Eli the Good Read online

  I was drenched within seconds, the rain falling so hard that I could barely see as it flowed over my brow and down into my eyes. But I felt like I was leaving my own body, as if I were giving myself up to the storm as I turned in the rain, my arms extended, my face tilted back to receive the water, just as Mom and Nell had done.

  I heard my father calling my name — a muted, dulled sound, as if he were on the other side of a waterfall — and through the rain I could see him and String standing in the shelter of the open garage, looking out at me as if I had lost my mind. Lightning flashed between us, a huge whiteness. His mouth opened again, his face gathered in anger, but all sound was lost. Jack still stood on the porch, laughing with both hands perched on the top of the broom, the way my mother sometimes stood in the garden with her hoe when she was looking around for any missed weeds.

  I closed my eyes again, turned, and gave myself over to the thunderstorm. I imagined I was standing on the bottom of a fast-moving river that churned around me. And then my father’s hands were on me and his voice was loud in my ear, a great roar that was too distorted for me to understand. He scooped me up and ran back into the garage with me bobbing on his hip.

  Once there, he half threw me down but I landed on my feet. I looked up at him, feeling his anger wash over me. He trembled before me, his eyes furious, full of the war. I had gotten old enough to identify it, just like my mother could. Both of us knew when the war had taken control of him. He put his hand out as if to slap me, and I flinched back, waiting for the blow, even though he had never struck me in the face before. When he got mad like this over the most unexpected thing, everything about him changed: the shape of his face, the way he held his body. His hand shook there in front of me as if he was struggling to control it, but then he pulled it back, hard, and shoved it into the pocket of his work pants. He looked down, shook his head. No one spoke. A wall of thunder shook the ground. Just when I thought he was going to walk away, Daddy bent at the waist and grabbed me by both arms, shaking me.

  “Why did you do that? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Puh-leez-duh-on’t-Da-ddy,” I said, feeling as if he were shaking my teeth out of my skull.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Daddy boomed, his eyes wild, his grip tightening on my arms. “That lightning was running all across that blacktop. Could’ve killed you.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw String step forward as if to intervene, but before he could, Daddy stopped. He squatted down so that we were eye level, wiping water off my face. I breathed hard and rain slid into the corners of my mouth, washing down my cheeks. My feet felt heavy in my wet Chuck Taylors, and my cutoffs stuck to my thighs. I pulled my T-shirt out from my belly and found that it sucked at my skin.

  “Why did you do that, Eli?” Daddy asked, calmer now, but still not right, not himself.

  “Mom and Nell stood in the storm the other day,” I said.

  He fretted his eyebrows as if he didn’t understand. I thought he might continue to yell at me, but then he held his hand up to my cheek and ran one thumb across the bottom of my chin. He had never touched me so tenderly before. “You scared me to death, little man.”

  The rain stopped, instantly, as if turned off by a switch on the wall, and the blacktop began to steam, mists rising and snaking through the corn. The bruised clouds cleared like a curtain snatched away to reveal white clouds against a blinding sky.

  Daddy was still squatting there before me, looking up at my face as if he hadn’t seen me in ages. And then I saw that he wasn’t there, really. He wasn’t behind his own eyes.

  I didn’t know what was scarier to me: when he looked me dead in the eye, hollering, or when he turned away and was quiet. Lately everything about him was terrifying to me. I felt all the time like my nerves would shoot out of the tips of my fingers.

  “It’s all right, Stanton,” String said, standing behind Daddy. String took another step toward my father, then stopped, as if he knew better than to get too close. “Come on, now, buddy.”

  Daddy rose as if pulling up a great load and moved past me, going in the side door that connected with the room where the cash register stood on the counter. He shrugged through the doorway and into the register room. The door had two glass panels, so I could see him in there, leaning on the counter near the register with one hand, staring at the back wall. His face was dry, but his body held the language of defeat and maybe even weeping: his shoulders arched, his head shook back and forth.

