Catching Tatum (32 page)

It didn't scare me when they didn't come home; I honestly preferred it. We could watch whatever we wanted on TV, listen to the music we wanted, and play however and wherever we wanted. But the best part was the quiet. We didn't have to worry about Clayton getting mad and yelling at us. There was no blaring music unless we wanted it up like that. The house was still and empty and free of stupid people doing stupid things. Peace came in and filled the rooms, only disappearing when they came back home. If we could have bought our own food I don't think I would ever have wanted our parents to come home. Of course as a kid I didn't think about all the other things they were also providing us, like clothes and lights and shelter; I only thought if we could get our own food we wouldn't need them.

Night was no less scary for me without them there. When they were gone I knew I couldn't be woken up by their fighting or Clayton's raging over some dumb thing my mom said or did. Justin would tuck me in with a story, he read to me almost every night of my life, but he read longer when they were gone. I wasn't afraid of being home alone because I had him, but he didn't have anyone. I think he was afraid and reading was an excuse for him to stay with me longer. Eventually I would fall asleep, and if I woke up first I knew I would find him not in his bed, but on the couch, with his bat in his hand.

I don't know how Justin felt about it, especially after he started partying with them, but I really didn't like it when they brought the party to our house. That happened often enough to be more than a novelty. It seems like it was at least a couple times a month, but maybe it was less than that. Let's just say it happened so frequently that it was common to find hungover idiots passed out on our couch on any given weekend morning. Some kids wake up on Saturdays to pour their cereal and watch cartoons; we did the same thing, only we had to maneuver around vomit piles and sleeping ogres, too. Clayton was sociable with his friends, a real party animal, and he liked to invite people he and Mom knew, from the bar and work and who knows where else, to come over to our place.

Once, on New Year's, some guys got into a pretty bad fight right after the ball dropped. Clayton made them take it outside. It was my “Uncle Jon,” who wasn't really my uncle, and this punk who thought he could take him. It stands out in my mind because it was the first time I had seen a fight in real life. I remember the sound of fist on face; it surprised me because it wasn't like the sound effects in the movies, like celery breaking crisply. It was flat, dull and deadly.

They kept fighting, hitting, punching, bloodying each other with blow after gruesome blow. People were cheering, and somehow it stopped being a vengeful fight and turned into a fun boxing match. They took breaks to chug beer and slam shots, laugh, talk crap to each other, and have the blood wiped from their faces; then they went back at it. I don't remember how it stopped, but when those good old boys were done, a couple more stepped up to fight. It was horrible and wonderful all at the same time.

I couldn't stop watching, but I stayed away from the crowd and watched from a perch in Justin's room. His upstairs bedroom overlooked the driveway, and his window had a bench seat. I could see everything from up there. Had I been in the mix I would have been lost behind knees and big butts. Justin wasn't up there with me; he was down with the guys, right in there with them. He wanted to box so bad, but they wouldn't let him. I don't think he was even ten then, or they probably would have let him. I saw them taking bets and trading money. I heard the laughs and cheers when a man went down. I saw the guys who got knocked out get pulled into the grass and watched as they gradually came to and got up. I saw it all and took it in.

Someone in the neighborhood must have called the cops because they came. I don't know which neighbor it was—we were pretty tucked away from them all—but the noise was probably going on for too long. Nothing bad happened to my parents or anyone really. I saw the first police officer on scene, arms crossed and stern looking, talking to Clayton, who was swaying like a tree in the wind. He had fought and won, but his cheek was busted open and still bleeding a little. He was trying to laugh and play it cool.

I couldn't hear the words, but knew he didn't want to get in trouble and was saying whatever they wanted to hear. It worked because no one went to jail, and after an eternity, the two cop cars finally left. Everyone must have stashed the illicit stuff—I know there was at least weed and probably coke too. Either they hid it well or the cops didn't look too hard because it was New Year's, and even adults were allowed to get crazy sometimes. They probably thought we only had parties once a year.

