by Robert Gipe
We passed three people with angel wings carrying liquor bottles coming up the steep grade towards us. “Everybody out here owns their own house,” June said. The road went down steeper and steeper. “But they own the land in common.” We passed a house that was all weird angles and porches. We passed a house on stilts with three VW vans underneath. We passed more houses, all covered with unpainted wood and decks running around them and lots of potted plants. Houses built as an idea. Book-smart people houses.
June turned onto the grass, down a meadow towards the river. There were cars parked all down the meadow, back ends covered with bumper stickers for the earth and women and peace and banjos. There were so many bumper stickers. June parked and we got out, and we passed people with more hair, and bowties and sandals with thick winter socks. The men called each other “dude.” We came to a barn. The door swung open, and an older man with little round glasses and cups of beer in each hand said, “Aw right. Merry Christmas. Praise Allah. Disco Duck.” June hugged the man, and I stepped through the door. A band played at the other end of the barn, raised slightly above the crowd. They had electric guitars and buck teeth and played “Mustang Sally” with their heads bowed. The people dancing hollered, “Woooo!”
The dancing was either jerky and reminded you of drowning people or slow and almost not like dancing at all. Everyone seemed anxious to let everyone else see how happy they were. There were people above looking down from the barn loft, people standing leaning against rough lumber rails. Hay trailed down from above when they scuffed their feet.
“Are you OK?” June was in my face, like the glitter on both our faces was magnetized.
“Yes,” I said.
June introduced me to a white-bearded lawyer and a woman with uncombed hair said she was a doctor. She introduced me to a professor of this and a person making a film about that. A fat man with black sideburns asked June to dance, and I followed somebody up a ladder to the loft. I did not see anybody close to my age. I did not see Willett Bilson. The music was loud and not so bad, and I wished I had something to drink.
A bald man who looked like he owned a business that used to do a lot better than it is doing now said, “Well, hello there.” His whiskey breath made me light-headed. The man’s forehead was the rind of a white watermelon, disappearing into his ski cap, and I wanted to thump it so bad. It made me sick when he said twice, “You got a feller?” I tried to set fire to him with my eyes. He looked like he was made out of marshmallows. I imagined turning his cheeks a beautiful golden brown, and then his whole face, and then his whole head flame and then ash, flattening like a poor kid’s birthday wishes gone to nothing.
“Cause I,” he said, “can dance. And I,” he said, “can fix a sink. And I,” he said, “will remember your birthday.”
“I don’t care,” I said, “for you to even know my birthday.”
“Do you care about this?” he said and jingled the worn keys to some kind of Chrysler in my face. “Three payments ahead,” he said, and raised his eyebrows and rocked forward on the balls of his feet, which were in low brown shoes with rawhide laces, and his thumb pushed loose a cup from the stack of red plastic cups in his hand. “You want a drink?” he said. “You look thirsty,” he said.
My aunt’s hippie party swirled below. They were all elbows and earrings down on the dance floor while me and this man with his bubblegum lips and his pitcher of milky-green something stood up above in the barn loft, amplified hippie music about cowboys and drugs and cars that got poor gas mileage knocking loose the hay at our feet.
“Me and you should think about getting married,” he said.
I said, “You got any ice?”
“How old are you?” he said as I took the cup and he poured me some of what he had. I didn’t give an age, not until I got me a cup full, and when he stopped pouring, he went to put his arm around me, and I spun out from under him and spilled some of what he gave me, and then quick I drank the rest. He raised his eyebrows like he was the witch in Snow White and that cup was the apple.
I said, “Don’t you touch me,” and he just raised his eyebrows again.
“Where’s your feller?” he said, and he tried to pour me some more to drink, and I moved my cup and the green poured out on the boards, dripped through to the stalls below. “Wasteful,” he said. “Waste not, want not,” he said.
I said, “I got me a feller. And he’s a good man.”
“Well, where’s he at?” that moonheaded man said, his eyes shrunk up inside his thick eyeglasses. “A fortune,” he said. “I made a fortune in the seventies.” He pointed as he spoke, his cup in his pointing hand. “Everybody wanted coal when the A-rabs cut off the oil. We all had helicopters and cocaine, and everybody wore big gold chains.” He touched the hair over his collarbones. “By God, a man could fill a coal gon with rotten wood. Put coal across the top. Sell it for a hundred and fifty a ton. The only time they ever treated us like they ought to.”
I started moving away. He grabbed my wrist.
“You need a man man,” he said, “somebody not afraid to be a man.”
“I got a man,” I said, but I trailed off saying it, cause I didn’t know what I had, didn’t know if Willett Bilson would ever show up, and what would show up if he did.
“You aint got no man,” the marshmallow said, “because you don’t know how to appreciate.”
His grip was tight and I wasn’t sure I could whip him. And I was in the wrong spot to knock him out of the barn loft. His belly was causing his shirt buttons to pull his button holes wide open. His pants was cinched so low didn’t look like he had a behind.
“You’re a man?” I said.
“That’s right,” he said.
I said, “You sure? You look like you’re about to have a baby to me.”
