by Jacob Beaver
“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you mind if I ask you something? What were you doing just now, as we took off?”
“I was praying to God,” she said. “We are in God’s hands.”
Then she closed her eyes.
I sat back and watched someone’s video screen across the aisle. The screen showed a map of Europe, with a red line tracing our path over Northern Ireland and out to sea. Altitude was 36,000 feet and ground speed 600 mph. Wow! We were hurtling through the stratosphere. I’d never have guessed it. Now that the plane had leveled out, the ride was smooth as could be. The only movement was a slight vibration under my feet, which I liked. I slipped off my shoes and looked right, past Steve’s profile, at a fairyland of cloud mountains and cloud castles, all pearly white against the infinite blue—and suddenly I felt okay. I felt almost hopeful. It was like I’d been loosed from my own life, from the creeping darkness that sucked light and air, and suddenly I could see, I could breathe. My lungs filled with the cool stream blowing from the vent above me, and I stretched out my legs so that my heels shook softy and sent soft shakes further upwards . . .
It was then that Steve explained the job to me. He leaned across the aisle and started yelling at low volume, which is his version of whispering. Normally I’d have pretended to listen, and made ironic comments to maintain the pretense, but Steve picked the perfect moment. At that precise point in that day, in that month, that year, floating in midair and in midlife, balanced between despair and hope, darkness and light, I was ready to hear what Steve had to tell me. “I’m all ears,” our father used to say. That was me, turning to Steve—all ears.
My job was to get clearances, Steve said. Anyone who appeared in the film had to sign something called a model release, which avoided any chance of litigation against Steve or the BBC. It was just a page of small print. There was also a longer document called a life rights consent agreement, which the subject of the film had to sign because we were telling his life story, but Steve would handle that, once everything else was agreed.
“What have you agreed so far?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Well, what’s this guy expecting?”
“He’s not expecting anything,” Steve said. “I haven’t contacted him.”
“You’re joking!”
“Look, the man doesn’t have a phone. Doesn’t have email. Doesn’t have a computer. He’s off the grid, you know. What could I do?”
“You could send a letter.”
Steve sighed. “A letter, right. I didn’t think of that. Anyhow it doesn’t matter. The bloke will be there. That’s his thing, being available to all and sundry. He’s some kind of preacher, a very holy-type person, all about saving your soul.”
“So you’ve researched this in depth?” I said. I couldn’t help it. But Steve missed the sarcasm.
“Yeah, I’ve dug around,” he said. “Didn’t find anything, actually. That’s how you know you’re onto a winner. This is virgin territory.”
“So how do you even know about . . . what’s this man called?”
“Buckner,” Steve said. “Lee Buckner. There was a tiny piece about him in the Metro. Just a few lines, no photo. Man walks on water in East Tennessee, basically. It was a summary of a syndicated article, which wasn’t very big in the first place, and hardly any papers picked it up. The woman who wrote it is a journalist in Johnson City. I phoned her and got what she had, which isn’t much. Only one person would go on record, this old man. He said he was fishing on a lake early one morning and Buckner walked out of the mist, right in front of his boat. Spooky, huh? Other people have seen him too, apparently. We’ve got to find those people and get them to sign the clearance forms. Then we interview the fuck out of them. And that’s the plan. That’s it. Apart from filming Buckner walk on water, of course.”
Steve grinned.
I said, “So what’s the point? He isn’t going to walk on water, obviously. It won’t happen.”
“I don’t know,” Steve said. “And you don’t know either. We think we know, but we don’t. It’s called belief, and that is the point. It’s all a question of what you believe. A religious person might believe something different. Right?”
“What does it matter?” I said. “He still can’t walk on water.”
“Oh, he can,” Steve said. “He does it somehow, and I’m going to see him do it. I got twenty grand on the line here. It’ll happen, don’t you worry. I know what I’m doing.”
“You think you know,” I said. “You believe.”
Steve looked at me. “Okay, I believe.”
And he went back to his laptop.
