I packed up that same afternoon. The earthly goods were down to a couple of boxes now, I’ve known homeless guys that had less. Shirts, a spare pair of shoes. Football trophies won by a shiny kid with two excellent knees. I
threw those out. I kept the notebooks and art supplies that filled up one
whole box, and it weighed on my conscience. I’d been hiding from Tommy.
My only real valuables were in bottles, stashed in an old leather shaving case that used to be Mr. Peg’s. Maggot had taken it for his stash, then at some point it became mine. I rarely thought twice about using Mr. Peg’s
nice case for pharmaceutical purposes, but from time to time I felt his eyes on me, seeing the waste of flesh I’d become. Now being one of those times. Maggot was asleep or dipped off. I punched him in the shoulder to tell him I was checking out.
He rolled off the bed onto the floor, a surprisingly smooth move, and lay looking at the ceiling. “Checkout time, checkin’ it out,” he said. Sang actually, some tune I almost recognized.
“Serious, man. I’m going.”
He raised his head off the floor and frowned at me in a fuddled way, like some zoo animal had subbed in as roommate while he was napping.
Anteater, sawfish. His head dropped back to the floor. “Going where?” “To be determined. Not really figured it out yet.”
“Then don’t figure. Saves wear and tear on the haggard brain cells.” “Nope. Can’t stay here.”
He sat up, drew his knees to his chest, and hugged them with his long arms. Lots of weird jewelry on the hands as well as the face, and still into
black, but the Goth vibe was scaled way back. Probably more negligence than fashion choice. He oftentimes didn’t smell that great.
“Nothing personal,” I said. “You’re the easiest person I probably ever cohabited with. Other than the snoring.”
He rubbed his face with the back of his hand and watched me stuff underwear in a plastic bag. The black ring that hung down from his septum pierce gave the permanent impression of booger. “Not my fault. It’s
adenoids, brother. I was born this way.”
I plopped the underwear bag into a cardboard box, and that was me, over and out on the Peggots. “I have to get out of here before I break something. It’s this family. They’re so goddamn nice, you end up feeling like you owe them. And then I get really pissed off, because there’s no way I can ever get it right or pay it back. You know?”
He gave me a woeful look. He didn’t. He wouldn’t, ever.
What surprised me was the rage. That it kept coming, in waves. Why? Out on my ass was the normal for me. I’d never yet met the people that could keep me. June was not my mother, regardless the ten or so minutes I almost laid claim to her. She just wanted the better version, not the broken boy I was. Nothing new here under my sun, and yet here was this car and me at
the wheel, taking all the curves too fast, hating everything I saw. The kudzu hanging off the trees, the ignorant caboose car in front of Pennington Middle, the bric-a-brac mammaw houses with flamingo birds in their yards. I’d have rammed my car into any one of them, but that would have stopped me, and I needed to keep moving. For the whole afternoon I leaned on my pissed-off heavy foot, because going nowhere fast is a kind of juice.
Then the energy started going out of me and I felt new kind of bad coming on. I stopped on a godforsaken road around Fleenortown to run inventory on Mr. Peg’s leather bag and the emergency supplies I kept in the glove box, and took what I needed to stave off the pressure in my chest.
That ache was an old, old story and it wasn’t ending. In Jonesville I stopped to fill up the tank. If I kept driving I might stay ahead of the monsters. Back in the car, pointed west, I tried to think of one place on the planet of earth where I would feel happy to be. Came up bust. Then tried to settle on
someplace I could stand to be. Nothing again. No house or vehicle or yard or pasture came to mind. No place. A guy could take this to mean he ought to be dead.
I was in and out, as far as paying any attention to the road. Which can run you into trouble as far as stop signs or speed traps, but we’re not big on
those here. I ended up way the hell out past Ewing, with no idea I’d gone that far till I noticed the white cliffs on my right side, lining the ridgetop, catching light. I kept on going and there they still were, laughing. Up here asshole, we’re up, you’re down. Those cliffs run on for a hundred miles. My car found the park where Miss Barks brought me, on that fateful day where my brain ran away with itself, thinking of being up there and jumping off to see if I’d fall or fly. And I mean really seeing it in my mind, because that’s
the troublesome brain I have, it’s got excellent eyes. Look at him up there. The boy on the edge of the cliff, the widespread arms and piked legs, the crash-dive or the sail. Even before I watched the end of Fast Forward, I don’t know how many times my brain had put me up there on those white cliffs, easily a thousand. To ask that question. Which, let’s face it, is not a real-world question.
