Being Dead in South Carolina Page 4

  I often wonder if my parents knew what was wrong with him. They never called a doctor to come by and figure whether it was tick fever or lockjaw or mercury or just a damned black widow. This was partly because we lived in a small town and Corey was still wanted. But partly, too, I think, my parents saw a doctor would be useless. Corey’d been sick in his own skin since birth. By Mother’s account, he couldn’t take loud noises as a babe, would carry on for hours after a mill truck geared past the house. Never could he be touched or held. I remember he always suffered sour breath, flatulence, and a feral temper. I can’t name a thing in this world that wasn’t hot flint in his side. He was a mean brother and I’d hated him those years before he ran off. But I don’t blame myself for that now. I was a kid, hardly six. And besides, my hate was a kind of pity. I knew even then he’d never be happy. The stuff in him that for some people turns to love he couldn’t let out, or in: it just kind of abscessed around his heart. Which is to say he didn’t sort well with people. Or with himself, is the point. He’s one of only two people I ever met who couldn’t abide music.

  Mother was cleaning Corey’s dishes one night during his fourth week home, and instead of giving us her daily report on how he was doing, she said, “He’s been grinding against the world so long, he’s just ground raw.” Pop ignored her, knowing she was right. Maybe they’d meant to get a doctor over eventually.

  It was around one on the following Saturday, a month into his stay. I waited until Mother headed up to the store with a thermos of chicken-noodle for Pop, then walked upstairs and stood before the door to what had become Corey’s room. No sound came from inside. I cracked the door enough to slide in, slipping it shut behind me.

  Through the curtains seeped a dim, pus-orange light that gave substance to the room’s heavy stench. Cutting that stench was a distinct piss. My eyes had to adjust.

  He lay in the far corner with his mouth open, one arm hung to the floor. A lamp had been knocked over on the bedside table, its shade dented and dangling off the edge. Crumb-covered plates and cloudy glasses cluttered the table; dried food or vomit streaked down the two drawers.

  A sound like a gas leak came from my brother. I walked over to the bed. Carefully, I folded back his quilt, finding beneath it my own, its patchwork darkened by sweat; I folded it back, too, revealing his hairless chest. The fever-heat hit my face like a furnace.

  I reached back, took the knife from my waistband. It was an A. G. Russel 1861-style bowie. I bought it from the hardware at the break of summer, and though Pop sold it to me at cost, I’d had to save up a year. It was the closest thing I’d ever seen to a sword in real life. Pop seemed surprised I wanted the knife, but knew I intended no harm with it. “A pretty thing,” Pop’d said, taking it from the case. But not good for much.

  I gripped the knife in front of me with both hands, blade down, its tip a few inches off the rise and fall of sternum. His lips, chapped white, formed a small, perfect o. I lifted my arms, inhaled, and drove it down.

  The blade clicked into rib as if into buried stone. The knife jumped from my grip, fell across his chest. He gasped.

  “Mov’vug”—his arm wheeled around with casual violence, catching my neck and crashing me across the bedside plates and glasses. His other arm came down on my head with the scrap of a curse—“vugger”—as if this is how he’d had to begin every day.

  He rolled to his feet, pressing a hand to his chest; the knife clanked to the floor. I curled up and heard the door slam back into the wall. He grabbed up my arm and flung me into the hallway. He stomped after me, top-heavy, half spinning off the jam, some blood smeared thin across his fatty chest. Cursing more articulately now, he picked me up again and threw me down the hall, kicking at my stomach and hips, shouldering picture frames off the wall. He kicked me toward the stairs and—a banister leg breaking off in my fist—down them.

  I raised my cheek from the shiny shock of oak flooring at the bottom and pushed to my knees. Still he was barreling after me, four steps at a time.

