by Robert Gipe
“Stop it,” I said.
Hubert pointed at the galvanized bucket where I was supposed to pour the liquor. “That’s where money comes from.” He pulled the silver flashlight with its ridges down its shaft, too many for me to count, out of his back pocket. He shoved the light in my face. I knew the flashlight was going to break my teeth, and I flinched. He turned on the light, an inch from my face. “This is where money comes from, you ignorant girl.”
Mad blinded me and I stood up and threw my shoulder into Hubert’s chest. He made a sound, a little one, the puff of a grunt a man can’t help but make when he gets out of a car or bends to pick up something he’s dropped. I knew Hubert was most likely to knock me clean off the mountain, but I stepped to him, taller than he was, my mouth at his eyes, and said, “I aint ignorant.”
Tires crunched in the gravel below. “Then show me you aint,” Hubert said, onions and tobacco on his breath. He went back down the trail to the store.
Directly, Hubert’s light flashed. My head still rang from his slap. I knew what I had done wrong. I shut off the water, opened the liquor valve, got a jar out of the truck, and spit down the pipe. I poured the liquor down after it and swore never again to tell a man what I need. Then I lay down on the cold truck seat and closed my eyes to sleep.
***
Nobody else came for liquor that day, and I slept on and on, face stuck to the hard truck seat on the hillside above the store. When Hubert woke me, it was a cold waking. He touched my shoulder and said, “Let’s go.”
“Where?” I said.
“Back,” Hubert said, “back to the ridge.” And so we went, Willie Nelson singing about the redheaded stranger in Hubert’s last good truck. “You still wanting tomorrow off?” Hubert said when we pulled into Mamaw’s carport.
“Yes I am,” I nodded. “Yes I am wanting off.”
Hubert nodded and I got out of the truck. Dark and cold it was, dark and cold. The stars were drops of oil in a black coffee sky. Dogs barked out on the ridge. No snow, only hardwood freeze. The rings in the trees drew close together in the bone-cracking night, and I didn’t care if I never went back to school, didn’t care if Jesus came tomorrow with me not knowing the Pythagoras theory. I was not ready for the house, and so I went out on the front porch, which I could barely find because the booger light was out and so were the lamps in the front room, and so with my hands I found the glider on Mamaw’s porch, and there I sat and let my eyes adjust, and the light from the stars grew brighter and my bottom numbed against the winter steel of the glider, and I wished for fire, fire against my bottom, fire to warm me inside out, and there came a chink and a spark and the whistle of air through tobacco in a wooden bowl, and Mamaw and her pipe sat waxy in the shadows like an unlit candle.
“Hello.” Mamaw’s voice came out of the smoke, and the smoke bore light.
“Hey Mamaw,” I said.
She said, “Why don’t you ask me for money? Why do you go running to him?”
I said, “Say what’s on your mind, why don’t you?”
And Mamaw said, “Too cold not to.”
The night sky sparkled, and I said, “You reckon the star of Bethlehem is still out there?”
Mamaw’s profile was like chiseled rock at the edge of the porch. She bent her neck back, lifted her chin to the sky, and said, “I reckon it is.” Then she turned to me. “Do you seek the newborn king?” she said.
I said no.
“Kings,” Mamaw said with a hiss, and put the spark to her pipe again. The smoke left her nose and lips and the wooden bowl and drifted towards me, sideways across the porch.
“I don’t know,” I said. I made the glider squeak. “You don’t want me working for Hubert, do you?”
“You know I don’t,” Mamaw said.
“Then why don’t you stop me?” I said.
“Why don’t you stop yourself?”
And then the night and the cold and the smoke came between us again, and I wished for alcohol, for my own pipe running down my own throat.
“Men,” Mamaw said, loud enough to make me jump. “Men are scared. Men are a bunch of rabbits—a bunch of rabbits who woke up one morning with sharp teeth and thought that made them lions. But it don’t. They can tear up the whole world with them sharp teeth, and they still won’t be nothing but rabbits.” Mamaw stood up and took hold of the porch rail to steady herself.
