Wait Until Twilight (8 page)

“If you don’t get your ass down here right now, we’re calling the cops!”

“Okay, okay!” I say.

“Back up and we’ll let you down!” I slowly back up, holding on tightly to the rope while looking up at the night sky with all its stars.
Hell, how many blue baseball caps are floating around out there right now?
“Don’t try to climb down! Just let go! We’ll catch you—don’t worry about it falling.”

I let go with my arms out. The crowd oohs and ahs as I slowly descend with the water on the engraving dripping down off the cliff onto my head. A couple of guys immediately grab me when I land. It’s Will and Brad. They help me out of the harness. “He’s with us,” they say, and start pulling me along. We start running back to the parking lot. “You crazy bastard. What were you doing up there?”

“I just wanted to see,” I say as we run back to the car.

Though we haven’t drunk that much, and it’s been over an hour since we began drinking, Will takes the wheel for David, who isn’t the most reliable driver in any state. They drop me off first. I notice on my way in a big stack of long white tubes in the garage. They look at least ten feet long and wide enough to fit a softball through. Looks like Dad’s going to do some plumbing work. When I go inside the house, Dad’s in the living room watching television.

“Where ya been?” Dad asks.

“The traveling fair at the Kmart parking lot,” I say, and go straight to the bathroom to brush my teeth and take a shower.

As I make my way from the bathroom to my bedroom, Dad asks, “How was the fair?”

I stand in the hall doorway. “The rides are for kids, you know, but it was still fun.”

“Yeah, it’s always like that,” he says, and then adds, “The spaghetti was good.”

I go to my room and check the model airplane, which is now all dry. I take it from the windowsill and carefully place it on the dresser. I go to bed early and make sure to look at the plane one more time before I close my eyes. The last thing in my mind as I settle into sleep is a blue baseball cap sitting there in the darkness of my mind.

I
GET UP EARLY SATURDAY MORNING TO HELP DAD
out at the family hardware store, where my main duty is manning the register for most of the morning. It’s pretty slow. I like it best when there’re customers to deal with, otherwise it’s pretty boring. So I read the paper from front to back and look out the store window at the passing cars. Luckily Cornelius and Yoshi pull up on a dirty old motorcycle that sounds like a lawn mower going
thump thump thump
. Cornelius is up front steering, and Yoshi’s holding on behind him.

“Whose dirt bike is that?” I ask when they come in.

“Mine,” says Cornelius. “Me and my cousin fixed it up.”

“Cool,” I say.

“You wanna ride?” asks Cornelius.

“I got to stay behind this register or my dad’ll kill me. What’re you guys doing?”

“Cornelius is going to show me the dirt track where everyone rides,” says Yoshi.

“By the gravel pits?” I ask.

“Yeah. We wanted to see if you come, too. We all ride together.”

“You think you can squeeze three people on that thing?” I ask.

“Sure, I done it before,” says Cornelius.

“I don’t know, man.”

“This your store?” asks Yoshi.

“Yup.”

Yoshi and Cornelius walk around the aisles and then come back to the counter and hang out. Dad shows up later in the morning, and I introduce Yoshi and Cornelius to him. He shakes their hands and asks Cornelius, “Is that your dirt bike out there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He fixed it up himself,” I say.

“I don’t see any helmets.”

“We ain’t got none.”

Dad just shakes his head and then tells me to take a break. “You’re not gonna ride that thing without a helmet,” he tells me.

“I know,” I say.

I take Cornelius and Yoshi around back, past the bathroom and office where there’s an old emptied-out storage room. While Cornelius and Yoshi snoop around I do some light stretching and sit down on a concrete slab. It’s quiet in there, real quiet and dusty, except for Yoshi and Cornelius talking about who’d win a fight between a grizzly bear and a tiger. “A tiger has claws and teeth, man,” says Cornelius.

“A bear has claws, too.”

“As big as a tiger?”

“Yes, I saw on a nature show…”

I’d like to join in on their debate, but I don’t feel like it. Yoshi and Cornelius know about those babies, but they haven’t seen them. Not
like me. They haven’t felt the way I feel about them. And those feelings just seem dark and wrong. At that moment Yoshi and Cornelius seem in a completely different world, where I’m just an occasional actor. A double agent for real. A phony. I cross my legs and lower my head. Then, in with Yoshi and Cornelius’s ramblings, I think I can hear some music. It’s very faint, but I recognize it immediately. It’s “Moon River.” A wave of memories comes flooding in…My mom playing this song on her old record player while Jim and I are in his room playing video games on the Atari…Me asking Jim if I can play, but he’s too involved in playing Defender even to answer me…I walk out of Jim’s room and when Mom sees me in the living room, she pats the seat beside her on the sofa for me to come and sit down…She’s got a big smile on her face and a newspaper in her lap. It made me happy to see her happy. But this music I’m hearing isn’t the record or even the original recording, it’s too clumsy and all the instruments are wrong, not to mention Audrey Hepburn isn’t singing.

“Do you hear that?” I ask.

