Loose Ends

by Neal Bowers

  Aunt Goldie nudged turnip greens, beef roast, gravy, and green beans onto his crowded plate. Meals at her house were modeled on excess—too much of everything, including at least three different kinds of potatoes—stewed, mashed, and fried.

  Some of the second cousins carried off more helpings of the greens and crowders from the table, even though they had already eaten. The adults pulled up chairs and studied Davis as he broke off small pieces of his corn bread.

  “How was your trip?” asked Gaylon, lifting a glass of iced tea.

  His mouth full, Davis could only nod and make an “unnh” sound. After swallowing, he said, “I hate flying, though. Always seem to sit next to someone with a big tale to tell.”

  The dining room opened directly onto the living room, and Davis could see still other cousins and their children on the sofa and chairs. Except for the smallest, who were playing with a toy dump truck and plastic soldiers on the carpet, everyone looked expectantly at him, as if he might offer up a revelation or confession. Feeling his throat tighten under the scrutiny, he put down his fork and said, “I can’t eat another bite.”

  “But you hardly ate nothing,” protested Aunt Goldie. “You always used to like my cooking.”

  Davis considered telling her that he shouldn’t be eating anything without knowing his blood sugar level and taking insulin. But as if reading his mind, Aunt Goldie slid a piece of pecan pie toward him, saying, “I know you ain’t supposed to eat sweets, but just have a little bitty taste.”

  Knowing resistance would make things worse, Davis took a bite and rolled his eyes upward in pretend pleasure when he felt the cold tines of the fork on his tongue. Silently, he calculated the insulin he would need to counteract the dense sweetness.

  “Coffee?” someone asked from the kitchen, but Davis flagged her off with his left hand while wiping his mouth with the napkin in his right.

  “Oughta come home more often,” chided Uncle Oscar, “get to know these cousins a yours a little better.”

  Davis scooted his chair away from the table, ignoring him. Aunt Goldie and the women cleared away the bowls and put foil over the pie. When Davis offered to help, they shushed him into the living room where a grubby toddler wobbled up with candy extended in the palm of his hand and pressed the chocolate goo into the leg of Davis’s pants, saying, “Me got, galala.”

  “Cody!” yelled one of his cousins. “Now look what you done to the man’s pretty pants. You bad boy! Bad, bad boy! Tell him you’re sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Davis said with a clear tone of insincerity. “It’ll wash out,” but he couldn’t imagine how. He had brought very little to wear and needed these trousers.

  Then came Aunt Goldie with a damp cloth and a bottle of dish detergent. She knelt and rubbed hard at the stain while Davis looked down into her teased, thinning hair. The imprint of the tiny palm began to fade, but the stain was twice its original size.

  Davis sat down next to Gaylon, who had moved from the kitchen to the sofa. Trying to make small talk, Davis asked, “What kind of car do you have?”

  “Ain’t a car; it’s a truck,” Gaylon replied. “A Ford. Parked right in fronta the house.” Gaylon pointed toward the picture window and across the short lawn to a forest-green truck sitting so high on its springs it seemed to be levitating.

  Aunt Goldie plopped down between them and, hanging her arm around Davis’s shoulders, said, “It’s hard, ain’t it, darlin’?”

  Davis shifted slightly to loosen her hug.

  “Don’t forget, I’ve lost my sister,” Goldie said, her voice taking on the dolorous tone of a mourner. “Of course, losing your mama is harder, I know.”

  It was one of Aunt Goldie’s patented explosive devices. Agree with her and she would take offense at having her own grief belittled. Disagree and get the lecture about mothers and sons and filial responsibility.

  “We’re all in a lot of pain,” Davis said, fingering the damp spot on his trouser leg. Aunt Goldie’s response was obliterated by a blare from the television.

  “Sorry,” Uncle Oscar said, “I mashed the sound instead of the channel changer.” He settled back in his recliner and clicked rapidly, creating a montage of car chases, toothpaste, wild animals, game shows, and exercise equipment.

  Aunt Goldie rose and went back into the kitchen, where she and Cody’s mother began washing dishes. Their voices were fractured by the clatter of silverware and pots, but Davis was certain they were talking about him, and he wished he could take Uncle Oscar’s remote control and raise the volume of their conversation.

