Gypsy Davey (2 page)

Lois roughly brushed Joanne aside to get to Davey, who quaked like an old washing machine behind her. “Come here, dear,” Lois said, and started pulling his hat, mittens, and coat off. He looked at her like she was a stranger on the bus, undressing him like that. Joanne ran as fast as she could, down the hall to her room, and slammed the door.

When Davey gently pushed the door open ten minutes later, Joanne was lying facedown on the bed, with her coat on.

“Joanne?” he whispered. She didn't say anything. “Joanne?” He was the kind of kid who would stand there and say her name a hundred times, assuming she hadn't heard him. “Joanne?”

“Go away, Davey.” She sobbed into the pillow.

He stood for a few seconds, looking at her, then looking at the door thinking he might leave, then looking at her some more. Then, as if he'd never called her name before, or he forgot that he had, or maybe he wanted to talk even though she told him not to, he called her low again.

“Jo? Joey? Okay, well, I had, okay, the best time today that I ever had before, is all, Jo. Okay?” He backed out of the room when she didn't lift her face. “Okay? Joey. Bye I'll leave you alone now, Jo.”

People always spoke to Davey
like he was a baby. They did it when he was a baby, did it when he was no longer a baby. Some people never stopped talking to him that way. Davey's mother Lois was the one who set the tone. She didn't mean anything by it, had always spoken to her other children that way when they were small ones. This time around, though, it was just one more thing she couldn't quite snap out of.

“You wan' me bring you back sumpin' nice, sweetie?” was Lois's standard refrain whenever she would leave the house without him. She never left him as an infant, unless five-year-old Joanne was there to take care of him. But later, when Davey was a big lump of a four- and five-year-old and Lois was running low on the patience, physical strength, and unflinching devotion it took to keep hauling him in and out
of the car, to the grocery store, to the bank, to the mall, to stop at bathrooms, to answer his questions, to eat at the “family” restaurants she was damn sick of, she began to slip.

Without consistent adult companionship for slightly more than the duration of Davey's life, Lois was more and more anxious to be shed of the boy for whatever minutes she could carve out of a day. The checks always set her off, the child support that sometimes came in the mail from Sneaky Pete, and sometimes didn't, and sometimes came in at three times the amount he was supposed to send if Old Pete had a particularly good run of luck at Hialeah. The money, though it didn't last long, got the itch going for Lois as soon as the mailman arrived.

First, she started leaving Davey in the car for the two minutes it took to punch up the automatic teller machine. Davey didn't mind that. He was that kind of kid, that a few minutes of staring out the landau window at passing cars and pedestrians was not an unpleasant thing. That worked out well enough that the money from the machine could be spent during a fifteen-minute spin through CVS without it hurting the boy much, as long as the doors were locked, and a juice box was within Davey's reach.

Lois loved Davey through it all. When she broke out in a sweat at the checkout counter and made a frantic dash back to the car, sometimes leaving every item unbought on the
counter, it was because she could see his face. She could feel, actually feel, the throbbing of his little boy's heart in her own racing, palpitating heart. “Never, never,
never
, never again, sweetheart,” Lois promised as she squeezed him, hugging him close to her without removing his seatbelt, making him groan and grip his juice box so hard it gunned apple juice all over the car windows. He smiled and hugged back, though he didn't understand the fuss.

She
did
, did love him. Only she wasn't very good at it anymore. She was a grown woman, lonely, and very weak, she knew. Just for a minute, or maybe ten or twenty, she had to make her little escape and find out, after all these years, who she was, what
she
was thinking, to hear the sound of her own voice and not the sound of her mother's coming out of her mouth and ricocheting around the walls, off the dirty dishes, into the cavernous empty refrigerator.

The problem was that it got easier. When fifteen minutes, and then forty-five, didn't seem to faze the unflappable, serene Davey, it seemed okay to leave him in the house—which was after all much more secure—during those same errands.

