by Brady Udall
“You’ve never popped your cork with a girl?” he says. The expression on his face would lead me to believe that he finds this idea pretty incredible. I am really embarrassed now. I walk faster, tripping through the underbrush so Buckeye can’t see all the blood rushing into my face. Buckeye picks up his pace and stays right with me. He says, “Being sterile would have been a blessing for me at your age. I used to lay pipe all over the place, and while nobody can be sure, there’s a good chance I’m somebody’s papa.”
I stop and look at him. With Buckeye, it’s more and more secrets all the time. A few days ago he told me that on a few nights of the year he can see the ghost of his mother.
“What do you mean, ‘nobody can be sure?’” I say.
“With the kind of girls I used to do things with, nothing was certain. The only way you could get even a vague idea was to wait and see what color the kid came out to be.”
There’s a good chance Buckeye’s the father of children he doesn’t even know and I’ve got baseless worries about being sterile. Buckeye points his gun at a crow passing overhead. He follows it across the sky and says, “Don’t get upset about that anyway. This is the modern world. You could have the most worthless sperm on record and there’d be a way to get around it. They’ve got drugs and lasers that can do just about anything. Like I say, a guy your age should only have worries about getting his cork popped. Your problem is you read too much.”
I must have a confused look on my face because Buckeye stops so he can explain himself. With a blunt finger he diagrams the path of his argument on my chest. “Now there’s having fun when you’re young and aren’t supposed to know better, and then there’s the time when you’ve got to come to terms with things, line your ducks up in a row. You’ve got to have sin before there’s repentance. I should know about that. Get it all out of you now. You’re holding back for no good reason I can see. Some people hold it in until they’re middle-aged and then explode. And frankly, I believe there’s nothing quite as ugly as that.”
We clamber through the brush for awhile, me trying to reason through what I’ve just heard and Buckeye whistling bluegrass tunes and aiming at trees. I haven’t seen him this relaxed in a long time. We come into a clearing where an old car sits on its axles in a patch of undergrowth. Remarkably, all its windows are still intact and we simply can’t resist the temptation to fill the thing full of holes. We’re blazing away at that sorry car, filled with the macho euphoria that comes with making loud noises and destroying things, when a Ford pickup barrels into the clearing on a dirt road just to the south of us. A skinny old geezer with a grease-caked hat pulled down over his eyes jumps out.
To get where we are, we had to crawl through a number of barbed wire fences and there is not a lot of doubt we’re on somebody’s land. The way the old man is walking toward us, holding his rifle out in front of him, would suggest that he is that somebody, and he’s not happy that we’re on his property. “You sons of bitches,” he growls once he’s within earshot.
“How do you do,” Buckeye says back.
The man stops about twenty feet away from us, puts the gun up to his shoulder and points it first at Buckeye, then at me. I have never been on the business end of a firearm before and the experience is definitely edifying. You get weak in the knees and take account of all the deeds of your life.
“This is it,” the man says. He’s so mad he’s shaking. My attention never wavers from the end of that gun.
“Is there some problem we don’t know about?” Buckeye says, still holding his gun in the crook of his arm. I have already dropped my weapon and am debating on whether or not to put my hands up.
“You damn shits!” the man nearly screeches. It’s obvious he doesn’t like the tone of Buckeye’s voice. I wish Buckeye would notice this also.
“You come in here and wreck my property and shoot up my things and then give me this polite talk. I’m either going to take you to jail right now or shoot you where you stand and throw you in the river. I’m trying to decide.”
This guy appears absolutely serious. He is weathered and bent and has a face full of scars; he looks capable of a list of things worse than murder. I begin to compose what I know will be a short and futile speech, something about the merits of mercy, but before I can deliver it Buckeye sighs and points his rifle at the old man.
“This is a perfect example of what my Uncle Lester Lewis, retired lieutenant colonel, likes to call ‘mutually assured destruction.’ He loves the idea. We can both stay or we can both go. As for myself, this is as good a time as any. I’m in the process of putting things right with my Maker. What about you?”
