Five Stories

Elvis

The day Elvis died, my father said we had to go out and buy his records, because one day they would be valuable. There might not be any left, he said, but we had to try. So we went out. We went from record store to record store, places we’d never been before, little shops, one in an old house. My father looked them up in the phonebook. He bought I don’t know how many Elvis records.

This was in Shreveport, Louisiana. In 1954, Elvis had performed there, at the Municipal Auditorium. The show that night went out on a radio program called the Louisiana Hayride. Later, Elvis signed a deal whereby he would play the Hayride every Saturday for one year. He was nineteen. This was just something you learned, growing up in Shreveport.

I don’t remember my father ever playing his Elvis records. I’m not sure he liked music. Sometimes, in the mornings, he blasted classical music, whatever was on the classical station. But that was just about getting my brother and me out of bed, more than anything else.

Which Way

I was just a kid, and it was raining. We were having a garage sale, my family, and it started to rain, and I think I yelled, It’s starting to rain, like letting everyone know the obvious, and my father asked which way the rain was coming. I think he wanted to know was the rain coming into the garage, was it getting the stuff wet. Well, I went out into the rain and looked up, trying to see which way the rain was coming. It was falling diagonally. Let’s say to the left, but I don’t honestly remember. So I started jumping up and down, saying, It’s falling this way. And I was like waving my arms in the air, in that leftward direction, tracing the path, like I was the rain.

I remember people laughed at this, the few people at the sale. But it seems right to me still, what I did. The rain was falling that way.

Houston

It was moving day. The family—the father, the mother, and their two sons—stopped at a McDonald’s for lunch.

We’re almost there, the father said. That’s our subdivision. He pointed across the parking lot, where an overgrown field gave way to lines of houses.

The boys looked out the car windows. It was a flat place, but big, bigger than what they were used to. The roads were wide, with many lanes.

The father said he would just go inside. It’ll be quicker, he said. They were meeting the moving truck at the new house. They had to be there at a certain time.

The boys waited with their mother, watching traffic, thinking, nobody saying much. A man went in after the father. He was old and black and he wore a suit. It wasn’t a nice suit, but it looked like maybe it had been nice once.

A few minutes later, the father was back. He had the food. That French-fry smell in the car, it smelled so good. The father handed the boys their burgers and whatnot. Did you see that gentleman who came in after me? he said. He gave the mother a glance.

They had.

Guy had a sawed-off shotgun, the father said.

The mother made a surprised sound. The older son said, What?

What’s a saw-off shotgun? the younger son asked.

It’s a gun, the father said. But it’s been modified, to make it shorter, so a person can conceal it. That’s the idea anyway.

The older son looked at his brother like, How stupid are you?

I didn’t see a gun, the older son said.

Well, he had it stuck down his pants, the father said.

The older son didn’t say anything, then he asked, How did you see it?

The father looked in the rearview mirror. He was walking funny, the father said. I noticed that right away. He had this way of walking, very stiff on one side.

The older son tried to remember how the man walked, but he couldn’t picture it. The more he thought about it, the less he believed his father, but at the time, he trusted him.

I saw it poking out, the father said. The gun, from his pants.

Nobody said anything. The mother looked at the father, and he laughed. Boopsie! the mother said. That was what she called him. Boopsie could mean different things at different times, but at the moment it meant something like, Jesus, what are we doing?

The father grinned and patted her leg. Welcome to the Wild West, baby, he said.

Years later, when the older son was in high school, there was a boy, a classmate of his, whose father was killed in a holdup. He was shot. That was what everybody said. The boy’s father had just gone out to the store. It was at night, and he was in line, checking out, when the robbers came in, and they shot him. Some people said he had refused to give the robbers his watch or maybe it was his wallet. Not long after, the boy and his family moved away. That was all anybody knew.

The Race

He and his brother were racing. The father was timing them on his stopwatch, to see how fast they were. They ran separately, first the older brother and then the younger. The younger brother was three years younger. They were supposed to run down the block, around the corner, and then down a short street, a cul-de-sac, where the older brother’s good friend had lived before he moved away. They ran all the way around the cul-de-sac, past the friend’s house, and back home. That was the course.

They raced a few times, and each time the younger brother beat the older brother by so many seconds.

The father said, You’re going to let your brother beat you?

The older brother wanted to run again, to redeem himself. So they did. He ran as fast as he could, full out, but still his time was not as fast as his younger brother’s best time. If anything, he ran slower. He was getting tired. It was the third or fourth time they had run.

Then it was the younger brother’s turn to run again. He stood at the starting line. The father reset his watch. On your mark, he said. Get set, go!

The younger brother was off, running, and the father cheered him on. When the younger brother turned the corner, the older brother ran after him.

The father called out. What are you doing?

