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  Evie was also practically my sister-in-law though her and Albert never had been officially married. But between him and running around with Momma and ever other person that “partied,” she didn’t have much time for me. Truth be told, I didn’t much want to be around her by that July, least not what she’d become since she’d been taking pills. She used to be fun. We’d sit in my room at Mamaw’s house and wish warts on stupid girls’ private parts and disfiguring accidents on their faces. We’d steal stupid girls’ shoes. Steal their lunches. Steal their homework. Evie loved to tear up people’s homework. She didn’t care to key a car either. One time Evie stole a girl’s lipstick and used it on a cat’s butt and then put it back in the girl’s purse. That was my favorite.

  I did everything with Evie back then. I was the one took her to the ER when she banged her head on the bathtub when she passed out piercing her own nipple with a safety pin. I’m the one huffed keyboard duster with her. Once. Cause keyboard duster will make the sides of your brain so they can’t talk to each other. Me and her would go to hear music every once in a while, always the music she liked. She liked rap and country, which I didn’t. Only person we both liked was Nelly. But we never saw him. I’d go with her to stuff though, just to go with her. But that got less and less after high school and I started going more and more to Tennessee and she went more and more to drugs until we’d got to where we were that summer—her being aggravated at me all the time. And truthfully I don’t know I missed her that much. That’s bad to say and I know it is probably also a lie. I was mad at her to hide how sad I was. It was a loss losing Evie cause she’d been there in a way more than Momma, in a way different from Mamaw, a way I’d needed. So it was sad. But I couldn’t show that, could I? Back then I didn’t think I could. Back then I thought they’d got on drugs just to ruin my life. I thought they’d got on drugs just to break my heart. That’s how stupid I was then.

  “Where’s Tricia?” Evie said to Mamaw.

  Mamaw said, “Not here.”

  Evie said, “She’s sposed to be here.”

  Mamaw pushed a spraypaint can into a pile of clothes with her toe and shrugged.

  Evie said, “You gonna let us in your college class, June? I aint going to lie to you. I need the money.”

  June was teaching a summer art class at the community college. She’d got a grant to pay the students who took it.

  June said, “Yes, Evie. Of course.”

  Evie said “Starts Wednesday, right?”

  “Yes,” June said. “No. It starts this coming Tuesday.”

  Evie said, “I’ll be there Wednesday.”

  Talking to Evie was like somebody emptying a nail gun into the side of your head. I said, “You don’t need to take that class, Evie. That class is for people who give a shit.”

  Evie said, “Why do you care then?”

  I headed to the kitchen.

  Evie said, “Tricia’s taking it.”

  June said, “Taking what?”

  Evie said, “Your class.”

  That summer Momma and Evie’s shame was so gone you couldn’t have found it with a pack of prison movie dogs. Momma and Evie could have cared less how it would make June feel for them to fart around in her summer class, how it might knock out somebody who might actually want to be in there.

  I went upstairs.

  GENE

  That banty-rooster girl Evie said, “Who are you?” and I said, “Nobody,” cause she come at me like a wad of yellowjackets, and caught me blank.

  She said, “I can’t say you aint.” Then she was gone, quick as she come, and that old woman, Cora, looked at me and said, “Now, whose are you?” I told her who my daddy was and she said, “Why you here?” and when I pointed at That Woman, Cora said, “Yeah, I seen you get out of her car, but why have you come here?”

  I said, “To mow the yard.”

  Cora said, “Well, that aint nothing to be ashamed of, is it?” She looked at Nicolette when she said it.

  Nicolette said, “I don’t reckon.”

  I’ll just say it—the whole bunch made me nervous. I come from some ruckus-making people, so I try to avoid stir in strangers, and if it was most people, I’d of just cut the grass and not said nothing to none of them, just gone to That Woman for my pay when I was done. But That Woman was a bug zapper and I was the bug. I couldn’t stay away from her nor nothing swirling in the area around her.

  Cora said, “What are you looking at June for?”

