The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

by Glenn Taylor

  Albert stuck out that left two quick times and pivoted his back right foot to bring the straight right. Pap pap, poom. Again. Pap pap, poom. Yellow Dog moaned from his spot in the corner. He didn’t care for the noise. Ace circled around Albert and Albert followed circle. When he started throwing combinations without moving his head, without snapping his guard back fast, Ace counter-punched him. Stomach, then nose. He put a little more on his love tap that day. He couldn’t help it. The boy was slipping away from him and he’d never told him who he was, what he’d done. It occurred to Ace that he’d never told Albert much of anything. He hit him in the nose again, then lowered his mitt on purpose under Albert’s straight right, just to feel that old sting again. Just to let the boy know what it was like to be on the sending end. Albert smiled and let out a little laugh after he connected. ‘You got me,’ Ace said, smiling back, his teeth out as they always were those days.

  Sam Townsend was trying desperately not to sleep with one of his Post-1877 U.S. History students. She was tan and leggy, from Wetzel County, and she’d failed the course in spring just to take it over again in summer. Sam was forty-seven, she was twenty. He’d never cheated on Zizi.

  On Tuesday morning, she shut his office door behind her. There were no windows, just stacks of books and cheap furniture. She sat down on the edge of his desk so that her knee touched his. He swiveled his chair away. ‘So, I was askin you about that recommendation letter for the departmental scholarship?’ She wore a green shirt that matched her eyes and showed her bra straps.

  ‘I don’t normally write recommendations for students who fail my courses,’ Sam said. He laughed a little, looked at his trilobite fossils, six of them. Paperweights.

  ‘I don’t normally fail classes. Just yours.’ She smiled and bit her lower lip with her teeth.

  Sam knew that teeth-on-lips move. It was like so many others. It meant something. Everything meant something. ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get out of here for the day.’

  ‘What about office hours?’

  ‘It’s summer.’ Truth was, the knee brush and the teeth-on lips had gotten his pecker to stand at attention a little. He had to get up and get moving to be at ease.

  It was the same as the first time Ace saw Zizi sipping vodka. A travel-sized purple lotion bottle, no doubt scoured of lotion trace years prior. This time though, she was in her own house. In the kitchen. The time before, in 1986, had been backstage after a sold-out show at Ritter Park Amphitheatre. Ace hadn’t said a word to her that time, or after. Not even after seeing her testify and cry at her regular A.A. meetings. He’d gone along once or twice. But standing outside the kitchen window that day in August, taking old Yellow Dog out for a poop walk, he hollered. ‘Hey!’

  Zizi threw the plastic bottle into the sink and turned her back on the window. On Ace. She stood very still there in the kitchen, middle of the day. Ace walked in calm through the back screen door. ‘It’s alright,’ he said. ‘I ain’t sayin a word to anyone, if that’s your worry.’

  She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. Then she started crying. At forty-three, Zizi was still the kind of woman who looked pretty even when she cried. She put a product in her hair that made it shine and hold still. No gray. Her teeth were straight and white and mild scoliosis had never bent her a bit. ‘I just…’ She couldn’t think of what to say. She was caught.

  They sat down in the TV room. It was on like always – All My Children. Zizi stood back up, ran the sweeper across the rug. She watched the soap opera while she did it, though you couldn’t hear a word over the roar. She switched it off and sat down again. They both lit cigarettes and she ran her fingernails through her hair. Ace just sat and watched and waited for her to put the words together. ‘I just…I used to do everything, you know. Acid, mushrooms, coke. So, somehow I thought bringing back just one of em, here and there, you know? Who’s it hurt? Let me ask you that, Ace. Who has it hurt in the last four years? Who even knows about it cept you?’

