Some Go Home

by Odie Lindsey

  He held his hand out and scowled until she turned over the pack of smokes, which he mashed up and jammed in his pocket.

  “And the lighter?” he asked.

  She grunted and handed it over.

  “And the backup?”

  “What?”

  He stared at her until she opened the drawer of the bedside table, reached in, and found her hidden cigarette and matches.

  “Happy?” she asked, slapping them into Derby’s palm.

  “Thrilled.”

  “And?”

  “And . . . I was just gonna tell you ’bye, and I love you. So ’bye. I love you.”

  “Wait. What? Where are you goin’ on a Saturday, Derb?”

  “No place, really. Just gonna putter outside here. Me and JP, knockin’ out a few chores. Isn’t my favorite type of Saturday, but someone has to keep the place up, you know? Plus, I wanna stay close to home, in case you need me.”

  “Hon? Why didn’t you ask me to help out? I am capable of help, you know? And I mean, really, Derb? On a weekend?”

  “I know you’re capable, Colleen. But at this stage, you need to take it real easy. Just ’cause you want to help doesn’t mean you need—”

  “You have got to stop tellin’ me what I need, man. Plus, it’s my house. And my Saturday, baby. At least drive me into town, so I can see another face.”

  She turned away, to look at the Tupelo telecast. Reporting live from Maui were Ray and Dottie, a couple from nearby Pontotoc. They’d won the Hawaiian Punch Dog Days of Summer Getaway prize: four nights, five days, all expenses paid, alongside a goofy, on-camera slot to send word about island geography, boat drinks, foreignness . . .

  Colleen stared at the surfside scene. “Don’t you ever want to be somewhere different, Derb? Be somebody else?”

  “You mean, like, big time somewhere else? Move away?”

  Colleen nodded.

  “Did I used to want to run? Hell yes. Most of my life. But now I want to prove this place wrong. Or prove me right. Shit, I don’t know.” He stared at her, and smiled, then sat down on the bed. Put one hand around her shoulders and placed the other gently on her stomach. “Besides. Pitchlynn has its fine points.”

  Colleen scowled.

  “Take this one time,” he continued. “I was standin’ in front of City Hall, when this goddess flowed past me in a red ragtop Corvette.”

  “Christ, Derby. Just get out of here, okay? I don’t wanna hear this story again.”

  His grin grew even wider. “This was four or five years ago. The whole town had gathered on the square to see the new Strawberry Maiden. And me? At first, I cursed hell for gettin’ caught in that parade. I mean, I had things to do, you know?”

  “Sure you did,” she said. “So important.”

  “Hush.” He traced a fingertip over the inside of her thigh. “It was like the whole world filled up with light. You floated by in that sparkled dress and sash, seated on the trunk of that ’vette. You were like a painting. A masterpiece.” He moved his boots onto the bed, and she shifted down onto the mattress. “You were the sun,” he whispered. “I couldn’t even look at you.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Now, that, babe, was the third time I’d ever seen you.” He kissed her neck. “And . . .”

  She ran a finger over his earlobe. “And what?”

  “And though I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen you since, you still knock the breath outta me. So see? You’re the reason this town matters. You’re the joy of it, the history, the—”

  “Now, you hush,” she said.

  Derby kicked off his boots and scooted down onto the mattress, kissing her breasts and basketball tummy. Colleen leaned back into her pillow, her hands kneading his dark, shower-damp hair, her body undulating and letting him give, accepting kisses as his lips and unshaven chin scribbled over her, the bedsprings weeping in chorus.

  Somehow, despite themselves and her condition, her ever-intensified scrutiny of her body, of its betrayal and the post-birth betrayals she knew were to follow, things grew gauzy and trancelike. She melted into the flow and lost everything: where they were, how she got here, and how she would never, ever leave. In other words, she forgot herself—until he giggled.

  “What is it?” she asked, propping back up onto her elbows.

  “Shhhhh,” he whispered, his breath slight over her thigh.

  “Seriously. What?”

  “It’s nothin’.”

