Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

  Even with all the signs, I can’t quite make out the name of the person that they want justice for. But even though I can’t read the name of whoever needs justice, I feel like I know.

  One thing that’s common on the protest signs and t-shirts, one thing that comes through loud and clear in the chants, whoever it was that got shot by whoever else it was, well, he was a young Black youth. And there’s only one Black youth that I know who’s been shot.

  The Kid.

  It’s been a day or two since I’ve seen him and I wonder where he is as we turn off of the main highway and onto the small two-lane blacktop that leads through the heart of town.

  Nestled in the sweaty armpit of Carolina swampland, surrounded by gum trees, and pines, and cedars, and oak, and wild grapevines, the town of Bolton is the land that time forgot. Go back far enough into the town history, and there used to be a railroad stop and a sawmill here. And that was at its pinnacle, somewhere around sixty years ago or so. Back then, the town had a population of maybe around three thousand people.

  The main exports of Bolton are lumber and Black manual labor. The wood comes from the forests and swampland—all of which are owned by the local paper mill—and the labor comes from the town’s seven-hundred-odd residents. I wish that I could tell you that something more than those two chief exports comes out of Bolton, but there’s nothing else. Bolton isn’t a town that gives, but neither is it a town that takes. It’s the type of place that keeps to itself. It’s self-sustaining, the way the past always is. And though it changes a little now and again, the way an old piece of metal seems to change colors over the years as some thin patina comes along and begins to grow over it, at its core the town is the same that it has always been. And that’s how the people like it.

  But, apparently, now the town of Bolton has two new exports: tragedy and a famous author.

  * * *

  —

  As we turn down the main street leading into town, the young protesters begin to find themselves being supplanted by locals holding up signs that read welcome home! And those that aren’t holding up welcome home! signs are holding up copies of Hell of a Book. It’s a hell of a sight to see.

  “This your doing?” I ask Sharon.

  “Nope,” she says sadly, looking out of the window. “But I wish I’d thought of it.” She scans the small town as we pass. Coming through, we cross paths with nine churches over the course of the town. “Why does a town this small have so many churches?” Sharon asks.

  “Because God needs the little people more than he needs anyone,” I say. There’s a knot in my stomach the size of Texas all of a sudden. I haven’t been back to Bolton in years, and with good reason. It’s a town with tendrils. And as soon as those tendrils get into your skin, you can never get rid of them. You can never get away. The truth of the matter is that I’d managed to get out of Bolton only because I snuck away under cover of darkness and something akin to invisibility. I never really fit into this town when I was a kid. I was always too much of something for the other kids I grew up with. I was too much of a bookworm. Too nerdy. Too weird. Too clumsy. Too skinny. Too black of skin. Too white of temperament. I never liked hunting and fishing enough. I never liked fighting or chasing girls enough. I never liked God or hated the devil enough. I never grew things in the garden. I didn’t eat okra and butterbeans. I couldn’t stand dumplings.

  My family did the best they could to not make me feel like the freak that I always was. My cousins, God bless ’em, they loved me like I was one of their own even though I’d argue that I didn’t really belong to anyone. Especially after the emergence of my condition.

  I can’t say exactly when it began, but I can definitely say that it’s linked to this small town of Bolton and my childhood. From what I remember, I’ve always been living in a different world. My therapist says that can’t be the case, not for the type of condition I’ve got. She swears that what I’ve got comes about only after a person has gone through some sort of trauma. And, typically, when you talk about this type of trauma, it’s got to be something beyond the scope of school bullying and general low self-esteem—both of which I had no shortage of in my youth.

  My therapist and I have been through more than a few loops about what might have caused my imagination and persistent daydreaming to work the way it does.

  “Can you think of any event that might have occurred?” she asks, over and over again, for the past five years since I’ve started seeing her.

  “No,” I reply. “I had a pretty normal childhood. I grew up in a small town that nobody’s heard of in the ass end of North Carolina. Well, now that I think of it, maybe you could count that as a trauma.”

  “I don’t think that’s funny.”

  “Neither do I. Have you ever been to Bolton?”

  “You know I haven’t.”

  “There’s nothing there. It’s just an empty hole decorated around its edges with people living in single-wide trailers and clapboard homes that look like the nearest breeze will blow them over.”

  “I think you’re exaggerating,” she says.

  “Everyone does,” I say.

  “Tell me about your parents,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s always the best place to start when we begin a conversation about trauma.”

  I cluck a laugh. “Well, that’s a harrowing thing to say about parenthood.”

  “What kind of woman was your mother?”

  My insides go tight, like always. “Did I ever tell you about how a man was shot in my town when I was a kid?”

  “No,” she says. She leans back in her chair and makes a note on her sheet of paper.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Was a terrible tragedy, or so I’m told.”

