[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell”][/title] When Bobby Romeo was going on nineteen, he left the hills with his tail afire. I never seen a body want to leave home as much as he did. He said, “Sister, the world’s awaiting,” and then he jumped in his rattle-trap truck and he gunned the engine and smoke rose like boom-diddly. Well, Mama took to her bed for a day and a half. She didn’t love nobody the way she did him. When she died, Bobby Romeo come back for the services, smelling like liquor, and he sung at the church. He sung “Always on My Mind” by Willie and everybody just bawled and bawled. He had a city girl by then—a big girl with a twitchy left eye and great big bosoms—and she sat on his lap at the graveyard, in the chairs marked FAMILY, and I like to have died myself. After that, he come back to the house, filled up a plate with fried chicken and Cat’s Head biscuits and then he told stories about mama that made everybody in the room fall-out laughing. When I got up the next morning, he was gone again. No note. No nothing.
When I thought about Bobby Romeo in those years after Mama died, I’d remember riding behind him on his dirt bike, my scrawny arms around his waist, the wind on my face. He’d whoop and holler when he popped a wheelie. I only saw him sad that one time when Mama died. When Daddy died, he didn’t even come home.
Bobby Romeo was living in Nashville by then, where he’d collected a slew of old lovers and ex-wives. I picked up the phone on an ordinary Tuesday and he was on the other end. It’d been so long, he had to tell me who he was. “Twyla,” he said, after that. “Bobby Romeo,” I said. “What’s your trouble?” Because I knew there was trouble. “The doctor says I’m dying. I didn’t believe it at first, but this morning…,” he said, and then stopped. And just like that, he asked to come home.
I will spare you the things I wish I could forget my own self. The body struggles long after it ought to give up. But there were times when it seemed like he might make it, and at night, when we sat on the front porch and looked out over the old home place, I was as happy as a pig in a peach orchard. “The ladies still call,” he said on one of those nights. “Can’t get Bobby Romeo off their minds.” He laughed. “My last Old Lady’s daddy called me the other day. Told me I was at the tip-top of Our Redeemer’s prayer list.” “Everybody on the hill is praying for you. The whole valley’s praying for you, too,” I said, and swept my hand from left to right to show I meant all the houses and all the people down below.
“Folks are mostly good,” he said.
It was early October and the air smelt of wood smoke. The moon was full as a rich man’s belly, and the stars winked above us.
“It’s time I wrote my finals,” Bobby Romeo said.
“Your finals?”
“The thing that goes in the paper after you die, that tells folks who you was. I want people to smile when they read mine.” He winked. “I want them to tump over laughing.”
“Now, Bobby Romeo,” I said. “No need to get ahead of yourself.”
When the sun come up the next morning, I found him propped up in his bed, scribbling on the back of a paper sack. I took it from him. It said, “Bobby Romeo DuPree died on _____, 2014. He loved fried chicken, Mountain Dew, PayDay candy bars, and foxy ladies.”
Bravery breaks my heart, and right then my brother was the bravest person I knew. I sat on the edge of his bed and sobbed.
“That’s not the effect I had in mind,” he said. And after a minute, “Why don’t you help me? It’ll be fun. You’ll probably learn a few things about me, stuff you can tell after I’m gone. I lived a big life, Twyla. Most of it was better than a picture show.”
For the next three weeks I listened to his stories. And I took notes like I was a secretary for a Big Wig. My thought was I’d use it to write a proper obituary, something that made Bobby Romeo sound dignified. Some of what he said made me blush. But there were other things, such as how he played Santa every Christmas, passing out gifts to kids in the worst part of Nashville, that made me love him anew.
“Don’t write that down,” he said. “I don’t want it to seem like I was patting myself on the back.”
By late November, he was getting too tired to talk much at all, and on a Friday, the doc told me to call the family in. There were folks I’d never seen before who showed up on my doorstep all through the day on Saturday. I guess one of his foxy ladies started spreading the word, and everybody who loved Bobby Romeo decided to come say their farewells. It looked like the inside of a honky-tonk in my living room, with all the low-cut blouses, and all the cigarette smoking, and men pouring alcohol and passing it around. I was the last one who talked to Bobby Romeo. He called me in after a lady named Betty come wailing out of his room, her high heels catching on the throw rug. She almost fell, but then a big man in a cowboy hat caught her in his arms, and the two stumbled out onto the porch. It must of been twenty degrees out there, but I guess if you’re drinking, it don’t matter much.
