by Robert Gipe
“Willett,” I said into the phone, “I gotta go. I’m fixing to get hit by lightning. Hunh? Nicolette’s with Houston. At his apartment. In the High-Rise. Yes. We’ll be there before dark, yes.”
The raindrops came in stinging gobs, tiny jellyfish pelting me by the thousand.
I said, “I got to go, Willett.”
I hit the red button on the phone and my husband was gone. Thank you Jesus. A trailer set across the road from the train track cornfield. Car wheels filled up with cement all in a row down the edge of the yard kept people from driving in the grass. Outside toys, red yellow and blue, giant dollhouse, purple pink and white, a brokedown trampoline, a rabbit-wire pop-can silo messed with my seeing till I almost missed the woman on the porch, woman way bigger than me, sitting across a kitchen chair in the gloom, chin tipped up, peering over top of the paint-peeling porch rail. I didn’t wave at her, and she didn’t wave at me.
June came to Canard to try and straighten us all out. She’d been living in Tennessee, but she grew up here.
The woman on the trailer porch stood and turned around, her massive shorts thin and pale yellow, spotted and hanging wide around her knees. She swayed as she made her way to the door, a storm door without no glass in it, just a frame. She went in the house without closing the door, and I could see right through her house out a window on the other side, into the summer light, the rain light, dull and serious, the serious business of rain filling the river behind the trailer. Her house was too close to the river, the corn too close to the train track, her too close to me, everything one bad day away from crashing into everything else, one bad day away from getting washed away and ruined.
I was twenty-two years old. It was all ridiculous. I couldn’t see no point to it. I looked up into the sky, gray like line-dried bedsheets, tiny jellyfish pouring out of it into my eyes. All I did was think. How could I get rid of Willett? How could I get Nicolette somewhere easier? How was I ever going to lose any weight? Why did this woman have to live so close to the river? Why aint they figured out time travel yet? It never stopped.
I didn’t have no more business doing as much thinking as I was doing than a dog did doing the dishes. I had too much to do. But I couldn’t stop thinking cause it seemed the world was a blank, a bottle of pills without no directions for use on it. Somebody was asleep at the switch. Somebody was falling down on the job. I wish I knew who it was. I’d go where they work and beat their ass.
June come to my side like I knew she would. She had a raincoat on. I don’t think I ever had a raincoat. I’d just stand there dripping and Momma say, “She’ll be fine. She aint made of sugar.”
“Come on, sweetie,” Aunt June said.
My Aunt June’s face beneath the bright yellow hood of her raincoat was like the center of a flower, the place where bees go to get what they need, a place made to be touched, but I couldn’t touch it.
“Let’s go, honey,” Aunt June said.
I went with her, back to the car, out of the rain, and the dry beige inside of her clean red Honda car wadn’t no solace, nor were the cool turquoise lights of the dash. They were the same no solace as other people laughing when you got cramps. Same no solace as a sunny day on television when you’re cold and soaking wet and can’t remember your nose not running, your bones not aching, can’t remember sleeping through the night.
Twenty-two years old.
I said, “What the fuck, Aunt June?”
She looked at me for a second, stared out the windshield a lot longer. “It’s a good question,” she said, and started the car. June said, “Is Willett’s mother having a bunch of people over for the 4th?”
I said, “Just us I guess. You want to come?”
“No,” June said. “I need to get this class figured out.”
I said, “Well.”
Willett’s mother’s house was his father’s too, but his father was so sick and his mother was such a force that it was easy to say it that way—Willett’s mother’s house. The fall before, I finally got Willett to move out of his mother’s house. I did all right in town, but it was good to get out, get a place of our own, a place where things weren’t so fixed up, a place where you could walk down the road without worrying about being accused of doing something, of taking somebody’s something, of tearing up somebody’s something.
Willett’s mother would fix too much. There would be enough meat for twenty people and she would just cram whatever was left in the refrigerator or the freezer and it would stay there until it was no good.
