Weedeater

by Robert Gipe

  Weedeater got up on his hands and knees. His head hung between his shoulders. His hair trailed off his face. The khaki man looked like he might kick Weedeater, but he just rolled away from him, got on his hands and knees, too. The morning light turned pink. The two of them both started crawling around. They looked like cavemen bred for little dwarf cavemen to ride the back of. I was afraid they were going to go at it again. I picked my pallet chunk up out of the mud.

  The khaki man veered off from me and Weedeater towards a wad of driftwood and garbage piled for burning. Khaki man rose up on his knees and stood and walked over to a khaki Dodge pickup, got in it, started it, and drove off without saying nothing else.

  Weedeater walked down the riverbank and I followed him. It was about the only time I’d ever been with Weedeater that he didn’t talk. He staggered along like the most tired person ever. I had to stand him up one time when he went to his knees tripping over a tree branch mired in the river mud. Then he took me to Momma’s body, lying on its side in the grass.

  I got on my knees beside her and put my hand in Momma’s hair. I put her T-shirt sleeve between my fingers. I hadn’t been there two minutes when an ambulance came. They asked who I was. I told them. They asked did I need to call somebody. I called June on my flip phone. She was in West Virginia. I called Houston, and he got there before the ambulance was gone. I left a message for Willett.

  They took Momma to the hospital. When we got there, Evie and Albert were there.

  Evie said, “What happened?”

  Albert said, “Where’s Momma? Where’s she at?”

  He acted like he was going to do something about something.

  Hubert came in and hugged me, hugged me good. I let go into him. He pulled me tight.

  Hubert whispered in my ear, “Where’s Belinda?”

  Evie stepped to us and said, “Where’s that Tennessee garbage?”

  And I wondered where Evie had been. Where was she when Momma died?

  GENE

  It’s not everyone has tried to choke another person to death, where it’s illegal and where when you start, it’s hard to keep going. It aint like changing a tire or giving a dog a bath. They’re fighting you. Sometimes a dog’ll be hard to bath. That Woman’s dog, where it was a rescue dog, found tied up and starving, scared of everything, I had to take it out in the yard to bath it, put it on two leashes, one on each of my wrists, and still I like to never get it wet with the water hose. She’d spin like a tornado and bite me every time I’d get my hand down near her mouth and still that was an easier thing than strangling Sister’s husband.

  When I strangled Sister’s husband, he gouged me in the eyes and kneed me in the privates. I didn’t much blame him where I was doing my level best to kill him. I can tell you about it now cause I aint mad like I was. I calmed down about a week after it happened. Had to count pennies every morning for a hour, every day for fourteen days. I have a canning jar of pennies I count for calming. Stack them out in stacks of ten or stacks of five, depending how many pennies I got.

  I stacked till I didn’t think no more about the stuff Sister’s husband had done to Sister. Not his cheating on her. Not his getting on pain pills and taking up with people scared Sister, women with laughs like spent fan belts and dudes with no tomorrow in their eyes. Fourteen days before I forgot what he said.

  I didn’t never shake hands with him, or tell him he was fine or nothing like that. But we did come to agree that it was best for both of us for me not to kill him.

  DAWN

  When I was fifteen, my mother got baptized at the church of Goldie Kelly, the sister of Keith Kelly, a man my mother used to go with before he died in a wreck. Keith Kelly was the first one any of us knew to OD on Oxy. That’s what caused him to wreck. That was six years ago. By the time Momma died, seemed like there were people overdosing every week. And it didn’t seem like it would ever end. One day they were normal people—some of them nice, some of them mean, some of them funny, some of them quiet—and the next day they was zombies or acting wild, acting so different to whatever they had been before. It would be like you hadn’t ever met them, and then the day after that they was dead. And you were left sitting there missing a person you could barely remember.

  I always thought she did it to get out of whatever trouble with the law she was in when it happened. Evie told me that wasn’t true, that my mother thought God would help her, that she really had faith.

