All Over but the Shoutin' (25 page)

He grew up thin as a rail, and stuck on one speed: wide-open. When we played football in the schoolyard, I was the quarterback and Mark was the only one I ever threw to, because he would catch it and knock anybody down who was in the way. The only way to fight him was to sit on him, carefully. He bit.

He was also the best rock thrower I have ever seen. After that time he hit me in the hand with a rock from so far away I didn’t even see him, we put him to work in right field for my uncle Ed’s softball team. He was the youngest player there. If the outfielders inched in on him, grinning at the skinny boy at the plate, he slapped it over their heads and they would chase it, cussing and red-faced, to the fence.

He didn’t care much for school, but he was a wizard with tools. When he was still too young to drive, he could take a car apart. He was a bricklayer, a plumber, a roofer, a carpenter who could sight down a board the way some people sight down a gun, and tell you if it was true or not.

When he was sixteen, he had a job that was hard but steady, a nice car and nice clothes. And that was all I knew about my little brother for a while, because it was about that time that the road in our life fragmented, that I stopped riding to work with him in those huge dump trucks, that I began a life that only faintly included him.

I heard, once, that he had found a girl, but that she was mean inside and ultimately left him, and broke his heart. People tell me he was never the same, after that. I don’t know. I can’t believe one woman can wreck a man. Maybe I’ve just never met the right one.

Out of sight and mind, he built a house with his own hands, far back in the woods, and used a handsaw to cut the boards. When I finally made it to see him, I was amazed. It was no shack, it was a real house. He was proud of it. He dug a catfish pond. He planted a flower bed. He filled the yard with dogs and chickens. When I went home on Thanksgiving, we would take my shotgun up into the woods behind his house and, with Sam, take turns throwing Purex jugs into the air and blowing them into scraps of white plastic. I guess I fooled myself into believing everything was fine; maybe I just wanted my new life to be free of any reminders of the old days.

But every now and then when I called home, I would ask Momma how she was and she would say fine in a way that told me she was lying. Always, there was some news of Mark, a wreck, a run-in with the law, and she would always say the same thing. She didn’t call me because she didn’t want to worry me. Once they sent him off for a year, and she suffered every day of it, afraid for him. You hear people say all the time how someone ages ten years in one. I have seen it.

I should have gone to see him. I told myself it was because I couldn’t bear the thought of it, seeing him in a cage. The truth is a damn sight uglier than that. That was a time in my life when I was so conscious of who I was, working hard not just to survive but succeed, and a brother in prison did not fit in.

I should have gone. I should have taken him a carton of Camels and some money for the prison store, and talked to him as long as the guards would let me. Instead, I gave the money to my momma, and let her take it.

I didn’t do right by him any more than I did right by my momma all those years I was content to let her live in the background. There is time, I tell myself, to make it right. But while I know what I have to do for her, I do not even know where to begin with my baby brother. There is an anger in him so much like my father, but I cannot tell how it developed, where it came from in his own life. It is enough to make a man believe in ghosts.

He calls me sometimes, usually when he is drinking, and tells me he loves me.

22
What if

M
y brother Sam grew up to be a good man. He works at the cotton mill in Jacksonville, unloading the big trucks outside that massive old red-brick building. It’s a good job, compared to the work he has done before. The pay isn’t a whole lot but it allows his family to have decent health insurance, and that eases his mind. It’s hard to put a price tag on peace of mind, he says, and that’s all he’s really working for. So he always comes to work on time and works as long as they will let him, and like any man who works with his hands in America today, he wakes up wondering if this morning might be the last time they let him in the gate. Still, his loyalty to the people who give him his check, his livelihood, his life, is boundless. The plant awards hats, shirts and jackets for bonuses for perfect attendance. I have seen him when every single piece of clothing on his lanky body read “Fruit of the Loom.”

In the slow times—no one likes to say the word
layoff
—he cuts firewood and loads it on his old ’63 Chevy pickup to sell to people in town. He will work on your car for five dollars and sometimes for nothing, but somehow he always manages to keep just a little ahead of the bank on his little wood-frame house with the rose garden in back and the state flower of Alabama, the satellite dish, off to one side, even if that means working with a drop-cord light and a fistful of tools until 1
A.M.
under a broken-down tractor, and getting up just a few hours later to pull a twelve-hour shift.

Teresa, his wife, works at the Food Outlet: we still just have two supermarkets. She has been good to him, and good for him.

The education he didn’t get so many years ago, as he fed that school’s coal furnace and plunged the toilets to earn his free lunch, doomed him to manual labor. When he was thirteen he was working full-time for my uncle Ed, pick-and-shovel work, loading those boxcars with fifty-pound bags of clay and lime that left fat blisters on his shoulders and arms.

He is not ashamed of work. If he is bitter about it, about any of it, he has never said. He built a decent life from absolute nothing and is content, and does his dreaming in a healthy way, forward. He rarely drinks and only cusses in moderation. (I respect him, in case I haven’t made that clear. I always have.)

Much of my young life he spent coming to rescue me, with his fists—on the playground—or just his hands. He is one of those men who can fix anything. I would break down on the side of the road and sooner or later there he would come, shaking his head, calling me a “chucklehead,” but he always got me running again, or pulled me out of the ditch, or at least wrapped a chain around my bumper and towed me out of the embarrassment of the middle of the road.

Sometimes I wonder what will happen if Sam and I are called to stand before Saint Peter on the same day, and my sins include everything from trifling with loose women to sleeping in church, and Sam just says, “Well, Pete, once I did fish on a Sunday.”

