Free Verse

by Sarah Dooley

  Phyllis keeps talking to me, managing to sound almost normal. She tells me everything is going to be all right. She tells me over and over. I can’t find my voice again, so I cling to hers. My breathing starts to hitch. When we are one all right short of me bursting into tears, I get up and hand the phone to Hubert. I lie down on the bed.

  “It’s me,” Hubert says into the phone. “Yeah. Yeah, I think she’s okay.”

  I roll onto my side. I close my eyes. Hubert talks to Phyllis until after I’m asleep.

  • • •

  I’m quick to wake, but it takes a long time to remember where I am. And then, all at once, that I don’t know where Mikey might be. He’s only nine. He won’t admit he’s still afraid of the dark.

  The motel room smells like old cigarette smoke and something clean that I can’t quite name. It’s empty except for me. I find Hubert smoking and pacing on the balcony. The morning is already warm and humid. There are no cars coming or going. I see us reflected at odd angles in the windows that stretch away down the row. Hubert’s reflection is broad and solid. I steal a glance at him and find he doesn’t look as broad or as solid when you can see his face. His curly beard and mustache hide most of his expression, but the worry lines around his brown eyes are tough to hide.

  The motel curtains are closed. I think of the empty beds behind them. I think of sleeping in grass, in a field, in the rain. I think of Mikey sleeping somewhere, somewhere.

  “Morning,” Hubert says.

  He stops pacing and leans on his elbows on the balcony railing. I lean on my elbows on the balcony railing, too. We look out at the quiet parking lot. We shake our heads. We exhale slowly.

  • • •

  We look for Mikey high and low. We look for him in the woods. We look for him in the city. The police are looking. The people of Alley Rush are looking. But I know that if anyone finds him, it will be us.

  I wish I had Michael’s worry stone with me. I pick up a piece of gravel and roll it between my fingers as we search. I wish I had given Mikey the suitcase. I would feel better if he had some money. Some crackers. The last of the peanut butter. I wish I had a poem for this.

  I try:

  Mikey went away.

  Me and Hubert waited, but—

  I stop. I try:

  Mikey.

  Small, sweet.

  sad beyond sad,

  lost in the coalfields.

  I stop. The last time I did poetry, I convinced Mikey that running away was a good idea. Now he’s missing. There is no form for this. There are no words for this.

  • • •

  The pictures in my head are these:

  Mikey asleep in a field in the rain.

  Mikey asleep in the woods under a tree.

  Mikey dead.

  Mikey crying because he’s hungry.

  Mikey crying because he’s scared.

  Mikey dead.

  Mikey how he looks back home. Moping on his porch. Running from the shed.

  Mikey how he looks back home. Stirring up muffins. Greasing the tin. Tilting his head like he’ll never understand me.

  Hubert talks while he drives. I listen to his voice, and my breath, and rain on the roof of the truck. I can hear the truck seat creaking while I rock.

  We drive from one end of Alley Rush to the other. We take note of roads that look inviting. We drive up one road and down the next. We forget to eat. We study the roadside. We check under bridges, in culverts, in old, leaning red school bus houses. We sneak into yards and check under front porches. We see a lot of empty things.

  “You done this before?” I ask Hubert. It doesn’t really come out sounding like a question.

  “Mikey’s momma could have done better than me,” Hubert says by way of answer. His fingers wrap and unwrap on the steering wheel for a minute. “I was already pushing thirty when we got married. She was younger. Nineteen. Pretty as a picture.”

  “What if the picture’s ugly?”

  “Huh?”

  “That saying. I don’t get it. Can’t somebody be pretty as an ugly picture?”

  Hubert snorts, shakes his head. “Nah. Aster was pretty as a very pretty picture. I still don’t know why she married me, unless it was the job. She had a thing for coal miners.”

  “Why?”

  He snorts again. “You got something against coal miners?”

  I charge ahead before I can hurt his feelings. “I just mean ’cause you’re gone all day and you come home really tired. Wouldn’t she rather have a thing for, I don’t know, news anchors? They get to dress nice, and they don’t usually die at their jobs.”

