Remember Me to the One Who Lives There

by Michael Parker

Tyson was stapling plastic to the windows of the farmhouse when the pickup pulled up to the landing. A boy in a backwards ball cap slouched behind the wheel. A girl rode shotgun. Kids cutting class, likely, or dropouts — even at a glance, distracted by his task, Tyson could tell they were teenagers.

Redneck insulation, he’d heard it called, covering windows in thick plastic when the weather turned, but the farmhouse was a hundred and fifty years old. Wind off the river rattled the panes and he didn’t have the money to replace a porch board, much less windows the dimensions of which were not exactly stock. He’d grown up to the sound of plastic flapping through the night, was accustomed to peering out into a world so opaque you could make out only shapes, like a man going slowly blind.

The boy revved the engine, as if Tyson, standing halfway up a ladder not twenty- five feet from the road, could not see him. At least he did not blow his horn, like passengers had been known to do across the river. Tyson ran the last private ferry in the state of North Carolina. The river where his ancestors had set up their once-thriving concern had ferried coaches and wagons along what he had heard described in the half- dozen write-ups they’d done about him over the years as a “major trade artery.” These days the landing on either side was the dead end of a back road off a back road, a place you’d nearly have to get lost to find.

At the crossing, the river was a quarter-mile wide. The ride lasted 12 minutes shore to shore, and took the tourists a good sixty miles out of their way, regardless of where they were going. What the river divided was, even Tyson had to concede, not much of nothing. Swamp and scrub, over-logged pine forest, the occasional abandoned homesteads, house and outbuildings wrestled to the ground by kudzu and Virginia creeper. The tourists, while they waited to board, took photos of cypress knees and moss dripping from the oaks, things that Tyson, who had been born in this house and lived here his whole life, saw as if through thick plastic, if he noticed at all.

Tyson heard the engine-rev again but did not put down his staple gun. The sign attached to the gate stated clearly that this was a two-vehicle ferry that ran on the hour. The pickup was the only vehicle in line and it was 2:20. Time meant little to him. He operated daily, weekends and holidays as long as it was light out; he only stopped running when the wind was bad or the water too high. All Tyson paid attention to was the big hand on his watch hitting 12 and little one settling on some other number on the dial. He never thought about the future and the present, to his mind, was over before you could spit out its two syllables.

But Tyson often thought of those Saturdays of his childhood when he went into town. Riding in the back of his uncle’s pickup, thirty mile round trip. Back then everyone came to town on Saturday afternoon. The eight blocks on Sunday were empty but on Saturday there was even alley traffic, though his father warned him to keep to the streets.

It was on one of these trips where Tyson first saw her. She was reading a book while lying on her back in the grass, her feet propped up on a swing hanging from a branch of a weeping willow. The house was a few miles out of town, a brick ranch set up off the road at just the point where the outskirts were overtaken by soybean and tobacco fields. The last outpost before the land turned sodden, the point where Tyson ignored the wayside to study the covers of the records he’d bought, or nodded off into a nap.

Tyson finished the window he was covering and climbed down the ladder. Still carrying his staple gun, he headed toward the pickup to tell the boy he might as well cut his engine off, they had 35 minutes yet, no sense wasting fuel. When Tyson was halfway across the yard, the boy flicked his cigarette into the grass. Tyson walked over to it and made a show of grinding it out with his boot heel. He picked up the butt and brought it over to the pickup.

Up close the boy looked even younger. Pimply and the kind of adolescent skinny that a steady of diet of fast food and soda and beer could not alter.

“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t toss your trash in my yard.”

Smirking, the boy said his ashtray was full. Tyson looked beyond him to the girl, but all he could see was her hair, blonde but not naturally so, brushing the collar of her leather jacket. He looked at the boy again and pointed to a trash barrel he’d chained to a tree by the picnic table.

“I guess I got time to empty it,” said the boy, “though I don’t really see why you can’t carry us across right now. Since we’re here early.”

“You in a hurry?”

“My mama said I was in a hurry from the get-go. Came out of her so early they had to put me in one of those glass boxes.”

“Incubator,” said the girl. Her voice sounded hoarse and faint, as if she’d been smoking too much, or screaming.

