by Odie Lindsey
“Do this every time you feed at home,” Deana said.
“As in, always?” Colleen replied.
“They’ll get better after a few days. You’ll see. Oh, and use your own milk. It’s the best thing there is for the rawness.”
“Like, from . . .” Colleen motioned to her breasts.
Deana laughed. “Where else are you gonna get it?” She reached out a cupped hand as a gesture of encouragement. Colleen stared at her, then grasped herself, lightly kneading her own breast and nipple, her jaw clenched against the pain.
“There you go,” Deana said. “Just get some out, a little bit. Rub it on there.”
Colleen did, her hands trembling.
“It’ll get better,” Deana said. “A touch, anyway. And if Derby gives you any ‘cover yourself’ man-bullshit, then shut him up or send him to me.”
Colleen nodded again. She focused on the sound of the girls playing in the other room, and on the sunlight, and the hint of Deana’s cinnamon gum.
“Dean?” she asked. “Hey, Dean?”
“Yup?”
“What say you and me get hitched? Load the kids up and get the hell out of Pitchlynn?”
Deana didn’t answer the question, though she grinned. Seconds later, they heard Derby’s truck barrel into the carport.
“I mean it,” Colleen said. “Dean?”
Deana patted Colleen’s knee. They heard the kitchen door open and Derby’s work boots pound the linoleum.
7
She gunned the remote in search of anything of value: travel, leisure, or local gossip. (And, yes, though she knew better she spent the most time taking in that Tupelo affiliate, looking for any mention of an upcoming segment about twin newborns.) All she saw was another Hare Hobbs package, recycled B-roll with at best a trace of new, local info.
Derby was outside, again, avoiding everything, again . . . save the string of endless projects on behalf of the twins. Colleen turned up the television volume, to try and deprive him of this escape.
The so-called “Hare Hobbs Massacre” had inspired a brief spray of national network segments (average two minutes one second). It was a voyeuristic American peek at the South, providing the nation both reassurance and a reminder that caste and cultural stereotype remained firmly locked in place: us, them. Next.
Far more than any export, however, the shoot-out itself (one minute twenty-two seconds real time) was bespoken for local news. Though the story had come and gone within a wink of national attention, the viral narrative and its tangents would color the state for a generation.
Colleen clicked through the coverage day after day, a de facto collage of security cam footage, news crew, and phone clips. Time and again, she watched the Glock poke Doc’s chest, while Hare’s lips engaged in what appeared to be questioning. She saw the young guard stare back at her father-in-law, saying nothing, and without the need to respond.
The guard wasn’t even scared. She recognized the adrenaline of Doc’s related, in-process trauma. His hand was clapped at the side of his neck, the blood flowing between his fingers. Yet he was collected. He was at one with the exceptionalism of the moment.
Though the Hobbs children would not attend their father’s state-paid funeral—itself a flash point of protest and media, though by relative measures a fizzle—their legal proxies acceded to the reclamation of his estate by the state, and the unceremonious decommission of his Platz. Without a single in-person meeting, they took up an offer to retain an upstart, profile-hungry Jackson attorney, pro bono, who would help them draft a statement of remorse and sorrow, editing out tones of guilt (or legal culpability); for a defined time, per the attorney’s suggestion, they even offered to meet privately with any victim of Hare’s crimes. To assist? To listen? To speak? To confess? Neither Derby nor Winnie would ever be sure of the function, though in the end it wouldn’t matter. Nobody took them up on it.
Yet before then, there, now, for Colleen, the only thing to consider were clips. They were a puzzle, a fixation. A triptych of violence, at once intimate, pop spectacle, and removed from time or place. She could consider the profundity on these terms. She was desperate to be moved by them.
So she watched, and watched, with the Bresties’ Nursing Pillow for Twins around her waist. (Deana had christened it the “Life Raft,” a name Colleen did not find affirming.) At some point, she spotted the guard’s wedding band, and wondered if his wife had been in on the attack, or if the man had abandoned her interests to his own. Or hell, Colleen thought, maybe his wife had already up and left him.
