The Vine That Ate the South

by J. D. Wilkes

  Well, the kids didn’t get far. The cops picked them up and they all got life in prison. But copycats kept the movement going for another year. And there were quite a few, actually. They would hang out in public places, making sure everyone saw their pretentious wardrobe and the slice marks on their arms.

  Luckily, I only had one run-in with them. One afternoon I went to my favorite coffee shop and was surprised to find it had been redecorated in a gothic manner to cater to the vampires. Most of the lights were dimmed and the interior had been painted black. Some mural-work was supposed to resemble the stone walls of a dungeon, but it just looked like a cheap community theater backdrop. Another crappy small-town misinterpretation of a subculture.

  Zit-faced geeks in trench coats lounged on Victorian furniture, reciting bad poetry to one another in fake English accents. A few sat in the back playing chess. It was just so corny I couldn’t believe it. I made the error of scoffing aloud, “Are you kidding me? Vampires? Seriously?”

  The barista was a fellow I had always joked around with before, but he was not amused this time. He just took my order with his eyes in a dead glaze. Was he one of “them” now, or had his new vampire-friendly training just taken hold? He handed me my coffee and I let myself out amidst a barrage of hissing.

  “Whatever,” I said back at them. “I hope you all get laid one day.”

  It was good to be outside. The sun never seemed more refreshing. But as I walked to my car I saw how all four tires had just been slashed.

  It is surreal and mildly upsetting to stand in the middle of their old dominion now.

  HEADHUNTER

  We catch up to a broke down box-truck slumped to the right of the rail bed. The faint sound of calliope music seeps from its bullhorn and warps like a bogged-down tape deck. At first I think it’s a lost ice cream truck, but the panels are painted with a sideshow scene. A blond bikini-girl poses in a jungle, unaware of natives approaching through the foliage. You can tell the artist spent more time laboring over her sexy legs and breasts, because they’re perfectly rendered. But her slightly cross-eyed face is just an afterthought.

  A corn-yellow scroll emblazons above:

  SHRUNKEN HEADS OF THE EQUATOR! EACH A

  VICTIM OF VOODOO! GODLESS PAGANS, WHY?

  “Well, I’ll be,” says Carver. “How’d this get all the way out cheer?” With a crunch of aluminum, the rear panel heaves open like a motorized garage door. Red velvet curtains are revealed in the doorway, and they hang perfectly still. They are fringed in gold like the edges of a fancy flag. After a few pokes from a pair of mystery hands, the curtains part, and a stocky mustachioed man pops out. He looks like a giant toddler in his shorts and nightgown-length JOURNEY ’88 WORLD TOUR t-shirt. The messy red-faced huckster leaps to greet us with nervous energy.

  “Steady, fellows. Does the warden know you’ve escaped?! Ha! I’m just joshing you! What?! Can’t ya take a joke? Gentlemen, I apologize. I’m Colonel Joseph T. Strong from Brownsville, Texas.”

  But before we can even respond…

  “Well, gentlemen, it looks like I’ve taken a wrong turn down the wrong road… which ended up being the wrong shortcut to the wrong damn town altogether! I’m all turned around and my navigational doohickey is on the fritz. Could you two fine sirs tell me how to get to Calvert City?”

  “Well, you’re not far from Calvert,” I reply, “but you are facing the wrong direction.”

  “Yeah,” Carver adds. “If you kin get yer truck pointin’ around the other way, you kin hook back out through the trailhead. I just ripped down the chain, so you orta be able to go up and hang a right.”

  “Much obliged for the directions, but I’m afraid this brings us to my next dilemma. As you can see, my mighty galleon has run ashore. She’s fine on pavement but these old gravel roads are a terror, even though she’s been coast-to-coast twelve times! But you two look young and healthy enough to lend a hand. Would you mind setting me back on solid ground? Would you mind giving me a push?”

  “Only if you let us take a gander at whatcha got in the back there.” Carver nods up with his chin.

  “Want a free tour, do ya? Well, I’ll be happy to show you! You will soon feast your eyes on the terrible fleshen trophies of the heathen tribes of Peru. As you can see from the pulchritudinous panel of my truckside tableau, each severed head is a tragic testament to the perils of paganism! Each one, a witness for Christ! Gentlemen, make haste, heave ho, and the free tour is yours for the taking!”

