In December Annie emailed to tell me the baby was skewed in some fashion and she might have to schedule the delivery soon. I needed to get my carcass over there pronto. I called her and said to forget about my nonsense, just worry about the baby.
“We’re not worried,” she said. “He’s just defying the rules, trying to come into the world back-asswards. Whose child do you think this is?”
She sounded so much like herself, I couldn’t picture the watermelon aspects. The baby of her and Mr. Armstrong would be a knockout, no way around it. Hardheaded, great beauty, high-octane fuel for the Lee County gossip engines. “Please come,” she said. “I’ve started my leave already, but I’m too fat to sit at my loom, and I don’t feel like cooking because eating
one saltine gives me heartburn. I’m just wallowing around here like a landlocked walrus.”
She needed distraction. She wanted to see drawings. Weirdly, I wanted to see the walrus version of Annie. I said I’d think about it overnight. Before we hung up, she mentioned the high school was having a big thing on Friday to honor Coach Winfield. Not just football players, this was the town. Coach had retired after the scandal to get his life together, and the guy they hired to replace him steered the Generals to something previously unimaginable: a 4–6 losing season.
“Winfield is a damn fallen hero,” she said. “I think they’re having this blowout for him because burning the new coach at the stake would be
illegal.”
She said she understood if I had hard feelings against Winfield. I’m sure June would second that. Undue pressures and pharmaceutical missteps, not
deniable. But she never saw me sleeping behind dumpsters, looking for something steadier than the DSS greatest-hits box set. Coach took me in. I blamed Watts for the worst of what happened. For the best of it, I needed to lay eyes on Coach and tell him it mattered.
If I went, I might also run into Angus. She’d gone back after graduation to take care of some of Coach’s loose ends, but was pretty clear on this being just a stopover. Bigger fish to fry, no doubt. I didn’t email her. I told almost nobody, since my friends were all dead now or waiting on deck for their turn. Just Annie. And June, that would kill me if I was in town and didn’t see her. I told Dr. Andresen I was going for it, and she did the rare thing of smiling with her whole mouth. “I think you are unlikely to
obliterate,” she said. And I said, You watch.
The drive alone threatened to defeat me. I should have taken some other random route, even if it took longer. To trick my body into believing we
were headed someplace else. Every few miles a memory broke like an egg on my face. Cumberland Gap, our bathroom stop on the trip to Aunt June’s where I was uninvited and smelled bad. Gibson Station, where Mrs.
McCobb made me try to pawn dirty Barbies and a used toaster with black crumbs in it. Cedar Hill, where I believed my childhood hero had bought
his own farm, prior to learning he was a liar. Prior to seeing his skull broken open. I was processing my traumas, like they say. Lately I’d cut my smoking back to negligible, just poker nights and blue rainy days. The occasional walk home from the library after Lyra was overly frisky. Okay but now I was chain-smoking in the car.
On the outskirts of Pennington I passed the dead strip mall and former pill mill of Watts that I knew was shut down. June had told me the soulless pervert got his due, federal charges pending. This was the year of trials starting to go to the top, the oxy tides turning. Angus said even people in Nashville were talking about oxy now, but in comic-book terms only, evil corporate villains. No mention of all the little people scorched but staving off their living death thanks to places like that pill mill, buying and selling in the parking lot. I thought of my old reliable buyers. The guy with his walker and fur-flap hunting hat, the sad fat lady with her Chihuahua. How the hell were they getting by now? According to June, the recovery
enterprise of Lee County was still limited mainly to church life groups,
Grapevine magazine, and basement twelve-step meetings. It was best not to
get her started on the subject. These megabuck settlements against Purdue, and not a dime of it ever getting back here.
Annie was set on me staying over with them, so she could lay out all my
High Ground drawings on her kitchen table. I had a breakfast date with
June the next morning. Otherwise, no strategy. I’d had vague thoughts of meeting up with friends, but turning that into a plan moved in the direction of what Dr. Andresen called suicidal ideation. Going to the Five Star Stadium on Friday for Coach’s thing, seriously? Every person there would try to sell me dope, unless they loved me and gave it to me for free.
Everything about that place was a trigger. Yard lines, goalposts, the chutes that were my superpower. The place where I’d made and lost my fortune.
