My Drowning (12 page)

He started laughing and passed the piece of bone to Carl Jr., who laughed too. Nora stood with them with her arms around Madson and one of the dogs licking a scab on her leg. Otis walked off, cussing. “Goddamn Mama,” he said, and then added, “old fat-ass big-titty bitch,” and he was headed in my direction and suddenly I couldn't get my breath. “She's an old goddamn fat-ass big-titty stupid bitch for lying to me.” He swept by me still cussing, with tears stinging his face and his voice trembling, so angry that even when he had passed, the wave of him was still moving through me.

“He cussed Mama,” Joe Robbie whispered.

I agreed that was what he had done.

WHEN YOU RIDE
through Holberta nowadays, you find there are a few changes. The colored store is still there, painted fresh a few years ago and faded again. The houses have
mostly improved, some of them pretty nice, bricked up, with fences and flower gardens. Yards decorated right up to the road with flamingos and cement art and whatnot. Not as many people live there as used to, that's true. But it's also true that most people, black and white, have moved away from Moss Pond.

The house where we had lived was a different case. I stopped there and walked a bit. The grayed siding had been replaced and the underpinning filled in, the whole thing painted a pretty pink with cream-colored trim on the windows and under the eaves. Smooth new double-glass windows replaced the grease paper and tacks. Best of all, a lawn was growing, with beds of impatiens, where only a dirt yard had lain before.

A sign out front read, “Mama Lisa's Homemade Mighty-Fine Quilts, All Patterns,” then, underneath, the hours of the store. Closed now, but bright quilt squares peered through the windows. At the bottom, in small letters, was an addition, “See Where The Witch Was Hung.”

But at the side of the pretty building, under the edges of the shade of that elm tree, the same junked icebox sat on the same patch of ground. The rust had eaten it to a lump of brown, and I stared right at it for a long time before I recognized it. The memory shot through me, Daddy and Carl Jr. propped there, the piece of bone passing from hand to hand. That happened lately, on one of my drives, that I visited Holberta and remembered about the rattlesnake and the tooth.

When I stopped at the Holberta store for a cold drink, paying in correct change, the owner, Mr. Detrice, shrunken as the Jarmans up the road, was explaining to another gentleman
that a flying snake had killed a man near Luma, oh, a month ago, swooped down out of the trees and latched onto his shoulder, and the man couldn't draw one breath, the snake gripped him so tight. “You don't see them kind of snakes around here like you used to,” the other man added at the end of the story. “Used to find aplenty of them.”

“It's that new road,” Mr. Detrice swore, “the pond half dried up after they put that road in, you can't even fish,” and nodded to me as I was leaving, a nice white lady stopping at his store. I stood there in the middle of Holberta sipping my Nehi. I could not remember that I had ever stood there before.

WHEN THE DAY
came that I started school, Joe Robbie finally understood he would never do the same. I got home from the first day and found him in the corner of the bedroom with his eyes red and swollen. “Hey,” he said. “I was by myself all day. I didn't play with Madson.”

“You can play with him. It's okay.”

He shook his head. His lip was trembling and he scowled. “Did you like it?”

“It was okay.”

“Who is the teacher?”

“Miss Sterndale. She's fatter than Mama.”

He nodded his head. “Did you learn to read books?”

I sighed. “Not yet.”

We sat quietly together. His eyes were wet, but he kept himself rigid. “Do you know why I can't go?”

Because he kept watching me, I shrugged, and waited beside him. “You can look at my books,” I said.

He shook his head. I wiped the spit from his mouth and then wiped the rest of his face with a wet rag.

HE SPENT THE
days alone after that, not by his own choice but because Madson lacked the patience to sit with him and Corrine was too tiny to be much company. I wished I could have shared Alma Laura with him, but he had never seen her, not even once, despite all the times she kept us company.

Maybe he could have functioned in the schoolroom, but he could never have made the trip. To catch the school bus, we had to walk the mile and a half to the end of the dirt road, to the Little Store. The bus refused to drive into Holberta because, other than us, only black kids lived there. Every morning, while we walked along the road toward the pond, the colored school bus passed us, throwing up dust, the driver smiling and lifting a pink-palmed hand.