I watch the fire go out of the old man’s eyes and his face get slack and pasty. He keeps his gun up but doesn’t answer.
“Shall we put down our guns or stand here all day?” Buckeye says happily.
The man slowly backs up, keeping his gun trained on Buckeye. By the time he makes it back to his pickup, Buckeye has already lowered his gun. “I’m calling the police right now!” the man yells, his voice cracking into a whole range of different octaves. “They’re going to put you shits away for good!”
Buckeye swings his gun up and shoots once over the man’s head. As the pickup scrambles away over gravel and clumps of weeds, Buckeye shoots three or four times into the dirt behind it, sending up small poofs of dust. We watch the truck disappear into the trees and I work on getting my lungs functional again. Buckeye retrieves my gun and hands it to me. “We better get,” he says.
We thrash through the trees and underbrush until we find the car. Buckeye drives the thing like he’s playing a video game, flipping the gearshift and spinning the steering wheel. He works the gas and brake pedals with both feet and shouts at the narrow dirt road when it doesn’t curve the way he expects. We skid off the road once in awhile, ending the life of a young tree, maybe, or putting a wheel into a ditch, but Buckeye never lets up. By the time we make it back to the highway we hear sirens.
“I guess that old cooter wasn’t pulling our short and curlies,” Buckeye says. He is clearly enjoying all this—his eyes are bright and a little frenzied. I have my head out the window in case I vomit.
Once we get back to civilization Buckeye slows down and we meander along like we’re out to buy a carton of milk at the grocery store. The sirens have faded away and I don’t even have a theory as to where we might be until Buckeye takes a shortcut between two warehouses and we end up in the parking lot of The Ranch. The place is deserted except for a rusty VW Bug.
“Never been here this early in the day, but it’s got to be open,” Buckeye says, still panting. I shrug, not yet feeling capable of forming words. It’s three in the afternoon.
“When’s the last time you had a nice cold beer?” Buckeye says a little wistfully.
“Never, really,” I admit after a few seconds. What I don’t admit to is that I’ve never even tasted any form of liquor in all my life. My parents have banned Simone and me from drinking alcohol until we reach the legal drinking age. Then, they say, we can decide for ourselves. Unlike Simone, I’ve never felt the need to defy my parents on this account. When I get together with my few friends we usually eat pizza and play Dungeons and Dragons. No one has ever suggested something like beer. Since I’ve known Buckeye, I’ve discovered what a sorry excuse for a teenager I am.
Buckeye shakes his head and whistles in disbelief. I guess we surprise each other. “Then let’s go get you a beer,” he says. “You’re thirsty, aren’t you? I’ll settle for a Coke.”
The front doors, big wooden affairs that swing both ways, are locked with a padlock and chain. Buckeye smiles at me and knocks on one of the doors. “There’s got to be somebody in there. I know some of the people that work here. They’ll get us set up.”
Buckeye knocks for awhile longer but doesn’t get any results. He peers through a window, goes back to the doors and pounds on them with both fists, producing a hollow booming noise that sounds like cannons from a distance. He kicks
at the door and punches it a few times, leaving bright red circle-shaped scrapes on the tops of his knuckles.
“What is this?” he yells. “What is this? Hey!”
He throws his shoulder into the place where the doors meet. The doors buckle inward, making a metallic crunching noise, but the chain doesn’t give. I try to tell Buckeye that I’m really not that thirsty, but he doesn’t hear me. He hurls his body into the doors again, then stalks around and picks up a three-foot-high wooden cowboy next to the cement path that leads to the entrance. This squat, goofy-looking guy was carved out of a single block of wood and holds up a sign that says, “Come on in!” Buckeye emits a tearing groan and pitches it underhand against the door and succeeds only in breaking the cowboy’s handlebar mustache. Buckeye has a kind of possessed look on his face, his eyes vacant, the cords in his neck taut like ropes. He picks the cowboy up again, readies himself for another throw, then drops it at his feet. He stares at me for a few seconds, his features falling into a vaguely pained expression, and sits down on the top step. He sets the cowboy upright and his hands tremble as he fiddles with the mustache, trying to make the broken part stay. He is red all over and sweating.
