Hill William

by Scott McClanahan

  It said: Born to Lose.

  Frank laughed as he smoked his cigarette and turned around to go skinning on the deer.

  You should have seen this poor deer with its dead black eyes and its tongue sticking out of its mouth like it wasn’t dead but drunk or doing a funny deer face. Frank stood in front of us, took out his hunting knife he always kept on his belt in his hunting knife holster, and started gutting it.

  He took the knife, put it in the crotch, and he started skinning all up through the stomach muscles, all the way up to the rib cage of the deer. Frank took his knife, and wiggled it around, and all the blood and guts started falling out of the dead deer going smack against the ground like wet rags. Frank had one of those watches with the elastiky wrist band you could slip on and off. Frank put down his knife and reached up into the deer carcass with both arms, pulling out parts until he was bloody up past the elbow. He reached up in the deer again and when he pulled his arms out this time his watch was missing.

  Frank laughed and reached back up into the open deer cavity and felt around with his bloody arms, but he couldn’t find the watch. He giggled and kept reaching inside the deer, feeling around inside the rib cage, and looking down towards where all the intestines were at, but the watch wasn’t there. He flicked his cigarette onto the ground and said, “Maybe it’s in the guts.”

  Frank picked up a stick and started messing around with them as they steamed. He started stirring the stick around. There wasn’t any watch. Derrick and I bent down and looked through the deer guts too. There wasn’t any watch. He checked the deer again, shook it all hollow on the clothesline, and nothing fell out. He finished butchering the deer and filleting out the meat. He even let the deer guts sit out for a couple more weeks.

  He let them rot and he found no watch. And even to this day twenty years later, the watch has still yet to be found.

  There were times when Frank brought home all kinds of animals from working in the woods. He was always bringing home a duck, or a squirrel, or a rattlesnake, or a groundhog. One day we all gathered around the box and looked down at what was there. Derrick took the top off the box that his dad brought home. We looked down at what was there. It was a groundhog looking up at us, snarling and looking meaner than hell. Derrick took his finger and said, “Watch this.” Then he flicked the groundhog testicles like he was flipping his sister Sissy’s ear.

  This wasn’t as good as the time Frank brought home a baby flying squirrel he found in the nest of a tree. We sat around for weeks watching it grow in its shoebox nest. Then one day we took it outside in the Anger’s junky backyard. I went down to one end of the yard, beside a turned over milk crate, and Derrick stood up on top of the porch of this old plywood outbuilding they had propped up on crooked cinder blocks. He held the flying squirrel up high in the air with his hand and the flying squirrel took off from his hand and then it was flying so slow through the air on its little flying squirrel flaps until it wasn’t like it was a flying squirrel anymore, but a ghost of some sort, before landing soft on my shoulder and just resting there. Sadly, the flying squirrel fell in love with the Anger’s La-Z-boy recliner a couple of days later and got up in the metal spring coils. No one realized it until Derrick’s brother, Gay Walter, sat down, and the poor flying squirrel was crushed. This was still weeks away.

  So we put the flying squirrel back into its shoebox nest and took off on our bikes. We rode up the pot holed gravel road and then back on the muddy back roads, jumped ramps at the dirt pile, and then took off riding towards the water tower before the sun went down and Derrick went inside.

  I stayed out after the sun went down and the mountain sky became purple. I went to the side of the mountain road behind our house and plopped my bike down. There was an old hill there, clear cut and cleaned off by an old timber company and it made a nice place for sitting and looking out over the valley and Rainelle. I looked out over the continentals on the street below me and in these houses were people walking around in the lights they just turned on. I sat and felt so lonely because I was only one person and couldn’t be each of them. I sat in the purple light and looked down to Kroger where the light was shining over Rainelle and listened to the coal trucks and the logging trucks zipping through town on Route 60. This is the place I’m from. This is a place like no other. This is an outer space Mars called Appalachia.

  I looked up and I saw spaceships returning.

  I sat on the side of the hill surrounded by the mountains, which in the summer looked like they were made of cauliflower painted green, and in the winter were white with snow and dark purple or dull gray without. I sat and looked over shining Rainelle and had no idea that this was going to be the place where I found out what it was like to die. This is the place where all of the joy of the world would come to me and where I’d fall in love with my life.

  I looked at the dark mountains, and I heard my mother calling me home. “Come home.”

  And I asked myself a question I’ve been asking ever since, but haven’t been able to answer. I asked myself whether the mountains were just graves full of dead skeletons or whether they were pregnant bellies popping full of life. And sometimes, I think to myself that the mountains look like graves, and then at other times I say, no, they’re not graves, but pregnant bellies, full of babies, waiting to be born.

  Who the fuck knows?

  WONDER WOMAN UNDEROOS

  One morning, my dad woke me up and told me we were going to Grandma’s. At first I didn’t know what the hell was going on because my mom was always the one who woke me up, not Dad.

  He wouldn’t tell me so I crawled out of the bed wearing my PJ top and these little Wonder Woman underoos. It was the kind of superhero underwear that came in a pack of three with Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. I liked the Batman underoos the best, but since it was the end of the week here I was with only the Wonder Woman underoos to wear.

