Pulphead: Essays (21 page)

The graveyard rests like an eroded rock stairway against the rim of a natural amphitheater, in the deepest fastnesses of the Daniel Boone National Forest. Without the GPS in the rental, I doubt I’d have gotten within ten miles (although the spot turned out to be not far from a cabin that belonged to my ancestors and which I saw as a kid—we drove through a streambed in someone’s truck, and my brother found an old snake-oil bottle stashed in the kitchen wall).

You could hardly imagine how they had physically buried people on this hill, it was that steep. The plots were by necessity almost terraced, with little wooden chairs and benches, since you couldn’t stand. The graves went up and up. It took me fifteen minutes to climb to the ridge above. As you ascended, you rose backward through unknown generations of the Hoskins family, from modern tombstones with laminated photographs of guys playing electric guitar, through older concrete slabs with crude lettering and misspellings, back to flat-lying creek rocks with no-longer-legible initials hacked into them, the ur-Hoskinses. Going higher, beyond the graves, you walked on a vast carpet of mosses and lichens, species growing out of other species—the reason the hill had looked oddly green from below, for November.

The death tree itself was glorious, massive. Its leaves clashed incessantly in the wind of a blustery day, like the branches were covered in thin coppery coins. The tree had been here before the first Hoskins.

They found Bill Sparkman strung up to one of its limbs, but not hanging. This last fact had been important (I thought unduly so) to the captain, that the body lay partly in contact with the ground when found. Not suspended there, in other words, the way you see in pictures of lynchings. His hands were bound with duct tape, his mouth stuffed with a red gag. He wore only socks. Apart from the ominous word on his chest, there was the calling attention to his badge. Otherwise, no defensive wounds. He’d died right there, of asphyxiation.

Homicide, suicide, accident—the captain confirmed, incredibly, that none of the three had been ruled out. It was hard to get your mind around. Auto-lynching?

A few days before I’d arrived, a law-enforcement source in another town had speculated to a newspaper reporter that if people wished to understand what had happened to Bill Sparkman, they needed to look into the David Carradine death. Carradine, you’ll recall, was found strung up in the closet of his Bangkok hotel room in what appeared to be an auto-erotic episode gone wrong.

Or had this source, in mentioning Carradine, been referring to the actor’s family, some of whom continue to insist that his death was a murder made to look like auto-erotic asphyxiation?

I lay down on the moss. It was perfectly soft; it had the softness of a mattress that a billionaire with a bad back would pay to have made for himself. Not the tiniest bit wet or muddy.

If homicide—intentional or accidental—had it been a gay thing? Not the most enlightened question, but it came. You could certainly make Sparkman’s biography match up in a wink-wink way, if you wanted. Middle-aged bachelor, former altar boy, raised an adopted son alone, lifelong affiliation with the Boy Scouts, a grade-school substitute teacher, an effeminate voice. I knew the last detail from having heard a speech Sparkman gave, on the Internet, from last year. He was receiving his diploma from an online university. They asked him to serve as class speaker because his story inspired them. While working toward his degree, he’d been battling cancer and seemingly winning. A man with a round, pasty, friendly, bespectacled face and a crop of light reddish hair. In probably the most commonly reproduced photograph of him, he’s wearing a toboggan to cover his chemo baldness and reaching down past a young male student’s chest to point at something on a piece of paper.

As I lay there, the spheres—pundo, talk radio, and blogo—crackled with talk of what had happened or not happened on this mossy hill. Had Sparkman run into some psychopathic meth cookers on his rounds, asked them how many people lived in their trailer and what they did for a living, and got himself choked to death?

Those leaning left sensed a sweeping under the rug: the Glenn Becks and Michele Bachmanns had Sparkman’s blood on their hands. Meanwhile the right seized on every shadowy hint that his death may not even have been homicide, much less a political assassination. See how quick you liberals are to demonize us! The two sides hissed at each other, in a ritual as routine by now as a
West Side Story
number.

