Jane Two (3 page)

“Seedlin', get the hell out here!”

My ankle was aching and swollen, and I tried not to limp. I ran outside and sat right next to him in the lawn chair that his best friend James usually occupied. He took a moment before he spoke, glancing at the Speed Racer baseball cap glued on my head. He eyeballed my leg, then kept staring out at the horizon. No one conveyed more information with fewer words than my Grandaddy. Nobody.

“Your daddy told me about that flagpole.” I just looked at him. He kept gazing out at the horizon. “You know, your daddy rolled a fifteen-foot Civil War cannon out and left it in the main intersection when he was a boy, your age, and I asked him the same goddamn question I'm 'bout to ask you. I reckon you got the same goddamn answer.” My Grandaddy never once asked me if I had done it, but instead said, “I can think of some good reasons to climb it, and some bad reasons to climb it. Which one did you have, son?”

As I stared at him watching out over the land, I took a very careful moment to decide exactly what I'd tell him.

“A good one,” I said.

My Grandaddy turned to me and looked clear into my soul, then slowly he nodded his head up and down before going right back out to the horizon. He took one of his trademarked gargantuan inhales of air, held it, and let a tiny little grin escape.

“Go get your Grandaddy a wing.”

“Charlie?! Where's Charlie?!” My Mamau came yelling, clutching her giant breasts draped in her gauzy gold dress as she stuck her head out onto the porch. She called his name in a panic the same way she always yelled out for him when she lost sight of him for more than five minutes. “Oh, that man gon' give me a heart attack one'a these days. Charlie, here ya go.” She handed him a plate with two small bits of chicken and retreated to the kitchen, where my sister was still screaming at my dad.

“And, Seedlin', give your Mamau back that saucer.”

I'd brought my Mamau that same plate back many times, and I asked my Grandaddy about those two bits, and why he never ate one. He told me that those two pieces were called the Bull-Yawn. He said it was the absolute best part of the bird, and that if you could measure the “delicious” in a fried chicken, 90 percent of it would be in those two tiny pieces. I loved the imagery of that term: A vicious bull, violently pulling at the ground with its front legs, suddenly so tranquilized by something that it just gives in, relaxes, and yawns. I asked him why my Mamau got them every time, and why he never wanted one for himself. He just looked out at the horizon for a moment like he was trying to find something, something that had been there for years and suddenly vanished. And whenever he would do this, I knew that as soon as his lips were to start moving, another piece of life would slip out. Some of the absolute best things I know came from that porch. Then he began, and he said, “You know, son, it's always better to live without good stuff than it is to live without someone you wanna give all your good stuff to.”

I wanted to bottle every single thing he taught me on that porch.

“You gotta deserve 'em to taste 'em,” he said. “Your Mamau deserve 'em, now go get your Grandaddy that wing.”

J
ane came into my life headfirst in the early 1970s when I was eight years old. I was staring into my bowl of Cocoa Pebbles, listening to my new 45 of Simon and Garfunkel's “The Sounds of Silence” when I heard a repetition of small, passion-filled breaths. My eyes followed the sound through the sliding glass window, across our backyard, up the fence, and collided intermittently with what I can only describe as the perfect embodiment of everything that I find wonderful about this life. Even doing my timed laps around the block on my Sting-Ray every morning, I had never noticed anyone moving into the house out back behind us, much less that they had a trampoline, or a lot much less that Jane would bounce on it. My hatred of gravity was punctuated by the fact that it would only allow me short glimpses of Jane's face before calling her back down, never failing to notify her long black-brown hair last so it hovered in the air just that much longer, like an echo, before it fluttered below the slats of the brown wooden fence. From that moment on, Jane would be the catalyst for all my ideas, secrets and dreams, never allowing my passions a moment's rest.

