I came to have a power over Jesse, a different kind than is the inevitable result of loving connection. There came a point when whatever power we had been playing with fumbled, flopped, and then finally flipped. It happened one night, one ordinary Tuesday night, when I was standing in the middle of Jesse’s living room leaning on his dead grandmother’s curio cabinet. The Chef took a guitar break, a bluesy run that didn’t quite fit with the song and then somehow did, and then they sang the chorus again—everybody I met, everybody I met, everybody I met, seemed to be a rank stranger—and the song ended, and Jesse sat down on the pink couch and looked over at me out of the bottoms of his eyes in this way, this troubling and electric way. The look seemed to say, Take my life and do anything that you want with it. I let my gaze creep through the alcohol in my blood and down the bridge of my nose and over the space between us and then up Jesse’s baseball cap and onto the crest of his head. Something very old in me, something that had been kept down too long, some desire to dominate and win in a struggle, boomed alive.
I sat down next to him.
What was the name of that song? I asked.
Rank Stranger, he said. It’s real.
Will you stay?, the Director asked me. We were on her porch, she in one wooden Adirondack chair and me in the other, twin glasses of Diet Coke and Old Crow in our hands, and passing a cigarette back and forth between us. We’d been talking about work and all the things we had left to do that week, and about a Mountain Views girl who had called to tell us she was pregnant.
She wanted to be a lawyer, I said, and she won’t get to do that now. It’s just too bad.
Not necessarily, the Director said. I’ve seen kids for whom getting pregnant was the thing that really helped them ask the deep questions and make the big, good choices. There are all kinds of ways to live a life, you know.
I know, I said. But I didn’t.
As we drank, the talk turned to Jesse and Trey and the other DMHB. The Director said that she had another dream. She’d dreamed that we had started a Mountain Views for boys and her son had gone to it.
That would be so beautiful, I said, because it would.
We could do it, she said. And you could help run it!
I don’t know, I said.
Why not?
I wanted to tell her that I was failing with men like I was failing with girls and I was failing to bridge the space that seemed to separate them like a river that was running very fast. I wanted to tell her that masculinity, as we have traditionally conceived of it, was a disease that was killing people. Mountain Views was an important part of treating it, but it was not enough. You cannot treat women only for a disease of which men are the main carriers. Nor, I knew, could you punish every man who fell ill.
I passed the cigarette back to her and drank from my glass.
I need you here, she said. I need you to stay.
More and more young people, I knew—the DMHB and their sisters, the Mountain Views girls who were graduating—were staying in West Virginia on purpose or coming back after years away to build lives for themselves. They were joining organizations and starting organizations and trying to do all the things that would make staying possible.
I felt the old urge—comply comply comply—and its opposite—flight that would make me free free free.
I’ll try, I told her.
The end of my one-year term came and went, but I stuck around, racked with indecision and guilt about whether I should renew for a second year. If I left after only one year, I would be a quitter, I knew, a stopper through Appalachia, another VISTA girl from somewhere else who didn’t stick around.
I went as Jesse’s date to the wedding of the Chef and his girlfriend. The ceremony was quick and without extended vows or testimonials from the couple’s friends; they had been together so long and loved each other so well that the wedding itself was a foregone conclusion. The redheaded girl was there, and I watched her face change as she realized that I was there as Jesse’s date. She looked at me hard and directly. “You have lipstick on your teeth,” she said, in a hostile way I still don’t understand—did she know something about Jesse and his friends that I didn’t? Did she know something about Jesse and his friends that I did?—then walked away toward the buffet.
At some point late in the night, Jesse and the Chef danced, arms around each other, the Chef dipping Jesse nearly to the floor. Jesse was so happy all that night and even into the next day. They’re married now, he said, taking my hand. I’m so glad.
A darker side to Tuesday night music nights began to show itself, and so did a darker side to my character. The boisterous DMHB brother and the blond-haired banjo player came to blows one night, then hugged and cried and called each other brother. My drinking got bad, then worse, then dangerous. I matched the men shot for shot and asked for more. Sometimes we drank and threw up and kept drinking. One night, a VISTA girlfriend of mine wanted to go out, and we did. On the way back from Lewisburg, I made an illegal right turn on red, and the lights of three West Virginia State Police cars whirled to life behind me, pulling me over into the Walmart parking lot.
Blow, one of them said to me, shoving the hard plastic Breathalyzer in my mouth. I can’t, I said—I have a natural distrust of authority and a hustler’s instincts for crime and evasion—but I really couldn’t; the machine was too far down my throat, and I kept gagging on it. Blow, the policeman said again, the light reflecting off his gun. It took twenty minutes for them to get a reading from me, minutes that may have been crucial—I blew a .07, just .01 from the legal limit to drive, and a hair away from losing my license.
At a local music festival that summer, I had sex with Jesse in his car while it was parked in a parking lot that was not dark enough nor far enough away from a gathering of community members, Mountain Views girls among them. To the array of pictures of their futures as young women from which the girls could choose, I added this one: the searcher who had gone too far.
