Slow Way Home (23 page)

“I don’t think we can do that, big guy.”

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“You better let me see them!” Even Sister Delores could not hold me at that point, and a fleck of spat hit the woman’s arm.

“I’ll walk with him over there if you need for me to.” Sister Delores was nodding her head.

“We can’t allow . . .”

“Listen, I know the head man down at Florida Highway Patrol.

Honey, I think you just might want to make an exception.” Bonita’s hip was flung out to the side, and a red streak ran down her neck.

She walked in front of us directing the crowd, who stared like it was me, not Josh, who had an autograph to give away. “Go on, move over,” Bonita yelled.

The smell of the cooker made me want to throw up all over the shoes of the people who lined the street. A salty taste tickled my tongue, and I knew that it was not the air but the taste of blood. Moving to clamp down on the other side of my lip, I once again ordered myself not to cry and prayed all the way to the car that Nana and Poppy would be dry-eyed as well.

Poppy was the first one we came to. The patrolman opened the car door, and he was sitting in the backseat with his hands tucked behind his back. The marina hat was twisted to the side, and his pointy chin trembled. “Son, don’t you worry none. This will get cleared up when we get back home.”

This is my home, I wanted to scream. But fearing any more attention, I looked down at the gravel parking lot and kicked a half-eaten chicken drumstick.

Sister Delores guided me like a blind person to the police car Nana sat in. The light inside the car made her seem even paler. She smiled as if I had just gotten home from a bike ride. “Hey, there. Now Sister Delores and Bonita are going to see after you while I’m away.”

Sister Delores and Bonita harmonized behind me. “We sure are.

Oh, yeah.”

Nana sat with her hands tucked between her knees. The top of the handcuffs would have seemed less obvious if she had been a woman who wore bracelets. “Now you be a good boy. I don’t want 162

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you studying about all this. No need to worry. You got a pile of people who love you and don’t forget I’m at the top of that list.”

When her voice broke, she turned to look out the window.

A white sedan pulled around in front of the cooker, and Harvey rested his wide hand on my shoulder. “You come from good people.

Don’t let nobody tell you no different.”

Josh hobbled up as the woman with white hair was telling me how wonderful it would be to be back home again. “Mama, what’s that lady doing with Brandon?” Bonita’s words mingled together with the hushed whispers of the others who lined the car.

A crease on Sister Delores’s forehead marked the spot where the Uncle Sam hat had been earlier during the celebration. “Baby, I found out where they taking you. Back up to Raleigh. Don’t you worry none. Sister Delores sees after her flock, and you one of mine.”

Her words were empty. I looked through the crowd to see if Jesus was among them. He could take me out of all this and unlock those chains on Nana and Poppy all at the same time. But the only faces I saw were those of tired, fakey smiles that had pretended to connect with me. Me, a poor boy stolen from a good and decent mama.

It was a movie, I told myself. A rehearsal for the role I would play on Hoyt Franklin’s TV show. Everybody in town had jumped at the chance to be an extra. Repeating the assurance helped my hands not to shake as bad.

“Brandon, you be good, hear.” Bonita’s scrunched-up eyes filled with tears, and she backed away with the others.

A man with hair the color of tomatoes got in the driver’s seat. Said his name was Tony and called me “buddy” just like the woman did.

“Hey, buddy, we’ll stop off and get us supper. Anywhere you like.”

Tony had just pulled the gearshift when a hand with dirty fingernails and a fresh blister snaked through the small space in the window.

Beau tried to smile real big, but it ended up lopsided like all the others. I shook his hand and glanced over at the woman who sat next to me. She patted my arm. A pull between the old way of living and what was yet to come. Finally, Beau’s fingers slipped through my hand
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and disappeared for good. The woman reached over and rolled up the window just as Mama Rose moved closer. “I knew that boy was trouble the first time I laid . . .” The window sealed off her last comment, but she still pointed the clawlike finger as the car moved forward.

Tony drove slowly as the faces I had come to know through God’s Hospital and Main Street drifted together as easy as the changing tide.

