By Janice Daugharty
Published in ONTARIO REVIEW
Fall-Winter 1997-98
He bumps open the screened door to the carport and the spotted
puppy stands and waggles around his boots, and it's a curious thing
to the boy why the puppy just sat there when the pistol went off
inside.
In one hand Beebee is holding the keys to his mama's blue Buick,
and in the other the pistol that made the little popping sound that
created a big blood spurt between her eyes.
On his way to the car, parked hood-in trunk-out of the carport,
he looks next door and sees Miss Frankie with her bleached hair in
pink rollers and the children she keeps hovering round the picnic
table where she is carving a jack-o-lantern from a huge grooved
pumpkin. Bunch of nonsense! She stands straight and stares at Beebee,
tugging her silky orange blouse down over her ballooned breasts and
stomach. Her hag face poses a question. He pokes the pistol into the
waist of his blue jeans and goes on walking till he gets to the car.
Gets in, places the pistol on the seat, switches the car on, and
backs down the dirt drive to the highway. The hard part, backing.
Of course, now that he has the car to drive to school, he can't
go to school, and he doesn't know where he can go or when he can come
back. And he feels sad driving past the old portwine-brick school
with a train of yellow buses parked along the west fence, but glad
that he doesn't have to go.
He tries to turn the long car on the narrow highway and has to
back up and pull forward and straighten up with the power steering
screaming right under the SLOW WHEN FLASHING sign between the
sheriff's white frame house and the front of the school. Then
scooching low and stretching his right leg so that the pointed toe of
his cream ostrich boot just touches the gas pedal, he is off, up the
highway, leaving behind the SLOW WHEN FLASHING sign that isn't
flashing which means he is late for school, that everybody knows he
isn't coming now but probably doesn't know why yet.
He hopes nobody has seen him but wishes his whole eighth-grade
class could see him driving. And not crying.
Cry, baby, cry. Stick your finger in your eye... That hot
feeling of humiliation forms behind his eyes, remembering his
classmates' chant when he used to choke up singing the National
Anthem, or when a friend was moving away, or when his mama and daddy
first fought over who would get to keep him, then fought over who
would have to keep him. It's a sorry man can't cry, Miss Frankie
would say and hold him in her arms till his cheeks crusted over with
dried salt.
At the Cornerville city limits sign, he speeds up, shooting past
his own long green house, past Miss Frankie's square gray playhouse,
driving into the sun shimmering through pine needles. He adjusts the
rounded-off rectangular mirror to fit the rounded-off rectangular
rear glass and watches the little town slip behind the liveoaks and
the liveoaks slip behind the pines, and then his pretty-boy face,
white as a Stephen King spook's.
He flicks on the radio and tunes it to WAAC, his favorite
country station. Garth Brooks singing "Friends in Low Places." He
sings along to get the chant out of his head and gazes at the sheeny
blue car hood, the green flatwoods and the sudden burst of sun in his
eyes.
The song sounds new in his own voice, but gets old before it is
over.
With his leg stretched, the tin of Skoal in his hip pocket soon
brands a hot circle on his right buttock. He brakes the car in the
middle of the road, shifts the gear stick to P, and squints up the
sun-shot gravel to check for on-coming traffic, then swivels his head
out the window to look behind because he doesn't quite trust the
mirror or the hollow dark eyes that will show there. Foot still on
the brake pedal, he fishes the can of Skoal from his pocket and takes
a pinch of the gummy tobacco and dopes his bottom lip, and the
chicory smell and bitter taste combined makes him feel grounded in
the going-nowhere car.
She had it coming to her. "Pop!" he says and laughs and swallows
the build-up of snuff juice. He hangs his head out the window and
vomits Sugar Pops and milk and gall.
He has to hand it to her though: lately, she'd been trying.
Yesterday, when he found the stray puppy outside while she was
cleaning out the car, she said, Son, why don't you take the puppy in
the house and give him a bath? You can keep him if nobody claims him;
you're practically a teenager now. He had gone inside and set the
spotted puppy free from his locked fingers. While Beebee paced and
ate an apple, listening to the TV without hearing, the puppy tipped
about the living room and sniffed at the green and maroon plaid sofa,
the matching club chair and ottoman, the beige drapes with frayed
hems from dragging morning and night over the no-color carpet. Then
in the kitchen, scratching at the white plastic garbage can with
dried juice runs along the sides, the puppy whined and switched
Beebee's boots with his scutted tail. Practically a teenager? Had his
mama forgotten his thirteenth birthday? Why was she turning things
around? Puppy? He used to beg for a puppy. Now what he needed was a
car.
