Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel

by Robert Gipe

  Willett played “Holiday in Cambodia” by the Dead Kennedys. Momma pulled her chin in, raised her eyebrows and said, “How old did you say he is?”

  “Eighteen,” I said.

  “He sounds younger than you,” she said.

  “He’s been to college,” I said, “in North Carolina.”

  “Well,” Momma said, “there you go,” and we both fell silent.

  I said, “This is where people get stopped speeding a lot.”

  “That right?” Momma said.

  “What Hubert told me,” I said.

  “Your daddy and I used to go to North Carolina,” Momma said. “To see his mother.”

  I remembered one trip there, right before Dad died. I remember his mother liked me, but she was strange and old-timey.

  “I am going to get Keith,” Momma said, “a leather jacket. A leather jacket and a fifth of liquor and a bottle of cologne that makes him smell like a jungle beast.”

  I sat and stared out my window, wished I was one of the cows standing on the gentle knobs of the leveling-out hills of Virginia, hills more mellow than the walled-up rat maze of mountains where we lived.

  “I want you to start being nice to Keith, Dawn,” Momma said. “You hurt his feelings.”

  “How could I hurt his feelings?” I said. “I don’t even talk to him.”

  “Well, you do, you and Momma both. You hurt his feelings talking bad about strip mining.”

  “I thought you was against strip mining too,” I said. “That’s what you told us when you was up in that tree.”

  It was too hot in the truck cab. Momma had the heat turned up, and the sun made everything bright white. I started feeling pukish. Momma’s top lip hairs had sweat in them. She looked like my mother again, like she hadn’t for a long time, her flesh golden-brown in the sunlight, a dark glow coming from inside her. Maybe the glow was just me needing her, because I was scared about what we’d done to Keith.

  She said, “Dawn, you got any money you could kick in on a leather jacket for Keith?” My mouth fell open, and Momma said, “I know you got money, Dawn. All that work you been doing for Hubert. Aint no need for you to be so stingy.”

  I said, “Keith Kelly is dead,” just like that, flat as a piece of paper, and Momma didn’t take her eyes off the road and she said, “That’s not funny, Dawn. You know better than to joke with me about stuff like that.” Then she looked at me. “I am still your mother.”

  A van cut in front of us, and I didn’t care if we had a wreck. Momma stomped the brakes, said, “Son of a bitch,” and laid on the truck horn. The van sped off.

  I said, “You don’t believe me, ask Hubert.”

  Momma said, “You better not be fucking with me, Dawn,” and when I sat there she said, “I’m serious. You’re not too damn big for me to not still beat your ass.”

  I was still looking out the window, so I know she couldn’t see it, but I was crying a little. She pulled over to the side of the road under a billboard said if you get your GED they could get you NASCAR tickets, and Momma said, “Look at me,” and I did and Momma turned off the radio and Willett was gone and his old music was gone and my mother’s face was alive in front of me, both eyes wide open and human with wet in her black-painted lashes, all dolled up for the trip to town, and now the tears rolled off my face hot and steady, and my mother took my glasses off, put her thumbs to my tears, and said, “What happened, Dawn?”

  And so I told her how Keith Kelly died and how I thought it might have been my fault the way I jerked the wheel in front of him. I put it out there because I wanted to put my head on my mother’s shoulder, bony like it was there by the side of the road in the white winter sun. She stared out the windshield like she was trying to see things she wouldn’t never see again, and I said, “I’m sorry.” She started the truck and pulled back on the highway in front of a flatbed and said, “What is he thinking? He thinking if he can make me miserable with everybody else then I’ll go back to him?”

  I wanted to be a part of what my mother was going through, but I was too young. There were simpler games I should be playing, games that wouldn’t make my stomach hurt so bad. I felt like I was watching a show people my age weren’t supposed to be watching, except that the show was my life, and I was watching by myself.