  String didn’t walk away, as I thought he might, but pulled a piece of Fruit Stripe from his pocket. “Here ye go, buddy,” he said.

  “Why’d he get so mad?”

  “One of his friends got struck by lightning over there in Vietnam,” String said in his slow, easy way. “They was walking across a big rice field, knee deep in water. Didn’t you know that, squirt?”

  “No,” I said, and put the orange gum into my mouth. “He never talks about the war.”

  String dipped his fingers into the tub of hand cleanser sitting atop the tire changer and soaped up. “Yeah, he don’t talk much about it, for sure,” he said. His face was so lined by weather and life that some of the furrows seemed like knife scars. “But every once in a while, he’ll tell a little something if you listen real close.”

  “I listen all the time. To everything.”

  “Well,” String said, and went back to the Charger and peered in at the engine. “Listen some more.”

  A car pulled in and the bell rang, announcing its entrance. It was Charles Asher and Josie in his fine Mustang. I walked out to them slowly, this new weight of knowledge slowing me down, and before I could even speak to them, Jack stepped down off the porch and tousled my wet hair. “You’re a sight, man,” he said.

  Daddy told me to go on home with Josie and Charles Asher since I was soaked and would be of no use to his customers if I looked like a drowned rat. He had stayed by the register a few minutes before coming out to greet Josie and Charles Asher.

  On the drive home, I sat on the edge of the backseat so I could prop my chin right behind Josie’s head. She sat close to Charles Asher and didn’t turn to say anything to me. Instead, she looked through the rearview mirror when she questioned me about why I was so wet, what had happened during my day, what Jack was up to. Everybody in the family was always giving her grief about her inquiries on Jack. I knew, as they all did, that she had a secret crush on him, but he was nineteen and not at all interested in her. Besides, I would have died if she had ever broken up with Charles Asher.

  Eventually all conversation ended when the Spinners came on the radio. Josie turned it up and moved around in her seat a bit, singing every word. She was in a good mood today, which was unusual for her these days.

  “Hey, y’all prepare yourself for the Rubberband Man,” she sang. This song made absolutely no sense to me, but it had a good beat, so I scooted back against the seat and sang, too, watching as the hills and houses rushed by, the river coming up next to the road as we neared our house. But I stopped singing, weighted down by the fact that I had once again been sent off to be with the women.

  I wondered if my father had really had me go with Josie because I was wet or if he had sent me away because he was ashamed of me.

  The music and Josie’s singing and the sound of the rushing wind coming through the open windows and everything else faded away from me. And then I was all alone, sitting in the backseat of some unmanned car racing down the highway. There was nothing but the road and the hills and the river. I’m not sure if they were ghosts or my imagination — I still don’t know — but when I looked down to the riverbank, I could see a line of soldiers, their machine guns held out in front of them as they moved cautiously through the water toward some uncertain death. Or maybe even life.

  My mother snapped a pillowcase out onto the hot, still air. “Why are you wet?” she asked. It was so hot that my hair and shirt had already dried, but my denim shorts were still heavy with rain.

  She listened as
I answered, standing at the clothesline, a full basket of sheets at her feet. One fitted sheet had already been latched to the line, so that our backyard had been overtaken by the scent of detergent and Downy.

  “Well, are those wet shorts rubbing your legs raw?” she asked, and pinned the pillowcase to the line. Apparently she didn’t think my dancing in the rain was particularly strange, or interesting.

  I shook my head no.

  “Then stay outside and play. You’ll dry soon, hot as it is. I’ve got enough clothes to wash without adding more to the pile.”

  I ran away across the yard before she could think of something else for me to do besides play. As I scampered away, I heard Mom tell Josie and Charles Asher to go help Nell break up beans. Josie responded with an exaggerated sigh, but Charles Asher said “Yes, ma’am,” in his polite way that didn’t seem so much like brown nosing as actual respect.