There was nobody around in the gravel lot where the trail started up. The sign said Sand Cave, White Rocks, so many miles. I didn’t register details. I’d heard of people hiking up there to that cave, those white rocks. It was doable. I had nothing in mind that would pass for a plan, only the need to move. I left my keys in the car.
Not sure why I thought walking would be any better than driving. It comes down to velocity. This was a business of outrunning ghosts, and
there was no end to my dead. Not even counting parents or Mr. Peg. Death of your olders is natural. I was losing people right out from under my living days. My doll baby, that I couldn’t love well enough to make her stay. My childhood hero that was a dangerous animal. Hammer that finished last.
Maggot that would surely die if they put him in prison, and Mariah on the outside, of heartbreak. I connected my worn-out rubber soles to the dirt of the trail, again, again, again. Knee bones grinding, heart pumping,
unthinkable matters battering the skull door. My dad. For him I’d gone to that waterhole of hell, maybe finally to tell the man to go fuck himself,
thanks for abandoning me and Mom. Or to prove something. Fast Forward dared me and I went, took the devil’s bath and came out with blood on my hands. Where do you go after that? All I knew to do was keep putting my feet to the rocky ground, waiting to register something in the body instead of the brain.
Because I wasn’t. Fifteen or so football fields up the trail I understood I wasn’t feeling. Not just drug-numb to moods or heartaches, I mean heat, cold. Tasting. That deadness of tongue and skin and eyes that doesn’t technically blind you, but you’re not seeing. Like the man said, the day I ran out of the pharmacy with my first ticket to oxy-nowhere: Blind blind blind. It grows on you till you’re darked out and don’t care. Something in me was wanting to grind my bones against this mountain till the body picked a side. Give up the ghost, or get back in here.
Eyes on the trail, deer tracks, moss, nothing. I chewed on my age-old grudges. The body is the original asshole, it can put you on detention away from all pleasures, but still makes you write out the list of its needs, one hundred times. I will piss and shit. I will go hungry. Thirsty was the one killing me at the moment. That parch like a bandanna pulled tight around your throat. It got so bad that the sight of water, a little creek, made me get down on my belly and drink like a dog. The water had taste, sweet. A little piney. People say you’ll get a dread disease from doing that, due to all the animals that have pissed in it. I wondered: Do I give a fuck here about dread diseases? I polled the mostly dead players—skin, tongue, eyes—on
the subject of checking out on all future days: What if anything would you miss? Came to no real conclusion.
I sat there on the fence about it. On a rock actually. One of those buzzy tiny hummer birds bombed in close. Not to be ignored, this guy. The air from his wings blew the weeds all around under him, like the choppers in
the war movies, tiny version. He didn’t land, just dipped around sticking his pointy nose into the flowers. The ones he liked were orange and dangly like ornaments, but shaped like little vaginas, lips and all. Go, tiny guy, I said.
Eat your fill.
Touch-me-nots. That name popped into my head from another age. They grew all over the banks where we used to go fishing. Mr. Peg showed us
how to touch the green pods and make them explode, throwing tiny shrapnel. Damn. Mr. Peg was there, sitting up the bank and a little behind me, out of my line of sight. Sorry for everything, I told him. And he said, Is that so hard to do? His voice, his words. My ears. I’m not suggesting any of this makes sense.
I got up and moved on. Yes sir, it is. Hard to live, and hard to watch the
opposite coming down the road at you. I left out the f-bombs, not being sure if he was still with me or not. I looked at the trail and the dirt and the moss.
The woods were their own show, with mushrooms for jokes. Mushrooms like orange ears that looked like they’d glow in the dark. I was delirious, given the no fuel in my tank, other than painkillers. But I felt some things.
