RAYMOND ADDOBATI

On a Bright Appalachian Morn

When I saw my chance, I ditched the filling station. It was a near-freezing morning and my job was to use gasoline to clean grease off the valve cover of a six cylinder. My brother Gil ran the business ever since our father took a powder eight years before. Unlike Gil, I had no mechanical abilities, and though I did my part that day, I couldn't wait to rinse the gasoline and grease from my hands and split.

Gil was preoccupied with the company of three men, local hangers-on, standing around the two abandoned cars behind the office. It was ten in the morning, and all four of them were already drinking beer, talking politics, and discussing the world as if they had acquired wisdom from the dull lives they lived. They had no idea their wives, at one time or another, spent time with Gil in the backseats of the very cars they leaned on. And this was the crux of society in our West Virginia town in 1955.

Before I left for the railyard, I sneaked into the office and stole three cigarettes from Gil's pack of Lucky Strikes. Being alone suited me, and I was a known loner by all in town except one. A kid named Vincent Pell. We were both fifteen. Because of that fact alone, Vincent saw himself as my brother. But I had no such fantasies about him. Deep down, I was afraid of him. Yet, he thrilled me.

His family disappeared one day when he was in school. From then on, he didn't have to answer to anyone, and he could be gone for months at a time. When convenient, he stayed in the family's abandoned house. But I lived with my brother Gil and his wife July. Since she was born in April, I always believed her name was in honor of some favored relative born in July. She was part Iroquois with a dash of Spanish, and her beauty capable of making everyone around her realize they lacked anything close to it. My crush on her consumed me.

Standing on the hilltop perch at the railyard, I could see a mile down the tracks. Below me, while I smoked, three workers shoveled rocks onto the ties and talked about women. Not far from them, Vincent Pell walked into my peripheral using the inner rail as if it was a tightrope. In his left, he carried a large brown paper sack. He stopped and looked up at me. Right off, I had an ill feeling about that bag.

"Guess where I’ve been?"

"Well, if I knew that I'd be a mind-reader, wouldn't I?” I said as I stood.

"A real gambling joint in Thurmond," he said.

"Well, if you're going so far as to tell me about it, I suppose you won."

He unfolded the bag, reached in, and pulled out two like-new black work boots. He tossed them up to me, so they landed in the dust between us with both toes pointed upward and, in the most disturbing bit of chance, both left and right fell exactly as if someone were in them and on their backside.

"Put 'em on. See if they fit," he said.

Queasiness came over me as I was looking at the boots, and I couldn't bring myself to touch them. Undistracted by the commotions of a freighter slowly moving in the yard behind him on the next set of tracks, he watched me.

"Well? Put them on," Vince said.

I picked up one of the boots, sat back in the dust, pulled off my right shoe, and tried on the new boot. It fit, but it was in me to say otherwise. Then I did the same with the left, tied the laces, stood, and walked a bit in them. They felt good, but the queasiness wasn't leaving.

"I won 'em playing dice off some greasy haired kid from the north. Boston or somewheres," Vince said. "Took his money, and all he had including the boots. But I'll be goddamned if they fit me. Then I remembered you got smaller feet than me."

As he talked, Vince's beady, black eyes flashed and caught some errant sunbeam and reflected it back at me. Vince wasn't any good at dice and lacked the savvy to play poker. He sure as hell didn't win the boots in a coin toss.

My plan was to wear them for the day, then bury them as if I owed a dead man I didn't even know. But he must've sensed my plan because he came up and took my old shoes in hand.

"You won't be needing these," he said. He carried them down to the tracks and tossed them onto one of the passing flat cars. My shoes went bouncing and rumbling on the car heading for points north.

Then he set up discarded wine bottles on the rails and threw rocks at them in some vain attempt to pretend it was the old days, and we were still kids. But those games and all the kid stuff were at an end. A fool could see the wrapping was unraveling off the truth of him, shrill as it was, no matter his will to hide it.

He picked up an old whiskey bottle and threw it at one of the tanker cars sidetracked just yards away. The bottle arced through the air, smacked the side of the car and shattered, splattering glass all over the three shoveling workmen. They brushed off the bits of glass from their hair and clothing and bolted for us. Vince wasted no time and ran up the hill, and I waited for him with a hand out to help pull him up. His fingertips were just inches from my own, but the dirt was loose and the slate slick and Vince slid back down to the workmen's feet.

