Dysphoria Read online

  Larry tugged and breathed through his nose in massive gusts, blowing snot mixed with sweat across the dry earth. He didn't notice the three of them until he was near the west corner of the field. Joe had disappeared to the shadows of the front porch, lost in the cool shade, clutching a cold glass of water and rocking patiently in a wicker chair.

  When Larry saw them, he forced a smile and then glanced back over his shoulder two, three times and hitched the straps into better position across his shoulders. David waved him over. Joe was already falling into an easy sleep in his chair.

  "Your old man's about to nod off,” Dave called to him. “Set them things down and get over here. It's an emergency.”

  Larry glanced again over his shoulder and then carefully, the way one might walk through a house at two in the morning after getting the baby to sleep, he stepped away from the straps. The plow broke through the dry field as he unhitched, spraying fine dust into the air on its way up and landed with a thud before coming to rest.

  "We're taking off," Dave said when Larry made it over to the fence and rested his arms across. "Let's go. You have to go. I mean we skipped out on the whole damn day."

  Larry shook his head and dug at his crewcut. There was dust and clumps of dirt sticking to his scalp which fell from his lowered head and drifted past the fence railings.

  "You guys better just go on ahead and I'll catch up. Daddy’s not bound to let me go much of anywhere today, you know, turning the field and all.” He pointed with his head toward the mangled expanse of dirt behind him.

  "He's asleep, man," Dave said, leaning in close to Larry. "Look at him over there."

  Joe Fenner was now fully slumped in the wicker chair at the far end of the porch. Larry's mother was somewhere inside, busy at her own chores, pulling and plucking some type of vegetables and letting fresh meat of some kind simmer in a large black pot until it was tender enough to tear into pieces. Across his lap, the old man had a bamboo cane he had been given by Doc Bill Calup about ten years earlier to use after his tractor accident, except most everybody knew, especially Larry, that the cane was rarely used to help Joe along. Most of the time it was used in place of a whipping stick. Larry had the scars from blood whelps to prove it. They made crossed up lines past the small of his back, disappearing at his belt like white bumpy blocked off trails.

  Hill knew that most of those whelps came while Larry plowed. He saw, on more than one occasion during spring planting time, Joe following Larry with the cane and pushing him and his plow forward, lash after lash.

  "I know you're scared to go," Hill said. He had stepped in front of Dave and propped his arms up beside Larry's along the fence railing. "I don't blame you. Ain't none of us know what it's like. I mean we've been whipped some, but nothing like— ” He stopped, aware that he had to be careful here. "Anyway, if you don't want to go then you don't have to. We're just saying it would be fun is all."

  Dave perked up beside Hill.

  "Yeah, Hoss, that's the thing. We just don't want you to miss out on the fun. Just like Hill said. See, we ain't told you where we're really heading have we?"

  "I figure you're going down to Harper's to drink some," Larry said without expression. He didn't look up from his shoes.

  "That's right," Dave said and smiled. "We're heading up to the Coal Tipple of Drink. Old Harper's."

  Joe Fenner snored in from behind them.

  A soft breeze cast its way through the small valley and dried the sweat across Larry's face. Hill stretched across the fence railing and patted the thick cotton sleeves of Larry's shirt and dust billowed away, caught by the breeze and carried away.

  "Let's go, Larry," Hill said. "If he wakes up and sees you're gone, we'll take hell for it right along with you, all right?"

  Larry studied this for a few seconds, working on the thought with great difficulty. "You guys won't get what I'm gonna get, but that's all right. You'll get what you're used to and that's bad enough, I guess.” He stared again at his boots and swung one long leg over the fence railing.

  The four of them left laughing and joking under their breath sliding down the grassy hillside leading to Larry's house. Joe Fenner was left to sleep and dream of ripe tomatoes, rows of corn, and farmer's daughters without last names.

