Hurt Go Happy (10 page)

Sukari screamed, too, fell backward, then scampered away and back up the power pole. “Where did she bite you?” Ruth cried, inspecting Luke's arms, then his legs. “Oh my God.” She tilted his head and inspected the red welt on his forehead.

“Mom, she didn't bite him. He ran into the pole. Sukari was comforting him.”

Luke jerked on Joey's pants leg. “I want to hug the monkey,” he shouted. His bottom lip jutted and quivered threateningly.

“Well, ask her to hug you.” Joey knelt down, hesitated, then showed Luke the signs.

“Monkey,” he said. WANT HUG.

“She uses sign language?” Ruth asked.

Joey nodded, expecting her mother to sneer.

GIRL MAD, Sukari signed, pointing at Ruth. BITE SUKARI.

“She won't bite you.” Joey glanced at her mother. “She thinks you're going to bite her. You won't, will you?” She grinned.

“It's not funny. They're playing too rough and I don't want her licking him in the face,” Ruth said.

“She's not a dog, Mom. She was kissing Luke's boo-boo. Right?” She mussed his hair.

WANT HUG, Luke signed.

Sukari came down slowly but stayed on the bottom rung, just out of reach.

“Mommy, go 'way,” Luke said.

Sukari watched Ruth walk slowly back to the house. When she was far enough away, Sukari hooted, swung down, and ran on bowlegs and knuckles into Luke's outstretched arms, bowling him over with kisses.

At the front door, her mother stopped to watch. In the instant before she went inside and closed the door, Joey thought she saw her smile.

It began to get chilly after the sun slipped behind the trees, but when Joey came to the door with Luke and Sukari, her mother waved for her attention. “They're all dirty; keep them outside.” She tossed Joey a damp dishtowel.

Charlie stood up. “I guess we'd better be going,” he said, lifting Sukari off Joey's shoulders.

“No,” Luke howled. “I want the monkey to stay.”

Charlie flinched. “She's not a monkey, son, she's an ape.”

“I want the ape to stay,” Luke wailed.

Sukari squirmed and leaned toward Joey, signing, HUG, HUG.

“I'll take them back outside,” she said. “You stay. Please. I want you to get to know each other. Charlie's parents were deaf,” she told Ray.

Ray's brow furrowed and he said something to Charlie under his mustache.

Charlie patted Ray's shoulder and said something that Joey couldn't see because he was turned so she couldn't see his mouth. Whatever it was, Ray glanced at Joey, his always sad eyes sadder.

Joey avoided looking at her mother. She took Sukari back from Charlie and kissed her. “Come on, Bear,” she said to Luke, who burst out the door ahead of her.

Charlie picked up his empty beer can and shook it. “Sure, I'd love another.”

It had gotten quite cold when Luke jerked on Joey's sleeve and pointed to the front door. Charlie and her parents were on the front deck. Her mother motioned for them to come. She no longer looked mad, but she wasn't happy, either.

Sukari, who was wearing Luke's cowboy boots, signed, NO GO, when she saw Charlie, then took off running toward the woods. The boots, which were on the wrong feet, tripped her up. Joey tackled her as she tried to scramble away and carried her screaming to the car, where Charlie strapped her into her car seat.

SUKARI MAD. BITE, she signed.

Whatever Charlie said to her had a sobering effect. Sukari hugged herself and blew angry little puffs of air through her long lips.

Charlie turned from scolding Sukari to shake hands with Ray, then with Luke, then Ruth, who paused before smiling stiffly and taking his hand. When he came to Joey, she hesitated a moment, then hugged him quickly. THANK-YOU. SIGN LANGUAGE BOOK, she signed.

Ruth reached to stop Joey, but Ray caught her mother's wrist in midair. Ruth jerked it free and jammed her hand into her apron pocket.

 

CHAPTER SIX

The second Charlie was out of sight, Ruth grabbed Joey's arm and spun her around. “You told him, didn't you?”

Joey's heart leapt and she threw her arm up to block the blow she expected.

It was her mother who looked as if she'd been slapped. She let go. “I've never hit you.”

