by I D Johnson
“You sure will make him proud,” Ginger agreed with a nod as she wiped away her tears.
Before Elliott could respond, Richard and one of the boys from the bus ran over, laughing. “Look at those stupid girls sitting with Slimy Sanderson!” he teased.
“Ha, ha! They’ll smell like trash by the end of the day!” the other called.
“You shut up and leave him alone!” Carla yelled, standing and putting her hands on her hips. Elliott prayed they didn’t say anything about his dad since Richard would know he’d stolen that story from Teddy.
“Yeah!” Elliott interjected, wondering where this newfound courage was coming from. “You ought not mess with me. I’m a lot bigger than you.” He looked Richard in the eye and slowly stood up, hoping it would be enough to intimidate him.
Richard’s face melted as he looked up at the giant in front of him. “Uh, yeah, you’re right. Sorry about that… Slimy—I mean, Elliott.”
The other boy, who hadn’t been looking at Elliott when he’d spoken, seemed confused. He gawked at Richard with his mouth hanging open. “What’s the matter with you, Dick?” he asked. “Are you going to let Slimy get away with talking to you like that?” He turned around and looked at Elliott, still wearing a cocky grin.
“I think you best get on your way, too,” Elliott warned, looking into brown eyes that went from confident to troubled almost instantaneously.
“Uh, right,” was about all he managed to say before Richard tapped him vigorously on the arm and steered him back in the direction from which they’d come.
“Well, you sure showed them!” Carla said with a proud nod as she reclaimed her seat.
Elliott sat down, too. “Oh, that’s nothing. Sometimes you have to make sure the little boys around here know when they’re about to get themselves into trouble. The last thing I want is to have to pound some kid because he didn’t know any better, but some guys never learn.”
“You’re so strong.” Becky had her hands folded beneath her chin and was gazing up at him. “Say, would you care to push me on the swing?”
In all of his days, he never imagined telling a string of lies might get him the chance to push a pretty girl on the swing. “Sure,” he said with a smile and a shrug.
“Me, too!” Ginger cried. “Push me, too.”
“I want a turn. I’m the one that invited him,” Carla reminded the other girls, grabbing his arm protectively.
“Ladies, ladies, there is enough of me to go around.” He chuckled, holding his arms up in assurance without pulling free of Carla’s grip. The feel of her fingers on his arm was nice. He felt like someone actually wanted to touch him for once and not to knock him across the room either.
The girls giggled and headed over to the swings where Elliott easily persuaded the previous occupants that it was in their best interest to go check out the four-square game going on across the playground, and before he knew it, he was hurrying back and forth keeping multiple swings full of pretty girls up in the air. They laughed and sang songs, and it was the best day he’d ever had at school. He didn’t even notice when the bruised apple fell out of his pocket and landed next to his holey shoe on the ground.
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1951
Elliott didn’t wait for Jimmy to get off of the school bus as he made his way down the sidewalk toward home, the other kids calling goodbye to him once they crossed into their yards. He knew his little brother was back there, and he’d just as soon have him far behind so that the little peon didn’t cramp his style. Having a first grader on your heels was no way to show everyone you were the coolest guy in school.
It didn’t really matter where Jimmy walked, though. Everyone knew Elliott was the most popular guy in sixth grade, maybe in the whole school. Where they used to make fun of him, now he was the one they all looked to for just about everything, especially to determine how to wear their clothes and their hair. He’d taken to slicking his back recently, the way he’d seen some of the high school kids do it, and the next day, half the boys in his class were wearing their hair the same way. He’d patched his jeans up with an older pair that didn’t fit anymore, and the rest of the boys had followed suit, even though most of them had had to make holes first before they could patch them. If there was a trend at school, Elliott was setting it. The kids loved him, the teachers thought he was the smartest, politest, most respectful young man in all of Oklahoma City, and no one at all suspected that his home life was a train wreck, and he was slowly dying inside.
