The racks of wine were mostly full. There must have been two hundred bottles stored in bins that tilted forward, keeping the corks wet from the inside out. She sat on the bottom step, leaned her head against the wall, and I sat down behind her. Waiting. She shined her light across the room to an old leather chair that had split. Most of the padding had either been eaten out or rotted away.
“Jack used to come down here and taste his wines. Peter was older than me by about four years. Quiet and not very healthy. Bad asthma. Jack brought him down here and made him rub his feet while he sipped some ancient cabernet or pinot noir. At least that’s how it started. About three glasses in, he’d climb back up the stairs and shut the door, keeping Peter down there for quite a while. I didn’t know what was going on until I was eight, and Jack brought us both down here. I hadn’t even reached puberty yet.”
She shook her head and gritted her teeth, shaking loose the tears. “When he tired of Peter, he turned to me. . . . That went on for about a year—him bringing us both down here together. We never talked about it. Not ever. One night, Jack brought us down here, and while he was . . . with me, Peter got Jack’s pistol and shot himself.” She shook her head. “The police called it an accident. The local community, church, business, everybody else, felt sorry for Jack. The headline read ONE MORE TRAGEDY IN LIFE OF HARDSHIP. Said he’d suffered so much loss in his life.” She sighed. “Some lies run deep.”
She turned and put her hand on my knee. “That was the night I ran across the Zuta . . .”
We climbed out of the basement and walked out through the kitchen to the back porch. The pool was green and covered in scum. Grass grew up through the cracks of the deck, and tiles had fallen off the side above the water level. Tommye looked at the barn where Lil’ Bubba stood hanging his head out over the stall door, looking at us. She put her hand on my shoulder. “Hey, why don’t you check on Bubba? I’ll be along in a minute.”
“You sure?”
She nodded.
I walked across the pasture to the barn where Lil’ Bubba greeted me with slobbery kisses. “Hey, big guy. How you been?” He was groomed, brushed, and his feet were freshly shod. Unc had been taking good care of him.
I hopped into his stall, grabbed the rake, and started mucking out the manure while he nudged me around with his head. I spread some fresh mulch, poured some oats in his bucket along the wall, and cleaned out his self-filling water bowl.
Minutes later, I heard Vicky’s muffler outside the barn. Tommye stepped out of the driver’s seat and leaned against the hood, staring at the house. That’s when the trail of black smoke caught my eye. It climbed out of the kitchen window. It climbed higher, and seconds later it billowed out of the soffits.
Tommye folded her arms, leaned back, and her shoulders arched downward.
“Did you do that?”
She nodded.
“I don’t think your dad’s gonna be too happy about this.”
She laughed. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”
Just then, an explosion rocked the house and blew off the back sliding doors and windows. Glass splintered across the pool deck and shingles were slung through the air like boomerangs. A second explosion occurred somewhere deep within the house and blew out one entire side. Flames appeared, engulfing the back half of the building. Within seconds, the formerly grand South Georgia mansion was one huge fireball.
Tommye stood expressionless, unaffected by the sight or the consequences.
I’d had about enough surprises for one day. I looked up and down the highway. “Don’t you think we ought to get out of here?”
“Why?”
“Well, your dad might—”
She stepped into Vicky, leaned back, and closed her eyes. “It’s not his house.”
Hearing sirens, I cranked the engine, pulled behind the barn, and slipped down an old logging road into the cover of the Zuta. We watched through the trees as the flames climbed higher. The wind carried pieces of ash, which flittered down on us like black pixie dust. A piece landed on Tommye’s thigh. She flicked it off and stared through the trees as the second story collapsed onto the first.
“I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time.”
With the sirens growing closer, I dropped Vicky into 4-wheel drive and we slipped off through the trees. We paralleled the main road, crossed the Buffalo, and drove aimlessly around the Zuta until night fell across South Georgia. By the time I pulled out onto the main dirt road, Tommye was asleep.
