Days when there wasn’t much to do at the dig site, Janie and Jon D. would ride his motorcycle down at The Washout. He ran the sandy hills to keep in football-shape. Janie’s daddy had surprised her with a new fishing pole and a tacklebox of her own containing a starter collection of lures, sinkers and hooks. It was too cold for much to bite. She liked the routine though, liked watching the lake drop and drop by her daddy’s hand. She prowled the widening shoreline for treasures and imagined her daddy turning a knob, mashing some button—Janie had no idea how the dam truly worked—and two big-old gates slowly swinging open, water spewing out like when you pinch the tip of a garden hose. Sometimes she could leave her body at The Washout and float off downriver, chasing bend after bend, past places she’d waded and some where she’d never set foot, out of Elberta County, beyond Bankhead, on and on through places with no name she could speak, the river branching out into deltaland where dolphins broke the silver surface with their smooth blue backs, crooking and craning through root and through rot to a bay, to the Gulf of Mexico, to the whole world waiting.
One afternoon in December Janie and Jon D. pulled into the pinebrake overlooking The Washout and heard voices below the bluffs. Plenty of kids came here, but rarely in winter. They moved close to the ledge. Next to a fire sat Pud Ward with June Renee Bishop—Miss Elberta Peach 1958. The couple had a quilt over their laps and some beer next to them. The fat boy said something and June Renee laughed like a looneybird.
“Let’s just go somewhere else,” Jon D. said.
“No, I don’t care.”
“Lie,” he said. “Come on.”
But Janie refused. As she watched Pud and June Renee begin fooling around, she thought back to a night in his truck, parked at the water tower. He’d cracked the windows and cut the engine. Janie’d schooched close. She knew what she was supposed to do when Pud took his pecker out. Already stiff. She opened the condom Goodnight had given her and rolled it down over his purple head. She beat and she beat then Pud all sudden stopped her. Yanked off the condom and threw it out the window. Janie could tell she hadn’t done something right. Exactly what, the girl still did not know, but it sure looked like June Renee Bishop knew better.
Jon D. nudged Janie, bringing her out of the past. He held a rock the size of a rabbit’s head. He raised his eyebrows then reared back and let loose. The rock fell short but skipped right upside Pud Ward’s cheek. The fat boy hollered and gripped where he’d been hit. June Renee tried to calm him down and see what was the matter. Jon D. yelled, “To hell with you!” and they ran back to the motorcycle. He peeled out, tires fouling the air. He was right. Janie did care. Made her so mad she could hardly stand the thought of herself.
They rode down at Livingstown. Van Crews draped burlap over a dope shipment when they walked inside his shop building. He gave Janie a limp carrot to feed a llama. The creature snatched it and chewed with big blunt teeth then whistled for another. “That’s all,” Janie told it, brushing the llama’s coarse filthy hair with her fingers. Smelled worse than a herd of billy goats, she thought. Tits swoll and fever red. Van had given up making llama products since Big Connie Ward allowed him back among his graces, though he would work without pay till he made up for the missing dope shipment from last summer.
“Hear they let Ricky out,” Van said. “Ought to of left him in there to die. I reckon your uncle can handle him if he dares come back around though.”
Janie’d already heard this news from her daddy. But it hadn’t occurred to her that Ricky Birdsong would ever go anywhere else.
“When we leaving?” Jon D. asked.
“Come good dark,” Van said.
Janie and Jon D. hung around the rice paddy while the last red sunlight fell at a harsh angle across the bottomland.
“How come you to help your daddy sell dope?”
“Because,” Jon D. said. “Who else will?”
A flock of ducks dive-bombed the fields then paddled across the steely water, snapping black bugs off the surface. Stray cats came calling. Janie pulled a green bottle out of the mud and chucked it at the mangy creatures. She looked at Pud Ward’s class ring, which she still wore on her thumb. She pulled the ring off and chucked it in the water too.
* * *
Tammy wanted to film De Soto and his caravan arriving in Elberta before taking a holiday break. Janie had been cast as the Elberta Indian princess De Soto falls in love with. She should of known who her aunt would ask to play the conquistador hisself.
