Jane Two (13 page)

As my Schwinn careened around the corner a few houses up from mine, I waved to the Milans, out bundled up in wool Cowboys blankets nested in their lawn chairs drinking beers and holding hands. Even from afar they recognized me, and Mr. Milan hollered, “There's my soldier!” Then I saw The Plank. Lilyth was getting out and blocked my path as she saw me approaching, so I skidded to a stop beside the Firebird.

“Hey! Listen, Mickey, don't tell Dad that Kevin gave me a ride home, okay?” Kevin flashed me a grin. “I'll give you a dollar, ya lil' brat! Kevin, give me a buck.” Lilyth snatched my brown paper bag hostage to prevent me from tearing off before she could hand me my bribe money. “What's in yer lunch bag?”

“Give it back, Lilyth!”

She tore open Totter's staples. “Where the hell did you get this? Kevin, Mic's got my bra!” I tried to put everything together, and even looked to Kevin for explanation, but he was too high to clue in. “Answer me, y'little retard!”

“From, um…Mr. Totter…he…”

As Lilyth looked to Kevin for support, I took off pedaling for home.

“MICKEY! Damn it, get back here!” Winded, I dragged my Schwinn inside the house and leaned against the front door to catch my breath, trying to process one of life's little revelations now aggregating in my head.

“Wanna eat somethin', Sug?” I just stood at the door processing my sister and The Hole. “You fine, darlin'?”

“Yeah, Mom.” I gasped for air as I walked to the fridge to grab the bottle of Gatorade. I gulped green, stopping only to catch my breath. Mom kept on charring fish sticks and stirring grits.

For a long time, I hung on the refrigerator door and chugged.

“Shut that door and use a glass!” I sat down at the kitchen table. I needed to after that. “Lawrence and his mother came by today. Seems you and Lawrence will be on the swim team together. And she and I think it'll be okay to ride bikes if y'all go together.”

“Who's Lawrence?”

“Y'all played football together. Big ole thing for a young fella. I think y'all call him Fireball? Or, Fireplug, maybe?”

“He's actually gonna swim?”

“I s'pose so. And as long as y'all stay together, bikes are okay. But stay together and be careful, that pool ain't just around the block.”

I hugged my mom and thanked her, and as soon as I got my wits about me, I opened the sliding glass door and thumped out just in time to hear, “One, Three, Five!” So I came right back inside to the kitchen just as Lilyth stormed in, eyes aflame, breathless.

“Mom! I just thought you should know, I'm really concerned, I saw Mickey smoking.”

From the stove, Mom turned to me and took a long drag of her cigarette. I knew she was thinking what to say. For a time she regarded me, standing there dumbfounded by Lilyth's bold-faced lie constructed to get attention off her bra, in case I had already told on her. I didn't tell on her and I didn't smoke. I had never smoked. Smoking fucking disgusted me. It still does. But I didn't know any words to protect myself outside of
that's not true
, so I left the room without saying anything else.

“Mom, I'm telling you!” persisted Lilyth.

Mom called after me, “We ain't done discussin' this till your father's home, Sug.” I went straight to my room—to my Charles Chip can. I lost myself in her, and I didn't hear another lying word about smoking for quite a while.

On Saturday morning, I met Firefly by The Ditch about an hour earlier than swim practice and we set out across town. We didn't really know how long it would take us to ride to the pool, so we gave ourselves a healthy margin. Down the golf cart path lined by huge houses under construction, we gaped at the fancy neighborhood. Eventually, I had to stop and wait for Firefly because he lagged so far behind.

As he caught up, I heard him yelling, “What the hell you stoppin' for, Mic? You can't hack it? I mean, if you need to, it's fine with me! We can stop if you need to. Do you?” Sweating profusely, Firefly coasted to a stop alongside me. “Damn, what is this place?” From under the trees near hole eighteen, we looked out at the landscape, and we both had to sit our asses down, taking it all in. There were huge houses everywhere like giant empires growing out of the verdant sod. Across the groomed green, I saw a giant butter yellow house still under construction that looked like something out of the movies. Firefly rolled on the golf turf that looked just like the fake grass at the Putt-Putt, only it was real. “Jeezus, how they git it like this?”

