by Sigrid Nunez
“Saw his cheek explode, got splashed with his blood, even thought for a couple heartbeats I’d been hit myself. Well, poor Carter survived, but I wasn’t much of a happy hunter for a while after that. ’Course it didn’t help seeing him all the time with his face so messed up. He had a bunch of operations, but I never did see much improvement. He still made Mason look like a beauty queen. I don’t like to say, but his wife up and left him. After that he stopped going to church and started talking crazy. He was going to finish the job. Anyone could tell he meant business. That’s when I promised the Lord I’d give up hunting for good if he’d do a work in Carter’s heart.”
“And that’s what happened?”
“Carter met a girl—much prettier than his wife, I don’t mind saying. He married this girl, Shane, had three kids with her, worked his tail off making a nice life for them all. Then the flu got him. And where he is now it don’t matter what his face looks like. His life is one pure joy.”
Hunting was second only to church in Salvation City. (“There’s a reason the Indians thought of heaven as the Happy Hunting Ground,” said Boots.) All the boys and more than half the girls Cole knew did some kind of hunting, and there were kids his age who’d been doing it for years. Clem had killed his first turkey at seven and his first deer at nine. There was no shortage of people eager to train Cole to hunt any time he was ready. But the idea did not sit well with the animal lover in him. He’d gone fishing just once and even that had been too much for him, his stomach mimicking the convulsions of the hooked fish.
Tracy was no hunter but she knew how to shoot, as she knew how to load a rifle and how to take it apart and clean it, too.
“My daddy always said that’s how you prevent accidents. Not by keeping young’uns away from guns but by teaching them how they work.”
And what was it with people who were scared of keeping guns in their homes? For her it was just the opposite. “I could never sleep in an unarmed house, especially after what happened with the flu,” she said. “And when you think about what might be coming, well, what are you going to do, just sit there defenseless?”
Defenseless was how she looked to Cole that morning as he and PW drove away. Smaller and smaller through the van’s rear window, in her short hot-pink bathrobe with white pom-poms at the belt ends, waving two-handed like a child.
The sun popped into view behind her just as she vanished from sight.
PW liked to drive fast. Once they got to the highway they would zoom up to eighty or ninety and maintain that speed most of the way. He turned on the stereo and they listened to Veronica playing their new song, “So Angel.” He kept the volume high, the way he did only when he was driving alone or when it was just the two of them. Cole thought Veronica was an awesome band and that “So Angel” was their best song yet.
The music was too loud for them to talk, but he and PW glanced at each other from time to time, grinning. Veronica was one of PW’s favorite bands, too.
Already they were having fun.
Next on the mix was “O Lonesome O Lord,” a bluegrass song about a man who’d lost his wife to the flu. Sung by Earl E. Early, in that famous wailin’-failin’ voice that gave everyone goose bumps. “O Lonesome O Lord” was a super hit, but there were lots of people, like Tracy, who couldn’t listen to it because it made them too sad.
“Man, this dude got a voice,” said PW, raising his own voice above the music, and sounding—as Cole had rarely heard him—envious. It was the part about the man forcing himself to dance alone so he’ll remember the steps and be able to dance with his wife when he gets to heaven.
Cole’s eyes filled with tears. It wasn’t because of the singer, though. It had nothing to do with the song. Today was his birthday. Happy birthday! But the truth was, as the day had approached, Cole hadn’t expected it to be happy. The only thing he could remember about his last birthday—passed in the hospital and totally ignored—was thinking that he would never be happy again.
One of the reasons people love to speed is for the illusion that they are escaping something, and though he wasn’t behind the wheel, that is how Cole felt now: as if he’d left some trouble behind. There was a vibe coming off PW that suggested he was feeling something like this, too. He steered with his left hand—his left palm, mostly—his right hand tapping his thigh to the song. Cole always studied the way people drove, losing himself in the dream of how he’d one day handle a car. This was how it should be, he thought: fast, but smooth and laid back. His mother, as she’d liked to boast, had been an excellent driver. But for some reason, his athletically graceful father had been a klutz at the wheel, the cause of several minor accidents, each of which had made him a more nervous and therefore worse driver. He drove squeezing the wheel with both hands, shoulders hiked to his ears, checking around so constantly in every direction he made Cole think of a bobble-head.
