by Robert Gipe
Dark gathered in and the wind turned cold and the library man looked at us hard as he went past to his little car, looked hard again as he unlocked the car door. Lights came on in the pretty windows of the deep porch houses of town.
Hubert said, “Yall go back up the river, hunt her up near Coates’s.” Evie and Albert nodded. “Me and Dawn will go see what Cinderella knows.”
***
When we went to Cinderella’s, his woman said Momma was with him, but she hadn’t seen them since early. She said they might be at this man’s had a pool table in Needle Creek, and so we went up there and Cinderella wasn’t there, but they told us he was on up the creek at this man’s kept a yard full of fighting chickens. When we got up there, Cinderella and this man sat in the kitchen writing bloodlines on eggs. Hubert asked them had they seen Momma.
“I seen her,” Cinderella said. “She went off with Terry.”
“Terry?” Hubert said, and Cinderella shook his head and give us directions.
Terry lived way up in the head of a holler in a trailer with holes from shotgun pellets all around the front door. “You stay here,” Hubert said, and went to the door. I sat in the truck, and moony faces came by in the dark, peeking in on me on their way to the trailer, and they scared me.
I was glad when he came back, and the sound of Merle Haggard as we got out of there and headed up Drop Creek towards Virginia was a soothing sound.
***
Terry and them told Hubert Momma went to a place below Queensbury on the Virginia side of Donnybrook Mountain. It was quiet and warming as we crested the mountain. By the light of the Rhubarb School we could see the sky hanging low. You could tell a big snow was coming.
“Which house is it?”
“They said it has a big cobra painted on the side of it. And a Confederate flag flying over it.”
We found the place. The flag flapped in the wind. We heard it better than we could see it. I hate rebel flags. Ooooh, you’re a rebel. So what? The cobra house was full of people more stoned than I’d ever seen. Their eyes were glassy and their faces red, and they were piled around a heater. It was none too warm in there, and they were in shirtsleeves. There were only like two beer cans and one wine bottle. People weren’t even smoking. People nodded by the dim heater light.
When Hubert said, “Find your mother,” he sounded like he was in an outer space monster movie and we had landed on the wrong planet. We stumbled through the drafty freak show Nativity scene of the cobra house party. Hubert tried to ask a couple of them about Momma, but they looked right through him and didn’t answer. When Hubert said “Let’s go,” he didn’t have to say it twice.
Outside the winter night closed on us like our heads were under the bed covers. Clean snow filled the ditch line and coated the trees. Snow makes you realize how many places there are that we never go, places we never set foot.
“You ought to keep a better eye on your mother,” Hubert said.
I said, “That’s my job?”
“Whose is it then?” Hubert said.
“What was that in there?” I said.
Hubert shook his head. “Quaaludes? I don’t know. Some kind of monkey dope.” Hubert spat. “Where do you reckon your mother went?”
I chewed on my lip. It began to bleed.
“Let’s get out of here,” Hubert said.
“No.” I looked around, looked for some reason why no. None to be seen. Just snow falling in the orange booger light.
“I done crossed state lines hunting her,” Hubert said, lowering his chin to look at me. “Maybe time for her to come to us.”
“Maybe,” I said. The snow fell thicker. I did not want to leave.
“Do you want to drive?” Hubert said.
“No.”
The snow touched Hubert’s shoulders, his combed-forward hair, and disappeared. “She’s probably at his house.”
“Whose?”
Hubert said, “Wavyhead.” Keith Kelly.
I could see her there, snuggled down in his pay-by-the-month black pleather sectional. I started towards the car.
Hubert said, “You sure you don’t want to drive?”
“We got to stop this,” I said.
“Good a time as any to learn,” he said.
I stopped walking to the car.
“You don’t get in a hurry,” Hubert said. “Slow things down. All there is to it really. Use your head.”
“Where’s the keys?” I said.
“In it,” Hubert said.
