by Odie Lindsey
Behind the perimeter of yellow police tape, the small house was tranquil. The yard had been rutted by emergency and media vehicle tires, and the grass in between now grew stitch-like and wild. JP parked, and looked back to find Lucy conked out. He left the AC and motor running as he stepped outside.
He walked around back, to the blast site. The house had been sprayed with a white extinguishing agent, and the window frames held only fanged glass. The yard was littered by particleboard and plastic toys, and the metal poles of the monkey bars. The grill had been removed, leaving a charred stretch of fescue.
After checking on Lucy, he stepped into the carport, and peered through the diamond window of the kitchen door. He knocked out of habit, but of course no one answered. He considered the workshop Derby had set up against one wall, the hand tools hung on pegboard, the trade manuals and mason jars of loose hardware. The paint scrapers, and the barrel of wooden dowels and scrap molding. Items amassed for restoration, or rebuilding . . . but which instead now served as markers of hurt.
JP had never cared about Pitchlynn, though he’d done untold damage to a man who did. Under the guise of redemption, or penance, or some one-liner, aggrieved widower act, he had only come South with the agenda to hurt back.
He understood this now. He admitted it to himself.
Still, his pain was cavernous. How could Dru’s family, her people, have treated her so poorly? Laid such guilt at her feet before shoving her off? While he now acknowledged that his wife had been clinically ill, he couldn’t get over the idea that this place had fired the condition. If Pitchlynn had not abandoned her, then she, in turn, would not have abandoned him.
Stepping to the workbench, JP inspected a glass jar packed with bolts and nuts, washers and grommets. He slung it down against the concrete, and a hail of glass and shrapnel skittered everywhere. He stepped over to the pole pruner in the corner, then picked it up and hurled it into the drive. He did the same with the Weed Eater and the square-point shovel; the rakes, the hoe, the post hole digger, and little Poulan chain saw. At last, he hoisted the big Husqvarna, but he was too gassed to chunk it.
JP WAS a third of the way through Bel Arbre before anyone noticed. He chain-sawed from within the cavern of thick lower limbs. The scream of the Husqui was all but deafening, and the skin of his palms had been split from vibration. His arms trembled to work the big saw, so he leaned his body into the cut, rocking the blade back and forth by shoving one hand onto the orange plastic casing. In reply, the blade bucked back now and again, jolting him to a stop. Spattered by sweat and sawdust, he then pushed it even harder.
Folks soon gathered on his lawn in a pack, yelling for him to quit. More than one neighbor dialed 911, though operators refused to acknowledge a “tree killing,” or a “You’ve gotta stop him!,” instead transferring the call to the non-emergency center. Behind the audience, the sitter held Lucy on her chest, pacing around at safe distance from the racket. (She had not known what to make of JP’s flip-out, and hoped only to receive a sweet bonus and good rec.)
After exhaust from the chain saw motor had fogged up the streets, a pair of police cruisers pulled onto the property, followed by the fire department’s first responder vehicle. Swirling colored lights blurred into the billow of smoke in the dusk. The cops called to JP over the patrol car PA, though they could only request that he stop, given the legality of his mission. At best he could be issued a citation for noise.
As if drawn by extrasensory distress, Susan George raced onto the scene. She, too, screamed at JP, then hurled her shoes toward the tree, one by one. She marched from cop to fireman to the growing crowd of townsfolk, demanding for anyone to stop him, to stop him now. No one did.
“Don’t y’all get it?” she yelled. “This fool is gonna kill himself! And he’s got a little girl. Now come on, help! Who are we?”
When no one reacted, she stormed straight toward the tree, but was arrested by the piercing crack.
Everyone scattered, fast as children.
9
Colleen slung her old Army duffel bag into the car trunk, then slammed the lid. On the back floorboard of the vehicle was a small cooler stuffed with snacks. Riding shotgun was a spill of scratched CDs, a road map, her phone charger, an open pack of Mistys . . . and an unopened e-cig kit.
