Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories (20 page)

Soon after he’d left for college, Lauren got fired for cursing a customer and took work at the poultry plant. Jody drove back to Canton once a month. Though phone calls and e-mails kept them connected, it seemed forever before Christmas break arrived. That first night back home, he’d picked Lauren up at her mother’s house and they had gone to a party. Jody expected alcohol and marijuana, some pills. What surprised him was the meth, and how casually Lauren took the offered pipe. When Billy asked if Jody wanted to try it, he shook his head. Once back at school their e-mails and phone conversations became fewer, shorter. He’d seen Lauren only once, in late January.

She’d lost weight and also lost her job. At spring break, Trey told him Lauren was in Charlotte and could have no visitors. Then Jody had heard nothing. When Jody entered Winn-Dixie, Trey was helping a customer. He finished and came over to where Jody waited. Trey offered his hand after wiping it on his stained green apron.

“So you’ve finished your semester?”

“Yes,” Jody answered.

“I bet you made good grades, didn’t you?”

Jody nodded.

“Maybe you’ll inspire some kids around here to have a bit of ambition,” Trey said. “What about this summer?”

“The school offered me a job in the library, but I think I’ll live with Mom and slice up chickens.”

“Why the hell do that?” Trey asked.

“Tuition’s up again. Even with the scholarships, I’ll have to get another loan. No rent and better pay if I stay here.”

“They don’t make it easy for a mountain boy, do they?” Trey said.

“No,” Jody said.

“How’s your sister?” Trey asked.

“Okay, I guess, considering.”

“I heard they got Jeff for nonsupport,” Trey said. “What a worthless asshole, always was. When Karen started going with him, I told her she was setting her sights way too low. You and her both tended to do that.”

Trey turned to see if a customer lingered in his area.

“I went up to the Shackleford place,” Jody said, and Trey grimaced.

“I knew I shouldn’t have told you. I thought you had sense enough not to.”

“I hadn’t heard from her in over two months,” Jody said.

“So now you’ve seen her and know not to go back,” Trey said.

“Can’t you do something?”

“Like what?” Trey said. “Talk to her? Pray for her? I did that. I’m the one who went out there and got her in February, drove her to Charlotte. Three weeks, five thousand dollars. I paid half and Momma paid half.”

“The law, they’ve got to know they’re out there,” Jody said. “I’d rather see her in jail than where she is.”

“Six months, since they aren’t dealing, Sheriff Hunnicut said, and that’s with a so-called tough judge. Soon as she got out she’d be back out there.”

“You can’t know that,” Jody said.

“Yes I can. She might have had a chance in February, but stay on that shit long as she has now and it ain’t a choice. Your brain’s been rewired. Besides, Hunnicut’s got his hands full rounding up the ones so sorry they let their own babies breathe it, them and the ones selling to the high school kids.”

“So you’ve given up on her, you and your momma both?” Jody asked.

“Sheriff Hunnicut told me he used to wonder why he never saw any rats inside a meth house. I mean, filth all over the place you’d expect them. Then he realized the rats were smart enough to stay clear. Think about that.”

“What happened to your father at the power plant, the way it happened . . .”

Trey’s face reddened.

“If she’s using that as an excuse, then she’s even sorrier than I thought. Momma and I had as hard a time with Daddy dying. We hold down jobs, act responsible.”

“Lauren didn’t say it,” Jody answered. “I’m saying it.”

“She had a daddy a lot longer than you did and you’re doing good as anyone around here,” Trey said. “That Trexler woman always put on about how smart Lauren was, such and such an IQ, such and such an SAT score. But I never saw much smarts in the decisions she made. I figured her to end up pregnant before finishing high school. Look, she’d have gotten where she is now a lot quicker if it hadn’t been for you. You and me both, we’ve done more for her than she deserves.” A customer called for Trey to weigh some produce. “Stay in Raleigh,” Trey said. “This place is like a spider’s web. You stay long enough you’ll get stuck in it for good. You’ll end up like her. Or me.”

As he pulled out of the lot, Jody remembered the afternoon before he left for college, the last time he and Lauren went to the Shackleford house. After they’d made love, Lauren took his hand and led him upstairs, where they’d never been before. In a back bedroom were a bureau and mirror, a cardboard funeral-home fan, and a child’s wooden rocking horse. Lauren had asked Jody if he knew why the house was supposedly haunted. He didn’t, only that something had happened and it had been bad. As they went down the stairs, Lauren had turned to him. When I’ve dared them to show themselves, she had told him, I always hoped they would.

