FAR BEYOND THE PALE
Daren Dean
Columbia, Missouri
Far Beyond the Pale. Copyright © 2010 by Daren Dean.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever without written permission except in critical articles or reviews.
Book design by Daren Dean
ISBN 97811453754467
First Edition:
August 2010
For my darling wife,
CASSANDRA
Under a Bad Luck Sign
There were fields of ripening wheat along either side of highway 54 leading into Fairmont next to pastures of grazing cattle. The gently rolling hills broke into a little valley where the hummocks are dotted with osage orange, cottonwoods, walnut, and hedge trees. Off toward the South, in the direction of Jefferson City and the Ozarks, a forest of oak, hickory, and maple fills the landscape spilling over into Cole and Boone Counties. We lost the radio station we had been listening to since Raytown around Kansas City. The local country and western station was the only one that would come in. We passed J.P. White's Brick Company as we drove into Fairmont when the truck started jerking and coughing blue smoke. Just about every man in town had worked at the plant at one time or another trying to hitch a wagon to what built the town and to where they hoped it would go despite the layoffs over recent years. The need for brick was heading for a huge decline, but nobody back then wanted to face the inevitable. Fairmont, like rural farm communities all over the country, was a dying town where a modern outlaw named Elston Vaughn had managed to hold the county in thrall by virtue of intimidation and an aggressive personal charisma.
When I was eleven years old I don't mind tell you: I worshipped my Mama the way boys will. Something inside me rested when were together even if by then we had already lived in half-a-dozen states. We had outrun bad men, bad jobs, and flat-out desperate situations. Mama talked sweet to the truck, “Aw, come on baby. Just a little bit more now.” She leaned in real close so her lips almost touched the dash and practically purred to the damned old thing. Her red lipstick so bright it made her lips look huge. That old truck wasn’t listening though and it died out in front of Roy's gas station just a block from the square. I had my mind set on seeing Grandma Kimbrough too. The last time I remember she gave me some of her sugar cookies. I do like a good sugar cookie too, but our bad luck sign was still hanging over our heads.
A smile spread across her face. She was happy to be back home, but I remembered she said Fairmont was the kind of small town heavy with all its secrets and it was that heaviness that depressed her. She pushed a strand of auburn hair out of her eyes. Her eyes were brown with a golden hue around the pupils. She used to wear her hair straight to her waist, but she had cut it off back in San Francisco to her shoulder and I thought it looked nice. She had been born a twin, but the other one died at birth. She had two sides to her. There was the Mama I knew, and there was another woman who I had seen rattling around inside those eyes, but who was a mystery to me. No matter where we lived her mind was looking over the next horizon.
A couple of days earlier she fell asleep at a rest area. I unzipped my duffle bag and took out the old-timey pistol and rubbed the pearl handles in awe. It was the one I took from Sonny's glove box. I imagined him scratching his chin, the way he did, and wondering where the pistol went. It made me think of a story Miss Curtain, my old fourth grade teacher, read to us once called The Frog King except Sonny didn't drop the gun in the water and I wasn't a frog. I pretended that I was Billy the Kid, because it was a western-style pistol--and it was loaded.
The way I had it figured Sonny owed it to me for all the times he slapped Mama around and I would have to go to a neighbor's or sleep on the couch in the lobby of our apartment complex. Sonny claimed to be kin to Jesse James, Robert E. Lee, and James Dean. He said all the Vaughns were kin to them too. He dared me to say they there weren't. He was an okay guy except for how he treated Mama. I guess I didn't hate him. Even if he was a son-of-a-bitch.
Mama had stopped at Gasper’s truck stop to change into a black mini-skirt and dark hose. There were Kenworths and Nationals parked all over the place with their diesel engines rumbling, and the gasping sound of hydraulic brakes. I was forever thinking that those truckers waited for you to walk close by their truck and pressed a button to make their hydraulics hiss in your ear. A fat woman in a blue house dress and a skinny old man in jeans and feed cap were giving away Heinz 57 puppies out of a cardboard box near the front door. Mama wore big round sunglasses that made her look like a starlet. Truckers whistled as she wiggled down the hallway toward the restrooms with me. I sure was proud to be with her, but nobody paid attention to me except as an occasional leaning post. I was invisible. Her hand trailed down to light on my shoulder and she called me her escort. She knew how to make me feel good instead of like a little boy. She was still young, she said.
In Fairmont Mama pulled into Roy's gas station and drove over the line as the bell rang. Mama liked full service gas stations even if it did cost more. She found a way to make her looks work for her. As the gas station attendant started toward us from the garage she gave me a wink and her blinding white smile.
“Lorene? Lorene Kimbrough?” Raffert Clearwater asked. I’d seen him by the garage changing the oil on a cop car, Deputy Sheriff it read beneath the seal, a Plymouth, oil all over his blue mechanic’s shirt with his first name on the little oval patch. I was hoping he wouldn’t see us. I could have cared less about Rafe Clearwater.
“That’s me,” Mama shook her shoulder at me like Betty Boop.
Grandma Kimbrough said Rafe wasn’t worth a good goddamn, so why didn’t Mama ever listen? Grandma seemed all right the last time we visited her at the King’s Daughters retirement home. She kept repeating, “This is the winter of my discontent,” but I didn’t know what she meant since it was spring when she said it. They let her keep some of her old stuff from home: the big fake leather chair that was Otherdaddy’s, an old picture of a man and woman he called Ma and Pap in an oval frame from the dinosaur age, and a dark picture of Jesus praying in Gethsemane. I knew all about Jesus and the Bible from Aunt Oleta. Sonny called her a fanatic and a Bible-thumper. For a long time I thought Jesus was one of my great Uncles since he held such an honored place on Aunt Oleta’s wall.
