CALLING OUT YOUR NAME
Ned White
Copyright 2011 Ned White
Smashwords Edition
ONE
You know how it goes. You're a kid -- somewhere in that inbetween age after the last time you cried from a hornet sting but before you can go to jail as an adult -- you're a kid who's friendly and kind to other people and who's regarded by older folks as a nice boy if only he could take the world a little more seriously and live up to his potential. So you're basically a good kid, and you know that about yourself and take pride in it.
Maybe you're also a kid who makes sacrifices for your family, like a younger sibling who needs some special care, or an aging relative whose brain is like tapioca draining memories into a sinkhole. That's what you're stuck with, but you cruise through it all and don't mind much, because those are the cards they dealt you. And so you stay as open-hearted and sweet-natured as some of those church ladies at bake sales, because that's the easiest way to be in a small town in the deep south.
Then things happen, and I know you know this because nearly all kids go through the same obstacle course of I can't believe this is happening to me mixed up with the kind assaults that nearly break the body and scald what's left of the sugar in you into something sticky and hateful. People get hurt; maybe people die. You're on a mission you know is absolutely necessary involving the younger sibling who needs special care and all around you the enemy is hiding and waiting to pounce.
When you come out of it all, when you come home, the bake sale ladies don't look the same any more. It's like your brain is totally rewired. Guaranteed, your soft parts have twisted into something like ropey ligaments, and you can feel them tightening like pliers around your heart. You look at someone with narrowing eyes and a crooked smile, and you feel it's easy to hate them. You listen to someone who's spouting out pretty words, and you don't trust them.
My younger brother wakes me up at night and wails at me - stop grinding your teeth. The dentist told me I should wear a mouth guard so my front teeth don't flatten out and look like cheap dentures. Maybe I will. Night is when I'm most angry, but I barely remember.
That's me, now. I wish it weren't so, but my heart doesn't have the room to make it better. Every day, it hurts just a little bit more.
This was me a few months ago -- just under the white space -- when I began writing my story.
•••••
It started last October.
I wasn't more than ten feet away from my brother when this big goon of a mall security guard grabbed his wrists, twisted them behind his back, and slapped handcuffs on him.
My brother's thirteen. He's short for his age, he has one of those angelic faces and a big goofy smile, and he looks like he could never do anything wrong. But he does stuff that's wrong all the time. He's been doing it for years. He's a klepto. And he's good at it - the sneakiest five-finger discounter you'll ever meet. His real name is Aubrey Elmont, but everyone calls him Tick.
I watched him yowl when the cuffs went on him.
When we're back home in Ogamesh, he steals useless stupid stuff like boxes of wing nuts or a can of silver polish, or the occasional candy bar from Crews' Grocery. The times he gets caught, they let him go. That's the Elmont boy, the slow one, he don't mean no harm, they'd say, but sometimes I wondered if he doesn't know exactly what's doing. Sure, he's "slow" - as in he's got cow flop for brains, and always has since he popped out into this world as blue as a popsicle and a few pickles short of a barrel - but he's not completely retarded and half the time I think he's just faking it. Still, people in Ogamesh think he's cute and adorable and forgivable, no matter what he does.
But this wasn't the sleepy little village of Ogamesh, Georgia. This was a mall in Macon, about an hour north of us, and it was a real city with city smarts and attitudes. And he wasn't snagging a Snickers bar; this time it was jewelry.
I actually went up to this security guard, who looked like he just got kicked out of the Marines for killing too many people, and asked, "Is there a problem here?"
"Who are you?"
"Older brother."
"Yeah, there's a problem." The guard showed me this fancy diamond ring in a box that Tick had lifted inside the store, where we just were.
"Didn't mean it, Woody," said Tick.
Yeah you did.
"Of course you didn't, Tick. It just happened, right? You had no idea."
The guard hustled Tick off to one of those Special Rooms they have for situations like this, where the guard calls the police and just waits. I had the option of going into the room with them, but I chose to wait outside in the corridor.
Part of me wished they'd throw the book at him. The other part of me wished we'd never come to this mall in the first place, and life would just carry on the way it's always been.
But we were forced to go shopping here because my aging Aunt Zee - short for Zelda Morton - said she was throwing a dinner party and needed some fancy, get this, lace doilies, and you can't get doilies of any kind in Ogamesh, you've got to go to Macon and the mall. Zee wasn't just our aunt, actually a great aunt, she was also our guardian, and we'd been living with her in her house ever since our mother died when I was about six and Tick was three. Doilies. They're old-ladyish little placemattish things, snooty-looking and stupid.
Zee was going soft in the head. You could see it happen every day. A couple of times recently she'd mistaken me for Tick, which is nearly impossible because I don't look or sound anything like him. But she was all hell bent for leather to get brand new lace doilies for her dinner party, and I sensed her brain was working well enough so she really meant it. It's hard to deny her when her mind is set. In fact, you can't.
Living with Zee was tolerable, but you'd never go so far as to say it was a raging picnic.
Tick and I and our friend Tychander Williams hopped in the car to do the errand. Ty, as we call her, is a black girl who just got out of high school and is on the payroll to help out with Zee and Tick, and do some cooking and cleaning. She's also the only legal driver in the family (and she is like family), so I sat in the passenger seat and Tick was behind me blowing at my hair and sticking his finger up his nose. I told him to knock it off, but you might as well talk to a post.
