The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963 Read online

  Whatever we were doing it was the best part of the trip so far. What could be better than driving on a mountain while “Yakety Yak” played and cool, light air blew all over you?

  11. Bobo Brazil Meets the Sheik

  The next time I woke up it was just starting to get light and somehow I was in the front seat and Momma was in the back. When my eyes got used to where they were I saw Dad holding the steering wheel with one hand and resting his other one on the mirror outside the car. The green lights from the dashboard made his face look puffed up and tired, but he was smiling to himself.

  I knew what woke me up this time. The Ultra-Glide was stuck. As we drove, the record was saying, “… and don’t forget who’s tak … and don’t forget who’s tak … and don’t forget who’s tak … and don’t forget who’s tak …”

  I started to say something to Dad but he looked pretty happy and before I could open my mouth the record hypnotized me back to sleep.

  The next time I woke up it was bright day and Joey was in the front seat drooling all over me. The Ultra-Glide was still saying, “… and don’t forget who’s tak …”

  Dad must have heard me breathe different ’cause he looked down at me and said, “Well, well, well, look who’s decided to come back to life!”

  “Hi, Dad, are we there yet?”

  “Oh no, et tu, Brute? You were my last hope. With By and Joey and your mother popping up every few minutes asking ‘Are we there yet?’ it’s been like a stuck record.”

  “Dad, it is a stuck record.”

  Dad seemed to notice the record player for the first time. “Ahh, that. Well, Kenny, I’m afraid it’s more than a stuck record. Something isn’t working right.”

  He lifted the arm off the record and looked in the backseat at Momma, who was asleep.

  “But let’s keep that between you and me, O.K.?”

  “Sure. How long before we stop?”

  “We’ll be at Grandma Sands’s before you know it.”

  Joey had been listening to us. “Daddy, that’s what you said the last time. How much longer? I’m sick of this old car.”

  “Not too much longer, honey.”

  “I’ll stay up and keep you company, Dad,” I said.

  “Yeah, me too,” Joey added.

  I don’t know who conked out first. I didn’t remember anything about coming into Alabama. I don’t think any of us did, especially Dad.

  We’d been in the car so long that Dad had started growing a beard. Little tiny hairs were coming out of his face. Most of them were black but nine or ten of them were white.

  Dad was looking real, real bad. He was still smiling to himself but now instead of a real smile it looked like he was gripping his teeth together to get ready to bite something. The worst thing, though, was that he had turned the radio on and was listening to country and western music! He was even tapping his hand on the steering wheel like he was really enjoying it.

  “Dad, do you know what you’re listening to?”

  Dad decided to cut up. “Kenneth, I been thinking about having all of our names changed to country names when we get back to Michigan. I’ll be Clem, you’ll be Homer, By will be Billy-Bob, Joey will be Daisy Mae and your mother will be … uh, your mother will be … well, I guess your mother’s name can just stay Wilona, I don’t think we’re going to find a more country name than that one, do you?” Me and Dad cracked up.

  Momma’s head popped up from the backseat and she said in a super-Southern style, “O.K., Clem, Ah hopes when us get to Birmingham you can ’splain tuh these he-uh babies’ granny how come you turnt ’em into little zombies from sittin’ in this car so long.”

  Dad laughed, “Now, Wilona, you know it hasn’t been that bad. In fact, I’m gonna admit to something that I probably shouldn’t.”

  Momma rubbed her eyes, then put her hand on top of my head. “You gonna do this here admittin’ in front of little Homer he-uh?”

  Everybody started waking up and stretching and scratching.

  Momma kept teasing Dad. “And what ’bout some vittles, Clem, the sun been up fo’ hours and you ain’t even been out to check them traplines to see if we’s gonna have some coon pie fuh bruk-fuss.”

  Dad yelled out, “Yee-haa!” and then said, “Haven’t any of you wondered why you’ve been sleeping like a little herd of angels?”

  Byron said, “Like there was anything to keep anybody awake in this carful of squares.”

