by Gregory Hill
If our plot were water, someone has just stirred into it a cup of cornstarch.
At the bottom of the secret box, under the newspaper clippings, there’s a stone spear point. Like an old Indian thing, shiny and black, about five inches long. And under the spear point is an actual piece of sports memorabilia. It’s no dirty jersey or anything, but it is a ticket stub from the final game Kitch Riles ever played: McNichols Arena, December 31, 1975, Kentucky Colonels vs. the Denver Nuggets. That’s the one where Kitch scored fifty points and his team still lost.
I bring the clippings out to the garden and set up a second wicker chair and a second TV tray opposite from Vero. Her gaze has settled on my hand-written note.
I read every word of the stories again, as slowly as possible. In simple terms, here’s what happened: On January first, 1976, Kitch and John go bye-bye. They are never found. Eight months later, a baby arrives on the scene and is anonymously donated to the Strattford County Courthouse.
And it just so happens that Charlene “I Don’t Discuss The Weather” Morning, who, thirty-three years later, still keeps a Kitch Riles trading card in her billfold and retains the ticket stub from his final game, has obsessively collected articles about both stories.
There is no mystery here. Evidence points in all three directions to a triangular love affair. Let’s speculate: As a kid, Charlene fell for Kitch Riles, but when he left town to play basketball she switched to his older brother, John. A few months later, Kitch comes home after a monster basketball game, sees Charlene in bed with John, goes nutty. There’s a battle on the plains, both brothers die, and are eaten by wild animals.
Alternate scenario: Kitch comes home, climbs into bed with his old lover, Charlene, and is discovered by John, who goes nutty. The final scene—battle, fratricide, wild animals—remains unchanged.
Let’s continue with the speculation: I am adopted. This is not speculative. However, my actual birth date is unknown. It’s believed to be around September 1, 1976. Kitch Riles disappeared on January 1, 1976, which is precisely eight months before I was born. If Kitch and John killed each other over an unsanctioned act of sexual congress with Charlene, then it’s quite possible that the possibly premature baby Charlene dropped off at the courthouse was a direct consequence of that congress.
How do I know that Charlene was the anonymous baby-dropper? I do not. But everything I’m imagining right now leads directly to that conclusion. Charlene becomes pregnant with a Riles child. She keeps her pregnancy secret from her neighbors. I’m not sure how you do that, but let’s say she hides the pregnancy somehow and gives birth in her own bathtub. After she cuts the umbilical cord, she weeps over the baby, terrified of sharing her secret with the world. Be it oppressive parents, judgmental townsfolk, poverty, or guilt about her role in the deaths of the Riles boys, she decides that the baby will be better off in the hands of complete strangers than in her own. So, one night, she drives the fifty miles to Strattford, the closest town with a courthouse, and gives the baby away.
Moving on. Kitch Riles was tall. I am tall. Kitch Riles played basketball. I officiate basketball.
Further, Kitch and John have similar noses. Sort of Roman, round and pointed, and broad and flat. I go into Charlene’s bathroom and look in the mirror. After several moments of shifting angles and cross-eyed focus, I concede that there is, indeed, perhaps, a close resemblance of the familial kind.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the facts lead to only one conclusion.
Dramatic pause, whilst the gallery holds their respective breaths.
I have brought my girlfriend to my mother’s house.
44
Tacked to the wall opposite Charlene’s toilet is a 1974 map of Strattford County. The map is big enough that a four-year-old human would be able to sleep comfortably upon it, assuming the map were augmented by sheets, pillows, and a mattress. The map itself is a black and white reproduction of an assessor’s grid, including every parcel of land in Strattford County with the names of the landowners written in each rectangle.
Perhaps you think it’s odd that Charlene hung this map in her bathroom, where, multiple times a day, she must sit and stare at grids of townships and sections and topographic whorls. But it’s not odd. Charlene is wise. What better way to spend your toilet time than by pondering the county you inhabit?
