Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel

by Robert Gipe

  “What evidence?” I said. Hubert never sold to nobody he didn’t know.

  “Somebody’s always got a weakness. And Sidney knows how to pick them off.”

  I asked Hubert were they going to get me.

  Hubert said, “Maybe.”

  “How come,” I said, “aint no more been said about Keith?”

  “They’re waiting on his labs.”

  “Where’s your truck?” I said.

  “Felt like walking,” he said.

  My breath out in front of me made me feel like I was smoking with Hubert.

  He said, “I’m sorry I got you into all this, Dawn.”

  “Don’t matter,” I said. I started walking toward Houston’s.

  Hubert stepped off into the darkness with me. “Did you see your mother in there?”

  I told him I didn’t.

  “I seen you sitting in there with that boy,” he said. It was weird having Hubert start all the talk. He usually just responded to other people unless he was telling somebody what to do. “He seems pretty soft,” Hubert said.

  “So?” I said.

  “We get past this,” Hubert said, “you should go live with June. Get out.”

  “You think so, too, hunh?” I said.

  “Some things is obvious,” Hubert said.

  We walked with our hands in our pockets down the little piece of road before you cut uphill to Houston’s.

  “We used to play that governor’s high school in football,” Hubert said.

  I said, “That right?”

  Hubert said, “I played against his little brother. He was dirty. Get you in a pile and put his thumb right in your eye.” Hubert stopped walking. “But I got even—kneed him in the nuts so hard he squeaked like a rusty hinge.”

  I asked Hubert who won the game.

  “They did,” Hubert said. “Their field, their refs.”

  I asked did Daddy play.

  “No,” Hubert said. “He was just a freshman. Didn’t even make the trip.” We were in the dark place right before the light pole in front of Houston’s house lit up the grassed-over driveway. I stumbled in a washed-out rocky place. Hubert caught me up by the elbow and hung on even after I had my balance. Hubert said, “Your daddy would be proud of what you’re doing tomorrow.”

  I looked at Hubert’s tangled hair drooping close to his red-rimmed eyes, and all I could see was all the things I’d done that would have shamed my daddy.

  “I’ll see you, Hubert,” I said.

  The barking of Houston’s dogs covered whatever Hubert said, and it was just as well. The light over Houston’s door came on, Hubert slipped back into the night shadows, and I went in the house and went to bed.

  ***

  Come five o’clock the next morning, Mamaw gave me a ride down to Kolonel Krispy to meet Agnes Therapin. Agnes sat sipping coffee from a Thermos cup with her husband in the front seat of a Chevrolet station wagon.

  “Felix said he’d drive us,” Agnes said.

  Mamaw leaned over in the Escort’s driver’s seat so she could see Felix. “Much obliged, Felix,” Mamaw said.

  “No trouble,” Felix said.

  “You want some gas money?” Mamaw said.

  “We’ll be fine,” Agnes said.

  Mamaw slipped four twenties into my hand as I got out of the Escort. “Try to get them to let you pay for things,” she said low with the back of her head to the Therapins. I nodded and got out of the car.

  “You want the front seat?” Agnes asked, but made no move to get out of it. I shook my head and slipped in the back.

  The ride to Frankfort was quiet. Agnes fidgeted around like she wanted to talk. She asked me questions, but they were all yes-and-no questions—Are you ready for this? Did you sleep good? Do you want something to eat? I guess I must have been nervous too, because I didn’t say nothing in answer to her questions but yes and no.

  When we got there, Felix parked in a parking garage and told us he’d wait right there until we got back. Felix told Agnes to remember the letter and the number and the color painted on the big concrete pillar where he was parked.

  “You’re going to have to help me remember, Dawn,” Agnes said when we got away from Felix. “By the time we get out of this meeting, I’ll be lucky to even be able to tell what building we’re in.”

  “I will, Agnes.”