A green log truck wobbles out from a woodsroad, left side of the
highway, up ahead. Thundering west toward the car. Growing from the
size of a Matchbox toy to the biggest, loudest truck Beebee has ever
come close to. He shifts the gear stick to D and sets out to meet it,
giving up his song to the suck of the truck roar. The driver with a
tarry shocked face shunts the loaded truck onto the right shoulder,
goes on, log tips wagging like limber switches. A red flag flies from
the longest log.
###
Thirty minutes on the flat lonesome highway to Nowhere, and
suddenly the Suwanoochee Creek bridge over grass-choked black water,
and then Somewhere. Fargo city limits sign and facing frame houses
with scaly white paint, lines of drenty wash and trash in run-
together yards. Sycamore trees, with trunks white-scaly as the
houses, rain down leaves like scraps of brown paper sacks, revealing
too much sky, stark blue light. There's a woodyard on the right,
piles of skinned poles on sterile gray dirt, and up ahead a deadend
sign with arrows pointing north and south to either or neither road.
Beebee slows at a railroad track and coasts into the next yard:
white sand littered with risping sycamore leaves. Bony tree. A faded
black pickup perching like a buzzard on concrete blocks. A white
bulldog with a nickel-pied body struts from beneath the screened-in
porch of the white house and stares at the car with wide-set eyes. A
toothy sneer tucks its fleshy jowls, and when Beebee puts the car in
P and buzzes the window down, he can hear it growling.
A young woman in a filmy pink gown opens the wooden door a slit,
then eases out on the porch with her thin arms folded. She steps
around a leached-blue plastic tricycle and gazes sleepy-eyed through
the screened door. Her blondish hair hangs limp as wet string.
"What you want?" she calls.
The dog starts barking in its bass voice and steps solid around
the front of the car. Hair roached the length of its backbone. Smells
of creosote, axle grease and dog drift on the green air from the
Okefenokee Swamp.
Beebee tips his head out the window, looking into the tin eyes
of the bulldog. "Daddy home?" he yells.
"At work," his stepmother says and rubs the top of one foot with
the sole of the other.
She used to call Beebee cute before she started calling him
spoiled rotten and caused his daddy to drop his end of the joint-
custody thing. Too much trouble, you know, specially and her on the
rag and bitching evertime you come about me not letting that half-
grown girl of hers move in with us and us just barely getting by on
what I sweat out in the pulpwoods and your mama hellbent on getting
fifty-cent of ever dollar of that and Uncle Sam with his hand out for
the other fifty. Between the niggers and the women and the wops this
country's about had it. I seen on television where...
Pink skin shows through the wrinkled white fur of the dog, a
phlemy growl gathers from its stocky body to its old-man face, and
before Beebee can raise the window, the dog lunges at the car door
and hooks its fang-like claws on the window ledge, loading the car
with its sour heat and throaty growl. Beebee leans away with a finger
on the window button, slowly glassing over the framed scowling face.
He starts the car, shifts to R, barely missing the jacked-up
black truck as he backs, then circles the sycamore with the bulldog
snapping at the Buick's tires and pulls level with the screened door
and the sleepy woman in pink and lets down the window and picks up
the pistol from the seat and fires first at the rosebud above her
crossed arms, and then at the dog face framed in the window again.
The dog's broad white forehead stains red, it yelps and drops. The
woman is crouching behind the fly-wing gray screen with a neat round
hole about the size of a pea.
###
Halfway between Fargo and Cornerville, Beebee turns down one of
the logging roads, augering north into the pinewoods, sharp tar
smells batting with the warm air through the open windows and
banishing the smoky cordite inside the car. Ditches of water like
melted copper run with the Buick along the rutted road. Bog holes and
muddy ramps and cleared plaits of woods with spikes of saplings and
raw stumps, then the same old pines--bushy tops on towering trunks
with brown scales. Ruches of reddening maples and yellowing foxgrape
vines on a field of brown and green. No sound, save for the clicking
of grasshoppers in the toasted weeds scraping beneath the car, and
the spotty ringing of a locust left over from summer. According to a
PBS Nature Special that Beebee watched a couple of years ago, locusts
stay buried underground for seven years; then they surface, crawling
up the tree trunks to shed, mate and die. Next summer, another crop--
surfacing, shedding, mating, dying. Seven-year cycles. That simple.
When he told his mama, she said "Really?" and was out the door.
Late for work again.
He used to hate that, used to hate staying by himself while she
was at work as much as he hated weekends with the man he called Daddy
before he remarried. As much as he hated his mama's last husband Ike
ragging him about wearing Reeboks and prissy clothes and writing
poems and going to Sunday School with Miss Frankie. Now he likes his
mama going to work and prowling for a new husband in her off-time; he
likes being by himself and not having to answer to anybody. Mostly
now he watches R-rated videos rented from from the Holiday Market--on
hold till the next daddy who might like poetry, prissy clothes and
Sunday school.
