No Heroes (9 page)

When I grew up, the town consisted of two hundred unemployed people. My grade school held a huge trophy case won by the high school that had been shut down sixty years before. Old railroad tracks traversed the land. Yellow bricks emblazoned with the name “Haldeman' reminded every child that our hometown had once mattered. Now it was like the bricks—broke and crumbling, embedded in the past.

Rita and I drove up my home hill. I stopped at a slight plateau, where the old path cut through the woods, now grown over with weeds, indecipherable from the brush and saplings. I continued past the Gob Dump, a gray substance on which nothing grew, evidence of a long empty mine. I played kickball at the hilltop, using a low clay-dirt hill for first base, the tip of a buried rock for second, a locust branch as third. Home plate was a vague area of shade. One ridge road held the house I grew up in, where my parents still lived. Other roads held the Henderson homeplace, Randy's trailer and woodshop, Faron's old trailer, the Sam Bowen house now empty and in disrepair, Dixie Blizzard's old place presently occupied by people from off, the Fraley man who moved here from Carter County thirty years ago and was still regarded as a stranger although his sons were Haldeman boys, and the Hortons' old place now occupied by one of the Messer boys, whose family had lived on the hill longer than anyone. I was home. The roads were paved and the children gone.

I drove sedately down the hill to Buffalo Hollow. The road tightened and turned to gravel, then dirt, and finally became twin ruts with grass between. I parked the Malibu in a wide spot and cut the engine. Rita scooted close to me. I explained the history of Buffalo Hollow as a site for romance. She told me she was glad I'd brought her here.

On the way home we played Lynyrd Skynyrd on the car stereo. Rita sat beside me on the bench seat, exactly as I'd hoped a girl would sit twenty years ago. I kissed her at a traffic light. When the color turned green, I chirped a black mark on Main Street. Rita laughed and put her feet on the dashboard. We drove through town in five minutes. We stopped by the grade school and picked up our kids and took them to the Dairy Queen for dilly bars.

The boss wants to paint his room. I think maybe I get a piece of grub out of this and I said, yeah, I can paint. He had something that looked like a brush. I wasn't sure what it was, a brush or a broom, but you could see through it. He had old paint. I started to mix them but the paint would separate. I had some violet in there, some red, some yellow and it became streaky. I was able to finish that room in two days. He came in and I said, waugh, there's not enough paint, so I modernized it a little.

He was very impressed. It looked like marble when it dried out. He said, what else can you do? I said, I do carpentry. So I made a desk for him. I put some legs on a bureau top and I polished it nicely. He came into the machine shop and he never saw a more beautiful piece of furniture than that. He said, you do very well. From a man like this, it was like getting a million dollars. He was shooting people for much less.

Now came my biggest prize. I said, if you give me the equipment, I can put light in the main warehouse. We go with wire from one side of the camp to the other side and we got light. He was happy. I was his personal handyman after that.

He had a favorite man in the Jewish Police. I called him sergeant. He had a white shirt, whiter than white, and he was the object of envy. Nice uniform, clean hands, smelled like a rose. The sergeant had a beautiful head of hair. The prisoners were unshaven at this particular point. Their hair was long and they looked like slobs. So the boss said, get those prisoners cleaned up. I want everybody to shave their hair, shave completely. Everybody, you included, he tells his friend the sergeant in front of us.

The sergeant is asking for permission to leave his hair on. The boss said, oh sure. You have a beautiful head of hair. I would never dream to deprive you of this beautiful head of hair. And he turns around, and shoots the sergeant in the back of the head.

He tells everybody to take the body and bring him over there. And he led the whole procession to the dump where we have our garbage. He says, now we gonna bury this beautiful Jew. We threw him in the garbage and there was rotting potatoes and all kind of shit. He says, everybody kneel and say a prayer for this beautiful man. Everybody kneels at the dump. He goes from one guy to another guy and says, are you praying? Are you praying? Do you pray? Now bury the sonofabitch.

That was my boss.

They took Arthur to one camp and Beno and me to the different camp. There were big cars for the transport of animals. Beno and me wind up in Plaszow. Arthur had a better camp.

I saw Beno. He was fourteen. He grew so much, I could not believe it. Beno was a short little guy, he grew to six feet. They took him from Plaszow after a year. He was sixteen. I don't know where Beno went and I never heard from him and Arthur he feels guilty. It's his nature that he blames himself. We don't know where he was and where he died.

Losing Beno was worse for Arthur than his father and mother. That he was not taking care of his little brother. Like Sam would feel guilty that he didn't take care of James. It's a terrible feeling. I was lucky enough that I didn't really have guilt. My mother, I saved her for three months. I could not do more than I did.

I had lunch with my mother at the Dixie Grill. It was unusual for us to have a private meal, one of the rare times when I saw her actually eat. My mother attended MSU for two decades, and now worked for a nonlitigating lawyer, an old family friend. Her job included greeting people as they entered his office. She had never held a job when I lived here, and it pleased me to take my mother out during her lunch break.

