The Green One did his dance. So did the Yellow One. Where was Vacuum?
Very scary.
Mommy said, “Charliebaby, time for your supper, sugarpop. Come and get your supper. While it’s hot.”
The Purple One did his dance. Where was Vacuum?
Mommy said, “I’m own count to three. Come sit. One.
“Two,” she said.
Charliebaby shimmied off Big Sofa and hurried to the table, where Blankie was draped over the chair with a seat on the seat. Mommy picked him up and set him down on the seat seat.
“A B C D E F G,” they sang. “Thank you God for feeding me.”
“Ay,” Mommy said.
“Men,” they said.
Charliebaby wanted to eat the mashed potatoes Mommy had made but there was too much steam. The potatoes would make his mouth burn.
Mommy reached for her stack of receipts, picked one and smoothed it out. “Anytime you want. And his number.” Mommy scrunched her nose. “Concerning.”
Charliebaby liked it when Mommy made faces.
The mashed potatoes felt hot near his mouth. He turned his spoon sideways and watched the small goop dribble down on the big one.
Was that Vacuum? Charliebaby turned but could not see TV from the seat seat. It sounded like maybe Vacuum was on the Telly Tubby show. (Concerning.)
Mommy smoothed out more receipts and read them in her mind. The middles of her lips moved, but not the corners.
After supper, Charliebaby waited to see if Vacuum would come back. Vacuum always came back. Would he come back tonight?
He did not see Vacuum.
Starting low and coming up the steps outside sounded creaky like Daddy steps, but it was not time for Daddy because it was still sunny outside. Daddy would be back when it got dark. Would he come back tonight? He would come back. He always came back, but only when it got dark outside.
Mommy left the apartment. She did not close the door behind her. Outside had colors like the colors on TV. Green leaves. Pink and purple on the sky. And blue on the sky. And white. The moon.
Where was Vacuum?
“I live here,” Mommy said.
“It sounded like you wanted me to just come by?”
Mommy and the creaky like Daddy steps went down.
She left her boy. Halfway down, she swiveled. The door was still open.
“Come on.”
How could she have left it that way? Her baby.
“Hadley.”
She lagged barefoot behind Blane Hammond, the man with the pills.
Don’t ever come to my door again, she thought.
He’d parked around the side of the building past E and F where the lot ended without a curb. He’d driven an Escort ZX2 tonight. Hammonds drive American. She strained and couldn’t recall who’d told her that. But it was true.
She scanned for neighbors. No one white, no one close.
Where the dim yellow light began to fade she stepped carefully. Fallen leaves broke between her arches and the cooling asphalt. He leaned shucking and turning a red cigarette box. In the box no cigarettes.
“We could of did this up there,” he said.
“Do not ever come to my door. I come to you.”
-
Charliebaby made Blankie a bundle on his lap. He sat crisscross and wondered where Vacuum was. Vacuum could be on TV or through the door whenever, or maybe he had already come through the door and was hiding someplace like behind Little Sofa or in Mommy and Daddy’s room.
Scary.
Outside the steps coming up sounded like Mommy’s. She closed the door behind her and picked up the remote. Charliebaby waited for the Green One, the Yellow One or the Purple One to come back.
Mommy sat on Little Sofa.
TV had a tiny red kangaroo in the middle of it after the commercials went away. “The journey is extraordinary. He is born with four limbs with which to make his ascent.” Thick watery stuff fell out of the mommy all around the tiny red baby. “Blind as a bat, nimble as a cat he must be.”
Just then TV got a bigger tiny baby in the middle of it.
“Down in the pouch, he latches himself to his mother’s nipple, safe now, and begins to feed.”
-
Owen Tate could hear the waiting room TV from his position at the front desk, not the words but the cadences, as familiar to him as the fear he was ruining his son, Charlie, or that his son was not meant to have lived. He told himself that it was not too late to go back to school and that if he left it would not mean leaving his son only this was a lie and he knew it.
He walked past the waiting room beneath fluorescent bulbs and saw through the glass door that Dave Hammond was still working on the red Ford in the garage. He went back to his stool at the front desk and shook the mouse and past his dim reflection he glared at the cars on the road.
