| starkey
flythe, jr.
If my parents answer the phone when she calls, she hangs up.
This is before caller-ID. My family wouldn't have had
such a thing anyway.
"I don't think she's the kind of friend a twelve year
old boy who's not doing so well in school should have,"
my father says.
Louisa. I know her through my parents. They may
have felt sorry for her though she wouldn’t like that
a bit. She had polio when she was two or three, is bent
left and right, over almost double, but isn’t stopped
by many obstacles. She can't walk but does. Each
step she has to bend over (which she can't do but does) and
crack the metal brace on whichever leg is going forward or
being dragged behind, take the step, then straighten the brace
and follow with the other leg. She is short of stature.
Likes to eat besides. "What else is there?"
she wonders aloud sometimes though she does not feel sorry
for herself, even imagines she is sort of pretty, rouges her
cheeks, sticks a rose down the front of her dress between
her boobs. Her arms move forward on elbow crutches,
aluminum--one benefit of the war, light-weight--crab claws
that cut into her forearms and hinder her when she's trying
to manipulate her legs. Her left shoe--an S. M.-looking
corrective torture device--something they'd hang on a cross
at Lourdes--black leather, twenty laces--"How in hell
they expect you to thread this," (before the days of
Velcro--before the days of anything)--is built up to compensate
for the difference of her uneven stubby limbs. "It
doesn't help," she says.
* * *
"Indeed he will march!" She roars to my high
school principal. We are in Mr. Markeby’s office.
I'd never been in there before. This feeling, fear?
1949, a recurrence of WW2 imminent? Russia.
Asia. We have to be ready, the country thinks.
Our school. The Academy. Military, as far as a
public school can be. New generation of boys.
Train them, drill them. Let them loose on the rifle
range. We wear scratchy wool army uniforms left over
from WWII, made for bigger, sweatier men. Most of them
dead. The uniforms –they are called, 'tropical
wool,' – retain a certain odor of those men, war, love,
South Pacific. "No telling who got laid in that
baby-shit-brown strait jacket," the boy shares my wall
locker tells me.
We tote M-1 rifles, firing pins removed, but still at nine
and a quarter pounds in the hands of teenagers, dangerous
weapons. You can lose your thumb when you present for
inspection, a parade feature where ROTC officers, most of
them yellow from malaria picked up in Guadalcanal, snatch
your rifle out of your hands and up-end it to stare down the
barrel, see whether you've punched an oil patch through to
clean out dust and gunk. The breech cover snaps back
like a shot when you release the action spring. Get
your thumb out quick or you don't have one.
* * *
"Markeby won't say no to a gimp," my locker-friend
tells me before Louisa and I go into the principal's office.
He is bald, the principal. You'd be standing at the
urinal, teeteeing and he'd be at the next one. I didn't
know what he'd learn from that. What size peters we
had? Whether we knew how to whiz? Toilet trained?
Who needed instruction? The result of his presence was
the bigger boys stopped beating us up in the bathroom.
Or, he'd be opening a wall locker padlock with a saw.
He rips down pinups. SAT scores went up, somebody said.
* * *
"Indeed!" Louisa says, her face red-orange
with its thick Coke-bottle glasses and sixty-six year old
acne crisscrossing her cheeks like Three-D-map mountain ranges.
I had never heard the word, 'Indeed!' used, hers imperiously,
without brooking argument. Mr. Markeby draws back like
she's going to hit him. He makes a note.
The drill team said I couldn't march. Too young, too
little. They have enough boys – 'men' –
already, they told me. The platoon is perfectly formed.
A perfect square. The same height as if a barber had
run a razor over the top. Perfect square. Eight
men long, eight men wide. All fifteen years old, or
sixteen. Five-foot-ten or eleven. No pimples.
The platoon marches out onto the football field at half time.
They toss their M-1's up in the air. The man behind
you catches yours and you catch the one coming down in front
of you as the platoon executes, 'to the rear-ah, march!'
We – they – wear white gloves and white canvas
belts. White puttees. White plastic helmet liners
– a gift from an MP unit at the Fort. I would
ruin the square, they tell me. 'In more ways than one.'