Once the rest of the kids were safe in their homes where mothers doted over them and fathers would be home soon to practice playing catch or invite them out to the garage to tinker with the car, Elliott’s countenance changed and he slowed his pace so that Jimmy could catch up, no longer a threat to his coolness.
“How was your day, Jimbo?” he asked as the rail thin boy loped up beside him. While Elliott wasn’t quite as stout as he used to be before he hit another growth spurt that year, he was still a big boy. His mother said it was because he was eating her out from under the roof, and she didn’t know how she was going to continue to feed them if he didn’t slow down, but since she hadn’t had a job in the entire time he’d been alive, he knew there was no risk of that. As long as the lady from the food pantry continued to feel sorry for him, and the girls from school kept bringing the food like lemmings, not even wondering how he managed to forget his lunchbox every single day of the week, he was confident there was no chance of him losing any of his girth soon. Jimmy, on the other hand, had always been a bit sickly and never cared much to eat—which Elliott was okay with since it meant more for him.
“My day was okay,” Jimmy replied. “I had to sit out at recess for a few minutes, though.”
“Sit out?” Elliott repeated. “How come?”
“Cause I forgot my homework.”
“How’d you forget your homework?” Elliott shook his head. “We did it together. I asked you if you had it this morning.”
“I know. I forgot.”
Elliott tried not to sigh too loudly. His kid brother needed to learn some responsibility. “Well, I can’t fix that,” he said shoving him in the arm slightly, enough to make him cross his steps. “I can’t fix everything.” The last part was more to himself, a reminder that he wasn’t this kid’s parent, even though he felt like it most days.
They turned the corner, and Elliott stopped in his tracks. He saw his house up ahead—and there was a car parked in front of it. A nice one. From here, it looked like a Buick. It was long and shiny, in an apple red, and possibly new.
“Whose car is that?” Jimmy asked, stopping next to him.
“I have no idea,” Elliott managed. “But I want one.”
“Yeah, right,” Jimmy laughed. “You ain’t never gonna have a car that nice. Not in your whole damn life.”
“Don’t swear!” Elliott urged, popping him sharply in the chest, not enough to hurt, but enough to get his attention.
“Ouch!” Jimmy hollered anyway. “You ain’t my daddy. You swear all the time.”
Elliott didn’t bother to remind him that neither one of them had seen his daddy since he’d limped his way out of the house the same night Elliott had learned to make a bottle. “Come on.”
He picked up the pace, Jimmy struggling to keep up with him, and took the porch steps in one stride. If someone was here in a fancy car, something important was going on. He pulled open the screen door and pushed the front door open. Voices were coming from the kitchen, and he halted to figure out how many there were.
Jimmy pushed him aside to make it into the living room, and Elliott backhanded him. He heard his mother and another woman’s voice. Neither of them sounded particularly happy. As he shut the front door quietly, in hopes not to interrupt the conversation, he heard the deeper tones of a man.
Not picking up on his plan, Jimmy barged through the living room, into the kitchen. “Mom! Whose car is that?”
Elliott shook his head, thinking he should’ve warned t
he kid to be quiet. He stopped in the doorway, and Elliott heard the screech of chair legs on linoleum at the same time as his mother said, “Not now, Jimmy!” in her exhausted tone, the one she generally used to address them if she wasn’t angry enough to yell yet.
“Well, now, if it isn’t little Jimmy,” came the sound of a nice woman’s voice. “How was your day at school?”
The jovial tone of her voice had Elliott approaching the kitchen as well. He couldn’t remember ever having walked into this house and having an adult show any sort of interest in his day—or anything about him at all, for that matter.
“Good,” Jimmy said, walking toward the dining area. “I had a spelling test. I only got two wrong.”
“That’s remarkable,” the woman said.
Elliott stepped into the kitchen and surveyed the situation. The lady had dark hair, pulled up on top of her head in a bun. She wore black slacks and a white button-down shirt with a red neckerchief. She looked a little bit older than his mother, but there was something else about her face that truly caught his attention as a stark contrast to his mother: she was smiling.
