by Ron Rash
Snowflakes cling to his lashes. He shakes them free and clasps the jacket collar tighter around his throat. It is getting dark and he looks at his wrist, forgetting his watch is gone, lost somewhere between the Philippines and North Carolina. He passes the meadow where he and his Uncle Roy used to rabbit hunt, then his uncle’s farmhouse, the tractor that has not been used since June rusting in the barn. No light comes from the windows, his aunt probably staying with her daughter until warm weather.
He steps onto the bridge, beneath him the slow, deep run that always held a trout. The snow muffles his footsteps. The wind is dying, not even a whisper now, and the world is as quiet as the moments after the Japanese sniper fired at him from the tree. He remembers the man he shot and killed, the man who would have killed him had he aimed six inches lower.
He had not heard the shot, only felt the blow as the bullet hit his helmet. He fell to the ground, his face looking up straight into the face in the tree. It was as if they were underwater, everything silent and in slow motion. He watched the Japanese soldier eject the spent shell, take a bullet from his ammo belt. Then he raised his own rifle, still dazed, the rifle wavering in his hand as he emptied his clip. The Japanese soldier let the rifle slide from his hands, then fell through the branches, the thud as he hit the ground the first sound he’d heard since the bullet hit his helmet. He turned the Japanese soldier over and saw a small, silver cross dangling from a chain. He was surprised. Peterson, the medic, who’d been to college, claimed the Japanese only worshipped their emperor. But he should have known better than believe Peterson, who didn’t even believe in God.
The front of the uniform was soaked with blood but the Japanese soldier was still alive. He was talking, his words strange and rapid like bursts of machine gun fire, but he could tell the man was saying the same thing, over and over. Maybe the man was cursing him for taking his life. But he didn’t think that was it. There was no tone of anger or defiance. Perhaps the Japanese soldier was forgiving him, maybe even asking forgiveness for trying to kill him.
By this time the rest of the squad was beside them. Peterson kneeled and jerked open the soldier’s shirt and peered in.
“What’s he saying?” he asked Peterson.
“Hell if I know,” Peterson replied, standing up. “He probably wants water. Most dying men do.”
“I’ll go back to camp and get some,” he said.
“Don’t bother, Hampton,” Peterson said. “He’ll be dead by the time you get back.”
And he was.
“Here,” Peterson said, raising a palm toward him that held the cross. “Your kill. If you don’t want it Vincetti does.”
He opened his hand and let the silver slide into his palm.
“I didn’t check his pockets or his teeth,” Peterson said. “You can do that but I’d hurry up. He’s already starting to stink.”
Peterson and the rest of the squad walked across the clearing to where a canopy of palm trees offered more shade.
He stayed, kneeling beside the Japanese soldier, his back to the other men. The man’s mouth was closed. He wedged his fingers between the teeth and pried the man’s mouth open enough to slip the cross under the man’s rigid tongue. He closed the mouth and joined the rest of the squad.
“Find anything?” Peterson had asked.
“No,” he’d said.
It is snowing harder now. He stumbles in a drift and almost falls. He is following the road by memory, for he can see only a few yards ahead. Although the creek runs close to the road here, he cannot see or hear it, but as the road curves left and the incline steepens he knows Big Rock is just below him. That is the name he and his little brother had given the chunk of granite large as a tank, the deep pool itself. That had been eight years ago, the summer before Joel died, the summer Joel hauled a sixteen-inch speckled trout from where the big rock dammed the stream, the biggest speckled trout anyone could remember being caught in Watauga County.
As he passes above where the deep pool and rock are, he remembers the last hours Joel lived, the way his mother kept cold poultices on his brother’s burning forehead, raising the pale, sweating face to drink cups of water while his father kneeled in the corner, face to the wall as he wept and prayed. When it was over two aunts bathed and dressed Joel’s body for the funeral. His mother couldn’t bear to do it.
He is breathing hard now, unused to the thin mountain air that grows thinner with each step farther up Dismal. In the Philippines the air had been so humid that it felt like he’d been breathing water instead of oxygen. He looks behind him, his footprints vanishing almost as quickly as he makes them. The last light is fading behind Dismal Mountain, and the near dark makes the snow seem tinged with blue.