Pud Ward showed up wearing his letterman’s jacket over his De Soto outfit—and Big Connie dressed the same too, just in case he was needed to step in. They were filming down at Dismal Creek. Janie could hardly stand looking at Pud Ward—let alone having him on The Seven. He toted a Japanese sword a veteran had brought back from the war then pawned to Gene Kilgore for dope money. Tammy gave direction then started the camera. Pud lumbered down the creekbank and stepped into the icy-cold water, trying not to flinch as it filled his boots, gazing up at the treetops as if they might yank him skyward.
“Now what is it I do here?” he asked.
“You’re amazed,” Tammy said from behind the camera. “Be amazed!”
“Oh yeah, that’s right.” He swung the sword back and forth a few times then stopped. “Hold on. Let me try it just one more time.”
Janie wasn’t allowed her eye patch. She wore a thigh-length dress made from cowhide. Freezing her ass off. She studied the pages her aunt had written:
DE SOTO sees ELBERTA PRINCESS picking blackberries in woods. She’s bent over. Looks prettier than a deer. DE SOTO calls out. They talk best they can without no common language. He lays a kiss on her head. ELBERTA PRINCESS squeezes them blackberries so they pop in her fist. DE SOTO wants her to leave valley, come with him. ELBERTA PRINCESS kisses DE SOTO and scratches his filthy-old beard. Both cry. END SCENE.
There were no blackberries this time of year, so Tammy gave her niece a handful of winterberries instead. “Alright,” she said, “we need some romance in this thing Sister.” She backed off and began circling. “Go!”
Janie tried hard not to look at the camera as she feigned berry picking among dried weedstalks. She could feel Pud approaching. She hated him. Hated herself. Feelings were hard to keep separate. Love, hate, all of them.
“Hey there!” he hollered.
She stood up and, without meaning to, crushed the berries in her hand. Pud tried to lean in and kiss her anyway. She shoved him, staining his tunic.
“Cut. Cut!” Tammy said.
Pud was smiling. “Ain’t this something else? A real-live movie in Elberta.”
“She never would go with him,” Janie said.
“Who?”
“The princess. She wouldn’t go with him no matter what.”
They reset the scene. Janie held another fistful of berries. This time Pud kissed her. Pop went the berries. Tammy pushed in on the girl’s face. “Cry,” she said. “Cry now.”
But Janie would not.
“Cut!” Tammy hollered. “Take a break.”
Janie cocooned herself in a mule blanket. Pud came over and sat next to her. “You don’t know what she’d do,” he said.
“That’s the point of acting,” Janie told him, tears now welling up behind her eyeballs. “You can make it up however you want.”
* * *
The week before Christmas the Treebornes gathered for a breakfast Maybelle would of cooked in years past. Biscuits with chocolate gravy, bacon, scrambled eggs. Geronimo was perched on the far end of the counter, yowling for something to eat.
While the biscuits baked Wooten took a trip down at The Fencepost. He returned with a copy of the Elberta Times-Journal.
“Lordy be,” Ren said, holding the paper away from hisself like the words might rub off on him if he didn’t. “Come here and see this Tam.”
“Done it to hisself,” Wooten said.
“What is it? I’m fixing a plate for Sherrill before she’s got to—” Tammy scanned the story. “C
ouldn’t live with hisself could he?”
Tammy abandoned breakfast, and the Treebornes loaded up and drove down at The Fencepost. Place was jam-packed. A booth near the register emptied and they sat.
This time around Janie felt some comfort in the rituals of death. She was, she thought, growing into herself. Everyone at The Fencepost had eternally full cups of coffee to hold while they talked. Lucy the waitress was red-faced and sweating as she made her way back and forth across the dining room, delivering plates of butter biscuits on the house. Time itself moved like syrup across an empty plate while Elberta, Alabama, mourned Ricky Birdsong in a tiny restaurant near the river. It was told his brain had shrunk small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. “Small enough it’d fit right here,” Millard Andrews said for anybody who’d listen, poking the hand that’d handled Ricky’s broken body. Janie’s uncle Luther even walked over from the veterans’ hall and joined in. Eyes not so glassy, he ate hash browns covered in ketchup, and six slices of buttered toast. Sherrill was the only one missing, Janie felt.
“I’m going by the old Rampatorium,” Tammy said, getting up from the booth.
“The Authority don’t like folks messing around out there,” Ren warned.
“To hell with The Authority,” she told him.
By now Janie knew a lie when she heard one. She told her daddy she was going to see Jon D. at The Peach Pit, then followed her aunt.
