“I’m outta slugs right now, but down the creek there’s plenty. An don’t try cheatin it with a worm. Gotta be a slug… a gray one.”
I gazed up at the gigantic trunk, thirty feet around, branches fostering a great green canopy in every direction. Three limbs up, through the bark and leaves, a boy about my age was smoking a cigarette and reading a dirty magazine. The rippled black soles of his army surplus boots dangled over the tree limb. He threw the naked lady down by my head and quickly worked the forty-foot drop, landing on the ground a few seconds after the magazine. He squatted, knees to ears like a bushman breaking cane, slowly weaving back and forth across the ground in a rhythmic search for something.
“Here she is,” he said, pulling the curled carcass of the spider from the leaves. He held it between his thumb and forefinger. “It weren’t deadly poisonous, but you’ll feel it for a few days less we get you that slug… Name’s Buzzy Fink.”
“Kevin Gillooly.”
Buzzy Fink was a head taller than me and half again as broad, with sandy blond hair cut in a flattop on an already thickening neck. Eyes so blue they made the rest of his face seem freshly washed. A spread of freckles across both cheeks met at his nose; his big white teeth, gapped in the middle, flashed pink tongue when he smiled.
“You’re the Peebles kid,” he said as a point of fact.
“My grandfather’s Arthur Peebles.”
Silence.
“Let’s you an me get you that slug.”
I followed Buzzy close, feeling the expanding numbness around the bite. He strode to the edge of the wooded plateau and plunged straight down the steep, rocky bank to the creek some hundred feet below. I was lagging off, employing saplings as ropes, sliding down the bank on my butt, thankful for finally finding a kid to do stuff with. When I reached the bottom, Buzzy was already under his fourth rock—a few red salamanders, armies of pill bugs, but no gray slugs.
“Here you go,” he said after rock five, extracting a gleaming slug twice as big as my thumb. “This’ll do you.” He stepped over the rocks and slapped the slug into my hand. “I got some duct tape up the tree. We’ll make a poultice an tape it up. You’ll be jus fine.”
He was off again, long, sturdy legs making easy work of the slippery bank. I made after him, trying desperately not to smash such a serviceable specimen. At the tree he took the slug and climbed up one-handed, feet on knobs, hands on bark. Three branches later he was lighting a cigarette in a red pine rocker on the front porch of an impressive tree house. The house nested in the middle branches of the colossal oak at a point where the main trunk divided, providing a perfect platform for the structure. Shingle roof, pane window, plywood walls, and a front porch. A blue door.
I started up the trunk, echoing the nubs and bobs that Buzzy used to earn the first branch, my foot slipping, stomach scraping bloody against the bark.
“What’s the matter, Kevin Gillooly, don’t you have trees in In-de-anna?” Smoke punctuated each of his laughs.
I finally made it to the first branch and onto the front porch of the tree house, where I could see the whole town, the hollows and the remnants of the old mines on the Hogsback. As I scanned the horizon, something seemed out of place. The silhouette of the mountains over by the Hogsback was strangely malformed, as if some giant had cut off the peaks, leaving a flat gray table. Buzzy was still sitting, enjoying his cigarette. The sound of a massive explosion reached us, muted like distant thunder, but shorter, sharper, and inconsistent with the perfect sky above.
“What was that?
“Big-ass explosion,” he said between puffs.
“From what? Do you think anybody’s hurt?”
“It’s how they mine now. Blow the tops off an dig at it from above.” He stood, put out the cigarette carefully on the underarm of the rocker, and flicked it into a dirt-filled coffee can, then went inside, rummaging for duct tape. He reappeared a minute later, tape and slug in hand. He gave me the slug, added a sprinkle of porch dirt, and spat into my hand. He screeched out two feet of duct tape. “Slap the slug on the bite and hold it there.” He readied the duct tape for application. “Now take your hand away.” I did and Buzzy quickly covered the slug with tape. “Leave it there for a day an you’ll be okay.”