“This is a two-car ferry,” said Tyson. “If no one shows up before the hour, you might have to wait a little longer. So yeah, I think you have time to empty your ashtray.”

For two seconds the boy’s face attempted some version of hard-ass before he leaned over and extracted the ashtray.

“Over there by the picnic table,” said Tyson, reaching through the window to add another butt to the pile. He stood back to let him out of the truck and let him get out of earshot before he said to the girl — or to the back of the girl’s head — “You really ought to switch the engine off.”

Tyson was headed back to the ladder when the girl in the truck called out, “Hey.” He was slow to turn — he figured he had enough time to cover another window, had wasted too much time on these kids already — but the girl was still turned away from him when she added, “Dad.”

Brenda’s parents never cared for Tyson, so they arranged to meet in town, after school sometimes, but because Tyson had to run the ferry, mostly on Saturdays. They always met on a side street called Sycamore, along the wall of a shoe store. And she always, no matter the season, waited for him in the same place. It took Tyson too long to mention it, though he’d noticed it from the start, and when he did finally ask, Brenda seemed almost disappointed.

“Because the sun warms the bricks,” she said. “Just those bricks?”

“These better than others.” “Why?”

“How should I know? But they keep the heat. All day long and I bet if we were to come here in the middle of the night they’d still be warm.”

“Kayla?” said Tyson to the girl in the pickup. She had her mother’s eyes, but his mouth. She nodded toward the boy, who had passed the trash can and was standing by the river.

“He doesn’t know and I don’t want him to know.”

Tyson had not seen his daughter for thirteen years. He had not heard from her mother in as long.

“Don’t tell him,” she said.

Tyson turned to watch the boy empty the ashtray into the river. “Who is he?”

“Just a ride.”

There had been a hurricane. Kayla was five. The bridges up and down the river for a hundred miles had washed out and when the water receded, the only way for the convoys of trucks come north to restore power was to take Tyson’s ferry. For two weeks Brenda and some women from a church up the road fed the men while Tyson made trips, across and back, east to west to east.. Don’t you ever get tired of this, one of the men asked him. A lineman from Arkansas. Had he not been so exhausted he would never have told the stranger about the girl who waited for him by the bricks. He hated that he had told their story to the man who took Brenda away almost as much as he hated the man himself. Hate did not come easy to Tyson. He’d had none of the youthful insolence he saw in this boy who had brought his daughter back to him. He’d been a good boy, mostly. The only thing he ever did to shame his parents was get a girl pregnant the year after he graduated high school, though he’d married her right off and brought her across the river to stay.

“You better go now,” said Kayla. “He’ll ask what we’re talking about.” “I’m supposed to ignore you?”

“Once we get on the river I’ll act like I want to know all about the ferry. He won’t get out of the truck. He could give a damn about your ferry. It’s a miracle I even talked him into going this far out of the way.”

Tyson didn’t ask where they were going, or why she was going anywhere with this boy, or where they were coming from, where her mother was.

“It takes twelve minutes to cross,” he said. When she did not answer he said, “Twelve minutes to cover thirteen years.”

“Here he comes,” she said.

“Kayla,” said Tyson. He could hear the break in his voice. After the storm, after Brenda left with the lineman, carrying their child in a truck with a cherry picker, days passed before Tyson stopped feeling as if he were crossing. It took even longer for his vision to clear, for the wind to strip the plastic from the windows.

The boy was back. He saw the car before Tyson did, an S.U.V. with Georgia tags. “Oh hell yeah,” said the boy. “All hands on deck.”

“Just a few more minutes,” Tyson said, not to the boy but to Kayla. He walked back to the S.U.V and greeted the two older women and told them he was awfully sorry, but something had come up, they were going to have to come back some other time.

“Well, the guide book said y’all run on the hour,” said the driver. She looked at her friend, who nodded in confirmation.

“Family emergency.”

“Oh,” said the driver. “Well.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I really am. I used to have a fellow I could call in situations like this but he’s not available short notice anymore and it’s only me now.”

