The Falls of the Wyona

by David Brendan Hopes

  We’d set aside a whole weekend to spend with Vince. We didn’t need it. Vince was not at UT, just like the switchboard operator had said. He got there, he practiced a few weeks with the team, looked good. Then he started getting queer. This is the evaluation of his roommate, a second-year linebacker who weighed about three hundred pounds: “queer.”

  Sherry said, “How do you mean ‘queer’?”

  Girls were not allowed in the dorms, so we stood in the lobby, catching the taint of male sweat subliming from the interior. Freddy the Linebacker said, “You know. Crybaby. Homesick, I guess. Something like that. He picked a fight with me and I didn’t say anything. He picked a fight with Coach and that was the end of it.”

  “He fought his dad?”

  I hadn’t remembered where I was. Freddy’s uncomprehending stare brought me back to the present.

  “You take a swing at one of the coaches and there’s just no place for you. He spent a night in jail.”

  “He spent—”

  “Yeah. Coach is big on lesson-teaching. He was flunking out anyway.”

  “Your coach was flunking out?”

  “Silvano was. Went to class maybe once.”

  I didn’t know where to take it from there. We chit-chatted about expectations for the UT team that year and whatnot. Freddy revealed that he wanted to be a business major, but there was some test he had to take first, and wouldn’t I take it for him because nobody knew me there. I said I would and gave him an imaginary address to write to when the time neared. Sherry said she was worried by how my deviousness had become almost reflexive.

  I said, “It’s because I’m hungry.”

  “You ate enough of those sandwiches.”

  “It’s not possible to eat enough of those sandwiches.”

  About ten miles below Knoxville, Sherry said, “That’s not what you expected to hear, is it?”

  “Nope. I thought Vince was just—”

  “You thought he was the General MacArthur of college football now and had no time for his small town friends anymore.”

  “Yes. I wish it had been that.”

  About twenty miles below Knoxville, Sherry said, “Tell me something.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you hear what he called you?”

  “Who? The linebacker? I never told him my name.”

  “I know. He called you Glen. Twice.”

  Some time later I did get the long-awaited call from Vince. His voice sounded tired and young, as though he’d been growing backwards away from us. I watched a gang of crows feeding on something in the backyard while I talked to him. The two things seemed related in a way I can’t describe.

  “Ardo.”

  “Man, where the hell have you been?”

  “Oh . . . man. A long story. Just let me . . . I just want to hear the sound of your voice.”

  When I realized that was exactly what he meant, I talked, about Sherry, about the high school, about the town, about the new gizmos Dad had gotten into the store and relied on me to figure out. One was the first TV anybody had in our town, for sale to anyone who had the money, with me to explain and assemble and maybe repair a little. Vince was not forthcoming about his own life, except to tell me where he was calling from. In a time when you actually paid for long distance, the remoteness of a call could be a measure of friendship, and I boasted to Sherry that my best friend had plunked down cash to phone me from St. Louis.

  “What’s in St. Louis?”

  “Glen.”

  I don’t know. Maybe he went looking for Glen. It was something you could never know for sure. Connections were bad in the mountains. Vince’s voice on the line came and went like a ghost . . . twice, three times . . . and then it stopped.

  The high school was the big thing in our town, so its news was our news. You could read in the Watauga Advertiser of the opening preparations for the celebration people were planning to honor Coach’s twentieth anniversary. He’d coached only sixteen years, but they counted the four years he played under Coach Andonian and ignored the four intervening years he’d spent at Auburn. Chairwomen were chosen for this and that committee. Funds were solicited. Pledges were pledged. It was still a long way off, so I decided not to pay that much attention, though my alumnus invitation to the big banquet arrived almost immediately—in the hope, I suppose, that I would help or contribute money. I’d be there for sure. I could idolize Coach with greater purity now that I wasn’t around him every day.

  The other source of excitement was the matter of the school mascot. School mascots had not been common in our part of the world. You were known by your town (in a place where most towns had only one high school) or your colors, but one by one the regional schools began to call themselves the Catamounts or the Spartans or what have you. I guess they picked this up from the North. Anyhow, our being Eddie Rickenbacker High, “The Aces” won hands-down in a single ballot. All this was set up to happen at the same time: the assumption of a nickname, the unfurling of all the new banners and modeling of all the new uniforms, and the honoring of the winningest coach in our corner of the world. Little towns like ours are asleep most of the time, but when we wake, we are relentless.