One night not long after this, I worked late, and Jesse said he was coming over, and we ended up entering my house from my dark porch together. I asked him to turn the light on. He didn’t, and I didn’t reach for the switch either. He took off his sneakers and lined them up by the door and then sat on the couch. Every so often a car passed my house lighting up the room, and I could see Jesse, his eyes open, one hand on the armrest and the other on his knee. I was down on my knees on the beige carpet, though I do not remember why I was down on my knees on the beige carpet. I want to say it was because I was making a fire, but that can’t be right because my landlords didn’t install that woodstove until after I moved out.
Every so often I said, What do you want?, and he said, I don’t know. After a while he started saying, What do you want?, and I started saying, I don’t know.
I was asking him to want anything—the music, a job, school, his life.
I want you, he said.
Something else.
Then it was winter again, 2010. I sat with Ruth in her car in a dark field, car lights on, windows rolled up, taking a quiet moment away from a party that pumped in a nearby house. Ruth used her thumb to slide the heat to its highest notch, but it did little good. We watched people stand in the window of the house or dance past it; inside were young people who were both from and not from West Virginia. It was such a good party—there was cider and a jukebox and everyone I cared for—that I couldn’t stand to go to it.
I loved Jesse in a way that I knew was doing damage both to him and to me, and I knew I could not be to the Director or to the Mountain Views girls what they wanted or deserved; these things had been revealing themselves to me slowly but with increasing gravity, and I felt them now as a sudden image of revelation, the red velvet Broadway curtains of my childhood drawing back fold by fold.
The last object I touched before I drove away from Pocahontas County was the phone. I pulled my truck over onto the shoulder of 219 a few meters down from Jesse’s family’s mailbox, put the phone in, and closed the little ti
n door. It had belonged to Jesse’s mom, it turned out, and it was time she got it back. I put my truck in drive and stepped on the gas. I could drive now, with confidence and trust and with my back touching the driver’s seat and only one hand on the wheel. My landlord, parked by his sheep pen, honked his powerful horn as I went.
It’s strange that we talk about leaving a rural place as happy, a bursting forth from black and white into color, though for some this may be the truth. “Why don’t they just leave?” many of my friends from cities had asked me of the DMHB and the Mountain Views girls and their families. But here is what they don’t know: Pocahontas County was the color. The world I was seeing now—I-64 heading west—and that I would be seeing for a long time was the gray.
That first night in Asheville, North Carolina, I tried to insert slices of gourmet pizza into my mouth, but they would go in only as far as the back of my throat, then stop. I could not bite or chew or swallow, on account of all the crying. I drank the beer that was set before me—markedly more hoppy than the American lite beers I’d grown accustomed to—and I watched the college kids in their prosperous backpacks and the artists busking in their feather caps. My cell phone made satisfied little beeps, reveling in all the service. I had come back. I was a citizen of society now, I supposed, with all its proper tools.
I found the little green house that belonged to Tim’s daughter and Peter’s sister, a woman who lived here in this cool and prosperous town. The house had dark wood floors and light wood walls, and I got into her bed with my clothes on. I looked up then and saw, pasted to the underside of a shelf, several small lithographs of the mountains of Pocahontas County. For years, I knew, this woman had been trying to get home.
3
MILES PASSED. I DROVE MORE than ten thousand of them in three months in my white Toyota Tacoma with the wooden platform bed in the back. Years passed. Philadelphia, with trips back to West Virginia. Virginia with trips back to West Virginia. Philadelphia again. I took jobs and did them. I bought books and read them. I drove up and down I-95 and I-76 and I-81 in every season and in every kind of weather. This was living.
I could hear voices talking calmly on the radio and voices yelling, trying to convince one another of something. I could eat and I could sleep and I could fuck and I could dream. I could look but I could not see. Not the orange cones, not the lawns that ended in softly sloping curbs, not the paved brick pedestrian malls or the wood and chrome coffee bars, not the classrooms in which I sat and then in which I taught. I focused my eyes on a point in the back of the room, safely above every human head.
One June, on my way back to Pocahontas County to work a few weeks at Mountain Views, an SUV collided with the corner of my tailgate, and my truck did two complete revolutions on 1-76 going eighty miles an hour before colliding with the concrete median. I’ll always hold the sensation of spinning in my body, how strangely slow it felt, and the ripping sound that rubber makes when it is dragged. The truck with its West Virginia wildlife plates was totaled, but aside from bad whiplash, I was not harmed. Then the West Virginia barn cat that had adopted me when I lived on Lobelia Road was run over by a passing car during one of his romps outside. He’d died as he lived, I felt—hard. I did not know what, if anything, these things meant.
In the winter of 2013, the Chef called down to the restaurant of the observatory where he worked, gave the menu for the following day, hung up the phone, and put a bullet through his brain. He had separated from his wife, or he was a sensitive person with depressive tendencies, or there is never any reason.
Not long after this, the boisterous DMHB called a friend. He didn’t have much money, he told the friend, but he could pay fifteen dollars plus a carton of cigarettes in exchange for the heroin. The friend did as he asked and came to the house. The younger brother, the quieter DMHB, was there too. The three men ground the heroin and injected it. I found a vein, the boisterous DMHB reportedly said, then dropped to the ground. His brother and the friend drove him down I-77 to the nearest hospital, where they left his body outside the emergency entrance.