Janie and Jon D. had spied on Sherrill Robinson a few times, so the girl knew which room at the Elberta Motor Lodge the archaeologist was staying at. Room thirty-four. She watched her aunt stop, look every which way, then knock. The door opened. Tammy checked again to see if anyone was watching then stepped inside.
That evening Janie was sitting on the porch with Crusoe when Tammy got home. Striped moths big as hummingbirds clumsily orbited the light. Janie asked where she’d been.
“Thinking about what to do.”
“Was Sherrill helping you?”
Tammy looked sideways at the girl and half-grinned. “She has some.”
“Well, what you going to do?”
Tammy sighed. “I feel sorry,” she said. “Over Ricky. That’s Momma in me I reckon.”
The girl recognized regret same as she did a lie. She’d had none in her life till this last year. Regret, she’d learned, felt much worse than committing the act which birthed it.
“It wasn’t even his idea,” she said.
Tammy didn’t respond. She retrieved her camera, cranked the key then pulled. The reel spun. She pushed toward Janie. The girl stared at a backward reflection of herself—the eye patch, hair just now grown long enough to touch the bottom of her ears—and, deep within the lens, a flickering point of light. The reel clicked, clicked, clicked, then stopped.
This Didn’t Make the Paper Either
1958
The water tower looked like it touched the bottom of the gray winter sky. The tank was painted blue and shaped like a hamburger bun. Ricky Birdsong knew he was walking toward the water tower, his feet were moving underneath him, but the tower seemed to draw no closer. A vehicle blew past and the driver honked. Ricky looked to see if he knew this person. Behind him he could no longer see the house where he’d grown up, where his momma used to make funeral flowers while she wore a housecoat that looked similar to the one Jesus, who was walking next to Ricky now, sometimes wore. Ricky buttoned up his letterman’s jacket. He didn’t fill it way he used to back in school. Jesus wanted to know if he was cold. Ricky told him no and walked a little faster—afraid The Savior might try to change his mind.
They said something was off in his brain. All that football, all them hits. To Ricky Birdsong it wasn’t thataway at all though. Seemed to him like something was off with them from the moment he stepped down from that big silver bus coming back east from Mississippi. It was still August, like the day he’d left, and the ECHS marching band beat a swinging rhythm while the cheerleaders high-kicked and showed teeth. The world looked to Ricky Birdsong just the way it always looked. He didn’t believe the doctors at the university when they said he couldn’t play football anymore, which meant he couldn’t be a student there either unless he paid. Paid with what? Look at me, he thought, standing naked in front of a hospital mirror. He asked the doctors what he was supposed to do.
“Go home son,” they said.
“Millwork maybe,” his former coach told him.
Ricky did go home—and now look. Home had eaten at him. But the Ricky Birdsong inside this body was yet the same Ricky Birdsong who once scored five times in a half against Poarch County, the same Ricky Birdsong who head coaches from eight southern universities came to Elberta, Alabama, all on the same Friday night, to watch him play ball. Him, goddamn it, the same Ricky who helped his momma arrange funeral flowers for Decoration Day, a line of wagons and wheelbarrows down the side of the road, folks standing around the yard and jawing, eating peanut brittle, while he hunted out their orders. If nobody could see past a drooping eyelid, past the way he sometimes talked, or hobbled when his hip hurt, if nobody could see the brain they imagined dark as the valley before the De Soto Dam, the brain those university doctors said had been sloshed up against the inside of his skull one too many times—they had pictures, see here—the brain that to Ricky Birdsong was firing so much it was all he could stand most days just being alive, if they couldn’t see him and understand him, then he’d just have to fucking show them hisself.
Downtown was all done up with Christmas lights and decorations. Love’s Hair, Best Southern Meats, the post office, Gene’s Pawn & Gun, The Fencepost Cafe. Fake snow and ceramic figurines displayed behind windows frosted with glitter and paint. Jesus was not impressed. He’d seen it all before, year in and out. A bitter cold snap had settled into the valley and the streets were vacant. Ricky passed underneath a tinsel-strung banner hanging across the square where Hernando de Soto stood eternal watch. Somebody had placed a red and white Santa hat on the conquistador’s mighty head. Ricky never much believed the stories about De Soto coming down from his pedestal to roam—not even when he was a kid who ought to of believed in such magic. Back in school some boys in his class attempted to steal the statue one night. Drunk as skunks, they didn’t realize how damn heavy the statue was till they’d torn the bumpers off two pickup trucks. The sheriff found the boys passed out in the grass the next morning. He woke them and carried them over at The Fencepost for coffee and butter biscuits, their foolishness punishment enough.
