by Robert Gipe
When the man came back he said, “Tell me what happened here.”
“We was driving—”
“Who was driving?”
“He,” I said, pointing at Keith Kelly, “come up behind us.”
“Ma’am. Who was driving?”
“He banged into us three different times.”
“Ma’am—”
“I was just trying to drive.”
“You were driving?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And how old are you?”
“Almost sixteen.”
“I need to see your permit,” he said. And then he leaned in. “Have you been drinking, ma’am?”
“Yes,” I said.
“She don’t know what she’s saying,” Hubert spoke at my shoulder. “I was driving.”
They separated me and Hubert, took us to either end of the two crashed vehicles.
The young police said to me, “So you were driving.”
I stood a long minute. The young police didn’t have any hair showing underneath his hat. I bet he had a wife, and I bet she had a lot of hair. I looked over in the direction where Hubert and the other state police had gone. The snow fell thicker. The big police flashlights drove out all other light.
“Miss,” the police said.
“Hubert,” I said. “Hubert was driving.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Yes,” I said. I wanted to make up a big story how I had started off driving and how we had changed drivers at the Lower Dogsplint Church, but one time I heard Hubert say don’t get cute. Don’t be thinking you’re smart.
“Because you said earlier,” the police said, “you were driving.”
I looked over to where Keith Kelly was, imagined Momma crying over his body.
“I took this out of his pocket,” I said, and held the flask out in my flat open palm.
“Where’d you get that?”
“When I was rolling him,” I said.
More cop vehicles showed up and these guys got out and looked at all the skid marks. They got out cameras and set up lights and strung yellow tape said “Do not cross.” They reminded me of computer boys at school who thought they were cool because they had carts with tools on them nobody else knew how to use. They were cop AV.
“You gonna arrest me or not?” I heard Hubert say.
The state police asked me a bunch of other questions about Keith running up on us, about who crashed into who, and I mostly told him I didn’t know, that it all happened fast. Then the two state police come together and talked for a while, keeping me and Hubert apart. Hubert stepped into the weak light from the pole at the corner of Furl’s place. He was dull gray, like the light off a pencil lead. Then the scene-reconstruction guys turned on their lights, and the whole place lit up like daytime. The older state police said to Hubert, “You’re free to go, Mr. Jewell.”
“Let’s go, Dawn,” Hubert said.
“Ma’am, we need you to come with us to post.”
“What the hell for?” Hubert said. “She wasn’t driving. You see she got her liquor off of him.”
The younger police said, “You’re free to go, sir.”
“I got a right to be with her,” Hubert said. “I’m her uncle.”
The older state police said, “Are you her guardian, sir?”
“Hell yes, I’m her guardian,” Hubert said. “I’m her daddy’s brother, and her daddy’s dead.”
“Where’s your mother,” the police said.
“That’s who we was hunting,” I said.
“Who do you stay with?”
Mamaw’s name was on my lips, and then I looked at Hubert and said,
The two police looked at each other and then at us. “We have your contact information, Mr. Jewell,” the older one said. “Thank you for your cooperation.”
The young police got me behind the arm, started walking me towards his vehicle. The other one got in his vehicle and took off.
“It’s gonna be all right, Dawn,” Hubert said. The young police pressed me down by the top of my head into his vehicle. “You stay calm,” Hubert said. “I’ll be down there soon as I can.” Hubert walked up to the window glass. The young police asked him to step away from the vehicle. “Calm,” Hubert said. “Don’t get excited.”
***
When I got to the state police place, they set me in a room by myself in a metal chair. A raccoon-eyed woman came in, looked drunker than anybody I’d seen all night. She didn’t look like state police. She was a case worker or something. When she asked me what happened, I told her Hubert was driving and we had a wreck and a man got killed. When she asked me did I get in fights in school, I told her about breaking Albert’s ribs between first and second period, and I told her about whipping Belinda Coates after French class. She didn’t seem too tore up about it.
