If You Want Me to Stay

by Michael Parker

Genres: Sagas

Synopsis

Joel Junior's daddy has gone off again. And since his mama and big sister got fed up and left, he's in charge of little brothers Carter and Tank. But Daddy's got Carter, and Joel and Tank need to get away.

So with no one to guide him but the soul singers in his head, Joel sets off with Tank to learn the truth about love. This work by PEN/Hemingway Award winner Michael Parker is at once funny, touching, and utterly heartbreaking.

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 192

Sample

THAT MORNING MY DADDY went off for the worst time, I was listening to some Rufus Thomas. “Push and Pull,” I believe it was, or maybe it was “Walking the Dog”? Both of them feature a saxophone sounds like it’s sliding upside you in bed on a bone cold night, and look—there are just certain songs which, look, if you hear them and your ass does not in anyway respond, I am talking not the slightest slow-twitch muscle memory if you’re old and the minimal sway if you’re still young enough to shake it, well, look—it’s hopeless. Give it up. What is even the point?

I had Rufus turned up loud while I fixed breakfast for my little brothers. Froot Loops and canned peaches which Carter likes them drained and Tank cares nothing for the peaches themselves, he’s all over the syrup. Ten in the morning and Carter and Tank were playing up under their bed with soup spoons to catapult plastic army sergeants up into the box springs. I had called them and I had called them.

I stood in the kitchen, moving to Rufus. It occurred to me to wonder where my daddy was but when he’s All Clear he likes to get up early and mess around outside. He’s got a vegetable garden going every season he’s well enough to get something in the ground good after the last hard frost. Me and Tank and Carter, we used to help him out hoeing and especially watering which we liked because Tank would plant his sergeants in the furrows and we’d flood their asses head over heel down out of there when the levee broke high up in the pretend mountains (there being nothing higher than an anthill within fifty miles of our corner of southeastern North Carolina) flooding also in addition to the sergeants, Tank’s namesake tanks, my long-gone older sister’s troll dolls, Cracker Jacks we would be eating to keep up our strength while hoeing and watering and whatever else pack-rat Carter would stick out there to get obliterated by the awesome force of nature. But sooner than later it turned itchy and hot out in that garden and my daddy would tell us it’s okay boys y’all are now officially off the clock and we’d get on our bikes and take off. Bye now, Daddy, you better put on some sunscreen! He’d holler back at us to be sure and hydrate. We might see him again in an hour or sometimes not until suppertime, it did not matter when he was All Clear.

The Froot Loops were puffing up, pink-milk-soaked for nearly an hour while I did not bother looking out for my daddy and called to my brothers who did not come and did not come. Could have been they hollered something smart-assed back at me. Likely I had turned up Rufus even louder, was walk walk walking that dog or doing that dance they call the Push and Pull. All I know is somehow I felt it, through the sweet saxophone and a rhythm section so slaphappy it slung water out of the muddy Mississippi all over them boys’ breakfasts when I went to pour some milk in their glasses: the end of the All Clear in my poor daddy’s head.

I went in the bedroom I shared with Tank and Carter and found them up under the bed with soup spoons acting like they had never heard somebody calling their names. First I tried to coax them out but then it got even louder, end of All Clear. Rufus fading like my daddy had ahold of the dial, and I dropped down on the floor and slid in under there to where I could grab Tank by the scrawny shoulder and yanked him out and told him to run outside, wait for us in the yard. Then I did the same for Carter, who put up more of a fight because he’s more of a fighter. I had him by the bygod hair by the end of it which, he loves his long yellow hair. Grabbing hold of it is a last resort but it works like last resorts are supposed to until they don’t anymore. I can’t say whether there was something else I could have pulled to make his hair a next-to-last resort. I would like to think there is always say another something to do to get someone to act right but then growing up with my daddy when he was half the time gone off and my sister who seems like she got to the bottom of her patience for all of us around the time she learned to cuss and my mama who had left by that time too, it’s hard to believe people have a little bit of themselves on hold like what my mama called her mad money, stashed away in a secret place for when you dearly need to spend it. When it comes down to it, though, you’re better off using yourself as an example than you are other people and it seems like I am the type that will put up with right much so long as I think the person I’m putting up with is mostly worth it. Lots of people including the great soul singers of the sixties and seventies me and my daddy and Carter and Tank so dearly love have made mistakes in their lives or got mixed up in some trouble they never left out of their houses seeking. Myself I like to listen to what all that mistake-making and I-didn’t-seek-you trouble has left in the way of I think they call it a legacy. I know that somebody stood fast by the singers of my sweet songs.

