by Robert Gipe
Brother fanned the gas, put the vehicle in gear, bounced over the railroad tracks, and threw gravel pulling out on the Drop Creek road.
“They’s a hundred women in there,” Brother said, pointing at the recovery center next to the jail. “A hundred women separated from mankind. Aint right.” When I didn’t say nothing to that, Brother spit his chewing gum out the window, said, “I heard Albert say that Tricia Jewell is ratting on Hubert.”
I said, “Why would she do that?”
Brother felt of his back tooth with his finger, said, “I’m gonna take them rehab girls some chewing gum.”
I said, “I might go back and work some more.”
Brother said, “Let’s go get some chewing gum for them women.”
I said, “We could.” Brother stepped on the gas. I said, “But I’d just as soon go work.”
Brother looked at me, then at the road. He had his vehicle wound up to where I thought it would fly apart. Brother said, “You’re a sight.”
Brother took me back over to That Woman’s. I started in on the ivy work and yard trimming. That Woman sat at a fold-up table on the porch, wearing a peach-pop tanktop and a flouncy flowerdy skirt, drinking a beer lit up by the sunshine, beer yellow as a caution light, out of a girl-shaped glass. She wrote in the book she was reading. I’d set a load of brush at the bottom of the steps and was heading back up the hill to the backyard. I wadn’t going to say nothing, just walk on, get on with my business.
“Say, Gene,” she said.
“Say,” I said, squinting up at her.
She said, “Be careful,” and I thought, shoo, I’d be careful with her, whatever she wanted me to take care with. I went on in the backyard, fired up the weedeater, let myself get lost in that.
Before long, Hubert Jewell come up the steps, Albert trailing behind, looking down at the muscles in his arms. I kept on weedeating. A while later, I seen them go back down. When I got done edging, I cut down ivy a while, hauled it off. I got the work going good enough I could give my mind over to think about things. Spent some time trying to think like a fish, so it’d be easier to catch fish. Thinking about having eyes on either side of my head give me a headache, and I had to stop thinking like a fish, least for a while.
Sun got close to the ridgeline. Bugs started to stir. I went to see if That Woman might still be on her porch. She wadn’t, but when I come up the steps, she come out, stood in the empty doorframe, said, “Gene, what are we going to do about a door?”
I said I didn’t know. She smiled and blinked real slow. She might have had another beer. I couldn’t see it mattered much. She wadn’t no drunk. You could see that.
She said, “How much I owe you?” I named a figure and she said, “OK.”
She was easy to work with. Always was.
She said, “Do you want a glass of water?” I told her I could drink some water. She wasn’t gone a second before she come back with a glass full.
I said, “You want, I could get Brother to hang a new door for you.”
She said, “You reckon we could get it done tomorrow?”
I said, “I’m sure we could.”
We stood there saying nothing. There’s days I go without talking to nobody. I hadn’t talked much at all, really, since Easter. Not since Sister died.
That Woman’s eyes darted like dragonflies. I felt she had something on her mind, something she wanted to talk about. I figured it had to do with Hubert Jewell coming up there. Figured it had to do with what Brother said about her sister telling on people. That Woman’s eyes settled off over my shoulder.
“I start teaching my class Tuesday,” she said. “I reckon Monday’s the holiday.”
I said, “I reckon that’s right.”
She squeezed hard on the door hinge. I asked her did it bother her to stay there without no door.
“I don’t reckon,” she said. “Should it?”
I sipped on my water. “I’d keep an eye on you if you like.”
She said she didn’t need that.
I said, “Let me know. There aint nobody else there at Sister’s.”
She said, “They gone for the holidays?”
I said, “Something like that.”
That Woman set on an old rocking chair with a fake leather seat.
I said, “I seen Hubert Jewell come up here.”
The sun went behind the ridge and everything got darker in a way made my head light. In the dim, That Woman’s face turned up at me, cool as the air from a coal mine.
She said, “You know him?”
I said, “Not really.”
