by Billy Coffey
“Hebbin.”
-7-
It was in Lisa’s mind all day to take the long way home after work. That way she could make sure the tears were cried out and the anger was put away. While she suspects there is still some of both in her, it is not enough to keep her from going straight home. She hasn’t spoken to Abel since leaving this morning. That makes almost twelve hours. Lisa’s never been out of contact with her boy for such a stretch of time. Anger or not, tears or not, she wants to see his face. Wants to wrap Abel in her arms and kiss his head and get some toots love in return, and then she wants to figure out a way to make things right with her creditors in town.
He’s in his room when she comes in, her shoulders rolled forward and her hair free of the bun Roy requires while working. The day’s mail pokes out from the unzipped portion of her purse. No letter again today. Trying to see the light. The house smells of pine needles and the little sachet of potpourri that Lisa keeps stuck on the vacuum filter. Abel’s cleaned. From the looks of it, he’s cleaned everything.
“You like it?”
Abel is peeking out from the corner where the living room meets the hall.
“Sure.”
“It took me all morning,” he says. “I didn’t clean nowhere else. Not the wreck room. Because I ain’t supposed to go in there. But I put you a beer in the freezer,” he says, “a little while ago. I thought maybe we could talk a minute.”
“I think a good talk’s in order.”
Lisa sets her purse on the chair by the TV and plucks the bottle from the freezer. It’s the only thing in there besides what’s left of a box of Popsicles and half a bag of corn dogs. She hears the front door open and close, then the sound of a chair by the table on the porch being pulled out. Abel’s waiting when she joins him. He’s gotten a wire hanger from his closet and is shoving it down his cast, eyes half shut with pleasure.
“Are you mad at me?” he asks. “I mean, still.”
“I don’t know. Maybe a little.”
“I ain’t never made you cry before, Momma. Except when I get hurt. But those are always on accident, so I guess that’s okay.”
“What you did last night,” she says, taking a drink, “was on purpose.”
“Only because I wanted to make things better.”
“Abel.” Lisa moves her hand to his own. “There ain’t no better for us, there’s just getting by. And that’s all folks need, really, when you think about it. We got a place to live and a car to get us to town and back. We’re warm in the winter and cool in the summer and our bellies are full every night when we lie down in our own beds. I’d call that good living. You’ll come to call it that too. But in the meantime, you’re grounded. Two weeks. That means no Willie.”
“Okay.”
Okay? That’s all he can muster? No bargaining, no grief?
“I know what I am,” he says.
“And what’s that?”
He shakes his head and pulls the hanger out, laying it on the table. It smells of dead skin.
“Tell me about Daddy,” he says.
“What about him?”
“Anything.”
“Well, he was a smart man, just about the smartest man I ever knew. Like you’ll be.”
“And what’d he do?”
“He drove a train.”
“And how’d he die?”
Lisa takes another drink, a long one, and forces her eyes to stop burning. “He died, Abel.”
“When?”
“Just before you were born.”
“ ’Cause his heart gave out?”
“Yes,” she says. “His heart gave out.”
They are the same questions he always asks followed by the same answers he always hears, though their repetition has grown no easier. Then comes this question, one that’s new:
“Where is he?”
Lisa sets her beer down. “What do you mean?”
“Is he in heaven?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t believe in heaven.”
“What?”
“You don’t believe in heaven,” Abel says again, “or nothing like that. Like Reverend Johnny, you said all he did was tricks.”
He’s looking at her square, not off into the trees at the dead end like he was looking yesterday. Studying her. Lisa doesn’t understand what’s happening here. This was supposed to be about Abel, not his daddy.
“That’s just what folks say,” she tells him.
“Where’s he buried?”
“North Carolina.”
“What town? Can we go there?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Abel.”
“Why not?”
“Because I said so.”
That’s not a good enough reason. Lisa knows it, and she expects Abel knows it too. But it’ll have to do for now.
“What if things could be better?” he asks.
“They can’t, Abel.”
“But what if they could? Would you be happy?”
“I’m happy now.”
