THE ONLY house in the Mississippi Delta with a full basement was a rambling many-roomed tar-paper shack owned by Roy Dale’s daddy, a white-trash gentleman named Runt Conroy. Runt was weasely and drawn and he worked, when he was sober enough, as a backhoe driver, digging sewers and graves and ditches for pipelines. It was his own hands that had dug the basement of the Conroy shanty.
There was a passel of Conroy children, all red-haired and sunken-cheeked. I was never really sure how many. There were the twin girls, Cloyce and Joyce, children who spoke in unison. There was a misfit child named Jeff Davis who believed his pillow was on fire. And, of course, there was the boy near my age, Roy Dale, and a very young child, about four, named Douglas, whose only ambition when he grew up was to become an apple. There were others who were grown and had moved away.
Mrs. Conroy, the mother, was an angry woman. She seemed especially angry at Douglas, the child of low ambition. She berated him for it. She encouraged him to want to be something finer than an apple. She threatened to beat him if he did not change his mind. “You will always be white trash,” she said to this four-year-old child. “You will never amount to anything. Do you want to be a doctor?” “Apple,” Douglas replied. “Do you want to be a policeman? A fireman? A cowboy? A secretary?” “Apple,” he replied each time. With enough effort she could wear Douglas down. With enough nagging he would change. Once he upgraded his ambition to a level that almost satisfied her. “Do you want to be a bootlegger? A pimp? A computer scientist?” “All right,” Douglas said at last. “I don’t want to be an apple.” Mrs. Conroy was happy, she was a new woman, she was elated. She said, “I knew it! I was right after all, my darling boy, my own true son! You are not like the rest of the Conroys, you are not white trash. You are a wonderful child, the hope of our family.” Douglas said, “I want to grow up to be a dog.” It didn’t matter. Mrs. Conroy was not dejected. Dog was not good, but it was progress. Dog was better than apple. Other days were less joyous. Other days Douglas would slip backwards. Once he wanted to be a cork. That night his mother cried herself to sleep while Runt sat lovingly beside her bed and wrung his hands and said, “He could do worse, darling, he could do a lot worse.”
Most of the Conroy children were filthy and ragged and had sores on their legs, and skin like alligator hide. One of them was different, Dora Ethel, a teenaged girl in perfect health who wore immaculate clothes and Woolworth makeup and made good grades in school, the freak of the family. She went out on dates.
My own family was poor, but this did not keep us from looking down on the Conroys and sneering when they took canned goods from the Episcopal charity box at Christmas.
Mrs. Conroy—Fortunata was her name—was a teacher’s aide in an elementary school some ten miles away. She was not an attractive woman. She had a horsey face and buck teeth and a voice like sheet metal. Most of the children she taught were poor blacks, scared little first graders with no telling what kinds of homes in the swamp. She was gentle but not warm to them. In the middle of a reading lesson, when any person on earth might least expect it, let alone a small peasant child faced with reading a language scarcely his own, Fortunata Conroy would suddenly look up at the small quivering sea of little black faces and she would say in her impossible voice, “God has denied me two gifts, beauty and a pleasing voice,” and without another word would turn back to the struggle of sounding out the meaningless words of the stories the children were pretending to read. Fortunata was jealous and believed that every other woman in town was sexually attracted to her weasely husband Runt.
I had been inside the Conroy home a few times, but only briefly and never to take a meal or to spend a night. Roy Dale never invited me to sleep over. He had a million excuses—the small space, the lack of hot water and meals, his meddlesome sisters, the single bathroom, even the possibility of rats. Neither Roy Dale nor I ever mentioned the real concern, that Roy Dale was ashamed of his family.
Finally I wore him down. When you can manipulate a person with nothing else, you give him your secrets. I told Roy Dale that my father drank and was often depressed and maybe even suicidal. Roy Dale did not believe me but he had sense enough to know that such an admission, even if it was false, required reciprocation.
“My daddy wants to die,” I said.
“Want to sleep over?” he replied.
THE CONROY home was a shack, but it was not small. There was one impossible room after another. The floors were covered with yellow linoleum, some of the rooms were papered with newspaper. There were dangerous-looking space heaters in many rooms. The pictures on the walls were of Blue Boy and of a wolf standing on a snowy hillside looking at a house. They had been cut out of a magazine and stuck in cheap frames. I pretended to love the wolf picture. For effect I said, “Sometimes that’s the way I feel.” Roy Dale gave me a look, but he didn’t accuse me of lying.