His eyes flashed with fire, but a smile come on his face. “Ride ’em, cowgirl,” he said.
And he said, “Aint nobody trying to scare nobody.” But his eyes stayed burning hot, and he still had hold of my wrist.
I didn’t know where I was at except I was over my head. I knew I should just hit him, and somebody would stop him before it got too bad on me. But I just didn’t know. I was too far from home. Anything could happen. Things I hadn’t seen before. And so I stood there, staring at the creases in his forehead, the red plastic cup in my free hand like a play telephone on a string pulled tight and me with no idea who was at the other end.
The marshmallow man said, “They’re gonna start a fire here in a minute.” When I turned to look at the dance floor, he said, “Down by the river.” He moved his thumb back and forth on my arm. “You want to go down there?” he said.
“No, she don’t,” said a voice behind me. Decent Ferguson grabbed me by the elbow with one hand and took my cup with the other. “Come on, girl,” she said. “There’s somebody I want you to meet.” Decent dumped out my cup when we got away from the bald man. She said, “Welcome to the party, little girl.”
Decent took me outside. The night sky was clear and cold. Decent was bare-armed, had on an emerald-green satin spaghetti-strap thing and cowboy boots. “Shit,” she said. We went to her Bronco. It was still cold there, but she didn’t start it, just threw on her coat, took a brown-bag bottle from between the seats and poured it into my cup, swigged straight from the bottle and handed me the cup. I took a swallow. It was sweet and peachy, and Decent looked at me with slow-down eyes. “Go easy, honey. Go easy,” she said. I nodded and sipped slower.
“Heard you had a wreck.”
“I did,” I said.
“June will take care of you,” she said.
“What are you doing here?”
“I been coming to this for years,” Decent said. “This is my tribe.”
I said, “Who was that guy?”
“Up in the loft? They call him Billy Goat Gruff. He was fixing to propose to you. That’s about all he does—drink and try and get women to marry him.”
“Hunh.”
“Hey listen,” she said
. “How’s your momma doing?”
“I don’t know. I aint seen her.”
“I heard she was cutting a swath. Heard she tried to run over Hubert in his own truck.”
“Tried?”
“I don’t reckon she killed him. I hear she came at him twice, but he got in the truck bed and wouldn’t come out til she gave him the keys. I guess she messed up his paint job pretty bad.”
“Hunh,” I said.
There was a tap at Decent’s window. She cracked it open. “Hey baby.” The woman at the window opened the back door and got in. “How’s it going in there?” Decent said.
“Good,” the woman said. “No broken bones yet.” Her hand reached over the seat to me. “I’m Sarah.”
“Hello,” I said. Sarah had short hair and—like everybody else at the party—round glasses.
“You’re June’s niece.”
“That’s right.”
“What’s your name?”
“Dawn.”
“Welcome, Dawn.”
“Sarah’s house is right up through there.” Decent pointed with two fingers up the hill.
“Have yall got a place to stay, Dawn?” Sarah said.
“I guess,” I said. “Back in Kingsport.”
“We’ve got a room here,” Sarah said. “A bed and everything.”
The snow kept coming, and the other back door opened and two dudes got in. One of them was Willett’s uncle Kenny, the one who interviewed me after the hearing right before Thanksgiving. “There she is,” he said when he saw me. “Me and this dude was just talking about you.” The other guy sat nodding like a bobblehead doll.
“How’s it going?” Bobblehead said.
“Oh man, Willett is going to be bummed he missed you,” Kenny said.
“He aint here?”
“Nah,” Kenny said. “Went with his dad to a ball game in Knoxville.”
I turned my head and stared out my window.
“Yeah, he plays that interview with you all the time. He’s got to where he does a pretty good impersonation of you.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“He repeats what you say on that tape all day long.”
“Hunh,” I said.
“You heard anything about the petition?” Kenny said.
I said no.
“That would be awesome if that got declared unsuitable,” Bobblehead said. “Aint never been one upheld.”
“Least not that big,” Kenny said.
“You’ll be up there with the immortals,” Bobblehead said. “Widow Combs, Preacher Dan Gibson, Hazel King.”
“Your grandma is already up there,” Sarah said. “She stood up to to strip miners before there was federal law. She was pre-SMCRA.”
“What’s ‘smack-ruh?’” I said.
“The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act,” Sarah said. “It’s the federal law that regulates strip mining.”
“They need to teach you your history, youngun,” Kenny said. Then they told me how the Widow Combs sat down in front of the bulldozers, how Dan Gibson held them off his son’s land with a single-shot .22 while his son was in Vietnam, and how Hazel King got the first strip job shut down using SMCRA after SMCRA passed in 1977. “I never heard of none of that,” I said when they finished.
“They need to teach that stuff in school,” Bobblehead said.
“How is your aunt June anyway?” Kenny said.
“Don’t tell him nothing,” Decent said. “Make him find out for himself.”
“Come on, now,” Bobblehead said, “don’t make a man in love suffer worse.”
I looked at Willett’s uncle. “You love my aunt June?”
“There’s a lot there to love,” Kenny said and looked out the frosty window. “Plenty,” he said.