The man looked like he might be in his early thirties, so slightly younger than the woman. He also had dark hair, which was perfectly groomed, parted on one side and combed to the side. He was also standing. Wearing a suit jacket and matching slacks in a soft gray, his black tie said he was a professional, though Elliott had no idea what his line of work might be. His hat rested on the table next to his mother’s arm, and she had an overflowing ashtray in front of her. Something told him that wasn’t apple juice in her tumbler. The other two were not drinking or smoking, and the luster of their skin implied that, if they did either, it wasn’t habitual, the way that it was for Arlene Howe.
“Hello, Elliott.”
The woman’s voice was familiar in a sense he could not place. She smiled at him, but not the same way she had Jimmy. When she looked at Jimmy, it was with the twinkle in her eye one might have when addressing a small child. For Elliott, she reserved the knowing look of a mutual adult.
“Hi,” he said quietly, not sure he could find his voice at first. “Mom, what’s… what’s going on?” Something about the way the air hung in the room let him know whatever these people had come to discuss, it wasn’t the sort of casual conversation one had with friends over a cup of coffee.
“None of your business.” Her response shouldn’t have been a surprise to him, but his eyes did widen when he turned to her. In a year or two, he’d be taller than his mother, and then he hoped she’d start to realize he wasn’t a little kid anymore, but that had yet to sink in. “Get out of here!”
With a sigh, the woman said, “Boys, why don’t the two of you head into your bedroom for a while? We have a bit more talking to do, and then we’ll be sure to let you know what’s going on.”
“The hell you will,” his mother said before taking another deep puff on her cigarette and blowing the smoke at the woman’s back.
“Is everything okay?” Jimmy asked, looking at their mother.
When she didn’t answer, the man said, “Everything is fine, son. Go ahead.” His smile was reassuring, and the boys looked at each other briefly before heading toward their bedroom.
There was no more talking until the bedroom door shut. “What do you think—”
“Shhh!” Elliott insisted, holding a finger to his mouth to quiet his brother. Their bedroom shared a paper-thin wall with the kitchen. He kicked his way through his brother’s broken toys, the ones Elliott had begun refusing to clean up for him when he’d started school, and pressed his ear against the wall, hoping to hear what the adults were talking about.
Jimmy sighed but followed suit. It was difficult to hear at first as the two strangers’ voices settled into trying to be reasonable. Whenever their mother spoke, it was easier to hear. Elliott hoped they’d all get angry soon enough so that he could make out more of what was being said, but it was hard to understand anything except for his mother’s angry responses.
The woman was speaking, something Elliott couldn’t decipher, followed by his mother’s declaration of, “Like hell you are.”
Then, the man said something, the only part of which Elliott could decode sounded like, “Even take care of them….”
“How the hell would you know?” Arlene said back, angrily. “You people think you run the world, but you don’t. My daddy warned me about you. Coming into my house, trying to take my kids.”
At that, Jimmy inhaled sharply, and Elliott told him to be quiet again, but he felt his insides lurch up as well. These two strangers were here to take them away? Was that possible? He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. On the one hand, he’d spent much of the last seven or eight years wondering what it might be like to sleep on a bed with clean sheets, one where there weren’t holes in the mattress and cockroaches crawling over his face at night. He wondered what it might be like not to have to worry if there’d be dinner that night or if his mom would be passed out when he got home from school, or what he might do when he was too big for his pants if the lady from the thrift store couldn’t bring any that fit. Looking at Jimmy, he thought it might be nice if he lived someplace where there was enough meat for him to put some muscle on his scrawny bones.
On the other hand, as much as he hated his mom, he loved her. Because she was his mom. It didn’t matter that she called him names all night long; that she was usually passed out drunk by the time the neighbors were sitting down for dinner around the table; that she hadn’t washed his clothes or a dish since that night Bob had left. No, there was absolutely every reason in the world for him to hate Arlene Howe—and also every reason in the world to love her, because if it weren’t for her, he wouldn’t even be alive.
