Weedeater

by Robert Gipe

  That Woman looked like a ghost standing there, like she might wisp away. She pushed her hair out of her eyes. I opened the door. Pharaoh stopped barking, laid her ears down.

  That Woman said, “Good morning, Gene. Did I wake you?”

  I told her she didn’t, told her I didn’t sleep much. Said, “Bout every other day, I catch a few winks.” I asked her did she want something to eat.

  She said no thank you, asked would I take care of Pharaoh for a few days. Said she didn’t know how long. She seemed agitated. I must’ve smiled cause she said, “Gene, did you lose a tooth?”

  I told her I’d knocked one out in the mine water, told her about my adventure in that underground sea.

  She handed me Pharaoh’s leash, said, “You’ve had a rough time of it here lately, haven’t you?”

  I didn’t say nothing. I just looked at her. Tried to listen to her the way Brother did a truck motor when he was trying to figure out what was keeping it from running right.

  That Woman said, “Gene, are you OK?”

  Because I reckon I was wobbling.

  She said, “Gene, let’s set you down.”

  She got me behind the elbow and took me to my chair. When I got there, I lay my head back, stared at the stucco on the ceiling. It swirled like outer space galaxies. Pharaoh licked my hand hanging over the armrest. I closed my eyes and traveled back in time to the day Calvin and Tricia run off.

  I saw in my mind how Calvin come to the house early that morning. I heard him rattle up to the downstairs bedroom window, the one where That Woman’s sister was. It was a big rattle, like it come from a giant snake, snake big as a phone pole. I saw his giant jar of Oxy Cottons, a jar big as a pickled baloney jars sitting on a store counter. Humongous bottle of pills. Which is why That Woman’s sister run off with him.

  I opened my eyes. That Woman was staring at me like I was a fish in a bowl. Said, “You all right, Gene?” and I said I was and she said maybe it don’t make sense for her to leave Pharaoh with me. Said, “Maybe you’re too busy to fool with her.”

  My head cleared. I about bumped her nose standing up, said, “You know what? I still have some food back there in the closet.” I went back in the bedroom where there was a garbage bag half full of the fancy dog food That Woman fed Pharaoh. I dipped out a cupful, filled her bowl.

  I said, “Where you going this time?”

  She said, “I’m going to a sit-in, Gene. In West Virginia.”

  I said, “I thought you did that already.”

  She said, “This is a different one. At a different mine.”

  I filled Pharoah’s water bowl, set it down. I hadn’t had a chance to talk to That Woman about what happened in Tennessee, her being with Kenny and her sister running off with Calvin, me getting thrown in the car trunk and not getting to be her hero. Hadn’t talked about that twenty-eight thousand dollars getting gone.

  It was a lot for her to deal with, especially where it was family, and not always on the right side of the law, and I’d say quite stressful, and then on top of that all she was doing for that class, that big project with the letters, answering to all kinds of people, and it aggravating both her mother and niece, who sure let her know about it. Then her running off to West Virginia to get up in someone else’s business. I don’t know. I was thinking maybe she needed somebody to talk to.

  So I said, “Is that Kenny going with you to West Virginia?”

  She said no. Said, “He’s got to stay here for the radio.”

  I leaned both hands on the kitchen counter and said, “Who’s going to look after you?”

  That Woman sat down in my chair and closed her eyes, leaned her head back. Pharaoh licked her hand like she had mine. I set down on one of the stools at the counter and waited for That Woman to say something. She didn’t. So I reached my hand out towards her and I seen how brown my hand was compared to her white face and I come aware of how I smelled and I wondered could my hand being that close to her ever feel good to her. My chest closed up and I was breathing like I was back in that mine, back swallowed up by water. I got excited like a man does. Her eyes didn’t open. I wanted to lay my hand on That Woman’s cheek, on its whiteness and softness. I imagined it would be like laying your hand in the stainless-steel pan of sour cream on the potato bar at the steakhouse. But then I thought, “She don’t need me touching her like that.”

  That Woman opened her eyes and my hand was still hanging there in the air above her face. That Woman jumped up and knocked over the lamp and I stood up straight and my excited man business felt like it was about to break off and That Woman didn’t say nothing, just ran out the door and left me there with the dog standing at the slammed shut door. That dog whined like a train hitting its brakes.

