My Own Sweet Girl
I’d told Cody not to love me, but I remembered his tattoos one by one as I drove east. On his upper arm, a spider’s web. A spiral on his chest. On his leg, an eye of God. Those last weeks, Cody had begun to make sketches of other tattoos for me. His favorite was a heart with a thin knife opening it up to the air, a drawing that made me feel the beating in my own chest. My heart felt that beating now, a sad on and off and on. I’d left town with barely a notice for Willy’s, left the Red Sari at sunset so I could follow the lights out of Knoxville.
And now here I was one more time, riding down my past. There’d been plenty of towns and more departures than I could name, but I’d followed the routine this time like it was written on my skin. The tin box and its scraps of paper. My dresses and shirts laid out flat in the bottom of a suitcase to keep down the wrinkles. My milk crates filled with bottles and little boxes and the book or two I didn’t want to leave behind, beside me in my car’s front seat. Snacks. Music. Road atlas. Before I rolled out of Knoxville, I tried to look up directions for a town called Radiance, but found little. Highways turned into two-lanes. Gravel roads trailed off into nothing on maps. I put the news clipping on my dashboard, a compass toward Radiance.
I took my time and more than my time. Stopped at historic markers. Sipped coffee at diners in little towns with names like Awe or Pelfry. I listened to the tales of strangers. A man whose wife had not come home for a week. A kid who’d hitchhiked two states away, just to see if he could. I lingered at the coffee pot and creamers in convenience stores and talked to no one in particular. A woman who’d spent her last five bucks on gas for the man who left her in a cloud of dust. The boy with big, dark eyes who looked at me like he might have known me, once. When I did drive, it was for an hour, two, loving the semis, the car lights. I made up a little song for myself as I drove. I’m leaving, now, goodbye. I rolled the window down and surfed the passing air. I tilted my head out like a little dog looking for the way home. My only direction was the sound my tires made on asphalt. I was heading toward a town called Radiance, and while I was eager, I felt a knot of fear in my gut. Father or none, someone was at the end of this trip, and so I took my sweet time.
I liked how some little place would appear out of nowhere. A sign for a truck stop. Some place with a jukebox at every table, one with lowdown redneck songs, maybe even that song Ruby used to play. Hold me in the morning, hold me at night. I wanted someone to hold me more than ever now. Someone to hold me, dive into me. Make me hurt. But not love. Not yet. Cody Black was right. Here I was all over again, driving toward something I didn’t know.
I rode past smaller and smaller towns until signs for gas and lodging gave out and a marker promised Historic Route, Mountains. That road was lined by stone fences, then by mountains that grew steeper. The road gave out way before the atlas promised. There were still signs, but none pointing to directions. Fresh Eggs. Jesus, One Way or No Way. I’d seen all kinds of mountains, green ones near cliffs and the ocean up in Maine, ones with flat roads in between with buggies and the Amish, but these mountains tugged me along, pulled me deep into them until the gravel road got eaten up by dirt.
I pulled off at a wide spot near a woman in a headscarf, a bag of trash in a poke on her shoulder. “Place called Radiance?”
She cocked her head and came up to the rolled-down window. “Them up yonder might tell you where what is, but I don’t know nothing about no road, lest it’s near them Johnsons. They’d know if anybody knowed.”
The dirt road led into a spread of evergreens until it narrowed to a wooden bridge I inched my car over. More signs. Sweet Sorghum for Sale. My tires skimmed dust and I thought of Cody, his hands loose on the steering wheel, the way his mouth and his throat and his chest took in the world. He’d have loved this world, my car the only one for miles until I met a long blue Camaro and another woman driving, two kids in the backseat, their faces pressed against the window. I slowed, rolled my window down again.
“You know where this road comes out or when?” Our cars barely made it past each other, my wheels sliding down into the steep ditch on one side of me, the blue sides of her car on the other.
“Ask at that store up there, they’ll know what I don’t.”
It was late afternoon by then, and the mountains were soaking up the daylight. I’d have an hour or two at most before dusk and I still had no idea where I was, so I was glad for the country store where I pulled over at last. A big-handed man was running the register, and a trucker had just finished unloading crates of soft drinks. They were both leaning against the counter, listening to a wiry-haired woman in work boots talk, and they made room for me as I spread my maps, looking for the turns I’d missed, the way toward where I was headed.
In a room I took for the night at a motel called Timberlands, I opened the windows to air out the room’s damp and I slept until a knock came on my door at about three. “You took the desk pen, sweet pea.” I crawled deeper under a pile of pillows and blankets until they went away. I had taken the desk pen, and I huddled under the covers with it, scribbling in the empty pages at the back of the bedside Gideon Bible. I drew hands there. I drew faces and ghosts. Ghost hands and little box shapes that were the houses where we’d once lived. I drew ghost daddies, too, ones with blank faces and only circles for mouths and bubble shapes about their heads and in there I wrote what I wished a father had said to me, once upon a time. You’re my own sweet girl. I took out the news clipping I’d found in the basement of Willy’s and copied the long shape of the fiddle beside one of the ghost daddies I’d drawn. Which father would I have once picked as my own if I could have picked back then? Would I love the father I found, after all this time? Famous musician and, maybe, just maybe, the father I’d never known.
