Robert Butler: Tabloid Dreams

This was the story Mama used to tell me and all I ever knew to do at the end was to say to her not to cry. But finally I stopped saying even that. I asked her once to tell me more of the story. “What happened to the boy?” I asked her and she looked at me like I was some sailor off a boat from a distant country and she didn’t even know what language I was talking.

So tonight I go out of the house and around the back and in through the kitchen to get to the bathroom. She and the Colonel Parker guy are in the bedroom and I never go in there. Never. Before I step in to wash up I pause by her door and there’s a rustling inside and some low talk and I give the door a heavy-lipped little sneer and a tree roach is poised on the door jamb near the knob and even he has sense enough to turn away and hustle off. So I click the bathroom door shut as soft as I can and I pull the cord overhead and the bulb pisses light down on me and I don’t look at myself in the mirror but bend right to the basin and wash up for Tina and there’s this fumbling around in my chest that’s going on and finally I’m ready. I turn off the light and open the door and there’s Mama just come out of her room and she jumps back and her sateen robe falls open and I lower my eyes right away and she says you scared me and I don’t look at her or say nothing to her and Elvis might could sing about the shaking inside me but I for sure can’t say anything about it and I push past her. “Honey?” she asks after me.

I slam the back door and I beat it down the street toward the river and it’s August so it’s still light out but the sun is softer this time of day and I’m glad for that. I start trying to concentrate on Tina waiting for me and I want the light and I want it to be soft and I keep thinking about how she says I don’t have to talk and that makes me feel better and it makes me think that I’m right about Tina. And thinking that, I start to feel the eyes on me. I’m going along a street of shotguns that are like them twins you see in pictures that are joined at the hip and the stoops all have people sitting and catching the early-night sun and maybe a little breeze off the river and the men are smoking and the women are in their bare feet and they all are looking at me as I pass and they know the sight of me cause I been coming by here for a long time and they always say Hi.

So they know enough to see the difference in me. They know I got something on my mind now. They can see things like that. Most of them along here are black folks and Elvis had a special feel for them. They taught him his music. He always said that. And they know by just looking at me that I’m thinking about Tina. They smile at me and say, Evening, and I dip my head when they do because I don’t want them to think I don’t appreciate who they are but it makes me feel real funny this night because they’re right. I’m thinking of the looks she says she’s been giving me and I can see her eyes on me from across the classroom and they are flat blue and when they fix on me they don’t move, they always wait for me to turn away, and I always do, and now I think maybe she’s been seeing as much about me as these folks on the stoops. Maybe more. I think maybe when I show her who I am, she’ll just say real low, but in wonder, “I knew it all along.”

Then I’m past Pelican Liquors and the boarded up Piggly Wiggly and a bottle gang is shaping up for the evening on the next corner and they lift their paper bags to me and I just hurry on and I can see a containership slipping by at the far end of the street and I have to keep myself from running. I walk. I don’t want to be sweating a lot when I get there. I just walk. But walking makes my mind turn. Mama’s robe falls open and I look away as quick as I can but I see the center of her chest like you sometimes see the light after you turn it off, she comes out of her bedroom and her robe falls open and I see the hollow of her chest, nothing more, and when I turn away I can still see her chest and it’s naked white and I wonder why Elvis didn’t appear there. She could’ve kept her own secret then and known his too, and there wouldn’t never had to be nobody else involved in the whole thing.

I’m walking real slow now. I even stop. The ship has passed and it looks like the street up ahead just runs off into nothing. I can’t see the river. But I know it’s there and the warehouse is not far now and I hear a sound nearby and I leap a little inside and I turn and it ain’t nothing but an old hound up on its back legs trying to get into a trash can. I watch him for a long time and he turns his head once, one of his ears flopping over his nose, and then he goes on trying to get in, though it doesn’t look like he ever will.

And then I see that the light is starting to slip away and I better get on, if I’m going to do this thing. And I turn down the next street and I can see the river now and I follow it and the warehouse has a chain link fence as high as my house but it’s cut in a few places and I find Tina on the other side already and she sees me and she comes my way. She’s wearing a stretchy top with ruffles around the shoulders and her stomach’s bare and she’s in shorts and I haven’t seen her legs till now, not really, and they’re nice, I know that, they’re longer than I figured, and we both have our fingers curled through the fence links and we are nose to nose just about and she says, “Get on in here.”

I go in and she says “I was worried you wasn’t coming” and I find out I don’t have anything to say to that and she smiles like she’s remembering that she told me I don’t have to talk good. But I can tell she’s misunderstood that. I talk okay in my head. I just can’t let it out. She says, “I don’t know this place so well. Where should we go?”

I nod my head in the direction of the end of the warehouse, on the river side, and I feel a lock of my hair fall onto my forehead and we move off and the ground is uneven, rutted and grown over with witch grass and full of stones and pipes and glass, and she brushes against me again and again, keeping close, and I think to take her hand or put my arm around her, but I don’t. I want this to go slow. We walk and she’s saying how glad she is that I come, how she likes me and how she is really on her own more or less in her life and she has learned how to know who’s okay and who isn’t and I’m okay.

And I still don’t say anything and I couldn’t even if I wanted to because I’m shaking inside pretty bad and we enter the warehouse through a door that says danger on it and inside it’s dark but you can feel the place on your face and in your lungs, how big it is and how high, even though you can’t see real clear at this time of day, you just see the run of gray windows down the river side and dust hanging everywhere and there’s that wet and rotted smell but Tina says “Oh wow” and she presses against me and I let my arm go around her waist and her arm comes around mine and I take her into the manager’s office. The light’s still coming in clear in the room and there are some old mattresses and it doesn’t smell too good but a couple of the windows are punched open and it’s mostly the river smell and the smell of dust, which ain’t too bad, and I let go of Tina and cross to the window and I look at the water, just that. The river is empty at the moment and the last of the sun is scattered all over it and there’s this scrabbling in me, like Elvis goes way deeper there than my skin and he’s just woke up and is about to push himself out the center of my chest. I want to try to say something now. Not say. There’s words that want to come but it feels like a song or something. I try to slow myself down so I can do this right.

Then I turn around to look at Tina and she must have gotten herself ready for this too because as soon as I’m facing her where she’s standing in the slant of light, she strips off her top and her breasts are naked and I fall back a little against the window. It’s too fast. I’m not ready, I think. But she seems to be waiting for me to do something, and then I think: she knows. It’s time. So I drag my hand to the top button of my shirt and I undo it and then the next button and the next and I step aside a little, so the light will fall on me when I’m naked there and she circles so she can see me and then the last button is undone and I grasp the two sides and I can’t hardly breathe and then I pull open my shirt.