I thought no more about our conversation, not at the time anyway. The film was Steve’s baby. As it happened, though, my mind turned to religion again. After we ate, my neighbor produced a fat book, like a Bible, and began clucking to her kids. It sounded like clucking, I mean. I guessed it was Hebrew. Then they all bowed their heads again, but this time in silence. I pretended not to look, though I wasn’t sure why. Partly it was that praying seemed very personal, like crying, but mostly I just didn’t know what to do. I’d never been around people who prayed. There had been a few Pakistani Muslims at my secondary school, and one Sikh boy, and other kids used to tease them about their religions, but I never saw them do anything religious. And our family didn’t go to church. Nobody’s family went to church. I honestly don’t think I knew what churches were for. Even when my girlfriend ran off with the TV producer, and I was marooned in a half-empty flat, all alone, all at once, like a shipwreck survivor gazing at broken pieces of his ship, even then it didn’t occur to me to pray. I just sat in the living room and stared at a space on the wall where a picture used to be. I sat there all day, until it got dark, and then I went out to the pub and got so drunk I forgot she’d left me.
The only other thing I remember about that flight happened right at the end, in Atlanta, as we were waiting to leave the plane. The Jewish toddler had been fidgeting for an hour or so. His mother tried to control him, but he kept pushing her away, and finally she slapped him on the wrist. He screamed. Man, did he scream. His little white knuckle face went red, and his mouth stretched wide, and he screamed and screamed. People were bunched in the aisles, yawning and gathering their stuff and making phone calls, and this kid went on screaming, and screaming, and screaming.
The man in front of me, the tough guy, stood up and turned around. His face was fleshy and pockmarked, and there was something funny about his eyes, like they weren’t moving in sync. He looked down at the screaming toddler. Then he raised a hand to his head, made a fist, and removed his jet-black hair.
He was bald.
The toddler went quiet. Other people went quiet too. The man didn’t seem to notice. He made no expression at all, simply replaced his wig and turned back around.
I’ll never forget that moment. It was wonderful. That’s a strange thing to say, I know, but it was a strange moment, strange and full of wonder.
* * *
The airport in Atlanta is big. It’s the main hub for the South, full of people changing planes. Since that first trip I’ve been there many times, in different seasons and at different hours, and it’s always the same, cool and hushed, TVs playing low, announcements off in the distance. Everyone plods down these long corridors, looking a bit dreamy, as if travel were a kind of sleepwalking between time zones. I go dreamy too, these days. The first time, though, when I stepped off the plane and walked down the Jetway passage, I was crackling with adrenaline.
America!
I saw two soldiers in camouflage, with buzz cuts and tall boots. I thought they were guarding the airport, but they didn’t have guns. Then I noticed their bags. And then I saw an old black man talking to someone, and as I walked past he said, “Shee-it!” He said it with delight, grinning and shaking his head, like in a movie. And then I saw a pretty girl in capri pants, like a movie, and two young boys in sunglasses, like a movie, and a large woman in a turtleneck, with jewelry hanging over the turtleneck,
like a movie . . .
And then I crashed. At least I don’t remember much else, apart from sitting at a departure gate for hours, wishing I could lie down. Eventually we trooped outside into a warm wind and filed across a stretch of tarmac. In front of us was a small plane with its taillight winking in the dusk. Within minutes we were off. We roared through darkness, peering down at clusters of lights, and then at nothing at all, and suddenly we dropped out of the darkness and there were yellow streetlights just below us, and a few cars, and next thing we were on the ground, roaring to a stop.
By now I was woozy with tiredness and nothing made sense. Why was it cold here? Why was the airport so empty? What did the rental car guy mean by “your John Hancock”? Which of these identical, shiny red SUVs was ours? And most puzzling of all, where was Johnson City? We were driving through it, with Steve at the wheel and Tino reading the map, but I couldn’t see it. All I saw was grassy fields, some houses and churches, a couple of supermarkets, and then a long row of lighted signs, mostly fast food. One of the signs said abc inn—Sleep Cheap!—which was where we stayed that night. Steve and I shared a room. Neither of us said a word, just hit the sack.
