by J. D. Wilkes
But the bourbon absolves my worry as the sexton’s key falls silent. Yes, this old man, this hobbyist on the fringe-of-the-fringe, has completed his work and sits now in dread stillness. Is he awaiting a reply from beyond our realm?
We agree to leave the dreamy figure to his sepulcher and roll on.
SHORTCUT
Behind the sexton’s building, a handcar sits astride a short line of train tracks. The rails lead over to a tipple by a wooded ravine. We discover a dump of cracked tombstones below, each defaced with crooked lettering and typographical errors.
“I reckon he pumps that car over cheer to dump off what he gommed up,” observes Carver.
“You can’t erase a carving.”
“You orta run down there and steal one of them headstones,” Carver suggests.
“How would I pack it home? Even the small ones must weigh a hundred pounds. Do you wanna carry…”
A shot rings out.
Carver grabs me and flings us both behind the trunk of a tree. His shirt has been pierced through the elbow, but I see no wound.
“Shit!” he hollers through bared teeth. “I forgot!”
“Who is it?!” I holler.
“Demp. I totally fuckin’ forgot. He’s the asshole that owns them woods over there. Look! He’s got his guns set up in them deer stands. Old bastard kin just sit at home and shoot at us like a damn video game. It’s remote control!”
I sneak a peek at the camo-draped deer stand. It is outfitted with a semi-automatic rifle, a rotor, and a single electric eye.
“We’ll need to cut acrost that way.” Carver points with his chin. His shortcut leads through a seemingly impassible ten-acre thicket.
“Demp is bat-shit crazy. He’s usin’ real live ammo. I tell you what, he’s wound up tighter’n bark on a tree.” Carver runs a pinky through his bullet hole, checking for blood.
“Man oh man.”
No time to ponder the esoteric message I just decoded. It’s time for fight or flight.
“Let’s run go get our bikes and head over there. Lucky fer us, them rotors move slow.”
At the count of three Carver and I make a break for it and head off in our new direction. Out the corner of my eye, I see the rifle slowly tracking behind us. Four more shots ricochet off some headstones. But headlong we fly, deep into the Kudzu. It hangs like bolts of muslin flowing down from the crooked limbs above. The ghostly forms remind me of the raised arms, hoods, and beaks of medieval Plague Doctors. Soon enough, we are safe within their cloaking embrace.
“They call him Demp,” Carver explains later. “He don’t want nobody settin’ foot or even layin’ eyes on his property. He ain’t right in the head. Besides bein’ crazy, he’s all eat up with the throat cancer too, so he’s got nothin’ to live for. He’s gotta fish out his little electric voice-box gizmo just to cuss at ya. He puts it on his throat and makes shapes with his mouth. He sounds like a damn robot offa Star Track.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen people use those.”
“All he does is sit around spittin’ blood into his coffee can. Spittin’ blood and shootin’ mockingbirds outta his birdhouses. But back in the ’50s he was a hell-raisin’ badass. He once-t got in trouble for bodysnatchin’! But it turned out he was just diggin’ up his mother-in-law’s grave to dynamite her bones. I reckon it wasn’t good enough that she was already dead.”
“Old bastard.”
“Yeah. But he always gets away with it. Arson too. He burnt down three houses they was buildin’ next door to his property. He got off scot-free with some lame excuse or another. Good thang is he’s so mean and unchristian, he’s trapped here in The Deadenin’. Unless he wants to lose a year. But I tell ya what, he’s slicker than boilt okra.”
Carver pauses, wiping the sweat from his forehead.
“Okay, so here’s the deal. To avoid him whole, I done cut a trail that T’s off the mainline over here.” Carver uses a stick to draw a map in the dirt.
“It runs down the side of a bluff, so the path’s steep as hell. It comes out at a boat ramp over at an old basin. The lake’s all dried up, so it’s just a quarry down there now, but if ya ride yer bike down the bluff fast enough and hit the ramp, it’ll shoot ya sky-high and right down into that quarry bed. So I hope yer up for it.”
“I’m down for anything,” I mumble. My mind is still awash with profound misadventure. Thankfully, the liquid courage I just pounded is doin’ the talkin’ for me. I promised myself a good time and, so far, I’m not disappointed. Slightly shook up, perhaps, but not disappointed.
