Ava's Man (15 page)

In time, as word of the little hermit’s presence leaked out, the stories came.

Some people said Hootie was a wounded hero from the Great War who had been horribly mutilated—that would explain his appearance, because nobody is born that ugly—and others said he was a circus performer who had committed some terrible crime under the big top. That, or he fell off the circus train as it passed through north Georgia. Some said he had escaped from a loony house.

And some said he had robbed a bank up north—in Chicago, maybe, or Indiana—and that all the other members of his gang had been gunned down. Hootie, they said, had escaped with thousands in silver dollars.

They said he came here to this isolated place to lay low—no one seemed to mind that he had been laying low for thirty years—and that he had hidden the money on the river.

Some people even said he had buried the money all around his yard in mason jars, and that he dug it up every now and then, to feel it in his hands.

If the stories had been true, Jessie Clines would have been the most famous man on the state line. Instead, there was just enough rumor, enough myth, to draw people to him, and many of them were bad.

The river was still a lawless place then. One night a group of men came to Hootie’s shack and told him they wanted his money, and they commenced to beat him. They passed a bottle and beat him, for a long, long time.

It became a ritual. Every now and then, a group of drunks would catch him in his bed, and make a game out of it. Some people are just a waste of human skin, and these people were that kind.

Sometimes they just beat him a little, slapping his jaws back and forth, and sometimes they beat him pretty bad, putting their boots to him—there is no mistaking a mark from a bootheel. No one knows why he did not pack his few pitiful belongings and run. It may be he had no place to go, or that even this was better than how he had lived before he drifted here.

One day Charlie came and he saw what the river trash had done to Hootie. Both his eyes were blacked, his lips were split and he was still bleeding from his mouth. When Charlie asked Hootie who had beaten him so badly, Hootie refused to answer.

Charlie sat with him all day, and that night he laid Hootie down on his cot—all Hootie ever slept on was an old army cot—and walked down to his car to fetch his roofing hatchet.

He waited on the stoop of the shack all night, his hatchet in his right hand, hoping. But no one came.

The next morning, he told Hootie to pack up his clothes and come with him.

“You can’t stay here, and I got to work and can’t stay with you,” he told Hootie.

He took him home to their little place in the country, outside Rome.

“What you doin’ with him?” Ava asked when she saw Hootie sitting on the porch.

“He’s gonna stay with us for a while,” Charlie said, and he explained what had happened, how the river trash had abused him.

“We barely got enough for us,” Ava said.

“We’ll have enough,” Charlie said.

Ava, who considered it a point of pride that she would go to her grave without ever letting anyone have the last word on anything, said she reckoned it would be fine, for a while.

It would be years before Charlie found out who had beaten his friend, and the anger should have cooled by then. It should have.

He slept on a pallet on the floor, or on a cot, or outside, when he needed to be by himself. He almost never spoke, but he would sit with Charlie and Ava’s children on the porch as the talk swirled around him.

He smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, and when he was done with the tiny cloth pouches, he gave them to the girls. They put them on sticks and made a doll.

And sometimes, when they were sick, or just because he felt like it, he would give them dimes. They jingled in his pockets when he walked and he never seemed to run out, as if there really was some magic in the little man.

The only things he owned in the world, he kept in a tiny bundle, the kind hoboes used to carry when they hopped trains. He had a spare shirt and a spare pair of pants—old army clothes, too.

“And,” Juanita said, “he slept in his hat.”

No one bothered him for a long time because he was almost always within the tall man’s orbit, and the trash who had hurt him apparently figured it was just not worth the pain.

About a year after Charlie adopted him, the work dried up there in north Georgia. Charlie and Ava packed up the children and belongings for a move to Alabama, and waited, the car’s engine running, for Hootie to climb on board.

Charlie blew the horn and motioned for him, but Hootie just stood there.

He had left his shack on the river, where he had been for as long as anyone could remember, and now Charlie wanted to take him even
farther away. It must have seemed like the cut-down was a rocket ship to the moon.

“I need you to make sure the kids don’t fall out,” Charlie said. Hootie’s job was, indeed, to stretch his legs across the tailgate of the truck—he was shaped funny and had long legs for a little man—and he took that job seriously.