Raccoon Eyes asked me about Hubert, asked me about Momma, asked me about Keith Kelly. When she ran out of steam asking, she told me she had to call a judge and see whether to keep me overnight and left the room.
About that time Hubert showed up. Hubert seemed to know everybody at the state police post, seemed to know how everything was supposed to go. It made it easier to breathe to look out and see Hubert talking close to Raccoon Eyes with his hands pressed together in front of him.
Raccoon Eyes disappeared, and I waited for Hubert’s eyes to find me. I knew they would even though the glass rectangle in the door wasn’t very big. When his eyes met mine, I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen him in such bright light. Probably never. He looked like somebody in some low-ceiling white-light don’t-give-a-shit-how-bright-things-are church. Had he raised up a rattlesnake above his head and started speaking in tongues I wouldn’t have been surprised.
When Raccoon Eyes came back, she asked me was I still suspended from school. I told her it was Christmas vacation. She got a look on her face like she had time-machine eyes and she was trying to drive me backwards in time by looking at me.
“The judge says he’s not going to keep you overnight,” she said. “In a few weeks you’ll get a letter telling you when and where you need to go. All right?”
“Yes.”
“Dawn,” that woman said, “you’ve got yourself in a bad place.”
“Do you want us to call your grandmother?”
“Can I go home with my uncle?”
Raccoon Eyes gave me the time-machine look again. “Is that what you want?”
“I guess,” I said. “Don’t matter.”
***
A coal train slipped through the mist and pearly light of town and stopped me and Hubert going home. The clanging of the bells at the railroad crossing was the same as it had always been. The train wheezed and squealed like it had forever. The moon looked back at me from the top of the sky, hazy and wakeful. There was no talking in town that night, only snow and the tossing of old men in their sleep, lights on all through the night, hopeless dogs breathing hard in dark corners of stale houses.
“Is this what you thought life would be?” I asked Hubert.
“Pretty much,” Hubert said.
***
Hubert rattled Mamaw’s beat-to-death Escort into the carport and walked back to his place. Mamaw didn’t wake up as I came through the dark house, and it wasn’t til I was in bed—the sheets cold and starchy—that I thought of Momma. I still didn’t know where she was. She might still be setting at Keith Kelly’s house for all I knew. I got out of bed and stood over Mamaw’s phone and thought, “This is too weird.” And I went back to bed. I knew we hadn’t heard the end of it. Me and Hubert would have to account for the death of Keith Kelly. I thrashed around in bed, pretty sure that was the way the rest of my life was going to be—never a decent night’s sleep because I was a killer, a murderous killer, just another Jewell, just another one of my daddy’s outlaw kinfolks.
The next morning was snow quiet, snow deep, and Mamaw’s shuffling and banging in the kitchen was like any other of ten thousand days. If she had
come to the room to see about me, I would have told her everything. I swear I would have. But she didn’t. I got up and went in the kitchen. It was hot as blazes in there.
“Sit down,” Mamaw said, not hardly looking at me, and I thought she’d found out, but she just set a plate of hot eggs in front of me, eggs scrambled hard.
I said, “These are the way you like eggs, Mamaw. These are your eggs.” And she said, “Hush now. You’re going to wake your Momma.”
I said, “Do what?”
And she said, “Your momma’s upstairs.”
***
When Momma came downstairs, the first thing she said was, “Let’s go to Kingsport. Let’s go Christmas shopping.”
“How?” I said.
“Hubert gave me a wad of money,” Momma said. “We got to get for the whole family.”
I sat blinking like a fresh-born baby.
“Do you want to go or don’t you?” Momma said, drumming her fingers on the back of her cigarette pack.
Mamaw came in the kitchen. “I got to see the governor,” she said.
“Do what?” I said and looked at Momma, but Momma had stuck her nose in the refrigerator.
