In Memory of Junior Page 5

  I got my twelve-gauge Remington automatic out of the closet, found a box of shells, buckshot, in the top dresser drawer, got out seven, dropped them on the bed. By god, if I did end up shooting this dog, the dog wouldn’t just be dead. He’d be dead dead. I wouldn’t do nothing like this half-ass.

  The Remington is my daddy’s. Was my daddy’s. He probably didn’t use it no more than eight or ten times in his life. He gave it to me after he got sick this last time. Last long time. He took me quail hunting a few times when I was little, but hell, I did more stuff like that with Uncle Grove in the six months I stayed with him than I did with my daddy all my life. Hunting, fishing, stuff like that.

  Uncle Grove used to have a bunch of guns. He’s still got that one that was handed down—the double-barrel with the old-fashioned hammers, handed down from his daddy, my mama’s daddy—the gun that was in a fight at a liquor still, got hit with buckshot. Uncle Grove told me that story a bunch of times. His daddy had to pick buckshot out of this nigger’s head. Black man.

  Mama told me some stuff, too. I remember her letting me sew one time—stick a needle with a white thread through a button hole. And I remember her chasing me around the house one time, and driving me to town in a car. She was pretty.

  Phone rang. “Hello.” It was the guy with the dog. Okay, I thought, let’s see what’s coming down here.

  “You the one wanted me to call you?”

  “Yeah. That dog has been barking for two solid days and nights, and it’s driving me crazy.”

  “I think I can get him quiet,” he says.

  “That’s good,” I said. “You want to take him in the house, fine. It ain’t my problem. But if I have to, I’ll—”

  “Where you located?”

  “Out your back door and to the left. That’s my house.” No way to meet this kind of thing but head-on, so I said, “I’ll meet you out at the bushes there if you want to.”

  So I go on out there and when I see this guy, I say, “You’re the same guy!”

  “Nah,” he says. “He’s my twin brother.”

  “You ain’t the same one?” They looked exactly alike.

  “No way. Now look here,” he says, “the dog was just barking, that’s all.”

  “I know he was just barking. That’s what he’s been doing for two days and nights. That’s the problem.”

  The dog starts yelping. Right then and there. So the guy acts a little nervous.

  I yell, “Shut up!”

  The dog stops barking. The guy looks at me, at the dog. “Good boy,” he says to the dog.

  There was a break in the bushes—a path. “Let me see the dog,” I said. “I know something about dogs.” I do, too. I walked on through.

  The dog was in one side of a double garage. A motorboat was in the other side, where the sun shined in, propped up on a little refrigerator. The dog was standing in the shady part, breathing vapor, chain running from his collar through a hole in the back of the garage and all these cages the size of suitcases laying around in there.

  Dog wagged his tail, pranced on his front paws. I put out my fist. The dog licked it. “It’s a Doberman,” I said, squatting down. “Or mostly Doberman.”

  Another dog, a pointer—liver and white—stood up from behind the boat. He stretched and shook off all over. “Whose pointer?” I said. “He’s right pretty.”

  “Jimmy’s. I bought them both, gave Jimmy the bird dog. He is pretty.”

  “Looks like a bird dog I used to have. I was going to give my boy a bird dog.”

  “What happened?”

  “He died,” I said.

  “I had a pit bull die on me three, four years ago. But he’d been eat up pretty good before I bought him.”

  “My boy died,” I said.

  “Damn. I’m sorry. What happened? Or . . . you know.”

  “Car wreck.” I didn’t want to get into all that. “You hunt any?”

  “Used to. But I quit shooting the birds. What’s your name?”

  “Faison.”

  “I quit shooting the birds, Faison. You know, got tired of it. But Jimmy still hunts. Goes all the time.”

  Right here I thought, man. Here’s a bird dog—good-looking bird dog. Here’s somebody at my back door that likes to hunt birds. I hadn’t been hunting in a long, long time. “What are all those cages for?” I couldn’t figure that one out.

  “Snakes. Jimmy’s a snake handler. Does shows for schools and stuff.”