I was sixteen and could've had my driver's license, but the lines at the Macon DMV were pretty long and I didn't have the patience for all of that. I didn't care, actually. I drove all over Ogamesh, mostly pretty carefully, and they never stopped me. Tick and I, we were basically orphans, we lived with a doddering old cranky woman we had to care for more than she cared for us, and the folks in Ogamesh knew this and gave us plenty of room to be ourselves. The Elmont boys. How they've suffered.
I was standing in the corridor outside the closed door room, and wouldn't you know it, the cops were taking their sweet time. I was getting antsy and thought maybe I should knock on the door and go in. But I stayed put, thinking it would do my brother good to endure the shame on his own, and not have me leap to his recue.
Tychander and I had found the doily section of the store, but Tick had sprung loose from us and ended up at a jewelry counter where it happened a young couple were looking at different engagement rings. We could see his scruffy blond head bobbing past the jewelry counter and headed for the exits.
Ty and I made a beeline for him and as we did we passed the couple at the counter who seemed suddenly distressed that something that missing. Well, we paused long enough to see they had several rings out on the glass display case, rings that were glittering with diamonds and emeralds and other stones, and the clerk was saying well I know we had six of them out. One's missing.
“I’m not goin’ after him,” Ty told me.
"I'll do it."
There wasn't much to do. The security guard, just outside the store, had seen everything and pulled out his cuffs.
And now here come the cops. Actually, just one - a policewoman who could've been a sumo wrestler, she was that big, waddling toward me in the corridor.
•••••
Piecing it together later at the police station in Macon, when Tick wasn’t snuffling or whimpering, it seemed he believed he had a reason for stealing the ring, unlike almost all the other times. He’d gotten it into his head that Zee’s party was actually for her birthday and he needed to swipe her a present. Well, this was October and Zee’s birthday is in May sometime – I forget the exact date until it’s a few days before it and she reminds me – and Tick should’ve known this. In fact, he has an uncanny knack for remembering details like birthdays or the time you almost cut your finger off with lawn mower, and it bothered me he could pluck such an idea out of nowhere and make such a mess of things because of it. The other hugely irritating part of this escapade is that he snatched a piece of jewelry costing nine hundred and seventy-five dollars for the “birthday present,” and because of that the overweight sourfaced policewoman looked at all of us with daggers for eyes.
We were in this back room with not much in it – a table where she sat, and a bench for the three of us. She started in on Tick, but it didn’t last long.
“That wasn’t a pack of gum you stole, son.”
“No ma’am. It’s a ring for my aunt.”
Her eyes grew wide at him.
“I’m saying, this is a serious crime.”
He nodded at her. “Ma’am, I sometimes don’t know what I’m doing.”
Yeah, right.
“It’s true!” I blurted out. “He doesn’t. You see –“
“Hold on!” She put her hand up to stop me and looked back to Tick. “Aubrey Elmont, do you have a kind of disability?”
“Yes, ma’am. What they say is, my mind’s not right half the time.”
Well, I’d never heard him speak it as such, and though I thought he was laying it on a little thick, a part of me felt kind of proud of him for admitting it.
He added, “They don’t got a name for it.”
“Is it okay if I talk to your brother and Miz Williams?”
“Sure.”
Well, Ty and I both knew there was a good chance Tick would end up in juvey - the juvenile detention center - and we both knew that would be the worst thing that could happen for this kid. So we jabbered out everything that was true or partly true about Tick's life of crime and craziness, and soon enough the cop knew that Aubrey Elmont was disabled since birth and had a long history of taking things from stores and not being consistent about how wrong it was. They also learned that our legal guardian, our great aunt Zelda Morton of Ogamesh, had her bright spots from time to time but was aging fast and sometimes didn’t know lunch from supper, so she was our guardian more in a legal way than actual. Tychander, as much as me, was the responsible adult for us, though not on any piece of paper.
It was a good thing I did most of the talking because any chance she could get, Ty launched in with her disgusted whine voice, as in that boy ain’t never hurt anyone, why you pickin’ on him so? and I ain’t nobody to tell you how to do your business, but you got that boy’s life in your hands, just so’s you know. You can treat him right, or you can just throw him away.
The cop might have been impressed by our loyalty, but it didn’t show in any way that counted.
“Now son,” said the cop, “whether you understand this fully or not, we’re gonna have to charge you with a crime, which is called a felony, and arraign you and then have a hearing. And it would be appropriate for all of you to come, along with Miz Morton, if she’s able.”
Tick hung his head low and shook it. “No jail.” The tears had dried on his cheek and left muddy streaks. I think the tears were real.
“Son, you’re not going to jail, the way you think of jail. But you can’t be loose as a tomcat in the world taking anything you want just ‘cause it’s pretty or someone’s got a birthday. If you were a few years older, you would go to jail ‘cause it’s larceny and a serious crime, and it’s also unethical. You understand about that word ‘unethical?’”
Tick shook his head.
“His mind doesn’t work just that way,” I suggested to her.
“Well, he’s old enough so he should catch up on it. Now let’s get to the paperwork.”
TWO
One of the problems I have with friends is that I don’t have very many of them. I’m not much interested in sports, especially football, so after school I tend to get on the bus with Tick and go home, leaving the other kids behind. Some days I send Tick home alone and ask or bribe somebody on the bus to keep an eye on him, so I can walk back to town with some of the guys or hook up with my friend Natalie Starke. But more often than not I’m on the bus with him, with my face pressed to the glass looking at lawns and gardens in front of houses. The other kids understand that I have to care for my brother, but they don’t do much to compensate for it, like coming over to the house or inviting both of us to go somewhere and do something. They tend to like Tick because he can be funny, but they usually give him plenty of room because they know he can explode at any time, or just act like a pain in the ass.