“Mamaw,” I said. I thought she was drunk.
“You going with me tomorrow to look at that strip job,” she said, and she wasn’t asking.
“Yeah, Mamaw,” I said, “I am.”
“All right then,” she said. “Don’t forget to go to bed.” And with that she knocked the fire out of her pipe and slid into the dark house.
By then I could make out the ridgeline of Blue Bear across the valley, and my mind grew still in the face of its broad silent dark. Then the mountain began to laugh. It wasn’t my mother’s scary high person laugh, and it wasn’t my father’s easy-rolling laugh. It was a laugh I’d never heard before. It was a laugh like something was actually funny, something that would be funny to everybody, and not mean. And even though I didn’t know who was laughing or what they were laughing about, my bottom grew warm against Mamaw’s glider. I rose and went into the house, and when Mamaw woke me in the morning I felt rested and we ate bacon and pancakes at the Huddle House and met the organizers and went and looked at the mine and what the rabbit’s teeth could do, and I was strong and free for a little while.
***
When we finished the strip job inspection, the last of the mist lay in the mud lot filled with pickups where you come off the job. The state man thought if he made us come early, wouldn’t be so many show up. But there was five of us—me and Mamaw, Otis who used to be a miner, and the organizer girls, April and Portia. The organizer girls had been partying the night before, and they made such a racket complaining, I stood away from them at the edge of the cliff drinking my pop. Something flashed in the parking lot. It was lit up green, green like a traffic light, but not really, more like I don’t know what—a funny green, like from a dream green, but it was something I knew and I couldn’t think from where.
“You people seen enough?” the state man said, his crew cut flat on top as the strip job and his voice dull as a city man’s pocketknife. We got back in the van, and he drove us down to the muddy parking lot. When we got out, Otis said goodbye and drove off in his pickup. The organizer girls stood with their expensive notebooks covered in bumper stickers and wrote down what Mamaw and Otis told them they seen. I walked over to where I’d seen the green light. I bent down and pulled it out of the mashed down gravel and yellow mud. It was a one-hit pipe, with the space alien from the Flintstones on it. The Great Gazoo. When you’d draw on the pipe, the Great Gazoo’s head would light up green. I knew what it was cause I got one just like it for Momma one time. Weird. I looked in the truck window next to where I’d found it. There was a pair of panties on the seat. They were mine.
“Dawn, honey. You ready to go?” Mamaw’s breath stood in the cold winter air, the tip of her nose red as a cherry Tootsie Pop. “Shut your mouth,” she said. “What you doing standing there slack-jawed?”
Would you have told your grandmother a pair of your panties were on the front seat of some truck you never seen before? Well, I didn’t. I closed my mouth and followed her back to Portia’s little car. It was bright midday when we pulled back onto the Drop Creek road, the sky so blue it was almost UK blue. The skinned trees stood gray and clear like old people talking, no word wasted.
“We need to follow up on those water test records,” April said.
“I wrote it down,” Portia said. “I’ll call EPA when we get back from the gathering.”
I was wracking my brain. Black Ford F-150. Who drove a black Ford F-150?
“I should have made them take us over on the Oat Creek side,” Mamaw said. We went by a house with a live gazelle in the yard. I knew the man owned it. He had a beard long as last year. “That’
s the way they do,” Mamaw said. “Wait you out. Make you beg. Make you figure it out.”
“Burden of proof, right?” Portia said. They all shook their heads.
April turned smiling to look at me in the backseat. “That was great what you said, Dawn.”
“What did I say?”
“About the rock getting pushed over the side of the hill,” April said. “That is a violation.”
“I didn’t even look at what that guy was doing,” Portia said. “I couldn’t get over his hair.”
I said, “I hate that guy.”
“Who was it?” Portia said.
“Why do you hate him?” April said.