(An aside meant to be heard.) The 'odd man' hanging
out behind, the tail that wags the dog. And who could
I throw my rifle up to? Who would catch it when it came
down? Nobody behind. They gave me – my friend
was right; they didn't say no to a gimp, an old woman –
a platoon banner to hold instead of a rifle. The "standard."
I marched out front of the drill team. She comes to
the games to watch me. She hates football. Everything
about it. "Why should they set those big morons
up heroes to the rest of the students? Trophy cases
in the front hall? Special table in the lunch room?
Steaks while these other poor souls are choking on frozen
fish sticks."
* * *
Louisa and I had first got to be friends – I guess you
would call us that – because I could help her get into
her car. She can't walk far or much, but she can drive.
Her Pontiac, dusty rose and gray – two-tone paint jobs
cars were going to sport in 1951-2, and hers already did –
was fitted with hand controls. But she can't get into
the car by herself. A hand truck – she can go
stiff as a board – to haul her, and at the car, I put
my knee gently under her back and with the help of her crutches
and her loosened braces and a large, pullman Samsonite suitcase
kept in the trunk for the purpose, elevate her into the front
seat where she sits – no, semi-lies – like a figure
stretched out on top of a beach ball. She'd wriggle
herself down, pull the hand throttle and roar off. She
couldn't or didn't adjust the throttle once she set it.
Whatever speed she began at she drove. She saw only
a little of the road ahead, the space between the half moon
of the steering wheel and the top of the padded dash –
an innovation she was proud of – "See? Soft.
If we hit we don't get hurt."
She had money. Which allowed her a certain liberal freedom.
She involved herself in politics – was one of the early
annoyances at corporate meetings – asking embarrassing
questions about directors' salaries, the export of products
to countries governed by un-elected dictators. She had
huge signs made for the top and sides of the Pontiac.
Anything that struck her fancy. "Go B.O. and Take
Lester With You," one sign read, urging the Georgia voter
to write in a third candidate when BO – she pronounced
it, Body Odor – Callaway and Lester Maddox ran for governor.
She painted-she was an artist, she swore and nobody disagreed,
huge, horrible visions of infernos and industrial plants –
wrote unpublished novels – "I don't think you're
too young, what do you think about this passage?" graphic
detail, the rape of a twelve year old slave girl by her white
master and the baby's subsequent delivery by an inept midwife.
Louisa started a puppet theatre. All the mothers and
daddies went to the opening performance with their children
expecting Peter Pan or Punch and Judy. She put together
a bill about the Marquis de Sade and the worst part of the
French Revolution brought up to date with General De Gaulle's
persecution of Algerians in North Africa.
* * *
"Come by the house tomorrow after school," she said
one evening when I'd got her out of the car from one of her
doctors' appointments, "and shine your shoes."
"You be home, tomorrow," my father said at my house.
"You're going to get through algebra if I have to cram
it down your esophagus myself."
I hated being small. Even if you had to submit to a
parent, if you were closer to their size it lent a certain
reality to your deference. If you were tiny, you were
any ant, any insect some big foot stepped on.
It began when I was four, half way to five. My parents
in their anxiety to get me out of the house, hauled me to
the Catholic school where they'd take you in first grade when
you were five no matter when your birthday came unlike the
public school where you had to be six by August of the coming
school year. So I began four, almost five, crossing
myself. Telling the nun who ruled my class I was 'Gentile'
when she asked the class who was not Catholic. Later,
second grade, when I finally got to public school they ridiculed
me, "mackerel snapper." I never caught up
with the other kids because I was more than a year and a half,
nearly two years younger. It beat on me, like practically
everybody else in the class. First life lesson.
Beat up the one you can beat up. "Why people ridicule
librarians," Louisa said. "Why politicians
attack public schools, teachers. 'We spend millions
of dollars on schools and Johnny still can't read and write.'
Why, she asked, did nobody say this about medicine.
Or, law? 'We spend trillions of dollars on hospitals
and operating rooms and doctor education and nurses and medicines
and research and people are still getting sick?' 'We
spend billions of dollars on court houses and judges and law
enforcement centers and police officers and jails and people
are still getting into trouble.'" "Hit the
little guy, the defenseless guy," she says. I can
barely detect sarcasm, wouldn't know what it was.
