I WOKE UP in a cold sweat, knowing for a definite fact that death was a teenage girl and that she had been standing silently by my bed during the night. For a few seconds I felt paralyzed, physically and mentally, smothering under the weight of my inability to protect Gram and L.A., or even myself, in case of attack.
Looking around me in the gray morning light, I couldn’t see anything wrong or out of place, so I pulled on my Levi’s and went to check the house. Gram was in the kitchen heating water for tea and humming along with the radio, which was quietly playing some old Bob Wills number. L.A. was asleep under her mound of pillows, snoring softly. One of the pillows lifted an inch or so and Jazzy peered sleepily out at me from underneath it.
There was nothing suspicious in any of the other rooms, and now that I was all the way awake I was beginning to forget why I needed to protect Gram and L.A. The house itself felt all right. I decided to see if a shower would get the last of the dreams off me. I stood under the hot spray until I was pretty sure I’d gotten all the benefit possible from it, then as I was drying off noticed the can of Colgate shaving cream I’d bought at the grocery store the week before and decided to shave, whether I needed it or not. Finishing with no nicks or scrapes to deal with and feeling a little smug about that, I dressed and went out to the kitchen. Cornflakes, orange juice, a little hot tea with honey, Gram shaking her head sadly at something in the paper.
She looked up at me, saying, “What is that smell?”
“Aqua Velva.”
She leaned forward and inspected my cheeks and chin. “I recommend lighter strokes, but more of them,” she said. “Do you have a styptic pencil?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Good. And if you must use that aftershave concoction, I’d suggest you be more sparing with it.” She sat back and eyed me. “As a courtesy to others.”
“Okay.”
“Is there an occasion?”
“Yes ma’am. They’re showing all the old Elvis movies at the Crest this week. I’m taking Diana.”
“Ah, the lovely Miss Chamfort,” Gram said, going back to her newspaper. “I trust you will comport yourself as a gentleman.”
The way Gram said “gentleman” made me think of a man in a tuxedo and top hat, with muttonchop sideburns and spats. But my instincts told me she really meant I should keep my hands strictly off Diana, an idea that made each and every molecule in my body vibrate with resistance.
I decided silence was my best bet.
After the movie, when Diana and I were walking home from the Crest, my usual random curiosities started to kick in. One of my theories was that getting to know a girl required understanding how she felt about rock stars, so I made up my mind to ask Diana what she thought of Elvis. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to hear, though, and I ended up waiting until we’d walked all the way to Skillern’s, where there was an EXCITING SALE! on trusses and mineral supplements, before I actually said anything, the whole time thinking about the different ways she might take the question. But since she and I were sort of going together—meaning we had dry-kissed a few times and I’d let her use my handkerchief during one of the weepy movies she dragged me to, after making sure it was clean, and then actually accepted it back afterward—I didn’t see where I had any real choice. One of the main principles Gram was always trying to drum into my head was that knowledge is power, and I figured understanding Diana as completely as possible was my best shot at getting the relationship up to a higher level.
Diana had always been L.A.’s buddy, which made us acquaintances from way back, but most of that time she’d been just another skinny girl who thought boys had cooties. Then, before I knew it, the three of us were hanging out together, or maybe us and Dee, or Hubert Ferkin if he wasn’t off somewhere jamming with some guitar accomplice of his. Then gradually it escalated from that to Diana and me actually going places on our own.
Lately I had really been warming up to this and therefore trying to maintain my poise, but it could sometimes be a challenge. In fact, the first time the two of us went out alone I strangled on my Coke to the point of practically coughing up my socks right there on the marble floor of the theater lobby. Diana slapped me on the back and offered me Kleenexes, which naturally did nothing to help my embarrassment, but I was hoping this one humiliation hadn’t damaged the overall dignity of our relationship beyond repair.
Diana was fascinating in a lot of ways. For one thing, she tended to give people and animals semi-mysterious nicknames. She was satisfied with mine but she called Jazzy “Muttkin,” which actually made sense, and her little brother Andrew “Fubbit,” which as far as I could tell didn’t. Neither did “Porkchop” for her dad or “Harpo” for L.A. If you asked her why she called them that, all you got was some loopy answer like, “If I don’t, who will?”
Sometimes she could be too intelligent for comfort. Once when we were watching a TV show about some kid whose parents had died, she started watching me instead of the show. I may have gotten something in my eye, but I definitely wasn’t crying. Diana seemed to think I was, though, and she said, “You’re thinking about your mom and your dad, aren’t you?”
I tried to clear my throat. “I miss them,” I admitted.
Diana thought about that for a minute, finally saying, “I don’t think that’s really true.”
I just looked at her.
“I think what you miss is how you think things used to be.”
