Mr. Fontenot began to laugh, but then he groaned.
Daddy was not laughing. “Son, get your butt back to bed before I go bankrupt.”
And Little Shep and me padded down the hall and sat looking out the window in his room, trying to see what would happen next.
What happened next is about ten minutes later a big red-and-white ambulance wagon pulled into our driveway. We flew back down the hall and into the living room in time to see the attendants pick up Mr. Mitchell Fontenot and carry him out to the ambulance. Mama and the Ya-Yas and all the others were crowded around him, making over him, telling him jokes.
“You are the bravest dancer of the Twist in all of Garnet Parish!” Mama shouted out the door as the ambulance men carried him away from the house.
At the last minute, just as they were putting him in the ambulance, someone had the great idea of following Mr. Mitchell Fontenot to the hospital. The next thing we knew, all the guests were hopping into their cars, drinks in hand, and pulling out of the field where Jefferson and Carver and my bad brother had parked them.
Little Shep took off out the bedroom, down the hall, and out onto the carport. I followed him, my feet cold against the concrete, goose bumps on my arms from the February air.
“Daddy,” Little Shep asked, “are you going to the hospital? Can I go too?”
“Hell, no,” Daddy slurred. “Hospital’s no place for a bunch of crazy drunks. That’s your Mama and her friends, always making fools of themselves.” Sure enough, Mama had climbed into one of the cars and taken off with most of the party guests.
Daddy turned to Jefferson and Carver, who looked sleepy, their church clothes rumpled after sitting around waiting to help the guests into their cars. They hadn’t had a chance to do that, since the guests had flown off to the hospital. They hadn’t been tipped either.
“Boys,” Daddy said, reaching into his pocket, “yall go on into the house and get Little Shep to give you something to eat before you go home.” Then he handed both of them some folded bills and shook his head. “Yall done good. Tell your daddy I said so.”
“Shep,” he continued, turning around, “get these boys something substantial, not just that finger food. Get them some duck gumbo and French bread, you hear?”
“Yes sir,” Little Shep said. “Come on,” he told Carver and Jefferson, and led them back to the kitchen.
Back inside, only Necie and her husband Mister George Ogden (he was the only Ya-Ya husband who made all us kids call him “Mister”) were still left. Necie was in the kitchen, making a pot of coffee and starting to clean up.
“Don’t bother with that, Denise,” Daddy told her. “Willetta will do that in the morning.”
“Oh, I’m just putting the food away,” she said, and kept dripping coffee.
Daddy stood there in the kitchen, staring at Mister Ogden and Necie. I sat at the breakfast table and watched them.
Little Shep opened the door to the icebox.
“What can I help you with?” Necie asked him.
“Daddy told me to feed Carver and Jefferson.”
Necie said, “I’ll do that, Sweetie,” and took over the job.
Carver and Jefferson stood barely inside the kitchen door, not moving.
“I’ll have yall something in a minute,” Necie told them, and smiled. “Why don’t yall sit over there at the kitchen table, and—”
Mister Ogden interrupted her. “Go on out under the carport,” he told the black boys, “and we’ll bring you something to eat.”
Carver and Jefferson stepped outside. Necie tried to hide the look on her face. Sometimes Mama and the other Ya-Yas said they didn’t know why she married Mister Ogden.
Little Shep looked at Daddy. He didn’t like Mister Ogden talking like he owned the place. But Daddy hardly noticed.
“George,” Daddy finally asked, “can Mitchell sue me?” Mister Ogden was a lawyer, too. He was a district attorney. My Daddy has always been a little intimidated by lawyers.
Mister Ogden leaned back against the kitchen counter. “Technically he could, Shepley, but he’d have a hard go of it, since that back of his is always going out. Went out at the Country Club right there on the tennis court not two months ago, and he never tried to sue anyone. I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”
“You’re probably right,” Daddy told him. “I worry too goddamn much as it is.”
Mister Ogden smiled at him, like Daddy had said something so true he didn’t even need to agree.
Daddy looked at Necie. Daddy never knew how to act around the Ya-Yas, not really. Necie especially bothered him. He called her Puffhead.