Beau ran along the side of the car waving and waving. But I did not wave back. It was a matter of survival more than shame. I kept my hands tightly latched between the slick seat and the flesh of my bare legs. They twitched with fever force, and I knew if the woman next to me saw how scared I really was, she would baby me the whole way back to my past.

Climbing to the top of the bridge, the car shifted into overdrive.

The special kingdom filled with my own subjects of crabs, saw grass, and pine trees was far below us. Trying to gather it into a postcard memory, my eyes scanned it all. Before I could make out the roof of Nap’s Corner, we had glided down the bridge and were on our way back to the place the woman called home.

Fourteen

B
y the time we got back to North Carolina, the lights from the homes just beyond the interstate flickered like a dying fire. Pressing my head against the car window, the glass was cool to my skin, but it didn’t bother me. As soon as we had crossed over the Georgia line, my body felt like it had already shut down. I saw my blood being pumped by the heart, a memory branded in my mind from all of the old black-and-white science films that Miss Travick had shown us. But now I saw my blood as cold slush, like the Icees I used to buy at the gas station back in Abbeville.

I watched the soft lights of Raleigh pass by us with one eye closed.

The eye closest to the woman with white hair had remained shut as soon as we crossed over into Georgia. When we passed through Jacksonville, she came clean and told me she was a mind doctor sent to help me deal with everything that was happening. But before we had made it to Tallahassee, I had already figured that out. They all had that smile and carried a bag full of questions: “How do you feel about leaving Abbeville? How do you feel about your mother finding you?” By the time we had passed the fifth Stuckey’s restaurant, I stretched out my arms wide, yawned right in her face, and leaned against the car window.

The car blinker ticked, and I measured it against the beat of my heart. We turned off onto a side street in Raleigh. The houses were still and dark as a ghost town. A yellow porch light cast an eerie glow
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over the driveway we turned into. The car headlights hit the windows of the brick house, and a motion inside made the sheer drapes dance against the glass.

A woman with a black hair net and legs shaped like oversized marshmallows stood at the door. She clutched the top of her robe, and I closed both eyes when the mind doctor leaned towards me. They tried to shake me, gentle at first and then harder. When the inside car light came on, I kept my eyes sealed tight and tried to hold my breath.

Maybe they would think I was dead. Tony, the driver, lifted me out of the car and carried me right into the house.

Cracking an eye, I made out a plastic-covered sofa with printed roses. Torn places on a lampshade fanned with the movement in the room. The sofa made a crinkling sound when Tony put me on it.

Soon a pillow was tucked under my head, and a blanket fell over my legs. Mumbled words intertwined with the squeaking hinges of the front door.

“I’ll come back to check on him tomorrow,” the mind doctor said. “Here’s the information we discussed.”

Papers rattled, and a coo-coo clock chimed.

“Let’s see, his name is Bobby?” the woman with the hair net asked.

“Brandon,” Tony and the woman doctor said at the same time.

“Brandon,” the other woman repeated. “Well, he’ll be happy here.

The children will make him feel right at home.”

The door closed and locks clicked. I kept my eyes closed until I heard the woman’s feet shuffle against a plastic runner down the hall.

Light seeped in from the streetlight, illuminating a painting of a beach.

The waves broke at the shore, and two seagulls hung in mid-flight. I stared at the painting, fighting hard against the temptation to blink.

Never leaving the sofa, I finally tasted the salt of the air and heard the waves crashing. I wiggled my toes hoping to feel the grit of the sand between them. Soon the waves began moving, and the seagulls were dipping and soaring against the wind. The painting became a TV

screen of wishful thinking. Suddenly Nana was at the end of the beach 166

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with the plastic bonnet on her head. She held the strings to the bonnet with one hand and waved with the other. Poppy walked up behind her and held up a piece of driftwood that had found its way back to shore. As I clutched the picture in my mind, the waves pulled away the emptiness that weighed down my chest. The sound of the tide rose and sank until sleep took me away from it all.

