Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel

by Robert Gipe

  “Dad,” I said.

  Daddy stood up, thinned out. “You and Hubert are going to jail,” he said.

  I raised my glasses, but Dad was gone. Dead and gone. My head gapped open, and I could feel my brain sizzle under the fluorescent light. I fell to the linoleum and rolled to my back. I pressed my hands to my forehead. The cinnamon bottle was still in my hand, and the plastic disk with the holes in it popped off. Cinnamon covered my face, filled my mouth and nose. The side of my head was hot. I coughed cinnamon smoke, snorted like a candy dragon. I closed my eyes and felt myself tumbling head first backwards, my feet above my head, and then I flipped onto my belly.

  My mother shook me awake. I was face down on the kitchen floor, and the cinnamon smoke filled the room. My mother coughed. I coughed. We couldn’t stop. “What are you doing?” Momma said. She pulled open the stove, and smoke boiled out. The pies were burnt.

  “Where’s Daddy?” I said. “Where’s Uncle Hubert?”

  Momma pulled the black slabs out of the oven. “Have you lost your mind?” she said. “You could have burned down the house.” Momma opened the doors and windows. Momma moved fast. She didn’t act like she had broke ankles.

  I said from the floor, “Where’s your casts, Momma?”

  “Jesus took ’em off,” Momma said.

  “I’m freezing,” I said. The couch was empty. “Where’s Hubert?” I said.

  “Dawn.” Momma grabbed me. “Pray with me.” Momma pulled me up to my knees and started praying. She held my head in her arms, mashed me up against her boobs. It was not that comforting, and all I wanted was to be alone in my own bed at Mamaw’s house, not praying, not drinking, not seeing things.

  “Momma,” I said, “let me go. Let me go to sleep.” I said it three or four more times, and she prayed right through all my begging and pleading. Jesus. I didn’t think she was ever going to finish. When she did, she held me out in front of her to where she could look me in the face.

  She said, “Better?”

  I nodded that it was. “Can I go back to Mamaw’s?” I said, and she took me outside and put me in the Escort. I sat down on her big zip-up Bible, which when she pulled it out from under me, I grabbed the door handle, pushed the door open, and threw up all over the gravel and grass outside Hubert’s trailer.

  “Oh, Dawn,” Momma said.

  I sat up, put my head against the headrest, and said more to myself than to Momma:

  ***

  I woke up Christmas morning saying to myself: They know about me and my car stealing. Me and my fighting at school. The governor and them—they know. They are getting a picture in their heads and in it I am dazed and frowning, my hair all fried, holding up a card with a string of numbers and CANARD COUNTY DETENTION CENTER in plastic letters over top of them.

  A million things from since I was little run through my mind. Momma and her hundred dollars worth of plants, her and Hubert forehead to forehead planting them. That’s when the seed dropped into the ground, the root of all evil. Lying there in the bed, the room darker than dark, I decided to end this story by killing Hubert.

  I sat up and turned on the light, thinking I was at Mamaw’s. But I wasn’t. I was at Houston’s. I got out of bed and went in the front room. It was still dark out. I looked out the front window. I seen Houston’s truck, his old Cutlass. And I seen June’s red Honda car.

  “Hey oh,” Houston said, way quieter than he usually did. He was sitting in his taped-up chair beside the heater.

  “Hey Papaw,” I said.

  “You didn’t stay down long,” he said.

  “Where’s Momma?” I said.

  “Don’t know,” Houston said. “Aint seen her since our big feed.”

  “Why’d she bring me here?” I said. “I told her I wanted to go to Mamaw’s.”

  Houston said, “Sweetheart, your aunt June brought you here.”

  I knew Daddy the night before had been in my imagination, but I would have swore Momma was real. “I was with Momma,” I said.

  “You’ve had a lot on your mind, youngun,” Houston said. “Go back in there and lay down, try and sleep a little more. Give them sugarplum visions one more chance.”

  I’d gone to Hubert’s and got witched. That was the only explanation. “Yeah,” I said. “I will.” I opened the front door.

  “Where you going, sweetheart?” Houston said.

  “Clear my head, Papaw.”

