Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Can we just talk?” he hisses. It’s then that I’m able to finally recognize and understand exactly what it is I see written across his face: fear. Abject, undeniable, inescapable fear.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “Please,” he says. “Please.”

  * * *

  —

  We wind up back at the farmhouse. This place reminds me of the house I grew up in. But if it was the same place, I’d know it, wouldn’t I? I mean, I’m not that far gone, am I?

  I’m not sure what time it is anymore. I smell like sweat and humidity and the late hours of the night. “Can I get you something to eat or drink? I’m not sure what all we’ve got in there, but my mama taught me to always do what I can to take care of people who come to visit.”

  “No,” the man says. He stands at the threshold of the house like a vampire that cannot enter without being invited in.

  “You want to come in?” I ask.

  “No thank you,” he says. The nervousness is thick in his voice. “I’d just rather stay out here. He takes a moment to turn and look back down the long road that leads out into the town of Bolton. “Do you mind if we sit out here and talk?”

  “Okay,” I say. “But you’re starting to make me a little nervous.”

  He barks a laugh. “Why would you be nervous? If anybody’s got cause to be nervous around here it’s me.” His southern drawl is as thick as The Kid’s and twice as uneasy.

  “Why’s that?” I ask.

  The man’s face goes pale. “What? Are you fucking with me?”

  “I don’t think so,” I say after taking a moment to check with myself and be sure that I’m not fucking with him. I’ve been known to fuck with people on occasion, but it looks like I’m not doing that right now. “So why are you so nervous?”

  “Don’t you know who I am?” the man asks, and I can tell from his tone and from the expression on his face that he can’t decide if he should be happy or afraid that I don’t know who he is. “Wait,” he says, his eyes searching. “You really don’t know who I am?”

  “Not the slightest clue,” I say. “And, to be honest, I’m not even sure whether or not you’re real. I might be talking to myself right now for all I know.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I’ve got a condition. That’s all you really need to know.”

  While the man stands at the transom of the old farmhouse, I go fix myself a tall glass of over-sweet iced tea and come back out to the seat on the edge of the porch. “Well, can we get down to whatever this is?” I ask. “I’ve got a whole lot of things to get done, both real and imaginary. And I’d just like to get them over with and move on out of this town.”

  Finally, the man takes a seat beside me on the porch. He still looks fidgety, like an animal worried about predators.

  “Maybe it’s better if you don’t know who I am,” he says.

  “I think that’s true of everyone,” I say. “Knowing people gets to be problematic eventually.”

  “I guess,” the man says. I can tell he’s having trouble getting a read on who I am. He’s trying as hard as he can to understand me, but I guess I’m a bit of a mystery for him.

  “First off, I guess you should know that I never read your book. It seems like the kind of thing that I should say. I don’t want you to think I’m a fan or anything. I don’t know much about you.”

  “Then we’re on equal footing there, my friend,” I say.

  “We went to the same school, though,” the man says.

  “That a fact?”

  “Yeah. I grew up here.”

  “In Bolton?”

  “Just down the road in Freeman.”

  “A local boy for sure, huh?”

  “Yeah,” the man says. He grins a sheepish grin. Finally, he doesn’t look as though he’s being hunted by the night. “I was a few years behind you in school, though. So you wouldn’t know me. Maybe you knew my brother, though. Harold Bordeaux?”

  I think for a moment. “Nope, sorry. Can’t say I remember him.”

  The man laughs. “I’m not surprised. He’s a forgettable son of a bitch. He knows you, though. Always talking about how he and you went to school together. Swears up and down you two were the best of friends. He says you were a weird kid back then.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “Said you used to spend all of your time sitting in the corner reading books. I guess it paid off, though. Don’t think Harold’s dumb ass ever read a book in his whole life.”

  “I know that type,” I say. “But how many books you read don’t make you a good or bad person. How many books you read is just how many books you read. My daddy didn’t read a whole lot of books. My mama either. But they were damn good people.”

  “I guess you got a good point there,” the man says. With each moment he relaxes more. His breath slows. All of the tightness that had been making him look so chased seems to have faded. “You got out, huh?”

  “I guess so,” I say. I take a long look at the star-filled sky. “But sometimes I wish I hadn’t.”

  “Nah,” he says. “You did the right thing. There ain’t nothing good here.”

  “It can’t be all bad,” I say.

  “No,” he says, glancing up at the same sky. “It’s not all bad. But that’s not the same as it being good. And when you really sit and think about the past you realize that things have been pretty bad for a long time. Things were never really good. They just had flashes of things that weren’t as bad.”

  He shakes his head.

  “Not the most optimistic person, are you, friend?” I say. “But I think I can relate to that. I think I’ve been there and I know a few other people who’ve been there.”

  “My brother said you had a hard time in school,” the man says. “Says you got picked on a lot after what happened.”

  “What happened?” I ask.

  The man’s face tightens. “Are . . . are you kidding?”

  “I don’t think so,” I say. I try to contort my face into something that lets him know that I’m not mocking him, but I’m not sure if it’s coming across or not. Mostly, I think I’m just confusing him.

