by Trey Holt
“The Japs are gettin’ready to go that way, too,”said Lucky.
After we had arrived home and Jean had stepped into her private chambers and I ascended the stairs into the attic and laid on my bed, next to the empty one Percy had slept in, I could not go to sleep. Ronnie Langford’s face would not leave my sight. Besides the fact that it was the face of a dead man—perhaps the first one I’d ever seen—it was the face of someone I scarcely knew. But should have. It was the face of the boy…young man…somebody, that taught me to throw papers. The face I’d seen at the graveyard less than three months before. One that now not only looked scared, but strangely unlike itself, like it had been changed not only by death, but by life as well.
+ + +
“Hey, baby,”I told her after she’d knocked and banged to a stop. I swear, I was sure that car was ready to give up the ghost any minute.“You really ought to get that thing fixed. It’s gonna break down on you one night comin’home from Nashville.”
“Maybe I won’t have to go by myself much longer,”she said.
“Maybe not,”I said.
I scooted across the seat by her, grumbling as I did.
“Yesterday, the seat. Today, the engine. You’re always complaining about my car.”
“I know it,”I told her.“Jean says I complain about almost everything. How does she put it? She says I’m the‘sourest person’ever. You know, she’s the presence of goodness and light.”
“She seems sweet enough to me,”said Sharon.“She always speaks to me at school…and smiles. I think she knows about us. Do you?”
“I’m sure she does,”I told her. I put my hand on her leg and felt my blood start to pump. Tried to push the thoughts out of my head about never telling my family about her. The reasons.
“And you’re not sour,”she told me.
“Just give me awhile,”I told her.“Or ask pretty much anybody I know.”
“I don’t think I’d want to be with somebody the rest of my life who’s sour,”she said.
“Okay…I’ll try to overcome it,”I said.
As we settled into each other, our bodies melting together until every crevice felt filled by the other, I looked out upon the cemetery. The graves going on and on and on, the slope rose only slightly until they faded out of sight in the distance and the faint daylight. The light of the morning was cast on the ground and the tombstones, making the distance seem longer and the markers themselves, more distinct. The river, we had tried that. The old empty house next to the Bishop house, the Samuels place; we had tried that. Too many memories. Van and Sharon. Now here. I wished there was some way to cut out parts of our brain, the parts that hold the memories that we don’t like. Life, then, it seems, would be much more pleasant.
+ + +
“That’s what it’s like,”his words echoed through my head.“Both the first time and the second time. It’s almost like it makes you forget who you are. Takes away the recollection we carry with us that we take for granted. You just feel like there’s this empty space where something used to be…but you don’t know what it was. And you know, that’s really all we really have. I’ve certainly not got anything but my ideas. I have certainly haven’t achieved riches or fame.”
The exact opposite, Lucky would say.“He’s infamous now. It’s kind’a embarrassin’, you know? I’m not one who sits around and thinks about what other people think about me…but I’ve got to tell you that it’s at least a little shamin’. Schizz–a’somethinoranother. Early on, I guess it was easier to ignore most of it, act like it wasn’t happening. Take the road of least resistance.”
Don’t most of us, Lucky? I wanted to ask. It seems like we all like to sit back and wait for cold, hard reality to remind us of what we’ve been moving toward for quite some time. It’s the human condition, a big part of human frailty, Percy would tell me a few days after the sermon when Mrs. Nedler had been standing there, waiting on her car in all her glory. We like to deny the truth to ourselves until we can’t deny it any longer. That’s part of the way we fool ourselves by employing human will. Like the will is our god…can make us one thing or another. I tell you that it can’t. The spirit of the true god, the Source of Being, is what makes us one thing or another. You might use your will to go along with where it’s carrying you…or fight against it…but will is useless when it comes to trying to make ourselves into other than what we are. It’s like swimming against the current of a river. Eventually you just stop and melt into its current. Let it swallow you.
