Counting for Thunder

by Phillip Irwin Cooper

  “The heck,” Garrett says, eyeballing my drumstick and Tina’s slice of meat, both now slathered in deep red, runny gravy.

  “It’s the sauce. For the turkey,” Tina says, holding out her hands for Garrett’s and Sis’s plates. “It’s Eye-talian.”

  “Nuh-uh,” Sis grunts, pulling her plate in close with both arms.

  “Turkey doesn’t need any sauce far’s I’m concerned,” Garrett says, still squinting at my plate.

  “Fine,” Tina says, unfazed. She takes her seat and drops her napkin into her lap.

  “What’s it made of?” I say gingerly, wondering if the cure is worse than the ill.

  “Oh, let’s see, it’s got ketchup, Worcestershire, and, well, let’s see—Heinz 57, pure grape jelly. All your favorite things,” she says, setting the bowl on the table.

  Sis makes a face. “It’s cold?”

  “They do it all the time in It’ly,” Tina says.

  “Land sakes.” Garrett sniffs at it.

  I take a judicious bite before realizing that, solely for my benefit, Tina has whipped up something really good.

  Garrett dabs a thumb into the concoction on my plate and licks it curiously. “Hmm,” he says. Lifting the boat over his plate, he spoons out the rest. “Hm,” he says again, grabbing a piece of turkey breast with his fingers, running it through the sauce, and popping it in his mouth. “Good stuff, doll,” he says out the side of his mouth, cutting his eyes once more at me, “but it would have been fine without it.”

  * * *

  The following April, Garrett began having problems with his lower back. The issue started as an occasional spasm, prompting him to leave work early. A couple of hours on the sofa with the heating pad usually did the trick. Sis and I would remain uncharacteristically quiet and let him choose whatever he wanted to watch on TV. By early evening, he’d get up and hobble around the house until he was back to his old self.

  Just after school one day, I spot the ambulance parked in our driveway as I round the corner in front of the Gordons’ place. When I race in the carport door, my father is flat on his back by the fireplace. My mother and sister are hugging the sides of the sofa, the paramedics crouched over him.

  “I can’t get up, Bo Skeet.”

  “We’re gonna take your dad to the hospital,” one of the paramedics says.

  “Can I ride with him?”

  “You stay here with your Sis,” Tina says, standing.

  I take Garrett’s hand.

  “It’s the craziest thing, son. I can’t move.”

  “He’ll be okay,” the other paramedic says. Garrett shrieks in pain as they lift him on the stretcher.

  The look on Tina’s face says it hurts her more than it does him.

  “I’m going with your father,” she says to us. “Ma Cora should be here within the hour.”

  Two days later, Garrett was released from the hospital. After a battery of tests, the doctors were at a loss. “Could have been a pulled muscle, a pinched nerve, or just plain stress,” Dr. Lowell said.

  After several weeks of recuperation, Garrett never suffered from back pain again. I often wondered if my father had worked himself into a twisted, tortured mess with the approach of another spring, when his wife could wind up who knows where. However it happened, the events of that April did, in fact, take the focus off my mother. During a time of year when she would find herself most vulnerable, she put all her energy into helping Garrett get well. In the process, she felt needed.

  The rest of the spring and summer passed without incident.

  6

  Scrubbing the last crunchy love bug of the autumn season off the Wildcat’s windshield, I check the rest of the humongous car’s windows for smudges. For years now, it’s been my duty to keep the shine on my father’s cars in tip-top shape.

  “Stalworth. You’re gonna take the paint off if you scrub any harder,” my eleven-year-old friend Greggie calls quietly from a patch of darkness in the far corner of the utility room.

  I spit one last time across one of Sis’s grimy paw prints on the passenger’s side. Garrett loved his big cars. And this one was the biggest ever.

  Greggie accidentally knocks something over and makes his way out of the shadows and into my sweaty field of vision just inside the garage door. “Hey.”

