by Robert Gipe
I said, “Say you dumped her like she was a bag of garbage.”
He said, “We were going to go back and get her. I swear on my mother’s grave.”
I said, “Calvin, your mother aint dead.”
I lifted up the other side of the ladder and cut the whole thing loose to sink to the bottom of the lake, take Calvin with it. When it started sinking, Calvin started really flailing. He couldn’t get loose. He was fixing to give up, fixing to go down with the ladder, when I’ll be damned if Weedeater didn’t come puttering up.
GENE
That Sunday, I come to clean the toilet of a bunch of them boats and little houses in that corner of the lake. When I come down through there and seen Dawn knock that worthless Calvin off the ladder down in the lake, and he started thrashing, and went down with that ladder, I stopped thinking, I guess, about how bad I hated Calvin, cause the water went even and quiet where he went down. If I’d come up five seconds later, I wouldn’t even have known there was a Calvin under there. I could have gone back and pumped out the toilet tank and wouldn’t have known Calvin was gone.
But as it was, I stopped thinking and jumped out of my boat and tried to get over where he was and the thing I stopped thinking is how I can’t swim too good and by the time I got close to where he’d gone under, I couldn’t keep the water out of my own mouth and well,
DAWN
When Gene tried to dogpaddle to Calvin, he didn’t get anywhere. Then Gene went under and came up choking and spitting out water. About that time, Nicolette came out on the deck, yawning and wobbly. She perked up quick enough when Gene started hollering, “AAAAAAAAA” and “GAAAAAAAAA.”
I didn’t want to explain to Nicolette, or anybody else, two drowned men and why I didn’t do anything to help them. I said to her, “Reckon I better get in there.”
Nicolette said, “You can do it, Momma.”
I threw on a life jacket and jumped in the water right next to Gene and threw my arm around his belly. He grabbed ahold of me around the neck, and it wasn’t too hard to hold him. Nicolette threw the pool noodle in and Gene’s brother, who also couldn’t swim, pulled up close enough to reach a hand down and I got Gene on that noodle and then his brother got him out.
About that time, up bobs Calvin, totally freaked out. He’d been under a good minute, I guess, and he was thrashing and flailing way way worse than Gene had been. He grabbed at me and I thought he might take me under. He poked me in the eye, slapped me in the face, and generally was a big baby.
I hooked him the same way I had Gene, but he was less agreeable than Gene had been. I got him pinned down and Gene’s brother reached me his hand and we got Calvin up out of there. Gene’s brother reached his hand down for me, but I didn’t want on their funkyass boat, and I swam back for the ladder, but of course the ladder was gone.
Nicolette said, “Here, Mommy. I can pull you up,” which she couldn’t.
Gene’s brother said, “Come on, Dawn. Come over here,” his brown hand stretched out and crusty like a five-finger pretzel.
I swam back, and Gene’s brother pulled me on that stinky boat. I sat there catching my breath with Gene and Calvin. Calvin looked at Gene and said, “Pew-wee” and made a face about the stink, which it did stink, but I don’t think Calvin had any call to point it out, so I told him so, said, “Calvin, this damn boat saved you from drowning. I don’t think you need to be criticizing how it smells. We could always throw you back in the fucking lake if you think you’d like it better, you damn pillhead.”
Calvin said, “I’m aiming not to be a pillhead anymore.”
I said,
Gene said, “That’d be good, buddy. That’d be good if you could.” Then Gene said, “Lord, buddy. Look at your leg bleed.”
Calvin had laid his leg open getting out of that ladder, gashed it open in a way you knew was going to need stitches—flesh flapping over the shinbone. It was gross. Of course, Calvin looked at it and passed out right there on the boat.
Gene’s brother said, “We might ought to get him to somebody could sew that leg up.”
I remembered how Gene’s brother didn’t want Gene to get looked at after he dropped that concrete on Gene’s head. I said, “What are you going to do, take him to the vet?”
Gene’s brother said, “You want to get your little girl before you go?”
