Calliope: Voice of the Writers
The Great Novel Race 2008:
Tumbleweeds
by Erin Trauth
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Chapter 1: The Guest
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I always knew when it was time for Mama to bring home a new friend. She got real sweet the day before - she buttered us up, like my daddy used to say. First, Mama'd go into town and bring things home in a big, floppy brown box from what she called "the helping place," all smiles when she came busting through the front door with the box stuck between her big arms. But somehow, I knew the presence of the frayed and weathered box meant much more than a helping hand.
The box always had gross foods like canned green beans and candied yams and some pencils for school, but it also had a few stuffed animals for Johnny and Austin, a couple Care Bear characters and hand-me down Raggedy Ann dolls that Mama said "had already been loved on a lil' bit." Some of them had holes or missing eyes, but Mama always said that meant they had character, and my baby brothers never really minded. Then, she’d buy me a bottle of Pretty-In-Pink nail polish and a box of Junior Mints, but the polish was always runny and the mints were always melted by the time she got home.
Mama always made me and Johnny and Austin cookies the night before, and would finally tell us we'd be having a guest over to fix something in the house the next day. Not like the whole house didn't need some work. She would then, calling the three of us over with the wave of her rough, sunburned hands, call a family meeting, and we all sat on the porch with glasses of milk and crispy oatmeal raisin Dee-Lites that somehow made the night feel sweeter, and made us more comfortable in the sticky summer air. Mama had her cookies too, with a side of what she called “the spiciest Bloody Mary eastern Florida had ever seen.” And it all worked just fine, my little brothers and I munching away on the sweet concoctions, until she started the talk. That time it was the air conditioner that needed work.
"I met a real nice man at the Jiffy today, babies," she started with a sickeningly sweet smile, and suddenly the cookie in my mouth didn’t taste so great. "Johnny, sugar, his name is Jasper. Kinda rhymes, doesn't it, baby?" No, Ma, not at all. I nodded my head up and down anyway.
"He's gonna fix the air conditionin' tomorrow -- it really needs fixin'," she had gone on, a big smile pasted across her face. "Ya'll don't need to be sweatin' in this damn house all summer once I start school. He's gonna help us fix that right up."
"Carolina," she said, her eyes meeting mine, with long beige hair cascading over her lean shoulder that had been reddened deeply by the harsh Florida sun. "Jasper's got beautiful blue eyes just like you, baby. I expect you to treat him just as nice as you did Daryl Joe, okay?" She looked deeply into my eyes as if to convey just how strongly she already felt about the man she met at the gas station that very day. She took a long, deep swing of her Bloody Mary, the glass sweating almost as much as we were. All I could do was nod again.
Without another word, Mama turned her gaze onto the darkening horizon, never looking back into my eyes again that night. I passed the rest of my cookies on to Johnny and Austin, who kept eating happily. My stomach churned, and I could feel the tingle of dread pull up and down, back and forth at my insides.
The next day after swimming lessons, our strawberry hair feeling cleaner than it had in weeks, Mama picked the three of us from the Y and gave us five dollars to walk down to Collins' Convenience for a chiller. "Mama's gotta get ready for Jasper to come over, babies... no man wants to fix no air conditionin' for a homely lady," she laughed, tugging a little too hard at her hair as she pulled our Coupe Deville into the cracked drive that lead to our house. I knew the drill. Five bucks in hand, I loaded Johnny and Austin into a Radio Flyer that, unsurprisingly, had been brought to us from "the helping place" just the day before that. I pulled them along the curvy red road that lead into town.
Halfway there, my youngest brother peered up at me from the little rusted wagon with a gaze that I just knew shouldn't belong to a five-year-old. "Carolina, why don't Daryl Joe wanna help me fix my bike no more?" Austin asked, peering up at me through innocent gray eyes. "Mama told me he would get me new wheels and spokes and a horn like Billy's got...but I ain't seen Daryl in foreva'."
I kicked the rocks in front of me gently and squinted my eyes tight from the beaming afternoon glare. I didn't know what to say. I never really did when Austin asked me things like that.
We made it to Collins' and get what we always did, three Screwballs and a pint of Cherry Madness to take home to Mama. Old Man Collins, sitting stooped over the front counter of his store, gave us a knowing wink like we were kids without a care in the world, just sittin' and enjoyin' some ice cream. The poor man, kind of falling apart in his 85 or so years of age, knew about as much as a blind skunk stuck in Chutney’s Creek, where all the homeless hung out in town. We sat out on the front stoop of Collins' and we licked up our Screwballs, racing the heat before it could melt it all, getting my brothers giddy like it always did.