  Leaning in, I whisper to Carver, “This has got to be the coolest-slash-weirdest thing I’ve ever run into.”

  We push Colonel Strong’s truck around while he stands on the running board, half in the cab and half out, steering with his right hand and holding the door open with his left, hollering, “Mush! Mush!” the whole time.

  “Steady, fellows. Steady as she goes!” With one last heave, the truck is set right and it’s time for our free tour.

  Colonel Strong steps down from the cab, widens his eyes, tiptoes slowly to the back, and motions with his index finger. It lures us in like the wormtongue of a snapping turtle.

  He leaps upon the rusty back bumper to begin his routine, surprisingly graceful for such a compact little slob.

  “Excellent, gentlemen. Excellent. Now for your reward. Who shall be first?”

  Carver seems particularly fired up, so I wave him on with a smile. Up the steps and soon to pierce the darkness. He turns to look back at me but the drapes swallow him like plasma.

  It seems an eternity. I’ve been left here for some time now, with just the white whisper of the leaves and the humming woodnotes of the forest to keep me company. That and the sagging tape of calliope songs. I might be wrong, but it sounds like there’s something else playing beneath the chewed-up circus music. The sound of a crying woman being interrogated, slapped around. The faint impression of a man punching and yelling. It fades in and out beneath the strains of “Waltzing Matilda.”

  Carver exits the curtain at last, rubbing his neck and half-smiling out of politeness.

  “Next!” kids the pitchman. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Not all at once, ladies and gentlemen! Form an orderly queue in a single file!”

  “What’d ya think?” I ask.

  “Pretty cool.” Carver pauses. “I reckon them South Americans didn’t keer much fer you palefaces neither. Or fer one another, fer that matter. Go have a looksee, I reckon.”

  Colonel Strong extends a hand and all at once I am gathered into his realm of mystery. After 30 seconds of utter darkness waiting for the Colonel to find the dimmer switch, the orange wire of a decorative candle-bulb awakens a display of death.

  Thousands of prune-like shrunken heads hang like dried delicacies in an Asian market. I count a dozen to a cord, clustered like strands of garlic. But this ain’t produce. These are people! You can see each of their tiny, horrible faces, like taut zip-lipped little scrotums, displayed so densely that there is literally nowhere to stand without having them touch you.

  Colonel Strong pushes through to the back, heads bobbing in his wake like wind chimes. I follow behind, tucked in a ball, squinting and wincing and spitting tiny hairs from my face. The soft bouncing weight of each leathery cluster sends shivers down my spine.

  He stops at the rear of the room where rows of “pickled punks” are set up on a table. Dozens of jarred human fetuses suspend in amber repose. A plankton of flesh floats around the stillborn specimens, their mongoloid eyes awash in urine-colored poison.

  “Planned Parenthood!” he cries. “Where the fetal meets the fatal! Heathen cannibals of modern times! The cruel tradition continues today!”

  “You probably work a lot of churches and revivals, don’t you?”

  “Indeed I do, sir. Indeed I do.”

  “Ever heard of the Reverend Tazewell?”

  “Ever heard of him? Why, I knew him like a brother! We used to work the same dope show back in the 1970s. Before we both found the LORD, that is. It was in 1993 when I heard the WORD
for the first time. But I remember like it was yesterday! It was a South Carolina puppet show. Excuse me, a puppet ministry! And when that fuzzy little muppet told us about how Procter & Gamble gives 100 percent of its profits to the Church of Satan, well, my friend, I walked that aisle lickety-split. I went up and kneeled before that little cardboard castle. And I grabbed that little fella, tears streaming down my face, and begged him to show me the way. Been on the straight and narrow ever since!”

  I explain my connection to Tazewell while admiring some antique maps tacked to a corkboard. The tea-colored charts are marked with little foil stars that indicate the places where headhunting was practiced (and perhaps still is).

  I turn to exit, preparing myself for the sensation of weaving back through a bunch of withered little pouch-heads. And with a deep breath, I duck and aim for the skinny sliver of light between the red curtains. And even though I feel a slight pinch, I am finally free… reunited with Carver and standing outside on the Old Spur Line.

