Читать книгу Man Alive - Thomas Page McBee - Страница 7

prologue

South Carolina

August 2010 ♦ 29 years old

What makes a man?

It’s not that I haven’t studied them: their sinew, their slang, their beautiful bristle; but before I was held at gunpoint on a cold April day, I couldn’t have told you.

A real man, a family man, the Marlboro man, man up.

The man in the mirror.

I loved that Michael Jackson song, growing up. Used to forget my girl-hips, used to sing it to my best imagination of myself.

What makes a man? The need to know led me to my father’s hometown in hot-damp South Carolina. The story starts there because that’s where I went when I could no longer afford to leave the question alone, to let it rear up every few years, when I’d had too much to drink and it was just me and my reflection and my hungry ghosts. And so I steered my rental through the swampy South with my cap pulled low. I had that teen-boy swagger, scars like smiles across my chest, and a body I was just beginning to love.

But the story also begins the night I almost died, back in April of 2010. And in 1985, when my father became a monster, and in 1990 when my mom found out he was one.

“Men,” she’d said then. And I’d learned to say it the same way, a lemon in my mouth.

In South Carolina I could smell it through my open window: alligators and secrets; the embers of Sherman’s march, the Klu Kux Klan, my father’s farm, burning. It smelled like my animal fear and the spicy deodorant I used to cover it.

Men, I thought with that old bitterness, but I already knew my body was shifting. In fact that’s why I was there.

A good man is hard to find.

The windshield blurred; the road was inky, the rain biblical. The cheap motel off the highway seemed like not such a hot idea after I passed my fifth gun-racked pick-up, but there wasn’t any turning back.

Once a body is in motion, it stays in motion. My mom’s a physicist; she told me that.

The truth is, this is a ghost story. No, this is an adventure story.

This is an adventure story about how I quit being a ghost.