WHEN WEJUMPKA was eleven, Vern, his father, made me Wejumpka’s godfather. Vern’s health had been going downhill fast all that fall, although he was only in his fifties.
Vern and I had been playing that ridiculous game of liar’s poker, and our final bet obliged me to be Wejumpka’s godfather if I called and lost, but if Vern was bluffing, he had to marry the woman he was then seeing, if she would have him. She was barely out of her teens, plump, with a pear-shaped face and orange hair. She had an easy laugh and had had two children already. I agreed to the bet with the hope that she could do something with him—straighten him up, as I knew women could sometimes do.
The woman’s father, who was a few years older than me, had attended my high school. We’d played football together; he was a wiry little halfback who’d gotten more wiry since, working on cars in his garage out near the Pearl River. His name was Zachary, and he collected insurance money each spring when the rains brought the river into his garage and on up into his house. Generally, he didn’t even move out when it flooded. He’d wade around, doing his chores, making sure all the circuit breakers were off, and wait for the water to go down. When he’d collected the insurance money, he would bury it in secret places.
The rains began in March, and he would sit on the roof of his garage and listen to the weather station, praying for more rain; each foot of water in his shop was worth about ten thousand dollars. It’s cruel, but I don’t know what his daughters name was. Worse, I don’t think Vern did either. We called her Zachary’s girl.
The final bet between Vern and me was made only around midnight, but we’d started drinking at four in the afternoon. It was a serious hand of poker. Vern wasn’t bluffing, it turned out, and as I suspected later, he wasn’t even drunk. It was a setup. It was as if I’d killed him, like in one of those hunting accidents where a best buddy trips and hits the trigger, shooting his partner. By losing the bet, by assuming responsibility for Wejumpka, I’d given Vern the last go-ahead he needed to let go of everything, let his downward spiral have its way with him.
After that hand, Vern wasn’t the same anymore. I played cards with him out of a sense of duty, and that was probably why I got so drunk—I don’t handle duty very well. Later that year, when Vern received the old stop-drinking-or-you’ll-only-have-one-year-to-live speech from his doctor, and yet didn’t stop, not much anyway, I felt naive and stupid for having called an older man’s bluff.
About the boy I have won, Wejumpka. When he was eight, he went with his scout troop on a father-and-son camp-out. They roasted marshmallows and sang songs around the campfire. The moon was high and silvery over the lake. Bats chittered and swooped above the water. There was the cool, sweet trill of a screech owl coming from the woods along the shore. Solemnly, the boys gave each other Indian names, written on slips of paper and drawn from a wooden box.
Every other scout soon forgot his name, or was less than flattered by it and threw the paper in the fire. But Wejumpka remembered his; he embraced it. Formerly his name was Montrose. Another thing about the boy I have inherited: he is a hugger, and he’s wild about puppies, cats, parrots, guinea pigs—he loves all animals, and other children too, even the mean ones who pushed him down and ran away when he tried to embrace them.
He’s always been that way, always holding on. Perhaps when he was in his mother’s womb he could feel, as if with some prenatal sonar, the dark shape of his future, of the divorce looming between Vern and his wife, Ann. Perhaps Vern said unkind words to his wife while Wejumpka was forming in her womb. It’s also possible that Ann could see into the future, could feel the absence of a thing. Perhaps she held Vern more tightly than ever then, being wise and clairvoyant and scared in her pregnancy, and this affected the unborn child, made him hold on in the same way.
When Wejumpka was six, the year before the divorce, he dressed up as Porky Pig for Halloween. The other children were devils or witches or Green Berets with rubber knives clenched between their teeth, but Wejumpka was Porky Pig, and he went from house to house hugging people when they answered the door. He never asked for candy, not quite understanding that part of it, but instead ran into these strangers’ living rooms and latched on to their legs, giving them a tight thigh hug. Vern and Ann were having one of their dinner parties in which they would end up insulting each other in front of the guests, and it was my job to take Wejumpka around to all the nearby houses and bring him safely back.
Vern and Ann had not started their fight, though, by the time we returned. It’s possible that they were still a little in love, or thought they were; when they answered the door and saw their own little Porky Pig standing in front of them, they looked at each other and smiled. They had been drinking.
“Trick or treat!” Wejumpka shouted through his plastic mask, hopping up and down. I had tried to explain to him how it worked, that sometimes it was best not to hug. He was overjoyed, after the running chaos of the night, all the hurried darkness, at seeing his mother and father standing in the doorway with the bright lights of the party behind them, all the safe noise.
“Trick or treat!” he shouted again, jumping up and down once more.
Ann frowned and took a step back. “Why, you’re scary,” she said, and Wejumpka stopped hopping and looked at me.
“Whose little boy are you?” Vern asked, bending down and peering into the mask. “I don’t believe I know any little Porky Pig boys,” he said, shaking his head. And they closed the door.
“It’s me!” Wejumpka screamed, struggling to get out of the hot costume and mask. “It’s me! It’s your little boy!”
His parents swung the door open, and this rime the guests were gathered around it, laughing as Wejumpka flew into Ann’s arms, crying. She patted him on the back and made soft comforting sounds.
