Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel

by Robert Gipe

  He said, “It was good pie, wasn’t it?”

  I told him I thought it was. Willett nodded and kept nodding.

  “There are good people in the world,” Willett said. “Good people who make bombs.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  “That’s in you, too,” Willett said. “Isn’t it?”

  “Isn’t what inside me?”

  Willett’s smile cracked the dried pie on his face. “Good,” Willett said. “You have good in you. And also the ability to make bombs.”

  This boy is strange, I thought to myself, and he has ahold of both my hands. I thought about Keith Kelly’s funeral. I didn’t know when it would be or what it would be like.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said. I moved my fingers in Willett’s hands, which were not as soft as I thought they’d be. Not as wet. When I saw real Willett for the first time, and I was repulsed and ashamed, I also thought—I bet he has wet hands. But they weren’t.

  “I’ll be damned, too,” Willett said.

  In my mind, I saw Keith Kelly waxy and gray in his coffin. I said to Willett, “You know I’m only fifteen, don’t you? Eighteen and fifteen—that’s not that good.”

  Willett said, “I know what you’re saying.”

  My thumbs rubbed Willett’s hands some more. Out of all of it, holding hands is the best.

  “Just so you know,” I said.

  Willett said, “Do you want to go home?”

  I saw Blondie Kelly’s lips, moist, pink, and thick as raw pork chops on Keith’s candle-wax cheeks, her tears splashing into the grooves of his face. I said to Willett,

  Willett took me to the Kingsport Kolonel Krispy. We sat at their glassed-in picnic patio. Willett had a trayful of hot dogs in front of him. He had been talking again, for ten minutes maybe.

  “It was a nasty sunburn. Just nasty. Scary is what it was.” Willett took a hot dog out of its little bag, peeled back its little paper tray, and shoved most of it in his mouth. “I couldn’t move a muscle without excruciating pain. I couldn’t lie down. I couldn’t sit up. I won’t lie to you. I screamed when Mom sprayed that stuff on me, that sunburn relief spray. That stuff with the dog pulling the little girl’s bathing suit down on the bottle? It hurt.” He shoved the last of the hot dog in his mouth and said, “It did.”

  “I hate it for you,” I said. I put the edge of my hands to the window glass and my eyes up against my hands, and I looked out the window of the picnic pavilion at Kolonel Krispy, past the neon Kolonel Krispy sign, with its winking doughnut-eyed army officer. A paper plant rose up out of the night a block away, its aluminum siding rising a hundred feet into the air, logo of a Canadian paper company big as a pin oak on its side in an open field. Behind it, sawdust lay heaped against the sky, a blowaway pyramid. I ran a French fry through the smear of ketchup on the wax paper on the stone table in front of me.

  Willett said, “Are you bored?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and took a sip of Willett’s milkshake. “But it’s nice to be bored for a change.”

  Willett looked into my eyes. “Can I have a fry?” he said.

  I slid the wax paper across to Willett.

  ***

  Willett liked for me to drive. So I was behind the wheel of his mother’s car when we left Kolonel Krispy. He showed me where he used to be a patrol boy and belched. He groaned; he farted. He said, “Oh.”

  “What?” I said.

  Willett said, “Pull in there,” pointing.

  “Where?” I said.

  “Up there,” Willett said. “That shopping plaza.”

  I turned into the plaza. The smells that went with Willett’s noises made my eyes water. “You want me to stop?”

  Willett’s eyes wrinkled up. He bared his teeth. “Grocery store,” he said.

  I pulled up in front of the grocery store, and Willett jumped out of the car, ran for the door, turned around and ran back to my window. I rolled it down. “I have a troubled colon,” Willett said, and ran back in the store.

  I parked and went into the store. I looked for Willett in every aisle and could not find him. I stood beneath the raised platform of the grocery store service desk and stared up the dog-food aisle to the back of the store. There were double doors at the back of the store, leading, I figured, to the restroom. The stringy-headed girl working at the service counter popped her gum.

