Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (32 page)

The jacket choice confirmed Calvin's horrified suspicions. His invisible mouth reared open in inaudible yell. Into his blue uniform,
Theodore Munney wiggled, the fabric straining a little across his shoulders, and with a deep breath, Theodore puffed his breast, brushed phantom epaulets, and reshouldered his gun. Then Theodore Munney and Calvin were slamming out the screen door.

The blue jacket rooster-stepped across the yard, Calvin towed behind like a hobo bundle. Past the possum pans, the Cub Cadet, past the dingy white blossom of the Arts Channel–snagging satellite dish. Theodore Munney scrambled up the railroad embankment, dropping the .30-30 diagonally across his hands the way the Seasoned Woodsman had instructed him to carry it when crossing fences. Through the roar in Calvin's ears penetrated the report of an upriver cannon. The battle reenactment was well under way. Facing calamity, Calvin's brain shimmered with an acuity it hadn't had since 1979, but Theodore could not hear Calvin's desperate shouts, could not see his flailing hands. Once they reached the railroad ties, they pivoted again, to face upriver. Another cannon boomed. And Theodore Munney, Calvin Bergdoll tethered to his collar, marched to the cornfield to defend the Union.

ROCKHOUNDS

J
OS HAD FOUND
it first. Went out early that morning to the flat place by the creek where she practiced and saw straightaway the orange dirt they'd laid over the hole ripped up and sprayed. Without getting close enough to tell if the little body was gone, she wheeled and ran to the house to fetch her uncle. If they had to break more bad news to her grandfather, they could break it slow. But she and Uncle Derek weren't halfway back to the grave when they heard the door whine open behind them. Granddad had sniftered it without being told.

When they saw for sure the hole was empty, Uncle Derek shook his head. “Must have been coyotes.” He said it “kai oats,” which was how Granddad would say it, not how Uncle Derek, who had been to college, did. Joslin held her soccer ball between her elbow and ribs. She looked up at her grandfather, saw on his cheek the red webs brightening, and she pulled her head, just a little, back into her hood.

“Yep. Coyotes dug er up and drug er off.” And that was all Granddad said.

They'd buried the little dog just the afternoon before, her granddad praying over her for a long time when they did. They'd waited until Jos got home from school, but not because she'd asked them to. It wasn't
a funeralish day. Late bright October and the kind of blue like if you struck the sky with a pipe it would ring. “That curly dog,” her grandma called Goldy; her grandma didn't much care one way or another, but her granddad doted on her. “Cuddle Dog” was Granddad's nickname, and Goldy was the only thing Joslin'd ever seen her grandfather hug. When she'd first come to stay with her grandparents five years ago while her mother got her life together, Goldy slept with Joslin every night until Granddad's bedtime. Then Granddad would shuffle into Jos's room, trying so hard to keep quiet he'd wake Jos with the effort. He'd pull Cuddle Dog by her armpits out from under Jos's covers and stow her in his own bed, where she slept on a pillow beside his head. Grizzled gold against grizzled black.

A little over a week ago, Goldy had looked at her food and looked away. Grandma said leave her be, she'll eat when she's hungry, but Granddad slipped her Penrose sausages and tuna until Goldy cared not even for those. By the fourth day, there was talk of taking her to the vet, but as usual, the consensus was wait and see. Mentioning cost would have been like saying there was dirt in the yard. Her uncle, when things became clear, at least to him, took hold the bigger younger dog, a lab mix named Bunker, and chained him to a pin oak behind the house. “It was the creek water got Goldy,” Uncle Derek told Jos. “We don't keep Bunker tied, we'll lose him, too.”

Anytime a person stepped out of the house, Bunker bolted to his chain end and danced on hind legs, baffled, but optimistic and eager to forgive. He spent the rest of his time wrapping himself around the tree and knocking his water pan dry. Every time Derek drove away from the house, Granddad unclasped the chain. Every time her uncle got home and found Bunker loose, he'd catch him and tie him back up. Neither her granddad nor her uncle said a word to the other about it. Joslin tried to keep the water pan full.

