Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel

by Robert Gipe

  ***

  When I got back to Long Ridge, Mamaw was in the kitchen trying to get an empty jelly jar off the top shelf of the cabinets. She was on her toes, and her fingers spread out blue-gray-pink and knobby on her walker. She cussed, and I stepped to her, put one hand on the jelly jar and the other on her shoulder.

  “Is it done?” she said. Her eyes were like frog eggs. “Is it done?”

  “I reckon,” I said, and told her what I could about the details of the deal.

  Mamaw nodded and closed her hand on the jelly jar. “They know we’re here, don’t they?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  Mamaw raised her eyebrow. She ran water in the jelly jar, poured it out. “Well,” she said, “it’s not about us anyway.” She held the jar to the light. “Is it?”

  “I guess not.”

  She took a carton of vanilla ice cream out of the icebox. She spooned slow and trembly the ice cream into the jar, packed it in with the back of the spoon. “What did you think of the governor?” she said, her back to me, putting her ice cream back.

  “Think I don’t want to be him.”

  Mamaw laughed and took a two-liter of store-brand root beer out of the bottom part of the refrigerator. “That’s good,” she said. She looked into my face. “You’d be a good one, though,” she said. “Get my vote.” She poured the root beer over the ice cream, stuck an ice tea spoon through the foam and the pop and the vanilla ice cream, and handed it to me. “Here,” she said.

  “Let’s go out on the porch,” she said, “see if we can conjure up spring.”

  It was too cold for a root beer float on the porch. The wind sliced us, first from one direction and then the other. Someone was cutting up wood in the trees below us. Their saw rang like a crying baby. The smell of mold come up from the plastic cushions when we set down on Mamaw’s glider. I set the jar down on the dirty table.

  When spring came, Mamaw would move the chairs and the tables off the porch into the front yard. She would spray them with the hose, her dry thumb over the hose end. She would knock the spiderwebs from the porch corners. She would rub oil soap into the wood, and when everything was back in place, light little candles, and maybe we would eat ham sandwiches with lots of pickles on the porch, and maybe a breeze would blow, not quite warm, through the buds and blossoms, the smell of cut grass in the air. Maybe it would be like that. It had been before. But I had trouble conjuring any of that the day I got home from Frankfort. Too cold.

  “Well,” Mamaw said, “your mother’s got religion.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Sometime since that boy died.”

  I spooned the ice cream into my mouth. The root beer tasted right, made me want to run through the spring woods naked. The leaves on the trees would be yellow-green, and things that would be spiky and sharp later in the summer would still be tender and soft. I wanted to run through sassafras and fall on my face next to a nest of little brown jug, my face buried in the smell of things root beer wished it was, the roots maybe root beer was named after.

  “She’s all cleaned up,” Mamaw said, “her face all plain, hair pulled back.”

  “Is she going out at the end of the road?”

  “No,” Mamaw said. “I reckon she’s going where Blondie Kelly goes. Up Drop Creek.”

  I wanted to see my mother sitting up in church. I wanted to see her hand raised, the pale inside of her arm raised towards Jesus, her plain T-shirt falling down her arm. I wanted to see her head thrown back. I wanted to see her eyes barely closed, her lips moving, touched by the Holy Spirit, but I didn’t dare go to Blondie Kelly’s church. Bad enough Blondie had come to Long Ridge with her brothers to whip me. Untelling what she would do if she had the whole Little Drop Creek Church backing her up.

  “Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig,” Mamaw said.

  I sipped out of my ice cream jar. “Yep,” I said.

  ***

  I stayed at Mamaw’s that night and woke up happy, remembering how the governor said I was the face of Kentucky’s future. I went in the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I ran my finger over a pimple, but didn’t squeeze it. When I went in the kitchen, Mamaw was on the phone with Momma.

  “I don’t care what they say,” Mamaw said into the phone. “People will say anything. No, I’m not saying she’s lying. Yes, I know you go to the church with her.” Mamaw drummed her fingers on the counter. “Well, I don’t care. She can say whatever she damn well pleases. It’s still a free country, Tricia. Yeah. Well. God bless you too.”

