Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel

by Robert Gipe

  I went to the back of the house. Mamaw’s sister, the one lives in Ohio, lay on the carpet beside Denny’s mommy and daddy’s bed, flat on her back, drunk it seemed from how loud she was and the way her eyes played in their sockets. Her hair spun loose around her head like cotton candy.

  “Kmeeer.”

  I did and she said, “You’re Cora’s girl,” and I said, “She’s my grandmother,” and she said, “You know she took my man,” and then she fell off to sleep, her head laid off to its side like a chicken ready for the ax. Mamaw’s sister. Aunt Ohio.

  When she talked she sounded mountain, which wasn’t the way she talked normal. Normal she talked through her nose all buckeye about stuff like everywhere they ate on the way down here and what they had at each stop. She told us about every chicken nugget, every drop of honey mustard sauce. She was aggravating. I watched her sleep a while. Normal boring church pictures of Denny and his brothers and their wives and kids in flimsy picture frames crowded the tops of the chests of drawers.

  I was chickenshit was what I was. That was why I was back in this shitty spookhouse county. Without the courage of my convictions, Mamaw would say. Aunt Ohio started snoring. I went in the kitchen, stood in front of the refrigerator looking at the Thanksgiving leftovers, the wads of foil, the piles of Ziploc bags. I took a pop and left in Denny’s truck and come back to Mamaw’s house on Long Trail.

  ***

  “Why’d you steal Hubert’s beer, Dawn?”

  It was hard to answer with my brother Albert’s arm clamped around my neck.

  “He said you drove off with his beer.”

  The night before I stole Denny’s truck, I stole my uncle Hubert’s Oldsmobile and drove it off the side of Astor Mountain. I rolled it at least three times and crashed it into the side of a hickory tree. Three days before that, I’d busted Albert’s jaw at school. Beat him bloody with my French book and put him in the hospital for Thanksgiving. And this is what was on his mind when I got home—the beer in the back of Hubert’s vehicle when I wrecked it.

  Albert tightened his grip around my neck. I could feel his breath against the back of my ear. He was hunched up behind me, trying to hook his leg around mine, get me on the ground. I tried to reach back and get his hair, but they’d shaved his head, at the hospital I guess. I tried to grab him low, but he wouldn’t let me get ahold of him. We spun round and round on Mamaw’s patio, concrete all slushy. Albert finally got me down, drove my face into the snow in the yard.

  “Where’s it at, turd?”

  He’s so stupid. I couldn’t tell him with my mouth full of snow. I had twenty pounds on Albert, probably thirty, so when he tried to pin my arm behind me, I threw him off and got on my feet. He grabbed at my ankle, and I turned one of Mamaw’s steel patio chairs over on his hand. Edge of the steel caught him across the fingers, and I figured it cut a couple off, but he jerked his hand back and all his fingers come with it. Me and Albert had been fighting my whole life. Just like that, like crazy people. I was sick to death of it.

  “It’s just beer,” I said.

  Albert stood up. He raised his lip at me, showed his teeth like a dog. “Wait til Hubert gets out and gets ahold of you.”

  “Shut up, Albert.”

  “He aint gonna turn loose of you so easy.”

  I smacked Albert’s finger out of my face.

  “You better calm down,” Albert said. He sat down in the patio chair.

  I stood over him. “What do you mean, ‘when Hubert gets out’?”

  Mamaw stood on her tiptoes looking out the window over the sink at us.

  Albert said, “Hubert’s in the Wise County jail.”

  “What for?”

  “Him and Cinderella got into with it some chicks over there.”

  Mamaw tapped on the window.

  Albert said, “Give me a ride back to Hubert’s.”

  “Come on, little mermaid. Let me ride in your new truck.”

  “Get there the way you got here, asshole.”

  Albert sat in the patio chair like the prince of winter. He belched and steam shot out his mouth. “Give me a ride, little mermaid.”

  With both hands on his shoulders, I knocked his chair over, left him laying there, and went in Mamaw’s house.

  ***

  “Did you make it home?” Mamaw said in a voice dry as flour, getting up from the kitchen table where she was reading coal mining permit papers.

