by Chris Offutt
Salem’s original settlers were so molded by Calvinism that they regarded the natives as either devils or the lost tribe of Israel. I seemed to fall into the first category. As in New York, my accent betrayed me, I had no local references, and my job résumé didn’t impress anyone. I applied for jobs at which I was grossly unqualified, simply to create theater for my subsequent journal entry. When the cash flow between Shadrack and me became lopsided, I concocted a false history and tried for my first professional job. I bought a white shirt from a thrift shop and used black spray paint to make a pair of brown shoes acceptable for an interview. A bar/restaurant hired me as a waiter.
Between art projects Shadrack chased women and read science books, considering himself a lay physicist. My ineptitude with women perplexed him, a phenomenon he viewed with the same curiosity he had for quantum mechanics. As an experiment, he introduced me to private school women who spoke with immobile lips, already worried about lining their future faces with too much expression. Their habitual lockjaw reminded me of a boy back home who’d been bitten by a rabid dog. The kid’s father killed the dog, cut off its head, and mailed it to Frankfort for analysis of the brain. Over the course of a season, the boy received a hundred injections in the belly as cure. I often wondered what the scientists would find in a sample dipped from the windblown cortex of those coastal women.
Shadrack called them trout and regarded their seduction as sport. He appointed himself my fishing tutor, steering me through faceless singles bars murky with cocaine. He deeply envied the blue whale, possessor of a nine-foot lingam it can harden at will. Though I was a lousy pupil, Shadrack never tired of lecturing me. Fishing was easy physics, according to him.
“You must maximize your options with a matrix of lines,” he said. “Trust the bait and forget about subject matter. Remember Newton’s laws of motion. You must behave as a particle wave. Stay away from sandbars, red giants, and octopi. Don’t be afraid to let the trout wander. And remember, Chris, never ever yank your rod.”
Five nights a week we trawled the many neighborhood streams, hauling our lines at closing time. Mine were always empty. My efforts at picking up women were absurd at best—I could never get past the notion of what I was up to, and assumed that the women knew too. The whole courtship dance seemed archaic, silly, and expensive.
To honor Shadrack in the Eastern sense, I went ahead one night with the subatomic anonymous sex. The woman and I were both quite drunk. We walked to her place. She pressed me deep into an easy chair, where my zipper parted like the jaws of life. She climbed aboard and impaled herself, pinning me odd-angled against the chair. Her face strained toward the ceiling, eyes shut, neck veins pulsing. Flush against me, her hips began vibrating like lunch trays in a tremor. Her sweat and spit dripped to my shirt. The chair rapped the windowpane in a frenzied rhythm. Everything hurt and I felt dizzy. Her body finally sagged, quaking and shuddering in a gradual meltdown. Our interface had ended with us more clothed than nude.
She peeled herself away, leaving my lingam hard as basalt, throbbing for release. She moved to the bed. I thought perhaps we were shifting to a more comfortable position, but when I lay beside her, she was crying. I was completely befuddled.
“Don’t look at me,” she said.
“It’s dark anyhow.”
“This isn’t right.”
“I know.”
“You know?” she said.
“It’s not easy to sleep with someone you don’t know.”
“It used to be.”
“That’s a good sign.”
“You’re not mad?” she asked.
“Why should I be mad?”
“The guy last week was mad.”
“I should go.”
She gently pulled me beside her. She wore a small golden ear of corn around her neck, a shibboleth. I moved to reap in silence. As Shadrack would say, our shared electrons produced a brief covalent bond and I snuck away early. Waking up hung over and intertwined with a stranger was worse than the hoosegow.
A few days later I mentioned the sordid mess to Shadrack, who suggested I upgrade my haunts. He’d begun ransacking tourist bars for a wealthy woman to raise a flock of blue-eyed athletic kids. His future wife’s earlobes must be attached to her head. He dated heiresses to old money and new money, the daughters of politicians and industrialists. He never quite learned that many women enjoy brief flings with artistic men. Legs opened like scissors at the chance to aggravate Daddy by introducing a scoundrel to the gene pool. No family wanted one of us in the woodpile, especially fresh-cut hardwood like myself.
