Treeborne

by Caleb Johnson

  Foot, Tammy thought. But she let the girl be.

  Janie got up when she heard the pickup truck coming down the road. Pud Ward stopped by Hugh and Maybelle’s house so he wouldn’t get stuck. Tammy and Wooten had missed their chance to plant grass around their new house. Next spring, she thought, waving at the fat boy. He honked back as Janie splashed toward the truck, leaving her aunt and the dirt boy behind a curtain of rain spilling off the eaves.

  Tammy leaned over and examined the dirt boy. Her daddy had given it a name but she couldn’t remember what at this moment. Sister was doing a decent job putting the thing back together, she thought. Looked much better than the one the girl had tied up on the porch back when Tammy and Wooten still lived in the trailer other side of the river. That thing, Tammy thought, getting tickled at herself even now, looked like a hot dog wiener dropped in dirt. But this one, Crusoe, that was the name given to him, Crusoe had an uncanny quality. “Looks like it’s just me and you son,” she said.

  She’d watched her niece work on the dirt boy, using Hugh’s tools: a scraper, a little hand shovel, a blunt hatchet, pliers and cutters. Tammy knew this behavior worried her brother, though Ren never admitted so. He feared how she’d turn out with no momma. Tammy tried easing his concerns, telling him that Pud, the Ward boy, would soon bring Sister out of her morbid obsessions. This seemed to give Ren little comfort though. He blamed hisself for what’d happened to Janie. But Tammy knew it wasn’t her brother’s fault. Tammy knew the truth. Janie was a girl, she was growing up, testing herself. Better now before the world started on her. It would soon, Tammy knew.

  She also knew how love could change you in a lick. It had been love with Wooten Ragsdale. Love so pure Tammy worried her only recourse, her only way of tolerating this kind of love, might of been to turn a pistol on herself one day. Not no more though, she thought, hunting the keys to the county-owned pickup truck she yet drove. More than two months since her return home and she still hadn’t gone back to checking water meters. Nobody had asked about the truck yet. Tammy hadn’t told anybody so, but she wasn’t ever going back to that job. When she found the keys she hollered off the porch to let Wooten know she was leaving, then she got in the truck and drove across town to the old Elberta Rampatorium.

  She’d spent hours in the courthouse basement figuring out who owned the land the Rampatorium was built upon. Turned out The Authority did. Mitchell Dodd, her boss at the water department, got word Tammy was at the courthouse one day and came by to say hello. Tammy was friendly with Mitchell, who she’d always liked, and deflected his awkward attempts at finding out how come she was browsing land deeds and when she’d be back to work at the water department. “Everybody sure does miss you,” Mitchell said. Tammy told him she sure did miss them too. Mitchell was nosy; word would spread.

  Tammy’d sent a letter to The Authority offering what she thought was a fair price for the land and the structures still standing on it. She expected a quick reply then a deal done. After all, the Ramp was just sitting there going to pot. A drive-in theater would be a boon for the town. If she couldn’t go to Hollywood then she’d bring it to Elberta.

  She parked near the concession stand then toted a catalog of available movie reels up at the projection room and sat there flipping pages. Rain leaked through the mossy roof, washed crooked gullies down the slumping terraces. Tammy would need to flatten those out some so cars could easily park. She’d need a load of gravel to spread around the lot. She’d need to install speaker posts. Folks would listen to The Peach before the movie started, Pedro Hannah’s voice coming out of each individual speaker becoming a multitude in effect, then tune to a frequency that played the movie’s sound. She’d need so much, she thought, looking out the tiny square window framing what remained of an enormous screen. The projector Wooten had bought for her home movies was not powerful enough to work at such distance. She was trying to track down a used one that would by calling the classified desk at newspapers across the state.

  Wooten had bought her the camera too. This was his way: buy in place of what he could not say. Tammy had been recording anything that looked interesting to her eye. When the rain was at its worst this month one of her daddy’s assemblies turned up in the fishpond. She recorded Ren wading out to retrieve it. His yellow poncho with The Authority’s A in bright blue on back and the lit cigarette dangling between his lips hissing in the rain would make for a gorgeous picture, she thought, though the footage would be black-and-white. Squint and you might mistake Ren for a star hisself.

