Coal to Diamonds (2 page)

What are you doing, Dean?
I asked, watching him stab tiny holes into the aluminum with a knife.

Makin’ a pipe
.

A pipe?
On the screen, Alex Trebek confounded the contestants with a new question; in the kitchen I watched my cousin’s odd crafting, stumped.

For pot
, he explained. The can was crushed, almost folded. On the far end, away from the opening, Dean poked and punctured until he’d created a tiny perforated area for a clump of weed to be ignited, then inhaled through the mouth of the can.

I’d never thought of a Coke can in quite that way before, and I guess it was sort of nice to observe Dean engaged in something remotely useful.

You want to smoke some?
he invited. It wasn’t like Dean to share the wealth, so I figured I should take advantage of his generosity. Besides, smoking pot with Dean seemed much more exciting than spacing out to another round of
Jeopardy!
I tagged behind my cousin.

Something you should know about that hectic house filled with aging, chain-smoking party girls, young moms and younger kids, with crazy puppies and me—the misfit cousin/built-in babysitter/housekeeper/nurse—is that the house was built from the ground
up by Uncle Artus himself. Uncle Artus was an excellent carpenter and had made a bunch of money supervising jobs around the state of Arkansas. He just must have been so crazy busy with paid work that he never quite got around to finishing up his own place. Though he’d built it thirty years before, most of the fixtures in the house still hung from wires. The windows were just frameless panes of glass stuck into the walls, unfinished. A person could see straight into the outdoors through cracks in the joints, especially when it started getting colder and the wood contracted. That day it was chilly, autumn, so the cracks grew wide and the whole house got colder. I shivered in my sweats and my favorite T-shirt—Aunt Jannie had painted a chanteuse on the front of it with fabric paint, a glamorous lady coming out of a giant seashell. Back then there weren’t many things I could call my own. I didn’t have a bed, and many mornings I rifled through Jane Ann’s dresser in search of clean bras and underwear. But that T-shirt was mine, and so was the character on it: a singer, a girl.

Like the rest of the house, Dean’s room was a mess. His bed was a knot of blankets, and dirty clothes littered his floor. I leaned against the open window and tried to seem cool. I’d never smoked pot before. It didn’t seem like a terribly bad thing to do—certainly more innocent than hard drugs that made people into zombies, or even getting drunk off a bottle of whiskey. But it was a bigger, badder deal than smoking a cigarette, and smoking a cigarette is all I’d ever done. An old babysitter had taught me to inhale at the tender age of six. That unethical babysitter—she was on the clock taking care of me the day she got herself knocked up—taught me how to pull the smoke into my lungs, and I’d been smoking ever since. I fed my habit by slipping Winstons from Aunt Jannie’s pack during our talk-and-television marathons. But marijuana belonged to a whole new tier of inebriants. I watched as he suctioned his face to the can, releasing smoke out the window with ease, and I followed his lead. I angled my mouth against the hole in the can while Dean dipped a lighter onto the scrabble of charred weed.

The smoke poured into my lungs in a hot gust. If cigarette smoke was a windy day, this was the tornado that sacked Judsonia. I swallowed it, choked, and felt my eyes burn and turn runny. I was concerned about looking like a baby in front of Dean, but he wasn’t paying me any mind. He was already singeing the rest of the weed and taking a final, powerful hit. He pursed his lips like Mick Jagger around the exiting smoke while I waited to feel the effects of the pot, and waited. I felt a little dizzy, but maybe that was from the coughing fit? I took an inventory of my body and mind. Then my cousin dropped the ashy can on his bedroom floor and reached for his gun.

In Arkansas, it’s no big whoop to have guns lying around. If you don’t have guns in your house, folks are apt to think there’s something not quite right about you. My friends’ families had cabinets where guns gleamed, displayed like porcelain figurines on a mantel. In Dean’s pigsty, his .22 rifle was just leaning casually against the wall by his bed. While I was in my stoned reverie, Dean leaned out the window and
pop pop pop
took down a trio of squirrels in the time it took me to think, Whoa, dude. The tiny mammals fell from their perch, landed on the ground, and sent up a kick of dust around their fur. The same skills that made Dean a kick-ass pool player also made him an excellent shot. Precision and a steady hand, depth perception, angles and physics, and a spot-on instinct for when to shoot, to send the eight ball rolling toward the corner pocket or knock that squirrel out from its tree. It didn’t hurt that the backyard was teeming with squirrels. Shit too. Out back was a little trail that led to an open sewer at the edge of the woods. If someone in the house flushed the commode you could watch the shit rush out of the pipe and into this ditch and it would float away, to where I don’t know. My cousins and I would be playing out back, where wild mulberry bushes and pecan trees grew. Bunches of the nuts fell from the trees, and what we couldn’t gnaw open we’d toss into the open sewer, trying to sink the shit that bobbed there.

