Bottomland: Based on the Murder of Rosa Mary Dean in Franklin, Tennessee

by Trey Holt

  He’s a fucking nut, Lucky would tell me by this point. The son of a bitch has never in his life had to do anything, because Mother and Daddy didn’t make him do anything because they always needed to protect him. You know why I think they did that: I think it was because Mother had a brother who was the same way, crazy as a shithouse rat…and he didn’t come to no good end. S’posedly he died in some crazyhouse somewhere because he couldn’t live at home no more. If he wasn’t already crazy, then one of them places would’ve done it to him. I didn’t know the first thing about him till he died and we had to go to the funeral. Of course they didn’t take Percy, because they tried to protect him from everything.

  Some of us didn’t have the luxury of sittin’up in a room in a farmhouse all day pourin’through books that you spend all the day before searchin’for at the library. Did you know that they would make me take him to the library in Nashville when he couldn’t find the kind’a books he was lookin’for‘round here? Ain’t that shit? Me, workin’by then for a goddam grocery store and helpin’them farm, and takin’him twenty miles in an ole farm truck so he could get some more inf’mation to help escape reality. If we could all be so lucky to be so fuckin’crazy!

  Your daddy’s too hard on Percy. He thinks that he can just be different. Be normal. He’s the same way with hisself, I guess. He can’t tolerate weakness in hisself. I know it’s the same with you. He can’t tolerate it in you either. I think that’s why he pushed you so hard to play football and baseball. It shows you’re strong. Little but strong. Just like him. He’s a symbol of strength in our town, I guess, just like Mr. Oscar Garrett. You know, he tells me that one day, when Mr. Oscar retires, that he’s likely to take his place. Wouldn’t that be somethin’? Your daddy as the Police Chief? I guess in some ways things couldn’t have turned out much better for us: you at the Academy, your Daddy the Chief of Police. We’ve got a nice brick house, a television, a nice car. You’ve got good friends, Jean seems happy. She doesn’t seem to be havin’trouble in school anymore. You’ve got a motorcycle now and don’t have to ride your bicycle anymore.

  He kind’a gives me the creeps sometimes. First of all, he’s never been baptized, not even like the Methodists. No sprinkling or nothing. You know, he even says that he doesn’t even believe in God. Bullshit, I tell her. Of all people, I can argue with her. Over anything. He does so say he doesn’t believe in God. No, what he says, I tell her, is that he doesn’t believe in God the same way they do at the Church of Christ. Then he’s going to hell, she says. Stupid bitch. Fuck the Church of Christ, I tell her. Brother Brown says you go to hell for saying things like that. Yeah? He says you’re goin’to hell for everything. He says you’re goin’to hell if you wear shorts. You wear shorts, so I guess I’ll see ya there. I hope my room’s a long way away from yours. No, seriously, does he believe in God? she asks. He says he believes in a spirit that guides everything. I think that’s in his“planned nature of things.” His what? Never mind.

  Well, I think we should ask Brother Brown to pray for him. Yeah? Well, I tell ya what, I wouldn’t want to be your ass if Lucky finds out you’re makin’our business public down at Fourth Avenue Church of Christ. Yeah, why don’t you get him put on the prayer list on Easter or Christmas when Lucky gives in and goes to church with Mama. That way he won’t even have to hear it second-hand. He can just hear it and beat your ass right after church.

  I wish sometimes you’d call him something besides Lucky. And I wish sometimes you’d just shut up. And by the way, Daddy has never laid a hand on me. No shit? I say. I wish I could say the same. You’re the only one in the family who can say that. You know that, don’t ya? What d’you mean? she asks. I mean, you’re the only one he’s never hit. He’s never hit you, she says. You live in make-believe, don’t ya? I tell her. It must be nice to create your own world and live there. Make it just what you want. It must be twice as nice to be such an asshole, she says. The pout takes over her whole face, contorting it where it looks like her lips might fall off.

  I’m still gonna ask Brother Brown to offer a prayer for Uncle Percy, she says, her heart now pierced.

