The Essay A Novel

by The Essay (retail) (epub)

  “For sure. It’s my senior year. I think I’ve got a good chance to be named the defensive captain.”

  “That’s good. Keep busy and stay out of here. This is no place to be.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe if you keep working hard, you’ll get yourself a college scholarship.”

  I smiled and looked at my dad and Virgil. “The coach says I might if I keep working hard. I’m hopin’.”

  “Maybe I’ll get to see you play.” Edgel pinched his cigarette between his lips, squinting as smoke rolled into his eyes, reached into his breast pocket and produced a letter that he handed to my mother. “It’s from my attorney. I go before the parole board in October. He said because I haven’t had any recent infractions in prison, and because the place is overcrowded, I’ve got a good chance to get out on parole.”

  “Oh, Edgel, that would be wonderful,” my mother said, tears starting to roll down both cheeks. She read the letter for a moment and said, as though Edgel had just been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, “It says here that you’ve been a model prisoner.”

  “Yeah, ain’t that somethin’ to be proud of? I’ll be sure to put that on my next job application.”

  “This is such wonderful news.”

  Virgil said, “Maybe when you get out, I’ll talk to Mr. Barker, who owns the carnival. His son, Bart—me and him’s real tight—and I’ll bet I can get you a job with the carnival.”

  Edgel looked at him and shrugged. “We’ll see, Virg.”

  I could have told Virgil right then and there that Edgel Hickam was never going to work as a carnie, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “When in October does the parole board meet?” my dad asked.

  Edgel shrugged. “I don’t know. All the letter says is October.”

  That was four months away and ample time for a Hickam male to get in plenty of trouble. “Oh Edgel, please promise me you won’t get any infractions between now and then,” my mom said.

  “Yeah, okay, Mom. I’ll try not to run into any more bunk beds.”

  Chapter Three

  P

  olio Baughman was my best friend, though it was a position he held by default.

  I met Polio when we were both six years old and waiting for the bus to take us to school for the first day of first grade. The Baughmans had just moved to a small one-story shanty on Red Dog Road and I was surprised to see this new kid standing at the bus stop. He was a skinny, malnourished little guy who smelled like a musty basement. He had a crop of unruly blond hair, untied shoes, and a perpetual line of snot running from his nose to his mouth. His real name was Kirby, but as a young boy he was so thin and bony that the kids gave him the nickname of Polio, which, like so many unfortunate nicknames, stuck. By junior high, even the teachers called him Polio.

  Polio and I were the only two doggers in the first-grade class at Zaleski Elementary School. Thus, we rode the bus together, sat beside each other in the slow reading group and, since the other kids had been forewarned to keep their distance from us doggers, pretended to be army commandos together during recess. Red Dog Road was segregated from the rest of Vinton County by prejudice, barren hills, and miles of bad country lanes. Consequently, Polio was my only friend. He spent countless hours at my house, coughing, swiping his snotty nose with his forearm, and looking for something to cram into his pocket.

  Polio didn’t have another friend in the world, yet he would steal from me at every opportunity. If there were a few pennies on my dresser when he got to the house, they would be gone when he left. Over the years I trudged over to Polio’s house to retrieve money, toys, the pocketknife my grandfather Joachim had given me, and three arrowheads that I had found on the ridge behind our house. Twice, I had to grind his face in the dirt and threaten him with a beating if he didn’t return stolen toys, but mostly he just gave them up.

  “Why do you steal like that?” I asked him once.

  “’Cause you got stuff and I don’t,” he responded.

  “But that doesn’t make it right, Polio. You don’t steal, especially from your friends. My brother Edgel’s like that, always stealin’, and he’s in prison now.”

  Polio just shrugged.

  Like most doggers, Polio was a survivor. He was the middle one of five kids, and even by the standards of Red Dog Road, they were poor. They had running water, but no indoor toilets. Polio did his business in a fetid outhouse that was the only thing on Red Dog Road that smelled worse than the dump, or he simply unhitched his pants and pissed in the yard. His father was a silent, grease-stained man who had chewing tobacco stains caked to the corners of his mouth and a growth on the top of his forehead the size of a lemon. He worked in the junkyard outside of Zaleski. Every day, Polio’s mother wore the same faded blue, sleeveless housecoat that revealed a mass of gray armpit hair.

