Authors: Tom Franklin
Dock kicked till he was let go, and he ran tumbling into the woods.
A group of Primitive Baptists found him after dark, wandering around. He didn’t remember anything. They snapped their fingers in his face but he just stared. His mother was at the hospital, praying by the bed. Nannie-Rae was still alive, but the doctor told the mother her daughter wouldn’t live much longer. The father was in his truck. He drove to the road where he found her shoes and he picked up the pieces of her dress and put them in his pocket. He lifted a pail from the truck and with a shovel dug the blood from the road, stopping only to drink from his bottle.
Uncle Dock will tell you all he remembers about Nannie-Rae now are the birds. He doesn’t even know what she looked like. The truck driver began stuttering after the accident and couldn’t stop talking about the little girl he’d killed. Until he died, he would visit Uncle Dock’s parents once or twice a year, and when they died he visited Uncle Dock. He would be drunk, crying, and though it took him a long time, he retold the story exactly the same way. How the birds stopped singing.
You you you you eyes was dis dis dis big, Muh Muh Muh Muh Mister Dock
…
Diane cried, too, when I told her that story, though some of it was stuff I’d had to imagine. Then I told her more, how after Uncle Dock’s wife left him in the 1940s, he fished summer evenings in the river behind the chemical plant where he worked. He ran trotlines, shot yawning cottonmouths out of trees from his skiff. Beer on the water, standing to aim a stream of piss at
the smooth blue catfish. Throwing the ones he didn’t want on the floor of the boat—grinnel, carp, suckers: trash fish, bottom feeders.
Give ’em to the niggers
, he’d say,
they eat anything
.
Hunting in the fall. Cool weather, steamy breath, moving like a ghost through woods. Uncle Dock calling up gobblers, yepping, their wily approach, bobbing heads, eyes like marble:
Come a little closer, Mr. Turkey, that’s it, yep yep yep, move into range, that’s it, and, and…ah
!
Drinking out of jars, a thousand gallons of homemade whisky. Lighting a million Camel cigarettes. Raising from pups a dozen fine coon dogs, one or two at a time, until they died, ran off or got killed: Herbert and Hoover, Sidney, Dan’l Boone, January, Abraham, Decent, Chickenshit, Otis, Rotten, Coon Ass and Jesus H. Christ. They slept outside, on the porch in a wooden box with a blanket in winter and under the house by the kitchen pipes in summer. He would shoot stray cats on sight and pay black boys a nickel to tote off the carcasses.
For forty-two years Uncle Dock worked at the chemical plant, making DDT, until it was banned by the EPA, then making diazinon until last year’s retirement party, a gold plaque, and we got drunk on his porch.
Fresh out of the army, I was staying with him. The whisky tasted like gasoline and ate the bottoms out of Styrofoam cups, and I got the feeling he knew I was lying about my rank of corporal. He had served, too. The draft. Flying home after fighting for his country to a woman who would leave him.
“Uncle Dock,” I said, “tell me the truth about your marriage.”
“Lasted ever bit of two months,” he told me, pouring us more whisky.
“What happened?”
“They was somebody else.”
“Another man?”
“Yep.”
“What’d you do?”
“Nothing.” He poured himself more whisky. “The hell could I do, boy?”
“Fight for her,” I said. “Kill the son of a bitch.”
“Lord, I thought about it many an evening,” he said, raising his glass.
Last night I rode the
elevator with Jack Daniel’s in my pocket. Hospital halls, long and white. Gray wainscotting for my fingers to run along. Belching. I got lost and asked and somebody showed me his room. I’d been standing right beside it. I tapped on the door and went in. He looked skinnier and was a paler color, but he just started talking like we were on his porch and nothing was wrong.
“They’s this big fat lady moved in that old place beside me back at the house,” he said. “Real porker. She wears this sombrero-looking gardening hat and these koo-lots and the cheeks of her ass hang out like I couldn’t tell you. I watch her through the whaddyacallit, the blinds. From my bedroom window. This fellow, a hippie, comes sees her once or twice a week and they set out on her back porch, giggling. He’s skinny as a damn rail. Shit, I get to giggling with ’em myself some days. The lady, she brings out beer and they toast after everything they say, and pretty soon they look around real shrewd-like to see if anybody’s watching, though there ain’t nobody on that whole damn street except for me, and I’m in there in the dark, dead for all
they know. So she brings out this plastic bag of reefer and he gets his papers and they roll a big fat one and fire up.
“Thing is, I can’t figure out if it’s the hippie bringing her the weed or if she grows it herself in that backyard jungle of hers. Sometimes he’ll get up and go wading through the weeds and fall down and plumb disappear. She spits out beer she’s laughing so hard. Then he stands up and they go inside holding hands. Shut the door and crawl all over each other, I reckon.”
I got out of my chair.
Morphine pumped into his arm, a thin white tube.
“Your momma tells me you done fell in love,” he said, closing his eyes.
I was looking out the window. Dark: car lights five floors down.
“Her name’s Diane,” I said. “We broke up.”
In the bathroom later while Uncle Dock slept, I snapped the tab of a diet Coke and poured half of it down the sink and replaced it with whisky. I heard sudden sharp dry coughs and hurried to his side and touched his arm. Dribble ran down his chin, his eyes rolled back.
Hunh
, he went, leaning up,
hunh hunh
. I could feel the coughs rattling in my own rib cage. Then a tall black nurse brushed me aside saying I’d have to leave, my time was up.
Shubuta. Population 614
.
Light-headed, sweating beer. Kudzu. Crows standing stiff-legged around a distant dead thing. Fields on both sides: corn, dying.
