Being Dead in South Carolina Read online

  “I taked worse,” I say as she skirts off.

  Russ chuckles, then pulls his brim back down, leaning forward. “Dayton, son, you’re a damn mess. Stay on a while. Jackie’ll keep you busy at the site. Right, Jackie?” He leans back, the matter settled.

  “Don’t bother,” says Peat. “He’s swamped.”

  “Oh? That so, son?” says Russ, perking up—believing it, bless him.

  “Well . . .” I give a little of this, little of that shrug.

  Jackie eats peanuts shell and all, glancing at me like what I say and don’t say from here on out is as predetermined as dog coil.

  “He can’t hardly get away,” Peat says.

  It’s not her fault, but this is a tender subject. I recovered months ago, but Mallard Doors never gave me a formal invite back to the mill, where I ran the trim saw for almost a year. For eight months. Turns out I didn’t show up to work much. Anyway, I got to housepainting with my high school friend Grady up till a week ago, when I saw he never intended to pay me. Packing my duffel in York this morning, I was part contemplating my empty house and part contemplating how on Monday I’d have to show up by Grady’s truck after work with a mattock handle or some kind of other handle. How I’d say, You know what, I got to eat too, bud. I’ve been thinking on this all weekend, on how to hit him in the head just right so that he’ll feel some pain before he goes soft and lies down. My life’s always dumping me into this sort of dilemma. I swear to god it’s easier for some people.

  “Look at him,” Jackie says, who I’m getting tired of already. “He don’t got a job. Look at him.”

  I think of Jackie hitting me. How I felt the bottom half of my face smear away for a moment, then eyed him right back. Eyed him and did nothing.

  I slide back out of the booth, saying I’d like to buy the table a round—a gesture I hope will wipe the know-it-all satisfaction off everyone’s face.

  I’m standing at the bar, and this cowboy type sitting next to me looks up and says, “Fella, looks like you got some jam there on your lip.” I look down at him. I can’t tell if he’s being smart or not. “And looks like you got a mouth full of shit, bud,” I say. The guy’s handsome smile kind of hangs there; he keeps his eyes on me. The beer arrives.

  When I get back to the table they’re already talking amongst themselves. I fill their glasses as they talk about some good body man named Clive, about what parts need ordering and from where, about repair and the clear steps toward it. No one expects me to help. I’m pouring my second before I notice the others haven’t touched theirs. I stare off. I study the measly, retriever-sized head of a black bear and, as my beer dwindles, begin to deem it the saddest species on earth. It looks almost apologetic. Its mouth is open with the I in I’m sorry.

  Then Russ pops his elbow onto the lacquered tabletop. His old fry-pan palm up in the air. “Let’s get it one time, son.” It takes me a minute to decipher through the heavy squint of his old age that merry look which he used to give me in my scooter years whenever I shouldered in through the screen-door looking mean or upset. We’d arm wrestle and he never once let me win.

  Lately I am working on being a good sport. I grind my elbow into the salt grit, take hold. “All right, Russ.” I cock my eyebrow.

  Jackie’s eyes fret across the table like insects, for once not knowing what’ll happen next.

  “Give you a chance to whup up on somebody,” Russ says. “Easy now,” he says, but the way his big hand chokes down on my own suggests he’s talking more to himself.

  Last week I woke up on the garage floor with Elden’s old Schwinn on top of me. I was holding it to my chest like a blanket. Inside, my machine winked with that terrifying red light. I pushed it and out poured some bad-breathed racket: a barroom, someone yelling at me—“Are you there? Are you there, Dayton?”—only it was my own voice, jagged and top-heavy, trying to out-yell the crybaby inside of me.

  Old Russ’s getting me, growling into me. He can’t help but be excited because he’s getting me. He feels how all my tautness has gone out, how something inside me has unstrung, come loose. And I catch that fellow at the bar pointing me out to three other fellows and having a chuckle. I look at him as if to say, “What’s so funny, dribble-dick?” He looks at me with some kind of narrow brown eyes, then looks away—like he’s seen right through to what I am and that what I am is common manure. I keep staring at him, hard. I want him to know he can’t pull that snicker and turn away shit with me. Like he’s some Townes Van Zandt or something. Don’t pull that flinty-eyed shit with me.

