In the Loyal Mountains (16 page)

She was the one who killed the chickens on Sundays for the big dinner after church. One of her older sisters would hold the chicken down on a tree stump, setting its neck between two nails driven into the stump, and my mother would hit the neck with the hatchet.

“One-Chop,” my mother said. “They called me One-Chop.”

We ate so much while listening to her stories. We stayed up late and ate and drank far into the night, as if trying to gain ground on some ache or loneliness that had slipped in while my parents were away. They let me drink, too; I was sixteen or seventeen by then. Zorey ate the most and drank the most. No matter how much food my mother fixed, no matter how many bottles of wine were opened, we finished everything, with Zorey leading the way. At midnight or one in the morning, we'd all be groggy and full, and stumble off to bed.

“Zorey, you were insatiable,” my father would say as he and my mother went down the hall, leaning against each other, to their bedroom. My father would look back over his shoulder and say, “Zorey, you were just an animal!” It was a joke they'd had between them for many years, a joke that began with their father. Even then, I had heard, Zorey had an enormous appetite and a brute strength; their father's nickname for him was “Animal.”

“Good night, Jackie,” my uncle would say to me, pausing at the doorway of the guest room. “Good night all.”

I remember stumbling into my room, reeling drunk, pretending I was a gut-shot actor in a western, spinning in the dark, pretending I had caught a bullet in the stomach. Clutching it with both hands, I would do a slow triple spin, all for Hollywood, and topple to the bed, land on my back, and fall instantly asleep.

 

I am a plain man. What I do for a living has little to do with the way I sometimes feel about things. I'm an accountant, and a junior one at that. I'd like to be someone with power, sweeping power, the power to change things, to right wrongs—a judge, a lawyer, a surgeon—but because I am not any of these things doesn't mean they aren't in me.

My uncle was a crook. His death was a suicide, and it came when he felt the evidence closing in. There were questions arising from (where else?) the construction companies' accounting departments; there were letters and queries from lawyers, polite at first. All of these things are in his dusty files, his long-ago files, which I felt the need to remove from his house after his death, and which I now keep in my attic. It must have been a very tough time for him near the end, with no way out. I wish that he'd never been found out, that he could have gone on forever. There was no fishing in prison, is what must have been on his mind, no woods in which to hunt, no grass airstrips to float down onto on hot June weekday afternoons.

What could he have been thinking? It is not right for me to try to guess. But it is fair for me to remember.

 

My mother might have thought it was a burden for my uncle to keep me while they were on the road. I don't think she ever realized what fun we had—my uncle and I, and then, once I hooked up with her, Spanda.

Spanda came from the wrong side of the tracks—although in Houston, at that time, there really were no tracks, literally or figuratively. She did not attend my school, and she sometimes didn't even attend her own. Spanda was not a nice girl. I thought she was lovely—and she
was
lovely—but she was a little rough, a little mean, and she did not have many odds in her favor except to be rough and mean.

My leg excited her, the shorter one. It's not proper or relevant to go into how much it excited her; it was her business and mine. But it did—she loved the leg—and though she did not love me, it was the first rime I had ever felt such a thing, someone
attracted
to my leg, and to me, and it gave me a confidence I needed badly. It didn't hurt, either, that Uncle Zorey was almost always around, his pockets bulging with dollars, like a caricature of an old-style Texan, the kind people used to love until they learned to make fun of him—generous, big-hearted, with loose money spilling from him like water. Uncle Zorey liked Spanda too, and he saw to it that she always got what she wanted when she was with me, saw to it that she was always happy.

We were both seventeen. This was clover for me. I believed in things rather than understanding them. What we are talking about here is innocence, no different from anyone else's.

Uncle Zorey was as wild as a big kid when he was away from my parents and away from his office. When I got in from school, those times I stayed at his house—which was many times that year, because my parents were traveling all the time—my uncle would change out of his suit and into a pair of old coveralls, go out to the driving range, and hit golf balls.

