Any Other Place

by Michael Croley

  In time, Della moved to Williamsburg where she got a job as a secretary for the county school system and married a boy named Hamlin from Goldbug. Marlene was a more agreeable grandmother than she ever was a mother and found in babysitting her grandbabies all the joy of parenting she’d never felt with her own children. The day Duke Mahan turned sixteen Della drove up to the house with her husband and handed him the keys to the bright blue Mustang he’d driven just four years before. She’d kept it up all this time just to give to her baby brother, and the engine still hummed like it was new.

  Duke took the keys from her and thumbed them in his hand. He could still see red blood spreading out from under Riley Lawson’s body, pooling at his elbows, and the look in his father’s eyes when he stood over the dead body, calm and matter-of-fact. He remembered the sheriff’s hand on his father’s shoulder, not comforting him, but approving him. There were Della’s cries that night. Nothing but whimpers and the small fight of her and Marlene as their mother tried to keep her from looking at the body and blood that was left behind. But what he remembered most was the car moving under him, his shoulder slamming into the door when he turned onto 92. It was in that moment—when he felt his ears pricking up in the night, his sight honing in like a hawk—that he understood the time and place of his youth, of nearly everything that would follow, and the undeniable feeling that he could run from nothing.

  WASHED AWAY

  IF I THOUGHT anything about the rain that afternoon we left our new house, it was that it might turn to snow by nighttime. Robert drove me through Fordyce and showed it was a little town. The high school football field sat right in the middle of everything, only a block away from Main Street, which was lined with a few stores and banks, a restaurant or two. We drove through downtown and back toward the highway, past the drive-in theater and the trailer park sitting beside it. I wondered what it was like to sit on your porch and see all those actors so large on the screen, almost looking down on you, but not to be able to hear what they were saying. Fordyce, like the valley where his parents lived, wasn’t what I had dreamed of when I married and came to America with Robert, but at least it was a town, and I thought that it would be enough, for a little while anyway.

  We got back to his parents’ home and the rain was heavier, but mostly it was just steady. All through the night it came down, and in the morning the creek behind the house had risen level with the bank. The temperature hadn’t dropped below freezing, but the water fell in cold, stinging drops and soaked the earth. The road was filled with puddles, and the gravel from the roads had washed out into some of the yards. The sky was a solid sheet of gray clouds. I don’t think it stopped raining for almost eighteen hours, and the radio was calling for flash floods all over the county. We lived with Robert’s parents, Owen and Evelyn, and they didn’t seem worried about the weather, and because of that, I didn’t think much of it either. Robert and I had been having problems, and I believed moving to Fordyce, getting out from under the roof of that tiny house, was going to be the break we both needed to begin our lives together.

  WHEN OWEN WENT out to the porch the next afternoon, he asked me to come sit and talk with him. That was one of the good things about living in the house. Owen always wanted to talk to me. He liked to listen to the radio, and every time Loretta Lynn came on, he’d look at me and say, “She’s a Kentucky girl, you know. Just like you,” and he’d laugh out loud and slap his knees. Even in old age he stayed young-looking. He didn’t give way to shrinking like my own parents had. He’d grown a beard over the winter, thick and red mixed with gray. He ran his fingers through it, scratching his neck, and I saw his fingers bowed and crooked from arthritis. The rain was a drizzle by then, and it fell sideways in a cold mist that brushed against my cheeks.

  “It’s too cold out,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said and grunted. He kept his wood for whittling in an old Coca-Cola crate, and he pulled it in front of him and handed me a piece of wood and a knife. “You need to have something to do when you sit out here with me,” he said. “That’ll keep you warm.” He had always liked carving things for me while we talked, a canoe or a gun, but some days he just stripped the bark and the pine, and the soft yellow wood fell in curls like candle wax on the porch floor.

  He’d hold out that smooth little rod he’d made and ask me questions about home. He was always curious about the mountains near Masan, and he picked up another piece of wood and pulled another knife out of the front pocket of his jeans. “Tell me about those mountains again. How high do they rise above the ocean?”

  “It’s not how high, Owen. It’s the view. It’s walking to the top and being out of breath and looking down on the earth like a bird. The ocean stretches out and meets the sky, and you can only tell the difference between the two where the sun splits them in the distance. And then you can see the people riding bikes, walking, driving cars, in, out of the maze of streets, and imagine where they are going. The Lord looks down on us this way,” I told him. “He picks us up and points us in different directions.”

  It always made me sadder to talk about Masan, to think of Korea, but I liked remembering, and I thought it was important to picture those scenes and images in my mind. I never wanted to forget my home.

  “To hear you talk, you sound like an old country boy,” Owen said. He had started cleaning the bark on his piece of wood. I was sitting on the edge of the porch with my back against one of the beams, looking at him and then up to Gatliff Mountain.

  “What’s that mean?” I asked.

  “Your voice,” he said. “My boys—even Robert with all that schooling, all that college—none of them can stand the thought of leaving this place. They’ll never leave these hills. No, sir. They’ll always be country boys. I don’t know how you left home the way you did.”

