Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (13 page)

One day at the bar in April, in the first hint of the tropical heat to come, Charlie, half drunk, pulled off his shirt and announced he was going in the water. As the others whooped and cheered, he took off his boots, stepped off the deck, and jogged out onto the echoing pier. Above the water, white gulls circled. He looked up at them, then down at his pale feet slapping the warm planks of the pier, then down through the cracks to the dark water below. He stopped short, yanked back by a thought that grabbed like the barbs of a fish hook in the back of his neck.

How many days? How many days did the kid fix its eyes on the crest of the hill, waiting for him? And Lucy, out checking the fence line for winter damage, how many steps did she take towards what was left of it, first thinking it was nothing but a last dirty pile of snow?

The men back at the table watched him. They wondered why he stood there, staring down through the planks, rather than diving in.
Se le perdió algo,
they said to one another after a while.
He has lost something.

I
t was Frank James, not Jesse, who buried the treasure in Brown's Ridge. This is what the Musician tells me as he pulls the metal detector out the back of his pickup and slings it over his shoulder. We find a deer path through the woods behind his cabin and take the back way up the ridge. The Musician breaks through low branches and lopes up the steep, loose ground.
But Frank didn't have half as much dough
, I say, out of breath when we get to the top. To the south, the Nashville skyline crouches on the horizon like a stalking animal.
But he was smarter,
the Musician grins.
He planned ahead. For future generations,
I say.
Exactly,
the Musician says, tapping the end of his nose.

Life in Brown's Ridge is like this: At night, the howl of the coyotes can split you in two. In the morning, the sun is slow to rise over the spine of the ridge, and starlings and
wild turkeys pick their way across the dark fields and into the trees. When the coyotes come by, Greenup Bird lifts his old head and howls, overcome by something ancient inside him. The woods hold pockets of cool air in the summer and warm air in the winter, and walking through them you tend to look over your shoulder, thinking something is following you. On the steepest parts of the ridge there are oaks and hickories over three hundred years old, saved from generations of loggers by their inaccessibility. Up there I have seen bald eagles, bucks with antlers like coatracks. In the valley below, Katy Creek rushes south to the Cumberland. Brown's Ridge Pike runs beside it, all the way to Kentucky. Out there on the horizon, Nashville seems to be hundreds of miles away. Not many people live here: less people than cows, less people than copperheads, coyotes, possums. They call it Brown's Ridge after Kaspar Brown, the first man killed by Indians here. No one knows when exactly, but that was sometime around 1799.

The Musician and I have lived here since 1985, and never before has there been any talk of treasure. I can't believe that no one has thought to look for it yet, in the same way I can't believe that the Nashville developers have only now discovered Brown's Ridge. When Joe Guy's father bought his farm in 1935, the James brothers had only been gone sixty years. There were people around who remembered passing them on the road, seeing them at the horse races, smiling to their wives. It's a wonder that it never occurred to Joe Guy to look for some sort of a treasure buried somewhere
on his thousand-acre tract. Or to anyone else, for that matter: the families in the trailers on the other side of the ridge, the dairy farmers, the kids in grubby T-shirts who miss the school bus day after day. Lacy, the pretty young waitress at the Meat ‘n' Three, talks every once in a while about striking it rich in the new state lottery, buying a plane ticket to New York. Even Preacher Jubal Cain would not be above scratching around in the dirt for a few thousand dollars' worth of gold. So why are we the first? The Musician says
None of them would have even known where to look.
The woods are quiet, the hot hush of late summer as it turns into fall.
Have you got a map?
I ask him.
Don't need one,
he says, handing me a shovel.
I got Dave.

Since he showed up on the Musician's doorstep last winter, Dave has claimed to have a direct line to the spirit of Jesse James. He is quick to point out that it is not Jesse's ghost, that he is in heaven and is not among us. The first time Jesse spoke to him, Dave was lying on the Musician's floor, and he sat up and said,
Holy shit, the Lord speaketh,
and Jesse said,
No, man, listen, it's Jesse James.
Last week, over an after-dinner joint, Dave told the Musician that Jesse said that his brother's treasure was buried somewhere along the ridgeline.
Can Jesse be any more specific?
the Musician asked, taking a hit.
No, man,
Dave said, exhaling a cloud of smoke.
I don't want to bug him.
Dave believes the end of the world is coming any time now.
As in the book of Revelation?
I ask him.
Fuck Revelation,
he says.
I'm talking Old Testament here. Isaiah, man. He saw it all.
He keeps the book of Isaiah
tucked in his coat pocket, torn from a Bible he stole out of a church. The pages are held together with duct tape. When I first met Dave, I thought he was a homeless guy the Musician had taken in, like a stray cat, but then he pulled a fancy cell phone from a holster on his belt and took a call from his girl in California.
She's got the vision,
he says, pointing between his eyes.
She's got it better than me.
Every Sunday, at Brown's Ridge Baptist church, Jubal Cain preaches Jesus' love. Outside the church is a sign that says:
HOT OUTSIDE
?
WE'VE GOT PRAYER CONDITIONING
! And beneath that it says,
YOU ARE WELCOME
.
COME AS YOU ARE
. When Preacher Jubal slows his Oldsmobile at the stop sign by my house and I happen to be outside, he looks long and hard but does not wave. I've never set foot inside Brown's Ridge Baptist, and neither has Dave. Dave's cell phone ring plays “Dixie.” He uses the pages of Revelation to roll his joints.

