Darkansas

by Jarret Middleton

  Walker sipped his coffee and witnessed the mists lift off the backyard. He had developed an eye for the birds in the surrounding woods and knew what time of year and even what hour of day they often arrived. What was lost to a person who did not know what to look for was registered by Walker in the blink of an eye. Two kestrels, dotted black and ember, emerged with the sun and landed in the dewy grass with a prolonged thrush of wings. Juncos, kites, and kinglets streaked through azure flows of sky. A pair of warblers, pocked olive and pollen, sifted from cover in stands of pine behind the barn. A copse of pine that grew so thick with underbrush that Walker had to hack it back by hand each spring.

  The aroma of coffee stirred Jordan on the couch. He sat up shirtless and coughed for a good minute while Walker fixed a mug with aqueous black and handed it to his son. Jordan yawned and took the cup. “Thanks,” he said, squinting against the bright wall of windows. “Can’t remember the last time I woke up here.”

  “You’re telling me,” said Walker. “I had to pour a whole other cup of coffee.”

  Walker spread his gaze around at the walls and furniture, realizing he never so much as passed through the living room when no one else was in the house. “You’re up now,” he said and slapped Jordan’s bare shoulder. Walker folded back one of the curtains and flooded the room with daylight.

  Gentle footsteps came up from behind. Elizabeth kissed Walker and Jordan each on the cheek and announced that breakfast would soon be served. Jordan was still trying to get the front half of his brain working. He gulped his coffee, confounded by the blonde hair and smooth legs that bounced down the hall toward the kitchen. Elizabeth pulled flour from the pantry and butter, syrup, and fresh berries from the fridge.

  “Nice having a woman fix breakfast,” Walker said.

  Malcolm joined his father and brother in the living room and Elizabeth handed him a cup of coffee. He sat beside Jordan on the couch then cleared a space among bottles, keys, and cigarettes to set his cup.

  “If you insist on staying down here, you should at least straighten up.”

  Jordan stayed quiet, hovered over his coffee. Malcolm shrugged it off and asked him what he had going on for the day.

  “I’m in meetings all morning,” Jordan said, amused. “We could go out tonight. You know, if you’re around.” He wrangled his jeans from the floor and buckled them on.

  Elizabeth yelled from the kitchen. “Hon, we’ve got to leave soon to pick up Ma and Aunt Mary, they arrive at 12:48 in Fayetteville. I don’t want to be late.”

  Malcolm held a sip in his mouth and pushed his cheeks out like a full bladder, suppressing whatever he was going to say. Jordan gathered from his silence that Malcolm was contractually obligated to retrieve his in-laws from the airport.

  Malcolm raised his voice to reach Elizabeth over the frying of the griddle. “The car does have GPS, you know.”

  “Don’t even,” she warned, flipping a pancake.

  Malcolm and Elizabeth left to retrieve her family and Jordan found himself alone in the house with his father. They meandered together at a slow pace down the hall that led to Walker’s music room. Gilded plaques, awards, and pictures lined the walls, testaments to Walker’s time in the trenches of American music. Gaunt and uncaring in a Stetson, donning a gray double-breasted suit onstage with an old Liberty. Smoking on the street outside the RCA building in Nashville, posing alongside Lee Hays, Don Everly, and blind Leon Payne. Jordan asked his father about a photograph where he was wearing headphones and sticking out his tongue in a wood-paneled studio booth.

  “My bassist, Jim Cleary, was giving me the finger on the other side of the glass while we were tracking vocals on ‘Late, Great, and Second Rate.’” He leaned in, studying the frame. “We were staying at our manager’s girlfriend’s apartment in south Kansas City, a block from the studio. Those were what they call the good old days with Rubin, Jimmy, and Greg. Lacy Duvall sat in on that record. She was on the tour, too. We did the album and then toured for eighteen months straight. A different stage in a different city every night. We had so much momentum, we couldn’t be stopped. That was our best record,” he said. “We played like hell on that thing.” He pointed at another photograph high up on the wall. “This one here was the same tour, but at the end. We headed west to San Francisco, then instead of playing our way back we flew out and did Boston, Philadelphia, then Carnegie Hall in New York. I remember the way it sounded, just pure. I remember I could follow what I was playing as it rifled around the hall, and at the same time I could hear the snap of someone’s fingers or sit there and have a regular conversation with the guy on the other side of the stage. It was unlike anything I ever heard.”

