by Ninie Hammon
On Tuesdays, he laid down his head on the screened-in porch of Miss Wilimena Crandle, who always left blankets, usually left something to eat or drink, a sandwich or a coke cola. And even once in a blue moon, she’d leave a beer.
He had residences like that all over the county. Transportation between them was the only challenge, as it had apparently been last night or he would not have awakened this morning with dew on his jacket and a fragrant mimosa tree blocking his view of the sunrise.
His wasn’t a bad life, he reminded himself, even if right now he couldn’t recall exactly where he had been going or why. Particularly on a beautiful spring Friday. Or Saturday. Definitely one or the other, in June. He was sure about the June part, a couple of days in, the third or fourth. And the year — 1995.
Kentucky was beautiful in the springtime, when the azaleas were in full bloom, blossoms so heavy they weighed the limbs down to the ground. Pink and white dogwood trees. Cherry blossoms in the tree at the front gate of the cemetery, under whose boughs he had spent more than a few nights, cuddled up warm in a sleeping bag that Lester Peetree at the hardware store had gifted him. He kept it inside the Mason family’s crypt.
Lester had been a good student, seemed to really enjoy Fish’s literature class when he was a sophomore. Fish had let him read the part of the narrator in Our Town when the class did a reading enactment of the play the year before …
Ah, yes. Before. There was Before. And there was After. And never the twain shall meet, so let it be written, so let it be done. Fish needed a drink.
And that’s where he’d been going, said a little memory that bubbled to the top of his awareness, like those little bubbles from the aerator in a fish tank, coming slowly up to the top to vanish. Fish had been on his way to that liquor store a few miles inside the Beaufort County line. Nowhere County was dry. Could you beat that. That’s what you got when a bunch of Baptists got hold of a place. Oh, that didn’t mean the county residents didn’t drink. Of course, they did. It was just inconvenient, that’s all. They could get beer at Henderson’s Grocery Store, but hard liquor — particularly, Fish’s favorite Maker’s Mark bourbon — was only available if you crossed the county line. He had never come up with the right adjective to describe the line of cars with Nowhere County plates in front of that store’s drive-in window on a Friday night. Pathetic, maybe. Sad, certainly. Hypocritical — absolutely that, too.
He had been on his way to Saunders Wine and Spirits in an unincorporated area in Beaufort County just on other side of the Nowhere County line. It being the last day of the month, he would have money in his account by the time the check he was about to write cleared, so he could purchase legal alcohol. In a few weeks, he’d be buying cheap moonshine wherever he could get it and cough syrup from the Dollar Store when he couldn’t, but he always treated himself to some decent whiskey when his retirement check from the Kentucky Teacher’s Association came in at the first of the month.
That’s where he’d been going. Now see, he had been able to put some of the pieces together after all. Not enough for a full picture, of course, but he had no desire for a complete picture. Not seeing a full picture was most of the point in drinking, after all.
He got to his feet. The ground all around was wet but the pile of pine boughs he’d been sleeping on had kept him dry. He wasn’t even cold, but that was the booze, not the pine needles. Dusting off his coat and pants, he relieved himself behind the trunk of a persimmon tree and made his way down the embankment and back up onto the shoulder of the road. He would hitch a ride if he could get one. Why had he ridden only far enough to see the “Welcome to Nowhere County” sign and then ended up in the woods sleeping off his inebriation under a tree? Who had he hitched a ride with and why had they let him out …? There’d been a storm with wind that buffeted the car, knocked tree limbs across the road in front of it. They’d stopped because you couldn’t drive in a wind like that. And then …
No, those pieces were obviously under the table, maybe kicked into the footsie and fur-ball enclave of darkness under the couch. Where he was indeed loath to seek them out. To what end? He often had no idea how he had been transported to a given location. What difference did it make?
When he stepped up onto the shoulder of the road, he saw a car fly by clearly going too fast, as evidenced by the red lights and siren trailing behind it like the tail on a kite. The county-mounty in hot pursuit was Liam Montgomery. Fish waved but Liam didn’t respond.