  ***

  The governor had a woman all smiles and smooth brown hair to take us in his office with its dark blue carpet and shelves full of pictures of people handing stuff to each other. Lawyers covered the dark red leather sofas, ties all stiff and bright with tiny dots and patterns on them. Our lawyer had messed-up hair and old scuffed-up shoes, but he grinned like a boy in a stolen car.

  The meeting was a blur of big talk. Our lawyer said, “We will need assurances,” and the company’s lawyers talked about their unrecoverable losses. “Yes, yes,” said the governor, and our lawyer said, “The protections, at least thirty-three hundred feet in elevation, three thousand would be safer . . . future considerations, etc., etc.” The governor cleared his throat. “Unique situation, yes, yes.” Agnes’s eyes went back and forth between the lawyers, and I kept mine on the governor. What makes one person end up this and another end up that? The governor was from a coal-mining county. He went to a high school Hubert said they’d played football against. Same people, rolling in the same mud,

  The lawyers went on talking and arguing. You could tell the company lawyers did not want the petition process to play out. If we got our land declared unsuitable for mining, then others might get ideas. And even if we didn’t win, the companies didn’t want to have to deal with a bunch of these petitions. They needed to make us out a special case, give us something, and get it over with. One of the company’s lawyers, he was definitely from Lexington. He had white hair, all swept together in a wad. He was tan as a saddle and talked through his nose and said goddam this and goddam that and stepped out to take a call to work out his UK basketball tickets, right there during a meeting with the governor. You could tell he was getting paid a lot just to be there, win or lose. The rest of us—even the governor—were like Happy Meal toys to that lawyer. He could push us around, feed us to his dog, throw us out the bus window, trade us to his lower arena basketball season ticket friends, and it didn’t make no difference.

  “When I was a boy,” the governor said, and started telling a story. While the governor spoke, dark splotches formed between me and him. The splotches started out far apart and then grew together, spreading like water stains in the ceiling beneath a leaky roof, but not rusty colored—they were darker, like black ink, and the splotches formed themselves into trees, and the trees grew together and then separated themselves so that a road could pass through them. And it was night along the road through the trees, and the headlights from a truck lit the road and lit the trees at the side of the road, and it was summertime and the trees were lush and full like drunk girls from Canard County driving home from the Hazard honky-tonks, and the truck is a twenty-four-foot rental, and my father is driving and I am sitting in the passenger seat and it was not a vision but a memory, and we were headed to North Carolina, the darkness opening in front of us and closing behind us. I am small and have no sense that we are on a line, that life is a line, no sense of that at all, my only sense that of the opening and closing darkness, and I am scared we will never find our way back, scared that North Carolina lies through a hole in the darkness that once closed we will never find again.

  I tell my father I am scared. He pulls over as we pass out of the trees and are at a wide place, a river bottom, and there is a gas station, and it is fluorescent and huge but there is still an edge to the light, and my father turns on the light in the cab of the truck and takes the paper map out of the hole in the door and shows me where we are going. He makes a map of the states with our hands—he is Kentucky and Tennessee and I am Virginia and North Carolina—and makes everything fit together. He makes a picture of things and I am OK, because I was a
little kid with a map of her own and Daddy said, “Are you all right to go now?” I said I was, and he pulled onto the four-lane and got the truck going fast. After we talked, I was happy to move to North Carolina, down by Daddy’s old-timey mother with a garden as big as a football field and a toothy laugh with a gap in the sides.

  He got going almost seventy, and I said, “Faster,” and he said, “I can’t go any faster.” I asked why not and he said, “Because the truck won’t let me. The truck has a governor on it,” and I said, “What’s a governor?” and he said, “It’s something they put on these rental trucks to limit how fast you can go, something to remind you it’s their truck and not yours.” And I remember not liking that my father and I were not alone in the wee-hour truck, that this governor was there with us, and I stared into my own face out the truck window, into the forest streaking past as we wound our way out of Tennessee into North Carolina. As the curves got sharper, we didn’t need a governor because we were back in the mountains.