  Jordan harbored a number of very specific grudges against his father over the years. Some he was aware of, others not. One of them was his success as a musician. The petty simplicity of that hatred now embarrassed him as he stood there, quietly listening.

  “I never wanted to leave New York,” Walker continued. “I must have stayed three weeks out on Long Island, and back in the city I stayed in Harlem. The country scene and jazz scene had these giants, but it was rare when they overlapped. So one night, in a packed apartment on 128th Street, I ended up meeting Bud Powell. He had this larger-than-life reputation, you know. Boy, could he drink. Ended up killing him. There was a piano in the parlor and he got on with a trumpet player. I didn’t know how you could play so loud in a building with other tenants like that. It didn’t make any sense, but they were stars of the neighborhood. I guess everybody enjoyed it so much nobody complained.”

  Jordan followed Walker into the music room. Soundproof panels hung between support beams, sound-absorbing carpet sealed the floor. The air was hot and dry to keep the instruments in ideal condition. The room had not changed in over thirty years. Walker’s acoustic and electric guitars, banjos, mandolins, fiddles, Dobros, a pedal steel, and several handmade dulcimers adorned the racks that spread evenly across the walls. The atmosphere was calm and resolute in its devotion to harmony, rhythm, and soul, the creation of music being one of the few forms of piety to which the Baynes ever adhered.

  A river of cords snaked up to amplifiers and speakers. Walker told Jordan to pick up a guitar while he worked his heavy body onto a stool and sat a steel Dobro in his lap. Walker fidgeted as he pushed the bottleneck on his ring finger. “My fingers are too fat for the slide,” he said. “Lord help me.”

  Jordan held a saddle-hipped Martin 17 and nested his palm in the crevice worn into the wood. The guitar had been played for so many years that the finish had faded and revealed the smooth, textured grain of the body, like driftwood on a beach. Walker slid a lick that rang from the metal. Jordan came in behind him, nervous. He paid attention to the casual changes of blues in E and followed his father as he would in a conversation. Walker nodded for Jordan to take it for a walk so he broke into a full galloping roll, pulling off thirds and pinching sevenths before winding back to the beginning, when Walker took over again with a high-pitched metallic wave from his Dobro. Jordan admired the way his father picked with the ease and effortless control of someone who had played that instrument their entire lives. They had never once played guitars together.

  Walker hung the Dobro back in its place on the wall, then threw on his jacket and zipped it over his chest. “I have to head into town to run some errands,” he said. “Propane for the wedding, some groceries. I’ll be back tonight for the barbecue.” Walker patted Jordan’s neck, his hand hard and warm. “That was fun, we’ll do it again sometime.” Jordan watched his father’s lugubrious shape skulk into the garage.

  Alone in the quiet, Jordan sat with the instruments. Emblems of a life that ran congruous to his but had remained inaccessible until now. He got up and flipped the switch on a record player. He pulled a beer from the mini fridge and perused the disarray of papers and opened mail strewn about Walker’s desk. A letter requesting Walker’s attendance at an event, a royalty statement, a bill for remodeling the kitchen, a gun catalog. A deck of car
ds sat on a round table. He pictured Walker playing cards with his friends, listening to records, drinking alone. He sauntered over to a bookshelf behind the desk, where a row of leather-bound photo albums caught his eye.

  Jordan pulled one of the albums and kicked his feet up at the desk as he flipped through the plastic-sleeved pages. The photos were from a period similar to those in the hall, but these were all personal. He spread the book open to a three-by-three of Walker posing in front of an Eldorado with his brother, Jacob. Jordan had not seen or heard mention of his uncle for so long it took a moment to recognize him. Jordan didn’t know if he was still alive. There were more pictures with faded corners, of summers on the porch, fixing cars, fishing. He flipped back to the previous page. Jacob and Walker shielded their eyes from the sun with the same posture, squinting, heads tilted, right hands curved over their brows like a salute. They stood casually by Walker’s old car in the same relaxed stance. Every essence was similar. Not identical, just repeated.

