by Cole Savage
“It was everything I had. Karen took the papers, and Kyle said, “Do you mind if I use the bathroom?” He felt, he needed, for the sake of clarity, to escape her gravity for a moment.
“You know where it is… While you’re in there piss out all that chagrin you been bottlin’ up.
“Thank you, Karen, I will.”
Kyle went to the restroom, when he came back a few minutes later, Karen was in the kitchen, veiled behind a column of steam, stirring what smelled like potatoes. Kyle looked around the parlor, and like taunts, this house, this room, these memories, were the past trying to claim him back at his weakest moment; struck with a familiar awe at how deeply grooved in a mind, a cut of time had become. Looking around, Kyle sighed at this remembered place, shorn of everything, but a pleasure so keen it had the power to destroy him. Karen shook the spoon into the pot, knocked down what looked like a beaker of Whiskey and returned in the form of destruction, to the parlor, drying her hands on a towel, bringing to the forefront the wrecked new world of things as they actually were. Kyle sat on the edge of the couch with his hands on his knees. Karen sat on her rocker, her head angled, her ear tuned into cosmic background radiation. Her anger seemed to have dissipated as she contemplated the shimmering curtain of her acrimony, and a heart pumping its life blood into something outside of her own self, as Kyle watched the truth of it surface in her eyes.
There was nothing for Kyle to do but stand there and marvel at her instant humanity. Her mouth snapped shut. Her cheeks turned bright red, but it was not out of embarrassment because she looked Kyle straight in the eye and said, trying to hold back another of her braying laughs, “So you helped Trent with the mortgage, so what?”. Kyle looked at her, seriously displeased with her response and heard a sound in his head, the rumble of a freight train coming down the tracks. He felt as if he was standing in the path of something fast moving and gigantic, that in its blindness, was bound to carry him away into oblivion. Was this woman human, or a monster sent from hell to suck him into a deep dark hole? His retinal fire swam across a vast darkness.
“I’m just kidding, Kyle. Nicki already told me,” she said, and let out a wheezy laugh. “But that doesn’t excuse what you did.”
Kyle looked like he was gonna cross that invisible line between danger and extremely dangerous, but her laughter hit a switch inside him that turned off the machinery that almost blew Karen out the end of a human cannon.
“Kyle, I’m sorry we sassed you, but you deserved it. What I want you to remember here, today, is that you respect my daughter. Don’t push, don’t pull— give her all the slack she needs. What she doesn’t need right now is you pushing yourself on her to absolve you of your sins because you feel guilty that my little girl is dying. Let my daughter be if that’s what she wishes. Are we clear, Kyle?”
“Crystal.”
“Repentance is a solitary pursuit, Kyle, even when you’re married, but for you, son, there’s no better place for penitence than in the arms of the girl you’re trying to woo back. So be gentle and mindful, my daughter has a lot on her plate and the boys running away yesterday didn’t ease her burden, one iota.”
“Karen are you telling me that you knew about the mortgage payment before I came here today?”
“Does a Bear shit in the woods, Kyle?”
“So you put me through the grinder just to sow your oats?” Karen laughed and said, “Kyle, this is the most fun I’ve had since I caught Trent down in Richmond sowing his oats with a Bama whore named Trixie.”
“You know what they say, Karen, what goes around comes around’. I’m a firm believer in retribution, so if I were you I’d sleep with my eyes open.”
“You don’t have the balls to mess with me, Kyle… And by the way, your skin is a whole lot darker than I care to recollect.”
“It was the three-a-days at the practice field. I’ll be this color for about six weeks.”
“I’m just sayin’, Kyle. If the good Lord wanted you to be brown, he’d a started you out that way, and let the Mormons do as they please with you.”
Kyle didn’t leave right away. Karen reached out a seine of anecdotes, genealogies, dark allusions, and shared places where the boys might have gone, places they were familiar with. She cherry picked through every detail of his missteps, stirring the pot, her eyes gleeful while she analyzed his weaknesses, failing to recognize his strengths. Each of her anecdotes were rebuked by Kyle, spoken with the aplomb of a born dialectician, not the same song that Karen remembered from him so long ago. Karen served him coffee, and Kyle seemed to take a certain gratification of her quasi-approval, of a man who had been off the family’s map, and on their shit list for so long. Nicki came in the house after seeing the sheriff and was surprised that Karen was sitting on the couch next to Kyle, humming lore and anecdotes like they were best friends.