“Maybe you ain’t,” he says. “Maybe you just been so sad for so long, you think that’s what being happy is.”
Lisa cannot answer this.
“Don’t worry, Momma.”
“About what?”
“About nothing.”
He gets up from the table and leans in close for what Lisa believes will be a kiss. Instead, he snatches a nickel from behind her ear and places it on the table.
“What’s this for?”
“For what I owe. I know it’s not all of it, but I’ll take care of the rest too.”
He walks inside, letting the screen door shut behind him. Lisa can only sit and drink her beer. She fingers the nickel and wonders how long Abel has been carrying that around, wonders what just happened, and whether it was Abel who just got punished, or her.
-8-
He spends the rest of that evening locked in his room and pretending to sulk. What Abel really does is pack his things and try not to say good-bye. His school backpack is big enough to hold everything he thinks he’ll need—extra clothes and underwear, a new toothbrush from under the sink, his atlas, and a small first-aid kit he sneaks from beneath the kitchen cabinet. The kit will be for Dumb Willie, should he need it. Abel knows if anything goes wrong with himself, antiseptic and bandages will be about as useful as a hammer.
An appearance must be made at suppertime and just before his momma goes to bed, if only to convince her nothing more is wrong with him than mourning two weeks without Dumb Willie. They watch an old Carol Burnett rerun on TV. It’s their favorite and something of a nightly ritual. Abel makes sure to laugh in all the right places. His eyes wander toward his momma’s purse, still on the chair. Today’s mail is sticking out from one zipper. Abel wonders if there’s something for him in there, another letter from his daddy. His momma has always been so insistent on being the one to stop by the post office. Even those times when Abel has been with her, she’s made him stay in the car. Now he knows why. He goes to bed right after the cartoon Carol slops her mop into the bucket and scratches her butt. Lisa follows soon after.
At ten thirty on this Saturday night in June, Abel changes from his pajamas, puts on a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt, shoulders his school backpack, and sneaks from his bedroom. He stops by the wreck room and chooses three letters at random from the popcorn tin. Three, no more than that, and tucks them into his back pocket. He has no idea how often his daddy writes. The letters could come once a week or once a month, Abel doesn’t know. But it wouldn’t do, should the next come while he and Dumb Willie are still on their way, for his momma to come straight here and find the rest of the letters gone. She’d know right where her son was headed and be in Fairhope waiting, likely with Sheriff Barnett.
He does not look in on her, afraid that even cracking the door would break his momma’s sleep. Abel merely leans his head against the door and shuts his eyes. He kisses the wood and whispers, “Toots love, Momma. I’ll be back soon.”<
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The back door is locked behind him. Abel twists the knob twice to make sure, once to the right and another to the left, and is struck by a sudden sense of guilt that there will not be a man around for a while to tend to such things.
The world beyond lies dark and quiet. No breeze tumbles down from the mountains this night. In the low places of the field, pockets of mist gather and spread like reaching fingers. The sky allows only a little more shine than the night before, a sliver of moon and stars scattered like bright grains of sand, a thick swath of the Milky Way. Abel tests the balance of the bag against his back by stepping off the slab of back porch. Past the rusting swing set and the clothesline and garage. At the edge of the yard he pauses to look back. A lone light burns over the back door.
“Good-bye,” Abel says, to everything.
The crickets quiet as he steps among the field’s tall grass. Here, Abel begins to relax. Night has never troubled him. Darkness brings a quality of balance. The eyes cannot be depended upon to judge big from small and strong from weak, meaning night is the only time he feels an equal to the things around him—not special, but ordinary. Yet he soon finds he cannot enjoy the walk down to the curve in the tracks as he should. Not merely because of the heaviness of the pack or the heaviness of his leaving, but because of the eyes upon him.
Someone is watching.
He stops, searching the shadows. Abel wants to dismiss the feeling as a symptom of some wider fear but finds he cannot. The feeling not only persists but grows stronger. He moves as quickly as he can manage, glancing over his shoulder as often as he does at his feet.
