“Some of them thought I might ort to report you a missing person but Hollis reckoned you didn’t want to be found.”
“See, I told you,” Diane said to me. “He ain’t all there.”
“Eugene and Lonnie wanted me to call the sheriff,” he went on. “Said she might have done something to you.”
“Now, Frankie,” Diane scolded. “You’re talking about this boy’s mother.”
“It’s all right,” I said, not looking away from his eyes.
“She was a pretty girl. Sweet little old girl. But some of them that come in the store said it might surprise you what a woman will do.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Frankie,” Diane said, “this is your grandson. This ain’t John. If you don’t behave, you ain’t getting these cigarettes.” She put the bag on the counter.
“It’s all right, ma’am,” I said. “Can I ask you a favor?”
She paused, brows knitting together. “I reckon.”
“Do you know if Frankie has any pictures of John?”
She hesitated. “Let me think. They’re not much of a picture-taking family. I believe he might have some pictures in a box back here in one of these closets.”
“Would you mind finding me one?” I asked. “Not to keep, or anything. It would mean a lot to me just to see what he looked like.”
I waited, careful to keep my face relaxed. “Okay,” she said. “There might be one of all the brothers together. But it’ll take me a minute to locate anything in this mess.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I’ll just stay here and wait.”
I watched her leave the kitchen, footsteps heavy on the rotting floorboards. Then I went to Frankie Odom and knelt before his wheelchair. The stench of him was powerful.
“Dad,” I said. “It’s been a long time.”
“Hollis figured you run off, but some of them said you might be killed.”
“What did you think?”
“I never did think that little old girl would kill anybody.”
My jaw tightened. “So you thought I was alive somewhere.”
He took a puff from his cigarette. “She made good coffee.”
“Where did you think I would run off to?”
“She always done a good job on the bathroom, made them faucets shine.”
“Where did you think I was for all these years?”
He plucked a shred of tobacco from his fat, purplish tongue. “I figured you went up north. You always did think you was borned in the wrong place.”
“Did you ever try to find me?”
“No, I never did try to find you. None of the rest of them did neither. They probably figured they’d divide your share. Greedy sons of bitches.”
“What about you?” I asked softly. “Why didn’t you look for me?”
“Shitfire, boy,” he said, fumbling at the baggy lap of his boxers where the ash of his cigarette had fallen. “You know you always was the meanest one of the bunch.”
I heard the creak of Diane’s feet and turned to see her watching us warily from across the room, holding a square of picture. “This is the only one I found,” she said. She came to me and I reached up from where I knelt to take it. I paused for a long time staring down at the creased black and white, a young boy with pitch hair and eyes, not smiling. I couldn’t tell if he looked like me. I tried to hand it back but she said, “You can keep it.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate it.” When I tucked the picture into my pocket I felt something else there, carried with me for a long time, its metal warm against my hip. “There’s something I’d like to give Frankie before I go. I believe it belongs to him anyway.” I pulled out the dogtags. “The chain was broken but I had it fixed.” I rose to my feet, the chain dangling suspended between us, and dropped it over Frankie Odom’s head. He blinked up at me with owlish surprise. The dogtags hung limp from his neck, down his stained and rumpled undershirt. He stared at me for a long, uncomprehending moment. Then he said, “You can’t let a woman run over you, son. She gets to acting up, you got to straighten her out, just like we done your
mammy.” He paused, still blinking up at me. “I ain’t never told nobody what we done to her. By God, you better not either.”
LAURA
Clint’s daddy was right. He should have been born a fish. I never knowed before how Clint loved to swim because we started out so far from the lake. All summer long, he swimmed every morning before work at the grocery store. At night when his shift was done, he pulled hisself with long strokes under the moon. Once me and Clint went out to the lake and took off our clothes. We got in the water and sunk like rocks. I wasn’t scared, even though I can’t swim. My hair floated up like a sea plant. I opened my eyes and it was dim. Clint had murky light all around him. His long legs and arms waved like tentacles. I wanted to live down yonder with him forever. Finally he took my hands and we floated back up. I was sad when we broke the surface. I could tell he felt like plain old Clint again, sputtering water with his hair plastered down. I missed him when he was out swimming, but I never made any fuss about it. I knowed he needed his time in the lake, like Mama needed her time in the woods. When he was ready to come in he’d dry off and climb in our bed smelling like fish and muddy water, the smells I like best in the world.
