by David Joy
“If there’s one thing I understand, it’s that.”
Maggie scooted toward me on the seat and rested her hand on my thigh. I looked over at her and she forced a smile. Her smile was genuine, and it was clear that her frustration was not with me, but there was sadness in her eyes that I couldn’t explain. All I could do was change the subject.
“I think you’ll like where I’m taking you.”
“Where’s that?”
“Up on the Parkway.”
“Where?” Maggie’s eyes lit up with excitement and if her smile told me anything it was that I’d actually managed to come up with something that might please her. “Max Patch?”
“Not unless you want to spend the night.”
“Then where?”
“Kind of in between Cherokee and Maggie Valley. The Thomas Divide.”
“I’ve never heard of it.” Maggie reached into her pocketbook and pulled out a tube of the sweetest-smelling lotion I’d ever caught whiff of, some foreign kind of fruit smell like something that might grow on an island. She spread the lotion up her arms until it was all worked in. “What’s at the Thomas Divide?”
I barely heard the question, my mind wandering. “The spirit lights.”
“Spirit lights?”
“It’s this place where lights come out over the mountains, but there’s no reason for the lights to be there.”
“You’re so full of shit.” Maggie laughed.
“No, seriously. My dad used to take me out there sometimes when I was a kid.”
“And you’ve seen these lights with your own eyes?”
“Ain’t seen them with anyone else’s.”
Maggie leaned over and slapped me in the shoulder. She shot those silver-dollar eyes at me and I was sure I’d run off the road. Winding around Cabbage Curve, headed north along a highway that bent serpentine, I was certain I better keep my eyes on my driving. But the way that sunlight reflected against her thighs, any lick of sense that had ever made residence in that pea head of mine was useless as tits on a boar hog at the sight of her.
We stopped at the Coffee Shop in downtown Sylva for supper, a place that’d been feeding locals for a lot further back than my lifetime. The little family-owned dive had kept the prices low and the plates piled high since sometime back in the 1920s, and had never had any use for going touristy like other places in town. Not all that long before Maggie and I broke up, I’d turned sixteen, gotten my license and a truck, and taken her there for one of the first real dates we ever had. I wouldn’t call it our restaurant or some pussy shit like that, but it was a spot we’d shared when the world seemed slower, a place that seemed to hold an energy similar to that spot in the creek where we stood as wide-eyed children with spring lizards squirming in our hands. In the two years that had passed, both of our lives seemed to have lost that simplicity. Both of us carried things now that we hadn’t carried before. But being there, being there with her beside me, seemed to bring back all that old feeling. When we were together it seemed like everything else, all the bad shit that surrounded us, stopped and we were all right for a moment or two. It was never a thing that felt like forever, but sometimes all a person needs is a chance to catch their breath.
—
THE SUN had already sunk behind the ridgeline by the time we made it to the pull-off, and I threw the pickup in park as that late June fire began to burn down into embers behind the mountains. I reached under the seat and grabbed a couple beers I’d smuggled out of the fridge, the cans sweaty from the long drive in warm air. I handed one to Maggie and she hesitantly cracked the top. She barely sipped enough to taste, but I gulped hell out of mine in a face-wrenching swallow and tried to chug past the foam.
“Sorry it’s not colder.”
“No worries.” Maggie took another sip of beer and scooted over on the bench seat till her legs pressed up against mine.
I sucked half that can down on the next swallow in a prayer that the alcohol would hide my nervousness. The last bits of orange melted over Big Cove, and it wouldn’t be long before blue faded to black and all that was left for light was moon and stars. “Kind of pretty, ain’t it?”
“I’m not putting out that easy, Jacob.” Maggie pulled away and scowled in a fashion that sent my heart up into my throat. I could feel my face flushing and palms getting clammy when she widened those eyes and smiled. “I wish you could see your face right now. Priceless.”
“I hate you.”
“No you don’t.” Maggie nuzzled up against my shoulder, and I wrapped my arm around her, held her close enough to feel her breathing on my chest. I didn’t talk much until that first beer was down, and I cracked the top on another.
“What was bothering you earlier?”
“What are you talking about?”
“When I picked you up. You looked like you were about to cry.”
The shrill of field crickets and spring peepers resonated through open windows, and it took Maggie a while to respond. “I really don’t want to talk about it.”
I’d never been able to leave well enough alone. I knew she would have drug it out of me, so I did the same. “That shit’s not right. You tell me you want me to open up, but you won’t talk. That doesn’t make any sense.”
Maggie pushed up from my chest and looked me square. Anger grew inside of her, a fire building in her eyes. “I don’t really know how to say it other than just to say it. I’m not going to college.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean I can’t go. I’m not getting out of here.”
“That’s crazy, Maggie. You were always top of the fucking class.”
“It’s not about grades.”
“Then what is it?”
“Money. It’s about money, Jacob.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s what my parents were fighting about tonight and that’s what they’ve been fighting about for months. For months they’ve been at each other’s throats.”