He wonders if it is snowing in Minnesota. That’s where Peterson is, probably still limping from the shrapnel that got him out of the war six months early. They had been a half mile from their base camp, and the Japanese mortar rounds were hitting so close the ground shuddered under their feet. Sergeant Meyers had yelled for them to deploy, and they’d hurried back through the jungle. Meyers and Peterson had been together when a mortar round screamed out of the sky and found them.
After the mortars stopped, he and the rest of the squad had come back to find them. Meyers was dead, sprawled against a tree. Peterson’s knee was torn up. He’d already cleaned the wound himself when they got there. He looked up at them and grinned. Peterson told them it was a bad enough wound to get him off this piece-of-shit island and back home. He told them he’d limp the rest of his life but didn’t give a damn because he wasn’t planning to do much walking anyway. He’d finish med school and then spend his time in an office with a good-looking nurse.
The road curves away from the creek and levels out. He can see the black spire through the snow and trees, then the wooden building itself. He steps into the church yard, goes around to the back. He leans on the barbed wire fence post and looks into the graveyard. He squints and makes out Joel’s gravestone. He sees the new stone near Joel’s and for a moment cannot shake the uneasy feeling that it is his own, that he’s really still in the Philippines, dreaming this, maybe even dying or dead. But it’s his uncle’s name on the stone, not his.
He steps back onto the road, passes Lawson Triplett’s place and then crosses a plank bridge, the creek running swiftly below his feet. A ghost couldn’t do that, he tells himself.
He knows there are mountains in Japan, some so high snow never melts on their peaks. He wonders if the man he killed was from those mountains, a farmer like himself, just as unused to the loud, humid island nights as he’d been—a man used to nights when all you heard was the wind. He wonders if the Japanese soldier’s last thoughts were of home.
He trudges past Tom Watson’s pasture, a little farther the big beech tree he and Joel had dared each other up as kids. The snow is easing some, and he can see better. The creek runs close to the road here, hardly more than a trickle now.
The road curves a last time. On the righthand side is the barbed wire fence that marks his family’s land. He passes above the bottomland where he and his father will plant corn and tobacco in a few months. He imagines the rich black dirt buried deep and silent under the snow, how it’s there waiting for spring’s plow and seed to fill it with life. Like the dead, he thinks, waiting to be resurrected.
He sees the candle in the front window but he will wait a few minutes longer before he steps onto the porch. He walks across the yard to the spring. He kneels beside it, unknots the duffel bag and removes the helmet. He fills the helmet and drinks.
WAITING for the END of the WORLD
So it’s somewhere between Saturday night and Sunday morning clockwise, and I’m in a cinder-block roadhouse called The Last Chance, and I’m playing “Free Bird” for the fifth time tonight but I’m not thinking of Ronnie Van Zant but an artist dredged up from my former life, Willie Yeats, and his line “surely some revelation is at hand.” But the only rough beast slouching toward me is my rhythm guitar player, Sam
my Griffen, who is down on all fours, weaving through the crowd of tables between the bathroom and stage.
One of the great sins of the sixties was introducing drugs to the good-ole-boy element of Southern society. If you were some Harvard psychology professor like Timothy Leary, drugs might well expand your consciousness, but they worked just the opposite way for people like Sammy, shriveling the brain to a reptilian level of aggression and paranoia.
There is no telling what Sammy has snorted or swallowed in the bathroom, but his pupils have expanded to the size of dimes. He passes a table and sees a bare leg, a female leg, and grabs hold. He takes off an attached high heel and starts licking the foot. It takes about three seconds for a bigger foot with a steel-capped toe to swing into the back of Sammy’s head like a football player kicking an extra point. Sammy curls up in a fetal position and blacks out among the peanut shells and cigarette butts.
So now it’s just my bass player Bobo Lingafelt, Hal Deaton, my drummer, and me. I finish “Free Bird” so that means the next songs are my choice. They got to have “Free Bird” at least once an hour, Rodney said when he hired me, saying it like his clientele were diabetics needing insulin. The rest of the time you play what you want, he’d added.
