The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart

by Glenn Taylor

All around the massive, planed blank was green. Bright, swirling green encircling the dull void like an unfinished puzzle. ‘Flush as a pool table, isn’t it?’ Larry said. He pointed to a faraway spot, a steep grade just under a flat top. ‘See that?’ Where he pointed, there was a pile up of junked cars – a rusty, dead traffic jam on the side of the mountain. ‘When they take off the top of a mountain, why shouldn’t folks roll their junkers off the side? It’s already gone to shit. You heard of wrecking yards, there’s your wrecking hill.’

  Then, nobody spoke. And again, the old man came close to crying. It all seemed too much for a moment, so he turned around and quit looking.

  They came down the other side of the mountain and walked up to his boyhood home. The barn was gone, the outhouse. Part of the cat-and-clay chimney had broken off so that it stuck up from the roofline like a blood-red fang. Ace stopped and looked at it all. He could see himself young, running. Always running and climbing and digging. He saw himself there in 1946, standing outside the door with Clarissa, their mother pale and lifeless on the bed inside. He turned to Larry and Louise, who had stopped a few paces behind him to give him space. To give him a moment. ‘I thank you all for bringin me here,’ he told them.

  It seemed so small to him, dwarfed by the hills around it.

  Inside, he climbed the ladder to the loft and laid down on the half-rotted boards. He breathed and pretended others breathed with him. When he came down, he put his hand to the old cook stove and laughed a little to himself. Shook his head. ‘The way we used to live,’ he said.

  ‘You know Ace, it’s still underground mining they’re doin up thisaway,’ Larry said. ‘Louise kept this place outright, judge ruled it. We think it’ll stick and keep those blasters out, for a while at least. Till we can get some legislation passed, some folks fired up.’

  ‘I don’t know that folks get fired up about such things nowadays, Larry,’ Ace said. His voice had lost a little of its usual weight. ‘Everybody’s got a price. Everybody gets bamboozled.’

  Louise frowned. They watched Ace, his hand on the stove top, looking out the thick, warped window. The panes had broken off. There were holes in the molding. When the rain picked back up, it blew inside, dotting Ace’s cheeks and collecting in his eyebrows. But he stood still. Staring.

  Out beyond where the garden had been, past where staked tomato plants had once grown head high, Ace saw a figure. It was hard to make out through the rain, but it was no doubt a man. A stooped one, old like him. The man stared back, soaked through. Then he walked into the woods.

  Ace could smell it as soon as he stepped inside the garage. When he opened the door to his apartment, he saw. Vomit. Everywhere. It was the bile type, yellow and brown. There was blood in some. Yellow Dog had stepped in it in places. On the cheap vinyl kitchen floor, his tracks showed. Fourpawed. On the green carpet, it had soaked in deep. They were like little islands across the length of the place, and he couldn’t help but think back to his own bile islands on the Missouri linoleum.

  Ace tracked his own dog and found him in the bedroom, wedged between the bed and the wall. He was panting hard. His ribcage showed through.

  ‘It’s alright fella,’ Ace said, bending to him. He got on his knees and hugged Yellow, whose breath carried the stench of an animal on his way out of the world. ‘That’s my Fat Boy,’ Ace told him. He rubbed his hands down the length of the dog, slowing the pants for the moment.

  He went to the kitchen for water, but thought better of it. The dog would not hold it down.

  He left the garage for the main house. Sam was no doubt in his study. Ace put his hand on the screen door and stopped. He thought better of this too. Sam would advise a trip to the veterinarian’s, and Yellow Dog would not want that.

  It was getting dark out.

  Ace helped his dog up from his spot between the bed and wall that evening. He carried him to flat, open ground outside the garage and set him down. Eight years back, he’d shown up licked, but on his own four legs. He’d walk out that way too. Ace made sure of it.

  Yellow’s hips gave out at first, but he hefted himself back up. Ace hugged him, kissed his white muzzle, and watched him walk away. He knew where the dog was going. Fire had taken a two-story apartment building down the block two years prior. When the rubble was cleared, only the thick front hedges remained. Behind them, the city had let the brush grow wild. Weed stalks and goldenrod grew tall in there, and people walking by dumped their trash.

  It was as close to the woods as Yellow Dog would find.

