Gypsy Davey Read online

  Until Joanne brought home Operation, the game where you get to play surgeon, pulling body parts out of a patient with a pair of electrified tweezers. Unlike most of his toys, Operation worked perfectly. From the first time Davey accidentally touched the side trying to remove the funny bone, and the big red nose flashed along with the alarming buzzer to tell him—shock him, actually—that he had failed, he was hooked. He kept Operation by his side as he watched TV and dutifully went to work saving the patient’s life during commercials. Sometimes during boring shows that he only watched because nothing else was on, like All My Children, he would even operate while the program was on.

  Joanne loved to see him react like that. Lois was pleased that he’d found an interest, one that seemed to have captured his imagination and that he could take in the car with him. But Operation began to consume Davey’s time much the same way television had, to the point where he sometimes wouldn’t back off the game for hours at a time except to shake his operating hand in a writer’s-cramp-type shake. After a while it started to bother Joanne, though Lois didn’t seem to mind.

  “How you doin’?” Joanne said as she walked in from school. As soon as she spoke she heard the familiar, annoying, mocking buzzzz! of failure.

  “I killed him,” Davey roared as he swung his face in her direction. “Again, I killed him. Like before and like before.” He was sitting at the kitchen table, kneeling on his chair actually. Just as he had been when Joanne left in the morning.

  “No TV, Davey?” she said.

  He shook his head “no” as gently as he could because he was trying to remove the patient’s heart. But it was not gently enough, as the buzz returned. “Dead, he’s dead. I killed him dead,” Davey said as he slapped his palm on the table.

  “Where’s Ma?” Joanne asked.

  Davey simply stared at the dead patient, took the tweezers in his fist and started hammering himself, jabbing the tweezers into his thigh again and again.

  “Stop that,” Joanne yelled, grabbing his hand. Finally he looked at her. “Where is Ma?” she said slowly.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “She went to the store. I don’t know.” He pulled the tweezers back from her and resumed work, immediately setting off the buzzer. It was then Joanne noticed that, despite the hours and hours of playing, he wasn’t getting any better at it. He was intense, and committed, that was for sure. But his hand had this little tremble, something no one could have ever noticed before, that would not allow him to remove any but the easiest pieces without stumbling. Through sheer force of will he managed to extract the heart once in every ten tries, but the rest was all frustration, and now fury.

  Lois came sweeping through the door. She would not look at Joanne. This was the first time Lois had left Davey alone and not returned before Joanne came home.

  “Sumpin’ extra special today, Davey,” she said, with a lot of extra gush. She pulled from a sandwich-sized brown paper bag an extra-large Milky Way bar. Davey took it with a smile. Then slowly, dramatically, she pulled out a bottle, short, curvy, green. A seven-ounce Coca-Cola bottle.

  The candy bar fell right out of Davey’s hand. He snatched the bottle out of Lois’s hand and stared into it, like into a microscope.

  “Great, huh, Davey,” Lois gushed. “They just reissued them, the old-style bottles. The ones you loved. Isn’t that nice? Do you remember, Davey?”

  He remembered, of course, because the last time he’d drunk from one was only two months before. Just before his grandmother died. Gram, Lois’s mother, was the one who always brought around the old Cokes—not the reissues—from some secret stash she kept in the dirt cellar of the house she grew up in herself, raised Lois in, and eventually died in. She said she knew of places, some secret network of distributors and collectors all as nutty as she was, who would refill and reuse the old thick scratchy bottles. Yet once in a while Davey downed one that was clearly an original out of Gram’s private stock, flat syrupy contents and all. Those he loved best.

