by Robert Gipe
Willett called the pizza place lying there in the mess. I went and got the pizza, never said a thing about quitting my job. Two for one.
* * *
THE FISH on the bottom of the plastic kiddie pool were blue and purple and blended with the blue of the pool. Their eyes matched the bubbles that came from their lips. Me and Willett lay in the pool, packed shoulder to shoulder. I put my arm around him.
I said, “What are you thinking, boy?”
He said, “If you have to work, I might go to Virginia in the morning.”
Willett loved to hang out at the radio station his half-brother Kenny and his papaw started back in the eighties. It was about an hour from Kingsport, between there and Canard.
I looked at the side of Willett’s head. “Is that right?”
He said, “Mm-hm. Maybe I’ll take Nicolette.”
A butterfly shadow passed over us.
Willett’s eyes run over my legs. “You want to go?”
I said, “I got to work.” I was feeling softer towards Willett, but when the chance for a day alone kisses you on the lips, you kiss it back.
Willett looked at me like I was doing him a favor. He said, “You care if I go?”
I said, “I don’t guess.” I stood up and the water run down my legs. I picked up the empty pizza boxes, put on my flip-flops, and turned to Willett, said,
* * *
DURING THE summer, Willett’s mother would get up early on Saturday morning and go down to the parking lot next to the library in downtown Kingsport to where farmers brought stuff to sell. Tomatoes and corn and beans. Watermelons. Peppers. Willett’s mother came by and brought us stuff. She brought us beans she’d cooked. Real buttery. They made me miss when I was little and Daddy’s mother was around or when we’d go see her in North Carolina when she left Green, Daddy’s dad. She cooked garden stuff. I liked it but never got it enough to get used to it.
Willett’s mother left and I got the vegetables ready. And I made chicken tenders with Grippo’s powder on them. I made a Cool-Whip-and-crushed-up-Oreo dessert. It was nice. We sat at a picnic table under a willow tree behind our trailer and ate. We stayed until the mosquitoes ate us up. Bit us through the Off! We went in the trailer front room and talked about getting a real house but also about how it was nice at this trailer park, quiet.
It got dark, and the booger lights came on in the park. I pulled back the curtains and let the pale orange light into the trailer front room. Willett took off his shirt and flung it over by the television. He flopped out on his belly. His back was a wad of meat, eggshell skin specked with moles and pimples. He spread his legs and I got down on my knees between them. I had me a felt tip, and with little jabby strokes I drew a giant dandelion exploding across his back.
I liked to draw on Willett’s back. I’d always done it. I’d draw a picture on his back, and then a day or two later I’d get in the shower with him and scrub it off. One time I drew a whole field of dandelions on him. Another time a penny, gigantic Lincoln staring into Willett’s underarm. Once a cuckoo bird, its wings spread from one edge of his back to the other. The Radio City Music Hall Rockettes. Daniel Boone, large. Different dogs from the trailer park, large. The local dairy bar. I drew trees remembered from home. Paintings from my Art 100 book. Icebergs when I wanted to move to Antarctica. I was constantly looking for something to draw on Willett’s back. A microscope slide of gonorrhea. Whatever.
While I was drawing the big dandelion, Willett clicked around the Internet, the monitor and keyboard on the floor in front of him. We didn’t talk much. The light faded, and Willett stretched his hand back towards mine. With his other he kept clicking, played a song by the Dead Kennedys. I stopped drawing to take Willett’s hand. Then I let go and drew the seeds blown from the dandelion. And that’s how we did when we got along.
* * *
THURSDAY MORNING Willett left early to go to Virginia. A short man with a long beard across the way had a pile of bicycles behind his trailer. A black pickup pulled up full of more bicycles. Longbeard got in the bed of the truck and threw bicycles onto the pile. I was still in my pajamas. I walked out and asked Longbeard if he had a bicycle that worked. He said he did. He went to a shed beside the trailer and took out a black-and-red trick bike. I asked could I borrow it. He said I could. I rolled up my pajamas so they wouldn’t get caught in the chain. I pedaled around the trailer park. I got out on the side road and went deeper into the hillside, past small little houses with lots of flowers in cutup tires with their flared-out rubber petals.