  “You don’t know for yourself?”

  “Nothing like that. I just have trouble remembering it. It happened when I was pretty young and so I have a hard time remembering it. I just remember a bunch of people being sad and angry at the same time. I remember people marching—I think I might even have marched along with them. I remember this long walk along this blacktop road surrounded by a bunch of people. I have this image of my cousin—he was a big boy, one of those kids who seemed to go straight from toddler to grown man. You know what I mean?”

  “I think so. What do you remember about him?”

  “I remember him walking behind me as we walked along this road. I remember getting tired and wanting to stop and I remember him nudging me from behind like I was some kind of mule that had refused to keep plowing. God, he was strong. He poked and prodded me and wouldn’t let me stop walking no matter how much I might have wanted to stop.”

  “How old were you back then?”

  “Not sure. Maybe around the age of ten or so.”

  “So this was after the death of your father,” the therapist says.

  For a moment, I’m not sure if she’s asking me or telling me. I can’t seem to remember exactly how old I was when my father died so I just hang there for a moment, thinking about the fact that I can’t remember parts of my past that I probably should be able to remember.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “No. Tell me what you’re thinking about right now. Tell me what’s going through your mind at this exact moment.”

  But the fact of the matter is that there isn’t anything going through my mind right now. Nothing at all. My mind is just a blank, windswept expanse. One that I’ve spent almost my entire life crafting. And now it’s here, and it’s slowly killing me, and there doesn’t seem to be anything that I can do to stop it.

  * * *

  —

  Sharon’s limousine pulls up in front of a small house squatting on the edge of a cornfield. A tire swing dangles from an oak tree limb by an old rope in the front yard. The “hotel” that Sharon has booked us at is not
hing more than an old gray house perched at the end of a long driveway lined with trees and surrounded by cornfields.

  At the sight of the house, I feel like I’m in a dream. I feel like I’ve been here before, but I can’t say when. Maybe I know this place? Maybe I’ve been here before? I mean, I grew up around here, didn’t I?

  The house is gray with a slanted roof and white-framed windows. It sits up on concrete blocks and the black earth can be seen beneath. The whole thing looks tired, and yet the whole thing looks as though it could stand for another hundred years without breaking a metaphorical sweat.

  Where do I know this place from? Why does it shake my guts and warm my bones at once?

  “Because it’s your home,” Sharon says.

  “What?”

  “What, what?” Sharon replies. “I didn’t say anything.”

  And I know there’s a good chance she didn’t. I can feel my imagination flaring up again.

  As the driver opens the door and we step out into the humidity and bright sunlight of the day, I catch sight of The Kid sitting on the front porch, swinging his feet back and forth over the edge, waiting for me.

  I can’t deny that a certain degree of calm washes over me at the sight of The Kid.

  “I wonder if there’s internet out here,” Sharon asks, eyeing the house suspiciously. “How in God’s name do people live like this? It’s barbaric.”

  I can’t help but smirk.

  “I’m going in to check on the internet and get down to work. You should do the same. You’ve got the town hall meeting to go to soon.”

  I’m not really paying any attention to whatever Sharon’s talking about. Mostly, I’m just happy that she’s walking into the house and leaving me to converse with The Kid without feeling self-conscious about talking to a boy who is there only for me.

  * * *

  —

  “Fancy meeting you here, kid,” I say.

  “Cool to see you again too.”

  I walk over and take a seat on the porch beside The Kid. “So how you been?”

  “Good,” The Kid says. He takes a long look down the driveway. He takes in the shimmering blue sky, the emerald cornstalks leaping up from the earth, the hum of the cicadas, the cool, wet breeze pushing the branches of the oak tree to and fro. “I like it here,” The Kid says.

  I sigh. “Yeah, me too. I grew up not far from here, but I’m sure you already know that.”

  “How would I know that? Because I’m a part of your imagination?” He smiles, his glowing white smile bursting from his impossibly black skin.

  “Let’s not start down that rabbit hole again if we can help it. I’d rather just sit here and enjoy this. It’s peaceful.”

  And it is peaceful. I haven’t felt the wind like this in years. I haven’t heard the trees shimmering, dancing under the summer sun. Say what you want about life in the South and the humidity that comes with it, but I swear it makes the world sound and feel different than any other place on the planet. Maybe it’s got something to do with air density or some other complex element of science. All I know is that there’s nothing like the South.

  “That field is pretty cool,” The Kid says.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “There’s a field like that not far from my house too. Looks almost the exact same. My daddy said that it was where they used to grow cotton a long time ago. My daddy was always talking about the way things used to be back before I was born.”

  “That a fact?”