“Did I ever tell you about the time Lucky threw me in the river when we were boys?” he asked me the Monday after the Saturday sermon.
“Umh-uh,”I shook my head.
“It’s like that,”he told me.“Since we were boys, I’ve always told Dillard that I couldn’t swim...” As usual, he was in his underwear, smoking a cigarette. His hair flopped down over his forehead, covering one eyebrow.“And he’s always told me I could. He swears that Wanda Jean and Nellie taught us when we were little. So when Dillard was sixteen and I was eleven or twelve, he took me down there one day. At first, he just talked me into going with him. Him bein’my older brother, I wanted to believe him when he told me I could swim.”
He walked to the window and peered out. Nodded like he was acknowledging someone. Tipped his cigarette toward the general direction and smiled and snickered. He gave me a cigarette. Lit it off the end of his.
“The funny part is that I think he really thought I could swim. He was sure he was doing something good for me.”
He paced back to the window and nodded. With the trouble he found himself having in‘53, Walter had come and gone: present sometimes, absent others.
I drew on the cigarette, enjoying the first jolt that nicotine gives, perhaps its only gift. I blew the smoke out toward the ceiling like I’d seen Lucky and Percy do a million times before. Stared into his eyes, bloodshot and wide-open.
“He was just absolutely sure I could swim even when I told him over and over that I couldn’t. Finally he just grabbed me by the shirt and seat of the britches and threw me in.”
“And what did you do?” I asked as much to get him to finish the damn story as anything else.
“I sucked in two lungs-full of water, that’s what I did. Sucked in so much water that I sank like a rock. Sank to the bottom of the Harpeth like an anchor…the anchor the family…pullin’everybody to the bottom. Funny thing then, the best I remember I stood there on the bottom lookin’up like I was watchin’a picture show down on Main Street. Everything else passed away. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I didn’t even try to swim. I knew as sure as I was at the bottom there that I couldn’t. I was the anchor.”
Later, Lucky would recount the situation by telling me he simply remembered Percy jumping in, telling him he was“going in the river”and then just disappearing from the bank. Both accounts, though, held that Lucky had gone in after him, found him on the bottom. According to Percy, as peaceful and serene as a cool fall afternoon. According to Lucky, flailing and fighting for air, trying to draw it from the water, thus the two lungs-full of the river. Both said though, that Lucky fought Percy loose from the branches and mud, returned him to the surface and laid him on the bank where he spat up the lungs-full of water.
Chapter Twenty-One
“You seem a million miles away,”she said.“Maybe in Alabama…or Mississippi.”
I laughed. It’d been an inside joke between us: where we’d run off to when the time came, when she got fed up with her mother and I got fed up with Lucky.
“Mississippi,”I said. I knocked a cigarette from the pack in my pocket. Put in my mouth in a way I thought looked like Montgomery Clift in From Here to Eternity.
“Personally, I like Alabama,”she said.“After all, it’s where my people are from.”
“Lucky says that not one good thing has ever come out of Alabama.”
“Hank Williams,”she said. She leaned and kissed me, leaving her lips pressed to mine only long enough to
leave me wanting more. Took some tissue paper from her purse and blotted her lips.“There, now it won’t get all over you.”
“I kind of like Hank Williams…and having it all over me,”I told her.“Even after I wipe it off, I can smell you most of the day.”
“Like to smell me, do you?”
“Yeah, I guess the only bad thing about our mornings together is that they’re too short.”
I felt her breath near my face again, her lips on my neck. And then I could think no more. Only feel. Only desire.
It was the first morning, I guess, that things had felt anything near to normal, whatever that is. As the clouds hinted at rain that might come again later in the day, they also held the morning light in some kind of stasis, neither letting it darken nor brighten. She stopped, sending me lurching to a stop with her.
“Godammit, hunny!”
“Do you still think about her?” she said.“I mean, still see her face in your mind? I’m not sure I’ll ever get that out of my memory.”
