by Ron Rash
“Where’s Leonard?”
“Went to the county library,” Dena said. “Gone to get more books for you. Evidently a trailerful ain’t enough.”
Travis picked up the science book he and Leonard were using and sat in the recliner. Dena watched him read, a smirk on her face. Her eyes were glassy, their blue opaque like the color in cat-eye marbles.
“What?” he finally said.
“You and him are quite a pair,” Dena said. “You quit school and he gets fired from one, so you all set up your own school in this shit hole of a trailer. It’s one of the most screwed-up things I ever seen in my life.”
A cigarette smoldered in the ashtray. Travis felt a need strong as thirst or hunger. A month now since Lori had nagged him into quitting but it didn’t seem to be getting any easier.
“He got fired because of pissants like you,” Dena said.
“What do you mean?”
“He caught some students cheating. One of them put some pot in his car and then called the cops. He can’t teach anymore because of that, leastways in a school. What’s worse is that conviction got his wife full custody of their kid.”
“He has a kid?”
“Oh, yeah, only he don’t never see her. His wife took her off to Australia.”
Travis tried to envision some physical feature of the child but nothing came. There was no photo on Leonard’s wall or night table, no letter ever in the mailbox from or to her. No phone call. Her existence seemed something Leonard should have mentioned to him. Travis felt betrayed, though he could not say exactly why.
“How come he never talks about any of this?”
“Because he has to be bad drunk first. He ain’t been that way for a while.”
Dena drank the last of the wine and set the empty bottle on the floor.
“Where’s your little honey?”
“She’s covering for another waitress tonight.”
“Too bad. I bet you were hoping to get something sweet from her.”
Dena’s words reminded Travis of what had happened in the meadow. They were like a taunt, and he wanted to be out of the trailer.
“How long ago did Leonard leave?” he asked.
“Not long. He won’t be back for at least a hour.”
Dena cut off the TV.
“Nothing but boring shit on,” she said, and let her hand brush his knee as she went to the back room.
Travis finished the chapter in the science book, then walked into the narrow hallway to put it on the shelf.
“Come here,” she said, calling him to the back room.
He stood at the doorway but did not go in. Dena lay on the bed naked. She faced him and he could see the heavy breasts, the dark patch of hair between her legs. He lowered his eyes.
“You want to lay with me?” she said. “You can if you want to.”
Her voice wasn’t gentle, but it wasn’t mocking either.
“Come here,” she said, patting a spot on the bed beside her.
“I can’t,” Travis said.
“Why not, big boy?” she said, mocking him now. “Afraid?”
Maybe he was a little afraid, but it was more than that. He didn’t look at her but at the window Leonard had painted black. Travis had once asked Leonard why he’d done this and Leonard said he’d been drinking, as if that were explanation enough.
“Because it wouldn’t be right,” Travis said, his eyes still on the window as if he could see through the black paint.
He expected Dena to jeer at him more but she didn’t. She lifted the bedsheet and covered herself. He looked at her now.
“I guess not,” she said. She stared at him intently, as though trying to memorize his features. “Last summer you wouldn’t have said that. You about got me believing people can change.”
He didn’t know how to answer her, or even if he was expected to. He wanted not just out of the trailer but to be miles away. He’d go and find Shank. Dena tugged the sheet until it covered most of her head as well. She looked like a creature peeking out of its lair.
“I’m going down to Marshall,” he said.
“You know where I’m going?” Dena asked.
She didn’t give him a chance to respond.
“I’m going to hell. I’ve known that since I was seven years old.”
She said it the same way she might look out a window and say it was raining.
“You can’t know something like that,” Travis said. He knew there were Bible verses to support him, but he couldn’t think of one. He stepped back from the door, wanting to leave.
“Yes, you can,” she said. “You learn it early and you ain’t allowed to forget. You even get to spend time there when you’re still alive. Just to give you a little taste of what’s waiting.”
She turned, facing the wall when she spoke.
“Go on now,” she said.
