Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel

by Robert Gipe

  Kenny tore up his knee during his senior football season trying to stop a boy a hundred pounds heavier than he was, and that was pretty much the end of his sports career. He was a mess for a while after that. He turned sour. When he would come home from college, Mom really didn’t want me hanging around with him, but there was a lot of times he wouldn’t even come home for Christmas or whatever, but when he did he would always have lots of records and tapes. Tapes mostly. It was the 80s. And sometimes he would bring guys from his bands and they would hang out with my papaw before he died. Because my papaw, we called him Pap, he played music. Old music. “It’s a world of wonders,” that’s what my pap always said. Pap always wanted Kenny to play the old music. “Pick it like Mother Maybelle,” Pap always said.

  Pap was already dead when Dad got sick the first time and Kenny came home to stay. When Kenny came home, he did something him and Papaw talked about doing a hundred times, talked about doing for as long as I could remember. Kenny started a radio station. Up on Bilson Mountain, where Pap’s people had been for 150 years.

  Dad survived the treatments and is even working some, and so I am kind of at loose ends. I started sitting with Kenny on his radio shows, and then I would do shows of my own mostly late at night, and a lot of times when I did that I would just spend the night over at Kenny’s house he built on the big bald on the top of Bilson Mountain where he had grown up and Dad and Papaw had grown up.

  So there it is. I came to the radio station, and there’s where I heard you, and you heard me, and now we are writing to each other. I suppose this seems like way too much of a letter, but since you have read this far, I will just tell you, devil may care, caution to the wind: I love the sound of your voice. “Fuck you”—you said it in that interview you did with Kenny. I think you thought Kenny had the tape recorder off. “What I’d like to say to them is, ‘Fuck you,’” is what you said. I was transferring that tape to the editing tape and I heard that and I about lost it. It sounded so good. I know it will sound weird to say, but I was like, man, I’d like to hear her talk to me like that. That’s the kind of girl I get on my mind, that I have imaginary talks with, and I can’t get them off my mind. I guess maybe I’m still hung up on Brittany. But anyway. Do you ever come to Tennessee? Do you have e-mail? It would be easier for me to write more if you had e-mail.

  Anyway. I will let it go at that. That is plenty to put out. Which is what she said. Ha ha.

  Your friend (hopefully),

  Willett Bilson

  PS: My email address is punkrockwarlord@netscape.com

  ***

  I took a job at Kolonel Krispy, which is where everybody in Canard County goes for milkshakes and fried chicken and doughnuts and such. The last day of my first week was a Sunday and a lady about forty with gentle eyes and straight hair was training me how stuff went in the freezer when Momma walked in and sat down in a booth back where the plumbers and carpenters smoked and ate their biscuits. Momma waved at me to come sit by her. I shook my head no. She waved again. The woman training me said it was OK to go.

  Momma said, “I need the car.” Mamaw let me use her Escort to go

  to work.

  “So do I,” I said.

  Momma lit a cigarette, drew on it with slitted eyes, exhaled, waved the smoke from in front of her face, and said, “Give me twenty dollars.”

  “No,” I said. Momma pounded her hands on the table, cussed me, slapped the salt and paper shakers on the floor. She slapped her hand on the table.

  “Give me them keys,” she said. And I did. That night, at the end of my shift, the boss lady paid me, thanked me, and told me it might be best if my mom didn’t come to see me at work anymore. I went out into the dark and looked at my check. Seventy-nine dollars. I folded it up, stuck it in my pocket. I went back in the restaurant and called Hubert to come get me.

