If You Want Me to Stay by Michael Parker Page A

whining don’t-mess-with-me, I’m-asleep noise: unnh.
    â€œWake up and look at this Tank.”
    He rocked up so violently I nearly lost my grip on the steering wheel.
    â€œDog,” he said. “Where we at?”
    â€œBottomsail Beach.”
    â€œMama’s here?”
    â€œNo, buddy.”
    â€œThere’s a roller coaster,” he said, stabbing his finger toward the Ferris wheel.
    â€œThat’s a Ferris wheel.”
    â€œNaw it ain’t.”
    â€œOkay, Tank.”
    â€œWhere’s the ocean?”
    â€œSee those lights,” I said, pointing to the pier. “That’s a fishing pier. It’s built out over the water.”
    â€œCan we go down on it?”
    â€œOkay,” I said. I didn’t know where the Breezeby was. I’d need some time to figure out what to say to her, what to say to Tank. I knew she wouldn’t want to take him. I knew he wouldn’t want to stay with her either.
    The parking lot of the Jolly Roger Pier was filled with beat pickups just like my daddy’s. Many of them sagged with crusty old campers. Between them in lawn chairs sat old fishwives wrapped in blankets. It was chilly in the ocean breeze. I grabbed Mario from Johnson Distributing for myself and Larry from Merita to wrap around Tank in case he got cold on the pier.
    Out on the pier the wind whipped our too-big shirts into flappy capes. A storm had just passed and the pier fishermen had layered themselves puffy to guard against wind and bait slime. Though it was only eight or nine o’clock at night we stepped over snoring lumps in greasy sleeping bags. Tank stared openmouthed at a coveralled man hunched over the railing eating cereal out of the box.
    â€œCan we sleep out here, Joel Junior?”
    I was thinking how good it was to be out of that truck. We had been in that truck for what seemed like a holiday weekend. I got the boys’ breakfast and then Daddy went off right soon after and we had stayed in that truck until late afternoon. I was thinking about Carter, was he hurt bad or lying on the floor with a Band-Aid on his ear listening to
Goat’s Head Soup
with my daddy, singing the words to “Hide Your Love” which was my favorite song on there though my daddy liked the one called “Coming Down Again” and Carter and Tank were partial to Starfucker though they weren’t allowed to sing the words.
    â€œWe’ll see,” I said. I realized after these two words had come out of my mouth that I could learn how to be somebody’sdaddy. Defer every question they ask and hope like hell they forget to reask. But this only applied to normal kids. It didn’t work on never-forget-a-half-promise Tank.
    The wide planks of the pier were slick from the storm, phosphorescent from fish gut. Kids about Carter’s age got to do mean things to stingrays left lying out in midpier for kids to do mean things to. These tortures were slow and cruel and drew many expressionless fishermen who sipped from bagged tallboys and watched the dismemberment soberly, as if it had been drained of all meaning from repetition but was too significant to ignore.
    At the end of the pier, where the crowd thinned, me and Tank stopped to watch this old man cast. He had the magic. His reel buzzed like a fluorescent light fixture gone wrong. His casts far exceeded the armchair flicks of others which dropped limp as dangled anchors and rose in a shameful seaweedy tangle. Me and Tank watched as the line shot toward the dark horizon. In my mind I tracked the silver hypotenuse down to where the slight hook pricked the green glass and disappeared beneath to do its sly seducing, an undercover cop posing prostitute. We watched for a half hour until the man pulled in something from far out in the dark green sea. Something big, silver, beautiful.
    â€œA fish!” screamed Tank.
    Everyone at that end of the pier laughed. I loved my little brother so much right then I scooped