Being Dead in South Carolina

  Jacob White

  Being

  Dead

  in

  South

  Carolina

  stories

  Leapfrog Press

  Fredonia, New York

  Being Dead in South Carolina© 2013 by Jacob White

  All rights reserved under International and

  Pan-American Copyright Conventions

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a data base or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without

  the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in 2013 in the United States by

  Leapfrog Press LLC

  PO Box 505

  Fredonia, NY 14063

  www.leapfrogpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed in the United States by

  Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

  St. Paul, Minnesota 55114

  www.cbsd.com

  First Edition

  Author photo courtesy of Kevin Dossinger

  E-ISBN: 978-1-935248-45-3

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Available from the Library of Congress

  for Somer

  Contents

  1. Being Dead in South Carolina

  2. Bethel

  3. My Father at the Mountainside

  4. The Oldest City

  5. Unvanquished by the Dusk

  6. Wolf Among Wolves

  7. Maintenance

  8. Out With Father

  9. The Days Down Here

  10. The Hour of Revision

  11. Feather by Feather

  12. San Sebastian

  13. Your Father Needs More Time

  14. Episode Before Putting on Pants

  15. Yardage

  16. The Plantation

  17. You Will Miss Me

  Acknowledgements

  The Author

  1. Being Dead in South Carolina

  Look. Have you ever tried to right a car you yourself have tumbled? I mean, working alongside a few others, rocking the dumb hulk back and forth in hopes of landing it back upon its four sound tires? No, of course not. You have no idea. This is one of those thousand lucky adventures (mark I said lucky) that one’s idea of life never allows for. Or if it does happen, your memory won’t know what do with it, with the strange articulation of stupidity and rebirth that is an overturned car. It’s the sort of story you expect to tell your asshole friends years later but never do, never do because you don’t know what else will come spilling out.

  I’ll say this. Standing there on that road bank, kneading ditch-side clay with your silly feet and trying to look away from what you’ve just done—crows cawing overhead—where you’ve been and where you’re going fall away, and you might as well be standing on some strangely dry and palpable beach, tossed there suddenly after murky years of sea change. You hear the faraway suck of tide. Your legs quiver like a doe’s. But it’s not you. It’s me. Me on an elbow of county road somewhere in Chester, me standing here, looking at a rolled car. Me, some others, pushing at this car. Trying to right it.

  I’m with my Uncle Russ and my cousin Jackie, whose Chevelle I have afflicted. I haven’t visited them since I was ten, when Russ used to torque out the scooters Jackie and me raced meanly around their farm house. This was before Russ moved his family down to Chester and Jackie grew up to be a testy little shine-headed son of a bitch foreman. A Christian, on top. A Methodist Christian, on top. Russ, he looks a bit soggier than he did twenty years back, but he’s still in charge. I had to beg Jackie to drive the car. Beg.

  Chester’s an hour south of York, where I was born and still live. These Chester crows sound different than York ones. Older. Parched. I hardly know these people next to me, pushing at this car.

  Why I am here with these grayer and more humorless versions of my childhood friends is by order of my mother, so I can reassociate my memory, which is defective somewhat. Or so say the doctors, ever since a bullet passed through my head last April and hit, it turns out, very little. I try telling Mother my memory feels fine, but she shakes her finger at my forehead and says, “We got to reassociate it, Dayton.” Plus she thinks Jackie’s going to turn my life around. She thinks Jackie the Methodist foreman can talk to me about the long range. “If we’re going to fix that head, we got to yank it from your ass, boy.” I’ve long suffered from shortsightedness, she says. And bad judgment as a result.

  And it goes to show you, because what I am thinking of as I grunt up against the car’s wide-hipped hull is not what a whoop-dee-doo adventure life is but how my cousin Jackie has just punched me in the mouth, which is what you do with some no-account cousin who’s just rolled the Chevelle you’ve been restoring for eight years. Like a no-account, I am fretting over a loose tooth as I push and so only half pushing.

  Now imagine among us, too, as we begin to rock this car toward rectitude, a woman. (Here, the lucky part.) She is, like us, asquat, grunting, rippling with a confusion of muscle and gristle. A strand of hair sticks to her plump cheek; hamstrings quiver through the dimpled backs of her legs; “Uhnnf,” she says, “shit.” She was at their house this morning when I showed up with my duffel. Jackie’d met her at church and introduced her as Peat—“spelled like the moss,” said Jackie, and he can’t even say this without it sounding high and mighty. It irritates the hell out of me. It irritates me more that my cousin who I always made fun of for being ugly is engaged to a real live beautiful woman. Anyway, it’s me, Jackie, Russ (who does nothing about the punching business, just stands and watches me take it—knowing I’d take it), Peat as in the moss, and then the gnarled black guts of this car, steam hissing up as if to draw out the word consequence. I’ve been in Chester maybe an hour.

