Black Hammock

by Michael Wiley

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  We stopped at Sapp’s Florists and drove on to Hazzard Hill Cemetery, which had no hill, no trees either, just a big scorched-grass field that would have been fine for football except for the white stone markers. Carol offered to go with me, but I left her with the others and scuffed across the dead lawn until I found the stones for my grandparents. I pulled half of the daisies and black-eyed Susans from the bouquet and laid them on the grave of my grandfather, deceased December 25, 1968. I said to his stone, ‘If you ever cared for your son, and I understand that you did once, then watch over me now because I’m going to get him what’s coming to him.’ Talking to dead people had never bothered me, and I added an Amen because it couldn’t hurt. Then I laid the rest of the flowers on the grave of my grandmother, deceased also December 25, 1968, and said, ‘You too. Amen.’

  When I went back to Carol and the others, Paul said, ‘That was quick.’

  ‘It was a one-sided conversation,’ I said.

  So Paul let the three German shepherds out of the crates and they ran across the cemetery, biting at each other’s haunches, lifting their legs on the gravestones. Cereb, Stretcher, and Flip had fallen into the category of unrentables at Paul’s security company, which meant they attacked business owners more often than protecting them. Other trainers would have put them down, but Paul took them home and called them family. Sometimes they bit him too, though they also came to him as if his low whistle gave them an electric shock. They were vicious and unpredictable, but Paul towered over them and they knew an Alpha when they saw one. After a while he’d taught them to treat Carol and me with vicious respect, if not affection.

  Now when Stretcher tore a clump of yellow chrysanthemums from a pot that a mourner had set on a grave, Paul said, ‘Come’ – almost too softly to be heard – and the three dogs spun, ran back, and raised their hard eyes to him for praise or punishment.

  ‘Those aren’t animals,’ Robert said. ‘They’re machines.’

  ‘Careful or they’ll eat you,’ Paul said, and he crouched and let Flip lick his cheek.

  While Jimmy, Robert, and Paul checked in at the Econo Lodge east of downtown Waycross, Carol and I drove to the house where my dad had grown up until he was seventeen and my grandparents died and he left town. The house was one of the few remaining in the historic district, and a law firm had converted it into offices some time ago. It was a big wooden place with a wide front porch and a wide second-floor balcony. Antique gas lamps burned on the sides of the front door, though the sun hung high in the afternoon sky. Roses bloomed in the garden between the front porch and the street.

  Carol pulled the truck to the curb and stopped.

  ‘Do you want to go in?’ she asked.

  From my dad’s stories, I knew the pre-conversion layout of the rooms, upstairs and down. I knew the smells – the sugar and fruit of the kitchen, the cigarette smoke in the den where my grandfather paid bills, the rankness of the bathroom where water sometimes backed up through the plumbing. I knew the bedroom upstairs in the back, where my dad slept and where he shelved the books he had bought in the order in which he had read them, as if the line of books was a timeline matching the years of his own life, and where he also kept an empty silver box that his mother had given him on his fifteenth birthday. I knew my grandparents’ bedroom, where they slept in side-by-side beds, and the yellowing Chinese screen that my grandmother set between the foot of her bed and the bedroom door. I knew that a middle step on the stairway to the second floor sagged when one stepped on it. I knew that the banister wiggled at the top where a bracket had come loose. I knew the house as my dad had described it, but while the outside structure still stood and roses still bloomed in the front garden, my grandparents had been dead for many years and even their ghosts would be painted back into the walls or gone altogether.

  ‘Let’s go to the motel,’ I said.

  ‘Are you sure you want to go through with this?’ Carol asked.

  I said, ‘Don’t I seem sure?’

  ‘You seem sad,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not sad.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I guess I’m just lonely,’ I said. ‘I can go into an art gallery and see my mother’s paintings of herself, and even though she’s hundreds of miles away, she seems more real to me than I do. I thought that coming to this house, I would see something of myself. I don’t. This place is nothing to me. I’m nothing to it.’

  ‘That gives you a kind of freedom,’ Carol said.

  ‘Does it?’ I asked.