A couple of my good friends either died or went away. Jake Culpepper hung himself in his barn when he was twelve, and no one could figure out why, since he was so good-natured and popular. Jupiter Strange is a black kid who lived in a trailer with his Mom and sister next to Jameson’s cotton fields, and he was my age and a lot of fun, but he went joyriding in a neighbor’s truck when he was thirteen and the sheriff took him for a wise guy and threw the book at him. Meaning, in this area, he got shipped off to juvey for a year or so, and then to St. Anselm’s Home for Troubled Youth. Jupiter Strange was his real given name, though you’d have to ask his Mom why she bestowed it on him.
It seemed pretty obvious to me, and just about everyone else in Ogamesh, that the court would do the same thing to Tick – shoot him directly off to St. Anselm’s. I’d been there once to visit Jupiter, hitching a ride with Mrs. Strange, and it seemed a decent enough place with lots of lawns spreading out among the buildings, and a big shady grove of pecan trees next to a pond that was loaded with bullfrogs. Jupiter said he liked it there just as much as his trailer, but he missed his friends (like me). It was about twenty miles away, so making a visit took some planning.
After Jake and Jupiter were gone, my collection of friends basically shrank down to Natalie Starke. It could be awkward and challenging getting to like her, for several reasons. First, as people around here would say, she was a “damn Yankee,” having recently moved here from Ohio with her mother and new stepfather, a rich professor named Dr. Hawkins who decided to retire. I had nothing in particular against Yankees, but her accent and her manner sometimes made it hard to communicate. Second, she was too educated for her own good, I thought. She could talk circles around me, and always kept me off balance with her philosophical view of things and her endless questions that had no easy answers. She liked to drink after school, which made it worse, since liquor loosened her tongue. Third, she was probably the richest kid in Ogamesh and everyone knew it. The family had bought an old cotton farm a mile or so out of town and they’d added so much on to the original house it started to look like a mansion, as if they were trying to show us all up. Fourth, she wasn’t exactly the best looking girl in my grade, and though it didn’t matter much to me what she looked like, I got teased now and then just for hanging out with her sometimes. Natalie was built like a sign post, straight and thin, she had bony shoulders and elbows, and the most noticeable part of her face were her thick black eyebrows that were trying to grow together over her nose.
One thing that will never change, from the beginning of civilization to the end: kids will always pick on other kids because of their looks. I swear, I never could figure it.
On the plus side of things with Natalie: if you don’t count Tick, she was the only friend I ever had who actually seemed interested in me and wanted to know what was on my mind. Another big plus was that she was the fastest girl runner ever on our track team because she had those long scrawny legs that could leap out about half a mile in front of her and never get tired. Lastly and best of all, she had her license and owned her own car, an old Buick that her stepfather snapped up for her at some auction.
But she could be tricky, as you’ll see.
About a week before Tick’s hearing, I finally got a chance to get Natalie to pick me up so we could go take a look at this guy’s old Honda motorcycle sitting in his yard and priced right, at three hundred dollars. I'd been checking it out for a couple of weeks and it looked just about my size, though I’d have to repaint the tank and the fenders because he’d spray-painted them a disgusting orange. When she pulled up in front of the house in her Buick, I left Tick swinging on the old tire hanging from the live oak in our back yard and ignored his annoying, singsongy Woody’s got a girlfriend. Ty was coming over any minute to help with Zee, so Tick would be all right.
I hopped in the car and we were off, down our street three blocks, then left onto Route 12, the main drag through town. Natalie was an exceptionally careful and slow driver, which was too bad since the Buick had a very strong small block engine under the hood, a three-fifty.
“So, you should know,” she started in, “that you’ve got a lot of friends in this town.”
News to me. “I do?”
“People tend to like your brother, and don’t be surprised that a bunch of them show up at the hearing. But they also know how hard it is for you. They’re behind you.”
It didn’t feel quite right that she seemed to know so much about what other people thought of me. Also, I caught a potent whiff of whiskey, so maybe she was stretching the truth.
“They also know you have to deal with your aunt.”
“Well, I don’t pay much attention.”
“They say you’re long-suffering, the patience of Job, things like that.”
Maybe they had a point.
“You’re very handsome, you know.”
Hadn’t thought about that either, not in any concentrated way.
“How you talk,” I said, rathering she wouldn’t. She was getting tricky on me. “Especially since you’ve had a nip or two.”
“Well, Woody, I think it’s healthy to exchange personal views like that, just so we understand each other better, even if you’re shy about it.”
“I’m not shy, and I think we understand each other fine without talking about looks.”
“I think you’ll look cool on that motorcycle, even if it’s utterly impractical. Have you got the money yet?”
“Look, it’s not impractical, I’m going to put saddle bags on it so I can help do errands and maybe go to school with it next year, and no, I’ve only got about two hundred so far.”
We rumbled over the railroad tracks headed for the other side of town. I was eager to get to the guy’s house, but Nat barely drove the speed limit. A huge log carrier, fully loaded, was passing us with a loud roar.
“Might be the best thing for Tick,” she said when the truck pulled in front of us and it quieted down.
“What might be.”