The twins nursed in unison, their bulged bodies wrapped in mock-football jumpers. The zippered sound of the hacksaw rose from the workspace set up in the backyard. Derby was cutting pipe length for a set of monkey bars. He’d first mentioned the project while they were in bed that morning, his body still scented by the shellac from the pull-wagon he’d finished the night before. Despite her appeal that he spend more time with the babies, or, better, with her, he had instead started cutting the pipe just after breakfast. She knew he’d be up well past midnight, again.
Since being fired Derby had sedated himself with task after task: mundane and profound, practical and ridiculous. A mobile now hung for each baby, and he’d built new cribs to go underneath each mobile. A locomotive and boxcars had been jigsawed out of plywood. A tire swing now swayed, as did a rope swing, just in case. He’d made a soccer goal, a beanbag toss, and a pair of miniature cane fishing poles.
“We get the work done now so we don’t have to later,” he kept saying. “I don’t ever want my kids to want.”
Monkey bars for twins who can’t even crawl, Colleen thought.
Her husband all but trotted in and out of the house, back, forth, his hands fouled by grease and blister, pausing only to give Colleen a cheek-peck as she sat in the Life Raft, or to fix her tuna fish sandwiches, or grilled cheeses, or, for some reason, my goodness, her demand for hot dog after hot dog.
Smiling, smiling, Derby Friar. Good ole boy, the best ole boy. To his credit, he was quick to launder the soiled nursing pillow, the soiled towels, and the soiled fucking everything. He took the trash out without prompt, and did the dishes before she’d had a chance to digest the meal (a.k.a. hot dogs). If you gave him a job, then the job would get done. The catch, of course, was that he had to be jobbing. He was fidgety when talking, or sitting, or touching. When Colleen dozed off, or turned on the television, Derby bolted for the carport-workshop, not a word.
He cooked, he cleaned, he built, he rebuilt. He went shopping, he dropped off, he picked up, he returned.
Late one afternoon he stopped long enough to answer the phone, his mood primed to thrash yet another insistent reporter. Colleen sat on the couch listening, as he had instead issued a series of grunt-like responses: “Uh-huh,” “Yeah,” “Yeah,” “Okay,” then hung up.
“It was Winnie,” he announced. “I guess we . . . we’re gonna get together, soon.” For the first time in some time, he beamed. He even loitered for a sec, before darting back out to the workshop.
***
GROOVING HACKSAW into metal, the sun nearly dipped, Derby pictured the scene: monkey bars in the yard behind the house, catching the web of afternoon shade cast through the cluster of pink crepe myrtle. He knew that some years later there would be a deep impression of dead grass and disuse; he foresaw the dust-thin rust on the painted metal bars, and the wistful day he’d have to dismantle the unit, the twins having long since moved on. He smiled at this coming history.
Before that, however, before he and Colleen knew it, they’d be staring out the window as Junior and Sarah invaded the structure, laughing and shrieking and falling off, crying. He figured one twin would prefer the swing, perhaps to sit and ponder, while the other would make chin-ups and build muscle. In fact, he knew this to be true. He would make it so. Now, he even pictured their cousin Ladybug tempting the twins off of the monkey bars, so she could teach them to play football.
***
WHEN THE h
acksaw ceased, Colleen took advantage of the silence. “Hungry!” she yelled out, and then whispered to the twins, “I know we’re not really that hungry. But how else can we get Daddy’s attention? If we don’t catch him now, he’ll start in to welding. Then we won’t see him for hours. And twilight’s already coming on.” She called for him again, to no avail. “By the way,” she said to Sarah, “ ‘welding joins pieces of metal by the use of heat, pressure, or both.’ Did you know that?”
This description was, verbatim, that provided by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Colleen cited another passage to Junior: “ ‘Brazing or soldering involves a filler metal or alloy’—don’t forget.”
