“Honey.” Mrs. Parker put her hand on her hip. “I’ve got nine of ’em, and if any of them buys a car anyplace but here, I’ll beat them like a redheaded stepchild.” She reached up, clutched Jake to her big sagging bosom, and kissed him square on the mouth.
I pulled out of the lot with Blue sticking his head out the passenger’s window to catch the breeze. I switched on the broken, scratchy radio, and Blue and I hummed down the highway to the sound of mud tires in need of alignment. I was in love.
I probably should have driven straight home, but I didn’t. Instead, we filled up, something that, were it not for dual fuel tanks, we would have to do often. Then I eased her into first. Jake was right, that vehicle was not underpowered. Someone had modified that thing at some point. We left Digger with the windows down, and I pointed the hood toward Wherever, which is just south of Whocares. Blue and I wanted the wind in our faces. Maggs wouldn’t have minded. If she’d been able, she’d have told me to get out of the hospital anyway. The sun disappeared around Charleston, so we turned south and headed down low country roads around Walterboro.
In need of some new boots, I stopped by the Western World in Walterboro and browsed the aisles. It didn’t take long. They were on the top shelf and just about jumped off at me when I walked by: Olathe Mule Skinners. Tough brown leather, medium toe, double welt, double-thick leather sole, medium heel, eleven-inch shank. They looked like the boots that Dean Martin wore in Rio Bravo, and when I slipped them on my feet, my search was over. I loved them. Maggie would not.
I turned to the attendant. “I’ll take them . . . And yes, I’d like to wear them out.”
He picked up my running shoes with two fingers, wrinkling his nose, dropped them into the box, and closed the lid. I paid the cashier, but not before buying two new pairs of Wranglers. Something Maggie would never let me get away with.
I walked out smiling like a cross between an artificial redneck and a wannabe ranch hand. But I was smiling, and that was not something I had done a lot of those last few months. Crossing the parking lot, I stepped in a puddle on purpose, and then Blue and I loaded up and I backed out of the parking lot.
My smile stopped me when I looked in the rearview mirror. I pushed in the clutch and sat there looking in the mirror at my face. After I recognized myself, we headed northwest up toward Columbia, and then south along a bunch of back country roads and some small towns that had grown up around cotton, peanuts, and tobacco.
Blue fluctuated between sticking his nose out the window and curling up in a ball on the seat next to me. He sniffed everything between the two locations. His nervousness told me he wasn’t quite sure what to make of me or this truck. I rubbed his ears and he settled down, finally putting his head on my lap. I sat with one hand on the wheel and the other on the windowsill. Occasionally I’d look in the rearview mirror just to see my smile, trying to get used to it. If Maggie were here, she’d have been smiling, too, and it was that thought that kept the guilt away and the food down. Without Maggie’s smile, I’d have never made it out of Jake’s parking lot.
Just before dark, we were rumbling along some back road that was an irregular patchwork of dirt, hardtop, and potholes when something caught my eye. A side road with my name on it. Blue and I slipped off the hardtop and down the wet, grassy, low road with cypress trees so large that Maggie, Amos, and I all together couldn’t reach our arms around them.
We idled for maybe a mile or so and then pulled up onto a sandy riverbank. I parked and let Blue smell the bushes. Hopping up on the hood, I crossed my legs in front of me, took another look at my boots, then tilted my head back and watched the sun go down over some no-name creek in some forgotten part of South Carolina through the limbs of a cypress tree that few humans had probably ever taken time to notice. I lay there for quite a while, humming a Randy Travis song.
The sun disappeared, and the cypress limbs took on a shape and character of their own in the dark. Blue whined. I turned the truck around, and we pulled back out on the hardtop. I don’t know how many miles we drove that night. Maybe three hundred. We were gone five or six hours, but it sure didn’t feel that way. Time is like that in Digger. It stands still for some people.
We pulled back into town about nine o’clock. It was dark, cool, and clear, and I could have driven for three more days. I still had five or six good songs in my head that could have kept me busy all night. Turning onto the drive, I laughed because it occurred to me then how much Maggie would have hated this truck. If you looked up the word “redneck” in the dictionary, you might see a picture of my truck. But she’d love that I love it.