  Wiping my forehead with the chamois, I peer over the open car door at a grinning Greggie making his way tentatively into the light, the waist of his Wranglers around his knees, his erect penis jumping like the ruby throat of a chameleon sunning itself on a lakeshore stump.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  Greggie shrugs, taking another step into the late afternoon sun.

  “Whoa,” I say, tossing the chamois over my shoulder. Thinking he must be in the throes of some meltdown brought on by his sorry-assed mother’s escalating whiskey intake, I jump out of the car and race toward him. Greggie pulls the foreskin over the glans of his organ and stretches it out as far as it will go, looking dead into my eyes with a raised brow, like he just pulled a rabbit out of a hat. “At least get away from the door,” I say, yanking him into the corner.

  Greggie pulls at the zipper of my khakis. “Show me yours.”

  I push his hand away. “I can’t. Wait.” Greggie is laughing and, oddly enough, so am I.

  “What the Sam Hill’s going on out here, boys?” Garrett stands in the open doorway of the utility room, arms crossed across his chest like a comic book genie.

  “Shit,” Greggie says, zipping up.

  I make a sorry attempt to drop my hands nonchalantly in front of my own open zipper.

  Garrett surveys the scene in silence. He finally straightens a bass net hanging haphazardly from a wooden peg on the wall next to him without looking at us. “Greggie, I think you need to get on home now.”

  Greggie scoots swiftly past my father, offering up a hoarse “Yessir” over his shoulder before disappearing out the door.

  I absentmindedly take the chamois off my shoulder and wipe my hands, shifting from one foot to the other. “I—”

  “Make it spotless, Bo Skeet,” Garrett says, heading out, glancing once over his shoulder with a familiar look of disappointment.

  Several minutes pass before I can pick up the chamois again. Standing in the same place, I wonder if Garrett could tell just how engrossed I was in the goings-on with Greggie. I replay the scene over in my head like a television sports announcer. After all, I thought, he had walked in at the moment when my focus had gone from confusion to excitement. I pray he missed the shift.

  I kept going back to the business with Greggie, attempting to block my father out of the scene. However fleeting, the experience was like none other I’d ever had. Of course, I’d peed in the woods with other male friends. One would try and take the other by surprise and spray his shoe, but this felt like all that times twenty. Although I wished Greggie and I had been able to explore a bit more, I knew it would never happen again. We’d both been humiliated during a defenseless moment. Who would ever want to revisit that?

  I grabbed the chamois and went back to work. I was determined to make this the cleanest the car had ever been.

  * * *

  Tina spreads another brand-new Batman across the bottom bunk. The bounty we’d scored from a three-hour comic-buying trip was meant to lift my spirits from the cold hard fact that we were leaving the only life we’d ever known behind. The idea that I was the cause of Garrett’s decision to uproot the whole family made this new reality unbearable. I still wasn’t aware if he’d told Tina what had transpired two weeks ago in the utility room with Greggie. And if he had, would that alone send her off for another stint at Tranquilaire?

  “Now, what in the world could you have done to make you think that we’re moving because of you?” Tina says, stacking the magazines in a neat pile on the bedside table. “Did something happen?”

  I keep mum, satisfied she was in the dark. “Listen,” she says, sitting on the bed, pulling me down next to her. “Here’s a
news flash. Whenever your father makes a decision, it doesn’t involve anybody else but him, you understand? And this is a big promotion. He’ll have his own office instead of being out in the field, which is a good thing. And it’s only an hour away, so you can still see Greggie and Marcie and whoever else whenever you want.”

  “Well, why doesn’t he just drive? It’s not that far. I mean, Farley West’s daddy works nearly all the way to Point Clear, and he drives it every day.”

  Tina gives me my answer by turning her mouth into a straight line.

  “But it’s Redneck Ridge,” I say, referring to the moniker Brewton’s football team had tagged the town of Jackson with on our trips to play them.

  “I’ll admit, it’s not as culturally rich as Brewton. I mean, there’s no college like we have here and that makes a difference. But it’s on the river. Do you know how much fun you can have on the river? Not a puny backyard puddle like you’re used to here. And your father’s decided you’ll be going to the Academy. That’s a terrific opportunity.”

