“Shoot, Welpler, don’t get no ideas to stick up for your old woman, now, just because she lies around the house buck naked. Got me a look—no thanks to choir boy there—and, son, I’m saying your momma, especially when she ain’t got no clothes on, is some kind of something. Woman could teach the new girl here a few lessons!”
Bobby Welpler’s pink face went purple, the acne across his nose a mountain range on a topographical map. His fists sprang up, small and gnarly. He swung at Mort.
Mort reached out one meaty arm and locked the heel of his hand on Welp’s forehead, so that Welp’s swings, and even his kicks, whiffed into the air. Mort laughed and looked at us to be sure we saw that Bobby Welpler was crying. With a snort of disgust, Mort pitched Welp aside.
Welp swung around again. One hand whipping his knife from his pocket, Welp threw himself, blade first, at Mort Beckwith. Who just laughed and pinioned Welp by the wrists.
Jimbo stormed toward them, and by the rage in Bo’s eyes, I knew for sure what was going to happen: Jimbo would pulverize Mort.
Mort, reared back and, laughing, released Welp. He lumbered back to his driver’s seat, motioning to Welp, “C’mon.” He revved his engine.
But Jimbo did what I could not have guessed. He lifted Bobby Welpler by the armpits, tossed him clear to Em’s truck, right at my feet. Emerson dove for Mort’s door handle and nearly got pulled under the wheels as Mort spun out from the clearing.
Em scrambled up from the ground where Mort’s truck had flung him.
Jimbo reached for Farsanna’s hand, and she grabbed at it this time and half hauled herself, half let herself be hauled up into the truck bed.
Welp curled up in a ball and sobbed.
22 Roadblock with Rifles
Jimbo, in the proper order of things, spoke first after we’d ridden a couple of miles away from the Hole. He propped himself in a sitting position, his face swollen and blue. “Steinberger’s?”
No reply.
He tried again. “Steinberger’s?”
“No!” That was little Bobby Welpler, suddenly come out of his ball.
“Welp, my man,” Jimbo told him, “I reckon you got a right to figure your snout’s got stuck in the cactus. But—”
“I ain’t hungry,” Welp sulked.
“Then come along for the fine talk and fellowship.”
“Just take me home.”
The word home croaked out unsteady, like he didn’t expect us to hear it any more than he’d meant what he’d said.
Welp raised his head to glower at us, meeting no one’s eye, but letting us all in on the sweep of his fury. “I ain’t going. And I’m telling you what, don’t you go neither.”
Jimbo reached to share L. J.’s Coke and added more peanuts. “Don’t what, Welp?”
“Don’t call me that name!”
“It’s a term of endearment, my man. Look, Mort’s making a pair of pig’s slippers out of himself. You know that. Your momma—”
“You just drop me off, you got that? And don’t be going to Steinberger’s. Or if you do, drop her off,” he stabbed a finger towards the tailgate of the truck where Farsanna sat still, staring out toward the woods. “And that’s all I’m saying. You got me?”
Jimbo crossed his arms and nodded, real slow. From the driver’s seat, Emerson cocked his head, trying to hear. The Big Dog whined softly.
Bo spoke up at last. “Bobby, my man. Seems to me you got to stay on board this ship for your own good tonight.” He banged on the cab window and motioned for Em to keep going.
Welp yelled up to Emerson, “Maynard, you drop me off! You got that? You drop me off now!”
Em ignored him.
Muttering, Welp resigned himself to a sulk and kept his eyes on the side of the road.
Bo looked at me. “Turtle? What do you think? You hungry?”
I shrugged.
He turned to Sanna and asked quietly, “How ’bout you?”
“Oh,” Welp fumed, “so she gets escorted home if she wants, that it?”
Farsanna crossed her arms. “I will stay.”
“Well,” L. J. said, “we could theoretically patronize another establishment.”
“Like what?” I asked. “The Pisgah Ridge Four Seasons?”
“Like, maybe just calling it a night,” he tried.
