“Ah, sweet Jesus,” he keened. Then suddenly his powerful tenor voice cleared. It rose, filling the room in what seemed an invocation of every spirit that had ever stirred in this room. “Oh, Lord, my dear Lord, we shall see you again and our hearts will rejoice, and our joy no man shall ever take from us. Blessed be you, my brother, in the sure and certain home of your Resurrection to eternal life…”
The clamor of a dozen feet rushing toward him on the hard cement floor tempted Truman to stop his prayers and turn but he did not.~
Congratulations On
Your Recent Death
Cal had just come off a long haul, driving from Portland, Oregon to Austin, Texas, then back home to White Mountain, with only one overnight, and was still up to any challenge, even from his best friend Teddy James—or T.J. as he called him. This time it started with a pig hunt, or at least the possibility of one. T.J. had heard wild boars were running over at Pine Mountain. Not only running, overrunning. The rangers said the porkers were tearing up acres of seedlings, starting at the clear cut on the south end of Long Grade and extending nearly to Mid-Mountain Pass. There were 400-some acres of clear-cut where the camp crews had worked all the previous fall setting in new growth. What the boars left looked like bombing practice, deep furrows carved out of the land with the porkers’ ferocious rutting.
“It’s not hunting season,” Cal said.
“Not guns,” T.J. said. “Bow ‘n arrow.” He pronounced it bone arrow. “They put out a bounty on ‘em. But no firearms.”
“You can’t handle a bow,” Cal said.
T.J. grinned, big and toothy. “You can.”
What was behind this exchange, Cal knew, was that T.J. had no fingers or toes, at least none you could call the real thing. Except for long, opposing thumbs that wrapped over his fingerless palms for gripping, he would have had to depend on the charity of strangers for even the simplest tasks like eating and zipping up his pants.
T.J. had been born that way, and Cal had known him since they were five and six, T.J. being the older, so Cal never thought much about his friend having fingers like other people and didn’t much care if he did or not. With fingers, Teddy James wouldn’t have been Teddy James. “Besides,” Cal often told him, “The Lord give you extra brains to make up for what He forgot in toes and fingers.”
Cal admired T.J. for his brains. He was pretty smart, not necessarily in a schoolish way but in coming up with ways of doing things that nobody else ever thought of. People who are different just naturally do things different, Cal always said. How could they not? T.J.’s world was not like anybody else’s world.
They were a pair, T.J. and Cal, the Two Musketeers, people called them. Between them they stirred up more trouble at Blue Mountain than any other ten citizens combined. Like the time T.J. came up with the idea of building a giant catapult. He’d seen it on TV, where this character built one and launched different things, like a piano, and finally a dear dead friend in his casket. T.J. proposed that they build one like it and launch a certain moldering road-kill deer carcass across the lake to the front porch of Mr. Conyers’ cottage. T.J. had it in for Conyers, the history teacher at the high school, who’d gotten him kicked out of school for two weeks because he’d pulled the fire alarm in the cafeteria, causing a major panic. T.J. argued that they’d never had a fire drill in all the time he’d been in high school, which was going on five years. Pulling the alarm put everyone on notice that student safety wasn’t up to snuff.
“Think about it,” T.J. told Cal, reflecting on further ways to carry out their vendetta against Conyers. “We could send over all matter of things besides rotting corpses--bags of garbage, rocks, maybe old chairs from the dump with the stuffing hanging out, tires, maybe that old transmission in your grandma’s barn. Picture all this stuff raining down from the sky onto Conyer’s front yard some night. It’d be pretty magnificent. And he’d never be the wiser. I mean, in the dead of night, how’d he ever know where it was coming from? Maybe he’d just think the gods were raining it down on him.”
The possibilities sparked both boys’ imagination. T.J. found a picture of a catapult in the Encyclopedia Britannica at the school library. In ancient times, the Romans launched fire balls and pots of boiling grease at their enemies. It was their ultimate weapon at the time.