At the end of June, Clint asked me to quit my job at the hamburger place because he wanted to take care of me. We made out all right on his salary and I didn’t mind staying home. While Clint was at work I buried Mama’s box under a cedar tree in the woods beside the lake. I didn’t want to risk Clint finding it in the trailer. I hated keeping a secret from him, but showing anybody that box would have seemed like betraying Johnny and Mama. Sometimes I’d take the shovel and dig it up because holding it made me feel closer to Mama. Them’s the times I’d cry for her and Johnny. But then Clint would come home and we’d wrestle all over the trailer. He’d make me laugh so hard I couldn’t breathe.
Pretty soon, summer was gone and fall had come again. At the end of September, when it was too chilly to swim, Clint got nervous. Every night after work he paced around the edge of the water. When Mr. Thompson said he had a junked car for sale, I told Clint he ought
to buy it. It was three hundred dollars, but I thought fixing it up might occupy his mind. It was an old orange Pinto that barely ran enough for Clint to drive it back to the trailer, but he loved it. He was always coming home with a new part for it. He’d stay under the hood some nights until way after dark. I’d get bored while he was working on the Pinto. There was a sadness growing in me and I couldn’t pick one thing that caused it. I’d set on the cinder-block steps for hours looking out at the water, feeling lonesome.
Then one morning, I got sick. I hung over the toilet wishing for Clint, but he was gone to work. After a few minutes it finally dawned on me. That whole time I was lonesome, mine and Clint’s child was already with me. I seen what had been causing my sadness. I just needed a brand-new little baby. I already knowed it was a boy, too, the way I know things sometimes. Later being pregnant was like a dream, because I couldn’t touch or see him. It was like my womb was another planet off in the sky. But right then he was real to me. I closed my eyes and thought of Mama. I wondered if I was ever this real to her when me and Johnny was in her belly. I imagined my baby, warm and heavy like Percy in my arms. Me and Clint was close, but it would be even better to have a child inside my body. I needed to be that close with somebody. I wanted a chance to be the kind of mama mine wasn’t to me.
When Clint got home from the grocery store I was standing on the trailer steps. He came up whistling and jingling his keys. He stopped as soon as he seen me, halfway across the grass with a big patch of yard still between us. I blurted out, “I’m fixing to have a baby.” Clint turned white and dropped his keys. We had a time finding them later. Then he came to me like he was sleepwalking. He fell down on his knees and hugged my belly for a long time. I looked out across the lake. His hair smelled like the water.
Them first weeks, Clint would lay his sunshiny head on my belly and try to hear the baby’s heart beating. Louise from the grocery store gave us a book of names. We stayed up late looking but never found one we liked. He’d rub my feet and we’d try to think up what the baby was going to look like. Clint wanted him to have black eyes, I wanted blue. Sometimes we’d even fight about silly things like that. Clint would get mad and stomp off. He’d slam the door so hard things
would fall off the walls. I knowed he was going to swim, even though it was fall and getting cooler outside. He seemed glad about the baby, but someway it made him nervous, too. I figure he was thinking about his parents, and the bad times he had when he was a little boy. He always came back in the trailer and said, “I’m sorry for being hateful. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Sometimes he was happy but sometimes he got quiet. He started staying outside more, working on his car. It helped Clint having something to work on. He still loved that Pinto.
Then one afternoon while he was at work and I was getting ready to cook supper, I heard a car door slam and a loud shrill voice. “You come on out of there, Clint!” the voice was saying. “I swear I’ll burn that place to the ground with both of y’all in it!” I knowed right away it was Clint’s mama, even though I never met her. I rushed around in a panic, looking for my shoes. “You ain’t no better than that sorry daddy of yours!” Clint’s mama was hollering. “I always knowed it!” Her voice was getting closer. I hurried through the living room and opened the front door just as she was fixing to pound on it.
“Where’s Clint?” she screamed at me. She was swaying on her feet. I could tell she was drunk or maybe on pills. She didn’t have any teeth and there was blue tattoos all over her arms. Her eyes was nothing like Clint’s.
