Treeborne

by Caleb Johnson

  Lucy came over again to refill his cup, catching Ricky looking at a picture of hisself on the wall. “That you up yonder?”

  “So they say.”

  Lucy smiled again. The big-talkers in back bursted into laughter over something. She sat down on the stool next to him. “Must be something having your picture up on a wall.”

  “I reckon so.”

  “Mine won’t never be.”

  Up close the girl smelled like pear and unsmoked cigarettes. Reminded Ricky of Tammy Treeborne when they were in school. He panicked at this memory, as if Lucy might see through his skull like the doctors did with the big clanging machine they slid him into for an hour at a time. Tammy. He’d known what the Crews boy was asking him to do wasn’t right. So why do it? Ricky still needed to answer this question for hisself. He was sick and tired of all the reasons Jesus gave him. Forgiveness, Jesus said. Forgiveness.

  “Listen,” Lucy said, “I don’t want to be the one to do this, but Elmo needs you to leave soon as you can finish that cup alright. It’s on us.”

  Ricky looked over his shoulder at Elmo Rogers, the dark-haired cook, standing in the kitchen window with a cigarette dangling from his purpled lips. He nodded then Elmo nodded back and cracked an egg onto the flattop.

  “I heard you used to be some ball player,” Lucy said. “My boyfriend’s on the Conquistadors now. Eighty-eight, Pruitt.”

  “Fight on,” Ricky said. He took one last sip of coffee, left a nickel by the cup, then walked out the door and continued on across town with Jesus.

  The girl was right—Ricky Birdsong was the most decorated athlete in Elberta County High School history. Birdsongs had always been pure-dee athletes, the men and the women both. Caught the most rabbits when the fields were burnt after harvest. Birdsongs had strong calves and sturdy ankles that made for easy cutting and lunging in tilled dirt. This rabbit hunt the valley’s oldest sport, tracing back to the Elberta Indians. After the hunt ended greasy meat was roasted over fires then cooked in its own gravy with dumplings big as a man’s clenched fist. Ricky’s folks, Ronnie and Debra, they used to light out on runs together just for the fun of it—long before it was fashionable to do such a thing. Debra even ran while she was pregnant with Ricky. Some folks blamed what happened to the boy on this habit. He had, they claimed, a medical predisposition. Folks thought the Birdsongs were loony anyhow. Work on your feet all day then go running? Ronnie was some football player too, and young Ricky shared his daddy’s build and his speed and his predilection for hurling hisself into lesser, slower boys. Headhunter, they called Ronnie Birdsong, who first noticed a smidge of hisself in his only son the day the boy tackled an eighty-pound nanny goat that had wandered into the yard and started chewing on his momma’s funeral flower arrangements. Tackled the goat so hard it stood stupid for the rest of its own days, drool dangling from a puckered lower lip.

  If the rabbit hunt was the valley’s oldest sport then football was its favorite. Ricky Birdsong joined the ECHS varsity squad the year he turned ten. Didn’t look ten though, a mustache kindly like the fuzz on a peach strapped his upper lip. He was the valley’s secret till Roger Manasco wrote a story in the Times that got picked up by several out-of-town papers. Then the whole state knew—before long, beyond its borders. Coaches rolled into the valley in big black vehicles. Tall men, every one, with gravelly voices. They visited for hours while Debra Birdsong sat making funeral flowers. Ronnie fixed a dark and bubbling stew, brittle that made your teeth ache for dessert. Flowers piled up around the coaches as they made desperate pitches for Ricky to play ball at their college one day. Before leaving they told Debra Birdsong where their families held Decoration, making it up if they lacked this tradition of gathering in a cemetery the third Sunday in May to picnic and remember the dead.