  “The Academy?” I say, horrified. “That’s a military school!”

  Tina laughs. “Where in the world did you get that idea? Lord, your father decides to move his entire family because of you, and then he decides to punish you by putting you in military school? Sounds like something Faulkner would have come up with. The Academy is not a military school and you well know it,” she says. “It’s just a private school. With better teachers and just—better everything.”

  I knew better. From what Tom Grant, a recent transfer from the Academy told me, the entire basis of existence for the brand-new school was to keep the more affluent white kids from having to learn next to the black kids, a belated way to spit in the face of desegregation without having to come out and say it. Tom Grant knew what he was talking about. Sleek, single-story schools were popping up all over the South like toadstools after a hard, soggy rain. According to reports, the Academy was proving to be one of the most poorly administrated, with a lack of any sports or activities beyond football and honors clubs.

  “Your uncle Donald knows the headmaster. He wants to take you over there this afternoon, and they’re gonna show you around.”

  “This afternoon?”

  Tina stares at her hands in her lap, her fingers toying with her wedding band. “Bo Skeet,” she says, “truth be told, I’m wrestling with this one, too. But I don’t know what to say to make it any better.” Tina grabs one of the springs underneath the upper bunk and pulls. “I know this sounds crazy, but sometimes I’ll pretend I’m someone else until whatever unpleasantness passes.” She looks at me, almost embarrassed. “You know, I’ll be whoever I want to—Mama Louella, Lurleen Wallace,” she says, flashing a brief, reckless smile. “Even Jane Fonda, woo-hoo.”

  Through the window, I see Garrett wiping off the radio antenna of the Wildcat, a task I’d seen him do many times when preparing for a trip or excursion he was enthusiastic to begin. Glancing back at one of the comic books, I’m thinking Robin and I could take care of the whole business with a series of ZONKs and POWs.

  Tina clears her throat. “You’ll make new friends, and you’ll learn so much. You’ll see. In no time at all, you’ll be thanking your father.” She spits in her hand and smooths my hair, the only person outside of the movies I’d ever known to spit on anything in hopes of making it better.

  Later, when my father steers the Wildcat slowly onto Dawson Street, I can hear Tina slam the front door of the house four times hard before she goes inside.

  7

  Shortly after we moved to Jackson, Aunt Violet told Garrett he could either find Tina a good housekeeper or a good divorce lawyer.

  Fanny came to us through a friend who had to let her go when they moved out of state. A tiny, deeply religious person who looked like Cicely Tyson, Fanny hated card playing of any kind. Sis and I were always looking for the chance to deal a hand of spades just so we could watch her leave the room like her pants were on fire. Behind her back, we lovingly referred to Fanny as Worst Case Scenario, because no matter how bad you thought things could get, Fanny was always there to tell you just how bad.

  Fanny loved movies. She also loved Omar Sharif. Monday afternoons, Sis and I gathered on the back porch where Fanny treated us to the details of whatever flick she had caught over the weekend, her short, nimble fingers relieving a mess of freshly picked field peas from their tough shells with a coarse, staccato ziiiip. Needless to say, our hero’s lowest points were punched the hardest, as were the endings, which she gave away first. “So. Zhivago and this lady are in all this snow. And theeen he dies. On the bus. After all that.”

  “So,” she’d say with another ziiiip and a nod of her head, intimating the same fate could happen to any of us hearing the tale of horror and disappointment for the first time.

  My father had recently begun visiting his brother in Grove Hill after church since we now lived closer. My mother decided those afternoons were going to belong to her. Most Sundays, she’d send me to the movies with my increasingly incensed sister. I pleaded with Tina to let me explore the creeks and gullies of Walker Springs Road with my new bucktoothed friend Billy Wade Gorman, but she said she’d rather know my exact whereabouts. Billy Wade’s father owned the local cement business and insisted on carting us around in his big silver cement truck, a vehicle which made Tina nervous. If I was with Sis, she wouldn’t have to worry.