“Boy named—” I started. Oh my God. That was Keith Kelly’s truck. I heard Denny say one time how vain Keith was about his black Ford. Keith Kelly was one of them tiresome assholes thought Fords were everything and GMs no good. Who gives a crap? But it was his truck with my drawers in it. Why, I thought, is Keith Kelly stealing my drawers? Pervert. Then I remembered the Great Gazoo one-hit pipe. It wasn’t Keith Kelly stealing my panties. Momma got into my underwear all the time when she didn’t feel like washing her own. That was Momma’s one-hit pipe. She’d been with Keith Kelly.
“Dawn,” April said. “Are you all right?”
“Dawn,” Mamaw said.
“Don’t feel good,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” Portia said. “Is it my driving?”
“Dawn don’t get carsick,” Mamaw said.
Maybe Momma didn’t go with Keith Kelly on her own, I thought. Maybe he kidnapped her. Motherfucker. He did. I would kill him.
“Dawn, do you need to stop?” Portia said.
“I want to go home,” I said.
They were quiet then. For a minute. Then they started talking again about overburden and permit boundaries and Indiana bat surveys and the agenda for the next meeting of the group. I got them to let me off at Hubert’s. Albert was watching TV in the front room.
“Who’s this girl Evie calling me, Dawn?” Albert said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Where’s Momma?”
“I don’t know,” Albert said. “At rehab, I guess.”
“No she aint,” I said, and when a banging came from the other end of the house, I said, “Who’s that?” Albert shrugged, and I went thumping down the hall, cheap-ass trailer making me feel fat like usual. Momma was on the phone, her door cracked open.
“Yeah . . . No. I aint like that. What?” Momma laughed, “Tee hee hee. Maybe,” she said.
I knocked the door open. Momma didn’t even look at me, just turned and hunched into the wall at the head of the bed. She tee-heed and mumbled a while longer and then finally turned and said, “I got to go,” and hung up. I looked at the clock. It was past three. Shift change.
“He aint working a double?” I said.
“Who?” Momma said grinning, bullshitting like somebody my age.
“Your boyfriend,” I said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“They cured me,” Momma said.
I said, “Then let’s smoke a little dope. Me and you and the Great Gazoo.”
“Get out of here,” Momma said. “Mind your own business.”
“What?” Momma said. “Such a what?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“A slut?”
“No.”
“What then? Say it, Dawn.”
“No,” I said. “Leave me alone.”
“Leave you alone?” Momma said, red and twitching. “That’s a good one. That is rich, Cora Junior.”
My breath went out of me worse than it ever had, because she saw it as meanness to compare me to Mamaw. “That don’t hurt my feelings none,” I said. “I’m glad to be like her.”
“Good,” Momma said. “Then why don’t you run cuddle up with her and leave me the fuck alone.”
“Fine,” I said, but I stood there, and when nothing happened I said louder, “FINE,” and slammed her door. Albert had the TV on mute, and it was weird quiet when I walked past him. He looked at me droopy-eyed like he was sad for me, lips tight like a line underlining what he was thinking—that I was wrong to stir things up.
“No I aint,” I said to him, and run flush into Hubert coming in the door. He caught me up in his arms, and I almost collapsed crying, then I stiff-armed him in the chest, but my elbows give and my face did touch his just for a second.
“Watch where you’re going there, hoss,” Hubert said.
“I am,” I said. “I am watching where I’m going. And I don’t like it. Not one bit.”
“What’s she talking about,” Hubert said to Albert.
I didn’t even look to see what Albert did. I was out the door, out into the cold. And glad I was of it, too. I knew Mamaw would be back at her house wanting to talk about the strip job trip, quizzing me about what I saw and what it meant and what was legal and illegal about the operation, and I wouldn’t know and I didn’t care. Hard to feel anything for a pile of rocks and dirt when your mother’s off running around with every no-neck dumbass that will buy her a cup of coffee and when she acts so stupid she ends up in the nuthouse she don’t even stay a week.