  I walked into the store and saw, on a poster the size of a mattress, that Summers Family Feed and Hardware was a main sponsor of Coach’s big do. Dad is not a talker, so it took me a while to figure out why he was so enthused about this. I knew he and Coach had been buddies as Vince and I were, but you never attribute the same keenness of emotion to other generations as you do to your own. Vince Jr. and I have been buddies since before we remember. Dad has pictures of us playing together in my grandpa’s backyard, under the colossal sweet gum, from when we looked pretty much alike, as babies do. The sweet gum tree had remained unchanged from the time when somebody took a photo of my dad and Vince’s dad in the very same spot, looking like us, looking like their sons would a quarter century later, all Marine-cut heads and ears and white T-shirts. The boys are a little older in my dad’s picture, and holding onto things that help to explain their lives. Vince’s dad is holding a football, as he was going to pretty much forever after. My dad was holding onto a book. You can read the title of the book through the fingers of his chubby little hand. The book is The Official Boy Scout Book of Home Repairs. Those two objects summarized what their lives would become. You’d think only in a movie would one turn out to be the high school football coach and the other the owner of the town hardware store, but that is exactly what happened. Copies of that photo endured in both houses, one on our kitchen wall, one in the Silvano hallway, as if it had been a kind of diploma, or a contract sealing a partnership, whatever came after. The point is Dad and Coach were friends from youth, when friendship first meant something. Men of that generation sometimes waited a good while for a means to show love that would abash neither party.

  Many things became clear when that relationship became clear: how Dad would not allow me to call Coach a shithead even when he was; how Dad would once in a while reach out and caress Vinny in a way that puzzled me—in the sense of making me absurdly jealous—until I realized that for a moment Dad was not seeing my friend, but his own twenty years before; how Dad was never surprised when I told him about our adventures at the Falls or in the gorge of the Wyona, was never as worried as I expected him to be. This dismayed me a little, wondering why he wasn’t more protective of his precious second son. At some point I must have realized that he and Vince Silvano Sr. had been there in their time, watched the swifts in the tornado of their evening descent, heard the water running under the bent moon, had done what all their sons would do a generation before they did it. It was kind of beautiful not to have invented anything, really, but to have carried on a tradition older than any one person in the world. I was glad to be where I was. Every night until dead winter the swifts sank into the mountain and the bats beat out of it, and it was like a beating heart by which all things were made alive.

  The Sanctified Brotherhood Church Hall was chosen for
the banquet. More obvious places, like the school cafeteria, were out because they were in use every day and the sort of preparations the committees planned needed to gather to a greatness untouched. The nine or ten of the Sanctified Brotherhood who remained could probably manage to keep out of the basement for a couple of weeks. Everyone in town had once been Sanctified Brotherhood, and the drafty dark 1816 church took up most of what would have been a city block, had our town been a city. I don’t know what the Sanctified Brotherhood believed distinct from what other folks believe, but only that, long before I came into the world, most of them had stopped believing it. Still, it was rich somehow, the church was, and kept going long after there seemed to be no point. Maybe it had kept itself alive so it could host this one last grand to-do.

  Stupendous was the achievement of the town ladies, the Boosters and the alumnae and the mothers of current Rickenbacker Aces, in the decorating of the Sanctified Brotherhood basement. That sort of thing was strictly gender-specific, and though men were present to handle the tools, they drilled where the women told them to drill and hammered where the women told them to hammer. The celebration of males in a male activity curiously overflowed with female energy. Walls were covered with brown butcher paper painted with the very mountains that could be seen if one walked out the front door. The paintings were fine, shockingly so, as if years of pent-up artistic energy had come pouring out at this one moment. My dad donated the paint and solvents and brushes and various kinds of adhesive, but the women worked, with their hair tied up in bandanas, floors covered in torn and stained sheets from the laundry room, doors propped open to let the toxic fumes out into the air. Women we had never seen before came to the store to replenish their supplies. They didn’t ask advice even once. I didn’t understand how they could know what they needed without men around to tell them. I worried that they had been taking their custom elsewhere, but Dad said women had a way of controlling things without themselves being present, and so they never had to go to the hardware store at all if they didn’t want to.

