Cementville (22 page)

Carl read the Forest Service sign. LOST MAN TRAIL, it said. They had traveled seventy or eighty miles and were at the northwestern edge of Daniel Boone National Forest.
Lost Man Trail
—
what are we doing here?
was what Carl wanted to know, but that was not the kind of question you asked somebody like Harlan O'Brien. Carl kept his face blank—a skill he had perfected at the hospital—so as not to give away his trepidation. Harley squinted at him, regardless of Carl not having said a word, and swung his stump down. He reached around and pulled his left foot off the jump seat behind him and strapped it on. They commenced walking.

They maintained silence a good distance up the trail, stopping occasionally to reconnoiter. Turkey vultures circled the cloudless sky over the valley. Carl cleared his throat, a bit too loudly. He swallowed big.

“I don't always trust what I see in Nature,” he said. “It's worth taking the time to make sure what you're seeing is Nature making the choices, and not some A-hole from Texas draining Her blood
and trying to pass it off as ‘stewardship' or ‘conservation.' Daddy taught me about that kind. He said you might as well accept there has always been greed, people stripping this and that out of the Earth. All of us share the guilt. The metal it takes to make a car, for instance, or wood for a house. But that doesn't mean I have to like it. I accept that. I am not stupid. I went to school, not as long as some, but I know some things.” Carl glanced over at his companion. There was no way to tell if Harlan was getting the drift. He sucked in some more air and went on.

“Take a for-instance. Doesn't it wrench you to watch a starling pester a downy woodpecker to death and finally throw that poor thing out of her nest and then stomp her eggs and throw her bald-headed babies on the ground to rot by their mama's carcass? Some will say,
Well, that's Nature for you!
But starlings are not natives to this place. Man in his infinite wisdom imported those thieving winged rats here from England.” He shut up for a bit, huffing some with the increasing arduousness of the climb. They rounded a bend. Before them lay a vista that made them stop. Carl put a hand on Harlan's shoulder and spread his other arm, an embrace of the desolation below and about them, a fresh clear-cut hacked into red-brown hillside ripped and ridged by rain. Laid out wide like a young girl left behind by a gang of rapists.

“All that soil will soon run into the creek and off to the ocean far away from here. Those red roads you see slashed across there like streaks of blood,” Carl whispered, “they cut across the state. I hear they're hauling off the tops of whole mountains.” His voice had taken on the tone of a so-called man of the cloth he'd heard under a tent once when he was a boy. “You don't have to look too close to see the difference. You wonder: Is it Nature doing the damage to herself, or is it fellers in some big skyscraper in Houston looking for coal or sometimes what they're calling shale oil, or is it—” This was the part Carl hated. “Sometimes you got to look in the mirror and ask,
Is it us?
”

Harlan, silent, had his eyes pinned on something straight ahead, which Carl took as a motion to continue.

“That's preaching though, and I'm no preacher. I don't go in for God and the hereafter and whatnot, and whether or not we get multiple cracks at this mortal coil. I just know things. Harlan, I'll say this about that and then I'm done.” Carl swallowed hard again and licked his lips. “There are all these highways everywhere out there in the air, see, layers upon layers of them, all at once going in every direction, connecting all our heads. Whizzing through every time and every age. In the top of all our heads there's this invisible hole, tiny as a pinprick. Once in a while, some soul pulls off the highway and takes a sharp left-turn detour down the hole. The soul didn't choose you necessarily, although sometimes I wonder about that part. Maybe I've got a flashing neon sign saying,
Eat at Carl's!! Stop in for Good Food!! Last Chance!!
The soul pulls off. Me, I've come to expect these visitors. Everybody's bound to have them, the way I figure. They just don't talk about it. Afraid of people thinking they're crazy. So mostly I keep my mouth shut too.”

And for the moment, Carl did. He'd gone on longer than he intended. He would keep his mouth shut and let this information sink into his friend's poor addled brain and hope it gave him some relief. They walked for what to Carl seemed an eternity, even with his two working legs. A red-tailed hawk swooped across the trail not two feet in front of them, and they sucked in a breath at the same time, then laughed and shook their heads.

When Harlan was ahead of him by several paces, Carl heard him say, “Roy Stubblefield had it coming, Carl.” A minute or two went by, and Carl began to think that perhaps it was not Harlan who had said it at all, because the sentence repeated itself in his head several times.

They broke for bologna and tomato sandwiches under a white oak maybe seventeen feet around. Three men holding hands in a ring would have had a hard time encompassing it. Harlan took a parcel of wax paper out of his knapsack and unwrapped a handful of Oreos. The two men grinned when both of them twisted the black cookies apart and scraped off the white cream with their teeth.

“You're wrong about that last part,” Harlan said. Carl was taken aback by the tone of certainty in his newfound friend's voice. “I don't think everybody hears them.”

They spoke little the rest of the day except to mark a particular plant or bird or track.

“Skunk cabbage,” one would say.

“Solitary vireo,” the other would say.

“Polecat.”

“Yellow warbler.”

“Dogtooth violet.”

They managed the entire drive home in a comfortable hush. Music rolled over them from the car radio as they headed into the sun that evening. It was good having somebody that understood you. Best thing for people like Harley and me, Carl thought, is to get out where the voice of the Big Entire, or whatever the hell it is out there, gets louder than all the ones inside a body's skull. Find the tallest knobs with the tallest trees where the only voice we can hear is the one that says,
You don't belong here! Go on back to your ridiculous crackerjack box with its power lines and its refrigerator hum and its doors closing one room off from another
. A voice that lets you know there's no such thing as making sense of it all.