  So here’s me one night six months ago. I’m carrying two bags of groceries out of Harris Teeter when out in the parking lot this dark voice is at my back. “Paper or plastic, dribble-dick?” he says, then shoots me in the head to let me know he’s being rhetorical. It was shortly before this parking lot business my wife and son left; and shortly before they left that I’d shown up at the house after a three-dayer and tried to recruit my son Elden for a road adventure. I shook him from his pillow: “We’re going on a road tear, boy. West and all.” His hair’s curly as hell. He bore back under the covers and I shouted at him fine then, that I’d go find me a raven-haired Indian boy out west who’d count for crud when it came to first-basing and showing respect. Which is about when Trudy showed up, collared me into the hall as if to talk, and then—as I hung my head and exhaled and waited for her to start in—maced me. I screamed in a way that might emphasize the severity of what she’d just done. But she didn’t even call the cops. Just kicked at my shanks until I was outside again, windmilling down the middle of our street hollering, “Shakespeare don’t know! Shakespeare don’t even know!” I stayed at my mother’s a week until Trudy and Elden cleared out, then went back to the house and chose as the first of many dismal tasks to restock the fridge. Trudy usually shopped at BiLo, but even though Harris Teeter costs more, it’s a great place to get your morale back.

  So you can see why, waking up in that hospital room, I was sure I’d done all this to myself. That I’d pulled the trigger. I was a bit shocked by my resolve. Then I was a bit proud. Picture me there, in that glowing moment just before I’d fully awoken to these last six months of afterlife: feeling at my crooked c
rown of bandages, semi-inclined and grinning; in my head bustling, already, the drama of Trudy and Elden crowding my bed saying why, why, humbled and mightily impressed by my solemn act. Me saying into a hand-mirror, “Dayton, you done it now, boy.”

  But it turns out I didn’t think this idea up. The world thought it up for me. My friend Diamond managed to think it up for himself a few years ago. His first try hadn’t come off: his wife came home early one night with Chinese and found him standing in the shower with his electric guitar, it plugged in to an amp on the toilet lid. Lukewarm water spattered over him as he strummed some mess. “What was he playing?” some smart guy once asked her. But there was only a soggy flub-flub sound, articulation not being the point.

  What Diamond ended up articulating to himself was a hollow-point from his daddy’s Ruger. This was a year later. But all anyone ever thinks of anymore is him standing in that shower, naked, strumming and, more likely than not, singing, moaning through verses of lyrics he’d never known. (I say why bother getting naked if you’re going to finish yourself off in the shower playing an electric guitar—your statement will just get confused.)

  Anyway, learning from some clever decatheterizer that I was shot not by my self but by Mr. Voice (who my dreams would reintroduce me to, eventually) has been one of the greater disappointments of my life.

  The bullet went in behind the ear and sort of fell out of my temple.

  That I can walk and talk and still hit the toilet makes me something of a miracle in the medical community. My memory has gone spotty—I’m sure whole years are missing—but I don’t notice. The thing is, I can’t remember if I ever remembered those years to begin with. I wish Trudy and Elden were here. Trudy would let Elden and me sit up late with her in the kitchen as she played her Townes Van Zandt tapes, telling us, Listen, this one’s about heartbreak, or This one’s about pickup-truck love. Now they are some place I can’t find them. They know nothing of how I was victimized in a parking lot. “We are going to have to write you off, Dayton,” the letter said. In cursive! If only she could see me, lying in a mess of blood and instant mashed-potato flakes (the canister went off like a roman candle when I fell on it). It might help if Trudy were here to tell me about some of those small, gem-like moments as she used to call them, precious little flickers of memory from the tinkerbox of her mind which whenever she brought them up I’d pretend to remember too. Some summer night we sat out in the truck and talked till dawn, or one of our trips to Myrtle Beach which was more special than the others, a nap we took in a canoe out on Lake Jocassee, the birds there . . .

  Nowadays I spend my afternoons at Mother’s. I lie on the couch and try to keep breathing as she digs through my old toy chest and hoists up skates and pistols and stuffed chipmunks which maybe she expects me to bat around like a half-wit. She keeps saying, “I know you remember this” before pulling the artifact out, and after about every three Remember thises I cover my face and say, “Uhg—burn it, Mother!” From the hallway her boxy clock ticks away stale afternoon hours. “As-so-ci-ate! As-so-ci-ate!” she cheerleads, using a monkey and tow truck as pom-poms. No thank you.

  Like I said, the weekend at cousin Jackie’s was her idea. On top of edification, she said it’s the happiest she ever saw me, when I was ten and tearing around the house on those scooters with Jackie. But who isn’t happy then? Dazed and muddy-kneed, too nearsighted to know you’re just doing circles. I ask: Who isn’t?

  There are things I remember now I’m not sure I remembered before. Like the day I winged Jackie with a .22. He was setting up Sun Drop cans. It’s like me to forget we weren’t using pellet guns anymore (by ten, both our backs were thoroughly pocked from those pump rifles). Anyway, he howled and ran at me holding his shoulder like someone named Igor. Ran at me the same way you run at the no-account cousin who has just rolled your just-waxed hotrod—yelling back then just like he did today, soon as everyone’d crawled out the Chevelle windows and scrabbled up from the dust—“I’ll kill you!” Jackie’s was a rage you get only when someone does exactly what you expect them to do. His face wadded into a rag of disgust—a countenance, I’m afraid, that plagues the faces of all my kin in their moments of fixing or scrubbing or sleeping.