The Dixie Grill is a small room filled with tables and chairs—no booths. When my mother and I entered, everyone looked to see who we were. We followed etiquette by sweeping the area with our vision and settling on someone to smile at. People never feel hurt if you don't wave to them personally. They understand that you are merely obeying custom by showing the crowd that you're not a snob. All of this is surreptitious of course, with no sense of choreography or awareness. It's simple convention. Staring is not considered rude here. In fact, the opposite is true—failing to acknowledge someone is a much worse social gaffe. Staring at strangers is common because you must try to figure out who the person is related to, if you know the family, and if you are perhaps distant kin. One of these scenarios holds true, because there are no strangers in the hills. People don't come here unless they are visiting relatives.

The Dixie Grill's menu is traditional mountain fare— fried, fatty, starchy, and sweet. There is no designated smoking section, which is to say the entire restaurant is a smoking section. My mother and I ordered the daily special of soup beans, mixed greens, and corn bread. To eat properly, you douse the damp clump of greens with vinegar, and crumble your corn bread into your soup beans. We looked at each other across the table. My mother seemed to enjoy the idea of eating lunch with me more than the actual experience.

“How are the boys?” she said.

“Pretty good. Sam's not too happy with school.”

“You always liked school.”

I ate a bite of soggy corn bread.

“Are things all right with you,” I said.

“Great.”

“And Dad?”

“Great.”

“How about the house?” I said. “The new roof?”

“Great. I'm so glad you're here. This is the busiest time of the busiest restaurant in Morehead.”

“Great,” I said.

There were perhaps twenty tables in the room, four of which were empty. My mother kept glancing around to see who saw us together. Other people were likewise engaged, which slowed the pace of eating. Many people were there merely to be seen—businesspeople communicating liaisons to the world, couples showing everyone that their marital problems were repaired, bosses eating with employees to display good relations. No one lunched alone at the Dixie Grill.

A boy I'd grown up with came by the table to say hello. He was balding now and I remembered when a VISTA worker took him to a dentist. The next day he brought a toothbrush to school. Since he'd never seen one, he figured none of us had either. I inquired about his six brothers and four sisters. He worked at Guardian, the only industry around, a manufacturer of ball bearings. They tried to unionize but failed. He still lived in Haldeman, but was thinking of moving.

“They built that new school,” he said, “but it ain't the same,” he said. “They combined Haldeman and Elliotville, and make those babies ride a bus twelve miles. Parents don't go to PTA meetings because it's too far away.”

“Don't they use the school for anything?”

“To vote in. They closed the voting house. But they're going to open it again because so many people quit voting when they changed it.”

“Why'd they close the voting house?”

“No bathroom,” he said. “The state says you got to have a bathroom. Shoot, there's some folks would vote just to use the bathroom.”

I laughed and he returned to his table. My mother smiled brightly to a person across the room.

“You know, Chris,” my mother said. “I liked it better when you lived in Albuquerque.”

“What?”

“I could visit.”

I continued to nod, my head slowly moving like a marionette in the wind. To reach the rest room I had to step into a narrow hall at the rear of the restaurant. The men's room was occupied. I glanced around and quickly went into the women's room, where I splashed cold water on my face and wrists. As I emerged, an older woman was slowly coming through the door. She stared at me, utterly aghast to find a man in the ladies' room. She was a retired high school teacher and she withered me with a look, shaking her head as if to say, “Christopher, you may have gone off and come back, but you have not grown up one bit.”

I paid the bill and said hello to my freshman composition teacher from college. I nodded to a man I'd once bought marijuana from. I opened the door for my high school typing teacher, a woman I held in high esteem.

I walked my mother back to her job at a new building that had formerly housed a Laundromat. She smiled at the door, resuming her role as a sixty-five-year-old employee in an olive skirt, the ubiquitous green of a redhead. Her hair was a different color now, but her taste in clothes was the same. She thanked me for lunch, straightened her skirt, lifted her chin, and gave me the smile of a receptionist seeing a person out. She nodded once and turned away. I watched the door close after her.

I realized that I knew very little about my mother's life, and that lunch had offered no insight. I didn't even know if she was happy. I hoped that my coming home would allow her to open herself to me. She never talked of her childhood and had told me nothing of her mother. I don't even know my grandmother's name. She died young.

When I was a child, some wild boys drove a hot rod along the dirt road on our hill. It was jacked-up in the back with short pipes that produced a rhythmic roar. A large black swastika was painted on each door. I had never seen that symbol before. I thought the car was cool, the driver was cool, the loud music roaring was cool. I especially thought the swastika was cool. For some reason I decided to carve it into the lid of a wooden box on my mothers dresser. I was about ten years old. I used the sharp end of a diaper pen. When my father asked if I had done it, I said yes and told him about the car. He said the box had belonged to my grandmother. It was the only item my mother had from her. I never saw the box again.