  Outside, it was a nice day. Flocks of birds lit and picked at the green grass showing between the sparkling patches of snow. Hubert’s truck was big and loud as a Tarzan movie jungle drum. Momma didn’t say anything to me the rest of the way. She muttered to herself and worked herself up into such a mad you could see her eyeballs vibrating. When we pulled up at my aunt June’s house, she jumped out and ran in without knocking even though she hadn’t been there, as far as I know, in years.

  I stayed in the truck when my mother ran in June’s house, which set across the street from a long, straight stretch of railroad track. It was one of a string of little houses facing the chemical factory, small and old and town-looking. It had a small porch with iron rails made into the shape of twining vines holding up the awning. I imagined my mother in there crying into June’s shoulder, June in some pretty color you couldn’t get at Walmart, and my breath grabbed up in me in the cooling truck cab and I tried to gag, but couldn’t.

  I was in the town where Willett Bilson lived, and I imagined his shoulders, even though I couldn’t really, didn’t have sense enough in my mind what his body would have been like. All I had in my mind was the picture of him with Chewbacca. His shoulders were broad and sharp, like he had a coat hanger still in his shirt. But he was nice and tall, tall as Chewbacca. The sun was bright, but in the house shadow in June’s narrow driveway I stayed cold. The chemical factory plumed out white smoke from a dozen smokestacks in the dim green light of Hubert’s rearview mirror, and I could smell their stinks layered one on top of another—the strongest stink like the poop of a cat that’s been living on molded popcorn for a month. I had just come to name that smell when Momma ran up to my window. She tried the door handle, but it was locked, and before I could get it open, she hollered through the glass, “Get out,” and when I opened the door, the cold clean winter air rushed in, and she squeezed me at the elbow and said, “Come on,” rough as a cop.

  I said, “Where am I going?”

  She said, “June will tell you,” and soon as I was clear of the truck, she stomped over to her side, jumped in, and started the engine. My door was still open and she said, “Here,” pushing my bag towards me.

  I said, “Where are you going?”

  “Home,” she said.

  I said, “What about Christmas shopping?”

  She said, “Shut the door.”

  When I did, she put the truck in reverse and left me standing in June’s driveway, the eaves dripping snow.

  ***

  I had not seen June since she came to my grandfather Houston’s birthday back in September. Their birthdays are three days apart. Generally June didn’t come home. I wondered how long I would be at June’s. People tell me all the time I remind them of her.

  When I turned to look, June stood at the front door, her fingers white and clean against the cast-iron ivy vine. She stood there with a black T-shirt on under some orangy-pink shirt, and she seemed lighter than anyone in the family, even birdy Cora, but she had Mamaw’s square-set jaw and Houston’s Santa Claus eyes. June sighed and waved at me.

  “You want something to drink?” she said, her fingers clung to the porch rail.

  “Where’s she going?” I said.

  “Home, I reckon.”

  “Is she coming back?” I said.

  June came down the four steps and stood beside me, put her arm around me. “You used to like hot chocolate,” she said. I put my head on her shoulder, and she walked me up in her house.

  11: Fake Marshmallows

  June’s front room was dark and golden, like a pirate treasure cave. There were posters on the walls for hippie music shows and works of art that were funky and done, you could tell, by people June kne
w. There were quilted and woven and crocheted things, and it was hard to imagine anybody ever throwing up on any of it or anybody ever flinging a chair at somebody in that room. Everything looked like it had been sitting there forever with its perfect chair angles and fat art books on low tables, chilling out until the guy from the magazine got there to take the picture.

  “Make yourself to home,” June said. I could hear nervous in her voice. I sat down on the sofa. June stood looking at me like a bird lost its flock, scared to fly off with me. Beautiful bird.

