Where All Light Tends to Go (2 page)

Jack pines crowded the property in all but a tiny sliver carved out a long time ago to make room for a house. The old pine plank cabin Mama lived in had always sat at an angle just right enough to hold off folding in a strong wind. The house was truly unfit for any sort of long-term living, but she’d been there most of my life. Boards once pitched dark had lightened with years and rotted with rainwater that held this place damp year-round. Transparent plastic I’d put over the windows to keep her from freezing a few winters back hung loose and torn from the frames, the plastic now opaque and dotted with mildew.

I wasn’t old enough to remember the day Daddy sent her there. The way he told it, she was stealing crank and spent most of her time climbing around the peter tree. So he sent her to this place. Loved her too much to give her nothing, but giving her anything at all squared things so he’d never have to love her again.

I don’t recall going over there much when I was a kid. I don’t remember seeing her but once or twice a year when those I’m-going-to-set-this-right moods hit her. It was always just me and Daddy, but I was older now, old enough to take the good and the bad for what it was worth and never any more. Besides, I just needed a place to kill a few hours and a safe spot to dodge the law while I got stoned.

The front screen door was propped open with a tin bucket half filled with blackened sand and smashed-out cigarette butts, and I could see straight through the house. I heard her before I saw her: yelling profanities, breathing heavy, snorting and sniffing. From the sounds of her, a line of dope had just lit her afire, and, while it may have seemed wild to anyone on the outside, I knew I was lucky to catch her at the beginning rather than the end.

She rammed her shoulder hard against the doorway into the kitchen as I came into the house. Her eyes wide, she seemed to look right through me. Her jaw racked and her teeth chomped on some imaginary thing she could never get chewed enough to swallow. When her eyes pulled back and settled onto me, she went to scratching her arms. “Where the hell did you come from?” She meant that question wholeheartedly, as if maybe I’d just manifested out of an Appalachian summer.

“Just pulled up. Needed a place to hide out for a bit.”

“Well, you’re just in time.”

“Just in time for what?”

“Just in time to help me find that goddamn lightbulb.” Her head yanked to the side, and she scurried into the back of the house, but I didn’t follow.

I plopped down on a ratty couch within falling distance from the front door, foam pushing through tears in the cushions. I reached into my pocket and took out what was left of a sack of weed, just shake now, but still enough to roll a pin. There was a half-empty pack of JOB rolling papers propped against a tarnished brass lamp on the side table. I pulled a paper from the sleeve, creased a fold in the 1.5, and dumped in buds that had been ground to powder. I was already twisting it tight and licking it sealed when Mama stumbled back into the front room.

“Jacob! Jacob, you not going to help me look?”

“Look for what?”

“The goddamn lightbulb, I done told you I need the goddamn lightbulb.”

I lounged back on the couch, struck a lighter to the end of the joint, pulled hard, and offered it toward her for a drag.

“Have you lost your ever-fucking mind, Jacob? You know I don’t smoke that shit and you can’t smoke it in here, you got to go outside if you’re going to be smoking that shit ’cause the last thing I need is the goddamn law.”

My mother was the definition of rode hard and put up wet. Her eyes were bulbous, her face sunken in, just a thin layer of skin stretched tight over bones. Hair that was thick and brown in old pictures strung greasy down her neck now. She was nothing like those pictures anymore, though she was exactly how I’d always remembered. She was absolutely pitiful. Before I could even respond, she was off again hunting that lightbulb, and I just loafed there and toked till a run crept down the seam of the joint. Licking a little spit onto the tip of my finger, I dabbed the fire, kept it burning even, and hit it again.

I slid my cell phone out of my pocket and checked to see if Maggie had written me back. She hadn’t. I knew she’d respond eventually because she always did, just never right away. Maggie hadn’t cut me out entirely, but there seemed to be few words left between us, or words too heavy for either of us to say. She loved me too much to let me go and I loved her too much to drag her down. That type of love doesn’t work. I recognized it before she did, I guess, so instead of hurting her for a lifetime, I broke her heart right then and there, and now she was gone. Probably in another world, I thought, and leaned back into the couch smoking on that joint to find a universe of my own.

I could hear Mama in the back cussing, drawers being ripped off rails and slamming against the floor, and only when there was nothing else to throw did she return. “Jacob, what the fuck did you do with that goddamn lightbulb?”

