Dirt Merchant Read online

  “I just mean, I hope I can scratch out some of the black marks got placed by my name by the old man.”

  “Maybe you should move away, head down south to the beach, or up north and try to make waves somewhere else. Somewhere people don’t know your history.”

  Young Rolson holds his can aloft, creating a mellow slosh-slosh of liquid, and says, “It’ll be this shit that drags me down. Just like my…dad. Dude turned into a comic book villain when he drank. I don’t remember much about him, but the drinking will stay fixed firmly in my brain.”

  “What’s that got to do with you, Rol?”

  “Man, you can’t get rid of a curse by moving away. Haven’t you ever seen a scary movie? Always tails you, wherever you go. My name is like that.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got a complex to work out,” Deuce says. He leans back on the hood of the old pick-up and stares at the stars, like hanging lights parked in the sky.

  “You’re not wrong,” Rolson replies. “But you don’t have that same unknown. You’ll be cracking heads up in Athens not two months from now.”

  “I’ve got two years, maybe three years, of getting my own head cracked open before I start dishing it out. If that ever happens at all. You know how many dudes go to college and just wash out? It’s a lot higher than you’d think, man. It’s terrifying.”

  “You’re not going to be one of those people,” Rolson replies. “You’re a five star recruit.”

  Deuce p’shaws. “Three on a good day. I’m big and slow. I don’t have the quickness in the forty they want, but I think they’ll be able to change some of that. Coach Goff has his mind right about strength and conditioning, but he was a quarterback. D’you know that?”

  “I didn’t. How’d he do?”

  “Nineteen wins in two seasons under Coach Dooley. Not bad. He’s a fine coach, I guess, but he’s kind of like a rebound. How can you do anything but go down after having somebody like Vince Dooley on the sideline for so many years?”

  “Last year wasn’t great.”

  “Yeah, but the two years before that were. You look at Dooley’s record, you think he won every game? No, he didn’t. It’s about that long haul, Rolson. Can’t always be concerned with the here and now. Things even out in the end.”

  Rolson tilts his head back and downs half his beer. “Let’s hope so. Way things have gone my first two decades on this planet, my twenties and thirties better be a real good time.”

  “Shit, Rol, when I’m in the NFL, we can party all the time, just like this.”

  “Hopefully not just like this.”

  “Well, you know what I mean. Together, man. Just throw down, and we’ll say it’s like the old days, but it won’t be. It’ll be better. Know what I’m saying?”

  “I do.”

  “But you’ve got your mom,” young Darron says. Even at this age, his voice is as deep as a river running through western states. Rolson peers, confused. The both of them know she’s been dead these last twelve years, so he doesn’t know quite what in the hell he might mean.

  “What I mean to say,” Deuce counters, “is that she’s the other side of the coin. She’s who you can look to for, I don’t know, inspiration. If you’re worried about becoming like your pops, man, you can reverse that by staying focused on what matters.

  “Reckon you’ve got Vanessa to help you through the tough times that lie ahead,” Darron says, punching his friend’s shoulder.

  “Reckon so,” says a younger, leaner Rolson. “She’s got a little spark, like she’s not playing by the same rules as the rest of us.”

  “And you think she’s going to stay with your backwoods ass?” Deuce says, trying to hold in some pretty intense laughing.

  “You’re not wrong,” Rolson says. “The way Vanessa acts tells me she’s going to head off to college and do something with her life. She talks about moving to Atlanta, getting a job in marketing. Working for a magazine, maybe.”

  “Sounds like a legit career. Would you follow her up there?”

  Rolson fixes his gaze on a distant light glinting off something metal. The hood of a car, perhaps, or the roof of an aluminum shack. It’s getting late, and he’s a little tipsy.

  “I don’t know, man,” he says. “We’ve been dating a few months now, and I think I’d like to chase Van wherever she goes. She brings it up, us going off and doing our own thing. But she’s, man, she’s full of ideas, and I just don’t know what would happen if all her dreams didn’t come true.”

