by Robert Gipe
When I stepped off the road again, the mountain swallowed me up. Put the Jonah on me. The snow had melted. The tree limbs were wet and heavy, the leaves underfoot wet and heavy. I went down the mountain a way I had never gone. An owl hooted. The woods dripped. There was light in the woods, but I couldn’t tell where it came from. It seemed it came from the water in the mountain. The total amount of water in the mountain began to freak me out. I did. I freaked out about the water. Stupid. I sat down on a fresh-fallen log. The wind crackled through the leaves clinging to the limbs. Sounded like a clutch of old women whispering at the back of a cold, empty church. The light was dwindly and low, and I wished you were there.
Who?
Ha ha. I want you to know what it’s like.
Maybe it wouldn’t be Hubert I’d see. Maybe it would be ghosts. Indian ghosts. Packing meat. Or ghost Indian braves moving fast and empty-handed, running from some stupid massacre. Or maybe it would be some scared Civil War boy ghost out there running. Not sure which side is which, only sure he’d took a shot at somebody.
I stood up and every manly story I’d ever been told rushed through me. I drew breath and sat back down on the fresh-fallen tree trunk. The train on the tracks at the foot of the mountain sounded like a piano playing in a cowboy movie saloon. I wanted somebody to tell me everything. Any of them would serve: Decent Ferguson, Aunt Ohio, Mamaw, Momma, Jan. Sit me down and lay it all out. The air went out of me, and I imagined a dog’s nose against the underside of my arm. I imagined my father, a big red hunting dog, lying down at my feet.
I began to walk again and directly came into a backyard. A dog barked, and I heard a child talking excited, too late for a child. I veered into the woods and come to an eight-foot drop down to the old road into town. I skirted the rim of the drop until I come to a creek coming off the mountain same as me. I got down in the gulley and come under the road through a four-foot culvert. On the other side I knew where I was even though I couldn’t see. A field opened out in front of me. It was the last beautiful bottom in Canard County, the last place to see how it was for the first white people, the last pocket pasture with its deep dark dirt, the last one that wasn’t road, wasn’t trailer park, wasn’t cigarettes for sale, wasn’t fucked-up mining equipment piled all archaeological. But this last one was going to be our new high school football field. I crossed the field, climbed the horse fence that bound it, thinking how if you, if I, had been a Cherokee, a Shawnee, we would have dreamed to see buffalo, to see elk, on that field and would have thought a farmer’s field no better than a car wash.
I crossed the field, done thinking I could see my happiness by the wee hour waterlight.
I come up on the halogen freakout of my glass-box high school, my shoes caked in yellow clay mud from the churned-up football field. I come across the twinkling black glass river on the Canard County version of some Paris bridge I’d seen in the fog on the television in a black-and-white movie I couldn’t understand. I come up on the part of the parking lot where the buses brought kids from all over the county and set them out. There, in one of the long parking places marked off for buses, I fell flat on my face and slept, my arms spread, the pavement soft, my fingernails digging into the yellow paint.
Act 3: Bulldozer
7: Hominy Heart
When my father said, “Take it like a man,” I couldn’t tell where his voice came from, face down like I was. The pavement pressed into my cheek, and the sun blistered my neck. I rolled onto my side, and my father squatted beside me, his beard loose and curly.
“I’m not a man,” I said. “I’m fifteen. And a girl.”
A cloud covered the sun, and his face came clear. His eyes were tired, the way they always were. “Don’t give up,” he said, reaching for my chin. “You hear me?” I nodded, and then I woke up. My father, of course, was still dead, and the only light stood on silver poles like low stars all through the high school parking lot. I put my head back down on the pavement and fell asleep. When I woke, it was still dark, but headlights moved above me, and a maintenance man, a fat one with a broad leather belt curled at the edges, stood over me with his hands at his side. He had no broom, no mop, nothing to do with, just biscuit in his moustache and the name “FURL” stitched on his dull green shirt.
“You want coffee?” he said.
An empty bus passed. Over top of Furl’s boots, the treeline took shape in the morning light. “Yeah,” I said, “coffee.”