  Mamaw hung up. “God Almighty,” she said.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” Mamaw said. “Nothing but a bunch of idle bullshit.”

  I said, “She was talking about me, wasn’t she? You heard something about Hubert and me.”

  “Somebody’s always talking,” Mamaw said.

  “Well,” I said, “what are they saying?”

  “Dawn,” Mamaw said, “don’t you need to be thinking about what you’re going to say up there with the governor?”

  “I aint going to be saying anything,” I said.

  “You don’t never know,” Mamaw said. “You need to be ready.”

  I said, “Are they saying I’m going to jail?”

  “You aint going to jail,” Mamaw said.

  “Is Hubert?” I said.

  Mamaw said, “I aint studying Hubert.”

  I said, “He is, aint he?”

  “Well,” Mamaw said, “don’t you think he ought to?” She was staring bullets at me. “Don’t you think he belongs in jail?”

  My eyes filled up with tears. I was thinking about what he said about Daddy being proud of me. “I don’t know, Mamaw.”

  “Well, I tell you one thing,” Mamaw said. “You aint working at that store of his no more. I hear you’re over there, I’ll come down off this mountain and flail you myself. You’ll wish you was in jail when I get ahold of you.”

  Mamaw didn’t talk like that to me. She thought threatening violence was beneath her. I’d seen Mamaw shoot a deer in her garden, seen her cut the throat of a living groundhog hung in a trap. Mamaw didn’t threaten violence. She committed it, when she felt like it needed committing. So I knew it was likely fixing to go bad for me if she was talking like that. The phone rang again. It was the woman in the governor’s office. She told me she was real sorry, but they had found someone else to be the face of Kentucky’s future.

  “Why?” Mamaw said when I told her. But we both knew why. Somebody’d told them about me and Hubert.

  “I got to go, Mamaw,” I said.

  “Where you going?” she said. “Sit down right there.”

  “I’m going to see Papaw,” I said.

  She looked at me. “You go straight up there,” she said after a minute. “Don’t go nowhere else.”

  “I won’t,” I said.

  “Here,” she said, and she gave me two oranges. “Give these to Houston.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  I went outside, stuck the oranges in my sweatshirt pocket. I wasn’t going to Houston’s. Houston never knew what was going on. I was going to Hubert’s and find out what was happening. Christmas Eve at Hubert’s, I thought as I started walking between his house and Cora’s. Least it would seem like Christmas at Hubert’s—fucked-up outlaw hillbilly Christmas, but Christmas all the same. Them women that hung out at Hubert’s, they loved wrapping presents. They wrapped them, and then they took them down to the old house, the house where Hubert’s daddy Green had lived with all his different wives. It was about the only time anybody stayed at Green’s house, was Christmas Eve, and then they’d have their Christmas in the morning.

  I wondered where Momma would be. Church, no doubt. I thought about the Christmas presents she would’ve got for Keith Kelly—the leather jacket and the gorilla perfume or whatever it was.

  The trees on either side of the road shrugged at me. I dreaded I might never see them again or might not
anyway for a long time. I knew I wasn’t likely to go to real jail. But they might send me away somewhere. And now that Momma had gone to Jesus, she wouldn’t fight it. She’d want me to suffer. Momma told me later she’d told Mamaw on the phone that morning I should come to church. She said it would be good for me and it would look good to the judge. I walked up the steps to Hubert’s. When I crossed the porch, it tripped a laughing Santa with greenlight eyes. It said Ho, ho’s in pairs—“HOHO. HOHO. HOHO”—in a demonic way. “SATAN CLAUS,” said a sign under it. No matter what holiday, they always found a way to put some Halloween twist on it at Hubert’s. The storm door creaked as I went in the house.

  15: Magic Yellow Pop Can

  Hubert’s house smelled of deer meat, tomatoes, onions, and celery cooking in a crockpot. As I came in, Hubert walked into the kitchen wearing three flannel shirts and work pants cut off at the knees, and he waved me to a stool at the counter with his wooden spoon. “Ho, ho,” he said, and grumbled into his chili. I sat down and he said, “Did you save the world?”

  I said I did and asked him had he heard what was going to happen to us.

