Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

by Pancake, Breece D'J

  “Don’t ya wanta help?” he said, hooking his arm around her waist and grinning as he kissed her neck. He smelled of Aqua Velva, but his chin was rough.

  “You missed a spot,” she said, brushing her hand across his face and pushing away. He went into the house.

  Jackie goaded “Pride and Promise” into the straight-bed truck, tied him, and latched the gate. Reva watched him hang his chuckled head as he jogged to the barn, knock-kneed. She wondered if he had a bottle hidden there.

  The fog was gone, and she could see the hills beyond the river—hills that soon gave way to the plains of Ohio. On the eastern shore, nearly hidden in the vines and weeds, stood the ship-lapped wooden lockhouse where her grandfather once worked. Even as it stood empty in their youth, it had been her playhouse or Clinton’s fort. By its concrete foundation, they dug for the bones of a body their grandfather said he had fished from the river as a boy, but never found them. Up and down the shore, paths were worn slick in the black river-clay. On the smooth gray bark of a water maple, its roots breaking the abutment of a lock gate, Clinton had carved their parents’ initials on the cold December Friday the bridge collapsed.

  A small dusty breeze moved across the porch, and Reva shivered in its heat, closing her eyes to tears from staring too long. A tiny pain screwed into her back, and she tried to hate against being left here, alone. She tried to blame Clinton, her parents, even the river, but opened her eyes to the white knuckles of her tiny fist.

  The bull stomped indifferently in the truck bed, and the early sun warmed the locust into buzzing, but the good air had gone with the fog. When she saw Bill’s new Buick turn off the highway, she got up heavily and went inside.

  * * *

  “She stares ’bout all the time,” Tyler said, watching the bull, waiting for his brother’s answer.

  The brother sat slightly higher on the banister, smoking. The locust buzz only thickened the air, and the dusty leaves of the water-maple hills hung limp green, showing no flags of wind. Bill yawned.

  Tyler looked up at his brother. “I figgered I’d give her a baby to keep her mind offa Clint. Boy, she was ripe the day he left. Now she just misses that sassy talk of his.”

  Bill still said nothing, and Tyler got up to stand beside his brother. Bill scratched at Tyler’s worry.

  “Aw shit, T., quit worryin’ like some ol’ woman. You got a farm to work. Worry ’bout that.”

  “Sure ’nough there. Weren’t for that tobacca yonder, I’d be up shit creek.”

  Reva stood in the hallway, her index finger tracing the serrated edge of a rose-colored arrowhead. Clinton had called it a Shawnee war-point, and gave it center honor because it was her favorite. Upstairs the toilet flushed, and she heard her sister-in-law humming as she primped. She went out.

  “Ready?” Tyler said, springing off the steps.

  “Where’s Carlene?” Bill asked.

  “In the john, I have an idee,” she said, snapping her purse closed.

  “Wife’s got a straight pipe,” Bill said to his brother.

  “Lookee there,” Reva said, pointing to where a mole was tunneling in the yard. Tyler walked out and poised his heel over the moving earth.

  “Tyler, that mole ain’t botherin’ us,” she said, bored with her husband’s grin.

  “I know it,” he said, dropping down at the head of the tunnel. “Dug his own grave.”

  “I heard tell ever’thin’s poison on dog days,” said Bill.

  Reva shot him a cross look.

  “What’s poison?” said Carlene, coming to the porch.

  “Nothin’.” Reva brushed her hair back, then walked down the steps toward the Buick.

  Jackie leaned against the truck, his big head lolling back on the sideboards. “Purty day,” he said as Reva passed, and she nodded, smiling, knowing any sort of day was good for Jackie. Waiting in the car’s building heat made the throb in her forehead bloom back between her ears. She stared at the sycamores and water maples along the riverbank. Secret totems hung there as gifts to the ghost-trees of her parents: a necklace from Reva, a charmed dog-bone from Clinton, bits of glass on fishing line to make the trees glitter in the winter sun. Her head cleared, and she heard the others coming to the car, whispering. Only Tyler’s voice came up low from within him, “… but they been dead a long time.”