None of us can claim to belong here. The Musician and I came to Nashville in the seventies, him for the drugs and the music, me just for the drugs. We got to be friends, or at least were always showing up at the same parties. He was young and knew the good-looking girls. I was forty years old, just getting started on the heavy stuff. When the scene vibed out in the eighties, we both decided to move to Brown's Ridge. Way out to the country, we thought back then. Dave's from California or Nevada or somewhere, no one really knows. I always thought Lacy was born here, but it turns out she moved up with her momma from South Carolina when she was a few years old. Preacher Jubal Cain is
from Bowling Green, Kentucky. Joe Guy's daddy, when he bought the farm, moved down from Paradise Ridge, a good twenty miles to the north. Frank and Jesse James came from Missouri via Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Brown, before he was pierced through the heart with an arrow, was a Yankee from Philadelphia, forging his way south to find a better life for his family. The only person I know who is actually from Brown's Ridge is Joe Guy Jr., born the year we moved here, in the upstairs bedroom of his daddy's big white house, but he cut out of here two years ago, and no one's heard from him since.

 

The metal detector that the Musician bought is cheap and unreliable. There is no depth setting and for the first few days he wastes hours digging up beer cans and pop tabs that lie just beneath the leaf litter. Every morning he knocks on my door and me and Greenup Bird go with him up the ridge. Dave comes, too, and we all help dig. The Musician points to a spot and I go at it with a short-handled spade while Greenup goes at it with his claws and teeth, dirt spraying out behind him through his back legs. Since the stroke, my left arm shakes so badly that it's difficult to control any tool. I get tired easily and have to sit down. Greenup is named for the victim of the first peacetime bank robbery in this country, which went down in Liberty, Missouri, in 1866. I live by the creek in a house that J. D. Howard, a local grain dealer known to be a gambler, built in 1875. The house has fifteen-foot-high
ceilings and a fireplace in every room. Across the Pike is the field where J. D. Howard kept his horse, an exceptionally fine animal for a man of his humble profession. On weekdays developers trawl through Brown's Ridge in their Hummers, wider than one lane of the road. They pull over to ask directions, looking down at us through mirrored sunglasses, and we point them the wrong way. I found Greenup Bird on the Pike two years ago, half-starved and half-dead, a cross between a God-knows-what and a Lord-have-mercy. He's got one blue eye and one black and a coat that feels like a wire brush. As the Musician says, he is one plug-ugly dog. We make a good pair, him and me.

The Musician once played bass for a famous band. He's been all over the world and he's got luggage stuffed in every closet in the cabin. He's got stories, whether you choose to believe them or not. He's played to a crowd of twenty thousand in Berlin, slept with a one-armed Haitian girl in the back of a Spanish club. The Musician's given name is Randy Spaulding, but when he started touring he had it legally changed to Lex Spark. He's got good days and bad days, and when I go to see him I usually know which one it is before I'm halfway up his mud-rutted drive. On bad days he stays inside the dark musty cabin, tending to his regret like it's a pot on the stove. On good days he is electric with plans, plans you wouldn't think he had in him, like searching for Frank James's treasure. He built the cabin himself, with lumber he talked various people into giving him. Three years ago, it was the Musician who broke into
my house, dragged me out of a puddle of piss and shit, and drove me to the hospital, where after three days in a coma they told me I was a very lucky man. He hasn't been able to get session work in Nashville in years. An upright bass leans against his kitchen counter like a woman trying to catch a bartender's eye. He won't touch it. I imagine he doesn't play music anymore for the same reason I don't do drugs anymore: you can only push up to the edge so many times before you realize the one thing on the other side is your own mortality, with no one waiting there to keep your grave clean.

It's impossible to prove, but most people would agree that it was Jesse James, alias J. D. Howard, who shot Greenup Bird at that bank in Missouri, committing one of the first crimes of a lifetime of infamy. It was ten years before he moved to Brown's Ridge and changed his name, built his high-ceilinged house, and tried to live the life of an honest man. Frank James, when he arrived soon after with his wife and young son, took the name of B. J. Woodson and rented a farm along the creek. Joe Guy's thousand-acre farm, the biggest tract in the entire county, was sold quietly this summer, in the middle of June. When the work crews started rolling in, Preacher Jubal Cain watched the surveyor's tape go up and said,
Whosever will, let him come. A time of prosperity is here.
We dig deep holes along the ridgeline, some because of a sign from the metal detector, some because Dave rolls his eyes back in his head and points, some for no reason at all. As we dig we call out to
each other through the trees:
You got anything? Nothing, man. You? Nothing.

