To Come and Go Like Magic (20 page)

“Wonder how Myra met that professor?” Lenny turns a clump of pages in the rock book and lands on a section
about petrified worm poop. Yuck. “Who knows,” he says. “But maybe it’s a good thing.”

“Why?”

“Jerry Wilson won’t be coming back.” He stops on a page full of diamonds.

“Diamonds come from plain old coal like we have in Mercy Hill,” I tell Lenny. “It says so right here.”

“And dinosaur bones sometimes turn to jasper,” Lenny says with authority.

“Everything changes,” I say.

“Yep. Everything changes.”

L
oose Threads …

I don’t mention the professor until Myra’s put on her nightgown and is sitting at the desk with her poetry book open. I look at her back and clear my throat like the school principal does before he makes an important announcement over the intercom.

“Guess who knocked on our door today?” I say.

“Can’t imagine,” says Myra.

“Drew Montgomery.”

“Wha—” Myra turns around and looks at me with her mouth hanging open.

“He said he was your friend.
A good
friend.”

“Well, I don’t know … I mean …” Myra is holding a whole book full of her own words, yet she can’t seem to find any to describe her friendship with the professor.

“Do we know any Montgomerys?” I ask. I look at her and wait for the answer like one of those men who host the TV game shows she likes so much.

“He’s a professor at the college in Jellico Springs,” Myra says finally, and she turns back around to her book.

“How come you know a professor?”

“I took a class last fall,” she says. “A philosophy class.”

“Do Pop and Momma know? Because—”

“No, they don’t. And it’s my business,” she says. “Nobody else’s.”

“Momma likes it when you look like you’re studying … when you’re writing in your poem book.”

Myra’s eyes are suddenly filled with suspicion. It’s like she’s found a loose thread and she’s searching back to see where the cloth started coming unraveled. She never told me this was a book of poems. She’s always said she was writing about the baby. I can’t let her know I read the book, have got to change the subject….

“Professor Drew didn’t know about the baby-to-be,” I say.

Her face turns red in the lamplight. “You told him?”

I nod. “Was he Jerry Wilson’s friend, too?” I think I know the answer, but I have to ask anyway.

Myra laughs. It sounds peculiar, like when somebody tells a joke and you don’t get it but you have to laugh anyway to be polite. “No,” she says. “Definitely not.”

The room grows quiet. Myra stares at the opened poem book on her lap, and I stare at Myra, and the lightbulb in the lamp starts to flicker like it’s going out. I’m hoping it does. I’m wishing the lamp would go out this very minute when the overhead’s not turned on, when everything could go dark and all the questions floating around our heads could just fly out the open window.

S
phinx Moths …

A buzzing in the jasmine bushes catches Aunt Rose’s attention and she leans forward and looks over the side of the porch.

“That hummingbird’s back again,” she says. “Look at it go!” The wings are a blur in the bushes.

Lenny gets off the porch swing and slips over to have a look. “That’s not a hummingbird,” he says. “It’s a moth.”

“A moth?” Aunt Rose puts down her quilt work, pushes her glasses up on her nose, and leans closer to the bush. “That’s a hummingbird,” she says. “I know a hummingbird when I see one.”

Lenny shakes his head. “There’re two of them,” he says. “They’re sphinx moths.”

Aunt Rose clicks her tongue. “A smart boy like you ought to know the difference between a moth and a bird.”

Lenny tries to explain why this little creature is a sphinx moth, but Aunt Rose refuses to listen.

“A moth looks like a butterfly,” she says. “Not a bird. I know that much and I ain’t even been to school.”

Lenny hushes and sits and stares at the moth-birds.

After a while I slip over and sit on the porch floor beside him, and Aunt Rose goes back to her sewing. The jasmine bushes are covered with white tube flowers that look like snowflakes scattered across the green leaves. Every day at dusk these moth-birds come and buzz like crazy till dark, especially after a summer rain.

I lean over the porch and see the two little fliers amongst the flowers. Their bodies are reddish brown and fuzzy-looking. They’re buzzing one minute and landing on a flower the next, sucking up the sweet nectar.

“What’s a sphinx moth?” I ask Lenny.

“You’re looking at two of them,” he says.

I peek over my shoulder and see Aunt Rose shaking her head.

“How do you know?”

“Do you see how it sits on the flowers?” Lenny asks.

I nod.

“A hummingbird hovers,” he says. “It doesn’t stop and sit on the flowers.” Lenny says a sphinx moth looks like a hummingbird and that a lot of people mistake them, but they’re not birds at all.

“It’s pretty big for a moth,” I say.