The next day, although she was completely unaware of it, Jane became the star of my very first short film. I documented her rhythmic bouncing on an old windup Bolex movie camera that my Grandaddy had confiscated off a criminal and given me—one five-minute shot of the top of my fence with Jane's head appearing at regular intervals. I crawled, completely hidden in the bushes, slowly pulling branches out of the way of the lens.

I kept the film in an old Charles Chips container in my closet along with all my other prized possessions. Either projected on my bedroom wall or out my back window, Jane bounced all through my youth to “The Sounds of Silence.”

I don't know how he always knew, but he just did. “Seedlin', get the hell out here.” So, out I'd go, straight to the front porch, where my Grandaddy was perched in his lawn chair next to his friend James as always. James was a second Grandaddy of mine, a black man who was born on the bayou about fifty yards down from my Grandaddy and exactly four months after him. They had been best friends and sheriffs together for more than half a century. My Grandaddy looked at me. “What you filmin' back there?”

“Oh, uh nothin' really.”

“Well, thing ain't got no zoom-up lens on it, so you want that ‘nothing' to be in focus, you gonna have to get closer, hear me? A lot closer.” James shifted his big butt in that rickety lawn chair the same way he always did before he spoke.

“Ya Grandaddy know.”

If I couldn't see Jane jumping when I looked out my bedroom window, she was in her garage painting. I knew. Always. And I always went. Jane must've just come from the shower, her wet hair hung tousled and wavy around her face and jumbled down over her olive-tan shoulders to her waist. Watching her through the bushes as she painted, my heart swelled listening to her. She had a beautifully unconscious rendition of “Song Sung Blue” by Neil Diamond. She'd sing a bit and then break off mid-lyric as she considered a brushstroke or choice of color. On her head she wore big padded black phones whose spiral plug connected her to the old turntable on the concrete floor. She was restricted, and when she'd reach for the darker colors at the far end of her paint palette, the headphones would come unplugged. She would escape for those colors. She would escape the tether of her headphones—even escape music for those colors—whereas I would have escaped colors for music. She'd swirl fresh globs of deepest cobalt blue oil paint into solar yellow. The isolated beauty of each slowly became a rich rainforest green. At times the purple hippie fringe along her sleeve would drag through the paints accidentally, so, unperturbed by the fact of indelibly stained clothing, she'd deliberately drag the leather tassels across her canvas, striping it with all colors.

Jane's soundtrack was as constant as mine. As soon as a record ended, she would select another. With her headphones on, I could never tell what song she had selected until she sang a line or two. I would watch her small cupped hand hovering under the brush from her makeshift cinder block pallet that displayed cadmium red, vermillion, lead white in the rainbow spectrum of heavy metals, beside Ball jars of linseed oil and turpentine and other solvents. Jane's voice rang out “The Sounds of Silence,” and I always wondered why they hadn't recorded her mellifluous, off-key version. It was my favorite song. Her brush traveled the short distance to the right lower corner of a finished canvas where she signed it:
Jane
. Her left palm held the globule of green, while her brush just kept dipping into her makeshift cup, before finally traveling back up to the canvas to add the word
Two
.
Jane Two
. I looked at my own palm and wondered if the green paint Jane held in her hand would remain in the crevices of her palm to mark Jane's life line and heart line. And how that hand would feel in mine.

Jane was my dream. She defied logic, but it was the faulty logic that came from underestimating my abilities. I now know that real dreams require unreasonable actions, like my Grandaddy always said, and that is why I despise my reasonableness with gusto.

My mom yelled, “Supper!” so I slipped away from the bushes shrouding Jane's garage, back around the block, up Sandpiper to Bentliff, and inside my house. To exist in Jane's presence was all I wished for. I hadn't a clue what I could ever conjure to say to such a unicorn. I walked inside my house for dinner and straight into a fog of the sickening perfume that my sister Lilyth had coated herself with and my mom's cloud of cigarette smoke at the huge chopping block with little drawers that contained postage stamps and paper.