  I pulled my mouth shut and said I didn’t know.

  Cora said, “Come with me.” We went through the kitchen to the back door. She took me out in the yard, said, “Is that all you do is mow?”

  I said,

  She said, “Come here.”

  She climbed up the rock steps wedged into the hillside past a flat spot held in place by a low stone wall, could have been a garden spot was it not all growed up. She took me to another stone wall on the far side of the flat spot. The second wall was higher than the first, made of creek rock. The old woman stopped short and I about run into her. She clamped down on my shirtsleeve, made me feel like a field mouse a bird had snatched up out of a field, said, “You see them hydrangeas?”

  I said I did.

  She said, “Anything happen to them hydrangeas I’ll murder you.”

  I said, “Did you plant them or something?”

  She looked at me flat as pavement, said, “Look at them.”

  They was four hydrangea bushes stretched out towards the kudzu that had took over the hillside behind That Woman’s house. Cora said again, “Look at them.”

  I reckon what she was wanting me to look at was the wads of flowers, blue and purple at once. The shade of a big oak made the flowers look like something you’d see under the ocean on one of them coral reefs like I saw on TV in this motel one time in Newport when Sister and her husband took us to see the Cincinnati Reds play baseball. I’d never seen a TV that bright and clear. I’d never seen a coral reef neither and I couldn’t believe how all them bright colors was waving in the blue water, and how bright and striped and spotted the fish were, and how all that bright actually helped them hide amongst that coral. I wanted to understand it more, but Sister’s husband flipped the channel to try and find the UK football game.

  That old woman said, “You got it?” I said I did and she said, “Well then, come over here.” She darted off behind a snowball bush on the other side of the yard where there wadn’t hardly no room to go.

  I followed in after her. We come to the far side of the house. The air condition perched in an upstairs window dripped like a ice cream cone. That old woman had a walking stick painted with spots and stripes like a coral reef fish. She tapped me with it on my shins, said, “All that vine has got to go,” and waved her stick from the back end of the house to the front. They was vine all over a trellis by the front porch and they was vine running up the electric meter and they was vine running up on the satellite cables and they was vine running up the power line feeding the air condition. At the base of the house, they was junk bushes, all thick and tangly with vine, out of which all the rest of that vine was spewing like some vine volcano.

  I said to that old woman, “That’s a mess of vine.”

  She said, “We need rid of it. Can you handle it?”

  I looked back over the whole thing, believing I could, and when I threw back my head, they was a woman standing at the very peak of the roof. I couldn’t make out much about her because the sun was behind her head, but I could hear a bird chirping and it was like a morning bird, a bird that had forgotten to wake up, which couldn’t be cause birds don’t forget to wake up.

  That old woman hollered, “Patricia!” and it startled the woman against the sky and she threw her arms out to balance herself. The roof woman seemed thin and light, nothing but the center nub to her, which could have been a trick of the sunshine. She wobbled, one foot on either side of the peak, faced right straight out over us. She fell down on her knees, hanging on with both hands to th
e lip of the roof, looked down at us, said, “Smile, Momma. Don’t be so sour.”

  DAWN

  The upstairs of Momma’s house wadn’t no better than the down below. The air conditioner in the stair window roared like people on Fox News. All the other windows swung open on their hinges, waved in the wind like pothead beauty queens. A bird flapped through Momma’s bedroom, bashed his head against the wall, pooped her bed, flung himself out into the glare. One wall was half-painted green. Another half-painted gray. There was a mattress on the floor, ashtrays on either side, a knocked-over lamp, scattered clothes—some sparkly, some tie-dyed—little clothes, way littler than mine.

  Out the window, Canard rolled out to a pointy-headed mountain at the other end of town. The town looked pretty laid out there in the valley. Things had been too jacked up in Canard for too long for anybody to have enough money to ruin its old-timey look. I wondered about the man who built this house, back in the 1920s. I wondered did he think Canard would go on forever. I wondered did he care.

