by Ninie Hammon
Late that afternoon, as she pulled the final page of her introductory column out of the old Royal Electric typewriter, she looked up to see a young man dressed in a t-shirt and acid-washed jeans standing in the doorway of her office. He was tall and skinny, with an unruly shock of chocolate-colored hair that was either styled in a bad mullet or the kid seriously needed a haircut. He had a big nose and Alfred E. Newman ears, but he was spared homeliness by clear blue eyes and a white-toothed grin so endearing it almost seemed to rearrange the features on his face.
“Excuse me, Miss Bingham. I’m here to work in the darkroom. If you want help, that is.”
There was nothing in the world Sarabeth wanted more right then than help.
“For a couple of years now, I been coming in once a week to do whatever your father didn’t want to do. It’s one of my part-time jobs. He was teaching me how to process film and print pictures when he got … before he died.” He reached out his hand to her. “I’m Gabe Lee, Wanda’s son.”
“No way! You can’t be Gabe.” Sarabeth looked him up and down. “Oh, my goodness, you are. Tell me, do you still bang your head on the floor and scream when you don’t get your way?”
Gabe’s brow wrinkled in confusion.
“The last time I saw you, you were maybe 2 years old. You were lying right there,” she pointed to a stretch of worn hardwood floor just outside her office, “throwing a Category Five temper tantrum because your mother wouldn’t let you play with her typewriter.”
The boy smiled. “You’ve got me confused with my little brother, Jesse. I had way more style. I’d hold my breath until I passed out to get what I wanted.” He sucked in a huge breath and squeaked out, “You are gonna let me work for you, right?” Then he filled his cheeks with air and squeezed his eyes shut, and within seconds his face was the color of a fire truck.
“I give! I give!” Sarabeth surrendered to her own laughter, too.
The boy sighed the breath back out. “Works every time.”
“Son, you have just become my new best friend. I hate the darkroom. Let’s go see how much you already know.”
For the next two hours, Sarabeth taught Gabe as her father had taught her, enjoying the boy’s non-stop chatter as they worked. The darkroom was hardly bigger than a closet, with a shelf for a big metal enlarger and three trays. One for developer, one for water, and the third for fixer. There was a safe for photographic paper, a small sink, and under the shelf were bottles of chemicals.
“My girlfriend and I saw Who Framed Roger Rabbit? in Bardstown the other night,” Gabe said. “You seen it? And I’m taking her to the Kentucky State Fair in Louisville on Sunday afternoon,” He held the metal canister upright and methodically swished the chemicals around the rolls of film inside it while counting one-two-three-four-five under his breath. “I’m prepared this time, though. Got me one of those airplane puke bags to put in my hip pocket. Last summer, she chucked her chili dog on the Tilt a’ Whirl.”
“My brother Ben’s about your age. What are you, 16, 17?”
“Eighteen, Ma’am. I’m a senior, though. Mama wouldn’t let me and Jesse start school ’til we were 7.”
“Save the Ma’am for your grandmother. Sarabeth’ll do.” She snipped the film that was already dry into six-frame strips and slid them into paper holders.
“Your brother play ball?”
“Ben was a starting halfback last year.”
“No, I mean ball. Round ball, the orange one that actually bounces, the big B. I got a nothing-but-net three-point shot’s gonna pay my way through college, if I don’t blow out a knee or tear up a shoulder.”
Sarabeth fit one of the negatives into the slot in the enlarger and turned on its light.
“I may not be Division One good, but Murray State, EKU, More-head.”
“What do you want to study?” She focused the negative image on the enlarger pad, then switched the light back off. “Hand me a piece of paper out of the safe. And make sure you close it back tight. It sticks sometimes.”
“I’ll tell you, but if you laugh, I’ll open the door and expose all your paper.”
“I won’t laugh. What?”
“Pre-med.”
“Good for you!”
“What, no lecture on how I’ll never be able to afford medical school?”
