A DISTANT THUNDER

by H. A. Covington

  “I didn’t see a gun,” I said.

  “Never mind, that’s just an old saying. I’m Rooney Wingfield. Who are you?”

  “I’m Shane Ryan,” I replied. Then she leaned over and kissed me. Full on the lips. Calmly, firmly. Not just a peck, and not a whore’s tongue-slurp either. A real man’s reward kiss from a real woman, acknowledging the sexual element but not making a big deal about it. An “all right, you’ve got my attention, laddie, and who knows, play your cards right and maybe some day you’ll get some of this” kiss. She looked into my eyes. Hers were green. She said “Thanks for coming for me, Shane Ryan.” She turned and she walked away, her hair and that long dress billowing. I stood there rooted to the spot. I couldn’t follow her, however much I wanted to. I had been struck by a thunderbolt. I think I stood there for another ten minutes before I could even move.

  I went home and I just savored the whole experience, which was more or less the only one I had ever had unless you counted my incredibly clumsy attempt to kiss Cynthia McCullock under the bleachers when I was thirteen, which we won’t get into. I was over the moon for about a week. I wanted to go up to her in school and start something between us, but I honestly had no idea how to go about it. Other than the one disaster with Cynthia I’d never had anything to do with girls before. Never had the chance, since I was trailer trash and I had no money and no car, and all white girls in them days wanted was material things which I didn’t have and couldn’t get without selling drugs. I had come to understand what most poor white boys in the United States who didn’t look movie-star handsome came to understand in junior high, and that is that lacking money, lacking Hollywood good looks, or lacking a ready supply of pharmaceuticals we would most likely never find a mate of our own race. It was just something we accepted. If we were lucky, some day we might have enough money to bring in a mail order bride from Hong Kong who would stay with us for the required two years before she accused us of beating her and fled with her green card. I accepted that, and from what I saw of the white girls in Dundee Middle School and Dundee High I didn’t really care. None of them seemed worth a shit in any case. What had happened that Sunday afternoon seemed to be something completely unique, almost like I had seen a flying saucer land on the town square and aliens descend to check out a library book. I desperately wanted to follow up on it, but I was completely at sea and terrified that it was a once-off thing and I’d blow it. I didn’t know what to do, and there was no one around to tell me, since Dad was pretty much at rock bottom now, unemployed for two years and lying drunk 24/7, and my brothers were both in the army, which was good in a way since their allotments were paying most of our bills. The thought of talking to Mom about a girl simply never occurred to me, even when she was sober. I mean, it wasn’t like she was an actual woman, she was my mom.

  Then one night in January, about six o’clock in the evening, I was walking home from a shitjob I had at the time, pushing a broom and cleaning the grease trap at the Burger Doodle on Harrison Avenue. I gave most of my pay to Dad for booze, because I knew if he didn’t buy rotgut vodka in the liquor store then he’d end up drinking Sterno or paint thinner or something worse, and I kind of figured I owed him for the Bobby Fernandez thing. I had the job through the Student Work Program at Vocational Ed class at school. This was a program run through the Washington state public schools to give local businesses access to teenaged labor at below minimum wage, for which the school system got a kickback. Or somebody got a kickback, anyway. To be fair, it was just about the only way poor white kids could compete with the Mexicans and get any work experience at all. I hoped to graduate to actually flipping the burgers alongside the Mexicans once I turned sixteen, if I could get my Spanish grades up and if I could persuade the boss to keep me on, and if that happened I’d actually go up to minimum wage. (He wanted to hire me on permanently, because I always showed up on time and I was sober and straight, but the head office in Seattle let me go and got another fifteen year-old from the high school to work another year at four dollars an hour.)

  It was winter, already dark and chill, and a light cold Northwest half-rain was hanging in the air. A pickup truck pulled up beside me as I trudged up First Street towards the bus stop that would take me back to the trailer park. To my left I heard this deep Southern voice say to me “Reckon you’d be Shane Ryan.” I looked over. The pickup’s driver had his overhead light on, and I saw a kind of skinny, hard-looking, middle-aged Elvis face with swept-back hair leaning over and looking at me through the passenger side window of the truck.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Who are you?”