  There was a clatter on the roof. Momma come around the corner, walking on the mostly flat spot that covered the porch. Momma swept the shingle grit off herself. The knobs of her elbows and wrists were scraped. Her hair rustled like willow branches in the breeze. She pulled a cigarette out of her pocket and lit it before she seen me.

  When she did, she said, “What are you doing?” like she always did.

  I said, “Come to wish you a happy birthday.”

  She said, “It aint my birthday.”

  I said, “I know it aint.”

  Momma blew smoke at me.

  I said, “Why you on the roof?”

  She said, “Come out here.”

  I said, “I aint.” My whole life felt like I was a bug crawling inside a coiled-up garden hose—smaller and smaller circles, slick-dark and rubber-smelling, the only hope of escape something likely to drown you as save you.

  Momma raised her voice, said “Come out here, Dawn.”

  I said, “I’m a mother now, Momma.”

  “Well,” she said, “Who aint?”

  The wind quit and Momma said, “Hubert’s mad at me.”

  “How’s he mad at you?” I said. “I thought he was in jail.”

  Momma said, “Come out here with me, Dawn.” She turned from me, not too fast, not too slow. She didn’t talk in a hurry. She seemed to be at normal speed, said, “Who’s that with Cora?”

  She didn’t seem excited, didn’t get all tangled up on her words, seemed to be saying what she meant to say. All this to say, she didn’t seem high to me. But I didn’t always know about high, didn’t know about pain pills and what they did to you.

  I knew Momma and Evie lived for them. Knew my brother Albert, my uncle Hubert, and a bunch of others sold them.

  Pills were easier to stay away from in Tennessee. So was crazy. Easier married to Willett Bilson and his momma’s houseful of fragile things, her house full of quiet sleep.

  I pulled up the window screen and stepped onto the radiator under the window. Swung my leg out and straddled the window frame. Momma stood at the roof’s edge amid loose siding and shingle scraps. Her shoulder blades come up out of her tank top like the oars of a boat, my name tattooed between them in cursive where she’d never see it. I got through the window and onto the roof without falling, but it was not a smooth exit. I am not a fireman nor a ballerina. I am big. I am an ox.

  My mother sat down, her toes hanging over the gutter. She turned and looked at me over her shoulder, one leg straightened out, its foot out in the air. She patted the spot next to her with her cigarette hand.

  I didn’t know to sit there or not. Smothery heat didn’t help me think. Two downpipes ran across the roof on either side of the window, framing the space where Momma sat. I guessed the shingles were hot and sticky.

  I said, “How can you sit on that?”

  “Used to it,” Momma said.

  “Momma,” I said. “Are you high?”

  Momma didn’t turn around. She said, “No.”

  I said, “We seen a wreck on the Caneville Road.”

  Momma said, “Anybody die?”

  I said, “Probably.”

  Smoke came out in a cloud over Momma’s head. She said, “So June’s down there?”

  I said, “Yeah,” pushed the window closed behind me, and sat down with my back against the wall. The shingles weren’t so hot as I thought. I said, “You OK with that?”

  Momma said, “With what?”

  “With June coming back.”

  “Got to be,” Momma said. Another cloud of smoke bloomed off her head. “I miss that tree,” Momma said.

  There had been a red oak in the front yard, big enough to have branches you could touch from where Momma sat, big enough that me and Momma could only barely touch fingers when we hugged it from opposite sides. Last time June got busy saving Momma, she had a man trim some limbs off the oak hung out over the street. Big storm a week later knocked the whole thing over. Bad roots, the guy from extension June called said. Thing blocked traffic, lay there a month across Momma’s yard, right across the steps into Glenda’s yard next door, before Mamaw got somebody to cut it up.

  One old lady in the projects down the hill across the road from where the tree trunk lay went and lived with her daughter in Corbin waiting for that tree to get gone. She was afraid the trunk would get loose, roll across the road, and explode the illegal propane tanks between Momma’s house and her apartment. Blow her to Kingdom Come. I don’t blame her. Who can you count on? Thirteen pickup trucks of cut wood come out of that tree.