  Carol had said she would do anything for me. Paul too. They loved me, they said. And Jimmy and Robert owed me. I had lied to save them from the police – as their mom had broken all the rules to save me. Jimmy and Robert had been screwing around up on the Beasley Knob mountain trails, riding their dirt bikes drunk and coked-up, which was a bad idea even on the open road, much less on rocks, ruts, and tire gullies. I was taking photos as they came up Blue Rock Trail and launched into the air over a dirt lip, doing no-footers, fender grabs, and whips, while Jimmy’s wife Diana, who should have been used to this kind of thing, kept calling him a fucking idiot and telling him he was going to break his fucking neck and she didn’t want to be a fucking widow. Finally, he got fucking sick of it, threw his helmet into the trees, brought his dirt bike beside her, and said, ‘Get on.’

  ‘I’m not getting on that bike with you,’ she said. She’d spent a year on the women’s motocross circuit and knew when the drop got bigger than the rise.

  ‘One ride, baby,’ he said.

  She said she wasn’t a fucking baby or a fucking fool either.

  He whispered something to her. I don’t know what it was – he never would tell – but she climbed on the back of his bike with a laugh and threw her head back so her hair fell on her shoulders. He hollered, ‘Fuck, yeah,’ and gave the bike gas. They rode halfway up the path doing a wheelie, dropped to two wheels, accelerated, and shot over the dirt lip.

  Why Jimmy decided to try a no-hander with Diana on the bike behind him, I can’t say.

  Why Robert, who’d been sitting on his bike above the jump, chose that moment to race down the trail, cutting off Jimmy’s landing, I don’t know either.

  But, flying through the air, Jimmy’s bike pitched forward.

  He grabbed at the handlebars.

  He threw his weight backward.

  He did everything an experienced freestyle biker can do to pull out of a crash.

  But Diana launched into the sky over him and the expression on her face was I fucking knew it.

  She landed headfirst on a boulder.

  And that was that.

  When the Blairsville police arrived, Jimmy was cradling Diana’s bloody body in his lap. If I had said what really happened and then the police had done toxicology, Jimmy would have faced manslaughter at the very least, and maybe Robert too. With their prior records, that could have meant fifteen years.

  How much was my made-up story worth to Jimmy and Robert? My story of Diana riding over the dirt lip alone on the dirt bike, the sun glinting on the metal, the sun catching in her eyes, disorienting her, seeming to melt the dirt bike out from under her.

  ‘It was nothing,’ I said, after her funeral.

  ‘It was everything,’ Robert said.

  ‘We’ll do anything for you,’ Jimmy said. ‘We love you like a brother.’

  ‘Anything,’ Robert said.

  I said, ‘Well, now that you mention it.’

  They owed me their lives, and so they asked, ‘When do we go?’

  The truth was, though, I would have lied for them no matter what – would have done anything for them too. Their mom had taken me in during the worst days. When my family thought I was dead and gone, buried in the woods behind their house, Jimmy and Robert treated me like one of their own.

  After we ate dinner at Ranchero’s Fresh Grill, we went to the Econo Lodge, and while Jimmy and Robert got high behind the motel, and Paul flirted wi
th the Dominican woman who was pushing a cart of towels down the breezeway, Carol took my hand and led me into our room. She pulled the shades and said, ‘Get in bed.’

  I stripped to my boxers and climbed under the sheet. But she didn’t come to me, not right away. She went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. I waited, alone, which was part of the game she liked to play when I was feeling sorry for myself and she knew she could make my world gleam, and when she came back out naked, her pale skin shined with water and her wet black hair rained on her neck and shoulders. She said, ‘You should never feel lonely when I’m with you.’

  She was almost pretty. Something wasn’t quite right with her face, something in the eyes and the nose. But I loved that not-quite-right something more than the rest of her. In Atlanta, she acted in training videos and, in good months, TV commercials that aired in the metro area. In the safety video that they showed to new MARTA drivers, she pretended to trip in the bus aisle and break her arm. Wearing a red uniform, she demonstrated how to empty a deep fryer into a grease trap in the video watched by every fry girl and fry boy who worked at the Big Buster Burger restaurants. But when we went out on a date, the people who recognized her knew her as the Whee-Girl from a commercial she did for Norm Thomas Toyota, in which, wearing a black bikini and red high heels, she slid down the windshield of a Camry, squealing, Wheeeeeeee.