I could feel the cool slug squirming against my skin and watched its outline in the tape, moving like a puppy under a rug. Buzzy offered me a cigarette.
I sat on the porch deck next to him, trying to look practiced as I lit the end and pulled the first raging drag, holding in a cough with my life.
After a while Buzzy said, “I seen you come into town last week.”
“We’re living with my grandfather, me and my mom are. My father went back to Indiana because of work. He’s a lawyer.”
“Heard your momma’s gone crazy cause your little brother died,” he said, looking hard at me.
“She’s taking it kind of bad.” I avoided his gaze.
“Is that why you been lightin them fires?”
I froze. “What do you mean?”
“I mean is that why you been lightin them fires?”
“Uhhhhh…” I looked down into the tree-house porch floor at an empty acorn top.
“You don’t need to be doin that no more,” he said before I could muster even a lame reply.
“I was just bored,” I said, eyes still on the acorn top. Finally I looked up.
He was staring straight into me. “You don’t need to be doin that no more,” he said again—softer this time.
I nodded, then looked out over the town.
“How’d he die?” he asked after a time.
“Hit by a car,” I lied.
“That sucks.”
“Yeah.”
“My brother Cleo coulda died when he was a kid. But he jus broke both legs instead.”
“How did he do that?” I was eager to change the subject.
“Fell off the barn roof. Climbed up there to get this airplane he carved.”
“Is he older or younger than you?”
“Older; he’s seventeen. Gonna be a senior this year. Bad-ass football player. Third-team All-American QB last year. Broke the state passing record again,” Buzzy said proudly. His face came alive at the talk of his older brother. “Lets me train with him, most times. Shaggin balls an stuff. Man, he is a machine—probably gonna go pro.”
“That’s cool,” I said and looked back over at the line of lopped-off mountains, hoping to shake thoughts of the brother that Josh would have grown into. Buzzy went on about Cleo’s college and pro prospects, and gradually the sad wonderings and guilt about Josh folded back into a dark closet of memory.
We stayed there, in the tree, on the porch, talking about everything all afternoon. The way toenails go hard after they’ve been clipped; the way dust clings to spiderwebs like dew; spit and the specks that float in your eye when you look at the sun a certain way; scorpions and Hissy Pillsucker, who would strip to her underwear for twenty-five cents; breasts and moles with hair, and Chucky Dingle, who had only one nipple. How wood feels in your hands when it’s wet; how to carve a whistle from green willow; what the ocean must look like; what horses smell like after rain.
“My grandaddy’s gonna hide me if I’m not home by Clinch Mountain sunset,” Buzzy said suddenly and was halfway down the oak in an instant, running off on the whisper of trail. “You help yourself to my smokes and make sure the lock is tight before you leave.” His voice threaded the darkened woods.
I stayed another minute, then locked the tree house and shimmied to the ground, tumbling onto a cushion of last year’s leaves. I made my way back over the blurred footpaths on the hills outside of town and reached the porch at Chisold Street in full night.
Back in Indiana, arriving home after dark and two hours late for dinner would have won me a half-hour lecture and a weekend pass to my bedroom. But things were different now. As I aired up the steps and onto the dim porch, I could hear the spinning of ice in a glass.
“Evening, Kevin.”
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I stopped. “Hi, Pops. I’m really, really sorry I’m so late and I missed dinner; I know you and Mom are really mad but I was out in the woods and I got lost and I—”
“Son, relax,” my grandfather said in his soothing southern way. “Audy Rae put your dinner in the refrigerator. You know how to work an oven. Heat it up or save it for tomorrow if you’re inclined.”
“Is Mom really mad?”
“Your mom’s still thinking about other things, so I’m gonna be mad for her.”
“You don’t sound mad.”
“Well, I’m only mad for her. If I was mad for myself, your hide would be bright red about now. Go on in and eat your supper.”
Just then, Audy Rae pushed quietly through the screen door, summer sweater on her shoulders, walking-home hat in her hands. The hat was rounded and brimless and loaf-bread brown with fabric flowers sewn into the band.
