Being Dead in South Carolina

by Jacob White

  But it’s many more. Well into dusk Jean and I watch him go back and forth behind the boat, mostly floating through the air, upside down, twisting and untwisting in a pendulous, alien language. The girl drives and the other boys watch in a silence that could be boredom, awe, or simply the pleasant swell of indolence. My son’s vigor seems misplaced in this twilight. He rides for an hour more, back and forth through the dusk. As he swings out into the flats—in that brief pause before the boat pulls him back toward the wake, that moment where the rope hangs slack and he’s just coasting—we can see his legs tremble.

  I look again at my wife, beginning to sense the cruelty of our discovering now, only now, such strange beauty in her son, something she won’t have time to understand. In October a wakeboard company would fly him to Florida for the winter to train. This spring he will begin touring across the country to compete. He’ll be on TV, he says. He’ll be on late at night.

  Perhaps I, too, should write a history. Something to be dug up by a future homeowner. But I’d hate for my memories to collapse into a sprawl of sad, brittle pages. Sometimes I hope my memories will outlive me; other times I just want to make it through the winter.

  We were there, my wife and I, crouched in a stranger’s boat one late-August dusk. We leaned shirtless against the warm knees of tanned kids and watched our son. Him holding on to that rope. Finally the day grew dark, and his movements, graceful as they were, became smears of shadow, something we could interpret only by the way the boat bogged each time his heels sank in, by the creaking around us, and by the shock that ran through the hull as he left the water.

  10. The Hour of Revision

  Is it all right if I say I wish my son were a little older? That I am sort of waiting it out? Till he can drive, maybe? Then I can tell him not to speed over Buster Boyd Bridge, because on Buster Boyd Bridge they will nail yo ass. That’s how I will say it: nail yo ass. They nailed my ass there twice. My daddy got his ass nailed on Franklin Boulevard in Gastonia once and could never give me the keys without saying, “Take it easy on Franklin, because on Franklin they will nail yo ass.” Hearing your father imitate a country judge, going so country with that yo that he is almost Creole for a second, is exhilarating. It is exhilarating at that age to have a grown man stand before you in a suit who has had his ass nailed. That comical yo he puckers with pained deliberation, as if still smarting from the nail—but so straight-faced you know he’s having a little laugh at it. At himself, probably, but a little at you too, or at the idea of you ending up in the same mess as he before you are quite ready, knowing full well that you will end up in the same mess as he before you are quite ready, because that’s how it happens: Ready or not, they will nail yo ass. “Easy on Franklin,” he’d say, a little wince as he spread the paper. “Nail yo ass.” My daddy could really toss it off. Like a judge. Which you’d swear he was, by that lipless escarpment of face, by the pithy black eyes that made the warm sound of nail yo ass so unexpected. I can’t recall it without recalling too my first sip of whiskey behind the house one night, Kirby’s little trash fire sending into the trees its dim far-flickerings and murk, Kirby the greenskeeper at Daddy’s club. What was he doing there, out by the toolshed with me, alone—my god, slipping me whiskey? What was he burning? Had my father contracted him for some yard work? How complicated, these adult negotiations. I handed up the flask, thinking I’d tasted some of Kirby’s adult lips on there, and watched flames weave and slip among one another.

  When you’re a kid and someone says nail yo ass, you can’t help but wrestle with the phrase literally. Metaphors don’t have their shells yet. The difficulty of setting a nail in a soft cheek of butt bothers you, and you’re faintly humiliated by the thought of having it done to you, by the baring of your silly white bottom. What’s more, the yo implies it will be some country hand such as Kirby contracted for the job, which he would prosecute both crudely and expertly, no one there to protect you, not even your father. Your father has seen your silly bottom and is a little bit teasing you with the nail yo ass thing. It will be years before you are in on the joke. Though by then the warning will have come to sound idle and heartless, the little nail yo ass a purely self-satisfying little flick of phrase, something to scatter the million other tired thoughts scuttling around in his mind. Years later still, you’ll wonder if it were not some graver irony that had beset him: In either case, they will nail yo ass.