She treats me like an adult. I appreciate this.
Nobody has ever told me anything about life. My dad
has never taken me aside to inform me about birds and bees.
My mother has never said, When you drink a Coke keep the rumble
to yourself. My parents are not uncultivated, they are
simply driven to the wall by economic demands right after
the war. The rich are getting richer, (having done something
profitable for the defense department while my dad was pushing
up D-day), and the poor are getting poorer.
* * *
Next day, I go to her house, two blocks up the hill from school,
half a mile from where I live. My shoes are shined.
Because she can't come to the door to open it, her front (back
and side) door is always open. Other things she can't
do besides walk are – well, I mean without a lot
of help – go to the toilet, dress – undressing
is easier; she doesn't care how she looks undressed, leaves
her clothes the way my parents would tell me not to if they
told me – cook anything to eat, defend herself, though
she did take a poker to an intruder who turned out to be one
of her puppet theatre friends. In costume.
"Louisa?" I call. All her senses are slightly
impaired. The thick glasses. Two hearing aids
turned up high. I call again. Her voice is half
man, half alligator-mating call. "In here!"
she yells; she is naked, something a twelve year old boy shouldn't
see maybe except in a prettier version. I see her, the
human body as interpreted by U. S. Steel, scaffolding, elastic
Ace bandages, leg braces, arms, torso mauled by the medical
profession's numerous painful and unsuccessful attempts to
straighten her body.
"Unsuccessful?" she cries. "Lordy, you
should've seen me before!" Many things to thank
God or the devil for. "See my bloomers over there?"
I find her drawers--what men would find exciting in a pair
of women's panties I don't know. Like football shorts,
these. She scratches herself, right there, making sure
I see. "Honey, one day you and I have to have a
little talk. I don't think you understand half of what
you should." I hope I don't ever. Those upside
down buckets on her chest. Another object that's supposed
to excite me? The tuft of wiry darkness under her hanging
out belly. Jesus, let me stay stupid! "And
I'm going to pull in the old gut a notch or two. Never
know who – whom – we might see. You spy
my stays over on the dresser?" "Your stay?"
I thought we were going. "My corset. My iron
lung. Little Friend, one of these days, well, you need
to see the female in a state of undress so you can figure
how to take it all in, or off!"
There's that awful moment when you think maybe your parents
are right about keeping everything from you. Right about
Louisa not being the ideal best friend for me. Only
trouble, she was the only friend I had. Well, I mean
somebody who would stick up for me. Come to the game
to scream her head off for the standard bearer. My parents
always side with the school, the teachers. Louisa was
somebody else. She disagreed with all of them.
I had a different picture of friendship, though. Doing
things boys would do. Shooting beebee guns at street
lights. Spooking cats. She hated guns. Thought
animals deserved reverence. For putting up with us.
I was learning that, at least. "Friends don't always
have to agree on every little thing, Honey," she said.
She turned so I was looking at her back. Two big square
chunks of rear end. My dad said she looked like the
Campbell soup kids. Both of them. A sort of happy,
goofy – eat-a-bowl-of-cream-of-tomato, or have you tried
our alphabet? – look on her face. "She doesn't
have a lot to look happy about, though," my dad admitted.
* * *
The car is out front instead of being behind her little studio
cottage. She rents out the big house, the big Colonial
her parents left her. She got through college –
UNC. She'd like me to go there, but that's not going
– grades, money – to happen. She met Andy
Griffin.
Louisa has a succession of black women, sometimes white, she
eventually drives off by her meanness or by their stealing.
"I can't help it, Baby," she tells me. "My
body's not big enough to count to ten when I get mad."
"If I could do it myself I would. God, I would.
Sit on the pot. You know what it's like to have to go
to the can and not be able to drag yourself in there?
Sometimes I can get there. On my belly, like a moccasin.
Then I can't get back up! Who wants to spend the rest
of her life sitting on the potty, lying on the bathroom floor
in a puddle of pee?" She giggles, guffaws, I guess
you'd call it. "Sometimes I have an accident."
Then her face is stone. "Like a goddamn baby."
But she brightens. "We're going, Baby. A
little trip, here."
"I have to be in school tomorrow," I say though
I'd as soon never go again.