  The hair on the back of his neck stood on end. “They’re twins?” he muttered aloud. Confounded, he placed the album back on the shelf with the others and listened as the last song on the record played out.

  FIVE

  1976—THE BEAR ATTACK

  Walker came home weary from two months of shows. It wasn’t raining, but it should have been. The RTS streamliner glided past a desolate park on the riverfront and coughed into the Little Rock depot. A cadre of hungover, homesick bandmates who had spent every waking moment together for the past sixty days departed the bus without a word and found their own lone roads back, hoping home was still the way they had left it.

  Wind tumbled under electric clouds that followed Walker out of the city. He rolled down the window of his brown Eldorado and the pressure of the air bore through the pinprick in his damaged ear, sending a high-pitched siren straight to his brain. He drove the winding roads squinting one eye shut and struggling to keep the wheel straight until he pulled into his driveway. Debris blew across the lawn. When he came in through the downstairs, the house radiated a stillness made all the more fragile by the anticipation of it being ruined. The walls in the corridor tilted and wavered. A sick feeling rose from his waist. Walker teetered on the bottom stair, suitcase and bag in hand, worried by what awaited him. He peeked into the nursery at Malcolm and Jordan before he went to the bedroom, where his wife Mercy stood by the far side of their bed.

  “Leave ’em packed,” she said, eyeing his bags. Her black hair flowed around the knit of a charcoal shawl, voice worn from anger slowly turning into sorrow. Neither possessed the energy to plead, whether it was Mercy demanding repentance or Walker begging for forgiveness. He knew why she was upset. He could not convince her of what he had not done—change. To fight would only further insult her, so he kept his mouth shut. She suspected he had a girl in Atlanta, and she was right. They had played two shows through Georgia and Walker hadn’t called home for the better part of that week. What Mercy did not know was how the girl rode with them all the way to D.C., how they spent their time together getting high and lying strikingly still, not speaking or moving. She was backstage, in the bus, rarely left his side. It was one of those things Walker could never say, because to say it was to be condemned.

  Mercy knew Walker’s father Maurel was planning to bring him and Jacob on their annual hunting trip. The time away would give Mercy space to think, and she told Walker he should use the time to decide where he would go upon his return. They looked at each other, so far apart, farther than the dimensions of the room could have allowed.

  “I love you, Mercy. You have to know that.” He fought his indefensible position as she turned away and cried. He looked down in shame, both bags still clutched in his hands. He hadn’t even set them down.

  The barrel of his hunting rifle stuck through the trees. Walker waited until the deer was so close he could see her hair twitch. The fawn searched around before lowering her nose in the grass. That was when Walker fired. The missed shot sent the skinny fawn bounding from sight. Jacob and Maurel poked fun at Walker for missing at close range. An hour later, Jacob hit a two-point buck from over a hundred and fifty yards through cover. “Don’t worry,” Jacob taunted his brother. “I’ll let you dress it.”

  Sheets of meat separated from knotted cartilage and rigid clefts of bone. Walker struggled through slippery viscous to make even cuts in the sinew. He got out the best meat first, from the hindquarter to loins, stabbing into the body with a quiet jealously that he hid from Jacob and his father as they reclined on a felled log, smoking. He skinned the fine-haired pelt with precision, removed the last of the vitals, and tossed the sack in the dirt for the coyotes. He went down to the water and washed his bloody arms in a nearby creek.

  Walker moped around the campsite, worried sick about losing Mercy forever. He did not say a word through dinner. Sloughing off his camp chair, he sat in the dirt, sipping off a bottle and staring into the fire. Maurel took a seat behind him, patted his shoulder and told him, in a matter-of-fact way, to do everything possible in order to save the marriage.

