This Didn’t Make the Paper Either
The water tower looked like it touched the bottom of the gray winter sky. The tank was painted blue and shaped like a hamburger bun. Ricky Birdsong knew he was walking toward the water tower, his feet were moving underneath him, but the tower seemed to draw no closer. A vehicle blew past and the driver honked. Ricky looked to see if he knew this person. Behind him he could no longer see the house where he’d grown up, where his momma used to make funeral flowers while she wore a housecoat that looked similar to the one Jesus, who was walking next to Ricky now, sometimes wore. Ricky buttoned up his letterman’s jacket. He didn’t fill it way he used to back in school. Jesus wanted to know if he was cold. Ricky told him no and walked a little faster—afraid The Savior might try to change his mind.
They said something was off in his brain. All that football, all them hits. To Ricky Birdsong it wasn’t thataway at all though. Seemed to him like something was off with them from the moment he stepped down from that big silver bus coming back east from Mississippi. It was still August, like the day he’d left, and the ECHS marching band beat a swinging rhythm while the cheerleaders high-kicked and showed teeth. The world looked to Ricky Birdsong just the way it always looked. He didn’t believe the doctors at the university when they said he couldn’t play football anymore, which meant he couldn’t be a student there either unless he paid. Paid with what? Look at me, he thought, standing naked in front of a hospital mirror. He asked the doctors what he was supposed to do.
“Go home son,” they said.
“Millwork maybe,” his former coach told him.
Ricky did go home—and now look. Home had eaten at him. But the Ricky Birdsong inside this body was yet the same Ricky Birdsong who once scored five times in a half against Poarch County, the same Ricky Birdsong who head coaches from eight southern universities came to Elberta, Alabama, all on the same Friday night, to watch him play ball. Him, goddamn it, the same Ricky who helped his momma arrange funeral flowers for Decoration Day, a line of wagons and wheelbarrows down the side of the road, folks standing around the yard and jawing, eating peanut brittle, while he hunted out their orders. If nobody could see past a drooping eyelid, past the way he sometimes talked, or hobbled when his hip hurt, if nobody could see the brain they imagined dark as the valley before the De Soto Dam, the brain those university doctors said had been sloshed up against the inside of his skull one too many times—they had pictures, see here—the brain that to Ricky Birdsong was firing so much it was all he could stand most days just being alive, if they couldn’t see him and understand him, then he’d just have to fucking show them hisself.
Downtown was all done up with Christmas lights and decorations. Love’s Hair, Best Southern Meats, the post office, Gene’s Pawn & Gun, The Fencepost Cafe. Fake snow and ceramic figurines displayed behind windows frosted with glitter and paint. Jesus was not impressed. He’d seen it all before, year in and out. A bitter cold snap had settled into the valley and the streets were vacant. Ricky passed underneath a tinsel-strung banner hanging across the square where Hernando de Soto stood eternal watch. Somebody had placed a red and white Santa hat on the conquistador’s mighty head. Ricky never much believed the stories about De Soto coming down from his pedestal to roam—not even when he was a kid who ought to of believed in such magic. Back in school some boys in his class attempted to steal the statue one night. Drunk as skunks, they didn’t realize how damn heavy the statue was till they’d torn the bumpers off two pickup trucks. The sheriff found the boys passed out in the grass the next morning. He woke them and carried them over at The Fencepost for coffee and butter biscuits, their foolishness punishment enough.
Ricky Birdsong walked into the same little cafe and sat on a stool facing out the window. Orville Knight and a few other big-talkers—all wearing insulated coveralls in varying shades of blue or brown—hunkered in a booth near the kitchen. A radio behind the cracked counter played The Peach. Orville holding court yet one more time about going down into that cave and finding Tammy Treeborne Ragsdale. Previously Orville was most well known for a low-speed crash in which he shit on hisself, but otherwise escaped injury. He’d paused for a moment when Ricky walked through the door, then kept on telling. The men were eating peach cobbler with knobs of melting vanilla ice cream on top.
“Must of been a good hundred-foot drop,” Orville said. He took a bite of cobbler and, chewing, called out, “Lucy honey, freshen everybody’s cup.”
The waitress did, then she brought a cup and the coffeepot to Ricky Birdsong and poured. “You want anything to eat?”
“I don’t believe so,” Ricky said. “Thank you though.”
Lucy smiled. She was a senior with pretty bangs and legs that moved like scissors when she crossed the dining room.