Furl said, “You want it out here?”
I got up, moving like my grandfather Houston when the liquor was gone.
“I seen you around here,” Furl said. “They say you’re smart. They say you do good on them testis.” He rooted a bandana out of his back pocket and wrung runny winter snot out of his nose.
“I’d rather have hot chocolate,” I said.
Furl put the handkerchief back in his pocket. “OK,” he said, ducked his head, and waddled at a tilt towards an unmarked door. “You graduating this spring?” he said, turning the key in the lock, pulling the door open by the key.
“I’m a sophomore,” I said.
“Well,” he said, and went through the door, down a hall with a stripe of scraped-off paint halfway up either side. Inside the double door at the other end of the hall, a radio sounding like it had pie pans for speakers played “Love Is a Battlefield” by Pat Benatar. We are young. Heartache to heartache. A skinny man sprawled in a wheelbarrow blended into the rake handles and weedeaters. He was younger than Furl, and stared at me like he wanted to handle me, like he was already handling me with his ballpoint eyes.
He said, “What you brung us, Furl?”
Furl moved to the utility sink, ran water into a coffee mug, and put it into a nasty microwave oven. Furl locked eyes on the skinny man while the mug turned.
“Well,” the skinny one said, tipping forward out of the wheelbarrow, “I’d say A.J.’d be needing me bout now fore he screws them heaters up totally.” The wheelbarrow crashed back into place. I jumped and Furl poured gray-brown powder into the hot water. The skinny man eyed me on his way out.
“Here you go, Swiss Miss,” Furl said, handing me the cup.
“Why you call me that?” I said.
Furl pointed at the chocolate packet, and I was embarrassed.
Furl got another mug off the shelf, poured him a cup of coffee, then stirred in hot chocolate powder. “You sleep out there all night?”
“Most of it,” I said.
“That’s the kind of thing I used to do,” Furl said. “When I was drinking.” Furl pointed at my green buzz cut. “Where’d you get that?”
“From my mom.”
“Your mom got green hair?”
I looked at Furl to see if he was fooling. He grinned and stirred his coffee. I smiled too. The principal, Mr. McCarty, come in.
“Ms. Jewell,” he said. “No students in the building til seven.”
“It’s—” Furl started.
“Ms. Jewell, please excuse us.”
I stepped into the hall.
“I told you last time,” McCarty said. “It was your last chance.”
“Who—” Furl said.
“Don’t worry who,” McCarty said. “Get your things.”
“Mr. McCarty, you don’t have no idea.”
“I’ll meet you out front.”
I was still standing in the long hall when Furl come by slow as church. McCarty came to the door.
“Not exactly coming back on the right foot, Dawn,” McCarty said.
I walked after Furl, dropped my chocolate. When it hit the floor, the chocolate sounded like when somebody busts a blown-up paper bag. When I stepped out the door, the skinny one stood there smoking, doing nothing.
I said to him, “Rat.”
“I might be doing you a favor,” he said.
“Don’t do me no favors, pencil dick.”
He stubbed out his cigarette, said, “Least it’s sharp,” and went laughing through the door.
The night before I wished I was back at school,
and there I was. I sat down on the curb and made a note to myself: no more wishing. Daylight came, dusting its gray-blue quiet lovely on the parking lot and the trees beyond. A shame, it seemed to me sitting there breathing hard in the cold, a shame a person had to go inside to school. What I wished was some mountain man in a fur coat for a teacher, who would take us out and teach us something—us, this grim parade of fatties and candy eaters, girls with brittle hair and green eyelids, mouth-breathing boys bent to the screens in their hands—I wished some grizzly beast would come take us out and show us the true facts of life—subject us to the elements, test us.
I was grinding my jaw over these things, no better than the rest of them bouncing off the buses like beachballs with bookbags, when a doughboy ninth grader Mamaw was trying to teach to read, a kid with a head like a green grape and wiry blond curls, came out of breath off my bus and set my bookbag down in front of me and stood there, gap-mouthed and weaving, wore out from the strain of packing my bag the four steps from the bus.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” he said sniffing. “Cora sent you that.”