  Anyway, the church Momma got baptized in was where the funeral was. It was out on Drop Creek, close to where Mamaw grew up. The church wasn’t big, but it was pretty full for Momma’s funeral. People always liked my mother. She had been fun. Sweet, people told me she was. Evie and Albert had done most of the getting the funeral together. I let them scan a couple pictures I had, but they did most of it. They were the ones put together the giant posterboard collages on either side of the coffin. They were the ones set up the flowers people sent. They were the ones talked to the church people and the funeral home people.

  And when I say “they,” I really mean Evie. She seemed like my sister-in-law then. She seemed like part of the family. It didn’t make me exactly happy she was. But it was mostly a comfort, at least at the time of the funeral.

  Houston was there. I felt sorry for him. He looked way older than he did when I took Nicolette to see him with June right before 4th of July. His prediction had come true about Mamaw dying, and now a thing everybody predicted, Momma dying, had come true, too. June had got word that they were going to hire her permanent at the community college, and she and Houston paid for Momma’s funeral.

  I sat there on the church pew, being sadder for Momma than I thought I’d be, but also worrying about money, worrying about how I was going to make it. I looked up at the homemade painting of Jesus with his arms spread standing on the water. The painting was on the wall behind the baptismal hot tub. I apologized to Jesus for thinking on the things of this world when I should be torn up over Momma.

  Albert wasn’t having no trouble being torn up over Momma. Ever since the hospital, he had been on a tear—ping-ponging back and forth between how everybody needed to get off drugs and how he was going to kill Belinda or Calvin or whoever it was responsible for Momma dying. Cause everybody who knew said Momma couldn’t stand needles. That somebody else must have shot her up.

  I didn’t know my mother’s drug-using ways. I didn’t care to know. Nicolette sat beside me and looked at the people who went to Goldie Kelly’s church. There was a woman playing piano had hair a yard long. Nicolette took in her songs, her lips moving like ninety, her eyes darting back and forth watching the long-haired woman play. Nicolette was storing up that church’s songs in her mind like a woman like to quilt storing up fabric scraps. Willett sat on the other side of Nicolette. He shifted from one butt cheek to the other. He drummed his fingers on the pew. He scratched his head and ran his fingers through his hair. He was aggravating. I wanted to throw him off. Get shed of him.

  Hubert came in and tapped me on the shoulder, had me to scoot over. He was late and I asked him why. He shook his head. I knew why. He’d been out in his truck crying when we got there. I looked across him. On the pew on the other side of the aisle set Evie and Albert. Albert cried into his hands. Evie patted him on the back, not with much spirit to it, doing it cause she was supposed to.

  On Evie’s other side sat June. She was still, her back up straight. She had a rolled-up handkerchief wrapped around her knuckles. She cried without any fuss. Kenny was beside her looking like he don’t belong on a front pew, looking like he didn’t belong in his dark blue suit, no tie, his orange curls against his shirt collar, rubbing his hands against his thighs.

  There was no sign of any Coateses, just like there hadn’t been at the visitation. Which suited me fine. Willett, June, and some others wanted to talk to me about how the Coateses killed Momma. They probably had a hand in it, but I was looking for Calvin, who hadn’t been seen either. That’s where I thought the problem was. That’s who
se eyes I wanted to look into.

  Others were there. Hazel was there. And Decent Ferguson. Willett’s parents. Them two, especially Willett’s dad, softened my heart toward Willett. I was glad Nicolette had the Bilsons for grandparents. I hoped Willett’s father lived a big long time. He was quiet and strong like my daddy in my memory. I don’t really know what my daddy was like anymore. People get gone and you have to work to keep their memory. You got to keep polishing it up to keep it from getting covered with everything that happens. The dirt and fuzz and dead leaves of all the different daily angers and hurry-ups and disasters and getting the baby ready and putting the food on the table and the house halfway clean and all that causes you to forget who they were.

  The other person at Momma’s funeral was Momma. Looking at her funeraled up was hard. Her face looked like instant potatoes been in the fridge a week. Making us look at her in the open coffin seemed pointless, but maybe it wasn’t because it sure did make me know she was really gone.