Her mother paced the front porch, bobbing Junior in her arms, while Little Sarah wriggled on a quilt beneath a catalpa on the lawn. Colleen’s father paced around the old Celica chattering to himself. Having checked every fluid, Brice now stared at the tires as if to threaten them. Though the car had been good to go for a dozen years, the farthest her parents had driven it was to a vacation rental in the Smoky Mountains. Colleen would surpass that distance in a day.
Derby hobbled out onto the porch and into the yard. Leaned hard on his cane as he limped over and handed Colleen a blue porcelain urn.
“I put packing tape on the top,” he said. “Otherwise it was gonna clack every time you hit a bump.”
He had cycled through a winter of pigskin grafts, then cadaver grafts; through traction and rehab—and now, more rehab. He still wore a heavy plastic boot, and his eyes were glassy from pills. He hated having to rely on the latter, especially now that spring was at full throttle, but his body could not yet incorporate straight pain.
The urn was a gag of sorts, a morbid joke to anyone beyond the couple themselves. While not as pronounced or indulgent as a proper living wake, it served the same essential purpose: to recap the narrative that had bound him all his life, and as reminder that there were other stories to be told. At least, he figured, there could be different perspectives on the telling.
Derby and Colleen had collaborated on the idea that they, or in this case she, could help fill the vessel with a hodgepodge of her own influence. Instead of the contents representing the life he had lived, or even the one he had insisted upon with her, in a sense they could represent things he hoped she would invest in him, show him, teach him, in the future. He scooped a few initial handfuls of backyard dirt into the urn, and told her that he didn’t care what else might end up in there: sand, rocks, a pop top, or chopsticks.
“But if you can help it,” he added. “How ’bout—”
“No ashes,” she interrupted. “Or cig butts. I get it.”
He kissed her forehead. “Now take this thing as far as you want to,” he said. “Do what you will with it, and then come on home. Please.”
“Roger that, babe.”
Jeanette now barked the loudest over her daughter’s decision to bolt. In a preemptive effort to keep Colleen in place, the mother-now-grandmother had both babysat and hired sitters, had cleaned and cooked and shopped. She had listened without judgment, and had researched trauma treatments from psychoanalysis to psychotropics, sharing all of her findings with anyone in the house. Having redecorated Colleen’s old bedroom, updating the decor to suit independent adulthood, Jeanette even turned her own crafts room into a first-rate nursery. Between Derby’s rehab, Colleen’s shock, and the twins’ relentless needs, the woman was exasperated. And terrified. And pissed.
Derby was mad, too—except when he wasn’t. He had alternately or concurrently felt abandoned, betrayed, agitated, furious . . . and, dammit, forever in love with Colleen. Though the meds worked pretty well to dull the blade of his emotions, any interaction with her, whether co-spooning baby food or squeezing side by side to brush teeth in the hallway half bath, still provoked him to snap, or bark, or brood.
Mostly, he begged her to stay. Her response was to touch him gently, nod in understanding, and say nothing. Though she was shrouded by guilt, her decision to leave was not about him, or them. At least, it wasn’t about them yet. And Colleen knew, and her family knew, that nobody needed to push for a referendum on her marriage or her motherhood. If they had, or did, she’d be out the door forever.
So the household had resigned to the fact of Colleen’s bug-out exactly as her folks had to the military deployment: spare any protest, and pray hard for safe re
turn. Colleen seemed to be suffocating right in front of their eyes, and nobody knew how to revive her.
In the wake of the propane blast, Colleen had fallen into a clinical sort of calm, one kindred to her experience of four or five years before, in the days before Derby, but just after the war. She no longer groused or growled or giggled. Rather, she grew machinelike, insensate, even nursing her children as if on orders. And while this iteration was preferable to any seeking out of powder, or some other mode of her active ruination, it was toxic nonetheless.
Her decision to leave was only set into motion after Derby’s medical bed was installed in her old bedroom. Having helped her husband situate on the adjustable, rubber-coated mattress, Colleen had then run to the bathroom to puke.
Her proximity to trauma, to a literal bed made by trauma, was just too much to stomach. Looking after Derby, tending his opioid mutters, smelling him and not finding the scent of his 3-in-One oil or cut lumber or earth, but rather only the fragrance of urine and plastic tubing, she’d been strafed by failure. It was, after all, the lack of her attention to detail—in this case, informing him of a commonplace propane hose leak—that had shattered things.