The sound of pots rattling from the kitchen woke me, but I kept my eyes closed hoping to avoid the people in my new home. Sweat from the night’s sleep made the plastic-covered sofa cold to the touch.

Relieved that it was only sweat and not one of the old accidents, I knew then why the big-legged woman kept it covered.

In the car the mind doctor told me that the woman who ran the place was a Foster mother. But I was determined that the woman with big legs and the hair net could be Foster’s mother all she wanted, but she would never be mine.

She was in the kitchen humming a song. The sounds of butter sizzling in a frying pan and a refrigerator door opening drifted into the foyer. Try as I might to fight it, the smell of melting butter managed to make my mouth water. I was just about to give in when the sensation of eyes looking down at me ate up any hunger I had. I could feel the heat of their bodies as much as I felt their stares. Their eyes sizzled on me the same way I pictured the butter melting in the frying pan.

Trying to peek at them, I heard the one closest to me speak first.

“We see your eyes a-fluttering. You’re awake.” At first only one giggled, and then two others joined in.

A girl with stringy brown hair and freckles on her nose pulled down at her shirt and laughed harder.

“If you knew I was awake, then how come you were leaning over me?”

Two boys with crew cuts and matching T-shirts looked under the sofa and around the side of the corner table. “Why don’t you have a suitcase? They always bring some clothes.”

“Because he’s jailbait.”

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A bigger boy with a stomach so low that it made me think of men who walked the streets of Abbeville came into the room. His fiery red hair matched the heat of his words. “The police brought him in here last night. They carried him in like some retard all bundled up in that baby blanket.”

“What you been in jail for?” one of the twin boys asked.

They all moved forward and widened their eyes, scanning the length of my body as though I was a mannequin on display at Mama Rose’s stand.

“Nothing much.”

The big one rubbed the tip of his elbow. Flakes of dead skin fell to the sofa while he tried to flex a muscle. “Son, you better tell us or I’m fixing to nail you but good.”

“I said nothing much. Just this thing about cutting a boy’s tongue out.”

“What?” the girl asked.

“Un-huh. You’re lying,” the bigger one said.

“That’s why they had me all wrapped up last night. I get these spells that make me jerk all over. If I don’t get to my medicine, they get real bad. Like that time this boy in school got to picking at me. I started jerking all over and reached for my pocketknife. It was like watching a movie, you know, but I was the one playing in it. I just walked right over while he was laughing and cut his tongue clean off.”

I held up my index finger and showed the scar left by a wayward hook from a fishing trip with Poppy.

“This scar is from him near biting my finger off. When he did that I went real crazy then. My legs went to flopping around like a puppet or something. And before the teacher could get a hold of me, I put my knife right in the middle of his rib cage. Blood went flying all over the place. They had to call in extra janitors from other schools just to clean it up.” I stared straight ahead at the painting meant to bring peace and twisted my jaw. “Those pills usually keep me calmed down. That’s why they put me in here last night, in case I went crazy and killed one of y’all.”

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The twins slid to the edge of the wall, but the redhead stood his ground. “You’re making that up.”

“You’ll see. All kinds of mind doctors are coming to see me. Ask one of them if you don’t believe me.”

“I’m gonna ask Miss Madelyn,” he said.

“Go on, but you think she knows? Last night I heard the doctors say they weren’t gonna tell her and get her all nervous. But right before they closed the door, they did tell her to keep that butcher knife locked up.” I sat staring at the scene of the ocean and jerked my shoulder up to my neck.

The twins darted out of the room first, followed by the girl. Just before he left, the older one lifted up his leg and farted. “That right there is what I think of you and your story.” But as he left, he walked out backwards. His eyes remained on me until he bumped into a shelf stacked with angel figurines.

“Quit your roughhousing, Pete,” the woman called out from the kitchen.

“Yes, Miss Madelyn.”

For good measure I jerked again before he skipped into the kitchen. My eyes never left the painted beach or the tiny seagulls that hung over the water.

The woman with the black hair net came and got me for breakfast. She tried to smile and told me her name was Miss Madelyn. I didn’t tell her that the others had already given it away.