In the Wild Light

by Jeff Zentner

  “Thanks again for the Blizzard,” I say.

  Delaney opens her door. “Thanks for the ride. Bye, gympie ass.”

  “You can’t just impose a new nickname on me. That’s not a thing. I reject it.”

  “Watch me.” She starts to step down.

  “Hey, Red?”

  “What?” Delaney stops getting out and sits back in her seat.

  “I always knew.”

  “What?”

  “You’d do something important.”

  She looks happy. “Yeah?”

  “You deserve all this. Your life is going to change so much.”

  “Not the part about us being friends.”

  “I’m not worried about that. But.” I didn’t know where I was going with what I was saying. It just felt like a thing that needed to be said.

  “I mean,” she says, “it’ll be easier to stay in touch if we’re at the same school.”

  I reach over and yank the bill of her Dairy Queen hat down over her eyes. “Go babysit.”

  She pulls off her hat and smooths the wisps of her hair. Once more she makes to leave.

  “Red?”

  Again she pulls herself back into my truck.

  I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time letting her go tonight. “How’d you know that mold would be in that cave?”

  “You’ve never asked that before.”

  “Been curious for a long time.”

  “How’d I know?” She looks at me and then into the chirping, humming half-light, then back at me. “Because for every way the world tries to kill us, it gives us a way to survive. You just gotta find it.”

  I take the long way home to try to slow the orbit of my thoughts. It’s almost full dark by the time I pull up our driveway, the gravel popping under my tires.

  Most everyone calls Papaw “Pep”—short for Phillip Earl Pruitt. He’s taking in the falling light on the porch, in one of the ramshackle hundred-year-old rocking chairs he restored. His wheeled oxygen tank is at his side. Our redbone, Punkin, sits by him.

  Papaw gets lonely. Our house is on a hill overlooking the road, woods all around. He sits out on our front porch hoping someone driving by will stop in to shoot the breeze for a while. It happens rarely now, for a few reasons.

  His politics didn’t always used to be much of an obstacle to friendships. He and his fishing buddies could sit for hours at McDonald’s, nursing cups of coffee, bullshitting, and having mostly good-natured political arguments that ended with everyone saying, But I’m just an old hillbilly. What the hell do I know, anyhow?

  Things took a nasty turn, though, when Lamont Gardner, a black pastor and lawyer from Nashville, became governor of Tennessee. Papaw’s buddies’ hatred of Governor Gardner went beyond amiable differences into an uglier place. The racist cartoons of Governor Gardner his buddies emailed around didn’t sit well with Papaw, and he wasn’t afraid to say it.

  Andre Blount was the final straw. He was governor after Governor Gardner. He was from New York and got rich after moving to Nashville and starting a private prison company with money his dad had given him after a string of business failures. He promised to bring high-paying manufacturing jobs back to East Tennessee. But mostly he was concerned about being on TV and crudely insulting rivals on Twitter. Papaw considered him a snake oil salesman, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who hadn’t worked an honest day in his life, full of hot air, braggadocio, vain promises, and venom for everyone different from him. He saw the betrayal of all he knew to be right. That didn’t sit well at all with him. And Papaw spoke his mind.

  One by one, his friends stopped coming around.

  He was popular at church—always with a story or joke ready. With his huge frame and bushy white beard, he was perfect to play Santa Claus at the annual Christmas potluck, a role he performed with gusto, telling kids he was going to bring them a hickory switch or a lump of coal instead of a “video-game doodad.” So for a while he still had the church crowd on his side.

  But that didn’t last either. He’d always taken a live-and-let-live and God-made-us-all attitude toward gay people, not much different from his general policy of nonjudgment and kindness toward others. This put him at odds with his fellow churchgoers, but not irreconcilably so.

  Then his sister Betsy’s grandson, Blake—his grandnephew—died in a car accident in Nashville. Aunt Betsy later learned from one of Blake’s friends that Blake was gay. And that changed everything for Papaw. Not three weeks after Papaw found out, the preacher started going off on how homosexuality is destroying America and how gay people are to blame for school shootings and terrorist attacks, because America’s acceptance of them has called God’s wrath down upon us.

