The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (4 page)

“You'll do better next time,” he said.

So the next shot, I tried to be strong. I didn't hit my target, but I stayed on my feet.

“That's the ticket,” Uncle Joe smiled.

Later on, he looked worried and said to me, “Now you don't need to tell your mama anything about all this out here. She'd burn my biscuits good if she knew what I was letting you do.”

“Mama says I ought to be more ladylike, stop running so wild,” I told him. “Do girl stuff.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know—whatever girls do, I guess.”

“Oh, not yet, Josie,” he said, still looking worried. “Not for a while yet.”

As I got older, I learned more. I learned to listen like I was interested when boys talked about cars and when girls talked about
boys. I learned never to let on when I read a book. I learned you should never get into a car with a boy who was a member of the National Athletic Brotherhood unless you were prepared to fight your way out. I learned never to let a boy I liked know I was a better shot than he was. I learned to keep my plans of leaving to myself.

The cable TV channel out of Atlanta showed Atlanta Braves baseball games and colorized movies. Sometimes those two worlds collided and there were movie stars in the stands at the baseball games. The camera would show them sitting there in their Atlanta Braves baseball hats and T-shirts and their designer sunglasses, looking intense and cool.

I thought to myself that it must be really something to live in a city like Atlanta and go to baseball games with movie stars. Or go to any big city where there were things to do that I'd never done and people to meet who didn't already know me. I could get a job there or maybe go to college someday. It would be better, anyway, than living at home with Mama and going nowhere and doing nothing. Somewhere outside those mountains was a world that was colorized.

When I was fourteen, I started waiting tables at the combination fish fry and gas station Uncle Joe ran out on the county line. I saved all my tip money, hidden in a coffee can in the shed. Every dollar was another step down the road to a bigger world.

The day after my twenty-first birthday, I arrived in Waterville on the bus with one suitcase filled with all my worldly goods, the
contents of the coffee can, and a four-hundred-dollar loan from Uncle Joe. (“But it's all your savings,” I said when he pressed the cash into my hand. “Maybe you'll need it for college someday,” he said. “Wouldn't that be something?” “I can't take it,” I said. “Pay me back when you can,” he said.)

I went into the coffee shop of the Greyhound station and bought a Coke, more to give myself time to get my bearings than out of thirst. A man was sitting at the counter reading a newspaper while a little boy next to him alternately looked out the windows at the bus parked by the curb, took drinks from a tall glass with a straw, and spun his stool around and around.

“You came on the bus,” the little boy said to me.

“Yes,” I said.

“Did you sit behind the driver?”

“No, I sat kind of in the middle.”

“I'm going to drive the bus someday.”

“Are you?”

“Not today, though. Right?” He looked up at the man next to him for confirmation.

“Not today,” the man smiled down at him. “Today we're just looking.”

“Just looking,” the little boy repeated while he spun his stool again. “Let's go look outside now.”

“Okay,” the man said, and folded the newspaper. He left it on the counter when he got up.

“Do you mind if I look in your paper?” I asked the man. “I need to find a job and a place to stay.”

“All yours,” the man said.

The little boy had hold of his hand and was tugging him out the door. “Come on, Rassi,” he said.

“Good luck,” the man said somberly to me. “I'm sure you'll find something.”

I spent the next hour circling ads and found a place to live that very day. It was three rooms down by the river, with weeds out front and mud out back. The rent was a hundred dollars a month. I figured I'd be able to get some waitress work pretty soon. But I didn't find a job until after I ran into Rafi again, started hanging around with him, and went to work in the Cave.

There were maybe some possibilities for finding my other half in that town, I thought.

Rafi had no girlfriend to speak of then, which was odd because he had dark wavy hair and hands that were both strong and delicate looking. His hands would shake some, though, before he had his first drink of the day, and that may have had something to do with the unsettled nature of his love life. Every February, he gave up drinking for the month and was, as a result, especially melancholy. He said he did it because he wanted to know that he could, but he picked February because it is the shortest month. Leap years were always particularly tough.

There were only two people I think Rafi loved.

The little boy I first met him with was Jordan. He was four—Rafi's sister's son. Despite Rafi's bartender's hours, quite often when he arrived at work, he had spent the morning with Jordan.

“Pumpkin Head and I saw a new calf today,” Rafi would say, carefully avoiding my eye so I wouldn't see the punch line coming. “ ‘Look, Jordan,' I said, ‘it's a new baby cow. It's just been born today. Today is its birthday.' ‘Oh, Rassi.' ” Here Rafi would imitate Jordan's droll, deep-voiced baby talk, wagging his head in baby resignation. About half of Jordan's sentences started, “Oh, Rassi,” and were accompanied by a small, patient sigh. “ ‘Oh, Rassi. It cannot be that cow's birthday. How can it have
a birthday if it cannot open the packages and cannot play with the toys?' ” Then Rafi would look sideways at me, and I would laugh for him.

“I saw Pumpkin Head today,” Rafi said, filling the cash register with change from the bank bag. “He had this little fire truck that was supposed to have lights and a siren, but it wouldn't work.

“ ‘Let me see if I can fix that truck for you there, Jordan.'

“ ‘Oh, Rassi, you cannot fix that truck. A wire is broke.'

“ ‘Are you sure, Jordan? Maybe it just needs new batteries.'

“ ‘It is not batteries. It a wire, Rassi. It a wire.'

“ ‘Well, maybe not. How long has it been broken?'

“ ‘Oh, Rassi, the weeks go on and on.' ”

Rafi didn't drive, or at least he didn't have a car. I'm not sure of any particular reason for this, but it was probably a good decision. So Rafi had to live no farther than walking distance from work. At one point, a patron gave him an old Stingray bicycle that he rode for a while, but then something untoward happened on his way home in the dark one night, he limped for about a week, and the bicycle was never seen again.

Rafi shared a tiny white frame house with a carpenter named Billy Joe, who was the best guitar player I ever heard in person. As a young man, Billy Joe had lived in Memphis and had once cut a demo tape in a studio there. By a long chain of good luck and kindness, one of Elvis Presley's Memphis Mafia—the one named Landon—heard the tape and liked it and called Billy Joe on the telephone. “Son,” Landon said to Billy Joe, “we're going to make you a star.” He invited Billy Joe to come to Graceland sometime soon. But the very next day, Elvis was found face
down, dead on the bathroom floor, and Billy Joe never went to Graceland but instead came back home and played the Cave pretty regular.

The white frame house was set back from the road at the end of a dirt drive, dwarfed by giant oak trees and hidden by scrub. Amenities in the house were somewhat scarce, and there was enough furniture outside and enough mice inside to make the distinction between being outdoors and being indoors a pretty fine one. The door we all used led straight into a kitchen that had a table with three chairs and an old stove with an iron skillet full of smooth river stones sitting on the back left burner. Rafi and Billy Joe said they were waiting until the stones were done to move out of the house.

Early on, Danny took me to a place he knew of—a barbecue shack out on the old blacktop highway toward Millboro. It had weathered board walls and tobacco farmers sitting with their wives and kids at the little tables, drinking sweet tea. There was no menu, and no one needed one. Danny and I ate plates of barbecue with slaw and hush puppies and drank cold beer.