  “Name’s Carter Wingfield. I’m Rooney’s father. My daughter tells me you like to march to the sound of the guns, Shane.”

  “When I can hear ‘em,” I said with a shrug. That sounded very clever, but actually it meant nothing. It was just a snappy answer that occurred to me. I was nothing but a punk kid and I didn’t think anything of it, but it passed muster.

  Carter Wingfield opened the door of the pickup truck. “Get in,” he said. I thought quickly. I realized that I had nothing better to do. Not then, most likely not ever, so far as I could see. So what the hell? I got in.

  The kids at school called the Wingfields trailer trash, but they didn’t live in a trailer. In the dark of that winter night so long ago, Carter Wingfield pulled up outside a large ramshackle house on the edge of town. It was one of those two-story 1920s fixer-uppers like my own family lived in until fifth grade, although Carter and the boys hadn’t done much fixing up, at least on the outside. Oh, they’d done everything that counted, re-wired the place and fixed the roof and put in all new plumbing, but from the street I have to admit the place looked pretty seedy, complete with motor vehicles in various stages of disassembly in the yard, and of course there were the obligatory dogs. Two, to be precise, a big Doberman Pinscher bitch with the odd name of Caprice, and a weird beagle-labrador looking beast called Porterfoy. That first night Caprice came over from the porch as I got out of the truck and gave me a good sniff all over. I guess she liked what she smelled, because after that I was in with the in crowd as far as she was concerned. Which was a good thing, because when Caprice put her mind to it her bite was much worse than her bark, as some white and black crackheads from Olympia found out one day when they tried to break into the Wingfield’s barn in the back and steal auto parts. Caprice literally tore the arm off one of those poor bastards and then Porterfoy tried to tear out and eat their guts. But that night Porterfoy was lying on the floor in front of the radiator just inside the door, and he just ignored me. Porterfoy was a coon-hunting dog from South Carolina. And I do mean coon dog. Remind me to tell you that story when we get to my telling you about after 10/22 and the revolt.

  When I arrived at the Wingfield house that night I had no idea what to expect. I walked into the living room, where two big look-alike guys with reddish buzz cuts whom I recognized from school as Rooney’s elder brothers were sitting on battered plastic upholstered armchairs sipping from plastic jugs of diet soda and watching TV. I noticed there were some pictures on the wall and also a big flag, like the French or Italian or Irish flags, in three colored vertical bands, blue and white and green. “This is Shane,” Carter told them by way of introduction. “He’s the young man who didn’t walk away on Rooney the other day. Shane, these are my twin boys, John Hunt Wingfield and John Bell Wingfield. Reckon you’ve seen ‘em on the football field.”

  “Yeah, I have,” I replied. I hadn’t, actually, because I never bothered to go to football games. Like there was anything going on at Dundee High School, sports or anything else, that mattered a single flying fornication to me? But it didn’t seem politic to mention that. “Hi, guys. Uh, you’re both named John?”

  “We’re named after two of the greatest generals during the war,” said one of them, not even looking at me. “I’m John Hunt Morgan Wingfield and he’s John Bell Hood Wingfield.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, and here my voluminous Confederate reading down thro
ugh the years stood me in good stead. “John Hunt Morgan, former slave trader out of Kentucky, either the second best or third best cavalry commander in the Confederate army, depending on how big a fan you are of Jeb Stuart. Everybody pretty much agrees that Nathan Bedford Forrest was number one.”

  “Including Robert E. Lee,” replied John Hunt. “He told some reporter after the war that Forrest was the best the South had.”

  “There was Scott Mosby,” put in Carter.

  “Mosby doesn’t count,” I said without thinking. “He turned carpetbagger after the war. He wouldn’t back the Klan and he wouldn’t help the South resist Reconstruction.”