"Pop!" he says, this time coddling the bitter snuff juice, then
spits hard out the window to keep from messing up his wash job.
You bathe that dog? You didn't bathe that dog. She was hosing
down the car in cut-off blue jeans and her brown hair in a ponytail.
She turned the water on the puppy and began squirting it with her
thumb over the end of the hose. Okay, so I'll wash the dog and you
wash the car. Damned if I know what to do with you, Beebee.
The blue vinyl seats and dash seem too bright, the day too
bright, seems to accent the toy-like pistol and a white box of
Kleenex, center seat, and his mama's soft brown leather pocketbook by
the other door.
He brakes, trying to switch off the car before putting it in P,
and the whole sun-blared blue Buick shudders and stutters and makes
Beebee's teeth grind. What if he has tore up the car? Testing, he
switches the ignition on again and leaves the car in D where it
apparently works best and slides the pocketbook to the middle of the
seat and feels inside. He's done it before--lots of times. Looking
for money. He smells her cherry lipstick that leaves red lip prints
on tissues in the bathroom at home. He feels the familiar long stiff
wallet-thing, bulging with pictures and cards, takes it out and takes
his time flipping through the filmy plastic sleeves: a picture of
himself as a baby in blue overalls--same picture of himself as on top
of the TV at home. Same pretty-boy face and smile that kept him in
trouble with Ike before he left.
He flips to another picture--his mama and two of her friends
with old-timey teased hairdos who worked with her at the telephone
office in Valdosta. Red lipstick, white teeth, heads pulled together.
They look so much alike that he has to look close to find which is
Mama. He's never looked at the pictures before and can't imagine why
he is looking now, but he keeps flipping. Maybe he's searching for a
picture of the man who would have been his next daddy. No man. Not
even his real daddy, who divorced Beebee and his mama so long ago
it's like never. To hear her tell it she holds no grudges against him
now; to hear him tell it he holds no grudges against her now. But,
they always add, listing a string of reasons why they couldn't stay
married that don't include the true reason: Beebee. A big mistake--
that's what Howard and Leighann call their first marriage--which
makes Beebee offspring of the mistake. A little mistake. He used to
think about stuff like that a lot when he was younger, when his mama
and daddy treated his childhood like a disease he would outgrow.
Beebee no longer signs his school homework with a last name;
he's just Beebee, not even a real name but a nickname they gave him
because he used to hunt all the time with the B.B. gun his real daddy
gave him. He was named after a gun--son of a gun. Try explaining that
to teachers. They go crazy! Make you stay after school. Pleading with
dour faces for the reason why you are acting "smart." Why you have
dumbed-down from all A's in seventh grade to all D's in the eighth.
He drives. With one hand. Arm out the window in the blue October
air. On the next curve, he is stunned motionless to meet a sudden red
pickup loaded with deerhunters in camouflage. He scoots low and rams
both feet on the brake pedal and his whole stiff body shoots forward
like a dummy's. His head hits the windshield hard enough to crack. He
screams, clasps his face with both hands, then wraps his arms around
the steering wheel, sobbing like a girl. Watery light behind closed
eyes. When he opens them, the red pickup is on his left, edging along
the ditch, and the two men on back with deer rifles are watching him.
A dead buck lies sideslung on the tailgate with one oval eye up to
the sun--solid turquoise. The man on the far side looks like Ike, has
a bristly black beard and a huge belly and a mad stare.
You a queer, boy? What ails you, crying like that? Beat the shit
out of them old boys next time they go to picking on you. And if I
catch you running to that old biddy next door evertime you stump your
toe, I'm gone take my belt to you...I'm gone put a knot on your
head...I'm gone tie a knot in your ass... Sensitive, shit! Pages from
Beebee's construction-paper-bound, self-illustrated poetry book went
sailing around his bedroom, silly words limned with snake squiggles
and hearts and stars exposing the secret satisfaction of his sorry
life.
Face pressed into his pillow and corners pulled jam-up around
his ears, smelling the oil from his own hair that makes him Beebee
and special and somebody nobody else can know, he had listened to Ike
and his mama quarreling in the kitchen, growls with sharp edges that
generated stars before his eyes, as if seeing and hearing were the
same and yet somehow separate and something he would know when he got
to that age of knowing, when he got around to being what everybody
wanted him to be if he could hold on that long.
