Black Hammock

by Michael Wiley

  ‘At first, Kay was as attracted to Amon’s new hardness as to his old wrecked self. She reached for him in bed. She followed him into the pine woods. She pushed my crib out into the hallway, closed the door, mounted Amon, and groaned as if she was singing a song.’

  Lexi asked, ‘How do you know this? Why would you want to?’

  ‘He told me,’ I said.

  ‘That’s messed-up,’ she said.

  ‘He was a complicated man,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s just messed-up.’

  ‘So Amon started to push Kay away,’ I said. ‘The mounting, groaning girl wanted to get inside him, he believed – wanted to see, touch, and smell parts of him that he wished to reveal to no one. So he treated her as roughly as he had treated her father, and though they continued to share a bed, they rarely touched each other.’

  Outside, Jimi Hendrix whined his guitar through the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’

  I said, ‘When the sex stopped, Kay went back to drawing pictures of Amon – Amon sleeping, Amon holding me against his sweaty chest, Amon shooting one of his guns into the air, Amon standing by the kiln with red-streaked eyes and soot- and tar-stained arms and cheeks – and she gave each picture to him, as they previously had given their bodies to each other. He took the pictures and, she thought, hid them – an act that would have had its own intimacy and that, while it lacked the pleasure of sex, made her think that, in spite of the torment that was driving him away physically, they still shared a bright place that excluded everyone else. But one morning she saw him in the yard with a charcoal drawing. It showed him standing shirtless in the sunlight with an axe in his hand. Now, in the yard, he looked identical to the drawing except that instead of an axe he held the picture. She watched, wondering if she would see where he was hiding her gifts. Instead, he ripped the picture and put it into the kiln. He loaded pine strips on top of it, added Spanish moss, and covered the pile with soil. He threw dry brush into the bottom oven, poured kerosene on to the brush, and tossed in a lighted match.

  ‘After that,’ I said, ‘Kay made only self-portraits and kept them for herself.’

  ‘Oh,’ Lexi said.

  ‘See?’ I said. ‘Amon was no hero. His meanness was bigger than other men’s meanness. But so was his love. Shortly after I could walk, he tried to teach me skills that few children are capable of learning at a young age and that few parents are interested in having them know. How to sharpen a knife and use it on rope and wood. How to fish and clean out the organs with the scoop of a finger. How to dig trenches and build fences. How to sleep in the open air with only an embankment of earth and a blanket of pine needles to stay warm and keep off the insects. When I turned four, Amon taught me how to shoot a rifle and a pistol. It was as if he was preparing me to survive on my own, not only without the help of others but despite their hostility to me. He seemed to feel a jealous love for me, a love so strong that he feared it had to come to a bad end.’

  ‘You remember this how?’ Lexi asked.

  ‘I remember everything,’ I said.

  ‘You’re making it up,’ she said. ‘Or someone made it up for you.’

  ‘Just go with me,’ I said.

  ‘That depends on where you want to take me,’ she said.

  I said, ‘When a social services worker came to the house shortly after I turned six, Amon panicked. The lady brought a questionnaire that asked about vaccinations and health, schooling, household conditions, and parenting. Amon had good reason to worry, but the lady showed no real disapproval. When she visited my room, she picked up an open pocketknife and a spent shotgun shell from my bed and placed them in Amon’s hand without a word. When she asked why I hadn’t started kindergarten, she quietly wrote down Amon’s answer that he was teaching me all that I needed to know at home. She complimented Kay on her pictures before driving out over the hill.

  ‘But her visit was like pushing Amon down the stairs. He wondered if she would try to take me away from him, and he decided that she would. So that same night, as Kay slept, he stuffed our clothes and the money that remained from his parents’ house behind the passenger seat of the Chevy pickup that Kay’s father had bought in the early seventies. He wrapped a few of his best guns in a plastic sheet and put them in the bed of the truck. He ripped the phone line from the outside wall to slow Kay when she tried to report him—’

  ‘This is when he left?’ Lexi asked.

  ‘The first time,’ I said.

  ‘It happened more than once?’