  He watched her go from caught and scared to mad and accusatory. Five seconds. It was something. ‘Nobody I reckon.’ He put out his cigarette in the big green ashtray on the coffee table. ‘Like I said, you don’t have to sell me on nothin. I ain’t judging you. I been through too much with that drink to pretend I can preach on it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. She was all worked up then. ‘Thank you. See…I wish more of em in A.A. were like you. I’ve been working the program…I say the words, I read the Big Book, you know. I try to believe they’re right about the great obsession, control and enjoy. I memorized all of it.’ She picked up the remote control and turned it around in her hands. ‘But I pulled into the lot at the ABC over on 3rd one night, and there you go.’ She dragged on her cigarette, put it out next to his, then looked straight at him while she talked. ‘And I did it. I know it sounds crazy, but I am the one. Maybe there’s more of us, but I have been able to take a drink, after lunch, after dinner, before bed, since 1983, Ace. Christmas 1983.’

  ‘That’s the only times you do it?’

  ‘Only times.’ The television had gone to commercial. An African tribesman put on a pair of Nike gym shoes and said something in his native tongue. At the bottom of the screen was the subtitle Just Do It. Ace and Zizi both half-watched. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘And sometimes before a big show, maybe right after if it went really good. But only eight ounces, you know? That shampoo is only eight ounces.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ He thought it over. Nodded his head and looked blank.

  Zizi stood up. ‘Hey, we got a show up at the mall on Sunday evening. You sittin in?’

  ‘I don’t care for the mall. It’s what made downtown the way it is.’

  ‘It’s a mall, Ace. It’s not the devil.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  She forced a laugh and walked to the basement stairs. She didn’t teach music in the summer, was always doing laundry. Doing something in that basement.

  Ace thought about following her down there that day. He knew she was going to change whatever hiding spots she had for those pints and half pints of vodka. They were flat and made of plastic, could be hidden in small spaces and would never break. It had gotten easier for the alcoholic since his days. Invention. That old vodka of hers may not have been untraceable to the nose like the Widow’s shine, but it was damn near odorless.

  Ace could hear her through the floorboards below him, shuffling things.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Man Attacked, Man Robbed

  December 23rd, 1991, marked the end of Ace’s seventh year at the Advertiser. Nobody said a word about it.

  He met Officer St Clair at the police station like he did every Monday at eight a.m., just like Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. Used to be that the cops scared him, worried him on his past deeds. But he played up the old man angle and did just fine. That Monday was like any other. St Clair handed over Xerox copies of his arrest reports from the nights prior. Outside the evidence room, he and Ace drank coffee from styrofoam and spoke a little about the football squad without Major Harris under center. ‘You can forgit bowl games,’ St Clair said. They had to hide in the break room to talk Mountaineer football. Every other officer was a Marshall fan, and they’d lost the Division II championship to Youngstown State a couple weeks prior. St Clair shook Ace’s hand and said what he always said. ‘Stay out a trouble.’

  ‘Will do.’

  In his no-window office on the half-empty basement level of the Advertiser building, Ace used an electric typewriter to bang out the Blotter for that day’s press run. St Clair’s arrest reports were the usual. Assault. Robbery. Always drinking involved. Ace chose which crime would lead, then started thinking up headline titles to match it. ‘If I had a nickel,’ he said out loud. If he did indeed have a nickel for every time he’d typed the words Man Attacked or Man Robbed in his seven years on the job, he’d have laughed to the bank. Man began most of the headlines in the Blotter section because it was mostly men who did the crimes and men who got done. Woman ran occ
asionally, but it was almost always a victim lead.

  People were poor and people were drunk. Angry sometimes.

  Ace had always been good with titles. He’d saved his favorite of the Advertiser stories, flat-pressed between pages of the same book inside which he kept a few of his stories from the Hillbilly – Mr Samuel Clemens’ Follow the Equator. The Blotter pieces weren’t as colorful, but there were classics just the same. Man stuffs wigs into pants, walks out of store was a favorite. It was a costume shop, broad daylight. Man knocks self out after girl’s parents turn him away. They wouldn’t let him court their daughter so he bashed his motorcycle helmet against his own head until he dropped in the driveway. Husband tells wife to ‘fight like a man.’ He’d backhanded her after she burned him with the curling iron. Wanted to see how much she had in her. Man attacked with rusty machete. The blade was dull. Minor lacerations. He shouldn’t have bedded another man’s wife.