Elliott looked down to see tears in Jimmy’s eyes. “It’ll be okay,” he said, even though he wasn’t sure it would be.
“Do you think it’s true? That they’ll take us?” Jimmy asked.
For once, lying didn’t seem like the right thing to do. “I don’t know. It sounds like Mom don’t want them to.”
Jimmy’s head sagged, and he swiped at his nose with the back of his hand.
Confused, Elliott asked, “Jimmy, you wanna stay here with Mom, don’t you?”
The tears streamed down the little boy’s face, and he sniffled again, trying to control himself. Elliott leaned down so he was closer to his brother. “What is it, Jimbo?” he asked. “What’s the matter with you?”
Between sobs, Jimmy managed to eke out, “I don’t wanna.”
“You don’t wanna what?”
“I… don’t… wanna… stay.”
Shocked, Elliott stood back up, not sure how to handle that information. It took him a moment to clarify. “You don’t?”
“No. I don’t.”
“You sure?”
“Yep.”
“But what about Mom?”
With another sniffle, he replied, “She ain’t never been no mom to me.”
Elliott let the information soak in a moment and returned his attention to the conversation on the other side of the wall. It was a little more heated now, and though the comments from the strangers were harder to pick up on, his mother’s strained voice was clear. “You’re forgetting, I didn’t choose this path. Just because my grandmother was one of you doesn’t mean that you have control over my life or my kids’. I don’t want that for them! Spending their whole lives looking for boogey men in the shadows. What kind of life is that?”
The words were alarming, even though he had no idea what his mother could be talking about and wondered if she was drunk again. He looked down at Jimmy, but he didn’t seem to be eavesdropping. He was too busy wiping his nose on the hem of Elliott’s shirt.
“Arlene, we’ve told you, the woman we’re recommending is no longer active. They’ll have no exposure to the Passel, I assure you,” said the man, in a clear, crisp, no nonsense voice.
The woman added something, but all Elliott could understand was, “Best for
your sons,” and then, “may as well consent because it’s happening either way.”
That, Jimmy seemed to hear. He looked up, his eyes wide with recognition. “Did you hear that?” Elliott asked. “It sounds like we’re going away with those two people whether we like it or not.”
Nodding, Jimmy said, “I’ll pack my toys,” and turned to the mess on the floor. None of his toys were anything more than cast off junk brought from the thrift store lady, but they were important to him, and Elliott decided there were a couple of things he’d want to keep, too. He didn’t have a suitcase in his closet, though he was sure he’d seen one in the top of his mom’s closet once when he’d been hanging up a dress he’d rinsed out for her, one she’d vomited all over. He didn’t like to think about that night. That was the night he thought she wasn’t going to wake up.
In lieu of a suitcase, he grabbed his pillowcase, and even though it was ratty and threadbare in a few places, he decided it would work. He grabbed the letter Miss Hays had given him when he was in first grade, the one that said he was smart and was going to do great things, along with a picture of Carla she’d given him last school year, and slipped them into the pillowcase, trying not to think about the fact that this meant he’d likely never see her again, which was difficult since they’d decided they were going to get married as soon as they were old enough, in just a few years, after high school. He held the pillowcase open while Jimmy dumped in a couple of broken trucks, four blocks, a half a dozen tinker toys, a ball, and a one-eyed teddy bear he liked to call Jack.
“That all?” he asked Jimmy, who nodded.
“You think we’ll need any clothes?”
Elliott thought about the clothes he had in his drawer. One other pair of jeans with patched knees that were too short and a couple of shirts. He thought about the fancy clothes the strangers were wearing. “Nah.”
Once again, Jimmy’s head bounced up and down. The voices from the kitchen were growing more intense, though muffled from here, but the shriek of a chair pushing out made Elliott think the strangers might’ve given up and decided to leave without them. “Come on,” he said, grabbing Jimmy by the arm, headed for the door.