  From the top of the hill where the water tower stood Ricky Birdsong could make out Lee Malone’s house, other side of a pasture that sometimes held a herd of rusty red cows. Lee’d visited him in prison just about every week. Time, Ricky thought Lee was going to break him out, especially the day he came with his guitar. Ricky kept imagining the old man reaching into the hole busted in the instrument’s side and whipping out a gun, shooting their way out like in the movies that used to play at the old Rampatorium. Ricky walked underneath the water tower. Scattered all over the ground were busted beer bottles, condoms, candy bar wrappers, mashed cigarettes. Sometimes you might find a watch here, a class ring, loose change, a broken pair of sunglasses. Often somebody’s bunched-drawers or a soiled sock slung out the window of a vehicle before it took off downhill to meet curfew. Ricky Birdsong hisself had come here many nights back in school. Sometimes with Freeda Hooper, a girl from Livingstown who let Ricky call her his girlfriend for a spell. Him twelve, her sixteen. Freeda liked spreading wide her legs and holding Ricky’s face down between them. He didn’t do anything, just kept his head still while Freeda rolled her hips and sighed like she was bored. Ricky was caught in this position at the pasture’s edge one night and carried off by the Conquistadors, who whistled and whipped him with wet towels, then tied him to a weight-lifting rack for three hours and forced him to drink a bottle of booze on the fifty-yard line as the sun appeared like a bloody eye opening on an ashen face.

  The ladder going up the water tower was cold to the touch. Ricky began climbing. Each time he grabbed a rung blue-green paint chipped off and stuck to his palm. Jesus had already zipped up top. It started sprinkling rain. The higher Ricky climbed, the stronger the wind blew. He slipped, caught hisself then snaked an arm through the ladder from the backside. He’d never had the guts to ask Tammy Treeborne up here, though he’d always watched for her. She never dated much back in school. By junior year the not-secret of Ricky wanting her became like a sick animal lying out in the open. He couldn’t put it down. He was terrified of heights. A fear which would of spelled doom for any other boy in the valley, climbing the water tower a rite of passage, like swimming butt-naked across De Soto Lake and back, or sneaking into Hernando’s Hideaway to watch Holly the Oyster Girl pop out of her shell and dance topless with a papier-mâché pearl big as a basketball in her hands. Ricky always hated when the Conquistadors would get drunk and fool around at Chief Coosa’s Overlook, wrestling, chucking rocks off the bluff and waiting to hear them clatter down into the abyss. He never even liked standing on the top row of the ballfield bleachers and looking off the backside.

  At the top of the water tower Ricky gripped the railing. His knees buckled as he forced hisself to look out. Tire marks mashed into the pasture mazed in and out of one another in loops and curls, some leading astray then doubling back toward the two-track road. Ricky could see all of downtown, past it big houses spaced along the Elberta’s eroding bank among now-bare oaks and poplars reaching into the winter sky hung low. Ricky reached too, as if he could grab the sky and break off a piece. The sky went on oblivious to him and spat more cold rain. Jesus laughed and leaned against the tank. He reminded Ricky what the sheriff’d said the day he brought him home from prison: Leave son. But Birdsongs of some incarnation had been living in this valley since before De Soto. If the line were to end it wouldn’t be because it’d taken root some other place. It’d be because this valley, in all its beautiful brutality, swallowed up the end of that line like a snake caught ahold of its winding tail.

  Sometimes back in school Ricky would see Lee Malone standing on his screened-in back porch looking up at the water tower. Ricky liked knowing Lee was down yonder watching. Nobody credited Lee, but he was the one who came up with Fly, Ricky, Fly! He was maybe Ricky’s biggest fan. His friend. Kindly a daddy too time Ronnie Birdsong drowned in De Soto Lake the year before Ricky graduated from ECHS. Lee loved the game of football, though he never had the chance to play it. After Ricky came home from Mississippi, Lee made sure the bullshitters and big-talkers and used-to-bes who gathered for butter biscuits and coffee at The Fencepost quit all their teasing once it’d gone on long enough. Alright now, he’d say—and that was it. Usually they l
istened to Lee Malone, though Ricky couldn’t figure out how come, since Lee was a nigger. All he knew was that Lee had been good to him. Ren Treeborne too, Jesus reminded the boy. Another Conquistador. And Ren’s brother Luther, who’d once told Ricky he ought to join up with the service. It’s kindly like being on a ball team, he’d claimed. Ricky and Luther had played together one season before Luther graduated and enlisted hisself. Ricky had seen Luther climb the water tower too, doped up and shirtless, wildly holding a crushed beer can in one hand. He followed Luther’s advice. But soon as the service saw his hospital records they turned him down. Not even The Authority would take him now. Ren said they couldn’t have an ex-con working at the dam. It was a security issue. He promised to help Ricky get more yards to mow though. Winter, he reminded the boy, wasn’t long in Elberta.