  I sat down, put my head on the table. The vinyl tablecloth was sticky with sugar. I could feel it against my forehead.

  Mamaw said, “You want some milk?” She brought me a glass of chocolate milk and sat back down. She put her hand on my hair.

  “Your sister’s passed out in the bedroom at your brother’s house,” I said without raising my head.

  “Do what?” Mamaw said.

  I told her what I seen and where I seen it.

  “Hunh,” Mamaw said.

  “What’s she talking about, you took her man?”

  Mamaw looked at me a minute. “Don’t pay no attention to her. She’s lost.”

  It didn’t bother Mamaw to be alone. Maybe she was preparing me for the same. Mamaw got up from the table, went over to where she kept her papers stacked, come back, set my glasses down in front of me.

  “Your cousin Denny brung them,” Mamaw said.

  My glasses had been cleaned, screws tightened. Shined up. Mamaw set back down to her business. Didn’t say nothing, but she wasn’t reading, just shuffling papers, waiting for me to say something. That was her being there for me. Hell with that, I thought. My leg was bouncing I was so mad. To calm myself down, I thought how Mamaw took me and Momma in when things at Hubert’s got crazy. I thought how she took me walking in the woods when I was agitated. I got up and went out on the patio. Albert was gone. The air smelled of coal smoke from my papaw Houston’s house back up on the hillside. I could see him in my mind, surrounded by his music, fire going in the stove, not like pioneer days, not that old feeling, but like something you couldn’t find no more in the world today.

  Everything was blue and gray out. It was so quiet I could almost hear Houston’s fire cracking and popping. My cheeks were numb.

  Kmeeer. Kmeeer. I walked towards Houston’s. Halfway up the hill, I looked back at Mamaw’s, light orange in the kitchen. I was starting to stink. Good time to go see Houston. Didn’t matter how you smelled at Houston’s.

  ***

  When I pushed open the door, Houston sat in the front room baked by coal fire, glazed in his own grease, his face sawed open in a smile. A man on a 78 rpm record sang, “The cuckoo, she’s a pretty bird, and she wobbles as she flies.” An idler and a thief is what Mamaw called Houston, but I never seen him idle. He was always out trading with somebody or fishing goods out of the river. Or holding something up to the light to check on how clear it was. Clarity.

  “Hey oh,” he said when I come in the door. “Is it a haint? Or the darling Misty Dawn?” He leaned up on the heels of his hands in the armchair. “Get to the icebox, little sister. Fetch out a jar.”

  I set the jar and a glass with painted flowers on it down at my grandfather’s elbow. Houston fixed a glass of the cold clear liquor and handed me the jar to put back in the icebox. I slumped in a chair across from him and fell off to sleep.

  “Go back there and lay down on the bed,” Houston said when I opened my eyes.

  I did, between the birdblue electric blanket and the ancient brown chenille spread, the light fuzzy through the window plastic. I dreamed I heard Willett Bilson’s voice, and I lay waiting for it to turn into a body. I wondered did Willett Bilson have chest hair and how it would be around my finger.

  Houston’s dogs whined and barked in my sleep. I woke annoyed, wishing Houston would make the dogs stop. Houston came in the room, said, “I reckon she’s asleep” to the dogs. The dogs sniffed my face. It was dark outside. The yellow lamp lit the window plastic.

  “Time to eat,” Houston said. “If you want.”

  “I shoul
d go back to Mamaw’s.”

  “Coming down pretty good out there.”

  A dog licked my hand. I said to Houston, “What did you do for Thanksgiving?”

  “I was supposed to go to Kingsport to see daughter June, before all this snow.”

  The dog licking my hand was wet and missing an eye.

  Houston said, “Nobody brought me nothing to eat.”

  The dog lay its head on my hand.

  “I thought maybe that’s what you was doing. Thought maybe Cora fixed me a little plate of turkey and dressing. Maybe some sweet potatoes. With them little marshmallows melted down over em.”

  “Nah.” I stood up. The one-eyed dog crawled under the bed.