“I see the prodigal come back at last,” she said, rolling her eyes over to Pops.
“He has indeed.”
“Ummm, umm,” she hummed and shook her head. “My day, a child miss supper does without.” She affixed the hat to her graying hair, paused for a moment, then readjusted it so the flowers were to the side. “See you gentlemen tomorrow,” she said and walked purposefully off the porch, down the stairs, correct and true to the corner of Chisold, her hat flowers captured by the streetlamp light.
I went into the house. Mom was on the wing chair in the dim living room. Her hobbled body followed the slips and contours of the chair as if woven to it. I paused for a moment and looked for any sign of the person I knew from Indiana—the easy laugh that was always the last in the room to quiet; the warm way she would make my childhood tribulations disappear like a late snow; the backbone she showed when standing up to my father about her painting, and about me.
She nodded her head silently to the demons taking tea with her on the sofa. I pushed back out to the porch and slumped next to Pops in the extra wicker chair.
The night was so still we could hear the movement of breath from the living room—every intake a reminder of what I had done; every exhale a calling of my guilt.
Pops leaned forward so his elbows rested on a shelf of knees. “How are you doing?”
“Good.” A moth dive-bombed my face; I backhanded it. “Good.” I stared at the gray outline of the fence at the hem of the yard.
Pops’ sideways gaze stayed on me.
“Doing okay,” I said and picked at my fingernails, which still had lines of black ash under the edges. “Everything’s pretty good right now.”
“Hmmm. I would have thought everything would be pretty crappy right now.” He brought both lips into his mouth so that the upper and lower were like a set of bank-rolled dimes. “Cause I’m feeling pretty crappy. It’s been an awful two months, and my crappy could use some company.”
I looked up. His eyes glistened.
“Yeah. It’s pretty crappy,” I admitted.
“And being stuck in this left-for-dead town with ancient me doesn’t make for better prospects.”
I smiled slightly, then shrugged.
“If you want, maybe we can bring that friend of yours out for a visit; Trevor what’s his name.”
“We’re not really friends anymore.”
“Why not? I thought he was your best friend.”
I shrugged again. “He just got all weird.”
“What do you mean?”
“I dunno, you know. Just went weird after Josh. They all did. Like I had some kind of disease or something.” I picked at the tail end of a wicker thread, tried to scratch the paint off with my fingernail. “I think it was cause of Mom, not Josh. What happened at the mall and the crying and stuff.”
“Friends can sometimes disappoint.”
“Yeah.”
“You know, when I was about your age I was handed a real turd sandwich. After my father was killed, we were left struggling. But I found a place I could go that would help me forget, at least for a while.”
“Where was that?”
“Black Hill Cove, Balnibarbi, Kukuanaland.”
“What? Where are they? Was this when you were in the navy?”
“Nope.”
“Where are they, then?”
He tapped his temple.
“I don’t get it.”
“I’ll show you.” He stood and went inside. He emerged a moment later with a tattered brown book, two pirates on the cover—cutlass ready, pistols crossed.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
“Read it, I imagine.”
I smirked. “It’s just some old book. Don’t you have…?”
Pops put his hand up to quiet me and pushed the scuffed copy of Treasure Island across the wicker coffee table. “Give Jim Hawkins a chance. I suspect he’ll be a better friend than Trevor what’s his name.”
Chapter 3
THE TELLING CAVE
That Saturday I left Chisold Street in the late morning to set fire to an old mine shed I’d found the week before. Audy Rae was off and Pops had office hours, so I stopped into Hivey’s Farm Supply to buy a soda and a sandwich for the mission.
Hivey’s was a constant in Missiwatchiwie County, a sanctuary for the miners and farmers who would gather at the back by the woodstove. Jesper Jensen was the unofficial leader, four-year pinochle champion, and key opinion former of the men by the back stove. His sons were now running what was left of the farm, which gave him even more time for pinochle and opinions. I went to the cooler case near the back for a turkey sub.
