Carry Me Home (3 page)

“I know it. I know it,” Delbert says. Delbert looks over to where Jimmy and me is sitting on the step eating our sandwiches. His forehead scrinches down ’til you can’t even see he’s got eyes under those clumpy eyebrows. “You and me remember war,” he says. Dad nods. “Goddamn shame,” Delbert says, and Dad says it sure is.

Delbert takes the door handle of his Oldsmobile, but Dad, he don’t stop yapping. “Yeah, it is a shame, Delbert, but still, we gotta do what we gotta do. I came across some papers from that Isolationist group at home. Someone brought them in the store and left them right there on the counter. I threw them out and told Eileen I don’t want to see that kind of crap in the house again. I don’t like the thought of us going to war any more than the next guy, but what to hell you gonna do?”

Then Dad and Delbert talk a bit about the Japs, who Delbert says are just as power-hungry as that goddamn Hitler. Me and Jimmy just eat our lunch and we don’t say nothing. Jimmy’s busy downing them cookies, and I’m busy thinking about them Japs. I ain’t never see’d a Jap before, but Jimmy says they is little yellow bastards with crooked slits for eyes. They sound scary as all hell to me and I hope I never see one.

Dad’s always talking about stuff that’s going on overseas. Jimmy showed me once on the globe where them places are that Dad talks about. He picked up Dad’s newspaper too and showed me a picture of that Hitler guy. He might be scary and mean, but I don’t think he’s too smart. How smart can a guy be who can’t trim his mustache right? There that mustache sits, like a fishing jig, right under his nose. It don’t even reach the sides of his mouth. I never see’d such a crazy-looking mustache in all my life. When Ma saw Jimmy showing me that stuff, she got real ornery. “We have enough to worry about right here at home. We don’t need to be worrying about what’s going on halfway around the world.”

I eat the parts of my sandwich I like, then toss the crust into the empty bag. “Jimmy? That nutty guy with the chopped-off mustache, he gonna come take over Willowridge too?”

Jimmy rubs my head and says, “Don’t you worry about it, Earwig. Ain’t nothing ever gonna change in Willowridge. That you can count on.” But I still worry.

When Delbert leaves, Dad eats the sandwich and cookies I set out for him. He’s still thinking about that Europe place. I can tell, ’cause when Jimmy tries talking to him about the motor he’s got torn apart in the garage, Dad don’t even hear him.

That night, we sit in the living room eating warm molasses cookies as we listen to the
Bob Hope Pepsodent Show
. Dad ain’t got sweat on his face no more. “That Jerry Colonna is one nutty bastard!” Dad laughs as Jerry sings some crazy version of “Blueberry Hill.” We are all laughing our asses off, ’cept for Ma, who says, “I think he should leave the singing to Judy Garland.”

And that’s how the summer and fall of 1940 goes. Me working to pay for what I done wrong and waiting for that Mrs. Pritchard to get back on her fat feet so I can stop doing housework that Jimmy says will make me grow titties if it keeps up much longer.

When Mrs. Pritchard finally comes limping into the store, I’m hoping Ma remembers that she limped before I axed her. I hide in the kitchen, listening, as Mrs. Pritchard tells Ma all about her “recuperation” and about how she hopes Ma taught me a lesson. Ma says, “I assure you, I did.” Then they talk about how that Dickens girl got healed up and how glad they are that summer’s over and that polio season is gone.

’Cause Mrs. Pritchard is on her feet now, and ’cause the polio season is gone, Ma lets me run around again, but she don’t take away them damn chores she added, and I can’t leave ’til they’re done, so there ain’t much time to do anything fun anyway.

Funny how things are. You have them worst days of washing clothes and stocking shelves, and you hate them lousy days when you’re in ’em. And then you have them best days too, like sucker fishing at the millpond, and later your dad saying that the sucker you speared is the best goddamn sucker he ever ate, and you figure them is the best days you’re ever gonna have. Later though, when times get
real
bad, them bad days and them best days get all mixed together in your head, and you think of the whole lot of ’em as something special. Something so goddamn special that you’d give your right nut to go back to ’em.

Chapter 4

I
t’s Jimmy’s twenty-first birthday, so Ma starts baking him a cake soon as her and me get back from church. She frosts it with seven-minute frosting, which I hate ’cause it gets this crunchy coating on top like snow that melted and then frozed up again. When I tell Ma this, she says it ain’t my birthday, it’s Jimmy’s, and he likes seven-minute frosting just fine.