“St. Anselm’s. They’ve got people who can give him the right kind of therapies and treatments.”
I nodded slightly, but inside of me it was a huge nod. I’d secretly gotten to the point where I could imagine carrying on my life at Zee’s without the constant shadow of my loony brother. In a way, I was glad he got caught, but I didn’t want him thrown into juvenile detention, which I’d heard was a snakepit, but rather straight off to St. Anselm’s, which was more of a residential treatment place.
“You think?” she prodded.
“I’d miss him. But it would be okay.”
“What would you do?”
“What would I do?”
She tsked at me and tried a new approach.
“Woody. If Tick weren’t with you, what kinds of things would you do? Perhaps this is like asking, what do you want to do? Now, and in your future?”
The odd thing is, I’d been more focused on Tick’s ideas about life than my own. I haven’t gotten into this yet, but he was nutso about being a champion surfer, and more specifically, a champion surfer in Malibu, California. He’d five-fingered a surfing magazine at the News and Gifts Shop and kept it right under his pillow. There were photos of people surfing at some competition in Malibu, and he kept telling me that’s where I wanna be and that’s what I wanna do. He’d never done it, of course. He was great on his skateboard, I have to admit, until a truck ran over it on our street and squished it, so I guess he had the coordination to be a surfer, and he was a decent swimmer to boot. But I tried to warn him you can’t make a living surfing, you can only do it when you’re young. Naturally he shot back at me, “Well, I am young.” The problem was, we lived four hours from the nearest waves and about two thousand miles or more from California, so it was just a fantasy for him. Even if I had a car, I was not driving him to California.
“Your future,” she said again. “Do you want one?”
“C’mon.”
“Use it or lose it. Plan it or can it.”
She was sermonizing, but I was still thinking how lame-brained it was for Tick to be obsessing about surfing, when there were so many opportunities for fun here in Georgia. Every adult I know, practically, and tons of kids too, go hunting and fishing. Hunting is all about wild boar and deer, and fishing for crappies in the lakes or catfish in a pond can keep your mind unoccupied for hours. In school, football and basketball and baseball are the most popular, and kids also get into their cars and trucks and motorcycles. So why surfing?
“Just a thought,” Nat said, and I snapped back to attention.
“I’m not sure yet.”
“What gives you pleasure, Woody?”
“Well.” And it hung there for a few seconds. “I like going to look at a cool motorcycle with you. In other words, what we’re doing right now. In fact --”
“Now, my dear boy, is a very short time.”
“My soon-to-be future is that motorcycle and you just drove by it.”
To hurry things along, we turned around and got back to the guy’s house. He came out to meet us and he showed me everything about the bike that was both good and bad. The main problem was that one of the cylinders had below-average compression and might need a ring job, so that’s why the bike was going cheap. I didn’t care that much, because I figured I could work on it after school at Winkler’s Garage, where I was a part-time employee doing simple things like changing oil and rotating tires. The guy lent me his helmet, I went for a spin down the highway and came back knowing this was my bike. It fit me great, and with 450 ccs it had plenty of juice in it, in spite of the bad cylinder.
Of course, I didn’t have the money yet, and I told him so. Being a regular guy trying to sell something, he said he’d have to unload it to the first three hundred dollars that came along.
••••••
Nat was right about the hearing. I swear half of Ogamesh showed up at the courthouse in Macon, and most dressed up for it, too, with coats and ties and long dresses. Nat and her family came, along with Harmon Crews, both of the Winkler brothers, and a bunch of teachers and parents from the school. Aunt Zee didn’t come; she said she was feeling kind of pokey, and wasn’t sure what all kind of a mess Tick had gotten himself into anyway, so the proceedings wouldn’t make much sense to her. Since Tychander had to drive us all up, Zee had her friend John Dandridge come to the house to help her out for the day.
The sumo wrestler policewoman, the one who’d hauled us into that little room, proceeded to lay out her case about the theft of the ring, and the judge listened carefully and nodded a lot while he looked at Tick, and then at me. He was a juvey court judge, and therefore a specialist in a case like this, but for all his experience he seemed very sad about what he was hearing. He was also a thin man with a bald head, and reminded me of a Sunday school teacher I had once who was gentle and friendly.
When the policewoman finished her story, which included her understanding that the young boy was developmentally disabled, the judge announced that he wanted to meet with the family “in chambers,” and also asked if other qualified witnesses were present, like schoolteachers or doctors. I turned around and saw a bunch of people leap to their feet, but eventually the judge sifted through them all and settled on the school psychologist, Dr. Tinkerman, and Tick’s teacher, Miss Sproul. They followed Tick, me, Tychander, the policewoman, and the judge into his back office.
Sad as he was in the courtroom, he got downright depressed when we were all together in his office and he started asking about our family. I did most of the talking in this regard, explaining that great aunt Zelda Morton became our legal guardian after my mother’s death when I was six and Tick was three, but that she’d probably had a few mild strokes because it was she who now needed attending, not us. The strokes must have been mild, because from one day to the next we didn’t see much change in her.
He asked about our Mom, Martha Elmont, and I was forced to tell the truth that she’d taken her own life, with pills, for reasons that she never shared with us, not that I could remember much since I was just six. We were staying with Aunt Zee anyway back then, for a lengthy visit while Mom was “sick.”
“And your father?”
I remember Mom saying he’s moved away and I don’t know where, and that was the end of it.
