17

Unearthing Ronnie

Ronnie’s Sportsman Barber Shop was a fixture of downtown Vinton, Virginia, for thirty years.

Photo courtesy of Don Petersen

I thought I’d be able to pack Ronnie away now, mentally and otherwise. But his landlord at the barbershop was pushing me to clean it out so he could rent it to a new barber. Research on other people would have to wait. Ronnie’s belongings, bearing clues to his story, were irresistible. I used the landlord’s pressure as an excuse to dig in.

I started sifting through it the day after the funeral. Practically everything Ronnie touched wound up on the floors of his bedroom, his kitchen, his cars, his barbershop, and its back room. Signs of what he cared most about rested among the fast-food wrappers and the antihistamine bottles. Wooden turkey calls with chalk to create friction on the lids and fine sandpaper to abrade them when the lids no longer took chalk. Flashlights by the score. Car registrations from the sixties. Hundreds of black-and-white photographs of snakes, bears, and paw prints. The dust of thirty years rose up and coated my throat.

As miserable as he was toward the end, Ronnie was still reading about history and about turkey hunting. I knew that for sure because he used recent medical bills as bookmarks. I found a young woman’s diary with the locking clasp broken off. I found tiny, torn bits of paper throughout the piles bearing Max’s name and phone number written in Ronnie’s hand, always askew and always without capitals or hyphens: “home max 242 1754.” Wherever he went, if something went wrong, whoever found him would know where he belonged.

I counted two hundred pairs of chukkas, Hush Puppies, and other shoes in several sizes for his growing feet. Almost as many pairs of slacks, many brand-new. Countless jockey shorts and brown socks, also new. In his sickest years Ronnie kept buying more rather than do laundry. A green duffel bag, three feet long and stuffed with clean but age-yellowed jockeys, sat at the bottom of a wardrobe. Weary, I almost pitched the whole bag, but from within the fiber popped two handguns and, rolled up in plaid boxers, a plastic rye bread bag containing three rubber-banded money rolls, $1,000 each. Here and there in the bedroom—between the medics first, then me—we found $12,000.

His illness left behind six or more blood pressure cuffs, books on diabetes and hypertension, and, stuffed in the pockets of every garment, tissues, napkins, and paper towels. I discovered a Ronnie-style order to his bedroom—down vests here, khakis there. Behind a dusty armchair heaped high with stuff was a tall cluster of brown paper bags, each marked by year, and within, white envelopes containing notes of a day’s earnings: “August 1985, $56, $30, $38, $42, $39, $69, $22 . . .” I could see him heading to his taxman every spring with the previous year’s brown bag under his arm. Ronnie was trying to be a good boy.

But the barbershop was vile from his sickened neglect. The sterilizer in which he plunged his shears and combs in alcohol was rusting and hadn’t been changed in a very long time. The first aid cabinet coughed up a three-pack of Trojan rubbers, one missing. Along shelves furry with hair clippings was a stack of Playboys from the eighties.

I brought home a videocassette and played it, hoping it might be a home movie. It was a bootleg porn flick.

I found a Rolex engraved in 1984 as a birthday gift to an unknown man. A jeweler confirmed it was counterfeit. Deep in the piles, I unearthed JOB rolling papers, matches, and a stainless steel hemostat, the surgical forceps people use as a roach clip. I didn’t find any pot, but Ronnie must have tried it. He left behind no tobacco or alcohol. I never saw him drink beer, wine, or anything alcoholic.

In his bedroom, I discovered guns, lots and lots of guns. Receipts showed that Ronnie had been buying and trading firearms for decades. But the day I had come to his bedroom to pick up Ronnie’s funeral outfit, as I searched for clean socks, I’d noticed a fancy bone-handled handgun in the masses of clothes. I never saw that gun again. Someone knew it was there and by the time I arrived to process his stuff, they’d come for it and only it. Max’s family reported no break-ins. I never learned who took it, but knowing someone had been there spooked me as I labored.

Ronnie’s kitchen was a mycology lab. Fresh-ground Kroger peanut butter from long ago had molded, dried, and cracked within its plastic tubs like desiccated lake beds. Cans of beans had sat in his corner cabinet for so many years that they exploded, rotted, molded, and turned to dust. Didn’t he and Max hear those cans popping and wonder what the heck it was?

The year before, when I came for his identification cards, I’d noticed two brown stains between vertical supports of the headboard of his iron bed. I figured an overheated bulb in his clip-on reading lamp had scorched the wall. But on closer inspection, I now saw that scalp oil, probably mixed with hair tonic, had built up over many years at two side-by-side spots where he rested his head. A piece of the rust-colored accumulation had become so thick it fell away, exposing a bit of the wall’s underlying plaster. These very rooms had given up hope.

* * *

RONNIE LEFT NO will. Over the next year and a half, I gathered his savings and cash, sold his cars, his remaining fourteen guns, and his barber chairs, and paid off $52,000 of his $84,000 in medical bills. I wrenched my back carrying a sixty-five-pound metal bucket of change out of his bedroom. Filtering out the tiny brown buttons from his khaki pants pockets and the ever-present bits of hair, I wrapped thousands of coins in paper sleeves at home in the evenings and deposited every single penny into Ronnie’s estate account. Dumb ass, I could hear him say, grab some of that for yourself. Don’t give it all to The Man. I took what I cared about—a Flattopper comb, two old razor strops, his books, his turkey calls, and his bags of pictures and papers, with battalions of tiny light-brown roaches streaming beneath it all.

As I drove back and forth between Vinton and Roanoke, I began to see Ronnie-like figures everywhere—tall, dejected-looking men, often sitting stoically behind the steering wheel of an old car or walking down the street, their long soles slapping the sidewalk. The reporter in me was running down, and the sister was kicking in. Our common smell was stronger than ever—so many of his things were at my house now—but I didn’t mind anymore. His scent meant he was still with me and he still had things to show me.

* * *

THE SALVATION ARMY hauled away a pickup load of Ronnie’s best suede coats, barely worn tweed jackets, and other high-quality clothes. For Ronnie and for our mama, clothes were prosperity markers, attainable when fancy cars and houses were beyond their reach. Mom equated a sharp dresser with respectability, cleanliness, and morality. Ronnie may have picked that up from her. Within his mounds, I found a navy-blue V-neck wool sweater she’d mailed him one Christmas, still store-folded in white tissue paper and in its shallow gift box.

Some of his cash probably went away in the pocket of one of those donated jackets. I couldn’t search through every one of thousands of garments. It seemed right, anyway, that some man looking for a warm coat might reach into a pocket and come out with a hundred-dollar bill, like Ronnie winning it big with that racehorse. The most heartbreaking sight as I dumped debris at a landfill from a friend’s truck was Ronnie’s bloody mattress lying lonely on the ground.

That spring, my folks came to visit. Daddy had watched as I labored on Ronnie’s behalf. He’d cashed one of his $450 paychecks from two weeks of work at the farm supply. “Here, Pie. Take this.” He bit his quivering lip. The money came in handy as the estate lawyer filed for refunds for landfill fees and other expenses.

Without examining much of Ronnie’s materials, I packed away what I hadn’t sold and schlepped boxes to the attic. Someday I’d study it all. Right then, I had research deadlines to make and aging parents to watch over.