  June went in the kitchen. The refrigerator opened with a soft pop. A pan hit the stovetop, and a cabinet door opened and closed. A spoon came out of a drawer with a tinkle and a rattle, and my breath came easy, and the stove eye went “unnnnn,” circling up orange on the cat-black stovetop. The wood spoon against the bottom of the saucepan was gentle, like the lap of water against a pier in the summertime at a lake house. June hummed over her saucepan of hot chocolate, maybe to calm herself, maybe to calm me. I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t even know she was humming. Maybe she just hummed—like the stove eye hummed, like the stars hummed.

  Directly June set a mug thrown by somebody she knew (of course) down in front of me on a piece of tile with a picture of a dog painted by a child, and then she plundered through a pile of CDs, one at a time, careful like she was picking apart a snowball. She turned to me and said, “Do you want to listen to something?” She stood straight and beautiful, like an unwrapped candy bar before anybody’s taken a bite out of it.

  Tears filled my eyes.

  She went to the kitchen and came back with her own mug of hot chocolate and sat down beside me with her knees together. A car slished by on the street outside. Cotton-white smoke boiled out of the factory stacks, and finally June said, “How are you?”

  It all came out. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how I am. Crazy. I’m crazy. I quit school. I wrecked a car and a truck and a four-wheeler and another car. I killed a man. Stole a bunch of stuff. Drove my mother off the deep end. Everybody hates me cause I’m a treehugger. I want to strangle about ten different people. I’m a crazy dangerous person liable to go off at any minute.”

  I wanted to knock everything off June’s peaceful coffee table, but I didn’t because I was afraid she would kick me out. I clenched up my fists and went “URRRRRRR” and put my hands to my head and tried to pull out my hair, but it was too short to grip. I grabbed at it until June put her hand to mine and laid my hands in my lap and left hers there on top of mine. We sat there for a bit, and I settled down some, and June said, “Yeah,” soft as rabbit fur. She was a good deal smaller than me, but she pulled me toward her, and as I fell into her, I knew in my heart I was not dangerous, and that I did not want to be, either. My head landed in June’s lap, her hand on my hair, and I just breathed and breathed in June’s pirate cove.

  “It is not too cold out,” June said, “doesn’t seem like.”

  “No,” I said, “it wasn’t too bad.”

  “How’s your chocolate?”

  “Good,” I said. “I like that the marshmallows aren’t fake.”

  June said, “You mean like those little hard ones that come in the packets?”

  I nodded.

  “I hate those,” June said.

  “Me too,” I said.

  I rose up out of June’s lap and sipped at the mug, my heart like one of those movies where they take a picture of a flower every day and run the pictures back fast and it looks like it’s blooming all at once.

  “You want some more?” June said.

  “I’m all right.”

  June put her hands between her knees, looked down, and then around the room. “I’m sorry it’s so quiet here,” she said.

  I shrugged my shoulders. I said, “You like it here?”

  “Here in this house,” June said, “or here in Kingsport?”

  “Don’t matter,” I said. “I was just wanting to hear you talk.”

  June looked at me fluttery. “I think this house is right for me,” she said. “Not too big and not so small I’m always tripping over myself.”

  I said, “You got a lot of stuff.”

  “I do,” she said, and laughed a watery laugh, water like comes out of a fountain at a shopping center.

  “Where does it all come from?” I said.

  “Don’t all come from one place,” she said. “People bring me stuff.”

  “You got a lot of friends, I guess.”

  “I guess,” June said.

  “Momma says you been everwhere.”

  “What does she say?”

  “Nothing. Just that you been a bunch of places.”

  June chewed on the pinky nail of her left hand.

  I said, “What did you do to your finger?” June had four Band-Aids on her left hand pinky.

  “Cutting up a chicken. Do you like curry?”

  June nodded.

  “Why aren’t you at work?” I said.

  “Christmas break,” she said. I sipped chocolate. June said, “Why have you stopped going to school?”

  I looked around June’s front room and wished music was playing. June’s eyes were gray like a shepherd dog’s, and I felt like a sheep, my urge to stray destroyed. June looked at her hands in her lap. “I should spend more time with you,” she said. “That’s my fault.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Cause if I did,” she said, “I would know why you left school. I would know.”

