He looked at the dime on the ground and slugged me in the shoulder, a small grin on his face. Not a hard slug. Just friendly. “A nickel it is, then.”
I nodded. “A nickel it is.”
High school hit, and Pete and me stayed friends. Always on each other’s side, that’s the way we were. Math was my favorite subject in school, came real natural to me, and Pete was good at it, too. Pete and me competed to see who’d get the best grades in math. It was always only a point or two difference, and we never fussed either way. For one year our family moved eleven miles away to a town called Clintwood, then moved back to Clinchco. All our friends still felt real close despite our leaving and coming home again. Us kids did more than hunt and shoot for fun, you know. True, we was always outdoors growing up. But we had baseball, softball, football, and basketball, no television then, but a few good radio stations to tune in to. We listened to Amos and Andy, and had cookouts, picnics, and there was always swimming, fishing, things like that.
Our family was always close knit. All seven of us looked after each other. They called my older brother Barnum Junior then just Junior for a while, then just Barney later on. He was older than me by three years. Then I had another brother, James, younger by three years, we called him Jimmy. My pretty sister Gaynell was four years younger than me. Then Franklin came along, the baby of the family, and we called him Frankie. Don’t ever remember fighting with my sister—sure, I’d tease her sometimes, but I always kept a good lookout for her. Us brothers sometimes argued about who brought in the coal and kindling wood, but other than that we never fought or carried on like some families do. Never did see my dad drunk. He had maybe two drinks a night, vodka and Wild Turkey were his favorites. Mother wasn’t necessarily stricter than he was, it’s just that Daddy left her in charge of making us behave, because he was off at work. So she assumed the role of disciplinarian. If we needed it, Mama dealt it out.
We always wanted to please Daddy. Mama, too, but we were with her all the time so it was different. Once my little brother Frankie was late coming in. Supper was ready and he wasn’t home. Daddy said, “Just wait till that boy gets here. Just wait.” I don’t know if he was gonna spank him or what. Finally Frankie came in, he’d been down at the river fishing. Before Daddy could say anything, Frankie held up his mud bucket and said, “Look what I got.” Daddy’s tone changed real quick, “What’d you get, son?” Frankie’s bucket was fat with trout, and he told him where in the river he was, and Daddy said, “Well, get us some minnows, and we’ll go back next morning real early and get us some more.” That’s the kind of daddy he was. Our parents raised us with a lot of love and fun, and that’s what they passed along to us.
When we lived in Clintwood, it came Easter and we had a terrible snow, so much that we weren’t able to go on our usual picnic Easter egg hunt. It wasn’t much trouble to me, but I could tell my little sister was getting choked up. She was in fifth grade and it was important to her. So I told her we’d hunt the eggs in our living room this year. Sis was so impatient, as was the littlest, Frankie. I wanted to give them a real good hunt, so I hid those eggs all over the room, then called them in, daring them to find them all. They squealed and laughed and ran about, and when the hunt was over, three eggs couldn’t be found for nothing. About a day or two later, I let them in on the secret. One egg I taped under the bottom of the table. The second, I hid in the back of our radio. I took off the cover, took out the tubes, hid the egg, then replaced the tubes. Third egg I ate, then opened the window, put the shells outside, and waited for the snow to cover them up. That’s why Sis and Frankie needed to wait outside the room so long, for those shells to be covered in snow. That’s the type of family we were. We made our own fun.
I played a lot of basketball for the high school, and that’s where I got my nickname. They thought I was kinda shifty on my feet, you know—quick-like, so they named me Shifty and it stuck. All the kids on the team had nicknames. There was Slick and Red and Pete and Flirty. It got so you didn’t remember what a boy’s real name was, but that was part of the fun.
When we moved to Clintwood, I played basketball there, and that year the Clintwood team won the county championship. I was also elected best dressed boy in school, but I don’t know if that’s something you’d care about. It’s not that I had better clothes than anybody, I was just careful, clean, everything had to be pressed neat. I had been tubby as a kid. Shoot—I weighed ten pounds as a newborn baby. But by the time I got to high school I had a long, lean build. Girls seemed to think I was a fine-looking fella, and I liked that real fine. Girls, I mean. I liked a lot of girls. Went with several. Nothing serious. Don’t even remember a steady girlfriend in high school, but we always went to dances and movies and for walks holding hands under the trees.