“Necie, what in the hell are you doing making coffee this time of night?”
“Shep, a little demitasse is all I need to make sure that I never get a hangover.”
“I’ll be damned,” my Daddy said. And then he just sat there at the counter, staring. Sometimes when Daddy got drunk, he just sort of went away. My Daddy looked kind of lost there in his own kitchen. My brother must have sensed it, because he went and sat next to Daddy on one of the kitchen stools.
“Would you care for a demitasse?” Necie asked Daddy.
Daddy looked at her like he could not remember who this woman was, standing in front of him in his own kitchen.
“No, thank you, ma’am,” he said. “What I would like is a good, old-fashioned Alka-Seltzer.”
Necie went right to the liquor cabinet and took out the Alka-Seltzer box.
“I want one, too, Daddy,” Little Shep said.
Daddy stared dumbly at the glass of Alka-Seltzer Necie had set in front of him.
“Can I, Daddy?” Little Shep asked again.
Daddy didn’t say anything, he just stared in front of him like Little Shep and the rest of us didn’t exist.
Little Shep put his hand on Daddy’s arm. I think he wanted Daddy to remember that he was still in the room more than he wanted an Alka-Seltzer.
“Daddy! Can I please have an Alka-Seltzer?” my brother asked again, getting desperate. I hated watching him when he did this. I hated watching any of us kids when we got desperate.
Necie took two big bowls of gumbo and a plate of bread and stepped outside the kitchen door. When she came back in, she asked, “Who is taking those boys home?”
Daddy got up from the stool. He walked out, through the living room and down the hall to his bedroom. We could hear his door shut.
“George,” Necie said, “we are taking those boys home.”
Mister Ogden looked at his wife and shook his head. “John F. Goddamn Kennedy has gotten to you, hook, line, and sinker,” he said.
“This has nothing to do with President Kennedy. It has to do with two little boys sitting on the carport freezing to death and nobody to get them home. We have a car. We can drive them, and we will.”
“Just what we need: drive over to Samtown late on a Saturday night.”
Necie turned her back to him and said something under her breath that I couldn’t hear.
“Shep, you still want that Alka-Seltzer?” Necie asked my brother.
Little Shep stared at the floor and nodded his head. “Yes ma’am, I do. I want an Alka-Seltzer.”
Necie made him an Alka-Seltzer and gave it to him in a jelly glass.
He drank some, and then handed it to me. “Here, you can have the rest,” Little Shep said. “I don’t want it anymore.”
“Plop-plop fizz-fizz, oh what a relief it is,” I sang, hoping to lighten things up a little. Nobody smiled.
Necie was sipping her demitasse, watching us. “Yall okay, Sidda?”
“Yes ma’am,” I lied, “we’re just fine.”
“Yall going to be all right?” she asked again.
“Yes ma’am,” I said.
She looked at her husband, and then she led me and my brother down the hall. When we got to Little Shep’s room, I said, “Thank you, Aunt Necie, I can take it from here.”
I went into Little Shep’s room with him. He got into his bed and
lay there with his eyes closed. Then Necie came in with two warm washcloths. She bent and wiped off Little Shep’s face, real soft, kind of just patting his face. Then she kissed him on the forehead.
“You going to sleep in here tonight?” Little Shep asked me.
“Yeah, buddy,” I said, and I got into the other twin bed with Baylor, who was sound asleep. Necie came over to me and wiped my face, too. When she finished, she kissed me on my eyelid. Then she left.
“You awake?” I asked Little Shep when she was gone.
“Yeah,” he said.
“What you thinking?”
“Nothing,” he lied.
“I know you’re thinking something.”
“Okay, I was thinking, would you tickle my back?”
I climbed into bed with Shep and began to tickle his back softly with my fingernails. My brother loved being tickled this way more than anything in the world. It was something he would beg for.
“You know that song?” he whispered.
I couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying. “What?”
“You know—the Valentine song?”
“Yeah, kinda.”
“Sing it,” he whispered.