But this time he just stood there, his chin—well, if he had a chin—tucked on his breast.

Finally Charlie put the truck in gear and rolled away, leaving Hootie standing in the yard.

In Alabama, they unloaded the truck and unpacked, and Ava cooked supper. Charlie stood on the porch, lost in thought. Then he walked back to his truck, slammed the door so hard that it boomed, and sped off down the dirt road, heading east.

He found Hootie sitting on the steps of the empty house.

Hootie hopped in the front seat.

They went home.

Hootie helped Charlie work sometimes, for decent wages. He ate at their table, and was treated like family. “I never remember when he wasn’t there,” Juanita said.

Sometimes their friends would ask them who the funny-looking little man was, and they always said the same thing: “That’s Hootie. Daddy got him off the river.”

“Why?” the other children always said.

T
imes was hard enough, Ava felt, without having to deal with the morons.

People still talk of the night the three drunk men kicked at the door in the middle of the night, shouting for him to come and drink some shine. One of the men was named Martin and everybody knew he didn’t have the brains God gave a water bug. With his babies in bed, Charlie had too much good sense to let such men in his home, even in daylight.

“Y’all git,” he said, loud, so his voice would carry through the pine. “These babies is sleepin’.”

“Come on, Bundrum. We got a quart,” growled Martin from the other side of the door. A whole country in need of food, but the clear whiskey still ran like water.

Before Charlie could swing his legs out of bed, all three men started hammering on the door.

“I said git,” Charlie shouted, and reached for his overalls. Ava
sat bolt upright but still, a hurricane forming on her features, and the children looked from the door to their daddy, big-eyed.

“Let us in, Chollie,” said Martin, his voice slurred, “or I’ll kick it in.” One man giggled as another, apparently Martin, kicked one, two, three times at the door, and then they all started kicking until the door trembled on its hinges.

Charlie’s tool belt was inside, and he reached down and drew his hammer—about a pound of good iron on the end of an oak handle—from its loop.

“You got one more chance,” Charlie said, but this time his voice was low, far too low to be heard by the men outside the wooden door. But then, most likely, it was way, way too late for second chances.

The men suddenly stopped pounding on the door, and it was deathly quiet. The littlest babies started to cry.

“Trash,” Ava seethed, and she turned her eyes like two drill bits onto Charlie, to let him know it was his fault for knowing such men.

Then, with a crash of breaking wood, the door slammed open, and Martin and the other men stood grinning and wobbling in the doorway, an open jar of likker held out, as if in apology.

As if in slow motion, the drunkards’ heads traversed from the rage in Charlie’s face down, down to the hammer that swung back and forth, grim as a hanged man, at the end of his bony arm.

They fled. They stumbled over each other and spilt their whiskey, but they made it to their car and piled into it like a troop of circus clowns. And then, feeling safe, Martin cursed Charlie out the window as he turned the key, the motor started and the headlights winked on.

And there in the yellow glow, just a few feet from the hood, was Charlie, a scarecrow come to life in baggy red long-handles, his hammer held high in one fist, like a thunderbolt.

“Help me Jesus,” Martin screamed, trying to find reverse.

The car lurched backward and Charlie threw his hammer with all his might, and the windshield shattered into a million glistening
pieces. The hammer passed through and hit one of the men hard in the chest, and all three of them piled out, one wheezing, trying to get his breath, the two others cursing and screaming. They ran to the safety of the woods.

Charlie, his face still full of fury, walked into the house and loaded his Belgian 12-gauge, and walked back out on the porch. He stood, patient, until he saw one of the men run for their car, and tracked him across the dark yard like he was a pheasant. There was a half-moon, not good light to shoot by, but good enough.

He squeezed the trigger and the whole house shook, and out in the yard there was a yelp, like when you step on a little dog’s tail.

“Damn, you shot me.” It was Martin’s voice.

“I shot you in the leg,” Charlie said, correcting him.

“You still shot me,” came the voice from the darkness, followed by some whimpering.

“Well, you ort not to kicked in my door,” Charlie said.

For some reason Charlie considered it a point of pride that the men not be able to get back in their car, that they had to walk home. It seemed only reasonable, perhaps, after the trouble they caused.

Finally Ava, who had undergone another sea change, walked up and herded Charlie protectively back inside.