Now, he listens to the truck engine hum out in the humming of
his eardrums but doesn't look till he has to spit out the window. Mud
is spinning from the rear wheels of the red pickup to the myrtle and
tyty bushes each side of the sumpy road.
"Hey, Ike!" he yells. "I wadn't really crying. I didn't even cry
when I shot my own mama this morning."
"When I shot my own mama this morning" echoes out over the woods
and goes flat before Beebee can add, "and my daddy's wife too," which
he wouldn't have said if he deep-down believed that was Ike in the
truck, if he deep-down believed he had for sure killed his mother and
his stepmother too. Half the time he feels there is a camera out
there filming what he does, just as his echo is recording what he
says.
He drives on, white-knuckling the steering wheel and this time
keeping to the right and slow around curves, just in case, though he
doesn't meet another truck and can't even find a ramp that doesn't
look boggy which he can pull deep enough into to back out without
dropping the rear wheels into one of the carved ditches.
He wants to go home.
Paul Harvey is preaching on the radio, which means it's 12
o'clock now, and Beebee is sick of the lump of snuff in his lip and
would like something salty, something fizzy to cut the taste. His
head aches. He wants to see somebody, though he has no idea who. Not
the tough boys at school he's been trying to get in with; not the
sniggering girls he used to hang out with in middle school. Not even
Linda Sellers, who he has picked to prove his manhood. She's like a
diamondback rattler, pretty only at a distance. He does kind of wish
she could see him driving though. But what he'd really like is to go
home and watch TV, on a school day, eating barbecue potato chips and
drinking Coke.
He knows who he wants to see: Geraldo, Jenny Jones, Oprah
Winfrey. The usual. The usual nerved-up audiences whose blank faces
and braying voices spike out to a thin line that keeps Beebee's mind
in motion without thinking. Maybe even Bob Barker, on "The Price is
Right," though recalling the hokey music and shouts, Beebee feels
that to watch that show would be taking a step back to the old days
when he'd be out of school with a stomachache or earache--too old for
Miss Frankie's daycare then--and watch TV till his mama got home from
work.
Stuffed but starving, he would listen for his mama's car. The
later it got the harder he listened, till if he hadn't died or gone
deaf from listening around the ghosting voices on the TV, he would
have had to hear sooner or later her car slowing on the highway,
motoring up the drive, its socketed roar under the carport. The car
door would snick open and clap shut and the kitchen door would squeak
and whoosh causing the blank beige drapes to suck to the living room
windows, then billow as if the TV had started breathing.
High heels clicking across the kitchen tiles and going soft on
the carpet in the living room. "You eat yet?"
He would shake an empty potato chip sack at her.
"Honey, why didn't you make you some soup or something?" Navy
pumps kicked from her stockinged feet and sprawled on the dingy
carpet. "Mama's bushed."
She would turn back into the kitchen, feet padding on the floor,
mumbling as she clanked dirty dishes and slammed drawers. "Beebee,
this kitchen's a mess." More mumbling. Spoiled milk, webby crackers.
"If you had a broke leg, I could understand it."
Too weary from sitting for too long, he would draw up small in
the club chair and wait for her to get louder, then taper off.
The phone would ring in the hall, in the kitchen, and she would
answer in that voice seldom switched on at home--over being tired,
over being mad--her otherplace, otherpeople tone, and the next day he
would go back to school unchanged.
Driving, looking for a place to turn around, Beebee reaches into
her pocketbook again, fingering lipstick and wadded Kleenex he knows
have her lip prints on them, and change on the bottom where the seams
of leather meet, but no long stiff wallet-thing.
He looks at the floor on the other side and doesn't see it, at
the floor beneath his cream ostrich boots and doesn't see it, then up
at the dash and sees a red light flashing on the letter E.
"Shit!" he says.
Next ramp, he angles the car in, scrubbing bushes, yanks the
gear shift in P, then R, hits the gas, and is surprised when the
dainty tires spin out to the road without bogging, so surprised that
he forgets to let up on the gas and backs into the ditch with the
rear of the car dropping on his side and the front popping up on the
other side, leaving him gawking up at the blown-glass sky of October
through the treetops. Through the windshield collecting brown worms
of pine mast.
He shoves the door open and has to hold it open to prevent it
from slamming on his body--ding, ding, ding--climbs out and surveys
the long blue body of the car with its centerpoint resting on the
banked gray dirt.
He reaches through the window, picks up the pistol and tucks it
in the waist of his jeans, then buttons his blue denim overshirt to
cover it. He starts walking. He has to get home. He has lost his
mama's wallet, he has wrecked the car, school will be letting out
soon.
