Читать книгу Nine Bar Blues - Sheree Renée Thomas - Страница 9

“If I could have another life, I’d take it,” he said, sitting upright in the straight back chair. “This one ain’t worth ten cents to me. I’d like to do things for myself again. Would give everything I’ve got for that.”

He was sitting on his porch, staring at a field so green, it almost hurt his eyes. Rachel, Doc’s middle daughter, had cut the grass for him again, and this time, she hadn’t bagged it yet. The grass lay in soft piles and clumps all along the neatly-trimmed rows. Suddenly, he wanted to jump again, to leap and roll in the mounds of grass like he did when he was little. If he could, he would scoot the red, peeling chair back against the leaning house’s wall. If he could, he would leap clean over the front steps, scattering the piles like great clouds of green dust.

He sat there and remembered when his back was both iron and water, when his legs pumped like two pistons, and his feet flowed like the river beyond his acres; when his whole body carried him whenever and wherever he wanted to go. If he could, he would leap across the fence, which separated his land from the company’s, and give those Viscerol folks a rough piece of his mind. Back in the day, he’d done more for less. But the world he lived in now didn’t look like anything Doc recognized. Seemed like people had given up, even the earth itself. He gazed at his little patch of land and remembered how lush it had all been. Pollen got in his eyes, and the orbs, one brown and one blue, soon covered in mist.

Outside, the wind picked up a loose clump of grass, along with his wishes, and spun the green stalks into the air. A lazy S, the bottoms of the stalks waved like flags in the sky above him. He sat there in the chair, one hand balled into a tight fist, the other’s nails dug into the rotten wood. Memory poured down on him like hard rain. Behind a curtain of pines and cypresses, a pair of eyes watched, and something listened.

A few days later, Doc rose, feeling more tired than he ever did. More tired than all those years ago when the nurses had stuck him so full of needles that he thought he’d turned into a pin cushion. “Y’all done drew so much blood, now you gon’ have to give some back,” he’d said, but the men had only smiled. Whatever they knew then, they didn’t speak, and what they told him later he wished it was a lie.

Now Doc’s whole body felt like he fell down the stairs and hit every step on the way down. He kept waking in the middle of the night with soil all over the thin white sheets and clumps of dirt all up in his hair. Doc didn’t know what he had done or where he had gone. He took the dirty sheets and held them like dark secrets, balled them up like fists, and hid them under his bed. He tried to bathe, but he couldn’t get himself in the lukewarm water before Rachel arrived. He could hear her fussing at the front door. His whole body flushed with embarrassment.

“Doc? Oh, Doc!” she cried and tossed the keys into the amber dish on the old phone stand. “Where are you?”

On Rachel’s best day, her whisper was more of a shout.

Doc fumbled with his pants so long, he tired himself out, had to sit on the toilet seat just to catch his breath. He grabbed a yellow Bourbon & Bacon T-shirt and pulled it over his head. His beard got caught in the neck. Doc untangled it with his fingers, then stroked the white strands straight and smooth until the ends curled into cottony wisps.

“There’s something in the blood,” he muttered. Doc had known for over a dozen years that something more than memory coursed through his veins. His body was full of poison. They all were. Those with good sense had already gone and got out.

“Doc, you hear me?”

He took a deep breath before Rachel could come around the corner, bustling with those big hands that didn’t know nothing about being ginger. He heard her hand jangling the knob at the door.

“Girl, why you always tryna bust in on me?” he asked. “You know this doxin got me moving slow.”

“Dioxin, Doc,” Rachel said and laughed. “And ain’t nobody trying to see nothing you got!” She put her bike helmet away and fluffed her flattened hair.

He opened the door and waved away her helping hand. “I got more than plenty.”

“Come on out of here, Daddy,” she said, and chuckled, opening the window. “It’s stuffy in here and too hot today to be fussing. I done cooked this food and I need you to eat it,” she said, side-eying his linen-less bed, “so I can get on back to work.”

“Y’all still protesting?”

Rachel sighed, forehead nothing but a crease. “Some of them still out there. Not as many as before.”

“Ain’t gon’ do no good,” Doc said. “You can’t shame the shameless.”

“Well, I don’t know one way or the other,” she said and bit off a hangnail. “It is good to know somebody still trying …”

“Even if these muthafuckas ain’t listening?”

“Daddy!” Rachel said. “Don’t start up again. Last time you made a ruckus, your pressure went up.”

“My pressure didn’t go up, my patience just low!”

“Exactly! And either way, we got to get these coins, so …”

Doc stiffened, lowered his voice. “I ain’t mad at you, baby girl. You do what you can. And I appreciate it. I’m just saying …”

“I know, Daddy. I know.”

