Research: Journals
The Journal
Past Issues
27.2
Jeffrey Utzinger
Jesus Saves and You Can TooYou can see the Bible Discount Outlet’s billboard a mile away with its red graffiti near the lower edge that reads: Where Jesus Saves and You Can Too—seven words you can’t really read until you’re right up on it, and would have already decided to stop, or not, for bargain Bibles, which is why no one’s faith was damaged enough to hazard the metal rungs of the billboard post with paint thinner to remove the stain, even though the sign marks the county line of Exodus, TX, population three thousand, four hundred and ninety three. Chances are, though, most folks on their way from Austin to Houston or Baton Rouge and beyond aren’t likely to ever see the actual Bible Discount Outlet their first time through because The Foxxxy Trot, a haven for Live Nude Girls, with cool blue flashing neon triple X’s perched atop its roof, is directly across the road and tends to pull one’s eyes to the left.
The Rankins own the BDO, and are a Christian couple with Exodus roots, who made their first million in oil, and second in real estate, before retiring to the Woodlands near Houston, having got out before the bottom dropped out, leaving a legacy all along Highway 71 East of rusted, still life pumps and burned out discount stores. Everybody calls Mr. Rankin “The Mayor,” a nickname that continues to piss off anyone who actually holds the office in Exodus, but a fitting one. He disguised the bland strip mall face of the BDO by erecting a pillared entrance with a twelve-foot, white cross mounted on top, and adorning the front doors with peel and stick stained glass. The Foxxxy Trot, on the other hand, embraced its history as a Mexican Taqueria with its red tile roof, aqua blue plaster archway, bright orange walls and Mariachi fresco.
My name is Walter Earle Whitman, not after the American poet, whose verse raised a ruckus or two of its own, but rather after a name on a book spine my momma found for ten cents at the Exodus County Library Book and Bake Sale, nearly forty years ago when she was nine months pregnant with me. Granted, the book was probably a copy of Leaves of Grass by the Walt Whitman, and so, technically, I am named after the poet, but it’s important to point out that momma was struck by the coincidence of finding a published piece of material by a man with her married name, and not out to honor a man whose turn of phrase she admired. Evidenced by the fact that she did not actually purchase the book. Therefore, I am Walter Earle Whitman to my mother only; “Earle Jr.” to my father before he passed (because his own name, of course, was Earle); and “Whit” to my wife and friends, because in Exodus when a man asks for a crescent wrench, he doesn’t give a rat’s ass that it looks like a sliver of the moon.
Exodus sprang up, like most towns, by a river and managed to grow because the railroad passed through, but we never saw air travel, interstates, outer space or the Internet coming. When the highway was cut three miles north of downtown, chain stores and restaurants sprang up along its side, and the old part of Exodus had nothing to entice weary travelers off the road. We do have an airport, but it’s really just a landing strip for light planes in a cow pasture, which the Mayor had built years ago so he’d have a place to launch his crop duster. But if you leave the highway, and drive past the airport, the VFW, and over the Colorado River, you’ll see the water tower clinging to the bank on the other side of the bridge, small and rocket-shaped, with faded green letters reminding the town that the last time they won State was 1961, when Earle Whitman rushed two hundred and five yards for three touchdowns.
Buildings along Main Street are brick with flat fronts, painted green, yellow and blue with wooden signs. About ten years back, the Mayor got the chamber of commerce to restore everything to look like a hundred years ago, and inside the buildings, antique and overpriced oak tables and chairs, mirrors, marbled washstands, wardrobes, china, linens, and silver are sold, but the folks selling are the only ones keeping the old downtown alive. They’re the few who can afford to live in the 1800’s, two-story railroad mansions in the great oaked neighborhoods that fan out beyond Main Street, the police station, post office, and courthouse. However, the majority of folks in the historic district have high tech jobs in Austin, so mainly it’s a community that commutes. The rest of us live on farms and ranches, up in the trees, or down by the river. We’re here because we were born here, and because somebody left us a little land. We’re all here, the hangers-on and the carpetbaggers alike, because we can’t imagine living anywhere else.
But you don’t enter towns where they began because few travel by boat anymore; you enter them mainly where they are right now, and sometimes that’s right where they died. The BDO and Foxxxy Trot are fifteen miles west of downtown, and my story begins there because now the town begins there, and like most towns (even dying or dead) the edges are never fixed. Resurrection is a long shot, but a dog that still hunts. It’s still a good town. Still a good place to begin a story.