  I was gonna clear my head all right. Clear my head by killing Hubert. I walked over to Hubert’s place. Christmas Eve, he didn’t stay at Green’s. He stayed at his trailer, and there was always a few stayed with him. I walked in and my cousin Jan, the one cut off my hair, sat on the floor in front of the sofa where Hubert was the night before. Her fingers were red from sanding the rust off a tow chain, sanding slowly, lightly, like she had forever to get that chain sanded. I asked where Hubert was, and she acted like she didn’t hear me.

  She shrugged.

  “You don’t know where he’s at?” I said.

  She looked at me like she was going to burn my head to a cinder cause I was trying to make her speak. She scared me. I went down the hall past three different ones of them sitting in different rooms watching different televisions. I asked each where Hubert was, but none had anything to say. The last was Albert, slack-jawed and watching the same wrestling videos he’d been watching since before Dad died.

  “So Hubert didn’t tell you where he was going? Didn’t ask you did you want to go?”

  “No,” Albert said, then “Yeah, but.”

  “But what?”

  “Leave me alone,” Albert said.

  Albert held a pillow across his chest. I grabbed his leg and pulled him straight out on the floor. His behind bounced on the rug, rattled everything on the little table next to him. I backed up, braced myself for the fight, but Albert just sat there. He made a face like he knew he ought to have pain from his broken rib, but there was no fight in his eyes. I’m not going to lie to you. It shook me up. I got down in Albert’s face and said, “What is the matter with you?” He wouldn’t look at me, just kept his eyes on his videos. He stared into the screen and went, “Boom.”

  “Get up,” I said. He acted like he hadn’t heard me. I kicked him, and his eyes never came off the television. I stood there with my hands on my hips.

  “I’m fine,” Albert said. The sound didn’t seem to come from his mouth. I went back down the hall looking for what they were using. There were no roaches in the ashtray, no bottles on the counter or the garbage. I went into the bathroom, all through the bedrooms. No sign. I’m fine. No sign. I’m fine. “I’m fine.” The way Albert said it made me hope I never felt fine again.

  I kicked Albert in the arm covering his broken rib. He barely flinched, just moved slow away from the kick like he was floating in outer space, like a balloon bouncing across the ground light as a dandelion seed.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said, and left Hubert’s house. One of my little five-year-old cousins sat shivering in his shirtsleeves on the trailer steps. “Why aint you over at Green’s?” I asked him.

  “Hubert went to Drop Creek,” the boy said.

  “Drop Creek?” I said, “Why?”

  The little boy said, “He said he was going to bring me a trampoline.” The boy played with a shiny silver knife, hand-forged from a railroad spike. A one-legged man from Tennessee lived out Long Ridge for a while made it for Daddy. I asked the little boy how he got it, told him it was mine and to give it to me. He wouldn’t, jerked it away, and laid the palm of his hand wide open on the blade. Some stoned woman came walking over from the direction of Green’s, kicked the knife off the porch, and started beating the little boy. Blood flew everywhere. The woman cussed me and shoved the boy in a vehicle.

  I stood there trying to unwad what the little boy said like it was a crumpled-up paper ball, and all I could think was he was talking about our old trampoline, the one Denny and them had used to catch Momma the day she broke her first ankle. But why, I tho
ught to myself, would Hubert have gone for that? “Why?” I said out loud. The boy broke from the woman and latched onto my leg like a metal clamp holding a hose on a spigot. He tightened down on me, and his blood got all over my pants.

  I thought I would take him with me to Drop Creek, but then I remembered I was going to kill Hubert and it would be foolish and unnecessary to take a five-year-old boy with me. So I let the woman pry him off my leg. I thought about taking him to Cora’s, but that would slow me down. There would be too many questions, and I would chicken out killing Hubert.

  I took off Decent’s sweater and wrapped the boy’s hand with it. I looked a long time in his face, his eyes brown, green, and yellow, still sparkling and cold, like stones in a creek on a bright sunny day. I took the knife, went back and got Houston’s Cutlass, and headed for Drop Creek.