“But why?”
“Mom hates Dad because he blew my college fund, and he hates her because she didn’t get the paperwork mailed off. And what both of them don’t seem to get, what both of them can’t fucking understand, is that I’m the one who’s stuck here.”
“When did you find out?”
“A couple months ago, but it’s been building and building since then. First we found out I didn’t get the loan. Mom missed the deadline and by the time they got to me they could only offer part of what I need. But rather than taking any of the blame, she’s mad at my dad for spending what little bit of a college fund I had back when I was a kid. It’s just a fucked-up situation, Jacob. It’s just fucked-up.”
“How much did you need?”
“I don’t know. Three or four thousand dollars, but it doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter if it was a few thousand or a million, we don’t have it.”
“Three or four thousand dollars is nothing, Maggie.”
“It is when you don’t have it. And it is when you have to pay it every semester.”
The two of us sat there for a while, neither saying a word, Maggie shifting stiffly as if she sat in a rocking chair with her hands tucked under her thighs. I could tell that she was broken, but I wasn’t sure how to make it all right. I was slowly coming to terms with my fate, and while there was a part of me that desperately wanted to get out, there was a much bigger part of me that knew I never would and accepted it. I knew it had to be different for all of that weight to come suddenly, to hammer someone all at once. There was nothing but darkness outside now. A sliver of moon hung low in the sky and though the stars shone brightly, there was a flickering in their brightness, a flickering that insisted at any minute they could all burn out.
I scooted toward her and pulled her into my side. Maggie looked up at me, her eyes glassy with tears, and buried her f
ace into my chest. I held her tightly curled in one arm and ran my free hand through thick blond curls, traced the tips of my fingers in circles against the back of her head. She didn’t move, and I didn’t either. Even when my arm went numb and I caught an itch at the base of my back, I didn’t move. She needed something solid.
After a long spell, that tightness she carried seemed to lift and she felt weightless in my arms. Only then did I speak.
“What if you were able to come up with the money?”
“I’ve already told you. We don’t have it.”
“I mean if you were able to come up with the money is there still time?”
“School starts in a month and a half, but maybe.”
“What would you have to do?”
“Just get the paperwork in.”
Maggie was still motionless against my chest. I finished my beer and tossed the empty into the floorboard, stared out of the windshield to where ridgeline met sky.
“I could get you the money.”
“What are you talking about?” Maggie pushed up from me, her hands pressed against my chest, and looked at me with squinted eyes.
“I mean I’ve got money.”
“Don’t joke about this, Jacob.”
“I’m not joking. I’ve been getting paid my entire life, Maggie, and I’ve never spent a goddamn dime of it. Everything I’ve ever made is sitting in my daddy’s bank account and it’s as simple as me telling him I need some of it.”
“I couldn’t let you do that.”
“Why?”
“Because it wouldn’t be right, Jacob. I mean it’s sweet for you to say, but it wouldn’t be right.”
“Well, my offer stands.”
Maggie stared at me. There were all types of things that seemed to be running around inside of her that went unspoken. Some thoughts can’t be put into words. She took both of my hands in hers and rubbed her thumbs across my knuckles. She stared at my hands the way she’d done on the couch that afternoon and then she sent those silver-dollar eyes back inside of me again.
“I’ll get there eventually, Jacob. And I’ll get there on my own.”
“I know you will.”
“It just won’t be this fall.”
“But it could be.”
“No, it won’t. But I’m all right with that.” Maggie stared off into the darkness with a calm certainty in the words she said. “You know, you could come with me.”
“Where?”
“To college.”
“I didn’t even finish high school.”
“You wouldn’t have to go to school. You could just move down there and get a job. I mean, at least it wouldn’t be here.”
“Where?”
“Wilmington.”
“Fuck, Maggie. That’s all the way across the state.”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“Ain’t it on the beach?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never even seen the ocean.”
“All the more reason to go.”
“And what the hell would I do in Wilmington?”
“You could work as a mechanic. I mean, you’re already doing that here.”
“Not really. I’m not a mechanic by any stretch of the imagination.”
“But you could be.”
“I guess I could be. I could be all sorts of shit.”
“Then why won’t you?”
“I might.”
“You will or you might?” Maggie nuzzled her head against my chest and I could smell the sweetness of her hair, and it was almost enough to confuse me into promises I wasn’t sure I could keep.
“I might.”
There were things that Maggie could never understand, and part of the reason was that she’d always been just passing through. The life I was born into seemed set in stone from the moment my last name was scribbled across my birth certificate. But in a lot of ways I’d come to terms with it. There comes a time when you’re so worn that you can’t fight that type of shit any longer and so you just surrender. There’s a peacefulness that comes with surrender. Slowly but surely it seemed that I was finding peace.
“I love you, Maggie.” I kissed the top of her head and cracked open the last beer I had.