Doc stared out the window, frowning at the silhouette that overshadowed his land. He raised a clenched fist up and covered the water tower with his knuckles.

“Did you crank the truck?”

“Not yet,” she said, and watched him lower his bony arm to tie his robe around his waist.

“When you gon’ do it?” he asked. “When I finally get ready to go, I want to be able to get on down. Big Daddy can’t crank hisself.”

“Soon, Doc, you act like I’m getting my nails done here.

Let me clean up this kitchen after you eat, and then I’ll start up Big Daddy. You and I both know that ole truck is just fine. Big Daddy gon’ outlast both of us. Besides, you been up and about, I see. But you looking frail. Don’t you want something to eat? Don’t look like you ate all day.”

Doc scratched his beard, avoided her eyes. “Not hungry.”

“Doc, you got to eat. Can’t be sitting up in here, nibbling on leaves, and that jug of water still half full.” She clapped her hands, brass bracelets singing like wind chimes. “I’m going to fix you something extra, for later tonight. Put some meat on them bones,” she said, and headed for the kitchen.

“Ain’t nothing wrong with my bones,” Doc whispered, muttering under his breath. “Ground is wrong.” He mourned his garden and his empty fields, soured burial ground of what used to be. His last crops had come out so scraggly, he finally gave it up. Yield so bad, neither a weevil nor a worm would want it.

Anyone that knew him knew his family’s roots had run deep in that land. Now he and Rachel and that rust heap he called a truck was all that was left. Outside, the wind whispered and sounded like somebody was calling his name. He wrapped the robe tighter around his waist and peered through the window. Nothing but shadows and wind. And that poison plant’s tower.

He glanced over his shoulder and remembered the muddied linen he had hidden. No need to worry Rachel. Besides, he had no idea where he had been.

When Rachel came in with that smile of hers, the smile that never quite covered the worry in her eyes, he decided he would go ahead and eat whatever she had taken the time to make. No sense adding his worries to hers. The girl had enough.

“This is good,” Doc said, licking his fingertip. “I don’t think I could eat a mite more.”

Rachel took the tray of pancakes from him and frowned. “You ain’t ate nothing but syrup!”

Doc shrugged and drew the sheet around his shoulders. He couldn’t seem to get warm. “I’m sorry, Slick Bean. Ain’t had much appetite. Them hotcakes are good, but whatever I eat these days feels funny in my throat.”

Rachel grunted. “Funny, huh?” She shook her head and eyed the empty Aunt Jemima bottle, as if she might answer back. “You ain’t getting a fever, are you?”

Doc waved Rachel away. “Go on, girl. Don’t want you to be late.” He lay his head on the flattened pillow and closed his eyes, whispered all night in his sleep.

The radio coughed and sputtered. “… administration dismisses EPA scientists … Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 gutted …” Doc reached up and turned the channel. “There’s an old flame, burning in your eyes … that tears can’t drown, and makeup can’t disguise …” Alabama and a chorus of cicadas filled the front yard with song. Doc turned, confused. He climbed out of his bed, big toe searching for his house shoes.

He stood up. The wave of sound droned around him, the rhythm filling his head and clouding his eyes. The food Rachel had prepared him was resting on a plate on his nightstand. The window he swore he had closed was wide open, gaping like a dark mouth.

The hair on his arms rippled, and he caught himself from crying out. He hadn’t been afraid for so long, he had forgotten how fear might feel. Rachel kept one of those drugstore cell phones for him, but he rarely used it because there was no one left to call. He thought about picking it up and calling Rachel, but he wasn’t so sure what he would say once she answered. Hey, daughter, a haint chasing me all through my sleep. Hey, daughter, I got mud on my clothes and mud all cross the bottom of my feet. Rachel wouldn’t understand none of that. And she had already started to watching him out of the corner of her eyes, when she thought he didn’t notice. He knew what his most loyal child had been searching for, and he was determined to hold back the fatigue that kept calling him to linger longer in his sleep. Whatever was chasing him would have to come harder than that.

When Doc put on his knock-around boots and stepped out into the yard to greet the day, he liked to fell down when he saw the ruckus in his yard. A big-ass crack, zigzagging long like Moses in the mountain high, had separated what was left of his family’s property. “Sweet geegee, great day in the morning,” he said, and stumbled down the porch steps so fast, he nearly flipped over.

He had never, in all the long minutes and hours of his days, seen a sight like this.

