White People (17 page)

In the dark adjacent room, Barker kept humming, knocking things over. I heard the clank of movie reels. “Didn’t expect company, Dave,” he called. “Just clear off a chair and make yourself at home. Momma was a cleaner-upper. Me … less. I don’t
see
the junk till I get somebody to … till somebody drops over, you know?”

I grunted agreement, strolled into his pantry. Here were cans so old you could sell them for the labels. Here was a 1950s tin of vichyssoise I wouldn’t have eaten at gunpoint. I slipped along the hall, wandered upstairs. An archive of
National Geographics
rose in yellow columns to the ceiling. “Dave?” he was hollering. “Just settle
in or whatever. It’ll only take a sec. See, they cut the leaders off both our movies. I’ll just do a little splice.—I’m fast, though.”

“Great.”

O
N THE FAR WALL
of one large room (windows smothered by outside ivy) a calendar from 1959, compliments of a now-defunct savings and loan. Nearby, two Kotex cartons filled with excelsior and stuffed, I saw on closer inspection, with valuable brown and white Wedgwood place settings for forty maybe. He really should sell them—I was already mothering Barker. I’d tell him which local dealer would give top dollar.

In one corner, a hooked rug showed a Scottie terrier chasing one red ball downhill. I stepped on it, three hundred moths sputtered up, I backed off, arms flailing before me. Leaning in the doorway, waiting to be called downstairs for movietime, still wearing my business clothes, I suddenly felt a bit uneasy, worried by a famous thought: What are you
doing
here, Dave?

Well, Barker brought me home with him, is what. And, as far back as my memory made it, I’d only wanted just such guys to ask me over. Only they held my interest, my full sympathy.

The kid with the terrible slouch but (for me) an excellent smile, the kid who kept pencils in a plastic see-through satchel that clamped into his looseleaf notebook. The boy whose Mom—even when the guy’d turned fourteen—
made
him use his second-grade Roy Rogers/Dale Evans lunchbox showing them astride their horses, Trigger and Buttermilk. He was the kid other kids didn’t bother mocking because—through twelve years of schooling side by side—they’d never noticed him.

Of course I could tell, there were other boys, like me, studying the other boys. But they all looked toward the pink and blond Stephens and Andrews: big-jawed athletic office holders, guys with shoulders like baby couches, kids whose legs looked turned on lathes, solid newels—calves that summer sports stained mahogany brown, hair coiling over them, bleached by overly chlorinated pools and an admiring sun: yellow-white-gold. But while others’ eyes stayed locked
on them, I was off admiring finer qualities of some clubfooted Wendell, a kindly bespectacled Theodore. I longed to stoop and tie their dragging shoestrings, ones unfastened so long that the plastic tips had worn to frayed cotton tufts. Math geniuses who forgot to zip up: I wanted to give them dating hints. I’d help them find the right barber. I dreamed of assisting their undressing—me, bathing them with stern brotherly care, me, putting them to bed (poor guys hadn’t yet guessed that my interest went past buddyhood). While they slept (I didn’t want to cost them any shut-eye), I’d just reach under their covers (always blue) and find that though the world considered these fellows minor minor, they oftentimes proved more major than the muscled boys who frolicked, unashamed, well-known, pink-and-white in gym showers.

What was I
doing
here? Well, my major was art history. I was busy being a collector, is what. And not just someone who can spot (in a museum with a guide to lead him) any old famous masterpiece. No, I was a detective off in the odd corner of a side street thrift shop. I was uncovering (on sale for the price of the frame!) a little etching by Wyndham Lewis—futuristic dwarves, or a golden cow by Cuyp, one of Vuillard’s shuttered parlors painted on a shirt cardboard.

Maybe this very collector’s zeal had drawn me to Carol, had led me to fatherhood, to the underrated joys of community. See, I wanted everything—even to be legit. Nothing was so obvious or subtle that I wouldn’t try it once. I prided myself on knowing what I liked, and going shamelessly after it. Everybody notices grace. But appreciating perfect clumsiness, that requires the real skill.

“Won’t be long now!” I heard Barker call.

“All
right,”
I hollered, exactly as my sons would.

I
EASED
into a messy office upstairs and, among framed documents and pictures, recognized Barker’s grandfather. He looked just like Barker but fattened up and given lessons. During the Fifties, the granddad served as mayor of our nearby capital city. Back then, such collar-ad looks were still admired, voted into office.

