[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell”][/title]
On the day I said goodbye to Kenner, we saw a girl we’d gone to high school with a million years ago, who still wore pants so tight you could almost see paradise. “Some things don’t never change,” Kenner said, and then he waved her over to our table at the Earl’s down on Main Street. She had hair the color of apricots. She had rings on her thumbs. She looked like something you’d see at the circus is what I thought, but Kenner told her she looked foxy, and she smiled and fluttered her eyelashes. And after we said our farewells and left the diner, we saw a screech owl in a tree in broad daylight, its wings spread out even though it didn’t attempt to fly.
We’d both signed on to Social Security by then, and we’d stand in line at the post office in Booneville on the first day of the month, waiting for the clerk to hand over the checks we’d earned from backbreaking work that had stooped us over and gnarled our hands.
Kenner had an old Chevy truck with a spidery break in the windshield, a buckled tailgate, and I was driving it. My eyes were just a little bit better than his, and as we climbed in, he said, “Don’t take me home just yet, Bird.” And I said, “Got nowhere to be, Kenner. I’ll go anywhere you want.”
The truth was, my wife expected me back. She wanted to go to the picture show to see a movie about a dog that had supernatural powers. I said, “Let me make one call,” and pulled out my cell phone, big as my wallet, and gave Ocie the news. She called me a name I deserved to be called and then hung up.
Me and Kenner went past the grade school where we met. “You remember Mrs. Woodruff, in first grade?” Kenner asked. And I told him I did.
“I sat on her lap one day when I was burnt up with fever,” Kenner said. “She took me home in her car at lunchtime, and my mama liked to have stroked out because the house was a mess like it always was. Too many kids to take care of and Daddy always gone. Mrs. Woodruff smelled like rose petals on a spring morning. I thought she was the prettiest woman I ever saw.”
“It was that red hair,” I said. “And the starched white blouses. Our mamas never dressed like that.”
“You remember that time we tied Miss Measles to her chair when she fell asleep? We were in fifth grade.” Kenner said, and he laughed, his belly rolling when he did it. “I took a licking for that, Bird, but I’d do it again just to see her face when she woke up.”
“We both took a licking for that, Kenner, as I recall. And then I got licked again when I got home.”
“Take me to The Hill,” Kenner said. His hand was gripping the handle that hung above the passenger window. The Hill was what we called the old Arkansas State Tuberculosis Sanatorium, closed since the 1970s.
I took the winding roads that switch back across the hills and valleys, and the grass was so green it looked painted on. Kenner said, “My Granddaddy Box had the TB. He died there. I used to slip him cigarettes when I visited. He said when somebody died, the nurses would come by and shut all the patients’ doors, but you could hear the gurney, wheels wobbling, rolling down the marble hallways. When the gurney swung back by again, the wheels never shimmied.” Kenner looked out the window. “The weight of the body and whatnot,” he said. “The weight of what had just happened. I wonder if Granddaddy was thinking of that gurney when he died.”
“That place was a masterpiece, though,” I said. “The dairy. The rolling hills. The air spiked with honeysuckle in the summer. That main building, five stories plus a basement. It looked like a piece of art.”
“I gave Granddaddy cigarettes. It was all I could think to do.”
When we got to the edge of the place, Kenner changed his mind. “Bird,” he said, I don’t want to go.”
I turned the truck around. Kenner’s arm was still gripping that handle, his skin looking like a white car birds had flown across after eating a fence row of blackberries and dropping the remains from their hind ends. It was the blood thinner Kenner took that made his skin look that way.
“I got an idea,” I said and leaned hard on the gas pedal. The old truck shook, and then it kicked in, and I got it up to forty miles an hour. Kenner said, “Now you’re cooking!” and put his free hand on the dash.
We made it to Kelsey’s Bar by two in the afternoon, and there were no other customers there. I got us two beers, and we sat in the corner by the jukebox. I dropped in a quarter and played “Make the World Go Away,” by Eddy Arnold. Kenner closed his eyes and sang along, his voice like something dropped from heaven by mistake.
When the song ended, Kenner sipped his beer. “I forgot how good it was,” he said. And I said, “The beer?” It tasted like flaked soap because of my heart medicine. And he said, “No, this whole dang planet.”