  She looked away from him, and to the white mini-blinds. The plastic slats had been snapped by their old cat, Diva, who’d cracked the blinds while trying to jump out the window. When that cat had finally escaped, it never came home. (Colleen missed having a pet. Derby was the only man she’d ever met who refused to have dogs. He wouldn’t even pet a puppy. A puppy, for chrissakes.) She looked over to Ray and Dottie: on television, in Hawaii, the plastic leis ringing their necks.

  “Go on to work now, giggles,” she said.

  “I said forget it.” He kissed her again.

  “Get on to your chores.”

  “Colleen? It’s—”

  She palmed his shoulders and pushed him off.

  “Fine,” he huffed. He sat back up on the edge of the bed and grabbed for his ropers. He stood up, then leaned over and kissed her forehead. “I’ll miss you, grumpy. Don’t say I didn’t try to show affection. I was all set to cancel with JP, and—”

  She rolled over to stare at the opposite wall.

  He shook his head as he walked out of the room, then called out, “I really will miss you. The nice you anyway!”

  She stared at the rumpled poly bedspread, and at the same old fitted sheets. The latter were chewed to bits by the washing machine agitator; small holes now speckled the fabric, as if the cotton had been flecked by acid. She couldn’t even conceive of a time when new sheets or new mini-blinds would hit the top of the need list. There were just too many Band-Aid fixes in front.

  On television, Ray and Dottie yammered on about Hawaii. Up Next, Breaking News about the Plane Man Lost in the Pines.

  Colleen lurched up, then went to look in the mirror on the back of the bedroom door. She examined her reflection, breasts to thighs, and to the new stripe of rose-tinted skin that stretched south from her now-outie navel, before figuring out what Derby had found so funny down there.

  “Oh,” she said, her fingers combing the shock of silver hair. She was three months shy of twenty-seven.

  She slid into a jersey maternity skirt and stomped outside, hiding in the carport until Derby’s truck rounded the bend of the dirt drive. She snuck over to the old barbecue grill, reached under and turned on the propane, and felt around for the hidden pack of Mistys. Lifting the lid of the grill while talking to herself, she held back the translation of her words into tears. The ignitor clicked and clicked when she turned on the knob, its rhythm like yet another metronome of life, or like the stopwatch timer on an action movie bomb. Click click click click . . .

  Colleen had barely registered the smell of propane when, click click click . . . Whoomp!

  She leapt back from the fireball, and tumbled into the grass. “Jesus!” Her eyes darted to her stomach, legs, then to her forearms and the singed patch of hair, wrist-to-elbow. She put a hand to the stove-hot skin of her cheek.

  From the base of the grill, the propane hose hissed from a split. Colleen steadied herself, then sprinted over and shut the tank off.

  Nothing was secure. It was all under fire. She leaned against the side of the little house, and hugged her stomach, and wept.

  ***

  DERBY AND JP lugged along the dirt pathway in the sun-faded jade F100. Derb yanked the column shifter into third, and the truck chassis shuddered wildly.

  “Someday, somebody’ll pay me enough to put a new clutch in,” he joked.

  “You get paid plenty,” JP replied.

  They drove over the winding dirt trail, the old truck’s engine wheezing like a turbine. Hot air gusted through the triangle side windo
ws and floor vents. Trunks of mature pines whisked by, alongside orphaned hardwood, berry thickets, scrub. Derby spent much of the ride twisting the factory radio dial in an attempt to tune in the Country Gold station out of Tupelo.

  This was not work. It was Saturday. Lately, as often than not, weekends meant making the switch from JP’s house to Derby’s, where the two knocked out chores with beers in hand, before cruising to the catfish pond at the interior of Derby and Colleen’s land. There, they determined to pretty much drink more beer, to talk about the work they’d completed on Wallis House, or the workload ahead.

  The green and placid pond was at the dead end of the trail. The tree line and sky were mirrored on its surface, and sparse grass grew on the embankments. Beneath the shade of frilled pines were a couple of old metal rockers, a thronelike chair carved of tree trunk, and a rotting bench. They got out of the truck and walked to a wooden bin near the water. JP lifted its top and removed the metal lid of a trash can housed inside. Each man then grabbed one of the large scoops from the reservoir of Sportsman’s Choice catfish feed, and slung the pellets in a wide arc over the pond. The feed pocked the water like raindrops.

