No Heroes (13 page)

The joy of nature is its constant reminder of how humans no longer belong. We can do nothing as perfect as a bird flying through the precise center of a small space between branches. Alone among the trees, I desire nothing. I try not to seek, which frees me to see what is revealed. Each day I empty the cistern of my mind and let the woods refill me. I want what is here to become who I am. I want to carry the secrets of the trees.

On the mornings I wrote in the woods, I entered the classroom wearing muddy boots and a plaid coat matted with burrs. Kentuckians were accustomed to the idea of walking in the woods as a necessary part of life. A few students told me they had followed my example and begun writing in the woods. One of these was Eugene, who often lingered after class.

“How you doing in your other classes,” I said.

“All right, I reckon. Sometimes I don't think I'm cut out for school.”

“I know the feeling. What are you cut out for?”

“Well, that's just it. I don't rightly know. Sometimes I can't stand to be at home, but I don't know where else to go. That's why I'm in school.”

“There's the army and the Peace Corps. But the army makes you take orders and the Peace Corps wants a college degree.”

“Sometimes I think about going to Ohio.”

“You got people there?”

“Yeah, my mom's cousins are laying thick. They can get me on at them factories.”

“Is that what you want?” I said.

“I don't know.”

“A lot of people just want to stay right in these old hills and do what their daddy and their papaw did. Nothing wrong with that, either. I envy them. But you're not that way, Eugene. You want more. Me, too. The first thing is to find out what you don't want.”

“Sometimes I don't want to think.”

“That's a good way to get bad habits. What I do is write in my journal the things I don't want to think, and that way they're out of my head.”

“I thought diaries were for girls.” he said.

“Didn't you ever watch
Star Trek?
Remember how Captain Kirk has that star log? Well, he ain't a girl and neither am I.”

“Well, you'd damn sure make an ugly one. Why don't you come home with me this weekend. See how we party up in Martin County.”

“I don't know about that.”

“I read your books so I know you ain't against getting a little wild. You didn't get saved here lately, did you?”

“Not hardly. I just ain't going to Martin County to get shot. If you boys have a party here, let me know.”

“You got yourself a deal.”

“How about giving me a story?”

“I got one right here, buddy.”

He dug in his pack for a manuscript.

“It ain't much,” he said. “But it's typed.”

“There's only one thing scarier than writing a story.”

“What's that?” he said.

“Showing it to somebody.”

“I ain't scared.”

He walked away. I gathered my papers and headed for the rest room. The English building had a private rest room for male faculty. The very idea of separate facilities had always galled me as a student, and I used that rest room whenever necessary. In the name of equality, I steadfastly refused to enter the private rest room as a professor.

Town people considered themselves above those from the county. People in the hills felt fortunate for not living in town. I grew up on a ridge, and would never dream of living in a hollow, crammed with houses. By the same token, hollow people regarded themselves as better than the wild ridge-runners who lived deep in the hills, farthest from town, roads, and neighbors. Our social pecking order is a Möbius strip, with each group believing themselves superior. Out west I preferred the company of Indians and Chicanos, while in the east I felt comfortable among African-Americans and people from the Caribbean. We were all hillbillies of the soul.

I walked to my office with Eugene's manuscript, seven single-spaced pages on blurry computer printout. It was a sad story with comic elements, about a young mans attempt to get hold of the drug called ecstasy. He was going to college in the mountains, his first time away from home. He hated school and thought of quitting. A series of misadventures ensued as the young man just missed a drug connection or encountered people who weren't familiar with ecstasy. He turned down offers of Valium, Xanax, speed, Prozac, codeine, and Viagra. At every stop he smoked a doobie with other college kids and drank a beer. Finally, frustrated and tired, he purchased some OxyContin, a painkiller given to terminal cancer patients, and snorted it with his buddy. Within an hour his buddy died.

I leaned away from the desk. Substance abuse is a common subject of student stories, but I suspected Eugene's work was based in truth. A number of people in the hills had recently died from recreational use of OxyContin. The protagonist's dissatisfaction with college reminded me of my own anger while a student here. I called the place More-hole, where students were trapped rats with no choice but to eat the cheese. Ostensibly I was living at my parents' house, but they never inquired as to my whereabouts. I owned a four-hundred-dollar car in which I often slept. On cold nights I stayed on the living room floor of a small house rented by two men and a woman. I made a mattress from couch cushions, which tended to slide apart during the night. Sometimes other people slept there, but I always got the cushions because I was a local guy with good drug connections.

If you were the first person awake in the morning you rolled a joint and lit it. You then put the burning end into your mouth, careful to hold your lips away from the fire. You walked through the house and blew smoke directly into each person's face until his eyes opened. We called this “getting shotgunned awake” and considered it a terrific way to begin the day.

Often we cut class and drank beer at the Tunnel Cut, a beautiful spot of mixed hardwood and softwood forest, wildflowers, birds, and water. The area was accessible by a narrow set of ruts, humped in the middle like a long fresh grave. Low tailpipes scraped the ground. We liked to go out there and take acid. We smoked pot to cut the side effects and usually stayed all night, tripping our brains out beneath the stars. We weren't beatniks or hippies, and we weren't punkers or slackers. We were rednecks with dope.

There was a guy among us who preferred heroin to any other drug. He was older than us and had been in the army. His given name was Billy Buck Junior, and if pressed he'd show a crumpled birth certificate, which he carried as proof. Naturally we called him June Bug. He lived in a trailer, one of those tiny ones you hardly see anymore with a bedroom at one end, a living room at the other, and a tiny kitchen in the middle. Louvered windows ran along the sides. June Bug owned a well-stocked arsenal of weapons and ammunition. Eastern Kentucky is a gun culture but June Bug loved his weapons as kin. He carried pistols in lined boxes that reminded me of miniature coffins. He rarely spoke and when he did, his voice was surprisingly mild.