June turned off the highway and headed up on Long Trail, where Mamaw lived, about a mile past where my daddy’s people lived in a gob of jacked-up houses against two hillsides and down in a bottom, close enough for constant spying and tormenting of one another. Mamaw lived off by herself, above everything.
We pulled in the carport next to Mamaw’s Escort. She came out on the patio, which she did more and more. Ever since I’d gone to Tennessee, Mamaw swore off housekeeping. She ate at the sink, let everything pile up where it fell.
“Have you got Tricia straightened out yet?” Mamaw thought my aunt June too ambitious in her plans to get my mother off dope.
“Mom, you want to come into town and eat, or go to the store?” June said. “You won’t have a vehicle until Dawn gets back.”
“I don’t need it,” Mamaw said.
June looked at Mamaw like she was a page of math problems. “Are you sure?” she said.
Mamaw put the key in my hand. “Be careful,” she said. “I love you.”
I said, “I love you too, Mamaw.”
“June,” Mamaw said, “You might as well be careful, too.”
“I love you, Mom,” June said.
Then me and June each got in our vehicles. I went and got Nicolette from the High-Rise and went to Kingsport. June went back to the house in town. And Mamaw went back inside her Mama Bear Wallow.
GENE
Next morning, me and Brother knocked at That Woman’s about eight. It was a minute before she come down. When she did, she was pulling a shirt on over another shirt.
I said, “I think we found your door.”
“Oh,” That Woman said, looking at the big door Brother held in front of him. “Do you think it will fit?”
“Well,” I said, “We’re thinking it’s your door.”
The door was the same color as the frame, but the glass knocked out.
“Oh,” That Woman said. “Where did you find it?”
Brother said, “At the river.”
That Woman said, “What was it doing at the river?”
I said, “Just laying there.”
That Woman didn’t have no shoes on, said, “Well, Let’s take it out in the yard,” pointed out towards the side of the house. Then she went back in.
Brother said, “She’s a odd one.”
Me and Brother took the door out in the side yard. That Woman went down to her vehicle and got out a hose and packed it up the steps. I run to help her, causing the door to slip out of Brother’s hands and go sliding down the hill, but me and That Woman and Brother was able to catch it before it run out in the street. We got the door washed and dried off mostly, and it didn’t take long to hang since it hadn’t been out there by the river but a little while. A little hammering and banging, and we was done.
That Woman said, “What do I owe you?”
Brother just stood there. That Woman looked at me. I said, “Whatever you think.”
She got her billfold out and give us eighty dollars, said, “Is that enough?”
We’d of been tickled with half that. Brother started down the steps. We’d told a man we’d help him tear the roof off his mother’s house, and I knew Brother was wanting me to help him get it done so he could go to wrestling at the Armory that evening, but That Woman stood there, her hand on that door, looking at the holes where the glass had been. The bugs was flying over the high grass in her yard and I said to Brother, “You go on. I’m gonna finish this yard.”
&nbs
p; Brother give me a look, but he went on, so it must not have bothered him too bad.
I went to mowing. I was about finished, out in the side yard that evening when Belinda Coates pulled up in front of That Woman’s house in her pink Camaro. I was hoping maybe when I got done, me and That Woman would get a chance to talk—talk about how hot it was or how I got one of my injuries. Just whatever she wanted to talk about.
She had the quietest ways, That Woman did. She only wore colors you’d see in the woods, and when she moved her hands, it was like watching birds settle on a phone wire. I liked how there wadn’t no ruckus to her, so I was hoping Belinda Coates would leave her alone.
Belinda Coates was short and solid and would have been nice-looking if she wadn’t such a terror. You’d probably recognize her from the paper or the detention center website. She didn’t have no mother nor father, not that I ever heard of, and she mostly stayed with her uncle Sidney, who kept his name out of the paper fairly well, but we all knew was pretty much behind everything bad they ever put in the paper. And a fair amount of other bad as well.