  I had met her at a video shoot for Emory University Medical School. They’d called me in because they needed a cadaver – middle-aged male, no evidence of external trauma – and that’s what I did for work – that and supplying live-transplant organs. They called in Carol because they needed an almost-pretty actress who could pretend to be a first-year med student queasy at the sight of a dead middle-aged male.

  Now in the yellow glow of the motel room lamps she came to the bed, pulled back the sheet, and put her hand in my shorts. I reached for her damp skin, but she said, ‘Don’t move.’

  So she pulled off my shorts and mounted me. Her face looked pained and happy, her neck flushing pink. I reached again, and again she said, ‘Don’t.’

  She rose and fell, cupping her breasts in her hands as if she was in a movie, and made a sound that was more engine than human. She closed her eyes. Then she screamed, as she liked to do, a thread of drool stringing between her lips, and collapsed on my chest.

  ‘Can I move now?’ I asked.

  She pulled herself from me and got on to her hands and knees, her ass facing me. ‘Go for it,’ she said.

  Afterward, as we lay in bed with the lights out, she said, ‘Tell me about the place again.’

  The room was hot, even though the air conditioner buzzed. ‘It’s an island, is all,’ I said.

  She said, ‘An island paradise.’

  ‘You know it’s not like that,’ I said.

  ‘It could be,’ she said. ‘I can picture you as a little kid running naked on the sand.’

  ‘It’s not like that,’ I said.

  With her finger, she drew a line down my sweaty chest. ‘It can be. It’ll be whatever we make it.’

  ‘Not this place,’ I said. ‘It’s about as forsaken as you’ll ever see.’

  ‘Then why are we going?’ It was a tired question, with a tired anger. She was sick of being the Whee-Girl and wanted some place better.

  ‘You know why I’m going,’ I said. ‘It’s not a choice.’

  ‘It’s all a choice,’ she said. ‘We can turn back.’

  ‘You can turn back,’ I said. ‘I can’t.’

  She leaned over and kissed my nipple in the dark. ‘Then we’ll make it a paradise.’

  I closed my eyes and tried not to dream the old dream of myself when I was eight years old, hugging my dad’s dead body, swimming in my own hot tears and his hot blood. I had dreamed that dream so many times that it no longer felt like a nightmare – the blood, the tears, the hot night as Tilson carried me out of the house on Black Hammock Island into the dark where I should have died but instead lived. The dream felt like a video of my life, and the fear that I felt was another’s fear – the fear of an actor who was playing me – as much as my own. The hole-like loss that I felt was real and unreal, so familiar that I could look at it as in a mirror and study it from different angles like a wound that existed more in cold reflection than on my own hot skin.

  A knock on the motel room door woke me. The lamp was burning on the night table. Carol was already sitting on the side of the bed, pulling on her pants. She looked at me, one eyebrow raised. ‘You were yelling in your sleep again,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  Another knock on the door. Paul, standing outside in the dark, said, ‘Time to go.’

  ‘What time is it?’ I asked Carol.

  ‘Time to go,’ she said, as if Paul was an oracle and all she could do was repeat after him.

  ‘Should we worry about his power over us?’ I asked.

  ‘Huh?’ she said.

  The night was hot, and sweat slicked my hands and neck as I climbed into the passenger side of Paul’s Taurus. ‘Why do we need to leave in the middle of the night?’ I asked him.

  ‘I was restless,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t sleep.’

  So we drove east out of Waycross, Carol in her Silverado – the German shepherds sleeping in the back – Jimmy in his Tacoma, Robert on his motorcycle. Through the windshield, the night under the back-road tree cover was so dark it seemed a mist hung in the air. We drove with the air conditioning on as if it could ease the heat that rose inside us.

  An hour later, we arrived in the little oceanside city of Brunswick. It was three in the morning, but we crossed the causeway to St Simons Island, parked where the pavement disappeared under a layer of fine white sand, and ran on to the beach. A half-moon floated in the western sky, and the light played on the white of the waves as they broke and foamed and rushed. A hot night-breeze picked up the ocean spray and laid its stinging salt on our skin.

