My brother-in-law was not famous in Fayette County as a great Caucasian hunter. My brother-in-law had been hunting both deer and turkey in season for over thirty years without bagging a thing save for dead-soldier cans of Budweiser he liked to toss in the roaring campfire and blast to smithereens. Mister Noise, was what his turkey- hunting buddies called my brother-in-law. Only a fellow named Mr. Smith, who was fabled for his patience and general bemusement at life and slowness of nature, would actually venture into the rough, mountainous terrain around Gaudineer Knob over in Pocahontas County to hunt with Mister Noise. Being noisy is a decided disadvantage when hunting wild turkeys, for they are not unlike huge chickens zonked on speed, with amazingly keen senses and survival instincts best described as paranoia in its purest natural state. But after years of effort and expenses, my brother-in-law finally encountered a turkey stupid or suicidal enough for even him to kill, hence my brother-in-law had returned from his annual turkey hunt triumphant for the first time in his life, which meant that for Thanksgiving dinner this year the family was going to be treated to about a three-thousand-dollar turkey, my brother-in-law’s own most conservative estimate of what he had blown over the years on hunting gear and guns.
Because he wanted to return home early in order to strut about town and brag, my sister drove over to fetch him at his hunting camp north of Greenbank (where the Robert C. Byrd National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Alien Research and Angel Studies Center is located), and carry the great Caucasian hunter home from the hill. My sister found the fearless turkey killers roughing it at their hunting camp, which was a room in the Hermitage Motel, as they passed a bottle of Wild Turkey and warmed their hands in front of a Debbie Does Dallas flick on the vcr.
When we met at Billy Ray’s roadhouse the following evening for the usual Friday night happy-hour hors d’oeuvres of chicken livers wrapped in bacon and rubbery deviled eggs, my brother-in-law presented me with a gift of one of the sacrificial turkey’s feet. I looked my gift over carefully. It was reptilian, scaly, puke yellow, with three long, evil, yellow-nailed prehensile fingers and a thumb like a claw, in other words, perhaps the pure ugliest thing, outside of my own member, I had ever held in my hand. What was particularly unusual, though, was the fact that the horrible foot’s middle claw-like finger was raised and frozen in that famous gesture of utter contempt known worldwide as, well, the bird, which, according to my brother-in-law, was exactly what that doomed creature’s last expressed sentiment on the face of this earth had been. I thanked my brother-in-law warmly.
But what I noticed that evening was that my brother-in-law was not at all blustery with brave bullshit and heavy with stories of the mythic hunt, as I had expected him to be. He and my sister were both subdued. After hemming and hawing around and ordering a round of drinks, we all got up to avail ourselves of plates heaped with chicken livers wrapped in bacon and rubbery deviled eggs. When I told them that Lindsay had decided to come down to Fayetteville for Thanksgiving after all, they didn’t say much, which really surprised me, especially the silence of my sister, who had pushed so hard for this hopeful reunion. Basically they both simply commented that that news was nice, and we all just sat there chewing chicken livers wrapped in bacon and those rubbery deviled eggs meditatively amid the beerjoint din.
I had seen my brother-in-law weep only once, and that was the night a few weeks earlier when old George Foreman knocked out Michael Moorer to regain the heavyweight championship of the world. We watched the fight at my place, and my sister headed on home soon after we had hooted and hollered around about the outcome until we were dizzy and hoarse. I clicked the teevee off, but neither my brother-in-law nor I turned a lamp on, and we simply sat there doing shots of George Dickel in a room dark save for the slant of light from the kitchen. We had been absolutely elated at old George Foreman’s knockout victory, and we were joking around about how old George had named all five of his own sons after himself, George, and what it would be like to have a world champion for a daddy.
Then, out of nowhere, for the first time ever in my presence, my brother-in-law began talking about his own daddy.
My brother-in-law’s dad had died in a freak car accident. It happened on a Saturday when my brother-in-law was twelve. My brother- in-law had run and hid so that he wouldn’t have to go to the store with the rest of the family that Saturday morning. His dad called around for him, but then gave up, and just climbed in the truck with Pearl and Lovelene to go do the big weekly grocery shop. My brother- in-law was pissed about the previous night, when his dad came home tired and broody from work, and had set a brown bag down on the kitchen table, a bad sign. Then his dad had fetched that particular mason jar down from the kitchen cabinet, the next bad sign. His dad then poured bourbon straight into the mason jar from the bottle in the bag. By ten o’clock, my brother-in-law’s dad was weeping. By midnight, my brother-in-law’s dad was yelling and breaking dishes against the wall.
That Saturday had been a rainy day and the roads were slick. My brother-in-law’s dad had swerved to avoid hitting a dog and lost control on the wet pavement, and the truck slid off the road over an embankment. My brother-in-law’s dad had not been driving that fast, but somehow the bumping of the truck jiggled the driver’s-side door open and bounced my brother-in-law’s dad out of the cab just as the truck struck a tree. The door slammed back shut on my brother-in-law’s dad’s neck and he was decapitated.