By the time we were ready to go Grandma started following us through the place: “Don’t leave me babies. Take me with you. I want to go home.” Aunt Oleta flashed her mean-eyed look and said, “Hush that up, now. You know we can't take you with us.” Grandma grabbed at my arm with what had turned into a claw and I started bawling like a little baby. I didn’t want to leave her, but it wasn’t up to me. Shit, if I didn’t hop to quick enough, I’d get left myself.
“Little girl,” Rafe said. “You wouldn’t believe just how good it is to see you.”
Rafe stuck his big head in the window so his face was inches from Mama’s filling the truck with Hai Karate, gasoline, sweat, and beer breath. He leaned back and rested his chin on his forearms crisscrossed over the window. His fingernails had black dirt under them. His fingers left their imprint on the red interior of the driver's side door. His face twisted with a pathetic effort to make an expression that passed for friendly, but it wasn’t used to it and nearly cracked from trying. His eyes looked Mama up and down and he wetted his lips with his tongue.
Go away, I said in my mind. Go away, please.
“Rafe,” Mama laughed, swatting at his arms with the tips of her fingers. “Well, we only got back just this minute. You think you might could take a look at this bucket of bolts?”
“Why sure! ain't nothing’ a Clearwater boy can't take care of.”
“Shi-it,” I said.
“Watch the language,” Mama said, but not mean. “Don’t get yourself all worked up. You know how you get with your asthma when you get all hot and upset.”
“Is that your new boyfriend in there with you?”
“Hey Rafe,” I said with a half-wave that I hope said, kiss my ass.
Rafe got us bottles of Coke and he jury-rigged the truck. He put in a big yellow button to start it without a key. It was the damndest thing. While he worked with the hood up he would flex his biceps extra hard, because he knew Mama was watching. He spun the nut around a few times, and looked at our air filter with a disgusted expression as a cigarette bounced out of one side of his face while he squinted his eyes and talked to us through the smoke. He revved the engine a couple of times, put everything back together, wiped his hands on a red rag and chucked Mama under the chin like she was a snotnosed kid. Then, he gave me a wink like I was in on some private joke.
Rafe had black hair down to his shoulders. His face looked like it was eaten up by acid. Mama said his face was pockmarked from acne. I knew that, but saying it was caused by acid seemed more dramatic. It made him look mean. His eyebrows kind of grew together too. Mama smiled at me when he walked into the gas station office. I took it to mean she thought he was a real hunk, because of his muscles and everything. He didn’t fool me. He was being nice, because he wanted to get friendly with her. Rafe was pretending to like me until he got what he wanted. I’d seen it all before. She always fell for it too.
Mama wanted a man to love her. I never understood why my love wasn’t enough for her, but I was beginning to understand there was a different kind of love that she needed from a man. That want made her lose her head. She left me with Aunt Oleta for a few months at a time in Fairmont when I was a little kid just so she could chase after one man or another. Just stuck there with nothing to do all day but watch Aunt Oleta trick out her bouffant or watch her soaps. Aunt Oleta wearing curlers, spraying half a can of Aqua-Net on her Jiffy Pop hairdo about made me want to vomit. Getting left, even if it is with family, because no one really wants you around is hurtful. I drew pictures of storms with the black crayon until it was a nub. I gnawed on the red and maroon crayons until they crumbled. It made me mad to see other kids with their mamas and daddies at Church. It was unfair. I felt like God had broken the rules.
In Sunday school a girl with long braided hair named Ruth played guitar and asked us if we had any song requests. I requested Slip Sliding Away but she said we didn’t sing those kind of songs in church. I was old enough to know better, but that song made more sense to me at the time than Jesus Loves Me. There was a part of me that still wanted to believe that God really cared about me, but then if he didn’t do things to make your life better like see that your Mama meets a nice man, or finds a job making more than minimum wage, or letting you live with your own Mama--then that God was kind of mean if he was all powerful like the preacher said.
A couple of hours later we left the truck on the lot to go out with Rafe for the night. Rafe made us get into his hopped up Mustang and took us down to a freshly blacktopped road just outside of Auxvasse. Locals liked to pronounce it the way strangers passing through for gas did OX-vase-EE with emphasis on the OX and the E as a joke. The paved road ended down near an area called Idlewilde where Grandma said she was born in a house, without paint, not much bigger than a chicken coop where winding roads curved in between scrub pines and choked maple trees. It didn’t take much for Rafe to convince Mama. She sprayed herself with Jean Nate’ perfume. I was kicking myself for forgetting my duffle bag in the truck at the gas station.
Rafe won his first race against a guy whose goatee made him look like the Devil. His car, a classic Chevy, painted black with fire on the sides. The Devilman sucked on a skinny cigar like that ole’ boy in the western I seen at the drive-in awhile back, the cherry glowed and he flicked the butt out into the road near the yellow center line. It was a cool car, but it wasn’t made for dragging like Rafe’s Mustang. The Chevy didn’t have a chance.
“How did you like that, Chief?” Rafe asked, laughing fit to kill.
We sat in a pink convertible parked on the side of the road with a girl named Lizzie.
Lizzie kept shooting Mama dirty looks. It was clear who she was there to see. She showed off her legs and her boobs too, but she seemed like a real tight-ass to me. She had ash-blond hair. Every so often she tossed her head and swung her hair around throwing rays of the smell of strawberries in the air. She kept looking at the men and pointing to this one or that one and telling Mama, “What a fox!” or “Don’t you think he’s a fox?” I about upchucked. Lizzie was one tight-assed mother.
