by Rick Bragg
“They have adventures?” I said. “They beat the bad guys?”
“Yeah,” he said.
One night he came into his mother’s bedroom.
“Tuck me in,” he ordered.
Instead, I grabbed him up by the neck of his shirt and seat of his pants, and threw him across the room.
I did aim him, roughly, at his mother’s king-sized bed.
He was still small enough to throw, and I got a good bit of wind under him on the upswing. He didn’t even have time to scream like a girl before he slid to a belly landing against the giant, poufy, totally unnecessary pillows that always covered the woman’s bed.
His mother stood at the door, a brush in her hair, stunned.
“You’ll throw him into the wall,” she said.
“I can’t throw him that far,” I said.
The boy rolled off the bed and ran out of the room, into therapy I supposed.
The woman drilled me with her eyes.
My back throbbed, but I grinned.
The boy ran back into the room just a few seconds later. He had on a blue plastic spaceman’s helmet, and a cape.
He struck a superhero’s pose, hands on his hips.
“Do it again,” he said.
We named him Captain Zoom.
Every night, before he would even consider going to bed, I had to catapult him into space onto the landing strip of his mother’s bed.
“Throw me,” he would say, after the evening news.
It was a start.
* * *
CHAPTER NINE
Settin’ the World on Fire
JACK ANDREWS CANNOT REMEMBER when he met my father, or how, only that they were friends forever from that forgotten moment on. They were teenagers then, fifteen or sixteen, as the 1940s slid into the 1950s. But even across all that time, Jack remembered what was in my father’s mind, the things he said before they left town in uniform, the only ticket out of town for a West Side boy. Some words vanished, like silver dollars he buried in the yard and forgot where he dug the holes, but some were right where he left them.
“I remember, when we was about fourteen or fifteen, we made us a kite. We had a big ol’ spool of nylon cord, a damn mile of it, and the wind was strong, and we just kept feeding and feeding that line until that kite got so high it was just a speck, plumb out of sight. I remember that we laid down on our backs in the field, to see just how high it would go. And this boy we knew, he come up on us, and Charles whispered to me, ‘No matter what he says, don’t say a word,’ and I didn’t. The boy said, ‘What y’all doin’ settin’ in the field?’ and then he saw the cord in Charles’s hands. ‘What y’all got on the end of that cord?’ But Charles and me just let him wonder. It was killin’ that boy, ’cause we wouldn’t say. And finally Charles said, ‘Why, hell, we’re fishin’.’ And the boy said naw, but we just laid there. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what you fishin’ for?’ And Charles just stared up at the sky. ‘We’re fishin’,’ he said, ‘for the man in the moon.’”
Like so many people here in the foothills of the Appalachians, he is an eloquent man, a survivor from an age of storytellers in a place where such people grow wild. He does not merely tell me he loved my father, he shows me, painting pictures on the dark, like the time my father’s family sent them to search for firewood in a cold spell, when the whole village was turning blue. They found instead a pile of scrap wood and tar shingles. “They’ll burn,” my father reasoned. He piled them into a fireplace, lit them, and they did. But the tar and creosote formed explosive gases that collected in the chimney, and “all of a sudden, there’s big balls of fire shooting out the top of the chimney, into the sky,” Jack said. “I looked at your daddy, and he was a’laughin’ and a’jumpin’ up and down.”
“Look, Jack,” he said, “we’re settin’ the world on fire.”
Jack is ice-pick slim, and his soot-black hair is mostly gone. But he still sports a little pencil-thin mustache, and when he smiles you see the rascal he once was, that they both were. You get the feeling that if he came across one last damsel in his old age, he would still know how to find a railroad track, and tie a knot. He lives by himself in a trailer on a hilltop not far from Billy Measles, and walks slow and careful when he comes to the door now, so careful some people give up and go away. He has an old movie poster above the couch, Hondo, starring John Wayne. “We used to talk about going west, me and Charles, to be cowboys,” he said, smiling. They didn’t want to string wire, rope cattle or chop wood. They wanted to ride across the movies on silver-studded Mexican saddles, shoot pearl-handled revolvers, sign autographs, drive long convertibles with steer horns on the hood, and date platinum-haired starlets two at a time. “We was full of foolishness, it’s a fact,” Jack said. “But man, we built us some dreams.”