  You do that. You just do that.

  And I’ll have him say one for you.

  I laugh. Don’t even dignify the statement with a response.

  Lucky pulls in and exist his own car, his face drooping in such a way that he looks like Jean when she pouts. Tired, I guess. Drunk. Some combination of the two. He doesn’t even notice that I’m stretched out across the front seat of his car because I don’t feel able to climb the porch post.I don’t even understand the game, even after all the games I oversaw when he’d put me in the front door of the filling station to watch for Mr. Oscar Garrett to make sure that he didn’t catch him playing. I laugh to myself, regardless of what has happened, somehow entertained with this different plane I’ve inhabited over the last couple of hours.

  I’m not sure if I’m asleep and dreaming, or awake. If what happened really happened. If Tully and I really did run his grandfather’s car off into the brush and bushes just west of the river and then walk home with two bottles of bootleg whiskey under our arm, or whether I’ve imagined it. Whether I left Van and Tully in the bushes at the edge of Van’s yard to drink down what was left after Tully’d said he worry about the goddam car in the morning. I know my stomach feels like somebody’s poured acid in it. That’s probably why Lucky’s told me not to drink shine. Says that’s the only advantage to store-bought liquor. It’s regulated. Coming out of Peytonsville or North Alabama, the only regulation’s“don’t let the wrong lawman catch ya.” I figure the way my gut’s feeling right now, that the last batch must have been bad, rotten…something. Lucky says this is why there won’t ever be another prohibition.

  Sweat breaks out on my forehead. My stomach feels like it might explode, tighten itself in a ball and throw itself from my body. It does. Or at least its contents do. I sit back in the car where I’ve found my rest, my temporary sanctuary. Ipull breath into my chest, breathe out when my lungs get near full, and hope that the process does not repeat itself.

  + + +

  I loved spring mornings on the Indian. The rumble of the pipe, the smell of the exhaust meeting the air, still cool but not cold. Only one out of every fifteen or twenty houses having somebody up. The world still asleep, still mine to make into what I wanted. An occasional dog or cat crossing the road, trolling for food. The sound blocked out everything. No one could reach me that I didn’t want to.

  Still feeling like my head might explode from the night before, my ride hadn’t been quite as good as usual. I swore again that I’d never drink anymore of that stuff. I could just picture, had I drunk much more, them having to take me to Nashville to General Hospital and pump my stomach. I wondered how Tully and Van felt this morning. If the one swig that Darlene had finally broken down and taken had made her sick. Maybe it was the just the second and third bottles that were the bad batch. To try to make myself feel better, I thought on the fact that school would be out in another month. Tully and Van and I would go to the Willow Plunge almost every day. We’d cruise Columbia, the next big town south of us, at night.

  And then she was in my head. Her eyes. Her laugh. Still echoing in my memory, like the call of an angel across a canyon at sunrise. Like beauty had its own voice. Hers. I looked into her house as I passed it. One light in the back; she had told me that her father, Edward, got up early. He was a carpenter. Poor as dirt. I thought about what Van had told me about poor girls; how he had made fun of their house. How he had never worked a job in his life except for the time when he was twelve that he got jealous of me having a paper route and had Scoot get him on at the paper office, only to less than a week later. The bicycle was making his legs sore. His“studies”were suffering, is what Evelyn told my mother. I thought about how Scoot somehow wrangled him into the Academy after I’d gotten a scholarship. He had told me he was on one, but I knew enough about football to know that nobody would give him anything to play it.

&
nbsp; Where Adams Street met South Margin was the last turn I’d make after the route was done. Having worked my way west, then back south, I’d swing through that intersection like I’d been shot out of a cannon. Lay the bike down. Feel the bottom of my boot go over the pavement like it was sliding on gray silk. Feel the back tire push as the engine began to toil and the front tire direct where the bike went over the next split second and then shoot across Adams toward the paper office to take any extra papers I had back.