“I bring you back sumpin' nice, Davey, okay?” Lois would say as she held Davey's cheeks between her hands. And she always did bring him something. Usually candy or a whole small pizza which she told him he didn't have to share with
her or with Joanne when she came home from school. He adored pizza and he adored having things of his own, having things he was in charge of, and Lois reveled in sitting quietly on the couch as he ate it all up in front of the TV.

When Joanne came home from school, Davey proudly showed her the empty box, which he'd always save to show off. Joanne pretended to be jealous, then took him into the kitchen for their daily macaroni and cheese, which he would eat no matter what else he had in his belly. And she made sure to glare defiantly at her mother, knowing by now what the pizza box meant. Lois would not acknowledge the look, and snapped at Joanne to remember not to leave her brother alone which she was out. The more Lois herself left him, the more insistent she would be that Joanne
stay
with him.

To fill the days before Joanne came home, hours that she knew were getting longer and longer for Lois, Joanne started picking things up for Davey at junk shops and yard sales. She bought him Chutes and Ladders, which he played by himself and never cheated at. She bought him as many G.I. Joe dolls and Matchbox cars as she could afford with her own, irregular, secret, Sneaky Pete monies that came addressed to her. She bought him an Etch-A-Sketch, which for some reason had a bald spot in the middle where you could not get the magnetic sand to stick so Davey had to draw everything with a big donut hole in the middle of it.

Davey was interested in everything and he worshipped Joanne, so that every little gift, every broken-down something that somebody didn't want (Joanne was not above picking a thing out of the trash on her way to school and carrying it around with her all day if she thought it would be good for her brother), turned out to be something he loved. But he somehow couldn't manage to love anything for long. Not that he didn't appreciate it, he just couldn't sustain anything. One day a game was the most important thing in his world, the next it was just one more decoration on the carpet, strewn around him with everything else as he returned to the thrall of the TV screen.

Until Joanne brought home Operation, the game where you get to play surgeon, pulling body parts out of a patient with a pair of electrified tweezers. Unlike most of his toys, Operation worked perfectly. From the first time Davey accidentally touched the side trying to remove the funny bone, and the big red nose flashed along with the alarming buzzer to tell him—shock him, actually—that he had failed, he was hooked. He kept Operation by his side as he watched TV and dutifully went to work saving the patient's life during commercials. Sometimes during boring shows that he only watched because nothing else was on, like
All My Children
, he would even operate while the program was on.

Joanne loved to see him react like that. Lois was pleased
that he'd found an interest, one that seemed to have captured his imagination and that he could take in the car with him. But Operation began to consume Davey's time much the same way television had, to the point where he sometimes wouldn't back off the game for hours at a time except to shake his operating hand in a writer's-cramp-type shake. After a while it started to bother Joanne, though Lois didn't seem to mind.

“How you doin'?” Joanne said as she walked in from school. As soon as she spoke she heard the familiar, annoying, mocking
buzzzz!
of failure.

“I
killed
him,” Davey roared as he swung his face in her direction. “
Again
, I killed him. Like before and like before.” He was sitting at the kitchen table, kneeling on his chair actually. Just as he had been when Joanne left in the morning.

“No TV, Davey?” she said.

He shook his head “no” as gently as he could because he was trying to remove the patient's heart. But it was not gently enough, as the buzz returned. “
Dead
, he's dead. I killed him dead,” Davey said as he slapped his palm on the table.

“Where's Ma?” Joanne asked.

Davey simply stared at the dead patient, took the tweezers in his fist and started hammering himself, jabbing the tweezers into his thigh again and again.

“Stop that,” Joanne yelled, grabbing his hand. Finally he looked at her. “Where is Ma?” she said slowly.

“I don't know,” he said. “She went to the store. I don't know.” He pulled the tweezers back from her and resumed work, immediately setting off the buzzer. It was then Joanne noticed that, despite the hours and hours of playing, he wasn't getting any better at it. He
was
intense, and committed, that was for sure. But his hand had this little tremble, something no one could have ever noticed before, that would not allow him to remove any but the easiest pieces without stumbling. Through sheer force of will he managed to extract the heart once in every ten tries, but the rest was all frustration, and now fury.

