Littlejohn (5 page)

Lex and Connie was born first. Daddy, who got to choose all the first names, named them Lexington and Concord, which was funny names, even for around here. You couldn’t hardly tell that they was twins. Since they was boy and girl, they weren’t hardly identical. The year after, they had another boy, John Geddie McCain after my daddy. He died when he was three weeks old. Gruff was born in 1898. His real name is Cerrogordo, after a battle in the Mexican War. Lord knows what possessed Daddy to name him that. They say he got his nickname because he had a pouty look to him all the time, and one time an old aunt said, “What a gruff young-un you are!” and it stuck, the way things like that will. I think anybody named Cerrogordo would be glad to be named Gruff.

Because Century was born in 1900, that was her name. Another baby, a girl, was born dead the next year. Then, in 1903, Momma had Lafe. Daddy named him after the Marquis de Lafayette. Marquis de Lafayette McCain. He was real happy to be called Lafe.

I come last. They said Daddy wanted to name me John Geddie McCain, but Momma wouldn’t let him, since it would insult the memory of her dead baby. Up to this point, she was in charge of middle names, and maybe to offset some of Daddy’s foolishness, she give every one of her children the same middle name: Geddie.

“Besides,” she’s supposed to of told Daddy, “how are you going to explain to this baby how come there’s a tombstone out there in the graveyard with his name on it?”

Daddy thought about it for a spell, and they say I didn’t have any name a-tall for several days. Finally, Daddy told the rest of the children that he had the perfect name. Considering his record to this point, I’m sure Momma was uneasy.

“We’ll call him Littlejohn,” he told Momma and them.

They said Momma only asked him one question: “One word or two?”

I reckon after Lexington, Concord, Cerrogordo, Century and Marquis de Lafayette, she didn’t think Littlejohn Geddie McCain was all that bad a name.

Aunt Mallie delivered me. She was ninety-seven years old, and she had delivered Daddy, too. She was living in the same old slave cabin her husband, Zebediah, and Captain McCain, who was my granddaddy, built over sixty years before, right after the captain married into the Geddies and got his land and slaves. She lived to be 104. Two days after her funeral, Daddy and them went down to the cabin, and all her family, nieces and nephews and what-all, had left. They never come back.

Aunt Mallie read fortunes. Momma didn’t hold to such foolishness, but all us young-uns sneaked away at one time or another to have Aunt Mallie look at our palms and tell our
futures. Century and Lafe sneaked me down to her place one day when I was five, so I reckon she was 102 years old.

She still dipped snuff, and I can remember the whole cabin smelling like it. She took my palm in her big old wrinkled hand and studied it real hard. She shook her head while Century and Lafe giggled behind her. She was about deaf, so I don’t reckon she minded. I never forgot what she told me.

“You got a hard road, boy,” she said. She spoke so low I couldn’t hardly hear her. “I see real bad times, but then I see a whole lot of happy times. Don’t be giving up on the good times. They be coming. The Lord Jesus is got some surprises in store for you, to be sure.”

I don’t reckon anybody ever give Aunt Mallie enough credit.

G
randdaddy is praying. I can hear him right through the wall between his room and mine. I can’t tell what he’s saying, but the sound of his voice wakes me up every morning at 7:30. If I ever live to be that old, I’m going to sleep until noon every day.

I’ve been here three weeks now, and this part never changes. Next, he’ll go to the bathroom, wash and shave,
then he’ll start fixing breakfast. He sings while he cooks, and he cooks the same thing every day, almost. There’s fried sausage and scrambled eggs, along with the biscuits he takes out of the freezer for us every night and heats up in the oven the next morning. We have apple jelly and peach preserves—or we did until we ran out this week—and milk. For some reason, Granddaddy puts ice in his milk, and it forms a little skim at the top. I’ve finally gotten him to serve me mine without ice.

He and I clean up the dishes. I watched him wash them the first two mornings I was here, and then he handed me a cloth and said, “Here. Time you earned your keep.”

