by Robert Gipe
They was fixing to have a church bazaar which I don’t even know what that is and they wanted a flyer to hand out to their friends and they wanted to know what kind of paper I thought they ought to put their church bazaar flyer on and so I got out fifty million different paper samples for them, and one of them said, “That lime’s too hot,” and another one said, “That pink looks tacky,” and they finally said, “Honey, what do you think?” like they were doing me some big favor to ask and I said I didn’t have no idea, and then I wondered to myself how many chomps it would take a pit bull to bite one of their heads off and I thought if you took their hair off first, a dog might could do it one chomp, and I was thinking such not because I cared one way or the other, but because they kept debating and debating about their paper color, and wouldn’t never stop, and so I thought, you know, their heads are actually pretty small if you take the hair out of consideration, and so I was looking at my pit bull picture and then back at the small-headedest one of them, when the biggest one said they’d decided. I took out my order pad and she fished out a piece of paper from the fifty million samples all over the counter and she said, “We’ll take this one. What do you call this one?”
And I said,
Which was like the most boring, obvious thing they could have possibly chosen. I didn’t say nothing. Or maybe I did, but if I did it wasn’t anything real bad, just like “I’ll be damned” or something like that, and probably said it under my breath, but they give me a funny look and said, “If you don’t want our business, you can tell your manager we took our business elsewhere,” and I said, “I am the manager,” because the stupid boy who was the manager was with his stupid friends staring out the front window of the shop, not paying a speck of attention to what was going on, and so them women left and I just said, “Bow-wow-wow-yippy-yo-yippy-yay” to the back of their helmets of hair, and went back to thinking about Willett’s blue folder and all his employee-ness and how the world was my goddam oyster.
* * *
WHEN THEM women left, it got quiet and everything was fine till I had to change the toner on one of the big main copiers. I spilled that toner everywhere—on the carpet, down in the copier, all over the job I was copying, all over myself. The manager and the two other boys working my shift blew snot laughing. They all went to the state university in town. They made fun of me, how I talked, the way I drug out my words.
“Fuuuuuck,” I said, when the toner got on my face and hair.
They had a time laughing at my dustyass face, but after a minute they went back to wishing for cars they seen in the parking lot. I went back to cleaning up after myself and wishing them dead. The lights in that place were gray as the carpet on the floor and the paint on the walls, and didn’t none of it ever change, morning noon or night. The boys laughed and talked about vomiting in public, and the fat funny-looking country kids in their classes. I got out the big vacuum cleaner that place had—it was big and gray too—and went to sucking up that toner powder. They were laughing louder than the vacuum. Laugh it up, boys, I thought. Cause it wouldn’t be much longer. In a minute here, I’d be working for extra money, not bill money. And maybe I wouldn’t be working at all.
When I finally got that mess cleaned up and the clunky-ass vacuum cleaner put up, I went back to copying. I was copying some book I knew was copyright violation but the boys had give me ten of the forty the guy needed it copied give to them. So I had the copier going top up. The light went straight to the back of my eyes, and hurt.
The copier was going ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk. The bell on the door rang. The toner had got up my nose. That toner powder was like coal dust. But it wasn’t. It was clean. Even though it messed everything up, it was clean, an indoor mess. It made me miss everything home, home like it was before Daddy died. Made me miss a genuine mess. Made me miss Momma making Daddy change clothes at work, making him shower at work, when his mines had a shower, so he didn’t come home covered in mine mud and dust. He’d have his work clothes in garbage bags. I’d see how dirty that work was when she’d do the wash. But he didn’t track it through Momma’s house, not when we all lived in the trailer out on Long Ridge.
That toner powder added to how I felt that day. I didn’t want to go home, I didn’t at all want to live at home, didn’t want to live in Kentucky. But in that moment, on that day, I sure did want to be home.
All the sudden I was tired of being inside, tired of being in town, tired of being swallowed up in gray. Despite all my family’s crazy shit, I wanted to be back there.
I couldn’t help it. I wished someone would come in smelling of moss. Smelling of woodsmoke. I wished someone would come in smelling of game and grease and cigarettes and gasoline. Paint. Even if somebody would come in smelling of paint, that’d be enough. Not likely here. People come in the copy shop were people living on paper, on presentations, on handouts, on printing for eight cents a page, on Internet access two dollars for ten minutes. I stood over the copier, light strobing my face. I could feel the customer behind me, but I didn’t turn around, cause if I did, the customer would be my customer. Let one of them chatty boys do the talking with the customers. But this customer come in with a smell I couldn’t figure out.
Ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk.
B.O. and wet dogs was part of it.
Ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk.
There was chewing tobacco in it.
Dawn, I said to myself, don’t turn around.
Ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk.
“Hey girl,” the customer said.
Ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk.
“Turn around here.”
Ca-chunk ca-chunk ca-chunk.
Orange juice and honey.
Ca-chunk.
“Say,” the voice said.
Ca-chunk.
“Can’t you hear no more?” I knew who it was.
Ca-chunk.
I smelled my granny Jewell’s moonshine recipe.
“Say.”
Ca-chunk.
“Turn around here, you big tall thing.”
