by Robert Gipe
“June,” Houston said, “Set these on the table,” and handed June a pan of biscuits. “Yall get some and hand me back the pan.”
Everything was calm. Maybe things could be in my family, I remember thinking, like they were on the hippie farm.
“Yall missed the blessing,” Momma said. She made a big show of moving her feet with their casts on them.
Me nor June said a word back to Momma. Sausage and bacon chattered in one skillet, potatoes in another. Pancake batter spread on an electric skillet. Houston cut grapefruits Aunt Ohio had sent from Florida, like she did every year.
June said, “Momma, you look good.”
Mamaw didn’t disagree, which she normally would have. Houston poured coffee all around and Evie and Albert leaned into each other in their own private world. I wished Willett was there, not because I was jealous of Evie or to show Albert I had somebody too, but just to make everything whole and rounded. But then I remembered how I left it with Willett and my mouth went sour.
People started to eat. The potatoes had green peppers and onions cut up in them. Houston laid pancakes right off the griddle onto people’s plates, and Hubert sang a little. The whole thing was like a TV happy ending. I wanted to ride the camera as it pulled out through the roof and left the family there and THE END came on the screen and the names of who all made the show went rolling over the perfect picture family. But our show went on, and spoons clattered in jelly jars, and plates filled with food passed through the air, and people rattled their silverware, and chairs scooted in, and we ate, forking it up and in, and then came the moment where in normal houses somebody would ask somebody about some good news something, but since it was our house, Albert looked up, jelly on his face and syrup on his sleeve, and said, “So. How was Keith’s funeral?”
We all looked up. Mamaw picked up the bowl of potatoes. “It was nice,” she said. She spooned potatoes onto her plate and said, “Yall need more potatoes?” Hubert put his hand out and Mamaw passed him the bowl, setting the spoon to where it would be easy for him to reach.
“You didn’t need to be going to no funeral,” my mother said. “Not so soon after your fall.”
“Old people fall down all the time,” Mamaw said.
“Momma,” June started.
“Well,” my mom went on, “It was nice Dawn happened to be around today. Never know when she’s going to be in the area.”
I said, “You’re the one dumped me in Kingsport.”
“I see you come back,” Momma said, pointing at Mamaw, “when she needs you.” Momma put a wad of pancake in her mouth. “Maybe you think you’ll get on the radio or something.”
“Tricia,” Hubert said.
“You leave her alone,” Evie said.
“I just don’t understand,” Momma said, “how people can be out fanning their tails all over creation when . . .” Momma’s eyes burned holes in me. “I just don’t understand.”
And then the only sound was the black dog barking outside and Albert scraping the last of the scrambled eggs out of the bowl. That day at the table was the end of some part of me.
I got up from the table. My tongue was so swollen in my mouth I thought I’d eaten something bad, but I hadn’t. I hadn’t hardly had a bite of all the nice stuff Houston fixed. I slid out from behind the table and out the door. I thought about walking up to the jumping-off place, not to jump off but just to be there at the edge of things.
Instead I went to Houston’s. Nobody came after me, and I set in Houston’s front room, which was cold and greasy like pork in the refrigerator. I got the jar out of Houston’s icebox and went outside and sat behind the wheel of Houston’s junky truck. It was a Ford and hadn’t run since I was a little girl. Houston mostly drove an old Cutlass that didn’t have room for anybody else it was so full of old records and empty Pepsi bottles and such. I threw a crate of wood scraps and a box of drinking glasses and plastic Jesuses and water wells and fake flowers out of the truck’s front seat, and made a place for myself—made me a nest there with my jar and my aggravation.
The liquor was buttery and easy to drink. The sun came out bright and warmed the truck, and when it did the smell got funky. The sweat on my lips and the sides of my head felt good. I was overcome by wanting to burrow down into the truck cab, let the sun pour in, and let the outside world pass me by. There is so much junk nobody ever sees it. It never gets moved. It just is. To be down in it, to be it, seemed not so bad. They would all walk past me like I was a junker pickup, ignore me so they wouldn’t have to deal with me. I could sink down, burrow in like an animal, too hard to get at, too small and gristly to be worth eating, not worth fooling with—
That’s where I was when Agnes Therapin came up to the truck window.
