Taft (3 page)

Marion went to school during the day while I watched Franklin and then she came home and took him in time for me to go to work. We didn't sleep much and we didn't much sleep together. I'd get into bed at four and she'd never so much as roll over. By the time I woke up, she was gone.

All that time we lived together she never forgave me anything and I got plenty sick of asking her. There was a long time when I would have gone along, married her, everything, had she been able to drop the subject of my bad behavior for one minute. Then even that opportunity passed. I'd see her studying at the kitchen table and just walk right by, not even thinking about her being a breathing person in the room. I couldn't picture her at eighteen the way I used to. That was a trick I had, a way of making myself feel warmly towards her.

"Hey," she said, and shook my shoulder. "Wake up and quiz me."

"Quiz you?" The room was dark and sweet smelling. I remembered for a second that Marion wore perfume called Ombre Rose.

"Here, take the book." She clicked on the light and it hit me square in the face. I pushed up on one elbow. "I've been studying all night," she said. "I know it. I just need somebody to quiz me."

I rolled away from her and pulled a pillow over my head. "Quiz yourself."

"I'm serious," she said.

"Don't you think I'm serious?"

What time I had in the day I gave to Franklin, who deserved it. He was a ball of fire, getting into things, tearing things apart. I often thought that if I were capable of so much movement I would have been the greatest drummer that ever lived. He liked to play something I called the Name Game, which was going up to everything and identifying it, right or wrong. Potato. Chair. Wall. Door. Daddy. Table. Tree. It was a long time before I could look at anything without stopping to think about what it was called.

When Marion graduated from Memphis State I took Franklin to see her get her diploma. We sat with the Woodmoores, who had softened on me since I'd sent their daughter through nursing school. I held Franklin up on my lap and pointed her out and he said "Mommy," but she was too far away to hear. Then the three of us went home and I waited. Waited while she took her boards and found a good job at Baptist. Waited while she got three paychecks stored up in the bank. She thought I'd be so surprised when she came home saying she'd found an apartment for the two of them closer to the hospital and she'd be out by the weekend, but I'd been watching it heading towards me for years.

What surprised me though, what made me want to wring her neck once and for all, came later when she announced they were moving to Miami for no good reason.

"Better jobs down there," she said.

"You need a better job than what you have?"

"Go back in your room for a minute," she said to Franklin. "Find your blue scarf. I can't find that scarf."

Franklin went back slowly, wanting to hear what we were saying since it was him that we were fighting over. He was eight years old by then, which I found impossible, so stretched and thin you would think he was never fed. He was still too young for any sort of trouble that counted, but I knew he was moving into that time when boys needed fathers around, someone to keep them in line. Marion had done a good job with him, no one was going to argue that, but it wasn't the time to be taking off.

"Miami's too rough," I said.

"Memphis is plenty rough." She was getting ready to go in for her shift. She was wearing her white uniform. Her little white cap was sitting on the table by the front door, wrapped in a plastic bag. The white always made her look fresh, like she'd had a good night's sleep. Just putting on that dress kept Marion young.

"You got a boyfriend? Somebody you know going to Miami. Is that it?"

"I wish that was it," she said in a nasty way, as if to tell me I'd spoiled that for her, too.

Franklin reappeared, the blue scarf hanging straight down over one shoulder like a flag. "Bingo," he said.

"We're going to talk about this some more," I told his mother, and held the door open for Franklin to go on ahead of me.

"Don't worry yourself," she said. "This isn't going to happen tomorrow."

But it happened, sooner than I would have thought. We had our share of fights over it, but they always came down to Marion saying my name did not appear on the birth certificate. For all those years I'd done nothing to see that Franklin was legally mine and she could take him out of the state just for the pleasure of doing it. Other times she was kinder. She said her parents were here and sure, they'd be back plenty. I could take Franklin on vacation in the summer and come down to see him if I gave her some notice. She said it wasn't like they were falling off the face of the earth.

I never did get the real reason she was going, but I could imagine Marion just wanted to give something else a try. There she was, a few years shy of thirty and what had happened except she'd had a baby way too young and spent her whole adult life mad at a man for not being good to her when he should have been. The year before there was a nurses' convention in Chicago. The head nurse got sick at the last minute and they sent Marion in her place. That was the first time she'd been on a plane. She'd taken things as far as they were ever going to go in Memphis. If something better was going to come to her, then she'd have to be willing to leave.