I got the car up the hill before the snow covered the road. We got back down in Kentucky to the big tipple right as second shift came out of the mine. “You’re doing good,” Hubert said, “doing good.” I got in the middle of the trucks coming out of the same mud parking lot where I found out Momma had been riding with Keith Kelly, the parking lot at the mine we had inspected. All them men roaring out in the snowy road tried to show one another how scared they weren’t, how they could go fast in the snow in their high-off-the-ground trucks and their headlights flashing right in my eyes. The motors roared, and their tires howled through the curves back and forth on the gathering snow. “God Almighty damn,” I said. The car heater got hot and made me sticky and pinched underneath my seat belt. Hubert smelled like cough drops and potato grease, and I thought I was going to be sick.
“Get out of this,” Hubert said.
“What am I supposed to do?” I said. Old angers, inherited angers I had never seen born, welled up in me.
“Pull over down there at the church,” Hubert said.
“Where?” I said. I didn’t know anything up there.
“Right around this corner.”
I pulled onto the lot next to the Lower Dogsplint Baptist Church. I let all those pickups rumble past. Directly it was quiet again. I spun my wheels pulling back onto the road.
“You don’t have to gun it,” Hubert said. “Nice and slow. Nice and slow.”
We came through Shifters Mill quiet as thieves. We didn’t have the radio on. We didn’t talk. The heater blew through the Escort. The snow dashed at my lights like a thousand tiny suicides, and my eyes locked into the flow of flakes. Hubert grabbed the wheel. “What?” I said, because we were still right in the middle of the road, safe as could be. “What?” I said again.
“Pay attention,” Hubert said.
I wanted to turn on the radio. I wanted to fly out the window, become a summer bird making a nest in my mother’s hair, singing from a branch of the tree I imagined my father had become. Tweeta tweeta tweet tweet tweet.
Lost bird. Lost summer bird. My jaw hurt from grinding it.
Keith Kelly fell in behind us when we passed the old Drop Creek School. He came bearing down on us in that black Ford, and it was snowing too hard for me even to be mad. I just wanted out of that mess. Keith Kelly banged into the back of the Escort.
“Lord have mercy,” Hubert said.
I thought maybe Keith Kelly’s brakes were messed up or something, but Hubert said that wasn’t it. We come sloshing through the tight curve where a Sugarberry man sold sex toys out of a Quonset hut below the road and the guardrails had already been torn out by numerous other wrecks. The snow was packed down and slick. “Where’s the salt trucks,” I said.
“They should’ve been here,” Hubert said. “That’s a fact.”
Keith Kelly bumped us again. They always salt the coal-haul roads first, but not that night. I wanted to lay my head down. Strange a woman getting knocked off the road by a mortal enemy would be getting drowsy, but I was, sure enough. Hubert slapped me, but it didn’t do any good. I had hoped it would, but it didn’t, snow coming straight at the windshield like in a spaceship movie.
Keith Kelly rammed into us again. I was like, by God, this is going to get finished right here and now. I jerked the wheel sideways, pulled it to the left just as hard as I could pull it.
“Ohmygod,” I heard Hubert say, all quick and together in one word, and I felt the whole left side of that Escort lift up off the ground,
but it didn’t flip. We got sideways, then backwards, then sideways in the other direction. The Escort ended up broadsided across the road.
I heard Keith Kelly go into a skid behind us. He swerved and clipped us, our front end spinning towards his back end, and we smacked into him and his vehicle, which was almost off the road anyway, slid back end first into the shallow ditch. If he’d gone off the other side, he would have free-fallen twenty-some feet and probably burst into scorching flames screaming, “AIIIIIIII,” and dying a horrible closed-casket death. But that didn’t happen. His truck just rolled up on its side, passenger door against the bottom of the ditch, roof of the cab wedged up against the rock wall. My front end was off the road far enough to where my back wheels raised up off the ground. The Escort hung on the lip of the road, the asphalt black against the snow gouging into the undercarriage just past where the back door met the front.
“You stay here,” Hubert said, opening his door to the snow, which come in the cab like a gang of hungry kids through a kitchen door. The bank was steep, and Hubert slipped. He steadied himself and climbed out of the ditch and walked around our vehicle, never touching it, his balance sure after the first fall. He opened my door, which gapped with a creak, and put one hard hand out to me, red and wet in the falling powder. I let him lead me.