I felt ruined by my time in Pocahontas County—no other place would ever be so good. I felt harmed and also that I had harmed others with my weakness and my silence and my actions, and I didn’t know how to make those two feelings stay together. Every time I grasped one of them, the other seemed to fade away.
Things kept returning to me and knocking, demanded to be heard. For one, I remembered that when I lived in the farmhouse on Lobelia Road with Bill, calls came in for him at night from men, older men who lived along the road and had known him since birth. Man, they would say, sometimes slurring his name into our answering machine. It would be 3:37, 4:28, 1:11 am, and I’d sit up in the night, disoriented, listening to their voices roll in downstairs. Man, I’m hurting real bad, they’d say. I never knew exactly what kind of hurt they meant, only that they had to wait until it was 3:37 and they were loaded to talk about it.
For another, the waitress at Hillsboro’s only restaurant who had helped me home that night of the whiteout had likely participated in the spray-painting of “NIGGER LOVER” across the restaurant’s north-facing wall. I thought a lot about the kindness in the waitress and also the cowardice and cruelty it took to write those words—both.
And then and always, Jesse. I’d see a station wagon that looked like his making a wide turn around the statue of Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea in the Virginia town where I now lived and be smacked again: What had happened to me in Jesse’s house, where we played music all those nights and drank until we could no longer feel the parts of our bodies that were most private and the blow-up sex woman peeked out from the closet?
And what had I brought into or out of being for other people? The withholding of true feelings and information from people with whom you are intimate can be its own kind of weapon. The redheaded girl’s words: you make me feel dumb. I was most haunted by my own actions, the ways I let my appetites for belonging and alcohol get out of control, for I was not just a witness but a part of all of it, a person who wanted oblivion for my own reasons.
What did it mean that I had been employed to better the lives of girls, and all around me it seemed, grown men were dying? Could women and girls and men and boys truly be together in mutual community, or could they only hurt and wound each other? And how did poverty and class play into all this? Didn’t know.
I reread my journals from my time there and found the entry about the writers’ group and about how Tim, Peter’s father, had found two women’s bodies up on Briery Knob. What had all that been about? I had camped with Jesse up on Briery Knob, I remembered.
There we were, Jesse—rail-thin and gentle in a West Virginia University hoodie, pale hands on the wheel of his station wagon, and me, the feral girl from somewhere else sitting shotgun. We were on our way to camp with Ruth and Peter, a new VISTA from California and her boyfriend—a boy from the northern part of the county—and the blond banjo player.
Briery Knob was a reclaimed surface mining site. We knew it had been reclaimed because plants were growing there again, but they were gray-green, spongy, and all the same height. We might have been on the surface of the moon. When we stuck our tent poles into the dirt, it wasn’t dirt but chalky ash. The poles went in an inch, hit rock, wouldn’t budge.
It was June probably, because the VISTA girl from California has already gotten her dog from the pound, a brown mutt who kept sniffing the perimeter around their tent, but Jesse and I hadn’t had our joint birthday party yet, the one where we wore newspaper hats that looked like boats and the Director and her husband got a babysitter and came and danced with Jesse and me, holding our hands. It could be July if it were early.
We pitched our tents in a flat spot surrounded by steep wooded embankments. Maybe fifty feet away, someone had dumped a blue corduroy couch. It looked strange in this moon place, but it was less foul than you might think, just damp. Some of us touched it; some of us didn’t. I touched it; Jesse touched it. When I climbed the e
mbankment to the ridge, I could see the white wind turbines over in Greenbrier County turning slowly. On the way back, I found a pair of sunglasses in the shaded path. Bear hunters, Jesse said, and put them on.
Later, we lit the fire, and the banjo player played a few tunes as the dark shrank the space. Jesse hadn’t brought his upright bass and kept looking around for it, his fingers twitching. When the temperature dropped, Jesse and I and Ruth and Peter chickened out and slept in our cars. But the girl from California and her boy stayed out, perhaps comforted by the noises her dog’s paws were making as he did slow circles in the dark. I thought for sure she was the tough one who would last—she wore brown Carhartt pants and thick knitted caps and learned how to change the oil in her car—but that isn’t the way it turned out. She went back to California, took some other man’s name, and I don’t know her now.
I remember being cold, the cold that moved across that plateau, and then being warm from the heat coming off Jesse’s body. I remember drinking water from a jar we filled at a spring on the way up, taking a bite from a block of white cheddar cheese in the night when I woke up starving, wearing two pairs of thick Smartwool socks, Jesse’s hands on my face. Laughing—roll over, roll over, three in the bed and the little one said, roll over.
I hadn’t known that Vicki and Nancy died in that spot when we camped there; now I did. Story speaking, nothing happened; it was just another night we slept in the woods as men and women from there and elsewhere. But I began to think about it all the time. I felt if I could understand what we had done up on Briery Knob and what had happened to the two dead women up there and if these things were the same thing or different things, I could answer some of the big questions that were choking my life and blocking my eyes.
The Third Rainbow Girl Page 25