"I'm doing the best I can under the circumstances," she said. "How come you never blame your father for anything? He's no saint, you know."
"I know," I said. I ran a finger along the edge of the desk. Dad was always parking his cigarettes there, and it was ribbed with a row of black cigarette burns, like a decorative border. "Mom, you have to leave Dad," I said.
She stopped doing her toe touches. "I can't believe you would say that," she said. "I can't believe that you, of all people, would turn on your father." I was Dad's last defender, she continued, the only one who pretended to believe all his excuses and tales, and to have faith in his plans for the future. "He loves you so much," Mom said. "How can you do this to him?"
"I don't blame Dad," I said. And I didn't. But Dad seemed hell-bent on destroying himself, and I was afraid he was going to pull us all down with him. "We've got to get away."
"But I can't leave your father!" she said.
I told Mom that if she left Dad, she'd be eligible for government aid, which she couldn't get now because she had an able-bodied husband. Some people at schoolnot to mention half the people on Little Hobart Streetwere on welfare, and it wasn't so bad. I knew Mom was opposed to welfare, but those kids got food stamps and clothing allowances. The state bought them coal and paid for their school lunches.
Mom wouldn't hear of it. Welfare, she said, would cause irreparable psychological damage to us kids. "You can be hungry every now and then, but once you eat, you're okay," she said. "And you can get cold for a while, but you always warm up. Once you go on welfare, it changes you. Even if you get off welfare, you never escape the stigma that you were a charity case. You're scarred for life."
"Fine," I said. "If we're not charity cases, then get a job." There was a teacher shortage in McDowell County, just like there had been in Battle Mountain. She could get work in a heartbeat, and when she had a salary, we could move into a little apartment in town.
"That sounds like an awful life," Mom said.
"Worse than this?" I asked.
Mom turned quiet. She seemed to be thinking. Then she looked up. She was smiling serenely. "I can't leave your father," she said. "It's against the Catholic faith." Then she sighed. "And anyway, you know your mom. I'm an excitement addict."
MOM NEVER TOLD Dad that I'd urged her to leave him. That summer he still thought of me as his biggest supporter, and given that there was so little competition for the job, I probably was.
One afternoon in June, Dad and I were sitting out on the porch, our legs dangling over the side, looking down at the houses below. That summer, it was so hot I could barely breathe. It seemed hotter than Phoenix or Battle Mountain, where it regularly climbed above a hundred degrees, so when Dad told me it was only ninety degrees, I said the thermometer must be broken. But he said no, we were used to dry desert heat, and this was humid heat.
It was a lot hotter, Dad pointed out, down in the valley along Stewart Street, which was lined with those cute brick houses that had their neat, square lawns and corrugated aluminum breezeways. The valleys trapped the heat. Our house was the highest on the mountainside, which made it, ergo, the coolest spot in Welch. In case of floodingas we had seenit was also the safest. "You didn't know I put a lot of thought into where we should live, did you?" he asked me. "Real estate's about three things, Mountain Goat. Location. Location. Location."
Dad started laughing. It was a silent laugh that made his shoulders shake, and the more he laughed, the funnier it seemed to him, which made him laugh even harder. I had to start laughing, too, and soon we were both hysterical, lying on our backs, tears running down our cheeks, slapping our feet on the porch floor. We'd get too winded to laugh any further, our sides cramping with stitches, and we'd think our fit was over, but then one of us would start chuckling, and that would get the other going, and again we'd both end up shrieking like hyenas.
*
The main source of relief from the heat for the kids in Welch was the public swimming pool, down by the railroad tracks near the Esso station. Brian and I had gone swimming once, but Ernie Goad and his friends were there, and they started telling everybody that we Wallses lived in garbage and would stink up the pool water something awful. This was Ernie Goad's opportunity to take revenge for the Battle of Little Hobart Street. One of his friends came up with the phrase. "health epidemic," and they were going on to the parents and lifeguards that we needed to be ejected to prevent an outbreak at the pool. Brian and I decided to leave. As we were walking away, Ernie Goad came up to the chain-link fence. "Go on home to the garbage dump!" he shouted. His voice was shrill with triumph. "Go on, now, and don't come back!"
*
A week later, with the heat still holding, I ran into Dinitia Hewitt downtown. She had just come from the pool and had her wet hair pulled back under a scarf. "Brother, that water felt good," she said, drawing out the word. "good" so it sounded like it had about fifteen Os in it. "Do you ever go swimming?"
"They don't like us to go there," I said.
Dinitia nodded, even though I hadn't explained. Then she said. "Why don't you come swimming with us in the morning?"
By. "us" I knew she meant the other black people. The pool was not segregated, anyone could swim at any timetechnically, at leastbut the fact was that all the black people swam in the morning, when the pool was free, and all the white people swam in the afternoon, when admission was fifty cents. No one had planned this arrangement, and no rules enforced it. That was just the way it was.
I surely wanted to get back in that water, but I couldn't help but feel that if I took Dinitia up on her offer, I'd be violating some sort of taboo. "Wouldn't anybody get mad?" I asked.
"'Cause you're white?" she asked. "Your own kind might, but we won't. And your own kind won't be there."
*
The next morning I met Dinitia in front of the pool entrance, my thrift-shop one-piece rolled inside my frayed gray towel. The white girl clerking the entrance booth gave me a surprised look when we passed through the gate, but she said nothing. The women's locker room was dark and smelled of Pine-Sol, with cinder-block walls and a wet cement floor. A soul tune was blasting out of an eight-track tape player, and all the black women packed between the peeling wooden benches were singing and dancing to the music.