  At first, I didn’t recognize the car pulled off on the shoulder of Adams Street, half on the sidewalk. Unless he had Percy in there with him, it was extremely uncommon to see him in the black Ford. It sat at home under the shed more than it was out. Jean drove it more than anybody besides Lucky himself. But there the son of a bitch was. Smoking a cigarette. His Police Uniform already on. That goddam hat sitting cock-eyed on his head like it most always did.

  I had to force my eyes to meet his as I pulled the Indian to the curb and got off. Usually we at least had a feigned a smile for each other, one that hid his rage, my bitterness. As I approached him, he propped his arms on the top of the window of his car door, swung open. He raised his Lucky Strike to his mouth and took a draw. The displeasure on his face was evident, there in the half-light of the coming day and the street light still on a half a block away. Dillard Eugene Lucky Fucking Hall. When the liquor hit him just right and he’d had a good day, that’s what he called himself sometimes. To Sammy Samuels, Paul Chester Sr., John Harvey.

  “Is somethin’wrong?” I asked him.

  “You tell me,”he said.

  “Sir?” I said. I stopped ten feet from him.

  “You come here and tell me,”he said.

  It began to come back to me. Laying in the seat. My resting on the door…when I was afraid I was too drunk to go in.

  I moved half the distance between him and myself. Stopped.

  “You can’t see nothin’from over there,”he said.“You gotta come over here for me to show ya.”

  I took the three or four steps between us. Sucked my lungs full of air, breathed out real slow, deliberate. Now I stood on the other side of the door, so close to him that I could smell his breath, the Lucky’s. The cheap aftershave he wore. Or maybe it was alcohol working its way out his pores from the night before. He moved to his left a foot or so and motioned for me to look on the farside of the car, where there were two footprints on the door from the worn-out wingtips.

  “What is that?” he asked.“Bend down here…look. What is that?”

  I tried to bend enough that I could see directly through the window, but because of the light and the glare and the darkness, I couldn’t.

  “No sir,”he said,“come over here so you can get a good look…a good smell.”

  He took me by the collar and pulled me to his side of the door, forced my head into the middle of the front bench seat. I could smell the stench as soon as my nose entered the interior of the car. What had happened, what the alcohol had helped erase in the few moments of heaven it gave me, began to come back to me like the sky breaking open and pouring drops the size of marbles.

  “It’s footprints,”I said, pulling at my collar, pulling for my breath.

  He forced my head down closer to the seat, used his free hand to grab my chin and turn my head toward the floorboard.

  “No, godammit. That!”

  I felt his knee center itself right above my tailbone, pressing. He pulled me back with the hand in my collar. It felt like my abdomen might rip, my guts pop out. Like they had the night before, only not out my mouth this time.

  “You know,”he told me, like he was carrying on casual conversation,“when I got that call this mornin’about car off in the weeds, it didn’t even hit me that it had somethin’to with the fact that my car stunk so goddam bad.”

  I waited for him to break his hold on me, obviously one he’d learned in some of his police training. Tried to let the memories come as they did. Tried to remember what we’d done. How what he talked about had happened. I remembered seeing his car, the squad car, that is, knowing that I should stay outside awhile while the drunkenness ran out of me. Threw itself out of me. I recalled making my way into his car, believing in that impaired moment that was the safest place to be. Smelling her again, over his funky aftershave, when I lay down in the godforsaken seat.

  “What is that in the floor?” he asked, like perhaps he was interrogating me.“What is it?”

  Not able to come up with a lie quick enough, it seemed I had no other recourse but the truth. At least as I could remember it.“It’s vomit,”I told him.

  “And how’d that get in here?”

  Before I could answer, he’s asked me if I knew anything about Tully’s grandaddy’s car. If that had anything to do with it.

  The images hadn’t settled, hadn’t had enough time to simmer and come together to make sense of the whole of what had happened.“I’ll clean it up,”I said.“My back…my back. It feels like you’re breakin’it.”

  “It may feel like it…but I ain’t gonna break your back. I been doin’this when I had to for years.”

