by Robert Gipe
Momma sat down beside me. “Daddy used to bring me and June down here, feed us doughnut holes, tell us stories.” Momma’s sister June lived in Tennessee. Momma plucked up a blade of grass, held it between her thumbs, blew on it to make a buzzing noise. “He said the old people say the forks was brothers. The brothers piled up where Albert’s standing, and went on adventures downstream—stealing out of people’s gardens, scaring up the fish. Done everything together, thick as thieves. And you know those high rocks down on the county line?” I nodded. “The river splits there, don’t it?” I nodded again. “People say that’s where something broke them brothers up.”
“What?” I said.
“Some say they was fighting over a woman. Some say a piece of land. Some say over which their mother loved best. But whatever it was it split them brothers up.” Momma sat humming. Even then I got all mixed up by my mother, all mixed up about how to feel, whether to go whole hog trusting her or not. I let the flow of the river fill my eyes, the caramel-colored water natural and unnatural at once.
“Which doughnut holes you like best, Momma?”
“Coconut.” Momma handed me her milkshake.
“I like coconut, too.”
“Looky there,” Momma said and pointed a painted fingernail at letters carved in a tree. “JR + PR” the letters said. “June Redding. Patricia Redding. We done that.”
“When?”
“When we were in high school. I think your daddy was swimming in that river over there that night.”
“Was you on a date?”
“No. Not then. We weren’t. Him and June may have been.”
“Him and Aunt June dated?”
“Nah, not really.”
I ran my finger down in the grooves of the letters. Aunt June lived by herself, older than Momma, but no husband, no kids. Albert said she liked girls. Albert didn’t know anything. Albert didn’t have a thought in his head. He just repeated what Hubert and the others said.
“Gonna get dark here in a minute,” Momma said. “Where did Albert go?”
He wasn’t throwing rocks in the river anymore. He wasn’t anywhere to be seen. The frogs croaked like old scolds, and I felt guilty. No idea why. Feelings came on me all that day I had no way of explaining. “I want to go home, Momma.”
“You want to go draw?”
“Yeah.”
Momma wrapped her hands around my head, pulled me to her, bent my glasses. My hair caught in Momma’s rings. Albert come up behind us, kneed me in the back, and ran towards the broken concrete steps hard as he could. He tripped three steps up and caught himself, never stopped running. I turned to the river, imagined the forks a brother and a sister, couldn’t wait to get to the county line where some rocky thing would split them apart and run them separate plumb to different oceans, never together again til Antarctica and by then so mixed up with other water it wouldn’t matter.
When we got home, Hubert called and asked did Albert want to go sit with him at the store. Momma said she didn’t care, said, “Albert, you want to go to the store with Hubert?”
Albert was out the door before she finished saying it. Momma sent me to take a bath. She shampooed my long black hair. Her fingers moved across my scalp like the big soapy brushes at the car wash. After I bathed, I stood on the mat. Momma sang songs without words while she dried my hair. The rough rubbing of the towel knocked me off balance, but I was happy.
“What you gonna draw tonight?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Something.”
I got my pens and crayons out from under the bed. They were in a cigar box I’d got from Mamaw. I got out the big pad of paper Momma brought me from the missionary salvage store. Eleven inches by seventeen inches. Big paper. I crawled into bed and opened the pad on my propped-up legs. I put a black pen in my hand and waited for my mother to get there to start. After a minute I put the cap back on the pen.
Momma came to the door. She had changed out of her blue jeans into dark orange cotton shorts and a light orange tank top. She got into bed and put her arm around me. She had taken her rings off and felt soft and perfect to me. I took the cap back off my pen.
I said, “How do you draw a penguin?”
“Well,” Momma said, “they got a little round head, and they aint got no shoulders.”
I put the black pen back in the cigar box and got out a pencil. I drew a penguin with my pencil and went back over it with the black pen. I colored in its beak orange. Then I sat feeling my mother’s rib cage rise and fall.
“Now what?” Momma said.
I turned to a new piece of paper. “What did you and Aunt June look like when you were my age?”
