Why then is this people of Jerusalem slidden
back by perpetual backsliding? They hold
fast deceit, they refuse to return.
— Jeremiah 8:5
Slipping and sliding
Peeping and a hiding
Been so a long time ago.
— Little Richard
The singer on the radio show called “Tried and True Tunes” was chanting over and over that there’s a bad moon on the rise, and Waylon McPhee was struck by the truth of that as he pulled his car into the driveway of his father’s house. Midday though it was, the moon hung like a stone in the sky above the rooflines of the Helena Street addition, reflected sunlight blazing from its white face so strongly that Waylon felt like looking off to avoid eyestrain.
A little out of phase, Waylon thought, like everything else on the Gulf Coast had come to be these days. Not wrong in itself, just wrong in the timing. Even the heavenly bodies are falling out of step. One of the celestial gears has slipped a little and thrown all the functions off a tad, interfered a little with the chain drive that makes it all go. Not enough to shut things down completely, not enough to grind it all to a shivering halt, but sufficient to throw things out of synch.
“Take me, for instance, Mister Moon,” Waylon said aloud, leaning forward to cut the ignition, his voice loud enough in the sudden silence after the singer was stopped in mid-note that he dropped it to a near whisper. “Here you are, a creature of the night, having to hang around in the hot middle of the day, and here I am moving back home with Dad.”
He knew he ought to toot the Chevy’s horn to announce his homecoming. Charlie McPhee had raised his children to do that, along with requiring a thousand other little rituals which taken together constituted what it was to be a member of the family, according to Charlie, believing as he did that repetition faithfully observed would hold off change, make things stay the way they were a while longer, maybe even avert calamity forever.
Hasn’t worked, though, Charley, has it, Waylon said to himself. It’s finally got out of kilter, just like that moon hanging up there. You’re going to drag yourself out of the house in a minute here, whether I blow my horn or not, trying to look cheerful, but you’re going to be what you are. A sad old man with his wife now dead and gone and his son moving back home to save rent, eat your groceries, use up all your hot water every morning and look about him for signs and wonders.
By the time Waylon had walked around to the rear of the car, popped the trunk, and begun to pull and tug at the cardboard boxes holding just about all he owned, Charley McPhee still hadn’t done what he always did when somebody showed up at his house. That was to make a rush toward the new arrival, arms open wide as he scampered toward initial contact, his high chortle filling the air, and whatever he had been holding when he heard the guest arrive still grasped tight in his fist. A screwdriver, a fish scaler, a blue plastic razor, an expired coupon, whatever happened to be at hand.
Waylon’s first box was giving him trouble as he pulled at it, wedged in between the two others in the trunk, and he jumped so suddenly when he heard his father say hello that he banged his head against the lid.
“Dad,” he said, rubbing his sore spot, “I didn’t know you were home, quiet as it is around here.”
“Well, Waylon, you are a lucky man to catch me home this time of day,” Charlie McPhee said. “I got to admit. Good thing you told me you were on the way back home or I might not’ve been here. And I might not be back here tonight at all, even if you have just got here. You just as well not wait up for me.”
“Why’re you so busy, Dad?” Waylon said, pulling with both hands and pushing with one foot on the bumper. It seemed to him there should be some aid coming his way from simple gravity, eventually. He felt something give, and the box began to slip reluctantly toward him. Encouraged, he leaned back harder, and the box picked up speed. It was well past the lip of the car body now and on its way to the rear bedroom.
“You working the graveyard shift tonight?” he asked and balanced the box of clothes and shoes on the front edge of the car trunk. “Is that it?”
“Nope,” Charlie McPhee said with vigor and edged out of the cool garage toward the Chevrolet backed up into his driveway. “I don’t work graveyard these days. Exxon put a stop to that when I turned sixty-five years of age and went temporary. Union rules. You knew that already, didn’t you? What’s that yellow thing you got there in that cereal food box?”
Waylon began responding to his father’s questions, one answer to match each push he was giving the box of his shirts and pants and socks and underwear. “Yeah, I already knew. I just forgot for a minute. It’s a warm-up jacket.”
“What you need that for? Not warm enough for you? What size is it? A small?”
“It’s for when you go jogging early in the morning when it might be cold. It’s a medium and won’t fit you,” Waylon said. He look at his father. “Why won’t you be back here tonight, then? If you’re not working graveyard. Are you in some kind of group grief therapy program or something you have to go to at night?”
Charlie McPhee made a smoothing motion with both hands down the front of his white pullover shirt as though he was feeling for imperfections in the knit. “No,” he said. “You have to handle grief alone, Waylon. It’s not a group thing, see. You got to hug it right up to you, all by yourself.”
“That’s what you think,” Waylon said. “That’s what they told you.”
“That’s what I know. And you may not see me again until later tomorrow afternoon. Maybe not even before suppertime.”
Waylon paused long enough to allow Charlie time to smooth the front of his shirt where it met his beltline before speaking again.
“It’s a woman, I guess, huh?”
“A lady,” Charlie McPhee said, dropping his mouth open into a grin wide enough to show the bottom row of his teeth caps. “But she’s a woman, too, let me tell you.”
“One of these widows on the street? Mrs. Larkin up there on the corner? Didn’t she use to come around and see Mama?”
“Nuh uh, son. Not Maude Larkin. A man doesn’t foul his own nest. I got to live here on Helena Street everyday. I keep my distance from the local stuff.”
“Local stuff? Where’d you hear that kind of talk? Who’ve you been talking to?”
“People say that all the time. Where have you been, Sonny? I guess you don’t get outside much. You got to get with the program these days.”
“You do, huh?” Waylon said and watched his father plunge both hands into the pockets of his trousers and begin to rock back and forth on the hot cement of the driveway, the tiny gold chains on his loafers glittering in the sun.
“You want to run with the big dogs you got to get off the porch,” Charlie McPhee said. “That means circulate. See and be seen. Let them know you’re on the job.” He paused for a beat and spoke again. “No offense
