A few years later you would not be able to drive
from Pine Grove to South Fork because the Buffalo Bridge would be taken out. Even
when my brother and I used to walk the road and over the bridge, for months
they had been talking about building a new bridge and tearing down the old one,
but people didn't get in much of a hurry around those parts. I guess they
figured, you could walk, swim the murky, smelly South Fork of the Kentucky
River, or you could just get out on highway 11 and take the long way around.
After all, the long way was only about eight miles or so.
None of that would matter to me for much longer though,
cause in a few years this whole area would become a memory. Then I would have
no reason to go from Pine Grove to the other side of the river. But on those
evenings after school, when we'd walk in that direction, it mattered.
My Grit paper route took me down that way too and it felt like a long way even though it was just
from our house, down into Pine Grove and back. I include back, because I always
did that, I always came back. Mary Snowden was my last customer. I always
seemed to make it to her huge, cracked yellow two story house about the time
the sun went down behind me. That meant that most of the time I rode my little
piece of a bicycle back home in the descending black. There was only one really bad place and that
was at Lowell Thomas's house, the Thomas brother who beat his boys, my age, and
a little younger, the age of my brother; senseless, from time to time - with a
trace chain. A trace chain was no
instrument of discipline, but a chain you hooked to horses and around whatever
you wanted the horse to pull for you.
I did mind, yes, I minded going by that house,
really I guess for two reasons. For one thing, it was a hell of a long hill to
climb just getting there and then they had diseased, but energetic dogs that
always seem to know when I was finishing up my Grit paper route. They never bit
me, but that did not keep them from chasing me and scaring the shit out of me.
I kicked at 'em. Sometimes I even got off my bike and bent down to act like I was
picking up a rock. That bluff always sent them scurrying for home.
You can tell dogs like you can tell people. Those
dogs had been thrown at before. Otherwise, you know nothing like somebody
bending down and acting like he was going to pick up a rock would scare them.
It's not like they are reincarnated or anything and can remember somebody
hurling stones at them from a thousand years ago.
The road was gravel and dirt or dirt and gravel,
you say potato, I saw potato, too. In fact, I say one potato two potato three
potato four. That was what we always said when we were trying to decide
something. The courageous leader of the group would say that as she went around
bumping the circle of friend’s fists with hers. Can you imagine.
I only had maybe 10 customers who took the Grit
newspaper. It was this tabloid thing that
came out once a week. As I recall it was printed somewhere in Pennsylvania.
They lured you into selling the paper by telling you how many famous people had
sold it when they had been little. Most of the ones they mentioned were halfway famous, except for a
few who were really famous. Right now I could not tell you a one of their names
if my life depended on it.
But I can tell you this: I am not famous.
And I can tell you another thing related to that: being popular, to be a widely-known adult;
has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to, because there has never been a
person who wanted to get bigger than me, when I was a teenager. I thought about
it all the time. I would be thinking about it in Algebra and get Cs as a
result. I thought about it in German class and now I cannot tell you but just a
word or two in German. I remember bitte, which is please and feder, which is
pencil. Pass me a feder will you bitte? That is about the extent of my ability
to converse in a tongue other than my native English, thanks in part to my
desire to be famous.
Yep, I would think about being famous when I took
a piss beside the road after all my papers were delivered and I could not hold
it until I got back home. Way out there in the country like that, it might be
fifteen minutes between cars out on the dirt and gravel or gravel and dirt
road, so I would haul her out on demand and let er whiz. Do you suppose I will
ever get famous, I would think to myself as I remounted that old bike of mine
and headed for the trailer.
One Saturday, Earl and me took off walking toward
Stewart's General Store, nevermind it was a good six or seven miles. The
clouds were way up there, like pillows on a clothes line, and that old road
would come up in your mouth when a car went by. Spitting little rocks from your
mouth, and after some fast walking, on a scorching hot day, you could wipe
off a mustache that looked like brown sugar and tasted like salt.
Every little while I would air it out and let
Earl try to catch me. His legs were too short to keep up with me. My best
friend Raleigh told me I was the fastest white man he had ever seen. I know I
sure felt that way. When everything was clicking I felt like my legs were a
bicycle wheel under me, like those pictures I would draw sitting in class, with
arms in a running motion and the legs a circle with two dark triangles to indicate
blurred speed.
We breathed the air deep as we walked, as deep as you could between car-kicked up dust storms. If I could walk that way on a Saturday morning with Earl right now, I
would breathe a hole in the air. Now I know about how many times you are that
free to wander off several miles, just to get an Ale-8 at a general store.
About three or four, that's all. About three or four, freaking times, maybe
five if you're lucky.
The road eventually turned to a broken asphalt,
and that meant heat and soft tennis shoe bottoms. Heat rising off like water
boiling for grits. Too much distance to cover; but too much urgency to get there and back, to let the
heat slow you down.
“Take off your shirt if you're hot, that's the
smart thing to do. Or be stupid and leave it on.”
It did not take much for me to get testy with Earl.
Young boys in logging trucks, complete with a
load, flew by. Some of the boys might do that their whole life, drive one of
those trucks. I did not know for certain that I would not. But I would have bet
money against it and I would have won. Stewart, the old man that ran the
General Store, really was an old man. His younger brother was the
Superintendent of schools. It's like they had different genes. They only looked
somewhat alike and Sedley the Superintendent, probably never paid many visits
to Chester's General Store. It was the tale of two brothers, about to be
repeated all over the place around there.
Those that want to get away, usually wind up
far-far away, and those that either decide or get tricked into staying, stay
about as close as you can get, to home that is. I am talking about a mountain
home, terribly unlike the city or even just the country. Something is just
different in Appalachia. I could not put my finger on it back then. I did not
know that it had to do with Scottish-Irish immigration from Pennsylvania, south
into the hills of Eastern Kentucky and on down into North Carolina, and that
these people would become clannish and eventually what people elsewhere sometimes loathingly called
hickish.
All I knew for sure was that I was deep into a boyhood,
about to become something that seemed to be in control, but only in short
stretches, about to venture into a life out there away from the world of rusty
bikes, grimey cars and dirt roads. Out there away from little brother, too far
to see him grow older; stronger; harder to talk to; harder to see. All that was
about to become me.
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