  He’d toted the assemblie to Tammy and Wooten’s new house and set it on the kitchen table. Looked like Chief Coosa trying to hold on to his soul as it escaped from his body. The soul itself a fistful of lacquered goldenrod. Geronimo jumped up and sniffed the assemblie. Rain beat down on the tin roof, sounding like corn popping on a stovetop. It was Ren who brought up the storm their folks had survived.

  “Feels like I somehow lived through it too,” he said, “even though I wouldn’t of been born yet. You ever get them kind of memories Tam? Somebody else’s.”

  Tammy knew what he meant. “Not really,” she said.

  Didn’t matter; Ren went on talking about the long-ago storm. The dam had been ruined, folks died. Downtown somehow untouched by the wind but for a toy wagon wrapped around De Soto’s head and the scores of broke-necked birds scattered in the flooded streets. Tammy knew the stories. Nobody thought she listened, but she always had.

  “Looked like a ship had sailed right through the dam,” Ren said, doing one hand thisaway and finishing a beer with the other. “Momma and Daddy lived through a lot.”

  For a long pause the siblings considered the history of their family, its future yet being spun out from the present. Then Tammy let boil up from her guts something she’d wanted to ask ever since their momma died.

  “You don’t reckon she did it to herself do you?”

  Ren shot Tammy a look then went to get another beer. Sister was leaning over the table, examining the newfound assemblie. “Not right now Tam,” he said.

  Janie looked up. “I know there’s people that do it to themselves.”

  “Well your grandmomma didn’t,” he said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Damn if I do!” Ren said, slamming his fist against the table so hard the assemblie jumped.

  Tammy sharply remembered how it was when you felt one certain way but folks still saw you in the same old light. Not a thing you could do, especially if you were a girl. This very feeling was what opened up the split between her and her momma. Tammy’d loved those walks in the woods too. Things changed. Sister would find out, if she hadn’t already.

  Back in school Tammy’d stand behind the marching band building smoking cigarettes while her classmates ate lunch. Mad as a sore-tailed hen, gut growling with hunger, and just puffing puffing puffing away. Elberta could constipate the soul. But movies … The marching band building set up above the football field. While she smoked Tammy would see Ricky Birdsong running hills, slapping the flagpole then skipping back down to the bottom where he’d turn and start up the grassy slope again. Tammy knew he saw her too—and she liked this reciprocated watching. At least he had ambition to leave Elberta, Alabama. Tammy’s momma had told her about all the letters colleges were sending so the boy would come play ball for them. Ricky Birdsong was going to get his pick, looked like, of where he wound up.

  Tammy didn’t hate Ricky for what he’d done. Wooten on the other hand wanted to kill him. She convinced her husband otherwise by letting him climb between her legs and slip inside till he didn’t want to kill anything anymore. Nita thought Tammy was protecting Ricky Birdsong. She’d read in a magazine that victims often will. That wasn’t it though. And now Nita was gone, the bitch. Living in her honeymoon cabin like a sad old fat-ass. Tammy couldn’t blame her, though she still did. Tammy and Nita’d swapped a few letters, which Tammy did not tell her brother about. More letters, more secrets. Knowing, Tammy figured, would only make Ren
worse off than he already was—horrible, screwing what’s-her-name who worked down at Gene Kilgore’s pawnshop. Sometimes ignorance truly was bliss.

  Ricky Birdsong had not acted alone. Tammy knew Sister was involved. It didn’t need saying. What good would it do? One close look at how the girl’d acted around Tammy since coming back home would of proved it. But the town had decided Ricky Birdsong was guilty. Tammy felt safe in knowing that nobody else had put together two and two to make four. She’d go to her grave with what Janie’d done.