“Your grabbing scared me.”

“Sorry,” she said, “but you did tell him, didn't you?”

Joey shook her head.

“Why would you tell a complete stranger our secrets?”

“I didn't tell him,” Joey cried and tried to turn away.

Her mother tightened her grip on Joey's arm. “I'm not through talking to you.”

Ray suddenly stepped between them, breaking Ruth's hold. He must have said something in defense of Charlie, because her mother snapped, “How would you know? Someone to watch football and drink beer with is not a measure of the man.” With that she spun on her heels and, dragging Luke, marched into the house.

Her stepfather turned, gave Joey's shoulder a squeeze, then followed her mother. The argument continued. Joey slipped in and began to set the table for dinner. She caught only the parts her mother wanted her to see or a snatch here and there when Ruth faced Ray directly, often shaking a spatula to emphasize a point: “---------- stranger butting ---------- our ---------- pushing her to learn sign language.”

Ruth glanced at her then deliberately—so that Joey could see every word—and said, “You want her to use a language a monkey can learn. Sign language.” She snorted. “It's a contradiction in terms.” She shook a finger at Joey. “No signing. I won't allow it.”

Joey's hands began to tremble. She put the plates on the table before she dropped them.
I knew this would happen.
Ray looked at her and shook his head, warning her off going further with this, but she couldn't let that be the last word. “Stop calling her a monkey,” she shouted. “She's a chimpanzee. And signing lets us know how she feels, what she's thinking, and what she wants. That's more than I can tell about my own brother.” She ran to her room, slammed and locked her door.

*   *   *

The Old Dock Café was opening early Monday to host a breakfast for some group or other. Since her mother had to be there to help set up, she insisted on taking Joey to school, as if not letting her ride the bus was a form of punishment.

Ruth pulled up in front of the middle school. Smoke from her cigarette formed a gray haze in the closed car. Joey put her hand on the door handle and glanced at her mother, who continued to stare straight ahead. Ruth hadn't spoken to her since last night.

Joey opened the car door and stepped out but held on to the handle. Her heart hammered as it always did when she had something she wanted to say. Speaking up for herself terrified her but her mother's silence was crushing. Before she met Charlie and Sukari, only the sight of her mother's lips moving made her feel a part of things. When her mother punished her, turning so Joey couldn't see what she said to Luke or to Ray, it was as if a lid had been clamped down on the jar she lived in, and twisted shut, airtight. Now Joey stood gripping the door, holding her mother in place. Her breath came in short gasps the way it did after a good cry. “He understands what it's like for me,” she said.

Her mother, without looking at her, reached across, pulled the door closed, and drove away.

Joey bit her lip to keep from crying. It wasn't until she turned that she saw Kenny watching from the front steps. He didn't smile or wave; he turned, as Joey did, to watch Ruth pull into the Senior Center parking lot, make a U-turn, and head back the way they'd come.

“I didn't tell him,” Joey whispered, as she passed without looking over.

*   *   *

Kenny was at her favorite table when she came into biology class. He had a foot on one of the chairs. When Joey hesitated, he dropped it to the floor and motioned for her to come over. He'd been doodling on a piece of notebook paper:
No Fear,
with jagged lightning bolts and a very good pirate's face with angular cheekbones, square jaw, and a patch over one eye. He flipped the page to expose a clean sheet when she sat down.
Hi,
he wrote.

Joey almost laughed, but she was too touched. “Hi,” she said.

Last week's notes,
he wrote, then handed her photocopies of the notes he'd scribbled in class. At the top he'd written
For Joey.
The “o” in her name was a tiny heart.

She blinked, sure her imagination had created it out of sloppy handwriting, but it was there. “Thank you.” She quickly put them away as if she hadn't noticed.

How was your weekend?

“Good. Yours?”

Same ole. Your old lady looked mad this morning.

“She was.”

How come?

Joey shrugged.

Kristin and Jason came in, trying to elbow each other aside to be the first to reach the table. Out of the corner of her eye, Joey saw Kenny cover what he'd written with his drawings.

Jason won and fell into the chair with his back to the teacher. “What's happening?”

