Boy's Life (33 page)

     The house was comfortable, but really nothing special. The land around it was, except for the stunted corn field, a garden and a small plot of grass, mostly forest; it was where the Jaybird stalked his prey. Grandmomma Sarah was genuinely glad to see us when we arrived, and she ushered us all into the front room, where electric fans stirred the heat. Then the Jaybird made his appearance, clad in overalls, and he carried with him a big glass jar full of golden liquid that he announced to be honeysuckle tea. “Been brewin’ it for two weeks,” he said. “Lettin’ it mellow, ya see.” He had mason jars all ready for us. “Have a sip!”

     I have to say it was very good. Everybody but the Jaybird had a second glass of it. Maybe he knew how potent the stuff was. Within twelve hours, I would be sitting on the pot feeling as if my insides were flooding out, and at home Dad and Mom would be just as bad off. Grandmomma Sarah, who was surely used to such concoctions by now, would sleep like a log through the whole disgusting episode, except in the dead of night she was liable to make a high, banshee keening noise in her sleep that was guaranteed to lift the hair right off your scalp.

     Anyway, the time came when Dad and Mom had to be getting back to Zephyr. I felt my face sag, and I must’ve looked like a wounded puppy because Mom put her arm around me on the porch and said, “You’ll be all right. Call me tonight, okay?”

     “I will,” I vowed, and I watched them as they drove away. The dust settled over the brown cornstalks. Just one week, I thought. One week wouldn’t be so bad.

     “Hey, Cory!” the Jaybird said from his rocking chair. He was grinning, which was a bad sign. “Got a joke for ya! Three strings walk into a bar. First string says, ‘Gimme a drink!’ Bartender looks at him, says, ‘We don’t serve strings in here, so get out!’ Second string tries his luck. ‘Gimme a drink!’ Bartender says, Told you we don’t serve strings in here, so you hit the trail!’ Then the third string’s just as thirsty as the devil, so he’s got to try, too. ‘Gimme a drink!’ he says. Bartender looks at him squinty-eyed, says, ‘You’re a danged-gone
string
, too, ain’t ya?’ And the string, he puffs out his chest and says, ‘’Fraid not!’” The Jaybird hooted with laughter, while I just stood there staring at him. “Get it, boy? Get it? ‘‘Fraid not’?” He frowned, the joke over. “Hell!” he growled. “You got a sense of humor as bad as your daddy’s!”

     One week. Oh, Lord.

     There were two subjects the Jaybird could talk about for hours on end: his survival through the Depression, when he held such jobs as coffin polisher, railroad brakeman, and carnival roustabout, and his success as a young man with women, which according to him was enough to turn Valentino green. I would have thought that was a big deal if I’d known who Valentino was. Anytime the Jaybird and I were away from the reach of my grandmother’s ear, he might launch into a tale about “Edith the preacher’s daughter from Tupelo” or “Nancy the conductor’s niece from Nashville” or “that buck-toothed girl used to hang around eatin’ candy apples.” He rambled on about his “jimbob” and how the girls got all fired up about it. Said there used to be jealous boyfriends and husbands after him by the dozens, but he always escaped whatever trap was closing around him. Once, he said, he’d hung on to the bottom of a railroad trestle above a hundred-foot gorge while two men with shotguns stood right above him, talking about how they were going to skin him alive and nail his hide to a tree. “Thing was,” the Jaybird said to me as he chewed lustily on a weed, “I spoiled them girls for every other fella. Yeah, me and my jimbob, we had us a time.” Then, inevitably, his eyes would take on a sad cast, and the young man with the flaming jimbob would start slipping away. “I bet you I wouldn’t know one of them girls today if I passed her on the street. No sir. They’d be old women, and I wouldn’t know a one of them.”

     Granddaddy Jaybird despised sleep. Maybe it had something to do with his knowing that his days on this earth were numbered. Come five o’clock, rain or shine, he’d rip the covers off me like a whirlwind passing through and his voice would roar in my ear: “Get up, boy! Think you’re gonna live
forever?
”

     I would invariably mumble, “No, sir,” and sit up, and the Jaybird would go on to rouse my grandmother into cooking a breakfast that might have served Sgt. Rock and most of Easy Company.

