Poe - [Anthology]

by Edited By Ellen Datlow

  In the earliest of the publicity photos—and ten years ago hardly seems a long time, looking back—Liam, with shaggy hair and dancing blue eyes, sports a royal blue firesuit, mugging at the camera with an aw-shucks grin, still marveling at his good fortune, happy to bask in the light of his new-found celebrity. He is a chosen one, ready to pay any price for that Cup ride. A decade later, the face in the frame is a solemn man in black and gold, with mournful eyes and a chiseled face infinitely more handsome through time and experience, but minus the joy he took with him when he started. I see nothing of the jubilant boy in the face of this somber successor. Now he is like a one-star general who has seen the war, not from a desk in the Pentagon, but from a blood-soaked battlefield. The youthful smile is gone; supplanted by the weary resignation of one who is forced to live with his wishes granted.

  It isn’t fun anymore. He knows it, but the rest of them don’t. You can die out there. He knows that, too. He has a scar for every time that lesson was repeated. The younger ones drive dirt track in podunk on weeknights under playful nommes de guerre, too impatient for the clatter of their own heartbeats to wait for the real race on Sunday. But Liam only races professional. Through the week he goes to practices and crew conferences, meetings and banquets, publicity appearances and commercial shoots. He poses for pictures with rapturous fans and signs his name a few hundred more times, always with a weather eye on the inexorable approach of Sunday next.

  At daybreak in the hours before the race, I pretend to be asleep as I listen to him throwing up in the bathroom. Later, when he steps out of the motor home into a field of microphones and camera lights, he makes bland remarks in a toneless voice, and they take his numbness for courage.

  But he knew. He knew.

  The people who come to the mountain house to pry probably know about that last trophy, too. It is not here, either. The one he did not win. The victor that day, that West Coast boy with the bland, perfect face of a plastic doll, won the race that Liam never finished, and afterward he brought the brass monstrosity to me as an offering, kindly meant, or perhaps subconsciously he intended it a sacrifice to some nemesis so that he should not be the next one... the next one. In racing there is always a next one.

  I accepted the trophy, because to do so was easier than explaining why the thing meant nothing to me. It meant a great deal to the winner. That was the point. I took it, and, mindful of Biblical precedent, I kissed his cheek. I did not say, Why don’t you go back out there to the eternal sunshine, and lose yourself in the movies? Be famous for your face; it’s good enough for that. What business have you out there, playing hole and corner with death every Sunday afternoon. The road is a circle, all right. Don’t you know where it leads?

  * * * *

  I came here to the mountain house a few weeks after it happened. After the carefully choreographed public memorial service, after decorous press releases and days of business meetings that melded into one long ordeal of signing pieces of paper.

  I work in the garden now in the cool of the evening. It gives me something to do with my hands while I think, turning over in my mind all the things I never actually said to Liam. Why don’t you quit then? Surely we have enough money for that. Why don’t you walk away... while you can? Unspoken. Useless, really. Because he couldn’t walk away. Back to being nobody. Or perhaps he just loved it. Even when his hands shook so much he could barely put on his driving gloves, he would not have turned back.

  The closest I ever heard him come to expressing regret came once when I walked him to the car at Darlington and he murmured, “I just wish it could be fun again.”

  The service was lovely. The governor said a few words. The president sent a telegram. Inside the church in a jungle of flowers were the same sleek people one might expect to find at a film premiere or aboard someone’s yacht off St. Thomas. Drivers do not attend the funerals of their comrades in racing. I think it is a superstition, perhaps a shadow of guilt that some move of theirs in the race might have set in motion the fatal chain of events, or even a primitive fear that the taint of mortality will touch them, and that they will be next. It is too easy to die out there. But Liam had friends in many other areas of celebrity, and some of them came: the country singers whose music he loved, the movie stars he met when he did cameos in their films, and the football players and professional golfers who were his fans just as he was theirs.

  Outside on the church lawn, standing vigil in the rain, were the others: the truck drivers, the store clerks, and all those pitiful women who loved whatever image of Liam they had conjured from that face on the key chain, the coffee mug. And somewhere, caught between the celebrities and the people in the rain, was Liam.

  At the close of the service, a black pop star, blonder than I am, sang “Abide With Me” in a throaty gospel contralto. I think he would have liked that old hymn. As a child he had attended a mountain Baptist church, where they sang old-fashioned hymns and baptized the faithful in a cold mountain stream. Of course, most of the races are on Sunday, so the closest he came to church when I knew him was a little tent in the speedway infield, where a NASCAR pastor said a generic prayer that all the drivers should come back safely.

  Abide With Me. I found the song in an old hymn book as I planned the service at the big church in Charlotte with the bishop, the rabbi, and the Air Force chaplain. Even in death, Liam must be all things to all people... One verse intrigued me.

  Come not in terrors, as the King of Kings,

  But kind and good, with healing in Thy wings...