  “Anyway,” Dad said, “I’ma let the cat out of the bag. I’ve been using two kinds of mind power to keep this trip going so smooth. First, after a while I started locking into the road and there was nothing to it! Just me, the road and the Brown Bomber, all tuned in to one hum, and as long as I listened to that hum everything was fine.

  “My biggest worry was you, Wilona. I knew after ’while you’d figure out that I wasn’t going to stop, and you gotta admit you were good and salty about it at first, right?”

  “You know I still am.” Momma was upset because all of her notebook planning had been wasted.

  “But, Wilona, you got to admit that once you figured out how much money we’d save by not stopping you went along with it.”

  Momma kind of grunted, not saying yes and not saying no.

  Dad cleared his throat and rubbed his hand over the little stubbles that were coming out of his chin. We all knew this was a sign that he was going to start acting the fool. He’d tested Momma to see how mad she really was and decided it was safe to play around.

  “Yup,” he said, rubbing his chin until it made a scratchy, sawing sound, “eighteen big hours in a row! Nearly a thousand miles! I had a load to deliver and”— he punched the air with his fist—“I delivered it. It’s just like this great song I heard a couple of miles back, ‘Big Daddy Was a Truck-Drivin’ Man!’ I’m not gonna lie and say it was easy, uh-uh. There was many a time I wanted to stop, but when those times came I’d just think of my old pal, Joe Espinosa, driving all the way to Texas without stopping and I’d keep my foot in that tank.

  “Oh yeah, there were times when your mother was giving me looks like she was gonna kill me the first time I slowed down, but I just kept smiling at her and kept the Brown Bomber chugging on. I’d tell her, ‘You’re right, sweetheart, we’ll just go a little bit farther.’ And you kids! You talk about some pathetic, tortured-looking little faces. Eighteen hours in a car can age a kid forty years. Yeah, I swear I’ve been looking in the rearview mirror and wondering where my babies were and where these three bad-dispositioned, sour-faced, middle-age midgets came from. But your sorry little mugs couldn’t stop me either.

  “In spite of all the cryin’ and bawlin’ and moanin’ and wailin’ and gnashin’ of teeth I kept pushing on.”

  Dad must have been real tired, he hardly ever talked this much straight.

  “I got to admit to the other trick I used too, but I can’t take full credit for this one.”

  I hoped Dad was going to say that I helped him by keeping him company, but, “No, some of the credit has to go to Scientific Popular.” That was the name of a magazine that came to Dad in the mail every month. It had real cool covers, there were always drawings of smiling white people on it standing next to cars with wings or sitting in private submarines or eating a whole meal in one little pill. The covers were real interesting but the insides were real boring.

  “Yup, good old Scientific Popular, they had an article about sound frequencies and said that certain sounds caused certain effects in all living things, even Weird Watsons! It said the sound of one of those vacuum cleaners can put a baby to sleep. And it works!”

  Momma laughed a little. It was strange for all of us to see Dad talking so much.

  “When we first hit Alabama and had a bunch of miles to go and you kids were popping up like prairie dogs and crying and saying, ‘How much longer?’ and ‘Mommy, make him stop!’ and ‘Is that Birmingham over there?’ all I did was use that vacuum trick.

  “I started buzzin’ like a Hoover vacuum and you guys dr
opped off in reverse seniority! First Joey dropped, then Kenneth, then Daddy Cool, then even you, Wilona!

  “Shoot, you guys were out cold from the state line on! I threw a blanket over you in the backseat and then even those whines and whimpers and moans you guys were making didn’t bother me.

  “And you, Wilona, once I got buzzing, the only thing that was coming out of your mouth was drool!”

  “Is that what that sound was?” Momma asked. “I thought you were driving so long you’d lost your mind. I’m still not sure you haven’t.”

  Everybody woke up but it was a fake wake-up, we were all soon back asleep, even though it was morning.

  The next thing I remember I was waking up back in the backseat and Momma was saying real, real Southern, “Babies, we home!”

  Momma was honking the horn of the Brown Bomber like she was crazy.

  I raised my head out of the seat to look at what Momma was calling home and couldn’t believe it!

  Birmingham looked a lot like Flint! There were real houses, not little log cabins, all over the place! And great big beautiful trees. Most of all, though, there was the sun.

