Buddy (14 page)

27

The next time Mrs. Watson calls me up to her desk it ain't about a letter. This time, she asks real quiet why I ain't done my homework. I shrug my shoulders and look out the window. She says I was doing so good at the first of the year and now I ain't. She says is anything troubling me, and I say, “No, ma'am.” She says, “Well, go finish this homework now. You'll need this study sheet for the test. I'll look over it after lunch.”

I sit back down at my desk. “What is the capital of Peru?” the question says. “Who was the first explorer to cross the Andes?” “List the three main exports of Brazil.” I put my head down on my desk. I fall asleep. When I wake up, there's a wet spot on the paper and I've missed my lunch.

The day before Mardi Gras, Mama leaves out to buy a King Cake the minute I come home from school.

“You watch Tanya and Terrell,” she says, “and I'll go find us a King Cake. We might as well get whatever Mardi Gras we can get.”

Tanya says she wants chocolate cream, and I say I want plain, and Mama says we don't get to choose. She says she'll just get what she can get, and we better be happy.

But ain't nobody in that town sells King Cake. She's gone a long time, and when she comes back empty-handed, we can't believe it.

We're sitting at the table that night and Daddy's saying what made Mama think they've got King Cake in a place like this, and Mama says she hasn't ever been anywhere in her life where they don't have King Cake.

And Daddy says, “That's because you ain't never been out of New Orleans.”

And Mama says, “Well, where all have you been, Mr. World Traveler?”

And Daddy says, “You forgot I was in the service. I've been all kinds of places.”

And Mama says, “So I guess you're smarter than everybody else sitting at this table?”

And Daddy starts to say something back, and then he stops.

Everybody at the table gets real quiet.

I look at Daddy and I see he's looking at Mama.

“It's going to be all right,” he says to her. “We're going to make it.”

Mama nods her head a little bit and pinches up her lips, and then she says, “It's not about the cake.” She turns her head and looks at me. “It's about Li'l T.”

All the eyes swivel around to look at me.

“What about Li'l T?” Daddy says, and I know he's thinking he ain't got a stick in this apartment.

“I was going to wait until after we ate,” Mama says, “but I might as well go ahead now.” She looks toward the window for a second then starts up again. “I didn't go out just to buy King Cake. I went by Li'l T's school, too.”

She looks back at me. “They called me this afternoon,” she says. She ain't taking her eyes off me. Ain't none of them taking their eyes off me. “They say he hasn't been at school today. They say he's getting
F
s.”

I feel like I'm sitting in a fire. I feel like the end of the world has come.

“Is that true, son?” Daddy says.

I look down at my hands resting on top of my napkin. My fingers are all twisted in a knot. I can't hardly move but I'm just barely able to nod my head.

“Look at me,” Daddy says.

I manage to raise up my head and look at his shirt.

“Look me in the eye.”

I lift up my eyes and there's his face. There are his eyes looking straight at me.

“Where did you go?” he says.

“The mall,” I say.

“What did you do at the mall?”

“Walk. Sit.”

“Who were you with?”

“Nobody.”

He's looking at me hard. His eyes are all squinched up. Tanya's eyes are big as saucers. Baby Terrell picks up his spoon and throws it on the floor. Mama bends down and picks it up and wipes it off.

“Is that the truth?” Daddy says.

“Yes, sir.”

“Go to your room. The rest of us are going to finish eating.”

I stand up. My chair makes a noise. I start to push it back to the table and then I give up. I go in my room and I shut my door. I lay down on my bed, and I can't believe it. I start to cry. I cry and cry and cry and cry. I stop for a while and then I start up again. I cry with my pillow on my head and without it. I curl up in a ball and then I flop around like one of Tanya's cloth dolls. I cry quiet and I cry loud.

And all that time, nobody comes in the room. Not even Tanya. When I'm finally done, it's way past bedtime and I need to go to the bathroom. The whole apartment is quiet. I open my door and it don't squeak a bit. I do my business and when I'm back in the living room again, I nearly jump out of my skin. There's Granpa T, stretched out on the sofa and looking straight at me. My heart stops.