On past a heap of soiled furniture, Carver hangs a hard right deeper into the blue-green heartwood. He has previously marked the way with red spray paint, but it has grown up thick since then. In fact, the forest is so thick each tree trunk nearly touches the one next to it. A web of grapevines fills in the rest. Each vine hangs slack as a hammock.
“Damn! There ain’t enough room to swing a cat!”
“Snaggly as a barrel of fish hooks!” Carver answers back as he and I brandish our swords and get to work. Behind us, our bikes lean upright upon the bushwhacked walls of our slowly forged trail. And with every ten feet of exhausting progress we must go back to get them. Recoiling branches lash our faces, again and again.
SPIDER MONKEY
The tarpaper shack of the “Monkey Man” can now be viewed through the widening gaps. Everybody I know remembers the eccentric old-timer pulling his pet spider monkey around town in a Radio Flyer wagon. He must’ve ordered the little critter out of the back of a comic book, or maybe it got loose from the Calvert City Circus. Who knows.
But a few years back, the Monkey Man met his match in a single spoonful of potted meat. He choked to death in his La-Z-Boy and sat there for weeks with his satellite TV going full blast and the monkey curled up in his lap. When the authorities caught wind of his death, the literal wind of his rotting, summer stench wafting from the woods, they discovered the body and the pet monkey standing guard of it.
They say that little feller pitched the biggest fit you ever did see, screaming and baring its teeth for three hours and leaving the cops no choice but to shoot it. From the top of the door it fell to the floor and immediately ossified, its tail locked in a zigzag-rigor and its face frozen into a grimace of fangs.
The funeral planner thought it fitting to place the monkey in the coffin with its master; that way they’d be together forever. Now the screeching simian spirit is given to rise at midnight and haunt this area… a corner of the woods now known as the Monkeyshines.
It’s a quarter to eleven before the light of day returns, and the path ahead is rockier than I had expected. Slabs of giant limestone resemble a natural staircase. These are the Steppes.
A fox darts out from the recesses of the jutting rock shelters, but once more I am detecting unnatural movement. Somewhere in my periphery I sense the silhouette of a stickman dancing on a fencepost.
On second glance he’s gone.
Is it the monkey? Some teenage vampire? Or just another pesky stray jesus?
Chapter Eleven
HARRAKINS
Windstorms from the south.
Stickers snag our britches while we bounce our bicycles down the rock steps. A clearing blooms through the trees as the light of day returns.
“Here it is.”
Ah, relief from the forest! A craggy white canyon gapes wide at the sky like the jaws of a screaming planet. From atop its teeth, we survey the vast sweep of an alabaster quarry below. It is where, with a little luck and athleticism, we’ll soon touch ground.
A mirage ripples the horizon like the waves of an ocean, but a panasonic rumble warns of storms. The high prow of a frontline hulks heavy, flashing a mute code of amber from a hidden filament. Heat lightning and the flicker of a dying sun. Although the Sun’s copper coin is unredeemed, beams of the eclipse lend its nimbus around the massive cloudbank in elongated trapezoidal rays. They are cartoonish rays even, like the trademark label on an old orange crate—or the bars
that shoot out from behind the head of a fearless leader, smiling down upon the mowing scythes of the proletariat. Stupid, childish bands of light, as if drawn in magic marker by the infant Son of God. So tack it up on the fridge with a magnet. “Nice job, kid!” says the LORD. But that’s just what you say.
“It’s been a-lookin’ like rain since dawn. Thunder before seven, rain before eleven!”
“Whoa-ho-HO! Take a look out there!” I point with my eyes.
Three white dust-devils descend from the black sky like tentacles in an ink cloud.
“Yep. That’s typical. These harrakins come a-blowin’ up from Reelfoot Lake every summer!” Carver says with a smile. If we time it out right, he thinks we could launch ourselves off the ramp and into their grip to catch some air. The thrill ride of a lifetime!
“Let’s go fer it!” Carver shouts, slapping my back like a gym coach. But he goes first, mounting up at the edge of a two-hundred-foot ramp. Pausing for breath and scanning the landscape to make some last-minute calculations, Carver reels back, adjusts his crotch, and then hurls himself down the rocky way at full speed.
