Julia Watts - Finding H.F.

by Julia Watts

  “Shit,” she sighs, “being broke and underage in Atlanta isn’t much better than being back in Cripple Creek or Pig Butt Pass or wherever you’re from, H. F.”

  “Morgan,” I tell her.

  “Whatever,” Laney sighs, flipping over to her stomach. “Not a goddamn thing to do.”

  “Oh, this would be the time of night when Laney starts bitching about not being able to get into the clubs,” Chantal says.

  “What clubs?” Bo asks, and I wonder if he’s picturing those nightclubs they’ve got in old movies with fancy clothes and little lamps on every table. Knowing Bo, I bet he is.

  “You know,” Laney says, “clubs with drinks and dancing and women.” She looks at Bo. “Or in your case, men.”

  Even in the half dark, I can see Bo’s face turn red.

  “Well, I don’t drink,” Dee says, “and I don’t want to pay no ten bucks to dance on a dance floor no bigger than a welcome mat. Plus, I’ve got all the woman I can handle right here.” She gives Chantal a squeeze.

  Chantal pecks Dee’s cheek, then lifts her arm to look at her wrist. “Damn,” she says, “my watch busted a month ago, and I still keep looking at my wrist like it’s gonna tell me what time it is.”

  Bo grins. “H.F., remember when we was kids and if you’d ask me the time when I didn’t have a watch on, I’d look at my wrist and say, ‘It’s a hair past a freckle’?” He rolls his eyes. “In fifth grade, that’s some great humor.”

  Of course, Bo does have a watch on—an expensive sterling silver one he saved up for six months to buy. “I ain’t gonna wear no Timex watch just because I live in a Timex town,” he said when he showed me the picture of the silver watch in the JCPenney catalog. I glance at the watch on his thin wrist. “It’s 10:35,” I say.

  “We’d better make ourselves scarce soon,” Dee says. “The park closes at 11. Of course, we sleep here half the time anyway. We just have to find a place that’s kinda outta the way.”

  “Hey, H.F., you guys got a hotel room or anything?” Laney lights up a cigarette. I wonder how she can live on the street and still afford to smoke.

  Chantal puts her hands on her hips. “Girl, you think they’d be hangin’ out in the park with us if they had a room over at the Hyatt Regency?”

  Laney shrugs. “Never hurts to ask.”

  “Well,” Bo says, “we was plannin’ on sleepin’ in my car. There ain’t much room, but y’all can cram into the backseat if you think you can fit.”

  Bo parks the car on a tree-lined street of old houses people have fixed up real nice. Laney and Dee and Chantal are squeezed into the backseat so close together, they look like mixed-race Siamese triplets. Dee and Chantal don’t look like they mind the close quarters, but Laney keeps trying to scoot away from Dee, even though there’s no place to scoot to. “Damn it, Dee, you’ve got a big ass,” she says.

  “Your ass ain’t so small for a white girl, Miss Thing,” Dee snaps back.

  Me and Bo are in the front seat, sitting up straight because we can’t lean back without squishing somebody’s legs. It’s definitely not a room at the High Regency or whatever that hotel was called.

  “Going to sleep at 11 o’clock...I might as well be living with my freakin’ parents,” Laney mutters.

  “Well, you’d have a more comfortable place to sleep,” Chantal says, “if you’d pretend to like boys and love Jesus.”

  “I know—it’s not worth it,” Laney says. “I’d rather be who I am than have the comforts of home. It just sucks that I have to choose.”

  The same question’s been running through my head all night, but I’ve just now got the nerve to ask it. “So, what are y’all gonna do with yourselves? I mean, you can’t live like this forever.”

  “Me and Chantal read the want ads every day,” Dee says. “When we can find jobs that’ll pay enough for us to get a place to live, we’ll be all right. But it’s hard to find a full-time job when you’re a teenager, ‘cause you’re still supposed to be in school.”

  “I hate bein’ a high-school dropout,” Chantal says, “but the first thing I’m gonna do after me and Dee get settled down is get my G.E.D. I might even go to college one day so I can get me one of those jobs where you get to sit at a desk all day and tell other people what to do. And Dee—she wants to be a chef. You should see this girl let loose in a kitchen sometime. She can cook!”