  Within seconds, hundreds of charcoal-gray catfish swarmed the surface, scuttling over each other, their white bellies oily in the sunlight as they gasped for feed. The frenzy made the water look like it was boiling. As a second sling of pellets hit, the fish formed a meta-organism of mouth and fin and whisker. Near the banks a few even breached, their bodies wriggling in the mud, oblong mouths agape, until a minute later, as abruptly as they had appeared, the last of the catfish swam back down to the mud bed.

  JP, pleased by the ritual but growing a bit used to it, too, splashed his face with the melting ice water in the cooler. The two then sat and downed their beers, and watched the sun fall against the pond, the atmosphere color. Now and again, a fish cracked the glassy surface. When the silence felt too extended, Derby would mutter on about the ratio of brim fingerling to catfish at stocking, and at what stages each should be introduced to ensure that no species fed off of the other, et cetera, whatever, no matter.

  The more they drank, the more the younger man analyzed the mechanics of his anxiety, the gears being his father, the trial, Susan George, Wallis House . . . and the threat that each now posed to his marriage, and his children. With the boil-down of sun, Derby burned to confess his confusion as to why he sometimes even acted despite himself. He wanted to understand how he could sprint from any mention of Hare, yet be brought to heel by the very folks who’d turned the man upside down. How had he gone to work at a place so connected to his pain?

  Complicity, it seemed, was on Derby like a bruise, in him like a gene. So when JP recycled their talk back to the house rehab process, he interrupted.

  “It not personal, this Wallis House stuff,” he said. “Rather, it’s real personal for the town, but nobody’s judging you personally.”

  JP shrugged, and turned to stare at the lake.

  Derby continued, “Place has just meant so much, for so long. Too long for you to occupy it without—”

  “See, Derb? You and I are on the same page here. None of this has anything to do with me. I repeat, it has nothing to do with me. Besides, is that pig all they’ve got?”

  Derby sipped his beer. “No. There’s more.”

  He could picture the other ones, twisting on ropes. The ones Hare had hung behind the Platz wall. I was just a little kid, Derby thought. I couldn’t help but go back there and look. At the time, the terror had served as both reprisal and warning. He understood now that it was also meant to be a reminder.

  He’d never told Colleen about the Platz, the little rally space behind his childhood home, or the militia of men Hare had inspired to build it. Derb was too afraid that if he did talk about it she’d leave him, as had the rest: his mother and sister, friends and girlfriends. The whole town, sort of. Though everybody in Pitchlynn knew the boy had nothing to do with Hare’s actions, he’d been stained by association, everywhere he went.

  “There’s so much more,” Derby continued.

  JP looked at him. “Then they’ll have to own every bit of it.”

  Derby listened to the grind of the crickets and small frogs. He downed his beer, crushed the can, then flung it into the pickup bed. Reached over to fetch another from the cooler, his fingers carving slow channels in the ice water. There was only one left. He held it out to JP.

  “Thanks, no. I’d better get home.” JP stood up and stretched. “Let that poor babysitter have her Saturday night, you know?”

  The truck’s headlights soon spotlit the darkened trail back, and its bench seat squeaked with every bump. Derby managed to dial in that crackled Country Gold station, though much of the broadcast was devoted to news of the downed plane and its pilot.

  Minutes later, they pulled into the carport-slash-workshop, parking the old Ford amid the legion of power and lawn tools, hardware and industrial shelving.

  JP said to tell Colleen hello, and to thank her for sharing the weekend. “By the way, are you guys having a baby shower?”

  “We haven’t even found time to talk about it. At this point, I doubt there is time.”

  “So that means yes. You are.” JP grinned. “Or, rather, I’m planning one for you.”

  “Naw, that’s okay, boss. It means that we—”

  “We’ll have it at my place. You and Colleen come up with a date, and let me know who to invite. I’ll tackle the logistics, the invitations, the everything else. It’ll be eleventh hour, obviously—likely best to do it next weekend!—but we’ll set up in the back gardens and go to town.”