  Ricky Birdsong and Jesus watched the light snuffed out of the sky. It grew cold up top the water tower. Ricky tasted metal when an owl hooted four long times. He willed a light to come on inside Lee’s house. If it would, Ricky told Jesus, then he’d climb down the ladder. But a light would not come on. A lone vehicle passed along the road and up into the deep-dark hills west of downtown. Ricky crawled to the edge of the grating and peered down. The ladder rungs were slicked over with a fine layer of ice.

  He walked laps around the tank. His hip began hurting and he felt other joints cementing together too. He did jumping jacks till the grating shook as if it’d come loose. He stopped then. Jesus pointed out a line of welded-over holes going up the tank. Fly, Ricky, Fly. An out-of-focus moon appeared from behind a weeping cloudmass. Ricky put his ear up against the tank. Sounded like the ocean was on the other side. Now the Gulf Coast was one place he’d considered going to when he got out of prison. Ren even said he’d drive him there and help him get set up if that’s what he really wanted to do. Truth, it wasn’t. In the end nowhere else would be Elberta, Alabama. Even Ricky Birdsong knew that.

  He grabbed the poorly welded-over holes with his fingertips. They cut as he pulled hisself up. The tank flattened out the higher he climbed. He inched along like a slug. Jesus up there waiting. At the very tip-top was a flat spot just big enough for Ricky’s tennis shoes to fit. The wind pushed back his thinning hair, which danced atop his great-big skull like weeds in a river’s current. Ricky Birdsong whooped, held out his arms for balance. Jesus applauded. Had the water tower been shaped like a peach, way the town would reimagine it a decade later to attract more tourists, Ricky Birdsong never would of been able to climb to its top. Maybe he would of sat there on the grating till morning, till the sun melted the ice off the ladder rungs, then climbed back down. But this was only a water tower, this was only the present, and Ricky Birdsong did stand high up yonder, whooping, arms held out as if he was ready to take flight, and he would stand nowhere else on this earth again.

  Blood’s All You Got Left

  1959

  Excavation was a lot of squatting, a lot of being down on your hands and knees in dirt. For Christmas Sherrill Robinson had given Janie her own set of picks and brushes. Every little piece of bone they uncovered on The Seven had to be marked and tagged and organized. Janie loved the detail in this work. She began thinking maybe she’d become an archaeologist when she grew up. Some of the bones had already been sent to a lab in Tuscaloosa. Janie and Jon D. had all kinds of stories for what the results might tell. Neither believed the bones were, like Sherrill claimed, only about 150 years old.

  When spring neared, and with it, Conquistadors practice, Jon D. couldn’t come over as much. Selfishly, Janie’d hoped he wouldn’t play football this season, though she enjoyed spending time alone with Sherrill. Sherrill was the kind of adult that made you forget her age. She’d told Janie she could ask her anything, so the girl often did.

  “You ever seen a real dead person, or just bones?”

  “Once I saw somebody drown in Florida,” Sherrill said. “I remember they dragged him up on the beach, and his belly was poking out something awful and his face had turned this light light purple grape color.”

  “What was you doing there?”

  “Work,” she said. “Had a dig near Ocala.”

  “De Soto?”

  “No Sister. There’s more to study than Hernando de Soto. That’s the problem with somewhere like this getting so fixated. It narrows down your perspective. And don’t you repeat this, but your aunt isn’t helping with this movie of hers.”

  The other day Tammy’d hired Jon D. Crews and fourteen other Conquistadors to play parts in De Soto’s caravan. Janie bloodied the boys with old paint from a can in her granddaddy’s studio before they battled Elberta Indians—played by Livingstown boys—out in the pasture where Janie and her daddy still lived in the camper. Pud Ward relished being the Spanish leader. The scene soon went from pretend to real violence. Tammy kept filming, and afterward nobody said a word about what had conspired.