Before she could answer, she saw Kristin glance at the ceiling. “Nothing much,” Joey mouthed.

“Gotcha, dork.” Kenny laughed and high-fived Joey, who blushed with pleasure.

In math, which was her best subject, there was a test, so time flew. She turned her paper in the minute she was done and left to get to the cafeteria ahead of the crowd.

Motion was sound. Joey heard with her eyes, so the running, pushing, shoving, arm-waving, ball-and-book tossing, the scrape of chairs and tables in the cafeteria, in the mood she was in, was more noise than her eyes could stand. Brad was at a back table, waiting for Roxy, but Joey didn't want to be with them. She got a sandwich and took it to eat at her favorite spot behind the library where trees grew densely on a steep hillside. There was a high chain-link fence along the property line, which kept her from actually finding a good spot in the woods. But between the driveway along the rear of the building and the fence was a line of trees and one stump. Her stump. Before she met Roxy, she used to go there every day and sit with her back against the fence and read while she ate.

As she was leaving the cafeteria with her lunch, she caught a glimpse of Kenny paying for his. He was with a couple of friends and either hadn't seen her or pretended he hadn't. She scooted out quickly before he caught her looking. She was afraid to let how he'd acted in biology class mean too much.

She sat with her book on her knees; the second half of her sandwich kept the pages from flipping. She hadn't seen Kenny coming and nearly jumped out of her skin when he kicked her foot, tipping the book off her knee and dropping her sandwich onto the ground.

“Sorry,” he said and bent to pick them up.

“No problem. I was full.” She took her sandwich, turned and jammed it through the fence for a possum or raccoon to get later.

He handed her a sheet of notebook paper.
How come you eat out here by yourself?

Joey shrugged. “I like it here.”

Kenny squatted to sit on his haunches. “Can you read lips?”

“Sometimes. Some people's lips are easier to read than others.”

“Are mine easy or hard?”

“Medium.” She smiled.

“I dried two ----------” He glanced away. “---------- wood bee ----------.” He looked down to open a bag of chips. “---------- deaf ----------.” He offered her some as he chewed. “---------- mug my ----------.” He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “---------- enough not to hear.”

Joey couldn't even attempt a bluff. She shook her head. “Sorry, I missed too much of that.”

Kenny balanced his notebook on his knee and wrote,
I tried to imagine what it would be like to be deaf but I couldn't plug my ears enough not to hear. What is it like?

“Real quiet.”

Kenny's serious, sympathetic expression lit up at her answer, then he laughed. “Like, duh.”

In spite of trying to stay calm and cool, Joey blushed again, hating herself for not being able to keep her color under control. “That's okay. It's a good question. I wasn't always deaf so I know the difference and that's pretty much it. There are no sounds except really loud noises like motorcycles and car horns, chain saws, stuff like that. All the pretty sounds are gone. Like I've never heard the ocean.”

It sounds whooshy.

Joey grinned. “That's the best description I've ever seen.”

“Are the scars where…” He reached and lightly brushed aside her hair. “They tried to fix your hearing?”

The question caught Joey off guard. She kept her hair medium length and bushy to cover those scars. No one had ever seemed to notice them before. Without thinking, she touched the one behind her right ear. “Not … Well, yes. Sort of.”

To her relief, he was writing his next question:
Do you and your parents talk in sign language?

“That's what my mother was mad about.” Joey hesitated. She wanted to tell him everything, especially about Sukari.

What do you mean?

“My mother doesn't want me to learn sign language.”

“How come?”

Her mother's face popped into her mind. “Dumb reasons,” Joey said, deciding it was better not to go where the details would lead. “Have you ever heard about Washoe, the chimpanzee who uses sign language? I read all about her in a
National Geographic.
”

“I thought…” he said, then wrote it instead:
I thought it was a gorilla.

“Koko is the gorilla who signs, but Washoe was the first and she's a chimpanzee. She's still alive, I think. Someplace.”

What about her?

“I know a chimpanzee that signs. My neighbor owns her and I bet he'd let you meet her if you wanted to.”