Just Shelby

by Brooklyn James

  “And there we were, addicts. Male, female, black, white, rich, poor. It was the first time in my life that there was no difference. The money didn’t make a difference. It wasn’t going to get me clean. I had to do that. I had to want that more than anything.” He taps his hand on top of my backpack, the note inside.

  The thing I want more than anything—college.

  “So you see, there isn’t much difference between you and me, Shelby. Between ‘us’ and ‘them,’” he whispers. A shameful admission, a sincere apology for the most offensive thing he said to me during our post-Happy Hour tiff. “Thank you for reminding me of that.”

  According to a feature I read in another outdoorsy magazine in the library at school, Grayson is a good fisherman. He is patient and persistent. He knows his target and uses the proper lure.

  I begin to circle. “Does the powerlessness ever go away?” Like oatmeal, it sticks to the ribs.

  “Not entirely,” he says, wincing an eye. “It lurks. There is always temptation. Social gatherings where I think just one couldn’t hurt. But it could. And it would. So I excuse myself, still powerless over addiction.”

  “But at least you maintain your ‘recovery’?” I think I’m using the correct term, based on his inference that he is a recovering addict. Is not was. As if recovery is a process that never ends.

  “Yes. Yes, I do.” He smiles, content with the encouragement and understanding. “And I’ll tell you the surest way to combat that feeling of powerlessness is to empower others.” He leans forward, the elbows of his corduroy jacket resting on the table, golden laser beams gauging whether empowerment is of any interest to me.

  How does one help others when she hasn’t even figured out how to help herself?

  “You may feel hopeless but you are not helpless, Shelby,” he totally reads me. “Help—charity—is not the problem. Focusing not on what you could do with the help, worrying about how people perceive you because of the help, is the problem. It feeds insecurity, fueling powerlessness. Believe me, even ‘the boy born with a silver spoon’ is not exempt from the sensation.”

  The boy is not exempt from offense either. I can’t believe I said that to him. And I can’t believe he is sitting here, right across from me in this dingy booth, yet to give up on me.

  “Allowing myself to accept the help I needed was the turning point for me. It changed my life, possibly saved it. And the people who helped me, I have to believe it enriched their lives too.” His arms splay from his shoulders, his infectious grin nearly as wide. “Hence, my involvement with Operation UCAN. I wanted some of that, helping myself by helping others. And UCAN, too.”

  Mr. Philanthropy, I chuckle, recalling the blonde-in-the-bathroom’s moniker for him, the only thing she said worth remembering.

  “So…Shelby, like the car…are you going to give me purpose, empower me, enrich my life?”

  Put that way, who wouldn’t bite—hook, line, and sinker.

  Outside Hot Brown, windows down and music up, I’ve been sitting for the past two hours after driving back from Knoxville.

  Fingertips as raw as the new Contra Band album pumping out of my speakers, I play anyway. I can’t stop. Johnny taught me so many tricks. I need to retain them.

  The song playing now is a battle for the soul: a fiddle and a banjo duke it out. I gotta get a banjo. Somewhere between a skirt-spinning hoedown and a gospel stadium-stomp, it feels like God is in the music and the devil is in my hands.

  Or maybe it’s just sleep deprivation…

  I don’t see her exit Hot Brown. Her arm is the first thing inside the Jeep, turning off the music through the open window.

  “Ah…I was listening to that.” I can’t curb my WTF tone.

  “The whole county was listening to it.”

  “I didn’t hear them complaining.”

  “Banjo-picking, rural narratives that romanticize the everyday lives of the poor. Music is supposed to be inspiring, an escape. Some of us have been poor all our lives. There is no escaping it. And there is certainly nothing romantic about it,” she nags.

  “That song isn’t about being poor.” When she hears music, does she even realize it has lyrics? “It’s about being an outsider. You should love that song. You’re not only just not that into it. You hate it. You resent music.” Because of her mother. Would she hold a grudge against herself if she knew the real reason behind her mother’s music bitterness.

  “Wait, wait, wait. Duh, Shelby. Did you hear nothing?” she talks to herself.

  Apparently not! I talk to myself too.