The deer family that left their tracks in the muddy trail. As much venison as I’d eaten in my life, I felt I was some percentage of deer. I felt the
kindliness of the moss, which is all over everywhere once you get out of the made world. God’s flooring. All the kinds, pillowy, pin-cushiony, shag carpet. Gray sticks of moss with red heads like matchsticks. Some tiny dead part of me woke up to the moss and said, Man. Where you been. This is the fucking wonderful world of color.
After another hour I sat on a big old mossy log to catch my breath, and remembered the joint in my pocket, a going-away present from Maggot. I hadn’t smoked much weed since Dori died, just not feeling it. Hard to explain the various levels of doping hell, but there’s a dark territory past the pleasures that weed is made for. I fished it out and admired it before lighting it up. Maggot’s perfectly rolled white twig, pointed as a pencil on both ends. I actually had a hankering to draw its portrait. Another itch I hadn’t felt in an age.
I set no land speed records. The sun got low, running me up against the wire on to-be-decided. I wasn’t getting to the top of the cliffs. Not this day. That original asshole, the body, took over then, harping on getting me through a night. Not even asking, did I want to do that. Just the gripes, no water or food or roof over my head. In dire need of a piss. The last was easily taken care of. The rest was yet to kill me. I’d known sketchy shelter, and had logged enough hours hungry to be licensed as a professional. Ain’t no hill for a climber, I thought, trudging up an ass-kick of switchbacks that knocked the wind out of me. The trail wound above the trees to a gravel slope, and then the Sand Cave. Dark and cool under a wide arch, seriously big. You could set a single-wide in there. Evidence of previous escapades
here and yonder littered the sandy floor.
If I were a Boy Scout, I’d have known how to make a campfire. I’d have thought to bring a can of beans for dinner. And a can opener. Water. Being an ignorant juvenile delinquent with little or no will to live, I had none of
the above. The person I felt watching me now was Angus. Not like Mr. Peg, earlier, I knew she wasn’t really there. But I told her to shut up, and she laughed some more. That was it, the one place I’d like to be: talking to Angus. Dopey, tougher than hide, generally if not always one to improve a
situation. Always saying I had to start trusting the ride at some point, because life was not a total and complete dumpster fire, which she was
wrong about. She said my messed-up childhood made me a better person, also wrong. She’d believed I would go far, regardless my drawbacks galore and unsavory habits.
I found a good rock and watched the sun melt into the Cumberlands.
Layers of orange like a buttermilk pie cooling on the horizon. Clouds scooting past, throwing spots of light and dark over the mountainheads. The light looked drinkable. It poured on a mountain so I saw the curve of every treetop edged in gold, like the scales of a fish. Then poured off, easing them back into shadow. I got all caught up in the show, waking up from my long cold swim underwater. Breaking the surface is a shock, the white is so white, the blue so blue. The air that’s your breath.
I shifted and felt the lighter in my hip pocket, and laughed at myself for forgetting it. Stand back Boy Scouts, I told Angus. Oh my Lord. I’d have paid money for a little bump of her. Angus that was solid while all the shiny objects I craved came and went. She was going away at the end of summer, to real college. She’d gotten an offer she couldn’t refuse. I was pissed as hornets. Vander-something the hell, Nashville T-N. Who knew they could make country hits and brainiacs in the one convenient location.
Okay, my friend. I rifled around the mess inside me and found what I needed to wish her happiness. Fly away and don’t fall back into the slime I’m trying to crawl out of here, and also drinking on the sly, calling it my life’s blood. Too scared to leave the last place where people looked at me and saw their son or blood brother or their shot at a winning season. I knew what she’d say about that. Trust the road. Because nobody stays, in the long run you’re on your own with your ghosts. You’re the ship, they’re the bottle.
I spent the night curled up on the sandy floor with my back pressed against cold rock, thirsty and hungry and in the end not sufficiently doped. Every cricket that inched along the cave face was a copperhead, every squirrel rustling dry leaves was a bear. If I lived till morning, I would walk down the mountain, find June, and tell her I was ready to fly.
