by Robert Gipe
Hubert said, “You go too, Dawn,” his eyes closed again. “Don’t leave it to them two.”
At the top of the waterfall, drops of water jumped free of the rest of the fall, but by the time the drops hit the rocks below, they were all in the same place. I followed Evie and Albert behind the sheet of water.
* * *
THE MONEY we found in the darkness behind the falls was duct-taped inside two garbage bags. We followed Hubert down the creek to a wide place where the water flowed slow and the creek bed looked smooth shiny and hard as the floor in the courthouse lobby. We took the money out of the garbage bags. It had mold on it. Some of it you couldn’t tell what it was.
Evie said, “This money is nasty.”
Albert said, “I think something shit on it.”
“Money’s money,” Hubert said. “It don’t go bad.”
We’d all asked Hubert over and over where it come from, and every time he acted like he hadn’t heard us. I stopped asking him.
Evie said, “Do we have to wash every bill?”
Hubert said, “You don’t have to wash none of it.”
Evie said, “Shoo.”
Hubert nodded.
Evie and Albert settled into cussing and picking at each other. They dipped the bills into the creek, their hands flat under the water, rubbing the presidents’ faces back to life. Hubert moved from one tree to another, his hand against the trunks, bad leg dragging, grimacing.
Hubert leaned into my ear, grumbled, “So much racket.”
I said, “That creek is so clean.”
Hubert looked at the creek. His throat rattled like a stick drug across a metal grate. “Your mother,” he said, walking away from the creek into the boulders, talking where I couldn’t hear him.
Evie said to Albert, “You splash me one more time and I drown you. I aint even kidding.”
I said to Hubert library low, “Do what?” and followed him into the boulders, followed him back where it could be just me and him. I came around one boulder and he was sitting on another, his hands in moss, breathing hard.
I said, “You’re hurting, aren’t you?”
He drew his lips tight, said, “I don’t know your mother’s worth the investment.”
I sat down beside him. I wanted to lean on him. I didn’t.
I said, “Does old money stay good?”
“It does,” Hubert said. “Legal tender.”
The tops of the trees rustled. The light sprinkled down like sugar.
“If Momma wasn’t in trouble,” I said, “what would you do with that money?”
Hubert sniffed. He wasn’t crying, but his eyes were watery. “Nothing,” he said. “It aint out here for using.”
I didn’t ask no more.
I said, “You don’t smell like you’re taking care of yourself.”
Hubert coughed but nothing come up.
I said, “You getting enough to drink?”
Hubert said, “I reckon.”
I said, “Smells like it.”
Hubert looked at me sideways, said, “Why don’t you go help your brother?”
I said, “Who else knows about this?”
Hubert didn’t look up, said, “I don’t know. Too many lost years. Too many nights.”
I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. I stayed talking low, said, “What are you talking about?”
Hubert said, “Too many years in the wilderness.”
“Hubert,” I said. “You need to think about getting married.”
Hubert turned his head to me, said, “You proposing?”
I said,
“I don’t know who all I told,” Hubert said. “They was years when I didn’t care who knew what.” Hubert stood up.
“Well,” I said, “you couldn’t of told too many. It’s still here.”
Hubert turned in his spot like a dog with arthritis winding up to sit down. “Don’t care who knows,” he said.
I wished Hubert would sit back down, but he went back and watched Evie and Albert wash money, and before long Hubert told them to forget it, and we stuffed the money in the red canvas bag, and we trooped back down the creek.
When we got back to Hubert’s place, June’s little red Honda car was there.
When June seen Evie she said, “Missed you in class this week.”
Evie said, “I know what we’re supposed to do. I found out. We’re supposed to write a paper. And I got me a topic now.”
Hubert said, “I want you to take this back with you, June.”
June looked at the red bag. We all did.
Story Hubert told was this: Cinderella had called Hubert said Sidney Coates hired a man in Stickerbush to make my mother disappear. Hubert called Sidney said what if Hubert put back the money Sidney had lost. Sidney said it’d be a start. People was scared of Hubert, but it don’t pay to have that much money in the house, not when you had a June who could take it and make it safe.