  At one end of the living room, a reproduction of The Last Supper hung above a table where a dozen wide-eyed figurines were assembled—mostly deer and bunnies—grazing the lace-edged table runner. Directly above the television was a banjo clock, complete with strings, Oscar’s proudest creation. Its filigree hands blurred from a distance, making it impossible to tell the exact time. And photographs hung everywhere else, most of them black-and-white Olan Mills portraits taken in hotel rooms in the early sixties, backdrops of mountains and meadows. Davis studied one of Goldie and Oscar seated shoulder to shoulder like strangers on a bus.

  “So why ain’t you married?” Gaylon asked, rubbing the knees of his jeans, his question coming from somewhere near the outer perimeter of the known universe.

  Clearing his throat, Davis responded, “I was once.”

  “What happened?” Gaylon persisted.

  “Quit your prying, boy,” called Aunt Goldie, demonstrating her remarkable hearing and her unconscious command of the ironic. No one meddled more in other people’s lives than Aunt Goldie.

  “Sorry.” Gaylon sulked as he slid a little further toward his end of the sofa and propped his right leg on his left knee, clasping his foot with both hands and pulling it toward him as if he were preparing to perform a contortionist’s trick.

  “That’s okay,” Davis reassured him. “I got divorced because things just didn’t work out.”

  That was an understatement. He had known before the ceremony, before he showed up one evening with a grin on his face and an engagement ring in his pocket, that they would never make it together. HOMETOWN BOY AND GIRL GET MARRIED. That could have been the newspaper headline, with the subhead LOCALS GIVE POOR ODDS FOR COUPLE. They had had nothing in common except the need to be married. Before the first year was up, they had run out of things to say to each other and communicated in a nonverbal code. Davis would hold up the car keys and jingle them as he turned the doorknob, and Linda would swivel from the television long enough to nod, her signal that she knew he was going somewhere but she didn’t care where.

  Gaylon was clearly brooding, but he brightened when Davis punched him on the arm and said, “Don’t worry, cuz. I don’t mind. Let’s look at that truck of yours.”

  Davis had no real interest in the vehicle but needed to get outside, to clear his head of the babble. Gaylon lifted the hood, licked his finger, and rubbed at a smudge on one of the chrome valve covers. Not knowing what to say, Davis exclaimed, “Pretty neat,” then tried to cover his ignorance and lack of interest by asking a question. “How fast have you run her?”

  Gaylon shuffled his feet in the gravel. “I’m a pretty safe driver.”

  “Yeah, but just between you and me, what have you seen on the speedometer?”

  “Seen the needle buried.”

  “Whatta you figure—one-twenty, one-twenty-five?”

  “Felt more like one-fifty. Tires plain floated over low places in the road.”

  Davis was quiet, recalling his own teenage recklessness. Afraid of nothing. Definitely not of death. He closed his eyes and remembered how it was, the wind ripping past, the pavement coming up faster than film rewinding. “What’d it feel like?” he asked Gaylon.

  “Didn’t feel like nothin’.”

  “Was it fun?”

  “Just somethin’ to do. You know.”

  Davis definitely knew the bravado, the breathlessness as the car slowed down and came back into
control, the weakness in his arms and knees. “Let’s take her out.”

  “You mean now?”

  “Sure, why not? Let’s see what she’ll do.”

  “Uh, I don’t know if we should.”

  “It’s your truck, isn’t it? Just tell your mama you and I are gonna take a spin.”

  When Gaylon came back, Davis was sitting behind the wheel, his hand extended for the keys. Gaylon looked uncertain but dropped them into Davis’s palm. “Square one’s the ignition,” he said.

  “Still good pavement out in the direction of Trenton?” Davis asked, jerking away from the curb, unused to a clutch and manual shift. He took Gaylon’s silence as assent and headed north into Kentucky. When they got beyond the franchises and bunched traffic, he increased the speed. Eighty in no time. Gaylon was tipped so he could see the speedometer but kept glancing up through the windshield.

