When they came for me, it was like I had done something wrong, which I guess I had in a way. I should have tried some college after all. For a time I worked security at a country-western place called Boots, where they let me try my hand at a few stand-up routines, but it never clicked. You got to make the crowds go wild if you want to do real comedy. You got to leave them gasping for air. Which I guess I never did. Within two years the mill was down to half production and only one shift. Businesses closing on Main Street while the pawn shops flourished. I got reports from my sister, who was a photographer at the local paper. She told me the mayor was applying for federal grants. Within two and a half years everyone was gone from the picking room except Murtaugh.
In my mind I could see him working alone, in his world where he had been shaped by the accumulated weight of years, dark and threatening as a thundercloud. Muscles corded under that white T-shirt like bridge cables. Hands and arms, God, like he could catch a Volkswagen if you could throw him one. Sometimes I think he had just been waiting for the rest of us to leave. Which is the way, I believe, that monsters are made. He stayed until the mill itself closed, about the same time I moved to the mountains and took up carpentry. My sister Emily sent me a picture of the picking room when it had been emptied of cloth, but it had no human perspective. It was just a photograph of a junkyard, like you could go searching the aisles forever and find nothing but the dry emptiness of canyons. And after that I tried to imagine Murtaugh walking the streets of our little town at night. Up and down, across and back, following the grid.
Jimmy John Pardue went into the movies and was arrested within a year for making the wrong kind. He bought a used video camera and a Volkswagen bus, which he drove through the mill village, offering money to girls who would accept a ride.
“Hey, sweetie, where you headed?”
And they would tell him downtown or to the movies or none of his business.
Then he would ask them, “You need a ride? Cause we can give you a ride and even give you a little money if you’ll answer some questions, me and Patty here.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Hop in, I’ll give you forty dollars to tell us the first time you ever kissed somebody.”
“What’s she need a camera for?”
“That’s Patty. And, Patty, I want you to meet the love of my life, the most gorgeous and most talented girl without a ride on this street whose name I want recorded right now on account of she’s got the best-looking little legs I’ve ever seen and a smile that would stop a train. Are you Sarah? Because that’s what somebody told me and you sort of look like a Sarah, you know, in a real fresh and perky kind of way. Why don’t you hop in, and we’ll give you a ride down to the shopping mall. I mean, if that’s where you want to go. And you don’t need to worry a bit. Ain’t nobody going to make you take any money that you don’t want to take, no sir, not one dime of this fifty dollars.”
In the film that they used for evidence, there is no sound, only unsteady images of the girl herself and the occasional hand or foot of the person holding the camera. Jimmy John is at the wheel, and you can see through the windows that they are driving through the country, trees and pastures spooling by in a blur. The girl is adjusting her skirt and pulling her hair behind her ears and touching the buttons of her blouse as she answers questions from the front seat. She is smiling, handling the interview well. Relaxed and talking to the camera. At one point she giggles and leans forward, planting a mock slap on the side
of Jimmy John’s head. He cringes in pretend fear. And they all laugh some more. You can see the camera jiggling.
A few minutes later the girl covers her face in mock embarrassment and then answers cautiously, looking out the window at tasseled rows of corn. There’s a shrug and a few more words from the front seat. Some folded twenties that get handed to the girl who stuffs them into her backpack and sits meditatively until the scene goes blank. When the light and motion resume, she is on her knees in an impossible position, her rump in the air and one shoulder and the side of her face on the floor in the middle of the van. She’s smiling and talking to the camera as she lifts her skirt and tugs at the elastic of her panties. Everyone seems to be laughing and having a good time.
6
I did not marry Patty the commissary girl or play professional baseball or become a big star, but my life is all right. Today I am a wood turner in a furniture shop in the mountains where the guys say things like “Hey, Riggs, run outside and get us a tree” and I feel like I am at home. At night I lie down in a bed that I made with my own hands beside a woman named Elise who gave me the one thing that I love most in this world. And she is so tiny. Normal and perfect like her mama and as light as a snowflake in my hand. At least that is what it feels like to me.