I passed kudzu valley and the Powell River and the mountain that doesn’t really look like a face. All of it a little homely in the dead of winter, but in that ugly-duckling way that you knew would turn around. The caboose in front of the middle school, the bric-a-brac mammaw yards. I saw people on porches, but my eyes shied away as they’d learned to do. Saving my juice. If it had been July, my heart already would have cracked for the beauty. As it was, I might die of loneliness. How could I be here with all these familiar things but not the people that looked me in the eye and called me brother, or God love ya, or You’re that one, or Honey I remember you from the feed store. To be here was to be known. If Lee County isn’t that, it’s nothing.
Annie’s house was no trouble to find. I was a little surprised every time the Beretta took a turn the right way, like it was the Impala and not me that had known these roads blindfolded. I knocked on the blue front door, and heard Hazel Dickens running around in there yapping. Nobody came. I opened the door and yelled hello. Hazel Dickens sat down and looked at me. I closed the door and knocked again. All this before I saw the note stuck to the doorbell: Gone to the hospital, sorry. Might be a false alarm.
Lewis will call you. Make yourself at home.
And it sank in: they were having a freaking baby. I thought of the McCobb twins, the all-night wailing, the casual flopping out of tits. I seriously doubted Annie knew what she was in for. These people did not need me or my box of drawings in their hair at this time. I called June. She had patients and a staff meeting and after that some meeting at the health department, but said I was welcome. Take Emmy’s old room. She’d see me, if not tonight then in the morning.
So I was cut loose without a safety net. I had no intention of sitting all day at June’s. I gave the Beretta free rein and we wandered aimlessly. It was an in-your-face winter’s day, so bright. I drove to the river bridge where I used to fish with Mr. Peg. Watched the glittery water till I had to drive on.
Went to Hoboland and sat looking up the skirts of those hemlocks, thinking of Angus lying back on her elbows, seeing straight into me. I had to get up and leave. The sun shellacked a shine on the houses and mailboxes.
Everything I looked at made my eyes water. It felt like being in love with somebody that’s married. I could never have this. Staying here, alone and sober, was beyond my powers. And I still wanted it with all my hungry parts.
I stuck to the lonelier roads, and really couldn’t tell you my thought processes, if any, but I ended up at the trail to Devil’s Bathtub. Was it a Step 4 type thing, courage and moral inventory? I doubt it sincerely. More like picking a fight with a person you’re ready to break up with. I needed to find the place that would make me hate it here and not come back.
The gravel lot had one other car, so. Still open to the public. Two more fatalities wouldn’t shut the place down, given the long history of youthful male recklessness. And girls wrecked too. I’d never thought of that before, not once. Mom was here. Walking the same trail as me. Watching what I watched and worse, the end of the man she loved. His body. I felt a little shaky as I locked my car, with nothing valuable in it but my box of
drawings in the trunk. City habits.
Devil’s Bathtub turned out to be the first place I’d been all day that wasn’t laid with mines. I recognized nothing. The trail was bone dry, the creek was easy to cross on stepping stones with white rugs of dried-up algae. I didn’t get my shoes wet. The air smelled like sweet apples and something else, Pine-Sol or medicine. Little trees alongside of the trail were covered with brushy yellow flowers. Witch hazel, that blooms in winter.
Mrs. Peggot used to make a salve of that and put it on our scrapes. All that just hit me, from the smell. Now the bees were all over it, rousted out from their winter nap, filling up the quietness with their buzz.
I kept waiting for the scary part that never came. The cliffs rose high along the creek, covered with bright-colored lichens that made them looked tagged, like the walls in my Knoxville neighborhood. Several times I sat down on a log because my knee hurt, because it always hurt. I was past sorry for myself. Like every boy in Lee County I was raised to be a proud
mule in a world that has scant use for mules. I’d tried the popular solutions to that problem, which generally pointed to early death. The trick was to find others. I sat and watched little jenny wrens hopping along the water’s edge pecking up bugs, ticking their heads side to side like wind-up toys. I heard a tom turkey up in the woods doing that bad-boy gobble thing the
hens cannot resist. I saw a hoot owl. It was hiding, all the same colors as
tree bark, but outed by a mob of loud crows that had their grudge against it. Probably something to do with eating their babies.
The trail got tricky eventually but never treacherous, and I came to the water hole before I expected it. The falls were a tame trickle and the pool itself a deep, easy blue. Taking art classes on repeat, you learn a lot about color, but I can’t explain that blue. You see it in photos of icy lands.
Peacock blue in the deep center, shading out to clear on the pebbly edges.
The water was dimply and alive on top, perfectly still underneath. My eye kept going back to the turquoise middle. You so rarely see that, but children will color water that way every time, given the right choice of crayons. Like they were born knowing there’s better out there than what we’re getting.
