Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel

by Robert Gipe

  “This boy give em to us.”

  “What boy?”

  “Some boy.”

  Dad turned to Momma, who was sitting on the couch with Albert. “Hubert going to help you plant?”

  “Too busy,” Momma said.

  “You know what he done today, Dad?” Albert said.

  I climbed onto one of the high stools at the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. I got tired of Albert’s Hubert stories. Hubert lifted the front end of a truck off the ground all by himself. Hubert got free HBO cause he run a line from an old woman’s house without her knowing it. Hubert killed a twelve-pointer with a .22. Hubert sold moonshine to a man from the governor’s office. Hubert. Hubert. Hubert.

  Hubert’s diesel pickup rumbled in the road below. Dad went down the hall to the bedroom. I sat on the stool and ate my oatmeal pie. After while, Dad came out, left the trailer, walked down the hill across the road to the house where Hubert stayed.

  “Yall get to bed,” Momma said, running her fingers through my hair.

  ***

  Momma was already out in the yard when I got up the next morning. Dad sat at the kitchen table eating eggs and fried baloney. I sat down next to him and stared at the side of his head. He didn’t look up, but he smiled. He kept chewing and reading.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Reading the instructions for how to put your trampoline up.” Dad got me and Albert a trampoline the fall before in an end-of-summer sale. We’d had it for months, but Dad hadn’t put it together yet.

  Dad had four brothers who lived on the ridge—Hubert, Colbert, Filbert, and Prestone—who were forever in their yards putting something together or taking something apart—deer stands, four-wheelers, backhoes, ditch witches, swingsets, come alongs—forever hooking stuff up—propane tanks, washing machines, water heaters—and I had never seen them read instructions. There were loose parts and old sets of instructions everywhere gathering dust on top of the refrigerators, getting sticky behind toasters, piling up like leaves in the gutter under furniture.

  “I don’t know,” Dad said. “They was just sitting here.”

  I knew Dad was fooling me. He was the one who read instructions. “You gonna put it up today?”

  “Hope to.”

  “That’d be good.” I lay my head on the table. I hoped Albert would sleep all day. I imagined how much happier we all would have been if I were an only child. Dad whistled as he rinsed a bowl for me and poured the last of the milk onto my Lucky Charms. Hubert’s diesel pulled up next to our house.

  “How come you walk to see him and he rides to see you?” I said.

  Dad set the bowl of Lucky Charms down in front of me. He rubbed the top of my head. “You’re gonna wear yourself out thinking.” He squeezed my shoulder and went outside.

  I took my bowl of Lucky Charms to the window. Hubert got down out of his truck. Momma was setting out plants on her knees in a circle of dirt in front of the house. Hubert stood at the truck with his hand on the rearview mirror, shifted his weight off his bad hip. He said something to Momma, something I couldn’t hear through the glass. Hubert was not as tall as the other Jewells, but he was tall enough. He was powerful built, biceps and calf muscles like roofing nails in paper sacks. His skin looked like roasted potatoes beneath the flecks of black hair that covered his body. I knew I would be taller than Hubert if I made it to full-grown, but when I backed up from the window, my reflection fit over Hubert’s form in a way that made me sick. We had the same high forehead—except Hubert was balder—same wide-set eyes on the same deep shelf of cheekbone—except my eyes were gray—same hammy shoulders, same birdy legs, same sausage fingers.

  Hubert backed the truck next to Momma’s circle of earth, sprang out of his vehicle, and opened the tailgate on a truck bed of mulch he’d collected from a debtor with a sawmill. He raked the mulch out on Momma’s bed. I could not see Dad standing on the trailer’s porch, but I heard his voice. Hubert stopped, knee-deep in mulch, nodded at what Dad said, and went back to spreading mulch.

  I chewed my Lucky Charms with my lower jaw pushed forward. Hubert and Dad’s other brothers made liquor, grew marijuana, came and went at all hours of the night in their sedans with chewed-up mufflers and their pickups with smokestack exhaust pipes.

  He drove a plain truck and worked in the coal mines ever since Albert had been born and he’d married Momma. The law didn’t come to our house. There wasn’t glass breaking and loud laughing all night long at our house. All that stuff went on across the road.