Behind him he can hear Garth Brooks singing "Friends in Low
Places" again. He feels all right, though his kneecaps feel twitchy
and his feet in the pointy-toed ostrich boots feel numb. Those bribe-
the-kid boots that cost his mama a week's pay when she went away with
her friends to Fernandina Beach for a forget-Ike weekend.
By the time he gets to highway, the sun is streaking down the
valley of gravel between pines. He walks toward home, along the right
shoulder of the road, hearing his boot heels clicking smartly on the
gravel and smelling the sun-heated asphalt cooling down and the sagey
cured grass and weeds of the wide, shallow ditches. Hungry tired and
thinking he will hitch a ride with the first automobile comes by. But
when he hears an engine like waves on a seashore, he lopes down the
ditch, through a trench of black water, and squats in a cluster of
palmettoes till the car shishes by and turns to a wave sloshing out
to sea.
All that saves him, all that makes him stand again and walk out
and continue walking, is thinking about what Ike the Stepfather or
Hannibal the Cannibal would do under the circumstances. But even
thinking about them doesn't work to keep him brave and sure when two
yellow school buses pass, like cocoons with metamorphosing moths, and
he is left with only the nothingness ringing of the lone locust.
###
It is cold and fusing dusk when he gets to the strand of woods
behind the row houses where he lives, where he used to shoot
squirrels with his B.B. gun on fair fall evenings like this one--
before Miss Frankie took the gun away from him. Kill it and you'll
eat it, Mister, I don't care if it's crow. Big laugh.
The sky is just losing its blue hue, and there's a topaz glow
where the sun is guttering out on the rim of the world. He can hear
the squirrels slisking air through their teeth, their claws on the
viney gum trunks as they spiral up; he can smell smoke--leaves
burning--and the rooty scent of chilling dirt, and he can see the
fake-moon glow of the halogen lights blooming in yards, and hear the
voices of people on TV and live. Pots and pans clanging, dogs
barking, somebody laughing, somebody crying. He wipes his eyes on the
sleeves of his denim shirt and starts down a deer path toward home.
Toward the off-and-on laughter of a TV.
In the grassed clearing of the yard, smoke unravels from a pile
of burning leaves between a tilled garden patch and a scraggly tree
with a couple of withered brown pears still hanging on after the
leaves have started to shed. A breeze stirs the white curtains in the
windows of the plain gray house. A sparrow flies down from the eaves
to a green shrub. Light as a falling leaf.
The spotted puppy comes and licks his boots and wambles with him
among the toys--a sandbox, a seesaw, a rocking horse, the faded
green, pleated-plastic Inchworm he rode to the mother-of-pearl moon
one day. A moon by day! Beebee walks past the redwood picnic table
cobbled in drying pumpkin seeds and pulp to the back wall of the
house, steps up on top of the air-conditioning unit and lifts the
screen from the window and steps inside. Removing the pistol from his
waistband, he creeps through the dim airy room with a white chenille
spread on the bed where he has read books, and on to the chute of
light from the hall, smelling toasted bread and hearing voices from
the TV that sound too familiar to be real.
He has done this before; she won't mind. This is home. She
understands. She knows he is a dreamer and a dreamer needs a place to
dream. A place to hide what is precious from the dream thieves.
He is halfway down the brief hall papered with children's crayon
drawings--all A's, all starred--and even some of his own drawings and
poems, when he sees her standing with her pudgy painted fingers
tugging down on her silky orange blouse. It has repeating patterns of
black witches on brooms and halfmoons hung over kettles.
"I ain't gone hurt you, Miss Frankie," he says and stops,
holding out the hand with the pistol."I'm hungry."
Her brittle platinum hair is puffed high on top and curled on
the ends, and he knows the children helped unpin the pink rollers and
brush her hair before they left for the day. Maybe helped paint the
black eyebrows and dab on the red rouge and lipstick and the morning-
glory blue eyeshadow that makes her eyes look open when they are
shut. A sad clown face.
She moves toward him.
He backs toward the bedroom.
She stops. He stops.
"She ain't dead, is she?" he says. "Don't tell me she's dead."
Her padded shoulders quake, her hiked breasts rise and fall.
They look hard but feel soft when she hugs him and calls him honey,
feeling for the pulse of his pain. She looks strange standing still:
she is never not moving, she is never not talking and smiling--her
mouth and body are like an electric machine. She looks as if she's
come unplugged. She looks old, ridiculous in her youthful get-up, yet
as beautiful as she hopes to be through Beebee's eyes.
"Don't call the sheriff on me," he says, again offering her the
pistol.
"I have to, honey," she says, easing toward him and taking the
pistol from his hand. "But I'll hold you in my arms till he gets
here."