  “Wonder Woman sucks,” I thought, but I didn’t say anything.

  My dad and I, we tried to get on the pants, but every time I tried to put my foot through—one of the legs got twisted, or if I got my foot in, it wouldn’t go all the way in, or just when I was getting both legs in, I’d almost fall over trying to stand up. As we were doing this I thought, “This isn’t how Mom does it.”

  I didn’t say anything because all of a sudden my dad started crying.

  I’d never seen him cry before.

  It was one of those big booming cries.

  The night before my mom sat down on the couch with my dad and she started crying too. I sat beside the couch and played with my wrestlers and noticed there wasn’t anything going on in her face.

  She was leaning lost against my father’s leg and I thought, “He never sits with her like this. What’s going on?”

  He was touching her head and rubbing his fingers through her curly hair. He couldn’t rub right. He rubbed her head like he was washing his truck.

  Then he whispered, “It’s going to be all right.”

  The next morning after getting up and putting on my clothes, and getting Mom ready to go and standing at the door, my father kept repeating to us, “It’s going to be all right. We’re going over to Grandma’s house.”

  My mother stood at the door wearing her baby blue winter jacket.

  She started crying, except she was still trying to smile and show me that nothing was wrong. She was smiling and crying at the same time like her face couldn’t decide whether to cry or smile. I knew this was the story of the world.

  I thought, “This woman’s crazy. I can’t wait to tell my friends.”

  I said, “I know it’s going to be okay.”

  My dad said, “We’re going to Grandma’s. And it’s going to be all right. Lets get in the truck.”

  We went over to Ruby’s across the Loops Road in Dad’s truck and almost got stuck in two feet of snow on the ground. We went over to Ruby’s, who I called Ruby, not Grandma, and who didn’t know my name until I was ten. She always called me Todd and real
ly only talked to me after Sunday dinner when she said, “You didn’t eat much, Todd.”

  I said, “My name’s not Todd.”

  We went over to Grandma’s and Ruby took me into a bedroom where she slept. It was a big comfy bed with a red bed spread that smelled like mothballs. It was a room full of picture frames and pictures she cut out of newspaper advertisements. She didn’t know the people in the ads, but she thought they were pretty people.

  She put me in that bed and tucked me in and said, “Now you go back to sleep now, Todd. You go back to sleep.”

  I tried sleeping too. I tried being this Todd. I closed my eyes tight and tried, but after a while I realized something was wrong. I tried moving my legs but they wouldn’t move. I tried bending my arms but they wouldn’t bend. I was flat on my stomach and listened to my mother crying in the other room.

  I heard them talking. I was sprawled in the bed unable to move, and I heard my Grandma talking to my mother who was in the back bedroom.

  My mother said something in a high pitched crying voice, “I’m so scared.”

  And Ruby said, “You just hush now and go to sleep. You just hush now and get your mind right.”

  And then my mom said, “I’m afraid of airplanes. I’m afraid of airplanes falling out of the sky.”

  My Grandma said, “You quit talking that foolishness. There’s not any of them flying things going to fall out of the sky. You just hush.”

  I listened and kept my eyes closed tight and wondered, “What am I going to do?”

  I tried to move in the bed some more, but I couldn’t move. I wondered if I was ever going to be able to get up. I wondered if my life would be like this forever—a life full of Wonder Woman Underoos. I saw myself at the age of forty wearing Wonder Woman Underoos.

  The next day Mom and Dad were getting ready to go someplace. Before they left, my mother sat at the kitchen table. Ruby stood at the sink washing styrophome plates, bragging about how many preserves she put up, or how many potatoes she was going to plant this year. My dad told her it wasn’t healthy to wash styrophome plates and use them again. Grandma whispered, “Shit.”

  Then my mother and daddy were gone and I was left alone with Ruby for a couple of hours. I sat and played checkers with my Uncle Nathan who had cerebral palsy. I went back into my Grandma’s bedroom and I looked at her pictures of people in their coffins she took at the funeral home.

  I asked her, “Why do you have all of these pictures of people in their coffins?”

  She said, “I wouldn’t ever get a picture of my kin folk all dressed up and with their teeth in if I didn’t take one at the funeral home.”

  So I asked again, “Where did Mom and Dad go?’

  “They went to take your mom to the doctor,” Ruby said.

  I looked at the picture and then I heard a car pull up in the gravel driveway.

  A door shut. I looked out the window. I saw Mom and Dad getting out of the truck.

  I watched them walk up the gravel path and my mother had a little bag of orange pill bottles. She looked better. She looked something.

  I saw she was carrying another bag in her other hand. It was a bag from a toy store. I watched the bag wrinkle and crinkle and I wondered what was inside of it.

  “I don’t think you have those do you?” my dad asked.

  I looked inside and shook my head no. It was two little WWF wrestlers you could put on your thumbs and wrestle. Hulk Hogan and Big John Studd.