The real reason I wanted to visit here was that I was interested in the Conroys’ cellar. I had never seen a cellar before. The word itself impressed me. Cellar, root cellar, storm cellar. The cellar was the one detail of the Conroys’ lives that almost rescued them, in my mind at least, from the charge of white trash.
Fortunata Conroy, Roy Dale’s mother, did not agree. She hated the cellar. It reminded her of Runt. Runt had dug it. It was a sewer, it was a ditch, it was a grave. It was an underground monument to white-trashery. Nobody should have a cellar. Having a cellar was proof positive to Fortunata Conroy that their genes and chromosomes were tainted. A billion dollars, a college education, and new teeth would not save a family from white-trash chromosomes if they were the only family in the Mississippi Delta with a cellar. Cellars stunk. Cats pissed in cellars. Potatoes rotted in them. Cellars were homes for rats.
Each day when Fortunata came home from work she walked into the house in search of evidence against herself and Runt. Her nose twitched, her entire face vibrated with accusation. And each day when she arrived home she said the same thing: “This place stinks!”
It was partly true. The incredible sea-level cellar could not be expected to hold out moisture. There was mildew built into the architecture. And the Conroys also had an old cat who sometimes peed in the basement, and especially on damp days a smell of urine could be detected in the air. “This place stinks!” Fortunata would say, and the cat and Runt and the whole gaggle and pride of viral and damaged children would leap for cover. At one time the Conroys had a parrot that could speak not a word but could make a sound like a cash register. It lived in the cellar until its feathers changed color and fell out. That, however, is another story.
The effluvium of the cellar was not really related to mildew or the cat; it was an accusation of Runt for his alcoholism, his birthright, his genes, his occupation, his adulteries real or imagined, his very breath. “This place stinks!” The house rang with the bad music of that refrain. “This place stinks!” The smell, real or imagined, was Runt’s fault. Runt believed this as thoroughly as Fortunata.
He sniffed the cellar daily for the place where the cat was doing her evil business.
It was a day in April that I came to spend the night with Roy Dale and his family. It was this same day that Runt put forth his best effort to correct the smell in the basement.
He filled a yellow plastic bucket with hot water from the laundry tub and poured in a dollup of Parson’s pine-scented ammonia. Roy Dale and I sat on the cellar steps and watched Runt the way normal children watch television. Runt swished the foamy water around with his hand and breathed the chemical fragrance into his nostrils. He began his search for cat piss.
He sniffed the fabric of a discarded chair near the useless hot water heater. He poked through a sad heap of linoleum scraps and cardboard boxes and cheap suitcases and round hat boxes containing veiled remnants of Fortunata’s millinery past—and through newspapers and cinder blocks and a cracked mirror and the rags-and-tags of children’s clothing, looking for the smell. He found nothing unusual, no cat piss, but he was not discouraged.
He tilted the yellow bucket so that the chemical water flowed over the basement floor. He had a new brush with yellow plastic bristles.
When he was finished his undershirt was sweaty and his knees were wet. He wiped sweat from his forehead with his scrawny scaly forearm. He looked satisfied.
Roy Dale had said nothing at all during the whole time Runt had been working. Suddenly now he said, “It stinks!” He meant the pine-scented ammonia cleanser.
Runt looked up. He forced a pained smile. He said, “It smells kind of refreshing though, don’t it? Kind of pine forest clean?”
Roy Dale said, “It stinks! Ugh! It stinks!” Then he jumped up and ran up the stairs, holding his nose in an extravagant way. I leaped up and followed him. I held my nose also and said, “Ugh! Gag! It stinks!” I understood that there is something about seeing a wounded man that makes you want to hurt him.
For that reason it is hard for me to think of Fortunata Conroy, for all her meanness, as an evil woman. In fact, I believe she loved Runt and all her strange children. I think her intentions were always better than her actions.
Now when I look back on this day I think of Fortunata getting off work that afternoon at the elementary school in Leflore. I imagine that her classroom is neat and orderly, unlike her out-of-control tar-paper house and life. I imagine that the chalkboards are washed and the erasers are clean. I imagine that she puts an extra thumbtack in a colorful poster on the bulletin board. There are health charts and dental-hygiene reminders and smiling Dr. Seuss monsters with good advice. Stop Look Listen, Be A Friend, Don’t Talk To Strangers. I imagine Fortunata grading the last of the first-grade writing papers. She brings the hump of an f up to the top of a line; she extends the tail of a g to the line below. She checks the pregnant hamster for babies, she grieves the dying Gila monster in the terrarium.