I didn’t have the place to myself, there was a family over on the other side. On the rock platform where I’d seen the scariest brain I’ve ever known, laid open. Also, maybe, the last spot where my two parents sat together stretching out their legs in the sun, kissing. He knew about me that day, my dad. That I was on the way. He’d written his mother. The family over there now was parents with two littles, the younger one at the squatting and poking age, big sister prancing back and forth at the water’s edge like a border collie. Mom saying no, they did not bring her cozzie, Dad saying no, she did not want to go in, the water would freeze her dinger. These people were not from here.
I said hey. They said good day, and wasn’t it beautiful. I asked what city they were from, and they said Australia, which amazed me. People from the other side of the planet coming here. I crossed the rocks over to their side and they offered me their water bottle. I distracted the border collie sister by showing her how to launch leaf boats, and then she was all over that, running around to hunt up the biggest ones. Sycamores were best, the size of football helmets. I liked having company there, this family of two alive
parents and kids that looked like they didn’t know the meaning of getting leathered. I ended up hiking back out with them, and they asked me what everything was, the witch hazel with the winter flowers, the jenny wrens. I
gave them sassafras twigs to chew on, that taste like root beer. The little girl hugged me around the knees before they got in their car, and I wanted so much not to be alone.
Breakfast with June was shoehorned in between her late night and another long day. Energizer bunny, was our June. She was beautiful as ever, and tired, and she looked her age, whatever that was. We poured syrup on our pancakes and she told me things about oxy, the lawsuits she’d helped get started, starting with the town hall meetings and petitions that made Kent furious. It was still going. The worst offender drugs were going off the
market, changed to be abuse-proof. She said this might help in the long run, but she’d still be here trying to mop up the mess for the rest of her days. A whole generation of kids were coming up without families.
I didn’t say, Right here, you’re looking at it. She knew.
Ruby had started a grief group in her church. Mrs. Peggot was hanging in, with kids or grandkids going over there every day so she could fix them dinner. Maggot and Mariah were both still working at PetSmart and staying clean. I promised to go see him soon. The whole family knew about Maggot’s boyfriend now. Some of them prayed it was a stage he’d outgrow, most said hallelujah. June had met the young man himself. He actually was
the store’s reptile expert, and kept a lot of snakes in glass boxes at his trailer home. I said that sounded about right.
The apple in June’s eye was still Emmy. She’d moved into an apartment in Asheville with some other girls in recovery, somewhat like my situation. Probably minus the poker nights and porn. June said it was in an older building where Grace Kelly had lived at one time. I didn’t know who that was, but acted impressed. She got serious then, and asked if Emmy had hurt me.
“How do you mean?”
June did that thing of running both hands through her hair. “I don’t know.
She’s such a charmer. You know what I mean. Guys are just moths to her flame. I’ve wondered if she was a little too dependent on all that.”
I said I couldn’t speak for others, but I was never Emmy’s moth. “Well okay, maybe in the early days. She was my first love disaster. But I lived to fight another day.”
June smiled. “You never were one to fall only halfway down the well, were you?”
“No ma’am,” I said. “I fall all the way in.” Then I asked how was her
love life, and she reached across the table and pinched my nose, like I was twelve.
She told me Emmy loved Asheville to pieces. She had a job as a restaurant hostess and was in a sober and body-positive dance group, which believe it or not does exist. They put on shows. Emmy was thinking about going in the direction of theater, so. There’s Emmy, wagon hitched back up to the stars. I asked if she ever got homesick down there.
June’s coffee cup froze halfway up to her mouth. “All the time. That’s what she says. But she can’t come back here. Not to live.” She said it with so much sadness. Age-old heartbreak of this place, your great successes fly away, your failures stick around.
June assumed I would be going to the program for Coach that night, and was relieved to hear I wasn’t. She still blamed him for my downfall. “The daughter, though, Angus. Are you two still friends? I ran into her yesterday at the health department.”
In her emails, Angus had made her summer and short-term jobs here into dark comedies. The nursing home where people talked to the dead. The in- school aides that talked messed-up kids out of murdering their teachers. “An impressive young lady,” June called her, which I’m pretty sure was the first time in history those words were used on Angus. Or maybe not, what did I know anymore. My stomach did a thing every time Angus came up,
because I really wanted to see her and really didn’t. Everything else had changed. So she would have changed. And I couldn’t take it.
June hated to run off, as usual, but did. I got in the Beretta and sat with my hands on the wheel a good five minutes before it decided where to go. Murder Valley.
My grandmother and Mr. Dick couldn’t get over it. Me! Showing up!