Back in the early fall, back when the leaves were still on the trees and the governor’s reelection didn’t seem so up in the air, his Tahoe pulled up at the Civic Center down in town, and he went in and gave a speech. Mamaw was there in her putty-colored shoes and her Roy Orbison sunglasses, and she and the organizer girls, and those retired coal miners, and those people whose house foundation had been shook by the blasting on Blue Bear held up signs asking the governor wasn’t he worried about history’s judgment, wasn’t he ashamed to stand by and watch the state’s highest peak get strip mined. When the governor left the building, he bowed his head and didn’t say anything. Then later when Mamaw and them got a lawyer, the governor said he didn’t have no power, didn’t have no say-so in matters like this, and the newspaper editorial writers (back then the newspaper was still big and wide and people still read their editorials) said:
And the governor he called Mamaw’s lawyer and said we got to talk about this, we got to get something settled. We got to get folks like Mamaw quieted down, the governor said to the folks beside him, until we can get this election done, and so Mamaw and them and the governor’s people started talking to the company people, and that got the governor calmed down a little bit, but then Mamaw and them filed their lands unsuitable petition, which is federal, and it started looking like maybe Mamaw and them might win and stop all the mining on Blue Bear, and people wrote letters to the governor by the thousand—letters on real paper like the newspaper was then, with real stamps on them—telling the governor he needed to do right, and so he said again, you coal companies and you putty-colored mamaws, yall need to sit down and figure this out once and for all, and so they set a meeting, and so Mamaw couldn’t go Christmas shopping with us on the Saturday before Christmas in 1998. She had to go see the governor.
That left it to me and Momma to go to Kingsport to get Christmas presents for the family. I didn’t tell Momma or Mamaw what had happened to Keith Kelly. This was before cell phones, before Facebook, and a person not knowing what happened the night before was possible, particularly if a person is up early and about the business of getting out of town, and so it was that me and Momma ended up on the strange sunny day after that big storm, sliding off the mountain headed to Kingsport in Hubert’s big green truck.
When we got on the road, I said, “When did Hubert give you this money?”
Momma said, “He come over before light, left me the truck keys and an envelope of shopping money.”
“Left it where?”
“On Momma’s kitchen counter.”
“You saw him?”
“Well, no,” Momma said, “but I heard his truck.”
Meaning the truck we were then sitting in, massive and green and high above the snow, crunching gravel with tire treads like rubber dinosaur teeth. I wondered that day in the blinding brightness of the sunshine on the fresh-fallen snow, the sky a burning blue, what happened to the cuss-word way Momma talked to me last time we had been together, before we lost her the night before. I dreaded to ask her what brought such a change or where she had been while the snow fell. I feared what she might say, be it the truth, or worse, a question that might cause me to have to tell that me and Hubert had killed her new boyfriend.
“So Albert and Evie are courting?” Momma said.
“I reckon.”
“Can’t no good come of that,” Momma said.
I didn’t think much good could come of Albert period, but I said anyway: “Why do you say that?” cause I liked Evie.
“Shoo,” Momma said, ripping past a little-car man, passing him in his own lane in a cloud of blue smoke, causing cuss words to pass his Sunday school liver lips. “Evie won’t give Albert a minute’s peace. Spindly little hen. ‘Cluck, cluck, cluck,’ scratch, scratch, scratch.”
Momma was wound up. “Got you kicked out of school, didn’t she?”
I said I could go back if I wanted, which was true, thinking of the fire and the Little Debbies that had passed between me and Evie.
“What should we get Hubert for Christmas?” Momma said.
Out loud I said I didn’t know. Hubert’s truck sailed through the slush. The cliffs in the curves glittered and dripped.
Momma said, “I’d like to get him a big gold ring, all pimpy, to wear on his little finger.” Momma’s big laugh showed where she had had her side teeth pulled. We skidded coming out of the curve. “Whoa,” Momma said. The truck straightened out. “We might have to buy a tarp,” she said, “to cover all the presents we’re fixing to get, and bungee cord to hold it down.”
My mother used to love getting people things. Her fingers shook on the wheel, and the smoke coming off the end of her cigarette trembled like the needle on a lie detector.