  I was sitting next to him. I could feel his sides pumping like a bellows as he breathed harder and harder. His face reddened. The anger radiated from him, a perilous warmth a few inches from his skin. If he could have jumped up, he would have. Instead, he pulled himself laboriously to his feet, knees cracking, easing up as fast as a back stiffened from a life of hard work would allow. And he walked out. Mamaw and I followed.

  Papaw didn’t hardly speak on the drive home. Finally said, “I been going to Bible study my whole life. Jesus talked about casting the first stone, not about who people loved.” He was silent for a few minutes before he shook his head and murmured, “Blake never hurt nobody. Didn’t do nothing but make this world a better place.” We’ve never been back. People from church don’t bring by casseroles when you leave like that.

  Still, he sits and waits for someone to talk to.

  I get out of my truck, and Papaw hails me with a lazy wave. The sort resulting from a constant state of exhaustion. Punkin bays in excitement and tries to lunge off the porch. Papaw catches him with his free hand.

  “Lemme square away the mower,” I call up to him. Lawn care equipment left out tends to disappear and get sold for pills where we live.

  “I ain’t going nowhere. Punkin, shush.” The vocal exertion sends him into a red-faced coughing fit.

  I lock up the mower in the shed and pass the chain-saw sculpture of a black bear Papaw carved out of a tree stump. Every time I pass it, I can’t help but think about how his disease has sawn away at him, lessened him, transformed him. I ascend the porch steps to where he sits.

  Papaw gives me a look.

  “What?”

  “You forget something?”

  “Did I?”

  “Where’s my Tess at? No Longmire tonight?” Tess is short for Tesla, which is what he started calling Delaney after she told him that Nikola Tesla was her favorite scientist. Before that, he called her Einstein.

  “Tending her half brothers.”

  “Y’all are like to have ruint my Saturday night.”

  “I’ll watch with you.” I sit in one of the rockers. Its weathered wood is worn so smooth it feels like touching someone’s arm. I lean over to scratch Punkin.

  Papaw reaches over with a rough hand, his nail beds blue from oxygen deprivation, and grabs my upper arm. “Get over here, Mickey Mouse.” He pulls me out of the chair to him. He was always affectionate, but he never misses a chance anymore to hug me. Delaney studied up on emphysema, said it wasn’t a terminal diagnosis. Papaw’s doctor said the same. Papaw doesn’t act so sure.

  His former strength is faded, but he still finds enough to give me a powerful embrace, kissing the top of my head. He smells medicinal, like salves rubbed on aching muscles, with the sharp menthol whine of Vicks VapoRub to open constricted breathing passages. Beneath it is the dense aroma of pine oil and the vague spice of unsmoked tobacco, even though he hasn’t been able to work with wood for some time and hasn’t smoked in years. His plastic oxygen tube is artificial and cold against my cheek. I hear his wheezing, the deep rattle in his lungs.

  “How was mowing?” he asks.

&
nbsp; I sit down and push my ball cap back on my head. “Hot. But fine. Mamaw working?”

  “Yep.”

  Mamaw manages the Little Caesars. She usually works Saturday nights to allow as many as possible of her mostly teenage staff to be young and free.

  We sit quietly for a while. Our chairs creak and chirp as we rock gently. There’s the periodic puff of Papaw’s oxygen tank, the idling diesel-engine rumble of his breathing, and Punkin’s own snuffly breathing as he dozes at Papaw’s feet.

  I’ve spent much of my life feeling unsafe, unsteady, and insecure. Sitting on Papaw’s porch with him was always my fortress against the world.

  Three deer step out of the woods onto our lawn, nibbling at the ground. We keep stone-still and watch until they move on.

  “Speaking of Delaney,” I say finally, my voice hushed as if the deer were still there. “She told me something interesting today.”

