To Come and Go Like Magic (26 page)

Pop doesn’t seem to notice my slip. “Will Epperson, for one,” he says.

I ask why Miss Matlock’s travels could possibly have bothered Mr. Epperson.

“She was supposed to marry him,” Pop says. “Then she up and runs off with some professor from Jellico Springs College and don’t come back for fifty years.”

“I thought it was forty,” I say.

“Thirty, forty, fifty. What’s it matter? She left Will, made a fool of him.”

I picture old Mr. Epperson with his shiny bald head sitting in the back of Brock’s store playing dominoes with Mr. Becker and Little Clyde Cummings. Every time the old man loses a game, he slams his fist down on the table and makes everybody jump. “Maybe she didn’t like him,” I say.

“Old Will’s a good man,” Pop says. “That woman couldn’t have found anybody better.” Pop’s face has turned a raw-looking red.

“She must have.”

“What?”

“The professor must have been better.”

Pop’s face goes white again and he pats me on the foot.

“She was a floozie, Chileda. And I don’t want you following the ideas of some floozie.”

“How do you know Miss Matlock was a floozie?”

“A man knows a floozie when he sees one,” Pop says. He says he’s seen this happen too many times. A woman gets it in her head to leave the hills, and she comes back a floozie.

“Who else?” I say, expecting Pop to mention Aunt Gretchen, except she’s still gone.

“Roxy March,” he says. “Nothing but a floozie.”

I remember Roxy March coming back to Mercy Hill for Uncle Roscoe’s funeral, carrying the big green reptile pocketbook.

“She was a good woman,” he says, “until she went off to Cincinnati. And Dorcas Billings,” he says, “you couldn’t even recognize her when she came back from Detroit.”

“That’s because she lost seventy-five pounds,” I say. I remember when Dorcas Billings substituted in my first-grade class and the boys called her the Blimp.

After a few minutes the hard edge slips out of Pop’s voice and he starts stroking his chin whiskers.

“I once wanted to go to California,” he says.

“You did?”

“When I was a young man, California was all I could think about.”

“Why didn’t you go?”

Pop says something happened that kept him here.

“What?” I ask. “What happened?”

“Life,” he says with a sad little laugh. “I was meant to be here and life kept me here.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’ll understand someday, Chileda. When it happens to you. You’ll get all riled up and raring to go and something will happen to keep you here because this is where you’re supposed to be. It’s where you belong.”

I don’t have the heart to tell Pop that I’ve never belonged in Mercy Hill, that I’ve dreamt for a long time of belonging to a bigger world, that Miss Matlock just showed some of it to me, that’s all.

“People come back,” I say to Pop. “Miss Matlock went away, but she came back.”

He sits for a while and stares out the window at the full moon. He’s finished talking, but something hangs in the air between us.

“Do you ever wish you’d gone to California?” I ask Pop.

He pulls at his whiskers and shakes his head. “No need wishing,” he says. “A wish in one hand and a nickel in the other won’t even buy a piece of bubble gum.”

Pop laughs for the first time all night. And I have to laugh, too, even though I feel more like crying.

U
nder the Bleachers …

Jack gets his new football uniform for the season. Number forty-five. He struts around the house in his shoulder pads and knee pads and stomach protectors, telling me to hit him as hard as I can in the belly. “Go ahead,” he says, grinning at me. “I won’t even feel it.” So I wind up and hit him and he stands as still as a maple tree and just laughs.

Summer’s about gone. Jack says he can smell football weather in the air. He leaves early in the morning for practice and stays all day. I follow him to the door and sniff the air, but I don’t smell anything different.

Friday night everybody except Lenny and Uncle Lu goes to the first scrimmage of the season: Mercy Hill versus Jellico Springs High. I don’t much like watching football, but Momma insists that I go to this first game. Even Myra waddles along with us in her flowered muumuu and slip-on tennis shoes. Her regular shoes won’t fit anymore because her feet are so swollen her ankles have disappeared. That’s what happens when a
baby is coming, Momma says. Babies put you all out of proportion.

School won’t start for another week, but they still have the big lights burning on the field and popcorn at the concession stand. Momma and Myra plop down on the first row of bleachers, but I keep climbing all the way to the top. I see Ginny and Priscilla down on the field talking to the high school cheerleaders and some of the older boys. They look like strangers.

At halftime I go for a Coke, but the snack line is too long, so I go back to my seat and wait. When the third quarter ends, I head again to the concession stand, slipping behind the bleachers in the dark so I don’t have to walk in front of people. In patches you can see up through the legs and feet to the lights. There are Coke cans and cigarette butts and candy wrappers lying all over the ground. I’m looking down at all this trash, wondering who’s going to clean it up, when I run smack into Zeno Mayfield.

“Whoa, Chili Pepper! Where’re you going in such a hurry?”

“To get a Coke,” I say. I can smell Zeno’s grape bubble gum, but he’s standing in the shadows and it’s too dark to see his eyes.

“Want a drink of mine?”