I parked beneath the barn, carried her upstairs, and tucked her into bed. As I pulled the covers up around her shoulders, her skin hot to the touch, she placed a palm behind my head, pulled me toward her, and kissed me gently on the forehead.
“I love you, Chase Walker.”
I had not heard that tone before, but my heart told me what it meant. I turned down the AC, closed the door, and walked down the steps outside her room. I walked out of the barn, away from the house, and toward the pasture. Stars lit the night sky, sparkling down. Darkness had fallen, outside and in. I could hold it back no longer. I reached the fence and buried my face in my hands, and somewhere in there I hit my knees.
Minutes later, I felt a hand on my shoulder.
I wiped my eyes. Flies circled a dried cow patty a foot or so away. “Why? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Unc looked up at Tommye’s window. “She wanted to be the one. She knew it’d hit you hard.”
“Well . . . what about doctors? All these new medicines I hear about. Can’t we do something?”
He shook his head. “When I flew out to get her, the doctors said she should have died already. Clinically, they don’t know how she’s still alive. Her body’s immune system can’t fight a sniffle.”
“We can’t just sit here . . . I mean, Unc, think about it. We’re sitting here right now waiting on her to die.”
“Chase, she’s a grown woman. Made her own decisions.” He turned away, wiped his face with his sleeve, and turned his hat around in his hand. “And we got to live with those. The question is not when, but what do we do with what we’ve got left.”
“Well . . . that just sucks.”
“Hey . . . ” Unc’s tone caught me. “That’s a scared girl up there. She needs us. Needs us real bad.”
The Saturday morning sun broke through the window and landed on Tommye’s face, but I was already awake. I don’t think I’d ever gone to sleep. An hour passed, then two. Finally, she blinked and opened her eyes. Neither of us said anything for a while. She reached out from under the covers for my hand. “I should’ve told you.”
I had to look further to find her eyes. “We should’ve done a lot of things.”
She sat up, steadied herself, and said, “You help me to the bathroom?”
I helped her to the sink and squeezed the toothpaste while she held the brush. I put the lid down on the toilet, and she sat down to brush her teeth. When she spit, the primary color was red.
“If my life were still a movie, this is the part that would end up on the cutting room floor.” She looked in the mirror. “We were all just fillins for a long-running soap opera. The actors changed, but the story seldom did. Certainly not the action.”
She stood up and hung her arms around my neck, gathering both her breath and her emotions. She hung there, and for the first time in our complicated life, she said the one thing I, in my selfishness and own blinded pity, had never considered. “You know, you’re not the only one with a hole in your chest. Girls get them too. We just fill them differently.”
She wiped her eyes, held my face in her hands, and tried to smile. “Seeing as how I can’t gain weight no matter how hard I try, I can pretty much eat whatever I want. And right now, I want some chocolate.”
Sometimes I dream that I’m stuck down there under that stump, that black water covering up my head and all the air sucked out of my lungs—my chest about to explode. Minutes pass, but Unc never shows and no headlights turn down the drive. Just before the black hole
pulls me down, I wake up, gasping, sweating, pulling at the headboard, having tied a knot in my sheets. And while I’m draped in a blanket of sweat and fear, I notice that it’s there—my head coming out of the water—that the air tastes sweet. Filling. I lie there, sometimes ’til morning, sucking it in. Gorging. But it’s never as sweet as that first breath out of the water.
I pressed my forehead to Tommye’s, and I could see the water starting to pour in over her head. She was losing her hold.
We walked slowly, arm in arm, across the yard. She stepped lightly, almost hobbling. “Sometimes my feet feel like they’re walking on broken glass.”
Unc, Aunt Lorna, and Sketch sat at the kitchen table. The kid was eating a bowl of cereal and beating Unc in a game of chess. Aunt Lorna stood over the stove, hot pads in her hands. We sat down, and Aunt Lorna pulled a pound cake from the oven.
Unc caught my attention. “Mandy called. Said she’s got to come by this morning.” He glanced at Sketch. “State business.”
