And that’s how I started having Kool-Aids with Mister Dean.
He had a real house with a porch that only had one chair. He would make me sit on the chair and he would lean against the porch rail facing me or he would sometimes sit on the stairs, sideways, so he could look at me. Mister Dean was about as old as my mom, I guessed. I didn’t like how I could always hear his breathing, this raspy gurgle. It never left him, even when he was speaking. It made me think of the cicadas at the mill pond and how their buzz never stopped, it just filled up the air like a jar. Mister Dean’s breaths were like that, but they never became part of the everything so that eventually you didn’t hear it anymore. His shirts bunched funny in the back and I wondered if he hid black filmy cicada wings under them.
I found out later he did not.
***
I don’t know why they call it a mill pond because there is no mill. Maybe there was one there back in the 1800s or something, but now there is not. I sometimes walk around in the brush around the mill pond looking for, like, relics of a mill. Ruins, I guess, pieces of something that used to be whole. Like old concrete slabs or stones or a broken turny-wheel for energy making, the ones on riverboats like they have on the Mississippi. Maybe some sort of old chutes that look like playground slides, but rusted. Big wooden beams with iron spikes sticking out of them. Big chunky things that look like they were put together with strong hands that knew how to make things that would last forever. They’d be broken but still strong. They would still look dignified, even though they were just old pieces of something bigger.
The brush is high in places and where there is no brush, there are weeds. I have looked as much as I can even though I might get bit by ticks or snakes. I just feel like I want to find proof of something that I feel is true.
I never do.
***
We drank the Kool-Aid out of jelly jars that were always dirty, but I never said anything. We’d sit on his porch and drink the Kool-Aid until it was gone. We would talk about things that people talk about when they don’t really have much to say to each other, water-treading things. I looked at my Kool-Aid a lot; some days pink, some days red, some days purple or blue. Sometimes he’d ask me how old I was even though I had already told him before. Sometimes he’d look at me for a long while and then say, “Tinkerbell…” like he was rolling my name around in his mouth, and then he’d shake his head and laugh a little. He mostly looked at me and did little nods. And breathe.
I must’ve said something about Suzy Q’s once and one day he brought me one with my Kool-Aid. I told him, “No, that’s all right.” And he said, “No, girl, you go on. Eat it.” And I said, “No, I’d better not. My mom…” and he said, “Your mom, what?” And I didn’t want to tell him about how my mom won’t let me eat sweets and how she hides all her cookies even though I always find them and how I heard her on the phone telling her best friend Avery how “Tinker’s just gettin’ so goddamn big.” And, so, I just set that Suzy Q down on my thigh for as long as I could, like it wasn’t delicious, like it was a turd or a dead thing, like I wasn’t sitting there wanting with every part of me to shove it right into my mouth. But after a while, I did. I ate it. I ate the Suzy Q. I couldn’t help it.
Mister Dean watched me eat the Suzy Q. How I unwrapped it and shook it out into my fist like it was a squeezed out pup. How I let the wrapper fall. How it blew across the dirty porch wood and fell off the side. He watched how I took it with both my hands and pulled it apart, slowly. How I listened to the quiet wet split of the cream pulling away. How I smelled at it, the sweet chocolate scent erasing the faint cherry smell of Kool-Aid and the wet dirt smell from his just watered garden. He watched as I placed one half down on my thigh, cream side up, and ate the other half with my eyes partly closed like when I was alone. Shoving and chewing and swallowing until its length was gone and then licking each of my fingers clean of its guts. Mister Dean watched me eat each half like he’d never seen anyone eat anything before.
“You really like them things, don’t you?” His breath, for once, sounded gone.
And I didn’t answer because he already knew the answer.
“You want another one?” He asked me this in a voice meant for church.
And I didn’t answer that question either and he didn’t wait for it. He got up from the stairs and disappeared into the house. When he came out he had the box. He leaned himself against the porch railing, opened the box, got one of the little chocolate cream cakes, and reached it out to me, just far enough to where I’d have to reach.
“Say please,” he said.
I didn’t want to, but then I did.
Mister Dean watched and then Mister Dean made me say please two more times.
Later on the only please I would say would be followed by the word, “stop”
On the Kool-Aid days, I’d never make it to the mill pond.
***
There is a little dock on the mill pond. There is a little row boat tied to the dock. I guess it belongs to the farmer, but nobody uses it. It never moves. I know this because I put a rock on it once. I put the rock in a wobbly place so if someone were to use the boat, it would surely fall. The rock is still there. The rope that ties it has moss growing on it and a spider web that always stays the same. The oars sit like an X in the belly of it. It might as well be on land.
After I am done looking for ruins, I lie on the dock, on my back, and pull my tank top up to my boobies. I rub my belly in the sun. I pray nobody comes but I also hope they do. Nobody ever does. Dragonflies land on the rowboat rope and then they fly away and then they come back and then they fly away again. Sometimes they land on my knees. It’s quiet there. The water never moves. It doesn’t really have a shore. Its outsides are mostly cattails, and by the dock, lily pads. Every so often there are clear plops that break the hum of the cicadas that like to do their buzz when it’s so hot outside. Their buzz sounds like how the sun feels hot. The wet frog plops are the only cool sound out there. The middle of the mill pond is a perfect circle. The water is black, like it refuses to reflect the sky or can’t. From the sky, looking down on the mill pond, I’m sure it looks like a big green eyeball, the cattail heads brown flecks in the green, its middle the shiny black pupil, staring up at the clouds. Like me.
I think about falling into that black pupil sometimes. Untying the rope, disturbing the spider web, falling the wobbly rock, and climbing into the belly of the boat. I have never rowed anything, but I would figure it out and paddle through the iris of green cattails and lily pads until I got to the pupil. I could lie on the boat for a while, there in the middle of the pupil. Stare up into the sky with it, just me and the mill pond’s pupil. The dragonflies would find my knees and I would rub my belly in the sun. When I felt ready, I would stand up in the boat. I’d stand there in my too short, too small striped tank top and my stripe in the fabric pants and my blanket fringe hair and I’d think about the ruins I could never find. I’d think about how I knew what it was like to be a ruin. The cattails would watch and the cicadas would hum their buzzy heat song, and when I jumped into the pupil’s shiny black it would make a cool plop sound like the frogs do. On my way down I’d wonder if I would ever be found and how nice it would feel to be looked for.