I laughed and coughed and spit on words that couldn’t make it out of my mouth quick enough to stop me from choking. “I didn’t do anything with a lightbulb.” She had me gassed, but there was always uneasiness in laughing at my mother. Even while I was laughing, there was an uncomfortable feeling that settled in the pit of my stomach. She’d given birth to me. She was blood. Those types of things are deserving of love, and I did love her. Since I was a kid, I’d carried those few moments when she came around sober like treasure. I’d always hoped she’d become a real mother. But with time, I realized that someone can’t give what they don’t have. She was what she was, an addict, and there was nothing that could be said or done to change her. Death was her only savior.

Staring intensely, her eyelids seeming to roll back even further on eyes the size of taw marbles, she swept her hair back against her neck, trotted over to the couch, and cannonballed down beside me. “Give me a hit off that shit.”

“You didn’t even want me to smoke inside, and now you want to hit it?” I leaned away from her and took a few quick drags off the roach that was already burning my fingertips.

Her jaw still racked like she was trying to saw logs with dull teeth, and that serious look never left her face. “What the fuck do you mean, I didn’t want you smoking inside?”

“That’s what you said. You just told me I had to smoke outside.”

“I didn’t ever say that shit.” She scooted closer. “Give it here.”

I bent forward, rested my elbows on my knees, and held the roach out to her. Mama picked it from my fingers like some cranked-out chimp culling fleas, and I stood up from the couch to let her lay with it. She sucked back on what little bit of paper was left to burn, and all of a sudden that son of a bitch shot into her throat, and she went to choking till I was sure her eyeballs were going to pop out of her head. I couldn’t stop laughing and fell into the doorframe on my way to the bathroom while she coughed and gagged and tried her damnedest to curse me without enough air to start a blow-and-go.

There were tears streaming from my eyes by the time I made it in front of the bathroom mirror. I pulled a bottle of eyedrops out of my pocket, tilted my head back, squeezed a bead into each eye, and stared at my reflection. Seeing a smile spread across my face lumped that uneasy feeling into my throat. I shouldn’t have found how bad-off she was funny, but with a lifetime of disappointment, it was the only way to handle it. Smiles outweighed tears. Laughter outweighed pain.

I turned on the faucet and wiped a palm full of water across my face. Daddy needed to see me in an hour, and he never liked handling business when I was stoned. My green eyes began to clear, and I brushed my thick brown hair with my wet hand. Daddy never cared that I smoked. He didn’t care that I popped pills. He drank and smoked and was known to eat a few painkillers when the mood hit him. The only drug off-limits was crank, and seeing what it’d done to my own mother, I’d never wanted anything to do with it anyways. But the line of work my father ran demanded a clear head, so I had to appear collected.

When I headed into the main room, Mama was in the kitchen, one foot standing in the seat of a dining room chair, the other foot propped up onto the back. She leaned out over the table to get her hands on the lightbulb, her head constantly shaking hair away as she twisted the bulb free. Her shirt lifted up and her belly hung out: loose skin, no meat, and stretch marks still visible after all these years from where she’d carried me. Just when I was about to speak, the chair rocked and she slapped down out of the air onto the floor. Her head smacked the laminate tile hard, but it didn’t faze her. She popped up to her knees and scanned the room, her jaw still chewing, and I didn’t say a word. I left her there on the floor like a bad joke, a bad joke that’s really not funny at all, but that a man is forced to chuckle through until the awkwardness fades.

The Walkers belted out long, jowl-stiffening howls as I pulled up the drive. It had never seemed to matter much that I’d been the one to fill their feed bowls each morning. Those dogs still snarled and bit at the tires every time I drove up to the house. Everyone in the country knew Daddy had the meanest line of hounds to ever run bear or hog in these parts. He’d had offers from far-off places like Maine and Wisconsin to have his hounds stud, but that never interested him.

Dogs were tied strategically across the property so that anyone making their way onto McNeely land would have to know a dance consisting of precisely thirty-four two-steps, fourteen ball changes, and a chassé to get anywhere near the door without being mauled. In the old days, Daddy used it as a tactic to ensure that only the customers in the know ever made it up to the window for late-night sales. Nothing ever really moved through the house anymore, and hadn’t in years. The business was too big for that nowadays, but I guess he kept the hounds out of habit more than anything.