A framed news photo showed the mayor, hair oiled, presenting horse-topped trophies to young girls in jodhpurs. They blinked up at him, four fans, giggling. Over the wide loud tie, his grin showed an actor’s worked-at innocence. He’d been a decent mayor—fair to all, paving streets in the black district, making parks of vacant lots. Good till he got nabbed with his hand in the till. Like Barker’s, this was a face almost too pure to trust. When you observed the eyes of young Barker downstairs—it was like looking at a
National Geographic
close-up of some exotic Asian deer—you could admire the image forever, it wouldn’t notice or resist your admiration. It had the static beauty of an angel. Designed. That unaffected and willing to serve. His character was like an angel’s own—the perfect go-fer.

I heard Barker humming Broadway ballads, knocking around ice trays. I opened every door on this hall. Why not? The worse the housekeeping got, the better I liked it. The tenderer I felt about the guy downstairs. One room had seven floor lamps in it, two standing, five resting on their sides, one plugged in. Shades were snare-drum shaped, the delicate linings frayed and split like fabric from old negligées.

I closed all doors. I heard him mixing drinks. I felt that buzz and ringing you learn to recognize as the sweet warning sign of a sure thing. Still, I have been wrong.

I checked my watch. “Ready,” he called, “when you are.” I passed the bathroom. I bet Barker hadn’t done a load of laundry since last March or April. A thigh-high pile made a moat around the tub. I lifted some boxer shorts. (Boxers show low self-esteem, bodywise; my kind of guy always wears them and assumes that every other man on earth wears boxers, too.) These particular shorts were pin-striped and had little red New York Yankee logos rashed everywhere. They surely needed some serious bleaching.

T
HERE HE STOOD
, grinning. He’d been busy stirring instant iced tea, two tall glasses with maps of Ohio stenciled on them. I didn’t ask, Why Ohio? Barker seemed pleased, quicker moving, the host.
He’d rolled up his sleeves, the skin as fine as sanded ashwood. The icebox freezer was a white glacier dangling roots like a molar’s. From one tiny hole in it, Barker fished a gin bottle; he held the opened pint to one tea glass and smiled. “Suit you?”

“Gin and iced tea? Sure.” Seducers/seducees must remain flexible.

“Say when, pal.” I said so. Barker appeared full of antsy mischief.

For him, I saw, this was still his mother’s house. With her dead, he could do as he liked; having an illicit guest here pleased him. Barker cultivated the place’s warehouse look. He let cat hair coat his mom’s prized rugs; it felt daring to leave the stag-movie projector and screen set up in the den full-time, just to shock his Florida sisters.

I couldn’t help myself. “Hey, buddy, where
is
this cat?” I nodded toward the hallway’s gray fluff balls.

“Hunh? Oh. There’s six. Two mother ones and four kid ones. All super-shy but each one’s really different. Good company.”

He carried our tea glasses on a deco chrome tray; the film-viewing room was just ten feet from the kitchen. Dark in here. Ivy vines eclipsed the sunset; leaf green made our couch feel underwater. I slumped deep into its dated scalloped cushions.

Sipping, we leaned back. It seemed that we were waiting for a signal: Start. I didn’t want to watch a movie. But, also, I did. I longed to hear this nice fellow tell me something, a story, anything, but I worried: talking could spoil whatever else might happen. I only half knew what I hoped for. I felt scared Barker might not understand my particular kind of tenderness. Still, I was readier and readier to find out, to risk making a total fool of myself. Everything worthwhile requires that, right?

I needed to say something next.

“So,” is what I said. “Tell me. So, tell me something … about yourself. Something I should know, Barker.” And I added that, Oh, I really appreciated his hospitality. It was nothing, he shrugged then pressed back. He made a throaty sound like a story starting. “Well. Something plain, Dave? Or something … kind of spicy?”

“Both,” I said. Education does pay off. I know to at least ask for everything.

“O
KAY
.” His voice dipped half an octave. The idea of telling had relaxed Barker. I could see it. Listening to him relax relaxed me.

—“S
EE
, they sent my granddad to jail.
For
something. I won’t say what. He did do it, still, we couldn’t picture prison—for him. My mom and sisters were so ashamed that, at first, they wouldn’t drive out to see him. I wanted to. Nobody’d take me. I called up Prison to ask about visiting hours. I made myself sound real deep, like a man, so they’d tell me. I was eleven. So when the prison guy gave me the times, he goes, ‘Well, thank you for calling, ma’am.’ I had to laugh.