  “We don’t usually sing that verse,” the cathedral’s music director told me, but I requested it anyhow. Its words comforted me in a way that nothing else had.

  Afterward, I came away to this house in Liam’s mountains, bent on solitude. I brought no one with me. The television stayed dark in the corner by the stone fireplace. When I ventured outside, it was only to instill perfection in the garden.

  Once while I was pulling creeper vines out of a bed of pink impatiens, I found myself thinking, “I wonder where Liam has gone,” and when I remembered that he had died, the question did not quite resolve itself.

  * * * *

  The first time I saw the boy it was nearly dusk.I knew that he didn’t belong to one of the families up here. He looked all right—they all wear shabby jeans and tee shirts nowadays—but there was an exotic look about his wiry frame, his black hair and dark almond eyes, that told me the boy was “local.” I do not even think “hillbilly.” Liam would not allow anyone to use that word. He said that political correctness had not made the public any kinder or wiser, only more careful about whom they bullied. He said he wouldn’t have his people belittled by bigots too cowardly to pick on any of the more protected ethnic groups. His people. Even when he owned a jet, a yacht, and two beach houses, he still thought of himself as one of them. When I pointed out this discrepancy between his privileged life and the simple people of the mountains, he had laughed.

  “Oh, there are plenty of rich people in these mountains. Doctors, lawyers, judges, millionaire furniture company owners whose families go back more than a century in these hills, but you’ll never meet them. They wouldn’t be caught dead associating with the likes of the summer people. The only folks you’ll ever meet are the ones you hire. The gardener. The cleaning woman. The handyman.”

  “But you are from here originally,” I protested. “Surely they’d associate with you,”

  He shrugged. “Not up here,” he said. So perhaps he passed the time of day with the local people when he went into town for a haircut or on some errand for me, but if he did have friends here, I never met them. He never brought them here to our home.

  But now I had company—one of them. I judged this boy to be about fourteen. In another time he wouldn’t have been out of place on this mountain in buckskin and moccasins, but now in faded Levis and battered sneakers, he simply looked like one of the cove dwellers scouting for odd jobs here among the summer people.

  Squatting on his hau
nches beside the flower bed, he watched me work with clinical interest. I turned to ask him what he’d come about, and it was then that I noticed his tee shirt: Davey Allison-Rising Star. It was a crisp, unfaded black, the yellow star and the black and red-orange 28 car bright as new. Davey Allison.

  “You shouldn’t be wearing that shirt out and about,” I told him. “It’s probably worth something.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Huh?”

  “Davey Allison. The Rising Star? He died ten years ago at Talladega. The shirt is a collector’s item. It ought to be kept in a box—not worn.”

  “You know about stock car racing?”

  His tone of incredulity nettled me. “I should,” I said, stabbing at the creeper vine with my trowel.

  He watched me in silence for a few moments, and then without a word he bent forward and began to pull more vine tendrils from the bed of impatiens. If he had pressed sympathy on me, or asked about Liam; if he’d said anything at all, I might have snubbed him and sent him on his way, but the companionable silence was oddly comforting, as if a friendly collie had ambled up to keep me company.

  “I was married to Liam Bethel,” I said at last, still intent upon the encroaching weeds. “I suppose you knew that.”

  He shrugged. “Knew he lived somewhere up here.”

  “And you don’t.”

  He smiled. “My people have been on this mountain a long time,” he said.

  I knew he was a local. NASCAR tee shirts are not worn up here on the hill. Summer people may watch the races on big-screen TVs, but they do not wear their hearts on their sleeves—or on their shirts. We are different from the local people. They are polite enough to us, but there is a wariness there that warns us not to try to get too close, in any sense.

  “Do you mind how things have changed up here?” I had asked the boy after a few days’ acquaintance. I nodded toward the cluster of stone mansions crowning the mountain top, barricaded away from his world in the valley by a gated guardhouse at the main road.

  He shrugged. “I don’t think these people really want to be here.”

  I was puzzled. Surely if you spend a million dollars on a home...

  But he went on. “In the gift shops now they play Navajo flute music. They decorate their homes in desert colors as if they thought north Georgia bordered New Mexico. It’s not that they’re here that I mind. It’s that they want to make heresomewhere else.”

  “But we don’t really live here,” I reminded him. “We only come for a while to get away from real life.”

  In those dark Indian eyes I caught a flicker of Liam’s bleak-eyed stare. “They come up here,” he said softly, “they shouldn’t change it and take it away from them that loved it like it was.”

  * * * *

  After a few more evenings of weeding and comfortable silence, I learned that the boy’s name was Eddie. I didn’t quite catch his surname, but it sounded very like those peculiar place names one finds in Georgia and Alabama. Names like Ellijay and Hiwassee—oh, yes, and Talladega. I knew that last one well enough. The sight of the north Alabama speedway bearing that name gives me chills. Talladega is haunted, people said, built on an old Indian burial ground. Talladega is the fastest track in NASCAR, so fast that the race teams put restrictor plates on the carburetors to keep the cars from going airborne. Drivers often made the half-joking remark: Be careful. Talladega will kill you. Oh, yes.