  I said, “Lot hotter out here without that tree.”

  “Seems like,” Momma said.

  Down below Mamaw lined out more chores for Gene. Her voice was like radio static. Momma peered over. “Who’s that guy?” Momma said.

  “Some guy June picked up,” I said.

  Momma turned to look at me, her eyebrows riding up her forehead. “Do what?” Momma said.

  “Hitchhiking,” I said.

  “Oh,” Momma said.

  “There she is up there,” I heard Mamaw say. “Not the sense God gave a goose.”

  Momma said quiet and tough, “Geese are smart.”

  I said, “And they honk a lot.”

  Momma laughed, said, “Hubert’s out.”

  I said, “Is he reformed?”

  Momma sat quiet. “No doubt,” she said with another puff of smoke.

  I said, “Why’d they arrest him?”

  Momma said, “Who knows?”

  “You do,” I should have said out loud instead of just thinking, but I’d been knowing a good while no point asking Momma for something she hadn’t already give you.

  The bedroom window pushed open. June held Nicolette back from climbing out there with us. “Hey yall,” June said. Momma snapped a look over her shoulder, turned back to the sky, pushed out another cloud of smoke.

  How cold Momma was made me hurt for Nicolette. Nicolette stood at the window, watched her grandmother like she was a biting dog or a flower she’d been told not to pick. I stood up, reached to Nicolette through the window. She put her hand in mine. Her hand was sticky and buzzed with energy, a beehive hand.

  June said, “I’m taking her over to see Houston.”

  I squeezed Nicolette’s hand. “You like that, honeypot?”

  Nicolette said, “I aint no honeypot.”

  She let me put my hand on her hair. I curled my fingers over her ear. I lay my hand against her cheek, and that was too much. Nicolette knocked the hand down, said, “Momma Trish.”

  My mother turned around. “Hey, baby,” she said. “You going to see your papaw?”

  Nicolette said, “You can come too.”

  Momma said, “I can’t today, baby. You hug that old goat for me. All right?”

  “Yeah,” Nicolette said.

  June put her hand on Nicolette’s shoulder. Our eyes met and June said, “We’ll be back.”

  I nodded. They left. My mother lit anot
her cigarette. In my mind, my mother’s coal truck heart T-boned mine, a dreadful crash on an empty stretch of road, all shattered glass and twisted metal, no law, no ambulance in sight. I climbed back through the window, set on the stairs,

  The air conditioner roared, and there was no way for Momma to know whether I cried or not.

  2

  RUCKUS

  GENE

  When Cora finished lining me out over what to do in That Woman’s yard, Brother come got me and we went down to the jail, put twenty dollars on the commissary of this girl from church. I was still inside when I seen Hubert Jewell out in the parking lot. His hair ran across his head in stripes, his eyebrows wadded together like plug tobacco. He was rubbing his arm muscles, which was like rocks. Hubert Jewell wasn’t tall, but he wasn’t nobody to mess with neither. Cats walked the other way when they seen Hubert Jewell. His nephew, skinny Albert Jewell, stooped to talk in his ear and Hubert turned away. Albert was Dawn’s brother. You’d see him in town, moving on all the store girls, gunning his big loud truck through red lights,

  I was going to stand there till they passed, but the jail woman said, “Is that it?” and before I thought, I said it was and went outside.

  Hubert Jewell said to Albert, “If you don’t know how to do it, you shouldn’t do it.”

  I kept my head down, walked towards Brother’s vehicle.

  Albert said, “What are you looking at?”

  I looked up before I thought and said, “Nothing,” then seen Albert Jewell wadn’t talking to me. Albert said, “I aint talking to you, old dude,” and Hubert said something to him I couldn’t hear.

  When I got close enough, Brother said, “Get in the damn car.” When I did, he said, “What are you thinking? It’s a dumbass step in the middle of two Jewells arguing.”