Ricky took a sip of coffee. Jesus was waiting for him on the sidewalk. The few folks who passed by did not realize it was Him standing there. Why would they? Jesus looked no different from the bullshitters sitting in the booth. The coffee warmed Ricky’s innards as he drank and his mind hummed like a throttled lawnmower. Most days the present was all he could comprehend. It’d always been thisaway though. Problem being Ricky lived among folks wrapped up so completely in the past. His own, their own, pasts of others, them who came before and after, all us, he thought. Living was hard on Ricky Birdsong before the injury. He wanted so much to explain this sensation to someone. Once he’d tried with Lee Malone. They’d walked up at the ruins of the old peach cannery. Buckshot the dog was sniffing underneath a broke-down fruit truck—likely on a rabbit or a fox. “All you can do in life,” Lee said after Ricky finished talking, “is keep open your eyes and be satisfied with yourself.”
Times, the past did wash up over the present and Ricky Birdsong sank down into it way you do De Soto Lake on a hot hot day. This began happening while he sipped coffee at The Fencepost Cafe. All around him a people’s particular past hung on the walls in pictures and jerseys and clipped newspaper articles stuck inside frames. Ricky saw hisself racing down the ballfield, everybody on the bleachers rising to holler, Fly, Ricky, Fly! Tormented him now whenever somebody uttered those three words, which they often did. In the photo, burning headlights shine toward the field to fight the coming darkness. The marching band sways, playing “Fight On, You Conquistadors!” Burnt popcorn and hot dogs, the saltiness of girls on Ricky’s fingers. The night at the lake when he had two at once, or one right after the other. Don’t you forget me when you’re gone off to college Ricky Birdsong, says Inelle Davies, taking his hand and shoving it in her warm soft crotch. Stepping off that big silver bus, he’d looked for her among the crowd gathered to greet his return. Forgot him herself. Sometimes Ricky Birdsong slipped into a place where an entire day passes thisaway, not realizing till he comes to on the floor, or wherever he’s fallen, a knot on his head, blood crusted around his sore nose, the tinny taste of a bit tongue. But not today. Ricky drank coffee and he tried to win this one off, tried to stay in the present where he had something yet to prove.
He’d been out of prison a few weeks now. Coffee there was weak and watery, but prison wasn’t so bad as folks said. Most things in life weren’t, he’d come to believe. Maybe that was the secret to surviving? Prison was forever the present moment. Inside those walls waited no future but the day that dawned outside and whatever past a man possessed did him not a lick of good. Before he was let out Ricky had started making brittle similar to what his daddy used to make when he was still alive. Hollowed out an aluminum can and stuffed it with day-old newspapers or toilet paper and set it on fire. Other prisoners gave him sugar packets, he gave them brittle. His brittle didn’t have nuts like his daddy’s did till some guards caught wind of his venture. They gave him even more sugar packets and a few cups of pecans from a tree beyond the cornfields. Everybody at prison started calling Ricky Birdsong The Candy Man.
Lucy came over again to refill his cup, catching Ricky looking at a picture of hisself on the wall. “That you up yonder?”
“So they say.”
Lucy smiled again. The big-talkers in back bursted into laughter over something. She sat down on the stool next to him. “Must be something having your picture up on a wall.”
“I reckon so.”
“Mine won’t never be.”
Up close the girl smelled like pear and unsmoked cigarettes. Reminded Ricky of Tammy Treeborne when they were in school. He panicked at this memory, as if Lucy might see through his skull like the doctors did with the big clanging machine they slid him into for an hour at a time. Tammy. He’d known what the Crews boy was asking him to do wasn’t right. So why do it? Ricky still needed to answer this question for hisself. He was sick and tired of all the reasons Jesus gave him. Forgiveness, Jesus said. Forgiveness.
“Listen,” Lucy said, “I don’t want to be the one to do this, but Elmo needs you to leave soon as you can finish that cup alright. It’s on us.”
Ricky looked over his shoulder at Elmo Rogers, the dark-haired cook, standing in the kitchen window with a cigarette dangling from his purpled lips. He nodded then Elmo nodded back and cracked an egg onto the flattop.
“I heard you used to be some ball player,” Lucy said. “My boyfriend’s on the Conquistadors now. Eighty-eight, Pruitt.”
“Fight on,” Ricky said. He took one last sip of coffee, left a nickel by the cup, then walked out the door and continued on across town with Jesus.
