All Over but the Shoutin' (24 page)

I rode with Jeff Hanson in a Volkswagen minibus to cover a tornado, and the wind blew so hard that the van swerved unnervingly over the highway. To keep our courage up, we sang every bad country song we had ever heard. He sang off-key, or maybe I did, but our harmony was so bad I had to keep yelling, “Shut up, Jeff, I’m tryin’ to sing.”

I had talks about the value of collard greens to the male digestive tract with a great man, a nightside editor named Ben House, who lamented the loss of the old-fashioned bathrooms that used to serve the historic
News
building. To hear him tell it, they were marble-lined palaces, an escape from the rigors of the newsroom. They were torn down, eventually, and replaced with bland, modern facilities. Purely because, Ben said, “some people just can’t appreciate an elegant shit-house.”

I rented an apartment on the fashionable Southside—in Birmingham, you could be pretty fashionable for $245 a month—with a view of Vulcan from the bedroom window. Vulcan was a massive cast-iron statue atop Red Mountain, the god of the forge, a relic from the days when the blast furnaces still smoked. He was supposed to point, I believe, a spear to the heavens, but a long time ago someone figured that he should hold a beacon that would shine red when there was a fatality on the highways and green when no one had died. For a while, I believe, he held a giant Coke bottle. Maybe that is just legend. I don’t know. I do know that there was talk once of dressing him up in a giant pair of blue jeans, because people in the neighboring city of Homewood were sick and tired of being perpetually mooned by a mythical Greek deity. Vulcan, it is true, had nothing on under his apron, which was all that prevented him from scandalizing the downtown as well.

I didn’t have much of a home life. I didn’t have much furniture, and for six months I made it just fine with a bed and a cast-off recliner. I never, ever cooked a meal. I had no pots. Once, I heated a can of peas in the can, and made such a mess I never turned the stove on again. I would have young ladies over and they would look with bald suspicion on the bare apartment, and I would explain that I was just too damn busy lately to shop for antiques.

This is one of those places where it would be better to lie, but the truth is that in those three years and change I was there, I was not always a nice man. I was just good-looking enough, and maybe just smart enough, not to be lonely. I spent time with very nice and smart and pretty young women who knew going in that I was a poor bet for anything permanent, and I lived up to their expectations.

I was not much better with my friends. Joe Kiefer, a reporter who lived down the hall from me, gave me a key to his apartment so I could “look after” his place when he was gone. Instead, I stole all his ice cream, one bowl at a time.

I pitched and played a lead-footed left field for the
Birmingham News
Softball team, and cussed out Greg, one of my own teammates on the softball field, when he fumbled a ground ball. He responded by throwing the ball at my head as the players in the opposing dugout stared in wide-eyed wonder at what was certainly the first time two players on the same team suspended play to contemplate kicking the mortal hell out of each other.

I guess I was having too much fun.

One day, after a small argument with my editor, Henderson, he sent me a simple note over the computer screen.

“Some people are beginning to say you are a prima donna,” was the gist of it. I reckon so.

The
News
educated me and put up with me and I will always appreciate that, just as I appreciated the editors who stood beside me at the
Star
in the face of such enormous pretension. But in the end I just didn’t fit in, again. I could have tried to alter my character—people do that—but I was afraid to start, because I thought it would never stop. I was too damn dumb to know that a swagger is a silly walk for a man with yet a long way to go.

I sent out résumés to several papers, and, in the end, I had some choices. The
St. Petersburg Times
, the best midsize paper I had ever seen, flew me down for an interview. A few days later they offered me a job, but my plans on moving there, in trying to prove myself, had to wait.

Personal reasons, family reasons, brought me home. My momma was sick, listless, tired all the time. It would turn out to be nothing serious, but I turned down what at the time was a dream come true and went home, to work again at the
Anniston Star
, to be close to her.

A lot had changed in those three years I’d spent in Birmingham, things I had not noticed coming home for a few hours on holidays and the occasional weekend. My momma looked washed out, helpless. It was as if, without children to raise, to provide for, she had lost her purpose, and just given up. She had grown accustomed to fighting upstream for us, for so long, and now there was no battle left. She went almost nowhere, spending weeks, months, without going farther than the mailbox. She just sat in the little house, day after day, reading the Bible, worrying.

But I was wrong about what threatened her, mostly. I do not know if there is a clinical definition for what afflicted her but I learned what it was over time. She dreaded hearing the phone ring, once again. She dreaded the crunch of tires on gravel in the driveway, once again. She was sick at heart, and scared so badly that there was little joy in living and every day just brought a new round of trouble, angst, fear, once again.

What she was, was worried half to death. She was not afraid for herself, at least not in any physical sense. Sam and I would have killed almost anyone who hurt her. We would have burned their house down and shotgunned them in the legs as they came running out. I wore a necktie, but I was not so civilized yet. Everybody loves their momma—there is nothing even remotely unique in that even in this dysfunctional world we live in. But not everybody owes their momma so much as us. We would do anything to protect her from the outside world, Sam and me.

But there was nothing we could do about this, absolutely nothing, except sit and watch and feel the anger claw away at us, inside.

21
Running hot

H
e was running from the law again, in a flatbed pickup that wouldn’t outrun a riding lawn mower, but on the narrow and twisting roads of home, speed is less important than nerve. A man who can live with the fact that he will almost certainly sooner or later drive head-on into a tree can almost always outrun a man who expects to live to see his children when he clocks out that evening. The man who doesn’t have any fear, who has so little to lose, hell, he can almost fly.