That Woman rocked in her rocking chair. She looked at me awhile and then she looked out over the town, said “Did you ever get in over your head, Gene?”
“Several times,” I said. “Mostly out at the lake.”
She smiled.
I said,
“Is that right?” That Woman said.
“Like a cinderblock with hair, she said.”
That Woman said, “Mine too.”
I was getting my talking ability back. I was about to sit down in the other rocking chair next to That Woman when she said, “Well, thank you, Gene,” in a goodbye way. She gave me forty dollars. I told her when I’d be back with Brother to get her a door and I went up the hill and back over to where I lived, in the little house out behind Sister’s.
DAWN
Friday night, I was going back to Tennessee, to be with my husband Willett Bilson and his parents for 4th of July. Aunt June took me up to Mamaw’s, to get the Escort she said I could drive. June had to stay in Canard. Get ready for her college class. She said, “They might have me a job. If I do right.” Before we left we went to see my grandfather, Houston Redding.
Houston didn’t live up on the mountain no more. He lived in one big room in town. Houston was June and Momma’s daddy. Since he’d settled down, they’d let him live in the High-Rise Apartments with all them other old people.
When me, June, and Nicolette got off the elevator in Houston’s apartment building, there was a wall covered by a photograph of some Rocky Mountain scene—sharp mountains covered with snow, flowers in the meadow in the foreground. Nicolette took off down the sticky carpet through the bleach stink to Houston’s door with its ribbons and toilet paper roll firecracker 4th of July decoration done by somebody feeling good about theirselves for all they’d done to cheer up old people.
Houston’s room was twenty foot square. His bed was in the far corner, in the shadows beside the window. It was a twin bed had an old quilt on it from the little house around the bend from my grandmother’s, the place she’d chased him when his loafing and trifling got too constant.
There was a bookcase beside his bed. On top of it set a big boombox. On the shelves beneath it set plastic boxes each holding ten cassette tapes. There was twelve of those boxes on the shelves beside Houston’s bed. There were another twelve cassette boxes on the shelf to my right as we come in the room. There were old dime store frames filled with oranged-out seventies-looking pictures of my mother and grandmother and Aunt June. They hung next to black-and-white copies of pictures of musicians in suits and fedoras from the twenties and thirties, blurred pictures of pictures hanging in the same dime store frames as the pictures of my mother and aunt and grandmother. A sorry-looking meals-on-wheels lunch sat on a white foam tray beside the bed—syrupy pear slices curled together on their side like people died in their sleep, a slab of meat covered by a morgue sheet of gravy. There was a little kitchen set in from the rest of the room painted the gold of strip mine mud, had nothing on its counters but a box of devil food snack cakes and a ceramic man in a sombrero holding a ceramic basket in front of him. There was a cactus growing in the basket, placed so as to look like the ceramic man’s penis.
Houston said,
Nicolette said, “Who is that?,” pointing at one of the black-and-white pictures, a picture of a man sitting spread-legged on a chair, his mouth a grim stripe across his face, fancy socks showing where his suit
pants had rode up, a banjo across his front.
“What’d you say?” Houston said, loud enough to be heard out in the hall.
Aunt June said, “Look at Houston when you talk to him, honey. So he can hear you.”
Nicolette turned, said, “Who’s that?,” and she slapped her hand flat against the wall below the banjo man with the fedora and the grim stripe of smile.
“Dock Boggs,” Houston said. “That’s Dock Boggs.” Houston marched up close to Nicolette and stuck his face in hers, said “You don’t know Dock Boggs?”
Nicolette laughed and grabbed hold of Houston’s ears. “No,” she said and went to twisting the ears.
Houston turned over a milk crate and said, “Sit down there.” Nicolette sat, and Houston pulled out one of the plastic boxes, taking out first one cassette and then another, holding them up to his face, pulling out slips of paper covered in typewritten names of musicians and songs paired the way they had been on the originals in his 78 rpm record collection. He settled on one of the cassettes and put it in his boombox. “You listen to this,” he said.
