I told Tyrell our mother didn’t mean it. Any words that came out of her mouth then or now. I told him he should be easy on her, Dad would want that.
Tyrell said disgusted, “If I’d been there he might not be dead, see? I might of made some difference.”
I don’t say this is not likely. I don’t say anything at all.
When Tyrell’s in one of his moods I don’t interfere. Watching like you’d watch a house ablaze.
THEY SAY THAT Raleigh Rawls didn’t turn back when the other firefighters did. They say he pushed inside the falling-down house, that burned faster than anybody expected. These old farmhouses with worn-out wiring and insulation, decayed chimneys, stacks of newspapers and God knows what stored in boxes, fire traps waiting for a spark to set them going. If not for Raleigh Rawls insisting upon going in the Barndollars would both be dead of smoke inhalation where they were fallen on the burning floor of their bedroom. He’d gotten them out, or almost out, when the ceiling caved in, and Raleigh Rawls was pinned beneath. Like that it happened, that fast. A flash fire in the kitchen after the fire began in the bedroom probably a mattress fire caused by a burning cigarette.
TYRELL SHAKES HIS head marveling like there is something in this room floating before our eyes you can see but can’t believe. “If it’d been somebody else for Christ sake. The fucken Barndollars.”
Tyrell fits the parts of his rifle back together. The oily swabs he tosses away. The gun cleaner smell is strong like lye soap. I like it, it makes my eyes water. Makes the inside of my nose sting.
I can see Dad cleaning his guns, his shotgun. But it’s blurred like through my bad eye. I see Dad’s mouth moving, he’s saying something to us but I can’t hear the words. Like the TV on mute.
Tyrell is looking at me. Like he asked me something, and I didn’t hear.
I say, “If we shot them up they’d know who did it. Right away everybody’d know, see, Tyrell?”
Tyrell keeps staring at me like he never saw me before.
Tyrell says, “I sure to hell hope they do.”
ALREADY TYRELL AND me have gone out. Not to where the Barndollars are staying with their married daughter and her kids but just out. It wasn’t planned. Tyrell didn’t take his rifle nor even think of taking his rifle. It was more just the two of us restless in the house. A wind from that direction, across the creek and the cat tail marsh we used to explore where people’d tossed their unwanted things some of it big as washing machines, kids’ broke bicycles, every kind of tire and car part, and mattresses so stained it was a wonder to see them. We’d played in there until Tyrell was too old and lost interest when he was maybe twelve but before then we’d gone sometimes with other kids including Judd Barndollar who was a year or so older than Tyrell, I mean he still is that age but he’s away at the Red Bank Boys’ Detention for car theft, attempted armed robbery, and some other serious things. All the guys including Tyrell would joke they’d wind up at Red Bank someday. But Tyrell would never joke like this that our father could hear. Some things are too close to the bone Dad would say to be funny.
A wind from across the Mud Creek and the cat tail marsh and it’s bringing the fire-smell to us. Outdoors and in. No matter how much wind, and rain on the windows peaking down the glass like a waterfall, when it’s over the smell returns. A smoldering stink you don’t want to think might have some burnt-human flesh in it.
Tyrell says, “Fuck let’s get out of here.”
It’s 9 P.M. Mom never came out for supper. Tyrell and me, we found some leftovers in the refrigerator but hadn’t any appetite for them. Nothing has much taste now which is O.K. with me, then I don’t get a sick stomach. We’ve been watching TV surfing the channels. Flickering faces is what TV mostly is, voices cranked up to sound important, corny mood music and laugh tracks and dumb-ass ads. After the fire it all seems like ways of not-thinking about real things but the real things poke through anyway. What Dad liked was sports mostly baseball which Tyrell and I tried to watch with him, but got restless when nothing happened. Every season Dad had some new player he liked, it was underdog teams he favored, and up to when he died it was a six-foot-ten gangling guy with lank hair and a mustache who pitched for Arizona who Dad was just thrilled by, said this character was the twin image of some old friend of his from high school who’d died in a car crash. I would watch Dad when this pitcher was on and Dad’s face was so tense, his fists closed on both his knees and his posture so straight, and the light of the TV flickering on him, and I was a little jealous I guess, and maybe Tyrell was, too, that nothing in actual life could mean so much to our father as some stranger pitching ball, and when a batter swung and missed one of these pitches it had the power to make Dad happy in a way we guessed we never could.