The driving range would be nearly empty on those afternoons, and my uncle and I were able to practice our swings in peace. There might be a woman or two—matronly, yellow-haired women, overweight, dressed in tight bermudas, with meat-eating spikes on their shoes, to better grip the earth for the long drives that seemed to give them so much pleasure. I was used to their looks—looks of pity, and what they thought was knowledge—and it was easy to ignore them.

Even hitting one-legged, as it were, even hitting off balance, I had my uncle's great, strange strength. After several weeks of practice, I was hitting the ball farther than we could have hoped for. But I could not hit it straight. With my twisting swing, I sent the ball into a wild, sail-away slice, or almost as bad, into a horrid, rocketing hook.

My uncle would sit on a soda crate, sweating, toweling his face with a handkerchief and drinking beers, which he kept in a little ice chest by his side. I would swing harder and harder, but along with my uncle's strength, I had my father's back. At times it hurt so much I wanted to tell my uncle that I didn't want to play golf anymore. But then I'd see his look of childlike expectation as he sat there on the wooden box and studied my swing, and so I took my best cut, and away the ball would soar. Sometimes I got so frustrated that I would shout as loudly as I could—at the frustration, and also at the cramps in my back—and the lady golfers would move away from us, pack up their clubs and leave. My uncle liked the shouts, and he would nod, take a sip of beer, and lean forward and hand me another bucket of golf balls.

My father was having a very good spring. He won one big local tournament, and for the first time in several years was selected to play in a prestigious tournament overseas. He was getting offers again to do endorsements, but he wisely rejected them and concentrated on his golf, and did even better.

He was often written about in the sports pages of the papers, and I was proud of him, but also felt a little guilty from all the days in school at a younger age when I tried to change his name and wished he'd competed in a sport more violent, more bloodthirsty than golf. The newspapers were always saying what a gentleman he was, what a good sport, and how he brought class to the game, class to the city.

I began to eat aspirin the way he did. My uncle never saw me doing it, but I started not long after my father won his tournament. My uncle and I stopped golfing around this time, and I felt a flood of relief. Though I may be attributing too much scheming to Zorey, I wonder now if he knew all along what he'd been doing—filling me with all that golf—eliminating all doubt, all question of what was and wasn't possible. I was delighted never to have to pick up a golf club again, delighted never to have to watch the game being played again.

 

Uncle Zorey brought Spanda home from work with him one day later that spring, saying simply that her father worked in his plant and that she was new in town, and didn't know anyone. She wanted to meet someone her own age, and so my uncle had volunteered me for the job. He hoped I didn't mind.

Lies! Many children are wise at the age of seventeen, but I was not one of them. I believed my uncle, as did so many other people. Spanda looked like an Indian, with dark eyes and long black hair. Often she wore faded blue jeans and a purple tie-dyed shirt. She never put on makeup. We got along famously from the start. It doesn't matter what I think now—wondering whether we would have gotten along so well were it not for my leg, and more importantly, for my uncle, and his money.

We played cards and listened to the radio; we went for drives with my uncle, who took us along in his truck. At night Spanda came to my room downstairs and slipped into bed with me. My uncle slept upstairs, and slept heavily. He got up only after I had left for school.

Spanda was angry at a lot of things. She had a wonderful vocabulary of curse words, which she used against any and all incarnations of the establishment: traffic lights, policemen, rainy weather. But she was never angry at me or my uncle. I felt like a hero. And I think that upstairs in his bed, as he drifted into sleep, perhaps imagining things, I think that my uncle, too, probably felt like a hero—as well he should have, as well he should have.