I imagine Fortunata driving home through the incredible flatscape of the Delta. She drives an ancient explosive Pinto beneath wide blue Mississippi skies. She smells the fragrance of cotton flowers on the breeze, she breathes the sweet swamp water of the rice paddies, she passes bean fields shrouded in dragonflies, a pasture with a white mule, the town dump where the rats are as big as collies, past a herd of deer in cornstalks, a dead armadillo on the berm, a flash and sudden clattering of swamp-elves through the brush and across a high-water bridge. The explosive Pinto is a spiritual thing. She is in love with her husband. Her children are normal children. She passes the local stick-fighting team, the high school arrow-catching team on a farther field. She watches old Mr. O’Kelly carve soap on his front porch, and she sees the ventriloquist’s dummy named Joseph of Arimethea that poor Mr. O’Kelly believes is his grandson. Mavis Mitchum, a neighbor woman, sucks her skirt. Joby Conroy, Roy Dale’s cousin, chases cars. Mr. Love’s goat walks across the mantelpiece in praise. Parrots ring out a wealth of good news. Fortunata is beautiful, her voice is a melody, and she is coming home to the man she loves.
And then she pulls into her driveway and remembers that Runt is probably drunk, has probably already betrayed her today with another woman, or several, that Jeff Davis is trying to extinguish his pillow, and Douglas is a child of low ambition. Before she has set the emergency brake of the car, she can already smell the cellar. The cellar stinks.
These are her first words as she enters the house. “This place stinks!” she says, as if the cotton flowers and the tidy schoolroom had never existed. “This place stinks to high heaven!” she says. Her voice is the wheels of a braking freight train, metal on metal, alarm and dangerous discord. God has denied Fortunata two gifts and Fortunata is here to prove it.
Runt was already defeated. Even Fortunata’s voice and angry manner could not have made this more clear. Today of all days it was impossible to deny that the house stunk. It stunk worse than cat piss. It stunk worse than architectural mildew. It stunk as if an ammonia bomb had been exploded in a pine tree.
“This place stinks!” Fortunata said once again for emphasis.
She dropped her plastic briefcase onto a chair where the guiltless cat lay sleeping. The cat shot off the chair and down the cellar stairs, for what reason only God knows. Fortunata glared at Runt. Runt was responsible for the cat. It was a white-trash cat. This is what Fortunata’s look told me.
Runt was glum. He said, “I scrubbed the basement floor.” It was an apology and an admission of guilt.
Fortunata said, “My God, what did you use!”
Runt was hidden inside his own head. His eyes peered out of a skull. He looked like a rat in a soup can.
I was frightened of what might happen next. I said to Roy Dale, “Want to go outside?”
I could hear Jeff Davis far away in his room. “Fire!” he called out. “Man the hoses!” Jeff Davis was a madman, but he was also a practical joker. It was never clear to me when he was in psychosis and when he was a comedian. Runt knew, though. Runt, even in terror of Fortunata’s wrath, could laugh a sweet and fatherly laugh at this dark joke of a little boy. Runt said, with sincerity, “We are a lucky family.”
Fortunata was having none of it. She said again, “What did you use?” Speaking of the ammonia bomb.
Jeff Davis called out, “Bucket brigade!”
Fortunata said, “What did you use to make this house stink?”
Runt said, “A good deal of time and energy.”
I could look into Fortunata Conroy’s eyes and know that she hated herself for this scene. I knew that she heard the impossibly harsh, hard metallic grating of her voice. I knew that she believed it was scenes such as this that gave her this voice, not genetics or even bad luck but only bitterness and a heart too long hardened by fear and rage and outrage. She knew how thoroughly out of line with her vision of marriage and joy and hope this scene fell and also that she was responsible for it. And yet she could not stop. In her mind swamp-elves bolted from cover and crossed a glen and into the trees and cane.
“Gallop the horses! Hook and ladders!” called Jeff Davis from his room.