Rafe’s second race against a drunk redneck who was sure that his old Ford pickup could beat anyone out there came to an end when Rafe lost control and crashed into an old silo. Rusty Vaughn tried to tell Rafe there wasn’t any point racing a farmer’s work truck--he even had this white toolbox that reached from one side to the other of the truck bed and an air compressor in the back. Mama screamed as soon as she saw Rafe veer onto the gravel shoulder. Guys were running up to the wreck real fast in their engineer boots and rolled up shirt sleeves. One old boy’s cowboy hat fell off behind him as he ran to the wreck. There was smoke coming out of the car so Lizzie was rubbing her hands together like a fly with excitement. “Bitchin’,” she kept saying. She was hoping the car would blow up--and then I began to like her a little bit. I could see yellow and orange flames jumping up into the air. A cloud of blue-black smoke rose up and made it hard to see. I had a coughing fit. Mama used to say I had asthma and just about anything would set it off. Lizzie narrowed her eyes as if I had interrupted her fun on purpose. Just when I thought I could control it a few coughs would sneak out of the first I held pressed to my lips.
“Shut it up, squirt,” Lizzie said to me. I stopped wheezing.
“I think Rafe’s a goner,” Rusty stuck his head in the window and started laughing like a hyena bathing us with his beer breath.
I felt a surge of hope rise up from my belly and into my chest. Maybe Rafe was killed in the wreck. Mama would have to find someone knew, someone better, to get a crush on.
“He really fucked up that Mustang,” Rusty said. “Hey, Honey Boy.”
“Hey Rusty,” I said.
“Y’all staying with Rafe now?” He asked Mama.
“Maybe,” Mama said with her lips pressed tightly together like she wanted to say it ain't none of your business. “I just got into town. Haven’t decided on what I’m doing. I might go on over to Aunt Oleta’s.”
“We cain't stay around here much longer,” Lizzie said. “Go check on Rafe for us, hon.”
Red lights started flashing behind us. Too many people piled into Lizzie’s car. I found myself in my usual position in the back, straddling the hump. Lizzie said I was riding bitch. Rafe took a Ziploc baggy and stuck it in Mama’s purse. I started hoping the cops would catch us and throw Rafe in jail, but instead they chased someone else. Rafe said he would report his car stolen tomorrow morning. Besides, he laughed, his cousin Mitch was a cop so Rafe wasn’t worried. I turned to watch the car burn as it grew smaller framed in the rear window like a drive-in movie.
Some by Signs, Others by Whispers
When Mama used to go with Rafe he listened to old songs that had funny words like Hank Williams howling at the moon. Rafe used to make me call him the King too,
and then he would gyrate and act the fool in the living room. It was nothing like the real thing. If I had to choose between Sonny or Rafe, I guess it was six-of-one and a half-dozen of the other. Sonny was a whole lot bigger than Rafe, meaner too. Mama used to go with Sonny’s older brother, Vaughn, a hundred years ago. She wasn’t no slut, but she was pretty wild according to Aunt Oleta, but then again Aunt Oleta’s notion of high times was taking her homemade pecan pies down to the community hall for the Kiwanis Club or the Ladies Auxiliary Patriarch Militant. Sounded like a bunch of whackos to me.
We went busting into Rafe’s house by the lake. It was pretty out there. I had seen it before in the daylight so I knew that much. Sonny and Rafe used to be best buds and was always competing for girls, especially Mama. Rafe’s place had pine trees growing everywhere. It had a gate you had to get out of your car to open, like one that went out to the pasture. Just about everyone on the estate had a little dock and a boat. Rafe just had a little fishing boat, but everyone else had bright-colored racing boats. Something about him living out here didn’t make much sense considering he was brought up by Mad Whiskey Watts down there past the MFA in a rusted mobile home. Something peculiar was going on. A thick fog hovered over the lake like when the preacher at Redeemer Pentecostal said that thing about the spirit of God hovering over the surface of the waters while he stood preaching with one foot in the bonfire on glowing coals.
“Good night, Honey Boy,” Mama said. Rafe gave me a pillow and a blanket and pointed me toward the couch. Mama and him started sucking face and clawing at each other’s clothes like they was going to eat each other up on the spot. Mama used to talk Rafe down to Sonny, but I guess she forgot all that since we didn’t have any place to go. She used to always tell me, “Kids ain't the only ones got to do what they don’t want. You do
what you can. You do what you got to. Remember that. before you go judging."
So I had to listen to them in there jumping around in the bed wearing each other out and then I finally got some sleep after watching the sickle moon through the window for awhile. The sound of the headboard banging against the wall disgusted me and then to make matters worse I could hear skin slapping against skin. I had a glass on the coffee table in front of me where I lay on the couch and watched the water tremble. It made me want to vomit. I must have caught a shotgun buzz from all the grass they smoked earlier, because I could see the individual particles that made up the blue and pale yellow moonbeams. I knew it wasn’t no way for a kid to live, but I had to make the best of it. Nobody ever had to tell me that. I was doing it my entire natural life. The icebox kicked on into its cycle, making a ruckus, so it drowned out their lovetalk.
“You’re awake,” Rafe came out of the bedroom with just his jeans on. “I can tell by the way you’re breathing. You’re awake so there ain't no use in pretending you sneaky son-of-a-bitch.”
“What?” I stretched real big then. “I was dreaming.”
“About what?” Rafe said looking mean. “What was you dreaming you skinny little shit? I’m suddenly feeling like I’m in the mood to hear your dream. What was you dreaming about? Choking your chicken and then you woke up, and you was?”
“I was dreaming about a talking asshole,” I said. “When I woke up, there you were.”
