F*ckface

by Leah Hampton

  Howard’s daddy was a Harlan man. Hassel Fields came from about the same conditions I had. He raised his children off the profits from his corner IGA back when coal money still streamed through town. By the time Hassel closed his store and retired, Harlan County was in decline, and his children had packed off to big-town college and condo. Hassel timed everything just right, and Howard couldn’t face him winding down. If his daddy lost his power, then Howard would have to reconcile with that, and with me. So he either tuned me out or told me some way we were alike, my father-in-law and I. And so the man kept driving.

  I kicked off so much about Hassel being a public threat that Howard’s sister wouldn’t talk to me anymore, either. Not after she told me she wouldn’t let her youngest ride in the car with her own father anymore. I’d already had enough of Violet, with her organic garden and her high shoulders, always acting like I was a superstition she no longer believed. My sister-in-law taught macroeconomics at some hippie school outside Lexington. I didn’t give a shit.

  “You won’t let Samuel ride with his granddaddy?” I said to her.

  The boy was in her lap chasing birds on her phone. He was three, all soft down, with little pudgy arms like stacks of fresh marshmallows.

  “No,” she said. “It is a worry.”

  We were in her kitchen, visiting on a Saturday. There’s a big interstate between Charleston and Lexington, so the trip takes half as long as it does to Harlan. Howard loves kids; he was always missing his niece and nephews. We visited my sister-in-law more than Hassel, more than my people in Mingo. He hadn’t wanted to move to West Virginia, but work was work.

  “I’ll find a way to talk around it so Dad doesn’t realize.” She smoothed her boy’s downy hair, looked back at me. “We have to love him through this, you know? It’s so difficult, I think, to lose one’s autonomy. Driving is all he’s got left.”

  Violet went on, but I quit listening halfway through that mess.

  “So it’s fine if old Hassel flies around town in his little boxy car and kills somebody’s baby,” I said, “just as long as it’s not your baby.”

  And then I crinkled my nose and nodded how the pretty girls in middle school used to when they picked on the kids from over my way. I learned her kind’s code a long time ago, and I used it on her now. She knew why.

  My sister-in-law’s eyes got big, and behind me Howard said, “Tina.”

  I held off saying more. Violet knew what it meant to hold tight to her own child right in front of me. She went quiet. Now she doesn’t talk to me, and Howard shuts down when I try to say Hassel Fields is a danger. No matter; I hadn’t gone on the last few weekend visits to Lexington anyhow. I’d been busy lately hollowing out.

  * * *

  We crossed into Harlan County after an hour of listening to the A/C exhale between us. I’d only made Howard stop once, somewhere near Pikeville, so I could snap a shot with my little camera. I spied some kudzu choking a church sign that read “You Shall Know Them By Their Fruit—Hardburly First Baptist.” It spoke to me, that verse amongst the coiling leaves, so I told him to pull over. I couldn’t explain my fascination with the sign, so I said I was taking pictures of roadkill. Nearby, a squished whistlepig splayed in the sun, teats up, fur glued to blacktop. She reeked of heat and rotted earth. I aimed and clicked at her, and at the kudzu, back and forth, while Howard waited in the pickup’s cooled cabin.

  As we closed the distance to the low-slung hospital where his daddy was sleeping off the morphine, Howard asked me about yeast infections.

  “How often do you get them?”

  “I mean, maybe once a year? Not as much as some.”

  “Is it a chemistry thing?” he said. He crunched his temples into crow’s feet. “Like a—like I don’t know, a sign of something not being balanced in there?” He nodded at my crotch.

  I tightened my lips to a white line. “That is not the reason it happened,” I said.

  “I didn’t say it was,” said Howard. “I’m saying, is it the other way around?”

  He took his gum out at the traffic light, folded it neatly into its old wrapper, and tucked the wad in the cupholder. “The stress, those antidepressants you take. Maybe all this effort to get pregnant is—I don’t know. Upsetting the balance. Maybe you need to let go of things a little.”

  “Howard,” I said. “It was just an itchy cooch. It’s July. It’s hot.”