Thinking of Willie Howe’s suicide, I pull off the road next to a rust-bucket pickup truck full of watermelons. This old black
dude sits there asleep in a ragged easy chair under a big purple umbrella with his head on his fist and his loafers propped on his tailgate. There’s a hand-lettered sign on the truck that says
WATERMELONS
3/$5.
After I’ve stolen like nine melons I get worried the old dude might be dead. So I ease the van door shut and go over and poke his shoulder.
“Hey,” I say. “Wake up, pops.”
His eyes open.
“You know Willie Howe?” I ask him. “The fellow shot all those watermelons?”
He straightens in the chair, shows pink gums but no teeth when he opens his mouth to cough. Then he says, “You gonna buy some melons?”
“Could be. I bet these’re right out of Willie’s fields, right?”
“You buying?”
“Some mighty fine specimens you got here,” I tell him.
“Thumpable ripe,” he says. “My wife, she a voodoo doctor and she know just when to pick ’em. She say, ‘Cleavon, this one ripe and this here one ripe, but that’n over yonder need to set three more days.’ You want some?”
“How much?”
“Can’t you read?”
“Well.”
“It’s right on that sign there, and I don’t like nobody axing they price when there it go in plain sight.”
“Your wife a voodoo doctor?”
“I just said that. Don’t like nobody axing me is she a voodoo doctor when I just said it.”
“Can she fix me a potion so my girlfriend’ll come back?”
“You damn right.”
“She can do that I don’t need any watermelons.”
An eighteen-wheeler carrying cattle roars by, a stink of manure and diesel.
He looks at me from the watery bottoms of his eyes. “When my old lady want a melon to eat, she tell me throw her some off on the ground. She mean hard, so they bust open. Juice flying everywhere. Then she make me fetch the heart out each one of them melons on the ground all split up, put that cool red heart in a bowl, give it to her. She eat it all. But only that heart. Rest just rurn.” He moves his feet from the tailgate and plants them on the ground and gazes at the melons. “You know how long it take to grow a good-size melon like these here?”
“No, sir.”
“Take a long time. I sell these babies, make a fine profit, ’less I know you. I know you, I cut you a deal. But I don’t know you, now, do I?”
I don’t say anything and he looks into the curves and humps of the melons in his truck.
“Lemme ax you a question,” he says. “How come I throw them perfectly good melons and bust ’em open just so she can gobble that heart out?”
“You got me.”
“This girlfriend, she ever make you poke chops?”
“Oh, man.”
“Son, you pitiful! Don’t never eat no meat a woman give you. They carry it in they panties and administrate on it before they cook it, and you eat it you theirs for life. That how my old lady caught me. You’ll do anything they say once they put the hex on you. You can’t get away.”
“Well, it don’t sound so bad, if it’s the right woman.”
“Ain’t no such thing! Bible say the man supposed to rule the house. You don’t want your girlfriend voodoo smoking up
your judgment.”
“She don’t know about voodoo. All she can do is look good.”
“Voodoo voodoo.”
What if that’s what happened to old Willie Howe, I think. Did some witch-woman get hold of him voodoo-wise? Did it break his heart to toss his hard work in the dirt for her? I picture Willie making his escape. He leaves her sleeping, her afternoon nap, a hot breeze coming through the rusty screens. He takes from the nightstand the snub-nosed thirty-eight, slips it and two boxes of cartridges into his pockets. He goes out through the tall summer weeds with grasshoppers springing up. In his pickup he drives to the most remote corner of his farm, the box of eyeglasses on the seat beside him.
“Poor old Willie,” I say.
“Poor old us all,” the watermelon man says.
In the van, its rear
end weighted down with melons, I dig in the cooler and find a beer. The landscape passes, two skinny silhouettes fighting with sling blades. My clothes and hair are damp from sweat, the four o’clock sun in my eyes. I come to a rest area and rumble off the road. Not a fancy place like on the interstate, this one just pine trees and a few rotten picnic tables, a garbage can. Kudzu climbs the trees, scales power poles, goes wire to wire.
My cigarette package, empty, flutters to the ground. A far-off buzzard doing wide, slow turns above the tree line is the only thing moving. Uncle Dock calls them country airplanes, the way they glide. He says your average buzzard can see for miles. I suppose that old fellow up there can see me clear as day, though he’s just a speck from here.
If he’s looking now, he sees me close my eyes. I’m imagining a young, healthy Uncle Dock going after the man who stole his wife. I make the thief a curly-headed half-breed from Shubuta, a high yellow giant with a hearty laugh. He is handy with knives. I pour straight rotgut down Uncle Dock for three days, bring him red-eyed and reckless to Shubuta with nothing to lose. My family knows how to work a shotgun. How to drink. Uncle Dock, reeling, pictures thick fingers undoing his wife’s dress and a bone-hard torso pressing her against a door, a big red tongue in her ear as the half-breed seizes her by her wet crotch with one hand and lifts her off the floor. Her high heel shoes fall off:
thump
, the left one,
thump
, the right.
Hearing her cries, Uncle Dock stops in the hall. Clutches his face. Turns the shotgun.
I open the van’s back door from the inside.
An old yellow dog with gnats around his ears regards me from one of the picnic tables. His tongue hangs out, and he doesn’t even blink when I approach, cradling a watermelon. I flick open my pocketknife and cut into the rind. The dog’s ears twitch, his drab tail wags. I reach over and shake the scruff of his neck.
“Half for you, half for me,” I say.
Without rising he sticks his head down in the bowl of melon and laps.
I think of Diane. Her sweet salty pussy. When I called her on the phone last week she said, “Somebody who goes on and on about suicide used to be considered not likely to carry out.”
I said, “What do you mean used to be?”
She said, “Now psychology’s changed and you’re actually dangerous.”
Dangerous
. It gave me a spiny thrill, being dangerous.