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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781935978473 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | West Virginia University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2012 |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Scummers
By Lee Maynard
West Virginia University Press
Copyright © 2012 West Virginia University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-935978-53-4
CHAPTER 1
Dirt Road The Edge of Horry County, South Carolina September, 1956
I was naked, sitting upright in the center of the hood of the big sedan.
In my journal, I once wrote that I had been "run out of the county" there in South Carolina. That was not exactly true. I was given a ride to the county line — on the hood of the car — but then I was launched through the air. Technically, I was "flown" out of the county.
It started out by my being given a ride down a hidden country road in a car large enough to be a boat, being driven by a three-hundred-pound redneck named Wimpo. In the passenger seat was a sheriff's deputy named Polk.
Wimpo had held a shotgun on me, made me strip, and climb up on the car.
Now, Polk had the shotgun and Wimpo had his head part-way out the open window and was yelling at me ...
"You come down here from the North, you mess around with the niggers, work with 'em ... hell, that don't matter much, we all work with niggers now and again, when we have to.
"But you, hell, boy, you living with 'em . And that ain't right, boy. That's against the law of God, against everything we know is right and true."
The car started to roll forward ...
The car picked up speed, tearing down the road, trees whipping by, a limb now and then catching me in the face or across the chest. I ran my hands around the hood, trying to find something to hang onto. There was nothing.
"And don't let anybody ever tell you," he screamed, "that I DIDN'T GIVE YOUR ASS A RIDE TO THE COUNTY LINE!"
And he slammed on the brakes, locking the wheels.
There are few times in your life when you are free, truly free, and I was free now, alive and vital and sensitive to the smallest things, the smell of thick rushing air, dust motes brushing my face, the sound a pine needle makes when it hits the forest floor, and I knew all of these things were there, all of them, in my world, in the black of night and the pushing wind against my face and the flailing of my arms and legs in freedom so complete, so pure, as I spun almost lazily through the air.
Freedom is a some-time thing. It seldom lasts forever. It begins, and it ends.
My face kissed the soft padding of the forest junk that covered the road, then kissed it harder, then dug into the junk and found the harder parts underneath and my body caught up with my face and passed it, tumbling and sliding, a huge, soft plow smashing open a furrow in the darkness and the dirt, skidding, twisting, bleeding, scraping.
I launched off the hood of the car, cleared the road, and hit a signpost. I had seen the sign before. It said Horry County Line.
Officially, I was out of Horry County.
"You think he's dead?"
The whining voice came through some dense wall of pain around my mind.
"Nah. Don't think so. Looks like he don't even have any broken bones. Got a pretty good head bleeder there, though."
My head moved and I thought he was adjusting it, checking out a scalp wound.
"He had a good trip, sure 'nuff."
"Yeah," I heard Polk say through the wall, "might've we set a record with this one. You think?"
"Maybe so. Went about twenty feet in the air. Bettah than most. Bettah than that nigger last month. He hardly get any distance a'tall."
"Too thick. Dense, they are. That's why they can't swim nowhere. Sink, like rocks."
"This 'un hit the sign, too. Head on. That never happen before."
Silence. The sound of breathing. My head was beginning to clear behind the pain, but, for once, I was smart enough to lie there and play dead. Damn near was ...
And then I heard them laughing, both of them, and the laughing wasn't too far from me and it didn't move and I knew they were sitting there, just down the road, enjoying. They didn't care that I was there. They had disposed of me like a piece of shit in a brown paper bag thrown from a car window. I was no longer in their lives.
... I had knocked the sign post over and I lay partially on top of it. I slid off the thing and sat up, wanting to scream but clamping my mouth shut. I ran my hands over my body and they came away sticky. I was bleeding from a thousand tiny cuts and scrapes ... But everything worked. I pulled my legs under me and stood up, careful to hang back in the edge of the trees. The car was there, a few yards down the road, pointed back toward the way we came. They must have turned it around while I was passed out because I never heard the engine.
. ... I could hear them laughing, hooting, howling, a brotherhood of the Confederacy come to a safe place after the battle.
I knew I was finished there at the beach ... in Horry County, in South Carolina. I finally got the message. I was standing naked and shivering in the fringe of black woods on a back-county road that led off into country I had never seen or thought about, hearing the howling of men who lived by laws of their own making, laws which did not admit me to the safe places of the earth.
It was ended.
They had won and all the rest of us had lost and that's the way it was going to be down here in the South and I wondered if there were other places in the world as good as this, with the soft air and the warm water and sand that toasted your feet and women who stood next to your chair and let you look down into the tops of their bathing suits. Places as good as this, but without ... Polk and Wimpo.
Maybe I should go looking for a place like that.
