“Wull. I can’t figure it.”
“Figure what?”
“The noise. I can’t figure the noise.”
“Huh.”
“Look, Luli.”
Now he starts scratching the back of his neck, shifting leg to leg.
“I wanna show you something.”
Boy, he sure knows how to be boring.
Shift. Shift.
“Wull, what?”
Shift.
“Um, wull, how bout you close your eyes and open your mouth.”
“Wull, why would I wanna do that?”
“Just trust me. Trust me. You’ll like it. I promise.”
And now something in the air around me starts to vibrate and I get the feeling that funny noise was pure make-up and my thumbs stop mid-twiddle.
But there’s also a side of me that won’t ever look away from a dead bird or a car chase or a hold-up at the Alibi at 2 a.m. There’s this side that wants to grab that buzzing thing and pull it close and twirl it around and inspect it, like dissecting a frog, belly-splayed.
So I do it.
I do what he says and I close my eyes and open my mouth and the next thing I know he’s got his twenty-eight-year-old tongue in my thirteen-year-old mouth and all I can think is that I don’t think the hero is supposed to be doing this.
He was supposed to grab me out the hullabaloo and gallop me off on a palomino horse, straight up into Orion’s Belt and up up up into the stars. Just leave out the step about making up truck noises and grumbling round the tires and then he’s got his tongue down my throat. Don’t tell that part. That part’s double-secret.
I squirm away and look at him like his marbles got lost. He looks at me, eyes swirling, and get this.
That thing swirling in his eyes, that thing, like he wants to jump into my body and devour me from the inside out, makes it like I could ask for whatever my little heart desired in this second and he would have to do it. He wouldn’t have a choice. Right here, in this second in the dead black night with nothing but two white beams and a fence-post waning, I could ask him to climb Chimney Rock or go rob a bank or take me to Lincoln, no, Omaha, no, Dallas. I could ask him, in this little speck of a moment, to jump off a cliff or spit on his mama or crash his truck into the Missouri and he’d do it. He’d have to do it.
And I don’t know if it’s the way I open my eyes or the way I gawk at his eyes swirling, but he steps back and looks at the ground and shuffles his feet and shakes his head. Then he gets back over to the driver’s seat, real quick.
Silent. Silent.
Two fence-posts back.
Silent.
Down the drive.
Silent.
Slam the door.
Silent.
Not even a good-bye. No sir. Not now.
And as I watch him crunching over the gravel, kicking up dust down the drive and into the nothing black night, I could jump for joy.
I could jump for joy, cause now I know I’ve got something. Fish-face. Quacky-duck’s got something. I’ve got something that cancels out too-broke Dad and cancels out dirt-lot brawls and cancels out that leaning, falling house I’m about to walk into. I got something that’s gonna throw me straight into the sun and leave this shitty little dust-bin behind and you just wait, you just wait, to see how I make it go boom.
TWO
Did you know I have a baby brother? Had one. it’s cause Tammy had a blue dress. Tammy had a baby-blue dress that came down not far enough and my dad liked her in that blue dress and then, the next thing you know, that blue dress started fitting tighter and tighter around her belly and, next thing you know, it looked like she swallowed a basketball and, next thing you know, my dad was skipping around talking about, “Luli, you’re gonna have a little baby brother, now, you’re gonna have to help your mama now, see.”
And even though I was only seven and didn’t know why Tammy swallowed a basketball or how that made a baby brother, you couldn’t help but smile when you saw my dad floating through the door and through the next, sashaying around Mama in her too-tight blue dress. And she’d say, “Now, c’mon, now, you don’t know it’s gonna be a boy, you just don’t know that, just shush.” And he’d say, “Yes, I do. I do sure know it like I know the sky is blue and I know the world is round and I know I married the most beautiful girl in the county, the state, the whole wide world, darlin, the whole big wide world.”
And this is the part where he’d sidle up behind her and start rocking back and forth and making her blush and play-swat him away, but she’s swaying, too, swaying there in that baby-blue dress, too.
And they had a Sunday with everyone coming over and bringing gifts and a cake and a little baby crib from Aunt Gina and Uncle Nipper, white with gold trim, like something you pulled out of a dollhouse and blew up life-size. And they were laughing and giggling and smiling thirty ways till sundown. And you would have been smiling, too, cause it was like all the good-mornings and all the hi-how-are-yas and all the well-hello-sunshines in the county had taken lunch all at once and decided to march down the dirt road and alight, just this once, just this one Sunday afternoon, and arrange themselves in a circle around my basketball-swallowing mama, sitting proud and pretty in that blue dress that started it all.
And maybe God and the angels took note of that blue dress, too, because when that baby came out the color of moonlight, we all knew something was wrong.
And he was a boy, all right, Dad got that part right, but he wasn’t the kind of boy you could take out front and throw a football to in four years or five or even six. No, sir, he was just born the color coming off the moon and sickly and sniffling and stiff. He was just born with a frown on his face, like he got dropped off at the wrong planet or maybe the angels left out a step or maybe he didn’t want nothing to do with it in the first place.
And he had to set in that incubator like some kind of other-world baby chick while my dad and Aunt Gina and Uncle Nipper just waited and waited and whispered and whispered and spent more and more money they didn’t have in the first place, just to keep him down on this here planet.
And there was a doctor came in from Omaha and he took one look at that baby and said we best be bringing him up there, cause that’s where they’ve got the best doctors and the best treatment money can buy, and my dad smiled and nodded and said oh-yes-Doctor, and that baby stayed right there in that incubator for three days straight before deciding that maybe this wasn’t the place for him after all. Maybe this wasn’t the right planet or the right county or the right too-broke family from somewhere out in the sticks, anyways, and so he just upped and took to floating back up into the blue sky from whence he came, back up to wherever planet you get to go to when you get born the color of moonlight and your too-poor daddy can’t afford to send you up to Omaha, where they’ve got the best white-coated smiling doctors that know what the fuck to do anyways.
You see, it’s one thing to pretend you’re James Dean and pump gas in the summer and make the girls blush before heading back to your double-wide. it’s one thing to pack mules in the fall and live in a log cabin and dip your hat down before riding off into the setting sun. But when not being able to scrape two dimes together makes it so your baby boy, born the color of the night sky, has to stay put in that glowing tin-cup incubator instead of up with the experts in Omaha, well, then, there’s nothing glamorous about that, now, is there?
And she didn’t have to say it, my mama, when the bones fell out her body all at once and Aunt Gina and Uncle Nipper