Beep beep beep.
It was my brother Albert.
Beep beep beep. Something was wrong with the copier.
Albert said, “You need help with that thing?”
Beep beep beep.
I turned to the counter. There stood Albert, stringy and brown, a big blue slushee in his hand.
I said, “What are you doing here, Albert? How’d you know where I was at?” I stacked and restacked the papers on the counter without taking my eyes off Albert.
Albert’s rat eyes twinkled like gas in a mower can. He said, “Hug?”
I come around the counter, motioned for Albert to follow me. He spread his arms wide as I went out the door into the parking lot.
He said, “No hug?” with a grin like a tent zipper.
Albert’s bird-yellow pickup set in a handicapped spot with its “Army of One” bumper stickers in the back window under the two-foot-tall stickers spelling out “REDNEKK” in gothic letters. Silver flames run back from the front wheel wells. Under lights. Tail lights blacked out. Pins holding the trunk down. Extra gauges ran up from the dashboard, which was spraypainted a lime green. Albert could waste money like nobody’s business.
He said, “Where’s your queerbait husband?” His head filled the truck’s opposite window. Albert backed up and grinned.
I walked back towards the copy shop.
“What’s the matter? Aint you gonna hug me?”
I said, “You got a woman. Go hug her.”
Albert laughed with his arms wide open.
My dark face in the glass of the copy shop door could have told me. There is no way to make your family disappear. Nor was I ever going to know peace with mine. Hubert’s face filled the glass next to my face.
Hubert said, “Where’s your momma?”
I said, “Yall get out of here. This is my work.”
“Your mother needs to call me,” Hubert said.
I didn’t even have the urge t
o say how pissed off I was, to tell Hubert to leave her alone, leave me alone, leave Tennessee alone. Hubert got me by the arm and jerked me around. I said, “Get your fucking hands off me, Hubert.”
He said, “I need your help, Dawn.” Hubert’s eyes was like the front end of bullets. “She’s gonna get herself killed.”
I said, “What am I supposed to do? Blink three times and make her appear?”
I could feel them asshole drips watching me from inside. Sweat was running in Hubert’s eyes. He looked like a bottle of orange pop just come out of a cooler in some old store.
“Just hold her,” Hubert said. “If you see her, hold her.”
I met Hubert’s bullet eyes with my own.
Albert put a Canard County Bugle, our newspaper, in my hand. As usual, there was a big drug bust on the front page. And there in big color pictures above the fold was Groundhog and Fu Manchu, cuffed and not even trying to hide their faces. Hubert and Albert got back in the truck.
I said, “Hey,” and Albert started the truck. I ran up to Hubert’s window. He rolled it down. I said, “Did Momma rat on them two?” and pointed at the paper.
Hubert said, “I don’t know. Why don’t you blink three times and ask her?”
Then they were gone. I went back in the copy shop. The boys were behind a row of shelves, but I heard them.
“Her boyfriend,” one of them said.
“I thought it was her brother,” another said.
“Probably both,” said the third, and then come the laughing.
I run as hard as I could, put my shoulder into them shelves. There was twelve foot of them hooked together. They went over easy and I caught all three of them dicks under it. They were rocking the shelves trying to get out, but I stood up on the flipped shelves, like a surfer, them hollering, hurt, while the desk calendars and candy bars went flying. I stomped till one of them cried and then I walked out of the store.
4
DRY IT UP
DAWN
I didn’t answer the phone when work called Wednesday morning. I was done copying.
“Well,” Aunt June said when I told her, “why don’t you come take my summer class?”
I was sitting up in bed when she asked me. I put the phone in my lap. Cause I don’t want to, I didn’t say. I also didn’t say this:
Aunt June was wanting to make a difference teaching them classes at the community college, and I’m sorry, Aunt June, but I’m afraid what you’re doing don’t. There were photographs by the thousands mounted on the walls in the building where Aunt June taught—photos she and her students put there the summer before, photos taken with throwaway cameras by kids and church people, by everybody in Canard County, pictures of endless mamaws standing at stoves stirring skillet bottoms skimmed with gravy, people standing out front of trucks with their fighting chickens balanced on their arm, feathers pluming down, grandfathers and grandchildren with guns, endless trailer underpinning backdrops, endless four-wheelers, photos of baptism hot tubs, children holding hot dogs and plastic tigers, plastic cups, plastic motorcycles, little plastic men with flowing plastic hair wearing plastic wrestling tights, pictures of people in the dollar store, children sitting in tires, children looking bored in school, looking bored behind cyclone fences in the yards of coal camp houses, children wallering in piles on brokedown trampolines, old men on couches with their eyes closed and their forearms resting on the top of their heads, a hillbilly parade, and it did give you something—I won’t deny it gave you something—but I don’t know. I don’t know, Aunt June.
So I sat in Kingsport Wednesday. Sat in Kingsport and wondered had my mother scored. Had she found her pills? Had she really snitched like June said Belinda Coates said she had? Was she really about to get killed like Hubert said? Momma might deserve killing. She might. I don’t know. So I sat at the trailer.