I turn to Bobo and Hal and play the opening chords of Gary Stewart’s “Roarin’” and they fall in. Stewart was one of this country’s neglected geniuses, once dubbed honky-tonk’s “white trash ambassador from hell” by one of the few critics who bothered listening to him. His music is two centuries’ worth of pent-up Appalachian soul, too intense and pure for Nashville, though they tried their best to pith his brain with cocaine, put a cowboy hat on his head, and make him into another talentless music-city hack. Stewart spent some of his last years hunkered down in a North Florida trailer park: no phone, not answering the door, every window of the hulk of rusting tin he called home painted black. Surviving on what songwriting residuals dribbled in from Nashville.
Such a lifestyle has its appeals, especially tonight as I look out at the human wreckage filling The Last Chance. One guy has his head on a table, eyes closed, vomit drooling from his mouth. Another pulls out his false teeth and clamps them on the ear of a gal at the next table. An immense woman in a purple jumpsuit is crying while another woman screams at her. And what I’m thinking is maybe it’s time to halt all human reproduction. Let God or evolution or whatever put us here in the first place start again from scratch, because this isn’t working.
Like Stewart, I too live in a trailer, but I have to leave it more often than I wish because I am not a musical genius, just a forty-year-old ex-high-school English teacher who has to make money, more than I get from a part-time job proofing copy for the weekly newspaper. Which is why I’m here from seven to two four nights a week, getting it done in the name of Lynyrd Skynyrd, alimony, and keeping the repo man away from my truck.
I will not bore you with the details of lost teaching jobs, lost wife, and lost child. Mistakes were made, as the politicos say. The last principal I worked for made sure I can’t get a teaching job anywhere north of the Amazon rain forest. My ex-wife and my kid are in California. All I am to them is an envelope with a check in it.
Beyond the tables of human wreckage I see Hubert McClain sitting at the bar, beer in one hand and Louisville Slugger in the other. Hubert is our bouncer, two hundred and fifty pounds of atavistic Celtic violence coiled and ready to happen. On the front of the ball cap covering his survivalist buzz cut, a leering skeleton waves a sickle in one hand and a black-and-white checkered victory flag in the other. The symbolism is unclear, except that anyone wearing such a cap, especially while gripping a thirty-six-ounce ball bat, is not someone you want to displease.
Sitting beside Hubert is his best friend, Joe Don Byers, formally Yusef Byers before he had his first name legally changed. While it seems every white male between fourteen and twenty-five is trying to look and act black, Joe Don is going the opposite way, a twenty-three-year-old black man trying to be a Skoal-dipping, country-music-listening good ole boy. But like the white kids with their ball caps turned sideways and pants hanging halfway down their asses, Joe Don can’t quite pull it off. The hubcap-sized belt buckle and snakeskin boots pass muster, but he wears his Stetson low over his right eye, the brim’s rakish tilt making him look more like a cross-dressing pimp than a cowboy. His truck is another giveaway, a Toyota two-wheel drive with four mud grips and a Dale Earnhardt sticker on the back windshield, unaware that any true Earnhardt fan would rather ride a lawn mower than drive anything other than a Chevy.
On the opposite side of the bar, Rodney is taking whatever people hand him—crumpled bills, handfuls of nickels and dimes, payroll checks, wedding rings, wristwatches. One time a guy offered a gold filling he’d dug out of his mouth with a pocketknife. Rodney didn’t even blink.
Watching him operate, it’s easy to believe Rodney’s simply an updated version of Flem Snopes, the kind of guy whose first successful business venture is showing photos of his naked sister to his junior high peers. But that’s not the case at all. Rodney graduated from the University of South Carolina with a degree in social work. He wanted to make the world better, but, according to Rodney, the world wasn’t interested.
His career as a social worker ended the same week it began. Rodney had borrowed a church bus to take some of Columbia’s disadvantaged youth to a Braves game.