I could feel myself deflating, like an overinflated tire jammed with a knife. I could almost hear the air hissing its good-bye. I ground my teeth together, tried to stay“nice.” Took a couple of deep breaths and reminded myself that I’d always heard men and women were different.
My eyes cut to the cemetery. I was pretty good, I thought, at wiping memories from my head as long as some place didn’t bring them around to kick me in the ass. Again, I wanted to ask her about her crying fit at school but didn’t, knowing that some things are better unsaid.
“Yeah, I still think about her,’I said.“I guess, though, I’ve turned it off some. Seein’how it’s all anybody’s talked about for two days. You know, I don’t believe I’ve heard anybody say anything about almost anything else. Christmas’ll be here in two weeks.”
I could feel her body tensing, trembling slightly, then releasing.“It’s not every day that a woman that nobody knows ends up dead at the high school we go to…I mean, that I attend.”
It was like she was trying to convince me it was tragic…how bad it was. I knew how fucking bad it was. I’d sat with the goddam body the night before as the population of Franklin filed by over and over again, to look at her. I knew all too well that the last couple of days hadn’t been run of the mill.
“Does your daddy know anything else?” she said.
The throbbing in my crotch was beginning to subside, give me my breath and my brain back. But I still didn’t feel like going into it...reliving anything, even the day before. I just wanted to go from here forward from here. Leave it dead where it lay, like the woman in the parking lot. Most of the time it just goes away. You don’t have to stare it in the face again when it’s been made to look better.
“I don’t know.”
She’d read it in the goddam paper soon enough. About my‘Daddy.’Or if she didn’t read it, somebody’d tell her. I was sure the front page article would be fodder for most of Franklin and part of Nashville the rest of the day. And Lucky’d go right on. Either showing that he had a heart of stone or acting like he had one. Or pretending to himself that he did.
+ + +
“What in the world are you thinking about now?” she asked.
I looked at her and shook my head, said“nothing,”the way we do when we don’t want to say what we’ve been thinking about because it doesn’t make any fucking sense or you’re sure nobody else in the world would understand.
“You were too thinking about something,”she said.
If her smell didn’t get me, then it was the way she parted her lips and smiled when she asked questions. Made me mush.
“Goddam Lucky,”I said. Close enough to the truth, I thought. Not a hundred percent a lie.
“What about him?” she asked.
My memory flashed to the images that had tauntingly made their way through my head a little bit before. How that was the only time I could remember the son of a bitch ever excited about anything…or glad to have me for his son. When I broke the plane on the end zone returning kicks. Other touchdowns were little more than fodder for him to ask other questions, insinuate things could have been done better. It had been the way he was in baseball; probably the reason I had learned to hate the sport so steadily. Why’d you miss that grounder? You popped up, didn’t ya? You know, I can see your swing as clear as if it was a mile an hour. You’re swingin’under everything today. You’re takin’your eyes off the ball. Watch the ball! Both catchin’and hittin.
Fuck you, Lucky. Then you play!
“What about him, baby?”
“Oh, nothin’.”
I could feel that goddam feeling I had been able to push away since I was eight: the rising of something in my chest besides anger. An emptiness that felt like it might swallow itself…might swallow me and everything else.
“‘Nothin’s what you tell me when there’s really something you need to talk about.”
Sometimes with her I felt like I somehow had made my way back to five. Needed and got something that I couldn’t speak. Some connection, after I had it the first couple of times, I was sure I couldn’t live without. The bristled hairs on the back of neck poked at me as I rested my head, stared at the ceiling in the still-coming light.
“They said some really bad things about Lucky in the paper,”I told her, still surprised that it bothered me. How could you slander someone like him?
“What?” she said. She laid her head into my shoulder, put one of her hands in the middle of my chest.“Your heart’s even beating hard.”
