Eli the Good Page 4

  “Oh, Nell, I’m so happy to see you,” Josie said, then leaned down and kissed me on the forehead. She smelled like Hai Karate, the cologne she had bought when we went to the Rexall for Charles Asher’s birthday. She had sprayed it on my wrist to test it.

  “Don’t you know better than to neck in your own driveway, though?” Nell asked. “What if your daddy had come out?”

  “Shoot, he worships Charles Asher. He wouldn’t care.”

  “He smells Charles Asher’s cologne all over you, he’ll care. Believe me, I know him well.” Nell pulled a blue milk crate full of record albums out of the pickup and put them into Josie’s hands. “He was my big brother and used to police every boy I went out with.”

  “He’s still your big brother,” Josie said, laughing, her face lit with the dim yellow light of the truck’s interior light.

  “All I’m saying is you better be careful.” Nell left the door open and then climbed into the back of the truck, swinging her legs over the tailgate. “Here, Eli,” she said, and handed me a small blue overnight case.

  “You shouldn’t have left the way you did tonight,” I told Josie. “You hurt Mom’s feelings.”

  “I don’t care,” she said, and even to me, she sounded like a spoiled brat.

  “You should care,” Nell said, hopping off the bumper, carrying a record player and several pairs of Levi’s stacked atop it. As she went by the truck, she slammed the door shut with her foot. “Your mother has been through a lot for you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Josie said, following Nell through the black yard.

  “That means she’d do anything for you, and I know what I’m talking about,” Nell said. “Be good to your mother.”

  We followed her back around to the screen porch through the black June night.

  Everyone was talking about freedom that summer, but I knew what freedom truly was: riding my bicycle as fast as I could down the road, then letting go of the handlebars and gliding along with my arms outstretched. When done just right, this felt like flying. There is no freedom like one a child possesses, and that summer Edie and I were about as free as two people can be.

  Every day was the same: we rode bikes up and down our road, back and forth, or carried rocks in the creek to work on our dam, or sat within the shade of the big snowball bush where we drew pictures or played war with little plastic soldiers or tried to read each other’s minds. But mostly we rode bicycles.

  Sometimes the heat spread itself out over us without our noticing. Before we knew it, the world was baking and we were sweating so much from riding up and down the road that we decided to go down into the shoals of the river to cool off. That’s the way it was the day after Nell arrived at our house.

  We parked our bikes and sat right down in the shallow water that ran over round black rocks. I loved the way denim felt when it got wet, so heavy and full of water. Once you got blue-jean cutoffs wet, you could be cool for a long while; it took them forever to dry. We pulled off our tennis shoes so the water could wash between our toes.

  After some splashing and then a long, thinking silence, Edie looked up at me with concern. “I’ve been thinking, about your daddy,” she said. “What that must be like, to hold all that in.”

  “Hold what in?”

  “All that. About the war,” she said, watching her toes as she leaned back on her hands. Her arms were very straight and long, already tanned a deep golden brown. “We studied about Vietnam last year, in school. The worst things happened during that war, Eli. It’s too awful to think about, some of the things that happened.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like little kids would come up to the men and have bombs strapped to them and they’d blow up. And monks burned themselves in the streets. And soldiers had to go into villages and kill everybody because they didn’t know who was their enemy and who wasn’t. And the men walked for ages and ages.”

  “Daddy’s feet are all messed up because of that,” I said, quiet. I had studied his feet many times. Some of his bones looked as if they’d poke right through the skin, and all his toes were mashed together, with his second toe popped up to rest atop his big one. They were awful to look at, so he rarely went barefoot, although the rest of us never wore shoes inside the house. Seeing his feet didn’t disgust me, though. They made me feel like I was regretting something, but I didn’t know what. You could see the war, right there in his feet.

  “I heard him tell Mom that he once went for two whole weeks without pulling off his boots.”

  Edie leaned back on her elbows and brought one foot up out of the water, arching her leg so that it was high out in front of her. “I have really nice feet.”

  “There’s no such thing as nice feet,” I said.

  She considered her foot, turning it this way and that, as if trying to catch the perfect light. “They’re the only thing I’m vain about.”

  “What does that mean, vain?”

  “Like stuck-up,” she said. “It’s a good word. I found it in the dictionary.” Edie was always finding words in the dictionary and trying to work them into everyday conversation. She slid her foot back into the water and looked at me. “Did he ever get shot?”

  “No, but his back is full of shrapnel. My mother squeezes it out sometimes.” Edie didn’t know what it was, so I told her. “Little slivers of metal from the grenades. It looks like pencil lead.”

  Edie didn’t reply, considering this. The sound of the water — like sizzling grease — churned between us, so we had to speak up to hear each other. “My aunt Nell came back home last night. She’s going to live with us.”

  “They don’t get along, though, do they?” Edie said. Last fall she was the one who had rushed onto the school bus, taken her seat beside me, and flipped open her history book to show me that Aunt Nell’s picture was in there. Edie read the caption below the photograph: “This picture of a young protester became one of the most recognizable images of the anti-war movement and was instrumental in changing the nation’s attitudes about the war in Vietnam.” Edie had said that the most powerful thing was the way Nell wants people to look not at her but at the peace sign. If I looked at the picture long enough, I could imagine everything about that day. The way the street must have peeled away the skin of her face when they dragged her, the roar of the people, the police on their megaphones, the smell of the tear gas.