Sometimes I tell her stories. I am still pretty good at that, and as I tell, I remember. Like how you got there by following the yellow line. One foot wide, repainted twice a year by men who never got off their knees because for them it was a never-ending line that wound through the carding room like a country road on a map. Then across the metal bridge and into the weave room where you dodged air cleaners drifting above you like jellyfish, tentacles hanging all the way to the floor and sucking up the cotton fibers so it’s like the cleanest floor you’ve ever seen, weavers bustling around in hairnets and masks like surgeons.
Then you took the yellow stairs down. Punched through two sets of swinging doors and went down some more until you smelled vinegar or maybe heard the dyer himself slamming at a bolt with one of his wrenches. And pretty soon there he would be, sweating on account of the steam and not even wasting a glance in your direction. Most of the time you only knew him as a pair of legs and a leather apron there in the blue fog, but it would be him all right. He never left the dye house. It was like the laundry room of a prison, the air a roiling thundercloud of blue steam. But sometimes you could see him in one of the aisles between vats, where he’d be roasting like a pig, arms absolutely blue to the elbows and where, if you came close enough, you would notice the one startling fact that stayed with you all the years. That his eyes were perfectly matched to his arms, the cobalt blue of new blue jeans.
Those are the things I remember because there was no direct route into the picking room. You had to follow the painted pathway. You had to take the yellow stairs down. And once engulfed in that fog, you simply held you breath until you reached the freight elevator, which, everybody said, was a one-way drop, like the canary cage dangling from some miner’s hand as he takes the long ride down. And I do not know how I got out alive.
Now I look back over my life trying to see where it went right, and I find someone four years old climbing into my lap, there in the big chair, on nights when the wind rushes up through the valley. And I try to think of what to tell her when she asks where the monsters come from.
TWO WHO DROWNED
Refiner’s Fire
So many things at once. Like this.
The woman I live with is white, which for some people, I suppose, counts as an accomplishment. While for me it suggests that they must have been desperate down there, at the church. Someone must have had a vision. And someone else must have decided they needed a delegation. So you see what I mean. None of this story makes sense when you tell it straight. I’m guessing they prayed for a month before reaching the bottom of their barrel, and then they prayed some more and sent elders up here to my house, scraping and shuffling like a bunch of plantation darkies, asking me what they’ve just been asking, blaming it all on Jesus. Maybe the only truth is this one—that I don’t have any idea of what their jumbled lives are like. Maybe somebody really did have a vision. I mean, how desperate do you have to be before you start seeing things?
That’s not cynicism. I’m just tired, tired of living on the edge of chaos, images coming at you like flash cards. I’m just tired. And so I see things too.
Like it’s been raining all morning. I can see that. There are puddles and rivulets. I can see that too, though now the sun sharpens every detail along our street. Parked cars are shining like new Lego blocks. And the one tree in my yard, a live oak as big as my house, is shimmering with diamonds. I just don’t see the angel. I suppose I could have
said Jesus doesn’t give a shit about the weather and I don’t believe that an angel sent you either, but that would have hurt their feelings, asked them to step outside their scope of understanding. And God knows we don’t do that.
So here we are, the peculiar couple, standing on the porch watching the delegation waddle down my walk like pachyderms. Karen’s holding on her hip a thin black child named Lamont, who is not my son, and she is saying to me, “Maybe you could just give it a try. For a few weeks. Until they’ve found a new minister.”
While I’m still burning up inside. Trying to sound calm.
“Did you ever notice,” I say, “that church committees—black or white, it doesn’t make any difference—all look like fat, greasy beggars? Except there’s not a white woman in town as fat as Hula Cole. Did you ever notice that?”
“Quinn,” she says.
