by Robert Gipe
Willett Bilson made a clucking noise and the jazz farmers laughed. I don’t know why I was taken with the voice of Willett Bilson. It didn’t seem like something I would like. Too goody goody. I should have thought him stupid. But I didn’t. I lay there in the bed and waited through a show-offy saxophone song to hear him again.
“Man, that was some playing,” said Willett Bilson. “I feel taken away, transported, swept right up off of this mountain to the bustle of New York City. You are my wife. Goodbye city life. Heh.”
There was a pause and the old jazz farmer said, “Well, that’ll just about do it for us,” and they signed off and Willett did a show by himself, playing music and announcing Christmas pageants and Santa Claus giveaways and a hog killing. He talked slow and appreciative about the beautiful morning—“the frost, friends, has created a jewel box out our window here.”
I worked Willett Bilson up in my mind. I didn’t think he would be super hot. But his reedy voice made him tall in my imagination. Maybe some kind of red hair. Maybe thick and curly. Maybe freckles. I drifted back to sleep, and woke when Mamaw called to say Denny was at her house looking for his truck.
***
Denny came to pick up his truck with a guy from work. The guy wore a ball cap and looked at me hard. His look said, “I have a life and it is a good life, a life of laughing and closeness and fun, and you aint never gonna be a part of it, weirdo treehugger girl.” Mamaw knew the boy. He had been to her house before. She had been to his. Mamaw had been a school nurse. People knew her that way besides her being a tree hugger. She had saved all kinds of people all kinds of money on doctor’s bills. She had that going for her besides what she was doing trying to stop a strip job.
There wasn’t any “well but” with me. I was a freak, soft and four-eyed, with black fingernail polish, a dead daddy, a drunk momma, a crackhead brother, outlaw uncles, and divorced grandparents who made trouble for normal people every time they come off the ridge.
Denny smiled at me with his eyes. He put his hand out, and I put the keys in it. He nodded and turned to get in his truck.
“That’s it?” his friend said. “Just take the keys and go?”
“I reckon,” Denny said.
“I’ll be damned,” his friend said.
Denny opened the truck door.
“What would you say,” I said, “if it was your truck?”
“Dawn,” Mamaw said.
Denny’s buddy turned to face us. “Wouldn’t say nothing,” he said. “I’d a called the law. Had you put in jail. Lawless thing. Wouldn’t matter if you was my cousin.”
“Lawless,” I said, “like when yall mine off your permit, and blast ten times more than you’re supposed to, build ponds where you aint got no permit, lie on your water reports—lawless like that?”
“You need to shut your mouth,” Denny’s buddy said, “cause you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What,” I said, “break a law on a bulldozer and it aint a crime?”
“I work,” he said. “That would be something you don’t know nothing about, you truck-thieving little freak.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, “drug dealers work.”
“I guess you’d know about that,” he said.
“I’d be glad to go to jail,” I said, “if they put me in right next to you.”
He come around the truck, wanted to get up in my face. Mamaw put her walking stick between me and him.
“That’s enough,” Mamaw said.
“This aint a game, little girl.”
I flipped him off. Mamaw knocked my hand out of the air.
“Let’s go, Keith,” Denny said.
“Yeah, go on, Denny,” I said. “You pussy. I’m glad I stole your truck. You strip mining pussy with your pretty Christmas lights and your chrome-plated double-wide. Go the fuck on.”
“Yall get on out of here, Denny,” Mamaw said.
Denny didn’t say a word, just got in his truck. His buddy tried to stare me down. He didn’t have nothing to say. What was he going to say? What I said was true. He knew it was. I flipped him off again. Soon as I did that last flip-off, I wished it all back, like I had at the hearing, except this was worse. I had made it personal with Denny’s friend. Way too personal. Denny and his friend left in the snow, sliding and slipping down through the gravel of Mamaw’s drive to the blacktop.
“You been paying more attention at them meetings than I thought,” Mamaw said.
“What’s that boy’s name?”
“Kelly. Keith Kelly.”