  The midday rain had only made the day hotter. The air seemed like a solid thing.

  I went to Edie’s and pounded on the back door, but nobody answered. An empty bottle of Dr Pepper stood in a wet ring on the small table by the door and Edie’s copy of The Outsiders lay on the porch swing, so she couldn’t have been gone long. She was on her third reading of this book, as she said it was her favorite of all time, and I opened it to find places I had seen her marking with a red ink pen. On the first page she had scrawled “loneliness” and then, farther down the margin, she had written, “He’s different.” I laid the paperback down where I had found it, sure that Edie would punch me for having looked at her thoughts, and went around to her bedroom window and peered in. The shades were drawn to keep the heat out, but when I pecked on the window frame, there was no answer, either. This was unusual, as Edie usually chose to stay home alone even when her parents went somewhere.

  I let the screen door to our porch slam behind me and found Nell sitting in her usual place on the glider. A newspaper was spread across her lap to catch the strings she peeled away from the green beans. She tossed the broken beans into a bowl that had been placed on the floor. Josie and Charles Asher had pulled the rockers up close to the bowl. Josie looked put out by this chore, but Charles Asher was happy, as usual. He broke the beans carefully, but Josie snapped them in a hard-rhythmed blur.

  Nell looked up when the door slammed, a smile playing on her lips. “Here he is, Mother Nature’s son,” she said.

  “What’s that mean?” I said, on the defense.

  “You stood in the rain, didn’t you?” Nell said, turning her eyes back to her hands, where she expertly broke the beans in four singular pops. I was surprised by how effortlessly she went about this kind of work. She looked much more herself with a book in her hands. “In the storm?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You were right. It did feel good.”

  “I told you,” she said. She smiled at the beans in her lap. “You’re always reminding me of that Beatles song, the way you spend so much time in the woods, and the river. And now standing in thunderstorms.”

  “What song?”

  Only then did her hands become still. She paused for just a moment, her fingers hovering over the pile of unbroken beans that lay spread out across the newspaper, mixed in with her discarded strings.

  “You haven’t heard ‘Mother Nature’s Son’?” she asked, completely taken aback. When I said no, she looked out to where my mother was finishing up hanging the sheets on the line. “Loretta, have you deprived these children of the Beatles?”

  “What?” my mother called, plucking a clothespin from her mouth.

  “Nothing!” Nell hollered back, loud. Then, to me: “I’ll play it for you later on. You have to hear it.”

  “Where’s Edie at, Eli?” Josie asked. She had a teasing smile on her face, as if she was so mad about having to break beans that she wanted to take it out on me.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know where Edie is?” she gasped, acting shocked. She laughed at herself. “That’s a first.”

  “I’m not her keeper,” I said. I had heard Josie say this many times about me, when I was hidden somewhere and my mother asked her where I was. I didn’t exactly know what this phrase meant, but it made sense somehow.

  “You don’t know where your girlfriend is?”

  “Shut up, Josie,” I said. It wasn’t often that we fought, but when we did, the arguments were usually brutal screaming matches. Josie reserved all her kindness for me, it seemed, but when she was feeling especially cruel, she took pity on no one.

  “Josie,” Nell scolded, but there was laughter in her voice.

  “You love her,” she singsonged. “You want to marry her.”

  “Shut up!” I yelled.

  “Josie,” Charles Asher said, quiet. “Leave him alone, now.”

  Josie laughed, a high, clear sound I couldn’t help appreciating, even though I was furious at her. Her laugh would save her many, many times in her life. There was no denying its beauty. “I was just kidding you, little man,” she said, but I got up and stormed away, letting the screen door slam behind me again. “Don’t be that way, now,” she called to me as I ran away. The thing that made me most angry about Josie was that I found it nearly impossible to be mad at her. She always did something like let loose of that great laugh or put just enough love into the way she called me little man, and I forgave her completely. It was a curse.

  So I went to the snowball bush.

