Burning Bright: Stories (13 page)

For half an hour he tried to explain. When Boyd finished his wife placed one of her hands over his.

“I know where you grew up that people, uneducated people, believed such things.” Laura said when he’d finished. “But you don’t live in Madison County anymore, and you are educated. Maybe there is an owl out back.
I haven’t heard it, but I’ll concede it could be out there. But even so it’s an
owl
, nothing more.”

Laura squeezed his hand.

“I’m getting you an appointment with Doctor Harmon. He’ll prescribe some Ambien so you can get some rest, maybe something else for the anxiety.”

L
ater that night he lay in bed, waiting for the owl to call. An hour passed on the red digits of the alarm clock and he tried to muster hope that the bird had left. He finally fell asleep for a few minutes, long enough to dream about his grandfather. They were in Madison County, in the farmhouse. Boyd was in the front room by himself, waiting though he didn’t know what for. Finally, the old man came out of his bedroom, dressed in his brogans and overalls, a sweat rag in his back pocket.

The corpse bird’s call roused him from the dream. Boyd put on pants and shoes and a sweatshirt. He took a flashlight from the kitchen drawer and went into the basement to get the chain saw. The machine was almost forty years old, a relic, heavy and cumbersome, its teeth dulled by decades of use. But it still ran well enough to keep them in firewood.

Boyd filled the gas tank and checked the spark plug and chain lube. The chain saw had belonged to his grandfather, had been used by the old man to cull trees from his farm for firewood. Boyd had often gone into the
woods with him, helped load the logs and kindling into his grandfather’s battered pickup. After the old man’s health had not allowed him to use it anymore, he’d given it to Boyd. Two decades had passed before he found a use for it. A coworker owned some thirty acres near Cary and offered Boyd all the free wood he wanted as long as the trees were dead and Boyd cut them himself.

Outside, the air was sharp and clear. The stars seemed more defined, closer. A bright orange harvest moon rose in the west. He clicked on the flashlight and let its beam trace the upper limbs until he saw it. Despite being bathed in light, the corpse bird did not stir. Rigid as a gravestone, Boyd thought. The unblinking yellow eyes stared toward the Colemans’ house, and Boyd knew these were the same eyes that had fixed themselves on his grandfather.

Boyd laid the flashlight on the grass, its beam aimed at the scarlet oak’s trunk. He pulled the cord and the machine trembled to life. Its vibration shook his whole upper body. Boyd stepped close to the tree, extending his arms, the machine’s weight tensing his biceps and forearms.

The scrub trees on his coworker’s land had come down quickly and easily. But he’d never cut a tree the size of the scarlet oak. A few bark shards flew out as the blade hit the tree, then the blade skittered down the trunk until Boyd pulled it away and tried again.

It took eight attempts before he made the beginnings of a wedge in the tree. He was breathing hard, the weight of the saw straining his arms, his back, and even his legs as he steadied not only himself but the machine. He angled the blade as best he could to widen the wedge. By the time he finished the first side, sawdust and sweat stung his eyes. His heart banged against his ribs as if caged.

Boyd thought about resting a minute but when he looked back at the Colemans’ house, he saw lights on. He carried the saw to the other side of the trunk. Three times the blade hit the bark before finally making a cut. Boyd glanced behind him again and saw Jim Coleman coming across the yard, his mouth open and arms gesturing.

Boyd eased the throttle and let the chain saw idle.

“What in God’s name are you doing,” Jim shouted.

“What’s got to be done,” Boyd said.

“I’ve got a sick daughter and you woke her up.”

“I know that,” Boyd said.

Jim Coleman reached a hand out as though to wrest the chain saw from Boyd’s hand. Boyd shoved the throttle and waved the blade between him and Jim Coleman.

“I’m calling the police,” Jim Coleman shouted.

Laura was outside now as well. She and Jim Coleman spoke to each other a few moments before Jim went
into his house. When Laura approached Boyd screamed at her to stay away. Boyd made a final thrust deep into the tree’s heart. He dropped the saw and stepped back. The oak wavered a moment, then came crashing down. As it fell, something beaked and winged passed near Boyd’s face. He picked up the flashlight and shone it on the bird as it crossed over the vacant lot, disappeared into the darkness it had been summoned from. Boyd sat down on the scarlet oak’s stump and clicked off the flashlight.