I reckon all of us were thinking our mothers wouldn’t so much mind our being home once for dinner. But none of us felt like dividing the day or our group or ourselves any further. I had the sensation of spinning, needing to clutch on to the people beside me or not be able to stand, the feeling of nearly being spun off into the night. Ashes, ashes we all fall down.
“We could,” L. J. tried again, “purchase sandwiches at the station.”
Jimbo wrinkled his nose—and that seemed to hurt his injured face enough to rouse him from his reverie, at least. “If you got a taste for motor oil with pimento cheese, maybe.”
So the whole Pack of us, including a seething Welp, shuffled our way through the sawdust up to Steinberger’s screen window. The old man was pacing behind the counter.
“Just closing down, kids!” he called, yanking the electrical plugs out of their sockets. He lowered the hinged wooden door behind the mesh windows.
Em looked at his watch. I looked at the sky, going ruddy between the pine fringes. We all looked at each other. It was well before closing time.
“Well,” said Jimbo, “I’ll be dyed amber.”
Wearing her black dress and straw hat and sitting on a picnic bench with a plate of barbecue, Mollybird Pittman had risen for a refill on her drink. “Levi? Levi Steinberger, what’s going on here? Levi, I want more sweet tea!”
The wooden door lifted a few inches, maybe a foot. Steinberger’s hand appeared briefly, shoving out a Styrofoam cup of iced tea and seven cans of soda, including my usual, Tab, and Big Dog’s Dr Pepper. Then the door dropped into place, and we could hear the hooks locking into their metal eyes.
Mollybird blinked at her tea. But then she plopped her plate in the round metal cans by the hut and stomped off to her car.
Jimbo tossed us each our can. “Might as well go, mangy pack.”
“What’s with the old man?” Emerson asked. “What’s with everybody today?”
We turned.
Steinberger dashed around the side of the hut. “You kids got that new girl with you tonight?” His eyes darted right and left as he spoke. My eyes followed, seeing nothing but trees and picnic tables—and Mollybird Pittman stomping back through sawdust to retrieve the purse she’d forgotten under a bench.
Bo jerked his head back toward our table. “Sure, we got her with us, Mr. S. As ever and always.”
Steinberger peered out to spot Sanna. “So you do. Well now, so you do. Look kids, I don’t want to be inhospitable….” He stopped there. “And I’m not going to be. Just … look … just be careful. And get on out of here soon, you hear? And turn left when you leave. That’s very important. And … just … you kids stick together, you hear?” Then he disappeared again. It wasn’t until the Volkswagen Rabbit he’d left idling behind the Hog Wild hut started to move that I saw his head poke from the driver’s-side window. “And turn left!” he called as the Rabbit darted into the road.
“Turn left?” I called back. “But—”
Steinberger couldn’t have heard me, though, his already pulling left on Stonewall Jackson Pike.
“He’s taking the long way,” L. J. observed. “Take him three times as long.”
We all looked at Welp. He stood, arms crossed, refusing to meet anyone’s eye.
Emerson nodded toward Mollybird, just pulling onto the Pike—and turning right. “But she’s headed the usual way.”
I pursed my lips, thinking. “Maybe she doesn’t know.”
&nb
sp; “Doesn’t know what?” Emerson asked.
I shrugged. “Whatever it is we don’t know either.”
We stood by the truck and watched Mollybird’s taillights launch into the dusk.
Jimbo spoke then for the first time in some minutes. “Reckon we got to fish and cut bait.”
“That’s fish,” L. J. corrected, “or cut bait.”
“Not in this case it ain’t.”
Jimbo offered me a hand, like he always did, to help me into the truck—and this time I took it. And I didn’t let go.
As we rounded to the right on Stonewall Jackson Pike, ignoring Steinberger’s strange warning, the first thing I noticed there in the deepening gray, streaks of pink still stringing together the pines, was Mollybird Pittman’s taillights, which should not have been there. Having left Hog Wild a full five minutes before us, she should, in theory, have been long gone. Emerson pulled behind her lights, and we squinted into the dark.