  Sis had decided to hold me personally responsible for Tina’s uncharitable act with a set of stringent ground rules that changed from week to week.

  “I swear to God, if you act for one split second like you know me I will scratch your face off, do you understand me?”

  Easy so far.

  “You are to quietly and calmly approach me at intermission to see if I want anything. And if I do, you’ll take it out of your allowance.”

  Okay. So this was gonna hurt.

  “Aaand if I ever get to the theatre and find I’ve forgotten something—chewing gum or compact, whatever—then you have to go home and get it. And you can’t complain. ’Cause if you do, I’ll scratch your face off.”

  Stringent rules aside, I soon became addicted to our weekly excursions to the Locke Theatre in downtown Jackson. Its crimson seats and tiled floors were kept sparkling clean by the Baileys, a Yankee couple in their seventies who had a checklist as rigid as my sister’s. Tiny as a stick with hair dyed just as brittle, Mrs. Bailey ran the box office with a clipped dialect that made her sound like she was from a different planet.

  “One ticket. That will be one fifty,” she said. “One” sounded like “wan,” and we all mocked her when out of earshot.

  Mr. Bailey was a World War II veteran who had lost both legs in combat, a fact that made him even more intimidating as he raced up and down the aisles at breakneck speed, his muscular hands propelling the wheels of the bright gold wheelchair, his teeth bared like a defensive James Cagney. “No running, no talking, and positively no fighting,” he’d say.

  This last admonition was strictly for the Dick brothers, three fat redneck siblings who proceeded to beat each other senseless during the opening cartoon every Sunday probably, we decided, over the shared ignominy of their unfortunate last name.

  Mr. Bailey would wheel his chair to a small control booth he’d constructed behind a navy blue curtain at the rear of the auditorium. There, he’d crank the volume to fit the mood during emotional peaks of the films. Whenever we saw the glint of one of Mr. Bailey’s wheels hustling up the aisle toward his beloved sound box, we knew something was gonna happen, and that something was gonna be good.

  When the whistling score crescendoed, we knew the bridge over the River Kwai was gonna go. When the waves swelled so potently from the depths of the Atlantic we could actually feel it in our chests, there was no question the Poseidon’s seconds were numbered. Mrs. Haney, my fifth-grade teacher, said Love Story wouldn’t have been half as sad if Mr. Bailey had left well enough alone.

  When the music pumped to ten decibels
during Scarlett’s dirty radish scene in Gone With the Wind, Beulah Money, the librarian at the Methodist church, marched right up to Mr. Bailey and demanded he turn the blasted thing down, adding, “Those same bombs that took your legs in France must have snatched what was left of your hearing along with it.”

  One of the drawbacks to Sunday matinees was that musicals always started on Sundays and played through Tuesdays, and I’d had to sit through more than my share. Sis liked to rub this in since musicals were her favorite and she knew I didn’t feel the same. I saw them all: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Sound of Music, Paint Your Wagon, and every period piece Barbra Streisand warbled her way through.

  One particular Sunday, having offered Sis a whole dollar to let me off the hook to no avail, I found myself watching Cabaret, yet another musical starring no one I’d ever heard of. From what I could tell from the previews, the movie was about Nazis and drunken whores hanging out in smoky German bars.

  Patience Harmon, a comely fellow fifth grader from down the street, spotted me sitting by myself in my usual seat on the front row. She offered to sit next to me, a proposal I readily accepted, since Patience had the reputation of being a bit loose herself. Patience was one of five offspring belonging to a drab, blank-faced couple who read from the Gospels in lieu of giving away candy on Halloween. Her Bible-thumping parents would have suffered joint coronaries had they known what a bowlful of junk she was being corrupted with on this particular Sunday.

  At a spot far into the film, the whore and her two handsome male friends were drunk, as usual, and dancing, as usual. But this time, they were all three dancing together, and the depraved manner in which they were ogling each other told me this scene was different from anything I’d come across in those other witless Sunday trifles. A wakefulness in the pit of my stomach felt vaguely familiar, like that split second when the cork on the end of your line disappears as a perch finally takes the bait.