 

My mind, before I ruined it, was a beautiful thing. As an old man I can say this without vanity or pride. The brilliance was like the light of late day over Joe Guy's back field, but now the light is gone. What's left are the scraps, held together with wire and string. Nothing has grown back in the ruts of the drugs. I used to be an inventor. I've sold dozens of patents for things you use every day. I like to think I have made life easier for people, better. Some nights I think I can feel Jesse's bootsteps if I lean off my mattress and press my fingers to the floor, but it is only the rumble of the trucks coming down the Pike. Living in a place like this, you would think it would be easy to start believing in ghosts. But I am haunted by something more real than ghosts. Behind the Minute Mart, on a scrubby lot where the gas trucks turn around, two perfect rows of daffodils come up year after year, just wide enough to line the drive of a farmhouse of which there is no longer a trace. Whoever planted those daffodils, a woman, I picture, in a homemade dress, did it decades ago, without any thought of me. The Musician drives me into town to cash my Social Security checks and buy new boots, and I hold my left arm down with my right to keep it from jerking out and hitting the gear shift. Every once in a while, I'll speak a whole sentence backwards, and the woman at the bank will smile at me with false patience, like I'm a little
boy. We used to go to the honky-tonks on Saturday nights to tell stories about the old days and complain about the music, but we don't go out at night anymore, because the headlights on the Musician's truck quit. He's working part-time laying tile. Days are rough for a self-employed tradesman, what with all the cheap labor the contractors can scare up. The Musician looks down at his boots, the steel toes showing through big holes in the worn-out leather. He sighs and says,
It's a tough row to hoe.

Dave won't touch the metal detector. He thinks it is a blasphemy. He says that God will disconnect his line to Jesse if he gets too greedy.
If you ask, you shall receive,
he tells us, and many days when we go out digging he stays behind at the cabin, leaning back on the porch steps with a joint.
Jesse might want to get in touch with me,
he says.
You two go on ahead.
When we come back in the afternoon he is curled up snoring in a patch of sun. We've happened on a cobalt blue medicine bottle, which the Musician is certain we can sell at an antique shop in town. We've found a lug nut, an old snarl of baling wire, eighteen broken Coke bottles, a hornet's nest, a hollow tree that the Musician climbed inside of and looked all the way up to the sky. We found an old shoe, a ladder, a cracker tin, but still no treasure.
Jesse's not sure yet if he really wants you to find it,
Dave says when we wake him.
Well, tell Jesse to make up his mind,
the Musician says.
We haven't got much time.
At dusk I walk Greenup Bird through the hay fields of Joe Guy's farm, letting him scare up rabbits and bark at the deer. I find a dead raccoon hanging from its neck in the crook of a beech
tree. I wonder how many more times we'll walk through the field: five more mornings, ten. I tell the raccoon,
You're lucky to get out now.
I rub out surveying marks spray-painted on the grass with my heel.

 

One morning in mid-September we think we've hit the jackpot. After a clear sign from Jesse, Dave starts in on a level stretch of the hillside, alongside the grade of an old logging road. A foot and a half down his shovel strikes metal, and we all rush over to him, Greenup panting, slapping our legs with his tail. With his hands in the air the Musician circumscribes the size of Confederate bills, bars of solid gold. The shovel twangs encouragingly. But what we dig up turns out to be a sheet of rusted tin hinged to a spiraled copper pipe from an old still. The Musician slumps his shoulders for a moment, then gets back to work. He's tall and lanky and loose the way a bass player should be. He eats and eats but stays skinny as a whip. He feeds me and Dave in the cabin most nights, frying hamburgers when he's got work, boiling potatoes when he doesn't. Dave chucks the pipe downhill. In the twenties, the ridge had more bootleggers than any other place in the county: so wild and steep, yet so close to town. They kept little fox dens at the foot of trees where they sometimes spent the night. They pinned pictures of Clara Bow to the sycamores and ate the lunches their wives packed them in tin pails, throwing the chicken bones over their shoulders. The ones without women sometimes moved out here for
good, squatting on unclaimed land in tar paper shacks. In the deepest hollers we find the last of these places, abandoned by the gangs of teenage boys who once used them as clubhouses. Behind their graffiti and karate posters, the walls are insulated with layers of newspaper from the 1950s. We peel them off and read the ads for land auctions and farm liquidations, and I think about how this cashing in on the country is not any kind of new thing.