  When I look back in front of me Russ’s eyebrows are flapping up and down like crazy and his mouth has got this twisted gape like he’s trying to sing in French. I got his arm pressed to the table; his fingers are open under my fist, gnarled and writhing. “Oooh-oooh-gahh!”

  “Hey, boy!” Jackie says. He goes to snatch my arm away, but I let go, hold my arms up. I’m sort of grinning. Peat shakes her head.

  Russ takes off his Firestone hat, wipes his brow. His temples pulse a bright pink. He’s panting. “I guess you did need someone to whup up on.” He looks down at his opening and closing hand. A clear, sober drop of sweat comes off his nose.

  “No dang sense of humor,” Jackie spits at me and sits back down. I don’t get it.

  “Well,” I say at him, “I guess the look on your face is pretty goddamn funny.”

  My missing-tooth smile absolves me, somehow. But all three of them are looking back at me funny—Jackie not even like he wants to kill me. They’re looking at my temple, I realize; my hair has fallen into my eyes. I sweep it back over the red sunburst of flesh.

  Rubbing his wrist, Russ says, “I guess you think you ought to died.”

  I shrug, trying to smile still. I pretend it’s a good question.

  Peat orders a round of Cokes. The scar bothers her, I see. Or maybe she’s just bored; maybe she’s thinking what is she doing with me and the hillbillies when there’s Townes Van Zandt over there.

  “Dying don’t make people forget what sort of man you are,” Russ says.

  Jackie does his annoying drop-and-hook nod, like a nod and a shake at the same time, and says like they’ve had this conversation before, “The dead don’t tend to improve.”

  I spread my arms, I hold tight to my grin. “I look dead to any of you?”

  Russ glances at Peat, like to apologize for me having said whatever I might’ve said to her, and then looks at me and says, “You look tired, son.”

  Mornings lately I wake up panting, my vision bursting with sharp light and flickers of snake tongue, the world pulsating with the blue and red of vein work. Out my window I see peacoated backs hunching behind trees. I worry about the police, and about a blacker tide. Other mornings I just lie there and think how the world is too heavy with machinery. Sometimes I lie there for hours. No shit I look tired.

  A song ends. The dance floor settles. Pool balls crack somewhere.

  “No matter,” I say, a new song strumming into the air. “I’m heading out West anyway. I’m made for desert living, I can tell.”

  Their gazes dangle over the table. Even Peat’s.

  Then Peat laughs—it just sort of spills out. The others chuckle in, too. And I can’t help but get tickled, and then we’re all laughing hard, even Jackie. He’s laughing so hard he’s all gums. Like when we were kids and I had over-wheelied or something. His whole bald head the meanest pink you ever saw, trembling to blow—and Peat laughing so hard at that. I’m laughing a long minute or two after they’ve stopped. Soon we’re sipping our Cokes, exchanging stories of the ridiculous. Peat describes the likes of Jackie in his white choir robe, and I can see him fidgeting up there, his little pink head rotating this way and that. Jackie tries to embarrass Russ with an old one about the time he dynamited a stump through a neighbor’s house. Russ tells one about Peat:

  “She’s over on that barstool there,
eighteen years old, and this boy, he comes up like he wants to tell her a secret, which she seems all for it until he gets to flicking this pink tongue in her ear. I’m sitting right here, and I get up—you know I can’t stand this kind of shit. But same time, this one here, she slides off her stool, rocks back on one boot heel—you could hear the floorboard creak—and packs him in the forehead hard enough to unhinge a barn door.” He slaps his knuckles into his fry-pan palm, then his hand into the table to show how the fellow went down. It cracks us up.

  It’s my turn for a story. And stories are one thing I have hundreds of. They look at me, faces slack with residual grins. But suddenly I’m tired of all my stories. I look at Peat. “I want to dance with you,” I say in front of them. And for some reason she nods; for some reason she gives me her hand and, without a look to either of them, leads me through the tables before Jackie can notice, his chortle trailing off behind us—“Hard enough to kill a hog . . .”

