I kept waiting for the scary part that never came. The cliffs rose high along the creek, covered with bright-colored lichens that made them looked tagged, like the walls in my Knoxville neighborhood. Several times I sat down on a log because my knee hurt, because it always hurt. I was past sorry for myself. Like every boy in Lee County I was raised to be a proud mule in a world that has scant use for mules. I’d tried the popular solutions to that problem, which generally pointed to early death. The trick was to find others. I sat and watched little jenny wrens hopping along the water’s edge pecking up bugs, ticking their heads side to side like wind-up toys. I heard a tom turkey up in the woods doing that bad-boy gobble thing the hens cannot resist. I saw a hoot owl. It was hiding, all the same colors as tree bark, but outed by a mob of loud crows that had their grudge against it. Probably something to do with eating their babies.
The trail got tricky eventually but never treacherous, and I came to the water hole before I expected it. The falls were a tame trickle and the pool itself a deep, easy blue. Taking art classes on repeat, you learn a lot about color, but I can’t explain that blue. You see it in photos of icy lands. Peacock blue in the deep center, shading out to clear on the pebbly edges. The water was dimply and alive on top, perfectly still underneath. My eye kept going back to the turquoise middle. You so rarely see that, but children will color water that way every time, given the right choice of crayons. Like they were born knowing there’s better out there than what we’re getting.
I didn’t have the place to myself, there was a family over on the other side. On the rock platform where I’d seen the scariest brain I’ve ever known, laid open. Also, maybe, the last spot where my two parents sat together stretching out their legs in the sun, kissing. He knew about me that day, my dad. That I was on the way. He’d written his mother. The family over there now was parents with two littles, the younger one at the squatting and poking age, big sister prancing back and forth at the water’s edge like a border collie. Mom saying no, they did not bring her cozzie, Dad saying no, she did not want to go in, the water would freeze her dinger. These people were not from here.
I said hey. They said good day, and wasn’t it beautiful. I asked what city they were from, and they said Australia, which amazed me. People from the other side of the planet coming here. I crossed the rocks over to their side and they offered me their water bottle. I distracted the border collie sister by showing her how to launch leaf boats, and then she was all over that, running around to hunt up the biggest ones. Sycamores were best, the size of football helmets. I liked having company there, this family of two alive parents and kids that looked like they didn’t know the meaning of getting leathered. I ended up hiking back out with them, and they asked me what everything was, the witch hazel with the winter flowers, the jenny wrens. I gave them sassafras twigs to chew on, that taste like root beer. The little girl hugged me around the knees before they got in their car, and I wanted so much not to be alone.
Breakfast with June was shoehorned in between her late night and another long day. Energizer bunny, was our June. She was beautiful as ever, and tired, and she looked her age, whatever that was. We poured syrup on our pancakes and she told me things about oxy, the lawsuits she’d helped get started, starting with the town hall meetings and petitions that made Kent furious. It was still going. The worst offender drugs were going off the market, changed to be abuse-proof. She said this might help in the long run, but she’d still be here trying to mop up the mess for the rest of her days. A whole generation of kids were coming up without families.
I didn’t say, Right here, you’re looking at it. She knew.
Ruby had started a grief group in her church. Mrs. Peggot was hanging in, with kids or grandkids going over there every day so she could fix them dinner. Maggot and Mariah were both still working at PetSmart and staying clean. I promised to go see him soon. The whole family knew about Maggot’s boyfriend now. Some of them prayed it was a stage he’d outgrow, most said hallelujah. June had met the young man himself. He actually was the store’s reptile expert, and kept a lot of snakes in glass boxes at his trailer home. I said that sounded about right.
The apple in June’s eye was still Emmy. She’d moved into an apartment in Asheville with some other girls in recovery, somewhat like my situation. Probably minus the poker nights and porn. June said it was in an older building where Grace Kelly had lived at one time. I didn’t know who that was, but acted impressed. She got serious then, and asked if Emmy had hurt me.
“How do you mean?”
June did that thing of running both hands through her hair. “I don’t know. She’s such a charmer. You know what I mean. Guys are just moths to her flame. I’ve wondered if she was a little too dependent on all that.”
I said I couldn’t speak for others, but I was never Emmy’s moth. “Well okay, maybe in the early days. She was my first love disaster. But I lived to fight another day.”
June smiled. “You never were one to fall only halfway down the well, were you?”
“No ma’am,” I said. “I fall all the way in.” Then I asked how was her love life, and she reached across the table and pinched my nose, like I was twelve.
She told me Emmy loved Asheville to pieces. She had a job as a restaurant hostess and was in a sober and body-positive dance group, which believe it or not does exist. They put on shows. Emmy was thinking about going in the direction of theater, so. There’s Emmy, wagon hitched back up to the stars. I asked if she ever got homesick down there.
June’s coffee cup froze halfway up to her mouth. “All the time. That’s what she says. But she can’t come back here. Not to live.” She said it with so much sadness. Age-old heartbreak of this place, your great successes fly away, your failures stick around.
June assumed I would be going to the program for Coach that night, and was relieved to hear I wasn’t. She still blamed him for my downfall. “The daughter, though, Angus. Are you two still friends? I ran into her yesterday at the health department.”
In her emails, Angus had made her summer and short-term jobs here into dark comedies. The nursing home where people talked to the dead. The in-school aides that talked messed-up kids out of murdering their teachers. “An impressive young lady,” June called her, which I’m pretty sure was the first time in history those words were used on Angus. Or maybe not, what did I know anymore. My stomach did a thing every time Angus came up, because I really wanted to see her and really didn’t. Everything else had changed. So she would have changed. And I couldn’t take it.
June hated to run off, as usual, but did. I got in the Beretta and sat with my hands on the wheel a good five minutes before it decided where to go. Murder Valley.
My grandmother and Mr. Dick couldn’t get over it. Me! Showing up! Bygones definitely bygones, as far as failures to apply myself. Reaching the height of six foot four evidently gave me a pass on all previous sins. She kept saying she hadn’t thought I could look any more like my father, but look at me now. Mr. Dick for his part had the hots for my car. He wheeled himself all the way around it, looking it up one side and down the other, saying “It’s blue!” They invited me to dinner and asked if I was aiming to move in. I said just visiting, but thanks all the same.
I whiled away the day looking at Mr. Dick’s newest kite and being handy. Got up on a ladder and cleaned their gutters. Unjammed a casement window that had been stuck open since August. Not the tight ship of its former days, that house. Miss Betsy told me Jane Ellen had graduated, and Mr. Dick winked at me, so I knew what that meant. By getting married. I wondered who did their driving. Dinner took forever because it was all on Miss Betsy and she was slowing down. The legs looking more than ever like bags of walnuts in stockings. A stool by the cookstove so she could stir sitting down. I know pain if I see it.