  After a few more words of pretension, the Colonel bids us “adieu” and we wave good-bye. As he peels out, I imagine the G-force swinging his tiny passengers in back. Gravel goes flying and his exhaust cloud looks like a fresh ghost released into writhing oblivion.

  It takes a few minutes for the smoke to settle, but at last it is clear. Clear enough for Carver and me to compare the strange baby-sized bite marks on our necks.

  Chapter Five

  SIN EATER

  He inches along like a wretched Rumpelstiltskin. The little jesus-creature in the corner of my eye. In the corner of my mind.

  He is summoned to his terrible duties, rising up from the floorboards of a woesome woodshed. He greets the dawn with a black-tongued hiss. Morning mist glazes his naked structure. It soaks into the mash of his unnatural makings: a meat-and-lumber frame held together with chicken wire, twine, skin, and nails.

  He is a re-animated ground-crawler. A stickman. A golem. A scourge. A haint. A pariah of the gullies. And this land is his home.

  Fog banks hang in the river bottoms like idling white ironclads. Yonderways, our little critter ambles through the fading moonlight and slides into the swamp. It’s an indecent time of day for anything to move about, and he knows that full well. Yeah, the hours suck. But, hey, it’s a job.

  His legs are like the bamboo walking sticks of an Alabama Dixiecrat. Skinny and ringed, knobby and bowed. His armbones bend at obscene angles, like a carpenter’s folding ruler. They are sleeved in the tattoo ink of Scripture, the Book of Leviticus, specifically. The full text is scrimshawed there in a scroll of misspelled chicken-scratch. And the writing contrasts harshly with his pearly-white flesh.

  He is an expressionistic Christ-form from a medieval reliquary. An apostate leper, whose lungs wheeze with lost air. But no oxygen escapes the gills along his gullet. He slides effortlessly through the ooze of un-drained malarial morasses. He burrows into the earthen lair of catfish canals. The sunlight that streams through crawdad holes illuminates his passage underground. He is utterly suited to this realm, as tight as a ball joint is suited to its socket. He puts the “man” in “salamander.”

  The stenches of stagnant ditches, which you or I find repulsive, are his manner of navigation. Each stinking hint of rot and ruin contains the subtleties that guide him on like starlight. Snaking through root systems, he emerges from the portholes of tree knots. An ancient villain of abstract purpose.

  Then up he hooks his ten-penny fingernails into the bark, climbing like a sloth into the canopy. He is sluggish yet sly, hungry and hellbent. And he is the “What-Is-It” that has called me here today. The homunculus heart of the forest.

  Chapter Six

  A CONFUSION OF FOWL

  Surprises found in Carter Mill.

  WERIFESTERIA

  Sometimes, in places this bleak, I have to force myself to take a breath, think of better times, and concentrate on happy thoughts. That’s when my mind floods with visions of long-ago summer vacations. Rolling hills of bluegrass welcomed my young eyes to a budding appreciation of nature. I recall lying in the tall grass of a valley to watch golden clouds zeppelin by. All by myself, I’d sit and craft little boats from lumber scraps, poke for crawdads with grass stalks, shoot my slingshot, and splash into the creek from a swinging vine. The weather was warm and balmy, and each Maxfield Parrish sunset proved more than my young heart could take. More than my old soul can now bear to remember.

  I dream of that shadowy creek, with all its knotty roots and moss, iron ore, clay beds, and whispering currents. It was God’s own water garden, and I had just happened upon it one day. A complete accident. Just one county over from here.

  Deep blue-greens cooled the lush Elysium. Flat rocks and toadstools perhaps hid the homes of gnomes and elves. Even Pan Himself could have appeared before me commanding worship, as in The Wind in the Willows, and I would have obliged. It was all too glorious not to honor in earnest.

  But, once I left, I was never able to retrace my steps. No matter the trail, I had lost it forever. Maybe it had been a dream, or my mind had become cluttered with so many comic books that I’d lost the mojo to find it. It’s one of the great tragedies of my life.