They kicked him while he was down and then picked him up by the shoulders, and two held his arms while the third slugged him and slugged him. Then they dragged him off, and I thought they were gonna kill him. He was spitting and cussing, and they kept on slugging his face with clenched fists. Each time they hit him, blood shot from his lips and eyelids.

Then he went limp, and I figured he passed out. The men relaxed their grip, and soon as they did Vince dropped his right hand to the ties and scooped up a shard of glass as long as a panhandle and swung it so he slashed one of them across the chest. The man cried out, and in no time, blood, and plenty of it, poured from that slash in his shirt like some solid red waterfall.

Vince broke loose and scrambled up the hill using all fours before the other men could figure out what had happened. He was limping and bloody from the beating, and even if he was free, he was in a rage. He cursed aloud that he meant to hit the man's neck and missed. All the while running as if hobbled with ropes, but moving as fast as he could.

The man he'd cut was screaming, and I was running and shaking as if every nerve in me had gone haywire. The other men were yelling for help, and men came running out from the work sheds. The mining company built the town its first school before I was even born. It set at the very end of Norman Street past several rows of homes, also built by the mining company. The school was mustard-yellow stucco and three stories high. Because the mining company skimped on its structure, it was deemed unsound and the county built a single story brick school on the other side of town. From a third floor window of the abandoned school, Vince and I watched the policemen looking for him in the town's streets. All the available railyard workers, including railroad police in squad cars from two towns over, spared no expense looking for Vince.

With a bloodstained hand, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a key, which he shoved in my right. "Get to my house. In my room, top drawer of the dresser, there's twelve bucks. Grab it and some clothes, shove it all in a pillowcase and get back here," he said.

I was still watching the cops, mesmerized, still shaking, still hearing the deafening screams from the injured man, though he was far from us. Vince elbowed me. "Waiting on a brass band?" he asked.

As fast as I could, I ran from the little room we hid in, down the hall, down the wooden steps, caked in old yellow floor wax and smelling like rotting wood. Each of my steps thundered until I ran out a little metal side door that opened up to the alley behind the school.

I ran through damp and knee-high Sweet Grass all the way up the hill that bordered the alley and then down the other side before any police could see me. Staying low, I ran along the bush-line behind the houses until I got to Vince's. Standing on the back porch, I fished my pockets for the key, and as I put it in the lock, cold loneliness took me over. If I didn’t know better, I might have thought that emptiness eating me up belonged to me, but I knew it belonged to that old house.

Inside, no sign existed that anyone lived there, though I knew Vince stayed there often, especially in bad weather. The kitchen didn't have a table or chairs, just a camp stove with a pan sitting between the burners. Several old stew cans set piled in the sink. In one of the bedrooms, where once there was a bed, bedclothes were in a jumbled pile on the floor. The room smelled just as musty and mildewed as he did. I always figured his scent was just part of who he was. But standing in his room in the middle of those rags soaked with that mustiness, I realized what an unclean smell it really was, and that a bloodhound could track him anywhere in the world.

A car raced up the street, and I looked out the window. A squad car pulled up in front. Two railroad men got out and rushed up the steps. I whipped around, hurried back to Vince's room, opened the top drawer of the old pine dresser near the window, and grabbed the money. The men were at the front door, beating on it as I pulled the pillowcase off his pillow. Off the floor, I grabbed some old work pants and a shirt and shoved them inside the casing, things he might need in his life on the lam. I jumped out a window and landed in a clump of rotting firewood, and ran back the way I came.

When I was about to go over the top of the hill bordering the alley, I saw the law had the old school surrounded. I dropped to the ground beneath the brambles and stretched out flat. Policemen and railyard workers went in and out of the old school like worms in an apple, but no one came out with Vince. He had outsmarted all of us. Maybe he sent me off to get me out of there, so he could ditch me. In an alley, I stuffed his old clothes in a garbage can.