His wife and neighbor stood beside each other in the Colemans’ backyard. They spoke softly to each other, as though Boyd were a wild animal they didn’t want to reveal their presence to.

Soon blue lights splashed against the sides of the two houses. Other neighbors joined Jim Coleman and Laura in the backyard. The policeman talked to Laura a few moments. She nodded once and turned in Boyd’s direction, her face wet with tears. The policeman spoke into a walkie-talkie and then started walking toward him, handcuffs clinking in the policeman’s hands. Boyd stood up and held his arms out before him, both palms upturned, like a man who’s just set something free.

S
o it’s somewhere between Saturday night and Sunday morning clockwise, and I’m in a cinder-block roadhouse called The Last Chance, and I’m playing “Free Bird” for the fifth time tonight but I’m not thinking of Ronnie Van Zant but an artist dredged up from my former life, Willie Yeats, and his line
surely some revelation is at hand
. But the only rough beast slouching toward me is my rhythm guitar player, Sammy Griffen, who is down on all fours, weaving through the crowd of tables between the bathroom and stage.

One of the great sins of the sixties was introducing
drugs to the good-ole-boy element of Southern society. If you were some Harvard psychology professor like Timothy Leary, drugs might well expand your consciousness, but they worked just the opposite way for people like Sammy, shriveling the brain to a reptilian level of aggression and paranoia.

There is no telling what Sammy has snorted or swallowed in the bathroom, but his pupils have expanded to the size of dimes. He passes a table and sees a bare leg, a female leg, and grabs hold. He takes off an attached high heel and starts licking the foot. It takes about three seconds for a bigger foot with a steel-capped toe to swing into the back of Sammy’s head like a football player kicking an extra point. Sammy curls up in a fetal position and blacks out among the peanut shells and cigarette butts.

So now it’s just my bass player Bobo Lingafelt, Hal Deaton, my drummer, and me. I finish “Free Bird” so that means the next songs are my choice. They got to have “Free Bird” at least once an hour, Rodney said when he hired me, saying it like his clientele were diabetics needing insulin. The rest of the time you play what you want, he’d added.

I turn to Bobo and Hal and play the opening chords of Gary Stewart’s “Roarin’” and they fall in. Stewart was one of this country’s neglected geniuses, once dubbed honky-tonk’s “white trash ambassador from hell” by
one of the few critics who bothered listening to him. His music is two centuries’ worth of pent-up Appalachian soul, too intense and pure for Nashville, though they tried their best to pith his brain with cocaine, put a cowboy hat on his head, and make him into another talentless music-city hack. Stewart spent some of his last years hunkered down in a North Florida trailer park: no phone, not answering the door, every window of the hulk of rusting tin he called home painted black. Surviving on what songwriting residuals dribbled in from Nashville.

Such a lifestyle has its appeals, especially tonight as I look out at the human wreckage filling The Last Chance. One guy has his head on a table, eyes closed, vomit drooling from his mouth. Another pulls out his false teeth and clamps them on the ear of a gal at the next table. An immense woman in a purple jumpsuit is crying while another woman screams at her. And what I’m thinking is maybe it’s time to halt all human reproduction. Let God or evolution or whatever put us here in the first place start again from scratch, because this isn’t working.

Like Stewart, I too live in a trailer, but I have to leave it more often than I wish because I am not a musical genius, just a forty-year-old ex-high-school English teacher who has to make money, more than I get from a part-time job proofing copy for the weekly newspaper.
Which is why I’m here from seven to two four nights a week, getting it done in the name of Lynyrd Skynyrd, alimony, and keeping the repo man away from my truck.

I will not bore you with the details of lost teaching jobs, lost wife, and lost child. Mistakes were made, as the politicos say. The last principal I worked for made sure I can’t get a teaching job anywhere north of the Amazon rain forest. My ex-wife and my kid are in California. All I am to them is an envelope with a check in it.