  Ace knew it to be a private, peaceful thing, this walk toward death. But he went to the front of the house just to be sure he was right about the destination. To make sure Yellow got there okay. He peered around the side of the porch and saw the dog, his bowels giving out freely by then, walking into the wild brush of the abandoned lot. In there, he could lie down and breathe easy.

  Ace waited till morning. Then he collected Yellow Dog and buried him in the backyard.

  That night, he didn’t see anyone in the main house to tell them what had happened. Albert didn’t much live there anymore, and there was trouble between Sam and Zizi. The puke needed cleaning, but Ace was out of Ajax and had gone in to ask for some of theirs. He’d slept a little that day, watched TV through the stink as long as he could.

  Mansour’s, the family-owned store down the street that stocked Chesterfields just for him, was closed. Ace was a little sore from his Mingo woods-walk with the Blevinses. He put on his comfortable shoes and his fedora, took two twenties from the still-thick Pulitzer roll stuck inside his mattress, and set out for the big supermarket on 1st Street.

  He’d never shopped there before. Always Mansour’s, always the same list. Inside Kroger’s, he couldn’t find a damn thing. And when he found something on his list, there were twenty varieties to choose from. He’d never seen so many sardine tins. All colors, fancy names. Where were the cigarettes? Where was the cream chipped beef? There were no store employees in the aisles. Music played, a bad excuse for country, and when the water jets cut on over the produce, he jumped from the spray.

  Ace kept looking down at his fingers, gripping the cart handle. All that black dirt under the nails. He’d been digging all morning. It seemed to him that he’d been digging his whole life. ‘Dig to goddamned China by now,’ he said under his breath. A woman with a baby in her cart looked at him funny. He smiled, tried to look like an old man should, but he didn’t care. He’d buried his dog that morning.

  He walked to an aisle under a sign that read Brooms, Mops, Dish Detergent, Laundry Detergent, Bleach, Furniture Polish. He couldn’t find Ajax. There was Mr Clean. Windex for glass and Lysol with bleach. Pine Sol. Pledge. Goo Gone. It was the language he’d heard spoken for ten years on television, one he’d never understood. Standing there, he knew that all around him, the people pushing their carts past one another without saying hello, they understood. They all spoke the language of the commercials. They fed their kids Pop Rocks and Lucky Charms and all manner of foods that made noise and glowed neon.

  Ace thought to himself how West Virginians had elected Kennedy president in 1960. How, like he said he would, he’d done something about the state of things, the state of people. Now, they were the same as everybody else.

  Ace left his cart sitting in the middle of the cleaning supply aisle. He walked to one of the twelve checkout lanes, brushed past a skinny man unloading his handbasket, and said to the checkout girl, ‘Could you point me in the direction of Ajax, Miss? I’d appreciate it.’

  ‘A-what?’ she said.

  ‘Cleaning powder.’

  ‘Aisle nine.’

  ‘Yes ma’am. I been in aisle nine for a while now, and I can’t place it.’

  She grabbed at the CB box in front of her face and spoke something unintelligible into it. Whatever it was she said cut off the bad country music and crackled across the place.

  ‘Thank you,’ Ace said to her.

  An hour later, after he’d used a scrub brush and wat
er bucket to work the Ajax into and out of all seventeen vomit piles, Ace opened the big window of his second story apartment. The place needed to air out. He walked to the television, bent at the knees, and lifted it, sidestepping across the small room. He perched the brown box on the windowsill and caught his breath. Then he gave it a push, stuck his head out, and watched it split and scatter on the blacktop down below.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Goddamn Son Of A Bitch

  Sam was in his study again. He was always in the study, reading or writing or drawing rough plans for stage backdrops. Ace knocked at the door. ‘It’s open,’ Sam said.

  ‘Sam.’ Ace nodded.

  ‘Ace.’ Sam leaned back in his leather chair and put his feet on the desk. He looked tired. Eyebags and stubble. ‘Have a seat.’ He motioned to a small couch against the far wall.

  ‘How’s things?’ Ace preferred a hardback chair to an upholstered one. He tried to get comfortable.

  ‘Good, workin on a book.’

  ‘Ain’t you already written three of em?’ Ace laughed. Sam joined him. ‘Look, Samuel,’ he said. ‘Officer St Clair said somethin this mornin about the Task Force whatever. The drug busts. Sweep comin through this week sounds like to me.’

  ‘What are you telling me for?’