Travis saw the purple scar on her back shoulder and knew that, as with him, someone had taken a knife to her flesh. He also believed that she’d deserved that blade less than he had. His jeans were almost dry now but the tennis shoes and socks were soggy, so he sat on the couch and changed socks and put on his boots. Dena had left the pills on the coffee table. At least fifty in the bag, enough that a few wouldn’t be missed. He picked three of the shiny black ones that looked like licorice, the ones he’d heard Dena call black beauties. He wasn’t sure what they’d do but that didn’t matter as long as they made him feel different from the way he felt right now. He washed them down with a glass of water and went out to the truck.
Travis headed south toward Marshall and in a few minutes drove past the Harbin Road turnoff that led to his parents’ farmhouse. He passed a harvested tobacco field that was nothing now but stubble. There were people who could drive by this field and have no idea how much work had been done here, Travis knew, recalling how he and his father had planted seeds in February before laying down sheets of black plastic anchored by creek rocks. Come April they’d removed those rocks and lifted the plastic sheets careful as they’d pull a bandage from a wound. He and his daddy had knelt in front of the plants and gently freed the stem and roots from the soil, then laid the plants on a burlap sack before putting them back in the ground with tobacco setters. That had been just the beginning, watering and worming and topping and suckering still to come. Finally the cutting, which was the sweatiest fieldwork of all. Now those plants hung from the barn’s rafters, muted to a brittle dusty gold, a smell like old leather musking the air. The barn would be shadowy, except for early mornings and late afternoons when sunlight slipped through the slats and the tobacco leaves brightened and shimmered as if tinged with fire.
By the time he crossed the river into Marshall, the pills had taken hold. It was like a lamp had been turned on inside his head. Everything was brighter, more defined. His heart raced and he imagined blood rushing through his veins like white-water. He wished he had a tape player so he could hear some fast hard music like Skynyrd or Black Oak Arkansas.
He found Shank and a few of the other guys at the Gulf station, their cars and trucks facing the passing traffic. Travis pulled beside Shank and cut the engine. The good feeling he’d had just minutes before was gone. His heart pounded even faster and thoughts came almost too quick for his mind to organize them. Like a truck in the wrong gear, everything felt out of sync. In the rearview mirror Travis saw the same glassy stare he’d seen in Dena’s eyes. He put on his sunglasses.
“Damn, boy,” Shank said loudly. “Lori loosened the leash on you a few minutes?”
“She’s working.”
“Lucky us,” Shank said, and winked at the others.
Travis got out of the cab and set himself on the Ford’s hood, all of them perched on car and truck hoods. Travis knew each face and name and they nodded back at him familiarly. He and Shank were close enough that Shank leaned toward Travis, punched him in the shoulder. Not a hard punch, but he’d had enough of people hitting on him the last few months. He hit Shank back hard, ready to trade a f
ew more punches if that was what Shank wanted. Shank rubbed his shoulder where the blow had landed.
“Miss you at school,” Shank said. “I got no one to sit with in detention.” Shank waved his hand at the other guys. “These boys ain’t outlaws like we used to be. You remember when Slick Abernathy called us that in his office, said we’d end up in prison if we didn’t change?”
Irritable as he felt, Travis still had to smile.
“We did raise some hell, didn’t we? I bet Slick won’t ever forget me.”
“No way,” Shank said. A souped-up Mustang drove by, the driver revving his engine as he passed. A couple of the guys cheered when the driver flattened the accelerator pedal, left two wavy smears of rubber in his wake.
“I reckon you really are a outlaw now,” Shank said, “what with you and Leonard in cahoots. We’re liable to see your ugly mug in the post office before long. I figure to turn you in and get a big reward.”
“Maybe it’s already up there,” Wesley said. “That’s how come he’s got those shades on.”
“Come on, son,” Shank said, “tell us some stories of the cutthroats and desperadoes you’ve been riding herd on, what kind of big dope deals you got going down.”