  I’m in love with a boy with a troubled colon. I said this in my mind to the stringy-headed girl up in the check-cashing booth at the grocery store in Willett’s town in Tennessee. I didn’t say it out loud. I said it in my mind. What I said out loud was:

  And that girl said “Yis” through her nose and turned and walked away like she couldn’t bear to watch me using her phone. But it wasn’t her phone. It was the store’s phone. I called June, said, “What are you doing?” She said, “Nothing,” and I said, “This boy is strange. He talks all the time and he ate too many hot dogs and too much pie and he’s been in the bathroom a half hour.” June said, “Is he OK?” and I said, “I guess,” and turned around and Willett was coming up the dog-food aisle with toilet paper stuck on his shoe. I heard that girl in the check-cashing booth snort, and I knew to stay on the phone or I would have had to whip her stringy-headed Tennessee ass right in the middle of her snotty Tennessee store.

  I could tell by Willett’s face he was going to come up to me and start talking like each of my ears has its own brain, like I could understand what he is saying with one and what June is saying with the other. Sure enough, he said, “If we had a house, what would you want in it?”

  I said, “I have to go, Aunt June,” and she said, “Wait,” but the phone was already hung up. Willett stood in front of me, breathing through his mouth, and I wanted to squeeze his big soft head. The feeling was new and strange, and I had to go to the front of the store, towards the light on the other side of the giant glass windows. The buckles and chains on Willett’s punk rock pants made a racket, and I could hardly hear him when he said, “Know what I’d want?”

  I stopped. My mind was all mixed up, and I didn’t know where I was at. I put my hand on a buggy and said, “What?”

  “I’d want me one of them power-flush commodes like they have in stores.” I just looked at him, and he said, “Can you imagine that kind of power in a domestic setting?” And then he said, “WHOOOOOSH.”

  I put my hand on his cheek and squeezed. I said, “How is your stomach?” and he said, “Better.” I squeezed his other cheek with my other hand and said, “Do I make you nervous?”

  He got a piece of candy out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. Then he took another piece of candy out of his pocket and offered it to me. All this with me standing there holding his cheeks. I shook my head. He put the second piece of candy in his mouth and said, “Everything makes me nervous.”

  I squeezed his cheeks between my fingers a little and said, “How nervous do I make you compared to everything else?”

  “Way less,” he said, chewing. “Way way less.”

  I said, “You aint gonna hit me.”

  Willett shook his head.

  I said, “You don’t hunt.”

  Willett shook his head again.

  I said, “You aint never cussed out the law.”

  Willett shook his head a third time.

  I said, “You aint on drugs.”

  “An inhaler,” Willett said.

  “Do what?” I said.

  “I use an inhaler,” Willett said. “For my asthma.”

  And I kept squeezing his cheeks between my fingers, and he kept chewing, and I was fine with a boyfriend who aint likely to slap me, aint likely to sell pills, aint likely to terrorize woodland creatures nor cuss out the law. And I was glad to have run off from home and quit school, and when that stringy-headed heifer from the check-cashing booth walked by, smartass grin on her face, I held onto Willett’s cheeks and did not knock her down though I easily could.

  Willett said, “I can’t go to Kentucky tonight.”

&n
bsp; “I’m staying at my aunt’s,” I said.

  “Oh. Yeah,” Willett said. “I’ll take you home.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “How do I get there?” Willett said.

  I let go of his cheeks, and we walked out of the store. “I’ll tell you,” I said.

  Willett stopped in the middle of the parking lot.

  “Draw me a map,” he said.

  “On what?” I said.

  “On the back of my hand.” He pulled a black marker out of his pants pocket. I took the marker, pulled off the cap, and took his hand.

  “So if here’s the park,” I said, drawing a big rectangle near Willett’s knuckles, “then June’s house is nine houses down this way.” I drew nine small squares, the last up near Willett’s elbow with an X through it

  “Right on the road?” Willett said, “Next to the railroad tracks?”

  “Mm-hm,” I said.

  “Put the road and the tracks on there too,” Willett said.

  I dropped Willett’s arm. “No,” I said.

  “Why not?” Willett said.