One afternoon June Bug joined us at the Tunnel Cut. He came alone and I watched as he refused the acid we had taken, and quite handily stuck a needle in his arm. I climbed the hill and entered the autumn woods. The sky was a bowl of blue that drenched the world. I could hear bugs crawling on leaves, the snakes and voles burrowing among roots, the bees preparing to sleep through winter. Birds headed south in continuous waves. I was lying amid a four-inch layer of crimson maple leaves with green veins that pulsed in mourning for the branch they'd left. The acid was so pure that I hadn't moved for hours, although it could have been minutes or days.

The first I knew of trouble was the cessation of a guitar that I hadn't even realized was playing until it stopped. Into that void of sound came an automobile heading our way. Most of us then had a terrible dread of cops, whom we regarded as bumbling fools bent on separating honest people from their drugs. That day I didn't care. I wasn't driving and my pockets held nothing illegal. I decided to remain on my back in the woods and move my arms among the leaves, trying to make an angel. The leaves didn't pack right. As I pondered how to give them more weight, I became very cold.

I rose from the earth without moving a muscle. For a long time I examined my skin for goose bumps as a sign of impending chill. The more I looked, the more I saw marvelous beauty among the tiny chips of leaf that spangled my skin like broken gems. My arm was gorgeous. It belonged in a museum, encased within a Plexiglas box on a pedestal of gleaming mahogany. I began experimenting with my fingers, changing their position, seeking the ideal gesture for display. I recognized a momentary time lapse between thought and action. It was extremely quick, but according to my grandfather, nothing was quicker than a double-play, and I began wondering how quick a double-play actually was, while still admiring the astonishing grace of my forearm* feeling the wind against my face like the breath of God, when every sound for miles around was abruptly stopped by a gunshot.

I walked to the tree line and looked down the hill. A stranger lay on his back in the grass, his hand on a pistol. Above him stood June Bug holding a bigger pistol.

All creation seemed to hold itself in abeyance as if time had shifted into reverse, and was straining to catch up with what had not yet happened. The earth ceased its spin. Sunlight became solid in the sky. Fragments of the wind dropped to earth. A brilliant scarlet stain spread across the shirt of the man on the ground.

I don't fully recall the rest of the night. The sun went down, and I headed west along the ridge. I walked ten miles through the woods toward what I hoped was More-head. The acid was cut with speed, which generated enough false energy that I made it to town. I awoke in the backseat of my car with my face marked by briars, my bad knee swollen from a fall, and bloody scabs on both elbows. I had never felt such thirst. I hurt everywhere.

Slowly and then in a terrible rush, I recalled the preceding day's sequence of events. I wanted someone to steal the car and drive somewhere with me in it. I wanted more of everything but didn't know how to get it. I didn't feel desire so much as hunger. There was life beyond the hills but I was afraid to leave, and my cowardice made me ashamed.

In the ensuing months I quit doing drugs, and stopped hanging around with the old gang. Some people got mad, and others regarded me with suspicion. I tried to act like I didn't care. I never saw June Bug again, though I occasionally ran into the boys who were at the Tunnel Cut that afternoon. No one ever mentioned the shooting. Maybe they were afraid to find out if I knew what had happened. Perhaps the acid interfered with their memory or perhaps I hallucinated the entire incident.

My reverie ended. I was sitting in my office, facing a blank wall. On the desk lay Eugene's story. I read it again, making a few structural suggestions. He was a good writer and I had no idea what to tell him. Stay in point-of-view. Show don't tell. Don't do drugs. Keep away from guns. Stay in school. Always wear a condom. Avoid fried food. Don't smoke cigarettes.

I knew couples who faced pregnancy in college, and few seemed happy about it. I was always grateful to have escaped the situation. If I had fathered a child then, he'd be Eugene's age right now, and what I really wanted to tell him was very simple: Get the hell out of the hills.

Instead, two days later, after class, I returned his manuscript.

“It's a good story,” I said. “Has a ring of truth, you know, funny then turns sad.”

“Like it could really happen?”

“Yeah. Did it?”

“Sort of. I heard about it.”

“How do you OD that fast, Eugene?”

“OxyContin comes in time-release capsules. You take them apart and smash up what's inside, and that takes away the time-release part. When you snort it, it's like ten Percocets.

“Where do they get it at?”

“Usually off their papaw or mamaw who's bad sick.”

“Listen, Eugene, I hate to sound like some old man who knows better than you. But drugs are pretty bad.”

“I know they are.”

“Anymore, writing is like a drug to me.”

“I been writing in the woods,” he said, “but so far only poetry.”

“Good,” I said. “Poetry is the backbone of literature.”

“Mine sure ain't. It's more like the old busted-up ribs. I was thinking I ort to go deeper in the woods.”

“Maybe you should go deeper in your poetry.”

“Damn, buddy, you know all the right shit to say, don't you.

“Only about writing, Eugene. Is everything all right up in Martin County with your family and all?”

“Pretty much. Except for my papaw being on cancer medicine.”

“Oh, man.”

“Just messing with you, Chris. I don't take drugs.”

He began laughing and backed into the hallway.

“Your face,” he said. “You're too easy, buddy.”

I laughed and watched him go, wondering if he was telling the truth. Then I wondered how many times teachers had pondered the same about me.