The place where the tracks curve lies empty. Dumb Willie is late. Abel touches his back pocket, drawing a sense of strength from the letters there. Could be Dumb Willie he senses. He studies the mist, the field, the house, watching for any movement. Abel even whispers a hard “Dumb Willie” into the black.
A shadow stands far off toward the side of the house. It does not correspond to any tree or shrub and seems rather to have sprouted from the ground on its own. Standing motionless near the light above the back door. Staring at him.
To Abel’s left, a train whistle calls faintly.
The shadow by the house leaps forward with a speed Abel believes supernatural as the long whistle calls closer. Dumb Willie, it’s Dumb Willie, that shadow is too fat to be Abel’s momma’s. Dumb Willie’s gone to the house and not the curve. Abel shakes his head in the same pitiable way most do when in the Farmer boy’s presence. He even chuckles to himself as he raises his cast to guide the figure in.
Closer now, the shadow running, Abel lowers his arm as a bolt of fear surges through him. The figure coming gains in girth as it approaches, but not in height. Screaming Abel’s name. Promising murder.
Not Dumb Willie. Not sweet Momma.
Abel cries out too late.
Chris Jones is upon him.
-9-
In spite of his advantage in both size and years, Dumb Willie does not share A Bull’s comfort with the late hours. Darkness frightens him and always has. These times of shadow and gloom are when the things that have always haunted him rise from slumber. Every creak Dumb Willie hears in the night is a spurut. Every pop a munster.
These are the things that own the night, just as flesh rules the day.
But there are powers greater than even the dread that grips him now, powers like love, and love is what shines as a light for him along the faint path through the woods to A Bull’s house. Dumb Willie sings because that’s what he does when there are munsters and spuruts about, mushing the words into a broken, staccato rhythm. He turns every few steps to make sure he has not wandered from the trail. Each rustle of limbs behind is the debbil come for him, scurrying him on with a series of quiet yelps. The sack of clothes and food he’s snuck from the house remains slung over his shoulder.
He was quiet when he left, just like A Bull said. Dumb Willie’s ma and da’ee didn’t hear, they don’t know about the . . . it’s a word . . . venchure. They don’t know about the venchure ’cause it’s a secret. Dumb Willie’s got to go find A Bull’s da’ee so A Bull won’t be no bass terd no more.
The singing carries him most of the way to where the trees stop at the dead end. Dumb Willie eases onto A bull’s porch and looks in A Bull’s window but A Bull’s not there. Then he remembers. A Bull say meet me at the curve where the train gets not fast.
Dumb Willie remembers he forgot, he’s so dumb.
He eases off the porch and swings along the side of the trailer, stopping only to peer through the single small window on the end. The glass is so far from the ground that even someone of his height must rise to his tiptoes. Only shadows lurk within. But in that dark there are neither munsters nor spuruts, just A Bull’s ma.
He waves though she cannot see. Dumb Willie say, “Gudbee Lee. Sa.”
There’s fog in the field and fog is where the munsters live, but that’s where Dumb Willie goes because it’s what A Bull said. Far away, the trayne whistles. He turns his face to the curve and sees a shadow there. It’s a small shadow from all that way, and thin, and that shadow raises an arm like hello. Dumb Willie raises his arm too because that’s A Bull. A Bull’s at the curve because they’re going to get on that trayne, have a venchure.
Dumb Willie holds his arm high, waving it. He takes a single step and sees another shadow bolting from the backyard and into the field. Running and running, a smudge that crosses his vision before vanishing into a bank of pale mist. It emerges again from the opposite side, aiming straight toward where A Bull stands, and there is only one word in Dumb Willie’s fragile mind, two syllables that freeze him in place and make him want to scream:
Mun. Ster.
A Bull screams.
Dumb Willie forgets the sack. It drops into the grass as he goes chasing, plowing through the fog that reaches for him like hands. A Bull screaming again and that munster screaming, the trayne screaming too. Coming around the bend that trayne has one-two-three eyes shining like day.
The munster is on top of A Bull.