  He pulled into the hospital lot and sighed, patted his open palms against the wheel three times. “Well, let’s get on in there. Find out what the old man’s done to himself.”

  Harlan Hospital was modern and beige, with plain angles and no design. Duke Power or US Steel probably built it out of guilt, with a sack of cash thrown over the company’s shoulder on their way out of town. I marked the Methodist church across the street, brick and proud. It had the confident architectural details of the WPA days. The two buildings stared at each other.

  Harlan was sturdy. I thought so on every visit. Harlan County had rock under it my Mingo towns couldn’t muster. And dovetail corners and craftsman bungalows Lexington and Charleston had forgotten or remodeled.

  I hated Harlan. Every time we came here, I wanted to stay. The land felt impenetrable and pristine. I wanted to swim in the black Kentucky dirt to prove it wrong, take my revenge on it. Mingo was barren, and Charleston was strange. Somehow I decided the blame lay here.

  I flopped out of the cab and swung my canvas purse strap crossways over my chest, then fished the tossaway camera out of the satchel. I snapped a picture of a rank of ambulances parked in a line in the distance, then snapped a shot of the WPA church, then the dull, square mouth of glass at the hospital’s entrance. I wound the nubbly black wheel and pulled the film forward with my thumb. It was a familiar motion, and my tendon tightened like a child’s.

  I held the camera as we entered the gray glass doors. My sister-in-law was waiting for us. She grabbed her brother’s bicep and leaned into him, spoke my name. Howard said, “All right now, Violet,” and stroked her back in a circle. She turned to lead us to their father.

  The hallways were cool and bland, a maze of sameness. The medicinal hush deepened as we neared Hassel’s room. Even wounded, the old man still had the whole ward spooked. My sister-in-law eased up to his door and called softly. I kept back, third in line. Howard and his sister wavered, stepped in slow. I peeked in just once, around Howard’s left side, to take in the damage.

  Hassel was a heap, and weak. I caught sight of him as a thick-armed mound of fabric and tubes at the center of the room, his face the only stark notion in the sterile tableau. At least two white sheets were tossed over his brawn. He was propped up, glaring. A crimson welt from the airbag’s punch bloomed across his left jowl. He nodded at me.

  “Tina,” he said.

  He put weight into my name. I tilted up the tossaway in my slack hand and shot a surreptitious portrait of Hassel. I used my thigh to muffle the click.

  I receded to the waiting area while Howard and his sister sank further in. Outside Hassel’s room, four seats faced each other on a neat trapezoid of dark-blue carpet. Their cushions smelled like bleach and cheap shoes, and a scatter of magazines littered the table between them. My sister-in-law had only brought her two eldest: her girl Mabel, who was all wiry limbs and a nest of hair, and teenaged Eric, who kept silent. He slouched sideways, back to his grandfather’s door, moonfaced and pubescent above a lighted screen. No sign of little Samuel with those marshmallow arms.

  I sat across from Eric, facing Hassel’s room, and felt glad I wouldn’t have to babysit these two much. Their mother bustled in and out across the narrow hall while Howard lingered inside the room. His voice and his father’s mingled into a drone. Little Mabel sat beside me reading a puzzle book. She giggled now and then about The Box while I flipped through last year’s tabloids and tried to keep the resinous chair arms from pinching my skin.

  We called Hassel’s car The Box because it was a cheap white cube of a thing, mostly plastic. He had o
nce captained only stalwart chassis with steel dashboards. The Box was all he could afford after so many crashes, all the State Farm agent would insure. The Box had been Hassel’s last shot. Now it was crumpled up, totaled, impounded at a junk lot out near the county line. Looked like Howard’s daddy wasn’t a driving man anymore; I’d been corroborated.

  Howard emerged from his conversation with Hassel with a glower. My sister-in-law stood in the corridor and debriefed him in a low, even whisper while I sat with her kids. The cops had taken Hassel’s license at the scene; he had a court date, misdemeanors to contend. He’d jacked into some attorney’s spendy coupe, so that was that.

  Mabel plopped off her chair and skipped up to me. She turned over the tossaway camera in my lap, ran her finger across its edge, and put a hand on my knee. “Aunt Tina?”

