Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel

by Robert Gipe

“Then how come—” I didn’t finish.

  Evie said, “I always get kicked out of school on Thursdays.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t know. Just do.”

  I said, “You don’t do it so you can have a long weekend?”

  Evie’s fire began to crackle. She fed it from her pile of sticks. The school made a buzzing sound, and kids came out punching and shuffling, papers flying loose and pop cans clattering on the pavement. The buses pulled away, and the people on the sports teams straggled back to school to practice. When Evie’s hand touched mine, all I could think to say was, “What do you see in Albert?”

  She rubbed her thumb across the back of my hand then let it go. “Nothing, I don’t guess,” Evie said. Evie’s fire got bigger, like something in Hawaii, huge pig-roasting hula-girl fire. Evie dragged a pallet over and threw it on, wood not meant to burn. The pallet snuffed the fire a little bit, and the cold on my back seeped into my arms.

  “Albert don’t never get tired,” Evie said.

  “Cause he don’t do nothing,” I said.

  “Yeah he does,” Evie said.

  The pallet caught, the sparks rising into the trees.

  “Then why you holding my hand?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Evie said. “Cause you need somebody to hold your hand.”

  I thought to say, “Who told you you know what I need?” but I didn’t.

  “Jesus,” Evie said. “Aint no point in getting all weird.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah you do,” Evie said, standing up. “We’re gonna get the Samson twins from Slope and beat the shit out of Belinda and them.”

  The flames danced like a carnival ride. “I don’t think I am,” I said. I was tired of it, tired of fists up. Tired of no talking til yelling. I wanted murmur-by-the-fire talking, whisper-in-the-cold talking. Evie got a box of oatmeal creme pies out of the truck and set it between us. She handed me a pie. I didn’t want it, but I ate it anyway. We sat and talked until the sun dipped into the treeline and its rays came long and low and lit our faces like candles. Evie got a pint of vodka and poured it into a half bottle of Sunny D, and we sipped on that easy and slow until we laughed. The fire burnt down to embers, so we kicked dirt on it, got in Evie’s Cavalier, and drove away.

  ***

  Next morning, I sat in Mamaw’s kitchen staring at the sticky plastic tablecloth the color of baby food peas. My eyes felt like balloons. Mamaw came down the steps in new yellow sneakers.

  “You ready for your scholarship interview?” She passed behind me, smelling of menthol rub.

  “I can’t go,” I said.

  “Yes you can,” Mamaw said. She set the skillet on the stove eye.

  “No I can’t,” I said.

  Mamaw cut a wad of butter into the skillet. The butter began to sink. “Why not?” she said.

  “I got suspended.”

  Mamaw turned to me, a jar of hominy in her hands. “For what?”

  “Fighting.”

  Mamaw emptied the jar into the skillet. The hominy sizzled and popped in the skillet. When it settled down, Mamaw slid a spatula under it, laid it out on a plastic plate, and set it in front of me. Then she went out to smoke. I shook black pepper out on the hominy. Mamaw came in and kissed me on the forehead. She ran her hand through my stiff green hair. I didn’t want Mamaw’s hand on me. I didn’t want the apple smell of her pipe tobacco up my nose either.

  “I’m going up on the hill,” Mamaw said.

  I nodded.

  “You fold the clothes,” she said. “All right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  Mamaw pulled the door shut behind her. There were three straight pins lying on the table. I used one to flip a piece of hominy out on the cloth.

  I said, “That’s your eyeball, Belinda Coates.” And I struck a straight pin in the loose piece of hominy.

  I said,

  I stuck another pin in the hominy. “Laugh with two pins stuck in your eyeball.” I stuck another pin in Belinda’s hominy eye and went back to eating, blind Belinda’s screams music to my ears. When I got done, I went down in the basement. I took our clothes out of the dryer and folded them on the washer. It was cold and damp in the basement, and it made my head hurt worse. I hate winter. To tell you the truth, I don’t have a favorite season. Don’t have a favorite month. Don’t have a favorite day of the week. I heard something sounded like thunder, and then a pecking sound. I went upstairs. Hubert shifted his weight through the clear crystalline contact paper over the windows in the kitchen door. I opened the door. Hubert had shaved since last I seen him.

