Devon had not wanted to go to the show. As usual he was content to be at home in his room or on his porch or patio. Early in his life he recognized that he was best when he was by himself. Though he hated to admit his preference. People were suspect of loners. They looked for weirdness, strange preferences and inclinations, anything to suggest sinister motives. The things that would bore or annoy most people were fine with Devon. He liked to figure out the small machine that made a thing work. His mother thought he was smart but he actually felt like he was slower on the uptake, the last one to get the joke, while other people rushed on to the next idea. His focus was his brain’s attempt to understand what everyone else seemed to take for granted. On the table beside his bed, beside the orange cup WORLD’S GREATEST GRANDPA was his stack of spiral notebooks. He loved to sit and draw. Each notebook labeled in his looping big script. He used to draw cars, trucks, any transportation, before he graduated to caricatures of people. He drew women, mostly he drew Joy. She was a slight girl with delicate thin lips, a face that always looked like she was smarting from a slight. He never drew her smiling. He rarely drew her clothed, though he’d never seen her naked. Her lips he penciled in as black as her nipples. One day he would show her what he saw. She’d be embarrassed at the drawings, she might even hit him in that girl way she did. There was so much beautiful about her that he saw that Joy clearly didn’t know. If he wasn’t drawing he liked to look at his pictures of her, like looking through a photo album.
Devon liked Joy, but he didn’t want to go to the show. But Devon’s parents had seen James Brown years before he was born and had talked for years of the concert like it was a religious event. James Brown broke down on cue during his shows and his band members would have to guide him off the stage wrapped like a baby in his spangled cape. For years when his father was in a playful mood, he’d mimic the Godfather of Soul and fall to his knees, begging one of his children to rush to his aid. “The soul has overcome me,” his father would insist while Devon ran to get a coat or towel, anything to resemble the clothes of royalty. Don would chant in rhythm like James Brown, break down slain in the spirit of funk. Devon loved to play this game and hurried to be first to his father’s side, ushering him to normalcy. Often he’d played the role too well and his eyes would be damp with tears that held like a miracle inside his eyelids. Tears that scared but delighted him at the same time. Devon had wanted a story like that to tell his own children someday, to make himself big and unreachable to them, the way the Gods are.
He and Joy didn’t make it to the show. Devon had no car anymore and Joy’s car was a piece of junk that stranded them early. Devon and Joy waited at first, neither with cell phones, deep in thought about what to do. What to do was obvious. And they walked the quarter mile to a service station and called her brother collect. As soon as her brother said he would come, Joy started to cry. Devon hadn’t seen her cry since a couple of the girls from the high school came into the sandwich shop, girls with hair like horse’s tails slick and swinging from their heads, and laughed at Joy’s black dyed hair and dark rimmed eyes, their talk loud enough for all the workers in the prep line to hear. “Do you smell something?” Devon had said as loud as he could. “I smell wet dog. You smell it, Joy?” Joy grinned so wide at him, her teeth under the black lipstick looked menacing, like a wolf’s teeth.
Joy’s brother was goat-eyed and nasty, “He’ll not get his black ass in my car,” he’d said, and Joy cussed him in ways that Devon had not yet heard from her but was impressed to witness. “Come on, Devon. Pay no attention to him.”
“That’s okay, I’ll walk.” Devon wouldn’t have gotten in with Joy’s brother for anything in the world. In those days anything might wound him, the wide expanse of an escaped white belly peeking from a shirt, the empty open mouth of a mailbox, but especially any unkind word. He would have to walk the twenty or so miles back home, the road open in front of him, one foot then the other for as long as it took to get there.
“Devon, please, get in the car, Devon. Please,” she’d said. “Don’t listen to him,” Joy said to Devon’s back. He had already started toward the exit with the gas station. “Wait, wait! I’ll walk with you.”
“No.” Devon shook his head and started walking, but Joy jumped out of the car and walked with him.
“Get in here, goddammit,” her brother yelled at Joy. But the two of them walked the half mile to the service station and waited for Sylvia to arrive.
That day Devon was tired, hot, and sweated through. His plan was to make it all the way to Winston-Salem, but it wasn’t looking good. He had walked miles. Ten? More? since he’d last stopped for a soda and wondered what he looked like to the people in the passing cars. He knew it wasn’t much. Did they see a man down on his luck? Did they look for that man’s hissing car on the side of the road? Or did they see a man who walks not for health or fashion but because he had no car to begin with?
At the service station, a slight girl was perched like a bird on the edge of a stool, her sinewy arms, dewy with fine blond hairs, Cutie in glitter letters on her chest, her face bright and round as a moon. Devon caught her eye and nodded in greeting. A handsome girl, Devon thought and laughed to himself. There was nothing handsome about her. That was a silly thing to think. Devon’s interest in her wasn’t exactly about sex. He wanted sex, with her, with any woman, but the thrill of the closeness was better. The knowledge that he could watch a woman sip her coffee in the morning or brush her teeth or walk around in her dingy cotton underwear or watch her fumble with the hooks of her bra as she pulled it on in the morning thrilled him.
For a few months, Devon had had just that kind of relationship. He had helped an old woman his mother knew clean out her basement. Her husband had left town years before, and it was finally time to get rid of the thirty-year-old couches, mattresses, and everyday dishes, the contents of catch-all drawers in boxes from her husband’s mother’s old house. Stuff they meant to but had never bothered to go through, but things her ex couldn’t stand to part with. “Devon will be glad to help you, Linda,” his mother had said. “He’s strong.” Devon had been working at the house for two days when on a break from lifting, Linda put the light bread and mayonnaise on the table, got a tomato from the windowsill for herself, and sat across the kitchen table from him. She was a skinny woman, but not stringy like a plucked chicken, just small. “Do you want to do it with me?” she asked.
Devon had paused at the question, not as surprised as he should have been. “I guess we could.”
“Okay, good,” she said, but she looked like she was going to finish her sandwich first.
There was nothing sweet about this woman but Devon liked her. Every day he came by, after he helped her clear her basement and storage building, her garden plot and attic, she asked him if he wanted to take her to bed. Every day he did. Neither of them had any idea when this situation would end, though they both knew it would. Weeks passed before the woman’s sister came to check on her in the middle of the day and found Devon at the kitchen table naked and unashamed.
“Where’s my sister,” she’d said. Devon had pointed to the bedroom.
The woman had started laughing at him, because of him, Devon couldn’t tell. “You tell my sister that I said she’s an idiot,” she said and walked out the door.
DEVON LIKED STORES, shelves of product, all that plenty. A small store with dog food so old, he wouldn’t give it to a dog, he thought. The joke made him laugh. A girl in the candy aisle looked up at him and rolled her eyes.
At the counter the moon-faced girl waited to ring up his items. She was beautiful, Devon thought.
“I’m sad,” Devon said to her.
The girl looked up from her register to see what the joke being played on her was, but there was only the tired boy.