“Scrawny. But June was way prettier than me. She had eyes like yours, gray like polished gravel. But she was backwards. Nose stuck in books. Her big treat was to go to the library and look at old magazines. Them things made me sneeze. Summer Momma would leave us there and I’d wander the streets.”
I drew two skinny stick bodies. “You weren’t scared somebody would get you?”
“Wasn’t like that then. Nobody wanted another kid.” Momma squeezed me close. “One time June cut up a Sears catalog and a bunch of National Geographics, pasted the pictures together, and made a story out of them. Had people in Africa with gold bands on their necks talking to women in girdles, except they never showed the faces of them women in girdles in the Sears catalog, so she’d glue somebody up, like a man in his hunting cap, and she’d have that half–hunter half–girdle wearer talking to that African woman.”
“That sounds cool.”
“It was cool. Your Aunt June is cool.”
I drew June with a pile of books under her arm and a pair of scissors in the other hand. I drew in my mother’s head.
“Put me in a football jersey. I loved football jerseys.”
“What number on it?”
“Sixteen. Joe Montana.”
“What color?”
“Red.”
I drew Momma with her arm around her sister. I erased out the scissors and put June’s arm around Momma’s shoulder, too. With her other hand, Momma held a knife. I drew a tree with June and Momma’s initials on it.
“That looks good,” Momma said.
“You want it?”
“No. You keep it in your book.”
I wanted my mother to stay there with me til I fell asleep. When Momma tried to shift out from under me, I pushed my head into her shoulder, tried to hold her in place. Momma got up to go. “Your daddy be here in a little bit.” Momma stood and turned off the overhead light. The little lamp next to my bed was hardly enough to draw by, but I kept on, moving a yellow pen in empty spirals. I was wanting to put a machine gun in the penguin’s flippers, draw a penguin army with belts full of bullets across their penguin chests, ready to fight to keep people they didn’t want off Antarctica. But I didn’t draw that. I didn’t want to scare my mother. I fell asleep by the dim lamp, my paper and pens all over me. When I woke up, my dad was dead, crushed by a cutting machine in the mines.
9: Ignorant Girl
My tenth day working at Kolonel Krispy was the day Hubert took Momma to the dryout hospital. Hubert and Momma, my uncle Colbert and his lunatic girlfriend came to see me at work on their way out of town. I signed out on break and sat with them at the pressure-treated picnic table outside. All of a sudden, Colbert said, “Oh!” and ran out in the middle of the road, blocking the way of Sidney Coates’s Firebird.
It had been seven years since my dad died in the mine when the arm of a cutting machine swung around and pinned him against the rib, broke his back. Colbert still believed a boy sniffing cocaine off the deck of the cutting machine hit a button caused the machine to kill Dad. Colbert said Sidney Coates sold the boy the cocaine. Sidney Coates’s cousin was the sheriff, and the story was the circuit judge owed Sidney something he never could quite get paid off. All that is to say only idiots messed with Sidney Coates.
Colbert spread his arms wide and walked up to the passenger windo
w and put his elbows on the roof of Sidney’s car and leaned in the window. Traffic backed up behind the black Firebird.
“Hey, you fatass piece of shit,” the boy driving the Firebird said. “You better step the fuck off.”
“Language,” my manager said. Hubert used his lower lip to clean the milkshake from his moustache.
“Why don’t you fellers move along,” Colbert said, “or come out of there and suck my dick.”
“Language,” my manager said, a little louder than the first time.
Sidney, his thick lips dry as stones in the sun, stared at Colbert. Without taking his eyes off Colbert, he pumped his pointer twice towards the windshield. The Firebird pulled forward. Colbert stepped out in traffic and flipped the back of the Firebird off with both hands.
Hubert sipped from his milkshake.
Colbert’s girlfriend said, “You better hope I don’t tell him you said that.” Colbert’s girlfriend’s eyes were dull as social studies, and she had no idea men had been to the moon.
At the end of my shift, the manager said it didn’t seem to be working out for me at Kolonel Krispy, and asked me not to come back.