  A pack of dogs came down the road then, their fur in wet clumps, and they chased one another’s tails, barking and yelping. Mud covered their legs as they ran off and up the mountain. I watched them and caught sight of the dozers and dump trucks moving at the very top. It was such an ugly scene with those mangy dogs and the yellow machines on the hill covered with black soot. The noise from their engines and the barking of the dogs swirled around me. I never understood, from the first day we arrived, what drew Robert back home. How could what I saw before me pull at him and make him miss that place? But I also knew that what Robert had longed for were the very things I was beginning to miss about my own home. That valley shaped him and made him. Even though I wanted to escape Korea, I understood that Masan was what defined me.

  “You don’t think he’ll ever leave?” I asked Owen. “Never?”

  He took a long strip of bark off the wood. “I don’t reckon,” he said. “He went all over the world in the army, and the first place he came back to was here.”

  I held my own piece of wood in my lap. My hands glistened from the drizzle, and I scooted back onto the porch a little closer to Owen. He instructed me on how to strip the bark and told me that the knife he’d given me was “sharp enough to cut frog hair,” but I wasn’t really paying attention to him. I was wondering if he was right and that Robert would never leave the hills, and if that was true it meant I would never leave the hills. I thought moving to Fordyce was only going to be a beginning for us. I thought that the future was spread out before both of us, letting us walk in any direction we wanted, but the truth was the future was where Robert pointed us, and we were never going to leave Kentucky.

  I held the knife out before me, and then the wood. I thought about how sharp that blade was, how easily it cut, how simple it was to shave the bark. Simple movements shaped everything. I pushed the blade away from me, down the length of the broken limb. The resistance was smooth, and the strip curled backward, tickling my knuckles.

  “Good, just keep that up,” Owen said.

  I continued just to try to take my mind off everything, but it was hard to concentrate. I wanted to leave the house again and go into the forest, as I usually did when
I felt overcome, but I couldn’t do that. I’d done that too much, and a part of me wanted to take what Owen said and deal with it. That seemed like the adult thing to do.

  I watched Owen carve the pine into the shape of a man. And then he took up another and started carving a woman. He began telling me a story I didn’t listen to. He had set me on the path of my life without knowing it, forecasting the landscape that would dominate my life, and there was nothing but ugliness in it. Mud and trees and loud machines. When I was a girl and we were without food for days, I would become so hungry I pinched myself just to feel something other than the hunger. I saw the tip of that knife, and I wanted to prick my finger to see the blood come out of it in a little trickle and have that small burning and pulse in its tip.

  Owen leaned forward and spit his chew of tobacco into the yard. He had finished telling me a story. It had been about Robert, but that was all I knew, though I heard him clearly say, “Yes, Robert’s always had a one-track mind about things. I never could figure him.” He looked down at me and at the wood I had whittled. “That’s good,” he said, taking it from my lap and holding it up to his eyes. “You’re a natural. You’re going to do just fine.”

  THE RAIN STOPPED for a few hours, but the clouds lingered over the house and the mountain. Evelyn had begun working in the garden early that winter, cleaning out the weeds and turning the soil over. Robert said his mother was always anxious during the winter and that each year she seemed to start on her garden earlier. I had been helping her, but with the rain falling there was nothing to do but watch the puddles fill and sit with Owen on the porch, listening to the radio. I wanted to tell Robert about what Owen had said and ask if he thought it was true, but we’d already had so many talks with both of us trying to control our frustrations, and I knew when he came home that night I wouldn’t say a thing. I didn’t know where to start, anyway, and once I started I didn’t want to feel the exhaustion those fights brought on and the questions they made me ask about him and about my life.

  It was already past suppertime when Robert finally walked in the door from the bank. He was always staying late. His tie was undone, and his eyes had no glimmer. Evelyn had put a plate of food for him in the oven, and I got it out and fixed him a glass of ice water and sat with him at the table.

  He ate the food, and we made small talk. Robert knew something was bothering me, but he didn’t ask what it was. He told me on the weekend we would go to Lexington and shop for some new things for the house. When I nodded my head, not looking up at him, he finally asked what was wrong. I tried to pretend I was sick, that I was tired, but he knew better.

  I tried to keep what I was feeling inside, but I didn’t know how to hide anything from him. He put down his fork and pushed his plate away. He took a deep breath and ran his hands through his hair. It had grown out since the fall from his army haircut and hung in small curls over his ears. I saw the traces of stubble on his cheeks; he’d rushed out without shaving that morning. “Nothing makes you happy,” he said. He stared at me, and I thought of the first time I saw him in the restaurant in Korea, looking starched and fit in his uniform, and how that one chance moment had led us both to the kitchen table of his parents’ home, my life completely altered and given over to him. “It’s true,” he said. “Nothing I do is good enough for you.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because it isn’t true.”