  “Yeah. It was like that was all he wanted to talk about. He used to have these books he would read to me on the weekend. These encyclopedias about Black people.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit,” The Kid says. He pauses a moment, testing to see how I’ll respond to his use of profanity, but once it looks like everything is going to be okay, he continues. “Every Sunday we would sit together on the couch while Mama was at church and, first, we would watch Clint Eastwood movies.”

  “Word?”

  “Yep. All those old Westerns. That dude was always shooting up the bad guys and my daddy loved it. So we’d sit there and we’d watch a movie and then, when it was over, my daddy would open up these encyclopedias about Black people.”

  “The Ebony encyclopedias.”

  “Yeah! That’s it! How did you know?”

  “I’ve heard of them,” I say, offering The Kid a smile. It’s clear that he’s excited not to be the only person to have heard of them.

  “Yeah, so you know all about them, then.” The Kid nods. “It was always weird, looking through them. They were full of all of these people that I didn’t know about and had never heard of and my daddy would get real serious when we read them.”

  “Serious how?”

  “Serious like he was trying to . . . I don’t know . . . trying to do something big. Serious like how you get serious when you’re trying to put a transmission in a car. Like he would just get all focused and tight. I could feel it. And he’d read the words slow. Real slow. Like reading word by word. I asked him why he read like that one time and he said it was because he wanted to be sure that he got the point across without getting anything confused. I’m not really sure what that meant.”

  “I think I know. My mama used to talk to me like that sometimes too.”

  The Kid nodded.

  “And then what?”

  The Kid shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing much. He’d read them to me. They seemed real important to him. He used to say those people were like me and I was like them. But I never really believed that. I’m not really like anybody else.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The Kid gave me a suspicious look. Then he raised his ebony hand. “This,” he said. “This right here makes me different from everybody. Always has and always will.”

  I want to tell The Kid that he’s wrong. But I can’t.

  “The kids at school used to pick on me about it. Said I was a freak because of how dark I was. Used to lock me in lockers, beat me up on the bus. A lot of other stuff too. One time, this kid got on the bus one morning and poured a whole can of motor oil on me just as we were getting to school. Poured it right over my head.” The Kid made a pouring motion with his hand. Then, believe it or not, he laughed. “Can you believe it?” he asked, half laughing. “It was so messy. The bus driver got so mad because he was going to have to clean it all up. We both got sent to the principal’s office.”

  “What? Why’d you get sent to the office?”

  “The other kid said that I started it. He said that he’d brought the oil onto the bus to take to shop class but that I started messing with him and we were fighting over it and I spilled it all over myself.”

  “And they believed that shit?”

  The Kid shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not really sure. I don’t think so because they didn’t try to make me clean it up. They just called my mama to come and get me, but she was at work so they got one of the teachers to take me home so that I could clean up.”

  “Kids can be assholes,” I said.

  “I don’t really worry about it,” The Kid replied. I could tell by the sound of his voice that he had been broken long before they poured motor oil on him. “It’s just how stuff goes sometimes. But that’s why when my daddy looked through those books I never really understood why he thought I was the same as those people. You think any of them were picked on by kids on the bus? You think any of them got called ‘Midnight’ and everything else? No. I’m something different and those kids never let me forget it. Yeah, I was Black, but I was also something else. Something that didn’t quite fit into being Black so they let me know that each and every day that they could.”

  The Kid looked down in the dumps. And why the hell wouldn’t he after a sad-sack story like that.

  “Fuck ’em, Kid,” I say. “Fuck ’em all.”

&nbs
p; For three weeks, Paul came around and took Soot off into the depths of the forest and taught him how to shoot. It was an old, rusty pistol that became the tool of indoctrination into the means and ways of southern self-defense. “This belonged to my daddy,” Paul said, turning the gun over in his hand. It was steel with flecks of rust and grimy black splotches here and there. “I should take better care of it. But it’ll shoot the wings off a butterfly if you learn how to use it right,” he continued, turning his focus from the gun back to his nephew. “It ain’t never been more important for someone like you to learn how to use this thing. You ask me, you’ve been too long in waiting to learn this. You should have gotten a lesson in it a long time ago from your daddy.” He sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to talk about that. But I wish he’d been carrying a gun with him when it happened. I told him for years that these cops around here didn’t care about us. This is the South. Always was and always will be the way it is.”

  “Daddy said that maybe things could be different,” Soot replied.

  Paul grunted a dark affirmation. “And where’d that get him?”

  The sun was high and the day long and hot; all of it would be filled with the sound of gunfire. Paul had stopped by the hunting store and come out of it with an entire bag of ammo. The bag crackled as he placed it on the dusty ground and began loading the pistol.

  “This is going to be all you,” Paul said.

  “I don’t like guns,” Soot replied.