Supper was ready when Jody got back to his mother’s house. Karen had come over with Jody’s niece, Chrystal. His sister’s hands were red and raw from deboning chicken carcasses and when she spoke to the child, there was harshness even when not chiding her.

“Have some corn, Jody,” his mother said, lifting the bowl more with palms than fingers. When Jody was growing up, there’d been evenings after work when his mother could barely wring a washcloth. Her fingers froze up and pain radiated from her hands to her shoulders and neck. After she’d had to quit the poultry plant and became a waitress, the pain lessened, but the fingers still curled inward.

“Hard to believe it’s already May,” Jody’s mother said. “Just three more years and you’ll be a college graduate.”

“And then gone from here for good,” Karen said. “Little brother always knew what he wanted. I thought I did, but I confused a hard dick for love.”

“Don’t talk like that,” their mother said, “especially in front of a child.”

“Why not, Mom?” Karen answered. “You made the same mistake.”

Their mother flinched.

“Too bad you didn’t knock up Lauren in high school,” Karen said to Jody. “You could have taken off like Daddy did. Kept up the tradition.”

“I wouldn’t have done that,” Jody answered.

“No?” Karen said. “I guess we’ll never know, will we, little brother.”

“Please,” their mother said softly. “Let’s talk about something else.”

“Lauren didn’t last long at the plant,” Karen said. “A good thing. High as she was half the time, she’d have cut a hand off. Still flaunting how smart she was though. At breaks she always sat with these two Mexican women, learning to speak their jabber, helping her ‘madres’ fill out forms.”

Chrystal reached for another biscuit and Karen slapped the child’s hand. Chrystal jerked her hand back, spilled her cup of milk, and began wailing.

“See what fun you’ve missed out on, little brother,” Karen said.

Three more years, Jody thought as he lay in bed that night. More loans to pay back and, in such an uncertain economy, perhaps no job. He remembered the Friday afternoon Ms. Trexler sat in the house’s front room and explained how coming from a single-parent family would be an asset. Your son deserves a chance at a better life, Ms. Trexler had told his mother, then explained the financial-aid forms she’d brought. The guidance counselor hadn’t let her gaze linger on the shabby furniture, the cracked windowpane sealed by a square of blue tarp, but her meaning was clear enough. All the while his mother had tugged nervously at her dress, her Sunday dress, as she’d listened.

Sleep would not come, so Jody pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt, went outside and sat on the porch steps. The night was cool and silent, too early for the cicadas, no trucks or cars rattling the steel bridge beyond the pasture. A quarter moon held its place among the stars. Like a pale comma, Lauren once said, and spoke of phases of the moon. That Friday afternoon, after all the forms had been signed, Ms. Trexler asked Jody to walk outside. Lauren has let both of us down, Ms. Trexler had said as they’d stood by her car, but don’t let that keep you from achieving what you want in life.

Jody went back inside and opened his laptop. His mother didn’t have internet, but he’d downloaded before-and-after photos. He watched the faces wither like flowers in time-lapse photography. Each year appeared a decade. Deceased was slashed across several of the faces.

After his mother left for her shift at the diner, Jody packed a suitcase and backpack and headed into town. He went to an ATM and emptied his account, then drove on to the Shackleford house. He parked beside the Taurus and stepped up the rotting porch steps and opened the door. They were all on the couch.

“I want you to go to Raleigh with me,” Jody said, and stepped closer to take Lauren’s hand in his. “Please, I won’t ask again.”

As she looked up, something sparked deep in her pupils. Something, though it wasn’t indecision.

“I can’t, baby,” Lauren said. “I just can’t.” Jody went back outside and returned with the suitcase and backpack. He set them in the center of the room and took the money from his pocket and placed it in the collection plate.

“Turn on the fire, Billy,” Katie Lynn said as she filled the pipe. “This boy’s been a long time out in the cold.”

B
ecause they were boys, no one believed them, including the old men who gathered each morning at the Riverside Gas and Grocery. These retirees huddled by the pot-bellied stove in rain and cold, on clear days sunning out front like reptiles. The store’s middle-aged owner, Cedric Henson, endured the trio’s presence with a resigned equanimity. When he’d bought the store five years earlier, Cedric assumed they were part of the purchase price, in that way no different from the leaky roof and the submerged basement whenever the Tuckaseegee overspilled its banks.