  “So I’ve heard,” said Rooney’s dad with a chuckle. I didn’t know it, but I had passed another test. People who could conduct an informed discussion on obscure issues of Confederate history were in short supply in Dundee. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

  “John Bell Hood has gotten a bad historical rep because of Franklin and because he lost Atlanta, but he did what he could with what he had to work with, and his men always swore by him,” I went on.

  “He led from the front,” said John Bell. “Okay, being a general and all, maybe he should have got up on the hill behind the lines and taken a look at what was going on with the big picture every now and then. Sometimes you can’t see or understand everything that’s going on from right down in front, not if you’re a general, but he felt so for his men that he couldn’t bear to send them to their death unless he himself was right there at their head. He was a man of the greatest personal honor and courage, and I got no problem carrying his name.”

  “Reckon the girls are in the kitchen,” said Carter, leading me on through. I learned that Carter and the boys had knocked out the dry wall to the dining room to make the kitchen much bigger, because to their way of thinking the kitchen was the most important room in the house, the heart of the home so to speak. Rooney and a younger girl were sitting there, doing their homework on the table. “Hi, Shane,” Rooney said as I walked in. Just that. She didn’t even look up. It was as if we’d never kissed. It was like we’d known one another all our lives and me walking into her kitchen was totally normal, and somehow to me that was even better than some kind of flirtation would have been. A small birdlike woman in blue jeans was standing at the kitchen stove stirring huge pots of bubbling stuff. (Married women could wear pants in the Wingfields’ interpretation of the Bible.) She looked like a medieval alchemist seeking the Philosopher’s Stone. “This is Shane,” said Carter to his wife. “Shane, this is my wife, Racine.”

  “Please to meet you, Mrs. Wingfield,” I said. The thought hit me that when I was ten years old and faking my ridiculous child’s Southern accent because I so badly wanted to be anyone on earth but who I was and anywhere else but Dundee, Washington, these people had been living it for real.

  “You’re the boy who didn’t turn away from my child. We’re all much obliged, Shane,” said Ma, wrestling with something in one of the pots. She looked over at me. “You need some feeding up, Shane. Don’t your mama feed you?” I just shrugged. My mama didn’t actually feed me much at all, but it wouldn’t have been respectful for me to say anything, so I didn’t, and that won me a point or two with Ma Wingfield, who needless to say already knew my whole story before I set foot in her house. My mom might have been a brown-bag lush, but for me to say so would have been wrong. I didn’t, and they respected that. Completely unbeknownst to me, I was making all the right moves. Carter pointed at the girl across the table from Rooney. “That’s our youngest girl, China,” said Carter. “She’s in seventh grade. We got another boy, Adam, he’s our eldest. Just got out of the army a few months back. They chucked him out early for not being sufficiently diverse. He had to finish a re-bore down at the shop but he’ll be in directly.”

  “Hey, Shane,” said China, looking up at me. She was a demure-looking little girl with darker honey blonde than Rooney. She wore a white blouse with hand-sewn lace and the same long skirt as her older sister. Her eyes were brown, and she was a bit shy.

  “Hey,” I said to China. First word I ever spoke to her. The Wingfields had a quirk, what they called among themselves the long and the short of it. They were either undersized or oversized, no in between. Carter, Ma, and China were the short of it, small and strong and wiry and all muscle. Rooney, John Hunt, John Bell, and Adam were the long of it, tall and broad-shouldered and all muscle. I should mention that as big as John Bell and John Hunt were, Adam could lift both of them, one in each hand. They called him Hoss. Wonder why? Adam came in a bit later, reeking of grease and sweat, and when he had showered and changed we sat down to eat. The house shook when Adam sat down in his seat. I learned later that in the army he had been rejected for both armor and the paratroops because he was too big to fit into a tank and they were worried the standard military parachute wouldn’t carry him. He was the only man I ever knew who really needed to drive one of those big huge SUVs the auto industry peddled.

  Carter offered grace. “Lord, we thank Thee for what we are about to receive and we thank Thee for helping our family walk in Thy ways. We also thank Thee for Shane Ryan who didn’t walk away from his sister in her time of need, present among us tonight to share Thy bounty. Now let’s chomp.”