I said, “You tell her thanks.”
He tucked his chin into his neck, tilted his head, and said, “You tell her. You live with her.”
“Get out of my face,” I said.
He kicked the bookbag and walked towards the school. I turned to see him pull up his drooping pants, which fell straight back soon as he let go of them. A dog with no more going for him than that I would hit in the head with the back of a shovel, put him out of his misery, never think a thing of it.
A motor revved and Belinda Coates’s pink Camaro ran straight over my bookbag. I cut through the parked cars to where she was circling through. She laughed in my face through the open window. Dirty nasty teeth. Belinda Coates thinks cause she has big titties and leaves them hanging out she don’t need to take care of her teeth. I busted her right in the side of the head with my bookbag. Knocked that smile clean off her face. That was plenty satisfying, but the force of swinging my bookbag made me fall, and Belinda Coates circled again and come up behind me, and this time I just barely had time to throw the bookbag at the front of her car as she passed. “Treehugger,” Belinda Coates said as she went by. I got up and flipped her off with both hands. Of course from there, it was back to McCarty’s office with its giant “Friends of Coal” stickers and a lecture about how I was pissing away my talent. He thought if he said “piss” it would get my attention, I guess.
***
When McCarty let me go, I sat in French class and drew a picture on my desk of me pushing Belinda Coates off the top of the Eiffel Tower until one of Ms. McKamey’s flunkies handed out a quiz. It was multiple choice and over French words for food, mostly meat. Boeuf. Canard. Stuff like that. The name of our county meant “duck.” And our school nickname was “Eagles.” The retardation around here staggers the mind. Asshole Belinda Coates finished fast because she answered a-c-d-c over and over because AC/DC is her favorite band.
Evie Bright, my best/only friend, turned and asked me, “What’s number seven?” I looked to Ms. McKamey. She was staring at her computer. I edged my paper to where Evie could see it. She pushed my arm away and moved my paper to her desk and copied all my answers.
After school, I was sitting waiting for the bus when the puffy frosted-blonde school counselor Ms. Cleek came by and said, “Scholarship interview day after tomorrow, Dawn.”
“Do what?”
She said, “Thursday at ten, Dawn. Don’t forget. If you really do want to go to art school, you need to be there.”
I nodded and didn’t look back at her shaking her head like I was some kind of waste of time, like I was a fool for wanting to go to art school. You should do something more practical, more realistic, I could hear her saying. Fuck her. Fuck you, school counselor, wherever you are tonight. Fuck you.
I fell asleep on the bus without anybody putting anything in my hair, a blessing, thank you Jesus, and when I went home, Mamaw didn’t say anything, another blessing, thank you Jesus, and I went in my room and fell asleep drawing, a yellow pencil dragging across paper as I went unconscious.
***
Next day, Ms. McKamey handed out the graded French tests. When Evie got hers, she hollered, “ZERO?” because Evie didn’t care what people thought. Evie’s paper had a long note written in red and French. “What does this say?” she turned and said to me.
“Says you cheated and she knows it. Says I should tell you not to cheat off me.”
“What’d you make?”
I showed her my zero. I looked at Ms. McKamey smiling a sad smile. I wanted to punch Ms. McKamey even though she used to like me. I wanted not to care she thought I was a redneck cheater. Belinda Coates cackled on the other side of the room. “Forty better than you,” she said, holding up her paper with its 40.
Ms. McKamey looked up from her papers and said, “Dawn, Evie, I need to see you after class.” The bell rang and the black-eyed hen Belinda Coates cackled. Evie didn’t stay after class. She headed straight for the door. “Evie,” Ms. McKamey said.
“You can tell her whatever you was going to tell me,” Evie said, and slammed the door shut.
“You don’t have to carry her,” Ms. McKamey said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Do you hear me?”
“Can I go?” I said, and then, “yes.” I thought Ms. McKamey would take my hand, but she didn’t. She just nodded. I went out Ms. McKamey’s door and ran straight into some football team quitters. They pulled back like they was scared to touch me. My ears rang. I went back to my locker, and even though the hall was packed I sat down, my back to the locker. I got out my math book, worked a geometry problem right in the margin.