“He’s gone to work,” I said. I pulled the door shut behind me. It was a chilly day outside and I hugged myself, wishing I had put on a sweater.
“You’re a liar,” she said.
“No. He’s at the store.” I came down the steps and she backed up. “He’ll be home around five-thirty if you want to come back then.”
“Listen to you,” she said. Her words was hard to make out for the slurring. “Trying to run me off from my own property. This place belongs to me, not you.”
I didn’t say anything, just stood still hoping she’d leave. She stared at me. Then she went to crying. “People’s always doing me this way,” she said. It was even harder to understand her words through the tears. “I ain’t never had nobody. When I was little they was always passing me around. Didn’t none of them want me.” She wiped tears away with the back of her hand. “D’you know they took my first
babies I had away from me? Put them with my ex-husband’s people and they never would come back to live with me. Then I had Clint and he picked his sorry old daddy over me every time.”
I didn’t know what to say. I wished I could make her feel better. I reached out my hand to her. I opened my mouth to ask her to come on in the trailer, but she went back to mad again. I never seen anybody act so mixed up since I left Pauline behind.
“But I’ll fight for him this time, little girl!” she hollered. “You better believe it!” She stumbled backward into Clint’s Pinto and fell. It was pulled up close to the trailer so he could work at night by the porch light. He never took it to the store. It was still in bad shape, so he drove the green car. “I been fighting people my whole life!” she screamed, spit flying off of her lips. “I been in fights all over this state!” When she got up I seen there was something in her hand. It was the jack handle Clint used to change the Pinto’s tires. “I always win, too,” she said. Then she raised the jack handle and I thought she was going to come after me with it. She crashed it into one of the Pinto’s headlights instead. Then she beat out the other one. I couldn’t stand to see her hurting Clint’s car. I ran at her faster than I thought I could move. There was noises coming out of my throat that didn’t seem like me. Clint’s mama had her back to me, busting out the Pinto’s windshield. I jumped on her from behind and grabbed hold of her face. My fingers was hooked into claws. They dug at her cheeks. I yanked her backward until she dropped the jack handle. She tried to sling me off but I hung on tight. She pried at my fingers but I wouldn’t turn loose. She dropped to her knees and tried to crawl away. I couldn’t let her go. I beat her head and bit her shoulders, put my whole weight on top of her. I wanted her to bear it all. “Don’t you hurt Clint’s car!” I yelled in her ear. “Don’t you ever hurt Clint’s car!” That’s all I could make myself say, even though there was a lot more that I wanted to.
Pretty soon I felt tired and rolled off of her. I laid in the yard breathing so hard it hurt my throat. She stumbled up and started limping to her car. “You crazy little bitch!” she tried to holler, but her voice was nearly gone. “I’ll call the law on you!” I laid there in the grass shaking for a long time after she took off. I couldn’t believe what I had done to her. I asked the Lord to forgive me. I was sorry but most
of all I was worried about my baby. I thought something had broke inside me, the way it broke in Mama.
JOHNNY
I left the Odom house in a daze, duffel bag over my shoulder. I had meant to search for my father after seeing Frankie Odom, but there was a weight on me when I walked out the door. I didn’t know what to make of all I had heard, especially the last thing my grandfather had said to me. I wandered down the street and paused at the stop sign to look around, head heavy and muddled. I noticed a house on the corner that seemed out of place in such a seedy neighborhood. It was white with two stories, set back from the curb on a manicured lawn. Urns with ivy topiaries flanked the front door and a sign above it read “Imogene’s” in fancy script. It was obviously a shop, not a residence. I crossed the grass thinking dimly of calling a cab to somewhere. When I opened the door I was standing in what looked like a living room crowded with musty-smelling furniture, price tags dangling off everything. A woman appeared out of nowhere, small with dyed hair and a powdered face. I assumed that she was Imogene. When I noticed the book in her hand my whole body tensed. Like always, a sign. But this time I would rather not have seen it. She was holding a slim volume, forefinger marking her place. It was a book of poems like one I had found in the woods but in better condition, not swollen with moisture or specked with mildew. She smiled at me. “Can I help you with something?”