The only thing cheered me up was the thought of Willett tooling around the factory floor in a forklift hauling plastic pellets to and fro. Corporal of industry. My plastic man. That blue folder full of employment papers sparked up my why-I-like-Willett. I was feeling good and warm, about that anyway, when Willett showed up in the back doorway, sawed off at the waist where we didn’t have no back steps.
I said, “What are you doing home?”
He said, “I have to train before I can work. The trainer got sick. They sent me home. Go back Friday, they said.”
I asked if they were still paying him.
“Yeah,” Willett said, climbing into the house. “Can you believe it?”
A pretty song came on the radio. A woman sang high and content in a voice had a cup of tea waiting when the song was over. I took the cap off a Pepsi. Willett opened a packet of instant oatmeal lying on the counter. He sang along with the cup-of-tea woman.
I said, “You’re in a good mood.”
Willett said, “I am,” and stuck his head in the refrigerator. He come out with the milk. “The baby still at Mom’s?” he said.
I said she was.
Willett said, “Maybe she could stay over there tonight.”
I said, “She could.”
Willett said, “Maybe after while we can get out the baby pool.”
I took the cap off my Pepsi, said, “Maybe so.”
A car raced by, loud. Somebody doesn’t have a job, I thought. Not like us. Not like Willett. Willett put his oatmeal in the microwave, went to the bedroom and changed into his favorite shorts, came back, and lay down on his belly in the TV room and ate his oatmeal. Willett’s shorts were shiny and baby blue and hung below his knees. There on our dingy gray carpet, his butt looked like the sky clearing after a snowstorm.
Willett got up and sat down at the computer. He downloaded an mp3. Music pumped from the speakers. Willett turned the volume down and the speaker fell behind the computer. Willett got off the chair and the chair fell over. Willett kneeled, stuck his head under the particle-board computer desk.
Willett’s butt crack rose up out of his shorts like a sea serpent coming up out of the ocean of his behind. The song on the computer wailed on. I fingered the flash drive hanging around my neck held the emails Willett sent me when we were courting. I kept that hanging around my neck because Willett was liable at any moment to bring that computer crashing to the ground,
Me and Willett met cause Willett played music on a radio station I listened to. His family ran the station. It was on the mountain named for his daddy’s family on the back end of Scott County, Virginia, and it broadcast into Canard. Bilson Mountain Radio was pretty much all volunteers. They played what they wanted. Mamaw and Houston listened to the old music they played. Mountain music. And Mamaw liked the hippie meditation shows from California and troublemaker news shows from New York City they ran.
Willett’s half-brother Kenny, the one June fooled around with, played lots of punk rock and weird music shows. I listened to them. I liked music my friend Decent Ferguson called “murder music,” old stuff like Bikini Kill, Sonic Youth, Malignant Growth. And because Willett had to do just what Kenny did, he played murder music. And so I listened to Willett on the radio too.
Willett’s voice is terrible. He sounds like a clothes dryer needs greasing. He made a lot more sense as somebody to be with when he started writing me. He wrote humongous letters. I still have them. I wont tell anybody where. Pretty soon after we started writing, email started. I have all my emails from him gathered up on a Xena the Warrior Princess flash drive he brought me back from a comic book thing he went to in Chattanooga. I wore that flash drive around my neck for a long time, strung on a shoestring I got off one of Daddy’s mining boots.
Those emails had stories about Willett traveling to see bands with his friends from college, stories about him being in New York City and Atlanta and Nashville and Massachusetts. There were stories about him being in Italy and London, all the time seeing bands and sleeping in parks and dumpsters. After while he got a scanner and he’d scan pictures of himself in all those places, and the more stuff he sent, the more I
could see myself a part of all that.
Also, he wore me down. When I first met him, I didn’t much care for him. He was sweaty and sticky, still is, even though he doesn’t do much with his body. But he just kept liking me, kept remembering what I told him, kept bringing me things couldn’t help but please me. Like, somehow or other, he was the best at getting me makeup, and good at putting it on me. He’d do my eyes better than I could, which was weird cause in most things had to do with using your hands, he was a total clod. One time it took him an hour and a half to change the wiper blades on the car, and even then he tore them up and Albert had to steal some off another car at the Kingsport mall parking lot and put them on for him. Willett’s dad said Willett could tear up an anvil.
Anyway, he could do eye makeup. Our best date ever was one Halloween he made me up to be a hot Frankenstein woman, green but hot, and I really was hot. Boys that always made fun of me and call me Lurch and stuff just stood and looked at me all night long at that party and would try and talk and couldn’t think of a thing to say, just ask if they could feel of the bolts on my neck.
So stories of all that and memories of all that was in Willett’s emails. That’s why I kept them on a flash drive around my neck. So they wouldn’t get messed up. And they didn’t for a long time.
Willett banged his head on the underside of the computer desk. I said, “Willett, get up out of there.”
Willett said, “It’s good to be back in shorts. I treasure their satiny comfort.” Willett stayed on the floor. He pulled his bowl of oatmeal to him. He reached me a pizza coupon he’d found behind the desk. “Two for one,” he said. “Still valid,” he said.