  I don’t remember Houston ever living under the same roof as Mamaw. When I was little he lived in a block building out in Mamaw’s driveway next to the carport. Momma told me Mamaw and Houston used to have a photography studio together, used to spit and fuss together every day of their lives. But Mamaw kicked him out and kept kicking him til she’d kicked him up here on the ridge.

  “Well then,” Houston said, “you want some stew?”

  The dogs trailed Houston out of the room. I followed. Houston browned meat and cut up carrots and onions and potatoes and put salt and pepper on them and poured soup out of a can into it. Houston sipped from a coffee cup.

  “Your grandmother was a nurse. How I met her. She was taking care of my head. Where I fell out of the back of a truck.”

  “Hit wasn’t moving. It was sitting in her driveway. At her daddy’s house. Drop Creek.”

  A dog stood on a rag rug next to the stove and shook water off itself.

  “So,” Houston said, “you courting?”

  Albert told me one time he heard Houston was fooling around with a woman come in their photo studio for some glamour shots and Mamaw almost beat her to death with a camera tripod.

  “I better go, Papaw.”

  “I done called your mamaw. Told her where you was.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “Said I could keep you. For the night, anyway.”

  Houston set the stove eye on low and headed back to his chair in the front room.

  “Course I’d had my eye on her long time before I fell out of the truck. Your grandmother was real good with makeup. She didn’t hardly wear none. But what she wore worked like a charm. Bright like a bird in spring. We took her picture, me and Daddy. I made me a copy, packed it around til one day it fell out of my schoolbook. My buddy found it and give it to her. Boy, was she mad. She didn’t want nobody having no part of her. At the time I thought it was me she didn’t favor, cause I wasn’t no slight airborne woodland creature of bright plumage and easy means of escape like her. I was earthy. A salamander at best, but more like a grub, something beneath the bark of a tree, at home in soft wood, something a bird like her, with her sharp beak and bright plumage, would feed on.”

  He said, “I wore her down though.”

  “Didya.”

  “One May I thought I was possessed by the devil. I wasn’t of course. It was just a kidney infection. But her preacher uncle convinced me it was the devil. He hollered and mashed my head between his hands til the spirit flew out in the yard and holed up in my Chrysler. Her preacher uncle dumped gas on that car and set it blazing. To get that devil out of it.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Go see for yourself. It’s still sitting up Drop Creek.”

  “Hunh.”

  “Your mamaw sort of took pity on me after that, and I got in there that way, you know.”

  I didn’t quite believe Houston, but I ate his stew and stayed at his house that night. He left me alone, played 78 rpm records out in the front room, and when I slept, I slept like I was dead.

  ***

  Saturday morning early, there was a knock on Houston’s door. Houston never stirred. I got up and opened the door. It was Aunt Ohio with a bunch of food. Houston came into the kitchen as Aunt Ohio come in the house.

  “Verna,” Houston said.

  Behind Aunt Ohio out Houston’s door, the sun came out. Water dripped even across the length of the eave. The ground was solid snow, but shiny.

  “How are you, Houston, honey?” Aunt Ohio had her hair done up tight. Her makeup was crisp as frosting on a cake in the glass case at the grocery store. She wore high-waisted jeans and shoes for walking. She set all them Ziploc bags and wads of foil from Denny’s daddy’s refrigerator on the counter. She had most of a ham. Half gallon jar of tea. Better part of a pie.

  Aunt Ohio said, “Houston, what time you coming to see us? You know it aint Thanksgiving til you come out. Them boys love your stories. We all do.” Aunt Ohio pulled Houston’s head over, kissed him right on its top.

  “Where’s Gene?” Houston said.

  Gene was Aunt Ohio’s husband used to manage a metal garbage can plant in Ohio before things went plastic. Houston told me one time Gene give him a job. Said it was the best job he ever had.

  “Down at Cora’s,” Aunt Ohio said. She went to the icebox and took out the jar.

  “Verna, I don’t know I’m going to get out to Drop Creek this year.” Houston’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down more than usual. “Gout giving me fits.”