  “Hello there, Dawn.”

  I let Hubert in Mamaw’s house. He crossed in front of me. His clothes smelt sour and slept in. Hubert leaned back against the kitchen counter.

  “I see you, see,” Hubert said. He put his finger to his eye and then pointed at me. “I see you.” I thought there must be some kind of new drug out. Hubert’s heard about it at jail and gone out and got him some. “I want you,” he said and I got stomach sick, heaved like I was gonna puke.

  “Not like that,” Hubert said. “No. God no. Not like that.”

  Crazy thing was I got offended by the way he said, “God no.”

  Hubert said, “I need you to work.”

  “No, Hubert.”

  “You need to work. You got a head for it. And you got the nerve.” He ducked his head so I had to look him in the eye. “Grand theft auto,” he said, the gaps in his smile showing. He pointed at me again. “You are a part of this,” he said.

  I’m not.

  “Besides,” Hubert said, “you owe me. You wrecked my car.”

  I said, “That Delta 88 was junk and you know it.”

  “Yeah, but they was thirty-eight cases of beer in the trunk.”

  “Then go get it.”

  “I did. It froze.”

  “Then go get you some more.”

  “I figure between the beer and the car you owe me seven hundred dollars.”

  “Well, that’s too bad.” I thought a second. “It’s what you get for kidnapping.”

  “We was taking you to the hospital.”

  “Law me then. I’ll tell the judge you tried to make me have sex with Cinderella.”

  Hubert smiled and Mamaw rattled the door coming in.

  “Well,” Hubert said, “I’ll tell your mother you said hey.” He nodded at Mamaw. “Miz Redding.”

  “Hubert,” Mamaw said as Hubert slipped out the door. Mamaw stood at the kitchen sink, watched out the window as Hubert pulled out. She shook her head. Then Mamaw squirted dish soap on the skillet and said, “The little hen said, ‘Who will help me hoe the corn?’”

  I stood at the table and jabbed a stray piece of hominy with my fork. I thought to myself that right there is Hubert’s heart, soaked in poison til it cracked, puffed up, turned pale. I took a pin out of Belinda’s eye and stuck it in Hubert’s heart, picked it up by the pinhead, and held it to the window light. I closed one eye. Hubert’s heart floated next to the back of Mamaw’s head.

  “You all right?” Mamaw said.

  I sucked the piece of hominy off the pin. I ground my teeth and swallowed. It hit me it was my heart, not Hubert’s, on the pin. Mamaw turned and looked at me like she didn’t have no idea what got into me.

  Who will help the little hen harvest the corn?

  Not I.

  The phone rang and Mamaw picked it up. When the call was over, Mamaw walked out of the kitchen. She came back in, got her pocketbook, and opened the door.

  “Where you going?” I said.

  “Betty seen your momma at Walmart.” She tapped on the doorknob and looked at me like a woman in a play who can’t remember what her line is. “I’ll be back,” she said.

  When she was gone, I wandered the house. I pulled an envelope packed thick and hand-addressed to me out from her mail pile. It was a letter written in the most sprawled-out handwriting I had ever seen. The letter was fifty pages long.
/>   ***

  Dear Dawn,

  Thank you for your letter. You asked me a bunch of questions, which I greatly appreciate. Curiosity is a dying art, and it gives me heart to see one such as yourself reach out to another human being known unto them only as a voice on a radio. I have decided to set down on paper my answers even though I am increasingly a digital man. In order to achieve proper flow, I will start from the beginning, even if it means telling you things you already know. If this does not seem a fit way to proceed from your perspective, you are well within your rights to stop reading now, or at any time during the following narrative, and I will understand.

  All right. Still with me, I see. Then onward:

  My name is Willett Bilson. I live in Kingsport, Tennessee. Kingsport is known as the Model City, because it was built with a plan. The plan is hard to see now, especially if you haven’t been told about it your whole life. Kingsport was built around the time of World War I. The people with the plan laid out the city right before the railroad came through. They recruited a bomb plant and a paper mill and a chemical plant for everybody to work at. And even now today we still have a bomb plant and a paper mill and a chemical plant. Some plan!