It begins three months ago with me out of welding work and odd jobs—a piss poor farmer holed up in the Fox, killing Tecates and overtipping the waitress. I go there, now and again, sometimes with friends, but mostly alone, because it’s dark and loud, the AC’s cranked down so you can feel it, the beer’s break-your-teeth cold, none of the girls have fake breasts, and there’s always the hope that one of them will go home with you. I guess I should tell you straight out I’m married to a wonderful woman named Helen, whose only flaw seems to be that she’s currently living in Louisiana with her sister whom I have nothing against.
She’d been gone six months when I realized—midway through biting down on a lime, zoning in on the hot pink g-string disappearing into a young lady’s rear end who was reaching for her ankles, her breasts rocking to ZZ Top—that I couldn’t get a clear picture of Helen’s face in my mind. I had the coal black, straight hair, the gray eyes that shifted color in different light, the thin nose and high cheekbones, but I couldn’t put them together. The tattoo on the stripper’s ankle reminded me of the Pisces my twin daughters had emblazoned near their shoulder blades shortly before they left home. A strip club is not the best place (or perhaps the perfect place) to think of your twin daughters, age twenty, and your nineteen-year-old son. The path they beat away from our door must have provided too great a temptation for Helen not to follow. I kept returning to the pink triangle, but kept seeing the twin Pisces, Helen’s earlobes, and the tuft of hair my son, Daniel, tried to control with mousse. And it seemed the sum of my blackened parts were gathering like a white hot star somewhere above me, gaining speed, hurtling through space with a Texas-guitar-riff-revelation of the true nature of Walter Earle Whitman.
And I lost it. Her wild, dyed red hair whipped upwards through the strobe lights, and her breasts rocked misshapen as she stood. She twirled. I stood and stumbled towards her fleshy thighs that rippled as I slipped a folded five into her waistband, and she bent to kiss my cheek. Her makeup was heavy and I imagined it concealed dark circles and crow’s feet. She whispered something I couldn’t hear, and though sweet nothings were born in places such as these, I walked to the boy’s room in a halo of her perfume, pretending I had a shot. My cousin, Stewart, was supposed to stop by, but hadn’t, and I had planned to give the girl my money, take a leak and leave, but as I stood at the urinal, I could still feel the place on my cheek where she’d touched me, could still smell her perfume through the urine stench. As I washed my hands, I studied the pictures on the silver condom dispenser mounted next to the sink, trying to figure out why there were four choices and how a unicorn, a woman with whiskers, three cherries on a stem and a shooting star would help me decide. I fished two quarters from my pocket, deposited them and turned the handle. Nothing. I stuck a few more dimes in the slot and tried again. Still nothing. Willy wrap had been etched through the price, and since I hadn’t purchased condoms since I was thirteen, I was at a loss. The door swung open, and if there’s one thing a man doesn’t want to get caught doing in a strip club, it’s loitering in the boy’s room, so I returned to my table and waited.
The dancers rotated from the stage to the floor where they double as waitresses, and soon the redhead passed by and asked if I wanted a private dance, but I knew I was about out of cash, so told her another Tecate would do. I reached into my wallet when she returned and handed her my last two dollars, even though beer is two fifty, not counting a tip. Helen always said I scrimped when extravagance was needed most (and, it’s taken me awhile to figure, she didn’t always mean money). The waitress said they took plastic, but could probably tell it’d been a month of Sundays since anyone had given me credit. “You owe me,” she said, setting the can on the table. Lost in the folds of her dimpled backside, I didn’t have the heart to point out she’d forgotten the lime.
I checked my watch, wishing Stewart would show, wishing I hadn’t ordered another beer. I don’t mind drinking alone, but it helps to have someone you know nearby. If you’re home and there’s someone in the house, then you’re set. A spouse upstairs reading while your side of the bed grows cold will do, as will daughters’ stereo voices on cell phones murmuring down the hall. Even a son—on the floor, half-watching late night T.V., who you nudge with your foot on the way for more ice just to see if he’s still alive—works. When the house is empty, though, you come to seedy places, to sit at cock-eyed tables, and smoke, to listen to music you don’t really like, and eat salsa and stale chips. You come for the beer and stay for the tits, but when the money runs out and your friends don’t show, and the angle you’re working begins to fade, you need a little Merle Haggard. Night air. A bit of whiskey on ice.
I went to my truck after last call because if you see the lights go up on a strip club, you may never come back. I sat on my tailgate with my blue heeler, Travis, smoking a joint, telling myself I was sobering up before the drive home, even though I’d already lost my license early spring, and I’m pretty tight with the sheriff who’s married to one of my sisters. The dog rides with me everywhere, sometimes in the bed, or on the cab if we’re on smooth back roads, but mainly on the passenger’s side. I have eight other hounds, but Travis is the only one who sits still and looks like he’s listening. The only one you’d really want along on a night like that.
