Welcome to Braggsville (35 page)

He didn't. Not only did he not remember, he didn't believe it had happened. Just like he hadn't remembered half the things his mother made him write in his college admissions letters. He was of late suspicious of the longstanding wild divergences in the family's accounts of history, of the entire town's, really, of wrongheaded answers to unasked questions, of the subjectivity of it all. Subjectivity. An angel poking a hole in the plastic bag pulled tight as air over your head. A finger in the sky pointing not to some promised land, some high school fantasy, but to your heart, affirming that what you feel is true. A message from God. As real as a strawberry, and just as magical. Christ! Of course Nietzsche grew a burl. Daron felt his own knar growing, grubbing, fingering his being like a pimp, saw that this subjectivity had not been the dance it felt that morning in class—him being set free—but more like him being let go, or worse yet, him letting go without realizing it. So that as his mother spoke—this woman who he had always thought did not understand him—he feared, as he listened, that
he
in fact did not understand her, and the latter was more frightening. So that now, as she spoke, arms at her side, blond hair kinked and corkscrewed (when had that begun?), shoulders down, confessional in all ways, he worried that he had never understood a thing. So that as she spoke, he listened anew.

Remember what you said? Why learn to do a job? Why commit your brain to making someone else rich? Remember? Her speech blossomed into sermon. You were out back with me, it was the year we planted the pears, it was the first summer you could have worked in their little apprentice program at the hotbox. It was the last summer you worked in the yard with me. You were thirteen. You won the debate championship. You refused to hunt. I was so proud. I didn't think I could be any prouder of you until the moment you spoke up about that job. That's why your father went back to school. Of course
he'll never admit that. Don't you remember? She wasn't asking. She was insisting. Remember?

Except for being called Buttercup after some kids from school saw him gardening, he didn't remember, but he uncrossed his own arms, willing to believe, damned desperate to remember it, desperate as a man stranded at sea struggling to get his bearings when he's only energy enough to swim to a shore unseen. Then he noticed the lock.

He tells her . . . that when he was in the garage talking to his mom this morning, the loft door was mysteriously padlocked, a security measure typically instituted only during that secretive season between Black Friday and Christmas, a month during which he scaled the support beams daily, ticktacking between two columns as if climbing in a chimney, inching his way along a four-foot crossbeam while hanging by his hands only, and hoisting himself at last over the loft knee wall with a grunt of pride and a soft, singing ache in the arms. He'd had imagination enough to make the climb at eight, limbs long enough at ten, hands strong enough at twelve. In addition to the pride that accompanied the exertion, the climb was one secret he didn't think his parents had ever sussed out. That was reason enough to continue the tradition.

He tells her . . . that tonight he announced his early retirement at the dinner table, soliciting both a welcome smile and a lingering look of concern—neither from whom he'd expected them—and retreated to his room, where he sat in the closet until he heard his parents leave, first the hum of the garage door retracting, followed by the Bronco easing out and dipping its toes in the dirt, patient as a sated retiree on a postmeal constitutional. He waited ten minutes after the whine of the tires was muzzled by safe distance to make his way to the garage. If his parents had not returned by then, as his mother always joked, Anything left behind has missed the ark.

He tells her . . . not . . . about why he had the house to himself for a couple of hours of essential isolation. Mother was going to make
groceries, as of late always at night, always one town over because, Queuing ain't cool; Produce is restocked second shift; Sun's so much milder after sunset. (Throat clearing? Sun after sunset? Cough-cough? She means humidity.) On her way to the big cold box, she would drop his father off, To go factoring, as he used to say. He hadn't said that for over a decade, not since eight-year-old D'aron, aka Mr. Hanky, bka Faggot, begged his father to visit his social studies class on Parents' Day. His father pinched his left nostril to clear the right, said no one wanted to hear about factoring, yanked his waxy brogan laces tight as a tourniquet. Back then, when D'aron was in third grade, both parents worked nights, which he understood to mean that they worked in a graveyard. He had prided himself on this fact, on his parents' valor and wisdom, their necessary intimacy with night rangers and the Holler's other bedizened denizens, their familiarity with the many charms and amulets certainly required to hold at bay the mad ether, just as guns, germs, and steel held at uneasy remove societal collapse. He imagined them as characters in Nana's favorite cartoon, one where a Saint Bernard and a coyote spent the day tormenting each other with pranks and insults only to clock out at dinner time and clap hands like rival ballers after a game, and then walk home shoulder to shoulder, their steps and smiles as steady, and their laughter as companionable, as those of brothers-in-arms. And those nights when his father sat on the back porch playing Tool and staring into the Holler, the Holler stared back with an equal measure of affinity. Everybody knew their place, and felt not shackled but swaddled. In those days the narrow garage storage loft was a kingdom of treasures.