In fact there was no other fellow. Only Tysons had operated the ferry for a century and a half. When Tyson’s great-grandfather started the ferry it was a barge made of planks. Two men poled it upstream and rowed it back across. There was room for a wagon and two mules. Now the ferry was pulled across by a cable drawn across the river, which, between trips and when Tyson shut down for the night, was submerged in the water. It wasn’t possible to stray off course in calm waters unless the cable snapped.

Tyson sat in the pilot house, as if he was running the boat, but all he had to do was let off the throttle at the right second so that the ferry would align with the landing.

The vehicle backed up slowly and turned around. When Tyson approached the truck, the boy stuck his head all the way out of the window. “What the hell? You run ’em off just because I flicked a cig in your yard? You think I’m going to wait around until somebody else shows?”

“I remembered something I needed to do in town.” Tyson got in his truck, nosed up to the boy’s bumper. He raised the arm and directed the boy down the ramp and onto the ferry. When his own truck was on board and he’d chocked the wheels and hooked the chain to the poles. He walked up to the truck. The boy had rolled up the window, music blaring again. Tyson motioned for the boy to roll it down.

“Twelve bucks.”

“How long does it take?”

“Half hour.”

“To cross that?” The boy pointed at the landing, just visible across the water. “Plenty bridges you could have taken.”

“It wasn’t my idea. Kay read about you in some book.”

“You like to read?” Tyson said, sticking his head in the truck. When they were first married, Brenda liked to cross with him. She’d sit in the pilot house and he’d let her run the throttle. Or she’d just lean against the side of the ferry and close her eyes and make Tyson wonder what she was thinking about. In the afternoons when it was nice out, she sat in her bathing suit in a lawn chair with her feet in the water, reading a book. Once, sometimes twice a week he’d drive her to the library.

“All I got on me is a ten, unless you got change for a fifty.” Tyson studied the boy, who had not yet opened his wallet.

“Tell you what. I’m going to let y’all ride free. Since your friend is interested enough in ferries to read a book on the subject.”

“Suit yourself,” said the boy, rolling up the window.

Thirty minutes? He’d once made the trip last twenty-two to please a van filled with Special Ed kids so excited they acted like they were on an airplane. But he started across at his normal speed. He was being ridiculous. She’d come all this way, after all these years. Surely she would come back across. It would not be possible for a man to go twelve years without seeing a daughter he sometimes wondered was even alive and have only twelve minutes with her before she was gone again from his life.

It took a minute for her to get out of the truck.

“Kayla,” said Tyson. He couldn’t stop saying her name.

“Mom always just called you Tyson. I never even heard your last name.”

Tyson started to say his last name was her last name but he understood just in time that it was obviously not.

“I’d rather not talk about your mother. I mean, eventually I might like to hear but right now….”

“I know,” she said, “we’re down to, what?” — she looked at the shore — “ten minutes?”

“Who is that boy?”

“Jamey,” she said, as if this was the answer he sought. “Jamey Bright.” “You can stay with me for awhile.”

“I don’t even know you.”

“That’s why you ought to stay. Because now you only know what she told you about me,” he said.

“And if I stayed here I would only know what you’re going to say about her.”

Tyson considered this. He had never thought of himself as an angry man, or a particularly sad one. So long as he kept moving, he wasn’t all that lonely.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “I didn’t either,” she said.

“This Jamey. Are y’all…”’

“He’s taking me to Washington D.C. Everybody should see the White House, right? I want to go to the Smithsonian Museum.”

Tyson could cut the engine. He could tell her all the places he’d never been. This boy, Jamey, what could he do about it if Tyson decided to stop the ferry mid-river.

“Our nation’s capitol,” she said, sarcastically, as if she’d decided already it wasn’t going to measure up. Turn out like she thought. Like this man who was supposed to be her father.

“You wanted to see if it was true.” “If what was true?” she said.

“That this is what I do. Cross this river umpteen times a day, seven days a week.”

If he let himself think this was anything but a job, he might as well admit that always, in every car bumping up the broken pavement leading to the landing, he still searched for Brenda, and for Kayla as she was when she left him, propped up in her car seat, sipping from a cup of juice.

The shore loomed. He felt it without looking up and she did too. When he did look — only because he had to, because he was in charge of her safety, if only for twelve minutes — Jamey Bright appeared to be asleep, the bill of his cap visible above the headrest.

“Mom said….”