Austin pinched Johnny when he wouldn't give up his gum at the bottom of the cup, and I hollered that I was telling Mama when we got home. It's funny, I always said it as if when I told her, she would actually do something about it.
We made it back home just before the sun went down and the new friend was already there. His rusty old Cadillac, a real piece of work, was backed up into the front lawn like there's wasn't a driveway thirteen inches away from the grass. He and Mama were sitting on the front porch sharing a Marlboro Light, a cloud of smoke billowing between their bodies.
"My babies are back!" She stood to greet us, arms extended and flailing as though she hadn't seen her damn children in weeks. I noticed she had the dress on, the one she bought from K-Mart in two colors because it made her legs look as long as a Daddy Long Leg spider's, as Austin had pointed out to her right in the middle of the store a few days before.
Jasper had blue eyes, all right -- big, watery blue eyes with big old ugly red cracks in them. One eyebrow was shorter than the other. His skin was a faded leather color that reminded me of my Auntie's horse saddle, caked with dirt in the crevices after we had been out riding for a whole day. His clothes, a blue checkered flannel and acid-washed jeans, looked they've never seen a wash bin, but then again, none of Mama's guests ever seemed to clean up real well. He smelled like tires, or car engines, or a little bit of both all rolled into one.
"Oh, Jasper-eeeeeeee! Meet my lil' darlings. This is Carolina, she's my little Mama-in-trainin'," she boasted as she brushed my head softly. "She just loves to take care of my little ones. You never would know she's only thirteen, would you, Jasper-eeee? She just loves being a lil' Mama!"
"Yes sir, I sure do," I said, smiling enthusiastically at the dipshit that looked me over. He put his greasy hand on mine as if he was being kind and began his schpeel.
"Hiya, there, Caroline," not even getting my name right. "I, uh, just fixed up the cooler for ya'll; you don't have to sweat no more inside. It'll be real nice." He drew back from our little embrace, lifting the veil of disgust off my back, and gave me a smile that revealed a mouthful of buttered teeth, a dingy yellow-brown that reminded me of popcorn kernals.
"This is Johnny;" Mama said as her gaze sauntered down to my brother. "He's my little future doctor -- he just went and won the whole third grade spelling bee. He's gonna be famous, Jasper, I just know it," she beamed. "You just betta' watch out for him."
"And Austin, he's my baby. He's startin' first grade in the fall." Jasper crouched down and tickled both my brothers, poking at their stomachs with a wrinkled index finger. He looked satisfied, like he had won them over because he made them squeal, and I suddenly felt a tight ball forming in the pit of my stomach. Take deep breaths, I reminded myself, but then my breathing came quicker instead.
I suddenly remembered the pint of ice cream that was quickly melting in the container I had set on the ground. I walked inside to put Mama's Cherry Madness in a bowl for her, although I knew she wouldn't eat it now, not with her guest in tow.
The first thing I noticed when I walked inside the house was how incredibly hot it was. I swore that it was hotter than it had ever been. I walked into the kitchen and pulled a stool up under the air conditioning vent. I waved my hand in front of it, hoping, wishing, praying that I was wrong. But I wasn't -- I never was when it came to Mama's guests. There was not a puff of cold air blowing from the vent, no sign of tools near the indoor unit we had bought last summer. So much for the air conditioner, I thought, shaking my head hard.
At a little past nine, Mama put Johnny and Austin to sleep in the futon they shared in their tiny little room at the corner of our house. She let me stay up later, and I got to work on the day's dishes like she’d told me to as she and Jasper sat on the porch, working on their twelfth cigarette. I watched them through the screen window as hot water poured over our old, blue chipped plates.
"Oh Jasssss-per," she started, saying his name slowly in a deepened drawl that I knew she thought made her sound sexy, and I felt myself start to gag. "The last one, Daryl Joe, was such a monsta'. He didn't do nothin' right, just a goddamn loser. I still got bruises from him and I still got 'em from the other bastards." Her eyes misted over and I could see her starting to let it all pour out. "Every single one of 'em, honey. They were just all so bad -- Richard, Lars, Eddie, even the babies' daddies." She leaned into Jasper a little closer then, letting little smoke rings she had made billow from the corners of her mouth on to his chest. "I'm so glad you're different, sugar. I can already tell."