I rounded the house and parked it next to the barn, then placed a pan beneath the engine so that tomorrow morning it could tell me if it was leaking oil. New engine or not, it was an old truck, and old trucks burn oil. It’s just part of their language. You drive one long enough, and you begin to speak it. I lifted the tailgate and heard light footsteps on the gravel behind me.
“What is that?” Amos asked, pointing at my faded orange beauty.
“This,” I said, still smiling with my hand affectionately resting on the tailgate, “is heaven.”
Amos pushed his baseball cap back on his head and looked at me skeptically. “Please don’t tell me you bought that thing at Jake’s.”
“Yup,” I said, rubbing my hand over the rusted tailgate.
“What’d it cost you?” Amos said with his hands on his hips.
“I’m not saying. All I’ll say is that Jake cut me a fair deal, and I agreed to pay him every month for the next two years.”
“Dylan.” Amos tilted his head sideways. “Did you pay that boy more than his asking price?”
“Now, Amos, what makes you think I’d do a fool thing like that?”
“Just answer my question.”
I looked into the bed of the truck. “The purchase of this vehicle was a private financial transaction between Mr. Powers and me . . . ”
Blue lay in the back with his paws covering up his eyes.
“. . . the details of which I am not at liberty to discuss.”
“Dylan, you are dumb as dirt!” Amos turned and walked down my drive, shaking his head.
I walked inside, grabbed the jar of peanut butter and a bagel, and then walked back outside, where I put down the tailgate and sat in the bed of the truck with Blue.
After Blue and I finished off the jar of peanut butter, I went back inside and put on my PJs. Which meant taking off my new jeans and leaving my boxer shorts on. I built a fire and sat down, flame-watching with Blue. An activity he was fond of and something we had done a lot lately. While I was mesmerized by the flames, it dawned on me that I needed to get the mail. I walked down the driveway to the mailbox in my boxers. It was cold, but who was gonna see me? This is the boondocks. You heard the man: “Egypt”!
I opened the box, fished around in the dark, and pulled out two envelopes. I walked back up the drive, and by the porch light I saw that the return address on the first read Thentwhistle. As I ran my finger beneath the tab and tore open the letter, the hair stood up on the back of my neck and sent chill bumps down my arms. I’d been expecting it, and no, I had no way of paying Maggie’s bills other than mortgaging the farm. I opened the letter, prepared for the worst.
Dear Mr. Styles,
It is my duty to inform you that the current bill for your wife’s complete and ongoing care since her admission is $227,753.87.
The size of the number took a few minutes to register. I looked across the farm, Nanny’s house, Papa’s fields, and I knew I had to let it go. I could never make payments on that type of mortgage. Life was about to become real different. I read on:
Secondly, and it truly is with great pleasure that I inform you: Hospital administration has just notified me that an anonymous donor has unexpectedly paid your bill in full and requested that all future bills be forwarded to an address other than yours for the duration of Maggie’s stay with us. If you have any further questions, or I can be of any
help at all, please call.
Respectfully,
Jason Thentwhistle
P.S. Dylan, I sincerely regret the timing of our previous conversation and wish you and Maggie all the best.
It took me about a half a second to determine the identity of the anonymous donor. That was just like Bryce; his actions always spoke louder than his words. And get a load of old Thentwhistle. Maybe he wasn’t as smug as I’d accused him of being.
The second letter was less formal and addressed to Professor. I recognized Koy’s handwriting.
Dear Professor,
I leave tomorrow for Spelman. I can start classes in the spring semester. I never thought I’d get out of this cesspool. Now that I’m leaving, it ain’t all that bad. I did a lot of dying in Digger. Lately, I’ve done some living too. Living and dying—it’s just a choice.
One thing I do know is that death is wrapped all around you like a blanket. You’ve been dealt a terrible hand, and in spite of it—or because of it—you live. You’re the livingest person I ever met. When you walk around, something inside you seeps out of your pores and screams, “I’m alive!” and “I’m not dying today!” It’s electric, and people feel it. They know you’re coming around the corner because something in them rises up to meet whatever it is that you got.
I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe it’s hope, maybe it’s love, but those words fall down. They don’t describe that thing that is you. I wish I could talk with your wife, because I think maybe she knows. Maybe she’s got the secret—the key—and then maybe I’d know.