His lips trembled then, so he covered his mouth with one bony hand.
“It’s good to live to be so damn old,” he said, “but it’s awful lonesome.”
When they were fifteen they nailed steel taps to their Steinberg shoes so pretty girls could hear them coming, and it never occurred to them that the homely ones could hear them coming, too. But at night they would slide their heels across the sidewalks, and sparks would fly. Jack carried an old guitar slung on his back, and could whup “Lovesick Blues” like it was going out of style. My father played the spoons, laughing out loud, as the girls drew close, hypnotized. “Pick it ag’in, Jack,” he liked to say, and Jack picked it till the frets felt hot in his fingertips.
His glasses are thick as funhouse mirrors now. He said he’d play me a song, but his strings are broken.
I told him not to worry, he could tell me one.
He remembers a time they got drunk, or tried to, on a sample of perfume. They were giving it away at Crow Drug Store, and it was mostly alcohol. They sipped it, and waited.
“You feel anything?” my father asked.
“No. You?” Jack said.
“Reckon it’s poison?” my father asked.
“Could be,” Jack said.
“Be bad, to be found dead,” my father said, “with perfume.”
“Bad,” Jack said.
My father gasped.
“What?” Jack said.
“Look at that damn monkey.”
“What damn monkey?” Jack said.
“That damn monkey, climbing up that damn wall,” he said.
Jack was pretty sure he was lying, but he looked, to make sure.
“Well, there wasn’t no damn monkey there, but that don’t mean Charles didn’t see one.”
People had always told me my father was quiet—even my mother told me that. But he talked to Jack.
“I knew him when he was wild as a hillside rabbit, and I was, too. People tried to bust us up. Police Chief Ross Tipton, some others, they all hated Charles even when he was a boy, ’cause of his people. They’d say, ‘You might be some count, Jack Andrews, if you’d keep better company and quit hanging round with that sorry damn Charles Bragg.’ And then they’d go tell your daddy, ‘Charles, you might be somebody if you’d stop hanging around with that sorry damn Jack Andrews.’ But there wasn’t no bustin’ us up. We was like magnets, you see,” and he banged his fists together hard. “We had a feelin’.”
He remembers fishing in a creek with my father as dark fell and the lightning bugs flickered on, phosphorescent green on the damp air. He saw my father smiling at them.
“What you thinkin’, Charles?”
“I was wonderin’,” my father said, pointing to the lightning bugs, “what they were thinkin’.”
The meanest fist-fighter in the village, pound for pound, was mulling the secret lives of fireflies.
“Well?” my father said.
“What?” Jack said.
“What do you think they’re thinkin’?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said.
“I mean, up yonder there’s that nice, clean place, where all the lights and people are, and they’re down here with us in this brush, where all these old tree
s and limbs and trash have washed up. I mean, why are they here and not up there. They can be anywhere they want to be.”
Jack had to think about that. My father just cast, and waited.
“Well,” Jack said, “maybe they’re here for the same reason we are, because it’s quiet and it’s peaceful. This ain’t no bad place. I mean, we could be up there, too.”
My father just watched them dance a bit longer in the humidity.
My father loved being alive then, Jack said. So what if he quit school in sixth grade, Jack said, and painted himself into a grim corner, as they all did?
“You don’t never quit dreamin’, son,” he said.