***
When Hubert got back from taking Momma to rehab, he told Colbert to stay close to the Trail for a while. But Colbert and his girlfriend kept running the roads. Two nights later somebody let Colbert off at the top of the driveway. Colbert’s pupils were two little inner tubes in a vast red sea. He was grinning and past language and lucky to make it to Hubert’s couch before his legs gave out. Colbert didn’t move from Hubert’s couch for sixteen hours. Hubert threw a sheet over him, and I sat and watched him out of the corner of my eye while me and Albert watched television. Every once in a while he would stir under his flower-print sheet.
“Where’s your woman?” Hubert said when Colbert finally sat up.
Colbert’s head crashed back to the sofa, and he slept another seven hours.
Right after Colbert fell back to the sofa, I got up and went and looked out the window over Hubert’s kitchen sink. At woods edge in the small backyard there was a spot where the briars and the blackberries broke. I put my shoes on, crossed the muddy yard, stepped through the break, and made my way into the woods. Two, then three, then four motors sputtered behind me. The sound of them began to move in circles. My head got light, and I drifted down the barely formed trail, dark in the middle of the day. Mud covered the tops of my shoes. I came to a little clearing where the mud rared up in truck tracks. I followed the truck tracks deeper into the woods. The front of my head felt like it emptied out, and I couldn’t see for a minute. When my sight came back, a pearly-green head rose up out of the viny mess beside the truck-tracked road. Dirt fell off the T-shirt hanging on Colbert’s girlfriend’s shoulders. Her lips and eyes were red as a clown’s, and when she reached out her arm to me it was covered in cuts and bruises and blood.
I took off running back through the woods. When I got to Hubert’s, I ran up the drive, across the Trail, and back up the hill to where I had lived when my dad was alive. I climbed up on the trampoline and sat on its edge. The sun broke through the wiry lattice of wood that hemmed us in, but it wasn’t warm at all. I pulled off my gray-mudded shoes, and sat on the edge of the trampoline and rocked. After while, Albert crossed the road with a pop. He reached it to me, water beading on the outside and curving down the sides of the bottle. I shook my head, still breathing hard.
“She’s gonna be all right,” Albert said.
I nodded, rocked a little.
“Who did that?”
“I don’t know,” Albert said.
“Colbert?”
“I don’t know,” Albert said. “Maybe.”
I rocked some more. My brother climbed up next to me, put arms around me, tried to still me. Within a minute, he was rocking too.
***
I went back to Mamaw’s, took a long shower, and went to bed. When I came to, I decided to ask Hubert to loan me money for a car. I went to his place, marched right down the hall and into his room. I shut the door behind me. He was sitting up on the bed, and when I seen him, I decided he didn’t have enough money to get me where I wanted to go, so I started backing out of the room.
He said, “Where you going?” and I just looked at him, and he said, “Girl, you need to be talking,” and God, that flew all over me.
I said, “Talking about what?” and he got quiet and I hated that room, hated how dark it was, how dark it all was, and I said,
The bed was my mother and father’s from when I was little. It was the bed I went to during thunder and lightning; bed I went to when girls at school called me Big Bird, Stork, Marilyn Manson, Freak Interrupted; bed of Momma’s pillowcase tears; bed of Momma gone to Hazard all night; bed Mamaw caught Albert having sex with a missionary girl in; bed Hubert packed off to his house the day he took Momma to the dryout hospital; hand-carved black walnut bed Daddy made in the carpenter’s class he went to when he tried to get out of the mines so he would be able to see us, see me and Albert play ball, see us do nothing, see us just sitting watching television, but Dad took too long with things, took too long to make any money being a carpenter, never enough money, and so he went back underground, and now he’s dead, cause he wouldn’t be no outlaw, not like his daddy, not like his brother Hubert.
I wouldn’t look at Hubert, but I heard him, heard Dad’s bed creak when Hubert leaned up on one hip and the chain on his wallet tinkled like a bell on a cat’s neck, and I didn’t look when his wallet come out and he said, “How much do you need?”
