Free Little Boy Blues by Malcolm Jones

there to die. I had never had the nerve to go under the house before, and in the gray light of the crawl space, I had to feel my way, crawling on my belly and trying not to bump my head as I navigated toward where the smell was the worst. The crawl space, with its shadows and spiderwebs—a place where even dirt, pale and powdery, seemed to have gone to die—frightened me more than the cat, which I located with no trouble and hauled out like a trophy. Standing there in the blinding sun, holding the cat by the tail, I was delighted and still a little terrified, but I had no time to savor the moment, as my mother swooped down and stripped me bare right there in the yard and then hustled me into the house for a bath. I never dreamed about the cat, but that crawl space crept into my dreams for years.
    When I was small, my grandmother lived in the family home place with my mother’s one unmarried sister, Aunt Kathleen. Then, when I was seven, Grandmother was moved to a nursing home in Winston-Salem, where she died two years later. Now Kathleen lived in the house alone. I don’t know why we went to stay for several weeks, unless it was simply all my mother could afford in the way of a vacation, because she and her sister despised each other. Kathleen was nine years older than my mother, and as Mother explained it, until she was born, Kathleen had been the baby of the family (Mother’s two older sisters were old enough to be her aunts). When Mother came along, she displaced Kathleen as the favorite and Kathleen “never got over it.”
    They conversed by quarreling. Most of the fighting concerned whatever small alterations Kathleen made to the house. Mother wanted to know what Kathleen had done with Mama’s gravy boat. Mother told Kathleen she was going to burn the house downwhen she bought a hotplate for the kitchen so that she wouldn’t have to cook over the woodstove. Mother thought Kathleen was obese, smoked too much and embarrassed the family by inviting men to the house to do who knew what. I found these arguments hard to follow, because to my eye nothing ever changed in that house. Even the peppermints in the candy dish in Grandmother’s bedroom had been there so long that the individual pieces had fused into one big, rocklike mass of white and red stripes impossible to pry apart. Kathleen’s responses to my mother’s accusations were always the same: she was the one who lived there and she could do what she liked. Even I understood that in her mind, especially after Grandmother was gone, it was her house, to do with as she saw fit. This response only enraged my mother. She felt every bit as possessive about the house as Kathleen did, and to be reminded in this way that she was, in fact, a visitor, a guest, an interloper—that it was, in short, no longer her home—was, as she put it, like being slapped in the face. “I think there’s something wrong with her mind,” Mother said. “Mama and Daddy had her tested, and they say she has the mind of a twelve-year-old.”
    I suspected that Kathleen didn’t like me any better than she liked my mother. One afternoon, when Mother and I were getting in the car, she sent me back into the house to tell her sister when we would be back. “Well, that’s just fine, Mr. Bullshit,” Kathleen said after I delivered my message. When I got back to the car, still giggling, because I had never heard that word but I knew it was dirty, Mother asked me what was so funny. When I told her, she raced back into the house and I could hear them screaming at each other in the kitchen all the way out on the street.
    They fought every day—the squabbling fading in and out like static from a radio as they moved about the house—and I didwhatever it took to make myself scarce. For once, luck was with me. I knew only one boy my age in Kershaw, a kid named Bobby Parker. A friend of my mother’s had recommended him as a playmate. All my friends were vetted in this fashion. If I brought home