American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  At such a total remove was Monty as he stood over the dead Germans he did not hear the first shot. It flew past his ear. The second bullet, which grazed his thigh, brought him back.

  He collapsed to the ground. On his knees and elbows, he scuttled between the bodies, using them as a shield. More shots were fired, but they hit the dead flesh. Pock, pock. The sound was almost comforting, a stalled pulse trying to find its rhythm. Pock, pock. Judging by the reverb of the shots and where the bodies were getting hit, Monty was fairly certain the gunmen were on a hillock forty yards to the west, but it was too dark beneath the tree canopy to say for sure. Even worse, when he tried to aim, situating the gun barrel on top of a lifeless shoulder, Monty realized it was also too dark to see the sight posts of his Springfield, not the front one, not the rear one, their black metal indistinguishable from the black night. Pock, pock, pock.

  How in hell could he hope to hit them if he could not even aim? Monty needed to think. He could try firing into the tree branches above him, clearing a hole for the moonlight, but that would probably use up most of his ammo. He could try waiting them out for the entire night, sending the occasional warning shot, but soon enough they would probably decide to flank him.

  Think. Goddamn it. Think.

  From the pocket of his shirt Monty took one of the hard candies Nicholas had on him the night he died. They always helped Monty calm his nerves. Right as he was about to place one in his mouth, he noticed how the wrapper reflected the scant ambient light, a tiny moon in the palm of his hand.

  Monty pushed the wrapper onto his rifle’s front sight post, letting the metal triangle tear through so it was hooked. He tried to aim. The white paper at the end of the barrel provided just enough contrast for him to line up the two sight posts. He took a long breath and relaxed his shoulders. All he needed was some movement, a shimmer in the darkness, a humming made visible, anything to pinpoint in his sights. Monty noticed a distant bush shake, just a touch, as though seen through a heat haze. He pulled the trigger, over and again, until he had to reload, which he did, over and again, until all his ammo was spent.

  “Would you say you have a death wish?” Colonel Duluth asked Montgomery, who was sitting in a tent at base camp twelve days later. “I’d honestly like to know.”

  The two men faced each other across a small table. Both in clean uniforms, hair combed and cheeks shaved, they were unrecognizable compared to just two days prior, when a report had come through, “Woods now U.S. Marine Corps entirely.” From outside the tent came sounds of celebration, men slapping each other on the back, wine corks popping from bottles, the occasional salvo of a sidearm being misused.

  “No, sir,” said Monty.

  “For two weeks I received reports of a soldier gone rogue. But that’s not the unusual thing. We were all scattered by the shit storm out there.” The colonel flipped through a folder. “The unusual thing is that the rogue soldier, according to reports, repeatedly went back into enemy terrain. Always alone. Like he wanted to die.”

  “All due respect, but I disagree, Colonel. Sounds to me more like he wanted to win.”

  Inside a tent miles from what had been enemy terrain, Monty thought of the moment, twelve days ago, when his desire to die had been overcome not by the will to live, nor even by some urge to be the victor, but rather by the desperate, instinctive need to survive. He could still see the lunar surface of a candy wrapper at the end of his rifle, still hear the crack of each bullet like a syllable of Ni-cho-las, Ni-cho-las echoing through the dark woods, still feel the cold air drying sweat from his forehead after he shot his last round. “Never be ashamed of who you are,” the colonel said, jarring Monty from his thoughts.

  “Sir?”

  “You’re a soldier. Be proud of that.”

  Monty stood, squared himself, and saluted Colonel Duluth. The colonel did the same. Despite the dim light of the tent, the colonel’s hand was clearly visible, the skin on its knuckles webbed with age, nails clipped, a gold wedding band on its ring finger. He sat back down. “Dismissed.” Montgomery took one last glance at the gold wedding band, transfixed for some reason he could not discern, and walked outside into a crowd of triumphant soldiers, where it occurred to him, with bitter clarity, that the Allied forces, American and French and British, had a long fight ahead of them.