  I understood this and that is why I tolerated Polio’s thievery. He was the only kid my age within miles and the only one whose parents didn’t mind having a Hickam in their yard. My Grandpa Joachim had an old billy goat on his farm that would butt you the second you turned your back on him. You had to be careful and you couldn’t take your eye off him. Dealing with Polio was no different from dealing with that old billy goat. If I was careless enough to leave something where Polio could get his hands on it, shame on me, because I knew he would steal it. It’s just what he did.

  Mr. Monihan sent word home with my mother that the hillside cleanup had to be a two-person job. I protested this, having no desire to share my ten-cents-a-tire commission. “Jimmy Lee, have you seen how many tires have been dumped over that hillside?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Well, there’s a slew of ’em, and they’re truck tires, which are a lot bigger than car tires. You’ll be glad for the help when you see ’em all.”

  “Who does he have to help me?”

  “He said for you to find someone.”

  Polio Baughman was the obvious choice. Like me, Polio was hungry for money and this was an opportunity to make more than he had ever seen—or stolen—in his life. I walked over to his house and asked him if he wanted to help me remove the tires. “What’s it pay?” he asked.

  “A dime a tire.”

  “That ain’t much.”

  I took a breath and rolled my eyes. “It’s more than you’re making now, isn’t it? I don’t see people lining up on Red Dog Road to offer you work, Polio.”

  “Okay, what time?”

  “Be at my house no later than five forty-five.”

  When we reported to work with my mother at 6 AM on the Wednesday after our visit to see Edgel, I realized how right Mr. Monihan had been. The truck stop garage backed up to the crest of a hill. For two decades or thereabouts, mechanics stood inside the garage and rolled tires out the bay door and across a small patch of asphalt, where they would bounce once on the lip of the hill before disappearing over the hillside, bowling over saplings and landing somewhere between the asphalt and the nameless ditch four hundred feet below.

  “You can’t hardly see any grass for all the tires,” Polio said as we surveyed the hillside.

  “That’s a lot of money there,” I said.

  “That’s a lot of work, Jimmy Lee,” Polio said.

  “Have you got better plans for the summer?” I asked.

  “No, I was just sayin’, it’s a lot of work.”

  “I can find someone else to help me if you’re not interested.”

  “I’m interested,” he whined. “I’m here, ain’t I?”

  I needed to set Polio straight from the start as I knew he would try to find a way to do as little work as possible. Mr. Monihan had backed a topless semi rig to the edge of the parking lot, between the garage and the diner, down an asphalt slope from the top of the hill. We created a system by which we rolled the tires across the parking lot and up a makeshift ramp that we made with scavenged two-by-eights and into the back of the trailer. This was a nice system until the top ridge of tires was gone and we had to cli
mb down the hill and haul them back up. This was dirty, brutal work. The tires were nearly all half full with putrid water that slopped all over me. Many had to be untangled from weeds and vines and I had poison ivy the whole damn summer. By August, my forearms were all scarred up from digging at the blisters. I could hoist a tire over each shoulder and carry them to the top of the hill, although I frequently slipped in the grass and weeds we had tromped flat. Polio could only carry one tire at a time and it was a struggle for him to drag it to the top of the hill, leaving me with the lion’s share of the work. I also learned that black rat snakes loved hiding in the caverns created by the spent tires. We spooked dozens of snakes, and they spooked us an equal number of times.

  Mr. Monihan paid us at the end of every day. I counted the tires and reported to his office at two every afternoon when my mother was getting off work. He paid me cash and I split it with Polio. It was all done on the honor system, which seemed ludicrous to Polio. At the end of the first day on the job, he said. “Why don’t you add about ten extra tires to the total every day? Not so much that he would suspect anything, but that would fetch an extra two-fifty a week for us, and he’d never know.”

  I poked him in the chest with an index finger and said, “We ain’t cheating him because I want to keep this job, Polio, that’s why. If I catch you trying to pull some shit and it costs me this job, I swear to Christ I’ll break your fingers.”

  “I was just sayin’ . . .”

  “I know what you were saying, Polio, and if I catch you cheating Mr. Monihan I’ll beat your ass. We clear?”