It wasn't like I was so used to coming home to my son at night, but when they left for Florida I found I didn't want to be in my apartment anymore. I didn't much want to be anywhere, so I stayed at work. I built new storage shelves for the kitchen so that the extra flour and canned tomatoes could be unpacked and put away. There had always been boxes all over the place. After that the whole kitchen seemed bigger. I reorganized the bar next, and once I started I could tell it should have been done years ago. I put the things you poured the most right up front, instead of it being alphabetical, the crazy way it was before, with Amaretto and applejack being the things you always wound up grabbing. I even started listening to the demo tapes that people sent in, something that nobody in their right mind would do. I got to where I would know in the first ten seconds whether a band was going to be any good. Most of the time you could tell by how they'd written their name on the box. Most of them were so bad it made me wonder how they could have thought it was a good idea to spend the money for blank tape. Finally, I found a little blues band called Tenement House from New Orleans, a town I am suspicious of musically since they were the ones that came up with that Dixie crap. I told them they could come and play, and it turned out they were good enough to keep all week. They were popular here and everybody talked about how I'd found them, how I had the ear. I wanted to say no, it was nothing as complicated as that.

I told everybody that I was working so much because I needed the money, or I told them I stayed at work because I didn't have the money to be going out. Money was the other thing. I told them Marion was soaking me. Any man will give another man sympathy for that. When Marion went to Miami she decided she'd need to have a set amount every month, an amount that she figured up to cover things. I won't say how much. It makes me uncomfortable to talk about money and it always has. Up until Miami we never had a problem with this. I gave her what she needed. I took Franklin out for clothes and in the fall we went to Woolworth's for school supplies. I bought him binders and pencils and other things, things he maybe didn't need but just wanted, like twelve-packs of Magic Markers that smelled like different kinds of fruit. I liked it this way. I got to spend my money on him. It never seemed like too much. If someone came around to the bar telling me they knew a good deal on hams, I'd go out and buy one for Marion. I never went to her place in the summer without peaches or a basket of sugar beets. I wrote out the checks for the visits to the dentist. I bought shoes, which aren't cheap and get tossed aside six months later when they're outgrown. I saw that they had plenty. I took good care. Franklin always knew who was looking out for him. But in Miami I couldn't take him shopping. Marion wanted X dollars on the first of every month, or the fifteenth if that was better, but the same money at the same time like clockwork. I didn't want any part of it.

"He's your son," she said.

"Funny how that works. Sometimes you think he is and sometimes you're not so sure."

But I knew Marion. She could find her way without my money and without me, so I paid. I worried about that payment all the time. I was always checking to make sure I had enough to cover it. When I put it in the envelope I'd write a note to go along.
This is for half the electric bill, for class trips, for a new pair of jeans.
Something along those lines.

When I got home from work the day I hired the girl in the puffy jacket and the striped stocking cap, it was nearly three in the morning. I'd stayed open late because there were a couple of guys still drinking at the bar and I figured there was no point in throwing them out. I was in no hurry. Two minutes after I walked in the door the phone started to ring. I could only think it was bad news. When it was Marion on the other end and she was crying, I knew it as fact.

"Franklin," I said to her. "Tell me."

She took a breath. "He's okay."

"Marion, why are you crying? Settle down, tell me what you're crying about."

"He fell," she said, then started up again. "Where were you till three o'clock? I've been trying all night."

"He fell how?" I said. There was no spit in my mouth and I sat down on the edge of the bed, which I hadn't made once since Marion left.

"Where were you?"

"Work," I said, trying not to be short with her. She wouldn't call me at the bar. Not if a life depended on it. "Fell how?"

"At the beach. He was running with some boys. They pushed him or he fell, I don't know. He fell on some glass, a piece of Coke bottle he says. It cut his face. The side of his face." She was crying. "It was by his eye, but it didn't cut his eye."

I looked at the carpet, a bad orange and brown shag left over from the seventies. I should have found a day job, something regular, found a nicer place to live. "Where is he now?" I said, thinking maybe in the hospital.

"Right here, asleep. He's fine now. It just scared me to death is all. Then you weren't home. When I got the call I thought he was dead at first."

"Stop that."

"Everything's fine, but I thought—I didn't want to call my parents. I didn't know who to call."