“It's like velvet.” I joined Firefly and rolled, too.

“What the fuck's velvet?” asked Firefly.

“My Mamau has some. It's really nice. Expensive, too.”

And then out of Firefly's mouth emerged James's gold standard. “Man, these houses are fuckin' NIGGER-COCK!” I asked Firefly where he had heard that term before and what he thought it meant. He said he had heard some cool black man on my porch say it when he and his mother had dropped by to talk about swim team, and that while his mom was inside, Firefly had sat next to him in a rickety lawn chair and coaxed the meaning out of him. And sure enough, James had told him the same thing that he told me that day that I was getting red-necked by Eddy.

“Nigger-cock, it just a little bit bigga, an a little bit betta'n anything like it. Now hush it, boy'n ya don't say it front a tha ladies.” I guess, until I heard Firefly say it, I had just never heard it used to describe anything besides ability.

“Hey, that yellow one ain't got no door yet; let's go check it out,” said Firefly. We rode our bikes across the exquisite expanse of emerald toward the inviting yellow clapboard structure. “It ain't got stairs, Mic.” Firefly followed me as I clambered up about five feet of stacked building materials and crawled into a gaping entryway where a new door leaned against the wall. It looked like the workers had just suddenly got up and left. Big black thermoses and lunch boxes remained in the middle of a polished hardwood floor in what seemed like it would become an auditorium. “You think they got giraffes, Mic?” asked Firefly panning up wide-eyed to the ceiling of the living room. It smelled of new wood, Formica, and factory chemicals. “Mic, it's like inside a fuckin' whale's stomach!” The Moby Dick ceiling vaulted to heaven. Trimming the room's circumference halfway up the walls was a balcony whose dark, lustrous wood matched the crossbeams ribbing the high ceiling. “How the fuck you get up there? Must be stairs, right?” Firefly then grabbed a cedar roof shingle from a neat pile by a closet without doors, set it between two sawhorses, and karate chopped it in half with a loud Bruce Lee wail. “Hey, how many families do you think live in these things?” Firefly bit a shingle splinter from the butt of his hand.

“I'm pretty sure just one family each.”

“Damn! Let's check out the bedrooms.”

Down a wide hall past a huge, modern kitchen, I found what should have been stairs, but, like outside the house, there were just two flanking zigzag supports. I grabbed some planks that leaned against the wall and set them across the zigzag frame and climbed up to find two more floors, counting the attic, and five bedrooms each the size of my living room. The largest bedroom on the second floor overlooked the golf course at the back of the house. On the third floor, the back bedroom was in the process of being painted bright violet with apple green trim. I noticed another sawhorse, measuring tape, carpenter's pencils, and raw wood shelves. Across the room, two shutter-style doors hung ajar. A single poster was curling off the back wall of the walk-in closet. A large can of primer sat empty beside the closet door. I crossed the large room and opened the two doors all the way and stuck my head inside a walk-in closet that was the size of my bedroom. It looked like someone had abandoned a tea party in the closet with five purple toy cups and saucers and purple napkins and a guttered candle. A Farrah Fawcett T-shirt lay rumpled as the tea mat. I pulled down the curled corners of the poster to see that it was a classic shot of Marc Bolan from his T. Rex tour. I thought about stealing that poster until I saw a small, unfinished painting leaning against the wall in the corner. It was the painting of the field of green that I had observed Jane laboring over in her garage, with those detailed blades of grass. It now had a giant white
H
goalpost right in the foreground. And I knew exactly where I was. It was Jane's room, and I was standing in it. I grabbed one of the wide-angle carpenter's pencils from the toolbox and quickly scribbled
I liken us to two balloons
across the bottom of her Bolan poster. And again, I prayed that she would remember that first day in the classroom.

“Jeezus, mother of Christ, Mic, where do they get the money?” I had no idea. “Oh shit, Mic, we better get the fuck outta here, I hear a motor.” In a fit of panic, Firefly's red crew cut disappeared as he ran clomping back down so fast he knocked off most of the stair planks we had laid in place, forcing me to jump from the third floor to the second and then climb down a window frame all the way to the ground. My fear of going to jail superseded my desire to stay in her room forever…so I ran.