The boys built a prototype and set it up at the edge of the lake. It wasn’t a large one but it would still sail twenty pound rocks a hundred yards out into the lake, coming down off the top of their arcs with the velocity of cannon balls. Fishermen who’d watched the rocks fly over their heads complained that if the boys weren’t stopped, somebody was going to get killed. Besides, they were scaring the fish.
Cal had the idea that if he presented the catapult as a history project, it might win them a little extra credit. He took Polaroid pictures of the diabolical machine and showed them to Conyers, along with pictures from the encyclopedia. Conyers was so impressed he arranged to bring the entire class of 28 sixteen year olds out to watch the thing demonstrated. They were studying Roman and Greek history at the time so it fit right in. In fact, that’s where T.J. got the idea--that and the TV show.
The day of the demonstration something went awry. That was often the case with T.J.’s schemes. The rock that was intended to project out over the lake went straight up into the sky instead. The students who’d come out to watch saw it sail high over their heads. They turned as a single unit, staring skyward, as the trajectory changed course. The rock reached its apex and then came plunging back to earth toward the parking lot near the public beach where the big yellow school bus was parked. The projectile came down with such force that it collapsed the hood of the bus and completely shattered the carburetor and distributor. Since it was the only bus the school district owned, the entire class was stranded. In the end, Conyers marched the whole band two miles back to school.
Cal and T.J. were suspended for two weeks for this debacle. The school principal even suggested that T.J. had planned it to come out exactly as it did. He allowed no room for human error. On the other side of the coin, their deed won them great admiration from every teenaged boy in a three county range. While school officials and civic leaders marked the boys as dangerous trouble-makers classmates urged them to build a larger catapult to send boys into the sky, shooting them out over the lake in the manner of a spectacular rope swing. Before these efforts could be carried out, a team of men from the sheriff’s department disassembled the diabolical device with chainsaws and notified the boys’ parents that if they ever tried to build anything at all ever again they’d be sent off to juvie to rot. T.J. was certain the boy-launching catapult would almost be worth the risk but reason prevailed and he pursued the experiment no further.
Never mind his physical challenges, T.J. was a dead shot with a 30-30 rifle and was pretty good with a shotgun if he had a place to rest the barrel. Though it was true that a bow was beyond him, he was pretty sure that with a little effort the two of them, T.J. and Cal, could figure that one out, too. They’d even built a crude crossbow from a ground down leaf from the rear spring of a pickup truck and the walnut stock from an old L.C. Smith shotgun with a shredded Damascus steel barrel. But that didn’t fly with the game warden, and when Rocko found them hunting deer with a crossbow during bow and arrow season, he fined them $300. Having no money, they paid off the fine by picking up rubble along the highway for the next three months. That worked out okay because in the process of fulfilling their community obligation they also amassed a large collection of lost hubcaps that had presumably popped off wheels and spun into the ditches. They traded the whole lot of hubcaps for a five horse Johnson outboard motor, circa 1960, from a small time hustler who dealt in watercraft and used car parts over the Internet. All in all, things worked out pretty well for everyone.
When rifle season came around the year following the crossbow fiasco, the boys went back to the system that had always worked for them, with Cal shooting and T.J. tracking, Indian style, driving the unawares a
nimals toward Cal as the latter sat hidden on the game trail. Both boys agreed it was a decent trade-off, even-Steven. They bagged two bucks that year.
“Pigs,” Cal mused. “I don’t know, T.J., I mean, about the bow. I’ve heard you wound one of them big fellows, there’s no stopping them, not even with an elephant gun. They keep coming even with their brains dangling out the back of their skull. There’s something unnatural about feral pigs, like they’re possessed and hell-bent on revenge for all their brothers and sisters we’ve turned into bacon. All I see is 250 pounds of mindless raging muscle and foot-long razor fangs that can tear out the tap root of an oak tree, galloping at me at about 50 miles per hour, while I’m standing there pulling on the goddamn oily string of my bow. You ever seen the damage they do with them tusks of theirs? Those things are like straight razors.”