  “Are you fucking with me right now?” There’s a tinge of anger in his voice all of a sudden.

  “Why would I be fucking with you?”

  “So you’re telling me you don’t remember what happened?”

  “That’s probably what I’m telling you. I still don’t know what you’re talking about so I can neither confirm nor deny whether or not I remember it. Plus, you should know, I’ve got a condition. I won’t go into the details of it, but the bottom line is simply that I have an overactive imagination and it makes it difficult to tell what’s real and what’s not.”

  “You’re a schizo?”

  I laugh. “No. Nothing like that. I’m just imaginative.”

  The man looks at me with more than a little suspicion. Finally, he shakes his head. “I ain’t got time for this,” he says. He sits up straight, looking me in the eye. “Listen, you’re a writer so I need you to write something for me.”

  “Sorry, I don’t do ghostwriting.”

  “Shut up! I . . . I need you to tell people what happened.” His voice is close to panic. It’s full of pain, and despair, and something else that I can’t quite understand.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “I’m not a bad person,” the man says.

  “I believe you. You seem like a square enough Joe to me.”

  “That boy,” the man says. His voice catches in his throat. “I can’t let people think of me like that. I can’t let them think of me as some sort of killer.”

  A shiver runs down my spine. I’ve run into my fair share of people asking me to write their li
fe stories, but none of those stories have ever had anything to do with a dead body.

  “I didn’t kill that boy,” the man says.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “I mean . . .” The man swallows hard, as if his throat is attempting to betray him. “I mean, it was my finger that pulled the trigger, but it wasn’t me. I’m not the kind of person to kill somebody. And nobody wants to hear my side of the story. Nobody wants to hear about what happened to me that night. Nobody wants to think that maybe I’m not some kind of goddamn mad-dog killer.”

  I think back to The Kid’s corpse lying on that gurney, full of holes and lifeless. I think of his sobbing mother. I think of a thousand other dead bodies that looked like The Kid and a thousand other sobbing mothers and I want him to be able to see them the way I do. I want him to shut up and stop talking. But I’m still not even sure if he’s real or not, and in case he’s a figment of my imagination, I decide to let him keep talking. I’m speechless, anyway.

  “The thing you got to understand is that this isn’t about me. It’s about everything. It’s about everybody. I’m just a regular guy. Yeah, I’m a cop . . . or I was a cop . . . but that don’t make me some kind of demon. I’m just a regular guy. I got a wife and a daughter.” He spits. “Now the wife won’t call me and she won’t let me speak to my daughter. I tried telling my wife all of this. Tried to lay it all out for her the way I’m trying to lay it all out for you, but she wouldn’t let me. Just up and walked out on me, crying like it was her kid that . . . well . . .”

  “So you decided to come and look me up?”

  “Something like that,” the man says. “Been staying at a friend of my brother’s since it happened. Have to sneak around. Can’t hardly leave the house because I’m afraid of what might happen if I go out and somebody sees me. That’s why I’m out here in the dark like this. You got any idea what’ll happen if these people around here were to find me? If they walked up right now and caught me sitting out here in the open?”

  “You think they’d hurt you?”

  “They’d kill me,” he says.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because . . . you know.”

  “No,” I say. “I don’t know. Why would they kill you?”

  “Don’t be like that,” he says. “Don’t pretend you don’t know why. Don’t pretend like you ain’t never had the thought. Don’t pretend like you don’t sit around sometimes being angry, chewing your cud—like my daddy used to say—over everything that’s been done in this country to people like you.”

  “People like me?”

  “Black people. You’re angry. And why shouldn’t you be? But the thing about it is, I didn’t do it. I didn’t do any of it. I wasn’t born when all of that slavery shit happened. I wasn’t even a twinkle in somebody’s eye. And you, you weren’t never a slave. You weren’t never nobody’s property. Me and you, we went to the same school. Grew up just as broke. We lived the same life but I get to carry around all of the guilt. I get to be called an oppressor. I get to be told about how everything my ancestors did was terrible. Well how do I know? How do you know? Wasn’t neither of us there. Not you nor me. So how you know that my folks owned slaves? How do you know that my folks had anything to do with hurting and harming your folks? And yet, you still want to blame me for it. You want to blame me just because you’re angry about stuff that you can’t control. I ain’t gonna sit here and say that your people ain’t had a bad shake. I won’t say that. But they’re all dead. All the ones that it happened to. They’re all gone. And now everything’s fair. Everybody’s got a chance at things. Everybody in this country can have a fair chance. Hell! Just look at you!”

  He points an angry finger at me and pokes me in the chest with it.

  “Just look at you,” he continues, “a goddamn fancy-ass writer. Been on TV. Sold more books than God only knows. And you did it all being Black. Made it a hell of a lot farther in this world than I have. You want to know the farthest I’ve ever been? Florida. That’s the farthest I’ve ever been. Only time I ever even been on a plane. Went down there for a funeral. You ever stayed in a hotel?”

  “What?”

  “Have you ever stayed in a hotel?!”

  “Yeah.”

  “A fancy one.”

  “Sure.”