The yard was all torn apart, as if a great hand from above had reached down and unzipped the dark earth. He walked over to the crack nearest him and eased over, his knee and his whole leg tense. Doc craned his head to see how far the hole went, and realized there was no bottom to see, just darkness leading down and thick, twisted roots and stones and things he wasn’t sure he actually did see.

What he did recognize was the same source of all his and the town’s troubles, that red-stained poison that the Viscerol plant had cursed them with. At one point, everyone and their mama had worked at Viscerol, and the money was good, too. But one by one, family by family, a sickness had come down on each of them, until finally, the only healthy families left had packed up their things and got on down the road. Only a few stubborn, hard scrabblers stayed on, Rachel included. That bloody water ran through each dark vein across the town, until only a few families remained. Rachel was all of Doc’s own, the others, he knew, long gone, perhaps to sweeter grounds. Silver citadels of columns and pipes, smokestacks and tanks rose along the town’s skyline like rusted spikes. “Relocate Fair Property Buy-Out” signs dotted abandoned lawns, jagged yellow teeth. Houses, once full of light and life, sat on their haunches, full of furniture, roofs lolling like broken baby dolls, doors flung open, bloated, wooden tongues.

Scavengers came to take what the families had not deemed worthy to carry on. Whole families had disappeared, it seemed, overnight, leaving all that they once owned behind to decay in the town’s deadly dust. And now Doc stood, staring down into what he thought had to be the dark face of God’s judgment. The Good Lord took man and put him in the garden to work and keep it, but from what Doc could tell, man had done a piss poor job.

And what had that hard, scrabble-back preacher said, before he, too, showed his backside to Viscerol and the town, with its labyrinth prison-like plant that spewed poisons, and the giant water tower emblazoned with its red V? They had transgressed the laws, violated the statutes. They had broken the everlasting covenants, turned an ancient blessing into a new curse. Old Rev. Bowen had preached a word that day, as he took the church Bible and its baptismal altar with him. That they never should have let Viscerol build on their fertile land. That they should have turned those jobs down, and the money, too. Now newborns of townsfolk, who had been there for generations, were being born so sick, they had to carry the future away from there.

Doc didn’t know what that was, rumbling deep inside the open door of earth, but he knew he didn’t want to be standing around when whatever it was came busting through. He bolted up the steps as fast as his legs would carry him and knew exactly what he must do. He planned to be long gone, before the skies rolled up like a scroll and the heavens vanished like smoke.

“Doc! Oh, Doc! What is all this you got piled up in the truck?” Rachel stomped up the steps, the screen door banging shut behind her. Her bike lay on the ground, the rusted kickstand jutted out like a swollen tongue. The house was dark and the whole sky, too, but she could still see that Doc had emptied half the house and had it sitting up in the back of Big Daddy.

A groan met her before she walked in his room.

“What did you say, Doc?”

She put her helmet down and found him lying on his side in his bed, staring out the window. Rachel missed the times when he was a handful, when she used to get off work and find him, stumbling, mumbling in the dark, cranky as ever. Then he would cuss like a thief with an empty wallet, tell her story after story about some slight from the past, a friend who stole away from the broken, poisoned town without even saying goodbye, the neighbor who still had his good clippers and never bothered to acknowledge the debt. The other one, whose grass he cut as if it was his own, when the poison had made the man’s skin peel off under the tainted bloodstained tap water. Thirteen years, he and his friends had suffered, undergoing varying stages of collapse and decay, until only Doc remained, steadfast and stubborn on his family’s land. But it wasn’t the land that worried her. It was his mind. Now it didn’t even look like he was going to be able to hold on to that.

“Where have all the fireflies gone?”

Doc pointed a finger at the darkness outside. “There used to be clouds of them, all up through here. When y’all was little, you used to run out and try to catch them …”

“In jelly jars, yes,” she said, “I remember, Daddy. Why are you worried about fireflies? We ain’t seen them in years, now. And why have you tired yourself out, packing up this old house by yourself? I told you, when you were ready to move, I’d be ready to move with you.”

“‘Cuz they gone like everything else.”

“I ain’t gone. I’m still here.”

He turned to look at her. “Yes, you are. You and that old maple in the yard, the only things softening the heat. What you gon’ do when my eyes close?”

“Oh, Daddy,” Rachel said and brushed some lint out of her eye. “Why you always got to say that?”

Doc didn’t answer for a while. He raised up on his elbow and craned his head, as if listening to a sound far off in the darkness. The wind whistled and the little strip of curtain fluttered like a moth’s wing. Finally, he turned to her, his beard jutted out like a question mark. “Because I don’t want you to be the last one left here.”