  He just shrugged and muttered a weak, “yeah.” It was incomprehensible to Polio that I wouldn’t cheat Mr. Monihan for a few extra dimes when it would have been so easy.

  I don’t know what Mr. Monihan was doing with the tires. Every morning the semi would be backed up to the edge of the parking lot, empty. I assumed that another hollow somewhere in Vinton County was filling up with used truck tires, but that wasn’t my concern.

  In mid-July, Coach Battershell stopped by the house to find out why I hadn’t been to any of the summer weightlifting sessions for the football team. He took one look at my arms and shoulders, thick and cut from hefting truck tires up the side of the hill, and said, “Never mind. Whatever you’re doing, just keep it up.”

  One afternoon toward the end of the month, while we were riding home, Polio leaned up from the back seat and asked, “Jimmy Lee, what are you going to buy with your money?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing right now. I’m going to save it until there’s something I need, probably.”

  He laughed. “No, seriously, what are you going to buy?”

  “I’m saving it, Polio.”

  He looked at me like I had a horn growing out of my forehead. The concept of saving was foreign to Polio. The summer following the first grade, after discovering that pop bottles had a two-cent deposit, Polio and I spent the entire summer combing the banks and waters of Salt Lick Creek and the ditches along every road within walking distance for our quarry. When we each had an armful, we made the perilous quarter-mile hike down the berm of County Road 12 to Pearl’s Grocery, a little country store built so close to the road that you had to check for oncoming traffic before you left the bottom step. I am sure that Mrs. Consitine tired of seeing us drag those scummy bottles to the store, but she would patiently split our reward on the counter. My money always went directly into my pocket; Polio always bought candy, soda pop, or toy balsa wood gliders.

  “What are you spending your money on?” I asked.

  “I’m going to buy me a motorcycle.”

  “You’ve saved enough to buy a motorcycle?”

  “Uh-huh. Junior Kelso is going to sell me his old Yamaha for a hundred and fifty dollars. It needs a little work, but I’m gonna fix it up so I can ride it to school instead of taking the bus.”

  The Kelsos lived in a silver house trailer on Buckingham Ridge. Their front yard was always adorned with two or three used cars that Angus Kelso had for sale. He was a shyster who, despite his moaning and groaning, never got the short end of a deal. One of the rusting hulks in our front yard—a 1962 Pontiac Grand Prix—was bought from Angus. My dad cackled for three days about how he had pulled one over on Angus. Then, on the fourth day, the transmission went out. My dad and Virgil dropped the transmission and found it full of sawdust, an old mechanic’s trick to make a manual transmission run smooth just long enough for the check to clear the bank. The next time Angus walked into the Double Eagle Bar, my dad smacked him in the side of the head with a Rolling Rock bottle.

  His son Junior had learned at the foot of the master, so I could only imagine that the motorcycle he was offering Polio needed more than a little work, or Junior wouldn’t be letting it go for one fifty. The motorcycle, I knew, would end up just another rusting lawn ornament in the Baughmans’ yard, but it was useless to try to talk sense to Polio. In his mind, he was already feeling the wind in his face as he cruised to school on Junior Kelso’s Yamaha.

  The final tire was hauled from the bottom of the hillside the last week of July. In all, we ridded the hillside of 6,720 tires and we each made three hundred and thirty-six dollars for the summer. In my world, it was a fortune. I found a canvas bank envelope in the basement and used it as my cache. Each day, I would come home and add that day’s take to the envelope, recounting every dime and writing the total on a slip of paper before hiding it in my closet behind a stack of fishing magazines.

  The first week of August, I began two-a-day football practices, and Polio bought Junior Kelso’s Yamaha. The second week of August, as I returned from the afternoon practice, Polio was struggling to push the Yamaha up Red Dog Road, the back tire frozen and dragging in the gravel. I stood at the bottom of our drive, my duffel bag tossed over my shoulder, and watched as black oil the consistency of honey dripped from the engine, leaving a dotted trail in the dust. “What happened?” I asked.

  “What the fuck does it look like?” Polio sneered. “The piece-of-shit engine froze up.”

  He trudged past, straining, and I watched until he slammed it into his yard. It never moved from that spot.

  Chapter Four

  I

  became a Bull Elk that fall.