  Aunt Ohio leaned on her elbows on the kitchen counter. She was trying to look appealing. On Drop Creek, she was the person knew the rules to the card games and didn’t care to tell you. She was the one said the mashed potatoes weren’t hot all the way through. She never tried to be appealing on Drop Creek. Aunt Ohio turned her smoky eyes on Houston.

  Houston licked his chops over that ham. I did too. Houston got a bag of white bread off the top of the icebox. He laid it on the counter, got the yellow mustard out. Aunt Ohio’s smoky eyes followed Houston to the icebox, to the counter, back to the icebox. The air was filled with honey-glazed tension. A car horn honked. Aunt Ohio stood up. Houston pulled a slice of ham off the bone. Aunt Ohio moved to the door and waved at Gene. She turned.

  “Goodbye, Houston.”

  Houston took two pieces of bread from the bag. “Adios,” he said, pronouncing it “add-ee-ose.” He laid the slices out on the counter and smeared yellow on both.

  “Hope that gout don’t get the best of you,” Aunt Ohio said with a smile. She turned to me. “Dawn,” she said. And then she was out the door, which slammed behind her.

  The liquor set on the counter next to the mustard. Houston lay down his knife and tipped the liquor jar.

  “Phwoo,” he said when he set it down.

  “What was that?” I said.

  “You’ll have to ask her.”

  Sunbeams leaned through the window. The dogs ganged up at the door, scratched the aluminum, dragged their noses across the glass.

  “I’m asking you, Papaw.” I walked to the counter and put the jar to my own lips.

  “I have not always been the gentleman you see today.” Papaw finished putting together his sandwich. He went to the cabinet, pulled a plate from a pile of plates, set the sandwich on the plate. He came to his chair. “I did not used to be so comfortable in my own skin,” he said.

  “Your own skin,” I said.

  “Let the dogs in,” he said.

  I did. They looked this way and that, set up underneath the ham.

  “I used to get agitated,” Houston said.

  “Hunh.”

  “Used to lose my sense of myself. Had to go elsewhere to figure out who I was.”

  “Only so much a man can figure out at home.”

  “So who’d you love more? Mamaw or Verna?”

  Houston chewed his sandwich, licked mustard from his lips, took a dreamy look.

  “First one thing and then another,” he said.

  The dogs settled down around us. They wagged their tails.

  Houston said, “There is a pain in watching others eat known only to dogs. They pretend to like us. But they are filled with anger at how unfair the world is.” He put the last of his sandwich in his mouth. “You are too young for us to
drink enough for me to tell you of my courtship of your grandmother and her sister. There are doors through which it is not yet time for you to walk.”

  My life was one long river of bullshit.

  “I will say this.” Houston put his knotty finger to his eye. “Fear men. Flee them. Give them nothing. They mean you ill. Their voices smack of honey and their words set off string music in the chambers of your heart. But mark my words: they will cut you down, chop you up, cook you over fire, eat only the pieces that suit them, and throw the best of you into the weeds for other beasts to rend and gnaw.”

  Houston pulled on his coat and went out into the snow, dogs on his trail in a barking wad. His yard was full of sunshine and puddles. I went back to bed.

  ***

  When I woke, clouds covered the sun. I lay there in a twist, thinking I wasn’t nothing, and wasn’t never gonna be nothing. Living was gonna be one long disastrous horrifying embarrassment.

  Houston was the best man in my life since Daddy died and he wasn’t for shit. I was eight years old when Daddy died. People say you can’t be happy til you know what you want.

  Right before he died we went to his momma’s house in North Carolina, and he set at dinner and told a story about a boy named Jack tying death up in a sack, and I thought it was real. I never heard him tell a story like that, and my mouth hung open, and that’s what haunts me, that every day I would have learned something new and good about what my daddy was.

  I turned on Houston’s portable radio with its rotted-off leather handle and red needle set on Willett Bilson’s station. Two tobacco farmers were playing jazz records.

  “Now that there was John Coltrane,” one of them said.

  “Hello there, Mr. Bilson,” the other jazz farmer said. “How are you this fine morning?”

  “Just dandy,” said Willett Bilson. “Up with the chickens.”