Before they left I heard the big policeman tell everyone to quiet down, leave if they were sober, and let the neighborhood have its peace and quiet again. That was the only time I ever remember the law coming over—until I was older and they were coming for me.

No one called the cops when the parental units didn't come home. No one called when Clayton and my mom fought. Maybe they didn't hear those fights because they were inside, but I don't see how anyone couldn't hear. That man could scream like a drill sergeant, even though he got kicked out of the Army for conduct unbecoming of an officer—a nice way to say his excessive partying made the Army look bad so they let him go. If he would have stayed in, I'm sure he would have become their best drill sergeant; he would have been great at it. Yeah, he could yell ... and yell ... and yell. I hated it when he got going because nothing could stop him—certainly not the weed he said mellowed him out. He would only stop yelling long enough to light up, but it didn't calm him down; it just gave us a momentary reprieve from the lecture. I wished the drugs would have relaxed him, but I don't think they ever really did.

We knew when they were getting high like we knew when Karina left: they did the same things every time. They went into their room to do it, shut the door, and put a towel under the crack, as if a towel could keep the smell from seeping out.

When they came out of the room, their eyes were red and it smelled like skunk, but Clayton was not more mellow. If he was in a mad mood when he went in, he would pick up right where he left off when he came out. I felt like he would yell more about everything and then broaden the targets of his anger from just us to the whole world: the governor, the president, the Iraqis.

But he would always bring it back to us to wrap it up; he was gifted in the art of trash talk like that. He would chastise me for laziness, first getting up in my face, then into my mom's because she birthed me. He would go off on how disrespectful Justin was and thump him in the chest. Then he would circle back, complaining about how dirty we were, how dirty the house was, how pathetic our lives would be because we didn't listen to his sage wisdom, how pathetic my mom was for being so lazy and not teaching us how to be anything but slobs. When it was really bad he would scream right into my face, only an inch away, and if I moved, he would follow me, leaning into my face, twisting his head to match mine move for move. His spit flecked my cheek and sometimes splashed into my eyes, that skunk breath of his invading my nostrils.

Believe it or not, I preferred the skunk breath to the booze breath. When he was drinking, I was liable to get slapped or spanked if I turned my head or closed my eyes, so I guess maybe the weed did chill him out after all. If he was yelling at Justin, it was no big thing for him to punch him. His favorites were sucker punches. I think he liked those best because they didn't leave bruises.

We learned to take his rants just like the soldiers in the movies we would watch together as a raggedy family. If we stood there strong, stiff, and stoic, looking straight ahead, he would eventually tire out and leave us alone. We never yelled, “Sir, yes, sir!” like they did in the movies, though. That would have not fared well for us.

I guess it's OK with your neighbors if you fight with your girlfriend and slap your kids around as long as you mostly keep it inside where they can't hear. I wonder if anyone would have called if Clayton took it outside more often. I can't blame our neighbors; they probably thought our life was as normal as theirs. We didn't bother them and they didn't bother us.

My favorite neighbor, Justin's too, was Mrs. Diaz. Mom called her an old bag; we called her Gramma Diaz, even though she wasn't anymore our grandma than Uncle Jon was our uncle. She was as persnickety as they get. She went to church every Sunday and Wednesday, and she smelled like old flowers. I liked that smell. She displayed pictures of her family in golden, gilded, gaudy frames all the way down her million-mile-long hallway. I always seemed to find my way to the hall. I loved to stare at all the happy people behind the glass in her frames. None of her people held beer bottles or pipes in their hand; they smiled just because they were happy.

Mrs. Diaz never asked us what happened at our house, and it never entered my mind to tell her that sometimes my parents left us alone or let people party till they puked. I did ask, once, where her bar was. Every house I had ever been in had a bar or liquor cabinet or something. She chuckled, exactly the way you would expect a chubby grandma with silver-gray hair to chuckle, patted my head, and said, “Oh honey, not everyone needs alcohol to have a good time.”

I loved to go over to her house. One step inside and I was consumed by a cloud of warmth and love. We ate her cookies; she baked them fresh for the neighbor kids every Wednesday before church. It was a ruse: get us in, sugar us up with sweets and invite us to church. How could we say no? Our parents were only too happy to let us go since it gave them one night a week they didn't have to deal with our snotty noses.