Just before dawn I made myself motel-room coffee and headed over to the office about six, wondering if the man behind the registration desk who smiled when I asked about Radiance was my middle-of-the-night pen seeker. He set about recommending back roads to get there.
“Let me think on it a minute,” he said. He scratched his head, a balding mix of orange bristles and a variety of big moles. “The road passes something like Abbott’s Creek.” He shook his head. “No, that ain’t right.” He fiddled with a desk calendar. “Asa’s Creek. That’s the name. What you looking for up Radiance way?”
“Just some things to settle up.” I filled another Styrofoam coffee cup.
“Radiance.” He whistled through his teeth. “Used to be, on a Saturday night, wasn’t a place to beat it. They had one of the best fiddle players up that way anyone could want anywhere, anyhow. And, oh, the dancing.”
I stirred my coffee, trying to be calm. “Yeah, I heard there’s some fiddle player up that way. Used to be pretty famous?”
“What was his name?” He tapped his forehead, trying to remember. “Leroy Something, if I remember it right.”
I drank the coffee too fast, my tongue burning. “What’s there now? In Radiance?”
He shrugged. “Still a dance now and again on a Saturday night, for one.”
“Is that fiddle player still around?” My heart raced as I laid down two twenties for the room.
“Loving. That was his name.” He winked at me. “You dance much, sweet pea?”
I handed him his desk pen so he could sketch me the way.
Asa’s Creek wound up and around as the name played and rewound in my head. I drove past boulders like big, fat hands, one painted with a Bible verse, Ezekiel 7:12. The time has come. The day draweth near. On either side of the road a gully was strewn with cans and bottles and plastic bags and sturdy weeds. Leroy Loving. Would it be this easy to find him? I drove until the gravel became a ribbon of red-brown dirt. I parked and got out at a place that was like some end-of–the-world movie with nothing at all in it but bulldozers and gravel and heaps of dry sand.
It was already twilight, and dark gnawed at me, trying to make me afraid. I was tired and the night was warm, but I refused to listen to sounds from the dry leaves as I made my jacket into a pillow on the car seat. Outside the inch of rolled-down window was the traipsing of something or other through the woods below the rise. Words circled and echoed inside me. I remembered Maria Murdy, how she’d talked about fiddles. Fiddle music playing so pretty. This much was sure. It was too late to find my way back and around or sideways to another motel. I curled up across the car seat and listened to the late-day mountains until I fell asleep.
I woke sweating, Ruby’s voice, as excited as it’d been. You’re there, girl.
I got out of the car, rubbing my eyes awake as I walked a ways through the trees. My key-ring flashlight quit, and I ran full on into a rusted-out wheelbarrow near a heap of red dirt. I licked my hand and rubbed the banged-up place on my leg, then stared off into the dark. I cupped my hands and called into nothing as loud as I could. “Anybody around here?”
I picked up a short, thick branch at my feet and laid into the wheelbarrow, a clanging that echoed against nothing in the trees in the distance.
I varied the rhythm of taps and full-out assaults on metal. I imagined country songs. Blues. The rat-a-tat and wail of music I’d heard with Cody on the backstreets of Knoxville. I drummed songs I knew and ones I didn’t and at last settled on my knees on the ground. Hold me in the morning, hold me at night. Hold me, Radiance, honey, till long past daylight. I imagined Leroy Loving fiddling until the wind in the trees hushed.
Dawn arrived like light through the bottom of a canning jar. Fog showed me just enough of a road, and I followed it to a town not a half mile from where I’d spent the long night. The town was a stretch of buildings along an empty street with partitions and signs everywhere for New Town Construction and You-Haul-It. There were heavy plastic bags and shovels and groups of two and three men with hard hats standing around some pickup trucks.
“Where’d you come from, sister?” one of them asked as I pulled over and rolled my window down.
“Back there,” I said. “Asa’s Creek, I think?”
He laughed. “Ain’t been no such a place for right smart number of years, sis. Ten or twelve, anyway. That’s a logging road and a coal road too you come in on.”
“And what place is that?” I gestured toward the street.
He whistled softly. “You are lost, girl. That’s Radiance.”
I took in boarded-up buildings and a large billboard sign with an angel on it. Open Hands Church, Service Every Day. Sundays, All Day.
He eyed streaks of mud down the side of my car. “Dodge Darts’ll get you one way and back the other, I reckon.”
“Radiance, you say?”
He leaned in and took a look at my dashboard. “More’n two hundred thousand miles on this thing.” He folded his arms like he approved.
Just ahead of us was a large tin-colored building with a rented marquee sign out front. Festival. End O’Summertime Fun.
“Could’ve come at a worse time.”
“What time’s that?”
“Radiance’s still got one claim to fame. Music. You like music?”
“I do.”
“Well, that’s good. Music’s about all around here’s got.”
I took a deep breath, remembering my dreams of the night before. A fiddle playing so pretty. I was in Radiance and all I knew was who I wanted to come next. My father. Leroy Loving.