There was a young dude in a sleeveless T-shirt and tattoos all up his neck out stringing Christmas lights through the scraggly little sticks of trees in front of the long blue trailer next to Hubert’s. I didn’t have anybody to go Christmas shopping with me. I could have gone with one of my cousins, but such a trip would turn into a shoplifting charge or a fight in the parking lot or the endless depression of listening to my cousins talk about everybody’s problems. I was too tired to keep up with who had an EPO out on who; who’d ratted on who and got their check cut off; who’d wrecked whose vehicle. I got behind the wheel of one of Hubert’s clunkers, a blue Cavalier with the paint peeled off the bumper showing the yellow underneath. Hubert came out and sat beside me on the front seat.
“You want to go get something to eat?” he said.
I pointed at the trailer. “Are they going?”
***
We couldn’t go to Kolonel Krispy because of idiot Colbert, even though idiot Colbert and his idiot woman had run off to Michigan out of fear of Sidney Coates. But we were still banned from Kolonel Krispy, so we sat in the truck and ate baloney sandwiches from the gas station downtown. The sun was out and leaves chattered across the parking lot, and the only sounds in the truck were the Merle Haggard cassette playing on the stereo and Hubert clearing his throat. After we finished our sandwiches, Hubert said, “You want anything else?” and I shook my head. Hubert wiped his forehead as he went in the store. He was sweating like it was summertime. I let the window down and thought about my schoolwork. I hadn’t learned anything in a long time.
Hubert came back with a big bag of spicy hot pork rinds. He pulled it open and offered it to me. This is my body broken into strips and fried to a crisp for you. I took some and ate them. I asked Hubert for a sip of his pop. It was grape. I hate grape.
“Why don’t you take me to the library?” I said.
Hubert said, “Do what?”
“Take me over to the public library and wait for me while I go in and learn something.”
Hubert ate some more of his pork rinds. “All right,” he said. “Spose to be a storm tonight.”
“I’ll walk,” I said.
Hubert curled out his lower lip and nodded. “I’ll be there when you’re through.”
I walked up the block to the corner by the fish store. I went back to Hubert’s truck. He rolled down his window. “Thank you,” I said.
“It’s all right,” he said.
***
The library wasn’t much bigger than the houses turned lawyers’ offices that sat next to it. When I walked in, the man behind the counter said the library was closing in eleven minutes. I walked past him to where the art books were. I walked down the aisle waiting for something to tell me to take it off the shelf. I
saw a red book called The World of Titian, and it was in a box and full of art from the island city of Venice, which was built on wood sticks and threatened by the sea and kept from silting up and turning into a swamp by the sea, and so the bigshots in Venice, the men, would every year go out in a boat and drop a gold ring in the water and marry the sea, so the sea would keep getting them rich in trade and plunder and not drown them all in their sleep. That book also showed how in olden days, painters would put forty layers of paint down on every painting. Forty layers!
“Five minutes,” the library man said.
I sat staring at a picture of a woman, floating on a cloud held up by a gang of babies. She was dressed in red and blue and reaching for a man looked like her daddy held up in the sky above her like an angel. She was the mother Mary, Jesus’s momma, and below was all these beardy guys, looked like the bunch on Hubert’s porch in a Nativity play, and they was reaching for Mary, trying to get past them babies to grab her and pull her back down.
The library man said, “We’re closed now,” and when I looked up from the rolling stool where I was sitting, the fluorescent lights looked like a rectangular halo over the library man’s head.
Hubert came up behind me, and I put the art book back on the shelf where I’d found it and went with Hubert the way he had come. I looked back, and the library man was checking to make sure I’d put the book in the right place. He had his finger on the spine of The World of Titian.
Outside, Evie and Albert leaned on Hubert’s truck, smoking. It was the first time I ever saw them together.
“What are you doing?” Evie said.
Albert said, “We need to find Mom.”
“Blondie Kelly is hunting her,” Evie said.
“That churchy bitch aint gonna do nothing,” Hubert said.
“Her brothers might,” Albert said. Blondie and Keith’s brothers used to bust out TV picture tubes headbutting them. They say the younger one survived drinking a bottle of lye. The other one time swallowed a live baby snapping turtle. When they showed up, it was like it started raining washing machines. Things got broke.