Shadrack escorted me to a fancy tavern with a three-piece combo playing jazz in a corner. The musicians and waiters were wearing suits. Shadrack had lent me a tie, but I felt like a fugitive whose story everyone knew. He ordered a mixed drink of a strange hue and smell, saying it helped cover his halitosis, a product of his decaying teeth which chipped away like pearls. He was watching a woman with a perfectly nostriled nose. I suggested he introduce himself.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Every time I look at her, I think of my old girlfriend. That makes me remember the one before her and then I think of my mother. When I think of my mother, I think of the Virgin Mary and then I remember how Joseph never got laid. So maybe I’ll talk to her for Joseph’s sake.”
He strode away, a man no taller than a broomstick, with the sterling posture of a career officer. His natural walk crested with a toe bounce that gained him an extra inch of height. I scanned the gleaming row of bottles behind the bar and ordered a shot of triple sec. The bartender gave me a peculiar look which pleased me; only the truly privileged drank it straight. I ordered another and another.
A few hours passed before I lurched from the bar and began walking home. I woke lying on my back in a softness that reminded me of grass. Sea gulls gave their mournful call. My head hurt. I closed my eyes against what was certainly a dream, and later woke in the same place. Slowly I realized that the lovely blue was genuine sky and I was outside. My clothes were damp with dew. I turned my head and the grass continued to expand across a vast amount of treeless space. A panicked awareness burrowed into me that I had passed out on a rich man’s lawn. I rolled to my knees and swallowed to prevent gagging. My belly felt straight-wired to my brain. A low dirt mound rose in the distance. I was in Salem High’s outfield. I crawled toward the foul line and slept in the shade of a padlocked hot dog stand. I never drank triple sec again.
A few weeks later the mail brought a letter from my brother advising me in no uncertain terms that I was to be best man at his wedding. Twenty-nine years ago, my parents had moved very deep into the hills to drop a litter in private. They discouraged both family branches from visiting, violating the premise of Appalachian culture. Mom and Dad explained that it was for our own sake. I had no history behind my father, no love beyond my mother. As adults, none of us wrote or called. What had begun as a tight-knit cloister now functioned as a barricade. We had become the very people our parents sought to protect us from—distant family members.
I called Dane collect and said I’d thumb down, hoping he would withdraw his request. Instead, he offered to fetch me and I reluctantly agreed, terrified at having him bear witness to my circumstances. The terror turned to rage at my brother for getting married before me. As oldest, it was my right. The anger gave way to a bleak depression as I realized I’d never been to a wedding and didn’t know any married people. Getting married was something full-fledged adults did; I was still struggling through a prolonged adolescence, Columbus lost in the fog. As an only child, though, my namesake had been spared the perils of a brother. Dane probably felt the same way.
Dane and I were very close until my behavior veered to the illegal. Our break came when I stole an electric football game to clean the seeds from a quarter-pound of marijuana. The gentle vibration worked perfectly but Dane didn’t share my pride at ingenuity. He was outraged by the tiny seeds rolling into the end zone.
A few months later the c
ounty sheriff banged at the door with a warrant for Dane’s arrest. Mom cried and Dad’s face paled beneath the strain of incredulity. I watched from the bathroom, fully aware that the wrong name was on the warrant. I marched to the door and gave myself up in what remains my most heroic act to date. Dad was less angry at me than at the foolhardy notion of going to court at seven A.M.
Several years later, the night before I left Kentucky, Dane and I lay talking in our flanking beds. He said that he worried about me, and I asked why.
“You don’t have goals, Chris. You just want to go. You don’t check your progress and you can’t see where you’re heading. If you can’t prove the answer, it’s all messed up. Know what I mean?”
While I contemplated the truth of his words, he began to snore. Dane was a mathematician whose life moved along an advanced formula of direct lines, bracketed exponents, congruent functions, and the ultimate goal of symmetry. He had no room for my random patterns of oblique and gleeful entropy. Dane could prove the world was round without ever leaving his room. I needed wind, a flagship, and open water.