  2.3

  Tree Bear! Tree Bear!—Rocket the Miracle Horse—A Serenade in the Moonglade—Storyville Stories—Historical Secrets

  “When a can of soda gets shaken up, let’s say because of a bumpy car ride, or some kid accidentally dropping it on the floor, or it falls out of the refrigerator, or because it’s been dealing with organized crime,” Special Agent Phillip Johnson said to Lance Forster on August 4, 1973, “do you know what you do with that can of soda? You tap. On the lid. With your fingernail. Tap, tap, tap. Then it cracks wide open. That’s what you do to a can of delicious, mouth-watering, thirst-quenching pop.”

  Decades before that interrogation, Lance, age twelve, was playing “Spot the Tree Bear” with two of his siblings, Ramsey and Harold. They were on the northeast corner of Eden. The twins ran ahead of their brother, older than them by seven years, while shouting over their shoulders. “Tree bear, Haddy! See?” “Tree bear!” “Tree bear!” “See it, Haddy? Tree bear!” With each shout, they pointed, at the ruins of a sharecropper cottage, toward a copse of pine trees, into a patch of nettles, at the old farm equipment, cow troughs and middle busters and well pumps, so rusted over as to be statuary.

  The children came upon a barn that had not been used since the year their father had a more modern one erected closer to the big house. The old barn’s rusting tin roof, situated atop wooden walls the color of brick, creaked in the afternoon breeze. A bluish copper weather vane on the barn’s cupola swayed from northwest to southeast.

  Built by the property’s first owner, the barn would remain standing for another two decades, its roof warping in the summer heat, its paint fading in the winter sun, until the day a report came from inside its walls, echoing across the hills, through the trees, and over the ponds of Eden, so weak by the time it reached the living room where the Forsters were gathered that the only reaction came from their white Labrador, who trotted into the kitchen and, whimpering, began to scratch at the back door. Houghton had the barn razed within hours of finding Monty.

  “Know what’s inside there?” Lance said to Haddy. “The king of the tree bears!”

  “Honest?”

  “The king spooks real easy,” Ramsey said to Haddy. “Let us go inside first.”

  Tree bears were a family legend. On trips to and from town, shadowy woods reeling past the carriage, Houghton would tell his children about those elusive creatures, how their skin was the color of bark and their eyes the color of leaves, how they lived on a diet of budworms, slept curled into tree hollows, and, when standing still, could be mistaken for bear-shaped stove wood. The twins had long since realized tree bears were about as real as unicorns. Their brother had not. Outside the old barn years after he’d first been told of the legend, waiting for Ramsey and Lance to call him, Harold shifted his feet as though he had to make water, he was so excited to see the King Tree Bear.

  At the sound of his brother and sister yelling, “We found it! Come look!” Haddy sprinted to the barn and slid open its door. His jitters turned to fear quicker than the one time he’d played a game of mumblety-peg. Inside, all was quiet. Prismatic cobwebs split the daylight into circular rainbows, and organ pipes built by mud daubers speckled the roof beams. Bales of hay were strewn about in a pattern as haphazard and methodical as the fallen stones of some prehistoric monument, shafts of light intersecting them to predict equinoxes and solstices that would only come round by a coincidence of time. Dust pirouetted in the humid air. Unable to see Lance and Ramsey anywhere in the dark barn, Harold called out to them, loud enough to send an owl, hidden among the rafters, soaring through a chute into the open air. Nobody who was a person gave any more of a response. Then, right as he
was about to holler this was no longer any fun, Harold saw, rising from behind one of the hay bales, the head of something that was most certainly not a person.

  The tree bear looked just as he had thought it would, animate but whittled, its eyes two ragged holes, mouth a yawning slash, and ears two brown triangles lodged at the top corners of its head. Was that the king? Haddy couldn’t tell. Without thinking he took a step forward. As the tree bear made like a curious dog, tilting its head from one side to the other, Haddy pursed his lips to whistle but was interrupted by Lance, who jumped out from behind a stall door and, with a growl to his voice, screamed, “Rawr!”