“All right,” she said.
We followed June in the Continental to the Virginia line. When June’s car slipped down the hill, Albert pulled in behind a coal truck idling at the top of the hill. Hubert got out of the Continental and smoked a cigarette. And then we went back to the Trail.
GENE
That Woman had a notion for what might happen that summer. She had a bunch of younguns taking a class at the college and somewhere she’d got money to pay them to take it. She’d got money for them to—I don’t know what you’d call it—make displays they put out where people could see them. Summer before she’d had money, give everbody who wanted one one of them throwaway cameras and then took the pictures they took and printed them big and put them all over the county and I guess it was popular and she showed people she could get people together to do something that wadn’t fussing and fighting and wadn’t just waiting in line to get something free and it seemed to make That Woman real happy to do it.
So that summer of oh-four when me and her met, she had another bunch of students and had a project lined out for them. The guys down at the courthouse, the fiscal court, or whatever you’d want to call them, they had this idea what Canard needed was a big old sign on the ridge looked down over town, and that sign would be like that big Hollywood sign they got out there in Hollywood, except our sign instead of saying “HOLYWOOD” would say “COALTOWN!” with an esclamation point at the end of it, which would show everybody how proud we was to be a town pretty much made out of coal. And That Woman, she said her and her students would do it. And so she asked me could I come down to Kingsport, down in Tennessee, to haul back some stuff she needed to make this sign.
I said sure, but that I didn’t have much way to haul stuff. I didn’t have a truck or nothing, but if she didn’t mind helping with the gas, I’d make as many trips in that little Nissan I pack my mower in as she needed me to make. And she said, “No, I got somebody with a truck,” and I said, “Are you sure, because that Nissan is real good on gas.” And she said, “Gene, honey, this is stuff like telephone poles and big sheets of plywood. I don’t think you could haul them in your Nissan if you wanted to.” She said she had a man with a truck, and that’s how I come to know Kenny Bilson, the other man loved That Woman.
* * *
IT WAS muggy the morning I rode with That Woman down to Kingsport. Where I’d been such a mess the first time I rode with her, I’d found me some washed stuff, white canvas pants and white T-shirt. They was paint-spattered, but they was clean and so was I. I slicked my hair down and put a little vanilla extract behind each of my ears to kind of top it off. That Woman noticed it right off when we got in the car, before she rolled the windows down.
She said, “Gene, you been drinking?”
I said, “No, that’s that vanilla extract to help with my scent.”
She said that was nice. She said, “Thank you.”
I said, “Granny used to put a drop of that on when she had men come over.”
“Well,” That Woman said, “that’s good.”
Then she asked was Granny dea
d and I said she was and she said she was sorry and I said wadn’t no need to be sorry cause Granny was old when she died and real Christian so it was just as well.
That Woman said, “That’s right.”
I showed That Woman where I had a BB stuck under the skin of my elbow since I was little and I talked about how Brother and me lived with all kinds of people before we settled in with Granny, and I run through all the bird calls I know and generally the time passed pretty quick down to Kingsport.
When we hit Kingsport, we went to That Woman’s house. It wadn’t nothing special on the outside, just one of many on a street looked like a coal camp, but That Woman said there had used to be a textile mill at the end of the street, on the other side of a big woody park, and that must have been nice, I said, to be able to walk to work through a pretty bunch of trees like that, and she said, “Yes, I’m sure it was, in many ways.”
When we got inside That Woman’s house, it was like walking into a cake, a cake with caramel-colored icing, everything clean and unstepped on as fresh snow. There was flowers in vases, and the vases was pretty as naked bodies, and the flowers went good with the colors that was in the curtains, and the blossoms flowed with the patterns that stretched out everwhere in the front room of That Woman’s house. I felt like I had entered into a chamber of earthly delights, and my breath got a little short, and I began to cough. I thought maybe something had flown down my throat and got caught, cause I’m sure my mouth was hanging wide open.