Most nights right before bedtime, Dad would time me with my silver stopwatch racing my bike around the block. I'd relinquish its leather thong from around my neck, and I'd set off on my Schwinn Sting-Ray. Often when I was out at the second corner of the block, I'd see Lilyth smoking with Magda on the far corner. Next morning, before school, same thing—Dad timing my laps and Lilyth out smoking. My red scarf just like Speed Racer's never left my neck and my dad had put an
M
on the front of one of his old racing helmets with red electrical tape. My Sting-Ray was my Mach 5, and I wanted to break a record every single day.

My dad would cheer me on like I was in a tight battle for the lead on the last lap of the Monaco Grand Prix. He would yell to me about braking for the corners, and proper apexing to shave tenths. And he always said that the biggest gains were hidden in the most overlooked areas. He always said that my goal was to improve, whatever the size of the improvement. And above all, to never quit, because
that's not what winners do
. I'd scream by in cutoffs and bare feet, the hot wind pulling at my hair, hoping to shave a tenth or even a couple hundredths of a second. The speed of my progress was less important than the progress itself, so I had to make sure it was always there. There was no rush—even with Jane, I only had to get a little bit closer to her every day. I just couldn't quit. And every day, I hoped Jane would see me as I was screaming by on my Sting-Ray.

I heard my father's words, but I was far too literal as a child. Maybe it was the things I stuck to that kept Jane at a distance. I wish I had understood at a much earlier age all the wonderful things that my Grandaddy told me. It all seeped down from my Grandaddy. And my Grandaddy contradicted just about every sentence from any parenting handbook ever written. He was the only person in my life to ever contest all those lies. He'd say, “Winners
do
quit, ya little seedlin', they quit doing the shit that makes 'em lose,” and, “Winning
is
everything, and forget what all those other pansies say, because they don't even know what the goddamn competition is.” He told me, “Progress, and progress alone, gonna point to the winner, and without it, ain't gonna be no pointing at all.”

Sports defined my absolutes in life. Sports framed a definite game plan. In sports I relied on no one else; the absolutes were clear. For me, sports were straightforward mathematical equations that, if approached with the right work ethic, could almost always guarantee success. It was easy to outwork people who I knew weren't working. But Jane was different. With her, it wasn't just up to me. The uncertainty of love was hard for me to process. I couldn't intentionally bend physics with Jane. But I could with sports.

My Grandaddy showed me my first magic trick of life when I was eight years old—a magic trick that I just had to find a way to apply to Jane. I was sprinting down the sideline of the soccer field during a game against Crestview when I chased after a ball that a teammate had passed to me just a little too hard. The ball was racing out-of-bounds, and my body did something instantaneously that no stopwatch, slide rule, or measuring tape could match. My instincts immediately and accurately calculated that the ball would cross the sideline and out-of-bounds a good two seconds before I could reach it. So, I slowed down. I gave up. I'd heard my Grandaddy say many times that “most people think that they's two possible results for every endeavor, success and failure, but they's wrong. They's three, but only one you gotta be scared of.” My Grandaddy taught me to learn from both success and failure, but he always told me that quitting would affect my life far more than anything else.

At halftime, my Grandaddy walked up to me, and I saw the absolute worst thing that a child can ever see in an elder's eyes.

Disappointment.

Grandaddy told me that he never wanted to see me quit again. He told me to chase every ball out-of-bounds with the true belief that I could keep it in-bounds.

“Even if you eyes is tellin' you that you won't make it, well goddammit, you keep sprinting, 'cause at the very least it will tell all those on the other team that even in the face of certain defeat,
you
gonna keep going. And they gonna know in they heart that they cain't defeat that level of determination. And at the very most, you gonna find that that level of determination gonna bend physics, and you eventually gonna catch that ball.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I knew I would sprint for every single ball just to avoid my Grandaddy's disappointment.