Tonight, though, tonight in the garage, after he scaled the support beams to the loft, Daron found a peculiar trove, he found, in a manner of speaking, Jo-Jo, and all else he had hidden, or asked his parents to hide, as well as dozens of small items he had not thought to ask them to tuck away, which explained Old Hitch's General Lee
flyswatter, the Confederate place mats, the picture of Bugs Bunny from
Southern Fried Rabbit
. Of these, neither his mother's undercover education nor

the garage menagerie, he tells her . . . not. And of the conclusion drawn

standing in the loft—breath spooked by shock and not exertion,

arms singing a soft ache, of the conclusion

he draws he thinks not to tell her

. . .

. . . T
he night before a big test, he slept with his head away from the door so that when morning came he could rise on the right side of the bed; he never sharpened more than three pencils at a time; and he always used the same door to enter the testing hall, the middle one, not the ones on the ends. Charlie had his lucky pencil, Candice her knit Rastafarian hat, Louis his entire family. The uncles would rather lose than play the four card in Uno. Mrs. Chang collected pineapples the way Daron's mom collected pigs, but Daron's mom didn't believe that pigs were good luck.

Maybe it was only OCD.

His father turning the dead bolt back and forth twice before locking it. His mother shaking the coffee can before throwing it away, and if she saw it atop the garbage later, shaking it again. Both of them always lining up the spout opposite the seam on their coffee cups. Considering how many times his father had scratched his car on The Charlies, it would make sense to back into the driveway. Then in the mornings dark and groggy the headlights would usher his exit. But his father only pulls into the garage and backs out of it, even stepping half backward across the doorsill when exiting it. Over the last few days, Daron noticed that they did this often, backed out of rooms as if to ensure they were not being followed. Maybe he hadn't
thought about it because they only did it while closing doors. Subtle to be sure. They could pass it off as checking the locks. It wasn't like they moonwalked from the kitchen to the hall. But it was strange nonetheless.

Like the sign at Lou's, Daron had noticed—hadn't he?—but never thought about why things were as they were. Never pondered, deliberated, considered, ruminated, cogitated. There was truth to the saying you look with your eyes but see with your brain. Look-see-think. Think-see-look. If he had done that, he would have known the answer all along. Or would he? Read the signs, the cook at the Awful Waffle had said. Read the signs. What signs?

What about the rabbit's feet, and the horseshoes over every entry door? What about hoppin' john, greens, cornbread, and a man first across the threshold on New Year's? Why is the odd-point stag's head burned? He had laughed at Candice's harvest dolls, Louis with his crazy feng shui–zee, Charlie's old-time religion. But watching his parents, Daron found himself facing an indecipherable hieroglyphic of rituals.

And there were more. Why do so many around Braggsville leave and enter the house by the same door, even after wheeling the trash bin from the back stoop to the front curb? Why do they sit with the dead for twenty-four hours before releasing kin to the authorities? Why do they stop the clocks and wave a candle over the body three times when a child passes? Why is it forbidden to sweep before breakfast? Why are doves' eggs bad luck, but partridges' eggs fortuitous? Why touch your nose when passing a slaughtered animal? Why spit on a restless grave to appease thirsty spirits? Why was it bad luck to eat in the Gully after dark? Why did his mother sprinkle rock salt on the porch after every visit by the Great Agent Denver, as she called him?