Belinda sat in that gaudy mess of a car she drove, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel and checking her mirrors. I knew That Woman was in the house, but they wadn’t no way I would tell Belinda Coates that. I thought about mowing so the grass would throw on Belinda Coates’s vehicle. I thought that might make her leave, but more likely she’d start something up with me, which I didn’t have no interest in. I’d done my share of arguing and making a horse’s behind of myself, and I was trying my level best to steer clear of such.
I was weedeating under a weeping cherry tree. Belinda Coates started blowing her car horn and That Woman and her yellow dog come out on the screened-in porch to see what was going on.
I knew That Woman thought highly of me because when I stopped to drink a pop she had asked me would I be interested in feeding that dog and taking it for walks when she was gone. That Woman didn’t have no man nor kids, not that I could see, and it seemed that dog was near everything to her. I guess somebody who’d had it before had beat on it and tied it up and left it when they moved away and That Woman had saved it, and so she prized it even though it looked like every other yellow dog you’d ever seen.
Belinda Coates took a break from blowing her car horn when she seen That Woman on the porch. Belinda Coates started hollering, “Tricia Jewell, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll get your ass down here.”
That Woman did a lot of cleaning up on her sister Tricia’s house. I know because I helped her do it. We packed clothes soaked in toilet water and broken glass and just plain filth down them steps for days. And when That Woman had them haul up some of her furniture from Tennessee to put in that place, I helped pack that stuff up them steps too.
That Woman come out from the screened-in porch and started down the steps, and when she did, Belinda Coates yelled up at her, “Who the hell are you?”
When Belinda Coates did that, the yellow dog stood up on its hind legs so it could see out the porch screen and started barking hard as it could go, rared up like a person, barks booming out over town like the tornado siren. That Woman tried to hush the yellow dog, but she couldn’t. She came down a few more steps and said, “I’m June. I’m Tricia’s sister. What’s your name?”
I had stopped weedeating by then and was standing sideways on the hill facing them, one leg higher up the hill than the other. Hard to stand like that, steep as it was.
“Don’t you worry who I am,” Belinda Coates said. “Where’s Tricia?”
That Woman come down some more, about twelve steps between her and Belinda Coates. That Woman sat down collected and calm, said, “She aint here, honey. I don’t know where she is. I wish I did.”
Belinda Coates come around the front of her car. She put her hand on the wall at the base of the steps. “I don’t believe you,” Belinda Coates said. “You’re lying. You’re just another lying Jewell.”
I stepped closer, still packing my weedeater.
“I aint a Jewell,” That Woman said, “but I do wish I was lying.”
“Tricia Jewell got my daddy throwed in jail,” Belinda Coates said.
Belinda Coates was talking about her uncle Sidney Coates.
“She got him throwed in jail and got his money confiscated cause she’s a rat snitch and when I find her she’s a dead rat snitch. Said my daddy sold her pills and he never did. Never sold her pill one.”
That Woman started punching buttons on her cordless phone. That’s when Belinda Coates come on up the steps and slapped the phone out of That Woman’s hand. That phone went flying, and Belinda Coates busted That Woman right in the side of her face and That Woman tried to stand up but Belinda Coates pushed her back down.
I was still a ways away and they was an unruly hedge between me and them, but I didn’t care, because Belinda Coates smacked That Woman in the face again, this time with her other hand on the other side of That Woman’s face, and I said, “Hey! You wait right there,” and I headed over there, because see,
So I said, “Hey!” again and then when Belinda Coates got a handful of That Woman’s hair and started yanking That Woman down the steps, I said, “You stop that now,” and stepped right into my weedeater and went chin first into them steps and when I tried to get up, my feet went out from under me and I went tumbling down That Woman’s hill and That Woman shouted and I imagined it was because of me, but more likely it was where Belinda Coates was flailing her, but whichever it was, I went over the edge of that wall, which was about a four-foot drop, and landed right on my forehead on the sidewalk in front of That Woman’s house.