Rafe’s head turned purple. I thought it would explode. He came over and sat on my chest, licked the tip of his fingers and began to slap at my forehead so only his fingertips would make stinging contact and leave little marks like uneven sunburn. Then he began to poke his thick index finger into my chest over and over again. The whole time I could see the cherry of his cigarette burning bright as he puffed. I pretended to be invisible and just watched the cherry. I guess my face must’ve went blank or something. Then he saw me watching the cigarette so he took it out of his mouth, grabbed my lower jaw with his hand, and made me puff on the filter while he held me down, but I had all but run out of air.
“How you like that hotrod?” Rafe asked. “You ain't so damn smart now are you?” He pulled down the blanket and grabbed my right arm by the wrist. “Now we’re going to see what kind of man you are.” Rafe held my arm down on the couch and pressed the lit end of his cigarette into my forearm. Tears clouded my vision. It hurt. The humiliation of it hurt more, I guess. “Are you going to cry now? Huh? What are you, a little girl? Well, I been in there fucking your Mom all night so I guess I could come in here and give it to you too--since you’re a little girl.”
I wanted to holler at him that I was going to get my pistol and blow his brains out, but I didn’t want him to know about it. I had to clamp my jaws shut so I wouldn’t blurt it out. I figured him for a sorry bastard, but Mama seemed to attract that kind. What was it? She looked real pretty when she wanted to so it wasn’t a looks thing. She talked all right too. She couldn’t cook too good or just didn’t cook. Maybe if she learned to cook, or I learned to cook, fried chicken with mashed taters and chicken gravy with biscuits with salted down corn on the cob smeared with butter she might find somebody with a good job. The service station didn’t pay jackshit and everybody knew that. It was a job for ex-cons unless you were the owner.
“Rafe,” Mama said from the bedroom. “Leave him alone and come in here. Bring my cigarettes if you don’t mind, darling.”
Did she know what was going on? Why didn’t she do something? She stood there smoking that Viceroy and was giving me a hard look, or was thinking seriously about something. She didn’t want me ruining things with Rafe since we didn’t have no place to go. It’s the worst feeling knowing you got no place to go. Rafe brushed past her sort of poking his forearm out to push her out of the way. She looked right through me breathing blue smoke out of her nose as she shut the bedroom door.
“That boy of yours has got a smart mouth on him,” Rafe’s voice through the wall. “Don’t he know he’s just a woods colt?”
Why don’t you just shut up! She’s my Mama--and your mouth ain't no prayer book!
I felt more alone than ever right then.
I sat down on the couch with my face in my hands and blubbered. I'm not too proud to admit it. Nobody was there to see it. Who would I tell? I held my arm in my hand and felt sorry for myself. Aunt Oleta used to call them pity parties. What if they were? No one else was invited. One day I’d have a jillion dollars and then wouldn’t everybody be surprised. I would show them all then. I’d drive by in a red convertible Corvette or a brand new black Cadillac wearing dark sunglasses and not even notice them when I drove through town with Mama in the seat next to me.
A train wailed pass; I cried some more.
I wondered who my daddy was and why he wasn’t here to protect me. He was probably big and strong and brave. Did I look like him? Whenever I asked Mama about him she gave me serious looks and sort of swallowed her words down like bitter medicine. I imagined a muscular shadow walking into the living room. Leaning over the couch to ruffle my hair with his warm hand and then going to the bedroom to beat the tar out of Rafe. Then the two of us would go outside where a black stallion with a star on its head was waiting for my Daddy, and a half-wild Mustang, that liked only me, waited for us to saddle up and ride out of town to our hideout where no one would ever find us.
Later on Rafe poked his big head out the door again, his bangs falling down near his bushy eyebrows. “I’m gonna do you a favor, and then you’re going to do me one. Hear?”
“You ain't my daddy,” I whispered.
Don’t you love me?
A man was talking in my head. I didn’t say nothing, but I cocked my ear to see if the voice would say anything else. I kept listening for it. Don’t you love me anymore? The voice whispered so quiet I could just barely hear him like a phantom radio station late at night playing your favorite song and making it through the powerful waves of the local station’s antenna that mostly blocked everything else out. Listening. Nothing. I can't explain it but a smell flooded into my nose unlike anything I ever smelled before. The best I can explain it is like the scent of honeysuckle but soured. The smell went away and I wondered what it meant, if anything. It reminded me of the last time we lived in Fairmont. Aunt Oleta had Mama taking me to Church twice a week. Once was more than enough if you asked me. Part of a hymn or a prayer ran through my mind, “a sweet savor.”
I felt better telling Rafe off even if he hadn’t heard me whispering and choking on my broken-hearted scolding. Mama would never tell me who my daddy was and always made
it into a joke. Ain't I enough for you? She might ask in a flirty way turning her head at an angle to look at me like I was a little baby.
Whoever my daddy was, I knew for a fact that he wouldn’t put up with the kind of goings-on that were the norm these days. Someday I was going to find my daddy. I made up the notion that my daddy had somehow gotten separated from us. Not that he wanted to but that’s just the way it happened. It was like a movie where a family is waiting for someone to arrive just as their train is pulling out of the station. Just then the person they were waiting on arrived but the train has picked up speed and it’s too late. The steam from the locomotive makes the scene go hazy. The whistle blows in a downhearted tone. The outline of my daddy standing on the platform waving pitifully because he just missed us and his pockets stuffed with cash. At least, that’s how I tried to see it. The only other option I could see was that he and Mama had fought over money, or him or her stepping out on the other one, and either way that meant it was permanent. I would never get to see my daddy. Mama would never find a real man to settle her down.
The Pistol
Thinking of that pistol made me get up and put on my soured clothes. I washed my face in the bathroom. There was Superman and Archie comic books in on the toilet, but what really got my attention was the Hustler magazine and the naked women. Looking at the women stirred something up in me, but I didn’t know exactly what it meant. They were
real interesting and even though I was alone it made me blush.