“You could have dragged those people straight off the streets of Calcutta, added a few tons, and got exactly the same effect. I mean, Jesus Christ, John Powell Baity looks like that fool who played Uncle Remus in the …”
“Quinn, nobody came here to insult you.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
“I think you would do a wonderful job.”
“I like the church the way it is, all singing and no sermon.”
“They need a minister.”
“They need a touch of reality. Far as I’m concerned, that pulpit can stay vacant till they find somebody from the Ku Klux Klan who’d be willing to take over for a while. What are we doing about dinner?”
“You weren’t very polite while they were here.”
“Look, polite to these people means yes. And in case you don’t remember, I already have a job. Which is the only reason they showed up here in the first place.”
“I don’t think that’s the only reason.”
… and on and on and on for the next half hour until she finally smothers the flames. Like she’s walking through the house turning out lights one by one, that kind of woman, who might one day save your life, or drive you insane. So let me tell you again. I’m not cynical. I’m just trying to protect what I own.
And what I’m talking about right now is a woman named Karen. Who lives with me. Wears a silver comb in her hair on most days and takes it out at night in a comforting ritual of gray-black strands shaken loose and brushed long. She does it in a way that suggests we are growing old together. And then, as she plucks off silver rings, turquoise bracelets, whatever jangly thing is around her neck, she places them in some solemn order upon her dresser as if praying for grandchildren. So I tease her. Every night. Because that’s the way we say it, by looking together into the same mirror and searching for a silver comb that seems suddenly, inexplicably lost in perfect camouflage. And the long dresses, I think, simply mean that she owns an art gallery, although they still remind me of the year we met. Back then we were a revolution. Now we are only an oddity. And the sweaters? I don’t know. I suppose she’s just cold.
So this is a story about us. No matter what happens in between.
You should know that there are crayons scattered over the floor because the porch of my house, which is really a veranda, is wide enough and deep enough to look like an invitation to every untethered child in town. There are crayons and piles of paper, chalk and the remnants of someone’s homework. There are two books fluttering like wounded birds. A pair of pink flip-flops. There’s a basketball. A stack of Monopoly money in green, yellow, pink, and white but no Monopoly board and no Monopoly tokens. Only a lingering argument over the money—isn’t that a surprise? And one of Karen’s hairbrushes and a knotted hair band. But there’s also a momentary calm, broken soon enough by one of the older boys, maybe eight or
nine, with a mouth full of sass and that accusatory tone that they use to disguise hope.
He starts in on me, just after the damn committee leaves.
“How come,” he says, “how come you don’t never tell a story ’bout a black man?”
“I do,” I say. “I’ve
written
stories about …”
But he looks at me like I’m the white principal.
“Look, I already have. Aesop was a black man. So was Lemuel Hawes. Jackie Robinson. So was Abram White.”
“How come you don’t tell no stories ’bout a black man living right now? That ends happy. I ain’t no turtle.”
“Hush now. Hush,” says Karen. Patting the big one’s back. Pulling little Lamont into the comfort of her, his legs dangling on either side of her hip. “Hush now.” This time to Lamont. “You’re not hurt anymore.” And her own hair falling loose in places and the full sway of her breasts as she walks among the other children and the dangling jewelry and the smell of her. Do you see what I mean? I have no idea what their quarrel was about, and yet she’s there among them, like the shepherd, and I am here on the edge, like the dog, looking for direction.
So I adjust my glasses and tug tight the cardigan she gave me for Christmas, the way I do in class when they ask impossible questions. And I put myself where I can look over the heads of the children and down the street where another, entirely different crowd is gathering, suddenly and inexplicably. It’s like the echo of the turmoil already around us. And I’m wondering if you understand yet. Because my stomach, already tightening, realizes that there is another story, a real and urgent one, unfolding farther down the hill and that I am being drawn into it at a most inconvenient spot. I’m being pulled in again because one silly, senseless event is always tied to another, that’s what I’ve learned. And this new one at the end of my street, at the bottom of my hill, on a Sunday afternoon is far more serious than the commotion on my porch.