Going up the holler behind our trailer park, my knees banged against the bicycle handlebars. Dogs barked at me. Little black ones. Big white ones. Long-haired ones three and four colors apiece. One little rooster dog ran up and down the cyclone fence marking his yard, barked crazy like he hated me, like I was going to kill his family and burn their house. That rooster dog made me nervous for what might happen to Momma, because maybe somebody was about to kill her, and maybe I should be barking. Maybe I should be a barking dog running up and down a fence line making a racket to warn somebody, to show I cared, to show I deserved feeding. With Momma, nobody mentioned calling the law. Momma was already a snitch, already working for the law, so they were probably mad at her as anybody else for running off. All her family and friends were either doped up and confused or ignorant and sober and couldn’t do anything.
On top of the dogs barking, there were bugs buzzing and humming everywhere. By the million. The mist burned off fast. The sun came burning through the gaps in the trees the way it never would in a holler at home. Always some way in Tennessee for the sun to get in, even in the morning.
The houses were brick, or had nice siding on them. They had floweredy bushes and concrete deer and iron porch rails. The trailers had shingle roofs on them, and carports built to them, so as not to look like trailers. There was more money here. Even the people who didn’t have much had some. How does that happen?
On up in the holler, houses got smaller and the road began to wind up. Houses started having little wood shed buildings and vehicles with shredded blue tarps over them out in their yards. The vehicles were green with mold and orange with rust, because the sun stopped getting in that part of the holler.
At the last house I saw before the blacktop gave out, before the road turned steep and grown up in weeds and garbage, there was a doghouse with a flat shingled roof. Moss grew at the shingles’ edge. A white dog with a brown spot like a saddle on its back lay on the mossy roof. The dog was chained, and watched me, its chin across its folded paws, paws hanging off the front edge of the house. The dog eyed me, but it didn’t bark. Skin hung off its eyeballs, showing the white part of its eyes, and its saggy red socketskin. The peoples’ house was dark, the screens in its windows and doors full of holes and peeling. All the vehicles in the yard were being used for storage. The dog rolled over, showed its belly to me. It was a momma dog, but there was no sign of its pups. No sign of the people supposed to be at the house. The dog lay her head back away from me, left her titted up belly facing me. She sighed. I wished she could talk.
I was about back to the trailer when Hubert met me in a Lincoln Continental had been the color of a winter night sky new but had turned the color of dirty miners’ coveralls. Albert was in the front seat beside him. Evie was in between them.
He said, “Where you going?”
I said, “Leave me be, Hubert.”
He said, “They gonna kill your mother.”
I said, “No they aint.”
He said, “Come with me.”
I said, “Come where?”
Hubert said, “Out to the lake.”
Albert leaned up, said, “Going to water.”
* * *
HUBERT DIDN’T hang out much with anybody, except when he needed to decide something. And then he would have a party. Or if it was summer, a picnic. The word would go around. A place would get named, and where Momma was the closest thing to a wife Hubert had, she’d get told and would go earl
y and Hubert would start a fire on his big grill and me and Momma would make hamburgers and keep making hamburgers and Hubert’s brother Filbert who was a biker would bring all the other stuff and there would be food and yelling and screaming and throwing of garbage cans. I never would see Hubert talk to anybody, just wander around, lipping beer off his moustaches, watching people get wild. Finally Hubert would figure out what he was trying to figure out and sometimes he would leave and sometimes he would make everybody else leave. Sometimes the law would come and break it all up for Hubert.
So that’s what me and Evie and Albert thought was happening when Hubert said we was going to the lake. The other thing was, Hubert went to water when there was trouble. He liked to float. He liked to lay his head back in the water and let it bob. And you didn’t talk to him. Really, you tried not to be near him when he was doing like that. Just let him bob.