The hell if I was going to sit around all day and wait for Rafe to wake up and start ordering me to go get him a beer, or go get him a flathead screwdriver, or griping at me about a three-quarters wrench. I made some toast with butter and cinnamon. I was determined to walk those four or five miles to the gas station and get my duffle bag out of the truck. I closed the front door carefully, and then allowed the screen door to smack shut. The sound made me grin despite the pain in my arm. It was an angry burn like a miniature volcano and the only positive thought that came to mind was that it might make me look tough when school started again. I found a pad and bandages in the medicine cabinet and wound a piece around my forearm and put some white adhesive tape over it so it would stick.
Outside the sun already warmed the macadam. The cicadas screeched everywhere among the horseweeds in the ditch going into town on Highway 54. A little black dog, part lab by the looks of him came up to me blinking his eyelids and beating the ground with his tail. It said Buddy in black lettering on the red collar around his neck. When I started walking again Buddy got in front of me with his tail in the air like a battle flag passed the Purina feed store, Modern Farm Equipment Company, the Drive-in, a used car lot with costs on the windshields, and the roller skating rink where Big John spun the records and worked the lights. Buddy led me into town, and every once in a while he’d look back at me to make sure he was doing all right. He made me feel better. That’s what dogs do best.
When we started to get in town some of the old people sat up in chairs and swing-
benches on their porches. Kingdom Days Historical Society was sponsoring a parade according to the banner stretched between the buildings on the square. Buddy would run into people’s yards and piss on their trees, provoking the geezers to ask, “Is that your dog, son?” To which I could truthfully reply, “Nope.”
I found the truck and my duffle bag wedged behind the seat. Buddy tried to hop up in the cab. When I pulled him out he kind of gave out a yip and old Roy came out of the station office. He was wearing a John Deere cap, and chewing tobacco made his cheek bulge like a gray squirrel. He had the pack in his hand like he was a starving man stuffing french fries in his mouth. Didn’t even have a chance to look at my pistol as I slipped it behind the tail of my flannel shirt and down into the waist band of my jeans.
“What you doing in that truck, boy?” the smell of Old Spice, oil, and sweat making me want to wilt in the morning heat trying to gather up to full strength.
“Just getting my stuff,” I said.
“Oh,” Roy looked at me as if to say I’m wise to you. “You’re Lorene’s boy. Now,
what’s that she calls you? Honey boy? That ain't much of a name for a young man full of piss and vinegar. What do you want me to call you? Cause I sure as shit ain't calling you Honey Boy.”
"Everyone started calling me Honey Boy on account of Mama Horne use to keep me with her kids," I had to yell because he didn't act like he could hear very well. "When Mama would pick me up after work Mama Horne used to tell her he is my Honey Boy and Mama thought that was funny. It just kind of stuck. Most people call me Kid.”
“Okay Kid,” he pushed up the bill of his cap. "That ain't much better. What's your given name?"
"Nathan," I said.
"What kind of sodie you like," Roy spit juice on the gravel. "Honey Boy?"
“Dr. Pepper,” I said.
“At ten, twelve, and two?”
I didn’t know what he meant so I just stood there squinting into the sun rising up smaller and hotter all the time.
“Guess you know it’s got prune juice in it?” Roy asked, starting to walk back to the office. “You drink enough of those and they’ll give you the shits. C’mon in. I’ll give you one of those sodies. Got a surplus on Dr. Pepper, because don’t nobody want that much prune juice in their diet. Who is your friend there?”
“Somebody’s dog,” I said. “He followed me here from Rafe’s.”
“So y’all stayed out to Rafe’s?”
“Yeah,” I said, my head down, afraid I was telling too much private stuff about Mama.
“It’s all right,” Roy said, lifting the lid to the old Coca-Cola freezer and pulling out a sodie and handing it to me. “Rafe and your Mama been knowing each other for a long time. He could’ve almost been your daddy, I reckon. Oh, you don’t like him much do you?”
“No,” I said. “He did this.” I showed him my forearm.
“Damn. He’s a mean little shit,” Roy took hold of my arm. “If I were a little younger I’d take him out behind the barn and teach him some manners. I’m too old for that though, sad to say. Maybe you two will grow on each other. It’s been known to happen.”
Roy disappeared into the bathroom and came out with a little white first aid kit that looked like a small toolbox. He took out a smelly little bottle of “salve” soaked a cotton ball and dabbed it on my forearm. Then, he taped on a bandage that was way too big for the burn. He even gave Buddy a drink of water out of an old hubcap.
“Know who that dog belongs to?” Roy asked.
“No sir.”
“He’s one of them Vaughn’s Hill dogs,” Roy wiped his forehead with a red handkerchief. “I tell you that for your own protection. Some of the Vaughn boys catch you with him, they may beat the shit out of you. They just live down off UU. It’s your lookout though. He’s a good dog. Just don’t try to keep him.”
“He was pissing in people’s yards earlier,” I said. “People kept asking me if he was my dog.”
“I expect they knew who he belonged to,” Roy said. “They were probably trying to figure out who you belonged to. You don’t look like a Vaughn. They’re big corn-fed sumbucks! Hey now, wasn’t Lorene and you living out in California with Sonny Vaughn?”
“Yep.”
“Then you know what I’m talking about,” Roy said. “Gas prices were high in California I bet?”
“Yep,” I said. “We had to wait in real long lines. Sometimes people’d get out and play Frisbee while they was waiting. You probably seen it on the news, huh?”
“People got to be crazy to want to live out there anyway,” Roy said. “How did Sonny like sitting in gas lines like that?”
“Not too well.”