“How’d it go with the whore of Babylon, Kyle?”
“Who you callin’ whore, Harlot,” said Karen. “Everything you are came from me. You’re a dad-gum double of me in my twenties. The only difference between the two of us, was that my hangers weren’t as well developed.”
“I know, Momma. You remind me every time we have a spat.”
Kyle laughed and looked at Nicki. “Hey, how’d it go with the sheriff.”
“He’s being a son-of-a-bitch. He said he’d look around, but he wasn’t enthusiastic about the task since the boys left on their own accord.”
Nicki took her boots off, sat on Karen’s rocker with one leg under her butt, and Karen said, “Look, you two. Them boys are fine. They’ll pop up when it gets cold outside, or when they run out of grub— specially Cole. That boy ain’t fit for the outdoors. Besides, that sheriff would rather be fishin’ than doin’ what the good people of Franklin elected him to do. No one can waste a life faster than that Kentucky redneck.”
“You’re probably right, Momma, but Kyle, if you don’t mind lets run up to Seneca Rocks and ask around. See if anyone has seen the boys?”
“As you wish, Nicki, but give me a second, Karen’s telling me about a family down the street.”
“Who, Momma?”
“The Goldstein’s.”
“Momma quit talking about them like that… Kyle if you haven’t noticed, Momma’s not too fond of black folks, Jews, or Latinos.”
“No, no, Nicki. I’m well aware. Karen didn’t keep her prejudices a secret, even back in our high school days.”
“You’re gonna burn in Hell, Momma.”
“Well, honey, where else am I gonna find your daddy?”
Kyle repositioned himself on the couch, with his arm on the backrest behind Karen, and said, “Karen was just telling me that she walked into a Wake at the Goldstein’s house.”
“Who died, Momma?”
Karen brought her glasses below her nose.
“No one died. I was looking for the boys down on Gambill Road where the Goldstein’s bought that three hundred acres next to Taylor Hollow, and every one of them Bronx Indians, and big-nosed bagel-dogs, at least a hunderd of them, was dressed in black, so I wanted to know, you know, who died and all, cause I know how clannish those Christ-Killers can be.”
“Momma stop with the racial slurs. Can’t you just call them Jewish people?”
“I can, but why? Those Jew-bags ain’t nothin’ more than niggers turned inside out, and they’s buyin’ every parcel of land in this county. The Jews moving in is worse than when the first niggers moved into Franklin back in ‘64, when they bought the Hadley stead.
“Don’t mind her, Kyle. She’s the Devil in disguise, doomed to an after-life of everlasting torment.”
“Does that make you the Devil’s spawn, Nicki?”
“Shut up, Momma. I think you stole me from a hospital, just like you stole the Clinton’s Terrier and drove him to Plattsburgh because he barked every morning before sunrise. There’s no way we share the same DNA, Momma.”
“I disagree, Nicki,” Kyle said, “she’s very colorful, I’m enjoying her spoof. She make
s me feel like Mother Theresa.”
“Both of you’s, shut your cake-holes, I’m tryin’ to spin a web.” Kyle laughed, and Nicki was in the throngs of discomfiture. She had her arms crossed and her face painted with scorn. “So, I find Loretta, bless her heart, she can’t help being ugly, and she tells me that their hound, Judah, a Doberman Pincher.” Karen turns to Kyle. “Judah imagine that, Kyle. No irony there. They named their German hound after the man responsible for crucifyin’ Christ. Jesus Christ, those snout-nosed Yee haws have no sensibilities whatsoever.”
“Momma, are you going to tell us what happened? And quit using the Lord’s name in vein… Hurry up and finish so we can go look for the boys.”
“Anyhow, I laughed at Loretta when she tole me it was their hound that passed, you know, the reason they were having the wake and all, and Loretta about passed out. Rabbi Abel asked me politely to huff it out of there and I did, not cause I was scared, you understand. The only thing that scares me is dying with dirty britches on… I huffed it out of there cause I was afraid I was gonna break my swizzle stick over that snipcocks head.” Kyle laughed, Nicki seemed annoyed, so she gave Kyle a fire and brimstone look, and Kyle quickly regained his composure. He looked at Karen trying not to laugh.
