daddy’s!”
One week. Oh, Lord.
There were two subjects the Jaybird could talk about for hours on end:
his survival through the Depression, when he held such jobs as coffin
polisher, railroad brakeman, and carnival roustabout, and his success as a
young man with women, which according to him was enough to turn Valentino
green. I would have thought that was a big deal if I’d known who Valentino
was. Anytime the Jaybird and I were away from the reach of my grandmother’s
ear, he might launch into a tale about “Edith the preacher’s daughter from
Tupelo” or “Nancy the conductor’s niece from Nashville” or “that buck-toothed
girl used to hang around eatin’ candy apples.” He rambled on about his
“jimbob” and how the girls got all fired up about it. Said there used to be
jealous boyfriends and husbands after him by the dozens, but he always escaped
whatever trap was closing around him. Once, he said, he’d hung on to the
bottom of a railroad trestle above a hundred-foot gorge while two men with
shotguns stood right above him, talking about how they were going to skin him
alive and nail his hide to a tree. “Thing was,” the Jaybird said to me as he
chewed lustily on a weed, “I spoiled them girls for every other fella. Yeah,
me and my jimbob, we had us a time.” Then, inevitably, his eyes would take on
a sad cast, and the young man with the flaming jimbob would start slipping
away. “I bet you I wouldn’t know one of them girls today if I passed her on
the street. No sir. They’d be old women, and I wouldn’t know a one of them.”
Granddaddy Jaybird despised sleep. Maybe it had something to do with his
knowing that his days on this earth were numbered. Come five o’clock, rain or
shine, he’d rip the covers off me like a whirlwind passing through and his
voice would roar in my ear: “Get up, boy! Think you’re gonna live forever?”
I would invariably mumble, “No, sir,” and sit up, and the Jaybird would
go on to rouse my grandmother into cooking a breakfast that might have served
Sgt. Rock and most of Easy Company.
The days I spent with my grandparents followed no pattern once breakfast
was down the hatch. I could just as well be handed a garden hoe and told to
get to work as I could be informed that I might enjoy a trip to the pond in
the woods behind the house. Granddaddy Jaybird kept a few dozen chickens,
three goats—all of whom closely resembled him—and for some strange reason he
kept a snapping turtle named Wisdom in a big metal tub full of slimy water in
the backyard. When one of those goats stuck his nose into Wisdom’s territory,
and Wisdom took hold, there was hell to pay. Things were commonly in an uproar
at the Jaybird’s place: “All snakes and dingleberries” was his phrase to
describe a chaotic moment, as when Wisdom bit a thirsty goat and the goat in
turn careened into the clean laundry my grandmother was hanging on the line,
ending up running around festooned in sheets and dragging them through the
garden I’d just been hoeing. The Jaybird was proud of his collection of the
skeletons of small animals which he’d painstakingly wired together. You never
knew where those skeletons might appear; the Jaybird had a nasty knack for
putting them in places you might reach into before looking, like beneath a
pillow or in your shoe. Then he’d laugh like a demon when he heard you squall.
His sense of humor was, to say it kindly, warped. On Wednesday afternoon he
told me he’d found a nest of rattlesnakes near the house last week and killed
them all with a shovel. As I was about to drift off to sleep that night,
already dreading five o’clock, he opened my door and peered into the dark and
said in a quiet, ominous voice, “Cory? Be careful if you get up to pee
tonight. Your grandmomma found a fresh-shed snakeskin under your bed this
mornin’. Good-sized rattle on it, too. ’Night, now.”
He’d closed the door. I was still awake at five.
What I realized, long after the fact, was that Granddaddy Jaybird was
honing me like one might sharpen a blade on a grinding edge. I don’t think he
knew he was doing this, but that’s how it came out. Take the snake story. As I
lay awake in the dark, my bladder steadily expanding within me, my imagination
was at work. I could see that rattler, coiled somewhere in the room, waiting
for the squeak of a bare foot pressing on a board. I could see the colors of
the forest in its scaly hide, its terrible flat head resting on a ledge of
air, its fangs slightly adrip. I could see the muscles ripple slowly along its
sides as it tasted my scent. I could see it grin in the dark, same to say,
“You’re mine, bub.”
If there could be a school for the imagination, the Jaybird would be its
headmaster. The lesson I learned that night, in what you can make yourself
describe in your mind as true, I couldn’t have bought at the finest college.
