Dead Oak Tree Leaves

Jonny Grant don't tell me hardly nothing anymore.

Jonny Grant don’t tell me hardly nothing anymore. And I ask, too, that’s the sad part. I sit and I wait for him to spill like old buckets of water. I don’t sit there and look all high and mighty like I used to. I learned recently that men like Jonny Grant like it when you stoop to their level. So, I get all easygoing when I’m right to prove I’m worth listening to and I lean the seat back like he does, but all it does is make my back hurt. I can never remember how tall he actually is. None of that matters when you got all that dirt over you, though, and I don’t really feel like trying to calculate the measurements of some old bones. I would sit by that old bench over by the ice cream shop and close my eyes and imagine he was right in front of me. I never stuck my arms out because I knew that nothing would be there to grace the tips of my fingers once I’d extended all the flesh I got. Jonny Grant never used to talk that often, but it makes it all the more difficult when he won’t even show up to the damn place like he used to.

My grandma used to see him in that grocery store where the newly renovated Methodist church is, but he quit showing up since September. His mama doesn’t reach out like she used to, sometimes I’ll wave to her in the store and sometimes she’ll wave back. I don’t even see her in the grocery store all that often no more. My mama says she don’t see her hardly anywhere, and when she does she’s got these circles around her eyes so thick you’d think she was in face paint, and when you shake her hands sometimes you can smell the cigarette residue. I told her Jonny Grant’s mama don’t smoke and she said “Like hell she don’t,” and we didn’t talk anymore for the rest of the car ride to the Food Lion but I got all mad thinking about his mama buying a pack of cigarettes from the Walgreens she used to buy us all that candy from. The parking lot by the Walgreens is empty all the time now, even on weekends. I get teary-eyed when I see it but I won’t tell his mama that. I don’t think she’d have nothing nice to say, all those late nights he’d come home with the tank on E and the mixed scents of tobacco and dollar store perfume covering up his crimes.

Jonny Grant don’t look me in the eyes anymore like he used to do. It’s something about him that I know he doesn’t like remembering. I’d sit there and stare, painfully, letting the tears well up all big in my eyes that they looked like starry nights. Jonny Grant used to give me those hand-rolled cigarettes and I never knew what was in them, but when he’d give me all that funny stuff I never used to ask. My body would get all of those funny feelings, my mouth ridiculously dry, I’d feel my heartbeat speeding up, trying to keep time with the putters of old car engines. The wheels turn all on their own. I used to think he breathed in time with the rotations. I once asked him what that mess was all about and he told me you just have to feel like you are the car. I’d sit in that passenger seat with him with the windows all rolled down a lot that summer, and sometimes he’d just stick his head out the window and put his foot down hard to rev the engine real loud, always doing something high and mighty because I couldn’t understand it.

“What’s it mean when it makes that noise?” I’d ask him.

“I don’t know, but it don’t sound too good.” He’d say back to me, head still pointed straight down like he was just staring at the wheels.

When he’d get too focused on all that ruckus I’d get all my quick studies done, watching how his lips would down turn and his eyebrows, or lack thereof, tried to furrow the best they could. If it exceeded more than five minutes in the August sun, I’d see how the top of his scalp would get all sweaty and he’d shake the fringe out of his face like a wet dog. I never minded it, but he’d always complain about getting a haircut. We’d sit there in that parking lot for twenty whole minutes just listening to the sounds of that damn car. Sometimes we’d walk into an Autozone but he never bought anything, and I always got too busy looking at the rear window stickers to care that I’d just wasted half my day in the hot sun with the car parked.

Well, today I saw the leaves spiraling. In the dead of December it’s 60 degrees and I saw the leaves spiraling like a fancy tornado. The turn of the rotted plant and the wind carrying it all this way just made me so grateful. I saw Jonny Grant walking by the tree stump the other day, or at least I thought it was him, all those ragged unbrushed curls looked like they could be sitting right on top of his old head. It reminded me of all those dolls I’d play with when I was a child and neglectful. I remember seeing his mama right beside him when she’d pick us up from his old job, and how she looked nothing like him, then I think of how his daddy didn’t either. It made me so sad to think about. We looked the same sometimes and I wondered if that was enough. Then I wondered if it ever broke his heart like it might break mine one day.

I saw the leaves turning all these different kinds of colors and I thought of him, selfishly, all dressed in dead oak tree leaves and muddled water, covered in formaldehyde and caution tape, looking at me like I did something bad. I was sitting down by that tree stump the other day and started thinking about where he went, where he was going all sour-like and torn to pieces. The rain was stuck to his hair and the cigarette hanging from his lips was damp and falling apart.

He looked so ugly that day. It made me feel so terrible to see those eyes so downtrodden. It’s a shame for eyes like that to have circles around them like tire tracks. Circling and circling and circling. Dead oak tree leaves, muddled water, and tire tracks. There was something rotten in him I wanted to just cut out. I knew how to uproot a tree. I’ve seen stronger storms than they have up in those tropical countries do it a million times over. At a certain point you just begin to mimic those movements. I put my fingers inside him, one by one, I count all those heartbeats and the flow of all the blood. The measurements, all of it. I know it like the back of my hand. When I close my eyes I see the wheels turn. All that dirt flying in your face and the little hairs of root, so many, you don’t know how to squeeze all of it out. Careful and alive until they aren’t.

But, there I was walking by the old tree stump and I see the way his hair is moving in the wind, all like the leaves and the dirt. I walk by him and my chest starts to feel all funny like I’m breaking something in. It’s a stiff glove. I’m fifteen and we are at the ball park. It’s empty of course except for us. When his mama picks us up from the fields he lays his head in my lap and I see the summer lightning shake him, he jumps like voltage went right through his bones. I hum along to the song on the radio and watch as the trees sway. His heartbeat matches their movement but I don’t tell him that. It’s a pulled tooth. I give him that piece of me, something pointed, the blood dribbles out of my mouth and I feel gutted. I’m a poisoned thing. He holds it in his hand and we just don’t talk about it. I don’t wanna, it’s just a landing place, but before we go to bed that night I see him stick it under his pillow like it’s his own damn tooth. That’s tightness.

I always sit with it just to see how deep it goes, how long it takes for me to not be able to breathe. I start to think about how fast his car is and how weak his damn lungs were and I get all mad I start crying some nights. When I close my eyes he closes his, and when I open them he’s gone. That’s fine.

I hum along to the song on the radio and my hands grip the wheel, soaked in sweat. When my daddy bought this car the AC didn’t work, but it’s too damn cold to take all these jackets off so when the wheels start turning in February I sweat like I did in July. It’s crazy I’m still under that same sun. I see his car in the old junkyard, and his mama shaking hands with some dealer guy I’d never seen before. Her hair’s got some gray in it now, all that black getting salted so heavily. Mama says it’s all that damn stress, no woman that young should be graying like that. I don’t see the point in arguing no more, and I don’t get as mad as I used to.

I walked by that tree stump the other day and the leaves were spinning, all grateful-like. The mushrooms were newly sprouted, and someone had ashed a couple cigarettes on it and left their butts sitting right in the crack of the wood. I couldn’t help but think Jonny Grant had come back just to pester me. That would be just like him.