“Hear what?” says Yoshi, who stops bouncing a small rubber ball he found on a counter.

“I can hear it, too,” says Cornelius. “I thought it was a stereo or somethin’.”

I get up and they follow me out the back door of the store to find a guitarist, a trumpeter, and a guy playing a recorder, performing in the empty lot behind the store. “Is that ‘Moon River’?” I ask.

“Yeah, sure is,” says the trumpeter.

“Sounds good,” says Yoshi.

“What the hell are you?” asks Cornelius.

“We’re the Abandon Mints,” says the guitarist with curly brown hair and black-framed glasses.

“What are you doing playing here behind my dad’s store?”

“We’re practicing. We’re supposed to be in the Spring Fling
Band contest at the West Georgian College. We need to practice playing out so…we’re playing out. We just randomly chose the first spot we could find just driving around. I hope your dad doesn’t mind.”

“Hey, do you sell thread? I told my mom I’d get some thread for her,” says the trumpeter.

“We have twine. I’m not sure about thread, though.”

“Are we finished then? We’ve been doing this for an hour,” asks the recorder player.

“I don’t know? Are we?” asks the guitarist.

They all look at one another again.

“Okay then. Tomorrow at three?” says the recorder player.

They all nod and dump their instruments in the back of a station wagon parked along the road. The recorder player and the guitarist get in the car and leave while the trumpeter comes back.

“My car’s parked out front,” he says.

“Just follow me.” I lead him, Yoshi, and Cornelius through the back into the store. I walk them to the shelf with all the twine and wire and tape. “It’s for your mom, right?” I ask.

“Yeah, she wanted me to get some while I was out of the house.”

“Here, just take it.” All three look a little taken aback. “I hate being salesman, anyways.”

“Are you sure you can do that?” he asks.

“So generous a man!” says Yoshi.

“Damn,” says Cornelius.

“It’s nothing. Just go out the back.”

I walk him to the back, where he stops and takes out three dollars. “Here, take it, man. You should come out to the concert. It’s at the college in two weeks.”

“I’ll think about it,” I say, and take the three dollars. Once he leaves, we three go back up to the front.

“Here,” I say to Dad, “I just sold a spool of twine to this musician guy I just met.”

“You what?”

“There were some college guys in the back lot. They were playing music—”

“Playing music? Son, you can’t just sell our stuff like that. It needs to be done up here at the register…”

“Uh, we should be going,” says Cornelius. “Come on, Yoshi, we gotta go.”

“Okay, ’bye.” He waves at me, and they both head out. Dad’s going to lay into me some more, but Cecilia, this red-headed lady who buys big amounts of supplies at a time, comes in to save me. She works for a bunch of contractors who get their supplies from the store.

“Samuel, you’re growing up like a weed,” she says when she walks in.

“Yes, ma’am,” I say.

“You ready for some heavy lifting?”

“Yes, ma’am.” She gives me the yellow order form, which I take to the back where we keep all the bulk items. I use the dolly to take all the boxes out to her van. Then I load them while Dad and she talk. I can overhear her talking about referring some other contractors to his store, which I’m sure Dad loves. After I load all the boxes into her white van, she tips me a five-dollar bill.

LATER ON AT LUNCH DAD
doesn’t mention my under-the-counter sale of the twine. He even takes us to get some steaks at a local steakhouse nearby called the El Rancho. The whole family used to go there on Sunday afternoon. Mom and Dad would pick Jim and me up from the house after church, and we’d all get the buffet and stuff ourselves. Mom would make sure we’d fill ourselves up, encouraging us to eat
more and more until I thought I’d explode. It was fun, almost like an eating competition between Jim and me. These days it’s just Dad and me. Jim wouldn’t come anymore even when he’s home.

Instead of the buffet, Dad and me both order T-bones with baked potatoes and mixed vegetables. Then we sit and wait. Across the aisle from our booth are three middle-aged black men in a heated conversation about money. The two sitting together wear nice-looking suits, the kinds with open collars without the ties. The guy across from them is bald and wears a black leather jacket.

“Did you ever find something for the video project?” Dad asks. I’m surprised because usually we don’t talk much when we’re eating here.

“Yeah, that’s what got me that first lockdown. I skipped classes so I could finish it up.”

“Oh,” he says, pulling out a newspaper. “What were those kids doing back there behind the store?”

I explain to Dad how they were practicing in an open public space for an upcoming performance. He seems confused by the whole thing as I try to explain, so I change the subject to something more suited to his understanding: plumbing. “Is that what you’re going to do with those pipes I saw in the garage?”

Dad gets a twinkle in his eye and leans back. “You know your mother was the creative one between us. Not me. Don’t have an artistic bone in my body. I guess you might have got it from her side. Back when I first met her she was really interested in the arts, but then Jim and you came along, and next thing you know we got other things to think about.” He takes a drink of sweet tea and continues. “When she found out she was sick, she spent some time on her own coming up with things. Ideas, designs just for herself. She gave me one of them. Called it a piece of installation art. Ever heard of that?”