  Ace cleared his throat. He took a minute to figure how that last question was meant. ‘I’m tellin you because when a net scoops up, things likely get caught in it.’

  ‘So Albert is a thing in this metaphor?’ It came out louder than Sam intended. For a couple weeks, he’d been having trouble staying bottled up.

  ‘Samuel,’ Ace said, and he gave Sam a look that reminded him of who he was talking to. ‘If you’re going to do your fake talk, you can head on over to the professor’s lounge at the supper club. They fall for leaky cases of verbal diarrhea over there.’

  Sam sighed and put his feet on the floor. ‘Point taken,’ he said.

  ‘There’s going to be some acquaintances of Albert’s, maybe friends. You just got to make sure it ain’t him.’

  ‘I know.’ He looked through Ace, at nothing.

  ‘Alright, buddy,’ Ace said, and stood up. He shook Sam’s hand and reached across the desk to pat him on the shoulder. On his way out the door, he turned and said, ‘And why don’t you get out of this goddamned son of a bitch once in a while. Stinks in here like assholes and oregano.’ There were a few utterances from his past, utterances like this one, that would not be wiped from memory.

  Out in the living room, Zizi sat on the dented yellow sectional with the band. They were supposed to be practicing. Flunky Cy had brought over a videotape copy of the 1970 movie Little Big Man. It had just started. A very old man spoke on the film. ‘I am a white man and never forgot it,’ he said.

  ‘How old is that man?’ Ace asked.

  At first they just ignored him. Then, Everette the banjo player said, ‘It’s Dustin Hoffman, man.’

  Ace had liked Everette since the time he first let him hold his banjo. The tone ring on it had been made by a Detroit friend of his out of an aluminum torque converter ring from a 1956 Buick transmission. It was pretty. ‘The hell it is Dustin Hoffman,’ Ace said.

  ‘It’s him, Ace. They’ve got him in makeup.’ Zizi wanted it quiet. She hit rewind, then play again.

  Ace leaned in over the back of the sectional and squinted his eyes at the old man on the screen. He’d never seen a body so old, so wrinkled and splotched. It was a real fella. He’d be damned if it was Dustin Hoffman in makeup. He straightened back up. ‘That ain’t no Dustin Hoffman,’ he said. He waved the whole room off and walked out the screen door toward his home in the garage. On the back stair stoop, he said, ‘Goddamn son of a bitch television.’ He’d been meaner ever since he’d thrown his own out the window. He’d never tell anyone how much he missed his friend the television, but oh, how he did.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Boys Should Have Gotten Their Educations

  Albert did not get caught in the net that weekend in August of 1992. It was in October, the day after Halloween, that Officer St Clair handed Ace the police report Xeroxes with a funny look on his face. ‘Could have been a lot worse, Ace,’ St Clair had said.

  Ace didn’t have to type the words possession with the intent to deliver a controlled substance after Albert’s name. He was thankful for that. It was only fleeing and underage possession of alcohol. Still, Albert got twenty hours of community service.

  Ace went with him to Presbyterian Manor on Thanksgiving. It was a nursing home, and it was a place every young, misdemeanor type of kid went to work off community service. Helping to write cards to family members and bussing dinner trays. Some of the staff didn’t care for the visits, but generally they were on holidays.

  They followed a good-looking young nurse down a hallway to the indoor recreation area. Ace knew he was older than some in the place. But at 89, he could still pass for 70. He whispered to Albert, ‘Don’t let them keep me here, you little turddropper.’ He wanted to try and get the boy back from where he’d gone. Sam and Zizi were evidently unable to do it.

  ‘Watch out for Mr Overby,’ the nurse said. She stepped aside for an old man, pushed in a wheelchair with oxygen tubes in his nose. Albert and Ace stepped out of the way.

  The old man looked up at Albert as he passed. ‘Navel?’ he said. The fat man pushing him kept going, but the old man craned his neck to see Albert. ‘Navel?’ he said again.

  Albert looked at Ace, who laughed a little. ‘Guess he thought you was Navel,’ Ace told him.

  In the rec room, Albert sat with a woman from Wayne County and wrote out the addresses of her people still back there. Her hand was too shaky. Her name was Mrs O’Brien and she had cards, dozens of them, all with birds on the front. ‘This one here, now I said this one is a Dusky Lory. And this one here, now I said this one here is a Pink Ring Neck Dove,’ she said. Before every phrase that parted her lips came the words, ‘now I said.’