“Your granny can’t go with us to the governor’s,” she said. “Says she’s hurting too bad. Says she’s addleheaded.”
“She aint addleheaded,” I said. Agnes stood beside the truck looking at me til finally I said to her, “Why you telling me?”
Agnes said, “Cora said we should take you, said you know more about it than her. She said you got a young spongy brain.”
“Agnes,” I said, “aint you heard? I’m practically a high school dropout.”
Agnes took a sucker out of her dress pocket, unwrapped it, put it in her mouth. She slipped the sucker in her cheek and said, “A lot of smart people drop out of high school.”
I shook my head.
“Your momma’s taking good care of Cora,” Agnes said.
“That right?” I said.
“Better than a lot of them said she would,” Agnes said.
Agnes pulled her sucker into the O of her lips and then, with a slurpy swallow, slid it into the other cheek. Then she stood there, like a scarecrow, except not all crucified out like a real scarecrow, but her man sweater had holes at the elbows and frayed cuffs like a scarecrow’s would. Agnes was suffering. She didn’t want that blasting to come back. “It’s getting on my last nerve, Dawn,” she said when I said something about it.
“I know it,” I said. I looked away from her when I said it.
Agnes said, “If don’t nothing come of this, I’m going to my daughter in South Carolina.”
Willett came over the rise with Evie Bright. They walked up and stood beside Agnes. “What are you doing?” Evie said to me.
“Nothing,” I said. “Sitting here talking to Agnes.”
“Well,” Evie said. She looked at Willett and then lay her hand palm up towards me. “There she is.” And then Evie Bright walked away. I hated to see her head drop out of sight when she walked down Houston’s grassy drive.
“Hi,” Willett said to Agnes Therapin.
Agnes nodded at Willett. “I better go, Dawn,” she said.
When she spoke, Willett’s eyebrows lifted and he said, “I know you.” Agnes looked to me and Willett said, “I’ve edited your voice.”
Agnes looked at me again and said, “I’ll see you, Dawn.”
When Agnes slipped over the rise after Evie, I said, “What are you doing here, Willett?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I have come to pursue you.”
“It seemed more romantic in my mind,” he said.
I sipped from my jar.
“Do you think I’m a creepy stalker?” he said.
Willett’s questions were stressful. I didn’t care much for him being there in my grandfather’s yard, far out on the ridge, what should have been my fortress of solitude.
Willett said, “I missed your hands.”
I looked out over top of Willett’s head at the wide gray-white sky. Grateful I was to that sky for not telling me what to do, for not trying to get me to think anything, to feel anything. I tucked the jar between my thighs and raised both palms to Willett. I held them there and when Willett didn’t say anything, didn’t do anything, I put them down in my lap.
“Cora said I could stay at her house,” Willett said.
I narrowed my eyes down at him. It took everything
I had not to let my mouth fall open in shock. But I didn’t say anything, just gave Willett Bilson my best gray-white sky face. I turned away from him, faced forward, and stared at the woods through the windshield. Willett went and sat on the back bumper of the pickup. It was muddy back there, and I knew it must be getting on his shoes. The bed of the truck was full of roof shingles and soggy cardboard boxes filled with rusting metal parts that hadn’t been part of anything for a good long while. Willett settled down on the bumper like a dog had nothing but time to wait for its human.
And there we sat. I’d lost my peace and quiet and put in its place Willett sitting on the back end of my grandfather’s truck. Out the rear window I watched him, the back of his head like a massive pine cone. He scratched his cheek. He rubbed the top of his head. Even after I had blown him off, talked to him like a dog, there he was. The glare of the sun made him look flat, like he was ironed onto a piece of cloth.