  “Well, you girls have fun working yourselves to death,” Laney yawns. “I’m gonna find some rich old dyke to take care of me.”

  For a long time I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep. Except for that one night at Wendy’s, this is the first night I’ve slept anywhere but in my own bed in Memaw’s sewing room. Plus, sitting straight up with one person beside me and three behind me isn’t exactly my idea of comfort. It’s been such a long day, though...

  I wake up to see a man’s face staring at me through the car window. His beard is a rat’s nest of tangles, and his eyes glow crazily in the moonlight. I must yell, because Bo jerks awake. “What is it?”

  “That man...in the window.” But when I turn my head he’s gone.

  “Probably just some old drunk,” Dee says from the backseat. “The street’s is full of ‘em. Go back to sleep.”

  But it’s a long time before I can.

  When I wake back up, the morning sun is blazing through the windshield, cooking me like a hot dog on a grill. My mouth tastes like dirt, and I can smell the sweat soaking my day-old clothes.

  “I know a place where we can get cleaned up and get some breakfast,” Chantal says.

  Of cleaning up and eating breakfast, I can’t decide which sounds better. Me and Bo grab a change of clothes and our toothbrushes out of the trunk and follow our new friends down the tree-lined street. It’s hard for me to keep up, though, groggy and dry-mouthed as I am. Plus, it’s got to be a good ten degrees hotter in Atlanta than it is in Morgan.

  “Lord, girls, how much farther is it?” Bo says, sounding like he did the first time I made him walk to Deer Creek. I’m fixin’ to melt into a puddle.”

  “Not far,” Laney says. “Just a couple more blocks.”

  Bo leans over to me and half-whispers, “What’s a block?” The girls all hear him and bust out laughing. I reckon they don’t know that when you live in a town that’s just got three stoplights, you don’t measure distance by blocks. If something’s pretty close, you say, “It’s about as far as from here to the Baptist church.” If something is a long way off, it’s “a fur piece.”

  We follow the girls out of the tree-lined neighborhood past a pizza place and a place advertising sushi, which I remember seeing on TV once is fish that Japanese people eat raw. Now, why would you want to do that when you could fry it up in some cornmeal? I’m glad when we keep walking past the sushi place. No matter how sick I am of bread and peanut butter, I’m not ready for raw fish.

  Next we come to this brick building with all these books I’ve never heard of displayed in the window. The neat white lettering on the window reads, OUT LOUD BOOKSHOP AND CAFE. Hanging over the door is a big rectangle painted with stripes in all the colors of the rainbow. “That’s pretty” I say.

  “Yeah, that’s how you know it’s a place for queers,” Dee says. “It’s got the rainbow sign.”

  “The rainbow sign,” I say after her. The last time I heard the words “the rainbow sign,” they were coming out of Memaw’s mouth. I haven’t thought about it for years, but there was this song Memaw used to sing to me when I was a little girl: “God Gave Noah the Rainbow Sign.” It was about the rainbow God sent to tell Noah that He would never destroy the world by flood again. It’s funny: I loved that song when I was little, but I had forgot all about it till just now.

  “You comin’ in, H.F.?” Bo says.

  “Oh...yeah.”

  The store’s almost empty. Over at a cluster of tables by the window, an older man is sitting drinking coffee and reading a newspaper. But that’s it for customers. The walls are lined with bookshelves, and books are
displayed on tables up front. I glance down at one big book that’s got a picture of two women, naked and kissing, on it. I jump backwards.

  “What’s the matter, H.F.? Never seen naked women before?” Laney is laughing.

  “Not...not in a book like this.”

  She grins. “Well, I guess y’all don’t have a queer bookstore down in Hooterville, do you?”

  “You mean...all these here books are about people...”

  “Like us,” Laney says. “All kinds of books: fiction, nonfiction, photography, erotica.” She smiles on that last word, and I look down to keep from making eye contact, but that just makes me have to look at the naked women on the book again.

  Instead I look over at Bo, who’s spotted some book with a picture of a muscle-bound guy with a policeman’s helmet and no shirt on. Poor little Bo’s face is so red it’s almost purple.