Both cars went around the bend out of sight and Fish started walking, his back to oncoming traffic, his hand out with his thumb up. Somebody’d pick him up and take him to the store. Or they wouldn’t, in which case he would walk.
The morning was warm. He felt sweat bead on his brow and considered taking off his jacket. But he’d made it a practice over the years to keep his jacket on — otherwise he would leave it somewhere and have to figure out a way to come by a new one. He rounded the corner where the vehicles had disappeared from sight and approached the Beaufort County line.
He stumbled a little, lost his footing, but didn’t go all the way down. When he looked back up again he saw himself coming toward him.
That was crazy. He stopped cold in his tracks, looking. About ten feet in front of him was a mirror. Why in the name of all things reasonable in the world was there a mirror out here stretching across the road? It was a mirror, after all, though even squinting to clear his vision, he couldn’t see the frame of the mirror, or what was holding it upright. He approached his reflection, noted that his coat was ripped, the sleeve of it. He needed to get that fixed. He’d ask Martha Whittiker to sew it up for him and likely she’d tell him it was not fit to be repaired and get him one of her husband’s old jackets that were still hanging in the bedroom closet ten years after he died.
Fish took another step toward the mirror. Got a really good look at the hollows of his face, the scraggly beard, the empty eyes. He never looked in the mirror. When he shaved, and that wasn’t often, he only looked at his cheeks and the lather and the razor scraping along the skin. He didn’t look at his whole face. Probably hadn’t really looked at himself in …
He didn’t know.
But he was looking now, at the bright sky-blue eyes that had faded to an overcast day. At the mouth with loose lips. The hairs growing out of his nose. His whole body so skinny he could have played the part of the superstitious Ichabod Crane in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a priggish school teacher he had strived his whole career not to emulate.
He didn’t like seeing himself, didn’t like having that image planted in his brain so that when he thought of himself that’s what he’d see. He much preferred the no-longer-accurate but infinitely more pleasing image of himself as the thin young man who taught high school English by day and by night expanded his consciousness with mushrooms and peyote and psychedelic drugs that opened up for his inspection and enjoyment an unknown alternative universe of extraordinary beings …
That was before.
This was after. After he discovered the beings weren’t imaginary. After he came to understand they waited for him in the mist.
The man with hollow eyes and only a finite number of days left to run from reality in this world, as evidenced by the sallow skin, the tremble in his hands, and the way his coat hung on him, not like a coat hanger but like a scarecrow.
That’s another part he could play. The scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. But he wasn’t out looking for a brain. He had a perfectly good brain, thank you very much. A functioning brain. A brain that he did everything within his power to dull, pack in cotton, soak in a haze of inebriation. He would not ask the Wizard for a brain. Oh no, no, no. If he ever encountered the “whiz of a wiz if ever a wiz there was,” he would ask the man pulling levers behind the curtain to take the brain he already had. He’d ask the wizard to leave his head empty, so vacant there weren’t even dust bunnies on the floor. Then he would pack the empty head full of straw.
He put out his hand, as his image put out it
s hand, and when their fingers touched the whole world went black, but he could see in the blackness as if it were light. Fish heard a sound that … No, he didn’t hear it. You hear with your ears, not with your fingers and your navel and your elbow. Not with your whole body. And he heard the static-y sound with every cell in his body, a mighty, fuzzy, buzzing sound that filled up his whole being, so loud-but-not-loud it loosened one of his fillings.
The dark and the sound ate up his world.
Chapter Five
Sam Sheridan was a big girl. Oh, not heavy. All long arms and legs as a child, she grew up to be slender and willowy — and to stand just over six feet tall in flat-heeled shoes, and she always wore flats. Her height had propelled her into the prestigious starting center spot on the Nower County High School girls’ basketball team back in the day. Some of the best memories of her life came from that time, the thump-thump of the ball on the hardwood, the sound of shoes squeaking, and the smell of girl sweat and deodorant and damp hairspray. The “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” That kind of thing. And she’d felt in control of her life then, strong and competent, in a way she had not felt since.