Fortunata did not hold back on account of me. This open fighting told me that she was white trash to the core. A family of higher quality would have died before allowing me, an outsider, to witness their anger and pain. She said to Runt, “You worthless failure. You stinking drunk. You impotent pig.”
I heard a voice say, “I like the way it smells.”
It was Roy Dale. We were standing together in the room, practically clinging to each other. There were framed pictures of the entire white-trash family on the mantel above the living room space heater. Generations of rednecks in black and white and sepia and even in color. Aunts and uncles and cousins, nephews and nieces, foundlings and mulattoes, Ku Kluxers and gentle parsons. There were rednecks behind the traces of a mule, rednecks beneath false bowers at the senior prom, rednecks at weddings, rednecks in academic regalia at Ole Miss, rednecks in flannel shirts and fake pearls and with stethoscopes around their necks. There was enough money in professional photography of rednecks to fill in the miserable cellar with dirt and bury Runt and the cat in the bargain.
When Roy Dale said, “I like the way it smells,” all the rest of the people in the room, including myself, looked at him as if he were a man from Mars.
Nothing could stop Fortunata Conroy, or so I believed. She said, “I’ll tell you why this house stinks.”
Runt said, “Shut your ugly mouth.”
Fortunata was momentarily stopped. She said, “What did . . .”
Runt said, “Your voice is like eating ground glass.”
Fortunata said, “Don’t you dare . . .”
Runt said, “Your breath is like Gary, Indiana.”
Fortunata said, “If you ever . . .”
Runt said, “Your tongue is a snake that swallowed a frog.”
Then Roy Dale’s voice again: he said, “It smells like pine trees to me.”
Runt said, “Your gums are raw liver.”
Roy Dale said, “I sincerely like the smell of pine trees.”
Jeff Davis was silent.
Fortunata said, “You low-life drunk.”
Runt said, “You stooge.”
Fortunata said, “You sexless lump, you eunuch.”
Runt said, “You bitch.”
Fortunata said, “Hit me! That’s what you want to do! Hit me! It would be a relief!”
Runt said, “You sick slut.”
Fortunata was screaming now. She said, “Get out! Go away! I don’t want you near these children! Go to a mental hospital!”
Runt said, “Then I would be near your entire family.”
Jeff Davis remained quiet. Even Jeff Davis could not be in a good mood all the time.
RUNT WENT away from the house then. We heard the front screen door slap shut and then the Pinto started up. There was no explosion. Roy Dale led me out of the living room and down a dark hall to the room where he usually slept. Douglas, the child who wanted to be an apple, was sitting on an army cot, crying.
Roy Dale said, “What’s your problem?”
Douglas said, “I don’t know.”
Roy Dale said, “Me and Sugar want to be alone.”
Douglas said, “Ask me what I want to be when I grow up.”
Roy Dale said, “I’ll ask you tomorrow.”
Douglas said, “Ask me now.”
Roy Dale said, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Douglas stopped crying. He was about four and had a round moonlike face, streaked with dirt. He said, “Apple.”
This was a joke the two of them seemed to share.
Roy Dale smiled and said, “Okay now, take off.”
Douglas said, “Ask me the next part.”
Roy Dale sighed. He said, “Do you want to be a cowboy?”
Douglas said, “No. Apple.”
Roy Dale said, “A fireman?”
Douglas was giggling now. He said, “Apple.”
Roy Dale said, “Astronaut?”
Douglas said, “Apple. Now say the best part.”
Roy Dale said, “You’ve got no ambition.”
Douglas said, “Say the next part. Say it right.” Douglas was laughing now, really hard. He lay down on the cot and kicked his feet while he laughed.
Roy Dale said, “You’ll always be white trash.”
Even Roy Dale was laughing now. Both of them were cracking up. Douglas laughed so hard he got the hiccups and Roy Dale had to say, “Boo!”
Douglas said, “Okay, okay, I don’t want to be an apple any more.” Both of them were tickled but they were holding back.
This was their favorite part. Roy Dale perfectly imitated his mother’s metallic voice: “My darling ambitious child!” he mugged. “My sweetest, most normal, most non-white-trash little angel!” he said, in his mother’s voice. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Now both of them were rolling on the army cot. They were pounding each other on the back. They fell on the floor. They were hysterical. Douglas tried several times and was too tickled to speak. At last he blurted it out: “I want to be a dog!” They hooted, they screamed, they guffawed, they chortled and lost their breath.