  Momma took another impatiens plant from the plastic cup it came in. She picked at the roots delicate as a bird and set the flower in a hole. She troweled dirt in over the plant and patted it. Momma’s hands moved like spider’s legs over the flowers, the dirt, her tools. I would cut off my foot, I thought, to have her hands.

  Albert came around the back of the house. Momma had Albert’s hair cut short, but it was still sticking up every which way. Albert was eleven then and a mystery to me. He was made skinnier than I was, and I never could get ahold of him, never could catch him. He wasn’t a honeybee, either—sting once and die. He was a yellowjacket. Sting over and over. He’d rap the top of my head with his knuckles on his way out the door and push me over when I came out of the house chasing him. Pour ice water in my ear while I was sleeping. Spit in my food. Break my crayons. Dad and Momma punished him every time. Didn’t even slow him down.

  Albert stopped in the yard in front of Hubert’s truck. Dad came off the steps and stood in front of Albert, put his hand on Albert’s shoulder. Albert got in Dad’s truck. Dad came in the house and headed for the kitchen.

  “Where you going, Dad?”

  “Get pop.”

  “Can I go?”

  Dad stopped on his way back to the door. He was the youngest of the Jewell brothers and had the softest face. “You stay here. Keep an eye on things. OK?”

  I nodded.

  “You’re the boss til I get back.”

  I nodded like the whole bunch were zombies me and my dad had hypnotized to do whatever we told them to do. I wished they were, cause if they were, soon as Dad got out of the yard, I’d snap my fingers and make them all squawk and scratch like chickens. Dad went out and got in the truck. Momma ran towards the truck and leaned in Albert’s window, rising up on one foot to kiss him goodbye. When she got around to the other window, Dad’s arm was out, reaching for her. Momma and Dad kissed what seemed to me a real good kiss. Dad and Albert left, and when Momma got back to the circle of earth, Hubert had pulled up some of the plants and put them other places. Momma stood with her hands on her hips. Hubert pointed with the trowel, explaining what he thought she ought to do. When he finished, he put his hands on his thighs and looked up at Momma. Momma smiled, nodded, fell to her knees, and went back to work on the opposite side of the circle of earth from Hubert.

  My bowl of Lucky Charms was all soggy. I sat down on the arm of the chair beside the window in the front room of our house and held the bowl of sweet pink milk to my lips, my mother’s rumbly voice coming from outside. Already in those first eight years of my life I had seen my mother’s parents split up. My other grandparents split before I was born. I had been to the emergency room seven times I could think of for one or another of my dad’s family. Been to the courthouse at least that many times for the same reason. I had been to Tennessee four times to see my momma’s sister. I had been to the beach once, to Dollywood once, and to see my dad’s momma in North Carolina once. I had set on Dad’s knee in the unemployment office and my mother’s at the food stamp office.

  Things were quiet that morning in the single-wide, the television off, the heater off, the fans off, the murmur of my mother’s voice in the front yard, laughing, telling a story. I wanted to go back to bed and dream what would happen next, dream a place quiet all the time, sunny pink and yellow, me drawing, people pulling up in the driveway of my house looking out over the ocean, the pictures I’d drawn piling up in a basket an
d a man with a black moustache, a woman with a gumball bracelet, coming to pick up the drawings—“Aren’t you something” and “These are spectacular,” they would say, and “Well, we’ll leave you alone” as they slipped out, leaving food and grocery bags full of money by the door and me by myself in the pink-and-yellow room, drawing, everything taken care of, everyone a stranger, the ocean in and out.

  The storm door jerked back with a squeak. The front door flew open and bounced off the wall. Albert shot through the room, put a fist in my shoulder—“Wake up, Fatso”—and was gone down the hall. The chunk-chunk-chunk of heavy metal guitars found its way to the front of the house through the trailer walls. I stared into my bowl at the blue marshmallow moon vibrating across the pink sweet milk. Surrounded by kin, nestled in the bosom of family, I exhaled. Then breath, heavy with the scent of hardwood mulch, diesel, and fried baloney, filled me again.

  ***

  A week later, three weeks before my ninth birthday, my father’s father, Green Jewell, sat at his kitchen table and tore up a playing card. “I need more room. People bringing in cars and I need more room.”

