Walking home from the bus stop, I wondered if DeRon was still trolling around. I pictured him driving up in his car, and after that, the picture went one of two ways. In one picture, I knocked him out with a right cross to the jaw. In the other picture, he had the rest of his loser friends with him, and they were looking for a party girl, and they didn’t want to take no for an answer.
Russ was out front unhooking his flea market trailer when I got home. For once, I was glad to see him.
“Where you been?” he asked, and gave my borrowed shirt a onceover. I pulled it tighter over the ripped tank top. If Russ or Mama found out what’d happened in DeRon’s car, they’d say it was my fault for being stupid. It probably was.
“At work,” I said. “I don’t feel so good. I’m gonna shower and go to bed.”
Russ just shrugged and told me to clean up the kitchen first. “Your mama’s ticked.”
What’s new?
I thought. Nothing ever changed here. Somebody was always mad.
Today Mama was on the sofa with a headache, trying to sleep off the weekend fun. I started picking up dishes, but she cracked open an eye and yelled at me to quit making noise, so I gave up and hurried to take a shower while Russ was outside. The lock on the bathroom door didn’t work, and if Russ needed to use the toilet, he’d just walk on in whether someone was in the shower or not. He never did anything but come and do his business, but it was creepy knowing he was right on the other side of the curtain, so I tried to get my showering done when he was asleep or when he and Mama were holed up in the bedroom together.
After the shower, I scooted past Mama to the kitchen, grabbed a sandwich and a soda, and headed to my room. Outside, a couple Harleys rumbled up, and I heard Russ shooting the breeze with some friends. The old refrigerator in the carport opened and shut, and Russ and his buddies popped the tops on some brews. They’d be there awhile.
Tiptoeing barefoot out of the room again, I looked down the hall and checked Mama on the sofa. She was out for the count, her mouth hanging open and her hair curling wild on pillows, splayed out like a lion’s mane. She’d probably taken one of the sleeping pills Russ’s VA doctor prescribed, and she’d be there all night.
I decided it was safe enough to go into Mama’s room and get the shoe box. The laundry in the closet was piled so high now, she wouldn’t notice it was gone, even if she did wake up. All this business with J. Norm hunting for his people had me thinking that I wanted to check the backs of my pictures for clues, too.
I shut myself in my room, wedged a chair under the doorknob, and laid out all the pictures on my bed. The voices outside, the rumble of another bike pulling up, and the noise from a siren somewhere in the distance faded off. I studied the photos, felt myself sinking in, looking at the women standing there with my mother as she balanced me on her hip the day of my first birthday party.
I wondered what those women thought about me when we all stood there together. Did they think I was pretty? Or did they just feel, like Mama did, that I was a problem to have around?
Did they love my daddy? Was he right outside the picture frame, saying, “Okay, everybody smile!” Or was he miles away already, about to land himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and end up dead?
Pictures couldn’t answer questions like that, so I got busy looking for questions that could be answered. Where were the pictures taken? What were the names of the people in them? There were kids at the birthday party. Where were they now? Who were they? Friends? Cousins?
Maybe brothers and sisters?
Did my father have other kids before me?
There was a church in the background of one of the photos. I wrote down what I could read of the name on the sign and then moved on. In one of the pictures, an old woman was holding me, her hands dark and wrinkled against my white dress, her smile missing a few teeth. She looked really old, but her eyes were bright and happy.
It almost felt like I could remember her, like I knew how it felt, sitting on her lap that day.
There was a baseball field in the background.
Greg Nash Park
, the scoreboard read. I wrote down the name, turned the picture over, and looked at the back. The words written in pencil had almost faded, but I held the photo to the light and I could see the indentation they’d made.
From Neesie. Mama Leela, 99 years old.
If the woman in the picture lived to be one hundred, there might’ve been something about it in the paper. They ran stories sometimes about people who were turning a hundred.
But the newspapers where?
I wrote down,
Neesie, Mama Leela, hundred years old?
There weren’t any other clues in the pictures, but I looked at them until my eyes got tired; then I copied my father’s full name off my birth certificate and put everything back in the box. I slid the box into the top drawer of my dresser until morning, because Russ was back inside. He was trying to wake Mama up and get romantic in the living room, but she was out cold. He wasn’t happy about it.
I decided the best place for me was in bed, so I turned off the light and climbed in. I left the chair in front of the door and went to sleep.
In the morning, Mama headed off early. She was doubling up some of her housecleaning jobs into the first days of the week, because Russ and her wanted to drive to Oklahoma to sell at some flea market this weekend. Since it was her day to clean at J. Norm’s and fix him supper, I wasn’t supposed to go there. I got dressed for school, and then stood looking at myself in the mirror, and I couldn’t deal with it. I didn’t have my books, because they were at J. Norm’s with paint all over them. Now that DeRon was mad at me, walking down the halls at school would be like stepping into a war zone. Just thinking about it made me feel like I was gonna throw up, so I put my sweats back on and went out to the living room to get Russ to call me in sick at school. Russ wouldn’t mind, I figured. He was in a good mood. He was busy digging through some boxes of cheap flip knives and bandannas he’d traded for over the weekend. I told him I’d help get the stuff sorted and priced if he’d call me in sick, and we had a deal. Mama never knew a thing about it, which Russ thought was kind of funny, like we had a special little secret between us.
Tuesday morning, he asked if I wanted him to call me in again. He was heading over to DeSoto to make a trade with a guy from Craigslist, and then he was going to some warehouse auction out in Greenville, and if that went well, he and Mama would have some good stuff for the flea market in Oklahoma next weekend. He asked if I wanted to go with him and help out.