He sits up, and then my heart starts beating again because I see it ain't Granpa T at all. It's Daddy.

“Son,” he says. “Sit down.”

That dog Rover ain't in his wire cage. He's all curled up at Daddy's feet. When I sit down, he lifts up his head and his tail goes
whap, whap
.

“What do you want in life, son?” Daddy says.

I don't answer.

“Whatever it is, skipping school ain't the way to get it.”

I still don't say nothing.

“Tomorrow I'm taking you to school. I'm going to walk with you to see the principal. I'm going to walk with you to see your teacher. But I ain't always going to be around to take those hard walks with you. This is just practice for when you have to do it by yourself.”

He waits for me to say something but I ain't got nothing to say.

“I'm going to miss some work and it's going to cost us some money. So you've got to pay us back.”

I raise up my head and look at him.

“I'm going to New Orleans this weekend. I've decided I'm going to start mucking out the house. Mama don't like it, but I've decided I'm going to do it. And you're going to help me. All day Saturday. On Sunday, you're going to sit in this apartment and you're going to study. You can't make up those tests but you can learn what was on them.

“Every time I go to New Orleans from now on, you're coming and you're working. You're working hard and you're working for free. Every Sunday from now on, you're studying and you're studying hard.

“Ain't no
F
going to come through the door of my house. Ain't no ‘skipping school' going to sit at my table.”

I'm shivering in the cool, but I don't move.

“You understand what I'm saying?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You got anything you need to tell me, son?”

I'm quiet for a little while. Then I find my voice. “Some of the brothers are smoking weed behind the Winn-Dixie after school. They asked me to come. But I ain't done that, Daddy. And I won't. I promise.”

I can tell Daddy's looking hard at me in the dark. “Can I trust you, son?”

“Yes, sir.”

He nods. “Anything else?”

“When I saw you laying on the sofa, I thought you were Granpa T.” I can't believe it. My voice gets all bumpy when I say that.

Daddy don't say nothing for a while. Then he sucks in a deep breath. “Go on to bed,” he says. “It's cold.”

I stand up. Rover hops off the sofa, too.

Daddy watches me walk to the door of the bedroom. When I push it open, Rover zips inside and jumps up on my bed. I don't push him off. I lay down beside him. I hear Daddy's voice talking to Mama in the other room. I hear Rover snuffling his nose once or twice.

I put my hand on his back and I go to sleep.

28

That first day we go back to New Orleans, Daddy works me so hard I think he's going to kill me. We're dragging all the wet, black stuff out of the house and piling it up by the street. We can't hardly carry the sofa between us, but somehow we manage. We stand in Granpa T's room for about an hour staring at the refrigerator laying facedown on the floor and trying to figure out how to move it. Daddy's afraid to lift it up because whatever is in it will fall out. But we can't just leave it laying there forever. Finally we give up and go back to work in the living room on the stuff we know how to do—the tables and chairs and dishes and clothes and pictures and curtains and books. By the end of the day, there's a heap of stuff as tall as me stretching all the way across the sidewalk in front of our house.

We're standing on the street looking at that pile. We're filthy from our heads to our feet. Daddy's grinning about as big as I've seen since August. “We started,” he says. “I guess we can finish.”

I ain't so sure but I don't say nothing. When we get home, I just open my book bag and start studying.

The next Saturday, we clean out Granpa T's room except for the refrigerator. I'm worrying it's going to be sad to do, but it ain't. We can't even tell all that stuff was ever his. I collect up what pictures are still hanging on the wall, except they ain't pictures anymore. They're just frames with glass in them and streaky, colored paper behind. The hanging rod in his closet broke and all his shirts and suits are wadded together in a heap on the floor on top of his old shoes. That old mattress weighs a ton, being full of water. The drawers in the bureau are stuck shut so we just haul the whole thing out at once.

