. . .
At the parking lot of Hickman’s IGA, our grocery store, I notice, on one of my late-night rides, the sunburned kid who mows our lawn sitting on the hood of his car, all alone, hugging his knees, waiting in the dark, watching the occasional car go by. I have also seen him sitting around at the car wash or chasing squirrels down the street in the evenings in his dirty clothes. Aside from a few old people and little kids, there are few pedestrians in Paris; everyone drives and practically lives in what they call their “vehicles.” I don’t know this kid’s name, or his family, or if he has one at all. He looks like he might belong to one of the wanderers—sham ministers who found churches and make off with the dough; women on the dole, unmarried or divorced, who drift in, rent old houses for next to nothing, and disappear, leaving a kid or two old enough to kick off the gravy train. You see these young ones, not even out of their teens, walking on the sides of the highway in the early mornings and wonder what they have been up to.
It is always the wandering ones, the underdogs, the eccentrics, the castoffs who tell me their stories. Leslie, who I met in graduate school, had a distant relationship with truth. From her I learned never to trust anyone who ever lived in Los Angeles. Then there was Esther, an old woman who pushed her stuffed cart along Perry Street. We met at a laundry called the Stinky Sock. Cookie, the black drag queen, wore enormous bejeweled crosses and earrings with healing crystals, small Statues of Liberty, and large glittery crescent moons. Jason was a homeless Puerto Rican street kid I took in. At night he wrapped his head in towels to try to silence the voices he heard when he tried to sleep. In my apartment he left a stocking cap I keep on a vase as a small tribute and a leaky plastic jar with colorful floating fish that he bought at a discount store for my birthday.
. . .
The first of these characters arrived in my life early on; he was a family friend who drifted through our lives. Wray Chowning resided in Madison, in his parents’ old house, a place so covered with vines that the brick barely showed. Preach Burton mowed the lawn, which received no other attention. It lay flat and half brown, like an old carpet. In the front hallway stood a huge grandfather clock coveted by Betty and a desk of cherrywood with thin elegant legs that slightly curved. My mother said the desk was of the Queen Anne style and that it wasn’t really right for a man’s house. Who knew these rules could attach themselves to even a piece of furniture? Though I told no one, I felt united with Wray. I understood, somehow, that we had a bond. I was a kid trapped between feeling something and knowing nothing.
Mammy often asked my mother to drive by to see if Wray’s car was in the driveway. It bothered her if it was not. It worried her if it was. I could see that Mammy wanted to reach out to him. She took pies and cakes, but sometimes, even when his car was parked out front, he didn’t come to the door when we knocked. “I’ll bet he’s just sleeping,” Mammy always said. “Maybe he’s just sleeping.” Betty tended just to shake her head. She and Mammy both knew Wray was drinking. Even I had picked up that this was his problem. Mammy, whose brother had also been a drinker, seemed to understand what came of a life trapped inside a bottle of disappointment.