I started telling him about the redhead and the pink triangle, but stopped when my eyes wandered across the road and caught the shining cross atop the Bible Discount Outlet, and maybe it was the first hint of change in the early September air, or the alcohol starting the long slow fade, a mellow buzz kicking in—something made me think it’d be a nice morning to roll up on a church. Wash my shoulder length hair and maybe see if the girls had left any conditioner about, so I could really wash it, let it breathe, pull the tangles free, give the baseball caps and cowboy hats a rest. Iron a dress shirt with real buttons, not snaps, and find a pair of slacks. Rub a bit of polish on the toes of my boots. Scrape the shit from my heels. Sit in a pew near the front so I wouldn’t daydream or doze, wondering what time the Cowboys kick off. Really listen to the word of God. Maybe they’d sing one of my favorite hymns to honor the lost sheep coming home. One of those Negro Spirituals near the back. “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” “Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me.” I’d eat the body. Drink the blood. Law and Gospel. “Amazing Grace.” Wash the sin, the death, the devil, away.
And then the cool blue flashing neon triple X’s flickered, went dark, and the live nude girls emerged, clothed and strung out, and started crawling into their boyfriends’ beat up cars. Engines cranked and doors slammed. Gravel grind and tire squeal. I looked back at the cross as though I expected it to be gone, or somehow diminished, but in the sudden dark, the BDO parking lot seemed to have expanded, revealing a car parked at the foot of the cross. Abandoned cars are as common to parking lots as grass and broken bottles, but I knew the car was Bill’s, and that more than likely it wasn’t abandoned.
“You lost or just hoping to get lucky?” a voice said behind me.
Travis huffed but settled when I whistled low. The redhead stood before us, looking baggy in a sweatshirt and jeans, and I wondered if the hot pink triangle was still on underneath. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her face shone from whatever she’d used to wipe the makeup clean. She had heavy acne scars on both cheeks, and she wasn’t what you’d call, passing her on the street, pretty—her head was too round and seemed small compared to her height which was about the same as mine, but her stature, and yes, the fact that she danced and had long hair made me want to take her home.
This was three months ago, and so I don’t remember exactly if the phrase “lost or lucky” was what she used, but the gist of the question is what I remember. I think I replied, “a little of both,” thinking it clever at the time, but realizing now it was less clever than true.
“Since you owe me a beer, why don’t you drop me off,” she said. “My ride seems to have forgotten the time.”
“Where we headed?”
“You go past Richard’s?”
“Every day.”
She looked down the road, at my dog, and back down the road.
“You’re lying, but what the hell.”
Richard’s Gas and Grub was indeed on my way, but you reach an age where you don’t let facts interfere with what you hope to achieve. If she already figured I was trying to get her in bed, then half my work was done. I should mention I’ve never cheated on Helen, but you wouldn’t believe me, what with me offering rides to women who get naked for money, but stick with me: I had the dog along.
Travis jumped in as soon as she opened the passenger’s side, and she asked if he bit. I told her all dogs do, but this one didn’t, unless you counted nipping goat heels. I asked if she smoked, and she said she did, but not tonight, then asked me for a cigarette. I stubbed out the roach, and flipped two cigarettes from the package. The crushed beer cans and empty quarts of oil piled on the floorboard didn’t seem to bother her, or the snuff-stained, ripped upholstery, and sour hundred thousand-mile carpet smell. I thought it a shame the girl didn’t expect more, but if you’re still bound to another woman in the eyes of the law, then it’s best not to think of a morning ride with a woman not your wife as a date. It’s best not to think of it as anything at all.
As we crossed the median and swung past the BDO, I looked towards Bill’s car and saw his slumped silhouette. The girl shrugged and stroked Travis’ head when I said I needed to make a quick check on a friend. Bill is one of the crazy few who still tries to make a living farming sixty acres, raising sorghum, and corn, selling cattle and hay, running a vegetable stand by the side of the road supplemented by a wife’s income. They’re hanging on through second mortgages and maxed credit cards, and I’m afraid I’ll stop by one day to find him hanging from the end of a rope. And I was afraid he was pressed so tight to his steering wheel because he was missing a part of his head. My headlights in his rearview didn’t stir him, so I got out and knuckle-tapped the glass until he leaned back and rolled down the window. Bill’s a year older than me, and he whipped my ass in second grade, and his look that night reminded me of how he’d cried and asked me to be his best friend as he untangled my arms from the merry-go-round. I sucker punched his ear and said I would if he’d stop beating me after school. He promised, and broke it, and always cried. His anger and sorrow are always one in the same. His head has always been too big for his body, his eyes set too close to sensibly fit glasses frames, but that night all his features seemed to have gathered closer to his chin that had expanded and begun to roll over a hint of a bosom poking through his thin white shirt. He isn’t fat or bald, but for the first time I could tell, given five to seven years, it’ll be a fair way to describe him.
