Eli the Good Page 3

  If I could have flown, I would have slipped out of our living-room window, floated down our road with the warm river by its side, and glided above the main highway, over Refuge’s closed but well-lit businesses, the courthouse steeple’s flag that rose and fell as if breathing in the thin summer breeze. Out into the darkness of the country again, over the high school and the spillway where teenagers went to park, over mountains becoming black with the deepening of night, and then to the drive-in, where the screen stood like an impossibly big and wide tombstone. The face of Gregory Peck loomed large there as he drew back the hair of his son’s head and found the Mark of the Beast. Among the rows of cars — the movie was sold out that night — was a candy-apple red 1966 Mustang that belonged to Josie’s boyfriend, Charles Asher.

  Inside the car, Charles Asher was kissing Josie’s neck, but she paid him no mind. She ate great handfuls of popcorn and kept her eyes on the movie. She paused from this only long enough to reach down into the floorboard for her Pepsi. She took a long drink, her lips capped around the straw for a moment after she was finished, and then set it back down without taking her eyes from the screen. Before leaving the house, she had shoved her flag pants into her big hemp purse and had changed into them as soon as Charles Asher picked her up. She had done so in the backseat, slapping Charles Asher’s ear when he tried to watch her in his rearview mirror as he drove away from our house.

  Charles Asher — one of those people who is always called by his first and last names for no particular reason — was used to my sister not paying him very much attention. It was common knowledge that she had first gone out with him simply because he drove the sharpest car at the high school. After that initial date, she was taken by how he fawned over her, and then grew to like him, and then dislike him, but ultimately she felt such a mix of pity and gratitude to him that she was never able to quit him. He told me more than once that he thought he loved her, but he also knew that he’d never capture her heart completely.

  Gregory Peck’s demon-child, Damien, was running into a church and the horrifying music was rising, and Josie couldn’t stand it anymore. She had snuck into a showing of The Exorcist when she was only twelve and had been forever scarred by that experience, so horror movies were not her strong suit, although she was scared of nothing else as far as I know.

  Josie couldn’t stand it anymore and had to look away. Only then was she completely aware of Charles Asher nibbling on her ear. She pushed him away, glad for this diversion. “Cut it out, Charles Asher,” she said. “God almighty, you’re like a dog in heat.”

  “I was just kissing you.” Charles Asher straightened himself in his seat, his elbow knocking against the horn so that it let out a brief, halfhearted honk.

  Josie ran the back of her hand down her neck. “You were slobbering all over me,” she said, but then she realized how hateful she was being and felt a momentary pang of guilt. Later that summer she told me that it had taken her a long time to understand that the very reason she could never love Charles Asher was because he allowed her to treat him so badly. She could have never respected anyone like that. But that night she didn’t understand why she sometimes detested him, no matter how much he bought her, no matter the long letters he wrote to her, confessing his undying love (she kept these in a cigar box under her bed, and I had read them all while she was out on dates). Really, she didn’t understand much of anything at all.

  Josie told me everything, even when I was very small, so I already knew that that summer she felt there might be something wrong with her. Any other girl at school would have killed for Charles Asher. He was good-looking in a JC Penney catalog sort of way, his face all angles and jutting bones, so that Josie sometimes had to look for the beauty there. His lips were his best feature — pink as the inside of a shell and plump as a girl’s — but his brow was too high set and his eyes too far apart for her. The problem was, he wasn’t interesting to look at, the way Steve McQueen or Paul Newman were. She found beauty in irregularities, in roughness. Charles Asher had none that she could find; he was all perfection and smoothness. He was a good dresser, though, and drove this fine car and knew how to treat a girl, always buying her record albums and roses in little plastic sleeves. Josie preferred daisies.

  She laid her head on his shoulder and tried to watch the movie again, but she had lost track of what was happening, although she could see that Gregory Peck was holding a knife up to stab someone.

  “I didn’t intend to be so mean,” she said, and she felt his forgiveness wash over her so instantly that she had to fend off the urge to simply bolt from his arms and walk home from the drive-in. Why couldn’t he ever fight back?

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  “Mom and me were into it again, before you came to get me.”

  “Over them stupid pants, I guess,” he said. He had been through this before.

  Josie sat bolt upright, mad again from thinking about it. “They’re just pants,” she said. “I don’t see what the big deal is about the flag and all that.”

  “Because it’s disrespectful for the flag to be worn. To be made into clothes.”

  “It’s not made out of a real flag, for God’s sake.”

  “Still, though,” Charles Asher said, and looked straight ahead at the screen, where the credits were beginning to roll. His father had been in Vietnam, too, so he often heard long lectures on the merits of patriotism and serving your country and good Americans versus bad.

  “Still, what?” Josie said.

  Charles Asher put his arm out across the back of the seat, Josie’s hair as cool and soft as water against his fingertips. “It’s just that we’re different from other kids, because our fathers were over there. Nobody knows what something’s like unless they’ve lived through it.”

  Josie looked at him for a long moment, seeing nothing. She hated his wisdom. Josie watched the credits roll and in that moment things changed for her. That is the exact moment when she began to question patriotism and Vietnam and everything that we weren’t encouraged to question. That night, she told me, she realized that she was less like her father than the hippies he hated. She was thrilled by this discovery, but also filled with a sudden wash of panic.