Dumb Willie feels his hands turn to fists. His face is hot from the running. A Bull crying, holding his cast high so that it may bear the blows. That munster punching, saying, “Look at you, you even bawl like a bastard,” and what Dumb Willie wants to scream at that munster is You can’t be punching A Bull like that, he’s got bad bonez, but Dumb Willie’s mouth is shut by the trayne’s next whistle and his own rage, and in the next moment Dumb Willie is upon them.
The munster makes a sound like POOF when Dumb Willie’s fist smashes into the side of its face. Dumb Willie reaches down to lift it from A Bull’s body, his hands grasping hold of each side of the munster’s head as he lifts it, squeezing that head as the munster cries and squeals and kicks its fat legs, making Dumb Willie even more incensed, making him scream out, “You leave. Him. Lone you. Stink,” as he goes shake shake shake and the munster’s bonez go crunch.
Dumb Willie throws that munster away it stinks. A Bull is on the ground. His cast is still in the air and his eyes are like a bug’s eyes. He’s shaking like he’s cold. Dumb Willie say, “A Bull Dumb. Willie you. Oh kay?” as the trayne sounds hard. Its eyes shine on the munster in the grass, it’s all dead like a weed, that munster looks like Chris.
“The train,” A Bull shout. “Dumb Willie, get on the train.”
Dumb Willie picks A Bull up and carries him like a football like they do on TV. He runs for that trayne passing. There’s cars that don’t have doors. A Bull says the doors on one car are wide. Dumb Willie reaches the . . . it’s a word . . . rails and runs beside. That trayne is too fast. Those wide doors run away. Dumb Willie reaches, he can’t reach. A Bull’s pack slips off. It goes under the wheels and that trayne keeps going, going on.
“Run, Dumb Willie, run!” is what A Bull yells.
Dumb Willie runs fast.
-10-
A grief Abel cannot grasp is joined by a terror he cannot stand against as he watches his pack crushed beneath the
train’s wheels. The noise is unbearable, the scream of the engines and the howling of the rails, the great shaking of the ground. Dumb Willie clutches him tight. Abel’s legs dangle from the ground. His head bobs free as an arm the size of a man’s leg squeezes against his stomach, stealing his breath. He can’t grip Dumb Willie’s waist because his arm hurts, the busted one. Now both arms feel busted because of the way Chris beat him.
Chris.
He lets his head fall as Dumb Willie chases the boxcar. Behind them lies the upside-down image of Chris’s body. One arm is stretched outward, the other pinned beneath his stomach. Chris’s legs are bent as though he’s trying to get up, but Abel knows Chris Jones will never get up again. His head is bloodied and caved from the rock Dumb Willie threw him upon. It is of little comfort that Chris likely never felt that hard landing. Abel had heard the boy’s neck snap under the force of Dumb Willie’s shaking and knew then that Chris was dead. Any doubt he harbored is gone now, at this final glance. Chris lies on his stomach and yet his head has been spun clean around, his chin tucked against his own back.
Abel cannot hear, cannot think for the noise. The cars seem ready to topple, shimmying, the only boxcar with an open door fading into the night. Even here at the slowest point of the tracks, the train moves too fast.
“Run, Dumb Willie, run!”
It is as if something even greater than murder and wobbly trains frightens Dumb Willie, because he looses a yell that pierces the night and finds a final burst of speed. The cars seem to slow as the train lurches and heels. The boxcar draws near again. Dumb Willie reaches his free hand out. His fingers strain for the bottom ledge of the car, almost as high as his shoulders, then draw back as the car eases away once more.
Abel feels Dumb Willie’s grip on him loosen. Feels the arm around his stomach slide from there to his hip as another arm settles beneath his armpit, feels himself being lifted high toward the gaping night inside the car. He has always read that time slows and stretches out in moments of extreme peril. Here at the end, Abel knows that to be a lie. The world instead streaks too fast for his senses and thoughts to judge. Even Chris Jones is pushed from Abel’s mind, forgotten in the midst of the new and horrible fact that Dumb Willie is about to toss him.