  “Not yet,” Hubert said.

  A girl curled up on the couch said, “They gonna bust you Christmas Day, Hubert. That’s some Grinchy-ass shit right there.”

  “Don’t make no difference to them,” Hubert said. “Everybody loves to fuck Hubert Jewell.” Hubert popped a beer and dumped it into the pot. He let the can fall to the floor and popped another, reached it to me. “Merry Christmas,” he said. I counted nine beer cans on the kitchen floor.

  “Where’s Momma?” I said.

  Hubert said, “With her new friends.”

  The girl on the couch raised her beer can and said, “To the eternal salvation of Tricia Jewell” and drained the can, her throat loosening and tightening like the mouse-swallowing snake me and Willett saw in Kingsport. I started down the hall to the back of the house.

  “Where you going?” Hubert said.

  “Use the phone,” I said.

  ***

  “Hey,” I said to Willett.

  “Where are you calling from?” Willett said.

  “Hubert’s.”

  “So you’re OK?” Willett said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “pretty much.”

  “Maybe I should come up there,” Willett said.

  One time at the lake when I didn’t hardly know how to swim, Albert held my head under the water. I figured out the only way to not drown—or worse, be at Albert’s mercy—was to relax and slip him. Albert fed off your panic, and when I didn’t panic, his super power disappeared.

  “I’ll be OK,” I said to Willett on the phone. Then I said, “Appreciate you offering.”

  “No problem,” Willett said. “Talk to you tomorrow?”

  “Christmas,” I said.

  “Yep,” Willett said, and I hung up the phone. Soon as I did, I wished I’d said goodbye.

  ***

  Hubert was gone when I got back in the kitchen. I dropped my beer can on the floor and opened another. There was a brown bag full of spotty yellow apples on the counter. The radio next to the bag played “Takin’ Care of Business.” It is such a Momma song. I decided to fix a pie. I knew there would be stuff to fix pie at Hubert’s because until Jesus got her, Momma loved to get high and bake stuff. That had been her thing before Daddy died—making cakes and pies for money. I took a pack of frozen crusts out of the freezer.

  I decided to make fried pies when the girl on the couch volunteered to help me. I laid out all three crusts in the pack, showed her how to cut them in turnover-size pieces, and turned to make the filling. Something came on television she just had to watch—some hip-hop dance thing—“So dope, so gangsta,” she said—and I was by myself in the kitchen again.

  So I decided to make three apple pies. “Sweet Emotion” by Aerosmith came on the little radio. Momma’s favorite song. “Turn that down,” the girl on the couch said, but I didn’t. I cracked another beer and wiped off a knife and started cutting up apples. “Peel them motherfuckers,” I heard my pre-Jesus mother say, but I cut them up with the peel on them, piled them on the counter. I cracked another beer.

  Hubert came back in the kitchen. “Tricia Junior,” he said. He set a big plastic bottle of vodka with a red-and-silver label down on the counter. Hubert put his hand to my face and said, “Aint so bad.” I have no idea what or who he was talking about. I put my apples in a bowl with butter and cinnamon. “Right now,” Hubert said. He was real drunk. I was on the edge of being drunk too. Something from Pink Floyd’s The Wall came on.

  “‘Run Like Hell,’” Hubert said.

  “What?” I said.

  “That’s the name of that song,” Hubert said. “That song sold me a lot of dope when I was in high school. Everybody loved to get high to that song. No dark sarcasm in the high school. Hey, teacher, leave that kid alone.”

  I took the oranges out of my sweatshirt and held them out to Hubert.

  He took the oranges from my hands, cut them into eight pieces with his hawkbill. He gave me three. “Squeeze them in your pies,” he said. He squeezed one of the pieces in his vodka cup, air guitared to the Pink Floyd song. I looked in the cabinet for sugar.

  “What are you looking for?” Hubert said.

  When I told him, he ran out of the room, came back with a fifty-pound sack, flipped it out on the floor. We laughed. Hubert gouged the bag open with his knife, and I scooped out what I needed with a green plastic coffee cup the color of a lunchroom tray. The fifty-pound sack of sugar sat on the floor like an old man sent to keep me and Hubert company.