A year or so back, she’d helped Derby study for his welding qualification, the first qualification he wanted to master before pursuing a contractor’s license. In preparation for the exam, he’d bought a series of damned expensive training manuals. After reading each section, he’d ask her to quiz him. They had drilled every night for weeks, sacrificing dinner, date, and intimacy (though to be fair the process was somewhat intimate, in that it was shared). All said and done, she knew the text as well as he did. Though the tedium of his dreams could be grueling, Colleen had clipped her complaint, fighting off boredom, hope, and her own budding interests in favor of the promise of his advancement. Alongside the challenge of the test itself, she knew he could take his skill set anywhere. Set up shop all across the country, if not beyond its borders.
“What’s up, babe?” he asked through the open windows.
“Hungry,” she repeated.
He’d never even taken the welding exam. Satisfied with passing the practice tests, he had instead moved on to other projects—namely, to working with JP. For all his good ole boy stability, Derby Friar was also a man forged by abandonment. As was applied to a new trade or skill set, or even to the breaking-in of 501 jeans, he committed to things in full, stuck with a vision for a while . . . then pivoted sideways, toward a new, lateral vision.
It had taken Colleen a while to understand that he wasn’t bored or inattentive. Rather, Derby was at his core riven by some broken legacy of tradesmanship, a vague, craftsman’s ideal of his grandfather’s that he was desperate to recover, and which would divorce him from his own father’s past. A generational skip, she supposed. A patch.
“Okay, hot dog,” he said through the window screen. “But this time I’m using the grill, to char mine beyond recognition. I am so sick of tube steak.”
She rolled her eyes, so he turned away, frustrated. “Proper ventilation,” Colleen whispered to the twins. “Oxygen mixture, acetylene safety information. Can you believe I still remember that stuff? What a waste.”
She sighed, and her breath hit Junior’s neck. When he wriggled in response, Colleen blew on him again. Once more, he wiggled—only this time he smiled. His eyes scrunched up just like Derb’s.
She had just given Junior his first-ever tickle. She was elated. Astonished. Obliterated by joy. And she knew that there was only one other person on the planet, and that there would only ever be one other person on the planet, who would fully immerse in the significance of the instant.
“Derb!” she called out.
“Two seconds, babe,” he called back, exasperated.
“Derby!” she called louder, looking to his near-silhouette against the bloodlike, crepuscular evening. She fumbled with the thick pillow that held the babies as if on a tray. “Derb, check this out!”
He turned the grill tank on, then stomped back over to the window and snapped at her. “What?”
Colleen stared back at him.
“What?” he repeated.
“Nothin’. Just, nothin’.”
He held her gaze for a second, then swiveled back to his task.
“Minimum of twenty feet between tank and project,” she muttered, and positioned the twins back to nursing. “Above all, you have to clean the lines. Have to check and inspect them before every single use. Must make sure the lines are . . .”
She stared through the window and saw Derby’s posture sag, and knew that he already regretted barking at her. His hands on his hips, he stared down at his chest. Took a deep breath, coughed, then waved off the propane fumes. He turned the grill ignitor, click click click click . . .
“DERB, BABY, PLEA—”
Whomp! The explosion sucked the scream from her throat. Colleen smothered the children as the windowpanes shattered into the room, her body absorbing the shards and splinters. The heat of the blast seared the back of her neck.
Colleen didn’t lift her head for several minutes. Rather, she breathed in the scent of her babies, who were scrunched into the soft folds of her breasts and tummy, bawling.
Emergency crews soon arrived on scene. Paramedics took the children—all but yanking the infants from Colleen—and rushed the family to County. In response to the EMT’s questions, Colleen offered only name, rank, DOB, branch of service.
8
A couple of months after Dru walked onto Chicago’s Dan Ryan Expressway, producing a violence akin to that which mangles the strays on county road Mississippi, the Labrador and pit bull mixes, bait dogs and/or gun-shy runts, their rubbery tongues and dangled teats . . . or, perhaps more appropriately, after Dru was crushed like the armadillos that now litter these same Deep South blacktops, like the despised and out-of-place vermin that only recently arrived-in-region (so say the old men in Tudor’s Hardware, on the square), nine-banded immigrants from Texas that have decimated the quail population (the old men say you can try to bring a covey of Wisconsin bobwhite or gambel or Georgia giants, but they’ll guarantee you not one bird will last a generation; heck, nobody has seen decent quail coveys since way back on the old Wallis Farm), scaly, scuted pests that have burrowed up the farmland, boring holes into field and meadow, holes the perfect size for snapping a horse’s metacarpal, holes so perfect as to cripple the handful of for-show-only mules that still roam on leisured legacy farmland, yes, after Dru was killed just like that, like some dumb thing, some regional liaison of snuff, well, JP had decided to give her away.