Newly stoned, my body felt grimy and cold. I needed a hot shower. Dean ran out to the yard to collect his kills and I took further advantage of the empty house, luxuriating in the hot water without anyone yelling at me to hurry up, hollering that they had to pee or take a shower themselves, and nobody bitching about the cost of hot water. Compared to the poverty of the home I’d run away from—well, “run away” is too dramatic, I’d just found a reason to leave, and no one stopped me—Aunt Jannie’s house was positively lower-middle-class. They had multiple boxes of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese standing inside their cabinets. They had Little Debbie snack cakes, all kinds of chocolate delights harboring secret creamy middles, chocolate dunked in chocolate, tunnels of sweet peanut butter, and Aunt Jannie’s favorites—chocolate-covered cherries. Aunt Jannie’s house had credit cards backing it, so anything was possible—new appliances, guns, televisions, a bounty of groceries. But still, no one was rich, and the cost of hot showers for a household of eight added up. I toweled off, got back into my sweats and special chanteuse T-shirt, and walked out of the bathroom into the greasy, meaty stink of fried squirrel.

I had the munchies!
Dean hooted from the kitchen table. The plate on the table in front of him was scarfed clean, a pile of leg bones and the dirty frying pan the only evidence of Dean’s impressive stoner feat: nailing three squirrels with a shotgun, then skinning them out in the yard, cleaning the meat, and frying it up, all while high on some kind of bud smoked out of a Coke can.

Smaller than a chicken, bigger than a rat. I hadn’t eaten squirrel since I was a kid, and it would take more than stoner munchies to get me to snack on it again, especially in a house stocked with Little Debbies and Doritos. I wasn’t a vegetarian, but something about eating the animals that had been traipsing through the backyard moments before—squirrels, deer—started to gross me out as I got older. Hunting everyday mammals was as normal in Arkansas as the guns ornamenting everyone’s houses. My dad liked to boil a squirrel head and suck the brains out the nose. Not
my idea of gourmet, but nothing outrageous in Judsonia. Simply the sort of vaguely nasty food enjoyed by adult men where I’m from.

The tails, however, fit into my idea of a good time. While the squirrel skins and grisly innards were dumped in the yard to be picked away by scavengers (or Alex and Cleo), the tails were treasured like rabbit’s feet—a bit of the wild in the palm of your hand, exotic and icky, lucky even, though not for the squirrel. Growing up, all the kids had squirrel tails; in the fall, when squirrel hunting peaked, they were everywhere. You’d carry them around and play with them until your mom decided they’d become too disgusting and threw them away. But before they got too ratty they were sleek and soft, like a secret curled in your jacket pocket for you to snuggle your fingers into.

The pot wore off before I could really figure out whether or not it had done its job on me. Dean left his squirrelly dishes behind for me to clean up, and he took the stairs two at a time to seal himself inside his bedroom. Soon the three A’s came home, and later Jane Ann, but Aunt Jannie, hadn’t. Forty-seven years old, gone into the hospital for a staph infection and held there for lung cancer. I waited for her in the stale cigarette air of the kitchen, but things would never be the same again.

Because Aunt Jannie was tough and mean, it was always a comfort to be beside her. Imagine if a fearsome lion allowed you into her den and protected you there. You’d feel like the coolest person ever—chosen by a lion, a beast that munches other people to bloody ribbons, but not you. There must be something so special and excellent about you that secures you the lion’s protection. That’s how it was with Aunt Jannie and me. Aunt Jannie was cruel enough to scare the dark away, but she was never cruel to me. It was a shaky sort of safety, but our standards of safety were so low that we felt protected in situations like that, and I thought I was.