  It was a good walk to Harper's Tipple, a fixed monument to a once prosperous coal mining operation owned by businessman George Harper. During most of the 1950's, Harper and his three sons ran the most successful business in the eastern part of the state. The Harper family had tapped into a nice thick coal seam and made money hand over fist, but most people only knew this through curious gossip and mildly exaggerated folklore. The Harpers were humble people, the type of family who shined on Sunday morning in freshly pressed suits and new shoes, but who were always found through the week in work clothes and coated with dirt, grease or oil. Mother Harper was the most admired cook in her church group, often filling three tables at local funerals with dumplings, cakes and homemade mashed potatoes.

  In short, the Harper family had been wealthy.

  The Shannon brothers and Tommy used a latch safe at the top of the tipple as a place for storing beer and cheap liquor for the past year. The Harpers were long gone. George Harper suffered a stroke in the summer of 1968 while driving north to a meeting with investors. His oldest son, Matthew, had been with him when his truck veered across the center line and dropped into the river two miles from the market. Matthew Harper was twenty-six and had been married for eight days.

  The rest of the family seemed lost after that. Two months later, Mother Harper passed on to follow her husband and oldest son, some said suffering from little more than a broken heart. The remaining family members moved north, but, to the luck of Hill, Dave and Tommy, did not sell their home or their land. Instead, the Harpers just moved away, lifted like a crying breeze away from what must have been the epicenter of their grief. The youngest son, John, loaded the last of the family belongings.

  The dynasty was over.

  It was George Harper's tipple, a 75-foot reminder of a humble, hard-working empire resting against the hillside ridge near the house, the boys first saw when they turned across the massive field to the south of Red Knife. Second was the mound of remainder coal left to gather decades of moss and grass at the foot of the tipple, and third, the hazy outline of the Harper house through the row of evergreens the family planted for privacy.

  The house was modest and, compared to the tipple looming in the background, not what most would have expected. Larry swiveled his head and shielded the cresting sun with one hand. The other hand rested on his hip. He was still breathing hard, winded from his work, panting and frothing a little like the horse back home without the benefit of shade. He looked at the rattletrap metal step ladder connected to the side of the tipple and tried to forget about his father, who might have already woke up to discover him gone. His mother would likely catch a beating in his place, something Larry thought the others didn't know about. Just the same, he started toward the ladder without saying much. Dave and Hill fell in behind him and Tommy brought up the rear, never really comfortable, he said, with having anyone climbing behind him.

  "Get your tremblin ass up here," Dave called back at Tommy. "Look at Larry."

  Larry had already cleared half the tipple. His weight caused the ladder to sway back and forth some and the group could hear Tommy's breathing go from fast to slow each time Larry lurched forward for another rung.

  It went this way, slow and steady, until the four reached the top. Hill was the second to settle himself along the top of the tipple. Larry had already disappeared around the wraparound runway circling the tipple's peak in the direction of the lock safe. He didn’t drink, but he was always the first to get to the top and made his way quickly to the side of the tipple facing away from town. Across that horizon was a world of milk and honey, Larry would say.

  "I got your milk and honey right here," Dave would usually say back, while turning up a pint of dark whiskey or a can of flat
beer.

  And it was the alcohol the rest of the group immediately went after. Dave in the lead, with Hill and Tommy behind him, made his way around the opposite side until all three came to a rest on their knees in front of the lock safe. It wasn't much really, just a portable locker turned sideways, what some would call a footlocker, maybe, but Dave had fitted the latch with a Master lock. It held with little problem two six packs of beer and three pints of whiskey, or a couple of fifths, if the boys could come up with the money and opportunity. The catch, of course, was that it was all hot. It was really hot during the summer and cans of beer would tend to burst from pressure if not taken out for a couple of days. But during the winter months, the beer would stay so cold that Tommy would joke it could make a man's teeth bust down the middle.

  Tommy learned that phrase from his father, Stanton. His father was a professional drunk, a man all the boys looked up to then and would later condemn as a street corner bum who would later be dubbed Piss Pot for his lack of bladder control in public places. However, this early introduction to how sweet an ice cold beer could be was marred during this time because along with the natural refrigeration came thin, crystal-specked ice which clung invisible to the metal rungs of the step ladder.