  “Really, JP, it’s not—”

  “Like I said, just give me a date, fast, and tell me who to invite.”

  Derby smiled, and nodded in appreciation. JP got in his car and drove back to town. Though he wasn’t sleepy, he was eager to curl up on the pull-out couch in his daughter’s room. To lie awake and listen close, as if memorizing her every breath.

  COLLEEN WAS startled when Derby came through the kitchen door. She scooted to the sink, and washed the teaspoon of d-Con rat poison down the drain.

  “Hey,” she said, though she didn’t turn to face him. She’d been so far gone that she hadn’t heard the truck pull into the carport, or the men talking outside. So far gone, contemplating the power it took to truly change someone: to steer them off track, to make them feel that no matter how much they believed in security, a stranger could show up and take it away.

  It was the revelation that even she could take it all from someone, another woman, no less, halfway around the planet, which had taught Colleen not just that life could be snatched from her, but that, in fact, it would. That in a sense, it had.

  Coming home to Mississippi, demobbed from active duty, she had understood that nothing—no family, no church, no job, house, or health insurance—could protect you, no matter what you gave up. No matter how hard you believed things were safe. At the end of the day, the only armor against loss were the acute reminders of your own fragility. You could never forget how to die.

  She’d been so far gone, staring at a gob of gleaming turquoise putty and strychnine crystals, held just over the large bowl of Hormel Chili, No Beans. She watched it wash down the drain when Derby walked up behind her.

  He kissed her neck, then eyeballed the poison tube on the counter. “We got a mouse or somethin’, babe?”

  “Somethin’,” Colleen replied, scrubbing her hands in the scalding water.

  8

  The Plane Man hung upside down in the fuselage of the crashed Cessna, in the Holly Springs National Forest, in the heat.

  “My god, legs, please go numb,” he muttered. “My god.”

  His hands were lacerated, trembling, as he tore off another strip of aeronautical chart. He wadded it between thumb and forefinger and dabbed it into his mouth. His cracked lips pooched as he suckled the pill-ball, the moisture of the gluey paper coating his tongue.

  The blood flow had shoved
into his head for three sunsets. He’d exhausted the first day trying to pull himself upright, to relieve the pressure in his skull. The effort had required the use of thighs and abdomen in partnership with a shattered femur. The pain of it had thrust him into a limbo of white light.

  It was curious now that the three-day migraine had gone away, had ebbed as if bored, as if it were time to step aside for heatstroke. He knew that sepsis was near. He’d been sucking tear-sized drops from the strips of wet aviation map: pea-green-, mustard-, and purple-colored ink; the yellow NAVAID box inside the hatched violet dial marked the Tupelo Regional Airport, TUP.

  He baked in the Cessna, his tongue thrush-like with paste. His khaki pants were a tie-dye of blood and urine and sweat, and his limbs were dabbled by bruises and egg-sized clots. Again, he reached up to adjust his right leg, to try and reckon it against the fracture. His screams were fanatical.

  He’d spilled his water bottle onto the map that first night. Having spent hours crying out for help, he’d now been silent for what felt like weeks. Greedy for survival, his body was hyperaware. His ears keyed to every decibel of sound. With the slightest twitter of leaf his lungs seized up and his chest contracted, in an effort to widen the gap between shirt neck and body, to thereby harbor a wisp of airflow.

  The map no longer mattered. Despite the intention of the pilot’s homecoming, or the years of directed energy and expense—both in service to, and in spite of, his family—the heat now dictated everything.

  9

  After she appeared I grew obsessed with coming home. JP and I even traveled down to Mississippi: once a month, sometimes twice. As often as I could convince him. But you knew this Susan George. You know everything in Pitchlynn, though you never dropped by to acknowledge us. No. For years now you have kept me at distance. Like a fact keeps a lie.

  Southwest to Jackson, United to Memphis: I flew home to reinvest in the state, to amend. (It is such a beautiful space, Mississippi. We hide how gorgeous it is.) Over road over highway through Hill Country and Delta, Black Belt and Pine, the car over asphalt, the finger traces a map. I came home to confront. To resubject. To remove to . . .