Kenner’s hair was white, and he wore it combed back. You could see the comb marks and the pink scalp underneath. He said, “One time I got sunburned so bad my skin was peeling off. That was back when I was framing houses for Goose, and I’d taken my shirt off in the heat. When I got home, Everline cussed me blind and stripped my clothes off and made me get in the tub. The water was lukewarm, but it felt like ice water. She sat on the side of the tub with a A&W root beer mug, and she dunked water on my head for a long time. She had a Glen Campbell album going, and every once in a while she’d sing along.” Kenner looked away. “Happiness stares you in the face when you’re young, and you don’t even recognize it.”
“She must’ve stole that mug from the A&W,” I said, “You couldn’t buy one back then.”
“You know it!” Kenner said, and he hooked his thumbs in his suspenders like he’d just won something.
After we finished the beers, the bartender asked us if we wanted another. Kenner looked around at the empty tables; the barstools still leaned over like fallen trees at the bar’s edge, and he said, “We’re going go drink where there’s a little more spirit. This place is drier than happy hour at the Betty Ford Clinic.”
When we got back in the truck, he said, “Let’s go stick our toes in some water.”
And so I drove out to Deerbone Creek, to the low-water spot down a rutted road so rough the truck jostled us like cats in a tow sack. A breeze was ruffling the trees, and the sun was warm as a wood stove in winter. We inched down, holding on to each other’s shoulder.
We sat on a spot beneath a willow tree that leaned out over the water, easing ourselves down little by little until our butts were safe on the ground. We took off our shoes and then our socks and rolled up our pants. Our legs were shiny white, our feet ugly.
“Mama used to chew the bark of the willow,” I said. “It was like aspirin.”
“Willows don’t live long enough,” Kenner said. He looked up. The undersides of the long leaves were white. “But how long is long enough, when you think about it?”
I started to answer, but then I realized it was not really a question for me. I felt the leaves, and they were ribbons in my hand. We scooted closer to the creek and stuck our feet in, the cold a jolt through our old bones. The water was green as a 7Up bottle and smelled like fish.
Kenner used my shoulder to push himself up, and he stood in the water, standing on the slippery rocks, lifting his face to the sun. I stood myself, there on the bank, ready to catch him if he started to fall, but he never did. In a minute, he said, “You remember Tank?”
Tank was killed in a car accident when we were all in sixth grade. I said of course I did, and Kenner went on. “He was an Indian, but I don’t know if you can say that now. I think you say Native American. Nowadays I mostly keep my mouth shut in public because everything you say can tie somebody’s panties in a knot.
“Anyway,” Kenner said. “I spent the night at Tank’s house one time. His mama made dumplings out of grapes, and they were about as good as anything I’d ever eaten. The next morning, before the sun come up, I saw him from the bedroom window. He was sitting Indian-style on the ground with his hands raised up above his head. He stayed that way till the sun was up good and proper.”
“What was he doing?”
“I never asked. But I think he was willing the sun to come up. It was one of the best things I ever saw, Bird, and I’ve been to Talladega to see Bill Elliot race.”
“What did you think when Tank died?”
“I thought the sun might never rise again.”
“I thought it meant the rest of us could go at any minute, but then I was always thinking about myself,” I said, and Kenner said, “You were always too hard on yourself.”
You could see tadpoles swimming in packs. Kenner rubbed his arms. I held my right hand straight out, and he turned around and took it. When he sat back down beneath the willow, I dried his feet with my own socks and put his dark socks back on his feet. I rolled them down—he was the only person I ever knew who rolled his socks that way—and I tugged his shoes back on and tied them.
Inside the truck, with the windows down, you could still hear the creek rushing along. Kenner leaned against the seat and sighed. He had a liver spot by his left eye and a scar that ran across his cheek. I knew the map of his face as well as I did my own. My wife Ocie didn’t think men knew how to be friends, and mostly she was right. But somehow me and Kenner had figured it out.
I turned on the radio. That new hopped-up country music was playing, the singer sounding like a beat dog. “What do you want to do now?” I asked Kenner, but he had his eyes closed.
When I think about it now, I figure Kenner was seeing Tank sitting in the clouds, just about then, his hands raised, bringing the sun back to heaven like a boy would do a yo-yo. And then Tank would call out the moon, this time for Kenner, getting it right where it belonged, so even and steady not one of us suspected how this magic worked, even though we’d witnessed it from the day we were born.