  My mother grew up in Kingsport. My father did not. He grew up across the line in Virginia. His father was a storekeeper. My father works at the chemical plant. It’s the biggest of all Kingsport’s plants so people just call it “the plant.” My father has cancer and is off work at times, sometimes for a long time. He works in the warehouses when he is able. My mother’s father worked at the plant. He was an office man. My momma’s daddy made plenty of money at the plant. Plenty, my daddy says. Momma’s daddy got my dad his job at the plant.

  When I was in high school, I was on the basketball team. I was the manager. I kept the scorebook, the statistics. And then I went away to college. My mother saw to that. She wanted me to to maximize my potential. One day when I was in high school, she came home from her women’s meeting and came in my room. I was listening to music and straightening out my scorebooks, refreshing my memories of important games. She said I was going to make myself deaf with the volume so loud. I said, “What did you say?” Ha ha. My little joke.

  She told me one woman’s girl was going to this one school. This other woman’s boy was going to that other school. And this other one’s girl applied to fourteen different schools. She told me I had better get busy or I wasn’t going to have any options. She told me if I didn’t get on the stick, I was going to get left OUT!

  On the stick, what does that even mean? I thought about that while I was sitting on the commode, where I always end up after one of Momma’s advice sessions. I have a troubled colon. When I got out of the bathroom, Momma had websites pulled up of different colleges and she asked me did I like this one, did I like that one? They all looked fine. The people on them all looked fakely happy, so it was hard to know. They should sneak up on people when they take pictures for those websites. Then it would be easier to tell what the places were really like for people.

  I don’t know if I was smarter than the children of my mother’s friends, but not a one of them made better grades than I did. People always used to look off my paper when we had tests. I acted like I didn’t care, so I wouldn’t get pounded and made fun of quite as loud. Sometimes the teachers would catch us cheating and I would get separated from the people cheating off me, but I would always get to stay where I was and the people cheating off me would have to go sit by the teacher. Which seemed strange to me, because if the teacher moved me, that would have stopped more cheating. But the teachers never did move me.

  One night a man with a bow tie came to our house after supper. He had gone to high school with Mom. He was a lawyer and had wavy hair, and he set me up a scholarship interview at the college he had gone to in North Carolina. My mother smiled and said, “What do you say, Willett?”

  I said his college was third in the ACC that year, which I meant as something good. But my mother said, “Willett!” and I knew I had missed that question, but the man still set up the interview in three weeks, and in that time Mom worked hard to help me not breathe through my mouth so much. I had to use a nasal rinse five times a day every day those three weeks. She said I didn’t look too smart sitting there with my mouth hanging open. Which I understand, but I have a hard time thinking when I don’t get my oxygen.

  The day of the interview the air in the room was full of oxygen, and so I got my scholarship and the next year I went to college. I was excited when my parents drove off and left me, mostly because of music. Mom never let me go to shows or concerts or things like that when I was in high school, so I was ready to rock and roll. To par-tay. I thought the music would be good at college. But it wasn’t. And the other thing was everybody there wanted to be popular and not look too different than anybody else. Which was not an option for me. And then the school wasn’t much bigger than my high school, and most of the uncool people were all smiling and Christian. And people seemed to have so much money. I wasn’t poor, and I didn’t have a car, but long as I kept my scholarship Mom would send me money if I asked for it. But I was going crazy because I couldn’t find people to be with. I couldn’t get started.