Keith Kelly’s truck was quiet as the snow and dark except for the dashboard scratches of green and orange light visible through the steamy windows. I dropped Hubert’s hand as we angled along the ditch, but took it back when I saw Keith Kelly. He was slumped sideways towards the passenger side, hands loose, blood blooming black against the side of his head. Hubert climbed onto the road, nearly level with the truck door. He stepped onto Keith Kelly’s truck. The truck rocked under Hubert’s weight enough to cause him to bend his knees for balance.
“Be careful, Hubert,” I said.
Hubert tried the door handle of Keith Kelly’s truck, but it was locked, and Hubert crouched to say “Son of a bitch” and figure what to do next. He stepped off the truck and back onto the road, shuffling through the new snow to Mamaw’s trunk. When he called, I brought him the keys, and he rustled through the trunk til he found the tire iron. He climbed back onto Keith’s truck. The iron smashing the glass startled me. Hubert ran the iron around the edge of the hole in the glass until it was big enough to stick his arm through and unlock the door. The door opened up into the air like a hatch on a submarine, and Hubert grabbed hold of Keith Kelly’s seat belt—which I was surprised to see he was wearing—and pulled Keith Kelly towards him with both hands.
“Is he alive?” I said.
Hubert strained to move Keith Kelly, but he finally got him close enough to wrap his arm around Keith’s shoulder. I could see blood bubbling in Keith’s nose. Hubert was on his knees above Keith, straining to hold him in his arms. Hubert managed to slide onto his belly without dropping Keith. Hubert breathed through his nose, deep distinct breaths. I could hear the snowflakes land on his canvas coat over the “ding ding ding” of the open door.
“Make that noise stop,” Hubert said, and I got on my knees on the road next to them and stretched out across the gap between the road and the car and pulled the keys out of the ignition. I stood back up.
Hubert’s feet began to work, his boots like a duck’s feet under water. He pulled himself forward on his elbows until his body covered Keith’s. I knew he would not be able to hold that position long.
“Do you need help?” I said, and started towards him. He raised up on his elbows. “Let me help you,” I said.
With a long low moan, Hubert grabbed Keith Kelly’s head with both hands and as Keith’s body fell back across the cab of the truck, Hubert twisted Keith Kelly’s face towards him. Keith Kelly’s neck made a sound like a pop bottle coming open, and when it did Hubert turned loose of his head and Keith’s body slumped into almost exactly the position it was in when we found it. The snow swirled into my brain.
. . . I said over and over, louder and louder til Hubert raised a finger marked with Keith’s blood.
“Shh,” he said, finger to his lips, “time for quiet.”
My breaths came so fast there was no way to count them.
“Help me get him out of there,” Hubert said.
I stared at the road. I dropped the keys into the snow. Hubert pulled Keith Kelly up by the seat belt again, a horror show rerun, quicker paced now, and got him first by one arm and then the other and got him out of the truck. Keith Kelly lay face down on the road, his arms above his head like he was diving into something.
“What have you done?” I said to Hubert.
“He was already dead,” Hubert said.
“No, he wasn’t,” I said. “I don’t believe you.”
Hubert put in a dip of snuff. “Good thing you aint the coroner,” he said. I stood there staring at Hubert with my mouth hanging open. The snow fell on both of us. I stood there thinking: if it wasn’t Hubert killed Keith, it was me.
“He was going off the road anyway,” Hubert said. “Wadn’t nothing you done.”
The snow stuck to my nose, my eyelashes. I turned from Hubert and stuck out my tongue. The snow stuck to it too. When it snows here, things get very quiet. There is no school; cars don’t go out. Nobody out in their yard. No four-wheelers. No hammering. Nobody on a grinding wheel in the driveway. A lot of times a tree or a bunch of trees will get loaded down with snow and fall across the power lines and knock out all the electricity. So there is that—the sound of the tree cracking, and the transformer going “pop.” But mostly there is nothing. Nothing but what you see—the snow falling from bushes in clods, hitting the snow on the ground without a sound, or maybe just the slightest sound.