Roy kind of snorted, “I expect not. Them Vaughns ain't got much patience.” The old man’s face went kind of funny like he was remembering something. I thought he was getting ready to tell me too, but I guess it was just one of those things you don’t tell. “Do you gotta shit?” he said.
“What?”
“You drank that Dr. Pepper down so fast I was just wondering if you gotta shit now?”
“No sir,” I said.
“Then get the hell out of my station,” Roy said. “I got work to do. Boys and dogs make it hotter than hell in here. I've got work to do. Anytime you need a sodie let me know.
Hellfire
A John Law was eyeing me from his cruiser as I stepped off Route UU, and onto
the gravel road I thought would be a short cut to Rafe’s lakehouse. Sonny taught me to be a good lookout for cops. He used to make me and Mama call shotgun to ride up front. It meant you had to keep your eyes peeled for the heat. Mama usually got to sit up front no matter what, because she’s an adult. The squawk box barked out some loud talk. John Law just looked at me his face cold behind his dark sunglasses, but he gave me a nod and pulled onto the road with his cherry tops churning around after a speeding Merc.
Buddy was following me now instead of leading. He was starting to take mincing steps as if he had arthritis. Insects were humming all around. A garter snake slipped from the side of the road and into the ditch. A horsefly was buzzing around me, a big fucker making a humming noise like a dirt bike so I stood still until he landed on my arm and smashed him dead with the flat of my hand. We were beginning to pass fields of soybean and corn. Along the white gravel road were hedge trees, walnut, and cottonwood that the pioneers had planted in the old days to mark their property boundaries from what Sonny used to tell me. He was always talking about coming back to Kingdom County. Up ahead was a broken windmill standing guard over a pond with a bunch of herefords hanging around chewing and looking annoyed.
I only just made it to the first big bend on the county road when I heard a pickup sliding around the bend on the gravel road. The closer the truck got I began to hear the twang of country music. I knew right then I had to do something with my pistol so I rolled it up in my flannel shirt, dropped down next to the culvert, almost as big as an Ozark cave, and tossed it into the cylinder and hoped we didn’t get a flash flood. It didn’t take but a few seconds to toss my shooter in, but getting back up was a son-of-a-bitch because I had to bear-walk on all fours to get back up on the road.
Three boys sitting across the front seat, far as I could tell. There was a huge white cloud of gravel dust formed up behind them. I was already dreading it. I was going to time it so I could hold my breath when the cloud hit so I wouldn’t have to breath it in. A mean looking red-headed kid with freckles was driving and he hit his brakes just as he passed me and skidded to a stop. The dust cloud passed over us and I tried to hold my breath. My heart fell into my stomach. I should have known they’d stop.
“Buddy,” the red-headed kid said. “Get up in here!” The kid put his fingers between his teeth and whistled as he held the door open. Buddy jumped onto his lap from the road, wedged against the steering wheel, until one of the boys threw him down into the floorboard. “What’re you doing with our dog?”
“You trying to steal our dog,” the dark-headed one in the middle said, although he was bigger than me.
“He just been following me is all.”
“Oh is that all, you all?” the driver asked with a nasty mocking tone. Punkin’ was his name. It just popped into my head. I hadn’t been gone so long I couldn’t remember all three of them: Punkin’, TC, and Riley but they were acting like they hadn’t ever seen me before. I was bigger now than I used to be.
“What’s your name, kid?”
“Honey Boy,” I said, knowing he would laugh.
“Honey Boy,” the kid in the middle said. “What kind of name is Honey Boy?” He climbed over the driver’s lap jumped down on the gravel road and punched me hard in the stomach. I did not fall on the ground. I did stagger back and hold my gut. He caught me off my guard or I would have kicked him in the cucumbers. I had been to so many schools that I had the feeling that if I kept my head and played it tough I might be able to get through this.
“I don’t know,” I groaned. I clutched my stomach with my left hand and bent over at the waist. It was mean of Riley to do it especially since he had two bigger boys waiting to jump in and help him if I did anything back.
“Where are you from?” Punkin’ asked.
“We just came back from California,” I wheezed some more.
"Who would want to live in California anyway?" Punkin' sniffed theatrically.
“We left Sonny there and just came on back.”
“Sonny? You know Uncle Sonny?” Riley said.
“He’s practically my step-daddy."
“Would you listen to that little mother-fucker? Practically’s ass,” Punkin’ said and kind of backhanded the lanky kid next to the passenger door in the midsection. “What do you think about that TC?”
“He’s something else,” says Riley. “He’s Lorene’s whelp. I didn’t hit you that hard, did I Honey Boy?”
“No,” I said. I made myself stand up straight although my face felt red and hot. My eyes stung with angry tears but I refused to cry. He smiled crookedly at me.
“He’s practically our cousin,” says the driver. “I’d say he’s about two pounds of Vaughn in a one pound sack. Get your narrow ass in this truck, Honey Boy! I remember you from before you all went out to California. Used to stay out to Mawmaw Vaughn’s. We was just fucking with you. Where in the hell is Uncle Sonny? Why ain't he with y’all?”
The driver told me his nickname was Punkin’ like I didn't now it already and he looked really old like he could have been eighteen. Riley was closest to my age. The tall quiet one with a hearing aid like a transistor radio that sat in his front pocket with a thin white cord running to an earpiece was TC. I wasn’t sure how old or young he was. Something about his hang-dog expression and the one lazy eye made me think of an old man. I was sitting half on Riley and half on TC. They adopted me right on the spot. They started laughing about how they pretended not to know who I was and Punkin’ kept saying, “You should have seen your face.” We had to pull over once to put Buddy in the pickup bed. Punkin’ claimed to know me since I was a seedling. The interior of the truck smelled like WD-40 and all us sweaty boys. Riley pulled out a hardpack of Marlboro Red’s, lit a cigarette and stuck it in my mouth, and he even rolled up the nearly-empty pack into my t-shirt sleeve like I was tough.