  More often Tammy wanted to capture nature. Janie led her aunt on walks across The Seven. Sometimes Sherrill joined, holding Tammy’s hand when she thought the girl wasn’t looking. But Janie saw. One night, when her uncle Wooten was out drinking, the girl saw Sherrill sneak from the couch, where she’d started sometimes sleeping, into Tammy’s bedroom. There wasn’t much to witness on these walks; the land still dormant. One time the women came across four gun-frightened deer in a bottomland though. Another time Tammy used an entire reel on icy-green rapids at Dismal Creek. Janie thought The Seven fascinating as anybody, but she wondered who else on earth would ever watch this.

  Wooten had finished the concession stand and was working on the top-floor projection room. The screen had been framed, but the big square panels Tammy’d bought still needed to be painted then fitted. There was time yet. Meanwhile she needed to finish the movie.

  One afternoon she filmed at The Peach Pit. Lee Malone permitted Raul and Pee-Po to forgo their work and watch. Even joined them, flipping over a plastic bucket and taking a seat. Lee couldn’t make much sense of what was happening in this scene. Janie was acting in it though. Dressed like an Elberta Indian, looked like. The girl appeared uncertain as her aunt circled with a camera. Lee admired Tammy for figuring out the next phase of her life. He still hadn’t figured out how he’d live his own.

  During a break, he went to say hello to Janie. She sat in the grass, scratching Buckshot, who’d finally returned home of his own volition, on the rump. Sometimes it startled Lee how much the girl resembled her grandmomma, even with that dark hair Janie had. The resemblance was not limited to her looks, but how the girl moved about the world.

  “How you doing Sister?”

  “Good.”

  “Having fun?”

  “Not really,” she said. “Wish I was on The Seven with Sherrill.”

  Took Lee a moment to put this name to a face. “Oh,” he said.

  “I’m going to be an archaeologist too one day.”

  “Well I’m sure you’ll make a fine one,” Lee said. “And if it don’t work out then you can just run this place for me.”

  When filming ended for the day Pud Ward offered Janie a ride home. She was tired, and feeling sorry for no reason, and she wanted to go with him, so she said yes. He cut through town then turned off the road and headed up through the pasture toward the water tower. Janie said nothing, leaning against the passenger-side door. She felt sickly excited when, at the top of the hill, Pud stopped and shut off the engine. Yellow police tape was still strung up around the tower’s base from Ricky’s fall.

  “Creepy up here now ain’t it?”

  “Will June Renee not wonder where you are?”

  “Ah,” Pud said. “Janie, I’m sorry.”

  She waited a moment to answer then said, “I still ain’t screwing you.”

  Pud laughed, and they were able to talk more freely. Reminded Janie of when he visited her at the sheriff’s office. She’d missed him. She said it: “I missed you.” Pud said he missed her too. “I lost your class ring,” she confessed. He told her it didn’t matter, he’d get
a new one. All at once Janie Treeborne imagined a life: Big Pud Ward running his daddy’s used-car lots while she raised a chubby baby that had her looks and his good nature. The speed with which the girl’s mind conjured this image felt disorienting and thrilling. She ached with wanting from her toenails to her scalp. Wanting Pud to touch her, hold her, do something.

  “I ought to get you home,” he said.

  * * *

  In March a reporter from the Times-Journal stopped by The Seven asking when Tammy aimed to show her Hernando de Soto movie. The whole town, the reporter said, wanted to know. “End of the month,” she told him.

  Janie didn’t see how this would happen. The drive-in screen and projection room were still half-finished. But Tammy had found a projector in a flyspeck town near the Mississippi border. That next weekend Janie loaded up and rode with her aunt to pick it up. A chubby man wearing wire-rimmed glasses rolled the projector out on a cart, and helped load and secure it in back of the county-owned pickup truck Tammy still drove. The man looked sad to see the projector go. “Nobody watches movies anymore,” he said. Tammy cranked the engine and they made the town square, where a limestone Confederate veteran stood among grass bordered by begonias, then headed back toward Elberta.