I nodded. Behind me, Aunt Lorna stuck ten candles into the top of the pound cake and began carrying it to the table. Unc cleared away the chessboard, and she set the cake in front of Sketch. He looked up at her. She pulled matches from her apron and spoke as she lit each one.
“Since we don’t really know your exact birthday, Unc and I have decided that it’s today, August 1.” She kissed him on the forehead. “Happy Birthday, Buddy.”
He perked up, and his eyes darted from us to the candles.
Unc started, “Happy Birthday to you . . .” and we joined in. “Happy birthday to you . . .”
The candles lit Sketch’s face, and the uncertainty grew. We finished singing and waited for him to blow them out.
I leaned forward and whispered, “You can blow them out now.”
“Make a wish,” Tommye added.
Sketch closed his eyes, inhaled—which spread his chest and shoulders—and then slowly blew across the top of the candles. Smoke rose from each one as he spent his lungs.
Aunt Lorna slipped the knife through the cake, slid out a piece, and placed it on a plate in front of him. The amazing thing wasn’t that he had blown out all the candles with one breath, or the fact that he held Unc’s hand with his; it was the smile that had pasted itself on his face. Every few seconds he would grow conscious of it, force it down, then forget about it—letting it climb back up his cheeks.
It was a great smile.
Chapter 27
In the summer between our junior and senior years, the county fair came to town for two weeks. That meant a windfall for Uncle Willee. He split his time shoeing horses for the wannabe cowboys who had come in for the rodeo, and mucking the stalls before and after the cattle auctions.
It also meant a windfall for me. Growing up on the outskirts of Brunswick, what some might call “the sticks,” I didn’t get out much. Excitement for me was the birth of a new cow. The fair spiked my curiosity and, in one particular case, satisfied it. Completely. Remember that scene in Charlotte’s Web when Templeton goes to the fair at night and eats himself sick? Me, too, but it’d be good to forget it.
Friday night I waxed Vicky, and Tommye and I drove to the fair around dark. I didn’t know it at the time, but Tommye was trying to drown her own demons, so we bought a five-dollar bottle of bootleg. Real rotgut stuff. We’d been listening to Don McLean’s “American Pie” and thought it’d be neat to sing dirges in the dark and toast the world with whiskey or rye.
We rode the carousel, threw baseballs at the bowling pins, shot candles with squirt guns, and ate cotton candy, hot dogs, and nachos, and then stepped on the Ferris wheel. The guy working the wheel kept starting and stopping, letting people on and off and juggling with the contents of my stomach. I couldn’t feel my lips or face, and judging by Tommye’s speech, she couldn’t either. We reached the pinnacle of the wheel, polished off the bottle, and the controller slammed the wheel to a halt.
That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
To Tommye’s wide-eyed amusement, I grabbed the safety bar, braced myself, and vomited in a fantastic arc out over the front, splat-tering six or eight swinging buckets of fairgoers. Mind you, prior to that night, I’d never had a drink in my life. Tommye, a sympathetic vomiter, didn’t have the good sense to grab the railing and keep it out of our bucket or off me. By the time the truth filtered down to the controller, people were screaming, which for some strange reason seemed really funny to Tommye and me. We laughed, vomited some more, and by the time we reached the bottom, our bucket and the ground below us was a mess in need of some diesel fuel and a match.
Somehow we stumbled back behind the tents and passed out. Just as the sun was driving an axe through the center of my head, some-body kicked my foot.
“You two ’bout finished?”
I cracked my eyes, but the sun had moved. It was sitting three inches from my face, burning a hole in my retina. I tried to nod my head, but the first wave of nausea told me I’d better not. I held up a stop-sign hand and whispered, “Please stop the world from spinning.”
Unc wasn’t having any of that. “You two want to live the high life, I can’t do much to stop you. Probably wouldn’t do any good anyway. You’re old enough to make up your own minds.” He looked around and shook his head at the rank smell of us. “But if you can stay up all night acting like a couple of idiots, you can work all day like honest folk. Now get up.”
His tone of voice told us he was only going to say it once.