I woke at dawn. The place was silent. Not a sound inside or out, except for the hum of a fan heater below the window. I watched the curtains billow and bloom with light. Then I dressed quietly and went out.
The door opened onto a car park—or parking lot, I should say. There was our shiny red SUV. Beyond it lay a strip of grass and then another parking lot, this one enormous and ending with a line of glassy shopfronts—or storefronts, I should say. Around the parking lot were trees, the most beautiful trees. They hadn’t been planted there. These were big trees, old trees, and they glowed with color. Leaves tumbled in the wind like confetti, red and orange and yellow. Against the falling leaves, the sky was solid blue, all the way to the horizon, which was dark and wavy and looked like mountains.
That’s East Tennessee. That’s North Carolina, too. In a sense, that’s all of America—a world of beauty shimmering behind strip malls. But I didn’t know this. I only knew what I saw: the cracked gray asphalt dotted with cigarette butts, and then these bright falling leaves. Like a baby, I was stuck in the moment, without history. How could I tell where I was? I had no points of reference apart from movies, and movies are dreams. They flash and fade.
Now a dented pickup rolled into the parking lot. It stopped ten yards away and a man got out, a bearded man in brown overalls. He took a toolbox from the back of the truck and came towards me, across the strip of grass, into the motel parking lot.
“Sure is purdy, ain’t it?” he said.
I said, “Sorry?”
“The leaves,” he said. “Jest so purdy. If they was any purdier I couldn’t stand it.”
He smiled, and I smiled too, and then he walked on towards the motel lobby.
I bent down and picked up a small leaf and tucked it into my shirt pocket. I still have that leaf. It’s from a maple of some kind, maybe an Autumn Blaze, and it is red as blood. At first I kept it flattened in a wad of clearance forms, but later I put it in my Bible. It marks 2 Corinthians 5:17, one of my favorite passages:
“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”
* * *
We ate breakfast at a diner, which took some time because the meals were huge, and also because the waitress wouldn’t leave us alone. She was old, this waitress, with a sad gray face, but she shivered with joy when Steve ordered steak and eggs. “I used to know a man from England,” she said. “He spoke like you, real proper. Everything he said, I mean every little thing, oh, it sounded so sweet. I wanted to marry him just to hear him talk! Say something else, honey. How you like your eggs?”
That became a running joke between me and Tino. Whenever Steve was ordering me about or yelling too much, I’d tell him to say something else, honey, I just love to hear you talk. Steve didn’t care. Mockery doesn’t touch Steve. Even when he was small and I teased him, he would never cry.
Anyway, we left the diner and drove out of Johnson City, and now I understood why I couldn’t see it the night before. Johnson City wasn’t so much a place as pieces of a place. What I mean is, the buildings were all grouped in separate developments: a mall here, a subdivision there, some car showrooms, office buildings, a Walmart . . . Between these scattered pieces were rolling hills of green, topped with bursts of fall color, all of it crystal clear beneath the blue, blue sky. The roads were wide and empty—or rather, they seemed empty to me. The traffic was mostly pickup trucks and big cars, some of them shooting past and others grinding along in terrible shape, as if they’d rolled off a cliff or something. Soon the road narrowed and began to curve upwards, past clapboard houses and barns of weathered wood, a trailer park, a little white church with a sign saying god answers knee-mail, then fields with cows, and more fields with cows, and suddenly—
Mountains.
We crested a rise and there they were, not ten miles away, one after another after another, like a sea of vast frozen waves fading to blue.
“Holy shit,” Steve said, pulling off the road. “Hey Tino, how’s that for an establishing shot? This is where the film starts, right here. Look at it! It’s got everything. Mystery, isolation. The power of the primitive. This is bloody brilliant.”
So Tino set up his camera, and Dave recorded some birdsong, and then we drove on down through woods of amber and ruby, with great branches overhanging the road like colored chandeliers. We came out beside a lake. It was maybe a mile across, with ruffled blue water. There were a few houses along the shore, then a marina with floating boat docks, and then we were back in the woods, zigzagging upwards. I opened my window. The air smelled great. It smelled of earth and rain. I let it flow into me as we climbed past some ruined houses, a trailer covered in ivy, a gas station with three old men on a bench, laughing in the sunshine . . .