  Standing on the tipple, the boys couldn’t tell anything about the condition of the present stash — a fifth of Jack Daniels stolen from Tommy's father and four cans of beer saved from two weeks ago. This was because Dave, who had been digging through his pockets since dropping to his knees in front of the safe, could not come up with the key and had started swearing, at first in only half-muttered "shits," and then finally in stentorian bursts of purely imaginative foulness.

  "Tell me you're just dealing with a bad case of crabs," Hill said and bent down to look close at Dave's twisted sunburned face.

  "Crabs!” It was Larry from the other side where he had taken a long overdue seat. He pushed his tired legs over the edge of the walkway and seemed to be watching them dangle far above the ground below. Now he was craning his neck to see the others.

  "Not those kind of crabs," Hill said and laughed. "Jesus," he said under his breath to Dave and Tommy.

  By the time the three boys made it around to where Larry was sitting with his legs hanging over the side, Larry had started to nod off to sleep.

  "You're gonna fall one of these days doing that," Dave said, and then stopped at his side. He stared down at the pile of coal below them and studied the landscape carefully. "We need something to get this lock off," he said.

  No one offered a suggestion. Tommy was thinking about how good even a hot beer would taste, while Hill sat down beside Larry and leaned against a portion of the railing. The metal walkway was still warm from the midday sun and he understood how Larry could have dozed off. Then, just as Hill was about to fall the opposite direction and land flush against Larry, Dave clapped two hands on his shoulders.

  "I've got a plan," he said.

  6

  "Who's in there?"

  A voice, soft and faint, came from the master bedroom of the house that William had converted from an embarrassingly small barn just after his retirement in 1976 from Inland Steel. He built the house with his own two hands, with a couple extra sets coming in the form of two strong and able sons willing to do anything to impress their father. David had once told Paul that his father, your grandfather, he would say, never loaded one shovel of coal. He would make it clear that William Shannon had been the best electricity man in three counties.

  "They paid him over fifty an hour just to sit around in case something went down," David would tell Paul. "Fifty an hour to sit and drink coffee and watch other guys hump it out. And when something did go down, like part of a belt line or a burned up engine, Daddy would have it back up and going in an hour or so and be back in the break room sipping coffee and reading scripture.”

  But David always reminded Paul that his father, your grandfather, hadn't made it to that point without hard work. He'd tell stories about how his father had started with Papaw Payne in the mines when he was just eleven years old, a brief training period before he went full time at fifteen as the head underground electrician. The barn William Shannon had built into a home stood as testimony to that work ethic and pride in a job well done.

  When his grandmother called from the master bedroom a second time, her voice had gone from a whisper to a louder more inquisitive tone. Worried maybe.

  Larry shifted his seat at the kitchen table. His wandering eye moved at twice the speed of his good eye, glancing from Paul to the doorway leading to the hallway. He stopped rubbing his hands together and switched to sliding them up and down his shins and calves.

  "It's Mamaw," Paul told Larry. "She's been sleeping, you know. She's real tired. I'll tell her you're here."

  Larry straightened up in his chair. He pushed his barrel-sized chest out a bit more and absently ran his fingers and the palm of his hand across his burred head. He had been called more than a scoundrel more than once by Eve Shannon while growing up with David and the rest and didn't care to start again on his first visit in so many years. He hoped, without realizing the extent of what he was hoping for, to seem respectable to the woman who had fed him many nights after his father had ran him off for some forgotten wrongdoing.

  It would be this memory of Larry's enormous appetite that Eve would remember when she turned the corner into the kitchen, tugging at the corners of her green satin house robe with one hand and tugging at strands of sleep-addled hair with the other. She drew her eyes together when she came through the doorway and then stopped just short of Larry, who had, by that time, decided to stand up and place his own hands behind his back. He was standing this way when Eve extended her arms and smiled with a strong set of natural teeth.