When I asked for time off work to attend the wedding, the manager of the restaurant said not to come back. I greeted Dane with the news that I’d been fired for his wedding, trapping him into complicity with my lifestyle. He couldn’t scold me, as he had in the past. I felt full of myself, like a hand puppet turned inside out.
Shadrack had recently learned the word “hodad” from a crossword puzzle, and we organized a hodad party. He and a friend with a green mohawk painted a beach mural on a wall.
“Are them boys all right?” Dane asked.
“Yup. They’re artists.”
“Ain’t queer, are they?”
“No. They’re friends of mine. It’ll be a great party, Dane.”
“What the heck’s a hodad?”
“A guy who hangs around the beach, pretending to be a surfer.”
“Like you and art.”
I turned up the stereo. Angry voices bellowed off key. Dane plugged in a bluegrass tape and somebody stomped it after ten seconds. Promising to replace it, I introduced Dane to a woman with a pierced nose. Our only window shattered into the street, venting the acrid haze of cannabis. At midnight a second wave of people arrived with another blast of hysteric energy. Cocaine flowed like twin white train rails.
Periodically I checked on my dismayed brother, who wandered my dump with his feed store cap bobbing above the exuberant crowd. He became grimmer and grimmer. The party peaked at three A.M. and people slowly trickled away, the floor squeaking underfoot from spilt beer. Shadrack was busy with the pierced-nose woman beneath the kitchen table.
I offered Dane my bed. He shook his head, holding the smashed bluegrass tape in his big hands. An empty coke vial crunched below his boot. I waited for him to speak so I could condemn his choice. He knew better, as always. The expression on his face reminded me of our father’s contempt, and I got mad.
“You’re too young to get married,” I said.
“Maybe,” he said. “But you’re too old to live like this.”
I went to my room and closed the door. In the morning we began an argument that lasted the next several years. By the time we reached Kentucky, Dane and I had not spoken for over five hundred miles. He reluctantly agreed that I was right—I should have hitchhiked. After Columbus’s third trip across the sea, he was brought home in manacles and chains. I knew how he felt.
We turned onto the dirt road up our hill, and drove along the ridge to our house. Vines on the south wall clung thick as snakes. My sisters, Jeanie and Sue, rushed across the yard, gave us each a kiss, and entered the house with Dane. Mom stepped from the porch and hugged me, rocking like a jonquil in the wind. She escorted me into the kitchen, where Dad stood beside the stove. Mom stayed in the middle, a demilitarized zone.
Dad and I regarded each other like a brace of roosters. I stiffened my shoulders. Seeing a familiar reaction, he relaxed and offered a beer, the family grease for social interaction. We settled into our former bunkers at opposite corners of the kitchen, separated by the stove. After several years, we had returned to the site of countless vicious conflicts which I’d always lost. During the Civil War, Kentucky was notorious for pitting son against father, brother against brother.
Dad and I gulped our beer through a strange new gauze of respect. I’d stayed away, had never asked for money. His hair was white and he had a belly. He was losing his family to the outside world and there was no replacement. We drank another beer, discussing safe topics that neither of us cared about. He slowly realized that I would not rise to his bait, while I saw him as he was-—a man unsure of how to face an adult son. He was stiffly cordial, treating me like an ambassador from an enemy country that had recently signed a treaty. This hill, I realized, belonged irrevocably to Dad. He was Ferdinand ruling Portugal, and he could keep it. I had the New World.
An hour later Mom marshaled the family to the table. Everyone sat in their accustomed seats. For years supper had been nightly and common, with tardiness promptly punished. Now we were disbanding like a riverboat crew confronted by the railroad’s swift competition.
I offered to hold the rings for Dane and he refused.
“Why not?” I said. “Afraid I might pawn them for tux money?”
“Don’t you have it?” he said.