“I been begging Hubert to build Albert a wrestling ring,” Momma said. “Out in the old man’s shed. I think if he’d just eat he could be a wrestler. Don’t you?”
“Yeah, Momma,” I said. “He’s just a suflex looking for a place to happen.”
Momma gunned it through a yellow light and turned left onto the main drag of Pennington Gap, Virginia. She slammed on the brakes for a gray string of a family crossing the road in front of us. The sun shone bright on the pavement as they straggled from the permanent yard sale at the old car wash to the drugstore. Momma’s cigarette hung on her lip like a two-by-four about to fall out the back of a moving pickup truck. She punched the gas again as the last of them cleared the road. She started mashing buttons and turning knobs on the dashboard. A school bus coming the other way blew its horn, and Momma jerked the truck back in her own lane.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“What’s he doing?” Momma said. “There aint even school today.” She took out her cigarette and coughed. “Find me a radio station, Dawn.”
I got the radio going as Momma jerked through the stop sign at the other end of town, and we cleared Pennington Gap. The radio was set on country, and I turned the dial to the left and Momma wished out loud for Aerosmith, and I kept twisting the dial and for some reason tears came to my eyes, and I got the knob twisted to Willett’s radio station, my wrist turned over, my elbow pointed up in the air. I almost leaned and put my head on Momma’s shoulder, but she started clapping her hands to the song, which wasn’t something I’d thought she’d like. It was a synthesizer dance music song about feeling fascination, and I had to grab the wheel, or at least I thought I did, to keep her from driving Hubert’s truck into a shaley bank or the winter-green river. She didn’t have neither hand on the wheel, but she said, “Dawn, you leave that wheel alone. Aint but one Santa can drive the sleigh, and that Santa is me.”
Once upon a time my mother would have made a hot Santa, but she was dropping weight and getting too bony—drawn about the cheek and eyes—and looking like she needed a good night’s rest. All in all riding with
her didn’t feel like Christmas. Felt more like a scary biker Halloween party.
“How you like your new hairdo?” Momma said. She reached out to palm my green buzz cut.
Momma said, “Let’s get you some big red hat, or a red sweatshirt. No. Candy canes. Get you some candy-cane tights. Make you into a humongous Christmas elf.” And then she started beating on the steering wheel with both hands laughing. I was glad she had hands on the wheel, but I didn’t care much for her elf vision.
Willett Bilson was talking on the radio. It made me happy to go to Kingsport because somehow that might lead me to him, and me and him might talk face-to-face, and who knows it probably wouldn’t but it might—it might end up with me having an actual guy friend.
“He sounds like a pussy,” Momma said.
“Who?” I said, because Willett was playing David Bowie, who I kind of think sounds like a pussy, and if that’s who she was talking about, then I could agree with Momma.
“That DJ,” Momma said.
“No, he don’t,” I said before I thought, and with a voice too hot.
“Ohhh,” Momma said, dragging out the word, “That’s him, aint it? That’s your little heartthrob.”
“No,” I said. I was in a fix because I didn’t like to talk about my business, not with my mother nor anybody else, but I wanted Momma to have her mind on something other than Keith. I was hoping for a nice calm day of Christmas shopping and that Momma had already bought Keith Kelly something.
“Look at that,” I said, and pointed across Momma at a pink Ford Pinto wagon had a bunch of young boys in it. “Aint seen one of them in a long time,” I said.
“Oooh,” Momma said, “that dark-headed one is hot,” and I was like oh no. She was getting sex on the brain. I swallowed hard and said, “Why do you think Willett sounds like a pussy?”
The song on the radio ended and we come under a railroad bridge, and the sun poured through the windshield and Willett said, “Fall into it, children, fall into it. Fall into the rich, buttery goodness of the world. Spread your arms wide, abandon concern for your personal body odor and fall into it. Ahhh, the world is a swimming pool full of Cool Whip, with marshmallows stirred all through it, marshmallows of various hues and the size of throw pillows.”