The Essay A Novel (7 page)

“You can't hardly see any grass for all the tires,” Polio said as we surveyed the hillside.

“That's a lot of money there,” I said.

“That's a lot of work, Jimmy Lee,” Polio said.

“Have you got better plans for the summer?” I asked.

“No, I was just sayin', it's a lot of work.”

“I can find someone else to help me if you're not interested.”

“I'm interested,” he whined. “I'm here, ain't I?”

I needed to set Polio straight from the start as I knew he would try to find a way to do as little work as possible. Mr. Monihan had backed a topless semi rig to the edge of the parking lot, between the garage and the diner, down an asphalt slope from the top of the hill. We created a system by which we rolled the tires across the parking lot and up a makeshift ramp that we made with scavenged two-by-eights and into the back of the trailer. This was a nice system until the top ridge of tires was gone and we had to climb down the hill and haul them back up. This was dirty, brutal work. The tires were nearly all half full with putrid water that slopped all over me. Many had to be untangled from weeds and vines and I had poison ivy the whole damn summer. By August, my forearms were all scarred up from digging at the blisters. I could hoist a tire over each shoulder and carry them to the top of the hill, although I frequently slipped in the grass and weeds we had tromped flat. Polio could only carry one tire at a time and it was a struggle for him to drag it to the top of the hill, leaving me with the lion's share of the work. I also learned that black rat snakes loved hiding in the caverns created by the spent tires. We spooked dozens of snakes, and they spooked us an equal number of times.

Mr. Monihan paid us at the end of every day. I counted the tires and reported to his office at two every afternoon when my mother was getting off work. He paid me cash and I split it with Polio. It was all done on the honor system, which seemed ludicrous to Polio. At the end of the first day on the job, he said. “Why don't you add about ten extra tires to the total every day? Not so much that he would suspect anything, but that would fetch an extra two-fifty a week for us, and he'd never know.”

I poked him in the chest with an index finger and said, “We ain't cheating him because I want to keep this job, Polio, that's why. If I catch you trying to pull some shit and it costs me this job, I swear to Christ I'll break your fingers.”

“I was just sayin' . . .”

“I know what you were saying, Polio, and if I catch you cheating Mr. Monihan I'll beat your ass. We clear?”

He just shrugged and muttered a weak, “yeah.” It was incomprehensible to Polio that I wouldn't cheat Mr. Monihan for a few extra dimes when it would have been so easy.

I don't know what Mr. Monihan was doing with the tires. Every morning the semi would be backed up to the edge of the parking lot, empty. I assumed that another hollow somewhere in Vinton County was filling up with used truck tires, but that wasn't my concern.

In mid-July, Coach Battershell stopped by the house to find out why I hadn't been to any of the summer weightlifting sessions for the football team. He took one look at my arms and shoulders, thick and cut from hefting truck tires up the side of the hill, and said, “Never mind. Whatever you're doing, just keep it up.”

One afternoon toward the end of the month, while we were riding home, Polio leaned up from the back seat and asked, “Jimmy Lee, what are you going to buy with your money?”

“I don't know. Nothing right now. I'm going to save it until there's something I need, probably.”

He laughed. “No, seriously, what are you going to buy?”

“I'm saving it, Polio.”

He looked at me like I had a horn growing out of my forehead. The concept of saving was foreign to Polio. The summer following the first grade, after discovering that pop bottles had a two-cent deposit, Polio and I spent the entire summer combing the banks and waters of Salt Lick Creek and the ditches along every road within walking distance for our quarry. When we each had an armful, we made the perilous quarter-mile hike down the berm of County Road 12 to Pearl's Grocery, a little country store built so close to the road that you had to check for oncoming traffic before you left the bottom step. I am sure that Mrs. Consitine tired of seeing us drag those scummy bottles to the store, but she would patiently split our reward on the counter. My money always went directly into my pocket; Polio always bought candy, soda pop, or toy balsa wood gliders.

“What are you spending your money on?” I asked.