Sarabeth turned on the timer and the image appeared on the photographic paper for seven seconds. “Here,” she said, gesturing to the paper and stepped back to let Gabe complete the process. The boy picked up the exposed paper and dropped it into the developer. They both watched in silence as the image began to form. Then Gabe snatched it out of the developer a second before Sarabeth could tell him to, swished it through the water to stop the development and plopped it into the tray filled with fixer.
“I’ve worked my butt off at part-time jobs during the school year and farm work in the summertime for years,” Gabe continued. “I’m gonna put my savings together with scholarships and fellowships. And finish it all off with the grants I’ll get for a four and no shoes.”
“‘A four and no shoes?’”
Gabe’s teeth gleamed in the green glow of the safe light. “With a 4.0 GPA, I can become some socially conscious, East Coast med school’s token deer-and-a-beer, barefoot hillbilly. There’s all kind of education funding out there for ‘underprivileged’ kids from Appalachia. I figure Callison County’s close enough to the mountains in Eastern Kentucky they’ll never know the difference.”
Sarabeth smiled. This kid had a lot more on the ball than a three-point shot.
When all the prints were hanging by clothespins from the darkroom line to dry, Sarabeth put up her hand and gave Gabe a high-five. “One more afternoon of lessons and you’ll be flying this darkroom solo!”
“Now you’re talking! I’ll see you next week.”
But Gabe didn’t return the next week. The engaging teenager who worried that his girlfriend would throw up on the Tilt a’ Whirl and dreamed of becoming a doctor never came back to the newspaper office again.
Chapter 6
Bubba turned his custom, dual-wheeled Ford Bronco off Lowery Road onto a nameless tree-lined lane. Except for the numbered brick mailbox beside the road, there was no sign anyone lived anywhere near.
Most people didn’t know Bubba owned the whole hollow where his house was nestled in the woods a mile off the highway. His Louisville attorneys had purchased the land plot by plot for a development company that was a front for many of Bubba’s business dealings. The hollow lay on the opposite side of Ballard Ridge from Double Springs Distillery, about three miles as the crow flies, 11 by the road around the base of the knob. In the wintertime, when there were no leaves on the trees, there were a couple of places on Bubba’s property where you could see the distinctive cedar shake roof of the bottling house on the top of the knob. Bubba liked that view, felt connected to the history the distillery represented.
Once he’d acquired all the land in the hollow, Bubba had systematically destroyed every building on it. He tore down all the deer stands in the woods, too, and posted No Hunting, Private Property and Keep Out signs. A 9-foot-tall, 220-volt electrified fence with strands of barbed wire stretching up another 3 feet encircled his house and outbuildings. It was hidden back in the trees behind a tall hedge though, because Darlene hadn’t wanted the place to look like a concentration camp.
An electric gate that opened with a key-punch code interrupted the fence at the bottom of the driveway. Inside the gate, a Rottweiler named Daisy, a pit bull named Target, and a German Shepherd named Lucky patrolled the perimeter relentlessly. Only Daisy had been silenced. The others let out a raucous cry if anyone came near. Nobody could get past those dogs. There was also a small gate in the fence in the trees behind the house. Visitors who didn’t want to be seen came and went through it, and Bubba used it to go hunting, or to turn the dogs loose in the woods.
The driveway wound from the gate to the house around a five-acre, man-made pond. Bubba had bulldozed it himself, re
-routed a stream to fill it and stocked it with catfish. He smiled when he thought about the fish. They’d certainly gotten huge; must have been feeding well on something. His 15-year-old daughter, Jennifer, would maintain they’d gotten far too big, of course, and his smile broadened at the memory of the day he and his son, Jake, had been summoned to the back deck by the sound of Jennifer shrieking. They feared she’d come upon a rattlesnake, or that somehow a cottonmouth had gotten into the pond. But she had merely pointed to a line of baby ducks swimming like beads on a string behind their mother. Without warning, an open-mouthed catfish had surfaced like JAWS behind the duckling at the end of the line. In one mighty gulp, the fish swallowed the little bird whole.
Bubba almost wet himself laughing.
