When me, June, and Nicolette got off the elevator in Houston’s apartment building, there was a wall covered by a photograph of some Rocky Mountain scene—sharp mountains covered with snow, flowers in the meadow in the foreground. Nicolette took off down the sticky carpet through the bleach stink to Houston’s door with its ribbons and toilet paper roll firecracker 4th of July decoration done by somebody feeling good about theirselves for all they’d done to cheer up old people.
Houston’s room was twenty foot square. His bed was in the far corner, in the shadows beside the window. It was a twin bed had an old quilt on it from the little house around the bend from my grandmother’s, the place she’d chased him when his loafing and trifling got too constant.
There was a bookcase beside his bed. On top of it set a big boombox. On the shelves beneath it set plastic boxes each holding ten cassette tapes. There was twelve of those boxes on the shelves beside Houston’s bed. There were another twelve cassette boxes on the shelf to my right as we come in the room. There were old dime store frames filled with oranged-out seventies-looking pictures of my mother and grandmother and Aunt June. They hung next to black-and-white copies of pictures of musicians in suits and fedoras from the twenties and thirties, blurred pictures of pictures hanging in the same dime store frames as the pictures of my mother and aunt and grandmother. A sorry-looking meals-on-wheels lunch sat on a white foam tray beside the bed—syrupy pear slices curled together on their side like people died in their sleep, a slab of meat covered by a morgue sheet of gravy. There was a little kitchen set in from the rest of the room painted the gold of strip mine mud, had nothing on its counters but a box of devil food snack cakes and a ceramic man in a sombrero holding a ceramic basket in front of him. There was a cactus growing in the basket, placed so as to look like the ceramic man’s penis.
Houston said,
Nicolette said, “Who is that?,” pointing at one of the black-and-white pictures, a picture of a man sitting spread-legged on a chair, his mouth a grim stripe across his face, fancy socks showing where his suit pants had rode up, a banjo across his front.
“What’d you say?” Houston said, loud enough to be heard out in the hall.
Aunt June said, “Look at Houston when you talk to him, honey. So he can hear you.”
Nicolette turned, said, “Who’s that?,” and she slapped her hand flat against the wall below the banjo man with the fedora and the grim stripe of smile.
“Dock Boggs,” Houston said. “That’s Dock Boggs.” Houston marched up close to Nicolette and stuck his face in hers, said “You don’t know Dock Boggs?”
Nicolette laughed and grabbed hold of Houston’s ears. “No,” she said and went to twisting the ears.
Houston turned over a milk crate and said, “Sit down there.” Nicolette sat, and Houston pulled out one of the plastic boxes, taking out first one cassette and then another, holding them up to his face, pulling out slips of paper covered in typewritten names of musicians and songs paired the way they had been on the originals in his 78 rpm record collection. He settled on one of the cassettes and put it in his boombox. “You listen to this,” he said.
The music was terrible old banjo plunking, singing like they was sparkplugs up his nose. I said, “Aint no way a daughter of mine going to sit still for that.” And that’s when I learned how I didn’t know my own daughter, how rank a stranger she was to me, cause she set there and kept sitting there, fat little fists jammed up under her chin, elbows on her knocked-together knees. She set there and mumbled words to one song after another—no use for the red rocking chair—never had a dollar nor a friend—and Houston just looked at her like, finally here a child that will do right.
I said, “Nicolette, sit up straight,” and she didn’t even act like I was in the world, and when it switched over from Dock Boggs to Roscoe Holcomb, Nicolette wheeled around said, “That’s a different one, Houston. That aint the same one, is it?”
I said, “Nicolette, come on honey. We got to go see your daddy.”
Nicolette said, “Can’t he come here?”
I said, “No. We got to go back to Tennessee.”
Houston said to me, “Why don’t you leave her till you get back from Cora’s? She’d be good company.”
I said, “Nicolette, you want to do that?”
“Yes,” she said without looking. “Of course.”
Houston said, “Look here,” and when Nicolette turned he had a record cover had a skinny old-timer in a straw hat and a khaki shirt on the cover standing in front of a barn. Houston said, “That’s Roscoe Holcomb. That’s who’s singing now.”
Nicolette took the record cover out of his hands, held it up to her face the way he’d held the cassette cases up to his, and said, “That’s a good-looking man.”
Houston laughed his wheezy laugh and I got Nicolette by the chin, said, “You do what your papaw tells you.”
She said, “He aint gonna tell me nothing.”
I said, “Well, you do it anyway,” and me and June left out of there.
We were halfway down the hall when Houston come out, said, “Misty Dawn, let me see you for a second,” and when me and June come back towards him, he said, “June, you go on. I need to talk to Dawn a second.”
June looked hurt, but she went on. Back in the apartment, Houston took a pair of green headphones looked like they could’ve been Jesus’s down off a hook and put them on Nicolette’s ears. The foam in them was hard and crumbly, left black dandruff all over Nicolette’s shoulders.
I said, “Houston, I don’t want her wearing them.”
He hooked his finger at me. Pointed back towards the kitchen, back where Nicolette couldn’t see me. I went in there, Houston right behind me. We about bumped noses when I turned around.
Houston said, “Tell Cora I had a dream.”
His breath was shine and menthol, his nose a skin-covered beak.
I said, “Do what?”
He said, “Tell Cora I had a dream about her. Tell her I dreamed she was down inside a pumpkin. Stuck to the bottom. She was the candle down in the jack-o-lantern.”
I said, “Houston, stop.”
He said, “The face on the jack-o-lantern was mine, Dawn. Her light shone through my face.” Houston grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. “Somebody was shaking the pumpkin. They was wind trying to blow out the light.” Houston stopped shaking me. “Do you mind telling her for me?”
I said, “Kind of.”
He asked why.
I said, “Cause it sounds crazy.”
He said, “Dawn, tell her I’m worried something is going to happen to her. Tell her I’m willing to come back and look after her. Tell her I’m willing to let bygones be bygones.”
I said, “Houston, she caught you in the backseat of her car in the church parking lot during Sunday morning services with a girl my age.”
“Dawn,” Houston said, “that wasn’t what it seemed. Cora don’t even go to church.”
I said,
He said, “Dawn, I’m worried about her. That’s the truth. The fire was coming out of the top of her head.”
I said,