  That Woman went halfway down the hill to her vehicle, down the flat rocks notched into the hill. She got into the shadow cast by Sister’s house and turned back, came back up the hill, her head bowed. She raised her head as her hand hit the knob and looked right at me, eyes like fire pokers.

  That Woman let go of the knob, turned and sat on the stoop. Her neck glistened like a water snake warming in on a rock in the eddy of a river.

  I cracked the door, said, “You want your dog back?”

  She turned her head toward me, her cheek down in her shoulder. Didn’t look at me, just turned her head to the side. That Woman said, “What were you doing?”

  I said, “Getting too close, I reckon.”

  She sat for a minute, then she nodded.

  I said, “You seem wore out.”

  That Woman said, “My mother has done more good for more people than I ever will.”

  I said, “That’s a hard thing to count.”

  That Woman smiled.

  I said, “And you don’t know. You might get in a place to do something for a whole bunch at once. Like find out about a bomb about to go off at a car race or something. Save hundreds and thousands at a whack. Get caught up that way.”

  That Woman said, “You never know, do you?”

  I said, “No, ma’am. You don’t.”

  That Woman said, “Why don’t Kenny want me? Why don’t he get rid of his wife?”

  Pharoah whined.

  She said, “He aint never going to leave her. Not with all them kids.”

  She put her head on her knees.

  I said, “Well, we don’t never know, do we?”

  She raised her head up, said, “I don’t need him. No point to a man, is there, Gene?”

  I wanted to agree with her, but I hadn’t totally give up on being a man myself. I let the birds tweet a minute. Let the sun get hotter. Then I said, “Well. There’s bound to be a point. To all this.”

  That Woman stood up, rubbed her hands down the thigh of her pants, said she had to go to West Virginia. She took two steps down the hill, stopped, said, “Thank you, Gene.” Took sixty dollars out of her front pocket, said, “Here’s for in case I don’t get back before you need to mow.” The money passed from her hand to mine, and That Woman said, “I appreciate you, Gene.”

  Then she walked off the hill and left the world yawning open like a sinkhole.

  7

  SPRAY PAINT & BURN

  DAWN

  My grandmother didn’t much care for Bill Clinton, but the one come after? Lord.

  “This little dickhead we got now,” she said, “I wouldn’t piss down his throat if he was dying of thirst.”

  Mamaw had on a long-sleeve denim shirt and leather garden gloves black and shiny in the fingertips. She had both hands full of poison ivy she’d cut down off a fence. The fence went around an aboveground swimming pool she got rid of when June went off to college. Foolishness, she’d said. Pool was Houston’s idea, she’d said.

  Nicolette ran in circles in the grassed-over gravel where the pool had been. Mamaw walked with her elbows locked, the poison ivy out away from her, and threw it onto the bank on the other side of the fence. Mamaw was slipping. Used to be, she would have bagged it, or taken it farther off, thro
wn it down a sinkhole. June said one time when she was little, Mamaw burned a pile of poison ivy, and Houston walked through the smoke and got poison ivy in his lungs. They had to put him in the hospital over it. Mamaw didn’t burn poison ivy after that. Said she didn’t need the doctor bills.

  Mamaw spit, bent over, clipped another dozen strands of vine at the base of the fence, pulled it loose, and had a double fistful when she said, “We aint got no law. Nobody to stop them doing whatever they want. Stripping. No answer for it.” She ground her jaws back and forth like millstones, dirt and flecks of leaf hanging in the lines of her shiny face, face the color of good fried potatoes. “And now these gas wells,” she said, and spit again. “Beats anything I ever seen.” She started back to the spot where she was pitching the vine. “Rip and tear,” she said, “rip and tear.” She chucked the vine over the fence. She turned with her palms out to me and Nicolette. “I’m glad I aint gonna be around much longer to see it.”

  Nicolette stopped swatting the seeds off dandelions with a stick. She said, “Where you going, Granny? Florida?”

  Mamaw stared at Nicolette, her arms out from her sides, said, “Who wants to go to Sand Cave?”