The music was terrible old banjo plunking, singing like they was sparkplugs up his nose. I said, “Aint no way a daughter of mine going to sit still for that.” And that’s when I learned how I didn’t know my own daughter, how rank a stranger she was to me, cause she set there and kept sitting there, fat little fists jammed up under her chin, elbows on her knocked-together knees. She set there and mumbled words to one song after another—no use for the red rocking chair—never had a dollar nor a friend—and Houston just looked at her like, finally here a child that will do right.
I said, “Nicolette, sit up straight,” and she didn’t even act like I was in the world, and when it switched over from Dock Boggs to Roscoe Holcomb, Nicolette wheeled around said, “That’s a different one, Houston. That aint the same one, is it?”
I said, “Nicolette, come on honey. We got to go see your daddy.”
Nicolette said, “Can’t he come here?”
I said, “No. We got to go back to Tennessee.”
Houston said to me, “Why don’t you leave her till you get back from Cora’s? She’d be good company.”
I said, “Nicolette, you want to do that?”
“Yes,” she said without looking. “Of course.”
Houston said, “Look here,” and when Nicolette turned he had a record cover had a skinny old-timer in a straw hat and a khaki shirt on the cover standing in front of a barn. Houston said, “That’s Roscoe Holcomb. That’s who’s singing now.”
Nicolette took the record cover out of his hands, held it up to her face the way he’d held the cassette cases up to his, and said, “That’s a good-looking man.”
Houston laughed his wheezy laugh and I got Nicolette by the chin, said, “You do what your papaw tells you.”
She said, “He aint gonna tell me nothing.”
I said, “Well, you do it anyway,” and me and June left out of there.
We were halfway down the hall when Houston come out, said, “Misty Dawn, let me see you for a second,” and when me and June come back towards him, he said, “June, you go on. I need to talk to Dawn a second.”
June looked hurt, but she went on. Back in the apartment, Houston took a pair of green headphones looked like they could’ve been Jesus’s down off a hook and put them on Nicolette’s ears. The foam in them was hard and crumbly, left black dandruff all over Nicolette’s shoulders.
I said, “Houston, I don’t want her wearing them.”
He hooked his finger at me. Pointed back towards the kitchen, back where Nicolette couldn’t see me. I went in there, Houston right behind me. We about bumped noses when I turned around.
Houston said, “Tell Cora I had a dream.”
His breath was shine and menthol, his nose a skin-covered beak.
I said, “Do what?”
He said, “Tell Cora I had a dream about her. Tell her I dreamed she was down inside a pumpkin. Stuck to the bottom. She was the candle down in the jack-o-lantern.”
I said, “Houston, stop.”
He said, “The face on the jack-o-lantern was mine, Dawn. Her light shone through my face.” Houston grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. “Somebody was shaking the pumpkin. They was wind trying to blow out the light.” Houston stopped shaking me. “Do you mind telling her for me?”
I said, “Kind of.”
He asked why.
I said, “Cause it sounds crazy.”
He said, “Dawn, tell her I’m worried something is going to happen to her. Tell her I’m willing to come back and look after her. Tell her I’m willing to let bygones be bygones.”
I said, “Houston, she caught you in the backseat of her car in the church parking lot during Sunday morning services with a girl my age.”
“Dawn,” Houston said, “that wasn’t what it seemed. Cora don’t even go to church.”
I said,
He said, “Dawn, I’m worried about her. That’s the truth. The fire was coming out of the top of her head.”
I said, “I aint leaving Nicolette here. You lost your mind.”
Nicolette hollered from the other room, “Yeah, you are.”
He said, “Dawn. Fire. Out the top of her head. I dreamed it clear as day.”
I said, “Listen to your music, Nicolette,” and to Houston, “Well, what is Mamaw spose to do about what you dream?”
Houston’s eyes got runny. His chin quivered. He pulled his jaw in and it got clear his teeth were out. He pecked the edge of a bill against the kitchen counter. He said, “Her hair was so black. Black as coal.”
I said, “What are you talking about?”
