If You Want Me to Stay by Michael Parker Page B

church, in the middle of the fiery preaching. I was hardly aware of the preacher up there in front of me, stomping around, quoting scripture, looking stern like we’re all of us about to die.
    â€œHush now,” said my savior.
    The children snickered.
    â€œI have to go,” I said, and before she could answer I was up and out of that room.
    Well, the music had stopped. I owed nobody nothing when it ceased. Just got to get on down the road to a place where I can receive the signal full on.
    Outside I kept looking over my shoulder to see did she send one of those children to bring me back in but she must have thought there is some that don’t even know how to take His love in they hearts. Or else she was glad to be shy of me. I thought she’d maybe turn up again before it was all over. Or maybe she’d storm in that trailer where my sister and hersurfer friends were goofing on some TV with the sound turned down. Dude, you would not fucking believe what happened last night at the crib, they’d say to everyone who wandered in their surf shop the next day. I could see Tank look up from his Game Boy. His face when he got startled was so pure and baby-looking. Frozen, innocent, it was the only time he was ever really still. The church lady pulls her girth up the stairs and pushes in the trailer. My sister’s friends cower as she plants herself in the doorway. Give me that Game Boy, she says to Tank. Or maybe it’s give me that play toy, I don’t know, all I know is she slips the thing into her pocketbook which swings threateningly from her arm, takes Tank by the hand and thunders into the night, bringing my little brother back to me.
    Out on the street the other storefronts were shut tight. Only light in this world was the streetlight and the lights of cars passing steady as a river inches away from me. The street was one-way which struck me as exactly right. I only needed one choice. I felt lost and lonely and all I wanted was a bath and to find my mother. How could I fall so swiftly from that rapturous height? I imagined wandering the rest of my life in search of a stronger signal, a place where the music reached me without static or disturbance. I was not like him, not at all, it was voices he heard, not Aretha, Arthur Conley, Deena Parker. Music for him was a drowning-out of those voices telling him to stuff bananas in the mouth of his middle son. Therefore we were exact opposites. There was one spot in the room I shared with my little brothers where at nightwhen we were supposed to be sleeping we could pick up WLS out of Chicago, 890 on the AM dial. It was over by the dresser drawers, a dip in the floorboards where moonlight fell on a no-cloud night. I’d put a little bit of masking tape there for my bare feet to feel. I would wait for them to fall asleep and then I’d shake their sideways-sleeping asses off me and wiggle out to that sweet spot, switch on the transistor my daddy bought me when I wasn’t but Tank’s age, listen to the Classic Soul hour, midnight to one in the morning, the signal traveling all the way down through Ohio across the river into Kentucky, bumping over the hills and hollers of West Virginia, shooting straight down the Valley of Virginia (I looked it up on one of my daddy’s maps) to cross the red-clay piedmont and reach me up home, just a spit from the sea. Just as people who love you feel your trouble rumbling in their stomachs, a song broadcast hundreds of miles away will be summoned by your need to hear it. I myself was not a boy in clothes about ready for the rag bag, half of them purloined, but radio waves coming through the swamps and pocosins, summoned down to Bulkhead by a mother’s undying love for her oldest boy.
    Have you seen the Promise Land? I asked a boy who looked to be lingering at the ass end of teenaged, as if he hadn’t quite got it together to pass over into his twenties. His sideburns were bristly and sharply