“I'm going to buy me a motorcycle.”

“You've saved enough to buy a motorcycle?”

“Uh-huh. Junior Kelso is going to sell me his old Yamaha for a hundred and fifty dollars. It needs a little work, but I'm gonna fix it up so I can ride it to school instead of taking the bus.”

The Kelsos lived in a silver house trailer on Buckingham Ridge. Their front yard was always adorned with two or three used cars that Angus Kelso had for sale. He was a shyster who, despite his moaning and groaning, never got the short end of a deal. One of the rusting hulks in our front yard—a 1962 Pontiac Grand Prix—was bought from Angus. My dad cackled for three days about how he had pulled one over on Angus. Then, on the fourth day, the transmission went out. My dad and Virgil dropped the transmission and found it full of sawdust, an old mechanic's trick to make a manual transmission run smooth just long enough for the check to clear the bank. The next time Angus walked into the Double Eagle Bar, my dad smacked him in the side of the head with a Rolling Rock bottle.

His son Junior had learned at the foot of the master, so I could only imagine that the motorcycle he was offering Polio needed more than a little work, or Junior wouldn't be letting it go for one fifty. The motorcycle, I knew, would end up just another rusting lawn ornament in the Baughmans' yard, but it was useless to try to talk sense to Polio. In his mind, he was already feeling the wind in his face as he cruised to school on Junior Kelso's Yamaha.

The final tire was hauled from the bottom of the hillside the last week of July. In all, we ridded the hillside of 6,720 tires and we each made three hundred and thirty-six dollars for the summer. In my world, it was a fortune. I found a canvas bank envelope in the basement and used it as my cache. Each day, I would come home and add that day's take to the envelope, recounting every dime and writing the total on a slip of paper before hiding it in my closet behind a stack of fishing magazines.

The first week of August, I began two-a-day football practices, and Polio bought Junior Kelso's Yamaha. The second week of August, as I returned from the afternoon practice, Polio was struggling to push the Yamaha up Red Dog Road, the back tire frozen and dragging in the gravel. I stood at the bottom of our drive, my duffel bag tossed over my shoulder, and watched as black oil the consistency of honey dripped from the engine, leaving a dotted trail in the dust. “What happened?” I asked.

“What the fuck does it look like?” Polio sneered. “The piece-of-shit engine froze up.”

He trudged past, straining, and I watched until he slammed it into his yard. It never moved from that spot.

Chapter Four

I

became a Bull Elk that fall.

The Bull Elk Club was the physical education class at East Vinton that was the high school equivalent of boot camp. Coach Battershell was the instructor and while the other physical education classes were playing badminton or soccer, we were running two miles with thirty-pound sandbags on our shoulders, flipping tractor tires the length of a football field and back, performing forty-five minutes of non-stop calisthenics, jumping rope until our calves knotted up, running outside when it was snowing and twenty degrees, or any number of other torturous exercises designed to make us the toughest, most physically fit students in the high school. It was worth a half credit, the same as the class that played badminton, but those who successfully passed the class received a Bull Elk Club T-shirt and certificate at the end of the year. Most of the boys who signed up for the class did it as a test of their testosterone. I was comfortable with my testosterone levels, but signed up for the Bull Elk Club because it was scheduled for first period and the rigors of the class assured me that I wouldn't be bothered by the daily embarrassment I had endured in English class the previous year.

The football team started the season 2-0, and, as sad as this sounds, it was East Vinton's best start in two decades. I had been named captain of the defense by a vote of the team. It was the greatest honor of my life. The other honors I had earned had been voted on by my coaches or sportswriters who didn't know me. Being named captain, however, was a position of leadership bestowed upon me by my teammates. I wore a “C” on my jersey and would get a gold captain's bar for my varsity letter at the end of the season.