Rachel rubbed her palms together, the sound like sandpaper. “What I tell you? When you leave, I leave.” The moon rose from behind a cloud, the light spilling over the windowsill into the room of darkness, a sign and a symbol. “We got to leave soon. The ground ain’t good.”

Doc lay his head down and drifted off to sleep.

The next night, Rachel could hear the sound before she pulled up. When she dropped her bike and first walked up the gravel driveway, little husks crunching under her feet, she thought the sound was coming from the tree. She stumbled on an upturned root that hadn’t been there before.

“Where did you come from?” she asked, and unsnapped the chin strap of her helmet, but the tree was silent. As she walked, the driveway sounded extra gravelly, almost crunchy. She thought she was moving carefully, but she tripped again. Not a root this time, but something hard, shell-like. Rachel turned on the flashlight on her phone and peered at the biggest husk she’d ever seen, liked to jumped right out of her skin.

“Lawd,” she cried before she could catch herself, started laughing at her own fool self. Then she looked around and saw that the yard and the porch steps, all the way up to the front door, were filled with empty shells.

The warm spring night chilled her, the fine hairs on her arm prickled in alarm. She was fine until the air filled with a high-pitched, shrill-sounding song. The sound was deafening. Suddenly, everything about Doc’s yard seemed strange and frightening. The driveway littered with hills of hollow husks, and the maple tree’s branches that hung low in the darkness, as if weighed down by a burden only the wind could see. Hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, resting and waiting in the limbs, singing that song that made all of her flesh ripple and itch. A deep, pulsing sound like a great alarm, ringing through the dark scroll of sky.

And then she saw it. A wave of movement rushing up from what looked like the biggest hole she had ever seen. A mini-Grand Canyon ripped right open in her daddy’s front yard. A few more steps to the right, and she would have been good and gone.

Rachel hunched her back, held her helmet like a weapon, and when a low humming buzzed her left ear, she flew up the front steps, practically barreling through the door.

“Doc!”

Inside the house, they covered the floor like a glittering, blue-green blanket. Rachel shuffled through them, trying not to cry out as they crunched beneath her feet. She found Doc lying there, wrapped up in his bedsheets, mud all over the bed, mud all over the floor. She called to him above the din, but he only turned his eyes away and would not answer. The more he refused to speak, lips sewed up, the more she found herself ripping at invisible seams. In her time, the town had seen its share of plagues, but this was a new marvel. And Doc didn’t want to speak. He didn’t even seem to want to be anymore. He seemed to be waiting, wrapped in his muddy cocoon, surrounded by the insects that cuddled him as if he was their own true kin. He held the sheets so fast that she’d grown weary and stopped wrestling with him. She patted his shoulder and left him to the mud, and the wind, and the rising moon.

Desperate for answers, she found herself breaking and entering. Shamed, Rachel asked for forgiveness as she crossed herself and climbed and picked her way through overturned piles of books, laid out like waterlogged corpses, all that remained of the town’s old library.

After some time, Rachel discovered a thin volume, Cicadas: The Puzzle and the Problem. She forced herself to slow her breathing, to focus her eyes on the handwritten text. An entomologist’s entry read, Magicicada tredicula, but by the time Rachel got to Doc’s house, all she could remember was “magic Dracula,” and something about thirteen-year-long broods and spirits. From the book’s maps, no broods of cicadas had ever been documented anywhere near that part of the state, but given the damage already done, no telling what else the plants had unleashed on the town and its few remaining citizens.

“They can’t sting or bite,” she’d read at the library, her wheels now crunching as she pulled up to Doc’s house. “They sing,” the book said. “Their song can be a hymn-like trance, a lullaby that lulls weaker spirits to waste away, while others rejuvenate, are resurrected.”

“They don’t bite, huh, but they sho’ll can swarm and scare the mess out of you,” she’d thought. One of the books mentioned something about a divine test, a path to transformation. Rachel didn’t have time for none of that. “Hush, loud bugs,” she said as she slammed on her brakes. “Ain’t no way in hell I’m finna let some devil dust bugs suck up my daddy’s soul!”

Rachel was kicking the piles of shells out of her way, determined to get Doc, when the ground shifted and rumbled beneath her. “What did I say that for!” she muttered as she held onto the porch rail.

Low clouds of cicadas swept from the holes in the grass, hovered in the sky, headed for the maple tree. Rachel ran into the house and locked the door behind her but remembered the open window in Doc’s room.

“Daddy!” she cried, racing to his bedroom. “I need you to get up.” She reached for him but discovered that he was covered in a sticky film. If he wasn’t her own father, scared as she was, she would have left him right there.