Dave came in and told the woman waiting that the problem, sure enough, was a coolant leak, which she would not accept. She’d been told this twice before, she said.
The stool collided with the tile floor and the reflection of Dave’s face swiveled palely. When Owen reached for the stool he gripped it like it might buckle if only he applied enough pressure.
The woman refused to leave her car overnight.
She wanted it fixed.
She wanted to drive it home now.
Owen gripped the receiver of the desk phone next and lifted it. He worked the cord around his hand and stretched its curls straight and yes, he could rip it if he wanted to, and paid it out and replaced the receiver.
Back in the waiting room, displaying what he hoped was a pleasant expression, Owen stood next to the TV mount not hearing the woman so much as waiting for her to run out of words. If she would just leave he could get out of here. If he could get out he could calm down. This fucking TV. He turned and squinted up at the curved glass. A medication commercial. He reached and turned it off.
The customer lady went quiet. She sat still reflected in the curved glass next to her handbag, the sides of her puffed over the armrests.
“Sorry,” Owen said. He touched the POWER button again. The image began to return. He pressed the MUTE button.
The customer lady looked incredulous.
“Meant to turn it down,” Owen said.
And if he could at least get out of here he knew he could gain the mental purchase from which to commence with a strategic reorientation of friends, depressants (vodka, petrols [inhaled, nostrils over jug], cannabis), caffeine/sugar, income, expenditures, nutrition, exercise (none), and was he forgetting something? He couldn’t think in the damnable Hammond Sons goddamn fucking repair shop.
Out of nothing Owen found the charm which had earned him the job in the first place. “Want me to take a look? He means well—you mean well, Dave. I don’t do what he does no more, ma’am, but I’ll take a look. You want me to, I’ll take a look. And we can all get out of here. Can I get you some food? We got good snacks in the fridge. What do you want? We got sodas, good stuff, TV plates. What do you want? We got it all.”
-
TV had koalas on it when Daddy sat Charlie up on his lap. Charlie had been sleeping. Mommy was the kind of asleep where it would be very hard to wake her up.
“See that? Mom left a mess on the table,” Dad said. Dad smelled like cars.
“Though he may look like a talking bear, he is simple as a worm.”
“Got a call from your Granny today,” Dad said. “She don’t like to have to call me at work. It makes us mad. But we love Mom. Yes, we do. Love, love, love.”
Charlie smiled. Dad was being silly.
“Granny wants you to live with her. How about that?”
“Without the Eucalyptus, the koala would have nowhere to go. It would not be able to eat any other kind of leaf. The only leaf for the koala is the Eucalyptus.”
Dad brought Charlie back to the bedroom. They left Mom very asleep. After he put Charlie down on the bed, Dad brought the bucket of coins over and dumped them out.
“This is Thomas Jefferson. And this is where he lived.”
Charlie did not look.
“Who’s this one?”
Charlie did not know who was on the brown coin. He never knew. This was not fun. Dad stepped through the bathroom door and turned the light on. He got naked and stepped into the tub under hot showerwater.
Charlie remembered his mashed potatoes. He hadn’t finished them. “I’m hungry,” he said.
Dad peered around the curtain. Where was his funny face?
“You’re hungry?”
Dad finished his shower and got dry fast without wiping his peen or his feet and stepped out of the tub and walked through the bedroom. Dad yelled first. Mom yelled louder. They were good at yelling and getting quiet and yelling some more and they got quiet now. Charlie could still hear them whispering.
Then Dad was back.
“Did you eat your supper?”
Charlie didn’t know what to say.
“I said did you eat your supper? She didn’t feed him, Jesus Christ.”
Dad left.
Charlie had had some of his mashed potatoes. First they were hot. Then they were cold.
Out in the living room Mom and Dad kept whispering. Charlie picked up some coins and dropped them near a pillow. “Hadley, put it down,” Dad said. Some of the coins were brown. Glass crashed. Most of the coins were silver though. Some small, some big. Would the big ones fit in his mouth? Yes, he could fit one in his mouth. Mom and Dad were laughing. Why were they laughing? They were mad, so what was funny?