  Before this moment, she had always been Daddy’s girl, his favorite in all respects. She had always sat on the arm of his chair while he watched the evening news, agreeing with anything Daddy said, whether it was his railing against something Ford had done or the legalization of abortion or his assumption that the whole moon landing had been faked. “They did it to get everybody’s mind off the war,” he always said, and nodded for emphasis. “Pretty smart.”

  Josie had always agreed with our father, and now she thought that she might not agree with him about anything anymore. It was a turning point in all our lives. Strange, how such a small realization can affect everyone’s life forever. In movies there is always a carefully staged moment — a big crescendo of music, close-ups of the actors’ faces, the camera slowly pulling away to let all this sink in for the viewer. Like the moment when Gregory Peck was about to kill the boy in The Omen. But in real life, most all of the extraordinary things happen with no more loudness than a whisper.

  On the other side of the county from us, my father’s turquoise Ford truck was making its way around the winding curves of the road from the train station in Black Banks. All was darkness in the cab of the truck except for a greenish rectangle of light that glowed from the radio and the circles of yellow light over the steering wheel, showing the speedometer. The radio was playing low, a country song that Daddy was vaguely aware of, somewhere in the back of his mind. He was more concerned with the woman sitting on the truck seat beside him, his little sister, and one of my favorite people who ever existed.

  I can just see Nell. I bet she was smoking and leaning on the door, letting her face be pummeled by the good-smelling wind that rushed in her open window. Honeysuckles had bloomed all along the road that very morning, and the smell was so sweet that Nell won
dered how such a fine thing continued to thrive in such a horrible world. She let this scent wash over her, hoping it would soak into her skin, even though she had really rolled the window down for the noise more than the fresh air. She didn’t want to talk to Daddy and thought this might keep him from pushing her for answers. Like everyone else in our family, she was carrying a secret with her.

  Daddy and Nell had once been very close, but I knew from many overheard conversations and one or two flat-out fights that they didn’t get along because of the war.

  While Daddy was in Vietnam, Nell had been a war protester. Eventually she had joined a march in New York City. She had carried a sign that read, GET THEM OUT NOW (I had seen a picture of this in a history book), and the fifty thousand people she walked with had sung “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “We Shall Overcome” and chanted “Stop the Bloody War.” The crowd had marched right up to the steps of the public library and lain down there, spread out so that the people trying to get in had to either turn away or step around them. They had lain there silently, hundreds of breathing corpses.

  Eventually the police came with dogs and tear gas, and Nell was one of the many who were dragged away while CBS News and the Associated Press captured it all on film. She was seen all across the country, her body stretched between two police officers who were carrying her away by the ankles and wrists. She managed to wrestle one hand free so that she could thrust it toward the camera, two fingers fashioned into a peace sign. Her face was a scowl that became an image burned into the minds of everybody watching as Walter Cronkite narrated the scene. The photograph was on the front page of every newspaper in the country.

  Nell’s arrest had been the talk of the town, and several people wrote to Daddy while he was in Vietnam, informing him of his sister’s actions. Some of them had even clipped the picture from the paper and enclosed it. Daddy never forgave Nell. Any argument between the two of them always led back to that day in New York.

  “I did it for you,” Nell said one Labor Day when they were both drinking tall cans of Schlitz out on the back porch. They didn’t even notice me, hovering near the kitchen door so I could eavesdrop on them.

  “You did it to get on the news, for the thrill,” Daddy replied. His best feature — his eyes — turned evil when he was mad, and he was giving her a murderous look. His speech was slurred. I had never seen him drunk before, and never would again. “Hippie.”

  “I didn’t want my brother to come home in a body bag, Stanton.”

  “You’re no better than those sons of bitches in Boston who spat on me when I walked down the street in my uniform.”

  Nell had put her hand on his arm and said, “But most of us weren’t like that,” in a motherly sort of voice, just as Daddy pushed her away.

  “Baby-killer, they said.” Daddy wasn’t even aware of anyone around him by then, drunk on beer and memories. “Baby-killer. And spat on me.”

  Both of them were silently reliving that fight — although one of many, it had been the most honest — as they drove along the summer road, toward our house, where Nell would be living now. My father was not happy about this situation, but she was his sister, and despite how mad he still was at her, he couldn’t let her go homeless. She wouldn’t tell him what had happened, and he didn’t press her for answers. She had called my mother and said she had quit her job and wanted to come home and needed somewhere to stay and that was all Mom had told him.

  My mother was closer to Nell than Daddy, anyway. They had known each other since high school and were more like siblings than Nell and Daddy were. When Mom called Daddy at the gas station and told him about Nell, he knew the only thing he could do was drive over to Black Banks to fetch her. He had, and now they were on their way home, the song playing on the radio between them.

  They didn’t say a word as they pulled into our driveway, got out, and made their way around to the back door. Our music greeted them, flowing out the open windows.