  We never moved to North Carolina. Momma stalled and Daddy died and then I was at Daddy’s funeral, my mother crying, Hubert and them clustered up, glad-handing Sidney Coates, the man that sold the drugs that doped up the man that killed Daddy, me sitting there in the funeral parlor looking at my hands, knowing in my heart they would never be a map again.

  I blinked and the dark splotches were gone and I was back in the governor’s office. The governor kept talking until a knock came on the door. A state police officer came to the door, same exact uniform, haircut, hat as the troopers who talked to me the night Keith died.

  Our lawyer was still smiling. “Governor, if you don’t mind,” our lawyer said, “we are asking that the land within the permit boundary be declared unsuitable for mining and that it be protected from the surface effects of underground mining, but to suggest that this petition would end all mining on Blue Bear Mountain is alarmist and I fear disingenuous on the part of my colleagues here. Engineering surveys suggest that mining can continue below the elevations designated by the permit boundary.”

  The Lexington lawyer said, “Boys, let me tell you something. We’re going to settle this, but son,” and he looked then at our lawyer, “you can’t ask these gentlemen to give away the farm.”

  The governor said, “Let’s take a break. We’re getting nowhere.”

  Out in the front room, the governor’s woman had set up a table with bags of chips and pop, brownies and cookies.

  “It is so nice to see young people involved in the process,” the governor’s woman said. “You are lucky.” Her face was like a breath mint with makeup on.

  I rolled my eyes. “The world is old,” I said. “It’s about to die.”

  “You have your whole life ahead of you,” the governor’s woman said.

  “That’s supposed to cheer me up,” I said.

  The governor’s woman kept setting out pops.

  “Things is used up,” I said. “Come up and look at Blue Bear Mountain and I’ll show you. There aint nothing for me. The world is old and it’s made me old.”

  The governor’s woman just kept filling cups with ice. I turned around, turned smack into the governor. I was looking him eye to eye. It made me sad the governor was no taller than I was. I let him look at me. “We won’t be much longer,” he said to his woman over my shoulder.

  “Yes, Governor,” she said, and poured him a cup of diet.

  The governor looked at me. “Are there a lot like you back in Canard County?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  I don’t know why I said that. Yeah, I do. I really did want to know what he cared.

  “I don’t see too many like you,” the governor said, “not in here, anyway.”

  “Well,” I said.

  “You know,” the governor said, “people been writing in from all over the country about Blue Bear Mountain.”

  Wadn’t nothing to say to that.

  “It’s a big deal to them that it’s the highest mountain in the state. Makes it special to them.”

  I looked over at Agnes. You could tell she was just listening to see how the story was going to end.

  “We’re going to protect that mountain.” The governor leaned in and took my sweatshirt between his thumb and forefinger. “You reckon you could be up here Christmas Day beside me when I announce it?”

  “I reckon,” I said.

  I looked over at the governor’s woman, the one had been handing out the pops. Her eyes were big as fried eggs.

  “You reckon,” the governor said, “if I had you up there with me you could wear something didn’t look quite so rebellious?”

  “Like what?” I said.

  “Well,” the governor said, “I don’t know. I suppose Madeline could help you figure something out. Maddy,” the governor turned to the pop woman, “you could help her, couldn’t you?”

  That woman brought her fried-egg eyes back down to normal size quick. She put on a fake smile and said, “Yes, of course we can, Governor.” Then she turned her smile on me like she was the sun and I was a tulip bulb in God’s own flower box.

  When we went back to the meeting, the governor acted like he had somewhere else to be. He said a dollar figure the state would pay for the mining rights on Blue Bear and that the state would then make a nature preserve of the land. No mining, no timbering. He told his man this needed to be done. He said people needed to see that the state had a past, a present, and a future, and nobody was going to say he didn’t care about all three.

  “Yes, Governor,” the governor’s man said.

  “Yall can live with that, can’t you?” the governor said.