In spite of her quirkiness Diana was intelligent and beautiful like L.A., but in almost everything else they were opposites, L.A. being sort of dark and solemn and never wasting any words, especially nowadays, whereas Diana was sunny and a lot of fun and of course always had something to say. She had easy-looking brownish blond hair that came down to her shoulders, and if you looked closely you could see a few light freckles scattered across her nose. Her eyes, which seemed to be smiling most of the time, were as big as L.A.’s but instead of almost black they were green with some blue mixed in, and little coppery specks around the edges.
Diana’s relationship with L.A. was one you’d never expect to happen, but now that it existed it was impossible to imagine them not being friends. They were so close it didn’t bother them to be apart.
One day when my nosiness got the best of me, I said, “How’d you and L.A. get to be such good buds?”
Diana shrugged the way she did when she was being patient with me. “She’s the only girl I know who’s smarter than I am.”
“Smarter than you?” I said. “You’re like a calculus magician or something—you’re gonna be an architect.”
Another shrug.
I said, “Doesn’t really matter, I guess. You’re both smarter than me, that’s for sure.”
She took a long look at me, then said, “You really believe that, don’t you?”
I didn’t answer, because I was still thinking about how friendship works and where it comes from.
Diana said, “Harpo could be anything she wanted. But that’s not what I’m talking about.”
“So what are you talking about?”
“I guess it’s the way you never have to explain anything to her. Or maybe because it’s impossible to lie to her.”
“How do you know? You don’t lie to her.”
Diana gave a little snort, saying, “I’ve seen it tried.”
“Well, she trusts you, I know that,” I said. “And she remembers stuff you said and did even way back when we were little kids.”
Diana thought about that for a minute. She said, “I was a kid—I mean, I guess I still am—but I don’t think she ever really was.”
This was a new idea for me, but I immediately felt the truth of it. I said, “It’s weird—I live with her but you know her better than I do.”
Diana didn’t answer right away, and when she did there was a hint of sorrow in her voice.
“Maybe,” she said. “But I think it’s what I don’t know that really matters.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know,” she said.
At this point I hadn’t exactly lost track of the conversation, but I was a little preoccupied with pretending not to look down at Diana’s legs. I knew better than to say so, but one of the reasons I liked her so much was the way she looked in her summer shorts, like the white ones she was wearing today. She had long legs for a girl, and I really enjoyed the way she’d cross one over the other when she and L.A. were sitting around talking. Once when I mentioned their smoothness to L.A. she looked at me in a way that left no doubt I’d just run the flag of my ignorance up the pole again.
“They’d be about as hairy as yours if she didn’t shave them every week,” L.A. said, inflicting on me a whole new gallery of mental images I could have done without.
Anyway, the movie Diana and I had just seen had been about Elvis in the Army, and I was remembering his song about not having a wooden heart. But Diana apparently wasn’t too impressed with him, which struck me as uncanny.
“Don’t you think he’s good-looking?” I said.
Without looking at me, she dug her elbow into my ribs. “You tryna be funny, Biscuit?”
“Hey, really.”
“Sure I do. He used to be almost as pretty as Paul Newman. He’s kinda fat now.”
“Okay, so how come you’re not impressed?”
“When I see Elvis in a movie?”
Like we might run into him at Piggly Wiggly.
“Anywhere,” I said.
She thought about this for a while, which was another thing I liked about her—she actually considered things. She shook her hair back as we walked along and kind of frowned. Finally she said, “Because he doesn’t seem real.” She glanced at me. “Like Batman.”
“The cartoon?” I asked, wanting to make sure she didn’t mean the guy who played Batman on TV, who seemed entirely real to me because he looked exactly like my shop teacher from last year.
“Yeah, like that.”
She opened her little patent-leather purse and offered me a Certs, which lifted my heart because I knew it meant that when we got back to her house I was going to get another kiss to go with the two or three quickies I’d had during the movie. During one of these I’d opened one eye and seen several kids in the balcony leaning forward to look down at us, and, being unsure whether they thought we were doing it right, I hadn’t known whether to be embarrassed or not.
Thinking about this, I noticed Diana smelled kind of spicy at the moment, halfway between the sudsy smell she came from the shower with and the salty one she had when she was sweaty. Wait, not sweaty, I corrected myself, remembering Gram’s rule: horses sweat, men perspire, ladies glow.
“What about Aquaman?” I said when I got my thoughts back in order.
“Mackerel breath,” she said, popping a Certs into her own mouth.
“Know what’d be good?” I said. “Living underwater like that—the cool and quiet and just plants waving in the current and a few fish going by. A whole ’nother universe.”
“I’d rather be in the clouds.”
“What, like an angel?”
“No, a fighter pilot.”
I visualized Diana diving on a MiG, cutting loose with the machine guns, the tip of her tongue out for concentration.
