by Odie Lindsey
“Huh-uh, no,” the nurse aide insisted, kneading his shoulder. “Don’t want to lose you again, friend.”
Primed by opiate, his consciousness ebbed, though the nurse aide would not let him drift off. Waking, he swallowed over and again, flinching and then panicked by the tube in his throat. The tubes in his arm, in his penis. He could barely lift his head, but he saw the apparatuses on his legs, made of stainless steel rings, held by pins, rods, and wires.
“We gotta get your body back in order, fast,” she said. “You hear me?”
He squinted.
“Yeah,” she said. “You hear me. Now, no doctor’s gonna tell you this outright, but we need you to start workin’, hon. We need you to do it fast. Your insides has shut down. It’s been too long now. Too many days.”
He flexed the corner of his mouth. The nurse nodded in response, and began to sponge him. “Just tell your body to come back online. I mean it, okay?”
He blinked, his throat still fighting the tube. His eyes welled.
“Hey, hey, it’s all right,” she assured him. “Look here. You’re famous, man. Which is funny, ’cause nobody knows who you are! There’s lots of people waiting to talk to you. All kinds of reporters, calling day after day to see if you’re awake. Wanting to know where you were heading ’fore you smacked into those trees!”
Her chuckle was as warm as a quilt, and he was desperate for her to put him back under. Instead, she stepped to the Formica bedside stand, then displayed for him the remains of the aeronautical map: stained by watermark, its shape chewed away like a moth-eaten fabric. He recognized the hatches, and the dials of yellow, purple, green: Tupelo Regional.
“How ’bout that?” she said. “Like a treasure map, am I right?”
He considered the little blank spot of his birth, a green void just outside the printed word Pitchlynn. He remembered, for the thousandth time, his final night on the farm. How the cloud-veiled moon had shone through glimmer-glass windows. How his mother had awakened him with her hand over his mouth. She’d demanded his silence while rushing him out of the cabin, before they sprinted down the dirt farm road and into the cab of Gabe’s waiting pickup truck. Her frantic reassurances as they sped over packed earth, then asphalt. Sonny remembered Gabe driving them off the farm, not a word, and he remembered wanting so badly to ask about the mules: What would happen to them? What were the secrets Gabe told them?
When they reached the train depot in Clarksdale, the three had stood in silence beside the pickup truck. Sonny watched Syl and Gabe stare at each other. A minute or so later, she had turned away, not even offering her thanks. She’d snatched Sonny’s hand back up and had run them through the station and to the platform. Northward, to Chicago.
He recalled, again and again, how the two had then traveled for what seemed like days: drowsed, starving, stopping every little bit, every small-town depot rousing him into the ripe smell of his mother, to the reek of her arms over him, unwashed. Upward, fleeing Hare and home, and flying through space—though Sonny had never understood why. He’d been given no map to follow. What of his clothes, his school? His arrowheads and toys? What of the soap figurines, and his squad of tin soldiers? His View-Master viewer? All were left behind. The only totem he retained was the Indian Head knife in his pocket.
He had turned this night over nearly every night since he left it. Details coming and gone. Questions formed, or answered, or lost.
No matter. The last time he saw his daddy was forever the driving force, the through line: Hare had been passed out cold in the chair, the one that his great-grandfather had built. The man had been splayed out like death, only snoring, Sonny believed. He believes. His mama had dragged him right past, over those creaky porch boards. Hare hadn’t so much as twitched, stone-drunk as he was.
The old man was innocent. Scout’s honor.
The Plane Man hated to think of all the wasted energy, time, attention, breath, disgrace. His own time line, even, the decades of his life kept in suspension. He’d been sick, sort of. Forever stuck, until the buildup to the trial had provided a shot, a starter pistol fired in order to hurtle him into some . . . relevance? . . . Some magnitude? . . . Some . . .
He’d been lured by a Big Fix, and had flown down to confess: on the night of Gabe’s death, Hare had been near-comatose, dead drunk. And Gabe? Gabe was with him and Sylvia, his mother, at the station. This truth was, and always had been, the only thing he could tell.