  The man looks down at his hands as though they’d just betrayed him. “I ain’t had no breaks. Not a single one. Don’t that count for something? So, yeah, maybe I was a little mad when I came across that boy. I saw him and I saw people like you, people that got to have the things that were supposed to be promised to me.” He shakes his head. “No, that’s not true. Truth is I didn’t know if he had a weapon on him. So I did what I did.”

  “You shot him.”

  The man purses his lips for a moment and turns away from me. I see a tremble run through his body like a goat that’s swallowed lightning. He clears his throat and his hands turn to fists and his arms fold across his body and he buckles in half at the stomach and lets out a heavy, wet sob.

  “I won’t say that,” he said.

  “It’s the truth.”

  “But I won’t say it.”

  “And that’s the whole problem.”

  Again he lets out a sob the size of Texas. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a gun.

  I manage to raise an eyebrow. I can’t say I didn’t see this particular development coming. Guns are like pets. Even if you don’t own one, it’s only a matter of time before your neighbor, friendly or unfriendly, brings one into your life and you have to cross your fingers and hope it’s friendly.

  “I need you to do something,” the man says.

  “Well,” I say, “I suppose you’ve got a pretty good bargaining chip in your hand.”

  “You don’t have to worry,” he says. Finally, he sits up. He wipes the tears from his face in the near darkness of the night and takes a deep breath. “I doubt I’ll really do anything with this.”

  “Then why’d you bring it?”

  The man looks at the gun. His brow furrows as though he’s only just realized he has it, as if his body had made the decision without him and only now was his mind catching up to the fact that he was carrying it. “I don’t know,” he says. “I guess because somebody had to.”

  “I’m not sure I understand that logic.”

  He chuckles. “Then you don’t understand people.”

  “So what do you want from me?”

  “I want you to help me figure this out.”

  “Figure what out?”

  He waves his hand at the world. “This,” he says. “All of it. I can’t figure it out. I can only ever get pieces of it. And even those pieces are stuck inside of me. I can’t get them out. If I could get them out, I could fix all of this. I could make it all better. People would understand who I am. They’d know that I’m not a bad person. They’d know that all I did was the only thing I could do in that situation.”

  “There are plenty of people who think otherwise.”

  “And that’s exactly what I’m talking about,” he says. He rests the gun on the porch between us. It’s close enough that, if I was fast enough, I could probably reach out a hand and snatch it away before he could stop me. But I don’t. If I did that, maybe he’d stop talking. Maybe he’d get up and leave. And, God help me, I want to hear what he has to say. I need to follow this thread out and see where he’s going.

  “I’m not a bad person,” he says. “That’s the thing that hurts the most. People think I’m evil. They don’t know about how I’m a good father. They don’t know about how good of an uncle I am. Do you know I’ve got a niece that I’m putting through school? Did you know that?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Yeah,” he says. He digs into his pocket and pulls out his phone. After a few fast swipes he shows me a picture of him being hugged by a brightly smiling blonde girl in
a cap and gown. “Harold couldn’t make the money and I had a little extra, so I’m helping her. Don’t that make me a good person?”

  “Sounds like a good thing to do,” I say.

  “But ain’t nobody talking about that,” he says. “All they want to hear about is me and what happened. All they want to do is whittle me down to just that one minute. Like I didn’t have a whole life before that. Like I wasn’t somebody’s baby once. Don’t the past matter?”

  “It does,” I say. “Not just three-fifths of it, but all of it.”

  A small movement in the field surrounding the property catches my attention. I look off and there, under the dim glow of the moonlight, is a man. His skin is dark and his hair is kinky. So dark is his skin that I cannot help but think of The Kid. The man has large lips and his hands are in shackles. His feet as well.

  “The past matters,” I say.

  The man hears a change in my voice and his eyes follow mine.

  Then there’s another one standing in the edge of the field. A woman this time. Her hair is long and decorated with cowry shells. She wears kente cloth and, at her side, a young child stands naked. It too has the same dark skin that seems to glow blue in the moonlight. The woman and child, their hands and feet are shackled too.

  The longer I stare the more of them there are, effervescing from the cornfield. Not all of them are shackled. Some stand in torn clothes with withered hands. Some of them with whip marks across their flesh. Severed hands and feet. Brands on their arms to identify their owners. They all stand and watch. They watch me. They watch the man.

  Silent and eternal, they watch, and I do not know what to say to them.

  “You see them too?” the man asks.

  I don’t know what to say to him.

  He reaches, picks up the gun, and steps off of the porch. “I wish that boy were here,” he says. Then he starts off toward the cornfield. As he walks, something stranger than usual in my life happens. With each step the man seems to fade away, little by little. Or, rather, he doesn’t fade away, but he’s replaced by something. A darkness. A blackness. Soon, after only a few steps, when he is still close enough for me to reach out and touch, he becomes nothing more than a silhouette of darkness. A shadow that walks. But it is not only darkness that forms the shape of him. There are stars there . . . I think. Inside The Shape that he has become, I can see twinkling, like that summer sky in the deep hours of the night. And yet, The Shape that was once a man continues onward, footfall by footfall, toward the cornfield and the figures that stand waiting for him.