None of the kids I knew wanted to leave Dickenson County. Didn’t think of things in other places we might want to see. Maybe a few of us did, but we had it real fine in our hometown, so we just figured, why go anywhere else? Wasn’t any money for us to travel, besides. Wasn’t many vehicles in those days, you know. Maybe we’d go see a movie in Clintwood and we’d put a quarter’s worth of gas in the car. Or we’d gather a carload and drive over to Norton, about thirty miles. They had a big swimming pool in Norton. It was a real treat to swim there. That’s as far away from home as any of us ever went.
Mostly, I just kept hunting. I’d go to school, and shine shoes on Saturdays, and help around the yard, and hang out with friends, and play basketball, and every other spare moment I had I was out in the woods, squinting down the end of a rifle barrel. People ask me if I grew up something of a mountain man, and I say more or less. When I got into the army, I thought everybody knew how to do the things I did growing up—you know, scout the land, shoot with a rifle. I never took food or water with me when I hunted. I just went out, usually all day. We did a lot of that in the Army, and I got hungry same as any man, but it might not have bothered me as much as it did the other fellas. Maybe because I had been out there and looked at the forest and the sky and learned the types of trees and which ones have fruit or nuts that you can eat. Never hurt me at all, in fact it came in handy later.
Time has a way of changing what you’ve always known. The further I got in high school, the more I knew I’d need to find a trade for my life. Times seemed to be changing for a lot of folks. The radio was on each night, and we weren’t much listening to Amos and Andy anymore. There was a war on in Europe. Crazy things were afoot. The chancellor of Germany seemed intent on gobbling up one country after another. President Roosevelt declared a draft in September 1940, the month I started eleventh grade, but the war in Europe was on the other side of the world, the draft only for twenty-one-year-olds at first, and that age still seemed a long way off. I was still dreaming of doing something beyond shining shoes, so I got a job picking slate for the company. You ever picked slate?
Don’t.
Wasn’t the hard work I hated. Was the dust. The coal car comes up out of the mine and dumps its load, see, and you pick out the junk rock from the coal by hand. This big black dust cloud rises up and there are times when you can’t see the other fella on the other side of the car. You’d have to wait till the air moved before you could see again. I worked Saturdays and was paid fifty-eight cents an hour. The first day I worked ten hours and made five dollars and eighty cents. At the end of the day the company made me go buy some hard-toe shoes and a hard hat. When I came out of the commissary with my new gear, I owed the company eight dollars. So I picked slate most of that year and the next, but I knew it wasn’t my future. I needed an occupation, even if I wanted to live in Clinchco the rest of my life, which I did. I needed to learn how to do something more than pick slate.
That meant I needed to leave home.
3
THE FUN AND THE FEAR
It’s a road you don’t want to meet another car on. No way can two vehicles fit. The road’s paved, you know, but spotty with potholes, and they sneak up without warning and bounce he
ll out of your shocks and springs. We was heading down the road, Pete and me, on our way toward a town called Haysi. You drive up one mountain, then shoot off the side of another, then coil around the roads a bit, and that’s how you get where you’re going. A trout stream beckoned us, one we heard was stocked flush, but to get there meant we needed to drive through Low Gap, and that’s what had us worried. Well, at least Pete, for he was behind the wheel.
Everybody in Dickenson County knows the legend of Low Gap. If you dare to drive through Low Gap at night and it’s foggy, they say your car will stall and roll to the bottom, then start up again, real sudden without you ever touching the ignition. One of our buddies told us how it happened to his cousin. Seems the cousin was heading that direction one murky night with the radio playing full blast. He was enjoying his drive, just meandering down that old road, but when nearing Low Gap everything shut off—ghost hushed—and he floated through the gap like a shadow over water. While coming through he heard voices, laughing and cackling, shivering things best left untold. By the time he rolled beyond a certain hollowed-out oak tree, his car came to life again and the radio roared up and he kept on driving. Only this time with his accelerator floored.