I said, “I aint going nowhere. I aint got a vehicle, and besides that, I don’t care what happens to him.”
Gene’s brother said, “Well, you got pretty bad cut yourself,” and pointed to my forehead, which I touched and my fingers come back all bloody from where Calvin had clawed me up.
I said, “I’m staying here. You can take him if you like. It aint no business of mine.”
Gene said, “Are you sure?”
I said, “Why doesn’t anybody think I know what I want? Why does everybody ask me, ‘Are you sure?’”
Gene said, “I only asked you the once.”
I said, “Put me back at that house.”
Gene’s brother put his honeyboat in reverse and eased it right up next to the house. I got out and stood there as they left, kept standing there until they were gone out of sight.
GENE
It took eighteen stitches to close up Calvin’s shin. While we waited on Brother to bring the vehicle around so we could take Calvin where he wanted to go, Calvin sat in a chair in the emergency room, a long strip of gauze trailing off behind him towards the treatment room. His lips moved like he was scheming or gone in the head.
Calvin said, “You know, I give three hundred dollars for that little kayak.”
I said, “Did you?”
Calvin said, “I bet I don’t never see it again.”
He went on like that, making a list of all the grievances he had against Dawn—that she’d tried to drown him. That it was her fault he’d had to get stitches. He wanted me to consider it was her fault her mother was dead.
Calvin said, “She used to agitate Tricia. Drove her to drugs. I ought to take Dawn Jewell to court.”
I said, “Hunh.”
He said, “I should. She thinks she’s such hot stuff. I’m gonna do that.”
I said, “What do you think you’re going to get off her?
Calvin said, “Everything she’s got.”
I felt like Calvin was kind of on his high horse. Felt like maybe I should try and get him off it. I had hate in my heart for Calvin. I wanted rid of it. Calvin glared off at the checkerboard tile on the emergency room floor like he was playing life-and-death checkers. I leaned over, my head below my knees, so I could see his eyes.
I said, “I love you, Calvin.”
At the time, I didn’t know if it did no good or not.
DAWN
When Calvin and them left, Nicolette said, “What was that, Mommy?”
I said, “That was why you’re getting swimming lessons soon as we get home.”
Nicolette said, “Where’s Aunt June?”
I said, “She went to the store.”
Nicolette said, “When she’s coming back?”
I told her I didn’t know, told her to come in the floathouse with me. When she did, Nicolette said she wanted a sandwich. When there was no bread, I asked did she want a piece of baloney plain, and she said she did. She ate it slow, lying back on the bed.
I said, “Nicolette, sit up before you choke.”
She sat up and I sat on a stool in the kitchen and thought how I was there when Mamaw stopped breathing, how I was there for her last breath, but wasn’t there for Momma. Wasn’t there for Evie. I thought how much me there isn’t. How much me isn’t there when it should be. I thought about there being more of me, multiple copies of me, so I could be more places, and
Nicolette got up and got her another piece of baloney. She lay on the bed like I told her not to. As I was fixing to fuss at her for it, she rolled up her piece of baloney into a breathing tube and stuck it in her mouth. She breathed through it and the baloney made a whistling sound as she slowly
worked it down in her mouth, eating it bit by bit without using her hands.
I said, “That aint gonna stop you choking if it gets caught in your windpipe.”
She sat up, said, “Can we call Daddy?”
I looked at my phone, said we didn’t have service, even though we did.
Decent’s boat pulled up and June and Decent made their way across the floathouse deck with bright-printed cloth bags full of groceries. They come in yakking about couches, leafy green celery stalks and carrot tops sticking up out of their bags printed with flowers and the names of conferences they’d been to. There were bottles of oil and vinegar with labels in French and Italian. There were two whole chickens, short and fat, plucked and naked like storybook kings, like headless magistrates.
Decent unwrapped one chicken, held it up by the legs, said, “Put your pants on and get me a load of gravel, you damn naked magistrate.” Then she laughed, and coughed, and said, “Lord. I’m out of breath. You’d of thought I paddled out here.”