Fists hold fast while arms absorb a jackhammering motion. A small avalanche of gravel follows behind him. Dead ahead, a twister waits in lithe undulation… its slow dance making all the movement of a hypnotic hoodoo woman. Carver barrels forth, like a little juggernaut, pedaling down onto the ramp, up the incline, off the lip, through the wind, and into the tornado’s whisking column. It is perfectly timed as the storm’s arms pull him inside, deep into the central eye. An extra 15-foot lift draws him Heavenward. It torques him like a propeller blade for three full 360-degree rotations! Then, like a kite that’s lost its zephyr, he plummets to the ground and power-slides a swoosh into the gravel.
“Whooooo-HOOOO!” he triumphs with a rebel yell. “Die, Demp, die! Yer turn! Root hog er DIE!”
It’s a tough act to follow, but, hell, I’m a little drunk. I ponder the distance, guess-timating the moment my dust-devil will pass. I turn full attention away from my many years of self-doubt and give over to a merciless force: one of lost Southern enterprise and Kudzu hunger.
I stomp the rat-traps and off I go, down the mountainside at top speed, head down and hell-for-leather. My brain dedicates itself to navigating each pit, pebble, and crag, maintaining complete balance and control. My mind’s eye, however, follows behind as if outside of my body, looking down and out ahead of me. I hit the lip of the concrete ramp and suddenly I’m aloft to find a twister all my own.
“LORD HAVE MERCY!!”
Harmattan winds lift me in a speckled haze of stinging sand. I am weightless and alive. I can make out Carver’s cheering in the background as my body and soul rise within the white windstorm. It is pure adrenaline as I reach the zenith and time stands still.
Has anyone ever done this before? I wonder as my hat gets sucked into outer space. Peppering sand blasts my face and neck, and I’m spinning like a brat in a swivel chair. The tornado has wholly consumed me.
Then down I drop. Down toward the quarry-bottoms below. Down down down. Deciding to go it alone I throw my ten-speed aside and Geronimo my legs, running midair, awaiting impact. The bike hits first and bounces itself into a ditch. But I stick my landing, post-holing my feet into the creek mud with a wet, buckling crunch. I slowly gather my full posture, lift my head toward Carver, and punch two fists of victory into the wind.
“YES!”
“Pretty. Famn. Dancy!” Carver hollers. “You musta plum gone up an extree twenty-five friggin’ feet!”
“God dog!” I shout, picking up my bike as the three dust-devils dissipate against the cliff. “That was insane!” My heart is boxing my chest bones, my eyes are crying out sand, and I can tell that adrenaline is masking some pretty severe bruising.
“Did you get as sand-blasted as I did?” Carver asks, showing off some of his bloody abrasions. Black blood congeals around pebbles stuck in his skin. He spits out a mist of grit. Red rivulets stream down his cheeks.
“Yeah, I got popped pretty good, but you were right… it was worth it!”
After some atta-boys, we’re back on the loose. The familiar friend of the Old Spur Line welcomes us back. And just like that, I’m sitting on top of the world. Sober as a judge and in love with life.
Chapter Twelve
CARVER
This old boy may be a sissy, but he ain’t no pussy. Ain’t half them mother-humpers back home kin come out cheer and deal with all this gun-farr and whatnot. Gotta hand it to ’im. Anybody else’ed turned high-tell whence Demp’d come up a-shootin’. And, I betcha, this old boy’d go toe-to-toe with the White Thang if it ever come right down to it, irregardless if he ain’t never set a trap or skint a buck. He cain’t help he ain’t never done none o’ that crap. That’s the problem when you don’t come up with no real daddy. My daddy learnt me all that shit early on. Meemaw learnt me about the roots and I’m thankful to the LORD, buddy.
Poor sum’mitch never knew his daddy, nor all that weird devilworshippy shit he was into. Meemaw tolt us all about it. Said t’watch out for that bad ol’ man. Tolt us how he’d come down to Uncle Lee’s Flea Market where she had that fortune-tellin’ booth set up on weekends. Set it all up inside a teepee so the white folks’d eat it up… readin’ snake gourd seeds and stirrin’ tea leaves. He come a-huntin’ that Mad Stone she worn up around ’er neck. He didn’t notice it all tucked up down in her squaw costume, but he started talkin’ smart and she tolt him git. He was up to no good. She took her finger and drawed his face in the wet cement of that slab we was buildin’ a shed on. “Memorize that face, Carver baby, and steer clear of him. He’s a Hoofenogger, part man/part woof, and he’ll kill ya dead!” I only seed him in the flesh once’t, just that one time… yessir, just that one time. This old boy ridin’ his bike behind me, well, he’s the spittin’ image of that old sum’mitch.