“Look at these chicken wings he’s got,” Riley said, I must have blushed since I knew he was kidding me.
We went to their place first. There was an honest-to-God flagpole in the front yard with a Confederate flag thrashing in the humid breeze. Their daddy was Daniel Vaughn. Everyone called Daniel the quiet one. I overheard Vaughn tell a truck driver once, “Daniel Vaughn has a long fuse but don’t get him riled up because he ain't got no quit in him.” Punkin’ said they lived down in the holler and we drove to a little house that had bicycles and parts of bikes laying all over the place. There were red, orange, blue, and black bikes. I saw dirt bikes, town bikes, three-speeds, and a few ten speeds. A couple of town bikes had orange flags tied to the back wheel. Riley went to one and rang the bell on a “old man bike.” Punkin’ hopped on a bike and jumped a mound of dirt especially erected for the purpose of Evel Knievel-like jumps. TC showed me the chopper he made and wanted to sell it to me, but I didn’t have any money.
“Where did you get all these?” I asked.
“Some kids gave them to us,” Punkin’ said with a sideways grin.
“I borrowed some from a kid I know,” Riley snickered. “He’s got eleventy-seven brothers and sisters.”
“Uncle Elston is gonna want to see you, Honey Boy,” Punkin’ said. “Only when you see him make sure you listen to what he says. Don’t go running off at the mouth. If he likes you, you don’t have nothing to worry about. If he don’t like you, he just might kill you.”
“Don’t you think he’ll remember me?” I asked.
“Uncle Elston don’t forget nothing,” Riley leaned in close to my face.
“Call him Vaughn,” TC said. “He likes everyone to call him Vaughn, plain Vaughn.
“When he passes someday, I think everyone’s gonna call me Vaughn.”
“Would you listen to that!” Punkin’ looked surprised. “That’s what I call a motor mouth! That’s more than TC says in a month of Sundays. I think TC likes you, Honey Boy. He’s taken to you awful quick. We ain't trying to scare you. Other than being kind of small, I can tell you’re a Vaughn. You’re good-looking like one.”
No one had ever said much about what I looked like before whether good, bad, or otherwise besides Mama. She mainly just wanted me to “look presentable” when we went to eat Sunday dinner at Aunt Oleta’s house. She made me take a bath the night before these dinners, wash my hands before we left, and sometimes she would even spit on her finger and try to smooth down my cowlick. I’d endure just about anything for roast beef with carrots, onions, and potatoes. Listening to the sound of Aunt Oleta's hissing pressure cooker was music.
When I laid eyes on Elston Vaughn he was sitting at the dining room table pouring lighter fluid in a silver lighter big as some belt buckles. He was drinking Old Grand-Dad.
His head seemed enormous, too big for his body, bigger than I remembered. His hair was dark and wavy, his sideburns flared out along his dark jowls, brown-black eyes. He wasn’t so tall, but he had a bit of a beer gut. On his lower right forearm was a tattoo of wings attached to the surname: VAUGHN. The muscles in his biceps were as big as softballs. The farmers around Fairmont made me think they could have sprung up out of the clay soil like a cedar tree, but Vaughn was different. He seemed like something wild, not of the earth like a tree, but more like a coyote or feral dog. Right away I noticed that the boys kept their eyes off of him because if he thought someone was trying to stare him down he’d make like he might get up and do who knows what. I remembered he would visit Mawmaw Vaughn when we were living out in her old barn that was converted into an apartment. He used to give Mama and me mean looks and holler at Mama a lot, but I could only just barely remember it like in a bad dream.
“You want me to do that for you, daddy,” Vaughn’s wife, Arlene said.
“No, I like doing it. I like the smell.”
Hellfire, I thought. Smells like hellfire, but I was too afraid to say it.
Punkin’ and the others were Elston’s nephews. They lived just down the holler in a house on Vaughn Hill that Vaughn’s brother Daniel, and cousins, built together even though none of them knew all the specifics about building houses, they each possessed some piece of the puzzle. Royal Vaughn knew roofing though his wife Opal was after him to redo their house; Earle and Corinne knew how to frame up the walls and their kids: Rusty, Win, Colleen, and Lloyd pitched in and between them they made the rest up. Colleen was pretty and could punch harder than any of the boys except for Punkin’. Claude and Nan lived in a trailer out near the dump. Claude came down slowly holding his cane in front of him trying to pretend he didn’t need it but plunking down into the ground before he fell over face first. He’d sit in an old metal lawn chair and holler advice from under the pin oak stroking his chin out of habit. The house had electricity, but there were places where you could see the wires through the sections of wall they forgot to cover with paneling. Daniel Vaughn and his boys had a house, but no indoor bathroom but they knew all about outhouses so that’s what they had. Punkin’ said once he got big enough the job of maintaining the outhouse fell to him. When he started in on the details it liked to turn my stomach. Putting in a bathroom was their summer project.
I remember Sonny would take out a Bicycle card pack and tell us about how he idolized his older brother Vaughn when he was a boy as he played solitaire.
“What I found out about Vaughn is,” Sonny said holding a card in the air above one of his stacks. “Chiefly-- he is, was, and always will be . . . a son-of-a-bitch.” He looked at me for a six-beat and then grinned the way he did at Mama when he convinced her to leave Missouri.