I hope you don’t mind, but I went to see your wife last night. I walked into her room with the lights off—the light of her heartbeat bouncing off the wall—sat down next to her bed, held her hand, and let my tears fall into her fingers.
Professor, I swear, so help me God, if I could I would walk into that hospital room, take off my skin, and give her me, I would. I’d strip before the devil himself, but life doesn’t work that way.
My insides hurt pretty bad when I think about that clinic, what I did to my little girl, and what fate did to your son. That won’t ever go away. There will always be two tombstones. But here today, right now, I’m living, and you did that. I was carrying a whole bottle full of pills, and I didn’t eat them because you turned the corner, walked up to me, and breathed life into me when I didn’t want any air. All I wanted to do was swallow.
Professor, you don’t know it, but you introduced me to me. This life needs people who stand in the ditch and argue with God because the rest of us are either too scared or too proud. I don’t really like all I see in the mirror, but I’m beginning to think that the girl behind the glasses is worth digging into. Maybe I’ll take them off one day.
Koy
I folded the letter and placed it back in the envelope, and I realized that I was still standing on the porch in my boxers. I went back inside and sat by the fire with Blue, where I reread the letter five times. When the coals grew powdery white, I slipped on my new boots, grabbed my sleeping bag, and walked out to the truck. I cranked it, left the lights off, and idled down to the river. After parking on the bluff, Blue and I hopped in the back and curled up in my sleeping bag. I couldn’t count the stars. My eyes wouldn’t let me.
chapter thirty-two
I SHOWERED AND SPENT MOST OF NEW YEAR’S DAY on the porch. Thinking. Sleeping some. Rocking some. I missed Maggie’s black-eyed peas. I don’t know if I missed the peas themselves, the smell, the anticipation and taste of the peas, or the sight of Maggie wrapped in an apron, covered in flour and messing up the kitchen. Anyway, something was missing.
It may seem odd, and it was, but all day I had been thinking about Pinky. Once I got my nerve up, I got off my rocker, jumped down from the porch, and figured it was time to fish or cut bait.
I grabbed my bucket, filled it full of corn, and stepped into the stall. Pinky immediately grunted and banged against the opposite side.
“All right, girl,” I said, teasing her with the bucket, “isn’t it about time you and I got to know one another?”
Pinky snorted, crapped, smeared it across her buttocks with her tail, and kicked her stall.
I closed the gate, put the corn bucket down next to me, and squatted some fifteen feet in front of her. “I mean, think about it. How long have I been feeding you? Three years? Maybe four? Haven’t I always taken care of you? Look around you.” I pointed to her latest litter of twelve little pigs, only two weeks old and all vying for a chance to suckle. “Look at all that I’ve let you do. This place is full of pigs, and that’s all because I feed you. You’re a sow-shaped Hoover. All you do is eat.”
I patted the bucket and sprinkled two or three kernels of corn in front of me. “Today is a new day. You and me, we’re getting friendly.” I patted the bucket again. “So come over here, and let’s shake ears, or snouts, or whatever it is that people and pigs shake when they’re getting friendly. I’ll rub you ’tween the ears.”
Pinky grunted and blew snot out her nose.
“Nope, that’s not good enough,” I said, wiping my face with my shirtsleeve. “That will not do. I’m talking about a full down-the- back-of-the-head-and-ear-rub. Snorting won’t get it. Now get your big self busy, and come on over here.”
Pinky swaggered back and forth and desuckled a couple of little ones. They were as filthy as she was. I needed a pressure washer. And the smell? Horrible.
“All right, you can swagger all you want, but you are not get ting one kernel of this corn until you come over here and apologize for being so dang mean and ugly to me.” I twisted a kernel of corn back and forth between my thumb and index finger. “And don’t think grunting and blowing your nose in my face is going to get it, ’cause it ain’t, as my students say. I ain’t meeting you halfway. You got to come all the way, and I got all day. So, when you get hungry, I’ll be squatting right here. It’s your call.”
Pinky banged her shoulders against the side of the stall, and her nose got wide and showed wet.
“Come on.” I held the corn in the palm of my hand.