Jennifer had failed to see the humor in it. Of course, she was always taking care of strays, dogs or cats she found abandoned on the roadside, injured birds. Anything that couldn’t look after itself. Just like her mama. She looked like Darlene, too, had a full, buxom figure like her mama. Some folks’d say she could stand to lose 30 pounds, but they’d said that about Darlene, too.
Bubba didn’t think about the kids’ mother very often. She had disappeared, vanished in a puff of smoke when Jake was 9 and Jennifer was 7. Nobody ever did find out what happened to her.
He parked the truck in front of the first bay of the four-bay garage. The space for Jake’s Jeep Wrangler sat empty. The bay on the end of the garage was a woodshop with several saws, a router, lathe, electric sander and all manner of smaller tools. Jake liked to work with his hands. He’d started out building bird feeders and picnic tables; but last year for Christmas, he’d made a walnut gun rack for Bubba and a cedar chest for Jennifer that looked like he’d bought them in a furniture store.
Bubba had another pickup truck, a beat-up old Chevy with a broken grill that he kept out by the storage shed behind the house. He’d had it for years, since the time in his life when he could afford nothing better, and he never replaced it because it was as comfortable as an old house shoe, and because it kept him close to his roots. He maintained that pickup’s old engine so it hummed along smooth as a Singer sewing machine.
Going through the back door into the house, Bubba sat on the bench in the mudroom and removed his boots, pausing to claw furiously at the chigger bites on his ankles, courtesy of spending so much time in the woods. He could have hired guards for his dope crops, of course. But he liked standing watch, enjoyed lying in wait for prey, like sitting in a deer stand ready to shoot whatever buck or doe happened by.
The bench where he sat had been reinforced to make it sturdy, as had all the furniture in the house, but it still groaned under his 300 pounds of pure muscle. Bubba stood 6 feet, 7 inches tall, with legs like tree trunks, knee caps the size of saucers and forearms so thick he had to have watchbands custom made.
He’d weighed almost 12 pounds at birth, dang near killed his mama. His daddy had often cocked his head toward his hulking son and pointed out that here, at least, was one youngster who’d never lay claim to being a descendant of the lanky 16th President of the United States, as much of the population of the little county next door to Callison County did. Abraham Lincoln had been born just a few miles from where Bubba had sicked Daisy on the squirrel hunter in the woods. Honest Abe’s Uncle Mordecai settled nearby, where his houseful of children multiplied like fruit flies, breeding a drop of Lincoln ancestry into just about anybody in the county who wanted to trace his roots back far enough.
Bubba had never looked up his family tree. He’d learned all he cared to know about his heritage from Grampa Jamison, who’d lived to be 91 in spite of the bullet he carried in his left side from a revenue-er’s ambush. Grampa Jamison had been big, too, but not as big as Bubba. He was about Jake’s size, and quick like the boy, too. Jake used his quickness as the quarterback for the Callison County High School Wildcats. Grampa Jamison had used his speed to avoid getting caught working the half dozen stills he’d hidden in secluded places all over the knobs. For half a century, the Jamison Clan’s brew was the gold standard for moonshine, the finest quality free-range whiskey available anywhere between the Ohio River and the Tennessee border.
Bubba noticed his fingers were wet, covered with blood from where he’d clawed into his itching ankles. He yanked his socks up over the bleeding wounds, stood and padded toward the kitchen to wash his hands.
The house was large and spacious, built like a log cabin with a high vaulted ceiling in the living room and a homey den that opened onto a deck overlooking the pond. It was a nice house—no expense had been spared—but it wasn’t a mansion, it wasn’t a castle like those other idiots built. They were just asking for trouble with their showy houses and cars, daring the law to come after them.
As he dried his hands on the red-checked dish towel, he heard the voice of Reba McEntire belting out Only In My Mind from his daughter’s room. Jennifer had a voice like that, deep and husky. His Jenny. She was a good girl, a good girl. He wondered why she wasn’t singing along.
• • • • •
She didn’t like mirrors. Sometimes there were things in them, hidden in the shadows, that maybe you didn’t want to get a good look at. But after Jennifer got out of the shower, she wiped the steam off the mirror and stared briefly at her own reflection.