He said, “Black is the color of my true love’s hair.”
I said, “Houston, I got to go.’
Houston’s shoulders trembled, like a dog after a bath. He said, “There was always fire in her, Misty Dawn.”
I said, “Houston, you got to settle down.”
He said, “That’s why she loved me. I aint scared of womanfire.”
I said, “You sure you don’t want me to take Nicolette?”
He said, “Promise me, Misty Dawn. Promise me you’ll tell her.”
“All right,” I said. “I promise.” Didn’t make no difference to me.
Houston pecked the bill envelope against the back of my hand, said, “Hey.” I looked up into his watering eyes. He face cracked a smile. He said, “That’d be good.”
* * *
JUNE WAITED till she got out of the parking lot before she asked.
“What did he want?”
I said, “Trying to worm back in with Mamaw.”
June crossed the new road that went up Drop Creek and into the old middle of Canard. Coal truck blew his horn at us. A city police leaning on his cruiser stared at us. I give him the stinkeye. Another coal truck downshifted, rolled through the stop sign at the corner.
June said, “I wish she would take him back. She just idles up there.”
Mamaw used to be good to get up in the face of the coal companies, challenging their mining permits, taking up for people who were getting blasted out of their houses, writing letters for people whose water got turned orange and poison, taking people to see the thousands of acres left bare and unstable—and back around the turn of the century, she and some others won a couple fights. But between the pills and the president, coal had knocked down most of the people willing to say something. People seemed tired out on fighting something big as coal, and though they still talked and had their meetings, it was mostly talk. That summer, Mamaw and this statewide treehugger outfit were lining up movie stars and such to come see what was going on. They’d had a dude in one of those boy bands and an actress who’d been about legalizing dope to come on flyovers. Mamaw paid for them flyovers with money she’d inherited from her sister, who made a bunch of money on coal.
I was proud of what Mamaw did. Houston had backed up Mamaw, when people would talk bad about her, soothing it over, so people would s
till come to their photo studio. So they could have money to live. It couldn’t have been easy. That was what he was talking about at the apartment. Loving Mamaw’s fire. When Mamaw got in a scrap, she was a woman on fire. As for that pumpkin shit, I don’t know what that was about.
I looked at my phone. I had a missed call from Willett.
I said, “Pull over, Aunt June.”
June stopped her car beside the railroad track at the only place for miles my cell phone worked. A bald man sitting on a four-wheeler cried into his cell phone behind us. A woman up ahead hollered into hers about the bad price she got for a bunch of mine batteries.
I called Willett about when we’d be getting to Kingsport. Willett wanted details. His mind don’t work right unless it’s full of stuff he don’t need to know. I told him, “We’ll be there when we get there, Willett. I got to help Momma.”
I must’ve sounded cross, cause Aunt June said, “Dawn.”
“Willett,” I said, “Why don’t you take care of yourself, stop worrying about us?”
Willett was at his mother’s. She was fixing 4th of July food. Willett’s nosiness always got worse when he was at his mother’s.
“Dawn,” Aunt June said.
“Why you got to take on everybody else?” I said. “Everybody else aint your problem.”
Albert said he’d heard people say my mother wore a recorder when she went to buy pills.
“Honey,” Aunt June said.
There was a strip of dirt twenty feet wide between the road and the railroad grade. Somebody’d planted four rows of corn in it. The stalks ran sixty yards down the tracks. The corn was tall as Nicolette. I told myself Nicolette wasn’t why I got married, but I guess she was.
I was getting heavy, couldn’t sit down without fat rolling over my middle, pinching me, making me grouchy. Only people skinny around here are on pills. My mom was skinny as a supermodel, a supermodel needed a good night’s sleep.
I got out of June’s vehicle, walked down the railroad track. I wished Nicolette was with me. She’d find things on the ground I never would. I turned to look at Aunt June. She stood outside the car, her elbows on the roof. Her head rested on her arms looking down the track at me. The wind turned the leaves upside down and the air looked like grape pop. It was fixing to rain.