“You afraid? I ain’t afraid,” Pete said, but his knuckles showed white where his hands gripped the wheel.
“Tall tales always got a cousin in ’em,” I said, and lit a cigarette. “Why can’t things ever happen to the guy actually telling the story? A fella can make up anything if he says it happened to his cousin.”
Low Gap lay directly in front of us now. A pothole grabbed the right front tire and the Pontiac pitched and swayed. It was early morning, clear, misty, but no fog.
“Goddam road,” Pete said.
“Want me to turn the radio up?” I asked. “That way we’ll know for sure when it cuts out.”
“Just shut your yap.”
I was teasing Pete, aggravating him like I always did. Wasn’t no real fear in our lives, you know, nothing that actually pressed our luck. Sure, legends ran the course of the county, and everybody’s cousin was always into trouble whenever you told tall tales. Just like the legend of Low Gap, an abandoned schoolhouse sits up in the hills that everybody claims is haunted. We called it Dave’s Ridge, though there’s another name, can’t remember what. Sometimes we’d go up there just for fun and act like the place was haunted. We’d camp out overnight with some school buddies, maybe shinny out of our sleeping bags around midnight and bang on walls. Supposedly you could hear an old widow woman’s voice yelling “Get out!” but I’ve got real good ears and never heard nothing. Those were our only fears around Dickenson County.
“Radio seems fine to me, Pete,” I said. In the side mirror I could make out Low Gap behind us now. Pete relaxed his grip on the wheel. Our car hadn’t shut off, and we were still heading for the stream and a day of fishing.
“How much time you got left, anyway?” Pete asked.
“Eight days.”
“Well, we’ll catch our limit this morning for sure.” He paused and shifted into third, then added, “You think you’ll ever come back to live in Clinchco?”
“That’s my hope. Just as soon as I can.”
Pete smacked the wheel. “It’ll be good to have you back,” he said.
Sure enough, we caught our limit, beautiful fat brown trout, and scaled them on the bank and packed them in a bucket to take back for Mama to fry for supper. Eight days later I said my good-byes all around and set out for Norfolk. It was clear on the other side of the state and the farthest I’d ever been from home. Norfolk was a big city, couple hundred thousand people, I guessed, and the September sun felt warm on my face as I walked through Town Point Park on the Elizabeth River. The river led to the deepwater channels of the nearby Chesapeake Bay where fresh and salt water merged together, the only bay in the United States where that happens, and seagulls from the Atlantic Ocean squawked over my head and swooped. Norfolk felt like nowhere I’d ever been.
I’d enrolled for a machinist course at a vocational school in Norfolk. Figured I could learn that skill, then come home and work for the company at a better job than picking slate. It was fall 1941 when I started the course. I was eighteen years old and had just graduated from high school the spring before, and only a tiny twinge of regret gnawed at me that I wasn’t heading off to college instead. Math was my best subject, you know, and maybe if I ever went to college I could learn to be one of those engineers. Build roads, bridges, buildings maybe. But, well, nobody I knew ever went to college, and I wasn’t sure what I’d ever do in Clinchco with a college education. And, well, maybe I’d still do that college thing later on after the machinist training. Life still held out plenty of time for me, I reckoned.
Come my first day of vocational school I shook hands with a wildcat named Robert E. Wynn, Jr. He had a cheerful, broad face and was from South Hill, Virginia, over in Mecklenburg County. Everybody called him Popeye. He suggested we go find ourselves a beer before classes started in earnest, and I grinned and reckoned me and Popeye were going to get along real fine.
It was good to make a friend right away. Right off, Popeye and me start picking on each other in a good-natured way, just little aggravations, funny things. About a week after we met he says, “Shifty, I’m gonna take you bowling.” Well, I had never bowled in my life, never even seen a bowling ball, and I told him that, but he gave me good odds on a five-dollar bet just to make things interesting, so we went over to the lanes. He stood up to bowl, and I watched real close on how he did things, see. His ball beelined down the lane, and I was a fair athlete, too, so I copied all his moves, how he held his leg back and so on, and my ball hit a good number of pins. He said, “You’ve bowled before, Shifty. The bet’s off.” And I said, “No, I haven’t. The bet’s on.” Well, we kept bowling and he won that game anyway and kept his five dollars and three of mine, but at least I didn’t look like a fool.