I said, “That aint your bed. You aint got no business with that bed.”
Hubert sucked his teeth.
“You aint got no dental hygiene neither,” I said, mad at myself for being so mad. I stepped to the door, said, “Nasty greasy thing.” Tears come up in my eyes. “I hate your . . .” I didn’t know what to say. “I hate your teeth.”
“You’re too excited,” Hubert said.
“Why am I here?” I said. “This is stupid.”
The roll of Hubert’s shoulders sitting on the bed looked like Dad in his johnboat fishing, me sitting there with him, fingers dragging in the warm lake water, smile about to break my face, air purple and green with the sun behind the mountain, me free to smile big as I want in the dimming light.
Somebody whistled at the other end of Hubert’s trailer. Somebody turned on Aerosmith loud. Somebody flung a garbage bag of bottles out in the yard. I heard the bottles scatter. The tears broke loose from my eyes, and I turned to hide them. I forced my hands to be still, so they wouldn’t go to my eyes, wouldn’t give me away.
“You like that boy talks on the radio,” Hubert said. “I hear you laughing at him.”
I stayed facing the door. “I do not,” I said. I wanted to lay my neck open with the knife on Hubert’s dresser, bleed out on the floor of Hubert’s room.
“What’s his name?” Hubert said, “William? Wilson?”
“I need eight hundred dollars,” I said to the door.
***
Hubert put me in harness. He sure did, the very next Monday, while I was still suspended from school for fighting Belinda Coates. There was a pipe come out of the mountain in a curve on the road to Hazard. On the back side of the mountain, there was lots of people didn’t have water where their wells had gone bad. People would pull up to the pipe and fill milk jugs all day long, however many jugs they could fit in their vehicle. They’d draw water to bath, do dishes, make beans, whatever people use water for. Hubert had a store right across from the pipe, sold cigarettes and lottery tickets, and the worst toilet paper ever was.
Hubert also sold liquor out of the store, which was illegal cause our county was dry, and this man Hubert didn’t back was sheriff, and so it had been hot for Hubert, and he couldn’t just be handing jars of liquor across the counter, so he’d gone back up in the mountain where the water ran into that pipe and he’d put a splitter on it, and then he’d run his own pipe up the hillside to a spot that looked out ove
r the store, a little rock-hidden spot where a person could sit and when Hubert flashed a light in the store window that person would turn a valve and the water would stop running out of the pipe. Then the person would open a second valve and empty one of the liquor jars stacked in the back of a pickup truck into a galvanized bucket Hubert had rigged up with a hole in its bottom that led into Hubert’s pipe, and then the liquor would run into the water pipe at that splitter and on into whoever’s water jug was waiting down at the road at the other end. And when the jug got filled, the person on the top of the hill would turn them two valves, and water would start running out the pipe at the road again. And the person at the top of the hill would sit there doing nothing until Hubert flashed his light again. And so Monday morning after our little bed talk, the person waiting for him to flash his light was me.
***
Nine o’clock Thursday morning, the day my suspension was over and I was supposed to be back in school, I was still up on the cliff above Hubert’s. After my first liquor jar of the day drained into an old woman’s Wisk jug, I turned on my little radio to listen to Willett on the radio. He played the song “Muscles for Brains” by Gang of Four. He liked old music and so did I. A man in a Geo without a hood pulled up, and Hubert flashed his light. I didn’t see it cause I was banging my head, dancing around up there at the cliff’s edge, mostly to stay warm, but also to be with Willett Bilson. Hubert kept on flashing his light, at least he said he did after, and then the gunshot shocked the birds off the phone wire and the bullet exploded my radio and killed the Gang of Four.
***
Hubert said, and kicked pieces of the radio off the rock edge. The radio parts made a thin clatter against the blacktop below.
I said, “From the money tree, I reckon.”
The flat of Hubert’s hand landed against my cheekbone, and the milk crate I was sitting on jerked out from under me. My shoulder hit the rock first. I scrambled to get up before Hubert could hit me again, but he put his hand in my shoulder and pushed me back down.