I stared at him through the glare and let him get less real in my mind. Then he raised both hands to his face. He rubbed them up and down. He ground the knuckles at the base of his thumbs into his eyes. I wondered what was going through his mind. I wondered what it was like for your daddy to die slow. I wondered if that would be better than having him die sudden.
I couldn’t get his thoughts to come clear in my mind. But I felt them—his thoughts—close. I almost could tell what he was thinking. That was what I wanted—to know what he was thinking, to know what was on his heart—but only if I could do it without having to ask him. I was afraid of the risk. I was afraid of being wrong. Afraid if I spread my arms and put my chest out to him, open and pink, that from somewhere a bullet would rip right through me, and I would be gone.
I turned around, facing forward, and sat down in the truck seat. The steering wheel was cracked. I put my finger down in the crack, that dark human crack, and I cried. The tears seemed to come from the base of my spine, the roots of my teeth, the bottom of the holes in my head where my hair took root. I let the tears come without moving, without making a sound, and I was a water tower, a head without a body, servant to a place with no idea how I came to be full of water, water leaking out through my rusted seams.
Willett opened the door, pulled me out of the truck. I almost buckled when my feet hit the ground. Short, boneless Willett put everything he could into holding me up, but I still went to my knees, ready for the Kellys and the law to have me, ready to fail completely, ready for the buffalo to come back from the dead and stampede down Long Ridge, vengeance in their humongous hearts for waste and nearsightedness and the sheer mean stupidity of me and everyone else who ever claimed to be human.
I let go, ready to fall on my face in the soft ground where my grandfather’s truck sat and let those snorting, angry, beautiful beasts grind me to meat, but Willett held the half of me still upright out of the mud, and I heard the sound of buffalo hooves as they went past us, and I looked into Willett’s plastic baby pool eyes, his hands clamped to my shoulders, and I could tell he was trying to think of a song to sing to me, something funny and perfect and unexpected, and I felt the muscles in my belly turn back on, and I put a finger to Willett’s lips, and I thought the song would be that one goes real slow: “You. Are. So beautiful . . . to meeeeeeee.” And I tried to mark in my mind so I could ask him later if that was the song, but at the time all I did was take my finger from his lips and kiss him. Gave him a kiss to keep.
14: Governor
So. Me and Willett kissed. It wasn’t bad, but it was too cold in the mud outside Houston’s to do it again, and I wasn’t sure where to go with him. Mamaw’s would have been OK, but Momma was there. Houston’s would have been fine. Houston would have left us alone if we wanted, or he would have kept us distracted if we wanted. We could have gone there.
The truth of the matter was even though I liked the kiss and I pretty much wanted Willett around, what I really wanted was getting close in baby steps. So I told Willett that in a way I hoped wouldn’t sound mean. I said, “Baby steps,” and put my head on his shoulder and let him hold me tight, and I wasn’t sure if he’d got what I said because he patted me on the back with both hands like I was a bongo drum, but more sweet and nice than that. Finally I said to him, with my head still on his shoulder, “Why don’t you go on back to Cora’s?”
He said, “Are you coming?”
I told him not right off. I told him I needed to stay and think a little bit.
“Out here?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you want me to build you a fire?” he said.
“How many fires have you ever built?” I said.
“Three,” he said. “No. Two.”
And Willett went. I got back in the truck. It was still early, not even lunchtime, and my mind was as jammed up with stuff as was Houston’s truck. There didn’t seem no way to sort it all out. What seemed most important? Was it Blue Bear Mountain and saving the land, protecting the earth forever and ever so that little babies not even thought up would have mountains to look on and scamper around in? Was it saving my own skin, somehow getting past what happened to Keith Kelly, getting shed of Hubert and crazy outlaw ways? Was it finding a way to patch it up with my mother, to stop our relationship from falling apart faster than a secondhand trailer? Was it finding a way to make my proud grandma Cora proud of me? And maybe I should think about high school and, like, graduating from it like so many young people way dumber than me did. And now also I had to think about love and figuring out what it would mean to care for somebody I didn’t have to—somebody I wasn’t obliged by blood or history to stick to.
