To Come and Go Like Magic (3 page)

At bedtime the desert is still on my mind. I dream of a camel walking down Persimmon Tree Road with a man
in a blue robe perched like a king between the two humps. When they get to our porch, the man asks for a drink, so I run to the kitchen and bring back a pitcher of ice water. After he takes a long swig, he points to the place where the river and the mountains are supposed to be, but there’s nothing but a long stretch of sand with the road running through it.

“Do you know what’s out there?” he asks, blinking at the sun.

“Sand,” I answer. “Sand without stones.”

The camel rider laughs like some wild animal, and his black eyes dance across my skin in a peculiar way that makes me feel uneasy. He bends down till he’s almost at my face and I can feel his hot breath blowing in my eyes.

“All the dreams in the world are waiting there,” he says, “but you must watch out for the wind. It can take your breath away.”

I see only sand and sky and so much light it hurts my eyes. I want to ask more about the desert, but I’m in one of those dreams now where you work your mouth but the words won’t come out.

“Come with me,” the man says, his blue robe blowing in the breeze.

In real life I’d never go near a strange man, but a dream is a dream.

When the camel starts to turn away, I grab on to the flying tail of the man’s robe and we head down a road that stretches through the desert like a thread in a sandbox.

Suddenly, the second we’re about to cross over a high dune where I won’t be able to see Mercy Hill anymore, I wake up. Catching my breath. Trembling.

W
illie Bright …

Willie Bright says he never believed in Santa Claus, not even when he was in kindergarten. Not for one minute.

“Who d’you think brought all those presents?” I ask. I’d wondered about flying reindeer and all that stuff, too, but Momma explained that Santa Claus was the good spirit of Christmas and if I didn’t believe in the good spirit, I might not get anything, so that kept me on track for years.

Willie Bright laughs and says he didn’t get presents. Not even one.

I tell him it’s hard to imagine an empty floor under the Christmas tree.

“Ha,” Willie laughs. “Not for me. We’ve never had a tree.”

We’re at the school-bus stop and it’s so cold I have to keep my hands in my pockets.

“I forgot my gloves,” I say, changing the subject away from Santa Claus.

Willie tells me he doesn’t have any gloves to forget. So I look for still another subject. We’re the only ones at the bus stop. The other kids have all been taken to school because it’s too cold to stand outside.

“Pop would’ve taken me to school,” I say, “but he had to go to work early because Mr. Simms is out of town.” When Mr. Simms is away during the cold weather, the school bus is always late. It’s like the driver plans it that way.

Willie has to stand in the cold and the rain and the snow every day. They don’t own a car because his mother can’t drive. She takes fits. When a spell comes over her, she falls down right where she is and doesn’t even know she’s alive.

I look up now and see Willie grinning at me as if I’ve made a joke about Pop driving me to school.

“If my momma ever got behind the wheel of a car, she’d probably kill herself or somebody else,” he says. “Tell
that
to your Santy.” His face is pinched up and his nose is red and when he laughs, he shakes all over. Mostly it’s because he’s cold.

B
ad Habits …

“Don’t hang around with welfares,” Pop says. “You’ll learn bad habits.”

“What habits?”

“Habits,” he says. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

Pop takes a deep breath and lets it out in a puff. “You’ll learn to expect something for nothing,” he says. “You’ll want to depend on other people in order to eat.”

“Like Uncle Lucius and Myra?”

“No, no, no!” he shouts. “Not like Lucius and your sister. They’re different.”

“How?”

“Go get ready for school,” he says. “I’m trying to read my paper.”

Pop’s at the table with the
Courier-Journal
opened on his left and the
Knoxville News Sentinel
on the right. He likes to see who’s saying what about important people.
When it’s time to vote, Pop knows both sides and he always votes the man, not the party, he says. But no Democrats. No women. Pop has limits.

I’m at the doorway when I decide to turn around and ask him a difficult question.

“What if I was to run for president some day? Would you vote for me?”

He looks up and laughs. “You?” he says. “You got a C in math the last six weeks.”

“So?”

“So … you couldn’t be president of anything. Not in a hundred years.”

