Tom Piccirilli: November Mourns

The Mustang held meaning. Life and death had been packed tightly in here. It was a sky-blue ’69 Boss 429, with 375 horsepower and 450 lb-ft. Bigger and heavier than the preceding year’s model, with much-improved handling. Four headlights to slice through the mountain mist, and the interior was more rounded off, with separate cockpits for the driver and passenger.

The seat now perfectly adjusted so that he didn’t even really have to press down hard on the pedal, it all came naturally. The thrum of the engine worked into his body, became a part of his pulse.

There was a history to the machine. The two previous owners had died in it, pretty much behind the wheel. You couldn’t feel sorry for them.

One was showing off for his girl. He had his hand up her skirt and was tearing donuts through her uncle’s cornfield, knocking down the scarecrows. It proved how crazy you could get with boredom when you weren’t blocking state troopers for the haulers. Standing on the pedal and cutting off the cruisers so the hunkered-down trucks of moon could slip away.

You lived stupid and died ridiculous. A prized sow had slipped her pen and escaped through the rows, came across the tire tracks and started to eat the crushed corn.

When the driver stopped short the point of his chin snapped down against the steering wheel. It showed where his heart was-you never hit another man’s animal. In an instant, his jawbone had shattered and he’d had a heart seizure, dead before the car came to a rest. His fingers still twitching inside the girl while she flipped.

The other guy was Luppy’s cousin from the next county over, and Shad had met him once. About twenty-five with a prim manner, vain to the point of carrying a pocket mirror all the time. He dreamed of making a break for Hollywood and becoming a soap opera star. Didn’t give a damn about movies, just wanted to do soap operas so his mama and aunts and lady cousins could see him every day on television.

He’d become so obsessed with his prematurely receding hairline that he couldn’t quit looking at it. In the car he always checked himself in the rearview, fluffing his curls up in the front, doing whatever he could to cover his broadening forehead.

While tugging at his thinning forelock he missed a stop sign in the middle of town. The blaring horns caught his attention and brought him back to the road, but not in time. He panicked and stomped the brake, skidding up a curb. The ’Stang did a slow, complete 360 in the intersection out in front of Chuckie Eagleclaw’s place, bumped the Civil War cannon on a little plot of turf there. His door sprang open and the guy flopped out into traffic. He managed to make it to his feet before getting smeared by Chuckie’s mom, who was turning the corner in her pickup, coming to bring Chuckie his lunch. Hush puppies and sweet-potato pancakes.

Not even a scratch on the car from where it hit the cannon. Chuckie came running outside to check on his mother, shouting, “Ma, you all right?”

She shouted back, “The hell you worrying about me for? I ain’t the one snarled in the fan belt.”

It gave you strength, being directly connected to death via the machine. Just driving it around in circles, going out to the highway but never getting on, passing the exit and heading back again. It made you feel invincible in an ass-backwards way. Like the black angel was sitting behind you, watching over you so long as you didn’t piss him off. That was the trick.

Shad put the ’Stang back in gear and rolled slowly toward his father’s house.

Something about the place suggested sorrow. Maybe the lay of the land, or because it had been built-mortar, brick, and log-by Pa while Shad’s mother lay dying of pneumonia, in a trailer at the edge of the grounds.

The lengthening shadow of her headstone on the foothill struck the road when the moon rose halfway across the sky. Shad never walked through it.

Mags would be buried up there now as well. It would take Pa a full five months, perhaps six, to cut the stone from the quarry and chisel and smooth the marker. He would put more love into the rock than he’d ever shown anybody in life. It was the man’s way, and Shad felt no resentment about it. You couldn’t pass judgment on your own father, no matter what he’d done. There were boundaries of blood that couldn’t be crossed.

Almost midnight, and Pa sat on the porch in his rocker, a hound pup flopped at his feet, shivering. The dog’s name was Lament. Every dog Pa ever owned was named Lament. There was a reason for that, but Shad didn’t know it.

Somehow the cold never bothered his father, regardless of how far the temperature dropped. Even after the ice crystals formed in his beard stubble, he’d still sit there rocking, waiting.

Pa was playing chess against himself, as usual, moonlight flickering in the polished, hand-carved quartz pieces. The old man made only three or four moves a night. He took the game more seriously than others might think-it gave his life an even greater simplicity than anyone would suppose. He just didn’t know what to do with himself since his third wife had left him.

The shotgun, always loaded, remained propped across his father’s knee.

Collar up, with the heat of his grief keeping him warm as he edged the ’Stang forward. The car helped to keep him in the past, where he needed to be.

A shiver worked between his shoulders as he thought of Mags’s empty room inside the house. He gripped the steering wheel tight and drove through the shadow of Mama’s headstone, teeth clenched. Symbols like these had the power to torment. You always had to be on your toes.

He felt it again, that somebody in the hills was thinking about him, worried, bitter.

Shad parked and walked up the porch. His father looked over and a rare smile crossed his lips. “Hello, son.”

“Hi, Pa.”

“You should’ve let me meet you.”

Shad shook his head. “I preferred it this way. Gave me a chance to reacquaint myself. See some of the folks gathering out in the fields, down by the river.”

“Any of them right enough in their minds to say hello?”

“A few.”

“Can’t expect more than that.”

You could, but there wasn’t much point to it. His father furrowed his brow but said nothing else. He stared at Shad’s hands as if inspecting them for prison tats, wondering exactly what tales the new scars might betray. Brawling, knifing, the puckered flesh around his wrists from the tight handcuffs.

His father handled grief and remorse even worse than Shad. You didn’t want to think of him as a hypersensitive beat-down disappointment, too often lost in self-pity, but there it was. The old man had discarded everything that ever belonged to each of his wives, damn near every dish, sheet, or couch cushion they’d ever touched. He walked around his own home like it was tearing off his skin.

His memories were already too powerful and he didn’t need anything more to remind him of the experiences. Pa couldn’t bear to own anything with a history that he hadn’t made with his own hands.

Karl Jenkins had turned sixty-three years old last month, and he’d finally aged into his flat broad face as hard-featured as bedrock. Firm-muscled and compact, he contained a coiled energy that made him always seem a second away from leaping forward into your chest. Pa moved with a bearish and terrible grace, a relentless sense of force.

He usually kept his thick silver hair short, but since Mags had died no one had cut it for him. Shad liked how it had grown out, giving him an easygoing appearance that offset his impenetrable dark eyes. Shad had started to go gray when he was seventeen, and now at twenty-two he had white at his temples and a patch in front that at first glance made him appear older than his own father.