  Tree limbs got dragged down from the hills, balanced in pails, and covered with paper blossoms intricately folded. Sunday schools and funeral parlors and classrooms were emptied of chairs and folding tables, which the school janitors set up after hours, rank on rank with the Honoree’s Table elevated at Upstage Center, just as in the movies. Florists in Johnson City and Jonesboro were alerted to be ready on the fateful day. Uniforms not currently in use got straight-pinned to the wall, helmets hung from the ceiling by strings as though they were enormous red fruit. Someone got the idea to simulate victory bonfires, so those fake fires you put in cardboard fireplaces at Christmas came out of attics all over town to make an unseasonal appearance, their pin-wheel flame-makers turning at various velocities so if you paid too much attention it would make you sick. Dad and I and some of the other men repaired, reinforced, suggested, but the women were in charge.

  Mrs. Silvano served as the honorary head of everything, though she was . . . confused . . . and spent her time waving her hand vaguely at the decorations and saying how beautiful it all was. It was pretty much done two weeks in advance. Should the Russkies drop their bomb and the rest of civilization be wiped out, Coach’s jubilee could go on as planned upon our hidden mountain.

  Sherry had a few weeks before she went back to her sophomore year at Western. My fears about her commitment to me faded some through the summer as we spent nearly every waking hour together. Tilden had flown overseas for the summer—Denmark, I think, or someplace where the physicists grew thick—so she was my main company. Even if she were sick of me, I needed her. I went to her house to watch her fold invitations and lick stamps. I could have helped her, but, as I say, the line between the work of men and the work of women was pretty clear in those days. It also gave me a rare chance to dominate the conversation, as at least part of the time her tongue was on a stamp or the back of an envelope. She looked at me with her golden eyes over the tops of the envelopes. It was very sexy.

  She said, “I know something you don’t know.”

  “Probably.”

  “Wanna guess?”

  “French.”

  “Besides that.”

  I grabbed at the envelope now in process, thinking it was something to do with that. She pulled it away and said, “No, it’s not that. I know where Vince is.”

  “So do I.”

  “You think you do. I have the address. I already sent him his invitation.”

  “Where?”

  “Gallipolis.”

  “What the hell is Gallipolis?”

  “It’s a little town in Ohio. The address is a high school. Arden, I think he’s coaching.”

  I said, “God, that’s wonderful,” but I meant about the coaching. To be in Gallipolis, Ohio seemed, on the other hand, sad almost beyond expression.

  XII

  Though the Event was but one day, one evening and one night, people arrived for it from the far corners of the world, and those who didn’t drive had to be picked up at bus stations in Asheville and Johnson City. War shortages remained an undimmed memory, and in some place gas went for as high as twenty cents a gallon. Fair summer weather turned stormy and temperamental as the day approached, but we were so well prepared that every outdoor venue had an indoor exigency, and even if the power went out, my dad had stacked boxes of candles in the Sanctified Brotherhood basement, and it would be more romantic than if the lights stayed on. The very night before, the rain intensified, hard and ceaseless. Just as the deluge hit a pitch of fervor and endurance, I received a call to pick someone up at the Johnson City bus station. I wasn’t told who, and didn’t ask. I watched the wipers and the wind rearrange the waves on the windshield for a miserable hour. When I got to the station I saw it was Vince.

  There were two others who needed a ride back in the Summers Hardware van. One was Coach’s old coach from Auburn, whose eyesight had gotten so bad he couldn’t drive (though evidently he still coached) and the other was a guy from the Rickenbacker varsity a few years before us who had gotten really roly-poly in that time, and kept worrying aloud if Coach would think he was fat. “Of course he will,” nobody said, “you are fat.” I didn’t care about them. I hugged Vince so hard we had to go back inside the station so I could hug my fill without drowning anybody. Vince was thin and haunted, but the waif look worked for him, and he was, to my mind, more beautiful to look at than anybody I knew. I couldn’t even make an exception for Sherry. Sherry was too healthy to stab you in the heart like that. The rain covered up the tears in my eyes, and my ardor made Vince laugh a little, like he did in the old days. Of course he got the invitation. Of course he would come. Of course he would be there. Only one Rickenbacker player had come even close to the renown of Vince Silvano Sr., and that was Vince Silvano Jr. Of course he was there. How could his father stand before us all without his son? The star was re-ascendant.