“Janie wake ya?” he asked.
“Just passin’ by, and saw your car.”
“Ain’t that Janie with ya?”
“Just a girl needs a ride.”
Bill twisted his neck to see the girl sitting in my truck. His wife, Janie, works at the BDO, and while there have been nights when she’s roused me from bed looking for Bill, I didn’t want to tell him he’d mistaken a topless dancer for his bride. Didn’t seem the kind of thing that’d cheer him at the moment.
“Whadda ya doin’ out here?” I asked.
“Takin’ it to the cross.”
Bill’s a member in good standing of Hope Lutheran Church where we were both baptized and married, where my membership has lapsed, and Bill has bluffed his way to elder at Janie’s urging—a fact that might make you believe he’d use a phrase like takin’ it to the cross unless, of course, you knew that Lutherans in these parts took talking about faith outside of church as a sign of weakness, and using phrases like takin’ it to the cross as a sure sign of Pentecostal tendencies. I let the phrase hang, looked away, embarrassed for us both. I waved at the girl, and realized I didn’t know her name.
“You think maybe you should head home?” I said.
“I’m in somethin’, and can’t figure a way out.”
“You drinkin’?”
“Been four months, Whit.”
He looked hurt, and I was sorry I’d asked. Bill’s sobriety is linked to his meteoric rise in the church and two washers perched on the lip of the cup at the Hope Lutheran picnic last June, where me, Stewart, Bill and his brother, Randall, were pitching washers for a thirty dollar pot in the championship round. We were huddled around the hole trying to decide whose piece was the counter when someone’s foot nudged someone’s washer and a fistfight between brothers ensued. Randall shoved Bill and Bill shoved Randall, motherfuckers were exchanged and children were present. Pastor Dave had to step in and help me and Stewart break them apart.
The pot was forfeited to the picnic fund, Bill’s shirt got ripped, and Randall walked around with a puffy lip for several days, but other than that, it’s not like Bill and Randall had never fought in public while drunk. The next Sunday, though, Bill felt compelled to address the congregation at the late service, where he apologized to his brother, pastor Dave, and the community as a whole. He also announced he had quit drinking and wished to rededicate his life to his family, and more importantly, the Lord.
This was two weeks after Helen had left me, so I didn’t witness the confession firsthand, not that I’d been to anything church related that didn’t involve fried chicken in years. All the same, I didn’t give it much thought, just assumed Bill’d be back in the regular ushering rotation, so when he told me he’d gone to his barn that evening to think, and started walking his fields and praying to Jesus for guidance, it seemed natural to me that he’d been backsliding, that he needed someone to drive him home.
Especially when he started in on the part about corn, rustling through the leaves, topping ears with his pocketknife, and rubbing his fingers through the silk. He said he’d made loops around the farm, but kept returning to the corn. And finally he made it to what looked like the end of a row that turned out to be a cornless rectangle about an acre wide.
“But it ain’t all clear,” he said. “There’s plants in all that space. And I bent down and thought the hell is this doin’ here?”
“I better get this gal home,” I said. “You too. We can talk after you get some sleep.”
I felt the sun wanting to rise although I knew it’d be hours before it did, but if I didn’t cut the thing short, we’d still be there with Bill going on about his dream or some sleep walking ordeal he’d survived, me hanging on the window, drifting on pink triangles, the girl whose name I didn’t know scratching my dog behind the ears. Bill’s face was dropping further into his neck. I took a step back from the window, and he lurched forward.
“And then I remembered—I planted them there.”
“Planted what?”
“I said, ‘Jesus, it’s come to this: tell me what to do.’”
I picked a piece of tobacco from my tongue.
“And what did Jesus say?” I asked.
“To come here.”
“He told you to come to the BDO?”
“Heard his voice as clear as I’m hearin’ yours now: take it to the cross.”
“I’d a told ya to come across the street,” I said. “Have a beer with ole Whit.”
He looked at me, the way a woman does sometimes in that way that says I’m so disappointed in you I can’t even find the words.
“What else did Jesus say?”