  I walked across the highway to the supermarket. When Hubert got there, I went to get in the cab, but he had three other guys in the front seat. They were one big wad of hairy arms and ball caps, so I climbed in the back. We pulled out in a cloud of exhaust, and I lay down in the truck bed, trying to keep from freezing to death. When we got back to Hubert’s place on Long Ridge, we bounced into the rutty, rocky yard, and the men piled out and bumbled in the house. I was so cold I could barely move. At least a dozen men were crowded onto the porch staring at sausages grilling on a sawed-off drum. I slid through them, trying not to touch them, and stepped over a man in coveralls passed out on his stomach inside the front door. I walked down the hall to the room where Hubert kept his computer. I started it—Windows 98. Hell yes. While the modem chirped and pinged, the front door slammed and men and women yelled. The door slammed twice more. Everybody in the house came running down the hall past where I was sitting and out the back door. Two sheriff’s deputies came down the hall, guns drawn. When they saw me, they turned and went back to the front of the house. They left, taking the passed-out man with them. I started my e-mail program. Hubert and the rest filed back in. Momma was with them. I ignored her. The pictures Willett sent me of himself made me smile. He was a lot cuter than I thought he’d be. I typed, “That’s a good picture.”

  Willett typed back, “Thanx.”

  We typed back and forth and the most relaxing calm came over me. Hubert walked past, looked in on me. Then he went into the bathroom across the hall. That trailer was so small it felt like he was in the room with me. Hubert’s brother Filbert hollered from the front of the house, “Hubert! Tell Dawn her turn’s over.”

  Momma yelled from the other end of the trailer: “You leave her alone. She’s doing her homework.”

  The door to the bathroom was still open. Hubert was sitting on the commode with his pants down. “You be off of there by the time I get out,” he said, and pushed the bathroom door shut.

  I typed to Willett, “Is that the real Chewbacca in the picture with you?”

  “One of them,” Willett typed back.

  Filbert come huffing and puffing up the hall. “Hubert, Dawn’s using up the Internet.”

  “Goddammit, Filbert,” Momma hollered from her room. “Watch one of your goddam videos.”

  Hubert came out of the bathroom and kicked over a pile of CDs. “Get off,” he said.

  “Don’t do that,” Willett typed.

  “Filbert,” Momma yelled, “Why don’t you go get something real?”

  “Why don’t you come sit on my face?” Filbert said.

  Hubert left the room, went back to where my mother was. “Can I poison their dogs?” I asked Willett.

  “Don’t do that, either,” he typed back.

  Filbert came and gouged a Phillips head screwdriver in my ear. I took a swing at him without ever taking my eyes off the computer screen.

  “Just save your money,” Willett wrote.

  Filbert gouged again. I swatted at him. Then I balled up my fist and punched him in the arm.

  “Buy you a car,” Willett wrote.

  “If I had a car,” I wrote, “I could run over them.”

  Filbert kept on gouging. I kept on swatting, still wouldn’t look at him.

  “If you had a car,” Willett wrote, “you could come here.”

  I snatched the Phillips head from Filbert. “If I came down there,” I typed, “would it be just you and me?”

  “Just you and me,” Willett wrote, “and my action figures.”

  Filbert came at me, and I stabbed him with a sharp downward motion, drew some meat, and flung the screwdriver down the hall after his retreating ass. “That,” I typed, “sounds like heaven.”

  Momma laughed loud and unpleasant. I told Willett goodbye, logged out of the e-mail program, and left Hubert’s house.

  ***

  Mamaw was asleep when I got back to her house. I came through the kitchen and went down the hall to my room. I took the check out of my front pocket and got down on my knees in front of the closet. I dug through a pile of shoes and clothes and picked up a basketball shoe. It smelled terrible. I pulled up
the insole and stuck my check under it. I picked up a notebook and flipped through the pages. The notebook was going good, filling up with drawings and collages of stuff I cut out of magazines. I turned to a blank page. I found a pencil and drew two heads. Momma’s laugh from the back of Hubert’s rang in my head. She used to have a pretty laugh. I scratched out the two heads. I closed my drawing book, turned off the lights, and lay back on my bed. The past came in on me like the smell from a busted sewer line. I fell asleep thinking about the day Dad died. I woke when I heard Momma rooting in my closet. The lamp came on and Mamaw was in my room. Momma was holding my check. I sat up in bed. “Momma?” I said.

  “Put that down,” Mamaw said. “And get out of here.”

  Momma closed her hand on the check and tried to bull past Mamaw. Mamaw clamped down on her arm and snatched the check away from her.

