In Memory of Junior (20 page)

All the stuff from last week about the graves was in the newspapers. Aunt Bette and Aunt Ansie blew up I guess when they found out about Uncle Grove being back in town and all. I can't figure out what they've got against him. They cornered me at the funeral home and said that Uncle Grove had been a bad influence on everybody he knew, including his sister, my grandmother. I don't know why they're so obsessed with all that. It happened over forty years ago, her running away. It's like when she left, that was the end of the world.

Mom says she's glad she's out of the family for good.

The sun was getting low in the sky. Uncle Grove had gone back to the cabin. The wind had died down. It was very peaceful. I hadn't been all that sure I'd like it, but it was so peaceful, and
big
out there—so much space and nobody, nothing, way, way down the beach anywhere. The times I've been to the ocean before there were always all these people around and everybody worrying about suntan lotion and all that. But this was different. We'd all sit quiet for a long time and look at the waves rolling and foaming. Uncle Faison and Jimmy would go to the cooler for a beer every once in a while. I'd go for an apple or a Snickers. It was like nobody was going to tell me what
to eat or drink. I thought about drinking a beer, but Dad would get all bent out of shape.

There was nothing out there but the ocean and sand and us, fishing. But mainly we were just sitting around. The rods were lined up along the beach in the rod holders, except for mine. I was still holding it. No bites. No nibbles. The sun was hot and the air was cool.

Your mind gets to wondering about things, like it begins to get a little disconnected from . . . from whatever. I would look at the sand and think about counting the grains and I thought about like how long the ocean had been there doing the same thing over and over. I thought about Uncle Grove. I thought about what if my grandma hadn't left—how it would have been different for my dad. I thought about Junior getting killed in the car wreck. There was supposed to be some argument between Uncle Faison and Aunt June Lee that led to the wreck. I've never heard anybody talk about it, but I got that from somewhere.

Jimmy stopped by my chair on the way to the cooler. “One of the best things about this,” he said, “is that there ain't no streets and cars over here. You ever think about how much noise cars make?” He was like actually talking to me. “You ever think about back before cars, when everywhere sounded just like iss? You ever think—HOLY SHIT!” he screamed. He pointed.

The rod on the far end of the line was just booking. Dad and Uncle Faison started getting up, which isn't easy in these waders we had to wear. We were sort of scattered around on the beach, far apart. Jimmy was screaming, “YOU GOT A TIT, BATE—A TIGHT, BATE—A BITE, TATE. GODDAMMIT. GODDAMN, THEY'RE GONNA
START HITTING. I KNEW IT. I KNEW IT!” He was like going crazy.

It was Dad's rod. He pulled it up out of the rod holder, looked at the reel like he was trying to remember how to hold it.

Uncle Faison grabbed at it, trying to turn the reel handle over some other way or something.

Dad pulled away, keeping the reel in front of him. The end of the rod like suddenly dipped down hard.

“Whoa!” said Jimmy.

The rod suddenly bent even more, dipped, and the reel whined.

“WHOA, LOOK AT THAT!” said Jimmy. “That fish weighs twenty pound if he weighs a ounce. God,” he said, “I hope it ain't no sand shark. Yippee, this is the year. This
is
the year. WHOA, HEY, LOOK,
I
GOT ONE!” He started toward his rod, which was dipping and pumping. “This is the year,” he yelled. “This is the year!”

And that's when the first one hit my line. It was like a fist hitting me in the shoulder. It was unreal.

We lined all the fish up on the cleaning table outside the back door—just a-shining. One flapping here, one flapping there. We were about to clean them, all but the boy. He was still on the beach fishing. When they had started hitting, he about flipped, screaming and I don't know what all. His voice is changing and all that.

We went to work on the fish with pliers and fillet knives.
Tate fell behind. I was using my Leatherman tool. Best tool I ever had, except my fingers. Man I used to work for at the sawmill was always saying, “There's no tool like the fingers.” Huh?

We skinned, filleted, stopped, drank beer, flipped the fish over, done the same thing on the other side, cut the fillets into steaks, dropped them onto ice in the cooler, drank some more beer. We had twenty-two big bluefish. Averaging out at twelve to fifteen pound. A real sight.

“Here, let me help,” says the old man.