  Carol whooped happily.

  ‘Shut up,’ Robert said, as if he was afraid the neighbors would call the police and then the police would find our load of weapons and explosives, and then what would we do?

  But the rushing water hushed Carol’s voice, sucking the edges off the noise, and all that remained was as chiming as night-birds. So she whooped some more and jumped and did a cartwheel on the sand where it turned hard from a receding wave, and she ran into the ocean with her pants and T-shirt on and dove into the black water. Then we all were tumbling and swimming, licking the salt off our lips as we came up from the Atlantic for a breath of air.

  After some time, we crawled out and lay on the beach, watching the sky as the moon and the stars clocked to the west and the hot breeze dried our salty skin.

  ‘If this is forsaken, I can handle it,’ Carol said.

  When the sun rose, we drove back across the causeway and ate breakfast at a Denny’s, then found a business called Hot Weld Auto and Truck and bought a roll-bar kit, which they promised to install on Carol’s truck by noon, and a set of high-powered flood lights, which they would hook to the roll bar. Jimmy and Paul drove to a Lowe’s and came back with a portable generator – 5,500 running-watts, enough to power the floodlights and anything else we might think of.

  Then Jimmy unstrapped his motorcycle from the bed of his Tacoma, and he and Robert rode off looking for whatever trouble they could find at ten in the morning, and Paul went into the Hot Weld front office, with its oil and metal smells, to pass time with the counterwoman. So Carol and I walked to a picnic table on the side of the building that had morning shade. Traffic hummed on the street, and inside the garage a metal saw sang as the blade touched steel. But the air smelled of the ocean and of trees and flowers that grew near the ocean and of the rivers and muddy swamps that surrounded the city on two sides out of three – smells that reminded me of the island where I’d lived my first eight years and where I’d known the love of my dad, who had died and had taken part of me with him.

  I must have looked sad again, because Car
ol said, ‘We can still turn back. You don’t need to do this.’

  ‘Yeah, I do,’ I said. ‘I’ve always needed to.’

  She watched me for a while.

  ‘But you don’t need to,’ I said. ‘And Paul and Jimmy and Robert. You still can turn around.’

  ‘We’re with you all the way,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  She put a hand on my thigh, and she had the thinnest, strongest fingers. ‘I’ll go wherever you go.’ She laughed. ‘Up to a point.’

  ‘This goes beyond that point,’ I said.

  ‘Let me decide that,’ she said.

  ‘And Paul?’ I asked.

  She said, ‘He’s always up for a bash.’

  But I knew what kind of bash this would be. I had been gone for eighteen years, but Tilson had visited me in Atlanta and had sent messages about my family on Black Hammock Island, and he had always ended by saying, Stay away, boy, stay away. I’d also gotten a single note from our Black Hammock Island neighbor, Lane Charles, an old civil rights fighter and journalist who reminded me of Paul, taking on battles that weren’t his own. He’d once written a book called Rough Justice that said violence is justified in honorable battles. In the note he’d sent me, he had typed six words on a three-by-five card – When are you coming home, child? – and he had sealed the card in an envelope and given the envelope to Tilson, who, he suspected, knew what had become of me. I took those six words also to mean that life on the island was as bad as Tilson said it was and that Lane Charles would stand by me, as he’d stood by others in battles bigger than mine.

  We drove south from Brunswick early in the afternoon, crossed the Georgia–Florida border, and hit the gas, speeding into the rising heat. As we crossed over marshes and winding rivers, thunderclouds started to stack in the western sky as they often did on July afternoons in this part of the South, but no wind blew and the sun shimmered on the pavement of the Interstate. When we saw signs advertising motels, we left the highway and got rooms for Carol, Jimmy, and Robert at a Red Roof Inn.

  I went in with Carol, and I showered and changed into my white dress shirt and my blue suit pants and jacket. I pulled on my socks, put on my black dress shoes, and used a rag to make them shine. I tucked a white handkerchief into the suit pocket.