  “Good, straight stretch up here somewhere,” Davis said, pressing harder on the accelerator. One hundred. One-ten. When the needle disappeared beyond the one-twenty mark, he shouted to Gaylon, “Close your eyes.”

  “What?” Gaylon’s voice was tight with fear.

  “Close your eyes. I’m closing mine.”

  “You crazy?” Gaylon sat upright in his seat and seemed about to pray. Davis closed his eyes and held the wheel firm, feeling the hard vibration along his arms and down his spine. The speed was purified by the absence of vision, a heart-rush into the blackout, a diabetic plunge without the loss of consciousness.

  “Whee-ha!” screamed Davis, opening his eyes just in time to see Gaylon reaching for the wheel. “Don’t do that! You’ll jerk us off the road!”

  Gaylon was panting, and his legs were drawn up against the seat. “Stop! Stop!” he yelled, until Davis slowed and pulled onto the shoulder. While the truck was still rolling, Gaylon jumped out, bounded the ditch, and fell forward onto the embankment. Rolling over, he sat up, both hands gripping the earth at his sides, his eyes fixed on Davis, the look of the blind in them.

  “First time you’ve gone that fast, isn’t it?” Davis asked from the opposite side of the ditch. Gaylon gulped, trying to get enough air. “Isn’t it?” Still no answer. “First rule of lying,” Davis said, leaping the ditch and standing over Gaylon, “is never tell a lie that can be challenged on the spot. Doesn’t matter if people think you might be lying, just don’t give them a chance to prove you are.”

  “You’re fucking crazy, man,” Gaylon said, his voice small and tense.

  Davis sat down in the weeds beside him. “Second rule is build a lie partly on the truth, or else make it so big and wild it’s obviously a lie, but one everyone wants to believe.”

  “Why are you telling me this shit? Give me the keys, man. I don’t have to take this shit.”

  “Gaylon, ‘shit’ is not the original cosmic word.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is weird.”

  “Listen. I’m trying to let you in on something most people never figure out. Life is built on lies. Memory is a lie, so the past is a lie. You understand?”

  Gaylon picked sticktights from his socks and said, “That’s stupid. If something happens, it happens.”

  “Yes, but how you remember it will be different from the way anybody else remembers it. Memory bends things. Haven’t you ever had an argument with someone over something you both saw or did? You have one version and the other guy has another?”

  “Sure, but that don’t change what happened.”

  “No? Well, answer a simple question. Did I close my eyes at a hundred and twenty miles an hour?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You were there. I know you didn’t close yours, so you must have noticed what I was doing. Did I close them?”

  “Yeah, okay, you closed them.”

  “For how long?”

  “This is stupid, man. How’m I supposed to know?”

  “You’re supposed to know because you were there, on that front seat with me. How long?”

  When Gaylon refused to answer, Davis said, “Must have had ’em clenched tight for at least fifteen seconds, maybe twenty.”

  “No way!”

  “But you said you didn’t know.”

  “I know nobody could hold a truck on the road for that long with his eyes closed.”

  “I did. And do you know what it felt like? Like holding your breath underwater. Can you prove I didn’t do it?”

  “Let’s go back. Gimme the keys.”

  Davis jumped the ditch and then tossed the keys to Gaylon as he stood up, testing his knees. Then, while Gaylon watched, Davis took a quarter from his pocket and placed it on the shoulder of the road.

  “What’d you do that for?”

  “Ever find a quarter or a dime?”

  “Sure, who hasn’t?”

  “Made you feel lucky, didn’t it? Made you sure whatever had been wrong was about to change. Well, I drop coins so people can find them and get that rush. Makes me feel good.”

  “That’s a lie, ain’t it?”

  “You just saw me drop a quarter here for the next hitchhiker to find, and I told you why I did it. Can you prove I’m lying?”

  On the way back, Gaylon said nothing and kept well within the speed limit. He looked straight ahead and, when parked in front of his grandparents’ house, got out and walked off down the street. Davis went inside.

  “Have a nice drive?” asked one of the cousins.

  “Sure did. Beautiful day to take in the countryside.”

  “Where’s Gaylon?” someone asked.