  “I aint drawing all over you.”

  “Go ahead,” Willett said. “Just a little more.”

  The skin on Willett’s arm was white and dry and had a grain like good paper. I drew a line for the road and then a line for the railroad. I put hatches across the railroad line. Willett stood still, the ink catching in the hairs of his arm.

  “There,” I said. “Think you can find it now?

  “I think so,” Willett said. “Yeah. That should help.”

  I twisted Willett’s wrist, turning up the fish-belly white underside of his forearm. “Want me to draw the plant on this side?” I said.

  Willett smiled. “Sure.”

  I dropped Willett’s arm. “Let’s go. You drive.”

  ***

  When we got to June’s house, Willett came with me to the porch. There was a note on the door. June was gone to Virginia. She probably wouldn’t make it back, the note said. I was surprised she would leave such news on the door for any sneak thief to see.

  “Where’s your aunt?” Willett said.

  “Out,” I said. Willett looked at me with the eyes of a puppy left out on the road. My stomach jumped like frog legs in a skillet. “You want a pop?” I said. Willett nodded and we went in the house. We stood facing each other in June’s living room.

  “Keith Kelly?” Willett said.

  “You know about that?”

  “Some.”

  Willett’s eyes were like plastic baby pools. Full of innocence, and you’d have to try really hard to drown somebody in them.

  “Would you draw on me some more?” Willett said.

  I said I would. The light in the room was warm and golden. Willett took off his shirt and dropped it next to the television. I pointed and Willett picked up one end of the coffee table with its laid-out art books. I got the other end, and we moved it towards the couch to make more room. Willett lay down on his stomach. His back was a hillside made of meat, his skin the color of eggshells and peppered with moles, freckles, and pimples.

  I left the room to get my pens and things, and when I came back Willett had his legs spread. I got down on my knees between Willett’s legs. His smile was calm, but his breathing seemed off, rushed. I leaned over Willett’s back with a felt-tip pen in my left hand. I sketched out Mary from Titian’s Assumption, and then the apostles, and the baby angels, and then finally God up above. I worked quick, with short strokes of the pen. Willett laughed to himself and didn’t say a thing.

  In the quiet, my drawing came to life. Mary’s face turned into Evie’s face without me putting pen to it. Then her face became Momma. The apostles turned into Hubert and my other uncles and cousins, dressed up like the whole thing was a Nativity play. At first I thought it was Willett that was moving, but it wasn’t, it was the figures I had drawn.

  I heard laughing, not coming from Willett, and I looked over my shoulder. But the laughing came from the picture. Hubert and them were laughing on Willett’s back. Laughing and complaining. They were grabbing hold of Momma, even as God and the baby angels tried to pull her into heaven. She was bobbing up and down, like a fishing lure. They pulled at her so hard I thought she was going to be pulled to pieces. And then Momma, Mary, turned into me.

  “Let me see,” Willett said. I came back to reality, and the drawing on Willett’s back was just a drawing again, not some freaky psychedelic cartoon. Willett got up and looked at himself in the mirror June had up over the door to the bedroom. “That is so cool,” he said.

  I fished around in my big Ziploc bag full of pens, erasers, and stuff.

  “Finish it,” Willett said, and got back down on the floor.

  I got up and put on some music. A woman with a big nose and a smoky voice began singing about sex over saxophones and a cheesy organ. I got back between Willett’s knees and put colors into the picture, colors I remembered from the pictures in the books, and colors of my own, colors based on what pens I had. As I colored Hubert and them came back to life. Mary was Momma again, and she floated up in a burst, and almost made it, and the baby angels had her by the hand, and Keith Kelly jumped out of the apostle pile and got her by the ankle, like a lost kite caught. I pulled an X-Acto knife out of my bag and cut off Keith Kelly’s hand. Momma floated loose, but another man got ahold of her, and so I took the knife and started cutting the throats of Hubert and the rest of the Apostles.

  Willett screamed, and the blood ran from the slits I’d made in his back. Willett tried to get up, but he was easy to hold down, like pressing a half-filled beach ball underwater. I could do it with one hand and keep cutting throats on his back. Willett kept screaming.