  Dust swirled in the morning sunlight behind Hubert in the new section of the kitchen where plastic sheeting stretched between pine studs, translucent in the morning sun, a blond cage.

  Hubert said, “I don’t know, Dad.”

  “Sippett set a load of gravel at Delbert’s. Get up there and spread it.” Green tore the playing card again. Green never wrote anything down, but he always kept playing cards held by a rubber band in his shirt pocket. Every card stood for something needed doing. When something got done, he tore up the card. Green wiped his lips with the back of his hand and prowled through the new section of the kitchen, stepping around buckets, over sheets of plywood, picking up nails, dropping them in his pocket. The bigger kitchen was Green’s new wife’s idea. Green began to growl. I followed Hubert out of the house to the bulldozer.

  “Go on,” Hubert said. “Get out of here.”

  “You aint the boss of me.”

  Hubert had on shorts. Dad said Hubert wore shorts because he didn’t like being hemmed in. Claustrophobic, Dad said. Green came off the porch and went around to the back of the house. Me and Hubert watched him go, an old man with a shock of white hair standing straight up off his head, black-rim glasses, body thick through the middle. Green passed the houses where my other uncles lived and went into a building made of corrugated metal. He pulled the door shut behind him.

  “Get out of here,” Hubert said again.

  “I aint.”

  Hubert smacked me in the face. “Get.”

  Hubert had never hit me before.

  “Go on, Dawn.”

  I stepped back to where I could get away from whatever he did next, but I didn’t go away. A thing boils up, I thought.

  Hubert turned away from me, and I touched my face. Hubert got on the dozer, started it, crossed the road, and went up my driveway. He lowered the blade into the gravel. I followed, and raised the back of my fist and then my middle finger at Hubert, but he didn’t see it.

  When I got inside our house, it came on my mind not to tell on Hubert. The thought of keeping Hubert’s smack secret scared me, but I couldn’t get around it. The television was up against the front window turned up loud. Albert lay on the floor in front of Dad’s recliner. The curtains were drawn, and it was dark in the room. The light from the television played on Albert’s face. I stepped over Albert on the way to my father’s chair. Albert shoved me in the side of the knee without taking his eyes off the television, and I fell into the chair.

  “Butt,” I said.

  Albert gave me the finger. He was watching a wrestling video. The crowd was full of people screaming at fake fights. Their anger was real, a smiling laughing anger they’d paid hundreds of dollars to let out. The dozer cut off, and Hubert came in the kitchen, took a glass from the shelf, ran it full of cold water. The door opened again, and Momma came into the TV room. Red splotches spilled down her neck. “Albert, where’s your daddy?”

  “Working a double,” I said.

  Momma went in the kitchen. She stood with one hand on the kitchen counter. “Hubert, you got to tell him.” Hubert smiled, his chin tucked into his chest. Momma stamped her foot. “Colbert can’t come in the store no more. Not while I’m working.”

  Back then, Momma worked in the bakery at the grocery store down the mountain in town. She was the best they had. She did cakes for the wives of lawyers and judges. She did the wedding cakes for coal operators’ daughters. I turned towards the kitchen, towards Hubert and Momma. I hated my uncle Colbert worse than I did Hubert. Hubert was a snake, but Colbert was a monstrous black cloud of stupidity and destruction.

  “Turn it up,” Albert said. When I didn’t, Albert rolled over, grabbed my foot and twisted my ankle.

  “Ow. Stop it,” I said.

  Albert sat up on his knees, grabbed the remote control out of my hand, and hammered my fingers against the chair arm with his free fist. When Albert turned back to the television, I kicked him in the ear.

  “Hubert, you could. He’s your brother,” Momma said.

  “What am I supposed to say to him,” Hubert said, spreading his arms. “It’s a free country, aint it?” Hubert sat down at the table and took a piece of cake out of a clamshell box.

  “Hubert, he was so drunk he peed on the eggs.”

  “When did he do that?” Hubert said.

  “Today.” Momma put her hands on her hips.

  “What time?”

  “What?” Momma was nearly panting.

  “What time of day was it?” Hubert said.

  “I don’t know,” Momma said. “Four.”