  Despite what Ren or anybody else thought, Tammy Treeborne Ragsdale had a sense of blood and what it meant. The girl, Tammy knew, was being torn apart. By herself, by her grandmomma’s death, by a boy. Such loss made for unbelievable recording though. First time Tammy turned the camera on her niece the look that came across the girl’s round and plain face reminded her of a story her momma used to tell on herself. Maybelle was seven-eight when one summer a traveling preacher came to Bankhead. He had with him a camera, the first Maybelle had ever seen. One night after dinner the preacher showed her how to use it. Then the next day she snuck the camera out to show her friends. Turned it on each one of them and said, “Now hold still.” Most of the dirty-faced Bankhead kids smiled like imbeciles. But one boy started crying when Maybelle aimed at him. “Hold still,” she demanded. But the boy wouldn’t stop crying and shaking. Finally she asked what was the matter. “I don’t want to die,” the boy said. “Please don’t shoot me Belle,” he whimpered, mistaking the camera for a gun.

  It could work thataway, Tammy thought. Killing the future for the posterity of a moment that’d soon become past. She could of done as bad or worse than Sister when she was that age. Maybe had, seeing where she’d wound up. Married a safe man to make a safe life, knowing better, hating herself for it, and now she was preparing to blow it all to smithereens. God, it would be good. Wooten could keep on living on The Seven, in the new house they’d built if he wanted to, but they would not go on being married.

  Tammy knew Wooten would quit giving her money if she dropped his name, which is how come she wanted to get the drive-in near opening shape before she told him she wanted a divorce. That word. So much work yet to do. The screen listed right and was pocked with shotgun holes and black mold and covered in poison ivy. The concession stand had been plundered and left exposed to the weather for years. Tammy had not one good lead on a suitable projector or an opening night movie picked out yet. Still, she hoped for a summer debut. She would not blame Wooten for how he reacted to all this change. The whole town might blame her though. Say she must not of been able to tolerate his bad hand. Foot, that pitiful-old hand never bothered Tammy. In fact she used to like when the scars first healed up and Wooten would rub between her legs till she screamed. It’ll be fine, she thought. Let them talk.

  When Tammy got home Sister was sitting on the porch. The girl had reattached the dirt boy’s crushed head to his body using baling wire and green creeper vines. She was smearing on a fresh layer of marbled purple clay.

  “Why don’t we bake him in my oven?” Tammy said. She led her niece into the kitchen and took out a large roasting pan. They placed Crusoe down in it then Janie positioned the dirt boy’s short arms across his chest, like a funeral pose. They let the oven warm up, then slid him inside and shut the door. “Let’s go out and shoot while we wait,” Tammy said.

  The earth made embarrassing sucking sounds each time they stepped. In spots they sank to their knees. Tammy loaded the pistol with six bullets. Aimed and squeezed. There was a loud pop then a ting when the bullet hit the lid of an old washing machine. Geronimo darted away from the noise and scampered up a tree.

  “I don’t do this for protection,” Tammy said.

  “Okay.”

  “Women just ought to have fun Sister. Here, you try.”

  Janie held the pistol out in front of her body with both hands. She aimed at the trees above her granddaddy’s art then fired. The bullet thunked into wood.

  “Janie, Janie Treeborne,” Tammy sang, “Queen of the Wild Frontier!”

  The girl picked up both empty casings. They were warm to the touch. She closed them in her fist and shook as they cooled.

  “I see it coming out in you,” Tammy said.

  “See what?”

  “You run off. It wasn’t nothing to do with this kidnapping mess.” The girl didn’t say anything, so Tammy went on: “I don’t aim to make you upset. I run off once myself.”

  “Where to?”

  “Oh, down at the beach. The Gulf seemed about far as you could get back then. I’d wanted to go to Hollywood. Hell-bent on leaving Elberta, I mean.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Worked at a restaurant, taking orders and cleaning up dishes. After work I’d just walk the beach up and down, up and down, long as I pleased. Waves coming in, pretty seashells by the gobs. Used to collect them. Bet you didn’t know that did you? One day, I remember, there was just hundreds of dead jellyfish the brightest purple and blue you ever saw. Looked like hand pies to me, way they was shaped. Sister, it was lonely as could be down yonder and I loved every damn-blasted minute of it.”

  “How come you to be back in Elberta if you liked it so much?”

  Tammy raised her eyebrows and laughed. “I asked myself that same question a hundred times. Got married. Divorced.”

  “Before Uncle Woot?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When I left I missed it.”

  “Some ways I did too,” Tammy said. “Hey, you want to hear something else?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Promise not to tell.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I’m buying me that old Rampatorium. Remember it? Where they used to show outdoor movies. Aim to turn it into a drive-in movie theater.”