Decent lit a cigarette and Nicolette said, “They was a man out here in a paddleboat.”
June looked at me and said to Nicolette, “Is that right? Who was it?”
I said, “Calvin come out here acting like he done something.”
June said, “Acting like he done what?”
I looked at Nicolette and told June, “I’ll tell you after while.”
Nicolette said, “Calvin said he give Momma Trish a shot.”
June looked at all three of us, one by one. Then she looked at us all three again. Then she went to setting the groceries out of the bags and on the counter. “Did he now,” she said.
Decent opened a high cabinet full of board games and pulled out a green-and-yellow ball with spikes sticking out of it, some kind of puzzle. Decent pulled all the spikes out of the ball and said to Nicolette, “Put them back in there for me. You got to do it just right or it won’t work.”
Nicolette picked up a spike and stuck it in the ball and when she stuck the second spike in, it wouldn’t go. She said, “Oh,” and then she sat down on the floor and started fooling with the ball. Decent waved me and June outside. We sat at the deck table and June said, “Tell me what Calvin said.”
I said, “He says he shot up Momma and killed her. Says it was an accident. Said they was partying and she asked for it and they just fucked up.”
June said, “Did she die right off?”
I said, “He didn’t say.”
Decent said, “Chickenshit Calvin.”
June said, “So Belinda didn’t have a hand in it?”
I said, “Not to hear Calvin tell it.”
My phone rang. It was Calvin.
He said, “Dawn, I need my kayak.”
When I didn’t say anything, he said, “Dawn, I’m going to go down to the police and tell them what happened.”
My breathing got short. I kept my mouth shut and air pumped through my nose.
Calvin said, “Are you there?”
I said, “Yes.”
He said, “Do you care if I come get my kayak?”
I said, “What do you need a kayak for? If you do like you say and tell the law what you done, you won’t need a kayak, cause you’ll be in jail.”
Calvin got quiet. Then he said, “I guess that’s right.”
I said, “I’m giving your boat to the next person I see and I dare you to say a thing about it.”
Calvin went quiet again and then said, “Please tell June I’m sorry.”
I said, “You better turn yourself in, asshole. Cause if you don’t, I’m gonna come find you and when I do, you’re going to wish you did turn yourself in, cause I will fuck you up my own damn self.”
I hung up the phone before I heard him say anything else. I sat there breathing hard. My head pounded and spun like a honky-tonk mirror ball. Nicolette stuck her head in the window screen above the bed, which she must have been standing on despite me telling her not to do that. She said, “Mommy?”
I said, “What?”
She said, “Can we call Daddy now since the phone’s working?”
Right then the neighbor women paddled up in a canoe, and Nicolette got distracted by all their bringing groovy food and the female hubbub of getting it all set out and the table set and the wine opened and the candles lit. And then Nicolette got distracted by all the big talk that kind of women talk about politics and natural products and gardening and adopting babies and women getting better jobs or not getting better jobs. And then it was Nicolette’s bedtime and I put her to sleep, and I lay down with her, and I went to sleep and I guess maybe she never did sleep, cause the next thing I know, Nicolette rolled over top of me off the floathouse bed, stood with her hand on my face, knob-kneed in orange shorts and no shirt.
I said, “Where are you going?”
She said, “Out there with the women.”
I said,
She padded across the floor.
I said, “You hear me?”
She answered with the slapshut of the screen door.
I slept through the start of the cleanup, cause next I knew, dinner with the two women from the next floathouse was over. Dishes rinsed and piled but not washed sat stacked by the sink. Empty wine bottles stood on the counter like they wished they could lie down, like they wished they were in the garbage. I could hear the women talking outside. I could hear Nicolette talking on the phone.
I was lying down. I had had enough. Enough of a day. Enough of the four women talking. Enough of organic garden talk and native ornamental talk. Enough of vitamins and herbal tea talk. Enough of free range and fair trade. Enough of victims’ rights and patients’ advocates. Enough of making connections and rinsing colons. The dead air of the floathouse suited me. I did not care it was cooler on the deck. I did not care to watch my child. Plenty of nurture on the deck. What was one mother more or less?