  “Like, she’s fragile?”

  “Sometimes she looks like there’s something she wants to tell me. She spaces out, opens her mouth, but then she just closes it and goes on with her business. I’m afraid of that part of her.”

  “Like she’d leave you?”

  Rolson nods. “Or something else. I don’t know, man. Me, I’ll probably end up getting a job working construction or driving a truck. It’s what people who can’t get out do around here.”

  “Don’t start a pity party,” Deuce says, “when I’m the only other person invited. You know I can’t stand that shit.”

  “I’m not feeling sorry for myself. Deuce, I tell you: there’s something binding me to this town. I could leave, I guess, but I don’t think that’s the way it works.”

  “You think some kind of voodoo is locking you to the Junction?”

  “Nothing so supernatural, but — I don’t know. There are people who leave their hometowns, and there are people who dream of leaving their hometowns. I’m in the second group. This place trapped me a long time ago, and I figure I’ll live out my sentence here.”

  Deuce claps Rolson on the shoulder. “You’ve got to be the one to choose to get the hell out,” he says. “Once you make the decision, it’ll happen. Nobody’s going to convince you to do it, unless you convince yourself first. And hell, maybe Vanessa will inspire you to get a job in fashion, so you can get rid of those tired-ass Metallica t-shirts.”

  Rolson laughs self-consciously. “I’ll be a metalhead until my dying day. When you’re inducted into the Hall of Fame, I’ll be in a black t-shirt and ripped jeans. When I marry Vanessa, Black Sabbath will be blasting on the church speakers, man. And when I die, they’ll bury me in Chuck Taylors and a Motorhead shirt.”

  As Rolson slips from tipsiness to out-and-out drunkenness, he thinks he hears something. A light jangling of guitar in the woods.

  “You hear that?” he asks Deuce.

  “You fart again?”

  “That sound off in the woods. You hear it?”

  Deuce tilts his ear in that direction. “All I hear is bullshit stretching across a teenage dude’s frame. That’s it.”

  “Well, hell,” Rolson responds. “I thought I heard something. Maybe I’ll just end up in Milledgeville instead of Atlanta.”

  “Oh,” Deuce says, looking like the cat who ate the canary, “I have no doubt you’ll spend your adult life in and out of governmental facilities.”

  Like a true metalhead, Rolson flips his friend the double bird and does his best James Hetfield impression, sliding off the truck’s hood and heading for the cooler full of cheap beer in the bed. He tries to shake off the feeling that something is watching him, but he can’t quite do it. He feels the way he does in dreams, the kind which terrify him in the moment but dissipate upon waking.

  He plucks a beer for himself and one for Deuce from the cooler. He hears the sound again, a tinny sound. Someone thwacking a metal tube against the strings of an old Dobro.

  He’s a little buzzed, so he doesn’t quite trust what he hears, though of course his senses have been going haywire recently. When he drinks, he hears music, and it’s not always the Metallica he’s got on his tape deck. It’s old-timey tunes, like the records his mother used to own.

  It creates in him a terrible association.

  I’m my father, he thinks. When I drink, I am my old man

  On second thought, he slips his can back into the white styrofoam container and returns to the front of the truck, handing
it over to his friend, who refuses.

  “What? None for you? Are we out or something?”

  “I’m good,” he says. “Guess I need to take it easy if I’m dropping you off back home.”

  By the time he gets home, Rolson sees on the kitchen clock that it’s well after two in the a.m. He tries to be quiet, intent on slipping into the fridge for a quick bite of chicken pot pie, but he runs knees first into the kitchen table, and before he can dive behind the living room couch, he hears footsteps on the stairwell.

  When Birdie appears, Rolson regards her as if seeing her for the first time. She’s a few years old than Rolson’s father, whom he hasn’t seen in roughly twelve years, but she still looks young and happy. Her eyes turn up at the edges when she smiles, and she breaks out into manic dancing fits of when a song she finds catchy ends up on the radio.