Maggie turned and looked up at me, and in that moment it seemed like she felt the same way that I did. I don’t know what she saw in me. Maybe it was the fact that I didn’t gloss over everything. Maybe it was the fact that I called the world’s bluff. She pushed up and kissed me, and I held on to her bottom lip until it pulled away and glistened. Her eyes were squinted and looked deep into me. Then she settled back against my chest, rested one hand on my stomach.
Maggie rubbed her hand against my stomach like she was trying to massage all of the bad shit I carried away, but her eyes stayed fixed on the distance. She didn’t say anything, and the two of us just sat there, the bugs and frogs offering the only sounds. I was honored that she asked me to go, and there was a part of me that desperately wanted to follow her. There was a part of me that wanted to burn what had been my life up until then. But trusting her entirely was still too uncertain. Hope and faith are loaded guns.
Everything I’d ever been taught told me things that were too good to be true usually are. It was a silly thought to think that I could ever get out of these hills. It was a silly thought to think that the life I was born into was something that could be so easily left behind. Some were destined for bigger things, far-off places, and such. But some of us were glued to this place and would live out what little bit of life we were given until we were just another body buried on uneven ground.
A small, yellow orb of light rose over the peaks in the distance and bent up and to the left slowly before changing directions midair and falling down into the valley. It danced down there in the gorge, then dropped further and out of sight. Maggie sat up from my chest and pointed out to where the light had gone. “Did you see that, Jacob? Did you see that light?”
I wanted to tell her I did, but I took a deep breath and another long swig of beer. “No,” I said. “I didn’t see a thing.”
21.
A small Tupperware bowl that sat by the office was slap overrun with keys come Thursday morning when I showed up at the shop. Big sales somewhere off the mountain meant Daddy had to keep the work orders piled high if he ever wanted to shimmy that cash into respectable places. So, that’s what he did.
Daddy kept a long line of easy fixes—oil changes, turning rotors, and such—so I could help him move small chunks of change into the bank. But the bigger fixes, heavily overpriced work like transmission replacements that really padded the deposits with zeros, had to be done by him until he could find good enough mechanics to do the work and keep their mouths sealed. Sinking those Cabe brothers down into Lake Glenville had really thrown a monkey wrench into the whole operation. But dead men tell no tales, as Daddy said, and I guess he figured he could suck it up till then.
Those bologna sandwiches were surely ripe in Daddy’s lunch bucket by the time he realized we’d worked straight through lunch. It was mid-afternoon, and aside from him telling me what to work on first that morning, we hadn’t shared a word. A light drizzle had sprinkled all day, never did turn to nothing more than a piss trickle, just that hazy kind of misty rain. I was thankful for it nonetheless, as it kept the early-summer heat from melting us, made the job a little more bearable.
A loud buzzing came over the garage, a shrill mechanical buzzing that sounded like an amplified tattoo gun. The buzzer served as a doorbell by the office, so folks working in the garage would know when someone was amongst them.
“Jacob!” Daddy hollered from the next bay over. His head never popped out from under the hood of an old, ragged Cutlass. “Go see who that is!”
The oil was draining out of the ride I had on the lift and there wasn’t anything l
eft to do till the draining petered off, so I wiped my hands on a rag draped across a mechanic’s chair and headed toward the noise. Standing by the office door was that wide-bodied deputy from a few days before, the one with salt-and-pepper hair who’d taken the missing-persons reports, the one who’d been almost close enough to hear me breathe when I lay flat on my back in the Cabe brothers’ trailer. Being this close to him again brought that rabbit feeling back, my hands jittery, my legs just a thought from running. He had his back to me. His shoulders shrugged up around his neck and his head was cocked back like he was trying to stretch some sort of stiffness brought on by catnaps in patrol cars.
“Can I help you?”
The deputy turned around, no sunglasses today, just those creepy-ass blue eyes. “Josh, ain’t it?”
“No. Jacob.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Jacob.” The deputy began spreading his mustache with his fingers. “Got a nephew named Jacob. That should’ve been easy enough to remember.”
“Well, what do you want?”
“No reason to be short.” The rain had his speckled gray hair slicked along the sides, kind of hid that gray amidst the hairs that still held color.
“We’re swamped today. That’s all. So, I don’t have a lot of free time.”
“I needed to have a sit-down with your father, if that’s all right with you. He around?”
“Yeah, he’s over there.”
“You reckon I might have a word with him?”
Rather than offer an answer to another half-assed question, I just hollered for Daddy.
“What is it?” Daddy yelled from across the garage.
“That deputy’s back. Says he needs to have a word with you.”
“Give me a minute.” You could hear the irritation in Daddy’s voice, hear him cussing under his breath, but in my mind he’d brought that irritation on himself with the tales he told. I heard the hood slam on the Cutlass and could make out Daddy shuffling across Oil-Dri. “Take him in the office and get him some coffee.”
I opened the office door and led the deputy inside. A twelve-cup coffeemaker still held half the pot from that morning, the coffee brewed down thick as stew now. I still poured a cup for myself, needing something to take the edge off, and offered a cup to the bull.