That Woman got me a glass of water and asked did I want to sit down on the sofa and when I did I seen a portly man out in the kitchen watching something in the backyard. He had on short pants that come down to his knees had a bunch of pockets in them and he rubbed a beard looked like a wad of orange moss on his chin and he had kind of loose curly hair piled up on his head and he wore a T-shirt said The Psychedelic Furs, which I thought was maybe where he worked.
That was Kenny Bilson. He come in there in the front room where me and That Woman was at, and he sat down in a arm chair facing us on the sofa, said, “What do you say, partner?”
I nodded at him. Didn’t see no reason not to.
That Woman said, “Where’s your truck, Kenny?”
“Still at the house,” he said. “I figured I’d take Gene and we’d go from there.”
“So,” That Woman said, “this is Kenny, Gene. He’s a good friend to me and he knows where all the stuff is yall got to load up, OK?”
And I was actually pretty cheerful about things at that time and I said, “Why, sure. Pleasure to meet you.”
That Woman told Kenny how as long as we got that stuff to Canard and unloaded by Sunday that that was fine. She didn’t have to teach again till Monday.
And so we stood there a while and it was OK this, and all right that, and then when we got ready to go, Kenny took his hand and put it in the small of That Woman’s back, like to pull her to him. Then he caught himself, and That Woman didn’t have to put both hands into his chest to stop him, like she was fixing to do.
They come apart, them two, like none of that hadn’t never happened, and I knew right then that he wasn’t moving in on her unwanted, he had just moved in on her at not the right time. And when that sunk in on me I got a headache, and my heart shattered like if you’d froze it and then beat it with the claw side of a clawhammer.
I don’t need to tell you that day went slow and hard. Kenny had him a nice house sitting up on a hill with a bunch of other houses next to it on the same hill, joined by a curvy little road, one of many such roads in a maze of houses, confusing to navigate where all the roads and the houses looked just the same. And I knew right when I walked in Kenny’s house he had him a wife. You could tell by how much useless stuff was sitting on the furniture. Candles, fake ivy, fake fruit.
Then it got worse. Cause once we got keys to the truck which was a twenty-six footer looked like it had been a rental, we went over and got Kenny’s friend Calvin. And Calvin, he didn’t do nothing for me at all. He looked like he ought to live at the beach, like he went to discos all the time. His teeth was real white, his hair black and shiny and straight as a poker, and his skin was a fake brown. Kind of orange, really.
Kenny had hired him to help us work, but he didn’t have on what looked to me like work clothes. He had on real skinny-legged jeans and a shirt with pictures of palm trees all over it, and the worst was he had on flip-flops—to load a truck. Kenny didn’t say nothing about it neither, but he give Calvin a long look.
Calvin finally said, “Well. Your old lady has that party tonight, don’t she?”
Kenny looked pained, and I don’t know cause didn’t nobody tell me, but I bet neither Kenny nor his wife had asked Calvin to go to whatever party it was they was having.
* * *
WE ALL piled in the cab of that truck and Kenny took us out on the four-lane to a warehouse set back behind a farmhouse and we went in there and that thing was stacked floor-to-ceiling with candy—them Dum-Dum suckers like they used to give out at the bank and them Smarties Sister would eat a pack at a time, but mostly it was Christmas candy, and most of that was candy canes. Then behind that was all kind of toys—not big stuff, but rubber balls and plastic dolls and lots of stuffed animals. They must have been a thousand blue kangaroos in there.
We drove right through that warehouse, past all that Christmas stuff, and then in the back was the stuff June needed, the plywood and the poles and a whole big scaffold. Kenny pulled in so the back of the truck was right where all of it was, and let a ramp down and we went to loading, and I’ll have to admit, Calvin worked pretty good, but they sure wadn’t no dead air when he was on the job.