  Anyhow, Eddie’s last name sounded like Cho-sto. I didn’t like to ask again, for to misunderstand would be yet another way for me to be an outsider showing my ignorance of this place and its traditions. Once I tried to give him a handful of dollar bills for his help in the garden, but he only smiled and waved it away. By then I was glad of his company, and had only been looking for a way to cement the bargain. Liam would have known not to offer him money. He knew these people, but I can only guess at what motivates them to do anything.

  I began to think that perhaps Eddie’s people were better off than I had at first supposed. I had an idea that they might be silkscreen printers—these hills are full of jackleg craftsmen, making pottery in wood-fired kilns or fashioning oak furniture one piece at a time, making just enough money to get by on. We hire them to custom-make our kitchen cabinets or to build stone walls in our gardens.

  I thought Eddie’s people might be silkscreen printers, because every day he wore a different racing shirt of a racing legend—Dale Earnhardt, Neil Bonnett, Tim Richmond—all looking like new, even though all those drivers had been dead for years. His family manufactures these reproductions of racing legends,I thought, and I wondered if I ought to have a word with them about trademark infringement, but I was too tired to care, really. What does it matter if poor country people sell a few bootlegged tee shirts of dead drivers here in the back of beyond?

  One day, though, when Eddie was decked out inFireball Roberts,who had died at Charlotte in 1963, I felt an unaccountable spurt of irritation. “Don’t you have a Liam Bethel shirt?” I said.

  Eddie shrugged. “Wouldn’t be right to wear one here.You being up here and all.”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” I said, although I didn’t know that until I heard myself say it aloud. “Just don’t wear some cheap reproduction. Come inside.”

  We kept caps and shirts and race trinkets in a drawer up here to give away in case, say, the TV repair man or the plumber should turn out to be a fan of racing. From the bureau in the guest room I dug out an old tee shirt commemorating Liam’s first Cup win at Bristol. On the front of the shirt was the smiling boy that Liam had once been, grinning up at me with the radiant joy that had faded a long time ago. When it stopped being fun out there.

  “Here,” I said to that other mountain boy. “Have it. You were his neighbor.”

  Eddie thanked me solemnly, and soon afterward he went away, with the Liam Bethel tee shirt tucked reverently under his arm. It was only then that I remembered the curious sense of honor these mountain people had. If you ever did them the slightest good turn, they would be forever your vassal, and they would go to any length to repay a kindness. I hoped if the boy felt compelled to return a favor that it would come in the form of tomatoes from the family garden, and nothing more valuable or troublesome than that.

  * * * *

  A day or two later, in the gray evening when the deer venture out of the woods, Eddie returned, empty-handed, but still in my debt, it seemed.

  “Come on. I want to show you something!” he said, fairly dancing with excitement.

  Inwardly, I sighed. What had he to show me? A litter of pigs? A prize watermelon? A hundred newly-bootlegged copies of Liam’s victory shirt? But I went with him anyhow, because I had grown tired of pulling up creeping vines from my flower bed. No matter how many times I ripped out the invader’s new shoots, more would have taken their place by the next time I weeded. I had said as much to Liam once, and he had only smiled and said, “It is a fact of nature. That’s probably why the folks around here don’t burn down these McMansions.”

  In the gathering twilight I followed Eddie into the woods, away from the soaring glass houses on manicured lawns, over to the other side of the mountain top and into even deeper woods, following no path that I could discern, but Eddie’s pace never slowed. The sun was nearly gone, and in the night air the chill deepened.

  “Is it much farther?” I asked, but he simply gestured forward and quickened his pace, so I stumbled on after him, pushing aside the pine branches, as we went farther and farther from the bright, safe houses on the edge of the mountain. I knew that without him it would take hours to find my way back.

  “Don’t leave me!” I called out, but he only slowed down for a moment, before beckoning me forward again.

  Long minutes passed, punctuated only by the sound of twigs snapping as I hurried to keep up with this boy, who neither stumbled nor slowed. I could see the stars again now, for the pines thinned as we reached the edge of the ridge.

  We stood on the edge of a precipice, where an outcropping of rock forme
d a ledge overhanging the valley below. I was disoriented, and did not know in which direction we had come. Should this be the side of the mountain that overlooked the village crossroads far below, or was it the wilderness side that gave out onto trees and a rock-studded stream?

  In any case, neither of those vistas spread out before me.

  I saw the dark shape of a forest stretching to the mountains across the valley, but directly below us lay a circular field ablaze with lights. I could make out an oval of red Georgia mud, encircled by a rickety grandstand of the sort one saw at high school baseball fields forty years ago. Within the oval was an assortment of battered haulers, campers, old pick-up trucks, and here and there a garishly painted stock car.