  I thought she was going to cry. “Kingsport seems OK,” I said. “All my teachers like it,” I said. “Guy teachers especially. They say they like it better when their wives shop here. They say it’s easy to get in and out of the stores in Kingsport.”

  June smiled. “You get to know people,” she said. “They’re really nice. Mellow. And invisible weird.”

  One time Hubert took me shooting, told me how you had to relax your face and eyes to see the animals moving in the woods. I looked out June’s front window, tried to relax my eyeballs so I could see the invisible weird in Kingsport, flat-chested little factory town.

  June got up and went in the kitchen, and came back and put the radio on Willett’s radio station. I wanted to hear a strong woman sing, some liquor-drinking, cigarette-smoking woman who knew exactly what she wanted to say. Maybe she didn’t know how to run her life, but at least knew what she wanted to sing, what she wanted people to hear, and when she got done singing, the crowd would cheer like a video poker machine hitting jackpot, gold coins spilling out on me and all the other tin-ear suckers cut loose in time.

  But Willett wasn’t on the air, and they weren’t playing strong-voice women. They were playing music like Houston had in his music room, 78 rpm records. They played one where different musicians played different little bits of old fiddle songs and banjo songs and harmonica songs, and then they would pretend to drink moonshine, and one of them talked, giving a lesson on how things go in the country, and I thought in that moment how recreating a thing, making a thing seem like the same thing later, was stupid, was impossible.

  I said, “Fix me something to eat, Aunt June.”

  June popped up like an actress I’d picked to be in a movie and said, “Come on in the kitchen.” She got out a pottery bowl, a pretty thing didn’t look like June used because she had to wipe the dust out of it and rinse it off.

  “I love these bowls,” she said.

  June handed me the bowl, and I held it while she spooned brown rice from a saucepan and then dippered me out some green-yellow chicken stew from an iron pot. I said, “Where do you want me to sit?” and she reached out her hand towards the table, fingers delicate and white as Virginia Slims. June’s hands danced over a stack of cloth napkins folded in an oak split basket. I put a spoon into the bowl of chicken. She lay a napkin down beside my bowl. I could hear the house creaking. June set down across from me. I ate the stew fast, bite on top of bite, and it wasn’t so bad.

  ***

  The dress June slipped over her head tha
t evening sparkled night-blue. She said we were going to a party.

  “What kind of party?” I said.

  “A dancing party.”

  “Why?” I said.

  June said, “There will be all kind of people there who will want to meet you because of what you and Cora are doing on Blue Bear.”

  “I don’t have a dress,” I said.

  “Do you want one?” June said.

  “No.”

  June swept her hair up on top of her head, pinned it, sprayed it. Then she stuck plastic flowers and wire strung with tinsel stars in it. She looked at me. “How about we put some glitter on your face?”

  I said, “I don’t know, Aunt June.”

  She sprayed glitter on her own face. She looked at me smiling and bright.

  “You look like a fairy,” I said.

  “You want some?” she said, her eyebrows dancing.

  “You make glitter sound like some kind of dope,” I said.

  “Glitter is a kind of dope,” she said. Then she said, “HA.” And then: “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

  I took the can and sprayed glitter on my face.

  “That’s some Christmas cheer, right there,” June said.

  I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked like I could grant myself wishes.

  “Willett Bilson might be there tonight,” June said.

  I looked at myself again. “I don’t guess you’d give me a sip of something would you, Aunt June?”

  “No,” said June, “I don’t guess I would.”

  ***

  We drove an hour getting to the party place. It was dark and a way I’d never been. We pulled off the blacktop onto a rocky road, and the car bounced until we came to a gate where a young boy with a red beard covering the front of his shirt sat. He smiled and pulled open the cattle gate. The road on the other side of the gate was rougher than what come before, and I asked June, “What is this place?”