  I was wearing thick jeans, and I felt the warmth of her palm through the dark cloth. She tucked her little elbow into her side and swayed, head cocked. She was going on six.

  “Are you and Uncle Howard still having a baby?”

  I told the child no and ruffled my magazine. I pulled the pages to my chest in a wad and dropped my gaze. My sister-in-law flitted up while I stared at the linoleum. A vague, wax-buffed reflection of Howard swung toward Hassel’s door, then back toward me.

  “Mabel, honey,” she said. She knelt down to her girl and reached out to pat the older boy’s sneaker. “Why don’t we let Auntie have some time with Papaw?” Then she shooed both kids off to the Arby’s for lunch.

  Howard cleared his throat twice. I looked up after the children were gone, just as he lowered his head and said, “Well, I’m going to the junkyard to have a gander at that Box.”

  I sat still, observing, as a scene change played out for me with theatrical rhythm. As soon as everyone had limped down the hall stage left, the PT rounded the corner opposite and glided up to Hassel’s open door like some kind of dancer.

  “Mr. Fields?” The PT tapped on the door and nudged it open. “I’m Walter. Your physical therapist.”

  Walter looked like he belonged on a bottle of bathroom cleaner. He was shaved bald, green eyed, and his scrubs hung sharp over the tightest set of muscles I’d ever seen. He slipped into Hassel’s room, and I straightened my back, leaned forward to hear.

  The PT went through a litany of questions and coaxed my father-in-law out into the hallway. Hassel emerged, rumpled and pained, gripping an aluminum walker. I stood as they came out and made to join them.

  “Hassel, you all right?” I said, and eased up alongside.

  The old man huffed, and gripped the walker’s side handles tighter.

  “Tolerable,” he said. He tilted his head at me and said to Walter, “My daughter-in-law. Come down from Mingo.”

  He didn’t look at either of us; he just started shuffling off like he had errands. I wondered whether he knew I missed Mingo County or had just forgotten where his son and I lived now.

  Walter nodded brightly and said, “I want to watch him walk? Check his range of motion, study his gait. You can tag along; tell me if you notice anything unusual. You know his movements better than I do.”

  I walked the hallway with them. Walter asked Hassel questions. He kept his hands close, arced and tense, waiting to catch the old man if he buckled. Hassel would have none of it. He behaved as if the PT wasn’t there and willed himself forward, refusing Walter’s touch. Somewhere in the slow route they took together, Walter decided I was Hassel’s best chance at recovery. Whenever the old man blamed his hearing and wouldn’t heed, Walter spoke to me.

  “He’s got to practice using a walker,” he said. “See how he’s putting weight on his elbows?”

  Just then Hassel stopped short and began to wobble. Walter’s biceps flexed as he turned from me and swooped in to steady his patient. Hassel’s body righted under Walter’s power, and he pressed on. The old man didn’t know it wasn’t his own strength; that’s how easy Walter held him as they inched down the hall’s perimeter. Hassel’s left arm brushed the pale pink walls, and the walker’s rubber feet squeaked and scuffed the tile. The old man kept flapping his hand to be released, smacking the walker forward while his flanks rattled under his gown. Eventually Walter relented, left the old man to his sloppy progress, and chatted to me.

  “So you’re from Mingo County?” he said.

  “Yeah, but we live in Charleston now. My husband’s from here.”

  “Well, tell me about it,” he said. “I got a cousin who used to work up there a long time ago.”

  Hassel continued on his path away from us.

  “There’s nothing there,” I said. “Used to be, though.”

  “Were your people miners?”

  I shook my head. “My daddy was a preacher. He died when I was young.”

  “Amen,” said Walter.

  “Hardly,” I replied, and Walter smirked.

  We both crossed our arms and watched Hassel puff and hobble.

  “I like coming through Kentucky,” I said. “Harlan’s nice, don’t you think?”

  Walter chuffed. “Boy, you must really come from the back of nothing if you think Harlan’s worth a compliment.”

  My forehead went hot, and Walter put out a soft hand. “I didn’t mean—” he said.