  This forest city, Carter Mill, stands in sharp contrast to that Shangri-La. Grays replace greens, browns replace blues. But, unlike most folks, I can appreciate the so-called “off colors,” the ones not found in a box of Crayolas. Now that I’m grown, I marvel at all of Nature’s many forms of intensity. And, ever since Daddy died, I’ve even developed a taste for the aesthetics of death.

  Or haven’t you noticed?

  THE LOBED MOUNTAIN CHILD

  Before we saddle up, Carver and I stop to take a leak. Through the branches of my bathroom, I can see the banks of Clarks River. They are blanketed with yet more thick green Kudzu. Their leaves hang like pennants: leathery, languid, and full of ticks. Blackjack vines lace through the treetops like circus wires. Woolly mammoths and brontosauruses parade in gray-green shapes. The Devil’s Topiary.

  Kudzu, AKA Pueraria montana-lobata, is of Chinese descent, and as such, has good reason to want to do us in—Communist plot that it must be. Deceptively, it begins as just a tiny thing. Its little runners spread via “vegetative reproduction,” producing shoots that root along its host. The seeds it sheds in autumn lie dormant for years, long after the pest has been thought destroyed. Yet, once again, it stirs, deep below our boots, in the loam and gloam of the shadowlands.

  And although deaf and blind, it maneuvers around the urns of sleeping saints, through the soil of the biblical Sheol. Here the earth is churned by the weed’s slow sinew. Like a constrictor, it girdles the good roots around it. Then up it slips, piercing the topsoil into daylight. It climbs to the treetops to unfurl its shroud of dragon scales, and kills the trees with shade.

  Oaks, pines, walnuts, sycamores. They are the good guys. They stand as strong as they can against their Kudzu cousin, digging their feet in to do battle. Because, as you may know, the roots of trees often run deeper than the branches grow wide.

  It’s true. If we could view a cross-section of Earth’s crust, we’d see how the woods above cannot compare to the wilderness growing underground. Believe it or not, this vast, gripping web is what footholds us to the planet. It reinforces our topsoil and gives humans a place to stand. Killer Kudzu, however, seems hell-bent on loosening these underpinnings, weakening our purchase, and sending us all flying into outer space.

  THE LAST SUPPER

  Interestingly enough, Kudzu is edible. Folks down here have been known to cook it into a “sallet” (or salad), boil it like collard greens, and douse it with Tabasco to help it go down. But, let’s be honest. Kudzu is more likely to eat you.

  We’re really not that different from plants. Consider the fractal makeup of the human body. Observe how each of our extremities branch into smaller and smaller parts. Arms and legs grow out from a trunk. Hands and feet grow out from arms and legs. Fingers and toes grow out from hands and feet. So are we that m
uch superior to Kudzu, a plant with infinite extremities?! A plant that triumphs over tall-columned verandas and mighty castle spires? Over entire empires?

  For not long after the footprints of man have faded into dust will Kudzu and all the other green things of the world join forces to stake back their claim. Like mold overtaking a corpse.

  After all, it was their fruit in the Garden that first tricked us. Now they wait, biding their time for our sins to find us. Waiting for the day when our last city is toppled and they can finally pounce. They will release their runners to go sailing through our ruins and into our bodies, spanning the globe round and round to bind the planet into one giant Irish knot.

  But let’s be a good sport about it. Let us bring forth, once again, the forbidden fruit of Eden. Wring its red nectar down in succulent currents. Replenish to the brim the very Holy Grail of Christ and have a toast!

  Remarkable old wizards! Warped, twisting elders! In the end, they will kick our butts.

  So to the victor the spoils!

  THE APPROACH

  The tinkling of chain links and the clonk of a cowbell pierce the air. We scan the skyline for cattle. Nothing.

  “Let’s check it out,” whispers Carver. “It come from the sawmill.”

  After kickstanding our bikes, we slide down a ridge of crushed stone into the stagnation of Clarks River. The black liquid barely ripples against our boots as we wade deeper into the muck. The phlegm of frog spawn circles stalks of cattails. The girth of cypress trunks settle near the water’s edge, billowing at the base as if liquid bark has been poured down a pole to harden. It slowly flows on like batter, channeling off from itself again and again like antlers, only to harden into the knuckles that grip the time-clawed clay.