We might have dragged Joe Robbie to the end of the road in the wagon and then toted him onto the bus and hauled him into a seat and out of the seat and off the bus and then into the school building. But even then we would not have any wagon and would have to drag him to his desk too.

Mama said it worried her that he sat there all day, doing nothing except looking at the pictures in comic books that the county woman brought to him, paid for by donations made by the Junior League of Luma. Studying them superhero books, she said, and gaping off into the sky like he was out yonder somewhere. She had no understanding when he cried because he could not go to school; she herself had survived with nearly no schooling and figured that he would survive too. He had his family, she always said. God had given him that.

He told me the stories of the comic books. Superman was out flying in the galaxy, he said, where he run into the Green
Bad Guy near outer space. The Green Bad Guy had a black mask and this green outfit and big muscles, like Joe Robbie showed me in the pictures. But Superman looked like himself and had big muscles too, along with super strength. At first the Green Bad Guy was winning and then Superman was winning, they went back and forth like that. Then the Green Bad Guy chained Superman with the green glowing chains that circled Superman's legs and arms. He beat up Superman real bad, to the point that Superman was injured and stuff. He even tore Superman's costume, and Superman almost didn't have any shirt at the end. The green glowing chains kept him imprisoned and weak until the Batman rescued him. The Batman searched and found him, then took off the chains. The Batman traveled through space in a spaceship that he made himself in his basement. Superman and the Batman teamed up to defeat the Green Bad Guy, and they killed him and exploded him, and then they went home. They lived together, according to Joe Robbie. Since neither of us could read the words then, his accounts remained definitive.

Sometimes he looked at the ads in the back of the comics, the Charles Atlas ads that promised a muscular body through dynamic tension in a few minutes a day. “I wish I could get some muscles,” he would say, “then I could walk.” Almost like a litany.

ABOUT THIS TIME
Mama took Joe Robbie for a doctor check and announced afterward that the doctor had told her Joe Robbie had a new muscle disorder. But when we asked her what kind, she had no idea. So for a long time we told everybody
that Joe Robbie had a new muscle disorder but we didn't know what kind, and we supposed that the doctor was planning to tell us as soon as he knew.

The doctor had been trying to tell Mama that Joe Robbie had a neuromuscular disorder, and we learned that when Aunt Addis took Mama and Joe Robbie to the doctor, one day when Uncle Bray couldn't make the trip. Aunt Addis brought them home and told us what the doctor had said. It was really just another way of telling us what we already knew, but Mama had thought he had given her a new name.

One time, Joe Robbie told me, pointing to the color-filled frames of the comic book, the Flash and the Atom went on this voyage through inner space into the inside of secret buildings, and they made the Flash as small as the Atom through a super discombobulator that shrank him to tiny size. They were saving the world through searching for a secret for weapons, and the secret was hidden in the laboratory of Dr. Einstein, who was the blue-haired man with the big muscles inside his white lab coat. Dr. Einstein planned to rule the world through bombs and guns such as those nobody else had. But the Atom got inside the laboratory because he could get tiny enough to go anywhere, and the Flash was faster than Dr. Einstein, and they all fought in the lab at the end until the Atom and the Flash had the secret to the guns and the bombs. After that, everybody was arrested. Neither the Flash nor the Atom pulled off their shirts, but they were always wearing tights and performing feats of strength with bulging chests and arms.

When he told me the story of a comic book, he went into a kind of trance. I turned from page to page, and he gave me
the particular scenario for each panel on each page when I pointed to it, sometimes in a sentence and sometimes in a miniature story. He described all the objects in the panel and made something of them. He rushed from one panel to the next.

“This is you,” he would say, when I pointed to the beautiful brunette. “This is you when you get big and meet the Batman.”

“But I don't want to meet him.”

“Yes, you do. He's a superhero. He's real good.”