The nurse aide dabbed his cheeks with a tissue. “Just gotta will your body back to action, right? I believe you can do it. So do it now.” She picked up his chart and notated her round. “Want me to turn the teevee on before I go?”
He blinked.
She lifted the remote and clicked it. “I guess you don’t care what you watch, so I’m just gonna leave it goin’. Keep you company, all right?” She wrapped his limp fingers around the call button handle. “Now don’t fret, pet. Think positive. Start with tiny good thoughts. Good little tiny thoughts. Doable things. Looking-forward-to type of things. And blessings, okay?”
He dozed in and out of the white light, his lips daubing the tube. The afternoon newscast promoted ongoing updates of his very situation, something he could tell was just that, an update, versus any pressing or late-breaking news. (How long had he been in the hospital, anyway?) And Eddie, Ed, Sonny, Hobbs, now the Plane Man, was astounded to see the still photography of the crash: a slim white fuselage clumped up like a squirrel nest in the pines. A blink of B-roll that captured a sheriff and volunteers milling below the trees.
The follow-up news teaser focused on a legion of first responders amid a downtown Jackson crowd. Onlookers wept as paramedics hoisted body bags onto gurneys.
NEW INFORMATION AT SIX ABOUT THE HARE HOBBS
MASSACRE. WHAT WENT WRONG, AND WHY.
For so long he had drafted it: the book-close of his return. As if he could script himself back in time. Before the ceaseless Chicago schoolyard taunts over his Mississippi drawl, when his back-asswardness was a conduit for bullying at school (a relentless affair that had only tapered with the onset of free weights, and bulk, and football); before the girls he could never connect with there, or the few women with whom he’d sputtered out later on; before the growth of his menial labor into paper-based work, or the abandonment of paper-based process for a stock computer terminal. Before the loss of Wallis Farm defined the lack in himself.
Only . . . the crash. The crash had prompted the recovery of a new, earlier truth. As if born again, and for the first time in memory, he now recalled a distant afternoon before the night of the chair. A string of afternoons, even. Times spent hiking deep into the gut of the Wallis Farm land with his father. Little-bitty-type days, when the two of them would go hunting arrowheads:
“Go ahead and squint a bit,” his daddy had suggested. “Squint, and you can almost see ’em.” Hare smiled as the boy had tried to fashion his eyes the right way. “That’s right,” his old man continued, his hand soft on Sonny’s back. “Just look out over the cotton field. Or, no, better yet, turn your eyes to that tree line on the far horizon. To that old growth, way back there, the big tree line. And then squint.”
Sonny had done so. In the haze of bright light between open and closed eyes, the boy had believed he could see them, far in the distance, across the field. In the splinters of shadows and the blurred light flickers through his lashes, they were alive.
“Yeah.” Hare spoke softly. “Before all this farm mess, they was here. Ever’where. Before these fields was clear-cut and planted. Before the land turned to profit, and the people to slaves. Chickasaw and them was like a whole other planet before our family was settled, that’s for sure.”
The boy had then held open his palm full of arrowheads. “Is that why there’s so many?”
Hare nodded. “They was clans all over creation. Chickasaw, Choctaw, or Creek or whatever. I tell you, Sonny, if you was to have flown up above us, flown all around this state, this South, you would have seen forest, and
mound, and people all through here, moving. Tribes. Thousands and thousands, maybe more. Cities-like in some places, while camplike in others. Wouldn’t look like no quilt of cleared fields. There weren’t no tenant shacks, or mansions. No mules or combines, industrial crop.”
“What’d they do then?” the boy asked, his eyes squinting against the far horizon of trees. “How’d they go about?”
“I don’t know much, Sonny. Just what my daddy and mamaw told me.”
“They saw ’em?”
“Daddy’s daddy did, for sure. Hell, I guess one of your great-grams was even a Chickasaw woman. Bird Clan!”
“What?”
“Don’t you dare say nothin’. Nobody likes to tell that kind of thing.” Hare had lingered in silence long enough to make his point, then mussed the child’s hair. “But it’s almost like we can still touch ’em. Bird Clan, Sonny. I guess my grandparents, or maybe great-grands, was the last folks to live in the same space as these others.”