My brother-in-law allowed, that night of George Foreman’s big victory, as to how he had “stuffed” (as he put it) his pain and anger and hatred for his father, and his guilt and sense of betrayal and confusion, because he had loved his dad so much too. His dad had been a quiet, gentle, good man when he didn’t drink, and he didn’t drink much really. He had been a Sunday school teacher type who only hit the bottle maybe one Friday night a month. My brother-in-law had stuffed these conflicting emotions about his dad over all these years, until he felt all eaten up inside by them, is what he told me.
My brother-in-law then commenced to bawl like a baby right there in front of me. I just sat there silently with an embarrassed, goofy grin on my kisser, thankful the room was dark, while I studiously looked away from the convulsive shadows of my brother-in-law’s shoulders. Then I entertained an awful urge to giggle, but choked that dark impulse down. Finally I moved over beside my brother-in-law on the couch, and, not knowing what else to do, I sort of patted him. I patted him on his balding head. I patted my brother-in-law tenderly, as I might have a pitiful, bawling, bald puppy.
So I was basically dumbfounded when right there in Billy Ray’s, suddenly, for no good reason I could see, or motive, my brother-in-law, sitting there at a table out amongst a packed Friday night honky-tonk crowd, commenced to weep. What I am saying is that my brother-in- law, a redneck killer of turkeys, was sitting in public munching on chicken livers wrapped in bacon with tears streaming down his face, not to mention snot shining like snails in his mustache. She’s my little angel, my brother-in-law suddenly blubbered aloud as though explaining it all.
My sister reached across the table and took my brother-in-law by the hand, and then she looked over at me smiling and said: —Well, we have us a little announcement to make. We’re going to have a wedding in the family in a few weeks. I said: —The fuck you say? You mean to tell me Momma went and caught her an old coot? I blurted out before it dawned on me how dumb that was. My brother-in-law would be pounding the table in joy and relief, not blubbering, at that prospect, and, besides, Momma had never been his little angel, to put it mildly. Then even before my sister said it, I knew the score. My niece was heavy with rug-rat, is what I knew before my sister said it. Her bright eyes shining with tears, her chin quivering, my sister took a deep breath and smiled and she said —Well, Angie is going to have a baby and she wants to marry the boy. He’s a good boy, I guess.
—Good boy, my red ass, my brother-in-law opined. —I’ve never set eyes on the litde sonofabitch yet, and when I do I plan to shoot the little sonofabitch down like a dog. I plan to break about as redneck as I’ve been in my life and kill the little sonofabitch deader than Hank Williams. And I’ll kill his daddy and his brothers and uncles and cousins too, if any of those Gatewood white-trash sonsofbitches get in my way. I am talking here about big-time blood revenge. That boy’s killed. Count on it. Take that dead boy to the bank. That’s the mountain code. I’ll shoot him and his kinfolks down and take to the woods and run wild as a bear. Are you with me, Chuckie-boy?
—Uh, shore, I said.
—You just hush up now! my sister hissed at my brother-in-law.
—Yes, dear, my brother-in-law said and hung his balding head.
—People are staring at us, my sister hissed at him and rolled her eyes around to indicate the nosy rednecks at neighboring tables who had stopped their own conversations cold and were leaning toward us expectantly. Under her breath, my sister went on to quietly relate that the boy’s name was Billy, and she had met him twice. He was a little guy, my sister said and rolled her eyes, but he was sort of cute in a shrimpy way and clean-cut for a Gatewood boy. And he had graduated from high school, and he didn’t have too many tattoos, and he didn’t ride a Harley, unlike the last couple of criminal boys Angie had drug home. He worked construction with his dad and brothers when there were jobs, and he had a little piece of land near where his parents’ doublewide was out on the Gatewood Road, and he had bulldozed a flat section off and hoped to run electricity out to it soon so he could put up a little trailer there for he and Angie and the baby to live in. Angie said she wanted to go back
to school after the baby was born, so they were going to pay her tuition over at the Tech extension, and Angie would sign up for some computer courses. Or she might go to beauty school. And she wanted to get a little part-time job, just something out at the mall, so she could at least buy baby food and her own cigarettes, although she had promised to quit smoking while she was pregnant. And she wanted to get married around Christmas, but she just wanted a little wedding, just immediate family and a few friends. Over half of the girls in Angie’s 1994 graduating high school class were pregnant already, my sister informed me, and only a couple of them are married. They hadn’t told Mom yet, my sister told me, her eyes flushed with tears and her voice still a little shaky but holding. But they were going to tell Momma that evening before the story spread around town like wildfire and one of Mom’s gossipy old biddy Baptist friends sprung it on her cold and Mom stroked out. We have to look on the bright side of things, my sister must have commented ten times in the course of her little announcement.