My forehead split open like one of them TV wrestler’s and I sat up and wiped the blood out of my eyes and seen a man from the waterworks grab ahold of Belinda Coates and it surprised me how the bald of his head looked like the head of the lawyer lived next door to where my sister did before she shot herself the morning of Easter past, me trying to get in her locked kitchen door, my arm all bloody through the broken glass of the deadbolt, her all tore up because her husband was gone on pills and had took up with this girl they had known in high school who was also gone on pills. I begged my sister not to do it, her with the gun in her mouth, her who had fixed my meals my whole life, had got me little jobs and made Brother take me on, who read my stuff for me, who begged me to stay out of them payday loan places. I told Sister I couldn’t do without her and she shot herself anyway and when she did I had gone to that bald lawyer’s house and his wife looked at me through the locked storm door glass and said, “Gene, what’s the matter?” and I said, “I need some help with Sister.”
As it was, that waterworks man held Belinda Coates by one arm while he got the police on That Woman’s cordless, That Woman saying, “No, no, no, we don’t need the police, no, no, no,” and my head light as dried grass and that dog barking like if it didn’t, That Woman would tie her up and move off, and That Woman’s beautiful bathtub eyes telling me she didn’t need me to be her hero, and that I wadn’t never going to be no more to her than the man who mowed the yard. But that didn’t mean she didn’t need me.
3
AIRPLANE GIRL
DAWN
Friday night, Nicolette slept in her car seat all the way to Kingsport, so I had the sundown light on the dragon-green ridges to myself. When we got out of Canard County, we were in Virginia, and stayed in Virginia for a hour till we got to Kingsport, which is in Tennessee.
Kingsport smelled like something dead you’d left in the car trunk and forgot. The last sun lit the white vapor plumes coming off the paper plant, the shiny new supermarket where the book press had been, the old stone bank on the corner in the middle of town. The chemical plant smokestacks where Willett’s dad worked glowed like the lightsticks they throw out to mark the corners of wrecks on the highway at night.
My husband’s hometown seemed like more of nothing than anything I’d ever known. People with nothing to talk about but going to work, going to ballgames, eating ice cream,
and going to the beach. Nothing.
Willett’s mother lived on a broad street in town with big flat front yards, grass like carpet, and trees grown on purpose tall as trees get. The houses were big as schools. His mother’s, the smallest on her street, was still plenty big.
It was dark when we got to the house. My nerves were raw and my bones sore. I packed Nicolette to the front door. Her concrete head on my shoulder drove pain into my chest. Willett come to the door keyed up, hair shooting this way and that like shavings off a drunk man’s whittling. He smiled with his mouth open, made me want to throw a little fish in it, like they do dolphins in them aquarium shows.
I said, “Hidy.” I didn’t have any reason to be sore at my husband.
But for whatever reason, I was sore at him anyway. Willett hugged me and I let him. It felt OK. He kept it up till I got annoyed. I pushed him off with the hand not holding Nicolette. I set Nicolette down.
Nicolette stood there with her eyes closed. When her father hugged her, she said, “Did you get fireworks?”
Willett looked at me, said, “We got some sparklers.”
Nicolette wobbled, eyes still shut, said, “Light them all at once. Be like your hand on fire.”
Willett shook Nicolette by her shoulders.
I said, “Don’t wake her up, dumbass.”
Willett said, “Guess what,” his eyebrows bobbing up and down.
I said, “I don’t know, Willett. You found a quarter in the sofa?”
“Good guess,” Willett said, “but no.”
“I’m putting her to bed,” I said. “I can’t fool with you both at once.”
Willett’s mother had Nicolette a pallet on the floor in the room where we slept. I flopped her on the bed, and she lay on her belly, claiming as much bed as her stubby arms could.