“Tough nut to crack,” Bobblehead said.
The women laughed.
“She likes things quiet,” I said, remembering how rambunctious Kenny had been when he was at the hearing. There was a quiet in the backseat.
“Yeah,” Kenny said. “I’m screwed then.”
They laughed again. “You aint without your charms,” Decent said.
“C’mon, Bobble,” Kenny said, and the two men left.
“I guess I better go back too,” Sarah said. When she left, we left with her. When we got to the barn, the dance floor swallowed up Decent. Sarah got caught up in a conversation about grants and jobs, and I saw a pack of cigarettes on a wooden rail, lighter under the cellophane. I picked it up and slipped out of the barn.
***
People laughed and burning wood cracked and popped down towards the river. I walked sideways away from them. The meadow was broad, creamy blue in the snow, simple and new, like a painting in a book June would have. I felt like I was walking in a poem. On the far side of the meadow was a little woods. I ducked into it, far from the party, alone. A path angled to the riverbank. The river was dark and noisy and took the falling snow like a fat kid eating Skittles. The talk in Decent’s Bronco got my mind off Keith Kelly, got me off the bad feelings I was having about everything. I felt good about what we were doing on Blue Bear.
A big tree had fallen into the river. I climbed its roots to sit on its trunk. I could see the meadow through the bare woods, the barn blazing with Christmas lights. I could hear the music and the laughs and whooping. I was glad those people were there, glad they were having a good time. They seemed so not hurtful to me. I tried to imagine myself a regular part of them. I tried to imagine myself walking across that meadow in each of the four seasons. I put myself on a tractor, mowing the meadow. I put myself in a room full of women, women like Sarah, working on a quilt and talking about smart stuff and feeling like things were getting better because all the people closest to me were working to make things better.
I made out a figure coming towards me across the pasture, walking in my footprints. I imagined it was Willett, traipsing towards me in snowshoes and a hat with earflaps, carrying an ax, a pipe in his mouth, a gentle giant with apples for cheeks and pockets full of cornbread hoecakes. When he got to me, we would turn our own circle of blue fire-orange in the winter woods, everything frozen melting, potatoes in the ash roasting, black and crusty and perfect, the roasted perfect of the past that only lasts a bit, a bit imagination blows on, like a fire with life still in it, needing a little air. The light in Willett’s pipe, coming towards me, was a moment of the perfect precious past meant just for us.
***
I was glad enough to see June. We are always glad to see something beautiful, even when there is something about them or it that makes us nervous. June did not have on shoes for snow. She had on soft leather boots dyed summer green, and I said “Watch your shoes,” but she didn’t seem to care and clambered up beside me. She’d been drinking a little bit.
“What do you think?” she said.
“It’s cool,” I said.
“You really think so?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Pretty much.”
“Has everybody been nice to you?”
“I guess so,” I said.
The sound of broken glass floated up the riverbank. June shook her head. The sound of the water made me want to pee. June’s body shook in the cold. I put my arm around her. She put her head on my shoulder.
“Do you think you’d mind living around here?”
“It would take some getting used to,” I said.
June said, “Getting used to people treating you decent?”
“That,” I said, “and just missing things.” I wondered did June even remember what she missed.
June said, “I miss all the racket people made when they got together. Everybody talking at once. Everybody jammed up together on the porch or in the front room, the kids all keyed up.”
I said that’s what I’d miss the least.
“Yeah,” June said, “all that’s why I left. Why I built me a fortress of solitude. But anymore it’s what I miss.”
We let the sound of the river do th
e talking for a minute. I said I’d miss our lay of the land, the way the mountains at home pitched up in your face, didn’t lay around polite and easy, willing to work with you, the way they did in Tennessee and Virginia. More laughing and glass-breaking came from the party, rising and falling behind the river sound.
“So what is this business with Keith?” June said. “What happened?”
“I don’t know, Aunt June. Even what I thought I knew I’m not sure I know. My mind is all muddled up.”
“You ran him off the road, right?”
“I guess we did.”
“And your mother puts it all on Hubert?”
“I reckon.”
“Doesn’t give you much credit, does she?” June said.
“Guess not,” I said.
June said, “Hubert never can quite get the hang of it.”
I said, “Hang of what?”
June was quiet a second and then said, “Living. No wife. No kids. Precious few friends. Hardest on the ones he loves the most.”
I said, “Which is who?”
“You and Tricia and Albert,” June said, “according to my calculations.”
“Not according to mine.”
“Who do you think he loves most?” June said.
“Himself. Then maybe Momma,” I said. “Then everybody else in a tie for last, a tie for not-at-all.”
“Maybe so,” June said. “But I doubt it.”
“Why don’t you live with us, Aunt June? Cause it sounds to me like you sit out here figuring out what to tell us, figuring out what we need to hear.”
“I don’t have to figure it out, Dawn. I just have to remember.”
“Well, then. What do I need?”
“You need somebody to clear the path for you to come up with all that you’re going to come up with.”
“You think I’m going to come up with something?”
June said, “I think you’re going to come up with something amazing.”
I said, “Maybe I don’t want to come up with something. Maybe I just want to be.”