Woof tracks! Speakin’ of. Ain’t been a woof in these parts for 100 years. Joe-Pye weeds a-bloomin’ on the southside bank of the Galilee Swamp. Gonna grab a gob o’ that shit on the way back. Make me a po’tice for this flesh wound. Cain’t let nobody know I really done got myself shot.
Shee-it. Ain’t his fault he looks like his daddy. Look at ’im. He couldn’t hurt a fly. Look at him shadowin’ me like one o’ them fish on a Great Hwite. Bless his heart. He’s hungry to learn who he is, but best jest let him study on who he kin become. With or without his effed-up daddy’s whiteboy blood.
Honey in the sycamore knot. Looks like a tumor. Hell, looks like a damned ol’ tiddy! Man, why’s everythin’ out here gotta look and smell so sexy?
Chapter Thirteen
DADDY
An unexplained childhood memory.
It was July 3, 1976, and the nation was in the throes of Bicentennial Fever. Small towns unfurled miles of bunting to adorn their town squares, parks, and gazebos. It was like stepping into a Norman Rockwell painting as the “Spirit of ’76” took hold of America. Mama, Daddy, and I were on summer vacation, weaving through the mountains of Kentucky like a slot car.
Daddy never liked being away from his Marshall County digs for too long, so he took the curves fast and hard with a “Let’s get this over with” attitude. Indeed, every charming roadside scene couldn’t be passed up fast enough. There were no stops at souvenir shops. No scenic overlooks. No swimming pools or old motels with neon signs. No national parks. No Smokey Bears. In fact, nothing about this wild ride into the far-flung crannies of Kentucky spelled “vacation.” And Daddy seemed scarier than normal. As if in a spell, he kept flooring it, eyes afire with reckless will. It seemed like he was intentionally driving farther and farther away from civilization as he turned from one dark gravel road onto another.
Occasionally he’d pull the car to a stop and get out, leaving Mama and me behind to wonder. We’d sit inside that cramped old Datsun and watch him scuttle off into some abandoned factory or warehouse in the woods. Or this old TVA facility, long left to the ravages of time. Windowpanes gaped with jagged g
lass teeth. Brick walls spilled in blocky terra cotta crumbles. Trees grew straight up out of smokestacks as fields of ruin ran wild—and formless creeks flowed through it all. My dad skipped and bounced like a madman in a frantic search. He disappeared inside the gutted facility as we waited in the hot car for what seemed all of an hour. I transfixed on his strange movements while Mama just sat there and listened to her tape of The Carpenters.
He finally got back into the car, tossing a red pebble up and down in his hand like a mobster flips his dime. He stuck the thing in his pocket, started the car, and drove us toward town. Had he found what he was looking for? Perhaps. Perhaps not, as he continued to speed along in an evil mood. (But when wasn’t he in a bad mood?)
What did my mother ever see in him, I wondered. I asked myself many times until I finally just asked her. One day, in a rare display of candor, she dropped the church lady shtick to let me in on something. Come to find out, before they were married, and long before she had found Jesus, they had dated for about a year and a half. But it was a long-distance relationship. She lived in Kentucky and he was down in Arkansas for work. One night, she was in bed reading when she looked up to see Daddy’s face slowly emerging through the wall… his long white hair whipping in a swirl of cosmic wind. It was as if his face was slowly revealing itself, nose-first, through a curtain of space-time. Two seconds later, the phone rang. It was Daddy, calling from Arkansas.
“Did you get it?” he asked.
Mama told me that he’d been concentrating on her that very moment, practicing his “soul travel,” in the hopes of impressing her. She was impressed, all right; they got married two weeks later. These days, that kind of display would normally scare the living daylights out of her. That’s just how much she has changed since finding the LORD.
Daddy continued to speed along, cutting through the Hazard town square. Then something again caught his eye. The courthouse was bustling with activity, swaddled in a million flags and that ever-present bunting. But Hazard, Kentucky, had gone that extra mile for Independence Day 1976. Costumed teenagers posed like living statues high atop the court pillars that cornered the roof like turrets. (You still see those characters every tax season: teens hired to stand by the road dressed like the Statue of Liberty. Green togas and face paint.)