Norfolk was a government training program, and the administration paid us ten dollars a month for essentials while at school, but September rolled on, and then October, and it seemed like both months we’d come near to the end and I was out of cigarettes. Popeye kept a pouch of tobacco and a rolling machine and he asked me if I felt like a smoke. I said sure and he said he’d roll one for me, then roll one for himself. I stood at the door of the room and he rolled one for me and I handed it to a guy as he passed down the hallway. “Need another,” I said. Popeye shrugged, rolled a second cigarette, handed it to me, and I handed that one to a different guy as he walked on by. “Better roll one more,” I said. Popeye kept rolling them and handing them to me, and as fast as he’d roll them, I kept giving them away. Oh, Popeye got good and mad about that, and it set me to laughing real hard. Then Popeye started laughing hard, too, and that was that. Popeye was fast becoming somebody I knew really well, almost as well as if he’d come from back home, and I felt fine about having a friend as good as Popeye.
Meeting new people in the outside world didn’t intimidate me. Good thing, too, because all manner of young men signed up for that course. They bunked us on campus and we got to know the fellas around us, and plenty of them were tough customers. Norfolk seemed to attract a rougher crowd. Maybe it was all the sailors coming and going, I couldn’t rightly tell you why, but life in a port city sure proved different than life back in Clinchco. Nothing goes in a rush back in Clinchco, you know, no one’s in a hurry, and everyone’s your friend as like as not. In Norfolk I found I enjoyed studying to be a machinist pretty well and seemed to be good at it. Mostly I just fixed my mind to my work. But I soon found out that even when you’re not looking for it, trouble has a way of finding you.
The last weekend in November, me and some guys headed downtown to shoot pool. The guys wanted to stay late but I had more studying to do, so I started back to the dorm by myself. It was an unfamiliar part of the city and I passed buildings and streets I didn’t recognize. When I came near an alleyway, up pulled this car. It dimmed its lights, you know, and at first
the guys just rolled next to me with their convertible top down though it was nearly winter. Nobody was saying nothing and I kept walking, quicker now, while counting out of the corner of my eye. Two in the front. Three in the back. Big fellas. None smiling, particularly when they swerved ahead of me and blocked my path. They climbed out and lined up in a row with their backs to the side passenger door, facing me. I considered hightailing it back to the bar, but any help I might receive was some distance away, and they had a car. So I squared my shoulders, reached my hand inside my jacket pocket, and spoke first. “I got no problem with taking you on. All I ask is that you come at me one at a time.” In my jacket pocket I always carried a switchblade, something I used for hunting back home, and I pulled the blade out and flicked it open. The sound of my knife echoed with a mighty click off those brick walls.
The biggest fella took three steps toward me, scowled, then stopped. “Why you out here?” he said.
“Studying to be a machinist. Going back to the dorms back at the vocational school.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve got a cousin over there.”
I nodded again.
“Get in.” He kept his scowl. “We’ll give you a ride back to school.”
I didn’t know if it was a command or a question, but I figured if I didn’t do it he might change his mind. I closed my switchblade and we all got in. The big fella took the wheel. We started driving and for a while all was dark. Then he switched on his lights again and we started passing more familiar streets. I starting thinking he was going to keep his word after all. The guy next to me handed me a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. I took a slug and passed it along, and the liquor relaxed me a bit and I wondered if I might tell some jokes to those fellas. Sure enough, I started telling tales and they started slapping their knees, and once we all got to laughing, everybody loosened up and we started talking. Those city boys had never been out hunting but had always wanted to, so I told them about that. And they told me about the girls they was meeting and about the good places in Norfolk to buy beer. We got to discussing baseball and who Cincinnati was going to put on the mound next spring. That’s pretty much the way I was taught to face any fight. I learned that plenty of fellas want to be scrappers, and if they’re swinging at you, well, you better swing back and swing hard. But I found out it’s almost always better to talk than fight, and when those fellas dropped me off at campus, I reckon we might have almost been friends.
Shifty's War Page 4