  * * *

  THAT DAY was Nicolette’s first trip to Sand Cave. Mamaw put potato chips and Hershey bars in a backpack. She filled aluminum bottles with water. She made sandwiches out of thick-sliced baloney. Then we set out walking down the Trail.

  Nicolette held my hand. I wondered why Mamaw was on about the coal mines. I reckoned her and June had been talking. They stirred each other up. Mamaw didn’t act like she cared whether June got in on Mamaw’s fixing-the-world projects. And when June did do something, like go to West Virginia to protest, Mamaw criticized the way she was doing it. They was like a pot about to boil over all the time, sizzling out on the stove eye, making you nervous.

  My mother was steam floating above Mamaw and June’s cookpot of world-fixing. She just floated away, disappeared, left everything sticky and greasy behind her. I wondered that day was Momma in sunshine like us. Was the wind blowing her hair? Was she driving fast in Calvin’s Bonneville?

  “Mommy,” Nicolette said, “Somebody squashed that turtle.” There in a dapple of sun a bright red crater opened in a yellow-black turtle back. I looked up at the sky. Two vultures circled like a waitress’s rag on a dirty table.

  “Cut down here,” Mamaw said, and pointed with her ski-pole walking stick down a graveled path. “Nicolette,” she said, “come away from there.”

  Nicolette come up from her squat at the turtle’s side. The vultures came a level lower. That turtle wasn’t sharp enough to stay out of the sunshine. Got your Vitamin D, didn’t you, turtle? Should have got it from a pill, turtle.

  Mamaw said, “It’s a tortoise.”

  I said, “What’s the difference?”

  Mamaw said, “Look it up.”

  Mamaw didn’t help me on stuff like that now I had a baby.

  Sand Cave was a bigmouth cave lay below the Trail about a mile from Mamaw’s house. Nicolette kicked her shoes off soon as she hit sand, went running right in its mouth.

  I said, “Nicolette, come here.”

  Mamaw leaned over and picked up Nicolette’s shoes. She kept her other hand on the ski pole. She put her fingers inside Nicolette’s shoes and held them both in one hand. “Let her go,” she said.

  I said, “There’s water in there.”

  “She won’t find it,” Mamaw said, “not till we show her.”

  It was Mamaw took me for swimming lessons when I was little. Her and Daddy. I didn’t want to go. Nobody I knew had to take swimming lessons. Nobody on Daddy’s side, which was about the only people I ever saw when I was little.

  “That’s stupid,” my cousins said. “Who takes swimming lessons? You need to take not-being-stupid lessons.” My cousins were crusty-eyed, Kool Aid–mouthed jackasses.

  I took swimming lessons back when Mamaw and Houston had the photo studio. Mamaw traded this woman with a pool lived up Falstaff Acres her daughter’s engagement pictures for them letting me swim in their pool and the mother teaching me how to swim—how to breathe right in water and do all them strokes. I hated it. Hated it because I hated Falstaff Acres, hated that woman’s peppermint breath, hated her red fingernail polish on her hands holding me in the water while I had to churn my arms like an idiot. I hated why I had to go there, too.

  I had to go cause I had bad dreams when I was little. Bad dreams about water—monsters in water, big storms of water, water black and green at once, water didn’t have no top and me down in it—and I’d scream out, they’d say, scream out but I’d never hear it. I’d just wake up and there’d be Daddy sitting on the edge of the bed and when he’d see my eyes he’d hug me to him and his face’d be wet where he’d been crying, and his cheeks would be like a scrub brush.

  I said, “Mamaw, I don’t want her running off. She don’t need nobody’s help to find water or nothing else.”

  Mamaw handed me the shoes and stepped back against the wall of the cave mouth and took her own shoes off and worked her toes down in the sand and said, “I know it. That child aint got a fearful bone in her body.”

  Nicolette come running up with something’s skull. Said, “Look, Mommy,” and I said, “Put that down. It’s nasty.” I knocked it out of her hand.

  Mamaw poked at the skull with her ski pole.

  “What is it, Mamaw?” Nicolette said.

  Mamaw rolled it with her stick, said, “Fox.”

