by Mark Richard
You avoid your father and in the Indian summer evenings read William Faulkner’s Light in August in your stuffy second-story bedroom. The pages soak with your dripping sweat. You don’t understand a lot of the book and it doesn’t matter, you concentrate on the pages anytime your father passes your door. As in the book, your town has a mysterious black man living in an old unheated house without plumbing in the woods on the edge of town. People call him Hogbear, and he roams your town in the day foraging for food from the rancid trash behind supermarkets. His bicycle is adorned with streamers and bits of colored cloth, the seat levered up to its highest position, the handlebars extended with sawed-off broomsticks. He wears a military jacket with sergeant stripes on the sleeves and a military cap. He says he won World War II by hitting a bull’s-eye on a rifle range in Illinois. He rides his bike back and forth to Norfolk, and he’ll come down off the bike when children throw rocks at him and call him Hogbear. His real name is Robert, Robert DeLoatch, and your father tells you when you see him behind the radio station going through the trash to be polite and call him Mr. DeLoatch, and this is what you do.
As in the book, your town has many spinsters living in old houses, like the old sisters who live two blocks over on High Street, where you go to sell lightbulbs and cleaning brushes to earn money for Boy Scout camp. They were up on the third floor of their house when you knocked, and there was that strange small ball of light circling the ceiling. One sister sat in a corner, and the other, the one who had urged you up the two creaking flights of dark steps up through the unlocked front door when you knocked, the low-simmer smell of something old stewing somewhere, the one who had urged you up made a gesture with her wrist and finger following the small ball of light circling the ceiling. The look on her face was that it would all be explained later, and you realized, as you fled fearfully down the stairs, your cardboard sample suitcase of lightbulbs and cleaning brushes dumbling down beside you, that she meant that it was all explained in the past, as in the book you are reading. As in the book, people learn, as you are learning, that some things can never be explained, like that strange light circling the ceiling, even when you run to The Preacher’s house and tell Janet and she says that everyone knows that house is haunted.
As in the book, people in your town want to make examples out of others, you even see it in yourself, the teachers who want to make an example out of you, because maybe that is the flip side of mercy toward the crippled. There’s another teacher at your school who keeps you off the honor roll by giving you a C in handwriting, for which a flying tiger will spring from the ceiling. When it is time to separate the college-bound from the vocational-skills students in your class, the teacher takes you all on field trips to show you the importance of an education. She takes you to a windowless, airless basement of a peanut warehouse with unbreathable peanut-dust air lit by a dim red lightbulb to witness the example of an old black man with a hoe guiding an endless stream of peanuts onto an endless conveyor belt that disappears into a black hole in a wall. She shows the example of the old man at the sewage plant sweeping spent condoms and rock-hard turds off the top of the bubbling brown settling pool of sludge with a long-handled swimming pool scoop and dumping them in a bucket. See? she will hiss.
Your father finally comes into your room one night as you read your book. He has something to tell you. He says the paper mill is digging four new wells on the river, they need more water for the papermaking process. People’s wells have been going dry, the water table has dropped for ninety miles around. Your father says where they’re digging the wells is the site of an old Indian camp. He says he bets you could probably find a lot of arrowheads if you look.
You and a friend go over where the drillers are unearthing thousands of years of human habitation and dumping it in piles the size of your house. You find some nice arrowheads and relics, including a ceremonial bowl shaped from a mollusk fossil. The fossil is four or five million years old, from a time when all of this land was underwater in a shallow ocean. You know this is true because you have gone out in the country and stood on the special little bridge a man built over his creek, and you have looked down over the rail and seen that the creek runs through the fossilized spine and splayed rib bones of a whale trapped in rock that must be as old as God.
You finish reading Light in August and you don’t understand a lot of it and it doesn’t matter. You are learning that time doesn’t always move forward, sometimes it moves backward, and that is a great comfort when you know exactly how many months and years it will be before you are committed to a wheelchair forever.
YOU’VE HEARD PEOPLE SAY God gave us the moon and the Devil gives us its moods. You’ve taken to roaming the countryside on moonlit nights with a boy of whom your mother is especially suspicious. His family lives near you, his little brother and sister, twins, come around asking for work, and your mother gives them jobs you no longer do around the house. She hires them to rake the leaves from the large oak tree in your backyard, then she overpays them and gives them more lunch than they can eat later. Their father has an old van that he has cut down to move lumber. He has taken out all the seats, there is no glass in the windows, there are no headlights, no license plates, the van is not supposed to leave the premises. It’s a banged-up vehicle that expels thick grey smoke when you finally get it started, so your friends call it the Smokebus, at least that’s the first reason they call it the Smokebus. On moonlit nights, because there are no headlights by which to see the roads, you and your friends throw some lawn furniture in the bus, and whoever is driving straps on some safety goggles to drive because there is no windshield and the bugs are fierce when you drive through the swamps, and you set out toward the pig farms in the northwest part of the county to steal a baby pig. There is a black shot house in the opposite corner of the county called Miss Pearl’s and if you bring Miss Pearl a baby pig in a burlap sack and put it in her pigpen out back, Miss Pearl will give you underage drinkers either a case of beer or a pint of whiskey.