  By the end of the song, my mother was fully spellbound. She held her arms over her head, shook her hair, let her head sway with the beat of the song. I was still dancing in front of her, but my heart wasn’t really in it. I was more concerned with watching her, as if I was seeing her true spirit for the first time. Just as the song went off, we noticed that Daddy and Nell had slipped in, standing in the doorway between the living room and kitchen.

  My father stood there with his hands on his hips. He was a big presence even though he wasn’t a particularly big man. He had a natural charm that caused people to like him right away, as he seemed to always know the right thing to say. He thought out his sentences and then delivered them in a careful way that made people respect him, too. He was dark in every way except for his green eyes, which were green as walnut husks. If a person looked at them too long, they might be hypnotized. Daddy’s whole face was smiling, and I knew it was because he liked to watch Mom dance. He looked only at her. But Nell winked at me.

  “What’re you all up to?” Daddy said in his laughing voice, the voice he had on good days, when the war wasn’t right there behind his eyes. Although he was addressing both of us, he was really only speaking to my mother. He took a single step forward and gave her a kiss. Their lips lingered longer than necessary, long enough for her to bring her hand up and put her pointing finger into the cleft in his chin. This was her favorite part of his face, a fact she made well known. Daddy was still dressed in his work clothes, although the gas station he owned had been closed since five o’clock that afternoon. His hands were stained by work but she pulled them up to her face and kissed them although they were grimy with oil and gasoline. “I love it when you come home dirty,” she said in a Mae West voice, and put her lips to each of his knuckles. Usually he washed up at work, but sometimes when he was in a hurry to get home, he came in like that. He kept a big plastic jar of hand cleanser that felt like lard and smelled like oranges on his shelf in the bathroom.

  “Hey there, buddy,” Daddy said to me.

  I didn’t answer at first, miffed that our dancing had been interrupted. But then I reconsidered, thankful that his voice was so easy tonight. “Hey,” I said, but I could tell he didn’t even hear me.

  Mom folded Nell up in her arms. Nell shut her eyes and looked as if she were about to cry, both her hands lain so flat on my mother’s back that I thought the cigarette stuck between Nell’s fingers might ignite Mom’s hair. Just when I thought Nell might shed a tear, Mom released her and held her by the shoulders. “Everything’ll work out,” Mom said, quiet. “I’ll see to it.”

  Nell stepped around Mom and held both arms out for me. “You better come here, buddy.” Her cigarette bobbed up and down in her lips when she spoke. “I need me some sugar.”

  “I’m too old to give sugar,” I said.

  Nell rushed across the room and lifted me onto the couch, her weight on me as she tickled my belly. “I’ll have to steal it, then,” she said, and twin lines of smoke escaped her nose as she laughed.

  After tickling me for a while, Nell finally fell back against the couch, out of breath. She kept her arm stretched out across my shoulders. “I missed you. Haven’t seen you in six months.”

  “Where you been?” I asked.

  “Oh, Lord, baby,” she said. “To hell and back, that’s where.” Nell was quiet long enough for me to study her properly. She had long red hair and freckles all over her body, strewn out across her nose like a constellation. I liked that about her. She looked younger than she was, most likely because she acted so much younger than I thought a woman her age should act. Her lips never quite closed, so that you could always see her two front teeth, and I liked that about her, too. It made her look wild and carefree, which she was.

  “Y’all must be starved,” Mom said to Nell and Daddy. “I’ll fry you some pork chops.”

  Daddy followed her into the kitchen, and this movement brought Nell back to earth, so she sat up and clucked me on the arm with her knuckles. “Hey, why don’t you help me get my stuff out of the tr
uck? I brought all my records, and you’re allowed to listen to them anytime you want to.”

  She squatted down so I could latch my arms around her neck and be carried on her back. She stomped out of the living room and into the kitchen, where Daddy was sitting at the table, sipping a cup of coffee while Mom worked at the stove, warming up the macaroni and setting the cast-iron skillet on the stove. Daddy barely glanced our way as we went out the back door.

  I buried my face in Nell’s hair. She always smelled like the woods, like trees and rocks and wild things. Hers was a clean scent, spicy and green. I thought: I should remember this moment. I could write it down in my little composition book, the one that contained all my secrets that no one would ever read. I didn’t know why, but I always felt the need to write about times like this evening when I had danced with my mother and rode Nell’s back. Whole scenes of your life can slip away forever if you don’t put them down in ink.

  There were no streetlights out here in the country, ten miles from town, so the night was black and it took our eyes a moment to adjust. Nell caught sight of the starred sky as we stepped out into the yard, so both of us were looking up as she bounced me on her back out to the driveway.

  “Country people sure do have more stars than anybody else,” she said. “We ain’t got much, but we got the stars.”

  The hills were full of the calling cicadas and katydids and crickets, but there was also the sound of an engine ticking in the driveway. Just as Nell reached the back of Daddy’s pickup and let me drop onto the ground behind her, we both realized that Charles Asher’s Mustang was parked in the driveway, too.

  Then the sound of much fumbling about and the door popped open and Josie practically fell out, scrambling to run and hug Nell. Charles Asher fired up his engine and backed away. Josie was so caught up in her reunion with Nell that only I waved good-bye, his headlights sweeping over me.