Gramma Diaz went to a church that was exactly four songs away. I still remember every single word to each song on the cassette tape she would play. We would go to AWANA as they called it; we called it game night. We played games, memorized Bible verses and got fake paper bucks to spend on goodies like sunglasses and erasers. Whenever I thought of heaven it always resembled the AWANA store, full of good things I wanted but could never reach.

Like I said earlier, our neighborhood was kind of spread out, not like the new developments nowadays. We lived at the end of a long dead-end road with six houses on one side and five on the other. I could only see the Diaz house from the street, and even theirs was barely visible because it was so far back. Our bus would drop us off at the beginning of the road, where Justin, Lizzie, and I would get off, along with two other kids, Michael and Kim. We saw other kids' parents wait in cars for them at the front of their roads; my parents almost never did. Clayton worked, and Mom was usually drunk by three or had a headache—and besides, we were old enough to know where home was anyway. So we walked home from the bus unaccompanied.

The road was long enough to keep the houses spread out. Maybe they really didn't know and couldn't hear what happened at our house. I know trees blocked one house from another, so I'm sure no one could see into our house to see the fighting and drinking just like no one could see mischievous kids prowling houses that weren't theirs. I'm not going to lie, once or twenty times we walked down my neighbors’ driveways. Once or twenty times we opened their locked doors, ate their food—just a little bit, like innocent mice—and left before anyone knew we were there.

Our house was the last one, a half a mile or so from the beginning of the road and far away from the other houses. Clayton bought it before I was born from an old-timer he used to work for after school, right after the Army sent him packing and he went back to doing drywall. That's why he got it when he and Karina split: because he bought it and because he kept Justin, the courts thought he was better for Justin than his mom. It made me wonder what his mom was really like for anyone to consider Clayton the better parent.

Our home—or rather, Clayton's—was down a rutted, gravel-less, brush-lined driveway of its own. Maybe that's why no one saw, heard, or said anything about what happened there. I think if I were a neighbor of that ramshackle house down the road, I could have heard the yelling. I think I would have called about it. Yeah, I would have.

When I was a kid growing up in it, I didn't realize how bad it was. I thought it was normal. But other people must have known that wasn't normal. Maybe not Clayton and Mom—maybe they were so broken they thought it was fine—but the neighbors? All of them? They had to know, at least some of them, like Gramma Diaz and the young couple in the pea green house. They had to have heard—at least in the summer when the windows were open. I swear Clayton would yell louder in the summer because his voice didn't stick in the house the way it did when they were closed. It was like he thought he needed to be louder for us to get the point that we were good for nothing. The old man with the huge hearing aids all the way up at the front of the road—I can accept his not hearing us. But there were nine other houses that could have. I still do blame them, I guess, and I need to get over it—
accept the things I cannot change,
right? But I can't quite accept it yet because if I could hear their music and barbecues, they must have heard Clayton yelling at me, Justin, Lizzie, and Mom. I don't know what good it would have done to call the police; maybe they would have taken me to Aunt Aerin sooner, or maybe they wouldn't have done anything. But if I were my neighbor back then, I would have done something to save a kid like me from a life like that.

In the summertime he played his music louder too. I could hear it from far away in the woods where we would play. But I could still hear his voice over it—not the words but the yelling—when he was mad at Mom. The music blasted outside but inside it was so loud I could barely think; their Friday friends liked it that way. They only had big parties every now and then, but they had friends over most weekends if they weren't out at the bar themselves. We would play outside with the other kids who had parents like ours. We took them to the woods where we had climbing trees and forts and freedom. That was the nice thing about their Friday friends, a lot of them had kids too. The grown-ups would be inside listening to AC/DC, Queen, and Duran Duran, while getting wasted, and we would be outside pretending to be real adults in wars and houses. We would stay outside as long as we could to avoid the noise and the noise makers, spilled beers, and nonsense.