Look out, world
You best run
We’re the class of ‘81
Two more classes graduated from the school before they closed it down and bussed the kids into Carlisle in Beaufort County to a regional high school. Two years after that, they’d done the same thing with the elementary school — the year before Rusty was supposed to start kindergarten they’d shut the place down.
When Sam had graduated, the name “Martha Ann Sheridan” was printed on the diploma. In first grade, somebody’d noticed that the initials MAS backwards was SAM. So “Sam” had happened and stuck. After high school, life had happened, and Rusty — Russell! — had happened, and her waitress job at the Me N’ Todd’s Whistle Stop Cafe and Grill was in danger of becoming her career path to … well, to nowhere. But she saw that one coming and dodged the bullet. Though she’d never said as much to anybody except her best friend in elementary school, Sam had always dreamed of becoming a doctor. That wasn’t going to happen to the fourth child of eight in the family of an often out-of-work coal miner. She downshifted her sights to registered nurse, RN. Then downshifted again. She’d had to scratch and claw her way through night school, but she’d managed to earn her LPN — became a Licensed Professional Nurse, which had landed her the position as the home health care nurse with the State Department of Human Resources for the tri-county area that included Nower, Beaufort and Drayton counties.
It was that job that had sent Sam to the Dollar General Store at the crossroads this morning. On your feet all day, you better have the right kind of shoes. She splurged on shoes when she asked for no other luxuries. New Balance Women’s WC806 D-width tennis shoes — size 10 — that cost almost $75 at Landon’s Shoe Store in Carlisle. They might be cheaper somewhere in Lexington, but Sam didn’t have time to chase all over Lexington looking for shoes. Her New Balance were strictly for work, which was why she’d come to the Dollar General Store this morning to pick up a pair of cheaper Adidas or Fila to wear when she mowed the grass.
Rusty’s Air Jordans had similar restricted use and he was scrupulously careful with them. The boy would go barefoot before he’d wear an off brand — what he called buddy shoes — to school.
Tall wasn’t Sam’s only striking attribute, though it was the one that suited her personality best. When she was waiting tables, she had zero tolerance for men who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves and being bigger than most of them helped her set up what she called her boundary of respect. Every man who had ever dared to cross that boundary had been very, very sorry he had.
She had an open, inviting face with a high wide forehead, just shy of pretty, though a big smile tipped the scales, and she was seldom without one of those. Her voice was surprisingly husky, kind of a startling rumble, that made her memorable — if her height and strawberry blonde hair hanging straight almost to her waist hadn’t already chiseled her image into your psyche.
The shopping basket she’d picked up by the Dollar General Store front door was almost filled by the big shoe box. She should have gotten a cart because a stop at the Dollar Store always awakened the tiny voices of a whole list of sorta-kinda necessary items all shouting in unison in their tinny voices, “pick me, pick me!”
Dishwashing detergent. When she’d squeezed the bottle last night over the frying pan, nothing had come out but a dribble of blue liquid and bubbles. Steak sauce. She didn’t use it on steak, of course, but Rusty loved to put it on Spam.
Rusty. That reminded her. The boy needed socks — white tube socks with the stripes at the top always in different colors so you eventually had a pile of lone soldiers in the unmatched-sock sack.
Toilet paper. She had several rolls, but standing before her in a huge display were bundles of six — on sale. No reason not to stock up. Far as she could remember, she’d never had a roll of toilet paper go bad on her.
Gummy bear vitamins. Not for Rusty, for Sam! Hair scrunchies that the magazine in the dentist’s office waiting room proclaimed were woefully out of vogue but she had to have something to keep all that hair out of her face. Flashlight batteries — or buy candles. One or the other. She passed on the display billed as a “bigger, better mousetrap,” though the one she used now was the laughingstock of the whole mouse population of the county.