That pig then lowered her head and charged at me full speed, detaching six piglets from their faucets and flinging dirt everywhere as she charged. A half second later, all three-hundred- plus pounds of Pinky, led by her snout, hit me in the abdomen and rocketed me against the side of the stall. My head hit the top beam of the gate, the room blurred, and I found myself lying flat on my back, looking up at the rafters.
When my eyes opened, I was shoulder deep in pig crap. It was in my hair, and I think, in the cracks of my ears. Sitting up, I heard somebody outside the stall. I lifted my head, looked through the boards, and saw Amos rolling on the barn floor, holding his stomach.
“Oh, stop! Don’t make me laugh!” Amos’s black face looked almost red, and tears were streaming out the corners of his eyes.
I sat up in the middle of Pinky’s stall and flung my fingers to get the clumps of manure and hay off them, and then cleaned out my ears. Inside the stall, Pinky finished her triumphant, tail-up victory parade, then walked over and began sniffing and licking my face. Looking at me eye-level, she nudged my leg with her nose, dug a little hole with her hoof next to my leg, and lay down in the hole. With a loud sigh, she laid her head on top of my thigh and released a deep, snot-blowing breath. Twelve little pigs then surrounded her, and consequently me, and began fighting for a teat.
Amos pulled himself off the ground and lifted himself up by the rungs of Pinky’s stall. Wiping his eyes and catching his breath, he said, “D.S., you know . . . ” He began laughing again. “You know you’re covered in pig crap?”
I looked down, patted Pinky on the head, picked up one of her little ones, and held it like a kitten. “Yeah, well . . . clean don’t always look it.”
Amos rubbed his eyes again, still chuckling, and said, “Well, Mr. Greenjeans, when you get cleaned up, and I think that’s probably a good idea, maybe even a priority, there’s somebody at the hospital who wants to see you.”
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Accountants, doctors, and other constipated pains-in-the-butt came to mind. “Who?” I said, wrinkling my brow. “If they want to talk about the bill, I just got a letter from Jason Thentwhistle . . . ”
Amos held his chin in his hands. His eyes looked down on me, and his teeth showed pearly white. Then his bottom lip quivered, and he broke into a smile.
MY SPEEDOMETER WAS PEGGED AT JUST OVER ONE HUNDRED miles an hour as I jumped the railroad tracks on my way to the hospital. The engine was whining as all four tires came off the ground on the other side of the tracks.
Amos followed in his Crown Vic, flashing blue lights, tooting his horn, and shouting over his PA system, “Slow down, you fool!”
Blue lay sprawled and whining on the floorboard, covering one eye with his paw. When I turned the corner and crested the hill that led up to Bryce’s trailer, Bryce stood piping at his gate in full regalia, decked out with all his ribbons. He stood, feet together, red-faced, and blowing for all he was worth, but I was going too fast to hear what he was playing.
The hospital was a zoo when I arrived. I bounded up the stairs, tripped on the top step, and slid three rooms down on the janitor’s nicely waxed floor. Blue jumped over me, disappearing down the hall and into Maggie’s room, where a crowd stood looking in. I began to raise myself off the floor, but the sound stopped me—a sound that I had heard only once in almost five months.
The last time I had heard Maggs’s voice, she was crying and screaming, “No, God! Please, no,” as the doctor pulled the sheet over my son. Now I sprawled paralyzed on the floor, listening. The voice that had said “I love you” ten thousand times, the voice that said “Dylan Styles!” the voice that whispered “Let’s go swimming” had cracked back into the world and filled my empty soul.
Moments before, I lived in a world where wisteria snaked across my son’s grave as he rotted beneath a cement slab; where Vietnam Vets inhaled beer to help them forget the day they wiped Vicks salve in their noses so they wouldn’t have to smell the bodies as they zipped up the bags; where a no-good farmer bathed in a cornfield but couldn’t wash the blood clean; where snow fell on iced-over railroad tracks; where used-car salesmen robbed old women with inflated prices and double-digit interest rates; where little boys peed in the baptistry and pastors strutted like roosters; where evil men tied innocent girls to trees, stripped them, raped them, and left to them die; where students cheated and burnt-out professors scribbled useless information on sweat-stained chalkboards and couldn’t care less; where not-so-innocent girls paid $265 for scar tissue; where the most precious thing I had ever known lay listless, scarred, childless, and dying in a nondescript hospital room in the armpit of South Carolina.