—Bright side? my brother-in-law mumbled around his mouthful of half-chewed chicken livers wrapped in bacon. —Bright side! Right. Sure. My baby is knocked up by a fucken wood-hick, and there goes her future down the toilet. Computers? Beauty school? Right. Why doesn’t she just go on and go to brain surgeon school while she’s at it? My baby is gonna grow old living out in some trashy Gatewood trailer pregnant year in and year out and on welfare half the time, and that’s all she wrote for my baby girl.
—We’ll just have to make the best of it, my sister said, as she smiled and waved at some people at the bar. —And that’s all there is to it, she added with a quivery chin.
My brother-in-law sat there chewing on those chicken livers wrapped in bacon like the regurgitated cud of a cow, his shiny bald head all hangdog, his beady eyes wet and glassy, and he told me that my sister had given him the big news yesterday when she was driving him home about half-drunk and happy as a clam from the hunting camp in triumph. My brother-in-law told me he had been in the best mood he had been in years yesterday before the big news hit him like a Mack truck.
He had had a half-full bottle of Wild Turkey between his legs and another wild, three-thousand-buck, skinny Thanksgiving turkey in the cooler on the back floor, and stories of the great hunt were growing more clear and mythic in his mind by the mile (my brother-in-law always declares he sees no good reason in ruining a perfectly good story by sticking to the facts, to which I add amen). As was their custom when they were in that part of the country, they had pulled over into this little picnic area near the Cranberry Glades turnoff that was extra-special to them. It was extra-special because they had stopped there for the first time when they were on their honeymoon. Lordy but that had been a happy, carefree, long-ago day, my brother-in-law mumbled, his mustache yellowy with deviled egg and mucus.
My brother-in-law then commenced to tell me the sweet story of that carefree long-ago honeymoon afternoon. He told me that my sister had been trying to impress him, that happy carefree long-ago honeymoon day, with what a good, thrifty little wife she was going to make him. She had bought about five dozen of these dirt-cheap hot dogs on sale at a roadside market that morning. They stopped to have a little lovey- dovey picnic roasting wieners (after they had first roasted his personal wienie on a picnic table with traffic flowing right down the hill steady as a stream, my brother-in-law felt compelled to inform me, which clearly meant he and my little sister had had sex on at least three occasions!). Then they fired up the grill and put about a dozen of those I thrifty-dog wienies on it. My brother-in-law had always really loved his dogs. And then my sister had slapped one of those babies on a bun drowned with ketchup and mustard, the way my brother-in-law liked! his dogs. My brother-in-law had bit into that little devil like a concentration-camp starving person, whereupon he about gagged to death, Those fire-sale dogs my sister was so proud of tasted like dust. But my j brother-in-law couldn’t tell her that, his little bride, who was so puffed up and proud to be a brand-new wife, and thrifty and smart i and a good cook and beautiful and the best piece of ass her husband had ever had, to boot (there my brother-in-law went again!). And they were so much in love. Lordy what a happy, carefree long-ago day that had been.
—Hey, my brother-in-law had gasped suddenly, that long-ago happy honeymoon day, and pointed over my sister’s shoulder with his hot dog, ketchup and mustard running down his wrist, —hey, is that a fucken bear in the woods or what? When my sister spun around to take a look at the bear in the woods, my brother-in-law whipped that sawdust dog out of the bun and tossed it back over his shoulder into the bushes. When my sister spun back around and accused my brother-in-law of bad eyesight or untrustworthiness, he protested vigorously that he had too seen what he thought was a bear in the woods. Then my brother-in-law ate the rest of that ketchup- and mustard-slathered bun. And when he was done with it, my brother-in-law told my sister that that old hot dog was probably the best old hot dog he had eaten over the course of his life. My sister promptly fixed him up another one. —Hey, my brother-in-law said just before he took a big bite, look at the wild cat up in that tree!
My brother-in-law said he ate maybe a dozen of those godawful wienieless buns dripping with ketchup and mustard that long-ago day as his darling bride had made him one perfect hot dog after another with her own two sweet little wifey hands, and each time he had figured out a way to distract her enough to flip those barf-dogs back in the woods.
Well, that little roadside-park was the special spot my sister had chosen yesterday to tell my brother-in-law the big news that his sweet angel-baby-girl had been knocked up by a fucken wood-hick, my brother-in-law informed me with a caustic yellowy smirk and then shook his balding head. He got that goofy, grief-stricken look on his kisser again, and his lips began to quiver. Here we go again, I thought to myself, old embarrassment boo-hoo city. And out in a public, packed beerjoint to boot! Had he no shame?
My sister reached across the table again and took one of his big, hairy paws between her own little hands, and he looked up into her eyes. They simply sat there then, holding hands like that, that sappy lost look of love on both their faces.