  “If you are stubborn, let it go,” Maurel said. “Whatever it is, it’s doomed, anyhow. Chances are virtue ain’t on your side, so tell her she’s right. Even if she ain’t, tell her a thousand times. Ain’t nothing worth defending in this life. You’ll end up with all that pride, alone. If it’s your ways you’re worried about, change every last one of them. They’re not worth shit in the end.”

  Walker kept his eye on the folding flames. Maurel pulled off the bottle and handed it back to his son, his expression dropping to the depths of his own painful past. “I never did that with your mother,” he said. “I could have talked more, only I never knew what to say. Still, I should have stayed and worked through it with her, would have been fairer to you and your brother. Instead, I left her at the first sign of struggle. Had to learn each lesson the hard way, I guess. Pretty soon, all that’s left is the truth staring you in the face, but it’s too late to fix what you done wrong, anyhow. Don’t take the path I did, son. Bring hell on yourself a hundredfold what anybody else could ever cause you.”

  The deer and potatoes were softened by the whiskey. Maurel wished Walker a good night and Jacob turned in soon after that. Despite his drunken reverie, Walker stumbled to his feet and felt his way through the darkness to the shallow side of the river. He removed his boots and waded in until his jeans flooded with a cold swirl of water. The paper glow of his skin disappeared below the surface. He let the best and worst of him flow in the gentle current. He wished the convoluted way of things would peel from his skin and float discarded downstream. He prayed to God for a chance to start over. Black water below, black sky above. Walker floated in the weightless repetition of prayer until a scream came pouring over the hill. Walker swam to shore and ran up the bank soaking wet to discover Jacob frantic and the campsite torn apart.

  He charged past the smoldering fire and debris and approached Maurel’s tent. The green fabric had been shredded and long strips of it dangled in the wind. Blood pooled in pockets and began to seep out. Jacob was on his knees fishing through the deflated folds of the tent. “Goddamn it, Walker, get over here and help me,” he yelled. Walker knelt next to him, pulling back layers of nylon as Jacob crawled into the tent on his stomach and came out with Maurel writhing on his back, moaning and gasping for air.

  “What the hell happened?” Walker asked.

  Jacob leered as he held firm the bleeding side of Maurel’s head. “A bear,” he gasped. “Somebody left out the dinner scraps and wandered off. Where the hell were you?”

  “I was swimming in the creek,” he said.

  “You stupid son of a bitch. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Shut up,” said Walker, a pit prying open his stomach. “What should we do?”

  “The truck is two miles back that way.” Jacob waved his arm in what could have been any direction in the hills at night. “We’re going to have to carry him.”

  They lifted
Maurel out of the tent and laid him on the ground. Walker pulled back torn clothing sopped with blood and did his best to identify his father’s wounds. He found deep cuts on his arms and abdomen and doused them with whiskey, then he pried open Maurel’s teeth and let a stream of alcohol down his gullet. Maurel flailed one of his balled fists at Jacob. They managed to hold him still and bandage his wounded arm to the front of his chest with a ripped T-shirt. Jacob brandished a buck knife and cut swatches from the tent large enough to hold Maurel. He folded each tent pole in half and threaded them through slits he made in the fabric. They grabbed their packs and Jacob slung the gun across his back. Then they lifted together. Maurel’s weight sagged in the nylon strung between the two poles. Walker struggled to consult the compass that hung from his neck and set them on the path north, hoping they would come out somewhere near the truck.

  The forest was uncompromisingly dark. Branches snapped at their arms. Trunks of pine wider than bodies emerged as though the darkness itself had created them. Maurel shifted erratically in his makeshift stretcher and they almost dropped him twice. Walker and Jacob tripped over rocks and lost footing on the soft ground, but they stayed on course.

  Maurel flopped his head violently and groaned until he collapsed back into wayward unconsciousness. He went in and out, from the blurred sway of Jacob’s back to the jungles of San Lo, carrying his companyman Billy Goat on a stretcher in the very same fashion. His unit was reversing their position from a bunker back to the deserted beachhead that had served as their landing point so PFC Herl could catch a medevac home. Herl never made it off that beach, and Maurel reckoned he would not make it out of those woods alive.