The Essay A Novel (6 page)

When Mom got up to clean the dishes she said, “It's lovely, Edgel. But I'm going to take it off so I don't get anything on it.” I watched her drop it in her apron pocket and she never wore it again.

After dinner, my dad and Edgel got into a terrible fight out behind the shed. My dad grabbed a sun-dried two-by-four and busted Edgel over the head and shoulders. Given my dad's penchant for trouble, I found it a little unusual that he would get upset with Edgel for stealing the widow Radebaugh's necklace, but there was no predicting the irrational behavior of Nick Hickam.

Late that summer, Edgel got drunk at the Antler Room Bar in McArthur and ran the Rocket 88 into a ditch off of London-Athens Road. Edgel was arrested for drunken driving and the car was impounded. When Sheriff McCollough searched it, he pulled out the back seat and found matches, a can of jellied fire starter, two pry bars, and a pair of pink sapphire earrings, which Mrs. Radebaugh identified as the ones stolen from her house. Edgel went to prison and the burglaries and arsons stopped.

A buzz-cut guard with a square jaw and lazy eye came out from behind the nearest barred door and said, “Hickam.” Although we knew the drill, we listened intently as he explained the rules of the visitation room before leading us through the door, which was electronically opened by a guard seated in a nearby room with a two-way mirror. The visitation room was pale blue and the size of a high school basketball court. Square tables were lined up in neat rows across the concrete floor. On a catwalk ringing the room, humorless, armed guards marched their paces, eyes darting for the first signs of trouble.

A haze of cigarette smoke hung over the room. No one smiled, inmates and their wives argued in hushed tones, and at least once every visit my mother remarked, “It smells so angry in here.”

Edgel was already seated at a table in the middle of the room. He was only five-foot-five and a hundred thirty-five pounds, and the prison-issue clothes he wore—a denim shirt and blue slacks— were always too baggy and made him appear comically small. As we approached, Edgel glanced up but gave no sign of recognition as he rolled the tip of a cigarette in the aluminum ashtray, sharpening the point of the burning ember.

Sometimes, I wondered why we bothered to visit with Edgel. One visit was the same as the next. As we took our chairs and crowded in around the table, Edgel just sat there, playing with his cigarette and picking at his cuticles, head down, hands in plain view as required, and saying little.

“Are they treating you right, sweetheart?” my mom asked.

“It's prison, Mama. They don't treat nobody right.”

“Them guards give you a hard way to go?” my dad asked.

He shrugged. “I don't give 'em any reason to bother me. You mind your own business and toe the line, they leave you alone. Besides, it ain't the guards you got to be watching out for.”

“What happened to your eye?” Mom asked, nodding toward the pad of faded purple that stretched beneath Edgel's right eye.

“Nothin'. Bumped it on my bunk is all.”

It was another lie, but my mother knew better than to press the issue. At least twice before, she and dad had pressed Edgel for answers to questions that he didn't want to answer. Each time he simply stood up and said, “I'll see you all in a couple of weeks,” and went back to his cell. Frankly, I don't think Edgel cared if we visited or not. But that was Edgel. He didn't care much about anything. Of Edgel, my dad liked to say, “He's a thief and he's crazy, and that's a bad combination.” Even by the questionable standards of the Hickams, there was just something wrong with the way Edgel was wired. Frankly, the more I heard my dad talk and the more I witnessed Edgel's morose, sullen moods, the more I believed that prison might be the ideal place for him.

From the time I could remember, Edgel was always stealing— from Mom, Dad, teachers, anyone. He didn't care if he got caught. He stole my dad's wallet one time and went out for the weekend. By the time he came dragging in Sunday night, my dad had had about forty-eight hours to build up a good froth and he took to beating Edgel with a belt. He folded the leather strap in half, wrapping the ends around his hand, and he hit him everywhere—on the arms, back, legs, ass, neck. The old man beat him until he was exhausted— red-faced, bending at the waist, and sucking for air. Edgel had welts swelling up everywhere and thin lines of blood seeping through his T-shirt in the back, but he never showed any sign that it hurt. I swear he didn't feel pain like a normal human being. He had these soft, heavy lips that always seemed pinched up in a perpetual smirk. The more my dad saw that he wasn't hurting Edgel and that he seemed to be grinning, the madder the old man got and the harder he swung, but Edgel just took it.

When Dad stopped to catch his breath, Edgel pulled the old man's empty wallet from his hip pocket and dropped it on the living room floor, then went to his room while my dad hunched in the middle of the living room, hands on his knees, struggling for a breath of air. My mom walked in from the kitchen and asked, “Was it necessary to beat him like that?”

Between wheezy breaths my dad said, “He's . . . a thievin' . . . son of a bitch.”

“Yes, he is,” my mother said in a calm voice. “And just who, Nick Hickam, do you s'pose he larnt that from?”

The old man spun on his heel and hit my mother full in the jaw. The blow was so hard that she left her feet, landing hard on her shoulders just before her head snapped back and thudded against the floor. It took her several minutes to roll over and get on all fours. When she was finally able to stand, she had tears streaming down her cheeks and a thin line of blood extending from the corner of her mouth. “You're quite the man, aren't you, Nick?” she asked.

Edgel stopped talking and stared down at his shoes while a prison guard made a slow pass by our table. When the guard cleared earshot, Edgel took a draw on his cigarette and looked at me. “You playin' football this year?”

“For sure. It's my senior year. I think I've got a good chance to be named the defensive captain.”

“That's good. Keep busy and stay out of here. This is no place to be.”

“I know.”

“Maybe if you keep working hard, you'll get yourself a college scholarship.”

I smiled and looked at my dad and Virgil. “The coach says I might if I keep working hard. I'm hopin'.”