  Nicolette grabbed hold of my hand. “Let’s go, Momma. It’s dark. You need to go with me.”

  Mamaw put her shoes back on, gave Nicolette hers. Mamaw got down in her sack and pulled out two knocked-around flashlights. She give them to me, then pulled out an elastic strap had a light on it like a miner’s light. The strap was rainbow-colored and the way it pinched her hair when she put it on made her look like she ought to be in a coal miner exercise video.

  Nicolette said, “I want me one of them.”

  “Here,” I said, and handed her a yellow flashlight.

  Mamaw took a drink out of her water bottle and reached it to me. I shook my head. Nicolette took it and drank fast, spilled water all down her front.

  Mamaw said, “Slow down there, girl.”

  Nicolette swallowed water hard, her throat pulsing like a vein. Mamaw shook the bottle when she got it back, put it in her bag, moved deeper into the cave. The path got narrow. The rock walls were covered with words written in spraypaint and burn. Mamaw clicked her light on and turned sideways and climbed up some rocks through a hole the size of a garbage can lid.

  Nicolette turned towards the hole and looked back over her shoulder at me. “Shove her through,” Mamaw said. Nicolette raised her arms and Mamaw’s hand came out of the hole. I got my hands on Nicolette’s hips and heaved her up.

  When we all three got through the hole, the only light was our light. Our three flashlights filled up the narrow squeeze we passed through for the next fifty yards. When we got to the other end, we had to climb up on what felt like a platform, like an overhead compartment in some giant geologic Greyhound bus. We all three got up there. Nicolette had smudges down her temples, but a face-busting smile to go with it. Mamaw and me scuttled along best we could—Nicolette moved way easier.

  On that rock platform with its low top, we were three girls hiding under some Big Momma’s bed. First I giggled and then Mamaw and then Nicolette laughed a great flat laugh of her own. We moved deeper back under the mountain. We came on a slot through the rock. From inside came the sound of trickling water, like a leak.

  Mamaw said, “Here we are now.”

  Through the slot was a flat spot, long and wide as a high school basketball court. It was water-surfaced, the ceiling high as in the old courthouse.

  We were quiet in the face of that black water hole. The water burped and slid. Further out you could hear splashing, like water does off a eave without a gutter during a rainstorm. We got down in that pond room, which I reckon
was a gathering spot for several streams. We sat down on flat stones piled to make a seat. When we set our feet in the water, you could feel it moving. I held my light out over Nicolette’s feet like it was an operating room lamp. The dirt and sand flowed over her toes like smoke.

  Nicolette got up and splashed and knocked around out into the middle of the pond, water up to her knees.

  I said, “Come here.”

  “That’s as deep as it gets,” Mamaw said, “where she’s at.”

  Nicolette dropped her flashlight in the water. I stood up. Mamaw said, “They’re supposed to be waterproof.” When I got to Nicolette, I saw the flashlight roll on the sandy bottom of the pond like a fish with a headlight. Then Nicolette’s light went out. I felt all over my body like Nicolette might get taken from me. I might lose her to that flowing water or maybe to the dark itself.

  Nicolette fell to her hands and knees, digging in the water for her flashlight. She stirred the bottom up, turned the water into clouds. She couldn’t find the light. I could only hunt for it with one hand cause I had to hold my own. Mamaw came to us, a light moving where her head was supposed to be.

  She’d first come to the cave with my grandfather, when he brought her to Long Ridge to live, after they’d been married a while, after she’d caught him catting around. He brought her out to the Ridge to try and fix things. The Ridge was where Momma met Daddy. Mamaw never could forgive Houston for that. She told me one time she got lost in her anger, lost for years over how Houston done.

  Mamaw came and stood with her blue jeans rolled up, said, “Dawn, give me your light.” I did. She said, “Help her hunt for it.”

  Mamaw turned off my light. There was only hers then. She said, “Did you find it?”

  I said no. She said, “Well, come on then. Let’s give the dust a chance to settle. She went back to where the rocks piled. Mamaw sat straight and solid, her hands on her knees, knees spread like a man’s. She was lean and slight as a young cat. We sat beside her. Nicolette was wet and shivering.