"School! They bore millions of children to death
daily. At great expense to the tax payer.
Just think of the group rate they could get, take them all
to Paris, London, Rome, a week. They'd see – "
Her eyes light up, and even in her pudding face a kind of
beauty a twelve year old boy can see shines out, "—
See! In an instant! The scales would drop from
their eyes. They'd understand. And those Frogs
and Wops and Limies could come here. Some could stay
in this house. I'd kick my tenants out. They could
help me. I could help them. Oh, Baby, every time
I think my life is over, something good comes up. Good
old Hope. You can get by, painfully, without Faith and
Charity, but Lord, don't let me ever lose, Hope. Going.
Now. Can you imagine the feeling when you haven't
been out of the house for anything but the doctor six months
and suddenly you're going?"
I wanted to know where. But I knew better to ask her.
"Go in the kitchen, the basket's loaded. Fat full
sandwiches. Shaker dry martinis. You may have
to drive. Can you work hand controls?"
We've gone on lots of 'adventures,' she calls them.
Day trips. Years before, I hardly remember, we saw Roosevelt
and Churchill – or at least their feet – "See,
baby, he's bolted down just like me, and he's president,"
– in their private railroad car over in Georgetown where
they were staying with Bernard Baruch. We've driven
to the mountains to see Carl Sandburg. She even bought
one of his Toggenburg goats. "The milk'll make
us strong, make us write good." Letters.
To the editor, letters they don't usually print. Is
working on another novel. When some smart soul says,
"Isn't everybody?" she replies "Not like this
one." And asks the person's name. She'll
put him in her book. "Ruin him," she says.
I put enough stuff in the car – a huge Hartman half
steamer – picnic stuff, a folding camp chair, car robe,
air mattress, pillows, several five gallon jugs of water,
bottles of apple juice, orange juice, V-8, a portable bar,
a portable toilet, soap, an overcoat, an extra set of crutches,
"Baby, you don't know what they don't got out there."
* * *
She seems shorter, less capable of driving the car than last
time. Her face though is bright as she high beams the
Pontiac. Bolstered by a swallow or two from the martini
shaker – just to see they're 'dry,' she tells me.
"Oh, Baby, you haven't come in contact with this world
until gin brushed with sterling silver crosses your lips--"we
lunge out the drive way.
She doesn’t – can't – look right or left.
We start off. I think, it's late. Even if we're
not going far, I'll never make it back and home for algebra
with my dad. Louisa's no excuse, he'll tell me.
I could jump out of the car now, but we're going too fast.
And how would she get home and out of the driver's seat, home
without me?
The usual drill after one of our adventures is for her to
send me home in a taxi when I've got her out of the car, to
the toilet, 'splashed,' she calls her bath, (not my favorite
operation), and into bed. I stop the taxi half a block
from my house, walk the rest of the way. Explaining
to my parents is something Louisa doesn't help with.
"You need to bolster your imagination. Think of
something to say. Anything! The wilder the better."
* * *
By now, we're out of the city. Through a couple of little
towns famous as speed traps. I think every clump of
bushes, every billboard hides a patrolman. "Don't
think" she says, "Imagine!" A miracle.
No one chases us. Somehow, she's nudged the lever out
an inch or so and we're hitting speeds of fifty-five and sixty.
The speed limit is thirty-five in most of these little towns.
"Good, huh?" she asks. "Aren't you a
little thirty? I mean, thirsty?"
"No," I say. "Drive, I mean drive slower.
I'll get you a Coke out of the cooler."
"Don't want a Coke," she says. "Little
more of the sterling silver."
She's read Ian Fleming. She's read everything.
"Maybe that's why I don't write so good, huh? Baby?"
she asks. "Read too much good stuff."
I wish I could reassure her, but I haven't read any of the
books she talks about. She's always trying to get me
to read. French novels--I'm in first year French--"I'll
get you a pony." Doesn't understand I'm too old
for one.
While I'm rumbling around over the front seat pretending to
get her some gin, we tear through two more little towns.
I have the feeling now of destination. Jail. Death
in a head-on collision.
Athens, or Sparta. Columbus. Our university towns.
That's where we're going. I've always, always dreamed
of going there. Classmates in school would listen when
I say I've been. They'd want to know about the team.