“Maybe I'll get to see you play.” Edgel pinched his cigarette between his lips, squinting as smoke rolled into his eyes, reached into his breast pocket and produced a letter that he handed to my mother. “It's from my attorney. I go before the parole board in October. He said because I haven't had any recent infractions in prison, and because the place is overcrowded, I've got a good chance to get out on parole.”

“Oh, Edgel, that would be wonderful,” my mother said, tears starting to roll down both cheeks. She read the letter for a moment and said, as though Edgel had just been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, “It says here that you've been a model prisoner.”

“Yeah, ain't that somethin' to be proud of? I'll be sure to put that on my next job application.”

“This is such wonderful news.”

Virgil said, “Maybe when you get out, I'll talk to Mr. Barker, who owns the carnival. His son, Bart—me and him's real tight—and I'll bet I can get you a job with the carnival.”

Edgel looked at him and shrugged. “We'll see, Virg.”

I could have told Virgil right then and there that Edgel Hickam was never going to work as a carnie, but I kept my mouth shut.

“When in October does the parole board meet?” my dad asked.

Edgel shrugged. “I don't know. All the letter says is October.”

That was four months away and ample time for a Hickam male to get in plenty of trouble. “Oh Edgel, please promise me you won't get any infractions between now and then,” my mom said.

“Yeah, okay, Mom. I'll try not to run into any more bunk beds.”

Chapter Three

P

olio Baughman was my best friend, though it was a position he held by default.

I met Polio when we were both six years old and waiting for the bus to take us to school for the first day of first grade. The Baughmans had just moved to a small one-story shanty on Red Dog Road and I was surprised to see this new kid standing at the bus stop. He was a skinny, malnourished little guy who smelled like a musty basement. He had a crop of unruly blond hair, untied shoes, and a perpetual line of snot running from his nose to his mouth. His real name was Kirby, but as a young boy he was so thin and bony that the kids gave him the nickname of Polio, which, like so many unfortunate nicknames, stuck. By junior high, even the teachers called him Polio.

Polio and I were the only two doggers in the first-grade class at Zaleski Elementary School. Thus, we rode the bus together, sat beside each other in the slow reading group and, since the other kids had been forewarned to keep their distance from us doggers, pretended to be army commandos together during recess. Red Dog Road was segregated from the rest of Vinton County by prejudice, barren hills, and miles of bad country lanes. Consequently, Polio was my only friend. He spent countless hours at my house, coughing, swiping his snotty nose with his forearm, and looking for something to cram into his pocket.

Polio didn't have another friend in the world, yet he would steal from me at every opportunity. If there were a few pennies on my dresser when he got to the house, they would be gone when he left. Over the years I trudged over to Polio's house to retrieve money, toys, the pocketknife my grandfather Joachim had given me, and three arrowheads that I had found on the ridge behind our house. Twice, I had to grind his face in the dirt and threaten him with a beating if he didn't return stolen toys, but mostly he just gave them up.

“Why do you steal like that?” I asked him once.

“'Cause you got stuff and I don't,” he responded.

“But that doesn't make it right, Polio. You don't steal, especially from your friends. My brother Edgel's like that, always stealin', and he's in prison now.”

Polio just shrugged.

Like most doggers, Polio was a survivor. He was the middle one of five kids, and even by the standards of Red Dog Road, they were poor. They had running water, but no indoor toilets. Polio did his business in a fetid outhouse that was the only thing on Red Dog Road that smelled worse than the dump, or he simply unhitched his pants and pissed in the yard. His father was a silent, grease-stained man who had chewing tobacco stains caked to the corners of his mouth and a growth on the top of his forehead the size of a lemon. He worked in the junkyard outside of Zaleski. Every day, Polio's mother wore the same faded blue, sleeveless housecoat that revealed a mass of gray armpit hair.

I understood this and that is why I tolerated Polio's thievery. He was the only kid my age within miles and the only one whose parents didn't mind having a Hickam in their yard. My Grandpa Joachim had an old billy goat on his farm that would butt you the second you turned your back on him. You had to be careful and you couldn't take your eye off him. Dealing with Polio was no different from dealing with that old billy goat. If I was careless enough to leave something where Polio could get his hands on it, shame on me, because I knew he would steal it. It's just what he did.

Mr. Monihan sent word home with my mother that the hillside cleanup had to be a two-person job. I protested this, having no desire to share my ten-cents-a-tire commission. “Jimmy Lee, have you seen how many tires have been dumped over that hillside?” she asked.

“No, ma'am.”

“Well, there's a slew of 'em, and they're truck tires, which are a lot bigger than car tires. You'll be glad for the help when you see 'em all.”

“Who does he have to help me?”

“He said for you to find someone.”

Polio Baughman was the obvious choice. Like me, Polio was hungry for money and this was an opportunity to make more than he had ever seen—or stolen—in his life. I walked over to his house and asked him if he wanted to help me remove the tires. “What's it pay?” he asked.

“A dime a tire.”

“That ain't much.”

I took a breath and rolled my eyes. “It's more than you're making now, isn't it? I don't see people lining up on Red Dog Road to offer you work, Polio.”

“Okay, what time?”

“Be at my house no later than five forty-five.”

When we reported to work with my mother at 6
AM
on the Wednesday after our visit to see Edgel, I realized how right Mr. Monihan had been. The truck stop garage backed up to the crest of a hill. For two decades or thereabouts, mechanics stood inside the garage and rolled tires out the bay door and across a small patch of asphalt, where they would bounce once on the lip of the hill before disappearing over the hillside, bowling over saplings and landing somewhere between the asphalt and the nameless ditch four hundred feet below.