He liked Shank calling him an outlaw, liked the respectful way the other boys looked at him as they waited for him to tell what it was like to live with a drug pusher and bootlegger. Travis thought about saying he and Leonard were like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, partners in crime and good buddies. Fast as his mind was working he could’ve come up with all sorts of bullshit. Instead he just gave a little smile, like there was stuff going on but he wasn’t saying.
“So what you got stashed in that truck?” Wesley asked. “I wouldn’t mind getting high.”
“Nothing but fishing equipment.”
“Not even a nickel bag?” Shank asked.
“No.”
“Maybe you ain’t quite the outlaw we were thinking,” Shank said.
“I don’t give a damn what you think,” Travis said. Shank’s words were like gnats swarming around his head. He wondered if you were supposed to take just one of the pills.
For a few moments they watched the vehicles pass before them.
“Leonard been practicing to defend his title?” asked a younger boy nicknamed June Bug.
“He shoots a few cans every once in a while,” Travis said, glad to have the subject changed. “Good as he is he don’t need much practice.”
“I don’t know why those other fellows even try,” Shank said. “They might as well hand Leonard their entry fee when they show up. Not even shoot so they don’t waste their bullets.”
A Dodge filled with girls passed. The windows were down and the girls waved and shouted. Shank lifted his arm in a beckoning wave, but they kept going.
“That girl driving,” Shank said. “I saw her tubing in the river last summer and she didn’t have enough clothes on to wad a shotgun.”
“If I had been there I’d of asked her to go skinny-dipping,” June Bug said.
“I bet that’s what you’d have done,” Shank said, rolling his eyes.
“June Bug, even if she’d got naked you wouldn’t have known what to do next,” Wesley said. “You’d have froze up like a deer caught in headlights.”
“That ain’t so,” Shank said. “June Bug would have got in the water and told her he hoped she didn’t mind that he’d kept his clothes on.”
While the other boys were laughing Travis slid off the hood. He acted like he was going to piss, but once behind the building he just walked around the back lot, kicking empty motor-oil cans, throwing a few rocks. Doing something for a few minutes besides sitting and listening to a bunch of stupid talk. Travis paused and placed his hand on his chest, was surprised he could not feel a wild battering against his ribs. He was worried about his heart, afraid it could only take so much before exploding. Shank met him on the way back, motioned for Travis to sit with him beside the gas pumps so they could talk alone.
“So Lori giving you what you need?”
Travis stared at the black smears the Mustang had made. He wished it was his truck that had made those marks and he was now someplace else. But where? He seemed to have run out of places he could go. Some of the other guys shouted as the girls in the Dodge drove back by.
“I bet you hadn’t even rubbed her titties yet,” Shank added.
“I’m getting what I want,” Travis lied.
Shank grinned at him.
“In your dreams maybe. Boy, the rate you’re going you’ll be laid up in the old folks’ home before she puts out.”
“I’ve got to go,” Travis said, standing up.
“I’m just trying to help you out,” Shank said. “Anyway, little as you come around these days I’d think you’d want to stay awhile and visit.” Shank no longer smiled. “If you ain’t careful I may get to thinking you don’t have time for your best buddy anymore.”
Travis wanted to tell Shank it wasn’t that way at all. But he was afraid to say a single word, because once he started he didn’t think he’d be able to stop. He’d tell Shank how hard living away from home could be, how scared he was sometimes because it was like there’d been a net beneath him that was now gone. He’d probably start bawling like a baby before he got through. Besides, for all the talking he’d already done today little good had come of it. He thought how much better the day would have been without words, catching the trout, laying with Lori in the meadow, even sitting on a truck hood with his friends. All those were good, until Lori and Shank opened their mouths and ruined them. Even Dena. It was her words that had brought him to the back bedroom. Words seemed to ruin everything.
Travis got in his truck and cranked the engine. What can be spoken is already dead in the heart. That was something Leonard had said last week, quoting some philosopher. At the time he’d had no notion of what that philosopher was getting at, but now those words went barb deep.