  The impromptu cabbage-patching has dwindled to the point of being ghostly remembrances. Birdie still smiles, but the pain is clearly visible beneath the fading twinkle in her eyes. In this moment, she’s obviously distraught at the sight of her adoptive son covered in mud, standing in the kitchen with a plate of cold food in his hands.

  She yawns. “I know you don’t want to hear such a recriminating statement, but you look just like your mother when you’re trying to hide out and play it cool. You know we used to sneak out of your grandmother’s house and smoke cigarettes under the oak trees in her backyard?”

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” Rolson says.

  “She and I had some good times, definitely. Go ahead and kick your shoes off. You’re tracking mud all over hell and creation.”

  Rolson does as she says and takes a seat at the table. He’s about to jab his fork into a chunk of crust, when his aunt snatches the plate up and tosses it into the microwave.”

  “Aunt Birdie, I can do that. I—”

  “Hush up,” she replies. “I’m already awake now. Might as well nuke this nearly-wasted dinner for you, so you can tell me why you look like you jumped feet-first into a cow patty?”

  Rolson tries to play it cool, maybe channel his mother’s nonchalant approach to things. “Slipped off the road. Slid into a ditch. That’s all. Deuce had to help me get her out, along with some folks who happened to pass by. I could have spent all night there, without the help of strangers.”

  “Ain’t no strangers in this town.”

  “I’ve never met them.”

  “Black or white?”

  “Aunt Birdie—”

  “I’m just asking a simple question. I’m not convicting them of a crime.”

  “They were white.”

  “And they helped your narrow ass out of the ditch in the middle of the night?”

  “Yes, ma’am. They said they was Bullens, but they didn’t look like trash to me.”

  “Cause ain’t all Bullens trash, just like ain’t all McKanes a bunch of ignorant murderers.”

  Rolson flicks his eyes at her, pausing mid-chew.

  “Don’t give me them eyes, young man,” she says. “There’s something you’re hiding from me, and I can’t settle down til I know what it is.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “You didn’t sideswipe nobody, did you? Get into a wreck?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “So then you just slipped into the ditch?”

  “For sure.”

  “And that doesn’t have anything to do with you smelling like a tiny little brewery?”

  He tries to meet her eyes, but her steely gaze sends his eyes toward his plate, where he scrambles the food but doesn’t take a bite.

  “Rolson,” she says, “when I was your age, I tried to split Hell half in two. Me and your daddy just about slap made your grandmother crazy for all we did.”

  “I bet,” Rolson replies, happy for the change in subject, even if it implies mention of his father, who is persona non grata at this household. She doesn’t mention him often, but when she does, she’s usually laying a pretty heavy trip on him.

  “You are going to be who you are,” she says. “I realize that. You are the spitting image of my brother-in-law, I swear to God. You’ve got a little bit of the self-destructive side to you, so I suspect the next few years will be interesting, to say the least.”

  Rolson notices the tears at the corners of her eyes but says nothing. He feels somewhat paralyzed. Weren’t they just enjoying leftovers and reminiscing about the old days?

  He leans forward, anticipating more, hoping that she’ll allow him a pass on talking.

  “I’m not being hard on you,” Aunt Birdie continues. “Your hellraising years lie just over the horizon, and I’m not convinced they won’t settle in and take up residence with you for a while. You’ve been a good kid, but that’s what worries me. I imagine the swing to the other side will be a desperate and violent one.”

  Rolson smiles, something he’s been working on the last few years. “Well, that’s why I have you here, to keep me in line. We’ve got to take that trip to the wilds of North Carolina, like you promised. Go see the relatives I’ve never met. The real distant ones.”

  Her smile is plenty heartbreaking, and he knows she doesn’t plan on making that trip with him, for obvious reasons. “I plan on it, son,” she says, letting the word linger there, like a present left unopened in the middle of the table. “But if I don’t—”

  “Birdie—”

  “If. I. Don’t,” she says, emphasizing each word. “You don’t allow that to stop you. You have people in this world love you, and they don’t even know who you are. Vice versa. If you’re going to be the man I know you can be someday, you might want to think about making them part of your life. Even if I make it through this rough patch, I won’t be around forever.”