  “I think he’s fiddling around with his truck. You know how teenage boys are.” Popping around the corner into the kitchen, where his aunt sat at a small table drinking coffee with her oldest daughter, Davis said, “Gotta go. Thanks for the meal.” Treena, her name was Treena, Gaylon’s mother. “Good to see you, Treena,” he said, glad to have remembered in time. Then he spun and was out the front door before Goldie could stall him, but he heard her wail of complaint mixed with the blare of the television. Neither roused Oscar from his sleep.

  When he got into the car, Davis had no destination in mind but found himself driving to Greenwood Cemetery, his father’s final resting place. Known at one time as a great spot for lovers to park, Greenwood now had a bold sign at the entrance—CLOSED AT SUNDOWN—and a heavy chain ready to join the low stone pillars of the gate. Davis steered under maples and oaks, past ancient grave markers, and saluted the ornate Confederate monument as he wound by on his way to the newer section where the stones were flush with the ground for easy mowing.

  Rolling to a stop, he could hear the whir of pinwheels on the mound of a child. At the spot where his father was buried, a yellow backhoe sat, its scoop knuckling the grass. As he walked toward it, he realized his mother’s grave had already been dug, red earth piled at one end of a rectangular hole. The late-afternoon sunlight cast an angular shadow across the opening, a door ajar. Davis sat and dangled his feet in the grave, feeling the cool air around his ankles. “Even cooler at the bottom,” he thought, easing himself over the ragged edge, surprised by the distance of the drop. Landing awkwardly, he struck his shoulder on one of the earthen sides but kept his balance and remained standing. Fully extending his arms above his head, he could see the sunlight on his hands and wrists. The rest of him was in shadow, and when he lowered his arms, he felt his heart quicken and noticed how the earth deadened the sound of his breath.

  “So this is where Mama will spend eternity,” he said, his voice sounding stoppered and strange.

  Lying down to feel the exact position she would be in, Davis held himself as still as possible and studied the slab of blue above him, trying to think of nothing. But he was thinking of his father, not six feet under but inches to his right, a thin wall of dirt between them. “Hello, Dad,” he said, placing a hand on the vertical wall, only it wasn’t earth or stone he felt. It was something else—fabric, stiff as canvas. Afraid to move, he left his hand there, thinking about the coffi
n and the impossibility of touching his father. “Can’t be. Cannot be.” And as he insisted that he couldn’t be doing what he was doing, he gripped the cloth and pulled something through the earth. At first it seemed like a practical joke, bones in a sleeve. Death’s hand extended in greeting. A human arm. His father’s arm. Then Davis was on his feet, trying to climb out of the grave, the earth crumbling down around him, the light completely gone now from the rim of the opening. But the harder he climbed, the less progress he made, a hoarse sound coming now from his own throat, coming with each breath, the whoosh of a blade, and he could feel the earth in his hair, under his nails; he could taste it, and it fell into his lashes and blinked his eyes, and he fell back down.

  From somewhere, he heard a whistle, a distant, sliding note, and he knew someone was calling a dog among the headstones. Knowing this, he began to breathe with less effort and slumped into a crouch, forced himself to imagine the dog nosing his way among the graves, flushing robins and rabbits. Holding the dog in mind, he began to climb, considering its name as he jabbed his toes into the grave wall for footing. “Jack or Buck or Princess,” he thought, “maybe Lady or Lucy,” and then he rolled himself over the rim and onto the swooning sod of his father’s grave. The sky was still bright, and the sunlight yellowed the treetops all around, but the shadow-tide had risen and he could almost hear, as he lay on the darkening grass, the night coming in like a huge breaker.

  CHAPTER 6

  __________

  FINDING ANN LOUISE’S house was harder than Davis imagined. Too many new subdivisions. Dozens of dead-end streets with circular turnarounds. And he wasn’t sure he would recognize the place in the dark. Embarrassing to admit he was lost in his own hometown, so when a random turn placed him on one of the old thoroughfares, he was relieved. At least he could go home and phone Ann Louise. She was a cop. She would know where to begin. “The bastards at Berkley’s!” Davis thought of them switching coffins at graveside after everyone had left, putting his father in a plain box or maybe just dumping him into the hole.