  Goldie Kelly’s preacher come in. He was a good hundred pounds bigger than he had been when Momma got baptized and his hair was thinner and he had a look about his mouth like he thought he was a lot smarter and better of a person than he used to be. He started right in, not knowing Momma that well, least I don’t think he did, but he called her Sister Tricia and talked about her relationship with the Lord, talking about it like him and the Lord and Momma had spent a day at Dollywood together. Preacher said how when Momma wandered, he had prayed so hard for Sister Tricia, but that, you know, friends, it’s hard to know another’s heart, and it is hard to stay on the path and that’s why it was important to stay in the church, to keep your church family close.

  Somebody said, “Amen,” and the preacher said it a question: “Amen?”

  And more people said, “Amen,” and that warmed the preacher up and he kept talking on being lost and he got louder and started making that “HAAA” sound about every tenth word and everything was about the salvation and it made it hard to think of Momma, but I made myself.

  I thought of how when we still lived at the trailer, after Daddy died, but before Momma fell apart, Momma used to keep flowers on the kitchen table. Momma took a hippie skirt she’d got at the mission store and cut it open and used carpet tacks to tack the skirt to the ceiling, turned the tube lights orange and blue, hippie shapes like tears and microscope slide one-cell animals met your eye when you looked up. When I was little, Momma liked to light candles and old globe lamps. She liked to make things magic, especially at night, especially when we were waiting for Daddy to get home from work, and even after Daddy died she did things to keep the light orange and golden, and everything warm and brown, and she’d play Linda Ronstadt and Fleetwood Mac and I thought things might be OK and I remember thinking that life could still be fun. I remember food tasting good and loving all kinds of weather and not being able to wait to put my clothes on and get going in the morning. And things were OK. Pretty much. Until they weren’t.

  Goldie Kelly’s preacher, he didn’t talk about none of that, he didn’t tell the stories on Momma that would make you smile, make you warm. It was just Jesus Jesus Jesus and hell if you didn’t like it. He went on and I wondered did he even remember he was doing Momma’s funeral. I didn’t have much else to think about while he went on. Didn’t no other Momma stories come to mind. I just sat there toughing it out.

  Finally the preacher did his “does anybody want to get saved” thing and Albert got up, his face still in his hands and he got down on his knees and kept his hands over his face like he was ashamed and wailed on and on, wailing like he was trying out for a play and all I could think was how stupid Albert had always been and how everybody thought somebody dropped him when he was a baby and wouldn’t admit it, or maybe he’d swallowed something, cause he was stupid in a different way than the other stupid people in the family.

  The preacher put his hand on Albert’s shaking shoulder and said, “Brother, are you ready to accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?”

  Albert put his hands down on his thighs and nodded his head. The preacher nodded at some of the dudes at the front of the church and they took Albert in the back and the preacher nodded at the piano player and she pounded out a come-to-Jesus song and the regular church people began to clap and sing, getting louder and more driving, and then Albert came back out in a white getting-baptized outfit.

  They led him around to the back of the baptismal hot tub and took him into the water and turned on the jets. The preacher was already there at the tub when Albert got in, and he said some Jesus words over him, and then they lay Albert back in the water, kept him down there for a good while, and he come up gasping and the bass player and the drums joined in with the piano player, and the air got all stirred up.

  Albert tried to climb out the front of the hot tub. The preacher had to grab him by both shoulders to stop him, and they got him out the back, the way he’d come in, but he tried to bolt. The men held him, didn’t let him go. Albert dragged them up the church aisle, him sopping wet, his hair mashed flat. The church women who’d brought out towels to comfort and dry him couldn’t get at him, and he looked people dead in the eye first this side of the aisle, then the other. Albert reached out and touched the faces of the people closest to him. He looked so plain without his usual hip-hop car-racer bullshit on, without his leather bracelets, without sunglasses and a sideways ball cap on his head, without his chunky boots not like people who work wear, just stupid unlaced boots—he didn’t have none of that on. Only thing messing up his pure paleness was his black drawers showing through where his wet robe clung to him. Finally then when he calmed down, them guys let him go. Albert went to the back of the church, turned around, and said, “You know I see you.”