I don’t like math. I hate numbers. Numbers are not like words. Words have something to say; they go places, do things. Miss Matlock says words can change the world. You won’t see any numbers do that.

C
ollections …

We’ve been best friends since kindergarten. Ginny Murphy, Priscilla Martin, and me. We ride bikes,
babysit, and do jump-rope team together. The “three Ms” is what our teachers call us. Pop says “three peas in a pod.”

Ginny collects teen magazines and Priscilla collects ribbons for her hair.

“What do you collect, Chili?” Priscilla looks at me with her pale gray eyes.

It’s stone quiet. Just the bells in the church tower ringing noon. Ding. Ding. Ding. Twelve times. I wait.

“Words,” I say.

“Words?” Ginny looks at me like I’m joking.

I collect words. They don’t have to be long or hard to spell, but they do have to be words we don’t use around here.
Concoction
. That’s the latest word in my red notebook. I think about mixing stuff in a big tub—herbs and spices and oils and colored water. A concoction. When I use a word that we don’t say around here, Ginny gives me
that
look. I make her tired, she says. I make her want to … she can’t think of a word. Sigh, I say. I make you want to sigh. Ginny rolls her eyes, looks at the clouds.

I collect words, but they don’t do anything … yet. It’s like if Momma put up tomatoes and stuck the jars in the cellar and we never got around to eating them for a long, long time.

T
he Corner Store …

Brock’s store is on the corner where Persimmon Tree Road ends and Main Street begins, and they sell anything you want. Bread and milk and candy and meat. Mrs. Brock makes baloney sandwiches at lunchtime for the state highway men who pave the road in the summer and scrape snow in the winter. Even when they’re working somewhere else, the men come to Brock’s to get lunch because it’s cheap. Not like a restaurant. They pay for the baloney and bread and Mrs. Brock makes the sandwiches for free. “No tips,” she says. “We don’t take tips.” She says this in a half whisper when Mr. Brock is standing nearby.

One day a city man traveling to Louisville stopped and bought a sandwich and left a dollar tip and Mr. Brock followed him all the way out to his car and propped the door open till the man took his money back. “No tips,” Mr. Brock said.

In the back room of Brock’s store the men play dominoes every day. Ralph Becker, Benny Moss, Will Epperson, and sometimes Little Clyde Cummings. Little Clyde is six feet tall, but he’s Little Clyde because his pop is Big Clyde, even though Big Clyde is short and fat. The men laugh and slap their legs and ask Mrs. Brock to bring this or that, Juicy Fruit gum or chewing tobacco or a baloney sandwich, and she runs here and there at top speed like one of those little cars you push until the wheels are spinning so fast it can go all the way across the room without stopping.

After jump-rope practice we stop at Brock’s and buy Bazooka gum and a Hershey bar to split three ways for Ginny, Priscilla, and me. In the back room the men holler for cold Dr Peppers, and Mrs. Brock rushes with our change and gives us back four quarters instead of four nickels and slams the cash-register drawer before we can say anything. Ginny says we could buy another Hershey bar and get four extra sections each. Or we could leave Mrs. Brock a tip. Priscilla puts the quarters on the counter beside the meat slicer where only Mrs. Brock is likely to see them, and we run as fast as we can out the door and down Persimmon Tree Road.

B
irds and Boys …

Twice a week, Monday and Thursday, I go to Miss Matlock’s house after school and we travel to places in her books—the mountains of Mexico, the Nile River, the sandy beaches of Indonesia. I tell Myra and Uncle Lucius I’m going to the library. If they knew I was at the old woman’s house, they’d tell Pop and he’d say I couldn’t go back. Even though she’s my teacher, some people think Miss Matlock’s crazy and others just don’t like her. It has something to do with her running away when she was young.

Ginny and Priscilla agree with the grown-ups. Ginny says that anybody who hates a place enough to run away automatically becomes an outsider. So I don’t dare tell them about going to Miss Matlock’s house or about my own thoughts of leaving Mercy Hill.

So what if people roll their eyes and shake their
heads at Miss Matlock? I don’t think she cares one bit. She has other stuff to care about, like her books of the world and her pictures and stories of the places she’s seen. And she cares about keeping her bushes trimmed properly and talking to Ivan the Terrible.