The barriers blocking the road were nothing but orange-and-white-striped metal barrels armied across the stretch of asphalt just before Stonewall Jackson Pike met the main highway that formed Pisgah’s spine. Em’s truck could easily have nudged one barrel, maybe two, out of the way. On their own, they would have signaled only that potholes were being filled there by daylight, and the warm tar was hardening by night.
But the figures in white that swept among the striped barrels signaled what I already knew: This was no construction site.
I don’t suppose I’d ever seen any Klan members before—in full regalia, I mean. No doubt I’d seen them in daily life, knew who they were in their jeans and their T-shirts, their wingtips and ties, and yet not guessed at who else they might be. I’d only ever heard stories of the Klan all dressed in their white, and of their hauntings, and of the horrors they’d brought down, years ago, upon the heads of dissenters in the Valley below.
Up on the Ridge, understand, we’d mostly been above all the mess—no problems with buses or houses or seating at all—having no one of the wrong sort so much as staying the night. Old Man Steinberger had been threatened, I’d heard, when he first opened for business, but he’d never pushed himself forward, never talked of his rights, never asked anything but to be left alone with his daughters, to provide a service, three days hickory smoked, that no one could match, no one in three counties. So they’d let him alone.
But they’d not gone away, and we knew it, just ignored it. Now and then over the years, my father had written an editorial that sketched them, them and their hoods, as silly.
And if I’d only seen a snapshot of them in, say, a history book or microfilmed newspaper photos, I’d have said silly myself. On first glance, sure, they looked like somebody’d gotten just real tangled up trying to put the sheets on the line. And they cradled their rifles—like nursing infants. And the eyeholes of their hoods didn’t always line up just real straight with their eyes. So you had to wonder how much trouble they could’ve caused if they’d tried.
They billowed back and forth the width of the Pisgah Ridge Crossing, tripping occasionally over their long gowns. And in the arms of those not cradling rifles rode family-pack chicken-and-biscuit buckets brimming not with dinner but with donations.
These donations they’d been gathering, it seemed, with the method they were inflicting upon Mollybird Pittman. A group of three approached the driver’s-side window, tapped on the glass, and slid the mouth of a rifle into the car.
Then asked for a contribution.
It was when they drew near I knew that my father must never have seen them—never in person. All the movies and old newsreels that show them as clowns, as silly, ludicrous, laughable, have missed all their power, have misunderstood. The rippling white, the fire-red crosses in circles emblazoned on some of their chests: They approached like a battalion of childhood horrors, and I knew then that my father was wrong, that this was not some ridiculous redneck costume ball, a gaggle of old men clutching their gods, some Technicolored past that never existed.
They were all that too, I could see, but they were more.
The pale figures surrounding Mollybird’s car that night, and then Emerson’s truck, snaking around us, were specters of my own darkest fears, grim reapers in white, with loaded deer rifles standing in for a scythe. They didn’t think this was play. Black and vacant behind slits in pointed hoods, their eyes were hollowed, King Lear’s after his blinding. But they could see: They lowered their buckets and rifles together inside my brother’s window.
This was not play; this was business. The human heart gone to rot.
23 The End Does Not Hold
Mollybird Pittman burst out of her Buick with her hat gripped in one hand, swatting at white hoods. And Mollybird was shouting.
“You bunch of inbred potbellies! You think I got time to sit here and play your little games?” She smacked a hooded figure across the eyes with her straw and silk flowers. “You think anybody asked you boys to play in the street and clog up a public road?”
“Calm down there, Molly,” one of them said, reaching to grab her arm.
She swung her hat at him. “That’s Miss Molly to you. I don’t have time for your messing around—do I make myself clear?”