  “Get out of here,” Hubert said to the girl on the couch when she turned up the television.

  “Shut up, Hubert,” she said, “you Scroogy motherfucker.”

  Hubert got in the gap between the refrigerator and the cabinet and took the flyswat off its hook and took it to that girl, first to her legs and then when she wouldn’t get up, he swatted her arms and neck. She jumped up and said, “Get that nasty thing away from me,” and when Hubert kept on flailing her towards the door, she raised her hands up around her head and said, “What kind of man use a flyswat anyway?” Hubert caught her a good one right on the back of the neck, but she didn’t stop: “Flyswat a woman’s weapon,” and about the time she said that, Hubert caught her flush across the mouth, and she didn’t say another word til she was on the other side of the storm door, where she said, “Merry Christmas, asshole” as Hubert slammed the door in her face.

  “Shit,” Hubert said, and turned off the television.

  “That wasn’t too Christmas spirit-y,” I said.

  “Her kids be glad to see her,” Hubert said. He sat down on the sofa, twirled the remote like it was a six-shooter. He eyed the vodka bottle on the counter next to me. “You wouldn’t bring that over here, would you?” Hubert said.

  I brought him the bottle and his cup, but Hubert drank straight from the bottle. I went back to my pies.

  “I don’t think there will be no more trouble tonight,” Hubert said. “No more trouble,” and then he closed his eyes. I put the filling in the pans, then fitted the crust tops on, pinched them down, cut slits in the top.

  “O come, all ye faithful,” I sang to myself, and Hubert joined in without opening his eyes: “Joyful and triumphant, O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem,” just like he was Perry Como in his white turtleneck and V-neck sweater on one of those worn-edged albums behind the couch in Cora’s living room. I took the vodka bottle out of Hubert’s lap. He stopped singing, but his lips kept moving. I turned the bottle up. It was too light in my hands, and I got a whole mouthful of vodka when I just wanted a sip. When I swallowed, it hit me hard, blew my head up. Hubert grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me into his lap.

  “Ho, ho,” he said without opening his eyes. “He’ll be gone in a minute.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Santy Claus,” Hubert said and fell silent. He wrapped me up in his arms like I was a liquor bottle, like I w
as a carnival-won stuffed animal. “Ho, ho,” he said again.

  I tried to pull his locked hands apart, tried to slip out from under him, but he wasn’t passed out enough for me to get away. I figured he would be soon enough, and so relaxed in Hubert’s arms, put my head on his shoulder. I don’t know how long I sat there like that, but when I come to, Hubert’s beard was scratching against my forehead and Daddy was sitting in Hubert’s TV chair.

  “Daddy,” I said. I put my hands out towards him.

  “What are you doing?” Daddy said like he was mad at me.

  “What am I supposed to do?” I said. I stood up. Hubert was passed out. His mirror sunglasses were in my hand. I guess they were his. Maybe they were that girl’s. I don’t know. I put them on.

  “What are you going to be?” Daddy said.

  “What am I supposed to be?” I said. “You never got to be, so how do I know what I’m supposed to be?”

  Daddy raised his pale finger to me.

  “And cause you never got to be,” I said, “Momma never got to be what she was supposed to be.” I moved past him into the kitchen. I closed my hand on the cinnamon bottle. I looked around for my pies, but they were gone.

  “I know what I am, Dawn,” Daddy said with his back to me. Daddy turned to the kitchen and pointed to me again. “Let me see your eyes.”

  I told him no.

  Daddy said, “Let me see your eyes, or I’m going.”

  “Who am I supposed to be?” I said. The veins in my head thrashed like a dropped garden hose. I was sure if I raised my glasses, them veins would burst, everything would go orange. I’d throw up orange. Daddy would be lost again in a flood of orange. “You told me to try to understand Hubert,” I said to Daddy. “You told me to try to make it work.”

  Daddy was eating a piece of my pie. He pressed the back of his fork into the top of the pie. “I didn’t tell you to love him,” Daddy said. He turned the pie plate over and dumped his pie on the floor. He dropped the plate. “I didn’t tell you to get drunk with him, destroy yourself, become your mother.”