“Derived from the frustration of the last few mornings,”I said, trying to sound like the chemistry teacher at the academy, Mr. Gilbert. One of the few guys I still liked at the place.
She laughed then set in on me again.
“What’d they say about Lucky?”
“For one, they basically implied that he was a drunk.”
“Well, you’ve said that before,”she said.“That’s nothing that you haven’t told me.”
“But it’s different,”I whined.“It’s like when you tell me stuff about your mother. You wouldn’t want anybody else to say it.”
“The truth’s the truth,”Sharon said.
She sounded like Percy. But I wasn’t going to tell her that. I didn’t want one of his impromptu visits. Lucky was enough for the moment.
“You know, since what happened to Daddy and Sheila, I’ve gotten an idea not a lot of things really matter that much. Most things are just little things we need to let pass over us…around us.”
Exactly what my people have done with Percy, I thought. But, again, didn’t speak it. I, too, was a part of the conspiracy of silence.
“I don’t mean acting like they didn’t happen,”she said, like she could read my mind.“I mean, somehow keeping your heart close to them but knowing that your heart also is above what happened. That it has to be. That we’re left among the living for a reason. I’m not saying that I know what that reason is. But that there is one.”
“Sounds like Brother Myron Brown to me,”I said.
“I’ve never heard Brother Myron Brown,”she said.“But I know what I’m trying to say is different from what I’ve heard in church when I’ve gone. It’s like what I’m talking about goes all the way to the bottom of us. It’s like it’s not just something you believe…or even something you live. But something that lives inside of you. Enough about that, though. Tell me what else the newspaper said about your daddy.”
I pulled the section of the paper out of my back pocket, where I had crammed it and left the paper office when I didn’t think I could take anymore.
“Where do I start?” I said.“I guess everybody’s like those assholes down at the paper office—they expect Lucky to get it solved in a day or so. Find out who the killer is…put him behind bars.”
“Well, I guess he’s kind of done that. I mean....”
“Don’t say it,”I told her.“I’ve heard enough about those two niggers. Lucky knows they didn’t do shit.”
She was silent for a moment. The kind that grabs the other person there, pulls at their insides.
“I’m sorry,”I said.
“Thank you,”she said.“Even though I don’t know exactly what it’s like to be a negro, I know what it’s like to have people look down on you for no reason.”
Godammit, Percy, go on! I wanted to scream.
“He really is tryin’,”I said.“I know he ain’t perfect. But he’s really tryin’.”
“What did it say?” she said.
I fought off the feeling in my chest one more time. She reached and took the paper out of my hand and looked until she got to the third page, where the story was.
“As was reported yesterday, a woman’s body was found behind Franklin High School on Monday morning, between the school building and the gymnasium, splayed on the ground where someone had, it seems, left her in a hurry. Although it is only speculation at this time, hearsay around the small town, best known for its Civil War history and battlefield, is that the body was left in the position it was found as a result of the woman’s killer failing to get her all the way into the incinerator.
“Thus far, the unofficial report is that nothing known of the woman’s identity or the place from which she came, excepting that it is highly likely she was a‘transient’and that she is not from Franklin, Tennessee.
“Dillard‘Lucky’Hall, former Assistant Police Chief in Franklin, stated last evening that he remains unsure of who the woman might be,”it read, in the crisp, black ink I had grown so accustom to over the years.“In a somewhat strange twist of events, she was laid out at the Franklin Memorial Chapel last evening, while hundreds of people filed by to look at her in an attempt at identification. The four deep gashes that were ruled to be the cause of death by Franklin Coroner Dr. Frank Guppy were covered as well as could have been possible, by thick makeup and a high-necked garment.‘We tried to do the best we could with what we had to work with,’said George Preston, Franklin Memorial Chapel Owner and Director.‘I do so wish, though, that we could have come up with a more respectful alternative, due to the fact that this one seems a bit demeaning. My God, it’s not a sideshow!’he chastised later in the evening.”