I kept tickling Little Shep’s back, and I started to sing “My Funny Valentine.” I sang it quietly while my fingertips were moving across the freckled terrain of my brother’s back. I pretended each finger was a different character with a different name, and that they had whole lives filled with secrets and adventures and important roles in the world. As I thought about these characters, I sang the words, and I felt my brother’s skin against my fingertips.
I lay awake for a long time. I knew that something big had happened to me that night. I thought about Saint Valentine writing letters of love from prison, how he had so much love in his heart that he had plenty left over to give away, even when he was in jail. On that night, I had plenty of love to spare, too. I didn’t know it, but I had just started my career in the theater. I fell asleep hearing a chorus of separate, distinct, and sometimes off-key voices harmonizing into a whole. Not perfect harmony, but harmony nonetheless.
BUCKAROO
January 1963
The day Baylor was supposed to appear on Buck Lemoine’s Junior Buckaroo Show, he woke up with a headache. Baylor had gotten headaches before. Little Shep always teased him when he got them. So Baylor never said anything about the headaches anymore. He got out of bed and padded down the hall to the bathroom, his cotton-white hair sticking out in front like he was a baby blue jay. Sidda, his oldest sister, was already camped in the bathroom, applying her new false fingernails. She barely acknowledged five-and-a-half-year-old Baylor as he entered the big blue bathroom.
“They came off in my sleep,” she told him, and went on sticking the pointed pink plastic nails to her nine-year-old fingers.
Baylor could not understand why a girl as smart as Sidda would glue plastic onto her fingers. But there was a lot he didn’t understand. So he just peed and then washed his face in the second sink.
The children’s bathroom at the Walkers’ house had three sinks. Big Shep claimed that most family fights happened in the bathroom, and he wanted to minimize the possibility of bloodshed among his four kids, who were each a year apart. So when the house was built, he made sure they put in two extra sinks. Now the bathroom had the feeling of some kind of wacky institution. Vivi and Big Shep’s cocktail party guests sometimes locked themselves up in the children’s bath for hours at a time because they felt protected in the blue-tiled room filled with plants and books. There was an old wicker magazine rack full of National Geographic and Life magazines in there. A big window at one end looked out on the bayou, so there was plenty of room to stretch out, or sit awhile in the old rocker that belonged to Vivi’s father before he passed away.
The bathroom was a big blue haven, and Vivi and Big Shep sometimes forgot about certain friends who tended to drink a little too much bourbon at parties and wander in there. Once Vivi forgot to check, and Lulu woke to find “Uncle” Chick still in the bathroom the next morning, asleep in the long blue bathtub. Vivi did her damnedest to always check after that, no matter how much bourbon she’d had to drink. At the end of each party, after she went around emptying ashtrays, she’d peek in the kids’ bath just to make sure it was clear for them in the morning. She had asked the rest of the Ya-Yas and their husbands to please not sleep there, but you just never could be sure.
Baylor needed to sit on the toilet, but he did not like to do it with his sisters or brother in the room. It had never felt right, but there had never seemed to be anything he could do about it. All the kids in the Walker family were supposed to share this bathroom. Sidda, Little Shep, and Lulu did it, but he had never been able to. He needed privacy. On an ordinary day, Baylor would never ask that Sidda leave while he used the toilet. Today he asked her, on the off chance that she might oblige him.
But she answered, “I must get these fingernails back on, Baylor. And besides, I was in here first.”
Baylor sighed and moved to the sink, skipping yet another morning bowel movement.
He brushed his teeth, the third one from the front still growing in. Baylor had almost all his grown-up teeth, but there were those two near the front still waiting to happen.