  “Girl’s a damn encyclopedia.” Whenever Delaney comes over to watch Longmire with him—one of their traditions—Papaw says, Tess! Tell me something I don’t know! And she always does.

  “This was different. She got into this fancy prep school up north with this millionaire gonna pay her way.”

  Papaw takes in the news and chuckles softly. “Tell you what. That girl wasn’t long for this town. Always knew.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She gonna go? She best.”

  “Looks like.” I rock for a couple of seconds, then say, “But that ain’t the funniest part.”

  “What is?”

  I squirm. I’m losing my nerve to tell him.

  “Go on,” he presses.

  I sigh, raise my hands, and drop them in my lap. “Apparently she told this millionaire lady that she’d only accept if I got a scholarship too.” I laugh to myself.

  Papaw doesn’t laugh. He leans toward me and shakes his head like he’s trying to get water out of his ears. “Do what, now?” he asks softly.

  “And the lady and the school both said yes.”

  Papaw squints. “The two of you have a scholarship offer to—”

  “Middle-something. Middleton? Middleford Academy? Can’t remember. It’s in Connecticut.”

  Papaw sits slowly back, with a mixed expression of wonder and surprise. He whistles softly.

  “It’s ridiculous, right? I don’t belong—”

  Papaw raises his hand to halt me, his brow furrowed. “Just…”

  “It’s nuts,” I murmur.

  “Full scholarship?” He sounds optimistically skeptical.

  “Sounded like.”

  “Good school?”

  “Apparently one of the best in America. That’s why I’m saying—”

  “Hush, now.” He says it firmly but not unkindly, like he’s trying to tally something and I’m making him lose count.

  After a safe amount of time, I say, “Obviously, I’m not gonna—”

  “This ain’t the sort of opportunity that comes along ever’ day.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Sure ain’t the kind me and your mamaw could give you. Much as we’d’ve liked.”

  “Never bothered me.”

  “Well? What do you think about all this?”

  I draw a deep breath. “Don’t know. I heard about it maybe two hours ago.”

  A long pause. “Now, mind you, I ain’t got all the information. But I think you might oughtta do it.” His eyes are intense. Like how Moses would look after coming down from the mountain, having spoken with God. He nods to himself. “I think you might ought to,” he says softly, as if the opportunity is something he’s afraid to startle, like the deer.

  I thought he’d laugh with me. Who knows what goes on in Tess’s head? he was supposed to say. Tell her that that’s mighty kind of her but you’re needed at home. He’d be the stalwart, sane balance to the erratic, staccato electricity of Delaney’s thinking, which causes her to do something as bewildering as what she did. Panic rises into my chest, into the back of my throat.

  “I’m happy here,” I say unsteadily.

  “I kindly believe you are. But ever’ so often, God opens a door.”

  “I can’t go to a school like that.”

  “Seems they beg to differ.”

  “No, I mean I’m not like the kids who go there.”

  “Now you listen. You’re pret’ near one of the smartest young men I ever knew.”

  “Everyone’s papaw thinks that about them.”

  Papaw coughs for a while and then continues. “You get good marks. Way you use words? Remember that essay you wrote for your English class about your mamaw? Made her cry. You started your own lawn business. Your best friend is the damn town genius. You think she’d run with you if you wasn’t bright?”

  “I don’t know how she thinks.”

  Papaw’s getting short of breath and wheezing. All this impassioned talk. He hacks and pauses to let a coughing fit subside. “That Tess is something special,” Papaw says, chewing on one of the homemade cinnamon toothpicks he’s started carrying around to help him quit smoking. He pulls it from his mouth and points at me with it. “I ever tell you she reminds me of your mama?” He returns it to his mouth.

  “How?”

  “Always asking questions. Trying to figure out how the world works.”

  “Mama didn’t seem like that to me.”

  “By then, the dope stole a lot of her. When she was a little girl, though? Shoot. Never without a book.”

  “Where’d they go?”