  When I got there, I drove past Denny’s and parked on the four-wheeler path. I edged through the woods, skirting the hole I spent Thanksgiving night in. I came to the trees at the edge of the clear spot where the trampoline stood. Hubert was on his knees on the trampoline, his back to me. I drew up breath. My plan was to run at him with the silver dagger, an Indian warrior princess, and plunge it in between his shoulder blades.

  Hubert stood up and threw a rope over a tree limb fifteen feet off the ground. The other end of the rope was tied to the hitch on his pickup. He grabbed the noose as it fell and put it over his head. He drew it tight around his neck and jumped off the trampoline. He began to dance in the air. I took off running across the clearing, and grabbed him around the legs. He kicked and slapped me in the head. I couldn’t tell if he was fighting with me or against me, but I got him worked back over to the trampoline, climbed up there with him, and managed to get my knife over his head and cut the rope. We both collapsed onto our backs. We lay there on the trampoline awhile. I sat up first.

  “What the hell?” I said.

  Hubert sat up, looked around. He picked up the silver dagger.

  I could see his face in the blade. He still had the rope around his neck. I asked him to take it off.

  “You sure?” he said.

  When I didn’t stop staring him in the eye, he took off the noose. The snow came quiet like it always did, and the trampoline squeaked like a girl talking about prom. There was a scrap pile of brick and creek rock near the edge of the clearing. It had been a chimney. Breath wheezed through Hubert’s nose and moustaches.

  “Your father would set me up for trouble,” he said. “Tell me to steal apples, throw a rock at a man’s horse, bust a dynamite cap with a hammer.” Hubert pawed the rope. “Then he would either stop me before I did it, or get me out of whatever trouble he’d got me into.” Hubert got tobacco out of his shirt pocket, put a wad in his jaw. He unpinned the note from his shirt. “Your father didn’t care what people thought of him,” Hubert said.

  “And you do?” I said.

  Hubert ran his thumb down the knife’s edge.

  “Say,” I said.

  “It don’t matter,” Hubert said.

  The winter woods smelled of ash and wet snow. “Yeah, it does,” I said.

  Hubert said, “I don’t think I killed Keith. I think he was already dead when I got to him.”

  I took the knife away from Hubert. I lay the blade against my thigh. I was cold and I missed Decent’s sweater. “Will they be able to tell that?” I said.

  “Probably,” Hubert said.

  I turned the blade over and over against my leg.

  Hubert set the noose in his lap. “Green didn’t understand your daddy. He thought he was soft. He kept wanting me to make him harder.” Hubert let the noose drop between his legs, held the loose end where I’d cut it. “Daddy didn’t want us at nobody else’s mercy.”

  My eyes filled with tears. So did Hubert’s.

  “Mercy,” Hubert said, and dropped the rope.

  A tree branch cracked. Denny and his daddy Fred walked towards us across the clearing. When they got close, they stopped and nodded at us. Denny looked at the ground, and Fred said, “We heard they got Keith’s labs back. He was all doped up when he had that wreck.” Fred put his hand on the pad at the edge of the trampoline.

  Hubert’s face was still wet with tears when he looked up at Fred. “How do you know this?”

  Fred said, “Sheriff called Houston.”

  The three of them told me how this meant there probably wouldn’t be no charges brought against me and Hubert. At least not over Keith. Then Hubert said, “Doped up on what?”

  “I forget what they called it,” Fred said. “Something I hadn’t heard of before.”

  It was the first time I ever heard the word. But I found later I had already seen it in action—at that party we went to in Virginia hunting Momma, and at Hubert’s that Christmas morning.

  Hubert nodded.

  “You all right, Dawn?” Denny said.

  I nodded. “Merry Christmas,” I said.

  Denny and Fred smiled. “Merry Christmas,” they said. Then they stepped back and left me and Hubert alone.

  “Bad medicine,” Hubert said.

  I took the note Hubert had pinned to himself and read it. In the note Hubert took responsibility for the death of Keith Kelly and everything else anybody might have against me and Momma and Albert.

  “I failed your daddy,” Hubert said. “And I tried to make it up with you and your brother.”

  “What about Momma?” I said.

  Hubert looked away from me. “I tried to do things different with you. Act like I learned something from Delbert.” Hubert shook his head.