  “Come over here, y’all,” Chantal says.

  We follow her and Dee over to the counter where you can order coffee. A tall, skinny, light-skinned black man is messing around with some kind of fancy coffeemaker. A white girl with the shortest hair I’ve ever seen on a female is putting bottles of juice and water into a cooler. I wonder what my hair would look like that short.

  When the black man looks up, he says, “Why, good morning, Miss Chantal. You’ll be needing the key to the women’s room, I presume?”

  Chantal looks over at Bo, who’s staring at his expensive shoes. “And the men’s room key too.”

  “Oh!” the man behind the counter kinda yelps. “You and your friends have picked up a boy! I didn’t know you had it in you.” He hands the women’s room key to Chantal and holds out the other one to Bo, whose hand shakes as he takes it. “Just look at those hands,” the man says. “You’re an artist, am I right?”

  “A...a...musician,” Bo sputters. “I play the flute.”

  A smile spreads over the counterman’s lips. “Ooh, honey, I bet you do!”

  Bo runs for the men’s room like a scalded dog, with the man behind the counter laughing fit to bust a gut.

  The short-haired girl looks up from putting bottles in the cooler. “Levon, you’re awful. You scared the hell out of that boy.”

  “I may have scared him,” Levon says, still laughing, “but he liked it, just a little.”

  With Bo gone and Dee and Chantal locked in the women’s room doing heaven knows what, I start walking past rows of bookcases, looking at the names of all these writers I’ve never read anything by. A couple of them I might have heard about in school...Willa Lather rings a bell, and Oscar Wilde. But mostly as I run my eyes over the names of the writers, I don’t recognize them any more than if I was running my eyes over the pages in the Atlanta phone book. When I end up in the same aisle as Laney, I say, “I need to read more. I’m downright ashamed of how ignorant I am. Except for homework, I ain’t cracked a book since I read my way through all the Nancy Drew books in the Morgan Elementary School library.”

  Laney shoves a book at me. “Well, you can start by reading this.”

  I look down at the page she’s opened it to. It’s a poem. “Adrienne Rich,” Laney says, like that’s supposed to mean something to me.

  I start reading the poem, and it’s obviously one woman talking to another about how she loves her. And when Miss Rich starts talking about her “cave”...well, I’m no English scholar like Wendy’s dad, but I think I’ve got a pretty good idea what she’s talking about. The poem’s beautiful, but it makes me feel all hot and flushed and awkward, especially since I can feel Laney’s eyes on me. When Chantal and Dee come over to tell me it’s my turn to use the bathroom, I’m glad.

  As soon as I shut the bathroom’s hot-pink door behind me, I strip off my sweaty clothes. After I’ve taken care of what always needs to be done first thing in the morning, I run the sink full of hot water. Using the store’s bottle of liquid soap and a handful of paper towels, I wash off as best I can—hands, face, armpits. After I’ve let the hot water drain out, I stick my sweaty head under the faucet and rinse it off. I put on a clean T-shirt and panties, brush my teeth, and pull my jeans back on. I’m not clean enough to pass muster with Memaw, but at least I don’t smell like a billy goat.

  When we turn the bathroom keys back in, Levon says, “And now I suppose you’ll be wanting to be fed.”

  Before anybody can answer, the girl at the cooler starts tossing us these little plastic bottles of orange juice, which somehow we all manage to catch...even Bo, who always ducks when somebody throws a ball to him in P.E.

  “Oh, Lordy,” Levon says in a loud voice that sounds like Prissy in Gone With the Wind. “It’s the big boss man. I sho’ hopes he don’t see me givin’ away free food to these po’ chillun.”

  I turn to look at the muscular, bald-headed white man who just walked in through the EMPLOYEES ONLY door. He covers his eyes with his hands like the monkey who sees no evil. “I see nothing. And I certainly don’t see any of my employees giving away merchandise.”

  Levon hands us each a big muffin wrapped in cellophane. “There you go...muffins for the little ragamuffins.”

  We thank him and take our food outside. Memaw always says she never took a handout in her life, and I probably shouldn’t have just now. But I’m hungry, and the muffin is crumbly and moist, with real blueberries. The orange juice flows down my parched throat like liquid sunshine. I close my eyes, drink it down, and think of Florida.