Standing on the road with Hubert, Keith Kelly’s body cold and getting colder, it was all that—quiet and dark, like a pretty Christmas card a hippie would send, something simple, light and dark, printed with a woodblock, so you can feel the dent in the card where the ink went on. The picture is a fallen log or a stand of trees, and it makes you feel you are right there in the scene, the printer’s woodblock straight from the spot in the forest that’s in the picture. And everything is safe, and you are looking at the Christmas card, and someone you don’t know hands you a cup of something that smells of those spices you only have in stuff at Christmas and sometimes Thanksgiving. And the cup is steaming, and you hold the cup up and the steam curls in front of the Christmas card when you close one eye and a log pops in the fire, and it is warm, and you don’t even want a present.
Act 4: Meatspace
10: Raccoon Eyes
“Me and the wife heard the noise.”
Mamaw’s Escort stood on its grill in the ditch, and Keith Kelly lay face down dead in the snow, his arms stretched towards Love World, the sex toy shop below the road on Lower Drop Creek. Furl, the maintenance man they just fired at my high school, stood over us in sweatpants and unlaced workboots. “The wife sent me up here to see what happened,” Furl said, staring at Keith Kelly’s F-150 turned up on its side. Furl’s eyes followed the blood in the snow where Hubert had dragged Keith Kelly out of his truck. Furl squatted beside Keith Kelly and turned his head sideways to look into Keith’s face.
“Nice truck,” Furl said. Hubert spat into the snow. Furl stood up with a moan and said, “Is everybody all right?” When we didn’t say anything, Furl said, “Except for him, I mean,” waving his hand over Keith Kelly. Hubert walked back to the Escort. I was afraid he would come back with something to kill Furl. Furl stepped past me, got between me and Hubert. “You all right, Dawn?” Furl said to me, but kept looking out into the darker place Hubert had gone.
I said, “He come up behind us, lost control.”
Hubert’s sneakers crunched in the snow. “You got a phone?” Hubert said to Furl.
Furl nodded and waddled back towards his house, us behind. “Nothing good can come of this,” Hubert said when Furl was far enough away.
“Come of what?” I said.
“Calling the law.”
/>
I stopped walking towards Furl’s house. My breath clouded out in front of me.
“Can’t get no fair shake,” Hubert said. “Law’s got us buffaloed.” Furl stopped and looked back at us. Hubert walked towards him.
“I don’t know,” Hubert said.
“Then why did you ask to use the phone?”
Hubert shook his head. “He didn’t need to be doing no more looking.”
I hurried up next to Hubert. “So what are you going to do when we get in his house?”
“You go back,” Hubert said to me, stepping into Furl’s yard. “Make sure nobody don’t run over Keith.”
When I got back, the snow had covered Keith Kelly. I got on my knees beside him and put my hands under his ribs. I lifted and kept sliding my hands under him until I got him flipped over on his back. He landed with a “chink.” He had a small flask, stainless steel, in his shirt pocket. There wasn’t snow on Keith Kelly’s front side. I could see the shine of blood and the orange stripes from his miner’s clothes under his coat by what little light come from the houses across the road. Coal dust caked around his eyes and down his gray cheeks.
I pulled the flask out of his pocket and drank the last of Keith Kelly’s bourbon. I put my hand on his wavy brown hair, the thing my mother found so beautiful about him. I ran my fingers through it. It was nice hair. I rolled Keith again and got him off the road. I leaned against his truck and wished for coffee and a better life. It’s not a thing I’m proud of, but I didn’t wish Keith Kelly back alive.
Twenty minutes later, blue lights filled the narrow curve. One police car set up below and another above me and Keith. A state police with his stiff hat pushed forward on his brow walked towards me in his shiny shoes and his state police winter coat. He asked me what my name was and if I was all right. When I told him, he wrote down my name and looked over the scene. When he got to Keith Kelly, he felt of Keith’s neck, looked at his watch, and wrote in his book. Then he waved up the man in the other car, talked to him, and went back to his car.