  “But you’ll be around long enough,” Rolson says, faux-confidently. He takes the ostrich approach: if you don’t see it, it isn’t there. It, in this case, being the truth. He wiggles around it, trying to give it room enough to breathe without actually touching him, but it leaves him mostly uncomfortable.

  “Of course I will,” she says, patting his hands.

  But, of course, she won’t. Aunt Birdie, who raised Rolson in the wake of losing both his parents, who shuttled him to and from baseball practice, who hosted a birthday party at the local Dairy Queen — the only restaurant in town — even though she barely had the money to pay her own rent that month, who promised him she would see him graduate and go off to college, will schedule a follow-up doctor’s visit and find that the cancer, which had previously seemed to be relatively minor, had spread to other organs and was effectively attacking the whole of her body. She’ll spend a few weeks getting her things in order but then will slip into a coma, from which she never wakes.

  Rolson, to his credit, will sit next to her in her final moments, watching her chest, which barely moves, go from a slight rise to nothing at all. He’ll inform the nurses and then wander around the nearby duck pond, both thinking and not thinking at all.

  He spends the summer living in the house, while everything is sorted out. If she could have given him the place, she would have, but she still owed money on it, and it had to be sold off to cover some other debts of hers.

  When he moves out, Rolson takes little more than the shirt off his back, leaving even his valued tape (and burgeoning CD) collection in the house to be sold off in an estate sale.

  He gets drunk alone for the first time and quietly promises to start his life over.

  He is eighteen years old.

  5

  My dreams during this period were caustic and dark. In some of them, I hovered over bodies on fire, the smell of flesh so strong my nostrils burned even after I fell out of bed. I projected wild fantasies of the investigation into my subconscious wanderings. Dreaming itself was akin to wandering through a gallery of horror so intense I anticipated being shut of it.

  Those dreams terrified me. They twisted my day into a kind of lopsided proxy of reality, and I ended up dipping into the bottle far earlier than on most
days.

  Or maybe that was my justification.

  Other dreams had me relitigating my past like a half-assed lawyer in a cruel, personal version of This is Your Life. Memories I thought had long been saved to the archive resurfaced and dragged me for a ride through my past. Everyone in my life, from my father to Vanessa and Deuce, returned to give one last curtsy before tap dancing off into the sunset.

  The most dominant and recurring image had to do with Aunt Birdie’s funeral. Recently, she had been on my mind, and I pondered the significance. Some of it was guilt, I knew. I had spent most of my life contemplating my mother’s place in it, all the while shutting out the woman who had actually raised me.

  With the fog of mama’s death slowly lifting, allowing me to view my earlier years with some perspective, maybe I was moving on to one of the elephant in the living room of my mind. I certainly wasn’t ready to tackle my feelings toward the father who had abandoned me for some rash self-denial of his own role in his wife’s death. Part of me hoped I’d never be forced to give headspace to him, or the required willpower to clean up all the mental trash cluttering up my mind.

  But Aunt Birdie, she deserved an entire wing of my memory, so the dreams involving her were not troubling. The most prevalent nighttime excursion dealt with the funeral, which had always weighed heavily on me.

  Aunt Birdie died, well, not unexpectedly, but news of her death was crushing to most everybody who heard it. She had always been a spirited woman, full of life and vigor and all the cliches people attach to women of a certain mentality. She wasn’t timid, but she also wasn’t vulgar. She lived the way I’m sure my mother wished she could live, unattached to the circumstances which had weighed her down.

  Unlike my mother, who married young and weathered the tempest of my father’s emotions, Aunt Birdie never married, never even got heavily involved with a man, so far as I knew, so she was possessed of a freedom that mystified her friends and galled her enemies. She owned a small business once, and traveled to the far corners of the continental states, which was something for a family which had scarcely left Georgia.