“Yeah. Yeah. That’s the sport, don’t you see? Play the edge, Cal.” T.J’s face contorted into a wide, toothy grin. Cal turned away. T.J’s smile always unnerved him, like he was looking at a man about to lose control of his senses.
“Like the man says,” T.J. continued, “if you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.”
“It’s my own space and my Constitutional right,” Cal said.
“Aw shit, you don’t know nothin’ about the Constitution.” T.J. paused, looked out over the water at something invisible to Cal, something singular and tranquil that existed only in T.J.’s private world, at least so far.
“You ever think about dying?” T.J. asked. “I’m thinking, being dead might not be so bad. Sometimes I think, hell, why not? Nothin’ to it. I mean, nothin’ after you done it because there ain’t nothing after that. You hear what I’m sayin’? I’m thinkin’ maybe death’s earned a bad name. No way all the fear about it makes any sense if you add up the pros and cons. I read about these monks, called Bud-ists, who say that all our trouble comes from being scared of death. It’s just a fact.”
“Stop talkin’ shit like that,” Cal said. “You ought not to be reading those books.”
Two summers before, they’d rummaged around the old Carlisle cabin that nobody at all had been in for eight years or more. T.J. came away with an armful of books that he said held all the secrets of life. Cal had never known T.J. to read anything but the Encyclopedia Britannica until then, except maybe the hunting regulations, mostly to find out how far he could push the envelope and look like he was following the law when he was not.
That was the summer T.J. found stories about the seven wonders of the world and how there were gigantic pyramids in Egypt, built tens of thousands of years ago but which, even now, nobody could build with such precision. He read stories about aliens visiting the earth and showing people how to move ten ton rocks with mind power, and how to step into worlds that were invisible to ordinary people today. He began wondering what it would be like to turn off gravity with your mind. Cal, being a realist, knew none of it could be true and told T.J. he was crazy to believe anything he read from those books.
“Don’t get me wrong,” T.J. said. “I ain’t unhappy with my life but I got to thinking, what if there are other worlds just a fart away? This one book says if you give up your life, you enter a whole different world. You step into other dimensions. When you let go of this life it frees you to step into another, free of old illusions and fears.”
“You shouldn’t be reading that shit,” Cal said. “I tell you, man, you’re poking around where you don’t belong. That’s witchery, playing games with Satan. People hadn’t ought to talk about dying and that stuff like that at all, else it could happen. Leave it be.”
“The way it works,” T.J. continued, oblivious to his friend’s warning, “you got to dare to get right up close with death, stare it in its face and sort of face it down. For instance, you kill an animal and watch it die, like last year, with that buck I took down. Bad shot, that was unfortunate, shouldn’t of had to suffer, and I’m sorry about that. But you and me took care of it, put it out of its misery. I got to thinking, holding its head in my hands like that, like a baby, like a pet or something you’ve loved, like a favorite dog or something....while you cut its throat....whoa, man, I mean that was impressive, it really was. That was even more than staring death in the eyes. I loved that animal that moment, Cal, while its life slipped out of it, right there in my hands. In my hands, man! I can’t stop thinking about all that.”
T.J. held up his hands, turning them this way and that, as if to say, these hands, this one and this one, they both held death, fingerless or not. Cal always thought T.J.‘s hands looked more like mittens than hands, like T.J. was born with fleshy mittens on the ends of his wrists instead of fleshy gloves with normal fingers and thumbs.
“This is ghoulish,” Cal said. “You’ve fucking lost it, T.J. You’ve fucking lost it.”
“Seriously, man,” T.J. said. “I don’t mean it in no bad way, you understand? I’m telling you, there is something important about this. Listen, Cal, I’m telling you, this ain’t easy to say. You do what I’m talking about and you’ll never be the same again. You slide over into a new dimension, that’s what the books say.”
“This is a fucked conversation.”
“No, man. Look, here’s what it is. Ever since that happened, you noticed something different about me?”