And then Douglas dried his eyes and got up off the floor. He was finished with the laughter. Roy Dale watched him, looking for something, I’m not sure what.
Douglas said, “That was a bad one.” He meant the fight between Runt and Fortunata.
Roy Dale said, “Your tongue is the snake that swallowed a frog.”
Douglas did not laugh. He said, “Yeah. Right.” And then went on to bed in another room.
IT WAS a good night for me to spend the night away from home. A steady rain had begun to fall and the clouds were dark and as low as the cottonwood trees in the bare grassless yard. Roy Dale and I sat alone in his room and played cards with a greasy deck of Bicycles and listened to the rain in the trees and on the roof and heard it puddle up in the yard. Life in the Conroy family went on and rarely touched the two of us. Supper was never mentioned, and my stomach gnawed on its own emptiness. It felt good to be hungry and to expect no food to relieve the hunger. It was easy to pay the small price of a night’s hunger for the sweet isolation that Roy Dale and i were allowed to share. It frightened me to enjoy these moments with a white-trash child who, until now, I had believed was put upon earth only for my manipulation.
A few times family members stopped by our door and looked in. The twins who spoke in unison stopped for a moment and said nothing. Cloyce and Joyce.
At last Roy Dale said, “You can’t come in here.”
In unison they said, “We know that.” They shared their mother’s nasality, but in them it was sweet beyond belief.
Roy Dale said, “Sugar is my friend, not yours.”
In one voice they said, “We know that.”
Roy Dale said, “You’re not really talking at the same time. Cloyce is talking first and Joyce is talking right behind.”
In perfect duet they said, “You think you are so smart, Mr. Smartypants.” Then they went away.
Roy Dale said, “Just be lucky you don’t have sisters.”
Later Dora Ethel, the freak sister who wore makeup and got good grades, stopped at Roy Dale’s door. She said, “Hey, Sugar.” Talking to me.
Dora Ethel was very pretty and I was surprised to find myself speechless and in love. I said, “Huh, huh, huh.” She said, “You’re cute.” The rain was drumming on the house. It was a tropical rain, a jungle rain. There was a prophet’s voice in the rain. It said: You will grow up to marry a white-trash girl Water stains were broadening across the ceiling.
Dora Ethel really wanted to speak to Roy Dale, though.
Roy Dale said, “So?”
Dora Ethel said, “So, look, I’m taking Daddy’s pistol, okay? Don’t tell, all right, but that’s where it is.”
Roy Dale said, “Got a date?”
Dora Ethel took the pistol out of her skirt pocket and twirled it on her finger in a funny little sexy way. She said, “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.” Dora Ethel was by far the cutest white-trash person I had ever seen.
When she was gone I said, “She takes a pistol on a date?”
Roy Dale said, “She goes with Grease Hodges. They shoot rats at the dump.”
I said, “That’s what she does on a date?”
Roy Dale said, “When it rains like this, yeah.”
I said, “Shoots rats on a date? That’s what she does?”
Roy Dale was not defensive. He said, “Her and Grease. It’s something they like to do together.”
I said, “Grease Hodges?”
Roy Dale let it drop. My heart ached with jealousy. I would never be old enough to leave the house beneath an apple-green night sky in a tropical storm, never old enough to love a girl who twirled a pistol on her finger, or to shoot rats at the dump for love. My genes had become infected with Conroy genes. I was terrified of the transformation, and I gloried in it.
No one came in later to tell us good night. One by one the children put themselves to bed. Lights went out. Runt’s Pinto never returned, though Runt did, on foot. Maybe that was the night the Pinto exploded. Or maybe it only stalled out in the deep rainwater in the street. In any case, Runt came home, and there was no more fighting.
Roy Dale took off his clothes and lay on the bed naked, so I got naked too, and together we lay and listened to the drumming insistent rain. The yard outside our window was a lake. Douglas, who usually slept on the army cot, slept somewhere else tonight. We turned off the electric bulb hanging from a cord in the middle of the room and lay in the loud sounds of constant tons of falling water. Even Dora Ethel finally came in, dripping wet, and skulked through the house trying to replace Runt’s pistol without being seen. The room was not entirely dark. There were streetlights far away, and the light from Red’s All Night Bar at the end of the street. I could see Roy Dale place his hand between his legs, and so in a short time I placed my hand between my legs too, and we lay and breathed and did not speak.