“Up ta you. You can spend your life checking things off your impossible list, or you can spend it adding things on, but you gonna learn real quick when you find ya self wantin' somethin' you ain't never had. And at
that
moment, you better get goddamn ready ta do something you ain't never done.”

As my Grandaddy spoke, Steve McQueen snuggled up next to me shoring up my courage, and the image of Jane bouncing, defying gravity, kept obscuring the image of that soccer ball. From that day on, I never let anyone see me give up on going after a ball headed out-of-bounds. In game after game, I chased every wild ball with a level of focus and intent that I previously couldn't match. Then one day, in a game against Westbury, Clatterbuck passed a ball to me. That ball, by my calculations, would go out-of-bounds about three seconds before I could reach it. The conundrum was that I ended up missing it by only a millisecond. It was at this point that I started believing that I could catch these balls.

Now, I'm the last person alive to believe in any hocus-pokery, but this much I do know: Either those balls started to slow down, or I started to speed up. I don't know if they coincidentally started finding a certain patch of grass that held them up just long enough, but I started catching the balls after my usually reliable instinctual calculations had deemed it impossible.

It was on the first day I caught the ball that my internal calculator underwent a correction. It had to recalibrate. Because, of all the criteria that it used to instantly determine success or failure, one crucial thing changed: my belief. You see, up until that first day that I saw my Grandaddy's disappointment, my body was inputting my lack of belief in the equation. My Grandaddy told me that belief can make a liar of your own eyes. But not to worry, he said, “Your eyes gonna catch up. That goalpost gonna move. What was impossible yesterday, but 'came possible today, gonna seem goddamn normal tomorrow. Then, there gonna be a new impossibility in ya life that 'ventually gonna fall under the constant bludgeoning of a certain determination. And once them impossibilities start to fall with practiced regularity, then space and time gonna contort all up, and the noise of life gonna be shrunk up into more a manageable volume. This is when physics gon' bend, and it gon' bend to your will. You gotta believe. Because getting your hand raised only make you a winner in one aspect of life. What
really
count is what you do after the goddamn crowd go home. It ain't ever what you get for puttin' in all the hard work, it's what all the hard work gonna make you become. That's the shit that make you a winner, and you better goddamn believe it, son…it's everything.”

That boy fell out of a car trunk in his driveway, so I painted a new painting with a lot of blue and listened to ‘Sounds of Silence' on my headphones. Finished embroidering one dinner napkin to put in my hope chest. Geraniums in cross-stitch. Mom said 11 more and I will have enough for dinner with all my brothers and mom and dad and invite five friends. But I don't have five. I have my cousin but he's far. And maybe I have another idea but I won't say or then it might not come true. Good night.

I came face-to-face with Jane for the first time when a brainstorm told me to confront my claustrophobia by locking myself in the trunk of my father's car after figuring out how to open it from the inside. I was determined to stay in for ten minutes, and I was halfway through the first five seconds when panic began to set in. My brain was on sabbatical somewhere near the engine compartment, and I couldn't get the latch—whose mechanism I had committed to memory—to be my friend. I imagined that this was what it must be like to be trapped in The Hole. I hollered and yelled as I flailed around in the sauna the trunk had become, when I heard a car pull into our driveway. I heard my sister saying good-bye to Kevin. I knew the engine on his Firebird. I hollered again and Kevin's car revved, so I hollered even louder as tires squealed out the driveway. My sister Lilyth yelled something at me as she passed, but I could make out only the words
retard
and
dumbass
. Then she drummed on the trunk and kept right on going into the house, but I could've identified her without even hearing her voice because the smell of a nauseating new perfume crept inside the trunk to savage me. I had to get out. I thrashed and screamed again in a full panic until the latch finally popped open, at which time I burst out, wringing wet from sweat and gasping for clean air, right into a perfect face-plant on the driveway. My sneaker was caught on the latch, so I remained dangling at a bad angle as my eyes adjusted to the sunshine.