I’d been around crank my whole life, so it had never been a drug, only money. When I was young, Daddy would put it to me like we were carrying on a family tradition, a matter of course that started with moonshine runs in chopped cars to make enough bread to survive the winter. It didn’t seem so bad when he put it like that. Outlawing was just a way of earning a buck. By the time I was nine or ten, Daddy had me helping him break down big bags of crystal into grams, never anything smaller, and I got a cut just like most kids got allowance. That’s what he told me anyways, though he kept the money for “safekeeping,” and merely upped the number in a little notebook for the day I’d cash out. Birthdays brought on new responsibilities, and by the time I’d hit tenth grade, I was staying up half the night working for him. I went to school to keep child services off his back, but slept through every hour right up until the day I turned sixteen, walked out of Walter Middleton, and never looked back.

From the porch, I could hear Conway Twitty’s “I’d Love to Lay You Down” and the drone of some mechanical buzzing that sounded like a bug zapper. I walked into the house, and a cloud of cigarette smoke hung in the room around my waist. Daddy was bent over a folding chair with his back exposed and some long-haired Hispanic man was digging into Daddy’s skin with a tattoo gun. Neither of them looked up. The only one who did was a skinny blonde Daddy had been seeing, who glanced me over before focusing back on the tattoo.

I didn’t speak but walked over to the coffee table and grabbed someone’s pack of Winstons. I flipped a cigarette into my lips and fell back onto the sofa beside the blonde. From where I sat, I could see that the Hispanic was halfway through spelling out that skinny blonde’s name in cursive between Daddy’s shoulder blades. He was covered in tattoos for the most part, and in the patchwork of my father, nearly all of them had started off as a woman’s name at one point or another, only to be covered by something more permanent down the road.

“What in the fuck are you putting her name on your back for?” I leaned into the sofa and lit the cigarette with my eyes still stoned and half closed.

“Shut the fuck up, Jacob!” Josephine hollered, but none of the others even looked up.

The tattoo gun shut off, the Hispanic man patted my father on the shoulder, and Daddy straightened up and reached for his cigarettes. The Hispanic had snubbed her name short at Jose, and I started to laugh, the joint from earlier still heightening humor. “Who the hell is José?”

“It says Josie, dipshit, that’s your daddy’s nickname for me, but what do you know? Ain’t like you can spell. You never even finished school.”

Daddy cut eyes at her to shut her mouth, and she knew to shut it fast. It was a mouth he’d paid for after all, so I reckon it gave him that right. Her teeth were damn near rotted out the first time she came around, but Daddy said he saw something in her, put fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of work into those gums just to have her smiling with teeth like corn pearls.

“From over here that looks like J-O-S-E, and far as I know, that spells José.” I glanced at the Hispanic and his stare widened. Part of him looked like he was about to laugh, but then there was this fear I could see way back in him like he just might piss himself.

“J-O-S-E?” Daddy turned around to look the Hispanic man square. That fear I’d seen suddenly shot up to the front of the Hispanic man’s eyes.

“Son of a bitch, that dumb fucking spic left out the
i
,” Josephine squealed. She was boiling now, her face getting flushed as she stood up with legs that ran from ankles to heaven in short shorts, and a tank top that she was all but pouring out of. For a split second, I thought I saw what Daddy had seen in her, but then she opened that mouth again. “Charlie, you better not let him do this to me! You better not let some spic ruin what we have.”

The Hispanic man watched her with eyes spread, and I knew if I handed him a knife at that moment, he’d stab that old loudmouth bitch till there wasn’t any sound left to be made but gurgling.

Daddy stayed calm like he always did, and there was something a bit more frightening about a man that could stay at ease while doing the sorts of things he was known to do. He never raised his voice and never raised his hand, just turned to the Hispanic man and asked him if he could fix it.

“Hell no, he can’t fix it!” Josephine squealed. She started to open her mouth again, but Daddy duct-taped her lips closed with nothing more than a glance.

“The two of y’all just get the fuck outside, so I can have a talk with Jacob.” Daddy rose and carefully rolled his T-shirt down over his back. “You’re going to fix this when I’m done talking to the boy.”