  ‘Just listen,’ I said. ‘Amon carried me downstairs, still wrapped in my blanket, and put me in the passenger seat. By the time that Kay awoke at the house, we were driving across the Panhandle with the sun shining through the rear window, Amon white-knuckling the steering wheel, and me with my blanket draped around my shoulders. I knew that the world had begun spinning in a new direction during the night.

  ‘Amon’s paranoia rose with each mile that we drove, and so we left the highway and took rural routes through small towns, bypassing cities entirely or else driving into them and circling through the tangles of streets as if doing so would shake our scent.

  ‘The first night, we camped inside the truck, tucking our clean clothes against the doors to make ourselves comfortable. The next day, Amon bought a tarp at a hardware store so that we could sleep in the truck bed. By the end of the third day, the pickup cab smelled of our bodies and breath and of the roadside food that we were eating. It was easy to forget the house on Black Hammock Island – or to see it as a dream and my present situation in the truck with Amon as my only possible reality. I didn’t ask where we were going or why we had left. I knew we were going where we needed to go.

  ‘We zigzagged north and then west toward California. When we needed breaks, Amon drove through small towns until we found playgrounds – the first that I had ever seen. I would go down the slides time after time, or swing on the swing sets, or pull myself to the tops of jungle gyms and sit on the metal bars, while Amon lay on park benches staring at the tree branches or the sky.

  ‘During the long daily drives, Amon told me about meeting Kay and the history of their relationship and my own history with him. And he told me about Vietnam, about the woman he had loved there, and about the sister I would never meet. He told me place names – Saigon, Bien Hoa, Dong Nai, Phu Nhuan, Nha Trang – and the names of people, and asked me to repeat them to him, quizzing me, repeating parts of his story as if it would make me understand who and what I was, where I had come from, and where I was going.

  ‘As we drove from Kansas City to Tulsa, the clouds, which had hung low and brown for the past hundred miles, turned green, and, though rain had fallen and dampened the ground, a wind kicked dust into the air. I asked if we could look for a playground, but Amon just looked up at the sky and accelerated as if the forces that he had feared were following us through the maze of American roads had collected above and would come down on us like a fist. The wind died and the air seemed clenched as we drove out of town. The clouds darkened over the farm fields to the east. Amon rolled down his window and bent low to watch the storm as it moved overhead.

  ‘When a tornado dropped from one of the clouds, Amon let out a short laugh, as if the storm had confirmed all that he’d suspected since the social worker came to our house. If he had accelerated, we could have driven away from the tornado. Instead, he took his foot off the gas and glided to a stop on the road shoulder next to a hayfield. He told me to get out.’

  ‘Stupid,’ Lexi said.

  I said, ‘We walked together into the field, the green hay mashing under our feet. We walked toward the tornado, which darkened as it picked up dirt and debris.

  ‘“Dad?” I said.

  ‘“Shh,” he said, as if he expected the tornado also to speak and he wanted to listen.

  ‘The tornado grew and blackened. Shingles and pieces of plywood and barn siding rose through the funnel and flew out when they reached a certain height, but still the tornado pulled more dirt
from the ground. Wind started to whip around us. Overhead, a set of telephone wires throbbed.

  ‘“Lie down, son,” Amon said.

  ‘“Dad—” I said.

  ‘“Do as I say,” he said.

  ‘We lay together on the rough hay, and the sky seemed to tilt above us.

  ‘“Hold my hand,” he said. I did, and he said, “Listen.”

  ‘Then I heard the tornado. It was a low rumble. Then it was a roar. Then it was a sound like the sky and the ground were tearing at each other. I gripped Amon’s arm and climbed on top of him, clutching his chest, and he was laughing, and his laughter was as terrifying as the storm.’

  ‘How close did it come?’ Lexi asked.

  ‘A hundred feet?’ I said. ‘Or a hundred yards? It came close, but it passed.’

  ‘He was stupid,’ Lexi said.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But how was he to interpret the passing? Had the tornado been a warning that worse would come? Or had it purged Amon of his past, freeing him? Had it meant something else, or had it meant nothing at all? Amon said it must mean something.