“How was the mood at the Wake, Karen?” said Kyle. A statement smeared with sarcasm.
“It was festive, Kyle.” A muffled snort escaped her lips. “The Jews German hound got run-down by a guy named Fritz, who was drivin’ a Mercedes. How the hell do you think it was?” she said slapping her free hand on her thigh, laughing in rhythm with Kyle.
“Do you mean Walter Fritz, Momma? The owner of Schmidt-bakery?”
“Is there any other Nazi’s in Franklin, Nicki? Kyle, can you imagine the chances of all these coincidences, or ironies, one of those damn things, happening.”
Laughing, Kyle said, “The only way for that guy fritz to unfuck that shit-fest is to throw himself in the oven at his own bakery and incinerate himself… Now that’s irony, Karen.”
Karen hunched over and laughed so hard, her glasses and dentures dropped to the floor. Even Nicki got caught in the moment— Kyle saw a tittle of laughter escape her compressed lips, and Kyle had to admit to himself that he had never seen Karen so animated. Karen managed to stop laughing long enough to say, “I can one up you, Kyle… What if Fritz ran down to the Goldstein’s and stole their dead dog, Judah, and threw him in the oven at the bakery, as some kind of bullshit symbolism.”
“I’m not sure, Karen, but I think you’re crossing some kind of socially unacceptable line there. I’d keep that between the three of us.”
“What does it matter, anyway, Kyle, Momma is destined for eternal darkness?”
“Shut up, woman, you ain’t got the right to judge me.”
“The two of you sound like Lucille Ball and Toby Keith squaring off in a debate.”
“Ease up, Nicki, you ain’t gotta be so politically correct in my house. If God was gonna burn it down with me in it, he’d a dun it while Trent was still alive— that sum-bitch— and gotten two birds for the price of one.
“I’m just sayin’, Momma. You can’t go around town talkin’ like this.” Karen shifted her gaze to Kyle.
“Kyle, you keep this up I’ll have a mind to save you a spot on the top of my hood as a trophy, to parade you around town, to show my neighbors what an asshole on two feet looks like.”
“I can’t imagine a greater compliment, Karen. Thank you.”
Later, Kyle recalled to Nicki the look that had crossed Karen’s face when he showed her the Bank statements, as one of embarrassment, discomfiture, the look of someone caught in a moment of self-contradiction, yet Karen, unbeknownst to Kyle, had played him like a fiddle and Kyle was disconcerted that they had played him so easily, failing to see the irony in their moves. It was unclear if Kyle had, or would, learn from the mistakes of his past, when most were doomed to repeat them. But Kyle was one of those individuals who operated on the fringes of society, unburdened by the confines of socially established norms, and conscience. Even Kyle wasn’t sure that the time that had passed would absolve him of his sins, like a statute of limitations, but seeing Nicki for the first time in ten years, was a clear indication that time didn’t heal wounds, it just made bad memories more distant, moving the pain to the outer fringes of the brain so that the pain would fade further with each passing sunset. Kyle had become an alien to his former family, an interloper whose transport vessel had crashed beyond repair in the backwoods of West Virginia, who had to learn to walk again in a world that rejected him, even the locals were aplomb with his foreign accent, and denied him as one of their own, in a place where the hillsides, peaks, canyons, the rivers, creeks, and the waterfalls, were his best friends from childhood. People want to believe that anyone given a second chance would surely use it wisely. But for most folks from these parts, wisdom was difficult to obtain when destiny stands in the way of its denizens who are hell bent on self-destruction, and Nicki, a vessel built to store the pain of their history together, had stood by while her veneer cracked, and watched as her lustrous darkness seeped out through those cracks like a hairline crack in a dam.
CHAPTER 21
Sitting next to Cooper, the boys talked about the consequences for running away while Cooper dialed his cell phone.
“Hey, T.D, what’s up?”
“Yeah, it’s been a while.” Tyler stopped talking long enough to hear if Nicki was mad at them, but he couldn’t hear the voice on the phone.
“Yep, I can do that, T.D.”