“I don’t know, sir. He left about three years before Mom died. Before Tick was born, in fact. So I’ve been told.”
“It’s so sad, so sad,” he said, shaking his head, and I thought he might burst into tears.
The policewoman reminded him that a felony had been committed and that the matter was before him.
“And no one’s contested the facts of the case,” she threw in.
The judge turned to Tick to take in a long look, knowing my brother’s future was in his hands. Now I have to say, in preparation for his day in court, Ty and I had worked pretty hard on him to trim his hair, clean him up and dress him right since he’d be disinclined to do any of this himself. Ty was the chief barber, trimming his hair at the collar and raising it over his ears, then using the electric clippers to shave the back and sides of his neck. I got out his only white shirt with buttons and ironed it on the kitchen counter, and did the same with a pair of gray wool trousers that I figured might still fit him. It’s obvious that if we ever went to church his clothes would be more up to date, but Zee gave up on church a few years ago so we all stopped going. Ty and I helped wash his face and, for the first time ever, I decided to let him use my deodorant.
The pants were too short but still fit around the waist. The white shirt was too snug at the throat, so we left the top button open and I tied his only necktie so it pulled the collars together, more or less. All in all, he looked spanking clean and as innocent as circumstances would allow.
“Is there anyone here,” the judge began, “who can say with certainty that this boy had a clear understanding of the consequences of his act?”
All I could hear was my own head pounding. I was actually pretty nervous about all of this and my heart rate was up.
“Son?” said the judge to him. “Just give me the best answer you can. Why on earth did you steal that ring?”
Well, Tick’s mouth twisted into that impish grin he sometimes makes, and he came out with this:
“Woody says I’m a klepto.”
Somebody chuckled – I think it was the school shrink, Dr. Tinkerman.
“But why the ring?” the judge went on. “Why not – a toy?”
“Don’t take no toys,” Ty chipped in. “He takes stupid things, like boxes of screws and such.”
“I’d like the boy to respond.”
Tick fired up for his answer. “It was a present for Zee. She wanted something nice for her birthday. She just has bracelets, no rings. It just sat there on the glass. She told me, get me something nice. I don’t have no money. I have three dollars in my magazine box. Under my bed. Zee’s good to me, I wanted to get her something pretty. But after I took it, my mind told me, you didn’t really take it, you just dreamed it. That’s what happens sometimes. I take things, and I don’t believe I actually did it. Until I feel it in my pocket.”
To this day I don't know how much of this is true or if he's totally faking it. But the judge was hanging on every word, it seems. He was leaning forward on his desk trying to focus on Tick’s face.
“When you feel it in your pocket, what do you tell yourself?”
Tick screwed his face up into a grimace.
“Uh oh.”
The judge sat back and put his hands behind his head.
“I’m not sending this child to juvenile detention.”
Well, nobody dared react with a hoot or a holler, but you could hear a lot of exhaling. I felt my shoulders relax and drop down about four inches. Juvey would be no good for Tick.
“I invite your thoughts and recommendations. St. Anselm’s, anyone?”
After brief discussion with Dr. Tinkerman and Miss Sproul, there was no question how this would all end up, because St. Anselm’s seemed like the perfect place.
“St. Anselm’s it is. Son, you’ll be remanded there for a period of between twelve and eighteen months, depending on your progress. You’ll start the first of the year, and I will strongly recommend that you receive the best of treatment for your disability.”
“Okay, judge,” said Tick.
“It’s a good place where people can visit you, and they say the food’s not so bad.”
“Okay. I’ll go.”
THREE
Through the spring, Aunt Zee’s physical problems started to catch up with the general slippages of her mind. Mostly it was in her lower back and hip, and I thought maybe she’d cracked one of her hip bones the way elderly people sometimes do, but no, she said it was the mugginess in the air that was tightening her joints and keeping her bent over. In any event, while she used to be able to stagger around on her own with only an occasional helping hand, now she needed one of those walkers to help her up off the couch and get to the kitchen or the bathroom. If mugginess were to blame, then it seemed to tighten up her voice, too; instead of asking for help the way she usually did, now she just barked it out. Woody! Tick!
That’s right, Tick was gone to St. Anselm’s but Zee couldn’t wrap her brain around it. In a way, I became both myself and my brother, especially when she needed help, which was more often than I’d like.
Tick!
If she called his name out, it was me showing up in the doorway.
“What can I get you?”
“Where’s Tick?”
I’d explain, again, that he was off to St. Anselm’s for a visit and wasn’t due back just yet, and I was cheered that she seemed to recall it. But then she’d be alarmed that he was gone for so long, just like he’d packed up and moved out.
“Is it the food?” she’d ask. “Tychander cooks a good meal.”
Ty and I, and sometimes Natalie, did some house rearranging to try to smooth things out for Zee. The big change was shifting her bedroom from the upstairs into the spare room downstairs, which overlooks the front porch. It happened that she had tons of stuff up there in boxes and old knitting bags that she wanted close by in her new room, but I didn’t dare go through any of it because so much of it seemed personal, like old letters and such. We just brought it all down and stashed it around the room as neatly as we could. The letters, I assumed, were mostly from Uncle Carl Morton, probably when he was off to war in the Pacific and he and Zee were freshly married. Carl was my mother’s mother’s brother, but I never met him beyond seeing his pictures in the hallway and on Zee’s dresser upstairs, because he died before Tick and I were born. As did our grandparents.
