazines until my food digested. It was the only real meal I’d had aside from Tupperwared police leftovers and I was dog tired from nothing but bench sleep. What I really wanted was to curl up in my very own bed. I supposed I had already made up my mind to go back but I hadn’t yet let myself aloud say it or even totally inside spell it out. It was just a suction pulling me. Faintly did the signal grow stronger when I strayed away from the surf and steered Tank westward ho toward the dunes. Let me let me let me. Then that harmonica riff that was like jumping off a building and trusting whoever’s blowing that harp (Was it old Pop Staples? My daddy, he’d know) to keep on blowing because the moment he ran out of breath was the moment I’d drop to my certain death. What they call a leap of faith. About Jesus I just don’t know now. I want something up there besides my high-up-in-some-hotel mama. Somebody lining up my rides. I’d let kindly Mexican reign supreme, Streetclothes, hell, even Landers if he’d clean himself up, unlike Otis I believe in people’s ability to change. Just let me get home and crawl in my bed which after Angie left I did get my own room, though Tank when he’s scared of the pine needles scraping the shingles or the coral snakes popping up out of the heating vent at night when he’s too groggy to remember the rhyme we taught him before we ever bothered with his ABCs has been known to come sliding in my bed. Used to before my sister left in a cloud of comic-book asterisks, exclamation points, and question marks, I shared a room with Tank and Carter. They had bunk beds with wagon-wheel headboards to which they’d bind each other with my daddy’s two ties I not once saw him wear. Cowboy and Indian, a far healthier for you pursuit than any video game as it involves the creation in what they call your mind’s eye of that same-ass cactus, tumbleweeds blowing down the dusty main street of Dodge, swinging saloon doors, give me a sasparillo in a dirty glass. I begged off playing because it was for babies but occasionally I would cameo in the role of high sheriff which I ain’t bragging but I feel I brought more integrity to the role of public servant than the preoccupied and often downright mocking Sheriff Deputy Rex.

  I let Tank loose in the aisles of the Dollar Store which had not shifted a dust mote since I’d last patronized it. The same Muzak version of James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” leaked like nuclear fallout from the dropped ceiling. Thank God for Mavis. I deliberated over the purchase of a three-pack of Fruit of the Looms for Tank which would leave us with only five dollars to get Tank a toy and us home on, the Dollar Store being in fact a damn lie, most of the stock costing considerably more. Tank chose finally, after I had to suffer through string-only versions of “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac, “I’m Not in Love,” by 10cc, and “Baby, I Love Your Way,” by Peter Frampton, a package of green plastic army men.

  “You got this same pack at home,” I said.

  “But I want it.”

  “We’re going home today.”

  “This,” he shouted, shaking it in my face.

  “Okay,” I said. I was going to pay big-time for leaving him behind. Also I figured he wanted to feel at home until he arrived there safely. Safe seemed the wrong word considering no telling what we’d find when we arrived there. I tuned into Mavis, not wanting to consider what we’d come home to find. I remembered that morning we left Tank and Carter had been playing with their plastic army men up under the bed. That is what he’d been doing when my daddy went off. I’m no shrink but it makes some sense to me that he’d want to take up where he left off. Besides the army men were nearly the only t
hing he was considering which cost in fact not much over one buck.

  We went to the dock on the sound behind the Breezeby to wait for Angie to get off work. It was hot and breezeless and I only wanted to sleep but I did not want to go back to Angie’s apartment which made me sad, livid, and itchy all at once and putting aside my own feelings I did not want Tank thumbing that joystick in front of that box. I craved my house on a hill, its basement up under the cool earth, the sweetly simple logic of an overheated dog: dig down to stay cool. Tank set his army men up on the railing and commenced his play-by-play of their epic struggle to rid the world of evil. In turn, Tank-like, I lay facedown on the dock, my nose slotted in the space between slats, smelling the fishy waters of the sound, rooting around in my basement, drifting off toward that space in my head where I don’t have to take care of nobody and the music is chosen for me by a DJ I believe to be (even though I hate him) I-love-my: daddy.

  I told Tank keep a lookout for Angie when she got off work and an hour later I heard him call out to her. It was cool inside my basement and Mavis and Pop had moved on to “Respect Yourself” and I was about around to where I could do so before Angie came flat-flooting it up the dock, no doubt thinking when she saw me stretched across the boards that Tank had messed up big time. Maybe killed a man. A conclusion logical if shocking seeing as how she left him alone all day to play video games and allowed her no-count boyfriend to show him porno and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did not get him high for their own entertainment.

  She stopped dead when she saw it was me. I guess she recognized old sweat-stained Mario, my resilient shell.

  “You better fucking wish you were dead,” she said.

  I pulled myself up all slat-creased and sweaty and this is when she slapped, kicked, and in general reverted to that tomboy self used to beat hell out of all the boys she played H-O-R-S-E and Twenty-one with in the sandy, cone-strewn backyard courts off Moody Loop. I put my hands up to shield her blows and laughed like I always used to when she went physically off. I guess because it was funny to me. Tank wasn’t laughing. It got away with him big-time. He wormed his way between us trying to break it up.

  “Red-yellow-black, stay way back,” I said to him.

  “What the fuck?” said Angie. She’d stopped swinging. I looked back at the plate-glass windows of the Breezeby to see the waitstaff, the cooks, the big-haired hostess, and a couple of patrons holding bottles of beer staring at the show.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve finally gone off too,” she said.

  “He is not,” said Tank.

  “If I were you I’d cool it,” I said, pointing to the audience.

  “Excellent,” she said. “I’m sure they’ll fire my ass now.”

  “You don’t want to stay here anyhow.”

  “You don’t get to tell me where to stay. Especially not now, Mr. I’m Just Going to Get Something out of the Truck.”