  Hubert shook his head. “I don’t think it was him.”

  “They got him on the store cameras,” Momma said. “He’s gonna get me fired.”

  “You need to start your own business anyway,” Hubert said. “Then you wouldn’t have to put up with shit like that.”

  Momma stood silent.

  Hubert said, “You need to let me help you.”

  Momma picked crumbs from Hubert’s beard. I walked on Albert’s hand on my way outside. Two boy cousins younger than me were on the trampoline.

  “Get off of there,” I said.

  “No,” the fat one said.

  “Tell you where Albert hid his BB pistol.”

  They stopped bouncing. “Where?”

  “Under the couch in his room.”

  The boys rolled off the trampoline and tore past me into the house. I pulled myself up on the trampoline. When I bounced I could see into the tree branches of the remaining oaks in the grassless yard. My hair rose and fell as I bounced. I wished I could see a black-and-white photograph of Hubert at the top of an obituary, blurry in a baseball cap, stunned or pissed or spoiling for a fight when the camera flashed. I jumped higher. I swore I’d see all my Dad’s brothers that way, their names under each other’s pictures, surviving, preceding, until they were all preceding, the last one dead. Then I would sit in the tree that rose and fell in front of me with a .22 and pick off their boy children one by one whether they had been proven Jewells or not. No Jewells left. None but my dad. I bounced until the sweat was pouring off of my face. I was still bouncing when Hubert came out and started up the dozer. I bounced with my back to him until he was gone.

  “Dawn, come get your supper,” Momma said from the trailer door.

  My knees buckled and I collapsed in a heap. I was hot and dreaded going back in the trailer. “I aint hungry,” I said.

  When I was little, I loved Kolonel Krispy better than anything. Momma went inside, came back with Albert. We loaded up, drove into town. The Kolonel Krispy had once been a dairy bar where people walked up and got their fried chicken and doughnuts, burgers and fries in white paper bags, from workers leaning through a sliding glass window, but they closed it in, built a dining room huge and smoky as an Indian cave. Momma took us through the drive-thru. Momma said, “Get whatever you want.” We a
ll got hotdogs and fries, and cherry pies. I got a large pineapple milkshake, Albert a drink full of antifreeze-blue slush. Momma got a hamburger with extra pickles. We all smacked our lips in fevered expectation, pulling fries from the bag while Momma parked the car. Crumbling concrete stairs led down to the river, and we ran to the broken pavement at the river’s edge. Momma set the bags on a picnic table chained to a tree in a muddy flat spot while Albert skipped stones and I stood staring at the food. Momma unwrapped the wax-paper squares and lay them on the table. She set the packets of fries on the corner of the bags. She called to Albert. Albert ran to the table, gathered his in his arms, and ran back to the river. He ate his fries a half dozen at a time, throwing rocks at a duck with his free hand. I settled in close beside my mother. She set my food in front of me and I ate, feeling better with each bite of hot dog, each handful of fries, each sweet, chunky sip of the pineapple shake. Momma elbowed me, and I looked up. Momma had a pickle covering each of her eyes. I always loved that. We sat eating, watching Albert. He threw a rock so hard his pie slipped out of his hand and fell into the water. I laughed, and when Albert stuck one foot in the river to rescue his pie, Momma said, “You fall in that river and you’re walking home.” I was feeling much better when Momma said, “Hubert told me what happened. Told me he hit you.” My hot dog turned to rubber in my mouth. “Told me he felt bad about it.”

  I asked Momma what she said to him.

  “I told him if he did it again I’d kill him.”

  I got up from the table and stood at the edge of the water, away from where Albert was. It gave my heart a jump to think of my mother killing Hubert. I wondered how she’d do it. Blow his head off with a shotgun. Maybe an ax. Ax would be good. She’d probably do something quieter, like put poison in a piece of cake.

  Albert stood at the point where the two forks of the river came together and ran on down the valley. Albert poured the pale slush, the blue juice drained from it, into the river. Then he threw the plastic cup hard as he could. It caught in the breeze and did not go very far, dropped into the water, spun and disappeared. Water doesn’t care what goes in it. It just keeps going downhill. I sat down on the weedy riverbank.