  Hubert steers past a downed tree limb. “Coal miners don’t usually die at their jobs,” he says.

  “Sometimes they do.”

  “Sometimes people die no matter what they do for a living.” He glances at me. “Honey, I know you lost people. Hell, we all lost people. But folks still got to turn the lights on and that means we need coal and that means we need miners. And folks still need to put out fires, and that means we got to have guys like your brother. Ain’t anything in this world that’s totally safe. A person might as well do the thing he loves.”

  “Do you love what you do?”

  He pumps the brake, steers across the yellow line to avoid the crumbling edges of the highway. Slows to avoid oncoming cars. “I do,” he says. Then, quieter, “Or what passes for love in a guy like me.”

  It seems an odd thing to say, especially for a man with three children and at least two wives that I know of. “But you loved Aster, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I did love Aster.” There is sadness but no doubt in his voice.

  “And you love Mikey. You love Sara and Marla.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “And you love Shirley.”

  “Sure. I love Shirley.” His foot finds the gas, and the truck speeds up a little. We drive awhile in silence before I hear Hubert repeat, in a low voice, like it’s meant for only himself to hear, “Or what passes for love in a guy like me.”

  • • •

  The closer day gets to night, the more scared I feel. I know Mikey can get through one night by himself; one night by himself might be all right. But this will be two nights by himself. This will be two cold, long, dark nights with Mikey alone in the woods trying to figure out what to do next. I know he doesn’t know. I know he is worse than I am, even, at surviving in the wild.

  Night falls like glass. The storm breaks. Lightning and thunder. Downpour like a faucet turned on.

  We’re in the motel parking lot, but I won’t get out of the truck. I’ll stay right here, where I can look for Mikey.

  Hubert pushes out a frustrated breath. He sits beside me for a while. Then he gets out of the truck. A rush of cooler air sweeps in. I smell damp pavement. I grip the seam of the upholstery. I curl my toes onto the seat.

  • • •

  Hubert brings a motel blanket to the truck. He tucks me in. He sits beside my head where it rests on the seat. He turns the key in the ignition so we can have radio. There are country songs, weather, reports about the search for a missing boy. Hubert turns the key the other way. The windows won’t roll up all the way, and rain drips in through the cracks. I curl my feet up tighter to keep them dry. Hubert leans his head against the window.

  “You asked if I done this before,” Hubert says after a while. His voice is soft against the rain. “You know about Mikey’s mama, right?”

  I think of the papers we found. “She got sick,” I say. I don’t like to say the words that were on the paper, words like toxicology screen and treatment for addiction.

  “She got real sick,” Hubert confirms. “And she ran off with Mikey.”

  I sit up and twist around to look at him. “She took Mikey with her?”

  Hubert doesn’t look at me. His gaze is
fixed on something past the windshield, something far away, out in the night. “Three days,” he said. “I knew she was struggling, but . . . it’s your wife, you know? You want to think she’s okay. Then she took off with my boy. He was only five. Three days they was missing.” He shakes his head slowly, closing his eyes. I study his weathered, wrinkled skin and his heavy mustache and beard. I wonder if he keeps all that facial hair to hide behind at times like this. But I can see behind it anyway, all the lines that must have got there in those three days, and all the lines that are deepening tonight.

  “Where’d they go?” I ask when he gets quiet too long. I wish Mikey’d felt like he could tell me some of this.

  He shakes his head. “Mikey never would say. I got him back when she checked herself into the hospital.”

  Now I twist to look at him again. “She checked herself in?”

  “She was real sick, Sasha. I think she knew . . . well, I think she wanted to get clean. For Mikey.”

  “Well, how come Mikey didn’t know, then? I mean . . . I mean, he got really upset when we found the hospital papers.”

  Hubert shakes his head. “He was a little thing, Sasha. He knew he went on an adventure with his mother. He always just thought I went and got him back. He didn’t understand what was happening. He didn’t know how sick she was.”

  “It was . . . it was drugs, right?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “I don’t understand why people do that.”