  He forced my head into the floorboard.“I ought’a make you eat it. I ought’a kick your ass all the way back home for what y’all did to Mr. Shafer’s car.“

  I had closed my eyes and began to brace for the worst. Nobody was going to stop him, even if someone did see it, which was unlikely. Just somebody else Lucky was giving a hard time during an arrest. It’s what kept Franklin safe.

  “Get out’a the fuckin’car,”he said, throwing me to the sidewalk.

  Even though I didn’t often pray, I prayed nobody from the paper office came. The embarrassment seemed to be so much worse than the physical pain.

  “You better get home and get some shit to clean this up with?”

  “Can I take my papers back to the office first?” I asked him, picking myself up.

  “You tell me,”he said, his foot hitting me half in the hip, the rest on my ass.“Which would get it done quicker?”

  “I’ll take my papers to the office later,”I told him.

  “Goddam straight,”he said.“After you’ve took yourself down to Mr. Shafer’s and told him you’re sorry. Lousy and sorry.”

  I started toward the Indian. Got maybe three steps.

  “No…hell no. You’re gonna walk home.” He drew back his foot, like he was going to kick me again. In the front if I didn’t turn my ass to him. I turned. His foot landed just below my butt.“Go.”

  I began to walk…watch my feet as they took step after step away from him, my boots kicking the sidewalk.

  Another kick in the ass.

  “Go!”

  “I ain’t gonna leave my motorcycle,”I told him, stopping, still not looking at him.

  “What?” he said.

  “I’m not gonna leave the Indian,”I said.

  “Ain’t nobody gonna bother your fuckin’motorcycle.”

  “I don’t care,”I told him.“I ain’t leavin’it.”

  He studied me for a moment, the look on my face. He was breathing hard, his mouth open to draw in air. He turned and took a few steps toward my motorcycle. I figured he was going to kick it over, maybe push it down the hill on Adams Street. He kicked the ground.

  “What’d you do that for?” he said.“I lent you the goddam car so you could have a good time.”

  My breathlessness was just coming to me, like I could let myself feel it only now that the crisis seemed to be passing. I pulled air in and pushed it out my open mouth, mirroring Lucky. I watched his eyes to see if the next wave would come. I reached and wiped at my knee, my blue jeans torn open over a bloody spot where I had hit the sidewalk.

  “I’ve told ya that if you ever drank too much then I’d come get ya,”he said, his hands on hisknees. He wanted more air than he could get, I could tell.

  I thought for a moment about landing my foot in his face. Pictured his teeth breaking, his lip splitting. But he couldn’t breathe.

  �
�Go—on,”he said,“take—your—papers…to the—office. I’ll take—the car—home…You can get—it—later…Just clean it—up—when you—get in—from school.”

  I nodded at him.“Yessir.” Didn’t have the heart to tell him that there was no school today.

  “You better get them papers…back to the office,”he said.

  “Yessir, I prob’ly should,”I told him.

  He pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow. He shook his head and looked around like he was trying to remember why exactly he was here on the sidewalk a mile from our house at six o’clock on a Saturday morning. His breath was coming to him again now. In and out easier, his chest rising and falling with less effort

  “You ain’t got—school today, do—ya?”

  I had started back toward the Indian. I looked back at him.“No sir…I thought I might go....” I started not to finish, but it came out on its own.” …to Nashville, though.”

  “Hell,”he said,“don’t worry about it then. If you hadn’t got to it later in the day, I can do it.”

  “I’ll come home and do it after I go to the paper office,”I said.

  “It ain’t nothin’if you don’t,”he said.

  I nodded and started my motorcycle. I left Lucky standing there in the half-light of daybreak, hands still on his knees as he tried to get more air than he could,the darkness beginning to erode like the long rotting underpins of our relationship.

  Chapter Twelve

  What is death but movement of our spirit into the next realm of existence? Percy once asked me. It was the summer that he first came to live with us part of the time, the summer that I turned nine and Jean got her own room. What is it but a kind of transition? Only someone who’s foolish runs from something they cannot avoid.