  I doubt I will feel like a country judge when I say it. I wonder if my father even did. He was closer to a judge than I’ll ever be, or anyone these days. Reading a paper now is like a joke. Picture me looking up at my son from my living room’s “workspace,” my face palely aglow with a screen of Yahoo spam. Not to mention the mother’s father will have already bought him his own turbo hatchback, so he won’t be asking me for keys or even to go out because, god forgive me, I live in a condo now, my authority diminished with the square footage, apparently. The workspace is a breakfast bar. “Take it easy on Buster Boyd Bridge,” I will say, stooped over the breakfast bar, “because on Buster Boyd Bridge they will nail yo ass.”

  Or maybe it will be okay. Maybe some of that sweet stupidity of his will hold out and he’ll stand there as I did, quietly moved and nodding, as if hearing a low rumble echo behind the clouds.

  Or he’ll blink at me with those clicking eyelids of his mother. He might even have enough of his mother in him to say, “They nailed your ass because you’re an impulsive driver, it’s a problem.”

  But I have years to prepare. I do drills in the foyer mirror Friday afternoons until he bursts in and throws his duffel at the foldout. Halo, O’Doul’s, pizza with banana peppers, and the weekend is gone before I can get a handle on him.

  You have to say it slow, slow but measured: They will nail yo ass. When you hit ass your eyebrows are raised, your mouth deadly serious: They will nail yo ass (!). The warning hangs for a moment on your forward-tipped face, your fine bottom teeth just visible. All severity and humility. For what is more severe, finally, than the humility a father?

  Of course, it all hangs on the nail. The nail is the secret to the whole thing. It took me years to realize it but that’s where the joke happens, if it even is a joke. My god, shivers the child, a nail! And the father, spreading the paper: If only it were a nail. If only it had been a nail. Yes, it has to be a nail. The simplest thing in the world.

  11. Feather by Feather

  He stands in the road, concussed, a typical creature before God or before no one. Behind him some ways a small bridge crosses a creek. Beneath the bridge, a truck. The truck, his, lies on its top. Waving in the clear current there is hair. Hair he isn’t sure whose. He is having county issues. What county is this? he wonders. And now wonders if county is an issue at all. Hair, a mossy yellow ghost of it from under the lee side of the truck, contemplating in the shallow current. County hell, he says and does not say, though the question sticks with him. He decides to walk.

  Walking, he pretends to take in the tree line. He squints at a pretend distance. Then, in the real distance, pinetops tipple; an oily black star of crow switches trees. Now he’s pretending not to notice the distance.

  The real break comes when he can’t remember if he talked to his mother on the phone this morning and catches himself not remembering, thinking it’s something he’d remember. Then he catches himself not knowing if it is morning or getting late. The sun’s pinched at that dramatic, unsure angle.

  He feels hilariously large. Texas football player large. He could have a cowcatcher jaw and be named Macky or Duce. He feels this way and then he doesn’t. His hearing gets, like, cold. He can hear air in the trees, air around his wet body, the on-moving of world. And then he’s feeling pretty small. He feels hunched and small and knows that’s what he is. More Beetle Bailey than Texas lineman. At one place his tongue finds gum instead of tooth. He doesn’t feel a lot of character at work.

  A bare thigh, solid and warm, just minutes ago in
his hand. He slows, looks over his shoulder. Then, a friendly tick on his temple: the asphalt has risen to meet him. His lips say something against the warm grit, dumb as slugs. He pushes up with the hop-to of a military drill. But as he rises to a crouch it’s like he’s got bowling balls around his neck, and he’s doing a funny downhill dance over the road shoulder and into a cow-sized ditch. He lies there.

  The lake, he remembers. He is supposed to meet her at the lake. A girl. A woman. Not his mother. Or maybe his mother. The ditch cups him coldly. A wire pulls through his mind and he doesn’t like it. He clenches his eyelids. He listens to the air.