  At the Panola Cola Museum years later, while arranging colorful kings and queens into meaningless patterns, Harold would remember not the shock but rather the confusion as he stumbled backward, tripped over a pitchfork, and fell onto a pile of scrap lumber. He would remember a rope coiled by his shoulder. He would remember how the rope started to move. Still and all, despite those sensations etched into his memory, Harold would be unable, throughout the years following the incident, to recall any sound: the rattling did not begin until after the snake had bitten his neck.

  Pain spread out from the wound as steadily as a drop of iodine touched to a cotton ball. Its intensity grew. His mind collapsing into shock, Harold could think of nothing but the wave of fire coursing from his neck, down his shoulder, and through his chest, as though his veins were filled with gasoline and the rattlesnake’s fangs had been a lit match. His field of vision telescoped from where he lay on the ground. Into it appeared two heads, that of his brother and that of his sister, both with mouths gaping. At the same moment as Harold began to wonder why Ramsey was holding a sugar sack, one that had three holes torn into it, Lance picked up the pitchfork and thrust it toward the ground, where, if Harold had been able to turn his head, he would have seen the pitchfork’s rusted tines impale four feet and six pounds of eastern diamondback.

  “Oh God, I’m so sorry,” Ramsey said, falling to her knees. With the sugar sack she wiped the sweat from Harold’s brow. “It was only a joke.”

  Although moments earlier he had shouted loud enough to scare away a barn owl, Harold, his vocal cords wrecked by the venom and his throat muscles convulsing from the bite, couldn’t speak loud enough to frighten a field mouse. He only managed to muster a single word.

  “Branchwater.”

  * * *

  Throughout their early childhood, Thomas Jefferson Branchwater had been looked after by his brother, George Washington Branchwater, the favorite son of their household. Little Tommy idealized Big George. It was from his older brother he learned how to laze away an afternoon tossing a line from a john boat. It was with his older brother he got corned for the first time on a stolen bottle of busthead whiskey. George shielded Tom from anyone in their small Cherokee community who called them half-breeds or pinkskins, who whispered that their father had been working on an oil field a thousand miles away when they were born, or who swapped rumors of a circuit judge from Oxford who’d been known to socialize with their mother around the time of their conception.

  Then came the morning when no one could find George. The family searched everywhere to no avail. Finally, on the second day George had been missing, Tom, while getting water for the morning coffee, heard a moan echoing faintly from the bottom of the well.

  George never was the same after his sleepwalking accident. Not only did his mind go simple—sweeping his only manageable chore, vocabulary often a mush of syllables, getting dressed difficult without help—but his body seemed to freeze in time, leading many elders in their community to suspect devilry in that fateful plunge down the well. Prior to the accident, George had been two years older than Tom, and three inches taller. Afterward, as he grew older, George remained the same size, trapped forever in the body of a twelve-year-old. He became an object of ridicule in town. “Georgie the cripple,” schoolchildren would taunt singsong, “Georgie the simple.” On most occasions, Tom—whose size following his brother’s accident had developed at twice the rate of a normal child, as though by some fourth law of motion one body’s deceleration led to the acceleration of another—would protect George, usually with an action no more violent than the folding of his arms across the precut, hardwood four-by-four that was his chest.

  Years later, the urgency with which he would lift Harold’s slack body from the floor of the barn and order Lance and Ramsey to run home, stemmed from the one time, back when his brother was still alive, he’d failed to keep him safe.

  “Who did this?” he asked George, eighteen years old, in the kitchen of their house. Using the side of his favored hand, the one already balled into a fist for whoever the answer might be, Tom lifted his brother’s chin to inspect the bloody scrape along his cheekbone. George shrank away in the childish manner, his whole body curling into itself, that always made Tom ripple with both heartache and anger, a combination that resulted in guilt. He felt the same way whenever he thought of the rumors his father must have heard about his wife and children after he returned home from his stint repairing oil drills in Texas.

  “Tell me, Georgie. Who did this?”

  “Them boys at school.”

  “Give me their names.”

  “It’s okay, Tommy. They look worse.”

  According to George, he had been playing jackstones when a couple of teenagers sidled up, knocked him over, and kicked dirt in his face, at which point another boy their age helped George stand up, telling the others to leave him be, an order the other boys refused, calling the one boy an injun lover, after which that boy threw down on the others until they were limping home with blood dripping from their noses. The story birthed Tom’s future career. Although George didn’t know the name of the boy who had helped him, nor could he provide a description more detailed than his gender, he did remember where he had run across the boy before that day.