Bygones definitely bygones, as far as failures to apply myself. Reaching the height of six foot four evidently gave me a pass on all previous sins. She kept saying she hadn’t thought I could look any more like my father, but look at me now. Mr. Dick for his part had the hots for my car. He wheeled himself all the way around it, looking it up one side and down the other, saying “It’s blue!” They invited me to dinner and asked if I was aiming to move in. I said just visiting, but thanks all the same.
I whiled away the day looking at Mr. Dick’s newest kite and being handy.
Got up on a ladder and cleaned their gutters. Unjammed a casement
window that had been stuck open since August. Not the tight ship of its former days, that house. Miss Betsy told me Jane Ellen had graduated, and Mr. Dick winked at me, so I knew what that meant. By getting married. I wondered who did their driving. Dinner took forever because it was all on Miss Betsy and she was slowing down. The legs looking more than ever
like bags of walnuts in stockings. A stool by the cookstove so she could stir sitting down. I know pain if I see it.
At dinner they wanted to hear about the book I was writing. I was floored. How did they know about that? Angus. She’d told them all about
the stories I put out on the computer, and my history book that was going to get published. Never at any time did the word “cartoons” come up, or “the
adventures of Crash and Bernie, teenage addicts,” so Angus must have put a respectable spin on things, which I appreciated. I told them I would do a chapter in my book on the Melungeons, and was counting on Mr. Dick to help me with that. He looked tickled. At some later date I’d have to break it to them it was more pictures than words.
They told me some about Coach, more about Angus. Things she’d not told me herself, such as being one of the smartest in her college class and winning awards. Her major was psychology, which I knew, and she planned to go back for even more school, which I didn’t. To be a counselor. I’d been around the block now, so was not like most guys I know, that would yell
“headshrinker” and run for cover. Angus would be awesome at it. I told them I thought so.
After supper Mr. Dick went to bed, Miss Betsy put her apron back on, and I washed all the dishes while she sat on her wooden stool and watched. I told her just sit, I’ve got this. Miss Betsy acted like she’d never seen a man clean up a kitchen before, which maybe she hadn’t.
I wanted to keep her talking about Angus, so I asked questions. How often did she come down here, did she still have her Jeep Wrangler. Was she still working her badass angle, not that I used those words. What I really wanted to know was, is she still the same Angus. What kind of question is that? Obviously, if she was married or pregnant or anything along those lines, she’d have told me. But Miss Betsy had been hearing
parts of her story that I hadn’t. I kept going at it sideways, like casting a line
in the water and holding your mouth right. Getting no bites at all. Finally I asked Miss Betsy straight up: Does she have a boyfriend?
I was scrubbing the glass dish she’d baked the bean casserole in. I didn’t look at her, just kept on digging with the steel wool. Finally she said, “I
have my hunches about that.”
I was careful not to drop the dish. I turned around. “What kind of hunches?”
She’d taken her glasses off, and her face was like a snail without its shell. Slowly, slowly she cleaned the two-tone lenses with the corner of her apron. “I oughtn’t to say.”
“Meaning what? She doesn’t like guys?”
She seemed unshocked by the suggestion, which just slipped out. I’d wondered the same of Miss Betsy. But she said that was not her thinking.
“O-kay,” I said, faking patience. I went back to the casserole dish and got that sucker clean as a whistle and nothing else was forthcoming from Miss Betsy. If she got up and left now, I’d probably shame myself by following her upstairs, wheedling.
“I really don’t think she’d care if you told me,” I said. “She’s like my sister.”
“But you’ve not asked her that question yourself.” “No,” I said. Busted.
“Well, maybe you ought. I think she has set her cap for one fellow in particular.”
With a statement like that, and Angus, you had to take it as cash on the barrelhead. She would set her damn hat. The guy would know. “Somebody she met in Nashville, then.”
“I oughtn’t to say. She never told me outright. But you know me, I’m seldom wrong.”
I was a good sport. Good for Angus. I hope they’ll be very happy.
That night I stayed in the same bed as before, the ship with a wooden
flagpole on each corner. I laid awake half the night running up every flag I could think of. Help. Surrender. Angus was my sister. I couldn’t want any more in the world than for her to be happy. So I would go to the wedding of her and Mr. Nashville. I would be her man-bridemaid, just like Dori in her sweet foggy brain had stood Angus up as my best girl-man in ours. Angus would have done that for me. My turn now, to throw popcorn at the happy
couple. I let her go. It’s what I had to do, so I could get up in the morning and go see Coach.