Cole had to laugh. Bobble-head! Just the word was hilarious.
The laugh came out a giggle, and he clapped a hand over his mouth in embarrassment.
“You know, son,” said PW, pitching his voice low like he was about to say something stern. “Most people cry when they hear this song.” They both cracked up then, and as their laughter died down a new feeling swept over Cole, one that almost made his eyes well again.
If only they could keep going. If only they could keep driving, just the two of them, it didn’t really matter where. Out west. To California. Or down to Mexico. Or to New York City. Or all those places. Images fanned before him like a hand of cards: The two of them riding horses, riding choppers, riding big waves. The two of them piloting and co-piloting a small jet plane, eating steaks under a giant chandelier. There’d be daring adventures, heroics, and so forth wherever they roamed. It would get so that before they even arrived in a place, people would know their names.
It was crazy—where did he get his crazy ideas—and it made him feel selfish and guilty. No place for Tracy in any of his grand plans. But it wasn’t the first time Cole had felt the urge to run. Now that he was completely healthy again, he often felt restless, bored, as if he was stuck somewhere, waiting for something to happen or for some special knowledge to come to him. Bible study, lessons with Tracy, church, the games he played with the other children—it was not enough. He wanted more. And there were times when he felt as if there was a force holding him back. Some force was sitting on top of him, squelching and trapping him and preventing him from growing into who he was supposed to be. Like a colossal spider, it pressed its boulder of a body down while its legs caged him in. He would have to be Samson to break free.
If only they could keep going. It wasn’t like he was asking them to run away from God. God would be with them if they wanted him there. He remembered how he had missed Chicago after he moved to Little Leap. But if they never turned back, he did not think he would miss Salvation City.
If there was anything he yearned to talk about with PW it was this. But he did not know how.
ON THE WAY, they stopped at the place where PW’s great-grandparents were buried. Cole had been expecting a real cemetery, but this was just a cluster of a dozen or so weed-choked graves on a rise off one of the mountain roads.
It wasn’t a real family plot, either. “Though everyone here was kin to some degree or other.” PW had brought a trash bag for all the litter he knew they would find. Beer and soda cans, mostly; he gathered them up without a word. But Cole was surprised to see so much litter in that lonely spot. There weren’t even any houses nearby. The closest thing to a house they’d seen had been miles back: a horseshoe of weather-beaten mobile homes sharing a clearing with several vehicles in various stages of being gutted. Rust city. A swaybacked horse tethered to a post, head hanging low to the ground, and some equally forlorn-looking dogs staring mutely at the van as it passed, as if they didn’t have the strength to bark.
Some of the gravestones were sticking out of the ground at such odd angles it was easy to believe someone had tried toppling them. PW’s great-grandfat
her’s slab had a long crack running down it, and Cole pictured a night of pounding rain and a zigzag of lightning striking.
Jasper Carson McBell was only forty-four when he died, but that was not unusual for a man who’d worked in the mines from the time he was a teen.
“That’s what men did for a living here, generation after generation,” PW said. “Only my daddy broke with tradition. He always loved where he was born, but he didn’t want to end up in the mines. Besides, those jobs were melting away like snow-flakes in June and there wasn’t much of anything to replace them. He roamed around a bit till he settled in Lexington. His main job was supervising deliveries for a big furniture outlet, but he had good carpentry skills, too, so he did some of that to earn extra. He liked doing that kind of work more anyway. But I know for a fact he never did feel at home in the city. He might even have gone back if it hadn’t been so hard to find work. Also, Mama was no country girl, and it would’ve been hard for an outsider like her to fit in. But my daddy went back to the mountains every chance he got. And once we kids come along we went, too, and those were the times we were happiest as a family, especially in summer.