I watched the jerk nod like he thought so, too.
"I just wanna raise my babies. They're all I care about, Jassss-per, really. Aren't they just dolls?" Then Mama went in for the kill, the clincher she seemed to think really reeled 'em in. "I start classes at Jillian's House of Cosmetology next Wednesday, Jasper, and I'm just so excited, I really wanna make somethin' of myself. And this could be a real good thing for me, Jasper...my babies here, my new career...me and you." Jasper swatted at a mosquito just long enough to take his eyes away from my mother's breasts, and I shuddered, dropping the dish sponge into the water beneath me.
"Your new life is startin' tonight, sweet thing," Jasper smiled back with a satisfied grin, knowing exactly what he'd be getting from this little speech of hers. And then, I made the dishwater scalding hot, as hot as I could take it. I let it pour all over my fingers until I couldn't feel them anymore.
Mama made a huge production of putting me to sleep in front of Jasper. "Oh, my best girl and me, we always talk bunches before bedtime." I wondered then when that had started happening and where I had been when it did, but didn't say a word. I contemplated this idea of her and I talking more as I fell asleep, trying hard to ignore the sound of beer cans clinking open in the kitchen.
I was in the middle of a very intense dream, something involving a handsome cowboy, when I heard it. It was first the whimper of the cowboy's gallant horse, until I realized my eyes were wide open and I was no longer dreaming. I quickly realized that the sound, only slightly muffled, was what I always heard on the nights when Mama brought home a new friend --- grunting from her bedroom, right next to mine. Every single time this happened, I thought the same thing. Does she not know I could hear everything through our paper-thin wall? I was seasoned at this, though, like everything else about the day, so I began my process of ignoring Mama ohhing and ahhing and oh babying in the room next to me. I prayed as I did each time that Johnny and Austin wouldn't wake up. They asked me everything and I could be sure they'd ask me about those noises. I rolled over to cover my head with a pillow, and in the process, knocked over the glass of water on my nightstand. Cold water streamed onto my comforter, and I cursed the water. Then I cursed my bed, I cursed the house, and I cursed my mother in the room next to mine.
I crawled out of bed, wide awake now, and I descended the dark, crooked hallway to our kitchen. I turned on the kitchen light, and the scene that unfolded was all-too-familiar. It was deja'vu, I guess. The clock overhead read 4:28 a.m. What looked like hundreds of beady cockroaches seemed to laugh at me as they scurried to the corners of the room. They loved summer nights like those and they seemed to love that I hated them living in our house.
At least twenty Milwaukee's Best cans littered the kitchen table and two green ashtrays were almost hidden by mountains of white and gray speckled ash. Mama's "Daddy Long Leg" dress was draped over a chair and Jasper's pit-stained T-shirt lied on the ugly linoleum floor. The pale moon's light from the kitchen window casted shadows I usually thought were beautiful, but not on nights like this. Nothing was beautiful about these nights.
I reached for a towel in the pantry to clean up the spill in my room, when I heard the familiar creek of my mother's bedroom door, and I instantly heard her stumble down the hall.
"Baby, what are you doin' up, huh?" she asked innocently; as if it weren't her that woke me up in the first place. Her breath was sweet with liquor on my face, her eyes red, her twisted hair streaming wildly down a red man's flannel shirt that hardly covered her body.
"Go on and go to sleep, puddin'. Jas...Jasper went home... wasn't it so sweet of him to fix up the air?" Her eyes glazed over and lose focus from mine, both of us knowing full well she was lying. "Go on and get in bed, Carolina," she repeated, looking very sad all of a sudden. All I did was nod my head, it's all I ever could do. I turned down the hallway without a word, but I wanted so badly to turn around and kick her. I wanted to shake her and ask her if it had ever occurred to her how very screwed up this all really had become. I wanted to question her, to ask her why she kept me up every other night and ask her why she couldn't be like every one else's mother. I wanted to scream.
And the worst part is, it's wasn't Jasper's fault. It wasn't my daddy's fault. Or any of the other guests we had had so many of lately.
Jasper didn't fix anything tonight, Mama. He never will. This is what I wanted to scream, what echoed inside my head each time. None of them ever have. And they never will, either, I wanted to yell, wanted to cry out to her in the night. Instead, I went to my bed, and listened to my mother softly cry herself to sleep in the room beside me.
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