  Gram, who didn’t like her daughter, never spoke to her, and never entered her house even though they lived within walking distance of each other, would come by like an apparition, like some all-knowing silent spirit as soon as Lois left on summer mornings. She would turn the corner and walk up to find, inevitably, Davey perched on the top step, working up the first beads of sweat on any one of a million long, long summer days. Those days when Davey just sat around, quietly crazy with the sticky dead heat and cicada buzzing high and loud right at him to warn him that tomorrow was going to be nothing but the same all over again. He sat on that porch for hours and hours, staring into his jar of beetles and bees—more often than not hunted and retrieved for him by Joanne—and shaking the jar now and then to make them fight. Maybe once or twice a day Lois would come by on her way to somewhere or back and pat him on top of his fuzzy head like a good, quiet watchdog.

  But Gram would appear in one of those housedresses with flowers like wallpaper that seem to be made just for old people. She brought with her, whether it was ten a.m. or ten p.m., the bottle of Coke and a tiny bag of cheese curls. Cheesy Weesies, is what she called them, something Davey never heard anyone else say, and which always made him feel silly when he heard it even though he was not a silly boy. The old woman and the little boy wouldn’t share ten words the whole time, as she sat and he consumed, but it was like a brief friendship, some kind of mutually knowing relationship, packed into the few minutes it took him to polish it all off. Gram always waited until Davey was done, took her bottle back, and was off again.

  No one knew what the deal was between Davey and Gram—all they could do was watch. If Lois happened to stumble across them in her comings and goings, she would just continue on her way, the three of them wordless and flat as if Lois were a mere tumbleweed blowing by.

  So no one knew, never even thought about it, when the day of Gram’s funeral Davey sat it out, in his perch on the porch, the whole day. Staring into space as guests came and went, patting him on the head as they passed. Through all the visits, all come, all gone, Davey sat largely unnoticed even though he was not a little boy anymore but a big beanstalk of a kid who came to people’s waists even when he was sitting. Waiting on the porch as if it were July and not November. It was suppertime and bitter freezing black under the broken porch light before Lois figured it all out and hauled him, stiff and reluctant and still staring, inside.

  He was still staring into his grandmother’s bottle, or his jar of bees, when Lois interrupted him. “Now isn’t that sumpin’ nice,” she said into Davey’s ear from over his shoulder. She was trying hard, but she just didn’t know. “Open it,” she said, rushing to the utility drawer and pulling out an opener. “None of that twist-off stuff with this.” She was sure, once more, that the magic was in the bottle.

  Davey looked at her for only a second. He put the bottle down with a bump, picked up the tweezers, and starting playing Operation more maniacally than ever. His hand shook spastically, setting off the buzzer again and again until it became an almost unbroken line of buzz. But he continued on, as if he were doing it on purpose.

  “I can’t stand that sound anymore!” Joanne yelled. She yelled not at Davey, but at Lois. Joanne stared at Lois, who stood with a wounded, confused face looking down at Davey, who stared at Operation.

  Finally Joanne stormed off to her room, nothing but the electronic game noise, the failure alarm, behind her. That sound hung in her head all night as she tried to sleep. It sounded, after a while, just like the cicada buzz chasing her in the summer heat.

  In the morning, before anyone woke up, Joanne pried the back panel off the Operation game and snipped every wire she could find with her nail clippers. She carefully replaced the panel and went back to bed.

  When she came home from school that afternoon, Joanna found the game had joined the rest of the discarded games on the floor in front of the TV, and Davey was glued to cartoons. She dropped her coat, went up to him from behind and sat. They sat together flat bottom
ed on the floor, Joanne’s legs running out alongside his, her arms wrapped around him, hands clasped over his chest.

  “Sorry, Dave,” she said. He nodded without turning, though he hadn’t a clue. Joanne had started the whole Operation thing without asking him, and had ended it the same way. She was sorry. But as he leaned back and settled into her, she also felt a little rush of power, of control over the chaos that was this house. That she wasn’t sorry for.

  LIKE A BIRD OUT OF WATER

  But I hardly ever see him anyway my dad is the one who changes me more than anybody else can change me and I don’t know why ’cause he really doesn’t know me very well or at least I don’t know him.

