Hillbilly Heart (6 page)

I wanted to be just like this guy. Every now and then he gave me a smoke. Or sold me one. He also introduced me to beer—little green bottles of Big-Mouth Mickeys. Sometimes we chased them with a shot of whiskey… or moonshine.

My mom usually kept a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Black Label or
Wild Turkey in the kitchen cabinet, and Cletis had a fridge in his work garage filled with a beer called Bavarian. It was the cheapest beer he could buy. But it was cold—and free!—so I helped myself.

I’d always had a daring streak, but the whiskey was like putting a match next to a can of gasoline. Toss in a soundtrack of ass-kicking southern rock with a double shot of outlaw, turned up loud, and it was a recipe for a big batch of trouble. I thought it was fun to pelt people’s homes or trailers with rotten apples or eggs at midnight. The evening wasn’t a success until I got the police to chase me. The blue lights were icing on the cake to a job well done. Mission accomplished.

Without my papaw or church in my life, I didn’t have any fear of consequences. One of my favorite activities was streaking. As soon as I heard about this fad of people running out in public without any clothes, I jumped on the bandwagon. I ran all over Flatwoods. I even went to Hills department store and bought Ray Stevens’s record “The Streak,” which became my national anthem.

My friend Robbie was usually running alongside me; other times it was Joe Preston or another buddy named Jeff Vest. I ran through the middle of town; people laughed and screamed. It was fun to see how far I could get running naked before the cops gave chase. That was the goal. To get chased.

We did get caught one time, me and Joe. We told the cops our clothes were in the woods. They knew who we were; we had a reputation. Laughing, they let us get our jeans and T-shirts before driving us back to my papaw’s house, where my grandmother still lived.

“Cyrus, don’t let us catch you hanging out in town again,” one of the cops said.

“Literally,” the other one cracked.

Despite the warning, my wild side and petty vandalism continued. I threw eggs, tomatoes, and persimmons (when in season) at homes and trailers. The sound of persimmons bursting as they smashed against the outside of a trailer sounded similar to a gunshot. If we threw them fast enough, we could approximate the sound of a machine gun—or so we imagined.

Then I started to shoplift. We had three department stores nearby, Hills, Hecks, and K-Mart. My frequent partner in this crime was a friend from the football team. He was the kicker and I was the holder. We were already a duo of sorts. When the weather turned cold, we wore large down coats that we called puff jackets.

“You got your puff jacket?” was code for “Let’s go steal stuff.” We slipped whatever we could inside those jackets and walked out of the store as if we weren’t able to find what we’d wanted. This was my acting debut; I just didn’t know it. We were loaded down with 45s, LPs, and damn near anything else we wanted. We got so skilled that we took orders from our buddies and sold the stuff back to them at a discounted rate. We considered ourselves redneck Robin Hoods.

Robbie only came with us one time, but it turned out the one thing he wasn’t good at was shoplifting. We went to K-Mart, and he also wore his puff jacket and he put a bunch of stuff in it. I was on lookout at the front door when I heard our gambit announced over the loudspeaker: “Shoplifter. Aisle 12.” Then an update. “He’s at aisle 10 now. It’s a man in a blue jacket.” Then: “He’s headed toward the side door and throwing stuff from the jacket.”

That’s when we took off. Robbie managed to escape through the parking lot, and we picked him up down the road where there were no lights. He was wet and sweaty from running his ass off and he looked scared to death. As he caught his breath, Robbie swore he’d never shoplift again.

One weekend I was having dinner with my dad at his house. It was just the two of us. Kebo had graduated high school and was off doing his own thing now, and I can’t remember where Angie, Joan, and Mammie were that night. My dad and I were talking, when I heard Clyde and Jimmy yelling outside. They were too far away for me to understand what they were saying. I went to the window and saw them running across our horse pasture as hard and as fast as they could.

“Look there,” I said. “Clyde and Jimmy are having a race.”

My dad turned around and looked.

“No, it seems like something might be wrong, Bo,” my dad said.

I stepped outside to holler at them, and that’s when I understood their scream: “Our house is on fire! Our house is on fire!”

“Dad, their house is on fire!” I yelled. “Call the fire department!”

I shot into the backyard and joined them in the field. We turned around and ran back up the creek to their house. We raced through a hollow, through the creek bed, and along a path that wound back to where two Appalachian foothills came together. When we finally got there, we saw that their wooden house was ablaze. The sun was setting; we were literally in a valley of shadows. Their house, which dated back to the 1880s, was a fiery hell. I had never seen anything like it.

As we got closer, I heard something that sounded like a young girl’s voice. The voice was faint, and creepy, like something out of a scary movie, but I could clearly hear the words: “Help me. Help me, Mommy.” I looked around for Clyde and Jimmy and found them over to the side, counting all their brothers and sisters.

“Everyone there?” I yelled.

“Yep,” Clyde said, adding to his parents, “Daddy? Mama? You OK?”

Then where the hell was that little girl’s voice coming from? When we were younger, Kebo and I would camp out in our barn with Clyde and Jimmy, and they frequently told us about a ghost that lived in their house.

“Last night the ghost came downstairs and took all the clothes that Mama had for Sissy and Bubba out to the well,” Calvin once said.

“And hung ’em on the clothesline,” Jimmy had added.

“Y’all are just trying to scare us,” I’d said.

Another time, Clyde and Jimmy said their father saw a Ford Model T from the late ’20s driving up the creek one night. I investigated and I found a carving of a Model T etched deep in the bark of a huge old beech tree by the creek. When I showed my dad, he shrugged it off.

“Oh, you know Clyde,” he said. “One night he might see a pink elephant and carve that into a tree. Given how he’s been known to have a little drinkie-winkie, he’s liable to see anything.”