  “Why didn’t you say something before?”

  Hubert got down off the trampoline, gathered up the rope, walked to the edge of the highwall, and flung the rope into the pit. I stood beside him as he stared out over the bare yellow ground, at the flat black patches, the dumped barrels and pallets.

  Hubert turned and walked back to his truck.

  “What are you going to do now, Hubert?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Go somewhere.”

  I asked him where.

  Hubert said, “North Pole, maybe. What about you?”

  I shook my head.

  “You should go back to Cora’s,” Hubert said. “Try to live normal. You don’t have to be a Jewell. It won’t hurt my feelings.”

  Hubert got in his truck and left. That was OK. Nothing else needed to pass between us. I tried to throw Daddy’s railroad spike silver dagger off the highwall, send it sailing after Hubert’s noose, but I couldn’t let go.

  I got in Houston’s Cutlass and drove back to Long Ridge. There wasn’t a soul at Mamaw’s. Nobody at Houston’s either. I found the Escort and June’s Honda all piled up with the clunkers and drug-dealer cars and hiding-from-the-repo-man vehicles down at Green’s log house.

  I went in and they were all in front of the big-screen TV. Houston and Cora stood side by side with June and Momma. Momma leaned on June, her feet still in casts. All the Jewells—including Albert—were sprawled out on the sofas and on the floor. They watched the governor talk on television about the protections the state was putting in place on the highest elevations of Blue Bear Mountain, and how the state was buying the mineral and timber rights so the companies wouldn’t be out no money. Then the governor said they done this for Kentucky’s future, and he waved his hand behind him at a gang of Lexington-looking schoolkids all neat and proper, holding up a long piece of butcher paper said, “SAVE BLUE BEAR MOUNTAIN” with signatures all over it.

  Then the governor looked dead in the camera and said, “A young woman from Canard County named Dawn Jewell, frustrated that we could not come to agreement, told me this week the world is used up and old, and that the way we so-called leaders acted made her feel hopeless. But I say to her and the rest of the commonwealth’s young people that their future, like the top of Blue Bear Mountain, will be there for the rest of their lives.”

  Everybody in Green’s house looked at me. Some clapped.

  “M
erry Christmas,” the governor said, “and God bless the Commonwealth of Kentucky.”

  I thought about what the governor said. “That don’t make no sense,” I said, but people slapped me on the back, and somebody turned the TV to a hunting show, and I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned and there was Willett.

  “Yay,” he said, quiet and sweet.

  “Yay,” I said back to him, trying to sound the same. We hugged and then everybody ate until there were five huge garbage bags full of red plastic cups, Styrofoam plates, and pop bottles and canned cranberry sauce and gravy smeared everywhere.

  Then somebody come running in said Hubert had gone down to the sheriff’s office, gave them five copper worms and a truck full of moonshine and turned himself in. That turned Christmas into a funeral for the Jewells. Momma said, “Praise God.” Mamaw and Houston and June excused themselves and asked did I want a ride back to the house. I gave Houston back his Cutlass keys and asked Willett did he mind walking. We went outside and June pulled me aside and asked was I OK, and I said I thought I was, and she asked did I hear about Aunt Ohio, and I said I hadn’t, and June told me Aunt Ohio died, that she wrapped her Cadillac around a telephone pole in the fog of Christmas Eve.

  Albert came up behind us smoking. “And she had some young dude in the car with her,” Albert said, “without no britches on.” Albert raised his eyebrows.

  I looked at June. She nodded. “Her pastor,” June said.

  “Daggone,” I said, and they all nodded and shook their heads and left me and Willett standing there alone. I took Willett by the hand and walked him up to the jumping-off spot. Willett huffed and puffed up the mountainside, his cheeks red as rubber balls. The wind rustled the tree-thick ridge, set off wind chimes, pushed a rattling car along the road somewhere below us. Me and Willett climbed through the empty winter sunshine to the top, and when we got there I pointed out Hubert’s store in the valley below. I told him about me sitting on the cliff across the road from the store pouring liquor down the water pipe. I told him about jumping off the mountain all sad and liquored up, and I showed him the ledge where Aunt Ohio saved me from falling off the mountain.