I was a starting outside linebacker and having a great year. I loved being on the football team. It gave me a sense of accomplishment that no one could take away from me because of my last name. After three years, I was finally accepted by the other members of the team. It was the first time in my life that I didn't feel like a total outsider. As I became more confident in my position, I began taking charge of the defense and noticed that teammates who for years had looked at me with disdain were now looking to me for leadership. Before the game against Upper Meigs High, the football boosters club hosted a spaghetti dinner for us and I overheard one of them say, “He's a Hickam, but he's a damn good football player.” I had to smile. It was, I suppose, as close to a compliment as any Hickam had received in recent years.

When I was about seven, Polio Baughman and I were across the road by the mountain of red dog taunting a neighborhood mutt named Primo. When we pulled Primo's tail, he would twist his head and snap, a low, guttural growl rolling into a high-pitched bark as he lunged for the offender's hand. This was great fun until I miscalculated Primo's quickness, or teased him once too often, because a few minutes into the game he turned and sank his teeth deep into my forearm. It was my fault, but I was never comfortable around dogs after that, no matter how friendly they appeared to be. And dogs sensed my fear.

That's the way many of my teammates and their parents felt about me as a member of the football team. They thought I had made a remarkable turnaround. They liked having me on the team, but they still were uneasy around me. They didn't trust me. I was still Nick Hickam's kid, and it didn't seem that I would overcome that burden in one lifetime. Football had enabled me to earn a degree of respect, but no real friends. This was not something I found particularly upsetting, but simply reality. I was, after all, the interloper. They had been friends for years while I was an outsider. They joked with each other, but were uncomfortable joking too much around me. Perhaps they retained vivid memories of Danny Clinton sliding across the shower with blood spilling from his face. While I had earned their respect, I was still the cur that might lash out at any moment.

My eligibility for the football team had remained intact by virtue of the fact that Miss Singletary had given me a D for the final six weeks of my junior year. She allowed me to hand in extra credit and I knuckled down the last two weeks of the grading period. Two days before the end of the year, she again asked me to stay after class. Her cheeks were already glowing red when she handed me an extra credit book report I had written on
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
by Mark Twain and said, “I can't begin to tell you how much this aggravates me, Jimmy Lee. That's one of the best book reports I've ever read, which proves to me that you can do the work when you put your mind to it.” She glared at me in a way that made my knees feel a little weak. “I ought to fail your lazy butt because you've had the potential to do well, but chose not to use it. However, against my better judgment, I'm going to pass you on to senior English. I know how important football is to you, and, believe me, that is the only reason I'm going to give you the D.” She put an index finger near my nose, her brows furrowing into one continuous, knotted line across her forehead, and said, “But so help me, Jimmy Lee Hickam, this is your last break. If I don't see more effort out of you next year, I'll make you wish you were sharing a cell with your brother Edgel. Do you understand me?”

I was so relieved I had to fight off a grin. “I understand. I'll do better. You have my word.”

She drew a deep breath and pointed toward the door with a thumb.

I knew little of the Alpha & Omega Literary Society or the Ohio High School Essay Competition until the second Monday of my senior year when Miss Singletary passed out flyers in class announcing the annual writing contest. The Alpha & Omega Literary Society sponsored the Vinton County competition. The best essayist at each school would be selected to compete against winners from the other schools in the county. The winner of the county competition would earn a thousand-dollar scholarship and their essay would be put on display at the Ohio State Fair the following summer.

Miss Singletary explained the rules of the competition, but not once did she make eye contact with me. She was speaking primarily to a group of girls who sat in a cluster of chairs that surrounded the teacher's desk in the front of the room. I liked Miss Singletary, but she seemed to favor the girls in our class, as if anyone with a penis was incapable of understanding English or would have no interest in the essay competition. And frankly, as a group, we did very little to disprove that theory. My football teammates were either reading magazines or whispering among themselves. I took a few notes. The competition was mandatory for Miss Singletary's senior English students and she would grade all entries for twenty percent of our grades for the six-week period. The competition would be held the following Monday morning in the school cafeteria. The topic was: A place and time that I wish I could revisit.