  In the silence of the car, Carlene felt bad about her sister-in-law’s spells. She remembered Grandfather Cutter standing for weeks in the cold wind on the riverbank, watching the cars come up, water spewing from the lips of their torn metal. Only when rumor of a Ford truck met him would he move closer, watching. When his son’s finally came up empty, he only walked to the truck where his grandchildren sat, staring at the masses of twisted steel.

  The smooth blacktop was interrupted suddenly by a four-mile section of concrete slabs. The car jolted over each one as it passed, and Tyler slowed down, motioning Jackie to back off his tail.

  “Damn idiot,” he said, then, glancing into the mirror to where Bill sat behind him, “You seen Layman’s bull, ‘Rangoon’?”

  “Sounds more like a disease,” Bill chuckled.

  “Probably got it in ’Nam.”

  “The name or the disease?” Reva grinned wickedly. No one laughed.

  “I’ll lay odds he made the papers on it,” Tyler continued. “Good-looker without a line.”

  “Naw,” Bill drawled, “Layman ain’t that smart.”

  Carlene leaned forward to Reva. “I can’t wait till ya hear from the doc. Scared?”

  “Just mad,” she said for Tyler’s ears.

  “Want a boy or a girl?” Carlene’s blue eyes widened with her question.

  “Don’t matter. Just let it be till I know for sure.”

  Tyler took her hand, and she could feel the worry in his cold fingers. The ride was making her carsick, and she closed her eyes thinking Clinton might never come back after the baby was born.

  “New Angus in the county,” she heard Bill say, and felt Tyler’s fingers flex.

  “Whose?”

  “Feller name of Jordan or Jergan—I forget, but the bull’s called ‘Imperial Sun’—S-u-n. All the way from Virginia.”

  “Good stock?”

  “You couldn’t afford the fee.”

  Carlene leaned up again. “What you gonna call the baby?”

  “ ‘Imperial Sun,’ ” Reva’s voice was hollow.

  “Ain’t neither,” Tyler tried to joke. “Gonna call him a’ter ol’ Jeff D. Cutter. Ain’t that so, Reva?”

  “Sure, Big T.”

  “Who won last year?” Tyler looked at Bill’s image, and waved Jackie back again.

  “You know,” Bill said, “I don’t rightly recall.”

  * * *

  The FFA boy shifted his tobacco chew as he handed Reva her ham sandwich, smiling tightly against the juice in his mouth. With the afternoon sun in his eyes, his squint reminded her of her brother’s, and she smiled back as she paid.

  “I don’t for the life of me know how ya eat that trash,” Carlene sneered.

  Remembering the boy’s smile, Reva took a big bite and pulled a slice of meat from the sandwich. She wagged it at Carlene like a tongue, and her eyes brightened a little. “Good,” Reva said, stuffing the meat into her mouth.

  The sawdust midway was full of the scent of dirt and people and fun, not like the stock pens or stinking the same. As they strolled, they looked at blank faces gazing on their own. The children chased each other with shrieks and laughter. A redheaded boy was pulling mats of cotton candy from his hair while his sister slapped on more, laughing. On the bench, their mother stared into the forest of faces.

  Reva remembered Clinton’s teasings after her wedding. “Gonna get slapped down like a ol’ catfish,” he had said, laughing. Afterward, he had called her Catfish, and always warned her about beef bait and hooks before she went to Tyler’s bed.

  Again they passed the gut-jolting rides, and Carlene was edging toward the Dodg’em cars. “C’mon,” she sa
id.

  “Naw, I been whipped up ’nough for today.”

  “Well, we done it all,” Carlene said, disappointed.

  “Ain’t seen the sideshows nor the animals neither.”

  “Those?” Carlene snarled and squinted, but followed Reva down the midway to the shows.

  Even with the barkers, the sideshow lane seemed quiet, and whispering adults made a drone below the barkers’ calls. They passed the Monster of Calcutta and the Living Torch, listening as the whispers grew into voices when the shows cleared out. The stripper had no barker, needed none.

  “Bill said she smokes a cigar with her you-know-what,” Carlene whispered.

  “Now that there’s a trick,” Reva answered. Her face lightened thinking about it. Her brother would come upriver, not in his boatman’s clothes, but as a naked Indian hiding in the pawpaw tunnels. In the lockhouse she would show him that trick. Her mood shifted back when she thought some whore might already have shown him.