“Reckon you oughta know, Miss Pittman, we ain’t got no gripe with you. We just—”
“No? Well, I got a gripe with you. A lady like me likes to think she can live in a town and get from one place to another unmolested. She—”
“Miss Pitt—”
“—Likes to think she can move around safe without a bunch of two-bit yellow-bellied ruffians threatening her on the road, asking—”
“Now, Miz Molly, we don’t—”
“—For what little fixed income she has to put bread on her own table, with no man to help her. Just her by herself. And no one to help her—”
“We ain’t asking—”
“Without anybody coming along like highway robbers, like the thieves on the road to Samaria to take what little she has!”
“Now, Mrs. Pittman—”
“It’s Miss, and I’ll thank you not to forget it. You think I don’t know your voices? You think I don’t know your names? You think I won’t report you to the IRS for trying to tax me twice?”
At this, the line of white hoods cracked, pried open by the sheer force of her rage.
Mollybird was back at the wheel of her Buick, her battering ram. She gunned the engine and blasted forward a foot, and then another, slamming her brakes each time just as her bumper made contact with white.
“Well, I’ll be cut and curly fried,” Jimbo whispered to me. “It’s like the breath of the Lord done parted the sea.”
“What?”
“Moses had his rod; Mollybird’s got her hat and fake roses. Oh, sweet Jesus, hang on …”
A wave of white surged toward Mollybird Pittman—just as she let off the brake for good and stomped on her gas.
Welp shrieked as he stood to leap from the truck, but Jimbo grabbed him again by the T-shirt and hauled him back down with us.
White gowns were lunging, some to the side and some toward her door, as Mollybird Pittman’s brown Buick roared into and over and through. Orange-and-white-striped barrels leapt into the air, slammed to the ground, and rolled off to the side. Pale figures flew behind them.
One of the white hoods called from the side as he dove out of the way. “Hey, boys! Ain’t that the truck we was looking out for?”
More hoods turned, some of them running now not just away from the Buick, but towards us.
“She’s here!” one of them shouted, pointing to Sanna. “We got her right here!”
I saw Em look through his rearview back at Sanna, right before he stomped on the accelerator, sending the five of us in the truck bed slamming against the tailgate. Remembering Em’s broken tailgate latch an
d how too much pressure would spill us out on the road, I screamed.
L. J. and Sanna grabbed for the side. I grabbed for L. J. And we all grabbed for Jimbo, holding to the bottom fifty-pound bags of manure. Welp clawed for a hold on my leg.
“We’re gonna die!” I cried into the night.
“Eventually,” I heard L. J. mutter as he and Sanna held to the side and I held to L. J. and Welp held to me and we all held to Jimbo—to a belt loop, a pants leg, his arm.
“Don’t let go!” I called out—maybe to L. J., maybe to Bo or to Sanna, and likely to the wire holding the tailgate.
White billowed by us like we’d launched into the sky and clouds scuttled out of the wind of our passing. Bo’s belt loop was holding and so was his hand. He clawed for a better hold on the bottom bags of manure.
We cleared the roadblock, their flashlights dueling with our taillights as we screeched past the last of the barrels and broke free down the Pike.
I recall my head falling back, recall seeing Big Dog’s head poking out from the truck cab’s back window, recall hearing her bark, hearing Jimbo’s big feet smack into the tailgate.
And then the wire no longer held—and neither did we.
24 Leaning In Together
We were still holding on to each other when we landed, splayed like truck-struck possums across Stonewall Jackson Pike.
Emerson must have felt the lightened weight in the flatbed, or maybe Big Dog’s barks. I could hear the shriek of his brakes, the pads already worn thin, and smell the Pike’s new skin of rubber.
The darkness throbbed around me, through me, inside my head.
And I thought of the Blue Hole, and thought how nice a final image that was before death. I knew I wouldn’t go to heaven myself, not believing in it, but Jimbo at least might find heaven to be a big swimming hole, sunk down into hemlocks and rhododendron in bloom. And I wondered if maybe angels took turns on the rope swing—and if it was only boy angels.
And then I saw legs slowly lifted into the air, like they were testing themselves to see whether they worked. I marveled at how I hadn’t commanded their moving, and that they still functioned at all.
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