Beyond the tables of human wreckage I see Hubert McClain sitting at the bar, beer in one hand and Louisville Slugger in the other. Hubert is our bouncer, two hundred and fifty pounds of atavistic Celtic violence coiled and ready to happen. On the front of the ball cap covering his survivalist buzz cut, a leering skeleton waves a sickle in one hand and a black-and-white checkered victory flag in the other. The symbolism is unclear, except that anyone wearing such a cap, especially while gripping a thirty-six-ounce ball bat, is not someone you want to displease.

Sitting beside Hubert is his best friend, Joe Don Byers, formally Yusef Byers before he had his first name legally changed. While it seems every white male between fourteen and twenty-five is trying to look and act black, Joe Don is going the opposite way, a twenty-three-year-old black man trying to be a Skoal-dipping, country-music-listening good ole boy. But like the white
kids with their ball caps turned sideways and pants hanging halfway down their asses, Joe Don can’t quite pull it off. The hubcap-sized belt buckle and snakeskin boots pass muster, but he wears his Stetson low over his right eye, the brim’s rakish tilt making him look more like a cross-dressing pimp than a cowboy. His truck is another giveaway, a Toyota two-wheel drive with four mud grips and a Dale Earnhardt sticker on the back windshield, unaware that any true Earnhardt fan would rather ride a lawn mower than drive anything other than a Chevy.

On the opposite side of the bar, Rodney is taking whatever people hand him—crumpled bills, handfuls of nickels and dimes, payroll checks, wedding rings, wristwatches. One time a guy offered a gold filling he’d dug out of his mouth with a pocketknife. Rodney didn’t even blink.

Watching him operate, it’s easy to believe Rodney’s simply an updated version of Flem Snopes, the kind of guy whose first successful business venture is showing photos of his naked sister to his junior high peers. But that’s not the case at all. Rodney graduated from the University of South Carolina with a degree in social work. He wanted to make the world better, but, according to Rodney, the world wasn’t interested.

His career as a social worker ended the same week it began. Rodney had borrowed a church bus to take some of Columbia’s disadvantaged youth to a Braves game.
Halfway to Atlanta the teenagers mutinied. They beat Rodney with a tire iron, took his money and clothes, and left him naked and bleeding in a ditch. A week later, the same day Rodney got out of the hospital, the bus was found half submerged in the Okefenokee Swamp. It took another month to round up the youths, several of whom had procured entry-level positions in a Miami drug cartel.

Rodney says running The Last Chance is a philosophical statement. Above the cash register he’s plastered one of those Darwinian bumper stickers with the fish outline and four evolving legs. Rodney’s drawn a speech bubble in front of the fish’s mouth.
Exterminate the brutes,
the fish says.

Advice Rodney seems to have taken to heart. There’s only one mixed drink in The Last Chance, what Rodney calls the Terminator. It’s six ounces of Jack Daniel’s and six ounces of Surrey County moonshine and six ounces of Sam’s Choice tomato juice. Some customers claim a dash of lighter fluid is added for good measure. No one, not even Hubert, has ever drunk more than three of these and remained standing. It usually takes only two to put the drinkers onto the floor, tomato juice dribbling down their chins like they’ve been shot in the mouth.

W
hen we finish “Roarin’” only three or four people clap. A lot of the crowd doesn’t know the song
or, for that matter, who Gary Stewart was. Radio and Music Television have anesthetized them to the degree that they can’t recognize the real thing, even when it comes from their own gene pool.

And speaking of gene pools, I suddenly see Everette Evans, the man that, to my immense regret, is twenty-five percent of the genetic makeup of my son. He’s standing in the doorway, a camcorder in his hands. Everette lingers on Hubert a few seconds, then the various casualties of the evening before finally honing in on me.

I lay down the guitar and make my way toward the entrance. Everette’s still filming until I’m right up on him. He jerks the camera down to waist level and points it at me like it’s an Uzi.

“What are you up to, Everette?” I say.

He grins at me, though it’s one of those grins that is one part malice and one part nervous, like a politician being asked to explain a hundred thousand dollars in small bills he recently deposited in the bank.

“We’re just getting some additional evidence as to your parental fitness.”

“I don’t see no we,” I say. “Just one old meddling fool who, if he still had one, should have his ass kicked.”

