Jesus in the Mist: Stories

J.P. and the Water Tower

J.P. and the Water Tower “So Daddy told’m,” J.P. said, flicking a long ash from his cigarette after nursing it until it seemed to be held up by air and made us nervous to look at, “that we’d paint that water tower and do it for a helluva lot less than they could get anybody else to do it.” “Y’all would paint it?” Potts slid down off the porch edge and eased between me and J.P., his mouth hanging open the way it always did when he heard something he couldn’t quite believe. “Y’all would paint it? J.P., that water tower’s . . . it’s got to be four hundred feet up.” “Naw it ain’t,” J.P. said. He reached down and picked up a stick and broke it, his way of getting our attention, as if he didn’t already have it, since we knew he could break our backbones just as easily. “It is exactly —” He breathed deep, let his breath out slow. “It is a hunderd and eighty- five feet from the tip of the lightning rod to the ground, as a dead crow would fall.” Potts started again. “You’d be just as dead if you fell a hundred and eighty-five feet or four hundred, just as dead as that crow.” “Which is how come I don’t intend to fall.” He broke the stick again and again, tossed the pieces out into the driveway, and stood up. “He told’m we’d paint it. He give his word. And, by God, we’re gon’ paint it, beginning tomorrow morning.” The best we could tell, J.P. was four years or so older than we were, around seventeen, though we never pressed him on his age, or background, or J.P. and the Water Tower 133 anything else he seemed reluctant to be bothered about. One of the few things we knew for certain was that late on New Year’s Eve two years before, a light went on in the old Cox house, which hadn’t had a higher life-form than roaches and rats living in it for as long as we could remember, and the next morning, the first day of the year, an old green car was blocked up in front and strange kids had their faces pressed to the windows. The house was just down the dirt road from us, squatting like some sort of sat-on orange crate, a paintless old derelict dating from just before the First World War. It was as sway-backed as a worn-out field mule turned loose in the pasture to die. A dozen or so families over the years had left it so foul and in need of repair that we kids who haunted the road figured no one would ever live in it again. I’d go in sometimes and lie down on the floor on an old blanket I brought from the house and jerk off while studying a girl on a page torn from the bathing suit or women’s underwear section of a Sears catalog. I knew nobody would disturb me in there, so I kept several different pages hidden in a closet. They stayed wrapped in the blanket. And then the Joneses came: a man and woman and more children than we could learn the names of in a month, ranging from a toddler in salivastiff overalls to J.P. The kids were clumped together as if the old man had decided on a family, then against it, then for, then against, then for again. There were three too young for school, four between eight and twelve, and three several years older than we were: two bovine girls and J.P. Our first encounter with him was not a very pleasant one. Accustomed to having the run of the road and all territory within five miles of it, including front and backyards, we simply nosed our bikes up to the old Cox place the morning after the Joneses moved in and started our appraisal of the new family, beginning with the green Buick, an old rusty leviathan propped up on cement blocks in the driveway with the wheels off and brake shoes removed. Barney Stutts, the most daring of us simply because as youngest member of the gang he had to take more chances to prove himself, had just crawled in behind the wheel to check the mileage...