He sticks a cup in front of my face and I think about it for a second. Why not? The line at the concession
might still be too long and I’m dying of thirst. I put my mouth right where Zeno’s mouth has been and take a long swallow. It feels criminal.

The next thing I know, I’m beneath the bleachers getting kissed by Zeno Mayfield. His lips taste sweet with grape-flavored bubble gum and he kisses me hard like he never wants to let go. Finally, he leans back against the bleachers and I can see his face in a streak of light sliding down between the rows, smiling like a satisfied dog.

I study his eyes. Would that pair of eyes ever want to see the other side of the world?

“Zeno,” I say. “Would you like to go to Paris, France?”

“Ummm,” he says, like he’s just bit into a Hershey’s bar. He leans over to whisper in my ear. “Yes, yes,” he says. “Take me to Paris.” He closes his eyes and waits.

I lean up against Zeno’s wobbly knees and kiss him back even better than he kissed me, long and hard like the French people kiss, like I’ve read about in Aunt Rose’s
True Confessions
magazines, a kiss that Zeno could never have imagined I had in me.

He swallows his gum.

By the time I get back to the seat with my popcorn and Coke, the game only has two minutes to go. I sit and stare at the ball field but don’t see a thing. Would it be so bad to fall in love with somebody and live forever in Mercy Hill?

A full moon hangs over the mountains, round and
cold and white like a Chinese paper lantern. I look down through the spaces in the bleachers and my head starts to spin. Miss Matlock’s voice whispers on the night air:
Someday you’ll leave … when the world opens up and starts calling to you
.

B
irthday Presents …

At Brock’s store I pick up three cans of Prince Albert loose tobacco for Uncle Lu’s birthday. He rolls his own cigarettes. First he flattens the white tissue and spreads a pinch of tobacco on it, and then he rolls it up, licks, seals, and twists the ends until they’re tight. He pops it into his mouth and lights up. Puff, puff, puff. Yuck!

Mr. Brock shakes his head at me, says he can’t sell tobacco to a kid, even though he knows full well it’s for Uncle Lu’s birthday. So Momma has to get out of the car with her feet hurting and curlers in her hair and come into the store to pay for it.

She throws Mr. Brock a hateful look and says maybe next time we’ll buy our tobacco in town.

“Don’t make me no never mind,” he says.

What kind of talk is that?

Next stop: the Holey Roller Donut Shop. Uncle Lu’s favorite place sells doughnut holes only. It’s typical of Mercy Hill to have a doughnut place that does not even make doughnuts. One day Uncle Lucius said to me, “How do they get the holes without the doughnut?” I had no idea how to answer that one.

C
hasing the Sphinx Moths …

It’s hot and sticky, not a hint of a breeze. We’re having a barbeque to celebrate Uncle Lu’s birthday. He says the Bible promised us three score and ten years and now he’s reached it; he’s seventy. So he’s got to think of some way to pay back the Lord for every extra moment. Our yard is full of
O
s. Momma rented plastic folding chairs from the Osborne Funeral Home and every chair has a big white
O
on the back. The whole church has been invited to Uncle Lu’s party because Pop says by next year he may not even recognize himself, much less all these other people.

Jack and Lenny set up the tape player on the back screened porch and you can hear gospel music from one
end of the yard to the other. Uncle Lu said no rock and roll. Since it’s his birthday, he can do whatever he pleases and he doesn’t want to have to listen to the music of the devil.

I’m looking out the bedroom window when Uncle Lucius comes around the corner of the house pushing the wheelbarrow. He’s been stoking the barbeque fire with big slabs of wood. Even though it’s his birthday, he insisted on building the fire. Momma worried that he might get burned, but she let him do it anyway. You can’t tell a seventy-year-old man what to do, she says.

Beyond Lucius’s white head the sun is falling behind the mountains, turning the blue sky orange through the wood smoke. A snowy contrail cuts the sky in two behind the tiny dot of a silver plane.

All of a sudden Uncle Lu moves to the side and I see what’s in the wheelbarrow.

No!

No!

I try to scream, but the words go silent, trapped in some deep, soundless place. My stomach winds up like a ball of yarn.

Nothing to do, but … stare at the fire, feel the heat of the words burning.

Lit pieces of paper float into the trees like fiery gems. Pieces of rain-forest rivers and blue Antarctic ice and snow-covered volcanoes.

Amongst the trees the men talk, pat backs, shake hands. Somewhere a woman with a sad voice sings “In the Sweet By and By.”

I look up, fix my eyes on the orange sky above the fire, and watch the airplane dot slip farther and farther away. If only I could catch it. If only I could fly away from here and never come back.

I rush down the stairs in my black patent-leather shoes and new blue dress. Cross the sunporch. Slam the back door. Don’t stop, don’t speak, don’t listen.

You look pretty tonight
. Shouts and smiles and empty faces.

At the edge of the woods the trees are enormous umbrellas, casting shadows and shade. Thick vines full of orange trumpets, blue morning glories, all wild and winding into the trees.

Everything is a blur behind me. The stretch of green lawn, the house drifting farther away, people and cars and gospel music and chairs stamped with big white
O
s.