His room was dark except for a lamp on the chiffarobe. I stood a ways away and he said, “Twyla.” The way he said it near about stopped my heart. I sat on his bed and took his hand, and he said, “You remind me of Mama,” he said. “Same good heart. I know you wonder, so I’ll tell you now. I’ll be seeing Mama soon; I’ve made my peace.” He coughed when he tried to laugh, and then he said, “I would’ve made a terrible old man, anyway.”
I was beyond crying then. I laid on my side next to him, and told him how when I was six, I wanted to grow up and be just like him, and how, somewhere along the way, I’d lost my nerve. When the story was over, so was Bobby Romeo. When the funeral director asked for it, I handed over the obituary I’d so carefully written. But then I went home, and in the nightstand drawer in Bobby Romeo’s room, I found the one he’d done. It was so much better than mine. After it came out in the paper, the TV station called. A itty-bitty brunette showed up on my front porch and asked me questions about my brother. They were going to tell his story on the six o’clock news. They used the picture I gave them of Bobby Romeo wearing a cowboy hat cocked back on his head, and a satin shirt unbuttoned to his belly, and his hair long enough to touch his collar. The brunette made me read the obituary aloud. I pulled my coat tight around me, and I started listing the family he left behind, real somber, because of course it was. And then I read the rest of what my brother had written.
“Bobby Romeo DuPree died on November 23, 2014. He loved fried chicken smothered in cane syrup, Mountain Dew, PayDay candy bars, and foxy ladies. He loved Jim Beam, his sister Twyla, and watching Two and a Half Men, and catching trout on the North Fork River just as the sun was coming up. He hated vegetables and hypocrites. Not necessarily in that order. He built his own house, popped wheelies on his Hog going 60 mph, and hit Coke bottles with his .45, from thirty-five yards away.
“Bobby Romeo had heroes, most of them on TV. He learned how to be a good man from Marshall Dillon and Ben Cartwright. He learned other useful things from Charlie Harper. There isn’t enough space here to list all the foxy ladies he loved. Goodbye to Happy Harriet, Loosey Lucy, Big-Bosom Betty, Stacked Stephanie and Marvelous Macy. He attracted more women than a shoe sale at JC Penney’s. He got married young, but it didn’t work out. He tried three more times just to be sure, but it always ended the same. Still, he kept those ladies as friends, and loved them till the day he died.
“Bobby Romeo,” I said, “was killed when he skydived into a burning building to save a passel of adorable children. Or maybe not. We all know how much he liked to tell his stories.”
The little brunette laughed then, but she also had tears in her eyes. I said, “I bet a lot of folks watching this are chuckling right now, and that’s just what my brother wanted. He left these hills when he was just a pup, because he knew this grand old world was itching to get hold of him. But when he knew he was dying, he come back, and he wrote this down because he wanted to tell the gospel truth about the life he lived and the people he loved. I didn’t always agree with his life, but I’ll tell you now, at least he lived it.”
The news lady stopped me. She said they had to go cover a fire, and then she hugged me real quick and took off. After they left, I took a walk, going down the same rutted dirt roads me and Bobby Romeo traveled as kids. I could almost see him there beside me, this lanky boy grinning down at me, trying his dangest to get me to do some foolish thing or another.
In those first days after someone you love passes, it’s like they’re not quite gone. Sometimes, walking around a corner, you think you catch a glimpse. Could they still be there? I don’t really know. But I do know, on that walk on that day, I felt an arm go ’round my shoulder, and the sun popped out from behind a cloud, and two kids I’d never seen before, a little tow-headed boy and girl, came bobbing up the path, holding hands and laughing. That was enough of a sign for me. Bobby Romeo had made it to glory. Someday, I would too. But not before I did a few foolish things of my own. No sirree, not until then.