  ‘He carried me, still clutching his chest, out of the field, set me on the passenger seat of the pickup, and closed my door. That day, we drove until we left the storm clouds far behind and long after the sun set. When we pulled over and drew our tarp over the truck bed on the bank of the San Gabriel River in Texas, the stars shined hard against the blackness. The next morning, when we awoke still in the dark, Amon pointed to the one constellation that he knew – Orion – not quite my namesake but, with its shield and sword, enough to reassure me that the universe might protect as well as destroy me.

  ‘Over the following days, we drove west into New Mexico, up through Albuquerque, and into Colorado. We drove up the valley of the northern Rio Grande, past the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and with each mile Amon became more sullen and silent. At night, lying in the truck bed under stars that seemed brighter and colder as we drove higher, I clung to him for warmth and comfort, and he clung to me too as if we risked flying apart. But during the days, Amon stopped looking for playgrounds, and he stopped telling stories of the places he had been and the people he had known.

  ‘After crossing the border into Wyoming, just short of Cheyenne, on a strip of rough concrete road that paralleled the Interstate, Amon pulled the pickup on to the shoulder, turned around, and, without a word, began driving south again, back across the border into Colorado, and down toward New Mexico. If I had been older, I might have questioned Amon’s sanity. As it was, I pulled my blanket around myself in the passenger seat and looked forward to the night-time when I would lie in the warmth of his muscular arms.

  ‘Between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, Amon turned the truck on to a road that headed to the north again, but the next day we swung to the west and crossed into Arizona. We dropped to the south, and two days later, sixty miles short of Tucson, we turned west and drove into the desert, which, with its emptiness, terrified me as much as the tornado.’

  Outside in the yard, one of my friends shot a gun. Shot it again and again and again. It popped like a string of firecrackers. Lexi jumped. The speakers in the back of the truck started to play ‘Reptile’ by Nine Inch Nails. The music sounded like ripping metal and machines that ate ripped metal.

  I said, ‘When we reached San Diego, Amon’s mood lifted. Maybe being close to an ocean again after all the miles we had driven gave him a sense of peace. Maybe he was just happy to be at the end of the journey. For a week, we parked at a campground above the beach. In the mornings, while the air was cool with the salt breeze, I played on a rusting slide outside the park reception office and swung on the one swing that still hung from the swing set. In the afternoons, we waded into the cold Pacific Ocean water, shivering and laughing as the waves slapped against our skin and the salt stung our eyes. On our fourth day at the campsite, Amon bought a boogie board for me and a fishing rod for himself, and that evening, with my skin sunburned and scraped raw by the sand, I ate white seabass that Amon had caught in the surf and then cooked over a charcoal grill that he’d rented from the park office.

  ‘For a long time, I blamed myself for what happened next. After all of our days on the road, being stationary made me think of home. The charcoal grill reminded me of the tar kiln, and the comforts of the park made me think of the comforts of Black Hammock. As Amon pulled the tarp over the bed of the pickup that night and a filmy layer of clouds crossed the rising moon, I told him that I missed my mother.

  ‘When he said nothing, I told him again.

  ‘In truth, I couldn’t remember ever having been happier than I’d been that afternoon as the waves lifted me on my Styrofoam board and carried me on to the beach, or that evening as I ate dinner with Amon at a picnic table. But I was six years old and at that age happiness was enough reason to cry, and so the tears came and I cried quietly and, when Amon still said nothing, cried more loudly.

  ‘What did I want? I wanted Amon to pull me into his arms and hold me. If he had done that, my day would have been perfect.

  ‘But instead Amon tore the tarp from us and climbed out of the truck. I sat up and Amon spun on me as if he would climb back in and kill me. In the moonlight, his eyes shined with an anger unlike any I had ever seen – the anger of betrayal, the kind of anger that might lead a man to throw his own child on to a grenade.

  ‘I backed away. I wanted to say I was sorry. I wanted to reverse time and erase my tears and my words about missing my mother. Instead, I said, “I want to go home.”’

  Lexi said, ‘That bastard. He totally brainwashed you.’

  I said, ‘I don’t want you to think of him that way. He was a good man but—’

  ‘He completely fucked with your head,’ she said.