They’d put him in that state pen out on the highway, the work farm. It’s halfway to Tarboro and I rode my bike clear out there. It was busy, a Saturday. I had to keep to the edge of the Interstate. Teenagers in two convertibles threw beer cans at me. Finally when I got to the prison, men said I couldn’t come in, being a minor and all. Maybe they smelled the beer those hoods’d chucked at my back.

I wondered what my granddad would do in the same spot (he’d been pretty well known around here), and so I started mentioning my rights,
loud
. The men said ‘okay okay’ and told me to pipe down. They let me in. He sat behind heavy-gauge chicken wire. He looked good, about the same. All the uniforms were gray but his was pressed and perfect on him—like he’d got to pick the color of everybody else’s outfit. You couldn’t even hold hands with him. Was like going to the zoo except it was your granddaddy. Right off, he thanks me for coming and he tells me where the key is hid. Key to a shack he owned at the back side of the fairgrounds. You know, out by the pine trees where kids go park at night and do you-know-what?

He owned this cottage, but, seeing as how he couldn’t use it—for six to ten—he wanted me to hang out there. Granddad said I should use it whenever I needed to hide or slack off or anything. He said I could keep pets or have a club, whatever I liked.

He said there was one couch in it, plus a butane stove but no
electric lights. The key stayed under three bricks in the weeds. He said, ‘A boy needs a place to go.’ I said, ‘Thanks,’—Then he asked about Mom and the others. I lied: how they were busy baking stuff to bring him, how they’d be out soon, a carful of pies. He made a face and asked which of my sisters had driven me here.

I said, ‘Biked it.’ Well, he stared at me. ‘Not nine miles and on a Saturday. No. I’ve earned this, but you shouldn’t have to.’ He started crying then. It was hard, with the wire between us. Then, you might not believe this, Dave, but a black guard comes over and says, ‘No crying.’ I didn’t know they could do that—boss you like that—but in jail I guess they can do anything they please. Thing is, Granddad stopped. He told me, ‘I’ll make this up to you, Barker. Some of them say you’re not exactly college material, Bark, but we know better. You’re the best damn one. But, listen, hey, you walk that bike home, you hear me? Concentrate on what I’m saying. It’ll be dark by the time you get back to town but it’s worth it. Walk, hear me?’ I said I would. I left and went outside. My bike was missing. I figured that some convict’s kid had taken it. A poor kid deserved it more than me. Mom would buy me another one. I walked.”

B
ARKER SAT STILL
for a minute and a half. “What else?” I asked. “You sure?” He turned my way. I nodded. He took a breath.

“W
ELL
, I hung out in my new cabin a lot. It was just two blocks from the busiest service station in town but it seemed way off by itself. Nobody used the fairgrounds except during October and the County Fair. You could smell pine straw. At night, cars parked for three and four hours. Up one pine tree, a bra was tied—real old and gray now—a joke to everybody but maybe the girl that’d lost it. Out there, pine straw was all litterbugged with used rubbers. I thought they were some kind of white snail or clam or something. I knew they were yucky, I just didn’t know
how
they were yucky.

I’d go into my house and I’d feel grown. I bought me some birds at the old mall with my own money. Two finches. I’d always wanted
some Oriental type of birds. I got our dead parakeet’s cage, a white one, and I put them in there. They couldn’t sing, they just looked good. One was red and the other one was yellow, or one was yellow and one was red, I forget. I bought these seed balls and one pink plastic bird type of toy they could peck at. After school, I’d go sit on my man-sized sofa, with my birdcage nearby, finches all nervous, hopping, constant, me reading my comics—I’d never felt so good, Dave. I knew why my granddad liked it there—no phones, nobody asking him for favors. He’d take long naps on the couch. He’d make himself a cup of tea. He probably paced around the three empty rooms—not empty really: full of cobwebs and these coils of wire.

I called my finches Huey and Dewey. I loved my Donald Duck comics. I kept all my funny-books in alphabetical order in the closet across from my brown sofa. Well, I had everything I needed, a couch, comics, cups of hot tea. I hated tea but I made about five cups a day because Granddad had bought so many bags in advance and I did like holding a hot mug while I read. So one day I’m sitting there curled up with a new comic—comics are never as good the second time, you know everything that’s next—so I’m sitting there happy and I hear my back door slam wide open. Grownups.