But the older brother kept going. He ran close to the houses, and when he got to the corner, he dropped to the ground next to some bushes and he looked. He watched his brother. When his brother reached the end of the cul-de-sac, he ran across the street and then started to come back, instead of running all the way around the cul-de-sac. He was cutting a whole big section off the course.

The older brother ran back to the father, yelling.

He’s cheating, he said. He’s totally cheating. And then he told him what he’d seen.

When the younger brother returned, the father laid into him. We do not cheat, he said. We do not lie. You are not a cheater, do you understand me?

The younger brother looked at the older brother, like how did he find out?

What happened next, the older brother couldn’t remember exactly. But the racing was over, and they went inside. Maybe the younger brother had to go straight to his room. Maybe he got hit. They were often punished for much less.

This was in Houston, in the 1980s. Once the neighborhood flooded so bad that people floated in canoes down the street. Another time, a neighbor’s house was broken into—the neighbor across the street, whose house backed up to the woods. The robber had been in the house when the neighbors came home, and then he ran out the back door and disappeared into the woods. They never caught him. This scared the older brother. For several nights he had trouble sleeping. He stayed up drawing pictures of castles, and his parents stayed up with him, letting him draw. It was not all bad, his childhood, when he thought about it. There were moments he felt tenderly about, even thankful for.

Recently, the older brother got it in his head that he ought to look up the old house on the computer. He found it of course; it was easy. He looked at which window was his bedroom window. The trees had gotten so big. They had planted them. He had helped his father dig the holes. They had installed lengths of pipes that went deep into the ground, so that when they watered the trees, the roots got water deep underground, not just on the surface. The father said this was to encourage the roots to grow down, so they would not crack the foundation. The older brother wondered if the pipes were still there, and if the current residents knew what they were for. Watering had been one of his jobs, growing up.

In the pictures of the old house, he saw the people who lived there now. A man was in the front yard with a shovel, and some other people were in the garage. They were having a garage sale that day, when the car that took the pictures had driven by. Their faces were blurred out, but he could see that they were waving to the car.

He started to drive around then, on his computer, just looking at the old neighborhood. He drove around the course that he and his brother had run. He saw the house that was his friend’s house. He saw the garage where they hid from these older kids who were chasing them, he can’t remember why now. Then he drove to the pool, where they swam, and the elementary school where he went for fifth grade. His family had moved when he was in the fifth grade. His first day was Valentine’s Day. The kids were all exchanging Valentines, and some—a few—gave him a Valentine. The cards were blank, he remembered, the ones he got. But he thought that was nice. Nobody knew he’d be there. He had just appeared in the classroom, and he got Valentines. Be my Valentine, they said. You are my special Valentine. That sort of thing.

He passed the elementary school and turned right, and then he found the tennis courts, where he and his brother played tennis. He did all this without thinking which way to go. He made no wrong turns. He was never lost.

Sleepovers

Tommy gave me a tour: couple of bedrooms, a bathroom, the usual. We stopped in front of two folding doors. This, he said, opening them, is my sister’s. It was a closet packed full of dishes, kitchen things, a crockpot in a box, sheets, towels.

Is she moving?

Tommy shook his head. It’s her dowry. He looked at me.

I’d never heard the word.

For when she gets married.

She’s getting married?

No. But when she does…

I nodded like I understood.

Tommy unrolled his sleeping bag in the living room, and I unrolled mine beside his. I couldn’t sleep. Cars drove by. Their headlights shone through the window and raked across the ceiling. People passed by the window. They were shouting, and someone was running. They sounded close.

You get used to it, Tommy said.

Another friend had a computer in his room. His family lived in the nice subdivision. Two-story houses, many with a swimming pool. The computer was hooked up to a TV. He had made a game and wanted me to play. He popped a cassette into a player connected to the computer and pressed play. We watched the wheels on the tape turn.

It’s loading, he said. He blew the hair out of his eyes.

I nodded. 

Once it’s loaded, it’ll run.

I nodded again. Does the program sound like anything?

I don’t know. Try it.

I turned up the volume, and we listened. Static shushing.

He wrung his hands, twisting his fingers into shapes that looked both awkward and intricate, as if one hand was at war with the other. He had long fingers. He saw me looking and dropped his hands to his lap. Force of habit, he said.

The game was a maze game. You ran around collecting stuff and avoiding other stuff. It was pretty basic. He showed me how to play, then he handed me the joystick. I’ll go get some snacks, he said.

I was playing for a while when a message flashed on the screen. The words were there and gone, but I was able to read them. YOU WANT SEX. I finished the game, pressed Q for quit, and typed a command to list the lines of the program. It was like a foreign language but with a few familiar words. I found the line containing the message and changed it to YOU WANT SNACKS. Then I ran the program and started playing again.

He came back with chips and dip. I asked if he wanted to play.

Sure.

I handed him the joystick, and he began playing. The message appeared. I stared at the screen.

Guess it was too obvious, he said.