  He threw me through the screen door. I again got to my knees and fought off the mess of boards and screen, then scurried for the yard and turned to take what was coming. But didn’t turn fast enough. His callused fist caught me under the jaw, filling my skull with the squeak of thick ice coming apart and lifting me into a dizzy snow of light. I’d barely hit the dirt before he grabbed me up by arms and drove my body again into the ground hard as he could, knocking a terrible emptiness into my chest. I stared up at him, unable to breathe, feeling his arms kick with voltage. His eyes were black and unseeing. “Stop, Corey!” I mouthed, and then fell to soundless crying because I’d pissed myself.

  By the time mother got home I was showered and changed. I told her J. T. and I had busted the door and picture frames horsing. I explained the bruise on my jaw the same. Pop was furious about the door, but didn’t say much: I think he knew what was what. Later Mother fried up some catfish I’d caught that morning. She took a plate up to Corey’s room, and the next morning he was gone.

  • • •

  Duluth, some roofers, Superior: my imagination worked on these facts for weeks. At school, at J. T.’s, at home, they stayed with me like lozenges I was forever pulling on—pulling on even in bed at night, where I was no longer given to comics or fantastical travels with my brother. Even now, all skin and age and bad sleep, I can’t help pull on them still.

  It wasn’t long before a certainty began to sink in that when Corey killed that man (a man my age now) it wasn’t for the reasons we all figured. Maybe it was a certainty of the sort that comes from being brothers, but I grew surer and surer that Corey’s act wasn’t any kind of righteous revenge or overspill of passion. He was just scared. Surely this ex-con fellow whispered in his ear what might happen if he told what he’d seen with the jacks. No doubt each shift at the garage brought glances suggesting this day might be his last. The man had made Corey afraid in the way only a child can be afraid. Fear did it, finally. Not righteousness. Not even meanness. Even now I am sure of this.

  One winter he took a stone to Skokey’s head after a truck got his hinds—this, given me on the porch one day, long after the meanness had passed into something else. He told me like we’d talked about it before. Like I knew everything about him.

  • • •

  It was three weeks later Pop and I found him. Fall had come, the sharp air, the cold rush of sun. It was the first day of deer season and Pop and I were making a last loop through Pond Forest. Swallows flew low eights over the pond, wing shards nearly cutting the quivered surface. Walking along the bank, I was watching them when Pop stayed my shoulder. I looked up at him and followed his gaze to a clearing. Then I saw him too, off past some ferns. He was lying on his stomach in the mud, knees knocked together.

  I followed Pop toward the ferns, the world tilting with each step. Pop stood over the body and slung down the harness from his shoulder. It was a leather drag harness for deer. Its buckles stung into the mud.

  He knelt, slid his hand under the forehead, and pulled my brother’s face from the suction of mud. He loosed the rest of the body in that way, then began to push and twist it over onto its back—laboring against the stiff weight of his son with a helpless violence—the weight, the suck of mud robbing him of any last opportunity for gentleness. As Pop stepped around to the other side, I saw the face, tilted back and swollen. One eye was mudded in. The lips lifted away from the small teeth as though his mouth had been inflated with air.

  I saw how small my brother’s head had been. I saw the shape of a boy inside the man’s coat of flesh—something you can’t see in the living. He was barefoot.

  Pop fastened the antler straps under the arms, then pulled two more straps up through the crotch, cinching them snug across the mid-flesh. His knuckles wobbled as he worked. I don’t know if he could’ve done this were I not there. Finally we each took a strap, put it over our shoulder.

  At fi
rst, we both strained against the weight, our feet sliding in the mud. He’d turned to mountain, my brother. It wasn’t until we felt the body pull loose, heard the sound of Corey’s back and bare heels snick across the mud and leaves, that we began to cry. Pop leaned forward, his small legs sliding weakly, his eyes and face purplish and crumpled in, tears coming off his chin. Me crying too, both of us choking out a rhythmic moan.

  “I could’ve done it myself,” he sobbed. “I could’ve done it myself.”

  Two hours later we walked into the house. Mother was washing dishes. A roasting chicken warmed the kitchen, filling it with the smell of stock and spices.

  “Y’all get him?”—she meant whatever buck we were about to lie about.