  Indecent exposures were Ace’s favorites. They came around four or five times a year. They were most enjoyable to write up when they involved multiple crimes, as in Naked man steals purse, woman takes it back. He took it from her while in his altogether at 2:14 in the a.m. He didn’t think she’d give chase to get it back, but she did. While he ran, he pulled off the used condom hanging from his pecker and threw it at her, but she was a persistent one. Naked man arrested trying to enter church service. He wore only a sheet around his neck at 10:30 in the morning. The ushers at 5th Avenue Baptist held him down until the police got there. They booked him on ‘disruption of religious worship,’ a misdemeanor.

  Ace never laughed or scratched his head as much as the time he wrote Man finds home burgled, hair and pornographic magazines scattered. The owner had been in Myrtle Beach for the week. It wasn’t his pornography, and it wasn’t his hair. Ace had wondered what Jim Comstock would think when he’d typed It is believed that someone broke into the man’s home, shaved off his or her pubic hair, scattered it throughout the apartment and then slept in his bed. Nothing was found to be missing.

  Dorothea had trained his fingers to be semi-quick back in Richwood, but he figured there weren’t many who could type as fast as he the words Larceny, Burglary, Robbery, Armed Robbery, B&E Auto, Battery, Malicious Wounding, Vandalism, Fleeing, and Destruction of Property. David Pace didn’t even proof the Blotter before he ran it.

  More and more, Ace found himself typing the phrase possession with the intent to deliver a controlled substance. And, more often than not, the substance was crack cocaine. The possessors were usually young and black and resided increasingly closer to the street where Ace and the Townsends lived. December 23rd marked the third time in the last two years he recognized one of the names. Friends of Albert’s, who, at seventeen, had quit hitting the mitts in the garage. He’d quit showing up to meet his father on the porch at curfew. Sometimes, in those days, Albert didn’t show up at all.

  Yellow Dog had to be twenty years old. When he’d shown up at Ace’s open garage door on a spring morning in 1984, half his right ear bit off and scabbed black, Ace had set his coffee on the ground and kneeled. ‘C’mon,’ he’d said. Yellow wagged his tail and came on. They’d been roommates ever since.

  But, by the looks of him on that first day, even after a bath, he was past ten. His hips hurt him. His muzzle had gone to white. Especially his eyes, encircled perfectly with the color of age. He was a mongrel, but there was no doubt yellow lab in there. ‘Fat Labrador,’ was what Ace said when folks inquired as to the breed.

  On New Year’s Day, 1992, they did what they always did together by then. Watched television. Ace had given in to the moving picture box a couple years after coming to town when Sam was going to throw an old one out. Within a year, he’d grown tired of the poor reception. He gave in to the cable soon after. He ran it illegal from the splitter on the neighbor’s box, which had also been hooked up illegal.

  Inside the TV, Bob Barker had yet to go gray. Every day, Yellow and Ace watched The Price is Right, and this day was no different. In the showcase, a girl wearing a mohawk couldn’t get the big wheel spun all the way around. ‘Put some elbow grease in it,’ Ace hollered at the screen. Yellow lifted his head from the green carpet between his front paws and woofed. He looked around him confused. Certain noises, inflections of Ace’s voice, caused him to do this sometimes. Ace rubbed his ears. ‘It’s alright Fat Boy,’ he told him. The dog put his head back where it’d been. He wasn’t as fat as he once was. Couldn’t eat like he once could.

  During the commercial, Ace turned to CNN. It was the same. The Soviet Union kept collapsing. The boys who went to the Persian Gulf kept coming home as men who were collapsing somehow themselves. If you watched it too long, you’d think the world was ending.

  He changed the channel when they started rolling footage of oil-coated ducks sticking to the earth again.

  Sally Jesse Raphael was on. Thirteen year old girls were dressed like street-walkers. One of them hollered, ‘You cain’t tell me what to do. I’ll do what I want to. I get paid.’ When they started bleeping out her words, Ace changed the channel again, but it was too late. The bleeping sound always got Yellow going. He was up on his front legs then, barking. Each time he barked, he whimpered, because it hurt his insides to do it. But he kept it up anyway. ‘Simmer, Fat Boy,’ Ace told him. He rubbed his old dog’s head, massaged him between the ears. ‘Simmer.’