“It’s a big moth, all right,” Lenny says. “And that fuzzy body catches pollen and spreads flowers.”

“Will it spread these jasmine flowers?”

“Maybe,” Lenny says.

The moon slips up over the top of the mountain on one side of the valley while the sun’s disappearing on the other. Pretty soon Rose will have to take her sewing inside. We sit still and watch the moths buzz through the bushes, trying to eat as much as they can before dark. They don’t simply fly from one flower to another. Instead, they buzz in the air for a long time before taking flight. Kind of like a helicopter.

“They’re getting revved up,” Lenny explains. “Sphinx moths can’t just take off when they want to; they
have to rev their engines and be patient until the time is right.”

“How do they know when the time’s right?”

Lenny looks at me and smiles. “They know,” he says. “They always know.”

“Where do they go?”

“Anywhere they want to go,” he says. “Anywhere at all.”

F
riendship, Past Tense …

I call, but Ginny’s not home. Or she’s busy, in a hurry, getting ready to go out. Where? Just out. Talk to you later, she says. Later never comes.

I call Priscilla.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Cheerleading takes time.”

“What about our jump-rope team?”

“That’s
yesterday
.”

Yesterday and today and tomorrow. Miss Matlock says when you get old, it all runs together like one long, crooked river.

Priscilla, Ginny, and Melody Reece hang out at the
bandstand in town. Two Ms and one R. Two peas and a bean in a pod. A new configuration, Miss Matlock says. These things happen.

I put
configuration
in my red notebook.
Pattern, arrangement, relationship
. I list only synonyms now. You can’t learn nearly as many words if you have to learn long definitions. Synonyms are like windows to peek through so you don’t have to memorize what the whole room looks like.

Sometimes the other cheerleaders are at the bandstand, too. Sometimes Zeno’s there with the football boys. The girls giggle in their own huddle, pretending to have secrets and dying for the boys to ask so they can tell. The boys lean over the sides and sit with their feet dangling above the azalea bushes.

I look the other way when Momma lets me out of the car to run to the Custard Corner and get Uncle Lucius a brown derby ice cream. On the way home we roll up the windows so the wind doesn’t melt it, and Momma breaks the speed limit twice, three times. I hold on to my seat around the curves.

One day at the Piggly Wiggly, Melody Reece was wearing Ginny’s sandals. Last year
we
traded. I wore those sandals for a whole week. They’re light-brown leather, a color that fades away into the skin. Thin straps. Expensive. Ginny’s mother ordered them from a catalog
and they cost more than regular shoes. That’s why Momma said I could
not
have a pair. You don’t pay all that money for a few straps.

I stopped in the aisle that day holding a head of iceberg lettuce and a dozen eggs with my eyes hooked on Melody’s feet. Her toenails were painted neon purple and this completely ruined the natural effect of those sandals. Suddenly I realized—this is how it happens. One day you occupy a spot in a pea pod where you trade shoes and T-shirts and secrets, and the next day your spot goes to somebody else.

P
ictures and Symbols …

“Let’s go to the movies,” I say to Lenny.

It’s Saturday morning and Myra’s getting ready to go to Jellico Springs to clean the room that will be a nursery if she ever moves back there. For breakfast Aunt Rose brought over a dozen of her homemade cinnamon rolls straight out of the oven and we ate them all. Now she’s washing the dishes while Momma dries.

“Nothing good’s playing in town,” Lenny says.

“Myra can drop us at the Rex in Jellico Springs,” I say. “They’ve got a new movie on called
Blowup
.”

“That’s not a new movie,” says Lenny. He listens to the movie reviews on his transistor radio late at night when our stations go off and the distant ones hit the airwaves. He says all the movies are old by the time we get them.

“So?”

Lenny nudges me out of the kitchen and down the hall to the living room. “Besides,” he says, “that movie’s not for kids.”

“I’m not a kid.”

“You’re too much of a kid for that movie,” he says.

“Have you seen it?” I know he hasn’t. I know everywhere Lenny’s been.

“No,” he says. “But I heard some man talking about it on WOWO a few years ago. Even then it was old.
And
for adults.”

“I’ll go by myself,” I say, and I turn and head back to the kitchen, knowing full well that Momma will not let me go to the movies alone.

Lenny hears everything on WOWO or WCAO or WLS, stations in the big cities, a million miles from Mercy Hill. He imitates the disc jockeys, tries to speak with a Yankee accent, walks around the house talking in slogans:
It takes two hands to handle a Whopper
. We don’t even have fast food in Mercy Hill. Only on television.