  “Has he got any in there? Maybe that’s why—”

  “Naw, he’s out of snakes right now. He lets them out under the neighbors’ houses.”

  “What? He what?”

  “Just kidding. He sells them, lets them out in the woods, different stuff. He’s supposed to be getting some new ones. Jimmy don’t stay out of snakes long.” He patted the bird dog’s head, looked at me. “He says he’s going bird hunting in the morning. Try out that dog. Dog’s been broke. Think you might want to go?”

  “Well. Yeah, I’ll go bird hunting. I’ll go bird hunting.”

  The pointer had good blood. You could tell. A beautiful dog. “But we got to do something about this other one’s barking,” I said.

  “We’ll work something out. We’ll bring him inside if he keeps it up. His name is Cactus. Hey, Jimmy,” he yelled.

  Jimmy came to the back door. They were twins.

  “What’s up?” says Jimmy.

  “This guy—what’s your name again?”

  “Faison.”

  “Faison wants to go hunting with you in the morning. He’s a old bird hunter.”

  “Sure. Come on out about six-thirty. I need somebody to go with me. Timmy won’t go. He got saved or something. Something happened.”

  “I just decided to stop shooting the birds. That’s all.”

  “I’ll be here,” I said. “I hope he’s a good dog.”

  “He’s a good dog. He better be.”

  Then they took the Doberman inside.

  That was about as simple as you could ask for. Stand your ground, don’t blink, nine times out of ten things will work out for you.

  June Lee

  Since me and Faison broke up I’ve moved twice, but the place I got now, I like best. It’s an apartment in the basement of a nice two-story home in Cherry Hill Acres. I got my own entrance, kitchen, parking place. And out back is a little patch of woods that’s real nice. I’ve been walking out there some.

  It seems like me and Faison can’t get around to a divorce. Everybody else I know, everybody, has been divorced. Faison’s brother, too. I liked his wife all right. We ate over there some. She got the house. Their boy is weird, and I think that kind of comes from her, actually.

  Faison or me don’t really want a divorce, so we keep seeing each other—here and there, one way or another. Since Junior died, it’s been hard. That car wreck was the event of my life, and I did some counseling with Preacher Gordon, but it got to be the same kind of thing over and over, the counseling. I do think he helped me in some ways. But some things you just can’t change.

  To let you know about how we are together—me and Faison—it’s almost like the last fight we had. It’s almost like that explains it.

  We were out in the backyard in broad daylight. “It was a promise!” he yelled. Screaming. “You promised to change his name. It was a goddamned promise!” He just kept yelling this over and over, about the name. Like Junior was his, and like that dumb name change was more important than anything else. He was acting crazy.

  I slapped him, I had to, and screamed right back at him, “He was mine, you son of a bitch. You don’t have no rights in any of this.”

  He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me toward the garage. I tried to get away. He was acting crazier than I’d ever seen him.

  He got me in the tool room—off the garage—and while I was scrambling to get back out I grabbed a shelf beside the door and it pulled down and stuff started falling all around us and I felt him ease up, soften up, come to his senses and
right there I realized with some kind of jolt that I was there in that tool room with the only person in the world I had. The only one. And in that minute that everything was falling down in the tool shed, I just reached down and put my hand on Faison, you know, like I used to do when we were playing around. We always played around a lot. And he melted. Right there in the tool room. Then he won’t melted, if you know what I mean. And for a minute I turned loose all he’d done with the lies when we got married. See, Faison was all I had in the world, except God. That’s one of the things I couldn’t straighten out with Preacher Gordon. If God reasons out things that happen, like they say at church, He didn’t have no reason to let that happen to us, Junior getting killed in a car wreck, with me driving. No God could ever have a reason for letting that happen.

  Faison showed up this afternoon.

  “I brought you some mail,” he said, standing in the door. Then he just started right in talking, came on in like he lives here, you know.

  “You been drinking?” I asked him. I could smell it.

  “Couple of beers,” he said.

  He started telling me about his Uncle Grove’s footstone getting cracked in two when it was being shipped.

  “Cracked in two?” I said.