  Only four showed up. Four college students interested in stopping surface mining’s ruination of West Virginia’s hills. They could have fit more in the wide living room at Louise and Larry’s house, but it was a place accustomed to emptiness. Louise and Larry spent most of their time at the house in Mingo. They’d asked Ace to come for his historical expertise. They’d asked Zizi and her bandmembers to come for a pledge to play a show. Sam they wanted for his construction skills. He hadn’t known that one of the Marshall students would be Brandie, another of his history undergraduates with legs and eyes and ways that meant things.

  ‘How many are here because you saw the fliers on campus?’ Larry asked.

  Three of the four raised hands.

  ‘How many know what mountain top removal is?’

  Two of the four. Louise came back in from the kitchen carrying a tray. On it were lemonades and a plate piled high with dried beef rolled around cream cheese. The floorboards creaked when any of them moved.

  ‘Well,’ Larry said. ‘Massey Coal, among some others, has decided to push on, in the face of all the protest, over sludge reservoirs and poisoned water, among other things.’ Larry always said ‘among other things.’ He rubbed at his unkempt mustache between sentences. ‘They say they keep blastin because they have to meet the demand for low sulfur compliance steam coal, but the land just doesn’t bounce back like they say. It just doesn’t.’

  He might as well have been speaking another language. Brandie made eyes at Sam who tried to be nice to Zizi despite suspecting her of drinking again. Zizi wondered how long till she could have her next drink. The band members looked like they’d shared a joint on the ride over, and Ace was missing the Showcase Showdown portion of The Price is Right.

  When it came time to commit to a trip down to Mingo the following Friday, folks had spring term final exams and family illnesses all of a sudden. Only Ace gave a definite yes. Louise was about to express her disappointment when a car drove past the front of the house slow. Bass beat out of it like static thunder. Everyone looked. Cutlass Sierra. Black with black windows, barely open. Ace could see two tops of heads inside, and he thought one of them was Albert’s. He was supposed to be in school.

  The band cleared the beef log plate like it was a contest. ‘Mrs Blevins,’ Flunky Cy the drummer said. ‘These beef logs is savory.’

  On Friday, May 1st, Ace boarded the Amtrak Cardinal passenger line headed to Matewan. It gave him a stomach ache to do it, but it was time to go home. Have a little look. Larry and Louise had promised he’d be fine, no police troubles.

  He’d put in his teeth for the occasion. />
  What drew him there most was the house he’d grown up in. It still stood. The coal company wanted the land, but Louise had fought them off in court. The Widow had left it to Clarissa, who kept the place up, had the roof repaired a little, and left it to Louise. She had the deed, the property rights, to prove it.

  That Friday, when the protest was a bust due to bad weather and a no show by the earth mover operators, Ace, Louise, and Larry went for a hike. Up Warm Hollow. It was a welcome change from Main Street Matewan, what folks had started calling ‘Mate’ Street. Even of he’d been able to stomach walking on paved ground he’d once shot men upon, Ace didn’t want anything to do with the mess they had down in town. It was all torn up to build the new flood wall. Matewan was not the same. Houses and roads gone. People. It was enough to make an old man think about crying.

  Up Warm Hollow, the air was breathable. He could still side-step up steep, rain-slicked inclines with the help of a walking stick he’d snapped off a dogwood tree. ‘Slow down, youngin,’ Larry hollered from behind. They laughed. Across the ridgeline, he could see the spot where he believed his first hideout may have been. Caved in upon itself no doubt.

  They reached the top of Sulfur Creek Mountain and looked south, along the Tug Fork. Ace couldn’t believe his eyes. The spot where his second hideout would have been was gone. All of it was gone. The entire top of a mountain range replaced by flat, red-brown workroads and levelled expanse. ‘It looks like the surface of the moon,’ Ace said.

  Louise breathed heavy, sat down on a rock. ‘Been like that since ’88,’ she said. ‘No re-growth.’