“Witch.”
I looked up and there was Belinda and two of her cronies. The second one said to Belinda, “She looked at you.”
“Better shut up,” the first one said, “or she’ll witch you down in that pop can.” They all three laughed.
In that moment I had a vision, and in my vision I waved my hand and the school doors locked and chains weaved through the door handles. Combination locks flew shut on the chains. I waved my hand again and Belinda’s pink Camaro flew up out of the parking lot and landed on its T-top in the river. I waved my hand and I was on a broom laying napalm down the halls of the school. I dropped my cigarette and the school burst into flames. Belinda and her friends screamed and I flew off on my broom, laughing my head off.
When I came out of my vision, Belinda was up in my face, her eyes red, her eyeliner blue. Belinda licked her lips. “Freak,” she said. I was ready to go on and get into it. Another suspension wouldn’t mean much. Stupid girls. One of the girls was redheaded. Her shirt was too small, and her belly showed underneath her jacket. “Go die, freak,” she said. Belinda stepped toward me. That other girl, who had real stressed blonde hair, came at me too. The redheaded girl fell in behind me. I was a head taller than all of them, but I couldn’t figure out how to whip all three at once. “I aint like yall,” I said.
The blonde one said,
I had my fists balled up ready to go when Evie came tearing down the hall behind Belinda and put the flat of her hands between the blondheaded girl’s shoulder blades. Blondie’s hands flew out in front of her, and she went down on her face. Kids walking down the hall veered out of our way. Some stopped to watch. “Get your asses away from her,” Evie said. She shoved the redheaded girl into the lockers. Evie held her hands out from her side, like a gunfighter. She looked dead at Belinda and said, “What are you looking at, cow?” and when Belinda didn’t say anything, Evie added, “Fucked up stoner cow.”
That was enough for me. I was over it, ready to get on out of there. “Come on, Evie,” I said.
Evie shoved Belinda in the chest. “Fight her, fight me.” She shoved her again. “Cow.”
I pulled at Evie’s arm. “Come on.”
Belinda smiled. “That’s right,” she said. “Go on. Go on, les
bian witch skanks.”
Evie jerked her arm loose from where I held her and buried the tips of her fingers in the underside of Belinda’s chin. Belinda’s chewing gum flew out of her mouth. I had to laugh. Belinda gagged and doubled over. Evie got a handful of her hair and twisted it, and Belinda’s knees bent and her head turned to keep Evie from tearing her hair out. Evie walked Belinda down the hall like that, and every time Belinda tried to rise up, Evie jerked her hair, give it a twist, and Belinda would holler and give. I saw what Evie was going to do. She was going to throw Belinda down the stairs. I said, “Evie,” and ran to her. I threw my arms around her. My arms were still around her when McCarty clapped a hand on our shoulders. Belinda sloshed onto the floor like spilled mop water.
***
“Your brother going with anybody?”
When McCarty kicked us out, me and Evie went back up behind the school where kids went to cut. There wasn’t anybody there, and we sat in broken lawn chairs patched with beer cartons. There was a fire pit filled with burnt aluminum cans. Evie was trying to start a fire with sticks and the chapter on the Depression out of her social studies book.
“No,” I said.
Evie shook her head and poked the fire. Her thin fingers ended in yellow smoker’s nails. “I hate them girls,” she said. “They can’t stand it when people don’t give a shit about them.” She poked the fire some more. “Damn cows.” She threw down her fire-poking stick. She took up a topic she’d raised on the way up the hill. “Why don’t you like vampire movies?”
“They’re all right,” I said.
“I love them.”
I hated them. I threw some twigs I’d been fiddling with into the fire.
Evie said, “You see that one where the woman’s husband don’t know she’s a vampire and tries to talk her into having a kid?”
I put my hands out to warm at the fire. “How come vampires can’t have kids?”
Evie stopped poking the fire. “Uh, because they’re dead.”