  “That’s right. Cracked in two right down the middle. There was this brass plate won’t harmed none, but that stone, man, was sure cracked in two.”

  “Why was he shipping a footstone?” I asked him. At that moment, Faison had to be thinking about Junior’s footstone, too. He couldn’t be standing there talking about a footstone and not be thinking about Junior’s.

  “He wants me and Tate to set him up a place to be buried. That’s all I know. So I guess we will.” Then he sat on the sofa, kind of looked around, casual-like. “Listen to this,” he says. “There was this dog barking out back yesterday. Been barking for days. So I go out there and this guy acts like I’m the one with the problem. You know, your typical—”

  “You want a Coke?” I knew he was getting into a long-winded story about something.

  “Got a beer?” he says. He knows I don’t have no beer.

  “You know I don’t have no beer, Faison.”

  “Just give me some water, then. So,” he says, “this guy acts like I’m the one with the problem. This is the way people are all over the place. You point out a problem and it’s you got the problem. You know what I mean?”

  I told him I did. I do, too—because I know Faison Bales.

  “But it turned out good,” he says.

  I handed him a glass of water. Just like him, he hadn’t said nothing about my place. Real nice little kitchen area. Just perfect, you know, for one person.

  “So, anyway,” he says, “this turns out to be a pretty decent guy after all, and hell, I end up getting a chance to go hunting. Tomorrow probably. With the one I didn’t think I liked. They were twins—Jimmy and Timmy. We’re going fishing sometime too, probably.”

  “You’re going to get killed hunting and drinking, Faison. It’s stupid.” He is very stupid that way.

  “You know,” he says—he throws his arm up on the couch, getting really settled in—“I ain’t been hunting since before, you know, Junior died.”

  Something snapped. “Faison . . .” I didn’t want to hear any more. Nothing.

  “What?” he says. Real surprised-like. This stuff builds up in me when he’s away.

  “Faison,” I said, “will you please put that tombstone back? It’s been over a year, and legally, it’s against the law to have that footstone out there with the wrong name on it. I ain’t going to just forget it. You know I’m going to do something about it if you don’t.”

  “June Lee, let’s don’t get started on that.”

  “You know I’ll switch it back if you don’t, Faison.”

  “Shit, June Lee, you know I’ll switch it back if you switch it back.”

  “You lied to me, Faison.” He told me he’d never been married, never really loved anybody, all this.

  “June Lee,” he says, “if I’d had the slightest idea it meant all that much to you, I’d a told you before I did.”

  “You lie. You knew it would of made a difference and that’s why you lied in the first place.”

  “I didn’t lie in the first place.”

  “Come off it, Faison.”

  “I think we ought to forget it. The footstone’s in place and that was our agreement, June Lee. We made an agreement.”

  “I ain’t talking about the footstone, Faison.”

  “Listen, June Lee, I want to ask you something,” he says. Going into his serious Mr. Lawyer mode. “Okay,” he says. “I just thought about this the other night. What if you had known I’d been married? What then?”

  Faison has this way of letting his face go into these expressions that may or may not go along with what he’s saying. And he’ll find a spot over your shoulder and stare at that instead of look you in the eye.

  “It was more than if I’d known you’d been married, Faison. You know that. But if I had known just that,” I said, “then I’d known I was marrying a honest man.”

  I’ve had a hard time with men in my life.

  “Honest, huh? I don’t understand why it’s so damned important about this stuff that’s history. Sure, I was married. But it was a failure. I put it behind me. It was a failure. Like they say, you buy what you pay for.”

  “You buy what you . . . ? Faison. And I don’t know why,” I said, “it’s so important for you to have a boy that won’t yours in the first place named after you. That’s history too, Faison.”

  He stood up. “I got to get out of here,” he says.

  “Good. Good. You just walk away from it, Faison. You always were good at that. Walking away. You’ll be walking away when you die.”

  That got his attention. He slammed the storm door so hard, the glass broke.

  I yelled, “Which won’t be one minute too soon!”

