by Jerry Portwood

Daddy came home with all manner of stuff after long nights of cards. A huge sailfish hung above our TV for two weeks before it vanished. The spider monkey that we fed finger bananas from the backyard spent even less time at home after it crapped everywhere and smeared its stuff in Momma’s yellow, living room wallpaper. “Time for it to go,” she said. She didn’t move, didn’t blink until she took a Virginia Slim out of her flowered cigarette case and put it between her red lips and instructed, “Better say goodbye.”

I remember a Tuesday he drove up in his brown beater with something lumpy and alive hanging out the back window. He stopped in the driveway, pulled the emergency break and all us kids ran out to see the Shetland pony hunkered in the backseat. Its head drooped out and eyes winked milky. “Look! It’s smiling!” I hollered. We all four of us crowded in the back with it and took snapshots, our hands around the corn color mane. Later we took our rides on its bare back, Daddy walking along beside us to make sure we didn’t fall and break anything – a husky pony, a man and the chatter of kids threading through coconut palms. It lasted til the following Thursday.

He loved that little, red MG more than any of his other winnings. Although most it usually did was sit under our flowering banyan
collecting leaves, animal pellets and paw prints. He’d periodically brush it off when there wasn’t a heavy rain to do it for him. Green
lizards would hide underneath when I went for them with cupped hands.

On a Saturday he’d go out to his shed strung with brown coconut shells that looked like shrunken heads – the white meat fashioned as eyes and teeth – and he’d tinker on a motor for the clothes dryer that waited on the porch.

The whole while, we’d try to get the kittens away from the momma cat that was protecting them in the hollow of the machine. She’d hiss and Momma would say, “Leave that cat alone. They haven’t even opened their eyes yet,” as she strung the whites up to dry. He never fixed the motor to that machine and later he dug up a hole and threw it in. I heard a neighbor once say that it was like land mines back there, “never know what you might uncover ’round that place.” I hated him, but I think he was right.

Noon sometime, Daddy’d wash-up his hands with that orangey stuff and go off for a ride – the top down, revving up the engine and popping the clutch. He’d be gone for hours. I imagined him racing around the cypress, down Alligator Alley, but I never knew where he really went all those afternoons for all those hours. “Please, Daddy, please, take me,” my little sis would plead. I knew better. He always said no, always took it out alone.

After he came back, he’d be all grins, his thinning hair feathery and pushed back like fingers had been separating each strand and putting
them in place. He’d pull the car up close to his shed and the rest of the night his head was under the hood. He filled up fluids, banged on
pipes. He asked us to hand him wrenches or duct tape. “Duck tape,” he called it and I thought about those white and black ones at the lake, their little baby ducks all taped together under the water in a line. If we weren’t quick enough he’d cuss under his breath, but he never got truly angry. With us, or the car.

It must have been sometime after the pony was shipped away. During its weeklong stay I would braid its tangled main and tie it off with tough weeds poked through with dandelion buds. After it was gone, I braided the long, brown roots of the banyon that swayed in the heavy, wet breeze. I sat up on the bucket seat of the MG with the top down. It hadn’t moved in months. It was summer and none of us went out daytime, waited til night to climb for neighbors’ mangoes and peel back the skin and bury our face in the sweet, drippy meat. Momma told us to slow down, stop acting like animals or we’d be sorry, and we were when our faces broken out in a delicate rash around our lips from all that sugary orange fruit.

No matter what Daddy tried, he couldn’t get that thing to start moving.

He stayed home from work one morning, all us kids about to go out of our summer skin but trying to keep real low on the blue shag to dodge the heat and mosquitoes; hoping he’d take us to the beach or the pool. Instead he took off his button-down and in his yellowed undershirt set to work on that car again.

The next day we woke up and Daddy was out back digging. He handed us shovels and told us to get to work as well. We started creating a long, wide hole that he marked with broken conch shells. Earthworms were uncovered and rolly pollys scattered in our wake. The sweat
burned in my eyes and dripped down like tears where it collected salty and gritty on my lips. He didn’t seem able to stop.

“Work around the roots, kids,” he said. “But make it deep.”

Finally, sometime after dark, Momma called us in to wash-up and eat supper. Daddy kept digging his hole. He didn’t come in before we went to bed.

Momma never told him to get inside. After she cleared the table I saw her looking out the back window. She took out one of the Slims and lit up. Her lips smacked when she took the cigarette from between her lips. Then she blew the smoke out through her nose.

I continued watching her look out the window, until she turned around and saw me, “What are you doing? Get out of here and get ready for bed.” She cleaned up quietly in the kitchen. I heard her scraping the rest of the red meat sauce of the spaghetti into the disposal. We all kept still.

Daddy took a lamp from the living room, removed its blue shade and hung it upside down by the cord. Its pale light made shadows of a man, of a monkey, of a monster stretch long across our bedrooms. The palmetto bugs sailed through the air above us, cutting through the yellow/gray family of silhouettes as we all went off to sleep. We never heard anything else unless it was the clink of that shovel hitting roots.

The next morning we noticed the hole was already covered up and a large mound of dirt was piled around. Took us a bit longer to realize Momma was missing. He told us she went to visit her sister for a while. But I knew different. She took her old pink hard case and the purple velvet dress she never wore cuz it’s “too damn hot down here.”

We stomped that dirt down and used it to play King of the Mountain during those dusky afternoons when we were pushed outside to play. Sometimes I’d be up there defending that patch of ground and think maybe she was down there. Then someone would yank me by the hair and I’d be breathing sand.

Momma and the MG disappeared just like the monkey, the pony and sailfish. We didn’t ask questions, we were so used to things showing up and then disappearing. “Never count on stuff,” Daddy always told us. “It always fails you.”