  Then one Friday afternoon I was sitting in a room in the student center with big sleepy chairs and barely anybody in there and this awesome music was playing. I’d had seven pork chops for lunch, fat and all I ate, and so I was sitting there burping and letting off steam so to speak, and they were playing some kind of ska punk and I was so happy. My head started rocking back and forth, and pretty soon I forgot about my unfortunate colon, but then somebody somewhere changed the music to some superbland “rock.” Made me so sad. I started feeling rumbles in my gut and I thought well, I’ll just go sit in the bathroom for a while, the bathrooms in that building were in the stairwells, green and quiet. I stood up and somebody yelled, and I quote here, “FUCK,” and I turned around and there was a blackheaded girl in a chair with her back to me and she was almost as fat as I was and she stood up and said, and again I quote, “WHAT THE FUCK??” and she had an L7 shirt on, which is a good band from the 90s, and she stomped out of the room, out into the front hall of the building, and by the time I got to where she went, she had climbed up on the information desk and lay down and said she wasn’t moving until they changed the radio station back and that that was the student station it had been on before and the girl at the info desk said, “Well, I’m a student and what they play on the student station sucks.” And the other girl rolled over on her back, laid out on the information desk, and shook her legs and shoulders, messed up all the flyers for free movies and prayer groups and hiking clubs, messed them up good, and then rolled off the counter back there on the other girl’s side and stuck her finger in the information girl’s face and said, “What sucks is you—sorority suck girl—suck is you. Suck. Is. You.” What she said didn’t make any sense—unless you liked that music that was on before they changed the station. And if you did, what she said made total sense.

  Then the fat girl climbed back over the counter, and I don’t mean to call her fat, that was just the difference between her and the other girl, and she stopped in front of me. “What’s the matter with your lip?” she said to me.

  I pulled my lower lip in. I hadn’t realized how close I was to drooling. “Nothing,” I said.

  “Where’d you get that shirt?” she asked me.

  I had on a Smiths shirt. “Knoxville,” I said.

  She looked me up and down. “Do you have your license?” she said.

  “Driver’s license?”

  “Yeah, doughboy. Your driver’s license.”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to go to a show tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  She took me to this little house place in Greensboro. Everyone there was weird and I know they didn’t go to my school. And the band that played was so good. They were younger than us, than me and Brittany, that was the girl’s name. They were young, but their hair wa
s caveman long, and they swung it in spirals and never cracked a smile, never took a break, never said foolish things between songs, never took a guitar solo. They were just real good. And I wanted to call my brother Kenny and tell him about where I was, wanted to call him so bad, but I knew he would just tell me to live it up and so I banged my head and when Brittany jumped in the mosh, I did too.

  I had the best time of my life. I had got to where I wanted to be, and Brittany took me there. And September October November of that year, she did all the drinking and created all the commotion and I didn’t have to do anything but drive and she figured it all out for me. And so it was hard when Brittany told me she was changing colleges right before I went home for Christmas. And when I got back from Christmas she was gone. But she had changed me, and I could do for myself a little better it seemed.

  The week of Thanksgiving my sophomore year, Momma called me home early. She cried on the telephone. Dad was taking chemo and was real sick again. She thought I should come home. She didn’t say so, but she wanted me to come because she thought it might be the end. I was on my radio show when she called. By that time I was assistant student manager of the student radio station, the same one brought me and Brittany together.

  I came home on Monday night. My dad had been sick like he had been before, but this time it was worse. Five rounds of chemotherapy, six more to go when I got home. I didn’t have to do anything when I got there, just be there. My dad was a supervisor in a warehouse. They stored and shipped filter tow, which is the raw material for cigarette filters, which they shipped to the cigarette factories in the town where my college was. Was. Where my college was. I never went back to college after that time my dad got sick. He got better, but I never went back. I took some classes at the community college, but I never went back to North Carolina. Never finished college. That year and a half in North Carolina seems like a dream now. It seems like I never went.

  My father had two sons with his first wife, my half-brothers Kenny and Ray. They grew up in Virginia and live there now. Kenny, he drives down every day to work in in a production unit at the plant, runs an extruder, Kenny does. He is my total idol. I love my dad, but Kenny, he was in bands. He was/is like a rock star. When I was little Kenny was still in high school. He played all the sports and he was my idol because of that too. I would sit in his room in the attic of the house he grew up in in Virginia—and I would listen to records with Kenny and he would try to figure out how to play the songs on his own guitar and it was just the best.