He was not from the village and was not part of my father’s circle of friends when he was a little boy, but Jack was from working people, too, from a place on the West Side called Nine Row. His father, John, ran a service station, and his mother, Lydia, raised a houseful of children. “Kids would make their mommas and daddies pass three service stations and almost run out of gas to get to my daddy’s, ’cause he gave free bubble gum,” Jack said. He and my father became friends for life. They dressed the same in stiff, snug Levi’s—“we liked ’em where they fit real tight, and the girls liked ’em, too”—checkered shirts and penny loafers, and when people mistook them for brothers they didn’t correct them, since it was mostly true.
Most of their friends had already vanished, twelve hours at a time, into the mill, but not them. They did not want to die working in the mill, or even live that way, and just figured they were sharp enough to ride any luck that came their way straight out of town. They did sawmill work for hamburger, ice cream and movie money, and dreamed of California, but never got any further west than Birmingham.
The closest they got to a soundstage was the front row at the Princess Theater. “A quarter was as big as a wagon wheel then,” Jack said. “You could go to the movies, buy a bag of popcorn and a soda, and still have a nickel left to go to the old Creamery and get yourself ice cream. What flavor? Why, vanilla. That’s what me and Charles always got.”
The closest they got to a convertible was the time they turned Jap Hill’s little Ford over in Cub Hedgepath’s cornfield. “It didn’t have no motor so we had to push it up the mountain. Well, it didn’t have no brakes, neither. We couldn’t make the curve.”
And the closest they came to a starlet was the time they saw Minnie Pearl live on the town square, that, or the time Jack drove his uncle’s ’40 Ford to a brush arbor meetin’ just off the Cove Road, to watch a lay preacher try to bring several comely young women to the Lord in the glow of a bonfire. Jack and my father sat on the hood to watch till the sweating, angry minister ran them off, shouting, “Y’all need to get you some church,” as Jack frantically tried to herd my white-hot father into the car before he waded into the congregation and gave the minister the left foot of fellowship right in his Sunday pants.
Mostly, they wasted days, and wasted none at all.
“We was over on ol’ Dean Edwards’ mountain. Back then, when they clear-cut a mountain, the government planted pine trees, just a few feet apart, to stop soil erosion. It was a sweet deal, because you got paid for the timber, then twenty years later you cut the pine. But the government planted the pines in a straight line, and you could stand on the ground and there would be a row of trees as far as you could see going one way, and a row as far as you could see going the other way. Your daddy got to lookin’ at it, and he got that look on his face. ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘we can go across this whole mountain and never touch the ground.’”
So they climbed a tree, and started moving, reaching from limb to limb, tree to tree. It was a gritty, nasty, gummy process, and every snapping limb seemed to fling specks of bark in their eyes. It would have been no excitement at all if they had tried it close to the earth, so they climbed as high as they could go and swayed from tree to tree. Jack can’t remember how far they had gone when he lost his hold, and fell.
He grabbed for the limbs as he dropped, the pines snapping, popping in his hands, till he landed on the pine straw with a loud whoompf.
He heard just one cry of “Jack?” and then he heard another body crashing through the limbs as my father threw himself down his tree, and came running.
Jack lay on the ground, bruised but alive.
“I thought you killed your damn self,” my father said, out of breath.
Then he looked down at his pants. The inside of the legs were covered in pine sap, from where he slid down the tree.
“Well, hell, Jack, look what you made me do to my pants,” he said, and stomped off.
But it was too late. Jack had seen.
“We’d follow each other to the jumping-off place, and jump,” Jack said.
He would catch my father, often, just watching clouds.
“What do you see?” he asked him once.
“Looks like a angel, don’t it?” my father said, pointing.
Jack would stare up with him, and ask him, after a while, if he was ready to go.
“Naw, let’s just lay here and see what it changes into next,” my father said.
Another time, as they were wasting time at Germania Springs just listening to the water bubble out of rocks, he saw my father, his eyes closed, begin to grin again.
“What now?” Jack said.
“I was just thinking, what if we lived in the desert.”
“What if we did?” Jack said.