Walking down Two Street, dogs were barking, but otherwise, all was quiet. I got home after dark. The kitchen light was on, so I knew July was still up. If the cops had yet to come around to the house asking July about me, then it was a good bet they didn't recognize me as the boy helping Vince escape. But I wouldn't know until I opened the back door and stepped into the kitchen. And as I did, she was in her ratty blue nightshirt at the refrigerator taking out one of Gil's cigarettes from the pack he kept there to keep them fresh. She looked up at me as I came in. "Where've you been all day long?" she asked.

"Around." My hands were shaking with shame. I fumbled a cigarette, but finally lit it. She began to strike me as curious. To divert her attention, I changed the talk to the filling station, and some crazy ideas I made up on the spot. Something about selling gas and oil changes and lube for ten bucks.

She blew smoke over the table at me and said, "Who has ten bucks all at once in this town? Anyway, where's this extra business coming from?" I let it go, but she told me, "There's not some way to get rich at the fillin' station, so no use banging your head against that wall. It's just what you and me and Gil ended up with. Even so, Gil's not the same as you and me. We're orphans really. Not to take away from your mother but she wasn't really there for you if I can say so."

"You got more right than most," I said.

"And my father, he was just like her in a way. Not here nor there, believin' himself an actor, told me he was going into pictures. Even got me thinking I was some actress he talked it up so. The way he put some folks on like he was already famous, selling them on some ground-floor-get-rich idea, snookering them outta money. If I never said it before we got our troubles, all of us, but this is the best thing I got so far. And I want to say something else, Jesse, I was really proud of the way you handled yourself at your mother's funeral." She came over, kissed me on the forehead, and enveloped me in the fresh and clean smell of soap and powder. All in a warm glow that came off her as if she was a candle. Then she went back to the table and dashed out her cigarette in the ceramic ashtray, and we were both quiet again.

July's beauty and my shame put me on edge, and I said I needed some sleep. She told me good night as I dashed out my cigarette in the ashtray, and then I went off to my room. I didn't look back at her, just went in and closed the door. Yet, I stood in the dark for some time with my hand on the doorknob. I had too much to hide, and I wanted to go out and confess to her.

Instead, I undressed, climbed under the covers, and thought about the kid from Boston. His boots standing in the corner, toes facing me just like it was the kid standing there in them. Warning me.

I don't know how long I was asleep, maybe an hour or so, but I woke to Gil's heavy footsteps marching across the kitchen floor to my room. The door flew open and the glaring kitchen light flooded in with Gil right behind it. I could smell the cold air around him and his liquor breath and his sweaty skin. As I sat up trying to figure out what the matter was, he stood at my bed and grabbed me by the hair. "You left the station when I needed you the most. I had to do all the work and all the cleanup," he said. I didn't answer, and he slapped me with his right. "You're just like our father, you lazy sonofabitch," he said with his teeth flashing and his spit misting my face.

July came in behind him and squeezed herself between us. He reached around her, kept slapping me, and tried shoving her aside to get to me.

"Well, he did the best he could at the station, and I came and got him and he was here helping me clean this place up for the rest of the day," she said. Then she took him stumbling from my bed and out of my room. She closed my door leaving me in the dark. I heard him plop down in a squeaky kitchen chair, mumbling, "We should move outta here, go to Colorado or Oregon."

"Sssshhhhh," she whispered to him like some gentle wind, "everything's all right and then some." First one and then the other of Gil's work shoes fell on the kitchen floor in clumps. The chair squeaked as he rose from it to go stumbling down the hallway. When he fell onto their bed, the springs squawked until he settled and probably passed out.

The kitchen light shone through the bottom of my door. I got up and eased the door open just a bit and looked out at her sitting at the kitchen table. A cigarette burning between her fingers. A can of Old Ironsides beer in front of her. Just staring out the kitchen window at that black-country night, just as black as a wall made of coal and swallowing all light.

I was witnessing her in what she thought was her solitude. Yet I knew her thoughts, she was finally figuring it out. Day by day, she was heading for the life every woman in the town surrenders to -- unwished for babies, meager meals, and boredom.

She was right about us being orphaned, but we were also fellow prisoners. In a hush, my lust evaporated and the gap between us closed and joined us as siblings forever. A freighter made its way up the mountain to our town, chugging up the troughs and over the hills, its whistle blowing mournful, sounding just like some creature befuddled, no longer recognizing the terrain it covered twice a day for over thirty years.

 

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