Jefferson and where he lives tasted nice. He didn’t mean to swallow, but he was hungry.
Dad had little pieces of glass in his stomach and feet when he came back to the bedroom. Then Dad went fuzzy.
-
After everybody got out of the ambulance, some hospital people took Charlie to a room. Mom and Dad sat beside the bed. They held hands when the hospital people were in the room. When it was only the young nurse watching, Dad held the side of Mom’s face and whispered at her and wiped beneath her eyes and slapped her once, quickly, for she had begun to droop toward the tile floor.
The doctor lady had a loud laugh and a big head.
“We’re going to have your mom hold tight to your hand here in a sec,” the doctor lady said. “Mom? We need you. Right now, mom.”
Dad was holding Mom under the chin. Dad had a hoodie on and Charlie remembered the glass in Dad’s skin and all the long runnels of blood branching into each other sideways even though they had been coming down.
The doctor lady fed a tube into Charlie’s throat and inflated the balloon at tube’s end and pinched the coin out of his throat by means of a pronged medical device and deflated the balloon and removed the tube steadily from Charlie and when the tube was out the hospital people helping beside the bed left the room. She handed Dad the coin. Dad held it with his thumbs and pointer fingers. He turned and turned it.
Doctor Lady smiled. “We have Sprite.” She sat so Charlie could not see Mom. “You want Sprite or root beer, doll?”
Root beer.
She hoisted Charlie and put him on her shoulders. Her hair was springy. Nice drum. She went backwards through doorways and held tight to his ankles. Charlie did not see the officers standing outside the ward room.
-
Murphy Whitler arrived at the hospital to take his daughter’s son home. He had been awake. He had answered the phone. Here he was.
The doctor who had removed the coin from Charlie’s throat was still with him, God bless her. She was the oldest black doctor he’d ever seen.
Charlie was asleep on the ward bed and next to him, propped against a pair of pillows, was a two-liter bottle of A&W.
“Goddamit,” Murphy said.
“They told you what happened?”
“Swallowed a nickel.”
“What else?”
“Well Owen come home and they get into it and she says he wailed on her but she won’t bruised or nothin. Are you aware I live separate from my wife? She would have been the one to call.”
The doctor shook her head.
-
Even after he’d laid Charlie down in the room his daughters had once shared and fetched a small pillow for his grandson, along with a plush blanket and a rabbit doll, Murphy couldn’t sleep. He sat in his armchair by the front door of the trailer willing himself to stay put and leave the TV off. He knew only that he lost his vigilance if he left it on, especially unmuted. She would come for Charlie in the morning.
-
Light passed evenly through cloud over the broad and pointed tops of trees and between the trees on the road the pickup followed the last leg of what had been its daily route in Durham County before she left Murphy. She’d no memories of the old work done in these fields under the watch of his father but he’d too many to leave them.
She started up the gravel drive cut through the tract he’d inherited and done little with. She passed cabins scalped of their tin roofing and drowned in kudzu. The barn.
At this rate, and she supposed it was she who’d raise him now, Charlie would not be ready for school next year. He stood loitering next to Murphy’s leg.
Murphy jerked as if hooked by the chin and stood up straight.
She turned the truck where there was room behind the trailer and drove back to where the drive sloped level with the front stoop. Charlie had made no progress down the steps, but she could see that Murphy was speaking as if to a horse and coaxing the boy like one, leading him by the hand.
-
That night she asked what he wanted for supper and got no answer. He stood watching her work. He was too short to see what she was making. Then he sat where he’d been standing. She tilted the lid over the pot of Spanish rice and turned in the cramped kitchen to switch the radio on. It was tuned to the station she wanted.
He sat watching. The head of broccoli finished before the rice and she set it on a plate before cutting it smaller. She turned both burners off and refitted the glass lid over the pot. He was standing again. His jeans were damp at the crotch and down one leg and his socks were soaking in an oblong puddle of piss.