Maybe so, but that still didn’t explain the voice I’d heard in the fire. Nor would I get an explanation that night. The fire trucks were unable to get up the hollow and Clyde and Jimmy’s house burned till there was nothing left. I waited for my dad to say something about this tragedy, something that would make sense out of it. I wanted him to at least tell me that Clyde and Jimmy and their family would be OK.

Instead, we sat up late that night, just me and my dad, not saying much of anything. Johnny Carson came on TV, and we watched him together as we always did on the rare occasions when we were in the same house, in the same room, at the same time. But this time we never laughed, not once.

When the show ended, my dad turned off the TV and we sat in the dark, enveloped by stillness of the night, the absolute quiet. Finally, my dad got up to go to bed, without mentioning anything about what had happened earlier. I was surprised. It was the only time my dad didn’t seem to know what to say, though now, as a father myself, I realize he’d said it all.

Sometimes silence speaks louder than words.

CHAPTER 5

A Higher Authority

K
IMMY BLEDSOE WAS MY
very first girlfriend. We started dating when I was three years old. I’m serious. Her family lived in the house next door to mine and that wasn’t close enough for us. We weren’t happy unless we were sitting on the sofa next to each other. We shared a little stuffed monkey that we referred to as our baby and took it into the woods, where we pretended we had a house of our own.

One day, a couple years into our friendship, I came out of the woods and my dad said, “Where have you been, son?”

“I was down in the woods, kissing Kimmy,” I said.

“Where did you kiss her at?” he asked.

“Down the woad,” I said, my speech impeded then by a few missing teeth.

“No, where did you kiss her at? On the lips?”

“No. Down in the woad, tupid.”

My dad loved that story and told it for years, always laughing as he recalled asking me where I had kissed her and then embellishing with an exaggerated accent, “Down in the woad,
tupid.
” But that romance ended when Kimmy and her family moved the summer before first grade. After that, I was unattached until I was eight or nine and noticed Regina Carroll had grown some boobies.

Starting in third grade, we were on-again-off-again boyfriend and girlfriend. Sometimes we were just friends. We played football or basketball together. By junior high, she had turned into an exceptional athlete (and would go on to star on every team in high school and stand out at the University of Kentucky). On Friday nights, we roller-skated at the local rink and held hands. Afterward, I walked her home, and somewhere between the rink and her house we’d end up in the woods, fooling around.

She taught me a lot. I’m not sure I taught her anything except that she could jump higher than me and shoot better.

My mantra was “play it by ear,” and that’s how it was with me and sex. It kind of happened, and I learned.

By fifteen, though, Regina and I stopped kissing each other (with a few exceptions, just because it was fun). I had a few different girlfriends in high school, but not anybody steady until the end of the summer between my sophomore and junior year. That’s when Susie Secrest not only entered my life but also took it over.

She was younger than me, coming up from the eighth grade to be a high school freshman, and she put out the word that she had a crush on me and wanted to date me. Up till then, I had never been in love. I didn’t have time for that foolishness. Oh, I might meet someone at the pizza shop or roller rink every now and then and have a game of hide-the-weenie. But that was it. Then it was back to work.

At first I felt that Susie was too young and flat-out wrong for me. She was from a religious family in a prosperous neighborhood called Kenwood, and I was from the other woods, Flatwoods. There was a difference. I knew her parents wouldn’t dig me. But that didn’t matter to Susie. She was smart and persistent.

It was August, and I was in the middle of two-a-day football practices before the school year started. I played defensive and offensive end. Robbie Tooley was the center. We worked out in the morning and then again late in the afternoon. It was hot and humid, temperatures routinely soaring into the nineties and hundreds. As far as I was concerned, the tougher the conditions, the better I liked
it—except wearing a helmet and chin strap in that heat made my face break out something terrible.

One day after practice, I looked up and saw Susie staring at me. She was blonde, with brown eyes, and she’d made the cheerleading team as a freshman. She stepped forward without my noticing and was straddling the front tire of my bike, a leg on both sides.

At first, all I saw was a pair of hot-pink gym shorts right in front of me, at eye level. As far as I was concerned, I was looking at the most beautiful, sexiest thing I’d ever seen in my life.

“Please, Bo, won’t you take me to my street,” she said, motioning to my dirt bike. “I won’t cause you any trouble. No one will ever know.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What if your mom and dad drive by? Or someone they know?”

“No one will find out. Just ride me to my street.”

I had no willpower at this point. I surrendered. The word
no
disappeared from my vocabulary.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, and it was game over.

We stopped along the way in the woods and kissed, and between then and dropping her off, I fell in love.

Even though I had strong feelings for Susie, I still played hard to get through most of my junior year. Susie was a good girl; I was from the wrong side of the tracks, and I wanted to spare her and her wonderful family the heartache and disappointment of a doomed relationship. I didn’t see how we could possibly work as a couple.

I had other reasons, too, and I couldn’t articulate them other than to know that Susie was such a good girl and I had some issues. Here’s the proof: A few days before Christmas, I stole a 3-D picture of Jesus from Hills department store and gave it to my grandmother Mamaw Cyrus for Jesus’s birthday. She loved it! Thank God she didn’t ask where I bought it so I didn’t have to lie to her.

I still don’t know how I could’ve stolen it in the first place and then given it to her. Anything would’ve been better than a 3-D Jesus. What had happened to my conscience? Had my spirit left me?

My heart was in the right place. I wanted to give my mamaw that magnificent three-pronged spectacle of Jesus on the cross, the Lord’s supper, and then I think if you moved in one more direction he was kneeling at the rock. You can understand why she loved it—and why I felt terrible.