“I don't care. I'd be scared of him. You want to meet him, I don't.”

My indifference to the Batman displeased him, but he rose above it by ignoring it. “Anyway, this is you. And you're with the Batman and he's got to save you from the bad guy, the Yellow Pearl.” We had been hearing about the yellow peril on the radio, and the villain in this comic book had a yellow costume.

“What is he going to do to me?”

“He's going to make you do it and then hit you,” Joe Robbie decided. “But the Batman won't let him.”

“If he does let him, I won't like it.”

“But he won't, because he lets good things happen, not bad ones. Then he rescues you, see. You're swinging with him on the strong rope that he keeps in his belt. It has these hooks. You see?”

“Hurry up and get to the end, I'm tired.”

“We can't skip any.”

“Just leave stuff out.”

He always remained patient. “Okay. So you and him swing
on the rope back to the place where he has a motorcycle hidden and he even has a helmet for you. And then you ride over the long roads home, only the Yellow Pearl still wants to find you and hurt you.”

“But he can't.”

“No. Because the Batman protects you.”

“He can't protect me. I can protect myself. Because I have my own house and I have a job.”

“Not in this comic book you don't.”

“Well that's what I have.”

I told him about school, to the degree that I understood anything about it, having only started. At school we sat in seats side by side, and my partner was Nina Holland. We had a bench near the back. I liked to sit with Nina because sometimes she didn't bring a lunch either, and it was easier to sit beside somebody who wasn't eating, during the lunch break.

We took naps in the afternoon, and I explained that meant that you laid your head sideways on your desk and you rested on your ear like that till it ached, or else you crooked your arm and it fell asleep, and you closed your eyes, and you did like that until the teacher said it was time to learn letters.

Joe Robbie was curious about everything and asked questions. He wanted to know about the other kids and what they looked like, and the teacher and how she acted. I described some of the kids, including the ones who had expensive clothes and clean hair and faces. Some of their mothers and fathers came with them on the first day, and I told Joe Robbie about it then, after he stopped being upset and started asking questions. The parents were all kinds, but some of the women even wore hats.

We talked most often in the kitchen when I did chores, like stacking firewood or drying dishes or cleaning the slop pot. Joe Robbie sat on his stool with the pillow for a seat cushion, always near the stove. He liked to sit there because he was usually cold, and there was a fire in the stove even in the hottest of summer. He had a murmuring, whispering, soft kind of voice, and he slurred a bit so you had to listen very close.

I told him the teacher, Miss Sterndale, could ask you all kinds of questions, like, one morning, she asked us all what we had for breakfast. It turned out that me and Nina Holland had the same thing, biscuit and sweet coffee, which we both called coffee soup, and she dipped her biscuit like I did. She asked what our fathers did for a living, and I said mine worked in the woods logging, but he only worked when he felt like it. Everybody laughed and I blushed and knew I had said something stupid, so after that when she said anything to me I kept it short. “I hate to talk in the class,” I told Joe Robbie.

When I was at home, Corrine became my baby, but sometimes Joe Robbie could help with her. He was strong enough to hold her while she was small and could warn me when she messed herself. Most of the time Nora was with us, but some of the time she was working in dry tobacco with Mama, at Mr. Allison's farm. Even then Nora had the harder chores for herself, making supper being the worst of them, and doing the heavy dishes, and carting most of the water. She had time for her own homework—she stayed in school—after supper when the dishes were done.

Once Joe Robbie asked her could she teach him how to read, and she looked at him like he was a stump.

When Daddy and Carl Jr. came home, Joe Robbie sat quietly in the kitchen, shy of them but wanting to listen to their talk. He liked their dirty jokes that made them stomp the floor laughing, and he liked the rough gossip about the other loggers. “I can't understand a goddamn word Tyrone says, can you?”

“No, I tell you what, Daddy, when he opens his mouth I just stand there.”

“He was trying to tell me something today, and he was talking like he had some goddamn shit in his mouth, and I told him not to fuck with me any more if he can't talk English. I be goddamn if I have to listen.”