  Papaw shakes his head and looks down. “She sold them.” He rubs at a spot on the porch with his foot, like he’s buffing out a burr. “Ever’ last one. They wasn’t fancy books, and they wasn’t in great shape from being read so much. I don’t guess they fetched much.”

  “I wish I could have known her before.”

  “Me too,” he murmurs. He gazes off, his eyes clouding and forlorn. He coughs. “You got your mama’s quick mind. It’s why you and Tess are Butch and Sundance.”

  It breaks my heart how extraordinary he thinks I am. It’s worse than being ordinary. I flash to a vision of myself wearing my soiled, sweat-sodden lawn-mowing T-shirt and grass-stained jeans and boots, standing in a huge library. All around me are kids my age, dressed like celebrities, polished and gleaming. Their hands are uncallused, their eyes clear, their minds unburdened with worry. They stand in small groups, chatting breezily about lavish vacations—summer homes and beach homes and ski homes—their backs to me.

  Their life stories have no chapters on mothers chasing that Cadillac high and succumbing to an overdose of heroin, fentanyl, and Valium mixed together. No fathers who ran off to work on an oil rig shortly before they were born. No slowly dying grandfathers on disability and exhausted grandmothers who work too hard at Little Caesars, to try to maintain some dignity and quality of life in aging and rebuild the nest egg that their addicted daughter decimated. No lawn mowers—used to make those grandparents’ lives easier—in the back of pickups that need to make it another year, always another year. No humiliating encounters with drug dealers in RiteQuik parking lots. None of it. They have lived free.

  Life has given me little reason to feel large, but I see no need to make myself feel smaller.

  A rising glow appears at the edge of our property, and a pair of headlights illuminate the driveway. Mamaw’s blue Chevy Malibu creeps up in a crunching of gravel.

  “How about that timing,” Papaw says. “Let’s see what she thinks.”

  I’m already heading down the steps to help Mamaw in with her things.

  “Hello, lovin’,” she says, rising slowly from the car, trying to balance a large pizza box.

  “That everything?” I take the box and hug her and kiss her cheek. Her short gray hair smells like warm pizza crust and artificial roses. She’s wearing a
black polo shirt, similar to Delaney’s, and khakis.

  “Thank you, sweetie. I believe so. Y’all in the mood for pizza?”

  I smile at her joke, like always. “Might could be.”

  She presses on her knees as she climbs the porch steps. She shuffles over to Papaw, bends down, and they give each other a peck on the lips.

  “Pull up a chair, Donna Bird,” Papaw says.

  I grab a rocker from the other side of the porch and slide it over.

  Mamaw sags into the rocker with an exhale, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. “Mmmmm, tell you what,” she says, trailing off. That’s how you know she’s really tired. When she’s only moderately tired, she finishes the sentence—Tell you what. I am tuckered out.

  I hold the pizza box in my lap. After a couple of moments, her eyes snap back open with a start as if awakening from a dream. “Y’all eat. Pizza’s getting cold.”

  She offers some to Papaw, but he waves her off. I hope he’s eaten something tonight. His once-prodigious appetite is now a ghost of itself.

  “What y’all been talking about?” Mamaw asks, like she’s not expecting much. And she shouldn’t, normally.

  Papaw nods at me. “You wanna tell her, Mickey Mouse, or I will?”

  “One of you,” Mamaw says.

  I inhale deeply. It feels gluttonous to do that around Papaw. “Delaney got a scholarship offer from a prep school up north. And she got them to give me one too.”

  Mamaw searches Papaw’s face for some hint of a joke, some glint in his eyes. He has no poker face with her, so he’d be caught quickly. He raises his eyebrows as if to say, I know, but not this time. He slaps at a mosquito.

  Mamaw turns back to me. I tell her everything I told Papaw.

  She sits quietly for a long time, Papaw’s oxygen tank punctuating the silence with whispering puffs. Finally, she asks, “So. What do you think?”

  I shrug.

  “Tell you what I told him,” Papaw says. “Said he ought to go.”

  Mamaw sits still, staring at Papaw. She nods slightly. “I’m with you. I think he ought to.”