  His name is Pete. Sneaky Pete is what my mother calls him and I guess that’s true enough since he shows up without telling anybody and without permission even though he’s supposed to have some kind of permission if he wants to come and see me and Jo. But he doesn’t bother anybody and he’s always gone by the time Ma comes home since he always knows when to come when she’s not here. He never does anything bad to us kids or to Ma neither and in fact leaves us all presents including perfume for Ma so I think the thing is not so much that he’s here that makes her so mean but that he isn’t here.

  Now you take good care of Ol’ Lois for me, okay, son? he says every single time I see him. Life and me ain’t been all too kind to your poor ma, but I still love her and wouldn’t want nothin’ to ever harm her. And she’s very harmable, you know.

  So is what I say because I can’t think of any reason not to say it. Why don’t you stay here and take care of her yourself and take care of everybody else while you’re at it? And Sneaky Pete laughs and plays with his gray whiskers with his long long fingers that wear all the giant gold rings with horns and skulls and goats and the one pinky ring with the coin in the middle of it. He’s real skinny and the rings slide up and down his fingers and he twirls them and turns them right all the time when he talks.

  Because I can’t is about all he can tell me. I can’t take care of Lois and she can’t take care of me, so all we can do is cross our fingers and hope that somebody we love is going to look after both of us. And the way I see it Davey, that somebody around here should be you. Look at you, you big strappin’ sonofabitch. You must be a foot taller than your old man already.

  Made me feel big every time he came around. Not so much the thing about the tallness since I’m a foot taller than pretty much everybody since last year but the whole man thing and he said the things he said in a soft voice like a flute only deeper. Don’t listen to him don’t look in his eagle eyes for more than a second was what Ma always told me because that nasty old Sneaky Pete is a snake charmer who knows what each and every person needs to hear and he tells it to them like a song. But then she cries when I tell her that he was here when she wasn’t.

  He knew about me that much was for true. He gave me my bike which after everything changed me more than anything. It gave me the other kind of me the one I like better. There’s the kind of me that stays home or sits in school and doesn’t say much out loud but goes on and on in here in the head without even stopping for a single little mental breath. The kind of me that makes me nervous. The kind of me that makes me feel like a fish in the sky trying to fly or a bird in the water. Only the other kind of me the one that I think Dad knew about somehow I don’t know how but after all he’s Sneaky Pete who knows everything so that’s how he knew but the kind of me that I can be on the bike. That talks a whole different way and doesn’t have the heavy beating heart that anyone can see thumping in my bony chest if I ever take my shirt off in front of people which so I never do. But instead the me that works perfectly in rhythm with the oily ch-ch-ch of the eighteen-speed tiger-paw mountain bike that takes me as far as I want over all and every terrain snow rocks curb or mud with no problem in total control. It’s a control machine.

  I can’t hardly say three straight words out loud because of the so many millions I got flying around inside playing like a racquetball game in my skull so loud and so fast and so every which direction at once that I can’t even try to talk over it. Like no one word or thought is more or less important than the others so there ain’t no order and they all just climb over each other to get out all at the same time. And the more all happens to me inside the less I can say it out. The bike though the bike makes it all work like shifting gears and pushing the pedals left right left right and before you know it I’m where I want to be doing what I want to do and it makes a lot more sense and is a lot quieter.

  Nothing like exercise for the head, boy, Sneaky Pete said like he knew all about my head when he wheeled the bike into my bedroom last time. Middle of the night like spook Santa Claus he came in and left it right there against the footboard kissed me on the ear and was gone again before I was even through twisting the sleeps out of my eyes. And Gary says hi, he said as he slipped away. Gary’s my brother who ran away to live with Dad and then hit some old woman in the head because she had something he wanted and who now lives in jail and who we never hear from which is okay with me.

  He’s a great guy my dad. He lives in Florida.