  Hubert runs a hand down his face. “Because they got to do something. Life just piles up and piles up until they can’t hack it. They got to make it stop somehow.” His words make me think of Chris McKenzie, whose death sent me running out to the Dumpster that day at school. I think of sparks floating up above the parking lot at the Save-Great, of the way he played with fire so he didn’t have to stop and deal with things. I didn’t know Chris. Can’t remember his face very well. In my head, he looks a little like Michael. I might have been the last person to see him alive, lighting things on fire because he had to do something.

  “What could pile up so bad that Aster would leave you like that?”

  Hubert lets out this awful noise, halfway between a sigh and a sob, before he answers. “There was a lot of hurt in Aster’s life,” he says. “And she didn’t have . . .” He draws this funny little picture in the air with his hands, like he just can’t find the right words to explain. “She didn’t have the right kind of mind to deal with all that hurt. So she had to find a way to make it stop hurting, and the way she found was drugs.”

  I look from Hubert’s face to the ceiling of the truck, headliner sagging and stuck up with thumbtacks. I think about what Hubert’s telling me, and this feeling swims up in me, this horrifying feeling that I shouldn’t be having, this feeling that might be envy.

  “Why’d she take him?”

  “Well, she loved him, Sasha.”

  “Why’d she take him and Judy didn’t take me?” Hubert twists in his seat to look at me.

  “Judy left when I was five. And she wasn’t sick. She felt like a caged bird who wanted to get free. Why didn’t she take me?” I think of what my life would be like if my mother had taken me with her all those years ago. I wouldn’t have had to wait for news of Ben’s death. I wouldn’t have had to watch Michael be lowered into the ground. I think of all the places my big brother wanted me to see, how much work he put into making sure I would see them. I think how maybe our mother has seen them all already. She could have saved Michael so much worry and trouble, and she could have saved me from all these sad things.

  “Do you wish she had taken you?” Hubert asks. “What about your dad and your brother? What would they have done without you?”

  I think of Frisbee in the graveyard with Michael. I think of rowdy housecleaning days set to loud music. There would have been no arm wrestling and hugs from Ben, no kisses hello and good-bye when he came home and left again for the mines. There would have been no poetry club. No finger-bone muffins with Mikey and no four a.m. egg salad with Phyllis.

  But I would never have met Mikey. I latch onto that thought.

  “She should have taken me with her,” I say, “so I wouldn’t have had the chance to lose Mikey.” I’ve never felt as terrible about anything as I do right now about this.

  Hubert sighs and lets his arm drape across me. “Try to get some sleep, little lady,” he says in a low, rough voice. I close my eyes.

  • • •

  In the morning, I help Hubert gather up the blanket to drag it into the motel. “Paid for a whole room and used one blanket,” Hubert mutters. “Danged expensive blanket if you ask me.”

  In the bathroom, I look at the mirror. The glass is smooth. I don’t look past it at the girl in the reflection.

  We climb into the truck. But it takes a long time for Hubert to turn the key. It takes a long time for Hubert to put the truck into drive. It takes a long time for Hubert to press the gas and aim us toward the road.

  • • •

  When we search in the direction of Caboose, my heart beats faster. My breath gets louder. I’m most calm when we search the other direction, toward Beckley and the rest of the world.

  We see a lot of the area today. We see more yellow ribbons tied on more power poles. We see more signs, in store windows and out front of churches: OUR PRAYERS ARE WITH THE DOGWOOD FAMILY and PRAY FOR OUR COAL MINERS and WE LOVE OUR MINORS, which is spelled wrong, which makes it fit both my situations but still makes me want to cry.

  “What happened the other day?” I ask.

  Hubert’s scanning the tree line. “Which day?” he asks. “You’re going to have to be a little more specific.”

  “At work.” He’s told me the basics—that he was stuck a few hours and he never got hurt—but the ribbons and the signs in Alley Rush let me know there’s more to the story.

  “Oh,” he says.

  “There’s all these ribbons.”

  “Yeah.” His voice is sad. “Freak accident. Couldn’t have been avoided.”

  “Did people die?”

  He swallows, hard. “Two, probably. They ain’t found them yet. Two more got hurt.”