Late orange butterflies moved over the moss bed. On the way here I’d passed road signs straight from the family Bible. Brightshade, Barbourville. In Barbourville my great-somethingth-grandmother Kate Adams presented a Union flag to the Home Guard during a ceremony. The college there still displays it. My people were those strange Southerners you don’t often read about in histories of the Civil War: white landowners who owned slaves but fought for the North on Republican principles. Kentucky cracked down the middle this way. That’s why you hear them say “brother against brother” about us. My ancestors freed their slaves with a kind of “Fine, run off, then” attitude—seeing no other course, maybe in the noblest cases relieved to be doing the right thing at last, to be on the side of furthering the great experiment, not holding it back.

I heard a vehicle come down the road and waited for it to pass. It didn’t pass. That was nerve-racking. They’d seen my car. It’s hard to overstate how far back into the park this place is—less than a mile on, the road ends. If you dead-end in the Daniel Boone park, you’re pretty far into one of the largest contiguous green blobs of wooded mountainous land left in the United States. It can be seen from space. Coming in along the winding, dipping roads, I’d sighted canebrakes in the river bottoms. Very few of those left. It was time travel, Kentucky-wise. Not wanting to be paranoid, wanting less to be stupid, I waited. Whoever it was drove out of earshot.

When I pulled away, I saw they hadn’t moved far. It was a sheriff’s deputy, parked in the middle of the road. His finding me here in all Clay County, unless he’d been watching the graveyard day and night, seemed Stephen Hawking–size, oddswise. Was I supposed to stop and get out? I sat behind him with the engine on awkwardly. I decided to pass him. As I went by, we waved. A smiling gray-mustached man with glasses. “Come on back,” he said, and just let me go by.

For the next few miles, I was edgy. “Come on back.” Had that been creepy? A leeringly cynical mockery of the cherished “Come back, now, y’hear!”? Casually threatening?

No, ironic. Paying attention to strangers who’d gone miles out of their way to visit fresh local crime scenes was solidly under the deputy’s aegis. Someone had called him about me. Hadn’t I become lost briefly and driven by a junkyard and made the dogs bark? That guy called. The deputy was probably amused by all of us lost-looking rubberneckers showing up with our GPSs, wanting to see the tree where Bill Sparkman died. When the deputy had said, “Come on back,” he’d meant, I know you never will. When he implied, I know you never will, he simultaneously meant, And I’m glad, because you’re almost certainly an opportunistic reverse-provincial clown who’ll go back to the office and try to make me look as stupid and scary as possible in what you write, despite the fact that we’ve been here since Boone in this forest, surviving, whereas you spend your life hopping around like a flea, chasing money.

He may not have articulated these things when he said “Come on back,” but they were present as an undertone. Among Kentuckians, much is exchanged with the volume and tempo of grumbled stock phrases. The deputy and I had achieved perfect social transparency in the fleeting eye contact of that drive-by.

None of which means I didn’t take a different, carefully eccentric route back to London, full of circle-backs and stops at country markets, to establish my presence for any future timeline of disappearance. In a gas station I heard a conversation about religion. I almost hesitate to reproduce it, because it sounds made up. The woman behind the counter and a bearded, even cartoonishly hillbilly-looking man who’d just bought a pack of generic cigarettes were talking. The man remarked that there were all sorts of religions right there in that part of Kentucky.

“Did you ever see snakes?” the woman said. She meant snake handlers.

“No,” said the man. “Did you?”

“Not right out in the open,” the woman said. “But I knew people that had ’em in the back room.”

While I paid, they exchanged some pieties on how everyone has his or her own beliefs, et cetera. Then the woman said, “It’s just like, ten people see a car accident, every single one is gonna tell the police something different” (a vivid way, I thought, of localizing the story about the blind men feeling an elephant).

“Tell me which one of ’em gets out to help,” the man said, “that’s the one whose religion I’ll listen to.”