“If I was ranking my wives’ titties,” Calvin said at one point, “I’d put Desiree first, and then Aster and then Felicia. Though Felicia got a boob job after we got divorced. But that can’t figure in the rankings, since I aint directly experienced the new situation. But you know, if she’s at your wife’s party, Kenny, I think maybe she might still have a little love in the tank for old Calvin.”
Since I don’t much care for such coarse talk, I was well pleased when Kenny said, “Shut the fuck up, Calvin,” at which point Calvin started talking about how him and his bingo buddies beat a bunch of boys in basketball the night before.
“Schooled em in my flip-flops, John,” Calvin said to me.
Kenny said, “His name is Gene, dumbass.”
Before long we got the truck loaded and ate some lunch. Kenny’s wife called him on his cell phone and told him she needed some something from the store for that party they was having. Kenny and Calvin decided to go get Calvin’s Bonneville, which was parked at his mother’s, where Calvin lived.
While we was on the way over there, Calvin asked Kenny what was all that stuff in that warehouse.
Kenny said, “That’s the stuff they throw off that train.”
Calvin said, “What train?”
Kenny said, “That one they take up in Virginia and Kentucky at Christmas time and throw candy and toys off in them coal camps and them kids scramble around and pick it up, make everybody feel good about themselves.”
“If I wadn’t so lean,” Calvin said, “I’d make a badass Santa.”
“If only,” Kenny said, squinting like a wore-out man just got four hours added to his shift.
One time, it was at the end of the first day of school, me twelve or so, and me and Brother and this boy Brother run around with, they called him Dog Turd, or Turd, cause if they was a dog turd anywhere around he’d step in it sure as you was born, we three got in between the gons of a unit train down in Canard we thought was going to Bowtie, where Turd lived. And the train, it did go to Bowtie, but it didn’t stop in Bowtie. Turd, he was scared to death of his daddy and so he decided he was gonna jump off that train and get back home.
We begged him not to do it, but he said he was gonna do it anyway. He jumped, but his foot caught, and he went face first into the track. Didn’t nobody know what had happened but me and Brother
and we didn’t know what to do cause we was way back in the middle of that train, and you might could guess, we was pretty scared to move after what we seen happen to Turd.
So we just stayed on the train, and it didn’t stop till it got to Kingsport, and when it did, me and Brother climbed off and started hitchhiking back to Canard, but we got our direction wrong, and was almost to North Carolina before we got turned around, and we ended up sleeping in some man’s corn crib, and didn’t get home till the middle of the next day.
We walked all up and down where we thought Turd would be, but by the time we got back to them people’s we was staying with, they told us how a stickweed gang from the jail had found Turd’s body. He was dead. I always hoped he died when he hit, but nobody never told us.
I do know this: we went to live with Granny not long after that, and she whipped us ever day for two weeks, ever time she thought about us jumping that train. We just let her beat us, cause we knew she loved us, and was whipping us out of love, which cut the sting a little.
That was Turd’s real name. Elston Corner, Junior.
But we called him Turd, and I got him on my mind, and I got on my mind how I’d hated trains ever since, and so I couldn’t think too well of them kids scrambling after that train for rubber balls and suckers and blue kangaroos. I couldn’t hardly think at all, and so it was that when I come to my senses, I was in the backseat of that Bonneville of Calvin’s, waiting on Kenny to come out of the store, listening to Calvin run his mouth.
5
ONE GOOD REASON
GENE
Calvin said, “See, Kenny’s problem is he don’t know hisself. He don’t know who he is.”
Calvin said, “I was telling Momma this morning, ‘Kenny don’t know where’s he at. Don’t know where he come from. He’s like a fart on a Ferris wheel.’”
I didn’t say nothing, just looked out the car window. I didn’t understand Tennessee. Things was different. People didn’t know you talked to you like they did and they taxed you too hard. I was only there cause That Woman asked me to come. That Woman. She grew up where I did. Same county, but out on the ridge, breathing lighter air. I stayed afraid she would float off on a cloud of her own ungodly beauty.