  And after a little back and forth they all did agree. And the briefcases snapped shut, and there was some handshaking, and when we got out in the hall, Agnes asked our lawyer if it was all right, and he said, “It’s the best we can do. Better than I thought we could do.” And then we were headed home, all before lunchtime.

  ***

  We stopped at a convenience store in Lexington on the way home from the governor’s office so that Felix could get gas for the Chevrolet. I called Willett from a pay phone against the brick wall of the store. I figured he would be back at his mother’s, and he was.

  “Hell-looo,” Willett’s mother said when she answered the phone. “Bill-sun res-i-dents.” It was like a bird call she was doing.

  “Is Willett there?” I said.

  “Yes, he is,” she said, “whom may I say is calling?”

  “Dawn, I guess.” I had never been called “whom” before.

  The wind blew cold through the phone line. “Oh,” Willett’s mother said, her voice an abandoned bird’s nest of sticks and fuzz and bird spit. “I’ll see if he can come to the phone.”

  People rolled through the slush in the parking lot. I should have got the governor to call Willett for me.

  “Merrrr-y Christmas!” Willett said when he came on the phone.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Willett asked how it went, and I told him the governor wanted me with him when he announced the protection of Blue Bear.

  “I knew he would,” Willett said. “Those dudes always want hot women with them when they’re doing their serious statesman shit.”

  I let that one hang in the air. No one cared what we’d done in the parking lot of this one of a million convenience store. A guy walked in telling his friend how excited he was about his new puppy. He’d never had a dog before.

  “Um,” I said, “when am I going to see you again?”

  “Do you want to come down here for Christmas?” Willett said. A truck went by, but I swear I could hear Willett’s mother in the background going NO!

  “I don’t know if I can,” I said. “I might get arrested.”

  “For real?” Willett said. I hadn’t told Willett about my brilliant career as a bootlegger. “Geez,” he said. “There’s no way they can say you wrecked that guy on purpose, right? No way. Besides,” Willett said, “you’re just a kid.”

  “Hey,
Willett,” I said. “I need to ask you something.” What I needed to ask him was could he maybe be there when I got home. Crazy to ask. I didn’t hardly know Willett. He couldn’t drive worth a flip. It was almost Christmas Eve. He wasn’t from a family like mine. He was from a family where things went regular, where people could afford to have things happen when they were supposed to happen.

  “What is it, my little pudding pop?” Willett said.

  The line went quiet.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Willett said, “Are you sure?”

  I said yes, and Willett said he had to go. And I said bye, and he said, “Call me when you get home.”

  Christmas. Why did all this have to happen at Christmas? It’s a stupid question because, like I said, my life don’t follow no normal schedule. Nobody works a normal job. My brother Albert, for example, never even knows what day it is. I’m not sure he could even name all the days of the week.

  Agnes stood off the curb down in the slush. She wrung her hands, and I knew her feet were getting wet. She said, “Are you ready to go, honey?”

  Felix had the car running, staring straight ahead, bent over the steering wheel. The gas station was a big bustle, like Christmas on TV. I had a feeling soon as I was in the Therapins’ vehicle things were going to get worse.

  “Honey?” Agnes said. “Are you OK?” Agnes knew about Keith and the moonshine rumors, and all the rest. She looked sweet standing there, like a shepherd at the manger.

  She smiled, smiled for Christmas, smiled for knowing she wouldn’t have to move to her daughter’s in South Carolina after all. “Merry Christmas to you,” Agnes said, “and a happy new year.”

  A big yellow truck toting some kind of pop I’d never heard of pulled up at the store. It looked like it might box Felix in to where he couldn’t get out. Felix tooted the horn, and Agnes and I got in, and we drove on through the tired winter light of the countryside outside the city, which gave way to the dark and the endless strings of Christmas lights lighting our way home, lighting up trailers and ranch houses and farm houses, a million tiny beacons of steady living alongside the runaway river of light that was the nighttime southbound interstate traffic.