  I sat on the floor and ripped open the package. I put the rubber wrestlers on my thumbs and wiggled my thumbs around and I had a wrestling match. I took my Big John Studd thumb wrestler and my Hulk Hogan thumb wrestler and let the bell ring. Then I had Hulk Hogan jump off the side of the recliner and punch Studd in his face. Big John Studd put Hulk Hogan in a headlock. Then Hulk Hogan got out of the head lock, jumped off the top rope, and knocked Studd out with a flying elbow. The imaginary referee came over and slapped the canvas…1…2…3. Hogan wins.

  I heard my dad standing in the kitchen and talking to my mom.

  “Now you remember to take these now.”

  I listened as my mom popped open a pill bottle, and drank a pill down with a gulp of pop.

  “I think I was just exhausted. I couldn’t sleep. Things will be better now.”

  And so I sat and wrestled with my thumb wrestlers and thought, this depression stuff isn’t too bad, especially if I can get some presents out of it. I dreamed about other bad things that could happen to her and whether I could get presents out of it. I dreamed about wars and car crashes and presents.

  I dreamed about insane asylums and presents.

  I dreamed about heart attacks and diseases and presents.

  I dreamed about rushing water and hellfire and lightning and presents.

  I dreamed about floods and sickness and presents. And now I dreamed about something else. I dreamed about cancer. I dreamed about cancer and even greater presents. Then I found myself saying, “Please let her get cancer, Lord. Please let her get cancer and people will give me presents.” The next morning there was a song and a magic trick. Do you believe?

  Later that evening I grew tired of wrestlers, and I went outside to play with the Fingus boys who were hanging out at the dirt pile. Derrick wasn’t there. I was wearing my hand me down snowsuit because there were a couple of inches of snow on the ground and Keith and Eric were building snow caves. When they saw me they stopped making their snow cave and snow bombs and Keith said, “Where you been?”

  Eric said, “Yeah, where you been?”

  I ran out into the snow with my hand me down snow boots and I shouted, “My mom just went crazy guys. She went crazy.”

  The boys looked at me with lost looks on their faces.

  I tried explaining to them, “She just went nuts. She went totally crazy.”

  They were confused and I could see it in their stupid little kid faces. They didn’t know what I meant.

  I stood watching them. They stopped building the snow cave and started throwing snow balls at each other.

  I thought, “This is all a big scam.”

  It was every bit as hard being six years old as it was being thirty six years old.

  I knew this already. I stood watching the sun shine down on my friends playing. Keith and Eric were laughing and smiling. I stood and said, “Don’t you know this is all going to end one day, guys? Don’t you know this is all going to be over and we’re going to be gone?”

  They weren’t listening. They kept playing. They didn’t care. They kept looking at me. They didn’t know there were things waiting to hurt us, even then, playing with our friends in the snow.

  VASELINE

  I went back to see Derrick when he had a couple of new magazines full of all these obese women posing in naked pictures. I went back to the Anger’s house. These were fetish pictures full of fat women with fat rolls and folds of flesh hanging from off of them and little skinny guys touching them in their fat stomach folds or in the folds of their fat legs. We were all alone in the house because Derrick sat and flipped through all the pictures of the fat women having their folds kissed. The women were all so fat and flabby. I sat beside him on his mother’s bed and watched it. He flipped to a picture of a skinny man lifting up the woman’s stomach so he could see her privates.

  I sat and watched him as he flipped through the magazine pages and looked at the pictures of the parts. He stopped and ended up putting the magazine across the bed flat like a bible and said, “Do you want me to show you how he does it?”

  I told him “No,” because I thought that it looked like it hurt.

  But he just smiled a chewing tobacco smile and said, “Nah. I promise. I won’t hurt you. I just want to show you how.”

  I said, “Okay.”

  I stood up off the bed and pulled down my Cincinnati Reds shorts that showed off my little legs so skinny and white. I turned around and Derrick told me to get down on the bed with my back facing him.

  Before I kneeled, I turn
ed and said, “You’re just going to show me? Right?”

  “Right,” he said and rested his hand on my skinny back.

  I closed my eyes. I closed my eyes and thought about the fat woman.

  I saw the giant fat wvoman and the fat woman folds. I saw myself standing at the bottom of the giant fat woman mountain. Then I was lost.

  “Help me,” I said to the fat woman. “Help.”

  She was laughing and covering herself with Crisco. There were waves of fat flesh and more waves. Then I was trying to climb her. I was trying to climb her and get away from the fat valley. I kept slipping into the fat folds and I kept slipping inside the stinky flesh until I couldn’t breathe. So I tried pulling myself up, but the skin was so slick I was drowning.

  Then this happened, Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.

  A week later, I was outside in the woods and Derrick said, “Man I wish I had some Vaseline.”

  I immediately knew what he needed it for. I didn’t know how to do it, but I knew all about it because of the dirty magazines.

  I stopped cutting the tree I was cutting with my cheap machete and said, “I think my mom has some.”

  He said, “You do?”

  I threw down the machete I bought at Aides for five dollars and I told him I would go home and get it for him.

  I left him standing in the woods and ran all the way back home through the briars and the brush to get the Vaseline, but when I got there I realized that I didn’t know what Vaseline was.