Still in her school clothes for the funeral, Jos'd stood behind the dug-up dirt pile while Uncle Derek carried Goldy to her grave wrapped in a bleach-splotched blue towel. Jos kept her head bowed, scared to look, then guilty that she felt more afraid than sad. Granddad wore the pressed red-checked shirt that reminded her of a cowboy, his hands clasped reverently below his dress belt buckle, a steel rope lasso that looked also like a snake. When Goldy'd first vanished, Granddad immediately named the pony shed, and when Uncle Derek found Goldy stiff behind a pile of pallets there, Joslin wasn't surprised. Granddad's snifters were almost always right. From the edge of her eye, Jos watched Derek lay the blue towel bundle down.

“Open it up,” Granddad said.

Uncle Derek hesitated. Jos could see Bunker watching, stock-still on his haunches at the end of his chain. Then Derek unfolded the top like giving Goldy a breath before she went under, and as he did, Jos finally felt it. A sharp high ache in her fingers. An unswallowable stone lodged in her throat. She forced her gaze to Goldy's head, Goldy's tongue poking out the side of her teeth in a way Goldy never did, but when she reached Goldy's eyes, the shock took her breath. They had no more Goldy in them than a black beetle's back. Instantly the sadness dissolved, leaving Jos a little stunned by its going. Her unable to cry for what was left, and weirdly unable to recall, though it'd been just three days, what had gone.

After the hole was filled and Granddad said the prayers, her uncle turned back to the house. Jos did, too.

“Help me pretty it up with some rocks, Jos.”

Her grandfather was already shambling towards the creek bank. These days even on level ground he walked always like he was stepping out of something sticky, and Jos followed behind. He made it safely to the rock bar, where he squatted himself like a stubborn folding chair
and began to sort, culling rocks round and smooth, about the size, Jos noticed, of Goldy's paws. He'd collected rocks that caught his fancy since he was a boy, and when Jos was younger and his body sounder, they'd look for them on their walks. “I'm just an old rockhound,” he often said. Most of his finds he stored in shoeboxes, but his favorites he displayed in the twins' old room where he now slept, the rocks on the blotter of their homework desk. When she was littler, Jos visited the rocks often. Tiptoed in and pressed her chest against the desk, placed her fingers in the fossil prints and stroked the ridges shells had left.

Now she filled her hoodie pockets. The cool rolling out the hollow mouth called the smells from the ground, rotting oak leaves, groundhog shale. She pressed a rock under her nose. Odor of creek water on it, so different from the smell of a rock in the woods. Twice they clambered up to the grave where Jos did like Granddad did, working each stone carefully into the dirt until the grave was ringed all around.

Finally Granddad wiped his hands on the seat of his pants. Jos brushed hers. She looked back at the creek, reflecting like aluminum in what little light was left. The creek water looked the same as it always had.

IT'D BEEN SIX
months since her uncle'd come back in a Honda Civic that'd been wrecked at least twice but still ran. Wisconsin tags. Montana bumper stickers. He'd come back with a ring in his nose that he'd since taken out, but Jos couldn't help staring at the hole, especially during meals, when it turned her stomach a little. A good bit younger than her mother, he'd been born when her grandparents were almost old, and that was part of why he'd been so spoiled, her mother'd told her. All of Joslin's nine years he'd been away, appearing only at Christmas and now and again for a week in the summer. Most of those years, he'd been “out West,” and before that he'd been to college, the second in
the family to go and the first to finish, Joslin knew because now she was expected to go and finish, too.

“Although you wouldn't know it to look at him,” her grandma'd say about the college. Him in jeans that looked slick from lack of washing, worn out around the hip pockets with his underwear showing through. Coffee-stained thermal shirts and floppy black hair without direction unless he rubberbanded it back in the tiniest of ponytails. Sometimes he'd not bathe for a solid week, and this outraged her grandma, who'd grown up without plumbing and kept herself and her house vengefully clean. But Joslin thought she understood. A group of college kids had driven down from Massachusetts last spring to work in Booker Hollow, where poor people lived. Jos's church had sponsored them for a dinner. The college kids came looking and smelling much like Uncle Derek, and her grandma's friends were still talking about one girl who appeared to have half-dried pee dribbling down her leg.