Full-grown sows can weigh a quarter of a ton and more, and if they knock you down, they can kill you and eat you. They are protective of their young except when they accidentally step on them; that is why they have so many in a litter. The mud and pig slop is slippery in their pens, and you can’t run fast, you can’t run at all. Somebody brings a softball bat and you think that is a good idea. Occasionally, a light will come on and a shotgun will be fired in your direction, over your heads, but that is rare.
Your friend whose father owns the Smokebus has long blond hair parted in the middle, broken teeth, and a laugh that sounds like he is choking. He wears an old long raincoat and a dirty driving cap. One night he says there’s not enough gas to take the long way around town. He says the Smokebus is invisible because it has no lights, so he’s going to drive straight through town as fast as he can. There are two stoplights in town and you are stopped behind a log truck. Everyone is muddy and it is your turn to hold down the burlap sack with the screaming pig fighting to escape. The Smokebus is coughing and rocking as the pig gets halfway out of the burlap sack. It is not a baby pig, more like a juvenile. You are all trying to stuff the pig back into the burlap sack, the van is rocking as you and the others chase it around, banging and falling over the upended aluminum lawn furniture. In the middle of it all you look out the paneless window, and you see your father has pulled up alongside you in his car and he’s looking over at what in the hell is going on over there in that van. Your and your father’s eyes meet for several long moments, and the way he turns and looks straight ahead you understand that he does not see you where you aren’t supposed to be doing what you’re doing, because he is on his way to where he is not supposed to be going to do something he is not supposed to do.
Something dark settles over these ventures and you don’t ride with them for a while. People out in the county are talking about the pig rustling, more shots are fired. The next time you ride along, somebody brings a rifle, and you decide this is the last time you are
doing this. There’s not much of a moon, there’s barely enough light to see, and when you pass through the swamp bottoms, whoever is driving has to look up and follow the grey swath of sky through the tops of the trees to stay on the road.
You are the one who shoots the church. There had been random shooting out the Smokebus window and careless gun handling by others. The rifle had gone off and put a hole in the floor by one of your feet. Clouds are confounding the moon, it’s past time to go home. You grab the rifle away and decide to empty the clip at the next lights you see and it’s the marquee and steeple lights of an old church, and you unload the rifle in the church’s direction and you’re done.
Years later you’ll stop and walk around the church like a tourist because in local history the church is famous as a hot pulpit of abolition before the Civil War. You walk around the church pretending to admire it all the while looking for bullet holes. You don’t see anything except some holes up in an eave that could just be carpenter wasps.
For your sins you get hard knots, two nodules pressing up under your skin chafing red beneath your belt with the CSA buckle. It’s the heads of two nails in a mending plate in your right hip that are working themselves out of your bones. The doctor decides he can take the nails out of your hip without putting you to sleep. Your father drives you to Richmond and they put you on a table. Two orderlies hold you down. The surgeon gives you a shot of local anesthesia in your hip. A nurse holds your head so you won’t look. The surgeon cuts into your skin and has a hard time getting the nails out. He has to get some pliers to pull the nails out, and he almost pulls you off the table. It’s not so much the pain, it’s the squeaking of the nails in your bones as he has to twist them back and forth like he’s pulling them out of wet lumber. It’s also the way the nurse winces and the way the doctor grunts with the effort. It looks like you’ll be going back into the hospital the next summer. When it’s over and you’re sitting in your father’s car in the parking lot, he asks you if you want a pastrami sandwich. You wish you could ask him for a cigarette and a beer. When he asks if you’re okay, you say, Let’s just go home.
THE BEST THINGS ABOUT your last year in your town after the last body cast and the crutches again are a girl, a play, and a short story. This girl is another redhead, bright blacklit brass, and she is the editor of the school newspaper. She’s a little older than you and asks you to write humor pieces for the paper. She reads them, laughs, and hands them back, saying, You’re crazy, I can’t print this. Instead, she teaches you to drive a stick shift, and you drive you two out to that fallen tree way out by the millpond.
In town her parents are elderly and have arthritic knees and can’t get up the attic steps that you can only slowly navigate on your crutches while the girl smiles and waits at the top, unbuttoning her shirt. Up in the attic is a dormer window that swings open onto limbs of green branches and bright blue sky, and there are old mattresses up there, and you can take all the time that you feel you have left with her. She has drawn blood on your upper lip with her teeth; she gives you raspberry hickeys that horrify your mother and make some of your girl classmates wonder who, who would do that to a boy on crutches?