  “‘Help others. Empower others,’” she chants, as if she read it in a book somewhere. “Play!” Cranking the stereo volume higher than I had it to begin with, Shelby fixes her eyes on me while I gawk at her as if she is one brick short of a load. “Play!” she prompts again.

  So I do.

  She pulls her hair from its braid and shakes it about like she’s a member of an ’80s hair band. Her dance moves, rivaling Pop’s, are anything but hair band. Is she clogging or line dancing or experiencing a tic? Whatever she’s doing, I’d play forever to watch it. God, she’s beautiful…when she’s not overthinking shit.

  Euphoric and out of breath, she piles into the Jeep, fires it up and peels out. Finally as wild as her hair—whirling out the window and up around her face like a disheveled halo—“Play! Play the whole damn way home!” she cheers.

  Under the impression that nothing could be more untamed than her driving and my playing, the scene at her house proves otherwise.

  A drug-thin Maisy wields an ax that weighs more than she does. Swinging it in propeller fashion, and with surprisingly good form, it slices through an upright sugar maple log elevated on a stump. The swing so powerful or the ax so sharp, it sticks in the stump below, the handle levitating. Maisy bends over, sucking wind, her gloved hands clutching into her sides.

  “This is crazy. You’re crazy! I’m going back to rehab,” she pants.

  “This is rehab. Hard work never hurt anyone but it can cure even you,” a silver-haired, leather-faced woman yells back.

  At least twice the age of Maisy, the woman moves more spryly. Wearing a long fringed skirt and moccasin boots as tan as her skin, she holds a bucket of feed in one arm and an orange traffic cone in the other. She casually throws seed to chickens as they cluck around her fringed hem. It takes me as long as it does the hens to discover that she is baiting them.

  In a breath, the woman sets the bucket down on the ground and the traffic cone down around an unsuspecting hen before she tips both cone and hen upside down. The hen’s beak, head, and neck slip through the makeshift hole, its body cocooned and captured inside the cone. She lets it hang momentarily. Letting all the blood rush to its head? Sedating it?

  “No. No! Not on my splitting stump. You wicked, wicked woman!” Maisy protests.

  Yep, that spry old bat cuts its head clean off with the ax.

  “Us women hadn’t a clue we were fighting so hard for your generation to be so soft. Who do you think’s gonna dress it!” The woman hangs the traffic cone—decapitated chicken and all—from a nail on a nearby tree. Letting it bleed out.

  “I sure as hell am not gonna dress it. I don’t even eat meat!” Maisy says, still bent over and nearly dry-heaving.

  “Your mom’s a vegetarian…” I say from inside the Jeep, mouth agape more at the fact than the scene.

  “When she eats at all,” Shelby murmurs, shell-shocked herself.

  “Who is that woman?”

  “I have no earthly idea.”

  “Let’s just go.”

  “Where?” She re-braids her hair, returning to robot Shelby.

  No. She just let it down.

  “They’ll be here when I get back. Your dad will be there when you get back,” she points out that I have yet to face him over dodging my mine shift this morning.

  Our eyes follow the blazing path of the resourceful elder woman from the nail on the tree toward the lopsided lean-to carport, hanging o
n by another nail to the side of the house. She marches past the primer gray metal of the broken-down Shelby Mustang parked beneath the frayed gray wood. At least they match.

  “And don’t think I didn’t notice these,” she calls to Maisy, who follows behind, as she pulls an old sheet off a pallet loaded up with cases of pop.

  “Yes, it was Mr. Green in the carport with a case of pop,” Maisy chides her sleuth skills.

  “Honey, my family was bootlegging long before Pemberton invented Coca-Cola, and long before druggies were bootlegging it.” She loads Maisy’s arms down with cases, pointing her in the direction of an old truck with a handmade wooden bed. “I’ll bet the local shelter could put these to better use than you would.”

  “Bootlegging pop?” Shelby says.

  It’s right under her nose and she doesn’t even know. “Black market. Cases of soda—plural, twenty, thirty cases at a time—purchased with federally-funded EBT cards are laundered at half the price to another retailer in exchange for cold, hard cash. Infamously used for scratch-off lotto tickets, Kentucky’s Best tobacco, or…bootlegged prescription painkillers.”