  “Please, Momma,” I said.

  Momma’s face was gray and damp. “You don’t care,” Momma said to Mamaw. Mamaw stared at Momma and Momma stared back. Momma blinked. “Fuck you,” Momma said. “You fucking bitch. You never cared.”

  “Momma,” I said. “Stop.”

  Momma said, “You don’t care if I die out there.”

  That’s when I started sobbing. Mamaw looked at me, and Momma snatched the check from her and ran out the door. Mamaw grabbed Momma’s arm and Momma knocked her hand away.

  “Stop,” I hollered.

  Momma knocked Mamaw to the floor and ran out. I ran to the bathroom and locked myself in. I rocked on the commode and cried.

  Mamaw said, “Don’t cry. Darling, don’t cry. That aint your mother. It’s that dope.”

  I wailed so loud the pictures on the wall rocked in their frames.

  8: A Thing Boils Up

  One time when I was eight years old, back when Dad was still alive, I drew a giant baby eating pickup trucks like they were candy. The people in the pickups screamed, and the baby smiled. The day I drew that, Momma was leaning against the kitchen counter. It was May, and Momma was on the phone. She moved the phone from one side of her head to the other, pushing strings of hair behind her ears. Her voice sounded like tennis shoes going round and round in the dryer. I loved that sound.

  I was lying on my stomach between Momma and the front door. My sock feet swung in the air. Momma hung up the phone and grabbed hold of my ponytail. “Come on, Dawn,” she said. “Time to pick up my flowers.”

  “What flowers, Momma?” I said.

  Momma rooted through the spark plugs and mustard greens on the kitchen counter until she found the truck keys. “I won that contest at the hardware store,” she said. “Hundred dollars of flowers for a prize. Aint that something?”

  I changed crayons. “When did you enter a contest?”

  “I didn’t,” Momma said. “Hubert entered me.”

  I was only eight, but I knew that didn’t sound right. “Uncle Hubert entered you in a contest?”

  “Come on,” Momma said from the front door. “Hubert said he’d help us plant tomorrow if we went tonight.”

  I pushed my glasses up my nose and put on my tennis shoes. The pickup was running and Momma was wearing out the horn as I came down the trailer’s cinder-block steps. I knew Momma wanted me to get excited, but I was like Dad. I didn’t get excited. I climbed in the truck, and before I got the door shut, Momma was bouncing down the ruts in the yellow-clay drive onto the gravel road. The steep hillsides off either side of the road flashed in the gaps between the dark green tangle of the woods. The truck twisted along, past houses with roofs standing even with the road—one here with a hula hoop on it, one there with dandelions in the gutter.

  “A hundred dollars,” Momma said. The truck picked up speed going downhill, and Momma jerked the wheel to avoid the deeper ruts. She stood on the truck’s brake pedal when the ridge road met the two-lane blacktop that led down the mountain to town. “God Almighty.” Momma jammed her foot down on the gas pedal and darted in front of a gravel truck. The truck’s horn wailed. “I want me some hollyhocks,” she said. “Big old irises.” Momma beat her hands on the steering wheel. “It’s gonna be beautiful.”

  I lay my forehead on the truck window, stuck my tongue out at a church. “Too late for irises, Momma. Mamaw said so.”

  “You got to help me water. You big enough to help me?”

  “I’m eight,” I said, nose against the glass.

  “So you will?”

  “Yep,” I said, breath fogging the window.

  The truck motor boomed when we passed through cuts in the crumbled sandstone. I hung onto the door handle for dear life when Momma swerved past houses hunkered in hollers, piled up together like gossips.

  I said, “You’re driving awful fast, Momma.”

  “I know,” Momma said. “I’m sorry.”

  The truck’s tires spit gravel as we spun onto the four-lane towards town. A Delta 88 trailed a cloud of blue smoke in front of us. Momma pulled into the left-hand lane behind a half-ton with nine refrigerators strapped on its bed.

  “Don’t close,” Momma said. “Please, please, please don’t close.”