* * *
GOD DIDN’T give us no lakes in Canard County. Too much downhill, too much push to the water. So when the government decided we could use some help, they dammed up our rivers and they made us lakes. Had us make them. The people I come from were good enough to push the dirt around, to make piles where a man in a white shirt and a government sedan said make piles.
But what do I know about all that? What I know is like scratches on rocks, shards of tales.
But I know this: the lakes in Tennessee are bigger. Way bigger. Big shots have houses around them. I know our lakes barely got enough to put a picnic shelter around. A ragged boat dock with a shack at its end where men spit in the same sawed-off two-liter bottle, listen to Bill Monroe, and talk about bodies found on the bottom of the lake and bodies never found. The company owned around our lakes, cause they still might be something worth taking from the mountains thereabouts. I’m sure there is. Orange water feeds our lakes. They are poor affairs.
I know this too: my uncle Hubert went to water when he was worried. He put on short pants and he went to water. Hubert had never given up on my mother. He remembered her the way I did, the way she was before my father died. I seen more love in Hubert over the years. He still kept to himself in that building his father built to hang out with his rusty gang of thieves and petty officials. All them gone now, and now Hubert had only me and sometimes Evie and Albert.
When the law took Sidney Coates’s money and everybody said my mother informed on him, we figured Hubert would plan a picnic, have us all go to the lake. Cause it was picnic season, plus that is what Hubert did.
“I could use a picnic,” Evie said. “Things is too tight around here.”
Hubert grumbled something none of us caught, ended on the words “ice cream.” So we figured a picnic was what was fixing to happen. But it wasn’t.
We were sitting in that building Thursday afternoon, all of us on stumpy chunks of oak save Albert, who sat on the backseat of a LTD. The rest of the LTD set burned up in the yard.
Evie and Albert argued as usual, about something stupid like whether fish or birds was smarter. Hubert stood up, said, “Let’s go,” and headed towards the barn door. We give him a head start. Hubert opened the passenger door of the Continental, told Albert to drive. Me and Evie got in back and Hubert told Albert to head out towards the lake, but when we got to the picnic shelters by the hauled-in beach, Hubert told Albert to keep going. Albert did, on up into what Evie called Yesterdayland, where folks kept bees, everybody played music, and nobody counted on the law to settle things.
Hubert’s daddy was Green Jewell, and Green’s mother was from up that way. Her people still had a place, still had land up there. But it was way far away from the Trail so hadn’t none of us been out there much, so we leaned on Hubert to tell us where to go, show us how to be.
Hubert said, “Turn in here.”
We crossed a wood bridge. An old woman walked towards us with a dead snake hung over the blade of her hoe. Albert stopped the vehicle and she stood at Hubert’s window.
Hubert said, “That’s a nice one.”
The woman said, “Never cared for snakes.”
Hubert said, “How you doing, Peck?”
The woman said, “Hubert, I been worse.”
Hubert said, “How’s your garden?”
“Pitiful.” Peck leaned down and looked at us. Stood back up, said “Who you got?”
Hubert pointed at me and Albert. “Him and her is Delbert’s.” He jerked his thumb at Evie. “She’s a Bright.”
Peck leaned down again, looked at Evie, said “My daddy courted a Bright. She run off with a gravel man in here building the dam.”
Albert said, “Your daddy’s better off.”
Evie popped Albert on back of the head.
Hubert said, “We’re going up to the falls, Peck. Why don’t you come with us?”
Peck looked out over the place like an Indian in one of those paintings by a white man, one of them ones where the Indian looks all noble peering out over a canyon full of buffalo, noble even though he’s in the middle of getting assfucked by a bunch of cowboys.
“Can’t,” she said. “Waiting on Shasta to bring me them babies. Untelling when she’ll get here.”
Hubert said, “Good to see you, Peck.”
Peck said, “Good to see you too, Hubert.” She probably would have said tell so-and-so hello, but Hubert didn’t have nobody around him anymore and so Peck just stood there.