  I shrugged. Walter was probably right. Most likely I had east Kentucky figured wrong. Things were probably just as bad here as they were in Mingo, as bad as they were all over.

  “We’ve got a house in Charleston,” I said. “It’s big, four bedrooms. We make out all right.” I looked up at the foam tile ceiling, pictured downtown Harlan. “Guess I just see this place as having character.”

  Hassel grunted his way past a janitorial cart and cursed.

  “In-laws notwithstanding,” I added.

  “Naturally,” Walter said with a bow, and moved back across the hall to resume his duties.

  Walter kept his hands out, gently poised, as he counted out a rhythm for the old man to walk to. Left, right, good, good. He had one tattoo on the inside of his left wrist—a plain circle around a feather. I remembered the tossaway in my back pocket and wished I could fill up the roll with stolen pictures of Walter’s toned arms, but he’d surely catch the aperture’s click and think me even weirder. I committed that tattoo to memory while Hassel lied to Walter and said he was fine, fine to drive, fine to get himself back to bed, fine to set his own pace.

  Walter finally deferred, cast his inked arm out with a theatrical flourish, and left Hassel in the hallway. On his way out, I told him I’d make sure Hassel got back to bed. I thanked those muscles as they passed. He smiled and said, “All in a day’s work, Mountaineer.”

  The old man hauled himself back to his room in record time; agitation charged his batteries.

  After I saw Hassel back to bed, I fidgeted for twenty minutes alone, then roamed down to the snack machines beyond the nurse’s station. I was fishing in my pocket for a dollar when Walter reappeared alongside me with a clipboard and a puffy blue lunch sack.

  “On my break,” he said.

  He pulled in close and let his arm brush my waist while he bought us each a lemon-lime soda. The hallway stood empty and bright around us, and I saw myself reflected in the candy-vending glass—pixie cut, T-shirt and jeans, jagged at the joints. At a squint, you’d have thought I was a boy. Howard was taking a while at the junk lot, reviewing the wreckage of The Box. Hassel was in bed trying not to look winded. And my sister-in-law was still at Arby’s smugging over her brood.

  “Your father-in-law is—” He reached for his change out of the machine, shook his head. “He’s a tough case.”

  Walter confided in me. I was kin to the patient, after all, and he seemed worn down by his shift. Hassel has that effect. His face was still, but a cord in his neck popped as he spoke. Hassel, Walter said, must not drive. They would let him go home today, but he needed watching and shouldn’t live alone. Somebody was going to have to dress him. Catastrophe was imminent. At his age, the strengths he’d long trusted having fail
ed him, Hassel would fall badly, break bones. Hassel could barely manage a flat hallway, wouldn’t listen to instructions. He thought feebleness was a state of mind. Walter had seen this brand of defiance before, never with a good end.

  I agreed. Yes. To everything. To everything Walter said about Hassel being disabled. Somebody finally saw it. This PT was giving me ammo, a line of proof that Hassel was unfit, spent. Each word swelled me up with righteous certainty that my sister-in-law was a pushover, Hassel needed taming and brute care, and Howard wasn’t paying attention to any of it. Not one important thing around him was my husband looking in the eye.

  “The family,” I said to Walter’s arms, to the fine motor skills of his person, “doesn’t want to admit it. But I know.” I chucked my head in the general direction of the Arby’s. “They keep drawing the curtain.”

  “I see that a lot,” said Walter.

  “I went through it with my granny. We held firm until she quit bucking. She passed easier for it,” I said. “The Fields don’t know how to do that. They can’t face facts.”

  He nodded, frowned, and pushed out his clipboard to show me a form he’d been filling out—a medical assessment with a copy of the police accident report attached.

  “This’ll make its way to the DMV. I promise you.” Walter was reporting Hassel to the state.

  “The DMV? Will he lose his license? Permanently?”

  Walter nodded. The soda machine’s fridge motor clicked on, and the hallway rumbled for a moment. My fingers moved to find his inky feather. I clutched his arm and nodded, kept nodding until my head collided into his shoulder. Walter stood firm.

  I gripped my cola bottle against my chest. “Hassel could kill someone if he drives again.”