  Pop stared at her. We’d buried him at the edge of the pines, almost in sight of the house—Pop’d sent me back for the pick and shovels. In the end we left him bound in those leather straps because Pop couldn’t bear wrestling them off. I could tell the straps were working on him now, though.

  “Lord,” laughed my mother. “You two got in some mud.” She kept her eyes on us; her smile fell. “Paul? Paul, what’s wrong?” Her voice began to get louder, buckle. “Paul, you answer me.”

  He was staring at the floor. He hadn’t taken off his boots. He shook his head.

  Then her face softened. She turned off the sink and walked over, drying a water-warmed hand and placing it on his cheek. “He’ll come back, Paul. When he’s ready. He just wants to say he’s sorry. It’s all he’s wanted since he got here. To tell you that.”

  “Sorry for what?” he finally snapped, knocking away her hand like he had no more room in his day for sorries. He walked back out of the house. Without looking at my mother, I went up to my room. It had had weeks to air out.

  • • •

  I sold that old place years ago. I left when I was seventeen to do some traveling of my own. Never did go back. Mother died of a stroke at sixty-four. Pop died four years later in a home up in Kirksville. I was twenty-eight by then, 600,000 miles on my rig, and both had been in the ground before I got word. I found the envelope about the property willed to me in a pile of bills on my apartment floor one night. I’d just returned from a two-week stretch hauling, of all things, Irish peat moss. I called, told some lawyer’s secretary to send me a check. Told her I really didn’t have time for this. I’d hoped it would be enough for a new rig. It wasn’t.

  Now I got over four million miles logged, most of them night miles I can’t account for. Not anymore than I can account for what led my brother home for one month at the end of a summer when I was twelve. I can’t account for the story of my brother, for what his life has meant to mine. I got no one to tell this ghost to, no reason for telling it. I had a girlfriend for a year once. She used to ride along on shorter hauls. One night, she drowsing in the seat next to me, I mentioned we were passing through Bethel, where I grew up. I don’t know why I even mentioned it. Nothing but black out there. Maybe I figured she and I would be something big one day. She said, “I never imagined you had a family. I guess we all got families, though. We all come from somewhere.” She rolled her head back to the side and closed her eyes. Peg was her name. But I know I’ve been driving too long, because sometimes I forget.

  Last week I was night-sailing through the Utah desert—which used to bother me but now just lets me feel empty for a while—and I stopped for this hitcher. He climbed in wearing a green army coat a few sizes big. As he pulled himself into the seat and shut the door, his arms trembled inside the baggy sleeves in a way that put you in mind of how spindly and pale they were. Right off, his smell hit me—a smell of charred bark and something god-awful dead. I was already regretting it.

  “Reno far off?” He’s your average hitcher, bug-eyed, greasy-haired, starving.

  “Eight hundred, maybe some less.”

  “Well shit, man. I got to make Reno.” He was staring at me, his small body cocked in his seat in a way that made me uneasy.

  “There’s a truck stop just over into Arizona. I’ll stop there. Plenty guys heading that way.”

  “How far is that, man?”

  “Hour.”

  “‘Maybe some less’?”

  “No.”

  He looked out the window. “Someone in that desert shooting at me, man.” He turned to me. “Bullets spitting by my head like hornets. In the fucking dark, man, so I can’t see where they’re coming from.”

  His smell was working on me. I had an impulse to stop and kick at him till he was out of my cab.

  “Some dude following me, man.”

  I didn’t say anything, just drove. On the radio a guy sent out a song to his brother in Iraq, some rock tune about a woman dancing on a bar. The hitcher winced. “Can’t hear you in Iraq, dummy.” I turned off the radio.

  I was hauling an illegal load of tar, hundreds of barrels of it. Some contractor tries to shave down a number on paper, and what it amounts to is me and my rig crossing eighteen hundred miles of mountain and desert, four tons over the legal limit. I don’t understand how this world works.

  A couple miles on, I pointed at the darkness out my window. “About there’s Monument.”

  The hitcher looked at me.

  “You know. Where they made all those John Wayne movies.”