It was just four days after the funeral, this night Tyrell and me went outside into the night and hiked through fields to get to the interstate by the mall. This is the worst ugly dug-up place around here. I’d swear it has been under construction forever. Mom says there was all just cornfields and grazing land here when I was a baby but it’s hard to believe. Just to see such ugliness makes you want to break something. Makes you want to toss a bomb. There was no plan that Tyrell had, though. We were out on the overpass kicking chunks of concrete and rocks and crap like metal rods, parts of tires, beer bottles, and cans down onto the highway and watching the stuff break, or bounce. There wasn’t much traffic this time of night about 2 A.M. A sick-looking moon behind some clouds tattered and blowing like old curtains. Tyrell grinned and grunted dragging a block of concrete to the edge and pushing it over to fall and shatter below us like ice. There was a fascination to this but I said:
“Drop it on some fucken car, you want to do something.”
Tyrell snorted. “Do it yourself, One-Eye.”
This was harsh. I felt the sting in those words, that kids at school used to call me when I was younger. (And maybe still do behind my back.) “One-Eye” was nothing Tyrell would dare to utter at home especially in Dad’s hearing he’d have had his ass kicked. That he knew this, and still he said it, and Tyrell being the one who’d blinded his baby sister himself, was something to ponder.
I said, “All right, asshole. I will.”
I was fucken mad! Felt like a hornet not caring who got stung.
With my foot I pushed another chunk of concrete up onto the overpass. It was damn heavy, I’d guess the weight of two bricks at least. Tyrell didn’t help me none just stood leaning over the rail smoking a cigarette. And he ain’t supposed to smoke, he’d promised Dad when he was my age. By the time I got the concrete where I wanted it I was sweating inside my jacket and my oily hair I hadn’t washed since the funeral was stuck to my forehead. But I liked the feel of my pulse going fast! It was like Dad’s bluegrass music where the fiddles race with each other. Tyrell said, “You ain’t gonna drop that on anybody, girl. You’ll kill ’em. Wind up at Red Bank Girls’. You can sleep in a bunk with Sissie Lamar.” Tyrell laughed. (Sissie Lamar is this mean fat girl pleaded guilty to smothering her own baby nephew she’d been babysitting, sent away for as long as they could send her as a minor of fifteen.)
At the interstate there’s not the same hilly land as there is other places outside Ransomville because when they excavated they cut through the hills to try to level the road. So you can see pretty far into the distance. Especially at night you can see headlights a long way away like at the edge of the earth. The size of fireflies when you first see them. We watched the headlights get bigger. We were excited but calm, too. Like Dad used to say telling us of hitch-hiking which nobody does now, but people did when he was a kid, even girls and women sometimes hitching all the way to Port Oriskany and Buffalo, he’d be standing at the side of the road with his thumb out and always sooner or later somebody stopped for him, male or female, old or young, somebody he knew or a total stranger, and it came to seem to him so weird that the vehicle destined to stop for him was already headed for him from miles away, and the driver with no awareness or expectation of him
as he had no awareness or expectation of the driver, and yet it would happen that this person would stop for him, Raleigh Rawls; and that Raleigh Rawls would be there at the side of the road to be stopped for, and he’d have no choice who it was stopped for him because it had been ordained that way, from the beginning of the world you could argue. “When your number is up” doesn’t have to be just some thing like being killed Dad would say it just means your number is “up” like in gambling, where you could win a bundle.
