Little Boy Blues by Malcolm Jones Page B

Mary herself told me that Mack’s problems weren’t my fault. I’ll always remember that. But it takes two people to make a marriage work, and Mack just won’t work at it. He had a good job out there at the bleachery when we lived in Lancaster. But he won’t think about us. No sir, not Mr. Big.”
    “We’re a team, right?”
    “Umhm.”
    The patrolman motioned the Plymouth forward. Putting the car in motion, my mother stripped the gears shifting out of first.
    “Every time he gets in trouble, he goes running back to Lancaster. And they take him in. I’ll never forget, him lying there drunk in the bed when we lived on French Street and Mother Jones back there in the bedroom saying, ‘You come on home, honey. Annie and me will take care of you.’ Buddy was the onlyone who understood. He told me himself that Mack was the baby of the family all his life. Buddy knew what I went through.”
    The car was moving fast enough now that the road through the hole at my feet was just a white blur. The heat of the day, unabated even now, mixed in with the heat of thousands of automobiles slowly crawling forward, and cast the whole landscape into a miragelike shimmer. My back was stuck to the car seat, and my feet hurt. I tried to wiggle my toes inside the hard black shoes.
    A car went by with the radio loud, playing a country-and-western song.
    “What sort of trash goes to these things?” my mother wondered aloud.
    “What things?”
    “This
race
, or whatever it is.” I stirred uneasily in my seat. For a brief moment, I felt a flash of terror, and what terrified me the most was that I wasn’t sure why I was afraid. My mother was not herself, that much I knew. What I didn’t know was what was going to happen next, what she might do. All my life, she had been the dependable one in our family. She lost her temper. Sometimes she cried. But day in and day out, she managed to pull it together. My father was the one who went off the rails. I expected that, or at least was not surprised when it happened. But I had never seen my mother like this. Underneath her anger, she seemed frightened of something, and I had never seen her frightened before, and that scared me.
    Up ahead, swimming in the air like a fairy castle, the orange tiled roof of the Howard Johnson’s.
    “Can we stop for ice cream?” I was surprised by the words that came out of my mouth—no, not the words, but the tone. I was almost pleading. Again, I felt the flash of terror.
    “Honey, we have to get home. Somehow I have to get up and teach tomorrow.”
    “We’re not going anywhere now.”
    “Well, we can’t be later than we already are. And when we get home, I want you to start putting those stamps in the album. That would be what Buddy wanted. He was so good about sending you those stamps. You don’t want to let him down.”
    “No, ma’am. But you said it was late.”
    “Tomorrow then, right after school.”
    “Yes’m.”
    I knew better than to argue, although by now I also knew that even if Uncle Buddy were still alive, he would not be “let down” if I did not keep up my stamp album. Right then, when I tried as hard as I could to remember what he had looked like, all I could see was the waxen face in the open coffin that looked more like a store mannequin than a real person. He always seemed delighted by my mere presence, as if breathing on my part were enough to please him. Uncle Buddy was one of several members of the family who gathered to eat the noon meal every workday at my grandmother’s apartment. She lived in the center of Lancaster, in a second-floor apartment reached by a staircase that ascended the outside of the big two-story white-frame house that had once been a single residence, when the town was smaller, before people moved out to the fringes into the newer neighborhoods with their split-levels and modest colonials. Her front porch was the roof of the porch below and was covered in tarpaper. Promptly at noon, her grown children