  I said, “Tilden drove in this morning.”

  “It’ll be great to see him.”

  “How are those Ohio boys?”

  “Big. Something cramps you up here in the mountains. You can’t spread out. They’re big, Vince, and they play hard.”

  “We played hard.”

  “Yes. We did.”

  Vince and his dad’s old coach had a conversation about “playing hard” and the different things that means to different people. Then I said:

  “So, when you coming home?”

  Instead of the guffaw I expected, he said, “I’ve been giving that a lot of thought.”

  “So what the hell kind of town is Gallipolis?”

  “Just like this one. Only really, really different.” Vince chuckled at his own joke. The fat guy let out a ringing snort, just to show he was in the conversation.

  “What does it mean? The name?”

  “Oh, Chicken City or something. I forget.”

  When I tried to make further fun of Gallipolis, he said, “Yeah, but it has a river that makes the Wyona look like someone pissing on a si
dewalk.”

  By the time we crossed the Wyona into town, it no longer looked like piss on a sidewalk, or like itself at all, but a twisty yellow dragon roaring and bumping its head against the bottom of the bridge. The willows that were normally its edge shuddered and swayed in the midst of it.

  I dropped the other riders at Maggie’s B&B. I stopped by Tilden’s to pick him up, so when I got to the high school it was the three of us again. I was so goddamn happy. It was possible Vince would be perturbed by the step backwards in time, but he wasn’t. He smiled. He laughed. He wasn’t his old self by any means, but what I was missing was a kind of brilliant cruelty that I thought I could do without.

  Rain was in it for the long haul. You open the door and the wind drowned you in one second. It was like breathing underwater.

  School had not yet opened for the year, so several special programs were planned for the momentarily gleaming and immaculate halls of Rickenbacker High. The space around the doorways bristled with wet umbrellas, most of them useless in and turned inside out by the fierce wind. Everyone who’d gone to the school remembered that wet floors are slick floors, and whole lines of people felt their way along the walls, locker to locker, to avoid slipping. Just like the olden days. Folks began whispering “hurricane,” but reception was so bad the radios could not confirm that. It didn’t matter. The girls’ glee club sang a medley of Armed Forces songs—which were, in fairness, not totally unlike football songs—and several of the teachers manned their rooms to give visitors a taste of current educational process. The band, washed out of their planned formations of the playing field, tooted and bellowed away in the band room. It was like a day at school, but better, because nobody had to do anything or be anywhere, or get bossed by anyone, until the banquet that night.

  Mrs. Herman, lost Judy’s sad mother, had prepared a special exhibit in the memorial vitrine. It had occurred to her that for every lost child of whom there was remembrance, there might be two or three who had vanished without a trace, or so long ago that no one grieved for them anymore. So she had taken to poking around along the river bank, and even to lowering herself—somehow—down the stone walls into the gorge, searching for remnants. Most of the stuff you found there was junk, and she knew that. But sometimes you’d come across a rotting wallet or a locket, or a once-treasured object that had obviously not gotten there on its own. These she cleaned and restored, and researched. Sometimes it was possible to determine to whom they had once belonged, but even if you couldn’t do that, she treasured them as people treasure the Unknown Soldiers under their white stone up in Washington. In making a monument for the lost ones, Mrs. Herman had made a monument of herself, the town’s chief mourner and remembrancer. Everyone recognized her pale trench coat poking amid the reeds or easing itself gingerly down the mossy river boulders. Everyone crowded around to what new things she had found along the Wyona, eager to help with the identification. We boys who had found the Falls and made it part of our lives rather thought that things given to the river should be kept by the river. Still, if we didn’t aid her search, we honored it, and if we recognized something (like Glen’s Field Guide to the Ferns which had disappeared from his backpack and lay hidden between two rocks for ten years before she found it) we told her as much of its story as we could.