I stood up and dry-heaved from my toes. It sent me to my knees, my hands landing in horse manure. I looked at them and shook my head.
“I don’t know what you’re shaking your head at,” Unc said. “You been sleeping in it all night. Even got it in your hair.”
He took us to the stalls, handed us a pitchfork and wheelbarrow, and pointed. “Muck ’em. All of ’em. You can take a break when you finish.”
I looked down the long row of stalls. There must have been a hundred of them. That’s when I decided to quit being stupid.
Tommye was still too gone. Her face was crusted over and her hair was matted to her cheek. Unc walked off, she passed out, and I spent seven hours lifting manure out of fresh mulch clippings.
In my head, Don McLean kept asking for some happy news.
Late in the afternoon, I walked out of the barn to check in with my boss. He was shoeing a roping horse, the front foreleg pulled up between his knees while he filed off the tip of the hoof and scraped out the frog. With sweat pouring off his forehead, a cut on his forearm, and dirt smeared over most every square inch of his body, he looked up at me and then looked down again without so much as a word.
I was about to start reciting the apology I’d spent all day memorizing when two guys carrying brown-bagged beers walked by the stall. The first one, a dark-haired guy with a heavy gold watch, looked twice at Unc and then poked his buddy in the shoulder.
“Hey, if it isn’t the murdering thief of Glynn County.”
Unc looked up but didn’t skip a beat. They walked closer and their voices grew, drawing attention.
“Lookee here. If it ain’t the whipping post of Fulton County Penitentiary. Hey everybody, come quick! It’s the cold-blooded clown of Brunswick.”
The fog of last night hung on, rattling inside my head.
“Come on up, folks, step right up.” They knocked his hat off, kicked it between them, and then flattened it atop a rather massive pile of horse droppings. While one fellow ground it into the dirt with his heel, the other played the role of circus announcer. Within a few seconds, a crowd had gathered.
“Step right up, folks. One free punch. No admission. If you lost your shirt, family heirlooms, or last penny in the Zuta First National Robbery, then here is your chance to feel better.”
With that, the guy turned and poured beer across the face of the horse. The alcohol must have stung its eyes, because it spooked. The horse jumped, broke the reigns that had tied it to Unc’s trailer, and kicked. Both feet caught
Unc squarely in the chest. Think of a cannon shot. Flying backwards, he crossed the stall and landed hard against the wall on the other side. When I got to him, blood was coming out the corner of his mouth, at least one rib was poking through his shirt, and he was having trouble breathing.
People were screaming for a doctor—who would later tell us he’d broken seven ribs—but that didn’t stop the guy who hit him. He walked up and jabbed me in the chest.
“Be glad you ain’t his boy. Last one he had got taken, burnt to a crisp, and dumped on the courthouse steps. You don’t want to be blood kin to him.” After he spit in Unc’s face, he walked off in the direction of the cotton candy machine.
With my head pounding, cotton filling every corner of my mouth, and no desire for another drink the rest of my life, I saw for the first time just how much and to what degree the folks around town blamed and hated Unc for every bad thing that had ever happened in Glynn County. Somehow, somewhere, somebody had twisted the truth to the extent that they couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
I’ve often wondered—if Unc really had made off like a bandit, then what in the world was he doing shoeing horses at a county fair? Not to mention the fact that the robbery cost him his career, inheritance, wife, and son. Is it just me, or does none of that make sense? I wanted to ask the guy at the fair that, but I never got the chance, because the helicopter came and airlifted Unc to the hospital, where he spent a couple hours in surgery. It’d be two months before he could walk to the greenhouse and another before he could even think about getting back to work. To make up the difference, I filled in after school taking care of his horses, and Aunt Lorna began working doubles at the truck stop whenever she could get them.
But maybe the thing that has caused me more thought through the years, the thing I can’t seem to reconcile, is that I’ve never seen Unc mad. It’s like all the bad stuff that happened to him poured into one side of his heart and fell out the other, flowing through the hole left by the death of his wife and son.
Chasing Fireflies Page 19