  Supper that night consisted of pretty much what it always was around the Wingfields’ house: plain food, deliciously cooked, and mountains of it heaped high on platters. Enough to feed a small army with leftovers that then went into everyone’s lunch boxes or into the fridge which was liable to open raiding at any hour by anyone who had invite into the Wingfield home, which as you will hear included by no means just me, but a wide cast of characters indeed. Ma would get seriously offended if various sealed plastic dishes of vittles didn’t disappear from her refrigerator after a few days. Sometimes I would be out in the yard helping the boys with something or in the schoolroom in the barn, and I would hear her yelling “Is there something wrong with this turkey mulligan?” (Or this lasagna or this meat loaf or this tuna casserole or this Brunswick stew.)

  “No, Ma,” someone would shout back.

  “Then why in tarnation is it still sitting here in the ice box taking up space?” she’d rant. “Are every single one of you jackanapes too lazy to heat up a pot on the stove? Then just chuck the whole bowl in the derned microwave! What do you think we got it for?”

  That first evening at the Wingfields’ I caught a break. It was pork chop night, and Ma Wingfield’s pork chops were an offering fit for the gods, sliced thick, breaded and spiced with black pepper and fried just a little bit crisp on the outside, yet still moist and tender at the center. How she got them like that was her secret. Other than her, Rooney, and China, I never knew anyone who could make pork chops like that. There were two monster wooden bowls of green salad with lettuce, tomatoes, onions, peppers, anchovies, diced cheddar cheese and cruets of ranch and Italian and French dressing you could help yourself to. There were no separate salad bowls. Once grace was finished you just went at it. You dug into whatever you wanted, in the full awareness that no one was passing judgment on how much or what you ate, and there would be enough for everyone and to spare. You heaped the salad onto your plate along with the chops and the rice and gravy. Oh, yeah, Ma had that one ability that only certain Southern women seem to have, of making rice that doesn’t stick together into a kind of mush. Rice where you can actually feel each grain as it goes down your throat. Rooney and China both learned that from her as well. In addition there were corn bread muffins that tasted almost as sweet as honey buns but which the Wingfield women always swore to me never had a drop of either sugar or honey in them. There was a big crock of bacon-baked beans which of itself could have fed a platoon, there were huge steaming plates of corn on the cob with tubs of actual butter, and to top it all off there was pumpkin pie piled high with whipped cream. Not one hint of low-fat anything, not a grain of granola or a tad of tofu. A true feat of culinary political incorrectness.

  I should also mention someth
ing which, in my opinion, places Racine Wingfield and her daughters head and shoulders above every chef, cook, or housewife of the Southern school of cuisine, of any generation. Southern cooking has always had one serious weakness, but it was one the Wingfield girls recognized and corrected. Unique among Southern cooks, past or present, Racine actually knew what garlic was. She used it in fifty different ways, from thin slices in the salad to the breading of her pork chops and her fried chicken. (That chicken was a gastronomic experience to which I am incapable of doing justice, and so I won’t even try.) Do you have any idea how good Southern cooking can be once you throw in some garlic?

  This kind of abundance was a new experience for me. Groceries were always a secondary expense at our house (very secondary) and consisted mostly of fast food takeouts which I usually had to go get myself with whatever money Mom had left in her purse or Dad in his wallet, or else supper was an inedible mess out of cans that Mom or Dad would scorch in a saucepan or a skillet in the belief that this constituted cooking, which pots and pans aforesaid would then lie in the sink for three weeks until somebody, usually me, mustered enough energy to do a wash with a steel wool scouring pad and some detergent. (Our last washing machine went when I was ten.) I had never experienced anything like this, but all of a sudden about halfway through the meal I realized that I had actually been hungry in the literal, physical sense for most of my life and that it was possible to put an end to this condition, at least for a while. The huge meal was washed down with large clear glasses of tea and cola with ice, which I found odd in the middle of winter. “Southern people put ice in all their drinks, even in wintertime,” explained Rooney when I asked. “It’s a habit we brought with us from the old country.”