I got those boys out in the yard and then into the truck in flat seconds. Usually, too late was what it was when the rumbling started in my daddy’s head. Sneak close up on him when he’d gone off and you could almost hear it in there, distant like a TV turned too up in a blue buzzing house you pass by down a dark street. Sometimes I could feel it building from the next room over. I’d need to get us out of the house before he blew. Else, hide.

Now when I think of that last time, it feels separated into little here and there boxes. I have to tell it the way it comes to me and that day, now, feels broken, not one continuous song like what happened afterward but more like someone’s tuning a radio and stopping to seek out a chorus or a guitar solo, then getting impatient or bored and moving on to the next station.

Daddy’d parked full out in the sun. It was boiling. Ten in the morning and I had not yet got those boys to eat any breakfast.

I grabbed the wheel of the pickup like I was going to haul us out of there for good. Like my sister, and my mama. Sheriff Deputy Rex when he come for us next to last time said, “You poor boys. Must be awful stuck way the hell out here by yourselves when your pa goes off his rocker.” “No,” I said (knowing by the way he said “rocker” he wasn’t the one going to save us), “it teaches me go on ahead do it now, don’t wait until you’re in bed, lie awake forever worrying why did you not.”

“Why did you not do what?”

“Whatever it is needs doing,” I said. I could see I had confused the man. He shook his big slow head. Sheriff Deputy Rex you could tell did not suffer sheriff deputy training to be carrying three dirty boys around to county agencies after a neighbor called to report their daddy was out in the yard howling at dead dogs again. It was not manly and we boys hummed (When was the last time y’all came upside some soap? asked Sheriff Deputy Rex.) and besides, unless our daddy actually went ahead and bodily harmed or sexually messed with us which he wasn’t about to ever do we always ended up back down in the country with him. Sheriff Deputy Rex said several times he knew my daddy and liked my daddy when he was acting right in the head that is but he had never actually laid eyes on my mama. He said it in a way suggested there wasn’t any mama, which got away with me big-time. I said, “You want me to describe her to you?” He said, “Shoot.” I said, “She’s got gold hair and shiny green eyes but the rest of her’s like underwater, you know?” Mr. Sheriff Deputy Rex studied my brothers in the rearview mirror then looked at me over his boxy shades and said, “Oh, okay, I hear you, bossman.”

In the truck I tuned out Tank and Carter’s growling stomachs and said to Mama, I don’t relish sky. Bottom of the ocean’s nothing to me but wet ridges, flooded old stubbly cornfield. Other people’s mystery places ain’t nothing to me. Places I crave are attic and basement. Dark and secret, filled with things people think they don’t need anymore.

Ma, I want a basement, I said.

Don’t say ain’t, she said. Baby, look: down there so close to the ocean it’d fill with water before you could shovel out the sand.

Maybe where you’re at then?

She sends me her address and I climb down off the train and shuffle along crowded sidewalks until I hear her voice floating down from way up in some hotel. Darling, come right up for iced tea and Fig Newtons!

I climb all out of breath up there. I don’t want doors closing on me I can’t open, so no elevator for me. She’s standing outside her room fully dressed under I think you call it a kimono. The lobby smells like elegantly got-up people who live irregardless in tiny rooms and cook soup on red electric coils.