“He told me to tell someone.”
“Well, all right.”
“And I have.”
I stepped further back. Slapped my hands together.
“All right.”
“You goin’ home?”
“I’m goin’ home.”
I should have seen, at that moment, the sum of my blackened parts racing towards me like shooting stars, but I didn’t. You don’t leave a man alone in a parking lot like that, especially if you’ve known him since second grade, and he danced at your wedding, and you stood up for his, and his middle son bears your name. You don’t leave a man alone who’s been talking to Jesus in cornfields, especially if you can’t smell liquor on his breath. Then again, I’m not the first guy you’d call in a jam. On average, I smoke sixteen cigarettes a day, which means, not counting anything else I do or don’t do, I’m guaranteed to make sixteen bad choices a day.
I patted Bill’s arm, and walked back to my truck. Asked the girl her name when I got inside, and she told me Renee, but didn’t ask mine, didn’t ask about Bill, just seemed generally relieved to see he wasn’t crawling in the truck with us. We never saw his taillights kick to life, but I punched the clutch and skedaddled.
We drove past the star of Texaco, where the pumps had been black with locusts all spring, and my boy had worked the graveyard shift with a garden hose, knocking the critters all to hell before he got sick of the dark and wet, and called his friends at the volunteer fire department who brought by a pump to eviscerate the pests, which had worked pretty good, until a guy driving home from the Fox saw them and called the sheriff, to tell him the station was on fire—simultaneously ending Daniel’s brief careers in gas and oil, and public service.
“So you cost your boy his job,” Renee said, in an even tone.
“Never said it was me that called.”
“But it was.”
“Boy should know better’n use county funds to kill grasshoppers.”
She turned to me and smiled.
I’ve outsmarted myself more times than I care to remember, but a firetruck at a gas station in the middle of the night is cause for alarm, and you can’t just stop by, even in an emergency, if you happen to be coming home from a night of gentleman’s entertainment. So I had stopped at the Wal-Mart down the road and called my brother-in-law, James, the sheriff, to see what he knew. He didn’t know anything, since I had woke him up from a deep sleep. He was the one called the owner, and then went to investigate himself. And, of course, somewhere in the midst of sorting everything out, James told Daniel that his father had just been worried about him. That’s probably the moment Daniel had stopped daydreaming about getting out of this town, and started to make concrete plans.
I wonder what might have happened that night had I stopped at the Texaco. Caught my son in the act of doing something he knew he wasn’t supposed to be doing, but only because I was out doing something I shouldn’t have been doing. I think, at the very least, it would have given him something, out there Greyhounding his way to my sister Brenda’s house in California, something to chuckle and shake his head about, some sort of connection with me. And maybe if things got really bad, he might have thought about that night, and think I may be a fuck up, but I got it honest.
“I’m not saying the boy never would have left,” I told Renee. “That I single-handedly drove him out of town.”
“People don’t leave town because of trees,” she said. I looked at her, and she smiled again, and I remember marveling that she had such straight, white teeth. “Or shitty houses or low paying jobs or potholed roads. They leave because of family.”
“That ain’t true.”
“—said the man driving home all alone with his dog and a stranger.”
And that’s when it hit her, when she realized she knew my wife. She had been piecing it together since she first saw my dog. Turns out Renee also cuts hair, and thought she had met me once when I was picking up Helen, but she used to have blonde hair, and she didn’t really remember my face, but she remembered Helen’s husband had come by with a blue heeler puppy, and that Helen had quit coming by the shop when her kids ran off, and Renee’d heard through the grapevine that Helen had now left her man. She figured she knew more about me than she should—the nature of cutting women’s hair for a living. And at night she sat at tables with drunk men and listened to them go on about their wives and girlfriends.
“A lot of goddamn problems could be solved if the men and women would sit down and tell each other what they’ve been telling me all these years,” she said.
I told her she had a point.
We passed the Ford dealership where I bought my first new truck, a 1984 F-150, (which I still drive) from Bill’s brother, Randall—his first, and perhaps only, sale. Passed the Wal-Mart where a few RV’s rest every night rather than pay campground fees at the state park nearby. And the DQ with its marquee proclaiming the “airy Queen” as a Texas Stop Sign and blizzards for 99 cents. We passed three more gas stations and four fast food joints—the sprawl that out-of-towners think is the heart of Exodus, and is, if you think a line of stores you can find anywhere in America makes a town. Hope Lutheran Church sits at the end of the line, a typical structure with high brick front and steeple, except that every once in a while, the front lawn is filled with foot high white crosses that glow in the parking lot lights and represent aborted children.