     The days I spent with my grandparents followed no pattern once breakfast was down the hatch. I could just as well be handed a garden hoe and told to get to work as I could be informed that I might enjoy a trip to the pond in the woods behind the house. Granddaddy Jaybird kept a few dozen chickens, three goats—all of whom closely resembled him—and for some strange reason he kept a snapping turtle named Wisdom in a big metal tub full of slimy water in the backyard. When one of those goats stuck his nose into Wisdom’s territory, and Wisdom took hold, there was hell to pay. Things were commonly in an uproar at the Jaybird’s place: “All snakes and dingleberries” was his phrase to describe a chaotic moment, as when Wisdom bit a thirsty goat and the goat in turn careened into the clean laundry my grandmother was hanging on the line, ending up running around festooned in sheets and dragging them through the garden I’d just been hoeing. The Jaybird was proud of his collection of the skeletons of small animals which he’d painstakingly wired together. You never knew where those skeletons might appear; the Jaybird had a nasty knack for putting them in places you might reach into before looking, like beneath a pillow or in your shoe. Then he’d laugh like a demon when he heard you squall. His sense of humor was, to say it kindly, warped. On Wednesday afternoon he told me he’d found a nest of rattlesnakes near the house last week and killed them all with a shovel. As I was about to drift off to sleep that night, already dreading five o’clock, he opened my door and peered into the dark and said in a quiet, ominous voice, “Cory? Be careful if you get up to pee tonight. Your grandmomma found a fresh-shed snakeskin under your bed this mornin’. Good-sized rattle on it, too. ’Night, now.”

     He’d closed the door. I was still awake at five.

     What I realized, long after the fact, was that Granddaddy Jaybird was honing me like one might sharpen a blade on a grinding edge. I don’t think he knew he was doing this, but that’s how it came out. Take the snake story. As I lay awake in the dark, my bladder steadily expanding within me, my imagination was at work. I could see that rattler, coiled somewhere in the room, waiting for the squeak of a bare foot pressing on a board. I could see the colors of the forest in its scaly hide, its terrible flat head resting on a ledge of air, its fangs slightly adrip. I could see the muscles ripple slowly along its sides as it tasted my scent. I could see it grin in the dark, same to say, “You’re
mine
, bub.”

     If there could be a school for the imagination, the Jaybird would be its headmaster. The lesson I learned that night, in what you can make yourself describe in your mind as true, I couldn’t have bought at the finest college. There was also the subsidiary lesson of gritting your teeth and bearing pain, hour upon hour, and damning yourself for drinking an extra glass of milk at supper.

     You see, the Jaybird was teaching me well, though he didn’t have a clue.

     There were other lessons, all of them valuable. And tests, too. On Friday afternoon Grandmomma Sarah asked him to drive into town to pick up a box of ice cream salt at the grocery store. Normally the Jaybird didn’t like to run errands, but today he was agreeable. He asked me to go with him, and Grandmomma Sarah said the sooner we got back the sooner the ice cream would be made.

     It was a day right for ice cream. Ninety degrees in the shade, and so hot in the full sun that if a dog went running, its shadow dropped down to rest. We got the ice cream salt, but on the way back, in the Jaybird’s bulky old Ford, another test began.

     “Jerome Claypool lives just down the road,” he said. “He’s a good ole fella. Want to drop by and say howdy?”

     “We’d better get the ice cream salt to—”

     “Yeah, Jerome’s a good ole fella,” the Jaybird said as he turned the Ford toward his friend’s house.

     Six miles later, he stopped in front of a ramshackle farmhouse that had a rotting sofa, a cast-off wringer, and a pile of moldering tires and rusted radiators in the front yard. I think we had crossed the line between Zephyr and Dogpatch by way of Tobacco Road somewhere a few miles back. Obviously, though, Jerome Claypool was a popular good ole fella, because there were four other cars parked in front of the place as well. “Come on, Cory,” the Jaybird said as he opened his door. “We’ll just go in a minute or two.”

     I could smell the stench of cheap cigars before we got to the porch. The Jaybird knocked on the door:
rap rap rapraprap
. “Who is it?” a cautious voice inquired from within. My grandfather replied, “Blood ‘n Guts,” which made me stare at him, thinking he’d lost whatever mind he had left. The door opened on noisy hinges, and a long-jawed face with dark, wrinkle-edged eyes peered out. Those eyes found me. “Who’s
he?
”

     “My grandboy,” Jaybird said, and put his hand on my shoulder. “Name’s Cory.”