Halfway to Atlanta the teenagers mutinied. They beat Rodney with a tire iron, took his money and clothes, and left him naked and bleeding in a ditch. A week later, the same day Rodney got out of the hospital, the bus was found half submerged in the Okefenokee Swamp. It took another month to round up the youths, several of whom had procured entry-level positions in a Miami drug cartel.
Rodney says running The Last Chance is a philosophical statement. Above the cash register he’s plastered one of those Darwinian bumper stickers with the fish outline and four evolving legs. Rodney’s drawn a speech bubble in front of the fish’s mouth. Exterminate the brutes, the fish says.
Advice Rodney seems to have taken to heart. There’s only one mixed drink in The Last Chance, what Rodney calls the Terminator. It’s six ounces of Jack Daniel’s and six ounces of Surrey County moonshine and six ounces of Sam’s Choice tomato juice. Some customers claim a dash of lighter fluid is added for good measure. No one, not even Hubert, has ever drunk more than three of these and remained standing. It usually takes only two to put the drinkers onto the floor, tomato juice dribbling down their chins like they’ve been shot in the mouth.
When we finish “Roarin’” only three or four people clap. A lot of the crowd doesn’t know the song or, for that matter, who Gary Stewart was. Radio and music television have anesthetized them to the degree that they can’t recognize the real thing, even when it comes from their own gene pool.
And speaking of gene pools, I suddenly see Everette Evans, the man who, to my immense regret, is twenty-five percent of the genetic makeup of my son. He’s standing in the doorway, a camcorder in his hands. Everette lingers on Hubert a few seconds, then the various casualties of the evening before finally honing in on me.
I lay down the guitar and make my way toward the entrance. Everette’s still filming until I’m right up on him. He jerks the camera down to waist level and points it at me like it’s an Uzi.
“What are you up to, Everette?” I say.
He grins at me, though it’s one of those grins that is one part malice and one part nervous, like a politician being asked to explain a hundred thousand dollars in small bills he recently deposited in the bank.
“We’re just getting some additional evidence as to your parental fitness.”
“I don’t see no we,” I say. “Just one old meddling fool who, if he still had one, should have his ass kicked.”
“Don’t you be threatening me, Devon,” Everette says. “I might just start this camcorder up again and get some more incriminating evidence.”
“And I just might take that camcorder and perform a colon
oscopy on you with it. Your daughter doesn’t seem to have a problem spending the money I make here.”
“What’s the problem, Devon?” Hubert says, walking over from the bar.
“This man’s working for National Geographic,” I tell Hubert. “They’re doing a show on primitive societies, claiming people like us are the missing link between apes and humans.”
“That’s a lie,” Everette says, his eyes on Hubert’s ball bat.
“And that’s only part of what this footage is for,” I say. “This asshole’s selling what the Geographic doesn’t want to the Moral Majority. They’ll shut this place down like it’s a toxic waste site.”
“We don’t allow no filming in here,” Hubert says, taking the camcorder from Everette’s hands.
Hubert jerks out the tape and douses it with the half-drunk Terminator he’s been sipping. Hubert strikes a match and drops the tape on the floor. In five seconds the tape looks like black Jell-O.
Everette starts backing out the door.
“You ain’t heard the last of this, Devon,” he vows.
Rodney lifts a bullhorn from under the bar and announces it’s one forty-five and anybody who wants a last drink had better get it now. There are few takers, most customers now lacking money or consciousness. I’m thinking to finish up with Steve Earle’s “Graveyard Shift” and Dwight Yoakam’s “A Thousand Miles from Nowhere,” but the drunk who’s been using a pool of vomit for a pillow the last hour lifts his head. He fumbles a lighter out of his pocket and flicks it on.
“Free Bird,” he grunts, and lays his head back in the vomit.
And I’m thinking, why not. Ronnie Van Zant didn’t have the talent of Gary Stewart or Steve Earle or Dwight Yoakam, but he did what he could with what he had. Skynyrd never pruned their Southern musical roots to give them “national appeal,” and that gave their music, whatever else its failings, an honesty and an edge.