James Hall - Off the Chart

‘Shiver me timbers,’ Jack Joy might say at such moments. ‘Blow me down.’ And he’d heavy-foot that full-race Rambler till the tires screamed against the asphalt and Anne and Vic were pinned giddy to their seats.

An unschooled man, Jack Joy was made sappy by love, swept away by what he considered his wife’s refined tastes and higher education. Around his wife he played a courtly role, part Southern gentleman, part movie idol. And for her part, Antoinette regularly assured any who would listen that her Jack was double the man of any Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power. For almost two decades of married life she and Jack stayed tipsy on that fantasy.

But Anne Joy had been born with a disbeliever’s eye, and when the sun poured into her bedroom each morning, she began her day by staring beyond the rickety maze of pine slats that formed the pirate schooner at the gashed hills below and the gray haze and acid stench of the underground fire that had plagued that town since before her birth. And she reminded herself of her own dream – an escape from those hills so complete that once she was out of Harlan she intended never to allow a stray memory of the place to flit through her head.

On this point Vic was her total opposite. Vic was his mother’s sworn disciple, the first mate on her wacky voyage. Vic’s favorite chore was to track down the burned-out bulbs that occasionally shut down the light show in their yard. He would spend entire dutiful afternoons unscrewing one bulb after another until he’d located the latest dud.

Whether her mother was insane or just fanatically determined to separate herself from the hard-faced local citizens was impossible for Anne to say. Such distinctions had little currency in that time and place, and it wasn’t for a child to diagnose her parents but simply to endure. Though she was sorely humiliated by her mother’s fixation, it had the positive effect of sending Anne on an inward journey in search of safer, more solid ground, starting a habit of introspection she might never have acquired had she lived in a less outlandish household.

In that town of coal hackers, dope and religion were the only release from the daily grind, and the Woodson brothers year by year grew fatter and more pig-eyed on the profits from their fields of marijuana and meth labs. Over time the entire Woodson clan, which populated the back roads of the countryside, took to driving flashy pickups and staggering drunk in public.

From time to time Big Al Woodson and his little brother, Sherman, made sudden appearances in the Joys’ living room. With big whiskey grins, they dusted their hats against their trouser legs and shuffled and nodded at Antoinette, repeating her name aloud more than was necessary as if to feel its exotic taste on their tongue.

It was on just such a night in early April that the Woodson boys made their last call and Anne Joy’s childhood was forever finished. Vic was seventeen, with sinewy muscles and his black hair swept back in an Elvis ducktail. Anne, two years his junior, already had been cursed with the lush swell of hips and breasts that was to lure men to her all the rest of her days.

Not quite summer, with green pine popping in the woodstove to chase the chill, the family had assembled in their usual fashion in the cramped living room. Anne sat on the ratty corduroy love seat while her father lay out on the blue-and-red rag rug in the center of the room. In the far corner, Antoinette was dabbing at the canvas she’d set up on a makeshift easel. An old hobby she’d recently resumed when Vic questioned her once too often about her childhood days in the lawless Florida Keys.

‘Don’t have any photographs of those days,’ she said. ‘Painting will have to do.’

After two weeks of labor, a scrap of beach and two crooked palm trees were emerging from the canvas, and in the sand by the shoreline there was something resembling a treasure chest tipped on its side with its glorious contents spilling out. In the last few days as she worked at her canvas on lonely afternoons, Antoinette had let slip that on that very beach her courtship with their father had reached its first ecstatic peak. Perhaps, she whispered to her two children, that was even the very spot where Vic was conceived.

For as long as Anne could recall, her parents had talked of returning to that far-off land where they had met and fallen in love. Someday very soon, the story went, when their savings grew to ample size, the Joys would abandon those wretched hills and make the long pilgrimage back to paradise to reclaim their rightful place in that balmy land of sun and water and abundant fish and forever thaw the bitter chill from their joints.

‘We’ll never do it,’ Anne said on one of those quiet afternoons.

‘What’s that?’ Her mother continued to paint.

‘We’re never going to Florida. That’s all a fairy tale.’

Antoinette set aside her brush and looked around at her daughter.

‘Of course we’re going. Soon as the nest egg’s big enough.’

‘We could go now,’ Anne said. ‘There’s nothing keeping us here. You could work. We all could work.’

‘And what would you have me do, Anne Bonny?’

‘You could waitress,’ she said. ‘I could baby-sit. Vic could have a paper route. Daddy could do anything – drive a truck, deliver things. Or he could be a mailman. They have mailmen down there, don’t they?’

‘Waitress?’ Her mother laughed and turned back to her painting. ‘Lord, lord, you’ll never catch me slopping food for a bunch of overfed idiots. No, sir. I’d rather die in these hills than waitress down there in Florida. And your daddy’s way too fine a man to stoop to delivering people’s bills and catalogs. When I go back home, I’m going in style.’

‘You’re just scared,’ Anne said. ‘You’d rather have us eat coal dust the rest of our lives. It’s all a lie. Every bit of it. Just one big goddamn lie.’

Her mother dabbed at the canvas and slipped off into one of her deadly silences.

On that final evening, Anne was sprawled on the love seat listening to Vic struggle with the archaic locutions of a pirate novel he’d plucked from the shelves of the school library. It was then she heard the rumble of Al Woodson’s GTO coming up the dirt drive. Her brother halted the scene and closed the book around his finger. As was his habit, Al pulled up beside the front porch and gunned his engine three times before shutting it down.

Anne’s mother put aside her brush and looked across at Jack.

‘Tell the man it’s too late for a social call. Kids got school.’

‘He doesn’t come but if it’s important. Just be a minute.’

His words were neutral enough, but Anne saw the cocky edge had drained from her father’s face. Her mother saw it, too, and stood up, and her hands knotted into fists and hung beside her hips.

‘You didn’t do anything you shouldn’t have, Jack. Tell me.’

Her father hesitated a moment, then shrugged his admission and made a wave at her painting.

‘Just to get us where we want to go a little quicker. Handful now and then, nothing serious.’

‘Oh, Jack, no.’

‘Risk worth taking,’ her father said. ‘Anyhow, there’s no way those old boys sniffed me out.’

‘Don’t go out there, Jack. Just poke your head out and send them home. Tell them we’re putting the kids to bed, saying our prayers. Settle it in daylight if there’s anything to settle. Give us time to think. Or else make a run for it.’

‘All right,’ her father said. But his words were as vacant as his eyes.

He opened the door, put his head out, then slowly opened it the rest of the way and stepped onto the porch. It was only a few seconds before the voices went wrong, turning high and croaky, then flaming up with curses and a sudden unnatural silence. Then Anne heard the moist thump of fist on bone and the scuffle of heavy boots on the planks of their front porch. The living room floor trembled and Al Woodson grunted a command to his little brother.