  Chapter Fourteen

  We wasted half a tank of gas today driving around Atlanta—me and Bo and Dee and Chantal and Laney—looking at the baseball stadium and the skyscrapers and the windows of stores where we couldn’t afford to buy nothing. Seeing the big city is fun, but it’s kind of sad too. It’s like being a kid in candy store, except the man who runs the store says, “Look at all this stuff, kid. Ain’t it great? Well, none of it’s for you.”

  Now we’re back in the park because Dee said that it being a Wednesday, Preacher Dave would probably come by, and if we play our cards right, we won’t have to eat peanut butter for supper again tonight.

  This whole thing is making me nervous, though, standing around, waiting for some preacher to show up. If I’d wanted to get my soul saved, I’d have stayed back in Morgan. “So who is this Preacher Dave guy, anyway?”

  Laney lights up a cigarette from the pack I’m pretty sure she stole from Starvin’ Marvin’s earlier today. “He’s your basic do-gooder. If we agree to sit through one of his fuckin’ church services, he takes us home with him and feeds us. Usually he lets us shower and sleep there too. His house is huge...it’s almost worth going to church just to get to stay there.”

  All my life Memaw’s been trying to drag me to church, and when I finally get away from her, strangers start trying to do the same thing. When I think about all the hours I’ve been forced to wear a stiff dress and sit in a hard pew and listen to some man tell me how I’m gonna burn in hell, eating stale bread and peanut butter and sleeping in the Escort don’t sound that bad.

  Just as I’m about to say peanut butter sounds fine to me, a car pulls up in front of where we’re standing. It’s a fancy, shiny black car with lots of silver trim. Bo nudges me. “That’s a Mercedes.” He breathes the words more than he says them.

  Do I really need to say that nobody in Morgan drives a car like that?

  The window rolls down—it’s the automatic kind, of course—and I see that the driver is a middle-aged guy, balding, with a gray-and-black beard. He’s got a gold hoop in his ear, which kind of surprises me, on accounta him being a preacher. “Evening, ladies,” he says, then notices Bo and adds, “and gentleman. So, Dee, Chantal, Laney...are you going to introduce me to your friends?”

  “This is H.F. and Bo,” Chantal says, “from Kentucky.” “Kentucky!” Preacher Dave exclaims. “Where in Kentucky?”

  “No place you’ve ever heard of,” I say.

  He smiles, and I’ve got to admit he’s got a nicer smile than most preachers I’ve met. When Memaw’s preacher smiles, it’s
just another way of him saying, You’re going to hell and I’m not. “Try me,” Preacher Dave says.

  “Morgan,” I say.

  “Yes... Morgan.” Preacher Dave rubs his beard. “About 30 minutes over the Kentucky state line...there’s a little Baptist college there, am I right?”

  “Yessir,” me and Bo say together, like he just did a great magic trick or something.

  Preacher Dave laughs. “I know my Kentucky geography pretty well. You two wouldn’t happen to have heard of a little burg called Pine Knob, would you?”

  “Where the Pine Knob Coal Company is at?” I say.

  Preacher Dave nods. “That’s the place. I was born and raised there, God help me. When I was your age, every morning I’d wake up with the same thought: I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Me too,” Bo says, and when I look at him, he looks like he’s hypnotized.

  “Of course you want to get out of there...a young man like yourself. If you don’t, you’re just going to turn into the town fairy, swishing down Main Street while everybody whispers behind your back.”

  “Pine Knob had one of them too?” Bo sounds amazed. I’m pretty amazed too.

  I look at Bo and say, “Cricket Needham.”

  “Oh, is he the Good Fairy of Morgan?”

  “Yessir,” I say, “he’s the mortician.”

  Preacher Dave hoots with laughter. “God bless the poor little sod! In Pine Knob it was Peter Cotton, the florist, surprisingly enough. Peter Cotton...with a name like that, you can imagine what torments he endured.” He takes a breath, then says, “So...Bo and H.F., which one of you is which? I had no idea people in rural Kentucky were giving their children such gender-neutral names these days.”