“What if we lived in the desert, and owned this spring?”
“Oh,” Jack said.
“We’d be millionaires,” my father said.
The only time he ever regretted asking my father what was in his mind was the time he had been thinking about God.
“You really believe all that, about going to heaven,” my father asked him, in the vanishing light of another wasted day. They liked to sit in the pitch dark and talk, for the privacy, but to Jack it seemed spooky this time.
“If you’re good, yeah,” Jack said. “You don’t?”
Most people did not dare even raise the possibility, here.
The idea of hell was bad enough, but you could always change your ways and get into heaven, even the greatest sinners believed. There was time to change.
But what if this was all?
And worse, my father said, what if you were born to live in hell on earth?
“Sometimes it seems like there’s somebody in me,” he said.
Jack knew better than to laugh.
“You mean like spirits?”
“I mean,” my father said, “suppose you’ve lived a life, and you was a bad person. If you come back, do you have to pay?”
“That’s not what the Good Book says,” Jack said.
“See, sometimes I think there’s something like that in me,” he told Jack. “It’s like I’ve been here before, and I didn’t do right that time.”
Jack had never seen my father afraid.
He wished they would talk about something else.
“Well,” my father said after a while, “I was just thinking.”
I asked him if he knew when my father took his first drink, when he let that demon into his mouth. But it was impossible to tell, in a house where whiskey sat on a table like salt. He stole sips whenever he wanted, but he did not hunger for it at fifteen, Jack said. “Funny,” he said, “that I don’t remember us drinking that much. I mean, now and then there’d be something, like this man I knew who called us over one time and let us have a drink of white whiskey flavored in peppermint. There was whiskey all around, but we was just boys, then.” He looks a little wistful when he talks about it, the way old, reformed drinkers do, like a married man thinking about majorettes.
THEY DECIDED, finally, to be entrepreneurs, instead of just dreaming about it. They picked something they knew—whiskey—and decided to get rich being bootleggers. It was their first business venture together, a tub whiskey operation in a five-gallon can in a holler outside town. “Take five pounds of sugar, two yeast cakes, and
one can of Blue Ribbon malt syrup. Put it in warm water, and set it someplace warm, where the sun can hit it. We hid it in the honeysuckle,” Jack said. “About seventy-two hours later, you’ve got yourself some home brew.” It was not quality whiskey. “You had to be careful not to get the sediment stirred up, or you’d get a terrible headache.” They made it, but wouldn’t drink it on a bet.
They filled Dr Pepper, Nehi and RC bottles with the stuff, and sold it behind the pool hall.
“Twenty-five cents a bottle,” Jack said, “and they’d drink it up fast.”
He supposed there was some risk of poisoning.
“But it was better than stealing,” Jack said.
One day he and my father walked up to their primitive still—really just a bucket full of mess allowed to sour in the heat—and saw that a possum had fallen in the swill.
“Is it dead?” my father asked.
“Yep,” Jack said.
The possum seemed to be grinning at them.
“What we gonna do?” Jack said.
“Well,” my father said, “we ain’t gonna pour it out.”
They filled their bottles and sacked them up. They were not even driving yet, and already bootlegging. They made their sales in their usual places, and watched as the boys poured it down, as usual. If their customers noticed any unusual flavor, they did not complain. A hog could have drowned in it, and not greatly affected the taste.
Walking home, my father started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” said Jack, who had just been happy no one had keeled over dead.
“I was just wondering,” my father said, “if any of them boys got any hair in their teeth.”
There was nothing to do but win, win over and over again, with so little to lose.
Once, they did odd jobs for a family that had a hundred cats.
“Let’s kidnap one of them cats,” my father said.
They would write a ransom note, and demand whatever a good cat was worth.
But the plan fell through, when they figured what that was.
“For the record, I never killed no cat,” Jack said.
But he wonders, did anyone ever do a better job than they did, of squeezing the last little bit out of being a boy?