“I told you I don’t want to know about her.”

“It’s not even about you, really. What I was going to say.”

Tyson looked at her. He did not avert his eyes. He studied her mouth, her ears, the way she wore her hair. He wanted her to flinch and he wanted to hold her tight.

When she was a baby and couldn’t sleep and cried in the night sometimes he would take her out on the ferry. She always fell asleep in his arms. He couldn’t just stop the boat. She just wanted to get a look at him. She didn’t want him to stop the boat and tell her all the things.

“Say it, then.”

“She said she came from the other side. That things were different over here.” Tyson sighed and shook his head, as if this were the craziest thing he’d heard ever. “Does it look any different to you?”

“I don’t know. We’re still in the middle. But I don’t think I’ll be able to tell any difference anyway, because, see, I grew up on a street with sidewalks and neighbors and steel grates in the gutters where the rain went. There was a water tower I could see from my back window. It had the name of the town painted on it.”

Tyson didn’t understand any of this. He hadn’t devoted too much time to wondering if there was some reason why Brenda left other than she happened to catch a ride. He especially didn’t like thinking about it now, with Kayla standing in front of him.

“I don’t think she was even talking about this place. I think she was saying that y’all, I don’t know, y’all got older and she changed. This wasn’t what she wanted.”

“I don’t see what all this has got to do with why I do what I do. This is a business.

It’s how I make my living. I could have chosen to do something else but I chose not to. As for what she wanted, she ought to have told me that herself instead of running off like she did. But I don’t even care. We’ve spent more time talking about her, time we don’t even have.”

“Well, I don’t see how you can talk to me without talking about her.” “Why is that?”

“Because she took me with her. And because I don’t even know you.”

The wind off the river could cut right through you and this is what it felt like, the coldness that came over Tyson when he understood she wasn’t going to stay.

He said, “Right about now is when I let off the throttle.” She looked confused.

“There aren’t any brakes. But you already know all this. You read a book about

it.”

“I made that up. There wasn’t any book.”

“If there was one, I don’t think it would tell you anything about your daddy.” She blinked and looked away from him.

“So she took you away with her. What does that make you, Kayla. Just another passenger?”

“No,” said Kayla. “I didn’t mean….”

“One of the last things I remember your mother saying to me was, how come you don’t go up on your price? We were still living with my parents and I had promised her we’d get our own place and I was saving every cent I could to get us out of there. But then that hurricane came and I was running night and day and it didn’t seem right to be charging the power companies who’d sent men up here from all over to help us get back to normal. She got on me about that. But I never answered her because I didn’t think it was any of her business.”

“Why are you telling me this?” said Kayla.

“Well, you came here to talk about your mother. I’m just telling you what she said. So you can go back and tell her I remember everything. I said earlier I didn’t do anything wrong but obviously I did. Tell her that if you want.”

Kayla leaned against the side of the ferry in the same way that her mother did when Tyson first brought her across. She’d stare off into the trees lining the bank and

Tyson always wanted to know what was in her head but he never was any good at asking and he wasn’t about to ask Kayla because he could tell by looking at her that she was wishing she’d never gone so far out of her way to see something that wasn’t worth seeing.

Kayla wiped her nose on her sleeve of her jacket and then she was gone. Tyson watched her climb back in the pickup and he saw her shake the boy and he watched the boy’s head jerk up. He stepped out of the pilot house and tied the boat up and he unchocked the tires and unfastened the chain and stepped ashore and raised the gate all without looking up once at his daughter, who was already gone.

A half hour later, he was coming up on town. Brenda’s parent’s place appeared on the left and he lowered the window and pointed to it and said, as if his daughter had chosen to ride with him, This is where your mother grew up, where I first laid eyes on her. Lying in the grass with her feet on a swing.

In town the streets were empty. People didn’t come to town like they used to. He whipped onto Sycamore and pulled up alongside the shoe store. I bet she never told you about this, Kayla. Tyson got out of his truck and walked up the sidewalk and stood next to the wall. When the sun dropped below the buildings across the street and the bricks were cool to the touch, he thought maybe it was time to raise his prices, though it still seemed to him that charging any more than a dollar a minute to go absolutely nowhere was kind of high.