The truck moaned up the incline to the last stoplight for sixty miles, and we waited for the green light at the entrance to Riverside Estates—the only subdivision in Exodus. My momma and Uncle Roy live there among the fairly nice homes that stretch through tall trees and winding hills, along a road that ends in a golf course by the river. Most of Exodus (including the land where I live) is flat and sparse, covered with twisted mesquite and cedar and dark red clay, but Riverside marks a change in landscape that lasts for about a five-mile drive and makes you forget you’re in Central Texas because there’s steep grades and rolling hills, loblolly pines, and hardwoods. The five-mile roadside view is just a glimpse of the three thousand acres that make up Exodus State Park—part of which looms over the dry patch of land where I live. When I’m driving by at night, or standing in my backfields, I always think of a glacier inching its way across the land, leaving fertile soil in its wake, and then what? Melting? Leaving behind a bent river. The seeds of a town.
I told Renee as we drove through the darkness, catching snippets of pines in the headlights, that this stretch of land was part of the reason I’ve never left Exodus. A friend of my father’s used to own all the land where the subdivision sits, and he let us go hunting when we were kids. I’ve hunted more dove, squirrel and deer, and cleaned more fish than I can remember, and my favorite part is the quiet place you enter when you track or stalk or cast, and the shallow breathing, the waiting, the sudden bursts of energy that absolutely take you out of your body. And I keep telling myself I’m going to get back in those trees again on a brisk morning before sunrise and lay out a nice buck.
“My father used to hunt,” she said.
“You ever go?”
“Once or twice. I can’t handle the blood. The way the insides slide out when they’re cleaned. It’s too brutal. I like men who hunt, though.”
A deer emerged on the shoulder as we rounded a blind curve, leaving behind the glacier’s path, and returning to flat land. I didn’t slow, because in twenty-five years of driving, I haven’t nailed a deer. No logic in that thought, just experience. I guess I figured that just about everything, save death, that could happen to me, had already happened. I think I said something like that to Renee, and she said I was stupid, and I thought of the choices she must have made in her life, poor or otherwise, and before I could reply we were right up on the doe. She ran along the shoulder ahead of the truck for a few seconds, then moved away and bounced in the air and disappeared from our sight just as the headlights left her. Travis lost his head barking and he clawed at the seat, at our arms and legs, trying to get out the window all the way to Richard’s Gas and Grub.
The store is white with red flames licking up the sides, just like Richard’s Camero, and like the birthmark that covers half his neck and runs up his right cheek like spattered paint. Richard’s old man left his family when Richard was a kid (Big D, law degree, secretary/new wife), but none of us felt too bad for Richard since his granddad is the Mayor. I started selling goat’s milk and eggs on consignment at the store years ago, when Richard and I were still friends. Richard also sold the usual convenience store fare, along with fried chicken, and homemade beer by the gallon—if he knew you and you’d brought along your own jar. When he sold the place three years ago to a Middle Eastern guy (whose name I can’t pronounce, so I just call him Shaq which he doesn’t seem to mind), Shaq let me keep selling my stuff, and in fact, didn’t change a single thing (including the store’s name) except for the homemade beer-selling part and the storeroom he converted into a little one-room apartment. Even the paramedics still parked their meat wagon out front every afternoon while they ate fried chicken. All the same, most folks complained that once Richard sold the place, it started to go downhill.
If you turn right at the Gas and Grub, you go down Pecan Grove Road, which is where Renee had told me earlier she lived. I realized I must have passed her house a hundred times on the way to Richard’s house to play poker, but that was a long time ago, back when Bill was still drinking, and James didn’t feel weird about being the sheriff and gambling, and I could hang in a hand with a hundred dollar pot. And back before Renee was even living there, but I wasn’t sure that night because when I slowed at the gas station to make the turn, she told me I could let her out there. I told her I could take her the rest of the way, and finally she said: “I’ll give you a hand job if that’ll help, but I’m tired and got two kids that I gotta get ready for school in about five hours.”
Standing outside of Bill’s window at the BDO, I had felt the possibility of this conclusion creeping up on me, knew in some way or another it would happen, but the crude suddenness of it made me blush. I declined, and as I watched her walk down the road, I wondered if when she’d said she liked men who hunted if that meant me. If she thought I was brutal. If she liked rough sex. And that scared me—not the idea of rough sex—but whether or not I could deliver such a thing. Even squeeze the trigger if she had stepped inside the crosshairs. Twenty years of sex with the same woman is like traveling a worn path through the woods. You know the high places, can anticipate the dips and curves, see the serrated edge of leaves, the fluttering lashes, without really looking. It’s a safe place to be, but I guess you miss a lot along the way.
