Читать книгу Weedeater - Robert Gipe - Страница 11

4

DRY IT UP

DAWN

I didn’t answer the phone when work called Wednesday morning. I was done copying.

“Well,” Aunt June said when I told her, “why don’t you come take my summer class?”

I was sitting up in bed when she asked me. I put the phone in my lap. Cause I don’t want to, I didn’t say. I also didn’t say this:

Aunt June was wanting to make a difference teaching them classes at the community college, and I’m sorry, Aunt June, but I’m afraid what you’re doing don’t. There were photographs by the thousands mounted on the walls in the building where Aunt June taught—photos she and her students put there the summer before, photos taken with throwaway cameras by kids and church people, by everybody in Canard County, pictures of endless mamaws standing at stoves stirring skillet bottoms skimmed with gravy, people standing out front of trucks with their fighting chickens balanced on their arm, feathers pluming down, grandfathers and grandchildren with guns, endless trailer underpinning backdrops, endless four-wheelers, photos of baptism hot tubs, children holding hot dogs and plastic tigers, plastic cups, plastic motorcycles, little plastic men with flowing plastic hair wearing plastic wrestling tights, pictures of people in the dollar store, children sitting in tires, children looking bored in school, looking bored behind cyclone fences in the yards of coal camp houses, children wallering in piles on brokedown trampolines, old men on couches with their eyes closed and their forearms resting on the top of their heads, a hillbilly parade, and it did give you something—I won’t deny it gave you something—but I don’t know. I don’t know, Aunt June.

So I sat in Kingsport Wednesday. Sat in Kingsport and wondered had my mother scored. Had she found her pills? Had she really snitched like June said Belinda Coates said she had? Was she really about to get killed like Hubert said? Momma might deserve killing. She might. I don’t know. So I sat at the trailer.

The only thing cheered me up was the thought of Willett tooling around the factory floor in a forklift hauling plastic pellets to and fro. Corporal of industry. My plastic man. That blue folder full of employment papers sparked up my why-I-like-Willett. I was feeling good and warm, about that anyway, when Willett showed up in the back doorway, sawed off at the waist where we didn’t have no back steps.

I said, “What are you doing home?”

He said, “I have to train before I can work. The trainer got sick. They sent me home. Go back Friday, they said.”

I asked if they were still paying him.

“Yeah,” Willett said, climbing into the house. “Can you believe it?”

A pretty song came on the radio. A woman sang high and content in a voice had a cup of tea waiting when the song was over. I took the cap off a Pepsi. Willett opened a packet of instant oatmeal lying on the counter. He sang along with the cup-of-tea woman.

I said, “You’re in a good mood.”

Willett said, “I am,” and stuck his head in the refrigerator. He come out with the milk. “The baby still at Mom’s?” he said.

I said she was.

Willett said, “Maybe she could stay over there tonight.”

I said, “She could.”

Willett said, “Maybe after while we can get out the baby pool.”

I took the cap off my Pepsi, said, “Maybe so.”

A car raced by, loud. Somebody doesn’t have a job, I thought. Not like us. Not like Willett. Willett put his oatmeal in the microwave, went to the bedroom and changed into his favorite shorts, came back, and lay down on his belly in the TV room and ate his oatmeal. Willett’s shorts were shiny and baby blue and hung below his knees. There on our dingy gray carpet, his butt looked like the sky clearing after a snowstorm.

Willett got up and sat down at the computer. He downloaded an mp3. Music pumped from the speakers. Willett turned the volume down and the speaker fell behind the computer. Willett got off the chair and the chair fell over. Willett kneeled, stuck his head under the particle-board computer desk.

Willett’s butt crack rose up out of his shorts like a sea serpent coming up out of the ocean of his behind. The song on the computer wailed on. I fingered the flash drive hanging around my neck held the emails Willett sent me when we were courting. I kept that hanging around my neck because Willett was liable at any moment to bring that computer crashing to the ground,

Me and Willett met cause Willett played music on a radio station I listened to. His family ran the station. It was on the mountain named for his daddy’s family on the back end of Scott County, Virginia, and it broadcast into Canard. Bilson Mountain Radio was pretty much all volunteers. They played what they wanted. Mamaw and Houston listened to the old music they played. Mountain music. And Mamaw liked the hippie meditation shows from California and troublemaker news shows from New York City they ran.

Willett’s half-brother Kenny, the one June fooled around with, played lots of punk rock and weird music shows. I listened to them. I liked music my friend Decent Ferguson called “murder music,” old stuff like Bikini Kill, Sonic Youth, Malignant Growth. And because Willett had to do just what Kenny did, he played murder music. And so I listened to Willett on the radio too.

Willett’s voice is terrible. He sounds like a clothes dryer needs greasing. He made a lot more sense as somebody to be with when he started writing me. He wrote humongous letters. I still have them. I wont tell anybody where. Pretty soon after we started writing, email started. I have all my emails from him gathered up on a Xena the Warrior Princess flash drive he brought me back from a comic book thing he went to in Chattanooga. I wore that flash drive around my neck for a long time, strung on a shoestring I got off one of Daddy’s mining boots.

Those emails had stories about Willett traveling to see bands with his friends from college, stories about him being in New York City and Atlanta and Nashville and Massachusetts. There were stories about him being in Italy and London, all the time seeing bands and sleeping in parks and dumpsters. After while he got a scanner and he’d scan pictures of himself in all those places, and the more stuff he sent, the more I could see myself a part of all that.

Also, he wore me down. When I first met him, I didn’t much care for him. He was sweaty and sticky, still is, even though he doesn’t do much with his body. But he just kept liking me, kept remembering what I told him, kept bringing me things couldn’t help but please me. Like, somehow or other, he was the best at getting me makeup, and good at putting it on me. He’d do my eyes better than I could, which was weird cause in most things had to do with using your hands, he was a total clod. One time it took him an hour and a half to change the wiper blades on the car, and even then he tore them up and Albert had to steal some off another car at the Kingsport mall parking lot and put them on for him. Willett’s dad said Willett could tear up an anvil.

Anyway, he could do eye makeup. Our best date ever was one Halloween he made me up to be a hot Frankenstein woman, green but hot, and I really was hot. Boys that always made fun of me and call me Lurch and stuff just stood and looked at me all night long at that party and would try and talk and couldn’t think of a thing to say, just ask if they could feel of the bolts on my neck.