The only idea that could cut her emotions was the notion of physical distance. She believed that she would have to run, in order to return.
So she had flushed her puke, brushed her teeth, and gathered herself up in that little half bath. Walked outside to consider her surroundings. She found her parents sitting in their glider rockers on the porch, fussing with each other and holding her babies. The quartet swayed back and forth, happy as larks. Sarah was asleep on Brice’s shoulder, while plump Derby Jr. fidgeted in Jeanette’s lap. On a tile-topped end table sat a glass of Pepsi for Daddy, and a sweet tea for Mom. Colleen saw the perfection of the moment. She needed to rediscover how to feel it.
Stepping back into her room, she climbed onto that medical bed, and sat alongside snoozing Derby. She unfolded a highway map, letting it drape across his body. Now and again, if he grunted or seemed out of sorts, she patted him, and hummed a little bit, to soothe. “Sorry, babe,” she whispered. “Hang in there.”
He had already hung in there, of course. His reward would now be to live mostly alone: no wife and partner, let alone a confidante, friend, or anyone but his in-laws to putter around with. (Colleen was incensed that JP had left without a word, never even mailing a card to the hospital, let alone visiting, or calling, or sending a goodbye text.) (It would be some time before she and Derby found out about the 529 fund he’d set up for the twins, established after JP had sold the house to the LMA. It would take even longer before the chasm of frustration, or anger, or just plain old hurt, shrank down to a pothole’s worth of abandonment when JP came to mind.) (They would never, ever know that JP had driven into the regional hospital parking lot on the morning after the tree fell, his last day in town. That while idling there, Lucy napping in the booster in the backseat, he had considered the drift of folks from the building entryway, and their radiated waves of anxiety. That he’d watched patient and volunteer and service provider flow in and out of the sliding glass doors, often slung up or limping, or just tacking toward the huddle by a cement ashtray on the periphery. That he had wanted to go in and visit, but had no idea of what he’d say to Derby, or Colleen. No idea of how to . . . apologize, or even attend? That instead, putting his car into gear, JP had decided to figure it out over the long drive home, certain—as certain as people are who talk themselves into taking care of things down the road, but then don’t—that he would reconnect with them soon, yes, just as soon as things felt settled.)
One scrap of solace was that Winnie and Ladybug were back in orbit. In a sense, now that Hare was gone, Derby could turn the corner and realize the person he’d wanted to be: a seeming one-liner punch line, Mississippi local with a little house on his own plot of land. He’d tend a small stocked pond and wield a yeoman’s work ethic. Most of all, he would at last live different, only in the exact same place, rehabbing family.
Good ole boy, the best ole boy. He wanted these things with her, and on behalf of the twins.
Maybe, Colleen thought, sitting beside him on the bed. She traced the highways on the unfolded map of America, St. Petersburg to Cincinnati, Boston to the Bay Area. Her heart began to skitter when she saw the name Menlo Park.
***
SHE HAD a vision of what would come next. A reincarnation of a scene she had cobbled together over years of watching movies, or flipping through mags, or from the images of adventure born in that very childhood bedroom. Though the daydream had taken on new wrinkles over the years (a dream wasn’t any good if it couldn’t run adjacent to reality), swapping out professions or partners, if not the plot altogether, it had always begun with her driving away from Pitchlynn, and ended with a variation of her eventual return home.
In this case, on that day, the dream involved a reckoning with the desert:
At some afternoon hour on I-40 east, in Arizona or New Mexico, she would crest a great hill at great speed, her stomach lilting and plummeting, as if flying through turbulence. The hilltop would overlook an epic expanse, hemmed in by craggy cliff and populated by red desert mesas. Astounded by the openness, by the painted rust and amber shades of earth, the white rock formations here and there, Colleen would pull the car onto the shoulder and park. She would throw a sweatshirt over the scalding hood, then sit on it and smoke a joint—a habit picked up in the Northwest, the effect of which she could handle, could manage without abuse, and which whisked her to the elating but secure border of paranoia, like leaning over the edge of a metro tower as the wind lashed. She would sit for more than an hour, watching a dense storm system at the far edge of the void. Miles and miles away, the cloud cell would drift over the red, oxidized valley, so clearly defined against the surrounding blue sky. She would stare into and around but never through the storm, an opaque, shifting mass whose shadow crawled up and down the sides of outcrop and spur, across flattop and arroyo, blotting the far horizon, but never reaching her.