I say to Ma waiting in the hall, How come you up and left us out there alone with him?

Don’t cuss, I swear I’ll fall apart on you if you cuss me, she says.

It’s my sister who’s got the foul mouth, I ain’t about to cuss her.

Then she says (louder, as if I’m going to have trouble understanding this), I worried it might spread.

It ain’t the chicken pox, I tell her.

Isn’t, she says. See, Joel Junior, I slept beside your daddy and it got to where I could hear it in there even when he was All Clear. I’d put my ear up to his, hear that conch shell roar.

So you took the TV and left us there with him?

No, hell no, honey, that’s not what happened. He took a golf club to that box to rid it of what he said were corrupt law enforcers. See, I got to where I could hear it all the time. I was always expecting it, even when he showed no signs of going off, even when he was the sweetest, funniest man I loved in this wide world.

So you were thinking it was better just to leave us to deal with it?

Y’all go outside and play, she says, which is what she always used to say to any one or all four of us whenever we asked her something she did not much want to answer. She goes inside her room and I follow and she lights a cigarette off a candle. A candle? Who burns one not in a state of emergency? I was thinking she had her new candlelit, high-up-in-some-hotel life and it won’t real, while back in the truck Tank and Carter were wanting to know why Daddy woke them up early hollering out in the yard at the neighbor’s been-dead dog.

We sat in the truck, doors locked, windows shut. Inside, Daddy had taken his hunting knife to the mattresses again looking that money, that money. He brought the stuffing out of the mattress in handfuls onto the porch where he washed his hands of it, I’m through with you, cotton! Tank, watching mattress guts fluff off Daddy’s fingers into the daylilies Mama planted in the dappled dirt where the gutters dump rainwater during a storm said, “Daddy’s snowing.”

Mama, if it’s catching we will get it, I say.

She says, Oh no baby you won’t either it’s not something would dare inhabit a child.

Once I asked my sister before she left what in the world was wrong with our daddy and she said when she was little our mama left our daddy and took his pickup and found another man to get with. She said this was what was wrong with him, having to see his wife’s boyfriend driving his own blue truck with the my child is an honor student at trent hills elementary school sticker around town. He didn’t say nothing, according to my sister. He just shrugged whenever anyone asked him about it, said, What can you do, jack? Then my mama came back to him and had more babies but it was too late, the pressure had built up in his head.

“Un-unh,” I said. “You’re a lie.”

“What do you think it is then?”

“I think he was born that way.”

“You better hope not,” said my sister, and I asked her what she meant but she was through talking to me about Daddy’s problems and pretty soon she was through with all of us.

Up in the cab of the pickup some Pop Rocks Carter had stashed in the seat cushion and half a crumbly pack of Nabs were all we had for lunch and supper too. Thank goodness for the empty Coke bottle and the empty quart of oil in the floorboards. Already Tank was twisting and grabbing his mess and after a little bit of this he squealed I got to go and I made Carter hold the quart of oil while Tank filled it with his bubbly pee. Carter wasn’t happy with this assignment. He said he won’t holding no pee bottle. I told him if he didn’t he could go back inside, hang with Daddy. Sometimes I talked awful to Carter but not really to Carter, he was just standing in. But he didn’t know that. He turned his head and held the god-durn bottle. I told Tank stick his skinny thing up to the mouth but don’t go down in it. Don’t get stuck now, I told Tank. Carter’s head was turned but I heard his smile. Flies buzzed. Plastic thundered as he let rip.

Tank fell asleep with his mouth open. His pee quart frothing on the floorboard. Carter caught me mumbling.

“Who you talking to?”

I screwed up bad. I said: “Mom.”

“Mama?”

“Babies say mama.”

“Where’s she at?”

My eyes went lazy-slack. I came close to saying, “Y’all go outside and play.”

But I said nothing because soon it would be dark down at the edge of the lawn and the woods woul. . .