I knew I should have been making plans to get Helen back, but each time I tried, I couldn’t figure out how. The last words she said to me before she left home were “I know what you can’t do Whit, God knows, I know what you can’t do—tell me what you can.” But I couldn’t, and as I drove off from the parking lot, my mind drifted to thoughts of a majestic buck, and the dreams I’d been having of cool blue ice reflecting moonlight, and looming. Thoughts of something larger than this town, larger than my small lusts, than life itself. Dreams of walking up a glacier’s side, laying my hands against its walls, struggling to the top and stretching out to watch the stars. Trying to feel its slow progress beneath me.
A Star Flight helicopter hovered in the distance over the Exodus hospital as I made the exit to my house. If patients reach a critical point, they’ll fly you to Austin to see a specialist. Floating lights in the night sky still make my heart race, not because I believe in creatures from other places manning crafts over the countryside, but because, in the country, they mean a wildfire’s broke out, a convict is loose, or somebody’s fucked up beyond repair. The hospital’s pretty good, but the helicopter always reminds me, if you’re in really bad shape, nobody here can help you.
When I rolled home, the gate to our land was open wide, something I hadn’t gotten used to, because before everyone ran off, we’d kept it closed. Even though a thief, traveling the nine miles off the interstate, down the mile and a half gravel drive lined with gnarled mesquite and scraggly cedar, would only have to take one look at our house to realize these people didn’t have shit. Add to that the howls and barks and yips of four beagles, three blue ticks, one bloodhound, and a blue heeler. All the same, it had made Helen and the girls feel safe to have the gate closed and locked. I’d been leaving it open since they’d left, though, because if they made it as far as the end of our drive, I didn’t want to block their path.
I also only let one or two dogs sleep in the house at one time, and I’ve tried to keep the bed made, to change the sheets now and then, to take my boots off when I lay on the couch. I ran the vacuum once, but it was such a pain in the ass that it’s still sitting at the bottom of the stairs. I used every clean plate, skillet, and spoon about three weeks after Helen left, so stayed up late one night washing everything, and since then, I use only one plate, one cup, one skillet and one set of utensils, and wash them before I eat. I do cheat with paper plates and plastic forks now and again, but if I feel like using real dishes, I have to wash the one set first, because if Helen and the girls made it past the front gate, all the way to the house and into the kitchen, I wouldn’t want to give them any excuses to turn back around.
I considered turning around myself when I’d parked the truck next to the barn, and was headed towards the house with dogs milling around my feet, some barking from the porch, and all of them with just enough whine mixed in their howls to make me pause, scan the moonlit lawn, and find a dead goat. I whistled, which silenced the older dogs, but the younger ones continued to prance and howl because they only know one thing. They’ve yet to learn when to sound the alarm, and when to halt so I can listen. We had sixteen floppy eared Nubians, and the one I found was a ewe with small bite marks around her flank and legs, so I knew it had been coyotes. Her head was lolled and eyes bulging, and one ear had been chewed clean off by puppies, I suspected, but since the older dogs had probably scared off the coyotes I couldn’t be mad. The girls, when they lived here, had so many cats dragged off in the night that lost and mutilated pets became part of our lives.
A head count on the dogs was impossible because they were too riled up, so I went inside, grabbed a beer to keep me awake, and a half-pound of ground beef I’d left open in the refrigerator. I rolled the beef into little balls and lured the beagles into the kennel, which I mainly use when the females are in heat. I chained the blue ticks to a row of trees. My bloodhound, Rusty, who is getting up in years, was already asleep in the tool shed. The beagles and blue ticks moaned and strained and snapped at one another long after Travis and me were out of sight. I worry sometimes the other dogs resent Travis, if dogs feel such things, what with him riding in the truck to town and going off to round up goats. They’ve all got skills, but since I don’t hunt much anymore, there’s not much chance left for the others to pull their weight. And since I’d been living alone, I guess I leaned a little too heavily on a dog to keep me company.
I flung the dead goat, still warm, over my shoulder, and we headed towards the pen to see about the others. We came upon a second goat stretched out in a clump of weeds near the small stock tank behind the barn. Travis pulled at her leg, but stopped when I called him off. The coyotes must have got spooked and left her behind, and I wondered how many others had been carried away. The girls had names for all the goats, which I couldn’t remember, but I recognized the one in the weeds by her all white face that Lindsey had named Casper, and I got a little choked up, maybe because it’d been her favorite or maybe because she wasn’t around to know it was dead.
When the girls were infants I panicked because I couldn’t tell them apart, and Helen would try to explain the crook in Lindsey’s nose, and the way Sarah’s left ear hung a little lower than her right, but I couldn’t see it, and of course, she dressed them exactly alike in homemade clothes, down to pink bows she tied around their heads. They cut their hair, and spiked it, dyed it an unnatural white their senior year to match the others on the volleyball team, which was fine because long and black had made them look so much like their mother when she was young it had begun to make me feel strange. They drove to College Station last fall with a friend where Lindsey made the volleyball team as a walk on, and Sarah ran off with a crew cut cadet to get married, or not. We couldn’t help Lindsey with her spring tuition, and she dropped out, and that night, I honest to God had no idea where either one of them was. Their room is still pink and I find their magazines rolled up in the basket by the toilet, a stray sock behind the dryer, bobby pins everywhere. And all these animals.
We got into goats because Daniel broke out in a rash when we got him weaned off his momma and onto cow’s milk from the store. He was nine or ten when we found out he wasn’t allergic anymore and had been emptying his thermos and drinking regular milk at school because he hated the taste of goat’s milk and cheese, but by then it was too late—I’d come attached to milking goats. Some nights after he left, I thought about calling and telling him he ought to come home for a visit, that I got real American, plastic covered slices, but I don’t think he left home because of the cheese.
I left the dead goats in the weeds, and went to check the pen where the gate was still cinched, but bent, where they’d leapt over, or more likely—where they’d been driven through. They must have been half-dead when they hit the ground. Travis sniffed and rolled at my feet, chewed a piece of scat, and I let him. I expected to find more dead and wounded when I entered the pen, but was greeted by a gentle bleating. The remaining fourteen were easily accounted for because they gathered around thinking it was feeding time. The nice thing, I guess, about being a dumb beast is it’s easy to forget about brushes with death, to think mainly about your gut, to not have to mourn the lost. All the same, I felt it was important to touch each one of them that night, to reassure them with a soft word. You remember odd things when adrenaline is heaped on lack of sleep and drunkenness, and I remember their hot breath on my hands and how good it felt.
And then Travis let out a howl. He had waited outside the gate as he’d been trained, but when the goats scattered, and I turned, I heard his short legs ripping through the mesquite pods and brush. I expected coyotes to be charging behind, and for the first time in a long time I was scared, wished I’d brought my gun along, even though a man hasn’t been attacked by coyotes in this county in my lifetime. I wished Daniel had never left because he and his friends had nearly wiped out every coyote spotlighting during the summers. I wished I’d gotten a start on the goats because, as the old joke goes, you don’t have to outrun the bear, just the slowest guy in the group. But I don’t know that I was conscious of any of these thoughts because a deer-like creature with long, black spiraling antlers and a thin, black-striped body cleared the fence, landed at an angle so slanted I thought for sure it was down, and moved sideways, never stopping, until it blew by me, out through the goat pen, out to pasture, into the woods and darkness, out of sight. I stood staring at its after-image that hung above the fence, thinking that my wife of eighteen years had left me, but not divorced me, that the bank had come close to foreclosing on my land, but hadn’t yet, that I knew every creature, rock and tree in Exodus, but had somehow missed this.
And I ran. I ran, hot on its trail with coyotes, real or imagined, nipping my heels, ran shouting for Travis to bring it on home, ran through the goats who kicked and cavorted, peeling off to each side to let me pass, ran smack into the fence and tore gashes in the palms of my hands climbing over, ran stumbling along hard dirt and brush, ran splashing through the creek and slipping on wet rock, crossed into the State Park, pine lashing my face, ran because goddamnit I’d been chasing things all night and wanted something to catch.
And it hit me—perhaps while tearing through the woods or on the slow walk back to the house, dogless and panting, cold from my sweat drenched shirt—that thing I thought I saw gathering above the Fox, ripping through the universe, crashing down to help me sort through the sum of my blackened parts—I get attached and can’t let go. I hold on, but can’t take care of what I got. I don’t do anything until everything’s gone to hell. And at the end of the day, the only thing you can really do, is try to save your own sorry ass. I lit a cigarette, hands shaking and lungs on fire. I went back to the house, unleashed the chains and opened the kennel. It was nearly five, so I lay on the couch in my clothes with one boot dangling off, thinking of the pink triangle, of cool blue glaciers, of strange beasts and dead goats, of Bill talking to Jesus, and the way Helen never once complained that I smoked in bed, even the night I fell asleep and caught her favorite quilt on fire.