  In the corner, Ace fed a pop machine quarters and pushed the button for grape soda. He looked at the book spines on the shelves. He’d never heard of a one. Picked one off called Voyage of Vengeance and put it back on the shelf after a couple sentences. It was no Follow the Equator.

  Albert finished addressing the last of eight cards for Mrs O’Brien. He smiled and shook her hand. At this, she began to holler, ‘Oh my. You are a cracker jack today!’ Evidently, she found Albert to be handsome and charming. ‘He’s a cracker jack today,’ she called out to the room of old folks. ‘He’s a cracker jack today.’ Albert nodded and patted her hand softly until which time he could pull his own away. She gave one last tug and he leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. This quieted her down and she wore a dreamy look then that might have put her at fourteen were it not for the cataracts in her eyes.

  Albert said ‘Alright, Mrs O’Brien, you take care of yourself.’

  After he’d bussed some trays, Albert and Ace made eye contact and nodded toward the hallway. Smoke break.

  They hotfooted it down the hallway.

  Through the open door to a room, they saw and heard an old, bearded black man saying, ‘Get out. Get on out,’ though there was no one in there.

  In the lobby was Mr Overby. Still with tubes in his nose. He looked out the glass panes at the traffic going by on Veterans Memorial. When he saw them headed to the door, each pulling a pack from his shirt pocket, he spoke. ‘Navel. Navel come over here.’

  Ace wondered if they’d come on a bad day. Plenty of the old folks were sedate, tranquil even, but the percentage of shuffled decks was high.

  They could do nothing but walk over to the man. He had a blue wool blanket across his lap. The fat chair pusher was reading a magazine and watching TV in the corner. As they approached Mr Overby, Ace whispered to Albert, ‘Before I start to seeing people that ain’t really there, I’ll walk out to the woods of my own accord, just like Yellow Dog, and I’ll lay down under a hickory tree at the top of a mountain.’

  ‘What did you whi
sper to him?’ the old man said to Ace.

  ‘Told him I thought you had mistaken him for another man.’

  ‘Oh. Well, are you Navel?’ He looked Albert up and down over his spectacles. Hair grew wild from his nose and ears and he breathed with his mouth wide open.

  ‘No, I’m not Navel.’

  ‘Well, what do you know about it?’ the old man said. ‘Give me a cigarette.’

  ‘Don’t do it,’ the fat man in the corner said without looking up from his magazine.

  ‘Maybe next time,’ Ace said.

  ‘I know you too.’ He looked at Ace wild. ‘You know me. I went to grade school up in Mink Shoals. We was in grade school at the same time. Boys should have gotten their educations.’

  ‘Nossir,’ Ace said. ‘I believe you have me mistaken with somebody else.’ He was perfectly willing to give an old man his time, but, for obvious reasons, this recognizing from the past conversation had never been his favorite.

  ‘Navel,’ the old man said. And then he got a confused look and started to cry a little bit.

  ‘Alright now,’ Ace said. He patted the man’s hands, tucked under the blanket. He waved over the fat man. ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘You might want to…’ he nodded at Mr Overby. The fat man understood without ever looking up from his magazine. He stood, dropped it on the couch, and walked over.

  ‘Alright, Mr Overby,’ Ace said, and he and Albert exited Presbyterian Manor.

  Outside, it was cold for November. ‘Damn,’ Albert said. He held the cigarette in his lips, didn’t have a lighter.

  Ace lit his Chesterfield and held out the flame to Albert, cupping it as he moved. ‘That’s just how it goes,’ Ace said.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Ewart Smith Spoke In A Dream

  ‘Harla harla ha na na na atta hoo hay om idayayamana,’ she said. But it wasn’t that way. It was the Wurlitzer theremin, on the spritz, humming like it had lips. Ewart was in among all the people somewhere. They danced like marionette puppets. Above all of it, Ewart was saying, ‘Glove box baby. Thirty-eight. Glove box baby. Thirty-eight.’ There was the smell of anointing oil and poison and flesh on fire. There were serpents. Ace let one ride his arm, on up into his mouth like he had as a boy. But he gagged and retched when the cold nose hit the back of his throat and tried to keep going down. It clogged his esophagus with its head, opened its mouth wide once in his throat.