  “Grandpa…” she says, bewildered. “He does chew tobacco.”

  “Thirty cases of pop worth of tobacco?” She knows for whom and why he’s buying the pop.

  “The syringe full of pills in his sock drawer. He bought them with soda? Why would he do that?”

  I shrug. “To keep her home. Off the streets. Away from the harder stuff?”

  “And how do you know about ‘black market’ soda?” She looks at me, almost accusingly.

  “I don’t do it,” I say, rightly offended. “I drink, maybe dip, when I feel like it. But, come on, give me some credit. I’d have to be fucking clueless not to know. Not to see. It’s all around us.”

  “Maybe I make it a point not to know. I’ve seen enough!” She jerks her pack from the back seat and through the space between our bucket seats, preparing to do what she does—run.

  Now’s not the time, Cooper. But I have to know. I grasp one of the straps on the pack, holding it and her hostage. “How’d he get it? Abercrombie in his daddy’s Aston Martin. How’d he get your backpack?”

  Her eyes, devoid of the spark that lit up my soul just moments ago, press into mine, aching with revelation. “You were there?”

  I shake my head. “Word travels fast. You know that.”

  “It was Red, wasn’t it. She was there.” At the counter with Destiny and Tawny as usual.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Raelynn couldn’t wait to tell me. “You met someone on your tour, already?”

  “And you care, because…”

  “Hell, yes, I care.” I pull on the strap, pulling the backpack and her closer to me across the console because… I haven’t figured that out exactly. But the way a child has a meltdown when he has to share his most prized possession, I care.

  “It’s not like that. It’s an internship, a community service opportunity, to beef up my college application. He’s only trying to help me with admissions.”

  “Bullshit.” Anyone who spends any time with her—it is exactly like that.

  “Seriously. He returned my backpack because I left it in a bathroom stall after running out. They saw through me, Ace, beneath Destiny’s makeover. They know who I am.” She gestures at the Jerry Springer-esque scene playing out on her lawn. “I didn’t fit in any better there than I do here. Trust me, it’s not like that.”

  I tuck a flyaway strand of hair behind her ear, my fingers continuing to her neck and coaxing her chin back up where it should be. “I know you aren’t meant to fit in, so quit trying.”

  “How could there be anyone else when you’re so…close.” The breath from her whisper pulls my eyes to the open lips it came out of.

  I push the Bootleg guitar—with Johnny’s “safest fucking strings”—to the floorboard. Easy, Cooper. Play softly. It’s easy to attack strings. But to play them softly leaves room for dynamics and texture. It is simplicity itself, but damn hard to put into practice.

  I give it a try. Gradually, thoroughly, tasting every mouthwatering dynamic, every tormenting texture, akin to one more song…it’ll never be enough.

  The backbone of any band, a rhythm player following my lead, she braces me up. Lightly brushed strings, she purrs—a bell-like murmur—the overtone imperceptible with loud playing. God, I hear it now.

  A kiss meant for the lips, I feel it everywhere. Coursing from the tip of my tongue through my mouth, down my neck, and into my body the way blood does through veins, until it spreads like tentacles around my heart. Fucking strings. Veiling it, a total eclipse, just like my mother said.

  I pull away.

  Her chest heaves.

  My heart throbs, as does the constricting hardness at the front of my jeans. Gawwwd!

  Then I see. It’s the way I looked at her the night she kissed me on my father’s couch. She backs out of the Jeep, like I am some beast of prey not to be trusted.

  I’m not.

  The woman who my mother says is my grandmother—my father’s estranged mother—says “Osiyo,” holding my hands tightly in hers.

  “She says ‘Hello,’” my mother translates, rolling her eyes at the elder woman showing off her Cherokee heritage.

  “Osiyo,” I give the greeting a shot.

  With no regard for personal space or discreetness, she looks me over. One hand measuring my height, she arcs it above my head. A few inches taller than she, maybe I am too tall. The other hand sizing up my braid—dark—the color seems to please her. Or maybe it is the braid. Hers is braided too, silver as the moon and longer than both mine and my mother’s put together.