  "Larry Fenner, Larry Fenner," she said. "Where have you been?” Her eyes were bright at the sight of one of her son's old friends, but beneath the warmth and kindness, Paul could see the tired look of a grieving mother. Paul wondered if Larry could see the same thing. "Would you like that I cook you something?"

  At this point Paul realized that people will generally fall into an old pattern when faced with revisiting a person from the past. Long lost brothers, reunited on national television, will hug instantly, hug a stranger, whether from a sick need to please the corporate sponsors banking on a tear-jerker scene for the viewing public or from the innate urge to embrace their brother. Sometimes people just settle back into their positions, sometimes without ever haven taken those positions.

  Paul thought about this while he watched his grandmother muscle her way to the stove, grabbing coal black skillets and silver pots which smelled of grease and some distant food, maybe bacon from that morning still lingering despite the clean washing given that afternoon. Larry seemed to either smell something or was simply remembering the numerous gangster meals Eve had fixed for him and the boys. David, Larry would explain later, had started calling them gangster meals.

  "Mom will make us a pot of spaghetti the size of this room and enough homemade garlic bread to last a month, just like in the old gangster movies down at the Strand, just wait and watch,” he would say during a long camping trip or an afternoon fishing. And it was always there. Today Larry was having thoughts about those meals, Paul figured, and then realized that his own stomach had started growling.

  Without saying much, Eve had already moved closer to the stove. She turned the back left burner on medium heat and placed the five pound skillet squarely in the middle. "Let's make some hotcakes. I know it's not morning, but some of us have been sleeping the rough off this afternoon and probably need a little nourishment.” She paused, hovering over the stove with a canister of flour gripped between her frail hands and lowered her head just slightly.

  Larry got up slowly from the table and moved past Paul, who had positioned himself protectively behind his grandmother. She had fainted three times during the funeral, gripping doorways and begging her family to not make her leave her baby boy. But Paul was moved ou
t of his place by Larry who nestled up behind Eve and wrapped his huge arms around her. Paul could see his grip startled his grandmother, but could also see that she welcomed the embrace.

  "I'm sorry about my friend Dave and your boy Dave," he said. He waited and looked as if he might say more, but then moved back to the kitchen table.

  "Ain't but one man suppose to wrap his arms around my wife, Larry Fenner, and that's me."

  William stood tall in the doorway. He must have been a towering man in his prime, maybe taller than even Larry, but now he seemed weak. Maybe from the inside was where his weakness revealed itself, because on the outside he was hard and rugged. Paul walked across the kitchen and hugged him, amazed again, just like always, of how the muscles he felt under his hand felt like rock, or old leather.

  "Hey, Paul. What'd you drag in with you here? Today's Tuesday. We're supposed to take garbage out on Tuesdays, not bring it in."

  Embarrassed, but aware of this gray old man's sense of humor, Larry eased himself out of his chair again and stuck out his hand. William pushed a hand mangled with severe twists and smooth, shiny scars from years of generally harmless 110 volt electric shocks into Larry's and smiled softly. With this small movement, Paul could smell English Leather aftershave float through the room and then another smell that reminded him of his bus ride into Red Knife — the smell of hard work pressed into the fabric of clothes with sweat and salt and warm, summer sun. When his grandfather spoke again, he could hear a low rattle from somewhere.

  "What've we got cooking here, guys?” William said. He also began moving across the room toward his wife. When he did, the illusion that William was still a hard man capable of sixteen hour work days was cracked, if not shattered. His steps were slow and deliberate, and then, as if this hint at a more realistic condition opened other windows, it became painfully clear to Paul that his grandfather had taken the death of his son in less stride than his strong will and general sense of pride had revealed. There were dark circles under his eyes and it seemed to Paul that he had lost thirty pounds in the last week. Paul wondered if he had even stepped into his father's old room since the horrible morning discovery.