“They’re gray, with a swallowtail,” Jeanie said. “We’re picking them up tomorrow in Lexington. Forty dollars is cheap for a tuxedo.”
“Not cheap enough,” I muttered.
“Some were a hundred dollars,” Sue said. “They were black velvet. But gray goes with pink and that’s what us girls are wearing.”
“You got it or not?” Dane glared at me.
I glanced quickly around the table. Mom stared at her plate. My sisters were smiling at how nice we’d look. Dad chewed the ham bone, its end small and round as a snake’s eye.
“No, Dane,” I said. “I don’t.”
“You could have broke down and got a job.”
“For a tux?”
“For me!” He pushed from the table. “You should see how he lives! Not a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. And he wants to hold my damn rings. One of his girlfriends had a ring in her nose like a root hog.”
“Is that true?” asked Jeanie.
“Yup,” I said. “On the side, though. Not in the middle.”
“Good thing she doesn’t have hay fever,” Dad said.
Jeanie and Sue giggled, while Mom smiled. Dane gripped the chairback so hard the veins on his hands quivered.
“It’s not funny,” he said. “No wonder he doesn’t bring girls home. They do it under the table up there.”
“That wasn’t me, Dane.”
“Your yankee buddy done it.”
“Shad’s like a brother to me.”
“What’s wrong with the one you got?”
“If I weren’t your best man, I’d tell you.”
Dad slammed the ham bone against the table like a gun barrel. The sound echoed in the small room.
“That’ll do, boys.”
Dane left the room, his big feet stomping the pine slat floor. Now that Dad and I enjoyed a cease-fire, I’d attacked my brother. For all my wayward ways, I was still the favored son and Dane was relegated to piloting the Niña, running aground on his own efforts to please the family.
Mom spoke, gentle as rain. “The evening before we got married, your daddy ran his truck through a pasture gate.”
“I’m not a gate.”
“He’s not much of a truck,” Dad said. “Let him be. Lord knows we’ve all let you be.”
The next day everyone but me drove to Lexington for the tuxedos. I went down the hill to my old stone grade school. Every Halloween I’d carried stolen feed corn onto the roof and hauled Dane up by his belt. I would give him half my corn and we’d shower passing cars with the kernels, rattling them like Demeter’s sleet. Other boys from the hill screamed at their brothers like dogs; Dane and I had wai
ted until we were adults to fight. In three months he was going to graduate school on a computer scholarship. Though I’d left first, he no longer needed me. I resented the loss.
I walked home well past dark and ate leftovers alone. The family seemed scared of me, a change from my childhood role. My job then had been to head off trouble by saying something funny, diverting attention. Now I’d become the trouble. I lay on the couch, drank a pint, and went to sleep.
We drove to the church early and changed clothes in a back room. The tux fit a little too tight. My grandmother and Aunt Lou arrived in a flourish of dacron. Cousins appeared, distant uncles and aunts, a hermitic great-uncle with his third wife. My old buddy J.J. roared his pirate hot rod into the lot, windows streaming rock music and marijuana smoke.
The family of the bride was polite and charming, although their Southern Baptist beliefs opposed them to coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, dancing, and me. Ellen’s clan outnumbered us three to one, but we had them buffaloed. The only other male in the wedding party was Dane’s college roommate from Saudi Arabia. Seeing Ahmed, Ellen’s family gasped, fearing that he might just be a black man. Ahmed hung on my arm like a virgin in a strip bar, his accent thick in my ear.
“Chrees. I never been to a Chreestian church before.”
“Hey, everybody,” I bellowed. “This here’s Ahmed! He’s from the Middle East!”
Group tension flitted away like a lynch rope tucked from sight. I left him with J.J. and searched the church for Dane, who was vomiting in the men’s room behind a locked stall. I climbed onto the pristine sink and leaned over the partition.
“You’ll be all right,” I said.
Dane gagged and retched. The stench rose, palpable as river sludge. My foot slid off the sink and I tumbled to the tile, landing spread-eagle on my back. Dane staggered from the stall.
“You split your pants, Chris.”