The sun had finally begun to nestle into the folds of the mountains. He was only supposed to have gained an hour but this day seemed like forever. A flock of redbirds flew across a cornfield, bright against the gloaming. The birds compressed and expanded, lifted a few feet higher and compressed again as if trying to mirror his own racing heart. Travis rolled down the window, hoping the brisk air would make his body feel something beside the pills.
The road began a long climb that ended where Harbin Road intersected with Highway 25. He could go home. It was as easy as making a left turn. That’s what his mother wanted, said as much during her weekly shopping trips, trips Travis knew she arranged to coincide with his work schedule. They always talked a few minutes, about his sister and her husband, his grandmother’s health, even his studying for a GED, which had done a lot to change his mother’s mind about him living with Leonard. Almost every time he saw her, her eyes teared up and she told him she wished he’d come back home. She told him his room was just as he left it. Travis had clothes and a bed there. His fishing equipment and rifle were in the truck. He wouldn’t even have to go back to Leonard’s trailer.
But not once had she brought a single word from his father. It was like the old man refused to acknowledge that Travis existed anymore, the same as when he’d driven by the grocery store’s parking lot. Travis remembered all the work they’d done together in the fields, his father never noticing how straight he made his rows or how good Travis was at spotting cutworms and hornworms, just noticing things done wrong like stepping on a plant or leaving a hoe in a furrow. Then the work inside the barn come harvest time, Travis hanging thirty-pound sticks of tobacco while balancing on a crossbeam no wider than a railroad tie. That was the hardest work of all, not just hanging the plants but the resin sticking to you like tar, flecks of tobacco burning your eyes. Dangerous work, because it was easy enough to slip off a beam and end up in a wheelchair like William Revis. Travis had done good work up there in the rafters. Others had said so, men who’d spent time on those crossbeams. But it was the same as in th
e fields, his daddy only noticing what didn’t suit him—Travis taking a break when he could hardly raise his arms anymore, or a plant with barn burn because it had been hung too close to another.
Travis figured a couple of beers might help mellow him out, so at the next crossroads he turned right and drove until he came to Dink’s. The bootlegger met him at the door, took what money Travis had with him and brought back three beers.
“I figured five dollars would get me a six-pack,” Travis said.
“You figured wrong,” Dink said. “That price is just for my regulars, and you ain’t been around in months.”
Once on the main road Travis drove north before turning onto an old skid trail lined with second-growth hardwoods. He parked and pulled the tab on one of the cans, poured its contents down his throat like vital medicine. He drank the second almost as fast. Soon the alcohol began taking the edge off the pills, or maybe the pills were wearing off now on their own. Whichever, he no longer felt as agitated. He opened the last beer and watched darkness seal up the last gaps in the branches. When the can was empty he did not leave. Dena wouldn’t miss just three pills, he was sure of that, but if he went back now Leonard would realize he was buzzed, might look closer and notice how dilated his pupils were. Nothing good could come of that. He’d wait another hour or two.
Travis leaned back farther in the seat and closed his eyes. Think about something good, he told himself, and settled his mind on the fish he’d caught, not the big rainbow but the speckled trout. Large enough to eat but Travis was glad he’d let it go. He thought of the orange pectoral fins spread open like small bright fans as the trout hid under the bank, safe from otters and kingfishers, anything else that might snatch it from the water. The speckled trout would be sore-mouthed and wary from the hook, but soon enough it would move out from the undercut and feed again on a crawfish or nymph, maybe a grasshopper that survived first frost. Then as winter came on it would feed less, stay near the pool’s bottom where the water wasn’t as cold. The water a still, dark place becoming darker and even more still as a caul of ice settled over the pool, shutting the trout off from the rest of the world. A dark, silent place, Travis knew, and the trout down there, its metabolism slowed, as close to hibernation as a fish could get. Dogs dreamed. He’d seen them make soft woofs and kick their back legs, eyes closed as they chased a rabbit or coon through the dark woods of their sleep. Travis imagined the speckled trout under the ice, rising in its dreams to sip bright-yellow mayflies from the surface, dreaming of spring as it waited out winter.