  He started back up the aisle said, “You know what I see when I see you.” He stopped and pointed at Terry who was just out of jail. “Terry, you know you need to slow it down.” He pointed at another one. “I see you, Kyla. You know what all we done together.” He got another one around the shoulder, a boy named Roy Lee Daniel. He said, “Roy Lee, come here.” He led Roy Lee to the coffin, said, “Look there, Roy Lee. Lay down the needle. Or you’re going to end up like Momma. End up in a box in the front of a church before your time, Roy Lee.” Roy Lee looked embarrassed, but like he’d been embarrassed before, and slipped away from Albert back to the back of the church.

  Albert lay his hand on Momma’s coffin and said, “You think they’re going to do anything about this? This is just another one off the list.”

  Albert’s shoulders hunched up and he stalked up and down the church aisle like a tiger in a circus ring you wasn’t sure was going to obey the tiger man. People backed up away from Albert as Albert pointed his finger first this way then that. He said, “Cilla, you know I aint no better than you, but you need to lay it down, girl. Playing with fire on Dum Dum Knob. You know you are.” Cilla just stared at him like she’d like to kill him. Albert kept pointing and said, “Aren’t you?” Cilla Stacey turned away.

  Albert made his way back up to the front of the church, turned and faced us. He said, “Jesus touched me. He laid his hand on me. And it took this woman here dying.” Albert pointed at a picture of Momma laughing in short pants, smoking a cigarette with her legs crossed in summertime. “Took her dying for me to feel His hand on my shoulder. You got to lay it down, Danny. You got to lay it down, Cilla.”

  Albert stood there teetering. Albert was the most horseshit person I ever knew. I loved him, I guess, but what you need to remember as you think about all them people crying over what Albert said and thanking him and petting him as they took him out to dry off and get his clothes back on is that we found Albert cold and blue stretched out dead on the table in Hubert’s kitchen right before Christmas, dead of the same thing took Momma.

  GENE

  I knew I was going to go to Tricia’s funeral, where I had set out with her body by the river and because she’d come to me in a kind of vision after that, but I don
’t much like going to funerals so it took me time to get it in gear to go. I come in during the middle of it, stood near the back door off to the side where they was two or three big dudes and a couple women all with their hands in the pockets of their jeans, all looking like they’d been through some rough times, all black-ringed eyes and dyed hair.

  I come in while Albert Jewell was stampeding up and down the aisle, calling people out for their bad habits. He was making such a show, I didn’t notice a gray-haired woman steal up beside me. She come to my shoulder with short hair all fixed up, color of dirty snow. She touched me on my shirtsleeve and bid me follow her. I looked at her and she nodded in a way reminded me of Granny and put me at ease.

  She was Calvin’s mother. I remembered her breaking up beans on her porch when we brought Calvin home after he stole that money the first time, after he’d locked me in the trunk of his Bonneville. I remembered how tickled his mother seemed to be to see him when we brought him home, how sweet a feeling I got to put Calvin back with her, and that’s who I was following out into the gravels of the Drop Creek Church of God parking lot. When we got out to her car, which was a Chrysler, a Newport, I believe, from years ago, but in very good shape, better a shape than I’d maybe ever seen a car that old. And when she lay her hand to the door handle, she turned and said,

  And I said, “Yes, ma’am, it is. From about anywhere.”

  She said, “I come from Kingsport. I brung yall something.”

  And it was what I figured it was—that red bag of money, that red bag about all of us had handled.

  I said, “Ma’am, that aint my money.”

  She pressed it to my chest, said, “I seen you. And Calvin told me about you. And I believe you’re good. I believe you’re the one to get this money where it goes.” She pulled the money back away from me, said, “Are you?”

  Before I thought, I said I was.