  “Naw, they don’t get along too good,” I said. “But there’s something wrong with her — I don’t know what — and she’s his sister, so he can’t turn her away. That’s what Mom told Stella.”

  Edie plucked a little rock from the riverbed and held it up to her face, looking for quartz. She turned it in the sunlight and brought it up to her mouth. Her tongue darted out and touched the skin of the stone. She had the habit of touching and tasting everything.

  “My parents are getting a divorce,” she said, just like that, then looked at me. I had heard of lots of people getting a divorce but had never known anyone who had. My parents didn’t even like for me to watch One Day at a Time because the mother on there was divorced. I didn’t know what to say, so I just looked at her. If I had been older, I might have told her how sorry I was or something. But in that moment I was helpless. There was no use in asking why, because everyone knew. If anyone needed to get a divorce, it was Edie’s parents. They fought all the time. Loud. Sometimes on the front porch or in the yard. And even when they kept their fury contained to the house, we could all hear them screaming at each other.

  Usually when this happened, Edie hid out in the high branches of her willow tree, or within our snowball-bush playhouse, or she came to our house and acted like nothing was happening. Once she had sat on the back porch with my mother and helped her with some microscope slides for Mom’s class, carrying on an entire normal conversation about school while her parents raged through the walls of their house. Even though she had talked to Mom as if nothing was happening, when she got ready to leave, Mom wrapped Edie up in her arms and whi
spered, “If you ever need me, I’m here.” I had never loved my mother more, but I had also felt a scratch of jealousy. It seemed she was never really there for me, not like that. It seemed she was aware of everyone’s hurting except for mine. I was always thinking of when she had told Daddy she loved him more than anybody else in the world. I thought that should be me and Josie, not him.

  “It’s all right, though,” Edie said, even while her face betrayed what she was saying. She looked down and sucked in on her lips, like she was trying to keep from crying. I had heard my mother tell Stella one time that it was easy to not break down unless you were talking to someone you loved. That’s when you lost it.

  I wish now that I had said something to make her feel better, but I couldn’t think of anything. Instead, I said something more selfish than compassionate: “Does this mean you’ll have to move off?” As soon as the words left my mouth, I had a rush of panic, thinking that she would definitely be leaving me, that she would have to go off to live with her mother somewhere else. I wanted to say, “I couldn’t stand it if you left,” but of course there was no way I was going to make that a known thing.

  “No. I’m going to stay with Daddy,” she said, and this was the only time her voice broke a bit. “My mother is leaving here, and she’s not taking me with her.”

  “But you and him don’t get along,” I said.

  “I don’t get along with her any better, though. She’s crazy, Eli. You don’t know how lucky you are, to have a mother like yours. Everybody loves her. But my mother, she stays holed up in that house, thinking up things to be miserable about. Daddy can be a turd, but he’s tried to be good to her. And it’s impossible. She’s impossible.”

  Edie stood up, streams of water falling from her shorts. “They don’t realize I know yet,” she said, and stomped across the riverbed. “They’re planning on telling me tonight.” She climbed up the fern- and ivy-covered bank with ease.

  We rode our bicycles for a long time without speaking. We didn’t talk or tell jokes or anything. Every once in a while Edie would zoom off in a burst of speed, her brown legs pumping with all her strength, her handlebar streamers crackling in the wind. We rode way out on our road to where the bridge spanned the part of the Refuge River that turned wild. My mother forbade us to set foot on this bridge, as it was too high and she knew that I had bad judgment when a danger presented itself. I was terrible about taking dares: if someone defied me to walk atop a bridge railing or jump off a twenty-foot-high cliff, I would. But we were already there, and I was desperate to see over the railings into the white water below. We stood behind the concrete railings lining the bridge and peered over. The water was more than thirty feet below us and didn’t look like the Refuge River we knew. Hurried along by a couple of falls, the water sizzled over mossy rocks and fanned out in clear, wide arcs against bigger boulders that sat in its path. The sight of all that air between us and the river made my stomach jangle, and I knew I’d write about this later, in my composition book.

  “That little boy haunts this place,” Edie said. “Can you feel him?”

  “No,” I said, trying to convince myself. “Hush.”

  All of us children had heard the tale of the little boy who had plummeted to his death from this bridge, ages ago, in the 1940s. He was out for a walk with his mother and she was thinking about her husband, who was off fighting Germans. She was daydreaming and picking wildflowers beside the road, so he went on ahead. He got to the bridge and climbed the railings, thinking that it must be just like the fence that stood at their backyard.

  “See? A rail here, and here, and here,” Edie said, telling the story for the hundredth time. “And when he got to the top railing he thought he could just jump over onto soft grass, like on that fence at home. His mother looked up from her flower picking about the time he reached the top rail. She started running to him. I bet she dropped them flowers all in one big clump.”