He finishes getting dressed, then goes out on the back porch, where the overhang keeps out the morning sun, and he reads the local paper. It’s called the
Port Campbell Post
, and it has about the worst sports pages I’ve ever seen. Nothing about anything out of North Carolina except for the major-league baseball box scores and a couple of paragraphs on every game, and they don’t even have the West Coast night games. But he reads every word. He’s a Minnesota Twins fan, because the Twins used to play in Washington, something I didn’t know, although Dad might have told me once. Granddaddy reads all the world news, commenting on an earthquake in Bolivia or the Russians in Afghanistan, and then he turns to the obituaries.

“Oh, Lord,” he’ll say, “Abel Bullard’s dead,” like I might ever have known or cared to know Abel Bullard. And then he’ll explain to me that Abel Bullard, on the outside chance I didn’t instantly know, was the brother of Miss Hattie Bullard, who used to sing in the choir at church, about a thousand years before I was born.

Granddaddy isn’t completely out of it, though, not by a long shot. It took him about three days to see through that scam I cooked up about wanting to come visit him. I guess he knew the number of times I previously had wanted to come visit him amounted to approximately zero.

It turns out that the Carlsons went apeshit when they found out I had run away. They called all over town, even had the police looking for me. Mom, naturally, hadn’t told them where Granddaddy lived, and all Trey knew was that we had relatives somewhere in North Carolina. Also, Mom, the scatterbrain, didn’t bother to tell them where Dad and the lovely Beverly were staying. Trey knew they were going to South Carolina, somewhere. I was counting on Trey’s failure to comprehend geography. But I guess his parents would have been a little embarrassed to tell Mom that her pride and joy had been misplaced. Not that she’d care. Also, she didn’t give them any addresses in Europe. She didn’t give me any, either.

But Granddaddy had insisted, unknown to me, that Mom give him the Carlsons’ address and phone number. He always wants her to tell him everywhere she’s staying when she travels, but she never does, and it pisses her off that he keeps asking.

Anyhow, he calls the Carlsons after he sends me to the store for groceries, and they tell him what’s been going on. By this time, the store detective and the Montclair school system have filled them in on all the gory details, and they, of course, tell Granddaddy everything. He tells me the jig’s up, an old expression of his, when I get back, and says he’ll give me one minute to come clean or he’s sending me back to Virginia on the first bus out.

It all started when Mom told me she was going to Europe and that I could stay with the Carlsons, like this was some kind of great favor she was bestowing on me. You didn’t even like Europe the last time we took you, she said when I pitched a bitch. That was three years ago, I said. I was a child. You were happy enough to stay with friends the last two times we went, she said, and then she went on about how I was trying to mess things up between her and Mark the Narc. I call him that because Mom never found the dope I keep hid in my room until she started dating him, and I’m sure he put her up to looking. Hell, he might have even searched my room himself, in which case I would never forgive Mom for letting him. Mark the Narc wants me in Fork Union, wearing a smart little uniform and standing at attention, so bad he can taste it. Then he can move in. I tell Mom this, and that she can go to China with him if she wants, just forget about me, and she accuses me of laying a guilt trip on her. We didn’t talk much the last two weeks before she left.

The day of finals in English, I skipped. I meant to go, and I had studied about twenty minutes, which is massive for me, the night before, because I was very close to flunking and facing the heartbreak of summer school. Mom acted like they’d take her job away or something if I flunked English, like if she was a minister and they found out her son was a Satan worshipper or something.

I went to school that day, or got as far as the parking lot, at least. It’s only a six-block walk, one of the reasons Mom moved to the town house after she and Dad split, she’s always reminding me, like this is a great sacrifice or something.
But as I walked through the parking lot, here come Tony Linhart and Kyle Waters in Tony’s new red Sunbird his dad bought for him; bastard’s so rich there ought to be a law. And they’ve both passed out of exams, so they have the day off.

“Goin’ up to Washpon,” Kyle says. “Want to come along?”

I guess I’m easily led. Washpon is this lake at the bottom of the Blue Ridge, where everybody from Montclair goes to party. I got in, and English was history.

I forged the grade to a D and got Mom to sign the report card just before she left, and I swear I had every intention of signing up for summer school and having the whole thing straightened out by the time Mom got back.