Sitting on the hardwood floor of the empty house in Pitchlynn, sifting through box after box of her belongings, his infant stretched out on the padded play mat beside him, he’d decided it was time: to consider Dru’s clothes, and to remember their drape; to recall the mood and season of each item as she had worn it; to reaffirm (or reimagine) any and all related memory; and to plunge into near-panic over what to save for himself, and more so what to save for Lucy. A Hermès scarf? That pair of red handmade cowboy boots? Perhaps Dru’s father’s old oversized, masculine Timex? Yes, these token items were to be kept for the child. The rest was to be stuffed into white plastic garbage bags. JP would then take them, her, Dru, to the Goodwill. Goodbye.
Only, damn it all, there wasn’t a Goodwill in Pitchlynn. There was a Salvation Army, and a place called Annie’s Re-Do. JP scouted both a few times, to gauge which outlet would be the best final resting place.
The Salvation Army staff was friendly and dependency-recovered and had no shortage of donations from individuals and, as was evident by the crest-marked passenger vans in the parking lot, protestant churches. JP had therefore decided on Annie’s Re-Do, a musty repository in a corrugated structure next to a string of corrugated structures out by the beauty shop. The register at Annie’s was tended by an old man whose forehead was bubbled by tumors, a feature that reminded JP of the burls on an ancient oak. The clothing was hung onto bowed chrome racks by a redneck teen queen, whose hammy appraisals of new stock was idealistic and immature, and free to flourish in the space.
JP had gone to Annie’s often since moving to Pitchlynn, leaving his wife there one bag at a time. The man with the tumors was gracious enough to let him present a labored, often meandering backstory with every drop. He would smile at JP and wiggle a finger at Lucy (in the harness on her father’s chest), learning that Dru’s dirty, court-worn tennis shoes were not court-worn tennis shoes. Rat
her, they were documents of her ability to suspend a game, in order to indulge any bored kid who happened to wander onto the City of Chicago’s public courts looking to whack a tennis ball like a baseball over the fence and into traffic . . . thus deflating all competition. (“Infuriating!” JP had exclaimed, earning a nod of sympathy from the clerk.) It was important to note that Dru’s thick woolen scarves, Scottish and knotted and useless in Mississippi, were the last, best carriers of her scent.
“Am I weirding you out with this?” JP had once asked the man.
“Naw. I’m tickled to hear it,” was the reply.
On this day, the day JP was headed home to Chicago, the old man greeted him with a kin-like smile.
“Last one from me,” JP announced, plopping the garbage bag onto an old ladder-back rocking chair by the entryway door.
“No stories today?” the clerk asked. The teenager paused his perusal of newly racked clothes.
“Baby’s in the car, so I’d better keep moving. You two take good care.” JP wavered at the door. “I mean, y’all. Y’all take care.”
Outside, he put the car in gear and cruised to the edge of the parking lot. A shoebox of Dru’s recovered Post-it notes rode shotgun. He was poised to drive straight to I-55, to head north and never look back. He figured his life would end up on the northside of Chicago, in Bucktown or Wrigleyville, Lincoln Park, or, hell, maybe even all the way up to Evansville. (He could glimpse, perhaps, moving into some iconic, South Side, Hyde Park masterwork, or perhaps, maybe someday, somehow even live-in rehabbing a southwest side ruin, all the while filling his days with ethical property restoration . . . if such a concept even existed.) He had to get back to the weather, to familiar obstacles.
Pulling to the lip of the parking lot, his blinker on for a right turn toward the interstate, JP stopped. He looked around, considered his own unfinished business, then turned left instead, toward Derby and Colleen’s house.