A day or so later she would pull back into that Mississippi driveway, in that same beater car. Her body would be less elastic, though still naturally fit, mostly young. She would have West Coast hair. In the grass beside the driveway, her now three-year-old twins would be playing with plastic trucks. Junior would be a bit larger than Sarah, it would seem. The boy would be just a bit more something.
Her mother would now sit alone on the porch, watching over the toddlers, a glass of tea beside her. At the edge of the field that stretched out behind the house, Derby would guide a three-plow behind her daddy’s old Allis-Chalmers D17, a handsome throwback tractor, misfitted and overambitious given the size of the plot—and as such, perfect for Derby. Catching sight of him, she would shiver against the seat belt.
It would be time to come clean. To offer him, at last, the full scope of her war stories, from deployment to Sarge, to the pig in the tree. After that, he could choose to take or leave the crush of her history. No matter his decision, it would be the only way forward.
The twins would stare at Colleen as she emerged from the car, their eyes sparked by concern, perhaps excitement, as they tinkered with memory.
***
SO THERE was the compulsion to run, and the vision of coming home. Yet it was the actual, real-world drive away from Mississippi that defined her. Because the wildest thing happened: she couldn’t leave.
Instead of turning north to Memphis, breaking free of the state in an hour before shooting west to California, Colleen decided to take the long way out. She drove through Oxford and Batesville, and to the far edge of Clarksdale, before turning south on Highway 61. She wanted to see the Delta one more time, with the fuzzy plan to end up in some motel in Louisiana, en route to Texas or maybe just New Orleans, having cut west on I-20 in Vicksburg. This route added only an hour or so to the schedule. She figured it no more than a long goodbye.
The signs read BOBO, and ALLIGATOR, and NEW AFRICA ROAD. She drove past sprin
kles of small, weary buildings and businesses. Past shuttered doors and title loans and mural-clad nightclubs and reinvented work farms; she drove past manors and stately courthouses, the signifying tendrils of a lost identity, the totems of opulence, both dead and relentless. Flat blankets of cotton and soy fields unfolded for miles, as did corn, Mississippi corn, its acreage radiating outward on all sides, the seeming thickets of it broken at times by the mirrored ponds of a catfish farm. Outpost to outpost, field to field, there seemed so much time to think, or maybe even outrun thought.
She saw a sign announcing a small state park, and turned westward to enter it. Hers was the only car in sight, save the park ranger truck that sat outside a double-wide office. She pulled up in front of a large observation tower, an open-air, framework structure that was several stories tall, and with a zigzag staircase leading to a visitors’ deck.
She got out, stretched, and started climbing the tower steps. The ascent reminded her of scaling the Victory Tower, a Basic Training structure back at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. She had aced that obstacle, beating out all in her company, all those years ago. Here, she sweated immensely with the ascent, pausing to gasp, though she didn’t stop until she reached the upper platform. Her reward was a sweeping view of the Mississippi River, its statesmanlike width and vast alluvial plain. This was the superior vena cava of American identity.
It wasn’t enough. Nowhere near it. So she climbed down and drove on, drove southward, deviating again. Colleen made use of the unfamiliar county roads, gaining a better handle on the Delta before hitting the interstate. She passed sign after sign, blue, brown, and green, reading FANNIE LOU HAMER and JAMES O. EASTLAND; B. B. KING, WILLIE MORRIS, and CHIEF GREENWOOD LEFLORE . . .
“Jesus Christ!” she shouted out upon seeing a JIM HENSON MUSEUM billboard. She swerved onto the road shoulder to take in the image of Kermit the Frog. Who knew that the amphibian was from deep in Mississippi?