“I guess I’ll have to owe you that beer,” he says.
Simone, my father and I are sitting around the dinner table and staring at the food on our plates. We’re all distraught; we poke at our enchiladas and don’t look at each other. The past forty-eight hours have been rough on us: first, my mother’s diabetic episode and now Buckeye has disappeared.
My mother is upstairs, resting. The doctors told her not to get out of bed for a week. Since yesterday morning old ladies from the church have been bringing over food, flowers and get-well cards in waves. In the kitchen we have casseroles stacked into pyramids.
As for Buckeye, nobody has seen him in two days. He hasn’t called or answered his phone. My father has just returned from the boarding house where Buckeye rents a room and the owner told him that she hadn’t seen Buckeye either, but it was against her policy to let strangers look in the rooms.
“One more day and we’ll have to call the police,” my father says. He’s made this exact statement at least three times now.
Simone, distressed as she is, cannot get any food in her mouth. She looks down at the food on her plate as if it’s something she can’t fully comprehend. She gets a good forkful of enchiladas halfway to her mouth before she loses incentive and drops the fork back onto her plate. I think it’s the first time in her twenty-one years that she’s had to deal with real-life problems more serious than the loss of a contact lens.
It all started three days ago, one day after the incident with the guns. I spent that entire morning nursing an irrational fear that somehow the police were going to track us down and there would be a patrol car pulling up outside the house any minute. I was the only one home except for my mother, who had taken the day off sick from work and was sleeping upstairs.
I holed myself up in my basement bedroom to watch TV and read my books. At about four o’clock I heard a knock at the front door and nearly passed out from fright. I had read in magazines what happens in prisons to young clean people like me. I was sure that trespassing and destruction of property, not to mention shooting in the general direction of the owner, would get Buckeye and me some serious time in the pen.
The knocking came again and then someone opened the front door. I pictured a police officer coming in our house with his pistol drawn. I turned off the light in my room, hid myself in the closet, and listened to the footsteps upstairs. It took me only a few seconds to recognize the heavy shuffling gait of Buckeye.
Feeling relieved and a little ridiculous, I ran upstairs to find Buckeye going down the hall toward my parents’ room.
“Hey, bubba,” he said when he saw me. “Nobody answered the door so I let myself in. Simone told me your mother’s sick. I’ve got something for her.” He held up a mason jar filled with a dark green substance.
“She’s just tired,” I said. “What is that?”
“It’s got vitamins and minerals,” he said. “Best thing in the world for sick and tired people. My grandpop taught me how to make it. All natural, no artificial flavors or colors although it could probably use some. It smells like what you might find in a baby’s diaper and doesn’t taste much better.”
“Mom’s sleeping,” I said. “She told me not to wake her up unless there was an emergency.”
“How long’s she been asleep?” Buckeye said.
“Pretty much the whole day,” I told him.
Buckeye looked at his watch. “That’s not good. She needs to have something to eat. Nutrients and things.”
I shrugged and Buckeye shrugged back. He looked worried and a little run-down himself. His hair flopped aimlessly around on his head. He rubbed the jar in his hands like it was a magic lamp.
“You could leave it and I’ll give it to her. Or you can wait until she wakes up. Simone will be home pretty soon.”
Buckeye looked at me and weighed his options. Then he turned on his heels, walked right up to my parents’ bedroom door and rapped on it firmly. I deserted the hallway for the kitchen, not wanting to be implicated in this in any way. I was there only a few seconds when Buckeye appeared, short of breath and a peaked look on his face.
“Something’s wrong,” he said. “Your mother.”
