“All right, all right.”
For Donny to drink he had to take off his mask. With some effort and a little help from Shelly, he peeled it away, a Mission Impossible moment. He blinked in the light. His good eye was rimmed with crud. As usual, he was not wearing his false eye. Shelly patted Donny’s face with a napkin and tried to fluff out his thin and matted hair. Donny resisted his brother’s attentions. There were many nervous glances in our direction. One younger girl stared greedily, the melting ice cream from her cone dripping down her wrist.
“Put your eye in,” Shelly ordered. “You don’t want your socket to fill up with lint.”
Donny plugged the eye in as if he were putting a quarter into a vending machine. The good eye fluttered as if it had caught a gnat.
Except for a massive belch, Donny did all right with two cups of beer. He grooved on the mariachi, gnawed on a sandwich, stared into a blazing parilla, swung and missed a few times at a piñata, kicked a soccer ball, and let the kid with the lasso rope him around the waist. At one point a large silver sombrero was placed on his head. The brim of the hat was wider than his shoulders and Donny was so pleased with it he kept feeling for it to make sure it was still there.
Evening fell. The sun, merged in clouds, lingered just above the horizon. The passenger train that passed between the ocean and the track every hour or so appeared from around the bend. Bukowski wrote a poem about this train once, “THACK THACK THACKA” it went. He had his pint and needed eight teeth pulled and he was wearing his dead father’s pants and I bet he missed the double and lost fifteen dollars that day. The shore was curtained in mist so the silver-blue train appeared to be emerging from a cloud.
And then the sun was gone and I was very drunk but content in a lawn chair with Sweets sitting at my feet. I watched Donny frolicking with the two girls at my porch that morning who were letting him fly their metallic green June bug attached to a string. Shelly strolled up wearing that serene expression that always came after five or six beers. He had a plateful of macaroni salad. He took the chair next to mine. “I’m taking Donny back to Alabama,” he said, after a few bites. “I’m going to put him in a home. I can’t take care of him and we have family there and it will be cheaper too.”
“Too bad,” I said.
“Wherever he goes now he does well.”
“He seems fragile to me,” I said.
“I hope this is my last Bay Minette trip,” he said, getting a mouthful of macaroni. “Hey, Donny!” he called.
Donny wandered over, holding down his hat as if the wind might steal it. He looked like a rakish, spine-twisted, one-eyed Howdy Doody. “Mom is in heaven,” he said.
“That’s right, Donny. Go pee now. We got a long drive ahead of us.”
32.Whiplash I Was Taking a Bath
AFTER SHELLY LEFT TO TAKE DONNY BACK TO ALABAMA I WATCHED his business once more. He did not bother to leave me any order forms or petty cash, not a single comment, bit of advice, or cross remark about the Japanese. Two weeks passed before an actual letter arrived, written on blue-ruled paper in his big round style.
Eddie: Found a place for Donny with our Aunt Floss, not really an aunt but a second cousin who lives in Carrollton (north). She lives alone in a big house that my grandfather built. Donny likes her, even if Donny likes everyone. I think it will work out. After I took him to the cemetery to show him Mom’s and Dad’s graves he said that he was going to die too, but I know humans can’t simply die because they want to die. If we could I would’ve done it long ago. Ha ha. He says they’re in heaven now, which shows that he has no memory of what they were like, but he is eating again pretty well so he had enough energy to make the trip. I think he will be all right. I’m headed home tomorrow. Need to get out of the South. Think I am allergic to rednecks and black-eyed peas. See you in three days.
Shelly didn’t return, however, in three days. It was well over a week before I saw him again. I was in the record room with Sweets sorting through the bundles of records that he had bought at the KLIK auction and never bothered to open. It was a fabulous haul, a year’s worth of revenue. Many duplicates, and many routine ten-dollar discs, but that’s what you need when the same people want the same records over and over. There were a few jackpots too: a seven-inch single of “Kissing in the Dark” by Memphis Minnie on J. O. B. Records worth about three hundred and Tom Crook and the Rock ’n Roll Four’s “Weekend Boogie” on Dixie worth close to a grand.
The record-room window was open, and before I heard a car pull up in the driveway, Sweets said, Shelly’s here.
There was talking, and I heard Shelly’s muffled thanks. I thought, well, he’s brought someone with him again, or maybe it’s Donny because Aunt Floss didn’t work out. I heard the car door closing, then the gate squeaking open. Looking out the open louvered windows, I saw a taxi pulling away. The front door whacked shut and Shelly appeared at the foot of the hall wearing a neck brace and a bandage on his elbow. Sweets and I went down to greet him. Stripes of sunlight from the open door fell across his upper body. His face had changed. He looked around as if he might’ve not known his own house.
“What happened?” I asked
He sniffed and took a seat at his work table.