“Sure. It’s like sculpture, except you can use anything, everyday
materials to fancy media stuff, whatever, to make some area feel different than before.”

“Right. I figured you would. But anyhow, she gave me a design for some installation art, and I told her I’d make it come to life. Her creativity and my hands. I never got around to doing it. Made me sad just to think about it, especially after she died. I don’t know, son, I just figured it was time to do it. I promised I would. Better later than never.”

“What’s it going to be?”

“It’s hard for me to explain, and I don’t really understand it myself. She called it ‘art for the sake of art.’ ‘Something to make you feel. Feel anything you want,’ she said. Just wait till I finish it, and you can see for yourself.” He went back to his paper, officially ending his talk.

It was about the weirdest thing Dad has ever done. Art? Dad’s right about him not being the artistic type. If anything, he was the opposite. Mom definitely had an artistic streak. She liked movies and music and books, but Dad? No way. I ponder a little bit more about this strangeness while Dad reads the paper. Then the steaks come. They’re good: nice and juicy. As we eat the conversation in the adjacent booth is becoming more and more intense. They’re keeping their voices low, but the two sitting together are really pissed off at the one sitting across the table from them. I’m watching them while I eat, and it looks like it’s going to calm down a little when the black guy with a mustache pulls a gun out of his jacket and points it at the bald one wearing the leather jacket. Dad must have seen the gun, too, because he says, “Son, don’t move, okay?”

“Okay, Dad.”

“Eat your dessert.”

“I don’t think I can finish it.”

“Just pretend to, then.”

The booths are high enough to where we can’t see the booths in
front or behind us, just the one across the aisle. So we’re the only ones who can see the gun. The man who’s holding the gun is talking about being disrespected and how he isn’t at all like him, the bald guy, who’s got his hands up. The gunman then gets up, careful not to expose the gun, and sits down next to the bald guy. He puts the gun to his head, and I can hear the bald one silently begging, “Yo man, don’t do it. I got kids.” The gunman’s friend on the other side seems scared, too, and is quietly talking to the gunman, telling him to chill out and put the gun away before something bad happens. I can see him out of the corner of my eye pointing the gun at his neck, his head, his guts, just all over his body to scare him even more. He keeps talking about how serious he is. “Man, you know I’m serious right?”

I get that cold dark feeling again down in my guts, and it’s as if there’s no sun and the light of day doesn’t have a source—it’s just there with no starting point. It’s the kind of faint glow you see at dusk. The fork I’m holding starts to rattle against my plate, and I realize it’s my left hand shaking. I put my hand below the table, where I try to calm myself by rubbing my thigh, but it won’t stop trembling. I look over at the black man and then at the gun pointed at his terrified face that’s contorted and twisted with fear, his eyes as big as saucers. In that instant he doesn’t look human. More like a grown-up version of one of those alien babies. But those babies aren’t scared, they’re just deformed. Or are they? What the hell do they feel? My hand keeps shaking. Suddenly, the bald guy shouts out, “Oh!” and raises his hands as water squirts out of the gun. He wipes his face and looks at his wet hands. The guy with the gun shoots some water into his own mouth and drinks. The two wearing the nice suits start laughing.

“You think that’s funny?” asks the bald guy angrily. “That ain’t funny! Mothafucka!” He curses and cleans off the water with a napkin while the other two are slapping their knees and hunched over from laughing.

Dad looks at me and asks, “You ready?”

“Yeah,” I say. I follow Dad out of the booth and up to the cashier, where we pay. As we walk across the parking lot to Dad’s car he puts his hand on my shoulder, and I’m so tense I reflexively jerk. He doesn’t say anything and keeps it there as we walk. It isn’t until he pulls out of the parking lot onto the road that he says, “Son, some folk are just plain crazy and stupid. All you can do is avoid people like that, but if you have to interact with them, keep it cool, leave them behind, and forget about the whole thing ASAP.”

“Okay, Dad.”

He drops me off at home telling me, “Take it easy the rest of the day.”

“All right,” I say halfheartedly as I get out.

“I’m serious, son. Just relax,” he says before leaving for the hardware store.

I LIE DOWN IN BED
but can’t unwind no matter how hard I try. I keep seeing that scared, bent-up face and the way it made me feel, all dark and clammy. I even start cold sweating on the bedspread, so I give up on relaxing and go out for a bike ride to try to clear my head and get some fresh air. The morning sun has been enveloped by a fluffy layer of gray clouds, but it doesn’t look like rain. The wind cools me down. I keep going out farther and farther on the back-country roads, aimlessly riding around until I come upon the dirt road that cuts through the old swamp. I stop on the rickety old bridge and look out over the bog. A chorus of frog croaks rise from the surrounding tall grass. The mosquitoes start ganging up on me, so I push on to Underwood. I’m going to see Mrs. Greenan and apologize again. No matter how strange those babies are, no matter how disgusting, I want to see them again because I don’t want to be afraid, and I don’t
want to feel the repulsion. I hate it. It just doesn’t seem right for me to feel that way.