  Thank god the Pattersons—upstairs—were gone. The glass fell on the outside, not the inside. Several big pieces. One leaned against the door. I just stood there—started biting a fingernail. I’ve been trying real hard to stop doing that.

  Why couldn’t Faison have been just a little bit more like Tate, and had some ambition, some sense about moving up in the world? If he’d been different then there wouldn’t have been a fight that day, the day I started out in the car. Why couldn’t he have just been a little bit different?

  Can’t live with him, can’t live without him. Damned if I do. Damned if I don’t.

  At some point I’m going to have to change that footstone back myself. I know where I can find some help.

  4

  Gloria

  It’s like Mr. Glenn more or less give up. I have to prop his back up with the pillows, then get his legs down off the side of the bed for circulation. He’s lasted a long time this way, and Miss Laura she going down so fast, I think maybe he be the one to outlast her, instead of the other way round.

  Miss Laura, she can stand on the floor and walk over to the window and back. We still do that twice a day. Once at ten and once at three. Social services all for that. But sometime it seem like she don’t even know where she is. She don’t even look out the window no more like she used to. She used to would stop and stand there a little while and mumble a little something. Now when she get over there she just turn around and head back like she be glad to lay back down.

  She used to mostly talk about Mr. Glenn, about all she had to do for him for all that time before she got sick. She tell me about having to pick him up outen the bathroom floor and all that. She tell about other stuff over and over too. That’s where he kept falling—in the bathroom. But at least she had one of them high commode tops, which I didn’t know nothing about while Lorenzo were down and out. You get a little bitty low commode down close to the floor, and you try to get a sick man, a dying sick man, down and then up off it without him toppling over in the floor, then you be doing a pretty good balancing act. You be
leaning back with all your weight pulling him up and if your hand slip loose you go over backwards yourself. And once he topple down there on the way down, instead of on the way up, then you know where he gone shit. He gone shit in the floor. And who gone clean it up? Mr. Clean? Michael Jordan?

  How bout them naming that highway after Michael Jordan? Pick my chicken. What that young whippersnapper done to get a road named after him except look out after hisself, doing what he love to do all his short life, big and strong with all that natural gift from God? What else he done? Seem like to me the one they name the road after would be somebody who done looked after somebody they have to look after—while they love the person but hate all that cleaning up and toting and heaving and lifting and shaving and wiping and feeding and scraping driedup stuff you don’t know what it is off the floor and the table legs. Humph. And you doing all this when you ain’t feeling so good yourself and ain’t got enough money to buy no bed sheets and run plum out of energy but have to keep going anyway, no matter what.

  Michael Jordan? You think he ever short on bed sheets? And if he ever been, you think he ain’t more than made up for it? And they name the road after Michael Jordan?

  I know Miss Laura she done a lot, because Lorenzo he only lasted bout two and a half years after he got down. Mr. Glenn he lasted I think about eleven years. And them boys of his not much help. Course my chiren was the same way.

  When I was growing up people took care of the old folks. We did, anyway.

  What would get me down most is Lorenzo’s bowels, you know. And then there’s no worse smell in bed sheets than piss less it be bedsores. Lord a mercy I would keep sheets in the tub. I wish I’d had the washamachine that’s here at Mr. Glenn’s. If anybody wanted to know what I needed I’d say lord honey I could sure use a washamachine.

  What about my little hallway with the cracks in the floor I travel back and forth on to the bathroom with my Lorenzo. Why don’t the government pave that and name that after Michael Jordan? Sha. I just don’t get it. A man make his living jumping up and down with people screaming all over the place and him making enough money to pave Hanson County three times over in gold-plated concrete getting a big four-lane highway named after him while at the same time hundreds of little women in North Carolina breaking their own backs scrubbing up after a sick, broke-down husband who done worried hisself down to a nub after sixty-five years of toting shingles and nailing roofs and these little women can’t buy a pair of bed sheets cause they cost so much—you looked at the price of bed sheets lately?—and they don’t have time to powder their nose much less wipe their own ass and they don’t even get their names wrote down in a . . . a two-bit beggarman’s matchbook.