  “He went to see Mama,” said Tank.

  “He sure didn’t stay long, did he?” said Angie.

  I told Angie I needed to talk to her. Her sneer bled into a smirk.

  “Didn’t I tell you? What part of she don’t want to have anything to do with us is confusing to you?”

  “Who?” said Tank.

  “Go play with your army men,” I told him.

  “Who don’t want to have anything to do with us?”

  “Great,” I said to Angie. “See?”

  “You’d rather lie to him, obviously. Tell him you’ll be back in a minute, got to just get something out of the truck. Do you know he asked for you every ten minutes all fucking night long?”

  I looked at Tank. He went back to his army men as if he was ashamed of calling out for me.

  “I finally had to let him play video games,” said Angie, “just to get him to settle the hell down.”

  I was so old. Now I’m a baby compared to that moment, out over the sound, in the boiling afternoon sun.

  Tank was humming and moving about his army men in seconds. Angie lit a cigarette and said, “What?”

  I started talking. Mavis was taking me by the hand. Wherever she was promising to take me it was a far better place than the no d Promise Land, where mamas denied their own offspring to kindly must-have-some-Mexican-blood street-clothed cops.

  I described the fire. “I asked him take me by there to see but he said it was nothing left,” I said. Burned to the ground. Just some charred bricks and ash.

  Angie stood there staring. Her cigarette, stuck in her hand like a sixth finger, smoked like the ruins of my mama’s cottage.

  She never said a word about it. Just turned and walked back up the dock into the Breezeby. I watched through the plate glass. She went right up to the hostess who was still staring at us as if we were a movie playing on the windshield of the boiling truck and said something to her and the woman said something obviously smart-assed back which was a mistake because my sister pointed her cigarette at the hostess’s face and then the hostess went off and my sister stood there smoking until the woman came back and handed her something in looked like an envelope and then my sister Angie walked out of the Breezeby past the retard candy and the free real estate magazines and blew out of the door and into the parking lot. Never once did she look back at us watching from the dock. This was the last time I ever laid eyes on my foul-mouthed sister.

  EIGHT

  THE NOISE OF HOME crackled in my head like the static of an album where the needle catches in the last groove. The arm tries to lift itself off the album but when it sticks like that you have to put everything aside, nudge it slightly—not too hard or it will ruin the song—with your finger. You got to bygod act upon it.

  Me and Tank, men of action, marching inland in the boiling sun, against the tide of pickups pulling boats, campers, vans with beach chairs, and coolers bungeed up on luggage racks. It must have been Friday, judging by the beach traffic. I’m no good at calendars. I only knew it was hot and I was tired and Tank was heavy as halfway across the drawbridge I had to piggyback him when he up and stopped walking. The sun boiling, beachgoers streaming by, Tank clutching his bag of army men. He’d got mad at me earlier for running Angie off which he said was my fault and then she beat it out of the parking lot into the sandy lot and over the protected no trespassing sand dunes without a look back or a last fuck y’all.

  “I am going to beat your ass,” he said, after I got him to stop screaming her name.

  “You and whose army?” I said.

  What shut him up was he never heard the expression and had to right then and there have it explained to him. Obviously he’d not reached that point in his schooling where all you learn is your mama trash talk. My daddy was no good at math but the local schools did allow him to commit to memory twenty uninterrupted minutes of the infamous legend of Dolomite of which we could only hear three or four sanitized verses. He claimed black guys taught it to him during shop class when they were supposed to be building bleachers for the new stadium. The woman he married, may she rest in peace, maintained he made it up himself. For some reason she could not fathom such a story passed down orally over generations in parking lots and mechanic’s bays and lunchrooms by kids who could scarcely read. Then again, aside from Aretha, she could take or leave music which we all know what that means.

  “Me and this right here army,” said Tank after I explained the phrase, shaking his bag of green men.

  Crossing the drawbridge, trying to drown out that stuck record static, I thought of learning Dolomite from my daddy next time he’s All Clear and teaching it in turn to Tank. Then I made a list of all the other things I’d like to teach him in the short time we had left. I knew it would not be but days before they came and took Tank away if we showed up home. I knew I had to go look for Carter though, now that Angie and the woman my daddy married were lost to us.

  THINGS I NEED TO TEACH TANK:

  — Difference between Stax/Volt and Motown

  — A little bit of Dolomite: the legend of

 
— Some manners?

  — East north south west

  — How to light the pilot on the furnace which it’s always me lights it every fall

  — Pee and brush your teeth at same time so you don’t miss bus

  — Beef stew recipe I got off the back of a can of tomato soup

  — He knows it already but the coral snake rhyme

  I thought of stories to tell Tank my daddy and some even my mother had told me, I thought of songs he needed to know, though he already knew more about music at his age than most people four times it. I wanted him to know that even though I would not actually physically right-beside-him be there always, I wasn’t about to ever let him totally alone. I’d feel it if he was hungry or hurting, I’d know if he needed me, and wherever it was I happened to be I’d—no, I won’t going to tell him this, I wasn’t going to go promising something I could not deliver, I’ve always hated worse than her leaving the way my mama used to tuck us in nights with her big promises.

  Al Green came on the waves, “Let’s Stay Together.” I started singing it aloud, Tank bobbing heavy on my shoulders, thinking I’d teach Tank that you could be walking down a Bulkhead backstreet and get whisked into a store looks like auto parts on the outside and up in the dim windowless inside, heavenly voices sing sweetly of the light in this world. When you are in need, the lights in this world line up to dice through the darkness, illuminate your path: magic caster, kindly Mexican, church lady, Streetclothes, moneylending trucker, what links them? Just knowing a traveler’s in need, Tank.