Jimmy’s whole room smells like beer farts when I go to wake him up to tell him Louie and John are downstairs and wanna go over to Floyd’s to do a little hunting. Since it’s Sunday, John don’t have to work at the Knox Lumber Factory, and Louie, who logs with his dad, he don’t work on any day he don’t wanna work. Floyd, he farms with his dad, and ’cept for milking so the cows’ tits don’t bust, they don’t do nothing else on Sunday either, ’cause that’s the day God says you gotta take a rest.

“You get plastered last night, Jimmy?” I ask when Jimmy rolls outta bed and clamps his hands over his head and holds it like there’s a woodpecker hammering inside.

“Yeah, a little bit,” he says. “Hand me my smokes and my pants there.”

“Where’d you go last night?” I ask Jimmy, feeling a little bit of a lump in my throat ’cause Jimmy leaved last night while I was in my room looking at comic books and he didn’t even come in first to see if I wanted to go along.

“Well, Floyd and I were heading to pick up Molly and Mary for the picture show, but we didn’t exactly make it there.”

Ma calls Jimmy “the birthday boy” when we get downstairs, and Louie and John snicker. Ma pats John on the arm when she’s gotta scoot around him, and she gives him a smile. Ma smiles at John ’cause she says that dent he’s got on his chin looks cute. Floyd says he thinks it looks like a butt crack.

“You get home in time for supper, Jimmy,” Ma says as we’re going out the door. “Molly will be here by six.”

Floyd and his dad got 160 acres just outside of town. They don’t got no ma ’cause she died when Floyd was ten years old, but they got a barn and cows, and chickens, and four goats that run up behind you and butt you in the ass with their heads if you ain’t careful. They got a dog named Scout too, one of them yellow Labs, and he goes hunting with us.

“How come I can’t have a dog, Jimmy?” I ask. I’m scratching Scout behind his ear, and his tongue is flip-flapping out the side of his mouth, and his tail is whacking my leg like crazy. Jimmy don’t answer me. He’s busy loading his shotgun with shells from his pocket, and laughing ’cause Louie is teasing John about hosing Ruby Leigh last night. John’s face is some red, but it might be from the wind. “Shit, who
didn’t
hose Ruby Leigh last night?” he says.

“I didn’t, Pissfinger,” Jimmy says.

John whistles, then says, “Well, Gunderman, that’s your loss.”

Jimmy laughs. “I’m missing out on a case of the clap too, but you don’t see me crying about that, do you?”

Jimmy don’t hose nobody no more. Not since him and Molly started talking about getting married soon as Jimmy can get together enough money for a down payment on the Williams place, which he says will be a mighty fine place once it gets fixed up. Jimmy says it’s okay to hose girls like Ruby Leigh when you ain’t promised yourself to another girl and if she ain’t the kind of girl you wanna marry anyway. But he says that it ain’t okay to hose a girl like Molly until after you marry her. He repeats then what Ma always says about men not buying milk when they can get it for free, or something like that. I never did figure what in the hell paying for milk or getting it for free has got to do with girls. Well, unless the girl you’re fixing to hose is a farm girl.

Jimmy hands me a shotgun—even though Ma says I’m not allowed to carry one—and reminds me how to carry it so I don’t shoot my foot off or blow somebody’s goddamn head off. He makes me walk in front of him a bit where he can keep an eye on me. Floyd, he ain’t walking real good, on accounta he was still guzzling Schlitz when we got to his house.

We walk along Balsam Creek, laughing and talking ’til we hear a grouse kick up from the alder brush, his wings making that loud thumping noise when he flies. Jimmy lifts his shotgun quicker than you can say “fart,” then,
pow!
That grouse drops, deader than dead. Scout takes off and comes back with the bird flapping out of his mouth and brings him right to Jimmy, dropping him at his feet. Jimmy takes the bird and pokes its foot through his belt loop, then flops the bird over so it stays. He gives Scout a pat on the head. It’s the damnedest thing how Scout always knows who shot the bird. Scout’s one smart dog.

We hunt for a few hours, then walk through the old field, heading back toward the house. We is walking along a line, pretty close together, except for Louie, who is off to the side. Jimmy always says that Louie’s got a voice loud enough to crack a guy’s head open, and ain’t that the truth. You go mixing his regular voice, then, with him being all excited ’cause he almost got to hose a girl last night, and we ain’t having a bit a trouble hearing him even though he’s a good fifty feet away.