One night when Vivi and Big Shep came back home from New Orleans, late at night after a long weekend party in the Garden District, they remembered that Willetta had called and left a message at the Monteleone Hotel, saying that Baylor had lost a tooth. Still half tipsy from the weekend, they remembered their Tooth Fairy roles just as they pulled into the driveway, the windows rolled down in the Thunderbird, the sweet April air hitting their faces. Big Shep had nothing but a fifty-dollar bill. So they sneaked into the bedroom that Baylor shared with Little Shep, where the horseshoe-shaped nightlight and the moonlight gave just enough illumination for Vivi to see the side of her youngest child’s face. Her breath was taken away by his delicacy, his paleness, his seriousness, even in sleep. Together, the Tooth Fairies bent down, smelling of Vivi’s signature perfume, Shep’s Old Spice, and bourbon, still dressed to the nines. Vivi wore an off-the-shoulder blue evening gown that looked fabulous, even wrinkled, with her hair mussed from sleeping on the drive home. Under their baby boy’s pillow they tucked a crisp fifty-dollar bill, a Monteleone swizzle stick, and three pralines from the French Quarter. When Baylor woke up the next morning, he was astonished to find fifty dollars for one tooth.
“Fifty buckerinos!” he exclaimed upon awakening, using one of his big brother’s words. It was like an act of God. He could not imagine what he had done to deserve it. They usually only got a fifty-cent piece.
Even though the other kids complained that they had never got that much for a dumb tooth, Big Shep could never ask Baylor for any of the money back.
Most of the time, Big Shep did not know how to act with Baylor. Baylor seemed like a prince from another world to him; the boy’s sense of refinement made Big Shep feel clumsy. Now his oldest son, Little Shep, he knew how to roughhouse with. But Baylor was like a ghost to his father, like a reminder of a dream Shep Walker had once in which, in front of a group of his father’s friends, he suddenly discovered he was both a man and a woman at the same time, and had to decide what his real name was.
Baylor studied himself in the mirror with complete concentration. He was four feet tall, skinny as all get-out, with huge brown eyes that looked slightly sad. His complexion was olive, a rare combination with such light hair. His ears didn’t yet fit his head, and he feared they never would. There was enough talk about his ears. His older cousins, every time they saw him, said, “Hey Bay-Boy, when you gonna grow into those ears?!” And then they laughed.
He didn’t want to look stupid on television. He gently worked his white-blond hair with a touch of Brylcreem like Big Shep showed him to do, but still, there was this tuft that stuck up in front. That was the reason they sometimes called him “Jaybird.” He held his ears closer to his head for a moment, just to
see what it looked like.
Without seeming to look up, Sidda said, “Bay, your ears are fine. You have fine cowboy ears.”
He liked his sister. She was mostly nice to him, took up for him. She once stopped Little Shep from making him drink a glass of Tabasco sauce, after Shep claimed it was “thick strawberry Kool-Aid.”
After he finished up in the bathroom, Baylor went back into the room he shared with Little Shep. He had laid out his clothes the night before: the black cowboy outfit and matching boots his daddy had given him for Christmas, and a red cowboy hat. Even if he had a holster, he would not wear it. Holsters are dumb, Baylor thought, and Baylor was not dumb. His head still hurt, and he definitely should use the toilet. This was always the case: the longer he waited to use the toilet, the more his head ached. Maybe Sidda was out of the bathroom by now. Down the hall again. Peeked in. She was still in there, gluing and pressing the false fingernails down over her own short stubby ones. She looked up at him when he lingered there for a minute. “I cannot get the thumb to stick,” she complained.
Can’t she tell? Doesn’t she know? Today is my day. I need the bathroom to myself.
Maybe Mama and Daddy’s bathroom, Baylor thought. The Walker children were not allowed to use the adult bathroom except in the most dire emergencies, such as the flu. Maybe this qualified as one. He was, after all, going to be on television. He would, after all, be seen by every single person in Thornton, Louisiana. He was representing his family.
It was very quiet back in his parents’ room, Baylor noticed. Maybe they were still asleep. Then he heard giggles from the bathroom. A tiny Vivi squeal. Not still asleep. Playing in the bathroom again. Vivi and Big Shep loved their bathroom. It led out to a small patio out back. There was never any telling what they were doing in there. Baylor knew better than to disturb them.
He must be at K-Dixie-BS-TV at eight-thirty sharp for Buck Lemoine’s Junior Buckaroo Show. Kids who got there late could not go on television, they made that clear. Baylor looked down at the watch that Uncle Chick gave him for Christmas. It was already ten minutes after eight!