  LOVE, SISTER, IT’S JUST A KISS AWAY

  There were just those days. Those days when she quit and ran and didn’t care much what it looked like to the neighbors or to Joanne or to any damn body else who wanted to look at what Lois was doing with herself and her responsibilities. Flight. Was all.

  And usually Davey was no trouble, no trouble to nobody. That was Davey. “Okay Davey” Joanne would call him, practically spitting it in his face when she saw him sitting for it, just taking and taking and taking whatever crap it was that Lois dished up on him. Lois was peeling out again, leaving Davey, all five years of him, in a cloud of her dust. “I’m going out now, Davey,” Lois said. “Okay,” Davey said. “Make yourself a sandwich for supper,” Lois said. “Okay,” Davey said.

  Joanne opened up Davey’s supper sandwich, which sat on the table long after their mother had returned. She’d told him to make the sandwich, but eating it was his own option. Lois remained barricaded in her room, talking on the phone, alternately giggling like a schoolgirl and crying like a Siamese cat, after a long afternoon out there. The sandwich Davey made for himself had one slice of bologna in it, dry. “Okay Davey, Okay Davey,” Joanne snapped at him as she flung the sandwich in the bucket. “You don’t have to just sit there and take everything, y’know, Davey. If you want a decent supper, then you can say something else besides ‘okay.’ ”

  “What should I say, Jo?”

  Joanne walked up and pinched Davey’s lean upper arm, twisting as much flesh as she could grip between her thumb and fingernails. “Wake up,” she yelled. “Snap out of it, will you? Wake up.”

  He didn’t acknowledge any pain. “Is that what I should say?” he asked placidly.

  Lois came out of her room and walked toward the kitchen. All conversation stopped as Joanne walked first to the refrigerator, then to the stove, and started scrambling an egg for Davey.

  The next day, as Lois was leaving, Joanne’s words still hung in Davey’s head. “Where are you goin’?” Davey shocked his mother, as if his were a strange voice coming out of the walls rather than out of the little boy who sat cross-legged on the living-room rug. She dropped her pocketbook on the bare floor by the front door, sending keys, makeup, change, Doublemint gum, and Salem cigarettes scattering across the hardwood. She crouched down to collect it in her waist-length rabbit coat, and Davey scurried over to help her.

  He asked her again, as they stooped nose to nose, “Where are you goin’?”

  It was another one of those days. “I’m goin’ where the action is,” she said.

  “Will you take me with you?” he said.

  Again Lois was stunned, but this time not scared. Her stomach was fluttery with confusion, with a gentle spark of weird warm excitement, as she looked into the bottomlessness of Davey’s pale green eyes. Like a girl, like she’d been waiting so long, and she’d finally be
en asked to get up and dance.

  She did so love Davey, as much as she could.

  “It’s really nice there, Davey. It really is a nice place, so many nice people, and fun.”

  “I wanna buy my man here a ginger ale, Victor,” Lois said as she first gave Davey a boost onto the corner bar stool, then took the one next to him. Davey shied from the big neon Löwenbräu sign that blinked off and on beside him face.

  “You got it, babe,” Victor said as he pulled out the black mini garden hose and squirted a glass full. Then he yanked the cap off a long-neck Budweiser and slid it to Lois without her asking. “Oh,” she said, sounding as if she were surprised by the thought of paying. She started pawing clumsily around her purse.

  “Don’t worry about it, sweetheart,” Victor said, reaching over the bar and patting her hand. “It’s all right.”

  “You see, I told you, Davey. There are just the nicest people here,” Lois said. “Victor here is the best of the lot, of course, but there are some pretty powerful figures like to hang out here as well. This is the kind of place, Davey, where a person could meet big lawyers, who come in from the courthouse right down the block, or city officials, they like to come here too, or doctors, Davey, a lot of doctors like to come in here from the city hospital because it’s right next door practically. Exciting, don’tcha think?” Lois leaned sideways to hug Davey close for a second, and Davey nearly slipped off the stool leaning into her.