  “I seen him behind the counter at that place with the pills that make my head feel better.”

  Early the next morning, Tom walked into Forster Rex-for-All and, with the manners his parents had made a point of teaching him, asked Tewksbury Forster if he might have a word with his son. “Houghton!” the drugstore proprietor called toward the back. “Visitor.”

  Tom chose to wait on the porch with his hat in hand, a preliminary attempt at deference, but he was taken aback when joined by the boy Houghton. “Can I help you, sir?” It was not so much that he was unused to being addressed that way, though such a thing was rare in these parts, but rather that he’d been addressed that way by someone so young. This boy had to have been at least four years Tom’s junior. How did he have the sand to fend off a pair of farm toughs?

  “Just wanted to say thank you for helping my little brother.” Tom rotated the brim of his hat like the wheel of a ship, a result of the realization he’d just referred to his older brother as “little.”

  “Your brother’s Georgie?”

  “That’s him.”

  With a swat of his hand at a fly that wasn’t there, Houghton expressed two seemingly disparate views of humanity, how some people had been given such innocence that only a lack of innocence could protect them and how other people had been born such shit-asses that only a whupping of said ass could learn them. The coupling of the sentiments, so redoubtable and frank, so droll and charismatic, engendered a loyalty Tom was not yet able to grasp and a surrogate family he had not yet met. All he could think to say was, “Consider me obliged nonetheless.”

  “I’m sure you’d do the same for my kin.”

  He would. Throughout the years ahead, Tom Branchwater, who in his last interview said that being close to “a family that rode shotgun with history” had been one of the greatest privileges of his life, treated Houghton’s children as though they were his own. He taught Monty how to thread a wriggling catalpa worm on a hook so it would not fall off midcast. “They call them catfish candy.” For her fifteenth birthday he gave Ramsey a Bond Arms derringer with a rosewood grip. “Helps keep
the fellas in line.” He showed Lance the best methods for sleeving a face card such that he could cut to royalty whenever needed. Despite his affection for those three of the Forster children, though, Tom felt the strongest bond with Harold, who, for reasons that family and townsfolk understood but did not express out loud, reminded Tom of his brother. He was, in fact, thinking of George as he lifted Harold onto his horse, situated him in his lap, and said, “Stay with me now, Haddy. You’re doing great.”

  The boy was not doing great. That much was plain to Branchwater as he geed up the mare. His neck was swollen like a sausage casing that had just been filled. The skin around the puncture wounds ranged from purple to black. To keep his constitution about him, Branchwater set his gaze on the far tree line, toward a Negro camp named Hobson Crossing, home of the county’s finest root doctor.

  After twenty minutes of a hard ride in summer heat, they reached the camp, tearing into it as though propelled by the cyclone of orange dust kicked up behind them. Branchwater dismounted with a swift back kick of his leg while still carrying Harold. He sprinted through the camp, scattering yard birds, causing old men to raise their suspenders over their shirtless torsos, piquing stray dogs, until he arrived at the home of Mother Shumate. So winded was he by that point Branchwater could just barely call out her name.

  In Mississippi: The WPA Guide to the Magnolia State, published in 1938, a chapter titled “Negro Folkways” notes, “When ill, the rural Negro has his particular methods. He discards all the stored-up information he has gathered by frequent trips to the doctor. The remedies he wants come from custom, not from science. At these times he calls a powerful root doctor or hoodoo woman to diagnose his case for him.” Mother Shumate practiced that sort of medicine on the citizenry of Batesville. Former proprietress of a hot-pillow joint two hundred miles south, she had changed her career as part of a deal to avoid jail time, taking her knowledge of venereal cures and repurposing them for all manner of sickness, be it insanity or constipation or anything between. To treat neuralgia she would hang a ball of camphor gum about the neck. As an aid for indigestion she would place a bag of tea on the ear. For nausea she would recommend a piece of cake with hair baked into it.