Other changes upstairs had to do with our bedroom, since Tick was no longer in it. I shoveled most of his stuff into the closet, or into a stack in the corner of the room next to his desk. He had tons of magazines about skateboards and motorcycles, guns and ammo and surfing, and just as many comic books, mostly superhero stuff. A bunch of them he piled into his trunk to take with him to St. Anselm’s, but most of them he left behind for me to deal with. I didn’t touch the posters and magazine covers he’d taped to the wall over his bed; they were generally surfing pictures and the word “Malibu” made with huge cut-out letters in a kind of rainbow over all the photos. It seemed all the guys and the girls in the pictures were blond, like him.
My desk was between the two beds, and I cleared off one end of it where he kept his pocketknife, buffalo head nickel, useless tube of anchovy paste that he stole, and hand-squeezer exercise thingy he used to strengthen his grip. I put all these things in his desk drawer. So I had my desk back all to myself, and also the view out the window to the live oak dripping with Spanish moss and the tire swing hanging still from the lower branch. It was a nice long, easy spring, and most days I left the window open so I could catch a whiff of whatever was growing in our neighbor’s garden beyond the tree while I tackled my homework. In the summer, with the wind from the east, you’d practically drown in the aroma of their gardenias.
I liked those smells, I liked flowers, and I wondered if maybe my future might have something to do with plants or nurseries. Or maybe forestry, because I liked being in the woods and understanding trees. Natalie had a point; it was time to think about what I wanted to be.
With Tick gone and Zee downstairs, it was amazingly quiet in the room, and I grew to adapt to it. Before the changes, I’d have to deal with Tick’s raspy night-breathing and hollering in his sleep, and also the sounds from Zee’s bedroom next to us, her snoring and the trumpet-like farts that she fired off when she was stirring in the early hours of the morning. She kept her closet door open, which was right through the wall, and I swear it acted like a loudspeaker.
But now she was safely and quietly downstairs, and spending more and more time in bed. Tychander’s hours and duties expanded, so that she was in and out of the house all the time, helping Zee into the bathroom or toting in lunch on a tray. Cream cheese and olive sandwiches and sweet tea were the usual.
A couple of times Ty drove me to St. Anselm’s to visit Tick, otherwise it was Natalie in the old Buick, going ever so slowly and I swear I was tempted to wrench the steering wheel from her hands and leap over to do my own driving at a sensible pace. I was usually impatient to get there and see how he was being treated, but you could only go during visiting hours on Wednesday evenings and Sunday afternoons. Either way, I didn’t think the staff did much to gussy up their behavior during visiting hours, since I heard plenty of loud, stern voices from the staff chastising the kids for one thing or another, just as you’d expect on a normal day. Also, the place looked raggedy here and there, with some of the buildings in need of paint, and they didn’t go out of their way to pretty it up just for visitors. In a way, it was comforting, because St. Anselm’s wasn’t trying to make a big show of being something it wasn’t. It was a fairly strict halfway house kind of place, designed to straighten out kids who had some major kink in their lives or their behavior, and it wasn’t any summer camp, for sure.
Nat and I would take turns using my baseball glove to play catch with Tick out on the main lawn, and sometimes Jupiter Strange would join us. They both lived in Magnolia House, in a big open dormitory with about twenty beds on the second floor, all with the same Navy blue wool blankets. Each kid got a dresser and a small table, and they stashed their trunks under the bed. It was all neat and clean, with a military feeling to it, but there was a strong odor of mildew and dirty socks which made it homier than you’d expect, and comforting.
I got a kick out of hooking up with Jupiter again. He was the same, big old goofy guy with a huge smile that showed which teeth were missing, but he’d lost some weight in the last year or so and looked much more athletic than before. One time, I think it was late April, he and I scooted off away from Nat and Tick, who were playing ball, and moseyed down to one of the ponds jammed with bullfrogs. I remember he said,
“I’m tryin’ to teach the scamp some morals.”
Which naturally led to a discussion of how teachable my brother was, but Jupe (as I called him) was sure he was making some progress. Tick had swiped one of Jupe’s baseball cards, as it happened.
“Sometimes,” I said, “he says he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“Uh uh, he knows just fine. He just keeps testing. I told him, do that again I’ll rip your arm out of its socket. That got his attention – he straightened right up.”
“No, Jupe, he pretends to get the message –“
“You shoulda tried that, threatening to rip his arm out.”
“I gave him Indian wrist burns –“
“No no no, worse, it has to be worse. And you gotta stick your eyes into him like you want to kill him, that’s how to educate him. Fact is, he wouldn’t be here if your aunt Zee hadn’t told him it was her birthday and she wanted something nice.”
Well, I still couldn’t see Zee lying to him on purpose, just to get a free present – not in her condition. Also, Jupiter was in one of his know-it-all moods, which added a grain of salt.
“She’s just as zoo-brained as he is,” I said.
We looked around the pond and the pine trees on the other side. At some point when you’re visiting St. Anselm’s, it dawns on you. There are no fences. If you hated being here, you could scoot off just like walking out your front door. It happened sometimes, they said, but then you’d get caught and be shuffled right off to juvenile detention without so much as a how-do-you-do.
“Tick and I,” said Jupe, “we’re tight now. He’s always lookin’ to me for the next lesson. ‘S like he never got no morals, so I am imparting my wisdom to him.”