Duh Team, Man. I'd say, "Looking pretty good."
"Good passing." "Strong line."
"Decent defense." "I smell bowl bid."
How to explain I hadn't seen the football stadium, that we'd
probably go to an origami paper exhibition? Shakespeare
touring company? "Oh, Baby, don't worry about the
truth," she tells me. "Whoever invented that
idea – truth – just didn't know how to lie good."
I wished I could make up some lie that tasted like gin for
her. Lemon juice in water? Listerine mouthwash
for the Vermouth?
But she's forgotten she'd asked for alcohol. "Can
you see anything pretty out the window?" She would
do this sometimes, lose her train of thought.
"Yes," I said. "Trees. Fields."
"That's okay," she said, "'Pink as tonsils
if the peach trees were blooming.' You had yours out,
your tonsils, didn't you?" Yes, I'd had them out.
She'd sneaked in ice cream to soothe my aching throat.
Got the drug store delivery boy into the hospital room.
"Any historic sites? Buildings? Something
we should stop and see? Picnic?" Which brought
me closer to the question? Time? Didn't we have
to be somewhere by such and such a time. To see the
beginning of whatever it was? But I kept my mouth shut.
Tried to think which was better, lock my car door--protection
against crash--or unlocked--easy escape?
In two hours or a little more or less we were in Athens--a
hundred miles plus from home. Country roads. Slow
going for most drivers. Hay wagons, tractors.
Louisa had sounded her "klaxon," – she called
it. People got out of her way.
Something about a college town. It thrilled me.
Girls in short plaid skirts, saddle oxfords. Convertibles.
Hair blowing out behind in the wind. Big signs.
"Beat Tech." “Home Coming.” “Go
Dawgs.” Students bent on serious pleasure.
Did anybody ever study? A light rain had begun.
We saw two convertibles, one yellow, one red, raise their
tops automatically. How beautiful! It was like
God creating the world. Who cared if I learned algebra.
'X's,' and 'Y's,' what were they? This was real.
Louisa knew where she was going, even if she was going too
fast, way too fast for the town, the campus, the co-eds, oh,
glorious world.
We pulled up in front of a building which looked like a church
married to a bank, columns, Greek looking.
"Go on in, Honey, I'll wait, see if they've got our seats,
somebody to help get me in. I told them when I phoned
to get a wheel chair. Easier than pulling ours out the
trunk."
Inside, they said yes, she'd phoned, but they didn't have
a wheel chair and she'd have to sit like everybody else, not
in the aisle, in a row seat. Fire laws.
The theatre was starting to fill up with people when I went
back to the car. Robert Frost. Posters.
Who was? No way she could sit like other people.
"I don't think you can park right there," I said
when she told me to get her out of the car, and jabbed the
car into a granite marker honoring Civil War dead. "Damn
war," she said. I got the wheel chair out the trunk.
* * *
"Got to go," she said, "just hold my skirts
out like I was a parachute. Let me lean on you.
Watch your shoes." I sniffed and heard the urine
pouring down, held her left hand while her right went up under
her skirt. "Give me a Kleenex," she whispered,
"what the hell are they looking at?"
Inside they said, No. She rolled up to the front of
the lobby and shoved the auditorium doors open and said in
a voice you could hear in back home, "There! That's
where we'll sit. Right there!"
"The fire marshal..."
"The audience is already in. Room enough on the
side. Not going to be any fire at a G. D. poetry reading!"
She put up a crutch. The man drew back. "All
right," he said, as if he were being kind to a cripple.
Louisa managed the whole audience as if she was going to be
on stage, not this Robert Frost. "The poet, Baby."
"Don't give me that," she said to a student usher,
and we sat down, Louisa in the wheel chair, I in the aisle
seat she'd made vacant with her other crutch, a terrified
'co-ed' sliding over two seats, one for me, one to protect
her soft, pink, angora-sweatered self.
I had never been to a poetry reading. Didn't know such
a thing existed. I think I'd seen him in my lit book,
though. Old man. He read as though this was nothing
to do with us. He talked to himself, to some higher
listener. Louisa seemed tuned to the same ear.
She cheered when the rest of the audience clapped politely.
