into the house and stole my panties.”
“Mrs. Mack,” he said, “I ain’t got a wife. And once we get on the road, you can buy all the underwear you need.”
“But I want my panties!”
“All right. I’ll tell her to bring them back, okay?” He knew she’d find her underwear in a drawer in her room.
“Lester Ray!” she exclaimed suddenly, “what are you doing here?”
“I came to let you know we got the car fixed. We can leave any time you want. I just got to go home and get some clothes and stuff.” He was praying that his father would not be there to make a scene. Not that his father cared where he went, or even that he was leaving, but he would not want him to go, because it was Lester Ray leaving and not him. Lester Ray might even have skipped the clothes, but he had to retrieve the picture of his mother from where he’d hidden it. He would never leave without that.
“Can you pack your suitcase?” Lester Ray asked.
“Of course I can, young man, I’m not a moron,” she said.
On the way down the sandy street to his house Lester Ray met Baby John on his mule, and the sight gave him a surprising stab of sadness. He would not miss much in Piper, but he realized with a jolt that he would miss Baby John, and he would not have thought he would since he rarely thought of him when he didn’t see him. Baby John had been riding his mule up and down Commissioners Street ever since Lester Ray could remember. That’s all he did all day, ride the mule up and down the street with no apparent purpose other than to do it. He was forty years old, and he lived with his elderly parents in a little white house up the road from Lester Ray, the third one, if you were counting, from the city dump.
“Evenin, Baby John,” Lester Ray said. Baby John was barefoot and wore faded, patched overalls without a shirt. There was no saddle on the mule, not even a blanket, and the bridle was cotton rope.
“Evenin,” Baby John said. “I’m gonna sang in church.” He held his index finger in the air and waved it around as though he were keeping time to music that only he could hear. He would always say that same thing if anyone spoke to him. He rode his mule to all the little country churches around Piper, whichever ones were having dinner on the ground that day, and he would get up during the service and sing. Nobody could understand what he was singing, could not tell if it were a religious song or not, maybe something popular he’d heard on the radio. Lester Ray had wondered if maybe what he was singing was something nasty or blasphemous, but he guessed that as long as the people couldn’t understand it they didn’t care.
It’s strange how you can sometimes tell if someone is home—is in the house—just by looking at it from the outside. Not chimney smoke or a car in front or lights on: it just looks different, like the presence of a live, warm body inside causes the outside appearance to subtly change, to undergo some chemical alteration. When Lester Ray looked at their house he knew his father was at home for the first time in over three weeks. He knew without a doubt that when he opened the door and went inside he would find his father either on the settee in the living room, at the kitchen table, or sprawled across his fetid bed, knew it so veraciously that it would have been cheating to have bet somebody money on it.
Earl Holsomback was at the kitchen table, a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in his hand. There was a woman with him. She was at least as old as Earl was but she had on a kittenish, frilly pink dress, with ruffles all over it, like some little girl would wear. She had smeared her lipstick all around her mouth, outside her lips; Lester Ray supposed it was to make her lips look larger and more inviting, but she had failed miserably in the effort. His father was wearing a green mechanic’s coverall jumpsuit with ROGER stitched over the front top pocket in orange thread.
“Hey, boy,” his father said, “pull up a chair.”
“I ain’t got time,” Lester Ray said.
“Hoo-de-do, what you got to do thass so important you can’t set down here and meet Sherry.”
“I got somewhere to be,” Lester Ray said. He went over to a small chifferobe, missing one leg and propped on a brick, and began to stuff his few clothes into a pillowcase.
“What you doin, boy?” his father asked.
“Mrs. McCrory’s gonna wash my clothes for me. She’s got an automatic washer.”
His father turned to the woman and said, chuckling, “This here Mrs. McCrory’s his girl friend.”
“Hmmm, I’d be his girl friend anytime,” she said.
“He ain’t but fourteen years old, he’s just a boy,” Earl said. “Shut that shit up!”
“Uh-huh, I know he’s a boy! Hey, sugar, you wanna be my boyfriend?”
“Cut it out, Sherry,” Earl said. “Lester Ray, you fuckin that old woman yet?”
Lester Ray whirled on his heel. He stared at his father, at the two of them. They were both drunk. Their eyes were swimmy, and it was an effort for them to focus on him. The woman had flat circles of rouge on her cheeks, uneven and smudged, her face like that of some plump baby doll that had been discarded, thrown away in the trash. Her hair was an unnatural white, like a cloud around her head. He looked at his father, at his caved-in mouth that was framed in a crooked, self-satisfied mock.
“You ever say anything like that again,” Lester Ray said, “and I’ll ram that goddamed beer can down your fuckin throat.”
“Awww, come on,” Earl said. “I’s just makin a joke. Can’t I make a joke?”
Lester Ray’s disgust and anger bristled inside him. He could feel it, a physical thing, like a fist shaking inside his chest. He had most of his clothes in the pillowcase now. He almost forgot his red nylon jacket. He went over and took it down from a nail in the wall behind the door. He shoved it down into the pillowcase.
“Wait a minute, now,” his father said, “I want to talk to you.”
“Well, I don’t want to talk to you,” he said.
“No, listen now. There’s jobs for us over there at Crestview, at a new paper mill they’re buildin.”
“Fuck your jobs, and fuck you,” Lester Ray said. He started to move toward the door.
“Goddam you, boy, you can’t talk to your daddy like that,” Earl said, getting to his feet. He moved with surprising quickness to between Lester Ray and the door. “You better apologize, and do it now.”
“Apologize to you?! Don’t make me laugh.”
They were close together and Lester Ray could smell him, the biting stink of his body, the soiled jumpsuit he must have been wearing for days, the beer stale on his breath. His smells were coming out of his pores like sweat and mingling all over him until the rancid odor was simply him. It would be hard to know where his smell ended and he began. Lester Ray suddenly knew—it felt as though the fist that had been trembling inside his chest had abruptly dropped into his belly—that to him this was the smell of fatherhood, all the fathering and parenting he had ever known. It was a huge void that was only partially filled by Mrs. McCrory, who had nurtured him for his entire young life even though she was not blood kin, was not his mother and never could be. She was not obligated to do it, but she did. And he would pay her back and try to care for her in