  “It sure as hell feels that way. You’re not happy here. You’re not happy with me. You’re not happy with what you’re doing. You’re not happy with living in this house. I make these changes for us, and it’s not good enough. You were happy yesterday morning in town, and now I come home tonight and it’s the same old shit.”

  I hated when he talked like that; as if he thought he could shut the whole conversation down.

  “You don’t think I have a right to feel unhappy?”

  “A right? You’ve got a right to feel whatever the hell you want, but I’ve got a right to not feel like every bad thing in your life is my fault.”

  Owen and Evelyn were in the other room, and I heard the television. This was the first time we’d ever argued out in the open. I wanted to keep my voice down, but Robert was beyond that. He got up from the table, taking his plate to the sink and setting it down with a crash. “What else can I do, Shin? What else have I done wrong?”

  “I didn’t even say anything,” I told him.

  “You don’t have to. That look says enough. It questions and judges me more than anything you ever say.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “What’s not fair is not trying,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “If you can’t give this place a chance, you can’t give us a chance.” He was at the sink, his hands holding the counter behind him, and glaring at me. I refused to back down when he did that, so we stared hard at each other, both of us searching for an answer to our troubles. That small kitchen held us like an eggshell—tight, leaving us unable to twist away from each other, and just as fragile. “I can’t do this tonight. I can’t go through it,” he said.

  “Run away,” I said. “That’s what you do when it gets tough.” Our voices were clear by then. There were no sounds in the house but our words in the air. “Go run to your brother’s and leave me here alone like always. Go run wherever it is you run to.”

  “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he said. He came toward me, and we stood face-to-face. I thought about my mother and my father and those times when I knew she pushed him with her words so hard that he would strike her, when she kept going to the edge of his anger—and hers—so she could feel her bones rattle. I’d always wondered why she did this, had never understood what made her want to feel that kind of pain, but with Robert in front of me I knew then—with his eyes both angry and distant—that it was a kind of pain you can deal with. You can pack ice on a bruise and nurse yourself through the throb. The ache in your heart can be made physical, and all that you are dealing with below the surface, that you never let anybody see, is brought out to the light. But Robert was too good a man ever to hit me. He knew I had tested him, and I saw his eyes change in that moment. I had hurt him, I saw. He didn’t cry, but what was in him looked worse than a man fighting back tears. It was defeat. And confusion. It was everything he had wanted and dreamed of evaporating.

  I saw it and I said nothing. I was too cold then and too young to know how to handle what we were in. All I had for models were my own parents, who I’d seen love each other all my life, but who I had also seen hate and push each other. Maybe I thought that’s what a marriage should look like, what it is made up of, but I don’t know for sure. He brushed past me and went to the car, and the headlights lit up the rain like crystal. It was falling heavy again, and for the first time all night I heard the drops on the roof. Slow and steady they fell, thumping time with the seconds.

  ROBERT WAS STILL gone the next morning at breakfast. I sat with Owen and Evelyn, and while I expected them to be angry with me, to say something about our fight, they didn’t. I was sure they blamed me for his leaving, and I should have stayed in bed all morning and not come out of the room until they were both off and doing their own business or chores, but I hadn’t. When I woke that morning it was to the sound of more rain. On the radio they were talking about floods in Bell County and that we weren’t far behind. After breakfast Owen had me go out on the porch with him, and I thought he was going to ask me about what happened the night before, but he just took up his whittling and asked me to turn the radio up louder.

  “Too much rain,” was all he said as he sat down in the chair. “Nothing good can come from this much rain.”

  I was thumbing through a magazine, only looking at the pictures, and my mind was on Robert and if he was going to come back that night, if he was ever going to come back. I’d split something in him and in us. And if he never came back, how was I ever going to get out of that v
alley? I didn’t think Owen and Evelyn were going to help the woman who ran their son off from his own home. Most of all, though, I just wanted to make it right between us. We were moving soon. We were going to have our chance, and that was what I wanted to focus on. People change, I told myself. Owen could be wrong, I thought. Our lives were up to us and not anything else. I should have never let what Owen said affect me so much.

  “You’re a lot quieter this morning than you were last night,” Owen said. Finally, I thought. Here it comes. Before I could say anything, he looked up at me. “Couples fight,” he said.

  “We have been a lot lately.”

  He nodded and went back to his wood and didn’t say anything else. He knew there wasn’t anything he could tell me.

  We sat on the porch an hour, maybe more, and the rain slowly stopped. Poplar Creek began overflowing its banks, and the water was brown and muddy.

  Then we heard it.

  A rumble up on the mountain, louder than anything I’d ever heard up there before. It wouldn’t have surprised me as much had it not been such a slow morning. The bulldozers and dump trucks hadn’t been circling on the carved-out chunks of mud and earth like usual, and it was one of the few times when the valley had been peaceful.

  Owen stood up and pulled his cap off his head. “That’s a loud sound,” he said.

  I walked out to the edge of the porch but couldn’t see anything. “I can’t tell what’s going on. Can you?” I asked.