I stopped before I was ready, backpedaled on the brake before I rearranged the things in my hands, and my soda fell to the pavement, leaving an orange puddle under my bike. “Best thing that could have happened to you,” she said, dropping from her hiding spot in the thick magnolia limbs. I started to ask her why she was in a tree, but she answered before I could speak. “I’m watching people. I’m not hiding or anything,” she said. “You guys go to the Bantam Chef couple times a day, don’t you?”
“My mom’s working,” I told her. “She’s a nurse.” Laurice had on shorts that didn’t fit her. Her legs had grown since school let out. She was taller than I’d remembered. And she was tan in every place I looked, like she’d been to the beach for a month.
“Wait here,” she said and ran into her house. It wasn’t a big place, but it was solid-looking, cement blocks painted a light green, an odd-angled roof, a porch without a screen on it. The front door made metal noises when it opened and closed.
Laurice ran back out with a bottle of Orange Crush in her hand. “Here,” she said, “don’t drop this one.”
“I thought this stuff is going to kill me,” I said.
“What don’t?” she told me and climbed back into the magnolia. My breath caught low in my throat while I watched her legs disappear into the thick canopy of summer leaves.
LONNIE CAME HOME from the hospital on a Wednesday morning. He rode his bicycle to my house the same afternoon. Before he even sat down, he told me he wanted to show me something that would make me puke. He wanted to bet me five dollars I’d throw up the second I saw it. I wouldn’t take the bet, but that didn’t stop Lonnie.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “That doctor who put my face together said I had to keep my new eyeball clean. I mean, not my eyeball, but the socket part.” Lonnie leaned toward me so his face would catch some light. The swelling that my mother told me about was pretty much gone. I could see the thin tracks of fresh scars dividing his face into sections. He was puffy on the curve of his jaw and his eye looked a little too big for his face, the fake eye, I mean. And the fake eye never moved. It just stared straight ahead, even when Lonnie shook his head. Still, he looked mostly like Lonnie, except one side of his expression never changed. He was slightly lopsided.
“The doctor told me, ‘You don’t keep it clean, Lonnie, you’ll get infected,’ and the last thing I need is infection, you know?” He pointed to his eye to punctuate the importance of a clean socket.
“So,” Lonnie continued, “they give me these little wipey things I’m supposed to use.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small plastic sleeve of wet tissues. Then he popped his fake eye out. He rolled it carefully between two fingers like a round diamond. He smiled.
“This doesn’t make me want to puke,” I said, which surprised me. I normally didn’t enjoy gazing on anything associated with pain. But to be honest, Lonnie’s fake eye looked more like a carnival trinket than a body part.
“Eyeball. Big deal, right?” he said, laying it carefully in a crack on my den table so it wouldn’t roll away. “The big deal is where it came from.”
Lonnie cocked his head toward me. The hole in his head wasn’t exactly black. A pinkish flap of skin stretched across the back of the opening. It was as if somebody in the vicinity of his brain had lit a candle. His socket glowed right in front of my eyes. With two fingers, he pried the opening wider. I could see the milky plastic of the rebuilt eye socket. Lonnie gagged a little, trying to talk.
“What?” I said, looking down at the table.
Lonnie cleared his throat. “Trying to say, something went wrong with my palate. Don’t ask me what. They left a hole and they didn’t know I could get my tongue up in there. They want to close it up one day. Hell with that. I can almost stick my tongue in my own eye. Check it out,” he said. And he may have said something else, but I missed it. Instead of listening, I ran for the back porch and made it in time to throw open the screen and puke across the azalea bushes.
“Nice shot,” my father said, standing there, his worn-out Army OD bag at his feet, looking like a skinny Jesus with his hair and beard and sandals. By the time Lonnie walked out, the eye was back in his head, and he wore a crooked grin over the good half of his face.
IT NORMALLY TOOK my father about two minutes to ease back into the family mode when he returned from one of his excursions. It took longer for my mother. She had to hate him awhile before she decided to love him again. He never gave her much information when she demanded details. His stock answer was, There’s not much to tell, hon. When my mother peeled the fried skin away from a chicken breast and offered it to him, that’s when we knew it was safe to breathe again.
That night, after my mother walked in to find her husband home, after she interrogated him in the hall and he said a dozen times that there was nothing to tell, hon, we sat at the table and gave thanks over a bucket of chicken from the Bantam Chef. “Dear Lord,” my father said to the ceiling, “thank you for my safe return. Thank you for Lonnie Tisdale’s new face—”
“And eye socket,” Lonnie interrupted.
“That too. And thank you for family,” he said, dropping his gaze to the bucket. “Y’all go ahead. I don’t have much of an appetite.”
My mother said, “God knows where you were. He sees it all, you know.” This was a new tactic. My mother normally left God out of arguments.
“We got an agreement,” my father said.
“You and God?” Lonnie asked, impressed.
“He gets decent prayers and I get left alone. I might have me a splash of that brown gravy,” he said. My dad’s stomach could handle soupy things, but not solid chicken. He’d end up rolling on the floor, grabbing at his sides if he ate so much as a couple bites of anything with substance.
“I thought about God when I was in the hospital. Probably thought about him when I was under the water, but I don’t remember that,” Lonnie said with his mouth full. As a matter of fact, Lonnie didn’t recall climbing up on the bridge scaffolding and diving into the black water. He said when he woke up in the hospital, it was like someone had pulled the ultimate practical joke on him—dressed him up in a gown and ripped half his smile off.
My dad studied the bad side of Lonnie’s face. “Trauma will always bring religion into the picture,” he said. “God was a regular in Vietnam.” Any mention of Vietnam meant war stories were close behind. My mother’s eyebrow arched a little. She knew. My father’s Vietnam stories constantly centered on Asian parasites and foot rot, as though the entire conflict had taken place inside of a smelly sock. We were never sure he was sure who the real enemy was. My mother tried to cut off the approaching tales of leper-like toes and microbes in canteens.
“Did you pray in the hospital?” she asked Lonnie.
He thought for a second. “I suppose you might call it that,” Lonnie said. “What I did was make a list of all the things I better get done because you never know when you might jump into a refrigerator.”
“Carpe diem,” my father said.
“No, a Kenmore,” Lonnie said back.
“No, I mean—never mind,” my father said, staring at the bucket of chicken and breathing heavily, as though he were eating through his nostrils. My mother spooned another scoop of gravy on his paper plate, in lieu of real meat. She worked hard always to keep him distracted, if not happy.
“That’s a very mature concept,” my mother said, bending her head toward me as if to suggest I should take note of