CHAPTER 2Two Lane Blacktop Outside Horry County, South Carolina October 1956
Goddammit, I wasn't a northerner. And from what I had seen, I wasn't a Southerner, either; didn't want to be; didn't want any part of it. Not after all the shit I had brought down on my own head in that wonderful place called "The South." I didn't know if there were any people called Easterners, but it didn't matter. I wasn't going east. I was just another West Virginian stuck in a hate warp that I didn't make but which, sure as hell, would suck me in if I stuck around and let it.
Had already sucked me in.
I was only kidding myself. I could not stick around. I had been run out of Horry County, South Carolina. I still had some of the scabs on my body to prove it.
If I went north I could end up back in West Virginia. If I went east I would hit the Atlantic Ocean. South? The South could kiss my ass.
I was going west.
I had grown up on Black Hawk Ridge, in the mountains of West Virginia; learned about tracking animals; moonshine; guns; blood feuds; the wisdom of relatives, especially my Great Uncle Long Neck. And fucking. I learned a lot about fucking.
But they sent me away from Black Hawk Ridge, sent me down to Crum, a tiny little town on the Tug River that had a high school. I don't think I wanted to leave the Ridge, leave Great Uncle Long Neck, leave the security of the mountains and the forest. My mountains. My forest. But what I wanted did not matter — they sent me anyway. They knew what I would become if I stayed. I would become like them.
And so I left Black Hawk.
I left.
It was only the first in a long line of leaving things, whether I wanted to go or not.
Crum sucked.
Well, maybe it didn't, but I never gave it a chance.
I lived with some distant relatives on a hillside across the railroad tracks and above the school and from the day I got there the only thing that held me together was the thought that someday I would leave.
And so I went to Crum High School. That was what Great Uncle Long Neck wanted me to do.
I did learn a couple of things, however.
I learned what love was. And I learned that I could be stupid enough to make someone hate me. Unfortunately, I loved, and was hated by, the same woman.
Yvonne Staley.
I wrote in one of my journals that Yvonne was the only truly beautiful girl in Crum. She had a dignity, a presence, a way of seeming destined for better things than Crum. She was the quietest of the girls, and certainly the smartest.
I think I loved her. I'm pretty sure of it. Looking back on it now, I know I did.
Loved her.
And I still do. Oh, God, I still do.
She came to hate me.
One dark, rainy night back there in Crum, I actually got to make love to her. And then, true to form, I messed it up, the kind of messing up that stays in your mind as long as you are alive, the kind of messing up that you might, one day, forgive. But you would never forget. And Yvonne never did.
You see, I thought she was a whore, and I tried to pay her for making love to me.
Mistake.
We had made love in the thick, heavy dark of a summer night, on the front porch of her house, the house stuck on a hillside above Crum, locked together, naked, not caring where we were or what we were doing.
But we knew what we were doing.
At the end of it all, back in her living room, dressed, still weak and panting from what we had done, I pulled out a crumpled five-dollar-bill — the only money I had — and handed it to her. I thought that was what she wanted.
Mistake.
After Yvonne and I had made love ... I didn't go to school for two days, and when I did Yvonne wasn't there. After school I walked in the cold and dim light down past Yvonne's house ... There were no lights on.
The narrow highway was empty and I shuffled on the pavement past the tiny rough-plank garage where Yvonne's brother parked his old Chevrolet. The doors were open and I could see the grill of the car grinning out at me. I felt uneasy, walking past Yvonne's house like that. I didn't belong there; she had made that clear. I stopped in the middle of the highway, intending to go back. Before I could move I heard the engine of the Chevrolet grind into life. The car rolled forward and turned in my direction on the road. It stopped, the engine idling. I figured Yvonne's brother was going to Kermit. I wondered if he would mind giving me a lift. But I didn't wonder long. The car's gears pounded and it lurched forward, the engine racing. Straight at me.
The whole thing didn't register. The car didn't have the lights on and the distance fooled me. I stood there almost too long before I leaped sideways, diving onto the gravel. As I rolled over the car raced by and I caught a glimpse of the driver. It was Yvonne. I got up and stared down the highway until I couldn't see the car anymore. And I knew then that she was gone for good.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure Yvonne hated me.
CHAPTER 3Two Lane Blacktop Western South Carolina October 1956
What the hell was I doing there?
That seemed to be the central question of my life, the question that kept coming up, again and again, no matter where I went, what I did.
What the hell was I doing here, on that two-lane highway far and west and into the mountains?
Whatever I was doing there, I wouldn't be doing it for long.
I was leaving again, hitchhiking, catching rides with strangers who always looked at me sideways.
Leaving again, just like I had left Black Hawk Ridge and Crum, West Virginia.
I left the Ridge because I was sent away.
I left Crum willingly, even though I had found Yvonne there; left desperately, blindly; could not wait to get the hell out. Yvonne, the most incredible woman I had ever known — but then, how many incredible women could I have met in a place like Crum? — had come to hate me. I hated Crum when I got there; I hated Crum when I left.