Louie’s so damn busy yammering that he don’t even notice when a grouse kicks up from the brush between him and us. Floyd notices, though, and before that bird hardly rises above Louie’s head, Floyd shoots.

Louie hits the ground, flopping right down on his belly. “Jesus Christ!” I yell. “You killed him, Floyd! You killed him!” And I don’t mean the bird, I mean Louie!

Louie gets up before any of us can move and props himself on his elbows, shakes his head, then starts running his hands up his forehead and through his orange hair. His face goes from ghosty white to tomato red as he leaps up and grabs his shotgun. “You goddamn drunken bastard! What the fuck were you doing?”

Floyd is laughing, even though Louie’s stomping through the grass, coming right at him. “You almost shot my goddamn head off!”

Floyd grabs his Lucky Strikes pack from his pocket, acting like Louie ain’t even coming at him. “Oh, stop whining like a sissy. That shot was a good twenty feet above your head.”

Louie reaches Floyd before Floyd even got time to light his cigarette. Louie, he drops his shotgun and butts his chest right up against Floyd’s. “Twenty feet? Twenty feet, my ass! Then how come I got a fucking BB stuck in my goddamn head?” He takes his hand and pulls back his hair and, sure enough, there’s a shotgun pellet stuck right in his forehead, the freckly skin around it rising up like a cinnamon bun.

“Good thing you got a hard head,” Floyd says, laughing, but Louie, he ain’t laughing.

“You think it’s funny that you shot a guy in the head?” Louie says.

John is laughing. “Ah, relax, Olson, you ain’t got nothing in that head to hurt anyway.”

Louie don’t pay John no mind. He’s too busy screaming at Floyd. “Sure, you can laugh like a big man, Fryer. You weren’t the one that got shot, you son of a bitch.”

Jimmy, he lights a cigarette. “Okay, end it, girls. Let’s go have a beer.”

I play with Scout while Floyd, John, and Jimmy clean the birds and Louie goes to find a mirror so he can dig that BB out of his head. By the time he digs it out and has a beer, he ain’t even pissed at Floyd no more.

After the birds is cleaned, we sit in Floyd’s kitchen and drink his daddy’s Blatz. There is food stuck to plates everywhere you look and clumped-up underwear and socks on the floor. John picks a dirty shirt off the counter and says, “You or your old man better find a wife soon, before the goddamn rats move in.”

I’m leaning over, gawking at some dried mashed potatoes, seeing the way they is cracked and dark like dried-up mud. As I’m looking, I see little black turds inside the cracks. “I think them rats already moved in, John,” I say.

Ain’t nobody listening to me, though, ’cause Louie, he’s talking about joining up with the Navy.

“What? Are you goddamn crazy?” John says.

“If I stay stuck in this shithole of a town, I’m gonna be,” Louie says. “I’m going sailing. See some of the world.”

That night Molly comes over for supper. I like Jimmy’s girlfriend. She reminds me of a tiny piece of candy, all pink and sweet. Her hair is the color of wheat, but it don’t look like wheat. Them shiny curls look soft as kitty fur. She smiles a lot too, and she’s got about the prettiest teeth I ever did see, all white and shiny and lined in a neat row like buttons. Jimmy says that Molly’s dad is a dentist, and that’s why her teeth look so nice. Jimmy says that Dr. Franks is always staring in his mouth when Jimmy’s talking, like he wants to start digging in his mouth too.

I get to sit right next to Molly, and I remember to chew with my mouth shut. Molly makes a big dent into my mashed potatoes with the back of her spoon before she pours milk gravy on real neat so it don’t spill out onto my corn. “When I get old like Jimmy,” I tell Molly, “I’m gonna get me a girlfriend pretty as you.” Molly giggles, and her giggle feels like a tickle in my belly.

Daddy stabs a piece of grouse with his fork and stuffs it into his mouth. “Damn good,” he says, forgetting to be polite and not swear around Jimmy’s girl. None of them birds Ma fried up is mine. I shot once, but turns out that damn shotgun was empty. Jimmy about kicked hisself silly for forgetting to load my gun. He says that if he’d been smart enough to remember, that last bird would have been mine, so when Dad says how good that bird tastes, Jimmy tells Dad, “That one was Earwig’s.”

“Fine bird, Earl,” Daddy says, and Ma says, “What was Earl doing with a gun?”