“You mean killing that deer? Yeah, it weirded you out.”
“You ain’t noticed? I can’t kill nothing, not even a damned fish anymore.”
“Get over it! You’ve been killing all your life.”
“But I never held a dying thing in my arms like that before, except maybe a fish. You know, it’s some kind of magic, all alive and full of the spirit one moment, later just a hunk of meat. And you feel it happening, making that change, and it’s crying inside ‘cause it doesn’t want to let go of its life here. You get it? What is it that leaves? That’s what’s burning up my brain, thinking about it. What is it that leaves?”
“It’s just dead, that’s all. What’s the big deal?”
“I might become a vegetarian. Seriously.”
Cal laughed, staring at his friend, then stopped abruptly. “You serious about that?”
“Yeah.”
“This is why you want to hunt pigs?”
T.J. nodded. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it. It’s ‘cause they’re more intelligent than most animals. I read somewhere they’ve got more in common with us humans than any other animal. They’re really intelligent, no matter what it might seem like. Did you know, Cal, that they put this certain heart valve from pigs into human beings and it works fine? Pig hearts in humans! I want you to think about that.”
“Like I give a shit....”
“I wish you would give a shit about something, Cal. I really wish you would.” He paused, staring at his friend. “You ever heard about parallel universes, worlds right here where we’re sitting only we can’t see or hear or touch ‘em?”
“Stop reading that shit. I know about those books you took. They belonged to old lady Carlisle, and she was a witch.”
T.J. shook his head and looked down at the ground between his feet. “When something dies, like that deer, where does his life go? It slips out of its body, sure, but it’s gotta go someplace. I’ve been figuring it out.” He slapped the earth with the palm of his hand. “Right there, into this other universe they talk about, Cal. That’s where they go. That’s where you and me will go, too, when we kick off. They say it’s easy as stepping over a log.”
“Jesus, T.J. . . You don’t know that for sure. That’s just bullshit! You’re raving, man, you’re raving!”
“Let me ast you this. You ever hear of the soul, man?”
“Sure I have. Like in Bruce Springsteen…”
“No, man, not like Bruce Springsteen. I’m telling you, I’ve seen the soul. I’ve seen it. It’s real.”
“You can’t see the soul!”
“Well, I have. And the soul is a real thing, Cal. I’m telling you it’s a real thing, and when you
die it slips right out of your body and if death was a person like you and me standing there, it would slip right through his fingers, slicker than shit, ‘cause death only knows physical things, like rocks and the dirt and our bodies. It don’t know anything else.”
“You’re making me real nervous, T.J. What you been smokin’ lately? You’re frying your brain, that’s what’s happening.”
The phone rang in the cottage behind them, which was Cal’s grandmother’s house. After awhile the ringing stopped and in a few minutes Cal’s grandmother called out the window. The phone was for Cal. “It’s about your daddy,” she said.
“Fee—uck,” Cal mumbled, loud enough for T.J. to hear, not loud enough for Granny. He got up, stretched. “What’s he want?” He made no great effort to race to the phone.
“It’s not himself. It’s her, that woman he lives with,” Granny shouted. “You tell them not to call here anymore.”
Daddy and his girl friend were on Granny’s shit list, had been for years, since the day he tried to kidnap Cal back from her. After spending half his young life in Granny’s home, she wasn’t about to give him up, no matter what. She’d had his legal custody for years, while Whalen, her own flesh and blood, played fast and loose, barn storming around the country for one reason or another with his booze and his whores and his airplanes. Too bad about Cal’s mother, Kitty, it really was, but people do get over things like that and get themselves back on track.
Elva, the girlfriend, was on the phone, calling from the lobby of the Veterans’ hospital. Daddy was there, had something wrong with him again. His cancer had come back and was all through him. Cal listened to Elva who recited everything she knew about Whalen’s condition, reading it off a list she had made in a meeting with the doctor. She gave Cal a number at the hospital and he wrote it down.
Backland Graces; Four Short Novels Page 9