  I am now trying to hold the world responsible for some sort of articulation. Or else you slide loose and end up upside down in a ditch. Or you’re calling yourself from a payphone. You’re written off, is what you are—written off in cursive. It’s about when you figure out the rest of the world has been listening to songs for the lyrics, and there you are in the shower with a guitar, trying to play the mush you were listening to when you should’ve been listening to the words—it’s about then that you start to listen up.

  My hand worries stiffly over the fleshy ravine in the small of her back; hers, miraculously, hangs over the back of my shoulder. The warmth I’ve been feeling among these people all day hits me. Whatever the song is, I love it.

  I say, not too close to her ear, “This man is telling about heartbreak, if you listen.” I’ve never been much for music before.

  “That’s what all men are telling about.” We’ve struck a nice rhythm, a careful sway.

  “It’s a particular one, Peat.”

  “Particular heart? Or you mean break?” She’s making fun of me.

  “Don’t ruin it.”

  And whatever this is, it’s not ruined. We work a tight circle under drunken sprays of light.

  I’m digging up more of these gem-like moments lately. For instance: we did get that Chevelle over, after all. We somehow got it up to a point for gravity to take over. There was no groan, no crackle of glass as we let go, just a metallic creak of the sort that runs through your grandpa’s recliner Sunday afternoons. The car towered for a moment up on its side, images of sky and tree slipping across the windshield—then it fell onto its tires and sat there, a bit brow-bent. You imagine a thunderous noise but there was none. Imagination’s got nothing to do with it. The world sometimes has to imagine things up for you.

  Less important is how the struts got jammed up; how Uncle Russ had to steer the ruined car to Gibson’s through some drunken counterclockwise cursive. Or how things didn’t go so hot with my wife and son. It’s less important, for now. It’s got to be. That’s what some dumb miracle like getting a car turned back over is good for—blinding you to what came before it. To what comes after.

  Which all I’m aware of tonight, even as we dance. For now, I hold as tightly to her as to the present. We are dancing. We dance. And later, when I’m outside giving it to Townes Van Zandt on the gravel, seeing out of the corner of my eye Peat hurrying Russ into the busted car and Jackie getting rough-armed back by the clientele, I know I’m tearing once again from the cradle of kindness. I’ve been born again a thousand times, and each time’s scarier than the last. You know what I mean? No, of course not. And that’s the hell of it. It’s about when Townes goes down, head clicking off a hubcap, and some others are on me, knocking teeth out of my head, air out of my lungs, sight out of my eyes, that the voice I hear in the dark becomes my own, saying as I fall backward, “Who’s behind me? Who’s behind me?”

  2. Bethel

  It was lying in bed at night I used to think of him. I’d click off the lamp, let a Conan flap to the floor, then pull that sad old quilt over me. I listened to a wide locusty static settle over the pasture. Gradually my eyes got accustomed to the dark, and I could make out the quilt’s patchwork stretched before me—crop fields glimpsed from a mountain pass. I thought of great distances and what it meant to travel them. And that’s when I could see him, my brother, appearing over some snowy curvature of earth, a man now—bearded, I was sure, shrouded in bear hide, our old hound Skokey ranging off a ways.

  I was twelve; I had never left northern Missouri. Seeing the wider world in a patchwork quilt was possible for me then. Corey’d been gone six years, half my life, long enough to become a giant—the world itself nearly. I forgot all about what a son of a bitch he’d been as a kid, how he’d quarter a barn cat or open hand Mother or twist my arm harder than you ought a boy my age. Mother blamed it on he was a blue baby—came out in a noose. He was troubled. But the day he left I forgot all that stuff, remembering only the mythic circumstances of his departure. The papers had called him a killer and the papers were right. He’d busted free of something, everything, and now he was somewhere I couldn’t imagine—ripping through man and beast, whipping at a world finally big enough to take it. “Out there getting the poison out,” Mother said often those six years he was gone, folding some shirt of his she’d come across.