Aunt Jannie was always too hot; she’d sweat like she had a coal furnace in her guts stoking her. She’d crank up the air-conditioning in April to try to keep cool, but it wasn’t enough. She found clothes unbearable. She’d take everything off and sit around in her bra and this underwear called Lovepats that were real stretchy and came up high around her middle. Lovepats were so cool, high-waisted granny chic.

Aunt Jannie in her underwear wasn’t like some lady hanging
out in her bra and panties who was too lazy to get dressed or trying to be sexy. She wasn’t trying to be shocking either, but if you were shocked, that was your problem, not hers. That mixture of comfort and defiance was her claiming the right to be comfortable inside her body and her home, with just the right amount of fuck-you, and it fascinated me just as much as her undergarments did.

Entitled: that’s what Aunt Jannie was. Entitled to her own body, entitled to its comfort, entitled to live in her home as if it was hers. I think about her home, with all those people in it, and maybe lounging around in Lovepats was a way Aunt Jannie reminded herself she was the queen. She sat around in her underwear and nobody could say a goddamn thing about it.

Aunt Jannie didn’t sit quietly in her Lovepats, either. She’d let out with a curse word as the inspiration struck her, and inspiration struck quite frequently.
Cocksucker, motherfucker
. I learned classic, shocking swearwords from Aunt Jannie, and I took them with me to the schoolyard, outrageous words that became just another tool in my arsenal. My town was tough, and Aunt Jannie was teaching me how to take up space and keep people away. Saying the shocking thing first made people a little scared. Who knew what I’d do? Are you going to mess with the fat woman sitting in her underwear and cursing in her kitchen? I do not think you would.

I was always discovering something more about Aunt Jannie. Just when I thought I had the whole of her figured out I’d learn a swearword or hear a new story. The day I learned about the tittie rock, I’d been balancing on a kitchen chair, hunting for a box of Teddy Grahams on top of the refrigerator.

What’s this?
I asked, holding out a long, strange rock the size and weight of a roll of quarters, with grooves worn into it for fingers to clutch.

Oh, you don’t know what that is?
Aunt Jannie grinned, teasing and proud. She waited for my answer.

A rock?
I guessed stupidly.

You’re half right
. She smiled. I clambered down from the chair
with the rock in one hand and a box of cookies in the other. Aunt Jannie took the rock and wrapped her hand around it. The rock disappeared in her hand, but Aunt Jannie’s fist looked heavy and strong.

It’s a tittie rock!
she crowed.
It’s for punching girls in the titties
.

Like Lara Croft with her giant gun or the goddess Athena with her sword, Aunt Jannie had a signature weapon. A tittie rock. Aunt Jannie fought a lot when she was younger. I couldn’t imagine she was still punching girls in the titties when I discovered her rock, and she was older and sick, but she kept the thing around just in case.

As she got older things shifted a bit. Even though Aunt Jannie had a special weapon for women, she hated men the most. Aunt Jannie was the first man-hater I’d ever met, outwardly harshing on the whole bunch of them, not shy about it either. Cocksucker and motherfucker. She wasn’t spitting those insults about women. Aunt Jannie could size up a man in seconds, be it an arrogant brainiac on a game show or the family’s no-good man of the moment. I knew that Aunt Jannie’s radar for “cocksuckers” and “motherfuckers” had been honed through her lifetime. No one knew, exactly, what man or men had done what to Aunt Jannie. Women in Judsonia didn’t talk about such things. All that was certain was that something dropped a layer of cement over that heart of hers. Something made her hard and scary. My guess is if you did a lineup to see who was responsible, a whole mess of ghosts would emerge from the past. Even though I was young I already knew how to stay quiet about the things men and boys did to me, I knew how to get up and keep going in spite of it, but what I didn’t know was how to be sharp and mean, protective and fierce, full of fuck-yous and defiance. That was what Aunt Jannie taught me.

With a Southern accent it’s hard to say anything in a single syllable. Speech is sort of lazy and luxurious, like the speaker needs to wring every possible bit of sound from a word and let it linger in the humid air. With a Southern accent a one-syllable word becomes two-syllabled. You can stick an “ay” in there somewhere, stretch that short, stumpy word into something melodic.
Jane
becomes
Jayayne
. Like the mouth can’t let go of the language, and the tongue just wants to hold on to the sound of it for a second longer.