  “Dawn,” a voice said. “Dawn!”

  I looked up and June stood at the storm door, calm as a barber. She smiled like a woman selling something on television.

  I looked at Willett’s back, and it was the same pimply knob it had been when I started, only with my lame drawing of Titian’s Assumption all over it. No cuts. I don’t guess he ever screamed. He was snoring, actually. I stood up with a head like a get-well-soon balloon, silver and wobbly on its string.

  “Looks like yall are having fun,” June said. The phone started ringing. A man on the stereo sang, “I don’t have much in my life, but take it, it’s yours.” Willett slept on, and I did not know what to feel.

  “Dawn, it’s for you,” June said.

  When I said hello, the voice on the other end said, “Hey-oh. The darling Misty Dawn.” It was my grandfather Houston.

  “Hey Papaw,” I said.

  “Your grandmother beckons you to history’s stage,” he said.

  I said, “Do what?”

  “The governor and Cora want to see you in Frankfort,” Houston said.

  “Not me,” I said.

  “You,” he said.

  I turned to June. She put her hand on my cheek. She smiled a Mother Mary smile. Willett stood with his shirt off in the doorway. I stared at him even though I wanted to close my eyes. He smiled. “I don’t need you,” I said. “Go on home.” I don’t know why I said that. But I did.

  “Dawn,” June said, her voice like the bell on an elevator going down.

  Willett kept smiling, put his shirt on, and left.

  ***

  Next morning June brought me home in her dark red Honda car. My head was still balloon-light, my vision swimmy. My night with Willett was too much of being with someone. Truth be told, it was the wanting to be with someone that was too much. I don’t know. I wasn’t in the mood to be loved. Not the way Willett might’ve, not the way June would’ve, if I’d let her. It’s weird and strange to say, but I was looking forward to falling back in with Hubert. Simpler.

  On the ride to Mamaw’s, June didn’t say anything. She fiddled with the knobs, the windows, the mirrors in the car, but she didn’t say anything. She wasn’t like Momma. She didn’t have to spill it all out there. I chewed on my bottom lip. We did not play the radio. It
was just us in the blue-white morning light. Our faces were chalk floating in milk. We floated away from each other, far away from the way we had been by the river the night of the hippie Christmas party.

  “So what’s this about Kenny Bilson loving you?” I said.

  “Who says that?” June said.

  “He says it himself.”

  June pushed in the cigarette lighter. She didn’t say anything til it popped back out. “When did you talk to him?” June said.

  “At the party.”

  June lit her cigarette, cracked the window. “He shouldn’t trouble himself,” she said.

  “You don’t like Bilsons?” I said.

  June smoked the better part of her cigarette. “I like them fine,” June said.

  “What then?”

  “I’m closed,” June said.

  “Closed,” I said. “What does that mean?”

  “Means I aint looking right now.”

  “Hunh,” I said.

  “Not for him, anyway,” June said.

  “How long you gonna be closed?”

  June pushed her cigarette butt out the window crack. “Not much longer,” she said.

  ***

  When we got to Mamaw’s, Hubert’s green truck was there. June and me both sat and looked at it. Evie’s Cavalier was there too.

  “Let’s go back,” I said.

  We sat some more. “I may not go in,” June said.

  A black dog with white feet sniffed June’s wheels, hiked his leg, and peed on her tire. Hubert came out on Mamaw’s patio.

  “We’re all fixing to sit down.”

  ***

  Mamaw’s kitchen table was full of people. I hadn’t seen it that way in a long time. Stranger than that, though, was Mamaw sitting at it. Houston was the one fussing at the stove.

  “Ho, ho,” he said, wiping his hands on a towel. “Santy couldn’t have done no better than to send you two.”

  Eating around a table with a big bunch of family wasn’t something I’d done much of and wasn’t really something I missed, but when Mamaw, who was facing me from the far side of the table, pushed out the chair next to her, I slipped past my aunt and through the others and sat down beside her.