Since 1974, when the map was produced, Charlene has crossed out several of the names that were originally printed on the land parcels and she has penciled new ones in. Some of the parcels have changed hands five times in the last thirty-five years. Consider, for example, one stamp-sized square at the bottom left corner of the county: Maus, Katze, Wolff, Jager, Engels. Other parcels haven’t changed at all, which suggests they’ve been under the same ownership for the last three-and-a-half decades. Amongst those parcels are a handful attributed to Vernon Riles. The land in question is just a couple of miles north of the House of Pronghorn.
Remember that abandoned homestead I passed thru after my near-death adventure with the hellfire tornado? The picturesque one that was filled with reverberations of dread? Remember? It, too, was just a couple of miles north of the House of Pronghorn.
I know from Charlene’s newspaper clippings that Vernon Riles is the father of John and Kitch Riles. Which means, if my wild suppositions are correct, that Vernon Riles is my grandfather. One wonders what the hell is going on.
*
Not long ago, the world was utterly still and my sole ambition was to go to Denver and give a man named The Blad an alpha-male ass whupping. Now, the world is moving (slowly), I’m moving (quickly), and I have two (count ‘em) purposes: to communicate with Vero, and to establish the veracity of my wild ancestral claims.
Like a shook-up snow globe, my sense of purpose is settling and I’m starting to see the little plastic gingerbread house within. Who might be living in that little plastic house? I don’t know, and I’ll most likely abandon this snow globe metaphor before I ever find out.
Bloodthirsty possémen! Join me as we march to Township Four South, Range Forty-eight West and heretothere meet our maker, or, at the very least, frolic amongst the remnants of his childhood home.
First, though, let’s visit Charlene’s backyard to say goodbye to Vero. Her index finger is now only inches away from my note, her eyes are squinted in concentration. I reach toward her hair, wishing to adjust her beehive, which has begun to lean Pisa-like after our hasty journey from Holliday. I restrain myself. Let the woman read.
I kiss Vero on the forehead, shoulder my backpack, and head up the street. On the way out of Keaton, I stop by the grocery store, where I slip the key chain back over Charlene’s neck and let it drop between her bosoms.
Hello, potential mother. My eyes are grey; yours are brown. My hair is brown; yours is brown-with-grey. You’ve got a button nose, not unlike that of Anne Murray. Mine is difficult to define, not unlike that of Elvis. I’m six-eight. The top of your head barely comes up to the bottom of my sternum. I’m swarthy. You’re the color of a lifelong tan. And although we both have slender fingers, neither of us owns a piano.
Okay, now let’s go knock on the door to my gingerbread house.
45
This is definitely the bucolic ranch of dread that I passed thru after my run-in with the tornado. There’s the collapsed barn, the sand blasted house, the broken windmill. It’s the same patch of land marked Vernon Riles on Charlene’s bathroom map.
Lingering, as it is, directly beneath the dark sky of hellfire storm and illuminated, as it were, by the hazy red sun on the west horizon, the whole ranch is coated with a film of decay. This is not a friendly type of decay, like you might find when you lift up a paving stone and discover some roly-polies eating an earthworm. This decay is more like what you’d see when you hold an untreated case of frostbite under an infrared lamp. As I describe the scene, imagine every piece of barn wood, every shard of broken glass, every molecule on this homestead as limned in the red-grey haze of the hellfire sun.
&nbs
p; When I had originally passed thru this place, after the tornado nearly ate me, I had been in an understandable rush to get out from under the storm and so I missed a few things. Item A: next to the old barn, there’s an old telephone pole with dead wires hanging off it and a circle of bird shit forming a halo around the base. Attached to the pole is a warped, peeling chunk of plywood that’s been jigsawed into an approximation of a backboard. Approximately ten feet below the backboard, half buried in the sand, is the iron basketball hoop itself, rusted and decorated with yet more bird shit, and with a yucca plant growing thru the center.
Surely, this is the Old Country Hoop into which young Kitch Riles tossed an Old Country Basketball day after day, night after night, as the snow fell and as the crows called.