  “Shit,” he said. “I never went in for movies. Not for songs or any of that shit. I got enough on my plate, man. I got a feast of fucking famine, man. Bullets grazing by like hornets.” He glanced past me, at the black window. “John Wayne. Shit.”

  Sure, he was alone, as alone as you can get. He was pitiable. But what I saw, too, was he was near the end. He’s near the end and it’s a good damn thing, I thought. He’d never make Reno. He’d be lucky to make morning. So what did I do? Thirty miles short of Arizona, right in deepest, darkest stretch of nowhere, I told him to get his bag.

  He didn’t curse or threaten me, and somehow I knew he wouldn’t. He just shrugged, looking out at the night, his eyes pooled dark in the dash glow—the strained eyes of some nocturnal, ground-grubbing thing, worn out from trying so long not to get caught. Worn out from the dark. He hopped out just before I came to a full stop, and I was accelerating again before his feet hit. I didn’t see him in the rearview—I looked. He must’ve started walking away from the road, maybe toward where he thought Reno was, trying hard as he could to fool himself. Maybe he was fooled. Maybe even in that blackness there was faith in every footfall.

  3. My Father at the Mountainside

  My father was a small man. I was ten when I inherited his cowboy boots, picked up years before on a business trip to Dallas and still new because he was not a cowboy and sensible enough never to wear them.

  A whole Saturday I walked back and forth across our slick garage floor to hear those magnificent heels clop. I mouthed the word gambol over and over, mouthed it with each wide step, until eventually saying it aloud. “Gambol” was what the cowpoke had done as a child in the Louis L’Amour book, something I gathered roughneck orphans and runaways did. Gambol was not gamble but it was close, like junior gambling. My stride grew increasingly bowlegged and bandy, and the left side of my mouth stretched wider and wider around the word as around an accreting tumble of chaw. As the hours yawned I began to look and sound drunk, which I suppose I was, and I still had on the boots Sunday morning despite blisters, my cereal bowl sitting untouched while the garage filled up with more of that dogged clopping and muttering. I was four laps in when my father collared me into the car and drove to Blowing Rock, two hours away, just for the hell of it, or because he was tired of the noise.

  I pressed my temple against the window as the road cut through canyons of lead-rock mountain, striped from what he called explosive charges. When I said I’d like to climb one of these walls, my father pulled over, cut the engine, and said it might be a fine way to break in the boots—deferring to me as he would to a sensible old hunting buddy. I stoo
d there in the highway weeds, a bit drowsy and stupefied by my burger earlier in Cherokee and nearly whipped off my feet by rushing traffic, and had only to walk up close to the wall and grope its massive stillness and raise my knee and skid a boot tip down the poly-planed convections and grit to know I wasn’t climbing anywhere—a sad realization of physics and weight that stunned me out of the moment with a boulder-drop of bonafide depression.

  My father crossed his arms and waited like a father letting me teach myself a lesson. Or possibly he believed, as I had, that the wall before us was indeed climbable, and climbable in cowboy boots no less, and this a standard method toward breaking them in, or breaking me in for that matter, he as senseless and giddy about the physics of fatherhood as I, in my shorts and boots, about those of mountaineering. “I got to talk to you, bud,” he said back in the car, but couldn’t.

  Later we tossed a cellophane Ritz wrapper off Blowing Rock and were blinded by crumbs, and the day pretty much dried up. Our gambols in general pretty much dried up, as did that wine-leather luster of the boots on the drive home. I grew bored of them, and certainly they of me.

  4. The Oldest City

  I arrived in Florida three days ago to provide for a woman getting her Ph.D. in Laotian Studies. I like the dog park here. Her dog likes to run and bite the hind legs of other dogs. Really just mouthing. “She’s just mouthing,” I assure the worried ladies in dungarees. The ladies are retired schoolteachers and I have already got to know their frank talk, their worried eyes on the dogs, ladies both frank and worried, never frankly worried. I get it. I like coming here more than looking for a job. I’m here mostly. Dog park clothes are the best.