  “Why do you go back?”

  “It’s my job.”

  “Hubert, I don’t get it. That makes five people killed this year.”

  “It ain’t usually like that, Sasha.”

  “So just every few years, a bunch of people die?”

  “If you don’t get it, then you just don’t.” Hubert sounds exasperated. He tugs at his mustache and his voice softens. “I don’t mean you, Sash. I mean everybody. People think it’s crazy, that we’re hillbillies back in the mountains digging coal because we don’t know no better. They wouldn’t last a day. You got to be smart and know your sh—stuff. The equipment, the training—it’s not some dumb hillbilly job. My dad worked the strip job. He was the explosives guy. You know how precise you got to be to handle explosives?” He glances sideways, seems to realize who he’s talking to. “I mean, no, I don’t reckon you do. Least you better not.” Half a smile. “I’ve worked the strip job and I’ve been underground, and the only thing I can tell you is, I love my job. Every time I flip on the damn light, I think, I did that. What would this place be without the guy in my job?”

  “But if something bad happens to the guy in your job, where would his family be?” I sneak a hand across the truck seat until my pinkie and Hubert’s pinkie are close enough to touch.

  He looks at me again, quick and startled, and then at the road, and then back at me.

  “Well, shoot, Sasha,” he says. “I ain’t got an easy answer for you on that one.”

  • • •

  We see houses in town that lean toward each other like they’re cheating on a test. Kids’ bicycles and plastic turtle-shaped sandboxes and electric scooters litter yards while their eight-year-old owners sit on th
e steps, playing with handheld video games. Teenage girls walk together in groups of three or four, passing cigarettes back and forth. Boys shove each other and gas up their four-wheelers. Women wrestle babies into loud trucks with big tires and cutout silhouettes of coal miners taking up the rear windows, stickers that read COAL MINER’S WIFE or COAL MINER’S DAUGHTER.

  We leave town. Outside it, there is space between the houses. Trailers climb hills like mountain goats. Pit bulls and German shepherds pace grooves around the trees they’re chained to. There are still kids’ bicycles and plastic turtle-shaped sandboxes.

  Farther out, there are cows, and tired horses with sharp backbones. There’s a rooster standing on a barn roof. There’s a shiny green tractor stuck in the mud. There are half a dozen leaning grain silos, ribs showing, siding worn through. There’s an eerie blank spot against the sky, an abandoned screen from a drive-in theater that closed more than a decade ago, back when this used to be a town. Every few miles, a low-slung building covered in dead vines of ivy claims a wide spot next to the road, windows boarded up and peppered with buckshot from somebody’s target practice. Nothing has been open for miles, not even the front doors of houses.

  We keep driving until there’s nothing but road, with a steep climb on one side and a drop-off on the other. Trees reach across the road to touch branches over top. With all the leaves leaning low, the sky never seems to get all the way light, even when there is sun.

  • • •

  We stop searching long enough to head back to the motel for lunch. Hubert insists. He says Grace will take me away if I’m not fed. He says he’s supposed to be my temporary guardian and a temporary guardian at the very least makes sure the temporarily guarded is fed.

  We’re almost to town when Hubert slams on the brakes. He curses and punches the wheel. There is a truck jackknifed in the road up ahead. The traffic snakes away in front of us, a sea of brake lights. Nobody is moving. Fear comes up in me so quick I can’t contain it. We are all stuck. We are all stuck. We are all stuck.

  I panic. I aim to move the glass.

  • • •

  In case I get upset again, Hubert requires me to wait at the motel. This is not an ideal situation, he says. Who knows what trouble I might get into at the motel? But I have to wait somewhere, and he has to look for Mikey. We’re three days out, and every day he’s missing, he gets that much harder to find. Hubert says a few other choice words, too, mostly to himself and mostly words I’m not supposed to say. I can’t tell exactly whether he’s angry or whether he’s just upset and overwhelmed like I was in the car when I started trying to fight my way out. I didn’t make a dent in the windshield, of course, but I reopened the cut on my hand. Hubert wraps it up clumsily for me before he starts to leave.