She certainly was no beauty, though she could have been. Her long, black hair fell to her shoulders, thick and shiny. Ignoring the popular “big hair” styles, she wore it straight, parted in the middle, and when she turned her head, it was a waterfall of black moving with her. Her eyes were a striking shade of pale green and her lips were full. But her skin was sallow, her face covered in pimples, and she never wore makeup. Then there was her bubble butt and her thunder thighs. Oh, call it what it was: fat. She was fat. Not that it mattered. Not that she cared.
The radio switched from Reba McIntire’s husky voice to Michael Jackson’s high falsetto, singing about The Man in the Mirror. He didn’t much like what he saw there either.
Jennifer turned and studied her closet for something to put on. All her clothes were ugly—shapeless dresses in black or drab colors, oversize blouses and baggy pants. She often wore men’s shirts and overalls, and hats she pulled down low over her eyes.
Selecting an old chambray shirt and a pair of size 16 jeans, she dressed, wondering idly if she should snort a line of coke to make her head stop hurting, or smoke a joint so she just wouldn’t care.
Jennifer Jamison was insane; she understood that. She just wasn’t sure why.
Maybe the craziness was a result of all the drugs she’d taken, and there probably didn’t exist a pharmaceutical compound other than Geritol or Pepto-Bismol she hadn’t abused at one time or another.
But deep down she knew it wasn’t that. She knew what it was. She had watched the disintegration of her mind and soul with the detachment of a spectator for years, the spiraling down, down, down into darkness.
The fundamental difference between Jennifer and normal people was that she wasn’t a whole human being. She was a collection of pieces put together so they looked like they worked, but they didn’t.
The older Jennifer got, the harder it was to hold the pieces of her psyche together so they appeared normal and functioning. And the effort required to keep the mechanism of her sanity from disintegrating altogether was absolutely exhausting.
Pieces had already fallen off, big pieces.
Music had been the great balm of her existence. She had a remarkable alto voice, deep and husky, with the pure, resonating tone of a gong on a cold morning. When she sang, the beauty of the sound took her far away and a feeling welled up inside her she had no name for. It was joy.
Then one morning, she couldn’t sing. That piece was gone. In its place was a vast, empty cavern in her soul where music had been. She’d gone there once, stood on the edge of the eerie abyss and listened. The wind whistling through it made a sound like dying birds.
Jennifer couldn’t see colors anymore, either. The color piece
had fallen off, left a vacant space. And she went back to it again and again, like your tongue constantly seeks out the ragged hole in your mouth where a tooth’s been pulled. But there was no cavern where color had been, no sound. Just profound darkness.
Now, she could distinguish only black, white and shades of gray. She ached to experience green grass and a blue sky and a purple sunset—just one more time.
Every day, the blacks were darker, the shadows deeper. How long before the light piece was gone, too? She lived in fear that some essential piece would fall off and she wouldn’t be able to function. Then what would she do?
She pulled open the night stand drawer, took out a bag of dope and some papers and began to roll herself a joint.
• • • • •
It was the Saturday after Gabe worked at the newspaper, and he was thinking about printing pictures when he heard something outside, like a car door slam. It was hard to tell, though, with Jesse’s old transistor radio blaring She’s Like the Wind from Dirty Dancing along with intermittent bursts of static. He stopped, stood very still and listened. If he’d been on a ship, Gabe would have been the guy in the crow’s nest, up on top so he could spot trouble coming. But there were no windows in the tobacco barn where he stood on the top rail, 25 feet above the concrete floor, waiting for his younger brother, Jesse, to start the next stick of marijuana up the line.
“You ain’t day dreamin’ up there are you, Gabe?” The boy on the bottom rail jeered. He was hollow-chested, with thick glasses and acne so severe the skin on his face looked like ground meat. Gabe always cut the boy slack, figured living his life probably wasn’t an easy job.
On the barn floor with another teenager, Jesse handed a stick loaded with marijuana up through three other workers to Gabe. Using the long arms that fired off perfect three-point shots on the basketball court, Gabe positioned the stick on the rail that stretched across the barn above his head so the marijuana plant could hang down from it to dry.