We drove past the place where I reckon Peck stayed given they was a garden on the side big as a grocery store parking lot with string-run beans and corn thigh-high and tomatoes already ganging on the vine. Then we went by a long house with white siding and storm windows and a two-vehicle carport. It was a nice house, a good liver’s house, built solid, but it didn’t look like nobody lived in it, nor had in a while—shingles blown off the roof, downspout come loose, sheets against the front windows.
Evie said, “Whose is that?”
Hubert said, “That’s where my papaw lived.”
Albert said, “Snatch?”
Hubert said, “What they called him.”
Me and Albert had heard about Snatch, our father’s grandfather. He was a union man. We grew up on tales of him shooting gun thugs from the woods above the road to mines on strike, tales of him tying scabs to the railroad track. The scabs’ screams when the train cut them to pieces woke me many a night, even though the killings were long before I was born, back in the thirties. Hubert and Daddy had showed us the road where the company drug Snatch by a chain behind a truck to the state line, threw him over a hill into a den of snakes, left him for dead.
I remember Snatch in a hospital bed in the front room of Green’s house, hooked up to oxygen cause of black lung, face gray as pipe. I come in crying one time when I was five. Albert’d run over one of my frogs on his Big Wheel and there was nobody home to cry to, only Snatch. Snatch opened his dinosaur eyes, raised up on his bed, tubes in his nose, stuck the broke-off stump of his right first finger at me, said,
Said it to me like I was grown. It stayed with me from that day on. I was grown. Got that from Snatch.
“They called him Snatch cause it was what he loved the best,” Albert grinned, his teeth like hominy. “Aint that right, Hubert?”
“Pull off here,” Hubert said, pointing at a wide spot off the road. We was back in the woods by then, Highhead Mountain rising up above us like a preacher had the goods on us and fixing to lay us low. The pull-off spot was robed around with laurel and when we got out we had to duck and dodge through it.
Hubert got a red canvas bag out of the trunk of the Continental. Bag had a strap where you could sling it over your shoulder. Hubert headed up through a gap in the laurel, which closed up behind him. Albert scrambled after Hubert, fell, and then he was gone through the laurel.
Evie said, “What’s he doing?”
I said nothing to Evie, who once had been dear to me, now just part of my problem, part of everybody’s problem. I didn’t have a friend now and that was Evie’s fault.
It was near-dark in the laurel. I could
barely see the horned ghost of Albert’s white wifebeater floating up the path, but I saw enough to follow, grabbing hold of roots and tree trunks, rocks and mud, till the path leveled off, skirted the hillside, and hooked right beside a creek running flat, past overhangs and rock towers, hiding places and lookouts enough for a hundred Indians and outlaws.
Hubert got going good once he got out in the woods, and I never did catch him and Albert, but little goat Evie caught me. She had trouble keeping pace, so she didn’t say much, and we moved huffing and puffing through that church of woods till we got to where the trail swung up in our faces and we could hear the sound of the falls.
When we caught up to Hubert and Albert, Hubert’s shorts dropped from his waist and naked Hubert stepped down into a pool eddying off the creek seventy feet below where the water crashed from a rock ledge. The waterfall landed in a rainbow spray and made the ferns and bushes and tree limbs in its sway shiver. Hubert’s mouth made a little O as he slipped into the chill water up to his chest. Albert crouched above him on the trunk of a fallen tree, a monkey henchman floating in the summer sparkle.
Evie said, “What are you doing?”
Hubert’s eyes were closed. He said, “I need yall to pass through the water.”
Evie said, “Do what?”
Hubert lay his arms out flat on the surface of the pool. “I need you to go through the falls and bring me back something.”
Albert said, “All of us?”
Evie said, “Why we gonna do that?”
Hubert’s eyes opened. He lay back in the pool, wetting the back of his head. “It’s money,” he said. Hubert floated and turned. “Lots and lots of money.”
Albert come off his perch and rockscrambled towards the fall. Evie caught him before he reached the spray.