“Don’t you be threatening me, Devon,” Everette says. “I might just start this camcorder up again and get some more incriminating evidence.”

“And I just might take that camcorder and perform a colonoscopy on you with it. Your daughter doesn’t seem to have a problem spending the money I make here.”

“What’s the problem, Devon?” Hubert says, walking over from the bar.

“This man’s working for
National Geographic
,” I tell Hubert. “They’re doing a show on primitive societies, claiming people like us are the missing link between apes and humans.”

“That’s a lie,” Everette says, his eyes on Hubert’s ball bat.

“And that’s only
part
of what this footage is for,” I say. “This asshole’s selling what the
Geographic
doesn’t want to the Moral Majority. They’ll shut this place down like it’s a toxic waste site.”

“We don’t allow no filming in here,” Hubert says, taking the camcorder from Everette’s hands.

Hubert jerks out the tape and douses it with the half-drunk Terminator he’s been sipping. Hubert strikes a match and drops the tape on the floor. In five seconds the tape looks like black Jell-O.

Everette starts backing out the door.

“You ain’t heard the last of this, Devon,” he vows.

R
odney lifts a bullhorn from under the bar and announces it’s one forty-five and anybody who wants a last drink had better get it now. There are few
takers, most customers now lacking money or consciousness. I’m thinking to finish up with Steve Earle’s “Graveyard Shift” and Dwight Yoakam’s “A Thousand Miles from Nowhere,” but the drunk who’s been using a pool of vomit for a pillow the last hour lifts his head. He fumbles a lighter out of his pocket and flicks it on.

“Free Bird,” he grunts, and lays his head back in the vomit.

And I’m thinking, why not. Ronnie Van Zant didn’t have the talent of Gary Stewart or Steve Earle or Dwight Yoakam, but he did what he could with what he had. Skynyrd never pruned their Southern musical roots to give them “national appeal,” and that gave their music, whatever else its failings, an honesty and an edge.

So I take out the slide from my jean pocket and start that long wailing solo for probably the millionth time in my life. I’m on automatic pilot, letting my fingers take care of business while my mind roams elsewhere.

Heads rise from tables and stare my way. Conversations stop. Couples arguing or groping each other pause as well. And this is the way it always is, as though Van Zant somehow found a conduit into the collective unconscious of his race. Whatever it is, they become serious and reflective. Maybe it’s just the music’s slow surging build. Or maybe something more—a yearning for the kind of freedom Van Zant’s lyrics deal with, a recognition of the human need to lay their burdens
down. And maybe, for a few moments, being connected to the music and lyrics enough to actually feel unshackled, free and in flight.

As I finish “Free Bird” Rodney cuts on every light in the building, including some high-beam John Deere tractor lights he’s rigged on the ceiling. It’s like the last scene in a vampire movie. People start wailing and whimpering. They cover their eyes, crawl under tables, and ultimately—and this is the goal—scurry toward the door and out into the dark, dragging the passed-out and knocked-out with them.

I’m off the clock now, but I don’t take off my guitar and unplug the amp. Instead, I play the opening chords to Elvis Costello’s “Waiting for the End of the World.” Costello has tried to be the second coming of Perry Como of late, but his first two albums were pure rage and heartbreak. Those first nights after my wife and child left, I listened to Costello and it helped. Not much, but at least a little.

Hal is draped over his drum set, passed out, and Bobo is headed out the door with the big woman in the purple jumpsuit. Sammy’s still on the floor so I’m flying solo.

I can’t remember all the lyrics, so except for the refrain it’s like I’m speaking in tongues, but it’s two
A.M
. in western Carolina, and not much of anything makes sense. All you can do is pick up your guitar and play.
Which is what I’m doing. I’m laying down some mean guitar licks, and though I’m not much of a singer I’m giving all I got, and although The Last Chance is almost completely empty now that’s okay as well because I’m merging the primal and existential and I’ve cranked up the volume so loud empty beer bottles are vibrating off tables and the tractor beams are pulsing like strobe lights and whatever rough beast is asleep out there in the dark is getting its wake-up call and I’m ready and waiting for whatever it’s got.