It helps to have a little bit of liquor in you, and Mark did, even on a Sunday. I only heard about it after the fact, but I can see him hunched over the steering wheel, cigarette in his mouth, rumbling between the ditches in a cloud of blue smoke, the engine running red-hot, about to come apart under his feet, slinging rods like shrapnel. He had a good head start and was already well out of sight, but to get away he needed a hidey-hole, a place to duck and cover for just a little while, until the deputy gave up. (One of us, it seems, is always running from the law, or something.)

That was when he saw the little church, the Church of the Nine Gifts, and saw the cars pulling up in the parking lot for the Sunday service. He hit on a plan. He whipped the truck in among the sheep, and together they filed inside, for the worship. Mark sat drunk in the back row. “Welcome Brother,” they said to him, and he stayed for the entire service, the preaching, the singing, the altar call, everything.

They are good people, there at that church, my momma told me. The preacher told her, when he came to visit her some time later, that the sinners are the ones he wants to find in God’s pews. The Saved are doing alright already. They treated Mark so good that he kept going back for two years.

But, like me I guess, he never heard the call.

I could not make that story up if I tried. At best, it sounds like a scene out of the whiskey-running days of the 1950s, like pages ripped from my own ancient family history. It was just a few years ago.

Time doesn’t mean much to Mark. In many ways he is frozen in a generation he never even saw, and all his adult life he has lived life pretty much like he wanted. The price, from time to time, is jail, and every time he goes in my momma dies a little more inside. I know it is a cliché to say that, but if you had ever seen her sit in that living room and talk to him on the phone when he is in jail, knowing there was not one thing she could do to help him beyond a little cigarette money, it would be clear to you what I mean. It’s not the shame of it. The shame she can stand. She has experience at it, at standing before judges and bailiffs, pleading. She learned to do it with my father.

No, what kills her is the helplessness, the worry, the fear that someone will hurt him while he is in there, separated from her love and protection by razor wire and iron bars. I have seen her, a dozen times, stare at the ringing phone like it was a coiled snake. But I never saw her not pick it up, because company was the only thing, I guess, she could give him.

Maybe it is because the boy is my brother and I am blind to some things, but I do not believe, not for one minute, that he is cruel, that he is inherently mean, the way that my daddy could be. But at times it seems like he is possessed by the same demons that drove my daddy, as if he inherited them, the way some rich man passes down a silver pocket watch. Sam escaped them. I escaped them, except on some particularly bad nights. In a way, I guess Mark was just a victim of odds.

I know he is a decent man, when he is not drinking. I also know that there is nothing he would not do for me, sober.

I have seen him almost cry over run-over dogs, and seen him gently lift them in his arms to care for them. I have seen the pride that he takes in building things—like the house he built with his own hands—and I have marveled at how there is nothing he can’t do, given the right tools.

There are times, many times, when he makes me laugh, like with the story of the church visit, and times when I want to drive my fist through a wall. Mostly what I do, just like my momma, is worry. Unlike my father, whose story came to me in time, I have no idea what he is trying to wash away. I only know that he hurts my momma, and doesn’t seem to know.

He would never hurt her intentionally, never. There is only the worry he causes from the drinking, fighting and recklessness. I know how close he has come to dying so many times. He carries one bullet in his arm, between the bones, and his back is crisscrossed with knife wounds from a man who cut him up from the backseat of a car as he tried to fight his way out the front. I’m afraid of what it will do to her, if he is hurt much more.

She told me, once, that the reason it hurt her so to see him so angry, so unhappy, was because it made her feel as if she failed, as if she did something wrong, or didn’t do enough.

“I know you can pass hate on,” she told me. “And when Mark was being born, I was so angry at your daddy. I’d write him letters, and I was so full of hate, I think maybe I give it to Mark.”

I told her she was acting crazy, that if my brother’s life was a result of genetics, we all knew where it came from.

Our family is patient with drinking men. I hope, someday, that I will be surrounded by so much love, so much loyalty and patience, as that boy engenders. Kin, angry over insults, butt-kickings, over being used again and again to pay off his bails and debts, still help him, protect him. I begged him, once to change, for her. He only grinned.

My momma has grown old beside him, afraid.

My father took her youth, boy.

Let her have her old age.

M
y momma had been hoping again for a girl, when he was born. He had light brown hair, darker than mine or Sam’s, more like our daddy’s hair. She used to let it grow a little too long, when he was a baby, because she thought it was pretty. He was the only one in the whole family who ever had a curl—mine and Sam’s and even her hair hung straight as a board, but not his. When she finally cut it, he was almost a year old. She put the curls in an old envelope, and saved them.

We called him Freckles when he was little. You could take one look at him and know, in that half-joking way, that this boy is going to be trouble. In his school pictures he is not smiling so much as he is grinning, grinning like the devil. Our barbers had improved at the time, so his bangs were cut more or less straight across his forehead, and the eyes underneath were alive with mischief, and you knew he was going to get into something as soon as the photograph was taken and he climbed down off the stool.

He was not spoiled any more than Sam or me, because there was nothing to spoil him with, except attention. After the fourth son had died, Mark was still just three, and maybe it is true that Momma made him the baby again, making him her greatest responsibility, the focus of so much of her attention, her life. In her eyes, he is still “the baby,” still her greatest responsibility on this earth. When Mark was sick, especially after her baby died, she was frantic.