Lois came sweeping through the door. She would not look at Joanne. This was the first time Lois had left Davey alone and not returned before Joanne came home.

“Sumpin'
extra
special today, Davey,” she said, with a lot of extra gush. She pulled from a sandwich-sized brown paper bag an extra-large Milky Way bar. Davey took it with a smile. Then slowly, dramatically, she pulled out a bottle, short, curvy, green. A seven-ounce Coca-Cola bottle.

The candy bar fell right out of Davey's hand. He snatched the bottle out of Lois's hand and stared into it, like into a microscope.

“Great, huh, Davey,” Lois gushed. “They just reissued them, the old-style bottles. The ones you loved. Isn't that nice? Do you remember, Davey?”

He remembered, of course, because the last time he'd drunk from one was only two months before. Just before his grandmother died. Gram, Lois's mother, was the one who always brought around the old Cokes—not the reissues—from some secret stash she kept in the dirt cellar of the house she grew up in herself, raised Lois in, and eventually died in. She said she knew of places, some secret network of distributors and collectors all as nutty as she was, who would refill and reuse the old thick scratchy bottles. Yet once in a while Davey downed one that was clearly an original out of Gram's private stock, flat syrupy contents and all. Those he loved best.

Gram, who didn't like her daughter, never spoke to her, and never entered her house even though they lived within walking distance of each other, would come by like an apparition, like some all-knowing silent spirit as soon as Lois left on summer mornings. She would turn the corner and walk up to find, inevitably, Davey perched on the top step, working up the first beads of sweat on any one of a million long, long summer days. Those days when Davey just sat around, quietly crazy with the sticky dead heat and cicada buzzing high and loud right at him to warn him that tomorrow was going to be nothing but the same all over again. He sat on that porch for hours and hours, staring into his jar of beetles and bees—more often than not hunted and retrieved for him
by Joanne—and shaking the jar now and then to make them fight. Maybe once or twice a day Lois would come by on her way to somewhere or back and pat him on top of his fuzzy head like a good, quiet watchdog.

But Gram would appear in one of those housedresses with flowers like wallpaper that seem to be made just for old people. She brought with her, whether it was ten a.m. or ten p.m., the bottle of Coke and a tiny bag of cheese curls. Cheesy Weesies, is what she called them, something Davey never heard anyone else say, and which always made him feel silly when he heard it even though he was not a silly boy. The old woman and the little boy wouldn't share ten words the whole time, as she sat and he consumed, but it was like a brief friendship, some kind of mutually knowing relationship, packed into the few minutes it took him to polish it all off. Gram always waited until Davey was done, took her bottle back, and was off again.

No one knew what the deal was between Davey and Gram—all they could do was watch. If Lois happened to stumble across them in her comings and goings, she would just continue on her way, the three of them wordless and flat as if Lois were a mere tumbleweed blowing by.

So no one knew, never even thought about it, when the day of Gram's funeral Davey sat it out, in his perch on the porch, the whole day. Staring into space as guests came and
went, patting him on the head as they passed. Through all the visits, all come, all gone, Davey sat largely unnoticed even though he was not a little boy anymore but a big beanstalk of a kid who came to people's waists even when he was sitting. Waiting on the porch as if it were July and not November. It was suppertime and bitter freezing black under the broken porch light before Lois figured it all out and hauled him, stiff and reluctant and still staring, inside.

He was still staring into his grandmother's bottle, or his jar of bees, when Lois interrupted him. “Now isn't
that
sumpin' nice,” she said into Davey's ear from over his shoulder. She was trying hard, but she just didn't know. “Open it,” she said, rushing to the utility drawer and pulling out an opener. “None of that twist-off stuff with
this
.” She was sure, once more, that the magic was in the bottle.