“No, I ain’t said nothing,” said Cooper, “I’ll call back.” Cooper pulled over to the right shoulder of the two-lane blacktop and parked on the gravel shoulder next to some pines and Douglas Firs.
“What are you doing, Coop,” Tyler said.
“Hang tight, boys. Gotta make a quick call.”
Cooper scampered out of the truck and walked along the dirt shoulder, behind his Ford, fifty or sixty feet. He punched numbers on his phone, and Tyler resumed his palaver with Cole, unconcerned with the delay getting home. Pacing, Cooper talked to T.D, looking at the truck, then back uphill, and after about five minutes he closed his phone and headed back to the truck, where the boys had stepped out onto the gravel.
“Who were you talking to, Coop? Was it my mom?” said Tyler.
“Nope. Just business stuff. Get back inside before an eighteen-wheeler turns you into roadkill. We gotta get movin’ before it gets dark.”
“Coop, we live twenty miles away. We got plenty of light.”
“Not where we're going, boys.”
“What do you mean, not where were going, Coop?”
“Change of plans, Tyler. Your mom’s waiting for us somewhere else.”
Tyler sighed. Cooper peeled out, turned the truck around, and headed the opposite way, north, in the direction they had come from. Cooper drove north on 33 for a while and the boys didn’t seem to mind the detour, at ease, anxious to see their mom.
“Coop, how much longer?” asked Cole.
“Sit tight. Your mom’s in a cabin, and askin’ me fifty times ain’t gettin’ us there any faster. You’ll see her soon enough.”
They approached the town of Seneca Rocks, high up in the Alleghany’s, and the landscape on highway 33 had changed. The trees became denser and the road narrower. The boys fell asleep, which was good for Cooper because he had to get gas and drain the dragon. He stopped at a Conoco station in the small town of Seneca Rocks— a Conoco with two gas pumps on a gravel drive with a small retail section, where visitors could get snacks, drinks, and motor oil. The service attendant checked his oil and fueled his truck while Cooper went inside to get canned drinks, chips, and candy bars. He brought the items up to the register and laid them on the counter.
“You must be pretty hungry, stranger.” said the attendant wearing denim coveralls covered in black blotches and oil stains. Cooper looked at the man with the long beard, withdrawn cheeks, and missing teeth that created a whistle when
he spoke.
“You takin’ notes… Of course, I’m hungry. You don’t see oil in my hand, do you?”
The smile quickly died on the attendant’s face. “You want these in a sack.”
“Judging by the crud on your hands, I’d just as soon do it myself.”
He gave the attendant cash for the gas and snacks, Cooper put the snacks in a paper sack and returned to the truck. Looking inside, he noticed the boys still sleeping, and judging by their open mouths, would be for a while. He opened a pack of gum, put a piece in his mouth and chewed it while he drove further up the mountain; looking at the landscape.
He turned the radio on, kept the volume down, and headed north on 33, the Oak Ridge Boys hammering a tune on a Country station, headed to his destination high up in the Alleghany’s. The landscape was lush with broadleaf trees, Yellow Birch, and Mountain Ash, interrupted by rolling hills of grass, hobble brush, and blackberries. He turned left on an unmarked road and motored down a washboard County road leaving a plume of dust in his wake.
An hour later, Cooper turned left onto a rough double track road that got narrower the higher in elevation he went, passing break lands, grassy swales, and copses of pines, the three of them pitching about in the cab. He drove slowly on the deeply rutted road, and thirty minutes later, Cooper turned uphill, traversed a triple switchback and came up on five young bachelor buck milling in a circle, head butting each other; scattering when the truck approached. Cooper continued for another twenty minutes, and Tyler woke. He sat up, looked around, wiped his eyes to regain his vision—the sweet evergreen smell of the woods flooding his senses.
“Are we here, Coop?”
“Just about.”
“Cole, wake up, were almost here.” Tyler shook Cole, and he sprang up and wiped his eyes.
“Where’s mom?”
“We’re not there yet— we’re close.”
The boys looked out the window, the thick forest closing in on the road, their faces pasted to the windows. The Sugar Maples and Hickory trees on the bluffs alive with birds, the truck ascending higher and higher, opening the roof of the mountains to a crystal clear, cloudless sky.