  He hears a lake nearby. A big one. An earthy, yawning sound. He thinks about how much he could go for a lake. Your chin on the water and you look down and your legs are moving and orange. Here I go! he once hollered at his mother, then lost himself in a back flip off a dock. Now he’s wondering if a lake is something you can hear.

  Again, he catches himself.

  12. San Sebastian

  Up ahead, a big-boned boy struts down the middle of the street, really strutting, left shoulder dipping eight inches with each step—fast dip, slow correction. Brand new white tee shirt to the back of his knees, the shorts themselves sagged to mid-thigh, his bottom buck-naked under that shirt for all I know. In the great landfill of the ages no one will tell us apart. I don’t know where my husband is.

  When I overtake him I see he’s one of those broad-knuckled boys with more man in him than he knows what to do with. Baseball-sized knots accent the hang of his long ludicrous shirt. I turn and ask about Dawlie.

  “Do you ever see a man drive up and down this road in a wrecker? Lives up at the end there? The chainlink yard with the big pecan?” I point behind him.

  His head is titled back so he has to look down his face at me. Beads of sweat under his eyes. The eyes dilate and his lips hang apart not unamicably; he is not pursing them at me. I am a woman well up in years and can still bring him to attention.

  “Well that is my husband. I want to know if you have seen him. He is I believe on foot.”

  He leans away and waggles his head over the curb, then hitches his drawers, gearing up for more strut. Then he’s off, slow and stiff as a zombie.

  Dawlie can’t be making much better time, given the sciatica. It wasn’t half a minute after the mower shut off I looked out and saw it by the street, empty, yard half cut. I keep waiting for summer to bust his tomato.

  Three blocks ahead, two white men approach loosely on bikes. I cross left to their side of the road so I can ask about Dawlie. But then they turn into the forest, disappearing single file into the pines and low fronds, a plastic bag full of tall cans swinging from the handlebars of the latter, who has been pushing along with one foot instead of pedaling. If you see white men on bikes here they are homeless.

  Across from the path into the woods, there is a house so full of black children that they stop up the road. The toys alone shut down traffic weekly and this is never corrected. Dawlie is patient and will get out of his wrecker to move the toys one by one to the grass. Meanwhile kids chase each other around the yard in packs, bursting out into the street, or clustering around the crabapple in front to jerk out some boy by the leg. It seems to be an orphanage, if that is the term still, or some illegal daycare situation. It’s just a little old brick ranch house. There is some regulation going on here but there is not nearly enough.

  You will imagine what people call this place. It is tolerated only barely by the neighboring blacks, who have come up over the years. The blacks have the smartest siding on the street and are laying in bright new driveways. They’re generally retired and by the looks prudently so. The scorched lean-tos and blattering flatbeds are gone, replaced by mauve Buicks to match the pale plum carpet inside. They’ve prepared. Meanwhile the whites have started to rust out. Our gutters sag, our shingles are going. People need to get on their yards.

  When I look back, the boy behind me is gone. I imagine him doing his grandmother’s dishes, then sitting on a made bed to suffer through geometry or program a computer.

  In the woods I kick through a trail of frozen dinner trays until I reach a clearing that overlooks the marsh and the San Sebastian. Across the river, a little train goes by with toy-colored cars. The men lying around the clearing, six or so, look at me blankly or do not look at me, even though this is private property and I could be the owner here to arrest them. In the middle of the clearing squat three men. Dawlie is one of them. His shirt is open. He’s grinning. The two other men are pouring gasoline into the earth.

  “Come look at this,” Dawlie says. He stands and steps back from the tarry spatter radiating from a small sphincter in the ground, into which the two other men have inserted the spout of a one-gallon gas can.

  “They bought that gas from me,” Dawlie says. “I come just to carry back the can.” He chuckles. “I thought somebody broke down.”

  “They bought it?”

  He tweezes a curl of bills out of his breast pocket like he used to his near-empty Winstons. “Three dollars. That’s pump rate.”

  “Won’t it get in the marsh?”

  Dawlie nods, laughing silent and hard at his shoes, face red. “Tell her,” he chokes out.