Sonny had squinted harder as he gazed into the tree line.
HE SQUINTED against the fluorescent hospital light, and to the close of his story: a migration of sorts, a lovely death. A deliverance. He had been removed from the land, and for decades had dreamed of being returned to it, with his father.
Only, Sonny’s return was never about Hare Hobbs at all. He could see this now. The relocation? The return? The compulsive strands of narrative: about a chair, or as carved into the handle of an Indian Head pocketknife?
It was a hallucination, an appropriation at best.
There were facts to be had, and perhaps he could start with these. He believed, and had perhaps read, that the Indians had been seasonal. Migratory. A synthesis of homeplace and roaming. He had read this along the way, perhaps, but then discarded it when the narrative didn’t suit him. Their kinship ties? In some cases, they’d been mutable—and quite normal. The families were fixed, yet they flowed, their leaving in full embrace with coming home. (Sonny decided again to forget their removal, a fact that made things way too messy.) He had learned this someplace, likely in those library texts. Yet he’d discarded the things that didn’t adapt to his story.
But now? The truth of that last night? The chair? None of it mattered. It had never mattered at all.
All that goddamned time, he thought. That lost yardage.
Besides, Hare was guilty enough. He was not worth saving. Never had been.
I am going to let go now, Sonny thought, though he did not understand exactly what letting go meant. To drift? To fall? To go straight home to his mother and forget this place? To re-immerse with her into rerun cable flicks on Sundays? Or to instead put his body in the bucket seat of a rental sedan, setting out to cruise the Mississippi hills for lost siblings? To . . .
Funny enough, he might return himself to an old, crumpled-up daydream of coaching peewee football in Chicago.
Because there were so many little things to live out. The biggest little things imaginable. A sheer winter hike to the local chain grocery. Bacon smoke. A baseball game.
At the end, it was Sonny’s inability to save Hare that had proved the greatest reward of his efforts. The gift of his burden was the failure of his cause.
I am letting go now.
He drifted then, he fell. He soared into the white light, and the past molted away. His body seized up and his breath gusted out, and Sonny was the one who was saved.
LIFE RAFT
1
A revolution. A homecoming. A devastation by love.
For Colleen and Derby, it was as if the past had been obliterated by baby Sarah’s yawn, while the future unfolded on Junior’s cat-sized sighs. The twins were at once an existential backflip and real-world front somersault. The debut parents felt godlike yet humbled, infinite yet insignificant . . .
They were elated. Astonished. And goodness gracious, concerned: first-timer, clichéd, new-parent-concerned. When the twins dropped a little weight, Colleen’s response was to feed them when they cried, and to wake and feed them when they didn’t. The infants responded with spit-up and drool, and smiles, sort of. The pair mushed their faces up against her very sore breasts, and then slept for no more than a hyphen. Both Junior and baby Sarah also soiled themselves relentlessly (which Colleen was told was a “good thing”). They bawled like beasts. They loomed like terrorists, in that they drove Derby and Colleen away from security or self-confidence, and into the truth of their inadequacy to protect. With the slightest rasp or sneeze, the pediatrician was called, as were nurses-on-call, as were parent-friends, and semi-friends, and JP, and Colleen’s parents, and . . .
On the family’s fourth day home from the hospital, having reached a summit of waked exhaustion, Colleen barked at Derby to please dear god keep the well-wishers away from the house! (Except Deana, of course.)
Praise be, though, at that same time the couple’s awe blanked their helplessness. Among other things, the twins provided them a source of great entertainment. The parents could pull Junior’s clef-bowed legs as straight as bars, watch those rubbery little limbs bow right back up . . . and laugh into tears on the living room carpet. Because Sarah somehow favored the actor Joe Pesci, they took turns calling up the Yankee paisan’s movie quotes while ventriloquizing the infant. They took photo after photo after photo.
During one of Derby’s endless runs between convenient store and country market, in-town grocery, Walmart, or Walgreens, he picked up the Pitchlynn daily Cardinal, and saw the write-up: a photo of the twins in their knit hospital caps, pink for Sarah and blue for Junior, alongside a stand-alone pic of the “former Strawberry Maiden” in her dress greens. He presented it to Colleen with a “Guess who made the Talk of the Town?”