Well, if I believed him, I would’ve been ashamed of myself, since it had always been my job to show Tick what was right and what was wrong. I knew well enough, you don’t have to spout it off all the time, you just need to behave a certain way and it’ll be noticed. I’d behaved more or less the same way all my life, and often as not Tick was right at my side to catch onto it. When he did catch on, it was gratifying, and when he didn’t – like with shoplifting – I blamed it on his troubles at birth. So I didn’t think Jupe was barking up the right tree, wanting to impart his wisdom to a kid whose brain-wiring was a spaghetti tangle of short circuits. Also, I believed Indian wrist burns were a better teaching tool than dismembering Tick’s arm, which on the face of it was a ridiculous threat and easy enough to see through.
I found out Jupiter’s time at St. Anselm’s would be up in July, if all went well in how he managed himself. He said he liked it there fine enough. The school part of it was as good as any school back in Ogamesh, he thought, and he believed the food tasted about the same as it would from his mother in the trailer, though they tended to serve too much macaroni and cheese and greasy burgers to suit his taste. As a rule, he told me, he and Tick would go through the cafeteria line together and Jupe would command him to stay away from the fatty stuff.
“It’s training,” he said, as we walked back from the pond. “If he’s going surfing, he can’t lard up like a farm hog.”
“Jupe, he’s not going surfing.”
“That’s his dream. You don’t deny a dream.”
I let it go at that. If they wanted to have some fantasy about surfing, so be it.
•••••
On a Friday in June, right after we’d gotten out of school for the year, I finally broke down and agreed to go on a “date” with Natalie. It had several conditions which, if I were the girl, I might back away from, but she stuck right to her guns. First, I told her I couldn’t spend any money because I was this close to piling up three hundred dollars for the Honda, which no one had bought yet and was now stashed inside the guy’s garage. Second, it had to be in the afternoon instead of night, and here’s where I shoveled it on a bit, explaining to her that Ty didn’t normally work past seven at night and someone had to hang around to help Zee, namely yours truly. That’s true except for the fact that Ty will come along to the house anytime day or night, as long as she gets her usual hourly wage, and I know aunt Zee is always good for it because of the terrific pension she has, and an annuity, too. But you have to give Ty a day’s notice, as a rule, just to be polite, and I hadn’t bothered working on it. In any event, Nat said fine, she’d treat me to a couple of shooters of whiskey and an early supper picnic over on the banks of the river by Jameson’s cotton field so I could be back by seven.
Now I need to say, I liked Nat as a friend up to this point, and only as a friend, and I knew she had ratcheted up her interest in me a little past that, so it was going to be tricky to keep it simple. For the life of me, I can’t figure out her problem. I didn’t have a tenth her brain or a millionth of her money or a zillionth of her car, and I wasn’t a star athlete. All those things mean a lot to most girls in this town. She’d said I was handsome, which maybe I was on a good cloudy day around dusk to a half-blind fool, but I’d come to sense that girls didn’t care so much for handsomeness as long as the guy had a good car and some cash for a fun evening out. Also, after a couple of hours working at Winkler’s Garage changing tires or oil, it was almost impossible to get all the grime off me and I wasn’t much to look at, especially the knuckles and under the fingernails. The other problem she raised was the shooters of whiskey. She knew I’d take a small sip and that would be it, leaving the rest for herself, just as she wanted. Basically what she had planned for herself was philosophy and some food by the river and a hell of a buzz.
There’s a nice grassy spot between the cotton field and the river, and Nat spread out a big blanket. Next to it she arranged the cooler and a picnic hamper, and then patted the blanket for me to come sit by her, though I was distracted by the river and the antics of some water bugs playing in a little eddy. After I obeyed her, she took out the bottle of whiskey, two short glasses, and some ice. I pinched my thumb and forefinger together, indicating I wanted just a tiny bit, and of course she said good, all the more for me.
Well, she slugged the first one down while I accidentally spilled mine behind my back, careful to aim for the grass instead of the blanket. Freakin’ idiot I muttered to myself, then took a sip of the half-thimbleful that was left. She topped her glass off again while I put my hand up to say, couldn’t touch another drop. Call me a total country idiot, but I’d much rather have a Dr. Pepper on a hot June afternoon rather than beer or liquor. What she did have in the hamper that excited me was crawfish salad, which she’d made from scratch because she knew it was one of my favorite things, along with some bread to make sandwiches. And some cold andouille sausage. I was ready for it any time, but she felt compelled to talk first.
“Friendship,” she said like it was important, “requires a certain intimacy. If it’s to be a good friendship.”
“Intimacy?” I knew the word, of course, but I needed more direction with it.
“Trusting the friend,” she explained, “with your innermost thoughts and feelings.”
“I’ve done that, haven’t I?”
She was slugging her whiskey again and she almost gagged on it she started laughing so hard. But she got it down.
“You do entertain me, Woodrow.”
“Well, I listen to you,” I rejoindered, believing that listening was as intimate as talking, in a way.
“I don’t want to pry or psychoanalyze, but sometimes I just can’t figure you. I mean, at home, do you ever talk about serious things, share things, with Aunt Zee?”
Now it was my turn to laugh.
“I believe she’s about as intimate as a wild boar.”
She shook her head in dismay.
“And as congenial, too,” I added. I started sucking on a whiskey-flavored ice cube.
“Well, I guess your aunt is not your friend.”
“Not so much. But I’m intimate with my brother. We talk about all kinds of things.”
“Can you talk to me the same way? Or do I sit here staring at your skull wondering what’s going on in all that moosh.”