I imagine back to that dismal first day of 1976, with John and Kitch Riles playing one final game of basketball to settle their differences vis-à-vis their respective relationships with Charlene. After much back and forth, and amidst escalating rhetoric, Kitch ends the game by dunking the ball so hard that it tears the hoop off the pole. And here it lays, still.
The fact that vandals have never stolen the hoop suggests that this here Land of the Dead Brothers was deemed haunted by the locals and assiduously avoided. Either that or the locals never appreciated the significance of an honest-to-gosh relic from the twilight of the ABA.
To the barn. With the roof collapsed, it’s hard to get around inside, but I weave thru the labyrinth of cracked grey wood and dusty shingles to find some old livestock stalls, one of which contains the skull of an actual cow. There’s a worn workbench scattered with rusted tools: hammers and horseshoes and whatnot. On the dirt floor, next to a mouse nest assembled from the leaked stuffing of a rotted saddle hanging on the wall above, there’s a giant stainless steel syringe with a glass—whaddyacallit?—cylinder. The needle is as long as a pencil. Maybe after Kitch won the one-on-one game, the Riles boys decided to kill each other in a suicide pact that involved cow tranquilizers.
I enter the farmhouse. There are holes in the plaster walls revealing lath, there are mouse turds everywhere, carpet rotted, light fixtures smashed, chunks of their frosted glass on the floor below. There’s also a strong suggestion of recent human habitation. A portion of the roof has caved in and the hole has been covered with a blue plastic tarp that still has its creases from its time on the shelf in the hardware store. On the living room floor are two giant cans that, per their labels, once contained tapioca pudding.
There’s a door so I open it. It brings me to a bedroom with a dirty mattress on the floor. Upon the mattress, two dirty kids are beating the everloving shit out of each other. They’re maybe six and nine. The boy, younger, is on bottom, the sister, older, is on top with one hand around the boy’s throat and the other hand cocked and ready. Shirts are torn, slobber drips, blood gathers on teeth. It’s a full-on inter-sibling battle.
As to the source of their mutual rancor, it is doubtless the upended bag of antique coins that has been spilled at the foot of the mattress. Ignoring the children’s frightful display of rage, I squat to examine the coins.
I’m no numismatist, but I recognize money when I see it. Tarnished silver dollars from the way-back days, buffalo nickels, wheat-head pennies, fifty-cent pieces, all manner of obscure currency. How and why these things ended up in the possession of two children in a condemnable house is beyond me.
All right, I’ll give it a shot. If I were the type to believe in the supernatural—and given my predicament, it’s odd that I still don’t—I’d be inclined to suggest that this scene is the ghostly manifestation of the souls of the Riles boys, created by a trickster demon solely for my bewilderment. But I don’t believe in the supernatural and I don’t care to dig into yet another dysfunctional family, my own being my primary concern, so I’ll pretend that these children are none of my business.
Ahoy, what do we have here, carved into the chipped paint of the molding in the far corner of the room?
Kitch tested Excal.
What’s “Excal”? Why was Kitch testing it? I neither know nor care. All I care about is the “Kitch” part. This is, without question, the childhood home of Kitch and John Riles.
One of those brothers is my father. Kitch, most likely, seeing as we’re both tall, and because he’s cool and carves things in molding. I squat and run my finger over the crooked graffiti. Imagine growing up here. Tossing a ball thru the Old Country Hoop, beheading the Thanksgiving turkey, wearing boots and neckerchiefs and multi-gallon hats.
I go thru the rest of the house. I look at my nose in the cracked bathroom mirror, I poke my head into the crawlspace, I pull open the crusty old oven door. I fail to find any documentation of my parentage. I do find, on the back of a shelf in one of the bedroom closets, a dusty pair of binoculars. It’s a nice set, of an early fifties vintage. The lenses are intact, the focus mechanism still works.
Avoiding chunks of glass and fly carcasses, I put my elbows on the windowsill and point the binocs northward. I make out the slowly spinning pipe of the tornado thru the drops of rain and hail.