It was very late now. So much time passed that I thought Roy Dale might be asleep. He said, “Runt has slept with two-hundred and seventy different women.”
I said, “Slept with them?”
He said, “I found a list of their names.”
I was beginning to catch on to what “slept with them” meant.
I thought about this for a while. I said, “Can I see it?—the list?”
He said, “It’s in the back of Runt’s closet in a box.”
I said, “My daddy hides a rock-and-roll suit in the back of his closet. It’s black and it’s got Rock-n-Roll Music spelled out on the back in little glittery things, sequins.”
Roy Dale said, “Do you want a rubber? I stole some from Runt’s drawer.” He reached under his mattress and took out a few foil-wrapped packets.
I said, “Naw, thanks. Daddy’s got plenty. I blow them up. Put water in them. You know.”
Roy Dale said, “You ought to try jacking off in one sometime. It adds a little something.”
I said, “Hm.”
We were silent again. The sound of the rain was without thunder. It was as constant as the feeling of loss that suddenly I felt inside me, that now I knew had been with me all along, a familiar part of me since the beginning of memory.
Roy Dale said, “Jeff Davis can pull a condom down over his head.”
I turned and looked at Roy Dale in the weird green light of the storm sky. I said, “Get real.”
He said, “No, really. All the way down over his face. Ears and everything.”
I turned and looked up at the dripping ceiling. I said, “Caramba.”
Roy Dale said, “He pretends he’s robbing a 7-Eleven. Mama won’t let him use one of her stockings.”
I said, “That’s really crazy, Roy Dale.”
He said, “Right, I know. You can smother with a condom pulled over your head.”
I said, “Caramba,” again.
He said, “I know.”
I said, “You would look pretty funny, you know, sticking up a store with a rubber over your head.”
Roy Dale said, “It would be on the ten o’clock news. ‘Two Caucasian males wearing condoms over their heads . . .’” We laughed pretty hard at this. We tried not to wake anybody up, but we were pretty tickled, I can tell you.
I said, “You wouldn’t be able to talk. You couldn’t say ‘Stick ’em up.’”
Roy Dale said, “You’d have to go, ‘Ump ump ump.’”
We laughed our damn heads off. We said, “Shh, shh!” And then we laughed some more.
THERE IS not much more to tell. The storm outside was without wind and without lightning or thunder. The rain fell straight down and its falling did not diminish. The sound was constant, a pounding like heavy hammers that we could forget to hear. For a long time Roy Dale and I said nothing. He lay on his back, and I lay on my back. He did not touch himself and did not move. His breathing was soft and regular and I thought again he might be asleep. In the stillness a thought came to me like a friendly voice. The voice said: We are all alone in this world
Just then Roy Dale said, “Your daddy has got a rock-and-roll suit?”
I turned my head in his direction and could see his body outlined in the green light of the storm-sky outside the window. I said, “In the back of his closet.”
Roy Dale said, “So, like, what does he do?—like, puts it on and dances around, or what?”
I said, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think he just, you know, has it.”
Roy Dale said, “Will you let me see it?”
I thought about this. No one had ever seen the rock-and-roll suit but me. I sneaked looks at it when no one else was in the house. Still I said, “I guess so.”
Roy Dale said, “Great.”
I said, “We wouldn’t be, you know, like making fun of him or anything.”
Roy Dale said, “No way. Uh-uh.”
I said, “Well, okay, yeah, sure. I’ll show it to you sometime.”
Roy Dale said, “Tonight?”
I said, “Tonight?”
Roy Dale settled back on his pillow. He said, “You’re right, it’s a bad idea.”
I said, “No, its all right. We could do it tonight.”
We did not go out that night, of course. We only lay in the dark and in the sound of the rain.
In a while Roy Dale said, “Come on,” and the two of us stepped out of bed and moved quietly through the house and opened the cellar door. We were careful to wake no one. Jeff Davis might have called for the pumper trucks, the REO Speedwagon. Douglas might have wanted to be an apple. Cloyce and Joyce might have god-knows-what, in unison. Dora Ethel might have broken my heart. Roy Dale had a flashlight, which he shined into the darkness. At first I could see nothing, only the sturdy solid beam of light like a long pole. I followed behind Roy Dale, through the cellar door, down the steps, only two or three steps down before he stopped. He sat and I sat beside him.