  “Blow your horn, Momma,” I said.

  She turned off the bypass onto the winding main street of town. The truck idled at a red light next to a convenience store. Inside the store, coal miners stacked cakes and candy bars, cigarettes and pop on the counter. They pointed at fried brown things in stainless steel bins lit by heat lamps. My stomach growled. The light changed, and I asked what would happen if we didn’t make it.

  We passed a car dealership turned pet store turned place to buy security systems turned payday loan shop. We rolled past a storefront church named in vinyl letters dripping vinyl drops of blood. The street turned left and crossed the ditch where the river used to be. I asked Momma what time the hardware store closed.

  “I don’t know,” Momma said, “but we’re gonna make it.”

  I looked at the clock in the truck dashboard. It said twenty til seven. It said twenty til seven my whole life. Momma pulled into the hardware store parking lot. She grabbed my fist and ran into the store. She slapped her hands on the counter and told the man standing there, “I’m Tricia Jewell. I won that drawing and I’m here for my flowers.” The man behind the counter wore both belt and suspenders and put the end of his pencil to his tongue before he wrote on his pad. He shook his head. “Don’t know what you’re talking bout.”

  “They told me they was a jar, had all these names in it. Told me they pulled my name out and now I’m spose to get a hundred dollars worth of plants. They told me whatever kind I want.”

  “They told you wrong,” the man said. He hammered a lid onto a paint bucket with a mallet. “What else can I do for you?” People in line behind us scuffed their feet and cleared their throats.

  I said, “He is the devil,” and stomped out of the store.

  “She aint talking about you,” I heard Momma say to the man behind the counter, “she’s talking about Hubert.”

  Out in the parking lot, a van’s tires screeched against the blacktop when I stepped in front of it. “Dawn,” Momma shouted, and when the van passed, she grabbed me by the arm. I shook loose of her and a guy from the store, a young one covered in sawdust, came up behind Momma.

  “Ma’am?” he said.

  I sat down on the truck bumper. The guy was pushing a buggy full of plants. He wore a brown knit shirt faded to tan stretched tight over his stomach. He looked like a sawdust doughnut. He stood in front of Momma, his eyes skimming over her, from the blue blood vessels visible through the skin of her high forehead to her hand, every finger with a ring on it, trembling in its grip on her purse strap. Momma’s hair lifted in the breeze and waved like the streamers on the handlebars of a rich girl’s bicycle. The young man’s mouth hung open. I couldn’t tell if it was from Momma’s beauty or if he had a breathing problem.

  “What is it?” Momma said.

  The man handed Momma two trays of impatiens from the buggy. He said, “These been here too long to se
ll. You can have them.”

  “Really?” Momma said.

  “Rootbound,” the man said. “You can have this stuff too,” and waved his hand over the rest of the wilted flowers in the buggy. The man put the plants in the floorboard of the truck. There were so many, some had to go in the back.

  When he was done, Momma said, “You won’t get in trouble?”

  “Don’t matter,” the man said. “Quitting Friday.” His eyes swam in his head as he looked Momma over one more time, and I decided he didn’t have a breathing problem. It was like this with Momma. Some people, like the man behind the counter, couldn’t see her at all. Some, like the boy with the flowers, had to stare at her from every angle, like she was some fancy salamander or butterfly. The staring made me proud, but

  On the way home, I sat with my feet on the seat to keep them out of the plants covering the floorboard.

  “That worked out good, didn’t it?” Momma said.

  “Yep,” I said.

  “Think Hubert will help me plant?”

  “Nope.”

  “Bet he will,” Momma said. “But if he don’t? Who cares?”

  I turned and looked through the back window of the cab at the plants rustling in the bed of the truck. I wished this flower business had never come up. “It sure is a pretty bunch of flowers, Momma.”

  “It sure is,” Momma said.

  When Dad got home from the mines that night, I told him what happened. “Hubert lied to Momma. Made us drive clear to town for nothing.”

  Dad stroked his beard, opened his lunch bucket, and gave me an oatmeal creme pie. “So where’d all them flowers come from?”