Hmmph! Ain't working anyway, he keeps coming right back, she complained. They were sitting in the kitchen, Daron peeling pota
toes, she chopping them. The sun had turned in, and his father slept the last few hours he could before heading to the mill.

Where's that come from?

She shrugged. Methuselah knows.

For the first time, though, Daron did not understand whether she meant that everybody knew or only Methuselah knew. He didn't even know, he admitted to himself with a snort, who Methuselah was.

Don't look at me funny, I know your friends have superstitions, especially the Chinese one, God bless him.

He didn't bother correcting her. Both parents made that mistake occasionally. For weeks he reminded them that Louis was Malaysian, not Chinese, from an island, not a continent. She would only remind him that when Daron first called about his new roommate, he himself said Louis was Chinese, and when Louis did his backyard stand-up routine, even Louis said he was Chinese. Touché.

When you were little—she made a fist—you used to snatch at the air in front of my mouth whenever I sang. Her speech again blossomed into sermon. It's like you thought you could grab the song right out of the sky. She smiled sweetly, as though that explained it all. He now saw that it might could account for everything.

O
nly twice-cut trees stay down. Birds don't sky before dusk. Where wolves walk upright, their curled tails question marks. Wily wind slips silent through soft Georgia pine, upsetting without a sound. Low moon's cloudy; high moon hangs behind the ridge. Spring babes won't taste winter stew. Moss grows on the wrong side, and if tracked into the house, mutts stop eating and soon die. Cats soon die, but not before eating their young. It's where preachers hold court at branching streams divining with serpents. Feudal clans retain witches and consult wizened sages said to have seen Bragg himself consort with night itself to console his interminable grief. Beavers build dams with the bones of fallen men. Had Abel been laid here, Cain 'a nev' been found out. According to his nana.

To the Holler's edge she took eight-year-old D'aron, to see her last chance, he who read life in the spine. Preacher swathed in rags, chained to anchor, length taut, swaying on unseen waves, like a swimming dog straining at the lead. Anchor and chain scraping up the steps, clumping, clanging on each one, tearing wood and stone, grinding, as if they were eating their way in, as if all the earth's anger was set to devour the church. D'aron dreamed of it for years, hearing it in every scraping midnight step on the front porch, darting awake, breathless, like Nana's final days.

Nana's remission everyone knew would be a black lunch, short-lived. Face gray as a catfish, she'd arranged a premature release. Hearing Nana coo and mutter (she could salt the air 'til it burned your eyes), her cracked lips intoning long-forgotten chants, the nurse—who knew a curse when she heard one—blanched to match her uniform and wheeled that patient right out the alley exit. When the ward caught fire a year later, that nurse was the only survivor. Glick was her name. Glick. She was from 'round the Holler.

In flashes, the memory of the church returned to Daron. Others said the blacks were just superstitious, but being amid those Gulls cauterized by faith was the closest he'd come to a true religious experience. The floor shaking and vibrating like the porch had collapsed. The smell of bodies pressed together. Kerosene. Wood varnish fumes rising from the pews, as if heated by anxious rubbing, turning every time again the floorboards shake, the doors bow as if the Devil himself is ramming, nostrils aflame, hooves driving down, searing the dirt. Murmuring as they slyly glance at their watches, women fan themselves and slap the wrists of fidgety children while the men nod, the oldest tapping chin to chest before jerking upright and glancing about rheumy-eyed. D'aron sighs loudly, wincing when Nana pinches his ear tight as a tick. He is tempted to peer over his shoulder, to see if anyone saw, before remembering there are few whites here, mostly elderly women and a few of their grandkids. So what does it matter? He looks around anyway, and sure enough, Giselle Goman is giggling. He would have died of embarrassment but for the doors swinging open at that moment, flung apart with enough force to rattle their frame and shake the floor. Deacon Woodbridge stands on the sill, sweating in force and fury, in his usual three-piece suit and holding before him, between his legs, a thick, silver chain draped in his hands like a spent penis. The men nearest him rise to their feet, but the deacon waves them away.