Why did I have to think so much? Why couldn’t I just be an animal? Why couldn’t I just enjoy the kiss—the whole wonderful nerve endings all afire dirty book joy of it? Why couldn’t I just enjoy fixing that dickhead Keith Kelly’s wagon once and for all? Why couldn’t I be like Mamaw and the organizer girls, glad to be in a fight for something good, throw my fists in the air and go YEAH! whenever we won the least little thing off the coal companies? Why couldn’t I just party like June’s friends—go WOOO! and dance around like a Roman with kudzu in my hair?
I took a pull off Houston’s jar. How in the world was I going to make eighty years old? I took another pull off the jar and wondered what the governor’s office looks like. How much difference could somebody like that make? Is somebody like that really high up? I got to thinking about law and order. Is there really such a thing? Order. Was there an order to my life? Was there an order to life in Canard County?
My head spun. You hear people say that—“my head was spinning”—but I felt like mine really was. Spinning like the earth. You have to decide, I said to myself. There really was deciding—people decided this and things were different than if they had decided that. I thought of Agnes Therapin. I thought of the explosions that knocked her mother out of bed. I thought of the men who set the shots that knocked her out of bed. I thought of their dinner buckets, and I thought of my daddy’s dinner bucket and the oatmeal creme pies that come out of it—all those oatmeal creme pies I ate by the time I was eight years old that come from my daddy’s hand, come from a coal miner’s dinner bucket, the world spinning, me bouncing up and down on a trampoline.
I got out of the truck and walked down to Mamaw’s and told her to tell Agnes I’d meet her at the Kolonel Krispy in the morning and we’d go to Frankfort. Then I sat down on Mamaw’s couch beside of Willett Bilson and ate out of a giant bowl of cheese doodles and stared at where Mamaw should have had a TV set, and Willett told me the story of some dumb movie he’d seen where a man gets saved from the gallows by a woman who needs him to dig in her pipe dream gold mine. I told Willett I was sorry I’d been bad to him that night at June’s.
I said, “I didn’t have no call to blow you off that way when I decided I was going home.”
“It’s all right,” Willett said, “Getting through bad feelings with a new friend is very important. I’m glad to have had the experience.”
Willett wa
sn’t looking at me when he said this. He was picking something off of his tennis shoe, scraping something poop-looking with his thumbnail. When I didn’t say anything, he finally did look up. He smiled. He was a boy in a bubble. I felt like he might need slapping silly. I thought I should tell him to grow up and go wash his hands. But I didn’t. Instead I said, “That’s right,” and he pushed the corners of his mouth down and pooched his bottom lip out like he wasn’t used to anybody agreeing with him, and he shoved a handful of cheese doodles in his mouth and looked away from me, looked straight ahead to where the television should have been and said with his mouth full, “Well, all right then.”
When he finished chewing and swallowed, he said, “Where are you staying tonight? Cora gave me your room. She thought you were staying with Houston. Maybe since you’re here she’ll just say it’s OK for you to stay in there with me. Or maybe she’ll just turn her head and not pay attention to what the sleeping arrangement turns out to be.”
Willett rolled one cheese doodle between his thumb and pointer. I stood up. “I reckon I’ll just stay with Houston,” I said.
Willett looked up and his mouth fell open. Then his mouth closed and he said,
And I kissed him on his sticky forehead and left my mamaw Cora’s house.
***
When I stepped out Mamaw’s kitchen door, Hubert stood silhouetted by Mamaw’s booger light at the rail that held up the patio’s corrugated roof, staring out into the frost like he was cut out of plywood. I went and stood beside him.
“Where you going?” he said.
“Houston’s,” I said.
“You going to see the governor?”
“I reckon,” I said.
Hubert nodded. “You remember Sidney Coates?”
“He was behind the dope in the man that killed Daddy,” I said. “And he fucked up Colbert.”
“Him and Blondie,” Hubert said, “is in cahoots. They’re going to get our liquor operation busted. Case done made.”