Yelled when the usher asked her to keep it down. From
her satchel – usually containing a flask, mace, biscuits
–she pulled out a book of Frost's poetry and a mini
flashlight, read along with the poet; I felt something, I
don't know what, better though than what I would've felt with
my dad and the algebra book. Her enthusiasm filled up
our seats. I felt defiant. I felt possible.
I hated the man who'd tried to keep us out. "Good,
Baby, get your juices flowing, hate's good." The
drill team.
The English majors in the auditorium – Louisa defined
them, drew a cartoon of them for me in the air – seemed
to listen as if in a year or two they'd be writing better
things. He even read a poem I know I'd heard, 'Stopping
by....' He read the last line twice, read it as if he
had to, knew it had to be, and that we knew, too. It
wasn't music, anything like that, or anything I'd ever heard.
Not entertainment. Something else. Like being
alone, and being glad to be alone, a nice day, out in the
woods, trees, some bird you couldn't identify, a day that
made you want to take a deep breath, a day you'd put off all
your life, a day when you got through job and all the books
you were supposed to read, again, and had some time to figure
out where you were, what the world was, where everything was
going, eventually.
Long after he finished, and they set up a table on the stage
for him to sign the books the audience had bought, Louisa
was still clapping. People stared at her like she was
crazy. She sent me up to the stage with her old books.
The man tried to stop me. "This is for books that
have just been bought through the university bookstore,"
he told me. I turned back toward Louisa. She waved
her crutch at the man. "Oh, go ahead," he
told me. "What name?" a woman at a table next
to Frost asked. "Louisa," I said. "Louisa
what?" she said. "Louisa," I said.
He smelled like an old man. Dandruff. Tobacco,
alcohol. Oddly, a good smell. "How old are
you, Boy?" he wondered, not really to me. "Twelve."
"Twelve," he said, and started reciting a poem,
a boy in the woods, an ice storm, persimmons. Or, was
it crab apples, wind? Something I – that boy –
had lost?
* * *
We weren't so lucky going home. Stopped twice by highway
patrolmen. Finger printed. Our mugs shot.
"Held." It excited me. They went through
the car. "Jesus," one of them said.
"Medicine," Louisa told them, held up prescriptions
from her satchel. I was really living, I thought.
There was something to poetry. She called her "lawyer,"
a law student who had once been me, one of 'her boys,' a few
years before. He cited some ruling to the magistrate
on the phone and dropped a name everybody in the state knew
and knew not to mess with. Talmadge. Louisa was
his cousin, the boy said. So was he. They let
us go. 'With a warning,' an expression that made Louisa
laugh. "What the hell they warning me about?
I don't know that I like this gin, tepid," she said when
she'd refreshed herself in the jailhouse parking lot.
"Not good for me to do this, anyway, is it? Just
such pain. Pain, pain, pain. All the damn time.
How many damned joints are there?"
We got home at four o'clock in the morning. My parents
had called the police. They were out looking for us.
In the river. In bars and any place that was open all
night and might have attracted twelve year old boys.
Louisa had to pay extra for the taxi to get me home, listen
to a tirade from my dad. And my mother. Like Frost,
I kept repeating lines. "She had to pay extra."
"My parents called the police." "Any
place that was open all night." "In the river."
"After I'd got her into bed." I thought of
co-eds. They didn't seem that much bigger than me.
Angora. That one who moved over in the seat, I could
smell her, like an Easter bunny, and the spring in the seat
might have been busted; they seemed so soft, so pastel, those
pretty girls. I thought, Louisa may let me drive the
car next time.
She may let me drive next time. Things could happen.
We'll go a hundred, my hand on the throttle in my head, the
solid silver gin cooling my throat, the police too far behind
us to ever catch us. We'll go a hundred. We’ll
go a hundred.
,
has worked with the South Carolina Governor's School for the
Arts and the Curtis Publishing Company in Indianapolis. He
served with the United States Army in East Africa and Saudi
Arabia, and has had stories in the O. Henry and Best American
annuals. A collection of stories, Lent: The Slow
Fast, won the University of Iowa Press Prize in 1990.
A story, "A Family of Breast Feeders," appeared
in the Winter/Spring issue of The Chattahoochee Review.
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