I slept and turned to mud, to thickness without air. I slept while my phone rang, woke enough to see it was Willett calling, woke enough to know when my phone stopped ringing and June’s started, that Willett had moved on to her, that Willett had heard the message that Nicolette left for him earlier that night.
I gave up waking for sleep, for dead hot sleep. I woke to Pharoah groaning on a rug beside the bed. She shifted in her sleep and groaned again.
I said, “I know, baby,” and she quieted.
I slept again, not rolling over when Nicolette shook me, not rolling over when she kissed me on the back of my head, not rolling over when she said, “I love you, Mommy,” not rolling over because I heard the puny motor start and I knew that Decent was taking Nicolette to her father, where she would be fine. I didn’t roll over though I wanted to. Then I cried. I cried fat and alone,
11
COALTOWN!
DAWN
The day after we got back from the floathouse was the day the president of the United States came to Canard. It was the day June’s giant sign got revealed. I didn’t want to go down there. Dudes in mirror shades and hearing aids had been talking into their wrists, poking in stuff, turning stuff over, looking at people like they were stupid or terrorists all week. Local politicians walked around puffed out and proud like they done something just cause the president came to get his picture taken in a place where people would vote for him cause he said he was for coal. All of them gathered at the parking lot below the new courthouse, proud of themselves for getting federal money to lock people up in their new jail big enough for the busted and snitched on from counties far and wide, not just Canard.
And June in the middle of it, all arted up in a fancy scarf trying to look hot, good with everybody cause she’d been doing all her hippie protest carrying on three hours away in West Virginia and nobody here knew what she was up to.
When I got there, the stupid president was already sitting on stage, squinting, like he didn’t know we were there. Or didn’t care. Or like he knew we were watching him and he thought he was worth watching.
I wasn’t watching him. I do
n’t know what his name even is. The kids in the high school band were down in front of the stage. They played a song and a fat man standing in front of me turned around and said, “Why they playing that? That’s a Texas song. “Yellow Rose of Texas.” They should play a Kentucky song.” The woman with him, his wife I guess, said “You got ketchup on your face,” and wiped it off with her thumb.
The band kept playing and the muckety-mucks piled in, men in shirtsleeves and neckties, women in bare-armed dresses and done-up hair. And down on the ground, everyone else struggled in, mouths open, fussing and pushing each other along in wads. Woman said to her child, “Johnny, you know what’s good for you you’ll get over here right now.” Bible camps of kids rolled in, all in matching shirts. There were people with hand-markered signs—“THANK YOU FOR LOVING COAL” and ‘YOU ARE THE MAN” and “CANARD HEARTS COAL AND THE PRESIDENT” and “GOD BLEASS OUR LEADERS. AND COAL”—and people with signs printed up by the coal companies and the politicians saying “COAL KEEPS THE LIGHTS ON” and some with just the names of the politicians, all the printed-up signs matching size and colors with each other. Churches had tents set up and sold hot dogs and rice krispie treats dyed red white and blue and pops for a dollar and a half each.
A girl’s baby set in crying next to me. The mother was churchy, long hair straight and dull brown like old chocolate. She was shushing that baby, saying, “Shhh, Jesse, shhh. You don’t want the president to hear you crying.”
That baby got on my last nerve, crying like a lawnmower running on bad gas. I looked around for somewhere else to stand and seen Calvin standing up front talking to these women I knew Momma and Evie partied with, and I said, “I’ll be damned,” and that church girl literally covered her baby’s ears. I wanted to say to her, “It’s done gone in what I said. All you’re doing is holding it in there like that,” but I didn’t have time to get into it with her. I took off through the crowd turning sideways and saying excuse me a thousand times and was close to where Calvin was when he saw me and left and I looked at them Secret Service guys, and I saw Calvin cross the highway that run alongside where the river used to be over to the all-night sitdown Kolonel Krispy.