My head spun. I wanted to be back at Houston’s, old music playing.
“Reckon we’ll see them again when this snow melts,” Mamaw said.
“What are you talking about?”
“We’re going up there and inspect that strip job.”
“By ourselves?”
“State man go with us.”
“Us who?”
“Me, you. Anybody we want to take.”
“When?”
“Supposed to clear Thursday.”
I walked over behind Mamaw’s snowball bush. I put my hands on my knees to throw up. I coughed. I spit. Mamaw came over, put her hand on my back. I stood up.
I was cold and filthy from sleeping at Houston’s. I wanted so to go in Mamaw’s and take a shower, but I did not want to have to talk enviro-fighter strategy with Mamaw. I wanted to go somewhere and be clean and beautiful. I wanted to wear a dress. I wanted to have my picture made. I wanted to rest my hand in the crooked elbow of a boy who loved me. I wanted our favorite song playing. I wanted my head on his shoulder.
I tried to think where my mother was. The last I had seen of her, she was in the rearview mirror of the Delta 88, high, trying to break up the mess between Cinderella, Hubert, and the party girls. Did she have to go to jail with Hubert? I didn’t figure she did. Albert would have said so. She was probably at Hubert’s. How did she get back from Virginia? I left her there without a ride. Who would I ask? I did not want to ask Mamaw. She probably wouldn’t know anyway. Hubert was in jail. Houston wouldn’t know. I could ask Albert.
“Honey, come in from the cold,” Mamaw called from the doorway. I saw in Mamaw’s face how crazy I looked.
“Where’s Momma?” I said.
“Come inside, Dawn.”
When I got inside, Mamaw told me hadn’t nobody seen her.
“She aint in jail?” I said.
“No.”
“Then where’s she at?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who does?”
“I don’t know.”
“You ask Albert?”
“I did.”
“What’d he say?”
“He don’t know.”
“Shoo.”
“I even asked Cinderella.”
“You know Cinderella?”
“I do.”
“What’d he say?”
“He don’t know.”
Out the kitchen window, Mamaw’s Escort sat in the carport. Mamaw kept her car cleaner than her house. Clean. A slight airborne thing. It was Thanksgiving Saturday and the men would be back at Denny’s house. The women might be doing their in-county Christmas shopping. The men were sitting around watching television, watching somebody beat the shit out of UK. Denny would be back with them in a minute. Him and Keith Kelly. My new enemy. Monday I go back to school.
Mamaw paused. “You scared to go back?”
Why did she have to put it that way? “No.”
“Dawn?”
“What?”
“She’ll be all right.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t.”
I turned from the window, looked around the kitchen, turned back to the winter light.
Mamaw said, “Want to walk with me? Clear your head.”
I stared out the window. Mamaw looked at me a long time, like I was a dead cow in the creek she couldn’t figure out how to move.
“You want some hot chocolate?” she said
.
I shook my head. She stood there some more. Dead cow still in the creek.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said.
“Don’t have to do what?”
“You don’t have to be involved with this Blue Bear business. You don’t have to go. You don’t have to speak.”
She knew it was too late for me to back out. I nodded. “Yall are right about what you’re doing. Somebody’s got to say it.”
I thought Mamaw might move towards me. But she didn’t. She put away dishes. She moved things from one end of the room to the other. She picked pieces of fuzz off her sweatshirt.
“Your momma’s been living the way she’s living for a while now,” Mamaw said.
“I know.”
“Aint there no other kids at school,” Mamaw said, “feel the way you do about Blue Bear?”
“Not that I know of.”
Mamaw nodded. “Well,” she said.
I went in my room, changed my clothes.
“You gonna take a shower?” Mamaw said.
I put on clean jeans, a high-neck shirt, long johns, a hoodie, two pairs of socks.
“I’m going out,” I said. “I can’t think.”
“Well,” Mamaw said.
I stood at the kitchen door. “I’ll see you.”
“You want something to eat?” Mamaw said.
“Nah.”
“You going up on the ridge?”