It is what Sam does if he is not working. He has the patience of Job and I like to watch him play his lure across the pond, so easy, smooth, peaceful, waiting for the tug on the line and an explosion of water as the fat bass climbs into the air, mad, shaking its head left and right, its jaw big enough to stick your fist in. “Son!” he always hollers, then pulls him in, slow and steady. He looks the fish over a little, not gloating, but admiring, and eases him back into the murky water, free. He is damn near a genius at fishing. When I was a little boy he would hook a fish, then hand the pole to me so I could pretend I caught it.

He watches over my mother, giving me opportunities to roam, to discover things. He cuts her firewood, and patches her water pipes when they freeze. He is the one who always comes to see her on her birthday.

All he demands is that once in a blue moon I will sit with him in the barn where he stores his pickup and bass boat and tell him about where I’ve been, what I’ve seen.

In return, he brings me home, all the way home, telling about layoffs at the mill, about who died and where the funeral was. He tells me about babies born, about how his new saw can cut through a green pine in nothing flat, and how ol’ Chuckle Head in Websters Chapel got locked out of his trailer again. He is a grand storyteller, much, much better than me. Sometimes I laugh so hard I have to go lie down.

We plan, every time we talk, to go fishing. Me, him, Mark, if he will. We plan it and I always ruin it, because of work. He never gets mad at me, he just nods his head.

Work. He understands.

F
unny, where boys find their heroes. We find them in wars, on football fields in Tuscaloosa and Auburn, on the hot asphalt at Alabama International Motor Speedway. I wanted to gallop with the football like Johnny Musso; I wanted to crash and live, like Jimmy “Smut” Means.

But the one I wanted to be just like for the longest time was the one who beat me up every other Thursday, who chased me around and around the house with a slingshot loaded with chinaberries, who lied and told me that a sunk-in septic tank outside the house was really an unmarked grave, who rigged up a trapeze in the barn and let me go first, to test the ropes, and who hid with me under that bed in that big, hateful house, and, as the tears rolled down my face, put his arm around my shoulders.

I
wonder a lot if Mark would have been different, if he had just had me, like I had Sam. Maybe not. Probably not. I guess well never know, and in a sad way, that will be my salvation.

W
e finally got to go fishing, Sam and me. Mark was nowhere around.

We fished in Paul Williams’s pond, about a mile from home, using bright-colored worms to compensate for the murk of the water. “Look,” he told me, pointing to where a water moccasin, thick as my arm, moved in slow undulations across the still water. “There’s fish in here,” he said, “that can eat that ol’ boy.”

But as usual, he was catching them and I wasn’t. I cranked the bait too fast, he told me, but I’ve never had any patience for anything. Any bass chasing my bait would have had to have been on roller skates. The hours slipped by and he caught six. I lost half a rubber worm.

I told him I reckoned I needed to be getting home. We fished the next few minutes side by side. One of his casts hooked a fat, four-pound bass, in the shallows near the bank. I could see its gills expand as the huge mouth, like a bucket, scooped up the lure.

Then he handed the rod to me, so I could reel it in.

23
Paradise

T
hose few months I was home in Calhoun County in the winter of 1988 and 1989, back at the
Star
, back with my family, run hot and cold in my memory. It was clear now that I had made a mistake, in believing I could somehow fix everything in my momma’s life by my mere presence, in thinking I could just click into place again in that world that had changed without me. In the meantime, I had placed my ambition on hold, but it would be wrong to say that it was wasted time. A wealth of good things happened in those few months. I wrote stories again for people who knew my name and face, which is always more rewarding than writing for strangers. I even got a letter from my ex-mother-in-law, saying she liked a column I did about King, my dog. He had gotten old, weak, and walked around stiff-legged, like an old man with rheumatism, and when he finally passed away I was relieved because I knew he wasn’t hurting anymore. I buried him in the goat pen, because the goats kept the weeds cut down.

I covered a high school football game again because the sports desk was shorthanded, and I got the names right, mostly, although the numbers still evaded me. I did get the score right, which is important. For the first time in years, I was home for Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s Day, and ate my momma’s black-eyed peas, for luck. I even went bird hunting, but all I shot at was the sky. I saw three puppies born, and one of them, to be named Gizzard, would become both the ugliest dog on this planet and my momma’s cherished companion. He was a sickly as well as a remarkably ugly puppy, but Momma kept him alive, feeding him drops of milk until he was well.

I ate breakfast again on Saturday at my momma’s, got to know my kinfolks again. When my car broke down, Sam came to get me, again. “Ricky, if I didn’t buy no better cars than you, I sure wouldn’t move away from home again,” he told me, once, from under the hood of my car. “I ain’t comin’ to get you in Florida.”

But after a few months, it was time to go. I was twenty-nine, and while that seems young to me now, I felt like I was standing on the dock, watching the boat leave without me. I might have been content to stay there the rest of my life, if I had waited fifteen, twenty years. I just came home too soon.

I had a girlfriend, a good woman, who pointed out that I was pacing in the living room late at night like some circus elephant in a pen that was way too small. “Go,” she said. She was about tired of me then, anyway. It had something to do with my attention span.

I called the
St. Petersburg Times
on the phone and asked if they would still have me. The St. Pete
Times
was not a big newspaper in circulation—though it was twice as big as any paper I had ever worked for—but it was big in reputation. It was, consistently, year after year, one of the top ten newspapers in America. I would normally have been a little scared of it, of proving myself there. But the editor who hired me, Paul Tash, told me that it takes all manner and texture of people to make a good newspaper, and he would be glad to say he was hiring a reporter from Possum Trot, Alabama. Randy Henderson, my editor at the
Birmingham News
, had told me that, too. As long as there was at least one such person in every newspaper I went to, I knew I would be fine.