  “Lookee, snakes,” Reva shouted under her breath.

  “Don’t want to pay to see nothin’ I got too much of.”

  “Aw c’mon, Carlene,” Reva said, handing the barker her quarters. Carlene dragged behind, pushing through the crowd to where Reva had squeezed a place by the canvas-lined pit. In the pit among the harmless snakes sat a shoeless old man, his voice running on professionally, but laced with boredom.

  “Now you can all see this is a living thing,” he said, holding up a small snake. Then he dropped it down his throat. Carlene gagged, and the crowd whispered.

  “You sir,” he continued, pointing to a man in bib overalls, “do you see the snake hidden?” and he gaped his toothless jaws. The man in overalls did not look up, but shyly shook his head. The snake eater belched the snake into his hands and freed it to crawl with the others. Whispers rolled through the tent, but Reva followed Carlene outside. She felt sorry for Tyler and his mole-killing foot, but knew it would always be that way with him.

  “I’m goin’ back to the yards,” Carlene said. “This here’s makin’ me sick.”

  “Well, lookee there.” Reva pointed to a chicken-wire cage where two spider monkeys bucked in their breeding. Another lay on a shelf near the roof, stroking himself, awaiting his turn.

  “I knowed a woman to mark her baby thataway.”

  Reva drew her stare away from the monkeys and leveled off scornfully at Carlene’s blue eyes.

  “Well,” Carlene continued bitterly, “my momma told me all about it. Said the gal was nigh onto seven months, an’ her husband couldn’t drag her away from them monkeys.”

  Reva looked at the female monkey awaiting her new mount. The other male climbed down for his share as the female’s empty face looked back at Reva, blinking.

  “That baby was born lookin’ just like a monkey,” Carlene said, bending herself to talk between Reva and the cage. “Momma swears it’s the mark of the beast, but she’s real partial to that kinda talk.”

  “Where is it now?” Reva asked, as if to seek it out.

  “Died, I think.”

  Both males rested, stretched full-length on the floor of the cage, while the female huddled in the corner, glaring. The wind carried their stench away. Now Reva wanted to go to the lockhouse, wanted to feel the chilly floor against her buttocks and shoulders.

  The pains in her belly were sharp and familiar. The soreness left her tired and empty. “My stomach hurts,” she said to Carlene.

  “That sandwich. I tol’ ya.”

  Tyler took her arm, startling her. “We been all to hell an’ back tryin’ to find ya’ll. You look sick,” he said, watching a cold paleness rise in her cheeks.

  “How’d ol’ Peepee do?” she asked above the grasp of cramps.

  Tyler shook his head.

  “Sorry, T.,” she said, stroking his cheek. It was already rough.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  She leaned her face against his chest, letting him hug her. He smelled sweaty and good, but the scent of roe and livestock clung to his skin.

  “Yeah, T.,” she said, feeling a menstrual slip. She was sorry the rabbit had died for nothing.

  * * *

  As she went down the steps, Reva did not look for the crushed tunnel of the mole. Instead, she made her way through clouds of gnats toward the river as the moon drove the darkness from the bottom. From deep in the grasses where the snakes were waking up, she saw fireflies speckling the sky and thought she caught scent of something moist in the dry air.

  Tyler watched from the porch as his wife passed under the shadows of maples along the riverbank, their foliage making lace of the rising moon across the river. He had lost the prize and the child in the same day, and grew bitter about her spells. “Hey, Jackie,” he called, waiting for the tenant to shuffle out to the yard.

  “Whut?” The tenant almost screamed from in front of his shack.

  “C’mon an’ have a drink.”

  By the moss-softened locks, Reva stared at two moons, one hanging quietly above Ohio, the other broken by the slow current of the river. Mosquitoes buzzed about her ears, taking blood from beneath her tender scalp, but she did not move. Upstream, a deer’s hoof sucked in the soft mud, but Reva kept watching the swimming moon—the same moon she knew Clinton watched with his Cincinnati whore. She felt her belly for the child that had never been, and almost wanted the deed undone, even forgotten.

  Across the river, a tiny fisherman’s-fire danced, and sometimes she thought she could smell its smoke. She stood up, her joints popping from sitting in the dew too long, and traced the carvings in the tree with her cold fingers; felt all that was left of her family: L.C. N.C. ’67.