Tyrell and me, that was how we came to feel watching these headlights coming toward us, a rig barreling along in the night on the mostly deserted highway. Sort of dreamy-hypnotized watching. And my foot on the big block of concrete rocking it back and forth at the edge. My heart was beating really hard now like listening to “Cumberland Breakdown” or “Whirlpool” on my dad’s tapes. My mouth was so dry I had to keep swallowing. It came to me slow that my dad was a trucker, too, short-haul trucking for the Ransomville Stone Quarry, and there was the thought What if it’s somebody else’s father, they’re waiting to come home. But I couldn’t change my mind because Tyrell would call me One-Eye and scorn me as a coward and I was pissed at him so I waited until the truck was almost beneath the overpass and shoved the concrete off and it fell straight down hitting the side of the highway, not the truck which was already past. My right eye was shut tight so just my blind eye could witness what would happen but nothing happened, the big old rig was past and the air stank of diesel exhaust. Tyrell was relieved I knew, just like me. Sweaty and shaky like me. But he’s got this nasty laugh saying, “See, you can’t do shit. Missed by a mile.”
I went crazy then, I hit Tyrell on the chest with both fists and he cursed and hit me back harder than maybe he meant, being so much taller than me, and not one to strike any girl. There I was on the pavement in broke glass and bawling like a baby he could not walk away from, under the circumstances.
NEXT DAY TYRELL would stammer he was sorry. He was goddamn sorry. Hurting me and near to causing some innocent man’s death, he’d want to think he’d been shit-faced drunk but in fact he’d been stone cold sober.
TYRELL DOES DRINK some. All the beers and ale in the fridge left over from the funeral, it isn’t just Mom but Tyrell has been depleting.
He’s got a beer in hand, driving to where the Barndollars are staying since the fire gutted their house. At least, we think this is where we heard the Barndollars are staying with some relatives. Tyrell grunts, “Put in a tape, M’lora.” In the glove compartment he’s got Dad’s old tapes and CDs, bluegrass, country and western, rock rattling around. “Cumberland Breakdown” is my first choice.
On the backseat of the car is Tyrell’s smooth-oiled rifle. Loaded, and the safety on.
The more Dad is gone the more I love these tapes of his. He’d be playing them in his truck turned up high. What “breakdown” means in bluegrass is the musicians playing so fast you can hardly hear the individual notes. There’s no lyrics only a wild nerved-up kind of music like somebody dancing till they drop. Like my feeling sometimes I want to run, run, run to feel my heart beat hard and the blood pound in my ears till I can’t run any faster, and the voices in my head fade to just wind and that scratchy whispering of certain kinds of leaves, poplar and willow, you would swear must be human and trained upon you.
Run, run! Ceiling is ablaze, ceiling’s going to fall.
They said he hadn’t a chance, once it fell. Trapped there, and the others couldn’t get to him in time.
Third-degree burns over 90 percent of his body they said.
Good reason for a closed casket. None of us, not even Raleigh Rawls’s wife and his mother, would get to see.
Our mother had her way, she’d thrown out these precious tapes and CDs of Dad’s like they were shameful. A drunk woman rubbing her sunk-in eyes. “Your father never grew up. That was his doom.”
You couldn’t believe these shitty things she’s been saying, when she isn’t bellyaching to Jesus.
It’s her car Tyrell is driving. He has the use of it now he has a license and has been working part-time in town. And Mom won’t go out anyway, so Tyrell just takes her keys. Nobody is going to make Tyrell go back to school. (Me, I guess I will. Sometime.) Dad’s truck is for sale with a dealer in Ransomville. We cleared it out right after the funeral when we were all nerved-up and couldn’t be cooped inside. Tyrell drove it under the carport and Mom still in her glamor makeup and her hair blow-dried for the funeral dragged the vacuum cleaner out, and I helped her, and we got the truck pretty clean inside, considering.
Dad’s cousins wanted to play “Cumberland Breakdown” at his funeral but Mom would not hear of it. Almost screaming No! Like his taste in music is something to be ashamed of. I think that must be it. Like anything a man cares for, after he’s dead seems like some weakness of his.
I’m thinking that being dead is a weakness. You can’t speak for yourself any longer, everybody else is gabbing and yammering and making speeches over you like they are chewing you up and getting set to swallow. I hate it.
Turning onto the Carpenter Road, which is the road the Barndollars are living at, Tyrell cuts the car headlights. Right away I say, “Hey. Your lights are out.”
Tyrell laughs. “Ol’ Eagle-Eye. What’d I do without you?”
