Hillbilly Heart (9 page)

My plan was to take him back to Flatwoods and give him to Ruthie, who’d never met a stray she didn’t adore. But the day before I went back home, I returned to my dorm after class and found a crowd of students waiting for me in the lobby.

“They killed your dog,” someone said.

“What? What are you talking about?” I said.

Someone had reported me for having a pet in my room, which was against school policy. Instead of coming to me for an explanation, the campus police had broken into my room, taken the puppy, and put it down. I immediately went to their headquarters, where I was directed to the head cop, who was expecting me.

“Rules are rules,” he said. “We can’t let you be an exception. If we did, what good is it having the rules in the first place?”

“So I’m an example?” I said, holding back my anger.

“That’s one way to see it,” he said. “Another way is that you broke the rules.”

“So you killed the puppy?”

“Thank you, son,” he said. “You’re excused.”

That night I made the rounds at all the fraternity parties on campus, and when I was good and soused, I got into my blue Camaro and headed for the dean’s house. I drove right onto her perfectly manicured front lawn, gunned the gas pedal, and proceeded to execute a series of spectacular loop-de-loos. Let’s just say that when I was finished, the dean’s yard was no longer the garden spot of Morehead State University.

The following Monday morning, I was summoned to the dean’s office. She was sitting behind a gleaming wood desk. Behind her was a wall of diplomas and awards. She motioned for me to sit and waited a moment or two before cutting to the chase.

“Mr. Cyrus, did you tear up my yard on Friday night?” she asked.

“Yes, I did,” I said, calmly. “Did you kill my dog?”

“We had to,” she said. “You broke our policy against keeping pets in the dorm.”

“Killing that dog was against my policy, ma’am,” I said.

She shook her head as if I didn’t understand. But it was clear
she
didn’t understand.

“Mr. Cyrus,” she said, “on account of your actions you may no longer continue as a student here at Morehead State.”

I stood up.

“That’s fine with me,” I said.

As I reached the door, I turned to her for one last jab. “I guess you’re the reason they call this place ‘moor head.’ You earned that name, didn’t you?” I had never said anything that harsh before. But she deserved it. Then I walked out, not knowing what was next but damn sure that I would find a better place.

CHAPTER 7

“My Buddy”

W
ITH MY NINETEENTH BIRTHDAY
just around the corner, I was back in my old bedroom on Long Street and taking courses at Ashland Community College, a branch of the University of Kentucky. Susie was ten minutes down the road at Russell.

It was all good, I suppose. But things felt different. Not in a bad way. They were just different.

Just before spring, I got a job managing the campground at Greenbo Lake, one of the most picturesque spots in the area. To get there, you had to go up one Appalachian mountain, then down to the lake, around a half horseshoe-like shore, up another mountain, and then you dropped down to a little piece of land where there was a boat dock and the entrance to the campground.

Since not many people went camping before summer, I usually had the remote location to myself. I was stationed inside a ten-by-ten shack, a tiny wood building with a couple of small glass windows that let me deal with approaching cars. I also stored the clubs and balls for the miniature golf course, where I played whenever I had the chance.

Mostly it was too cold out there for anyone trying to keep warm. The wind would come howling off that lake. I kept a tiny electric
heater going. Despite the chill, it was a cozy setup. It felt like my camp, and I liked being out there by myself.

I did have a phone in the station in case I needed to get in touch with someone or vice versa. It was old and black, government-issued from the ’60s. An operator connected all calls in and out. Susie would call me every day around lunchtime from the pay phone at school. We would catch up and make plans to see each other later on.

One night I was running late, and I stopped at the state park’s main lodge to turn in the money and receipts I’d collected from the miniature golf course. They had a small souvenir section inside, and on my way out, I picked up a stuffed bunny to give to Susie. Since the office was closed, I couldn’t pay for it. I made a mental note to pay the next time I saw someone behind the counter.

I hurried to my car, which happened to be my dad’s four-door Cadillac; I’d borrowed it that day. It was about 10 p.m., and Susie’s parents wouldn’t let me see her after eleven. I knew if I drove fast, I could make it to her house in about twenty minutes. So I went flying down the two-lane highway leading out of the area, and lo and behold, a drunk driver came down the road on the wrong side, headed straight for me. I swerved to the side and went spinning down a modest slope. My head went through the window and I got beat up pretty bad. I still have a scar on the middle of my hand where a vein was cut.

I staggered out of the wreckage, looked around and saw a trailer nearby. I knocked on the door and next thing I knew, I was in the back of an ambulance, heading to the hospital. As I lay on the gurney, with EMT workers cleaning my wounds and wrapping me in bandages, I heard a voice: “Cyrus, both of us know you stole the rabbit. But because you said you were going to pay for it later, it was a kind of gray area.”

The circumstances were different the next time I was racing along those roads. It was April 1980, and the first blush of spring was evident across the landscape. I was late for work at the lake, hence the
reason I was driving fast. I had turned from Route 207, a connector road that led from Flatwoods to Argillite, onto Route 1 and I was trying to make up time when I saw a nice car stopped on the side of the road. Standing next to it was an older man. He had white hair and was in a suit.

Despite my hurry, I stopped and rolled down my window. You never know on those country roads.

“Sir, are you OK?” I asked.

“Yes, I’m all right,” he said.

He looked at me kind of funny.

“Say, ain’t you that Cyrus boy?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“It’s unusual for a person your age to help a man in need, don’t you think?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“Well, I find that’s a unique quality in a human being,” he continued.

“I just wanted to make sure you were OK,” I said.

“Actually, I stopped to admire the cattle over there,” he said, pointing off to a hilly pasture where a herd of cows were grazing on fresh spring grass. “I’d like to ask you something, son.”