Roy Dale shined the light out into the basement and I understood for the first time what I was looking at, not mere blackness but deep water. The basement was four or five feet deep in rainwater. Roy Dale swept the light back and forth across it. I might as well have been Hernando DeSoto discovering the Father of Waters, the mighty Mississippi, for all my amazement at the sight. It was an interior sea, an indoor elementary mystery as dangerous and filled with evil meaning as any cavern, any water-filled cavity of the underworld.
Then on the face of the deep I thought I could see something else, some moving thing, or things. I imagined eyeless fish, I imagined mermaids, I heard their song. Roy Dale caught them in the beam of his flashlight. Earnest little faces and diamond-bright eyes, moving through the water, swimming for dear life, no doubt, but as if for pleasure. It was rats. A dozen or more of them. Large doglike barn rats, swimming quietly and without desperation along the black surface of this cellar sea.
Roy Dale said, “If Runt was awake he might let us shoot them with his pistol.”
We took turns holding the flashlight on their sweet earnest evil little comical faces. I thought of the collie-size rats at the town dump. They were burrowed deep in the garbage. They were waiting for the rain to end. I thought of that time a few hours from now, when this jungle storm would be finished. I thought of the Delta moon shining in the after-storm sky, with its ragged slow-moving clouds. I imagined the collie rats creeping from their hiding places in the rank waste-pits of human misery and into the soft air. I saw them sit along riverbanks and scratch behind an ear or shake rainwater from their fur. I saw the collie-rats look up at the miraculous moon and howl and bay at its light. They barked and sang like mythical beasts and I heard the little town of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, fill up with their strange rodent harmony. I thought of the swamp-elves, happy in their marshy cozy dens. The deer bedded down in cane, the muskrats and the beavers and the ropey-whiskered catfish in the mud. One of us held the flashlight on the little swimmers while the other pointed a finger like a pistol and made pistol sounds—balooey, or ptoosh, or blammo!—and we passed the night in the belief that feeling love for each other and for this single incredible moment in time was all in the world that was important, and that it needed no acknowledgement, not even with a single word.
Later, when we had finished the game and only sat and shined the light onto the water, the old cat crept down the stairs and passed the two of us on the steps, first holding her tail up as she rubbed past, and then going all the way down to the last step visible above the surface of the waves. Roy Dale held the light on her, and we watched her test the water only once, briefly, one second, with one paw, before entering it in a kind of slow, mad cat-dive outwards, sploosh. The cat swam out into the cellar sea, holding her head high above the water and then relaxing some and swimming with confidence and ease. She was trying to corner one of the rats in the flood. Roy Dale and I cheered the cat. We shouted whispered directions—“This way!” and “Behind you!”—and we tried to direct the cat to individual rats with the beam of the flashlight. It was no use. The cat was a good swimmer but no match for the experienced rats. This was their home, and there were frequent heavy rains in the Delta. Finally she gave up and left the water, back up the steps the way she had come, defeated and cranky and soaking wet, not even shaking herself to dry her fur. An apathetic, lazy, white-trash cat.
Roy Dale and I were finished. We were tired and sleepy. We turned off the flashlight and went back up the stairs. Roy Dale eased shut the cellar door, so that no one heard. We went to bed then and snuggled close to each other. I felt his rough white-trash alligatory skin against my own softer skin and was comfortable and drowsy and I listened to the rain and I knew that it was falling more softly now, coming to an end, and that tomorrow everything that had been thrown underneath my own home a few blocks away—the empty whiskey bottles, the soup cans and empty paint buckets, a dead battery, a hairless doll, a slick tire, scraps of paper, indescribable garbage, the ice pick my father once stabbed himself in the chest with while I watched him, the towels he bled into as his face turned white while my mother closed the window shades so that no one else would see—all this would have been washed out from under our house by the jungle rain. It would lie in the yard and on the sidewalk and in the street for anyone to see. And then my mother would gather it all up again and toss it beneath the house again, and again we would forget.
I moved my body close to Roy Dale. I reached in the darkness, afraid even to open my eyes, afraid he would disappear, and I held him to me. I embraced him. I encircled him. We were like spoons together. We were like swamp-elves. And in this way we went to sleep, bare-assed children, the two of us, and in my memory not blameworthy for any sin and not even victims of the sins of our sad fathers, but, only that moment, in love with what is and what has always been or what might forever be.