Nat could get kind of snippy when she was drinking, but the fact is I didn’t really mind because there could be some wit to it and she’d make me laugh.
“Try it,” she went on. “Talk to me like Tick. I just transformed, I’m Tick.”
“Hi Tick. You smell like booze.”
“Gee, Woody, booze makes me feel better, ‘specially when I get sad thinking about how we got no parents, only Aunt Zee, and she ain’t no real parent.”
She did this goofy retarded voice that didn’t sound much like Tick, but I got the idea. His voice sounded more jittery and sharp, and actually kind of musical sometimes.
“Well, that’s our lot. We make the best of it.”
“Don’t you miss ‘em, Woody? Our daddy ran off, didn’t he? Why’d he do that? Didn’t he love us or nothin’?”
“Husbands do that, and so do wives. Now drink up, Tick, and quit whining in that phony voice, I’m hungry.”
“Y’never give me a good night kiss, Woody.”
Oh Lordy, how she got tricky.
“I’ve never kissed a brother and I never will, I just swat you on the bum and that’s it, and I’d do the same to Natalie Starke next time I see her.”
That more or less killed the game, which didn’t satisfy her, I don’t think. She finally got into the hamper and assembled some crawfish salad sandwiches as best she could and drank some more whiskey. As things unfolded, I could see I was going to drive us home.
The truth is, Tick never whined about not having parents, but we hadn’t skipped over the issue either, because he was interested. Our father was a man named Milton Clayne, according to Aunt Zee, and he was a lumberman who lived and worked in our area for a few years before moving on. He and our mother never got married, so the town had plenty to talk about, particularly if you consider that Tick and I came three years apart, which was plenty of time for him to pop the question or for our mother to go find someone else who would. It’s always been the truth to me that our mother loved Milton, in spite of his waffling on the subject of marriage, and it was all but a gunshot to her head when he finally left town, before Tick was born, to seek his fortune elsewhere. Whether he was upright and honest or a total scoundrel is a mystery to me. It doesn’t matter, because I don’t remember him at all, and there are no pictures.
I’d told all this to Nat before. But she couldn’t seem to get it out of her head that I must have cared in some way for this guy and therefore had to confront the business of his running off and deal with it. She was digging for anger, but there wasn’t any. Most of my teenage years, I was too busy trying to manage my brother and my addle-brained aunt to get angry at some guy I’d never known.
Still, it was irritating that he’d bailed on us when we sure could’ve used a father around the house.
With some fathers I’ve run into, you get the impression their kid is only alive because of him. That’s true in a factual way, of course, but it’s the sort of swollen-up pride that has nothing behind it. I swear Tick and I would’ve popped onto this earth one way or another, in some different shape, no matter who made us. That’s how I felt.
When I drove us back along the access road past Jameson’s cotton fields, Nat tried to describe for me what all she’d been building up to, but she was so full of whiskey it came out in a series of gurgles and confusion. As I recall --
“I think – no intimacy ever with an adult. A parent. So you can’t be intimate. No hugs gotten. No hugs to. Give. Woody. Strong like tree. Won’t – bend.”
“Will hug Nat,” I mimicked.
“Will?” Here eyes flashed wide with hope, or something similar.
“Will. Won’t kiss, though. Friend.”
She chewed on the word friend like gum and then seemed to want to spit it out.
The problem with Nat being so drunk was that I had to drive the Buick to her house, which is about two miles from Aunt Zee’s, and then hoof it on home, or maybe hitch. I wasn’t that crazy about walking along Route 12, what with all the logging trucks and semis and whatnot, and hitching was always a little sketchy because likely as not you’d get some crazy redneck who’d be drunker than Natalie, as opposed to someone you knew. Normally I didn’t mind rednecks, because I was pretty close to being one myself and I could speak their language, but the ones most likely to pick you up would be drunk, and the first thing out of their mouths would be you got an older sister? I swear I’ve heard that a dozen times, always from guys who look tough but who are lonely inside.
So I told Nat when we pulled in her long driveway, “Looks like I gotta walk home.”
“’S good for you.” And a burp, followed by a giggle.
“I could take your car.”
She didn’t even hesitate. “Yeah, take it. You can pick me up tomorrow.”
“Your parents won’t mind?”
She shook her head and seemed to gulp for another burp. “They don’t mind. Anything.”
I knew that in advance, of course. Her parents struck me as kind of detached from her, and very relaxed about rules. “Well, if they do, you can tell them I thought the Buick might be burning oil and I offered to run it into Winkler’s to have them check it out.”
“They won’t ask.”
We got out by a stand of spruce where we wouldn’t be seen from the house, and I gave her a big hug, just as I promised, as well as a little swat on the bum afterward. She was too loopy to try to kiss me, which was a break, so after the intimacies I watched her start to stagger back to her house, and then I hopped in the Buick and drove back to Aunt Zee’s.
•••••
It happened that it became extremely important to have Nat’s car sitting in our driveway, right below my window.
I’ve told you I’m not a religious person, but I have a pretty strong streak of faith – in something, whatever it is that strings things together in the right way when you don’t even know it. I connected the strings like this: Nat wants to take me on a picnic date, so she picks me up in her car. She wants to get a buzz, so she drinks and then gets too clobbered to drive home. I drive her to her house, and she takes pity on me for having to walk two miles, so she lends me the Buick. Suddenly, I have wheels I didn’t expect.