“You're the overseer,” said Faison. “You give the orders.”

The old man looked like he felt pretty good. He'd had a few.

Tate was standing at the fish-cleaning table, talking to him. “There, Uncle Grove,” he said. “Over there. Get that chair and sit down.” He pointed to a old stool by the faucet. The old man started over and Tate said to Faison, “He's swaying.”

Faison says, “Yeah, I know. Pass me a beer, Jimmy.”

“We should have bled them,” I said. But hell I didn't have time. You need to cut a bluefish's throat soon as you catch it. Especially the big ones. Just like a deer or a pig.

“Wha's a matter?” said the old man from his chair. “One of 'em ain't dead? Here, I'll shoot his ass.” He stood up, reached into his back pocket, pulled out a snub-nosed .38.

“Well, that's a load off my mind,” I said.

“Whoa,” said Faison, walking over to him. “Here, let me have that.”

He put the gun back in his pocket and sat down. “Never mind. They're just fish,” he said.

Old man made me a little nervous. Not too nervous. But a little nervous.

“That's right,” said Faison. “Don't you want to give me that gun?”

“Oh no.”

“What the hell you need it for?” asked Tate.

“You never know. You never know.”

“Did you know he had that gun?” Faison asked Tate.

“No. Think we ought to take it?”

“Go ahead, if you think you can.”

“He ain't going to hurt nothing,” I said. “We should've had him shooting down at the beach. That second or third one—second one I hooked—was like he was pulling me out, man. I had to keep, you know, walking out farther and farther. I tell you one thing: for his size, that was the fightingest fish I
ever
caught.”

Fox drove up in his truck, got out and walked over. “Looks like you boys had some luck. How do you do, sir?” he said to the old man.

The old man says, “I catch them. They clean them.”

“Pretty, ain't they,” said Faison.

“They sure are,” said Fox. He thumped his cigarette out into the sea oats. “Y'all need anything from the mainland?”

“We might be needing some beer before too long,” I said.

“I need a woman,” says the old man. “Anna Phillips.”

Later on that night we're eating supper in the cabin. The boy finally come in. He'd caught four more blues, but they were small. I got him out on the cleaning table and showed him how to clean them.

For supper we had fresh, fried bluefish, corn bread, cheese nachos, pork and beans, and beer.

We're sitting around the table after supper, more or less
shooting the shit, talking a little about what that farm would bring. So I told them about Timmy winning twelve hundred dollars in a crap game last year. We were feeling pretty good. The man won twelve hundred dollars. This really happened. As soon as he won the money he decided we'd go live in a condominium on a golf course for a week. Wherever that is—Pinehurse. I tell all about the trip—crazy trip—and then the old man, he's feeling pretty good by now, starts in.

“Hell, I been to Pinehurse,” he says, “right when they come out with electric golf carts. I was down there with Merle Mayberry, a guy I was in business with. I never played no golf, but he had two sets of clubs, see. And he let me play with the god-awful one. We get down there and we rent two carts. Him and the other fellow got one, and I got the other one. Hell, I ain't never been on no
golf
cart. Merle has. I ain't. He tells me to follow them on over to the place where you practice hitting it.”

The old man is going good. He can tell a story, and we're just sitting there listening, with all the time in the world. There's nothing else to do on the island.

“Well, hell,” he says, “I didn't know them golf carts don't make no noise. So I figure it won't crank, so I get mad and stomp on the gas pedal and wham, I run into this sweet gum tree and shake all the golf clubs out the back and roll back over 'em and so forth and so on. Crazy.”

The boy cracks up. It was pretty funny.

“And let me tell you, them clubs really won't worth two cents. Well, I finally get to hitting them pretty good over at the hitting place, and I let go this swing, hit the ball, dribble it off to the side, and the club you know I'm holding
up over my head feels real light somehow, and so I look up and there goes the damn club head, sailing through the damn air.”

I was cracking up too, sipping on a cool one, smoking a cigar, leaning back in my chair, listening to the ocean crash a couple hundred yards away. The life.

“Well, hell,” the old man says, “now I'm standing there with this
pool cue
in my hands, right? In front of, you know, forty, fi'ty millionaires.” He'd pulled his chair out from the table, kind of out into the center of the room.