I hang the binoculars around my neck, claim my rightful ownership. I don’t feel guilty for taking them. While you may doubt it, I’m almost certain that I’m the son of one of the Riles boys. Shit, I am a Riles boy. Technically, everything here is part of my inheritance.
Speaking of which, fuck it, I’m taking those antique coins. I return to the master bedroom, where the two kids are still beating the everloving shit out of one another, and push the coins one by one into their cloth bag. There are fifty-five of them. Based on the fact that they’re all more than a hundred years old, I figure they’re probably valuable to someone somewhere, which means I should do something stupid with them.
Those fisticuffing kids are driving me crazy. I can’t possibly leave them posed like that. I’m a referee, after all. I may be an unconventional cuss, but I never hesitate to stop a fight.
I haul the kids outdoors to the red-grey dread. I bring the girl to the west side of the barn and fold her into a cross-legged Indian-sit, so she’s facing the glow of the setting sun. The boy, I haul to the opposite side of the barn, where I place him flat on his back so he’s facing the bottom of the hell-fire storm. The change of scenery ought to terrify at least one of them into civility.
I don’t know what the hell else I can accomplish here. I’ve ended a fight, acquired coins and binoculars, and confirmed that Kitch Riles lived in this house.
There’s no reason to rush back to Keaton, as I’m sure Vero hasn’t finished reading my note. How about another visit to the tornado?
46
I walk into the cool air of the downpour, binocs over my neck, coins in my backpack. Since I’d last been under these clouds, enough rain had struck the ground to render it properly wet. Prisms of raindrops are suspended in the air, the grass hunches over in the invisible wind, and, in the background, the tornado continues its stately spiral.
I march straight to it, my own personal vortex. The tornado has completely devoured the stand of trees and is now progressing up the far side of the bowl-valley. As it creeps along the landscape like a morning shadow across a bedroom floor, the limbs from the mutilated trees poke out like straw in a stray cat’s fur.
When I’m close enough to feel the faint vacuum tug of wind on my arm hair, I stop. I look up, up, up and see the molecules of water vapor collide and burst. Faintly, at the very tiptop of the tornado, little snakelike strings of lightning creep in and out of existence. You could fly all the way to Mars and never see anything like this.
And way, way up there, what’s that? I bring the binocs to my eyes and focus. Yes, it’s little Fiver the rabbit, his rodent jaws opened wide in terror. I’m rooting for you, kid.
I remove my backpack and extract the bag of coins. I slide one of the less tarnished silver dollars into my pocket and then bring the rest of the coins to the front of the tornado. I stand as close as I dare and then empty the bag so the coins float in mid-air right in t
he path of destruction.
I step back and watch and wait for minutes or hours until the coins begin to draw toward the tornado, first one, then another, slowly rotating, accelerating, then being swallowed into the column and up to the great jukebox in the sky, where all currencies are accepted.
I return to the wake-side of the tornado and sit on a patch of soft grass and eat from a box of granola cereal and chew from a carton of soymilk I’ve brought with me. The ground is sloped here, like a natural theater in the round, with the tornado climbing up the staircase on the opposite side. I sit with my feet pointing toward the bottom of the valley where the splintered, twisted stumps of the mutilated trees raise their shards to the clouds above.
I nap on the soft grass. When I awake there are actual water drops on my clothes. My naps are pretty long, I think. Long enough for rain to accumulate.
I stretch, focus the binoculars to the very top of the tornado and then let my eyes slide down. Deep within, about twenty feet off the ground, I see the glint of coins.
47
On the walk back to Keaton, my left knee begins to hurt. This is in addition to the clunking noises in my right knee. At approximately thirty-three years old, I’m no longer a kid. I gotta take it easy in this thick air. I walk slowly. Eventually I enter Keaton and pass the gate into Charlene’s backyard.
To my great surprise, Vero has finished my letter. How long was I gone? Three days, maybe four. Five, tops. A week? Whatever.
Happily, she’s answered yes to both of my questions: