Probation (19 page)

I swerved to miss a rabbit. The car buckled, smearing the poor bunny across the asphalt.

My mother. I’d barely thought of her since I met him. Even when I was listening to her complaints, answering her questions, playacting at having a conversation, my thoughts were in a bed-sitter on a pull-out mattress under an itchy blanket. I loved him and he was trying to escape without confrontation, without any ugly scenes. Why should he bother with those? It wasn’t as if he loved me. I was a diversion, a release. The hospital was more important. So, of course, were his parents. His young and healthy parents who weren’t even dying. Me. I would snap to attention when wanted and keep at a safe distance when not.

I made the decision quickly and dialed his machine before I could change my mind. I knew how I wanted to sound. Sad, but not hurt. Fond, but not in love. Not paternal, but maybe a bit avuncular.

Hi. Look. I understand how you feel. You didn’t have to make up an excuse about having to work tonight. You could have just told me it’s over. It would have been all right. I’ll make this easy for you so you can enjoy your trip and not have to dread coming home to face me. I don’t want to see you anymore. You can call if you like. So I’ll talk to you if I talk to you.

I didn’t know how to end the message. I couldn’t find the right words to compel him to call. Words that would make him pick up the phone to tell me I had it all wrong. I checked my voice mail every hour for the next two days. It’s Friday night, almost a week later, and I’ve accepted he’ll never call. His silence means either his feelings for me were small and easily abandoned or deep enough to need protecting. I’ll never know. Someday I will see him at the bar. It will be awkward. Maybe we will speak. Maybe I’ll see him at the hospital during my mother’s next inevitable admission.

“I’m shaping up,” I swear to Matt. “No more missed appointments. I promise. My sales are good, better than good, great.”

“You look like hell,” he says. “Let’s try this,” Matt says, interrupting my patter to write me a script. “I’ve seen some good, relatively quick results with this medication.”

I’ve got a better idea. Let’s build a time machine and set the clock back ten, twelve, months ago. I don’t need drugs. I need another chance. An opportunity to do things right this time. The days are getting longer, but the sky is growing darker all the time. Look ahead. Nasty-looking clouds are hovering on the horizon. The forecast is calling for storms.

S
melling your mother’s farts feels uncomfortably close to incest. Disease does many ugly things, but this is the worst, this stripping away of dignity. She controls the things she can, observing the rituals, big and small, that mark her days. Sunday Mass at ten. Tuesday bridge nights. Friday mornings devoted to Forrest, who whips her new chemo wig into a facsimile of her old familiar hair. She accepts the things she can’t control, like flatulence and the other rude outbursts of a body in revolt. She and I have learned to ignore them. She doesn’t beg my pardon and I don’t crinkle my nose and crack the car window. We sit tight, waiting for the not-altogether-unpleasant smell to atomize and disappear.

It’s too cold to open the window anyway. Spring is in full bloom in the Piedmont, but winter still clings to these ancient hills. Columns of gray smoke rise from the bonfires of last season’s field debris burning in the valleys below. The towns on the distant ridges all look the same, a dozen or so low-pitched tar-paper roofs clustered around the steeple of a white wood-frame church. Most of these buildings are older than my mother. There’s no new construction in these hamlets. Their citizens are all dying off. Only the valiant still force a living out of the exhausted fields.

My mother, the youngest of ten, escaped over forty years ago after being orphaned at sixteen. My grandfather went first, losing a slow, ugly battle with colon cancer. My grandmother followed eight months later, quickly, from a heart attack, leaving my mother, only a high school girl, to keep house for the two bachelor sons who’d stayed behind to run the farm. The other boys had fled Watauga County for the machine shops of Johnson City and Knoxville; Buster, my mother’s favorite brother, made it all the way to occupied Japan, courtesy of the United States Army. Her sisters had left the farm when they’d married, following their husbands to Cleveland and Detroit, where union jobs in steel and construction paid good money. The house where she was born seemed strange, unwelcoming, after her parents died. She felt she was a burden on her brothers even though she washed their clothes and cooked their meals.

One Friday assembly during the fall of her junior year, the principal of her high school introduced a special guest from a brand-new factory up north. Mr. Yarnell, a gentleman in a black suit and heavy steel-frame glasses, had been dispatched to the backwaters to seduce the daughters of the harsh subsistence farms and dying towns of Appalachia with promises of adventure and excitement. The gray eyes behind the thick lenses saw the spark in my mother’s eyes as he described the lush truck farms of New Jersey, bursting with sweet corn and beans and especially tomatoes. Trucks and trucks of huge, red tomatoes so ripe they split at the seams. My mother jumped at the opportunity to enlist in the army he was recruiting to bottle and label the rivers of ketchup flooding the Garden State.

Her oldest brother resisted signing the consent forms. But the principal was a kind man who intervened and gently persuaded my uncles to allow her to follow her dream. He came to the bus station to see her off a week later. They corresponded until he died of lung cancer ten years later. His letters are tied together with a blue ribbon and kept in a box with her photo albums. His name was Andrew Miller and I am his namesake.

My uncle Buster, his wanderlust cured by two tours of duty in the Pacific, inherited the Calhoun homestead when his bachelor brothers died. He went to his grave ten years ago leaving my cousin Bobby to fight the noble fight. After Bobby’s gone, the farm most likely will be sold. His son JR spends his days staring at his computer screen, making contact with the world beyond this county, counting the days until, like my mother, he can escape.

We’re close now, almost there. The scrub brush, still gray and bare, grows right up to the edge of the county road, hiding the ancient fence of stacked railroad ties that stakes out Calhoun territory. I make a sharp left and the car crawls up the rutted path to the barn. I help my mother to her feet. It’s a long walk to the farmhouse and the stone path, worn smooth over the years, must be negotiated with care. The door to the barn is open. Inside, someone—my cousin Bobby most likely—is banging milk buckets and listening to the Power Country station on a portable radio. If he heard our car and our voices, and he must have, he is ignoring them.

My parents used the farm as a summer camp, sending me to Watauga County every July. The landmarks of my childhood are aging and precarious, but still extant. The barn, of course, never changes, reeking, as always, of damp straw and shit. I spent long afternoons as a kid shucking field corn in the mesh crib until blood blisters bubbled on my fingertips. The muddy pen, empty now, is where Uncle Buster performed a brutal autopsy on a sow that turned up dead one morning. The small slaughterhouse, garage to a new pickup truck these days, is where, laughing and drunk on beer, he pointed a fat kidney at us kids, threatening to squeeze piss in our faces. Ahead, closer to the house, is the chicken coop where I would trail my aunt as she gathered freshly laid eggs. But the old oak tree has lost the branch where the ruined tractor tire used to hang. I still have faint scars above my eyebrow and upper lip where its crusty bark tore up my face when I swung too high and lost control. Beyond the house are fields, and farther yet, the boarded-up entrance to a small, abandoned mine, the black hole in the earth where Bobby claimed to have killed a vampire bat, no, ten vampire bats as the story was embellished, that tried to suck the blood from his neck.

My aunt has been watching for us at the kitchen window and comes outside to greet us, her arms open to embrace my mother. They have known each other for more than half a century, their entire lives, and no words are necessary between them. My aunt tries to hide her shock and concern. She knows my mother has been sick, but is unprepared for the fragile creature she has become.

There’s no affection in the hug she bestows on me. She’s never been fond of me. My aunt is a tough old bird, broad and squat, butch despite the bleached French twist she’s worn since the sixties. Almost seventy, she still walks like a shot-putter. Her one concession to the cool weather is not going barefoot and her little toes peek out of the frayed edges of her old, unlaced Keds. She loves boys, had three of them, and spent her life happily refereeing their roughhousing. My reticence as a child irritated her. She had no patience for any boy who feared bruises and pain.

I feel ten years old again.

I’m really nothing but a bystander, a spectator, to this weekend. I’ve finished my role, driving my mother, and have no other part to play. I have nothing to contribute to any conversations. My mother and aunt will take pleasure in each other’s company, both thankful the other is alive, the last survivors of their generation. My cousin and his family will go about their routines as if we aren’t here. I’ll find a quiet place to read, maybe slip into the living room and stare at the television. There are no Catholic churches in this corner of the world and I can’t even look forward to driving my mother to Mass to break the monotony. It will be an eternity until Sunday night when I will pack my mother into the car and head back down the hills, leaving this place behind.

Bobby’s wife is cheerful enough. She doesn’t mind the extra mouths to feed and enjoys the company. She knows we’ll keep out of the way and out from under her feet. Damn, she says, staring at an Easter Bunny cake with coconut frosting fur and jelly-bean eyes. She forgot to buy licorice whips for its whiskers. The cake seems odd, a little out of place. JR is a teenager, too old for Peter Rabbit. She frets that Bobby will be sure to notice if the whiskers are missing. She needs to make a quick run to the drugstore. I offer to go for her. It’s the least I can do. After all, there’s sweet satisfaction in learning that the Fearless Vampire Killer might break down in tears if his Easter Bunny’s missing his whiskers.

Up in Watauga County you can’t simply jump in the car and drive five minutes to the local superstore. This mission could take me the entire afternoon. The local convenience store only sells candy bars; the drugstore in the nearest town sold the last bag of licorice whips an hour ago. Too bad. I suppose I’ll have to drive all the way into Boone, to the Wal-Mart strip center or maybe to that little mall a few miles on the other side of the town. I’ll hang around, nothing better to do.

The mall is grim. Bottom-of-the-line chain stores, bad lighting, high vacancy rate. The man lingering at the entertainment shelf of Waldenbooks wouldn’t be my first or even second choice in a lineup of possibilities. He’s slightly effeminate, puffy, and wearing a shabby Members Only jacket. He flips through a picture book,
The Films of Joan Crawford
, his eyes darting quickly between the page and me until we establish there is an understanding, an attraction, a chemistry. I decide he’s not so bad after all. He’s got a pleasant smile and a dimpled chin, and his gold wedding band is a powerful aphrodisiac. He clears his throat and slips Joan back on the shelf.

I tell myself I’m not really going to do this. But I know that I am. No one will ever know. I’ll be careful. I won’t do it unless I’m absolutely certain it’s safe. I’m not really going to do it. It’s just a fantasy and I’m bored. I already have an erection. The fact that I’m nervous, very nervous, makes it more exciting. I’m on autopilot as I follow him. He walks slowly, looking back over his shoulder, not trusting he won’t lose me in a nearly empty mall deserted by everyone except a few elderly power walkers. He nods at the door marked Men and disappears inside. I steel myself for the inevitable:
Just do it! There’s not another soul in sight. Do the deed, zip up, no harm, no foul.

“Hi, Andy.”

I’m speechless, confronted by my cousin Bobby’s son as he emerges from the restroom.

“Be out in a minute, really got to go,” I manage to say, flustered by this completely unexpected encounter.

He steps aside and I rush by. I’m so shaken I can barely locate my zipper. I fumble inside my shorts and try to find my dick. It’s shriveled into my body cavity. It’s not as if I had to piss anyway and I’m conscious of every passing second. I run my hands under the faucet, barely wetting them. My confused would-be paramour is peeping over the stall. I’m in and out in two minutes flat. No reason for anyone to be suspicious.

JR is standing at the door to Women, waiting for his girlfriend.

“Weird,” he says, “running into you here.”

He seems a bit embarrassed. Maybe he suspects something. I tell myself I’m being paranoid.

“Your mother sent me on a mission,” I say.

“Oh yeah?”

“Licorice whips.”

His eyebrows form a question mark.

“For the bunny cake.”

I’m spared further explanation by the appearance of his girlfriend. Amanda, I think he says her name is, Mandy.

“You had lunch yet? We’re going to grab something to eat.”

Mandy doesn’t look too pleased by his invitation. I tell him I’ve eaten and that I’ll catch up with him back at the house.

“Well, have coffee then. You can have a cup of coffee.”

She squeezes his arm, signaling him to not encourage me. She doesn’t attempt subtlety, doesn’t care I can see. Fuck the little slut. I say yes to spite her.

Mandy orders fries and a Diet Coke. She won’t take off her cheap leather jacket even though the mall is overheated. Her magenta nail polish is chipped. She affects the Gothic look, her hair dyed black, parted in the middle and breaking at her shoulder, trying to project sensitivity through fashion. I feel hopelessly middle aged in my pastel polo shirt.

Bobby’s son has changed since the last time I saw him. He’s always had a face that hinted at masculine beauty. Now, at the verge of manhood, it’s fulfilled its promise. He could pass for a heartthrob on one of those television teenage soap operas.
Watauga County 90210.
He has deep blue eyes and a perfect nose. His thick, shiny hair is a testimonial to the miracle qualities of his conditioner. He looks exactly like Bobby at his age except he didn’t inherit the cruel streak that cast in cold stone those same perfect features in his father.

I congratulate him on his big news. He’s headed for Chapel Hill come fall. It’s a couple hundred miles away and on the other side of the moon. He’s already shed the clothes of Watauga County. Gone are the dirty sneakers and down jackets, replaced by black T-shirts and boots, the look of MTV. A thrift-shop overcoat is slung over his chair. But none of these accoutrements, intended to make him look dark and ominous, can dampen his sunny disposition. He’s a terrible mismatch with this scrawny vulture who’s licking the ketchup off a greasy limp fry.

We talk about college. He tries to appear world weary, but can’t hide his eager giddiness at escaping this pit. He says he’s sure that no one on campus will be cool, but it’s just a show of bravado. He’s already worried he’s going to come off as a country bumpkin. We talk about pop music. He’s amazed at how familiar I, a dinosaur, am with his favorites from the college radio station. I ask Mandy where she’s going to college. She responds with a look of sheer hatred. I’ve picked at a scab.

“Mandy’s thinking of going to nursing school,” JR interjects.

It’s impossible to imagine this harsh, brittle creature in the healing professions. Then I think back to all the snide and abrupt registered nurses I’ve encountered in the past few months and decide she’ll probably graduate first in her class. She doesn’t bother to thank me for picking up the check and her good-bye smile has a sarcastic undertone. JR thanks me profusely and promises me we’ll catch up later.

I buy a bag of licorice whips. I try to kill time in the record store but the aisles of Nashville hitmakers depress me. The toilet is off-limits now. To go back would make me feel dirty, diseased, a polluter desecrating public places where nice, trusting kids like Bobby’s son go to empty their bladders. I have nowhere to go but back to the farm. I hand over the candy and ask Bobby’s wife where she wants me to bunk. She says she hasn’t given it much thought. She’s got a full house this weekend. Would I mind sharing? JR’s got a double mattress and hasn’t wet the bed in ten years, she laughs. It’s either that or the couch.