But back there, right now, right this minute, far behind me, through the mist, was not Crum. Back there was Myrtle Beach. I had come to hate the South, but I did not want to leave Myrtle Beach. And maybe because of that — not wanting to leave — I had been driven out.
Maybe that was how I would spend my life: wherever I was, just leave, or be driven out.
I stood there at the side of the narrow road, staring back at the land that fell away to the east, back toward the thin pines and the sand and the ocean.
I did not want to leave.
Yvonne was in Myrtle Beach. And I don't think she hated me anymore.
I did not want to leave Yvonne. Yvonne of the midnight hair and the long, firm legs. Yvonne, who could raise in me feelings that I did not understand. There, in those final days back at the beach, for the first time in my life, I had no urge to leave. I never wanted to leave Yvonne. Ever.
And yet, here I was, on another no-name highway.
I had left Crum on a hard run and worked my way down through Kentucky, finally plopping my ass down in Myrtle Beach. I got a job as a lifeguard. The guy who hired me never even asked me if I could swim.
And that's how I found her again. Back there in Myrtle Beach. In a saloon.
I was just looking for a beer. I sat on a stool nursing a long-neck and looking past the bar and out the windows that bled the light from the beach into the room. The bar looked like one of those that was supposed to be dark and dim. Maybe it was, at night. But now the light flooded across the worn wood and battered counter top and glistened from unlit neon beer signs that cluttered the walls.
The woman behind the bar stopped in front of me.
Yvonne. She was there. In Myrtle Beach.
She stopped directly in front of me ... The blood was rising in her face and she struggled to stay calm. She reached for my empty beer bottle, absently wiping the bar with the damp rag.
My mouth wouldn't work right. "Uh ... howdy ... Vonny."
She pulled her arm back and swung the beer bottle. I saw it coming in a brownish blur that cut an arc across the bright light coming in from the windows. I saw it coming in the light from her eyes and the heat of her body. I saw it coming in what she owed me, in the great justice of my being there on that bar stool within reach of her. I saw it coming, but I couldn't move. The bottle caught me cleanly on the temple and I crumpled off the bar stool, tumbling downward. My mind clicked to another time, some place far removed and safe, a place where there were tall hardwood trees with vines in them and I was swinging on one of the vines, clinging to the end of it, my body cutting great, sweeping arcs out and through the sunshine and far over and above the forest floor. And then the vine broke.
I fell into a pool of left-over mop water still standing in a depression in the wooden floor of the bar. I hit the mop water face first ...
But we had gotten past that, Vonny and I.
Myrtle Beach, for a while, was as good, and as warm, and as safe, as I would ever find again.
There, with Vonny.
Even though, twice now, she had tried to kill me.
CHAPTER 4Two Lane Blacktop Western South Carolina October 1956
Winter was coming on in the Carolinas. The land rose to the west and lifted higher into the mountains and I could feel the cold flowing down and out of the hills and wrapping itself around me in my beach shirt and old jeans and I wished I were back there, sitting on the sand, sweat running down into my eyes and a can of cold beer dangling from my hand. I carried a thin, tattered gym bag but there was nothing much in it but an old shirt.
I started walking down and around the mountains and farther into the South, my thumb out every time I heard a car, trying to keep my eyes straight ahead.
I thought about going home, but I really was not sure where home was. And it didn't seem to matter. I just ended up in places I didn't want to be, after taking off from some other places I didn't want to be.
Actually, I had no intention of going home, ever again. Wherever it was.
The rain was pissing down out of a sky I could not see and the tree did little to protect me. I sat under it anyway, pretending it was better than nothing. But it wasn't. I pulled the tattered shirt out of the gym bag and wrapped it around my head, but it was soaked instantly and all it did was feel cold and clammy as it slid down around my neck.
I clutched the gym bag to my stomach, trying to keep it dry. There was nothing in it now but a piece of soap in a plastic box. There wasn't even a book in there. No book. I squeezed the bag harder, and that's when I felt it. A book. I opened the bag. There was a book in there — well, not a real book, not the sort of book you buy in a store. It was one of those hard-backed notebooks with the pages stitched in. Composition books, the kids called them, dark cardboard covers, thick sheets of paper. It was my book, my notebook. I wrote in it. It was my journal, but I didn't remember putting it in the bag. I did not know what it meant to keep a journal. I just wrote. And it became a habit.
It is still a habit, but one I have been trying to break for years.
The tree was up a slight rise and back a ways from the road and I knew anybody driving past would not see me. I would wait until the rain stopped and then walk down to the pitted blacktop and keep on walking west. No one was going to stop and pick up a guy my size, soaking wet, carrying nothing but an old gym bag. It didn't matter. I really had no place to go.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Scummers by Lee Maynard. Copyright © 2012 West Virginia University Press. Excerpted by permission of West Virginia University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue,Part I The Road West,
Part II Scummer Training,
Part III The Scummers,