  Jackie was smiling at the second drink. Tyler made them stronger, laughing at Jackie’s stupid grin.

  “Whut ya gonna call yer kid?” the tenant asked.

  “Ain’t gonna be no kid,” Tyler answered.

  “But I’s of a mind—”

  “You ain’t got no mind. Ain’t gonna be no kid.”

  Jackie looked stupidly at Tyler. The farmer rubbed his forehead, looking for words.

  “She lost her heat,” he finally said, hoping Jackie would understand.

  They heard a low, simpering whine coming from the porch and went out. Reva sat on the steps, rocking back and forth, hugging herself, whining.

  “Goddammit to hell,” Tyler said, seeing the orange blades of fire wave out from the lockhouse.

  “I done it,” Reva said to Jackie, who stood on the step in front of her. She looked up on the porch to her husband. “I done a awful thing, T.”

  “C’mon, git up’ar,” Jackie said, grabbing her arm to help her up. His huge head hid the moon, and, when she cried against him, the fire. He smelled like coal and whiskey.

  THE SCRAPPER

  IN the silence between darkness and light, Skeevy awakened, sick from the dream. He rolled over, feeling his head for bumps. There were only a few, but his bones ached from being hit with chairs and his bloody knuckles stuck to the sheets. The shack was dark and hollow as a cistern, and he heard his voice say, “Bund.”

  The dream had been too real, too much like the real fight with Bund, and he wondered if he had really tried to kill his best friend. His mother begged him to quit boxing when they brought punchy Bund home from the hospital. “Scrap if’n you gotta,” she had said, touching the bandage over Skeevy’s eye, “but don’t you never wear no bandages again. Don’t never hurt nobody again.”

  Trudy mumbled softly in her own dreams, and he slipped from under the covers slowly, trying not to make the springs squeak. He felt empty talking to her, and did not want to be there when she woke up. He dressed and crept to the refrigerator. There was only some rabbit left; still, it was wild meat, and he had to have it.

  Outside, a glow from the east was filtering through the fog and turning the ridge pink. Skeevy knew Purserville was across that hill, but he knew the glow could not be from their lights. He started up the western hill toward Clayton wishing he was farther away
from Hurricane, from Bund.

  As he crested the first knoll, he looked back to the hollow, where he knew Trudy was still sleeping, and far beyond the horizon, where he knew Bund would be sitting on a Coke case in front of the Gulf station begging change, his tongue hanging limp. Skeevy felt his gut skin, and he figured it was just a case of the flux.

  At the strip mine, Skeevy sat on a boulder and ate cold rabbit as he looked down on the roofs of Clayton: the company store, company church, company houses, all shiny with fog-wet tin. He saw a miner steal a length of chain from the machine shop where Skeevy worked during the week, promised himself to report it, and forgot it as quickly. Around the houses, he could see where the wives had planted flowers, but the plants were all dead or dying from the constant shower of coal dust.

  Just outside of town, across the macadam from the Free Will Church, was The Car, a wheelless dining car left behind after the timber played out. The hulk gleamed like a mussel shell in the Sunday sun.

  Skeevy threw his rabbit bones in the brush for the dogs to find, wiped his hands on his jeans, and went down the mountain toward The Car. As he crossed the bottle-cap-strewn pavement of the diner’s lot he looked back to where he had sat. The mountain looked like an apple core in the high sun.

  Inside, the diner still smelled of sweat and blood from the fight the night before. He shoved the slotted windows open and wondered how ten strong men could find room to fight in The Car. He rubbed his knuckles and smiled. He yawned in the doorway while he waited for the coffee-maker, and through the fog saw Trudy’s yellow pantsuit coming down the road.

  “Where you been?” he asked.

  “You’re a’kiddin’ me, Skeevy Kelly.” She came through the lot smiling, and hooked her arm around him. “You don’t show me no respect. Just up an’ leave without a good-mornin’ kiss.”

  “I bet you respect real good. I’d respect you till you couldn’t walk.”

  “You’re a’kiddin’ again. What you want to do today?”

  “Bootleg.”

  “Stop a’kiddin’.”