The woman and I both stood there. I think we each understood in our own way that Snuffy Smith here had just dropped some upper-level wisdom on us through a parting in his tobacco-browned beard-nest.

*   *   *

At my hotel, I called Sparkman’s son, Josh, on the phone. I had met him earlier in the driveway of their house, where a sofa laden with heavy junk had been pushed up against the front door like a barricade and a large dog barked in a way that said he would bark until you left. I’d been leaving a note when Josh pulled in. A bearded kid with dark hair and worried eyes, formally polite but then unexpectedly talkative, he’d stopped by just to drop off some stuff. We could connect later.

Josh was adamant that his father hadn’t killed himself. He repeated to me what he’d said to others: A man who fights cancer like that does not commit suicide. Bill Sparkman showed every day how badly he wanted to live. It angered Josh that the cops wouldn’t come out and at least give his father the dignity of victimhood. As a result of their dithering, a cloud of tawdriness had begun to settle over the whole business. Indeed, two of my formerly cooperative interviewees stood me up on my last day in London. People weren’t sure they wanted anything to do with this story anymore.

But Josh’s concerns about the delayed determination of death were practical, too. He wanted to hold on to his father’s modest ranch house, intended to be his inheritance. Bill Sparkman had worked for sixteen years to keep that house, so that he could leave it to Josh. Without the payout from his father’s life-insurance policy, Josh would lose it.

He told me that even before people had begun trying to make his father’s death seem like suicide, the insurance company had been giving him problems, claiming his father had missed a payment. Possibly the policy was void before he died. Josh wanted to know if I knew any lawyers.

He and his father had gone through a troubled phase the previous year—while Bill fought cancer, Josh was busted for receiving stolen property and ended up working at a Church’s Chicken in Tennessee—but they’d patched things up since then and saw each other not long before Bill died.

The whole thing was sad as hell, if not worse. That was the real question, I suppose: Was it worse? Did it concern anyone but a few people here? The captain had cut straight to it: “Why are you here?” When Josh, too, stood me up the next day and night, I packed and flew home.

*   *   *

The official police pronouncement, when it came weeks later—I watched the captain announce it over a live video feed—was like a dark punch line. Sparkman’s death had been all about health care. He was financially ruined from fighting lymphoma without good insurance. Deep in debt, working multiple low-paying jobs to make his mortgage while trying to earn a slightly more lucrative degree, he took the census work as most people take it, out of necessity.

The police investigation concluded that Sparkman had killed himself as part of a tragic insurance scam. He’d taken out two policies on himself not long before dying. The policies became void in the event of suicide, but not if it were murder. He’d just learned that his cancer was back. This was his only way of leaving Josh something. Josh knew nothing about it. One of the ways they solved the case was by studying how
FED
got written on Sparkman’s chest. There were clues in the formation of the letters that the wrist holding the pen had been bent, the way your wrist would be if you were trying to write on your own chest.

*   *   *

I saw my cousin again, at a party in the little lakeside village in northern Michigan where my mother’s family has spent every summer since the nineteenth century. It’s a kind of Victorian-cottage Utopia, frozen like Brigadoon, a little WASP heaven. The uncles were having a party for another of my cousins, the lobbyist’s brother, just back from serving as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan, “taking it to ’em,” as he said. And no joke, he’d been over there during the deadliest months since the invasion. I sensed an air of physical relief and lightness in my blond aunt, his mother.

The lobbyist cousin said it was getting rough back in D.C. The public option had gained momentum coming out of the House. The last thing his boss had said to him, that very morning, was “We may be fucked.”

From the front porch, we could see a deep green field where we had raced as kids; from the back, the postcard loveliness of the tiny harbor, where the white sails of the sportsmen’s boats hung motionless in the afternoon, moths on a pale blue wall. We had grown up here, in what for children was a kind of paradise, all courtesy of private insurance. Now my own daughter was running by, chasing a dog. How could anyone wish it away? It’s rather that everyone should have it.