  “What’s a drive-in movie theater mean?”

  “Folks’ll bring their cars, pull up and watch movies from the front seat. Tune in on the radio for sound. Might even run the Grand out of business!” Tammy cackled. “You know I could use some help fixing up the place if you got the mind to.”

  “Alright,” Janie said.

  The rain quit and the floodwaters began draining. All of Elberta sang. Flopping fish turned up in yards, in the downtown streets. The paper printed pictures of these oddities and others. A ski boat stuck up in a tree near the high school that kids dared each other to climb up in and sit. Furniture washed into ditches exactly like it’d been arranged inside homes. Folks had to be careful starting their vehicles, in case a cat had crawled up under the hood. The Fencepost hosted a fish fry with all the fish folks found, and served fries and coleslaw and hush puppies with a slice of raw onion and lemon on the side. De Soto’s square was trampled and muddy after this event. The floodwaters washed away much of Wooten’s workshop, his tools and lumber as well. Tammy helped find and catch what could be so. Meantime she and Janie’d cleaned out the Rampatorium’s concession stand and repainted the walls. Tammy had talked to Orville Knight about flattening the terraces and spreading a truckload of gravel. She was just waiting on a letter from The Authority saying they’d agreed to sell the place to her.

  * * *

  One day in November the sun broke through a winter sky so beautiful and warm that Tammy couldn’t resist putting on her bathing suit and tanning her legs. She carried a chair up onto the pool deck. She was reclined there when Pud Ward showed up.

  “Oh, sorry,” the boy said when he saw her.

  “Sister!” Tammy hollered. “Your date’s here.”

  Pud Ward handed Tammy a stack of mail. “Seen it’d run when I drove up,” he said. “How you been doing Mrs. Ragsdale?”

  Tammy leaned forward in her chair so her breasts pressed against her bathing suit. “Call me Tammy,” she said, trying to make the fat boy uncomfortable. She adjusted her bathing suit strap. “Pud Ward, you best treat her right.”

  “Yes ma’am,” he said.

  Tammy knew what the boy was after, she thought, watching them drive away in his p
ickup truck. Football season was nearly over. The Conquistadors had no chance at the playoffs. Tammy knew what Pud Ward was after, but she couldn’t yet tell whether Sister had or aimed to give it to him. The girl was wearing his class ring. She had to fold a piece of paper around the band and wear it on her thumb so it’d fit. Tammy didn’t need to imagine her niece up at the water tower with this boy. She’d been that girl, scooched over to the middle of a sticky vinyl truckseat, fishtailing up the washed-out hill. The sky pinpricked, radio turned up, hot nervous breaths fogging windowglass. A star falling, screaming down toward the earth. Engine cut off, but the switch left on to play The Peach. What romance. A flash of lightning back west, lonely and left behind as those nights Tammy spent parked underneath the water tower herself. How about tonight, come on, just let him feel some. Pull him out from the zipperhole of his blue jeans and he’d lay both hands on the dashboard like he was ready to talk to God. When we going to screw, huh, when? Just beat harder, beat faster, beat till he hushes and wilts and forgets whatever you want him to.

  Tammy thumbed through the mail Pud had brought. Finally, a letter from The Authority. She took off her sunglasses and ripped the envelope.

  They’d rejected her offer to buy the Elberta Rampatorium.

  That night when Janie got home dried tear tracks shimmered like a slug had crawled down the girl’s cheeks. Tammy was drunk on her daddy’s whiskey. The letter from The Authority had destroyed her, but she managed to ask the girl if she was alright.

  “Yeah,” Janie said.

  “Let’s go shoot.”

  “I don’t like that.”

  “Well what the hell do you like Sister?”

  Janie picked up Crusoe and led Tammy into the woods past Hugh and Maybelle’s gravesite. Tammy marveled at the girl’s sure-footedness, which she’d also once possessed. Enough moonlight seeped into the woods that each individual tree could be distinguished. Tammy tried seeing the woods how the girl must, how her momma did, to do what she’d done. The trees were tall, sure, old, pretty. They were still only trees to Tammy.