She spoke calmly and knelt and held him upright with one hand while with the other she removed first one sock, then the other.
“I peed,” he said.
She made to lift him and thought better of it. From the counter she took a roll of paper towels decorated with green and purple flowers and laid a path for him to follow.
“Wait right there,” she said.
He did not wait. He followed her to where the kitchen met the hall stepping obediently on the towels but not listening.
“Wait.”
She flipped a switch to illuminate the hall and kept unrolling. He stood rocking his weight slowly back and forth and he was staring at her fingers. Into the bathroom he was still leaving footprints. She helped him over the lip of the tub and undressed him.
When he was clean she reopened the tub drain and used her towel to dry him. All she had of his was an old pair of Batman pajamas. The pants fit okay but the shirt was too tight.
He ate wearing only the pants, seated on a pair of pillows. Fully upright his chin cleared the height of the tabletop. He ate the broccoli well. The rice he needed help with.
After supper she turned the radio up for the Merle Haggard song playing. She swept beneath the chair and dumped the fallen rice in the kitchen trashcan and he stared the while, following.
She still had some toys he’d outgrown in a bin in the front room and he took to none of them. She fetched the radio from the kitchen and placed it on the floor beside the toy bin and adjusted the volume down to a level she deemed reasonable. Finally he took his eyes off her. He stared at the speakers as he did faces.
It was too late to read and besides, she was too worried. No word yet from Murphy. If Hadley called directly, and Charlie detected his mother’s voice through the phone, there was no telling what he might do. While she watched him watching the radio she held her bible in her lap. It did her good to hold it.
She dozed.
When she woke he was standing against the footrest fingering his navel.
He lurched back and scuttled some.
“Charlie. You scared me.”
She worked the wooden handle forward to collapse the footrest and leaned toward him, reaching. She did not trust herself to get down on the floor.
“Come here.”
Another commercial.
“Charlie, come here.”
He remained posed on one elbow, belly heaving, not blinking. She thought about asking him to fetch her the radio and thought better of it. Instead she stood, leaving the bible leaning against the armrest, and bent for the radio. When she had it by the handle she lifted and turned it off.
“I’m tired. Come on.”
The radio perhaps had been wearing on him. He stood quietly and followed her into the bedroom. She had hoped to set him up out on the sofa but there was nothing for it. He would have to sleep with her.
She took him into the bathroom and helped him brush his teeth and brushed her own teeth and peed with the door open and asked him if he needed to go.
“No,” he said. A twitch of his mouth like a smirk left his face.
She didn’t own a nightlight and so left the light on in the bathroom. She showed him where to put his hands and feet and he climbed up the bedframe at the foot of the bed and crawled for the pillows. Upon collapse he sighed theatrically.
“Soft?” she said.
“Yeah.”
She helped him under the covers. As she rounded the bed he squirmed to follow her progress. Peeing with him watching hadn’t been embarrassing. Undressing was.
“Close your eyes,” she said. Though he pretended to obey she felt he was merely concealing his gaze with his fingers. In her shift she folded back the sheets on her side and sat and swiveled underneath. Then she drew the sheets across her stomach. She eased against the headboard with pillows cushioning the small of her back wishing it wasn’t so bright still. “You want the light?”
He nodded. She removed her glasses and placed them on the end table.
“Alright,” she said. She clasped her hands.
“Now I lay me down to sleep,” they said, “I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Angels watch me through the night, and wake me with the morning light. Amen.”
She removed her dentures one at a time and placed them in their container.
Charlie shrieked and went red from shrieking.
Her thoughts went to the neighbors through the wall and through the ceiling and she tried shushing him but couldn’t. He fell out of bed and stumbled back for the wall, shrieking. She stepped out quickly and rounded the bed and went to comfort him. His eyes went wider and before she could reach him, he lurched away. He crawled beneath and whirled his head below the slats. The monster was walking. The monster knelt but it wasn’t the monster. It was Granny.
She was saying, “Bless your heart.”
He turned and crawled out the way she wasn’t. But she was standing there watching while he was getting out from under. Then she was hugging.