After the divorce, Vern’s sports car stopped running, and he never fixed it; it sat in the small woodshed-garage behind his apartment. Mice built their nests in and around the engine; they nibbled the insulation off the electrical wiring. Birds nested in the rafters of the shed, and the car was soon dappled with what seemed to be their hearty enthusiasm. When Vern does go to work now, he walks. Or Zachary’s girl picks him up. Vern slumps in the seat beside her and drinks rum from the bottle, still wearing the suit he wore the day before, and the day before that.
Sometimes I drive Vern over to Zachary’s. We’ll play cards at a little linoleum-covered table that rocks whenever we lean our elbows on it. Zachary’s girl and Vern drink from the same bottle, but Zachary and I drink from jelly glasses.
“Lot of bad shit goin’ around,” Zachary will say, shaking his head, studying his hand as if it’s the first game of cards he has ever played in his life. Zach’s girl and Vern giggle, look at each other’s hands. At just such an opportunity, Zachary and I start talking about football, talking as if we’ll run ourselves into another winning streak, talking and drinking rum with hope and idiocy. Zach’s girl and Vern slide to the floor, in a way becoming rum themselves. They land in a tangled heap.
The room grows quiet. By this time the moon might be up and full. Zachary sighs and turns to the window, thinking perhaps about Vern’s rotting sports car—Zachary could fix it, maybe, or weld it to the top of a tower he could climb each day after work. He could sit behind the steering wheel and dream that he was a sailor in a crow’s nest, peering out at everything, ever mindful of the treasure he had hidden away.
When Wejumpka entered junior high school, he finally stopped hugging people. The authorities made him stop. They told Ann that he couldn’t come to school anymore if he continued. He was hugging teachers, students, the custodians, the principal. He was considered a disciplinary problem.
Vern and I decided to change his name then. He was getting too old for Wejumpka—though its what Vern and I still call him—but God knows, Montrose was nothing to fall back on. In order to settle the matter, we told him to pick a name from a wooden bowl that had a lot of slips of paper in it, and “Vern Jr.” was the one he pulled out. Fate.
He is luckier than Zach’s girl, though, and luckier even than Zach, who has some malaise in his blood, some unknown chemical that makes him have to lie down and rest every time the wind changes direction.
For his twelfth birthday, I rented a boat and two pairs of water skis and took Wejumpka and his cousin Austin, who was sixteen, out to a nearby lake, just the two boys and I. Neither of the boys had skied before, and for a long time we let our boat idle, feeling the warmth of the sun. Zachary had finally towed Vern’s sports car away and had indeed welded it to the top of a tower on the far side of the lake. We were some distance from shore, so we had to use binoculars to see it.
“I pissed in that car after they got the divorce,” Austin bragged, proud and tough. He was wearing a gold earring and a dirty blue-jean jacket, even though it was close to one hundred degrees. His body gave off a fetid odor, like a boys’ restroom at school, and I wanted him to ski first so that he would get cleaned off.
“I pooted in it,” Wejumpka admitted in a small voice. The two cousins looked at each other and then broke up laughing. I laughed too, at the coincidence of this. It came to me then how good it would feel to turn on the engine and go. The water was deep, and I could see a long way down into it, or so it seemed. I noticed fish shilly-shallying and the square marks on a turtles back.
Wejumpka, in an odd gesture of bravery, asked to ski first. It’s possible that he wanted to show off for Austin, or perhaps he thought his father had not yet abandoned him, that he was being given one last chance. Perhaps even as he climbed down into the water, buoyed by his life vest, and slipped his feet into the oversized skis—even then, in his staggered, hugging-poet’s imagination, his father was climbing up into the car with Zachary, watching him through binoculars, giving him a final chance, maybe even elbowing Zachary and pointing to his son, saying, “That’s my little boy. That’s my Wejumpka.”
I started the motor and tipped our craft from side to side, getting the tow rope lined up, making sure Wejumpka had his skis on properly. We moved forward slowly, but he lost his balance and went down. He was stout, though, and he bobbed right up, with a surprised look on his face. We tried again.
When I glanced over my shoulder, I saw that he wasn’t watching the boat but the shore, squinting as if he were waiting for something to appear.
“He says he wants to go faster!” Austin shouted, amazed at the spectacle of his cousin. “He’s pointing his thumb up. He wants to go faster!”
I turned again and saw that it was so. Wejumpka was leaning back like a pro. Already he was relaxed, with a cocky but determined look on his face, and he was jabbing his thumb at the sky as if trying to poke out the bottom of something, skiing with just one hand.
I eased the throttle in. The boat surged forward like a lion, but Wejumpka would not allow himself to be easily left behind. I saw that he was a little pale—the throttle was now all the way in. He was crouching into the wake, no longer showboating, trying only to hang on. We neared a wall of blue trees, and almost without realizing it, I noticed that we could see without effort the car on top of its tower, looking like the most natural thing in the world.
We skimmed the chop of summer-wind waves. The breeze was blowing my hair, and the sun was beginning to burn my cheeks and shoulders. When I looked back, Wejumpka was gone. Austin was staring open-mouthed at the water behind us.
Then we saw that he was still holding on to the end of the rope, though the skis were knocked off by his fall; he was bright as a fishing lure. Occasionally he raised his head above the rooster tail of water, his mouth a tiny, frightened O, gulping for air. The force of the water must have been tremendous.
“Let go!” I shouted, easing back on the throttle. “Wejumpka, let go!” I could feel the strain on the boat.
But he couldn’t hear me underwater. I had to shut the engine off and coast to a stop before he understood that the ride was over.