Rachel wiped her palms on her jacket and reached for Doc again. She unpeeled the cottony layers and tossed the dirty sheet onto the floor.

“I need you to help me, Daddy,” she said. She spoke to him quiet, calm, like he did when she was a small child and had fallen and didn’t want to get up. He had always been there for her; that’s why she vowed she would always be there for him.

“We don’t have to live in this place, no more. We can leave, Daddy. You can leave. We can go right now. Come with me.”

She peeled the spider web-like substance from across his eyes. She was relieved to see recognition there.

“All right, Slick Bean,” he said, as if waking from a dream, and reached for her outstretched hand. He held it, letting the warmth spread through his palms, and then he forced himself to rise.

They waded through the carpet of husks until they were standing outside.

“Daddy, did you see that hole in the ground? I swear, I ain’t never seen nothing like this in my whole life. You think it’s fracking that did all that? Brought all these damn bugs?”

“Not all. I did it,” Doc said as he leaned on her, letting her guide him to the green truck door. He didn’t wait for her puzzled reply. “You know how it is! Here, people don’t always say what they mean or mean what they say. They just be talking, thinking aloud. But sometimes, out here, the land be listening.” He turned to the wind, the piles of husks, the moon and the shadows. “Can’t a person think aloud sometime? Wrassle with a thought until they come up with their own good answer?”

He stood and pointed at the dark tower, the V lit up like a bright red scar.

“What’s a good answer for this? How can we fight it?” he shouted into the black mouth of earth. “We opened our mouths and welcomed them here with open arms, helped them build the very thing that would kill us.” He turned to Rachel. “Some things you build, not so easy to tear down again. Now, what’s the answer for that?”

The wind carried his cry through the air, and the question rested in the darkness around them, in the limbs of the tree.

And something else waited under the roots of the trees and beneath their feet. The wind rippled through the leaves, shook the maple’s branches in answer. Loaded with emerald and red-orange cicadas, the branches swayed as the insects split their skins and struggled out. As the ground shook, they emerged from the dark, wet earth, emerged after a lifetime of waiting alone. Night after night, they had awakened. Wave upon wave, they came.

“The ground gon’ sour?” Rachel asked as she opened Big Daddy’s passenger door.

“Not the ground. Us.”

The humming rose, a hymn that seemed to sing the world anew. Up from the jagged edge of earth, a great figure climbed out, six gigantic, jointed legs lifting it up and out of the land Doc and his people had once proudly claimed as their own. Iridescent wings unfolded from its wide, curved back. They glistened and sparkled in the night, unearthing mountains of soil and roots and old things not witnessed since the angel poured its first bowl over the sun, and the moon had opened like a great eye in the sky. Free from its dark sleep, the giant unfurled its wings and thrummed a deep tympani-drum sound that the little ones echoed and joined in, their song a bellowing in the air.

Rachel and Doc covered their ears and watched in wonder, as it raised its great, jewel-encrusted head and turned to them. It seemed as if a million eyes watched them from all directions, all at once, then within minutes, the creature stomped across acres of what had once been the town’s most fertile land. The ground shook beneath its many feet, and the others raised their drumsong as it headed toward the Viscerol plant.

Safe in Big Daddy, Rachel and Doc stared at each other, not speaking in the airless truck. They held each other for a long, long time, and for an even longer time, it seemed like neither one of them breathed. Then they jumped, a startled, delayed reaction after they heard the thunder, a rush of mighty wings as the last of the Viscerol plant and its signature water tower crashed to the ground. The earth rumbled one final time, and Rachel and Doc shook in the truck that rattled like a great tin can. The wind howled, a loud keening, and the old trees lay low, then all was still and quiet, and the only thing they could see was the white mouth of the moon.

Rachel rolled the window down, hands shaking, the old handle squeaking. She started to crank the truck up, but Doc reached for the keys.

“Come on out and let me drive, girl,” he said.

Tired as she was, Rachel didn’t even have the strength to argue. She just shook her head and looked at him. “Daddy, you ain’t driven Big Daddy in years.”

Doc wiped a layer of gossamer threads from around his jaw and his throat. His hands looked smooth, sturdy. His heart felt ripe and strong. “When I leave, you leave,” he said. “Step on out, Slick Bean, and let’s get up out of here.”

Rachel stared at him, her eyes wide with wonder. “Doc?”

He hummed a happy tune as they drove off, some of that old country music Rachel pretended she couldn’t stand. Big Daddy groaned down the road, only empty shells and withering husks remained. But above them and around them, hidden in the dark earth and in the green branches of trees, something like hope remained, listening and waiting for a warm spring night, and a mischievous wind to return again.