She soaked up every printed syllable. To Derby’s surprise, however, she put the clipping in a drawer instead of up on the fridge.
At some point, a producer from the NBC affiliate in Tupelo even phoned the house, asking for Colleen and citing the joyful Cardinal story. He told her that the station was interested in a segment on her. A vet-turned-beauty-queen-awarded-two-more-blessings type of thing.
“Actually, I don’t think that’ll work,” she replied. “I’ve had my coverage, you know?”
The producer, taken aback, began to question this position, until Colleen cut him off: “But if you wanted do a little somethin’ on just the twins?” she added. “Like, maybe somethin’ about how special they are? That’d be great. We can do a picnic, or you can watch and see how they—”
It was the producer’s turn to cut Colleen short. He agreed that this sounded like a fine idea, and said he looked forward to running her pitch by his assignment editor. If things went well, he and the crew would soon be out to see her—or out to see those babies, anyway.
She hung up, and looked down at the toddlers, two dollops of euphoria on a padded green play mat. Just then, Derby came in from the carport-workshop, sweated to hell. Colleen made a sour face and told him to keep his filthy hands away from everybody.
He rolled his eyes and went to wash up in the kitchen sink.
“Boy, you had better slap some Speed Stick on, too!”
“Go easy, it’s blistering outside. I’m workin’ on a rockin’ horse, but I have to finish two.”
“I don’t care if you make a stable,” Colleen said with a laugh. “You stink!”
Derby dried his hands on a dish towel and leaned up against the adjoining doorframe. “Did I ever tell you about the first time I saw you?”
“Oh no, not now.” Colleen grinned. “Nobody wants to hear some old—”
“The thing is,” Derby said, “I can’t even remember. I swear I can’t recall anything before this very second. Right now, you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”
Colleen walked over, into Derby’s embrace.
“Love you, Derb,” she whispered—then wriggled from his grasp. “But rinse.”
“Enough. I gotta finish with the jigsaw. Then I’ll cook us somethin’, and then I guess I can—”
“What?”
“Somewhere in there a nap? Please?”
“Lord, yes.”
Elation, exhaustion. Beauty, and baby shit. As the afternoon closed, Derby produced the twin rocking horses, forgot the nap, and moved on to a pair of gourd rattles. He then cut a team of teddy bear footballers out of plywood, alongside bunny rabbit cheerleaders, each of which was to be sanded, painted, and mounted across the top of the nursery wall. He finished off the evening by assembling a pair of mobiles made of slim wood balusters, ping-pong balls, and toy airplanes hung by fishing wire.
Colleen daydreamed about the TV segment. She engaged the twins in imaginary on-camera interviews that affirmed their first impressions: of their renowned parents, and, in particular, the blessings of such a dynamic mother. She nibbled their inchwormy fingers, pinched their rolled-dough thighs, and swooned to the whisper-thin echolalia of sounds they made when she sang to them. Her pulse lilted when their eyes strayed to follow the flares of light.
A WEEK later, with the infants having been fed and put down again, and with Derby in the shade of the carport, his jigsaw whizzing again, Colleen called the Tupelo affiliate to find out when to expect the news crew. The receptionist took her name, put her on hold, then sent her to voice mail. She spoke until the recording cut off, offering details about Sarah’s new taste for her own toes—gag!—and how Junior’s eyes were, like, really starting to see. Best of all, Colleen was pretty sure the twins could already tell who she was . . . and wasn’t that, like, super-early for babies? “I swear,” she went on, “these kids are really, really special.”
Neither the network nor Derby would reveal that the segment was never going to happen. It had been a package deal, a nasty bid by the producer—of the same crew that had confronted Derby in the driveway—to get an on-camera interview with her husband. Nobody cared about Colleen or the twins. They only wanted to expand on the gothic stage play of Derb’s childhood, of what it had been like to come up a Hobbs. The wanted new angles on the massacre, new wind to keep their ratings aloft. When Derby had refused the interview, the offer to profile his newborns was dropped.