     “Jesus, Jay!” the long-jawed face said with a scowl. “What’re you bringin’ a
kid
around here for?”

     “No harm done. He won’t say nothin’. Will you, Cory?” The hand tightened.

     I didn’t understand what was going on, but clearly this was not a place Grandmomma Sarah would have enjoyed visiting. I thought of Miss Grace’s house out beyond Saxon’s Lake, and the girl named Lainie who’d furled her wet pink tongue at me. “No sir,” I told him, and the grip relaxed again. His secret—whatever it might be—was safe.

     “Bodean won’t like this,” the man warned.

     “Jerome, Bodean can stick his head up his ass for all I care. You gonna let me in or not?”

     “You got the green?”

     “Burnin’ a hole,” the Jaybird said, and touched his pocket.

     I balked as he started pulling me over the threshold. “Grandmomma’s waitin’ for the ice cream sa—”

     He looked at me, and I saw something of his true nature deep in his eyes, like the glare of a distant blast furnace. On his face there was a desperate hunger, inflamed by whatever was going on in that house. Ice cream salt was forgotten; ice cream itself was part of another world six miles away. “Come on!” he snapped.

     I stood my ground. “I don’t think we ought to—”

     “You don’t
think!
” he said, and whatever was pulling him into that house seized his face and made it mean. “You just do what I tell you, hear me?”

     He gave me a hard yank and I went with him, my heart scorched. Mr. Claypool closed the door behind us and bolted it. Cigar smoke drifted in a room where no sunlight entered; the windows were all boarded up and a few measly electric lights were burning. We followed Mr. Claypool through a hallway to the rear of the house, and he opened another door. The windowless room we walked into was layered with smoke, too, and at its center was a round table where four men sat under a harsh light playing cards, poker chips in stacks before them and glasses of amber liquid near at hand. “Fuck that noise!” one of the men was saying, making my ears sting. “I ain’t gonna be bluffed, no sir!”

     “Five dollars to you, then, Mr. Cool,” another one said. A red chip hit the pile at the table’s center. A cigar tip glowed like a volcano in the maelstrom. “Raise you five,” the third man said, the cigar wedged in the side of a scarlike mouth. “Come on, put up or shut—” I saw his small, piggish eyes dart at me, and the man slapped his cards facedown on the table. “
Hey!
” he shouted. “What’s that kid doin’ in here?”

     Instantly I was the focus of attention. “Jaybird, have you gone fuckin’ crazy?” one of the other men asked. “Get him out!”

     “He’s all right,” my grandfather said. “He’s family.”

      “Not
my
family.” The man with the cigar leaned forward, his thick forearms braced on the table. His brown hair was cropped in a crew cut, and on the little finger of his right hand he wore a diamond ring. He took the cigar from his mouth, his eyes narrowed into slits. “You know the rules, Jaybird. Nobody comes in here without gettin’ approved.”

     “He’s all right. He’s my grandson.”

     “I don’t care if he’s the fuckin’ prince of England. You broke the rules.”

     “Now, there’s no call to be ugly about it, is th—”

     “You’re
stupid!
” the man shouted, his mouth twisting as he spoke the word. A fine sheen of sweat glistened on his face, and his white shirt was damp. On the breast pocket, next to a tobacco stain, was a monogram: BB. “
Stupid!
” he repeated. “You want the law to come in and bust us up? Why don’t you just give a map to that goddamned sheriff?”

     “Cory won’t say anythin’. He’s a good boy.”

     “That so?” The small pig eyes returned to me. “You as stupid as your grandpap, boy?”

     “No sir,” I said.

     He laughed. The sound of it reminded me of when Phillip Kenner threw up his oatmeal in school last April. The man’s eyes were not happy, but his mouth was tickled. “Well, you’re a smart little fella, ain’t you?”

     “He takes after me, Mr. Blaylock,” the Jaybird said, and I realized the man who thought I was so smart was Bodean Blaylock himself, brother of Donny and Wade and son of the notorious Biggun. I recalled my grandfather’s brash pronouncement at the door that Bodean could stick his head up his ass; right now, though, it was my grandpop who looked butt-faced.