  No one looks up. The gas can’s air hole gasps like a little baby saying puh-puh-puh.

  A few times a year Dawlie finds one of these men asleep in the shed and has to warn them about the pigmy rattlers living underneath.

  “Come on, now. You got to tell her.”

  The pourer’s helper says, “I don’t know, Dawlie.” The primary pourer is apparently in the grip of concentration.

  “She’s all right, man,” says some bearded trash splayed on the dirt in direct sun. “Lives back up ’air”—swinging his head up the street. “That’s Dawlie’s wife.”

  “You got to tell,” Dawlie says, wiping a finger across his eyes.

  The pourer’s useless helper, wiry with long rotten teeth and Eddie Haskell eyes, rocks back on his heels and explains they aim to fill the earth with oil, ma’am, and sell the land to a prospector. Already, off behind a log, dozens of sticky motor oil bottles and a few three- and five-gallon gasoline containers are piled together with a rope through the handles. “We’ll have to haul them out before the speculators get here.”

  “Haul out your beer cans too?” I say.

  “It’s got to look like a natural rupture,” says the primary pourer without looking up. All I see of him is his blistered bald head and tight wiry glasses. He’s got the boxed, trimmed temples of tired math teachers.

  “Do oil rupture from the ground like that?” says the pourer’s helper, now rocking back on his heels and holding his knees and watching vapor ripple the air around the hole. “Naturally?”

  “That ain’t what oil looks like when it come out,” says a fat pink-eyed man off against a tree, under shade.

  “It will look like something,” the pourer says. He won’t look up.

  “Y’all two don’t know how it works,” fat man says, trying to laugh but breathing like he has a condition.

  “Son, you talking to a operator, now.” This nonsense earns laughter from the circle of sun-bleary men and even from the pourer himself.

  “Good afternoon,” a very old man calls from under a low frond when the laughter abates. He’s propped on elbows in the tiger shadow and appears to have just come to. He addresses me in the measured twang of my grandfather. “Do you have cocaine?”

  “How deep is that hole?” Dawlie asks the pourer.

  The pourer has been staring at the hole since I got here. He pushes the little spectacles up his nose. “It goes on down.”

  “It’s deep!” a terribly drunk young man hollers from a log. He’s been trying to sit with his legs crossed, his forearms leaning on the top knee, but he can’t make it work.

  “There was yellowjackets coming out of it,”
the pourer finally says. “Popped Sweetwater there four times in the neck. Next day he comes back with that five-gallon tank over there full of gasoline. Pours it all down that hole. No more bees.”

  “No more bees,” says the helper, who I guess is Sweetwater.

  “We been pouring for three days now and it ain’t near filled,” says the pourer.

  “One of you boys own this land?” I say.

  There’s a glance dance. “We own it,” two or three say together, looking then at the pourer.

  “Y’all own this? Y’all pay the property taxes? Buy all that oil, too?”

  Dawlie looks over. All right, Sadie, all right.

  “It’s ours,” says the drunk man on the log. “Who the hell are you?”

  “That’s Dawlie’s wife, man,” says the bearded man in the dirt, apparently dying. “She lives back ’air.”

  “What the lady’s telling you is you ain’t got papers,” shouts one man behind me who has been lying on a wooden pallet with an arm over his eyes. It’s the first he’s spoken and he’s paler than everyone, the youngest by a decade or two. His long black hair is wet and combed and hangs right on the dirt. Under the skinny arm his face is gaunt and gray. He wears a striped polo and denim shorts that look washed. His legs are hairy sticks that taper into bulbous white sneakers. “Ain’t somebody just going to give you money for this land without papers, oil or no oil,” he says straight up into the air. “You over your head.”

  “Somebody gonna want that oil,” says the pourer, his bluster flagging now.

  “It’s half gasoline. And you there smoking. Like to lift us to the moon.”

  “He’s right,” Sweetwater says, flicking his cigarette. “We need more motor oil.”

  “Motor oil ain’t oil!”

  “It’s got oil in it! It looks like oil.”