There’s another best thing of a drama teacher who casts you in the lead as Mr. Antrobus in The Skin of Our Teeth, compelling you to get off your crutches and cane early, and there’s the English teacher who pushes you and pushes you to finally write a comprehensible term paper, and if you can’t do that, then a short story will suffice, and you write a story called “A Case of Eggs,” and she enters it into a regional short story contest and it wins. When your teacher hands it back to you, the community college judge has written “seeds of excellence” on the cover page.
AFTER THE WAR, ROBERT E. LEE became headmaster of a small academy, and that is where you go to college. They’ve saved Lee’s desk as it was on the day he died, writing a letter to the parents of a slothful student. In photographs you see Lee dressed in suits cut from his old grey uniforms. You are required to wear a coat and tie to some of the classes, and this place might not be the best fit for you, you with your shoulder-length hair and bib overalls and records by the thousands you haul up there that don’t sound anything like the beach music most of the prep school boys seem to listen to.
Your new best friend is a boy from Houston, Texas, with a melted face from an explosion and you know each other very well on the day you first meet. Your other friend is from Roanoke, Virginia, and he has a 1955 bulletproof limousine that his father bought from the Turkish embassy, and in it you make the rounds of girls’ schools and ease into parades with little flags put on the bumpers, him driving, you in the back waving to crowds and in a coat and tie.
You get a job working for the literary magazine, and the editor, Jim Boatwright, invites you and the other young assistant to his home to listen to Bessie Smith records and gives you a dinner of chicken livers. Later, he wants to know if you want to go downstairs and have a steam in his sauna. The other young assistant does but you don’t, and Boatwright keeps you on the staff anyway. He teaches creative writing, and it’s the only A you get your first year in college. Once, when Walker Percy comes to visit, Boatwright asks him to sit in on your class, and you read a story called “The Moon Struck One”; it is about the night you and David were frog-gigging and you reached down and were struck on the hand by a snake, you were in a nest of snakes in the dark, and the part of the story Walker Percy tells you he likes best was when the best friend tells you it’s okay, he was bitten too, and he holds his hand up for you to see, but you can’t see it, because it’s dark. Boatwright also introduces you to Reynolds Price when he comes one afternoon in a brand-new brown leather jacket, before he was stricken, and you read The Surface of Earth, and all you want to do at the college is take writing courses and work at the college radio station. You sign up for prelaw, but with your grades, it’s like they say, the back door of the Commerce School is the front door of the Journalism School, so that is where you spend your time, there and in the English department proofreading for the literary magazine and sorting post office bags when it’s time to ship issues.
You tag along when they go down to Roanoke to pick up Truman Capote at the airport, and the first thing he wants is a drink, and the only place your friend with the limousine knows is the Polynesian restaurant by the airport where they serve birdbath-sized drinks with fruit and parasols, and Mr. Capote says, Perfect! You’re supposed to keep an eye on the time because you still have an hour drive to school, but Mr. Capote keeps ordering scorpions, and you’re all getting drunk listening to him talk about a man who injected rattlesnakes with amphetamines and put them in a car that someone got into and the doors locked once he got in and he was bitten to death, isn’t that something? It’s true, it’s true! he keeps saying in a catlike voice; he says he has the newspaper clippings to prove it.
By the time you get to the school auditorium for the reading, people are leaving, and there are some people really angry with you. Mr. Capote has requested a pink spotlight, and even though he’s had as much to drink as you, he goes right to the podium and gives a reading of a Christmas story that makes people cry. Afterward, he signs two books for you; one you give to the father of a girl you are in love with who will die. She will be your first true love. When you would drive out to her gentleman farmer’s house, you’d take bunches of gardenias cut from your neighbors’ bushes, and while you’d wait for her to get ready, you and her father would sit on the back patio if it wasn’t too buggy; his house was near the river where you could still see trenches from the siege of Suffolk, and the two of you would talk books, Faulkner and Camus. For years after she dies, when you would run into each other, you both try not to cry.
Your other writing teacher is an angry man who has just come from flying reconnaissance missions over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and it is in his class that you begin writing a series of stories about a character you name the Spotlight Kid, cribbing the title from a Captain Beefheart song. The teacher’s office is
empty of books, his shelves are bare, as if he knows he is just passing through, and he is, but not before he reaches into a cardboard box beside his desk and gives you books by Richard Brautigan, Thomas McGuane, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
YOU HAVE COME TO A POINT at your private coat-and-tie college where the dean has asked you to come to his office for yet another talk. To cover your impending exit, you intern with a small weekly newspaper in Virginia Beach during spring semester. There’s the beauty pageant where you don’t behave well and the terrifying ride in a Blue Angels F-4 that permanently bursts some blood vessels in your left eye. You wreck your car several times, an overpowered Mercury Montego MX. The last article you write is this: the circus has come to town, and you spend the day watching the wranglers use the elephants to hoist the tent poles and canvas. Later, you see a guy bathing out of a bucket, and you think, That’s the life for me! as you face another college-boy summer in the paper mill and having to tell your father that the dean of the college has invited you not to return to school the next fall.