Ron Rash - Burning Bright

It took eight attempts before he made the beginnings of a wedge in the tree. He was breathing hard, the weight of the saw straining his arms, his back, and even his legs as he steadied not only himself but the machine. He angled the blade as best he could to widen the wedge. By the time he finished the first side, sawdust and sweat stung his eyes. His heart banged against his ribs as if caged.

Boyd thought about resting a minute but when he looked back at the Colemans’ house, he saw lights on. He carried the saw to the other side of the trunk. Three times the blade hit the bark before finally making a cut. Boyd glanced behind him again and saw Jim Coleman coming across the yard, his mouth open and arms gesturing.

Boyd eased the throttle and let the chain saw idle.

“What in God’s name are you doing,” Jim shouted.

“What’s got to be done,” Boyd said.

“I’ve got a sick daughter and you woke her up.”

“I know that,” Boyd said.

Jim Coleman reached a hand out as though to wrest the chain saw from Boyd’s hand. Boyd shoved the throttle and waved the blade between him and Jim Coleman.

“I’m calling the police,” Jim Coleman shouted.

Laura was outside now as well. She and Jim Coleman spoke to each other a few moments before Jim went into his house. When Laura approached Boyd screamed at her to stay away. Boyd made a final thrust deep into the tree’s heart. He dropped the saw and stepped back. The oak wavered a moment, then came crashing down. As it fell, something beaked and winged passed near Boyd’s face. He picked up the flashlight and shone it on the bird as it crossed over the vacant lot, disappeared into the darkness it had been summoned from. Boyd sat down on the scarlet oak’s stump and clicked off the flashlight.

His wife and neighbor stood beside each other in the Colemans’ backyard. They spoke softly to each other, as though Boyd were a wild animal they didn’t want to reveal their presence to.

Soon blue lights splashed against the sides of the two houses. Other neighbors joined Jim Coleman and Laura in the backyard. The policeman talked to Laura a few moments. She nodded once and turned in Boyd’s direction, her face wet with tears. The policeman spoke into a walkie-talkie and then started walking toward him, handcuffs clinking in the policeman’s hands. Boyd stood up and held his arms out before him, both palms upturned, like a man who’s just set something free.

So it’s somewhere between Saturday night and Sunday morning clockwise, and I’m in a cinder-block roadhouse called The Last Chance, and I’m playing “Free Bird” for the fifth time tonight but I’m not thinking of Ronnie Van Zant but an artist dredged up from my former life, Willie Yeats, and his line surely some revelation is at hand . But the only rough beast slouching toward me is my rhythm guitar player, Sammy Griffen, who is down on all fours, weaving through the crowd of tables between the bathroom and stage.

One of the great sins of the sixties was introducing drugs to the good-ole-boy element of Southern society. If you were some Harvard psychology professor like Timothy Leary, drugs might well expand your consciousness, but they worked just the opposite way for people like Sammy, shriveling the brain to a reptilian level of aggression and paranoia.

There is no telling what Sammy has snorted or swallowed in the bathroom, but his pupils have expanded to the size of dimes. He passes a table and sees a bare leg, a female leg, and grabs hold. He takes off an attached high heel and starts licking the foot. It takes about three seconds for a bigger foot with a steel-capped toe to swing into the back of Sammy’s head like a football player kicking an extra point. Sammy curls up in a fetal position and blacks out among the peanut shells and cigarette butts.

So now it’s just my bass player Bobo Lingafelt, Hal Deaton, my drummer, and me. I finish “Free Bird” so that means the next songs are my choice. They got to have “Free Bird” at least once an hour, Rodney said when he hired me, saying it like his clientele were diabetics needing insulin. The rest of the time you play what you want, he’d added.

I turn to Bobo and Hal and play the opening chords of Gary Stewart’s “Roarin’” and they fall in. Stewart was one of this country’s neglected geniuses, once dubbed honky-tonk’s “white trash ambassador from hell” by one of the few critics who bothered listening to him. His music is two centuries’ worth of pent-up Appalachian soul, too intense and pure for Nashville, though they tried their best to pith his brain with cocaine, put a cowboy hat on his head, and make him into another talentless music-city hack. Stewart spent some of his last years hunkered down in a North Florida trailer park: no phone, not answering the door, every window of the hulk of rusting tin he called home painted black. Surviving on what songwriting residuals dribbled in from Nashville.

Such a lifestyle has its appeals, especially tonight as I look out at the human wreckage filling The Last Chance. One guy has his head on a table, eyes closed, vomit drooling from his mouth. Another pulls out his false teeth and clamps them on the ear of a gal at the next table. An immense woman in a purple jumpsuit is crying while another woman screams at her. And what I’m thinking is maybe it’s time to halt all human reproduction. Let God or evolution or whatever put us here in the first place start again from scratch, because this isn’t working.

Like Stewart, I too live in a trailer, but I have to leave it more often than I wish because I am not a musical genius, just a forty-year-old ex-high-school English teacher who has to make money, more than I get from a part-time job proofing copy for the weekly newspaper. Which is why I’m here from seven to two four nights a week, getting it done in the name of Lynyrd Skynyrd, alimony, and keeping the repo man away from my truck.

I will not bore you with the details of lost teaching jobs, lost wife, and lost child. Mistakes were made, as the politicos say. The last principal I worked for made sure I can’t get a teaching job anywhere north of the Amazon rain forest. My ex-wife and my kid are in California. All I am to them is an envelope with a check in it.

Beyond the tables of human wreckage I see Hubert McClain sitting at the bar, beer in one hand and Louisville Slugger in the other. Hubert is our bouncer, two hundred and fifty pounds of atavistic Celtic violence coiled and ready to happen. On the front of the ball cap covering his survivalist buzz cut, a leering skeleton waves a sickle in one hand and a black-and-white checkered victory flag in the other. The symbolism is unclear, except that anyone wearing such a cap, especially while gripping a thirty-six-ounce ball bat, is not someone you want to displease.

Sitting beside Hubert is his best friend, Joe Don Byers, formally Yusef Byers before he had his first name legally changed. While it seems every white male between fourteen and twenty-five is trying to look and act black, Joe Don is going the opposite way, a twenty-three-year-old black man trying to be a Skoal-dipping, country-music-listening good ole boy. But like the white kids with their ball caps turned sideways and pants hanging halfway down their asses, Joe Don can’t quite pull it off. The hubcap-sized belt buckle and snakeskin boots pass muster, but he wears his Stetson low over his right eye, the brim’s rakish tilt making him look more like a cross-dressing pimp than a cowboy. His truck is another giveaway, a Toyota two-wheel drive with four mud grips and a Dale Earnhardt sticker on the back windshield, unaware that any true Earnhardt fan would rather ride a lawn mower than drive anything other than a Chevy.