“I remember it’d be suppertime and we’d all be outside, either at my grandparents’ or some other kinfolks’. Or it might be a church supper that night. And there’d be games, like sack races or darts, and there’d be singing and banjo playing, and the sun’d be going down behind the mountains, and of course there’d be good eatin’—though I remember one time there was this dish that gave me the heebie-jeebies: a whole hog’s head on a platter of white bread slices.
“My granny was a great cook, though. She didn’t need a pile of money to put cuisine on the table. All she needed was some fish from the creek or a chicken or a couple squirrels and what she gathered from the earth. She taught my mama to cook the food my daddy loved.
“Right before he passed, he couldn’t swallow, but he kept ordering Mama to cook his favorite dishes. She’d stand at the stove with tears dripping into the pot, and when she brought him the food all he could do was smell it and maybe hold a bite in his mouth before spitting it out.
“Mama couldn’t stand it. She said it felt like she was torturing him. But I think it must’ve been a good thing. That smell and that little-bitty taste did the trick, so he could feel like he was back in the mountains that he loved again.
“Once you had a taste, you never forgot Granny’s chicken and dumplings, and her biscuits and gravy were even better than that. Hey, we got any more of them sandwiches left? I’m making myself hungry, talking like this.”
It was the most Cole had heard PW say about his family at any one time. In general, neither he nor Tracy talked much about the past. It made Cole wonder if maybe sometime during this trip PW would end up talking about Delphina. Cole couldn’t ask about Delphina, because when he’d asked about her before, PW had said, “If I tell you the story now, do you promise never to bring it up again?”
He couldn’t ask Tracy about Delphina, either, though he once overheard her tell Adele: “That girl come a hairpin close to assassinating Wyatt.” Which turned out to mean she had waved a gun at him.
PW had kept the story short. They had met when he was in community college, studying business administration and working part-time in her father’s stable. They had eloped right after his graduation. They had fought a lot. She had been untrue. But she was the one who walked out. PW had tried to stop her. This was where the gun came in. Wresting it away from her had somehow involved dislocating her shoulder and cracking a bone or two.
An accident, but she told the police—and later the world—a different story.
PW was so distraught over what he’d done he almost turned the gun on himself.
(“Lord forgive me, Adele,” Tracy said, “but if I’d been around then there wouldn’t have been one bone in that girl’s body left uncracked.”)
Cole has heard it said that one of the worst things that can happen to a man is for him to love a woman more than he loves God. This, of all things, appeared to have happened to Pastor Wyatt.
“I’m not saying she was a bad person. She was in many ways the sweetest woman I’ve ever known. She was spoiled, was all. Her mama and daddy had spoiled her but good. They were kind of fancy, her folks—horse breeders—and they had just the one child. That child didn’t get her way, she’d about lose her mind. She had a wicked temper, and enough tears in her to float Noah’s ark. But the man is the head of the woman. Wife goes wrong, you look first to the husband. Where’d he go wrong?
“I was an arrogant man. Make that fool—arrogant fool. I thought I could handle everything myself. I was too blinded by my pride to pray—not that I was much into praying back then. And the longer I was with Delphina, the further I fell from the Lord.”
Cole had expected the story to end with something bad happening to Delphina. He thought maybe she was dead, and that’s why it was so hard for PW to talk about her. In fact, she had married again. But her second marriage hadn’t lasted, either, and now she was with someone else, a horse breeder like her father. Flip Boody, a man known for his high-rolling style, whose private life sometimes made the news. It was old news but evergreen scandal that he’d abandoned his wife and that he and his girlfriend were living in sin. She was worse than dead, Delphina.
Though his every attempt to reach her over the years had been met with silence or rage, PW continued to feel responsible for Delphina. If she was lost, he was at least partly to blame. “Just ’cause now I got a marriage that’s a success doesn’t mean I’m absolved of that failure.”
Delphina gone, PW had plunged headlong into darkness. He had started drinking in that way that has only one purpose and, unchecked, only one likely outcome.