My mother was lying still on the bed, her eyes open, unblinking, staring at nothing. Her skin was pale and glossy and her swollen tongue was hanging out of her mouth and covered with white splotches. I stood in the doorway while Buckeye telephoned an ambulance. “Mama?” I called from where I was standing. For some reason I couldn’t make myself go any closer.
I walked out into the front yard and nearly fell on my face. Everything went black for a moment. I thought I’d gone blind. When my sight came back the world looked so sharp and real it hurt. I picked up a rock from the flower planter and chucked it at the Conley’s big bay window across the street. I guess I figured that if my mother was dead, no one could blame me for doing something like that. I had always felt a special distaste for Mr. Conley and his fat sweating wife. I missed the window and the rock made a hollow thump on the fiberglass siding of the house. I cursed my uncoordinated body. If I had played Little League like my father had wanted all those years ago, that window would have been history.
I reeled around in the front yard until my father and the ambulance showed up. My mind didn’t want to approach the idea that my mother might be lying deceased in her bed, so I didn’t go near the house to find out. I hung out in the corner of the yard and swung dangerously back and forth in the lilac bushes. I watched the ambulance pull up and the paramedics run into my house followed a few minutes later by my father, who didn’t even look my way. Neighbors were beginning to appear. I noticed their bald and liver-spotted heads poking out of windows and screen doors.
After a little while my father came out and found me sitting in the gardenias. He told me that my mother was not dead, but that she had had a severe diabetic reaction. “Too much insulin, not enough food,” he said, wiping his eyes. “Why doesn’t she take care of herself?”
I’d seen my mother have minor reactions, when she would get numb all over and forget what her name was and we’d have to make her eat candy or drink soda until she became better, but nothing like this. My father put his hand on my back and guided me inside where the paramedics were strapping her onto a stretcher. She didn’t look any better than before.
“She’s not dead,” I said. I was honestly having trouble believing my father. I thought he might be trying to pull a fast one on me, saving me from immediate grief and shock. To me, my mother looked as dead as anything I’d ever seen, as dead as my aunt Sally in her coffin a few years ago, dense and filmy, like a figure carved from wax.
My father looked at me, his eyes moist and drawn, and shook his head. “She’s serious, Lord help her, but she’ll make it,” he said. “I’m going to the hospital with her. I’ll call you
when I get there. Go and pray for her. That’s what she needs from you.”
I watched them load her into the ambulance and then went upstairs to pray. I had never really prayed in all my life, though I’d mouthed the words in Sunday school. But my father said that was what my mother needed, and helpless and lost as I felt, I couldn’t come up with anything better to do.
I found Buckeye in my sister’s room kneeling at the side of the bed. My first irrational thought was that he might be doing something questionable in there, looking through her underwear, etc., but then he started speaking and there was no doubt that I was listening to a prayer. He had his face pushed into his hands but his voice came at me as if he were talking to me through a pipe. I can’t remember a word he said, only that he pleaded for my mother’s life and health in a way that made it impossible for me to move away from the door and leave him to his privacy. I forgot myself completely and stood dumbly above the stairs, my hand resting on the doorknob.
Buckeye rocked on his knees and talked to the Lord. If it is possible to be humble and demanding at the same time, Buckeye was pulling it off: he dug the heels of his hands into his forehead and called on the Almighty in a near shout. He asked questions and seemed to get answers. He pleaded for mercy. He chattered on for minutes, lost in something that seemed to range from elation to despair. I have never heard anything like that, never felt that way before. Light was going up and down my spine and hitting the backs of my eyes. I don’t think it’s stretching it to say that for a few moments, I was genuinely certain that God, who or whatever He may be, was in that room. Despite myself, I had to peek around the door to make sure there was really nobody in there except Buckeye.
After Buckeye finished, I stumbled into my parents’ room and sat on their bed. I put my hand on the place my mother’s body had made an indentation in the sheets and picked the hairs off her pillow. Buckeye’s prayer had been enough; I didn’t think I could add much more. I sat there and mumbled aloud to no one in particular that I backed up everything Buckeye had said, one hundred percent.