  ‘These were difficult times,’ I said. ‘For the next three days, Amon stayed at the truck when I went to the playground by the reception office or sat on the beach while I swam. He brooded, and the weight that he had shed as we drove into San Diego lowered upon him again.

  ‘When I woke on the eighth morning at the campground, Amon was already out of the truck picking up the clothes that I had left to dry on the hood overnight and gathering the odds and ends that we had accumulated and left outside. Amon picked up the boogie board, snapped it in half, and stuffed it in the garbage barrel at the side of the campsite. He stuffed his fishing rod in too. He carried the rented charcoal grill to the reception office as if it was the only object in Southern California worthy of care. When he got back to the pickup, I was sitting on the passenger seat, my blanket close around my shoulders.

  ‘We drove up through Los Angeles and on to the Pacific Coast Highway. The mountains climbed over rockslides and mud runs outside of my window. The ocean waves pounded against stone cliffs and washed in and out of rock basins outside of Amon’s. When I saw sea lions lying on a spit of sand, with the sea mist sparkling in the air above them, I begged Amon to stop. He accelerated around the next bend. “I want to go home,” I said, and he accelerated again.

  ‘That night, we slept by Limekiln Beach, south of Carmel.’

  Lexi said, ‘None of this really happened. Did it?’

  ‘Shh. Some of it did,’ I said. ‘When the damp and cold woke me in the dark, Amon was crying silently, his tears shining in the moonlight.’

  Lexi asked, ‘How much of it happened?’

  I said, ‘Everything that matters is true.’

  ‘Why should I believe you?’ she asked.

  ‘Because,’ I said, ‘I watched Amon crying, and I was unsure and scared, and so I climbed on top of him and held my face close to his wet cheeks. I wanted to kiss the tears – to take his salt – but instead I touched the skin under one of his eyes with a finger.

  ‘“No,” Amon said, and lifted me off him, setting me on to the cold metal truck bed.

  ‘In the morning, neither of us mentioned the crying, and Amon even seemed cheerful. “You want to go home, son?” he asked.

  ‘I said nothing. I was unsure
what I wanted.

  ‘“That’s fine,” Amon said. “That’s what we’ll do. We’ll take you home.”

  ‘I was only six years old and I not only loved my dad, I had a kind of crush on him, but I knew he was lying.

  ‘He bundled the sleeping tarp and put it in a garbage can, and I climbed into the pickup and wrapped myself in my blanket. Amon spun the tires of the pickup in the gravel and dirt as we pulled from our camping spot back on to the highway.

  ‘Late that morning, we arrived in San Francisco. We cruised through the streets and up and down the hills as if we were tourists. Then we drove through the Presidio and on to the Golden Gate Bridge. Amon slowed until the other cars honked and sped around us. He peered past me, out the passenger-side window, and down to the churning water of the bay. “That’s something, isn’t it?” he said.

  ‘“I’m hungry,” I said.

  ‘“Soon,” he said. “Real soon.”

  ‘When we reached Sausalito, on the other side of the bridge, Amon turned the truck around and took us back over to San Francisco. Then we drove across the city and got on the highway to Oakland. We climbed the ramp on to the Bay Bridge, and Amon again slowed and peered through my window. “That’s more like it,” he said, and when I said nothing, he asked, “Isn’t this more like it?”

  ‘“Yes,” I said, wanting to please him, though I was unsure what it was like or even what it was.

  ‘Amon pulled the pickup to the side, and as cars blew their horns and whipped past, he got out and came around to my door. His eyes were wet but he smiled and said, “You ready to go?”

  ‘He climbed over the metal rail and lifted me after him. We stood with the cold metal behind us and an expanse of open air in front, the concrete bed of the bridge ringing under the tires of the passing cars and then going silent as traffic stopped and people got out and spoke to us – dozens of frightened voices calling over each other. A cold wind blew my hair back and whistled in my ears. A brown gull hung in the air as if gravity was only a thing of the human imagination. The sun glimmered on the water below, and the surface looked as permeable and harmless as light itself, as if an object could pass through and arrive in another realm that was invisible only because of the glare. Amon held my hand, and though only a thin ledge kept me from falling, I felt safe.’