  Me, Joetta and Byron unfolded ourselves into the Alabama heat and it was like we all remembered at once that we were going to finally see what Grandma Sands really looked like!

  We all bunched up together by Momma’s door but she didn’t get out, she was still honking the horn like a nut! We had to cover our ears.

  Dad said, “Nothing’s changed.”

  The door of a regular little old house opened.

  Me and Joey had never seen Grandma Sands in our lives. Byron said he could remember that she was the meanest, ugliest person in the world but he was probably lying, he was only four the last time Momma and Dad were here. Byron said he’d had nightmares for a couple of weeks after they left Alabama ten years ago.

  All the Weird Watsons had real good imaginations but none of us was ready for what came out of the door of that house.

  I was expecting a troll. I thought Grandma Sands would be bigger than Dad, I thought she’d be foaming at the mouth like she had rabies.

  I remember a couple of years ago how Momma had cried and cried when someone called from Alabama and told us that Grandma Sands had had a little stroke, so I knew she walked with a cane now. I’d imagined the cane would be as big as a tree trunk with crows and owls and lizards living in it.

  What came out was a teeny-weeny, old, old, old woman that looked just like Momma would if someone shrank her down about five sizes and sucked all the juice out of her!

  Grandma Sands waved a little skinny stick in the air and said, “What are you all doin’ here today? You ain’t supposed to be here till Monday!” Man, if you think Momma can talk Southern-style, you should hear Grandma Sands!

  Momma was blubbering and smiling and covering her mouth with both hands and ran right up on the porch and nearly broke that little old woman in half.

  “How you doin’, Momma?” She cried on the woman’s shoulders, then held Grandma Sands out to look at her. “You look so good!”

  Boy, Momma can lie when she wants to!

  “Y’all come on over here and give your granny a hug,” my Southern-style mother said.

  Me and Joey and Byron shuffled over in a little crowd and when we got through pushing each other forward I was at the front and had to go on the porch to hug Grandma Sands first.

  I tried to be real careful with her. She was just a little taller than me and skinnier than anything I’d ever seen alive. I could see her brown scalp right through her curly silver hair.

  Grandma Sands squeezed me hard and cried all over me. She wiped a bunch of tears away with a twisted-up hand and blinked a couple of times before she looked at me. She was so short she didn’t even have to look down!

  She tried to say something but she couldn’t talk, she just stuck her bottom lip out some and nodded her head up and down a couple of times, then pulled me back to her and squeezed me like crazy.

  Momma slapped the back of my head and said, “Kenneth Bernard Watson, you’d best quit actin’ so silly and give your grandmother a good hug!”

  I squeezed her a little. A smell like baby powder came out of her when I did. I really think I could feel her lungs when I touched her back!

  I don’t know what got Joey started but she was off to the races with her tears. She was the only one who’d practiced what she’d say to Grandma Sands. She sniffed a couple of times then said, “Hi, Grandma Sands, it’s a real pleasure to meet you.” You could only half understand what she was saying, she was blubbering so much.

  Grandma Sands matched Joey tear for tear. They squeezed each other for a while, then Grandma Sands got her little, squeaky voice back and said to Momma, “Lord, ’Lona, if this child ain’t you! Look at this baby, just as pretty and sweet as you!”

  Momma and Joey grinned like two nuts.

  Byron was next.

  This was what I’d dreamed about. These were the two meanest, most evil people I’d ever known and I knew only one of them was going to come out of this alive!

  There was going to be a battle something like if Godzilla met King Kong, or if Frankenstein met Dracula, or like when champion wrestler Bobo Brazil meets the Sheik!

  I’d imagined that a week or two after we got back to Flint we’d get a phone call from Alabama with the winner of the big battle on the other end.

  If it was Byron, he’d talk kind of cool and low out of the corner of his mouth and say, “Shooot, man, you better come get this old chick, I ate her alive.”

  If Grandma Sands won the battle we’d have to hold the phone away from our ear while she shouted, “ ’Lona, you call this a bad child? This li’l saint is ready to come back North and go to Sunday school and scrub all y’all’s floors!”