Cole was fascinated by the idea of PW madly in love with an apocalyptic girl. He’d never seen Delphina, not even a picture of her, and no one had ever described her to him. But that she was apocalyptic he had no doubt.
Cole didn’t know why all of a sudden he was thinking so much about Delphina. Maybe because Tracy wasn’t there. Maybe because of Mason and Starlyn. Before the trip was over, Cole would find himself several times on the verge of spilling the beans about them. (Later, he’d be appalled to think how close he’d come to tattling.)
PW referred to the days after Delphina left him as a time when he wandered in the desert.
A desert that was, however, anything but dry.
“Many were the nights I could not find my way home.”
Passed out in the street, he got rolled more than once. All the while, he kept trying to get back with Delphina. He called it love, she called it stalking. “The law was with her.” Served with a restraining order, PW chose to leave town.
“I had this idea about starting over in Louisville.”
But in Louisville he only drank more.
One morning he woke up to find himself lying next to a Dumpster in the back lot of the Red Star Bar-B-Q.
“My wallet, my watch, my cell, my keys, my jacket, my belt, and my two shoes—they were all gone. I got up and was staggering around, hoping maybe at least my shoes were somewhere in the vicinity, when I noticed this skinny dude in a hoodie and diddy rags leaning against the Dumpster. He was smoking a cigarette and watching me.
“I was never a mean drunk. But the morning after? Dude, look out. So I cussed him in my best French, you know, and I asked him what he wanted. And he told me he knew where I could find what I was looking for. Is that right? I said, real sarcastic. But he just flicked his cigarette away and jerked his head, like, follow me. I thought maybe he really did know where some of my stuff was, so I went along, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or punch his lights out when all he did was lead me over to the other side of that Dumpster. Then I saw there was this other dude lying on the ground, and the one thing I could say for sure about him was that he didn’t have my stuff. He didn’t have anything except for one piece of clothing, a pair of filthy old hospital p.j. bottoms about three sizes too big, and a smell o
n him so ripe I come this close to hurling.
“This was the middle of winter. I was shivering to death myself with no jacket, and I didn’t know how he could stand it half naked like that. I didn’t see any bottles around, but I knew he was a drunk like me, or a meth head or some other kind of junkie. His eyes were open, but I might as well have been invisible. Lying next to him was this pile of bones he must’ve got from the Dumpster, and they were all picked clean. He was nothing but the sorriest sack of bones himself, and I didn’t know why I was supposed to be looking at him.
“I wheeled on the first guy and started to cuss him again. And he points a finger at me and he goes, ‘Tonight you lost your coat and your shoes. Tonight you lost some money and some of your other possessions.’
“I felt my scalp tighten up. I was thinking, How’d he know all that? Then he points at the dude on the ground and he goes, ‘This man is your brother. Won’t you help him? You lost your coat but you still have a shirt. Won’t you give him that shirt of yours? Can’t you see he needs it more than you do? You have a home to go to. But this man has no home. Take him with you, invite him into your house, and let him wash himself. Feed him a good meal, give him some clean clothes and a bed for the night. And if he needs to talk, listen to his story.’
“That’s when I had to sit down. Next thing I know I’m crying. I’m hiding my face in my hands, bawling my eyes out, like I hadn’t done since I was maybe five. I don’t know how to describe what my soul was going through. All I can say is it was the worst feeling I ever had in my life, the fullest measure of misery and shame I believe it is possible for one human being to experience. It was like seeing myself clear for what I was: a sick, selfish, cowardly sinner, a man without hope, without peace of mind, without any joy in his twisted heart.
“It seemed like I cried for a couple days, and with every tear I was cleansing something foul and perverted out of me. And when I was able to pick my head up again, I saw that the stranger who’d spoken to me was gone. And I knew he was the Lord. The man on the ground was gone, too. And I knew he was one of the angels of the Lord. All that was still there was the pile of bones, and when I saw them I felt the hairs all over my body rise. I knew whose bones those were. And I looked up and saw that I was wrong, it wasn’t morning at all. The sky was dark, even though it’d been light before. It was still the middle of the night.