The Hispanic man stood first, laying the tattoo gun down on a side table before sidling toward the door. Josephine, on the other hand, stuck around for a minute, rose and hung around my father’s neck like a yanked-loose necktie with corn pearl teeth strung at the knot. She kissed him on his neck, and he paid her little mind. Josephine strutted toward the door and glared at me as if I was responsible for the misspelling of her name. I smirked, and it ate her up.

Daddy walked over to the record player—even now in 2009 “nothing sounded as good as vinyl”—and cranked the knob on the speaker dial till Twitty filled the room. He always turned the music loud when it was time to talk business so as no one outside of the conversation could catch a word without ears pressed close to our lips. He dragged the folding chair in front of me and straddled the chair backward.

Even to me Daddy had that look about him like he’d seen and done things that glazed over any bit of light that had ever been in his eyes. All that was left was what folks from war called that “thousand-yard stare,” and though he was my father and hadn’t ever done me wrong in any sort of way deserving of my cower, I was always a little fearful when he spoke.

He lit a fresh cigarette with the one still burning and leaned close so that I was certain to hear him. Dark hair was slicked and parted across his brow, and divots from teenage acne freckled the flanks of his face. His nose had a bit of a crooked hook to it, but it was the acne scars that drew a man’s eyes, the way his face seemed pitted. “You’re going to go to the camp tonight.” Afternoon beers swerved along his words. “You’re going to make sure it happens just like I need it to happen.”

I knew what he was talking about, so I just nodded. I reckon in the old days when Daddy first started the business, he didn’t have any choice but to dirty his own hands, but that time had long since passed. The story had started when he made some small-time connection with a mid-level crystal dealer from somewhere over in Tennessee, back when it was one-percenters responsible for most of the trade. Back then they’d run an ounce or two across state lines in the crankcases of their motorcycles. For a long time Daddy stayed pretty low on the ladder, but connections came about and he latched on. Now he no longer touched anything that came or left Jackson County. He just directed traffic with low-spoken conversations in music-filled rooms. Methamphetamine was a living, breathing body in Appalachia. The dope came from Mexico, but Daddy was the heart of the body here, pumping the blood through every vein in the region. Though it all started here, by the time that crystal made it into the hands of local crankers, it had been passed all over the mountains a dozen or more times to lap back.

What this problem boiled down to, though, was the way that Daddy handled the money. Once it went from being just enough to get by on to big money, he’d had to come up with a way to make all those dollars look legal to prying eyes. That’s how he came up with the idea for McNeely’s Auto Repair. In a tight-knit scheme where every service offered cost four or five times that of any normal mechanic, Daddy laundered the money into something legal. Every dollar that came back to him had a receipt. Everyone who brought in a car to be serviced was on the payroll, and the majority of cars being worked on had been purchased at one time or another by my father. They paid him in his own money.

When legitimate folks brought in a car, they left outraged at estimates. When some rookie deputy got the gall to try and figure out what was going on, he got the same price gouge as anyone else. A few of those deputies even forked it over to try and get close, but nothing ever came of it. Some of those bulls were on the payroll too, and the folks on the payroll were tight-lipped. They just brought in the cars and paid to have them serviced, and in return Daddy kept food on their tables when winters killed everything from field grass to dreams. The one thing he’d never done was allowed anyone cranked-out to get near the business. That was up until now, and now that one person was threatening it all.

“You understand what I’m asking, Jacob?”

I nodded.

“This ain’t something you can just nod about, goddamn it. I need to hear you fucking tell me that you understand what I need done.”

“You want me to head out to the camp with the boys and take care of Ro—”

Daddy slapped me hard against the side of the head. “Don’t say his fucking name! Don’t you ever say his fucking name! You don’t know his name, you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Good.”

That was all that was said about it and that’s the way it had always been. Daddy only said enough to ensure that what needed to be done got done, because any added details might lead to confusion. There was no room for confusion in a business like this.

Daddy hoisted himself from the chair and wandered to the front door. He opened the door, stretched his arms wide, and yawned as he headed onto the porch. The Walkers were still howling, noisy even over the blare of “She Thinks I Still Care” from the speakers. Though the sun would still be shining for another hour or so in the flat land, here on The Creek it was already casting an orange haze through the open doorway as sunlight melted behind the mountains. I took the pack of smokes from the coffee table and lit another. The three of them stayed out on the porch, Daddy silencing the other two so the Hispanic and Josephine didn’t start cutting each other. I just let the record play.