But then Marcia and I went over to the university two days after Mom left to find this guy we hoped would sell us an ounce. He works in the campus bookstore, and I wanted to find out when he’d be home, so I could come around. While I was waiting for him to take care of a couple of customers, I saw this pair of shades on the rack about halfway down the aisle that I really needed. We’d been doing a little lifting here and there, and it had gotten so it almost seemed like they must know we were doing it, we were so obvious. So, I slipped these shades off their little holder and into the big pocket of my Army surplus jacket. Marcia was standing next to me. She’s a fox, blond page-boy cut, bedroom eyes, body that won’t quit, real tough for fourteen. All of a sudden, there’s this old guy I’ve never seen before, short hair and a white shirt with sweat stains under both arms, clip-on tie, a real dork, and he’s saying, like, come with me, please, except he doesn’t say please the way somebody does when
they’re asking. The way he says it, “please” translates as “or I’ll break your arm.”

He also hustles Marcia along, and she’s cussing the guy, telling him to get his goddamn hands off her. He takes us into a room at the back of the store, and there’s this closed-circuit TV where he can see the whole store. He just sits there all day, I guess. Like maybe he gets a bounty for every desperado he brings in.

I’ve got to tell you, I kind of lose it. I beg him not to arrest me, tell him my mom is at Sloan-Kettering in New York being treated for cancer. Marcia cuts me a look, like, what the hell is Sloan-Kettering and where did you dig that one up? He makes us both sweat, insists that Marcia is in on it, too, for about thirty minutes. Then he tells us he’s going to give us a break, but somehow, looking at this guy, I don’t think this is going to be quite as good as winning the lottery. He won’t have us arrested, he says, but he insists that we both bring our parents in so he can talk with them about our little crime spree. I tell him, again, that my mom isn’t home, and that my dad is out of the state. Who am I staying with? he asks. When I tell him, he tells me I’ll have to bring the Carlsons in. He has our names and addresses by this time, and he’s checked the phone book to make sure we’re not shucking him, so we’re caught.

I really feel bad for Marcia, because she’s got to face both parents and deal with this right now, and her folks are so tight they squeak. They will ground her until she graduates and forbid her to see me until she’s like fifty. I also feel bad because I’ve begged and whimpered in front of my girl, in addition to getting her into more trouble than she thinks she can handle right now. I also am not looking forward to telling
the Carlsons that their house guest for the next six weeks is an apprehended if not convicted shoplifter. Christ, at that point they didn’t even know they had to help me register for summer school because I didn’t really pass English.

So, faced with a future of being straightened out at Fork Union after being ostracized by polite society and, much worse, Marcia and all her living relatives, I split. I went home that same Thursday afternoon, packed everything I thought I could carry in my backpack, took most of the money out of my account that Mom left there for my summer fun, wrote the Carlsons this spaced-out note about taking a little time to get my head together and left. Trey had been at a job interview or he’d have been in it as deep as Marcia and me.

I’m dumb, but I’m not terminally stupid. There have been kids from here who went to New York and were never seen again. I just wanted to get away, not commit suicide. I wasn’t sure about the best way to thumb to Granddaddy’s, but he was the only one who came to mind for some reason, the only one I thought might take me in, no questions asked. I figured he’d be so out of it, he wouldn’t mind.

I bought a road map at the Exxon station and sat down on the corner to read it. Route 35 would take me south almost to the state line, it looked like, and from there I’d have to take a bunch of dippy little state roads to get to East Geddie. But it was cheaper than taking the bus, and there wasn’t one going that way from Montclair for five hours, the guy at the station said. By then, they’d have my picture on the post-office wall.

So, I walked the mile down to the bypass and stuck out my thumb. It went real well for a while. Two coeds going down to Sweet Briar picked me up and got me almost all the
way to Lynchburg. Then a construction worker in a pickup, not as friendly as the college girls, but a ride nevertheless, drove me all the way past Danville.

By this time, it was getting late, about seven, I guess, and I must have stood there, watching rednecks in white T-shirts drive by giving me the fish eye for like an hour and a half before this bubba stops, asks me where I’m going. I tell him East Geddie, North Carolina. It obviously does not compute. I mean, this guy’s probably never been out of the county. It’s a wonder they let him out of the house.