"You call me," I said. Was there a bandage around his head? Was it only taped up over the cut? Did the white from the tape make his skin look warm and rested up the way his mother's uniform made her look?

"Don't fight me about this," she said, tired.

"Who were the boys? Who was he with?"

"Boys from around here. There're boys everywhere. He has friends from school. They play."

"Are they rough kids? Do you know them?" I wanted to blame her, but only because I felt too far away. I wanted to go into his room and see him sleep. Miami was drugs and guns and gangs, packs of half-starved refugees who'd kill a boy like mine for the sneakers he was wearing.

"Some of them," she said, "but there's no sense in wondering. It's nobody's fault, unless it's my fault."

"You shouldn't have taken him so far away," I said.

"I need some sleep," she said. "I have to work tomorrow."

I started to ask her if she'd heard me, but she hung up.

I sat there with the phone in my hands, not able to put it down in case I thought of another question. I didn't know what things were coming to, how things had gotten so far away from me. This wasn't terrible. A cut near the eye was not a lost eye. I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes, touching the side of my face where I imagined the cut would be. I hadn't asked her if it was on the left side or the right. I saw my son's head. It was oval-shaped. His hair was as short as it could be and still be hair, but it wasn't shaved off on the sides and the back. There were no lines shaved into this boy's head, no thin braid at the nape of his neck. His skin was darker than mine or Marion's. It was not an inky black, a blue black. It was a warm color, brown black. His eyes were lighter than his skin. I thought about the shape of his eyes. I thought about his mouth, which was wide and bright. I thought of every tooth that mouth contained, every one of them straight and hard and white as chalk the way new teeth are. The phone began to make that awful sound phones make when they're off the hook and no one is at the other end. It startled me, and then I hung it up.

I thought about Franklin's face so hard I gave myself a headache. I wanted to know what happened. I wanted to know all of it. I pictured the day hot, even for this time of year in Miami. From a distance I could make out some shapes and then make out that they were boys. They were coming from every direction. The boys gathered up together like some sort of dust storm moving down the street. Haitian boys, West Indian boys, lighter Latino boys with black silky hair. They wear red tank tops, T-shirts that say Batman or Desert Storm. They are barefoot, in tennis shoes and flip-flops as they run down the street laughing. Boys picking up boys like dogs packing together. Then all of a sudden Franklin is with them. He's not wearing a shirt. He's wearing some shorts that are so big they cover his knees. They are electric blue. He is hollering with the boys and I can't hear what he's saying. They're on their way to the beach, which isn't far. They cut through the traffic, not waiting for anything, cut across the parking lot, weaving in and out between the cars, trying to hide and scare one another. They make their way down to the sand and across the sand to the water. They run back and forth with the waves, trying to keep their feet dry, acting crazy. One boy gets in the water and pretends to drown. He cries for help in a foot of water and the pack goes in to save him, but he struggles because everybody knows a drowning man will fight off the person who is trying to save him. Franklin reaches down to him, but
when he does the drowning boy slings out his arm and catches Franklin hard on the side of the face. Franklin, hit, falls back into the water. Now the game changes without anyone saying anything about it. It is to drown someone instead of to pretend you're drowning. All at once they reach out to catch Franklin's arms and pull him under. Franklin gets the change in the program just as fast as they do. There are so many boys, eight counting Franklin, and they get all tangled up together. One boy pushes him under by the neck and he shuts his eyes tight against the salt water. The water fills up his nose and ears and blocks out the sound of the voices. Franklin is terrified, scared like an animal. He kicks up out of the water with everything he's got and his foot makes contact with something and for a second he is let go. He takes that second to make his break. In the water he is slick and he slips between them. He digs his heels in the wet sand and takes off running, twice as fast as before, and the boys run after, screaming. He's pretty far away, past the empty lifeguard chair, halfway to the parking lot, when he takes a look behind him for one quick second, loses his balance, and goes straight down into the hot, soft sand. The broken bottom of a 7UP bottle, a flat disk of green glass with a quarter inch of jagged edge, cuts a half circle on the side of his face near his left eye. When he raises his face out of the sand he doesn't know he's bleeding. The sight of the blood stops the wild boys dead and turns them all back into regular boys again. Just like that. They forget that things had gotten out of hand or that Franklin is the one they were chasing, and Franklin forgets too, as soon as he touches his hand to his face because there is something, riot water, dripping into his eye.