If You Want Me to Stay Read Free

that guitar chug with his tongue, announcing Mr. Hot Buttered Soul himself. He said, Shaft he a bad mother hush your mouth I said then here came Tank: I’m talking about Shaft.
    All three of us said it together so loud I would not doubt Daddy could hear us:
John
Shaft.
    T HE WINDSHIELD WAS a movie screen. I described everything to my brothers: mountains and a castle and spotted horses and maidens in a hay field wearing dresses that lace up at the chest like my Chuck Taylors. There goes Grandpa on the
Beverly Hillbillies
chasing after Lady Godiva, there’s Mama and Daddy watering a garden and then sitting up on the porch stairs, her one step down, his knees pinching her tight to where she can’t go anywhere.
    I N THE GLOVE compartment Carter found two of Daddy’s wobbly old water-stained cigarettes. Because Carter’san old root hog he knew there were matches on the dash under the drift of receipts, napkins, newspaper circulars listing what’s on sale.
    He held the matchbook up to the cigarette and looked at me.
    â€œGo ahead light it up, be just like him see do I care.”
    Carter held the cigarette in his hand, twisting it.
    â€œDragons if you ask me have smoke coming out of their mouths, not people.”
    Carter twisted off the filter and the brown leaves pelted the floorboard.
    I HAD AN OLDER SISTER , she left, she couldn’t take it. She said, If this is love I’m joining the motherfucking carnival.
    Tank and Carter missed her but I tried to act like she was ill at everybody all the time which she wasn’t. She could make somebody laugh. Once when she was about Carter’s age she got mad at Mama and Daddy and ran away and when they caught up to her at the Family Mart playing pinball and asked her where she was headed anyway, she said, On a goddamn diet, and smacked the gum some old boy had bought her.
    I N D ADDY’S TRUCK : duct tape from when he used to go to work as an assistant. He assisted: carpenters, plumbers, pipe fitters, surveyors, farmers, roofers, ditch diggers, pulp wooders. He could assist near about anyone doing nearabout anything. I believe he could have done most of it himself, could have hired him some assistants, but there was the pressure in his head.
    Plastic curly rings from when you open a thing of milk.
    All these receipts. What’s he doing, fixing to file his taxes?
    A couple of tapes: Creedence which don’t work anymore or I’d have it blasting and the Sound of Philadelphia featuring Teddy Pendergrass and Gamble and Huff. Miles Davis’s
Sketches of Spain
which he used to put on whenever either Tank or Carter would not go down and he’d put one or both of them in the pickup, ride them around listening to some Trumpet Jazz, which always worked. Mama claimed it was a miracle. According to her I never had problems going to sleep, never fought it. She said I must have been born tired. What it was: I’d close my eyes and a whole other world would start to spin and I’d hang on and dearly hope.
    I’ M NOT THINKING I’m going to go to college. I might get me a job counting stuff like nail clippers in bins. Dip your hands in a sink of cool metal. You will probably find me living out in the middle of some field or in some trees on the backside of a hill or near a train-track trestle or some broken-windowed warehouses. I will be up in there all alone. People might ask are you lonely? They might stick their head in my window. Might chuck dirt clods at signs out on the road in front of my house. I’ll be behind the curtain smiling.
    T ANK AND C ARTER were hot, hungry, tired, aggravated, smelly. I could not distract them. They wanted out of that pickup.
    â€œWe haven’t seen him in an hour,” said Carter. “He’s sleep.”
    But there was no telling. When it ran its course he drifted off from the awful strain of it. Like running a marathon, I heard him tell Mama once. Slept like he was dead for twelve hours