 

Into the hill country we'd drive, once summer came. The rough, rocky country there was in no way like the rest of Texas, certainly not like the gentle, windy gulf coast where we lived. We stayed in hotels in the German tourist towns—Fredericksburg, Boerne, New Braunfels—getting separate rooms, one for Spanda and me and one for my uncle. We stopped at beer gardens and sat outside in the shade, drinking cold beer and eating huge amounts of food, my uncle usually ordering one of everything on the menu. We would walk up and down the wide streets of the little towns, window-shopping in the dazzling heat, with hardly anyone else out, the heat far too great, and buy whatever Spanda desired, whatever my uncle saw and wanted: an old sewing machine or a rocking chair in the window of an antiques store, fresh-baked loaves of bread, a gingham dress for Spanda, a walking stick for me. Then we would put more beer in the ice chest in the back of the truck and head for the wild country. We drove up twisting white caliche roads into mountains of cedar and rock and cactus, the heat rising in shimmers and mirages, then sailed down into the small valleys between the hills, rattling across creek bottoms and high-water caution dips, through water-seeking live oaks. We barreled along, my uncle with a beer in his hand, one foot mashed on the accelerator and the other foot propped up and hanging out the window. Spanda and I would drink beers too. She sat in my lap with her arms around me, her hair swirling, her eyes fuzzy and distant, looking out at the countryside.

Roadrunners scurried across the road in front of our mad flight, and browsing herds of little deer leapt away from us in alarm, vaulting gently over barbed-wire fences and disappearing, with flagging white tails, into the thick tangled cedar. Hawks circled overhead, and vultures too. We headed for an obscure range that we knew about, a small chain of mountains in the central part of the state that was not even on the map: the Loyal Mountains.

A stream called Willow Creek flowed through the range, along which were many great boulders and sandbars and the huge, shady live oaks. Uncle Zorey drove across someone's pasture, bouncing the truck over rocks and logs, still with his foot hanging out the window, and singing “Red River Valley.” We'd drive until we couldn't go any farther, then get out and hike up the canyon, following the creek upstream to a cool spot we knew, where we could picnic, nap among sweet ferns, and go swimming in a pool beneath a small waterfall.

We'd stay until dark, drinking Jim Beam and shooting pistols—my uncle kept several in a tool chest in the truck. He'd lug the chest as though it were full of stolen gold while Spanda and I carried the ice chest. All three of us got unbelievably drunk. Spanda floated on her back in the pool, naked and sun-dappled beneath the canopy of oaks, her long hair floating all around her. Zorey sang and shot at the boulders, and the bullets ricocheted with mean, zinging whines. It was impossible to imagine what my father and mother would have thought, had they been able to see us.

“Yeah I've played the Red River Valley,” he would bray, “and sat in the kitchen and cried...”

The water was deep beneath the waterfall. Spanda and I would climb up onto the boulders above the pool, both of us naked now, and would practice our best dying-actor, shot-from-the-stagecoach falls while bullets flew around us. My uncle wasn't drunk, so much as just crazy.

Later, too tired to drink any more and too tired to attempt the long drive back to Houston, we would check into a hotel in the nearest town. Uncle Zorey would give us some money for supper and the keys to his truck, then go off to his room, where he sat up in bed with all the lights on, watching television.

Spanda and I were always ravenous after the long afternoon of play, and the drinking. With the alcohol beginning to lose its edge, we'd eat barbecue, then go back to our room as if we were adults, as if we were married—as if we had all of life figured out—and make love on and off through the night, falling into it as if diving from one of those boulders. Now that I am older and have seen more, I realize, sadly, that it was more of a dutifulness with which Spanda moved, there in the dark.

But sometimes I awakened from sleep and she would have the covers pulled back. She'd be sitting up in the bed, looking at my leg. I caught her doing this several times, and at first I was flattered, and felt special. When it happened more and more, it began to trouble me a little. Thoughts would come into my head about Spanda, and where she had come from, but they went away, or I put them away.

In these hotel rooms, right after I made love to Spanda and was about to fall asleep, I could hear the TV next door in my uncle's room. I heard the sound of the news, usually, and then my uncle's voice, talking to the person on the television. He would argue with the weatherman about the forecast, or with the sportscaster about the replay of a close play at the plate.

Once, as I lay there listening, I heard the sportscaster talking about a golf tournament, the one my father was in, and I heard my fathers name mentioned. Spanda was already asleep, and I sat up to hear better, but my uncle must have gotten up then and turned the set off. I felt bad not knowing whether my father was winning or losing.