Again I had that glorious feeling, as if I’d been loosed from my own life, as if I’d been somehow lifted out of it, into a realm of light and loveliness, into this airy moment.
Now we dropped through the trees and saw the lake again, much wider here, with two buildings by the shore. The first building was timbered, with a red roof, and looked to me like a ski lodge. The sign said shelby’s bar & barbecue. The second building, of pale brick, was wide and low, with an empty swimming pool at the side. The sign said shelby motel.
Steve pulled into the parking lot of the motel, next to the only other car. He bounced off in his silly shoes, and I borrowed the map from Tino. I didn’t learn much, because the map didn’t show much, just a couple of wiggly roads and the wiggly blue fingers of the lake, which was called Watauga Lake. A patch of green surrounded the blue: Cherokee National Forest. Cherokee? I knew that name. Weren’t they the Indians in some dusty western? But how could that be, here in the southeast among these wooded mountains?
“I booked us a room each,” Steve said, opening the back of the SUV. “Apparently this is the only hotel for miles. We’re close, though. Buckner lives up the road somewhere. Let’s unload our bags and then go see.”
The Shelby Motel was classic Americana. Standing outside, looking at the row of numbered doors, I was reminded of a thousand movies, from Psycho to Pulp Fiction. In fact I was more than reminded, a lot more. For a second or two, I had the eerie sensation that I was in a movie, some kind of ultrarealistic 3D movie with warm sunlight and a cool breeze. Even nowadays, after ten years in America, the same thing happens. I’ll be driving somewhere and I’ll see a white picket fence, and all of a sudden I’m in Technicolor. Maybe manic depressives feel this way when they’re up, as if the world just exploded in their face. Of course, manic depressives are delusional, and so is this feeling. The world is what it is, if only we could see it. Ten years ago, standing in that parking lot, all I could see was myself—but that was about to change. It started changing a moment later, when I walked into the office of the Shelby Mot
el and a young woman smiled at me.
She had the greenest eyes. They were green like a cat’s eyes are green, piercing green, and they shot green holes in me. I could hardly take in the rest of her or smile back. Then Steve came in behind me, asking about keys, and I saw that the woman had one arm. The left sleeve of her blouse was pinned to her waist.
“I’ve given you rooms four to seven,” she said. “Take your pick. They’re all the same.”
Her voice was soft and slightly husky, with a certain lilt to it. I assumed that lilt was southern, which it was, but at the same time it was entirely her own. We all talk differently, don’t we? Anyhow, I liked her voice. To be honest, I loved her voice. It seemed to fall over me like a gentle rain.
Steve said, “Tell me again. Where does Lee Buckner live?”
The green eyes widened, perhaps in amusement. “Oh, I don’t know where he lives. I said I know where his church is. He uses a big old barn.”
I didn’t hear the rest of their conversation. I was just watching the woman. Her hair was dark and long, cut just above those green eyes. Her skin was tanned, very tanned, with a dusting of freckles. Against the tan, her teeth seemed incredibly white.
Now a phone rang.
The woman said, “The road ain’t got a sign, but you’ll see it. It’s just around the curve, on the right.” And she picked up the phone.
As Steve and I walked back outside, I heard the woman say, “You’ve reached the Shelby Motel. I’m Summer. How may I help you?”
* * *
“Just around the curve” is like “up yonder” and “down the road a piece.” It’s the southern way of being friendly, which means putting you at ease, making you feel happy about your day. It’s nothing to do with distance. In fact, “the curve” went on for a good mile, and the road to the right snaked into deep woods. This road was narrow and freshly paved but without markings. It might have been a private driveway if not for the odd mailbox by a gravel track. I didn’t see a single house, or a car, or a person. I didn’t see any animals. I saw tree trunks and leaves and shafts of yellow sunlight filled with falling leaves, and leaves mashed into the asphalt ahead of us, like gold flecks in black granite.