  But as soon as I saw Grandma Sands I knew that Byron would destroy this poor old woman. I was even afraid Momma might decide not to leave him in Alabama.

  Byron walked up on the porch real cool and kind of bent over to give Grandma Sands a hug. Grandma Sands squeezed him hard.

  “ ’Lona, what you teach these babies up North? Don’t they know how to give no one a proper hug?” She held Byron by the arms and looked at him from top to bottom. “You grew up to be a fine-lookin’ boy. You was so puny when you was born you nearly worried us crazy. Got strong too.” She slapped Byron’s arm and he kind of laughed.

  Grandma Sands reached up and ran her wrinkly old hand over Byron’s head. “A little short on hair, but we gonna get on just fine, what you think, By?”

  Yes, ma am.

  “Good, good, see, there’s lots of things you can do down here, Mr. Robert ain’t as much help as he used to be, so all them things he used to do you can do now.”

  Momma said, “Who? Mr. who?”

  Dad came up on the porch and got a ton of hugs and tears too, then Grandma Sands pulled everybody together. Her little arms could only get around one person at a time but as the Weird Watsons stood there with some of us laughing, some of us crying and some of us looking cool it felt like we all were wrapped up in a big ball.

  Grandma Sands kept saying, “My family, my beautiful, beautiful family,” except with that Southern-style accent and all the weeping it sounded like she was saying “fambly.”

  Finally the crowd started breaking up and Grandma Sands said, “Now what am I gonna feed y’all? I wasn’t expecting you till Monday. Me and Mr. Robert usually just has leftovers on Sunday, but I guess if By’ll go down to Jobe’s and pick up some things we can have chicken tonight. You good at following directions, Byron?”

  “Huh?” By’s face twisted up.

  “What?” Grandma Sands’s voice popped like one of those big brown grocery bags being snapped open.

  By looked surprised and said, “I meant, ‘Huh, ma’am.’ ”

  “You good at following directions? Jobe’s is a good little walk.”

  I said, “He can follow directions real good, Grandma Sands, he’s not as dumb as he looks.”
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br />   I shut up real quick and wished I hadn’t said anything when Grandma Sands looked at me and said, “ ’Lona, maybe there’s two who should be spending the summer down here with their granny.”

  Everybody started going inside the ugly little house. Momma sounded worried. “Momma, who is this Mr. Robert?”

  Grandma Sands laughed just like the Wicked Witch of the West and said, “Honey, we got to talk. You jus’ be patient and soon’s he gets up I want all of y’all to meet him.”

  “Soon’s he gets up? Awww, Momma …” Momma sounded real upset and disappointed and Southern.

  But not as disappointed as me.

  The way Byron kept his head down and was smiling and saying “Yes, ma’am” this and “No, ma’am” that, it looked like he had surrendered before the first punch was thrown.

  Instead of King Kong and Godzilla it was like King Kong and Bambi; instead of Bobo Brazil and the Sheik it was like Bobo Brazil and Captain Kangaroo; instead of Dracula and Frankenstein it was like Dracula and a giraffe, and Byron was all neck.

  He knew exactly what I was thinking.

  After Grandma Sands gave us directions Byron looked at me sideways and said, “What the hell you starin’ at?”

  I just shook my head.

  “What you expect?” By asked. “You seen her. That bird’s as old as dirt. She’s so old I bet she used to step over dinosaur turds. I ain’t gonna have her death on my hands.”

  I knew that was a lie.

  It seemed like all of the fight was out of Byron and we’d only been in Birmingham for a couple of minutes.

  12. That Dog Won’t Hunt No More

  Birmingham was like an oven. That first night I couldn’t sleep at all, me and By had to share a bed and we both were sweating like two pigs. It got so hot that Byron didn’t even keep a sheet on himself to make sure I didn’t accidentally touch him in the night. He finally slept on the floor because he said it was a little bit cooler.

  When I got up Byron was gone. I looked out of the window into the backyard and By and Dad and Mr. Robert were standing under a great big tree with a dog. I went to the bathroom real quick, did my morning scratches, then ran out to be with the guys.