There was also the subsidiary lesson of gritting your teeth and bearing pain,
hour upon hour, and damning yourself for drinking an extra glass of milk at
supper.
You see, the Jaybird was teaching me well, though he didn’t have a clue.
There were other lessons, all of them valuable. And tests, too. On Friday
afternoon Grandmomma Sarah asked him to drive into town to pick up a box of
ice cream salt at the grocery store. Normally the Jaybird didn’t like to run
errands, but today he was agreeable. He asked me to go with him, and
Grandmomma Sarah said the sooner we got back the sooner the ice cream would be
made.
It was a day right for ice cream. Ninety degrees in the shade, and so hot
in the full sun that if a dog went running, its shadow dropped down to rest.
We got the ice cream salt, but on the way back, in the Jaybird’s bulky old
Ford, another test began.
“Jerome Claypool lives just down the road,” he said. “He’s a good ole
fella. Want to drop by and say howdy?”
“We’d better get the ice cream salt to—”
“Yeah, Jerome’s a good ole fella,” the Jaybird said as he turned the Ford
toward his friend’s house.
Six miles later, he stopped in front of a ramshackle farmhouse that had a
rotting sofa, a cast-off wringer, and a pile of moldering tires and rusted
radiators in the front yard. I think we had crossed the line between Zephyr
and Dogpatch by way of Tobacco Road somewhere a few miles back. Obviously,
though, Jerome Claypool was a popular good ole fella, because there were four
other cars parked in front of the place as well. “Come on, Cory,” the Jaybird
said as he opened his door. “We’ll just go in a minute or two.”
I could smell the stench of cheap cigars before we got to the porch. The
Jaybird knocked on the door: rap rap rapraprap. “Who is it?” a cautious voice
inquired from within. My grandfather replied, “Blood ‘n Guts,” which made me
stare at him, thinking he’d lost whatever mind he had left. The door opened on
noisy hinges, and a long-jawed face with dark, wrinkle-edged eyes peered out.
Those eyes found me. “Who’s he?”
“My grandboy,” Jaybird said, and put his hand on my shoulder. “Name’s
Cory.”
“Jesus, Jay!” the long-jawed face said with a scowl. “What’re you
bringin’ a kid around here for?”
“No harm done. He won’t say nothin’. Will you, Cory?” The hand tightened.
I didn’t understand what was going on, but clearly this was not a place
Grandmomma Sarah would have enjoyed visiting. I thought of Miss Grace’s house
out beyond Saxon’s Lake, and the girl named Lainie who’d furled her wet pink
tongue at me. “No sir,” I told him, and the grip relaxed again. His
secret—whatever it might be—was safe.
“Bodean won’t like this,” the man warned.
“Jerome, Bodean can stick his head up his ass for all I care. You gonna
let me in or not?”
“You got the green?”
“Burnin’ a hole,” the Jaybird said, and touched his pocket.
I balked as he started pulling me over the threshold. “Grandmomma’s
waitin’ for the ice cream sa—”
He looked at me, and I saw something of his true nature deep in his eyes,
like the glare of a distant blast furnace. On his face there was a desperate
hunger, inflamed by whatever was going on in that house. Ice cream salt was
forgotten; ice cream itself was part of another world six miles away. “Come
on!” he snapped.
I stood my ground. “I don’t think we ought to—”
“You don’t think!” he said, and whatever was pulling him into that house
seized his face and made it mean. “You just do what I tell you, hear me?”
He gave me a hard yank and I went with him, my heart scorched. Mr.
Claypool closed the door behind us and bolted it. Cigar smoke drifted in a
room where no sunlight entered; the windows were all boarded up and a few
measly electric lights were burning. We followed Mr. Claypool through a
hallway to the rear of the house, and he opened another door. The windowless
room we walked into was layered with smoke, too, and at its center was a round
table where four men sat under a harsh light playing cards, poker chips in
stacks before them and glasses of amber liquid near at hand. “Fuck that
noise!” one of the men was saying, making my ears sting. “I ain’t gonna be
bluffed, no sir!”
“Five dollars to you, then, Mr. Cool,” another one said. A red chip hit
the pile at the table’s center. A cigar tip glowed like a volcano in the
maelstrom. “Raise you five,” the third man said, the cigar wedged in the side
of a scarlike mouth. “Come on, put up or shut—” I saw his small, piggish eyes
dart at me, and the man slapped his cards facedown on the table. “Hey!” he
shouted. “What’s that kid doin’ in here?”