Ma makes us sing happy birthday to Jimmy as she brings out his cake, all wrecked with that crusty frosting. While we eat cake, she gives Jimmy his present she ordered from the Chicago Woolens’ catalog. “It’s one of them gangster suits, like you wanted. It’s double-breasted, pin-striped, and has those nice wide lapels.” She tells him this like he can’t see them things for himself. “The pants have boxed pleats and suspenders too.” Dad wrinkles his brow, and I know he’s thinking the same thing as me—that that’s about the dumbest present a guy could get for his birthday. If Jimmy thinks it’s dumb when he first opens it, he changes his mind real quick when Molly starts carrying on like it’s something good like a new shotgun or a fish pole.

Molly wants to help Ma clean up the kitchen, but Ma says she don’t have to. We go into the living room. Dad rubs his big poochy belly and falls into his favorite chair that is the color of chocolate and has a big dent on the seat shaped like his butt. Ma calls from the kitchen to put a Glenn Miller record on, and Dad rolls his eyes ’cause he wants to listen to Edward Murrow.

Jimmy don’t put Glenn Miller on. He flicks the radio on and swishes the knob until he finds some good music. When they start playing Louis Prima’s “Jump, Jive an’ Wail,” Jimmy lets out a loud whoop as he grabs Molly and drags her into the middle of the living room. Jimmy is damn good at dancing. Molly, she don’t dance all rowdy like Jimmy. She looks like a leaf fluttering from a branch when she dances, and she giggles and her cheeks turn even pinker than they already are.

Ma comes to watch at the kitchen door and she’s got a dish towel draped over her shoulder, her foot tapping. When Molly sees Ma watching, she stops dancing and hurries to the sofa where I’m sitting. “Come on, Ma, let’s cut a rug!” Jimmy says. Ma tosses her head back and laughs as she dances with Jimmy, their legs going like eggbeaters. I can’t dance a lick, so I don’t do nothing but sit on the sofa and stare at Molly’s button teeth. When the song is finished, Jimmy plops on the couch. He’s breathing hard and laughing.

That night, Jimmy leaves to bring Molly home, and I sit on my bed looking at my comic books and wait ’cause I wanna ask Jimmy who he thinks is stronger, Superman or Captain Midnight. I fall asleep and I wake up in the morning ’cause Ma’s shaking me good. “Earl? Earl! Where’s your brother?”

“I don’t know.” And that’s the God’s honest truth.

“Earl, if you know and aren’t telling, you won’t leave this house until you’re forty! And what are you doing, sleeping in your clothes?”

All through breakfast, Ma asks me again and again where Jimmy is. I can’t hardly get my oatmeal down, ’cause every time I put a spoonful in my mouth, Ma’s asking me that same question all over again and then harping at me to not talk with my mouth full when I try to answer. Then Ma, she starts yapping about how she hopes them boys didn’t wrap their car around a tree on some back road or run off the road and plunge into Spring Lake. She gets my head so full of bloody pictures that I don’t even bother putting no more oatmeal in my mouth. A guy could starve to death when his brother don’t come home.

One thing I know for sure is that when I get twenty-one, you ain’t gonna catch me running off and getting drop-dead drunk with my buddies, then going into some National Guard place with the only buddy who’s still standing and signing myself up for Guard duty just ’cause the buddy with the new big-titted girlfriend dared me to before he passed out. No sirree, I ain’t gonna do that, but that’s what Jimmy did.

He come home three days later, his hair matted like a collie’s ass, dried puke streaked down his shirt, and Ma, who is worried sick, and Molly, who is mad as hell, they start chewing on him like he’s a dead fox and they is hungry crows. Now, when you piss off a guy, you don’t gotta say you’re sorry even after you shoot ’em in the head with bird shot, but when you piss off a girl, saying “I’m sorry” ain’t even good enough. You gotta say it about a hundred times, and you gotta yammer on and on about how dumb you are and how you don’t blame ’em if they never speak to you again. Jimmy says all them things, and he looks mighty sorrowful when he says ’em, but Ma and Molly, they just stand there with their arms crossed over their titties and their lips stretched into crabby little lines.

Nobody stays mad at Jimmy long, though. Not once Jimmy gets word from them National Guard people that he’s gotta show up for active duty in one week. Ma fusses at Dad when Jimmy gets the news, telling him he should go down to Janesville and get Jimmy’s name scratched right off that sign-up sheet. “Tell them Jimmy is a foolish boy who did it on a dare while he was drunk. Tell them he didn’t know what he was doing.” Dad looks at her like she’s gone nuts. Then he says, “The draft went into effect today, Eileen. Jimmy would be heading in that direction anyway.”