The two boys, who were brothers, had come clattering across the bridge, red-faced and already holding their arms apart as if carrying huge, invisible packages. They stood gasping a few moments, waiting for enough breath to tell what they’d seen.

“This big,” the twelve-year-old said, his arms spread as wide apart as he could stretch them.

“No, even bigger,” the younger boy said.

Cedric had been peering through the door screen but now stepped outside.

“What you boys talking about?” he asked.

“A fish,” the older boy said, “in the pool below the bridge.”

Rudisell, the oldest of the three at eighty-nine, expertly delivered a squirt of tobacco between himself and the boys. Creech and Campbell simply nodded at each other knowingly. Time had vanquished them to the role of spectators in the world’s affairs, and from their perspective the world both near and far was now controlled by fools. The causes of this devolution dominated their daily conversations. The octogenarians Rudisell and Campbell blamed Franklin Roosevelt and fluoridated water. Creech, a mere seventy-six, leaned toward Elvis Presley and television.

“The biggest fish ever come out of the Tuckaseegee was a thirty-one-inch brown trout caught in nineteen and forty-eight,” Rudisell announced to all present. “I seen it weighed in this very store. Fifteen pounds and two ounces.”

The other men nodded in confirmation.

“This fish was twice bigger than that,” the younger boy challenged.

The boy’s impudence elicited another spray of tobacco juice from Rudisell.

“Must be a whale what swum up from the ocean,” Creech said. “Though that’s a long haul. It’d have to come up the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi, for the water this side of the mountain flows west.”

“Could be one of them log fish,” Campbell offered. “They get that big. Them rascals will grab your bait and then turn into a big chunk of wood afore you can set the hook.”

“They’s snakes all over that pool, even some copperheads,” Rudisell warned. “You younguns best go somewhere else to make up your tall tales.”

The smaller boy pooched out his lower lip as if about to cry.

“Come on,” his brother said. “They ain’t going to believe us.” The boys walked back across the road to the bridge. The old men watched as the youths leaned over the railing, took a last look before climbing atop their bicycles and riding away.

“Fluoridated water,” Rudisell wheezed. “Makes them see things.”

On the following Saturday morning, Harley Wease scrambled up the same bank the boys had, carrying the remnants of his Zebco 202. Harley’s hands trembled as he laid the shattered rod and reel on the ground before the old men. He pulled a soiled handkerchief from his jeans and wiped his bleeding index finger to reveal a deep slice between the first and second joints. The old men studied the finger and the rod and reel and awaited explanation. They were attentive, for Harley’s deceased father had been a close friend of Rudisell’s.

“Broke my rod like it was made of balsa wood,” Harley said. “Then the gears on the reel got stripped. It got down to just me and the line pretty quick.” Harley raised his index finger so the men could see it better. “I figured to use my finger for the drag. If the line hadn’t broke, you’d be looking at a nub.”

“You sure it was a fish?” Campbell asked. “Maybe you caught hold of a muskrat or snapping turtle.”

“Not unless them critters has got to where they grow fins,” Harley said.

“You saying it was a trout?” Creech asked.

“I only got a glimpse, but it didn’t look like no trout. Looked like a alligator but for the fins.”

“I never heard of no such fish in Jackson County,” Campbell said, “but Rudy Nicholson’s boys seen the same. It’s pretty clear there’s something in that pool.”

The men turned to Rudisell for his opinion.

“I don’t know what it is either,” Rudisell said. “But I aim to find out.”

He lifted the weathered ladderback chair, held it aloft shakily as he made his slow way across the road to the bridge. Harley went into the store to talk with Cedric, but the other two men followed Rudisell as if all were deposed kings taking their thrones into some new kingdom. They lined their chairs up at the railing. They waited.

Only Creech had undiminished vision, but in the coming days that was rectified. Campbell had not thought anything beyond five feet of himself worth viewing for years, but now a pair of thick, round-lensed spectacles adorned his head, giving him a look of owlish intelligence. Rudisell had a spyglass he claimed once belonged to a German U-boat captain. The bridge was now effectively one lane, but traffic tended to be light. While trucks and cars drove around them, the old men kept vigil morning to evening, retreating into the store only when rain came.