“Do they let girls fly jets?” I said.
“Probably not. But I’d do it if I could.”
“You’d really shoot down a Russian?”
“I didn’t know you actually had to shoot anybody.”
“Fighters have to shoot somebody down. What else can they do?”
She chewed her lip and reflected. “I’m not sure about that part,” she said. “Maybe they’d just let me fly around and watch for troop movements and stuff.”
“Balloon’d be better,” I said, thinking of the silence.
Diana didn’t say anything.
“Holy shit!” I yelled, jerking her into the doorway of Woolworth’s, causing her to yip in protest. “It’s Jack!” I said, the words coming out in a kind of desperate hiss.
Getting it now, she followed my eyes. A block down the street Mom’s boyfriend and another man, a thin bald guy in a black Harley T-shirt, were having a conversation on the sidewalk, looking almost like a mirage at this distance in the heat haze. Jack was dressed in starched jeans and a bright green cowboy shirt.
“Did he see you?” asked Diana. “Is your mom around?”
As if hearing her, Jack looked our way. I felt a sensation like swallowing a chunk of ice. It sounds strange now, but in those days I actually thought I understood what danger was.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “C’mon.”
We ducked into the store, negotiated a couple of aisles, found the rear door and pushed through it. Walking along the alley toward the next street, I said, “I can never figure out where the hell he’s going to be.”
Diana took my arm. “He wouldn’t do anything to you out in public like this, would he?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It’ll be okay, Bis.” She squeezed my arm. “Just stay away from him.”
Neither of us said anything else for a while. The locusts filled the atmosphere with their zinging. We walked along the hot sidewalk, in and out of the shade of the old maples, pecans and sycamores that overhung Madrid Street, the sections of concrete occasionally tilted one way or the other or cracked across to accommodate the thick roots knotted up under them. Diana had complained to me of having big feet, but I didn’t see it that way at all. In fact I thought they looked pretty delicate next to mine, and I enjoyed the light little stepping sounds they made as she walked along beside me. She was about L.A.’s height, which meant she was almost eye to eye with me and could keep up without any trouble even when I was in a hurry.
I was still thinking about how all-around good it was to walk with Diana when we saw Colossians Odell. We weren’t too far from the bus station and the Salvation Army, definitely still in bum country, so it was no surprise to run into him here. He was halfway down the alley with his red Radio Flyer wagon, looking into a trash can that stood against the wooden fence behind a gray-roofed house. When we caught up to him, he flinched at the sound of our footsteps.
We took his upwind side.
Diana said, “Hi, Mr. Moog.”
“Why, how do,” he said when he saw who we were, giving us the whole keyboard of his smile. “Proud to see you, miss, and you too, Mr. Biscuit. This a fine day the Lord done made us.”
Along with his big cream panama hat, Colossians was wearing his usual all-weather outfit today, baggy old khakis, brown tweed sports jacket with no collar or lapels, and his holey black high-top tennis shoes. I figured he’d have his rat Caruso in his pocket too because he never seemed to go anywhere without it.
Of all the walk-around people I knew, Colossians was my favorite, one of the reasons being the songs he sang. They always came without warning, Colossians just spreading his arms out wide, throwing his head back and letting go, singing up into the trees about the fell tide or the Negro jubilee or other strange, tragic things in a voice so huge, dark and unbelievably powerful that it made dogs bark a block away and started the squirrels chattering in the trees. Hearing it for the first time, Diana had blurted, “Oh, geez,” and taken a quick step back before she could stop herself.
Gram had said, “He must be a basso profundo. That’s quite a rare voice—I wonder if he’s been trained.”
Generally Colossians only sang in the middle of the afternoon.
“It’s according to how much wine he’s had,” L.A. had pronounced.
When she and I had first met him we asked why he sang to the trees. He took off his panama, ran his long hand over the smooth dome of his eggplant-colored head and said, “Now you darlin’s, right there you done ast me the veriest thing I doesn’t know.” Then he put the hat back on his head, scooped out his rat and held him up for us to admire. He told us the rat’s Christian name was Caruso, but he usually called him Honey or Lagniappe.
“How’d you get him?” I asked.
“Outquick him down Salvation Army last year. Took a little gettin’ used to, both sides, but we finest of frens now.”
Today Caruso let Diana stroke him between the ears with the tip of her finger, his whiskery nose twitching. Colossians took a raisin from a box he carried in his back pocket and gave it to Caruso, who sat on his haunches on Colossians’ palm and held the raisin in his miniature hands like an ear of corn as he ate it. With the sun behind him, the veins glowed red in the pink shells of his ears. We messed with Caruso for a while longer, then when we were sure Colossians wasn’t going to sing today we told him goodbye and walked on, me thinking about everything and nothing, Diana thinking no telling what, neither of us saying anything.