We go back inside and stand in Granpa T's room just looking. It's so quiet in New Orleans now that when we ain't making noise ourselves my ears feel like they fill up with silence, like there ain't no such thing as sound.

Then Daddy sucks in a deep breath. “Well,” he says, “at least we still got some pictures of your grandmama.”

I don't say nothing because there really ain't nothing to say.

The next weekend we have a bunch of helpers. We wrap the refrigerator around and around with duct tape and set it on the street. One of the helpers thinks he's so funny. He gets a marker out of his truck and writes all over the refrigerator,
FREE KATRINA GUMBO INSIDE! SPECIAL RECIPE!
Everybody stands around and laughs for a little bit. Then we go inside and drag out the washer and dryer, still sloshing with water inside them.

I'm carrying a load of rotten towels to the street when along comes this big old truck. It's got a claw arm attached behind the cab. It pulls up in front of our house and that claw arm reaches out and latches on to the refrigerator. It lifts it up like it's a toy, turns it a little this way and a little that way, and sets it down in the back of that truck with about fifteen other refrigerators all lined up like they're on sale, except they're not. And then off it goes, looking for another dead refrigerator.

When we get home that night, I'm telling all about the refrigerator truck and this other truck that came along with a little Bobcat. That little Bobcat hustled up to our washer and dryer and picked both of them up at the same time—side by side just like they always were in the house. It carried them to the truck and set them down in the trailer and off they went, side by side forever.

Tanya falls out laughing, and then Baby Terrell grabs one of her dolls and whops her, and Mama starts fussing, and Daddy shakes his head, and Rover starts barking, and to tell truth, I can't help but laugh a little bit myself. I laugh and then I get out my books.

A couple weeks after that, Daddy say's there's so much work to do, we're going to start staying overnight soon as my grades get better.

“They're already better,” I say. “School ain't hard.”

“Then you're a bigger fool than I thought making
F
s.”

“I ain't making
F
s no more. I'm up to
B
s now.”

“Then I guess we can stay overnight. You can bring your books with you. But if you go down—”

“I ain't going down. I promise.”

Mama's standing there listening with her arms crossed over her chest. “So now you'll be gone Saturday and Sunday,” she says.

“I guess,” Daddy says.

“Then you can take that dog with you. Nobody's taught him any manners yet, and I can't watch him and my babies, too.”

Baby Terrell's kicking to get down out of his high chair. Mama picks him up and while she's still holding him, she turns around and looks at Daddy.

“Why are you doing all this, T Junior?” she says.

“We're going home, baby,” Daddy says. “When I get that house fixed up, we're going home.”

So Daddy and me start camping in the old house on Saturday nights. We get us a couple of air mattresses and a battery-operated lantern and a cooler so big I can almost lay down in it. Daddy fixes up a kind of hideaway spot in the backyard where we can do our business and we're ready to go.

Mama cooks us something to take that we can eat cold. We stop at a store on the way in and get a supply of drinks and two gallons of water. Daddy always has it figured out what we're going to do. Maybe we'll be tearing out the plaster in the living room. Maybe we'll be ripping out the carpet. When it gets too dark to work, we each get one gallon of water to wash up. Then we eat what Mama cooked, stretch out on those air mattresses, and don't move until morning.

Not even Rover. He spends the whole day hunting rats in the yard or keeping cool under the house. When we wash up, he stands under the drips and tries to bite them. When we go to sleep, he snugs himself down in a spot he's made under the house right below my mattress. Soon as he hears my feet hit the floor in the morning, his tail starts whopping on the dirt, and then we get busy all over again.

One Saturday Daddy sets me to work in the old bathroom banging out the tiles and adding them to the pile in front. He gives me a little mallet and a face mask and he tells me to knock off every last piece. Daddy goes over to Mrs. Washington's house to help some men from the church get her refrigerator wrapped up and on the street. Her nephew's coming back soon they say and at least that much will be done.

