A corn plant In a flour bucket sagged like a drunk propped up a wall.
One chubby t cactus, a fist in a glass, threatened you to touch it.
There was the skin of a real live alligator nailed on the closet door.
In the next room, over the television set, they had one of them velvet rugs that depict bulldogs playing cards.
I had gone to check the next room out.
“This here’s nice,” I said to Little King. The boy was glaring at
TV.
He didn’t so much as look at me.
“Little King,” I said. “Hey there, it’s me.”
“The don’t call himself Little King anymore,” Lynette said from the kitchen. “He thinks his name’s Howard.”
“Howard?”
The boy looked at me and nodded.
“He won’t claim his dad no more,” said King, standing in the doorway.
“He’s too good.”
Which was true enough. You could see how smart that Howard was. The boy’s black eyes had fairly swallowed me up in their short glance. He was a skinny little kid, with pea kish hair the light brown color that Lynette’s was when it had been natural.
The contrast between his light coloring and those deep black eyes was what made him so startling to look at. He turned back to the set.
His face light up for a moment, captured in the drama of old cartoon Coyote getting blown to bits for the fifty-millionth time by the Road Runner.
“Man that was decent,” he said in a false little squeaky voice.
They showed the coyote all blasted and frayed.
I always thought, personally, the coyote deserved to roast that chipper bird on a spit.
“I feel sorry for old Wiley Coyote,” I said.
The kid looked at me like I was a sad case.
“That don’t matter,” he said. “They still blow him up.”
Or run him over with garbage trucks. That’s what they did next.
When he was flat as a pancake someone rolled him in a tube and mailed him C. 0. D. to Tijuana.
It was just early evening, a typical Sunday night for the King Kasbpaw family. I decided to put them out for dinner at the very least. I’d get paid back for the pork chops and Koolaid King had screwed me out of as a child. I could see my presence was not exactly welcome to them, however. They seemed to have something weighty on their minds. They kept sighing and looking out their windows, which led down the air shaft. No one appreciated me asking Lynette whether I could help with dinner. She hadn’t actually looked like she was going to fix any. She sat back at the kitchen table, flicked her little red lighter, and blasted a ball of smoke in the air.
“I’m on strike,” she said. “Tonight I’m improving my mind.”
Across the table, King closed his eyes and popped a 7-Up.
“She thinks that’s funny,” he said, “which it is.”
She had a long blue sweater on and a blouse that looked. as if it was ripped whole from a shower curtain. There were magazines behind her in a cardboard box. She grabbed up a fistful of pages JAN.
how.-, and went in to sit by the television. Me and King tipped back the 7-Ups.
Pretty soon the boy came in and opened the refrigerator. He took out a carton of milk and put it on the cupboard. Then he got himself a bowl and spoon. He poured the bowl full of milk. Then he reached under the sink and took out a box of cereal.
“He does it all backwards,” observed King. “First he should put the cereal in his bowl, then the milk.”
Howard didn’t say nothing. He carried the bowl and the box of cereal very carefully in to the television. It was like he was going to make a religious offering. He and his mother would be huddled to the box, sitting there like cold spooks. I almost laughed. I was so tired from the bus that my mind was running wild. I asked,
“Do you ever think about that summer you came to stay with Grandma Kashpaw? When you were little?”
“Not too much.”
I wondered what the hell he did think about. And then I thought there was no harm in asking.
“Well what do you think about?” I asked.
You could have knocked me over with a straw at the way he started to answer that question. It was a big fat surprise, I’ll tell you, to know that King Kashpaw could do much more than growl, whine, throw his weight around. I guess being on the wagon brought him out or something.
“Minnows,” he said. “It’s like I’m always stuck with the goddamn minnows. Every time I work my way up-say I’m next in line for the promotion-they shaft me. It’s always something they got against me. I move on. Entry level. Stuck down at the bottom with the minnows.”
He grit his teeth, picked the warm can up in his hand, then crushed it softly so it gurgled.
“I’m gonna rise,” he said. “One day I’m gonna rise. They can’t keep down the Indians. Right on brother, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said.
I couldn’t help it; the laugh behind my face was like a sneeze.
He’d called me brother.
“What’s so funny?”
“Don’t know.”
“My God,” he said. “You’d think the Indians that got up there would look out for their own! Once they start earning twenty-five, thirty grand they move off in a suburb and forget about their cousins. They look down on you. Hey. You ever heard of the food chain?”
“I’m hungry,” I said.
“You been smoking dope? Dopehead. Listen. The big fish eats the little fish and the little fish eats the littler fish. The one with the biggest mouth eats any darrin old fish he wants.”
I got up. They had another box of cereal under the counter.
Lucky Charms. I poured some milk in my bowl and then dumped the cereal in, like Howard.
“Yeah,” said King, “go ahead and eat anything you want. Like I was telling you, I was in the Marines. You can’t run from them bastards, man. They’ll get you every time. I was in Nam.”
That was a fat lie, but I sat there and listened. The cereal was sweet, good, like candy, and the milk was filling. I lapped it up. I had a desperate hungry craving. I kept pouring it in and feeding my face fast as I could. He hardly noticed. He was off into his own mind.
“BINH,” he popped his lips. “BINH, BINH.”
That was the sound of incoming fire exploding next to his head.
“Apple, Apple?”
“What Banana?”
“Over here, Apple!”
That was what he and his buddy, who King said was a Kentucky Boy, used to call each other, in code.
“How come you didn’t just use names?” I asked between gulps.
“What difference?”
“The enemy. ” He glared at me. He was getting into the fantasy.
“They’re a small people. ” He put his hand out at Howard’s height.
“Hard to see. ” I sat back. My whole middle was comfortably soaked in milk.
“That’s all right,” he said, waving my imaginary pleading off.
“Some other time. I don’t really like to talk about it.”
“All right,” I said. “I understand. Let’s play cards.”
Anything to get his mind off all that fun he had missed in Vietnam.
Anything not to think what might happen if the army caught up with me.
What they did with the Lipsha Morrissey type I didn’t want to ask. I ‘just knew I didn’t want to be a member of some fruit bowl in the jungle, not to mention of how they crazed your mind in training camp.
Not for me.
There was a pack of cards on the windowsill, that window looking down into the sad gray patch of space. I thought perhaps they should have closed it off. That shaft went through all the way to the ground floor.