  I could see her, too. I had imagined her many times, her hair falling down out of its pins when she ran. Her hands, white-knuckled, holding on to the railing while she peered over and saw her little boy lying on the rocks down there, already dead. I always wondered what happened then, how she made her way down to him, how she got help to come to her. I thought she had most likely gone down there and carried him back up the steep bank herself. I thought about this for a time. I bet myself that she fell down in the road with him stretched out across her legs. I could see every bit of it, playing in my mind like a movie.

  “I can definitely feel him,” Edie said, her eyes scanning the space around us in search of his ghost showing itself. “He stays here, I think.”

  “Shut up, man.” My words came out like three quiet breaths.

  Edie had frightened herself, too, and somehow we both knew to start pedaling at the same time. We pumped our legs hard to get as far away from the bridge as we could. I kept seeing the little boy, though, pausing atop the railings for one second before he stepped into air. I thought that he probably didn’t have enough time to call out. I tried to stop myself from thinking about it or I’d end up obsessing about it all night long, the way I sometimes lay awake thinking about the end of time or eternity, which — even if spent in heaven — was bound to get boring at some point.

  The June wind washed over us as we pedaled up and down our road, sometimes racing, sometimes riding with no hands. After a thick time of silence, I turned my transistor radio back on and we sung along with Melanie on “Brand-New Key,” and before long Edie was laughing again.

  The noon sun was burning at the top of the sky before I went home. I rode my bicycle into the backyard and saw my mother, but she was too far away to notice me. The garden was at the farthest corner of our backyard, and she was crouched in the dirt, studying her strawberry plants. Being a biology teacher, she approached everything like a scientist. She only raised fruits, which was unusual, as most people on our road worked big vegetable gardens full of dark-leafed tomatoes, leaf lettuce that was so bright and green it was almost yellow, and shady little pepper plants that shivered in the faintest breeze.

  I watched her as I put down my kickstand. Mom stood and brought up a hoe that had been lying next to her, then immediately began to chop out any weeds that had popped up in the last couple of days. I liked to work in the garden, but not in the hot part of the day, so I went on inside to make myself a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, a meal I would have lived on if I had been allowed to do as I pleased.

  As I came around to the screen porch, I saw that Nell was still sitting there in her nightgown, drinking sweet tea, smoking a Winston, and reading a thick paperback with a bright orange cover. Her legs were folded out on the seat beside her, one elbow propped on the arm of the glider. She was far away, transported by the book, and she hadn’t noticed my approach. Her face was as peaceful as a pasture, smooth and free of worry as she read. She took long draws from her cigarette, concentrating particularly hard until she blew the smoke back out.

  I wondered what mystery lay behind her coming to us. We hadn’t seen her in six months and now she was all-the-sudden here. She had stayed with us for short stints before, but this time she had brought all her albums and her record player and the few clothes she owned, so I knew she planned on staying awhile. Nell was always wandering around the country, never staying in one place long. She had lived in Nashville and New York City, Atlanta and Boston. Sometimes my mother called her “a free spirit,” in the kind of voice that let me know she approved of this lifestyle. For Nell, at least.

  I opened the creaking door to the screen porch and stood there a solid minute while Nell finished the page. At last she laid the book facedown across her thigh. “Hey there, wild man,” she said, as if I had just slipped in the door, and blew smoke out of her nose. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Out riding with Edie,” I said, and plopped into my mother’s rocker. A breeze came down the valley and knocked the chimes together. “Why are you still in your nightclothes?”

  She gla
nced down at her gown as if surprised she was still wearing it. “I didn’t feel like getting dressed, that’s why,” she said. “I just wanted to smoke and drink sweet tea and read my book. That’s just about the perfect way to spend a day, if you ask me.”

  “What is it?” I said, nodding my chin toward the book.

  “A James Michener,” she said.

  “It’s so big. I’d never in this world read all that.”

  “It has one of my favorite lines of all time in it: ‘Only the rocks live forever.’”

  “What’s that mean?” I said. There was a scab on my ankle, so I reached down to pick at it while we talked.

  “Well, I can only say what I think it means,” she said. “To me it means that we might as well not worry about anything because we’re all going to die, anyway.”

  “That’s sad,” I said, and at once wished that I hadn’t replied in such a way. It seemed much too revealing. The scab picking was producing a pleasurable hurt. I lifted it too far, and a dark bubble of blood stood around the edges.

  “It’s beautiful, though, don’t you think? Just the way the words go together? It’s all perfectly chosen. ‘Only the rocks live forever.’ A good truth.”

  I appreciated that Nell was talking to me like a grown-up, but I had no idea what she meant. Still, I could see that the words flowed together like water over a riverbed. It was a phrase I would repeat in my head later on in the summer without really knowing why.

  I took off my tennis shoes and brought my feet up under me, sitting Indian-style in the rocker. This produced a helpless feeling in my gut, rocking back and forth without my feet touching the ground. Somehow I knew that this was how Nell felt all the time, this wild stirring in the gut brought on by her own doings.

  Nell stretched and let out a long yawn, her arms going out wide, her hands balled into fists. “I usually don’t sleep so late,” she said, midyawn. “But Josie and me set up all night, talking.”