I'm swinging that mallet like there's no tomorrow and sweating hard. Those tiles are flying. Every once in a while I stop and catch my breath and then I get going again. That bathroom's getting full of dust. I'm finding the same thing on every stud—black mold growing at the bottom. Daddy says when we get everything cleared out, we're going to wash every stick of wood in that house with bleach. That's going to be some kind of hard job.

Eventually, there's so much dust in there I can't hardly see. I'm covered in white from head to toe. I decide it's time to take a break. I go outside to sit on the front porch.

Soon as the screen door bangs, Rover comes zipping around from the backyard. He loves coming to New Orleans. He kills a rat twice a day almost, and that's way more fun than dragging that old doll around. Sure enough, he's carrying something dead now and he wants me to see it.

“Put that down, you fool dog,” I say.

He just stands there looking at me, his tail slowing down a little bit.

“You can't come up on the porch with that,” I say, and his tail starts going again. He takes one step forward and I hustle down the steps.

“Drop it!”

He don't budge.

“You got to learn, Rover,” I say. “We just can't have dead rats lined up on the porch anymore. Drop it.”

He's kind of whining and trying to decide what to do. I'm thinking I wish he spoke English. I wish he knew what to do like Buddy did. I wish somebody had trained him.

And then—
pow!
—it hits me. Ain't nobody trained Rover because he ain't never been anybody else's dog before he was mine.

I'm standing there looking at that dog and his tail whapping away and that dead rat hanging out of his mouth, and I'm thinking,
It's all on me.

He's watching me right back and his tail is speeding up. I notice his eyes are sort of like Buddy's. They're dark, dark brown and they've got black going all around them. Rover stretches out his front feet and bends down and looks up at me, and I can't decide whether he's laughing at me or not.

“Drop it,” I say, making my voice sound like Daddy. I point to the ground.

Rover ducks down a little farther. He shakes his head like I must think he's a fool if I think he's going to let go of that rat.

And then—
boom
—he drops it.

I can't believe it. I go down on my knees. His eyes ain't laughing at me at all. They're just laughing. I rub him all along his neck and say, “Good dog. Good dog, Rover.”

Then he's trying to climb me, and it's all I can do to stay out of the way of his tongue and his scratching, wet paws when all a sudden I hear somebody say, “That ain't Buddy.”

I whip around and there's J-Boy, standing at the gate.

My heart leaps up in happiness. “You're home!” I say.

“Yeah,” he says, and nods his head a little. “I'm home.”

I'm standing up, and Rover's jumping on me and still licking me and letting out little barks, and I'm trying to push him down, and he thinks it's all a game just like Baby Terrell when he whops you with his toy and thinks it's so funny.

“That ain't the three-legged dog,” J-Boy says. “What happened to him? He drown?”

I don't feel like answering that. I push Rover down again, and lucky for me and J-Boy, he hears something scratching under the house and goes sniffing after it.

We stand there a minute, watching Rover's back end sticking out from under the house and his tail whacking back and forth. When I look up at J-Boy, I see his eyes are half-closed and he's got a piece of lint stuck in his hair.

“Where have you been?” I ask him.

“We ended up in Houston.”

“We're in Mississippi. But we're coming home once we fix up the house. Are you fixing your house?”

“Nah,” he says. “It ain't our house anyway.”

“Where're you staying then?”

He nods his head to the side a little. “Down the street.”

“Where're you going to school?”

“I ain't.”

“You ain't going to school?”

“I'm finished with school.”

“You graduated?”

He rolls his eyes. “You always was a fool. I'm sixteen. I don't have to go anymore. I'm through with school.”

“You're sixteen?”

“Almost.”

“When will you be sixteen?”

“Ain't none of your business.”

“Your mama says you can quit school?”

“Ain't none of her business.”

“She ain't calling the cops on you?”

“She ain't here. She's in Houston.”

“So you're staying in New Orleans by yourself?”