The girl was right—Ricky Birdsong was the most decorated athlete in Elberta County High School history. Birdsongs had always been pure-dee athletes, the men and the women both. Caught the most rabbits when the fields were burnt after harvest. Birdsongs had strong calves and sturdy ankles that made for easy cutting and lunging in tilled dirt. This rabbit hunt the valley’s oldest sport, tracing back to the Elberta Indians. After the hunt ended greasy meat was roasted over fires then cooked in its own gravy with dumplings big as a man’s clenched fist. Ricky’s folks, Ronnie and Debra, they used to light out on runs together just for the fun of it—long before it was fashionable to do such a thing. Debra even ran while she was pregnant with Ricky. Some folks blamed what happened to the boy on this habit. He had, they claimed, a medical predisposition. Folks thought the Birdsongs were loony anyhow. Work on your feet all day then go running? Ronnie was some football player too, and young Ricky shared his daddy’s build and his speed and his predilection for hurling hisself into lesser, slower boys. Headhunter, they called Ronnie Birdsong, who first noticed a smidge of hisself in his only son the day the boy tackled an eighty-pound nanny goat that had wandered into the yard and started chewing on his momma’s funeral flower arrangements. Tackled the goat so hard it stood stupid for the rest of its own days, drool dangling from a puckered lower lip.
If the rabbit hunt was the valley’s oldest sport then football was its favorite. Ricky Birdsong joined the ECHS varsity squad the year he turned ten. Didn’t look ten though, a mustache kindly like the fuzz on a peach strapped his upper lip. He was the valley’s secret till Roger Manasco wrote a story in the Times that got picked up by several out-of-town papers. Then the whole state knew—before long, beyond its borders. Coaches rolled into the valley in big black vehicles. Tall men, every one, with gravelly voices. They visited for hours while Debra Birdsong sat making funeral flowers. Ronnie fixed a dark and bubbling stew, brittle that made your teeth ache for dessert. Flowers piled up around the coaches as they made desperate pitches for Ricky to play ball at their college one day. Before leaving they told Debra Birdsong where their families held Decoration, making it up if they lacked this tradition of gathering in a cemetery the third Sunday in May to picnic and remember the dead.
From the top of the hill where the water tower stood Ricky Birdsong could make out Lee Malone’s house, other side of a pasture that sometimes held a herd of rusty red cows. Lee’d visited him in prison just about every week. Time, Ricky thought Lee was going to break him out, especially the day he came with his guitar. Ricky kept imagining the old man reaching into the hole busted in the instrument’s side and whipping out a gun, shooting their way out like in the movies that used to play at the old Rampatorium. Ricky walked underneath the water tower. Scattered all over the ground were busted beer bottles, condoms, candy bar wrappers, mashed cigarettes. Sometimes you might find a watch here, a class ring, loose change, a broken pair of sunglasses. Often somebody’s bunched-drawers or a soiled sock slung out the window of a vehicle before it took off downhill to meet curfew. Ricky Birdsong hisself had come here many nights back in school. Sometimes with Freeda Hooper, a girl from Livingstown who let Ricky call her his girlfriend for a spell. Him twelve, her sixteen. Freeda liked spreading wide her legs and holding Ricky’s face down between them. He didn’t do anything, just kept his head still while Freeda rolled her hips and sighed like she was bored. Ricky was caught in this position at the pasture’s edge one night and carried off by the Conquistadors, who whistled and whipped him with wet towels, then tied him to a weight-lifting rack for three hours and forced him to drink a bottle of booze on the fifty-yard line as the sun appeared like a bloody eye opening on an ashen face.
The ladder going up the water tower was cold to the touch. Ricky began climbing. Each time he grabbed a rung blue-green paint chipped off and stuck to his palm. Jesus had already zipped up top. It started sprinkling rain. The higher Ricky climbed, the stronger the wind blew. He slipped, caught hisself then snaked an arm through the ladder from the backside. He’d never had the guts to ask Tammy Treeborne up here, though he’d always watched for her. She never dated much back in school. By junior year the not-secret of Ricky wanting her became like a sick animal lying out in the open. He couldn’t put it down. He was terrified of heights. A fear which would of spelled doom for any other boy in the valley, climbing the water tower a rite of passage, like swimming butt-naked across De Soto Lake and back, or sneaking into Hernando’s Hideaway to watch Holly the Oyster Girl pop out of her shell and dance topless with a papier-mâché pearl big as a basketball in her hands. Ricky always hated when the Conquistadors would get drunk and fool around at Chief Coosa’s Overlook, wrestling, chucking rocks off the bluff and waiting to hear them clatter down into the abyss. He never even liked standing on the top row of the ballfield bleachers and looking off the backside.