Instantly I was the focus of attention. “Jaybird, have you gone fuckin’
crazy?” one of the other men asked. “Get him out!”
“He’s all right,” my grandfather said. “He’s family.”
“Not my family.” The man with the cigar leaned forward, his thick
forearms braced on the table. His brown hair was cropped in a crew cut, and on
the little finger of his right hand he wore a diamond ring. He took the cigar
from his mouth, his eyes narrowed into slits. “You know the rules, Jaybird.
Nobody comes in here without gettin’ approved.”
“He’s all right. He’s my grandson.”
“I don’t care if he’s the fuckin’ prince of England. You broke the
rules.”
“Now, there’s no call to be ugly about it, is th—”
“You’re stupid!” the man shouted, his mouth twisting as he spoke the
word. A fine sheen of sweat glistened on his face, and his white shirt was
damp. On the breast pocket, next to a tobacco stain, was a monogram: BB.
“Stupid!” he repeated. “You want the law to come in and bust us up? Why don’t
you just give a map to that goddamned sheriff?”
“Cory won’t say anythin’. He’s a good boy.”
“That so?” The small pig eyes returned to me. “You as stupid as your
grandpap, boy?”
“No sir,” I said.
He laughed. The sound of it reminded me of when Phillip Kenner threw up
his oatmeal in school last April. The man’s eyes were not happy, but his mouth
was tickled. “Well, you’re a smart little fella, ain’t you?”
“He takes after me, Mr. Blaylock,” the Jaybird said, and I realized the
man who thought I was so smart was Bodean Blaylock himself, brother of Donny
and Wade and son of the notorious Biggun. I recalled my grandfather’s brash
pronouncement at the door that Bodean could stick his head up his ass; right
now, though, it was my grandpop who looked butt-faced.
“Like hell he does,” Bodean told him, and when he laughed again he looked
around at the other gamblers and they laughed, too, like good little Indians
following the chief. Then Bodean stopped laughing. “Hit the road, Jaybird,” he
said. “We’ve got some high rollers comin’ in here directly. Bunch of flyboys
think they can make some money off me.”
My grandfather cleared his throat nervously. His eyes were on the poker
chips. “Uh… I was wonderin’… since I’m here and all, mind if I sit in for a
few hands?”
“Take that kid and make dust,” Bodean told him. “I’m runnin’ a poker
game, not a baby-sittin’ service.”
“Oh, Cory can wait outside,” the Jaybird said. “He won’t mind. Will you,
boy?”
“Grandmomma’s waitin’ for the ice cream salt,” I said.
Bodean Blaylock laughed again, and I saw the crimson flare in my
grandfather’s cheeks. “I don’t care about no damned ice cream!” the Jaybird
snapped, a fury and a torment in his eyes. “I don’t care if she waits till
midnight for it, I can do whatever I damn well please!”
“Better run on home, Jaybird,” one of the other men taunted. “Go eat
yourself some ice cream and stay out of trouble.”
“You shut up!” he hollered. “Here!” He dug into his pocket, brought out a
twenty-dollar bill, and slammed it on the table. “Am I in this game, or not?”
I almost choked. Twenty dollars to risk playing poker. That was an awful
lot of money. Bodean Blaylock smoked his cigar in silence, and looked back and
forth from the money to my granddaddy’s face. “Twenty dollars,” he said.
“That’ll hardly get you started.”
“I’ve got more, don’t you worry about it.”
I realized the Jaybird must’ve raided the cash jar, or else he had a
secret poker-playing fund hidden away from my grandmother. Surely she wouldn’t
approve of this, and surely the Jaybird had agreed to get the ice cream salt
as a ruse to come here. Maybe he’d just planned on dropping by to see who was
playing, but I could tell the fever had him and he was going to play come hell
or high water. “Am I in, or not?”
“The kid can’t stay.”
“Cory, go sit in the car,” he said. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“But Grandmomma’s waitin’ for—”
“Go do like I said and do it right now!” the Jaybird yelled at me. Bodean
stared at me through a haze of smoke. His expression said: See what I can do
to your granddaddy, little boy?
I left the house. Before I got to the door, I could hear the sound of a
new chair scraping up to the table. Then I walked out into the hot light and I
put my hands in my pockets and kicked a pine cone across the road. I waited.
Ten minutes went past. Then ten more. A car pulled up, and three young men got
out, knocked on the front door, and were admitted by Mr. Claypool. The door