Ricky Birdsong walked into the same little cafe and sat on a stool facing out the window. Orville Knight and a few other big-talkers—all wearing insulated coveralls in varying shades of blue or brown—hunkered in a booth near the kitchen. A radio behind the cracked counter played The Peach. Orville holding court yet one more time about going down into that cave and finding Tammy Treeborne Ragsdale. Previously Orville was most well known for a low-speed crash in which he shit on hisself, but otherwise escaped injury. He’d paused for a moment when Ricky walked through the door, then kept on telling. The men were eating peach cobbler with knobs of melting vanilla ice cream on top.
“Must of been a good hundred-foot drop,” Orville said. He took a bite of cobbler and, chewing, called out, “Lucy honey, freshen everybody’s cup.”
The waitress did, then she brought a cup and the coffeepot to Ricky Birdsong and poured. “You want anything to eat?”
“I don’t believe so,” Ricky said. “Thank you though.”
Lucy smiled. She was a senior with pretty bangs and legs that moved like scissors when she crossed the dining room.
Ricky took a sip of coffee. Jesus was waiting for him on the sidewalk. The few folks who passed by did not realize it was Him standing there. Why would they? Jesus looked no different from the bullshitters sitting in the booth. The coffee warmed Ricky’s innards as he drank and his mind hummed like a throttled lawnmower. Most days the present was all he could comprehend. It’d always been thisaway though. Problem being Ricky lived among folks wrapped up so
completely in the past. His own, their own, pasts of others, them who came before and after, all us, he thought. Living was hard on Ricky Birdsong before the injury. He wanted so much to explain this sensation to someone. Once he’d tried with Lee Malone. They’d walked up at the ruins of the old peach cannery. Buckshot the dog was sniffing underneath a broke-down fruit truck—likely on a rabbit or a fox. “All you can do in life,” Lee said after Ricky finished talking, “is keep open your eyes and be satisfied with yourself.”
Times, the past did wash up over the present and Ricky Birdsong sank down into it way you do De Soto Lake on a hot hot day. This began happening while he sipped coffee at The Fencepost Cafe. All around him a people’s particular past hung on the walls in pictures and jerseys and clipped newspaper articles stuck inside frames. Ricky saw hisself racing down the ballfield, everybody on the bleachers rising to holler, Fly, Ricky, Fly! Tormented him now whenever somebody uttered those three words, which they often did. In the photo, burning headlights shine toward the field to fight the coming darkness. The marching band sways, playing “Fight On, You Conquistadors!” Burnt popcorn and hot dogs, the saltiness of girls on Ricky’s fingers. The night at the lake when he had two at once, or one right after the other. Don’t you forget me when you’re gone off to college Ricky Birdsong, says Inelle Davies, taking his hand and shoving it in her warm soft crotch. Stepping off that big silver bus, he’d looked for her among the crowd gathered to greet his return. Forgot him herself. Sometimes Ricky Birdsong slipped into a place where an entire day passes thisaway, not realizing till he comes to on the floor, or wherever he’s fallen, a knot on his head, blood crusted around his sore nose, the tinny taste of a bit tongue. But not today. Ricky drank coffee and he tried to win this one off, tried to stay in the present where he had something yet to prove.
He’d been out of prison a few weeks now. Coffee there was weak and watery, but prison wasn’t so bad as folks said. Most things in life weren’t, he’d come to believe. Maybe that was the secret to surviving? Prison was forever the present moment. Inside those walls waited no future but the day that dawned outside and whatever past a man possessed did him not a lick of good. Before he was let out Ricky had started making brittle similar to what his daddy used to make when he was still alive. Hollowed out an aluminum can and stuffed it with day-old newspapers or toilet paper and set it on fire. Other prisoners gave him sugar packets, he gave them brittle. His brittle didn’t have nuts like his daddy’s did till some guards caught wind of his venture. They gave him even more sugar packets and a few cups of pecans from a tree beyond the cornfields. Everybody at prison started calling Ricky Birdsong The Candy Man.
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