As I met Firefly out back behind the Leviathan past giant rolls of lawn sod, I noticed the pipes of the in-lawn sprinkler system and realized that even their dirt was “designed.” And then a golf ball rolled right up to our toes. Gasping for air, Firefly reached down and started laughing uncontrollably, reading the ball.

“Fuck does zat mean, Mic?
Tit-lee-ist
? Like the biggest tits? I'm titly-est! Balls fer boobies.” He held it up to his chest like a nipple then popped it in his pocket. “Check out that fuckin' golf cart goin' in circles. Buncha faggits, look at 'em wearin' them pink and bright green pants! Hey Mic, how far to the pool?”

“At the end of this path, there's another velvety putting green thing. Right next to that.”

“You've been here before?”

“Only with my mom to sign up and get a suit.”

“I ain't wearin' no faggit's underwear, showin' off the baloney pony! I ain't no goddamn figure skater!”

“Maybe you can ask to wear something else? But my dad says you won't go as fast.”

“Shit! We gonna hafta start doing this trip five times a week!”

“It'll get easier.”

“No it won't, I'm gon' die!”

The golf cart cruised up with two older men dressed to a T, one in starch-pressed pink trousers and the other in creased Kelly green trousers, and matching alligator shirts. The pink pants had a fabric belt with little blue-and-white whales on it. And the green pants had a matching green belt with little white sailboats around his gut. The older golfer in pink pants, who was around forty, came up to us with this swagger that looked like he might even fall over. You could tell that he was trying to be stealthy like a shark, but he just looked like a fat, overfed goldfish. Firefly and I got on our bikes.

“Say, have you boys seen a Titleist Three around here?” We looked at each other and shrugged before Firefly turned around to talk to the man.

“The hell's a Titus Three?”

“
Title-ist.
It's the brand name of a ball, a golf ball. Have you seen anything roll through here?” We shook our heads and started to pedal off. It was funny, I thought at the time, how the man had rolled out the word roll like he was putting on a south-of-the-border migrant Mexicano
rrrrrr
, yet he was talking like Mr. Howell from
Gilligan's Island
.

“Kid, if you should see it on your way, do grab it and I'll give you a buck for it.”

“A whole buck? For a little piece a plastic shit?” yelled Firefly over his shoulder. Then Firefly locked up his brakes and tore a slash in the velvet green beneath his tires and turned to face the man. We both looked at him in disbelief. Then Firefly yells out, “I can find it for a buck. I mean, probly. I can probly find just about anything for a buck.”

“All right, let's see you do it!” said Green Pants, the younger of the two.

I followed Firefly around the hedgerow where we huddled. Then we turned around and headed back toward the golfers.

“Hey, mister, found your Titly-est!” yelled Firefly.

“So, kid, how do I know you didn't have it all along?”

“Well, I guess ya don't.”

“Well then, I guess I don't know if we'll give you two little thieves a dime!” snarled Pink Pants, but he wasn't very convincing.

“Then I guess I'll run and chunk it in that lake over there for the gators to chomp on, sir!” Firefly looked to me and grinned. “Can you believe these queer baits wearin' these weird-ass colored clothes? Fuckin' pink!”

“Boy, I'll run your fat ass down before you get ten feet away,” boasted Green Pants. “And it is
Nantucket red
, you nitwit, not pink.”

The provenance of pink trousers was lost on us, but Firefly, whose eyes sparked piss and vinegar, and smiling wide, threw the ball to me. “Yeah, well both of you together cain't catch Mickey. Gimme the buck and it's yours…or Mic runs, Mr. Pinkie, sir!”

Pinkie and Green Pants finally agreed to pay us, and I realized that our golf course currency was more valuable to them than the thick wad of cash they had in their pockets. Our economic glory led to ice cream from the Snack Shack at the pool, and to Firefly shaming himself in front of the young lady behind the counter.

“How much is a Fudgsicle?” Firefly ogled the waitress's chest. “Do you see them titties, Mic? She's the Titly-est right there, man!”

“Thirty-five cents. Hurry up, there's a line behind y'all.”

“DAMN! What a rip-off. Okay, gimme one of those, and a Coke. How much is a Coke?”

“Twenty-five.” The girl got his ice cream and drink from the cooler. “Anything else?”