“I reckon.”
“Here.” Mamaw went to her coat pocket behind the door, got me her pipe, her tobacco pouch. I held them in my big hand, tucked them in the front pocket of my hoodie.
“Helps me,” Mamaw said.
“Does it?” I said.
Mamaw tucked her chin and smiled. Mamaw was so strange. The house ticked like a clock. Tick. It was the heater. Tick.
“Mamaw?”
“Yes, honey.”
“Would you rather I was alone?”
“Do what?”
“You wish I was by myself all my life? You rather I live that way?”
“Honey, no. I wouldn’t wish that on a dog.”
I bowed my head. Mamaw came to me. She closed me up in her arms. I was so much bigger than her. Big. A big girl.
Mamaw said into my ear, “I’m doing my best, honey.”
***
I walked out the door like I was leaving for good. That’s always how I felt when I went out in the snow.
Houston wasn’t at his house. I put a pint jar in my hoodie pocket and headed up on the ridge. The trees against the snow-white sky were like words on paper. I tried to read what they said. In a beautiful mystical nature language that no one could understand but me they said for me to kiss their ass. I am not a nature girl, see. Don’t camp. Don’t fish. Can’t tell which animals are which by their poop. I just wander the woods. All. By. Myself.
The snow squeaked under my feet. I lost my breath when the way got steep. I sat down on a boulder and sipped from the jar. Corn liquor. Made by some ancient craft. The children I was gonna have or not danced at the edge of my eyes. When I turned my head towards them, they were gone. I didn’t think about Denny. I didn’t think about Keith Kelly.
“Til this year I thought you was a boy.” That’s what the only boy who ever said he liked me said the first time he got me by myself. I sipped from the jar.
“Mamaw,” I said in my head.
“What?” she said in my head.
In my head I said, “Remind me what I’m missing doing home school.”
In my head, Mamaw laughed. Ha. Ha. Ha.
I got drunk in the snow, on a narrow patch of land Mamaw owned. Hell deep. Heaven high. No divided mineral. Do you know what I mean? Fuck you if you don’t. Do you remember what it was like to be fifteen? Do you know what it is like to grow up in Kentucky? Either you do or you don’t. Aint no use explaining if you don’t.
I moved through the snow. I wished I had a dog with me. I turned to see if one of Houston’s dogs followed me. I took out the jar again so as not to think about what it meant that not one of Houston’s dogs followed me.
Snow and trees gave way to snow and rocks as I climbed. Fresh, I said to myself. Everything was fresh. Maybe, the wind said to my face, maybe you should cut yourself off with that liquor. I sat on a rock at the crest of the ridge, exhaled. Everything to the north of us sprawled out in front of me. Cut yourself off, I said to the wind.
I took out the pipe and pouch. I did not have a lighter. I did not have fire. I stood up to kill myself. I looked down. There was a ledge ten feet below. I could jump down on that to practice kill myself.
5: Monster Birds
I fell heavy off the north side of the mountain and landed on the rock ledge ten feet below. My first thought on landing was “I’m sorry. So sorry.” My weight took me forward, towards the valley below. The great white of the sky turned in front of me, and as I pitched forward the stripped winter ridges rose up and then the road at the base of the mountain, and I closed my eyes to fall. Why close my eyes? I wondered. Why deprive myself of the last marvel?
Something took hold of my legs. I stopped moving. My ears filled with the sound of dripping water and a white pickup truck pushing through the slush on the road at the base of the back side of the mountain.
When I rolled over onto my side to see what had stopped me falling, the wet rock soaked me from my ribs to the bulb of my ankle. Aunt Ohio lay face forward against my hip and looked at me calm as if she were beside me on Houston’s sofa, as if I had just asked for a cookie or for her to change a channel on the television.
Aunt Ohio squinted past me, and I imagined a winged monster bird coming in for a landing behind me. Aunt Ohio took the jar of liquor from me and said, “Shame we couldn’t live right here.”
I said, “What are you doing here?”