“Yes, sir?”

“You gave me something when you stopped here,” he said. “You gave me your time. The fact that you cared whether I was OK speaks volumes about your character. That’s a rare quality, son.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s just how I was raised.”

“Well, I’ve been around a little longer than you, and I think it is. And I want to give you something in return. How would you like to know the secret that could lead you to see, have, or do anything you want in this world?”

Inside, I was thinking
Hell yes! What’s the catch?
Outwardly, I was more polite and restrained.

“I would love that, sir,” I said. “It sounds incredibly exciting. What do I do?”

“Good, very good,” he said, offering a hint of smile, before introducing himself as Dr. H. V. Bailey, a local chiropractor. “My office is right down on Argillite Road. As a matter of fact, I started renting the place in 1950 from your grandfather. You can’t miss it. You come by next Wednesday at five p.m.”

“I’ll be there, sir,” I said.

For some reason, I never doubted Dr. Bailey’s credibility or intent. If the same thing happened to me today, I probably would have written him off. But something he said turned my brain on. For the first time in my life, I was hungry to learn. Basically, I was in from the start. And when I showed up at his office the following week, Dr. Bailey’s last patient was on his way out. Dr. Bailey greeted me warmly, led me into his office, and presented me with a book,
Think and Grow Rich,
by Napoleon Hill. Hill was a newspaper reporter and motivational speaker from southwest Virginia who published his bestselling book in 1937. It went on to become one of the bestselling books of all time.

I stared at the cover almost as if it were a foreign object. Dr. Bailey was the first person who ever gave me a book. While I flipped through the pages, he explained the process of positive thinking and visualization that formed the basis of the book. He reiterated the message: I could achieve whatever I wanted with the techniques in the book. As we talked, I let him know I was ready. I kept waiting for Dr. Bailey to share some Yoda-type line that would instantly unlock the secret, but it turned out the wisdom was in learning the lessons and committing to them.

We started studying
Think and Grow Rich
together, as we would weekly for the next few months, reading each chapter together and discussing the passages we’d read. I copied key lines in a notebook and memorized important passages. Like “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” Or “What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” Or “As a man thinks in his heart and in his soul, so is he.” It all came down to this: thoughts are things. I had never been much of a reader, but this book obviously struck a nerve, as did Dr. Bailey. I had a pretty realistic view on my own life—the anger and
shame I’d buried, having come from a family split by divorce—and I wanted, more than anything, to figure out a way to do better. According to Dr. Bailey, this book,
Think and Grow Rich,
was the way.

As I was studying, Robbie returned to Flatwoods, but he was extremely ill. He’d gotten into harder drugs and somehow contracted severe hepatitis. I was shocked when I saw him in the hospital. He was emaciated. He’d lost a ton of weight. His body mass was gone, and so was his passion for life. His latest girlfriend had left, he’d lost his scholarship, and he’d been expelled from school. Everything had crashed down around him, he said.

On my next visit, I brought him a
Playboy
magazine. I should have brought a Bible, or even
Think and Grow Rich.
But I didn’t. I still regret that choice. I just thought the
Playboy
would lift his spirits. He loved girls. Oh man, did he love pretty women.

“Man, you’re the only person who’s visited me,” he said. “The only one. When I get out of here, I’m going to go to church and get me a good girlfriend like you’ve got.”

“You can do that,” I said. “That’d be a good idea.”

“When I get out of here, me and you will start working out again,” he said. “We’ll go back and hit the weights hard, like we used to.”

“Definitely,” I agreed.

I told him that I’d gotten into canoeing and had competed in a couple of contests. His face brightened. He wanted to go with me.

After he got out of the hospital, we canoed down the Little Sandy River and had a great time, even after it began to rain. It was a warm shower, the kind that feels good. We came upon a little bank where we found an old wooden swing attached to a tree. As we swung over the water and dropped in, a violent electrical storm filled the sky with thunder and lightning, and we laughed at it. We knew that we were flirting with danger, but we had been through worse. Plus, the risk made it fun.

We talked about God and what life was like without being all messed up. I said that I was really happy, and Robbie seemed genuinely happy to hear it.

We got back in the canoe and finished our trip. A ways down the river, Robbie spotted a glass pint of Jim Beam that someone had tossed into the shitty-ass mud of the bank. Who knows how long it had been there. The bottle was covered with moss. But there were a couple of swigs left in the bottle. Robbie held it up.

“Want a hit?” he asked.

“No,” I laughed.

He cranked the lid off and slugged it down. I didn’t know whether that was cool or desperate. But that was Robbie.

A couple of days later, I was in the middle of my shift at Greenbo Lake when the phone rang. It was Susie.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“At the campground,” I said. “You just called me here.”

I could hear people in the background screaming or crying. I couldn’t tell which it was, but I could tell wherever she was it was pretty chaotic.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Are you sitting down?” she said.

“I can be. Do I need to?”

“Yes,” she said, her voice sounding wobbly. “You need to sit down.”

I pulled a little stool up close to the phone.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” I said. “You’re scaring me.”

“They just found Robbie Tooley dead in his basement,” she said. “They say he killed himself.”

“What? I don’t think I heard you right. What’d you say?”

“Robbie,” she said. “He committed suicide. They found him in the basement.”

If Susie kept talking, I didn’t hear her. I dropped the receiver, picked up a golf club and started swinging it against the shack. Glass shattered. I swung it again and more glass shattered. I did it again and the cash register exploded. Then I busted the phone. More glass broke, half a wall came down, and I was steadily beating that shack to the ground when I saw a car coming off the far hill.
Soon a state park ranger pulled up in front of the destroyed shack. I was standing in the middle of the rubble, holding a golf club.