“Well, I look out across the field and here comes the . . . this guy in the little caged-in green tractor.
He's bringing me the damn club head back
—in front of everybody, in front of these forty, fi'ty millionaires. So I took it, put it in my front pocket, and that looks pretty odd, and Merle is about to die laughing.”

“Then I lose the head to my other wood—same way, fourth or fifth hole—and that bag of clubs looks pitiful. No wood things, just a bag of sticks. I played maybe two, three times since then. You boys ever play any golf?”

“I played a couple of times,” said Faison. “I ain't no good, though. I played with my mama one time.”

Things got quiet.

“When did y'all play golf?” said Tate. He seemed a little shook. He still hadn't drunk no beer or nothing.

“She took me to the Putt-Putt over across from the Taylors' house. That Putt-Putt they had on Highway Twelve. You remember that Putt-Putt, don't you? Probably one of the first there ever was. Had that great big WHITES ONLY sign across the front.”

“I remember that place,” I said. I did.

Tate says he never knew his mama took Faison to the Putt-Putt. A little family stuff, here.

“Evelyn was something,” said the old man. “She could plow, do anything I could, growing up. Plowed that little old crooked-legged mule like a man.”

“She die?” I asked. I didn't know nothing about this stuff. How was I supposed to know what was coming?

“She left home,” said Faison, “when I was seven and Tate was about six months old.”

So I said something about being glad me and Timmy had a good mama and Faison says, “I don't think she was necessarily bad. She just got tired of farm life, I think. Hell, I did too.”

“She was a good woman,” said the old man. “It was all kind of sad. She left. Then five years later, I left.”

“So she was your sister?” I asked the old man.

“Right. She was a good one, too.”

“Do you know why she left?” the boy asked the old man.

It was quiet again, almost like somebody else had just walked in the room. Spooky. I could tell that it was one of those things in families that nobody talks about. Like Timmy's stuff.

“Yeah, I do know, but it's well enough left alone. I took care of it more or less,” says the old man.

“Did she just leave?” said the boy. Pressing, see.

“Leave it alone,” said Faison. “What's the big deal? She left, she left.”

“I guess it's a big deal to me,” said Tate to the old man, “if you know something we don't.” Tate was sort of leaning forward, serious-like, his elbows on his knees, looking the old man in the eye.

“She left,” said the old man—and he looked right at Morgan—“she left because she was funny, you know, queer, she left so she could kissy-kissy with another woman, some dyke with a English accent. That's what happened.”

I'm thinking, hold on, this is
too
serious.

Faison kind of laughed. “You're lying.”

“So help me God that was it,” says the old man.

Faison stood up like he was going somewhere, took a couple of steps, turned around, then sat back down. “She ran away with a
woman?”
he says.

“That's right.” The old man was wetting down a cigar.

“Bullshit. I knew her. She might have been unhappy or something, but she won't no queer.” Faison looked like he might be a little mad at his uncle.

“You're right. You're right. I don't think she was either,” said the old man. “That's the whole problem. What happened was this woman from England talked her into it. She was a smooth-talking dyke that come from England, through New York, and took advantage of her. That's what it was.”

So they get to going back and forth, you know, about all this stuff that happened, hell, something like forty, forty-five years ago and the old man tells them they ain't got nothing to worry about, that he took care of everything—that he paid them a visit and roughed up the one from England enough that she and their mama, they split up for good. I about cold-cocked the kid because he wants to know what's wrong with being a lesbian. Butts in, asking that shit. I about cold-cocked him.

So here I am fishing on McGarren Island with some sixteen-year-old weirdo, sitting around the supper table
drinking beer, and suddenly all this strange stuff comes out, and Mr. Weirdo wants to know what's wrong with lesbians. You figure it. So I told him. Anybody with any sense knows you behave the way you want other people to behave—if you've got any ethics to you. That's the bottom of the Christian tradition which is the foundation of America and so you got these homosexuals behaving in such a way that if
everybody
did, then the human race would
peter out
so to speak. In other words, we're talking the elimination of the whole human race, and here's a sixteen-year-old so-called leader of tomorrow wanting to know what's wrong with
that.
You figure it. I didn't want to waste the breath to try to explain it. His old man didn't even look at him. He just sat there looking at the wall like he hadn't ever
seen
a wall.