  When my father returned from Vietnam, my mother had planted a snowball bush in the side yard to commemorate his survival. The bush had grown unnaturally big and by the summer of 1976 was as big as a small shed and so roomy that it served as a perfect playhouse for Edie and me. Inside, the branches made room for two little chairs we had dragged in there. The ground was hard, packed dirt. In June the blossoms were in full bloom, so often the floor of our playhouse was littered with white petals that looked like identical pieces of waxy confetti. The snowball bush didn’t have a particularly overpowering scent except in the early mornings, when the whole place smelled of vanilla.

  Our family spent most of our time on the screen porch, which was out back. When people used the front porch, they usually were seeking privacy, so that the juiciest and most shocking conversations often took place there. The front porch was mostly used by Josie, since she was on constant lookout for privacy. Sometimes she would run the long yellow phone cord across the living room and out the front door, close the door, and then prop herself up on one of the porch chairs to have a long conversation with one of her girlfriends. It was also Josie’s habit to direct Charles Asher out to the front porch. People rarely passed on our road, except in the mornings and evenings, when they were either going to or coming from work, so hardly anyone would see them there. But you never knew who might show up at the back of our house. People were always walking across a succession of backyards to reach our place and congregate on our screen porch. Stella burst in unannounced all the time, as did Edie and various others. Nell had pretty much taken possession of the screen porch since her arrival, too, so any privacy that had once been found there was completely gone now, as there was hardly any time when Nell wasn’t out there smoking or reading or gazing out at the garden as if all the secrets to life were hidden beneath the damp petals of cucumber vines.

  Edie and I had a few select toys we left in three tin boxes beneath the snowball bush. One box held a collection of silver and blue jacks, along with a raggedy deck of cards. Edie had taught me to play rummy, and even though she always beat me, I still loved to play there in the hidden world where nobody could see her get the better of me. In another tin there were several colored pencils (last summer we had left crayons out here but despite the shade they had still melted into one multicolored, square clump that we spent the rest of the summer prying out with my pocketknife) and a small pad of paper.

  In the other tin was our entire collection of plastic cowboys, which were blue or orange; Indians, some yellow and some red; and soldiers, which were all gre
en. We had outgrown them but I actually missed playing with them, so I chose them to entertain me until Josie and Charles Asher made their way out onto the front porch. I was sure this would happen before long; my sister was predictable in most matters.

  I lined all the soldiers up in one line, clumped the cowboys on a small hill I formed by raking dirt into a pile, then took two fingers to dig out a wide trench where the Indians waited in hiding.

  I made shooting sounds by pursing my lips and blowing out air, raked all the cowboys down, flicked the soldiers over one by one by using thumb and forefinger the way Nell sent cigarettes flying across the yard when she was finished with them. Then I ran each Indian up the hill and had them dance over the slaughtered masses. I always let the Indians win. I don’t know why.

  Josie and Charles Asher made their way out onto the front porch and the chains of the porch swing clinked when they sat down. Josie kicked at the floor with a bare foot to get them swinging. She put her right leg up over both of his and then a hand up to his face and drew him into her lips. Soft kisses at first, then her head moved around the way necking couples did in the movies. She chewed at his lips, arching her body in toward his, although they were sitting in an awkward position, being on the swing together. He sat very stiff and ran his hand up her back until his fingers disappeared beneath her hair. I imagined this to be a cool place, in the shade. Like the space beneath the snowball bush.

  Josie put her hand on Charles Asher’s chest and slid two fingers in between the buttonholes on his madras shirt, and with her other hand she held on to one side of his face, holding him as close as she could. I nearly gagged when I caught a brief glimpse of their tongues knocking at each other. I couldn’t understand how this was at all pleasurable, but I recognized the hunger in Josie’s tightly closed eyes, in the way she kept digging her leg into his.

  But then Charles Asher pulled away, turning his head from her, and put a hand up to his mouth.