At the top of the water tower Ricky gripped the railing. His knees buckled as he forced hisself to look out. Tire marks mashed into the pasture mazed in and out of one another in loops and curls, some leading astray then doubling back toward the two-track road. Ricky could see all of downtown, past it big houses spaced along the Elberta’s eroding bank among now-bare oaks and poplars reaching into the winter sky hung low. Ricky reached too, as if he could grab the sky and break off a piece. The sky went on oblivious to him and spat more cold rain. Jesus laughed and leaned against the tank. He reminded Ricky what the sheriff’d said the day he brought him home from prison: Leave son. But Birdsongs of some incarnation had been living in this valley since before De Soto. If the line were to end it wouldn’t be because it’d taken root some other place. It’d be because this valley, in all its beautiful brutality, swallowed up the end of that line like a snake caught ahold of its winding tail.
Sometimes back in school Ricky would see Lee Malone standing on his screened-in back porch looking up at the water tower. Ricky liked knowing Lee was down yonder watching. Nobody credited Lee, but he was the one who came up with Fly, Ricky, Fly! He was maybe Ricky’s biggest fan. His friend. Kindly a daddy too time Ronnie Birdsong drowned in De Soto Lake the year before Ricky graduated from ECHS. Lee loved the game of football, though he never had the chance to play it. After Ricky came home from Mississippi, Lee made sure the bullshitters and big-talkers and used-to-bes who gathered for butter biscuits and coffee at The Fencepost quit all their teasing once it’d gone on long enough. Alright now, he’d say—and that was it. Usually they listened to Lee Malone, though Ricky couldn’t figure out how come, since Lee was a nigger. All he knew was that Lee had been good to him. Ren Treeborne too, Jesus reminded the boy. Another Conquistador. And Ren’s brother Luther, who’d once told Ricky he ought to join up with the service. It’s kindly like being on a ball team, he’d claimed. Ricky and Luther had played together one season before Luther graduated and enlisted hisself. Ricky had seen Luther climb the water tower too, doped up and shirtless, wildly holding a crushed beer can in one hand. He followed Luther’s advice. But soon as the service saw his hospital records they turned him down. Not even The Authority would take him now. Ren said they couldn’t have an ex-con working at the dam. It was a security issue. He promised to help Ricky get more yards to mow though. Winter, he reminded the boy, wasn’t long in Elberta.
Ricky Birdsong and Jesus watched the light snuffed out of the sky. It grew cold up top the water tower. Ricky tasted metal when an owl hooted four long times. He willed a light to come on inside Lee’s house. If it would, Ricky told Jesus, then he’d climb down the ladder. But a light would not come on. A lone vehicle passed along the road and up into the deep-dark hills west of downtown. Ricky crawled to the edge of the grating and peered down. The ladder rungs were slicked over with a fine layer of ice.
He walked laps around the tank. His hip began hurting and he felt other joints cementing together too. He did jumping jacks till the grating shook as if it’d come loose. He stopped then. Jesus pointed out a line of welded-over holes going up the tank. Fly, Ricky, Fly. An out-of-focus moon appeared from behind a weeping cloudmass. Ricky put his ear up against the tank. Sounded like the ocean was on the other side. Now the Gulf Coast was one place he’d considered going to when he got out of prison. Ren even said he’d drive him there and help him get set up if that’s what he really wanted to do. Truth, it wasn’t. In the end nowhere else would be Elberta, Alabama. Even Ricky Birdsong knew that.
He grabbed the poorly welded-over holes with his fingertips. They cut as he pulled hisself up. The tank flattened out the higher he climbed. He inched along like a slug. Jesus up there waiting. At the very tip-top was a flat spot just big enough for Ricky’s tennis shoes to fit. The wind pushed back his thinning hair, which danced atop his great-big skull like weeds in a river’s current. Ricky Birdsong whooped, held out his arms for balance. Jesus applauded. Had the water tower been shaped like a peach, way the town would reimagine it a decade later to attract more tourists, Ricky Birdsong never would of been able to climb to its top. Maybe he would of sat there on the grating till morning, till the sun melted the ice off the ladder rungs, then climbed back down. But this was only a water tower, this was only the present, and Ricky Birdsong did stand high up yonder, whooping, arms held out as if he was ready to take flight, and he would stand nowhere else on this earth again.