Chris Offutt - Kentucky Straight - Stories

I told her and she said, “I don’t mean poor like that, there’s other ways.” She just set and looked at me, real pale like she never got out much. On her back was a new flannel shirt, still yet with the folding marks not wore out. She wore red-laced shiny boots. I’d never seen a woman wear blue jeans before unless it was somebody’s granny but she wasn’t that old. I put my fists back down.

She kept looking at me like I was some kind of black snake that you ain’t supposed to kill or the rats will eat you out. My daddy said he chopped a black snake in half when he was little, and his own daddy tied him to a bucket and lowered him down a well over killing it. Daddy seen stars and it full day. Down below it was blacker than a cow’s insides, and the brick well walls were slick as a glass doorknob. He said they’ve got glass ones down to the courthouse. Daddy ought to know because he’s been there plenty, which is why I took them precocious tests anyhow.

She wasn’t a state lady and she wasn’t from town. She was a VISTA lady that got sent here over me and my brother, who can’t talk plain. He can’t say his R s or his L s, and there’s some sounds he don’t even know. I’m the one to understand him most. He ain’t precocious. What he is, is a singer, singing made-up stuff. Daddy calls him Little Elvis.

That lady, she went and reached her hand over mine and it was the smoothest thing, smoother than a horse’s nose hole, which is pure soft. She held my hand like you do a frog when you’re fixing to cut its legs off and eat them. I let my fingers lay real still so they wouldn’t wiggle and give her no big ideas. Mommy always did say I was full of big ideas. She took off two summers back and we ain’t seen hide nor hair of her yet. Daddy used to say “fuck you bitch” to her and that was one of my brother’s songs till we went to live with Granny on the Blue Lick River. Granny filled my brother’s mouth full of lye soap over that song. He never liked her after that. He called her the fuck-you-bitch when she was far enough away, like out back at the toilet by the river. Granny goes in there at least a hundred times a day. She’s skinny as a broom straw.

Daddy got out of prison early over there not being nobody to raise us up but Granny, who’s old as God. The funny-talked lady asked if I knew why Daddy went to prison the first time. I knew all right. Daddy’d told us a million times about wrecking his car and waking up thinking he was dead. What he done was run his car ninety miles an hour off the road by a Shell gas station and plow through a fence into a horse. He woke up and the horse had come in the windshield on Daddy, covering him with blood that he thought was his own. A tree was blocking the S off the Shell sign. Daddy said he seen them big red letters and knew right then he’d died and gone to where everybody always said he’d wind up anyhow. The horse’s belly had tore open and half a colt was hanging out with its legs on the floorboards. Daddy thought he’d turned into part goat, like the devil.

They locked him up a year because the man whose horse it was didn’t like losing two at once. Daddy said he wouldn’t have a record if he’d had the sense to hit a mare that wasn’t knocked up. Plus the car was a borrowed car. When the man he borrowed it off heard how he run through a pasture fence into a horse, the man claimed it wasn’t borrowed after all. He took to watching out for us when Daddy was in prison. He watched good, I reckon, because Mommy took off with him. After Daddy got out of La Grange, the man’s barn burned down and people said it was Daddy done it, but nobody told the law.

Daddy came home with two tattoos on him right smack over his titties. One said “Blue” and the other said “Lick.” Little Elvis wrote on his ownself with an ink pen and Daddy laughed like a wild man when he seen it. You couldn’t read what was wrote. It wasn’t even letters, more like worm tracks on the riverbank.

Daddy’s feet stunk bad, too. He said it was from wearing shoes all the time in La Grange, even in the shower and bed. Little Elvis started wearing his shoes to bed, but Granny said it made the sheets bad to be muddy, and Daddy took her side because there wasn’t no mud in the joint. He said they had boys like girls in prison, too. Little Elvis wanted to know if their feet stunk. Daddy said we’d know we were grown-up men when our feet had a good solid stink to them. Little Elvis wanted Daddy’s socks so he could hurry it up, but Daddy said that was bad luck and we’d have to find another way.

Little Elvis wanted bad to be a man and I started thinking on all the things that’s got a smell to them. Grasshopper piss for one. Polecats and rotten eggs. Road kill, too, but I didn’t feel like fooling with dead stuff. A boy that used to live down here did, and the state took him for cutting them animals up. He made his sister show me her thing once if I’d give him a bat my daddy killed that got in the house. After seeing her poon, I wanted that bat back. I just know he cut it up.

The only other thing I could think of was the toilet shack, which Granny called the White House. She planted honeysuckle around it to cut the smell but it drew mud daubers big as tree frogs. Me and Little Elvis went to the woods mostly. He used poison vine to wipe with once and never did wipe again after.

A month ago, I had to go bad and it was nighttime, with the moon not up yet. I sneaked out to a pine where the dead brown needles below was soft and would cover the smell up. Daddy was off fox hunting and everybody else in the world was asleep but me and it felt fine, just fine, being in the woods alone at dark. Then the hunting dogs got on my trail and started howling. I had to climb that pine, getting stickered by needles every branch. Dogs were barking below the tree, trying to claw their way up the trunk. There’s not a dog in all creation that climbs trees. That’s why trees are here, Daddy said, to give varmints somewhere to get away to.

Them dogs wouldn’t leave and I had to do my business so bad it was hurting. I got scared it would back up in me like a culvert in a storm. What I did was just go ahead and go. First I pulled my pants down and kindly hung on to the tree and let my hind end aim through limbs I wouldn’t have to climb back down on. I cut loose and the dogs jumped like somebody’d set them on fire. They were catching it in the air and eating it and then jumping again. Pretty soon they were fighting over scraps and I couldn’t get my pants up on account of needing both hands to hold on to the tree with.

The men were coming out the ridge and I heard them arguing over whose dog was at the lead, and whose fox it was. Somebody shined a flashlight on me while the others pointed guns. They started laughing. One man said to Daddy, “I told you that dog was a shit-eating dog, he’s treed your boy.”

Daddy stepped right up to the man and said, “You wouldn’t say such if I weren’t on parole.” Daddy put his gun down and looked around at all the men and said, “If he shoots me, tell the law I didn’t have a gun.” Then he hauled off and hit that man square in the face and knocked him back in the brush.

Daddy started kicking dogs off the tree trunk until there wasn’t none left. The men were cussing, trying to sort dogs out. The man who Daddy had hit was whopper-jawed and he had his rifle in both hands pointed at Daddy. Daddy put his arms up. The other men were backing away. Daddy turned to the tree real slow, looked at me, and said, “Let go, damn it.” I didn’t want to, but I did. Pine branches scraped my face half clean off and Daddy caught me. He turned back to the man, holding me in front of him. The gun was aimed right at me.

“Your own boy,” the man said.

He turned his gun and shot Daddy’s dog. He went into the woods and he was gone, and all the others were gone, and Daddy let me down and we stood there in the dark while the hound dog sound got further away until there wasn’t nothing to be heard since that shot scared everything in the woods. Daddy’s best dog was dead, its throat blown out. He made me promise not to tell Granny how the dog got killed.