  The Bull Elk Club was the physical education class at East Vinton that was the high school equivalent of boot camp. Coach Battershell was the instructor and while the other physical education classes were playing badminton or soccer, we were running two miles with thirty-pound sandbags on our shoulders, flipping tractor tires the length of a football field and back, performing forty-five minutes of non-stop calisthenics, jumping rope until our calves knotted up, running outside when it was snowing and twenty degrees, or any number of other torturous exercises designed to make us the toughest, most physically fit students in the high school. It was worth a half credit, the same as the class that played badminton, but those who successfully passed the class received a Bull Elk Club T-shirt and certificate at the end of the year. Most of the boys who signed up for the class did it as a test of their testosterone. I was comfortable with my testosterone levels, but signed up for the Bull Elk Club because it was scheduled for first period and the rigors of the class assured me that I wouldn’t be bothered by the daily embarrassment I had endured in English class the previous year.

  The football team started the season 2-0, and, as sad as this sounds, it was East Vinton’s best start in two decades. I had been named captain of the defense by a vote of the team. It was the greatest honor of my life. The other honors I had earned had been voted on by my coaches or sportswriters who didn’t know me. Being named captain, however, was a position of leadership bestowed upon me by my teammates. I wore a “C” on my jersey and would get a gold captain’s bar for my varsity letter at the end of the season.

  I was a starting outside linebacker and having a great year. I loved being on the football team. It gave me a sense of accomplishment that no one could take away from me because of my last name. After three year
s, I was finally accepted by the other members of the team. It was the first time in my life that I didn’t feel like a total outsider. As I became more confident in my position, I began taking charge of the defense and noticed that teammates who for years had looked at me with disdain were now looking to me for leadership. Before the game against Upper Meigs High, the football boosters club hosted a spaghetti dinner for us and I overheard one of them say, “He’s a Hickam, but he’s a damn good football player.” I had to smile. It was, I suppose, as close to a compliment as any Hickam had received in recent years.

  When I was about seven, Polio Baughman and I were across the road by the mountain of red dog taunting a neighborhood mutt named Primo. When we pulled Primo’s tail, he would twist his head and snap, a low, guttural growl rolling into a high-pitched bark as he lunged for the offender’s hand. This was great fun until I miscalculated Primo’s quickness, or teased him once too often, because a few minutes into the game he turned and sank his teeth deep into my forearm. It was my fault, but I was never comfortable around dogs after that, no matter how friendly they appeared to be. And dogs sensed my fear.

  That’s the way many of my teammates and their parents felt about me as a member of the football team. They thought I had made a remarkable turnaround. They liked having me on the team, but they still were uneasy around me. They didn’t trust me. I was still Nick Hickam’s kid, and it didn’t seem that I would overcome that burden in one lifetime. Football had enabled me to earn a degree of respect, but no real friends. This was not something I found particularly upsetting, but simply reality. I was, after all, the interloper. They had been friends for years while I was an outsider. They joked with each other, but were uncomfortable joking too much around me. Perhaps they retained vivid memories of Danny Clinton sliding across the shower with blood spilling from his face. While I had earned their respect, I was still the cur that might lash out at any moment.

  My eligibility for the football team had remained intact by virtue of the fact that Miss Singletary had given me a D for the final six weeks of my junior year. She allowed me to hand in extra credit and I knuckled down the last two weeks of the grading period. Two days before the end of the year, she again asked me to stay after class. Her cheeks were already glowing red when she handed me an extra credit book report I had written on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain and said, “I can’t begin to tell you how much this aggravates me, Jimmy Lee. That’s one of the best book reports I’ve ever read, which proves to me that you can do the work when you put your mind to it.” She glared at me in a way that made my knees feel a little weak. “I ought to fail your lazy butt because you’ve had the potential to do well, but chose not to use it. However, against my better judgment, I’m going to pass you on to senior English. I know how important football is to you, and, believe me, that is the only reason I’m going to give you the D.” She put an index finger near my nose, her brows furrowing into one continuous, knotted line across her forehead, and said, “But so help me, Jimmy Lee Hickam, this is your last break. If I don’t see more effort out of you next year, I’ll make you wish you were sharing a cell with your brother Edgel. Do you understand me?”