Vaughn’s little girl, Sugarbaby, was sitting in a chair next to Vaughn. Her hair was bright yellow and her face was dirty. Her lips were bright orange from her last partial glass of Kool-Aid Aid. She was alternating between smashing brazil nuts with a hammer and trying to use nutcrackers. Intent as she was on cracking those nuts she never even looked up to peek at me. When she managed to crack one she put the meat in a bowl for her daddy. Vaughn would reach over every so often and eat the nuts and wash it down with a swig of Miller beer, yellow like horse piss. Just because it looked like piss, don’t mean I don’t like it.
“You want a nigger toe?” Vaughn held out a handfull of nuts in the palm of his hand.
I meant to say no, but he handed one to me and I looked at it suspiciously.
Vaughn was studying me without trying. Occasionally he’d give me a look as if he was purposely making me wait. He flipped his lighter open and shut like a cowboy practicing his quick draw. I could smell his stale Old Spice cologne. There were stacks of old copies laying around the house everywhere of the Fairmont Sun, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kansas City Star, True Detective, Reader's Digest, and National Geographic--even a battered black leather Bible. When he was ready to deal with me he put the lighter down on top of his pack of Camels. He reached behind him and pulled on a shoulder holster with a .45 automatic. Patting the gun after he put it on, “I bet you know the value of self-protection,” he said. “If you don’t, you ought to learn.”
“Yes sir,” I said. I knew my manners: my yes sirs, and no sirs, and thank yous and your welcomes. Men loved to be called sir. Don’t ask me why. I used it on them whenever I needed to. Women gave me sour looks whenever I said Ma’am so I wasn’t sure what to say to them except to say whatever they was wearing made them look pretty, if they was ugly, or thin if they were fat. Sonny had taught me all that old junk.
“Nice and polite,” Vaughn opined, taking out a pocket knife he opened the blade slowly and began to go at the grime under his fingernails. Those fingers were enormous and freckled. Each finger looked like a sausage link. His knuckles were huge as if there weren't but one thing they were good for, cracking skulls. “Polite young men may go far in this world,” he said more to himself than me.
“Oww!” Sugarbaby wailed. “Do I have to keep cracking these nuts, daddy?”
“No,” he said. “Don’t you got something for daddy?”
“What daddy?”
“Where’s my sugar?”
“One lump or two?” Sugarbaby asked. He held up two fingers and Sugarbaby kissed him twice on the cheek. She hopped off his lap and picked up her Mrs. Beasley doll off the floor and disappeared into the kitchen.
Vaughn took another sip of beer, lit a Camel and had a couple of leisurely puffs. Considered me some more. Everything smelled of woodsmoke even though it was warm now and they probably hadn’t banked a fire in a couple of months. I could hear the boys playing pool down in the basement. The crack of the balls. Punkin’ and Riley were arguing about something, but I couldn’t hear them too well. I was wishing I was down there fighting with them too. It was easy to guess what other kids would do, but with grown-ups you never know.
“Why didn’t Sonny come back with you?”
“We snuck off,” I said, picking at a scab on my elbow.
“Why’s that?”
“He was beating’ on us and we got tired of it,” I said, defiantly as I dared.
“Fair enough,” he said. “Your Mama’s shacked up with Rafe Clearwater. You think he’s better than Sonny? You think y’all’s better off with him?”
“No,” I said, holding out my bandaged arm. “He done this to me . . . put his cigarette out on my arm.”
“He won’t do it again,” Vaughn said, matter-of-fact. “You know, your Mama used to come see me some before she grabbed on to Sonny? That Sonny’s too handsome for his own good. Other than being kind of mouthy, he ain't bad. You know your Mama and me used to be together?”
“I heard about it,” I said. “You and Mama.”
Blue smoke was swirling around in the room, around his too big head like evil spirits was locked up in the room with us. Something about Vaughn made me want to get out of the little wooden chair and never come back. I could tell he was mean to the bone. Hell,
anyone could.
“You know what I mean when I say, be together?” He held his mouth in a way that made the word cruel bubble up to my lips but I fought against myself and didn’t say it. He reminded me of some of the bullies I had met at different schools. Vaughn looked to me to be the kind that could be mean and enjoy every millisecond of somebody else’s pain.
“I guess so.”
“I reckon you don’t,” Vaughn said. “But that’s okay for now. You tell your Mama come by the house for me. You tell her to get shut of Raffert Clearwater, because I aim to scare him off or put his lights out. Don’t matter a tinker’s damn to me.”
“I’ll tell her,” I said, scooting out of the chair. “But that don’t mean much. She don’t like to do what people tell her. She’s hard-headed. That’s what Granny says anyway.”
“I guess she is at that,” Vaughn laughed, but not like it was funny. “I want your mama and you to come stay with me for awhile. Arlene and me be glad to have you, ain't that right, honey?”
“Yes daddy,” Arlene said.
“Let me tell you what,” Vaughn began. I tried to listen real good and then he said it again. “Let me tell you what--” but he never did tell me what. He was having another talk with somebody in his head or that’s how I featured it. A glazed look come over him and I could see expressions changing on his face like a Japanese puppet show we saw a film of in school. One puppet had a face long and permanently sad and another face was always happy. The story was a complicated one at best.
Vaughn pushed himself up with his hands on the table. He put a toothpick in his mouth and placed one of his heavy paws on my head to steer me out the door in front of him. It was as if he’d known me his whole life and it felt good and scary at the same time. It was nice to be known after being like a secret everywhere we had been. Like we was under some witness protection program, only not. I suspect we were hiding out from something Mama was afraid of, something inside her head and not out in the world. I knew that much. It choked me up a little to have this powerful person know me, have good will toward me, but I couldn’t say how I felt because all the roaming had knocked all the normality out of my actions and manners. We’d been gone for going on three years or so except for Christmas that first year when we came back, so being amongst home people felt kind of funny.