Like Grandma, Uncle Derek was no smiler, and like Granddad, he angered quick as a yellow jacket, but unlike Granddad, Derek carried inside some kind of reservoir that could fuel a fury forever. At first Jos figured he was mean and kept her distance, but soon she learned he'd also gotten Grandma's give-you-the-shirt-off-her-back. A little longer, and she saw he had too Granddad's mushiness under the crust, although Joslin had lived with that long enough to be far more leery of it than of Grandma's steady hard. Uncle Derek knew nothing about soccer; they didn't have that here when he was a kid, but he'd play it with her anyway even though she was better at it than him. Once he got used to her, he'd sometimes take her with him to town, where she'd fool with the library computers while he keyboarded furiously on his laptop. He helped her find soccer sites and soccer books, and it was Uncle Derek bought her the first pack of animal wristbands to be seen in her school after he learned about them from the son of a friend
in Pittsburgh. In the evenings, especially when it started getting cool, the old people monopolizing the television, Joslin took to doing her homework on his bed, him busy on the laptop or with his magazines and flyers and books.

It was there in his childhood room in early September not long after school started that he'd explained it to her. Before that, of course, Joslin understood he was in an ongoing, unspoken rage at her grandparents, but her mother was angry at them always too and never with a reason that made sense, so Jos thought little of it. What did unsettle her was his bitterness towards the Hackerts, who had two girls younger than Joslin and lived on the mountain above. She and Sylvie Hackert played on the same soccer team. The Hackerts gave her rides to practices and games. Usually when their name came up he'd just snake-spit under his breath, but that afternoon, he'd blown. By the time Joslin got down to the kitchen to hear better what was going on, her grandma'd shut him down.

“Now don't you be badmouthing the Hackerts!” Her voice with the tremolo it got when she really meant business. “As good as they've been to Joslin. Me and your daddy can't be doing all that running around anymore.” But Derek was already slamming the front door so hard the photos on the TV toppled, then Joslin heard the Honda throwing gravel behind it.

Shortly after, Addley from down the road dropped in like he often did, always right around time to refuse supper. He'd sit back along the wall with his chair tipped forward while her grandma'd beg him to eat, and just when they were ready to clear the table, Addley'd inevitably give in.

“You know the business sense Gary Hackert's got,” her granddad was saying to him. Granddad's jaws worked his chicken patty twice as hard as they had to and Jos could see the red webs showing themselves
on his cheek and the one side of his nose. “If he thinks it's the smart thing to do. . . . Why not have the property bring in a little income for a change?”

“You're right, Lloyd. You're exactly right,” said Addley. Jos prodded a green bean, dull as straw, her grandma having left out the bacon grease because Uncle Derek wouldn't eat meat. The land man had come while she was at school, two years ago, but she did know now, after overhearing Granddad and Addley at dinners before Derek'd come home, that the Hackerts had come to the house with the land man. The land company wanted every acre they leased to touch. The Hackerts' hundreds. Her grandparents' twenty-seven.

“We can no longer be dependent on foreign oil,” her granddad went on in the tone he used to quote TV news and the Bible. “The country needs natural gas. Energy independence.”

Addley made his whole chair nod. “You're right, Lloyd. You're exactly right.”

“Our young men and women being sent overseas to die for oil. It's a tragedy.”

“You're right, Lloyd. Buddy, you are right.”

Jos took a long look at Addley. The bottom half of his face was twice as long as the top, out of balance even by horse standards. Although Derek's name was never spoken, Addley knew it was against Derek Granddad was defending himself. Because Addley could not stand Derek, an arrogant enigma, and because Granddad wouldn't abide Addley speaking outright against his son, Addley was savoring this conversation like a pup rolling in a dead deer.

“He needs to find himself a woman and settle down,” Addley declared. Granddad ignored this.

“I can show you the lease, Addley. It talks about the United States' energy independence right on it.” Joslin had seen the lease herself, a
photocopy Derek had made at the library after sneaking the original out of Granddad's files. In the upper right-hand corner was stamped a small American flag in a frozen ripple. “And it's not like they're gonna strip-mine it or something. This ain't southern West Virginia.”