  The bullet went clean through Jackie that day—we never found it—and I know Jackie’s preaching to himself how the bullet that got me was the same. Like while I’ve been living a slacker sort of existence all these years—pawing after women, reeling out of bars, denting up friends’ cars, occasionally chopping trim at the door mill—that bullet’s been crossing oceans and continents, headed right for me. For the back of my head. It sounds a mean thing to think, but you don’t know Jackie. His is a strange brand of Christianity. For all I know, he spent his youth matriculating his way toward Adult Sunday School. Now he’s a big shot on the site and what he tells my mother after Trudy and Elden left is that I just wasn’t ready. He’s got a mousetrap for a heart.

  Anyway, the day I shot Jackie, Russ had to take the .22s away and lock them up until next summer. Uncle Russ is an old-time carpenter and the type who says nothing except for the very pinnacle of what is obvious and true, but says it in a way that puts the world more in square, knocking you like a nailhead flush with the truth of life, and what he said that day, laying his soft blue eyes on me, was, “Son, you ruin about everything.” I don’t remember remembering this before, but I remember it now. Uncle Russ is all right.

  After half an hour or so pushing against the discouraging weight of that car, we finally get it over. It’s dented up pretty much all round, roof scalped of paint. The back windshield is cracked. First thing, Jackie runs around and leans in the driver’s window to see if it’ll start, and it does. We pile in, Peat and I in back. All I need is a dunce cap. Since the struts are jammed, Jackie surrenders the wheel to Russ, who, shifting into drive, right away produces one of his small miracles of sound judgment by announcing, “Well, let’s try to get her to Gibson’s.” Gibson’s being Chester’s version of a bar and where I suspect Russ continues his tradition of ordering a mug of beer and not drinking it. The one time I ever saw my uncle take a drink was after I shot Jackie. He pulled a Schlitz from under the workbench in his garage, cracked it, took a sip, and leaned there for an hour staring out at god knows what.

  In front of me, Jackie, who never graduated from Sun Drop, hangs his head out the window, inspecting the dangle of fender, the warp and splay of tires. He’s fat now but still moves with the fitful jerks of a wound-up six-year-old—he’s about to bust the seat back. It annoys me enough to make me forget this is all my fault. I look out the window and shake my head, working at the tooth with my tongue. I can feel my lip swelling. After a while I spit the tooth into my palm. It’s from somewhere in the incisor region. In my hand it looks small and ugly as hell, a sliver. I see Peat’s watching, and I flash her my new smile. Jackie’s handiwork has left me with the grin of a fifth-grade bully.

  “That lip’ll turn plum black,” she says.

  “Someone’s got to do the Lord’s work,” I say.

  “Hurt?”

  “Not much.”

  “Not much,” she repeats.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  The afternoon is getting late. We pass a gas station and its light swims across those knees of hers—they’re drawn up against the vinyl back of Russ’s seat, looking both sexy and fulsomely generous. She’s got those heavy round legs I have often looked to for salvation. I think of her putting her back into that Chevelle, her crosstrainers sliding in the mud. The smell of her black hair makes my leg tremble. I want to steal her from Jackie. Me with my fifth grader’s smile. Add to this the little dollop of scar tissue behind my ear—it could pass for a cigarette burn. It’s worse at my temple, where the bullet nudged its reluctant exit, but I comb over it.

  At one point she looks over and says, inexplicably, “Jackie thinks you might should come live with him and Russ. For a while. Jack
ie can put you to work.”

  Suddenly it’s too small in the car. I wriggle my knees, a little rough on the back of Jackie’s seat, which he won’t move up (he’s still hanging out the window, hollering something to Russ, who’s trying to steer). “No offense,” I say, going for some high and mighty of my own. “But Jackie don’t get it.” We sit there for a minute. “Besides,” I say, “I’m pretty swamped”—I flick my head back toward York.

  When I’m not at Mother’s, I sit out in my front yard in a plastic Adirondack, staring not at the highway but at my own house, my memory working hard to fill it up.

  “Well,” she says, “fine. We didn’t know you were so busy,” and I think she’s going to drop it. Then, “Someone tries to help you and you get all prickly about it.”

  “I need help now? That what this is? I am your Christian brother and whatnot?”

  “For now I’d say more along the lines of whatnot.”

  This shuts me up for a minute. “What kind of Christian are you, anyway?”

  “The kind not afraid to split your other lip.”

  I think about this for a while.

  Gibson’s is crowded and people are even dancing. It’s mostly old couples. South Carolina’s turned into all old people recently. I follow them over to a lacquer-encased booth. All three slide in one booth seat. I sit in the other. They look at me.

  “Mercy,” Russ says, knocking up the brim of his boxy Firestone cap an inch, signifying to us that our ordeals are over and it’s now time to ponder what bigger picture there is. Which I’m doing okay at when a waitress comes by, looks at me, and says to the rest, “That whuppin he taked still workin on him.” This is Chester for you.