Carl decided to say one last thing when he got out of the truck that night, lightning bugs flaring off and on over Katherine's vegetable garden.

“Nature talking to me doesn't make me grind my teeth,” he said. “She has a right to her opinion. And as for the voices, well, they mean no harm.”

“Hard to tell sometimes though, isn't it?” Harlan said as he shut the door.

Carl watched Harlan's taillights disappear across the narrow ridge road over to the O'Briens' place, where he imagined his friend stretching out on the floorboards, dreaming himself back to his little bamboo box in the jungle.

ELEVEN

D
usk. Nimrod Grebe floats near the ceiling, circling like a hound that cannot find a resting place, watching the blood pour out from a hole in the shoulder of the broken-down mess of a man sprawled on the floor below. He had not thought things through. Had not counted on missing his head, big old thing, head so big it was hard to find hats to fit it. Most of all he had not counted on Bett Ferguson's children being the first ones to run up on his porch and look in through the screen and find him there, his blood mixing with the spilt cup of Heaven Hill. Worse, he has soiled himself.

In the years since Nimrod returned to Cementville (it was Taylortown he was returning to, really, not to put too fine a point on it) to live in his dead mother's house, he has watched the neighborhood go downhill, from a reliable bunch of hardworking colored sharecroppers to successive clans of white trash who hollered and fought one another all hours of the day and night. Recent years, Nimrod watched from his front porch as Bett Ferguson's five, six, seven children (he could never be sure how many there were) ran around the yard in their altogethers, white moon bottoms shining, lawless innocents
climbing his crabapple trees and terrorizing God's creatures with the hard green fruits. Sweet, really, but wild, just wild, having no daddy. Bett Ferguson, she's all right though. How often Nimrod has stopped to visit when, at the end of the day, Bett props her swollen feet on a raggedy ottoman on the front porch. She has been nothing but kind to him, giving him rides to town, sharing big hunks of government cheese and whatnot. All he has to give is a few eggs from his banties, knowing full well she's got chickens of her own.

“The kids love them little banty eggs,” Bett always tells him. She asks after his health. It's been a long time since anybody else did that.

“I got a dirty liver, Bett,” Nimrod tells her, shaking his big head.

“Here's some tomato juice I just put up,” she'll say. “I got too much. It'll spoil if you don't take it off my hands.”

Nimrod brooks no judgment for poor Bett, daughter of that scoundrel Angus Ferguson who rode with the Klan. Her nephew Levon, now he is another matter entirely. Hellhound. And Nimrod knows from hellhounds.

It galls Nimrod that Levon's face is the one that comes into focus now. Galls him so badly that the part of him floating against the ceiling drops suddenly to the floor and nestles itself, glove-like, back into his body, like some kind of charism inhaling the hot breath of God.

Levon rips the blue tape from Nimrod's left hand and sniffs at the sippy cup. “I tell you what, boys,” he says to the silent children, their eyes wide, “that is one bad-smelling highball.” And Levon throws Nimrod's cup out the window.

O'Donahue pulls up in his cruiser, big hell-colored light swiveling round on top like an evil eye. Bett must have got ahold of him. Sheriff figured on finding a dead body, because he picked up the coroner, Tommy Thompson, on his way out here to Taylortown. Malcolm Duvall from the funeral home pulls in behind the squad car. Duvall's long black hearse doubles as the only ambulance for miles around, always rolling onto the scene whenever there's trouble of a potentially mortal nature, its nearly silent V-8 engine gliding in like a vulture.

“Get back, kids,” O'D says. “Levon, what the hell you think you're doing? This here's a crime scene. Get those children out of here.” Malcolm and Tommy finagle the gurney onto the porch and through the door.

“He dead?” somebody says.

“Naw, more's the pity,” Levon says. “What's that blue stuff?”

“Blue?” Tommy says. Tommy Thompson has been county coroner so long that when he kicks the bucket himself, people will not be able to fathom anyone else filling the slot.

“All over his hand there . . .”

“Holy Mary,” O'Donahue says and lets out a long whistle. From Nimrod's hand he wipes off blood that has already begun to thicken and turn black. Nimrod watches the sheriff's face change as he figures out what is strapped to his hand with bright blue tape.

“I bet that's his old war pistol.” Tommy whistles too. “I always took Nimrod for a happy man,” he says, as if Nimrod is indeed dead and not laying right there staring up at him.

“We cannot know a man's insides,” Duvall the undertaker murmurs profoundly.

Well, if that isn't divine revelation, Nimrod would say to Mac Duvall, were he not too weak to speak. Sheriff O'Donahue and the coroner and the undertaker all seem to receive his thoughts, the way that woman on television talks about reading minds, because they all look at him at the same time.

“Nimrod, what on God's sweet earth were you meaning to do?” the sheriff whispers with that familiar mix of condescension and magnanimity and tired patience, as if Nimrod is a child and not a soldier once, of the 369th Infantry of the 93rd Division, who had received France's Croix de Guerre for holding a line west of the Argonne for over a month, all before Mickey O'Donahue was even born.

“Can you tell us who taped this pistol into your hand?” O'D is hollering at Nimrod now, assuming as so many do that the old and the helpless are also deaf.

Nimrod looks the other way while the three men hold their breath against the stench and,
With a one, and a two, and a
—lift him onto the gurney they have dragged in through the door. Mickey O'Donahue, poor excuse for a sheriff, forgets and leaves Nimrod's old World War I pistol lying under the overturned lounge chair.