Her basket was full to overflowing when she started to the checkout counter and when a packet of tube socks made a break for it, taking a swan dive off the top of the shoebox, the resulting avalanche was unpreventable.
Abigail Clayton appeared at Sam’s side and began helping her pick up what she’d dropped.
Abby was Sam’s physical opposite. Where Sam was tall and lithe and moved with the grace of a former athlete, Abby was short and as boney/frail as a baby bird that didn’t yet have feathers. Her shock of unruly hair was an untamable mass of curly frizz a color Sam’s mother would have dubbed dishwater blonde.
She handed Sam the shoebox containing the size-ten sneakers.
“I could about put both my feet in one of them shoes,” she said, indicating the maybe-a–size-five feet on the ends of her skinny white legs. She was wearing pink plastic flip-flops. One bore the face of Beauty and the other of the Beast from the children’s movie. “I mostly wear kids’ shoes. They fit fine and they’re cheaper than grownup sizes.”
The girl’s face still bore a red flush from the adolescent acne that had made her skin look like ground meat only a couple of years ago. She was nobody’s definition of attractive, but she was beautiful today, totally beaming.
“Lordy, girl, the glow on your face is warm enough to melt frost off a windowpane,” Sam said, and the smile Sam would have bet couldn’t possibly get wider did — so wide across the bottom of Abby’s face if the ends connected in the back, the top of her head would fall off.
“I got ever-thing in the world to smile ‘bout. Gonna be bringing my Cody home this mornin’.”
That was big news.
Abby had grown up so far back in some hollow the sun probably didn’t shine there more than a couple of days a week. Her father was a disabled coal miner and Sam had no idea how many brothers and sisters she had — but it was a bunch. She did know that the oldest, Claude, was locked up somewhere in a mental hospital, judged incompetent to stand trial for hacking his druggie roommates to death with a meat cleaver.
Abigail Letcher and Shepherd Clayton quit school at sixteen — the legal age to do so, and almost seventy percent of the high school students availed themselves of that privilege — and got married. They moved into a little rental house off Swords Creek Road in Poorfolk Hollow that at least had running water. No indoor plumbing, though, literally didn’t have “a pot to piss in,” but they were young and stupid and didn’t know their circumstances should have made them miserable. Sam knew Abby’s story because one of her many sisters cut Sam’s hair at the Hair Affair Beauty Pa
rlor and Nail Salon on Main Street in Carlisle.
“She was so excited when she got pregnant you’d have thought she’s the first female on the face of the earth ever had a baby,” her sister Ramona had said, as she ran Sam’s wet hair through her fingers and told Sam for the umpteen-billionth time how she’d trade out her black hair for Sam’s red any day. “Then she got that pre-something.”
Pre-eclampsia. That had put her to bed, and Shep’d had to cut his work hours back as far as they’d let him at the storm-door factory in Lexington, which was an hour-and-a-half commute from Nower County. Abby had become one of Sam’s circuit of home-bound patients for a time, and then the baby came early, had what Ramona called “all kind of preemie troubles,” and the child remained for several months in the hospital’s neonatal unit — while the couple racked up medical debt, the numbers getting bigger and bigger every day, faster than the numbers on a gasoline pump when you fill up the tank.
“This here’s the first time I been home in two months, spent ever day and ever night with Cody. But Shep’s with him now and I come home to get his room all ready.”
She grinned, displaying crooked teeth that had likely never been in the presence of a dentist.
“Shep sent me home to get a good night’s sleep in my own bed last night because I ain’t likely to be getting much sleep from now on. Cody being so little and all, you got to feed him ever two hours ‘round the clock.”
She looked suddenly shy.
“I been, you know, pumpin’ … feeding it to him outa a bottle because at first he was too weak to suck. But this morning when I get there, I ain’t gonna be giving him that last bottle. I’m gonna nurse him. Nurse my baby for the first time.”