I’D GONE TO school two days. Second day, I walked out and all the way home three miles in the rain.
A sick feeling comes over me like I am confronted with a math problem I can’t figure out. A tall column of numbers to be added up. I’m O.K. at math but this I can’t do. I feel sick like throwing up all the time. It’s the smell in the air from across the creek.
Melora! I’m so sorry, dear. I feel so bad about your father, I…don’t know what to say.
So don’t say anything for Christ sake.
Your father was a very brave man…
Miss Urquhardt with her watery droopy eyes and sniveling voice that’s too loud so everybody in homeroom can hear. Oh! oh! She’s fainted! Melora Rawls is fainted! Get the nurse, somebody! Hurry!
Fuckers, I’m thinking. Could strap dynamite under my jacket and walk into Friday morning assembly like one of them suicide bombers no older than me. I’d do it in a heartbeat. Like Tyrell says groping his words, “Just to get it over and done. Fuck, so you wouldn’t have to think about it.”
It is all we think of, for sure.
Fifteen days have passed since the funeral. Seventeen, since the fire.
Each day, like today, especially staying home from school, time moves s-l-o-w as pushing a boulder uphill. You can’t believe how slow the clock hand moves.
How any days have passed at all, I don’t know.
I wish I could hear his voice better. Words he’d said to me, a thousand thousand times, they’re fading.
At school there wasn’t just Miss Urquhardt of course there was everybody else. Teachers from last year and Mr. Klinkson the principal. And this new ninth grade teacher with the scissor-cut blond hair and flashy glasses I overheard ask something of an older teacher and the reply was Childhood accident so I knew they were talking of my ruined eye. Like it’s part of Raleigh Rawls dying like he did, that his daughter would have a ruined eye. All of them adults have got to take you aside and Talk. Like it’s so fucken important they say what they have prepared to say like a politician on TV and you hear it, like you give a shit for them Feeling Bad. How many times you need to be told your daddy was a hero for Christ sake. At the memorial service no wonder half the Rawlses was drunk. In cafeteria line where I was grabbing my own scraped elbows and glowering to scare people off there came Brad Lamar and damn if Brad didn’t say Your dad went into a fire to save those Barndollars, Jesus why’d he do that? I’d of let ’em burn.
“Cumberland Breakdown” is about finished, so I set the tape back to play over. Tyrell is driving with no headlights only just moonlight but it’s a weird shifting light, clouds running over the moon so he’s taking care. Suddenly he stops the car. Are we here? Where? There’s a lone bar
n off in a field looking like it’s floating. Tyrell says, “We could burn that barn. I’m prepared.”
Quick I say, “We could.”
I’m thinking this would be safer than shooting out windows at the Barndollar place. If that’s what Tyrell is thinking of doing with the rifle.
Dreamy Tyrell finishes his beer and tosses the can out the window which I don’t like, you’re not supposed to do. Leaning his arms around the steering wheel. Almost I can hear his thoughts. You need so bad to do something.
Raleigh Rawls! Until the fire, just to say that name would be to make people smile. Dad was so well-liked.
Now somebody sees you, that name flashes to them and they get this look in their face like somebody jammed a stick up their ass. So sorry and guilty-seeming and hope to escape from you. And you can’t blame them.
The older girls used to say my dad was sexy. I hated to hear this, you don’t like to think that way about your own father.
What sexy is, is a mystery. Some people are, but most are not. Good looks has only part to do with it I guess.
(But being One-Eye would definitely exclude you. I would guess that.)
They say there will come a time, it might be years, it might be sooner. When you surrender your hurt and grief. My Grandma Rawls telling how she surrendered her son at last, Dad’s older brother who’d drowned when he was nine years old in 1967, when there was the Yewville flood in 1984 and seventeen people died including five children in a single family and one of them but a baby. Grandma said she saw it then, the justice of it, that a boy of nine might drown if these others drowned. Grandma couldn’t explain it but we knew what she meant.
About Dad, though. I don’t think that time will ever come or that I would wish it. Mostly I don’t give a shit for any future time, I’m thinking the only time is now.
I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories Page 11