For about half a second, I thought about saying yes, but I knew it was a stupid idea. If you got in the truck with Russ, you were likely to end up at some biker bar, and besides, Mama didn’t like it if I got too friendly with her men.
“I better go catch the school bus,” I said, and my stomach knotted up like one of those shoestrings you’ll never get untied.
“Yeah, well, you’re about as much fun as the ol’ lady. If you see her this afternoon, tell her I’ll be late getting back tonight.” Russ belched and set his first brew of the day on the coffee table.
“She’s got houses to clean this afternoon, and then she goes straight to work cleaning classrooms. I won’t see her.” With Russ and Mama gone, there wouldn’t be any reason for me to hurry home from J. Norm’s tonight.
“You need some beer money?” Russ grabbed the chain on his wallet and started to pull it out. That was his way of saying I’d helped him out yesterday, and asking if I needed money for lunch. Russ could be all right, sometimes.
“Yeah, sure.”
Russ handed over a five and winked at me. “There ya go. Buy a round for your friends.”
“’Kay.” I slipped the money into my pocket, and since we were buddies and everything, I asked him if, sometime soon, he could help me get my driver’s license.
“What’s in it for me?” He looked between some pillows for the TV remote, then smiled a little under his bushy mustache. “Yeah, sure, kid. Soon as I get a chance, and speakin’ of cars, you tell that little punk in the Chevy Caprice if he don’t quit drivin’ by here, he’s gonna get a load of scattershot right through the front window, understand? You got something goin’ on with that boy?” Russ looked hard at me for a minute, and I didn’t like the way it felt. I backed a couple steps toward the door and shook my head. “You tell him you’re jailbait.” Russ pointed a finger at me. “He gives you any trouble, you let me know.”
“Oh . . . okay.” I headed out the door feeing itchy and strange under my clothes, partly because DeRon had been driving by the house, and partly because Russ’d never, ever asked me anything like that before. He only cared about stuff that had something to do with him.
When I got to school, the basketball boys were gone to some kind of college tour day, and I was glad, because that meant I wouldn’t run into DeRon. Everything seemed normal enough. I kept my head down and tried to get by without anybody noticing I was there.
In study hall, I talked the teacher into letting me use the computer so I could work on my research report. She let me do it, since she liked me. She never had to peel me off the ceiling, or chase me down the hall, or bust me out of a fight, which put me at the head of the class.
I sat at the computer desk and looked up the names on J. Norm’s list, and even shot some stuff to the printer while the teacher was busy with some jerk who’d passed out in the back of the room. I knew pretty quick, though, that finding anything useful about J. Norm’s people was gonna take a while. Mostly I just clicked from one dead end to another. I’d never have enough time to do it at school.
The teacher figured out I wasn’t working on a research report, and she kicked me off the computer just when I was about to look up the names and places on my own list. After that, I knew I wouldn’t have any more chances at a computer. I finished up the afternoon mostly trying to keep my head down and catch up on my work. By the time I made it to the last class of the day, all I could think about was getting out of the building as soon as the bell rang. Just because DeRon was gone earlier today didn’t mean he might not be back now.
Five minutes before class was supposed to get out, the teacher got a note, and the next thing I knew, she was handing the note to me and telling me to get my stuff and go to the office.
A million things went through my mind on the way down the hall, but if I’d of had ten years to come up with ideas, I wouldn’t have guessed what I saw through the glass when I turned the corner by the secretary’s desk. Standing right there in the principal’s office were DeRon and one of the basketball coaches. The principal was rubbing his eyes like he was tired, and the coach looked like he was set to blow.
A half second later, I figured out what was going on. Someone was sitting in the chair across from the principal. He didn’t have to turn around for me to know who it was.
J. Norm. And my backpack was on the desk with red-painted stuff strung all over the place.
DeRon saw me coming. His eyes went narrow, and his lips got tight and straight, and I knew if he’d had a gun in his hand, I’d be dead already.
Chapter 13
J. Norman Alvord
Epiphany refused to offer the least bit of testimony against the boy. She meekly agreed with his version of events—that the spray-painted books were an accident, the result of a prank gone wrong. The can of spray paint had ended up in her backpack accidentally and it had exploded.
The coach, standing with his hand possessively on the boy’s shoulder, nodded along with that explanation and was anxious to hustle his player back to an ongoing practice.
I was the villain now—a fussy old man sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong, offended, perhaps, that a boy from “off Hill” had disturbed my quiet, upscale street with a noisy, older-model car. Given Epiphany’s reaction to my school visit, perhaps it would have been better if I’d minded my own business, but it had seemed the right thing to do, taking the backpack to the school and seeing to it that the boy was held responsible for vandalizing the textbooks. I would have come first thing on Monday, but the principal had put me off until this afternoon. While waiting, I’d had time to work up a full head of steam. What sort of school would let such heinous activity go unpunished?
“This is a good boy,” the coach remarked. “He’s on his way to a D-one college scholarship.”
“Then perhaps he should mind his extracurricular activities accordingly,” I replied, and the boy delivered a silent, openmouthed reply. Behind the mask, his eyes held a wickedness, a simmering anger that caused me to press the point. “Perhaps we should ask Epiphany for her side of the story—
without
an audience present.”
Epiphany, however, had other ideas. Crossing her arms over her stomach, she sagged in her chair, looking at the floor. “It’s no big deal. There’s nothing to tell. It was an accident.”
The coach and the principal were pleased to accept that answer and give us the bum’s rush. Epiphany followed me to my car, stiff armed, and didn’t offer a word until we’d traveled the few blocks to my house.