“I been coming here long before you was born, little darling,” she said. “What are you doing out here flying around,” she said, “scaring me to death?”
I sat up out of the wet. “I didn’t know you were here,” I said. “I wouldn’t have scared you.”
Aunt Ohio smiled. She drank off all that was in the jar.
Clouds diffused the light. Aunt Ohio was clear as a bell. There was barely enough wind to chill us. The snow was coming again soon.
“Mother Nature,” Aunt Ohio said, and scooted back under the overhanging rock. She pulled twigs from her pockets. She had branches piled for a fire. Aunt Ohio said, “I would give anything to be you.” She took out her lighter and lit the little pile and bent to blow.
It was like a rocky bedroom there, and I wanted to sleep by the fire with Aunt Ohio and her smoky eyes.
“I don’t have the energy to get stirred up,” she said. “I don’t have the stick-to-it anymore.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“I couldn’t steal nobody’s man no more,” she said. “I don’t care enough to try.”
“I barely had enough to get up this hill,” she said. “Not enough to fling myself off it. I mean,” she said, “look at you. You jumped right off. Full of life.”
I said, “I only jumped ten feet.”
Aunt Ohio crawled to the edge of our little perch. She gathered up Mamaw’s pipe and pouch.
“We are what we are,” Aunt Ohio said. “Aren’t we?”
“I guess,” I said.
Aunt Ohio filled the pipe and struck her lighter. The tobacco flared. She smoked by her little fire, then passed the pipe to me. “I suppose this is your pipe to smoke.”
I reached for the pipe and she pulled it back.
She said, “You didn’t steal it, did you?”
“No.”
“You didn’t steal it from your grandmother?”
“No.”
I snatched at the pipe. I did not like her treating me like some dandelion. She handed the pipe to me, its thin flat drawhole pointed towards me. I pulled at the pipe and coughed. The tobacco made me think of George Washington. So did Aunt Ohio.
“There must be some magic,” Aunt Ohio said.
“Why?” I said.
Aunt Ohio took the pipe back from me. “We sit at the top of the world with a roof over our heads,” Aunt Ohio said. “Magic enough in that, I suppose.”
She drew on the pipe, and the smoke curled out in question marks.
“Come here,” she said, and she moved over on her rock to make room for me. “Call me Verna.”
“All right,” I said.
“Not Aunt Verna,” she said. “Just Verna.”
“All right,” I said.
“You can’t be careful,” she said. “You need to be careful. But you can’t.”
Birds flew by level with us. I would always like that.
“Don’t worry about your grandmother,” Aunt Ohio said. Her Ohio accent was back on full blast. I could hear her septum vibrating when she spoke. “You can’t pay any attention to her.”
“I like paying attention to her,” I said.
Aunt Ohio searched my face. “Sure,” she said. “Of course you do. I’m not saying don’t. Not what I’m saying.” She stared at me like I was her reflection in a window she was cleaning. She wrinkled her brow, looking for the spot she missed. I expected her to lick her thumb and rub the spot off of me. But she didn’t.
“You must breathe,” Aunt Ohio said. “There is no substitute. The air going in, going out. Focus on that.” Aunt Ohio raised both her eyebrows as high as they would go. “If you do,” she said, her raised finger like some twisted stick of Christmas candy, “there’s no stop to it. Natural. It’s what your body wants to do.” Aunt Ohio pulled on the pipe. “It’s like music,” she said exhaling. “See,” she said, “running her hand through the smoke, “like music.” She lay her arm across her knee. She pointed the pipe at me. “What is the most magical thing you’ve ever done?”
“Well, think.”
“I wished Albert would puke one time and he did.”
Aunt Ohio turned to the swirling snow, and then back to me. “It’s a start,” she said.
I asked Aunt Ohio had she done something magic.
“I’ve been around,” she said. She waved her arms, nearly hit me in the head. “Whoosh,” she said. Pulling her arms back into her lap, she said it again: “Whoosh.” She offered me the pipe. I didn’t take it. She put her arm around me. “It’s hard doing this,” she said.