  The turquoise color of my eyes is enthralling. But judging from the discerning squint of hers—mocha and almond-shaped—they will not pass either. The turned-up shape of my nose is most displeasing. Too short, too cute, no bridge or other distinguishing characteristics, she actually appraises my nose between her thumb and forefinger.

  “Enough, Etsi,” my mother says.

  My grandmother waves her off and replies, “You lost the right to call me Etsi a long time ago.”

  “Etsi” is “mother,” then. I wave my mother off too. It’s okay. It’s uncomfortable. What isn’t around here. So I appraise her nose. It is aquiline, having a prominent bridge, Romanesque. It matches her persona—heroic.

  She softens with my curiosity, her hands cupping my face. Fair complexion but round as hers, nonetheless. “Adanvdo is all that matters, Shelby Lynn. You have your father’s spirit.”

  “It’s just ‘Shelby.’” I gulp, hoping she doesn’t attribute the correction to disrespect.

  “Shelby.” She clasps my hands in hers. “And you will call me Enisi.”

  “‘Grandmother,’ baby. ‘Paternal grandmother,’” my mother mutters, translating begrudgingly once again.

  Got it, Mom. When she’s mothering at all, she’s over-mothering.

  Enisi and Mom do not leave their mutual disdain on the lawn; they arm themselves with it inside the house.

  A one-room kitchen/living area divided by a sleeper sofa should be big enough for the three residents who live here. However, it is painfully tight for the two of them.

  Shoulder to shoulder over the sink and stove, their bodies wrestle with the task of scalding and plucking a hen.

  “Get out of my way,” Mom says, transferring the bird from the hot pot into another pot filled with an ice bath. “I can do this. You ‘gut’ it.” She cringes with the thought.

  “Good thing I brought my own pots,” Enisi says. “Literally, not one to piss in around here.” She shakes her head at Mom’s lack of domestic fortitude.

  I busy myself by chopping small pieces of wood into smaller pieces and loading them into the kindling bucket beside the stove.

  All I can think about is Ace. That kiss. I still feel it. It lingers on my mouth and in the pit of my stomach. An ache that can only be alleviated by more kissing, I suspect. What happens when kissing isn’t e
nough?

  I guess I assumed my mother was weak or careless, pregnant at seventeen. Maybe she was just in love. Or curious. Maybe I should talk to her about birth control. I read in a magazine in the library at school that it is almost one-hundred percent effective. Or maybe I should stay away from Ace. That would be absolutely effective.

  Finished with her scalding and plucking duties, Mom sits down at the table—a folding card table, half desk, half dining. She doesn’t want to bear witness to the gutting at the sink. Her shaky hands, a few days free of substances, couldn’t handle it anyhow.

  “Is this the paper you need me to sign, baby?” She eyes the driving log atop my backpack, pulling a pen from a collection of them in a coffee cup.

  “Yes, ma’am.” I make my way from the wood stove and lean over her shoulder, a barrier between her and Enisi. The first signature looks like chicken scratch, pen as wobbly as the table. “It can wait until another time.” I gently lay my hand upon her shoulder.

  She pats it before returning to the log. “Now is as good a time as any. It’s the least I can do,” she says, paralleling Ace’s sentiment. “You’ve done all this driving?” In her voice is a familiar mix of pride and remorse. The drugs must make life seem like a flash. She misses so much.

  I sit down beside her at the table, eager for these moments of clarity, actual conversations with my mother. “It’s all manual. If I can drive a stick, an automatic will be a breeze.”

  “Oh, yeah. If we ever get the Shelby up and running, it’s four-on-the-floor. You’ll be all set. We should bake cookies for the Cooper kid, or something.” She assesses my eyes for signs of something, anything. Maybe wondering what he is getting out of the lessons.

  I can’t ask her about birth control now. She’ll take it out of context, not to mention the eavesdropping ears of my long-lost grandmother.

  “It’s a shame, that car. Mason always kept it up so well,” Enisi chimes in right on cue. “Probably rolling over in his grave. For more reasons than the car,” she mutters the last part.