  Still now, thirty-five years later, it’s that slim hour before sleep I think of after I click off my rig’s fuzzy radio, two hundred night miles ahead of me. It’s that faded quilt, glorious gory Conan, and somehow my brother, the visions I had of him, how all this together could lift me beyond the outlines of my childhood. Looking back, of course, my childhood was still firmly upon me, and it now seems inevitable that on one particular night as I lay there dreaming of his bone heavy footfalls, his wide winter breaths, the winterkill lolling across his shoulders, I should hear the floor give some, and see beyond the flat fields of my quilt the full shadow of my brother, standing at the foot of my bed, his back to me as he unbuttoned a flannel shirt.

  • • •

  He’d run off plenty as a kid. Weekly, gone days at a time. But the night he left us for good I remember. I was six, Corey sixteen. He sat on the edge of his bed in his garage dungarees and hunting boots, stuffing a duffel with uncharacteristic forethought. Jeans, BVDs, deodorant, a comb. His face held a strange ash in the lamplight. A brown crust flecked his knuckles and forearms. “Go back asleep, Pickle.” He said it firm, not mean. I closed my eyes; I slept. Only later was I waked by the hallway ruckus that always attended his departures—the sinewy, red hot curses; bodies hitting walls; my brother’s voice breaking into a womanish yowl; Mother calling, “Careful, Paul!” The bedroom door bowed in; the handle jiggled. Pop could often corral Corey back into our room, but I’d locked it when the fighting started and lay curled up under my covers. Finally the downstairs door slammed. The house went quiet. Then Mother let loose a long gut-sob I’d never heard before.

  He’d been gone a day when word came of a man turned up dead over in Emden. The man was a forty-eight-year-old ex-con who’d come on as a tire-buster at the garage where Corey helped out. Corey got under a car himself now and then but mostly just helped out. The owner knew Pop. Not long after the ex-con started on, another guy there was killed when a car came off its jacks. I expect Corey saw it, saw it wasn’t an accident like everyone said. Months later, up in Emden one February morning, a neighbor noticed the ex-con’s front door half open, a socked foot hanging out. “Face all stove in,” I remember an older kid on the bus saying. Buried in that face was a ball-peen hammer, Corey’s, a recent birthday gift from Pop. Pop identified it for the police. It’s funny, I can’t anymore recall the Emden fellow’s name. Big son of a bitch, I’d heard.

  Both our nattered birders had tried to leave with Corey. But the next day, just after Pop saw off the two Emden cruisers and was walking back to where I sat on the porch step—holding out to me a G. I. Joe doll he’d found in the dr
ive—Sister came tearing down our dirt road. We could see her pinned-back ears over the highgrass. Pop’s hand sank back to his side, still dangling the doll by its boot as we watched. We both climbed up on the edge of the porch and craned as Sister rounded down a hard wheel rut of our drive, looking smaller now that for once Skokey wasn’t with her. The dog leapt up on the porch and heeled with her chest pressed against Pop’s leg, panting, glancing wildly around her. Only then did Pop’s gaze falter from the road bend she’d come around.

  Pop’d come up on a dairy farm and tried it himself, but after having me he had to turn to something more profitable and went into hardware. The store forever teetered on the brink, and at the end of a long day puttering with displays and scribbling in his ledger Pop came home looking not so much tired as strained, scuttle-eyed, his voice gone petty. Always in the breast of his coveralls was a small wire rust brush frayed to the wood.

  Corey could always pull some red into Pop’s cheeks, and while I’m sure Pop was some relieved to see my brother take his furies into the wider world, not having Corey there to fight against every day made him appear instantly old, standing there on that porch. In the weakening light his once jowly face seemed to sink and gray like weathered wood. Soon I’d begin to realize, at too young an age, that my father was just a man who wanted always to complain but never did because he knew he oughtn’t.

  Pop turned back toward the porch shade, toed Sister out of the way, and walked inside. I was surprised later to find the doll grimacing up from my grip.

  Lowering his heft onto the other twin, a small blue flicker glanced from Corey’s eyes: he knew I was awake.

  “Pickle,” he said, lying back and exhaling. The cherrywood frame popped and cracked under him. It suddenly felt natural to me he was there.

  “Skoke outside?” I said.

  He breathed. “Skokey. He got off in some woods. Up in”—he yawned—“up in Dakota. I’m going to sleep now, Pickle.”