“You really think Tennessee is a better choice, Paitsel?” Jesper asked.
“Cleo’s a pure passer and Notre Dame is option heavy,” a tall, sinewed man replied. “Irish may be a sentimental favorite, but a bad offense for the boy.”
Jesper nodded solicitously; the rest of the men did the same.
Paitsel Meadows was twenty years retired from minor league baseball but still held broad shoulders and forearms muscled and tendoned, veins worming up to his biceps. Short-cropped hair brushed with gray, sparkling eyes, chin enough to hang a Christmas stocking.
Drafted out of Alabama to the Cleveland Indians farm system with a baffling 12-6 curve but little else, he played A ball in North Platte for a season, then went on to Reading. He threw three seasons for Double-A, working his way up the rotation, then finally onto the Mobile Bears. His big break came when two Indians starters blew out UCLs in a late-summer climb out of the cellar and Birdie Tebbetts drove down from Cleveland for a Bears homestand.
He came out against the Washington Senators with the 12-6 on point and his fastball propelled by debut adrenaline. He notched a win, striking out Ken Mullen, Frank Howard, and Don Lock in succession. But as August wore, the 12-6 began to hang, and hitters had at it. Without a fallback fastball, Paitsel was sent down, then down again, eventually drifting out of baseball and into small-engine repair around Missiwatchiwie County. He’d been in Medgar eighteen years, taking the extra room at Paul Pierce’s house, but his time in the majors made him an instant celebrity around town and the go-to arbiter on any discussion of sports physiology and practice.
“Got a call from the Tennessee baseball coach, who’s an old buddy a mine. Says Johnny Majors wants to come up for a visit.”
“He’ll have to get in line,” Jesper said.
“Yes, he will,” Bobby Clinch agreed.
“Long line a folks,” someone else said.
“Johnny Majors ain’t much of a line waiter,” Paitsel said and tipped his Caterpillar hat. “You ladies take care a yourselves.”
They all waved and smiled. “You take care, Pait.”
“See ya tomorra.”
“Bye now.”
The door jingled shut. Jesper watched as Paitsel disappeared around the corner, then leaned in to the boys. “Well, I always knowed it to be true bout Paul,” he sniffed. “I can tell these things, you know. I been to New York.”
“What’s New York got to do with anythin?” someone ch
allenged.
“New York’s got a pile a them people. Once you seen one, the rest is easy to spot.”
“You were up at Niagara Falls, Jesper,” someone else reminded him.
“Yeah, but we changed planes in New York City, Bobby. You ain’t been there, so you don’t know. Airport was full of em.”
Bobby Clinch found Jesper’s logic hard to argue, so he changed the subject. “Well, I don’t think Paitsel’s like that. He’s jus like one a us. Good pinochle player an all. You sure Paitsel’s in on all this?”
“I dunno, Bobby,” Jesper said after a long intake of air. “Hilda was in there for the meetin bout how to organize against the blastin. Said that second bedroom is a guest room.”
“How would she know?”
“Women can tell a guest bedroom from a regular bedroom, an she said it was most definitely a guest bedroom.”
“How can they tell?” someone asked.
Jesper rolled his eyes. “I don’t know, Levi. Ask your dang wife.”
Bobby shook his head and bladed a hand toward him. “Friends is all, Jesper. Friends is all.”
I picked a sub from the top of the pile and started to the cash register.
“Guess we’re all gonna have to drive to Glassville for trims now,” Jesper announced. “I hear Lark’s over to the Pic-n-Pay got him a Wednesday special. Trim an a shave for two dollars an fifty cent.”
The men around the stove nodded. “That’s a good price,” Bobby Clinch agreed.
“Tis,” someone else said.
I paid at the register, went out to the sidewalk, and turned down Green Street to head up the saddle toward Buzzy’s tree house. The porch was empty and my callings were met with silence. I waited for a while, then hiked over two ridges to the abandoned mine.
The Secret Wisdom of the Earth Page 2